"Just the job. Well, Lampton, we'll get our money's worth out of you before you go - glance through these accounts, will you?"
The tone was supposed to be one of mock severity, but it came out vicious. I grinned and tugged my forelock.
"Yes, Master. Right away."
He gave me the folder of accounts and a cigarette. "I'll expect a box of Havanas in return." He frowned at me. "You don't seem bothered about Alice Aisgill," he said. "Or hadn't you heard?"
"What about her?"
"She's dead."
Oh merciful God, I thought, she's committed suicide and left a note blaming me. That's finished it. That's finished me in every possible way. Teddy's eyes were a pale blue, as if all the colour had been drained from them; they were probing my face now.
"She was a friend of yours, wasn't she?"
"A very good friend," I said. "How did she die?"
"Ran her car into a wall on Warley Moor. She'd been drinking all night at the Clarendon and the St. Clair. They wouldn't serve her any more at the St. Clair."
"He let her drive home, though," I said. "And he took her money for booze so that she could kill herself." It was hardly fair to blame poor old Bert; but I had to say something.
"She must have been going at the hell of a pace," Teddy said. "They say that the car's bent like that" - he cupped his hand - "and there's blood all over the road. It wasn't till this morning that they found her."
"Where exactly was it?"
"Corby Lane. You know, right up in the north, above Sparrow Hill. It's the last place that God made. What she was doing there at that time I can't imagine."
"Me neither," I said; but I could. I could imagine everything that had happened to Alice after I'd left her. She'd stayed in the flat the duration of two more double gins. Then everything in the room - the little gilt clock, the Dresden shepherdesses and Italian goat boys, the photos of dead names of yesterday, the flounces and the gilt, the bright chintz curtains, the glass I'd drunk from - had gathered together and attacked her, trivial individually but as deadly collectively as those little South American fish which gnaw swimmers to the bone in five minutes. So she'd run out of the flat and into the Fiat; but once in Warley (she didn't know she reached there, there was a blank until she found herself waiting at the lights in Market Street repeating my name under her breath) she didn't know what to do with herself. She turned up St. Clair Road with the idea of going home. Home would be an abstract notion - Father, Mother, safety, hugs, and hot milk and a roaring fire and all the trouble and grief forgotten in the morning. But as she'd gone past Eagle Road (Joe lives there) she'd recovered her bearings. Home was the house where she lived with a husband she didn't love; she was fleeing towards an electric radiator and George's cold tolerance, she was too old for hot milk, there were no hugs going, even if she wanted any from him, and it would all be even more unbearable tomorrow. She'd reversed at Calder Crescent or Wyndham Terrace and gone to the Clarendon. Probably she'd used the Snug, where she was less likely to see anyone she knew - the Thespians always used the Lounge. If she needed company, if she were able to persuade herself that she didn't care about me ditching her, she could move out of the Snug and return to the main stream, return to, perhaps not happiness, but to a sort of emotional limbo. When she heard their voices from the Lounge at about nine-fifteen, she discovered that she didn't want to see anyone whom she knew or who knew me. She slipped out of the back door. To the double gins which she'd had at the flat would have been added three or four more. She still wouldn't want to go home. There was only the St. Clair. The gins rolled their sleeves up and got to work on her: you must eliminate him from your system, they said. Eliminate, obliterate, expunge. You've been to the St. Clair often with him? Very well, then, walk straight in and sit where you used to sit with him. Spit in his eye -
Or had she gone there in an attempt to recapture the decent and wholesome happiness we shared once when I was nearly a year younger and fully ten years more innocent? More gins had been called upon to assist her nearer towards whichever stage of illusion she wished for, and then she'd started to sing or to swear or to fall flat upon her face or all three, and Bert, who kept a respectable house, had persuaded her to leave. She drove up St. Clair Road again, then along the narrow switchback of Sparrow Hill Road; but she couldn't exorcise my presence by stopping at the old brick works. And she still couldn't go home. If she pressed the accelerator down still harder, she could travel out of herself - I was beside her in the car now, she was approaching that double bend which only a racing car could take at over twenty -
"What a damned awful way to die," Teddy said.
"I expected it," Joe Lampton said soberly. "She drove like a maniac. It doesn't make it any the less tragic, though." I didn't like Joe Lampton. He was a sensible young accountant with a neatly pressed blue suit and a stiff white collar. He always said and did the correct thing and never embarrassed anyone with an unseemly display of emotion. Why, he even made a roll in the hay with a pretty little teen-ager pay dividends. I hated Joe Lampton, but he looked and sounded very sure of himself sitting at my desk in my skin; he'd come to stay, this was no flying visit.
"Alice wasn't perfect," Joe Lampton said. "But who is? She was a jolly good sort, and I'm going to miss her very much." He shook his handsome dignified head slowly. That meant that a moral exordium was on the way. "I enjoy a drink myself, but no one in charge of a car should be allowed into a pub. It's lucky she killed only herself. My God, only yesterday she was alive and cheerful, and then, all in a second - "
"A second?" Teddy said. "She was still alive when the ambulance came. She didn't die until eight o'clock."
"Jesus Christ," I said. "Jesus Christ." I turned on Teddy fiercely. "Who told you? Who told you?"
"My cousin works at Warley Hospital," he said. "Turned me up a bit when I heard about it. She was crawling round the road when a farm labourer found her. She was scalped and the steering-column - "
I half ran out of the office and went into the lavatory. But the w.c. door was locked, and it was nearly ten minutes before it opened and one of the Health Department juniors came out looking sheepish and leaving the compartment full of tobacco smoke. I locked the door and sat on the w.c. seat with my head between my hands, those gentle loving hands that had so often caressed what was, because of the treachery in the brain in the head between the hands, a lump of raw meat with the bones sticking through.
At twelve o'clock I told Teddy that I was sick. I don't know what I did till then; I hope that I had at least the decency to make a lot of mistakes checking the accounts. I stood about at the station end of Market Street for about ten minutes, then caught a bus to Leddersford. I couldn't eat any lunch, and I couldn't stay in Warley, and I couldn't face the Thompsons. They were sure to talk about her, and then Joe Lampton would take possession of me again. Joe Lampton Export Model Mark IA warranted free of rust, flaws, cracks, dust or pity; as long as I was in the bus I was safe. I tried to make my mind a blank as it speeded up on the main road; a stationer's, a draper's, a tobacconist's, a cricket field, a little girl pulled along by an Alsatian, an old woman wincing away from the Alsatian, who only wanted to lick her face anyway. Then there were fields and cows and narrow roads wriggling like tapeworms into the new Council estate. But Alice had been killed, and what I saw was the components of a huge machine that now only functioned out of bravado: it had been designed and manufactured for one purpose, to kill Alice. That purpose was accomplished; it should have been allowed to run down and then stop, the driver asleep at the wheel, the passengers sitting docilely with their mouths wide open, waiting for the bus to fly away, the estate left unfinished, the shops shuttered and overrun with rats, the unmilked cows lowing in agony with swollen udders, the dogs and cats running wild and bloody-mouthed, and then a great storm to scour the whole dirty earth down to clean rock and flame. I licked my dry lips, looking round the bus at the other passengers, sleek, rosy, whole, stinking of food and tobacco and sleep; I closed my eyes as a big sickness came over me. I was cold and trembling and on the point of vomiting, but it was more than that. It was an attack of the truth: I saw quite clearly that there were no dreams and no mercy left in the world, nothing but a storm of violence.