The Gigantic Shadow (3 page)

Two people bent over, smiling at him. The smiles on their faces were upside down. His head ached. He put up a hand to it, and felt bandages. He closed his eyes and opened them again and the people were right way up, Charlie Cash and Anna. He was lying on the sofa in the living room of the flat which he shared with Anna. With that fact established, he closed his eyes again.

Anna’s voice, soft as melted toffee, said, ‘Bill, darling, are you awake?’

Charlie’s sharp Cockney voice said, ‘You’ve got those bandages on because you tripped and brought one of the cameras down on the side of your head. No serious damage. If you can open your eyes and talk, you’d better.’

It was Charlie’s voice he answered, opening his eyes. Anna knelt by the sofa, her soft pudgy face inches from his. ‘Are you sure you can talk?’

‘I can talk.’ He swung his legs to the ground and groaned at the pain in his head. ‘Tell me what happened.’

‘The interview was rotten. Then you asked some questions about Bond. Mekles came back with some stuff about your name being O’Brien. You took a poke at him.’ Charlie paused. With no change of tone he added, ‘That all went out. Anna here saw it. A million people saw it.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, yes.’ You can’t get away from the past, he thought, you can’t get away from the kind of person you are – or were, if the tense held any significance.

‘Then they cut us off. Your poke at Mekles just grazed him, worse luck. One of his thugs caught you on the face. You fell over, brought down the camera, and it hit your head. Exit one personal investigator, brought home by research assistant to his ever-loving mistress, who bandaged the head. Exit also TV technicians, in confusion.’

‘And Mekles?’

‘Also exit Mekles, but not as quickly as he expected. He was leaving England tomorrow, changed his mind and wanted to leave tonight, but police questioning kept him till three this morning.’

‘Police questioning?’ His head was aching badly.

‘He can’t talk,’ Anna said. ‘He doesn’t feel like talking. I won’t have him worried.’

The French clock on the mantelpiece said five minutes past six. He had slept, then, most of the night.

‘He needn’t talk, but he’d better listen.’ There was an edge to Charlie’s voice. ‘I’ve had the telephone cut off, but you’re an object of interest at the moment. To newspapermen. And the police. We stalled them last night, but they’ll be round this morning.’

He felt utterly confused. ‘Because of – ?’

‘We started transmitting at nine-thirty last night, right? You asked Mekles questions about this and that, and then asked him about a man named Bond. You implied that Mekles had come over here to do business with him, right? Where did you get the dope on that?’

‘From your research notes.’ The question held little reality for him. The past had him, gripped him like a pair of pincers.

‘But I told you it was background stuff. I told you not to use it,’ Charlie cried in exasperation. He took out a toothpick, put it in his mouth, bit through it, threw it away and took another.

Imprisoned in his dream of the past he said idly, ‘Does it matter?’

‘This much.’ Charlie rolled the toothpick quickly to the corner of his mouth. ‘You quizzed Mekles about Bond in the programme. Rather more than three hours earlier – just after six o’clock to be precise – Bond jumped out of the window of his flat. He lived in a block near Marble Arch. You didn’t know that?’

‘Of course not.’

‘He was dead when he hit the ground. It was in the late evening papers, a paragraph.’

Anna watched him anxiously. His mental processes were sluggish, he could only think about the past. ‘And so?’

‘So it looked as though you knew about Bond’s death and were accusing Mekles of being implicated in it. Naturally he was riled. But the point is this, Bill. I hoped you might have some good reason for mentioning Bond, beside the guff in my notes. But you hadn’t? Nothing at all?’ Charlie threw up his hands. ‘Then we’re up the creek.’

The doorbell rang.

No doubt they were up the creek, as Charlie had said, but they were hardly up equal distances. It was nice of Charlie to make the disaster inclusive, but really for him it was no more than a matter of losing one pretty well-paid research job out of a dozen. For Hunter it was another thing, although not one which he could yet take seriously. To the policeman who talked to him he patiently but rather absently repeated that he had no basis for making the remark about Bond other than the research notes of his assistant, Mr Cash.

This policeman was a slick young man, who had the brisk, confiding air of an insurance or even a vacuum cleaner salesman. When he spoke it was with a slightly apologetic air, as though he were trying to sell you something, and knew that it was an article of inferior quality, because unfortunately he did not work for the very best firm. He had this air now as he read the note on Bond made by Charlie Cash.

‘These notes were not much more than gossip, as Mr Cash has admitted. You agree about that?’

‘Yes. The interview was not going well. I was trying to get some reaction from Mekles.’

The police inspector, whose name was Crambo, shook his head in apparent puzzlement. ‘They call me Dumb Crambo at the Yard, and I’m not surprised. I would never have suspected that you’d ask a question in that way, just on a basis of gossip.’

‘Well, I did,’ Hunter said wearily.

‘If it had been someone like me, now, someone stupid, I should have been afraid of slander. But I suppose you put the questions very cunningly, eh?’

‘I don’t know that I worried about that. The question itself was harmless, just a suggestion that Mekles was doing business with Bond. I was surprised by the way he reacted.’

‘Harmless,’ Crambo said meditatively. ‘That’s assuming you didn’t know that this chap Bond had dived out of his window earlier that evening.’

‘I didn’t know it. I hadn’t seen a paper.’

‘But Mr Mekles had seen a paper, he told me so himself, and he didn’t like it at all. Natural that he shouldn’t like it, don’t you agree.’

‘I suppose it was.’

‘All quite natural, you might say. Your innocent question and his feeling that you were needling him, you might say.’ He said suddenly, ‘When did you first meet Bond?’

‘I didn’t know him from Adam.’

‘I expect you’d have known him from Eve,’ Crambo said, and looked shamefaced. ‘You’ll have to pardon me. My sense of humour gets the better of me at times. Then Mr Mekles makes this nasty remark about
you.’

‘Yes. I –’

Crambo gave a twist to the trousers of his neat grey pin-stripe suit. ‘We know all about that. There’s no need to explain. A bit of bad luck for you, if I may say so. I’ve always admired your programme, you know.’ Hunter mumbled something. ‘Indeed, I have. I always say to the little woman, “Turn it on now, Doreen, mustn’t miss the Personal Investigator.” I like a programme with a punch. Next to Dragnet, you’re my favourite. The way that man Friday goes on – oh, there I am again,
man Friday,
do you see? I apologise.’

‘Did Bond commit suicide?’ Hunter asked, in an attempt to put a stop to this clowning.

‘No doubt about it. A witness opposite saw him clamber out on to the sill and jump.’

‘Why did he do it?’

‘That’s what we’d like to know.’ Crambo’s glance was suddenly remarkably keen. ‘I should value your ideas about that, you know.’

But Hunter had no ideas. When Crambo left after an hour and a quarter, his professional salesman’s cheerfulness seemed to mask slight disappointment.

After Crambo came the reporters, but he disappointed them too by his blank serenity and artificial calm, as well as by his refusal to say anything about past or future. He said only one thing that interested them.

‘Mr Hunter,’ said the owl-faced crime reporter of the
Banner,
‘a certain accusation was made against you last night by Mr Mekles.’

‘You mean he said that my name was O’Brien, and I had been in prison?’ Their pens pointed eagerly at the pads in their hands. Their faces had an identical expression of Pavlovian doggy pleasure at the rung bell when he said almost indifferently, ‘What he said was true.’

He refused all further details, he refused an offer of money for his life story, he refused to say whether he would resign his job. They left, dissatisfied after all. There had been the bell ringing, the salivation, but in the end no food. Within a few hours there would be food enough, Hunter thought. They hadn’t long to wait.

After the reporters, with the telephone reconnected, came Jerry Wilton, sepulchral, sad, inviting him to attend a committee meeting to discuss his position that very afternoon.

Calmly he said, ‘You don’t really want me coming along, Jerry. I don’t want to be an embarrassment. I’ll sit down and write my resignation now.’

He could hear relief as well as sympathy in Jerry’s voice, as he said that Bill understood the whole thing, taking it like a sportsman, wanted to be absolutely fair, must consider public, duty we all owe, hoped remain good friends. Jerry did not mention O’Brien or prison, and Hunter guessed that he knew all about it, and knew what O’Brien had gone to prison for. But Jerry did proceed to dot the i’s and cross the t’s when he mentioned the disgrace clause in the contract, and added that strictly speaking it could be invoked, but nobody wanted to do a thing like that, remain good friends, resign and be paid six months’ salary.

There was a question mark in Jerry’s voice. Hunter guessed that he might have got more by bargaining, but he did not want to bargain. ‘That’s very generous,’ he said, and meant it.

Jerry was pleased. Jerry’s voice had changed a great deal from its artificial opening grace notes, changed almost to his ordinary, equally artificial, back-slapping geniality, as he said that the whole thing was a great pity, a damned shame, he blamed himself a good deal, they must have a drink sometime. Hunter agreed that they must have a drink sometime, and added mentally, sometime never.

And after Jerry there was Anna, facing him now with the look of a bitch that knows something unpleasant is going to happen, afraid that she is going to be put to sleep. Anna, a blonde, not dumb but sluttish, a girl who powdered in the good eighteenth century way instead of bathing, a girl who left her hairpins in the bed. Anna, who wore expensive but vulgar clothes, who had taken lessons at the Cordon Bleu Cookery School but still left slugs in the salad. Anna, who at twenty-eight showed no wrinkles round her big blue eyes, but was losing her figure through indulgence in chocolates. But Anna, also, willing companion of bed and never bored, never bad-tempered, faithful although ineffective cosseter in time of trouble. What did one do about Anna, who wanted marriage but bravely pretended that she liked living in sin, Anna who now sat looking at him fearfully while one hand, with a pretence at disembodiment, conveyed a liqueur chocolate to her mouth.

‘Anna.’ She started, as though a statue had spoken. One or two drops from the chocolate went on to her frock. ‘Three and a half years, Anna. It’s a long time.’

Tears welled easily into her eyes, as they are said, inaccurately, to come into the eyes of babies. ‘You’re going to leave me.’

He stood up to look at himself in the glass and saw a burly figure, a bruiser’s face with its blunt features and a squashed nose. The neck was thick, ropy, the body big and clumsy. The ridiculous bandage topped it. When he pulled off the bandage thick reddish hair sprang up eagerly. On his forehead there was a bump, no blood.

‘But why? Don’t you like me any more?’ Now the tears rolled. They did not make her look unsightly. Glycerine tears could not have made less impact on the smooth glow of her cheeks.

‘Three and a half years since that night at Biff Ellerby’s party.’ Biff Ellerby was a minor band leader and Hunter, who was on the news desk of an evening paper, had been invited to the party at second hand, by the paper’s radio critic. There he met Anna, wearing a blue frock the simplicity of which she had not quite been able to spoil by adding to it a number of chains and trinkets. There had been, there still was, a softness and pliability about her. He had immediately christened her, mentally, the Dunlopillo girl. She was a commercial artist, she told him, a freelance doing work for an agency, but that was only temporary, she did serious paintings as well and they were so much more interesting, really, didn’t he agree?

Hunter was enchanted. He went home with her that night, and appreciated the untidiness of her flat off Marylebone Road, the knickers left in the lavatory, the six unfinished canvases sweating in the bathroom. He moved there next day, bringing his few belongings in a battered blue suitcase. Within a week she had given up the freelance work to concentrate, as she said, on real painting, but somehow the real paintings – portraits of him and of their friends, still lifes, abstractions – turned into rather bad commercial art, just as her most wholehearted attempts to produce purely commercial work were touched, and in a way spoiled, by her dim knowledge of something better. But she had made enough money out of her work as a freelance to live independently of horrified parents in Ealing, and no doubt – he told himself – she would always earn enough to keep herself in comfortable disorder.

‘Why do you want to go? I don’t see.’

How could he explain? ‘After what happened last night there’s no room for me in TV, you understand that.’

‘But you could go back to a newspaper.’

‘Or in newspapers.’ He hesitated, but the impulse to self-revelation was too strong, the current of the past carried him along with it. He said it baldly. ‘I spent ten years in jail. For murder.’

‘For murder.’ Her hand groped instinctively for another chocolate, then moved rejectingly away.

‘I was in the IRA when I was a boy. In the thirties. We were in what they called a fund-raising group. We came over to England, three others and I, and we robbed a big store in Manchester. The night watchman found us, there was a fight, and I shot him. I never meant to kill him,’ he said protestingly. ‘You believe that, don’t you?’

She said nothing, but took a chocolate, put it into her mouth.

‘I got a life sentence. Pardoned after ten years. That’s all.’ That was the story, and with what miraculous compression he had told it, leaving out so much, the days on bread and water, the nights when he had prayed, truly prayed, for a bomb to hit the prison and kill every living thing in it, the other times when he had gone over and over the raid on the store and seen how ludicrously careless it had been, the absolutely inadequate precautions taken against possible discovery by the watchman – and then had replanned it in his mind so that the whole thing went like a charm, the watchman was taken out and filled with drink or drugs, the exit and getaway were elaborately planned so that within twelve hours they were back in Eire…

‘What was that?’ he asked. Anna had said something.

‘You must have believed in it. To take a risk like that.’

‘Believed in what?’

‘Why, I don’t know. A united Ireland.’

He laughed, and Anna, who knew that social questions were important, looked offended. How was it possible to explain that it was not really a matter of belief at all, that one did certain things regardless of their effects, things that affected, totally and catastrophically, one’s whole life? What had the Movement, as they called it, meant to him? An organised unruliness that offered release from the strict dreariness of his Dublin home, his drunken prayer-saying father and invalid mother. It might have been the Boy Scouts, jamborees and clasp knives, it might have been emigration and the British army. But by chance, or rather by chances, a fine network of interlacing chances, this boy known at school, that one met casually in a pub, it had been the Movement, secret meetings, the necessity for terrorism explained and accepted, the virtue of robbery for the Movement taken for granted. And then the smoke going up from the revolver that he had fired no more than a dozen times in all, and suddenly the decisions were made and the illusion of choice, by which so many of us live, was gone.

‘It wasn’t like that,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t like that at all.’

‘You didn’t believe?’

‘I don’t know. But that didn’t matter.’

‘Didn’t matter?’ she echoed wonderingly. ‘But of course it mattered. It was the only important thing.’

‘There are certain things you do,’ he said slowly. ‘And there’s no going back on them. Even when you do them by accident –’

‘You didn’t mean to shoot?’

He waved a hand in an attempt to brush away her literalness. ‘I meant to shoot, yes.’

‘Then it was murder.’

‘It was murder,’ he said earnestly, ‘but I might just as well have missed, do you understand that? The raid might have succeeded, we could have got back safely.’

‘There could have been other raids. One day you’d have been caught.’

Again her words seemed to him almost irrelevant. ‘You do something, you do it almost by accident, and you never get away from it all the rest of your life.’

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ she said obstinately. ‘You said you meant to shoot. But it doesn’t matter to me.’

She was sitting now on the sofa beside him, and he looked with sudden tenderness at the soft, grimy hand, with its line of dirt under the nail. ‘You never get away from it, but you have to try. That’s what I’ve always thought. That’s why I didn’t tell you about it.’

‘It would have been bad luck, is that what you mean?’

‘Something like that. But you don’t understand, nobody can.’ The problems of having no past history, no references, no union card, were impossible to explain. But still, he tried. ‘O’Brien’s my real name, but not the one I was using on the raid. I was arrested and tried under the name of Hartley. That’s why the papers haven’t made the link-up yet. But they will soon, probably today. It’ll be a front page story for a couple of days, the convicted murderer who ran a personal investigation programme on the telly. And after it, I’m finished, you see that.’ He found himself anxious, after all, to convince her of it, to show her the futility of struggle.

‘But you did it once.’ She would not give up easily.

‘I was lucky. Met Charlie and worked out the personal investigation idea with him, he knew Jerry and got it a trial run. You know all that.’

‘You might be lucky again.’ He did not trouble to reply. Almost timidly she asked, ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I shall go underground.’ He was annoyed when she giggled. ‘Change my name. Go abroad, perhaps.’

‘Go to Africa.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘And shoot big game.’ Now, on the sofa beside him, she rocked with laughter. These sudden changes of mood, which had once charmed him, now seemed merely distractions. But she dropped back quickly into seriousness, tears glistened becomingly on the plump cheeks. ‘Why can’t you take me with you, wherever you’re going? I won’t be any trouble. I love you, Bill.’

There it was, the direct and naked statement. He felt himself moved by it, yet there was an ice block somewhere within that remained unfrozen by the words.

‘Ralph would divorce me,’ she went on. ‘You know that. We could get married.’

He was appalled by the words. To marry was to accept responsibility, and it had always been for him one of Anna’s attractions that she had a husband in the background, a plodding, pleading civil servant whom she had left after a year. He wrote to her once or twice a month, offering to divorce her but saying that he loved her still, and asking her to go back to him. Anna sometimes showed him the letters, and one recurrent phrase in them impressed him particularly. ‘If you come back we would wipe out the past, and start again with a clean sheet,’ the phrase ran, with occasional variations. To wipe out the past – what a fool the man must be even to consider it possible. And now Anna herself, whom he had always thought of as living by and for the minute, was proposing a variation of this
wipe out the past
idea.

‘Don’t you see,’ she said now, ‘it’s what you want? A fixed point, something to rely on. Don’t you see that it’s no good running away?’

He shook his head by way of implying what he obviously could not make comprehensible to her, that running away was not the way to talk about it, that for a man like himself life must consist of a series of attempts, however unsuccessful, to break with the past.

‘What’s the use of talking like that?’ he said roughly, and then, more because he knew she expected it from him than because of real concern, added, ‘What will you do, Anna?’

‘Me?’ She seemed surprised. ‘Go back to commercial art, I suppose. I might even do some real painting. But you’re not worried about me. Why should you be? You don’t love me.’

There was evidently to be a scene, and one of the things he had always liked most about Anna was the fact that she avoided scenes. He felt obscurely, perhaps, that he if any- body had a right to make scenes and that if he, with the shape of his life disastrously decided in youth, made no complaint about it, kept the fact tucked away like the Spartan boy with the fox, others had no right to voice their trivial complaints about the hardness of life and the narrowness of love. Yet he knew that that was what they did, and prepared himself now for Anna’s scene, her grand renunciation.

But at the last moment the storm did not break. She got up, walked away from him, smoothed down her skirt over her hips. ‘It’s whatever you want. It always has been. I’m going out now. I shall be gone for a couple of hours. I want you to be out of here when I get back.’

‘Yes.’ He was, in a way, cheated by her calmness. ‘Don’t tell me where you’re going. Then I shan’t be able to tell the newspapermen who come round asking.’

He said yes again, surprised, almost alarmed, by the placidity on her plump face. She bit a dirty nail.

‘There’s one thing. Have you thought that you might be giving up too soon?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You said you were tried as Hartley. But Mekles called you O’Brien. Where did he get that name from? And for that matter, why did he say what he did about you?’

He shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’

‘To me it would matter. But to you perhaps it doesn’t. You want to think of yourself as one of the lost, and I can’t stop you.’

The blow struck too near home for comfort. He wanted to explain that he had no choice in the matter, that what she interpreted as a feeble fatalism was simply acknowledgement of the facts, but she raised her hand in a careless goodbye, and was out of the door and down the stairs before he could marshal the words of explanation. He went to the window and watched her walk in her slovenly heel-scuffing way along the street outside, and then turn in the direction of Baker Street.

He stayed in the room with that disturbing consciousness of something left unsaid. It was Anna’s room, not his, with her bad paintings on the walls, her French clock, her collection of foreign dolls staring, dusty and frozen-eyed, from a shelf in one corner, her books, D H Lawrence and Rupert Brooke and
Gone With the Wind
untidily piled on another shelf, her box of darning wools left open with two or three needles from it gleaming on the floor. There was no personal sign of his own occupancy, more than his shaving things and toothbrush in the bathroom, and his clothes in the bedroom wardrobe. She took me into her warm, comfortable life, he thought, and let me become part of it, but now that I am separating myself from her, it will be for her as though I had never been.

He went into the bedroom and began to pack his clothes, taking only as much as would go in the old blue suitcase. One day he would come back for the rest.