The Suburbs of Hell (8 page)

‘My wife,’ said the Commander, ‘once had a Mrs Mop who said about some woman they both knew: “Yes, we’re friends, but not
nice
friends.” I should say that a lot of Frank De Vere’s friends have made that discovery. As a matter of fact, I should have expected Sam to be busier than usual, in the circumstances. I don’t think there’ll be so many pedestrians tonight wending their way home to New Tornwich after Last Orders.’

‘The pubs are very quiet,’ Taffy observed. ‘The family men are doing their duty. As this one should be,’ he went on, raising himself on the arms of his chair. ‘Oliver, this has been a very pleasant hour or so. We must foregather again.’

‘I do hope so,’ said the Commander, touched by the rare sound of his Christian name.

‘Sam,’ Taffy continued, on his feet, ‘nice to see you with a little leisure for once.’

‘Never for long,’ Sam said, pausing on his way towards the door. His high-boned face with the everted African lips was grave. ‘I had something to do for a friend, like. Evenin, Commander; quiet old night.’

‘Indeed,’ the Commander murmured, covertly studying his face. Sam, he decided, was not ill at ease, or different in his manner. What he was was unhappy.

Taffy was struggling into his coat. ‘Wait for me, Sam. I see you’re parked beside me. Oliver—till the next time.’

‘Night, Commander,’ said Sam.

‘Good night,’ the Commander said, to their backs making for the quayside door, and turned in his chair to look through the window. He watched them cross the road and pause beside their cars at the quay’s edge, spinning out some polite exchange which Sam evidently found too long, for he hunched himself against the cold and dug his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

The oppressive sense of another body looming over him brought the Commander’s attention back into the room, and he turned his head and looked up into the face of Frank De Vere, also intent on the two figures under the lights above the water. When De Vere looked back at him he saw that the man was drunk, which had the effect of making his exceedingly blue eyes look rather crazy.

The Commander said, not cordially: ‘Evening, ah—Frank.’

‘Snooping,’ Frank said to himself.

‘Snooping?’ the Commander repeated. ‘Who? Oh, Taffy, do you mean. Good heavens, no. He’s the right sort, Taffy.’

Frank did not answer, but folded his arms and continued to stare through the window.

‘Everyone’s snooping,’ he said after a while. ‘Do you see, behind me, a rather squat-looking bloke at the bar? Scotland Yard, I believe. And our brave boys of the Press, risking their lives for us yet again. Snooping arseholes.’

The two cars backed out and drove away, and Frank went on staring at nothing.

‘Are you all right?’ the Commander enquired. ‘You look a bit keyed up, if I may say so.’

With a sudden movement Frank dropped into Taffy’s vacated chair. Putting his elbows on the table, and fixing the Commander with his crazy eyes, he said after a moment: ‘Yes. Yes, I’m tensed up.’

‘I suppose everybody is.’

‘My wife is, that’s for sure. That’s why Sam was here. He brought young Donna, who I think is his girl, but maybe not, he brought her to sit with my wife this evening. Because she’s in quite a state—my wife, I mean. I’ve told a lie and made a joke of it, but she’s not quite sure, I think.’

The Commander, not being able to think of a thing to say, only gazed at him mildly.

‘I’ve got to get him first,’ Frank said, drunkenly gazing back. ‘Short and sweet—snicker snack—and it’s over.’

‘Am I following you, I wonder?’ the Commander mused. ‘Are you talking about vigilantes, or something of that sort?’

‘Something like that,’ Frank agreed. ‘I’m talking about one vigilante: me. Because he’s threatened my life. Mine, or my wife’s; probably both. So I shall have to get there first, wouldn’t you say?’

‘De Vere, old chap,’ said the Commander, ‘you’re not making yourself terribly clear, I’m afraid. I shouldn’t, myself, have any scruples at all about shooting down this man like a mad dog—that
is
what you’re talking about?—but one must first know who he is.’

Frank De Vere laced his fingers over his chest, still intently searching the Commander’s eyes. ‘I do know,’ he said. ‘I know him, and I know the weapon. What do you say to that?’

‘I say,’ said the Commander hesitantly, ‘as anyone would, I say that if you’re of the same opinion in the morning, you must go to the police immediately.’

‘Oh, shit,’ Frank muttered. He dropped his arms from the table and got up. ‘Good night, Commander. Thank you for your advice. Time I wasn’t here.’

The Commander watched him cross the room unsteadily and go out by a side door. ‘Fella’s potty,’ he remarked to himself. He picked up his glass, saw it was empty, and decided to have a last double whisky; because old dogs, he was discovering, liked their sleep.

The Jew of Malta

I hear the door of the Speedwell bang, and soon afterwards he comes into my line of vision. A slight form, erect, but a little bowed in the shoulders, crossing the road with a measured tread towards the quay’s edge, where he halts, under the pinkish-orange lights, and stands looking out over the water.

The water is broad, black, glossy. The tide is coming in. The two wide rivers drive, northwards and westwards, deep into the dark land, its rustling unleaved woods, its hibernating fields.

Again and again one gull comes with a leaflike fall into the light, is for a moment the ghost of a bird, then is caught back into the night.

He stands beneath the lamps, looking out, beyond their influence, to the clear black sky with frosty stars. Below and beyond him the red and white lights of a pilot launch rock a little on the swell.

He is always, now, in a ferment of memories. Other climates, other seas. A trick of light will bring back some place half a world away, and changed utterly by years, passed with no record except in his mind.

The stick on which he leans was given him by his wife when he came back to her finally, to stay forever. The gift said to him that he was old, with nothing before him but a little daily walking for his health. She suggested a dog, and he snapped at her. They found that they had never known each other well.

Now he carries the stick always; it is a reproach. He would like to explain to her that his irritations were with himself and with time. He remembers, from the long months of her helplessness after the first stroke, moments of impatience, perhaps understood by her, which he would like to cancel out, undo.

His profile is still that of the youth, more youthful than his years, who married her. A short straight nose, a chin just firm enough, a pink cheek. His profile, in the sights, is very Anglo-Saxon.

He hears nothing, will hear nothing ever. His arms fly up, his body twists. The stick clatters on to concrete as he disappears.

From below where he was standing a splash comes back. On the pilot launch, out of my line of sight, a man cries out.

Soon it snowed: fat heavy flakes drifting past Linda De Vere’s window as she lay in bed by daylight, past the window of the eyrie in Harry Ufford’s house where Dave Stutton sat listening to loud music, over the high irregular roofs of the old town. On some days the north-easterly howled down the tunnels of the streets, searching out every chink in the close-packed houses. On others the sky was clear, the light was desert-sharp, the flat sea looked like grey silk, and lethal. On a night of rockets and exploding maroons two ships collided a mile offshore, and half a dozen people died within minutes of touching the water. The national newspapers instantly became friendly, and heaped praise on the pilots and lifeboatmen of the notorious town.

A few days after the death of Commander Pryke the idea was floated that all the males of Old and New Tornwich above the age of sixteen should be fingerprinted, with their consent. A solicitor and a schoolteacher worried in the
Tornwich & Stourford Packet
about civil rights, and Harry Ufford wrote the
Packet
a confusing letter arguing that the prints of all members of the professional classes ought to be in the records anyway. An edited but still puzzling version appeared in print, and he discussed it with Arthur in the deserted bar of the New Moon.

‘Well, I can’t make head or tail of it,’ said Arthur, showing his usual distaste for the subject. ‘From what I hear poor old Prykey was hit by a sniper, from somewhere near the telephone box. So what fingerprints could they have?’

‘P’rhaps he was
in
the box,’ Harry suggested. ‘P’rhaps they found one there.’

‘Well, good luck to them,’ Arthur said; ‘they’ll need it. The owners of a lot of the prints they’ll find there are in Turku and Antwerp and San Sebastian and even bloody Leningrad and Lagos now.’

‘If it’s not that,’ Harry said, ‘then they’ve found something in one of the other places. They int all that stoopid, Arthur. I read a lot of books about how they work in this sort of case.’

‘You and all the rest of the ghouls who drink here,’ said Arthur. ‘Kinky, I call it.’

‘Well, we int ezzackly crowded out with ghouls,’ said Harry, ‘are we? I mean, I can still sort of move my elbows, like, tonight.’

‘You know what it is?’ said Arthur. ‘It’s that outside Gents of mine. Nobody dares risk a pee in case he gets shot. I’ll let you use the Ladies, if you need it. Not many ladies get in here lately.’

‘I int scared of your bog,’ Harry said. ‘Glad I int a milkman, though. They’re the jumpiest boys outside Ulster these dark mornins.’

‘It’ll all blow over,’ Arthur said. ‘I’d put a tenner on that. What is it—two weeks since the Commander? Poor old boy. He was the same age as me. Well, he had no one to leave behind, and I suppose that’s a sort of a mercy. How’s that young brother of Paul’s? I haven’t seen him since they used to get in here sometimes of a weekend.’

‘I’ve seen him better,’ Harry said. ‘Things catch up with you, know what I mean? It’s sort of—I dunno, weird, and ’
orrible
—that the three what was picked out was
that
three. You’d think that whoever it is was tryin to kill Greg too, tryin to sort of kill him inside, like.’

‘Three in a cluster,’ Arthur said, ‘then a fortnight with nothing. I think it’s over, Harry. I don’t think I’m going to have to bring my Gents indoors. A nine days’ wonder, which will never be solved, I bet.’

Harry was looking moody. ‘But that’s got to be,’ he said. ‘We can’t live with that unsolved. Christ, Arthur, you’re a proper cheerer-upper, you are. Now you’ve got me thinkin about that lad, that young Greg. He’s—’ Harry said, and paused, brow ridged with searching for the right word, ‘he’s wiped out, like, know what I mean?’

Greg Ramsey seldom went upstairs in his brother’s house, and never into the room in which his brother died. Now and again, more and more rarely, the telephone would ring in that room, behind the closed door, but he made no move to answer it. He had arrived in Tornwich the last time with most of his possessions in his car, and before long had turned the downstairs sitting-room into an average student bedsit, where he spent most of his days listening to records or playing his guitar, or lying in his sleeping-bag with a book in his hand.

The house was cold, but he did nothing about that except to switch on an electric fire. The meals he cooked for himself were usually vegetarian, and most often of baked beans. Washing-up piled in the shining new kitchen, which gradually acquired a greasy patina and a sour smell. One night, lying sleepless, he heard one of the taps dripping into the filled sink, and because he liked the sound in the empty house he set it dripping every night before he went to bed. Later he bought from a nearby antique shop a Victorian cottage clock with a loud tick and chime, and placed it in the house so that the sounds of clock and water-drip came to him at the same volume as he lay in the dark.

He had not shaved since the day of his brother’s funeral, and rather slowly grew a sparse blondish beard. His clothes were washed, not very often, in the bath. After a while it became apparent that he need not leave the house except for a quarter of an hour once a week to buy food.

He was scrupulous in his attention to chains and bolts and window-catches. It was generally accepted that his brother’s murderer had entered the house by the unlocked back door, which opened on a small blind yard, after climbing the high wall dividing that from the yard of an empty house. The two bolts on the back door were always shot home.

The cellar door, which opened outwards, he kept bolted at first, but later he nailed it up with two lengths of timber, and after that lay easier at nights, listening to his tap and his clock.

He became increasingly disturbed about the postman, and formed the habit of always waking before he came. It worried him that this stranger could intrude objects, could even perhaps intrude his hand or arm, out of the world into his private space. Of all threats in the house, the letterbox threatened most. But letters for his brother continued to invade, and he piled them on the dining-room table for someone to attend to some day. Often he had strange suspicions, and would stand staring at some object which he thought had been displaced by another hand. From the dining-room he could occasionally glimpse strangers moving about behind the windows of the late Commander Pryke.

He heard from Harry that the Commander’s house was soon to be for sale. The visits of Harry were no distress to him, but an abiding difficulty, because he could no longer find the things to say that people said to one another. Harry wanted to take him out of himself, which meant to a pub, and he invented a recent history of hepatitis with no attempt to be credible. Harry was insistent that he should see people of his own age, and brought him as visitors Dave Stutton, who sat speechless and grinning in an agony of awkwardness, and a girl called Donna, who said things like: ‘Pudden?’ and ‘You what?’ but looked threateningly ironical and intelligent.