Yes, he had been suspecting me. He had seen me in action as an official, he could imagine me going round to doctors, talking to them about “diminished responsibility”, which was another feature of the 1957 Act.
“Yes, they’ll try that, Clarence,” I said. “On the strength of what you tell me, any competent lawyer would have to.”
“They don’t want any help,” he said.
“But don’t you think they’ll get it—”
“I told you something else a minute ago. Those two are as sane as you and me.”
“How are you so certain?”
“I’ve seen them.”
“That’s not enough—”
“If you’d seen them and talked to them as I have, you’d be certain too. You’d be as certain as that you’re sitting there.”
He went on: “If anyone pretends they didn’t know what they were doing, then we’ve all gone mad. We might as well give up the whole silly business. Will you listen to me?”
He was more intense. And yet, I had been misjudging him. Yes, he was inclined to see conspiracies, he thought I might be one of those standing in his way. He was a policeman: he had “brought them in”, he wanted his conviction. But, staring open-eyed at me in the flowery office, he didn’t want only, or even mainly, that. Strangely, he was making an appeal. It was deeper than his professional pride, or even moral outrage. He wanted to feel that I was on his side. He wanted to drag me, with all the force of his great strong body, on to what to him was the side of the flesh, or (to use a rhetorical phrase which he would have cursed away) of life itself.
In a sharp but less passionate tone, he asked: “You don’t believe in hanging, do you?”
“No.”
He gazed at me, unblinking.
“Don’t you think you might be wrong?” he asked.
“I’ve made up my mind.”
He still gazed at me.
“I’ll give you one thing,” he said. “I don’t believe in all the crap about deterrence. It deters some of them from carrying guns, that’s about all. Nothing in the world would have deterred those two.”
“And you go on saying they’re quite sane.”
“By God I do. They just thought they were cleverer than anyone else. They just thought, I expect they still think, they’re superior to anyone else and no one would ever find them out or touch them.”
There was a silence.
“I can’t get away from it,” he said. “There are some people who aren’t fit to live.”
I replied: “We’re not God, to say that.”
“I didn’t know you believed in God.”
“It might be easier if one did,” I said.
Maxwell shook his head. “Either those two aren’t fit to live,” he said, “or else the rest of us aren’t.”
“Why did they do it?” I broke out. “Have you any idea why they did it?”
“I think it was a sort of experiment. They wanted to see what it felt like.”
His lip was thrust out, his face, interrogating, confronted mine. After a moment, he said: “I told you, when we had them in and discovered what they’d done, I’d have put a bullet in them both. What would you do with them? That’s a fair question, isn’t it? What would you do with them?”
I had a phantom memory of another conversation, a loftier one, in which a character more tormented than Maxwell asked a similar question of someone better than me. But I was living in the moment, and I had no answer ready, and gave no answer at all.
20: Two Clocks
AS I looked up from the road outside my father’s house, the winter stars were sharp. I had gone there straight from the police headquarters: looking up at the stars, I had a moment of relief. I was getting ready for the mutual facetiousness which, as a lifetime habit, I expected with my father.
When I got inside his room, though, it wasn’t like that. First, there was something unfamiliar about the room itself which, to begin with, I couldn’t identify. Then his voice was toneless as he said hello, Lewis. He was watching a kettle beginning to boil on the hob. He was ready to make himself a cup of cocoa, he said. Would I have one?
No, I said (the flicker of how I usually addressed him still showing through), I wasn’t much given to cocoa.
“I don’t suppose you are,” said my father.
His spectacles were at their usual angle from forehead to cheek, the white hair flowed over the wings. Through the lenses, his eyes were lugubrious.
“How are you getting on?” he said, not half-heartedly, nothing like so much as half.
“How are you getting on?”
“They’ve given me the sack, Lewis.” Suddenly his eyes looked magnified: tears began to glisten down his face. They were the tears, as abject and shameless as a child’s, of extreme old age. And yet, watching them, I wasn’t shameless myself, but the reverse. I had never seen him cry before. Not in all his misfortunes or his humiliations: not when he went bankrupt, or when my mother died.
I said: Hadn’t he told the people at his choir that I would provide transport? That it was all arranged? In fact, immediately after my last visit and before the operation, I had, through Vicky, made contact with a car hire firm in the town. They were to produce a car and driver any time he asked. I had written to my father, spelling out precisely what he had to do. I had had no answer: but then, that was nothing new.
“I did tell them,” said my father, sniffling, defensive, as though I were angry with him for incompetence, as his wife and sister used to be. “I did tell them, Lewis.”
“Well then?”
“It was no good.”
“They had me on a piece of string,” he added, lachrymose but acceptant.
It turned out, he went on to explain, that they persuaded him not to find his own car. They drove him forth and back every Sunday night until Christmas. Then they told him — one of the older men had to break the news — that it was “getting too much” for him.
“It wouldn’t have done any good, Lewis. Even if you’d driven me yourself. They thought it was time to get rid of me. They thought it was time I went.”
I couldn’t comfort him. Wouldn’t they let him go on somehow, wouldn’t it be something if he just attended the choir, when he felt like it?
“It’s no use. There’s nothing I can do any more.”
He went on: “I told you what they were up to. You can’t say I didn’t tell you, can you?”
For an instant, that pleased him. He said: “I suppose you can’t blame them. They’ve got to think about the future, haven’t they?”
“You’ve got to think about yourself.”
He answered: “I haven’t got anything to think about.”
As I heard that, I was left silent.
“Mind you,” he said, “they made a bit of a fuss of me. They had a party, and they drank my health. Sherry I think it was. You’d have enjoyed that, Lewis, that you would. And what do you think they gave me?”
I shook my head.
“Over there,” he pointed.
The little room had struck strange: but in the dim light, taken up by my father’s wretchedness, I hadn’t noticed the clock in the corner, although it had been ticking, I now realised, heavily away, racket-and-whirr. It was a large old-fashioned grandfather clock, glass-fronted, works open to sight. When I drew my chair nearer, I could see that it was a good specimen of its kind, with gold work on the face and gilt inlays in the woodwork. They had made a handsome, perhaps a lavish, present to the old man.
“Two clocks,” said my father, indicating the familiar one, on the mantelpiece. “That’s what I got.”
“They can’t have known you’d had another one—”
“I’ve only had two presentations in my livelong days,” he said. “Both clocks.”