A Fragment of Fear (7 page)

The thought of seeing him regularly through the years was appalling. Yet one had to be gentle with him. It seemed to me that there was no malice in the man. In fact, despite the irritation he aroused in me, I felt sorry for him.

He had recently retired from the post of general manager in a small, but long established firm, which over the decades had slowly evolved from making tin and wooden children’s toys to plastic ones. Stanley said that they might be old-fashioned, but they moved with the times. It was the sort of remark one might expect him to make. He also said they combined the tradition of the past with the spirit of the future. Dear me.

He had married Elaine Bristow late in life, by which time he had somehow managed to save a good deal of money, and Elaine had a little of her own. What with a small inheritance from a brother, and his pension, and his savings, and Elaine’s money, they were able to live at a reasonable standard in a ground floor flat between Kensington Church Street, and Camden Hill, which is not a cheap area.

He should have been happy, but I wondered if he was.

Since his retirement, he had spent most of his time going alone to race meetings, and interesting himself in various Service benevolent organisations, which entailed visiting people and eating and drinking for charity.

It seemed to be doubtful if he was particularly interested in racing or horses or charity. He was certainly interested in getting out of the house, not that Elaine Bristow actively nagged him. She just treated him with a faint, amused contempt.

“It is, of course, difficult to make really worthwhile money these days, if one is honest like Stanley,” she would say, or, “Personally, I would like to have had more than one child, but there, it was not to be.”

Stanley affected to take no notice of these remarks, with their snide reflections on his financial acumen and his virility. She was a tall, over-blown woman, and she was always pleasant enough to me. I played her along on her own terms, the same as I did her husband.

Sometimes I wondered how this superficial couple could ever have given birth to somebody like Juliet, with her intriguing, withdrawn manner, and her thoughtful, secretive glances. Both Stanley and Elaine were fair. Both had tall, substantial figures, though not actually stout. Stanley’s hair was sparsely distributed over his rectangular Anglo-Saxon skull, and was grey except for a few streaks here and there which remained tow-coloured.

Elaine Bristow’s hair was fair all over, and people were allowed to draw their own conclusions about it. Both had grey eyes. Both in their different ways were seemingly extrovert types.

Out of this physically consistent nordic blending had come Juliet—of only medium height, dark-haired, pale, slim, brown-eyed, and quiet.

The thing which I noted most of all, in the beginning, was her watchfulness. She would be thumbing through a magazine, or eating her meal, saying little, while her parents and I talked. Now and then, without moving her head, she would glance towards us, and if I glanced back she would drop her eyes. She wasn’t consciously flirting, she was discreetly observing.

It was difficult to know whether she was secretive or shy, and I didn’t care. I just knew that almost from the first moment I met her at a cocktail party I found her enchanting and wanted to marry her. I was thirty-two, no bleating lamb turned loose on the world, but Juliet was the only one who had ever aroused in me a feeling which justified the words “blind passion.”

Passion it was, entirely physical at first; and blind, because although men of mature age will usually regard the physical side of love as a big incentive, they will seek for some other ingredients before proposing marriage, such as gaiety, wit, a sense of humour; even kindliness, though this ranks lower in the scale; nor do I think that money counts for much with men, though women think it does.

When I met Juliet, I knew I would seek for none of these things. So it was blind passion. For better or for worse. I was aware of the gamble I was taking, but I wanted the woman and, all things being equal, I was going to have her, whether I regretted it later or whether I didn’t.

She wore glasses, not all the time, not at parties, or when she wished to look her best, as she thought; but when she was at the cinema or theatre, or reading, or driving a car.

Women with glasses attract me, as they attract many other men. Perhaps the greatest untruth ever spoken by a talented woman were the words of Dorothy Parker, “Men don’t make passes at girls with glasses.”

Men do. Hordes of them.

It’s not a question of a fetish, or sex deviation. Psychologically, it’s simple. Glasses indicate a physical weakness. Weakness arouses the protective instinct. Most men are suckers about being protective. It’s as clean and simple as that.

Juliet, glasses or no glasses, didn’t arouse any particular protective instinct in me when I met her. Her shy-sly withdrawn manner, and soft voice, and soft hands, and soft shoulder blades when we danced, they didn’t arouse any Sir Galahad feelings in me, I assure you, and what feelings they did arouse don’t need to be spelt out in this day and age.

I don’t believe that it was Helen’s face that launched a thousand ships and led to the sack of Troy. No woman’s face is worth the effort. But if you said that a thousand ships were launched because Helen had a shy-sly manner, a secretive, thoughtful way of glancing up at a man, and then away again, a supple, yielding body, and a skin like a magnolia leaf, then I would believe you, whether her face was beautiful, or, like Juliet’s, oval and classically undistinguished.

Let’s face it. Lust caused me to gamble on Juliet.

Good fortune alone decreed that she had those other ingredients which men hope for and sometimes get and sometimes don’t. So I was lucky. But I would have proposed to her anyway.

The frame of her horn-rimmed glasses was black, and perhaps too heavy for the delicacy of her face. Not that it matters at all.

It was her father’s ’phone call which set me off thinking about her, in fact, all three of them, as I dressed and boiled an egg and made some toast, and prepared to call at the police station.

I never made that visit because the door bell rang just after eight-thirty. I went to the door thinking it might be a parcels delivery or even a cable from Juliet in New York saying her time of arrival had been changed. But it was a police sergeant who had apparently cycled round from Kensington Police Station. He still wore his trouser clips.

I was surprised and pleased to see him, thinking that something suspicious might have been reported by a neighbour in my absence.

He was a middle-aged man, rather short as London policemen go, and when he took his helmet off I saw that he was bald on top, with grizzled hair above the ears.

He asked me if I was Mr. James Martin Compton, and I said I was, and asked him if he would like a cup of tea. He said, no, he had just had a cup. I asked him to sit down, but he said, no, he wouldn’t be very long, and he’d just as soon stand. I said:

“I am glad you called.”

To which he replied:

“Then I take it you were not altogether surprised, sir?”

“Well, yes and no,” I said. “The fact is I’ve been away for a few days, and I think—indeed, I’m sure—that somebody has been into this flat in my absence. I was going to call round at the Station and mention it. I thought they might as well know about it. Not that they can do anything about it.”

He had taken a sheet of paper from his pocket while I was speaking, and when I had finished he looked up from it, and around the living-room, moving his head slowly, his big, brown, good-natured eyes seemingly searching for some intruder who might still be there.

He looked at me for a couple of seconds, and then down again at the piece of paper in his hand, and cleared his throat. He said:

“Well, we can come to that later, sir. Whatever has happened here, or has not happened here, is not the reason for my visit, sir.”

I had the impression he was ill at ease.

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“Did you travel on the eight-twenty-five train last night from Burlington via Brighton to Victoria Station, sir?”

I had brought the breakfast tray into the living-room, with some tea, and toast, and the egg and the butter and marmalade. I was pouring out a cup of tea when he asked his question. I went on pouring, having no idea what was coming.

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you have in your compartment a female, possibly between the age of forty-five and fifty, dressed in a white mackintosh, and wearing a head-covering, attached beneath the chin?”

I added the milk to the tea, and nodded, and carefully replaced the little milk jug on the tray. I didn’t feel sick, but I felt a surge of dull pain in the stomach.

“Yes, I remember her,” I said, and remembered the tears welling out of the naïve eyes, and although I also thought of the note she had given me, it was the thought of the grief I had witnessed which was uppermost in my mind.

The note, and its message, was a minor thing at that moment, a trivial, stupid little mystery compared to the major issues of the black night of the soul, of death by suicide, of my slap-happy remark about putting one’s head in a gas oven, and my tongue-tied inadequacy in the face of her distraught pleas for reassurance.

I saw the significance of her longing for an assurance about life after death and about whether she would see her friend again. Inadvertently, I had taken the wrong line.

By assuring her that she and her friend would survive the grave, and that she would see her friend again, I had given her the arguments she needed, the confidence which had been in the balance, about what would happen if she took her own life. If I had told her there was no life after death, she would have fought on, struggling to maintain the Awareness, which is life, against the Dreamless Sleep, which the atheists consider to be death.

It is surprising how fast such thoughts can pass through the mind. They flash between the time it takes to lift a milk jug and pour some drops into a cup; or during the time it takes to add two lumps of sugar. One moment you are happy, or if not happy, you are at least stabilised in the general turmoil of life, and the next you are sick with guilt and with a hopeless feeling of your own inadequacy to lead and inspire.

I felt sure, and still feel sure, and always will feel sure, that her emotions were genuine, even though the sergeant now said:

“At about eleven-thirty last night, a person of the above description called at Kensington Police Station and laid a complaint against a person of your name, sir, of this address, alleging that you had made improper and indecent suggestions. She declined to give her own name and address, sir, or to make a formal statement.”

He was reading from his piece of paper, so as to get the exact wording right.

“I have to inform you, sir, that in the circumstances, and failing further evidence, it is not the intention of the police to take further action. It is felt that you should nevertheless be informed of this matter, and should you wish to make any statement I am authorised to take it down.”

He folded up his sheet of paper and replaced it in his tunic pocket. I could almost hear him sigh with relief. We looked at each other awkwardly, in silence.

“We get this sort of thing now and again, sir,” he said, in a soothing, matter of fact tone. “I take it you completely deny the allegation, and do not consider it necessary to make a formal statement in rebuttal?”

Short of nudging me in the ribs or kicking me on the shin, he could hardly have given a broader hint. But I couldn’t take the opening.

I kept thinking of the two sides of her, the shapeless bundle which was her body, the red chapped hand dabbing at the tears with a grubby handkerchief, the childish apology for her whimpers; and on the other hand, the instructions she had been given and carried out. I doubted if they meant anything to her, or if she even knew what was in the envelope, or what was going on at all, except that she was wallowing in misery.

“I had a description of her from the desk sergeant, sir. They get hallucinations at certain times of life. Dentists suffer from the same sort of accusation sometimes, sir, when they give anaesthetics. That sort of thing. Well, I’ll report back now, unless you have something to say.”

He picked up his helmet from a chair.

“You don’t wish to make any statement, I take it, sir? Except an oral denial?”

I shook my head, but he misunderstood me, and began to put on his helmet. He thought his job was finished.

“Yes, I do want to make a statement,” I said.

He looked at me and shook his head.

“You don’t need to, sir, in my view of present police intentions, of which I have informed you.”

I got up and walked to the window, and said:

“It’s not as simple as that. This woman you called about, this woman who made a complaint about me, there’s something odd going on, and I don’t understand it.”

He nodded in an understanding way.

“You don’t need to worry, sir, like I more or less said, we get these cases now and again. If she pesters you, sir, and if she goes on pestering you, and becomes a real nuisance, you want to get a Court injunction against her. It usually works. Frightens some sense into ’em, as it were.”

He began to move towards the door again.