The Protagonists Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  The Protagonists

  Praise for The Protagonists

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  PART TWO

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  PART THREE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  About the Author

  He died young whilst still in the prime of his writing career and after a few years, his books and his name disappeared from the public eye. It was only through the perseverance of one film producer who remembered the Author for his past successes and who sought to option the film rights for The Protagonists that the Author has been ‘rediscovered’. His books will now be available once again, although initially as eBooks. Almost five decades later, his fiction is as fresh as it was when first published, and each story can be seen to relate to the social history as it was then.

  James Barlow was born in 1921 and educated in Leamington Spa, Stoke-on-Trent and North Wales. He became a gunnery instructor in the R.A.F. in 1940, but the following year he underwent prolonged treatment for tuberculosis and took to writing technical articles for Flight and Aeroplane.

  He became a regular contributor for the magazine Punch in 1948 and in 1956 published his first novel, The Protagonists, to much critical acclaim in both the UK and the US. He wrote two further novels, The Man with Good Intentions and One Half of the World before hitting the big time with The Patriots. With this success in 1960, he gave up his post as a water rates inspector for Birmingham Corporation to devote his time to writing.

  Barlow’s 1968 novel, The Burden of Proof, was made into a successful film (retitled Villain) starring the late Richard Burton. In 1962, Term of Trial was turned into a film starring Laurence Olivier (whose performance received a BAFTA nomination), Simone Signoret, Thora Hird and Terence Stamp. The television adaptation of his third novel, The Man with Good Intentions, starred Francesca Annis. In 1972, Barlow won an award from Pan Publishers for Liner. The research for all his books was meticulous and detailed, which underpinned their success, but he particularly enjoyed writing Liner which included a 6-week cruise taking most of his family along and learning all about the technicalities of radar, gyro-pilots, turbines, telegraphs and boilers.

  Barlow also wrote a non-fiction book, Goodbye England, in which he explained his reasons for emigrating to Tasmania. In fact, he and his family only stayed there two years and brought his family to Ireland after his sister's husband was killed in a tragic accident. He spent the remainder of his life in Ireland with his wife and three children of his four children.

  The Spectator called him ‘one of the most able thriller writers in the business, with an alarmingly acute eye for the degenerate quirks of society’. His books often weave universal questions into fast-moving narratives.

  James Barlow died suddenly (of pulmonary and cerebral emboli following an operation) on 30th January 1973 at the age of 51. He is buried in a beautiful little church on Long Island a few miles out of Cork, Eire.

  His novel, Black Country, about the build up to a race riot set in Wolverhampton was never published and is currently being edited by his daughter, Gillian.

  By the Same Author

  The Protagonists

  One Man in the World

  Both Your Houses

  The Burden of Proof

  The Hour Of Maximum Danger

  One Half Of The World

  This Side Of The Sky

  The Man With Good Intentions

  The Patriots

  Liner

  The Love Chase

  In All Good Faith

  Term Of Trial

  The Protagonists

  THE GIRL

  She was red-haired, beautiful and passionate, but she had the essential innocence and trust of the good, the born victim.

  ‘What’s your real name, Roy? Tell it to me so the baby at least may know who his mother should have married.’

  HER LOVER

  He lied to her, took her splendid body, used her shamelessly, until she became pregnant and refused an abortion.

  ‘I told her. She went very pale. She knew now that she had surrendered her everything to someone she didn’t know at all.’

  THE DETECTIVE

  To him this was more than a murder – it was a hideous, personal outrage.

  ‘First the girl and her baby,’ he thought. ‘Then her parents, her friends, all victims of the one act of destruction … He needed to kill girls to make him feel good.

  Barlow tells this story from the point of view of the three principal characters. The analysis of the interplay of goodness and evil makes this a clever novel, inspiring pity, terror and a good deal of admiration for the Author's neat yet compelling style, never losing suspense along the way.

  Praise for The Protagonists

  ‘Impressive! Deeply perceptive study of a crime of passion. Distinguished, poignant and memorable’ Boston Globe

  ‘White-Hot, Compelling!’ Washington Post

  ‘A classic piece of detection and understanding of humanity’ Manchester Evening Standard

  ‘This is a masterly study of humanity under the strain of violent emotion’ Birmingham Mail

  ‘We have to welcome a careful and painstaking talent’

  Sunday Times

  ‘A high voltage of interest’ New York Herald Tribune

  ‘The anatomy of a crime brilliantly articulated’

  Sheffield Telegraph

  ‘Passion, violence and retribution, suspense and superb storytelling!’ Los Angeles Times

  The Protagonists

  JAMES BARLOW

  Copyright © 1956 James Barlow

  The moral right of James Barlow to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-78036-149-9

  Published by

  Peach Publishing

  PART ONE

  Victim

  Chapter One

  The man and the woman walk slowly, unwillingly, at a pace that is funereal. Tiredness contributes to the dragged movement of the woman, and the man, in kindness, in awe at her suffering, moves at her pace. He is taller than she, gaunt, a thing of structure and sinews, with a good, well-boned face, and a middle-aged body that is in almost athletic condition. He wears the black uniform of a bus-driver, but no hat: he is off duty. On the black sleeves are two diamond-shaped black patches of cloth. The uniform is not black enough to convey his mourning, so he has added the patches. The woman’s attire is more obviously that of bereavement: all black and grey – gloves, shoes, s
tockings, handbag – everything. Older, in appearance, but not in fact, than the man, she has no need to wear black clothes; her middle-aged face, not trained or inclined to hide her feelings, shows the lined exhaustion and the stunned grief of some personal blow, some appalling loss. They are man and wife, these two; one sees that in their oneness; and one wonders in the slight impatience of the non-involved what, if they still have each other, they could lose that could hurt them so much.

  Their background is quite startling. In a city they might not be conspicuous – for much of a city’s background is black or dirty; but they are surrounded by green. Fields and trees stretch away to three horizons, ending in distance on two and Welsh mountains on a third; on the fourth is the sea, a cold, fast-moving sea despite the still air, green, choppy water flecked with white. There is not much cloud on this day, and what there is spreads in two layers across itself in a pattern of extraordinary beauty. If one turns the head sideways, or even upside down, there is an incredible appearance of space and volume. The man and the woman are walking down a lane towards the sea and whichever way they stare is splendour; but they do not look; they do not see; the magnificence is merely distance to be overcome; the volume of salt air merely emphasizes the emptiness.

  At a crossroads they turn right and walk along a main road (there is no pavement) parallel with the sea, which is half a mile away and about fifty feet lower. A few cars hurtle past: over-coiffured women yawn and stare (country bumpkins dressed in black: where on earth are they going?); someone throws out a cigarette stub from a saloon and it rolls near the man in an unintentional movement of contempt. The world passes by, anxious to be elsewhere: nothing special here: no town, no newspapers, the scenery flat, dreary and uninspiring, no good hotels, no music, no art, no petrol station, all looking rather too damp anyway; nothing but two people moving along the road. Should we give them a lift? No, better not; what have we to say to them? They do not even speak to each other. And that, indeed, is true. They have walked nearly two miles and scarcely said a word; it has all been said; there is nothing left to discuss.

  The cemetery gates are unlocked, but there is no one else about. That is why the man and woman have come at this particular hour. There is a bus that they could have travelled in as far as the crossroads. They must know the time of the bus, for the man himself drives it often. But they, wishing to be alone, visit the cemetery when they can expect to have it to themselves; the woman suffers the two-mile walk rather than endure the stares or even the sympathy of others; in the cemetery there is silence; no one says a word out of place.

  The man approaches the small lodge where there is a tap and a watering can. He then follows the woman, who is carrying chrysanthemums, to Grave 125. It has no stone; it is a recent grave; indeed, the whole cemetery is quite new and there is room for lots more dead. Several patches are marked out in anticipation (freehold or leasehold? one wonders). The woman bends to a small metal vase, removes some dead flowers, twists off the colander-like top of the vase, fills it with water and, having refastened the top, inserts the chrysanthemums one by one. The man stands near, watching her. The grave is tidied to the woman’s satisfaction and they stand there, the ritual over, nothing to alleviate the suffering that brought them here; now they are face to face with it.

  A shrieking noise attracts their attention, a scream of pure animality. Five or six seagulls – difficult to establish how many, for they hop about in busyness – have somehow forced a crow on to its back, and there is a frantic beating of wings now to accompany the shrieks, as the seagulls peck fiercely. It is a cruel, hard thing, unbearable to watch. Even the man flinches and turns away. It is too carnal – the killers and the victim, the shrieks of fear and satisfaction and the thing they fight about: a scrap of food. It is, for the couple, too reminiscent, and they make their way back with the watering can towards the lodge.

  The woman is tired now and moves to a seat by the tap. On an adjoining seat sits an old man. Because she does not recognize him the woman sits near – it is only friends and acquaintances she is afraid of and cannot bear to meet. The man on the seat is badly dressed, old, white-haired and with a curious, spatial expression. He stares out to sea rather too evenly, and it occurs to the woman that some thing exceptional must be happening on the water. She looks, and on the horizon, eleven miles off, moves a boat. It is just an ordinary boat bound for the colliery farther up the coast, and the air is so still that behind the slow progress of the boat is a thin track of smoke. It stretches horizontally all the way along the horizon – a ribbon of smoke perhaps twenty or thirty miles in length. Remarkable. Very interesting; but not so extraordinary that it merits the prolonged, penetrating stare. The woman looks again at the man on the seat and she sees that he is blind. The first emotion beyond herself wells up in her throat and she feels pity. To be blind. The man on the seat has a small dog, and this animal now gets down and sniffs at the woman and her husband. He then jumps back on to the seat and licks the face of the man who is blind. The man’s hands grope, fondle the dog in affection and then proceed to a raincoat pocket to produce a rubber ball. This he throws to the ground and the dog jumps down eagerly to fetch it. The game continues until the dog, exploring too far, does not come back. The blind old man on the seat suddenly makes a noise – a screech of distorted, unhealthy sound that is far more abnormal than the shrieks of the crow or the satisfaction of the seagulls. After the first shock the woman realizes that the man is not peculiar, not mad or perverted in any way. It is just that he cannot speak. The strange, distorted cry is his communication, and the only one who understands it is a small dog, a mongrel with brown hair and watery brown eyes. It is so disturbing that the woman forgets her own tragedy and fetches the dog and the ball. She is glad that the old man cannot see her, for she is crying. She thinks: There is always someone worse. To be blind and not able to speak; and yet he can offer love to a small animal. She weeps like a casualty – without awareness, as though she suffered from shell shock. And, in fact, she is a casualty; she and her husband are those semi-participants, the next-of-kin. She is going to recover. At this moment she is being given shock treatment. She is confronted with another, more appalling casualty so that in the face of his disability she will again learn pity. The treatment will perhaps succeed: she cries now, not for her own flesh and blood, but for an old man who is blind and dumb and who sits (why?) on a cemetery seat with a dog.

  If there is a battle – and that there exists a struggle of some description can hardly be disputed; we are not just animals who grow old; in our faces can be seen deteriorations that belong not only to age; in them can be discerned bitterness, pride, lust, greed, compassion, innocence, ignorance and the other things called qualities, relate these qualities to whatever you will – if there is a battle and it is, let us say, between good and evil, it is certain that these in the cemetery are casualties as well as next-of-kin. They are also participants. And in the grave they have visited lies another casualty. It is their daughter. The grave is only a few months old. This still, clean, cold day belongs to October and the daughter died in July. She, too, died in a battle, in part of the war between good and evil. Her sins and failures are well known. Her name, Olwen Rosemary Hughes, has been mouthed on the radio; it has been headlined; her picture has appeared in the newspapers; her defeats have been given all the publicity normally offered to a public interested in failure; she has been accorded the attention once allowed (before it became widespread, boring) to the fornication of a film star. Nobody has mentioned her victories; that is why her parents suffer so badly; and perhaps nobody ever will, for her last defeat was irrevocable, permanent. She was murdered.

  In the war between good and evil the interest of the spectator – himself a casualty – is almost invariably directed towards the victories of evil. It is the same with that part of the struggle labelled crime – as though it were a separate part. The worst crime of all merits the greatest attention. A murderer is a rar
ity, a man apart, and it is natural that any focus of attention should be upon him. For anyone can be a victim: murder falls upon the innocent and the guilty, the rich and the poor, the normal and the abnormal, with the impartiality of an air raid. The killer, committing his deed without premeditation as he ‘normally’ does, in the uproar of the moment leaves a trail behind him. It is always interesting to see this trail pursued by authority, and then to hear the unhappy, normal words about love, unfairness, jealousy, the children, the other woman or man, the broken intentions, the meeting, the hammer or knife that happened to be available – to hear about it and to realize that it might have been oneself.

  When a young woman is murdered, no matter how innocent she may be, there is a tendency by the onlooker – the newspaper readers, the people in court, the man in the bar, even, perhaps, the police – to presume that she was killed with justification. And the justification is often said – at a comfortable, theoretical distance – to be that she involved the killer in a love affair; she drew him away from his family, wove a complicated net around him and finally made it necessary for him to commit violence to cut his way out of it. And if someone were to protest, ‘It was not like that at all,’ the same onlookers, the non-involved, the apathetic, would say, ‘Well, what difference does it make? The pathologist said that the girl was not innocent. What d’you take us for? Mugs? We know all about it. We know a thing or two’ (because we, too, are no longer innocent). They would shrug it all away; the truth does not matter all that much; let the parents suffer; let it all go down on record slightly inaccurate; what does it matter about the degree of guilt or who seduced whom? Waiting themselves for death in a more spectacular form, they find it easy to labour under the delusion that big explosions are the great sin of the world. Like many of us, while they wait to be destroyed, they do not believe the original sins matter so much. A dead body; a destroyed virginity; some lies; some unfaithfulness; some blasphemy; some person-to-person cruelty; some thefts – what do they matter if whole towns can be destroyed in the twinkling of an eye? But that sin is so big and obvious that even the atheists can see it. We have become enmeshed in our own complexity, and perhaps we should struggle back to the realization that the small, personal, individually-decided sins are the ones that hurt God the most …