He Died with His Eyes Open (21 page)

'So what you're saying is that you don't think this is suicide, you think it's murder.'

'Of course it is,' I said, 'only like everything else in this case, I can't prove it. It's my balls-up. I should have charged him with possession of drugs and held him. But I didn't want to, I wanted to let him run'

'You let him run right off the edge of the plate,' said Bowman. He looked round the room. 'Christ, what a mess for a bloody murderer to make.'

'Okay, but don't forget that some of them enjoy making a mess,' I said. 'That's half the fun for these demented bastards, that's how they get their kicks. You get a hundred cases a year of it at the Factory, as you well know. It's dark, bloke's got a car parked downstairs, he strips off in here when he's done the work in overalls and a pair of sneakers, dumps all that in a plastic bag, changes, and burns the lot when he gets home. And who's to know?'

'They did it with the razor blade?'

'Why not?' I said. 'There's no other wound. They're a well-built pair. Hand in his hair, drag his head back, do it to him, and tidy up.'

'Two of them?'

'Just two. Man and a woman.'

'Sounds to me as if they ought to set up in wedded bliss at Broadmoor,' Bowman said.

'Suit them very well,' I said. 'They love to kill, the pair of them, and the longer it takes, and the more mess they make, the better they like it. And they had a motive,' I added. 'I'm that close to them that they don't want me to get any closer.'

He looked at me with something very nearly like concern. 'I hope you know what you're doing, Sergeant.' He said: 'You got any chance at all of proving this, do you think?'

'A faint one.'

'Well, I don't know,' he said gloomily, 'it sounds like a right fuck-up to me. Thank God it's your problem and not mine.' He picked up his expensive tweed jacket and put it on; I got a glimpse of the Savile Row label sewn onto the inside pocket. 'You want to see any more?'

'No, that's it.'

'You'll have to make your report for the inquest.'

'I hadn't forgotten.'

'I'll have him taken away, then.'

'Yes, call the ambulance,' I said, 'if there is such a thing.'

32

The next tape of Staniland's I played started:

I dreamed I was walking through the door of a cathedral. Someone I couldn't distinguish warned me: 'Don't go in there, it's haunted.' However, I went straight in and glided up the nave to the altar. The roof of the building was too high to see; the quoins were lost in a dark fog through which the votive lamps glowed orange. The only light came through the diamond-shaped clear panes in the windows; it was faint and cold. This neglected mass was attached to a sprawl of vaulted ruins; I had been in them all night; I had wandered through them for centuries. They had once been my home; burned-out rafters jutted like human ribs above empty, freezing galleries, and great doors gave onto suites soaked by pitiless rain. Angry spectres, staggering with the faint steps of the insane, paraded arm in arm through the wrecked masonry, sneering as I passed: 'The Stanilands have no money? Good! Excellent!'

In the cathedral there were no pews or chairs, just people standing around, waiting. No service was in progress. Knots of men and women from another century stood about, talking in low voices to bishops who moved in and out of the crowd, trailing their tarnished vestments.

I realized with a paralysing horror that the place really was haunted. The people kept looking upwards, as though waiting for an event. I managed to overcome my fear and went on up the nave towards the altar. As I passed, groups of people crossed themselves and said nervously: 'Don't do that!'

I took no notice, but opened the gate in the rails and went and stood in front of the altar. Behind it, instead of a reredos, hung a tapestry with a strange, curling design in dark red; the tapestry was so high that it lost itself in the roof. As I watched, it began to undulate, to flow and ripple, gradually and sensuously at first, then mere and more ardently, until it was rearing and thundering against the wall like an angry sea. I heard people behind me groan and mutter, praying in their anguish and fear. Then my waist was held by invisible hands and I was raised from the floor; at the height of the roof I was turned slowly parallel with the ground and then released so that I floated, immobile and face downwards, far above the people whose faces I could make out in the half-dark as a grey blur, staring up at me. After I had floated the length and breadth of the building I descended quietly, of my own accord, and landed lightly on the spot from where I had been taken, whereupon I walked directly out of the building without looking back. As I walked swiftly away down a gravel path someone like Barbara came running towards me in a white coat, approaching from a thick hedge that surrounded the graveyard.
'Quick,'
she said over her shoulder,
'don't let him get out!'

But I walked straight into a wood that confronted me without a qualm; no one had any power over me now.

33

I had played all of Staniland's tapes now, but there were certain passages that had made an indelible impression on me. I put one on now, on the player I had in the car. Staniland said: 'The terrace at Duéjouls, a north wind in June. Recorded in great agony of spirit.'

There was a traffic jam in front of me, spreading right through the West End. I eased the car along automatically, moving up in the queue, but I was in a different world, Staniland's. The horrible position he had got himself into over his wife and child, and his oncoming fate, stared through his words. Dead though he was, I had begun to suffer from the delusion, because of his cassettes, that he was still alive—it was as though, for me, he was already in the morgue before he had got there. The passage that I was listening to now ran:

Unhook the delicate, crazy lace of flesh, detach the heart with a single cut, unmask the tissue behind the skin, unhinge the ribs, disclose the spine, take down the long dress of muscle from the bones where it hangs erect. A pause to boil the knives—then take a bold but cunning curve, sweeping into the skull you had trepanned, into the brain, and extract its art if you can. But you will have blood on your hands unless you transfused it into bottles first, and cure the whole art of the dead you may, but in brine—a dish to fatten you for your own turn.

What better surgeon than a maggot?

What greater passion than a heart in formaldehyde?

Ash drops from the morgue assistant's cigarette into the dead mouth; they will have taken forensic X-rays of the smashed bones before putting him back into the fridge with a bang; there he will wait until the order for burial from the coroner arrives.

Those responsible for the end of his mysterious being will escape or, at best, being proved mad, get a suspended sentence under Section Sixty.

I switched the player off and began thinking for no apparent reason about a friend I had once when I was a young man. He was a sculptor who used my local pub in the Fulham Road; his studio was just opposite. He wore sandals but no socks, whatever the weather, and was always powdered with stone dust; this gave him a grey appearance and got under his nails. He wore his white hair long and straight over his ears. He was a Communist, and he didn't care who knew it, though he only said so if people asked. They didn't bother often. He was a Communist as an act of faith, like a Cathar. He accepted the doctrine straight, as Communists used to before they won and everything turned sour. But he rarely spoke to anyone about politics; there were so many other things to talk about. He and I used to stand at the bar together and drink beer and talk about them. But few people talked to him. That suited him. Most people couldn't be bothered because he was stone deaf and could only lip-read you. He was deaf because he had fought for the Republic with the XIIth Brigade in the Spanish war. He had fought at Madrid (University Buildings), and later at Huesca and Teruel with the XVth. But at Teruel he had had both eardrums shattered when a shell exploded too close to him. 'It was worth it.' 'No regrets?' 'No, of course not.'

One of the greatest forms of courage is accepting your fate, and I admired him for living with his affliction without blaming anyone for it. His name was Ransome, and he was sixty-five when I first knew him. He got his old-age pension and no more; governments don't give you any money for fighting in foreign political wars. People like that are treated like nurses— expected to go unseen and unrewarded. So Ransome had to live in a very spare, austere way, living on porridge and crackers, drinking tea, and getting on with his sculpture. It suited him, luckily. He had always lived like that.

Nobody who mattered liked his sculpture; when I went over to his council studio I understood why. His figures reminded me of Ingres crossed with early Henry Moore; they were extraordinarily graceful, and far too honest to mean anything whatever to current trendy taste. There was a quality in them that no artist nowadays can seize anymore; they expressed virtues—toughness, idealism, determination—that went out of style with a vanished Britain that I barely remembered. I asked him why, with his talent, he didn't progress to a more modern attitude, but he said it was no use; he was still struggling to represent the essence of what he had experienced in the thirties. 'What I'm always trying to capture,' he explained, 'is the light, the vision inside a man, and the conviction which that light lends his action, his whole body. Haven't you noticed how the planes of a man's body alter when he's in the grip of a belief? The ex-bank-clerk acquires the stature of an athlete as he throws a grenade—or, it might be, I recollect the instant where an infantryman in an attack, a worker with a rifle, is stopped by a bullet: I try to reconstruct in stone the tragedy of a free man passing from life to death, from will to nothingness: I try to capture the second in which he disintegrates. It's an objective that won't let me go,' he said, 'and I don't want it to.' He had been full of promise before he went to Spain; he grubbed about and found me some of his old press-cuttings. In one of them he was quoted as saying: 'A sculptor's task is to convey the meaning of his time in terms of its overriding idea. If he doesn't transmit the idea he's worth nothing, no matter how much fame he acquires or money he makes. The idea is everything.'

I knew what would happen to Ransome's work when he died. The council would come round, view what Ransome had left behind, and order it to be junked; a truck would arrive, and a couple of men with sledgehammers. The whole lot would be smashed up and go into the council dump; in a thousand years' time one of his stone faces might be found staring enigmatically upwards from the base of a demolished block. Meanwhile, in our lifetime, horrible pieces of rubbish, commissioned by the ignorant from the ambitious, would continue to clutter London parks, blessed by the senile patronage of the Arts Council. ('The most terrifying responsibility in stone,' Ransome said, 'is that it's eternal.') The dwindling number of places in London parks where you could peacefully eat a sandwich in the shade of the plane trees on a hot day would go on being deformed by stone drivel, bronze and marble drivel, eternal drivel.

Now Ransome reminded me of Staniland. When we had known each other in the pub for about a year Ransome asked me over to his studio for the first time. 'I'm married, you know,' he remarked as he plunged deafly and fearlessly into the Fulham Road traffic. When we got into the studio it was empty, and I asked him where his wife was.

'Oh, she's away.'

'Visiting?'

'Well, yes. Visiting.'

His wife was completely mad. From time to time they discharged her from the mental hospital and sent her home, but these spells never lasted long. Ransome would do everything for her: 'She's much better,' he would whisper to me confidentially,
'much
.' Maisie knew that something was expected of her because there was a visitor, just as when she tried to pull herself together in the Asylum Park for Ransome's own visits to her. She would try to make tea for us at the studio, but Ransome usually had to take over from her halfway through because she started wringing her hands over the teacups in the kitchenette, seeing them, as far as we could make out, as wrong and too flat. He would finish setting out the tray himself while she sat between two of his sculptures in a wicker chair. She was as white as they, an atrociously thin woman with terrified brown eyes, shuddering with terror.

When it got very bad she would drop her biscuit on the floor and start singing. 'It's just to keep the fear off,' Ransome would say calmly in my ear—he could tell what she was doing from the look on her face. But her tuneless singing always meant that he had to take her off to the corner of the studio where they slept; he had to take her there at once and give her the sedative he had got from the doctor. If I was there, we would put her into bed together and Ransome would say, as he tucked in his side of the sheet: 'She looks at naked existence all the time, you know, the way we only do with a bad hangover.' We would stand looking at the sallow agonized face on the pillow until the singing died away at last into a confused murmur and she would sleep. 'She doesn't know how beautiful she is,' Ransome would say to me. 'I tell her that beauty is proof against every-thing, but she just won't believe it. I tell her there's nothing for her to be afraid of, but she won't accept it; she's too sensitive, you see.' The next time I went round with Ransome she would have gone away again.

There was also one dreadful time when she screamed in the middle of tea and biscuits, broke a cup and tried to kill herself with a sharp piece. Ransome and I got it away from her, but she upset the table in the struggle. 'She doesn't think she's worthy to live,' said Ransome afterwards. 'But she doesn't realize, she
is
life. I love her,' he added. 'I could never love anybody else the way I love Maisie. My work struggles to sum her up.'

(I knew what he meant at last, thanks to Staniland, though it had seemed difficult to accept at the time. Skeletal Maisie juggling the teacups with the confused haste of the insane, and the way Ransome felt about her, corresponded to the way I felt about Staniland.)