The Day the Call Came

by Thomas Hinde

  I must have lain still for an hour, wondering why she didn’t fall asleep. Twice I heard her sigh. Every sound I heard made me break into a new wash of sweat. I be­gan to shiver. Suppose they had been disturbed at their work and had to hide. Suppose they were still hidden in the house? The owls were hooting, but far away down on the common. I slipped out of bed.

  For a minute I crouched, waiting for her to speak. I could have said I was using the pot. I went with soft steps out of the bedroom on to the landing. I went into the bathroom and took off my pyjamas and rubbed my­self hard with a towel.

  I began to walk about the house, but I didn’t know where I was going. I used a torch at first and went quietly. I stood in doorways, wondering where to go next. Sometimes I discovered myself standing and wasn’t sure how long I’d been there.

  I thought of going to the cellar to check my guns. I knew better than to do that when every movement I made could be watched.

  The black rooms of the house began to frighten me and I switched on lights. I went quickly round the house switching on every light. It seemed important to do this at once. I noticed my toe was bleeding. I hadn’t felt a thing. I thought of the house as it would seem from the garden, all its lights shining out into the night. That would show them.

  I was coming up the stairs. I think I was talking to myself, but I don’t remember what I was saying. I was worried by this bright light and the way I was walking about so conspicuously at its centre. More and more it seemed to be directed at me and I wanted to escape from it. Glancing up, I saw Molly at the head of the stairs.

  She stood in her long white nightdress, staring at me. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘The lights . . .’ I noticed she was shivering, not just her arms but her jaw and whole face. ‘Why are they on?’

  ‘Are they?’ I said, cunning again, but there seemed little point. It was then that I felt real anger with her, anger at the way she was interfering and making my task more difficult.

  ‘You must come to bed.’

  I stared at her, trying to hide my anger which was close to hatred. I managed to shrug my shoulders. I went round the house turning off the lights. I went to bed. As I passed the landing clock I saw it was twelve-thirty. I’d imagined it must be three at least.

  All night I lay awake. The clouds went away and I could see the bright moonlight on the pine tops in the garden. Dawn came and I lay still, putting off the moment when I would get up. It was the waiting I couldn’t bear. There would be nothing to do but wait. Perhaps I fell into a doze. I turned and Molly had gone. I didn’t remem­ber her going.

  I dressed quickly. At once I knew what I had to do – and do quickly.

  I had let myself be frightened into evasion – though I hadn’t for a moment been deceived. Her mock illness, so cleverly contrived. It must have been contrived in the few seconds after they had seen me coming up the path – or had she expected me ever since that look we had ex­changed at the party?

  I could hardly wait for breakfast to finish.

  The excuse was no problem. I would go to inquire about her health. I was working out the details, filling time by a circuit of the house, when I saw, just outside the backdoor, my trug of Michaelmas daisies. Should I take them too? Then if she was still ill I could offer to plant them. Left out of the earth much longer, they would die. It would give me a perfect reason for a careful survey of the garden. I hesitated. Some memory about the ritual associations of Michaelmas daisies was worrying me. I heard a car in the front drive.

  I stepped into shadow. I went through the back door and stood listening in the scullery. There were voices on the lawn. Their voices drew me through the house. It was Dr. Grott.

  I saw him from the sitting-room door, standing be­tween the sofa and the french windows, talking to Molly. Though I couldn’t see his features against the light, I knew it was he by his tallness and the silhouette of his short stiff hair which was like a brush. When he saw me he said, ‘How are we keeping?’ in that friendly but guarded way doctors use, in case there will be bad news to break soon.

  I wanted to ask him angrily why he’d come. Who could have called him when no one was ill? I wanted to drive him out.

  He turned back to Molly and went on with something he was saying – about Dan I guessed because I could now see him beyond them on the lawn, coming nearer with half untucked shirt. I remembered his rash.

  ‘Dr. Grott dropped in so I thought he’d better look at Dan,’ Molly said.

  ‘Dropped in!’ I said. But if they noticed my sarcasm they pretended not to.

  ‘He’s just been down there.’ She gestured with her head. She glanced to see how close Dan had come. ‘Mrs. Willis,’ she said quietly. ‘She’s died.’

  My astonished horror must have shown. I think it surprised them.

  ‘Heart,’ Molly said.

  ‘Seventy-seven,’ Dr. Grott said.

  ‘We were just wondering,’ Molly said, ‘if you’d let Dr. Grott give you a check-up?’

  ‘Me?’ I said.

  ‘Well, all of us,’ Molly said. ‘We ought to be,’ she hurried on. ‘Everyone should be. Every year.’ She sat in an armchair, her head a little back, as if offering her­self to be checked. ‘That’s why Dr. Grott came.’

  ‘But you didn’t say that,’ I said. ‘You said it was be­cause of Mrs. Willis.’

  ‘Well, now he’s here,’ Molly said, but less hopefully, as if already admitting defeat. ‘Please.’

  She had stood again. She was appealing to me. And suddenly I had an idea that she was appealing about something different. She was asking me to understand this, or if I didn’t understand it, to trust her. The fear and anxiety in her eyes were so terrible that I hesitated. Per­haps it was this which encouraged them both to begin to move forward. I saw Dr. Grott’s hands come up. I hesitated so long that his hands actually started to feel the glands at the base of my neck.

  ‘No,’ I shouted. I hurried away from them.

  At the moment I felt his hands and saw Molly watch­ing beside him, my understanding had become com­plete. It didn’t matter where I started: with the moment I had met her crossing to the Draycotts with the jar of pâté, or the time I had found her coming down our drive on the way to that gathering at the Brightworths’. If I ignored the footprint in the flower-bed and the way it had been covered up, there was the way she had tested me by asking why we no longer quarrelled.

  The calling of the policemen, the unnecessary tennis party, the stealing of my gun, her attitude to my tele­phone calls, the moment as far back as the day of the stand-by when I’d seen her on the way to my attic, all pointed in the same direction.

  And now the way she had helped them so ruthlessly to do away with the old woman as soon as she was sus­pect and called the doctor to explain it to me. And tried to tempt me . . . I went to the bedroom and lay on our bed. There was something shocking yet totally fore­seeable about what I was to be asked to do. It was the hardest thing of all and so the most likely. I realized that on a certain level I had always thought about this possibility. I could afford to because it hadn’t seemed possible.

  I could hear my children playing on the tennis court. Outside my north window there was grey shadow, but there on the other side of the house they were shouting to each other in the sun. I sat upright, worried by the tears which were running down my face.

  Unlike the others whom I had suspected and at once hated for the vicious deceit of their lives, I could not hate Molly. I loved her more. That was why, for the first time, I was certain.

  PART SEVEN

  That afternoon the order came. All day I’d expected it but when it came it wasn’t the order I’d expected. I didn’t know what it meant.

  As soon as I heard the doctor go I got up from my bed. I had to force myself to do it. Suddenly I was tired. I only wanted to go on lying there. I had to tell myself that there were only a few more efforts now.

  But I had to go slowly. I was feeli
ng my lack of sleep as I hadn’t before. When I made sudden movements my heart pounded and sometimes as I walked carefully or stood listening I seemed to be losing my balance and raised my arms sideways, thinking I was falling when I wasn’t. Presently I started to follow her.

  At first I followed her at a distance – just to be sure I always knew where she was. When she was upstairs I stood in the hall, listening to her moving up there. When she went into the garden I stood in the veranda, sometimes taking a step forward so that I could see her, sometimes stepping back into the shadows.

  At lunch I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t eat. I took my plate to the sink and put the food into the bin, pretending I’d finished it. After lunch I followed her more closely.

  I was frightened that she might make a sudden run. That was why I had to follow her closely. But I was frightened, too, that she might notice. Several times I thought she glanced back anxiously as I waited just out of the line of a doorway she’d gone through. And once she came out quickly again, surprising me. ‘Oh!’ she said with a sort of gasp and shudder, but went on quickly as if it was nothing she could explain.

  It was after tea – I hadn’t had any. I watched her carry the tray into the kitchen then go upstairs to the bath­room. I followed her there, then went up the flight to my attic. After a few steps I stopped and kept still. Peering back and down I could tell she was still there by the slight changes of light her shadow kept making on the landing. Then I saw Dan and Peggy. They were on the lower stairs where they must have followed us. They were both staring at me with wide eyes. I saw that Peggy was about to ask what on earth I was doing, standing there so curiously, leaning back and peering down over my shoulder. ‘It’s not true,’ I wanted to shout at them. ‘I’m not doing it.’ I ran the last steps up to my attic. That was when I got the order.

  I heard it as soon as I opened the door. It was coming from below the floorboards and went on steadily, as if humming to itself. Perhaps it had been doing it all day.

  It must have switched itself on, using some emergency procedure I didn’t know about. I leapt for my pad and pencil. I squatted by the boards, ready to decode the message which it would begin to send at any moment. Instead it went on humming with a steady beat. ‘Wow wow wow wow wow wow.’ There’s no other way to describe it.

  I lifted the boards. I worked the knobs. I made it louder, then softer – though I could never quite make it disappear. I could get no other sound.

  What could it mean?

  It was like someone beating the air, only they would never have had time to raise their arm. It was like some­thing flapping. Wings. Butterflies.

  No doubt I’d got used to their messages, stripped to their essentials, but I couldn’t help a moment’s pride at my skill. It wasn’t this which kept me on my knees for fifteen seconds more, but relief that it wasn’t the order which I had been expecting all day. There were tears of gratefulness in my eyes. I stared at the equipment between the floor joists, wishing there was something I dared do to thank them.

  Anger came later. I was in the woods, working my­self up a gully of dry leaves and snapping twigs towards the kitchen garden and beyond it that circle of lawn which I had looked at through my binoculars from the hills ten miles to the east on the day of our picnic. It was anger with myself, of course, for not seeing through the transparent double bluff. But mostly it was anger with this bogus lepidopterist.

  Though I still believed that he was the centre of some organization in which the Draycotts, Quorum, all of them, yes, even Molly, were involved, I began to under­stand that it was an organization unlike any I had sus­pected. Because it was no organization. It had none of the secret-meeting, coded-message character which I had suspected. It wasn’t a cell for the dissemination of propa­ganda. They were involved with him in a way they none of them perhaps knew about because of their love for him. He was their leader because of what he was.

  To them he represented compassion, that supreme quality overflowing into universal love, which they none of them possessed but all longed for. It was compassion that I was to destroy, with its head-in-the-sand escapist fallacy.

  By destroying it – try as I would to avoid the question, my logic led me to it – whose side would I be acting on? Creeping forward up that crackling ditch I crushed the thought.

  The wood went on a long way – why had I never wondered that his house should be surrounded by so large a wood? It grew thicker, with tangled brambles and low branches between the trees which blocked my path. Although I knew it was still bright daylight out­side, it seemed here like evening already. I began to hear noises which weren’t mine in the trees around me. I should have expected it.

  They grew louder and closer to me as I hurried for­ward. I began to tear my clothes on the brambles and once fell into a leaf-filled hole. Twice I stopped, half in panic, half because the undergrowth had blocked me. I stood still, shivering and listening. All around there was silence, as if they had stopped at the same instant.

  I began to run towards any brighter light I could see through the trees, not caring where I came out so long as I escaped from this wood. Each time I seemed to lose the brightness and looked round in panic for some new direction to try. The footsteps were closer as if no longer caring how much noise they made. The scream was rising in my throat – when I saw the trees thinning ahead and came out into the low evening sunlight. I crouched and ran between shrubs, my legs brushing through heather. I could tell from how low the sun had sunk how much time I had wasted in the wood.

  As soon as I could see the red roof and imitation Tudor chimneys I stopped for breath. I must check that in my scramble through the woods I had dropped nothing. I felt in my pocket. It was still there.

  Ever since I’d got the message I’d known I couldn’t bear him to be facing me. I could not bear the idea of his eyes watching me as I aimed at his stomach, and of how they would fill with pain when the first shot hit him. I had to manage it differently.

  Once I hesitated as I made my way up the side of his vegetable garden, using the beech hedge for cover, only ten feet from where I’d worked two days before. I got the idea that he’d known what was going to happen. It would explain why he’d wanted me to prune his blackcurrants: so that I could see the approaches. It fitted with all I knew and hated about him. I hurried forward among the rhodo­dendrons.

  Peering through them I could see directly on to the circle of lawn. Not more than five or six yards away, at the edge of his veranda, Percy was sitting in a deckchair. He was facing away from me, bathed in the yellow evening sunlight. He had a book on his knees, but I thought from its angle that he was asleep.

  I got out the cord and adjusted the knot. I moved along the bushes and began to creep forward in the open. Though I was in the open for these first yards I was hidden by the near end wall of the veranda. Only for the last two would I be in full view if he heard me and turned. I’d reached these and was staring past him at the far windows of the veranda when without warning I was crouching and shivering. I had begun to hunt again.

  And now I didn’t care whether or not I should let myself hunt. I didn’t care that I was making my memories real when they might not be. To me they were real be­cause they were the only reality I had. And this was the last moment I had. I swept them all aside in the hunt for the one memory which I realized for days now I had been trying to recover, a memory of something which had really happened and I had not invented or contrived. I seemed to grasp at it. It was like a voice, the voice of a real person speaking to me. In my memory it grew more and more substantial till it was on the point of appearing, solid and visible. There it was. There could no longer be any doubt. My mind choked on the words. They were the opposite of the truth. There could only be doubt . . .

  At that moment I saw Percy’s peke.

  I saw it clearly, where it must have been lying all the time, by the far corner post of the veranda, also in the sun. Its ear had twitched.

  It had its rump towards me and its head t
owards the drive, no doubt so that it could yap at visitors without getting to its feet. Because of the way it was lying I couldn’t tell whether it was asleep or had its eyes open, ranging over its field of view.

  I thought of going back and inventing a new plan. I thought of rushing and hoping. Neither was any good. Very cautiously I began to move forward again. At that exact second its ear twitched.

  I was so sure I’d made no noise that I thought it must be coincidence. I had to think so. I went on moving forward, an inch at a time, holding the cord in front of me, the knot in my right hand, my left keeping the loop open.

  He was wearing an open shirt, and its collar had fallen back so that his neck showed to where it joined his shoulders. The top of his neck was brown and wrinkled, the bottom white and smooth. There was a clear line.

  Glancing down I opened my right hand to see that the knot seemed free. I judged the size of the loop and glanced up to see that it seemed big enough for his head. Beyond his head I saw that the peke had risen on its fore-feet and was staring at me.

  Astonishment must have silenced it for that vital second. I jumped.

  The noose was tight before he seemed to feel it. If he made any sound it was drowned by the peal of yaps the peke had begun and I had the strange idea that he, too, was distracted by this.

  His hands came up and began to feel at the cord, trying to get inside it, but they didn’t try hard and pres­ently fell away. I saw them hanging by the side of the deckchair, opening and shutting.

  I pulled as hard as I could with my right hand, at the same time forcing the knot forward with my left. I was worried by the indefiniteness of what I was doing, but determined to go on as long as necessary. I think it was the sight of his hands opening and shutting that upset me. The deckchair fell sideways and he sat on the ground.