Soon it snowed: fat heavy flakes drifting past Linda De Vere’s window as she lay in bed by daylight, past the window of the eyrie in Harry Ufford’s house where Dave Stutton sat listening to loud music, over the high irregular roofs of the old town. On some days the north-easterly howled down the tunnels of the streets, searching out every chink in the close-packed houses. On others the sky was clear, the light was desert-sharp, the flat sea looked like grey silk, and lethal. On a night of rockets and exploding maroons two ships collided a mile offshore, and half a dozen people died within minutes of touching the water. The national newspapers instantly became friendly, and heaped praise on the pilots and lifeboatmen of the notorious town.
A few days after the death of Commander Pryke the idea was floated that all the males of Old and New Tornwich above the age of sixteen should be fingerprinted, with their consent. A solicitor and a schoolteacher worried in the Tornwich & Stourford Packet about civil rights, and Harry Ufford wrote the Packet a confusing letter arguing that the prints of all members of the professional classes ought to be in the records anyway. An edited but still puzzling version appeared in print, and he discussed it with Arthur in the deserted bar of the New Moon.
‘Well, I can’t make head or tail of it,’ said Arthur, showing his usual distaste for the subject. ‘From what I hear poor old Prykey was hit by a sniper, from somewhere near the telephone box. So what fingerprints could they have?’
‘P’rhaps he was in the box,’ Harry suggested. ‘P’rhaps they found one there.’
‘Well, good luck to them,’ Arthur said; ‘they’ll need it. The owners of a lot of the prints they’ll find there are in Turku and Antwerp and San Sebastian and even bloody Leningrad and Lagos now.’
‘If it’s not that,’ Harry said, ‘then they’ve found something in one of the other places. They int all that stoopid, Arthur. I read a lot of books about how they work in this sort of case.’
‘You and all the rest of the ghouls who drink here,’ said Arthur. ‘Kinky, I call it.’
‘Well, we int ezzackly crowded out with ghouls,’ said Harry, ‘are we? I mean, I can still sort of move my elbows, like, tonight.’
‘You know what it is?’ said Arthur. ‘It’s that outside Gents of mine. Nobody dares risk a pee in case he gets shot. I’ll let you use the Ladies, if you need it. Not many ladies get in here lately.’
‘I int scared of your bog,’ Harry said. ‘Glad I int a milkman, though. They’re the jumpiest boys outside Ulster these dark mornins.’
‘It’ll all blow over,’ Arthur said. ‘I’d put a tenner on that. What is it—two weeks since the Commander? Poor old boy. He was the same age as me. Well, he had no one to leave behind, and I suppose that’s a sort of a mercy. How’s that young brother of Paul’s? I haven’t seen him since they used to get in here sometimes of a weekend.’
‘I’ve seen him better,’ Harry said. ‘Things catch up with you, know what I mean? It’s sort of—I dunno, weird, and ’orrible—that the three what was picked out was that three. You’d think that whoever it is was tryin to kill Greg too, tryin to sort of kill him inside, like.’
‘Three in a cluster,’ Arthur said, ‘then a fortnight with nothing. I think it’s over, Harry. I don’t think I’m going to have to bring my Gents indoors. A nine days’ wonder, which will never be solved, I bet.’
Harry was looking moody. ‘But that’s got to be,’ he said. ‘We can’t live with that unsolved. Christ, Arthur, you’re a proper cheerer-upper, you are. Now you’ve got me thinkin about that lad, that young Greg. He’s—’ Harry said, and paused, brow ridged with searching for the right word, ‘he’s wiped out, like, know what I mean?’
Greg Ramsey seldom went upstairs in his brother’s house, and never into the room in which his brother died. Now and again, more and more rarely, the telephone would ring in that room, behind the closed door, but he made no move to answer it. He had arrived in Tornwich the last time with most of his possessions in his car, and before long had turned the downstairs sitting-room into an average student bedsit, where he spent most of his days listening to records or playing his guitar, or lying in his sleeping-bag with a book in his hand.
The house was cold, but he did nothing about that except to switch on an electric fire. The meals he cooked for himself were usually vegetarian, and most often of baked beans. Washing-up piled in the shining new kitchen, which gradually acquired a greasy patina and a sour smell. One night, lying sleepless, he heard one of the taps dripping into the filled sink, and because he liked the sound in the empty house he set it dripping every night before he went to bed. Later he bought from a nearby antique shop a Victorian cottage clock with a loud tick and chime, and placed it in the house so that the sounds of clock and water-drip came to him at the same volume as he lay in the dark.
He had not shaved since the day of his brother’s funeral, and rather slowly grew a sparse blondish beard. His clothes were washed, not very often, in the bath. After a while it became apparent that he need not leave the house except for a quarter of an hour once a week to buy food.
He was scrupulous in his attention to chains and bolts and window-catches. It was generally accepted that his brother’s murderer had entered the house by the unlocked back door, which opened on a small blind yard, after climbing the high wall dividing that from the yard of an empty house. The two bolts on the back door were always shot home.
The cellar door, which opened outwards, he kept bolted at first, but later he nailed it up with two lengths of timber, and after that lay easier at nights, listening to his tap and his clock.
He became increasingly disturbed about the postman, and formed the habit of always waking before he came. It worried him that this stranger could intrude objects, could even perhaps intrude his hand or arm, out of the world into his private space. Of all threats in the house, the letterbox threatened most. But letters for his brother continued to invade, and he piled them on the dining-room table for someone to attend to some day. Often he had strange suspicions, and would stand staring at some object which he thought had been displaced by another hand. From the dining-room he could occasionally glimpse strangers moving about behind the windows of the late Commander Pryke.
He heard from Harry that the Commander’s house was soon to be for sale. The visits of Harry were no distress to him, but an abiding difficulty, because he could no longer find the things to say that people said to one another. Harry wanted to take him out of himself, which meant to a pub, and he invented a recent history of hepatitis with no attempt to be credible. Harry was insistent that he should see people of his own age, and brought him as visitors Dave Stutton, who sat speechless and grinning in an agony of awkwardness, and a girl called Donna, who said things like: ‘Pudden?’ and ‘You what?’ but looked threateningly ironical and intelligent.
He took to pinning on the door notes saying HARRY—GONE WALKING IN THE COUNTRY, or HARRY—GONE TO LONDON ON BUSINESS. The visits continued, but tailed off.
The nights when he was supposed to be away he spent lying in the dark, listening to the water-drip, the tick and the chime. Sometimes the telephone, felt as hardly more than a vibration of the ceiling, rang in the tabooed room. For two or three days in late November it rang continually.
One day he was woken by the sound he had expected and feared, heavy raps of the knocker on the door. It was not Harry, it was not the sound or the spirit of Harry. He could not tell what time it was, his watch had stopped, but he felt a conviction that he was at last to meet the postman.
He got out of his sleeping-bag, and he was naked. His hands were shaking as he pulled on clothes. Outside in the street it was snowing, but the strange car parked near his window had almost no snow on it.
In the hall he removed the chain, he slipped back two bolts, he made himself open to the stranger.
The slight woman on the snowy step was shivering inside a sheepskin coat, and beating her hands in bright folksy gloves. A headscarf made her unfamiliar. She was staring at him.
‘Greg,’ she cried, ‘what is going on? Why don’t you answer my letters? Are you never in when I ring? Greg, I’m absolutely in the dark about you.’
‘Diana,’ he murmured, recognizing his brother’s betrayer, bent on coming in.
Diana Ramsey was a petite dark woman of thirty, with a rather diffident manner contradicted by a rather imperious voice. She had always seemed, to her brother-in-law, like a schoolgirl taking on the role of hostess before she was at home with it, and therefore overacting a little: her expressions of pleasure too emphatic, her talkativeness with unpromising material like himself threatening to go over the top. But her hostessly ways served her while she examined what he had done, in a few weeks, with the fruits of her taste and planning. ‘Oh dear,’ was the worst she had to say of the kitchen. ‘Well, all men are born bachelors.’
But the pile of mail on the dining-room table did throw her a little. ‘Oh, Greg,’ she sighed, skimming through the envelopes, ‘how could you? And here are my letters to you, and some others addressed to you, too. Haven’t you even looked at them?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I thought they were all for Paul. I thought you would come, or a solicitor, or somebody.’
‘And I did come,’ she said. ‘Obviously I had to. I suppose you thought the telephone calls were not for you, either.’
‘I never go into that room,’ he said. ‘I thought that the police would rather I didn’t.’
At the mention of the police she looked grim for a moment. Then she said: ‘Even the police, above all the police, know that life goes on.’
He said the first thing to her that had not been dragged out of him. He said: ‘Is it your house, Diana?’
She looked up from the letters, sidelong. ‘Do you mind that, Greg?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Why should I? It’s usual. It’s what I expected.’
‘I don’t want it. Truly. Will you let me give it to you?’
He made one of his vehement, inappropriate gestures, rejecting the idea. ‘That would be silly.’
‘No,’ she said with conviction. ‘Not silly at all. But we needn’t talk about it just yet.’
He bowed his head, in doubting agreement.
He had hoped that she would put all the letters into her car and drive away with them to wherever it was, Pimlico he thought, that her lover had his pad or swinging studio. But she had meant all along to stay for a day or two, and now saw that she must stay for a week. There was so much to be done after a death, and it was she who must do it, the paperwork, she meant. As for the housework, well, there she would expect some help. In the kitchen, while he dried dishes for her, she made an attempt to jolly him along about his slovenly ways. ‘Dear Greg,’ she said, growing sentimental at one point, ‘we were good friends, weren’t we? Not, perhaps, just at first—you did make me feel a little bit like a stepmother at first—but later, it was fun.’
Sometimes he had the feeling that, far behind his eyes, there was another pair of eyes, watching her down two dark tunnels.
In the evening she called downstairs for him to come and join her in a drink. At the open door of the room he hesitated, feeling in his body a physical reluctance to go further. His brother’s chair had been moved, and a small cushion which had been behind his head was gone. Had the police taken it? Or had she, a few minutes before, capably tidied it away, with her husband’s life-blood on it?
Her remarks about his silence became less playful, and began to sound a little fretful. But he clung to it, because he knew that if he once began to talk he would never be able to stop, just as he knew that if he once began to weep he would break in two.
She slept that night in her usual place, and in the morning she asked him to come with her to the bedroom. ‘This is always a dreadful moment,’ she said, throwing open a wardrobe; and she asked him to choose whatever he could use from among his brother’s clothes. The rest she would give to the church.
He said, with a sort of horror: ‘No—no, don’t.’ And when she looked surprised, he said more calmly: ‘Leave all his things, just leave them. There is a lot here that I could use. I mean, I haven’t got much of anything. We professional students don’t.’
She closed the doors in silence, then asked: ‘What will you do, Greg?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What will I do when?’
‘Will you stay here? I wish you would, and yet—is it good for you?’
He did a wan imitation of Harry. ‘I reckon that int bad, gal. I mean to say, thass a roof over my head.’
‘Funny old Harry,’ she said.
For a moment he was almost expansive. ‘It was Harry who arranged the funeral. Harry and Whatshisname, the headmaster. Harry’s not particularly practical himself, but he knows so many people that he can get nearly anything done.’
‘I know,’ she said quietly. ‘Harry and I spoke on the telephone, several times. I’m sorry, Greg, but I couldn’t come. For every kind of reason, I just couldn’t.’
‘Oh, I understood that,’ he said.
‘Did you? Well, that’s by the way. Though it’s a relief, I must tell you, to know that you weren’t ignoring my letters deliberately, only accidentally. But we were talking about your living here. Isn’t it very lonely?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘no, I’ve lots of friends here. There’s Harry, and a young guy called Dave, and a girl called Donna, and Frank De Vere, and Arthur, the landlord of the Moon, and Bob the grocer. If I can, I’d like to stay in Tornwich through the summer.’
‘Of course you can,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’re hoping for a job in the autumn?’
‘Hoping,’ he said.
‘And there’s a Donna, is there? That sounds cheerful.’
‘It was Donna,’ he said, ‘who got me to board up the cellar door. She’s a nervous girl. She’s heard of these old smugglers’ tunnels.’
‘What nonsense,’ Diana said. ‘But—well, it’s very satisfactory.’ Passing him to go to the door she took his hand and gave it a light squeeze.
He was sure he did not hate her, but whatever it was that watched her through his eyes watched very coldly. You took him away, it was thinking; but he came back again, hurt.
If he cried, a fault-line would appear between the two tears, and he would crack apart in neat halves.
She was indulgent, exaggerating, as she always had, the difference between their ages. But she was firm. She had not designed the sitting-room on the ground floor for unemployed Ph.Ds to crash in. ‘Why waste those empty rooms on the second floor?’ she asked, friendly and managing. ‘We’ll do it together, make a proper bedroom for you. It will be fun, Greg.’
But he insisted on attending to it himself, doing no more than sweep the bare boards before lugging his possessions upstairs and dumping them in the large room. He had a colourful piece of garden furniture for sleeping on, and his record-player and his loud clock for company.
In the changed state of affairs he preferred to be up under the roof. She assumed that he went out sometimes, and he let her think so.
Over meals she was sometimes playful, in a maternal way. ‘Oh, Greg,’ she said, after some new proof of his impracticality, ‘you are a pillock.’ He guessed that the word was borrowed from her lover’s vocabulary, but found it apt. He visualized a pillock as a sort of phallus made of marshmallow. He felt like a pillock.
Their meals together he found very long. When they were met over a table he discovered great faults in her. He knew that he would have found others, perhaps worse, in anybody else; but then, no other human creature had so sought him out, thrust its company upon him. At times he felt driven to tell her about her shortcomings, but knew that if once he began to speak he would never stop, that it would be the beginning of something violent and irrevocable.
She stayed for a week, and then one morning he carried her things out to the car. It was snowing again, and she was well wrapped up, and when she gave him a hug was soft and yielding like a toy. ‘What a scruff you are nowadays,’ she said, after kissing him. Rather hesitantly, she invited him to spend Christmas at Pimlico, but seemed relieved when he made an excuse. The excuse that came into his head was Donna, and she did not press him.
She went away, with promises to come again, to telephone. Her tyres made the only marks on the snowy road.
He went back inside and shot home the two bolts, put up the chain. Then he boarded up the cellar door.
That night he could not sleep, and wandered downstairs to the room in which he had last seen his brother. Though he rarely drank except to conform, he poured himself a large whisky.
The telephone was on the same table as the drinks. He opened the telephone book and tracked down a name with his forefinger. It was two o’clock in the morning. Carefully, he dialled a number.
The voice of the man who answered was full of sleep. Hearing silence, it was at first angry, then puzzled, then angry again. He put down the receiver.
He went and sat in his brother’s chair and idly picked up a little box from the table beside it. Painted on the lid in enamel was the picture of an eighteenth-century soldier, something from his childhood, something he remembered from his mother’s drawing-room, perhaps on that same small table. He lifted the lid, and just as he remembered it tinkled out Non più andrai.
He got up and went to the telephone and dialled. This time the man’s voice was, from the start, a furious bellow. He opened the lid and held the box to the mouthpiece.
When the music had played for half a minute he stopped it. The man at the other end was still listening. He could not help giving a broken laugh.
The line clicked, and he heard the purr of lost contact.
He placed the box beside the telephone and returned to his brother’s chair. He leaned back and stretched his legs, studying without expression the almost untouched whisky in the glass between his thin hands.
Just before Christmas Diana rang him to renew her invitation, tentatively, and firmly he renewed his excuse. She asked about his welfare, and the house. He was able to report reassuringly of the house, because he was going through a phase of being obsessively preoccupied with it, and sometimes got up and polished silver or brass in the middle of the endless nights.
Harry, who would still often ‘give him a look’, as he expressed it, asked several times from the doorstep what he meant to do for Christmas. ‘I don’t pay much attention to it myself, but you come to mine, boy, you’ll be very welcome. Dave won’t be there.’ He saw that he had been right in thinking Dave most unhappy in his company, and hedged about his own movements, not letting his irritation show. Knowing now that Diana talked to Harry on the telephone he was cautious, but suggested that he might, just might, go home to his native village.
But when Harry knocked on Christmas Eve he did not deny himself. He led Harry, who had the little dog with him and was none too sober, upstairs and waited upon him with alcohol. He even toasted Harry and the dog, with a sort of diffident bonhomie which made his cheeks ache.
‘No,’ he said, in answer to Harry’s question, ‘I find plenty to do. There are all these books,’ he pointed out, with one of his gestures. ‘I’m working, in my fashion.’
In fact, he had read nothing for two months. He had had books in his hand and had stared at them, but the print would not go in through his eyes.
When Harry had gone, he almost thought that he might venture out where people were, might go to church. In his bare bedroom he pulled down an upper sash and let midnight bells come to him on the freezing air.
At three o’clock on Christmas morning he went downstairs to the telephone. He dialled the number which was now written on the cover of the book, and played the music-box into the mouthpiece.
By the time he closed the lid the man had hung up. The purr on the line was aggressively loud, like a defiance.
He knew when it began to be spring by the birds which came back, increasing in numbers and volume as the nights shortened. At daybreak in his stark bedroom it was the blackbirds and song thrushes he noticed first. Later came woodpigeons and collared doves, whose sound made him think himself back deep in leafy countryside, until the sounds were cut across by the squawk of a gull, the bourdon of a ship’s siren. The dove-voices intrigued him, hinting at hidden gardens in the blank-faced, secretive old town.
On one of his visits Harry was wearing a buttonhole of snowdrops, and said that they were always sold in the pubs in aid of the lifeboat.
The milder weather in some way changed him. In the early morning, in the walled yard which was the only place where he could stand still under the sky, and in which a few daffodils and crocuses had appeared, he felt the sea-air on his skin, and with it a wellbeing which was animal in its lack of reason.
It brought him out of the house, that tremulous sense of health and hope. He was timid at first, and pretended to be busy and purposeful, with the idea that stray glances would not have time to light on him. But most of the few people who might have recognized him were dead or gone away, and his nondescript beard and clothes made him much like any other seaman or fisherman or labourer to be seen there.
Unimportant things pleased him unreasonably: that ragwort was flowering yellow in the crevices of old walls, that fields across the estuary were bright green with new barley, that the sea was like a polished grey stone with a sheen on it, as if reflecting a blue-green sky. Oystercatchers waded and searched, gorse was brilliant in the weak sun. The crude bright colours of man, on fishermen’s dinghies and on a line of beach-huts, brought back a pleasure he had once taken in a new box of coloured pencils.
In a different place, in a bay of the estuary, a plain of sea-purslane and sea-aster carved with shining brown runnels, he watched mallard waddle and swim, and flocks of dunlin skitter away like blown white smoke over the sculpted, sky-mirroring mud.
He went further afield, to the woods fringing the estuary some miles from the town. Walking towards the shore through newly green fields, in sun just warm enough to bring out the smell of grass and sea, under planing gulls and invisible larks, he felt his sense of wellbeing as an agitation, something extreme. Celandine was budding by the field edges, and in the bare woods, among fresh leaves of dog’s mercury and wood-spurge, wood anemones and primroses were showing above ground. He climbed down an earth cliff to the shore and from an uprooted tree watched on the sleepy blue water a few swans drawing to them all the sky’s light.
In the woods, or in some field beyond, there was a shot, and a flock of rooks rose cawing. At first he thought nothing, found nothing to think about in such an ordinary country sound. Then something must have happened, like a shadow cast over him by the wheeling black birds. He found that he had edged into a sort of cave made by the great roots of the tree. He was trembling. He could not think how to get home again.
He forced himself to his feet. He stood exposed on the sand, between woods and water, and shouted through his cupped hands. The jittery rooks took flight once more, but nobody came.
He had a habit of shutting himself up early in his room, but that night he could not sleep. The excitement of having wandered so far, and his fright on the lonely shore, had built up a tension which turned, when he was lying in the dark, to anger. That was not altogether new, but the violence of it was new. It shook his heart: that he distinctly felt, as his memory fetched back, seemed to bombard him with, instances of injustices, slights, affronts offered to him as far back in his life as he could remember. The things he had endured with such meekness made him choke now with rage, and words burst out of him, all the bitter words that ought to have been said earlier to a world which could treat him so undutifully.
‘Oh sleep,’ he groaned, hugging himself. ‘Oh sleep, poor boy.’
He began to feel that if he tried to lie still any longer he would suffocate, and got up and threw on some clothes. He paced up and down, making wide, angry gestures at the thoughts that came into his head. His loud clock, which was slow, started with a whirr to strike midnight.
He went downstairs and poured himself a drink, and while he drank it continued to pace and gesture and mutter. Now that he had, as he felt, called the world’s bluff, he longed for a confrontation with it. He wanted a fight, even if only with words: the just, lethal words which must have been in him all the time but had never insisted on being said in the days when he was dulled by docility.
As he continued to drink the words came very fluently. Fluency had never been much prized, or even trusted, by the contemporaries among whom he had spent most of his life. Taciturnity was thought more sincere. But now he was almost awed by the sincerity, pointed by gesture, of the rebukes that poured from his lips.
Eventually he had to go to the bathroom, and while he was there studied himself in the glass. Diana, he remembered, had said he was a scruff nowadays. He rebuked her, cuttingly, for that characteristic remark, and then hunted up a pair of scissors and a comb and gave his hair and beard a trim. Afterwards he washed and combed himself with care.
In the dimness of Paul’s bedroom, by the light of street-lamps, he chose clothes from the wardrobe and drawers. When he had put on a white shirt and a tie, a dark suit and sober black Oxfords, he went back to the study for another drink.
The telephone was picked up as soon as he had finished dialling, but for some moments the man did not speak. At length he said, warily as usual, ‘Hullo?’
‘Hullo,’ Greg said. ‘Did I wake you? Are you in bed?’
‘No,’ said the man, and sounded relieved. ‘Who’s that?’
‘You know,’ Greg said, and opened the lid of the musical box for a couple of seconds. When it was closed, he added: ‘Don’t you?’
The man’s voice had altogether changed, and was now dead tired. ‘So you talk.’
‘Oh, I talk sometimes. Sometimes I want to talk. I suppose you know how it is, like when you’ve had a drink or two, and there just isn’t anyone—you know?’
‘I don’t know nothing,’ the man said. ‘I don’t know who the fuck you are, or why you ring up and play that tape or whatever that is. That don’t mean nothing to me. I reckon you’ve had the wrong number all this time.’
‘No, that’s not it,’ Greg said. ‘It’s silly, but I was wanting to talk to you. But when it came to it, I couldn’t get started. Very silly, that. You didn’t recognize the box, then? I thought you might remember it.’
‘Listen, boy,’ the man said, ‘you sound harmless enough, but you don’t sound very well, neither. And we had a homicidal maniac here not so long ago, and p’rhaps he didn’t sail away after all. The worst you’ve done to me so far is give me a couple of sleepless nights. All the same, I’m startin to think I won’t keep this to myself no more.’
‘No, why should you?’ Greg agreed. ‘Only, would you come and see me, come and talk to me? I’ll give you a drink. I mean, now.’
‘Oh, sure thing,’ said the man. ‘Like a shot. Thass me you can hear knockin on the door.’
‘It’s all different when I’m talking to you. It all feels so quiet. Oh, come here, please. It’s only a short drive from you. It’s number 11 Watergate Street, opposite Commander Pryke’s.’
For a long time the other man was silent. Then he said: ‘That’s you—Greg?’
‘You don’t know me,’ Greg said. ‘Do you? No, you don’t know me.’
‘I’ve sin you about,’ the man said, ‘once or twice, but that was months ago. You haven’t been there all that time, have you? On your own? Christ, boy, you must be out of your tree by now.’
‘I used to be clever, in a way,’ Greg said, ‘about acting so that people wouldn’t worry about me, and so be a worry, as people are, you know. Diana and Harry just thought: “Well, that’s Greg, he’s always been quiet and a bit spineless and always had his head in the clouds.” But it wasn’t true; I wasn’t quiet, like they thought. It was only when I started talking to you that I got quiet.’
After a long pause the man said: ‘Listen, Greg, this is all very confoosin. Like you say yourself, you and me never knoo each other, so that beats me why I’m the one you want to talk to. But I think thass not a bad idea, even at this time of night. So I shall come, boy, but not just this minute.’
‘Oh, that’s great,’ Greg said. ‘That’s really great. I’ll leave the front door on the latch and the lights on, and you can just walk upstairs to Paul’s room, you know, and I’ll probably be asleep in his chair, you know, just the way it was.’
There was an intake of breath at the other end of the line, and the man said: ‘Greg, I never was inside that house in my life.’
‘It’s very good of you,’ Greg said, seeming not to have heard him, ‘because it must sound so silly. But things were going wrong. I was getting so—agitated, and so—hostile, and—spiteful. But now I’m quite quiet, and I’m going to sleep for a little while, until you come, Sam.’
He replaced the receiver, and going downstairs to the street-door, removed the chain, freed the bolts and snibbed the Yale lock open. In the room above the lighted hall he found a cushion for the back of his brother’s chair, and sat down and closed his eyes.
Painter. |
And is this the end? |
Hieronimo. |
Oh no, there is no end; the end is death and madness. |
The Spanish Tragedy
In his sleep the thin youth has sprawled in the chair. His long legs stretch out in untidy angles towards the open door. His head droops against the cushion, mouth open in the scanty beard.
The dark figure standing a few feet within the doorway says loudly, grimly: ‘Greg.’
The boy starts alert, and takes up a position sitting on the edge of the chair, hands on sharp knees, sharp elbows akimbo. He stares up into the other face, with dread at first, but soon begins to laugh.
‘You thought it was someone else,’ he says, ‘didn’t you? Oh, you did. But I’m taller and thinner, and my hair’s fairer, and my beard doesn’t grow the same way.’
‘What do you want, Greg?’ the other man asks, with no expression.
The youth makes excessive gestures of ignorance, shrugging, spreading his hands. He asks after a moment: ‘Why don’t you come nearer, Sam? You look scared. Are you scared?’
Sam says: ‘Listen, boy, I int no kamikaze. I dint come here on my own.’
The boy looks with a sort of horror at him, and beyond him, and then jumps up, screaming in a boy’s voice. ‘You black fucking toe-rag,’ he screams, ‘you ignorant fucking jungle-bunny, that wasn’t what I told you to do.’ In his hand is a long shining knife from the kitchen. ‘I told you to come like the other times.’
‘Stay there!’ Sam shouts over his shoulder, and turning back to the boy, who has kept the same distance between them, he asks angrily: ‘Less get this clear, young sir. Are you accoosin me, in front of witnesses, of the murder of your brother?’
‘Accusing?’ the boy says. ‘I’m only telling you that I know. We all know. The Commander told me what people were saying. I said to the Commander: “What disgusting racial prejudice,” I said, just like a liberal. But when he was dead and I heard all the details, well, I knew. I couldn’t doubt it. Of course it was you, everyone knows that.’
The black man is so utterly still that for a long time after the boy has stammered into silence there is no stir in the room. At last he asks: ‘Whass the knife for, Greg?’
‘The knife?’ repeats the boy, vaguely. ‘I don’t know, really. I just got used to having it near my hand when I went to sleep.’
‘It’s a big old house,’ Sam suggests. ‘You’ve been lonely, I should imagine.’
‘Ah, lonely,’ the boy says. ‘It’s not good. You start to get funny ideas, do you know? You say things you don’t mean. Calling you raghead and coon and so on, that wasn’t me, it’s not how I think, I hope you believe that, Sam. I’ll tell you what it was, it was that I thought it would be nice to have an argument with you. Because it’s been lonely, for years it has.’
Suddenly he claps the hand not holding the knife to his eyes. ‘Oh Christ,’ he gasps, ‘oh Christ, it’s starting.’ He breaks into racking sobs, and the black man leaps at him, snatching the knife, throwing it away. But at that the boy begins to flail and scream, screaming: ‘Not like that, not with the knife!’ as they clinch and fall to the carpet.
Other figures bound into the lighted room from the darkened landing. But there can be no more doubt in their minds than there is in the black man’s that the howling, kicking child restrained in his arms is a mad child now for ever.