With another look at me, full of accusation, Betty blundered out into the scullery and banged the door. Later I thought how cruel it was that she’d been met by bland preoccupation instead of the distress or anger she’d longed to provoke, that her brave show of defiance must have seemed to her to have misfired. But at the time I only wanted to get out before she came back.
Brushing aside Bent Arnulfsen’s halting apologies, Mair led me away. ‘Astonishing how predictable these girls are,’ she said as we drove off. ‘I’d seen that little lot coming for some time. You usually get it sooner or later and afterwards you often find you get on better than you did before. Sort of clears the air in a way. Next week she’ll be falling over herself and holding on to my hand and going on about “Oh, Mrs Webster, how could I have said what I did, what a pig I was to you, Mrs Webster, and you so kind”, and not being able to do enough for me. Not that that phase lasts very long, either. No, there’s no doubt about it, if you look for thanks in this job you’re wasting your time and letting yourself in for a big disappointment. The approval of your conscience is all the reward you ever get.’
‘Seen this?’ my wife asked me later in the same year.
I took the local paper from her and read that Elizabeth Grace Arnulfsen (19) had been sentenced to two months’ imprisonment for helping to burgle a café in Harrieston. (The two men who’d been with her got longer sentences.) Mrs Mair Webster, it was further reported, had spoken of her belief that Elizabeth Arnulfsen was weak-willed rather than vicious and had been led astray by undesirable companions. She said this out of her thorough knowledge of the girl’s character, and had been thanked for saying it.
‘Well, I hope Mair’s satisfied,’ I said, throwing the paper down.
‘Don’t be silly, you know she’ll be very cut up. She’s always done her best for Betty.’
‘Her worst, you mean.’
‘Don’t talk so soft.’
‘Betty only burgled that place to get her own back.’
‘What, on Mair?’
‘Yes, I should say it was chiefly on Mair. Not on society or any of that crap. As a method of not being the kind of person Mair wanted her to be.’
‘Mm. Sounds more like just high spirits to me. And according to what you told me Betty’d been breaking into places quite a time back.’
‘Not until Mair’d started licking her into shape.’
‘You’re exaggerating the whole thing, John. What should have happened according to you, anyway? Betty going on being a tart?’
‘Why not?’
‘What about the twins and this Bent bloke?’
‘Yes. No, she shouldn’t have gone on being a tart, or couldn’t or something. Pity in a way, though. She was enjoying herself.’
‘You don’t know anything about it. I’m going to make supper.’
‘I know how not to deal with people like Betty. Shall I give you a hand?’
‘No, you make the cocoa after. How do you stop people being tarts? How would you do it if it was you?’
‘Always assuming I thought I ought to try. It’s all a mess. It all needs going into.’
‘Who’s going to go into it? You and Mair?’
‘No, just me. What about that supper?’
I could picture Mair doing what she’d have called helping Betty through the ordeal, going to see her in prison, meeting her when she got out and at once settling down again to the by now surely hopeless task of inducing her to lead a normal life with her husband and children. And what would friend Lewis be up to while all this was going on? Getting boozed with his mates, having fantasies about some new beautiful borrower, binding about his extra evening duties in the summer and explaining to his wife that you couldn’t have good social workers, because the only kind of chap who’d make a good one was also the kind of chap who’d refuse to be one. Of the two of us, it had to be admitted that on the face of it Mair had a claim to be considered the less disreputable character, up there in the firing line while cowards flinched and traitors sneered.
Once you got off the face of it, though, and got on to what Mair was actually doing up there in the firing line, the picture changed a bit, just as things like the Labour Party looked better from some way away than close to. This was a timely reflection, because I’d been almost starting to admire Mair rather, and admiring someone you think is horrible is horrible. It was true enough that you had to have social workers, in the same way that you had to have prison warders, local government officials, policemen, military policemen, nurses, parsons, scientists, mental-hospital attendants, politicians and — for the time being anyway, God forgive us all — hangmen. That didn’t mean that you had to feel friendilly disposed towards any such person, bar the odd nurse perhaps, and then only on what you might call extrinsic grounds.
Actually, of course, it wasn’t Mair I ought to have been cogitating about. Mair, with her creed of take-off-your-coat-andget-on-with-it (and never mind what ‘it’ is), could be run out of town at any stage, if possible after being bound and gagged and forced to listen to a no-holds-barred denunciation of her by Betty. What if anything should or could be done about Betty, and who if anyone should or could do it and how — that was the real stuff. I was sorry to think how impossible it was for me to turn up at the gaol on the big day, holding a bunch of flowers and a new plastic umbrella.
ALL THE BLOOD WITHIN ME
That morning Alec Mackenzie had been unable to eat even his usual small breakfast, so when, some minutes out of Euston, coffee and light refreshments were announced, he went along to the dining-car. He felt that, in view of what lay ahead, he should have something inside him, however nasty it or the task of getting it down might prove. It was good, too, to quit the company of those sharing his compartment, a standard crew of secret agents for the bus companies: two sailors and a portable radio, an ever-toddling toddler, a man whose pipe whimpered and grumbled, an old woman with a hat who moved her lips as she read her library book and wet her fingers thoroughly before turning each page.
The first person he saw on entering the dining-car was Bob Anthony, wearing a suit that looked like woven vegetable soup and reading a newspaper with awful concentration. Alec found it hard not to dive back the way he had come, let alone stand his ground, but he knew that the two of them must have caught the train for the same reason and would have to meet sooner or later. Hoping only that it would be later, he did not resist when the steward put him in a chair facing Bob’s, but at the opposite end of the car.
For twenty-four hours now his brain had behaved as if some terminal had come loose, deactivating half of it and letting the rest work only at low efficiency. Perhaps this was what people meant when they talked about moving round in a trance. The half-rural landscape, wheeling past the window in average September sunshine, had a flat, pointless quality. Alec felt a slight amazement that things like keeping out of Bob’s way for a few extra minutes should still matter to him, and again that he should find himself making his customary weak and futile appeal for a pot of tea instead of the donkey-coloured mixture now being served under the name of coffee. Habit persisted when other things broke down. He drank coffee and ate biscuits.
The one look he had had at Bob had been quite enough to assure him that Bob’s recent outbreak of affluence showed no sign of abating. Alec was well enough resigned to his own failure — bowing uncomplainingly to the inevitable was part of his code — but he had no intention of ceasing to be indignant at Bob’s luck. A long period of floundering round the legal profession had been halted by two deaths. The first of these, brought on by an alcoholic seizure occurring slightly ahead of expectation, had had the effect of hauling Bob up a notch or two; the second, in which drink had played a more devious role as the agent of a fall downstairs, had made him virtual head of the firm, Bob having helped fate along, so to speak, by becoming friendly with the faller’s widow. The depth of this friendship remained obscure, but it was certain that the second dead man’s half-share in the business had passed under Bob’s control and stayed there.