Report on Probability A (16 page)

“Get out of this bloody set-up. Go south. You don't stand a dog's chance here. Talk about snakes.…”

After a lapse of time, he placed the periscope by his right-hand side and moved crabwise to take in a view through the window.

No break showed in the clouds. Under a dull sky, the road showed dull. On the opposite side of the road could be seen railings with sharp spears pointing upwards and walls crowned with shards of broken bottles, guarding private property and the premises of small breweries, greenhouses, or vivisection clinics. Almost opposite the garage stood a café with lighted windows. The windows of the café were filled with all kinds of goods. Through one of the windows could be seen a small square table on which a red and white patterned cloth had been spread. Through the other window could be seen a man with folded arms, standing and looking across the road at the house.

C licked his lips. Turning his head away from the window, he leant sideways and picked up his home-made periscope. He thrust it through the hole in the bottom left corner of the window, adjusting it so that the top of the periscope was free of the top of the roof, and could look over it towards the south-east side of the house.

By peering along the line of his wrist, C could see in the bottom mirror of the periscope the reflection of what was visible in the top mirror. This gave him a limited but clear view into the small bow window that formed one of the two windows of Mr. Mary's wife's bedroom.

“My God, there she is! You're in luck.…”

Seated in the bow window, head bowed and fists clenched over her eyes, was the woman with tawny hair. She still wore the brown tweed coat. Her shoulders shook. Presently she removed one of her fists from her eyes to feel into a pocket concealed from C's line of sight. As it moved, the fist stretched into a long stalk of flesh, returning to its normal shape after it had passed over a flaw in one of the periscope mirrors. The flaw distorted the body of the woman, elongating and blurring her. Producing a small handkerchief, she mopped at her eyes and at her nose, while her shoulders continued to heave. A strand of her hair fell down across her neck. She was within about two and a half metres of the eye of the periscope.

“Huh, have a good weep! You might have been weeping for me instead of a miserable.… Hello! Here comes Smiling Boy!”

Behind the woman, a man in dark suiting appeared. He spoke to her. He placed a hand on her shoulder. She shook her shoulder away. He spread his hands. His lips could be seen opening and shutting. He smiled. Suddenly she turned her head towards him. She had high cheek-bones. The skin moved across the cheek-bones as her mouth opened and closed. The lips of both faces moved at once. The man was frowning now. Her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes were red; they could be seen as again he advanced towards her and again she turned away, trying to shake her shoulders from his clutch.

The man in dark suiting grasped her firmly now, although she struggled. He appeared to be shouting, although no sound reached C. The woman raised her fists, one of which clutched a handkerchief, above her head, and brought them down on her knees. Then she slumped forward with her forehead pressed against the window, making a white outline against it. Again her fists were raised to her eyes, and her eyes buried behind her knuckles, out of sight. The man in dark suiting shook his head and disappeared. The woman gave no indication that she knew he had gone from behind her.

C's arm was beginning to ache. He brought his regard away from the periscope mirror. Handling the instrument carefully, he pulled it in through the window; thrusting his right hand, which had been exposed, under his left armpit for warmth, he noted that it had grown appreciably duller outside. Only the fact that the woman with the tawny hair had been so close to the window had allowed him to see her clearly.

Pushing the peaked cap onto the back of his head, he stared out of the window. Street lights had come on while he was gazing through the periscope. The road looked drab. A motor hearse drove slowly down the street; above the cab, a neon sign flashed on and off forming a single word, Diggers. The hearse's tires were deflating slowly. When the hearse had passed, a man began to cross the road towards the café opposite. He moved fast. C recognized him at once. It was the man in the dark suiting.

The man in the dark suiting crossed the road in a certain number of strides. As he did so, the intensity of light falling on him varied greatly. When C first saw him, stepping from the pavement that was not visible from the inside of the garage window, his left shoulder was clearly illuminated by the light falling from a street light that C knew to be situated on the other side of the front of the house, between the house and a brown side gate in the wall beyond the house.

As the man in the dark suiting got further from this source, the street lighting tended to light the back of his left shoulder rather than the arm of it, growing fainter at the same time. A second street light, down the road in the opposite direction, beyond the east corner of the property, lit the man's suit with a pale illumination that served merely to distinguish the right side of his body from the dark of the street he was crossing. The lights from the windows of G. F. Watt's café lit the front of him increasingly, bathing his outline and the line of his jaw until, from C's viewpoint, the effect of the two more distant street lamps was nugatory.

As he entered the café door, the man was celarly visible under the lights. He walked into the café. The door hung open behind him. He walked to the counter, and the view of him was obscured by a pile of packaged goods arranged in the window.

Removing his right hand from his left armpit, C picked up his periscope and thrust one end of it through the hole he had made in the bottom left corner of the window. It had been summer when he had begun to hide in the loft, and the aperture had then admitted warm air. He adjusted the periscope and squatted by it, but looked over it and not through it.

Presently, the man in the dark suiting was seen turning away from the counter. Behind the counter, G. F. Watt leant forward with both arms on the counter and hands clasped, watching his customer leave. The customer came through the door of the café into the comparative darkness of the street. As he came, he tucked a small pink carton into one of his jacket pockets. While he was crossing the road, nearing the point where C would no longer be able to see him, C put his eye to the lower mirror of the periscope.

In the arrangement of mirrors, the man in the dark suiting became visible in attenuated form. A flaw in one of the mirrors rendered him very tall and thin, while a blurry effect covered his head, so that he appeared to have a sharp face covered with flesh-coloured fur. The side of the house was represented obliquely, with the distortion of perspective. The long legs of the man climbed up two steep stone steps. The man vanished through a slot in the brickwork.

“If he poisons her, I'll be in there after him. I will. Poor little kitten in there with that snake of a man!”

C was about to bring the periscope from the hole in the garage window, and had already leant back from the window in order to do so, when a movement in the arrangement of mirrors caught his eye. He bent his head to the instrument again.

In the steep perspective of brick visible through the arrangement of mirrors were several niches, the nearer niches being wider than the further niches. A distant and narrow niche could be interpreted by a skilled observer as a brown side gate set in the wall on the far side of the house. Through this niche or slot was stepping a man in a ragged jacket. Because a street lamp stood between the watcher and the ragged man, his face was clearly visible as he looked across the road.

“What's
he
think he's up to?”

The man with the ragged jacket crossed the road. He carried a small white jug in one hand, swinging it in a way that indicated it was empty. C observed him directly through the window of the garage and not through the periscope. As the man entered the café, G. F. Watt could be seen behind the counter, speaking to the man. Watt was obscured as he moved behind the counter, first by his customer and then by an arrangement of packaged goods in one of the windows. Then he could be seen going through a door behind the counter. Stuck to the door was a poster; the details on it could not be seen from the garage.

The owner of the café presently reappeared with a white object that he passed over the counter to his customer. His customer turned away and walked out of the door to the café. The lights from the café shone strongly onto the road now. Little illumination was left in the sky. As the man in the ragged jacket crossed the road, he was observed to be carrying a small white jug of the kind generally used for milk. He carried the jug before him with care, steadying it with both hands. He crossed the road and disappeared from the range of C's view.

“Blighter! I know what he's up to.”

C did not attempt to follow the man's further progress through the periscope. Holding the periscope firmly in in his right hand, he thrust it through the hole in the window, allowing his right hand to pass through also. By turning his wrist, he could adjust the instrument so that it assumed a vertical position and looked over the slope of the metal roof at a section of the house otherwise unavailable to scrutiny.

After some manipulation, he looked through the arrangement of mirrors. Again he had the bow window on the first floor of the house under surveillance. The window was unlit from within. A radiance in the western sky, shining from the back of the house, rendered its details with dull clarity.

In the bow window, the woman with the tawny hair was sitting. She appeared to stare out of the window. She wore a coat. Her arms protruded from the coat. She rested her fists under her high cheek-bones. Now and again her shoulders shook.

C pushed the peaked cap back from his forehead with his left hand. Outside the window, his right hand grew cold.

The woman in the bow window was observed to turn her head as if to listen to a sound behind her. Light came on in the room, very bright and sudden, silhouetting the woman and making features impossible to see. She turned her head away from the light.

A man in dark suiting loomed behind her. His lips were moving as if he were talking to the woman. In his hand he carried a glass. One side of the glass gleamed with reflected light. The glass was about a quarter full of some grey liquid. Suddenly the glass became almost as tall as the man. It disappeared from the watcher's view behind the woman's back, and the woman's head became attenuated, growing narrow and thin.

The man reached out his right hand and put it on the woman's shoulder. The woman turned violently towards him, bringing her hands from her cheeks as she did so. It could be seen that the glass flew in an arc, changing shape as it did so. It was lost beyond the side of the arrangement of mirrors. C flicked his right wrist so that the periscope moved slightly. He saw that the man had stepped back so as almost to be concealed from sight by the bow window. His left shoulder and part of his head were hidden from inspection by the arrangement of mirrors by a curtain hanging in the window. He was brushing at the lapels of his dark suiting. Because the light was behind him, the expression on his face was impossible to see. He stepped forward and put out his right arm which blossomed to strange proportions in the flaw in the mirrors. He struck the woman across the face with his right hand. She threw up her arms and moved swiftly towards him. The man retreated. He became hidden by the side of the bow window. Momentarily, the woman's hair made a long tawny spike as she moved into the room. Then she became hidden from view by the side of the window. Nothing could be seen in the window but light pouring through its panes and wallpaper of an indistinguishable pattern on a further wall.

“Someone ought to do for him.”

The bow window, pouring its light out into the side of the garden, trembled in the arrangement of mirrors. C grunted. Carefully, he brought in his wrist and his right hand clutching the periscope through the gap in the window at the front of the garage. He set the periscope down on the floor below the window. Sitting down beside it, he drew his knees up before him, resting his left hand on his knees and thrusting his right hand under his left armpit to warm.

4

A certain amount of light still lingered in the loft above the garage. Through the square window at the other end of the loft, light came from the brightest part of the sky, A small section of a brick wall could be seen, and a distant tree in another property beyond the garden; beyond that, a troubled band of pink light marked where the sun set behind clouds.

Within the loft, a few simple shapes were visible. On the left of where C sat was a smoothly curved bulk made jagged in the middle (as if it had struck a rock) where a tarpaulin hung over the side of it. One point towards the far end of the smoothly curved surface reflected back the dying light from the window; the reflection trailed into straight lines where individual planks along the hull caught it on their edges. On the other side of the loft, the cartons made a continuous shape, black with five sharp corners, except where the box nearest to C picked up a reflection of light from the windows of the café opposite the front of the house. Along the floor were a number of small wet patches which reflected light from the window at the back of the garage.

Stuck to the side of one of the cartons was a cheap colour reproduction of a once-popular painting. It was possible to discern in the fading light that it represented a symbolic confrontation between the two sexes in which, by inserting certain images, the artist had cast doubt upon both the advisability and the possible success of the confrontation. This ambiguity was further increased by the poor light, which fused the man and woman portrayed into a semi-recumbent whole, in which only the faces of the pair, and of a lamb upon the girl's lap, were really distinguishable.

Setting down the red-and-white striped phone, the President said angrily, “It's that confounded Holman Hunt picture again, with the shepherd and the heavy-eyed dame and all that stuff. G had it, S had it, now we are told C has it. What does this mean, Baynes, for God's sake?”