“A tank! A water-tank, that’s all!” I cried, pushing open the door; and there, sure enough, a huge, pale, galvanised iron tank loomed in the shadows ahead of us. Another slow gurgle shook its interior as we watched; and I turned triumphantly to the cowering little figure behind me.
“There! What did I tell you? Those must be the noises you’ve been hearing!”
Her eyes held mine. They looked huge in her pale face, as though they had responded, like a cat’s eyes, to the surrounding dimness.
“That isn’t what you told me at all,” she pointed out gravely. “What you told me was that you didn’t hear anything. That there weren’t any noises; that’s what you told me. And there are!”
She was right, of course. All the same, such logic-chopping seemed inappropriate, not to say ungracious. I was annoyed with her for not being wholly reassured by the solid, incontrovertible explanation that stood four-square in front of us.
“First you say there aren’t any noises, and then you say they’re caused by a tank!” she continued, in the same low, argumentative whisper. “So how do I know what to believe?”
“Your own eyes—that’s all. Come on, let’s get some light on it!” I felt about for the light switch, pressed it, and a dim bulb—fifteen-watt again—sprang on among the beams which criss-crossed the sloping ceiling. The room was windowless, bare. Apart from the great sighing tank, only a rusty iron bedstead was to be seen, leaning derelict against the wall, as if it had been there for a hundred years.
“See?” I said, turning truculently to my companion; but her eyes were fixed on the beams above.
“I don’t like them!” she said in a low voice; and then her gaze dropped to the tank: “And what’s behind there? What’s behind that tank?”
It was true, there was a space behind it. It stood out some inches from the wall, possibly leaving room enough—such was the calculation I seemed to read in those big, frightened eyes—for some intruder to be lurking behind it. A very small intruder, but still…. Boldly, and in spite of her vague squeaks of protest and the restraining clutch of her little insect hands, I strode across the room and peered into the dark, choking space behind the tank.
There, on the tangle of dusty, ancient pipes, sat two brand new dolls. Quite big ones; the sort that a three-year-old can barely lug about. Their fixed, silly faces smiled endlessly at the blank metal wall in front of them; and just then, like a kitten clambering up my shoulder, I felt Mrs Redmayne’s hands, padding and pulling at me, as she tried to peer past me and see what was holding my attention.
Her screams set the tank ringing like a gong—or so it seemed to my ears, only a few inches from the vibrating metal. How I silenced her I do not know. Perhaps I didn’t. Perhaps she silenced herself, for some overpowering reason that conquered even her terror. I am not sure. We stood there, anyway, while the echoes of her screams sank to a ringing silence, and even after that, in the absolute silence that followed, we still stood there.
CHAPTER XV
I WOULD HAVE thought that those screams must have woken half the block. But either I had misjudged the loudness of them, or else Mrs Redmayne had been right about flat-dwellers keeping themselves to themselves, and in a big way. For we regained Mrs Redmayne’s floor to find only two heads poked out of their front doors. One said: “Oh, my Lord!” and retreated smartly; the other asked half-heartedly—no, quarter-heartedly—if it could do anything? This one was covered with curlers and face-cream, its eyes were already glazed with sleeping-pills, so I said hastily that it was quite all right.
Of all the lies I told that day, this, I think, was the most excusable. What else could I say? I knew, of course, that it wasn’t ‘all right’, but I didn’t know, then, what it was that was wrong.
She was ill, of course: that’s what I kept telling myself; and indeed by now she looked as if she might be feverish. Her eyes were too bright, and her face, instead of being pale, was suffused with heavy colour, like the outer petals of a rose past its prime. She kept saying she must phone Mervyn, Mervyn must come home; that was all she could think of, and it was with the greatest difficulty that I got her back to bed. Then I went out to the hall and rang Ralph. I told him that I would have to stay the night here, explaining to him as well as I could what had happened, trying to make him see that it was impossible to leave Mrs Redmayne in such a state.
He was annoyed. He didn’t see it at all. He said all the things to me that I had been accustomed to say to Sarah, about the folly of giving way to the tricks of a selfish, hysterical malingerer. But I hadn’t known, until now, the awful power of such tricks; the power, in fact, of not being tricks at all, but genuine, desperate needs. I tried to convey this complicated and—at a distance—unconvincing idea to Ralph, but he was cross, he was sleepy, he wanted me home. Further to pile on the agony, he informed me that Janice hadn’t eaten her baked potatoes. She had come in late, and she hadn’t even bothered to turn the oven off, and so there they were, charred to cinders. Three of them.
He made it sound as if it was all part of my selfish decision to spend the night away from home. To have three charred potatoes thus thrown in randomly among my misdemeanours annoyed me.
“Why was she late?” I countered—trying to make it sound like his fault this time, in retaliation for the potatoes. “I thought she had such a lot of homework tonight?”
“I don’t know about the homework. She said she’d been to the Hardwick’s. I suppose they fed her there. She should ring up, Clare, when she goes off somewhere after school like that. It’s not good enough!”
My fault again? This was fast turning into a quarrel. And anyway, why was Janice suddenly frequenting the Hardwick household like this? I remembered now—though I had been too preoccupied to take it in at the time—that during our conversation on the bath-edge, Liz had referred casually to some visit or visits from Janice. Surely the girl was not getting herself enmeshed with one of those awful boys? She could be, though. I could see her—yes, all too easily I could see her—ending up as one of those nervy, tear-stained females sobbing down Liz’s telephone, chain-smoking, slumped in a dressing-gown over those day-long breakfasts in the Hardwick kitchen. There was a streak in Janice that could develop just like that…. Was I going to have to worry about her love-life, as well as Sarah’s?
Suddenly, I didn’t want to know. Not now. Not at midnight, and with so much on my mind, and with Ralph sounding so cross. We couldn’t possibly discuss it now.
“Yes, well, tell her off yourself, then,” I advised Ralph crisply. We both habitually try to shuffle off the reprimanding of Janice onto each other’s shoulders, and this time I was in the strong position of both feeling annoyed with him and of not being there.
“Tell her she’s not to do it again,” I said, and rang off, quickly, before he could start arguing, saying it would come better from me, or would be better left till the morning—some such pusillanimous piece of paternal theorising.
When I got back to the bedroom, I found my patient sitting bolt upright in bed. As I came in, her too-bright eyes bored into me, with a wild, questioning look: she seemed, for a moment, afraid to speak. Then: “Did you get onto them? Are they all right? Did you tell them I was ill?”
For a moment I was quite bewildered. I nearly said: “Tell who?”—and then I realised that all the while I had been telephoning, her little, one-track mind must have been revolving round and round in the same old circle: Mervyn and how to manoeuvre him back to her side. So deep was her self-absorption, it seemed, that she could not conceive of anyone having any other preoccupation than this one of hers, and thus she had actually been imagining that I had all this time been ringing up hotels in Bristol!
Suddenly, it all seemed amazingly simple.
“Yes,” I said. “They’re both fine. They’re sorry to hear you’re ill, but I told them that I was here looking after you, and not to worry. I told them you wouldn’t hear of their changing their plans on your account.”
Would the bogus message succeed in calming
her, in heading-off her determination to get in touch with Mervyn herself? Or was I just exposing myself to a volley of abuse for not having summoned the wretched young man back as to a death-bed?
I need not have worried. Her reaction to my story was one of total, overwhelming relief: a relief so intense as to be almost unnerving.
“Oh, thank God! Thank God! So he is in Bristol after all! He really did go there! And here I’ve been, imagining that I could hear….” She stopped. She passed her hand across her forehead.
“Forgive me, Mrs Erskine. I’m just a bundle of nerves tonight! And thank you—thank you a thousand times—for setting my mind at rest like this! You don’t know—you’ll never know—how much it’s meant to me, that telephone call of yours!”
Her gratitude seemed out of all proportion. It made me feel really mean. I had meant the lie to work, of course, but not to work as well as this. This frantic gratitude for my hastily botched-up story was something I hadn’t bargained for. But there was nothing to be done but to stick to my guns. It would be cruel to disabuse her now of the comforting illusions I had so recklessly engendered.
And anyway, I told myself, the deception was justified. I had not only intended nothing but good; I had also—which is much rarer—achieved nothing but good. I had saved the young couple from having their weekend spoiled; I had saved Mrs Redmayne—at least for the moment—from her obsessional anxieties. I felt pleased with myself, not guilty at all.
The wicked thing, of course, would be to be found out. This would be a cruelty to Mrs Redmayne that would be unforgiveable. I must remember to pick my way very carefully through the tangled aftermath of falsehood; to keep clear in my own mind exactly what story I had told, and to whom; and to forewarn Sarah and Mervyn so that they wouldn’t gape and say “What telephone call?” when they got back. Many a good and convincing lie has come to grief on this sort of thing.
Mrs Redmayne was as grateful as if she had sensed, somehow, that it was all my doing. I had been such a support to her, she said; such a comfort; she’d never forget it, no she really never would. And would I be very, very sweet and do just one more thing—fetch her sleeping pills from the bathroom? Oh, and a glass of water, warm water … she felt relaxed now, as if she could sleep…. Soon she was lying, drowsily content, waiting for the pills to carry her effortlessly into unconsciousness. As I watched her slipping so peacefully over the borderland of sleep, I felt the sort of pride a surgeon must feel when the operation has been successful and the patient’s life is saved.
*
It was lucky that she had taken those sleeping pills, and that she had taken them so late. It meant that she was still deep in her drugged sleep when, at nine o’clock the next morning, the telephone rang.
It was the Queens’ Hotel, Bristol, calling. They were sorry to trouble me, but a Mr Redmayne, who was booked to arrive last night with his fiancée, had failed to turn up. Would he be arriving tonight, did I suppose, or was the whole booking to be cancelled?
CHAPTER XVI
WAS THIS WHEN I began to feel the first stirrings of uneasiness about Sarah’s safety? I am not sure: my immediate reaction, I know, was simply one of dismay at the immensity of complications that this was going to introduce into the comparatively simple web of falsehood which I had thought myself to be weaving. Now how was I going to get in touch with Sarah and Mervyn, and warn them of what I had done? And suppose the hotel rang again, later in the day, after I had gone, and Mrs Redmayne herself answered? The only way to avert this was to tell them something definite, now.
“Yes—I’m sorry: the booking is cancelled: they should have let you know,” I said firmly. I had a brief, guilty vision of the unlucky pair arriving there tonight, in heavy rain, and being turned away from their rightful, pre-booked lodging; but it couldn’t be helped. The answer I had given was the only one which would prevent the hotel ringing up again, and then again.
Serve them right, anyway! The tiresome pair, why couldn’t they organise their affairs more efficiently?
It did cross my mind, momentarily, that casual, inconsiderate behaviour like this was not characteristic of either Mervyn or Sarah; but the thought did not take root, and I did not attend to its implications. As I say, my mind at the moment was a whirling kaleidoscope of falsehood; new, supplementary lies to bolster up the old ones poured from my over-stimulated imagination in embarrassing profusion; selection and rejection of these, and the re-weaving of my tangled web, occupied all my faculties.
I decided I must get home, quickly. There might be a message from Sarah telling us where the two of them really were staying. Also, I felt that I could not face Mrs Redmayne until I had got my new story thoroughly worked out; if I left now, while she was still asleep, then I could work on it in peace, and be ready to answer every question, meet every eventuality.
So I left her a note: I hoped she was quite recovered now, but if she was still worried about anything, she must ring me. If she liked, I wrote, I would come back in the afternoon; meantime I must go home and attend to my family.
And home indeed I went: but attending to my family proved to be an over-statement; for I had not been back two minutes before Peggy’s excited knuckles were rapping on the kitchen window; and a few moments later she was inside, agog with news.
Sonja had been here! Yes, already, before nine this morning! Yes, Peggy knew how impossible it was that the girl should be up and dressed, let alone out of the house at such an hour, but there it was. And if I thought that she, Peggy, had been “seeing things”, then all I had to do was to ask my own husband. He it was who had answered the door to the visitor and had informed her that I wasn’t in.
“Just like a man!” commented Peggy; and I knew exactly what she meant. What Ralph had told the girl was, of course, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; but who but a man would have left it at that? Who but a member of that incomprehensible sex would have failed to realise how extraordinary, at such an hour, was the apparition on his doorstep, and thus have failed to worm out of her at least something of the reason for her arrival? If it had been left to him, Peggy declared indignantly, Sonja might have just given up and gone away, and then we might never have known what it was all about! This unthinkable disaster had, it seemed, been averted by Peggy herself. She had (naturally) been craning out of her bedroom window throughout the brief interchange on our doorstep, and the moment Ralph closed the door she had rushed down, just as she was, in her nightdress, and had called to the departing Sonja to Wait, Wait!
“She seemed awfully upset,” continued Peggy, beginning proudly to enumerate the rewards already accruing from her promptness and presence of mind. “And she was wearing the weirdest slacks I’ve ever seen! I think she must have been up all night, she looked so sort of bedraggled. I told her you’d be back soon, and I tried to persuade her to stay at our place and wait for you, but she said No—she had such a funny, hunted look, Clare, as she said it! It was as if devils were after her! Isn’t it weird?”
Ralph’s subsequent account of the same episode was that yes, Sonja had called, but had gone away without leaving a message. When you compare his narrative with Peggy’s, and observe that in terms of objective fact the two accounts are identical, then at last you realise how unbridgeable after all is the gap between the sexes. Admittedly Ralph was still being somewhat cool with me because of last night, but even so….
“So I told her you’d ring her up immediately,” Peggy resumed. “Straight away, the moment you got back. But she said, Clare—and this is what’s so exciting—she said she couldn’t talk about it on the phone, it was private! So I said you’d go straight round there—you will, won’t you, there’s a dear! I’m dying to hear all about it. I’ll drive you there if you like: Harold’s not using the car this morning. He doesn’t go into the Lab. on Saturdays any more, it’s ghastly. He’s got all his microbes at home now, in horrid little greasy glass jars all over the dining-room. He says he can’t trust the Lab. girls to keep them at the right
temperature! God knows why he thinks he can trust me—I’d murder the lot of them if I knew how, but how can you when they just look like a lot of dirty water? You can’t even see the little brutes! But anyway, it means we’ve got the car. So come on!”
Peggy’s undignified determination to be in on my mysterious dealings with Sonja was heart-warming: it sent my morale soaring. But all the same—
“Supposing she won’t talk to us, both together like this?” I suggested reluctantly. “I mean, if it was so madly private that she couldn’t even phone …?”
“Oh, I don’t propose to muscle in on the actual tête à tête,” Peggy assured me. “I thought of all that: I quite see that my being there might spoil the whole thing, and then neither of us would ever know! No, I’ll just take you there, and then I’ll hang about gossipping with Liz until you’ve finished. Liz’ll love it, because do you know what?—Adrian is refusing to go back to school next term! He says A-levels are all a lot of balls, and he can get himself a job at thirty pounds a week any time he likes, doing psychedelic lighting in some club, or something. Liz’ll be in heaven. You know how she adores hearing of other people’s sons going to the bad just the way hers are: I’ll get a welcome like royalty, you see.” This was almost certainly true; and added to this there was, as Peggy explained, her own urgent need to get the hell out of her own home this morning.
“Birds in their little nests are not agreeing, as you can imagine,” she told me, as she steered the car into the main road. “Harold’s trying to put his poor harrassed little foot down, his voice has gone all shrill the way it does when he’s in a rage, and he’s squeaking sweet reason like a tin whistle into those deaf, teenage ears. And on top of everything, Mother’s there, trying to be madly progressive about it all—They’ll all have murdered each other, honestly they will, Clare, by the time I get back.”
She swung cheerfully round the corner into Liz’s wide, tree-lined road; and soon the familiar bedlam of her once-gracious Edwardian residence was washing over us. The little boy in the torn vest was in the hall, crying; the girl from Wolverhampton was there again, also crying; and Giles, the eldest boy, in his pyjamas, was yelling down the phone that the gear-box had had nothing the hell the matter with it at the time of the deal, and to tell them where they could stuff it. On the upstairs landing I caught a glimpse of poor Bernard, darting into his bedroom like a mouse into a hole; and in the kitchen was Liz, pleading with a big, vacant-looking girl with bouffant hair to release one of the gas-rings so that she, Liz, could put on a kettle. “O.K.”, the girl kept saying, and went on dreamily prodding at some burnt-looking messes in various pans. Tony’s voice, loud and irritable, shouted something from upstairs; someone had given the little boy in the vest a toasted teacake, which he was now slowly and systematically picking to pieces on the bottom step of the stairs; Susan from Wolverhampton went on crying quietly.
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