The Little Walls by Winston Graham

  When I saw him for the second time he had gained on me; he must have been almost trotting, and it showed his condition after being nearly drowned. I put on a spurt and tried to think of Grevil, because thinking of him seemed to feed the right fires; hatred curiously did not seem to come from that, but determination did and a greater, detachment.

  And so thinking, I came round a corner and found an inhabited house, and then another, and suddenly was in Poltano.

  By now, a thousand feet below us, Amalfi might be moving into the afternoon shadow, but in the square of San Stefano the sun hammered down with all its midday heat. It was dusty and deserted except for a few pigeons pecking among the loose stones. A half-dozen plane trees drooped in the centre of the square and not a leaf moved on them. Two sides of the square were occupied by small houses, a third by the inevitable café and a few shops, and the fourth by the cathedral, a queer flat-faced church in black and white marble with a Campanile beside it and olive trees climbing steeply behind. In front of the cathedral a car was parked and three or four bicycles, the only sign that life had not left here as it had left the mills and the cottages below.

  I looked at my watch and wondered because it was past siesta time. But the only things stirring were the swallows. They broke both the stillness and the silence, round the cathedral dome and the Campanile they flew, darting and swerving and endlessly twittering, in order or sequence, crossing and recrossing each other’s flight scrawling swift meaningless lines over the slate sky. Martin Coxon had gone. He had been perhaps three minutes ahead of me, and had evidently made good use of the time. Number 15, Piazza San Stefano, Sanbergh had said. I walked round the square and saw 10—it would be on the other corner. It wasn’t a detached villa as I’d expected but the corner house of the row, a narrow two-storied place with a balcony with some hibicus in pots. I went to the door and knocked sharply.

  There was no answer Only the hot sun and the dust and the silence. I knocked again and then tried the door. It opened. There were steps up and a door on this level. I chose the steps and was half-way when the door opened and an old woman in black looked out with a suspicious angry face.

  ‘‘Signora Winter?’’ I said.

  I got the expected gabble of Italian, but I did pick out the word Duomo and could easily understand the pointed trembling hand. ‘‘The man?’’ I said. ‘‘Signore Coxon. Where is the man?’’

  ‘‘Si, si, si, si.’’ She nodded her head and pointed impatiently. If Coxon had in fact been here, this was the second disturbance she’d suffered in five minutes. The pointing hand began to wave up and down from the wrist indicating that she expected me to go.

  I turned and walked across the square to the church. The noise of the swallows made the silence more intense, as the humming of bees will. A couple of pigeons edged cautiously away from my footsteps. I pushed open the door of the church and went in.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I shall never forget going out of the dusty empty silent sunbaked square into the hum and light of a church full of people. It was like finding a dynamo in a desert. All the way from Amalfi I had only seen three people apart from Martin. There were half a dozen men standing by the door, and they turned to stare at me before looking back towards the altar. A funeral service was on.

  Of course the church wasn’t full, but it had that first: look—there were probably fifty or sixty people in the centre aisle; until a minute ago I should not have thought there were sixty people in five miles. The coffin lay under a silk catafalque; there were more candles than people, and the yellow light threw a discreet sheen over the jewelled cross and the madonnas and the emblazened saints. The dull black of the family mourners pointed the contrast between earth and heaven.

  It took me only a minute to pick out Leonie. Her fair head was alien among the dark ones. She was on the edge of the crowd, against a twisted rococo pillar; and Martin was beside her. They were both looking towards the door, and they had both seen me.

  I began to edge my way towards them. It wasn’t easy’’ because the priest in his rich white robe was just then waving a censer over the coffin, and the people were kneeling and crossing themselves.

  When she saw me coming towards them Leonie said something sharply to Martin, and he began to edge out of the crowd in the opposite direction. I think he pressed her hand before he went. After he’d slid out of the crowd, he moved away up the side aisle towards one of the unlighted lady chapels.

  Although the Italian Church is tolerant of people moving around when a service is on, I got one or two black looks from the people I had to negotiate. She was edging her way out to meet me. She had moved to cat me off, in case I went straight after him.

  We were stall among people when I said: ‘‘I’m sorry. This is the wrong funeral. I arranged a much quieter one.’’

  She stared into my eyes. ‘‘ Martin told me. Thank God it didn’t come off.’’

  ‘‘Is that the way you feel about it?’’

  ‘‘If s the only way to feel. Philip, the Old Testament eye-for-an-eye can only do worse harm here. Please listen.’’

  ‘‘While he gets away?’’

  ‘‘There’s no way out that end. But even if there was …’’

  Although we’d spoken in whispers the people about us were staring and frowning.

  She said urgently: ‘‘ Please listen, Philip. I want you to let him go freely. Revenge on Martin can do no good now. Nobody will ever know all the truth about Grevil’s death, but it was not by Martin’s wish nor choice that he died. Oh, I know what he did was about the lowest thing there could be—but they were two men living on different levels—of conduct, I mean. Your brother’s attitude—his suicide—put what Martin did out of proportion, magnified it, made it something bigger than the contemptible trick that it was …’’

  She broke off because the people had turned on us. I thought they were going to surround us with protests and waving hands, but then I saw that the service was over and the coffin was being carried to the door. We stood in silence to watch it until it had disappeared through the crimson curtains; then the people began to shuffle after it, pressing to get out. For a minute or so we were separated. My feeling for her, which had got smothered in the last hours, had flared up at sight of her again; but her trying to defend Martin, her quite obvious sympathy with him, her siding with him against me, turned it back on itself, made poison of it, so that her being that way got the reaction she most wanted to avoid, reanimating a purpose in me that had been half thrown off.

  The crowd dwindled, like sand in the neck of an hourglass, fifty grains, twenty grains, and then the last was gone. The church was empty except for the priest snuffing the candles and myself—and Leonie standing out white in the darkening church—and somewhere Martin.

  I moved up the side aisle. She came across to bar my way.

  I said: ‘‘ Keep out of this, Leonie.’’

  ‘‘Stop it, Philip. You’re—you’re crazy.’’

  ‘‘Yes,’’ I said, ‘‘it’s a family failing. I’m going to make the most of it.’’

  As I pushed past her she wrenched at my arm, ‘‘You fool, that’s just what it’s not! There’s never been a better-balanced person than you, Philip, nor a nicer one. Don’t let his drive you to extremes. It isn’t worth it—nothing is worth that.’’

  The priest had put out the last candle. Evidently our voices had raised no particular alarm or interest in him, because he switched off the light above the altar and went out without even glancing at us.

  The church was suddenly dark. It had become no longer a place for worship. Now it was empty, I noticed that the whole floor of the place sloped uphill towards the east. An extraordinary pulpit stood near the door, a thing with crouched lions supporting twisted columns and a stone chariot-like platform, tricked out with hideous gargoyles. More Assyrian in inspiration than Christian. So perhaps my impulses. Both came from the older things.

  I heard Martin then. His footstep clattered against a
stone step. It sounded as if he were at the extreme end of the church behind the high altar.

  I pulled my arm free from Leonie’s fingers. Probably if I’d looked at her then it would all have been different.

  I went up the hill of the central nave.

  At best it must have been a dark church, because there were hardly any windows high up for the sun to come through. But I think the place had just now come into the shadow of the steep slopes behind.

  I said in a fairly loud voice: ‘‘Martin!’’

  He didn’t answer. Near the main altar I went more slowly, sensing danger but not sure where it lay. So far as I knew he had no weapon—though weapons of a sort could be had in plenty in this church. The clip of a sandal on the stone floor told me that Leonie was following.

  I saw him as I went round behind the altar. He was standing at the top of some steps which looked as if they might lead to a crypt. There were similar steps at the other side. In the half light I couldn’t see his face properly, only the shadows that lay across it, and the dark sockets of his eyes. He had nothing in his hands.

  He said: ‘‘Well Philip …’’

  ‘‘Well, Martin.’’

  ‘‘Leonie thought she could turn you back. She overestimated her influence.’’

  I said: ‘‘Will you come outside or have we to finish it here?’’

  ‘‘I’m not going to fight you.’’

  ‘‘I think you will.’’

  ‘‘I’ve told you.’’

  ‘‘It’s too late for talking.’’

  It seemed then to me that it was vitally important that I should give neither of them any more time. If I did I should be out-manceuvred, with the two of them against me. I went slowly up to Coxon.

  As I got to him he stepped away from the threshold of the steps, suddenly came at me with both fists. It didn’t surprise me but I took more on the face and head than I needed, watching for the foul or the villainous kick.

  They didn’t come. But he did, following up, I could see, to put me out in the first rush because his strength was half spent. Reeling, I went back against, an effigy of St Peter, and a chair slid screaming across the stone floor. There, against the railings, I shook myself and stood up to him and gave blow for blow, no gloves on this but bone against bone, like old fighters whom exhaustion has robbed of the last finesse.

  Then I drove him away before me and we lurched against a table with candles on it; the candles leaned all askew and a bunch of them rolled chattering to the floor. He slid away as the table overset, and turned and stumbled down the steps to the crypt Leonie cried out something to me as I went after him.

  Not a crypt, but the tomb where the sacred relics of the patron saint were kept. A single blue point of light burned above the sarcophagus. Before I could reach him he had come to the ledge before the tomb—there were more candles, but on it also a tall wrought-iron candle-snuffer. He picked it up and turned. I stopped and we looked at each other.

  There was blood on his face. The paleness was vividly stained. He looked like a wax saint come to miraculous liquefaction.

  I walked towards him. He lifted the iron-snuffer. I hesitated, took another step. With a sudden contemptuous gesture he flung the snuffer away; it clattered down upon the marble floor. He turned and walked away towards the other steps which led back into the church again.

  I caught him, and we fell very heavily together. A sudden jerk up of the knee told me he could have fought that way if he’d wanted to. But now it was too late. I got him by the throat, and his own fingers weren’t strong enough to break the grip. Then he looked at me and smiled slightly, and deliberately struggled no more.

  I held on, but I had known instantly that I couldn’t tighten my grip any more. At the last the mind has to direct the muscle, and the mind would not. It was not he who was cheating me by this last refusal to straggle—it was myself.

  I let go suddenly, feeling my hands unclean, part guilty of an evil act. I stayed there for some seconds or minutes, I don’t know which, because there was no breath left in me either and my heart was thumping in my ears.

  ‘‘No,’’ I said. ‘‘Your business … is to go on living.’’

  I got up and began to shiver. I leaned against the wall of the crypt and shivered and shook, at first letting go in the complete reaction, and then struggling to stop it, straggling to get control. He lay on the steps where I’d left him. He wasn’t moving yet.

  The crypt began to go round, and I reeled up the steps, clutching at a slipping world. I got to the top and something in that small ascent was like climbing away from the Pit. Someone was saying something to me.

  ‘‘No,’’ I, said to her, ‘‘ I haven’t killed him.’’

  She covered her face in her hands. ‘‘Oh, thank God!’’

  ‘‘Yes,’’ I said foolishly. ‘‘That’s about it.’’

  ‘‘You’re hurt, Philip … Let me——’’

  ‘‘No, I’m all right …’’ I did for a second feel better. Only I wished the church wasn’t tilting so much. In the increasing slant I saw her now clearly for the first time. I seemed to have been killing what I loved as well as what I hated.

  ‘‘Dear Philip, I tried so hard——’’

  ‘‘Go down to him,’’ I said. ‘‘ I think he—needs some help. And—you’re the person to give it him, aren’t you?’’

  She looked at me slowly. ‘‘Yes … I’m the person to give it him. He’s my husband, you know.’’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I don’t remember much about the journey down, except for one bit of it. I suppose I must have left her then and gone straight out of the church. I think she said something else before I went, but I never knew what it was.

  I do remember the shock, like another blow, to come out into the sun. The heat was going, but it seemed wrong that there was any light at all. And the swallows still darted and wheeled and twittered, busy with a sky-writing no one could read. There was something running down my face and I thought it was sweat. I’d walked right through the empty dusty square and out of the village before something dripped on my hand and I saw it was blood.

  I took out my handkerchief then and tried to close up the gash that his knuckles had made. The people must still have been at the funeral, because I don’t think I met anyone all the time I was doing this. I didn’t stop walking. It’s the first and only time in my life I’ve known what it is to be punch-drunk. My legs carried on, all the time just about to fold up but never quite doing that. Of course I wasn’t only punch-drunk from Martin’s fists.

  The thing I do remember was after I had been walking for a good bit I came to a piece of the road where a hairpin bend skirted the edge of a precipice. The fall was probably a hundred feet, and at the bottom were a lot of loose white boulders like big skulls that had been bleached in the sun. I stopped there at last and leaned over the parapet and thought very clearly about everything.

  I thought, this is the lowest you’ll ever be in your life—you’ve lost everything, Grevil and Leonie and all the things you’ve come most to care about; you’ve failed in everything you’ve set out to do, every single thing, and you’ve finished up by failing yourself. This is rock bottom. I looked over the precipice and thought, this is the time to take your own life—it no longer has the slightest attraction for you; indeed, far worse than that, it’s a poison in the mouth that makes you want to escape. Well, here’s the way. It’s all laid on.

  And I looked down again and thought, I really would at this second like to finish it off—but to do that there’s not only got to be the thought, there has to be the impulse—and there just isn’t any impulse, none at all. I could stand here for twenty-four hours and not even put my knee on the parapet. So perhaps that explodes that. I wasn’t even going to be a failure in the grand style.

  I remember smiling wryly to myself and thinking, perhaps there’s more of Arnold in you and less of Grevil than you supposed. Perhaps this is why you never got to be a successful pai
nter. Perhaps this is the advantage of being ordinary and commonplace and having both feet on the ground.

  I went on then.

  I suppose it took me best part of an hour to get down to the road to Amalfi, and then luck was with me, because a bus came along marked Sorrento and I put up my hand, and because I looked such a mess the driver stopped in astonishment and picked me up. The conductor helped me in through the mass of strap-hangers and someone gave me his seat, and I shook my head at the questions and just said ‘‘accidente’’ two or three times. Somebody wanted to pay my fare, but I found a crumpled thousand lire note in my pocket and booked all the way to Sorrento. From there I might be able to hire a boat.

  I don’t know how many miles it is to Sorrento, but it is by way of one of the most fantastic roads in Europe. It’s as if the genius of all Italian road builders came to flower in it. It seems never to be more than six feet from a thousand-foot precipice and many of the hairpin bends are so acute that the bus has to stop and reverse to the edge of the cliff to get round. Now and then It swoops down into a bright-coloured fishing village, but soon it soars up again to the old heights.

  Soon after I got into the bus I began to feel sick, and the swinging of the bus and the twisting panorama of sea and sky made the nausea worse. I didn’t think of it then, but I’d eaten nothing that day except a roll and coffee for breakfast. Several times I thought I should have to stop the bus and get out, but somehow I stuck in my seat. After about ten minutes the conductor got some first-aid kit from a box at the front and insisted on pressing sticking-plaster on my cheek and dabbing something that stung on a bruise on my forehead and on my lip.

  I knew now I’d been wrong to try again after the first attempt to kill Martin. That expenditure of spirit had been enough. The impulse to go on to the bitter end, provoked finally in the church, had sprung from the need to finish for ever with him and what he had done and the things he stood for. But it had been doomed and damned from the start.