Perfect Gallows (30 page)

The woodland clattered with birdsong. He took deep, deliberate breaths of the dewy air, feeling marvellously alive, free, uplifted. The black, cold well of terror at his centre was gone, drained clean away, and in the space where it had been was thrilling hope. No, more than hope, certainty, foreknowledge of a life of glory. By his own powers he had wrought the change, he and Samuel, sweeping them all up—Hazel, Jean, Peter and the others, drawing out of them energies they never knew were there, so that the impossible audience was stilled and swept up too. And Barrie Oakley had been there to see, and had understood what had happened. Halfway up the valley an engine started, then another and another, as the dawn convoy readied itself to carry its seven hundred GIs away to the war.

Startled by the squeak of the gate rabbits flickered back into the wood as he came out into the field. The shadows of the stooks lay long in the barely risen sun, making a striped pattern across the silvery stubble. The harvest had kept going last evening after he'd left and the barley was reaped right up to the dovecote, which now stood naked apart from a fringe of nettles round its foot. Its shadow ran all the way to the camp fence.

There were still about ten minutes before Jean would show up, he guessed. He'd come early, on purpose, so that she shouldn't have the slight advantage of having been kept waiting. Not that it made any difference. The whole thing was her fault, that afternoon at the chalk-pit. She'd known his resistance was at its lowest. She kept saying how well she knew him … well, in that case she'd know he wasn't going to marry her. Money? Cousin Brown would stump up—she'd have friends too, actresses who'd got into the same sort of mess and could tell Jean who to go to … Anything, provided it was tidied and done with.

A pigeon was cooing in the further wood and a couple of doves were out on the sills of the flight-holes, muttering in their deeper, bubbling note. Now the noise of engines from the camp strengthened as the first lorries started grinding across the valley, parallel to his path but in the opposite direction. The symmetry prickled his skin. Seven hundred men going one way. He, alone, the other. Tomorrow they'd be in France. By next week the chosen ones—you, and you, and you—would be dead. They would die with their own memories, which made them what they were—childhood in a prairie town, or a particular girl, or some quarrel or moment of shame, some drunken night—but in one or two misting minds a paved stage which was supposed to be an island, people in fancy clothes who were supposed to be courtiers and sailors, a magician who for two hours had made those suppositions solid. A memory to die with.

He had fitted the big iron key into the lock before he noticed the splinters on the jamb. An instant later he felt the slight give in the door itself and heard the scrape on the threshold stone as he pushed it further. The metal block into which the lock-tongue slotted had been wrenched loose, screws and all. The door had been forced.

Poachers after dove-meat? GIs from the camp? Lovers desperate for a place—but the nights had been fine and warm and the woods were private enough. He tiptoed up the narrow spiral stair.

April 1986

H
ow did it go?”

“Very well. Benny sends his love.”

“Really well? You weren't …”

“Apparently not, judging by the fact that two of the audience screamed just after Polly's exit. How's the hand?”

“It hurts when I think about it. I'm not really interested in them. I want to know about you. Were you all right?”

“I'd like some hot milk with rum in it. Give yourself something. We're not going to bed for a bit.”

“It's half past two.”

“I know.”

“All right. You'd better come and get it. I might spill with a tray.”

He fidgeted while he waited for her call, interrupted the flow of the water-clock, fingered about among her collection of treen, made adjustments to the fire. At the sound of her voice he crossed rapidly to the kitchen but slowed his pace at the door. He came back behind her, carrying both mugs which he put on the table by the sofa. He adjusted the table, then finally settled with her into their tableau with himself propped against the wing of the sofa and her nestling between him and the back. He lifted her mug to her left hand and tasted his own.

“Not enough rum. Don't move. It's probably just as well. Now, listen. Driving up this afternoon I came to the conclusion that I was going to have to break it off with you. By the time I was dressing it had become a definite decision. It is not, as you are aware, the first time I have broken off a relationship such as ours. Usually I have enjoyed the process, or at least experimented with it, arranging for it to happen in ways that might be useful to me. Not this time.”

He paused and drank, studying her over the rim of his mug. Though her face was smooth with youth it was so structured—small snub nose, mobile mouth, too-round eyes—that it implied the sad and puzzled wrinkles you see in monkeys. Time would bring them. She was watching him dry-eyed but her tension showed in the hardening of the mouth-muscles.

“I was trying to remember when you stopped calling me Adrian,” he said.

“After your birthday party.”

“How do you know so precisely? Somebody … Priscilla?”

“She's one of the haunters, isn't she?”

“Uh?”

“Before me.”

“I doubt if she'll haunt you in the kitchen. She never set foot there. Bitch. Did she tell you it wasn't my real birthday?”

“Wasn't it? August the twenty-fifth?”

“It is the birthday of Adrian Waring. Let us go back to your calling me by the ambiguous initial.”

“I saw she was trying to stir things up so I only did it a little at first. I sort of guessed you mightn't like it if I actually asked. I'll stop if … It's too late, isn't it?”

“Was it a deliberate choice on your part, to cover both names?”

“It just felt more comfortable.”

“Because it covered both names?”

“I suppose so.”

He put his mug down and lifted her bandaged hand on to his lap, meditatively fingering the criss-cross folds.

“You seem incapable of the saving lie,” he said.

“Of course not! I'm a terrible liar! You know that!”

“Not this time.”

“I'm sorry … darling Adrian … oh dear …”

“There is an important scene in
Nada
in which the narrator has to convince Chaka that he is telling the truth. Chaka is an appalling monster, prepared to sacrifice whole tribes, whole regiments, to his egotism. One of his decrees is that no son of his may live, but the narrator has rescued a baby boy, who becomes the hero of the story. Chaka suspects this to be the case, and makes the narrator hold his hand in the fire while he swears that it is not. He does so, saving his own life and the child's at the cost of a permanently withered hand.”

“That's quite different. I didn't even think. Mine's going to be well in a week, Fritz says.”

“Besides, the man was lying all along. You know, I do not think I am quite the monster Chaka was.”

“Of course not!”

“Certainly what appears to be my egotism is considerable. Equally certainly I have caused sacrifices to be made. People have suffered, because I needed them to. You will have met people who think that I have let them down badly, or deliberately betrayed them.”

“I never listen.”

“Much of it is true. I have more than once prevented actors who thought me their friend from getting parts they desperately wanted. Outside the profession I have exploited whoever I needed to and refused to be exploited in return. In my own way I have been as ruthless as Chaka. The difference is that I have been equally ruthless with myself. Nothing and nobody, myself included, matters, compared to the performance. That is the only thing that counts.”

“You don't have to tell me. I'll go whenever you want.”

“An analyst, depending on his creed, might trace my behaviour to my relationship with my mother, or my lack of stature, or whatever. My own rationale has been that I must have no impediments to my career, no ties of duty, friendship, affection, need. I must slide through the seas with a clean keel. But privately I have been aware that there is more to it than that.

“There has been another kind of sacrifice—or rather, such events, in addition to the hackneyed sense in which I have been speaking of sacrifice, have sometimes also been sacrifices in the original meaning of that word, magical acts which endow the operator with powers not his own. To that extent I am like Chaka, whose authority was fed on the deaths of his victims. Of course I do not believe in powers out there, invisible forces, angelic or demonic, that can be summoned by word and ritual to do my bidding. Despite that what seems to happen can most truthfully be described in terms of magic. The spirit I conjure is mine, the deeps from which I call it forth are me. Perhaps all that is taking place, physically, is the transfer of a few molecules across a millimetre of my brain, but when that has happened the powers are there. The audience respond. They know.”

“Magic does sometimes work.”

“I can remember the place and hour at which I first half-knowingly performed the ritual. Dusk. A lane in Hampshire, under beech trees. We waited, leaning on our bicycles, to allow a convoy of American army lorries turn in to the driveway. I let the girl understand that our affair was over. Five weeks ago I received a letter from her daughter—our daughter, though we did not at the time realize that she was pregnant—saying that she had recently died of a brain haemorrhage. The girl had made no attempt to get in touch with me in the intervening years, though I learnt from other sources that she had refused an abortion and insisted on keeping the child. She had married and had more children, and as far as I am aware had led a reasonably contented life—she certainly had it in her to do so. Despite that my daughter's letter was extremely bitter, rancorous, an unhealed suppuration. It did not touch me at all. I felt no guilt. Instead, I imagined myself free-wheeling down the drive behind the last lorry, beginning to sense that something new and important had happened, a reinforcement of my powers, somehow connected with breaking off the affair. Deliberately, to emphasize my own confidence in that still being the case, I chose to take you to a sale at the house where all this happened. I wanted to prove to myself my own right to have behaved as I had.”

“Won't she tell Hickey or someone? The daughter, I mean?”

“I think it quite likely. My public credit may suffer a little, but my private accounts will be in the black. The episode was necessary—in a certain sense crucial. Do you understand?”

“Sort of.”

“Such sacrifices have occurred a number of times since then, not always or only concerned with the women I have lived with. To be merely bored with a companion is not enough. There must be a genuine sense of giving something up, of moving on, of loss. I should certainly feel that at your departure.”

“Me too.”

“Well, that's what I decided must now happen. I went on tonight with my mind made up. The house was full, the performance went well, everybody was very kind, Benny enthusiastic as only he knows how, it is clear that I can make my own terms for Broadway—but I knew from the first scene that it would not do. I felt no relief, no cleansing of my keel, only loss. All I had done to make the performance work was to draw on my reserves. This has never happened before.”

He paused but she said nothing, waiting, sucking repetitively at her lower lip.

“What happened last night was a magical act. Not on my part, but on yours.”

“It wasn't anything. I was just stupid. Don't let's talk about it. I feel so ashamed.”

“You have altered the rules. The old rites have lost their force, and I must attempt new ones. We will therefore proceed to summon the dead.”

“You're acting.”

“It is my only means of telling the truth, the embodiment of an inward apprehension in visible form. My name is Adrian Waring. That is who I am. I took the name by deed poll when I came out of the army in 1947. Before that there was a boy and a young man called Andrew Wragge. He died, as he had always foreseen he would, during the war, not instantly from a bullet or shell, but over a period. I remember the time and place at which that death began, standing behind a yew hedge, turning away from an old man who was pleading to be heard. Now I am going to bring him back to life. That is to say I am going to attempt to explain how and why he chose to make that particular betrayal, inevitable in its way, but still the one sacrifice I seem never to have convinced myself was acceptable. It will take some time.”

“As I ran down the dovecote stair my thoughts were wholly of myself. I could get rid of Jean for the moment by telling her what I had found—unless she wanted it to be known that we had arranged the meeting she would have to leave the scene at once. I could be as brusque as I chose. There would be no more performances, so there was no longer any need for a happy Miranda. Are you still awake?”

“Course I am, but I do think you ought to stop. You don't want to croak tonight.”

“The voice will stand it. Much more important to me than Jean was that I must reduce my own role as a witness as far as I could, so as not to delay my call-up or in any other way disrupt the arrangement Barrie Oakley had said he would make. All I would admit to was going out for an early stroll, noticing the forced door and finding the body. Jean in fact insisted on seeing for herself—she suspected me of trying some kind of trick—but having done so she left. I ran up to the house, woke my Cousin Elspeth and told her what I had found. But even before I spoke to her I had begun to be aware that if I had listened to what Samuel had been trying to tell me the night before he would still be alive. I worked out most of the details over the next few days, but I still said nothing, and when it came to the inquest, as I told you, I maintained my silence. Charles gave evidence that he had dismissed Samuel for gross impertinence while they were dressing for the play; Mrs Mkele said that he had been very depressed since his old master's death and was not asked to say why. Perhaps she too chose not to rock the boat. At any rate, the motive for suicide must have appeared more than adequate.”

“Poor old man. But it's a long time ago. You couldn't've done anything, could you?”

“I could have listened. I had promised to do so.”

“I meant after. He was dead. Telling people wouldn't …”

“That is the rational response. You might also say that I could not have known that my refusal to hear what Samuel was trying to tell me would lead to his death. Rationally, that is true. But we are not dealing in rationalities. It is not my refusal which, in your phrase, has begun to haunt me. It is the manner of my refusal. I killed him with the same voice as that with which I killed my uncle, my great-grandfather. I should have spoken to him in my own voice. He would have understood.”

He fell silent. The fire was almost out and had ceased its murmur. The faint ripple of the water-clock was the only sound until, somewhere outside, a blackbird piped up, anticipating day.

“Are you still awake?” he said again.

“I'm thinking. It wasn't the Americans. Who killed him, I mean. If it was them, you wouldn't've felt …”

“Yes. It may be morally absurd, but that is so. My actions and motives would have been no different, but my refusal to listen to Samuel would no longer have been a link in the chain of events that led to his death.”

He paused again. This time, for once, it was she who took the initiative.

“You'd better tell me or you won't get to sleep.”

“Yes, I suppose so. I feel extremely reluctant. Well, you remember that I told Trinder about the Wragge fortune and the missing heir? He already had dealings with Stephens, and must have told him. Stephens took advantage of the tours of the house to photograph the family portrait, which showed Charles as a young man. With that to go on—Trinder had theatrical connections—they were able to find an actor of the right build to impersonate Charles, and by the device of having him lose his memory they avoided the pitfalls such as the Tichborne claimant, for instance, encountered. Thanks to May's enthusiastic reception he was provisionally accepted by the family. This may seem surprising, but he did in fact put on a very good show. Since Sir Arnold refused to give an opinion the one active objector was Samuel, so in an effort to prevent him making his own inquiries Stephens pretended to take my side and send a private detective to check on the story. I don't imagine the man ever left the camp.

“Then Sir Arnold's condition took a turn for the worse. He accepted at last that he was dying and sent for his lawyer so as to change his will and leave his estate to me. Samuel made the arrangements but did not know what the changes were to be. Hoping to influence the decision he must have asked Stephens whether there was any last-minute news from the detective, telling him that it was urgent, perhaps even why. At any rate Stephens and Trinder attempted to bolster Charles's story by providing a forged newspaper cutting which appeared to verify an important detail. Newspapers are printed on both sides, of course, so they used an old photograph of a flower show on the back. Trinder's tame printer may have had it lying around his works, or he may have worked part-time for a local paper. It was the best they could do. They had very little time, so little that Trinder took the risk of getting me to bring the cutting out that week-end.