The Suburbs of Hell (18 page)

By the head of the ladder which at low water gave access to the barge, Harry paused, and settled his heavy clothes around him. Clumsy in his thigh-high boots, he made his way down to the deck. He opened the wheelhouse door, spilling brightness, and said a word to the two figures inside. Then he turned back to the ladder and held it steady for Dave, who was bulkily descending.

Together they lifted the ladder down and laid it on the deck. ‘Righto, boy,’ Harry said, ‘you lash that to the side of the wheelhouse like I shew you the other day. Thass your job now, you bein the noo boy.’ He went away forward to the moorings.

When he came back, Dave’s frozen fingers were still fumbling with the rope, and the throbbing, juddering barge was on the move. ‘You’ll get handier in time,’ said Harry. ‘You’ll find thass a nice place, our wheelhouse, and you won’t hang about out here.’

The time spent in the wheelhouse was the bright point of his working day, all that the job offered of warmth and sociability. Crammed in the fuggy stall with Charlie the crane-driver, with the taciturn Dutch skipper and with Dave’s chirpy predecessor, only a few feet from the icy water, he was always in a mood to count his blessings. Though he scarcely knew the Dutchman, who lived on board, he had a fellow-feeling for the man who had made his living-quarters in the stern so snug and seemly.

The Dutchman, at the wheel, stared straight ahead; but Charlie had busied himself, and turned about holding out a mug of black coffee well spiked with whisky. ‘Where’s the lad?’ he asked.

‘He’s now comin,’ said Harry, and moved aside as Dave entered. Dave leaned his back to the door, and blew on his hands, slightly nodding at the crane-driver.

‘He takes up more room than little Eddie,’ Charlie remarked. ‘We’re going to have to build an extension. Here, Dave, have a swallow of something warm.’

‘Ta,’ said Dave, taking the mug and warming his fingers on it.

‘I am thinking,’ remarked the Dutchman. There was respectful silence while he thought. ‘I am thinking,’ he continued, ‘about your police. They will take the fingerprints of all of us, every one?’

‘So I hear,’ said Harry. ‘I hear they’ll be gooin from door to door, askin everyone—every male over fifteen, that is—to report to the nick. Thass voluntary, like; but if your name int crossed off their list, they int goonna just forget you.’

‘I am not in favour,’ said the Dutchman. ‘I am not British. Why should the British police have my fingerprints?’

‘They’ll destroy them after,’ Harry said. ‘After they’ve got him, I mean. It said in the paper they’ll shred ’em, like.’

‘After they’ve got him,’ repeated the Dutchman. ‘May we all live so long.’

‘It sounds as if they’ve found something,’ Charlie said, ‘at last.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ said Harry. ‘Thass just window-dressin, in my opinion. Thass gettin them down, the rude things they read about themselves in the noospapers.’

Out in mid-estuary the movement of the barge was unsteadying. It made him feel drowsy. He leaned beside Dave, going with the motion. Sometimes, making the trip by daylight, he was struck by the view ahead from that point, the wooded headlands so unexpectedly massive in a country which rolled so gently. That long road of water made him feel like an adventurer, perhaps a Viking, striking into the heart of unfamiliar land.

Half an hour later Dave slipped out of the wheelhouse, and Charlie asked with an unfeeling grin: ‘He all right?’

‘Oh Christ, yes,’ said Harry, stoutly. ‘He’s like me, he’s a fisherman’s son.’

He was pleased when Dave came back looking perfectly normal, and went to stand near the wheel.

‘Harry,’ said the Dutchman, not turning, ‘pontoon ahead. Get down and tie up.’

‘
Jawel, mijnheer
,’ he murmured, and went out, carefully shutting up from the freezing air the wheelhouse’s hoarded stuffiness.

He went down the two steps from the door and moved to go forward, but something caught at his clumsy boot. Something had trapped him. He felt irritation, alarm, panic. He groaned out the one word: ‘Ladder!’, pitching head-first into blackness.

My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,

Is driven, I know not whither.

Vittoria Corombona in
The White Devil

The water is black, but pied with foam from the violent wavelets that dash themselves against his calling mouth.

His swamped sea-boots are pulling him down. He is struggling to be rid of them, trying to float on his back and at the same time free his legs of that weight. For a moment he disappears in his contortions, but when he surfaces again one overlarge boot has gone. It calms him, that success, and he works, with one hand and a stockinged foot, less frantically at removing the other. Now the weight of water is on his side. The clinging thing yields and drops to the bottom of the sea; his legs are suddenly amazingly light and limber.

The stern of the barge is going away. But they have missed him, and their shouts come to him across the waves which to them appear so small. Now he must think of the dragging weight of his coat, and he thrashes and writhes in the water, but cannot escape it. He sinks again, and comes up gasping, still hampered by the coat.

From the moment he touched the water he has had no hope, but will fight till the last moment, as a duty.

The barge has turned and is bearing down on him. It is travelling empty, and he is astonished at the height of its sides. In front of the wheelhouse, silhouetted against its light, two black figures are gesticulating.

He sees the commotion of the churning propeller, and suddenly he is in terror. He begins to shout and wave. And perhaps they see him, perhaps they make out his pale hands and pale face, because the barge veers off, the propeller merely tumbles him in its wake.

Now he tries again to be rid of the coat, and keeps on trying, but the struggle is wearying him, and again and again he goes down and swallows water.

And the strong incoming tide is bearing him away, to the farther shore, upriver.

He goes with the tide, swimming breaststroke in the freezing water. Strangely, he does not feel the cold. He only knows that he is very tired.

He feels something more elevated than self-pity. He feels grief; he mourns. It is tragic and pitiful to him that all his life—the rebellious law-breaking boyhood, truculent adolescence and man’s life of loving and feuding—has been tending towards this, the death of an unwanted kitten.

The sky has grown light, traversed by long ribbons and tatters of black cloud. Now he is near the other shore, where bugles are sounding, he is amazed to hear bugles. Near this place there is a naval training school where the boys are being roused from their beds. Soon he can hear their voices, frivolous before the beginning of their disciplined day.

The current carries him on, taking another course, back to the other bank, driving always inland. Now he is too weary to swim for long, but much of the time floats on his back, paddling feebly. The lighter of the clouds are pink and golden, the black trees are turning blue.

He thinks that the craft which passes in mid-channel is probably a lifeboat from Old Tornwich, whose crew would be men he knew. But he cannot tell, or care much, and something—tiredness or darkness or salt—has weakened his sight.

The current bears him on. His thoughts drift also, far from the river. Now he returns again and again to the disappointments of his life, the satisfactions denied, the pledges not honoured, the vague something, indefinable, sought in bouts of drunkenness or aggression and never found, always withheld from him.

He cannot tell that the lifeboat has seen him, that messages are flying through the air. Taken out of that world, he drifts.

When the barge reappears he is far from everything. He has not noticed that it is now full daylight, and that he is once more near land. The height of the barge’s side astonishes and disheartens him. Hands, and then ropes, are reached down to him, but his snatches at them are feeble and unconvinced.

He sees the ladder against the barge’s side, and leans back his head to look up the length of it, to the downturned solemn face of Charlie, and the face of Dave, the handsome boneheaded boy, passive in everything, a passive murderer.

He reaches for the ladder, but his fingers will not close on the rung. They open, they slip away. He drifts from the ladder’s foot, and closing his eyes, goes down and breathes in his death.

‘He was strong all right,’ Frank De Vere said. ‘What, two hours, was it, he was in the water? And he swam over five miles. Swam and drifted, I suppose. He must have had a heart like a bull.’

Dave Stutton said nothing, but got up from his chair and began to mend the fire. When he had sat down again, he snapped his fingers at the dog. It came, and he scratched the tan-coloured silk behind its ears.

‘What will become of that now?’ Frank wondered. ‘What did Harry’s brother say?’

‘That’ll stay here for a while,’ said Dave, with his face turned away. ‘I shall look after fings for him. You know, there’s a lot of them Uffords, brothers and sisters. They’ll get fings worked out between ’em after a while, but thass likely to take time.’

‘You’ll be staying on in this house, then?’ Frank said.

‘Yeh,’ Dave said, ‘for the time bein.’

‘And what about the job on the rig?’

‘I shall keep that, until I fink of somefing else to do.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ Frank said, ‘probably. Stick at it till the inquest, at any rate. It will look better. Though I don’t know: it would sound natural enough if you said you couldn’t face that barge any more.’

At last Dave looked round at him. The young face above the beard was set, and the black eyes hostile. ‘No more I can’t,’ he said. ‘However, I shall have to. I need a job.’

‘I see,’ said Frank, sardonically. ‘Turning over a new leaf, are we? Making the clock run backwards? Not easy, boy.’

‘I shall do it,’ Dave muttered; and went back to fondling the dog, while the coals blazed up, the cuckoo clock, whirring, produced a wooden bird to mark eight o’clock, and sleet raked the windowpanes with bursts like automatic fire.

‘You’ll be going over to the old home village, then,’ Frank said, ‘for the funeral?’

‘I s’poose I shall,’ Dave said. ‘Jim Ufford expect it. Well, anyone would expect that, wouldn’t they?—including my muvver, I should imagine.’

Frank was meditating another question, but hesitating over it. He brought it out with caution. ‘Did he know?’

‘What?’ Dave’s face was again turned down to the dog.

‘Did Harry know what you did to him?’

Instantly Dave was on his feet, and had Frank by the lapels of his coat, dragging him upright in the chair in which he lounged. ‘I dint do nofing to him,’ he said in a hoarse voice. ‘The rope worked loose, or he leaned on the ladder and brought it down on his foot. That was my fault, I know that, but thass the worst of it. So you watch your mouf, just watch your fuckin mouf, Frank De Vere.’

‘Dave,’ said Frank, ‘let go of my collar, Dave.’ His dark face was slightly darker, but his manner was calm. Suddenly he raised his right arm to deliver a karate chop, and the young man, with a hiss of pain, stepped back clutching his wrist.

‘That’s better,’ Frank said. ‘Now, let’s get a few things straight. I realize that today’s little tragedy off Birkness was a shock to you, and I sympathize. I know you wish it hadn’t happened. But don’t try to bullshit your old partner, don’t tell me it
didn’t
happen. I know better. I know what caused it: a halfhearted, gutless little booby-trap, that’s what. And there I could recognize your handiwork: because I’ve never been able to hide from myself that underneath the macho disguise you are a pretty halfhearted, gutless little individual, Dave, old friend.’

Dave was mute, still rubbing his wrist, and watchful.

‘That language too plain for you?’ Frank enquired. ‘I’ve always had to wrap things up for you, haven’t I? But I think we might as well drop the flannel now. Why should we pretend not to know things that we know perfectly well? It’s a waste of time, it’s a complication we don’t need.’

‘I on’y got this to say to you,’ said Dave in a choked voice. ‘Take away that fing out in the yard what belong to you. Take that away from here and get rid of it. And give me that key what you never ought to have had. And don’t you come back here, never.’

‘You’re throwing your weight around a bit, aren’t you,’ Frank said, ‘for a caretaker?’

‘I don’t want no more to do wiv you,’ Dave said. ‘You keep away from me after this, or you shall be sorry.’

‘Hey, now,’ Frank said, and smiled up from his chair in a tolerant way, though his eyes were cold. ‘You’re upset, Dave. Well, I understand that, and I’m making allowances. But cool it, d’you hear me?’

He got up from his chair, and the young man, who had been standing, wavering, suddenly came to life. The punch that landed beside Frank’s mouth sent him staggering back into the chair again.

‘Oh, you shouldn’t,’ he said, looking up, pale. A little blood was running from his lip. His hands were clamped tight on the arms of the chair. ‘That really wasn’t clever, boy.’

‘Thass enough of that,’ said Dave, fiercely, though looking alarmed at what he had done. ‘You int goonna talk to me like that no more.’

But Frank’s tensed hands had hauled him to his feet again in one movement, and he struck out with a punch to the wind, followed by another to the head. Dave, reeling away, found the coal bucket in his path, and fell with a crash to the floor. The cat sprang up from the nearby rug and the dog yapped. All around the room little objects of brass and china rang.

Dave was gasping, and gazing upwards, dazedly, at Frank kneeling over him. ‘I didn’t want to do that,’ Frank was saying, almost gently, ‘but it had to be done. You let yourself get a bit hysterical. But it’s over now, isn’t it? I don’t think this is quite the time for us to have a chat about things. We’ll have to, some time—but not tonight. What I’m going to do now is go out and have a few pints. I don’t suppose you want to come?’

Dave, on his back, made no answer.

‘I should think,’ Frank said considerately, ‘you’ll want to go to bed now, as you’re working such unsociable hours. But it’s a good idea for one of us to keep an ear to the grapevine. Tell me, mate, is there such a thing as a mirror around here somewhere?’