The Parasite Person

by Celia Fremlin

  For one moment, he panicked. Already, he was way behind schedule with the interviews, and now the prospect of actually doubling them …!

  The panic passed, almost before it had properly made itself felt.

  For was there not Ruth Ledbetter now, beavering away at the interviews with a speed and efficiency that almost took his breath away? Five she’d brought in yesterday, and four the day before, nearly all of them long and very thorough, full of the sort of intimate revelations which only a top-class interviewer knows how to elicit.

  Nine in two days—nearly thirty a week! Long before that deadline in May, the whole lot would be in the bag!

  He’d never known such a marvellous interviewer—never! And any moment now, she’d be along with today’s supply!

  CHAPTER XVII

  “SO POOR OLD Parsons is gone at last!” said Miss Crane, indicating with a well-shaped but unvarnished finger-nail the relevant spot in the Births, Marriages and Deaths page of the local paper. “Look. Albert Vincent Parsons, of 24 Lymington House—it must be him! Ninety-four—my goodness! I never realised he was that old. Why, he must have been gone seventy already when I first came …!”

  Somewhat blank looks were all she got in the way of response from the other occupants of the staff-room, and she had to explain:

  “You wouldn’t remember him, of course, you young ones, but he was the caretaker here for—oh—something like fifty years it must have been. He retired soon after I got here, I remember the Presentation, and half the school in tears, though by all accounts he must have been a holy terror. He used to hook the children off the Governors’ Lawn by their coat belts with a window-pole, and then chase them with it all the way to the playground steps, yelling frightful threats at them. The Governors’ Lawn,” she explained patiently, for the sake of those who still looked blank, “was at the far end of the playground; you know, that muddy bit, where it says ‘KEEP OFF THE GRASS’. Well, there used to be grass there once. And the children had to keep off it.” She sighed. “I suppose Parsons was the last person left alive who actually knew how to stop kids doing things; and now he’s dead, too! Ah well …!

  She sighed, laid down the paper, and began putting her books together for her next lesson. When she had gone, Helen, who had a free period ahead, idly picked up the paper to glance through while she finished her coffee.

  Ninety-four! Quite a character, too, by the sound of it. Vaguely intrigued by what Gillian Crane had told them, Helen cast her eyes over the remaining few lines of the insertion, and was pleased to note that the cantankerous and colourful old man had at least had a good send-off. Not for him the lonely end usually experienced by those who outlive by so many years the allotted span; on the contrary he was “Deeply mourned by his son, his four surviving daughters, his nineteen grandchildren, his eleven great-grandchildren.”

  A good life. A full life. Helen found her eyes wandering idly down the rest of the column to see what sort of deaths the others had died, and at what sort of age.

  “Peacefully, in his own home, after a long illness, Gordon White, aged 79, beloved husband of Maud …”

  “After a long illness bravely borne, Doris, much loved sister of Gertie and Win, aged 83 …”

  Yes, most of them seemed to be truly mourned by somebody or other. Most of them seemed to have had good long lives—and then, suddenly, Helen stiffened. If anyone else had been in the staff-room to notice it, they would have seen the paper shaking in her hand as she picked it up to look closer … to see if she hadn’t, somehow, misread the small print….

  No, there it was, just as it had first caught her eye:

  “Suddenly, at his own home, Mr Clive Willis, of 17 Whitbread Mansions, aged 59 …”

  There could be no mistake. Only yesterday—only last night—she had been typing this very name, this very address, at the head of one of Martin’s new interviews. One of Ruth’s, rather, this Ruth Ledbetter, who had taken over (Martin had explained) from the incompetent Walter as his chief assistant. It had been a long interview, Helen remembered, and quite extraordinarily interesting: after typing it, together with two or three others equally good, she had agreed with Martin wholeheartedly that this Ruth girl, despite her off-putting manner, was proving herself an absolutely top-class interviewer, with a real gift for putting her subjects at their ease and extracting from them the most surprisingly detailed and intimate information. This Clive Willis, she recalled, had been particularly revealing about his relationship with his wife, who had been “wonderful” to him ever since the depression had first struck:

  “Such a marvellous woman … so patient … I don’t know how she puts up with me, I really don’t … I’m such poor company these days … And then she has her job, as well … yes, a part-time job every afternoon, and the pity of it is that it’s the afternoons that are just the times when I begin to feel a bit better … you know, I can sort of get myself going … and that’s just the time when she’s not there to see it! A shame, really …”

  And now he was dead! Helen felt the shock almost as if she had actually known him, after having typed out so many of his inmost thoughts.

  How sad! How very sad! And only fifty-nine, too.

  “Suddenly”, it said: was this a euphemism for suicide? With depression this was a small but ever-present risk. If only one was able to do something for these people, instead of just interviewing them; but of course that wasn’t what Martin’s research was all about. It was a shame.

  By now, the shock was subsiding slightly, but it left her, somehow, with a compulsive need to read to the end of the column, as if the list of unfamiliar names would be in some way reassuring.

  But that first shock was as nothing to the second.

  “Mrs Claire Huntingdon, of 11 Tewkesbury Avenue aged 44 …”

  This, too, she had typed, word for word, this very morning!

  It couldn’t be true! It couldn’t! She must be dreaming! She must be hallucinating!

  Yes, that was it. The shock of that first item must be causing her to hallucinate a second, similar one. Shock could do that sort of thing to you, she knew, though it was a bit disconcerting to discover that she, Helen, so sane and well-balanced, could be susceptible to such aberrations, even if only for a second or two.

  She closed her eyes for a few moments, confident that when she opened them again, the item would be gone.

  But it wasn’t gone.

  “Mrs Claire Huntingdon, of 11 Tewkesbury Avenue …”

  It was impossible. It couldn’t be happening.

  But it was happening.

  She must think, think. Putting her head in her hands, Helen tried to conceive of some credible explanation, because, of course, there must be one. The only answer she could come up with was, once again, the rather unsatisfying one that it was something inside her head that was running amok, and not the world outside. Since she wasn’t hallucinating the newspaper item—she had looked at it too many times to doubt its reality any more—then maybe it was her memory that had gone haywire? Maybe the shock had affected her in such a way that she thought she’d typed that name and address this morning when in fact she hadn’t … a sort of déjà-vu phenomenon …?

  *

  Luckily, the phone was free—well, it would be, with everyone else at lessons—and luckily, too, there was no one passing along the passage outside the booth and overhearing, possibly, the bizarre conversation that was about to take place.

  “Martin Lockwood speaking. Who is it?”

  His voice, so cold, so peremptory, almost left her speechless; but then, quickly, she reminded herself how preoccupied he was with his work these days; and how marvellous it was that he should be so. She should be glad, not affronted, that he was so absorbed in what he was doing that interruptions were intolerable to him.

  “Darling—it’s me. I’m terribly sorry to interrupt you, but it won’t take a moment. That interview I typed this morning—the one right on top of the pile? What exactly was the woman’s name …? And her
address …?

  “Well—for God’s sake!” Martin’s voice was, if anything, more irritable than ever. “Do you have to bother me about it now? Can’t it wait till you get home?”

  There was a pause; and during the brief silence Helen became aware of sudden tension coming at her down the line, a mounting wariness.

  “What is all this, anyway?” he barked. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because she’s dead: that’s why,” Helen snapped back, suddenly angry in her turn. “Her name’s in the paper—in the Obituary column! ‘Mrs Claire Huntingdon, of 11 Tewkesbury Avenue It’s right here, in front of me. I just want to check that it is the same name as on that interview…. Please, darling…. I mean, it’s a bit scarey…. It seems so awful….”

  She was talking into empty air. He had moved away from the telephone, she could tell, and was now, presumably, looking for the interview in question. Not that it needed looking for—it was right on top of the pile, beside the typewriter.

  She waited. She went on waiting. It was a mercy, at least, that everyone else was still in class; as soon as the lunch bell went it would be bedlam, with queues of people waiting outside the telephone booth, and further conversation would be impossible.

  She looked at her watch. It was all right; a full ten minutes still to go; ten minutes of privacy to thrash the thing out quietly.

  Nine minutes … eight minutes … What was he doing all this time? Had he mislaid the interview somehow, heedlessly piling his new exciting pages of typescript here, there and everywhere, obliterating everything else under the unstoppable products of his inspiration? Beyond the telephone booth, the faint, muted hum of a well-ordered school at lesson-time just reached her, while down the telephone wire, from her far-off flat, the silence was absolute.

  Five minutes had passed; six. Her ear, pressed to the receiver, throbbed with listening; her cheek ached with the pressure of the instrument against it.

  “Bugger off!” suddenly snarled a loud and instantly recognisable voice, right into her ear. “Just bugger off, will you?” and forthwith the receiver was slammed down with a noise like crashing furniture.

  So Ruth was there. Ruth-Bloody-Leadswinger, as Beatrice had so aptly named her. Helen stood for a moment, her ears singing, and her anxiety swiftly being replaced by sheer fury.

  That bloody girl! She had a devil in her, she really had! She was nothing but trouble! Trouble, trouble, trouble, wherever she went, and the insolence of her was beyond endurance! Why in Heaven’s name must Martin choose her, of all people, to be his research assistant, his replacement for Walter …?

  Because she was so bloody good; that’s why. This was the answer, and it was irrefutable. Helen made a big effort to calm herself, to see the thing in proportion.

  Here was Martin, the man she loved, the man who was to all intents and purposes her husband, desperately behind with his work, desperately worried about it; and now, out of the blue, as if dropped by Heaven itself, comes this superbly competent and marvellously enthusiastic assistant, who was not only taking off Martin’s shoulders a huge and gruelling load of work, but also seemed in some way to have inspired in him a quite extraordinary burst of creativity such as he had been awaiting in vain for months and years. For there was no getting away from it—Helen forced herself to be absolutely honest about this—there was no getting away from the fact that Martin’s sudden burst of creative euphoria had coincided just about exactly with Ruth’s appearance on the scene; and for this incomparable service, by whatever means it had been achieved, the ill-mannered, coarse-spoken young woman must be forgiven anything.

  Yes, anything. Helen felt pretty certain, in her own heart, that it was not sex that was the driving force in this sudden, headlong partnership between her lover and this peculiar girl; but even if it had been, Helen told herself stoutly, it would have been worth it. To see her beloved Martin happy at last, inspired at last, succeeding at last in his long-frustrated ambitions—for this, there was no price too high to pay. No price at all.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  “COINCIDENCE, DARLING,” Martin assured her off-handedly when she finally succeeded in making him look for himself at the announcements in the paper, and to compare them with the names and addresses on the interviews. “These things are bound to happen sometimes, you know. After all, depressives do commit suicide quite often. It’s one of the hazards of our job.”

  Not “quite often”. From her intensive apprenticeship to the subject on Martin’s behalf, and her consequent wide reading, Helen knew very well that depressives, although somewhat more prone to suicide than the general population, were not all that likely to meet their deaths in this way. That two out of nine of Ruth’s subjects to date should have died within a week seemed to Helen to be quite beyond the bounds of coincidence. Besides …

  “Martin—please! There’s nothing in the notices to say that they were suicides, either of them. ‘Suddenly’ doesn’t have to be a euphemism. Besides—two out of nine in a single week! It can’t be coincidence! The chances against it …”

  “Look, darling, you’re ever such a clever girl, we all know that. You’ve got an I.Q. way up in the stratosphere, I don’t doubt it. But do you, actually, sweetie, know anything about the laws of Chance and Probability? It’s a highly specialised field, you know; you have to be something of a mathematician before you can even begin to grasp it. I don’t claim to be an expert myself, but I did do a bit of Probability Theory as part of my degree course—which you, my sweetheart, didn’t—let’s face it! And I can tell you this much: coincidences have to happen sometimes. They mathematically have to. It would be if there weren’t any coincidences any more that we’d have to start wondering what had gone wrong with the universe!

  “Look at it this way. Suppose, instead of nine interviews, Ruth had done a million. Then would you think it such a frantic coincidence if out of these million, two should appear in the death column this week? Would you?”

  “Of course not, Not out of a million. But …”

  “But nothing, lovey! Don’t you see? These two coincidences have got to come somewhere among the million, if they are to be there at all, and every single place they could come is just as unlikely as any other place! Being in the first nine is no more unlikely than being in any other particular place! If you think of these nine interviews as being the first nine out of a million—and if Ruth was going to do a million then they would be—then the ‘coincidence’ problem just doesn’t arise. Wherever they were in the million, it would be just as much a ‘coincidence’ that they should be just exactly there. Don’t you see?”

  That there was a huge, jumbo-sized fallacy somewhere in this argument, Helen was absolutely certain. But exactly where the fallacy lay, and how it could be countered, she did not know. He was blinding her with mathematics; that much was clear to her. But the question still remained, was he blinding himself as well?

  Full of unease, she glanced warily up at him, and found herself looking into his shining, triumphant face, all lit up with success and with fulfilment.

  How could she destroy such radiance, for the sake of a mere logical fallacy? Why not bask in it? Enjoy it? Revel in the fact that the hopes and struggles of the last months had borne fruit at last?

  And yet … and yet. Two people had died. Not old people, either; one of them was only forty-four. It wasn’t coincidence, it couldn’t be, not all the mathematicians in the world were going to convince her to the contrary.

  Something weird, something sinister was afoot, it must be, and if she, Helen, took no action now, it would be on her conscience for the rest of her days.

  “Look, darling,” she began, with infinite caution, and attempting to approach the question from another, totally non-mathematical direction: “This girl—this Ruth Ledbetter. I know she’s a marvellous interviewer and all that, but do you actually know anything about her? I mean …”

  “I know what you mean!” Martin’s handsome face was flushed, his eyes blazing, and yet, despit
e these overt signs of anger, Helen had the momentary impression that he was relieved; relieved that he had an excuse, now, to quarrel with her, thus bringing rational argument to an end.

  “I know what you mean. You mean you’re jealous of her,” he accused. “You’re jealous of her helping me so efficiently—of being so damn good at the job! Of—well—of inspiring me, as nobody has ever inspired me before …!”

  Was she jealous? Was there something in these accusations? If Martin has stopped there, Helen might have been prepared to admit to a grain of truth in what he was saying. But he did not stop there.

  “You’ve had it in for her right from the start!” he blustered. “You’ve been absolutely beastly to her, from the very beginning!”

  This was too much! After all Helen’s tolerance and forebearance, her unfailing civility in the face of the girl’s insolence, her outrageous manners, her cool assumption that she could walk into Helen’s flat just whenever she chose, and monopolise the attention of Helen’s lover for just as long as she liked! After all this, to be told …!

  “Well, I like that!” Helen flared back. “I’m beastly to her! I really do like that! What about the way she treats me? What about her telling me this morning to ‘Bugger off!’ when I telephone my own flat …? ‘Just bugger off, will you?’ she said …!”