Murther and Walking Spirits Page 2

  I suppose all this sounds second-rate and tacky, but it was not our fate to live on a higher moral level in the world in which we found ourselves. That I should be killed, however – that put the affair in a different and lurid light.

  (5)

  AND I, the murdered man? My name is – was – still is, I suppose, Connor Gilmartin, and I am the Entertainment Editor of the Advocate. Thus Allard Going is one of my staff; I suppose I should call him a colleague, because it is not my way to lean too heavily on the writers who work under my direction; I recognize their right to a good deal of freedom in their work, and my directions are given more as suggestions than as orders, though there are times when I disagree totally with what they say, and the way they say it. It is woefully hard to find good, or even merely literate, writers, and they laugh at me when I say that sloppy, go-as-you-please writing carries less authority than decent prose. You must remember our public, they say. And indeed that is what I do, and I think the public is fully able to deal with the best they can produce. Patronizing the public, and assuming that it hangs, breathless, upon what it reads in the papers, is almost the worst of journalistic sins.

  My parish, as Hugh McWearie calls it, includes not only the writers about theatre, ballet, opera and films, as well as music, and painting, and architecture, and of course the book editor and his reviewers, but also some odds and ends – the stamp columnist, the astrology columnist, and the religion columnist. I even have a place under my umbrella for our restaurant critic, known in our trade as Madam Greedygut. They ought to be in Features, where Esme is, but in some ways our paper is ill-organized. McWearie, who writes about religion, is, I suppose, my best friend, which many people find strange, for McWearie, a stern Scot, is not on first acquaintance a particularly attractive fellow. I like to go to his office now and then to smoke a pipe, for Hugh is an unrepentant smoker. Anti-tobacco zealots, of whom my wife is one, have persuaded the General Manager to outlaw smoking in all the public and general rooms of the building, but he did not go quite so far as to say that people might not smoke in private offices. I do not smoke in my own office, for Esme says I must set an example, but I sneak off to Hugh when I want tobacco and good conversation.

  Is that enough about me, for the present? As I wait in my apartment, observing my wife, who has no awareness of how near I am, I am amazed to see her go to a locked drawer in her desk, take out a package of cigarettes and light one. She smokes near a window, and carefully blows the smoke outside. She must be more shaken than she admits, or she would never revert to an old habit. She used to be a two-package-a-day woman, in the time when smoking was part of her persona as a woman of the world, and an angel of public compassion.

  (6)

  THE POLICE COME. They are commendably prompt in answer to her call. No need, surely, to describe the scene that follows. A doctor examines me, and measures, and makes careful notes. Detectives measure, and examine, and make careful notes. A constable with a stenographic machine takes down my wife’s statement. She is a little uncertain about the time of my murder; she loses a few minutes somewhere and who is to know but I? Understandably she cannot be too explicit, for she now permits them to see that she is shaken and distressed – more so than I have observed since my sudden taking-off. They remove my body, and I discover that I am in no way tied to it; indeed, I feel no impulse to follow them, for I know what nasty things they are going to do with it, and where they are going to store it until they have found out all they can from it. I prefer to stay with Esme, because I want to see what she will do in this unusual situation.

  To my astonishment, I have begun to feel hungry, but this familiar sensation abates as soon as the police have wrapped my body in a winding-sheet of coarse cotton and carried it away. I recall having been told by a biologist that the digestive process continues for something like forty-five minutes after death, and clearly the carcass that is lugged to the waiting truck is still busy at its work.

  (How do medical people know this particular piece of post mortem information? My friend told me that it had been established as long ago as 1887, when two curious French physiologists, Regnard and Loye, examined the bodies of two decapitated French criminals in the cart in which they were lugged away from the guillotine. One thinks of Regnard and Loye, hacking and peeping in the jolting cart, as the horses dragged them toward the murderers’ graveyard. What devotion to science!)

  When my body is taken away, my hunger goes with it. My gut and I have bid farewell forever. But my powers of observation are at a peak.

  My wife’s performance for the police filled me with admiration. What an actress was lost to the stage when she chose journalism. Perhaps if her television career develops as she wishes, that brilliance may not be wholly lost.

  She displayed a refined dramatic sense, not sobbing or giving way to hysteria, but like a woman of strong character who finds herself in a trying position and is determined to meet it with courage. She would not embarrass the young constable who took her statement, but from time to time she hesitated, and I could see how deeply he felt for her.

  She told her story briefly and well, for she had been rehearsing it before the police came. Lying in bed, with some of her work as a crusading journalist spread about her, she had heard sounds from the little balcony outside the bedroom window. Before she could investigate a man pushed aside the long, sliding window which was also the door to the balcony. He was surprised to find her in bed. He menaced her with a weapon he held – a cudgel of some sort – and warned her not to cry out. No, he had no identifiable accent. At that instant I had come into the room from the adjacent sitting-room and rushed at the man, who struck me a forcible blow and then escaped through the window as I fell to the floor. No, she could not describe him except as a man of perhaps thirty years of age, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. He was dark and was either unshaven or had a scrubby beard. (A man, I thought, like ten thousand other men.) She had rushed to my aid, but I was dead. Yes, she had felt for a heartbeat, a pulse, but there was none. She had then called the police.

  The other policemen were trying to discover how a man had reached a balcony seventeen storeys above the ground; he must have come from a nearby apartment, climbing from one balcony to another, dangerous though that was, but he had left no marks.

  As a man who had, for a few years, served his time as a theatre and film critic, I was delighted with Esme’s performance and her subtle management of the scene. One or two of the cops, I sensed, found her irresistible, and hated to leave. Was this the woman I thought I knew as my wife? How fully does one ever know anybody?

  When the police have gone, I watch as Esme helps herself to a stiff drink, returns to bed and, as she is not yet sleepy, reads some reports on the frequency of wife-beating in the city of Toronto, but I do not think she takes in much of what she reads. After an hour or so she falls asleep, and in time a film of bee’s wing coloration forms on her full lower lip.

  (7)

  JUST WHAT OF Randal Allard Going? To my delight it was easy to remove myself to his apartment. I did not fly, or float; I simply wished to be with my murderer, and behold! I was. I found him in what I suppose I may call a pretty pickle. He had tried to steady his nerves with a lot of whisky, but had only made himself sick, and had vomited with extraordinary force until he could vomit no more, and now lay in his bed, weeping. Not presentable, dramatic weeping. No: racking sobs, as though he could not get enough oxygen.

  I was not touched by his distress. This fellow had killed me, and I saw no reason to forgive him. No, indeed. I decided that, in so far as my unaccustomed condition would permit, I would hound him down, and revenge myself upon him in any way I found possible. What that way would be I had still to find out, but my determination was total.

  (8)

  MY FUNERAL RITES were a comedy beyond even my expectation. Newspapers are very good to their own, and my murder was a front-page story. A smudge, said to be a picture of me, was well displayed. I was popular, I found to my astonishment.
My colleagues regarded me as a first-rate journalist. (Well, that was true.) A fine career had been brutally interrupted. (Would my subsequent career have been fine? And what might the word fine imply, in the circumstances? But obituaries do not quibble about such things.) I was married to Esme Baron, the well-known and widely admired columnist on feminist affairs, a friend of the poor and afflicted, a writer of moderate but firm opinions. We had no children. (It was not said that Esme had refused to have any, though the obituarist, who was obviously my friend McWearie, knew it.) All of this was sober and pretty well factual. It was the funeral which moved into the realm of comedy and even of fantasy.

  It was a church affair. Esme and McWearie had a fine row about that, for Esme had no use for churches, but McWearie had insisted that I was a Believer – a word he loved and used somewhat immoderately – and must be buried like one. So, to a small Anglican church adjacent to the crematorium my carcass was conveyed and there I drew a full house of my newspaper associates who showed themselves, like most journalists, men of strong emotions. Newspaper people like to be thought of by the public as tough, hardened creatures, made cynical by the procession of crime, political duplicity and public shenanigans that passes continually under their gaze. My experience is that, apart from policemen, they are the most sentimental people you will meet anywhere. And so at my funeral they sat in rows of weeping men and grim-faced women (for in our day there has been a reversal which makes it perfectly all right for a man to give way to feeling, whereas women must show no such weakness) as the parson read the ancient burial service and read it, I thought as a former theatre critic, pretty well, though I could have given him a few pointers about emphasis and the value of pauses.

  I suppose it is not astonishing that one should be moved by one’s own funeral, but I had not expected one tribute Hugh McWearie had prepared for me. He had been put in charge of the funeral, on behalf of the paper. Who else, as a special friend of mine, and the Religion Man of the Advocate? Esme had been satisfied to leave the details of the affair to him, though he consulted her, as a matter of form, about everything. The paper had not been mean. There was a handsomely printed Order of Service and I was stirred to find that the only hymn was a favourite of mine, and of Hugh’s. It was Bunyan’s hymn, from Pilgrim’s Progress, and Hugh had insisted on Bunyan’s own words and not the watered-down modern version. My colleagues were not great singers, but they did their best, and I rejoiced to hear the final verse:

  Hobgoblin nor foul fiend

  Can daunt his spirit;

  He knows he at the end

  Shall life inherit.

  I rejoiced, though I think I would have trembled if I could have known how prophetic the words were.

  I took the hymn as a splendid compliment.

  His first avowed intent

  To be a pilgrim.

  Yes, I suppose now that I no longer had to pretend to a Canadian modesty, which can sometimes sink to a Gee Whiz, Aw Shucks simpletonism, the hymn told of what I had meant in my life, whenever I could collect my thoughts together enough to discover a meaning. I had wanted some self-recognition, as a path to – to what? In what path had I been a pilgrim? Was I now to find out?

  The hymn gave nobility to the service. Farce was provided by the Publisher of the Advocate, who spoke the eulogy. He did not know me; I suppose I had shaken hands with him half a dozen times at newspaper functions. But he had been assured by the Editor-in-Chief and also by the General Manager that he ought to make an appearance and a strong statement on this occasion, because of late there had been two or three assaults on newspaper men – cameras broken, some shoving, one punch on a sensitive newsnose – and here we had a murder. It is part of the received wisdom of the press that newspaper men, like priests and pregnant women, should be immune from violence, however much they may be thought to provoke it, and somehow the idea had taken hold among the great ones of the Advocate that my profession had something to do with my murder. The killer was not a frightened, probably doped, hoodlum; he was surely some outraged poet or affronted actor who had sought revenge for being sorely wronged in the entertainment pages of the paper. There must be a stop to such enormities, and the Publisher, as the principal figure in the hierarchy of the paper – not to speak of the moneybags – was the man to speak out for the profession.

  The Publisher, however, was no speaker. He was a financier of the backroom type, a small, stone-bald, unremarkable man whose money commanded great power. The eulogy had been written for him by the Editor-in-Chief, who had collaborated with the General Manager on the purple paragraph which spoke of the iniquity of killing a newspaper man. Surely this was an attack on freedom of speech, and on that much touted and widely misunderstood windegg, the freedom of the press? In the fuss that had followed my death, Esme’s statement to the police that the man had been surprised and frightened, and had pretty clearly been a robber and not a vengeful artist, had been forgotten.

  The eulogy was typed for the Publisher in large print, but he made a bad job of reading it. There was a paragraph, surely written by McWearie, that spoke of my intellectual interests, which had lent distinction to the Entertainment section. This was handsome, for the paper had the traditional journalistic fear of scholarship as being over the heads of its readers. But as I was dead, a whiff of scholarship could do no harm, so long as it did not give my successor dangerous ideas. The eulogist spoke of my concern with metaphysics, which was also described as scholarly. Nobody but McWearie knew that I cared a damn about metaphysics, or that I was no more than a bewildered amateur in that murky realm. But McWearie had, with the kindest intentions, put the best face on the long conversations, descending often to undignified wrangles, which I had had with him in his office. McWearie deserved to be called a metaphysician, for he had given the best of his life to such speculation, and he was my tutor, and not, as the eulogy suggested, an equal in those talks. I was grateful to Hugh for his kind words, and was even persuaded that I had been a little more intelligent than I had supposed. I have always thought of myself as an unappeasably curious, but not particularly bright, fellow in my concern with things of the spirit.

  It was in McWearie’s paragraph that our Publisher came to grief. There were words he did not know, and had not asked his secretary to look up for him. He had sought no guidance about pronunciation. I could tell from his struggles that he had not even troubled to look over the eulogy until the time came for him to read it. So he emerged as the clown of the funeral, and even people from the sports and advertising departments, who were certainly not themselves metaphysicians, stopped weeping or looking grim, and could hardly control their laughter as he struggled and fumbled through what was supposed to be an expression of his personal estimate of a valued employee.

  Thus my funeral might well have ended as a farce, if Esme had not redeemed it by a fine stroke – or what seemed to everybody present except myself to be a touching gesture. Touching is the proper word, for as the parson spoke the committal, she stepped out of her pew and laid a gently caressing hand on the coffin, above where my face might be presumed to be, and then returned to her seat with finely controlled emotion. A flash! An alert photographer had captured the moment for tomorrow’s Advocate. Widow’s Farewell.

  It was at this moment that I heard my mother gasp. She and my father had been self-possessed and dignified; they had not smiled at the Publisher’s performance. But Esme’s bit of theatre was almost more than they could endure. Poor dears, I thought, they are beginning to look old. I had not noticed it before. And certainly they had never “taken” to Esme, though relations between them were civil. They were the saddest, and least demonstrative, people at my funeral.

  There was a muted humming of machinery, and my coffin moved slowly toward the doors beyond which presumably lay the furnace, or the antechamber to the furnace, and the Publisher, nudged by the General Manager, took Esme’s arm and led her out of the chapel.

  Am I cynical about this final farewell by a grieving wife? I suppose, as
in so many situations in life, I was both right and wrong. She had loved me once, I am sure, but she had never been greatly demonstrative, and certainly not in public. She walked firmly, gracefully, solemnly out of the chapel on the arm of the Publisher – not easily managed, for he was much shorter than she was – without a glance at the spot where, in the third row of seats, Randal Allard Going was making an ass of himself.

  He had broken down and was sobbing noisily. Two women colleagues assisted, and indeed almost manhandled, him toward the door. One of them had to recover and press upon him his famous walking-stick, without which he was never seen in public. The murder weapon, and now he could never be rid of it.

  I was laughing uncontrollably as I joined the procession, right behind him, so that I should not miss a snivel or a tear. I was a free spirit, free to go wherever I wished. I did not want to go with my body beyond the crematory doors. This scene from life’s unceasing comedy was too good to be missed.

  (9)

  NOW THAT THE excitement of the funeral and the inquest is over, I have time to take stock of myself and my situation. Immediately a philosophical, or metaphysical or perhaps merely physiological question arises: what self am I talking about? And why do I speak of “having time”? My sense of time has gone; day and night are one to me; there are periods – long, so far as I can judge – of which I have no awareness. I have no substance. I have looked in vain in the mirrors in my apartment for my reflection, and there is none. I have no physical appetites but I have keenly experienced emotions; no hunger, no drowsiness, but a mounting anger tempered with hilarity as I watch the misery of my murderer.