Nelle was sitting in the other corner. She was still smiling, but not breathing heavily, nor was her face flushed, and not a hair of her coiffure was disarranged. ‘You didn’t think that you could outrun me, did you, Ellen? You know that I could always run faster than you. But, tell me, where are we going? To see Basil?’
She said nothing, but stooped to pick up her bag from the floor. As she reached, the driver swerved the taxi to move into another lane of traffic, and the unexpected jolt made her lose her balance. Clinging to the strap, she leaned forward to get her bag again, but it was not where it had been. Nelle had kicked it into the other corner.
‘Why don’t you answer me, Ellen?’ Nelle had her foot on the open bag. ‘I won’t let you have this until you tell me. Where are we going?’
There was no reason why she should hide the truth. And there was a good chance that if Nelle discovered that she intended to visit Dr Danzer, Nelle would leave her. At the hospital, when she had been taking her course of shock ‘treatments’, Nelle had never accompanied her to the doctor. Often she had been waiting for her when she awakened afterwards, but she had not been with her before.
She decided to tell her. ‘I am going to see Dr Danzer,’ she said. ‘He told me to come to him at once if I ever saw you again.’
Nelle’s face changed horribly. Her smile was transformed into a sneer, her eyes bulged with anger and her pale skin became suffused with the hot blood of ire. She glared at Ellen hatefully, then bent down and picked up the bag. Snapping it open, she begun to go through it.
Ellen could not let her do this. She threw herself across the seat – on to her enemy – struck out blindly at her face and hands in an attempt to wrest the bag from her. Although she did get her hands on the purse, Nelle proved too strong for her, resisting her as if she were a steel wall, hurting her head, bruising her. In the struggle the bag fell open on the seat and Dr Danzer’s card fell out. Both of them clutched at it, succeeded in touching it. But before either could hold on to it, a sudden gust of wind from the open window sucked at it, made it flutter and fly blindly in a small, dizzy circle like a flame-fascinated moth – while both of them stabbed at it with their hands – then forced it to swoop through the window and into the busy street. As soon as this happened, Nelle relaxed, lay back limply under Ellen’s weight. The smile returned to her face – her expression became benign. ‘You didn’t really want to see the doctor, now did you, Ellen?’ she cooed.
Tears of frustration and rage filmed her eyes, and she retreated to her corner of the cab, weak with exasperation. The taxi had halted at another light, and she could see the cabby’s face in the rear-view mirror, his eyes dull with bewilderment.
‘Are you all right, lady?’ he asked. And when Ellen did not, at first, answer, he asked again, ‘Are you sure you’re all right, lady? You aren’t sick or nothing?’
Nelle was signalling to her to answer, to say something sensible.
‘I’m quite all right, thank you,’ she said. ‘Just feeling a little tired.’
‘I heard a commotion back there,’ the cabby said, turning around and peering at Nelle’s corner. ‘I heard you talking pretty loud, as if somebody else was there. Have you decided where you’re going?’
‘I think we’ll go home,’ Nelle answered sweetly, before Ellen could speak, before she had decided what to say or whether to say anything at all. ‘We’re a little tired and wet.’ And she gave the driver Ellen’s home address.
‘I don’t know why you wanted to see that foolish doctor,’ she complained to Ellen. ‘He’s not your friend, as I am. He would only make you go back to the hospital and take another course of “treatments”. I’d rather see Basil. I always liked Basil – I think he’s handsome, you know – and I haven’t seen him in so long a time!’
Ellen did not answer her. She sat very still in her own corner, holding her aching head, her eyes shut. If she were silent, if she said nothing, Nelle might get bored and go away. But if she did not choose to, Ellen knew from long experience that there was no way she could make her go. She felt sick and weak, frightened, alone…
Nelle kept on talking, softly, quietly, but with a deliberate vehemence. ‘Dr Danzer has never understood you or me,’ she said, ‘for all his big words and fancy ideas. He hasn’t helped you either. You are just the same as you always were, Ellen – a silly little wretch who is afraid of her own shadow when I’m not there! But I’m always there, Ellen, when you need me, whether you admit it or not, whether you choose to remember me later or not. I was there when you were a girl and your father whipped you – if it hadn’t been for me you would never have stood up to him, never been allowed to go out alone or with your friends, never been permitted to go away to the conservatory. And I was there, too, that night when you walked the streets alone and the men mocked you, when you went up to your hotel room to wait for Jim to come back to you, meekly, humbly, ready to forgive him if he only returned! If it hadn’t been for me you would have forgiven him, wouldn’t you? Yet what thanks do I get? You won’t even remember what I did – you let that doctor of yours with his psychiatric mumbo-jumbo persuade you that it never happened, you let him convince you that I did not try to kill Jim that night, that the little you do remember of what happened was only an expression of the guilt you’re supposed to feel towards your father!’
Ellen turned away from her and her diabolical words. Gazing out the window at the brownstone fronts, the tenements, the pillars of the Third Avenue ‘El’, she could almost succeed in not hearing the softly spoken statements, the terrible lies – or truths? – with which Nelle tormented her. But her indifference did not discourage Nelle. She kept on with her spate of accusations, her taunts and her boasting.
‘What happened when you told Dr Danzer about me? Tell me, what happened?’ she cajoled. But when Ellen refused to answer, she supplied the response herself. ‘He told you that I was only a figment of your imagination, didn’t he? He said that you had withdrawn from reality – what a catch-phrase that is! – when you found the life you led too unpleasant, too frustrating, and had invented me to be your companion. Do you believe that, Ellen? Do you believe that you invented me? Rather that I invented you, I who am your better part! You can’t live without me, Ellen, and you know it.
‘What else did that doctor of yours say about me? Oh, yes, the funniest thing of all! Do you remember how we laughed about it at the time, Ellen? When he told you that the best proof you could have that I did not exist – as if you could ever prove that I did not exist, I who am more real than you are yourself – was the fact that my name was your own spelled backwards, do you remember how we laughed, how we rolled on the floor and laughed when he told you that? And do you remember that last concert of yours before you went to the hospital, that concert when you were so frightened and your fingers would not obey you, when I had to play instead of you, when we exchanged roles and you stood beside me and I played? What would you have done without me then, Ellen? Would you have just sat there before your instrument, with the entire concert hall filled with people who had come to hear you play, and have stared at the manuals unable to lift a finger, terrified because you could not hear the music in your head? Yes, that is what you would have done – ah, I know you! – if I had not taken your place, if I had not played for you!’
Ellen let her rave on. Part of what she said was true, but the greater part of it was subtly distorted. At her last concert before she had become ill and Basil had taken her to Dr Danzer, she had forgotten what she was to play, she had not been able to hear the notes sound in her head as she always had before. But she had played – she herself had played and no one else. This much she knew. This much she must hold on to. It had come out wrong, everything had got all jumbled up, her hands had roved the manuals like wild distrait creatures – but she had played, not Nelle. It had been Nelle who had stood behind her, who had mocked and laughed at her, who had tried her best to distract her. And it had been Nelle who had run forward across the st
age when she could not play any longer, when the effort to control her wild hands had become too much for her, who had lunged across the footlights at the great, many-faced beast she hated, who had thrown herself screaming upon them, cursing them, reviling them. It had been Nelle, not Ellen.
The taxi parked in front of her house, and Ellen, who had recaptured her purse after the doctor’s card had been lost, paid the driver. As she opened the door, Nelle, rudely, squeezed past her and rushed up the steps to the door of her house before she could step to the street. While she fitted her key in the lock, Nelle stood beside her, breathing violently, her lips open passionately, her hands warm and feverish on her shoulder. ‘Tell me about Basil, Ellen,’ she kept saying. ‘Tell me all about him. Is he still as tall, as lean and blond as he was? I can hardly wait to see him!’
She had anticipated a struggle with her when she opened the door, since she had decided that whatever happened she would not let Nelle see Basil first. But as the door opened they both stood motionless in surprise. The hall was filled with the full, sweet tones of a violin. And as they listened, the sound stopped, broke off in the midst of a passage, as it might if someone had pulled back on the hand that held the bow.
Nelle led Ellen into the hall of her own house, led her on tip-toe to the library door. Together, they stood behind it while Nelle pushed it open a crack, far enough to see into the big, book-lined room.
Basil was standing by the piano, his arms around a woman. The violin had been laid aside on the piano bench, forgotten. He held her passionately, and her long auburn hair had come undone, falling in profusion along his shoulders as soft, coppery dusk sometimes falls upon the hills and the sea.
Then Nelle closed the door and turned to Ellen, smiling. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘I am your only friend.’
7
‘I am your only friend.’ Nelle was present in the darkness, in the foul, seething blackness – Nelle was close to her, bending over her as she lay stiff and tense beneath the bed-clothes, Nelle’s sweet whisper echoing in the silence of the room. She had come to expect Nelle’s appearance at this point of her compulsive journey into the past, had come to accept it and to make no attempt to fight it off, although she knew that it meant that the greatest terror of all was coming, would be upon her before the night was done. Nelle’s hand touched her now, the long fingers grew dimly before her eyes, strips of shadow only slightly lighter than the surrounding, threatening darkness. Against them, slowly, she saw vertical bars – the fingers seemed to rest against the bars, but on the other side of them. Then, as on the other nights, the ring on the longest of the fingers took shape, the horrible stones in its centre flickered and came alive, became a deepness, a soul-sucking vacuum towards which she herself was drawn, upon which her consciousness was focused, into which, inevitably, she must go. She felt herself contracting, growing smallerand smaller, and at the same time moving up towards the bars, the dark aperture of the stone, being pulled into it as thread is pulled into the eye of a needle.
She resisted this magnetism, knowing that she could not resist it long enough. By compressing herself until her bones ached and her skin was taut with the straining of her muscles, she managed to achieve an equilibrium, a delicate poise, on the threshold of the dark entrance within the ring. And it was at this moment that she seemed to stop existing. As she hesitated, by means of an ultimate exertion of will, on the rim of nothingness, the present instant stood still, Nelle’s sweet, coaxing voice froze in mid-syllable, her future came rushing towards her, bringing with it a tremendous impact of experience – as if all the events that were to happen had been poured into a funnel and she was at the bottom of the spout – and her past overtook her, swelled up and around her, spread out on all sides.
A nest of bars, a menagerie of vertical and horizontal lines, cage upon cage upon cage, and she herself in the centre of them all – no matter where she cast her gaze, she saw bars, some round and ivoried white, some square and darkly painted and curving downward to end in points, some themselves shadows on the face of a sleeping man (two sets of these, one seen in the silver light of the moon, the other redly in the glare of a neon sign), and a final set – the closest, the most threatening of all – which seemed to press against her temples as if she were peering through them, on the other side of which the vague, dark shapes of the elms could hardly be seen.
Nelle’s voice began again, time began again; but the vision of the world of bars did not disappear. Nelle was saying, ‘This is you, Ellen. Believe it if you can – for this is what Dr Danzer says – these bars are you. These are the bars of your crib as a child, the bars you saw in the park that were meant to protect you from the den of bears, the bars of shadow cast by two, different blinds at two, different hotel windows on two, different nights upon Jim Shad’s face, and the bars on the window of this room, the latticework that casts the checkered pattern on the floor. These bars, so the doctor says, are your fate – you can’t escape them, although you can learn to prevail over them by making the best of them, as a caged creature rubs against the bars of its enclosure. Look at them, Ellen; see how they confine you, how they warp and twist your actions, how they influence your thoughts, how they make you.’
A great chill settled upon her – the coldness of the irrevocable – and the fear she had known long enough to grow accustomed to grew in intensity until it regained its pristine force: the terror of a child. She realized that she had been thrown back in time to an unknown period of her childhood, that she was small and bewildered, awakened out of sleep to stare at the darkness, to listen again for the unexplained sound she had heard in her crib. Suddenly the sound came again: a creaking of the stairs, a giggling, her mother’s voice protesting, ‘But I’ll have to look in at the child; she may not be asleep.’ Then, a loud noise and a bright streak of light appeared out of which two monstrous forms, two genii as in the fairy-tales, burgeoned and approached her crib. They stood over her, blocking the light, laughing and struggling, bending down to get her. ‘Don’t you do it! I tell you she is too young to touch any of that!’ More struggling above her. More menacing shadows that grew and wavered and swooped down on her. An hysterical giggle, a high screaming, ‘Don’t! Don’t! Oh, you’re terrible!’ Again the larger shadow bending over her, coming nearer and nearer, and with it a queer stench. The lights suddenly brighter, blinding her, the hand – her mother’s hand with its queer dark stone – upon the bars of her crib, the great fear looming out of her and the great hate – the huge, senseless force of hate that she had never felt before streaming out of her, directed towards the shadow, as her mother cried again, ‘If you touch a hair of her head, I’ll murder you!’
The shadows came down upon her, blanketing her, but the terror subsided; she felt herself grow again, move forward in time, move out of the small world of a child into the larger, more complex environment of an adult. The darkness still surrounded her, yet now it was the natural darkness of night. The air was cool on her brow and she lay back peacefully on Basil’s arm, her head resting upon his shoulder, as the carriage they were riding in moved slowly through the park. About them the scent of freshly drenched verdure pervaded the atmosphere – the storm had passed and the vaulted firmament above them was brightened with the flashings of a thousand stars. Nelle sat across from them, sulking. For Ellen had not looked at her in many hours, and was now sure that eventually she would become tired of her game and leave them to themselves.
Basil’s hand had held her own, Basil’s rangy form rested beside hers; she felt almost secure and safe. The long afternoon she had passed shut up in her own room listening to the intermittent sounds of the violin belonged to the past. Throughout the afternoon Nelle had tried again and again to force Ellen to go down to the library and confront the lovers. If she had steadfastly refused to do this, it had not been out of any confidence that her impression was mistaken, or out of dread that her worst suspicions would be verified. Instead, she had sat and looked at a picture on the wall, a pr
int of Picasso’s that she particularly liked, had focused all her thoughts upon its form and shape, had studied it as if she were seeing it for the first time. Nelle had kept pacing back and forth across the floor, her smile turned to a scowl, berating her, pretending at times that she could see into the room downstairs, could watch its occupants and describe their love-making to Ellen. She had refused to listen, and had at last reduced Nelle to sullen silence and an even more frenetic pacing.
At the end of the afternoon the violin’s sound ceased altogether. The door to the library was heard opening, and the high, musical voice of a woman penetrated to her room. Nelle, gnashing her teeth, flung herself upon Ellen, pulled at her, cursed her, in a final attempt to get her to go out in the hall and interrupt the meeting. But Ellen had shut her eyes and withstood her urgings. When she had looked through the narrow crack of the door and had seen the auburn-haired girl in Basil’s arms, the calmness of certainty had descended upon her. She knew then that her husband’s infidelity was a fact – from that moment on anything else she might have learned would only have been a detail. Not that it had been possible at all times in the afternoon to suppress her imagination: occasionally the sound of laughter had been heard, of talk and – once – the sound of something falling. But if she had followed Nelle’s promptings and had broken in on them, she would only have been adding to her own jealousy.
A little later, after she was certain that Basil’s visitor had gone, she went down to the library. Nelle had stayed behind her all the way down the stairs, had walked into the room with her and had seated herself in one of the wingback chairs by the fireplace where she would be best able to see what occurred. Basil had been seated at his desk, but had looked up when he saw Ellen approaching. He had come to her and taken her in his arms and had kissed her complacently on the brow. She had let him do this because she had not felt deeply about it. He was her husband, she was his wife, he was unfaithful to her. The three facts, despite their seeming relevance to each other, had been kept separate and unconnected in her mind. What was happening and how she acted seemed to her to be unimportant, distant matters that were curious to observe and even debatable, but not in actuality a part of her life. Nelle, who sat on the other side of them, sneering at them, was real, her hatred of Basil – which was the greater because of her recent passion – was incontestable, and Ellen felt it as she might feel the warmth of a great fire even at some distance. But Nelle was also not a part of her.
Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly Page 18