The Confidential Agent (22 page)

It was a fantastic country, D. thought. Civil war provided nothing so fantastic as peace. In war life became simple – you didn't worry about sex or international languages or even getting on: you worried about the next meal and cover from high explosives. Fortescue said, ‘Wouldn't he feel better if – well – you know – if he brought it up?'

‘Oh no,' Rose said, ‘he's better as he is – just lying quiet.'

‘Of course,' he said meekly, ‘I don't know much about these things. Parties, I mean. I suppose he doesn't hold his drink very well. He oughtn't to do it – ought he? – it can't be good for him. And such an old man too. Forgive me – if he's a great friend . . .'

‘You needn't mind,' Rose said. D. wondered: will he never go? Only the warmest heart could have failed to be frozen by Rose's manner.

‘I know I must sound prejudiced. You see in the Group we learn to be ascetic – in a reasonable way.' He said, ‘I suppose you wouldn't care to step upstairs to my place . . . I've got a kettle boiling now for tea. I was going to ask Emily . . .' He leant suddenly forward and said, ‘Good heavens, his eyes are open . . .' This is the end, D. thought.

Rose said slowly, ‘You didn't think – did you? – he was asleep.'

You could almost see a terrible surmise come up behind the eyes, then fall again for the mere want of foot-hold. There was no room for murder in his gentle and spurious world. They waited for what he would say next: they had no plan at all. He said in a whisper, ‘How dreadful to think that he heard everything I said about him.'

Rose said harshly and nervously, ‘Your kettle will be all over the floor.'

He looked from one to the other of them – something was wrong. ‘Yes, it will be, won't it? I hadn't meant to stay.' Back and forth from one to the other as if he wanted reassurance – to-night he would have bad dreams. ‘Yes, I must be going. Good night.'

They watched him climbing up the area steps into the safe familiar reassuring dark. At the top he turned and waved his hand to them, tentatively.

PART THREE

The Last Shot

[1]

It was still dark over the whole quiet Midland countryside. The small unimportant junction lay lit up like a centre-piece in a darkened shop window: oil lamps burned beside the general waiting room, an iron foot-bridge straddled across towards another smoky flame, and the cold wind took the steam of the engine and flapped it back along the platform. It was Sunday morning.

Then the tail-light of the train moved on like a firefly and was suddenly extinguished in some invisible tunnel. D. was alone except for one old porter hobbling back from where the luggage van had stood. The platform sloped down past a lamp into the indecipherable wilderness of lines. Somewhere not far away a cock crew, and a light which hung in mid-air changed from red to green.

‘Is this right for the Benditch train?' D. called out.

‘It'll be right,' the porter said.

‘Is it a long wait?'

‘Oh, it'll be an hour . . . if it's on time.'

D. shivered and beat his arms against his body for warmth. ‘That's a long time,' he said.

‘You can't expect different,' the porter said. ‘Not on a Sunday.'

‘Don't they have any through trains?'

‘Ah, they used to when the pits was working – but no one goes to Benditch now.'

‘Is there a restaurant here?' D. said.

‘A restaurant!' the porter exclaimed, peering closely up at him. ‘What call would there be for a restaurant at Willing?'

‘Somewhere to sit?'

‘I'll open the waiting-room for you if you like,' the porter said. ‘It's cold in there, though. Better to keep moving.'

‘Isn't there a fire?'

‘Well, it might've kept in.' He took a monstrous key out of his pocket and opened a chocolate-coloured door. ‘Ah well,' he said, ‘it's not so bad,' switching on the light. There were old faded photographs all round the walls of hotels and resorts, fixed benches round the walls, two or three hard movable chairs and an enormous table. A faint warmth – the memory of a fire – came out of the grate. The porter picked up a black ornamental cast-iron scuttle and shook a lot of coal-dust on to the dying embers. He said, ‘That'll keep it in.'

D. said, ‘And the table. What's the table for?'

The porter looked at him with sharp suspicion. He said, ‘To sit at. What d'you think?'

‘But the benches won't move.'

‘That's true. They won't.' He said, ‘Darn it, I've been here twenty years an' I never thought of that. You're a foreigner, ain't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘They're sharp, foreigners.' He stared moodily at the table. ‘Most times,' he said, ‘they sit on it.' Outside there was a cry, a roar, a cloud of white steam, wheels pounding past and fading out, a whistle again and silence. He said, ‘That'll be the four-fifty-five.'

‘An express?'

‘Fast goods.'

‘But not for the mines?'

‘Oh no – for Woolhampton. Munitions.'

D. bent his arms for warmth and walked slowly round the room. A tiny pillar of smoke fumed upwards in the grate. There was a photograph of a pier: a gentleman in a grey bowler and a Norfolk jacket was leaning over a hand-rail talking to a lady in a picture hat and white muslin – there was a perspective of parasols. D. felt himself touched by an odd happiness, as if he were out of time altogether and already belonged to history with the gentleman in the bowler: all the struggle and violence over, wars decided one way or another, out of pain. A great Gothic pile marked ‘Midland Hotel' stared out across some tramlines, the statue of a man in a leaden frock-coat, and a public lavatory. ‘Ah,' the porter said, giving the coal-dust a stir with a broken poker. ‘What you're looking at's Woolhampton. I was there in 1902.'

‘It looks a busy place.'

‘It is busy. An' that hotel – you won't find a better in the Midlands. We 'ad a Lodge dinner there – in 1902. Balloons,' he said, ‘a lady sang. An' there's Turkish baths.'

‘You miss it, I daresay.'

‘Oh, I don't know. There's something to be said for any place – that's how I look at it. Of course at Christmas time I miss the panto. The Woolhampton Empire's famous for its panto. But on the other 'and – it's 'ealthy 'ere. You can see too much of life,' he said, poking at the coal-dust.

‘I suppose this was quite an important station once.'

‘Ah, when the mines was working. I've had Lord Benditch waiting in this very room.
And
his daughter – the Honourable Miss Rose Cullen.'

D. realised that he was listening avidly, as if he were a young man in love. He said, ‘You've seen Miss Cullen?' and an engine whistled somewhere over the waste of rails and was answered, like a dog calling to other dogs in the suburb of a city.

‘Ah, that I have. The last time I saw her here, it was only a week before she was presented – at the Court – to the King an' Queen.' It filled him with sadness – the vast social life going on all round her in which he had no part at all. He felt like a divorced man whose child is in another's custody – somebody richer and abler than himself; he has to watch a stranger's progress through the magazines. He found he wanted to claim her. He remembered her on the platform at Euston. She had said, ‘We're unlucky. We don't believe in God. So it's no use praying. If we did I could say beads, burn candles – oh, a hundred things. As it is, I can only keep my fingers crossed.' In the taxi, at his request, she had given him back his gun. She had said, ‘For God's sake be careful. You are such a fool. Remember the Berne MS. You aren't Roland. Don't walk under ladders . . . or spill salt.'

The porter said, ‘Her mother came from these parts. There's stories . . .'

Here he was: shut out for a little while from the monstrous world. He could see, from the security and isolation of this cold waiting-room, just how monstrous it was. And yet there were people who talked of a superintending design. It was a crazy mixture – the presentation at Court, his own wife shot in the prison yard, pictures in the
Tatler
and the bombs falling; it was all hopelessly jumbled together by their mutual relationship as they had stood side by side near Mr K.'s body and talked to Fortescue. The accomplice-to-be of a murderer had received an invitation to a Royal Garden Party. It was as if he had the chemical property of reconciling irreconcilables. After all, even in his own case, it might have seemed a long way from his lectures on Romance literature to the blind shot at K. in the bathroom of a strange woman's basement flat. How was it possible for anyone to plan his life or regard the future with anything but apprehension?

But he had to regard the future. He came to a stop in front of a beach scene – bathing huts and sandcastles and all the dreary squalor of a front reproduced with remarkable veracity – the sense of blown newspapers and half-eaten bananas. The railway companies had been well advised to leave photography and take to art. He thought: if they catch me, of course, there
is
no future – that was simple. But if, somehow, he evaded them and returned home,
there
was the problem. She had said, ‘It's no good shaking me off now.'

The porter said, ‘When she was a little thing she used to give away the prizes – for the best station garden in the county. That was before her ma died. Lord Benditch, he always overmarked for roses.'

She couldn't come back with him to his sort of life – the life of an untrusted man in a country at war. And what could he give her, anyway? The grave held him.

He went outside; it was still pitch dark beyond the little platform, but you were aware that somewhere there was light. Beyond the rim of the turning world, a bell, as it were, had rung in warning . . . perhaps there was a greyness. . . . He walked up and down, up and down: there was no solution except failure. He paused by a slot machine – a dry choice of raisins, chocolate creams, matches and chewing-gum. He inserted a penny under the raisins, but the drawer remained stuck. The porter appeared suddenly behind him and said accusingly, ‘Did you try a crooked penny?'

‘No. But it doesn't matter.'

‘Some of them are so artful,' the man said, ‘you can't trust them not to get two packets with one penny.' He rattled the machine. ‘I'll just go an' get the key,' he said.

‘It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter.'

‘Oh, we can't have that,' the porter said, limping away.

A lamp lit each end of the platform; he walked from one to the other and back again. The dawn came with a kind of careful and prepared slowness. It was like a ritual – the dimming of the lamps, the cocks crowing again, and then the silvering of the sky. The siding loomed slowly up with a row of trucks marked ‘Benditch Collieries', the rails stretched out towards a fence, a dark shape which became a barn and then an ugly blackened winter field. Other platforms came into sight, shuttered and dead. The porter was back, opening the slot machine. ‘Ah,' he said, ‘it's the wet. They don't care for raisins here. The drawer's rusty.' He pulled out a greyish paper carton. ‘There,' he said, ‘there you are.' It felt old and damp to the fingers.

‘Didn't you say it was healthy here?'

‘That's right. The 'ealthy Midlands.'

‘But the damp . . .'

‘Ah,' he said, ‘but the station's in the holler – see?' And sure enough the dark was shredding off like vapour from a long hillside. The light came drably up behind the barn and the field, over the station and the siding, crept up the hill. Brick cottages detached themselves; the stumps of trees reminded him of a battlefield; an odd metallic object rose over the crest. He said, ‘What's that?'

‘Oh, that,' the porter said, ‘that's nothing. That was just a notion they got.'

‘An ugly-looking notion.'

‘Ugly? You'd say that, would you? I don't know. You get used to things. I'd miss it if it weren't there.'

‘It looks like something to do with oil.'

‘That's what it is. They had a fool notion they'd find oil here. We could've told 'em – but they were Londoners. They thought they knew.'

‘There was no oil?'

‘Oh, they got enough to light these lamps with, I daresay.' He said, ‘You won't have so long to wait now. There's Jarvis coming down the hill.' You could see the road now as far as the cottages; there was a little colour in the east, and all the world except the sky had the blackness of frost-bitten vegetation.

‘Who is Jarvis?'

‘Oh, he goes into Benditch every Sunday. Weekdays too, sometimes.'

‘Works at the mines?'

‘No, he's too old for that. Says he likes the change of air. Some says his old woman's there – but Jarvis, he says he's not married.' He came plodding up the little gravelled drive to the station – an elderly man in corduroys with bushy eyebrows and dark evasive eyes and a white stubble on the chin. ‘How's things, George?' the porter said.

‘Aw – might be worse.'

‘Going in to see the old woman?'

Jarvis gave a sidelong and suspicious glance and looked away.

‘This gentleman's going to Benditch. He's a foreigner.'

‘Ah!'

D. felt as a typhoid-carrier must feel when he finds himself among the safe and inoculated: these he couldn't infect. They were secured from the violence and horror he carried with him. He felt a long inanition as if at last, among the frost-bitten fields, in the quiet of the deserted junction, he had reached a place where he could sit down, rest, let time pass. The voice of the porter droned on beside him – ‘Bloody frost killed every one of the bloody. . . .' Every now and then Jarvis said, ‘Ah!' staring down the track. Presently a bell rang twice in a signal box; one noticed suddenly that unobtrusively the night had quite gone. In the signal box he could see a man holding a teapot; he put it down out of sight and tugged a lever. A signal – somewhere – creaked down and Jarvis said, ‘Ah!'