Reflex Read online

  “White.”

  “What were they wearing?”

  “Jeans.”

  “Gloves?”

  She closed her eyes and whispered, “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Millace, please try to answer,” the policeman said. “What did they want?”

  “Safe,” she said, mumbling.

  “What?”

  “Safe. We haven’t got a safe. I told them.” A pair of tears rolled down her cheeks. “ ‘Where’s the safe?’ they said. They hit me.”

  “There isn’t a safe here,” Steve said furiously. “I’d like to kill them.”

  “Yes, sir,” the policeman said. “Just keep quiet, sir, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “One . . . smashed things,” Mrs. Millace said. “The other just hit me.”

  “Bloody animals,” Steve said.

  “Did they say what they wanted?” the policeman asked.

  “Safe.”

  “Yes, but is that all? Did they say they wanted money? Jewelry? Silver? Gold coins? What exactly did they say they wanted, Mrs. Millace?”

  She frowned slightly, as if thinking. Then, forming the words with difficulty, she said, “All they said was, ‘Where is the safe?’ ”

  “I suppose you do know,” I said to the policeman, “that this house was also burgled yesterday?”

  “Yes, I do, sir. I was here yesterday myself.” He looked at me assessingly for a few seconds and turned back to Steve’s mother.

  “Did these two young men in stocking masks say anything about being here yesterday? Try to remember, Mrs. Millace.”

  “I don’t . . . think so.”

  “Take your time,” he said. “Try to remember.”

  She was silent for a long interval, and two more tears appeared. Poor lady, I thought. Too much pain, too much grief, too much outrage: and a good deal of courage.

  At last she said, “They were . . . like bulls. They shouted. They were rough. Rough voices. They . . . shoved me. Pushed. I opened the front door. They shoved in. Pushed me . . . in here. Started . . . smashing things. Making this mess. Shouting, ‘Where is the safe? Tell us, where is the safe?’ Hit me.” She paused. “I don’t think . . . they said anything . . . about yesterday.”

  “I’d like to kill them,” Steve said.

  “Third time,” mumbled his mother.

  “What was that, Mrs. Millace?” the policeman said.

  “Third time burgled. Happened . . . two years ago.”

  “You can’t just let her lie there,” Steve said violently. “Asking all these questions . . . . Haven’t you got a doctor?”

  “It’s all right, Steve dear,” the neighborly woman said, moving forward as if to give comfort. “I’ve rung Dr. Williams. He said he would come at once.” Caring and bothered, she was nonetheless enjoying the drama, and I could envisage her looking forward to telling it to all her friends. “I was over here helping your mother earlier, Steve dear,” she said, rushing on, “but of course I went home—next door, as you know, dear—to get tea for my family, and then I heard all this shouting and it seemed all wrong, dear, so I was just coming back to see, and calling out to your mother to ask if she was all right, and those two dreadful young men just burst out of the house, dear, just burst out, so of course I came in here . . . and well . . . your poor mother . . . so I rang for the police and for the ambulance, and Dr. Williams . . . and everybody.” She looked as if she would like at least a pat on the back for all this presence of mind, but Steve was beyond such responses.

  The policeman was equally unappreciative. He said to her, “And you still can’t remember any more about the car they drove off in?”

  Defensively she said, “It was dark outside.”

  “A lightish colored car, medium sized. Is that all?”

  “I don’t notice cars much.”

  No one suggested that this was a car she should have noticed. Everyone thought it.

  I cleared my throat and said diffidently to the policeman, “I don’t know if it would be of any use, and of course you may want your own man or something, but I’ve a camera in my car, if you want photographs of all this.”

  He raised his eyebrows and considered and said yes; so I fetched both cameras and took two sets of pictures, in color and in black and white, with close-ups of Mrs. Millace’s damaged face and wide-angle shots of the room. Steve’s mother bore the flashlight without complaint, and none of it took very long.

  “Professional, are you, sir?” the policeman said.

  I shook my head. “Just had a lot of practice.”

  He told me where to send the photographs when they were printed, and the doctor arrived.

  “Don’t go yet,” Steve said to me, and I looked at the desperation in his face, and stayed with him through all the ensuing bustle, sitting on the stairs out in the hall.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said, joining me there. “I can’t drive like this, and I’ll have to go and see that she’s all right. They’re taking her to the hospital for the night. I suppose I can get a taxi . . .”

  He didn’t actually ask it, but the question was there. I stifled a small sigh and offered my services, and he thanked me as if I’d thrown him a lifebelt.

  I found myself finally staying the night, because when we got back from the hospital he looked so exhausted that one simply couldn’t drive away and leave him. I made us a couple of omelettes as by that time, ten o’clock, we were both starving, neither of us having eaten since breakfast; and after that I picked up some of the mess.

  He sat on the edge of the sofa looking white and strained and not mentioning that his fracture was hurting quite a bit. Perhaps he hardly felt it, though one could see the pain in his face. Whenever he spoke, it was of his mother.

  “I’ll kill them,” he said. “Those bastards.”

  More guts than sense, I thought; same as usual. By the sound of things, if nine-stone-seven Steve met up with the two young bulls, it would be those bastards who’d do the killing.

  I had started at the far end of the room, picking up a lot of magazines, newspapers and old letters, and also the base and lid of a flat ten-by-eight-inch box which had once held photographic printing paper.

  “What shall I do with all this?” I asked Steve.

  “Oh, just pile it anywhere,” he said vaguely. “Some of it came out of that rack over there by the television.”

  A wooden-slatted magazine rack, empty, lay on its side on the carpet.

  “And that’s Dad’s rubbish box, that battered old orange thing. He kept it in that rack with the papers. Never threw it away, just left it there, year after year. Funny really.” He yawned. “Don’t bother too much. Mum’s neighbor will do it.”

  I picked up a small batch of oddments; a transparent piece of film about three inches wide by eight long, several strips of 35-mm color negatives, developed but blank, and an otherwise pleasant picture of Mrs. Millace spoiled by splashes of chemical down the hair and neck.

  “Those were in Dad’s rubbish box, I think,” Steve said, yawning again. “You might as well throw them away.”

  I put them in the wastepaper basket, and added to them a nearly black black-and-white print, which had been torn in half, and some more color negatives covered in magenta blotches.

  “He kept them to remind himself of his worst mistakes,” Steve said. “It doesn’t seem possible that he isn’t coming back.”

  There was another very dark print in a paper folder, showing a shadowy man sitting at a table. “Do you want this?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Dad’s junk.”

  I put some women’s magazines and a series on woodwork back in the magazine rack, and piled the letters on the table. The bulk of the mess left on the floor seemed to be broken china ornaments, the remnants of a spindly-legged sewing box, which had been thoroughly smashed, and a small bureau, tipped on its side, with cascades of writing paper falling out of the drawers. None of the damage seemed to have had any purpose beyond a frightening show of power, all of
a piece with the pushing, shoving and shouting that Mrs. Millace had described. A rampage designed to confuse and bewilder, and when they got no results from attacking her possessions, they’d started on her face.

  I stood the bureau up again, shoveled most of the stuff back into it and collected together a heap of scattered tapestry patterns and dozens of skeins of wool. One began at last to see clear stretches of carpet.

  “Bastards,” Steve said. “I hate them. I’ll kill them.”

  “Why would they think your mother had a safe?”

  “God knows. Perhaps they just go around ripping off new widows, screaming ‘safe’ at them on the offchance. I mean, if she’d had one, she’d have told them where it was, wouldn’t she? After losing Dad like that. And yesterday’s burglary, while we were at the funeral. Such dreadful shocks. She’d have told them. I know she would.”

  I nodded.

  “She can’t take any more,” he said. There were tears in his voice, and his eyes were dark with the effort of trying not to cry. It was he, I thought, who was closest to the edge. His mother would be tucked up with sympathy and sedation.

  “Time for bed,” I said abruptly. “Come on. I’ll help you undress. She’ll be better tomorrow.”

  I woke early after an uneasy night and lay watching the dingy November dawn creep through the window. There was a good deal about life that I didn’t want to get up and face: a situation common, no doubt, to the bulk of mankind. Wouldn’t it be marvelous, I thought dimly, to be pleased with oneself, to look forward to the day ahead, to not have to think about mean-minded dying grandmothers and one’s own depressing dishonesty. Normally fairly happy-go-lucky, a taking-things-as-they-come sort of person, I disliked being backed into uncomfortable corners from which escape meant action.

  Things had happened to me all my life. I’d never gone out looking. I had learned whatever had come my way, whatever was there. Like photography, because of Duncan and Charlie. And like riding, because of my mother’s dumping me in a racing stable; and if she’d left me with a farmer, I would no doubt be making hay.

  Survival for so many years had been a matter of accepting what I was given, of making myself useful, of being quiet and agreeable and no trouble, of repression and introversion and self-control, that I was now, as a man, fundamentally unwilling to make a fuss or fight.

  I had taught myself for so long not to want things that weren’t offered to me that I now found very little to want. I had made no major decisions. What I had, had simply come.

  Harold Osborne had offered me the cottage, along with the job of stable jockey. I’d accepted. The bank had offered a mortgage. I’d accepted. The local garage had suggested a certain car. I’d bought it.

  I understood why I was as I was. I knew why I just drifted along, going where the tide took me. I knew why I was passive, but I felt absolutely no desire to change things, to stamp about and insist on being the master of my own fate.

  I didn’t want to look for my half-sister, and I didn’t want to lose my job with Harold. I could simply drift along as usual doing nothing very positive . . . and yet for some obscure reason that instinctive course was seeming increasingly unattractive.

  Irritated, I put my clothes on and went downstairs, peering in at Steve on the way and finding him sound asleep.

  Someone had perfunctorily swept the kitchen floor since the funeral-day burglary, pushing into a heap a lot of broken crockery and spilled groceries. The evening before I’d discovered the coffee and sugar dumped in the dust, but there was milk along with the eggs in the refrigerator, and I drank some of that. Then, to pass the time, I wandered around, just looking.

  The room which had been George Millace’s darkroom would have been far and away the most interesting had there been anything there; but the original burglary there had been the most thorough. All that was left was a wide bench down one side, two large deep sinks down the other and rows of empty shelves across the end. Countless grubby outlines and smudges on the walls showed where the loads of equipment had stood, and stains on the floor marked where he’d stored his chemicals.

  He had, I knew, done a lot of his own color developing and printing, which most professional photographers did not. The development of color slides and negatives was difficult and exacting, and it was safer, for consistent results, to entrust the process to commercial large-scale labs. Duncan and Charlie had sent all their color developing out; it was only the printing from negatives, much easier, that they had done themselves.

  George Millace had been a craftsman of the first order. Pity about his unkind nature.

  From the looks of things he had had two enlargers, one big and one smaller, enlargers being machines which held the negatives in what was basically a box up a stick, so that a bright light could shine through the negative onto a baseboard beneath.

  The head of the enlarger, holding the light and the negative, could be wound up and down the stick. The higher one wound the head above the baseboard, the larger one saw the picture. The lower the head, the smaller the picture. An enlarger was in fact a projector, and the baseboard was the screen.

  Besides the enlargers, George would have had an electric box of tricks for regulating the length of exposures, a mass of developing equipment and a drier for drying the finished prints. He would have had dozens of sheets of various types of photographic paper in different sizes, and light-tight dispensers to store them in. He would have had rows of files holding all his past work in reference order, and safelights and measuring jugs and paper-trimmers and filters.

  The whole lot, every scrap, had been stolen.

  Like most serious photographers he had kept his unexposed films in the refrigerator. They too had gone, Steve had said, and were presumably at the root of the vandalism in the kitchen.

  I went aimlessly into the sitting room and switched on the lights, wondering how soon I could decently wake Steve and say I was going. The half-tidied room looked cold and dreary, a miserable sight for poor Mrs. Millace when she got home. From habit and from having nothing else to do I slowly carried on from where I’d stopped the night before, picking up broken scraps of vases and ornaments and retrieving reels of cotton and bits of sewing from under the chairs.

  Half under the sofa itself lay a large black light-proof envelope, an unremarkable object in a photographer’s house. I looked inside, but all it seemed to contain was a piece of clear thickish plastic about eight inches square, straight cut on three sides but wavy along the fourth. More rubbish. I put it back in the envelope and threw it in the wastepaper basket.

  George Millace’s rubbish box lay open and empty on the table. For no reason in particular, and certainly impelled by nothing more than photographic curiosity, I picked up the wastepaper basket and emptied it again on the carpet. Then I put all of George’s worst mistakes back in the box where he’d kept them, and returned the broken bits of glass and china to the wastebasket.

  Why, I wondered, looking at the spoiled prints and pieces of film, had George ever bothered to keep them? Photographers, like doctors, tended to be quick to bury their mistakes, and didn’t usually leave them hanging around in magazine racks as permanent mementos of disaster. I had always been fond of puzzles. I thought it would be quite interesting to find out why such an expert as George should have found these particular things interesting.

  Steve came downstairs in his pyjamas looking frail and hugging his injured arm, wanly contemplating the day.

  “Good Lord,” he said. “You’ve tidied the lot.”

  “Might as well.”

  “Thanks, then.” He saw the rubbish box on the table, with all its contents back inside. “He used to keep that lot in the freezer,” he said. “Mum told me there was a terrible fuss one day when the freezer broke down and all the peas and stuff unfroze. Dad didn’t care a damn about the chickens and things and all the pies she’d made which had spoiled. All he went on and on about, she said, was that some ice-cream had melted all over his rubbish.” Steve’s tired face lit int
o a remembering smile. “It must have been quite a scene. She thought it was terribly funny, and when she laughed he got crosser and crosser . . .” He broke off, the smile dying. “I can’t believe he isn’t coming back.”

  “Did your father often keep things in the freezer?”

  “Oh sure. Masses of stuff. You know what photographers are like. Always having fits about color dyes not being permanent. He was always raving on about his work deteriorating after twenty years. He said the only way to posterity was through the deep freeze, and even that wasn’t certain.”

  “Well . . .” I said. “Did the burglars also empty the freezer?”

  “Good Lord.” He looked startled. “I don’t know. I never thought of that. But why should they want his films?”

  “They stole the ones that were in the darkroom.”

  “But the policeman said that that was just spite. What they really wanted was the equipment, which they could sell.”

  “Um,” I said. “Your father took a lot of pictures which people didn’t like.”

  “Yes, but only as a joke.” He was defending George, the same as ever.

  “We might look in the freezer,” I suggested.

  “Yes. All right. It’s out at the back, in a sort of shed.”

  He picked a key out of the pocket of an apron hanging in the kitchen and led the way through the back door into a small covered yard, where there were garbage cans and stacks of logs and a lot of parsley growing in a tub.

  “In there,” Steve said, giving me the key and nodding to a green-painted door set into a bordering wall; I went in and found a huge chest freezer standing between the motor lawnmover and about six pairs of rubber boots.

  I lifted the lid. Inside, filling one end and nestling next to joints of lamb and boxes of beefburgers, was a stack of three large gray metal cashboxes, each one closely wrapped in transparent plastic sheeting. Taped to the top was a terse message:

  DO NOT STORE ICE CREAM

  NEAR THESE BOXES

  I laughed.

  Steve looked at the boxes and the message and said, “There you are. Mum said he went berserk when it all melted, but in the end nothing of his was really damaged. The food was all spoiled, but his best transparencies were OK. It was after that that he started storing them in these boxes.”