A Cry from the Dark (18 page)

“But how come you are here, Betty?” asked Hughie. “With the British?”

“Bettina,” she corrected him. “It just happened. I was assistant to an Australian war correspondent, and doing a bit of reporting for Australian papers on the side. My Italian had got to be pretty good. I decided I wanted to be part of the war, not just see it and report it. The British Army recruited me because I could speak to people, find quarters for the officers when necessary, negotiate with local politicians, who are slippery as hell. It's been great.”

“Yes, it
has,
” agreed Hughie. “Better than any war ought to be.”

“What are you doing?” asked Cecil. “I'm in transport.”

“I'm in art,” said Hughie. “They found a use for me after I proved pretty duff with a gun or a bayonet. For the past year I've been monitoring the American and British advance from the south and advising on buildings and art collections that call for special protection in the towns they're about to come to. The Americans have had a lot of good propaganda out of this. The Germans have been calling them philistines and barbarians and worse where the black soldiers are concerned. This proves they're not, and contrasts with the Germans destroying all the historical archives in Naples. So there, you see: it's very important work.”

“Of course it is,” said Bettina. “Though I bet all you really do is get out your Baedeker and write a list of all the obvious things that need protection.”

“
And
the map readings,” said Hughie, with a comically exaggerated sort of complacency. “Vital, that. It ensures that the buildings get one hundred percent protection—provided the troops get
their
map readings right.”

Their pasta came—drizzled with olive oil and with a tiny spoonful of Parmesan already sprinkled on it. Venetian food, always considered a bit spartan, had become meager. But they plunged their forks into the long, thin lengths of pasta and twirled with all the expertise of more than a year in Italy.

“Who's to say they're eating any better back home?” said Cecil.

“Better this than corned beef hash,” said Bettina.

“Home they have rationing. Italy has intrigue, bargaining, barter, sex, blackmail, family connections, Mafia—a much richer brew.” Hughie took up the glass into which the proprietor had poured a villainous-looking thick red liquid. “
Salute!
May the war last forever!” said Hughie.

They drank.

“Well, it won't,” said Bettina, “not the European part, anyway. They'll get rid of me as surplus to requirements within a month or two of Hitler being hanged from a Berlin lamppost. Cecil will have to wait longer for demob.”

“Won't stop us getting married,” said Cecil with a broad smile. “If necessary we'll get a backstreet priest to do it. My mother is a Catholic.”

“Marriage!” said Hughie. “My! I didn't realize it was that serious.”

“Well, we can't go on living in sin indefinitely,” said Cecil. “The British Army would like that even less than marriage.”

They all laughed.

“The British Army!” said Hughie reflexively. “You wouldn't believe them, would you? When you look at the C.O.'s you wouldn't think they could organize a school bun-fight, and here they are defeating the great German military machine.”

“With a little help from our friends across the pond,” said Cecil. “God—I need a leak. I suppose they've got a little cupboard somewhere here.”

He left the tiny triangle of sunlight in which the table was set, overlooking a landing stage, and went into the bar where, with the help of graphic mime, he made the proprietor understand what he wanted. Bettina gazed out at the few passing boats on the canal. If this wasn't pure magic, she thought, it was near enough for her.

“We're not actually living together,” she said suddenly, without quite knowing why, “but only because we can't find anywhere to do it. Cecil has to sleep with his unit, and my billet is a large and springy sofa in a cold old palazzo. You'd probably love it, Hughie, but I find it palls after the first day or two.”

“He's not worthy of you,” said Hughie, ignoring her remarks but looking at her clear-eyed. “He's nice, and funny, and very approachable, but after a time he'll know that you've got a much better brain, and he won't be able to live with that. I know I've no right to give you advice, but can't you just stick together and see whether it works? Because it won't.”

Bettina remembered these words in the months ahead. Remembered them in the tiny, backstreet church with the dirty, unshaven priest who married them without a smile or a word of good wishes or advice. Remembered them in the up and down of the first months of their marriage, when she resumed writing for the
Bulletin
and the
Sydney Morning Herald
and started work on her first novel, which Cecil tried so hard not to resent that he seemed to resent absolutely everything else she did. Remembered them when she found she was pregnant—Cecil's carelessness, that, and the stupid boy didn't want a child any more than she did. Remembered them on the way back to see her dying mother, remembered them when she heard her mother's account of how she met her husband-to-be, which oddly seemed so much more romantic than her own marriage. Remembered them when she gave up her child to her father and Auntie Shirley, then traveled for the first time to London to resume her single state and begin her career as an English writer.

“God, that place was indescribable!” said Cecil, coming back. “I'll smell it on my uniform for weeks.”

“There speaks someone who has never known a dunny, and certainly not one in a baking climate, hundreds of miles from the sea,” said Bettina.

They went shares on the meal, and Cecil put down the notes and coins, with the regulation small tip the army recommended. Then they linked arms and walked toward the nearest bridge that would take them in the direction of the Grand Canal. As they walked over the bridge, Bettina turned back. The dark, gnomelike proprietor, stowing their money away in a pouch at his waist, turned in their direction and spat.

Not all Venetians welcomed the coming of the Allies.

 

The hospital where Katie lay in a world or nonworld of her own was about ten minutes' walking time from Holland Park Crescent, and when Bettina got permission to visit her, ten minutes after Sylvia left the flat to go back to Mark's, she put on her summer mac and set off with her umbrella for a stick. She had never come to trust English spring days.

The hospital was, for London, a small one, specializing in brain disorders. There was a private security man on the entrance, and when Bettina found the room where Katie lay she found a policewoman dying with boredom near her bed.

“I don't think you'll get much reaction,” she commented when Bettina introduced herself. “I try, of course, now and then, and sometimes she squeezes my hand back, or there's a flutter of the eyelids, but that's about it.”

Bettina suspected the young woman to have a natural garrulity that was currently suffering from disuse, so instead of going over and taking Katie's hand she detained her in conversation.

“What is Superintendent Murchison guarding against?” she asked. “Does he think she might be attacked again?”

“Well, it's possible, isn't it? Officially I'm just here for if she wakes and manages a few words, but the other possibility is there. Even if it was just a common or garden burglary there's a chance he will be afraid she saw enough to identify him and that he'll come back to finish the job.”

She was intolerably breezy, but Bettina suppressed her irritation.

“But Murchison obviously doesn't think it was a casual burglary.”

“Oh, I didn't say that. But there are other possibilities, aren't there? She may have told any number of friends—or enemies—that she was going to look after your flat for a few days.”

Bettina pursed her lips in disbelief.

“Katie has a very sharp tongue, and strong likes and dislikes, but I don't see her as having ‘enemies' of the sort who would want to do her in.”

“She was your cleaner, wasn't she?” Bettina nodded. “Do you really know all that much about her private life?” Sharp, thought Bettina.

“Maybe not enough to say what I just did,” she admitted.

“And then there's the possibility that whoever was in the flat didn't know that you were in Scotland.”

“That she was attacked in mistake for me?”

“That, or he didn't intend to attack unless he needed to, but was willing to do it even if it was you.”

“If Murchison thinks that, then he should have put a guard on me.”

“Are you quite sure he hasn't?” She was still horribly breezy, but she now changed her tack. “I say, I'm dying for a cup of coffee and something to eat. Could you man the fort for ten minutes or so? It'd save my life.”

“Of course. Get along.”

She didn't query how much use the girl thought she would be if the imagined attacker turned up to finish the job on Katie or to get the right person this time. She simply watched her depart, locked the door of the small room, and went over to Katie's bed. Through the maze of tubes and masks she saw the injured head with a sinking of the stomach. If only she'd thought. If only, when the suggestion had been made of Katie as flat-sitter, she had taken a few moments to consider it first. It was her own suggestion, and a bloody silly one, but it was her, Bettina's, responsibility. She sat down on the little chair beside the bed and took the other old woman's hand.

“Katie, it's Bettina.”

She squeezed the hand, feeling a sharp arthritic pain as she did so. She thought there was a feeble return of pressure.

“Katie, I wish to God I'd never let you be in that flat on your own. Can you forgive my silliness?” She wondered if the eyelids had flickered, but she felt no answering squeeze. “If I'd only thought, I would have hired a firm. Maybe asked Peter if he had a friend who could do it, or got Rod from the Duke of Sussex. If only I hadn't brought you to this.” She thought there might be a very faint return of pressure. Comforting her, perhaps? But that didn't sound like Katie. “If only I'd thought,” she repeated. “You can never tell with people. Never tell what they might do.”

She sat there till the policewoman returned, but the hand in her hand remained limp and the eyelids motionless. If she had ever emerged from it, Katie was now back in the nonworld.

Two days later Inspector Murchison rang Bettina. He said he knew she was alone in the flat now, and wondered how she was faring. Newfangled police PR, Bettina thought to herself. Or old-fashioned covering his back.

“I'm ‘faring' perfectly well,” she said, a touch of tartness in her voice. “As I always have.”

“I'm sure you have,” said Murchison. “But when a murderous attack has occurred, and on someone you are quite close to, a place is not quite the same, is it?”

“No,” Bettina had to admit, “it's not. But I'm coping.”

“I thought I should come round sometime and bring you up-to-date with the investigation,” Murchison said.

“You'll be very welcome,” said Bettina. “Is it worthwhile? Are you close to making an arrest?”

“If we were close to making an arrest I probably wouldn't come. I'd wait till it was made and talk to you after that.”

“I see.”

“What I mean is, since you were well away from Holland Park when the attack took place, your evidence is unlikely to be crucial when we come to make an arrest. But what I would value is your knowledge of the background—the facts and tensions surrounding the attack.”

There was a pause while Bettina thought.

“Yee-e-es. Assuming, that is, that it isn't an attack by a casual intruder.”

“Yes. And we're not assuming anything at this point.”

“No, I see…Well, please do come and see me.”

“What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Well, Sylvia and Ollie are going to watch Mark filming a commercial at Margate. Mark regards it as a breakthrough. Of course normally I wouldn't bother, but they did ask me to go with them, and at the moment I feel I should take any opportunities that occur to be with Sylvia.”

“Well, shall we say the day after? Tuesday morning? That would suit me quite nicely. I hope you'll keep your eyes and ears open tomorrow.”

“I normally do. It's what I earn my living by. What in particular am I to be on the alert for?”

“Anything that seems to you to be revealing about character, about the particular situation at this time of the people you're with, about their hopes, aspirations, disappointments, hang-ups.”

“ ‘The people I am with' in this case are pretty close members of my family.”

“I pay you the very big compliment of thinking this would not lead you to hold back anything that might be significant. There is a defenseless old woman who was savagely beaten in this case, as you've seen for yourself recently. You'll be even keener than I am to catch her attacker.”

Again Bettina had to think. How age slowed the thinking processes!

“Katie was never defenseless. I'm sure in this case she was just unlucky. But of course you're quite right. I will look and listen.”

“It's true, isn't it, that you've never been a family person?”

“Yes, it's quite true,” said Bettina with a sigh.

Bettina was picked up the next morning by Ollie and Sylvia in a rented Honda. Mark had already been at Margate for two nights rehearsing—doubtless with deleterious effects on the health of all those who employed him as a personal trainer. Ollie was a tense and cautious driver at first, but before he was even out of central London he relaxed and drove as if he had been perfectly acquainted with British roads and regulations for years. He was a child of the car age. Bettina herself had never had the slightest urge to acquire a car or to learn to drive—though she had done a bit of emergency driving in Italy during the war, when no one was in the least bothered about driving licenses: the lack of anything much else on the roads was a plus, but the possibility of being shot at was a minus.

“So what are we going to be watching?” asked Bettina as they all untensed themselves.

“Oh, the usual garbage,” said Ollie genially. “I thought British television was supposed to be so much better than the Aussie rubbish, but it's pretty much the same.”

“Yes, it is now,” said Bettina.

“It's for something called Munchets,” contributed Sylvia. “I think it's a variation of the ‘bully kicking sand in my face on the beach' formula.”

“Mark being the bully, I suppose,” said Bettina.

“Well, he's so big it would be difficult to imagine anyone intimidating him,” said Sylvia.

“And if he was the ‘before,' it would be terrible to think of the ‘after.' ”

Ollie was sensitive to the tone of the conversation.

“You'd never think, would you, that Mark was the one who was bullied at school?” he said.

“I can't believe there was anyone big enough to try it,” said Bettina. “Or was it psychological bullying?”

“No, no. Mark wasn't big then. Well, he was quite tall, but he was one of the beanpole kind—skinny and weedy. They picked on him. Of course he was never too bright—always in the bottom two or three in the class, so that didn't help. But he pulled himself up. Went to gyms, took up weight training.”

“Took steroids,” said Bettina before she could stop herself.

“Never asked. Best not to,” said Ollie cheerfully. “Anyway, after a time it wasn't in anyone's interest to take him on. Did wonders for his confidence.”

“I can imagine,” said Bettina.

“The other one in the ad is a high-powered footballer,” Ollie went on. “Plays for Chelsea or somewhere like that. Mark tells me he's the only Englishman playing for them, which seems a bit odd. Anyway Mark won't take any crap from him. Mark's always man-to-man, whoever he's with.”

Bettina could imagine that too.

When they got to Margate they got a parking space not too far from the beach. It was not yet high season, if English seaside towns still had a high season. Their habitual bleakness was mitigated today by a hazy sun, and they had a pleasant stroll to the end of the promenade, where they could see a little knot of vans and all the apparatus and busy-ness of filming. When they got nearer they saw it was not just a little knot of vans but one of people too: locals, with the odd visitor, glad to vary the monotony with a glimpse of something that they might in the future see on the thing that was the center of their lives—the TV set.

They watched for half an hour as down the beach, well-barriered from the spectators, the figure of Mark was filmed over and over again running in a gaudy Hawaiian-style shirt and beach shorts toward the recumbent figure of the famous footballer, apparently consuming things from a silver-papered packet. Just when her interest was on the point of evaporating entirely, Bettina was relieved to hear the man in charge call for a break. The little knot of people started moving away, but when it became clear that the two performers were coming up toward the promenade the more devoted stayed on.

Mark and his friend hadn't got far up the walkway before there was a shout from the director, if that was what he was called. Mark didn't bother to stop walking, but he turned around and the man bellowed something incomprehensible.

Mark shrugged his shoulders.

“It's my oldies. My dad and my auntie. No worries.”

As they turned again the director renewed his shouting. Probably various parts of the footballer were insured for ridiculous sums on stringent conditions. Mark, barely modifying his voice, said, “Oh, go to buggery,” and came up to his little party beaming a big smile that told them he was very chuffed with himself.

“Hi, Dad. Hi, Sylvia. Hi, Auntie Bet. This is Mel. He plays that English game with the round ball.”

Mel looked about eighteen, and had probably gone straight from school to earning fifty thousand a week. By now he was quite likely used to wall-to-wall adulation rather than Mark's jokiness, but he smiled weakly while he was trying to get his emotional bearings.

“Good to meet you,” said Ollie to him. “Australians know perfectly well what soccer is. Won't be long before we beat the world at it.”

Bettina remembered Hughie teaching his classmates the rules, when it was virtually a foreign game. She had to tell herself that countries changed, their people changed. She should not confuse Mark with Sergeant Malley. He was a different generation and mind-set. Even about the people she had known as a child her confidence had been shaken by Sylvia's revelation that Steve Drayton had played flute in an amateur orchestra.

“How did you think it went, Auntie Bet?” asked Mark, turning to her, presumably as the expert on film due to the forthcoming
Heart of the Land.
It was an impossible question to answer.

“Difficult to say, really,” Bettina said. “I'd heard about doing the same thing over and over, but when you see it actually happening it's still hard to see why it should be necessary.”

“Oh, they'll find the take that best fits in with the whole sequence, won't they, Mel?” said Mark sagely.

“Suppose so,” said Mel.

“The next bit's the difficult one,” resumed Mark. “That's the bit where I snatch the packet of Munchets.”

Bettina cast a covert glance at him, hoping to see some sign of joking, even a degree of self-irony, but there was nothing of that. She was relieved when the two boys were called back to perform this dramatically challenging section of the commercial, though her interest waned during the twenty or thirty repetitions of the maneuver. Is this the peak of civilization we have been aiming for all the years of my lifetime? she wondered.

Eventually a halt was called. It was after twelve o'clock. Mark was allowed to come up and fraternize with his oldies, but Mel of the precious limbs was spirited away with the director and crew. As they walked off in search of the nearest presentable pub for lunch, Mark showed himself still incurably self-satisfied.

“I thought that went really well, didn't you, Auntie Bet?”

“Awfully well,” she replied, straight-faced.

“The director's a beaut bloke, underneath. We went over it a fair bit yesterday evening. Mel had a lot of problems, not being used to this kind of work. But I got him through it all right today.”

“I suppose there are all sorts of possible reactions to having your Munchets snatched on the beach,” said Bettina.

“Too right. But the director's got clear ideas about everything like that, and it was just a question of getting Mel to understand what was required.”

They were interrupted by a woman in her twenties, someone Bettina had noticed when they first joined the little knot of onlookers on the promenade. She was looking diffident, but proffering a book in her hand.

“This is awful cheek I know, but I recognized you and…I managed to find this book in a bookshop here. I wondered if you would sign it for me. Could you write ‘for Caroline'?”

“Of course,” said Bettina, taking the book and pen. As she turned to the title page she caught a glimpse of the faces around her. While Ollie and Sylvia were looking pleased and rather proud of their subsidiary part in this piece of unexpected homage, Mark was looking in what seemed like bewilderment at the book, as if he remembered what they were but hadn't seen one in years, and wondered what a woman of about his age could be doing with one, and why she should read a literary work by a very old woman.

“Oh,
The Chattering Crowd,
” said Bettina with practiced friendliness. “My first book set in London.”

“I'm sure I shall enjoy it,” said the woman, slipping tactfully away.

“I suppose that's a book about the arty mob, isn't it?” said Mark.

“Something like that,” said Bettina, though that was in fact precisely what the book was about.

“You'd know about them. But how did she recognize you, Auntie Bet?”

There was no mistaking his expression now. There was on his face the most naked, naive, childish jealousy.

“Oh, I used to appear on arts discussion programs on television,” said Bettina. “Before the BBC dumbed itself down.”

But something in Mark's reaction—not the jealousy but the naïvety—made her remember her father's reaction, shortly before his death, when she gave him one of her books. She dictated it into her tape that night, knowing she would have to fit her father's death into the novel somewhere.

 

Bettina flew back to Australia in three laborious stages in 1961 to see her father, who was dying of kidney failure. He had been living for the last three years in Ollie and Judy's home in Bendigo, northern Victoria. She brought with her one of the first copies of her book
The Chattering Crowd,
which she had great hopes for. It was an exciting time to be part of the British literary scene. Angry young men vied with sparky young women for critical attention, and once again, as in the Brontës' time and Arnold Bennett's, writers from the provinces, soon to be renamed “the regions,” had pushed their way to the forefront of public attention.

Bettina could not compete with writers from Stoke-on-Trent or Nottingham. She had quarried her first twenty years of life in four novels set in Australia and it was time to move on, as she had moved on in actual fact fifteen years before, to London. The Australian novels had done respectably, but they had certainly not managed to go with the tide of popular interest aroused by Shute's bestseller
A Town Like Alice.
Bettina had not been surprised. She had not aimed at or expected bestsellerdom. But it was time to move on, time to make use of that sharp, satirical intelligence that she had only intermittently brought into play in the first novels: it was the age of the Discontented Migrant, and there were too many people sounding off about the awfulness of Australia for her to want to join them. It would have been the emotional equivalent of rejecting mother's milk.