The Parasite Person

by Celia Fremlin

  At first, she could see almost nothing, so accustomed were her eyes to the sharp radiance outdoors; but gradually her vision cleared, and she could see that the kitchen was indeed currently in use; it didn’t look at all like the kitchen of someone who has packed up and gone on holiday. A half-empty bottle of milk, still looking quite fresh, stood on top of the refrigerator; and on the draining-board, in a saucepan of cold water, some freshly-peeled potatoes were awaiting the time when it might be convenient for someone to cook them. You shouldn’t do this, of course, it’s bad for potatoes to be left to soak like this, it takes away all the flavour: but that was typical Beatrice for you. The kitchen table had on it a pale blue plastic cloth adorned with smudgy pictures of knives and forks and lobsters and things. At the moment, it was covered with crumbs, and at one end lay the remains of a salad lunch, beetroot and bits of lettuce, together with an open packet of sliced bread and a dish of butter without a lid. In the midst of all this sat the Lockwoods’ tabby cat, licking itself contentedly, as it had no doubt been licking its fill of the butter. The way Beatrice would never discipline that cat had been one of Martin’s early grievances, Helen remembered; and in those days, in the heyday of her self-imposed mission to succeed triumphantly in every area where Beatrice failed, this could have presented quite a problem, for she was no more capable of disciplining a cat that has made up its mind what it wants to do, than anyone else is. Mercifully, however, this grievance of Martin’s had been followed up almost immediately by one concerning Beatrice’s insistence on keeping a cat at all; and here Helen had been able effortlessly to excel. Nothing is easier than not keeping a cat, especially if you live on the third floor, whereas disciplining one is very nearly beyond the wit of humankind.

  The place was very quiet. The cat went on licking itself, the sun moved inch by inch towards the butter, which would soon be squashy and yellow, its own special way of celebrating the return of spring. In the far corner, above the sink, a tap dripped steadily, needing a new washer. This was another thing that Martin wouldn’t have been able to stand. The mincer, too, with scraps of raw meat still adhering, standing on today’s newspaper. That was something else that he had a thing about, using today’s paper for household tasks; never mind the cat having had a go at the mincer, as well.

  The place was untidy, certainly; even neglected, in a way; but not in the way that a place is neglected when the owner is actually away. This was current, day-to-day neglect, mere sloppiness, a general Beatrice-way of doing things. Soon, the remains of supper would be joining the remains of lunch, and no doubt Beatrice would get around to washing up as soon as there was nowhere to put anything down except on the floor.

  *

  And then she saw them. Sticking out from under the table-cloth, with one down-at-heel slipper off, the other still covering the laddered toes of her stocking—Beatrice’s feet. You could have thought they were dummies, a stage-set, except that you knew they couldn’t be.

  Helen’s first impulse was to scream. Her second, to smash the window with the nearest hard implement—her fist, if necessary—and scramble to the rescue.

  Rescue? But it was too late for rescue. Those feet … so still … so lifeless … so unresponsive to the sharp little sound of terror which Helen knew she had made…. Beatrice must be already dead.

  Ruth’s third victim? For hadn’t that been an “interview” of sorts that Beatrice had been describing in such trenchant terms just before the phone went dead …?

  Dead. Helen shuddered, and with the sun still beating on her back she felt icy cold.

  Was that the precise moment when it had happened? Had she, Helen, actually been present at the murder, albeit on the end of a telephone? And had just shrugged her shoulders, assuming a fault on the line, and bothered no more about it?

  There was a roaring in her ears now, she felt as if she was choking, but Helen forced herself to batten down the panic, to pull herself out of shock, and to try to think rationally.

  The thing she was imagining was impossible. Whatever had happened, it couldn’t have happened all those days ago. Look at those remains of an obviously recent meal; look at the opened bottle of milk, not yet curdled and yellow. And what about the contented cat, washing itself? Surely no cat would sit licking itself in this leisurely way if its mistress had been lying dead for a week less than a yard away?

  Or would it? Helen knew so little about cats. Were they truly attached to their owners, other than by cupboard-love? Did they care?

  And even if they did care, would they necessarily show their caring by not getting on the table to wash themselves, by refraining from licking the butter …?

  *

  “Beet! It’s all right, Beet, you can come out now!”

  The voice, screeching from an upstairs window, startled Helen almost out of her senses, though even in that first moment of shock she still managed to recognise it: it was the voice of the Pocock woman from across the road, Beatrice’s bosom friend, and Martin’s No. 1 bête noir. The black, shining scrolls of hair bobbed and quivered above the window-ledge up there, and the face was so red with excitement and glee that the over-rouged cheeks looked almost natural.

  “It’s all right, Beet!” the voice howled again; and then, full of explanatory gusto:

  “It’s not her, Beet, this time! It’s only her!”

  CHAPTER XX

  AT THE SECOND exhortation—“You can come out now, Beet”—the feet protruding from beneath the table began, reassuringly, to stir, one of them groping ineffectually for the lost slipper, the other withdrawing itself from sight as its owner, heaving herself around in her cramped quarters like a beached sea-monster, prepared to emerge into the light of day. The crisis was over, evidently. Beatrice, sheepish and dishevelled, but no longer scared, crawled out from her hiding place, and with much cracking of joints scrambled up to a standing position. She turned to face Helen, blinking into the sunlight.

  “Oh. It’s you,” she said, still a bit dazed; and then, vaguely hospitable: “Do come in.”

  Through the window? Or round to the back door? Beatrice, still blinking, seemed oblivious of the problem: just looked at Helen expectantly, waiting for her to materialise indoors. But at this point the problem was solved by Marjorie Pocock bursting in at the back door agog with neighbourly joy at the prospect of something happening, but not to her.

  “It’s her!” she exulted, for the third time, though on this occasion lowering her voice a little in deference to Helen’s proximity, “Martin’s fancy piece! Do you want to let her in?”

  By now, Beatrice had dusted herself down, had both her slippers on, and was already padding to the back door.

  “Oh, there you are,” she said, amiably enough, as Helen appeared round the corner of the house. “It’s funny you should turn up just now, we were just talking about you.”

  Since the two of them must have talked of little else for the best part of eighteen months, the coincidence was not startling; but Helen took the remark as it was meant, as a sort of “come-and-join-the-club” invitation, and soon the three of them were seated round the kitchen table drinking mugs of inordinately strong tea. The crumbs were still there, and the liquefying butter, but the cat had made itself scarce, doubtless calculating, with that universal feline wisdom, that visitors nearly always prove a threat, bringing with them fearsomely un-cat standards of hygiene with which to intimidate your normally easy-going owner. “Down, puss!” she will cry, in tones of wholly factitious horror, and will even push you off the table quite sharply, in that nasty, showing-off way, trying to make them believe that this was what she normally did.

  Really, humans! What traitors they became to your cosy working relationship whenever there was another human around.

  Helen sipped the nasty and none-too-hot tea, accepted a slice of swiss roll out of a cardboard packet, and wished heartily that Marjorie would go so that she could have her private conversation with Beatrice about Ruth Ledbetter. This was what she had come for, and she did no
t want to waste time on social chit-chat.

  She need not have worried. Marjorie did not want to waste time on social chit-chat either, she plunged straight in.

  “You must be wondering,” she said to Helen, before even biting into her swiss roll, “why Beet was under the table when you arrived? A bit funny, didn’t you think?”

  “Well, a bit,” Helen agreed cautiously, adding “But of course it’s none of my business …”

  “None of your business?” shrieked Marjorie, slapping her mug of tea down so hard that it slopped over on to the (luckily) plastic table-cloth. “But of course it’s your business! I’d damn well think it was my business if my partner’s Ex was hiding under the kitchen table when I called! But, of course, she never would be … she’s not like that….”

  She sighed, as if having a rival in love who doesn’t hide under tables at your approach was one of life’s minor deprivations. Then, cheering up, she continued:

  “She wasn’t hiding from you, Helen, don’t think that. You weren’t, were you, Beet?” and Beatrice, her mouth full of swiss roll, nodded emphatic assent. “She was hiding from that other one. The Leadswinger one. Weren’t you, Beet? The one who keeps coming round persecuting her. A dozen times she’s been here, I should think. Tell her about it, Beet. Go on.”

  Beatrice nodded, swallowed the remainder of her mouthful, and took up the narrative.

  “That’s right. Well, perhaps not a dozen times, but at least twice. I told you, Helen, don’t you remember, how rude she was that time? Badgering me about Martin’s work, just as if I knew anything about it, why should I? His work!—that always makes me laugh, anything to do with Martin working! I’m sorry, Helen, but it does. I’ve know him longer than you have.

  “So anyway, about this ghastly girl. I got rid of her that time, and I thought that was the end of it. But not two days later—something like that, anyway—there she was again. The nerve of it! Crack of dawn it was that time, I wasn’t even up. So that’s when I phoned you, Helen. Enough is enough, I thought—and I think that scared her a bit, hearing me telling you all about it on the upstairs extension. She maybe thought Martin was listening, I don’t know, anyway, she cut us off half through a sentence, and when I ran downstairs to ask what the hell, she’d gone. Since then I haven’t let her in, and I think she’s given up now. Thank goodness. Long time no see, that’s what I’m praying for.”

  In all this, there wasn’t much that Helen didn’t already know, and the questions she could think of asking didn’t elucidate much more. No, Beatrice didn’t know the girl’s address, how should she? Nor anything at all about her background, it wasn’t quite that sort of a friendly chat, was it? Just a lot of nosey-parkering about Martin, and the stuff he was working on just now….

  And talking of Martin’s stuff, she continued, somewhat tartly, what about all that junk of his in the back bedroom? When was he coming to move it? Because now that she wasn’t going to get a bloody penny from him, just the house, she was going to have to think about making an income from it, wasn’t she? She was planning to take in lodgers; she could make thirty pounds a week, easily, out of that back bedroom once Martin’s clobber was out of it.

  “Forty pounds,” interposed Marjorie, who liked to see dissension escalating.

  “And so,” reasoned Beatrice, “every week he doesn’t take that bloody stuff away is costing me thirty pounds.”

  “Forty pounds,” said Marjorie.

  “And so in fact,” continued Beatrice, “If you work it out, he owes me ninety pounds already—”

  Hastily, before Marjorie could work out what three forties were, Helen intervened.

  “I’m sorry, Beatrice, I really am. I do see what a nuisance it is for you; but the point is, my flat isn’t very large, and I’ve already taken quite a few of his things. The desk, for instance, and that nest of tables. It isn’t as if we need any more furniture.”

  Rivalry, temporarily in abeyance, was astir again. As much as they had once fought to possess Martin’s person, so did they now fight not to possess his filing-cabinets, his overflowing cardboard boxes, his mounds of obsolete papers pertaining to long-abandoned projects.

  “You could have them put in store,” suggested Helen, as she always suggested when the subject came up, “and send us the bill.”

  “He can have them put in store!” Beatrice snapped back, again in the identical words she had used on previous occasions. “They’re his bloody things!”—and there, once again, the matter was allowed to rest. Since each of them felt herself to be the loser in this battle, it was never allowed to go on very long.

  One way and another, it seemed about time for Helen to go. It was plain by now that Beatrice had nothing useful to contribute to the problem; also, for some minutes Helen had been aware of an increasing restlessness in her two companions. They were longing to get her out of the house so that they could start talking about her again; and taking pity on their impatience, and not wanting to outstay her welcome, Helen took her leave.

  CHAPTER XXI

  MARTIN HAD BEEN more perturbed by the two announcements in the Deaths Column than he had allowed Helen to see. He knew as well as she did that they couldn’t be coincidence. But the reason for his anxiety was quite different from hers. Not for one moment did he suspect that Ruth might have somehow brought about the deaths of these two subjects; in fact he had reason to be certain that she had not. His fears related to a possibility quite other than this.

  For he, too, in his student days had worked off-and-on as a part-time, partially-trained interviewer on various projects. He knew all the dodges, and this was one of them, it came in very useful in those surveys where a name and address was demanded as well as a complete set of answers. The reason for this demand was, of course, to enable check-ups to be made, and thus to deter the unscrupulous interviewer from doing the whole job in the comfort of his own armchair, making up answers out of his head.

  A reasonable precaution, given the motley collection of people commonly employed as interviewers. But all the same, the system failed to take account of the ingenuity of some of the resourceful young people who got themselves employed, especially those of them who worked in teams, egging one another on, Us against Them. Whatever new obstacle They might set up to obviate cheating was taken as a challenge; and this particularly mean-spirited device of making you extract names and addresses from the people you accosted in the street, so that the supervisor could call back on one in ten of them (Helen had been absolutely right, as usual) and check that the interview had in fact taken place—this device had stretched the team’s ingenuity to its exciting limit.

  There had been various ploys; and this one, of picking names out of the Deaths Column of the local paper had been found to work surprisingly well, if used in moderation. No supervisor, finding herself (it was usually a her in this kind of work) in a house of mourning, the subject of her enquiries barely cold in his grave, would ever have the nerve to pursue the matter: she would just fall over herself apologising, and beat a hasty retreat.

  Of course, you couldn’t do too many like this, too consistently, or they’d begin to spot it. Ruth had been rather pushing her luck with as many as two out of nine. She was also foolish in not realising that whereas in a vast, impersonal Market Research Survey the chances were very small indeed that any of the far-off staff at headquarters would be regular readers of the local paper of your particular area, in this small-scale survey of Martin’s, in and around the campus, the chances of this being the case were really quite high.

  It was worrying. Not only worrying in itself, but it set you wondering what else the naughty girl had been up to?

  He tried to remember the other ploys they’d used; and as he recalled them, one after another, from the golden, dare-devil days, he could hardly refrain from smiling.

  There was the “Fifth Girl” trick, for example. If you were short of an “F 25 C” to complete your quota, you simply looked through the Accommodation Vacant columns for “Fifth Gi
rl Wanted” for some communal flat or other; then copied out that address (or rang up for it, if it was a box-number), invented a name at random, and then effortlessly filled in your questionnaire, confident that if the supervisor should choose this address as one of her one-in-tens, there would not be a single inhabitant who could say with certainty that there had or had not been such a character temporarily in residence at such-and-such a time: still less whether any among the myriad of recent callers had or had not come from Market Investigations Ltd, or whatever.

  Removal vans were good, too. The team kept each other posted about addresses outside which removal men had been observed carrying furniture. By the time the supervisor did her rounds, the newcomers would be safely installed, and naturally could not be expected to know anything much about the doings of their predecessors.

  Of course, you couldn’t do all your interviews like this; there was tacit agreement in the team that at least 50% of your stuff had to be genuine. How else could there be any basis from which to calculate a plausible proportion of “Yeses” and “Nos” and “Don’t knows” in the various categories? Besides, with any reasonably short, straightforward, and un-embarrassing questionnaire, it just wasn’t worth the bother, it was easier and quicker to do the job properly. Where these dodges really came into their own was when you were landed with a long and complicated questionnaire to be administered by the Quota Method—so many C-class F’s aged under 35, so many D-class M’s of over 60, and so on, all of them to be accosted in the street with nothing better to go on than their appearance. Often, your guess could be quite absolutely wrong, and you could get quite desperate, picking on perky young girls who turned out to be over fifty, or down-and-out old wrecks who turned out to be headmasters of public schools of Peers of the Realm.