Sleep and His Brother (2 page)

“You can tell me what I can do for you,” he said. “I believe you made this appointment with my wife.”

“Ah, yes,” she sighed. “Dear Mary.”

“That's the one,” said Pibble. “You met at some do. She didn't tell me the details, but you must have talked about some problem which was worrying you which had a bearing on the law, and she suggested I might help. I've just retired from the police, you know.”

Mrs. Dixon-Jones nodded, a priest in the social confessional. Policemen are low. They court housemaids, if not scullery maids, round basement areas. The maids have vanished, but in a certain cast of mind the myth persists.

“I was an in-betweenish kind of copper,” explained Pibble. “If it had been the army, I'd have been some sort of staff officer—a major or perhaps a colonel.”

Damn the woman. There was no earthly need for such defensive maunderings.

“How clever of you to talk my language,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “We were all riflemen, but I took it into my head to marry into the Welsh Guards.”

The words were chatty, but the tone pushed Pibble's supposed commission out into the limbo of the Ordnance Corps.

“Well?” he said, scrabbling for the upper ground.

She picked up a ball-point pen and began to tap it slowly against a cigarette lighter made from a two-inch silver terrestrial globe. He let her tap, and hoped that she was thinking how to let them both off the hook. Before the wars this room had probably been the master's study. The bookshelves were still here, frilled with carvings of quills in inkpots and crowned with medallions of muses; since then someone had institutionalized the walls, garage green to shoulder level and cheese yellow above; sepia photographs of soldiers hung crooked from random nails; the new wave of decorators with their Day-Glo fantasies had been kept at bay; khaki filing cabinets and an antique switchboard hulked out from the walls, and on them dusty pyramids of paper counted the years in deepening shades of yellow; presumably the curving wall in the corner between the windows hid the spiral staircase up to the master's bedroom and ultimately to the newly weather-cocked spire; some Cretan knickknacks on the mantelpiece, below a board of neatly labelled keys …

“I really do appreciate your coming, Mr. Pibble,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones, not bothering to conceal the let's-get-this-over-with note. “But I am afraid there has been a little misunderstanding. I thought so at the time, but it was difficult to … Well, I'd better tell you just what happened. I expect you know that the McNair is a charity with very strong local connections. I won't tell you what percentage of our income comes from the good people within ten miles of where we sit, but I assure you that we couldn't survive without it. So we've made a rule that one of our senior officials should always try to put in an appearance at any large gathering or committee of the people who help us raise funds—just to show how much we value the work they do for us. Now, Mrs. Dalby …”

A slight cocking of the proud-held head asked Pibble if he knew that busy beldame. He nodded.

“. . . Mrs. Dalby held a coffee morning the week before last, and I managed to find time to show my face there. Lady Sospice was there—she's our patron, you know; old Lord Sospice endowed the Foundation and gave us this house. She's very old but she likes to know what's going on. I was talking to her about the activities of a group of busybodies who are interfering with our work, and I used the word ‘criminal,' quite fairly, I think, though I wasn't talking in your sense. But dear Mary happened to overhear me, and suddenly she swung round and said that if anything criminal was afoot you were the man to ask, and I'm afraid that Lady Sospice, who can be very deaf and obstinate, took her at her word and insisted that I was to call you in and that we should make an appointment there and then. Well, though she hasn't got any official standing it saves trouble in the long run if I keep on the right side of her … If Mary hadn't been a newcomer she'd have
understood
, but she had her diary out, so … I considered writing to you or telephoning to cancel the meeting, but if I'd told the truth it would have been a very
difficult
letter—I hate lying—so I'm afraid I decided that now you're retired you wouldn't mind wasting the time coming here, where I could explain it all in private and apologize for bringing you on a fool's errand. I do hope you understand.”

“Oh, yes,” said Pibble. He understood very clearly the only facet of the affair that mattered to him these days. In the hierarchy of that coffee morning Lady Sospice would have been top, Mrs. Dixon-Jones about third or fourth, and “dear Mary” well down in the double figures. Lady Sospice was known to be a tedious old tease. When Mary had charged unwanted into a chat among the upper echelons, the patron had amused herself by demoting Mrs. Dixon-Jones to the indignity of haggling over diaries with Mary, who, hungry for gossip and vaguely trying to conjure up some kind of retirement therapy for her poor sacked husband, had refused to be put off. So Pibble had wasted a good windless morning, ideal for spraying the roses with an early winter wash; and he would have to waste several evenings trying to iron the creases out of Mary's calm. That was all that affected him now, so why should he worry if it wasn't all that affected Mrs. Dixon-Jones?

“That's all right,” he said, beginning to shuffle out of his chair.

“I thought you'd probably understand,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones. She tapped at the tiny world again.

“Don't move,” said Pibble. “I can find my own way out.”

“Good-bye.”

Her sharp smile pinned him through the thorax, another specimen in her collection of insects.

“Give my love to Mary,” she added.

“Of course.”

For Mary's sake he almost broke his submission. For instance, he could have remarked, casually, on … He probably would have, too, in the days when he still had a job, and colleagues, and some self-esteem.

As he reached out his hand for it, the door handle turned slowly. Slowly the door crept into the room; knowing what the movement meant, Pibble stood to one side and waited.

An enormously fat boy, a lad who could have modelled for Master Bones the Butcher's Son, seeped into sight. By his tight dark curls Pibble knew that this was the one who had been lying asleep on the sofa, dreaming (perhaps) of gold fish in dirty water.

“Why, Tony!” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones in a voice suddenly floppy. She reached down a large ledger from the top of the shabby old telephone switchboard behind her, flipped it open, ran a quick finger down a column, and said, “You didn't have your supper last night, Tony. Or your breakfast this morning.”

“Biscuit,” said Tony.

His voice had the same light, unbroken timbre as the doorkeepers', though he must have been three years older. Mrs. Dixon-Jones took a box of assorted chocolate biscuits from a drawer and held it out; while Tony's hand dithered over the tray she smiled at him with happy patience, quite unforced, a whole spectrum away from the acid genialities of Mrs. Dalby's coffee mornings. At last the boy selected a crescent-shaped biscuit and took a reluctant nibble at one of its horns.

“Up,” he said.

“You want to go upstairs, Tony?” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

“Up,” he affirmed.

“Oh, Tony, not yet! You're not ready!”

“Tired.”

“Now, Tony, Jennifer is six months older than you, and she's stayed with us. You can sleep on the sofa as long as you like. I won't ask you to do any duties if you don't feel like it.”

Tony turned slowly away, and Pibble saw Mrs. Dixon-Jones relax from her sudden, inexplicable distress. The boy was almost past him when he turned again.

“Man,” he said.

“Yes. Mr. Pibble,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

“Help you,” said Tony, speaking so slowly that he had time to take a breath between the two words. Smiling, he shambled out. Mrs. Dixon-Jones nipped across the room and shut the door before Pibble could leave behind him.

“Please sit down,” she said.

He did so, and watched her return to her desk and push its bric-a-brac into a new pattern. Then she lit a tiny cork- tipped cigarette, watched the match burn for a while before blowing it out and laying it neatly on the rim of the ashtray, and at length gave a tinny, uncomfortable laugh.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “I'm afraid you'll think us very silly and superstitious. One gets into the habit of paying attention to what they say—they say so
little
, you see, and when they do comment on anything outside their immediate needs it seems like a, well, sort of
sign
. I wouldn't bother if I were clear in my own mind, but they don't seem to bother either then. It's when you're in a dither, if you see what I mean …”

Pibble felt awkward for her. She spoke with such difficulty, so many sighs between clauses. Perhaps she really did hate lying, and also hated having to parade to a stranger the truth about a strong and secret irrational motive.

“They said quite a lot when they let me in,” he said. “They seemed more on-the-spot than I'd expected.”

“On-the-spot?”

“Well, shrewd.”

“Oh, that's
quite
different. What did they say?”

“The girl said, ‘Cold hands, warm heart' when I shook hands with the boy—I suppose my face showed how surprised I was—and they argued twice about who should bring me to find you.”

“‘The exercise will do you good,'” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

“Yes.”

“Those are both things they're always saying. Our children, Mr. Pibble, come from rather
underprivileged
homes. Doctor Kelly has worked out an interesting theory about that. He thinks that the disease may be hereditary, with a mild and an acute form, and the acute form only occurs very rarely, so that no one has yet spotted that it's hereditary, but the families with the mild form tend to be rather slow and stupid anyway, and so to be, well, not actually deprived, but warehousemen and lorry drivers and so on. People like that, you know …”

A benign glance assured Pibble that she wasn't for the moment including him among people like that.

“. . . people like that always say the same thing when the same situation occurs. Proverbs and clichés and so on. All our children have heard their mothers laughing off the coldness of their touch or coaxing them not to lie around sleeping all day—again and again. You see?”

She was genuinely likable when she talked about the children, likable but dismal. Pibble wondered what was so horrible about Tony's going upstairs.

“You have to keep remembering that they aren't at all clever,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “We can't measure their IQ because all the tests send them to sleep, but Doctor Kelly says they'd be about sixty-five, and now Doctor Silver thinks even lower. He's keeping a record of every word they say, and
among them
they seem to have a vocabulary of less than three hundred words.”

“But it wasn't all clichés and proverbs,” said Pibble.

“Oh.”

“They said something about my being a policeman when I came in. Had you told anyone that?”

“Of course not.”

In three syllables her voice had lost its warmth.

“And when we passed the sofa they said Tony was fishing for yellow fish in dirty water. At least—”

He was interrupted by the loud tap of her pen on the globe. She had pulled her features into their bony command, and now honed the cutting edge onto her accent.

“It has been nice to meet you, Mr. Pibble, but we mustn't sit here gossiping, must we? I'm sure we both have things to do.”

Obedient to the crack of the whip, Pibble stood on his hind legs.

“Well …” he began to say.

She looked at him. Mouth and nostril and chin were implacable, but her eyes despaired. He saw how soft she really was, a shell-less crab scuttling in and out of the social carapace left by a dead creation. He smiled at her eyes and sat down.

“You can't leave it there, can you?” he said. “I'd be much more likely to talk, and I can see it would be hell for you if it got into the papers. You'd be smothered with cranks from all over the world.”

She said nothing, but carefully stubbed out her cigarette, tipped the contents of the ashtray into her wastepaper basket, and started to wipe the ashtray clean with a tissue.

“I won't even tell Mary,” he said. “Then there's this other thing—too much money all of a sudden.”

“I wasn't talking to Lady Sospice about that.”

“No. But I think that's what you felt I might be able to help you about. I expect you were talking to Lady Sospice about Mr. Costain and our Preservation Society—the busybodies you mentioned just now. I've read something in the local paper about their being interested in the house. But if Mary had actually heard what you were saying there wouldn't have been any misunderstanding, and I'm quite sure that you wouldn't have let yourself be cornered into fixing an interview with me if there hadn't been something you felt you might want to talk to an ex-policeman about. It's usually money. Then you changed your mind, but you still aren't really sure.”

“For a charity, Mr. Pibble, there's no such thing as too much money.”

“But a sudden surplus is difficult to digest. I think I'm right in saying that until recently you were always short of funds. Your own job seems to include both money raising and keeping track of the children's diet. A richer organization—”

“We've advertised for a matron.”

“But you haven't had one for some time.”

“Only two months.”

“Another thing: I imagine that a year ago the whole building was decorated like this room, but now you can afford to paint and repaint the passage outside for experimental purposes. And I doubt if the hall carpet cost less than a thousand quid, or if the Preservation Society sanctioned that design, let alone paid for it. And all those tape recorders …”