Devil's Work

by Margaret Yorke

  One theory Louise read of implied that a shock sustained in childhood and possibly forgotten could be revived by some later trauma and provoke a subsequent phobia.

  Bats in your bedroom, in childhood, weren’t enough, surely, she thought, and laughed at the idea as she dismissed it. Perhaps, since she’d forgotten so much – could remember nothing, really, until the hotel in Wales – there was some hidden horror. Perhaps it was connected with the departure of her father?

  At intervals through the weekend, Louise thought about him. How different things might have been, she thought, if he had stayed in her life. But what sort of man had he been? Was he like Roddy? Or was he a man like Alan – gentle and kind? Her days were so different now, with his friendship. Often, she thought of the kisses they had exchanged which were so different from any she had known before, and which had come about in so natural a manner. All her instincts had been to prolong the moment. He hadn’t mentioned a wife, and she hadn’t asked; a man like that had to be married, though, and in time he would tell her about it.

  He did, on Monday.

  After taking Tessa to school they both hurried back to Oak Way, for they wanted to discuss the books which Alan had left with her over the weekend.

  ‘It’s like being reborn, Alan,’ Louise told him. ‘I feel so grateful to you. I slept like a log last night, and without any pills.’

  ‘It shows,’ Alan said. ‘You look splendid.’

  They were in the kitchen. Louise had put the kettle on, and now, as she turned to spoon instant coffee into mugs, he caught her by the shoulders and turned her gently round. Softly he kissed her mouth, then let her go. Louise turned back to the mugs and made their coffee. They sat down at the table, smiling at one another.

  ‘Let’s take the day off,’ Alan said. ‘The sun’s coming out – let’s have a day in the country.’ He shut his mind to the thought of the employment agency and the newspapers that waited in the library. ‘Why not?’ he urged.

  Louise had a pile of typing that had to be done to a deadline. She thought of the job which one day, perhaps very soon, Alan would get, and which would end what had barely begun between them. For once she felt no compulsion to flee from a positive act. She could do the typing at night, when Tessa had gone to bed.

  ‘Good idea,’ she said.

  She drove. She was improving all the time. They went through the town and headed westwards into the country, where if it wasn’t too cold they could walk on the downs. The wind was chilly, but the sun was shining and there were only small, puffy clouds in the pale blue sky. There was, at last, the feeling of spring in the air as they parked the car and got out. The wind caught at them as they set off up a track towards a small copse on the top of a hill. Alan took her hand and put it in his pocket with his own. They walked in silence for a while, until Louise said, ‘Tell me about your wife. You are married, aren’t you?’

  He did not answer at first, tightening his grasp on her hand and staring down at their two sets of feet trudging over the turf.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘Daphne and I have always got on well.’ But with her he’d never felt the sense of elation that filled him now, walking along with this frail young woman who somehow reminded him of a wounded bird, whose hand in his was so small and thin. ‘We’ve got one daughter who’s married and lives near York.’ He did not mention the baby.

  ‘Your wife doesn’t know you’re out of a job, does she?’ said Louise.

  ‘No,’ Alan said, and added, ‘It must seem very strange to you that I haven’t told her.’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ Louise replied. She knew about non-communication. She hadn’t known about Roddy’s work. ‘You probably didn’t want to worry her,’ she suggested.

  ‘In a way, yes,’ Alan agreed, glad of this excuse which he knew was not the whole truth. ‘But also, you see, she’s always so busy and on the go. It’s hard to catch her in a settled moment. I intended to tell her but the chance kept passing and after a while it seemed too late altogether. I’ve decided, now, to wait until I’ve found something.’

  ‘And you’re leaving home at your usual time and getting back when you always did?’

  ‘Yes.’ Admitting it, Alan felt sheepish. How craven it must seem.

  ‘Mightn’t she telephone you at the office?’

  ‘She hasn’t for years,’ said Alan.

  Louise did not seem to think this strange.

  ‘It’s my good luck, then,’ she said, in a firmer voice than he had ever heard her use. ‘I’ll have to get cured quickly before you start a new job. I won’t be able to manage it on my own.’

  He kissed her again then, her face cold in the wind.

  ‘You won’t have to,’ he said, and wanted to add, you need never be quite alone again, yet caution compelled him to leave the words unsaid: better not promise something you might be unable to deliver. He kissed her once more, holding her close, his mouth gentle at first and then more demanding. Slowly, she relaxed and then he felt her respond.

  They walked on at last, their hands linked.

  Two nights later, when Daphne was playing bridge, Alan went round to Oak Way, bringing with him a bottle of wine. Tessa had gone to bed, and Louise was expecting him, for he’d suggested this plan that afternoon and she had agreed.

  She’d changed, and was wearing a dark red dress. Her hair was newly washed, and a flowery fragrance came from her as he bent and lightly kissed her lips when she opened the door.

  They sat on the sofa at first, drinking their wine, and Alan moved close to her. When he gently moved on from kissing her to begin soft, tender caresses, a wild delight took hold of Louise and any last fear, any lingering thought of resistance, was gone. She could not bear to release him.

  She was shy at first, like an untried girl, and she enchanted Alan, who had forgotten, in Daphne’s familiar and always welcoming arms, that women were not all the same.

  Before he left her, he made tea and brought it to her in bed, where they drank it together.

  ‘Fancy tea in bed in the night!’ Louise exclaimed, the sheet drawn up round her naked breasts. ‘I didn’t know this sort of thing happened – that it could be so much fun.’

  ‘Didn’t you?’ Alan asked. He drew the sheet down and kissed her, and Louise shivered with pleasure.

  She shook her head. Her hair, loosed from its customary clasp, fell across her face. She didn’t know how to describe Roddy’s untender invasion.

  ‘I didn’t like it,’ she said, and added simply, ‘I just used to wait for it to be over.’

  Alan, the expectant grandfather, could not wait to gather her up in his arms again. There’d just be time, if he drove home fast, before Daphne returned.

  Mrs Cox was still up when he left. She’d been indulging herself that evening, looking at her cuttings book, and she’d heard him arrive earlier, his brisk stride on the path. She’d been listening since then, waiting for him to go. Her hearing wasn’t as good as once it had been, but she opened the living-room window a fraction and she heard soft voices as Louise said goodbye at the top of the iron stairs.

  The shameless hussy, Mrs Cox thought, putting her cuttings book back in its drawer and glancing up at her clock. It was shocking.

  Daphne wouldn’t notice his car was still warm when she put her own Mini away beside it, Alan thought, hurrying into Cherry Cottage some time later. He felt deliciously languid.

  He went into his study to put on a record. Tchaikovsky again, it had to be, he thought, after all that. It had been wonderful, and his heart, literally, seemed to sing as he listened to Romeo and Juliet. He was dozing a little when he heard Daphne’s key in the door, and the record was still playing, but when she came in to say she was back he appeared to be reading.

  ‘How’s Larry Walsh getting on?’ Daphne asked, as they made ready for bed. ‘Have you seen him again?’

  Who on earth was Larry Walsh? Alan stared at Daphne and was on the point of asking her whom she meant when, just in time, he remembered his fictitious
friend with Louise’s initials in whom Daphne had diagnosed agoraphobia.

  ‘Oh – he’s more cheerful,’ he said.

  ‘I asked Emily about her sister,’ Daphne said. ‘It seems she’s not completely cured, though she’s much better. She’s going to group therapy classes where they all talk about it, and then are taken for escorted walks and so on, gradually going further, and on buses and that sort of thing.’

  ‘I suppose cases vary,’ said Alan cautiously. It was worth continuing this conversation; Daphne might produce useful information.

  ‘Some people don’t leave their homes for years,’ Daphne said. ‘They bring up their children like that. Amazing, isn’t it?’

  Alan remembered a case history he had read. He said that Larry had no trouble driving the car, and was all right once he reached his office.

  ‘Well, he knows what caused it, doesn’t he?’ Daphne said. ‘It was losing his wife. I expect he’ll get over it in a year or two. Someone was saying at the hospital that it takes three years to recover from a bereavement.’

  ‘Some people never recover,’ said Alan.

  ‘Well, they adjust,’ said Daphne. ‘You can get used to anything, if you have to. It’s like losing a leg – dreadful. But you have to learn to walk again. You’re not the same, but you can live normally. Or try to. It’s like that after any serious illness, in fact. You can’t put the clock back and pretend it never happened.’

  ‘You see a lot of surface healing, don’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Brave people learning to walk and talk and dress themselves after strokes and terrible accidents,’ Daphne said. ‘Sometimes their families don’t realise what huge efforts they have to make.’

  What a good woman Daphne was, Alan thought. Yet if anyone told her that, she would be embarrassed and would brush the tribute aside. She was calm and confident, but her personal courage had never been challenged. Her health had always been good; she had had loving parents and a secure childhood. He was not, himself, the world’s most dynamic man, but until tonight he had been her faithful partner and had provided for her, gladly, always hoping for her happiness, for almost a quarter of a century. Was he insulting her, now, by seeking to spare her from worry? She would, he knew, support him in whatever might lie ahead, if he gave her the chance.

  She had just said, herself, that one could not put back the clock. It was too late, and tonight he had taken a step down another path which he meant to explore to the end. He couldn’t give up Louise. He was counting the minutes already until he would see her again.

  Creaming her face, Daphne told him that her golfing friend, Kitty Gibson, had given up playing. Her husband still hadn’t found a job and was very depressed; they had put their house up for sale. Daphne thought the real reason she’d stopped going up to the golf club, where her subscription was valid for the rest of the year, was because she dreaded facing her friends.

  Alan was rather surprised that she should show so much perception.

  9

  On Friday morning, Mrs Cox went to the shops. She had seen the legs go past as usual; the two pairs from the flat first, the mother and daughter, then later the other two pairs, the mother again and the man. When Mrs Cox left, pushing her wheeled shopping basket, the old green car was outside 51 Oak Way, but it had gone by the time she returned.

  Mrs Cox had been to the supermarket to buy a chop and some vegetables for her midday meal. In the evening she ate lightly – an egg, poached or boiled, with toast and tea, or cheese on toast, though sometimes that made her dream. When she went baby-sitting, a meal was always provided – a casserole in the oven, or a tastefully arranged salad – and a glass of sherry or wine. Sometimes there would be a fresh peach, or a pear, or even strawberries and cream. At one house a note would advise her to help herself to yoghurt from the refrigerator as her dessert, but Mrs Cox didn’t care for that newfangled stuff. She preferred a nice rice pudding, or custard, or old-fashioned junket made properly with essence of rennet.

  After the supermarket, she went to the chemist’s for Steradent for her dentures, a bottle of baby oil with which to combat the dryness of her elderly skin, and some of the sedative medicine her various employers used to soothe their fractious children at night. The girl in the chemist’s shop took scant notice of who bought these items; she was used to grandmothers buying nursery requirements.

  Mrs Cox took the mixture back and put it in the medicine cupboard. A child of six would need a very large dose to fall unconscious, and it did not work at once. She would have to use something that acted quickly. She looked at the bottle of chloral hydrate, and the flat white tablets. They’d have the same effect, she was sure, as the blue pills she had used long ago.

  She drew some chloral hydrate out of the bottle with an ear dropper and squeezed the liquid into a hole she had made in the base of a Mars Bar. Three times she filled the dropper and added its contents to the caramel mixture. She plugged the hole with chocolate and lit a match to melt it a little so that the drug was contained and her tampering concealed, though a child never looked closely at titbits.

  Tessa would bite greedily into it, swallow it down too fast to notice the bitterness, as Grace had eaten, long ago, a Mars Bar prepared the same way with another drug.

  She put it in her handbag. In the past she had often met Tessa when, on fine days, she had walked in the recreation ground and the child had been coming back from school. Mrs Cox liked watching the children playing. She would talk to the mothers sometimes as they pushed toddlers on the swings or stood by the slide or the see-saw. Mrs Cox’s charges had all had swings in their own gardens; there was none of this communal playing for them, though selected friends had come to tea and to parties. But times had changed.

  Lately, Tessa had not come this way at all. Her mother, and that man, her mother’s friend, had been meeting her at the school. Why was he not at work? Why had he time to spend half the afternoon in the flat with the child and her mother? For he never left until half-past five.

  The afternoon was sunny and dry. Mrs Cox had a nap after lunch and then, just before three, she set off for a stroll. She sat on a bench near the gate through which Tessa would come on her way home from school if today was to be the day.

  One day, she would come through it alone, and today might be the one. They would sit together, Mrs Cox planned, and when the Mars Bar was eaten they would walk to the river. Tessa would go where Mrs Cox led; children always obeyed her. She was not allowed to go to the river alone, of course, so it would be quite a treat. When she felt drowsy, Mrs Cox would find her somewhere to rest. No one would query a child and an elderly woman seen together, the child leaning against the woman as if with affection. When the moment came, with no one in sight, it would be easy to slip the child into the water. Later, when enough time had passed and the small body had quite disappeared, Mrs Cox would raise the alarm and be found in distress on the bank. They had been walking together, she would say – she could not say that Tessa had been on the path without permission, since they would have been noticed; she had run on and slipped.

  What would Louise Waring say then, wondered Mrs Cox with grim satisfaction as she brooded over her plan.

  But that fine, sunny day, Louise and Tessa came together through the recreation ground gate. Together they went to the swings, where for quite ten minutes the small girl enjoyed herself. Hand in hand, they went on home.

  They never noticed that Mrs Cox was there, watching them, holding her leather bag on her lap, the Mars Bar inside it. They loitered a little. Alan had been for an interview and would not be back just yet.

  Alan’s interview that day was at Coxwell, with a light engineering firm of repute, whose products and processes would be easy for him to understand.

  Setting out for the appointment, his heart was light. If he got the job, he could tell Daphne the truth about his redundancy but let her think he was still working out his notice. He could see Louise in the evenings, while Daphne was out. There would be plenty of chance
s for them to meet. He whistled, driving along. Things were improving, he thought, driving into the small town with plenty of time to spare before his appointment.

  He parked in a side road and went for a stroll down the main street. There were the usual branches of multiple stores as in most towns now, but there were plenty of other shops too, including a record shop that had some musical instruments in the window. He went inside.

  Browsing among the stock, he found Peter and the Wolf and on impulse bought it for Tessa; Louise had a record player, her own property, she said, during her marriage, and she had been able to prove it by producing the bill, so she’d kept it and a good many records too.

  He asked if they sold recorders. They did, though only treble ones. He bought two, one each for Louise and Tessa. It wasn’t the flute she had once wanted, but he knew she would find it a lot easier to play, and the two could have fun together.

  From a florist’s near the music shop, he bought six bunches of daffodils, and walked jauntily back to the car with his shopping, which he put on the back seat. Then he drove off to keep his appointment.

  The Escort looked very inferior, so shabby and so old, inserted into a space in the visitors’ parking lot between a large Peugeot and a BMW. There was a Datsun, too, and a Honda. When he went into the office building and was directed to a room where several men were already silently waiting, two smoking, one gazing at the ceiling and one reading the Guardian, he spent some time wondering which man belonged to which vehicle.

  At last his turn came to enter the interview room.

  Alan tried to look confident, sitting before the three directors who were assessing him. His qualifications for the job and his experience were what had got him thus far; now he must try to impress them with his good sense and adaptability.

  They kept him some time, longer than the much younger man who had gone in ahead of him and who had come out wearing a somewhat complacent smile beneath his droopy moustache.