‘Yes,’ Baines said, ‘I’ll go.’ He came across the room to Philip, begging, begging, all the way with his soft old stupid expression: this is Baines, the old Coaster; what about a palm-oil chop, eh? a man’s life; forty niggers; never used a gun; I tell you I couldn’t help loving them: it wasn’t what we call love, nothing we could understand. The messages flickered out from the last posts at the border, imploring, beseeching, reminding: this is your old friend Baines; what about an elevens; a glass of ginger pop won’t do you any harm; sausages; a long day. But the wires were cut, the messages just faded out into the enormous vacancy of the neat scrubbed room in which there had never been a place where a man could hide his secrets.

‘Come along Phil, it’s bedtime. We’ll just go up the steps …’ Tap, tap, tap, at the telegraph; you may get through, you can’t tell, somebody may mend the right wire. ‘And in at the front door.’

‘No,’ Philip said, ‘no. I won’t go. You can’t make me go. I’ll fight. I won’t see her.’

The constable turned on them quickly. ‘What’s that? Why won’t you go?’

‘She’s in the hall,’ Philip said. ‘I know she’s in the hall. And she’s dead. I won’t see her.’

‘You moved her then?’ the constable said to Baines. ‘All the way down here? You’ve been lying, eh? That means you had to tidy up.… Were you alone?’

‘Emmy,’ Philip said, ‘Emmy.’ He wasn’t going to keep any more secrets: he was going to finish once and for all with everything, with Baines and Mrs Baines and the grown-up life beyond him; it wasn’t his business and never, never again, he decided, would he share their confidences and companionship. ‘It was all Emmy’s fault,’ he protested with a quaver which reminded Baines that after all he was only a child; it had been hopeless to expect help there; he was a child; he didn’t understand what it all meant; he couldn’t read this shorthand of terror; he’d had a long day and he was tired out. You could see him dropping asleep where he stood against the dresser, dropping back into the comfortable nursery peace. You couldn’t blame him. When he woke in the morning, he’d hardly remember a thing.

‘Out with it,’ the constable said, addressing Baines with professional ferocity, ‘who is she?’ just as the old man sixty years later startled his secretary, his only watcher, asking, ‘Who is she? Who is she?’ dropping lower and lower into death, passing on the way perhaps the image of Baines: Baines hopeless, Baines letting his head drop, Baines ‘coming clean’.

History of Vintage

THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE