The Malcontents (14 page)

‘I don’t understand,’ said Mr Kelshall.

‘What has happened, Mr Freer? Please, you must tell us.’ Mrs Kelshall was polite, and spoke as though belief hadn’t touched her: and yet, there was hate and accusation in her expression, hate and accusation towards Stephen because he was the bearer of the news.

They were sitting round the parlour table.

‘He fell out of a window. Fifth storey window.’

‘Bernard is a careful boy.’

‘We were having a small meeting after tea. I don’t know how it happened, but he fell out. He must have been killed instantly. He can’t have suffered.’

He said that in the hope that it would be a comfort: as she heard it, Mrs Kelshall gave a loud, prolonged, passionate cry, not a wail, more violent, more harsh with pain than that. She hadn’t begun to show tears, though they were running down her husband’s face.

As the cry exhausted her, she said: ‘What have you done to him?’

‘I wish I could tell you something,’ said Stephen. ‘He was one of us, you know.’

‘I know.’ She had replied quite gently, and now she was crying.

Prudish about emotion, and nevertheless emotional, Stephen was near crying himself: as though the meaning of that night had suddenly caught up with him, and overwhelmed the blankness. Mr Kelshall was muttering his son’s name.

Mrs Kelshall began to show feelings that contradicted each other. She said to Stephen, with a tentative maternal care, that he was looking very tired: then, only minutes later, flashed out with suspicion. Was something being kept from her? Had there been an accident? Had there been some fighting?

Stephen told her, no. It occurred to him that she knew almost nothing of Bernard’s companions or of his political life. Stephen said: ‘I think I ought to warn you, there’ll have to be an inquest.’

‘Inquest?’

For the first time since they came into the room, she spoke directly to her husband in what, so Stephen took it, was Yiddish. They had an exchange, soft-voiced. Mr Kelshall, eyes filled, was nodding his head.

‘It is necessary. We wish it,’ he said.

‘I ought to warn you of something else,’ said Stephen. ‘The police seem to think that he committed suicide.’

Just as his attempt to give comfort provoked an outburst, so this, which he was timid about saying, had a surprising result. Mrs Kelshall actually smiled, a curious proud smile. She said: ‘That is not true.’

She and her husband gazed at each other, with what seemed like understanding, and he repeated: ‘That is not true.’

‘Do you believe it, Mr Freer–’

‘No,’ said Stephen. He would have said it anyway: but, as to the constable, he was giving an honest answer.

‘You are quite right.’ She spoke with politeness, but with dignity, not gratitude, as though she were congratulating him.

Then she was asking him questions and he had to repeat what he had told Shipman. There wasn’t much to tell, he tried to persuade her. There had been a short discussion in Lance Forrester’s flat (she didn’t recognize Lance’s name) in which Bernard had taken part, and then they had sat round. Was there drink? Yes, there was some drink. Not for Bernard, she said. Her glance was alight with suspicion. She had no idea what a drinking party was like. At instants Stephen’s quiet answers melted her, at others she believed that he was covering up. Someone had pushed Bernard or hit him, wasn’t that it?

‘No,’ said Stephen, ‘I’m almost sure that wasn’t it.’

‘They are your friends.’

All Stephen could do was repeat: ‘I’m almost sure that wasn’t it.’

He had heard a shout, he said, and someone crying that Bernard had gone out of the window.

‘He couldn’t do that,’ Mrs Kelshall said.

Mr Kelshall was too far gone to find any release in blame. For her, it was a help, though one that flickered in and out. When she was doubting him, reproaching him, facing him like an enemy and a detective, Stephen could keep his own control. It was worse when the room fell quiet. Once, he was wondering, if one were drunk enough, one might confuse a window with a door: but Bernard hadn’t been in the slightest drunk, no one had mentioned his even having a second glass of beer.

There was another curious thing, in the midst of pain such as Stephen had not witnessed before. Mrs Kelshall and he himself were sometimes speaking – almost without emotion – as though the facts of Bernard’s death were all-important in themselves, irrespective of what had caused it, as though the facts of a violent death had their own magic. How far open was the window? How high was the sill? What was the distance from the pavement? To himself, though not to her, Stephen could give the same importance to the nature of Bernard’s injuries. His skull had been fractured. He had gone on breathing. How many minutes before clinical death? It might have been the same obsession, which doesn’t seem to have been morbid or clinical, that recurs throughout the literature of fighting men: as though it was essential, and in some manner magical, to know precisely how a man met his death.

There was a long silence. Their mourning had been very quiet. Mr Kelshall sat, head bent over the table. Mrs Kelshall was crying again.

At last she looked at Stephen. ‘Please can I make you a cup of tea, Mr Freer?’

‘No, thank you very much, Mrs Kelshall,’ said Stephen, finding himself match her politeness, which seemed an easement to them both. ‘But do you mind if I have a cigarette?’

‘Please. Please.’ But then there was a commotion. The Kelshalls neither drank nor smoked, and she couldn’t give him an ashtray. He said apologetically that she wasn’t to trouble, he would use the packet, it made no difference.

Silence again. In the little room Stephen saw, on the wall to his right hand, a framed certificate. Bernard’s A levels.

Mrs Kelshall had followed the direction of his glance.

‘Yes, he did very well, they all said so.’

‘Of course he did.’

She had to take only one step to fetch something from the sideboard.

‘He always keeps his album in here,’ she said, putting it in front of Stephen.

‘Are you fond of stamps, Mr Freer?’

‘Well, I used to–’ Stephen opened a page, annotations neat, stamps accurately aligned.

‘He’s always been fond of his stamps. Ever since he was little.’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course, he hasn’t been able to do so much with them this last year or two. Because of his work.’

‘Of course.’

In the next silence, while Stephen was riffling through the album, she was dry-eyed. When Stephen (she wasn’t asking any more, for the time being, there mightn’t be an easier time to leave) said that he ought to be going, she once more offered him a cup of tea, but as a matter of courtesy, and didn’t press him. She told her husband that Mr Freer was saying goodbye, and he raised his head and half-stood up. It was Mrs Kelshall who took Stephen to the door, shook his hand, and said: ‘It was good of you to come, I’m sure.’

After taking a bus into the town centre, Stephen called at a pub. He did not want to drink, he was allowing himself no anodyne, but he was all of a sudden hungry, rapaciously so. The bread was dry on the sandwiches; he got through them and went to the bar for more. His mind wasn’t clearing, he was looking at the faces round him as though through smoked glass.

Then he walked through the market place towards his home. In sight of the cathedral, all was dead quiet. There were no stars, the spire lifted away vague, assimilated into the dark. As he entered the familiar hall, so familiar that for years he hadn’t noticed the little Varley, chaste reminder of Thomas Freer’s predilection, he saw a note on the letter table. It had been written by their housekeeper, and said: ‘Mr Robinson rang, 9.20. Will Mr Stephen ring him back at 10.15?’ There followed a telephone number which wasn’t Mark’s and which meant nothing to Stephen.

Time had elongated since Neil’s first shout, but it was still not ten o’clock. Stephen went up to his room, lay on his bed, picked up a book, even glanced at an equation. Seconds before 10.15 he was dialling the number.

A woman’s voice answered.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Stephen.

‘It’s me. Sylvia.’

‘Is Mark there?’

‘Yes, he’s here.’

‘He’s told you?’

‘He’s told me.’

In the background Stephen could hear music, too faint to identify, maybe Bach, maybe a fugue.

‘It’s pretty awful,’ Sylvia was saying. Her voice sounded brittle, strained but friendly.

‘How is he?’

‘He seems fine. More than I do.’ She added: ‘He has something to tell you.’

‘Hallo.’ That was Mark.

‘What is it?’

‘Well. Another policeman came. And someone in plain clothes. They went through the place fairly thoroughly. They took away some stuff.’

‘Didn’t anyone stop them?’ Stephen heard his own question, so violent, so lame.

‘It wouldn’t have been much use, would it?’

‘Did they get anything?’

‘He can’t have got rid of it all. They must have done.’

Mark’s voice was urgent and constrained.

‘Did they do any more about Bernard?’ Stephen was beating about, unable to let go.

‘There wasn’t much more to do, was there?’ Then Mark went on: ‘This is it, I think.’

Stephen replied, harsher, less evenly: ‘It looks like it.’

‘There’s nothing we can do. Nothing in the world. We have to sit through it, that’s all.’

Mark spoke as though he were consoling and encouraging his friend. When Stephen said that they would have to meet tomorrow, Mark said of course, but like one humouring a wish that wasn’t real.

He said: ‘We can’t do anything. We can’t really. You’d better accept it. Try and rest.’

In his intellect Stephen might be accepting it, but the intellect didn’t reach deep. There was nothing to do, but that made rest less attainable, not more. When there was nothing to do, one wasn’t self-sufficient. He went downstairs. Before he reached the drawing-room floor, he caught the sound of more music, Mark was not the only one listening that night. But this Stephen could recognize: it was his mother’s favourite Schoenberg, she would be listening to it alone. That relieved him. Not that he would have gone to her for comfort, not that he had ever done: directly, that is. But, more than he knew, he had looked up to her coolness, her sarcastic style: they had been welcome on Sunday morning, they had always been welcome: more than he knew, he modelled some of his manners upon them.

Lying back on the sofa, one of the standard lamps behind her, she smiled as he came in, and waved a hand. He brought a chair near to her, and waited for the piece to end. She was rapt, cheekbones shadowed, the lines on her forehead smoothed out. After the final note, she said: ‘You’re in, are you?’

‘As you see,’ said Stephen.

‘Nice,’ she said, gazing at the record player.

‘Do you mind talking?’

‘Not a bit.’

‘As a matter of fact, things have gone worse than they reasonably could.’ Stephen was speaking – it came naturally just then, it didn’t take an effort – with scrupulous care. He went on to give an account, lucid, quite brief, of the last two days, of Bernard’s death, and of the police searches. He was looking in front of him, not at his mother, like one concentrating on leaving nothing out. He and his friends, he said, would for certain be involved in the inquest: there would most likely be drug charges against Lance, and suspicions against the rest (‘which happen not to be true,’ he remarked evenly): after that, the other consequences neither he nor anyone else could foresee, ‘but it would be an error to think that they’re going to be pretty.’ Before he had finished, his mother broke out: ‘This is unspeakable!’

The cry, high-pitched, was angry: so, when he turned to her, in disappointment that was emptier than disappointment, was the expression on her face. The fine features were ravaged: her mouth was open, she might have been a football fan shouting at the referee: the remoteness, the coolness, had gone, all gone.

‘Unspeakable. How do you expect us to get through this?’

‘We shall have to, shan’t we?’

‘It’s going to mean a public scandal. I can’t bear living in public. I never have done. I wasn’t made for it. I got out of it from the start.’

‘It won’t last for ever.’ He had to supply the strength, he didn’t wish to. To take command would have been the last of his choices, when he came to see her a quarter of an hour before.

‘Why in God’s name did you let me in for this?’

‘It will pass, I tell you.’

‘Don’t talk to me about things passing.’ She was speaking loudly, almost stridently: he hadn’t often heard her raise her clear county voice.

‘This isn’t mortal.’

‘You’ve ruined everything for me. All I wanted was to be left in peace.’

‘This isn’t mortal. I might remind you, someone died tonight.’ He said it sternly: perhaps because there was a comparison lurking (unwittingly, vestigially) between her whom he admired and the other mother whom he had recently left in Walnut Street. Perhaps because Bernard’s death, to himself, went in and out of mind.

‘I didn’t know him,’ she said.

They looked at each other; neither of them spoke. At last she said, as though attempting to get her distance back: ‘Will you ask your father to come down?’

Thomas Freer was in his study, and Stephen, outside in the passage, talked to him on the internal telephone. ‘Mother would like you to join us,’ he said, and added: ‘I’m afraid that I have bad news.’

Carpet slippers flopping, smoking jacket glowing, Thomas Freer entered. Before he could ask a question, his wife said: ‘He may as well tell you himself.’

Thomas Freer pulled up another armchair, so that he and his son faced each other, flanking the sofa on two sides. Once more, this time in a rougher manner, more alienated and also seeming older, Stephen went through the story, but didn’t end with a sarcasm or an understatement.

Thomas Freer had tented his fingers together as he listened.

‘I knew it,’ he said. ‘I knew it.’

‘You can’t have known it.’ His wife broke in, temper edged with impatience and contempt. ‘You can’t have known that this fellow would get himself killed.’

‘No, not that.’