Meg’s voice is like Mildred’s too, as it used to be; her movements—her hair—she will seem to Paul to be the very girl he left behind, while Mildred will be a middle-aged stranger, of no account.
And Meg will be there when he comes to the cottage. There is no escaping it. She is there all day every day now, interfering, impervious. Snubs won’t drive her away, nor even threats of danger. In her cocksure, busybody fashion, she thinks she is helping…. Even as she helped once before….
And the cruellest irony of all is that it does help. Meg’s companionship does soften Mildred’s fears—the fears that she fights so fiercely to suppress. Meg is courting hatred in the surest way known to human beings—she is pandering to and encouraging the person that Mildred is trying not to be….
Suddenly Meg recalled that first morning, leaning over the empty well, with Mildred standing behind her. Mildred, white and shaken with some hidden thought. That was when the idea must have been born. How easy—how very easy!—just a tiny push! Almost an accident, really….
But the opportunity passes. Another must be made. For it is becoming urgent now. Paul is coming. He is coming—surely—on the anniversary of his betrayal. The fortune-teller says so. Mildred’s own heart says so. Her whole romantic soul flings itself into hope—into belief—into certainty. The date and the hour are fixed irrevocably, by fate and by her own conscience. By that date, by that hour, Meg must be gone.
… The obstructing barrow … the empty well in the darkness. A trap that could not ensnare Paul himself by accident, for had he not invented it?—and wasn’t it already a subtle link between them, that Mildred should adopt it too—a silent uniting of their souls in the solidarity of crime?
Though still it didn’t have to be quite a crime—it would be Meg’s own silly fault if she didn’t remember that the well was there. A sort of accident…. But oh, God, the waiting in that darkened room to see if it happens! The dread that it will … that it won’t …! And who could have guessed that Meg would have that tiresome boy friend with her, almost as interfering as she is herself?
There was still the snake. Cedric’s cobra, that Mildred had helped him to buy. That would be a sort of accident too, of course, for it mightn’t do any harm … and Meg mightn’t be sleeping at the cottage any more—no one had asked her to. Indeed, they had begged her—warned her—not to do so.
But this plan meant waiting for it to happen, too. Waiting, knowing that there was a snake upstairs. Have other murderers felt this sheer envy of their victims—envy for their ignorance of what is in store? And that very evening Peter had to be playing with Sharkey, making him hiss and squirm, as if deliberately to remind her of the dreadful night to come….
The night which did come … when scream upon scream aroused her … Meg’s screams. How Mildred must have stopped her ears, buried her head under the bedclothes, praying for it to be finished!
But still it wasn’t finished. Here was Meg, alive and well, ringing up the hotel the next morning as if nothing had happened. Mildred could not face the telephone … she sent a message that she was having a bath.
And tomorrow is the seventh day. If Meg comes to the cottage tonight, then she must be dead before morning.
And she had come.
Meg awoke from a sort of doze to hear Isabel’s voice again:
“It’s strange,” she was saying. “But I feel, somehow, that it had to happen. I mean the three of us all thinking, in different ways, that Uncle Paul had returned. It was the betrayal, you see, we all felt the guilt of it, I believe, almost as much as Mildred. I know I did—I felt for months—for years—exactly as if I’d done it myself. Of course, I’m rather that sort of person—I do feel guilty about things; but I believe Meg was shocked too—more, perhaps, than she remembers. Because it was she who first found the picture, you know, although she forgot about it afterwards. As if she couldn’t bear to remember, I sometimes think…. Betrayal of a lover—it’s a very big thing, when you’re young. And so we had to re-live it, somehow, all three of us, each in our own way, and—sort of—try to manage better this time. That’s why poor Mildred persuaded herself so completely that he was coming back … and I was so ready to believe that Philip might be him … and Meg thought that you were—”
Now it was Freddy’s voice breaking in:
“I suppose she’ll know now that I can’t be Uncle Paul,” he was saying. “But I don’t know that I’m a much better bet for her even so. I daresay I am like him, as she says. The same type. How much difference do you suppose it makes, Isabel, whether you’re actually a criminal, or only the sort of person who easily might have been?”
“I should think it’s exactly the same as the difference between a jug that’s broken and one that easily might have been,” said Isabel. “I mean, one’s useless and the other’s just as useful as ever. But, of course, I daresay that’s just a housewife’s point of view,” she added, deprecatingly.
Freddy was speaking again.
“I never had a proper home,” he was saying—and his voice was not quite as assured as Meg remembered it—“I never knew my parents, though I believe my father was Italian, or something. They say that boys who’ve never had a proper home make rotten husbands. Meg may not have heard that—she’s very young. Do you think she ought to risk it?”
Meg did not hear Isabel’s answer. She wasn’t troubled by the thought of the risk, but by the feeling that Freddy sounded different, somehow. Meek—unsure—almost childlike. Under all that flamboyant gaiety, that jesting self-confidence, had there been lurking all the time this hesitant, questioning boy?
But could she love a hesitant, questioning boy? She loved the old Freddy—witty, confident, on top of everything. And he would be like that again—of course he would—when all this upset was over. He would be like that again, and she would still love him, in spite of this glimpse of his weakness.
In spite of it? Suddenly there flashed into Meg’s mind the words that Isabel had spoken only yesterday: “It’s funny, but in the end you find you’ve married a man because of all the qualities you thought you were marrying him in spite of.”
But she was too sleepy to work it out now. And besides, here was someone else speaking—was it Philip?—saying what a tragedy it was that the news of Paul’s death had not reached Mildred in time to prevent it all.
Meg was glad that she still had no strength to speak, and could not answer him. For a strangely vivid picture had come into her mind—a picture of Mildred as she had been in those last minutes before her death, at the triumphant peak of all her wickedness, her silliness, her courage.
For the three were all there, and indissoluble. It might be that some other mind might one day sort them out, might be able to say: “This was courage; this was worth while,” and “those were only silliness and wickedness; a dreadful tragedy.” But in Meg’s eyes they seemed to make a single glittering whole; and as she lay drowsing there, and for long after she had woken, she could feel nothing but gladness that her sister had died as she had, dazzled by the rising sun; died before she could learn that never, now, in either love or hate, would her beloved come striding towards her through the morning.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2014
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Celia Fremlin, 1959
Preface © Chris Simmons, 2014
The right of Celia Fremlin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised
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ISBN 978–0–571–31299–3
Uncle Paul Page 21