The End Of Solomon Grundy Read online

  “What do you mean?”

  “A word to the wise. He’s no good, that’s all.”

  Grundy tapped the mobile above his head. Little gold and silver blobs on the ends of the wires moved round. He drained his glass. His voice, hoarse but powerful, came like rusty water out of a tap.

  “Marion and I were talking about this before we came here. Do you know what I said? I said to her, ‘Edgar’s a bastard.’”

  Edgar’s face wobbled, the eyes staring fixedly in their jelly of flesh. He began to say something, then put down his glass on a table and turned away. Grundy began to laugh. The Weldons’ daughter, Gloria, a girl of thirteen, came up carrying a tray of sausage rolls.

  “Have one of these. Mummy made them, and I’ve made them hot. Isn’t this party just marv.”

  “Marv.” He took a sausage roll.

  By ten o’clock Marion had drunk three large whiskies, two glasses of white and one of red wine, and had eaten a number of biscuits and bits of things on toast. She had seen her husband’s ginger head only once or twice across the room, but this was not unusual. They were after all, as she often said, independent beings, and you didn’t go to a party just to talk to your husband. So she had talked to Peter Clements, the TV producer, whose general air of extrovert normality made it all the more surprising that he kept house with Rex Lecky, a young actor who seemed to be nowhere about. She had talked to Jack Jellifer, who was a professional expert on wine and food, and to his rather tarty wife Arlene. She had had a long conversation with Dick Weldon, in which Dick had told her that he often worried about the kids, particularly about the language Cyprian used.

  Marion shook her head. “Doesn’t matter.”

  Dick was serious, even solemn. “Honestly, sometimes I wonder whether a psychiatrist is the answer.”

  “Trauma. Just a trauma.”

  “You think so?”

  “If you’ve got a good relationship, you and Caroline, that’s what’s important to – to Gloria and Cyprian. Home example, that’s the thing.”

  “I expect you’re right.” Dick nodded, with what in another man might have been called complacence.

  “I mean to say, when you’ve got a relationship like that you can feel happy about – anything.”

  She became aware that her voice was a little high. Dick’s large nose pointed upwards, his brown eyes looked at her speculatively. To avoid his gaze she lifted her glass. It was empty.

  “I’m being a bad host.” He filled her glass with white wine and moved away. From the dining-room there came the sound of music. Marion moved towards it and stood in the doorway. Somebody had turned out all of the lights except one, and had placed a thick bit of material over that. In the semi-obscurity half a dozen couples moved around. Marion saw Jack Jellifer dancing with Caroline Weldon, and Arlene moving round with her head resting on the shoulder of a stranger to the Dell, whom she vaguely recognised as a guest of the Weldons. She did not see her husband.

  “Would you care to dance?”

  This was another stranger, a slight smiling man. His teeth gleamed whitely, his dark suit fitted him snugly, a white handkerchief peeped out of his breast pocket.

  “Thank you.” She was dismayed to hear the hint of a giggle in her voice. She looked round for somewhere to put her glass, and in a moment he had taken it from her. Then she was in his arms. There came from him some faint semi-sweet semi-astringent smell, perhaps a blend of hair oil and eau-de-Cologne. He murmured something which she didn’t hear.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I love the name of The Dell. It is well chosen for a little oasis of peace.”

  “It’s a real little community, yes. A paradise for children, five miles an hour for cars, they can play in safety.”

  “You have a family?”

  “No.”

  “I suppose most of the people here are part of the community?”

  He had a pleasant voice, low and melodious. “Why, yes. Someone or other in The Dell gives a party pretty well every month, and of course they ask their neighbours. I suppose you might call it a bit dull in a way, but we don’t think so.”

  “How could it possibly be dull?” He smiled, and pressed himself very slightly against her. The music stopped. They separated. He recovered her glass and handed it to her with the hint of a bow. They leaned against the wall. “I am sure I shall not find it so.”

  For a moment what he had said did not sink in. “You live here?”

  “I am what you might call a new boy. Tony Kabanga.”

  “Of course. How silly of me. I’m Marion Grundy. We – I don’t know where my husband is – we live at No. 70.”

  His teeth were gleaming. “I know almost nobody here, that was why I so much appreciated Mr Weldon—”

  A woman screamed, a noise that pierced the noise.

  Marion was startled, and more startled to find her wrist suddenly and painfully gripped by Mr Kabanga. She looked down, and in the dim light it seemed to her that the hand placed on her wrist was dark. “Where did that come from?”

  “Upstairs, I think. Probably somebody’s spilt—”

  But he had left her, moving smoothly and sinuously into the large living-room and through the crowd that had now perceptibly thinned. She followed him, out into the entrance hall from which a self-consciously elegant staircase went up to the three bedrooms and bathroom on the floor above. She looked up the stairs and it seemed to her that what she saw would be printed on her mind for ever.

  Coming down the stairs was a young woman she had never seen before in her life. She was perhaps twenty five years old, she had a high colour, her eyebrows were thick, her nostrils flared boldly, her glossy dark hair was piled up in a beehive. She wore a dress that glittered as though it was made of fish scales, with slits up the side of each leg. This dress had been torn on the left shoulder, and the tear extended down the front. She was doing her best to hold the tears together, without much success. On the fine pure marble of her left shoulder there could be seen red marks.

  At the top of the stairs, glowering down, stood her husband, hands hanging ape like. He looked enormous, seen from below. His collar and tie were pulled a little to one side, his suit was rumpled, and upon his cheek there were four thin red vertical lines.

  This was the scene that stayed with Marion Grundy unblurred by the nightmare events of the following days and weeks. In fact, no doubt, there never was a moment of time frozen like this, in fact the girl must have been moving down the stairs, Grundy must have been in the act of taking out a handkerchief to dab at his cheek, but the picture stayed in her mind as though fixed permanently by a camera. Then it splintered as though the camera print had been dissolved by acid, everybody began to move and speak.

  The young woman came down the stairs, even in these difficult circumstances, with natural grace. Tony Kabanga moved forwards from the people in the hall just as gracefully and Marion saw now that his skin was a very light coffee colour, so that he could never really have passed for white although he was a long way also from the dusky African of her imagination.

  “Sylvia,” he said.

  “Tony.” She descended the rest of the stairs, put her white arms round his coffee-coloured neck.

  He said nothing but, by some masterly strategy produced from an inner pocket a small gold safety pin. With this he repaired the worst ravages to the silver fish scales. Dick and Caroline were now on the scene – when had they got there? – Dick’s nose high and eager. Kabanga, with what seemed miraculous speed, had discovered their coats.

  “You’re not going?” Dick’s nose swung from side to side in quest of information.

  Kabanga said with courteous gravity, “Yes, we must go.”

  Caroline moved forward, looking at the tear in the girl’s dress. Grundy came down the stairs. He did not look at his wife, but held a handkerchief to his cheek. Dick glanced from one to the other of them, then said heartily: “And now, Caroline my dear, how about a bowl of soup? Did I smell something quite intoxica
tingly delicious brewing in the kitchen?”

  “Not unless Gloria’s doing it.”

  Cyprian’s fat face appeared from somewhere. “Did she scratch his face?”

  “Just see how Gloria’s making out, will you, my dear?” Dick said with transparently false bonhomie.

  “You tore her dress, didn’t you?” Cyprian asked Grundy.

  “You just shut up, young man,” his father said.

  “High time you were in bed.”

  He hustled Cyprian upstairs, Marion and Grundy got their coats. Just before they left she heard Cyprian’s voice from upstairs: “But it’s interesting. Was he trying to rape her?”

  When they got indoors Grundy poured himself a large whisky and drank it neat. Marion indicated her own refusal of a drink by a sharp shake of the head. It would have been against her principles to criticise her husband for drinking, although she thought he had had enough.

  “What worries me is why you had to do it,” she said.

  “I mean, I’ve always thought we had a good relationship. Of course I quite accept that you can be attracted to somebody else, although I didn’t think she was – well, your type.”

  “Let it alone.”

  “I can’t. It worries me.”

  “You’re so beautifully bloody rational.”

  “What’s worrying is that it must show we’re badly integrated.” He burst out laughing.

  “If you want to know, it wasn’t what you’re thinking at all.”

  She sat down. Her voice was consciously patient.

  “Please, Sol. I know what I saw on the stairs. I won’t say I don’t mind, but we’re civilised people. Please don’t be childish about it.”

  “You’re too good to be true.”

  “I’m going upstairs.” She got up, swaying slightly, just a little drunk. At the door she turned and spoke, almost defiantly. “I don’t see that it’s all my fault if we don’t have a good relationship. If you’d like—”

  “No, thanks.”

  Grundy poured himself some more whisky, and went upstairs half an hour after her. The light in their room was out. They slept in separate beds.

  The departure of Tony Kabanga and his friend, followed by that of the Grundys, destroyed the rhythm of the party. People were not exactly embarrassed by what had happened, and indeed, as is always the way on these occasions, most of them were not sure just precisely what had occurred. Was it that somebody, drunk, had hit somebody else upstairs? A woman had slipped and fallen down that treacherously elegant staircase, tearing her dress? Grundy had had a fight with the coloured chap? Whatever it was, people wanted to talk about it, and they felt that this would not really be proper in the Weldons’ house. The party therefore began to break up immediately after the Grundys’ departure, and had completely disintegrated before midnight. Edgar Paget and his wife Rhoda were among the first to go, and they took with them their daughter Jennifer. The Pagets lived just outside The Dell, in Brambly Way, but Edgar had been responsible for selling several of the houses in The Dell, and exercised such a near-proprietorial interest in them that he was generally invited to parties.

  Jennifer, who was seventeen, spotty, and much larger than her parents, was silent on the way home, and remained silent while her father opened the cocktail cabinet and poured for himself and his wife their ritual night-cap. She longingly watched her father recork the whisky bottle. It was understood, but not by her, that she was too young to drink more than an occasional glass of sherry or white wine.

  Edgar settled himself into a chair, crossed one little leg over the knee of the other, and swung it jauntily. “Shows what happens when you make the mistake of letting in our coloured friends.”

  “And their fancy ladies.” Rhoda Paget was no taller than her husband, and was indeed an almost square little lady, but where Edgar’s features were malleable, capable of constant change, Rhoda’s solid trunks of legs, square figure, firmly defined features, might have been made out of metal. “It wasn’t Kabanga, though, there was some sort of row upstairs.”

  “Shouldn’t let ‘em in. Great mistake to let them in to The Dell.”

  “Don’t see how you can stop them.”

  “Not stop them?”

  “One man’s money’s as good as another’s, I suppose.” Rhoda was fond of making such apparently bold statements.

  Her husband did not reply directly to this remark.

  “You can always stop them. There are ways and means. I was saying to that lout Grundy, when you let them in, what do they do? Cause trouble.”

  “It was Grundy who caused the trouble.” At this speech of Jennifer’s her parents, for the first time, gave her their attention. “He attacked her, tore her dress.”

  “You weren’t upstairs,” her mother said sharply.

  “I was. I was in the lav, and I heard her scream. Then when I came out she was standing in the doorway of Caroline’s room and her dress was torn. She came out and there he was behind her. She’d scratched his face, it was bleeding.”

  “The dirty dogs,” Edgar said. “The dirty dogs.” It was not clear to whom he was referring.

  Rhoda fixed her daughter with a heavy, steely glance.

  You didn’t actually see him do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Attack her.”

  There was a fractional hesitation before Jennifer replied. “He had his hand on her shoulder. You know, pressing it, trying to hold her. But she broke away from him.”

  “I expect she led him on.” Edgar got up, walked over to the modern tiled fireplace which was empty of heat, and put his hands behind his back. “I can’t understand the women who go about with these coloured chaps…”

  They listened to him, Jennifer looking modestly down at the carpet, Rhoda staring sometimes at her daughter.

  The Jellifers were among the last to leave, and before they went they had heard from the Weldons as much as their hosts could tell them of the scene on the staircase. They lived in the next block of houses, and it took them only a couple of minutes to walk home across the path that separated them. Jack Jellifer felt, as always, a slight stirring of self-satisfaction as he stepped into their own hall and appreciated the good taste with which it was furnished, the appropriateness of the prints about eating and drinking on the walls, the rightness of the one good original picture in their living-room, a sort of abstract with a central shape strongly suggestive of a fish. Little bits of rather good furniture, ingenious standard lamps, unobtrusive carpets, blended into one harmonious whole.

  “People say these houses haven’t got any individuality, that they’re like each other,” Jack was fond of saying. “What they don’t understand is that a house is simply a machine for living. You want it to be comfortable, warm, easy to run, like these houses. Then you stamp your own individuality on it.” Now in his early forties, and just a little jowly and paunchy from conscientious adherence to his duty of eating and drinking, Jack had been extremely good looking in youth, and he retained still a fine fleshy operatic handsomeness, a ponderous elegance of manner that was impressive in its way. Arlene, when she had gone upstairs to make sure that their son Charles was sound asleep, came down and stood smiling at him. Arlene had a style too, the style of a beautiful parrot. Her clothes blared at you, her dark eyes signalled what seemed an invitation to pleasure, her cheeks were brightly-coloured as a doll’s. She waited expectantly while Jack poured the brandy. Should it be aerated in gargantuan goblets or put into vessels more modest? Jack, who firmly believed – and had often said so on radio and television – that one shape of glass was suitable for almost any drink, poured the brandy, stuck his nose into the glass, gravely approved, offered it, sipped, rolled the drink on tongue and palate, swallowed, spoke.

  “Rather a curious business. What can old Sol have been up to?”

  “He’s frustrated.”

  “Would you say so?”

  “He’s got every right to be. Who’d be warmer in bed, Marion or an icicle?” Arlene’s laugh was ra
ther surprisingly coarse and jolly.

  “You really think that?” Jack frowned at his brandy.

  “Still, feeling frustrated is one thing, tearing a girl’s clothes off is another.”

  “Our Solomon has blotted his copybook, has he? You’d never do such a thing yourself, of course.”

  “Certainly not,” Jack said with stiff pomposity.

  “I hope I can take my pleasures in a civilised manner.”

  “I’m sure you can.” Arlene’s gaze was brightly mocking. “All the same, I do agree it was a bit queer. I mean, you only do that sort of thing when you’re pretty tight, and it didn’t seem to me old Sol was all that tight. Do you suppose he knew her already?”

  “I’ve no idea.” Jack conveyed the distastefulness of this sort of speculation.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “I don’t see you’ve any reason to say he did or didn’t.”

  “Oh, don’t be such an old stuffed shirt. Come to bed.” Half-reluctantly, half-willingly, he allowed her to take his hand and pull him out of the living room.

  “My God, what a shambles.” Cigarette butts stubbed out in plants, dregs of drink left in glasses, bits of half-eaten sausage rolls, all the characteristic debris of a party, confronted Dick and Caroline Weldon. Gloria and Cyprian had been sent to bed, and they were smoking a last cigarette.

  “We ought to do some washing up.” Caroline leaned back on the sofa, stretched like a cat.

  “Saturday tomorrow. Leave it till the morning.”

  Tentatively, a cat probing at some possibly forbidden feast of delicious fish, Caroline said, “Rather a flop tonight, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh I don’t know. Do you know, I think I’m going to have my pipe.” Caroline watched with pleasure as he put out his half-smoked cigarette, stuffed tobacco into the pipe bowl, tamped it down, lit up and puffed. That pipe smoke rising at the end of the day had been the herald of some of their most cherished confidences. With the pipe properly going, Dick conceded: “It wasn’t too good. Not really our fault, though. After all, if you have chaps like old Sol going berserk, it’s enough to break up any party. I must say I thought it was rather much.”