Letters to a Sister (32 page)

Peter only sighed. His friends, while they made their sympathetic partisan comments on the situation, plied him with more drink, firmly, painfully and mistakenly massaged his ankle, which appeared to be broken, tried to get his victim into a less comfortless posture, and conned over in their minds the probable tale of their unfortunate friend's iniquities. Distressed by his mournful plight, and by the alarming inanimateness of the poor cyclist, to whom such plights are a recurrent occupational disease, Sukey blinked away tears. She was a sympathetic girl of great natural kindness.

Presently there arrived from Amesbury two policemen, a doctor, and an ambulance. The policemen and the doctor sized up the familiar scene. The doctor knelt down by the cyclist, examining him for signs of life, and finding none. It was apparent that yet another pedal cyclist had got the worst of yet another encounter. The doctor presently said, ‘Back broken. Dead for at least an hour, I should say.'

The police took measurements and photographs, and the poor cyclist was placed in the ambulance. The police then turned their attention to Peter. The doctor said he had broken his ankle, and bound it round with something.

The police said, with their poker-faced severity, ‘May I see your papers?'

‘No papers with me,' said Peter.

‘Name and address?'

‘William Smith. I live in Iceland.'

‘British citizen?'

‘No. Icelandic.'

‘Over here on a visit?'

‘Yes. To see Stonehenge.'

‘Is that your own machine?'

‘No, it belongs to a friend.'

‘They drive on the right in Iceland, I take it?'

‘Yes. Oh yes, always.'

‘Will you kindly turn out your pockets, sir?'

Peter groped in his pockets and produced a wallet, a handful of coins, a ball-top pencil, a cigarette case, a lighter, a handkerchief, a dog's lead, and an empty whisky flask.

‘Come, come,' said the policeman, and drew from Peter's breast-pocket a couple of letters. One envelope was addressed ‘The Hon. Peter Luckles, 13b Shepherd Market w.1,' the other, in a less literate hand, ‘Hon. Luckles, White Barn, Great Gussage, Dorset.'

‘We shall have to charge you, Mr Luckles,' (he pronounced it Luckless) ‘with giving false information to the police. I should advise you to answer the ensuing enquiries accurately. Are your insurance certificate, driving licence and motor licence in order?'

‘What's the good of my telling you? You know damn well they're not.'

‘Anything known?' said one policeman to the other.

‘Quite a lot,' said the other, and addressed Peter. ‘You will be charged with riding dangerously, riding under the influence, riding an unlicensed machine, without an operative driving licence, and causing the death of a man. You will now accompany us in the ambulance to the Amesbury police station, where you will be formally charged with these offences, and will enter a hospital for the necessary treatment. But first we should like your account of the incident.'

‘Well, I was on my way to Stonehenge …'

‘After dinner, no doubt?'

‘Naturally after dinner. Hours after. I dined with friends at Little Gussage.'

‘And had plenty to drink there, I take it.'

‘Well, they did me all right. I wasn't drunk, if that's what you're getting at. I was quite capable of riding the Vespa.'

‘It appears not, doesn't it. And you're slurring your words now. What made you take that bend on the off side?'

‘How should I know? I didn't know there was anything in the way. The next thing I knew, I'd crashed, and was lying in the road all tangled up with a push bike. Of course I'm damned sorry about him, whose-ever fault it was. But he hadn't got his lights on, and no one could've seen him, poor chap.'

‘Well,' said the policemen, putting away their notebooks and looking impassive, ‘that will be all for now.'

Peter's three friends said they would accompany the ambulance to the police station, for they did not like to desert him in his dark hour. They were allowed to do this, and when Peter had been charged and taken to the hospital for treatment, they drove on to Stonehenge and joined the great crowd who were milling round the stones in the dark. Some sat on the grass drinking beer and tea and playing gramophone records, some on the tops of the stones obstructing the view so that no one behind them would see the Druids when they arrived. The fence round the circle of stones was well broken by those who had surged through it. Among these was the party whom Peter and his three friends had arranged to join. When they heard of poor Peter's latest mischance, they all agreed that it could scarcely look worse for poor Peter. Riding with suspended driving licence his unlicensed, uninsured Vespa, quite drunk, taking a blind corner on the off side and killing a cyclist—it might well be manslaughter and prolonged incarceration. As they were all fond of poor Peter, they were shocked and saddened and drank some more. It was about half past three and quite dark still. The Druids would not be there until after four. People were eating and drinking out
of paper bags and beer bottles, and throwing the empty bottles at the stones. Gramophones played jigging music, and there was rocking and rolling. But Peter's friends sat on the grass against one of the sarsen stones, and sadly drank. They were Bill Hammond, and the two Bun-Flanagans, and Henry and Emily, whom they had joined. Henry and Emily were engaged, and had driven over from the house of Henry's parents at Tarrant Hinton. Henry was a lawyer and a novelist; he was very distinguished-looking but by now quite drunk. Emily was pale, round-faced and wide-eyed, and she too was now intoxicated. Both had reached the quietly morose stage, and were taking an irritable view of the proceedings. When the dawn began, it was chilly and grey, and the stones looked still more rude and unpleasing than in the dark.

The Druids were perceived to be arriving, and there was a general rush towards them. White-robed and hooded, some oak-garlanded, they did not suggest the Ku Klux Klan, nor even, really, such Druids as Caesar and Tacitus and Nennius had known, spell-hurlers, potent magicians and enchanters, wielders of the sacrificial knife, bards and priests of the sacred groves, bloody and learned men; no, these Druids seemed innocent, mild, affected, performing their innocuous rites with prim correctness, feeding the sacred fire with sacred oak boughs from the sacred groves, uttering mystic words, joining hands and beseeching the sun to arise, but in vain, it did not arise. The Druids did not seem to mind; they were no doubt used to this, and had probably never seen it arise, which, for heliolaters, made a frustrated life. But they went on about the Sacred Purpose and the Divine Harmony and the Three Desirable Objectives which all Druids ever strive to uphold; they seemed to invoke the Great Spirit, and rather suggested Red Indians or the Ethical Society; in fact, they were pretty sissy. There seemed to be some implication that earlier Druids had planned and built Stonehenge, a notion in which they had been encouraged in the past but now not at all, for they had been long told that Stonehenge was built a millennium
and a half before any Druids entered Britain, but they did not listen much to this, and did not care for archaeologists. So they innocently pomped it among the great stones as if these were their temple, reciting their spells the while, and obviously intent on the good and noble life, in spite of being so phoney.

‘Where are the wicker images?' a hopeful child enquired of her parents.

‘What wicker images, silly?'

‘The ones the Druids had, to burn people in.' For it was this holocaust that she had been allowed, she thought, to come and see, so delightfully, in the very middle of the night.

‘Oh, they don't burn people now, they've learnt better. Besides, the police are here.'

‘Won't there be human sacrifices, like the book we do at school says?'

‘No pet, not to-night.'

‘Why are they lighting a fire on that stone?'

‘That's Druid magic, that is. Look, that's Mr Popplethwaite from the draper's in the High Street lighting it.'

‘Will they sacrifice an animal?'

‘Dear me no, Mr Popplethwaite wouldn't consider doing a thing like that.'

‘Well, will they chase early Christians, like in the pictures?'

‘No early Christians here.'

‘Why aren't there?'

‘Afraid of the Druids, I shouldn't wonder.'

Hope dwindled. The expedition was apparently for nothing in particular, only to see the big stones by night and Mr Popplethwaite playing games with fire and water. The child, raised on her father's shoulders, yawned, drifting into sleep. The Druids went on with their strange rites, speaking the while of the Golden Age, the Triad, and the Word that had been made known to their forebears. They were prolix and high-minded, but few people could hear what they said.

The friends of Peter Luckles did not try to; they thought
poorly of the whole business, sitting against a sarsen stone on the grass and drinking. Three of them had brought with them Druid costumes, which they had thought would be amusing to put on, but the idea no longer seemed good. The outsize stones looked as uncultured as ever, in spite of all the work lately done on them. Those who wrote them up said they were polished, but this did not seem to be noticeably the case.

‘The wrong shapes, the wrong sizes, no elegance, no architectural unity. What, after all, do they mean?' they complained.

‘Religion, human sacrifice, bloody death. Like all ancient temples,' Henry grumbled.

Emily, who viewed religion, human sacrifice and bloody death with the greatest apprehension, and only liked ancient temples for their elegant and noble shapes and their sculptured ornament, blenched at Stonehenge. Why had the Bronze Age inhabitants of Britain been so little accomplished that, at a time when their contemporaries overseas were building Mycenae, Tiryns, Knossos, and all that, all they could manage was to transport great slabs of rock from one part of Britain to another, cut and polish them inadequately, and stand them on end in circles? So much labour, such huge, uncultured achievement, like the uncouth gestures of giants.

‘Bloody cannibals,' Henry said, as if the builders of Stonehenge had been capitalists and he a Soviet orator.

‘My uncle Danny is a cannibal,' said Sukey. ‘He sells things to cannibal chiefs in Africa and goes to their banquets, and they often have human dishes. Uncle Danny rather likes them, they keep up his strength. He says if ever he lives in Europe again, he'll have to contrive something, or he'll waste away.'

The rain began; it had a persevering look, tumbling out of slate-grey skies. There was a rush towards the car park across the road. Henry stopped his quiet drinking and said, ‘We'd better get back. I'm leaving my car in Amesbury for the
night, the steering wants seeing to. Can you take Emily and me to Tarrant?'

‘Very wise of you, Henry,' said Bill. ‘Meet us outside the George.'

The others all got in, Bill and Emily and Sukey and Tim, and, when they had fought their way out of the car park, they drove off into the wet dawn, and presently Henry joined them outside the George.

Two miles out of Amesbury Sukey said, ‘That's the bend where Peter met the bicycle.'

‘Stop,' Tim said. ‘I want to look for my lighter.'

He got out, and Henry got out too, and they searched the road and the green verge.

‘All right,' Tim said presently, ‘here it is.'

Henry went on looking about.

‘Peter may have dropped something,' he said, moving his torch about the edge of the road. But nothing was there, only the rain-splashed dust and the green wet verge and a frog that hopped in the ditch. The smell of honeysuckle and dog-roses and cow-parsley and rank ditch mud hung on the air above the crushed and flattened grass where Peter and his Vespa and the cyclist and his Rover had lain tangled and smashed, and the others had sat by them plying them with Thermoses and flasks and vain comfort, and the police with their questions and notebooks had, experienced and grave like recording angels, summed up the scene.

If any of them had left anything there, it was no longer there now. Henry got into the car; they drove on through the melancholy night and the soft midsummer rain.

‘What's the worst they can do to poor Peter?' Sukey asked of Henry, who as a lawyer might know, though under-briefed and meaning to stand soon for Parliament as a Socialist, or perhaps a Tory.

‘Oh, he won't get much,' Henry said. ‘Perhaps six months, for all those crimes—no driving or car licence or insurance, dangerous driving while suspended and drunk, misinforming
the police, and all his past driving record. The fact that the poor chap died doesn't add much actually.'

He did not pronounce ‘actually' at all well, and the others thought how wise he had been to leave his car in Amesbury.

Bill said, ‘But surely the fatal crime was to kill a man. It could be manslaughter, I suppose.'

‘Don't be silly,' said Henry, indistinctly. ‘That's finished.'

‘Still,' said Bill, ‘I should have thought it could be two years, given a vicious judge.'

Henry, wrapped in thought and drink, did not answer.

Sukey said, ‘Poor old Peter. He must have had a hellish time, lying there for an hour by himself with the dead chap.'

‘An hour?' said Henry.

‘Well, the doctor said he must have died at least an hour ago.'

‘I wouldn't give that,' said Henry, ‘for what doctors say about times of death. Did Peter say he'd been there an hour?'

‘I shouldn't think Peter had a clue,' said Tim, ‘the way he was.'

Henry and Emily were dropped presently at Tarrant Hinton, where they were staying with Henry's parents. The midsummer night had not agreed with Emily, who was pale and shivering now that her mild intoxication had abated. She looked wan and plain, and had no word or smile for her friends as they parted. She and Henry had fallen out and were estranged; perhaps, thought Emily, for good.