Five Roundabouts to Heaven (9 page)

Hence the smell in the house, which was caused by joss sticks, and was aunt Emily’s way of showing her appreciation. She said Chan liked them, and she was luckily able to buy them from Mrs Brewer.

“Does she charge anything when you go there?”

Aunt Emily looked at him with an expression of joy and wonder on her gentle, placid face.

“Nothing! Nothing at all! She says that it is her mission in this world to help others to help themselves. She says she feels it would be wrong to accept money for this sort of thing. Mind you, I usually slip a few shillings into her hand when I go, just to help to pay for the tea, and she is more than satisfied. In fact, at first she didn’t want to take it. I had to press it on her.”

Aunt Emily suddenly clasped her hands together again ecstatically.

“Oh, how silly I am! I haven’t told you the most wonderful part! Chan says—just fancy!—that I should look carefully into the financial affairs, in boyhood, of poor uncle Basil!

“He says I must pay particular attention to the will left by his grandfather. He says everything is not all that it seems to be! Fancy! Do you know, dear, I have always had a funny sort of feeling—mind you, I’m not as psychic as poor aunt Rose was—but I have always had a funny sort of feeling that old uncle Basil should have inherited far more money than he did when his mother died.”

“You don’t mean you are starting a case, too?”

But she was not to be drawn. She just smiled mysteriously, and said: “Ah-ha! Wait and see! Perhaps you’ll be surprised one day. Your old auntie Emily may surprise everybody yet!”

Bartels heard her voice droning on, and suddenly and ferociously wondered why he bothered to come to see her.

There was no emotional contact between the two of them, and never had been since the time when, a lonely and bewildered boy, he had first gone to live in the house.

They had treated him kindly enough, with the vague, detached benevolence of people who were eternally preoccupied with their own affairs. But that was all, and the emotions had coiled up tighter and tighter inside him, and even Beatrice had not held the key to the spring.

But you couldn’t just not come anymore, even though she was old and eccentric; indeed, you had to come just because she was that; so you went on calling once a fortnight, and you listened to her drooling on and on. You had no deep affection for her, and she had none for you, but you were a part of the routine of her life, something real in a world which for her was gradually becoming ever more unreal.

The aunt Emilys of this world, he thought bitterly, never had any friends. They had at best a few relatives, who tolerated them, or not, as the case might be. They moved, eccentric and untidy, towards the grave, and nobody cared two hoots.

If you were normal, you shrugged your shoulders and said it was their own fault, and the devil of it was that the normal people were right.

If you weren’t normal, if you were tortured by compassion and afraid of your own thoughts, you came once a fortnight, and were bored and irritated, because it was easier to pay a visit rather than stay at home and reproach yourself for not visiting her.

He saw aunt Emily rise and go across and open her writing desk, which stood in a corner of the drawing room, and watched her come back with a pencil sketch about eight inches by six inches.

“That’s Chan. Madame Clevistki did it,” said aunt Emily.

“Madame who?”

“Clevistki. Isn’t it beautiful? What a dignified, wise old face, eh?”

“Who on earth is Madame Clevistki?”

“She is a White Russian, dear, a friend of Mrs Brewer’s. She is really a princess, you know, but she does not use her title. Oh, my, she’s so psychic! Directly I shook hands with her it was like an electric shock going right up my arm.”

“I see.”

“She lived at the time of Peter the Great. A wonderful, wonderful man!”

“Do you mean she is dead, like Chan?”

“No, no, no, dear,” said his aunt Emily chidingly. “I mean that in her former life she was at the Court of Peter the Great. She has a most wonderful studio in the Fulham Road, and all the most famous painters come to her for lessons, says Mrs Brewer. Of course, she drew Chan in a trance.”

“Oh, of course. What did she charge you?”

“Nothing dear, only the cost of her taxi to and from Fulham Road; seven and six, I think it was, in all; and that was only because she had to fit the trance in between painting lessons. She is like Mrs Brewer; she feels she has been put into this world to help others. She doesn’t feel she would be acting right if she made money out of her great psychic powers.”

He watched his aunt replace the drawing in the bureau and wondered whether Chan, the talented mandarin, would stagger them all at the next séance. Would his voice, constricted within the vocal cords of Mrs Brewer, burst forth in high-pitched tones and cry: “Watch Philip Bartels! He has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.”

Or would the voice, struggling with the unaccustomed syllables, say: “Altrapeine. This poison is exceptionally difficult to detect. Its action is swift and painless and in the case of a fatal dose the circumstances surrounding the death of the subject closely resemble those attendant upon coronary thrombosis.” That, more or less, was what the book had said.

Bartels didn’t think Chan would be so practical.

I
t
is one thing to murder in a speculative kind of way, but except for those who blunder into the crime, there comes a pause between the impersonal contemplation of the deed, and the realization that there is the remotest possibility of the deed being carried through.

Again, excepting sudden acts of violence, the mind needs time to become attuned to the idea; the social sense inherent in all of us is instinctively outraged and requires a period of softening-up; the odds for and against success have to be calculated; and courage must be summoned to risk capital punishment.

For a man of Philip Bartels’ temperament and imagination there comes, later, a curious interlude. The emotions involved in taking the decision have subsided, the greater emotions involved in the crime still lie ahead. Between plan and final action the husband, in the case of a married couple, regards his wife with a strange detachment.

There is no longer hate, if there ever were hate, for he knows that the cause of the hatred will soon be removed.

There is no longer gnawing greed, if her money be the motive, for his financial cravings will soon be satiated. And if lust for another woman is the driving force, he is soothed by the thought that shortly his desires will be completely fulfilled.

He watches her, therefore, in a detached way; sees her going about her household chores, cleaning, making the beds; observes her quietly reading in the evening, or sewing and listening to the radio; hears her, too, making plans; what dress she will buy, whom she proposes to invite to tea, what film she intends to go and see.

All the while he is thinking: You won’t be doing that work much longer; neither sewing, nor reading, nor carrying out your other plans; that mechanism which you call your body will soon be stilled.

You will be dead and in your grave. Finished. You think you have your own little future, like other people, and you are filled with your own hopes and modest ambitions.

You think that I am fond of you; you think you can trust me, or you would not remain under my roof; you think I would even protect you from danger.

But you’re wrong. I’m going to kill you.

The mind of the normal wife-murderer must therefore be almost animal-like in its lack of sensitivity, or it must be twisted, perverted with a kind of cat-and-mouse sadism raging within it.

But Bartels was an exception.

So far from lacking sensitivity, he had too much; and so far from being sadistic, he was too kind.

I brooded over these contradictions that evening when I returned to the château. I could not as yet entirely resolve the problem. I could not see how a man of Bartels’ temperament could fill the role of one who was either cloddishly insensitive or gloatingly feline.

But I was continually conscious of a sensation of discovery, for I felt instinctively that as the next part of the story unfolded in my mind, I should be groping still nearer to the solution of at least one part of the mystery. I had already sensed that pity, the inability to inflict pain, had played a part in Bartels’ action. What I had not hitherto realized was the devastating effect which this had had on him.

Now I was beginning to get a clearer picture and, collating all that I knew, I suddenly saw that, queerly enough, it was Beatrice herself who made up Bartels’ mind for him, not by any conscious deed, or quarrel, or hurtful words, but by a small instinctive action in the early hours of the morning, while she lay in bed more than three parts asleep.

B
artels had driven down to Thatchley, and dined with Lorna. She had been very sweet to him that evening, because she knew his kindly nature, and knew also, therefore, that a struggle was going on in his mind, though she obviously had no idea of its exact nature.

He left her at about 11.30 p.m. and set out on the road home, and Beatrice’s chances of life increased as he felt the car answering to his touch and listened to the hum of the engine.

Driving, the feeling of controlling a car, always increased his self-confidence, helped to smooth out his worries. At such moments he recaptured a belief that, given the right set of circumstances, he still could carry out his earlier plan, and that he and Beatrice would be able to go their own ways in peace, and perhaps even friendship.

Bartels drove at speed that night, but without effort; he was a fine driver. The weather was dark, but cold and dry, and there was only an occasional car on the road at that hour. For long stretches at a time the road was well studded with catseyes, and the bends were gentle.

As he drove down the slope leading into Cobham, his headlamps picked up a fox slinking swiftly across the road, its belly close to the ground. He caught a glimpse of its pointed mask, and was surprised to come upon a fox in that area.

For a few moments it distracted his mind from the burden which was weighing it down. He thought of uncle James, and his wish for one day out fox-hunting before he died; and of an abortive fox-shoot which he himself had attended in Germany in 1947; and of his last close view of Germany, when he hurried from the Volkswagen, out of the sleet and the biting wind, into bomb-battered, dingy Hannover station.

The station was dirty from day and night use by thousands of men, women, and children, refugees from the east, businessmen in shabby suits clutching their attaché cases, and women with mysterious bulging cloth carrier bags back from the country after bartering clothes, jewellery, anything, for food.

There were deep shadows, and a few weak electric-light bulbs, and draughts, and the strange musty smell formed by a mixture of German ration soap, German-grown tobacco, German perspiration; and always the raw, icy wind blowing eternally through the battered station.

Bartels dropped smoothly into Cobham, and followed the road as it curved through the village to the left, and thought: There you had it, in Hannover Station, the fruition of the dreams of revenge, the final triumphant blossoming of hatred’s hopes, the chance to look, to listen, to smell, to gloat, and to say: “Serve the swine right! They asked for it!”

In the main hall of the station, he remembered, a woman stood with a cheap pram in which a child lay, and two other children stood by her side. She had a round, yellow face, and wore glasses and was tall, and not very fat or very thin: just dull-looking. The group stood isolated beneath a light, caught in an island of illumination, as though picked out by an overhead searchlight, and the woman turned her head this way and that, as though looking for something or somebody, miserable and bewildered. That was defeat, that was our revenge.

If you went down below the station, to the former air-raid shelters, you found a thousand or two people herded together; some were there because it was warm, and the trains were always hours late, and you had to wait somewhere; others were there to do black-market deals; others because, in all Hannover, by day and by night, they had no other roof under which to shelter.

Here you met it again, hitting you in the face, the German smell, the stink of defeat and misery.

There were tables and hard chairs, but not enough, and a counter where you could queue and get a hot drink, if you had the right coupons. You picked your way carefully, in those foetid, smoky, musty vaults, shouldering your way through the human jungle, stepping over trunks, avoiding handbags, and legs, and feet, and bodies; some people were sitting or lying, some were awake, some sprawled asleep.

A seventy-year-old woman, with grey, streaky hair hanging lankly, sits on a suitcase, head on arms, knees up, eyes closed. A child lies across the end of a trunk, yellow hair touching the ground, sprawled out, ungainly, grotesque, as though a giant had used her as a toy, and then had tossed her down. She is asleep, despite the raucous songs from one corner of the room, the burble of voices, the shuffle of feet.

In the middle of the rooms the air is thick and foul and chokes you like cotton wool; but it is warm, it is away from the vicious wind, and the sleet, and the snow. So you pick your way gingerly past the woman with the crying baby, and the filthy ragged man mumbling to himself, and past, with greater care, the groups of long-haired, grubby youths who hang around and plot and trade in cigarettes and other unobtainable things. They look at you curiously with their grey faces and grey eyes, and would like to provoke an incident and beat you up and rob you.

Bartels took the final bend in the road out of Cobham, and thought: It’s so easy to hate at a distance. You read your newspaper, and you are well fed, and reasonably happy, and you say: “Let ’em suffer. We did.”

But it’s different when you’ve got to watch it.

You don’t feel as you thought you would, when you see women with yellow faces trying to shield undernourished children from icy draughts on the slimy steps of a ruined station, and when you hear the desperate words with which despairing human beings have tried to comfort each other since the beginning of history.

That’s what hurts, thought Bartels, the sight of people being unselfish in their miseries; trying to protect others, trying to cheer them when their own hearts are pools of unhappiness; trying to nurse them when there are no medicines, to give hope when there is none.

The man on the spot gets no satisfaction out of mass revenge; it is a thing to be read about and to be savoured from afar. The ordinary man has to stand at a distance to inflict suffering; if he comes too close he is lost. He becomes the victim of pity.

It is in man’s nature to remove the cause of the pain, and if he cannot remove the cause, he will, as like as not, put the sufferer beyond the range of it. If he is a veterinary surgeon, he turns to the lethal chamber, and the sufferer sleeps. If he is a doctor, he may take equivalent action.

But for the suffering of the mind, of the broken heart which cries out in its agony of loneliness, the trusting heart which has been betrayed—for this kind of suffering, thought Bartels, there is no release.

There are mercy killings for the others, but none for these.

Nobody has ever reached out a hand to help them to sleep. And certainly nobody has ever killed to
prevent
such suffering.

“Or have they?” said Bartels aloud. “Or have they?” he repeated, above the noise of the engine. “You can’t tell. You can’t tell, because you can’t see into people’s hearts.”

By now he had reached the stage when he could coolly contemplate the use of altrapeine. The time when he had refused to face his thoughts, refused to understand why he did not wish his aunt Emily to see him with a book on poisons, that time was past now.

If I kill Beatrice, he thought bitterly, and if I am caught, I shall go down in history as a monster of callous cruelty. That’s funny, of course, because if I did not care about her mental suffering, I could just walk out and leave her flat, and I wouldn’t even risk my neck.

I could have all I want, without risk, without even great trouble, if I were the callous monster they will consider me if I kill and get caught.

“Yes,” said Bartels, aloud again, “yes, it’s funny, and it’s silly.”

Outside Cobham, he saw a man walking by the side of the road. As he passed, the man turned and signalled for a lift. Bartels swore, and pulled up some yards farther down the road. He heard the sound of the man’s feet pounding on the roadway as he ran to catch up with the car. Bartels opened the side door, and the man climbed in.

“How far are you going?” Bartels asked.

“Couple of miles farther on. Thanks for stopping, mate.”

The man was still breathless from running, but he began to fumble in his pocket, and pulled out a packet of cigarettes and opened it and offered one to Bartels: “Have a ‘Wood,’ mate?”

“Thanks. You’re out late.”

The man searched his pockets for matches, found one, and struck a light. He said nothing as he held the match for Bartels. Bartels glanced at him in the light of the flame. He was a middleaged man, dingily dressed, with a thin, stringy tie, a cloth cap, and a lean, bony face.

Bartels wondered why he was out.

He thought idly that he might be a burglar, except that he hadn’t a bag of tools; or a poacher, except that he wasn’t wearing the kind of clothes you associate with a poacher; and he looked too old for a man returning from a love assignation.

“You’re out late,” said Bartels again.

“I’ve been with my sister. My eldest sister.” The man drew on his cigarette.

“Whereabouts does she live?”

“She lived in Cobham. She died this evening.”

Burglar, poacher, lover, mourner, they all looked much the same. They all wore suits of clothes, and asked for lifts, and offered you cigarettes. Aloud Bartels said: “I’m sorry to hear that. Very sorry indeed.”

The man drew on his cigarette again. Bartels saw the red glow in the windscreen. The man said:

“I was happy to see her go, and that’s the bloody truth, mate. She’s been hanging on for seven months. Well, we’ve all got to go sometime.”

“That’s right,” said Bartels, “we’ve all got to go sometime.”

“They didn’t find out soon enough; that was the bloody trouble. You’ve got to catch it early with a growth; that’s what the nurse said. A good nurse she was, too. It was a happy release, and that’s the truth. A bloody happy release.”

Platitudes and clichés, one sneers at them, thought Bartels, but they have their uses. We’ve all got to go sometime. A happy release. And all the others, ranged neatly in rows, potted and tinned and ready to hand for all occasions; the ever-ready solace and balm for simple folk, the soothing ointment for untutored minds. Aloud he said:

“Well, none of us can live forever.”

“That’s a bloody fact,” agreed the man. “That’s true enough.” He said nothing for a few moments, then he added: “It was bad the last two days because the poison didn’t burst the walls of her stomach, it kind of went to her brain; that’s what the nurse said.”

Bartels felt slightly sick. Desperately he said: “Yes, well, it’s all over now. She’s at peace now.”

He hoped the man had finished, but he had to have a last fling.

“They didn’t find out early enough,” he repeated dully; “that was Mildred’s trouble. She was never one for running to bloody doctors. Not Mildred. There’s a turning at the bottom of the hill, if you’d stop there, mate.”

Bartels stopped at the turning, and the man got out and thanked him, and trudged off down the lane. Bartels threw away the end of the Woodbine and drove on.

It was all over now, he had said, and he was right. If you didn’t adopt that attitude about suffering, you went mad in the end. Suffering wasn’t permanent, except in hell, if there was a hell; there was always peace in the end, one way or the other, and then the pain was finished, and the fear. Finished and over and at an end, forever and ever; past, irrevocably past and done with.

That was the only way to cope with the suffering, the agony, and the fear in the world. Any other line of thought made you clutch your temples and groan aloud.

He drove through Esher and beyond, and turned right at the Kingston Bypass, and twenty-five minutes later crossed the Thames by Hammersmith Bridge. Hammersmith Broadway was deserted except for one policeman standing at a corner.

Bartels had a sudden desire to hear a strong, normal human voice unburdened by grief, untrammelled by worries, which would drag him from his own thought-world of speculation, and intrigue, and foreboding.

He stopped the car, and the policeman moved slowly over to him. Bartels lowered the nearside window, and the officer stooped down and looked through the window at him.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Could you tell me the way to Alvington Road, please?”

“Yes, sir, it’s near Olympia. Take the road facing you, and after the second set of traffic lights, take the first turning on the left, and you’ll see it up on the right.”

“Thanks very much. It’s a nice night,” Bartels added, reluctant to let him go.

“Lovely night. Bit cold out here, though.”

The policeman laughed good-naturedly. Bartels envied him. To Bartels the policeman represented sanity: a plain man, an honest man, leading a regular life, without fears for the future or regrets for the past. After the miserable conversation with the bereaved man, after the loneliness of the drive in the dark, Bartels clung eagerly to human warmth and said:

“All quiet round here, tonight?”

“Not a mouse stirring, sir.”

Bartels took out his cigarette case. “Cigarette?”

The policeman hesitated, then removed a glove, looked briefly round the Broadway, and accepted one.

“Not supposed to, really, sir.”

“You’ll probably find a quiet corner.”

“I wouldn’t say it isn’t done sometimes, sir. Thanks.” He smiled and put the cigarette into his breast pocket. There seemed little more to say.