“That’s the grandson,” said Maxwell. “Have you got any yet?”
“No,” I said.
“They’ll give you more pleasure than your children,” said Maxwell. “I promise you they will.”
We had sat down in the armchairs. He pointed to a cigarette box on the desk, then said, without changing his tone of voice: “I want you to keep out of this.”
I replied (despite his quiet words, the air was charged): “What could I do anyway, Clarence?”
He looked at me with an intent expression, the meaning of which again I couldn’t read.
Suddenly he said: “Who is this relative?”
He was speaking as though we were back in the pub, the past twenty minutes wiped away.
“Cora Ross’ uncle. A man called Passant.”
“We know all about him.”
I was taken aback. “What do you know?”
“It’s been going on a long time. Corrupting the young, I should call it.”
I misunderstood. “Is
that
why you want me out of the way?”
“Nothing to do with it. We can’t touch Passant and his lot. Nothing for us to get hold of.”
“Then what are you warning me about?”
For once his response wasn’t quick. He seemed to be deliberating, as in the pub. At last he said, “Those two women are as bad as anything I’ve seen.”
“What have they done?”
“You’ll find out what they’ve done. I tell you they are bad. I’ve seen plenty, but I’ve never seen anything worse.”
I had heard him speak pungently before, but not like this. His feeling came out so heavy that I wanted to divert it, to return to the matter-of-fact.
“You can prove it, can you?” I said.
“We’ve brought them in, haven’t we?” At once he was a professional, cautious, repressed, telling me that I ought to know the police didn’t arrest for murder unless they were sure.
“And can you prove it?”
“We can prove enough,” he said in a businesslike fashion, a good policeman at the end of his career, one who had brought so many cases to the courts. “You can trust us on that.”
“Yes,” I said, “I can trust you on that.”
“They’ll go down for life, of course. There’s just one dodge they might pull. And you know that as well as I do.” He stared at me, with meaning and, at last I realised, with suspicion.
He said, in a level, controlled tone: “I’m going to tell you something. I mean every word of it. Those two are as sane as you or me. When we had them in here and found out what they’d done, if I could have got away with it, I’d have put a bullet in the back of both their necks. It would have been the best way out.”
Once more I wanted to get back to something matter-of-fact, or innocent.
“They’ll get life, you said. This isn’t a capital murder, then?”
At this time we were still governed by the 1957 Act, a bizarre compromise under which the death penalty was kept, but only for a narrow range of murders, depending on the choice of weapon and the victim: that is, poisoning was not capital, unless you poisoned a police officer; but murder by shooting was.
“No,” said Maxwell.
“How did they do it?”
“They beat him to death. In the end.”
“You may as well tell me–”
“We don’t know everything. I doubt if we ever shall know.”
I said, once again, tell me.
“We’re pretty sure of this. They played cat-and-mouse with him. He wasn’t a very bright lad. They picked him up at random, they don’t seem to have had a word with him before. They’ve got a hideout in the country, they took him there. They played cat-and-mouse with him for a weekend. Then they beat him to death.”
He wasn’t being lubricous about the horrors, as I had heard other policemen or lawyers round the criminal courts, telling stories of killings which I remembered clinically, as though they had happened to another species: I had to remember them clinically just to remember them at all, and yet I believed that, despite appearances, I was less physically squeamish than Maxwell.
“The worst they can get for that,” he said, “is life. Which doesn’t mean much, they’ll be let out all right, you know that. But it’s the worst they can get, and by God they’re going to get it.”
“The alternative is–”
“The alternative is, a nice comfortable few years in a blasted mental hospital. Diminished responsibility. They’ll try that. What do you think I’ve been talking to you about tonight?”
Yes, he had been suspecting me. He had seen me in action as an official, he could imagine me going round to doctors, talking to them about “diminished responsibility”, which was another feature of the 1957 Act.
“Yes, they’ll try that, Clarence,” I said. “On the strength of what you tell me, any competent lawyer would have to.”
“They don’t want any help,” he said.
“But don’t you think they’ll get it–”
“I told you something else a minute ago. Those two are as sane as you and me.”
“How are you so certain?”
“I’ve seen them.”
“That’s not enough–”
“If you’d seen them and talked to them as I have, you’d be certain too. You’d be as certain as that you’re sitting there.”
He went on: “If anyone pretends they didn’t know what they were doing, then we’ve all gone mad. We might as well give up the whole silly business. Will you listen to me?”
He was more intense. And yet, I had been misjudging him. Yes, he was inclined to see conspiracies, he thought I might be one of those standing in his way. He was a policeman: he had “brought them in”, he wanted his conviction. But, staring open-eyed at me in the flowery office, he didn’t want only, or even mainly, that. Strangely, he was making an appeal. It was deeper than his professional pride, or even moral outrage. He wanted to feel that I was on his side. He wanted to drag me, with all the force of his great strong body, on to what to him was the side of the flesh, or (to use a rhetorical phrase which he would have cursed away) of life itself.
In a sharp but less passionate tone, he asked: “You don’t believe in hanging, do you?”
“No.”
He gazed at me, unblinking.
“Don’t you think you might be wrong?” he asked.
“I’ve made up my mind.”
He still gazed at me.
“I’ll give you one thing,” he said. “I don’t believe in all the crap about deterrence. It deters some of them from carrying guns, that’s about all. Nothing in the world would have deterred those two.”
“And you go on saying they’re quite sane.”
“By God I do. They just thought they were cleverer than anyone else. They just thought, I expect they still think, they’re superior to anyone else and no one would ever find them out or touch them.”
There was a silence.
“I can’t get away from it,” he said. “There are some people who aren’t fit to live.”
I replied: “We’re not God, to say that.”
“I didn’t know you believed in God.”
“It might be easier if one did,” I said.
Maxwell shook his head. “Either those two aren’t fit to live,” he said, “or else the rest of us aren’t.”
“Why did they do it?” I broke out. “Have you any idea why they did it?”
“I think it was a sort of experiment. They wanted to see what it felt like.”
His lip was thrust out, his face, interrogating, confronted mine. After a moment, he said: “I told you, when we had them in and discovered what they’d done, I’d have put a bullet in them both. What would you do with them? That’s a fair question, isn’t it? What would you do with them?”
I had a phantom memory of another conversation, a loftier one, in which a character more tormented than Maxwell asked a similar question of someone better than me. But I was living in the moment, and I had no answer ready, and gave no answer at all.
AS I looked up from the road outside my father’s house, the winter stars were sharp. I had gone there straight from the police headquarters: looking up at the stars, I had a moment of relief. I was getting ready for the mutual facetiousness which, as a lifetime habit, I expected with my father.
When I got inside his room, though, it wasn’t like that. First, there was something unfamiliar about the room itself which, to begin with, I couldn’t identify. Then his voice was toneless as he said hello, Lewis. He was watching a kettle beginning to boil on the hob. He was ready to make himself a cup of cocoa, he said. Would I have one?
No, I said (the flicker of how I usually addressed him still showing through), I wasn’t much given to cocoa.
“I don’t suppose you are,” said my father.
His spectacles were at their usual angle from forehead to cheek, the white hair flowed over the wings. Through the lenses, his eyes were lugubrious.
“How are you getting on?” he said, not half-heartedly, nothing like so much as half.
“How are
you
getting on?”
“They’ve given me the sack, Lewis.” Suddenly his eyes looked magnified: tears began to glisten down his face. They were the tears, as abject and shameless as a child’s, of extreme old age. And yet, watching them, I wasn’t shameless myself, but the reverse. I had never seen him cry before. Not in all his misfortunes or his humiliations: not when he went bankrupt, or when my mother died.
I said: Hadn’t he told the people at his choir that I would provide transport? That it was all arranged? In fact, immediately after my last visit and before the operation, I had, through Vicky, made contact with a car hire firm in the town. They were to produce a car and driver any time he asked. I had written to my father, spelling out precisely what he had to do. I had had no answer: but then, that was nothing new.
“I did tell them,” said my father, sniffling, defensive, as though I were angry with him for incompetence, as his wife and sister used to be. “I did tell them, Lewis.”
“Well then?”
“It was no good.”
“They had me on a piece of string,” he added, lachrymose but acceptant.
It turned out, he went on to explain, that they persuaded him not to find his own car. They drove him forth and back every Sunday night until Christmas. Then they told him – one of the older men had to break the news – that it was “getting too much” for him.
“It wouldn’t have done any good, Lewis. Even if you’d driven me yourself. They thought it was time to get rid of me. They thought it was time I went.”
I couldn’t comfort him. Wouldn’t they let him go on somehow, wouldn’t it be something if he just attended the choir, when he felt like it?
“It’s no use. There’s nothing I can do any more.”
He went on: “I told you what they were up to. You can’t say I didn’t tell you, can you?”
For an instant, that pleased him. He said: “I suppose you can’t blame them. They’ve got to think about the future, haven’t they?”
“You’ve got to think about yourself.”
He answered: “I haven’t got anything to think about.”
As I heard that, I was left silent.
“Mind you,” he said, “they made a bit of a fuss of me. They had a party, and they drank my health. Sherry I think it was. You’d have enjoyed that, Lewis, that you would. And what do you think they gave me?”
I shook my head.
“Over there,” he pointed.
The little room had struck strange: but in the dim light, taken up by my father’s wretchedness, I hadn’t noticed the clock in the corner, although it had been ticking, I now realised, heavily away, racket-and-whirr. It was a large old-fashioned grandfather clock, glass-fronted, works open to sight. When I drew my chair nearer, I could see that it was a good specimen of its kind, with gold work on the face and gilt inlays in the woodwork. They had made a handsome, perhaps a lavish, present to the old man.
“Two clocks,” said my father, indicating the familiar one, on the mantelpiece. “That’s what I got.”
“They can’t have known you’d had another one–”
“I’ve only had two presentations in my livelong days,” he said. “Both clocks.”
I couldn’t be sure whether he was ready to clown, or making an effort to. I said, anyway, they had spent a lot of money this time, the gift was well-meant.
“They don’t even tell the same time,” said my father. “You ought to hear them strike, they go off one after the other. When they wake me up in the morning, I think, confound the clocks.”
Not for the first time, I was beating round for something to interest him. Wouldn’t he at least let me send him a television set? No, he said with meek obstinacy, he would never look at it. How did he know till he tried? He did know. Everything else I could think of, record player, books, he met with the same gentle no. Wasn’t there anything at all I could get for him?
“Nothing I can think of, thank you, Lewis,” he said.
Absently, quite remote from me, he seemed to be thinking again about his clocks.
“I don’t know why people should fancy that I always want to know the time. Time doesn’t matter all that much now, does it?”
He went on: “After all, I shouldn’t be surprised, I might go this year.”
He was speaking without inflection, and in fact as though I were not present. He didn’t say much more, apart from offering to put the kettle on again and make some more cocoa, or tea if I preferred it. Whether he was glad to have told me of his demission, I couldn’t guess, but he was calm and affable as we said goodbye.
Outside the house, I remembered the visit with my son Charles the previous spring. When I thought of the old man, I should have been grateful for my son’s company, all of us part of the flow. But then Maxwell’s question drilled back into my mind: that was what I was here for: no, it was better to be alone.
THE following afternoon, there was a light in George Passant’s sitting-room at three o’clock. When I lived in the town, that light had often welcomed me late at night: he had taken lodgings in this dark street of terraced houses – similar to the Patemans’ and less than half-a-mile away – as soon as he got his job in the firm of solicitors, and had kept them ever since. Though I had not visited him there for a good many years, it was my own choice, and a deliberate one, to go that afternoon. I did not want to meet in a pub, and give him an excuse to have a drink and break – restlessly? secretively? – away. At least that would have been my rationalisation. Perhaps I did not want to be reminded of hearty evenings and the grooves of time.