A Penknife in My Heart Page 12

  “Can I stay with you tonight?” he said.

  “You can stay here forever, my darling Ned.”

  “I’m supposed to be at the club. I didn’t mean to—I don’t know what I’ve been doing tonight—wandering about—and then the dog bit me, and it was too late to get back into the club—it was locked and I hadn’t got a key,” he incoherently babbled, feeling a sour taste of shame in his mouth that he should be lying to Laura already.

  “It’s all right, dear heart. I’m here. Don’t worry any more. Don’t talk.”

  Ned was in a daze, like a man who, having lost his memory, finds himself in a vaguely familiar, comforting place. Oh God, he thought, if only I could lose my memory.

  “You’re tired out,” said Laura. “Come to bed and I’ll put you to sleep.”

  She helped him undress, and then took off her own clothes. Now they were looking at each other with a different, sightless stare, and Laura gave a shivering cry and they came together like a clap of hands.

  When he awoke, the electric clock by the bedside stood at midday. He could hear Laura moving about in the kitchenette. He felt languorous, peaceful: the flood had erased, it seemed, all traces of the last ten days. Perhaps it had been a prolonged, dreadfully plausible dream. The throbbing in his right hand dispelled that fancy: yet he still had this strange, new feeling of wholeness.

  Laura came in with a tray of coffee, toast and boiled eggs. They were both ravenously hungry. When they had finished eating, and she had removed the tray, Laura came back and stood beside the bed, looking down at him with a brooding expression.

  “Still love me?” he asked.

  “Yes … You’re changed.”

  “Changed?”

  “I don’t know how to describe it. Different. Harder, somehow. No, not quite that. Clearer round the edges.”

  “Well, quite a lot has happened to me since we last met.”

  “I know, darling. We haven’t talked about your wife yet. Would you like to?”

  “What is there to say? She’s dead. Somebody killed her. The police think it may have been a lover—a young chap she took up with in the village.”

  “Poor Helena. And you never suspected—?”

  “If I’d known she had a lover, do you suppose I’d—?” Ned broke off abruptly, horrified to realize how near he’d come to blurting out the truth. He began again— “do you suppose I’d ever have let you make the break?”

  Laura’s lip trembled for an instant, but she continued to regard him musingly. “I wish it hadn’t happened this way,” she said.

  “Well, for God’s sake! I didn’t jump for joy myself,” he bitterly replied.

  “I’m afraid, Ned.” She was very much in earnest, her eyes averted from him now. “It’s a bad beginning for us—no, don’t be angry with me! I’m afraid of the effect she might have on us—dying that way.”

  “Oh nonsense! Scared of ghosts?”

  “It’s your sense of guilt I’m worried about,” she patiently explained. “I’m afraid you’ll start feeling you were really responsible for it, could have prevented it—if you’d been nicer to her, she wouldn’t have taken a lover; and if she hadn’t taken a lover—”

  “You leave my sense of guilt alone! I can look after it myself.”

  “All right. But I do feel guilty too.”

  “Oh really, Laura!”

  “Yes. You see—” her voice went into a whisper—“I often wished her dead. I almost prayed for it, lately.”

  Ned was deeply moved by this confession, for it revealed how much Laura had continued to love him during the time when they had been parted and he had imagined her starting an affair with someone else. He said, tenderly now, “And don’t you think I wished her dead too? Often and often?”

  For the second time he found himself on the very brink of confession, wanting to pour it all out and leave no vestige of falsehood between them.

  “What would you say if I told you that I really was responsible for Helena’s death?”

  “But you were in Bristol.” Her eyes looked uneasy, almost panicky. “Weren’t you?”

  “Yes, I was. But would you still love me, supposing I told you I’d—well, encouraged another man to kill her?” he tensely asked.

  “Ned, please stop! It’s unbearable. I don’t like that sort of joke. It’s not worthy of you.”

  “I’m perfectly serious. Would you still marry me, if—”

  “No, I won’t have it. Why are you going on like this? Hateful, melodramatic stuff—it’s not like you, Ned.”

  “So you know exactly what I am like?”

  “I know you wouldn’t do anything so—so vile and appalling.”

  “Not even for you?”

  She tossed her head angrily, thinking that he was teasing her, testing her—she did not know what, but it was unspeakably distasteful. She turned to go out, but he seized her wrist with his left hand.

  “Let me go, Ned. You’re being horrid.”

  He had failed again to tell her. He had given her a chance to hear the truth, and she had rejected it. His sense of moral failure set up an obscure, scorching resentment.

  “Come to bed again.”

  “No. Please, Ned. Don’t—”

  He dragged her down beside him. Mastering her, he felt as if he were subduing something in himself—something which tried and condemned him. Looking down at her beautiful mouth distorted by pleasure, the head weaving from side to side, the suddenly frantic eyes, he saw for a moment not Laura’s face beneath him but Helena’s as it might have been when the pillow was stopping her breath; and the voice he had tried to stifle was saying, “Now you are damned, now you are damned eternally.”

  After a long time, Laura whispered, “I love you, love you, love you. … You were only joking, Ned, weren’t you?”

  “Only joking,” he replied thinly.

  When he rang up his club, to explain that he had stayed the night with friends and would be coming in this afternoon to pick up his bag and pay for the room he had not used, he was told there was a message from Inspector Bartley asking him to telephone. Irrational fear seized him. Somehow the police must have got on to the journey he had made last night: in spite of his alibi for Helena’s murder, he was being followed. Well, he’d soon know. He got through to Marksfield.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you, sir,” came Bartley’s slow, reassuring voice. “I tried to get you at your club last night, but—”

  “Yes, I met some friends and they put me up.”

  “We’re still puzzled about the front-door key,” the inspector explained. “The spare one we found in your chest of drawers—did you normally keep it on your key ring, sir?”

  When in doubt, tell the truth. “Yes, normally.”

  “Was there any particular reason why you left it behind when you went to Bristol?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Your wife hadn’t temporarily mislaid hers?”

  “No.”

  “I see. Can you remember missing any of the three keys, or lending one to anybody, during recent months?”

  “I’m sure I didn’t. Of course, my wife may have lent hers—I wouldn’t know. But there’s never been one missing.”

  “Well, sir, I am much obliged to you. You will be staying several days in London? At your club?”

  “No, with a friend.” Ned gave the inspector Laura’s address and telephone number. “May I know why you’re asking about the keys again?”

  There was a slight pause before Bartley replied. “If Mrs. Stowe did not admit the murderer herself, he must somehow have got possession temporarily of a frontdoor key and had a copy made.”

  A minute later, when Laura came in from making the bed, she found Ned sitting by the telephone looking thoughtful.

  “Who was that?”

  “The police. Inspector Bartley.”

  “Oh.”

  Ned was thankful now for Laura’s lack of curiosity. He felt considerably shaken. Though the inspector had sounded qui
te unsuspicious, Ned realized he had made a gaffe by telling Bartley that he normally kept the spare key on his ring. It had not been on the ring for a fortnight prior to Helena’s death, because he had lent it to Stuart Hammer. And, since he kept no other keys on the ring, the absence of one might have been noticed by Mrs. Marle—by anyone: that appalling child at Bristol had commented on his paucity of keys.

  When he had got back from his club, Ned went for a walk with Laura along the Thames. She clung to his arm, in a dependence she had never shown before. The sun was sparkling on the river: an eight rowed past like a clockwork water beetle, a yellowish-white smoke bellied out sluggishly from the chimneys of Lots Road power station. It was the first time that Ned and Laura had been able to walk together without his glancing involuntarily around him, worried lest they should be spotted by acquaintances.

  “We only need a pram,” he said, “to be a standard young married couple.”

  “Not standard, I think. But I’d like the pram part of it.” She squeezed his right hand, and he winced.

  “Oh, darling, I forgot. Sorry. But oughtn’t you to show it to a doctor?”

  “I will tomorrow, if it goes on throbbing.” Ned halted, and they leaned on the embankment wall, gazing at the river. “I wish I could remember exactly what did happen last night. I suppose it must have been delayed reaction. I went out before dinner, with the general idea of getting tight. Then—I don’t know how much later it was—I saw a bloke in the street thrashing a dog. I told him to lay off it. He went for me, and I knocked him down. Then his bloody dog attacked me: a white bull terrier. And after that I must have had some sort of blackout. The next thing I remember is ringing your doorbell.” Ned was staring at the river while he said all this, as if he were repeating a lesson to it.

  “Poor love. Why didn’t you come straight to me?”

  “My conventional upbringing, I suppose. Nasty streak of respectability. Simply not done to gallop off to another woman when one’s wife is hardly cold in the grave.”

  Ned was startled by the bitterness with which this came out. Laura was looking distressed. A month ago, he would have hastened to apologize for such a remark, seeking to re-establish himself with her. But his heart felt harder today: he had less compunction about hurting her, now that he was sure of her.

  “The point is this, Laura. I’m so vague about last night I don’t even know if anyone saw this set-to I had. But I suppose it’s just possible the police might start inquiring about it. So, if you should be asked, will you tell them I was with you the whole evening.”

  “Well, all right, if you want me to. But—”

  “I just don’t want to be involved in anything else for a while. I couldn’t stand it.” His voice rose to a higher pitch, almost out of control.

  “I’ll do whatever you say,” she agreed meekly.

  And if she can swallow that story about the dog, she can swallow anything, Ned thought, with a flick of cynical contempt for which he was at once ashamed.

  The next morning, as soon as the alarm clock woke them, Ned went downstairs and fetched the letters from Laura’s box. The envelope he had expected, addressed in his own handwriting, was not among them. Laura left for work at nine o’clock. Ned read the paper, mooched about the little flat, unable to set his mind to anything, feeling as if he were in a kind of limbo. Monday passed, and Tuesday, and by the Wednesday-morning post his letter had still not come. What sort of cat-and-mouse game was Stuart Hammer playing?

  Ned had arranged to lunch at his club with an I.T.A. producer and discuss a new series of programs over which they would be collaborating. While he was waiting for this man, he opened a Times in the reading room, and the first thing that caught his eye was an obituary of Herbert Beverley.

  For a moment he was convinced it must be a delusion. The print blurred and flickered before his eyes: then it settled down. The obituary told Ned two things—that Herbert Beverley had died of a heart attack last Saturday night, and that he had been a model employer of labor, a man of liberal views, high cultivation and upright life, esteemed by all. Even allowing for the de mortuis decorum proper to an obituary notice, it was clear that Her bert Beverley had been the very opposite of the character whom Stuart Hammer had described. The face of the man he had glimpsed in the glare of the headlights—a face he had shut out of his mind ever since—rose up before Ned Stowe: he had known then, instantaneously, the real Beverley: illumination had made him wrench the Humber away from his victim. But it must have been too late. The shock of his narrow escape from death must have killed Herbert Beverley.

  Ned was so distrait during lunch that his companion apologized for having asked him to discuss business so soon after the tragedy.

  “Please don’t,” Ned answered. “I thought it would take my mind off things. You don’t happen to know where the nearest public library is, do you?”

  “Public library?” His friend looked at him askance. Poor old Ned was in a very peculiar state of mind. “Afraid I’ve no idea. Why?”

  “I want to do some research.”

  The hall porter did not know, either. He suggested trying the telephone directory: but Ned, saying good-by to his I.T.A. friend, hurried out of the club. A sudden revulsion had seized him—he did not want to know any more, he wanted to dig a hole for himself and disappear from sight. Yet, seeing a policeman standing at the next intersection, Ned walked up to him and inquired for the nearest public library. As he went in the direction indicated, a mad voice started banging through his head—“Murderer asks policeman way.” “No,” he corrected the voice, “Man asks policeman show him way find out if he’s murderer.”

  Ten minutes later he was turning over a file of the Norringham Record. Monday’s issue carried a long account of Herbert Beverley’s services to the community, and a short one of his demise. He had been found dead in the road outside his house at 10:50 on Saturday evening. For some years the condition of his heart had caused anxiety. Death was due to heart failure. Tuesday’s issue made up for the undramatic nature of Monday’s. Shorn of its sensational trimmings and clichés, the story was this: The morning after Mr. Beverley’s death, his niece discovered that his car, which he kept in a cul-de-sac near the house, was missing. Police inquiries produced a number of eyewitnesses who had seen the car at several points in the neighborhood, shortly after its owner’s death, being driven fast and pursued by a dog. The dog, identified as Mr. Beverley’s bull terrier, did not return to the house till an hour after its master’s body had been discovered. The car, a Humber, was subsequently found abandoned in a street off the Euston Road. The Norringham police were working on a theory that the car had been stolen by criminals, that Mr. Beverley had seen it being driven away when he took out his dog for a walk, had tried to stop it and been struck down by a heart attack in the process (there were no signs of violence on the body): the criminals, finding themselves chased by Mr. Beverley’s dog, had abandoned whatever plan they had stolen the car for—some local robbery, perhaps—and driven it back to London.

  The paper also carried an interview with Mr. Beverley’s nephew and personnel manager, Mr. S. E. Hammer, in which he expressed his deep sorrow at the tragedy which had befallen his uncle, his intention to do all in his power to help the police bring the criminals to book, and his determination to carry on Beverley’s great tradition of service to the community, upon which Norringham’s prosperity had been founded, along the lines laid down by his uncle. “It will be my responsibility and my privilege,” Stuart Hammer was reported as saying, “to ensure, so far as in me lies, that the excellent relations between management and labor which have always been the proud boast of Beverley’s shall remain the keystone of our policy. It is what my uncle would most have wished. There could be no finer memorial to this great citizen of Norringham than the continued prosperity of the firm to which he gave the whole of his working life.”

  10 The Market Gardener

  When Ned drove down to the country next day, his mind was full of discordant feel
ings. Fear of discovery was, to his surprise, the least of these. Though he had killed Herbert Beverley as surely as if the car had in fact struck the old man, there could be nothing to connect him with the crime: he had left no fingerprints on the Humber, for he had worn gloves throughout, and it had been too dark and misty for anyone to see the face of the man who was driving it. He felt an increasing resentment and contempt for the man who had tricked him into the deed by so misrepresenting the character of the victim. Stuart Hammer’s cynical hypocrisy, in his interview with the Norringham Record, sickened Ned. But, for the manner of Helena’s death, he hated Stuart—and hated himself still more.

  He had told Laura he must return to the Old Farm to wind things up, remove his personal belongings and arrange for the auctioning of the furniture. She did not argue about it; but instinctively she felt, and he knew she felt it, that this was only an excuse. There had been an anxious look on her face when they parted, for all his reassurances that he would soon be back. What he could not tell her was that he must return to the Old Farm to confront and exorcise a ghost. Perhaps she suspected this, though not the reason for his need to do so. At any rate, he knew now that Helena’s death had not broken the wretched bond between them: it would shadow his relationship with Laura, falsify it and make it unreal, unless he could somehow in his own mind face up to the full horror of what he had done.

  There were moments, indeed, when it seemed that Laura, not Helena, was the ghost. She had been the Promised Land—a dream for which he had sacrificed everything, a place flowing with milk and honey. But now that he was there, it was not so different from any other country. After the first wild excitement of their reunion, the certainty that at last he had come home where he belonged, there had been times during the last few days when she seemed a stranger to him. He could not focus this flesh-and-blood woman with the image of her he had carried about with him so long. In the cramped little room above the river, while Laura was out at work, the aftermath of physical satisfaction had left Ned with a feeling of hollowness, flatness. What am I doing here? he had caught himself wondering. Was it for this I incurred damnation? Perhaps hell is a place where one is condemned to know love as eternally meaningless.