The Man Who Killed Himself (13 page)

After leaving the station he walked to a small public garden and sat down on one of the green wooden benches surrounding a dry fountain topped by a mournful bronze bust. Below the bust it said: ‘These gardens are the gift of Ezekiel Jones, citizen of this borough, educator and philanthropist.’

He knew that he should feel sorrow and remorse, but in fact he felt nothing. What had she said to him on that last evening?
Can’t live without you, I shall kill myself
, something like that. People really do kill themselves, this is something that happens, he thought. He tried to remember what Joan looked like, but was unable to bring her face before his eyes. He seemed insulated from emotion, as though some fibrous barrier had been interposed between his feelings and what went on in the world.

An old man sat down on the bench, produced a bag of bread from his pocket and began to break the bread and throw bits to the pigeons clustering round him. One of the pieces fell beside Arthur’s foot. He picked it up and threw it to a bird that seemed weaker than the rest. The pigeon looked at the bread, pecked at it ineffectually, then moved away. None of the other pigeons came near it.

He found a house soon after he moved into a Brighton hotel and began to look for one. He found the house quickly because he knew what he wanted. The area between Devil’s Dyke and Brighton, which he remembered with pleasure, proved distressingly urbanised and unattractive. Perhaps the beauty of it had been invented by him and it had always been like this, for he learned with surprise that a railway had run to the Dyke before the war. The triangle to the east of this area, however, topped by Ditchling Beacon, with its small villages and relics of ancient earthworks, fascinated him. He knew from the map that this was not where he had come in childhood, yet it seemed to him that he recognised landmarks, the Iron Age fort of Hollingbury, Plumpton Plain, and the black and white windmills known as Jack and Jill. It was here, near to the road running from Ditchling to Brighton, that he bought a small bungalow, surprising another estate agent by his acceptance of the price asked for it. The bungalow had been built in the nineteen thirties, of ochre brick now weathered to neutral brown. It had a square living-room with French windows, two bedrooms of which one was minute, a surprisingly large kitchen with a good deal of electrical equipment in it, and a bathroom with green tiles on the wall and mustard coloured plastic tiles on the floor. Geese flew on the living-room walls. It was not pretty, but nothing could have been less like The Laurels, and the setting was delightful, sheltered in a small cleft between hills. Outside there was a garage and a quarter of an acre of wilderness which had once been a garden. He was able to move in before the end of August, and he drove the Triumph into the garage himself, for a week before the move he passed his driving test.

Almost the first thing he did was to put up his mother’s watercolours in the sitting-room. For some reason he did not take down the flying geese. Did he leave them because, like the watercolours, they would have offended Clare? Had he bought the bungalow because it was what she would have described as a potty little place? He could not be sure, but in any case this was a line of thought that he did not care to pursue. The furniture came from a Brighton store. It was all new and mostly finished in light woods, polished pine and afromosia. On the afternoon that he moved in, there was a knock on the door. He opened it to find a diminutive couple standing there smiling at him.

‘Mr Brownjohn?’ The little man took off a check cap and presented a card. ‘George Brodzky.’

‘And I’m Mary,’ the little woman chirped. ‘We’re your neighbours.’

‘Neighbours?’

‘Over the hill. From Dunroamin. You must have passed it. So amusing, English names, are they not?’

That was George. Mary chimed in. ‘And we thought as you were moving in – I mean, we know what it’s like – you would come to tea.’

‘Come to tea!’ The note of horror in his voice escaped them.

‘Tea is on the hob.’ Little George rubbed his hands.

‘You’re very kind but–’

‘I won’t take no for an answer,’ said little Mary. ‘I’ve made some buns, and although I say it myself my buns are good. And you’ll find the men get on
much
better without you, isn’t that right?’ She called this out to the foreman, who agreed enthusiastically. Arthur had been altogether too fussy about occasional bumps and splinterings.

‘Her buns are the tops,’ said George.

He went to tea with the dismal knowledge that he would regret it. The Brodzkys lived over the brow of the hill, five minutes’ walk away, in a bigger version of his bungalow. Brodzky was a Jewish tailor who had come over as a refugee from the Nazis, and had evidently done rather well. Sufficiently well, at least, to retire and buy the bungalow which had been named Dunroamin in what Mary told George was the English tradition. It was not about themselves that they wanted to talk, however, but about their new neighbour. They knew he was alone, but what had happened to his wife? Arthur said she had died recently, and did not expand on it. He did not need to, however, for Mary Brodzky read about every case of criminal violence in the newspaper.

‘Not
the
Mr Brownjohn?’ She saw from Arthur’s hesitancy that he was. ‘George, Mr Brownjohn’s wife was – this was the case that – you know, you read about it –’

‘The lady who was murdered?’ Little George rubbed his hands together.

She lowered her voice respectfully at mention of the tabooed word. ‘Such a terrible thing, and they still haven’t got the man, have they?’

No doubt the manner of Clare’s death would have become known quickly in any case, but he felt that acceptance of the invitation had been disastrous. When he went into the local general shop or into the nearby pub, conversation ceased for a moment before being abruptly resumed, and he saw people looking at him with sidelong expectancy. Mary Brodzky twice telephoned him with invitations to meet people, both of which he refused, and one day she called to ask if she could do any shopping for him in Brighton. He replied politely that he was driving in himself. On the following day George called. It was raining.

‘We have here in the village our society for amateur dramatics. I am to ask if you would like to join.’ His smile was wide.

‘No, thank you.’

‘It is very amusing. Perhaps if I should explain it –’

Brodzky was not wearing a coat. Rain spotted his shoulders. It was outrageously rude not to ask him in. ‘Go away,’ Arthur said.

Brodzky was dumbfounded. ‘I beg your pardon?’

He was dismayed to hear his voice rising to an undignified squeak. ‘I don’t let nosy parkers into my house.’ He stepped back and slammed the door. After that there were no further invitations from the Brodzkys, and they did not acknowledge each other in the street.

That was really the end of his relations with the village. In the shop he was greeted politely but without warmth, and he stopped going to the pub. The milkman said good day to him and the butcher delivered three times a week. The vicar called once, but lost interest when he learned that his new parishioner did not go to church. The Brodzkys had offered to try to find a woman who would come in and do for him, but their relations had been severed soon afterwards and he felt reluctant to allow anybody to intrude on his affairs, asking personal questions and poking about among his things. The bungalow was small, and it was quite easy to clean it himself without the nosy assistance of some Sussex Susan. He had escaped from them all, Susans, Elsoms, Paynes and the rest. He was, as he had often wished to be, alone.

He found sufficient occupation inside and outside the house. He bought a multi-purpose electric tool with which he sanded and polished the floors of both living-room and bedrooms, repainted them, built some bookshelves and also a cupboard for the living-room. The making and fitting of this cupboard, which was made of a polished wood named sangrosa, gave him great emotional satisfaction, and he put a small compartment inside it, with its own separate doors. The latch on these inner doors did not fit perfectly and had a tendency to come open, but still he was delighted by his own skill. The garden also took up a good deal of time. What could be done with a quarter of an acre? He bought half a dozen books on gardening and cut out articles that appeared in the papers. He would have liked to see things flowering immediately, but it proved that September was not a good time for planting. However, there were things that could be done. He reduced the wilderness of the lawn with a scythe, mowed it, and then spiked the mossy weedy surface with an aerator. Every day for a week he carried out destructive operations, pulling up weeds and nettles and burning them in a new kind of incinerator which he bought. Sodium chlorate extinguished weeds on the paths. There was broken fencing at the back of the house which he mended with new palings and wire. He worked every morning and afternoon, eating a quick lunch of bread and cheese with an urgency he could not have explained even to himself. In the evening he cooked something, often out of a tin, and settled down to read the papers and watch television. The news seemed unreal to him, the capers on the screen even more insignificant, and watching them he often fell asleep.

One day he took the train to London, went across to Waterloo Station, collected the blue suitcase and came straight back again. In spite of his advance trepidation he felt no flicker of fear when he handed over the ticket and was given the suitcase. He would have been quite prepared to meet Coverdale at the station. Easonby Mellon had had a blue suitcase, he was carrying one too. What was strange about that? He was strong in the assurance of success. He would not have been so boastful as to call what he had done perfect, for he recognised that he had been helped by one or two fortuitous circumstances like Mr Lillicrapp’s sight of Easonby Mellon leaving The Laurels, but still he was satisfied.

He deliberately delayed opening the suitcase until the evening, leaving it to be savoured like a favourite sweet. As a further congratulatory gesture, a measure of Brownjohn’s confidence in Brownjohn, he opened the sangrosan cupboard, considered the bottles which had been lined up there – gin, whisky, vodka – and opened the whisky. Gobble gobble, went the liquid in the glass, giving him a delicious feeling, not unlike that felt by Easonby Mellon when having a bit of nonsense. A zizz of soda and there it was, ready for drinking. He drank. Then he took the little key from his ring and turned it in the lock of the suitcase. Was everything there? He checked, hugging himself.

Item. One suit in loud gingery tweed, jacket and trousers only, in good condition.

Item. Tie decorated with small coloured horseshoes, sporty shirt and ditto socks.

Item. One fine head of glossy red-brown hair, one small beard of slightly different colour. One small bottle of spirit gum.

Item. One pair of contact lenses in small box.

Item. One diary in black cover.

The rest of Easonby Mellon’s clothes, together with two of his wigs, had been incinerated at Clapham. He stroked the crisp hair.

‘Safely home,’ he said aloud. ‘Safely home, my beauties.’ He drained the whisky and poured another, then opened the diary and sat down to read, absorbed by the account of problems that had loomed so large in the past and now looked trivial. All the fear he had expressed about Hubble, for instance, and his feeling that the doctor had been suspicious. Obviously what he had taken for suspicion was natural drunken rudeness, the ‘terrible glare’ he had noted was annoyance at being called so late at night. At the same time he was pleased that he had given up the zincalium scheme, which as he saw now had been clumsily conceived. When he came to the passages about Clapham the past flooded back unpleasantly. To stop himself from reading further he took out the sheets, tore them up into small pieces, and put them into a cardboard box. Tomorrow would be D-Day, D for Destruction. His glass was empty, and he poured another drink. He took off his jacket and trousers, put on the tweed suit, clapped the wig to his head without bothering to use the fixative. Easonby Mellon walked again!

Not quite, however, not really as he should be. He used the spirit gum to fix the beard and put in the contact lenses, which were more trouble than they should have been because his hand was shaking slightly. ‘Not a bad little bachelor establishment you’ve got here, Brownjohn,’ he said. ‘You don’t mind if I look around?’ He strutted into kitchen and bedroom commenting loudly on them, bouncing up and down on the bed. He went to the front door, opened it with a little difficulty and staggered slightly as he walked out to the garden, looked up at the green swell of hill.

‘Nestling under the down,’ he said. ‘Very nice, though it’s nicer to nestle between the sheets.’ It was twilight, and the air was filled with the sweet scent of early evening. He sniffed this air, opened his mouth and drank up the air in great gulps, staring at the green hill. A tickling sensation at the back of his neck made him turn.

The Brodzkys stood beside the gate, arm in arm, staring at him. The little man with his check cap, the little woman gazing eager-eyed – for a few seconds they stared at him and he stared back at them. Then the Brodzkys, still with arms linked like some four-legged creature, scuttled away up the road to their bungalow, and he returned to the house. He stared at himself in the bedroom glass. He seemed to have shrunk within the clothes, which hung on him with curious looseness – could he have lost weight? With furtive speed he took them off, together with the wig and moustache, and slipped out the contact lenses. Safely back in Arthur Brownjohn’s nondescript old flannel trousers he recorked the whisky bottle and returned it to the cupboard. The latch came open and he closed it with a thump. The genie who had come out of the bottle lacked his old magical power.

On the following morning he put a barrowful of weeds into the incinerator, stuffed the suit on top of them together with the box containing the torn-up diary, and added the beard. He broke up the contact lenses with a hammer and added them to the pile, and did the same thing with the bottle of spirit gum. Then he put on more weeds and set fire to the lot. Blue smoke swirled upwards. He placed the top on the incinerator and left the past to burn. At the last moment he found himself unable to dispose of the wig. As he stroked the crisp reality of the hair tears came to his eyes. He put it carefully into the inner compartment of the cupboard, promising himself that he would destroy it very soon. At midday he lifted the incinerator lid and stared at the contents that were reduced to satisfying but saddening ash.