A Fragment of Fear (17 page)

I didn’t trust him enough to tell him the whole facts. I didn’t trust him not to go and blab them out to Juliet. I was going to tell Juliet something, but not everything. I didn’t see the point in telling her everything. You can’t protect yourself against an acid thrower.

He can be anywhere. He can be in a bus, or in an Underground train, or waiting at a street corner, or passing you on the pavement, and one moment you are full of the joy of life, and the next the searing burning fluid is over your face, and your skin is ruined, and if it gets into your eyes your sight may be gone for ever, and that is that, and it’s no good talking then about police protection, or wearing glasses to protect your eyes.

“Forget it,” I said, “there’s nothing one can do about it today.”

Nor was there. If the police couldn’t protect her, then Stanley Bristow couldn’t. In the close-knit circle of a wedding, it was possible; in the normal run of the day, there was no chance.

“Somebody rang up again,” I went on. “The usual thing, the usual threat.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said soothingly:

“Don’t worry, old boy, don’t worry at all! Everything’s going to be all right. You mustn’t worry, see? Take it easy. Don’t overdo it, and above all have a good night’s rest. You’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”

Later, Juliet had lunch with me. It was our last meeting alone before the wedding. She was quiet, paler than usual and jumpy. I supposed that fool Stanley had said something.

“Looking forward to tomorrow, darling?” I said half-way through the meal. A silly question.

She didn’t look up from her plate when she answered.

“I’m dreading it,” she said. “You’ve asked me, and I’ve told you. I’ll be glad when it’s over.”

She saw my dismayed look.

“It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s because I do.”

“What’s Stanley been saying?” I asked angrily.

“Nothing much.”

“Stanley’s always exaggerating.”

“Not always.”

“Nothing’s changed,” I said. “You must believe that. Everything is as it was. See?”

It was a flagrant lie, but I was appalled. The wedding was supposed to be a joyous day, and I saw the fragrance slipping away. Whatever was or was not to happen, I wanted her to go to her wedding with happiness.

“How long is it all to go on?” she asked sadly.

“Not long now, darling. I know that.”

“How long?” she insisted.

I searched my mind for an answer.

“Only till we get back from the honeymoon.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. This sort of thing can’t go on.”

“And if we don’t get back? If one of us doesn’t get back?”

“We’ll get back all right,” I said. “Once we’re off, we’ll get back all right. Don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about that for one moment.”

My heart ached as I looked at her magnolia skin, wondering if we would, in fact, get off, or whether she would be lying in hospital with her face swathed in bandages.

I am rather a solitary walker, with few intimate friends. I had had to scratch round a bit for a best man for the wedding. In the end, a chap called Gerald Bailey agreed to do the job. We had worked together on a magazine at one period, and had kept up a desultory friendship ever since. I didn’t have the usual stag party the night before, but I had to give Gerald a good dinner. It was the least I could do in exchange for the morning suit he would have to hire for the occasion.

But before I met him I called in at the Bristows’ for a final word with Juliet. I couldn’t delay it any longer, and in due course I said:

“Do me a favour, will you? You know I love you in glasses. Will you wear your glasses tomorrow, darling?”

She looked at me in astonishment.

“Wear my glasses? I don’t need to wear my glasses.”

“I know you don’t need to, I just asked if you would.”

“Why?”

“Because you look pretty in them.”

“I shouldn’t think anybody else thinks so.”

“You’re not marrying anybody else.”

She didn’t take me seriously, of course, and laughed.

“You’ll have plenty of time to see me in them later.”

“Please wear your glasses,” I said. “Do please wear them, sweetheart, just for my sake. Will you?”

She must have noted the urgency in my voice. She looked at me, and I saw a flicker of fear reappear in her eyes.

“Why?” she asked again.

“Just because I love you in them.”

She didn’t ask any more. She guessed that it would be useless. Behind her quiet manner her quick brain could seize an unspoken thought, she sensed subterfuge, and yet she knew when it was useless to press a point.

“I’ll see,” she said, and would promise no more.

But I wondered if she
would
see, if she wore no glasses. Suddenly I broke, and cast aside my resolution.

“Juliet,” I said. “Juliet, listen to me.”

“What?” she said.

The flicker of fear had become a bar across her beautiful eyes.

“What I’ve done, I’ve done and whether I did right or wrong, doesn’t matter now. For the time being I can’t undo it. I want you to protect yourself in every way.”

She looked at me thoughtfully.

“Including my eyes?”

“Well, yes, including your eyes.”

“Against what?”

I hesitated a moment.

“People might throw things,” I said at last. “You never know they might throw something.”

“Protect my face and my eyes?” she said slowly. “And to some extent my clothes?”

I didn’t say anything.

I saw the flash of naked terror though she tried to hide it, and wished I had kept quiet after all. I didn’t think she would reach exactly the right conclusion so quickly.

I wasn’t big enough to take upon myself the burden of responsibility. She should have at least arrived happy for her wedding.

In the event, she arrived both fearful and unprotected. Doubtless, Elaine Bristow played a part in the matter of the spectacles, but I think it was mostly vanity.

T
he church we were married in was small and unpretentious. It had been built as a chapel for a Roman Catholic ambassador in penal times, and, from the outside, had the look of a disused factory. This was an intended effect. The façade was a camouflage to hide the church and protect it against eighteenth-century anti-popery riots.

Gerald Bailey drove me to the church. I suppose he attributed my tenseness to the usual nervousness of bridegrooms. He dropped me at the door and drove off to park the car somewhere.

Inside, the church looked warm and welcoming, the gilt and blue of the gallery gleaming in the light of the candles. On the steps of the altar were two huge urns of gold and white chrysanthemums. Elaine Bristow had not been mean about flowers.

Near the Lady Chapel a dozen candles were burning, and an old woman was sitting muttering, and fingering her rosary, oblivious to what was going on around her. The organist began to play a soft wandering tune, like the background music to a film.

I did not want to go up to the altar too soon, and stood in a side aisle in some shadows and watched the church fill up. There were not, in fact, many guests, as weddings go, and most of them were Juliet’s.

Gerald Bailey joined me. Promptly at three-thirty I heard a car draw up outside, and a few seconds later a car door slammed, and I guessed it was Juliet.

Gerald and I made our way to the altar.

When I stood near the altar rails, I turned round and glanced down the church, past the blobs of faces, to the door where Juliet would appear.

In a seat bordering the centre aisle, and on the side occupied by my scanty collection of guests, I caught sight of a face which was not that of a friend or a relation, but was red, benevolent, and vaguely familiar.

I caught a glimpse of somebody fiddling about arranging Juliet’s dress, and Stanley Bristow watching, and in those few seconds I glanced again, puzzled, at the face by the aisle.

By the time I realised it was the man who had called himself Sergeant Matthews, Juliet was already coming through the main door on Stanley Bristow’s arm, and although she wasn’t wearing her glasses, I suddenly knew that her veil, firmly attached to her headdress standing out stiffly from her face, white, symbolic and protective, would be her shield.

I saw the man who called himself Matthews turn his head as she came up the aisle. He made no movement as she passed, and she herself, her eyes fixed ahead to the altar, passed him with no inkling of what he represented.

Quite apart from the chains of social behaviour and custom which kept me motionless, inhibited, reluctant to cause a scene, I do not know to this day what practical measure I could have taken. In law, he had a right to be sitting there, in a church open to the public; intruding perhaps, but at the moment offending nobody.

So I watched her slowly pass him, her dress almost brushing his arm, and felt the sweat accumulating in the palms of my hands, because I knew that although her veil was a protection on the way in, on the way out, after the ceremony, her veil would be thrown back.

But I would be walking by her side, I thought feverishly, I would be by her side, and I could interpose my body, and I could do—something. I watched her drawing close, and thought again that I could take some action; at the first sign of a movement from him I could do something, strike, fend off, bash, kick, I could do something.

Then Juliet reached me.

She was not smiling.

She was very pale, and under the veil her large dark eyes held the bar of fear I had seen before.

She came and stood by my side, and I could see the soft cloud of her dark hair caught into unaccustomed stiffness by a knot of stephanotis. She wore a stiff silk dress, and I could hear it rustle when she moved. Her bouquet of stephanotis trembled in her hands. I smelt the strong scent of the flowers.

The priest walked down the altar steps. He was a short, red-faced man, and the lace-trimmed alb over his cassock looked odd on him.

I glanced again at Juliet, but still she didn’t smile. Her lips were touched with a little colour, but otherwise her skin was as colourless as her dress. I took her hand. It was like touching a flower in the snow.

One might have thought that she knew she had just brushed past terror in the aisle, and that it was still there, behind us, as we knelt at the altar.

As with all Catholic-Protestant weddings, the service was short and simple, because a Nuptial Mass is not allowed.

Gerald Bailey handed me the ring and at the appropriate moment I said the words, “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, Amen,” touching each of her fingers, and with the word Amen I placed the ring on her finger, but all the time I was thinking of the walk back, down the aisle, with her veil thrown back and the man with a bottle of acid in his overcoat pocket, and I was thinking, “I’ll be able to do something, something I’ll be able to do, because I know him, and I know what he plans, and forewarned is forearmed. So it’ll be all right. Ah, God, please let it be all right.”

After the civil ceremony in the vestry, and the signing of the Register, and the kissing and smiling, I thought again as we set out down the aisle, “Oh God, please let it be all right. Please let me be able to stop it.”

So we set off down the aisle, and I held her very slightly back, so that I was a fraction of a pace before her, but I needn’t have bothered, because he had gone from his seat.

I was tense and rigid and keyed up, because I thought he might merely have changed his seat, or hidden himself elsewhere in the church. But he hadn’t.

He was nowhere in the church.

He was outside the church.

Even then he allowed the photographers to line us up. I saw him saunter from behind a police constable of all people, a little to the left. I had been looking at the cameramen, but I saw him all the same. I saw him out of the corner of my eye as he suddenly quickened his step and drew nearer, and I saw him take the bottle out of his overcoat pocket and remove the stopper.

I remember I shouted “Look out!” and flung Juliet back with my right arm, and leaped down the three short church steps at him, and because I had this impetus I bore him easily to the ground and had my left hand on his right wrist, because his right hand was holding the bottle, and with my right hand I held him on the ground, by the throat, and looked down at him, and saw the brown, bovine eyes looking up at me as they had looked at me when he had called and pretended to report the fictitious complaint by poor Bunface.

I remember I gasped, “Now, you bastard!” and half choked him.

Then I felt myself being dragged off by the policeman and Gerald Bailey.

When questioned, he said his name was Arthur Robinson of Clapham, and he had paused to watch the wedding out of curiosity.

He suffered a good deal from asthma and had been about to take a sniff of the remedy he always carried with him when I jumped at him. He showed the bottle and allowed the officer to sniff the contents.

No, he had suffered no injury from the assault, though the shock might induce an asthma attack later. No, he certainly did not wish to bring a charge against me and spoil a happy occasion. He gladly agreed that it must be a case of mistaken identity.

So he went his way, respected by all for his magnanimity.

Everybody did their best to laugh it off, at the reception. I myself could only make the lame excuse that he resembled a man who had a grudge against me and apologise to all and sundry for causing such a stupid rumpus.

But I didn’t need to apologise to Juliet, and for a while the bar of fear had gone from her eyes.

We were undisturbed on our honeymoon, largely, perhaps, because we were continually on the move in the South of France. There was no threatening letter on our return.

I would have been glad to believe that we were to be left in peace, but I didn’t believe it. One letter, therefore, among the pile of bills, circulars and other communications which awaited us gave me a thrill of pleasure, mixed with excitement and relief.

It was from Stanley Bristow.

He had written it a week after we left, and a day before he and Elaine had themselves gone off for a tour in northern Europe and Scandinavia. It read: