Collected Short Stories Read online

  ‘We may go to the police station later. I want to have a talk to you first. We’ll go . . .’ Where should they go? South London has many open spaces, commons they’re called. Wandsworth Common, Tooting Common, Streatham Common . . . What made him choose Drywood Common, so far away, a place he’d heard of but hadn’t visited, so far as he knew, in his life? The Man had known, and he was the Man now, wasn’t he? ‘We’ll go to Drywood and have a talk. There’s some chocolate on the dashboard shelf. Have a bit if you like.’ He started the car and they drove off past gran’s old house. ‘Have it all,’ he said.

  The boy had it all. He introduced himself as Barry. He was eight and he had no brothers or sisters or father, just his mum who worked to keep them both. His mum had told him never to get into strangers’ cars, but a cop was different, wasn’t it?

  ‘Quite different,’ said the Man. ‘Different altogether.’

  It wasn’t easy finding Drywood Common because the signposting was bad around there. But the strange thing was that, once there, the whole lay-out of the common was familiar to him.

  ‘We’ll park,’ he said, ‘down by the lake.’

  He found the lake with ease, driving along the main road that bisected the common, then turning left on to a smaller lane. There were ducks on the pond. It was surrounded by trees, but in the distance you could see houses and a little row of shops. He parked the car by the water and switched off the engine.

  Barry was very calm and trusting. He listened intelligently to the policeman’s lecture on behaving himself and not trespassing, and he didn’t fidget or seem bored when the Man stopped talking about that and began to talk about himself. The Man had had a lonely sort of life, a bit like being in prison, and he’d never been allowed out alone. Even when he was in his own room doing his homework, he’d been watched – (‘Leave your door open, dear. We don’t want any secrets in this house’) – and he hadn’t had a single real friend. Would Barry be his friend, just for a few hours, just for that evening? Barry would.

  ‘But you’re grown up now,’ he said.

  The Man nodded. Barry said later when he recalled the details of what his mother called that nasty experience – for he was always able to remember every detail – that it was at this point the Man had begun to cry.

  A small, rather dirty, hand touched the Man’s hand and held it. No one had ever held his hand like that before. Not possessively or commandingly – (‘Hold on to me tight, Richard, while we cross the road’) – but gently, sympathetically – lovingly? Their hands remained clasped, the small one covering the large, then the large enclosing and gripping the small. A tension, as of time stopped, held the two people in the car still. The boy broke it, and time moved again.

  ‘I’m getting a bit hungry,’ he said.

  ‘Are you? It’s past your teatime. I’ll tell you what, we could have some fish and chips. One of those shops over there is a fish and chip shop.’

  Barry started to get out of the car.

  ‘No, not you,’ the Man said. ‘It’s better if I go alone. You wait here. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ Barry said.

  He was only gone ten minutes – for he knew exactly and from a distance which one of the shops it was – and when he got back Barry was waiting for him. The fish and chips were good, almost as good as those gran used to cook. By the time they had finished eating and had wiped their greasy fingers on his handkerchief, dusk had come. Lights were going up in those far-off shops and houses but here, down by the lake, the trees made it quite dark.

  ‘What’s the time?’ said Barry.

  ‘A quarter past six.’

  ‘I ought to be getting back now.’

  ‘How about a game of hide and seek first? Your mum won’t be home yet. I can get you back to Upfield in ten minutes.’

  ‘I don’t know . . . Suppose she gets in early?’

  ‘Please,’ the Man said. ‘Please, just for a little while. I used to play hide and seek down here when I was a kid.’

  ‘But you said you never played anywhere. You said . . .’

  ‘Did I? Maybe I didn’t. I’m a bit confused.’

  Barry looked at him gravely. ‘I’ll hide first,’ he said. He watched Barry disappear among the trees. Grown-ups who play hide and seek don’t keep to the rules, they don’t bother with that counting to a hundred bit. But the Man did. He counted slowly and seriously, and then he got out of the car and began walking round the pond. It took him a long time to find Barry, who was more proficient at this game than he, a proficiency which showed when it was his turn to do the seeking. The darkness was deepening, and there was no one else on the common. He and the boy were quite alone.

  Barry had gone to hide. In the car the Man sat counting – ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred. When he stopped he was aware of the silence of the place, alleviated only by the faint, distant hum of traffic on the South Circular Road, just as the darkness was alleviated by the red blush of the sky, radiating the glow of London. Last time round, it hadn’t been this dark. The boy wasn’t behind any of the trees or in the bushes by the waterside or covered by the brambles in the ditch that ran parallel to the road.

  Where the hell had the stupid kid got to? His anger was irrational, for he had suggested the game himself. Was he angry because the boy had proved better at it than he? Or was it something deeper and fiercer than that, rage at rejection by this puny and ignorant little savage?

  ‘Where are you, Barry? Come on out. I’ve had about enough of this.’

  There was no answer. The wind rustled, and a tiny twig scuttered down out of a treetop to his feet. God, that little devil! What’ll I do if I can’t find him? What the hell’s he playing at?

  When I find him I’ll – I’ll kill him.

  He shivered. The blood was throbbing in his head. He broke a stick off a bush and began thrashing about with it, enraged, shouting into the dark silence, ‘Barry Barry, come out! Come out at once, d’you hear me?’ He doesn’t want me, he doesn’t care about me, no one will ever want me . . .

  Then he heard a giggle from a treetop above him, and suddenly there was a crackling of twigs, a slithering sound. Not quite above him – over there. In the giggle, he thought, there was a note of jeering. But where, where? Down by the water’s edge. He’d been up in the tree that almost overhung the pond. There was a thud as small feet bounced on to the ground, and again that maddening, gleeful giggle. For a moment the Man stood still. His hands clenched as on a frail neck, and he held them pressed together, crushing out life. Run, Barry, run . . . Run, Richard, to Plumtree Grove and Brenda, to home and mother who knows what dreadful evenings are.

  The Man thrust his way through the bushes, making for the pond. The boy would be away by now, but not far away. And his legs were long enough and strong enough to outrun him, his hands strong enough to ensure there would be no future of doubt and fear and curtained memory.

  But he was nowhere, nowhere. And yet . . . What was that sound, as of stealthy, fearful feet creeping away? He wheeled round, and there was the boy coming towards him, walking a little timidly between the straight, grey tree trunks towards him. A thick constriction gripped his throat. There must have been something in his face, some threatening gravity made more intense by the half-dark that stopped the boy in his tracks. Run, Barry, run, run fast away . . .

  They stared at each other for a moment, for a lifetime, for twelve long years. Then the boy gave a merry laugh, fearless and innocent. He ran forward and flung himself into the Man’s arms, and the Man, in a great release of pain and anguish, lifted the boy up, lifted him laughing into his own laughing face. They laughed with a kind of rapture at finding each other at last, and in the dark, under the whispering trees, each held the other close in an embrace of warmth and friendship.

  ‘Come on,’ Richard said. ‘I’ll take you home. I don’t know what I was doing, bringing you here in the first place.’

  ‘To play hide and seek,’ said Barry. ‘We had a nice time.’

  They got back in
to the car. It was after seven when they got to Upfield High Road, but not much after.

  ‘I don’t reckon my mum’s got in yet.’

  ‘I’ll drop you here. I won’t go up to your place.’ Richard opened the car door to let him out. ‘Barry?’

  ‘What is it, Mister?’

  ‘Don’t ever take a lift from a Man again, will you? Promise me?’

  Barry nodded. ‘OK.’

  ‘I once took a lift from a stranger, and for years I couldn’t remember what had happened. It sort of came back to me tonight, meeting you. I remember it all now. He was all right, just a bit lonely like me. We had fish and chips on Drywood Common and played hide and seek like you and me, and he brought me back nearly to my house – like I’ve brought you. But it wouldn’t always be like that.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Richard looked at his strong young man’s hands. ‘I just know,’ he said. ‘Good-bye, Barry, and – thanks.’

  He drove away, turning once to see that the boy was safely in his house. Barry told his mother all about it, but she insisted it must have been a nasty experience and called the police. Since Barry couldn’t remember the number of the car and had no idea of the stranger’s name, there was little they could do. They never found the Man.

  People Don’t Do Such Things

  People don’t do such things.

  That’s the last line of Hedda Gabler, and Ibsen makes this chap say it out of a sort of bewilderment at finding truth stranger than fiction. I know just how he felt. I say it myself every time I come up against the hard reality that Reeve Baker is serving fifteen years in prison for murdering my wife, and that I played my part in it, and that it happened to us three. People don’t do such things. But they do.

  Real life had never been stranger than fiction for me. It had always been beautifully pedestrian and calm and pleasant, and all the people I knew jogged along in the same sort of way. Except Reeve, that is. I suppose I made a friend of Reeve and enjoyed his company so much because of the contrast between his manner of living and my own, and so that when he had gone home I could say comfortably to Gwendolen:

  ‘How dull our lives must seem to Reeve!’

  An acquaintance of mine had given him my name when he had got into a mess with his finances and was having trouble with the Inland Revenue. As an accountant with a good many writers among my clients, I was used to their irresponsible attitude to money – the way they fall back on the excuse of artistic temperament for what is, in fact, calculated tax evasion – and I was able to sort things out for Reeve and show him how to keep more or less solvent. As a way, I suppose of showing his gratitude, Reeve took Gwendolen and me out to dinner, then we had him over at our place, and after that we became close friends.

  Writers and the way they work hold a fascination for ordinary chaps like me. It’s a mystery to me where they get their ideas from, apart from constructing the thing and creating characters and making their characters talk and so on. But Reeve could do it all right, and set the whole lot at the court of Louis Quinze or in medieval Italy or what not. I’ve read all nine of his historical novels and admired what you might call his virtuosity. But I only read them to please him really. Detective stories were what I preferred and I seldom bothered with any other form of fiction.

  Gwendolen once said to me it was amazing Reeve could fill his books with so much drama when he was living drama all the time. You’d imagine he’d have got rid of it all on paper. I think the truth was that every one of his heroes was himself, only transformed into Cesare Borgia or Casanova. You could see Reeve in them all, tall, handsome and dashing as they were, and each a devil with the women. Reeve had got divorced from his wife a year or so before I’d met him, and since then he’d had a string of girl friends, models, actresses, girls in the fashion trade, secretaries, journalists, schoolteachers, high-powered lady executives and even a dentist. Once when we were over at his place he played us a record of an aria from Don Giovanni – another character Reeve identified with and wrote about. It was called the ‘Catalogue Song’ and it listed all the types of girls the Don had made love to, blonde, brunette, redhead, young, old, rich, poor, ending up with something about as long as she wears a petticoat you know what he does. Funny, I even remember the Italian for that bit, though it’s the only Italian I know. Purche porti la gonnella voi sapete quel che fa. Then the singer laughed in an unpleasant way, laughed to music with a seducer’s sneer, and Reeve laughed too, saying it gave him a fellow-feeling.

  I’m old-fashioned, I know that. I’m conventional. Sex is for marriage, as far as I’m concerned, and what sex you have before marriage – I never had much – I can’t help thinking of as a shameful secret thing. I never even believed that people did have much of it outside marriage. All talk and boasting, I thought. I really did think that. And I kidded myself that when Reeve talked of going out with a new girl he meant going out with. Taking out for a meal, I thought, and dancing with and taking home in a taxi and then maybe a good-night kiss on the doorstep. Until one Sunday morning, when Reeve was coming over for lunch, I phoned him to ask if he’d meet us in the pub for a pre-lunch drink. He sounded half-asleep and I could hear a girl giggling in the background. Then I heard him say:

  ‘Get some clothes on, lovey, and make us a cup of tea, will you? My head’s splitting.’

  I told Gwendolen.

  ‘What did you expect?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d be shocked.’

  ‘He’s very good-looking and he’s only thirty-seven. It’s natural.’ But she had blushed a little. ‘I am rather shocked,’ she said. ‘We don’t belong in his sort of life, do we?’

  And yet we remained in it, on the edge of it. As we got to know Reeve better, he put aside those small prevarications he had employed to save our feelings. And he would tell us, without shyness, anecdotes of his amorous past and present. The one about the girl who was so possessive that even though he had broken with her, she had got into his flat in his absence and been lying naked in his bed when he brought his new girl home that night; the one about the married woman who had hidden him for two hours in her wardrobe until her husband had gone out; the girl who had come to borrow a pound of sugar and had stayed all night; fair girls, dark girls, plump, thin, rich, poor . . . Purche porti la gonnella voi sapete quel che fa.

  ‘It’s another world,’ said Gwendolen.

  And I said, ‘How the other half lives.’

  We were given to clichés of this sort. Our life was a cliché, the commonest sort of life led by middle-class people in the Western world. We had a nice detached house in one of the right suburbs, solid furniture and lifetime-lasting carpets. I had my car and she hers. I left for the office at half-past eight and returned at six. Gwendolen cleaned the house and went shopping and gave coffee mornings. In the evenings we liked to sit at home and watch television, generally going to bed at eleven. I think I was a good husband. I never forgot my wife’s birthday or failed to send her roses on our anniversary or omitted to do my share of the dishwashing. And she was an excellent wife, romantically-inclined, not sensual. At any rate, she was never sensual with me.

  She kept every birthday card I ever sent her, and the Valentines I sent her while we were engaged. Gwendolen was one of those women who hoard and cherish small mementoes. In a drawer of her dressing table she kept the menu card from the restaurant where we celebrated our engagement, a picture postcard of the hotel where we spent our honeymoon, every photograph of us that had ever been taken, our wedding pictures in a leather-bound album. Yes, she was an arch-romantic, and in her diffident way, with an air of daring, she would sometimes reproach Reeve for his callousness.

  ‘But you can’t do that to someone who loves you,’ she said when he had announced his brutal intention of going off on holiday without telling his latest girl friend where he was going or even that he was going at all. ‘You’ll break her heart.’

  ‘Gwendolen, my love, she hasn’t got a heart. Wome
n don’t have them. She has another sort of machine, a combination of telescope, lie detector, scalpel and castrating device.’

  ‘You’re too cynical,’ said my wife. ‘You may fall in love yourself one day and then you’ll know how it feels.’

  ‘Not necessarily. As Shaw said –’ Reeve was always quoting what other writers had said ‘– “Don’t do unto others as you would have others do unto you, as we don’t all have the same tastes.”’

  ‘We all have the same taste about not wanting to be ill-treated.’

  ‘She should have thought of that before she tried to control my life. No, I shall quietly disappear for a while. I mightn’t go away, in fact. I might just say I’m going away and lie low at home for a fortnight. Fill up the deep freeze, you know, and lay in a stock of liquor. I’ve done it before in this sort of situation. It’s rather pleasant and I get a hell of a lot of work done.’

  Gwendolen was silenced by this and, I must say, so was I. You may wonder, after these examples of his morality, just what it was I saw in Reeve. It’s hard now for me to remember. Charm, perhaps, and a never-failing hospitality; a rueful way of talking about his own life as if it was all he could hope for, while mine was the ideal all men would aspire to; a helplessness about his financial affairs combined with an admiration for my grasp of them; a manner of talking to me as if we were equally men of the world, only I had chosen the better part. When invited to one of our dull modest gatherings, he would always be the exciting friend with the witty small talk, the reviver of a failing party, the industrious barman; above all, the one among our friends who wasn’t an accountant, a bank manager, a solicitor, a general practitioner or a company executive. We had his books on our shelves. Our friends borrowed them and told their friends they’d met Reeve Baker at our house. He gave us a cachet that raised us enough centimetres above the level of the bourgeoisie to make us interesting.

  Perhaps, in those days, I should have asked myself what it was he saw in us.