The Hours Before Dawn

by Celia Fremlin

  By this time the church clock was striking half past twelve, and Louise hurried indoors. She had been late with everything this morning, and now lunch would be late, too. It had been a mistake to go to bed at all when she came in at dawn this morning; but the temptation had been very great. She had been encouraged, too, by the reflection that as school had finished yesterday it wouldn’t matter what time the children got up; and had been bowled over completely by Mark’s touching but impractical suggestion that she should stay in bed all day. And so she had fallen into a heavy sleep from which she had been roused by Margery, wearing a pyjama jacket and one bedroom slipper, at a quarter to ten. Mrs Philips was at the door, Margery explained, and was asking did her mother know that the baby was crying again, and could she, Margery, start the new packet of cornflakes because the old one was all crumbs?

  Foolishly blind to the implications of this last request, Louise was naïely saying ‘Yes’ to it when a babel of shrill protest arose from half way up the stairs. It’s not fair, Harriet pointed out, with all the unanswerable righteousness of a foghorn; Louise had promised, she’d absolutely promised, that Harriet should have the next one of Bimbo the Boxer. Margery had already had three Bimbo the Boxer’s, and—

  All this, of course, had somehow to be side-tracked for long enough to get a civil message delivered to Mrs Philips, still glowering on the front step. Louise had no intention of facing Mrs Philips herself, particularly in a dressing-gown. It was bad enough that Mrs Philips should see that the children weren’t dressed by this hour in the morning, without revealing to her the still more disgraceful fact that Louise wasn’t dressed either.

  Now, three hours later, things seemed to have achieved a temporary lull. Mrs Philips had gone out shopping, and might, if Louise was lucky, be meeting a friend at the Kosy Kuppa, which would keep her out for some time yet. Margery and Harriet seemed to have reached some amicable agreement which had resulted in Bimbo the Boxer and his surrounding coils of cardboard covering the whole of the kitchen floor, while paste and more snippets of cardboard littered the table. Both children were now quietly engaged in writing in their new fourpenny exercise books, bought with last Saturday’s pocket money. They were very quiet and quite absorbed, and Louise was surprised at the number of pages they seemed to have covered. Margery’s would probably be a hideously derivative story about a pixie, and Harriet’s would consist entirely of rhyming couplets – or triplets – or quadruplets – according to how long it was before her vocabulary gave out. There once was a frog, Louise found herself thinking as she sorted out the large potatoes which wouldn’t take so long to peel – Who sat on a log, And saw a dog, And fell into a bog – Really! Who was it said that motherhood automatically rots a woman’s brain? One could see what he meant…. It would have to be chips, of course; they were quicker than anything else, and besides, if there were chips perhaps there wouldn’t be any fuss about the cold meat that was to go with them….

  ‘Mummy, how do you spell “Recknergizzled”?’

  Bother, she hadn’t even put on the chip pan to heat yet, and it was nearly one o’clock. Now it would be at least twenty minutes before—

  ‘Mum-mee! How do you spell “Recknergizzled”?’

  ‘What, dear?’ Louise hastily lit the gas under the pan. ‘R-E-C-K—’ she continued mechanically, and then pulled herself up. ‘What did you say, Margery? What’s the word you want?’

  ‘Recknergizzled,’ repeated Margery patiently. ‘How do you spell it?’

  ‘But, darling, there isn’t such a word. Where did you hear it?’

  Margery looked helpless, and Harriet broke in cooperatively:

  ‘It’s in the Spy Book. I know how to spell it. R-E-C—’

  In spite of the chips, and the preternatural speed with which the hands of the clock always revolved as lunch-time drew near, Louise was becoming interested.

  ‘What is this word?’ she asked. ‘I’ve never heard of it. What does it mean?’

  Both children stared at her, and Louise felt apologetic for having introduced so superfluous a complication into an already difficult problem. She went on hastily. ‘What’s the Spy Book? I don’t remember it. Is it from the library?’

  ‘Oh no!’ said Harriet, wide-eyed. ‘It’s not a printed book at all. It’s a written book. Spy books always are, Tony says.’

  ‘Is it a book of Tony’s, do you mean?’ asked Louise, light (she thought) beginning to dawn. ‘Something he’s written about spies?’

  ‘No!’ said Harriet again, a little impatiently. ‘Tony didn’t write it, he’s only copying it. At least,’ she added cryptically, ‘we’re copying it for him, because he can only do it if you ask him to tea a lot. It’s only us who can get into the Rubbish Room.’

  ‘You’re not to call it that—’ began Louise automatically; and then, realising the implications of Harriet’s words, she became suddenly alert:

  ‘Do you mean it’s something of Miss Brandon’s? A story she’s shown you?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Harriet placidly. ‘She hasn’t shown us. It’s a secret, you see. We go when she’s not there and copy it out for Tony. He says we’ve got to, it’s very important, but it’s miles long, and we’ve still only done four pages, haven’t we, Margery?’

  ‘You’ve only done three and a bit,’ corrected Margery. ‘Because you got that page with only two or three words on it. I’m on my fifth—’ She pointed proudly to her new page, where the words: ‘She knows nothing. I am washing my time’ were clearly written.

  For a moment Louise was mystified. ‘Washing my time’? – was this a code message to delight Tony’s heart? Then she realised that the word must be not ‘washing’ but ‘wasting’ – a mistake easily explained when she saw the untidy, crumpled piece of paper from which Margery was copying.

  ‘You see,’ Harriet explained proudly, ‘we have to copy it quickly – you know – anyhow – while we’re up there, and then we rush down and copy it properly into our Record Books. Tony says we mustn’t ever take the Spy Book itself away, even for a minute, or she might come in in that minute and notice. That’s why we have to copy it twice.’

  Evidently this refinement of technique had taken a lot of explaining by Tony, and Harriet was proud to have mastered it.

  ‘And it’s all a deadly secret cross my heart,’ added Margery, rather belatedly. ‘That’s why we can’t tell you about it, Mummy. Mine’s much tidier than Harriet’s, isn’t it?’

  Louise studied the proffered page, hoping that she was not betraying too much interest. But the text, twice copied by Margery, was too garbled to convey much at a brief inspection. ‘The apple in M’s eyes’ – did that mean ‘the appeal’? And what about this word that Margery was struggling to spell? ‘Recknergizzled.’ Once written down, the derivation was clear. ‘Recognised,’ of course. Miss Brandon had been writing something about someone being (or not being) recognised…. The document appeared to be something in the nature of a diary….

  ‘Mummy, you’re reading it,’ accused Margery, with gentle reproach, after watching her mother studying the page closely for the best part of five minutes. ‘I told you it was a secret. Tony said we weren’t to let anyone see it except him.’

  ‘But you showed it to me, darling,’ pointed out Louise, though not with much hope that such reasoning would carry any weight with her audience. ‘And,’ she added, feeling that it was about time that the ethics of the whole business should be given an innings: ‘It was very naughty of you both – and Tony too – to pry about in Miss Brandon’s room like this. This must be her private diary, and you’ve no business to touch it. Or to go in her room at all, for that matter, without being invited. That room is her home, don’t you see. How would you like it if people just walked into our home without knocking or anything?’

  ‘We didn’t walk in,’ objected Harriet; and Margery amended: ‘We can’t walk in, because she always locks the door now. But she keeps the Spy Book behind the broken ceiling, you see, inside the cupboard. We can get to it u
nder the roof from the hole in the other attic. Tony showed us. It’s where we used to keep the Regulations and the Password of the Explorers’ Club. That’s how we found it, you see, because we were looking for the Regulations again, because I said we’d done them in red ink, and Harriet said we hadn’t, and so I wanted to just show her. I knew we must have done them in red ink, you see, because—’

  Louise remembered the Explorers’ Club very well. It had enjoyed its week and a half of glory about six months ago, during which period Tony Hooper, two other exceedingly dirty urchins, and a rather bigger and considerably less dirty little girl with straw-coloured plaits, had appeared regularly after school to consume immense quantities of bread-and-jam and rock-buns. The party then repaired to the attics, where they bumped suitcases about, argued and dropped things until Mrs Philips sent in a message about her head, and Louise had to put a stop to it all. Louise had known, vaguely, about the holes in the plaster of the attic cupboards; but she had not realised the uses to which they could be put – or, indeed, that either of them were big enough to crawl through at all. Nor had they been, it now appeared, until the resourceful Tony had greatly enlarged the one in the lumber room with his pocket knife; though it was Harriet who thought of shifting a slate above their heads so that there should be a crack of light sufficient to read by.

  For a moment Louise thought wistfully of those modern children who are said to do nothing but watch television in their spare time. Then she turned her attention back to her duty as a parent:

  ‘You’re not to do it any more, do you understand?’ she said severely. ‘It’s very dishonest to read people’s private diaries—’

  ‘But we weren’t reading it; we were only copying it,’ protested Margery; and, in view of the utter lack of intelligence of Margery’s transcription, Louise could not but feel that the distinction was valid.

  ‘Well – anyway – you’re to stop it,’ she concluded, perhaps a shade weakly as she contemplated the guilty eagerness with which she herself would be studying those exercise books as soon as the children weren’t there. ‘You’d better give me the books, and—’

  But this raised a storm of protest. The exercise books were theirs; they had spent fourpence on them. Besides, it was a secret, and the books must be kept in a special, ever-so-secret place, Tony had said so.

  Louise had to give in for the moment, for the fat in the chip pan was beginning to smoke. In any case, she felt sure that the ever-so-secret place would in practice turn out to be the kitchen floor, among most of their other belongings.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The kitchen floor it was. Louise found the two exercise books after lunch, as she swept up the crumbs, the bits of chalk and the remains of Bimbo the Boxer. There seemed to be a certain lack of finesse about Harriet’s and Margery’s methods of guarding their deadly secret, and Louise could not but be touched by Tony’s apparent faith in his two colleagues. She shook the crumbs off the books and carried them guiltily upstairs to her bedroom – though whether the guilt was due to her intention of extracting the secrets from another woman’s diary, or to the fact that she ought at this moment be washing the bathroom floor, she could not tell. A housewife’s sense of moral values is often blurred by this sort of thing.

  In Louise’s case, it was blurred even more by the fact that she could make almost no sense at all of Margery’s careful transcription – failure to achieve dishonesty often seems the next best thing to honesty itself. Although the writing itself was careful and neat, the meaning of what she was copying had clearly been far beyond Margery’s comprehension. She had copied one word after another as best she could, parrotwise, and only here and there did a phrase stand out which had been within her grasp, and had therefore been copied legibly. ‘M’s cheek against mine’ was one of them; and ‘M and I’ recurred three or four times, the bold, straightforward capitals standing out unequivocally amid the surrounding gibberish.

  ‘M and I.’ ‘M and I.’ Louise felt illogically and immediately certain of two mutually contradictory ideas. First, that it was impossible that the ‘M’ of the diary should refer to Mark – that he couldn’t – wouldn’t – deceive her in such a way. Second, that it couldn’t refer to anyone else, and that right from the beginning she had known and expected just this. And who could blame him? He had been getting little enough from his wife these past months – none knew that better than Louise.

  ‘And yet he knows I really love him,’ she thought wildly. ‘He must know it. It’s like the happiness – it’s just put away in a drawer for the time being until I have time – energy – to take it out—’

  But can love live in a drawer? And for how long? And if it can – if it is tough – resistant – can take anything – still, how can anyone but the owner of the drawer know that it is still there? How can you expect the neighbours to know that you possess a mink coat if you never wear it?

  Louise felt her heart beating in heavy panic. Was it already too late to open that drawer …?

  Trembling, she pushed the book away from her, and in doing so knocked Harriet’s book on to the floor, in company with two cotton reels and an unemptied ash-tray. The book had fallen open at the second page, and even before she stooped to pick it up, Louise could read the three words which straggled across the middle of the page in black, uneven capitals:

  ‘M IS DEAD’

  For a moment the shock deprived her of all sense. Like a puppet on a string, she jerked round to stare at the double bed, half expecting to see her husband’s body, stiff and white, stretched out on it. Her next impulse was to rush down to the telephone, to ring the office, to find out if Mark was well, to tell him to be careful, terribly careful….

  Then her intelligence began to work again, telling her over and over again that of course Mark was all right; it couldn’t conceivably refer to him; that Vera Brandon must have dozens of friends of whom Louise knew nothing; for all she knew, the whole lot of them might have names beginning with M. Maurice. Mervyn. Mickey. Monty. Oh, heaps of them. Martin. Manfred. Marmaduke…. The need to think of names beginning with M was taking on the quality of an obsession. It was becoming irrational….

  Irrational? Well, of course, the whole thing was irrational. Her intelligence had told her at least twenty times that she was being a fool to worry about any of it. Yet still those black, ill-formed capitals stared up at her in purposeful silence. ‘M Is Dead.’ The message was for her. She knew it. An instinct, older and more compelling than any intelligence, warned her that she would neglect that message at her peril. Though the words had been copied by Harriet’s unskilled hand, they were not Harriet’s words. They were someone else’s words, born of such savage intensity of feeling that they had grown like plants, with a life, a power of their own. They were Words of Power, belonging by rights in a darker, younger world than this….

  Another second, and Louise was herself again; civilised, rational and inquisitive. Oh, terribly inquisitive. All guilt, all hesitation gone, she studied Harriet’s exercise book as if it held the key to all earthly happiness and security.

  In a way, this book was more satisfactory than Margery’s, for instead of copying blindly and senselessly as Margery had done, Harriet must have skimmed through the original for words and phrases that she could understand. She had written them all down in block capitals in a disjointed list, which had an oddly apocryphal effect:

  ‘NO SENSE OUT OF HER’

  WIND AND HAIL BETWEEN THEM’

  ‘HARDER TO FIGHT A FOOL’

  ‘FILL IN MORE FORMS’

  ‘IT SEEMS I MUST HATE IN TRIPLICATE’

  Louise wondered that Harriet had tackled ‘Triplicate’ so successfully; and then she remembered the ball game that Mrs Philips had been complaining about only last Saturday:

  ‘Careful Kate

  Climbed the gate

  Take it down in triplicate.’

  At the word ‘Triplicate’ the player had to twirl round while the ball was still in the air, and then catch it, an
d this, with shrieks of joyful frustration, the children had consistently failed to do; it was this, combined with the thud – thud – thud of the ball against her side wall that had roused Mrs Philips.

  Louise turned a page.

  ‘RE DORSANDY’

  What a peculiar name – if it was a name? Or a place? Not much use trying to guess – Harriet had probably misspelt it anyway. Louise read on, and was surprised to find herself confronted with two carefully printed though badly spaced addresses:

  61ELSWORTHYCRESCENT N.2

  10 MORT LAKEBUILDINGS N.17

  61 Elsworthy Crescent. 10 Mortlake Buildings. Neither address conveyed anything to Louise, but they seemed perfectly plausible. Might not one or the other of them be the address she had been seeking – the address of someone who might be able to throw some light on the past life of this Miss Brandon? That previous landlady, perhaps, from whom Mrs Morgan said Louise ought to have obtained a reference?

  Louise was suddenly reluctant to do anything about it at all. It was one thing to lament the fact that she knew nothing of Miss Brandon’s past; it was quite another to be confronted suddenly with a perfectly simple means of finding out something.

  ‘M IS DEAD’

  It was as if the page had spoken aloud, repeating the message peremptorily; demanding the answer. Snatching up the exercise book Louise ran downstairs to the telephone.

  No, the operator explained, she was sorry, there was no telephone at No. 10 Mortlake Buildings. There was one at 61 Elsworthy Crescent, but what was the name, please? To Louise’s tentative suggestion of ‘Dorsandy’ she replied with a momentarily nonplussed silence; and then, after a little delay, suggested obligingly that perhaps Louise meant ‘Palmer’?