And so, what with one thing and another, Milly was distinctly relieved to find on this particular morning, that it was to be a library morning. Mrs Graham was on the telephone telling someone all about it when Milly arrived (she had her own key to the flat now, as she had to the homes of all her employers: lucky, really, that her crimes had been what they were, and did not include burglary). As she came into the flat, she heard Mrs Graham’s voice, loud and clear, from the sitting-room:
“I shan’t be back till one,” she was saying. “But my woman will be here. She’ll let you in, and then you can pick up the lot. And the yellow wool as well, if you like, I don’t ever wear it. No, really: it’s only cluttering up the wardrobe. As a matter of fact, I’d thought of giving the whole lot to my woman, but you know what they are these days. I daren’t risk offending her!”
How do you make a noise like not being offended? Outside the door, Milly was wringing her hands. A yellow wool dress, and who knew what else besides, all going to waste to someone down a telephone! She thought forlornly about the endless drip-drying of her only garments in front of the coin-devouring monster of a gas-fire: she thought of Mrs Mumford’s ever more speculative eyes watching her as she set off to work in the same outfit every morning: any day now, she would be prowling round Milly’s room, drawing her own conclusions from the empty drawers, and from the locked, feather-light suitcase with its absurd labels.
But what could Milly do? Rush into the room crying “No offence! No offence!”? Or simply “I want them!”, like a spoilt toddler? Or how about: “My other lady always used to give me her old dresses”? When you came to think of it, there was no reason why “My Other Lady” should not be built up into just as powerful a folk-image as “My Other Woman”.
But while Milly was still debating her unusual social dilemma, the “ping” of the phone told her that her chance was over: and now here was Mrs Graham out in the hall, and telling Milly all about this Mrs Innes, and how she would arrive at midday, and must be persuaded, somehow, to take the lot.
“She’s getting fat, that’s the trouble,” Mrs Graham confided. “It’s compensatory eating, I keep telling her, but she won’t do anything about it, and now she’s going to start complaining, saying everything’s too small….”
By this time, they had reached the bedroom, and Milly’s shoulders under her thin blouse fairly shivered with longing when she saw the pile of woollen garments on the bed. Wool dresses … cardigans … all near enough the right size!
“Get her to take them all, won’t you, Mrs Er?” her employer was urging. “Don’t let her pick them about … she’ll have this … she won’t have that … all that sort of nonsense! Oh dear, it’s so difficult getting rid of things these days, isn’t it, Mrs Er?”
Since this was not really a problem for Milly, now or in the foreseeable future, she made no answer. Besides, her mind was already full of scheming … If only this Mrs Innes could have grown as fat as fat, and fussy with it!
“If you really can’t get rid of them—” she opened the subject cautiously, improvising as she went along. “I mean, if you want just to give them away, then I wonder if the Bring-and-Buy sale at our Church—they have one every,” (here she did a quick calculation)“—every third Saturday in the month, and I’ve been asked—”
But Mrs Graham had clinched the deal before Milly could round-off the lie properly. “I wish I’d known!” she exclaimed, with just the faintest edge of reproach in her voice. “Then I’d never have bothered about this Innes woman at all. It only ends in having her stay to lunch, or something: you know what these people with troubles are. Look, Mrs Er, this Baptists’ Fête of yours, do you think they’d be interested in a few books as well …?” Her voice blurred abruptly as she swung open a cupboard door and dived into the dusty interior.
“There’s several volumes of the 1910 Children’s Encyclopaedia, that might interest them,” she called hopefully over her shoulder: “And a complete set of—I can’t read the name, the backs are a bit torn, but anyway, a complete set of Somebody’s Meditation and Reflections, in twelve volumes. Oh, and my old sewing-machine, I’ve got one that works now, so perhaps this other one might come in useful to somebody….”
The semicircle of floor around Mrs Graham’s crouching form was filling up fast; but she continued her explorations with undiminished zest.
“Do they ski at all?” she continued, plunging deeper into the recesses. “There’s Arnold’s old skis somewhere at the back, he does hoard things so. Ah, here they are! And his army uniform, too, I’d forgotten about that. And what about the portrait of his mother, in oils? I could never stand having it on the walls, so if they’d like it …?”
She straightened up, pushing the hair back from her forehead, and surveying the chaos around her with a satisfied air.
“There you are, Mrs Er! you can take all those! Oh, and while you’re about it, the old carpet-sweeper—”
At last, Milly interrupted.
“But—but I can’t carry all that!” she protested: and at this Mrs Graham looked up, and stared at her in a sort of vague surprise, looking her up and down as if this was the first time she had really got around to counting how many arms Milly had.
“Oh,” she said: and thought for a moment, painfully, picking away at the bit of her brain, long-disused, which concerned itself with other people’s affairs.
“Yes, well,” she said at last, reluctantly. “Well, perhaps you could bring something round to put them in, could you, Mrs Er? I’ve been trying to get this cupboard clear for ages. Oh, and Mrs Er, are these Mission people at all interested in fossils? Arnold has….”
Mercifully, at this point the first tentative protests began to sound from Alison’s room. Straightaway Mrs Graham abandoned her discourse, and went into paroxysms of deafness: racing from room to room, head down, as if in a high wind, shovelling papers pell-mell into her briefcase … flinging on coat and scarf….
“And Alison will sleep till lunch-time,” she shrieked, in the nick of time: and managed to get the front door closed before the first real yell of fury resounded through the flats.
*
Alison loved the old sewing-machine. She spent the whole of the two hours till lunch time contentedly wrecking it, screw by screw, and Milly was able to get on with her work in unprecedented peace and quiet.
By quarter to one, everything was clean, and the lunch was ready in the oven: and—to crown Milly’s satisfaction—the unknown Mrs Innes with her unknown troubles hadn’t turned up at all: and so Milly had gleefully parcelled up all those woollies for herself. They were already waiting, neat and inconspicuous, behind the kitchen door.
Now, with Mrs Graham’s return imminent, she stuffed the sewing-machine back into the cupboard with the rest of the things, silencing Alison’s screeches on the subject by a judicious mixture of savagery and blandishments. Then she washed the child’s black and oily face and hands, put her into a clean frock, and forced her (by dint of monstrous subterfuge and sleight of hand) to sit and play with a nice clean toy till Mummy returned.
*
Disconcertingly, it was Daddy who returned first. He looked for a moment utterly panic-stricken when he realised that his wife wasn’t back, and that he was therefore going to have to make conversation with the Daily Help. Then, summoning up all his resources as a gentleman and a scholar, he plunged recklessly into speech.
“Good morning!” he said: and fingered his folded newspaper longingly. Was that enough, he seemed to be wondering, or did one have to say something else before one could decently sit down and read?
“Nice day,” he ventured, plunging yet further into the uncharted territory of conversation with Daily Helps. “A bit cold, that is. Looks like snow.”
“It does,” agreed Milly modestly, wondering whether she ought to call him “sir”? Or was it going to be possible always to frame her sentences in such a way that she never had to call him anything?
“Yes. Hm. Yes, indeed. Look, Mrs—” Prof
essor Graham stopped unhappily, and Milly realised suddenly that her problem about what to call him was as nothing to his problem about what to call her. Unlike his wife, he seemed to be miserably aware that her name couldn’t really be Mrs Er, not possibly.
“Look, Mrs—” he began again, and this time Milly came to his rescue.
“Barnes,” she prompted cheerfully. “Milly Barnes.”
“Barnes. Ah, of course … Mrs Barnes…. So stupid, do forgive me. Look, Mrs Barnes, did my wife—did Mrs Graham say when she’d be back?”
One o’clock. You’ll be off the hook at one o’clock, Milly almost told him; but changed it, hastily, to “Mrs Graham told me she hoped to be back by one. Would you like to wait, or shall I …?”
“Oh no! No thank you! Oh, no, no!”—Professor Graham’s horror at the possibility of having to talk to Milly all through his lunch stuck out through his natural mildness like a snapped twig—“No, no! That’s all right. Don’t put yourself to any trouble. I’ll just …”—and under cover of such politenesses he succeeded in getting himself into the chair by the window, safely hidden behind the protective expanse of The Times Business News.
*
Silly, really, to let it affect her. There was no real resemblance at all. Just a man’s legs, topped by an outspread copy of The Times—framed, this time, by an expanse of winter sky, swept white by the sea-wind, and empty of clouds. How could such a sweep of pure, unsullied distance bring back to her, as if it was right here and now, a choking sense of claustrophobia … of encroaching darkness …?
*
The back page of the paper quivered, just as Gilbert used to make it quiver, in the moment before he softly lowered it, and peered over the top to see, with those strange, silvery eyes of his, what his wife was doing. And now the paper lurched, as it used to lurch in the greenish lamplight … it swung to the left … to the right … it swooped downwards, and once again eyes, questioning eyes, were fastened upon her….
“Did you want something, Mrs Barnes?”
Professor Graham’s pleasant, puzzled voice jerked Milly into an awareness of how oddly she was behaving … standing here staring, like a hypnotised rabbit, with no snake anywhere.
“No—no, it’s quite all right,” she stammered, and fled into the kitchen. Once there, she leaned against the sink for a minute, trying to steady her racing heart, to control her gasping breath. One of these days, she scolded herself, I shall be giving myself away! How many times, in these last weeks, have I let myself get into a panic over nothing? First that man in the café, and the headline in his paper about … FOUND IN FLAT. And then that first morning at Mrs Mumford’s, with Jacko—as it turned out to be—bumbling around her room in the dark. And after that the telephone call at Mrs Graham’s…. Oh, the occasions were too many to count: and each time, it had been sheer luck that no one had happened to notice her state of shock and inexplicable terror. One day, if she didn’t control these reactions, she would find she had given herself away, utterly and irrevocably. When would her body learn not to flood her system with adrenalin at every tiny surprise? When would her brain learn that these trivial little incidents, these chance reminders, were fortuitous, not aimed at her at all?
Aimed at her! How ironic that it should be she, now, who should find herself constantly interpreting the bright, preoccupied world in terms of her own fears! Would there not be a strange, twisted justice about it if, in the end, it should be just such an attack of irrational, deluded panic that brought her to her own doom? How Gilbert would have laughed, that strange, silent laugh of his, like a small clockwork motor jerking away somewhere inside him.
It was just as if he was still there, waiting for her, in the black, bottomless past; waiting, in the quiet certainty that, in the end, she would lose her footing in the bright, precarious present, and come slithering back: back into the darkness, into Gilbert’s own special darkness, which at first had seemed to be merely the darkness of a gloomy London basement, and had only later been revealed as the black, irreversible darkness of his own disintegrating mind.
For many weeks after her marriage, Milly had refused to recognise the special quality of the darkness: she had tried to fight it off with new fabrics, and higher-watt bulbs. By the time she had nerved herself to go to the doctor about her husband, it was too late.
Perhaps it had always been too late. After waiting all that dark November morning in the overcrowded surgery, among the humped, coughing people, Milly had in the end seen the exhausted young doctor, eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep, for barely two minutes. He hadn’t said much, he was too weary and dispirited: and what he did say wasn’t really a lot of use. For by the time she had got around to consulting him, Milly already knew as much about delusional paranoia as any doctor. She knew more or less everything there was to know about it, except how to face it: and that no doctor could tell her.
CHAPTER XIII
HE HADN’T BEEN as bad as that at the beginning. Well, of course he hadn’t, or Milly would never have married him. And yet, even then, even in the days of the decorous, best-behaviour outings to tea-shops, there had been signs—tiny, warning flashes—which might have put a more astute woman on her guard. No, not a more astute one, necessarily; simply one who was more interested in Gilbert, as a person: one who was contemplating marrying him for himself, and not merely as a stick with which to prod her former husband into some sort of reaction.
Yes, the warnings had been there, all right; and Milly, in the throes of her plans for impressing Julian, had not given a thought to any of them. There was Gilbert’s life-story, for a start: swindled out of his inheritance, estranged from his only brother, bullied by his wife, deprived of his rightful pension—what sort of a man is it who has all these things happen to him, unrelieved by any spark of generosity from anyone? And then there was the matter of his friends—his lack of them, that is to say. It was this, actually—this strange, dignified solitariness—that had attracted Milly’s attention to him in the first place. Long before she knew who he was, or anything at all about him, she had noticed the way he always arrived at the Industrial Archaeology class alone: tall and silent, looking neither to left nor right, he would make his way to the furthermost desk of the back row; and throughout the session he would focus an almost disconcerting intensity of attention on the teacher: fixing his light grey eyes—so light as to be almost silvery, Milly had already noticed, before she knew so much as his name—fixing them on the teacher with unblinking concentration, broken only by the occasional need to copy a diagram off the blackboard, or the correct spelling of some little-known technical term. Since Milly herself was bored to death by the classes (her motive in enrolling had been the despairing one advocated in so many advice columns—“to meet people”) she thus found herself with plenty of time, in between doodling and daydreaming, to watch this mysterious, white-haired man, and idly to wonder about him. He seemed so alert, and attentive, and purposeful: and yet he never spoke—neither at question-time in the class, nor afterwards, when the rest of the students were gathering in twos and threes, chatting, comparing unfinished homework, waiting for one another to come out for a cup of tea, or to catch the same bus home. Instead of joining in any of this, the inscrutable Mr Soames (this much Milly had learned by now, from the class register) would silently gather up his notes and edge his way out of the classroom, without a word to anyone.
Milly had been intrigued: and, since she had come to the class with the sole purpose of meeting unattached men, she determined (since nothing better offered) to cultivate the acquaintance of this one; and so, for three classes in succession, she made a point of greeting him boldly, with a smile, as he came into the room. He had seemed startled—almost affronted—the first time: the second, he acknowledged her greeting with a politely embarrassed murmur: and on the third, he had actually paused to say “Good afternoon”, before retreating to the far corner of the room.
So far, so good. Slow-ish: but then, if the whole of the rest of your life is to s
pare, then where is the advantage of speed?
It was not until the next Class Outing that she really got a chance to speak to him. Twice a term, or thereabouts, on freezing winter Saturday afternoons, the whole group would go off in a coach to look at some blackish bit of brickwork at the edge of a canal, or something; and Milly would stand, bored to death and freezing cold, with her hands in her coat pockets, and sustained only by the thought that she was out. She was doing something: no sharp-eyed mutual friend would now have the chance of reporting-back to Julian that his poor ex-wife spent all her weekends moping about the flat, alone. It was as she stood thus, one February afternoon, that the silent Mr Soames had approached her, and, after some minutes’ hesitation, had asked her, in a voice stiff with unease but still smooth and cultivated, if she wouldn’t like a cup of tea? And she, filled with a mixture of triumph at the success of her campaign, and boredom at the prospect of carrying it any further, had followed him into a waterside café. They had sat opposite one another at the slopped, plastic-topped table, and sipped the strong, tepid tea; and he had let out for her—hesitantly, as through a rusty gate—little bits of information about his troubles.
Troubles, even the dullest, are always mildly interesting at the first hearing; and Milly had been mildly interested. He wasn’t too bad, he was better than nothing; and so, from then on, she had allowed the tepid relationship to take its course without any special effort on her part, either to foster it or to bring it to an end. Until, suddenly—it would have been about the middle of June—she realised that under cover of her inattention, the thing had been surreptitiously growing: she realised, with a little shock, that if she chose she could now give Gilbert that last little push that would get him asking her to be Mrs Soames!
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