He thought she meant the five victims at Kemalpan, and though he knew she
could be held accountable for their deaths, he thought it was going too far
to say that she had actually killed them. But then she always did go too far,
and he always tried to drag her back by being severely and irritatingly
logical; it was almost a routine. So he said: “Oh, come now, don’t put it
that way. They might have lost their lives in any event.”
“THEY?” she echoed. And then it turned out that she hadn’t been thinking
of Kemalpan at all. “Then who?” he asked, puzzled but also wryly amused.
“Don’t you remember Anne Westerholme?” she answered.
He told me that when she spoke that name he first had to make an effort to
recollect it, but that when he did so he felt himself growing pale and cold
with an emotion he would have called fear, except that he had known fear
before, and this was nothing like it.
He also told me about Anne Westerholme, and the story took him back almost
ten years, to the time when he was adviser to another Sultanate and lived
with Livia at a place called Tanjong Palai. It was not such a good job as the
one he obtained later, but the district was healthier and they had a pleasant
bungalow in the hills, with the usual neighbourhood society of tea and rubber
planters. One of these, a friend of Jeffrey’s, was bringing out a young
governess from England to look after his three small boys, but as they
developed scarlet fever while she was en route he had arranged with the
Winslows that the girl should stay with them until the end of quarantine. So
Anne Westerholme arrived one afternoon at the Winslows’ bungalow, and the
next morning she was dead. She had been bitten by a five-foot krait, the most
venomous of Malayan snakes, and as it could be surmised that she had opened
her bedroom window without fixing the screen there was no hitch in the
presumption of accidental death. Thousands die from snake-bite every year in
that part of the world; it was tragic, but hardly remarkable.
But now, a decade later, Livia had more to say about this, and what she
said was quite dreadful. She said that very early in the morning she had
entered the girl’s room and seen her asleep with the krait curled up at the
foot of the bed. It would have been easy then to kill the snake (she had
killed scores) but she simply did not do so. She went back to the kitchen,
calmly gave the Chinese houseboy his daily orders, played some Mozart records
on the gramophone, and waited for the call that summoned her, along with the
servants, too late.
Jeffrey said that when she told him this, sitting over the turf fire at
Carrigole late one night, he was so horrified that it did not occur to him at
first that he had only her word for the story; but that later, when he did
realize that, his feelings of horror hardly diminished. He made her go to
bed, he said, and himself spent the night in his downstairs workroom,
arranging the manuscript of the book he knew he would never finish— not
at Carrigole, anyhow. And in the morning he took the train for Dublin en
route for Holyhead and London.
We sat over coffee in the club smoke-room discussing the matter throughout
most of the afternoon.
“But do you really think she was speaking the truth?” I asked.
“I think she could have been,” he answered, with no kind of reluctance.
“But I also think she could have made up the story.”
“But what motive could she possibly have had? A girl fresh from England
—how could Livia have had any concern with whether she lived or
died?”
“Jealousy,” Jeffrey answered. “She saw in this girl some menace to her own
life with me—or so she said when she made the confession.”
“But that’s equally absurd!” I persisted. “How long had you known the
girl? A few hours, I suppose… Had you had any chance to… but of course
it’s preposterous… and what sort of a girl was she? I suppose you hardly
remember—even the name didn’t stay in your mind—”
Jeffrey nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I’d almost forgotten that, but I do
remember HER—she had reddish hair and a rather calm face.”
“Not pretty, though?”
“No, but calm… CALM.”
“And Livia was with you the whole of the time—”
“Oh yes. The three of us just talked during dinner, that’s all.”
“Well, it’s still absurd,” I repeated. “Even for Livia it’s absurd. How
could she possibly imagine there was anything for her to be jealous of?”
He nodded again, but then suddenly moved restlessly in the club armchair.
“You know,” he said at length, “I’ll be perfectly frank with you, since you
deserve that much for all you’ve done for me lately… It’s true of course
that there was nothing between me and that girl. Yet… there almost might
have been… eventually. I knew that, in a queer sort of way, while we were
just chatting during dinner. Nothing special or exciting or significant or
provocative—and yet—and I was aware of it—that girl’s
calmness came over to me… and Livy intercepted it, just as later on she
intercepted the cable.” He got up, clenching and unclenching his hands.
“That’s the really frightening thing about it,” he exclaimed, when he had let
me order a second brandy. “Livy KNEW. She ALWAYS knew. She doesn’t miss a
thing…”
The Mayor of Browdley sat for a long time in silence after Millbay had
finished. He was—and he was aware of it—a little out of his
depth. This world of rubber-planters and Sultans and five-foot kraits was so
foreign to him, or seemed so when he tried to get it into extempore focus;
how different from that other world of cotton mills and council meetings! And
yet, after all, it was the same world, governed by the same passions, the
same greeds, the same basic gulf between those who take and those who give.
True, there were no snakes in Browdley, but there was diphtheria that could
kill (and had killed, hadn’t it?) just as effectively; and there had once
been a murder in a street not far from Mill Street, a particularly lurid
murder that had made headlines in all the Sunday papers. From Browdley to
Kemalpan and Tanjong Palai was only a matter of miles, but from Livia’s mind
to his own… how far was that?
Millbay interrupted his musings. “Well, Boswell, you stipulated for my
story first. Now what about yours?”
George answered at length: “Aye… but I haven’t one. Nothing to match
what you’ve told me, anyhow. I can’t say I’m glad to have heard it, but it’s
been good of you to give me so much time.”
“No need to be grateful. I’d rather know how it all strikes you.”
“That’s just it,” George answered. “It DOES strike me. It strikes me all
of a heap.”
“You mean you don’t altogether believe it?”
“I don’t disbelieve it, because I’ve been struck all of a heap before by
some of the things Livia did.”
“Oh, you have?”
“Aye… When she left me I was a bit like that for years. But I got over
it…”
And that was all. Millbay, though disappointed, was tactful enough not to
press him. “Seems to me,” he said later, “that those who want to plan the
future with everything neatly laid out in squares and rectangles are going to
find the Livias of this world sticking out like a sore thumb.”
“Maybe,” replied George. “But maybe also if the world was planned a bit
better there wouldn’t be so many Livias.”
“You evidently accept that as a desirable state.”
“Nay,” said George quickly. “I’ll not say too much against her. We had
some good times. And this jealousy you’ve talked about—I never noticed
it particularly…”
Millbay smiled. “May I be very personal?”
“Anything you want.”
“It’s perhaps such ancient history that you won’t feel hurt if I suggest
it… that perhaps she wasn’t as jealous in your case because she didn’t…
love you… as much.”
“Aye, that might have been it.”
It was getting late and George took his leave soon after that. He thanked
Millbay again, walked from Smith Square to his hotel in a street behind the
Strand, and rather to his surprise slept well and did not dream. The next day
was a Saturday and he was busy at a conference. The conference was about
nothing more or less momentous than the coordination of local authorities in
the grouping of road-transport services throughout the northern industrial
areas; and George, again to his surprise, found it quite possible to
intervene in the discussion and secure for Browdley favourable treatment in
the proposed set-up. The conference then adjourned till Monday, and with a
day to spare George could not think of anything better to do than visit
Cambridge. He had never been there before, and thought it would be a good
opportunity to compare it with Oxford, which he had visited once, in a mood
of envy and adoration, thirty years earlier. So he took the train at
Liverpool Street and eventually arrived, after a journey in which war-time
and Sunday discomforts were incredibly combined, at a railway station whose
form and situation roused in him the most drastic instincts of the rebuilder.
He then took a bus into the town, got off at the Post Office, had a late and
rather bad lunch at a restaurant, and entered the nearest of the
colleges.
Here at last he felt an authentic thrill that years had scarcely dimmed;
for George still worshipped education and could still think nostalgically of
never-tasted joys. To be young, to live in one of these old colleges, to have
years for nothing but study, and then to emerge into the world’s fray already
armoured with academic letters after one’s name—this was the kind of
past George would like to have had for himself, and the kind of future he
would have wanted for his own boy, if his own boy had lived. The multiple
disillusionments of the inter-war years had not dulled this dream, because it
had been a dream only—for George, in Browdley, had never heard about
fully-trained university men having to cadge jobs as vacuum-cleaner salesmen.
So he could pass through the college archway and stare across the quadrangle
at sixteenth-century buildings with the feeling that here, at any rate, was
something almost perfect in a far from perfect world.
Civilian sightseers being rare in war-time, the college porter, scenting a
tip, came out of his office to ask George if he would like to be shown over.
George said yes, with some enthusiasm, and for the next hour was piloted
through various courts, and into a quiet garden containing a famous
mulberry-tree; he was also shown the rooms in which there had lived, during
the most impressionable years of their lives, such varied personages as John
Milton and Jan Smuts. George was entranced with all this, and by the time the
tour was completed had absorbed much assorted information about the habits of
undergraduates in pre-war days. It did not entirely conform to what he had
imagined, or even thought desirable. But perhaps after the war things would
be a little different in some respects. He soon found that everything the
porter was afraid of, he himself most warmly hoped for; and presently he
summed the man up as an incurable snob, of a kind almost never met in
Browdley. However, all that did not matter in war-time, since the man, from
his own statements, was an air-raid warden and doubtless doing his duty like
everyone else. George gave him five shillings, which he thought was enough;
and the man took it as if he thought it just about enough.
“By the way,” George added, as an afterthought, “have you a list of all
the men in the University—not just this college only?”
He had, and George inspected it. It did not take him more than a moment to
find that Winslow was at St. Jude’s. The porter then told him where St.
Jude’s was and he walked there across the town.
He did not know whether he really intended to visit Winslow
or not, but as
he was strolling towards the College entrance he saw a man leaning on two
sticks walk out towards the kerb and there hesitate, as if uncertain whether
to risk crossing. George caught his glance from a distance and immediately
changed direction to help him; whereupon the man turned away, evidently
deciding not to cross after all. But the whole manoeuvre puzzled George, so
that he approached nevertheless and asked if he could be of any service. The
man was a tall young fellow in a rather ill-fitting tweed jacket and
grey-flannel trousers, with a hat turned down over his forehead in such a way
that, with the further obstruction of dark glasses, the face was hardly to be
seen.
Yet immediately—from some curious instinct rather than from any
arguable recognition—George knew who it was. He had never seen him
dressed before, or even standing up before, yet there was not a shadow of
doubt as he exclaimed: “Why, Charles…” and took the other’s arm.
Charles stared at him for a moment before forcing a smile. “I—I
didn’t expect you’d recognize me.”
“Don’t say you didn’t want me to!”
“I won’t say it if you’d rather not.” The voice and the tone were ironic.
“What are you doing in these parts, anyhow?”
George explained and added heartily: “No need to ask what YOU’RE
doing.”
“Isn’t there? At present I’m going to have my hair cut by a barber who
most obligingly does it for me privately every third Sunday afternoon. I
can’t face that sort of thing when there’s the usual audience.”
George nodded with understanding. “Then I mustn’t keep you. But perhaps
afterwards… How about having a meal with me?”
Charles declined with a brusqueness that softened into an only slightly
irritated explanation that he hardly ever left the College after dusk. “For
one thing there’s the damned black-out.” And then, either shyly or grudgingly
(George could not be sure which): “I’m in Room D One in the First Court. Come
up tonight after dinner if you like. About eight.”
George had been intending to return to London by the seven-thirty train,
but he cancelled the arrangement quickly enough to accept without an
appearance of hesitation. A later train, however inconvenient, would do all
right. He said: “Thanks, I will. And now, since you WERE wanting to cross the
street…”