pierce the darkness and know what would happen—afterwards. George had no religion to speak of, and shunned the prison chaplain, who appeared each day and left a tract or two. It wasn’t the loss of the soul that terrified George but the loss of the senses, the loss of the sensible world: hence his sudden fierce spurts of love for the simple chair he sat upon, for the smell of black tobacco, and for the solid warmth in the voice of a warder called Bert. Then the wave would pass, and he would be left with the dull sardonic ache that throbbed behind all his thoughts, and was only kept manageable by the smoking of his pipe. He played endless games of dominoes with Bert, and the hours seemed at times to drag by with painful slowness, at other times to slip away with terrifying speed. He thought about his trial, quite listlessly; he often thought about me, and asked for news of me. Did he understand why I had forsaken him? I hope to God he did. The prison doctor came to examine him, and pronounced him in sound health. Suddenly George realized that he’d had his allotment, that all that remained was to break down his body and create a death. He was forty-nine years old, and on the far side of the prison they had dug his grave.
During this period, after the trial, Mrs. Giblet was working on George—against me. This was why she came to the prison; why else would she visit the man who had fed her hams fattened on the flesh of her own son? She was plotting against me, trying to get George to betray me, suggesting to him, either in subtle and oblique terms, or quite candidly, that he could save himself by indicting me. She was having no success, at this stage, for George was intensely loyal to me, had been since our African days. But there was another factor in all this, and that was the intense loneliness that a man in George’s position feels. To contemplate one’s own imminent death—I speak now from personal experience—while the rest of humanity looks breezily forward to years, decades—indefinite spans: this sets a man apart. There is a sort of solitude that touches every traveler leaving home, a melancholy that lives deep within the sense of excitement or purpose that prompts the journey. Take that melancholy—Is it the primal fear of the hunter leaving the cave? The fear of never returning? Or of returning to a deserted home, or a home in ruins?—take that melancholy and magnify it a thousandfold, and that is the sadness and the isolation of the condemned man. I know. And I suspect that Mrs. Giblet was quite canny enough to know it too, and thus to realize just how vulnerable George was.
For George was pathetically grateful that she visited him, I see that now. In the eyes of the world he was a monster, and the visits of this old woman, the mother of his supposed victim, were the only sort of external support he had with which to buttress his increasingly fragile sense of who he was. Mrs. Giblet functioned in relation to George as Cleo did to me—they shored us up with their faith and enabled us to go on. They gave us back a reflection of ourselves that was not grotesque or monstrous. They allowed us to believe we were still human, still men. With Mrs. Giblet, however, that support had a price.
Time passed, and the strain grew more intense. George’s thoughts revolved constantly around this one stark theme: I’m going to swing for what I didn’t do. He began to have doubts. Until this point he had talked to Mrs. Giblet only because she seemed to want to talk —the profound sense of gratification he derived from her visits had less to do with conversation than with the simple fact that she’d come to see him. He hardly even needed to see her—just to know that she’d come was enough. But if it was talk she wanted, then talk he would give her, that clipped, brusque countryman’s talk, the only kind George knew. So he talked about Crook, about the weather last winter, the state of the garden, the state of the soil. And when the old woman asked him about me—or rather, when she told him what she suspected of me—well, George just sucked on the stem of his pipe and gazed at the ceiling.
And still the days slipped by, and May 24 loomed larger and larger, like some great animal advancing upon him, and him powerless to move out of its path. Up and down the cell he paced, pulling furiously on that much- chewed pipe stem. Bert could no longer tempt him to dominoes, so he sat in placid silence as George paced up and down, up and down that narrow cell. The prison grays flapped about his bony frame like winding sheets.
George at last reached a decision. He sat down across the table from Bert and stared him straight in the eye. “Bert,” he said, “you know who done young Giblet?”
A cloud of unease crossed the other man’s face. He said nothing.
“I’ll tell you, Bert,” said George. There was a husky rasp to his voice. This was going against the grain, but he had to do it, now. “Sir Hugo done him, Bert. Not me, Sir Hugo.”
There, it was out. He, too, had betrayed me. In terror of losing his life, he had betrayed his old comrade. He sat there, waiting for Bert’s reaction. Bert gazed at his face, a small frown etched between his sandy eyebrows. From far away came the clang of a metal door and the rattle of a bunch of keys. It was night. At last he spoke. “Don’t get worked up, George,” he murmured. “Don’t get yourself in a state, not now.”
George gaped at the man. With a rather sick sensation, a sensation of dizzying vertigo, it came to him that he wasn’t going to be listened to. He began to protest, but he knew, with utter certainty, that it would do no good. He’d left it too late, much, much too late.
Poor George. Even after what he’d done, I still had love and compassion in my heart for the man.
On the afternoon of May 23 Cleo brought Herbert to the kitchen. Yes, my old toady friend was still alive and well, still living in a glass tank in my study and being sporadically fed. The dear girl sat at the kitchen table and put before him a saucer of diced chicken entrails, while I sat looking on with that ever-present bloody grin on my face. Doris, meanwhile, was not very steady on her pins, having been at the gin a little earlier. Something of a novelty for Doris, gin, and her susceptibility to the stuff was distressingly evident. Back and forth she lurched on the other side of the table, a large sharp chopper in one hand and, on the cutting board in front of her, a plucked chicken.
It was a warm afternoon and we had the back door open, and all was tranquil enough, I suppose, apart from this unsteadiness of Doris’s. Cleo didn’t seem to notice, engrossed as she was with Herbert, and I think I must have dozed off, for it was with a rude shock, as though I had awoken from a dream, that I suddenly heard Doris shout out with pain. I opened my eyes: there she stood, the chopper in her right hand, gazing with astonishment at her left hand, which she held up in front of her face. She had chopped half the index finger clean off. It lay on the table beside the cutting board. There was a good deal of blood around it, and also on the chicken. Cleo was paying no attention at all, but instead sat gazing, her hands flat on the table and her chin on her hands, at Herbert, who had hopped from his saucer of entrails to Doris’s severed finger and was lapping at the puddle of blood around the thing with his long flickering amphibian tongue. Doris sank into a chair and sat there in a daze, and watched the blood oozing thickly from the stump of her finger. I sat there grinning at the woman as, with her good hand, she reached down to the floor and picked up the gin bottle and poured herself a stiff one.
George, meanwhile, was pacing up and down the condemned cell. Up and down he paced, up and down. Bert was disappointed in George. He thought he was made of sterner stuff. The chaplain came, for this was May 23, and George had one day left to live. George told him it was I who’d “done” Sidney Giblet—he couldn’t help it, in his terror of death he would say anything. The chaplain tried to turn his thoughts to the state of his immortal soul, but with no success. The doctor came, and he too was subjected to an impassioned harangue. The word went quickly round the prison, as these things will, that George Lecky had cracked. It made men sad. For in a way he died for all of them.
When Mrs. Giblet visited George that afternoon she found him in a mood very different from the brusque taciturnity she had come to expect. There had even been some doubt as to whether he should be allowed to see her; finally the visit was approved, but the warders were instructed to take George back to his cell if he became at all excited. They warned George of this before they took him down.
George was no sooner seated in that dingy little visitors’ room than he seized Mrs. Giblet’s hands across the table and began to speak. Nobody, I think, myself included, had ever heard George speak as he must have spoken that afternoon. When he had finished Mrs. Giblet hurriedly left the room, made several telephone calls from the front office of the prison, then took a taxi to Waterloo Station. She was coming to Crook.
Difficult to say how long I sat in the kitchen watching Doris drink gin while the stump of her finger bled all over the chicken. Twenty minutes, maybe more, maybe an hour. Eventually Fledge came down the hall. He quickly took in the scene, his eyes darting from the blood on the table, to Doris, to Cleo, to myself, then back to the blood; and it was all too easy to understand the quick twitch of contempt that touched his lips. His intoxicated wife looked on dumbly as her own blood dripped steadily onto a plucked chicken, and watching it all, in utter passivity, grinning
