The Tiger in the Well (8 page)

done it, but that didn't come out till much later, and then only in the course of another case altogether. Too late then. Belcovitch had drowned himself. Now then, the plaintiff— man who brought the case against him—^was called Lee. Some time later, when the business was on the market, Lee bought it, and set up your man Parrish as manager. Changed the name. All perfectly legal, no hanky-panky. Point of this is, Parrish isn't the boss. Lee is. Don't know anything about Lee. All my pal recalls is that an address in Spitalfields came into it somewhere. Kind of a French name, he thought, but he couldn't recall it exactly. T^-something square. Here you are."

He handed Sally the slip of paper with the address written on it in precise copperplate.

"No number," he added.

"Is this Mr. Lee's address.? Or wasn't your friend sure.'*"

"That's what he can't recall. Something to do with the case of Lee V. Belcovitch, that's all he remembered."

"Belcovitch . . . Was he Jewish, this man who lost the case.?"

"Don't know. I daresay, but I don't suppose we'll know for certain. Is that important.?"

"No. Probably not. It's just something that crossed my mind. Thank you very much, Mr. Bywater. Thank your friend for me. Will you tell Mr. Adcock about this.?"

"If you'd like me to, miss. Can't do any harm."

His tone said clearly that he didn't think it would do much good, either. She thanked him, said good-bye, and left.

A COUPLE of words on a slip of paper, and only the most distant connection to her case; it didn't seem worth going there now. The afternoon was drawing in, and she didn't want to be late home. As she wandered up Middle Temple Lane toward Fleet Street she felt herself yawning again and again, a huge weariness settling over her. All she wanted to do was sleep, but she couldn't, because all around her someone was setting traps, laying nets, putting down poison. She

must be vigilant and energetic; she must throw off this ridiculous business like someone brushing away cobwebs. It was no more substantial, after all. The man must be mad.

She drew herself upright and held her head high, opening her eyes wide, trying to dispel this tempting sleepiness. She hadn't realized how tired you get when you are worried.

As she turned into Fleet Street she stopped at a newsstand and bought the latest Illustrated London News, and a Jewish Chronicle. She was curious, now she thought about it, to read more about the Russian persecutions. The arms manufacturer Axel Bellmann, who'd been responsible for Frederick's death, had been backed by Russian money, and she'd taken an interest in that country's affairs ever since.

Frederick . . .

Sometimes, when she least expected it, she had the overpowering sensation that he was beside her,, and all she had to do was turn her head and she'd see him. It was a sense of utter conviction. She was not imagining it or daydreaming; he was there.

She had that sense now, as she moved away from the newsstand, and it was so vivid that she gasped and turned half-around with eager happiness, and her lips had formed the start of 'Tred—"

Nothing there. A dim, gray afternoon, a curious passer-by in a black coat, the crowded traffic of Fleet Street. No Frederick.

But the sense of his presence didn't vanish at once. That instant flash of total happiness and certainty still illuminated things, as one of Webster's magnesium flares left a drifting image of itself in your eyes for a long time after it had burned up and died.

She tucked the papers under her arm and set off for the station and home.

That evening, Sarah-Jane Russell went to visit her married sister in Twickenham. Sally was alone, and for no reason she could name, she set about tidying up the breakfast room.

It was the center of the home, the place where they sat in the evening and worked and read and talked, and where they ate except on the (very few) formal occasions when they used the dining room. It was the biggest room in the house, and it opened through French windows onto the veranda overlooking the lawn. It was part studio, part sitting room, part library. The one thing it wasn't was a laboratory. Webster Garland was fond of conducting chemical experiments, and the old kitchen at Burton Street in Bloomsbury, which had served as their sitting room when they lived there, was often pungent with fumes or smoke; but Sally had banished activities like that from the breakfast room at Orchard House.

She turned the gas lamps up and cleared the great table first, putting away the atlas in which she'd been following their South American trip, and tidying all her work papers into the little walnut bureau by the window. There was a vase of flowers on the table, too, which Margaret had brought her; she put it on the mantelpiece, next to the wooden clock they'd brought from Switzerland the year before. Then the books, two neat piles of them. There were books everywhere in the room, but she'd kept these two piles as Webster and Jim had left them: in one a textbook of physics, an account of someone or other's travels to Bolivia, in German, and a German dictionary, with a feather in one, a scrap of litmus paper in the other to serve as bookmarks. She put them on the little revolving bookcase by Webster's chair. Jim's books were penny dreadfuls for the most part, lurid shockers with titles like Skeleton Gulch or Wildfire Ned. She smiled as she picked them up, thinking of his pride when one of his stories was published for the first time. There was a copy of Great Expectations, too, and Redgauntlet. She put them all on the bookshelf that ran the length of the wall, and then took up the painting on the easel by the door.

Webster had bought it not long before he left, and hadn't yet had it framed. It was a little oil sketch by Camille Pissarro, one of the Impressionists: sunlight on a suburban road on a spring morning, and such freshness and vigor in the light

that you could almost feel the breeze on your face that was making those little dabs of flake white scud along the blue. Webster had bought the Impressionists from the time of their first exhibition five or six years before, recognizing in their experiments with light some of his own concerns with recording the passage of time through photography.

Well, this Pissarro would have to wait until Webster's return before it was framed. Sally had said she'd arrange it, but this wasn't the time. She took the little picture upstairs to his study, and then folded the easel and put it away.

The stereoscope on its little mahogany stand on the sideboard, and the box of pictures . . .

That had been the start of Garland and Lockhart. She had persuaded Frederick to take a series of comic pictures to view through stereoscopes, those parlor optical toys which gave a magical impression of three dimensions, and they'd sold so well that they were able to go on and produce many more series and start their business properly. And here they all were: the scenes from Shakespeare, the castles of Great Britain, the corners of Old London. . . . And the very first ones: Jim as the boy David, with a monstrous papier-mache head of Goliath; Sally herself as a kitchen maid discovering a swarm of goose-sized black beetles in the cupboard; the little girl Adelaide, whom they'd rescued from a dismal lodging house in Wapping, sitting on the knee of Frederick's assistant Trembler Molloy to illustrate a sentimental song. . . . Adelaide had vanished. She must be somewhere in London now, but they'd never found her. The city had swallowed her up in a moment.

These stereographs brought back that time so sharply that she found herself blinking back tears. She returned the pictures to their box, shut the lid, and put them and the stereoscope away in the cupboard.

Harriet's toys . . . There was bound to be something behind a cushion or under a chair. Sally cast about and found one of her blocks down the back of the sofa. She'd take it upstairs later on.

And she'd take up Frederick's portrait, too. It stood in a silver frame on the piano: a full-length photograph showing him not dressed up stiffly as for a formal portrait, but in his everyday wear, as she remembered him, his hair disordered, his eyes laughing. It was the only picture of him she had. It had been taken by Charles Bertram, Webster's partner in his photographic experiments, who was now in South America with them. Charles was a good man; he was kindly and gentle, and the year before he'd asked her to marry him, and she'd been anxious not to hurt him as she said no.

A thought came to her. Suppose she'd agreed to marry Charles: would Parrish have sprung the trap then.? He'd laid it long before, after all. And would he have challenged the wedding before it took place or waited till afterward, so that she'd seem to be committing bigamy.?

It would have been hideous, but Charles would have trusted her. And Mr. Temple had still been alive then. Even if Parrish had claimed at that time that Harriet was his child, she'd have had a far better chance of fighting him off.

Well, she'd refused Charles's offer, and she mustn't start wishing she hadn't. Things were as they were.

She took the photograph, and Harriet's block, and one or two other bits and pieces, and put them in her bedroom. Then she took a leather case from her wardrobe and brought it downstairs, and looked into the kitchen, where Mrs. Perkins, the cook, was reading her newspaper, the cat in her lap.

"Hello, miss," said the cook. "Ellie tells me you were asking about the knife man."

"Yes. I don't think he's what he seems to be. I don't suppose he'll come again, but if he does I'd like to catch him— just come in without him expecting it. Mrs. Perkins, I just looked in to say I'm going to do some shooting, so don't be startled."

"Very well, miss. Thanks for letting me know."

In the breakfast room, now cleared and tidy and looking almost austere, she unfolded a large, heavy screen covered

with a light green Morris-printed cloth and stood it against the far wall.

She took off the cloth and laid it on the table. Underneath it, the screen was plain soft wood, pitted with holes. She pinned a paper target on it, adjusted the light to shine on it more clearly, and then opened the box she'd brought from her bedroom.

It contained her target pistol: a single-shot French model made by Flaubert, a beautifully balanced gun with which she'd often shot against Jim or Charles. She was better than they were, but she could never match Webster, even though he'd never shot before she'd shown him how to. His hand was as steady as his eye. There was a vogue for this kind of shooting; the light guns were called saloon pistols, after the sort of rooms they were often used in. A good pistol like her Flaubert was utterly accurate up to ten yards or so, which was all you needed, and it didn't make much noise.

She pushed an armchair aside, loaded the pistol and fired a shot. Not good, too far to the left. Never mind. Here was something she knew how to do, and a job for which she had the tools.

She practiced for half an hour or so, firing off a box of fifty cartridges, taking her time, pausing to clean the gun and put up a fresh target, and she felt much better when she'd finished. Her shots were bunching closely around the center of the target, and she'd found that calm, detached rhythm that made for concentration.

Before she put away the target and covered the screen again, she decided to try the new pistol, the British Bulldog.

It was an ugly thing, not at all like the long, elegant Flaubert. She put a cartridge in the chamber, held the pistol firmly, bracing herself for the recoil, and aimed low, as the gun shop assistant had advised her.

When she pulled the trigger, the noise filled the room and shook the windows. Her wrist felt as if a horse had kicked it: so much for her boast that she was used to it. And as for the heavy screen, which had absorbed fifty shots from the

saloon pistol without moving, it had been slammed back against the wall and was split from top to bottom.

Blinking through the fumes which now filled the room, she put down the revolver and went across to the screen, shaking her wrist. The bullet had gone right through and buried itself in the wall behind. At least she'd put it close to the center of the target, she thought. She stood the screen up and put the revolver away. She knew for certain that if she fired it, she'd do some damage; but if she didn't fire it two-handed, she'd damage herself. If you weren't careful, you could break your wrist.

She tidied up, opening the windows to the chill autumn night to clear the room of fumes, and throwing the cloth over the screen. Then, as she occasionally did, she took one of Jim's cigarettes from the box on the sideboard and sat down to smoke it. Empty the room of one kind of smoke, fill it with another, she thought.

She looked idly through the papers she'd bought. There was nothing about the Russian business in the Illustrated London News, but in the Jewish Chronicle, to her surprise, she found an article by Daniel Goldberg. She was surprised because she hadn't thought that the Jewish Chronicle was especially sympathetic to socialism, and because she'd had the impression that Goldberg was some kind of agitator or demagogue. But this article was calm and closely reasoned. He was putting the case for considering the problem of Jewish immigrants as part of a wider social question, involving the relations of all men and women to one another and to the means of production and exchange.

He wrote well. His tone was light and persuasive and clear, and she found herself grudgingly admitting the force of his case.

The last paragraph read:

There is, however, one burden which Jews have to carry merely because they are Jews, and which their fellow workers are spared. I refer to the attentions of Mr. Arnold Fox. This gentleman, in

the fervor of his anti-Semitic zeal, is now collecting what he fondly takes to be information regarding the influx of large numbers of Jews from Russia. He will certainly use whatever facts his imagination can find to discredit all Jews in the eyes of English people; and we should certainly avoid giving him any ammunition. I write this in the perfect confidence that all the Jewish sweatshop owners who read the Chronicle will instantly treble the wages and halve the hours of their workers in order to spite Mr. Fox. Such is the power of the press.