Give Us This Day (12 page)

He had not locked it and on crossing the threshold it seemed that the place was full of people. He drew back, rubbing eyes that were still smarting from smoke and yellow soap. Then he saw that there was only one person in there, but the man by the window was so huge, and possessed such a commanding presence, that he seemed to fill the room. It was Saul Keate, his former waggon-master, who had been his friend and confidant since that first summer evening in ‘58, when Avery had introduced him as the likely recruiting sergeant of a South Bank work force. A gentle giant, standing six feet six in his socks, with a great, slabsided face and mild blue eyes, a man who had searched the docks night after night for lost souls with potential that could be channelled into the network. Another Bible-puncher, certainly, and a prude who winced every time he heard a carter swear, but a person of immense positiveness for whom he had always entertained the greatest respect.

He said, “Have you just come from the yard?” and Keate, surprisingly, said no, although he had heard about the fire from one of the men who lived in his street. “According to him there was little I could do,” he said, “so I thought it best to come here and give you this, sir. It had this address on it or I would have travelled down to Tryst, late as it is.” He handed Adam a sealed envelope addressed to him in Tybalt’s hand and marked
“Urgent and Personal.”

“Where did you get it?”

“At Tybalt’s home. It was on his sitting-room mantelshelf when I called round for some mission funds appeals he asked me to collect this afternoon. His front door was ajar but he wasn’t there. I called up the stairs and then made enquiries. He lives alone, as you know, except for a woman who comes in and does for him since his wife died. I found her eventually. She told me he was there at midday, when she left, but she hadn’t seen him since.” He waited in his grave, self-effacing way that recalled so many orders-for-the-day sessions down the years.

Adam said, “Very obliging of you, Keate,” and carried the envelope over to the window, opening it, taking out two closely-written sheets and reading them with his back to the light.

The first lines made him catch his breath for Tybalt began:

My dear Mr. Swann,

When you read this I shall have moved on, and I pray God Almighty finds it possible to forgive me for what I am about to do. But I thought it only honourable to admit that I did not follow your advice last night. I was far too agitated to let it rest until morning. I took a train to Annerley to discuss this grave matter with my son, and try and discover whether he had remained in ignorance of the fact that Robsart and others were robbing the firm. I learned a great deal more than I bargained for.

He looked up, glancing across at the impassive Keate. “You say you couldn’t locate Tybalt? You’re sure he wasn’t somewhere about the house?”

“As I said, I called, sir…”

“Then listen to this, Keate. I’ll read it first and explain on the way over there. You and I are going back as soon as I’ve got some clothes on…”

“…You will understand, Mr. Swann, how excessively painful it is for me to write this, so I do not propose to go into details. You will do that as soon as you confront my boy, Robsart and that scoundrel Linklater. The truth is, in a word, Wesley was implicated so deeply that he heard me out and then offered me a substantial bribe to forget what I had seen and deduced, saying he could concoct some plausible explanation to satisfy you and dispose of Robsart and his associates overnight. I do not think I need tell you I spurned his offer and counselled him there and then that there was only one course open to him now, to lay everything before you and Mr. George, and throw himself on your mercy.

“At first he brushed this aside, saying you would make certain he went to prison, but I went on and he finally promised he would consider taking this course, provided I would allow him a few hours to make up his mind. It seemed to me I owed him that, or rather I owed it to his wife and child, so I left and went home. No words of mine can express the shame I feel on his behalf. I can only assume he was a far weaker vessel than I thought and was led away by Linklater or Robsart, but one thing he did add and I pass it on for what it is worth. The pickings were trivial at first but when Mr. George took to travelling more, and gave Wesley a free run of the yard, he plunged deeper and deeper into wickedness and began organising big-scale runs from the north and Midlands, roughly along the lines you suggested—that is to say, our vehicles making the long hauls and Linklater’s onloading from that warehouse whenever the occasions were propitious.

“I can only add that never, under any circumstances, could I look you in the face again. Our long association has been, to me at least, a very happy one, and I will carry with me to the grave a deep appreciation of all your trust and kindness since I came to work for you in the earliest days of Swann-on-Wheels.

“I remain, sir, your very humble servant, Hubert Tybalt.”

He had never seen Keate so blanched and tense. The big man seemed dazed with shock and when his lips moved no sound issued from them for a moment or so. Then he said, hoarsely, “He can’t… he wouldn’t do anything so… so foolish, so dreadful, Mr. Swann?”

Adam said, sharply, “He certainly will if we aren’t lucky enough to run him down and persuade him a man can’t take upon himself the guilt of others, no matter how close they are. Go down and get a cab. Pick the youngest horse in the rank and tell the cabby we want him to risk his neck in a dash to Rotherhithe. Don’t say anything more now, we haven’t time. I’ll be with you in less than five minutes.” And without waiting for Keate to leave, he tore open the wardrobe and threw his spare suit on the bed, struggling out of his dressing gown and flinging himself into his clothes. He went out in such a hurry that he left the door open and the bed strewn with keys.

3

Traffic had eased off at this hour, but the journey seemed a tedious one, for it did not take him long to acquaint Keate with the basic facts of the situation and afterwards, following a futile speculation or two, the pair of them jolted on in gloomy silence. It wanted a few minutes to ten when the cab drew up beside Tybalt’s little house and he bundled out of it, calling to the cabbie to wait. Keate was close behind him and they paused in the narrow hall to light the gas, then went on into the front-room, where Tybalt’s mission appeals lay in neat stacks on the red plush tablecloth. He said, gruffly, “You stay here. I’ve got to make sure before we alert the police. I’m pretty certain it’ll be the river, and I only hope it takes him a long time to screw up his nerve!” Adam clumped upstairs, finding a candlestick on the tiny landing and lighting the wick.

Tybalt’s bedroom, tidily done over by the woman who looked after him, was empty, and the bed had not been disturbed, but that meant nothing, for she had been here until midday. He went back across the landing and examined the other two rooms, scarcely more than boxes. One that was furnished had been Wesley’s all the time he was growing up here, and a text hung over the bed, one of those framed Biblical quotations that hung in the homes of all men like Tybalt. It read “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light.” He went out and was beginning to descend the stairs again when he noticed a door midway between the bedrooms that he had mistaken for a cupboard. He now saw that it was not a cupboard but a recess, converted into a water-closet. On impulse he turned back and flung open the door, holding the candle high above his head.

Tybalt looked back at him, a baffled, outraged expression in eyes that were wide open, as was his mouth. His feet reached to within about six inches of the floor. The knotted cravat about his neck was hooked over the trigger of the cistern and entangled, somehow, in the short length of chain; even as he stared, the final irony of the situation jumped at him in the form of the raised lettering on the cistern. It announced that the water-closet was the product of James Lockerbie & Company, Ltd., Sanitary Engineers, Glasgow, the man George was cuckolding. George had given Wesley Tybalt so much rope that he had succeeded in hanging not Wesley but Wesley’s father.

He would have thought himself proof against the shock of witnessing a violent death, but this death was more than violent. It was obscene, a bizarre and shuddering mockery of all the man hanging there had believed in and practised throughout his blameless life. It was as ritualistic as the death of a terrified savage willed to destroy himself by a witch-doctor, and it was acknowledgment of this, rather than the spectacle itself, that made him recoil retching, steadying himself by throwing up a hand to grasp the lintel of the makeshift door frame.

In that moment Keate was beside him, the pair of them crowding the narrow door frame as Keate said, quietly, “Leave him, sir. I’ll see to him. Go down, sir, I’ll not be a moment.” Adam turned and groped his way down the stairs to the front door, standing there with his back to the hall gulping the river breeze and telling himself that he was past this kind of thing, long done with meddling in other men’s affairs, and yearned only to be safely back at Tryst, with Henrietta, his trees, and his flowers.

He was still standing there when Keate came down, saying, in the same steady voice, “Take the cab and get along home, sir. Leave everything to me. I’ll inform the police and do what has to be done.” When Adam made a gesture of protest, Keate insisted, “He was
my
friend, sir! The best a man ever had,” and practically propelled Adam to the cab, calling to the driver, “Back to the hotel, but take it steady this time. The gentleman is in no hurry now.”

But later, an hour or so later, Adam decided that Keate was wrong. He was in a hurry, a tearing desperate hurry to call George to account, and he only waited long enough to down a couple of stiff brandies before searching through his notebook for the number that butler had given him earlier in the day, a day that seemed to have stretched itself into a month and a month in which disaster piled on disaster in a way that was somehow new to him, and that after a lifetime of adventure. He went down to reception and saw the night manager, asking if he might use the inner office for a private telephone call, and when the young man had ushered him inside and offered, as was usual he supposed, to get the callee for him, he waved his hand, saying impatiently, “No… I’ll get it. I know how to work the damned thing. Mr. Irons showed me this morning.”

It took longer than he thought, a matter of ten minutes or so, and he was close to giving up when a woman’s voice said over the wire, “Who is it? Who is calling?”

“Is that Lady Lockerbie, ma’am?”

“Yes it is.” The voice was snappish and decisive, the voice of a woman who did not suffer fools gladly. “Who is it calling?”

He said, very meekly, “You won’t know me, Your Ladyship, but I’m calling on very urgent business. This is Mr. Wesley Tybalt, yard manager of Swann-onWheels. I was given this number by Mr. George Swann and told to use it in emergencies. There has been an emergency, Your Ladyship. I’d be very obliged indeed if you could put me in touch with Mr. Swann.”

He waited, counting the seconds and perhaps ten elapsed before she said, carefully, “What
kind
of emergency, Mr. Tybalt?” He said, eagerly, “A fire, Your Ladyship. I’m afraid I have some bad news for Mr. Swann. Half the yard has been burned down. The brigades are still there.”

That rattled her a little. He heard the swift intake of breath but the voice was casual when she said, “I think I might be able to locate Mr. Swann for you. He is one of my house guests.”

“You could reach him soon, Your Ladyship?”

“Possibly. I’ll pass your message to him.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am… at the risk of sounding impertinent it is essential I locate him as quickly as possible. I could wait while you enquired for him.”

There was a longish pause. Finally she said, “Very well, Mr. Who-is-it?”

“Tybalt, ma’am.”

“Tybalt.”

She went away and he settled himself as comfortably as possible in a cane chair that was too deep and too small for his bulk and customary sitting posture. Minutes passed and he yawned, trying to keep awake by equating the faraway voice with that lovely imperious face of the horsewoman Gisela had shown him. Presently a polite male voice enquired, “Did you get your subscriber, sir?” and he said, “Yes, I’m waiting.” Slowly, as minutes passed, the exhilaration the success of his ruse had injected into him waned, the mild glee insufficient to hold at bay the memory of Tybalt’s baffled eyes and short legs dangling six inches from the closet floor. His head nodded and the confines of the uncomfortable chair enfolded him in a way that made him yearn for release. And presently, against all probability, he dozed.

Six

Return of Atlas

T
he garden-house, a pretty, timber-constructed building, set in a secluded part of the grounds of Sir James Lockerbie’s country home, was his wife’s favourite resort when she was temporarily disenchanted with cities. It was comfortably furnished and out of sight and sound of the big house, an ideal place to re-enact a kind of Marie Antoinette Arcadian fantasy, and Barbara Lockerbie was given to fantasies. Indeed, she would have argued that fantasy (judicially translated into fact whenever the opportunity offered) had been responsible for her spectacular climb from the daughter of an Irish emigrant, to the late Victorian equivalent of a Regency courtesan. George himself would have acknowledged this. In fact, every young spark and kept doxy in London’s second-grade society acknowledged it, and it was generally assumed that even Sir James Lockerbie must have adjusted to it, for there were certain commercial advantages accruing to the husband of one of the most talked-of women in London. It kept the name of Lockerbie in the eye of men with money to burn, especially in a society where, despite so many impressive technical achievements, the earth-closet and the close stool were still much in use, where few country houses boasted a bathroom and the habit of daily bathing was still regarded as a mark of eccentricity.

Thus Sir James, who spent a great deal of his time travelling, and whose ambition it was to die the wealthiest man in Scotland, gave his wife a notoriously long leash and appeared to pay little heed to gossip concerning her virtue. She was gay, undeniably pretty, an excellent hostess when he had need of her services as such, and wore a romantic halo that went some way to encourage tolerance regarding her alleged shortcomings in other respects.

Her father, it was rumoured, was a Kerry landowner whose gambling debts had obliged him to live abroad where he subsequently married a Portuguese heiress. Her mother, some claimed, was a Polish ballet dancer, and had been a mistress of Czar Nicholas II, who had married her off to a British embassy official. She had, according to other random tongues, been born in Trieste, in an Indian garrison town, in the American West during the ‘49 gold rush, in Bergen, in Egypt, and in any number of places with exotic connotations, like Samarkand, Baghdad, and a village high in the Caucasus.

Not one word of these colourful stories was true, but this was no loss to romance. Real romance resided in her survival and promotion to a position where she could pick and choose wealthy lovers and receive them, more or less openly, at the Garden House, on a Hertfordshire estate of four hundred acres, or in her apartment in the Avenue Wagram, in Paris. Promiscuous she undeniably was, but she was not a fool, and London had never been the setting for a single indiscretion. She had more than enough common sense to realise that nobody moving in her circle credited the fact that anything important, including an act of infidelity, could occur outside London. Incidents rumoured to have taken place across the Channel, or in the British provinces, could therefore be dismissed as fiction.

As to the truth concerning her origin, perhaps she herself had never known it and had been obliged to invent a pedigree. In fact, she was the illegitimate daughter of a scullery-maid, employed on an absentee landlord’s estate in County Mayo at the time of the Irish potato famine, and Bab Casey, as she began life, was the deferred price paid by a starving girl for one square meal a day. Her mother must have had a certain shrewdness, however, for she at least prevailed upon her lover to give her enough money to emigrate to Canada on one of the Cork coffin ships, and the scullery-maid must have been hardy, too, for she and her child survived when three-fifths of her fellow passengers died on voyage, or during the quarantine period in the St. Lawrence River, where they were buried in mass graves on an island before the survivors were set ashore at Montreal.

It was here, in the shantytown, that Barbara spent her brief childhood until she followed her mother’s example and ensured her own survival by sailing away as the fifteen-year-old mistress of a German sea captain, later drowned off the Newfoundland Banks. She next turned up in Liverpool, as part of the travelling equipment of an animal trainer, who exhibited at one-night circus stands in the cotton towns of the northwest. It was here, while assisting her employer in his alligator act, that she attracted the attention of a professional gambler, who took her to Glasgow, graveyard of many a gambler, and his too after Barbara moved from half-world into broad daylight by leaving him and marrying a Paisley architect of respectable family.

From then on her career was at least on record. She divorced her husband when she was twenty-three and married Sir James Lockerbie a few months after his wife had died of jaundice. Few women could have come this far without learning the basic rules of survival in a world shaped by men for men, and Barbara learned more than most. Her philosophy was simple, and based on the assumption that a busy man, obsessed with the business of coaxing a good living from a gullible public, may prattle a lot about domestic felicity but invariably ventures beyond the range of his own hearth in search of it during his brief intervals between stints of hard grind. Another thing she learned about men was that few of them ever matured, as a woman matures. From adolescence until senility the simple gratification of their senses was more important to them than all their wealth and status, and almost any man, however thrustful and ambitious, was a slave to his carnal appetites. It was therefore in this direction, and no other, that a personable woman should look for advancement. Had she been asked to summarise her conclusions in this field she would have said that a helpmate, however dutiful and accomplished, invariably lost the battle to a bedmate, providing, of course, that the bedmate knew her business as well as Barbara Lockerbie, alias Mrs. Creighton, alias Barbara Tracy, Barbara Villeneuve, Barbara Schmitt, and so on, all the way back to little Babs Casey, fighting to stay alive in a Canadian shantytown.

* * *

She had tested this theory on a string of lovers, some chosen for gain and lustre, others, as she passed the thirty mark, for diversion, and her involvement with George Swann, head of a national transport network, was proof that her theory was sound. George attracted her for a variety of reasons, chief among them being his indifference to competition. It was as though his headstart over every other haulier in the country equipped him with an ability to discount her other admirers, past and present, and this added up to a kind of amiable arrogance that she found very agreeable. George took what she had to offer boisterously and gratefully, but he left it at that, using her, she suspected, much as she had used a succession of men in her rise from the gutter. He never probed her past, or speculated on their future as lovers, seeing her, no doubt, as a prolonged holiday treat, and, God knows, the poor man badly needed a holiday when she ran across him at his ship launching last April. As far as she could decide he hadn’t had one for years and was not even aware that he had earned one, and it might have been the memory of this that prompted her to lie about the telephone bell that broke in upon their idyll towards midnight the day of the regatta.

He was shaving now in the tiny dressing-room adjoining the bedroom and from the bed she could hear the rasp of razor on stiff bristles that required him, so he said, to shave night and morning. She felt very much at peace with the world after a tiring and somewhat boring day on the river, for the regatta and the sunshine had brought everybody out, and she had had her fill of chitter-chatter with local sportsmen and their frumpish wives. George, thank God, was not a sportsman, and had no interest in fashionable games and pastimes. He evidently enjoyed his work and manifold responsibilities. He must have done, in order to keep his nose to the grindstone ever since he took his father’s place as head of the network, but he had no social ambition and this in itself was refreshing. He was, she would have said, a man who preferred to save his vitality for his network and her, and she was not disposed to let him go until she had exhausted all his possibilities.

She now lay spreadeagled on the silk coverlet of the bed, speculating whether the long day by the river had exhausted him as much as it had her, and how this was likely to affect his performance as a lover. She was clinically interested in such performances, and his, a little storming and clumsy at first, was improving rapidly under her tuition. She even thought he was aware of this and gave her the credit for it, and this was very exceptional in the male animal. She called, lazily, “Do you know why I’m always pleased to see you, George?”

He called back, “Because you don’t have to flatter me.”

“No,” she said, “although that’s a point. It’s because you’re the only man I know who doesn’t decorate his face with a lot of bristly undergrowth.”

He said, laughing, “Got it from the Gov’nor. Never seen him with a beard or whiskers.”

He often mentioned his father, usually in terms that implied they got along much better than most reigning monarchs and their heirs apparent. “You’re very fond of him, aren’t you, George?”

“I’ve got a hell of a lot of respect for him.”

“Does he keep a mistress somewhere?”

“He’s turned seventy, woman.”

“Did he ever keep one?”

“Not to my knowledge. Personally I doubt it. All his energy went into the network. He started from scratch.”

He drifted in, dabbing his tanned, good-natured face with a towel, and contemplated her a moment before lowering himself on the edge of the bed. He was in no hurry. He never was nowadays, and this was something else she found rewarding about him.

“What’s your mother like, George?”

“You’re not interested in my mother.”

“I’m interested in any woman whose husband reaches seventy without him getting goatish.”

He said, thoughtfully, “Come to think of it, I daresay you’re right. She probably had a good deal to do with it.”

“How, George?”

“I always got the impression she wilts every time he comes into the room. She still does.”

“That wouldn’t account for it, would it?”

“It would in her case. She never troubled to conceal the fact and that has a steadying effect on a man.”

“Tell me.”

“It enlarges his domestic conscience. Makes him feel shabby when he does cut loose.”

“Your wife thinks a deal of you. Do I bother your conscience?”

He said, quite seriously, “Yes, from time to time. But then I tell myself that a man must have fun sometimes. I had a good deal up to the age of twenty-one, but not much since.”

“Where did you find your fun, George?”

“In Munich.”

“Tell me about Munich.”

He told her something of his time in Munich, where a statuesque German widow, almost old enough to be his mother, had seduced him before he was twenty. He still remembered Rosa Ledermann with great affection. It was she who had shaped his tastes in women. He had a preference for well-covered women, with generous hips and busts, and now that he looked at Barbara Lockerbie he realised that it was her figure that had attracted him, even though she had delicate features and a beautiful skin. He said, voicing his thoughts, “If I had met you a few years ago, I wouldn’t be here dancing to your tune. You were skinnier then, or so I’ve heard. Is that so?”

“Yes, it is so,” and she subjected him to a long, careful scrutiny, noting his jauntiness and the half-smile about his clean-shaven lips. She thought:
He could keep me quiet for a year or more, I daresay. Maybe even longer, providing he didn’t begin taking me for granted.
Aloud she said, “Kiss me, George.”

“I’ll do more than that. Move over.”

Her arms arched over his strong neck, pulling him down and pressing his mouth to hers with a kind of playful determination, as though willing him to take the initiative. And when her mouth opened he did, losing his jauntiness and letting his hand run as far as her thighs, but it was never her habit to yield to the first overtures. As his head came up she turned hers sideways, and he saw that she was laughing.

“What’s the joke, Babs? Is it us? Saying good night all round and slipping away here?”

“No, not that.”

“Something that came to mind unexpectedly?”

“That’s very sharp of you, George. Sometimes you’re a little too sharp. I was thinking of that poor little man on the other end of the telephone.”

“What little man? You said it was your town butler, ringing about tomorrow’s enquiries.”

“Well, it wasn’t. That was a wicked lie.”

“Why?”

“To keep you here. It was someone who works in your yard. A man called Tybalt.”

He sat up, instantly attentive. “
Wesley
Tybalt? My yard manager?”

“Yes, and it was very naughty of you to give him this number to use in emergencies.”

His face clouded now as he said, “Tybalt’s had that number ever since our first time up here but he’s never used it. What was the emergency?”

“I’ll not tell you.”

“You damned well will tell me!”

It was a long time since Barbara Lockerbie had felt menaced, and the experience was rare enough to excite her. She said, “Now listen here, Mr. Waggonmaster, you might be God Almighty in your network but here…” but he cut in, taking her by the shoulders in a grip that would leave bruises.

“I’m not fooling any longer. It might be very important, so you’ll tell me why Wes Tybalt rang.”

“It wasn’t important.”

“You let me be judge of that.”

She had learned, over the years, precisely how much teasing a man could stand. There was no sense in antagonising him beyond a certain point or he might turn sulky and sulks in a lover meant a dull evening.

“All right, let me go. It was a fire at the yard.”

“What kind of fire?”

“How should I know? He said a fire, and asked if I could get hold of you.”

“And you left him on the end of the telephone?”

“The line is still open.”

“But good God, I heard that bell tinkle when I started shaving fifteen minutes ago. You had no right…” and he would have made for the landing where the telephone was, but she felt challenged and grabbed him by the hand, throwing her full weight against his arm so that he staggered and fell on her.