The Chequer Board (32 page)

She said, “How have you been, in yourself, Jackie? Had any pain, or any of them dizzy fits?”

He said, “I had a fall, ’n passed out for three hours.”

“Three hours!” She was appalled. “Was anyone with you?”

He told her how it had happened, and what had been done. “They couldn’t have been nicer,” he said. “No one could have done more. There wasn’t any doctor in the place, but I didn’t need one. I got over it all right.”

She said, “You’d better see Doctor Worth, now you’re back.”

“I don’t want to go seeing no more doctors,” Mr Turner replied. “I know what’s coming, ’n there’s no good bellyaching about it, wasting people’s time.”

They took another chair out into the garden, and sat together while he told her about his journey, what he had seen and heard. It took an hour. She listened carefully, trying to understand the changes that had taken place in his outlook.

At last she said, “Well, what are you going to do now, Jackie? Going to try it in the office?”

She had worked, herself, for several years in an office. She knew that managements are generally kind to the individual; especially where the individual is known. In asking if he was going to try it in the office, she knew that in his case there would be no harsh dividing line between employment and sick leave; so long as he showed his face now and then and did a bit of work when he could manage it, he would draw his salary all right. Sick leave for Mr Turner would begin when he had not shown up for a consecutive fortnight or so, not till then.

He said, “I think so.” He thought for a minute, and then said, “I got to think about them other two, the corporal and the nigger. I’m not so much worried about the nigger, now; it looks like he got off all right. I would like to know about that Corporal Brent, though.”

She said, “I wouldn’t bother about the nigger any more, Jackie. He’ll be back in Nashville, or some place like that. He’ll be all right.”

“Aye,” he said slowly, “I think he’s all right. I don’t think I’ll do much about him. It’s just Duggie Brent now.”

His wife said, “I expect he’s all right, too.”

“Maybe,” said Mr Turner thoughtfully. “But I’d like to know.”

In the distance they heard the church clock strike six. Mollie asked what he wanted to do that evening, and Mr Turner said at once that perhaps it would be nice to take a run out to the Barley Mow. She vetoed that, on the score that he was tired after his journey, and won her case.
Instead, they talked about Burma, and about her refresher course in shorthand typing, and presently they moved indoors, as it grew cool, and put the wireless on and listened to “Itma” with Tommy Handley and Lady Sonly and Inspector Ankles and the Colonel and Naive, and Mr Turner, who had missed this programme very much while he had been away, laughed until the tears came to his eyes, and fifteen million other people in the British Islands did the same.

He went down to the office next day—only a day or two adrift on his holiday time—and found a little work to do, and told the Managing Director about Mr S. O. Chang in far Rangoon. Secretly they were all rather shocked to see the change in him. If Mr Parkinson had wanted any confirmation of the sentence of death passed on Turner, he found it in the change in his appearance.

He went back to the office after lunch for a short time, and then went out and took a bus to Notting Hill Gate. He walked slowly through the streets to Ladbroke Square, and then up the steps, and rang the bell. Again the door was opened to him by Morgan’s sister, as it had been only about five weeks before.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

The girl said, “Oh—it’s you.”

“Aye,” he said, “it’s me all right. I’ve been staying with your brother, out in Mandinaung, Miss Morgan. I told him that I’d come and see you when I got back home. I got some things to tell his mother.”

She stared at him. “You say you’ve been staying with my brother, out in Burma?”

“That’s right.”

She did not move from the door, or ask him in. “You can’t have been,” she said suspiciously. “You were here only the other day.”

He said, “I flew out, and flew back again; I was in Burma just on a fortnight. I was staying with your brother Thursday of last week.”

“But that’s fantastic …” She moved aside, still only half convinced that this was not some imposition. “Come in, Mr Turner.”

She took him up to the first-floor drawing room. The mother was not there, and one of the long windows was open, letting fresh air and sunlight into the room.

“Yes,” he said, “I made a very quick trip, but I got time to spend a few days with your brother, up at Mandinaung.”

“At Mandinaung? You went and saw him there?”

“That’s right. He gave me a fine time.”

She stared at him. “But could he … where did you stay?”

Mr Turner said, “I don’t know as you’ve got the right idea of how he lives, Miss Morgan. He’s got a great big house, ’n servants, ’n a good job, too. It’s true enough he lived in a palm hut for a while after the war, same as any young couple might live in a prefab when they start off first. But now he’s built himself a great big house outside the town. Real lovely that house is,” he said a little wistfully. “He’s living better than what I do, or what you do here.”

She said, “He did mention something about a new
house, once …” She glanced at Mr Turner. “I’m afraid we don’t know as much about my brother as we ought to,” she said. “There was—well, something of a breach when he married that native woman. We don’t hear from him very often.” She paused, and then asked, “Did you see her?”

“Aye,” said Mr Turner, “I saw quite a lot of her. As nice a girl as any that you’d find in this country or any other.”

She stared at him, incredulous, and then asked, as Mollie had, “Can she speak any English?”

He felt at a loss, not knowing where to begin. “She speaks better’n what I do, by a long chalk,” he said. “She’s a very well-educated girl, Miss Morgan, and come of a good family, too. I think your brother done all right for himself, marrying her, if you ask me.”

She said, “But they lived in a palm hut in the jungle!”

The wheel had gone the full circle, and Mr Turner started again, patiently. He told her about the house, the meals, the furniture, the children, the servants; he told her everything that he could think of about life in Mandinaung. As he talked, there came to his mind the figure of Nay Htohn, wistful. “That is the trouble with the English,” she had said. “They so seldom go out to see for themselves.” He talked to Morgan’s sister with the figure of the Burman girl before his eyes, and he talked for nearly half an hour, and he was very tired by the time he had done.

A uniformed nurse came into the room, hesitated at the
door
on seeing Turner, and went out again. Miss Morgan
said, “My mother is ill, Mr Turner, or I should have liked her to see you and to hear all this. But I’m afraid she is too ill to see you now.”

“That don’t matter,” he said. “I’ll look in some other time, when she’s up and about again.”

The girl hesitated. “That’s very kind of you,” she said at last. “My mother had a stroke soon after you were here before. She’s very ill. If she recovers sufficiently, I will let you know. But she’s made no progress in the last three weeks and the doctor tells me I must be prepared for anything,”

“Dying, eh?” said Mr Turner.

She nodded, and her eyes were very full.

“Well, there’s a pair of us,” he said cheerfully. “I’m dying, too.” The girl stared at him indignantly. “It’s a fact,” he said. “This wound in my old napper’s going wrong on me.” She glanced involuntarily at the great wound on his forehead, red and angry. “I got till next April, not longer, and I don’t reckon that I’ll be in circulation after Christmas. I’ve had it, Miss Morgan. But what the hell? All be the same in a hundred years, that’s what I say.”

She said, rather at a loss, “I am so sorry.”

“So am I,” said Mr Turner. “I’d like to have gone on a bit longer, but that’s the way it is.” He thought for a minute. “I think you should go out and stay with your brother,” he said at last. “After your mother’s gone, that is. I think you ought to go and see with your own eyes how different it all is to what you think. It don’t cost much to go, considering what you’d get out of it.”

She said seriously, “I’ll think that over, Mr Turner. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

He said, “You won’t be seeing me again, Miss Morgan, I don’t suppose, because of what I told you.” He got to his feet to go. “So just remember this. When your Ma dies, you write out to your brother, ’n go out and spend a few months with him, ’n get to know your sister-in-law. You girls are of an age and educated much the same; you’ll hit it off with her all right if you can just forget what folks have told you about colour and judge for yourself from what you see with your own eyes. I don’t ask more than that. Just make up your own mind from what you see with your own eyes.” He picked up his hat. “Well, I must be getting along.”

He left the house and travelled back to Watford on the underground, and arrived home in time for tea. Mollie was expecting him and had a kipper for him and a great slab of cherry cake and strawberry jam, all the delicacies that Mr Turner liked best. And relaxing in a deck chair after this repast, and looking at the roses, and smoking his pipe, Mr Turner felt that there was a great deal to be said for Watford, whatever the charms of Burma. And presently, when Mollie came from washing up the tea things, he said, “Like to take a run out to the Barley Mow this evening?”

She smiled tolerantly. “If you like.”

So presently they got out the little seven-year-old Ford and started down the arterial road in the cool evening. They got to the Barley Mow at about a quarter to nine and parked the car with all the others, and went into the saloon bar. It was full of light and smoke and good company;
all his old familiar cronies were there—Georgie Harries, and Gillie Simmonds with a new girl friend on the stage, and fat old Dickie Watson, the bookie. In that atmosphere Mr Turner drank his beer and came out like a flower.

He told them the story of the temperance lecture and the glass of whiskey and the worm, and he told them the one about the lecture on psychic research and the goat. He was a very good raconteur and told a dubious story well. Standing in the middle of the crowd by the bar, flushed with beer, with the great wound in his forehead red and pulsing he was in his element. He never thought to tell them he had been in Burma, but he told them about the schoolmistress and the little girl who lisped, and about the man who climbed up on the wall of the lunatic asylum and found out all about Hipposexology. He had an inexhaustible supply of these stories, all somewhat juvenile, all certain of a laugh when told as Jackie Turner told them. The men enjoyed his company tremendously; the women stood by, faintly bored and brightly cheerful, with one eye covertly on the clock.

He tired presently, more quickly than he used to, and stood listening to other people’s anecdotes and stories, with a mug of beer clasped in his hand. A broad-shouldered young man dressed in a black coat and dark-grey striped trousers told a very legal story about a man who had half his house requisitioned as a Wrennery and went on living in the other half, which was a Roman bastion and so an “Ancient Monument,” and immune, and what came of it all. Mr Turner found himself beside this young man presently, and said:

“You in the law business?”

The other nodded. “I’m a junior clerk in Sir Almroth Hopkinson’s chambers, in the Temple.”

Mr Turner took a sup of beer, and thought for a moment. “Suppose one wanted to find out what happened in a trial back in 1943,” he said. “How would one set about it?”

“Get somebody to look it up in the register.”

“Can anyone do that?”

The young man shook his head. “You’d have to do it through a solicitor.” He glanced at Mr Turner. “What sort of case was it?”

“A murder.”

“Murder? Do you remember the name of the prisoner?”

“Brent. Douglas Theodore Brent. A corporal he was, in the Parachute Regiment.”

“Rex v. Brent …” The young man stared at him absently. “Wait now, Rex v. Brent … He got off, didn’t he? Manslaughter, was it?”

“I dunno,” said Mr Turner. “That’s what I want to find out.”

“Rex v. Brent …” the young man said again. “I’ve heard about that case. I know—Stanier, Marcus Stanier—that’s right. He was defended by a chap called Carter in Sir Phillip Bell’s chambers. A man called Marcus Stanier is a clerk there now. It was he who told me about it. That’s right. I could find out about it if you like.”

“I’d be real glad if you would,” said Mr Turner. “I was in hospital with him just before. I’ve always thought I’d like to know.”

They exchanged names and telephone numbers; Mr
Turner learned that the young man was Mr Viner. He rang up Mr Viner the next afternoon from the office.

Viner said, “Oh yes. I’ve got a copy of the transcript of the shorthand note of the trial here, Mr Turner, taken for the Judge-Advocate General. And I’ve got counsel’s notes for his speech. Marcus Stanier brought them over this morning. I said I’d let him have them back tomorrow. Matter of fact, I’ve been reading it myself—it’s quite an interesting case. He got six months, for manslaughter.”

“That all?” said Mr Turner in surprise. “It don’t sound much. He reckoned he was charged with murder.”

“That’s right,” said Mr Viner. “But he had a very good counsel, a very unusual counsel, I may say. Would you like to see the papers?”

“I would,” said Mr Turner. “If I slip over now, could I have a read at them?”

He went out and took a bus down to the Temple, and found the chambers with some difficulty. Mr Viner sat him down in a little badly lit outer office full of books and packets of old briefs and coats and hats, and gave him a dusty carbon copy of the shorthand transcript, Rex v. Douglas Theodore Brent. With it there was a dog-eared, marble-paper-covered book of pencilled manuscript, now smudged and faded, labelled P. C. CARTER.

The Judge was Mr Justice Lambourn; the prosecuting counsel, Mr Constantine Paget, K.C., with Mr Peter Melrose for his junior; and the defending counsel was Mr P. C. Carter. In the opening formalities the Judge had asked, “And for the defence?”