Designs on Life (15 page)

But when he reached his lodgings he was jolted out of his abstraction by the discovery that he had no matches in his pocket with which to light the gas fire in his room. He had only a packet of cigarettes which he did not remember having bought. Like many very heavy smokers, he had never been able to come to terms with a petrol lighter, for apart from the fact that he was one of the people in whose hands any gadget immediately goes wrong, he had found that a lighter never had enough fuel in it to last him long. Yet only a few days ago he had bought half a dozen boxes of matches, so where were they now? Of course, at the Bournes’ house. So he would have to go downstairs and ask his landlady to help him out.

At the thought he flung himself down on the bed in the cold room, clutching his head and pouring out frantic, childish curses, of a kind that he thought he had forgotten until this moment of shattering pain.

During the next few weeks Sankey thought a great deal about Mary Bourne, not with love or tenderness, but with a deep, revengeful concentration. When he met Oliver Bourne in the school, the two men scarcely spoke to one another. But Sankey was very much on Bourne’s mind. Though he had never discussed the matter with Mary, he knew that the scene that he had made had driven her to tell Sankey to stay away from the house. That she had done this had been a great relief to Bourne, yet whenever he passed Sankey in the corridors of the school building, or saw him in the staff commonroom, saw the unhealthy blotching of his sullen face and the way that his dark eyes evaded his own, an uneasy conviction developed in Bourne’s mind that he and Mary were not at the end of their troubles with Sidney Sankey.

Among the other masters it was generally said that Sankey would never last the year out. He was too inefficient, too helpless with the boys, too lazy. But the year, what was left of it, often seemed to Bourne a long time, too long to be endured without taking action of some sort. Only he did not know what kind of action to take. And really there seemed to be nothing that he could do about Sankey but, like the other masters, leave him alone.

To have left him alone, to have continued leaving him alone, would have been far the best and safest course for the Bournes to pursue, the best and safest for themselves and the best and safest for Sankey. He was almost intolerably unhappy at the school, was suffering badly from sleeplessness and eating so little that even his indifferent landlady had begun to worry about him, but the image of Mary was fading from his mind.

He had almost managed to blot out of his memory the sweetness of the evenings that he had spent playing with Roddie while Mary went ahead with her cooking, calling out to them occasionally from the kitchen, her voice intimate and gay. If he gave a thought to the few occasions when he had been quite alone with her, it was no longer to think of her as gentle and desirable, but as really rather insipid. At the same time, when now and then he tried his hardest to make his first clear anger against her, that confident, humiliated hatred, blaze up as fiercely as at first, the flames required a tiresome amount of stoking. So if Mary had not happened to meet him in the town one Saturday afternoon and to invite him to go home with her for tea, there need have been no tragedy.

Mary gave him the invitation because her own feelings about him had completely changed. She was far happier than she had been during those first weeks in Bardley, because now she had plenty of friends. There was the wife of one of the other schoolmasters, who had a little boy of Roddie’s age and whom Mary saw nearly every day. There were her next-door neighbours, a middle-aged couple who had begun an acquaintanceship cautiously by commenting on the weather over the garden wall, but with whom Mary and Oliver now spent frequent evenings, eating large quantities of homemade cake and being instructed in local politics. There were the members of a choral society to whom Mary had been introduced. In this altered situation, Mary knew that she had no reason to fear the strength of her own feelings for Sidney Sankey, and on catching sight of him, looking idly into a shop-window, as usual, alone, she thought only that she had really been extraordinarily unkind to him and that it would be pleasant, would be a load off her conscience, to make it up to him by asking him to tea.

She did not notice that he started to tremble when she spoke to him, and the hoarseness of his voice when he answered her only made her think that perhaps he had a cold and hope that he would not pass it on to Roddie.

His answer was a confused excuse for not having tea with her, yet he started to walk along beside her, and Mary had no doubt that he was pleased and grateful. His failure to give any answer at all to what she said next, and the way that he avoided looking at her, did not seem to her particularly strange. Hadn’t he always gone in for these trance-like silences? She talked for both of them, apologising cheerfully because it was so long since they had seen one another, and because she had nothing special at home for tea, and because Roddie, when they arrived at her home, showed so little interest in his old friend.

“It isn’t that he’s forgotten you, it’s just that he’s shy,” she said. “He’s always talked about you a lot, and he keeps making us play those games you taught him.”

Roddie looked up at his mother with a little frown. Of course he had not forgotten Sidney, but he was not shy either and he did not understand why she should say that he was, when usually she complained that he was too eager to thrust himself forward. If he wasn’t bothering much to talk to Sidney now it was simply because, as she knew, he had a friend of his own age and so could get on very well without the help of a grown-up who stayed away for weeks at a time without any explanation.

Sidney, glancing down, sensitive as always to the moods of others, saw all this in the child’s face, and his mouth, normally a little crooked, dragged further still to one side. He hardly knew what was happening to him. He seemed to be split in two, one part of him feeling a deadly fury against both mother and child, the other part feeling all the old, comforting sweetness in their presence.

Mary, going to the kitchen, made tea and hot buttered toast and opened a packet of biscuits, and bringing the tray into the sitting-room, found Sankey looking thoughtfully at a drawing-board that was balanced on a stool, on which Roddie had recently constructed an elaborate, cathedral-like structure out of safety matches. A little patronisingly, Roddie was explaining to Sankey how he had supported the walls and the spire with fuse-wire and pins. Sankey, nodding, had a curiously dazed look, as if he could not follow what the child was saying.

The one part of him had suddenly thought that all that he had to do now was absently to put a cigarette in his mouth, light it and drop the still burning match on to Roddie’s cathedral. Almost as if he had already done it, Sankey could see the whole building burst into one great flame. Then he had only to knock over the drawing-board so that Roddie’s clothes caught fire. Mary’s work-basket happened to be on the floor nearby, with a heap of what looked like net for curtains, which she was hemming, spilling out of it. The stuff would flare up at a touch. And Roddie would scream, Mary would come running to him, would try to beat out the flames, her own clothes would catch fire and her hair, her soft, fair hair…

“He did it all by himself, you know.” Mary had put down the tray and had come to Sankey’s side. “Neither of us helped him at all. The fuse-wire was all his own idea. We feel a little proud of him.”

She was standing so close to Sankey that her sleeve was brushing his. Her hair, with the lamp-light shining on it, curled on her forehead and against her smooth, plump cheeks. To touch, it would feel like silk. It had a faint scent that seemed to him intimately and uniquely Mary’s.

Sankey gave a deep sigh, pocketed the packet of cigarettes and the box of matches that he had just absent-mindedly taken from the mantelpiece, reached out clumsily and drew Mary to him. He was aware that her body stiffened against his and that she made an attempt to draw away from him, and then that she stood quite still, but he was not aware how fiercely his arms were crushing her. He had again started trembling violently and had tears in his eyes. Nothing in the world seemed to matter except that he should bury his face in her hair and forget the image of the flames.

But Oliver Bourne, coming in at that moment from the study where he had been correcting homework, felt his reason consumed in a roaring flame of hatred. Somehow he had the presence of mind to grab Roddie, thrust him out of the room and close the door before picking up the heavy brass poker from the fireplace and bringing it down on Sidney Sankey’s skull.

As Mary shrieked, Bourne struck again and again. It was only as Sankey’s limp body slumped to the ground that the madness died out of Bourne’s face, leaving it as dull and empty as Mary had sometimes seen Sankey’s.

As she stumbled away from them both to the door, Bourne let the poker slip out of his fingers on to the carpet.

“Wait!” he croaked.

Mary turned, leaning against the door, clutching at it to stop herself falling. She had thought at first, when she saw her husband with the poker held high over Sankey’s head, that he meant to kill her too, and her fear of him had not begun to lessen.

Bourne muttered something that seemed to be mainly a repetition of her name, then again he said hoarsely, “Wait!” Pressing his hands to his temples, he stood quite still, looking blankly at Sankey’s body, as if he knew neither what it was nor how it had come there.

Mary could not bear to look at Sankey. She kept her eyes on her husband’s grey, vacant face and so saw expression return to it. For a moment this seemed as terrifying as the sight of Sankey’s battered head, for the expression that appeared, business-like, determined, competent, was one so familiar to her, so normal, that it left her straying wits no possibility of escape from the knowledge that this man whom she knew so well, was a murderer and had always had it in his nature to commit this murder.

Bourne stooped and searched quickly through Sankey’s pockets. All that he appeared to be searching for were his own cigarettes, for as soon as he found them he straightened up, thrusting them into his own pocket.

“Mary, can you handle Roddie?” he asked sharply.

“Handle him?” she said helplessly.

“Persuade him that he didn’t see Sankey today.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Then persuade him that he must never tell anyone about it.

That it’s a secret.”

That seemed to her less impossible, since Roddie loved secrets.

“I can try,” she said.

“Then go on—do it.”

“What are you going to do—with—?”

“I’ll tell you when I’ve done it. For now, just remember you never saw Sankey today. You or Roddie. You haven’t seen him for weeks.”

“For weeks,” Mary echoed stupidly, then she turned swiftly, jerked at the door-handle and escaped from the room.

As soon as she was out of it she started to cry hopelessly and noisily. The sound brought Roddie running to her. She cried fairly often, yet whenever she did so he always had the feeling that it was something unbearable that had never happened before, and that he would do anything in the whole world to stop it.

Today what he had to do, it seemed, was to promise never to tell anybody that Sidney Sankey had been to the house. Well, that was easy. He wasn’t interested in Sidney any more and didn’t see why anyone else should be. But the trouble was that even when Roddie had given the promise, his mother’s tears did not stop, for Mary had a terrified conviction that she had forgotten something that was vital to Oliver’s safety, and what was almost worse than that, had a wild horror of even trying to remember it.

The news of Sidney Sankey’s death was in the newspapers the next day. His body had been found, late in the evening, on a railway line a short distance from the town. In the short paragraph devoted to this fact, no mention was made of foul play being suspected, and Sankey’s landlady was quoted as having said that she really wasn’t at all surprised, because, poor boy, he’d been in a terrible state of depression for a long time. Next day that was what Sankey’s colleagues said too, both among themselves and to a detective inspector who appeared at the school to ask a few not particularly searching questions.

All of the masters to whom he spoke, and that included Oliver Bourne, said that they had all noticed and been greatly worried by Sankey’s recent air of dejection. Some of them said that they had wished that they had known how to help him, others remembered prophesying that he would not last the year out. The detective inspector went away, looking not specially interested or thoughtful.

But that was because he had trained himself not to show interest or thoughtfulness, except when it might be useful to do so. In fact, something that had happened while he had been talking to the senior history master had roused his interest and struck him as deserving more than a little thought.

During that interview Oliver Bourne had been smoking a pipe. It had gone out, and to re-light it, he had brought a match-box out of his pocket, taken out a match and tried to strike it on the match-box. But the match had failed to light. Cursing absently, Bourne had thrown the match into the wastepaper-basket and accepted a light from the inspector. This had happened more than once.

The last time that it occurred, just as the inspector had been leaving, Bourne had not troubled to return the match-box to his pocket, but had left it lying on his desk, and the inspector had unobtrusively pocketed it himself. On his way back to the police-station he verified what he thought he had observed about the matches while talking to Bourne. They were safety matches, yet the box that they were in was of the kind intended for matches that will strike on anything, from the sole of a boot to a thumbnail. And that, the inspector thought, was an odd thing to carry in your pocket, since it was entirely useless.

The uselessness of it, the complete pointlessness of having carefully filled an ordinary match-box with safety matches, made it a far odder thing to carry than the safety match-box filled with ordinary matches which the man found dead on the railway line had had in his pocket. The inspector, as a matter of fact, had not thought that there was anything particularly unusual about those matches in that match-box. He had supposed that Sidney Sankey had run out of the safety matches that he had probably been in the habit of carrying, and had been helped out by someone who had happened to have only the other kind. Even now the inspector did not attach overmuch importance to the complementary character of the match-boxes in the two men’s pockets. However, several people had told him that the Bournes were the only people in Bardley with whom Sankey had even tried to make friends, so in spite of Bourne’s statement that he had scarcely spoken to Sankey for a couple of months, the inspector decided to pay the Bournes’ home a visit.