Hammond Innes - The Doomed Oasis

David Thomas stood there, checked in the white beam of it. His fair hair was plastered down by the rain. His face was streaked with blood from a gash on his forehead, the left cheek bruised and filthy with mud. There was mud on his clothes, too; black, wet patches of it that clung to the sodden cloth. His jacket was ripped at the shoulder and one trouser leg was torn so badly that the flesh of his leg showed through the rent. He was breathing heavily as though he’d been running.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I said and switched on the light. His face was ghastly white, his eyes unnaturally wide. He looked scared out of his wits. ‘Well, I don’t expect they’ll think of looking for you in my office.’ I closed the door and walked past him and put the curtain straight. Then I took the guard from the fire and put some more coal on, poking it till a flame showed. And all the time I was conscious of him standing there, watching me in silence, too surprised, too scared probably, to move. I pushed the old arm-chair reserved for clients close to the hearth. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Take your jacket off and come and sit by the fire and dry yourself out.’ He did as I told him, too startled to have any initiative of his own left. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘just tell me what in God’s name made you do such a damn-fool thing?’

For a moment I thought he was going to close up on me the way that sort of kid does when things go wrong and people start asking questions. The sullen tough-boy look had come back into his face. ‘Take your time,’ I said. ‘There’s no hurry. You’ve got all evening if you want it.’ I thought I’d try flattery then. ‘Not many chaps manage to get away from the police so soon after being taken in charge. How did you do it?’

The tight lips relaxed slightly, a ghost of a smile. ‘Luck,’ he said. He was shivering and I poked the fire again, coaxing it into a blaze. They’d got a car to take me to one of their bloody jails. Said I’d feel more at home in the nick.’ His tone was a sneer.

‘And you made a break for it.’

‘Yeah. That’s right. There was only one of them in the back with me and I made a dive for it when they were driving down the Cowbridge Road. I hit the pavement and just about knocked myself out. They nearly had me then. But there was a pub I knew and I dived in there and got away out the back.’ And he added, ‘I said I’d see you in your office.’ There was a touch of bravado in the way he said it.

‘Your sister was here a little while back,’ I told him.

‘Sue? What did she want?’ He was on the defensive immediately.

‘Wanted me to help you.’

‘Help me?’ He gave a derisive laugh. ‘The only way you can help me is by giving me that address. That’s what I came for.’

‘Your mother’s worried sick,’ I told him.

‘So what?’

I lost patience with him then. ‘Can’t you get it into your thick head that your actions affect other people? Stop being so damned irresponsible. The police phoned your mother that you’d escaped and now she’s half out of her mind-’

But he wasn’t interested in the heartbreak he was causing other people. ‘She should have thought of that before she wrote me that letter,’ he said. ‘She was half out of her mind then. Did Sue tell you I’d two more months to do in a Borstal Institute?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I had. Two more months and I’d have been out and in the clear. And then I got this letter threatening she’s going to commit suicide. Your Da’s driving me to it, she said, and I can’t stand it any more. And then to come home and find she’s been holding out on me all the time, kidding me I was that drunken old fool’s son. Christ! And you talk about being irresponsible.’

‘It isn’t an easy thing for a woman to tell her son.’

‘She’d nineteen years. In nineteen years she ought to have been able to screw up her courage. Instead, she drives the old man to fling it in my face.’ He stared at the fire, his shoulders hunched, his face bitter. ‘Does Sue know?’ he asked at length. ‘Does she know she’s illegitimate?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what does she feel about it?’

‘She said she’d known for a long time — deep down.’

‘Then why the hell didn’t she tell me?’

‘1 said — deep down. Her mother didn’t tell her. She just knew.’

He looked sulky then. ‘We never kept anything from each other before.’

‘It’s not the sort of thing you want to share with anybody else,’ I said.

‘Too right, it isn’t.’ He suddenly beat his fist against the arm of the chair. ‘Christ! If I’d only known before.’

‘It wouldn’t have helped you,’ I told him.

He thought about that for a moment and then he nodded. ‘No, I guess you’re right.’ And he added, ‘I always wondered why the old man hated my guts.’ He leaned suddenly forward, picked up the poker and jabbed at the fire. ‘Guess I hated his guts, too,’ he said viciously.

‘Well, he’s dead now,’ I said. ‘Did you know that?’

He nodded and let go of the poker so that it clattered into the grate. ‘Yep. They told me that. Croaked on the way to hospital, blast him.’

His attitude to the man’s death shocked me. ‘For God’s sake!’ I said. ‘Haven’t you any compassion for the man who was a father to you?’

‘He wasn’t my father,’ he cried. ‘I told you that before.’

‘He was your father in the eyes of the law.’

I Then the law ought to be changed, oughtn’t it? You can’t make chalk cheese by a legal declaration.’

‘He supported you all the time you were growing up,’ I reminded him.

‘All right, he supported me. But he hated me all the same. I always knew that. When he took a strap to me, he enjoyed it. He hasn’t been able to do that for a long time now. But he’d other ways of getting at me, jeering at me because I read a lot, and at my Arab friends. Do you know what he’d done whilst I’d been in Borstal? I went up to my old room after you’d left. All my books on Arabia, every damn’ one of them, he’d pulled out and torn to pieces. The only books he hadn’t destroyed were the technical ones. I’d a lot of them on oil — geology, seismology, geophysics. He left me those because he didn’t think I cared about them.’ He stared at me. ‘Now he’s dead, and I’m glad. Glad, do you hear?’ His voice had risen and suddenly the tears were welling up into his eyes and he began to cry. ‘I didn’t mean to kill him,’ he sobbed. ‘Honest. I didn’t mean to.’ He broke down completely then, sobbing like a child, and I went over to him and gripped his shoulder. ‘It was an accident,’ I said, trying to steady him.

‘They don’t believe it.’

‘Did they prefer a charge?’

‘No, but they think I killed him. I know they do.’ And he burst out, ‘I haven’t a chance with them.’

‘You certainly haven’t made it any better by making a break for it like that.’ I was wondering whether I could persuade him to come back with me to the police station and give himself up. I hesitated and then walked over to the phone, but he was on his feet immediately. ‘What you going to do? Ring the police?’ There was panic in his voice.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m going to ring your home — get your mother down here, your sister, too.’

‘What for? What good’ll that do?’

‘If your mother makes a statement, explaining exactly how it happened-’

‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t do it. She’d rather have me hanged-’

‘Oh, don’t be childish,’ I said.

‘It’s true,’ he cried. ‘She told me so herself- after you’d gone.’ He followed me to the desk and his voice was intense, very serious: ‘She thinks I’m going to kill Whitaker if I ever lay my hands on him. And she loves him. After all these years, she still loves the man. I don’t understand it, but that’s how it is. You’d think after the swine had treated her like that, after he’d left her flat-’ He pulled a bloodstained handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. ‘When I got back this afternoon the old man was giving her hell. I could hear it out in the street. He was calling her all sorts of names. I suppose he was drunker than usual. He had that book of press-cuttings in his hand, and when I told him to shut his mouth, he taunted me with being a bastard, said he’d had all he could stand of another man’s whelps. And then he turned on my mother and added, ‘And all I can stand of another man’s whore. After all I’ve done to cover up for you,’ he said, ‘you creep off as soon as I’m out of the house to mope over your lover’s pictures.’ And he flung the book at her. That’s when I went for him.’ He paused, staring at me, his eyes over-bright. ‘That book was full of press-cuttings of him, pictures some of them. I’ve grown up with that book, grown up with the man himself. I know him, know his way of life, everything about him. It’s like I told you — he was a sort of God to me. I wanted to be like him, tough, independent, an adventurer in far places. I tried to get a job as a seaman on ships going out that way from Cardiff docks, but at first I was too young, and then there was the Union. I even tried to stow away once. And now I find he’s no more than a rotten, dirty little sham who’d leave a woman to bear her twins alone. I told Ma I’d kill him if I ever laid hands on him. Remember? You were there when I said it.’