“We’ve come to see Sonja. At least, Clare has,” Peggy made herself heard above the hubbub. “And Liz. I must talk to you about Adrian…. We’re so worried….” Liz brightened at once, as Peggy had known she would. She even seemed to derive a little extra moral strength from the good news, for she pushed one of the gently charring frying-pans to one side, and put the kettle on.
“Sonja’s in her room, I think,” she told me, offhand with relief at the prospect of a few minutes’ contemplation of troubles other than her own; and following these rather vague instructions, I set off in search of Sonja. I say vague, because almost every room in the house had at one time or another been Sonja’s room. Usually she was to be found on the front room sofa, but today it was occupied by Pete, stretched out full-length, watching television. Behind the door of the big back drawing-room I could hear a gabble of aggrieved Italian going on, and in a third room the wireless was on, loudly. So I set off upstairs, and, taking a chance, knocked on the door round which I had seen Sonja’s head appearing on my last visit. It seemed I was lucky.
“Come in!” came the husky, weary voice; and I opened the door onto an unmade bed, a tray of last night’s drinks, and Sonja herself, sitting hunched over the gas-fire. She was dressed in emerald green slacks, a heavy dark sweater, and her hair was piled loosely on top of her head, as if it would fall down at the slightest movement.
It didn’t, though. She turned round sharply as I came in, and it remained intact.
“Hullo,” she said guardedly. “You got my message?” I told her I had, and she looked me up and down for a moment, without expression. “Well—sit down, or something,” she said, vaguely gesturing. “Have a drink. Sorry everything’s such a mess, but—well—”
She abandoned her sentence. She knew, and I knew, that the mess that surrounded her had gone beyond explanation: it was a way of life; it was just simply the case. I sat down on the edge of the tumbled bed; I refused the drink, and waited while she sloshed into a tumbler some liquid that I think was whisky. She sat down again.
“I hear Mrs Redmayne’s ill?” she said abruptly. “You were with her last night. How is she?”
“Better, I think,” I answered cautiously. What was at the bottom of this sudden solicitude? “How did you know? I mean, I didn’t think she’d told anyone else.”
She shrugged.
“Everyone knows everything in this madhouse,” she pointed out, with some plausibility. “So she’s better, is she? Well, that’s good.”
“Yes,” I said. The conversation had reached an extreme of futility that amounted to paralysis. What was it that she wanted to know? She was obviously trying to pump me about something.
“What exactly was wrong with her?” She took a long, slow gulp of the whisky, eyeing me over the rim of the glass; and I wondered how much to divulge.
“Well—she seemed a bit feverish,” I said, cautiously. “And a bit nervous too—you know—”
“I’ll say I do!” she burst out viciously; and then, controlling herself, she went on in unnaturally casual tones: “Nervous, eh? Was it about anything, would you say?”
She was watching me closely. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing; but since I didn’t know what she was after, almost anything might be wrong—or, indeed, right.
“I think she’s nervous about intruders,” I said. “When Mervyn’s away, I mean, and she’s alone in the flat.” No harm, surely, in admitting this much. Mrs Redmayne herself certainly made no secret of her dislike of being alone.
“Intruders? How silly!” Again the unnatural, offhand voice, this time followed by an unnatural little laugh. “How could there possibly be intruders? In a great block of flats like that!” Again I had the feeling of being scrutinised while I searched for a non-committal answer. “Don’t tell me,” she went on, more ostentatiously offhand than ever, “That there was an intruder? Or any sign of one?” Her laugh, deprecating and dismissive, indicated, just a little too ostentatiously, that she was only joking.
Suddenly, I realised that I had quite as much to learn from this interview as she said; without warning, I moved over to the attack.
“Sonja,” I said. “Every time we meet, you go out of your way to make uncalled-for insinuations about the Redmaynes. First you hinted a lot of unpleasant things about Mervyn’s father. And then last time you were dropping hints about Mervyn’s former girl friends. Now you’re hinting something about his mother. What it is, I don’t know, because you’re being purposely obscure; but it’s obviously something none too pleasant. Now, suppose you tell me exactly what it is you are getting at?”
She was startled. Plainly, this sudden reversal of rôles was something she hadn’t bargained for. Her face took on a sulky look, and she sipped her drink defiantly.
“Golly!” she said at last. “You don’t know you’re born, do you? And neither does your precious Sarah. I wonder what you’d say if I really told you all I knew …?”
“I’d say it was all old hat!” I declared boldly, shooting in the dark. “Because you see, Sonja, I know it all already. I know that you were Mervyn’s girl friend a few years back. I know that you ditched him….”
“I did not ditch him!”
My ruse had worked. The one infallible way to get people to tell you some story is to start telling it to them, and to get it wrong. No one can resist it. Certainly no one as vain and egocentric as Sonja would sit back and let her precious life-story be thus mishandled.
“It was that fiend of a mother!” she burst out. “We were getting on fine, Mervyn and I, until she started poking her nose in! Not that he’s really my type, you know. All that gentlemanliness, it’s not what I’m used to, but all the same it was quite intriguing at the time. First running into him in London, after not having set eyes on him for over ten years, and having him recognise me straight away. And then his amazing way of going about things, it was out of this world, it was like something out of some soppy romance. Flowers, theatres, dinners in town, and still not a word about going to bed with me—it’s not what I’m used to, Mrs Erskine, it most surely is not. But I didn’t mind. I thought it was rather sweet, really, a nice change. Still, enough’s enough—wouldn’t you agree, Mrs Erskine—? and in the end he came to the point and we fixed that he was to tell his mother he was going to Bristol on business and would have to stay overnight—there’s some branch of his firm down there, or something, which comes in handy—and then he was to come nipping along to my flat, and there we’d be. Candles, soft music, the lot. I tell you, Mrs Erskine, I was really quite smitten at the time.
“How she got wind of it I don’t know. Sometimes I think she’s got second sight, that woman. Anyway, there we were, it was about ten o’clock, and we were just sitting down to eat—I’d fixed us quite a meal, I may say, lobster and such. And just then there was a ring on the door. I was for not answering: just let them ring, I said. But Mervyn has never had the nerve for that kind of thing; he soon had the door open, and there, if you please, was Mrs Almighty Redmayne! She took it all in—me, the candles, the whole set-up, and then—listen to this—she told him it was time to come home! You know—like he was a kid—Thank-Sonja-for-the-lovely-party sort of stuff!
“I just couldn’t credit it was happening. ‘Tell her to go drown herself!’ I said, trying to punch a bit of guts into him; and I think it shamed him, just for a minute, because: ‘Mother,’ he said, all stiff and pompous. ‘You must go away and stop interfering. This is my business.’
“‘Stop interfering’!—apparently this was the toughest line he’d ever taken with the little vixen, because he looked frightened to death the moment he’d spoken, and he and his Mummy stared at each other as if a bomb had dropped. Her face sort of swelled up, I thought she was going to burst; and then Mrs Erskine, she began to scream. And I mean scream. She went on and on, neither of us could stop her, and in half a minute the neighbours were pounding on the door of my flat, and someone was yelling for the police. You won’t believe the next bit: I wouldn’t my
self if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. There she was one moment, screaming and bellowing like a madwoman—and then, the moment someone got the door open and they all surged in—in that very second, if you’ll believe it, she stopped screaming. Between one breath and the next, she had become calm and prim as the Lady of the Manor.
“‘I’m so sorry for the disturbance,’ she says, ‘But this young lady has been having an attack of hysterics. My son and I have been trying to quieten her—would one of you be kind enough to telephone for a doctor?’
“‘For God’s sake!’ I yelled. ‘Mervyn, you tell them …!’ And would you credit it, Mrs Erskine, not one word did the rat say on my behalf! He let them go on thinking that I was the one who’d been screaming! He let the doctor come, and the police, he let the doctor give me some goddam injection, I was as near as nothing put into a Bin that very night! And the more I ranted and raved and tried to set the record straight, the more they were sure it was me who’d been screaming, and the rat, the snake, he stood by and let it happen! That I ended up getting turned out of my flat was the least of it! And that’s why, Mrs Erskine, now that I can see an amusing way of getting my own back on the pair of them …!”
She stopped. The door opened, and Liz’s face appeared round it.
“Clare? Oh, you are there. I’m sorry to barge in, but there’s someone on the phone for you, she says it’s urgent. She’s been trying all morning to get you at home, she says….”
The familiar, breathless voice was no surprise to me. I had guessed it would be Mrs Redmayne. But the fury behind her words was a surprise. For a moment, I could hardly take in what she was saying.
“You lied to me!” she shrieked. “You lied to me last night when I was helpless, when I trusted you! You told me you’d rung Mervyn at his hotel, but you were lying! You couldn’t have rung him because he wasn’t there! He wasn’t there last night, and he still isn’t there this morning! He and your precious Sarah, they’ve disappeared!”
CHAPTER XVII
IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to quieten her over the telephone. It seemed to me that there could be a dozen soothing and perfectly reasonable explanations of the couple’s non-appearance at the hotel, but I could not get beyond the first two words of any of them before being swamped by further floods of vituperation. She had every right to be angry, of course. I had lied to her; and any explanation would be worse than useless because, from her point of view, my motive for lying would appear even worse than the lie itself. What seemed to me to be a wholly benevolent intention—namely, the freeing of an over-conscientious young man from the octopus-clutch of his possessive mother—would seem to her to be wholly malicious—the encouraging of a son in deceit and undutifulness towards his ailing and devoted parent. There was nothing to be done but to go and apologise in person, and to try, in any way I could, to undo the harm I had done. The thing to remember was that the poor woman was not only angry; she was also hurt, and frightened: and while I might deserve her anger, I also might be able in some degree to allay the hurt and the fear. That she was a changeable little thing I already knew, and also that she was pathetically easily swayed by kindness and a little cossetting. I decided to go to her straight away and do my best. First I rang up my long-suffering family to tell them they must get their own lunch. Did I say long-suffering? Actually they were both thoroughly sulky and fed-up, and I can’t really blame them, seeing that I had deserted them last night as well. Ralph remarked, icily, that if I was leaving him, why couldn’t I say so outright, and leave a proper note propped on the mantelpiece, like other wives? Janice said what about her revising? If she was to be expected to run the whole house, and cook all the meals, for ever, then how could she ever get through her Mocks next term? I pointed out that, actually, she hadn’t cooked anything so far, I’d left last night’s meal in the oven: and that anyway, she hadn’t even been in. She retorted, aggrieved, that that was all very well, but if she had been in then she would have had to cook it; and without being in, how could she possibly do any revising?
The logic of this defeated me—Janice’s logic often does. I told her sharply that she could either cook something or go without: or even, I suggested, she could try being nice to her father for a bit, then he might take her out to lunch. I then rang off quickly, so as not to hear any more about the revising. Clearly, I was going to have a heavy day on Sunday smoothing down ruffled feelings; meantime, I must lay out my ill-gotten freedom to the best advantage.
I refused Liz’s cordial invitation to stay to lunch; for one thing it didn’t look as if there was going to be any lunch, there were so many people still having breakfast; and for another I wanted to get to Mrs Redmayne as quickly as possible. I felt that if I didn’t calm her down without delay, she would be calling out the whole Bristol police force after her errant son.
Peggy walked along to the tube with me in order to be regaled with a rapid resumé of my situation, and of the conversation I had had with Sonja. She was intrigued, eager to hear more details when we were properly at leisure. Meantime, she said, she must hurry back as she had accepted Liz’s invitation to lunch—if lunch it should turn out in the end to be. She was accepting it, anyway, she declared, even if it should prove to be ships’ biscuits with weevils in, because she and Liz were having such a lovely time telling each other what a frightful time they were both having. She’d been hearing all about the time when Liz had at last got Bernie to throw Giles and Pete out of the house: “Literally throw them out, Clare,” Peggy retailed gleefully “Into the street! With all their tape recorders and pools coupons and fancy shirts—the lot! But by the time Bernie got in from work the next evening, there they both were again, quite amiable, just as if nothing had happened. Giles was having a bath. That’s what made them give up, Liz says, that bath; I know just what she means, don’t you? There’s something so final about someone having a bath; it knocks all the fight out of you; you just know they’re here to stay. She’s been telling me about Tony going to live in Wolverhampton, too. They were so thrilled, she says, when they heard he was living with this girl; they thought it meant he’d really left home; especially when he wrote and asked to have his record-player sent on, and a lot of his books. It was the most marvellous fortnight of her life, Liz says, until the afternoon when he turned up again with two record-players, and this girl, and hundreds of extra books. They’ve been here ever since, more or less. She’s back—did you know—this Susan girl? And this time she can’t go back to Wolverhampton, even if she wants to, because she’s quarrelled with her father. Oh, Clare, what will I do if Adrian turns out like that? I mean of course he will—boys from good homes with enlightened parents always do—but I mean if he stays at home turning out like that? I always pictured him running away and getting into mischief; but Liz says she used to picture that, too, once upon a time. She says it doesn’t happen that way, not any more. It seems, Clare, that none of the young people nowadays want to get away from their parents the way we used to. Now it’s the parents who want to get away from them. She says she feels she’s spent her whole life so far in a trap: first she was trapped by possessive parents, and now she’s trapped by possessive children. They’re furious, she says, if she’s ever not there, to lay on food, and wash their shirts, and everything. Oh, Clare, we’ve been having a marvellous time, I must get back and hear the rest! Pray for me, though. Pray that whatever else Adrian does or doesn’t do, that at least he’ll run away! You will, won’t you, there’s a dear. Because if he doesn’t, it won’t be just bedlam in our house, like it is at Liz’s; it’ll be bloody murder! So long, then. Get all the pickings you can off your Mrs Redmayne, and I’ll do the same with Liz; tomorrow we’ll piece it all together. Yes? Bless you! The more frightful our lives become, the more fun we can have talking about them, can’t we, that’s one thing!”
With a cheery wave she was gone; and I went on down into the wild, warm, windy tube. I willed the trains to go fast, fast, to get me to Mrs Redmayne’s before she made any mad, silly, irrevocable phone
calls to Bristol.
The flat was hot and airless. The central heating—I suppose to provide some sort of primitive, infantile comfort—had been turned full on, in spite of the warm, muggy winter’s day outside. Mrs Redmayne—not surprisingly—looked flushed; but I could see at once that it was not from anger. Since telephoning me, her first fury seemed to have wilted, and she welcomed me with a sort of desperate thankfulness.
“Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come, Mrs Erskine! But why have you been so long? You said you were coming at once! At once, you said! I began to be afraid that you had changed your mind. I was afraid you had decided to let me down! Oh, I was so frightened!”
“I wouldn’t do a thing like that—!” I began indignantly; but realising that such self-righteous protestations were hardly becoming to the bare-faced liar that I seemed overnight to have become, I changed my tone.
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