The Flying Goat (23 page)

She pondered over this statement with dull astonishment. More serious? She knew that nothing could be more serious. To her the money was like a huge and irreplacable section of her life. It was part of herself, bone and flesh, blood and sweat. Nothing could replace it. Nothing, she knew with absolute finality, could mean so much.

In the village she left the bicycle at the cycle shop.
Walking on without it, she lumbered dully from side to side, huge and unsteady, as though lost. From the cycle-shop window the repairer squinted after her, excited. Other people looked from other windows as she lumbered past, always a pace or two behind the policeman, her ill-shaped feet painfully set down. At the entrance to the police station there was a small crowd. She went heavily into the station. Policemen were standing about in a room. An inspector, many papers in his hand, spoke to her. She listened heavily. She looked about for a sign of Thurlow. The inspector said, with kindness, ‘Your husband is not here.' She felt a sense of having been cheated. ‘They are detaining him at Metford. We are going over there now.'

‘You know anything about the money?' she said.

Five minutes later she drove away, with the inspector and two other policemen, in a large black car. Travelling fast, she felt herself hurled, as it were, beyond herself. Mind and body seemed separated, her thoughts nullified. As the car entered the town, slowing down, she looked out of the side windows, saw posters: ‘Metford Murder Arrest'. People, seeing policemen in the car, gaped. ‘Murder Sensation Man Detained.'

Her mind registered impressions gravely and confusedly. People and posters were swept away from her and she was conscious of their being replaced by other people, the police station, corridors in the station, walls of brown glazed brick, fresh faces, a room, desks covered with many papers, eyes looking at her, box files in white rows appearing also to look at her, voices talking to her, an arm touching her, a voice asking her to sit down.

‘I have to tell you, Mrs. Thurlow, that we have detained your husband on a charge of murder.'

‘He say anything about the money?'

‘He has made a statement. In a few minutes he will be charged and then probably remanded for further inquiries. You are at liberty to see him for a few moments if you would like to do so.'

In a few moments she was standing in a cell, looking at Thurlow. He looked at her as though he did not know what had happened. His eyes were lumps of impressionless glass. He stood with long arms loose at his sides. For some reason he looked strange, foreign, not himself. It was more than a minute before she realised why this was. Then she saw that he was wearing a new suit. It was a grey suit, thick, ready-made, and the sleeves were too
short for him. They hung several inches above his thick protuberant wrist bones, giving his hands a look of inert defeat.

‘You got the money, ain't you?' she said. ‘You got it?'

He looked at her. ‘Money?'

‘The money you took. The money under the mattress.'

He stared at her. Money? He looked at her with a faint expression of appeal. Money. He continued to stare at her with complete blankness. Money?

‘You remember,' she said. ‘The money under the mattress.'

‘Eh?'

‘The money. That money. Don't you remember?'

He shook his head.

After some moments she went out of the cell. She carried out with her the sense of Thurlow's defeat as she saw it expressed in the inert hands, the dead, stupefied face, and his vacant inability to remember anything. She heard the court proceedings without interest or emotion. She was oppressed by a sense of increasing bewilderment, a feeling that she was lost. She was stormed by impressions she did not understand.
‘I do not propose to put in a statement at this juncture. I ask for a remand until the sixteenth.' ‘Remand granted. Clear the court.'

This effect of being stormed by impressions continued outside the court, as she drove away again in the car. People. Many faces. Cameras. More faces. Posters. The old sensation of mind severed from body, of thoughts nullified. In the village, when the car stopped, there were more impressions: more voices, more people, a feeling of suppressed excitement. ‘We will run you home,' the policemen said.

‘No,' she said. ‘I got my cleaning to do. I got to pick up my bicycle.'

She fetched the bicycle and wheeled it slowly through the village. People looked at her, seemed surprised to see her in broad daylight, made gestures as though they wished to speak, and then went on. Grasping the handles of the bicycle, she felt a return of security, almost of comfort. The familiar smooth handlebars hard against her hands had the living response of other hands. They brought back her sense of reality: Miss Hanley, the cleaning, the poultry farm, the time she had lost, the boys, the money, the fact that something terrible had
happened, the monumental fact of Thurlow's face, inert and dead, with its lost sense of remembrance.

Oppressed by a sense of duty, she did her cleaning as though nothing had happened. People were very kind to her. Miss Hanley made tea, the retired photographer would have run her home in his car. She was met everywhere by tender, remote words of comfort.

She pushed home her bicycle in the darkness. At Miss Hanley's, at the poultry farm, at the various places where she worked, the thought of the money had been partially set aside. Now, alone again, she felt the force of its importance more strongly, with the beginnings of bitterness. In the empty house she worked for several hours by candlelight, washing, folding, ironing. About the house the vague noises of wind periodically resolved themselves into what she believed for a moment were the voices of the two boys. She thought of the boys with calm unhappiness, and the thought of them brought back with renewed force the thought of the money. This thought hung over her with the huge preponderance of her own shadow projected on the ceiling above her.

On the following Sunday afternoon she sat in the
empty kitchen, as usual, and read the stale newspapers. But now they recorded, not the unreal lives of other people, but the life of Thurlow and herself. She saw Thurlow's photograph. She read the same story told in different words in different papers. In all the stories there was an absence of all mention of the only thing that mattered. There was no single word about the money.

During the next few weeks much happened, but she did not lose the belief that the money was coming back to her. Nothing could touch the hard central core of her optimism. She saw the slow evolution of circumstances about Thurlow as things of subsidiary importance, the loss of the life he had taken and the loss of his own life as things which, terrible in themselves, seemed less terrible than the loss of ideals built up by her sweat and blood.

She knew, gradually, that Thurlow was doomed, that it was all over. She did not know what to do. Her terror seemed remote, muffled, in some way incoherent. She pushed the bicycle back and forth each day in the same ponderous manner as ever, her heavy feet slopping dully beside it.

When she saw Thurlow for the last time his face had not changed, one way or the other, from its
fixed expression of defeat. Defeat was cemented into it with imperishable finality. She asked him about the money for the last time.

‘Eh?'

‘The money. You took it. What you do with it? That money. Under the mattress.' For the first time she showed some sign of desperation. ‘Please, what you done with it? That money. My money?'

‘Eh?' And she knew that he could not remember.

A day later it was all over. Two days later she pushed the bicycle the four miles to the next village, to see her brother. It was springtime, time for the boys to come back to her. Pushing the bicycle in the twilight, she felt she was pushing forward into the future. She had some dim idea, heavily dulled by the sense of Thurlow's death, that the loss of the money was not now so great. Money is money; death is death; the living are the living. The living were the future. The thought of the boys' return filled her with hopes for the future, unelated hopes,
but quite real, strong enough to surmount the loss of both Thurlow and money.

At her brother's they had nothing to say. They sat, the brother, the mother, and the sister-in-law, and looked at her with eyes over which, as it were, the blinds had been drawn.

‘The boys here?' she said.

‘They're in the workshop,' her brother said. ‘They're making a bit of a wheelbarrow.'

‘They all right?'

‘Yes.' He wetted his lips. His clean-planned mind had been scarred by events as though by a mishandled tool. ‘They don't know nothing. We kept it from 'em. They ain't been to school and they ain't seen no papers. They think he's in jail for stealing money.'

She looked at him, dully. ‘Stealing money? That's what he did do. That money I told you about. That money I had under the mattress.'

‘Well,' he said slowly, ‘it's done now.'

‘What did he do with it?' she said. ‘What d'ye reckon he done with it?'

He looked at her quickly, unable suddenly to restrain his anger. ‘Done with it? What d'ye suppose he done with it? Spent it. Threw it away.
Boozed it. What else? You know what he was like. You knew! You had your eyes open. You knew what – '

‘Will, Will,' his wife said.

He was silent. The old lady said: ‘Eh? What's that? What's the matter now?'

The brother said, in a loud voice, ‘Nothing'. Then more softly: ‘She don't know everything.'

‘I came to take the boys back,' Mrs. Thurlow said.

He was silent again. He wetted his lips. He struck a match on the warm fire-hob. It spurted into a sudden explosion, igniting of its own volition. He seemed startled. He put the match to his pipe, let it go out.

He looked at Mrs. Thurlow, the dead match in his hands. ‘The boys ain't coming back no more,' he said.

‘Eh?' she said. She was stunned. ‘They ain't what?'

‘They don't want to come back,' he said.

She did not understand. She could not speak. Very slowly he said:

‘It's natural they don't want to come back. I know it's hard. But it's natural. They're getting on well here. They want to stop here. They're good boys. I could take 'em into the business.'

She heard him go on without hearing the individual words. He broke off, his face relieved – like a man who has liquidated some awful obligation.

‘They're my boys,' she said. ‘They got a right to say what they shall do and what they shan't do.'

She spoke heavily, without bitterness.

‘I know that,' he said. ‘That's right. They got a right to speak. You want to hear what they got to say?'

‘Yes, I want to,' she said.

Her sister-in-law went out into the yard at the back of the house. Soon voices drew nearer out of the darkness and the two boys came in.

‘Hullo,' she said.

‘Hello, Mum,' they said.

‘Your Mum's come,' the carpenter said, ‘to see if you want to go back with her.'

The two boys stood silent, awkward, eyes glancing past her.

‘You want to go?' the carpenter said. ‘Or do you want to stay here?'

‘Here,' the elder boy said. ‘We want to stop here.'

‘You're sure o' that?'

‘Yes,' the other said.

Mrs. Thurlow stood silent. She could think of
nothing to say in protest or argument or persuasion. Nothing she could say would, she felt, give expression to the inner part of herself, the crushed core of optimism and faith.

She stood at the door, looking back at the boys. ‘You made up your minds, then?' she said. They did not speak.

‘I'll run you home,' her brother said.

‘No,' she said. ‘I got my bike.'

She went out of the house and began to push the bicycle slowly home in the darkness. She walked with head down, lumbering painfully, as though direction did not matter. Whereas, coming, she had seemed to be pushing forward into the future, she now felt as if she were pushing forward into nowhere.

After a mile or so she heard a faint hissing from the back tyre. She stopped, pressing the tyre with her hand. ‘It's slow,' she thought; ‘it'll last me.' She pushed forward. A little later it seemed to her that the hissing got worse. She stopped again, and again felt the tyre with her hand. It was softer now, almost flat.

She unscrewed the pump and put a little air in the tyre and went on. ‘I better stop at the shop,' she thought, ‘and have it done.'

In the village the cycle shop was already in darkness. She pushed past it. As she came to the hill leading up to the house she lifted her head a little. It seemed to her suddenly that the house, outlined darkly above the dark hill, was a long way off. She had for one moment an impression that she would never reach it.

She struggled up the hill. The mud of the track seemed to suck at her great boots and hold her down. The wheels of the bicycle seemed as if they would not turn, and she could hear the noise of the air dying once again in the tyre.

A sensitive and touching tale of a Latin teacher approaching the end of his career, reflecting on his obsolete methods of trying to teach a dying language. The story is based in part on Bates's Latin teacher who he described as "extremely fat", so in a sweetly comic moment we hear how he fasts every Thursday so as not to become obese. Published in the
New Adelphi
(1929), and not republished since.

‘Attention! Amicus, a friend… usque ad aras, literally, even to the alter…that is, even to the last extremity… Go on translating! Go on! Quiet! Detention for the next boy who speaks!'

The voice resounding through dim corridors was hoarse and irate, like the resentful croaking of some old dog. Now and then could be heard the rapid tap-tapping of a ruler, angrily warning an offender.

In the common-room two or three masters off duty looked up from piles of red and green exercise books and listened. ‘That's old Saul at it again – sounds furious,' one remarked. ‘But it's a shame really. Not only that, he's preventing another man…yes, he ought to realise. It's no joke.'