Suspension of Mercy (4 page)

“My, you’re going great guns this afternoon. A brainstorm?” Alicia stood in the doorway with a large bowl of strawberries.

“Yep,” Sydney said over his shoulder, annoyed at being interrupted, but not as annoyed as usual.

“Sorry I crashed in, but your door wasn’t shut, and Mrs. Lilybanks just brought these over. Isn’t that sweet of her? She got them in Fram. Want some now or wait till dinner?”

Sydney stood up and smiled politely. He looked straight at Alicia, though he really didn’t see her. Even his eyes were still focused for the distance of the typewriter page. “Save them for after dinner. For me, anyway.”

“Okay, darling. Sorry I bothered you.”

Sydney worked until dinnertime, read his synopsis over, then took it to the post office in Roncy Noll, whence it wouldn’t get off till early tomorrow morning, but he wanted it in the post tonight. This was Tuesday, and Alex would get it in the early post Thursday. Sydney was pleased. The Whip had been taken by surprise by a man delivering wine, but had knocked him out on the way to the wine cellar. Then amused by three prostrate forms in the flat, The Whip had decided to make the robbery look like the work of a gang, and had soiled several glasses with beer and scotch, though without leaving fingerprints, and wadded a few linen napkins up on the kitchen table. Coolly he had walked out the front door with his bulging kit, entered a tube station, finally arrived at his own house. He had telephoned his fence, who came that evening, finding The Whip in dinner clothes, displaying his loot which presumably had come from someone else, and driving a good bargain. The Whip received a sizable sum, and the stolen jewelry and silver left the house via the fence.

“Another Nicky Campbell?” Alicia asked.

“No, something else,” Sydney answered. He was making the salad, rather hurriedly, as dinner was almost ready and it was soufflé tonight. Eggs were only one and six a dozen now in the country.

“A new character? What kind?”

“Well, just for luck—or superstition—maybe I shouldn’t talk about it. It’s so new. Born this afternoon at three o’clock.”

“A serial?”

“No, thank God. Complete episodes.” A crook this time, he started to say, but maybe it was bad luck to say even that much. “Anyway, Alex ought to be able to write the first story from what I sent him.”

Then back again to
The Planners
, Sydney thought, which was going to have a plot now. He had never had much respect for plot, mainly because he thought in real life people were more separate than connected, and the connection of three or more people in a novel was an artifice of the author, who ruled out the rest of the world because it did not contribute. His first two books, however, had a bit of plot, he had to admit.
Monkey’s Choice
, his first, had gone into paperbacks, and he still occasionally got a royalty, like $4.19, from hard cover sales, as the book was only four years old. It was about his experiences in the Merchant Marine and involved some of the men he had met in the crew, but that was the kind of book one couldn’t repeat. His second,
Shell Game
, had to do with three married couples in Manhattan, all young, all jockeying for position in the discount house where they worked, and for one another’s wife or husband.

When Sydney was in the middle of writing
Shell Game
, he had been invited to a party in Sutton Place. There had been six or seven people at the party who might have been called celebrities—a television actor, an actress, a best-seller writer, a Broadway producer—and Alicia Sneezum, whom Sydney had liked from the moment he saw her. He had asked her if she were free for dinner and the theater in the following week, but she wasn’t, she was here for such a short time, etc. It had been a brushoff, and also a snub. Sydney had retreated to a corner for a few minutes, trying to think what to do, and had come up with something that he thought would both impress her and secure her company for at least one more evening: a party of celebrities. He would go up to each of the important people at the party and say, “Excuse me, are you free for cocktails at my house next Wednesday at seven? So-and-so (naming someone like Mary Martin or Leonard Bernstein or Greta Garbo) will be coming, and she (or he) would like very much to see you, I know, because he (or she) told me so. So-and-so is coming, too.” The last named would be a celebrity at the party. Then by telephone or letter he would actually invite Mary Martin, Leonard Bernstein, and Greta Garbo, and hope. Then he would invite Alicia, and drop a few names of the people who were also invited. He almost dared carry out his plan, but not quite. He used the idea later as an incident in
The Planners
, a young man with one bold stroke building a circle of important acquaintances, none of whom ever got onto his scheme, because his social life rolled merrily on from there. However, that evening, he did pluck up his courage and approach Alicia again, this time with the tritest of ideas, a boat ride around Manhattan Island. This proposal might have reassured her as to his honorable intentions, since it had to take place in daylight among hundreds of people, or the tourism may have had some appeal to her, or his persistence might have tipped the scales—anyway, she accepted. Sydney feigned illness and took an afternoon off from his job in a discount house. From then on, Alicia was his, Sydney felt, though he took nothing for granted about her, and played everything very coolly for fear of losing her through a misstep. They were simply in love with each other. He did not try to start an affair with her. He proposed, just before Alicia was to go back to England. Alicia accepted, but said they had to wait much longer—maybe three months—and that her parents would have to find out all about him, and perhaps her father in England would want to meet him. Sydney had confessed that he hadn’t much money and that his ambition was to be a writer. He felt sure enough of himself to say that, and he was correct, because Alicia wanted to be a painter, “or at least try to be.” She said she had an income of fifty pounds a month. Sydney met her mother, Mrs. Clarissa Sneezum, and her American-based aunt, Mrs. Pembroke of East 80th Street, where Alicia and her mother were staying. Alicia arranged to stay on another month while her mother went back to Kent, and this period was taken up with planning where they would live (in England) and how, and with Alicia’s answering her father’s questions by letter about Sydney. Finally came the parental consent, though Alicia had said she would marry him no matter what attitude her parents took. Her parents were not enthusiastic, Sydney knew. He felt he had just scraped by. Sydney and Alicia had decided to look for a house in the country rather than live in London. Both liked the country, and thought it would be better for writing and painting. On the honeymoon, Sydney continued to work on
Shell Game
, and when it was bought in America (but not in England), Sydney had felt rather established. Alicia praised him and so did her friends. But the advance had been only $1500 less agent’s commission, and there had been only about $300 in royalties after that, and no paperback edition.

Sydney had started on
The Planners
in the glow of
Shell Game’s
acceptance. He felt that
The Planners
declined in spirit as his own spirits declined when
Shell Game
didn’t go into a second edition or sell to paperbacks. It was a kind of Human Comedy, with the planning of desirable experiences taking the place of Balzackian money-grubbing and social-climbing. The six characters made bets with each other, and the ones who threw in the sponge (abandoned their plans) had to pay a forfeit to the others. Some were total failures, some succeeded. One man wanted to become a doctor, and did, at fifty. An unpromising but determined woman shed her husband and nearly grown family and married the man she really loved. Another man, attaining what he had wanted, died of melancholia.

On an afternoon when he went to Framlingham for white enamel paint, Sydney drove by Abbott’s in Debenham and bought a carpet. It cost eight pounds, four times as much as they paid for the threadbare red and blue one, but it was in much better condition. And its colors were dark red and dark brown, still just as good with the curtains. Sydney carried the rolled carpet in and laid it at one side of the living room. Alicia was evidently in her room painting, or perhaps visiting Mrs. Lilybanks.

An hour later, when he was working, Sydney heard Alicia’s voice downstairs:

“What’s this?”

Sydney slid his chair back and stood up. “Bought a new rug for us,” he yelled into the hall.

“Let’s see it. Where? Debenham?”

“Yep.” Sydney came downstairs. “Only three pounds.” He helped her to unroll it.

“Why, it’s very nice. I didn’t know you took an interest in carpets, darling, whether they’re falling apart or not.”

Sydney smiled but made no comment. They pushed back and lifted the furniture, until the rug was in place. It touched the front and back walls, but they agreed it would be that much cozier in winter, and winter drafts were certainly something to contend with. Sydney rolled the old rug up, and started outdoors with it.

“It’ll get damp in the toolhouse, Syd,” Alicia said. “Or were you thinking of the garage?”

“I’ll park it in the guest room.” The guest room had a rug, but he could leave the old one rolled somewhere out of the way.

“We might sell it. Trade it in or something,” Alicia said.

“You think they’d give us ten bob for it? Abbott?” Sydney said as he climbed the stairs.

In the next week, Sydney received Alex’s first draft of
The Whip Strikes
. He went into his room and read it eagerly. From the first page, he felt it was incomparably better than anything he and Alex had done before. But Alex had written on his cover note merely:

Syd, dear boy,

See what you think of this. Not so sure we need the exchange with stranger in Act Two, fourth scene, P. 71.

Alex

Sydney thought the exchange with stranger was great, adding a little humor to the suspense. He had no suggestions for Alex except to cut some of the conversation of The Whip and the cab driver at the beginning. As usual, Alex had done a good job on his side characters, people Sydney had not even written into the synopsis. Alex had a Dickensian gift for minor characters. Sydney had an impulse to ring Alex and tell him how much he liked it. No, no use being gushy, just send it back ordinary post and say he liked it very much, and go ahead with the final typing after the cutting. After all, the script was no better than scripts ought to be, it was just that he and Alex weren’t in the habit of writing them so good.

5

S
ydney’s euphoria over The Whip script enabled him to lose a day in Ipswich more or less cheerfully, getting the car serviced. He spent a couple of hours in the library, browsing in the stacks downstairs, and then upstairs in the reference department. He took out some books on his thirty-shilling-a-year card, then walked through the business and shopping part of town, gazing into windows with the indiscriminate curiosity of a sailor ashore after a long voyage. A pair of brass-rimmed binoculars in a junkshop window caught his eye. They looked as if they had seen service with Montgomery in Africa, or maybe with Rommel. Their black leather was worn, and showed brown scuff marks between the brass-framed lenses. The strap was worn also, but looked still trustworthy. Sydney was tempted. The price was less than that for a bottle of gin. But did he need binoculars? Not really.

The car was waiting when he arrived at the garage at 3:30, the time they had told him to arrive, and Sydney as usual had the feeling the car had been ready long before. He felt in a good mood as he drove home. Tonight after dinner, he would polish another few pages of
The Planners
for typing up, then watch a suspense play at 9:10 on television.

“Letter for you in the living room,” Alicia said when he came in. “From Alex, I think.”

Sydney left the groceries in the kitchen for Alicia to unpack, and went to get his letter. It was in one of Alex’s little buff envelopes. There was a letter from Barlock in it besides Alex’s letter. The Barlock letter was a rejection of
The Whip Strikes
, which had been sent back to Alex.

Dear Mr Polk-Faraday,

I have read THE WHIP STRIKES with interest—more at the beginning than at the end, alas, because I am afraid it declines to what we already have too much of—crime, plain crime unrelieved by any hero-sleuth with whom the audience can identify . . .

Sydney muttered a curse at Barlock, then read Alex’s letter. Alex’s reactions were violently derogatory of Mr. Barlock’s brain and other things, and he went on:

. . . Too much crime? The TV men are turning out miles of film of good-looking heroes dabbling at catching crooks with one hand and fondling their girls with the other. We hardly see any crooks any more. I suggest we tell Barlock to boil his balls and I send this off to Plummer at Granada. Unless I get a ring from you tomorrow (Thursday) I’ll do this in late Thursday post.

Alex

“Well?” Alicia said from the doorway.

“It’s another rejection.” He tossed the two letters down on the telephone table. “The hell with them all,” he said quietly.

“Well, it’s only one person. Barlock, isn’t it? What did he say?”

“Stuff that doesn’t make any sense.” Sydney was talking calmly, but he twisted up the brown envelope until it was a tight, stiff length like a twig.

“Can I see it?”

“If you want to.” Sydney left the room, went upstairs, but near his study door he found he couldn’t go in to his typewriter, didn’t want to see his table or his chair. He turned around in the hallway, wishing he were anywhere but where he was. He wandered downstairs again and out into the garden, caught a snail—a hobneydod, Rutledge the handyman called it—on the lettuce and hurled it far across the road. He wandered about in slow strides, not doing anything constructive, though he noticed half a dozen things he might have done, pull a weed, put the hoe back in the toolhouse before the next rain, straighten a tomato stake. He paused and looked straight at Mrs. Lilybanks’ house with an air of defiance, but he didn’t see her outside or in. He’d had the feeling she was looking at him.

At dinner, Alicia said, “I read that rejection. Maybe he’s right and it is old hat. I sometimes think Alex has a cramping effect on you. On your imagination.”

“It’s I who think up the plots, dear,” Sydney replied, on guard against a coming dig from her. “But he knows how to write a television play once he’s got the plot.”

“But the fact the synopsis is going to him may be cramping you. I think you should go more on your own imagination. You act afraid of it.”

He felt as if she were poking at a raw wound deep within him. She wanted him to try something on his own and fall flat on his face, Sydney thought. It would hurt worse than a joint failure.

“You take it all much too seriously, anyway. You’re—”

“You’re not in my shoes,” he interrupted. “You’re not trying to make a go of anything, because you don’t give a damn. You just go on painting with your little finger like Mrs. Lilybanks.”

Alicia’s eyes widened—with anger, not surprise. “All that bitterness. My, my. How could you create anything—anything salable? It’s impossible.”

“It’s certainly impossible with your heckling.”

“Heckling? Would you really like to see me heckle?” She laughed.

“I’d like to see you dare.”

She said more softly, “This isn’t the night to have a meal with you, is it? You might keep your temper while we’re eating, anyway.”

But neither of them was eating now.

“Just like Mrs. Lilybanks, sweetness and light,” Sydney said. “But I’m at the beginning of my life, not the end.”

“You’re at the end of your creative life, if you keep this up.”

“Who’re you to tell me?”

Alicia got up. “Whatever you say about Mrs. Lilybanks, she’s better company than you, and if you don’t mind, I’ll spend the rest of the evening with her.”

“Go ahead.”

She took a jacket from the clothes hook by the door, glanced into the mirror there to see if her face looked all right. Then the front door closed.

Sydney had no heart for any work on
The Planners
that evening, which made him feel more depressed, as he knew the work would have to be done at some time. He watched television, then went to bed with one of the books he had taken from the Ipswich Library. Alicia came in just after ten.

“I think I’m going to Brighton tomorrow,” she said, not looking at him.

“Um-m. For how long?”

“Several days.” She began to undress, taking her pajamas out of the room to the bathroom, though she usually undressed in the bedroom.

There was nothing else to ask her about Brighton, so Sydney asked nothing more. It meant driving her to Ipswich tomorrow morning, unless she preferred to take the train at Campsey Ash, a bit closer home.

“I’m sorry, Syd, but when you get in these moods, they go on for days, and I find them unproductive and not at all fun.”

“I don’t blame you, and I hope you have a nice time. Brighton is it?”

“Brighton or London.”

She didn’t want him to know which it was, so he wasn’t going to pin her down.

The next morning, he did the breakfast dishes, so he did not see what kind of clothes she packed into her navy blue zippered suitcase. By 11:15, he was back at the house, alone. She had left from Campsey Ash, just outside Wickham Market. The day was rainy and miserable, and Sydney plunged back to work on
The Planners
. At 2
P.M.
, the drizzling rain became heavier, with thunderclaps.

Mrs. Lilybanks telephoned. “Hello, Sydney—” She now first-named them both, though Sydney could not get out of the habit of calling her Mrs. Lilybanks. “I wonder if Alicia’s forgotten her clothes on the line?”

“Oh! I’ll get them in. Thanks.” Sydney hung up and ran out for the clothes—half a dozen dishtowels and two of Alicia’s cotton blouses on the square revolving tree. He dashed in the back door with them, and had just removed his raincoat, when the telephone rang again.

It was again Mrs. Lilybanks. “I wanted to say a word to Alicia, if I may, Sydney.”

“I’m sorry, she’s not here. She’s—I’m not quite sure where she is.”

“What do you mean?”

“I drove her to Campsey Ash this morning. For the train. I think she’s going to Brighton. I thought she might’ve mentioned it to you last night.”

“No.”

“Occasionally, she—you know, likes to get away for a while by herself.”

“Yes. Well, it’s not important, I only wanted to tell her she didn’t need to bring over that wild flower book this afternoon, since it’s raining so hard.”

Sydney knew which book she meant, an old Victorian flower album with colored drawings made by some Victorian miss, which Alicia had picked up in a London bookshop. “I’ll tell her you called.”

“When will she be back?”

“I think in three or four days.”

“Well, if you get lonely, do come over,” Mrs. Lilybanks said. “Any time.”

Sydney thanked her and said he would.

That evening a little after six, when the rates became cheaper for trunk calls, Sydney rang Inez and Carpie in London. They were two girls who shared a house together, and each had a baby about a year old. Inez was a Negro girl from New York, Carpie a Jamaican of nearly white skin, and they both were dancers, though since the babies, they had retired from their London dance group. Their husbands were always away, in New York or the West Indies, or had been since Sydney and Alicia had known them, which was more than a year, and at last it had dawned on Sydney that the girls had no husbands. Alicia thought Sydney was probably right, so they had stopped asking the girls anything about their husbands. Certainly the babies looked no more than half what the girls were, the rest of them white. Inez and Carpie were hospitable, bright, and good fun. On one of her runaway trips, Alicia had stayed with them, as they had a three-story house in a mews. But Alicia was not with them now. Sydney spoke to Inez.

“Gosh. Well, you’re not really worried, are you?” Inez asked.

“Oh, no. If she’s not in London, she’s in Brighton. It’s happened before. Or she could be with the Polk-Faradays, I suppose.”

“If you want me to, I’ll call a couple of places here and call you back. Save you some dough.” Inez was always mindful of economy.

“No, thanks, Inez. I’ll ring Alex, because I want to talk to him about something, anyway.”

“But she’s okay, is she? Not mad or anything?”

“Oh, no. She just gets housebound out here now and then.”

Then Sydney called the Polk-Faradays.

Hittie answered. “Oh, hello, Syd! Alex is having a drink with someone tonight. He’s not home yet.”

“I hope he’s buttering up Plummer. That wouldn’t be it, would it?”

“No, it’s some new author for Verge Press. I’m sorry about that reject, Syd. I thought that script was super.”

“Well, it’s down but not out. Yet. What I called up about is—I don’t suppose Alicia is there, is she?”

“Here?”

“At your place.”

“No. You mean you don’t know where she is?”

“She went off this morning, I thought maybe to London, but it looks like Brighton, because you’re the second place I’ve called in London. Sometimes she likes to get away, and I can’t blame her. I’m not the picture of cheer with one rejection after another.”

“Goodness . . . Did she take the car?”

“No, I put her on the train. For London. I’m not worried, because she’s done it a couple of times before, you know.” He knew Hittie knew she’d done it a couple of times before. But he could almost hear Hittie’s brain clicking over, thinking Alicia wasn’t a good wife to desert her husband just when he was discouraged.

“If you don’t hear from her by tomorrow, do let us know, would you, Syd?”

“Thanks, Hittie. I will.”