'Sit down, have a drink, you look cold.' But I said:
'This can't wait, it's very urgent, we can't talk in here.' And so he excused himself to Higgins, who looked scruffy as hell, if you don't object to the expression, and downed what was left of his pint of beer and came outside with me. And as we walked back towards our house I tried to break it very gently to him what had happened. He hadn't got an overcoat on, and he shivered a bit and he walked a bit too fast for me, but when it had dawned on him what had happened he suddenly stopped and said:
'Good God.'
'Good God nothing,' I said. And then we passed near this copper who went, 'Haw haw, found im, ave yer? I'll be around, missis, never fear.' After that we sort of bounded to our house and I opened the front door and switched on the hall light. I hoped in a way that the body of Howard might have sort of disappeared by magic while I was out, but it was still there on the floor. Red looked a bit pale and kept saying, 'Good God' over and over again. Then he said, 'You'll have to have the police, you'll just have to. And this is what you hit him with, is it?' He was handling this coal-hammer and sort of swinging it in his hand. 'Very nasty, very nasty indeed.' You could see he didn't watch the TV very much, or go to the pictures much either, for he was covering this coal-hammer handle with fingerprints, I'd cleaned mine off, of course, with the tea-towel, which is what you're supposed to do if you kill somebody. I said:
'It's all right you talking about going for the police, but what are the police going to say? They're going to say that we had a quarrel or something and I did him in. They're not going to believe any of that about him wanting to do himself in but do me in first, are they? That stands to reason. And all this is not fair and a lot of trouble's been caused by Howard's silly ideas. Anyway, he's dead and that's what he wanted. To die, that is. Not quite this way, but it's done the job the same as the other way would have done, not that that was my intention. To call the police in is going to cause a lot of trouble.'
'I'd better do it,' said Red, very loud and nervous and still clutching this hammer in his right hand. 'I'd better ask that policeman out there on the road to come in.'
'You'll cop it worse than I will,' I said, 'you mark my words. There you are with that hammer with all your fingerprints on and none of mine, me having done the correct thing.' He dropped the hammer with a clang on the floor and then started wiping his hands all over his pullover. 'And the police already suspicious,' I said, 'and you having written that poem too about dying in a good cause and so on.'
'That's silly,' said Red. 'What cause would I have to do him in? Besides, I've got alibis for earlier on. This is a lot of nonsense, this is, and I'm getting out of here.'
'Alibis nothing,' I said. 'It might be now you killed him, mightn't it? I could go out screaming all about it, couldn't I?' And the silly idiot had still got his fingerprints all over the hammer. 'They couldn't prove it wasn't now he was done in, could they?' Then I went sort of weak. 'Oh, Red,' I said, 'I'm so miserable. I want help.' And, God forgive me, what I wouldn't have minded then was a bit of love, God help the lot of us.
'The truth,' Red was sort of yelling, and there was sweat on his face even though it was so cold, I still had my mink on, it was perishing in that kitchen. 'The truth can't harm the innocent,' he yelled. 'Tell the truth, get the police in and tell them the truth. The truth won't do you any harm, the truth is your only way. The truth.' He sounded like somebody on a street corner with a soap-box selling magazines. But I wasn't wasting my breath now, I was thinking very hard, and while I was thinking and Red was going on about the truth I gave the coal-hammer a bit of a kick and it went straight under the electric cooker, our model not having a warming drawer at the bottom but little legs and there was a bit of space between the oven part of the cooker and the floor. Red didn't see me do that or hear it either, he was going on so about the truth. But I thought to hell with the truth because nobody would believe the truth. The thing was that I'd got to organise things so that there'd be no trouble for me, for I didn't deserve trouble, God knows I'd had enough. In a little while Red calmed down a bit and said:
'Well, I warned everybody, didn't I? I warned the police and everybody about what was going to happen. They should have listened to me, you should have listened to me, but nobody would listen to me, they all thought I was mad.'
'The thing is,' I said, 'what's to be done with poor Howard's body?' The funny part was that Howard lying dead there on the floor, I couldn't sort of feel any sorrow or anything and I knew that would come later when this body was out of the way. 'We just can't leave the body lying here,' I said. Red said:
'Leave me out of it, it's nothing to do with me, I don't want anything to do with it or any part of it, I just want to be left out of it.'
By now my brain was working very quickly, very cool, real cool, man, silly old idiot he'd been, and I said:
'Your fingerprints are all over that hammer and you don't know where that hammer is.' He said:
'Where is it, where is it, what have you done with it, where have you hidden it?'
'It's in this kitchen,' I said, 'and while you're looking for it I'll just go out and bring in that copper. Nice that'll be, won't it, you on your knees looking for that hammer and a copper coming in to see this dead body and you all in a dither as you are. Come on,' I said, 'play it real cool.' Stupid of me. Red wasn't all that bright, really, you could see that. He was all right in bed, and that was about all, but I suppose you have to be thankful for small mercies. 'I've got a cheque-book,' I said, 'with all Howard's signatures on it. If I go to the bank on Monday morning I can draw out this fifty-odd thousand quid can't I?'
'How much? 'said Red.
I had to tell him again. 'And,' I said, 'the Daily Window won't be quick enough with their cheque, will they? They'll be a bit annoyed, but what you've never had you've never missed, and that goes for everybody.'
'I don't like this one little bit,' said Red.
'You will,' I said. 'And there's nothing to feel guilty about, really. Howard didn't want his money and he wanted to die. So there's nothing to feel guilty about.'
'What are you going to do?' asked Red.
'We could go abroad,' I said, 'taking Howard with us. I've got some lovely new luggage. There's a lovely big trunk we never used. Howard can go in that. Before he gets stiff, that is.' I was handling this real cool, that's really the only expression you can think of.
'I don't like this one little bit,' said Red again.
'Oh, come off it,' I said. I'd really taken over now. I was really in charge and I was quite enjoying it. I was only wishing that things could get moving a bit faster, what with tomorrow being Sunday and nowhere open. And then that fool Howard had invited Myrtle and Michael to tea. Well, they shouldn't come. It had been no idea of mine. Tomorrow morning first thing I'd go round and tell them that Howard was taking me out for the day as a kind of day-after-my-birthday treat and they could come to tea some other time. 'Oh, poor stupid Howard,' I kept thinking when later on Red and I were stuffing him into this lovely big pigskin-covered trunk. He went in very nicely, doubled up of course.
Chapter 27
To do a fiddle with a passport isn't really all that difficult. It was lucky in a way that Howard and I hadn't travelled on two separate passports. What we'd done was to get one, really Howard's, with our two photographs on the one page, me as wife or femme, with this Foreign Office stamp stamped on to both photographs, but with only a very little bit of it on Howard's, just the sort of curve of the kind of oval that has the lion and unicorn inside and FOREIGN OFFICE. So it was no real trouble for Red to get a passport photograph taken (ready while you wait) at Bealby's on the Monday and stick that on Howard's passport on Page 3, first of course having removed Howard's photograph. It was only for crossing the Channel anyway and nobody was going to look too closely, and the description on Page 2 is a bit vague, Red anyway having brownish hair just like Howard, also being the same age and only a bit shorter in height.
I had a bit o
f trouble at the bank on Monday morning, not really trouble so much as everybody getting into a bit of a flap because I wanted to draw out so much money. But there was Howard's signature and they couldn't get away from it, it was no business of theirs, it was Howard's money and it was now rightfully mine. I had to see the manager and I explained we were going abroad again, and he said he didn't like this at all, really, cashing a big cheque like that, but I said it was no business of his and I'd take full responsibility. He said he hoped I realised the regulations about exporting currency and I told him yes, I knew all about it and then I had a brainwave and said the money was for buying jewellery and Howard had left everything to me in that respect. Well, after this big flap and humming and hah-ing, I got the cash in what was called big denominations and I had it all in one of these pigskin cases. So the Daily Window wouldn't get a penny.
I'd write to the council housing committee or whatever it was when I got over to France and say that we didn't want the house any more, my husband and I now going to live abroad, and they could do what they liked with the TV and the furniture and so on, perhaps give it to some old-age pensioner or somebody who needed it. Howard would have liked that. I packed practically everything else, including the coal-hammer in a yellow duster, and Red had Howard's suitcases and also his clothes, which fitted him reasonably well. The idea was that we were going off to Paris for a bit, Red saying he knew Paris well and could speak French well, and then find a villa or something somewhere. Anyway, he was quite efficient himself, getting Continental Trunks on the telephone and booking in, in French, in a hotel called the Superbe or something, as Monsieur and Madame Shirley. British Railways made no trouble about collecting the luggage, though they sweated a bit over the trunk with poor Howard in it. That trunk was in the luggage van when we travelled down to Folkestone and it was on board the boat with us when we crossed the Channel, I being very sick.
At Boulogne, in France, the Customs people didn't seem very interested in our luggage, and Red made a joke about the trunk, saying there was a dead body in it, and everybody had a good laugh about that. The dead body of poor Howard was only a few days old and it was very cold weather, being the end of January, but there was still the question of getting rid of it in a way that nobody would be suspicious about, and Red said being in France was not really like being in a foreign country, because there was Interpol nowadays and Scotland Yard all nicely tied up with the Surete and so on. So he said we had to be careful.
I loved Paris really, the shops and so on, though it was very damp and cold, and Red got back something of his old spirit and was very loving. He began to see that we had nothing to be guilty about and my conscience was quite clear, there being only the question of this body of poor Howard's. There it was, in this trunk in our hotel bedroom, and sometimes it didn't seem quite decent to be there with Red and Howard, though no longer alive, there too. We thought of all sorts of things, such as setting the hotel on fire, but that didn't seem fair somehow. But one day Red hit on an idea which seemed as if it might work. He said:
'That shop in Rue What's-its-name. Where they have the antiques and things.'
'Yes?'
'They have a Chinese camphorwood chest. A nice big one. Camphor will preserve anything. A lovely smell, too. We'll go and buy that.'
'All right,' I said. So we went to this shop and Red spoke in French to the old man who ran the place. This chest was a nicely carved big box, all covered with dragons, very cleverly done. It was very big, too, as big as my trunk. Poor Howard. Anyway, Red managed to get it for one thousand new francs, which he said wasn't too dear, considering. This chest was brought to our hotel on a lorry and it was much admired by the hotel staff, even those who had to bring it up to our room. Then, when we'd locked the door, we bundled poor Howard's dead body out of my trunk on to the floor. It was looking less and less like Howard now, but it made me feel a bit distressed and sick as we put it into the camphorwood chest. It went in very nicely, and Red was right about the lovely smell of camphor that came off this box. So now the body was all right and we didn't have to hurry too much about finding somewhere more or less permanent to live.
Not to make too long a story of it, and I have tried to keep this whole thing short, you have to admit that, we took a lease for a year on a kind of bungalow in the country, not too far from a place called Montmorillon, which is west of a river called the Vienne. We took all our luggage with us, of course, and the two important parts of our luggage were this chest with Howard's body in it and my pigskin case full of English money of high denomination, as they call it. The chest has been put in a room all by itself, for there are a lot of rooms, none of them with much furniture in them, but of course we can't have this body of Howard's there for ever. What Red says he's going to do is to start sowing seeds on the big patch of land at the back, and he's going to prop poor old Howard's body up as a scarecrow, saying that the crows will make short work of him. That sounds a bit creepy, but it's only a dead body and Howard's no longer anything to do with it. It's perhaps what Howard himself would have wished, to try and scare black birds off from seeds.
It's very hard for me to feel any real sorrow for Howard. I miss him sometimes, especially with Red carrying on a bit, as I think he is, with a woman called Madame Crebillon about seven miles down the road. That's why I've got this coal-hammer still. Because there's a man called Henri Fournier who has something to do with wine and speaks English really very well and says he'd do anything for me. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Because now all Red has to do is to say he's sick of the modern world and he wants to leave it, taking me with him, and then the old coal-hammer will come into play, and that won't be murder, it will be self-defence, like with Howard. But what I was going to say was that it's hard to feel any sorrow for Howard really, because he's got what he wanted, except of course that I didn't go with him. Howard was just a handsome machine wanting to die, and Red says that that's what the world is today. If he keeps on saying it I'll know it's time to keep my fingers on that coal-hammer. Not that I really wish anybody any harm, because all I want is to live a nice decent life, getting as much pleasure out of it as I can. That's what we're here for, when all's said and done.
I've finished writing my story now, and that's my story, and whether you believe it or not is your business and not mine. Some people have been saying unkind things about Red and me, about murder and robbery and so on, I don't know where the stories started, perhaps even in the Hastings Road Supermarket, the world being a small place nowadays, but the story I've told you is the story I stick to. And my final words are to those who worry about the modern world and about life and so on. They're not my words really but Pop's words (my father, that is) and they're not so much his words as words he was always quoting from a corporal who said them to him during the Second World War. This corporal was giving them a lesson on the rifle or something, and somebody said, 'How long do you think this war's going to last, Corporal?' And the corporal said, 'What does it matter how long it lasts so long as there's still plenty of beer and fags?' Well, I don't go much for either of those two things, but I see his point. And Howard, by the way, when he was doing his national service, was said by everybody not to be much of a soldier. Let me like a soldier fall. That's just what he didn't say, did he? Poor silly Howard.
1 For a more detailed account of the Joseph Kell affair, see Andrew Biswell, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (London: Picador, 2005), pp. 272-6.
2 For Burgess on Dylan Thomas, see 'The Writer as Drunk' in Urgent Copy: Literary Studies (London: Cape, 1968), pp. 88-92. For further detail on Thomas, see Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living, 1900-1939 (London: Viking, 2002).
Anthony Burgess, One Hand Clapping
(Series: # )
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with
friends