Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

‘Pay for it?’ repeated Daniel, astonished.

‘Expensive things, motor cars,’ said the man.

By now several people had come out of their houses, or stopped in passing, and were as outraged as Daniel. ‘You are a drunk, and a murderer,’ he said.

‘Steady on,’ repeated the man. ‘Let’s try to keep things decent, eh?’

‘Decent? Decent?’ Daniel felt the rage rise up in him, hatred mixed with contempt, and instinct overtook him.

He took the man’s throat in his left hand, pulled his right fist back past his ear, and drove it straight into the drunkard’s face. There was an explosion of blood from the man’s nose, and he put his hands to his face. Daniel kicked his legs from under him, and he went down on the pavement.

Constable Dusty Miller appeared at that point.

In those days policemen were numerous and ubiquitous, and were able to summon other policemen by blowing vigorously on a whistle. Many was the mischievous child who possessed an Acme Thunderer, with which to decoy the police for the entertainment of their friends.

Dusty Miller had happened to be in the kitchen of The Grampians, drinking tea kindly supplied by Millicent and Cookie. When he had realised that there was a fracas on the street outside, he had been faced with a dilemma: either to get there quickly and give himself away as a covert tea drinker in a forbidden kitchen, or to find a long way round that would save face, but possibly allow the fracas to get further out of hand.

He chose the latter course and ran down to the end of the garden, where he scrambled over the wall, turned right and sprinted round up the alleyway, appearing on the scene, breathless and red-faced, thirty seconds later, just in time to see Daniel felling the drunk.

‘Stand back! Stand back!’ he ordered, wearily resigning himself to having to intervene in a fight. It was the one thing he least liked to do. Keeping calm was impossible, and conquering one’s own fear never became any easier. Fortunately there was no fight. The crowd had gathered round Daniel and the fallen man, wondering with admiring horror what Daniel would do next.

‘What’s all this about?’ demanded Constable Miller, and Daniel gestured towards where the children lay by the wall.

‘One child almost certainly dead, and another with broken legs,’ said Daniel, panting, ‘because this cretin ran them down when he was drunk.’

The policeman hurried to where the children lay and knelt by them. ‘Oh my word,’ he said. ‘Has anyone gone for an ambulance?’

‘We have a telephone in the house,’ said Ottilie. ‘We’ve called for one. And Rosie and I were both with the VAD.’

‘Well, thank God for telephones,’ said Constable Miller. He got to his feet and turned to Daniel, who was flexing his fingers. ‘You were committing an assault, sir. You should know better than to take the law into your own hands. I ought to be arresting you.’

‘He got what was rightly comin’,’ said the cats’ meat man. ‘Poor little kids. He’s a feckin’ murderer, that’s what he is. No doubt about it.’

There was a murmur of agreement, and a respectable woman dressed in a fur coat and a hat with a prodigious feather sticking out of it said, ‘You can’t arrest him, Constable. There aren’t any witnesses.’

‘No witnesses?’ repeated the constable. ‘What? With all you lot here?’

‘We didn’t see nothing,’ said the gaslighter.

‘I saw it,’ said the policeman.

‘No, you didn’t,’ said the muffin man. ‘None of us saw sod all, including you.’

‘Help me, help,’ whimpered the drunk, and the policeman prodded him in the ribs with his boot. ‘You shut up,’ he said. ‘And get up.’ He took out his notebook. ‘I need names and addresses of all you lot who saw what happened when the kids got hit,’ he said. ‘And as for you, sir, I don’t care if you’re the King himself, you don’t take the law into your own hands. Do I make myself clear?’

Daniel nodded, feeling ashamed. He had not previously realised that he had so much anger and stress pent up inside. ‘I’m sorry, Constable,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I lost control.’

‘Well, sir, it’s understandable under the circumstances. We’ll let it pass, shall we?’

A motorised ambulance arrived. The drunk was led away by Dusty Miller, who propelled him along to the station with frequent prods in the small of the back, and gradually the little knot of people dispersed. Ottilie and Rosie insisted on going in the ambulance with the children, and were not resisted, since ambulancemen did not defy middle-class women who had the habit of command, and vital nursing experience to go with it. They came back two hours later with the news that the little ragged blond boy who looked like an angel had died an hour after admission. Millicent and Cookie cried in the kitchen, and the sisters wept in the drawing room. Daniel went for a walk at high speed, three times around the perimeter of the golf course. Upon his return he started up the AC and parked it in the driveway. Ottilie cut flowers from the garden and laid them on the front wall at the scene of the accident, and Mrs McCosh went to her bedroom. The whole thing had reminded her too greatly of that awful day in Folkestone, when she had seen the child’s severed head looking up at her from a doorstep.

That night, having sobbed again over the death of the boy, Rosie lay in bed clutching her plaster statue of the Virgin, thinking about what Daniel had done. She had found his violence frightening and repulsive, but completely understandable. She had watched it with fascination, and done nothing to stop it. Despite herself, she could not help but admire his moral outrage, his energy and strength. She thought that for him there must have been some catharsis after so many years of strain. She realised that she hated that driver as much as Daniel must have done, and found herself hoping that something a lot worse than a broken nose would happen to him. ‘Sometimes I’m not really a very good Christian,’ she thought, and she fell asleep wondering if Ash or Hutch would have punched the drunk.

ROSIE WENT DOWN to the Tarn to sit on her own and think about things, and on the way home she heard a pathetic mewing as she passed one of the houses near the church. At first she could not locate it, but when she peered over the low wall, she saw a hessian bag in the darkness between the wall and the laurel hedge. It was too far to reach by bending over, and she was reluctant to go into a stranger’s driveway.

She looked around hastily, saw nobody, put her bag down and, without thought to her clothes, clambered onto the wall. By lying along it, she could just reach down a hand and lift the bag out. She just had it in her right hand, when a voice said, ‘Are you all right, miss?’

Rosie hastily got off the wall, very abashed, and dusted the moss and grit off her front. ‘It’s all right, Constable,’ she said, looking up. ‘I was just rescuing these kittens.’

‘Kittens, eh?’ repeated Dusty Miller. ‘Let’s have a look, then.’

Rosie struggled with the knot in the neck of the bag, and gave up. ‘You have a try,’ she said, handing it to him.

Dusty Miller could not untie it either, so he handed the bag back to Rosie and fetched his penknife from his pocket. He cut the bag as Rosie held it, and said, ‘What have we got here, then?’

He took the two tiny creatures out and held one in each hand, showing them to Rosie. Their eyes were only just open and their ears still flat on their heads. There was a ginger-and-white shorthair, and a silver tabby that was clearly going to be long-haired.

‘I just don’t know how people can be so cruel,’ said Rosie. ‘They’re so sweet. How can anyone just throw them away and leave them to die?’