Hindsight Page 15

  He was scrambling up, scarcely even aware of his fall as more than another stumble, and turning for the path when something stopped him, a touch of the real world, outside the nightmare. The touch of whatever it was he had stumbled over against his bare knee. The memory of it remained down there, waiting to be summoned by his mind when it came out of the nightmare, the feel of solidity without hardness, stillness without cold. Nothing like some mound of turf or a log which someone might have left there; not even the hide of a dead deer. Cloth. A coat, with something inside it. Somebody.

  Using all his sane will Paul just managed to force his hand into his pocket, take out the torch and switch it on.

  Mr Wither lay face down below the steps with his stick beneath him and his broken spectacles beyond. He must have slipped and fallen. Paul shook his shoulder. No response. The cheek was warm, but … Paul’s hand flinched back from a stickiness. In the torchlight the tips of his fingers were scarlet. He rose and crept round by the feet to the far side. There was blood on the flagstone. He crouched, keeping well clear, and shone the torch-beam level along the ground. Mr Wither’s head was turned a little towards him so that he could see where the right eye ought to have been. There wasn’t an eye there at all. Only mess.

  Paul rose, drew a deep breath and let it out, blowing the shreds of nightmare away. He felt a sense of extraordinary relief, almost of happiness. It was as though Daisy had had her death and he was safe after all. Keeping his torch on he started to run down the path, but the crunch of leather on gravel seemed to fill the night and after the first few steps he swerved on to the soft turf at the side and went on down at a free-wheeling lope. Near the bottom a sudden glitter alarmed him, then he saw that it was the chrome headlight of Mr Wither’s MG, parked beside the drive. Without stopping to look closer he turned up East Drive. With the slope against him now his lungs began to gasp the frosty air. The drive snaked, with the trees beyond it so planted that you didn’t see the house until you had almost reached it. It stood as usual, a dark mass, but because somebody had left a chink in the black-out on the first floor it seemed less like an unwelcoming cliff than usual, more obviously a house, a home, safe ground. The chink of light vanished, but still there was that sense of ordered, ordinary life, with adults who would know what to do, who could take over. Paul raised his pace in a final spurt, wrenched open the door at the end of Long Passage and staggered blinking into the dusty light.

  Total silence and emptiness. For half a heartbeat the nightmare brushed by, and then he told himself that he had come back early because of Daisy going mad, so the film show wasn’t over yet. Slow footsteps descended what had been one of the servants’ stairways to his right. He ran to meet them. The Captain was coming down—of course, he was duty master—he’d just been doing the rounds and seen that chink.

  ‘Sir! Sir!’

  The sunken red-rimmed eyes gazed darkly down.

  ‘Mr Wither, sir! I found him! On the path by the Temple! I think he’s dead!’

  In proof Paul held out his red-smeared fingers. The Captain merely glanced at them, then back at Paul’s face. He came another step down, and for a moment as he did so, though it may have been an effect of the dim stair-light, his eyes changed, the blackness of them becoming somehow hot in their red rims. He looked furious, dangerous.

  ‘I know it’s out of bounds,’ Paul blurted, but …’

  Then he realised he couldn’t explain that Miss Penoyre had asked him. She had said he wasn’t to tell anyone.

  ‘I … I think the stag must have killed him,’ he said.

  The Captain nodded, took his watch from his waistcoat pocket and looked at it. Everything was suddenly ordinary again.

  ‘The film will end in three minutes,’ he said. ‘Go and wait at the door. As soon as it is over, report to Mr Smith. Tell him I sent you and it is urgent, but do not say anything else until you are alone. Then tell him what you have told me. Say that I have gone to the Temple to confirm your story. Give me that torch.’

  12

  It may seem perverse of me, seeing that this book is being written and presumably read in the form of a detective story, to insist that the previous chapter was not in any way planned for that purpose. I had been aware, almost from the moment when the three incidents re-surfaced in my memory, that there were details in them which I could use in a fictional plot, but I did not emphasise them, let alone invent bits of plot-machinery, however tempting. My need was to get the events down on paper, as they had been.

  Very hard work I found it, not for the reason I complained of before my visit to Richmond—that memory was beginning to run thin—but the opposite. Memory came in spate, more than my emotional sluices could handle. Just those three episodes, revolving like whirlpools on the turmoil, staying where they were, hardly moving despite the rush that created them, but going round and round and round.

  One would have thought, for instance, that the inquest might have proved equally traumatic to a child, but I still remember almost nothing of it. Evidently the blanking-out process started almost at once. The point was brought home to me in all its strangeness by a press-cutting from the Western Daily Mail of 7 November, 1940. My wife’s cousin lives near Exeter, and I had written to ask her to see if she could find something about the inquest in the Exeter reference library. I heard nothing for several weeks, and then the photostat came, taken on a poor machine and barely readable in its tiny, cramped wartime print.

  ‘TRAGEDY OF LOVERS’ TRYST,’ it said. ‘SCHOOLMASTER KILLED BY STAG. PLAN TO ELOPE TO GRETNA.’ The report had been hacked about by the subeditor to cram it in. There was nothing about why Annette and Mr Wither had needed to elope, nothing about his row with The Man, or his having left the school. No mention, even, of Molly—an amazing omission, considering her notoriety over the twenty years before the war. The verdict was accidental death, with the rider that the stag should be found and destroyed. My name was given, and the coroner’s praise for me reported. Incredibly unsatisfactory.

  Gretna! Surely we must have known about that, in the school. The idea that Miss Penoyre was some sort of heiress, worth running off with before she could be made a Ward of Chancery, would have had a good deal of gossip value. And yet all I faintly recall is Molly coming to teach Freshers for a week and then Annette returning to duty—and even that may have happened at some other time.

  Had anyone apart from myself and Molly even spotted that the pair were seriously in love? I assumed at the time Molly had, because of her behaviour towards Wither, and still thought I was right. The Captain seemed to have been told. Was it a peculiarly sudden deepening of a mutual attraction? Or had it been long brewing? They were both such shy people that they might well have managed to keep it quiet. In real life, as opposed to stories, people are secretive, and other people unnoticing. But still, Gretna Green? It had got into the papers, too. Surely we’d known?

  Puzzling about this, and my own blanks of recollection, and the violence of such memories as did emerge, it struck me as possible that my own reaction to the whole set of events might have been warped by an earlier event which I’ve referred to several times but had always believed I’d simply taken in my stride—my father’s death. I do not normally go in for such morbid self-probings, but since reading the letters my father had written to Molly I had begun to wonder whether he had something to do with the vehemence of my reactions. A child might well feel strong, if irrational, guilt over such a death, confused and compounded by resentment at his mother’s re-marriage, and try to bury these feelings deep as he could. But their ghosts, or something like them, may have been at my shoulder as I stumbled in panic along the track below the Temple. And then, finding Mr Wither’s body …

  Wondering about this possibility I became increasingly uneasy about its mirror-image. Might not a grown man, unconsciously haunted all his life by those ghosts, sit down and invent a chain of memories—persuading himself that they were real—to acco
unt to himself for such uneasy presences?

  Mercifully I had not got far down the spiral of moral hypochondria before I was given the good shaking which was all I needed. A letter arrived out of the blue from Dobbs which put all that out of my mind by giving me something concrete and exciting to think about. And to do.

  Dear Rogers,

  A breakthrough has occurred, I suspect much better news for me than it may be for you. Richard Smith has answered my advertisement, more than a month after its last appearance. He is willing to see me. The maddening thing is that though I am now said to be on the mend, there is no chance of my getting out of here for at least a couple of months; and as the man is over eighty, surely, I cannot well ask him to journey down here. Yet I feel in my bones it is vital to make contact with him at once. I simply must know how he is going to affect my book; and it would be too sickening if he should die before I am up and about, though he writes in a firm enough hand—very small and neat, much as you describe it.

  May I ask you, as a great favour to me, if you will go and see him? I will compile a list of questions I need to have answered, but they are secondary; really I want you to spy out the land. If in your opinion he is hale enough to last till I emerge, I would much prefer to conduct detailed interviews myself; but before that, if at all possible, I need to know what shape and weight the section dealing with him is likely to need. It is (I can trust you to understand this) as much a matter of architecture as of getting the facts right.

  Will you take this on? I leave it to you how to approach Smith. I feel this to be a good omen; we shall dish the woman yet. You know, that is something more than a manner of speaking. Somehow she killed her lovers, sucking the life from them to feed her own ebullience. She has been killing me, and my book. But now my doctor begins to say good things, and Richard Smith is alive.

  Sorry to exult so, when this may well queer your pitch. Still, it might have been worse for you if you had gone ahead and published, with RS alive and fully recognisable. He lives at 98 Mortimer Court, London SW3. He does not give a telephone number.

  Yours,

  SD

  My reaction was not what Dobbs, or I myself, would have expected. No doubt Dobbs thought that my portrait of the Captain might be libellous. The possibility didn’t bother me—the character in my book was a goody, and if there was anything actionable in the details it was only fiction and could be changed. Much more important, the news had come for me, as for Dobbs, at the right moment; I had now used up all there was to use of my own memories of Paddery. I had already decided that I could afford at this point to make the trip down to Devon and look the place over as it was today. It would have been fatal to do this earlier. One is a crystal-gazer in the tent of time. Faint shadows move in the transparent sphere and the lights must be precisely placed, precisely graded, for one to be able to see them at all. Open the flaps, let in the sunlight, and one is looking at an empty glass ball. But now, having seen and recorded all there was by way of shadows, I could begin to compare my perceptions with the real world. Going down to Paddery would be a minor way of doing this, meeting and talking to the Captain much more.

  I wrote to him, explaining that Dobbs had asked me to do so because he was writing a life of Isidore Steen. No doubt he knew of Dobbs’s reputation. Unfortunately Dobbs was recovering from an illness and would not be able to see Mr Smith for a while, so he had asked me to do a preliminary interview. I did not mention my own acquaintance with him, nor use the title ‘Captain’ on the envelope. I wanted to approach him as a stranger.

  Next morning a woman telephoned. She said she was Mrs Smith and was speaking on behalf of her husband because his hearing made the telephone difficult. Her husband was willing to see me. We fixed an appointment for an afternoon later that week. She sounded disturbingly ordinary for the mate of a creature so exotic in my memories.

  I wrote and told Dobbs what was up and asked for his list of questions. When they had not arrived on the morning of my visit I telephoned his secretary. She told me that Dobbs had had a minor relapse and had been ordered not to attempt any work, but had sent her a message that he would still like me to see Smith and spy out the land. She herself sounded anxious about the interview, as if aware that Dobbs was pinning many of his hopes on it. I drove up to London on a fine, warm November morning.

  Mortimer Court is one of those Thirties-ish blocks of flats on the south side of King’s Road, near Sloane Square. Smith lived on the top floor. I went up in the lift and along a corridor—dark cream walls with debased art deco mouldings. Remembering Mrs Smith’s voice, I began to feel a sense of let-down. I would find an old codger with a dim, downtrodden wife living in a tidy dull flat with Regency wallpaper, Redouté prints, gold-tasselled lampshades, dull green armchairs piped with looped gold braid, all done by the Harrods people fifteen years ago. There would be a smelly little dog.

  When I rang the bell the exact wife opened the door, apart from her not looking down-trodden—a small woman, some five years older than me, square heavy body in grey twinset (no pearls) and brown tweed skirt; permed grey hair, not blued at all; a look both nervous and eager. I introduced myself, expecting her to withdraw so that I could enter the flat, but she stood and peered at me, then smiled like a child.

  ‘You are Rogue Rogers,’ she said. ‘I thought you must be, from the photographs on your books.’

  ‘Oh … well, yes … but nobody’s …’

  ‘I don’t expect you remember me. Anne Penoyre. You used to call me Annette.’

  ‘Good Lord! Of course I remember you well, but I didn’t …’

  ‘Women change more. You’ll find Richard’s hardly changed at all. He’s looking forward to talking to you. I haven’t told him who you are. He doesn’t approve of me reading detective stories.’

  She let me in now. I felt confused, almost shocked. She was in a sense right about my not remembering her, in that she had not at Paddery made any great impression. The Annette Penoyre of my novel was more my fictional creation than most of the other characters, even those with mere walk-on parts such as Stock and Floyd. And yet here she was, living a life wholly untouched by my imaginings, even to the extent of having read some of my books, a detail I would not dream of building into one of my fictional characters. And she had apparently married the Captain when, in my own mind, though she had not necessarily died, she had somehow ceased to exist except as an embodied grief for poor Christopher Wither.

  As she led me along a short corridor I saw that I was wrong about this also. Harrods decorators had not set foot here. The paint was dead white, the carpet black, the inner wall covered with a large and ancient-looking oriental hanging, picturing monsters and demons, the colours as ferocious as the gestures and grimaces. It breathed a powerful, musky personality—not a thing I would choose to live with at close quarters. Mrs Smith walked past it unnoticing and opened a door.

  ‘Mr Rogers is here, darling,’ she said.

  He was standing at the window, looking out, in the remembered pose. There was a goodish view east and south over the roofs of buildings and the froth of tree-tops towards the tower blocks and spires of the city, all lit with pale wintry sun. I did not feel he was seeing any of this. He seemed not to have noticed our entrance.

  Mrs Smith went over and put her hand on his shoulder to catch his attention, but making the gesture into a light caress.

  ‘Mr Rogers is here,’ she enunciated. ‘Do you want me to fix your deaf-aid?’

  He patted the back of her hand as he turned.

  ‘I seem to be hearing today,’ he said.

  He looked at me and bowed slightly, actor-fashion.

  ‘Mr Rogers,’ he intoned.

  He had shaved off his moustache.

  Though every sound and movement he had made had been true to memory, I still thought for an instant that I’d got the wrong man, so powerfully did that weird growth persist in my mind. Then I reali
sed that, as Mrs Smith had said, he had changed very little. His eyes were the same, large, deep-sunk, dark brown, very bloodshot round the rims. His head was quite bald and his face more mottled than at Paddery; it was also immensely handsome, a model for a bust in the grand manner, old, imperious, marked but not marred by vicissitudes endured. For some reason I thought of Rimbaud at Harar, refusing to discuss the incredible poems of his youth, merely dismissing them as absurd and disgusting.

  ‘It’s very good of you to see me, sir,’ I said.

  He nodded.

  ‘You sit there,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait for me. I move slowly these days.’

  I stood till Mrs Smith had left the room, then sat and watched him cross with careful steps to a cushionless wheel-back armchair. He had shed a lot of flesh, but had also lost that look of weightlessness, that odd appearance of floating, that had been produced by his light, quick, silent gait. The room was a well-lit clutter; a lot of books, both on shelves and in piles; a big desk covered with papers; several pictures—oddly hung, probably not at random but not according to any design I could see—and in varied styles but all producing a strong, rather uncomfortable effect, whether by strident colour or harsh outlining or the nature of the subject portrayed. I had no idea how good they were, but one was either a Munch or the work of an imitator. The same quality of energetic disquiet emerged from the many objects—masks, old weapons, pots and so on—that littered the room. Nothing dominated, unless it was Smith’s own personality. I got the impression of a man who needed his sensations lull-flavoured, to say the least. I remembered the amount of mustard old Stock used to put on his food when he ate with the boys—he was the only person I have ever seen smear mustard on rice pudding. In a much more complex way Smith, or so I guessed, needed his messages from beyond the barrier of the senses to come with greater emphasis than most of us could tolerate. Perhaps I had not been so wrong to be reminded of Rimbaud.