Devices and Desires (35 page)

“I can’t say I took to either of them.”

“You don’t think I was wrong, George, telling them about the quarrel?”

“Had no option, did you? This is murder, Doris, and you were one of the last people to see her alive. Anyway, they’ll probably get it, or some of it, from Neil Pascoe. No point in keeping back what the police will find out in the end. And you only spoke the truth.”

“I wouldn’t say that, George, not the whole truth. I may have toned it down a bit. But I didn’t tell them any lies.”

For a moment they contemplated this nice distinction in silence. Then Doris said: “That mud which Timmy smeared
on Miss Robarts’s trousers, it came from the patch under the outside tap. Been like that for weeks. Be funny, wouldn’t it, if Hilary Robarts was murdered because Neil Pascoe couldn’t fix a new washer?”

George said: “Not funny, Doris. I wouldn’t exactly say that it was funny.”

Jonathan Reeves’s parents had moved from their small terraced house in South London to a flat in a modern block overlooking the sea just outside Cromer. His appointment at the power station had coincided with his father’s retirement, and the idea had been that they would return to a place that they had known and liked on past holidays and, as his mother had said, “provide a home for you until the right girl comes along.” His father had worked for fifty years in the carpet department of a large store in Clapham, starting at fifteen, straight from school, and rising eventually to be head of the department. The firm let him have carpets at less than cost price; the off-cuts, sometimes large enough for a small room, he got for nothing, so that from childhood Jonathan had never known a room at home which wasn’t carpeted from wall to wall.

Sometimes it seemed that their thick-pile wool and nylon had absorbed and deadened not only their footsteps. His mother’s calm response to any event was either “Very nice,” equally appropriate to an enjoyable dinner, a royal engagement
or birth or a spectacular sunrise, or “Terrible, terrible, isn’t it? You wonder sometimes what the world’s coming to,” which covered events as diverse as Kennedy’s assassination, a particularly gruesome murder, children abused or violated or an IRA bomb. But she didn’t wonder what the world was coming to. Wonder was an emotion long since stifled by Axminster, mohair, underfelt. It seemed to him that they lived together in amity because their emotions, debilitated by underuse or undernourishment, couldn’t cope with anything as robust as a row. At the first sign of it his mother would say, “Don’t raise your voice, dear, I don’t like rows.” Disagreement, never intense, was expressed in peevish resentment which died through lack of energy to keep it going.

He got on well enough with his sister, Jennifer, eight years his senior but now married to a local authority officer in Ipswich. Once, watching her bending over the ironing board, her features set in their familiar mask of slightly resentful concentration, he had been tempted to say, “Speak to me. Tell me what you think, about death, about evil, about what we’re doing here.” But her reply would have been predictable. “I know what I’m doing here. Ironing Dad’s shirts.”

To her acquaintances and to those she might have called friends, his mother would always speak of her husband as Mr. Reeves. “Mr. Reeves is very highly thought of by Mr. Wainwright.” “Of course you could say that Mr. Reeves
is
the carpet department of Hobbs and Wainwright.” The store represented those aspirations, traditions and orthodoxies that others found in their profession, in their school, regiment or religion. Mr. Wainwright senior was headmaster, colonel, their high priest; their occasional Sunday attendances at the local United Reform Chapel merely a gesture to a lesser God. And they were never regular worshippers. Jonathan suspected that this was
deliberate. People might want to get to know them, involve them in mothers’ meetings, whist-drives, Sunday-school outings, might even want to visit. On the Friday of his first week at secondary school the form bully had said, “Reeves’s dad is shopwalker at Hobbs and Wainwright. He sold my mum a rug last week,” and had minced across the room, hands obsequiously clasped. “I know madam will find that mixture extremely hard-wearing. It’s a very popular line.” The laughter had been sycophantic but uneasy, and the teasing, for lack of popular support, had quickly died. Most of their fathers had even less prestigious jobs.

Sometimes he thought: We can’t be as ordinary, as dull as we seem, and wondered if it were some defect in himself which diminished them all so that he invested them with his own inadequacy, his own pessimism. Sometimes, too, he would take from the bureau drawer the family photograph album, which seemed to document their ordinariness: his parents stiffly posed against the rail of Cromer Promenade and at Whipsnade Zoo, himself ridiculous in cap and gown at his degree ceremony. Only one held any real interest for him, the sepia studio photograph of his great-grandfather in the First World War, perched sideways on an artificial wall with, beside him, a huge aspidistra in a Benares jar. He would gaze intensely across seventy-four years at that gentle-faced, vulnerable boy who looked, in the ill-fitting, high-buttoned serge and the grotesquely overlarge cap, more like an orphaned poor-law child than a soldier. He must have been under twenty when it was taken. And he had survived Passchendaele, the Ypres Salient, and had been discharged wounded and gassed early in 1918 with strength enough at least to father a son, but of little else. That life, he told himself, could not have been ordinary. His great-grandfather had survived four years
of horror with courage, endurance and a stoical acceptance of what his God or luck had dealt him. But if not ordinary, the life seemed now of absolutely no importance to anyone. It had preserved a family, that was all. And how much did that matter? But now it struck him that his father’s life had held a not-dissimilar stoicism. You couldn’t, perhaps, equate fifty years with Hobbs and Wainwright with four years in France, but both had required that same dignified and stoical acceptance. He wished that he could talk to his father about his great-grandfather, about his father’s early life. But it never seemed possible, and he knew that what held him back was less an inhibiting shyness than the fear that, even if he broke through this strange barrier of reticence and inarticulateness, there would be nothing there. And yet it surely hadn’t always been like that. He remembered the Christmas of 1968, when his father had bought him his first science book,
The Wonder Book of Science for Children
. On Christmas morning they had sat for hours together, slowly turning the pages while his father first read and then explained. He still had the book. He still occasionally looked at the diagrams. “How television works,” “What happens when we are X-rayed,” “Newton and the apple,” “The marvel of modern ships.” And his father had said, “I would have liked to have been a scientist if things had been different.” It was the only time in his life that his father had given any indication that there could have been for him, for them, a fuller, a different life. But things had not been different, and now he knew that they never would be. He thought, “We need, all of us, to be in control of our lives, and we shrink them until they’re small and mean enough so that we can feel in control.”

Only once had the routine of their predictable days been interrupted by an event which was unexpected, dramatic.
Shortly after his sixteenth birthday his father had taken the family Morris and had disappeared. Three days later he was found, sitting in the car on the top of Beachy Head, looking out to sea. It had been called a nervous breakdown due to overwork, and Mr. Wainwright had given him two weeks’ holiday. His father had never explained what had happened, colluding in the official view that it had been a temporary amnesia. Neither of his parents had ever referred to it again.

Their flat was on the fourth and top floor of a rectangular modern block. The sitting room at the front had a glass door giving onto a narrow balcony sufficient to hold two chairs. The kitchen was small but had a flap which could be lifted to provide a table just large enough for the three of them to eat at it. There were only two bedrooms, his parents’ at the front and his own, much smaller, giving a view of the car-park, the row of breeze-block garages and the town. The sitting room had a wall-mounted gas fire to augment the background central heating and, after they had moved in, his parents had surrounded this with a false mantelshelf on which his mother could display the small treasures brought from the Clapham home. He remembered the morning when they had viewed the flat, his mother stepping out onto the balcony and saying, “Look, Father, it’s just like being on the deck of a liner,” and turning almost with animation, as if remembering that store of old movie magazines she kept, the pictures of befurred film stars on the gangplanks, the ship festooned with streamers and flags, hearing in imagination the hoots of the pilot boat, the band playing on the quay. And indeed his parents had, from the start, seen the flat as a glamorous change from their small, terraced house. In summer they would move the two easy chairs so that they faced the window and the sea. In winter they reversed them and huddled round the gas fire.
But neither the winter gales, nor the uncomfortable heat when summer beat on the glass, ever drew from either of them a word of regret for the old life.

They had sold their car when his father retired, and the single-car garage was used to house Jonathan’s second-hand Ford Fiesta. He garaged it and swung back the door. Locking it, he thought how very private the flats were. Nearly all of them were occupied by retired couples whose routine seemed to be to walk during the morning, meet their friends for afternoon tea and be home before 7.00. By the time he returned from work, the block was quiet and the rear curtains drawn. He wondered if Caroline had guessed or had known just how private his comings and goings could be. Outside the flat he hesitated for a moment, key in hand, wishing he could postpone the moment of meeting. But any longer wait would seem unnatural: they must have been listening for the lift.

His mother almost ran towards him.

“It’s terrible, isn’t it. That poor girl. Dad and I heard it on the local radio. But at least they found the Whistler. That’s one worry over. He’ll not go on killing again after her.”

He said: “They think that he died before Miss Robarts did, so that it may not have been the Whistler.”

“But of course it was the Whistler. She died in the same way, didn’t she? Who else would it be?”

“That’s what the police are trying to find out. They’ve been at the station all morning. They didn’t get round to seeing me until nearly twelve.”

“What did they want to see you for? They can’t think you had anything to do with it?”

“Of course not, Mother. They’re interviewing everyone, everyone who knew her, that is. Anyway, I have an alibi.”

“An alibi? What alibi? Why would you want an alibi?”

“I don’t want one, but as it happens I have one. I went to supper last night with a girl from the station.”

Immediately her face brightened, pleasure at the news momentarily eclipsing the horror of the murder. She said: “Who invited you, then, Jonathan?”

“A girl at the station. I told you.”

“Well, I know it’s a girl. What kind of girl? Why don’t you bring her home? You know that this is your home just as much as it is Dad’s and mine. You can always bring your friends here. Why not ask her to tea next Saturday or Sunday? I’d have everything very nice, your granny’s best tea-service, I wouldn’t let you down.”

Torn with a dreadful pity, he said: “Perhaps I will one day, Mum. It’s a bit early yet.”

“I don’t see how it can be too early to meet your friends. It’s as well you were with her if they’re looking for alibis. What time did you get home, then?”

“About quarter to eleven.”

“Well, that’s not so very late. You look tired. It must have been a shock for everyone at Larksoken, a girl you knew, Administrative Officer, too, so it said on the radio.”

Jonathan said: “Yes, it has been a shock. I suppose that’s why I don’t feel very hungry. I’d like to wait a little bit before supper.”

“It’s all ready, Jonathan. Lamb chops. They’re half-cooked already. I’ve only got to slip them under the grill. And the vegetables are cooked. It’s only going to spoil.”

“All right, I won’t be more than five minutes.”

He hung his jacket in the hall, then went into his own room and lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. The thought of food nauseated him, but he had said five minutes and if he lay there much longer she would be knocking at the door. She always knocked, but very gently, two distinct, discreet taps,
like an assignation. What, he wondered, did she fear she might find him doing if she came in unannounced? He made himself sit up and swung his legs over the side of the bed but was immediately seized by nausea and weakness, which made him fear for a moment that he was actually going to faint. But he recognized it for what it was: a mixture of tiredness, fear and sheer misery.

And yet so far it hadn’t been too bad. There had been three of them, Chief Inspector Rickards; a thickset, serious-faced young man who had been introduced as Detective Sergeant Oliphant; and a younger man in the corner apparently taking notes whom no one had bothered to introduce. The small interviewing room attached to the Medical Physics Department had been set aside for them, and they had been sitting side-by-side at a small table, both in plain clothes. The room, as always, smelt faintly of disinfectant. He had never understood why, since no clinical procedures were carried out there. Two white coats still hung behind the door, and someone had left a tray of test tubes on top of the filing cabinet, adding to the air of inadvertence and amateurism. It had all been very low-key, very matter-of-fact. He felt that he was being processed, one of the dozens who had known her or claimed to have known her and who had passed through this or a similar door to answer the same questions. Almost he expected them to ask him to roll up his sleeve and to feel the prick of a needle. He knew that the probing, if there was to be probing, would come later. But he had been surprised at his own initial lack of fear. He had somehow assumed that the police were endowed with an almost supernatural power to sniff out lying, that he would walk into that room bearing an all-too-visible load of guilt, prevarication and conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice.