The Malcontents (13 page)

He was later to regard that interval with incredulity and shame. He couldn’t believe that all his caution, his concentration, had – for no reason, on that special night – evanesced. And yet he couldn’t deny his own experience: he had to recollect that, for a couple of hours in that room, he was basking on an island of peace. Later, he knew that it lasted for a couple of hours, but then he had no sense of time passing. No one had mentioned eating: some must have been in a condition like his own. Time too had its relativistic shortening. Once he looked at his watch, and noticed that it was 7.55.

Not long afterwards – he was listening to Lance, whose face was softened with Stephen’s own benignity – he heard a shout. No, not a shout, a bark of exclamation.

It came from Neil.

‘Bernie.’ That was all he said.

They looked to the end of the room.

Neil, stiff-armed, pointed to the side window. It stood wide open. That was nothing new. It had been opened long since, to waft away the smell of Lance’s reefers.

‘Bernie. He walked out.’

Neil said it without expression. For an instant, others gazed without expression at the open window. The rectangle was innocent, a curtain stirring gently in a draught of air. It was an instant of dead blank. Shock hadn’t reached them, it was the vacuum before the shock. When afterwards they tried to explain what they saw and felt, the accounts contradicted each other, but all were reconstructions after the fact. Tess believed, and held to it, that she had heard the smash on the pavement: but that was almost certainly an illusion. She was sitting near the front window, talking to Mark, some distance away, with her back towards where Bernard had been sitting and nothing to draw her attention. Neil was close to him. His story, from which he never departed, was that he watched Bernard get up, stand quite straight, take two steps and then another over the sill and through the window. Others began to think that they had seen the same sight, but that might have been in retrospect.

Neil was the first to act. ‘Come on,’ he said, and vanished out of the room. Following him, from the top of the stairs Stephen heard the footsteps clattering below. It was some distance, perhaps a hundred yards, round the front of the building, along the New Walk, down the side street under the window. Along that street there was no one in sight, but only, near a lamp standard, a heap on the stone flags.

Neil was there first, and had already turned away when Stephen joined him.

‘I think he’s had it,’ said Neil.

There was no inflection in his voice: and, as he told Stephen that he would ring the ambulance, he might have been making efficient arrangements with a stranger. His quick footsteps departed in the direction of the apartment, and Stephen knelt down beside the body.

He had not seen a corpse before (he had been born at a time curiously sheltered from the sight of death), nor a man dying. He hadn’t seen wounds.

Bernard’s right shoulder was twisted under him, but his face was looking upwards. In the lamplight the skin shone a livid blue. His eyes were open, pupils dilated: but Stephen was looking at the black courses, three or four almost in parallel, running from the side of his head down to his temple and cheek. From two of these a flocculent mass had issued, and could, like ectoplasm, still be seen ballooning out: Stephen thought of it as white, for he knew that was the colour of brain tissue, but on a colour film, taken under the lamp, it would have been nearer green. There was a lake of blood percolating over the flagstones, more on his clothes, missing his coat, darkening his trouser legs below the knees. As Stephen stood there, he was, without being conscious of it, shifting his feet to avoid two disjected pools. There was the sweet thick smell of blood.

Afterwards Neil said that, when he first arrived, he had heard the sound of quick pulsing breaths. Stephen heard nothing. He felt nothing, not pity or remorse or fright (all of that came later), except the hollowness of not knowing what to do. Perhaps he felt how un-human death could look.

Mark and Tess had come beside him. Tess gazed down at Bernard, and said: ‘We mustn’t move him.’

The three of them stood silent. Very soon, from the other side of the quiet street, two or three passers-by stopped and crossed over. ‘What’s happened? What’s happened?’ said someone in an officious, kind, inquisitive tone.

‘He fell out of a window,’ Mark replied.

‘Poor chap.’ Their interlocutor, who was wearing a bowler hat and carrying a briefcase, made his own inspection and then faced them with a brisk glance: ‘You must send for an ambulance.’ ‘That’s been looked after,’ Stephen said. All this sounded a long distance away.

‘In that case,’ said the bowler-hatted man, ‘I’d better go and find a policeman.’ He jogged off towards the main road – from which, only a minute or two later, blue light flashing, siren hooting, the ambulance arrived. Neil had returned by now, and two ambulance men were asking the same question as the passers-by, and getting the same flat reply.

As the two men, quick-handed, laid Bernard on a stretcher, Tess asked: ‘Is he dead?’

‘Can’t tell you, miss. They’ll let you know about him from the hospital.’

Stephen had written down his own name, Bernard’s, and the telephone number of Lance’s flat (that was the first time that any of them thought of how to tell Bernard’s parents), but before the ambulance drove away a policeman half ran down the road, the organizing man behind him.

The policeman had some whispered words with one of the ambulance men. As the flashing and hooting started again, and the vehicle swirled round the corner, the policeman asked Stephen whether he knew Bernard.

Hearing the reply (or really the tone which Stephen, in trouble, couldn’t subdue) the policeman changed his manner.

‘I’m afraid it looks bad for him, sir.’

The policeman, whose name was Shipman, was a local lad, quite young, fresh-skinned. His questions were unassertive. Where had he fallen from, did they know? Who lived there? Had anyone seen him fall? It was Stephen who told him that they had been in the room themselves.

‘I see,’ said Shipman. Tentatively, soft-voiced, he thought they had better go up there again: he’d have to take statements, of course they knew that.

On the way upstairs, Shipman asked Stephen: ‘What were you all doing there, sir?’

‘Just a party.’

A very small party, Stephen added.

‘A bit of drinking, was there?’

‘A bit.’ Stephen recollected that his breath must be obvious enough. ‘I’ve had three whiskies myself. Maybe four.’

‘That’s all right, that’s all right.’

Stephen was utterly alert, not numb but chilled, chilled into control, as much by fear as shock. Fear, purely selfish fear, or rather a set of fears, one replacing another. What would this man notice? Would Lance have had the wit to get his drugs away? What state would they be in?

As soon as they entered the sitting-room, light brilliant after the dark landing, cold air blew in their faces. The side window, to which Stephen’s eyes were compelled, had been left open, untouched: but so were the other windows open, over-bracingly for a January night. Lance at least had been active. He was standing up, explaining hospitably that there had been too much of a fug: his speech was connected, the synapses were working, he was cool, serious, not too facile. As for Emma, her head lay back in the armchair, but she gave a half-smile which might have meant distress.

Shipman took off his helmet, and appeared younger than before, hair as fair as Mark’s, nearly as low on his neck, and trimmed in the same style. He was shown the window, and Neil began to retell how he had seen Bernard walk across towards it and then out–

‘I’d better talk to you one at a time, if you don’t mind.’

Pulling out a notebook, he sat with Neil in the corner, asked low-voiced questions in his soft midland accent, and wrote as carefully as, much more slowly than, Bernard had written the minutes two and a half hours before.

While he was compiling Neil’s statement, the telephone rang. Lance answered it, and called to Stephen. ‘It’s the hospital. They want you.’

A womans voice said: ‘It’s about Mr Kelshall. The ambulance gave us your name. DOA. Dead on arrival, I’m afraid.’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s a police officer here. He’ll want–’

‘We have one here already.’

‘Oh. Will you put him on?’

As Shipman spoke, inaudibly to the rest of them, Stephen said: ‘He’s dead.’

‘We knew that,’ said Neil.

‘Yes, we knew that.’

Not shifting her head, Emma said: ‘It’s a shame.’

So far, they had said nothing to each other. They had asked no questions, those who had stood by the body in the road, and no one had asked questions in this room. Some of them, coming out of shock as though it was an anaesthetic, watched each other to identify (it brought back some feeling) the lineaments of their own fear. They watched the young constable, now sitting with Lance at the coffee table, close by the still open window.

In a short time – Lance looked casual, but wasn’t spreading himself on lawyer-like diversions – Stephen had replaced him at the table. It all seemed so unclimactic, so simple. Once or twice Shipman gazed at him, as though in puzzlement, with light-blue Nordic eyes. In holidays years before, Stephen had played village cricket in the county with boys who looked like this.

Bernard’s name, his address, Shipman had written down already. Stephen didn’t know his date of birth; he wasn’t much over twenty.

‘Did you see him go out, sir?’

‘No.’ Stephen pointed out where he had been sitting; he had been in conversation, and hadn’t noticed what Bernard was doing, for some time past.

‘What was the first you heard of it then?’

‘There was some sort of noise. I think it came from Neil St John.’

Shipman wrote carefully away.

‘Then you went down into the street, did you?’

All simple, like all actions.

More writing: Shipman stared down at his composition.

‘Should you say that he had anything on his mind?’

Suddenly a jangle of suspicions, fear renewed, fear breaking out in a new place.

‘Do you mean, to make him kill himself?’

It was a half-evasive answer, but Stephen’s reactions were quick, it would have taken an observant man to pick out the change in tone.

‘Well, he threw himself out of this window, didn’t he, so I’m told?’

‘Did he?’

It wasn’t precisely what Stephen had been told.

‘You don’t believe he meant to do away with himself, sir?’

‘I think it’s very unlikely.’

That was an honest answer. It might have been wiser, he thought later, to have been less positive: the trouble was, in the shock, in the presence of the fact, nothing else had entered his mind. He hadn’t wondered about suicide, or any other motive behind the fact. To an extent, his caution had returned, enough to be anxious about what a policeman might suspect in Lance’s flat. But, for the first time since Saturday night, his intelligence hadn’t been working. He might have comforted himself that he was more sensitive than most to the sight of death: but in fact it was a source of self-reproach for a long time after.

‘That’s as maybe,’ said Shipman, a frowning line between his eyes. After a pause, he said: ‘Had he been drinking, did you notice?’

‘I saw him with a glass of beer. He didn’t drink, less than anyone here.’

Shipman, writing, muttered: ‘They’ll find out what was inside him. Well, sir,’ he said to Stephen, ‘I think that’s all for the time being.’ He asked for Stephen’s address. ‘You’ll be at home until the inquest, will you?’

‘When will it be?’

‘Two or three days after, as a rule, when it’s an accident.’

Stephen was getting up, beckoning to Tess, as Shipman said: ‘Oh, there’s the matter of his family.’

Mark, as well as Tess, was coming near. Glances met.

‘Yes,’ said Tess. ‘Someone’s got to tell them.’

‘We can do it for you, if you like,’ said the policeman.

For an instant, Stephen was craving to agree. Tess was watching him, her face frigid with concern.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve met them. I’d better do it myself.’

‘Shall I come with you?’ cried Tess.

‘I’d better do it myself.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Shipman. ‘You can go as soon as you want.’ He added, in an off-hand fashion. ‘A colleague of mine will be coming along here from the station. We don’t want to keep anyone too long.’

Once in the street outside, Stephen for the first time felt active fear (what was this going to mean?), and an edge of remorse.

Then he had another feeling, less selfish than either the fear or the remorse, but just as much like a physical sickness, oppressive, emptying him inside: so heavy, that he would have chosen to have the fear back instead. Rear lights of cars glowing and cheerful down the slope to the gaol: against the sky, the bright circle of the fire-station clock. The heaviness wouldn’t leave him, now it was all he felt. Just as he had never seen a dead body before that night, he had never seen others grieving over death. Now he had to bring the grief with him. He would have liked to turn back and ask the police to go instead. He felt unavailing, impotent. As he walked on, down by the drill hall, his legs dragged as though gravity had doubled itself, or as though this was his first outing after weeks in bed.

There was no escape. Light shone through a chink at the side of the street door. They were at home. He made himself press the bell.

He heard steps along the little hall, and, as the door opened, music from the back of the house. They must have been looking at TV in the kitchen. Mrs Kelshall stood gazing up at him, with a smile of welcome.

‘Good evening, good evening, Mr Freer. Please come in.’

‘It’s terrible. Bernard has been killed.’

The words had been prepared, he had to get them out: there was no way of breaking this news. His voice sounded harsh, almost angry. For an instant the smile remained, not yet wiped out, on Mrs Kelshall’s face.

‘Please come in,’ she said.

She called out ‘Hyman’, and opened the door of the front room, as tidy as on the evening before, but, with no fire lit, smelling dankly cold. Mr Kelshall followed them, pulling his jacket over his shirtsleeves. Without a word, his wife inclined her head towards Stephen. He said, this time quietly, to Mr Kelshall: ‘Bernard has been killed. In the silence, he went on: ‘Nothing I can say is any good. I’m dreadfully sorry for you both.’