Ross had another go with his truncheon. Instinctively I started to stand up... to retaliate, to escape, heaven knows.
‘Sit down,’ Vjoersterod said.
I looked at his toe. I sat down. Ross swung his arm and that time I fell forward off the stool on to my knees.
‘Sit.’ Vjoersterod said. Stiffly I returned to where he said.
‘Don’t,’ Elizabeth said to him in a wavering voice. ‘Please don’t.’
I looked at her, met her eyes. She was terrified. Scared to death. And something else. Beseeching. Begging me. With a flash of blinding understanding I realised she was afraid I wouldn’t take any more, that I wouldn’t think she was worth it, that I would somehow stop them hurting me even if it meant switching off her pump. Vjoersterod knew I wouldn’t. It was ironic, I thought mordantly, that Vjoersterod knew me better than my own wife.
It didn’t last a great deal longer. It had anyway reached the stage where I no longer felt each blow separately but rather as a crushing addition to an intolerable whole. It seemed as though I had the whole weight of the world across my shoulders. Atlas wasn’t even in the race.
I didn’t see Vjoersterod tell Ross to stop. I had the heels of my hands against my mouth and my fingertips in my hair. Some nit on the television was advising everyone to keep their sunny side up. Ross cut him off abruptly in mid note.
‘Oh God,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Oh God.’
Vjoersterod’s smooth voice dryly comforted her. ‘My dear Mrs Tyrone, I assure you that my chauffeur knows how to be a great deal more unpleasant than that. He has, I hope you realise, left your husband his dignity.’
‘Dignity,’ Elizabeth said faintly.
‘Quite so. My chauffeur used to work in the prison service in the country I come from. He knows about humiliation. It would not have been suitable, however, to apply certain, of his techniques to your husband.’
‘Russia?’ she asked. ‘Do you come from Russia?’
He didn’t answer her. He spoke to me.
‘Mr Tyrone, should you try to cross me again, I would allow my chauffeur to do anything he liked. Anything at all. Do you understand?’
I was silent. He repeated peremptorily, ‘Do you understand?’
I nodded my head.
‘Good. That’s a start. But only a start. You will also do something more positive. You will work for me. You will write for me in your newspaper. Whatever I tell you to write, you will write.’
I detached my hands slowly from my face and rested my wrists on my knees.
‘I can’t,’ I said dully.
‘I think you will find that you can. In fact you will. You must. And neither will you contemplate resigning from your paper.’ He touched the electric switch with his brown polished toe cap. ‘You cannot guard your wife adequately every minute for the rest of her life.’
‘Very well,’ I said slowly. ‘I will write what you say.’
‘Ah.’
Poor old Bert Checkov, I thought drearily. Seven floors down to the pavement. Only I couldn’t insure myself for enough to compensate Elizabeth for having to live for ever in a hospital.
‘You can start this week,’ Vjoersterod said. ‘You can say on Sunday that what you have written for the last two weeks turns out to have no foundation in fact. You will restore the situation to what it was before you started interfering.’
‘Very well.’
I put my right hand tentatively over my left shoulder. Vjoersterod watched me and nodded.
‘You’ll remember that,’ he said judiciously. ‘Perhaps you will feel better if I assure you that many who have crossed me are now dead. You are more useful to me alive. As long as you write what I say, your wife will be safe, and my chauffeur will not need to attend to you.’
His chauffeur, did he but know it, had proved to be a pale shadow of the Boston boys. For all my fears, it now seemed to me that the knuckledusters had been worse. The chauffeur’s work was a bore, a present burden, yet not as crippling as before. No broken ribs. No all-over weakness. This time I would be able to move.
Elizabeth was close to tears. ‘How can you,’ she said, ‘How can you be so... beastly.’
Vjoersterod remained unruffled. ‘I am surprised you care so much for your husband after his behaviour with that coloured girl.’
She bit her lip and rolled her head away from him on the pillow. He stared at me calmly. ‘So you told her.’
There was no point in saying anything. If I’d told him where Tiddely Pom had been on Tuesday, when he first tried to make me, I would have saved myself a lot of pain and trouble. I would have saved Elizabeth from knowing about Gail. I would have spared her all this fear. Some of Bert Checkov’s famous last words floated up from the past... ‘It’s the ones who don’t know when to give in who get the worst clobbering... in the ring, I mean...’
I swallowed. The ache from my shoulders was spreading down my back. I was dead tired of sitting on that stool. Mrs Woodward could keep it, I thought scrappily. I wouldn’t want it in the flat any more.
Vjoersterod said to Ross, ‘Pour him a drink.’
Ross went over to where the whisky bottle stood on its tray with two glasses and the Malvern Water. The bottle was nearly half full. He unscrewed the cap, picked up one of the tumblers, and emptied into it all the whisky. It was filled to the brim.
Vjoersterod nodded. ‘Drink it.’
Ross gave me the glass. I stared at it.
‘Go on,’ Vjoersterod said. ‘Drink it.’
I took a breath to protest. He moved his toe towards the switch. I put the glass to my lips and took a mouthful. Jump through hoops when the man said.
‘All of it,’ he said. ‘Quickly.’
I had eaten nothing for more than twenty four hours. In spite of a natural tolerance, a tumbler full of alcohol on an empty stomach was not my idea of fun. I had no choice. Loathing Vjoersterod, I drank it all.
‘He seems to have learned his lesson,’ Ross said.
14
They stood in silence for nearly fifteen minutes, watching me. Then Vjoersterod said, ‘Stand up.’
I stood.
‘Turn round in a circle.’
I turned. Lurched. Staggered. Swayed on my feet.
Vjoersterod nodded in satisfaction. ‘That’s all, Mr Tyrone. All for today. I expect to be pleased by what you write in the paper on Sunday. I had better be pleased.’
I nodded. A mistake. My head swam violently. I overbalanced slightly. The whisky was being absorbed into my bloodstream at a disastrous rate.
Vjoersterod and Ross let themselves out unhurriedly and without another word. As soon as the door closed behind them I turned and made tracks for the kitchen. Behind me Elizabeth’s voice called in a question, but I had no time to waste and explain. I pulled the tin of salt from the shelf, poured two inches of it into a tumbler and splashed in an equal amount of water.
Stirred it with my fingers. No time for a spoon. Seconds counted. Drank the mixture. It tasted like the Seven Seas rolled into one. Scorched my throat. An effort to get more than one mouthful down. I was gagging over the stuff even before it did its work and came up again, bringing with it whatever of the whisky hadn’t gone straight through my stomach wall.
I leaned over the sink, retching and wretched. I had lurched for Vjoersterod more than was strictly necessary, but the alcohol had in fact taken as strong and fast a hold as I had feared it would. I could feel its effects rising in my brain, disorganising co-ordination, distorting thought. No possible antidote except time.
Time. Fifteen minutes, maybe, since I had taken the stuff. In ten minutes more, perhaps twenty, I would be thoroughly drunk.
I didn’t know whether Vjoersterod had made me drink for any special purpose or just from bloody-mindedness. I did know that it was a horrible complication to what I had planned to do.