Dance and Skylark by John Moore

Author:John Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

III

On His way home Mr. Handiman paused out of habit to lean upon the parapet of the old bridge and stare at the river. The parapet was made of soft sandstone and its top was notched with smooth rounded grooves where a dozen generations of men and boys had sharpened their pocket-knives. Mr. Handiman had carved his initials there with his tenth-birthday knife in the year of Mafeking. How many hundreds of times, on summer evenings, had he leaned there since!

But never before had it passed through his mind, as it did now, that a man could cock his legs over that parapet as easily as when he crossed a stile and that with the river running so full there would be quite a short drop on the other side. After that, if the man couldn’t swim, there would be a minute or less of gasping and choking, and then nothing. No empty paying-in book, no kindly, puzzled, incredulous Mayor, no pompous Inspector Heyhoe reading the charge, no Quarter Sessions, no stern Recorder. He remembered how frightened he had been of the Recorder when, as Foreman of a Jury, he had helped to send a gipsy to prison for stealing a horse. All he had had to say was “Yes, my lord” and “Guilty, my lord,” yet he had trembled like a man with the palsy. Now he repeated to himself the terrible phrase, “Guilty, my lord,” and his mouth went dry as he did so. He leaned a little farther over the parapet, and saw the stars drowning in the swift dark current, and thought that if he sank down among them he would never have to say those words.

Yet nothing had happened to make his plight any worse to-day than it had been yesterday or the day before. John’s Agent hadn’t written, it was true, but John had said he didn’t really expect that letter with the cheques in it before Saturday. And still nobody suspected him, Mr. Handiman assured himself: certainly not the Bank Manager, who had rung him up—a terrible moment!—to discuss the arrangements for providing the programme sellers with change; certainly not Mr. Tasker, who had sent round a batch of Festival cheques for his signature; least of all the Mayor, who had put an arm round his shoulder and called him “Dear old George” when they stood watching the balloons go off from the hill.

Why, then, he asked himself, had he known all day such panic as he had experienced before only in dreams, pounding down lightless corridors with a nameless, shapeless, stealthy, swift Thing at his heels and a closed door, which he both longed and feared to open, at the corridor’s end? Perhaps it was the waiting that had got on his nerves: the waiting for somebody to find him out. Or perhaps it was the lack of sleep, for he had only dozed wretchedly and briefly during the last four or five nights. At any rate, to-day had been a long

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