Listening in the Dusk (23 page)

Footsteps leading away into the darkness, and none returning. This is one of the archetypal terrors of mankind, and it was several minutes before Mary could summon up the courage to search the house.

It didn’t take long. Several of the light sockets, as it turned out, had live bulbs in, and it was soon evident that there was no one there. Mary was on her own in the deserted house.

And the footprints? Well, no mystery really, now that her first moment of panic had subsided. As a result of some small alarm he could have made his exit by one of the back windows upstairs; or — for some similar reason — he could have taken his shoes off for extra quietness, his stockinged feet making no discernible mark on the dusty surfaces. Anything.

The essential fact was that he was no longer here. And so he must be somewhere else. Once again, Mary had that strange sense of absolute certainty. She knew, already, just where he would be.

*

She had already traversed three or four miles, some of it at a run, but somehow she wasn’t in the least bit tired. All the way, she had been peering tensely ahead, straining her eyes into the uncertain light, imagining, every now and then, that she could indeed glimpse a slender, swinging figure, now here, now gone, in the feeble half-light of the waning moon.

That young, swinging, questing stride that she remembered. Would it still be his after all that had happened, all that he had become?

There! What was that …?

The shadow ahead shivered, melted sideways as she came nearer, loomed again across her vision, and it was only the
leaning hump of an old, old tree, balancing between life and death in the damp, almost windless air.

She was beginning now to feel the slope of the hill pressing against the soles of her feet; her steps shortened in response to the steepening gradient. All round her now rose the raw mounds of construction work, great gashes of blackness criss-crossing the centuries-old turf, throwing up huge hillocks of tortured earth as far as the eye could see. The irresistible power of destruction was everywhere; the glimmer of huge plastic covers glistened over mysterious piles of things; cranes, diggers, and things like interlocking tanks stood silent under the stars, ready for the onslaughts of tomorrow.

And yet, the scene seemed different under this elvish light; gentle, somehow, and impermanent. Less like a brash new building-site than like the ruins of some ancient city: which of course it one day would be. One day, the bats would be here again, darting in miraculous zig-zag flight in and out among the crumbling walls of supermarkets, establishing their homes and breeding-grounds in the caved-in ceilings of betting-shops and pin-table saloons. One day, the grass and the brambles would grow over the washing-machines rusting back into the ground in the roofless launderettes …

She recognised these thoughts as Julian’s thoughts. This was the way he must have seen it as he passed this way ahead of her so short a time ago; this was his vision, these were his very thoughts, that she was picking up as she toiled upwards, on and on, towards the place where she knew he was going to be.

The raw, half-built road came to an end at this point. From here on, a rough, slippery track led towards the wooded ridge to which the bulldozers had not yet climbed. Here, for a little longer, the turf was still springy beneath one’s feet; here, wet swathes of winter bracken caught in the darkness at one’s ankles; and as she drew nearer and nearer to this last surviving patch of ancient woodland, the gibbous moon seemed to dip and leap drunkenly among the leafless twigs with every step she took.

She came upon him almost at once, and at first she thought he was asleep, so peacefully did he seem to be reclining among the brambles and the coarse tufts of winter grass; half-sitting,
propped against a dark mass of tangled winter vegetation. The sound of her soft footfalls on the dead leaves did not seem to rouse him, but she could see, now, that he was not asleep. In the shaft of moonshine that made its way through the restless tracery of twigs overhead, she could see that his eyes were open and very bright, staring straight ahead with an intensity rendering him oblivious to small distractions.

Her next thought was that he was dead. But no, for even while she watched, his right hand moved a little, stirring ever so slightly the wet, dead leaves as he lifted it.

There was no mistaking now what it was that glittered in his grasp, nor the quiet purpose with which he held it against his head.

She lunged forward through the undergrowth, and
immediately
there was a mighty noise, a blow on the shoulder that sent her spinning, with a sharp cry; and above and through it all, she heard her brother’s voice, for the last time:

“Oh
no
! Oh Midge!
No
…”

And then came the second shot, she heard it echoing from tree to tree, from bush to bush, and shuddering at last into silence.

Not quite silence, of course. There was still the faint stirring of the night air; the whisper of one more leaf circling down from some twig or other; all the ordinary little sounds of a winter woodland, continuing as if nothing had happened.

And of course nothing had: just one more death among the billions and billions of deaths which had gone to the making of this rich earth; to the making, over countless millennia, of Flittermouse Hill and all that grew upon it.

The two invalids were both in hospital, and both recovering fast, Cyril from a broken collar-bone and concussion, Mary from the gunshot wound in her upper arm. It was Cyril, conveniently in a London hospital, who was perhaps getting the most visitors. His family came first, including Sophy (even though she was manifestly under fourteen, they’d still let her in), who explained to him, wide-eyed, that Tracty also had broken his collar-bone and banged his head ever so hard, and was all bandaged up.
Look
…!

Then came Alice who, on his urgent request, agreed to bring Herodotus later on; not yet, because he wasn’t supposed to read until the doctor had seen him again and tested his reflexes and so on to see how his concussion was getting on. All nonsense, in Cyril’s opinion, because his head had almost stopped aching, and he could read perfectly now, the print no longer jumping about, not even the small print in newspapers. This latter he’d been able to put to the test — despite the ban — earlier in the afternoon, when, to his immense delight and surprise, Winston had come to visit him, proudly clutching a much-folded page from the local paper, in the left-hand column of which Cyril’s adventure had been briefly recorded, albeit not very accurately, giving his name as Cecil, his age as eleven, and his exploit as the foiling of a
hold-up
by an armed robber attempting to make his getaway. Well, of course, the chap
was
a robber in a way, even though (as Cyril had learned since) the box pinched from Alice’s room had only had junk paper in it; the diary (about which the whole fuss seemed to be centred) having been extracted by Alice herself that very evening, and stored away safely in her old home.

Anyway, the story the way the paper told it was still pretty good. It made him out quite a hero, and featured a rather smudgy
picture of him grinning into the camera on some holiday or other; not bad; and, as Winston pointed out, anyone could see it was him and not this poxy Cecil person, and so not to worry.

What Cyril was actually worrying about, though, was the Bike Run. So badly had he done last time; and now, with his
collar-bone
, he’d be out of it for weeks, getting quite hopelessly behind.

But here, too, Winston repeated his injunction ‘not to worry’.

“We’re off it,” he explained. “Right off it, somehow. We aren’t having no more bike meetings for a bit. It’s not much fun now, not without you, Nigger,” and for a moment Cyril could hardly breathe, so overwhelmed was he by the honour just conferred by this long-coveted, scarcely hoped-for name.

So happy was he, so proud, that when, later on, Miss Dorinda, of all people, came to visit him, it hardly got him down at all. It was nice of her to bother to come, of course it was, and she’d brought a huge bunch of black expensive grapes, which was nice too. Besides, by now he was quite used to the way she talked. Having asked him how he was, and having told him details of the various cases of head-injury, some fatal, some not, among her ever-widening circle of people who knew people who knew people. After this, she found herself, irresistibly, drawing the moral of it all:

“Well, I’m very thankful to find you no worse, Cyril, but I do trust it’ll be a lesson to you. I’ve told you before, haven’t I, that running around with all that riff-raff the way you do, and getting into these dare-devil scrapes … I’ve told you, one day you’d be sorry! And now it’s happened! I only hope you’ve learned your lesson!”

He had, too. He had learned that the pain of a broken
collar-bone
, of a concussed head, were as nothing compared with the joy and triumph of partaking in such an adventure; of defying an opponent much bigger than yourself; of getting your picture in the papers, and finally, in recognition of all this, being called ‘Nigger’ by the leader of your gang.

So, “Yes,” he said meekly, in answer to Miss Dorinda’s question.

*

Meanwhile, in another hospital, a good many miles to the south,
Mary’s visitors sat in Reception, waiting obediently for it to be two o’clock. Alice and Hetty had come together by train, after quite a struggle to dissuade Brian from coming too.

“No, Brian, we
must
see how Mary feels first,” Alice had insisted. “She’s had this tremendous shock, you know; and now to give her the additional shock of learning that you know all about it — who she is, and everything — when you are the very person she was above all trying to hide it from …”

This was the tail-end, really, of the discussion that she and Brian had been engaged in, on and off, ever since the news broke.

“Why didn’t she
tell
me?” he’d kept re-iterating. “It wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to how I feel about her. Why should it? It was only her
brother
, for God’s sake. How can anyone be held responsible for what their
brother
does? I’m a brother myself, I should know!”

And then Alice had tried to get across to him the real core and essence of Mary’s terror and withdrawal; her sense of being contaminated, of being irrevocably touched by evil; of being for ever unmarriageable, unfit even for a love-affair, because of the ‘bad blood’, the faulty genes, that she must be sharing with her brother.

He had pooh-poohed the entire thing.

“Faulty genes, my foot! As if there could be special sets of genes that inexorably turn a man into a criminal, or a bus-driver, or an Intourist guide! It
can’t
be as specific as that! Of course, I grant you that to be a way-out fanatical criminal like this Julian, you’d need
some
inherited qualities. Like courage, for instance; and dogged determination. Like the ability to care desperately about something, and the strength to defy the whole world in support of your conviction. Just the qualities a chap would have needed in Nazi Germany if he was to defy the regime …”

All very well, Alice had protested; but you’ve left out the
negative
qualities. Ruthlessness. Greed. The actual ability to kill a human being at all, in any circumstances whatever …

Well, greed didn’t come into it, did it, in this Julian’s case? “And as to the ability to kill a human being, everyone has
that,
every male, anyway: homo sapiens would never have survived
without it. It’s inhibited, of course, in our sort of society, but once something happens to make the inhibitions crack … Honestly, Alice, the actual inherited qualities you need to become a spectacular criminal are exactly the same as you need to become a spectacular anything.
I
probably need them to get to the top in my profession, and God knows whether I’ve got them! Though actually, Alice, I forgot to tell you, it
does
look as if a bit of luck may be coming my way at last! You remember that chap I was sending some of my compositions to — that evening you were on about the Blu-Tack — well, I’ve had a cable from New York, and he wants me to … Oh, Alice, I’m so longing to tell Mary about it! I’m sure, once I saw her, I could …”

But Alice was adamant. It all sounded much too exciting, too sudden, too overwhelming for an invalid still in a state of shock. All she would promise was that she would ring him from the hospital and tell him as much as she could about how Mary was feeling.

*

Mary, too, had been trying to get a clear idea of how she was feeling. Yesterday, coming-to from the anaesthetic, and before she had begun to recall anything at all of what had happened, she had been conscious of an enormous sense of happiness and release, unfocused and apparently without cause. Only as
consciousness
slowly returned, and clear memory, did she realise that this huge happiness lay at the very heart of a huge grief.

Julian was dead. The brother she had loved was back; the dark, bitter last months of his short life were now over. He was safe in the past.

Safe in the past. All the while he lived, while he still existed in the world, the dreadful and continuing present was blotting out completely the whole of the happy past, as if it had never been.

The present has this awful, tyrannical power. It arrogates to itself a total and absolute importance over and above all other moments in all of time. It is a spurious power, though. You have only to wait, and it, too, will become the past, its awful domination at an end …

Would Mary’s mother, already on her way from Spain, be
thinking these same thoughts? Mary hoped so. Now, at last, they would be able to mourn for Julian properly, together.

She must rouse herself now, visiting time was at hand. Already, at the far end of the ward, she could see Alice and Hetty make their uncertain way among the beds, glancing
questioningly
this way and that. Their pace quickened, smiles brightened on their faces, as Mary waved to them.

*

As promised, Alice went straight to the telephone when her visit was over, leaving Hetty to finish off the snippets of news from number seventeen with which she’d been regaling the invalid. Such as that — would you believe it! —
Horsa
was back! After seventeen weeks, and so fat and glossy too, whatever had he been up to? The only thing was, he kept eating out of Hengist’s dish, no way of keeping him out of it, and oh, the kerfuffle! Oh, and another thing, another truant returned, Mr Singh! He seemed to be in fine fettle, too, his troubles (presumably) all sorted out, which was a grand thing, Hetty was delighted. Here, the only thing was that he didn’t want the TV set in his room. Where in the world it was to go Hetty couldn’t imagine, such argy bargy it caused in the kitchen, as well as blocking the way to the broom cupboard …

That sort of thing. Alice smiled as she picked up the receiver. Already she was visualising Brian hovering in the dark, cluttered hall, on tenterhooks; and when, sure enough, the receiver at the other end was snatched up almost before the end of the first ring, she rejoiced that the message she had for him was so exactly the one he was hoping for.