The End Of Solomon Grundy (21 page)

When Mr Justice Crumble had finished this balancing act with his ten fat red fingers and his nimble judicial brain, the jury filed out. They were back in a little more than an hour, and those wise in the ways of courts noticed that they abstained from looking at Grundy. The foreman, a neat sort of man with a well-kept toothbrush moustache, rose composedly when asked whether they had reached a verdict, and said that they had.

“Do you find the prisoner at the bar guilty, or not guilty?”

Fingering the little moustache he replied, “Not guilty.”

It would be too much, far too much, to say that there was a sensation in court. Magnus Newton smiled a fat jolly kind of smile as Toby Bander patted him on the back and Trapsell shook hands with him. Hardy congratulated him also, his thin features paler than ever, his voice almost extinguished by the cold in which he was now visibly enfolded. Mr Justice Crumble stroked his rotting nose, entwined his over-ripe fingers, and said that the prisoner was discharged. Grundy, whose expression had not changed when the verdict was given, stepped out of the dock and came face to face with Magnus Newton. He did not thank his counsel, nor did he offer to shake hands. “Congratulations,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“That coin came down on the right side.”

As Newton said to Toby Bander afterwards, the man was the most insufferable boor he had ever met. No word of thanks for sweating your guts out, nothing about the care with which every possibility had been pursued, every crack in the prosecution armour prised open, nothing but that atrocious joke. But when Grundy had gone to pass through the usual form of discharge Newton was able to put him out of mind, and to savour again the taste of triumph, that taste which never varies yet is endlessly fresh upon the tongue.

Now people in Court were busy gathering up papers, putting into order a case which was finished and could be tied up with pink ribbon and placed into its appropriate pigeon hole. It was finished for all of them and passed quickly out of their minds, for Newton who was defending in a couple of days’ time two men accused of a bank robbery, for Hardy who got down to work on the details of a complicated security case, for Mr Justice Crumble who brought his ageing body and alert mind again to the Old Bailey on the following day, when he attended to a case of alleged rape. For them what was done was done. They had no second thoughts and no regrets.

Marion had not come to Court on this last day because she felt, as she wrote to her husband, that she might break down or do something foolish. Dick Weldon had told her that he would be there and would telephone her as soon as a verdict was reached, but Dick was trapped unexpectedly by a client who had come down from Newcastle and insisted on talking to him. He did not reach the Old Bailey until half an hour after the verdict had been reached. He learned what had happened from an usher, and then went to look for Sol, but was told that he had passed out of the jurisdiction of the Court, and had presumably left its precincts. He telephoned Marion in the expectation that Sol would have rung her already, but she had heard nothing.

What should have been an evening of celebration became increasingly muted through the absence of its subject. The champagne cocktails Dick made tasted sour on Marion’s palate, the irrepressible energy that spilled out of Caroline made her feel for some reason uneasy, every word said by Gloria and Cyprian rasped her nerves. She knew that this was wrong, that Dick and Caroline had both been wonderful, and that only last night (could it really be no longer ago?) Cyprian had made the suggestion about checking with the airline that had helped to dispose of Mrs Stenson’s story. But it was no use, she felt that she must be in her own home, to await Sol’s arrival or a telephone call from him. It was logical enough to say that if Sol rang his own home and got no answer he would obviously try the Weldons’, but still she felt she had to go and wait for him.

“I’ll come with you,” Caroline said at once.

“No, really. I’d rather be alone.”

“But I don’t like to think of you, sitting there waiting on your own. Let’s go round together.”

“Now, darling,” Dick said. “Do you think Sol will want to find an old matron like you sitting there when he’s expecting to see his wife?”

“I ought to have been in Court today, then this wouldn’t have happened.”

“Marion, my dear, it’s I who ought to have been there.” Dick was earnest. “I’m very sorry I wasn’t.”

They watched her go, her elegant legs put one before another with the abstracted accuracy of a sleepwalker’s. All of them, even Gloria and Cyprian, felt an obscure disappointment, as though they had been rather disgracefully let down. They ate the salmon that Caroline had bought and cooked, but it did not really taste as it should have done. Dick expressed the feelings of the whole family accurately when he said, “I must say, Sol is a very odd cuss.”

In the empty house the telephone did not ring. Marion wandered from one room to another, touching Sol’s jackets in the cupboard, taking down a frying pan in the kitchen, putting salt, pepper, butter and eggs ready to make an omelette, switching the television on and quickly off again, looking out through the drawn curtains in the living-room and then letting them drop. She arranged a trayful of drinks, whisky, gin, pernod, but the very idea of taking a drink sickened her. Aloud she said, “My heart is full of love,” wondered if the phrase was true, and decided that it was. Her legs were already smooth, but she went to the bathroom and shaved them carefully. Then she returned to the bedroom, took off her coat and skirt and put on a cocktail dress. She put on three times her usual modest ration of lipstick and used mascara liberally round her eyes. The process brought some relief to her feelings, but inevitably the relief was only temporary. She spoke aloud again in the empty room, saying, “I want sex.”

She was painfully aware of the urgent need of her body. The apparatus of her life in this room, bits of china picked up cheaply, a collection of books about wild flowers, in which she had been passionately interested as a child, the curtains chosen with so much care at Heal’s, what did they mean, what did they add up to in a life? She unlocked a drawer in her desk and took out a small photograph album in which were recorded scenes of her childhood, dogs and holidays, dead aunts and uncles. Looking at them she wept and made the mascara run. She cleaned herself up, put on fresh mascara, and poured a large whisky. The time was almost nine o’clock.

Just after eleven she was sitting, half-asleep and half-drunk, beside the picture window. She had opened the curtains to look for Sol so that he saw her at several yards’ distance, framed with the light behind her, as he walked along the gravel road and opened the gate. He saw and was seen by Felicity Facey, who had been watching her neighbour’s house all the evening. When she told her husband, who had moved on from Sir Herbert Read to Sir Kenneth Clark, he grunted and advised her not to make a fool of herself again. The Faceys too had found themselves unpopular in The Dell in the general reversion of feeling that had taken place during the trial.

When Grundy opened the living-room door it seemed to Marion for a few moments that she had been transported back to the night of the Weldons’ party, for down one of his cheeks could be seen again the scratches that had been visible when he descended the stairs. Then she saw that these were not scratches but livid weals, and that they were upon the wrong cheek. The greeting she had imagined, in which she melted unquestioningly into his arms, was forgotten. She rose. “Sol,” she said, as though uncertain of his identity. “Sol?”

He stood there, filling the doorway, looking at her.

“Where have you been, Sol? I’ve been waiting. So long.” She heard with dismay a note of querulous complaint enter her voice.

“Seeing those bastards.” He had been drinking, although he was not drunk, no more drunk than she.

“Seeing – who? What happened to your face?”

“What do you think?” He came cautiously into the room, stepping as though there might be a trapdoor beneath the carpet. “First went to see MY partner, my loving partner who tried to shop me.”

“Theo?”

“Who else? Beat him up. His girl was there.”

“But Sol, Theo only did what he had to do, he only—”

“Broke two of his teeth.” He looked at his knuckles, and she saw that they too were scarred and bloody. “Little dummy, he’ll have to get some dummy teeth. But I did a better job on the other.”

“What other?”

“Took her away from me, the scheming little bastard. Doped her up to the eyes, I shouldn’t wonder. Then tried to frame me.”

“Sol,” she cried out. “Sol.”

“He’s out on bail, you know that. He’ll wish he wasn’t, now. Two of his boys caught me, but I think I broke his jaw first.” He began to laugh, then stopped.

Desperately she tried to preserve something at least of the dream with which she had begun the evening. She came towards him, entered the circle of his arms – or would have entered, if those arms had not been hanging, like great atrophied fins, by his sides. “Sol, I don’t want to hear any more, I don’t want to know, we can make a new start. We must make a new start.”

“A new start.”

“I want—” She could not say the word sex, it seemed wrong. “I want love. Make love to me, Sol.”

“Too late.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Too late, I tell you. You do what you’ve got to do, you see what I mean.”

“No, I don’t see what you mean. Tell me.”

“With her it was always, it was all, she was sex, you see what I mean.”

“
Her,
” she cried out, horrified. “Her?”

He sat down now, heavily, and talked, not looking at her, not coherently, yet with a total meaning in his words that she was unable to avoid.

“From the beginning it was like a revelation, you see what I mean. It was reality. All my life, I felt as if all my life had been wasted, not wasted exactly, but meaningless. Instant sensation, you see what I mean, that was what it was, and through it you get the whole meaning of life.”

She tried to extract from this jumble something of what, for her, made sense. “It was true then, what they said.”

“Who said?”

“Jack – Jack Jellifer, Peter Clements, that man – Leighton.”

He might not have heard her. “It was reality, you see what I mean, nothing else existed. That’s not right, though, no, you live in two worlds, but only one of them is real. And you don’t – you don’t control either of the worlds, they do things to you, not the other way round, you see.”

“You strangled her because she was going to marry Kabanga, that’s right, isn’t it?”

“To destroy a world. I only did what I had to do.”

“Oh, talk sense,” she said, more angry than frightened, determined to know the truth. “They were all telling the truth, even that wretched little Jennifer.”

“The truth,” he said, and seemed to meditate on the words. “Jennifer saw us.”

Gropingly she said, “But I don’t see – why didn’t you give yourself up?”

Before she had finished he was shaking his head.

“You live in two worlds and in both of them you have to
behave
as if they were real, you see? You play the game, you don’t give anything away. But shall I tell you something terrible? When one world has gone it’s impossible to live in the other.” For a moment the eyes that looked now straight into hers seemed to clear, and she thought she saw in them an intense suffering. Then they were again opaque, milky, like the eyes of a sufferer from glaucoma. He took something out of his pocket. “I got this from Kabanga, he tried to shoot me with it.”

For a moment she could not speak, then she said,

“You’re not responsible.”

“Do you know that if I’d been found guilty they wouldn’t have hanged me. That’s the law.” He laughed.

“If you strangle someone they don’t hang you. If you shoot someone, they do.”

I have done nothing, she wanted to say, but she could not utter the words. “Those letters you wrote, how could you have written them?”

“They’re part of the game. You have to pretend, that’s one of the rules.”

“The rules,” she cried out. “Did you live by the rules?”

“I only did what I had to do,” he said, as though the words were an answer with which she should be satisfied.

“But you don’t have to do it to me.” She was aware of a desire to live, the most intense desire she had ever known. “I am innocent. I’m not responsible.”

“Which of us is innocent?” he said gently, almost chidingly. “And you said just now that I was not responsible. Do you mean that there is no such thing as responsibility?”

Then the revolver went off.

Felicity Facey heard it. “That was a shot.”

“Don’t be absurd, my dear.”

“I don’t care what you say. I’m going to telephone the police.”

Her husband sighed.

When the police arrived they found Grundy sitting beside the window, as though he were expecting them. His wife lay on the floor. He had shot her once, through the temple. His hands, large, strong and hairy, rested on his knees. One of them held the revolver.

The End of Solomon Grundy

Solomon Grundy was held to be fit to plead to the murder of his wife, and he refused to accept his counsel’s advice (his counsel was not Magnus Newton this time) to base a defence upon diminished responsibility. He refused also to enter the witness box. When he had been found guilty, and was asked if he had anything to say before sentence, he replied: “I am happy to accept the verdict of the Court, but I wish to go on record as saying that I do not regard the members of the jury as responsible for their actions.” The judge made no comment upon this remark before pronouncing the death sentence. Grundy was hanged on a cold morning in March.

Shortly afterwards local school children began to sing a rhyme which, although (or perhaps because) they did not really understand the meaning of it, became very popular. It ran:

Solomon Grundy

Strangled her Monday.

Arrested on Tuesday.

Tried on a Wednesday.

Acquitted on Thursday.

Shot her Friday.

Arrested on Saturday.

Ate his dinner Sunday.

Hanged on a Monday.

That was the end of Solomon Grundy.