It’s a Battlefield (8 page)

Mr Surrogate answered without looking: ‘My wife.' It faced the bed. It was the first face he saw in the morning. It greeted him, before Davis, with its beauty and its malice and its integrity.

‘How you must have loved her,' Kay Rimmer said softly, under the spell of the face, and for a moment Mr Surrogate longed to tell the truth, that it was hung there as an atonement for his dislike, as a satisfaction for his humility, because of its reminder of the one woman who had never failed to see through him. ‘Let me show you the kitchen,' he said quickly.

The kitchen was like a snowdrift with its white casement and white dresser and white table and enamelled gas stove and its deep blue walls and ceiling. The lights in the back rooms of the houses opposite glinted on the walls; a car complained in the mews between. ‘You can see what everyone's doing,' Kay Rimmer said, standing at the window. Through the chink of the curtains on a top floor she saw a woman brushing her hair; a great double bed waited for its inhabitants; a maid laid breakfast; a man wrote letters; a chauffeur lent from the window of a little flat above a garage and smoked his last pipe.

‘Everyone doing something different,' she said, her eyes going back to the double bed and her thoughts on the pink bedspread in the other room and Jules and half a loaf is better than no bread and the lovely dead indifferent woman on the wall. Her body was ready for enjoyment; the deep peace of sensuality covered all the fears and perplexities of the day; she never felt more at home than in a bed or a man's arms.

*

Conrad Drover, attaché case in hand, walked all the way to Battersea. He could not bring himself to spend any pence on bus or tube that might be spent on his brother's petition. His brother was the only man he loved in the world, and his brother for the first time in his life needed him; strength for the first time needed brains. Before it had always been brains which had needed strength, cleverness which had needed stupidity. All the way down Oakley Street and along the Embankment a child ran scurrying to the corner of the playground where his brother beat a ball against the wall; the trams came screeching like a finger drawn on glass up the curve of Battersea Bridge and down into the ill-lighted network of streets beyond; on the water the gulls floated asleep. Into the darkness of the secondary school Conrad fell, alone without his brother, his name tossed across the asphalt – ‘He's called Conrad, Conrad, Conrad.' His brother sat in a steel cage driving through the rain; he earned three pounds a week; Conrad sat at a desk aware of the hatred behind him, in the school, in the office; the cold recognition of his efficiency through the glass door of the headmaster's room, of the manager's room; Conrad earned six pounds a week.

The cold railings round the Battersea Polytechnic touched the backs of his hands; Conrad Drover walked on towards the woman he loved more than any other woman. He opened the letter from his brother at his desk and read with despair, ‘married on Tuesday'; it was weeks before he realized that Milly had not robbed him of his brother's stupidity and serenity and strength.

A notice on the railings said: ‘It is forbidden to throw stones at the Polytechnic.'

There was nothing that either of them had ever been able to do for his brother; they had come together in their admiration and impotence, sitting as it were in his shadow away from the world which rocked and roared around them. Now he was gone and it was they who had to have strength. All day in Court Conrad had prayed that he might be lent stupidity, so that he might not recognize what lay behind the three white wigs, the silk robes, the whispers, the getting up and the sitting down: ‘I submit, m'lud, that if you look at Rex
v
. Hindle'; the coughing and the complete lack of interest. A child ran into him chasing a ball, and Conrad clutched a railing for support. He thought with bitterness of Kay: ‘The manager would sack me. You are different. You have brains.' If ever I have a child, he thought, I shall pray that he will be born stupid.

The oldest judge put his head on his hand and said wearily: ‘We have given counsel for the defence the greatest possible latitude. He has taken up a great deal of time with irrelevancies.' He seemed surprised and a little shocked at the ingenuity of the attempt to save the accused man. Ingenuity but not passion; the two counsel nodded and becked and exchanged compliments; once they became a little acrid over Rex
v
. Hindle; but afterwards in the corridor Conrad Drover saw them arm in arm going off to lunch. ‘Of course I hadn't a chance.' ‘You did splendidly. I could see the solicitors were impressed.' And afterwards in Piccadilly, on the steps of the Berkeley, he had heard the thin man with a jaundiced face say: ‘A pram on top of a taxi,' and laugh. Conrad Drover had recognized him. On the same day as his brother's fate was decided, the Assistant Commissioner could laugh at a stupid joke. His brother was just one of many men strung up for justice. The old judge said in a kind voice: ‘Counsel for the defence has argued with great skill on the question of motive. He has tried to show that the jury were improperly directed. . . .' A young barrister just behind Conrad said: ‘I'm off to old Symond's Court. There's nothing more of interest here. See you in hall.' When the door opened Conrad could hear someone sweeping in the long passage outside. The old judge said: ‘We have come to the conclusion that no cause has been shown for setting aside the decision of the jury.'

His brother lived in a basement flat opposite the laurels and the railings of the Polytechnic. Conrad looked down and saw beneath his feet the yellow glow of the kitchen. The tenement disappeared unlit into the sky. It was like a monument above a tomb, and a light showed that someone was awake in the tomb. He rang the bell and waited. Everything was as usual, even to the footsteps and the glimmer of light which went on behind the door, even to his following Milly in silence down the stone stairs to the kitchen. They had never had much to say to each other, but it was true, he thought, as she opened the door and led him into the glow of gas among the clean stacked plates, that this was the first time they had been completely alone. One did not need to be alone with Milly to love her more than any other woman. She was not beautiful. She was small and fair and thin, her hands were too large, and she had high prominent cheekbones in a face which was too generous to be beautiful. Some women were like audited account books, the proportion of every part was entered in double column and checked and found correct, but Milly's accounts were of a bankrupt firm, they did not balance; but this failure to balance had an extravagant generosity.

In the kitchen they kissed with quick formality, as if it were a courtesy to be got through before the important business. He looked at the table, at the stove. ‘You've had no supper.'

She said: ‘I'm not hungry,' and then lied, ‘I had a big tea.' The lie was not meant to deceive. It was a warning, which he understood, that everything must be said and acted on the usual plane. She was dug in so inefficiently against emotion that she was afraid of almost anything he might do. He said: ‘I'm going to fry some bacon,' and she did not dare to make any protest. While the bacon sizzled in the pan he began to talk very fast, so fast that soon the words were almost unintelligible. ‘We had an interesting case yesterday. Suspected arson. The man set fire to part of his shop, so we think. We were going to contest his claim, but he dropped it quite suddenly, and we're leaving it at that. He put the fire out himself, so it never came to the police. Name of Bernay. Just one room, a lot of stuff burned, and a lot more spoilt. Now why did he drop the claim? Afraid we'd be able to prove arson? The manager doesn't believe it. He believes he didn't care a damn about the claim, he wanted to get rid of the stuff, perhaps it was stolen and the police were watching and he got the wind up, not our business anyway.' He looked up suddenly with horror, watching her from the other side of the stove across the thin smoke from the spitting fat. As clearly as if she had spoken he was aware of her thoughts clinging round the words fire, police, burned. ‘No,' he said, ‘No. You must take care of yourself. There's still hope.' The words were bundles of grenades flung into her parapet.

‘You don't believe it.' He watched with pain and tenderness her white hopeless face, her shoulders a little bent with the weight of five happy years. He became aware with sudden clarity how injustice did not belong only to an old tired judge, to a policeman joking in Piccadilly; it was as much a part of the body as age and inevitable disease. There was no such thing as justice in the air we breathed, for it was those who hated and envied and married for money or convenience who were happy. Death could not hurt them, it could only hurt those who loved. Intolerable the weight of those happy years, of days in the Park and nights at the pictures, of the shared bed and the shared meal and the shared misery.

She said: ‘I shouldn't mind if he was dying here. I could look after him. We'd be together all day and all night.' She convinced herself of how happy she could be with him dying upstairs, her eyes shone for a moment with the false happiness of her day-dream, that he was dying in the room upstairs. His love of his brother wavered at the sight of her despair. ‘Why did he do it?' he protested.

‘The policeman was going to hit me,' she said. ‘Everyone was excited.' She began to shake all over as if she were again in the centre of the mob near Hyde Park Corner. They straddled across Rotten Row, kicking up the dust into thin smoke, and the riders turned their gleaming groomed mounts and trotted hurriedly back while the crowd shouted and laughed at them. An unemployed man waved a banner by the Achilles statue.

‘I saw Kay. She was off to a party meeting. They'll have to do something for him.'

The crowd turned and ran as the mounted police came down the Row with drawn staves. The man by the Achilles statue struck out with his banner at two policemen who pulled him to the ground and twisted his arms behind his back. He shouted for help, but the crowd was fighting to get away from the wedge of police who were driving them towards the gates. The great green plains of the Park were dotted with shabby men running away.

‘They won't do anything for him,' Milly said, flinching again at the raised truncheon and the fear of a pain which never came. The policeman was on his knees bleeding into the turf and crying and gasping, and the crowd was suddenly very far away and the three of them were alone with the grass and a park chair and a sense of disaster. The policeman's face was wet with tears.

‘You've got to have some supper. Look, the bacon's ready.'

‘I'm not hungry.' Conrad pulled out a chair and made her sit down. He took a warm plate from the oven and laid the bacon on it. He was almost happy, making her eat.

‘Can't you do something, Conrad? You're clever.' The words from her were not an insult as they had been from Kay.

‘I'm going to look after you till he's back. You must have a man in the house.'

‘There isn't a room.'

‘I'll make up a bed on the floor here.'

‘All right. But I don't need anyone. I don't need anything.' But she contradicted herself a moment later. ‘Isn't there anything I can do? Think of something I can do.' He drew a chair to the table beside her and sat down. ‘I'll think of something. Don't be afraid.' But he himself, with his head in his hands, pretending to think, was dizzy with fear. She was appealing to him. He was being asked for help, and the only help he had been trained to give was adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing. The whole office depended on him, directors driving up in their cars, nodding presently over the green baize in the board room, shareholders leaping to their feet and asking petulantly what this figure meant, why that figure was not accounted for; but the dependence of one individual left him dizzy with fear.

‘I'm afraid without him here,' she said. Jim had sat for the last five years in one chair in one place in the kitchen and they had talked and laughed and had hardly noticed how their nerves and their cleverness had been quietened by his serene obtuseness. ‘Tell me what to do. He always said you had the brains.'

Conrad stared at the spread newspapers on the kitchen table. His mind took the opportunity to shirk its task, wandering across the columns of type, picking up a headline here and a headline there: ‘Mr MacDonald to fly home to Lossiemouth'; ‘Are you Insured?', ‘Spot the Stars'.

‘We ought to use influence. Everything goes by influence,' he said, thinking of the brothers on the board, the nephew in the clerks' room. But he was daunted the next moment by his own and Milly's insignificance. He heard the world humming with the voices of generals and politicians, bishops and surgeons and schoolmasters, who knew what they wanted, who knew what everyone else wanted: ‘I have a cousin, an uncle, a nephew, a niece,' the world humming and vibrating with the pulling of wires. Milly's face was lost among the harsh confident cultured faces. It did not belong to the same world; they were insulated against pain, poverty and disaster. One could not appeal to them for justice; justice to them was another word for prison.

‘But how?'

‘Spot the Stars', he read. ‘Are you Insured? Mr MacDonald –' There was a photograph of the Prince of Wales opening a new hostel for the unemployed; he was surrounded by men in frock coats carrying top hats; women in fur coats pressed round the edge of the picture gazing at the golden key. An officer and his bride stepped out of St Margaret's into the blaze of publicity under arched swords. A shabby woman with a cameo brooch seemed out of place on the same page: ‘Mrs Coney, wife of the murdered police constable.'

‘Have you seen this?'

The photograph roused her for a moment from the dullness of her despair. Her happiness had always been shot through with touches of malice. Her husband contented with his job and his pay had been the Communist; not Milly, contented with nothing but his love, suspicious of the whole world outside. She had never believed that they would be left alone to enjoy each other. Her malice had been a form of defence, an appeal to other people to ‘leave us alone'. She said now, looking at the photograph, in the usual tone of exaggerated dislike: ‘She reminds me of – She looks like –' but she had been robbed of her only weapon; the woman reminded her of nothing, staring bleakly out, an inimical stranger, into the warm clean kitchen, but of the policeman on his knees crying with pain and fear in the Park.