A Penknife in My Heart

by Nicholas Blake

  “Indeed?” Lady Avening appeared to swell within her tweeds.

  “You haven’t got a drink, Colonel. Let me—”

  “Now you mustn’t quarrel about me,” said Helena. Ned’s hand, poised over the decanter, was arrested by the different note in her voice. She sounded almost gay. As long as she’s the center of interest, he thought—“I gave up my career, as you all know, because I found public performances too great a nervous strain. And of course,” Helena went on, “because I wanted to look after Ned. I believe a husband and a home should be a full-time job.”

  Lady Avening nodded approval. Her husband piped up unexpectedly:

  “Rather a strain on a husband, being a full-time job.”

  “Really, Bob!” His spouse was roguish now. “How lucky for you that I have outside interests, then.”

  “Quite, m’dear.”

  “Marriage,” said the colonel. “Hah. A good sporting gamble. Don’t know why I’ve never tried it.”

  “Too many outside interests?” suggested Josephine Weare.

  Mrs. Holmes remarked pleasantly, “I can recommend it, Colonel Gracely. My husband and I were very happy together.”

  “I often wonder, though, whether artists should marry.” Helena’s voice was toneless again. “What do you think, Josephine?”

  “Oh, I’d take the risk. But at thirty-five I’m a bit past it.”

  “Nonsense, m’dear,” said the colonel.

  Helena ground on, like a child repeating a lesson, “It’s not only that marriage endangers an artist’s career. But we’re such difficult people to live with. Ned could tell you. We’re just a burden, with our temperaments and tantrums.”

  Ned recoiled inwardly. It was like Helena to play the martyr and to point a finger so forgivingly at him as the persecutor. The atmosphere in the room felt suffocating to him: an emotional storm had been circling round, with mutters of thunder, and he almost wished it would break. He rose abruptly and began refilling glasses.

  “I think,” said Brian Holmes, a little too loudly, “any s-sacrifice should be m-made for art.”

  “What’s your instrument? The recorder?” Ned was shocked to hear himself saying.

  “Actually, I play the flute.” Brian Holmes blinked at him uncertainly.

  Bob Avening rubbed his hands. “Well now, why don’t we have some music? Just for ourselves. Mrs. Stowe—Helena—can’t I prevail upon you? It’d be a great pleasure and privilege if—”

  “Oh, my wife never—” began Ned, but was astonished to see Helena get up, give him a look both defiant and sly, and open the piano.

  “What shall I play?”

  “Play that Schubert Impromptu,” began Brian Holmes.

  “I quite love Schubert,” said Lady Avening. “So tuneful. Particularly Lilac Time.”

  This is it, thought Ned. Either she’ll break down in the middle or she’ll never get started; she hasn’t touched the instrument for years.

  He was quite wrong. Helena managed very well. She had never been a flexible, still less a truly musical pianist; but, as far as Ned could tell, she was playing the right notes and all the notes. The old, brittle brilliance of her technique was recognizable, if impaired. Ned glanced round the cozy, shabby, low-ceilinged room—it had been the kitchen of the farmhouse. His six guests were clearly enjoying themselves, each in his own way; and one could hardly expect them to realize that a miracle was happening. Lady Avening gave the impression that she had been a lifelong patron of music. Her husband’s eyes were closed, Josephine Weare’s wide open and attentive as if she were taking notes. Colonel Gracely had his head on one side, like a bird listening. Mrs. Holmes was glancing covertly toward her son, who sprawled all over a window seat, gazing at the pianist.

  Helena, after playing two Impromptus and the Liszt Petrarch Sonnet, stopped as decisively as she had begun.

  “Well now, that’s quite something. Thank you,” said the tiny Josephine Weare. The guests all chimed in. Finally Ned, bringing his wife a drink, said:

  “Well done, my dear. But I didn’t know you’d been practicing.”

  “Oh, only when you were away, or out of the house. I know it disturbs your work.”

  A deadly weariness came over Ned’s spirit. Helena’s implication, that he was responsible for her not playing the piano—that she sacrificed everything to his comfort—sickened him. It was so cleverly, so plausibly done; and it was not true. Often in their earlier days he had tried to coax her to start playing again, but it had been useless, like all his other efforts to build her up—sooner or later she herself always knocked away the props.

  He felt antagonism in the room. Helena had turned their guests against him. Mrs. Holmes alone seemed not to have been infected: her eyes conveyed some message of sympathy to him: yet the Holmeses were newcomers to the village—the other four might have been expected to know by now the true situation of things in the Stowes’ ménage. God knows what Helena didn’t go hinting about the place when he was away.

  They were talking about television now, making efforts to bring him into the conversation; but he answered morosely, curtly. If they liked to think him surly as well as selfish, let them. A picture of Laura—generous, loving and naked—rose suddenly before his mind’s eye.

  Soon the guests began to disperse. Mrs. Holmes and her son went along the field path at the back which led to their cottage. The others walked down the path through the unkempt front garden. The white wicket gate screeched as Colonel Gracely opened it. I must oil that, thought Ned. Yes, of course I’ve got to oil it.

  “I hope your lecture at Bristol goes well,” called Josephine Weare as she waved good-by, her head only showing above the four-foot beech hedge.

  Helena and Ned ate a scrappy supper, talking in a desultory, unreal way about their guests. Helena seemed a little tipsy, but perhaps it was still the intoxication of her recent triumph. When they had washed up, they settled down in the sitting room, Ned scribbling notes for his lecture, Helena sighing over the pile of socks she was darning. The storm, which had been circling all the evening, did not break till they were upstairs, side by side in their separate beds. Ned knew it was coming by the fidgeting of her fingers on the counterpane, and braced himself. Perhaps he could even avert it. He made a mental resolution that, if Helena showed some friendliness now, he would give up the nightmare plan in which Stuart Hammer had involved him, though it would mean losing Laura forever.

  “It was marvelous to hear you playing again,” he forced himself to say.

  Her fingers plucked the counterpane furiously. “Really? Why did you grudge me my little success then?”

  “Grudge you? Helena—”

  “You sulked all the rest of the time they were here. It was too painfully obvious. You can’t bear anyone else getting the limelight for a moment.”

  “You know that’s nonsense. I was annoyed, I admit, because you made them think I prevented you from practicing.”

  “And you were unpardonably rude to Brian Holmes.”

  “That’s it! Change the subject when you’re in the wrong!”

  “Don’t shout at me, Ned. My nerves won’t stand it. Brian does do a decent job, anyway, and sticks at it.”

  “When he’s not mooning over you.” A sudden thought struck Ned. What had Brian said—“Play that Schubert Impromptu.” “I suppose it’s him you’ve been playing to while I was away.”

  “Why not? At least he’s interested in me.”

  “I wish you luck of him. Have you dragged him into bed yet?”

  “Don’t be so unutterably cheap. The role of jealous husband doesn’t suit you. You’ve forfeited any right to—”

  “So you have!”

  “Your elation is premature. I have not been to bed with Brian. And I’ve no intention of doing so: it would give you just the excuse you want.”

  “Excuse? What on earth—?”

  “For wallowing about with whatever bitch you’re sniffing after just now. And with a clear conscience.”

&
nbsp; Ned’s whole body was shaking uncontrollably. Two feet away, Helena lay rigid and pale in the moonlight that streamed through the low window. Without having to look at her, he knew the expression on her face: gratification. She loved whipping him out of control, she fed upon the signs that showed her destructive power over him. Now is the moment to tell her about Laura, he thought. Now or never. And he knew it would be never, because—beneath his exasperation, his loathing and pity for this woman—he was afraid of her. He made a strenuous effort to master himself.

  “Look, Helena. We simply cannot go on like this. I’ve—we’ve both tried. It’s hopeless.”

  “You want to get rid of me, don’t you?” She gave a gusty dramatic sigh. “I’ve never been much use to you, I know.”

  Ned hardened himself against the old self-pitying appeal. “We’re neither of us any use to each other. Why don’t we admit it, and—”

  “Yes?” Her voice was at once deadly quiet. “And what?”

  “And separate.”

  “You have someone else in mind? I hope she can support you in the style to which I’ve accustomed you.”

  “I’ve no one ‘in mind,’” Ned angrily, miserably retorted, knowing he had failed again. He could not face the fury Helena would become if he told her about Laura. Out of his humiliation, he went on more viciously, “I’m bored with you, bored with your dishonesty and schoolgirl sarcasm. What I have in mind is to preserve my own sanity.”

  Helena’s legs kicked convulsively under the bedclothes.

  “And don’t stage one of your fits of hysterics,” Ned shouted. “They don’t impress me any longer.”

  His wife’s voice went into a muttering gabble, low, leaden and monotonous. “You’d like me dead, wouldn’t you, wouldn’t you? But you haven’t the nerve to kill me. Go on kill me go on I dare you here I am hit me then hit me! You see? You can’t you’re not a man you can’t touch me you can’t make love to me you can’t even be unfaithful no woman would look at you except some filthy whore filthy whore filthy—”

  Ned was out of bed, slapping her hard on both cheeks. “For Christ’s sake pull yourself together and shut up!”

  Her stone eyes hated him from the pillow. Then the new, sly look returned to them. She kicked away the bedclothes, tore off her nightdress, and staring at Ned exclaimed:

  “I’m giving you one last chance.”

  “You’re giving me—” He bit off the rest of it. “Chance of what?”

  “You know.” Her thin, pallid body trembled. Her voice coolly mocked him now. “To be a husband. Take me or leave me, I shall never let you go—you hear?—never. So you might as well have the benefit of me.”

  This was worse, far worse, than it had ever been. Ned felt flayed all over. “Cover yourself up,” he said coldly. “You’re not an attractive sight.”

  He got back into bed. The faint, sweet, clean smell of grassland came through the open window on a breeze that stirred the curtains. The springs of compassion, of mercy, were dried up within him forever, he felt. He heard Helena’s voice going on and on, as it had done so often before, dredging up grievance after grievance from the past, vindictively exposing his own weaknesses, holding up for inspection every inch of the tattered fabric of their relationship. But tonight this terrible cadenza left him cold. Helena had lost her power to drag him into the maelstrom of her own mind: the recent scene had finally destroyed the last link between them. He hardly heard what she was saying now. Other words kept beating in his head—“I shall never let you go … I shall never let you go.”

  She was lying on her back, silent at last, her face like a death mask in the moonlight. A mousy smell pervaded the room. Ned saw her rigid, sculptured form shaping the bedclothes into folds of light and shadow. He saw her as the effigy of a woman, a dead woman, the dead woman she soon would be.

  5 The Upright Director

  Self-confidence, which had been the making of Stuart Hammer, might well prove his undoing. At times he carried it—or it carried him—to the lengths of abnormal vanity and perilous complacence. He had been saved, so far, because his distrust of others was in proportion to his trust in himself. This Sunday morning, while Ned Stowe still slept, exhausted by the scene with Helena, Stuart was giving him considerable thought. The fellow had nerve, no doubt of that, in an emergency: but had he the stamina? He was desperate enough to want his wife got rid of. But there was a softness in him, Stuart reckoned, which might wreck their scheme. The chap was a bit off balance—the type who would follow you boldly enough into action: would you choose him, though, for a solitary mission? And unless Ned did his stuff when his turn came, it would be the bottom of the ladder again for Stuart.

  Since joining his uncle’s firm, Stuart had rapidly stepped up his standard of living. At present he occupied a couple of rooms in a country club just outside Norringham—a flashy place where no questions were asked and where credit was unlimited, for a certain period: that period, for Stuart, was drawing to its close, even though he had done the proprietor—the usual “Major, retd.”—a number of what in business circles are called “favors.”

  Stuart glanced at his gold Cartier wrist watch, rang down to the restaurant for a large breakfast, put on a heavy silk monogrammed dressing gown, washed and shaved, then sauntered into his sitting room. This he had furnished himself: deep crimson-leather armchairs and settee, television set, cocktail cabinet, hunting prints on the maroon walls, an outsize desk—its drawers filled with bills—a round inlaid rosewood table, and an array of gadgets for making life comfortable. Stuart Hammer did not surround himself with luxurious and pretentious objects, as many men do who have no time or capacity for the private life, in order to bolster himself up: he did it because of a firm conviction that he had a right to such things.

  Drawing the curtains, Stuart Hammer looked out over the regimented “grounds” of the club toward the factory chimneys and spires of Norringham beyond. He drew a deep breath. There was the Beverley works; and Beverley’s was Norringham: if all went well, Stuart Hammer would soon be Beverley’s. An early couple strolled, swinging their rackets, past the beds of geranium and lobelia, toward the hard court.

  The door opened. A blonde came in, carrying a large tray, and began setting the table. Stuart ran his eye over her like a cattle dealer; she was new to the place—the casualty rate among the maids at the country club was high, but its proprietor never had much difficulty over replacements.

  “Day of rest, Peggy?”

  “Not for me, Mr. Hammer.”

  “No rest for the wicked, eh?”

  “Wicked? Me?” The girl tossed her head affectedly.

  “I hope so. Just a little. I like naughty girls, and they like me.”

  Peggy wiggled her haunches, at which Stuart Hammer was staring, and pretended indignation.

  “Well, I’m not then, Mr. Hammer.”

  “Stuart to you, darling.”

  She gave him a bold, provocative look, which he returned with such interest that her loose mouth fell half open.

  “You have a cheek, I must say,” she replied, a little breathlessly, turning away.

  “I’ve got what it takes. And so have you. We should get together sometime.”

  “What a hope!”

  “Trouble is, I sleep badly. Have to take a sleeping draught every night.”

  “So what?”

  “No use unless a pretty nurse gives it to me. Doctor’s prescription.”

  “You find someone else then.”

  “Come here, Peggy.”

  “I’ve work to do. And your coffee’s getting cold.”

  “Oh, that won’t do.” His hard blue eyes locked with hers. “I like it hot. And sweet. Well, off you go to your Sunday school,” he added in a mincing voice.

  “Ta-ta now, Mr. Hammer.”

  “Stuart.”

  “Stuart.”

  “I have to be given my sleeping draught sharp at 11 P.M.”

  A pushover, he thought. He began to devour his large breakfast, glanci
ng at the Sunday papers. Things were boiling up all right in the Middle East. Just how long could he keep Meyer on the string? If the deal went through, there’d be a tidy sum in his sock, and the prospect of more to come. Meyer would divert the shipment to his Arab chums: the cover was absolutely foolproof—safe as houses. If only that dried-up prig Herbert Beverley were not so obstinate and suspicious. Herbert did not trust Meyer. Well, what the hell was that to do with business? Meyer was good for his commitments—not even Herbert disputed it. Who cared where the stuff went as long as it was paid for?

  It maddened Stuart that he still had no official say in the firm’s policy. And now it looked as if he’d exaggerated to Meyer his personal influence with his uncle. Well, he’d give the old fool one last chance. After lunch today. And there was the little matter of Barbara, too. Herbert’s niece and ward had been another iron in the fire for Stuart, and he’d be damn near burning himself on her if he wasn’t careful. He supposed he could always marry her, in the last resort. But God forbid!

  The brush with Peggy and the large breakfast, however, had soon restored Stuart Hammer’s self-confidence. He finished reading the papers, dressed at leisure, then took the new Bentley for a spin over the flat country south of Norringham. At 12:45 he drew up outside his uncle’s house. Herbert Beverley’s black Humber stood in the cul-de-sac down the road opposite. Stuart eyed it, fingering an ignition key in his pocket.

  Barbara opened the door to him. A white bull terrier at her side scrutinized him without any marked enthusiasm. He gave Barbara a cousinly kiss, which she did not return, and followed her into a small sitting room on the left of the gloomy hall. Turning to face him—a tall, angular girl in tweed skirt and magenta-colored sweater, wearing no make-up—she said:

  “Well, Stuart, your worries are over.”

  “What’s that? Oh, I see. I’m very glad, darling.”

  “It was a false alarm.”

  “Good girl.” He smacked her lightly on the bottom. “But you gave me a hell of a fright.”