Mrs Poulter lurched, but ran, her watermelon cardigan flickering, up Terminus Road, through the rainy green.
And He released His hands from the nails. And fell down, in a thwack of canvas, a cloud of dust.
It was not Arthur. Arthur would never ever of done that. He was not God. Arthur was a man.
Just this side of Duns’ Mrs Poulter’s heel came off.
So that she went racketting round the back, lurching worse, smashing the fuchsias, crushing a lobelia border, grabbing the back door-knob, which, although highly polished, was not all that secure.
Mrs Poulter stood rattling the knob. The door was locked, on account of it was bowling day, and Mrs Dun, she knew, was nervous on her own.
“Mrs Dun!” Mrs Poulter called in her highest voice.
She would never of dared call Mrs Dun Edna. What she would tell, she couldn’t think. She was still living it all.
Then Mrs Dun came through the house to the glassed-in back veranda. She had not had time to put her teeth in. She looked to be suffering from neuralgia, though that, with Mrs Dun, was not the case. It was her normal look. With something added by the rattling of the knob.
Mrs Poulter, who longed to share her terror with someone, saw that her friend Mrs Dun was already far too terrified.
“What,” said Mrs Dun, “what is it?”
Her lips so pale behind the glass.
“I got to come in, Mrs Dun,” Mrs Poulter shouted, “then I’ll tell.”
“No, you don’t!” Mrs Dun croaked back. “I said: What is it?”
The flaps of her lips flew in on her empty gums.
Mrs Poulter realized she would never succeed in reaching Mrs Dun, but continued, for continuity’s sake, rattling the old brass door-knob. Even if she broke it off. As Mrs Dun had broken their always fragile relationship.
“Mr Brown — Mr Waldo Brown is dead,” Mrs Poulter said in spite of all. “I can’t tell exactly what ’as ’appened. Who done it. I don’t know. But something funny. Something. Dead,” Mrs Poulter rattled.
“Ring the police,” Mrs Dun hissed, you could see the spray on the glass door. “That’s what you do. Don’t you know?”
“Yes,” Mrs Poulter said, while continuing to rattle the knob.
Then suddenly she felt quite exhausted.
She began to recede, like Mrs Dun, as through water, only it was glass. Both backing. Mrs Poulter smiling, because she didn’t know what else to do. To hear and feel the fuchsia sticks, so frail, snapping against her body. Cool at least the leaves were. And Mrs Dun backing through her always darkened house into the deepest darkness of it. Her lips clamped to her gums. Perhaps Mrs Dun would be too terrified to open even to Mr Dun, when he returned, carrying his bowling kit.
Mrs Poulter manoeuvred past the fuchsias. To ring the police. At least she could thank her friend for reminding her of the obvious, though even so, she was not so very grateful. For the moment her leg was hurting more than her thoughts. The rain didn’t exactly wet, but warned, out of the purple-looking clouds. The light had deepened until it was sort of moss-coloured.
She began running again through the heavy landscape, through which she had meandered formerly with Arthur Brown. Now she whimpered for the sparkle of it, the long lost bird-shot silences.
Then she fell down. She lay amongst the cold mossy-coloured grass at the side of the road, extended, not so much injured by her fall, as bludgeoned by this moment at which the past united with the present, her own pains with those of others.
When she got up, her stocking down, her right knee grazed blue and bleeding, Arthur should have been standing beside her. As she ran on, he was that close to her thoughts, without putting out her hand she could feel the shape of his.
For a moment, on her own gate, she hung gasping like a stranger about to ask a favour of the house. Then she went in to the telephone.
“Yes,” she said. “Mr Waldo Brown. The dogs,” she could not say. “Mr Arthur Brown is not, he isn’t anywhere about. Mr Arthur Brown didn’t do it,” she said. “He couldn’t of. Not Mr Arthur.”
Sergeant Foyle, a decent fellow, must understand.
When she had shuffled the phone together, she turned round and there He was, dressed as some old hobo. Which of course was how he always had been. Only you forgot.
“What have you done to yourself?” she asked, raising the kind of joky voice a person might expect. “You look as if you was dragged through a tunnel!”
“Yes,” said Arthur. “I had a shock.”
He sat down, and she went to him.
When he had run out of the room, out of the house, slamming doors, he had at first some intention of escaping a murder he had committed. So he ran down across the paddocks, into the thin remainders of scrub. An escaped cow he had chased as a boy flickered around him as he listened to the lunging and crashing of his own body. With a recurrence of houses, and people staring over fences, he had to walk, to appease the faces. While failing to appease Waldo’s eyes. He began to suspect he might never escape the hatred of which his brother had died.
Waldo had always hated people, but always rather, well, as a joke. Waldo had done his block at Arthur, but always more or less as a brother. Till it was made plain as a bedstead that the life, the sleep they had shared, must have been jingling brassily all those years with the hatred which only finally killed.
Arthur walked chafing his killer hands, big blurry lips blubbing through the streets for what he had caused.
“Who is this crazy old bugger going or gone off his rocker?” people were asking one another.
Without ever addressing Arthur, at most an animal, at least a thing.
This was possibly why he had been moved to take the bus, the train: to lose his name, if not the hateful load of his body. Streets are full of guesses which rarely develop into questions. Certainly in the days when the city had been celebrating with relief and joy the ends of wars, people had plastered themselves all over him, boozily expecting to discover a new style of love. No one, fortunately, was over-anxious to investigate grief or terror. So now he went unmolested. Provided it was dark enough, he was free to enter where he liked, to prepare himself for putrefaction. Several dark corners dedicated to garbage might easily have assimilated his bundle of old torn clothes and older aching flesh. Collections thrice weekly removed the possibility of a too obtrusive stench.
Arthur Brown did in fact enter a narrow printer’s lane, and got down alongside the cold-smelling bricks, in the corner in which drunks, evidently, came to piss.
He began to hear a pair of these, streaming and calling to each other as they stood buttressing the wall.
“Is it Friday ter-morrer?” one of them asked.
“At this time a night,” the other replied, “you couldn’t christen it any bloody day at all.”
“We done our best!” laughed the first, belching, and shaking the drops off his end.
Then he fell to tripping and cursing.
“God sod the bastard!” he shouted.