John Brown's Body by A. L. Barker

observed him while she lit the gas under the kettle. He stood waiting, a big neat man in a respectable and respecting City suit. He had everything packed away, he was a quiet one, the quiet ones were the worst. Thinking of Tomelty who was a riot and was merely not good, she could see that a murderer would be very, very quiet.
    “Aren’t you going to look out of the window? Isn’t that what you came for?”
    He started to move, cautiously, like a giant in a doll’s house, but nothing here was as small as that. Marise laughed: embarrassed, he put his hand to his head and smoothed his hair.
    “What’s the matter? You look all right, you look very nice.” She was feeling great pleasure. The situation was perilous and she would be taking her life in her hands, taking and throwing it away in style. She had felt this undercurrent of passion coming to her from other people and now it was coming to her from a murderer. There couldn’t be anyone more passionate than this murderer. “Go and look out of the bedroom window, it will set your mind at rest.”
    He went quickly into the bedroom, glanced through the window and came back.
    “Well?”
    He shook his head.
    “I don’t think you care about the cat. I wanted to be friends with it. Where we lived before there was nothing to be friends with except the birds. I used to feed them on the window-sill. They ate out of my fingers.” It was a picture she had seen, of herself covered with loving birds. Once in Victoria Station a pigeon blundered on to her bare arm butshe had hated the sight of its dirty old mauve feet on her skin.
    “We can be friends,” he said, “you and I.”
    She frowned. “I don’t know.”
    “But surely, surely –”
    She did not miss the pleading in his voice. “Friends have to trust each other.”
    Then he gave her what she described to Tomelty as a funny look. Oh, he knew what she meant, John Brown knew that she knew and that was how she could suddenly see what he saw – no Marise, no charmer, just a tender pink parcel for tearing open. Suddenly she was frightened in a plain, cold way. “I don’t like his eyes,” she told Tomelty, “I look at the holes in his chin while he talks.” She added, “He doesn’t talk much.”
    Not that he was another Uncle Fred. This man would tell her anything she asked, he wanted to, she could see that, but he did not know where to begin. She tried to help him. She explained about herself and the life she lived. It was necessary to go into a few details about Jack Tomelty.
    “He’d like to stop me living when he’s not here. He’d like to switch me off until he comes back so that he needn’t bother about what I was doing. Of course I don’t do anything, I’m very happy.”
    She took a cup from the china cabinet. It had a pattern of green peacocks and would still have been pretty if the glaze had not cracked. Inside the rim was dust which she forgot to wipe off.
    “I love this cup, I don’t know what I see in it – just about everything. I bought it the last time Jack took me out. That would be last Christmas, he took me to see the Christmas tree. A shilling was all I had, and that’s what the cup cost.”
    Tomelty had picked it out of the china cabinet the day they moved in and told her it was genuine Spode. It was when he was talking to her about graciousness and Marise had asked if Spode meant a cracked old cup and Tomeltysaid she had to learn that things need not be new to be good.
    Tea ran out of the crack and made a pool on the table. “It’s very old, old things are best. Except me, I don’t want to be more than twenty, ever.” She watched him take up the cup, trying to catch the drips in his hand and putting his lips to the rim to drink the dusty tea. “Are you married?”
    He nodded.
    “Why haven’t I seen your wife?”
    “She lives with her sister.”
    “Why not with you?”
    “Her sister’s a widow. They lived together since before Emmeline married.”
    “Emmeline Shilling? Is