“Are you an idiot?” asked Spandrell, when he had suggested that they should go away at once and leave the thing lying there. “Or are you particularly anxious to die of hanging?” The sneer, the cool ironic amusement were maddening to Illidge. “It would be found tonight when Philip came home.”
“But Quarles hasn’t got a key,” said Illidge.
“Then tomorrow, as soon as he’d got hold of a locksmith. And three hours later, when Elinor had explained what she had done with the key, the police would be knocking at my door. And I promise you, they’d knock at yours very soon afterward.” He smiled at Illidge, who averted his eyes. “No,” Spandrell went on, “Webley’s got to be taken away. And with his car standing outside, it’s child’s play, if we wait till after dark.”
“But it won’t be dark for another two hours.” Illidge’s voice was shrill with anger and complaint.
“Well, what of it?”
“Why …” Illidge began and checked himself; he realized that if he was going to answer truthfully, he would have to say that he didn’t want to stay those two hours because he was frightened. “All right,” he said. “Let’s stay.” Spandrell picked up the silver cigarette box, opened and sniffed. “They smell very nice,” he said. “Have one.” He pushed the box across the table. “And there are lots of books. And the Times. And the New Statesman. And the latest number of Vogue. It’s positively a dentist’s waiting room. And we might even make ourselves a cup of tea.” The time of waiting began. Heartbeat followed heartbeat. Each second the earth travelled twenty miles and the prickly pears covered another five rods of Australian ground. Behind the screen lay the body.
Thousands upon thousands of millions of minute and diverse individuals had come together and the product of their mutual dependence, their mutual hostility had been a human life. Their total colony, their living hive had been a man. The hive was dead. But in the lingering warmth many of the component individuals still faintly lived; soon they also would have perished. And meanwhile, from the air, the invisible hosts of saprophytics had already begun their unresisted invasion. They would live among the dead cells, they would grow and prodigiously multiply, and in their growing and procreation all the chemical building of the body would be undone, all the intricacies and complications of its matter would be resolved, till by the time their work was finished a few pounds of carbon, a few quarts of water, some lime, a little phosphorus and sulphur, a pinch of iron and silicon, a handful of mixed salts—all scattered and recombined with the surrounding world—would be all that remained of Everard Webley’s ambition to rule and his love for Elinor, of his thoughts about politics and his recollections of childhood, of his fencing and good horsemanship, of that soft strong voice and that suddenly illuminating smile, of his admiration for Mantegna, his dislike of whiskey, his deliberately terrifying rages, his habit of stroking his chin, his belief in God, his incapacity to whistle a tune correctly, his unshakeable determinations, and his knowledge of Russian.
Illidge turned over the advertisement pages of Vogue. A young lady in a fur coat priced at two hundred guineas was stepping into a motor car; on the opposite page another young lady in nothing but a towel was stepping out of a bath impregnated with Dr. Verbruggen’s Reducing Salts. There followed a still life of scent bottles containing Songe nègre and the maker’s latest creation, Relent d’amour. The names of Worth, Lanvin, Patou sprawled across three more pages. Then there was a picture of a young lady in a rubber reducing belt, looking at herself in the glass. A group of young ladies admired one another’s slumber wear from Crabb and Lushington’s lingerie department. Opposite them another young lady reclined on a couch at Madame Adrena’s Beauty Laboratory, while the hands of a masseuse stroked the menace of a double chin. Then followed a still life of rolling pins and rubber strigils for rolling and rubbing away young ladies’ superfluous fat, and another still life of jars and gallipots containing skin foods to protect their faces from the ravages of time and the weather.
“Revolting!” Illidge said to himself as he turned the pages. “Criminal!” And he cherished his indignation, he cultivated it. To be angry was a distraction, and at the same time a justification. Raging at plutocratic callousness and frivolity, he could half forget and half excuse to himself the horrible thing that had happened. Webley’s body was lying on the other side of the screen. But there were women who paid two hundred guineas for a fur coat. Two hundred guineas! His Uncle Joseph would have thought himself happy if he could have made as much in eighteen months of cobbling. And they bought scent at twenty-five shillings the quarter pint. He remembered the time when his little brother Tom had had pneumonia after influenza. Ghastly! And when he was convalescent, the doctor had said he ought to go away to the sea for a few weeks. They hadn’t been able to afford it. Tom’s lungs had never been too strong after that. He worked in a motor factory now (making machines for those bitches in two-hundred-guinea coats to sit in); Illidge had paid for him to go to a technical school—paid, he reflected, beating up his anger, that the boy might have the privilege of standing eight hours a day
