Will she love him as she loved Mervyn? Here I shut my eyes, and cover my face with my hands; for who can tell? And who can tell if, under the influence of her unshakeable faith in him, Mervyn might not in the end have changed, become a worth-while person?
But on the other hand, he might not. Leaning on her strength, confident of her forgiveness, he might equally well have grown more childish rather than less; the long-suppressed impulses of his teens might have come creeping back, leading them both, step by inevitable step, to a hideous culmination.
At last, worn out with crying, Sarah fell asleep, and I sat for a while looking down at her tired, young, tear-stained face, temporarily at peace. Had I that night saved her from a ghastly fate? Or had I deprived her of the supreme chance of using her great gifts to bring about a magical transformation of another human being? I can guess. I can feel fairly sure. But I can’t know.
CHAPTER XXII
IT WAS LONG after midnight when I tiptoed out of Sarah’s room, closing the door softly behind me. The grandfather clock in the hall had come into its own now, down there in the sleeping hollows of the house, and its tick sounded loud and masterful.
Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Suddenly, as I stood there, I realised that Janice was still not home. I had not thought of her for one moment during all this harrowing evening.
No, not true. I had thought of her, once or twice, right at the beginning, but only to say to myself: “Thank God that at least Janice isn’t here!” Her tears, her tactlessness, her dislike of Mervyn—they could only have made a ghastly situation even more ghastly, and it had been with fleeting but profound thankfulness that I had reflected that she would probably stay gossipping at the Hardwicks’ for most of the evening.
Since then, I hadn’t thought of her at all. In my concentration on Sarah, I had virtually forgotten that I had another daughter. And now it was nearly one o’clock in the morning.
Was she staying the night, then, at the Hardwicks’? She had never done this before: surely she would have rung up and told me—especially since the scolding we had given her yesterday for merely staying there for supper without telling us?
I had no compunction about telephoning them at this hour of the night. There was always someone awake in that household, just as there was always someone asleep, at any hour of the day or night.
It was Giles who answered.
“Mum?” he said at once, without giving me a chance to speak more than the first syllable of “Hullo”. “Mum, where are you? The boiler’s out; we’ve had nothing to eat. There’s not even any bacon! Honestly, Mum, I do think you might at least see there’s something left in the fridge….”
I explained that I was not his mother. Not being Giles’ mother must surely rate as one of the more solid of life’s pleasures; but I was too anxious about Janice to dwell on this happiness. “Is Janice there?” I kept saying. “Is she staying the night at your place?”
“Well where the hell is she, then?” Giles kept on answering, referring to his truant mother: and for a while we talked thus at cross-purposes, neither of us able to break out of our cocoon of self-absorption enough for communication to begin. “IS JANICE THERE?” I yelled for the fourth time, and at last Giles’ eardrums must have jerked the words into his brain willy nilly, for he answered me at last.
“Janice? Janice Erskine? The girl with the hair? Yes—I think I’ve seen her around. Yes, that’s right”—his faculties seemed to be warming slowly to the unaccustomed task of thinking about someone other than himself—“She ate the last of the bacon. Somebody’d cooked it for her. There wasn’t so much as a bit of rind left by the time we got there. And they’ve finished the Camembert, too….”
“Listen,” I said. “I’m worried. I don’t want to hear your tomorrow’s grocery order; I want to know if Janice is still there? Now?”
“Shall I go and see?” he said at last, quite meekly—I must have succeeded in sounding almost as much of a dragon as I had intended—“I’ll ask Sonja, shall I? It’s her that Janice is always coming to see, isn’t it?”
“I don’t care who you ask—” I began; and only as he went off, leaving me with my ear clamped to a buzzing emptiness, did I begin to take in the significance of his last words.
It was Sonja, then, whom Janice had been calling on all this time? But why on earth …? And then, suddenly, like two bits of magnetised metal, the two separate ideas began to slide towards each other in my mind; at first hesitantly, and then with headlong acceleration towards the inevitable, blinding revelation.
Janice must have known! Right from the beginning, long before I had begun to suspect anything, Janice must have learned from Sonja’s spiteful hints and reminiscences that some sordid and terrible mystery surrounded Mervyn. Hence her tears, and her sullen refusal to join in the general rejoicings over her sister’s engagement. Probably she had talked to Sarah about it; probably Sarah had asked her not to tell anyone; and Janice, with sulks and temper, but otherwise with all the nobility of the boy-on-the-burning-deck, had kept to this promise, and held to it even under the pressure of being scolded for her ungracious and apparently jealous behaviour. With no one to confide in, her anxiety for her sister must have mounted day by day. She must have gone back and forth to Sonja (just as I had) for further information, and have reaped from these visits (again just as I had) a growing harvest of frightening rumour, spiteful innuendo, and distorted fact.
But it was Susan, not Sonja, with whom I had seen her conferring this evening. Did Susan, then, know about it too? Of course she did: the whole Hardwick household probably knew by now—in that maelstrom of tears and telephones, of jumbled bedrooms, of quarrels shouted up and down the stairs, it would be impossible for anything to remain a secret for long. Probably, I thought wryly, they all had heard Sonja’s story about Mervyn, but only Susan was interested. A mere threat of murder (for someone else) would make little dent in the overpowering self-absorption of the rest of them.
“Sonja’s not there.” Giles’ voice broke into my thoughts. “Pepita says she went off in the car with Tony, ages ago. I think Janice must have gone home,” he added helpfully. “Nobody seems to have seen her for hours!”
“Fetch Susan!” I ordered. “Tell her I must talk to her. I’m sorry if she’s asleep, but it’s urgent. You must wake her up.”
“O.K. But what is all this?” Giles’ inert curiosity was roused at last: he really wanted to know. I explained to him once again how Janice was still out … how it was one in the morning….
He didn’t get it, I knew. ‘Out’ seemed to him the natural place for a seventeen-year-old girl, especially at one in the morning. I sensed his bored bewilderment as my anxious queries poured along the line and into his ears. Still, I must hand it to him, he humoured me. He said he’d fetch Susan if he could find her—and I could imagine that the search from sleeping-bag to sleeping-bag through the whole height, length and breadth of the house must be quite an undertaking. Thin and far off, I heard his voice yelling: “Susan! Telephone!”—followed in a few seconds by: “No! Just some old cow looking for Janice!” and then his footsteps echoed cheerily away into the distance.
Susan’s sleepy voice was not reassuring. No, she had no idea where Janice was. She—Janice—had left just after ten—yes, to go home, that’s what Susan had understood. No, she had no idea what could have happened. Oh dear. What could she do? Would I like her to do anything?
Had Janice seemed worried, I asked her? Had they been discussing anything special this evening?
The child hesitated. “I promised …” she began—but I wasn’t standing for any more of such Bravest Girl in the Fourth nonsense, and I told her so. She had got to tell me. Janice might be in danger.
As it turned out, she knew very little. She knew, from Sonja, that Mervyn and his family had been mixed up in a horrible murder case: sometimes Sonja hinted one thing and sometimes another as to who had murdered who: anyway, over the past weeks Sonja had worked Janice up into a terrible state of anxiety ov
er her sister’s fiancé.
“On purpose, I think!” said Susan indignantly. “Sonja’s a horrible, evil woman. She loves upsetting people and making them miserable! She pretends to love Tony, but actually she just torments him! He’s been ever so miserable, he really has, Mrs Erskine, ever since she got him into her clutches! She hurts people for fun! And she’s forty! I’ll swear she is! Not twenty-nine at all!”
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned; nor, in my experience, is there any creature more difficult to keep to the point. Susan did her best, I suppose, but her answers to my questions about Janice tended to burgeon into colourful but repetitive accounts of Sonja’s character, appearance, and prospects. However, I did in the end elicit the main facts as follows:
(a) that Susan really had no idea of where Janice had gone.
(b) that yes, they had been discussing the Mervyn-and-Sarah situation this evening, and Janice had certainly seemed worried: but no more so than she had been for ages. Nothing special (so far as Susan knew) had happened to make her extra worried tonight.
(c) that she, Susan, would stay up all night if necessary, and ring me if she heard any news from anyone about Janice.
(d) that if I’d like her to kill Sonja for upsetting Janice so, then she would willingly do so.
Regretfully, I declined this last offer, but accepted with gratitude her other, more practical suggestions. Then I rang off.
Tick, Tock. Tick, Tock.
Kind little Susan was once again a mile and a half away, and I was alone. My mind whirled helplessly, like a powerful piece of clockwork detached from the mechanism in which it is designed to function. Who else could I telephone? Where could I start looking? Where, in all this wide city, might Janice be roaming? Why, Oh why had I not taken more seriously, long ago, her blatant and undisguised hostility to Mervyn, and persuaded her to talk to me about it? Why had I simply assumed that her ungracious behaviour must be due to jealousy and bad manners, and never even wondered if there might not be some objective reason for it?
I know why. It was because Janice is, by nature, a tempestuous sort of a girl, given to sulks and dramatics. It is so easy, once a person’s failings are thus stereotyped in your mind, to assume that all their troubles can be explained by their particular shortcomings, and to look no further into the material circumstances. One assumes that bad tempered people are never actually exposed to intolerable provocation: that touchy people never suffer genuine insults: that stupid people are never confronted by genuinely insoluble problems. “Just the sort of jam an idiot like that would get into!” we say cheerfully: or: “Don’t worry, she always takes offence at the least thing,” and we do not look to see if, this time, the “least thing” was a piece of undoubted cruelty; or if the “jam” in question is one that anyone, and not merely an idiot, would have found inescapable.
For a minute or two I sat in a state of bitter, helpless remorse. Clear as daylight now I could see the S.O.S. signals that Janice had been putting out over the past weeks, couched in the irritating form of haughty silences and bursts of arrogant ill-humour. I hadn’t recognised these signals, hadn’t bothered about them, partly because they were so annoying, and partly because I was so engrossed in Sarah’s concerns. In trying to help my elder daughter, I had failed my younger one utterly. And now she was gone. Where? Why? Was she embarked on some wild, quixotic escapade? Or had something happened to her as she walked quietly home from the Hardwicks’ through the lamplit streets, hours and hours ago?
Suddenly, I was shaking from head to foot. Mervyn! I had seen with my own eyes the lengths to which he had been driven by the terror of discovering that I knew his secret. To what other lengths might he be driven if he knew that Janice knew it too …? If, half-mad with fear of discovery, he had met her in the quiet streets … if she had challenged him, provoked a showdown on her sister’s behalf? It was exactly the sort of thing she might do: but what, in such a case, was the sort of thing that he might do in retaliation …?
I must call the police. But even as I reached out towards the receiver, the bell suddenly began to ring, yelling like a mad thing into the darkness of the house.
I snatched it up. Police … Police …; the word was still hammering away inside my head, and I could not imagine it was anyone but them, ringing to tell me God knows what.
“Mummy? Is that you, Mummy? Listen, I’ve got to be terribly quick….”
“Janice! Thank God! Darling, where are you …?”
“In a phone box. But listen, I’ve got to tell you quickly, I haven’t any more sixpences, and an awful thing has happened. That horrible Sonja has got Tony to help her to play some horrible trick on Mrs Redmayne! I don’t know what it is, but it’s something to frighten her terribly. They were just getting into someone’s car as I came out of the house to come home. They were laughing, and carrying a great parcel, and they asked me wouldn’t I like to join in with them, because they know I hate the Redmaynes. Well, I do hate the Redmaynes, but not like that. I mean, I’d never want to play a horrible trick on them just because I hate them. So of course I said No. And then they laughed some more, and they wouldn’t tell me what the trick was, they just kept giggling about it in a horrible sort of way, and Sonja was saying how beautifully it would pay her out—Mrs Redmayne, I mean; and how it would give her the fright of her life. And then they drove off—I couldn’t stop them. But I knew they must be going to the Redmayne’s flat for whatever it was they meant to do, so I went after them. But I had to go by tube, I hadn’t any money for a taxi, and by the time I got there it was miles too late. They weren’t there; and the flat was all locked and dark; and I don’t know what they’ve done! Nobody answered when I knocked. I don’t know whether Mrs Redmayne is there asleep, or dead of fright; or whether she’s still out, and will find the trick when she comes back…. I don’t know what to do!”
“Janice. What phone box are you in? … At the corner of the Redmaynes’ road? Where it joins onto the main road, you mean? Well, now look along to your left. There’s a taxi-rank just along there. Can you see any taxis waiting? Oh, good! Well, go and get one at once, and come straight home…. Oh, don’t be silly, darling, you don’t need any money, I’ll pay him when you get here! Do you understand? Come at once. Then I’ll go back, in the same taxi, and I’ll get into the Redmaynes’ flat somehow, and see what’s happened, and make sure that Mrs Redmayne hasn’t come to any harm. Right? Off you go, then: I’ll be here, waiting, ready to start off the moment you’re safely home.”
CHAPTER XXIII
THE RAIN HAD stopped, and plump, wild clouds were swinging across the night sky behind the cube of blackness that was the Redmaynes’ block of flats. I paid the taxi, and watched it glide off round the deserted corner into the main road: then, alone in the empty street, I scrutinised the great walls of building in front of me, where humans were sleeping, tier on tier, like gulls upon a cliff face.
All was in darkness. All, that is, except a single pair of windows, high up, nearly at the top. In this flat alone there must be someone awake, someone moving about, or reading, or talking. Someone who for once hadn’t drawn the thick, expensive curtains, gliding on smooth rails, to shut out the darkness and the sound of the wild, warm, December wind. Even down here, in the sheltered canyon of the street, the wind was pushing at me, tweaking at my hair and at my skirt; up there it must be roaring like the sea, breaking itself against the sturdy, expensive glass, retreating, and hurling itself yet again out of the darkness against those intrepid squares of light.
Was it the Redmayne flat? It was the right floor, and—yes—it was the right side of the building. This was the street you looked down at from the sitting-room … and while I stood speculating, the moon burst from behind one of those flying clouds, and all the black surfaces became grey, the grey ones silver; the speed of the moon was like an express train, and for a moment the whole street seemed to be flying, with me aboard, into a dream of silvery light.
I knew, really, that it was only the clouds th
at were moving; that the great block of flats was still standing foursquare before me, inert and solid, and that it was I who must make the decision to move. I pushed the great entrance door open, and my footfalls at once became hushed on the deep carpet. If there was a caretaker, he was off-duty, or asleep—after all it was two o’clock in the morning—for the entrance hall was silent and deserted.
There is something strangely unnerving about shutting yourself into a lift at two o’clock in the morning. You feel that at this hour the mechanism—whatever it is—will be at its lowest ebb, just as is the human body. At such an hour the pulse rate is slowed, the breathing shallow, and the mind wanders feebly, at the mercy of fears, and worries, and strange fancies, which by day would be just laughable. Are lifts the same? Absurdly, I hesitated before pressing the button for the ninth floor, with the uneasy feeling that the lift would bungle it somehow; it would be only half awake, dreaming muddled dreams of non-existent floors; of attics far beyond the heights of human architecture; of basements deep, deep, near the fiery centre of the earth; and while I stood there, scolding myself for entertaining such ridiculous fancies, I really did feel as if the lift was beginning to move. I seemed to feel it quiver, to stretch itself, yawning after it’s long sleep, and—My God, it was moving! Downwards! Down into the basement … down, down…. Was this a nightmare, or was it really happening?
With a soft little sigh and a faint whisper of metal, the lift came to a rest, and the doors slid open.
Did I imagine it, or was there a tiny flutter of movement in the dank, stone corridor on which the doors were opening? Was there a light scutter of fleeing footsteps, or was it the machinery of the lift settling into immobility after it’s brief exercise?
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