The Human Factor (24 page)

‘My father wasn't married then. He married my mother after the war. In the twenties.' Daintry realized the conversation was becoming absurd. The gin was acting like a truth drug. He knew he was talking too much.

‘He married your mother?' Dicky asked sharply like an interrogator.

‘Of course he married her. In the twenties.'

‘She's still alive?'

‘They've both been dead a long time. I really must be getting home. My meal will be spoilt,' Daintry added, thinking of the sardines drying on a plate. The sense of being among friendly strangers left him. The conversation threatened to turn ugly.

‘And what has all this to do with a funeral? What funeral?'

‘Don't mind Dicky,' Buffy said. ‘He likes interrogating. He was in MI5 during the war. More gins, Joe. He's already told us, Dicky. It was some poor bugger in the office.'

‘Did you see him properly into the ground?'

‘No, no. I just went to the service. In Hanover Square.'

‘That would be St George's,' said the son of the bishop. He held his glass out to Joe as though it were a communion cup.

It took quite a time for Daintry to detach himself from the bar at White's. Buffy even conducted him as far as the steps. A taxi passed. ‘You see what I mean,' Buffy said. ‘Buses in St James's. No one was safe.' Daintry had no idea what he meant. As he walked down the street towards the palace he was aware that he had drunk more than he had drunk for years at this hour of the day. They were nice fellows, but one had to be careful. He had spoken far too much. About his father, his mother. He walked past Lock's hat shop; past Overton's Restaurant; he halted on the pavement at the corner of Pall Mall. He had overshot the mark – he realized that in time. He turned on his heel and retraced his steps to the door of the flat where his lunch awaited him.

The cheese was there all right and the bread, and the tin of sardines which after all he had not yet decanted. He was not very clever with his fingers, and the small leaf of the tin broke before the tin was a third open. All the same he managed to fork out half the sardines in bits and pieces. He wasn't hungry – that was enough. He hesitated whether he should drink any more after the dry martinis and then chose a bottle of Tuborg.

His lunch lasted for less than four minutes, but it seemed to him quite a long time because of his thoughts. His thoughts wobbled like a drunken man's. He thought first of Doctor Percival and Sir John Hargreaves going off together down the street in front of him when the service was over, their heads bent like conspirators. He thought next of Davis. It wasn't that he had any personal liking for Davis, but his death worried him. He said aloud to the only witness, which happened to be a sardine tail balanced on his fork, ‘A jury would never convict on that evidence.' Convict? He hadn't any proof that Davis had not died, as the post mortem showed, a natural death – cirrhosis was what one called a natural death. He tried to remember what Doctor Percival had said to him on the night of the shoot. He had drunk too much that night, as he had done this morning, because he was ill at ease with people whom he didn't understand, and Percival had come uninvited to his room and talked about an artist called Nicholson.

Daintry didn't touch the cheese; he carried it back with the oily plate to the kitchen – or kitchenette as it would be called nowadays – there was only room for one person at a time. He remembered the vast spaces of the basement kitchen in that obscure rectory in Suffolk where his father had been washed up after the Battle of Jutland, and he remembered Buffy's careless words about the confessional. His father had never approved of confession nor of the confessional box set up by a High Church celibate in the next parish. Confessions came to him, if they came at all, second-hand, for people did confess sometimes to his mother, who was much loved in the village, and he had heard her filter these confessions to his father, with any grossness, malice or cruelty removed. ‘I think you ought to know what Mrs Baines told me yesterday.'

Daintry spoke aloud – the habit was certainly growing on him – to the kitchen sink, ‘There was
no
real evidence against Davis.' He felt guilty of failure – a man in late middle age near to retirement – retirement from what? He would exchange one loneliness for another. He wanted to be back in the Suffolk rectory. He wanted to walk up the long weedy path lined with laurels that never flowered and enter the front door. Even the hall was larger than his whole flat. A number of hats hung from a stand on the left and on the right a brass shell-case held the umbrellas. He crossed the hall and, very softly opening the door in front of him, he surprised his parents where they sat on the chintz sofa hand in hand because they thought they were alone. ‘Shall I resign,' he asked them, ‘or wait for retirement?' He knew quite well that the answer would be ‘No' from both of them – from his father because the captain of his cruiser had shared in his eyes something of the divine right of kings – his son couldn't possibly know better than his commanding officer the right action to take – and from his mother – well, she would always tell a girl in the village who was in trouble with her employer, ‘Don't be hasty. It's not so easy to find another situation.' His father, the ex-naval chaplain, who believed in his captain and his God, would have given him what he considered to be the Christian reply, and his mother would have given him the practical and worldly answer. What greater chance had he to find another job if he resigned now than a daily maid would have in the small village where they had lived?

Colonel Daintry went back into his sitting-room, forgetting the oily fork he carried. For the first time in some years he possessed his daughter's telephone number – she had sent it to him after her marriage on a printed card. It was the only link he had with her day-to-day life. Perhaps it would be possible, he thought, to invite himself to dinner. He wouldn't actually suggest it, but if she made an offer . . .

He didn't recognize the voice which answered. He said, ‘Is that 6731075?'

‘Yes. Who do you want?' It was a man speaking – a stranger.

He lost his nerve and his memory for names. He replied, ‘Mrs Clutter.'

‘You've got the wrong number.'

‘I'm sorry.' He rang off. Of course he should have said, ‘I meant Mrs Clough,' but it was too late now. The stranger, he supposed, was his son-in-law.

4

‘You didn't mind,' Sarah asked, ‘that I couldn't go?'

‘No. Of course not. I couldn't go myself – I had a date with Muller.'

‘I was afraid of not being back here before Sam returned from school. He'd have asked me where I'd been.'

‘All the same, he has to know sometime.'

‘Yes, but there's still a lot of time. Were there many people there?'

‘Not many, so Cynthia said. Watson, of course, as the head of the section. Doctor Percival. C. It was decent of C to go. It wasn't as though Davis was anyone important in the firm. And there was his cousin – Cynthia thought it was his cousin, because he wore a black band.'

‘What happened after the service?'

‘I don't know.'

‘I meant – to the body.'

‘Oh, I think they took it out to Golders Green to be burnt. That was up to the family.'

‘The cousin?'

‘Yes.'

‘We used to have better funerals in Africa,' said Sarah.

‘Oh well . . . other countries, other manners.'

‘Yours is supposed to be an older civilization.'

‘Yes, but old civilizations are not always famous for feeling deeply about death. We are no worse than the Romans.'

Castle finished his whisky. He said, ‘I'll go up and read to Sam for five minutes – otherwise he may think something's wrong.'

‘Swear that you won't say anything to him,' Sarah said.

‘Don't you trust me?'

‘Of course I trust you, but . . .' The ‘but' pursued him up the stairs. He had lived a long time with ‘buts' – we trust you, but . . . Daintry looking in his briefcase, the stranger at Watford, whose duty it was to make sure he had come alone to the rendezvous with Boris. Even Boris. He thought: is it possible that one day life will be as simple as childhood, that I shall have finished with buts, that I will be trusted naturally by everyone, as Sarah trusts me – and Sam?

Sam was waiting for him, his face black against the clean pillowcase. The sheets must have been changed that day, which made the contrast stronger like an advertisement for Black and White whisky. ‘How are things?' he asked because he could think of nothing else to say, but Sam didn't reply – he had his secrets too.

‘How did school go?'

‘It was all right.'

‘What lessons today?'

‘Arithmetic.'

‘How did that go?'

‘All right.'

‘What else?'

‘English compo –'

‘Composition. How was that?'

‘All right.'

Castle knew that the time had almost come when he would lose the child for ever. Each ‘all right' fell on the ear like the sound of distant explosions that were destroying the bridges between them. If he asked Sam, ‘Don't you trust me?' perhaps he would answer, ‘Yes, but . . .'

‘Shall I read to you?'

‘Yes, please.'

‘What would you like?'

‘That book about a garden.'

Castle for a moment was at a loss. He looked along the single shelf of battered volumes which were held in place by two china dogs that bore a likeness to Buller. Some of the books belonged to his own nursery days: the others had nearly all been chosen by himself, for Sarah had come late to books and her books were all adult ones. He took down a volume of verse which was the one he had guarded from his childhood. There was no tie of blood between Sam and himself, no guarantee that they would have any taste in common, but he always hoped – even a book could be a bridge. He opened the book at random, or so he believed, but a book is like a sandy path which keeps the indent of footsteps. He had read in this one to Sam several times during the last two years, but the footprints of his own childhood had dug deeper and the book opened on a poem he had never read aloud before. After a line or two he realized that he knew it almost by heart. There are verses in childhood, he thought, which shape one's life more than any of the scriptures.

‘What are borders?'

‘It's where one country ends and another begins.' It seemed, as soon as he spoke, a difficult definition, but Sam accepted it.

‘What's a sin without pardon? Are they spies?'

‘No, no, not spies. The boy in the story has been told not to go out of the garden, and . . .'

‘Who told him?'

‘His father, I suppose, or his mother.'

‘And that's a sin?'

‘This was written a long time ago. People were more strict then, and anyway it's not meant seriously.'

‘I thought murder was a sin.'

‘Yes, well, murder's wrong.'

‘Like going out of the garden?'

Castle began to regret he had chanced on that poem, that he had trodden in that one particular footprint of his own long walk. ‘Don't you want me to go on reading?' He skimmed through the lines ahead – they seemed innocuous enough.

‘Not that one. I don't understand that one.'

‘Well, which one then?'

‘There's one about a man . . .'

‘The lamplighter?'

‘No, it's not that one.'

‘What does the man do?'

‘I don't know. He's in the dark.'

‘That's not much to go by.' Castle turned back the pages, looking for a man in the dark.

‘He's riding a horse.'

‘Is it this one?'

Castle read,

‘Yes, yes, that's the one.'

‘Go on. Why do you stop?'

‘That's the one. That's the one I like best.'

‘It's a bit frightening,' Castle said.

‘That's why I like it. Does he wear a stocking mask?'

‘It doesn't say he's a robber, Sam.'

‘Then why does he go up and down outside the house? Has he a white face like you and Mr Muller?'

‘It doesn't say.'

‘I think he's black, black as my hat, black as my cat.'

‘Why?'

‘I think all the white people are afraid of him and lock their house in case he comes in with a carving knife and cuts their throats. Slowly,' he added with relish.

Sam had never looked more black, Castle thought. He put his arm round him with a gesture of protection, but he couldn't protect him from the violence and vengeance which were beginning to work in the child's heart.