The Forgotten Story (13 page)

Scandalised, she began to struggle again, but more weakly, for her strength was partly gone.

So it came to pass that Patricia, who had begun the evening flirting with Ned Pawlyn, ended it in the company of her husband. Had Tom Harris been more of a brute the encounter might have gone further than it did. Patricia, for once in her life, was really frightened, for she did not misread his intention. Love can so change that it becomes instead a fusion of hatred and desire. That was what Tom Harris found.

But unless the change is absolute, it can injure but it cannot wilfully destroy. That and something in the fundamental relationship between civilised man and woman finally stood in his way.

Not, however, before she had paid in good measure for her deceit and resistance.

He turned quite suddenly and left her there on the old couch, bruised and breathless and silent. She had never been so shaken up since she was three.

Policemen are not often found when and where they are most needed. Anthony had to run half a mile, as far as the parish church of Charles the Martyr, before he came on two standing defensively in the recess by the steps.

Market Street and Church Street were not pleasant at this time of a Saturday night; the boy was astonished and rather frightened by what he saw. Sailors were sitting on doorsteps singing, women were arguing shrilly outside public houses, and drunks lay about in the gutter waiting for the wheelbarrow men to come along and take them back to their ships or to some convenient doss-house.

By the time he reached the policemen he was so much out of breath that he had difficulty in explaining what was the matter, but rather suspiciously they decided to accept his word and hurried with him back to Smoky Joe's.

When they reached the scene of the trouble they found that order was just being restored. The Chief Mate of the windjammer had succeeded in lighting the gases again, and the fight had been broken off. Casualties were about to be examined for serious injury. Contrary to the statement being shouted in the darkness, nobody was dead, but four were unconscious, and this made an impressive picture. The most seriously injured was Todt, who in addition to a broken arm had been hit over the head with a bottle. Then one of the young shop assistants had been bit by the Scottish engineer and had fainted clean away. The tall Finn who had turned out the gas had been put out of reach of further mischief by the second mate, and the drunken Swede with the giggles had gone under with drink and was snoring peacefully with his head in the fireplace.

The second mate had a knife cut on his cheek and one of the Cornish sailors was bleeding from a similar cut in the forearm. Ned Pawlyn was on his feet, supporting himself against a chair and looking furiously round the room. One of the girls with the shop assistants was in tears. Uncle Perry had finished his piece of cake.

The long process of inquiry stretched out to infinitely tedious lengths. During it Joe Veal sat upright in a chair, his mouth set in a line beneath the grey-black moustache. He did not move and hardly spoke except now and then to shoot out a word at this witness or that. Aunt Madge stood beside him, her pince-nez wobbling with indignation from time to time. In this crisis Joe had gone back to his whisky, and no cajolings could persuade him to renounce it for milk food.

The upshot of all these painstaking inquiries, so far as the testimony went, was that the disturbance had been begun by one Thomas Wilberforce Harris, a solicitor of Penryn. It seemed that this man, under the influence of drink, had forced his way into the restaurant much against the wishes of the Proprietor, Mr Joe Veal, and having seated himself at one table for a time, had then gone across to a table where Edward Pawlyn, mate of
The Grey Cat
, had been peacefully having a meal and had tried to pick a quarrel. Edward Pawlyn had refused to take him seriously until he leaned forward and hit him across the face. Despite all efforts to calm him, Thomas Wilberforce Harris had continued to fight. Failing to rouse his chosen opponent to the proper pitch, he had then set upon the six young people eating in the middle window table, and pushed their table across the room and knocked one of their number unconscious with a foul blow in the stomach. He had then thrown a beer bottle at Heidrich Todt, bosun of the
Listerhude
, rendering him unconscious, and had finally begun to aim any crockery he could lay his hands on at the nine Norsemen eating by the fireplace.

This was about as far as the matter could go at the moment. The only circumstance which troubled Constables Smith and Behenna was that this Thomas Wilberforce Harris, having, as it were, stirred up trouble on every side, had somehow with diabolical ingenuity succeeded in making his escape in the darkness, leaving all these peaceable people fighting furiously among themselves. However, being not without experience in matters of this sort, they made no editorial comment.

And presently, when all the names and addresses had been taken and all the statements had been written down, one by one the witnesses were allowed to go. After that, in their own good time, the policemen also went; and there were left only Smoky Joe and his wife Madge and their nephew Anthony and brother Perry and David the waiter and Ned Pawlyn, standing and sitting in various attitudes amid the dust and the ruins.

The instant they were alone Ned Pawlyn snapped:

‘Where's Patricia?'

‘That's what I want to know,' said Aunt Madge.

‘So we shall,' said Joe, between tight lips. ‘So we shall.'

‘Do you know where she is?' Pawlyn asked.

‘No, I don't. And don't bark at me!'

‘They went out through that window,' said Perry. ‘I saw them. Blast my eyes, what a mess!'

Anthony went to the window. ‘ There's no sign of them. It's not a big jump to the ground from here.'

‘The bastard may have kidnapped her!' Pawlyn exclaimed. ‘I wish I could get my hands on him again.'

‘Are you looking for me?' said a voice from the stairs.

Patricia had come from somewhere in the interior of the house. She was neat and tidy and cool – outwardly cool. But somewhere in her appearance there was a difference. Her eyes were too bright, the corners of her lips not quite sure of themselves.

‘Where have you been?' Ned demanded. ‘We were all worried. The police have only just gone.'

‘Are you all right, Dad?' she asked.

‘No credit to you if I am,' he snapped.

‘I know,' she said quietly. ‘I'm more than sorry –'

‘What happened?' Pawlyn asked. ‘Did he force you to jump through the window? I was out for a minute or two and when –'

‘Get back to your ship!' said Joe. ‘This is a family affair. We don't want outsiders in it. David, get this place cleared up. Perry, make yourself useful.'

‘Yes, we went through the window,' the girl said. ‘Then … he wouldn't let me come back until it was all over. He – he wanted to keep my name out of it.'

‘He'll find his own name in it tomorrow, by God!' said Ned Pawlyn. ‘The police will be round at his house first thing –'

‘Your place was with your father,' said Joe. ‘I thought I came first.'

‘So you do. But … he wouldn't let me …'

‘D'you mean he held you by force?' Ned asked.

‘I've told you,' said Joe, ‘to get back to your ship! Otherwise you'll lose your job. I'll not have every Tom, Dick and Harry interfering in my affairs. Good night.'

‘Well,' said Ned, ‘ I –'

‘Now I'm going to bed. Madge, give me your arm.'

Patricia came forward quickly to take his other arm. For a moment it seemed that he was about to refuse, but he accepted her help.

‘Pat,' Ned said. ‘ Can –'

She gave him a queer constrained smile.

‘Not now. Tomorrow.'

The trio moved slowly up the stairs.

‘Well,' said Uncle Perry when the procession was out of hearing. ‘A pretty peck of pickles we've stirred up tonight. A good thing one of us kept cool about it. I remember when I was in Jo'burg, much the same sort of thing happened. You need to be able to keep your nerve at a time like that.'

Ned Pawlyn looked at him. ‘Oh –' he said, using a vulgar word, and left them.

Midnight was long past before even Anthony found his way to bed. He could not sleep. For some reason he kept thinking of the occasion when Mr Lawson, the master of his school, called him out of the class and said, ‘Your mother is ill, Anthony; she would like you to go home at once.' He remembered the way in which he had snatched up his satchel, first making sure that his homework was inside, and men gone bounding off down the lane that led home. Certainly he had been anxious, but he did not expect anything serious, and almost outweighing the anxiety was the pleasure at missing most of an afternoon's school. Then, he remembered, he reached home and through the window he could see three people standing talking gravely in the drawing-room. One was Dr Braid, one was the next-door neighbour, the third person, a woman he had never seen before in his life. At that moment he wondered where his mother was, and it seemed as if a cold hand clutched at his stomach. For minutes he stood on the door-mat and was afraid to go in.

The incidents of that afternoon were a watershed which divided his life. Before that he had been a child; after it he had become half adult, acting for himself, answering for himself: things that happened to him now remained with him, were confided to nobody. There was an end of frankness.

He had been pitchforked abruptly into an adult world. Nobody really troubled about him; they were not concerned what he thought, and therefore they were not concerned with what he learned.
They
did not hide things.

He remembered the foreshortened figure of Uncle Joe counting up his little piles of gold. He saw again Uncle Perry slipping through into the restaurant with a couple of bottles of gin under his coat. Other happenings too; things occurred which he could not quite understand, for the explanation of which he did not yet possess the adult key.

Over and over again he remembered the expression on Patricia's face as she came down the steps into the restaurant, returning from they knew not where. Her face was beautiful then rather than pretty in its strange suppressed wildness; she kept her eyes down so that they should not be seen.

He remembered also an incident of two days ago when Patricia had rolled her sleeves up almost to the shoulder to do some washing in the kitchen, and he had seen Uncle Perry looking at her pale, slender arms, and he had glanced away and suddenly perceived that Aunt Madge was watching Uncle Perry. And Aunt Madge had said: ‘Joe thinks
The Grey Cat
might be here tomorrow. Nice for you that will be, Pat … Ned Pawlyn.'

Once or twice he dozed off to sleep, but woke with a start as if there had been voices in his ears. He seemed to hear his uncle say: ‘There's been a Veal in Falmouth ever since there was a Falmouth; an' we're proud of it, see? Straight as a die. Sons of sons all the way.' And he seemed to hear Perry laughing and his words: ‘
Houd vast
, now, so we've taken another hand aboard. Greetings, boy! I could do with a second mate.' Then there were the stumbling drunken footsteps making their way to bed and that queer haunting song: ‘ They heard the Black Hunter! and dr-read shook each mind; Hearts sank that had never known fear-r.'

… He woke suddenly with the sense of a frightening dream still upon him. He thought he had heard strange unpleasant sounds somewhere below. The noises were still in his ears. The room was pitch dark and he had no idea of the time; he only knew that the dream had struck down the defences of his courage and he was afraid. The menace was the greater for being unseen and unguessable. Everything was at its lowest ebb in this dark hour; he shivered and turned over and tried to bury his head and body under the tangle of the bedclothes.

So he lay while the dream like a slow tide of horror ebbed gradually away. Dank pools of it still lay in his mind. Fear of death, fear of illness, fear of sex, fear of the whole hollow cavern of life, these lay on his struggling reason. A light would have helped, but the matches lay on a table by the window and he could not bring himself to jump out, to leave the semi-security of the bed and venture among the unknown dangers of the room.

Time passed and he felt warm again, and warmth brought a return of drowsiness. He was just dropping back into the comfort of dreamless sleep when he started into wakefulness.

This was no dream. The sound was coming up from the darkness below.

The menace of a dream is usually harder to combat than the reality because its outlines are vague and fearful. But sometimes not even nightmare can stand against the brutal hard clarity of waking fact. A man may dream of the cut of a knife and wake in perspiration. But that is nothing if he feels the knife itself.

No sooner was Anthony kneeling up in bed than he heard footsteps climbing the uncarpeted stairs which led to his room.

Frozen, he waited. They came slowly but with a hidden suggestion of urgency, as if haste were intended but not achieved.

A light showed through the cracks in the door and someone began fumbling with the door handle.

‘Yes?' he said, his voice cracking.

The door opened and someone came in. A wavering candle showed up the ambiguous bulk of Aunt Madge.

‘Yes?' he said again when she did not speak. He saw that she was trembling.

‘Dressed,' she said. ‘Get dressed. Your uncle; very ill. We want you … go for Dr Penrose.'

By the half light of a gibbous moon Anthony picked his way through the deserted streets of the town. He was thankful that this mission led him in a different direction from when he had run for the police. At four o'clock in the morning the main streets were probably as empty and silent as any others, but the earlier memory of them remained.

In white night things and a white dressing-gown Patricia had come down the stairs with him.