It’s a Battlefield (23 page)

He saw a nurserymaid leading a child across a grassy plain, a Guardsman in uniform leaning over railings, a girl with puffed sleeves and long thin legs trailing a borzoi down a gravel path. Dogs were barking, children were shouting, and two lovers lay and whispered in the grass behind him. He sat alone, with hate curled inside him, and envied them all, the shouting children, the barking dogs, the lovers whispering. A man pushed a perambulator down the gravel and four children hung along the sides, impeded the wheels, stumbled and cried and talked. It seemed to Conrad that he was watching a great victory; this stranger was not alone, he would never be alone, not only in the sense that he was the centre of a crowd but because the crowd included him and recognized his existence; they asked him questions, they complained to him, they demanded his approval. Even the harassed face was, in Conrad's eyes, a token of victory: a conquering general is not free from care.

The lovers whispered, and the girl with the borzoi raised a gauntleted hand and waved to someone whom Conrad could not see, and the sunlight lay flat on the flat glass. The gravel was like gold and the light flooded under the lowest bar of the palings. In ten minutes it would be dusk and the nurserymaids would stand up with the perambulators under the trees, calling to the children to come in to supper (a glass of milk and two petit beurre biscuits) and bed with a nightlight burning and the sun sunk out of sight below the Park and the horses going home and the lamps being lit and the cars drawn waiting to the kerb, like black cats crouched on a narrow leaden roof.

Conrad sat and nobody stared at him, nobody looked over a shoulder, nobody laughed; his clothes were properly adjusted, his face clean, his voice unheard. But he was embittered now because he was unregarded. It was as if he were dead and his unhappy ghost unable to communicate some incomprehensible wish belonging to the past. He got up; nobody looked at him; the girl with the borzoi had disappeared; the lovers were quiet because the shadows were reaching them, because soon it would be dark enough to be happy in; the nurserymaids were going back to Bayswater. He banged his fist on the paling and ran his nails along the bar, but nobody looked at him. The desire to grip a sleeve, to say, ‘I am alive like you,' was almost irresistible; for if one were dead and so unhappy, there would be no hope left, no comfort – ‘one day I shall be dead.' But these were fancies; at the same depth as his hate he knew that he was alive; for if this had been death, he would not have envied Jim; this was life which Jim was escaping, into which persistently, with a love indistinguishable in its effect from hatred, they were trying to push him back.

But no, he was wrong again. He was giddy, leaning across the paling, allowing the grass to shift and return, as the pawnbroker's face had receded and approached. This wasn't the life into which Jim might be thrust. That life did not include Milly.

He thought that nothing would induce him to return to Battersea; one was not driven to return to someone one did not love. One returned home, for that should mean comfort, tenderness, knowledge, understanding. These were things it was impossible, once experienced, to do without; but one could dispense with the satisfaction of a crude hunger, one could dispense with shame. But a dog, he thought, returns to its vomit. If I'm not careful, I'll be back where my brother's so often been before me.

That was the distance he had travelled from her in a night. Before their bodies had known each other, they had been closely acquainted; they had even shared something, their nerves and their suspicion, in which Jim had no part at all; she had sneered at him, as she sneered at all the world except his brother, but the sneers were without malice. He could believe that she loved him in a way, and that way, though it promised no satisfaction, was better than this shared lust, this shared ignorance of anything beyond a touch, a sense of physical closeness, a heat and a movement.

You began it, he accused her, rubbing his fist along the paling, but never again, never again. He was determined to sleep out, but in the darkness and the autumn cold, he was turned from the Park by a man who rang a bell. The motorcars purred away, running softly; the Guardsmen walked away down Knightsbridge with their canes under their arms; the amateur whores were drinking coffee at the stall.

Conrad walked back up Piccadilly; every policeman stared at him, every woman grinned. The old game began again; they conspired to make him mad. It would be a bad look-out for them, he thought, if I were really mad, with a revolver in my pocket, and suddenly he knew why they all looked at him: the bulge and hang of his pocket told what he carried. They could see through the cloth; perhaps there was a hole and the metal shone. Presently, he thought, they will stop me and take it away, and I shall be able to do nothing with it after all. He had not yet decided what he would do with it, but if he could find a quiet place and sleep a little, he would be able clearly to consider its uses. It began to rain, a cold stinging rain close to hail; the people sheltering under the Ritz arcade stared at him: a policeman came down the pavement, watching him. It was as if they all envied him the power he carried. He did not dare to stay in one place lest they should rob him of it.

But the rain went on, he was drenched below the knees, and his back began to stiffen with rheumatism. He walked to keep warm and he only got more wet. It occurred to him that he might go to his old lodgings, but his landlady would be in bed, and he had not enough money to pay his fare all the way. The fire would be out, he would hang his dripping clothes over a chair and all night the drops would fall over the linoleum, and in the morning in damp clothes he would have to go to work. The director's nephew would talk and laugh among the clerks, and if cautiously he opened the door of his inner room, he would hear his voice: ‘A night on the tiles.' Then the manager would pass through the clerks' room and hear what was said and be aware of the hidden current of mockery. He would ring his bell, as the man in the Park had rung his bell, and speak to him in front of his secretary, Miss Batlow, lean, elderly Miss Batlow with pince-nez, who fumbled in the files. The rain dripped from the canopy of the Criterion.

‘Discipline, Drover, discipline. We must have someone who can keep discipline' – one hand on his telephone, another tapping a pencil, and presently the director's nephew in his place in the inner room.

There was always suicide. That would solve the problem of how to stay out and keep dry, the problem of his rheumatism, the problem of how to keep his black-striped trousers neat. ‘There is one thing we value very highly in an employee, Drover: neatness.'

He dived out suddenly, recklessly, into the rain. Neatness, I'll show them. The water splashed up above the kerb as the taxis came by from the theatre; it drummed on the umbrellas and scattered the lamplight like oil on the black surface of the street. It ran from the brim of his hat behind his collar; when his foot turned on the slippery pavement a pain ran inwards at his spine. It was difficult to know what kept him alive; he had no ambition, work was only a grim struggle to survive; the only man he loved was locked away from him; the only woman he had ever loved had shown him exactly what love between a man and a woman was worth. But it was that short pleasure which made him pause; it seemed nothing when it was first over, when he was ashamed and Milly cried and the walls shook and day came. Then the betrayal of his brother seemed everything. Hours passed and the body stirred again and pleasure, however short, seemed more important than a scruple. If I were stupid enough, he thought with envy, I should go back now; I'd forget everything but meeting her again; if she were stupid, she'd be wanting me now, forgetting everything, even Jim, in her hunger; if we were stupid, like Jim, we'd not care a damn about anything but the moment.

But she's no more stupid than I.

The rain drove between lamp and lamp and made the street dark. A bus drove down and stopped at the kerb beside him, like a small lit house in which people sat and talked and were warm before a fire; the lights on the wet pavement flickered like the gas flames in asbestos towers.

‘Battersea,' somebody said (he thought it was the conductor). ‘Last bus.' He sat in it and tried to see through the steaming windows Shaftesbury Avenue unwind behind them.

‘Is this the last bus?' he asked, and the conductor said: No. There were many more. It was hardly eleven yet. But it was too late, Conrad thought, to do anything now. He was going back – like a dog to its vomit, he told himself again, for I'm not stupid enough to think that when this is over anything will be changed: it will all happen again, self-condemnation and despair. I'll be happy for ten minutes. If she has any sense, she'll have locked the door of her room; she can't lock the hall door, for it's broken.

A police boat went gently down the stream, burning a red light, and disturbed a sleeping gull which beat up through the rain to the level of the bus windows, then sank again on rigid wings into the dark and the silence, while the sheets of rain fell between.

If she has the sense – but he would not expect more sense from her than from himself, and he had come back. Pushing open the broken door and letting the rain drive after him into the hall, he saw her at once sitting on her bed with her frock off and her shoe slapping on the floor and her bony knees and her starved face.

She said: ‘I was afraid you weren't coming back. Kay's not come home. She's away with some man. I couldn't bear to be alone.' The uncompleted form lay on her dressing-table; the common familiar scent came to him. He thought: how generous she is, pretending that she's pleased I've come, but she can't be as stupid as that, she can't be as stupid as that.

He said: ‘I got so wet,' but she interrupted him, ‘Don't talk. Don't say anything. Come to bed,' and for a moment he was able to think: how foolish to imagine that home meant comfort, tenderness, knowledge, understanding; home is hunger about to be satisfied, bitterness about to be forgotten; that's all one wants of home. He said: ‘I didn't mean to come. I couldn't keep away'; and saw her expression harden at the very moment when she took him in her arms. ‘Don't talk,' Milly said. ‘I hate you when you talk.'

5

‘T
HERE
'
S
been a man hanging about nearly all day,' Mrs Simpson said. She moved an ash-tray a few inches and flicked with a duster.

The Assistant Commissioner looked up sharply; he had known quite well that something worried her, for ever since he returned from the Yard she had been at him about one thing or another. Quite suddenly a few hours ago he had remembered that he was dining with Caroline Bury and had telephoned to say that he would not be at home for dinner and that his evening clothes must be laid out. Mrs Simpson liked a lot of warning; she was growing too old for her job, but the same would be said of him very soon and he had not the heart to dismiss her, not did he wish to go back to the silky domination of a manservant younger than himself.

‘A man in dark striped trousers?' he asked.

‘If I didn't think you'd be in any minute asking for something, ringing up,' Mrs Simpson added with unhappy scorn, ‘I'd have gone out and given him a bit of my mind. He ought to have been ashamed of himself, wasting all the day like that. He was here at lunch time, he was here at tea time. While there are some people who have to work themselves to the bone.'

The Assistant Commissioner looked at his watch. ‘I must be off in a few minutes.'

‘You'll have a taxi?'

‘No, no, I'll walk.'

‘It would give me the creeps,' Mrs Simpson said, ‘spending all the day with murderers and thieves. Why, I dream sometimes that you're bleeding on the doorstep.'

‘Come, come, Mrs Simpson, this is London.'

‘Them as knows what London is,' Mrs Simpson said, ‘would not be surprised to find their nearest and dearest bleeding.'

‘Well, I must be off. You mustn't have – er – these fancies.'

‘Your tie needs straightening,' Mrs Simpson said. She turned her tongue against him as if it were a knife; in her harsh pulls at his black tie she seemed to put him in his place, to rebuke him for offering advice to someone older than himself, to someone who knew London so much better. She defended herself always in this way against the faintest hint of patronage. Ten years' seniority gave her the privilege of advising. ‘You ought to take a taxi,' she said. ‘I'd take a taxi,' but the advice from her was not convincing; it would have needed more than ‘the creeps' to have broken the routine of a lifetime, the fitting on of the straw hat, the secure pinning of the brooch in the high-necked blouse, presently the slap, slap of old feet going down the street towards the Embankment, towards the trams.

‘I must take exercise when I can get it, Mrs Simpson.'

‘Get along with you. When you've reached your age you need a rest.' She flicked her way, apprehensively, to the window, ran the duster over the dustless gleaming pane, stared down into the dark street. ‘I'll call a taxi.'

‘No,' the Assistant Commissioner said and snapped his watch-case.

‘I don't see why I should go home worrying, just because you won't take a taxi.' There was ‘nothing to her' in her grey dress, her apron which had once been white; her grey hair was pulled tight on the top of her head into a bun no larger than an egg-cup. She was like a wisp of smoke at the window from an almost extinct fire. ‘I've got enough to worry about.'

‘Quite unnecessary,' the Assistant Commissioner said.

‘I don't want to find a new job at my age.'

‘But what was there about this man – ?'

‘I didn't like his face.'

‘You mustn't trust too much –'