It’s a Battlefield (25 page)

‘Faith?'

‘Faith.'

‘Christianity, you mean?'

‘No, no, not Christianity.' He waited with his fork poised and wondered whether the problem of Caroline Bury's religion was to be solved at last; from the drawing-room came a faint smell of incense cones slowly burning. ‘You mean – just faith,' he prompted her.

‘Well, haven't you faith?'

‘Well,' he said, ‘of course one – er – hopes,' and crumbled his bread and found himself again faced with the question; how can so cynical, so clear-sighted a woman bemuse herself with incense, Indian idols (there were several in the spare bedrooms), ikons (there was one on the staircase), pictures of the Virgin (they were everywhere)?

‘What do you hope?'

‘Well,' he said, ‘one lives and then, that is, one dies.' It was the nearest he could come to conveying his sense of a great waste, a useless expenditure of lives: Caroline in the operating theatre, Drover on the scaffold, the girl on Streatham Common, Justin in Spain. It was impossible to believe in a great directing purpose, for these were not spare parts which could be matched again. He was filled, under the shadow of retirement, beneath the nausea which fogged his sight as he rose too quickly from the table, with a passionate desire for an eternal life, but an eternal life on earth watching the world grow reasonable, watching nationalities die and economic chaos giving way to order. But when that time came, he thought, it would not be enjoyed by the most selfless: Justin was dead; Caroline would be dead, several men in his old company whom he had admired. . . . It would be enjoyed arbitrarily by certain people who happened to be alive in a certain century, by adventurers and politicians and swindlers among the rest. Those who had fought hardest for it would probably be dead. That he himself would be dead was not unfair; he had not helped; he had served those who paid him; he had stood aside. But Caroline who had wanted to bribe the Home Secretary with an inheritance deserved to live, and following her trailing dress back to the incense and the shaded crowded room he felt small and mean and ashamed. His excuse had always been that he did his job, but remembering Justin he thought: she did her job, but she did a great deal more.

‘I must be going,' he said.

‘And you can't help with Drover?'

‘I'm sorry, Caroline.'

‘Good night then.' She held out a bony chalk-white hand. ‘You used to find your own way out.'

‘Yes, yes,' he said and realized suddenly how old they were, two old people who could not part with any warmth but who should have been able to part with greater ease. ‘I'm sorry,' he said again and thought: it's lucky she has got Faith, whatever she means by it, she's got nothing else: an ageing haggard woman in a dark room crowded with the relics of a taste which had been enthusiastic, never impeccable.

He searched a long while in the unlit hall for the Yale latch. She was an unconventional woman; she did not care for a maid to shut the door behind a friend as if he were a stranger; she wanted to give the impression of a door always open. But it would be more convenient in that case if the light were left turned on. He pulled himself up; he had nearly joined all her other friends in criticizing her. His hand found the latch, pushed the door open; he had forgotten while he had been with her the man who so persistently followed him. At the top of the three worn steps he remembered. The man stood in the middle of the street and held something forward in his hand. For a moment the Assistant Commissioner failed to recognize what it was.

When he saw that it was a revolver, he quietly closed the door of number fifteen. He did not want Caroline startled if anything happened. He was not afraid; he was supremely confident; his spirits rose like a rocket through the mist of indecision, dissatisfaction, regret; they dropped his ageing body to earth like the rocket's stick, while they soared higher. But though his spirits soared, he was not reckless; he knew exactly what he had to do. He must remain still, make no sudden movement; with any luck at all a taxi would presently appear, or a car might be driven between them and give him an opportunity to cross the pavement. He held the man's gaze, standing there three steps above him –

*

as yellow as the light behind the shoulder, old, calm, the enemy, the joker outside the Berkeley. ‘A pram on a taxi,' and the fume of hatred smouldering at the base of the brain rose and coiled and rose, and the fingers tightened and one thought: Now. Shall I fire now? Where must I aim? At the top stud of his evening shirt? But my hand is shaking. I must be calm. If he moves an inch I'll fire; but old, calm, yellow in the face, with his thin lips and his upper class lids, he waited, and one thought: He knows I'll miss. Have I come all this way, tracked him down so many pavements, waited and waited without food, only to miss him in the end because my hand shakes? And one thought again: If a car comes I must fire at once. I mustn't wait. There's nobody in the world who wouldn't help him against me. I'm alone.

He was separated from everyone he loved by his hatred. But when the shot was fired and the man was dead, his hatred would leave him. He would have let it run its course and it would leave him. And he thought of the dark steep stairs he had trodden at prostitutes' heels and afterwards was calm again, except for the dim feeling that this was not the kind of life a man should have to lead. His hand rose, he did not look at the other's face but at the top stud in his evening shirt, somewhere a car hooted, he was aware, at the edge of the left eye, of headlamps blasting the darkness at the top of the long Bloomsbury street . . .

Then, I said to Milly, I fired. You told me that I could never hold a gun, but my hand was still for long enough. He fell down the three steps and lay in the road. The car tried to stop, but the road was slippery after the rain, and it skidded fifty feet. I put the pistol in my pocket and came away. I hated you last night, but now I hate no one. I feel quite at ease again. They will not trace me, because he does not know me, and I had so little motive for anger against him. I love you now without hatred or jealousy or lust. It is as if I had driven my own nightmare into his body through the hole the bullet made.

He was telling himself a fairy tale; but this was true: his hate narrowed to a stud in a man's shirt, the headlights of a great car splashing the road and pavement between them, the thought: he'll run when it comes between. He steadied his hand; somebody shouted to him and he heard the brakes grind and the wheels scream as they failed to hold the surface of the road; he took his final aim at the man outside the door, at the policeman in the witness-box, at the jester outside the Berkeley, at the director's nephew, at the manager, at the voices calling, ‘Conrad, Conrad', across the asphalt yard. You can't frighten me with the name of murderer: Jim is a murderer. He pulled and pulled and the rusty trigger did not move. Then he was struck in the body and thrown a dozen yards and could not think: what has done this? nor wonder: why am I here? lying with his face over the pavement edge, watching the black water trickle down the gutter and fall through a grating, aware of pain and voices and pain, pain in the back and a worse pain in the jaw (the dentist's drill ground and ground and Milly came up the church and the smell of anthracite choked him).

‘Do you know him, sir?'

‘I haven't any idea who he is.'

‘The ambulance is coming.'

‘He wouldn't have done any damage; the revolver's loaded with blanks.'

Mr Bernay said: ‘You'll have to pay me for the risk,' and smiled and checked the smile and blew his nose. He thought: soon I shall be unconscious, nobody could bear this pain for long, and as the great drill thrust again between his teeth, he tried to move, he tried to scream, but he could hear nothing but the voices talking: ‘Really, you know it wasn't our fault. He stepped forward. The road's so slippery.' Again he tried to scream, because pain was scratching now like little sharp finger-nails at his spine, and this time he heard: the sound was a low grunt. It gave no satisfaction. Pain was like a bird frantic for freedom, dashing from wall to wall of the imprisoning room; his brain was bruised with the beat of its wings. Again and again he flung the window wide as it drove towards the glass, but back it went to the furthest wall: beaten and bruised and never exhausted. If I could faint, he thought, if I could scream.

‘Better not move him; his back may be broken.' His hand touched the black water trickling in the gutter; he could see his own blood joining the water, flowing thickly off the pavement edge. The bird ceased to blunder back and forth in his brain; it was resigned; it lay in a corner exhausted; it knew that it could never get out. The words which people spoke dropped slowly through the air: ‘Listen . . . I . . . can . . . hear . . . it . . . coming.' He could hear each word drop from the lips and his brain shrank with fear, waiting for the sound to reach him and pierce him like an aerial dart on the base of the skull. Even light was retarded; the headlights brushed the street slowly like a yellow broom. Somebody knelt on the pavement beside him, and the slight touch of the overcoat on Conrad's side stung like iodine on an open sore.

But when they lifted him the bird was roused again; the walls of the brain throbbed and trembled with its assaults; if I could scream, if I could faint.

He remained conscious and they lifted him into an ambulance and a police constable and an attendant sat beside him and they drove back the way he had walked. He could tell when they reached Trafalgar Square, because they drove round and round for what seemed a long while in a circle. Then he was out in the street, he was carried up steps and he tried to scream, and Big Ben struck the half-hour. He was on a wheeled bed passing down long corridors, nurses walked the opposite way and stared at him and he tried to scream; he was in a small room and they held a little box in front of his face and he tried to scream. Then the pain became unbearable and he closed his eyes and opened them and Milly sat beside him and a metal flask hung above his head and a tube dropped saliva into his mouth and he felt no pain. The pain, he knew, was still there, but it was exhausted, it lay still and cramped in a corner, stiff with the bandages which confined him too; one pretended not to notice it; everyone walked softly on tiptoe not to wake it.

They had put screens round his bed, but through a gap he could see the wards, rows of men wearily sleeping, and a sister sitting reading at a table where one light burned. Milly bent forward over the bed. ‘They found a note for me in your pocket.' He tried to answer her, but he could not move his bandaged jaw; the artificial saliva dripped, dripped on his tongue.

‘What was the use, Conrad, what was the use?'

He could not answer her. He tried to convey through his eyes some hint of the pain it caused him to be questioned and to be unable to reply.

‘Why didn't you ask me first, Conrad?' She leant her face close to his and whispered: ‘What was the good? Why couldn't you have waited?' He stared back at the skin drawn tightly over the bone and tried to raise his hand. But he was strapped and plastered and he could not move.

‘You couldn't have thought it would do any good?' He struggled to answer her. The nurse came round the screen and whispered: ‘You mustn't talk to him. You'd better go.'

Milly put her hands on the edge of the bed and whispered with desperation, ‘I must tell him – I've got to tell him – about Jim,' but the nurse pulled at her arm and said: ‘Tomorrow. You'll excite him. He's got to be quiet.' She looked down at him; he could tell at once how bad was the news she had received; and he struggled to understand. It was as if all the impressions of the room, the sight which had been wasted on the screen, on the nurse, on the ranged beds, could be driven back into his brain to reinforce the vitality he needed if he was to understand: he closed his eyes. He closed his ears to every trivial sound, the pinned watch ticking over the nurse's heart, the breathing of men asleep, the drip of saliva down the rubber tube, so that he might only hear what the nurse and Milly whispered. He pushed his toes against the bed's end, feeling the iron cold through sheet and blankets, drawing all his remaining strength to one centre, so that before she went he would have power, in spite of bandages and plaster, to sit upright, to move his jaw and speak, asking her what it was she had heard of Jim.

He opened his eyes and saw Milly, quite clearly, in relief against the reading-lamp, blackness all round her, and he was aware that she was bewildered and hopeless and needed him and that he was dying; it seemed to him that she was watching him with horror as if he was the first of all the men whom sooner or later she must come to know; he unsealed his ears and heard the breathing catch in her throat. He put his foot against the rail and urged his jaw to open, his muscles to respond; then there was pain and a sense of something breaking and the taste of blood and his throat filling and a struggle to breathe.

He never knew that he screamed in spite of his broken jaw; but with curious irrelevance, out of the darkness, after they had left him and his pulses had ceased beating and he was dead, consciousness returned for the fraction of a second, as if his brain had been a hopelessly shattered mirror, of which one piece caught a passing light. He saw and his brain recorded the sight: twelve men lying uneasily awake in the public ward with wireless headpieces clamped across their ears, and a nurse reading under a lamp, and nobody beside his bed.

*

Incomprehensible, the Assistant Commissioner thought, incomprehensible. He trod slowly up the stairs step by step, paused at the landing: a steel engraving of Frith's ‘Railway Station' (the thief in handcuffs, the abandoned wife), on an occasional table a naked bronze child withdrawing a thorn from his foot. He opened the door of his flat, and the light gleamed on the carved gourds and flashed back from the native spears. A middle-aged man rose from the one arm-chair. ‘Your housekeeper let me in.' He hesitated. ‘You don't remember me.'