31st Of February (18 page)

“A word to the wise, you know. I happened to notice you coming out of that – establishment, shall we call it? I was surprised – not shocked, you understand, but surprised – and I was worried. Within a few days that establishment may be raided. It would be a pity if you were there, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t look well. I was trying to be thoughtful, but do you appreciate it? No, you think I was persecuting you. Really, Mr Anderson, sometimes I agree with Gilbert and Sullivan.”

“Gilbert and Sullivan?”

“A policeman’s lot is not a happy one. That’s a very true saying, though not intellectual enough for you I expect.” In the same comfortable voice, almost apologetically, the Inspector said: “But I shall have to ask a few questions.”

“Me? Ask me?”

“Why yes, Mr Anderson. I must tell you that we are not satisfied.”

“Not satisfied?” Anderson repeated stupidly. He sat looking round at the disorder of the room.

Without ceasing to look at Anderson, the Inspector pulled a nail file from his pocket and began to file his large well-kept nails. As he did this, he went on talking in the same conversational half-tone; and beneath his quiet, coarse voice there lay the faint rasp of the file. “I’ll tell you something now, Mr Anderson. This morning we had another of those anonymous letters. Very nasty, too; beastly things they are altogether. Don’t ask me what it said, because I can’t tell you, but you can take my word for it, it was nasty. Take no notice, you may say, and that’s all very fine. But then what about this business tonight? A few days ago you told me you hadn’t an enemy, but it looks as if you have. Eh, Mr Anderson?”

“I didn’t speak.”

“I thought you mentioned a name.”

“A name?”

“Your enemy’s name. You told me a little while ago that you had no enemy. That’s not true, is it? You have got one, and you know who it is.”

“You want to know the name of my enemy?”

“That would be interesting.” The Inspector stopped filing his nails.

“The name of my enemy,” Anderson leaned forward and spoke with an intensity the remark hardly warranted, “is Anderson.”

Obligingly, the Inspector leaned forward, too. Poised on their chair edges, they confronted each other like eager dogs. “Your brother, is that? I didn’t know you had one.”

“Myself!”

The Inspector’s interest notably diminished. He dropped back into the lap of his chair and as he did so dropped the emotional level of the conversation. “A man’s worst enemy is himself! Well, I suppose you’re right, but it hardly answers what I want to know, does it?”

The Inspector’s obtuseness made Anderson anxious to disentangle his own fine shade of meaning. “You don’t understand me. These things that you describe – the anonymous letters, the wrecking of this flat – they are things that I might have done myself. They awaken a response in me. The anonymous letters – spying through the keyhole and telling the world the secrets we’ve seen inside the room – that’s a thing I might have done. And then the flat – look at it now. Do you remember what this room looked like the last time you saw it, how every ghastly object was in the right place, every filthy little cushion and lampshade just as my wife had them. Now I see it all utterly disordered, everything completely boss-eyed, and do you know what I wonder, Inspector? I wonder why I didn’t do it all myself years ago.” Anderson had meant to speak perfectly quietly, but in spite of himself his voice had risen a little. The Inspector, nevertheless, continued almost perfectly obtuse.

“Well, you do say the oddest things, Mr Anderson. I don’t hold much with all this modern psychology stuff myself.”

It was injudicious to shout, Anderson knew, but now he fairly shouted. “Psychology, nonsense. Don’t be a fool, man. I’m saying that the actions of this man, whoever he is, are actions I can understand. The desire to destroy, that’s what I’m talking about, is that plain enough for you? Because he wasn’t searching here for anything, there was nothing to search for. Hatred was moving, hatred of me, the wish to wreck my life, to destroy anything that belongs to me. And I feel that impulse, too. Do I make myself clear? To make disorder out of order, to wreck, tear, kill –” Abruptly Anderson stopped. The word hung in the air between them, a word for which, in the Inspector’s terms, there was no possible explanation or excuse. But, so far from asking him to explain it, the Inspector merely sat filing his nails. When at last he spoke it was to take up Anderson’s remarks at one remove and with a rambling clumsiness, a missing of the essential point that seemed, on this evening at least, characteristic of him.

“It’s funny, now, that you should be talking about order and disorder, because my wife’s great on them, too. Did I tell you I was married? Well, anyway, I am, and two kids as well. Here we are in the front garden.” With the pathetic pride of an amateur conjurer the Inspector whipped from his wallet a photograph. Anderson looked at a pretty woman in a smock, flanked by two young boys. Their slightly bovine faces, staring earnestly into the camera, were recognizably of the kind that would later attain their father’s flat weightiness. A rather younger Inspector, less bulky and with a thick fringe of hair round the side of his head, looked at them with the affection of an overgrown bulldog.

“Very nice,” Anderson said. He handed back the photograph and thought:
Wreck, tear, kill
– what could have possessed him to use such words. He had been drunk, it was true, at one time in the evening, and now it was very late, and he was so tired that he hardly knew what he was saying. He looked at his wristwatch. Two o’clock. Would the man never go?

“The apple of their mother’s eye – and their father’s, too,” the Inspector said earnestly. “But I was telling you about my wife.
Order,
she says, you must have order or how can life go on? And she tells that to the kids, and makes them understand it. There’s a time and a place, she says, for skylarking, and the time’s not lunchtime and the place isn’t the dining room. And she makes the punishment fit the crime – to use another Gilbertian phrase. If the kids throw food about at the dining table they have to do the washing up, if they come into the house with muddy boots the wife puts mud on their clothes and makes them clean it off. She’s got a sense of humour, and that’s a wonderful thing.”

Good God, Anderson thought, no wonder the poor little creatures look bovine. But the Inspector was droning on. “I say to the wife that it’s only a little bit of fun they’re having, but she will have it I’m wrong. Disorder, she says, is wicked. I must tell you, though,” the Inspector said with one of his devastating lapses into bathos, “that she was brought up a Non-conformist. I say to her sometimes that the state of disorder is a state of nature. Do you know what she says to that? The state of order is a state of grace. It’s from the impulse to disorder, she says, that these Mussolinis and Hitlers gain power. And if she were here tonight she’d say to you that it was quite right to say that the impulse to make disorder out of order was the same as the impulse to kill. Killing is disorder, that’s what she’d say. And what would
you
say to that?”

Anderson felt suddenly a quite overwhelming anxiety simply to get rid of the Inspector at any cost. “I should say she was a damned fool,” he answered harshly, “and was going the right way to make Fascists out of her children.”

Surprisingly the Inspector laughed. “You’d be perfectly right. I made it all up.”

“What?”

“All that stuff I was saying just then. The wife’s thoughts don’t rise above the kitchen sink. I was curious just to see what you’d say. It’s getting late.” At last, at last, Anderson thought. The Inspector stretched like a hippopotamus and yawned. “But somehow I don’t feel tired. Insomnia, that’s my trouble; one of my troubles, I should say. Do you mind if I have another little drop of Scotch?” He poured a drink and wandered about the room, stopping to peer out into the street. “Not what you’d call a very salubrious neighbourhood. But I suppose there’s no accounting for tastes. One man’s meat is another man’s poison, as they say. How are you getting on at the office?”

“The office?” Anderson lay back exhausted. As he did so his eyelids, like a doll’s thick lids that shutter the staring eye when it is laid flat, closed.

“Everything all right, not feeling the strain or anything like that? You look as if you’re feeling the strain, you know. But Philosophical, too. I feel in a way it’s my business, and sometimes it worries me.”

Behind the closed lids Anderson could see the Georgian writing desk. Put your hand inside, open the secret drawer and there, in the mind’s eye, was the black book with its marbled edges. In the mind’s eye, ah yes, in the mind’s eye.

Order got to be preserved; we’re all agreed on that, I hope,” the Inspector said, rather as if he were addressing a public meeting. “But how far are we justified in using disorder to preserve it? That’s the kind of question that worries me when I can’t sleep. Supposing a man’s arrested on suspicion, now; you know as well as I do that the boys give him a little going over on the way to the station. Very useful it is, too, often enough, in taking the starch out of them. But is it right? That’s the thing I’ve started worrying about in my old age.”

The doll’s lids flickered. “Ethically no. Practically yes.”

“I’m very glad to hear you say so – because practice makes ethics, doesn’t it? Though I’m out of my depth even when I’m thinking about this kind of thing, let alone talking about it. Still, methods like those wouldn’t be any use in dealing with a superior man such as yourself, say. Would they?”

“They might extract a confession. Isn’t that always what you’re after?”

The Inspector’s voice was plaintive. “It certainly is
not,
Mr Anderson. Only incidentally. A policeman is like God. He wants to know the truth. And he’s bound to believe that any means are justifiable – any means, do you understand me – if he can find the truth through them. The truth, the clean and perfect truth – that is what we shall reach tomorrow if not today, next year if not tomorrow. The truth!”

The voice was suddenly loud, and like a bell. Anderson opened his eyes and saw the Inspector standing, overcoated, in front of his chair. Seen from this angle and at this moment, he was no longer a comic figure. The deep vertical lines that ran down the cheeks were cruel: the pudgy features had assumed a coherent severity; power and the will to use it lay in the great bald skull. For a moment Anderson lay defenceless, sprawled in his chair, ready for raping by this ogre of order. From behind his back the Inspector then brought forth – not a whip, but his bowler hat. Clapping upon his head this symbol of order the Inspector turned upon a respectable black heel. “Good night.” The words rang through the disorderly room. The front door closed. For perhaps five minutes Anderson lay in the armchair, deprived of movement, looking at the writing desk. It does not matter, he told himself, whether the notebook is there or not. What does the notebook say, after all? It says our marriage was not ideally happy – but what marriage is happy? No, no, he told himself, the notebook does not matter in itself. But which of them could have wanted something in this flat so badly that they committed burglary to get it? Lessing? Reverton? Vincent? Wyvern? But Vincent was ruled out, was he not, by the fact that he had been in Anderson’s company? Lessing, Reverton, Wyvern? Or – remember the open door, the figure pulling up the long pants – Pile? Ridiculous, ridiculous.

Like a sleepwalker, Anderson moved over to the writing desk, fumbled, found the protusion, pushed. The secret drawer opened. It was empty.

9

Awake, it seemed that he was still asleep. His feet touching the floor had the lightness of a dream; but entirely real was the pain that beat in his head, and the tightness of his face, which felt as if it had been coated with varnish. He applied Hey Presto and wiped it off. He felt absolutely nothing, for the varnish was apparently impermeable, but the blue growth on his chin disappeared magically. The toast he cooked and ate, the coffee he boiled and drank, had similarly no taste or smell. An automaton pushed food and drink into its mouth.

This numbing of the senses continued on his way to the office. The omnibus came noiselessly along the street; he saw but did not hear the click of the conductor’s punch. He stood between a fat woman who breathed in and out, deeply but apparently noiselessly, and a figure holding a newspaper. This figure was interesting. Two delicate hands were visible at either side of the paper which faced Anderson, and occasionally an edge of the paper flicked his face. It became important to Anderson that he should see this newspaper holder. The hands seemed to be those of a woman, and yet the trousers, as he saw on looking down, were a man’s. A woman in slacks? Anderson swayed forward against the newspaper, but it remained obstinately raised. When somebody by his side got out he said, although to him the words remained inaudible, that there was a seat vacant. The figure accepted the seat, without for an instant lowering the paper. Infuriatingly, when the man-woman sat down, somebody else pushed against Anderson and he was still unable to see over the newspaper barrier.

The figure rose, still holding the paper before its face – and then in a flash the paper was folded and the figure, presenting its back to Anderson, was on its way out of the bus. Excuse me, Anderson said, excuse me, but by the time he reached the end of the bus the figure had dropped off and was running across the road concealed in a duffle coat which effectively concealed sex as well as identity. Anderson jumped off the bus. For a moment a taxi was in front of him, then it swerved aside and he saw the driver’s shaken fist.

Running, running across the wide road he saw the figure, ahead of him, enter an office block. He ran in after it and found with astonishment that he was in the reception hall of Vincent Advertising. The figure sat at the reception desk with its back to him, but turned as he approached the desk. The newspaper still held in front of the face was slowly lowered, and behind it he saw the laughing features of Molly O’Rourke. He stood still in astonishment. She bowed her head in mock acknowledgement, showing all her fine teeth in laughter, and then pointed down the corridor toward his room. He ran down the corridor and at the first bend turned to look at Molly. He could see nothing but the newspaper held at the edges by two delicate hands.