Appointment with Yesterday

by Celia Fremlin

  A typewriter, with always the same dusty page jutting from the roller:

  This may seem, on the face of it, a rather extreme position to adopt, or at least to savour of the disingenuous; but it must be borne in mind that congruence rather than equivalence should be our aim.

  Yes, indeed! Good, safe stuff, congruence! Milly used to wonder about it sometimes, when, at her lowest ebb of afternoon tiredness, she reached this point in the dusting: and to wonder, too, if it wouldn’t be rather fun to go on with it—say to half way down the page—and see if her employer noticed? Why, the poor woman might even be grateful; it was obviously something waiting to be finished.

  What, though? A highbrow novel—with a publisher’s deadline being missed while the crucial pages sat thus immobilised in the typewriter? Or an article for some specialist journal on almost any subject whatsoever with the Editor ringing up, more and more irate, as press day drew near? Or could it even be a love-letter—there were couples, Milly knew, who in the heat of passion wrote this sort of thing to each other endlessly, in the interests of analysing their relationship to shreds. She imagined the poor man sitting alone in his attic/boarding-house/loveless mansion, rushing for the post each morning, his soul afire with longing for polysyllables that never came.

  When she was at her very tiredest, Milly would toy idly with ways of continuing the passage that would fit all of these three possibilities. As she slumped over the dusting, taking the weight off her feet as best she could, appropriate sentences seemed to flow through her exhausted brain with extraordinary fluency:

  But of course, as far as this is concerned, there are two ways of looking at the matter, neither of them entirely atypical, and neither (at least from the point of view of the onlooker) either more or less convincing than any other possible approach. For it must not be forgotten that the factors previously cited may well be only marginally relevant to the particular point at issue. In saying this, one is, of course, discounting the more obvious considerations: it is a matter, really, of the concepts applied, and the level of coherence aimed at …

  Why, one could go on like this for ever! Milly was amazed that the clever Mrs Day should be finding any difficulty with it. She must be either a very busy sort of woman, or a very muddled one. Muddled, probably: a truly busy woman either finishes this sort of thing, or she refrains from starting.

  Or perhaps the incomplete masterpiece wasn’t hers at all? Perhaps she had a highbrow lover who had brought his typewriter to his assignations just once too often, and had thus found himself out on his ear, minus the end of his paragraph?

  Yes, this seemed the most likely. It was more in keeping, too, with the Mrs Day revealed by the rest of the flat.

  Her bedroom, for instance, strewn with fringed ponchos and psychedelic cat-suits. Four kinds of eye-shadow and a blonde hair-piece belied the learned pretensions of the typewriter: while flimsy shoes, kicked here and there as though the wearer had shed them triumphantly the moment she entered the flat, suggested that her feet were killing her more often than not—sure sign of an exciting social life. No one has ever been able to get far in the glamour stakes unless her feet are hurting.

  What did Mr Day think of it all? So far, Milly had found no conclusive evidence of his existence, unless you counted the cigarette ash all over the place, and the permanent presence of a man’s overcoat on a peg in the hall. Though this, of course, could just as easily have been left behind by the congruence man, when he leapt up from his typing and fled before the onslaught of Mrs Day’s scarlet, inch-long nails.

  If there was a Mr Day, then he must be a very tidy man, Milly decided, as day by day she tidied the all-feminine clutter from Mrs Day’s bedroom floor. The bed, too, though a double one, had a decidedly feminine look, with its pink nylon sheets and matching frilled pillow cases; not to mention the pink panda night-dress case, with its simpering Walt Disney eyelashes and the zip coyly camouflaged along the length of its stomach. No doubt such a creature passed muster with the occasional lover—occasional lovers put up with almost anything, knowing that tomorrow they will be safe back in their own beds with their indigestion tablets to hand. No doubt such a one would easily bring himself to smile benignly on the awful panda, and to agree that it was cute. “You must pander to it, darling!” Mrs Day perhaps giggled, each time, as she shimmered out of her cat-suit … and each new lover in turn would be enchanted by such wit. But a husband? To have this sort of thing year in and year out … it would be an odd sort of man who would put up with it.

  Well, and perhaps Mrs Day’s husband was an odd sort of man? Perhaps it was he who had fixed up that great mirror opposite the foot of the bed, in which you could see yourself as you lay propped against the pillows (Milly had tried, and so she knew). The Days could sit and watch themselves drinking morning tea, if they liked. They could see not only their partner’s ugly, contorted face during a quarrel, but their own as well. Lovely.

  Sometimes, as she enlivened her solitary afternoons with this sort of thing, Milly felt it was rather sad that poor Mrs Day couldn’t do that same sort of thing about her. But there were no clues that way round: no data on which to work. Just a clean flat in place of a dirty one, and, on Fridays, the removal of the envelope with two pounds forty it. Even the most fanciful employer couldn’t build much of a picture of her Daily Help out of that.

  Just as well, actually. Every now and then Milly went quite hot and cold wondering what would happen if her unknown employer did walk in suddenly, and see what she was doing.

  Not that she was doing any harm: nor, in the long run, was she skimping her work at all. She always did the two hours’ work for which she was paid. It was the way she set about it—the way one does set about things when entirely alone and unobserved—that would have caused the raised eyebrows.

  For the first thing Milly did, when she arrived tired, straight from Mrs Graham’s, was to choose the most inviting of Mrs Day’s new library books, and settle herself on the sofa with it. Mrs Day must belong to a very good library: the latest shiny best-sellers always seemed to be lying on her window-ledge almost as soon as they were published. Sex, cancer, the end of life on earth—all the most popular topics were laid out for Milly’s delectation week by week: and having made her choice, Milly would lie and read greedily, for twenty minutes or more, gobbling the pages with the uncritical gusto that comes from book-starvation. Access to books had been difficult for her of late.

  And so there she lay, often till past three o’clock, in Byzantine luxury: central heating, absolute peace and quiet, and—if she cared to look out at it—a wonderful view through the picture window, right across the tiled roofs of the old town, to vistas of wintry sky and grey, tumbled sea. It was a lovely bit of the day, and Milly looked forward to it all morning. And later, as she bustled about the flat, she would often find herself stopping … to read a picture postcard that had arrived … to try on a pair of Mrs Day’s gold sandals … to examine the framed photograph of a handsome young man who might be Mr Day and then again he might not … or to sit on the edge of the unmade bed reading an article in the New Statesman…. This is what is called self-discipline, greatly lauded nowadays in contrast to discipline of the more old-fashioned kind. Its only disadvantage, for Milly, was that it made her two hours’ work at Mrs Day’s take at least four hours, which was very tiring, and got her home too late to put her feet up before going out for fish and chips with Jacko and Kevin.

  The first thing Milly noticed, when she arrived on this particular Thursday, was that Education for Death was still there. She recognised it from right across the room, sleek and successful-looking, with its shiny red lettering and the crude silhouette, in vivid black, of a child with round white eyes, and round white buttons all down his front, and his hair sticking up all over his head—presumably with horror at the education he was receiving.

  Milly noted its presence with relief (Mrs Day had a maddening habit of returning her books to the library just as Milly was getting properly into them)
, but before she settled down to it, she took a quick look round the flat to assess the nature of her afternoon’s tasks. It was different every time. Sometimes the bedroom was a shambles, and the sitting-room virtually unused: sometimes the other way round. Sometimes the kitchen was so cluttered with dirty crockery that you could hardly move, at others the washing up had been done, but there were beer bottles all over the bathroom. You never knew. And what made it more complicated was that Mrs Day sometimes made hasty, last-minute efforts to make the place look a bit better—shoving dirty glasses behind the window-curtains, kicking crumpled paper handkerchiefs under the bed, or tossing a clean newspaper lightly over the place where the cat had been sick.

  None of this helped at all, of course, but Milly presumed that her employer meant well. Anyway, it wasn’t too bad this time. A saucepan had been burnt and not left to soak: and whichever character it was who threw his cigarette-ends into the electric fire as if it had been an open grate, had been visiting again: but otherwise everything was much as usual. There was one of Mrs Day’s scribbled notes, though, propped up for Milly’s attention against the flour-bin:

  If Mr Plzpwrdge rings up, it read. Please tell him to skrr the dgllrwn and not to rwrwll prrrn beivoose until I let him know.

  Thank you. A. L. Day

  Milly sighed. Mrs Day was always leaving notes like this, and Milly often wondered what happened about them.

  Please wash the strt grr thoroughly had been the first one, followed, the very next Tuesday, by Please be careful not to rdvool the qumqmvruin gra pllooll without removing the plug.

  Milly had done her best. She had washed thoroughly everything that looked in the least like a strt grr; and as to the qumqmvruin gra pllooll, she had played for safety, and avoided anything that had a plug on it at all, for fear of rdvooling it.

  So far, the method seemed to have worked all right. Anyway, she had not as yet found any fierce notes pointing out that the strt grr was still filthy. Thus it was with a fairly tranquil mind that she tossed this latest specimen into the waste-paper basket (if and when this Mr Plzpwrdge did phone, he would presumably know himself what he was talking about), and settled herself happily on the sofa to read.

  CHAPTER XV

  BOTHER MR Plzpwrdge! The telephone was already shrilling through the flat before Milly had read so much as a page of her chosen volume. Why couldn’t the wretched man have rung later on, when she’d only have been working? Dragging herself from her comfortable couch, she got herself reluctantly across the room, and picked up the receiver.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs Day’s not in,” she said. “Can I give her a message?” She did not make her voice very encouraging. He had not even said he was Mr Plzpwrdge yet; with any luck she could avoid learning his name altogether, and then none of it could possibly be her fault. “She’ll be back about half past six,” she added, cautiously, and waited for the pleasant middle-aged voice to say very well, it would call again later.

  But it didn’t go like that at all.

  “Who’s that speaking?” the voice asked—and it seemed to Milly that a slight sharpness had come into it. “Who is it, please?”

  “I—Oh, I’m just visiting here, I’m just—well—just a friend …” gabbled Milly, some instinct—or was it by now just habit?—preventing her telling the simple, innocuous truth about her rôle here.

  “Oh. Oh, I see. Well, look, I’m sorry to bother you, but perhaps you can help us. Do you happen to know of a Mrs Barnes who works for Mrs Day? A Mrs Milly Barnes? We’ve been given to understand that she comes two or three afternoons a week and …”

  “She doesn’t! She isn’t! There must be some mistake! Mrs Day doesn’t know anyone called Barnes …!”

  Only after she had got the receiver back on the hook did Milly realise what a complete fool she had made of herself. This man, whoever he was, might have been ringing up about something perfectly harmless—an offer of another job, perhaps, or to ask some market-research questions about detergent. Now what was he going to think? Frantically, she tried to recall the exact wording of her wild, muddled assertions, and to work out what an outsider would deduce therefrom. That she was lying, obviously: or else that she was half-witted. How could she—or anyone—know for certain that Mrs Day didn’t know anyone called Barnes? You can know of your friends that they do know a Mrs Barnes, but how can you possibly know that they don’t?

  Oh, she had been a fool! A fool! And after her resolutions of only a couple of hours ago, too! Milly sat with her head in her hands, staring down at a crumb of ginger biscuit on the carpet, trying to understand what it was that had driven her to behaviour so insane.

  Fear, of course. Some people might prefer to call it guilt. The ever-present knowledge that she was wanted for murder.

  Murder. This was the first time that Milly had allowed the word to come into her mind uncensored. Murder. She waited for guilt, long repressed, to burst from her subconscious and wash over her in an intolerable tide.

  Nothing happened. She said the word again, aloud, this time, into the empty flat. Murder. I have committed murder.

  Still nothing. Nothing that could be identified as guilt, anyway. Fear, yes; and a lively determination not to be caught. These were familiar feelings by now, almost old friends, but they could not possibly be described as guilt.

  This was ridiculous! Summoning up all the honesty she possessed, all the power of self-scrutiny, Milly probed deep into her inmost heart, searching for the black core of guilt that must lie there.

  No good. The most profound and earnest piece of soul-searching that she had ever undertaken revealed absolutely nothing except a vague, generalised resentment about the whole business. “It’s not fair,” something inside her was childishly complaining, “why should I be a murderer when other people aren’t? It’s not fair!”

  She tried again. “I have killed. I have committed the ultimate crime. I have taken a human life.”

  Still nothing. Human lives are being taken all the time, some by disease, some by cars, some by over-eating. To have contributed to one of these commonplace events seemed—well, not exactly trivial, but lacking in some essential element of evil. Somehow there was nothing there for guilt to feed on—it was like one of those imitation foods with no nourishment in them, that are designed to make you slim.

  What was wrong? Why did she have no proper feelings? Was it that Gilbert’s life had, in the end, been so divorced from reality that it was not a life at all? And did it follow from this that his death could not be a real death?

  Was this the immortality that men have dreaded in their hearts since the beginning of time—the immortality conferred upon Tithonus as the ultimate vengeance of the gods?

  Had Gilbert brought this ultimate vengeance upon himself as he sat in the thickening darkness behind the closed shutters in Lady Street? Towards the end, darkness was the only thing he trusted: he screamed at Milly, sometimes, if she so much as switched on the light in the scullery so that he could see it shining under the crack of the door. After such a denial of life, how could Death get him when the time came? On what could Death’s skeleton hand get a sure grip in such a case? When bony hand encountered bony hand in the darkness, who would have been the one to flee in terror …?

  *

  She should never have let her husband get into such a state: that’s what the overworked young doctor had said, reprovingly, a month or two before Gilbert died. She should have brought him round to the surgery: and no, of course he couldn’t prescribe anything without actually seeing the patient, how could he, it would be most unethical…. And then, when the old man never turned up, and the wretched, jittery wife stopped pestering at the surgery, he must thankfully have written-off the whole business. What could he have done, anyway? One more marriage foundering in the familiar welter of recriminations and mutual accusations of paranoia. What did people think doctors were?

  And perhaps, if Milly had recognised the nature of her problem a little earlier, while Gilbert was still willing to wal
k in the light of the sun, she might perhaps have persuaded him, on some pretext, to go along to the surgery with her. Or even to allow the doctor to visit him at the flat, which had not yet become a fortress, barricaded against all comers. And perhaps, at that stage, medical treatment might have been able to achieve something. But while Gilbert was no worse than this, Milly was still viewing her disastrous marriage as just this—a disastrous marriage, which she must learn to live with and to alleviate as best she could. And unfortunately it so happened that the very ways she devised to improve her husband’s spirits might just as well have been so many carefully graded provocations, each one a little more traumatic than the last—so little did she comprehend, at the beginning, the nature of the shadows she could feel gathering about her.

  First, the matter of friends. According to her not very penetrating observation, it seemed obvious beyond all question that Gilbert was suffering from too dull and solitary an existence. Pottering about in this dreary flat all day … never seeing anyone but each other, no wonder it was driving them both up the wall!

  Cheerful, varied company, then: that was the first necessity. A lively to-ing and fro-ing of visitors to brighten the poor chap up, take him out of himself.

  Milly was not so blind, even in those days, as to suppose that she could let loose a chattering horde of her own former acquaintances on a man like Gilbert, with any hope of success: and so she tried, tactfully, to find out who his friends were, preparatory to bombarding them with invitations.

  There were none. Absolutely none at all. When this fact was finally borne in upon Milly, she could not think what to do. Naturally, she hadn’t supposed that Gilbert could boast any very scintillating circle of acquaintances, but she had imagined that there would be at least an old colonel or two, bumbling on about polo in the nineteen-twenties, and perhaps offering Gilbert an occasional game of chess, lasting for hours and hours under the green lamplight. She had expected to be bored by Gilbert’s friends, but not as bored as she was by Gilbert on his own; and she was therefore quite ready to put a good face on it and make them warmly welcome.