by Muriel Spark
Gwen’s boy friend thought it a good story and recounted it at his work which was in a builder’s yard.
“My girl was in with an old girl, some dame or countess or other up Hampstead way…went round the place every night…kept hearing burglars…wouldn’t get the police…My girl walked out on her a week past, too much of it….”
“There’s some cranky ones going about,” commented one of his friends, “I’ll tell you. I remember during the war when I was batman to a colonel, he…”
So it was that a labourer, new to the yard, picked up Gwen’s story—a youth who would not have considered himself a criminal type, but who knew a window cleaner who would give two or perhaps three pounds an item for likely information. But you had to have an address.
“Where’d you say this countess was living?” he said to Gwen’s boy. “I know all up Hampstead and round the Heath.”
Gwen’s boy said, “Oh, this is a posh part, Hackleton Rise. My girl says the old woman’ll be carted off looney in the end. She’s one of them. Did you see in the papers about the phone-call hoax? She’s cut off her phone now…”
The young labourer took his information to the window cleaner, who did not pay him immediately. “I got to check the address with my contact.”
The window cleaner himself never actually touched a job like this, but there was money in information. In a few days’ time his contact expressed himself satisfied, and paid over ten pounds, remarking that the old girl in question wasn’t a countess after all. The window cleaner duly paid a small share to the young labourer remarking that the information was a bit faulty, and that he’d better not be leaky with his mouth the next few days.
So it came about that Dame Lettie’s house and nocturnal searching fell under scrutiny.
On the day of her last visit to Miss Taylor she returned to Hampstead by taxi shortly after five. She called in at the employment agency to see if they had found her a woman yet, a middle-aged woman, clean with good references, to live in. No, they had found no one yet, Dame Lettie, but they were keeping their eyes open. She walked the rest of the way home.
Gloomily she made a pot of tea and drank a cup standing in the kitchen. She then puffed her way into her study and started writing a letter to Eric. Her fountain-pen ran out of ink. She refilled it and continued,
…I am thinking only of your poor mother put away in a home, and your poor old father who has done so much for you, and who is rapidly failing in health, when I demand that at least you should write and explain your silence. There has been bitterness between your parents and yourself, I know. But the time is come, surely, in their declining years, for you to make what amends you can. Your father was telling me only the other day, that, for his part, he is willing to let bygones be bygones. In fact, he asked me to write to you in this vein.
She stopped and looked out the window. An unfamiliar car had pulled up at the house opposite. Someone visiting the Dillingers, apparently, not knowing the Dillingers were away. She began to feel chilly and got up to draw the curtain. A man was sitting waiting in the car. As she drew the curtains, he drove off. She returned to her desk and continued,
Do not suppose I am not aware of your activities in London and your attempts to frighten me. Do not suppose I am in the least alarmed.
She scored these last sentences through with her pen. That was not what she had meant to write. She had, at first, thought of writing in this manner, but her second thoughts, she now recalled, had decided her to write something more in the nature of an appeal. One had to employ cunning with a man like Eric. She took a fresh sheet and began again, stopping once to look over her shoulder at a potential noise.
I am thinking only of your poor mother put away in a home, and your poor old father, enfeebled and rapidly failing in health, when I…
She finished the letter, addressed and sealed it, and called Gwen to catch the six o’clock post. Then she remembered Gwen had left.
Dame Lettie laid the letter helplessly on the hall table and pulled herself together so far as to think of supper and to switch on the news.
She prepared her supper of steamed fish, ate it and washed up. She listened to the wireless till half-past nine. Then she turned it off and went into the hall where she stood for about five minutes, listening. Eventually, various sounds took place, coming successively from the kitchen quarters, the dining-room on her right, and upstairs.
She spent the next forty-five minutes in a thorough search of the house and the garden, front and back. Then she locked and bolted the front door and the back door. She locked every room and took away the keys. Finally she climbed slowly up to bed, stopping every few steps to regain her breath and to listen. Certainly, there was somebody on the roof.
She locked her bedroom door behind her and tilted a chair under the door knob. Certainly, there was someone down there in the garden. She must get in touch with the Member tomorrow. He had not replied to her previous letter which she had posted on Monday, or was it Tuesday? Well, there had been time for a reply. Corruption in the police force was a serious matter. There would have to be a question in the House. One was entitled to one’s protection. She put her hand out to feel the heavy walking-stick securely propped by her bed. She fell asleep at last. She woke suddenly with the noise in her ears, and after all, was amazed by the reality of this.
She switched on the light. It was five past two. A man was standing over by her dressing-table, the drawers of which were open and disarranged. He had turned round to face her. Her bedroom door was open. There was a light in the passage and she heard someone else padding along it. She screamed, grabbed her stick, and was attempting to rise from her bed when a man’s voice from the passage outside said, “That’s enough, let’s go.” The man by the dressing-table hesitated nervily for a moment, then swiftly he was by Lettie’s side. She opened wide her mouth and her yellow and brown eyes. He wrenched the stick from the old woman’s hand and, with the blunt end of it, battered her to death. It was her eighty-first year.
Chapter Fourteen
Four days passed before the milkman reported an accumulation of four pints of milk on Dame Lettie’s doorstep, and the police entered her house to find the body, half in, half out of her bed.
Meanwhile Godfrey did not wonder, even vaguely, why he had not heard from Lettie. Now that her telephone was disconnected he seldom heard from her. In any case, he had other things to think about that morning. Alec Warner had been to see him with that extraordinary disturbing, impudent, yet life-giving message from Taylor. He had, of course, ordered Warner out of the house. Alec had seemed to expect this and had departed with easy promptitude to Godfrey’s “Get out,” like an actor who had rehearsed the part. He had, however, left a slip of paper behind him, bearing a series of dates and place-names. Godfrey examined the document and felt unaccountably healthier than he had been for some months. He went out and bought himself a whisky and soda while he decided what to do. And, over his drink, he despised Guy Leet yet liked the thought of him, since he was associated with his new sense of well-being. He had another whisky, and chuckled to himself to think of Guy bent double over his two sticks. An ugly fellow; always had been, the little rotter.
Guy Leet sat in his room at the Old Stable, Stedrost, Surrey, laboriously writing his memoirs which were being published by instalments in a magazine. The laboriousness of the task resided in the physical, not the mental effort. His fingers worked slowly, clutched round the large barrel of his fountain-pen. His fingers were good for perhaps another year—if you could call these twisted, knobble-knuckled members good. He glanced reproachfully at them from time to time—perhaps good for another year, depending on the severity of the intervening winter. How primitive, Guy thought, life becomes in old age, when one may be surrounded by familiar comforts and yet more vulnerable to the action of nature than any young explorer at the Pole. And how simply the physical laws assert themselves, frustrating all one’s purposes. Guy suffered from an internal disorder of the knee-joints which
caused one leg to collapse across the other whenever he put his weight on it. But although he frequently remarked, “The law of gravity, the beast,” he was actually quite cheerful most of the time. He also suffered from a muscular rheumatism of the neck which caused his head to be perpetually thrust forward and askew. However, he adapted his eyesight and body as best he could to these defects, looking at everything sideways and getting about with the aid of his servant and his car, or on two sticks. He had in his service a pious, soft-spoken, tip-toeing unmarried middle-aged Irishman for whom Guy felt much affection, and whom he called Tony to his face and Creeping Jesus behind his back.
Tony came in with his morning coffee and the mail, which always arrived late. Tony placed two letters beside the paper-knife. He placed the coffee before Guy. He stroked the fronts of his trousers, wriggled and beamed. He was doing a Perpetual Novena for Guy’s conversion, even though Guy had told him, “The more you pray for me, Tony, the more I’m a hardened sinner. Or would be, if I had half a chance.”
He opened the larger envelope. Proofs of the latest instalment of his memoirs. “Here, Tony,” he said, “check these proofs.”
“Ah, ye know I can’t read without me glasses.”
“That’s a euphemism, Tony.” For Tony’s reading capacity was not too good, though he managed when necessary by following each word with his finger.
“Indeed, sir, ’tis a pity.” Tony disappeared.
Guy opened the other letter and gave a smile which might have appeared sinister to one who did not realise that this was only another consequence of his neck being twisted. The letter was from Alec Warner.
DEAR GUY,
I’m afraid I sent Percy Mannering the last instalment of your memoirs. He would have seen it, in any case. I’m afraid he is a trifle upset about your further reference to Dowson.
Mannering in replying to thank me for sending him the article, tells me he is coming down to see you, no doubt to talk things over. I hope he will not prove too difficult and that you will make all allowances.
Now, dear fellow, you will, I know, assist me by taking the old fellow’s pulse and temperature as soon as it can conveniently be done after he has discussed the article with you. Preferably, of course, during the discussion, but this may prove difficult. Any further observations as to his colour, speech (clarity of, etc.) and general bearing during the little discussion will be most welcome, as you know.
Mannering will be with you tomorrow, i.e. the day on which you will, I expect, receive this letter—at about 3.40 p.m. I have supplied him with train times and all necessary directions.
My dear Fellow,
I am, most gratefully,
Alec Warner
Guy put the letter back into its envelope. He telephoned to the nursing home where Charmian was now resident and asked if he might call and see her that afternoon, and was informed, after the nurse had been to make enquiries, that he might. He then told Tony to have the car ready at three-fifteen.
He had intended to see Charmian, in any case. And to-day was warm and bright, though clouds came over at intervals. He held no resentment against Alec Warner. The chap was a born mischief-maker; but he didn’t know it, that was the saving grace. He was sorry poor Percy would have to undergo the journey for nothing that afternoon.
When he left at a quarter past three he left a message on the door of his Old Stable, “Away for a few days.” Quite improbable, it sounded, but Percy would have to take it or leave it.
“’Tis a lie,” commented Tony, sliding into the car to drive his master off.
Charmian liked her new room. It was large and furnished with bright old-fashioned chintzes. It reminded her of her headmistress’s room at school in those times when the days were always, somehow, sunny, and everyone seemed to love each other. She had been quite eighteen years of age before she had realised that everyone did not love each other; this was a fact which she had always found it difficult to convey to others. “But surely, Charmian, you must have come across spitefulness and hatred before you were eighteen?”
“Only in retrospect,” she would reply, “did I discern discord in people’s actions. At the time, all seemed harmony. Everyone loved each other.”
Some said she was colouring the past with the rosy glow of nostalgia. But she plainly remembered her shock when, at the age of eighteen, she became conscious of evil—a trifling occasion; her sister had said something detrimental about her—but it was only then that Charmian discovered the reality of words like “sin” and “calumny” which she had known, as words, for as long as she could remember.
The window of her room looked out on a lawn in the centre of which stood a great elm. She could sit at her window and watch the other patients walking in the grounds, and they might have been the girls at her old school sauntering at their recreation period, and she with her headmistress taking tea by the window.
“Everything,” she said to Guy some time after he had made his difficult way across the room, “has an innocent air in this place. I feel almost free from Original Sin.”
“How dull for you, dear,” said Guy.
“It’s an illusion, of course.”
A young nurse brought in tea and placed it between them. Guy winked at her. The nurse winked back, and left them.
“Behave yourself, Guy.”
“And how,” he said, “did you leave Godfrey?”
“Oh, he was most depressed. These anonymous telephone calls worry him.” She gestured towards her white telephone receiver. The civil young man had vaguely assumed in her mind the shape of a telephone receiver. At home he had been black; here he was white. “Does he worry you, Guy?”
“Me? No. I don’t mind a bit of fun.”
“They worry Godfrey. It is surprising how variously people react to the same thing.”
“Personally,” said Guy, “I tell the young fellow to go to hell.
“Well, he vexed Godfrey. And then we have an unsuitable housekeeper. She also worries him. Godfrey has a lot of worries. You would see a change in him, Guy. He is failing.”
“Doesn’t like this revival of your books?”
“Guy, I don’t like talking against Godfrey, you know. But, between ourselves, he is rather jealous. At his age, one would have thought he had no more room for these feelings, somehow. But there it is. He was so rude, Guy, to a young critic who came to see me.”
“Fellow has never understood you,” said Guy. “But still I perceive you have a slight sense of guilt concerning him.”
“Guilt? Oh no, Guy. As I was saying, I feel unusually innocent in this place.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “a sense of guilt takes a self-righteous turn. I see no cause for you to feel either in the right or in the wrong where Godfrey’s concerned.”
“I have regular visits from a priest,” she said, “and if I want moral advice, Guy, I shall consult him.”
“Oh quite, quite.” Guy placed his gnarled hand on her lap; he was afraid he was forgetting how to handle women.
“And then,” said Charmian, “you know he has estranged Eric. It is really Godfrey’s fault, Guy. I do not like to say these things, and of course Eric was a disappointment, but I can’t help feeling Godfrey’s attitude—”
“Eric,” said Guy, “is a man of fifty-five.”
“Fifty-seven,” said Charmian, “next month.”
“Fifty-seven,” said Guy. “And he has had time to acquire a sense of responsibility.”
“That,” sighed Charmian, “Eric has never possessed. But I did think at one time he might have been a painter. I never had much hope for his writing, but his paintings—he did seem to have talent. At least, to me. But Godfrey was so mean about money, and Godfrey—”
“If I remember,” said Guy, “it was not until Eric was past forty-five that Godfrey refused to give him any more money.”
“And then Lettie,” said Charmian, “has been so cruel about her wills. Always promising Eric the earth, and then retracting her promises. I don’t know
why she doesn’t do something for Eric while she is still alive.”
“Do you think,” said Guy, “that money would make Eric any less spiteful?”
“Well, no,” said Charmian, “I don’t. I have been sending Eric sums of money for some years, secretly, through Mrs. Anthony who is our daily woman. But he is still spiteful. Of course he disapproves of my books.”
“They are beautiful books,” said Guy.
“Eric doesn’t approve the style. I’m afraid Godfrey has never handled Eric tactfully, that is the trouble.”
“Beautiful,” said Guy. “I have just been re-reading The Seventh Child. I love particularly that scene at the end with Edna in her mackintosh standing at the cliff’s edge on that Hebridean coast being drenched by the spray, and her hair blown about her face. And then turning to find Karl by her side. One thing about your lovers, Charmian, they never required any preliminary discussions. They simply looked at each other and knew.”
“That,” said Charmian, “is one of the things Eric cannot stand.”
“Eric is a realist. He has no period-sense, no charity.”
“Oh, my dear Guy, do you think these new young men read my books from charity?”
“Not from indulgence and kindness. But charity elevates the mind and governs the inward eye. If a valuable work of art is rediscovered after it has gone out of fashion, that is due to some charity in the discoverer, I believe. But I say, without a period-sense as well, no one can appreciate your books.”
“Eric has no charity,” she said.
“Well, perhaps it is just that he is middle-aged. The really young are so much pleasanter,” said Guy.
She was not listening. “He is like Godfrey in so many ways,” she said, “I can’t help remembering how much I had to shut my eyes to in Godfrey. Lipstick on his handkerchiefs—”