Appointment with Yesterday

by Celia Fremlin

  Safe? What sort of head-in-the-sand logic was this? By disconnecting the telephone she was cutting herself off from the awareness of danger, not from danger itself. The danger was still there. Biting its nails, perhaps, in some nearby telephone box—maybe only a stone’s throw away—and getting more and more impatient with the monotonous line-engaged tone. Tactics would be changed … and the first she would know of anything amiss would be the sound of the lift moaning to a halt out there across the landing.

  By then, it would be too late. Whereas if she left the telephone in working order, she would at least get some sort of advance warning—enough, surely, to enable her to go racing down those six flights of softly carpeted stairs (no lifts, thank you! —she felt trapped enough already!) and out into the wild, wide, windswept world, where surely she would have the same fifty-fifty chance of freedom as a deer, or a fox, or any other hunted thing?

  Already she could feel flight mustering in her limbs, speeding-up her heartbeat. Her hand, as she re-connected the telephone yet again, was trembling with a build-up of muscular energy as yet un-needed. From her brain the alert had gone forth, and throughout her body general mobilisation had begun: Milly found it hard, with this turmoil of activity going on within, to slow herself down to the pace of dusting … of handling ornaments … of washing up wine-glasses, putting them away on the high shelf of the cupboard. A slender glass stem snapped, brittle as ice, and tinkled sadly to the floor … Milly felt herself moving among Mrs Day’s fragile possessions like a battering ram. Already the sensitivity had gone from her fingertips, the delicacy from her movements: all her finer sensibilities were already in cold-storage, packed away to leave room for the essentials—strength, speed and cunning.

  When the telephone finally did ring, it was almost a relief. Milly knew, now, exactly what she was going to say to them: she was inspired, the lies almost told themselves. No, she would tell them, she wasn’t Mrs Barnes, Mrs Barnes was no longer working here. Oh, yes, there had been a Mrs Barnes, certainly there had, she had worked here until—when was it? Two?—three?—weeks ago. Would that be the Mrs Barnes they were looking for? And no, she was very sorry, she couldn’t tell them where Mrs Barnes was working now she had moved—gone after a job in Birmingham, someone had said. There’d been some sort of trouble about her references, or something, and she’s had to leave in a hurry….

  That would fox them! A big place, Birmingham. They could hunt down Barnes-es there for weeks on end, and as fast as they eliminated one lot, another batch would appear … Barnes after Barnes, rolling in without pause over the smoky Midland horizon.

  And meantime, the Seacliffe police would have stopped bothering. Once the search had moved out of their district, they would surely lose interest … they must have plenty else on their minds, with hooligans smashing up deckchairs, and everything. And as for the big men in London—Scotland Yard, or whoever it was—surely their enthusiasm, too, would flag once the trail had grown as cold as this? London … Seacliffe … Birmingham … and already the dockleaves and the nettles beginning to sprout on Gilbert’s grave, somewhere or other in the crowded, neglected cemetery you could just see from the top of the bus as you travelled towards Morden.

  They didn’t solve all their murder cases: how could they? No doubt they did their best, but you can no more trace every murder to its bitter source than you can trace the course of a stream beyond the place where it merges into marshland, spreading out into a formless no-man’s-land of bog, and reeds, and treacherous patches where, if you are not careful, you can sink nearly to the waist.

  Surely Gilbert’s murder stood as good a chance of going unsolved as any? There was nothing newsworthy about it, nothing obviously bizarre to challenge the ingenuity of police or detectives, or to stir the popular imagination. The victim was not a beautiful young girl: the suspect was not a member of high society. If Milly could only put them all off the scent for even a few days, she would be safe. Their other files would begin to pile up … their in-trays to overflow…. After all, the police are only human, and in any human transaction, if you can once get muddle and procrastination working on your side, you’re home.

  “Barnes? Mrs Barnes? No, I’m afraid not….” Now that it came to the point, Milly found herself gabbling nervously. The lies, spoken out loud, sounded less convincing than they had in the imagination, and she was hurrying to get to the end of her rehearsed speech before her nerve cracked. “No, I’m afraid there’s no one of that name here at the moment. But there was a Mrs Barnes working here not long ago. I wonder if that’s the one you mean? She left—let me see—two or three weeks ago, I think it must be. Someone told me she was moving—to Birmingham, I think they said….”

  “Barney! Have you gone nuts, or something? What the hell do you think you’re playing at?”

  “Jacko!” The relief was so great that for a moment it was indistinguishable from the terror that had preceded it, and Milly just stared at the pink wallpaper in front of her, and waited for her blood to start flowing again, and for her brain to start comprehending the miraculous new turn of affairs. “Jacko! Why didn’t you—? Your voice sounded all—! Oh, Jacko, I’m so thankful! I thought you were—!”

  “Yes. You sounded like that’s what you thought,” Jacko commented drily, his voice sounding very small and far away. “Look, Barney, what the hell’s going on? Have you got the sack, or something? We rang you about sixty thousand times this morning, and the hag kept saying you didn’t exist….”

  “Jacko! At Mrs Graham’s, you mean? So it was you, then, all the time! Oh, but how marvellous …!” The relief, the sudden lifting of fear, was almost more than Milly could sustain. The pale sunlight seemed to dance in the room, the very air shimmered with freedom, such freedom as she had never thought to breathe again.

  Was it three breaths of it she drew, or four? Then Jacko’s voice again:

  “… and so we tried to put him off, just like we did the Town Hall wallah yesterday, but it was hopeless. He just wouldn’t believe us when we said we’d never heard of you; and you see, Barney, by that time the Mums was poking her nose out of the kitchen, wanting to know what it was all about, so we just couldn’t keep it up any longer. Well, I mean. But I wouldn’t worry too much, Barney, really I wouldn’t. He seems terribly harmless, this one, like he couldn’t hurt a fly if you paid him. He must be about a hundred for a start, you should just have seen his mop of snow-white hair. Said his name was Soames.”

  CHAPTER XXII

  AN HOUR HAD passed, and Milly still had not stirred. The room was in shadow now, the brief winter sunlight had faded from the rosy walls and gleaming mirrors. It was already quite hard to read the figures on the dial of the telephone, at which Milly was still staring, vacantly.

  She did not know how long she had gone on talking to Jacko, nor how long she had been sitting here since the line had gone dead.

  There was no reason to move. It seemed to her, now, that she had known all along that this was how it was going to end. All the time she had been on the run, dodging the police, watching the headlines, concealing her identity … all this time she had known, somewhere deep inside her, that it was not merely the Law from which she was fleeing, but something much more terrible. Her fear of being arrested for murdering Gilbert had been genuine enough, but it had all the time masked a quite different fear, one too terrible to confront: the fear that she had not murdered him. The fear that somehow, somewhere, he had survived, biding his time, perfecting his plans for her punishment. He had waited while the moon waxed and waned once, and now he was on the move.

  *

  No, Jacko had assured her: he hadn’t told the old boy her address at work; he wasn’t quite a fool, thank you. Though it was always a bit of a help (he pointed out aggrievedly) if people would tell you what the hell they were up to before they let you in for this sort of thing. And no, he didn’t know where the poor old carcase had gone now, he hadn’t said. And yes, of course he, Jacko, would phone her if anything cropped up. She coul
d count on him and on Kevin too, even though nobody ever told them anything.

  *

  So Gilbert was already on the prowl through the darkening streets: peering into the cafés, (the bus shelters, his white hair raked into a cockatoo-crest by the wet wind from the sea.

  *

  How long would it be before he found her? That he would do so in the end, she never doubted. Already the feel of him was all about her, she seemed to feel the strange power of his madness guiding him as he roamed the ill-lit streets, staring left and right, through lighted windows and through solid walls, with his shining, visionary eyes.

  *

  Ridiculous! was she taking leave of her senses? Madness was a disability, not a rare and valuable gift! It rendered a person less able to achieve his purposes, not more! Where a sane person would seek his objective in a strange town by asking the right questions, following up the relevant clues, a madman would be driven hither and thither by a bizarre logic of his own, getting nowhere, banging up against the relevant facts only at random, like a fly in a window. Milly felt her strength returning. The sheer, gibbering terror had passed, and she began to take stock of her situation.

  Here, at Mrs Day’s, she was comparatively safe, at least for the moment. No one, mad or sane, would be able to trace her to this address in the space of a single afternoon, via such a trail of mis-information as they were certainly going to encounter as they went. Like a mediaeval baron surveying his moats and drawbridges, Milly reviewed the obstacles that such a person would have to surmount. First, Mrs Mumford, tight-lipped, minding her own business if it killed her. Then, Jacko and Kevin, lying tirelessly on her behalf to all comers: and lastly (if they ever got so far) there was Mrs Graham who, in her sublime unconcern with things which only involved other people, didn’t even know that Milly had a name, let alone an address, or a continued existence beyond her, Mrs Graham’s, front door.

  She would stay here, then, here in Mrs Day’s flat, for as long as it was possible to stay. Why, perhaps Mrs Day would take her on as a proper housekeeper, living-in! It was just what the flat needed, actually, someone permanently around to clear up after the all-night parties, to iron the crumpled finery, put the orchids in water … and it was just then that she heard the sound. The soft whine of the lift gliding to a halt … the doors sliding open, smooth as cream.

  Well, and what of it? There were other flats on this floor, weren’t there? It could be anybody … absolutely anybody.

  It was funny, certainly, that there was no sound of footsteps after the opening of the lift doors, but not so funny that it need set the veins pulsing in your temples like this. Were not the carpets in this building thick and soft, the acoustics carefully planned to deaden footfalls? Absurd, then, to imagine that someone must be lying in wait out there, or advancing soundlessly in ancient white gymshoes….

  She seemed to know, though, what the next sound was going to be, and when she heard it, the shock was the shock of recognition rather than of fresh terror.

  It had all happened before, that was the thing: happened exactly as it was happening now, only at a different door, opening on a different flat … the slow fumbling at the latch … the faint scratching of a key inserted by unsteady fingers, and then the door swung silently open….

  “Oh!” said the girl: and for a few seconds she and Milly stared at one another in mutual stupefaction, each separately trying to reconcile a turmoil of imaginary expectations to a completely unforeseen reality.

  The newcomer was a heavy, thick-set young woman, with a big, freckled face devoid of make-up, and she was wearing a grey jersey and navy blue skirt which (Milly found herself inanely reflecting) the exotic Mrs Day wouldn’t have been seen dead in.

  Where on earth did so unglamorous a figure fit into Mrs Day’s glittering life? Friend? Relative? Or—yes, that was the most likely—she must be a betrayed wife come to have it out with her husband’s mistress! That’s how she’d come to be in possession of the door key, of course: she had found it in the pocket of his suit when she was sending it to the cleaner’s, and then (driven by curiosity and by the chronic insecurity of the plain and dowdy wife of an attractive man) she had searched the rest of his pockets … had come across the love-letters, the pressed orchid…. No wonder, after all that, that the poor girl had been a bit non-plussed at the sight of Milly! Probably she had never seen the legendary Mrs Day, and was right now trying to fit Milly to the part, twisting her hands agonisedly as she did so, with her doughy jaw dropped open.

  “I’m afraid …!” began Milly, and “I thought …!” interrupted the girl; and then they both gave up simultaneously and stared at one another again.

  “I’ve come for my coaching,” the girl volunteered at last—and at the sound of the hesitant small voice, Milly suddenly noticed how very young the visitor was, and how paralysed with shyness—noticed, too, the bulging briefcase she was clutching.

  “Mrs Day—that’s our headmistress—she said just to let myself in, as she’d be late. I—I’m sorry … she didn’t tell me there’d be anybody here…. It’s my A-level physics, you see, I was away all last term….”

  A headmistress! How one lives and learns! For the second time in five minutes, Milly found all her presuppositions being turned upside down: and her mind was still spinning from this second effort of readjustment, when the buzzer sounded on the front door.

  For some reason, she wasn’t frightened at all this time. Somehow, she assumed that it must be Mrs Day herself, and was all agog with curiosity at the prospect of actually seeing this many-sided character. “Yes?” she said confidently into the mouthpiece, and heard the caretaker’s voice in reply:

  “Mrs Barnes? Good, you are still there, I thought you might have gone. Your husband’s here, Mrs Barnes, he’s come to call for you. I’m sending him up now.”

  CHAPTER XXIII

  RUNNING, RUNNING, RUNNING, all over again, through dingy, ill-lit streets, only this time there was so little sense of escape. She remembered how her lungs had laboured, just as they were labouring now, seared by the freezing night air. Only then there had been a taste of dawn in the January darkness: now, the black night was only just beginning. There had been hope then—though she had scarcely been aware of it—hope of escape, of a new life somewhere on the far side of despair, of new worlds yet untried beyond the horizon of her experience. She had thought then, as she raced through the dark, deserted streets that zig-zagged away and away from the basement in Lady Street—further and further, ever safer, ever more anonymous—she had thought, then, that she was actually escaping: that if she could only run fast enough, and far enough, then she could be out of it all, her very identity left behind like an empty packing case with all the rest of the debris.

  Not now, though. From the moment when she had flung herself out of Mrs Day’s flat, and out of the life for ever of Mrs Day’s astonished pupil, she had known, in her heart, that there was nowhere to run; that this was the end of the road.

  Oh, she had run, just the same: had run like a madwoman, down all those flights of richly-carpeted stairs, round and round … down and down…. There was a curious moment when Gilbert must have been barely two yards away, as the lift slipped up and past her, gliding upwards in the opposite direction to her headlong flight.

  She had not even glanced towards it. On to the bottom she had sped, without pause or backward look. Nor had the startled voice of the caretaker delayed her. The heavy glass door swung back against his exclamation of surprise and protest, slicing it off, and she was out and away, hurling herself from the lights and warmth of the flats as from a high rock, plunging headlong into the dark beyond.

  Yes, she had run, all right. She was still running, her breath coming in short, painful gasps and her heart lurching. Already she had reached the outskirts of the town. The houses were smaller, and shabbier, the street lights dimmer and further and further apart, until presently there were no more lights and the darkness was unbroken, except for an occasional orange gleam from
a window as a curtain was twitched aside and a face peered out, idly censorious, to see who it could be, running so fast and so noisily through a respectable suburb at such an hour.

  Still she ran on: and after a while she felt the road change to something rougher under her feet. She found herself stumbling against cobbles—or was it dry tufts of winter grass?—And now she could just see that the path ahead of her was forking in two directions, one winding up towards the downs, the other curving down to the right … it must be towards the beach. Already there was a salty tang in the air, and that sense of emptiness and uncluttered distance that is unmistakeable: the sea could not be far away.

  It did not matter which of the two paths she chose, for she knew by now that she was running nowhere. The options were at an end. Whichever way she chose now, to left or right, it would still be the way back. Back … back … by the same way she had come…. It had come to pass just as she had foreseen it—was it only yesterday?—as she stood at Seacliffe station watching the London trains come in. The past had got her. It had caught up with her at last. She could feel the weight of it, dragging her backwards and downwards, even while her legs still went through the motions of running. It was like riding to your death on a stationary bicycling machine.

  Strange how her legs would not give up, even now! Still they ran: ran, and ran until her heart seemed to be beating some strange tattoo behind her ribs … tapping out messages … telling her something…. She could hear voices, just as Gilbert had once heard voices: