The man drew on his cigarette again. Bartels saw the red glow in the windscreen. The man said:
“I was happy to see her go, and that’s the bloody truth, mate. She’s been hanging on for seven months. Well, we’ve all got to go sometime.”
“That’s right,” said Bartels, “we’ve all got to go sometime.”
“They didn’t find out soon enough; that was the bloody trouble. You’ve got to catch it early with a growth; that’s what the nurse said. A good nurse she was, too. It was a happy release, and that’s the truth. A bloody happy release.”
Platitudes and cliches, one sneers at them, thought Bartels, but they have their uses. We’ve all got to go sometime. A happy release. And all the others, ranged neatly in rows, potted and tinned and ready to hand for all occasions; the ever-ready solace and balm for simple folk, the soothing ointment for untutored minds. Aloud he said:
“Well, none of us can live forever.”
“That’s a bloody fact,” agreed the man. “That’s true enough.” He said nothing for a few moments, then he added: “It was bad the last two days because the poison didn’t burst the walls of her stomach, it kind of went to her brain; that’s what the nurse said.”
Bartels felt slightly sick. Desperately he said: “Yes, well, it’s all over now. She’s at peace now.”
He hoped the man had finished, but he had to have a last fling.
“They didn’t find out early enough,” he repeated dully; “that was Mildred’s trouble. She was never one for running to bloody doctors. Not Mildred. There’s a turning at the bottom of the hill, if you’d stop there, mate.”
Bartels stopped at the turning, and the man got out and thanked him, and trudged off down the lane. Bartels threw away the end of the Woodbine and drove on.
It was all over now, he had said, and he was right. If you didn’t adopt that attitude about suffering, you went mad in the end. Suffering wasn’t permanent, except in hell, if there was a hell; there was always peace in the end, one way or the other, and then the pain was finished, and the fear. Finished and over and at an end, forever and ever; past, irrevocably past and done with.
That was the only way to cope with the suffering, the agony, and the fear in the world. Any other line of thought made you clutch your temples and groan aloud.
He drove through Esher and beyond, and turned right at the Kingston Bypass, and twenty-five minutes later crossed the Thames by Hammersmith Bridge. Hammersmith Broadway was deserted except for one policeman standing at a corner.
Bartels had a sudden desire to hear a strong, normal human voice unburdened by grief, untrammelled by worries, which would drag him from his own thought-world of speculation, and intrigue, and foreboding.
He stopped the car, and the policeman moved slowly over to him. Bartels lowered the nearside window, and the officer stooped down and looked through the window at him.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“Could you tell me the way to Alvington Road, please?”
“Yes, sir, it’s near Olympia. Take the road facing you, and after the second set of traffic lights, take the first turning on the left, and you’ll see it up on the right.”
“Thanks very much. It’s a nice night,” Bartels added, reluctant to let him go.
“Lovely night. Bit cold out here, though.”
The policeman laughed good-naturedly. Bartels envied him. To Bartels the policeman represented sanity: a plain man, an honest man, leading a regular life, without fears for the future or regrets for the past. After the miserable conversation with the bereaved man, after the loneliness of the drive in the dark, Bartels clung eagerly to human warmth and said:
“All quiet round here, tonight?”
“Not a mouse stirring, sir.”
Bartels took out his cigarette case. “Cigarette?”
The policeman hesitated, then removed a glove, looked briefly round the Broadway, and accepted one.
“Not supposed to, really, sir.”
“You’ll probably find a quiet corner.”
“I wouldn’t say it isn’t done sometimes, sir. Thanks.” He smiled and put the cigarette into his breast pocket. There seemed little more to say.
Reluctantly, Bartels put the car into first gear and released the handbrake. He bade the policeman good night and took the road leading to Kensington. His depression had lifted. He thought: I must get this thing into its right perspective. He would have liked to have had a drink with the policeman. Perhaps several drinks, so that they could reach the stage where personal problems could be aired, and the policeman would forget that he was a policeman and give the common-sense view of a down-to-earth man.
“Well, sir, if you’re not happy with your wife, leave her,” the policeman would say in his solid way. “There’s no need to kill her. That’s murder, sir, and there’s no two ways about it. You get hanged for that sort of thing.”
“But it’s to save her suffering and humiliation,” he would reply. “What difference do a few years more or less make, in all the aeons of time which make up eternity?”
“I don’t know what an aeon of time is, but I know what murder is.”
“It’s a mercy murder; surely you see that?”
He imagined the man taking a gulp of his beer, and setting down his glass and saying: “Murder is murder, sir, call it what you like.” And his own reply:
“But, dammit, she is flesh and blood, and filled with her hopes for the future. I am part of those hopes.”
Now he imagined the constable looking at him in surprise and heard him say:
“Don’t think me rude, sir, but aren’t you being a bit conceited? There are other men in the world, sir. She sounds a very attractive young lady. Anyway, there’s no reason to kill her, sir, none at all. That’s murder, that is.”
“You think she would get on all right without me?”
“I think she would be very hurt, sir. Especially in her vanity. Women are great ones for vanity, sir.”
“But she would get on all right in the end?” he heard himself insisting.
“I’ve no doubt she would get over it, sir. Anyway, she would rather take her chance, sir, if you were to be so bold as to put it to her.”
By the time he had reached the traffic lights at Holland Road he had made up his mind. He saw now that he had been overdramatizing things. He had been neurotic and hypersensitive and ridiculous, and had very nearly put his neck, literally, into a noose.
It was perfectly simple, after all.
He would leave Beatrice and go and live in digs again, near Lorna. He would do just that. He would give Beatrice a handsome share of his income. Five hundred a year, that’s what he would give her. Tax-free, too. A good income that, even in these days.
She would be all right on that. If he earned more money, he would give her a share of that, too. He’d be generous all right. She never would be able to reproach him on that score. Then she would divorce him, and he would be able to start afresh with Lorna. Just the two of them, together, for always.
Beatrice was a strong character really; she just had moments of weakness; but Lorna needed him and he needed Lorna. Beatrice would be hurt, which was a pity, but she wouldn’t live in a wilderness of loneliness as Lorna would without him. Lorna wasn’t as strong as Beatrice.
Beatrice would go out into the world again and, with her indomitable courage, carve out a new life for herself, probably a far better life than she had led with him. He felt queasy as he thought how, through a total misjudgement of the situation, he had so nearly placed himself within reach of the law. After all, however clever you were, there was always a chance that you would be caught.
“There’s always the risk,” he murmured, “there’s always the risk.”
By the time he had driven up to the door of his block of flats, he knew that what he had decided to do must be done quickly. He knew himself, at least to some extent.
In two days he was going up north again. In Manchester he would write Beatrice a letter explaining things. He would praise her to the skies, and the praise would not be unmerited. He would take all the blame upon himself, blacken himself, castigate his own weakness.
There would be no criticisms, no reference to previous quarrels, no harking back to grievances and past
