The Trouble With Harry (6 page)

‘You can stuff him for all I care,’ Jennifer said. ‘Stuff him and put him in a glass case – but I should have frosted glass.’

‘You don’t like him at all, do you? What did he do besides marry you?’

‘Look,’ Jennifer said, sitting on the arm of the artist’s chair. ‘I’ve wanted to explain about Harry a lot of times, but nobody could understand, least of all Harry. But you – you’ve got an artistic mind. You can see the finer things.’

Sam agreed with her. ‘Tell me everything, Jennifer.’

The woman’s eyes hazed. ‘It was a long time ago,’
she said, ‘and I was in love. I was too much in love. But I was young and he was younger.’

‘How long ago was this?’ Sam asked.

‘Let’s see,’ she said. ‘How old is Abie? … Four … that’s right; it would be about four years ago.’

‘You
were
in love, weren’t you?’ Sam remarked.

‘We were going to get married,’ Jennifer explained. ‘It was all arranged. We had agreed to overlook each other’s families and everything. And then Robert got killed …’

She paused, and it was a tearful pause, full of might-have-beens.

‘That was terrible for you,’ said Sam.

She sighed. ‘I was heartbroken,’ she said, ‘for six weeks – then I discovered I was going to have a baby.’

‘That was embarrassing,’ said Sam.

‘And that was where Harry came in,’ said Jennifer. ‘Harry the Handsome Hero. Harry the Saint. Harry the Good.’

‘Who was this Harry?’ Sam asked.

‘Robert’s brother,’ she said, ‘his elder brother.’

‘He fell in love with you?’

She made a derisive sound with her mouth. ‘If he had fallen in love with me I wouldn’t have minded. But he wanted to marry me simply because I was in a jam. And because it was his brother who had put me in a jam.’

‘Harry wanted some of the jam,’ said Sam.

She nodded darkly. ‘I didn’t guess. I thought he loved me. I thought he had been silently suffering all the time Robert and I had been courting. I thought he loved me to desperation and though I didn’t think much of him I decided to let him marry me for the sake of giving Abie a name.’ She fell silent and Sam sipped his second cup of tea. Then she looked down at him and there was a minor tragedy in her eyes. ‘It was on my wedding night I learnt the truth.’

‘That’s when most people learn the truth,’ Sam remarked.

‘But this was a terrible truth,’ Jennifer said. ‘This was the truth about Harry.’

‘What happened?’

‘How old are you, Mr Marlow?’

‘About twenty-nine.’

‘This is what happened,’ she said, softly and secretly. ‘I had undressed …’

‘Go on,’ Sam encouraged.

‘I had undressed,’ she continued, ‘and donned my nightie. I went up to bed first, you understand.’

‘I understand perfectly,’ Sam said.

‘Although I had no true feeling for Harry I had worked myself into a certain enthusiasm because I thought he loved me.’

‘It must have been hard work,’ Sam said.

Jennifer was back to her wedding night and going strong. She said: ‘I sat by the window and there was a moon. I didn’t get into bed because I wanted him to see my new nightie.’

‘Naturally,’ Sam said.

Jennifer returned to Sam for a moment. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you all this – you a perfect stranger, too. I’m not boring you, am I?’

‘Not at all,’ Sam said politely.

‘Have some more tea?’

‘Soon,’ said Sam. ‘Soon.’

‘Where was I?’ Jennifer asked.

‘You were sitting by the window and there was a
moon. You hadn’t got into bed because you wanted him to see your new nightie. You had worked yourself into a certain enthusiasm.’

Jennifer laughed lightly. ‘Did I say all that?’

‘When does Harry come in?’ Sam asked her impatiently.

Her face straightened and the mirth left her. ‘At last,’ she said, ‘Harry came in.’

‘What had he been doing all this time?’ Sam said, petulantly.

‘Finding a picture of Robert,’ Jennifer said.

‘Robert!’

‘Robert,’ Jennifer repeated. ‘A photograph of my dead lover. A photograph of the father of my child. A photograph of his brother.’

‘Why did he want that?’ Sam asked.

‘That’s what I wanted to know. It wasn’t even a good photograph. He said … I hardly like to tell you what he said.’

‘I’d like to hear it,’ Sam encouraged her.

‘He said,’ she said, ‘“I’m going to hang dear Robert over our bed, dear. You are bearing his child, remember. So when I make love to you, Jenny, I want you to
imagine that it’s really Robert making love to you.”’

Sam was shocked. ‘He said that?’

She nodded soberly. ‘I was going to imagine it was Robert, anyway,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t want him to imagine that I was imagining it was Robert.’

‘I should think not!’

‘And,’ said Jennifer, ‘he didn’t as much as mention my new nightie.’

‘What did you do?’ Sam asked.

‘I left him,’ she said. ‘I went round to mother’s straight away. So I never
did
have to imagine it was Robert and now I never shall.’

‘What a poignant story,’ Sam said.

Jennifer smiled sadly at him. ‘I knew you would understand – nobody else does. Even mother thought I should live with him. But I wouldn’t. He pestered me to go back, but I always refused. At last he even offered to take down the photograph over the bed, but it was too late.’

‘I don’t blame you,’ Sam said.

‘Abie was born,’ Jennifer said, ‘and as soon as I could I moved away to where I thought Harry would never find me. I changed my name—’

‘But he did find you?’

‘Yes. Today.’

‘Yesterday?’

‘No. Today. This morning. There was a knock on the door and there he was. Harry.’

‘What did he want?’

‘At last,’ Jennifer said, ‘he wanted me. Not on his brother’s account, either, but on his own account. He had suddenly felt a basic urge, he said. He wanted me because I was his wife.’

‘How did you feel about it?’ Sam asked.

‘I felt sick,’ said the young woman. ‘Did you see his moustache and his wavy hair?’

Sam agreed with her. ‘But when
I
saw him,’ he said, ‘he was dead.’

Jennifer shrugged. ‘He looked exactly the same when he was alive, except that he was vertical.’

‘What did you say to him?’ Sam asked.

‘Nothing,’ Jennifer said. ‘I hit him on the head with a milk bottle and knocked him silly.’

‘How do you mean “silly”?’

‘Silly-dilly,’ she said. ‘Bats. He went staggering up towards the heath saying he was going to find his wife.’

‘So he turned human at the last?’ Sam asked.

‘He did,’ she said. ‘But he was too late as far as I was concerned.’

‘I’ll have another cup of tea,’ Sam said.

While she was preparing it for him he sat back and thought.

‘The Ship’ was a thing of stucco breeze blocks and cheap Canadian timber. It lay at anchor in its little garden amongst the trees. It lay in the heat of the summer afternoon, looking not merely becalmed but derelict. The portholes were dusty, being draped with a grey material that might have been curtain or cobweb. The paintwork was worn and cracked by the weather, unwashed and covered by the colourless, dried drippings from leaves on hundreds of past wet days. It was a bungalow that had suffered abominably from bachelors.

The three rooms that comprised the inside of
this residence were stuffed with untidiness. Every possible hiding place for odds and ends had been thought of and used. Every item of furniture that nobody could ever find a use for had been gathered together in those three rooms. Outside, in the small shed, four tea chests of personal belongings, mostly junk, stood still packed, while the more treasured of these relics took pride of place in all the corners of the rooms, filling the bungalow with riverside memories spread over some thirty years. Relics that ranged from a lifebelt that had saved Albert Wiles’s life, to the suspender belt of a Deptford barmaid who had almost wrecked it. So crammed with stuff was this bungalow that only by habitual movement from room to room could the captain keep a space free for movement.

When at five o’clock on this pleasant summer afternoon Captain Wiles stepped out of this mess and muddle, looking spry and spruce, it was the miracle of the new-laid egg leaving the bowels of a scruffy old hen. For some strange reason he had taken greater pains with his personal appearance than ever before, greater even than on that famous occasion when he
had set out to meet Gertie at Gravesend with the intention of cutting out his old rival, Tiger Wray. It was strange because this Miss Graveley bore no comparison to Gertie of Gravesend, who had been young, supple and red-haired. But then the captain was no longer young and supple and by this time Gertie, who had eventually married Tiger and borne him seven cubs, was even less young and supple.

These thoughts chased each other through the captain’s mind as he came to the hollyhocks of ‘The Haven’. These and other thoughts. He compared this trim little bungalow with his own. The white muslin curtains with the bright embroidery, the shining blue paintwork of the window frames and door, the organised splendour of the garden. And with it all he remembered her nice, grey eyes and her dark hair. And in his memory the old fashioned ‘bun’ vanished and instead he saw bright ribbon amongst gay but dignified curls; her eyes shone brightly and her mouth was a colour that matched the ribbon, while her cheeks were the candy-pink of the hollyhocks.

These thoughts took no ordered or conscious significance in his mind, for all his life he had thought
of a woman as a woman, a house as a house, and a garden as a home for cabbages. Nothing more or less. He was a man of the world with a broad mind, human impulses and a convenient conscience; he had always found marriage entirely unnecessary. But in some vague and disquieting way the sounds of the woodlands now held a hint of wedding bells, and the captain knew that it was because his memory was lying. He knew it was the ribbon and the bright eyes and the pink cheeks.

He knocked at the door of ‘The Haven’ and then stood back with a smile on his soap-shone face and his shoulders squared, viewing his reflection approvingly in the shiny paintwork. When Miss Graveley answered his knock she did so from behind him, for she had been cutting the roses which she held in her arms.

‘Here you are, then,’ she said.

The captain swung around and his pose was wasted. He felt as if he had been caught pulling faces at himself in the mirror. Then he forgot his embarrassment and lost himself in the picture of the woman as she stood framed by the porch against the
garden. His memory had been perfectly accurate. There were the curls and the ribbon and the pink cheeks and the bright eyes. And there, also, far beyond the buzzing of bees and the bored chirp of a bird, were those bells again.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, removing his cap.

Abie Rogers was trying to make somebody answer his knocking at the door of ‘The Ship’. For a small boy he was able to kick up a terrific din with the aid of a rusty saucepan lid he had found on the front path.

He banged and nobody came. He banged again, and again nobody came. He kept this up for five minutes and then put the dead rabbit down by the front door and walked back up the garden path. When he got to the gate he looked back and saw a cat sniffing at the small corpse. Abie threw the saucepan lid with great accuracy and it landed with a clatter
right beside the cat. The cat, a large tabby animal belonging to the captain, recognised this saucepan lid as one which had been tied to its tail for the greater part of yesterday and, resigned yet curiously forgiving, it scuttled away, expecting the lid to follow.

Abie came back and picked up the rabbit. He stood idly stroking its fur and wondering what could have happened to the new captain. As he stood there the quiet sounds of the woods were augmented by a laugh. It was a man’s laugh and it seemed to come from beyond the hollyhocks of ‘The Haven’. He made no immediate move, for common sense told him that no man could possibly be in ‘The Haven’. ‘The Haven’ was where Miss Graveley lived and Miss Gravely spoke only to women and girls and boys under twelve.

Soon again the laugh was airborne and Abie’s hunter’s sense overcame his common sense and told him that the new captain was indeed visiting his neighbour. With the rabbit hanging by its feet in one hand he walked down the woodland path to Miss Graveley’s bungalow. He walked around the bungalow and when he got to the sitting room window
he saw Miss Graveley and her guest sitting on either side of a most attractive tea, which included several kinds of cake. Abie stepped into view and held aloft the dead rabbit. His eyes were fixed unswervingly on the cakes.

When Miss Graveley caught sight of Abie and the rabbit she got up and opened the window fully. ‘Well, little man,’ she said, ‘and do you want to sell a rabbit?’

‘It belongs to the new captain,’ Abie said, dipping his head a trifle to keep the cakes in view.

The captain reached the window in half a stride. ‘What’s that?’

Abie handed him the rabbit without losing sight of the cakes. ‘You killed it,’ he said absently, ‘with your gun.’

The captain held the rabbit away from him and squinted at it, as though it were a rare oil painting.

Miss Graveley watched him with some slight amusement in her eyes. ‘You must have shot it this afternoon. It will make a nice supper for you.’

The new captain did not reply, for he was almost beyond words. And this was strange, because he had just been recounting to his hostess an abundance
of tall stories relating to near squeezes and narrow scrapes in distant and dangerous lands. But Captain Wiles, who had never done any of these things, but had long cherished an ambition to shoot a rabbit, was sent completely out of his head by this little furry victim. He parted the fur and examined the bullet wound. He felt for the rabbit’s pulse. He looked into its dead eyes. His face turned white and crimson in ten-second cycles. He breathed deeply and ecstatically. He tried to say something to Abie and failed. He tried to say something to Miss Graveley and failed. He was completely incoherent for several minutes, during which time Abie stood outside the window watching the cakes and Miss Graveley stood inside the window watching the captain and smiling indulgently. Mingled with this indulgence was a certain fondness. Such excited behaviour in a man of his years was an endearing quality.

At last Captain Wiles held the rabbit aloft and found his voice. ‘I’ve killed a rabbit! I’ve killed a blooming rabbit!’ Then he reached through the window and ruffled the little boy’s hair. ‘Where’d you find it, sonny?’

‘On the cake,’ said Abie promptly.

‘Eh?’

‘On the heath,’ said Abie.

Miss Graveley got Abie a large slice of cake and the small boy retreated gratefully. The captain went slowly back to his chair, stroking the fur of his small victim. ‘I must tell Sam about this,’ he murmured. At that moment his pleasure in the rabbit reached out and embraced his pleasure in all things; in meeting Sam Marlow; in making young Mrs Rogers so happy with the small accident to Harry; in providing shoes for the tramp. Especially in meeting Miss Graveley and hearing the bells. Impulsively he laid his hand on hers and said: ‘It’s a nice afternoon, ma’am.’

She responded by putting her other hand on his arm. ‘And I think you’re awfully nice, Captain Wiles, even when you’re lying to me.’

The Captain opened his mouth to expostulate or something, but Miss Graveley placed a finger across his lips and he said nothing. They exchanged a look. It was the look of an adult man to an adult woman in an adult world.