Fen Country (13 page)

I got them settled on the chesterfield.

“Coffee?” I suggested.

But this seemed not to be what was wanted.

“You haven’t got a drink, old boy?” the man said.

“Stanislas,” the girl said.

“Yes, of course. Whisky? Gin? Sherry?”

“Oh, Stanislas darling, you are
awful,”
said this female. “Fancy asking.”

I had no recollection of the name of either of them, but surely Stanislas couldn’t be right. “Stanislas?” I asked.

“It’s private,” she said, taking one of his hands in one of hers, and wringing it. “You don’t mind? It’s sort of a joke. It’s private between us.”

“I see. Well, what would you like to drink?”

He chose whisky, she gin and ltalian.

“If you’ll excuse me, I’ll have to go upstairs for a minute,” I said, after serving them.

One thing was abundantly clear: Giorgio’s map had been wrong, and as a consequence
—

“Ooh-hooh!”

I went out on to the landing.

“Yes?’

“We’re lonely.”

“Down in just a minute.”

“You’re doing that nasty writing.”

“No, just checking something,”

“We heard the typewriter. Do come down, Charles, Edward I mean, we’ve got something terribly, terribly important to tell you.”

“Coming straightaway,” I said, my mind full of Giorgio’s map.

I refilled their glasses.

“You’re Diana,” I said to her.

“Daphne,” she squeaked.

“Yes, of course, Daphne. Drink all right?”

She took a great swallow of it, and so was unable to speak for fear of vomiting. Stanislas roused himself to fill the conversational gap.

“How’s the old writing, then?”

“Going along well.”

“Mad Martians, eh? Don’t read that sort of thing myself, I’m afraid, too busy with biography and history. Has Daphne told you?”

“No. Told me what?”

“About Us, old boy, about Us.”

This was the first indication I’d had that they
weren’t
a married couple. Fond locutions survive courtship by God knows how many years, fossilizing to automatic gabble, and so are no guide to actual relationships. But in “Us,” the capital letter, audible anyway, flag-wags something new.

“Ah-ha!” I said.

With an effort, Stanislas leaned forward. “Daphne’s husband is a beast,” he said, enunciating distinctly.

“Giorgio’s map,” I said. “Defective.”

“A mere brute. So she’s going to throw in her lot with me.”

Satisfied, he fell back on to the cushions. “Darling,” he said.

As a consequence, we were two miles south-west of our expected position.
“So what is the expected position?” I asked.

“We’re eloping,” Daphne said.

“This very day. Darling.”

“Angel.”

“Yes, this very day,” said Stanislas, ostentatiously sucking up the last drops from the bottom of his glass. “This very day as ever is. We’ve planned it,” he confided.

The plan had gone wrong, had gone rotten. Giorgio had failed.

“Had gone rotten,” I said, hoping I might just possibly remember the phrase when this pair of lunatics had taken themselves off.

“Rotten is the word for that bastard,” said Stanislas. Suddenly his eyes filled with alcoholic tears. “What Daphne has suffered, no one will ever know,” he gulped. “There’s even been… beating.” Daphne lowered her lids demurely, in tacit confirmation. “So we’re off and away together,” said Stanislas, recovering slightly. “A new life. Abroad. A new humane relationship.”

But was his failure final? Wasn’t there still a chance?

“If you’ll excuse me,” I said, “I shall have to go upstairs again.”

But this attempt aborted. Daphne seized me so violently by the wrist, as I was on the move, that I had difficulty in not falling over sideways.

“You’re with us, aren’t you?” she breathed.

“Oh yes, of course.”

“My husband would come after us, if he knew.”

“A good thing he doesn’t know, then.”

“But he’ll guess. He’ll guess it’s Stanislas.”

“I suppose so.”

“You don’t mind us being here, Charles, do you? We have to wait till dark.”

“Well, actually, there is a bit of work I ought to be getting on with.”

“I’m sorry, Ted,” she said, smoothing her skirt. “We’ve been inconsiderate. We must go.” She went on picking at her hemline, but there was no tensing of the leg muscles, preliminary to rising, so I refilled her glass. “No, don’t go,” I said, the British middle class confronting its finest hour. “Tell me more about it.”

“Stanislas.”

“H’m, h’m.”

“Wake
up
, sweetie-pie. Tell Charles all about it.”

Stanislas got himself approximately upright. “All about what?”

“About Us, angel.”

But the devil of it was, if Giorgio’s map was wrong, our chances had receded to nil.

“To nil,” I said. “Nil.”

“Not nil at all, old boy,” Stanislas said. “And as a matter of fact, if you don’t mind my saying so, I rather resent the ‘nil.’ We may not be special, like writer blokes like you, but we aren’t ‘nil,’ Daphne and me. We’re human, and so forth. Cut us and we bleed, and that. I’m no great cop, I’ll grant you that, but Daphne—Daphne—”

“A splendid girl,” I said.

“Yes, you say that now, but what would you have said five minutes ago? Eh? Eh?”

“The same thing, of course.”

“You think you’re rather marvelous, don’t you? You think you’ve… got it made. Well, let me tell you one thing, Mr. so-called Bradley: you may think you’re very clever, with all this writing of Westerns and so on, but I can tell you, there are more important things in life than Westerns. I don’t suppose you’ll understand about it, but there’s Love. Daphne and I, we love one another. You can jeer, and you do jeer. All I can tell you is, you’re wrong as can be. Daphne and I, we’re going off together, and to hell with people who… jeer.”

“Have another drink.”

“Well, thanks, I don’t mind if I do.”

They stayed for four whole hours.

Somewhere in the middle, they made a pretense of drinking tea. Some time after that, they expressed concern at the length of time they had stayed—without, however, giving any sign of leaving. I gathered, as Giorgio and his map faded inexorably from my mind, that their elopement plans were dependent on darkness: this, rather than the charm of my company, was what they were waiting for. Meanwhile, with my deadline irrevocably lost, I listened to their soul-searching—he unjustifiably divorced, she tied to a brutish lout who unfortunately wielded influence over a large range of local and national affairs, and would pursue her to the ends of the earth unless precautions were taken to foil him.

I heard a good deal about their precautions, registering them without, at the time, realizing how useful they were going to be.

“Charles, Edward.”

“Yes?”

“We’ve been bastards.”

“Of course not.’

“We haven’t been letting you get on with your work.”

“Too late now,”

“Not really too late,” lachrymosely. “You go and write, and we’ll just sit here, and do no harm to a soul.”

“I’ve rather forgoten what I was saying, and in any case I’ve missed the last post.”

“Oh, Charles, Charles, you shame us. We abase ourselves.”

“No need for that.”

“Naturally
we abase ourselves. We’ve drunk your liquor, we’ve sat on your… your sofa, we’ve stopped you working. Sweetie-pie, isn’t that true? Haven’t we stopped him working?”

“If you say so, sweetie-pie.”

“I most certainly do say so. And it’s a disgrace.”

“So we’re disgraced, Poppet.
Bad,”
she said histrionically. “But are we so bad? I mean, he’s self-employed, he’s got all the time in the world, he can work just whenever he likes. Not like you and me. He’s got it
made.”

“Oh God,” I mumbled.

“Well, that’s true,” Stanislas said, with difficulty. “And it’s a nice quiet life.”

“Quiet, that’s it.”

“Don’t have to do enything if you don’t want to. Ah, come the day.”

“He’s looking cross.”

“What’s that? Old Charles looking cross? Angel, you’re mistaken. Don’t you believe it. Not cross, Charles are you?”

“We
have
stayed rather long, darling. Darling, are you awake? I say, we
have
stayed rather long.”

“H’m.”

“But it’s special. Edward, it’s special. You do see that, don’t you? Special. Because of Stanislas and me.”

I said, “All I know is that I…”

‘Just this once,” she said. “You’ll forgive us just this once? After all, you
are
a free agent. And after all, it’s only us.”

I stared at them.

I looked at him, nine-tenths asleep. I looked at her, half asleep. I thought what a life they were going to have if they eloped together.

But “It’s only us” had triggered something off.

I remembered that on just that one day, not an extraordinary one, there had been Mrs. Prance, the meter-reader, Chris (twice: she had telephoned a second time during working hours to apologize for telephoning the first time during working hours), the laundry-man, the grocer (no Chivers Peas this week), my tax accountant, a woman collecting for the Church, a Frenchman wanting to know if he was on the right road to The Duke.

I remembered that a frippet had come from the National Insurance, or whatever the hell it’s called now, to ask what I was doing about Mrs. Prance, and if not, why not. I remembered a long, inconclusive telephone call from someone’s secretary at the BBC—the someone, despite his anxiety to be in touch with me, having vanished without notice into the BBC Club. I remembered that undergraduates at the University of Essex were wanting me to give them a talk, and were going to be so good as to pay second-class rail fare, though no fee.

I remembered that my whole morning’s work had been a single, botched, incomplete paragraph, and that my afternoon’s work, before this further interruption, had been little more than two hundred words.

I remembered that I had missed the post.

I remembered that I had missed the post before, for much the same reasons, and that publishers are unenthusiastic about writers who keep failing to meet deadlines.

I remembered that I was very short of money, and that sitting giving drink to almost total strangers for four hours on end wasn’t the best way of improving the situation.

I remembered.

I saw red.

A red mist swam before his eyes
, doing the butterfly stroke.

I picked up the poker from the fireplace, and went round behind them.

Did they—I sometimes ask myself—wonder what I could possibly be doing, edging round the back of the chesterfield with a great lump of iron in my hand?

They were probably too far gone to wonder.

In any case, they weren’t left wondering for long.

Eighteen months have passed.

At the end of the first week, a detective constable came to see me. His name was Ellis. He was thin to the point of emaciation, and seemed, despite his youth, perrnanently depressed. He was in plain clothes.

He told me that their names were Daphne Fiddler and Clarence Oates.

“Now, sir, we’ve looked into this matter and we understand that you didn’t know this lady and gentleman at all well.’

“I’d just met them once or twice.”

“They came here, though, that Tuesday afternoon.”

“Yes, but they’d been booted out of the pub. People often come here because they’ve been booted out of the pub.”

Lounging on the chesterfield, ignoring the blotches, Ellis said, “They were looking for a drink, eh?”

“Yes, they did seem to be doing that.”

“I’m not disturbing your work, sir, I hope.”

“Yes, you are, Officer, as a matter of fact. So did they.”

“If you wouldn’t mind, sir, don’t call me ‘Officer.’ I am one technically. But as a mode of address it’s pointless.”

“Sorry.”

“I’ll have to disturb your work a little bit more still, sir, I’m afraid. Now, if I may ask, did this… this pair say anything to you about their plans?”

“Did they say enything to anyone else?”

“Yes, Mr. Bradley, to about half the population of South Devon.”

“Well, I cen tell you what they said to me. They said they were going to get a boat from Torquay to Jersey, and then a plane from Jersey to Guernsey, and then a Hovercraft from Guernsey to France. They were going to go over to France on day passes, but they were going to carry their passports with them, and cash sewn into the linings of their clothes. Then they were going on from France to some other country, where they could get jobs without a
permis de séjour.”

“Some countries, there’s loopholes as big as camels’ gates,” said Ellis, biblically.

I said, “They’ll make a mess of it, you know.”

“Hash-slinging for her,” said Ellis despondently, “and driving a taxi for him. What was the last you saw of them?”

“They drove off.’

“Yes, but when?”

“Oh, after dark. Perhaps seven. What happened to them after that?”

“The Falls.”

“Sorry?”

“The
Falls
. Their car was found abandoned there.”

“Oh.”

“No luggage in it.’

“Oh.”

“So presumably they got on the Torquay bus.”

“You can’t find out?”

Ellis wriggled on the cushions. “Driver’s an idiot. Doesn’t see or hear
anything.”

“I was out at the Falls myself.”

“Pardon?”

“I say, I was out at the Falls myself. I followed them on foot—though of course, I didn’t
know
I was doing that.”

“Did you see their car there?” Ellis asked.

“I saw several cars, but they all look alike nowadays. And they all had their lights off. You don’t go around peering into cars at the Falls which have their lights off.”

“And then, sir?”

“I just walked back. It’s a fairly normal walk for me in the evenings, after I’ve eaten. I mean, it’s a walk I quite often take.”

(And I had, in fact, walked back by the lanes as usual, resisting the temptation to skulk across the fields. Good for me to have dumped the car unnoticed near the bus-stop, and good for me to have remembered about the luggage before I set out.)