The Flying Goat (16 page)

He began to question her, gently, in an impersonal fashion that would not hurt her. He thought he was correct in saying that Mr. Montague was seventy-one?

‘Yes,' she said.

‘He had come to the town in 1892? I just want to verify these facts.'

‘Yes, in 1892.'

‘He had not been married at all?'

‘No.'

‘Had Mr. Montague any other interests outside the town and the paper? Had he any interests in London?'

‘No,' she said. Then she altered her mind. ‘Well, if you call it an interest, he used to go up to London every Friday to discuss affairs with an old friend. A Mr. Clarkson.'

‘Do you yourself know Mr. Clarkson?'

‘No,' Miss Montague said, ‘I never met him.'

Very shortly afterwards the breakfast came. The
girl said she had put the fried bread on a separate plate. Miss Montague thanked her and then lifted the covers and began to help Stacey to eggs and bread and bacon. She was looking now at the eggs, and he saw in her eyes again the same ebb and flow of guilt and temptation, pursued by courage, that he had seen before. Something made him say:

‘You know, I don't think I can eat two eggs, after all, my mother always used to say my eyes were bigger than my' – he wanted to say ‘belly', but couldn't – ‘stomach. You eat the other.'

She hesitated and he saw her lips trembling: he knew she was crying with anxiety, inwardly, frightened. He coaxed her: ‘You haven't eaten since last night,' and then, at first slowly, then quickly, in a fashion meant to be quite debonair, she took the egg.

She began to eat. At first she ate daintily, with circumspect rabbit-movements of her thin lips, then more quickly, then quite rapidly, the golden egg-icicles hanging on her fork and lips and dropping down before she could lick them off. He saw the bacon fat shining, forgotten, on her chin, the shine very like the look in her eyes, a look of gleaming, unadulterated pleasure. And he knew that he was
watching her, for the first time in her life, eat two eggs off the same plate, at the same time.

They each drank three or four cups of tea. Miss Montague at last sat back with an expression of almost bloated repletion. Two eggs, a rasher and three slices of fried bread, washed down by tea, had puffed, very slightly, the starved bagginess under her eyes. She was full up, blown out, and the effect on her was like that of a small dissipation. She got out her handkerchief and held it to her mouth, and Stacey saw her stifle a series of small belches behind it.

The look of repletion in her flushed eyes reminded him of something, but he could not think what. But suddenly he thought of something else: he realised that she had told him nothing of Mr. Montague himself. So he put another question: ‘What had been Mr. Montague's relation to the arts? Music, for instance, books, painting?'

‘Music he didn't care for,' she said. ‘Nor painting, I think. He read a lot, at night, in bed. Most of his books are in his study upstairs.'

‘You care for music?' Stacey said.

‘Oh! yes, very much. Very much. I – '

She stopped. The thought, the sentence and the
resolution to tell him something all collapsed. Her mind shut itself up, tight, behind its prayer-book clasp, so that nothing should fall out.

‘I'm afraid I can't be much help to you,' she said.

‘No?'

‘He never took me very much into his confidence.'

He was about to ask another question when he remembered something. The remembrance was evoked by the puffed full-stomach look in her eyes. He had it clear, now, what it was he had been trying to remember. It was a recollection of Mr. Montague himself, at the anniversary dinner of the Local Fire Brigade. He saw Mr. Montague eating at the long white table like one of a litter of forty shirt-fronted pigs, sucking the food into his mouth nervously, as though in fear he would be pushed from the trough. The look in and under his eyes, puffed and slightly flushed, was exactly the look on Miss Montague's face: a look of hunger, in his own case intensified by greed, satisfied at last. He saw the pork gravy rushing down the bony chin, the grease like oil on the moustache ends, the eyes slightly protuberant, as though in an effort to magnify the food on the plate.

He came back to the drawing-room. He knew
that he had already asked her enough. He put a last question:

‘May I see Mr. Montague's books?'

‘They're mostly under lock and key,' she said. ‘He prized some of them greatly. But you can go up, of course.'

She led him up the once white but now bone-coloured stairs. Up above, it was silent, and he could feel the presence, like a long-held breath, of the dead man. Except for this, the whole house seemed empty, a house of bone, hollow, from which flesh and marrow had been starved out. In this bare skeleton he pictured Mr. and Miss Montague living, for forty years, on half an egg a day.

She showed him into the study. ‘You just look round the books,' she said, ‘while I go and speak to the maid. I have so much to do.'

When she had gone he looked round the study, saw the rows of dull books, theological, political, memoirs of London journalists, on the leather-fringed bookshelves. The room held two bureaux, with wooden cupboards on top. In one of the cupboards Stacey saw a key and curiosity made him turn it and open the cupboard and look inside. Again, many books.

Stacey did not touch them. He stood looking at their titles. Not quite astonished, he read:
The Symbols of Eroticism, Love and Beauty, The Art of Love, Full Womanhood, Love and Woman, Seventy Art Studies
(
From Life
),
Erotica Ancient and Modern
. There were others, perhaps a hundred or a hundred and twenty volumes. Stacey did not touch them. He locked the cupboard, hesitated about the key, then left it in the lock and went downstairs.

‘He was a great reader,' Miss Montague said, when she met him at the foot of the stairs.

‘Have you a photograph of him?' Stacey said.

‘There is a very good one of him, taken at the Church Conference,' she said.

‘Yes, I think we've got a block of that.'

‘I daresay there were others,' she said.

‘As a young man?'

‘Perhaps I could look something out,' she said, ‘and send it down to the office?'

He thanked her, said he would see that she saw a proof of his article by eight o'clock on the following morning – the paper would not be on the streets until afternoon – and said good-bye. She looked at him sadly, with the habitual hungriness ingrained into her bones and flesh by years of under-nourishment,
of acquiescent and perhaps, he thought, terrorised starvation. Then just as he was going, she smiled. It was the furtive semi-guilty smile of someone who has done something a trifle reckless, in a momentary spasm of abandonment. The yellow splash of egg-yolk had dried vivid on her chin.

Driving down the hill, back to the town, he only just remembered his promise to Rankin. He turned off from the hill and, in about three minutes, came to Lime Street. ‘Mr. Montague owns that property', he remembered.

He looked at the property. Two rows of dog-kennels ran parallel down a steep slope. A notice prohibiting heavy traffic stood at one end. Kids were playing, snot-nosed, on the street and on the two-feet pavement; shoe hands sat on the door-steps, in the shade, waiting for the afternoon buzzers.

Stacey found No. 12, Rankin's house, and went up the entry and round to the back door. Rankin was sitting in his shirt sleeves at the dinner-table, and called, ‘Come in'.

Stacey went in. ‘The missus has just gone into next door,' Rankin said. ‘That just leaves room for you.'

Stacey looked round the room.

‘You ever keep dogs in a kennel?' Rankin said, in his dry, pin-pricking way.

Stacey knew there was no need to answer, no need to comment on the miserable smallness of the room, with the old-fashioned upright gas-mantle on the wall, the broken ceiling, the varnished and re-varnished wall-paper rubbed off, here and there, by years of passing elbows.

‘If you smell anything,' Rankin said, ‘It's just a stink.'

‘What's the rent?' Stacey said.

‘Eleven and six. Began at four and six. Montague itched it up and up till it was thirteen and six, one time. But they stopped that.'

‘How many more rooms?'

‘Oh! tremendous number,' Rankin said. ‘Come on, I'll show you.'

Rankin showed him the little extra front room. Even on that hot day, Stacey was shocked by its coldness. Rankin pulled back the linoleum, showing it blue-green, mould-furred, on the under side. He pulled up a floor board. On the joist, underneath, he showed Stacey the marks of rats' teeth, and, on the bare earth lower down, the marks of rats'
feet and many rat-droppings. ‘I'd take you upstairs,' Rankin said, ‘but the missus would die. Come outside.'

Stacey followed Rankin into the yard. Rankin showed him the little community water-closet, the old-fashioned iron yard water tap. ‘Mr. Montague owned the property,' he said.

Then: ‘Did Brierley tell you anything?'

‘Yes.'

‘Everything?'

‘No.'

‘He wouldn't tell you about the girl dying?'

‘That was it.'

Stacey felt that there was nothing more to say. Rankin's slow words had made another pattern of pins in his mind, and he could see the pins, now, very bright in the wider aperture of light.

He drove Rankin back to the office. They came up out of Lime Street like men coming up from a culvert for air. The heat of the day, in the higher streets, was sweet.

‘Ever hear Mr. Montague talk of anyone named Clarkson?' Stacey said.

‘No,' Rankin said, ‘I can't say I did.'

Obsessed by the name, for some reason, Stacey
went upstairs to his office. The imprisoned heat struck at him in a muffled cloud as he went in. He stood on a chair and again, as in the morning, tried to beat open the window with his fists, but without success.

Then he went into Mr. Montague's office, sat down at his desk, and tried to find some evidence of the name Clarkson. As he searched, he kept coming across the Paddington hotel bills, always for the same night, Friday, always for the double room.

He went back into his own office. The reporters had been in with notes, urgent queries, which they had left on his desk. He scanned them, scribbled replies on them and then telephoned down to the composing room that he would be out again until seven or eight o'clock that evening, and that he would work all night.

Then he looked up the trains to London. There was one at 1.53 which would bring him into Euston at 3.11. He caught this train.

The woman who came to the door of the Paddington hotel, that afternoon, asked him at once:

‘Room? Double or single?'

Like Miss Montague, the woman was also in
black, and her mind, like hers, seemed clasped tight shut, so that nothing should escape from it. But the closing up of her mind was conscious.

‘I would like to know if you ever knew a Mr. Montague?' he said.

‘Mr. Montague, Mr. Montague,' she said. ‘No, no.' She thought again. ‘No.'

‘Is this one of your hotel-bills?' he said.

She looked at the bill. ‘Oh! yes, oh yes. That's one of our bills.'

While she was looking at the bill, he took out the photograph of Mr. Montague taken at the Annual Church Conference, and gave it her. ‘Would you know that gentleman?'

‘That?' she said. ‘I should say so! That's one of our regular clients. Mr. Clarkson.'

‘That's right,' Stacey said. ‘This Mr. Clarkson was a friend of Mr. Montague. That's what I was trying to get at.'

‘Nothing wrong, I hope?' she said.

He told her then that Mr. Montague, Mr. Clarkson, was dead.

‘Oh! poor Mrs. Clarkson!'

Stacey did not say anything.

‘Sudden?'

He told her how sudden it was. ‘They often came here?' he said.

‘Oh! yes. But don't stand out here in the hot sun,' she said, and he followed her into the hotel, with its hat-stand in the hall, the stale odours of greasy meals, the hush of afternoon. She looked into the lounge. It was empty, and she invited him in.

‘Oh! poor Mrs. Clarkson.'

Casually, Stacey asked about Mrs. Clarkson. What was she like?

‘Smart,' the woman said, ‘Long hands. Much younger than Mr. Clarkson. Very smart.'

‘Had they been married long?'

‘I think about seven or eight years. Of course Mr. Clarkson used to come here before that. Oh yes. He came here quite often with the first Mrs. Clarkson.'

Stacey asked what the first Mrs. Clarkson was like.

‘Oh! a much different woman. Plumper. A bit coarse. Common. A type. You could see what she wanted.'

‘She died?' Stacey said.

‘Oh! no, no. I don't think so. A divorce, I think. Oh! yes it was a divorce. I know we thought it was a very good thing for Mr. Clarkson at the time.'

‘Thank you.' He picked up his hat.

‘Won't you have a cup of tea?' she said. ‘I didn't ask you.'

He thanked her, said no, and went out into the street. As she let him out of the shabby hotel lobby he knew her eyes were filling with tears and he tried not to notice it. ‘We shall miss him,' she said. ‘He had such a way with him.'

There was nothing else he could do. He caught the earliest train back from Euston at 6.3, having a wash and some tea on the train so that he could drive straight to the office.

It was just after half-past seven when he arrived at the office and now, as in the morning and afternoon, the pent up heat of the day struck at him as soon as he opened the door.

He sat down at his desk, tired, and looked at the day's accumulation of papers: the notes brought in by reporters, others sent up by the composing room, and among them the photograph of Mr. Montague, as a young man, sent along by Miss Montague.

He sat looking at the photograph. ‘This would have been taken,' Miss Montague's note said, ‘about 1893.' Mr. Montague was wearing a straw-hat, a white crocheted tie and cream flannel trousers
held up by a wide fancy waist-band. The face was full lipped, the eyes very black, like ripe berries, and the nostrils wide and sensuous. Stacey looked at it.