Criminal Conversation (19 page)

“I have to know more. Does the girl herself want this child?”

“She doesn't know – at sixteen, how can she know? She isn't at all happy at the idea of a bond with the father. I've checked – an unpleasant, rather undesirable person all round. Took advantage of her in a mean-minded way – got her drunk, the little idiot, after the warnings I've given her.”

I made up my mind, with difficulty. Had I some notion that the step meant my undoing?

“If,” I said slowly, picking my words, “you were to find a pretext for my seeing her that she would accept, I might find means to terminate this pregnancy without her being aware of the fact. How far is she?”

“Two and a half months.”

“Less bad. How's her general health?”

“Good. She's perhaps a scrap on the anaemic side.”

“That might serve. The miscarriage at three months is a commonplace. I must warn you that one such sometimes seems to involve a tendency towards more.”

“Oh, my dear, I would be grateful all my life. I simply daren't risk Carl's finding out.” In her relief she was letting slip what really worried her. “Carl would quite assuredly throw all the blame on me,
and in shock, rage, horror – believe me, you don't know my husband – he might do anything.”

It was ironic that she did not suspect that this famous husband was exactly the reason why I agreed. I disregarded the outburst, tactfully.

“Send her to me.”

They were fateful words, those. A week later Suzanne was sitting on the chair opposite, and I was coming the heavy, ‘Well, young lady…' Pompous puffwit that I was.

I may have been pompous, even a little adrift right from the start, because I am not accustomed to young girls. I see few, and have never been altogether at my ease with them. I can explain that, and will, perhaps, in the course of this narrative. What I cannot explain, van der Valk, is first that I found her desperately desirable, and second that I fell – yes, fell, it is the only word – in love with her. With a girl of sixteen. To explain… A phrase comes into my mind from some book or other. Disraeli said upon some occasion to an English duke – ‘My dear Henry, never explain'. There is no wiser counsel. But I cannot, even had I wished, and I do wish, I suspect. I have come to wish to explain everything to you.

She was a little anaemic; it was not serious. I went into a patter; she had had colds. She said without hesitation, quite simply, that she was pregnant.

“Yes.” I was giving her a general examination; she had undressed unselfconsciously and was lying on the couch. “I see as much. Well, that is all the more important, to get you in good shape, hm? I would have suggested a good holiday in the sun, but soon you won't be wishing to wear a bathing dress. Never mind. We'll give you some artificial sunlight.” For I intended to give her some harmless ultra-violets, and slip in a much shorter wave, in which I am
proficient; a type of deep X-ray that I know would ‘do the trick' as it is revoltingly called.

I cannot explain either my tension or her abrupt encouragement of my vicious instinct. She has a splendid body, unusually finely formed for a girl of that age. Bella's body, and Bella's internal noises, I noticed while listening to her. But I had myself under control – I am a doctor, after all. My voice was calm as always, my eyes masked from her candid blue look.

Had she some suspicion of the relationship between myself and her mother? Bella had perhaps been a scrap indiscreet in getting her to come and see me. Had she wished to get me in some way in her power? Had she some youthfully cynical contempt for men in general, acquired from her recent experiences? I have no idea. I cannot tell. Break your head on it, if you will.

For she deliberately encouraged me, and I lost my head.

I can only relate that for a month she came for treatment. She seemed indifferent to me. And I was possessed by passion for that girl. I raged in her. I made a beast of myself the way one does sometimes in a very expensive restaurant. And I loved her. In a way I have loved no one.

A month. Then she simply stopped coming. Bella came one day after, and told me that Suzanne had had a harmless, painless miscarriage. She was much relieved. She kept saying so. She said that Carl knew nothing, that the family doctor knew nothing, that she had fixed everything, and that she was eternally grateful. To show how grateful she was she pelted into the back room and took her clothes off in a great hurry. I am fond of Bella. I tried to oblige her out of politeness.

I suppose you have understood. I found out quite by accident that Suzanne was acquainted with Casimir. I saw her once, after she left me, go towards his door. I imagined that Casimir, idiot that I was, for what ground could I conceivably have, was the ‘unpleasant, undesirable person' of Bella's fears. That Casimir, and no other, was the putative father of the child that I was busy getting rid of. The
child I would have so greatly desired, and so greatly desired from that young girl of sixteen…

Once more, irony has overtaken me. For when, the last time, I asked Bella to come and see me, in order to satisfy myself that no effort had been made at blackmailing her, I asked, in a casual turn of phrase, whether she had seen anything of Suzanne's past snare.

“Oh that, no, no, thank heaven,” she said quite airily. “A young man called Simons whom I've never even seen, but from all I've ever heard I felt quite sure was objectionable. Suzanne's quite got over that, at least.”

Suzanne? I have never seen Suzanne since. I think she regarded me as a catharsis for the whole episode. Looking back now, I feel sure that she knew all along that I was employing means to abort her. And, even, that her mother had sent her to me for that express purpose. I would not be in the least surprised, now, to learn that the very thought of me made her sick.

I think, Inspector, that this episode comes under the heading of criminal conversation. Don't you? I am not proud of it.

And poor old Casimir. I should have told him simply to go to hell. With his tape recorder and his cheap binoculars and his eavesdropping. And every word he uttered giving him away for the mangy old dog he had become. Nobody would have listened to him for a second. I had not the slightest need to stamp on him in that frenzied way. Obliterating a poor harmless old bugger whose simple pleasure was gazing at the windows opposite, where typists changing their frocks after work can sometimes be espied in their underclothes. He was not as much of a criminal as I was.

A thought has just struck me. I think, now, that Casimir hated me, and for the identical reason that I hated him. I think that in his espials he had seen Suzanne leave my house. Knowing what he already did I think he jumped to the conclusion that I had seduced her. I think that he may have loved her, in much the same ridiculous, absurd way that I did – and do – myself.

In killing Casimir, did I kill myself?

I am sitting up in the top-floor flat, quite alone, in Casimir's studio. It looks almost as if the summer had died suddenly, violently, for it is cold, and rain is beating fiercely on the windows. I understand that the little gas fire would not have heated the studio enough in winter. It makes, too, a tiresome hissing sound, and I have preferred to light Casimir's oilstove. I have had to shut the windows, and the paraffin makes the room stuffy and smelly. I am changing: a month ago it would have been impossible for my fastidious nose to remain five minutes in a room with the thing. Now I am almost enjoying it. I have always had a sensitive nose, even as a child…

Now I had resolved to have none of that. I had determined to avoid this imagined psychoanalytic claptrap whereby scarring episodes of childhood and youth are presented with a flourish in novels. With the author, the fool, clapping himself upon the back in self-congratulation and saying ‘How clever I am' as he presents some worthless fiction as a justification for the unreality, the pretentiousness, the imbecilities which the worthless poltroon knows, uneasily, have filled his print-wasting pages.

There is truth in it though, alas. There are episodes in one's childhood that one always remembers. And they can be so trivial. Why should one remember them, if it were not that one knows they left a permanent mark? Ach, knows; what does one ever really know? Still, I am as detached as any man. And since I said in my last instalment that there were things I now wished to show you, to allow
you to draw your own conclusions – I do not pretend or wish to ‘explain' anything at all – so be it, then.

I doubt, in fact, whether anyone can really pinpoint with accuracy the hours or days that later gave direction to his character. I fancy though that anybody with training can give some indications. Take this rain, now. It is a summer's day, although the fine weather has been broken off like a branch struck by the summer lightning. Heavy rain is falling out of an overcast sky, with a fairly strong westerly wind and a temperature around fourteen degrees. The day before just such a one – there may have been sun then or there may have been cloud; I do not recall – I went to school, aged seven, in the neat, tree-lined, clean streets of the provincial town of my childhood. Recall that there were no buses then with automatic doors but primitive-looking trains with open platforms. It was our pride, as children, to finish the ride on the bottom step and hop off thirty or forty metres before the train ground to a stop. The bigger children gauged with absolute precision the speed at which they could jump as against the chance of being taken by the ear in the grimy fingers of an elderly conductor and pinned until the train stopped altogether – a disgrace this, though it could happen to anybody. Rather like the paratrooper colonel Langlais, who broke an ankle in the first jump over Dien Bien Phu! Indeed the bigger children had to us, the seven-year-olds, all the glamour of paratroopers. I had never dared jump, myself, and had perforce cravenly to wait with a group of other timid tinies, till the old tram had lurched to its standstill. One morning – this morning – I jumped, and at a speed that only lordly eleven-year-olds could attempt. I was determined, you see, to ‘get my wings'.

I had, however, never grasped the trick of the three or four rapid pattering steps in the wake of the momentum. I leapt out at right angles, stumbled erratically, gyratically, through bewildering space, tripped over the gutter, and tumbled on the pavement, my head coming hard against a tin litter-box, and fortunately not the ornate cast-iron lamp-post to which it was wedded. Several sympathetic middle-aged women picked me up, and brought me into the nearest
shop, where a kindly butcher deposited me on a slab and poured cold water on me. I came to and was violently sick.

“Oh, the poor lamb,” said all the women, a thing they would never have said to the other lamb, hanging above me on a hook.

“He'll be all right,” said the butcher soothingly. “Where d'you live, sonny?”

I suppose I told. The butcher, possessor of a Citroën delivery van (yes, it was a Citroën, I recall it perfectly) deposited me on some cleanish sacks smelling only slightly of blood, so that it may have been the smell of sacking that promptly made me sick again, and brought me home, where my dear mother flapped about rather. The butcher calmed her down, doubtless, and she recalled that she had recently followed a grandiose First-Aid-To-The-Wounded Course. (Evening classes were organised in the singularly gloomy urine-scented building of the lyceum, even more petrifying after twilight, but adults, I had remarked, were indifferent to such things.) She diagnosed concussion, quite sensibly, wound me in wet compresses, gave internal treatment of linden-tea-and-Aspro, and put me into bed.

Our house at the time was a large pompous villa – I was ten or so before we got ‘poor'. It had turrets and gables, stood in a quiet heavy street where all the shopping was brought by errand-boys, and had a garden with evergreen oaks and a copper beech. It was called, of course, ‘The Beeches'. Firmly in the plural, according to the current snobbery that a suburban villa was a townsman's country mansion. (The house next door was called ‘Normandie' and on the other side ‘Montreux' – and both had tennis-courts.) I had, being the youngest, the only son, and a great treasure, a room of my own; the ‘tower', which had two lancet windows and an octagonal shape.

Next day – the day it rained - I was kept in bed. I had a very slight headache and was otherwise in rude health. After my dear mother had fussed about with bread-and-milk and tip-toed out, I sat up. I wolfed the two dry rusks that had been left me, abolished the beastly cold compresses, and reached for a book. I spent there, with the rain hammering upon the tiles and windows of the turret – my crow's
nest – the happiest day of my life. Quite alone, in a warm ecstatic nest, thinking occasionally, between more highly coloured fantasies, of all the other little boys, suffering in their inky smelly classroom with the opaque globular lampshades that spread an acrid stink of heated dust. I hated and dreaded school.

I was a fidgety child, frail and timid. I was quick at reading and spelling, and had always the ‘recitation' and the verses by heart while the class was still struggling with the first line and a half up-to-the-semicolon. But figures were a nightmare to me. To this day I am flummoxed by nine sevens and seven eights. The decimal point was to me a maniac dot, invented by scholarly sadists. It flitted about among the rows of noughts, utterly uncomprehended, and poisoned my life. The classical ‘passage from one ten to another' pushed me with contempt and derision to the bottom of the school, and I suffered. What would have been my lot had I had to wrestle like an English child with pounds, shillings and pence?

Every day we had a ‘maxim'. This was a pious thought written first thing every morning by the master, in superb flowing longhand at the very top of the blackboard, and it stayed there till the following morning, when it was erased with hieratic gestures by a long hairy hand projecting from a grimy flannel cuff and the shiny sleeve of a soutane, holding a thing like a clothes-brush, but that had a sort of pad instead of bristles. I can still see it, sewn in a blue-and-white swiss roll of some woolly dishcloth material.