Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper Read online

  Mr Winthrop started jerking and twisting. This was getting beyond a joke, his lungs were bursting. This intruder was most inordinately strong. He twisted and turned, pulled and pushed, and he felt his body hit the bannisters and the wall, and gradually his body assumed a prone position, heavily weighted, and with head pointing dizzily down the stairs. He kicked, but his feet hit nothing. They both slid downwards for a few stairs.

  It now came to Mr Winthrop that this could not, after all, be plain burglary. It was something extremely different. His lungs were at bursting point, and his two hands had no further strength with which to tear at those merciless hands which had started to blacken him out. He prayed. But one gasp of air and he’d let out such a yell which would wake the already dead.

  But there was no gasp of air; only a black, suffocating silence, and the sound of heavy and dreadful breathing, which he envied.

  Mr Winthrop then knew that he was going to die. He immediately said in his mind:

  ‘Oh, Vera, my dear, you must forgive me? I’ve behaved very badly to you, I know it, but I’m paying for it now? If only I could finish the letter I’d actually started to write, it’s on my table now. Please believe me …’

  His thoughts broke and dissected into a thousand fragments, only Vera remained, good to him to the last, as she always had been. He was now in very great pain, he was at the bottom of the sea, though quite dry, and the weight of the sea was too great for him to rise to the surface and breathe again God’s beautiful air, and smell the cannon smoke in it. In a moment, it would be over, his head would explode, and he could sink down, down, down, he could rest.

  His body began to go limp.

  Feeling it slacken, Mr Bowling felt a relief. He didn’t want the poor chap to suffer unduly. Mr Winthrop’s body went limp and they both slid in the darkness a couple more stairs.

  Suddenly a door opened somewhere. There was a long, long pause, and he imagined somebody listening. He waited, breathing heavily and quietly.

  Then the door quietly closed again.

  He felt Winthrop’s heart and there was no movement. He got up. He left him face downwards there. He went down the stairs to his room. When he approached his door he was startled to see a light. He had left it pitch dark, the blackout wasn’t up. The police would be in any second.

  He charged into the room and suddenly stopped.

  ‘Hallo!’ a girl said. She said: ‘I did the blackout. You look hot. Have you been having a bath?’ She smiled and sat down.

  He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. He lit a fag and said fairly calmly:

  ‘I thought you’d left?’

  She giggled and said something about being back in the room next to him, and how it was like home. The silly little thing was suddenly serious about it all, saying some nonsense about it being love, and she didn’t realise it until she’d gone. Lighting his cigarette, he’d noticed that there were scratch marks right across the back of his hand, as if the old cat had done it. He immediately thought: ‘I’m for it this time, they’ll find bits of my skin under his nails.’ He got a sense of the hunt. May as well give them a run for their money.

  ‘Got any iodine, Joan?’ he said. ‘The damn cat.’

  She ran down to the bathroom cupboard and back. All the time the house was still as the graveyard. Mr Winthrop lay where he had left him, alone in the shadows, waiting for the very first person to go up or down those stairs. It might be Miss Hull if she came down to the lavatory in the night, or it might be Miss Brown on the prowl, or most likely of all it would be poor old Alice in the early morning.

  He put out his left hand.

  ‘You couldn’t have been having a bath, it’s not steamy in there? Why were you so hot? Oh, your poor hand, Bill, what a beastly scratch. Where is the cat now, darling?’

  She dabbed on iodine and chattered, never waiting for an answer. He thought: ‘I shouldn’t have bothered about the new flat.’

  He got out some whisky.

  CHAPTER VII

  ‘HERE you are,’ he said. ‘And then clear off to bed. There’s a sensible girl. I’m tired.’

  But no, she would have it she was going to stop. He had only seen her a few times before, when she’d been in the room next door. He’d come in and she’d be just coming out of her room, or out of the telephone kiosk. The second time, she asked him in for a sherry, and of course he’d asked her back one night and given her a glass of port. She’d been a bit of a nuisance that night too, and two or three days later. But he’d held out good-naturedly and sent her packing.

  Nothing would shift her now. She behaved like a kid, slipped off the blue thing she had on and jumped into his red bed. She giggled and sat grinning at him enquiringly with her knees hunched.

  ‘No,’ he said good-temperedly.

  ‘Oh, Bill,’ she said, and put out a thin white arm and shut off one of the two lights.

  She snuggled down. She had great coils of yellow hair and it was like a shower of gold on the pillow. But there was nothing to it, he thought, no heart, no brain, only a rather flat body which probably needed washing. She had quite nice pyjamas, that was about the only thing.

  And yet, it was not unpleasant, her being here just now; he was more and more nervous of loneliness. Used to it, it yet had grown to a sensation almost physical, when it caught him. It soon drove him to Queenie, or to the street, or the crowded public bars where people screamed and spat. She was lonely too, that was her trouble, it was most people’s trouble, in some form or another; either you were Joan, and very lonely, or you were King Charles and the loneliest man in the world. Or you were stuck in Berchtesgaden, longing for a street café and just one real friend to talk to: you couldn’t even talk to God.

  They had a bit of a wrangle. She had long, tapering fingers, and all sorts of ideas and promises. But he got up and began to arrange a chair at the foot of the armchair. ‘I slept like this at the ambulance station,’ he explained, ‘so I may as well do it again. And I only had a deck chair there.’ He settled down after he had put the lights out and removed the blackout for some air. It was sweltering. She started up copying the noise an owl was making outside the window. He settled down and made the same row himself. It was very ridiculous. Poor old Winthrop upside down and dead out there on the stairs, and the two of them in here laughing and going:

  ‘Too-hoo? Too-hoo?’

  ‘I’m still at Smiths,’ she chattered. ‘Have you read much lately?’

  ‘I gave up reading,’ he said with his eyes shut, ‘during my marriage. My dear, misguided wife considered that books only made for dust. I shall have to start again. Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with me.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’

  ‘Am I mad?’

  ‘Mad! You!’

  ‘But am I?’

  Her voice had a young, musical lilt to it. Perhaps she had a bit of Irish in her somewhere.

  ‘Mad? I should think you’re the sanest person I know. And the nicest,’ she said quite seriously. ‘D’you know what I think’s wrong with you, Bill? You’re too much alone. Why don’t you marry me? Then you’d have a home again. You’re the kind of man who’s lost unless he’s got a home and some kids. You’d make a wonderful father.’

  He laughed dreamily.

  ‘Family life built the nation! True! And it will probably build it again when this conflagration has burnt itself out … But not for me, I greatly fear …!’

  ‘Yes, you fear—why do you? It’d be the making of you!’

  ‘My dear Joan, has it occurred to you that one must first love—and be loved?’

  She leapt out of bed and knelt at his feet, encircling him with those long, white arms. In the darkness, he imagined her round face turned up to him, and her rather long breasts which he remembered seeing freely on a former occasion, and he sat dreamily to listen while she said:

  ‘Don’t you see, Bill—I love you, really I do, I could make you happy, life would become full, instead of empty, it would be so wo
rth while?’

  It was hopeless. He told her she’d drive him mad in a week, you built a marriage on something far deeper and more solid than anything they could ever bring to it. Besides, you needed money, a man did. He hadn’t believed that once, but by gum, he believed it now. She sidetracked all about how her people had pegged out, and all she’d had was this job at Smiths. She thought somebody ought to write a book about ‘people like us’, and he assured her hundreds had, and hundreds more would, ‘so get to bed and go to sleep, there’s a good child, I’m tired!’

  ‘I could write a book about my life, Bill! Really I could! And when I see some of the stuff that’s written!’

  ‘Dry up. Go to sleep.’

  ‘Not unless you come to bed too.’

  ‘Why don’t you go back to your own room?’

  ‘It’s drear and loathsome and I hate it. I want to be with you.’ She sat in silence and then wondered: ‘I suppose you have lots of affairs. Of course you do.’

  ‘I don’t believe in affairs, as you call them.’

  She had seized his hand and was trying to pull him up off the armchair. Without effort, he pulled her down and pretended that she was poor old Winthrop out there.

  He laughed and soon let go.

  ‘Don’t, Bill,’ she giggled, ‘I could hardly breathe! What enormous hands you’ve got! They’re like steel …! Come on, darling, to bed.’ She pulled at him.

  At last, he said:

  ‘Well, I give in, as usual, but no funny business.’

  She quickly nestled down in the crook of his left arm, showering his face with gold. He chewed it contemplatively, reaching firmly to seize her two hands and hold them still. ‘Shut up and go to sleep.’

  ‘Oh, Bill …!’

  ‘You’re a bloody nuisance,’ he said good-naturedly. ‘You’ll never get a man with plaguesome methods. You should learn to be rude and cold.’

  ‘That method’s dangerous,’ she said interestedly. ‘Too many men take it as meant.’

  ‘Well, you have a try,’ he said. ‘Give it a trial. I give you my word you’ll be married in six months.’

  ‘I do wish I was married,’ she said.

  The clock ticked.

  Big Ben struck midnight.

  He thought: ‘It’ll be foul play, this time. That’s quite clear. Scotland Yard will take it up. Question the house. Well, I spent the night here with Joan, that’ll put her in a slight spot. Wonder if I dropped anything by the body? A button? A thread? Trifles like these hanged you, didn’t they? And then the man’s nails. And the scratch on the back of my hand, with iodine on it, and Joan coming in and saying, “You look hot. Have you been having a bath?” No, there was no steam in the bathroom. The cat did that.’

  Where was the old cat last night? Perhaps it had been run over the day before yesterday?

  He saw himself sitting in the dock. Well groomed; caricaturists making hay while his star set. Reporters putting: ‘His refined accents and educated appearance obviously impressed the jury and the court. His charm of manner, and his apparent sincerity, coupled with the lack of motive, make this one of the most interesting and sensational trials on record. Miss Brown, in the witness box, said she had never known a more charming and …’

  But it made no difference. There was his very flesh under the nails of the deceased, the girl Joan, the scratch and the iodine, the cat had been run over the day before.

  With tears running openly down his cheek, the foreman of the jury sentenced him, in effect, to death. The evidence was conclusive. The judge, in fact, sentenced him to be hanged by the neck until he was dead, he was to be taken to the place whence he came, and thence to a place of execution. The Evening Standard placards would shout: Public School Murderer To Hang!

  And what did it mean? Why, it meant happiness! It meant, in fact, freedom.

  ‘I did it for freedom,’ he might risk telling Queenie, when she came along for the last interview. ‘My own freedom,’ he’d give a rueful little laugh. Her kind, agonised face would stare across the long table at him.

  ‘Oh, Bill …!’

  Poor old Queenie!

  The warders would be very decent fellows. They’d play whist and chess and realise that he was a cut above the usual murderer, not in character, but in cloth. They might even let him lock the closet door; and trust him with a razor, or his old school tie.

  ‘He’s a sport,’ they’d say. ‘Darned if I think he did it?’

  The chaplain would be ripping. He’d come to intercede for him on behalf of God. ‘I want to set your mind at one with God’s,’ he’d say excitingly. ‘Shake hands, won’t you, Bowling?’

  He’d reply:

  ‘Why, that’s just what I want, old man!’ and he’d grip his hand warmly. ‘That’s just the bally thing I want! It’s what it’s all about!’ And he’d sink down on his cell bed, head in hands, and sincerely mean it, just as he’d sat through so many unhappy nights and days on shabby London beds, thinking and meaning it, and trying to puzzle it out. ‘And then I got bombed,’ he’d tell the parson. ‘But God didn’t want me even then! I decided I’d make him want me. Do you see?’ And if by chance he didn’t see, at least he’d see his sincerity and agony.

  And then at last there’d be the last scene of all. A rope and a handshake and a bit of pain. He’d stand stiffly on the square, wooden platform.

  What was a short pain like that, eh, Winthrop, Watson, old man? Ivy? What was it, compared with all the suffering here, the horrors of peace and war, chiefly peace?

  And then face to face with the Lord Himself.

  A huge hand, his own, made of hairs and steel, pointing out challengingly, as well as pleadingly, to God, who had power of us all.

  ‘What have I to say? … What have I not? What need I to say? Thou knowest all!’

  And his expression would change like the shadows on the wall of fading summer, green, yellow, red, like traffic lights; stop, now you can go; stop.

  A sound of thunder, like the thunder which had come after the Crucifixion. A tremendous thundering.

  He started out of his dream with a cry and sat bolt upright.

  Somebody was thundering on his door.

  The early morning light was filtering mistily in.

  Alice rushed in.

  ‘This night shalt thou be with me in Paradise’ had been the veiled, misty words teasing his brain while it slept, and he remembered a parson chap telling him how those words only really meant that Barabbas would be with Christ for that actual night, and it did not mean what public school education taught you that it meant, to wit, that the sinner Barabbas had achieved, in his sin, what Christ had achieved in His suffering and goodness, and had attained the complete Heaven: for that actual night only; while Christ would go on to the complete Heaven. It was interesting, and his brain wanted him to go on with the dream but the thunder and panic started in, like men with a tree trunk swinging at the Gates of Hell to open them for him.

  Alice’s face was a kind of mottled white. She looked as if she had first of all turned ashy white, then reacted to a deep, dark flush, then gone puce. Her dry old lips were working, and her bovine eyes were wide with fright.

  Even in her panic, she caught sight of the threads of gold hair which he was trying to hide under the sheets, and he saw the spasm of jealousy which flitted like a shadow of vexation across her kind old face, as with his other hand he held Joan down, yet she wriggled and said in a stifled voice:

  ‘What’s the din …? Bill …?’

  Anger and jealousy were chased away from Alice’s face by a spasm of shocked disgust, and she was herself again. ‘Mr Bowling, could you come, sir? Something dreadful’s happened … Mr Winthrop …!’ She put a handkerchief partly into her mouth, to steady the flood of tears which waited in obedience. Alice always cried when anyone was dead, and, if it looked fishy, she had to look scared like this. The clock downstairs started to chime seven. Somewhere or other, through a wall, a familiar voice said this was the seven o’clock news, and
it said who was reading it.

  He had a bit of a job with old Winthrop. He was lying head downwards on the narrow stairs there, and his arms were out at a ridiculous angle, as if he was spouting a spot of Shakespeare in his sleep. Alice was afraid to touch what she called his ‘poor, dear corpse,’ and she looked as if the sight of Winthrop’s face was going to make her sick. Miss Hull heard the din they made, and came out in a sort of turban affair, wearing protruding, startled eyes and a pinched look, and smelling of some vinegarish lotion she liked to put on her grey hair. She wouldn’t touch Winthrop either, and he had to go downstairs and knock up a chap Alice said was called Mr Gunter, on the second floor. He knocked and a sleepy, startled voice said, hallo, in a surprised way, as if nobody had ever called on him in his life before, and that it must be the police for certain. Mr Bowling went in and was at leisure to see that Mr Gunter slept without pyjamas, and without his teeth in. It took a bit of time, so he stood and waited while Mr Gunter’s ginger coloured body was clad in striped trousers and a brown jacket, and while his teeth were rescued from their smiling position in what looked like a glass of saline solution. He told Mr Gunter that he was frightfully sorry to disturb him, but the poor chap upstairs had kicked the bucket and fallen downstairs or something.

  Mr Gunter covered his queer looking nipples with his brown jacket, and looked scared stiff. Mr Bowling wondered whether he was scared at being seen with nothing on, or at anyone knowing he hadn’t got any pyjamas, or at the hearing of somebody having died.

  ‘I say!’ he kept saying, buttoning up everything. ‘By jove, how frightful …!’

  ‘I can’t lift him by myself. And the women are nervous.’

  ‘I say, though! dead, eh?’

  They went upstairs, Mr Gunter’s mouth being half open, and his face half pale. He kept going: ‘You mean he’s actually dead?’

  ‘Now, then,’ Mr Bowling said.

  They got Winthrop up to his room and put him on his bed. His arms remained in their grotesque posture, with his head twisted back at a strained angle. His legs were twisted inwards and there was a stain down there.