Swinging the empty case to the floor, Jacko reproduced the pantomime for Milly’s benefit, bending to the imaginary weight, and panting for breath. “Good, isn’t it?”
“As a comic turn, yes,” observed Kevin drily. “But as a serious attempt to kid Mrs Mums that it was a respectable item of luggage belonging to a respectable lady—well, I don’t know why you didn’t dress up as a clown and sling custard-pies around as well, just to make sure! I was scared every minute she was going to ask us what was in it to make it so heavy—That’s all we needed, to have the Mums searching it for bombs, when the whole idea was to lull her suspicions!”
“Oh, gee, it was the best bit of acting outside of the West End for years! It had the Mums eating out of our hands! And was she impressed! Look, Barney! See the labels we’ve given you!”
Looking closer, Milly saw now that on each of the flamboyant foreign labels, some unknown name had been carefully erased, and “Milly Barnes” had been substituted, in small, neat capitals.
Her two knights-errant seemed so pleased with themselves, and were so obviously waiting for little cries of admiration and gratitude from her, that she hadn’t the heart to reveal her qualms about the whole business, or to point out to them that the fictitious story of her life—hard enough to make watertight anyway—was henceforth going to be further complicated by the necessity for fitting into it spells of globe-trotting on this daunting scale. How was a life of devotion to her invalid father in the depths of the country to be reconciled with a giddy round of visits to half the capitals in Europe? Lisbon—Copenhagen—Athens—Madrid … her eyes scanned the array warily, and she tried to remember how much of the invalid-father stuff she had given Mrs Mumford…. Or was that the story for Mrs Graham …? Had she told Mrs Mumford merely that she was a widow …? From now on, she would keep notes—if necessary in columns, on squared paper—so that she could see at a glance whom she had told what to. System and orderliness were clearly as necessary to a career of deception as to any other calling.
Meanwhile, the two eager young faces were beaming on her expectantly, awaiting suitably fulsome expressions of gratitude and of admiration for their cleverness: and she proferred both, wholeheartedly. The genuine friendship and concern for her that had gone into the prank were heartwarming: as to its wisdom, she kept her doubts to herself. She could only hope that the shrewd-eyed Mrs Mumford was as easily deceived as these two lads seemed to imagine.
After they had gone, all puffed-up and glowing with their good deed for the day, Milly kicked off her shoes, and settled herself on her bed to think. It was cold, but not unbearably so. With the eiderdown over her knees, and her coat clutched about her shoulders, she was comfortable enough, except for her feet, which were aching and tired. She had not noticed her tiredness while she was bustling about at Mrs Graham’s, with one eye on Alison and the other on the clock: but she realised now how unaccustomed her body was to hard work. The months that lay behind her had seemed, in the living, to be months of almost intolerable strain; but in point of fact they had been months of rotting; of slow, insidious decay, a slackening of all the fibres, of mind as well as body, under the encroaching shadow of fear.
*
Shadows … shadows … a blotting out of daylight, a barricade, thicker than death itself, between herself and the sun … this had been Milly’s first impression of the basement flat in Lady Street, when she and Gilbert Soames had returned to it after the strained, registry-office wedding, and the nearly silent wedding lunch which had followed for the two of them in the dark, expensive restaurant, both of them sunk in thoughts unmentionable to the other, and scarcely able to eat. Gilbert had paid the huge, futile bill for the uneaten food without the faintest quiver of dismay on his aristocratic face, and had then summoned a taxi and handed Milly into it as though she was a queen. In silence, they had driven back through the tired August streets, heavy with the fag-end of summer, and with the faint. South London haze blurring, ever so slightly, the heat of the afternoon. Milly (already she was thinking of herself, in retrospect, as Milly: her old name had become as remote as a dream)—Milly remembered how she had sat in the corner of the taxi feeling very tidy and compact, and vaguely surprised to find that she was feeling nothing else of any kind. She wasn’t even feeling too hot, in spite of her new cream-coloured crimplene suit with its high neck and elbow-length sleeves. So she sat, staring out at the shopping crowds of the Brixton High Road, and at the heavy, muted sunshine, and waited to feel something. For she had not, as yet, given a name to the small, nagging sensation that had awakened somewhere inside her at the moment when she was saying “I will!” She had not recognised it as dismay, still less as horror: and she had, indeed, found it easy to forget about it, after those first few moments. What with the necessity for looking her best and happiest in that photograph that was to go to Julian; and then the difficulty of persuading the photographer to have the prints ready before the weekend—all this gave little time for speculation on such trivial matters as whether her marriage would be a success, and whether the rest of her life, and Gilbert’s, was going to be worth living. If only the prints could be ready on Friday, before noon, then there was every chance that Julian would get his copy on Monday. The air-mails were pretty good, usually: letters often crossed the Atlantic faster than they crossed London, that’s what everyone said. With luck, the photograph, proof of the wedding, would reach Boston (where Julian—the brightest star in all the glittering brain-drain of that year—had recently landed some kind of high-powered research job)—it would reach Boston first thing on Monday morning. That would be good. Monday morning, going off to work with the shock of it still raw in him, and with no time to go over it all with Cora, the two of them consoling themselves by thinking up catty remarks, and looking for secret strains in the brightness of the pictured smiles.
Yes, Monday morning would be the time. Milly leaned forward in the taxi, bracing herself, using all her willpower, as if that would somehow speed the photographer in his task, and get that thin blue letter airborne, winging its way to Julian almost at the speed of sound.
The taxi drew up half way down the grey length of Lady Street, and Milly felt her husband’s—(No! No! how her mind had choked on the word, even in her thoughts!) No, she felt Gilbert’s bony arm under her elbow, helping her ceremoniously to the pavement. She stood watching while he paid the driver, selected the correct tip, and handed it to the man with that air of authority, of unquestioned Tightness, which had first attracted—Well, no, attracted was too strong a word—let us say which had first made Milly feel that it probably wouldn’t be too bad being married to him. She liked men to be good with taxis. As she stood there, a sudden memory of Julian being good with taxis hit her like a blow out of the sullen August heat. For a moment she could hardly stand, and so she was glad enough of the steely old arm gliding along under her elbow, helping her across the pavement: helping her past a high iron railing … and now it was propelling her down the steep, shadowy area steps. Down, down…. She was aware of a chill striking upwards as she left the sultry August heat behind … and as she went, the damp, shadowy stone seemed to march gravely upwards, on every side, until at last, here she was, at the bottom of a dank, narrow canyon, out of sight of the sunlight and of the passers-by. The tap-tapping of their unseen feet above her seemed suddenly far off, part of a vanished world.
And now Gilbert, at her side, was fingering through a bunch of heavy great keys…. Selecting first the one for the mortice lock…. Then for the yale lock … then for the special burglar-proof catch … until at last the basement door creaked open, and a smell of trapped mildew surged out towards her like water when the lock gates are opened.
*
Gilbert Soames did not lift his bride across the threshold. He held the peeling old door open for her, courteously, and waited for her to creep through ahead of him into the darkness.
*
It wasn’t quite dark, of course, once your eyes got used to it. Gilbert’s flat (Milly�
�s flat too, of course, now, but as yet she wasn’t facing that sort of thing) was well below ground-level, but on a bright day such as this a muted grey light managed to seep down and to find its way through the heavy iron bars that protected every window in the flat from burglars. That was Gilbert’s explanation, anyway, and at first Milly had thought it plausible enough. In an area like this, he’d said, people living in basements or on the ground floor had to protect themselves as best they could.
But now, looking at the bars from inside, Milly became aware of that strange tremor again, right in the pit of her stomach. Just for one second, she experienced the first, faint quiver of realisation of just what it was that she had done in marrying Gilbert Soames. The knowledge that this place was now actually her home flicked at her mind for a moment, and was gone. Quickly, she thought about Julian, and the way he would off-handedly slit that envelope open on Monday morning, never guessing what was inside.
She became aware that Gilbert had come back into the room. Since their arrival a few minutes ago, he had been padding softly around the flat, almost sniffing at everything, like a cat that wants to make sure that all its familiar corners have been undisturbed. Now he was back in this front room, with its massive ancient, mahogany furniture, and he was looking at her with a curious bright intensity: and it came to her, with a sudden, overwhelming sense of revulsion, that he expected to kiss her.
The intensity of her revulsion took her totally by surprise. Because Gilbert had often kissed her, naturally, in the course of their decorous courtship, and she hadn’t minded at all. But that had been different. A kiss, then, had usually been a goodbye kiss, heralding the fact that one more leaden-footed outing was safely over, and that she could now skip upstairs to her solitary flat and think about Julian, and about his and Cora’s faces when they heard that she had hooked herself another husband. Those kisses had had the same sort of satisfying finality as putting a stamp on a letter—there, that’s done!—and they hadn’t bothered her at all. But now….
“I’ll make some tea!” she proposed quickly, and without waiting for an answer she darted off into the damp, windowless cavern which Gilbert (she had already learned) insisted on calling “the scullery”. It served as the kitchen, though, and must have done for years, since it was here that an ancient, grease-caked gas-cooker kept its quiet vigil, undisturbed by the faint, ceaseless footsteps above, tap-tapping their way, unnoticed, out of the nineteenth century and far into the twentieth.
Tea. Afternoon tea. As she searched about for matches, kettle, teapot, Milly turned the phrase around in her mind and found it good. She was here for afternoon tea. For afternoon tea, you arrive at four (just as she was doing), and at half past five you begin to look at your watch and say you think you ought to be going. That’s how it would be: she’d been invited to tea by this strange old man, and in a couple of hours she’d be home again, in the peace and solitude of the Kensington flat: maybe ringing up one of her friends to tell her, just for laughs, how she’d been to tea with this weird old man in such a strange, depressing flat, like something out of Dickens, my dear, it really was!
Milly knew quite well, in one part of her mind, that she was playing a game with herself, one of the most dangerous games in the world. She knew, too, that sooner or later the make-believe would come to an end, and the reality of what she had done would come crashing in: and yet, for the moment, she couldn’t in any way worry about it.
Detached, even tranquil, in a strange way, Milly part-filled the great iron kettle at the cold tap above the ancient stone sink, and set it on the wavering small flame of the gas-cooker: and as she sat, patiently waiting for it to boil, she suddenly had the oddest feeling, that all this was really, actually happening. To her!
For one moment, she was seized by such panic as she had never dreamed or imagined; but instantly she fought it down. She fixed her mind on Julian, and on what he would be thinking next Monday, and on what Cora would be thinking; and very soon reality had shrunk back to its proper size. The size, that is, that would conveniently fit into the small compartment of her mind which was all she had had to spare for it of late.
Now, she looked around at the peeling plaster walls of the windowless kitchen, and at the strange shadows cast by the dim, fifteen-watt bulb, and wondered, for a moment, what it would feel like to realise that she would never cook by daylight again.
*
To her relief, she found she couldn’t realise it. Well, of course she couldn’t! All this wasn’t happening to her. Not herself. It couldn’t be.
CHAPTER X
HOW LONG HAD she succeeded in thus keeping reality at bay? Stirring restlessly on her narrow bed in Mrs Mumford’s First Floor Back, Milly tried to recall the precise moment she had realised exactly what she had let herself in for by marrying Gilbert Soames: the moment when she had first faced, fairly and squarely, the fact that she had tied herself irrevocably to a dreary, ill-tempered old man whom she did not even like, and for whom she felt nothing but a powerful and disconcerting physical revulsion.
There had been no such moment, of course: such cataclysmic moments of self-revelation are rare. What happened to Milly was what happens to most people when they are confronted by mistakes or disasters too big to be borne: they let in the reality of it inch by inch, as it were, a little bit at a time, avoiding at all costs the full, total shock of it. And meanwhile, unnoticed and unallowed for, something in the inmost core of such a person’s being is all the time quietly getting used to it. It starts in the body, the very bones and muscles imperceptibly accustoming themselves to the new patterns of movement through the day, the new doorways, the new steps up and down, the new weights and obstacles. Thus, long before she had in any degree resigned herself to her new state, or properly comprehended it, Milly found her hand giving just the right twist to the scullery tap to make it stop dripping: found her feet pausing, without any direction from her, when they came to the broken seventh tread of the dark, evil-smelling stairway down from Mrs Roach’s part of the house: found her eyes shutting, of their own accord, just in time to escape the sight of Gilbert sucking the skin from his hot milk, greedily, spinning-out the pleasure of it with smacking lips. By the time full realisation had broken upon her of what she had done to her own life, it all seemed to have been going on for quite a long time.
The evenings had been the worst, in those early days. Strange how those first evenings of her marriage to Gilbert seemed, in retrospect, to have bunched themselves together like frightened sheep, so that they seemed like just one evening, with no beginning and no ending.
Certain episodes stuck out, though, sharp as flints, the horror of them catching at her breath even now, just as it had done at the time: but she could not place them chronologically or set them in any ordered sequence of day succeeding day. Was it the first evening, for instance—or the second?—or maybe later still?—that she had first noticed the earliness of the hour at which Gilbert was accustomed to lock up for the night? She remembered listening to the pad-pad of his ancient gym shoes as he roamed from room to room, locking the doors, drawing the hinged wooden shutters across the windows, fastening the great bolts: and only after he had finished, and had settled down in his big leather chair, with the green-shaded reading-lamp casting a strange cat-glitter into the gloom of the great room—only then did it dawn on Milly, with a sickening stab of sheer horror, that outside the sun was still shining; that toddlers with bare legs and sunsuits clutched their mothers’ hands as they wove their way homewards, with prams and shopping, through the heat of the late afternoon.
*
That was one memory. Was it that same evening, or a later one, when she had found herself in the scullery, rinsing the two teacups meticulously under the cold tap, and setting them upside down on the old wooden draining-board, spongy with the wetness of years? And then the two saucers … the two plates … And then just standing there, wondering how on earth to make the task take longer, so that she would not have to go back, just yet, to the r
oom where Gilbert was waiting for her in the greenish lamplight, leaning back in his great leather chair, stroking the tips of his long mottled fingers together gently while he waited.
Waited for what? It was many weeks before Milly began to guess at the answer—or, indeed, to realise that there was any particular need to pose the question. These first evenings, all she was clearly aware of was an intense need to procrastinate: to put off, by any means, the moment when she must join him: when she must push open the heavy door and make her way across the big, shadowy room, aware of his eyes on her continuously as she edged her way between the vast mahogany side-board and the dusty great mahogany table, piled high with bundles of yellowing newspapers, each carefully tied round with string.
“Finished in the scullery, my dear?” he would say politely, as she settled herself in the sagging cretonne-covered armchair that stood across the empty hearth from his leather one. “Yes,” would reply Milly, or perhaps “Yes, it’s all done”: and this, somehow, signalled the end of the little tableau. Gilbert would at last take his eyes off her, and almost with an air of relief would pick up his newspaper and disappear behind it, sometimes for two hours or more.
He didn’t like Milly to read, though. If he should look up from his paper and notice that she had a book or a magazine in her lap, he would frown, and mutter, and finally make a great show of folding up his own paper; and then he would sit there, silently, waiting for her to say something.
Had conversation always been as difficult as this? Sitting there tongue-tied in the sombre great room that Gilbert called the dining-room, Milly had racked her brains trying to remember what they used to talk about before they were married? Those Tuesdays and Fridays when they had gone off to a tea shop together after the Industrial Archaeology class—what on earth had they found to say to each other? She could remember that the afternoons had been dullish, and that she had usually been relieved rather than sorry when it was time to go home—but it hadn’t been as bad as this. Surely not—it couldn’t have been. Had they talked about the class, then, and their fellow-students, and the snippets of homework they were sometimes set? Now and again, she remembered, the conversation had become quite interesting, and Gilbert had revealed little bits about his past life: about the house he had been forced to sell at a loss when he went abroad: about the brother he hadn’t spoken to for forty years because of some sort of quarrel about their father’s estate. Nothing very exciting, but still, it had made conversation of a sort. But now, when Milly tried, in desperation, to revive these topics, throwing bright little questions into the oppressive silence of the great room, something killed them even as they left her lips. They fell, heavy as stones, into the gloom, and the silence surged back, sometimes with a strange hostility in it, as if she had interrupted something.
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