Henry and Cato (42 page)

‘I'm—well—I'm a little older than I said—I'm—nearly forty—Oh dear, oh dear—please understand—I just had to look after myself, nobody else would—and then you came and you were so
kind,
you called me Miss Whitehouse and you were so respectful and so polite and you didn't treat me like dirt like everyone else did and you
noticed
me and thought I was attractive—'

‘It sounds as though I was your first bit of luck.'

‘Yes, yes, darling, you were my first bit of luck, the first good thing that had ever happened to me—but oh I haven't spoilt it all by lying to you, have I? You do forgive me—' Stephanie slithered onto the floor and edged up towards him on her knees, pushing the rug before her on the wooden floor. She put her hands up to him like a begging dog. Her hot damp fingers tugged at the blue cotton sleeve of his pyjamas.

‘No wonder you laughed so when I proposed. You needed me and you invented me. Yes, you're a genius.'

‘Henry, please—'

‘So you're not a
femme fatale
after all, you're just the char. You're just a comic, a comic charwoman.'

‘Yes, yes, a comic, your comic, aren't I? You do forgive me don't you, say that you forgive me. You said you were sorry for me, you said you loved me because you were sorry for me, but you still are, aren't you? I've had such a miserable life and I've been so lonely, and you can't leave me just because I've told you the truth, I had to tell you the truth because I love you—you can't leave me now, you said you'd taken me on, that hasn't changed, has it, just because—'

‘That hasn't changed,' said Henry.

‘Oh—thank you, thank God—' she continued to kneel, giving little shuddering sobs, and holding his hand against her wet lips.

Henry looked down at the disordered hair and the absurd feathered collar and Stephanie's heaving shoulders. He thought, she admits to forty and is probably more. He said, ‘Hi, Steph. Hello.'

‘You are so good, so kind, the only person who was ever kind— '

‘Do get up, Steph, these transports are most improper, no, I don't want you, go and sit in that chair, please. Here, have my hankie.'

Stephanie got up and went to the chair, mopping her face. ‘So it's all right, it's really all right?'

‘Yes, it's got to be. Steph, I can't chuck you, I won't, I just feel I don't know you very well, you don't know me very well, and there we are, we seem to be each others' dooms. I expect we'll be O.K., we'll look after each other O.K. Now please go away, no, you can't sleep here, there isn't room and I'm as cold as ice. Yes, yes, I forgive you, but please go.'

‘Henry, don't go to that place tomorrow.'

‘I've got to.'

‘If you were killed tomorrow I'd have nothing—'

‘Oh, Steph! All right, I'll make a will leaving everything to you!'

‘I didn't mean it that way.'

‘You don't know what you do mean. You're my comic girl friend. But look, you must do as I tell you, I mean if I survive as I certainly intend to, you must come to America with me and be an ordinary person and not a rich lady. Please no more fantasies.'

‘I'll do whatever you—'

‘Now please go,
please.
'

‘And it's—'

‘Yes, yes, yes.'

After she had gone Henry got up and drank some water. Then he washed his hands. He turned out the lamp and pulled the window curtains back. The dawn was breaking.

Cato had been jerking the pipe to and fro for a long time now, perhaps an hour, his sense of time had become very vague. He was kneeling on one knee, leaning his shoulder against the wall. His arm ached, his hand felt wet, perhaps it was bleeding. The pipe had unscrewed to a certain point, then stuck. Cato moved the loosened pipe to and fro because it was an occupation, like turning a prayer wheel. It was the only thing he could think of to do for his salvation. His open eyes were filled with blackness, useless as if atrophied. His body lived through his sense of touch and already seemed as if it had always done so.

Prolonged darkness and hunger seemed to have radically altered all his senses. He experienced himself in relation to his surroundings through a sensibility which lived in his feet, his fingers and the flesh of his face of which his blind eyes now seemed an indistinguishable part. When he was still, lying or sitting on his bed, he felt himself to be both narrowed and enlarged, as if his body had become a big tight uncomfortable barrel within which his soul or his will or something lived as a thin flexible line. He felt at the same time solidified and hollow, weak and yet frenzied with useless power. His body was a burden to him, a source of disgust, and yet his sensitive fingers, like long long antennae, had learnt new tricks, a new sense of space. He could move noiselessly, lightly, confidently about his prison, yet at the same time he was a toad and he could smell the horror of his breath.

It was now some time since Joe had paid the last of his flying visits, bringing him bread and water. Very hungry, Cato had eaten all the bread. Later on, drugged or again hungry, he had begun to feel giddy. He had still seen no member of the gang except Joe, and this in itself had become a source of dread. He felt a crazed lonely curiosity, as if even the most horrible person would have been welcome company for him. Only still, fearing for his own safety and for Joe's, he did not dare to shout and knock. He had heard once more, but not lately, the odd distant gabble of voices, and sometimes footsteps. Now, obsessed with detaching his piece of metal pipe, he had ceased to listen. He had no plans for his tool, he just wanted to have it. Now, growling very softly, after a short rest, he shifted to the other knee and set to work again.

The time of writing the first letter to Henry was now immensely distant. It was, he supposed, days ago, and seemed by comparison a period of ignorance or even innocence. When he had first addressed Henry he had done so, it now seemed in retrospect, with a certain sense of absurdity and without any very lively realization that he was leading his friend into serious danger. Yet of course he knew that he ought not to have written that letter, and he could not remember having been then so afraid that he could not have refused to write it. Extreme fear, it seemed, had come later, had come with physical weakness and mental confusion. Yet it was the fact that he had written the first letter that had made it that much easier to write again, to Henry, and so shamefully to Colette. He had written in fear of Joe, of Joe's anger and his craziness and his viciously playful knife, and in fear of
them,
to whom he was to be delivered for punishment if he failed; whose victim also Joe would then become. It was all so incalculably complicated. Cato had felt so weak, so sick, so tired, so unable to fight, so unable to think, to resist, even to delay. And he had let himself be consoled amid the horror of his treachery by the thought that Colette would tell his father and his father would tell the police. Colette would not come, that never. Only now he was not so sure.

There was a sudden cracking sound and a pattering shower of fine debris and Cato sat back abruptly on the floor holding the section of piping. He sat there for a moment exploring his trophy. The pipe was heavy, about nine inches long and having a jagged tongue of metal at the end projecting perhaps four inches. Cato sat touching it, playing it as if it were a silent instrument. Then he struggled up, stood giddily for a moment, and made for his bed. He lay down holding the piece of pipe against him as if it were something cherished and precious. He even felt its shape against his cheek. It was dear to him as an indubitable thing, something outside his body and his mind, a talisman, something for which he had toiled and which he now possessed as some kind of evidence or proof.

Cato listened. There was total silence. The intermittent vibration which he interpreted as the underground railway was absent, so it must be night, perhaps two or three in the morning. Night. His father and Colette would be safely asleep at Pennwood. Silence. He tried to think about Henry and to wonder whether Henry had brought the rest of the money, but Henry and the money seemed unreal and shadowy, could not possibly be part of the story. He thought, I shall stay here and starve, stay here and die. I shall scream in the end, but there will be no one to hear. Perhaps they have all gone away and Beautiful Joe is already dead. I shall scream in the end. No one will ever know where I am or what happened. Silence. Night. Colette is asleep.

Then, clutching the pipe, he turned over in anguish and then sat up. He had written that letter to Colette, that terrible craven fatal letter. He had not fought, he had scarcely even argued, he had tried to purchase his survival with his sister's safety, perhaps with her life; with her honour, with his honour. He thought of other prisoners, brave men imprisoned by tyrants for speaking the truth. He was not of their company. Cato sat open-eyed, light-headed with misery and shame. He now saw that of course Colette would come, would come like an arrow to him, for him, as she thought. She would tell nobody, she would simply come.

He sat listening to his breathing and to the beat of his heart. He sat upright, straight-backed, legs slightly apart, and the attitude suddenly brought back memories of his earliest days as an ordinand when, sitting in what had then seemed like darkness, he had passed long periods in meditation. No one had told him what to expect, scarcely even what to attempt to do. Should I see images, he had said to Father Bell. Do what you please, he was told. Kneel. Sit. Stand. Kneel. Sit. Stand. Kneel. Automatically Cato canted forward and knelt on the floor. He laid the piece of piping down carefully and noiselessly beside him and he looked into the perfect darkness. He saw Colette looking at him with a look of immense tenderness, and then with an air of sadness turning her head away. With an intense concentrated quietness of transformation, Colette's face had become the face of the Redeemer, and the Redeemer had huge eyes luminous as a cat's, staring at him out of the darkness, yet there was a bright light all about. And Cato could see the tendrils of hair that flowed about the beloved head, and the way the beard grew. And he had a most intense sensation of not being alone.

Cato knew that these images were simply hallucinations. He had never so clearly felt and known the emptiness of such imagery, the falseness of that consoling sense of presence. He had betrayed his sister. He might soon die, or else live in shame. He had written a letter, he had performed an act, there was evidence against him. Some words came to him: God is the author of all actions. And he thought, but there is no God. Only those images, only actions and their consequences, and death. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy. This is not prayer, he thought, and I have never prayed. There is only sin and nothing to alter it or to change it, only our sin which is more foul than anything which we can understand or know, because we are made of lies.

He reeled, steadied himself with one hand on the ground, and went on kneeling. There is no God. I have nothing. I am nothing. God is the author of all actions. There is no God. Lord have mercy. I am a criminal. There is no hope. There is no one here. There is an abyss. He reeled again. Then, placing his hands on the floor, let himself fall forward until he was lying prone. There is no God, he thought, and he felt that it was the first time that he had ever really experienced the positive truth of this; and with the experience came an extraordinary breaking as if all the strings and tendons of his body had been cut, and he lay there limp as one to whom death has come unexpectedly.

The candle was burning on the shelf, moving slightly in the draught, like an almost motionless dancer who quietly shifts one foot. Colette and Beautiful Joe were sitting on the bed.

‘Colette,' Joe reached out his hand and held it open towards her. Then he let it fall gently to touch her knee. She shuddered. ‘Let me touch you. Call me “Joe” will you?'

‘Joe.'

‘Are you afraid of me?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are you afraid of sex?'

‘Yes.'

‘You've had sex?'

‘Never.'

Joe withdrew his hand. ‘I've never met a bird like you. You're—you're—precious.'

‘Joe,' said Colette, ‘I want Cato to be all right. I want him to be set free. There's no need for them to keep two of us. I came so that he should be set free. Won't they do that? Surely whoever paid that money would pay it for me.'

‘Henry Marshalson. You reckon?'

‘Henry paid that ransom money?'

‘Yes, and he's going to pay a lot more before he's through.'

‘But can't Cato please go now? I'm enough for ransom.'

‘You aren't here for the money,' said Joe.

Colette looked away from him. She looked at the low table where Joe had once more laid down his unsheathed knife. The knife glittered amazingly as if it were made of some magical metal which was a source of light. The blade shone like a flame. The strewn bank notes were still carpeting the floor.

‘Colette,' said Joe. ‘I want you to give yourself. I don't want you to fight me.'

‘Give myself—to you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Not to—anybody else—I mean?'

Joe was silent for a moment. Then he took off his glasses and put them on the table beside the knife. His face now showed weariness. ‘Sex is so nice, Colette. A woman's body, the way it moves—'

‘If I give myself to you, will Cato be set free?'

‘Maybe. Yes, it'll help. I could get mad, I could force you, you're frightened of me. Some men like that. Don't make me mad. I'll try to help your brother. But you've got to give. After all, you're helpless, you're a prisoner. I could force you, anybody could. You're just a girl. You don't want to get messed up, do you? You don't want your face to get messed? I could slash you with that knife. I know how to slash people so they stay slashed, the scars never go. You know?'