Appointment with Yesterday

by Celia Fremlin

  *

  He had not killed her, nor even injured her in any way. She could feel no pain anywhere. He must, at some point, have hauled her to her feet from behind the chair, because here she was, standing, with his hands gripping her shoulders, while he howled and shrieked with fear, right into her face.

  Fear. This was the first time she had ever observed that fear was what racked and tore him, a degree of fear beyond the comprehension of the sane. And even now, the fact hardly registered. So great was her own terror that she could not even understand his words, let alone the nature of the passion that lay behind them.

  Presently, it all seemed to have been going on for hours, her standing there, and his voice streaming into her face. She found she was taking in the gist of it: how she had been putting poison in his food for a long time now; but he had foiled her—ha ha, how he had foiled her! —by changing round the plates each time! Did she think he hadn’t noticed the way she always refused to eat her helping after they had been changed?

  Milly listened almost with interest. And sometimes, Gilbert himself seemed quite to forget that his listener was also the arch-villain of his fantasy, and spoke as if she was a sympathetic outsider, to whom he was confiding his wrongs. He explained how he had been collecting these samples from his wife’s uneaten platefuls to send off for analysis: and how the analysis would prove that she had been stealing his sleeping-pills and crushing them up into his food. He had noticed, he confided, that his hidden store of sleeping pills, which he had had by him for years, was diminishing, and he knew his wife had been stealing them, but he could not find where she hid them. He had searched her drawers and cupboards over and over again…. She was very cunning … that was why they had chosen her for the job, because she was so cunning….

  *

  Barely an hour later, Gilbert was in his usual chair, with the newspaper held in front of his face, as if nothing had happened. Everything was as usual again, except for one small detail: he would not have the light on any more. In the darkness, Milly could hear the twitchings of the paper, and the familiar rustlings, as he turned the pages, and folded them this way and that as if to make them more convenient to read.

  *

  He never mentioned the poisoning again. Indeed, there were not many more days, now, for him to mention anything. Already it was the fifth of January.

  He seemed to have forgotten his suspicions. He ate the meals Milly gave him, and dozed, and seemed disturbed by nothing, except the light. He hated to have any lights on now. Even his own green lamp he would only switch on now and then, for meals, or to check on the time: and when it was borne in upon him that without a light Milly simply could not cook his meals, he fumbled among his belongings and found her a torch. And thereafter, groping and fumbling, to all appearances as mad as he, Milly produced her meals by torchlight, humbly thankful for this insane concession which spared her total darkness. She knew, and somehow did not mind, that her behaviour had gone beyond humouring him, and that she had become a madman’s puppet, battered by terror into a subservience that was close to idiocy.

  That way, a ghastly, twilight peace was brought into being: and by giving in to all his mad whims, by following at heel, like an obedient dog, down the twisting path that led to the black caverns of the insane, she managed to maintain this peace, precariously, for four whole days.

  And then, on the fifth day, it all began again. For the first time in several successive nights, Gilbert once again roused his wife in the small hours, and demanded lunch. As he flashed the torch into her dazed eyes, and shook her by the shoulder, he seemed strangely eager and alert, like a child bursting with some wonderful surprise that he has been forbidden to tell. Milly had only once before seen his eyes as bright as this, and their strange, silvery brilliance sent a chill through her, like the touch of the finger of death.

  Worn out with terror and despair, Milly staggered from her bed at his bidding, threw on some clothes, and stumbled across to the kitchen. And as she stood at the cooker, numb with hopelessness, stirring curry powder and turmeric into the mess of tinned mince and dehydrated vegetables, it came to her, quite suddenly, and with a strange, quiet certainty, that she would never be doing this again.

  The feeling faded as quickly as it came, but it left her with a curious sense of power, of being in control of what was going to happen, whatever it might be. And so when she saw that Gilbert was back at his old tricks again—changing the plates round when he thought her back was turned—she almost laughed. She felt that it would be fun—yes, fun! —to jerk him out of his idiotic suspicions. By placidly eating the helping he had allotted to her, she would make him see, once and for all, that he was mistaken, and it couldn’t have been poisoned.

  It was horrible. It made her feel sick and awful at this hour in the morning, but she was determined to go through with it. But she had barely had a couple of mouthfuls, when Gilbert’s gnarled hand, green in the lamplight, flashed like a snake across the white tablecloth.

  “You’ve changed them back!” he hissed between his teeth. “You’ve changed the plates back while I wasn’t looking!”—and before she had time to protest, the plates were once more changed round, and she now had in front of her the plate from which Gilbert had already begun eating.

  So. She had made him see his mistake, all right, but the mistake he saw was one which fitted nicely with his picture of the situation, not with hers. Within his system of thought, a wife who could double-cross him by magically re-changing plates under his very eyes, was far more credible than one who merely wasn’t trying to poison him at all.

  Triumphant, full of sly glee at the thought of having outwitted her, Gilbert fell to, smacking his lips, and plying his fork greedily. Milly did not try to protest, or to point out that she couldn’t have changed the plates back, even if she had wanted to, since he had been watching all the time. She didn’t even try to make any further show of eating what he had so gleefully placed before her. It wouldn’t do any good. His delusion was complete now, perfected by months of skilful toil. It was unassailable now by the assaults of reality in any form.

  So she just sat, quietly, her hands in her lap, waiting for what she knew was coming.

  “Not feeling well, my dear?”

  Gilbert’s voice, gentle and solicitous as always on these occasions, came to her across the dimly illumined table. “Don’t you like this delicious curry, that you made yourself?”

  She could not see the sly sarcasm in his eyes, for they were downcast to his plate, from which he was still eating hungrily. But she saw the vulpine look come into his face, and the champing jaws. She watched the familiar narrowing of his features, as suspicion worked inside him like yeast.

  Familiar? Well, of course it was, after all these months. But what was not so familiar was the way his face not only narrowed, but then swelled out like a balloon … and then narrowed again … out, in … out, in … for all the world as if his skull was breathing, instead of his lungs! For a moment—so accustomed was she by now to helplessly confronting new and terrifying symptoms—she found herself accepting it, raking among her half-forgotten nursing expertise for the significance of a breathing skull. It meant that the brain was breathing too, of course. Breathing-brain, or cerebropulmonosis, was one of the early symptoms of … and at this point she noticed, dimly, that her thoughts had become nonsense. She was half-dreaming, on the edge of sleep, right there as she sat. And now—what do you know?—her skull was breathing too, in, out, in, out, just like his, swelling as if it would explode. And it was then that she knew, without any doubt at all, that she was drugged.

  The curry. Gilbert, in his madness, had imagined that it was poisoned, and it was! He had fancied, in his deluded state, that sleeping pills were crushed into the plateful she had given him, and they were! And in heavy dosage too, for she had only had a couple of mouthfuls before he had changed the plates round all over again. Everything had been done in exact accordance with his mad fantasy—but by whom?

  S
trangely, with her brain pulsating like a dynamo, and already awash with sleep, she was able to understand it all more clearly than she was ever to do again. It was Gilbert who had done it, naturally. In this moment of drugged dizziness, she could follow his train of thought with perfect ease. What is the most certain way of proving that your wife is trying to poison you? Why, by actually discovering poison in the food she serves to you, of course! And what is the most certain way of actually discovering poison in the food she serves you? Why, by putting it there, of course! The simple, unassailable logic of it struck her as forcibly as it must, a little earlier, have struck him.

  Too clever by half, though: that was his trouble! It was going to be funny when he found out how he had double-crossed himself, changing the plates round a second time, as soon as he saw her beginning to eat her share! He’d landed up with the poisoned one himself! She giggled weakly, wondering how soon he would find out, and what he would say.

  Wait, though. He wouldn’t say anything, because by the time he found out he would be dead. That took the edge off the joke, rather. Still, it would be quite funny, all the same. She watched, fascinated, while a bit of rice dribbled down his chin and on to his tie, as it sometimes did when he was over-eager about his food. This time, she wasn’t even disgusted. It was almost interesting, to watch it happening for the very last time.

  *

  He had laid down his fork. He was staring, first at her plate, and then at his own, as though trying to work out what had happened. Milly watched his puzzlement in a detached sort of way, as if he was already dead, as if it was already no concern of hers. She watched his face grow pinched and grey as some new and monstrous suspicion began to work inside him like a digestive juice, breaking down data from the outside world and re-constituting it into the special kind of nourishment needed by his fantasy. She watched his eyes narrow, and knew herself to be watching, as if it was a physical process, the building of the new suspicion into the old. She could see him joining, dove-tailing, filling in the cracks, until the job was perfect: and then, and only then, did he speak:

  “You’re lying!” he said to her, very softly, and leaning towards her across the table, intimate as a lover in the dim light. “You’ve lied to me all the time! You’ve pretended to put poison in my food to frighten me! You thought it would frighten me into letting that precious doctor come! You knew he was after me. You knew he was in league with them, he’s been trying for years to worm this way into my house, only I’ve been too clever for him! And now you, my own wife, thought you’d trick me into letting him in by telling me I’d been poisoned! Didn’t you? Now, don’t lie to me, my dear, it is no use at all, I can see into your mind. I’ve seen into it all the time! Do you think I haven’t seen you slinking off to his surgery, when you’d sworn to me you were only going shopping? Do you think I haven’t watched, and waited, and timed you, and found out just how long you spent in there plotting against me? I have a record of it, I’ve kept a record … and of the phone calls, too. Did you think I didn’t know what you were up to, sneaking off to the phone box, and betraying my whereabouts to him … promising to let him in when he came to get me…. You, my wife, betraying me….”

  Gilbert’s slow rising from his chair was like a snake uncoiling. Never taking his eyes from his wife’s face, he worked his way round the table towards her, holding on to the edge of it with one hand, and feeling for his keys in the depths of his trouser pocket with the other.

  Was the drug beginning to take effect at last? He must have had ten—twenty—times the dose that she’d had. When he spoke, his voice was still firm, but strangely monotonous:

  “You thought you’d tricked me, didn’t you? You thought I was fool enough to believe that you really had given me poison! What sort of a fool do you take me for? Do you think I couldn’t see right into your evil, treacherous mind, right from the very beginning? I knew what you were up to—of course I did!” Here the strange and terrible laughter began: it rocked him, silently, from deep within, until he had to clutch at the back of her chair for support. As he stood thus, half leaning over her, his next words seemed to hiss down into her ears like wind.

  “That is the last trick you will ever play, my dear. What I am going to do to you now will make it quite, quite certain that you will never be able to play any more tricks, ever again. But first, we must fix the door. We must fix it so that no one will go in or out any more. There will be no need. After this, there will be no need….”

  Snatching the keys from his hand was surprisingly easy. So was the push she gave him, which sent him staggering backwards, right across the room, and before she could know where or how he had fallen, she was gone. Outside the door … locking and double-locking it, and shooting home the great bolts that Gilbert had fixed there only a few weeks ago. From inside, she could hear a floundering, thumping sound, but by the time she dashed past the door again, with coat and handbag, it had ceased. She fancied she could hear another sound now, fainter and much more sinister: a scratching noise, a small scrape of metal, as if he was fiddling, somehow, with the lock …

  The next thing Milly knew, she was in the street, running, running, through the icy January dark: and although she knew it could not be true—for had she not locked the door, fixed the great bolts, and hurled the keys, the only set of keys, far away into the night?—even though she knew all this, every nerve in her body, every cell of her racing blood, told her that Gilbert was already on her track. Why wasn’t he dead? Or in a drugged coma at least? What was the strange strength of his madness, that could fight off the onslaughts of such a dose? Let him die! —let him die quickly she prayed, as she raced along. Let him die before he can get the door undone … before he can somehow break down the bolts … master the lock …! The sound of her own footsteps echoing in the empty streets seemed to have multiplied, until now it seemed that there were footsteps everywhere, racing as she was racing through the winter blackness that was not yet morning. A race, a race to the finish, between her, and Gilbert, and Death. The three of them, strung out along the dark streets, with her (so far) in the lead; then Gilbert, gaining on her relentlessly with his long, stiff stride, the lamp posts spinning away behind him; and lastly Death, pounding along in the rear, the icy air of the January dawn whistling through the sockets of his eyes.

  *

  It was only after she had been travelling round on the tube for quite a while that Milly’s heart began to slow down, and she gradually took in that she was safe. Gilbert must be dead by now, or so deep in coma that nothing would ever rouse him. And it was not until later still that the implications of this began, gradually, to force themselves upon her slowly clearing consciousness. When they found him—when the police came to investigate—they would find the door locked and bolted on the outside: they would learn the cause of death, and that the dead man’s wife had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. In the face of all this evidence, how could she ever convince them that she hadn’t murdered him?

  She had, of course. That was the trouble.

  By sitting watching while he ate the drugged meal: by locking him in the room so that he could not go for help: by taking no steps herself to inform doctor or police: by all these omissions and commissions, she had killed her husband as surely as if she had done it with her bare hands.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  MILLY REACHED UP and touched her hair. It was damp with the sea-wind, and her face was stinging from the blown spray. From these things, and from her icy hands, she knew that she must have been walking home from Mrs Day’s along the sea front: but she remembered nothing of it, so totally had she been reliving the awful weeks that had brought her former life to an end. Looking about her now, she saw that she was nearly home. Already it must be quite late, for the little lighted shops on the corner of Leinster Terrace were just beginning to close, and at the sight of these familiar landmarks, the black memories fell away, like an illness when recovery has set in.

  She was here! She was safe in the present! Thes
e were the lights of Seacliffe, and this salty wind that whipped at her scarf and through her hair was the wind of now! The past was gone, she had escaped from it for ever: and that night, her dreams, for the first time, were all of Seacliffe. Strangely, they were not very happy dreams, a thread of stress and anxiety ran through them all. She dreamed that she had lent Kevin Mrs Graham’s typewriter, and somehow could not return it in time, she was hurrying with it towards a bus stop, and the driver would not wait, though she shouted at him, and waved the typewriter as she ran, trying to explain to him about Mrs Graham’s degree in Sociology, and how angry she would be. Next she dreamed that she had lost a parcel of clothes, and Mrs Mumford would not let her leave the house till she had found them. “But I never even groped them!” she seemed to be protesting, with the meaningless intensity of dreams—and woke to the sound of torrential rain beating against her window, and the grey, half-light of the winter morning warning her that it must already be nearly nine.

  It was bad enough getting to Mrs Graham’s in weather like this, but walking from there to Mrs Lane’s was worse still. She had no mackintosh, or umbrella, the way was almost all uphill, and by the time she arrived her scarf clung like a bit of limp washing round her soaked hair. As she slopped through the puddles at the side of the house, and pushed open the side door, she prayed that there would be some heating on somewhere. She had had enough of all those bright open fires that would be glowing in every room once Phyllis had “got things organised”.