Last Bus to Woodstock (11 page)

When she had first considered committing suicide, the car had seemed a very real possibility. But she now knew that she could never do it that way. Driving brought out all her primitive instincts for safety and self-preservation. And anyway, she couldn’t smash up her lovely new Mini. There were other ways . . .

She parked carefully, getting in and out of the car several times before she was perfectly happy that it was as safely ensconced and as equidistanced from its neighbours as she could manage, and entered the large, four-storeyed, glass-fronted building that ministered to the needs of the city’s maturer students. She saw Mrs Palmer, one of her classmates, starting up the stairs to Room C26.

‘Hullo, Mrs Crowther! We all missed you last week. Were you poorly?’

‘What’s wrong with those two?’ asked James.

A quarter of an hour after Margaret’s departure, Bernard Crowther had caught the bus down to Lonsdale College, where he dined one or two nights a week. The children were alone.

‘Not unusual, is it?’ said Caroline.

‘They hardly talk to one another.’

‘I ’spect all married people get like that.’

‘Didn’t used to be like that.’

‘
You
don’t help much.’

‘Nor do you.’

‘Wha’ do you mean?’

‘Ah – shut up!’

‘You misery.’

‘F – off!’

These days their conversation seldom lasted longer. With a few minor permutations and, in the presence of mum and dad, a few concessions to conventional middle-class morality, their parents had heard it many times. It worried Margaret deeply and infuriated Bernard, and each wondered secretly if all children were as vicious, ill-tempered and uncooperative as their own. Not that James and Caroline were uppermost in either parent’s mind this Wednesday evening.

As one of the senior fellows of his college, Bernard had naturally been invited to the memorial jamboree for the ex-vice-principal who had retired the previous summer. The dinner was to begin at 7.30 p.m., and Bernard arrived in Peter’s room with half an hour to spare. He poured himself a gin and vermouth and sat back in a faded armchair. He thought he liked Felix Tompsett – the old sod! Certainly he ate too much, and drank too much and, if many-tongued rumour could be believed (why not?), he had done a lot of other things too much. But he was a good ‘college man’; it was on his advice that the college had bought up a lot of property in the early sixties and his understanding of interest rates and investment loans was legendary. Odd really, thought Bernard. He finished his gin and shrugged into his gown. Preprandial sherry would be flowing in the Senior Common Room, and the two friends made their way thither.

‘Well, Bernard! How are you, old boy?’ Felix’s smile beamed a genuine welcome to his old colleague. ‘Can’t grumble,’ replied Bernard lamely.

‘And how’s that lovely wife of yours?’

Bernard grabbed a sherry. ‘Oh fine, fine.’

‘Lovely woman.’ Felix mused on. He had obviously begun to celebrate his own commemoration with premeditated gusto, but Bernard couldn’t match his bonhomie. He thought of Margaret as the conversation burbled around him . . . He tuned in again just in time to laugh convincingly at Felix’s discovery of a recent inscription on the wall of the gents in the Minster bar.

‘Bloody good, what?’ gaffawed Felix.

The party moved next door and sat down to the evening’s feast. Bernard always felt that they had far too much to eat, and tonight they had far, far too much to eat. As he struggled his way through the grapefruit cocktail, the turtle soup, the smoked salmon, the tournedos Rossini, the gateau, the cheese and the fruit, he thought of the millions in the world who had not eaten adequately for weeks or even months, and saw in his mind the harrowing pictures of the famine victims of Asia and Africa . . .

‘You’re quiet tonight,’ said the chaplain, passing Bernard the claret.

‘Sorry,’ said Bernard. ‘It must be all this food and drink.’

‘You must learn to take the gifts the good Lord showers upon us, my boy. You know, as I get older I must confess to the greater appreciation of two things in life – natural beauty and the delights of the belly.’

He leaned back and poured half a glass of vintage claret towards his vast stomach. Bernard knew that some men were naturally fat – all to do with the metabolic rate, or something. But there were no fat men in Belsen . . .

But whatever other confessions the good chaplain may have been about to divulge were cut short by the toast to Her Majesty and the clearing of the Principal’s throat as he rose to his feet to begin his encomium of Felix Tompsett. They had all heard it all before. A few necessary alterations in the hackneyed, hallowed phrases – but basically the same old stuff. Felix would be leaving holes in so many aspects of college life; it would be difficult to fill the holes . . . Bernard thought of Margaret. Why not leave the bloody holes unfilled . . . One of the foremost scholars of his generation . . . Bernard looked at his watch. 9.15 p.m. He couldn’t go yet. Anecdotes and laughter . . . Bernard felt pretty sure they would all be reminded of that incident when a disgruntled undergraduate had pissed all over Felix’s carpet two years ago . . . Back to the academic stuff. Top-of-the-head. Phoney . . . His work on the Elizabethan lyric poets . . . why, the old bastard had spent most of his time doing first-hand research on the historic inns of Oxfordshire. Or with the women . . . For the first time Bernard wondered if Felix had made any overtures to Margaret. He’d better not . . .

Felix spoke well. Slightly drunk, amiable, civilized . . . quite moving really. Come on! 9.45 p.m. The presentation was made and the company broke up by 10.00 p.m. Bernard rushed out of college and ran through the Broad to St Giles’, where he found a taxi immediately. But even before the taxi stopped, he saw some movement outside the darkened house. His heart raced in panic-stricken despair. James and Caroline stood beside the front door.

‘You might have . . .’ began Caroline.

Bernard hardly heard. ‘Where’s your mother?’ His voice was hard and urgent.

‘Don’t know. We thought she must have been with you.’

‘How long have you been waiting?’ He spoke with a clipped authority the children had seldom heard.

‘’Bout half an hour. Mum’s always been here before . . .’

Bernard opened the front door. ‘Ring up the tech. at Headington. Ask if they’ve finished.’

‘You do it, Caroline.’

Bernard brought his right hand with vicious force across James’s face. ‘Do it!’ he hissed.

He went to the gate. No one. He prayed for the sound of a car, any car. Car! A cold sweat formed on his forehead as he darted to the garage. The door was locked. He found the key. His hand shook convulsively. He opened the door.

‘What on earth are you doing?’

Bernard started, and in his heart blessed all the gods that were and are and are to be. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ In a fraction of a second his terrible, agonized fear had flashed to anger – relieved, fierce, beautiful anger.

‘As a matter of fact the starter-motor’s gone on the Mini. I couldn’t get anyone to fix it and in the end I had to catch a bus.’

‘You could have let me know.’

‘Oh yes, of course. You want me to ring round all the garages, then you, and then presumably the kids.’ Margaret herself was becoming very angry. ‘What’s all the fuss about? Just because
I’m
late for a change!’

‘The children have been waiting no end of time.’

‘So what!’ Margaret stormed into the house, and Bernard heard the high-pitched voices within. He closed the front gate and then the garage. He locked and bolted the front door. He felt happy, happier than he had felt for many days and many hours.

M
ORSE DID NOT
know what had persuaded him, after seven months of promises and prevarications, to fill in the ragged gaping hole above the kitchen door where the electrician had led in the wires for a new power-point. Everything had been wrong from the start anyway. The Polyfilla powder, purchased some two years previously, had hardened into a solid block of semi-concrete within its packet; the spatula he used for cracking eggs and filling cracks had mysteriously vanished from the face of the earth; and the primitive household steps never had stood four-square on their rickety legs. Perhaps he had taken inspiration from Mr Edward de Bono and his recipe for lateral thought. But whatever the motive for his sudden urge to see the wretched hole filled in, Morse had taken a vertical plunge, like some free-fall parachutist, from the top of the steps, when the cord restraining the uprights to a functional 30° angle suddenly snapped and the whole apparatus collapsed into a straight line beneath him. Like Hephaestus, thrown o’er the crystal battlements, he landed with an agonizing jolt upon his right foot, lay with a feeling of nausea for two or three minutes, wiping the cold sweat which formed upon his brow, and finally limped his way to the front room and lay breathing heavily on the settee. After a while the foot was a little easier and he felt somewhat reassured; but half an hour later the swelling began and a fitful, sharp pain nagged away at his instep. He wondered if he could drive, but knew it would be foolish to try. It was 8.30 p.m. on Tuesday, 5 October. Only one thing for it. He hobbled and hopped across to the telephone and rang Lewis, and within the half hour he was sitting disconsolately in the accident room of the Radcliffe Infirmary, waiting for the result of the X-ray. A young boy sitting on the bench next to Morse was wringing his left hand in some agony (car door) and two men badly injured in a road accident were wheeled by for priority treatment. He felt a little less depressed.

He was finally seen by an almost unintelligible Chinese doctor who held up his X-ray pictures to the light with the disinterestedness of a bored guest having a casual glance at one of the holiday slides of his host. ‘Nobrocken. Creepancrushes.’ From the competent nurse into whose hands he was now delivered, Morse gathered that no bones were broken and that the treatment prescribed was crêpe bandage and hospital crutches.

He expressed his thanks to nurse and doctor as he swung along diffidently towards the waiting Lewis. ‘You,’ shouted the doctor after him. ‘You, Mr Morse. Nowork twodays. You rest. OK?’

‘I think I shall be all right, thanks,’ said Morse.

‘You, Mr Morse. Youwangebetter, eh? Nowork. Two days. Rest. OK?’

‘OK.’ Oh God!

Morse hardly slept through Tuesday night; he had a vicious toothache in each of the toes on his foot. He swallowed Disprin after Disprin and finally towards dawn dozed off from sheer exhaustion. Lewis called several times during the prolonged agonies of Wednesday and watched the Inspector fall into a blessedly deep sleep at about 9.00 p.m.

When Lewis greeted him the next morning, Morse felt better; and because he felt better, his mind reverted to the murder of Sylvia Kaye, and because his mind was not now wholly preoccupied with the tribulations of his right foot, he felt a great depression grow upon him. He felt like a quiz contestant who had almost got some of the answers right, had others on the tip of his tongue, but had finished up with nothing. One always longed to start again . . .

He lay with these troubled thoughts on his mind. Lewis was fussing around. Good old Lewis. They’d all be having a good laugh at the station, he thought. Humiliating, falling off a ladder. Well he hadn’t fallen
off
a ladder. He’d fallen
through
one.

‘Lewis! You told everybody what happened, I suppose?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well?’

‘They think you’re making it up. They think you’ve got gout really. You know – too much port.’

Morse groaned. He could picture himself limping round with every other person stopping him to enquire into the circumstances of the disaster. He’d write it all out, have it photocopied, and distribute the literature around the station.

‘Still painful, sir?’

‘Of course it bloody well is. You’ve got millions of nerve endings all over your bloody toes. You know that, don’t you?’

‘I had an uncle, sir, who had a beer barrel run over his toes.’

‘Shut up,’ winced Morse. The thought of anything, let alone a beer barrel, being within three feet of his injured foot was quite unbearable. Beer barrel, though. Morse was getting better.

‘Are the pubs open yet?’

‘Fancy a drink, sir?’ Lewis looked pleased with himself.

‘Wouldn’t mind a jar.’

‘As a matter of fact I brought a few cans in last night, sir.’

‘Well?’

Lewis found some glasses, and positioning a chair a goodly distance from ‘the foot’, poured out the beer.

‘Nothing new?’ asked Morse.

‘Not yet.’

‘Mm.’

The two men drank in silence. Some of the answers almost right . . . others on the tip of his tongue . . . What, wondered Morse, if he had been right, or almost right? If only he could start again . . . Suddenly he sat up, forgot his incapacity, yelped ‘Oh, me foot!’ and leaned back again into his nest of pillows. He
could
start again, couldn’t he? ‘Lewis, I want you to do me one or two favours. Get me some writing paper – it’s in the writing-desk downstairs; and what about some fish and chips for lunch?’

Lewis nodded. As he went off for the writing paper Morse interrupted him.

‘Three favours. Open a few of those cans.’

A thought had been floating around in Morse’s mind for several days, elusive as a bar of soap in a slippery bath. In the beginning was the thought, and the thought became word and Morse unwrapped the text carefully and read the message.
Im Anfang war die Hypothese
. In the beginning was the hypothesis. But before formulating any hypothesis, even of the most modest order, Morse decided that he would feel sharper in body, mind and spirit with a good wash and a shave. Slowly and painfully he got out of bed, tacked crabwise around the walls and ended up by hopping over the last few feet of the bathroom floor. It took him almost an hour to complete his toilet, but he felt a new man. He retraced his irregular progress and gently heaved his right foot into a comfortable niche alongside a spare pillow stuffed down at the bottom of the bed. He felt exhausted but wonderfully refreshed. He closed his eyes and fell fast asleep.