Peter Guttridge - The Thing Itself

June, 1934

I was sitting in my suit in a corner of the room when she came home. City of Dreadful Night lay open in my lap. My father, a sunless man, had given me the bleak Victorian poem for my twelfth birthday. The gas jets were lit and the one behind my head cast my elongated shadow across the room.

‘You startled me,’ she said, her mouth somewhere between a smile and something more nervous. ‘I didn’t expect to see you today.’

I was sitting, left leg crossed over right, trousers on the left leg pulled up to avoid bagging at the knees, a narrow band of lardy, hairless leg between turn-up and sock.

‘Where have you been?’ I said.

‘To Hove — to that doctor we heard about. It’s all set for next week.’

I knew my temper scared her. I saw she was avoiding looking at my face, her eyes fixed instead on that narrow band of bare leg. Her eyes were still focused there when I stood. She looked up and saw my face. I moved towards her.

I felt I was in a cathedral or some vast building where the silence buzzed. That strange susurrus of sound that pressed on my ears. Then I realized the dim roar was inside, not outside my ears. My blood pumping through me in sharp surges. I checked my pulse with a finger on my wrist. My heart was beating quickly but not as rapidly as I expected.

I looked around me. Everything neat and in its place. I glanced down at my suit. I saw a dark spot on my waistcoat. I took my handkerchief from my pocket and rubbed at the spot. It didn’t budge, although there was a blossom of pink on the white cloth.

I needed to still my ears. I walked to the radiogram and turned it on. The bulb glowed red. I recognized the music that grew louder as the radio warmed up. Ketelbey’s In a Monastery Garden .

I picked up the packet of Rothmans on the table beside the sofa. I smoked two cigarettes, listening to the music, looking everywhere but at her. She lay face down on the floor, blood in a spreading halo around her head.

I should have felt regret. I knew that. But long ago, in Flanders, my emotions had been cauterized. I had returned unable to feel. Besides, the carcass lying splayed on the carpet was not the woman I had desired and, in my way, loved.

I’d explained the rules right at the start of our relationship. It was just a bit of fun. I would never leave my wife. I said things, of course. The things women liked to hear. But she knew — she must have known — that was just pillow talk.

I had been intoxicated by her. In bed there was nothing she wouldn’t do. Things my wife would never contemplate. Soiling things. I was shocked by some of her suggestions — she could be coarse, using phrases I’d never heard before — but I had enjoyed what she did with me, there was no doubt about that.

I tolerated her wish to be seen out in public. In the best places, places I had never taken my wife. A part of me liked being seen with her — she was as beautiful as a movie star — whilst another part worried about being seen. Especially as she laughed in a ribald way. She was loud and vulgar. In private, I accepted it. In public, I was faintly embarrassed.

For me, the life had gone out of her weeks before I’d killed her. It had drained away the day she said: ‘There’s something I have to tell you. It will come as a surprise to you — as it did to me.’

I knew she didn’t know about me. How could she? And so when she told me she was pregnant, she saw the immediate change in me but misunderstood the cause.

She sensed my heart harden but thought I was worried about a scandal. She promised to get rid of it but I could see she hoped to keep it.

It wasn’t the scandal. She didn’t know the reason. How could she? An abortion would make no difference.

I went to the kitchen and took her apron from behind the door. I put it on. I bent and opened the cupboard beneath the sink. I took out the toolbox. Removed the short saw.

I crossed to the window. I had a coppery taste in my mouth.

All I’d asked of her in return for this flat, the money, the expensive meals was fidelity.

I knew the baby wasn’t mine. It couldn’t be. My inability to give my wife a child had been a heavy burden for many years. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do the deed. It was that nothing ever came of it.

The day outside went on, unconcerned. Nothing in the street had changed . In a Monastery Garden was drawing to a close. It reminded me of the beautiful ruined frescoes I’d visited some months earlier in the churches on the South Downs whilst we were staying in Brighton.

I moved from the window to stand over her, the saw in my hand. The music stopped and there was silence. For a moment.

And then a hammering on the door.

I tilted my head. Silence, then the hammering again. A voice, faint through the solid wood. I strained my ears. I thought for a moment. I put the saw down. Though my hands were clean, I wiped them on the apron and walked to the door. I lifted the latch. I opened the door wide and half-turned.

‘Excuse the mess.’

Twenty years earlier

August 1914, and I was upstairs on the front seat of a London double-decker bus a few yards behind a Waring and Gillow pantechnicon. We should have been on Oxford Street but we were jostling along a cobbled road in northern France, lined by cheering peasants throwing flowers.

In the narrow seats behind me in the scarlet bus, tired soldiers dozed on each other’s shoulders. I didn’t have a shoulder to sleep on but I couldn’t sleep anyway, despite my exhaustion.

In the past week 80,000 of us — the British Expeditionary Force — had been mobilized and shipped over to fight the Bosch. A year earlier I’d lied about my age to enlist. In a couple of years other men would be lying about their ages to get out. But for the time being everyone was gung-ho and keen to get at the Hun, who was bayoneting Belgian babies and raping nuns and Red Cross nurses.

I’d been infected by Rudyard Kipling. Until 1910 I’d been at preparatory school in Rottingdean, outside Brighton, with his son Jack. Jack got a good-natured ribbing every May when we had to memorize and recite his father’s poem, Children’s Song , about our duty to the Empire. Personally, I believed the sentiments.

I liked Jack. We’d started chatting first when he’d seen me reading City of Dreadful Night and thought it was his father’s Indian story with the same title. We’d lost touch but I’d heard Jack had tried to get into the war in 1914 — his father had pushed him forward — but he was as blind as a bat so would be useless in battle.

Not that I’d had battle experience. I was wet behind the ears. Even so, I was a professional soldier, a Tommy Atkins. Kitchener’s amateur army came the following year.

I was in the Royal Sussex. Good lads but not all from Sussex. I’d palled up a bit with three ex-weavers from somewhere up north. Cousins: Jim, Jack and Ted. A salty bunch. Ted and Jack were both married men with two young ones apiece but they’d been reservists. All three men reckoned the war would be over by Christmas and they’d be home war heroes with the chance of better jobs.