Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper

‘My dear boy, don’t you worry about me!’

At breakfast, she used common sense.

‘Be a sensible boy and go back home. You can stick it, my dear. It’s better than this? Come over and see me whenever you get too fed up. Will you?’

He told her earnestly that he would never have been unfaithful to his wife if only she’d played the game.

‘I can assure you I’m being eminently fair,’ he told her. ‘I can assure you I never thought there could be anything worse than an unfaithful wife, Queenie. But there is.’

‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘The Hell you know’s never so bad as the Hell you don’t know. That’s a true enough saying. Be a good boy and go back. Or I shall worry.’

‘It’s immoral to live with a woman you don’t love.’

‘But you don’t make love to her, do you? Be like neighbours! Friendly enemies!’

And they laughed again.

Later in the morning, he took the tube and went home. But there was a strange new happiness in his heart, the feeling of having both found love and made a friend. He already felt it so strongly that he wanted to divorce Ivy and marry Queenie. He was far from sure that Queenie was the kind for marriage, and in any case she had told him she would marry for security when she got the chance, and for nothing else, she would be insane not to. But he had been so happy with her, he was vain enough to think he could break this down. His feelings about it were strong, although he had got over it by evening, when he realised she was not a lady. This was a practical thought, not a snobbish one, it was whether a gentleman could live happily married to somebody a bit different. Ivy was a lady, and look what that meant?

What a mess it all was.

He let himself in.

She was there, as he knew jolly well she would be there, and she behaved in the way he jolly well knew she would behave; she said and did simply nothing at all: she just sat around with that particular expression on her face.

Her face was pinched and had always been a bit sallow, a sort of brown that was not sunburn. There was that about her which made the name Ivy seem dry and hard and right. Her hair was black and dry. She was thirty-eight at that time, his present age, and she looked more than that. Poor old Ivy. It wasn’t her fault, any more than anything was anyone else’s fault. And she was every bit as unhappy. Hardly any friends, only a few callers, and cut off from her parents. It was bad luck. But they were long past the stage of trying to console one another, it had all been run through before, and was threadbare. There were deep wounds, and any words now only lead to louder words, and which made for nothing. He just let himself in, and there she was, and she sat and sewed and he wandered about. He finished up at the piano. About late evening they would have a fine old bust up, he’d have to say about the money owed to the landlady, and she’d have to fork it out; then she’d say the old one about how she always thought he was going to do such wonders with his music, and he’d trot out about how a woman ought to be an inspiration to a man, and not a hindrance. And all the rest of it. Then he’d trot out the divorce topic again, and get the usual defiant No. She challenged his religion with it, ‘I thought you said you were religious?’ and that was always that. Whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. ‘We were married in church, weren’t we?’

‘Yes, Ivy. But the marriage has never been consummated, has it? And do you know that even the Pope is impressed by that?’

‘Well,’ she said then in her quiet voice, ‘why don’t you do something about it, then?’

‘No money.’

‘What about the Poor People’s Act?’

‘Now, Ivy, you know quite well I’ve applied. They refused my application.’

‘There you are, then.’

‘Now, Ivy, I have it on good authority they only accept a small percentage of applications, they get so many. It does not mean I have not got a case.’

Her expression continued the dialogue, triumphantly, without the need of words. He thought her cruel about it, and he was not cruel himself, always wondering what would happen to her if he did get a bit of cash together, and divorced her. Where would she go?

On this occasion, the bust up was much as usual. There were no tears, it was past that. She’d known he would come back with his tail between his legs, she supposed he was starving, she supposed he’d been sleeping with other women.

Then she slammed the door and went to bed with her Bible.

He hadn’t any money to get tight with, so he played the piano furiously for an hour, and then slammed a door himself and went to bed, not with the Bible, but with a box of matches and twenty Gold Flake. In earlier days, there would have been tears from the next room. He’d have gone in.

‘Now, Ivy, this won’t do, my dear child. Can’t we straighten this thing out?’

But there was nothing to straighten out. She just wasn’t meant for men.

When he first met her—and they only met at all by the merest chance, a tragedy in itself—she’d looked so kind and well-bred and quiet, he’d fallen for her at once. ‘That’s the girl for me.’ Her smile was a tiny bit pinched, and her lips inordinately thin, with a dark down on top, but her eyes were straight and bright, they were dark blue. It wasn’t Angel, but it was perhaps Angel with dark hair. He’d been taken to a musical show by the aunt he stayed with during his school days, not many months before the old girl died. She was to meet a friend at the theatre, and when they got there this friend had just bumped into a Mr and Mrs Faggot, and their daughter. ‘This is our daughter—Ivy.’ They’d made a party of it, getting the seats changed at the box office so they could all sit together. And if they hadn’t just chanced to see the Faggots, he would never have seen Ivy. But there, wasn’t history made up of these ifs? He and Ivy seemed to have got on fine. He hadn’t fancied the old birds much, but you couldn’t get on with everyone. ‘No, I’ve got musical ambitions, really,’ he confided in Ivy in the interval. ‘Not this kind of thing, I’m afraid. The more’s the pity. There’s money in it.’

‘Classical?’ she asked, sounding interested.

‘Well, yes. I’m not saying I spurn the other. That will sound young. But I want to write. And play, too, of course.’

‘The violin?’

‘No. Piano.’

They went to several concerts, and one summer night at the back of the Albert Hall he discovered she’d never been kissed. She was rather shocked at being set upon in the street, so to speak, but he laughed.

‘You mustn’t mind, Ivy. What other chance do I get? Your people watch me like a pair of hawks, I’m afraid they don’t approve of me at all.’

‘Yes, they do,’ she lied.

‘Well, won’t you kiss me? I mean, there’s nobody about?’

‘Don’t be so common, William. I know you aren’t common, but we oughtn’t to behave like servants.’

He laughed.

‘Why not? If we don’t feel like servants?’

Their very first row was when he slapped her bottom good-humouredly, never a habit of his with ladies, but solely in an effort to make her a bit more human. To his astonishment, she turned pale with anger and humiliation and fainted. When she came round, he couldn’t help laughing because, if she wanted the truth, she never let him touch her anywhere else. He laughed and told her.

The first shock of realising she literally knew nothing, was a pretty stiff one. Victorian novels and all that, he thought. And he thought of her stiff and starchy and exceedingly stupid old mother, and felt no longer surprised, only angry. Poor kid.

‘Look,’ he sat on the bed and said, ‘Don’t you worry, old dear? I’m not a lout, I’d simply no idea, honestly.’

He could see she believed him, but she was too embarrassed to do anything other than huddle in the hotel sheets, like a wan and rather too old fairy who has just been assaulted by a hitherto virtuous gnome. ‘Look, Ivy, we’ll just talk. Or, shall I clear out? Whatever you say, my pet? I’ll dress again and go for a bit of a tootle by the sea, what?’ They were at St Leonards, of all Godforsaken places, The Hotel Criole, a fearful affair up the hill. Her mother had known of it, needless to say, and practically insisted. The old crab. But he’d laughed—you knew what that kind of woman was. ‘Whatever you say, Mrs Faggot!’

‘It is what my daughter says, I should hope,’ the silly cow said. My word, to think that kind of person lived safely through her seventy years and then died comfortably in her bed.

But he laughed.

‘Hastings,’ Ivy confirmed, so Hastings it was, at least, they seemed to call it St Leonards down there, though it looked all one to most people.

It was a bit of a job explaining to Ivy, in one’s best public school manner, where babies came from. She seemed to know, and yet she didn’t. She vowed she did know. ‘Of course I do, Bill, but …!’

‘But what, my dear child?’ he smiled. ‘Silly old thing!’

She sniffed and sobbed.

‘Never mind. Don’t even think about it,’ he said kindly, he went out of his way to be kind and considerate for months and months. ‘It’s quite unimportant,’ he pretended.

When he decided it was time to stop pretending, they were in the half-house in Blythe Road, Fulham, a basement, ground floor, first floor affair, some other family living upstairs. The marriage was already gravely threatened; quarrels, hair falling out in the bath, and other nervous disorders too despairing to mention, he thought. It dawned on him that he ought to have seen Doctor Elliot about her ages ago, though Dr Elliot was usually too fuddled to be seen about anything except elbowitis. But he tootled along and tackled him in the saloon. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘confidentially, old man, I want to talk to you about the wife. She’s driving me balmy.’ He laughed, being slightly embarrassed, but old Elliot wouldn’t send a bill in, this interview would only cost a pint of bitter, eightpence.

He returned home quite jubilant, and although they’d had a bit of an Upandowner in the early afternoon, he was very kind and considerate.

‘Ivy, my dear,’ he said gently, sitting beside her. ‘I’ve got this for you. I think we might save our marriage even yet.’ He gave her the admission card Elliot had given him, to a local hospital. ‘Will you go? You will, won’t you? It’s your duty, surely, isn’t it?’

She gave one look at the card, coloured, swung round and gave him a fearful welt round the face.

He got straight up and walked out of the house.

His face was hot one side, cold the other. His heart was icy cold all over, all round inside and out. Bloody Hell! Women. Well, well! there was something to be said for homosexuality after all. He was through with women. Through with them? He’d never started with them. Merely married one of them, one who wouldn’t even go to a hospital and be examined, perhaps have a small bit of an operation. This was the end.

He strode about Kensington Gardens, not knowing how he had got there, but realising slowly he hadn’t the fare back and must walk, in shoes which let the snow through.

The park looked sad and nice. It was white, the trees were stark and white, and the people like cold, uncertain shadows, moving about the ice of the Round Pond.

The sun was blurred red and shapeless up there in the grey-black of more snow to come, it looked like a half-healed wound.

When he got back, his feet were wet and cold and he was worn out. He was too tired to say any of the things he had decided to say. What was the use of saying he was going to leave her? Where would he go? Where would she go?

And what would God say about his obligations?

What God might not say about hers, were not his affair. He was full of self betterment, and spiritual theories, and liked to feel that marriage led two people towards a goal.

What could he feel now?

She sewed and she said:

‘I’m sorry I lost my temper. I ought not to have done that. I apologise.’

This time it was he who sat and said nothing.

She said:

‘You must realise, William, a woman is different, physically, mentally, and spiritually, from a man.’

‘I do begin to realise it,’ he said quietly.

CHAPTER IV

THERE was a fearful shindy the first time it came out that he had made love, as she called it, to a girl who came in to dust up the old homestead. She was a naughty little thing, and he found her methods irresistible. In vain did he tell himself he was not playing cricket, and he loyally refused to allow himself to think: ‘It’s entirely Ivy’s fault.’ It wasn’t. It was his fault, and it was Elsie’s fault. Elsie was sixteen and her trouble was she had elder brothers. She kept getting in his way in the passage, and smiling up at him and going red. She had a floppy little body which it was impossible to ignore. When Ivy cleared out Up West one winter afternoon, he went up to Elsie, who beamed round and upwards, and, as she put it later, ‘Let him take a liberty with me, but I didn’t mind, at least Mr Bowling is a gentleman.’ On the bed, there was no difficulty about clothes, because the wretched child didn’t seem to go in for them. She had soft lips and elegant teeth and Cleopatra appeared to have nothing on her. And although he condemned himself for a cad, and thought about the old school and all that sort of thing, he repeated the performance at teatime, and many teatimes afterwards. It was a bit of a strain, craning the neck up at the basement window, to see if old Ivy was coming up the road yet. And needless to say the poor child clicked, as she called it, dead on the three months to the minute. This at least threw off a certain amount of reserve, and they went at their love affair hammer and tongs while the going was good. His health at once recovered, he liked women again, thought about Angel, and even contemplated marriage with dirty little Elsie. This didn’t last long, however, and he started in at insurance with new zest, now and again varying it by crowd work at Elstree, whence his accent very occasionally got him a line to say, or his dinner jacket got him a sitting part in a cabaret scene. Then he came home one day and heard, smelt and saw the fat sizzling in the fire. He couldn’t resist:

‘Well, my dear Ivy, you’ve asked for it, you know, I must say!’

Needless to say, she said:

‘How like a man! You’re a cad and a brute, and I hope you go to prison!’

‘Prison?’ he said, startled, and had quite a turn when it became apparent Elsie had lied about her age, and was really only a pullet-like fifteen, or had been ‘at the time of the alleged incident’. This was going back a bit, and he did some anxious arithmetic. Elsie stood about, sniffing and sobbing, and looking more like a slut than she ever had before, as if to increase his shame, and he thought: ‘Well, now perhaps I’ve achieved a divorce, which will be something!’ But not a bit of it. There was to be no freedom, and the threat of prison hovered for some time, together with the unpleasing rumour that Elsie’s dad, from the docks, was coming along presently to tear his block off. Unnerved by the general prospect, he hurried along to Queenie, confessed all, and was well ticked off for his lack of caution. However, it was worth it, for she took on her shoulders the entire matter, going to fix up for Elsie where she was to have the baby, firmly insisting that she got it adopted immediately afterwards, and the outlook began to look a little safer. Life with Ivy was then grim indeed. She threw it up at him for each meal, and she threw his music up at him, ‘not that you do any,’ and she threw money items up at him, ‘not that you earn any.’ They had frenzied scenes, and slammed doors at each other, and hated the very sight and thought of each other. Sometimes he went to the piano in a state of exhaustion, and composed a sad little tune which he knew was rather good. But when he saw music publishers about it, they just smoked cigars at him, said nice things, but were clearly thinking about something totally different. One winter he got a nice little job playing in a concert party at Eastbourne, but something or other happened, a quarrel or something, and he was soon back picking up the crumbs from insurance magnates’ tables.

‘I dunno, I’m sure,’ was what he thought about life. And he laughed helplessly. ‘I dunno, I’ll tootle along and see old Queenie. See if she’s really going to be married.’

Having had a good time with old Queenie, and learned that she was going to marry a crashing bore because he had a fiver coming in certain, apart from his job, he went out with the quid she pressed down his shirt, and had a couple at Victoria Station. He returned home to Ivy and silence, read a bit of If Winter Comes, the only book in the place, and chain-smoked in bed with it.

Life crept by, Ivy got older, he felt now older, now younger, and wondered what on earth the whole thing was about. Why be born a gentleman if you weren’t allowed to live like one? It was the most frightful punishment in the world.

He felt this most when he had to visit the office. He always sensed that it was resented. When he finally got on the salary list up at the office, he felt his particular department resented that too. Apart from the manager, who was usually too important to be talked to, there were only two blokes who concerned his little affairs at all, Mr Nash and Mr Rosin. They were two beauties. They both had hilariously witty things to say about his old school tie, and about Lord Baldwin and Mr Chamberlain. The things they had to say somehow seemed to appear to be Mr Bowling’s fault. Mr Nash was thin and sour, and Mr Rosin had a flat, stupid face like an uncut cheese. The really common man, Mr Bowling decided, was a nice chap, but these two belonged to the half-and-half species; they were really sprung from the common man but they thought they were old school tie whilst resenting that sorry class. They loved it when a public school man got sent to gaol, and took care to cut the bits of news out of their paper for when he next came in. ‘There you are, Mr Bowling,’ they pushed it forward, winking at each other, ‘there’s your old school tie for you. H’r! H’r!’ too stupid to realise that at any moment he could cut out a bit of news about Winston Churchill and say, ‘And there you are, Mr Rosin, and Mr Nash, there’s another of your old school ties for you! H’r H’r?’ But a chap wouldn’t stoop to it.

Coming in to collect the thousand quid, Messrs Rosin and Nash had appeared very different, almost admiring.

Such was the pitiful power of filthy lucre.

‘Money, money,’ he sighed time and again. You just could not ignore that miserable subject.

It was tough if a chap was bad at it.

He liked to ponder upon the illogical, in respect of money. You got paid for doing what was called ‘a job,’ but which was often and often nothing but sitting around. But for real hard work, like thinking out and writing something, more often than not you got Sweet Fanny Adams.

And they said when you had got money, you thought about it even more—in case you should lose it.

It was true of Mr Watson, at any rate.

The day he murdered Mr Watson, he got up early. Thinking about it had deprived him of a good deal of sleep, yet he felt a kind of exhilaration. He’d pasted the policy carefully on top of the other one, and it didn’t look too bad. There was the ridge at the bottom, of course, which old Watson would at once spot, but he’d explain to him: ‘Paper economy, old chap, if you don’t mind?’ and Mr Watson wouldn’t mind, because he liked to try and give the impression that he was doing something for the war effort, it was so obvious he was doing nothing. ‘All right,’ he’d say. If he didn’t, the deal was off. Something else would have to be thought out.

At breakfast, Mr Bowling felt a bit restive. He was a man of leisure, these days. He’d eaten into his thousand quid a bit, nothing much, but a bit, it was so nice being able to give old Queenie bits and pieces, after all her kindnesses when he was down. He gave her a nice bit of cat, thirty quid it cost, and she was so pleased. She kissed him and he laughed: ‘Just a bit of cat!’

‘And you be careful who you marry next time, my dear,’ she told him. ‘Come and see me first!’

And he’d thrown a bit of a party, here at Number Forty, yes, with the bombs still whistling down, you only died once, didn’t you. There was a din, and he played the piano and they sang, and the chap came down from upstairs to complain. He played about with chemistry or something of the kind, he’d been to Oxford and he was interested in Mr Bowling. He was a bit of a bore, that first day stopping him in the hall downstairs.

‘My name’s Winthrop. Alexandra Winthrop. I hear you’re joining us.’

‘Yes. Bowling’s the name.’

‘Miss Brown was telling me, Mr Bowling. I hear you were blitzed. Bad luck! Yes, she told me about it. I’m very sorry.’

‘Oh, well.’

‘You mustn’t be lonely. I’ll pop in, may I? And you must pop up.’ He frowned. ‘Usually busy. Eton?’ he guessed.

‘No.’

‘Ah. H’m. Well, I shall hope to see you. Bath water’s always hot,’ Mr Winthrop informed, and went out with a friendly nod.

Mr Bowling went up to his room. He didn’t want to know any of these people. Winthrop already seemed to know about Ivy having been killed.

He frowned and shut the door, wondering who else lived in the place.

With the plans forming in his mind, he preferred solitude.

On the day of Watson’s murder, Winthrop knocked at the door and came in without waiting. He smoked his pipe and wore a Norfolk jacket.

‘Ah. H’m. ’Morning, Bowling?’

Mr Winthrop was just a lonely and middle-aged man. And he was a bit inquisitive.

He chattered and peered about. He was already insured, so he was sheer waste of time. He gave peeping looks all over the shop. He chattered about the furnishings here being better than most places of the kind, said Miss Brown was a dear, ‘she’s a lady, you know,’ and remarked that Mr Bowling seemed to have made a lot of purchases, suits and shirts, and said he believed there would very shortly be coupons for clothes. He said it must be awful to lose your things, and he said the various things he thought about the Ambulance Service, the Home Guard, the Fire Service, and the F.A.P. He swayed to and fro on little brown shoes, but looking overweighted with fat. His face was round and his mouth disgruntled. He was a flabby man. He said all about the people who came to live in the house, they changed weekly sometimes, but that Miss Brown preferred people to stay, providing they were, ‘gentlemen like ourselves’. He dragged Mr Bowling up to his ‘den’, which appeared to be a square room with a wide view of blitzed London, and crammed with wires and cables and acid bottles and chemistry books. When he got out at last, it was eleven o’clock, and the strain of being civil to Mr Winthrop had made him nervy. With his policies, he went along by bus to Fulham, for his interview with Mr Watson. On the bus, he thought: ‘Is this I who am doing this? Am I really going to do this?’ It was certainly quite a nice bright morning for a murder.

He no longer thought he was going to do it at all.

He’d just go along.

‘Good morning, old man?’ he hailed Mr Watson as he went up the little tiled path. Old Watson was in his doorway looking up at the sky. He was looking singularly well and alive. His grey moustache was very neat and trim, as if he was back from the barber’s.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘good! How are you, Mr Bowling? Haven’t seen you for some time. Sorry to hear about your little affair.’

‘Oh, well …’

Mr Watson had a habit of chewing some real or imaginary morsel, as if the last meal had been singularly pleasant and recent. His eyes gleamed, while he did it.

He kept his caller in the little porch for a time, talking about various things, how he didn’t like the Welsh, and how he didn’t really like the English much either, and then jumping from that in a mentally restless manner, to geraniums. He pointed at various green plants in boxes, as if Mr Bowling was sure to be fond of flowers, never mind whether they were in flower or not.