‘Ah. Going home for a few days?’
‘Yes. Bit of family trouble.’
‘Ah. Family trouble. What I don’t know about family trouble you could write on a visiting card.’
Darkness was falling as they drove through Egham.
‘Wife or girl-friend?’ said the man.
‘Eh? Oh – er – wife.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Gone off with another man, she has.’
Gibb thought that would appeal to his companion. It did.
‘Too bad. Wish mine would.’
‘You wish yours would what?’ said Gibb.
‘Go off with another man. Instead of sitting at home waiting for me.’
‘It all depends how you look at it, don’t it,’ said Gibb cautiously.
The man offered him a cigarette, which he took. It would keep the hunger away. ‘ What are you going to do?’
Gibb’s cigarette was lit from a blowing thing pulled out of the dashboard. He tried to sound thoughtful. ‘Me? I don’t know. Depends if I can find her, see.’
‘Know the man?’
‘Ye-es. Old flame of hers. Name of Chertsey.’
‘That’s odd,’ said the driver. ‘ We just passed a signpost saying Chertsey 3 miles. Think he’s there?’
‘Ha, ha,’ said Gibb, sweating. ‘That’s funny, that is. No, I reckon he wouldn’t be there.’
‘You’re not pulling my leg?’
‘No. No, of course I’m not.’
‘Maybe you’re well out of it,’ said the other, dragging his cap a half inch more over his eyes. ‘Women always try to tie you down. Even blondes – you only have to know ’em a fortnight and they start getting their hooks in.’ He made a racing change and overtook a Bentley which was proceeding at a comfortable sixty.
After that silence fell, and to Gibb’s relief his friend did not speak again until they were in Twickenham.
It was easy from there. You said goodbye to the type and watched his numerous tail-lights disappear; you walked along the main street looking at the shops and the people, thankful you were back in your own surroundings and that darkness had brought you safety. You had a snack meal at a café and then you got on a red double-decker – two years since you had seen a red double-decker; and you dozed all the way into central London. Then you changed to another bus and dozed again while you bobbed and swayed out to Shadwell.
The windows of the bus were open, and it was a different smell out here. A smell of weed and water and tar somehow crept through all the ordinary city smells of an early summer night. It might be no beauty spot, not like all he had seen today, but it was home.
After he got off the bus he walked right past the warehouse they had broken into. Everything had gone wrong from the start, that night. Then Alf had panicked and slugged the night-watchman. You could never tell how a man would be in an emergency, not until the emergency came. Alf had been the biggest mistake of his life.
Across the Highway and up towards Cable Street. Now it meant going slow again. They’d be on the watch for him round his old haunts. They’d keep a sharp watch round the Basin, expecting he might try to stow away on one of the ships. He stopped at a stall and bought one or two things, then went up the narrow street beyond like a cat slinking towards its own back yard.
Half-way along the street he turned down an entry, picking his way among the broken milk bottles and the cans. A dustbin gave him a convenient lift over a wall. About him the shabby houses were lighted, but a little mist had drifted off the river and was smearing the sharp outlines; a baby was crying; somewhere a man and a woman were having a flaming row.
On the roof of a wash-house he slid off his shoes, moved along the ridge; then he began to climb a drainpipe with his feet pressing into the angle of the wall.
The window was lighted. He tapped but there was no answer. He got his hand under the sash and shoved it up. It made a screech, and by the time he was in the kitchen an old woman had opened the door opposite and made a dried-up noise exactly like the opening window.
‘Les!’
‘ ’Lo, Beat, you not expecting me?’
She took a hand away from her mouth to shut the door behind her. It cut out the music from a radio. ‘Well …’
‘Mean to say you hadn’t heard?’
‘ ’Course I ’ad, but … I didn’t know if you’d try … I didn’t think you’d dare try. I thought they’d be sure to catch you before you got ’ere.’
‘I’d like to see ’em. Where is she – here or …?’
‘Sal? She’s ’ere. They sent ’er ’ome this morning.’
‘What’s she like? Is she bad?’
‘They say she’ll be O.K. It was a lucky escape. I near died … Now careful, don’t give ’er a shock. Let me go first.’
In the next room a girl of ten was in bed listening to the radio. She had a bandage round her head. ‘ Dad!’ she screamed.
‘Now take it easy. Take it easy. What you been up to, you little monkey, then – getting into this sort of mess. Cor, how you’ve grown!’
She tried to put her arms round his neck, but grimaced and lay back on the pillows and let him kiss her.
‘I’m bristly,’ he said. ‘Haven’t had time to clean up. Been travelling, y’know.’
‘I said Dad’d come, didn’t I? I did, didn’t I! I said you’d come, Dad … I said he’d come. How did you? … Have they –’
‘Never mind about that, then. What about you? Tell me about it.’
‘It was a van,’ said Beat from the doorway. ‘ Come round a corner and skidded. Crazy fool driving. Crushed ’er against a lamp-post. They thought she was badly ’urt.’
‘She looks hurt,’ said Les, peering sourly at his daughter’s thin face.
‘She’s got two ribs broke. But nothing else, they says. I says they should have kept ’er in ’ospital another day, but they says she’s O.K. to come ’ ome.’
‘I’m glad they did,’ said Gibb, ‘else maybe I wouldn’t have seen her.’
‘But you’re going to stay now, aren’t you, Dad?’ Sally said. ‘ I heard about you on the radio! They gave it every news! Can’t you stay now you’ve come? It’s been so long …’
‘I got you a present,’ said Gibb, taking out the thing he had bought at the stall. Then he looked at the length of the figure in the bed. ‘But I reckon I made a mistake. I …’
He handed her the doll he had bought, and while she exclaimed over it he looked across at Beat, who was still in the doorway. ‘You don’t notice time passing where I been. Honest to God, you don’t. Least, not in the same way. You don’t realize Sal‘s getting too old for dolls. It’ll be fancy hair-do’s and high heels before you know where you are.’
‘Lay off it. Sal’s never too old for dolls, are you, Sal?’
‘It’s fabulous,’ said Sally. ‘ It’s fabulous.’
‘Think you can risk it ’ere tonight?’ asked Beat. ‘They won’t think you’ll be ’ere yet.’
‘I don’t know. I’d like to, but …’
There was a photo on a table by the bed. It was the old newspaper cutting framed: ‘Max and Maureen, Melody with a Smile’. His wife. She hadn’t changed much. And Max with that smile. He’d knock it right off his bloody face if he got the chance. Gibb slapped the photo over on its glass and stood up.
‘I want a word with you, Beat.’
He followed her into the kitchen and shut the door and stood with his back to it, looking at the old woman.
Beat said: ‘ She’s coming back, Les. I had a wire this morning. She should be ’ere tomorrow.’
‘So she went off with him after all.’
‘What d’you mean, went off with ’im? Who told you that?’
‘I got a letter.’
‘Who from?’
‘It wasn’t signed.’
‘Ah …’ The old woman wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. ‘Don’t it make you sick – always somebody ready to make trouble.’
‘It i
sn’t them that’s made trouble,’ he said between his teeth.
‘It’s Maureen, the bitch. I knew all these years she was dying to go back to her act – and him. Well, now she’s gone – left Sally, left me. I suppose she couldn’t do without a man.’
‘Les, you ought to be ashamed of yourself! She ’ asn’t left you. She only left Sal temporary. You know how Max was always plaguing ’er to go back. Well they got this offer of a three-week tour in Scotland. Good money. She thought she’d do it – earn a bit extra. She took ’ er ’oliday and the Dock Board give ’er a week extra. That’s all.’
‘All! And three weeks with Max!’
‘Man, don’t you know ’e’s married! His wife’s with them.’
Gibb slowly rubbed his hand up and down the bristles on his chin. He glared at Beat and then rubbed the other side of his chin.
‘You can’t ’ave fairer than that,’ said Beat.
Gibb looked round the room. Two more pictures of ships from calendars on the wall. The clock had stopped and the minute hand was broken. The tin where he used to keep his cigarettes was still on the shelf. It all smelt the same.
‘Why the hell didn’t she write me?’
‘Les, you know what she’s like. She says, I must write to Les, and then she don’t. She gets out paper – often I’ve seen ’er – and she writes three lines and then she sits biting the end of ’er pen. There she sits, and she says, I can’t think what to say. You ought to know what she’s like by now.’
Gibb rubbed his nose for a change. ‘Maybe yes and maybe no. But it sounds different in that place and she ought to’ve written.’
‘Yes, of course, she ought, but –’
There was a knock on the door. Gibb’s attitude, which had been slowly easing, tensed up again. He jerked his thumb at the old woman and slid quickly into the other bedroom, which was in darkness. Beat went to the door.
A plainclothes man with two policemen behind him. ‘Good evening, Miss Royal, we’ve come for Leslie Gibb. I have a warrant here, and all ways out of the house are guarded.’
‘Why, I don’t know what you’re talking about! The idea. Forcing your way in! Reelly …’ Protesting, Beat was pushed aside. In a few seconds the men were in both rooms. Gibb stood by the open window of one, looking down at the policeman in the area below.
‘Well, Gibb …’
‘Looks like a fair cop, don’t it.’
‘ ’Fraid so. I hope you’re going to come quietly.’
‘You don’t want a rough house?’
‘You know it’ll do you no good.’
‘I’ll come quiet on one condition.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Give me half an hour with the nipper. It’s a long way to come – just for nothing at all.’
The plainclothes man hesitated. ‘ You’re a slippery customer.’
‘Not all that slippery.’
‘I’ll have to sit beside you.’
‘O.K. It’s a deal.’
Watched carefully, Gibb went past them and was followed closely into the next room. Just inside he stopped.
‘Well, stone the crows, look at that!’
Sally was asleep. The radio still going, she lay with her bandaged head half off the pillow and with her new doll clutched in one hand.
‘Looks as if you won’t need your half hour,’ said the plainclothes man.
‘Now give me a break! Think I don’t get pleasure just looking at her like that? What d’you think!’
‘O.K. If you feel that way.’
The other two policemen went back into the kitchen and the plainclothes man sat on a chair near the window while Gibb stood by the bed for a bit. Then he pressed up the pillow cautiously so that she was lying straight. He held her plait in his fingers for a minute or so. ‘ Hair like her mother’s,’ he said. ‘ Not a bit like mine.’
The plainclothes man offered him a cigarette; Gibb nodded his thanks and accepted a light. ‘You got kids?’
‘Yes, two.’
Gibb sat on the chair and looked at his daughter.
‘Hope she don’t want it cut off.’
‘What?’
‘Her hair. Kids these days …’
The plainclothes man tapped his cigarette.
‘She’s not like me at all really,’ said Gibb. ‘I’ve got coarse hair. Always had – even as a kid.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes. I expect she’ll be like her mother when she grows up.’
Time passed.
The music on the radio faded and the midnight summary began. At that moment there were voices outside in the kitchen and hurried footsteps and the door was flung open by a dark woman of about thirty-five. Her glance took everything
Gibb got up.
‘Well, Maureen.’
‘Les! … I didn’t expect you! … I been in the train all day!’ She came up to the bed. ‘Is she all right?’
‘Seems like it!’
‘God, what a fright! … I nearly died!’ She scowled at her daughter carefully for a few seconds as if making sure no one was deceiving her. ‘ It’s – she’s just asleep? That’s all? Just asleep?’
‘Yes.’
She turned to Gibb. ‘ Les, you fool! You are a flaming fool! This’ll mean longer for you when you get back …’
‘Maybe.’
They hesitated, and then he kissed her.
The radio voice said: ‘Search is continuing for Leslie Gibb who escaped from Dartmoor at 5 p.m. yesterday. Gibb, an ex-paratrooper wounded at Arnhem, is serving a three-year sentence for robbery with violence …’
At The Chalet Lartrec
I was looking out for a village. Almost any sort of village would have done, because things had been difficult for the last hour.
The snow had started just as I reached the top of the pass. They’d told me in Pontresina that the road was still clear, and I’d found it so: a few piled heaps of white here and there like dirty linen waiting to be collected, but nothing new at all. Right at the summit by the now-empty hospice I stopped the car to let the engine cool in the icy wind and strolled about to ease my stiff leg; but I didn’t stay long. The clouds were lowering all around like elephants’ bellies, and it was lonely up there, more than a mile high, with nothing human or alive anywhere, the great peaks half hidden and the first fall of winter long overdue.
So I climbed in and the engine fired at the fourth push, and as I turned the car round the first corner the flakes of snow began to drift absent-mindedly about in the wind.
It’s a nasty road at the best of times. You go down and down but never seem to get any lower, round dozens of acute hairpin bends and through echoing tunnels with faint relics of daylight at the far end; and every time your tyres slither on the loose surface you look down thousands of feet into the dark pine-wooded valleys wreathed in cloud. It’s like some medieval artist’s vision of judgment; and of course if you slither too far the vision becomes an immediate fact.
In a mile or two it was snowing hard, and the car had no chains. It was nearly five o’clock – the climb having taken so much longer because of that plug – and very soon it would be quite dark. The snow was fine and soft, and for a bit the strong wind blew it off the centre of the road, piling it in drifts in the unexpected corners. I’d hoped to make Tirano and find a hotel there – it looked no distance on the map – but today it just wasn’t going to work out. I couldn’t remember whether there was anything at all before Tirano except the frontier post. It might be better to try to spend the night in the car than to skid to the edge of a precipice and then … whoo!
The screenwipers were making heavy going of it, and I had to stop and get out to clean them. The snow was soft in my face, like walking into a flight of cold wet moths, and the wind was howling away in the distance across the valley. Somewhere nearer at hand just for a moment I caught the musical note of a cow-bell, but there was no other traveller, no other human being anywhere. They might all have gone long ago to some more civilized land.
>
With the dark I had to stop again and again, because the screen was freezing over and it was easy to miss the turns of the road. I could see the paragraphs in the papers: ‘The victim of a sudden storm in the Bernina Alps was Major Frederick Vane, aged 33, a British officer attached to UNESCO, who unwisely attempted to cross from Switzerland into Italy by the Bernina Pass, which is normally closed to vehicular traffic in October. His car …’
And then I turned one more contorted bend and the headlights showed up a few farm huts and the narrow cobbled street of a village.
It was a welcome sight. There was no one about, and the wind whistled through the slit between the houses like an errand boy with bad teeth.
Almost at the end of the street I braked in time to avoid a man with a handcart. After the lonely drive, I felt warmed towards him as towards an old friend. But the feeling wasn’t returned because he didn’t like standing in the draught and didn’t feel warmed at all. However, after a minute or two our conversation attracted attention even on that bleak night. Two other figures appeared, anxious to help. Yes, they said, it was as Angelo Luciano stated: nothing here and doubts about Bagnolo, the next village, fifteen kilometres on. Beyond that was the frontier and then Tirano, but …
Then quite suddenly, as an afterthought, someone mentioned the Chalet Lartrec, and at once they were all agreed it might be worth trying at the Chalet Lartrec, which was off this road and only about a kilometre distant. The season being over, they said, Monsieur Lartrec would have closed down his house, but it was just possible he would make an exception in a case like this.
By now my screen had frozen over completely, so I scraped it into a state of semi-transparency and thanked them and drove on, reflecting how often people forgot the important thing until nearly too late.
At the stone marked 10, I turned as directed down a narrow track barely wide enough for a car. I knew that somewhere not far away the valley fell into further cloudy depths. Two gateposts showed up and beyond that a light. I left the car in the semi-shelter of three waving pines and picked a way across snow-filled frozen ruts towards the light, carrying my smallest suitcase.
The chalet was a three-storeyed place, painted in green, and all the shutters were up except at the window that showed the light.