“I won’t have it, I won’t!” cried Liz. “And your father won’t, either! He’ll throw you all out; all three of you! Just wait till he comes home and sees all this!”
“Yes! Just wait! Oh, Mum, you’re a knock-out!” Both of them laughed uproariously—I suppose at the recollection of that screamingly funny time when their parents had attempted to turn them out of the house before. And now, for the first time, Liz noticed my presence.
“Oh, Clare!” she cried thankfully—as though I had arrived in a helicopter to rescue her from the Cannibal Islands and carry her back to civilisation. Her gratitude was pathetic, for, in fact, I had no such equipment; could, indeed, conceive of no sort of rescue-operation which would ever, now, get those boys off their parents’ backs. It did not need this additional weight of a grand piano to crush the unhappy pair; they were crushed already. As far as I could see, it was a life-sentence; the slaves of the Pharoes themselves, it seemed to me, must have had as good a chance of throwing off their chains as had these prosperous parents in their expensive freehold residence.
Also, sorry as I was for Liz, I was far more preoccupied about my own problem; I asked if Sonja was in; and since no one seemed to know, I hurried up to her room and knocked on the door.
I thought I heard low voices; a shuffle of movement. I knocked again, and this time the door was violently flung open, and I found myself confronting Tony. He stared at me in hostile astonishment, while I looked past him for the usual inhabitant of the room.
“Sonja?” I said. “Is she in?”
“No.” He stood there, waiting for me to go; but I ignored his patent lack of welcome, and resumed chattily: “Will she be back soon, do you know? I want to see her urgently.”
“I don’t know.” His rudeness was really quite a challenge, especially after the voices that I was sure I had heard as I knocked. Was Sonja hidden in the room, then? Under the bed? In the wardrobe? If hide-and-seek was the game she wanted to play, then I would give her her money’s worth.
“Oh, well, I’ll wait, then,” I said sweetly; and edging past Tony’s uncooperative frame, I walked into the room and sat down in the chair with the fewest garments scattered about on it.
He looked disconcerted as well as angry; I guessed he was going to catch it from Sonja for mismanaging the scene in this way, and I enjoyed the thought of her lying in the dust and fluff under the bed (or wherever) listening, and planning what she was going to say to him. Had they been making love, and had I interrupted them? Much I cared! I just went on sitting there, with an air of impenetrable middle-aged innocence, and waited to see what would happen.
Nothing did. Tony fidgetted about the room, looked at his watch, and hummed under his breath; I went right on taking no notice. It was odd, it really was. I just couldn’t believe that someone like Sonja would be as embarrassed as all that by my inopportune arrival. And now I noticed that Tony, in all his restless peregrinations, was managing to keep his bulk between me and a large white cardboard box. Yes, each time he passed, he was trying to edge its lid back on without my noticing. I heard the rustle of tissue paper.
“Wouldn’t you like to wait downstairs?” he said at last—when rudeness fails, these boys will often turn to politeness as a last resort. “You’d be more comfortable.”
“No, I’m very comfortable here, thank you. It’s quite all right,” I assured him, sweeter than ever; and how long I would have stayed there, just for the hell of it, I am not quite sure; but just then, downstairs in the hall, I heard a voice that shook me from my obstinate intention.
Janice’s voice. In Heaven’s name, what was she doing here? Had she brought some message of disaster…? I sprang to my feet, my curiosity about Sonja forgotten.
“Well, perhaps I had better go down,” I muttered; and ignoring the boy’s incredulous relief, just as I had ignored his hostility, I rushed out of the room.
Janice was talking in a low, hurried voice to Susan-from-Wolverhampton; they both looked up, startled, as I appeared on the stairs.
“Mummy!” Janice’s unfeigned astonishment reassured me at once. She couldn’t, then, have come to bring me some awful message about Sarah.
“Janice!” I exclaimed; and then, in unison: “What are you doing here?”
“I asked Janice to come, Mrs Erskine,” Susan was explaining hastily, almost guiltily. “I wanted to talk to her—”
That was all right, then! Of all the young people in this lunatic household, poor Susan seemed to me to be quite the most harmless, and I was greatly relieved to know that it must be she whom Janice had been visiting of late, and not one of those awful boys.
“Oh. Splendid,” I said, quite dazed with relief. I went on past the pair of them into the kitchen in search of Liz. I had decided I would talk to Liz for a bit, and give Sonja a chance to crawl out from under the bed, dust herself down, and hide her wretched box of whatever it was. I had no wish to pry into her secrets other than those involving Mervyn; and also it had been almost as boring for me sitting in that chair waiting for her to come out as it must have been for her lying under the bed waiting for me to go.
But Liz wasn’t in the kitchen; nor in the front living room, nor the back one. She wasn’t in her bedroom either, nor taking refuge in the upstairs bathroom. Soon it became clear that others besides myself were missing her.
“Mum! When’s supper?” yelled cheery voices; then, less cheery: “Mum! I say, Mum!” And then, on a note of mounting anxiety: “Mum! Mum! Where are you? When the hell are we going to eat?”
I searched the house, and so did the boys, in a ravening pack. Meanwhile, of course, Sonja made her escape: I went back to her room to find it empty.
The commotion continued. “Mum! Mum!” echoed frantically through the house. I decided to get out while the going was good.
I wasn’t the only one who had so decided. Outside the front gate, under the shelter of a tall laurel bush, well away from the light of the street lamp, I saw two figures lurking.
Liz and Bernard. Each clutched a suitcase; and from each emanated a sort of carefree, wondering radiance such as I had never beheld.
“We’re leaving!” whispered Liz to me excitedly. “We’re going to live in a hotel aren’t we, Bernie? And then later we’re going to find a little cottage in the country with only two rooms….”
“Only one room!” corrected Bernard joyously. “Nobody—not a single living soul—will ever be able to come and stay with us again! You see, Clare, we can’t make the boys leave home, we’ve tried, no end of times; and so now we’re leaving them! They can have the damned house! They can pay the rates; and the insurance; and the electricity bill….”
“They can buy the fruit, and the cornflakes, and the peanut butter! They can pay the butcher, and the milkman….”
“They can repair the roof!”
“They can make the beds!”
“They can mow the lawn….”
“Or find a gardener….”
“And pay him!”
The exultant chorus had to be kept down to a whisper, and now here was the taxi drawing up. With a last furtive look backwards at their one-time home, the two figures scrambled breathlessly into the vehicle; the door slammed; and then, holding each other’s hands, and staring into each other’s eyes with the first, incredulous awareness of freedom, the poor little rich pair sailed away into the night.
CHAPTER XXI
I GOT HOME to find the house in darkness. Ralph, of course, was away tonight, and Janice was still at the Hardwick’s. But where was Sarah? She had gone shopping, she had said; but the shops would have been long shut by now. Or had the shopping expedition been a fabrication to cover her tracks for a few hours while she ran off with Mervyn to Gretna Green, or something?
It wasn’t like Sarah to tell lies. If she had been planning to do anything like that, she would have told me so, and would have faced all the opposition I could offer.
What else, then? She must have gone on somewhere after her shopping was finished. T
o the Redmaynes’ flat, very likely. She was probably with Mervyn right now: she might at least have telephoned to tell me she wouldn’t be in.
But perhaps she had? I had been out since four o’clock, after all … and just then I heard a crunching of steps on the path, a key turned in the door.
In spite of all the turmoil of decisions and counter-decisions that had been tormenting me throughout the last twenty-four hours, I had made no plans at all about how I was to confront Mervyn the next time I met him. Mervyn the murderer. How are you supposed to greet a murderer? What is the etiquette of it? When he smiles, and bends to kiss your cheek, and says “Brr. .rr! What a night!”: when he closes his umbrella, and walks into the house like one of the family, with your daughter hanging lovingly onto his arm? At what stage in this commonplace little tableau do you scream: “Get out of my house, you murderer, you, and never darken my doors again!”
Have you ever tried to scream something like this, unprovoked, to someone who looks and behaves exactly as he did last week, and the week before that, and all the other weeks before you knew what he really was?
“Hullo, Mervyn,” I said: and to Sarah: “Did you have a good day, dear? Are you terribly wet?”
“Not too bad. We’ve been in the car, mostly. Mervyn was a darling, he took the afternoon off to come and help me, he was marvellous at finding places to park the car.” She looked up at him, full of love and admiration, and he laughed down at her, pleased by the small compliment.
Well, was this the time, then, to start the “Get-out-of-my-house” routine?
“Have you both had a meal? … Well, I’ll put some coffee on,” I said, and raced for the kitchen as a swimmer might race for the beach when he sees some fantastic monster of the deep, unknown to science, surging towards him through the waves.
For my situation—it seemed to me—was fantastic in just this sense: it had no precedent. There were no rules to govern it, no conventions on which I could fall back. Coffee for a murderer. Do you take sugar? Cream? Arsenic? And how’s your dear old uncle keeping? What, dead already, and left you a fortune? Dear, dear; but a merciful release, no doubt…. How on earth was I going to talk to the man, now that I knew the truth about him?
I turned the kettle down low, so that it would take a long time to boil, and give me time to think. Just as if thinking would somehow alter the situation, make it possible for me to avoid the showdown.
For I knew I would have to have it out with him. There was no escape anywhere. I would have to tell him that we were forbidding the marriage—that Ralph would see it exactly as I did when he knew the truth—and that he, Mervyn, would have to take himself out of our lives. I would have to say all this to the friendly, well-mannered young man sitting on our sofa, drinking our coffee, and I would have to say it in front of Sarah. Through the closed door and across the hall I could hear them both laughing, a warm, intimate sound.
No. Not coffee. For God’s sake, not coffee! Disaster was upon us, and unavoidable, but at least I could keep farce out of it. I turned the kettle off, and strode into the sitting-room.
“Mervyn,” I said, before I had time to think, to confuse myself with cerebration “Mervyn, there’s something I’ve got to say to you…. I imagine you won’t be very surprised…. I think you will realise that any parent….”
But he was surprised. He stared at me with gaping, dumbfounded amazement: and it was only then that it dawned on me that of course he didn’t know that I knew. Sarah would have kept his secret absolutely; in her loyalty he would have placed (rightly) absolute confidence; and he probably had never dreamed that his mother would actually carry out her threat of betraying him—for this is what the threat must have been that I had heard through the closed door, that first evening at the Redmaynes’ flat: she must have been warning him that if he persisted with his plans she would tell me, Sarah’s mother, the truth.
He stared: and as I went on talking, his expression changed in an odd way: he gently disengaged his hand from Sarah’s, and at the end of my speech he gave a strange little laugh.
“My dear Mrs Erskine,” he said. “I’m sorry my mother’s been worrying you with these silly fancies of hers. You really mustn’t take them so seriously, you know. She has turns like this every so often … has done ever since my father’s death.”
“You mean—you mean it’s not true!” I cried. “You mean you didn’t murder that girl?”
“Of course I didn’t,” he said coolly—though I could see that his face had gone very white. “It’s just one of my mother’s delusions. As I say, she suffers from this sort of thing on and off, that’s why I dare not leave her alone too much….”
“Mervyn! Stop it!” Sarah broke in sharply. “Don’t tell lies to Mummy. There’s no need. She knows all about it. She’ll never, ever betray you, I swear she won’t. I didn’t tell her, because you asked me not to; but it doesn’t matter her knowing, I promise you it doesn’t. You mustn’t tell lies to her, I can’t bear it. Not to Mummy.”
He stared down at her with a strange, still, calculating look.
“My dear Sarah,” he said. “You’re just being a silly little girl. I’m not telling your mother lies. It’s the simple truth I’m telling her: that it’s all nonsense, the story about that girl: that I’ve never murdered anyone, any more than she has.”
“Mervyn!” Sarah’s voice was a little cry of incredulous horror. “What do you mean? You told me—you said…. You broke off our engagement because of it…. We’ve talked and talked about it, all this time….”
“My dear girl, it was only a joke!”
If Sarah had been sobbing less wildly, I think she would have heard the terror behind the cool, mocking words: she would have recognised that the shock of discovering that I, too, knew his secret, had temporarily deprived Mervyn of all his tiny stock of courage and loyalty: he was behaving like a rat because he felt himself trapped like a rat: his rat-eyes glittered through the bars, and I could see the blind, animal panic behind them, whereas she, in her distress and bewilderment, was aware only of the sneer, and of the enormity of the betrayal.
“A joke!” she shrieked. “You mean—you mean you made it all up? You let me think…. You let me feel….”
Her voice failed, and she flung herself sobbing across the arm of the sofa. I could have finished her speech for her, though: ‘You let me think I was saving you, rescuing you from the long years of guilt, giving you new life, new hope: and all the time you were laughing at me. You let me expend on you all I have of faith, of love, of courage; and all the time you were mocking me, you thought it was funny. A joke …!’
Suddenly quietly, she stood up. Gently she slipped the ring off her finger, and smashed it down into his lap with such controlled intensity of violence that she hardly seemed to have moved; and a second later, swift as a deer in flight, she was gone from the room. I was aware of her fleeing up the stairs…. I heard the door of her bedroom slam … and then I turned once more to the shivering figure that still cowered on the sofa, fingering the ring that was now all his. Even now he eyed me slyly, trying to guess how much I knew, how much he could still make me believe.
“I didn’t do it! I never did anything! My mother has delusions! She makes things up! My father never hanged himself. He died of a heart attack….” The defensive, futile lying went on and on, a repetitive, endless wailing, like bagpipes. It was as if he had to convince me not once but twenty, thirty times. It seemed like hours before I was able to quieten him, and get him out of the house. I watched him stumble down our path, never to return.
That night I betrayed my daughter. You see, I knew that the story of the murder was true, and that it was what he had said tonight that was the lie. With my own eyes I had seen the father’s suicide note: with my own ears I had heard Mrs Redmayne’s story, with its ring of total, heart-broken veracity. I could have told Sarah this: and then she would have known that Mervyn had not been deliberately making a mockery of her love and faith; he had simply been lying to me ou
t of panic; and since she was in the room as well, he had found himself—coward that he was—obliged to lie to her as well, regardless of her feelings.
And this, I think, she would have been able to forgive. Cowardice and weakness like this she would have taken in her stride; she would have taken him back and loved him perhaps even more for this new display of weakness. She would have faced, with love and courage, the prospect of a lifetime of bolstering up a man of such shameful cowardice, of such shabby, scheming selfishness. She would have given to him with both hands the strength he could not find for himself, the loyalty he could not return. She would have been a light to his darkness, a warmth to his chill spirit, and would have spent her radiance, willingly, in a cause which seemed to me at best worthless and at worst leading to total, irreversible ruin.
And so I betrayed her. I sat on the edge of her bed and wept with her, and offered all the comfort of the whole earth, except for the one thing that would really have comforted her: the truth. The knowledge, that is, that her lover was a scheming coward, but nevertheless still loved her and needed her. I knew all this, and I didn’t tell her, even when her arms were round my neck and both our hearts were breaking. I sat there, betraying her trust, and to this day I do not know whether my betrayal was right or wrong. Had I the right, by my silence, to swindle her out of spending her great gifts of sympathy and generosity on a cowardly, perverted scoundrel? After all, qualities like sympathy and generosity are talents like other talents; if, instead of these, she had had a rare talent for painting or for music, would I then have considered it my duty to supervise the pictures she painted, the music she composed? Of course I would not; but this, I tell myself, is different.
She will get over it, of course. She is young; in a few weeks or months she will be serene and gay again. The bitterness will fade, and the disillusionment; she will be happy again, our own Sarah, warm-hearted, generous and lovely. By my silence I have saved for her her youth, her innocent integrity, her hope of a happy, successful marriage. In due course, she will find some other man to love.
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