England's Lane (43 page)

“Well, Stan … that didn't go too badly, did it? On the whole. I'd say. Are you all right …? Oh heavens—the
time
, Stan …! I ought to have telephoned Jim while I was down there … Oh bother—I just didn't think of it …”

“Oh good—so you've decided already then, have you Milly? Well I can't tell you how happy that makes me.”

“Oh dear … what on earth are you talking about now, Stan …?”

“Jim. You were going to tell him that his time is now over. Yes? That he is in the past. That he must now make do with his floozy called Daisy. Did you know, Milly, that Jim has a floozy called Daisy? Oh yes. Big girl. And that from this day forward, you are to follow your heart …!”

“Oh
Jesus
, Stan …!
Jesus
 …! Oh God oh God oh God. Look. Everything's been attended to. No more can be done tonight. I'm really very tired and I have to go home now. All right?”

“I perfectly understand, Milly. You'll want to be picking up all of your things. Well thank you for coming. I'm sorry you can't stay
to have some tea or something. Cold cream. Would you care for it at all …? Great big pot there, look. Shame to let it all go to waste …”

“I'm leaving now, Stan. This minute.”

“Right you are, then. Well what shall I do …? Oh yes—I know. I think I'll just go and wake up Anthony.”

“What?
What
 …? What is
wrong
with you, Stan …? I've only been thinking what a blessing it is he hasn't already been woken, with all these people traipsing up and down the stairs. He's asleep, Stan. He's got school in the morning. The little mite's at peace, for heaven's sake. What on earth do you want to go and wake him up for …?”

“Well—I thought he might like to come in and say hello to his mother.”

I stared at him. I just stared at him wide-eyed, willing either one of us to blink.

“Say hello to his
mother
 …? Jesus Christ—she's
dead
, Stan …!”

“Well yes I think I do know that, Milly. Perfectly aware. But it hardly matters, does it? Because even if she wasn't, it's not as if she'd have spoken to him or anything. And anyway—I think she looks quite nice, just the way she is now. Don't you, Milly? I really do think she looks quite nice. It's her hair, you know. I never noticed it before … not before she pointed it out to me.”

That's when I turned. That's when I ran. For the second time that week I hurtled down that blessed black staircase before I even realized I was doing such a thing—and Stan was calling to me, his voice so plaintive: Milly …! Milly …! Come back—you've forgotten your negligee, look …! And it was only at the very bottom of the stairs, God curse it, where it was completely and quite bafflingly dark, that in high confusion I was caught up into a welter of disorientation and totally lost my footing and … well: a
badly barked shin—not to say a ruined pair of Bear Brand nylons that I'd bought from Marion's only last Saturday—as well as an extremely painful eye, due to its staggering and audible collision with an acorn finial. The pain in my stomach was really very acute, and the ice that hung in the air outside was forcing me to gasp. Never before have I shut behind me my own front door with such solidly heartfelt relief. I crept upstairs as quietly as my bitterly stinging shin would permit—I could hardly avoid a hobble—and I was desperate to know that all was well with Paul, while not at all hopefully hoping against hope that Jim would have long ago tumbled into his pit of oblivion so that I could in peace simply tend to my wounds as best I might, and then stop forever just
thinking
. Sleep then, oh yes … oh please God yes—sleep, just sleep …

But no. There was Jim. Of course, of course: there just had to be Jim. Words were exchanged, heated on his part, and all to no purpose. At last I could bear not a second more of it, and I escaped to my bed. Some time later—I have no idea how long—I think I might have been hovering with bliss amid that weird though lulling twilight of very nearly somnolence, when I was jarred of a sudden into total wakefulness by the door of my room being briskly swung open. As I winced away from the light on the landing, cowering under covers, at once all of my pains concertedly returned to me, and I braced myself against whatever new form of anguish there now was to come. Though very much to my surprise, here before me stood Doctor McAuley—round-faced, comfortingly overweight—the waistcoat of his three-piece suit, where the watch chain winked, very apparently under strain—this almost miraculous presence quite instantly and utterly reassuring. I exhaled with what I sensed to be a profound and long-repressed relief, and felt quite heady with joy: I knew absolutely that I was very pleased indeed to see him.

Yes. And all that was last night. He dressed my leg rather better
than I had, anointed my swollen eye and laid across it a soft and comforting pad. He probed my stomach with sensitive care: the chill of the stethoscope, it made me flinch, and then it made me giggle. He assumed of course that I knew I was pregnant …? And I suppose … yes, that I did, though I could hardly dare hope it. I implored him, however, to say nothing to Jim—please, Doctor McAuley, please oh please: you must now promise me—not a single word about it. Promise me, Doctor—promise! He smiled, patted my hand, and warmly gave me his complete assurance. He asked in return for no explanation, and nor did he seem even remotely perplexed by all such insistent beseeching. Very possibly—and in common with seemingly just every living soul the length of England's Lane—he knows, or fancies he does, all of my very most intimate secrets. And since he left me … I simply have lain here, and thought of nothing but my physical state. Nothing else at all, except the state of me now. Then, very early—I had lost the thread of time, but long before usually he opens up the shop—I was aware of him banging about on the landing, Jim, and then of his leaving the house. No doubt he will be stamping up the road, hell bent on confronting what he will soon enough discover to be the gibbering madman that now is Stan, and accusing him of all the most terrible things. I don't really mind. Don't mind at all, in fact. And anyway, the news of Jane will serve very well to bring him up short. Maybe Jim will strike him, before explanations are tendered. Maybe Stan will gabble to him in a rush of all his golden visions of the idyllic future that he and I are to share, if only amid the twisting avenues and profusion of kaleidoscopic flowers that bloom irrepressibly within the elliptical contours of his own quite delirious imagination. I don't really mind. Don't mind at all, in fact. I don't at all care what either one of them will be doing, saying, thinking. Nor—but of course—do I care even remotely about the existence or otherwise of the
floozy called Daisy. Was I really meant to? How perfectly laughable. Moreover … and for the first time I can remember … nor even do I care about Jonathan Barton. For he is gone, you see—gone from me, has been for a good long while. No longer am I yearning, and nor am I dogged by the clogging of perpetual anxiety—its immutable core has crumbled into atoms, and then nothingness. The cowl that covered me has fallen away, and I wallow in a new-born peace, my pain a tangible comfort. And I glow now with all that I am cherishing within me: a future that annihilates the present, and so very far exceeds simply all that has gone before. And it is everything I have ever wanted.

It is fitting—the symmetry of the thing, its pleasingly plump and nicely rounded wholeness: I am satisfied completely. For how perfectly splendid—finally to hear it from the more than abundant lips of Obi: that now John Somerset, erstwhile colleague and adversary, is finally dead. And that the news of his so very devoutly wished-for demise was brought to me on the eve of this cold, bright and really quite excitingly bracing, exceedingly early morning—while happily I am engaged in packing tightly into yet one more of these coarse and greasy jute sacks of detritus, the final few fragments—the last and rotten dismembered parts of the oafish and ill-fated pig man. That beggarly messenger who so very far overreached himself, as eventually will all such untried, raw and rapacious yahoos. He now, quite thoroughly, has ceased to exist. As too has his sender: the dispatcher is duly dispatched.

And when Obi had come to me last evening, primarily I was most eager to stem at the outset any great rush of vocal enthusiasm—jubilation over his triumph, or even the barest detail: I wished to know nothing at all of the entire affair beyond the absolute truth, forged in iron, that Somerset now is dead. And of course I did
wonder, during the really very surprisingly brief period of time that Obi has been away from London, how I could trust beyond all question the veracity of his words … and though I have no potent explanation for it, I implicitly do so. It is perhaps his literal simplemindedness in which I so ardently believe: I imagine him to be possessed of a primitive and inherently slavish commitment to not just unthinking obedience to so evident a superior, but also the dinned-in sense of duty to complete a given task before any due bounty may be expected or bestowed—or else come cowering and crouched, to stoically endure the severity of punishment administered by the master. I believe Obi to be the blank-eyed personification of doggedness in his pursuit of an end, this in order then to justify the commensurate reward. It soon transpired, however, that I need not at all have concerned myself over any surfeit of eloquence: he uttered very few words, I rather suspect because there are pitiably few at his ready disposal, and those ejaculations that do break free—from amid much quite comical facial distortion—are extraordinarily difficult to accurately decipher. A good deal of what he utters truly does sound to be no more than mutedly furious and animal grunts—although gradually, by degree, one finds that with concentration one may usefully ally and conjoin this or that stray and passing consonant with a couple of broken-backed vowels, and consequently, with considerable delicacy and painstaking dedication, reasonably deftly construct a plausible, though yet conjectural, half-phrase that would appear to be not wholly without relevance. Ultimately I found it more reliably straightforward to put to Obi a set of perfectly simple questions, each requiring from him no more than an emphatic and affirmative nod, or else a shake of his big and bull-like head. The only factor that concerned me, of course, was positive and unequivocal confirmation of Somerset's death. I wished not to know of the agency—and neither do I mind in how subtle or warlike a
manner Obi elected to fulfill his commission. Should he have been careless in his method of execution or else in its aftermath, then the consequence will be merely that a shambling and deeply suspect colored stranger—witnessed by many to be of fearsome aspect, and with hooded and malevolent eyes—will actively be sought by whatever means and authority the town of Henley can muster. Whether, in cooperation with Scotland Yard, they track him to the capital—and I should say that I deem this to be doubtful … though should they, by way of fortune or good judgment, be successful in their endeavor … well that outcome too is quite perfectly conducive: for in custody, his continued sullen insolence or else a detonation of his physical power … even quite simply the color of his skin—any of these will more than adequately measure to serve as his jailer, and walk with him subsequently the short way to the gallows.

And so just last evening, I paid him the money, quite as contracted. I adjudged that to have retrogressively haggled with the man, as comes quite naturally to me, would have been more than unwise. His hands are both large and strong—as is this patently disfigured though innate perception of correctness within him: earlier I alluded to this—and no, I do not feel wild in ascribing it to him. At the sight of the considerable roll of cash, his eyes betrayed no hint of light: he pocketed it without comment. I think that upon parting he might have attempted to convey to me his willingness to again be of service, should ever such necessity arise—I believe that it was some sort of valediction loosely upon those lines, though in perfect honesty it is most damnably difficult to be sure, many of the more guttural noises that emerge from him being open to any manner of interpretation. Smilingly and in return, I myself offered up an alternative selection of non-commital though thoroughly agreeable-sounding utterances, which did appear to content him. But of course
we never again shall encounter—well of course not. Indeed, within a very short time, I fervently aspire to be no longer compelled to encounter nor consort with any other living soul, the length of England's Lane … for now, I have so very thoroughly outgrown it: I hear its stitching, ripping at the seams. The Lane—this ultimately tiresome though I suppose quite perfectly blameless little street, together with an amenable smattering of its more credulous inhabitants—has amply fulfilled its usefulness. And this is true too of my foray into butchery: so unlikely a diversion has well served its purpose … and all such purpose, now and at last, is come to an end. For with the long and threatening shadow of Somerset's continued existence darkening no longer the sunlit uplands of what I hope and trust to be a far more golden future, I know that very soon, I shall quit this place: to begin anew, and somewhere fresh—finally, and in long and criminally overdue recognition of their sweet and saintly eternal forbearance, to be able to bestow upon my dear wife Fiona and my little girl Amanda … the life more suited.

So … I have tied up the mouths of the sacks with twine, and now I manhandle the pair of them to be propped against the gates of the yard … when next there comes of a sudden, to quite mar the still and stinging cold of this perfect winter's morning, a staccato and determined pounding from without. The dirty and angular man—he who swings up at once and with ease to his shoulders these deadweight and unspeakable burdens, those which I am straining even now to drag along the ground, and then will shrug them away so very lightly and with insouciance into the rear of his cart: the very same who confided in me the baffling truth that the contents are “all boiled down”—never before has he called this early, nor demonstrated such unmannerly insistence. But no matter: in the light of all, it is good, now—yes, it is fitting to be rid of the last of it. Ah … but no, in fact—such a conclusion is not yet to be …
for as I haul wide the door, what of all things should I find to be festering upon the other side of it but a risible and shabby little ironmonger, seemingly in the midst of a losing though self-evidently strenuous struggle to contain within him all the spillage of his grievances.