They had gone out to dinner, and had sat and talked afterwards over their coffee. Nelle had accompanied them, had remained near them, watching them. Most of the time Ellen had managed to ignore her unwavering, insolent stare, but she had not been able to forget that it was on her. Nelle’s presence had fitted into the back of her mind and nagged her like a worry. It was in the hope that a drive in the park might serve to vanquish Nelle that she had suggested to Basil that they hire a carriage after leaving the restaurant. Nelle had not left them as they entered the park, but she had seemed to grow less oppressive, and Ellen sensed that she would soon give up and go in the face of their felicity. Nelle depended on violence, on frustration, on hate.
The carriage slipped smoothly forward along the wide road, the horse’s hooves slopping placidly and the driver’s cocked hat bobbing irregularly as he smoked his pipe. Nelle had been looking at them intently ever since they had entered the carriage, but now she looked away. Ellen sighed and allowed herself to relax even more. Nothing was right, she realized, but life went on, jogged slowly past each day in much the same way the carriage moved gradually past each dark clump of trees. The trick was to learn to be indifferent.
Then Basil cleared his throat and sat up. He had looked thin and restless in the reflected light of the street lamps, and vaguely unhappy.
‘Ellen,’ he had said, ‘there is something I would like to talk to you about.’
She had looked at him and nodded her head, had waited for him to continue. But he had hesitated, had fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette and had taken a long time lighting it before he spoke again. ‘It’s about your concert, Ellen. Last night’s concert, I mean. I’m not sure you should give another one.’
She had not expected this. Her face stiffened and, although she knew it was the last thing she should do, she had looked across at Nelle. She did not look back at Basil. Nelle had held her hand up so that the ring with its dark stone had caught the dim light of the lamps. Its deeps of darkness had their old effect on her: she felt herself drawn irresistibly towards its horrible emptiness. Nelle had begun to smile and to gain substance and distinctness – Ellen felt as if she were flowing towards her, even though she knew that she had not moved. She tried to take her eyes off the ring, but it was impossible.
‘Why are you sitting over there now?’ Basil asked. ‘I had no intention of insulting you. I said what I did for your own good.’ Ellen was startled to see that Basil was looking past her and speaking to Nelle, that Nelle was no longer gazing at her, but at Basil.
‘I am not over there. I’m here beside you,’ she said. Yet before she had stopped speaking, she had glanced down at where her own body should be, and realized that she could not see herself. Nelle, however, was frighteningly visible.
Basil paid no attention to what she said. He continued to look at Nelle – whose eyes were glinting wildly and whose hair had become disarrayed. ‘I went to see Dr Danzer today,’ he went on. ‘I told him that you had – had difficulties last night. I asked him what was wrong.’
Nelle laughed scornfully. ‘You poor fool! I suppose you believed what he told you?’ she said.
Basil shook his head worriedly, stubbed out his cigarette and threw it away. ‘Don’t listen to her, Basil. Please, don’t listen to her,’ Ellen cried.
But Basil did not seem to hear her. He went over to the other side of the carriage and sat beside Nelle. When he attempted to put his arm around her, she shrank away and clawed at his face.
‘Darling, you’re ill!’ he said. ‘You’ve worked too hard too soon, and now you’re on the verge of another breakdown. You must listen to me!’ (Nelle was laughing again, showing her teeth.) ‘Dr Danzer is quite concerned. He wants to see you, to talk to you. He says it is not at all unusual for a musician, after a course of shock “treatments”, to experience difficulty in regaining his previous skills. He thinks that you may well be ill again, that you may need more “treatments”.’
Nelle struck his face with her open hand, her nails digging into his cheek’s flesh, gouging it, leaving long, deep scratches from which the blood flowed freely. ‘Didn’t the doctor tell you that might happen when you gave your consent for the “treatments”?’ she demanded. ‘Didn’t he tell you that an artist’s skill is lost when that current passes through the brain – that if an adjustment is made later it will be on a lower level?’ She stood up in the gently swaying carriage and pointed her long finger at him accusingly. Her face was a mask of hate. Ellen shrank from the sight.
Basil’s hand rubbed at his bleeding cheek. ‘The doctor told me that,’ he said. ‘He also told me that your chance to recover was slight without the shock “treatment”. I had to make a decision.’
Nelle spat at him, then jumped from the slowly moving carriage. Her hair streaming in wild disorder down her back, she ran swiftly across the road to the path that led to the zoo. Basil jumped out and ran after her, crying, ‘Ellen! Ellen! Stop and listen to what I have to say!’
The driver pulled on the reins and halted the carriage. Ellen leaped out, too, and began to run after both of them down the curving path. Basil was a good way ahead of her, and Nelle was almost out of sight; in her desperate hurry to catch up with them, to stop what she felt was about to happen, she deserted the twisting walk and ran down the hill, through brambles and against low branches of trees that she could not see in the night. Nelle, she knew, was running towards the bear-pit.
Ellen got there in time to see Nelle, who had fallen in her headlong flight and whose clothes were tom to ribbons, climbing the bars that overhung the grotto. The creatures below were moving about restlessly; one of them was growling. By the time Nelle had reached the top of the bars, was outlined whitely against the dark iron rods, Basil had begun to climb after her.
‘Don’t do it, Basil!’ Ellen cried. ‘Leave her alone – let her do whatever she wants. She is not me! I am here!’
But if Basil had heard, he had given no indication. He had kept on climbing up the bars, holding on with one hand and his twining legs as he reached out for Nelle with the other. She was perched on the outermost limit of the barrier, clinging carelessly to the arching points of the bars. Beneath her the bears, huge, lumbering shadows in the night, padded heavily, sniffing and growling. Then Nelle had started to teeter, to swing back and forth as if she were losing her balance, and Basil redoubled his effort to get to her in time.
Ellen watched helplessly. There had been nothing she could do. Each time she called out to her husband he ignored her – he seemed only to have ears for the blasphemous taunts Nelle threw at him. But as Ellen, her hands clenching and unclenching, had watched the perilous climb, she had remembered a similar experience – a horrifying time – not too long ago. She had remembered awaking in a hotel room with Jim Shad lying beside her. A neon sign blinked on and off outside the window, casting a pattern of red and black bars across his sleeping face. She had left the bed to walk to the window and change the angle of the slats so that the light did not fall on his face, when she felt the familiar pressure on her shoulder, had turned and had looked into Nelle’s face. That time she had screamed, and the scream had awakened Jim. He had jumped up and run – not to her, but to Nelle. She had hit him again and again with the heavy base of a lamp, and had beaten him until he had fallen back gasping on the bed. Then she had begun to batter his head against the bedpost, while Ellen watched and screamed her terror.
This time she knew it was useless to cry out. She could not have even if she had wanted to, for Basil had reached the top, the outermost bars, and was working his way laboriously across their points towards Nelle. To scream would have been to startle him, perhaps to cause him to lose his balance and plunge into the pit. Ellen could only stand by and wait.
But Nelle had screamed. Just as Basil had been reaching her, she had begun to shriek – great, full-throated cries. Basil had thrown out his hands in an attempt to save himself, but he had already lost his equilibrium. As he pitched downwards, h
e caught at the point of a bar with one hand; she saw the flesh tom by the cruel edge. Then his body dropped into the pit with a heavy thud, the cumbersome shadows moved in, and he cried out piteously. Nelle had climbed down as soon as he fell and had run to Ellen, had put her hand over Ellen’s mouth and held tightly on to her to keep her from running for help until it was too late and the only sounds that came from the bear-pit were hideously inhuman.
The room was dark, the darkness settled all around her, seething and twisting, claiming her for its own. Even the window was dark now, the moon having passed behind a cloud. She had lived through it for another night and had witnessed it all once again, helpless to intervene. Any time she closed her eyes, day or night, it was likely to begin again; but she did not have to close her eyes to hear those screams. Their piercing ululation filled her ears whether she waked or slept, banishing music forever, creating their own symphony of pain. And another sound was at all times with her: a sweet, lying whisper, advising, cajoling, misleading her. Nelle rarely left her now, seeming almost a part of her, spoke for her, acted for her, often even forced her to think her thoughts. Sometimes it seemed that she was not Ellen, that she was Nelle.
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