The Paying Guests(186)
And somehow, somehow, though she and Lilian had been together when they had left their bench, by the time Frances had fought her way across the courtroom she was alone. She stood close to the door and peered back into the crowd. She spotted the widow’s hat, the coat: Lilian had been stopped by Mr Ives, who had her hands in his; he was like the solicitor, grave and apologetic. Now Douglas had joined them. He had got hold of a newspaper man… Frances tucked herself, as best she could, out of the flow of people. She watched the crowd leaving the gallery. She watched a clerk going from desk to desk on the dais, gathering papers.
And it was only then, seeing him make his tidy bundle of ink-stained documents, that she began to believe it. The burden had gone, and had left her light. She felt that, without any trouble at all – a flex of the toes, a jolt from an elbow – she might start floating from the floor. But the feeling had something wrong about it. The lightness was the lightness of ash. She was scorched, dried out. She couldn’t even kneel and thank God. For God, she was sure, had had nothing to do with it. There was nothing and no one to thank, here at the very end of it all, just as there’d been nothing and no one to blame for the accident at the very beginning. Or – no, there was that man, that Bermondsey neighbour. What was his name? She’d forgotten it already. But he was the one who had saved them – saved the boy, and Lilian, and her. The jury had persuaded themselves that he was decent, because they had wanted to think that in his shoes they would have been decent too. They had no idea how decency, loyalty, courage, how it all shrivelled away when one was frightened.
She remembered Lilian reaching for her hand as the foreman got to his feet. In the seconds before the verdict, her own grip had tightened like a vice. Had she been about to urge Lilian forward, or to hold her back?
She didn’t know. She would never know. And the not knowing wasn’t like the absence of something, it was like another burden, a different shape and weight from the last. The lightness left her. She wanted to get out. She looked for Lilian again. But when their gazes finally met it was only for an instant; and then it seemed to her that she saw Lilian turn away.
She saw it almost without surprise. The thing was finished now, wasn’t it?
She turned, and pushed free of the courtroom. The hall was thick with people, but no one watched her as she made her way across to the staircase and down. Even out on the street, though a crowd had gathered to hear the verdict and see the boy, she got through it easily enough: faces lit up when she appeared, like misers’ at the gleam of gold, then dimmed and turned away from her when they saw what a dud she was. The light was a flat grey twilight. It must be some time after four. She left the massive building behind and followed the downward slope of the streets towards the river.
She said to herself, as she plodded: You are safe, you are safe. They were all safe now, she supposed: she, Lilian, the boy. For, having once been cleared of the murder he couldn’t be re-arrested for it, and if the police truly believed him guilty then the case, perhaps, would languish… Or perhaps it wouldn’t. She had no idea. She could still see Spencer in the dock, wiping the sweat from his top lip. You are safe, you are safe… But, no, she thought, this wasn’t safety – or, if it was, then it was the kind of safety that came after a war, the kind of safety she had always despised, because it was got by doing harm. So much harm! She felt sick to think of it. Leonard, Leonard’s parents, Spencer, his mother, Billie, Charlie: the list of casualties seemed endless. They seemed to be trudging along with her. There was the miscarried baby, too…
She had got on to Blackfriars Bridge now. She had been walking like a blind woman all this time, moving by every sense save sight. But then, which way could she go, except this way? And what was her future but a dark one? She pictured the house on Champion Hill. She pictured herself stepping into the porch, opening the door, passing through it. She saw the door closing behind her and sealing her in.
At that, like a clockwork figure running down, she slowed to a standstill. She was on the high mid-point of the bridge, had barely travelled half a mile; glancing back over her shoulder, she could still see the black dome of the Old Bailey, the golden figure on the top. One or two people looked curiously at her as she stood there in the middle of the pavement, so she moved to the parapet, put her back to the traffic and the passers-by. Ahead of her were the sooty criss-crossed girders of the neighbouring railway bridge. Below, the river was swollen, sullen; it had the lustreless colour of clay. Why not pitch herself into it? The parapet was low enough. Why not just chuck herself right over? Add one more casualty to the list? She leaned forward, feeling the tilt of her own weight, startlingly persuasive.
But now she was being like a bad actress again. She straightened up and looked around. At regular points across the bridge the parapet became a sort of alcove, with a shallow stone seat inside it; she went gratefully into the nearest of these, and sat.
At once, she felt that she would never be able to get up again. There seemed nothing to get up for. She was out of the breeze here, out of the chill, tucked away in the deepening twilight. A bus went by, a score of faces staring blankly into hers: she simply closed her eyes against them. The roar of the motor gave way to another, and to another after that. Minute by minute, layer upon layer, the sounds came and were withdrawn: hooves, voices, hurrying steps, the clash and grind of iron wheels. She could feel it all in the stone on which she was resting. It felt like the tired turn of the world.