In the Time of Greenbloom (24 page)

With dreadful care, with no sob or sigh, she walked over the thick carpet to the door, opened it and went out into the hall. They heard the sound of the clock from its place by the
stairs before the door closed; they heard no other sound as she passed from them and went silently up to her bedroom.

George Harkess put down his knife and fork. “You can forget all that,” he said. “You can place it with certain other incidents which have happened this evening and which you should never have witnessed.”

“You can't forget things that have happened,” said John; “not things like this, and nobody can make you. If you can't make
yourself
forget them how can you expect anyone else to stop you remembering them?”

“I'm warning you that on this occasion you
will
forget certain things.”

He got up, towering darkly over the carved back of his chair. “I think it's about time you realised, Blaydon, young as you are, that but for your presence here this situation would never have arisen. In the first place you were not wanted at Nettlebed. I have no connection with either you or your family, and had it not been for the respect and affection I owe to Victoria's mother, you would never have been invited. As it is, by your influence over the girl and your persistence in making your own arrangements, you are directly responsible for the inconvenience to which my entire household has been subjected. Therefore, you had better give me your assurance, and give it quickly, that you will say nothing to the Police about my personal relationship with Mrs Blount.”

John looked up. “What do you want me to say, sir?”

“I've already told you that you are to tell them,
if
you are asked, that on your return to the house you were under the impression that Mrs Blount and I were talking business in the study and that consequently you thought it would be impolite to disturb us.”

“Don't you think, sir, that they might decide that it was rather careless of me to waste half an hour when I was so worried, just because I thought that you and Mrs Blount were talking?”

“It's not your business to speculate about the probable or improbable decisions of the police. It's your business to do
what you're told, by
whom
you're told, like any other decent schoolboy.”

The voice stopped speaking, and in the quietness of his own mind John sensed the creation of a decision which he was powerless to alter. He had been uncertain of what he would do or say many times during that day, had been foolhardy when he decided to insist on having tea in the cave, timid when the hiker arrived for tea, and too slow to take and post the letter; but now, only a few feet away from the anger and insistence that reached him from the body of George Harkess, he was quite certain that he would give himself his own time and his own right to act as he wished over the question of the Police.

“I'm not going to have them thinking I'm a fool, sir,” he said quietly, “not for anyone. If I'm going to be a fool now, and be laughed at and lied about, I'll be a fool for ever. I'll still be a fool when I'm as old as you are, so I won't tell them a story that only a fool would tell and only a fool would believe.”

George Harkess watched him ruminatively for a moment.

“Very well then, just what
do
you propose to tell them?”

“I'm not sure. How can I be sure until I see what happens? This afternoon I was quite sure what was going to happen when we went out to the caves; and it all did happen, but other things happened as well that I had never expected; so how can I be sure what's going to happen when the Police come? When I went upstairs to the bedroom with the dogs I thought I'd find a thief or a burglar up there and that I'd been very clever to do what I did do; but when I opened the door and put on the light there was no thief and no burglar; and I wish there had been, because then whatever the dogs had done and whatever the man had done, it would have been right, and
I
would have been right. But you showed me that I was wrong; although you're a man and I'm only a boy you smashed my shoulder in and lost your temper in the bathroom; and all because I thought,
before
I found you, that you were a criminal doing something wrong in somebody
else's house. So you see I'm not going to decide for certain what I'm going to say to the Police until I know what they're going to say to
me
.”

George Harkess left his chair. He strode over to him and took him by his bruised shoulder. “I think you had better realise that you are not going to leave this room until you have told me what you are going to tell them,” he said.

“If you'll take your hand off my shoulder I'll tell you what I
might
say—but that's all.”

George Harkess grunted behind him, the hand was removed and John stood up.

“I might say that when I got in I found the house empty, that there was no sign of anybody, and that I was alone for nearly half an hour because you and Mrs Blount were out giving the dogs a run in the home-field.”

“I see. Yes, that is fairly sensible; and in any case there's no time for further discussion now; mind you stick to it.”

He stood there for a few moments longer biting his upper lip with his teeth and then he turned and walked out into the hall. Two minutes later John heard him knocking at the door of Mrs Blount's bedroom; he knocked three times and again three times but no voice answered him and at last he came heavily downstairs and going into the study closed the door behind him.

The house did not sleep that night; all the night long throughout the throng of the dark minutes and their hours it remained as restless as he was himself, the very fabric of its walls and floors creaking and stirring minutely like the joints and tissues of a person who wills sleep so intensively that in the very smallness of his movements he refuses to acknowledge his wakefulness and attention. Twice he heard footsteps on the landing outside his door, the sound of water running in the bathroom and the groaning of concealed pipes in the wall; and once, the high despairing sobs of Mrs Blount as
they reached across the landing when she opened her door to move out upon some errand of her sleeplessness.

He thought of Sergeant Sanders, of his quick questions and air of knowing just what he, John, had been going to say before he had actually said it. He had liked him; his clean blueness the fresh blood in his cheeks and the easy regard of his grey eyes. He wished that he was out there now standing somewhere sentinel in the hall or on the landing, keeping everything in order, commanding silence and sleep from the house, inspiring the running rats and mice with so much terror that they would obediently slink back to their holes in walls and wainscots.

Sergeant Sanders had been confident; and in the short time he had stayed talking to them all, his confidence had so fortified them that their suggestions of search-parties by torchlight and vague journeyings by car had begun to seem not only impracticable, but unnecessary too. Standing at his ease in front of the study mantelpiece, his shoulders braced and square against the looking-glass, he had explained to them that the police were even then converging on the area from all sides and that if Victoria and her companion were anywhere within it they would certainly be picked up by the early morning at the very latest. Then after closing his notebook and drinking a very small glass of whisky with George Harkess, he had left as suddenly and briskly as he had come.

No one, thought John, could say that Sergeant Sanders had seemed to be enjoying his enquiry. He had not smiled once with his eyes in the half-hour he had stayed, or shown any other sign of pleasure, but he had seemed to be impersonally ‘busy' about it in a manner that suggested it was not at all real to him in the sense that it was real to John. He had even felt that the very act of describing the hiker to Sergeant Sanders had made him sound progressively less real despite the fact that every particular he had given had been true. Somehow it had not been enough to say that the man had fair hair a fresh complexion and a Sunbeam car, that he had smiled often, talked with a slightly ‘brown cow' accent, and
worn a wrist-watch with a white strap. These insufficient words with which he had attempted to clothe and make real the man he had seen, in order that the Sergeant might himself see him through the borrowed senses, had seemed to stylise him into a totally different less solid and therefore less ominous person; so that by the time he had finished answering the questions he had been asked, he had begun to feel that in some extraordinary way he had cheated the Sergeant of the truth; even that he had confused him by equipping the man he was describing with some secret part of himself.

He remembered that immediately after he had finished his own interview and moved away to a more shadowy part of the study, he had tried to evade his discomfort by persuading himself that he might perhaps have imagined the whole incident, that it might like some dream by daylight have accrued from the putting together of a whole series of unrelated trifles: his jealousy over Victoria's talk with a stranger, the conversation they had shared about Blake's tiger, the lonely motor-car ascending the steep of the dale and the sense of some third invisible personage attending them during the moment outside the cave.

His confusion of mind had continued for several minutes; and it was only when Mrs Blount had been committed by the Sergeant's questions to a description of Victoria in similar terms, that he had realised with the most acute relief that the unreality had no part in the person questioned, but was something to do with Sergeant Sanders himself; for he had noticed that the moment the Sergeant was told anything, it at once became wrong in some way; not fully accurate, not enough, scarcely true. Even the words, ‘
Victoria Blount
', though they undoubtedly made up her name, sounded different after the Sergeant had repeated them, and it was perhaps for this very reason that his visit had temporarily cheered them all to such an extent that after his departure they had for a little time been able to talk normally and optimistically and had even managed to say good night quite cheerfully before making their way upstairs to bed.

But, for John, the sense of a lightening in his thoughts had been very short-lived. Like the house itself, every part of his body was restless and ill-at-ease, seeming to be possessed of a separate interest and intention, refusing to remain subservient to the singleness of his being. He could feel very soon after he had switched off the the light the singularity of his heart, the creeping mobility of his muscles and the living pain in his injured shoulder. In the infinite darkness of his head, thoughts rolled and heaved like an ocean under the night sky; and soon pictures began to spring unbidden to his mind, causing him to mutter words aloud in the darkness. Insistently, again and again, as clearly as though he were experiencing it truly for the first time, he saw Victoria's last sombre smile through the window of the car before she had been driven off into the village. The image was so real that he began to feel she was herself vitally in the room with him; even that she lay beside him in his bed trying to awaken him not from his sleep but to some dark nightmare of her own.

The conviction of her presence was so intense that he uttered hoarse and strident words which resounded coldly and continuously in the blackness about him and wrung the fingers of his clasped hands as he reproached himself for not having realised what her smile had conveyed at the moment she had given it to him. He writhed beneath the cold sheets when he remembered that there had been a moment when he might have flung open the door of the car and seized her in his arms to pull her out on to the wet road. If it were true that thoughts were swifter even than lightning, there might have been an instant between the show of her self-confidence and her passing down the village road when in some way, at the very last, even as she was smiling through the closed window, she might have anticipated these present moments of the night: her own absence from the house, the flat emptiness of the bed in the next room, the comings and goings of the others on the landing, and the movements of unseen policemen on the moorlands surrounding the house.

He longed for light, for the sounds of the morning.
Nothing, he felt, could happen during the night; there could be no good news of any sort before dawn. But then, when dogs barked, when cocks crew, and the men came into the yard, there would be something healthful to do. They would find Victoria by daylight; it was the friend of them all and would not permit her to be hidden from them any longer.

Wherever the man had taken her, whether to Scarborough, or to York as Sergeant Sanders had seemed to think, he would stand no chance of concealing her when the bright world awoke and the people moved out into the roads and streets with their eyes seeing and their ears hearing. Then, after they had brought her safely home, then would be the time to deal with the man for the terror he had caused her and the fear he had visited upon them.

Sergeant Sanders had suggested that even the car might not have been his own, that in all likelihood it would have been one which he had stolen during the morning; and for that offence alone, the man could be sent to prison for many months. He had also said that the Police had a strong suspicion that he had a ‘record' and that as soon as they were able to identify him they would be able to charge him with a number of other crimes, not so serious as the present one but quite serious enough to ensure that he would be grievously punished. The Sergeant had explained to George Harkess that criminals grew in crime and that it was the tragedy of detection that although the development of a particular tendency in one man might clearly have been foreseen, they were powerless to punish or prevent it until it was too late.

‘Too late,' he thought aloud. Could it be true if Sergeant Sanders had been with Victoria in the cave and had heard everything the man had said as he, John, had heard it, that he would have known that at some further point in time he would suddenly decide to run away with her? How could the Sergeant have known something that the man had not appeared to know himself? At the very last minute when she had snatched the letter and decided to post it herself, the man had almost shouted at him ‘It's too late, she has made up our minds for
us', or if he had not said ‘too late' in those words, he had
meant
that it was too late. This, the very last thing he had said, suggested that until that moment he had taken no final decision about stealing Victoria. If that were so, if his decision to kidnap her had appeared to
him
to come from somewhere outside himself, although to the Sergeant knowing everything it might have seemed inevitable, then perhaps everything that had happened since, everything that was happening at this moment in the moonless hours of the night, might be combining to make the man commit some further unforeseen and yet inevitable act … To the Sergeant, knowing what he did know, it would seem that there was time to prevent this act, but to the man who would not know what he was about to do until he did it, it would seem that there was no time in which to change his mind. And therefore it was not altogether true to say that anything was too late.