She did not know what her punishment would be: but she knew enough, by now, to guess that whatever it was, it would not fall immediately. Rather it would come upon her piecemeal, over the next days and weeks, almost while she wasn’t noticing. She would not know when it began, nor when, or by what route, it would reach its unimaginable end.
Even after they were home, Gilbert still did not speak: nor did Milly defend herself, or make excuses. It had gone beyond that. Only after Gilbert had gone all round the flat, bolting and securing the doors and windows, did he finally bring himself to make an observation. Wandering casually towards the bookshelves, and searching along the rows of old leather-bound books, he came upon the volume he wanted. He turned the pages thoughtfully: then paused for a minute. As he read, he began to laugh, that strange, silent laugh of his, setting his gaunt body jolting soundlessly, as if there was a time-bomb ticking away somewhere deep inside him:
“You know what the ancient Scythians did with their runaway slaves?” he said to Milly from across the room, and without raising his eyes from the book. “They used to blind them!” He laughed again, gently, as his eye travelled down the page. “They made just as good slaves, you see, like that, as they only had very simple tasks to perform. It didn’t matter at all.”
*
The chiming of Mrs Day’s ornamental gilt clock roused Milly from her daydream. Three o’clock already, and nothing done! —not to mention the precious reading time frittered away to no purpose! Jumping up from the telephone corner where she had been sitting, immobilised by memories, ever since that disturbing telephone call for “Mrs Barnes”, Milly determined to think no more about any of it. Collecting her dusters and brushes, she set off for Mrs Day’s bedroom—usually the storm-centre of operations—to tackle the by now familiar medley of cigarette ends, underwear, coffee cups and evening dresses, with a cross Persian cat asleep in the middle of it.
But the memories were not so easily dispelled. All the while she was squeezing flimsy, glittering garments into the packed wardrobe, trying to find hangers for them all, Milly felt the past lingering all about her, like a taste in the mouth. It would not leave her alone, with its if’s, and if only’s, and supposing’s.
Supposing she had refused to go back with Gilbert that evening? Supposing she had said, boldly: “No, Gilbert, I’m sorry, but I’m not coming. Felicity has invited me to stay, and I’m staying!” What would have happened then? What would have been the course of her life thereafter?
Even as she posed the question, she knew that it was futile. What happened had happened. It had had to happen. The sense of inevitability was as strongly with her now as it had been then, when, unresisting as a puppet on a string, she had followed Gilbert down all those stairs and into the waiting taxi. There was nothing else she could have done. That was how it had seemed then: that was how it still seemed now, when she looked back. It had been fated: she seemed to have had no option: she had been a pawn in the grip of forces outside her control.
This, of course, is the way people usually do feel when they have come to grief through taking on grave and extensive responsibilities for fun. When the full weight of their casually-undertaken commitment finally comes to rest on their shoulders, and there is no longer any way out, then it is that they experience this sense of helplessness, this feeling of being a pawn in the hands of fate, a plaything of the gods: and they rarely remember, by then, that it was they, first, who treated the gods as playthings.
*
It is amazing how much your hands can accomplish without, apparently, any assistance from the mind at all. By the end of the afternoon, Milly had completed all her usual tasks in Mrs Day’s flat, and had set off for home, with only the briefest spells of conscious attention to what she was doing: —one when the cat brought half a lobster into the bathroom for her inspection, and she had to decide what to do with it: and the next when the swing doors of the block of flats thrust her forth out of the lush central heating into the gusty winter night, with a wet wind lolloping in from the sea, stinging her into momentary consciousness as it caught at her face, and at her ears, and at her gloveless hands.
CHAPTER XVII
AFTER THAT EVENING, Gilbert’s deterioration was swift and terrible. It seemed to Milly that there was something almost purposeful about the way he forged onward towards the abyss, as though nothing and no one should stop him. He seemed, at times, to be seeking the Dark Night of the soul with an intensity and passion that other men have devoted to the search for gold.
She knew by now, of course, that he was ill; and when her belated resort to the local doctor produced nothing helpful, she tried to calm her growing panic by telling herself that it was an illness, like any other illness.
But it wasn’t like any other illness; that was the trouble. And then there was always the feeling—inescapable for the trapped onlooker—that the patient has somehow chosen to be ill in just that way rather than in any other: that if he had been a nice kind person to start with, he would have gone mad in some nice kind way….
Maybe there is some grain of truth in this: Milly had no means of knowing, as she had been acquainted with her husband for less than a year, and had anyway devoted precious little of her time so far to trying to understand him. Now, when it was too late, she did try to make some sort of contact with his disintegrating mind, if only for her own safety: but by now such efforts were futile.
It was the day after her abortive attempt at escape that Gilbert nailed up the area door; and that same evening he fixed bolts on the dining-room door, inside and outside. Now, when Milly wanted to go shopping, she had to go up the dark basement stairs to the ground floor, and wrestle with the bolts and chains and double locks on the ancient, peeling front door. Often, as she struggled, Mrs Roach, who inhabited that floor, would hear the groaning and the grinding of the rusty metal, and would shuffle in her slippers out of her fusty bed-sitting-room, and stand watching, almost like Gilbert himself. Milly knew that Mrs Roach disapproved of her—she would hardly even exchange a “good morning” on most days—and this made her nervous and clumsy: it was sometimes five minutes before she finally got the creaking old door open on to the blessed light of day.
But soon even these brief excursions came to an end. Gilbert had taken recently to coming up the basement stairs with her, and taking his stand in the doorway to watch her as she set off down the street. When she came back she would often find him still standing there, watch in hand, and if she had been longer than half an hour or so he would sometimes be actually trembling, with a terrible, silent rage.
Half an hour. Then twenty minutes was all he would stand for: and then ten; and presently there came the time when he forbade her to go shopping at all. He had arranged for Mrs Roach to do it, he informed her, coldly, since she, his wife, was not to be trusted. Thereafter their diet was restricted mainly to things that could be bought at the poky little corner shop—sliced bread and tins of things mostly—since Mrs Roach was reluctant to drag her bloated body further than this, even for generous pay. Soon the milk was tinned too, for Gilbert would no longer allow the milkman to call, insisting that Milly left messages for him hidden among the empty bottles.
And now the time came when Gilbert would no longer open the window shutters at all, for fear “They” would look in. The era of the long night had arrived: and now that it was here, Milly realised that she had been waiting for it for a very long time. She seemed to have known, all along, that this was how it would all end.
End? It was only December even now: and the strange thing was that no sooner had Gilbert achieved the timeless, unbroken night towards which he had been so quietly and purposefully moving all these weeks, than he became passionately, obsessionally preoccupied with the passing of time. A hundred times a day he would ask Milly what the time was, drawing out his watch to check on her answer: comparing his watch with the clock in the kitchen: checking and counter-checking.
Sometimes he would scream at Milly that she was deceiving him,
telling him the wrong time on purpose. She would be bringing the lunch in, say, at one o’clock, and he would suddenly heave himself round in his great chair to scold and storm, confronting her with his heavy gold watch with its hands pointing to three, or four or even five…. No matter how closely she tried to watch, Milly never seemed to catch him tinkering with it; and so presently, in the weird, darkening world that was closing in on her, she began to feel that the watch itself might have become malignantly alive, in league with its master to put her in the wrong.
*
And now his time sense began to swing like a great pendulum in the dark, gathering momentum. Sometimes he would call for his supper thinking that night had fallen when in fact the bright, frosty day beyond the shutters was only just beginning. At other times—and these were the most terrible of all—he would think that night was day, and would come creeping into his wife’s room at dead of night to find out why she was asleep. She would wake, then, from strange uneasy dreams, to find him shuffling around her room, softly opening drawers, peering into boxes, fumbling about among her clothes and other possessions with his old fingers.
The first time this happened, she had called out to him, in spontaneous terror:
“Gilbert! What is it? What are you doing?”—but she had never done so again. So strange had been the look in his shining eyes as he strode swiftly to the bed and leaned over her: and so strange had been the things he’d said:
“Why, my dear, I just wondered if you were ill?” he began, softly. “It seems so strange of you to be lying here, at past midday! It’s nearly time for lunch! Aren’t you going to cook me any lunch?”
This first time, Milly had argued, and shown him her watch in some indignation: and at last, in reckless determination to prove herself right, she had wrenched open the window shutter and shown him the moonlight filtering down, grey and silent, from the deserted street above.
At first, she thought it was a tom-cat setting up his caterwauling, very suddenly, from the silent area steps. Then she realised that it was Gilbert screaming. He wrenched the shutter from her hand, and slammed it shut, shooting the bolt home, and slotting in the great metal catch.
“So this is how they get in!” he jabbered, his voice cracked and shrill with fury. “This is how I am being betrayed! In my own house …! By my own wife …!”
Less than five minutes later, Milly was only too willing to agree humbly that it was lunch time. That she had overslept. That she was sorry. Anything…. Anything at all. And thus it came about that, in the small hours of that December night, she had cooked him one of his beloved curries, rice and all, and had served it with a trembling smile, carefully referring to it, in a small, shaking voice, as “lunch”.
After this, she had pretended to be asleep, always, when she heard the nightly roamings beginning. Sometimes she would watch, through barely opened lids, as he peered and poked among her belongings, his white hair gleaming and bobbing in the faint light through the open door. At others, she kept her eyes tight closed, listening, willing the soft rustlings to cease, that she might know he had gone away.
And sometimes he had: and then that would be the end of the night’s terror: but more often than not he would end by rousing her, and insisting that it was lunch-time. After that first night, Milly never argued again. She got up and cooked his curry, or whatever he might fancy, immediately.
There was something strangely inert, she sometimes felt, about the way she allowed herself to be thus carried along with his insane delusions, and sometimes she was puzzled by it. Fear of him did not seem to be quite the whole explanation, for even her fear, now, was beginning to have a strange passive quality about it, as if she was no longer a real, autonomous being with a real life to be lost or saved. Wherever it was that Gilbert was going, she knew now that he was beginning to drag her with him: already she could feel the tug and pull of it. Before long, as the black storms rose higher in his disintegrating mind, she, too, was going to lose her footing and be sucked along, irrelevant as a spinning twig, towards the darkness where his spirit boiled and churned….
*
It was towards the end of December when Gilbert began to imagine that Milly was trying to poison him: and at first Milly did not take in the significance of the new symptoms. She noticed a slight tightening-up of his surveillance of her activities in the kitchen, she was never alone there at all now, for even a minute. But this was a difference in degree, not in kind, and anyway she was beginning to be used to it now. As she bustled from cooker to sink, she took it for granted now that out of the corner of her eye she would be aware of the tall, waiting figure in the doorway, just as she would be aware of the roller towel hanging white and motionless in its usual place. In some ways, it was less disturbing than it used to be, because he did not pad around helping any more. Instead, he just watched—or sometimes, as it seemed to her, listened. This puzzled her at first: and then one day, she stopped and listened too. She became aware, as he had been aware all along, of the faint, endless tap-tapping of footsteps on the pavement far above. Tap-tap-tap, they went: or tappity-tap-tap-tap … and suddenly she knew, in sick terror, that she must never stop and listen like this again. For she had heard the sounds, just for one telepathic second, through Gilbert’s ears, and—just fancy! —they were in code, tapping out messages! So that was why he never took his eyes off her—he was watching for the moment when she would begin to understand, and to tap messages back! How terrifyingly easy it would be! —three cups placed in quick succession on the draining-board—tap-tap-tap … or the wooden spoon knocking too rhythmically against the side of the pan—trr—trr—trr—as she stirred! After this, she carefully blurred and muddled the sounds she couldn’t help making, and hummed noisily as she worked.
Perhaps it was not surprising if, after all this, she should have taken little note of the fact that Gilbert was gradually becoming more and more fussy over his food. Such a trifle it seemed, in comparison with all the other problems. It was an odd kind of fussiness, though, and seemed to have little to do with the quality of Milly’s cooking—she had, in fact, long since learned how to please her husband (in this department at least) by producing highly spiced, highly flavoured dishes, hot with pimentoes, and peppers, and green chiles. He didn’t seem to mind much about the basic ingredients, and thus had noticed no deterioration in the menu since Milly had been limited to the tins and packets of stuff that were all Mrs Roach could be bothered to buy. No, he still liked his food, and ate it with appetite: but he had developed an annoying habit—that’s all it seemed to Milly at first—of changing plates with his wife just as the meal was about to begin. Just as she had it all served out, and was already picking up her own knife and fork, he would lean across and slide her plate away from under her very hand, and deftly substitute his own. Usually he would murmur, deprecatingly, some sort of explanation—“You must have the bigger one, dear, I’m not very hungry today”: or “Do you mind—I’d rather have the one without so much rice.” Sometimes one or both of them might already have started when the long, gnarled fingers slid across the table and closed upon her plate. She never protested, even though she often found it impossible to eat the food thus exchanged. The thought of his fork having touched it, straight from those old lips, turned her stomach. And so there she would sit, pushing the food around her plate, and trying to look as if she was eating. And when she glanced up now and then, and noticed him watching her, his features narrowed with cunning, she did not understand the significance of what she saw.
*
She had been noticing a peculiar unpleasant smell in the dining-room for some days now: and one evening, early in the New Year, she siezed her chance to investigate. Gilbert was for once out of the room for a few minutes, as Mrs Roach had just come down with the week’s shopping, and he was busy in the scullery examining the purchases and putting them away. This was a task he would no longer trust to his wife: and Milly calculated that it would be some minutes before he returned. She knew his slow movem
ents, and the punctilious thoroughness with which he would examine every package: she could hear the low mumbling of his voice even from this distance, as he checked and re-checked each item against the list. Swiftly, she pushed the heavy dining-room door almost shut, and made for the corner of the room from which she was sure the smell emanated. The corner behind Gilbert’s great leather chair…. Somewhere among those ancient leather-bound books…. Behind them, perhaps, right at the back of the shelves….
*
What she had expected to find, she did not know. When she pulled out the first matchbox, full of old boiled rice, she simply felt that there had been some sort of a mistake. It just didn’t mean anything. But when she found the next one, with dried remains of scrambled egg in it … and then the one full of mince that had gone green … and the one oozing with decaying stew … then, indeed, she knew that she had crossed the border into madland, and that there might be no return … and now here was the king of madland himself, come back into his own … leaning over her, blotting out the last of the light. Darkness blazed from him as from a black sun, and she prostrated herself before it in gibbering, slavish terror. The time of the blackness was come, the black dawn was breaking and there would be no more day. The shrieks and howls from the bottomless pit were already loud in her ears, they came from Gilbert’s lips … and now she began to feel her sanity itself twisting from her grasp. He was upon her … his bony fingers danced like lace … he was screaming like a madman—because, of course, he was a madman: and at this thought, strangely, her mind snapped back, like good quality elastic, and she was sane again.
Appointment with Yesterday Page 15