Margaret, disturbed by the accident and knowing that she would not be able to work, had telephoned Robert and told him everything. Presently, his white Citroen appeared at Kilruthan. Jenny had retreated to the dining room and was making a pretense of typing, though Margaret had told her to consider herself sick. She stayed there, making mistake after mistake while they talked in low voices in the hall. Later, they came into the dining room wearing over-cheerful expressions and bearing coffee and biscuits.
“Poor old Jenny,” Robert said patting her shoulder. “You are in the wars. You’ve got on the wrong side of the Cornish piskies, that’s what you’ve done.”
“You’ll have to turn something inside out,” added Margaret pouring coffee, “a sock will do; it’s the only known cure if you’re being pisky-led. But myself, I blame the Spriggans; they’re the little people who live among the rocks and stone circles. Nasty vicious lot; baby-stealers, the Spriggans.”
Jenny would have been annoyed by their teasing if she hadn’t sensed an underlying seriousness, as though they were more worried than they were prepared to own, or knew something that they wished to conceal. She kicked off a shoe and turned a sock inside out as she nerved herself for the question she had to ask Robert.
“Both times things have happened I’ve been out with you,” she said, “there’s no one who would mind that, is there?”
He looked at Margaret. “So you do think someone is out to get you,” he said. “Well, if you mean my wife, no, she doesn’t object to girlfriends. We came to an understanding about that a long time ago.”
“She means Bromwyn,” said Margaret. “Jenny’s not that dumb.”
“It sounds highly improbable,” answered Robert. “And yesterday wasn’t early closing, was it? But if you’re suggesting it seriously I’ll ask her.”
“She’s a Celt, remember,” said Margaret. “We Anglo-Saxons still don’t understand their passionate natures, the poetry in them, their burning need for revenge.”
“Balls,” said Robert. “Be sensible now, Margaret. If anyone has a Celtic imagination it’s Jenny and she doesn’t need encouragement.”
“But Nigel thought something odd was going on, really,” protested Jenny. “And I know the cover didn’t give way under me. I remember stepping into space quite distinctly, the cover giving way under me would have had an entirely different feeling.”
“Knowing Nigel’s devious nature, I’m quite sure his first thought would have been to sow mysterious doubts in your mind. The poor devil probably spent the whole night reading Law for Everyman to see if he could be held liable in any way. You must stop being so innocent, Jenny.”
“I know what we’ll do,” said Margaret as though suddenly coming to a decision. “I am going to take Jenny to Truro and buy her a fabulous new pants suit. We’ll have lunch there and then go sightseeing; that’ll take your mind off all this.”
“It’s very kind of you, but the pants will mend and what about the book?”
“I am not taking ‘no’ for an answer. For once I shall be firm,” said Margaret. “Come on.”
Jenny allowed herself to be cajoled into a pants suit of brightest emerald green. They lunched greedily on lobster thermidor, visited the cathedral, lamented the lost assembly rooms. Then they drove through the lunar landscape of the china clay country to Fowey. Margaret was an enthusiastic guide, loosing a flood of information which Jenny struggled to divide into fact and fiction: the sternly historic, the embellished legendary, figments of Margaret’s imagination. She was shown “Q”, the novelist’s house, Hall Walk from which the citizens had watched for Napoleon’s fleet and a ship loading china clay in the port which had supplied more ships for Edward III’s navy than any other port in England and later, become notorious as the haunt of pirates. They ended the afternoon with a cream tea and then drove home. The sun was shining on the moor. The air smelled of spring, cold as running water but with the faint warmth of flowers. Larks were singing and even the stern tors looked benign.
“Work,” said Margaret opening the front door.
“I’ll just hang this up,” said Jenny brandishing the pants suit in its bag. “It too beautiful to be allowed to crease.” She ran upstairs and burst into her room. The gruesome object on the bed caught her attention at once. She stared at it unbelievingly. Its presence in the center of the pink bedspread seemed infinitely sinister, huge and gray, pawed and tailed, he lay with an evil grin. Jenny’s nerve failed her, dropping the pants suit she screamed and fled. Halfway down the stairs, she collided heavily with Margaret.
“A rat,” she cried, “a huge, horrible rat, on my bed.”
“A rat’s nothing to scream about,” said Margaret sharply. “Really, Jenny, I shall have a heart attack if you go on like this. I thought that at least you’d come face to face with a burglar.”
“It was horrible, seeing it suddenly like that lying there showing its teeth in a dreadful mocking sort of smile.”
“Robert’s right, you are letting your imagination run away with you,” said Margaret stumping resolutely up the stairs. “I suppose with all this noise he’s gone, but we’d better go and see.”
“I don’t usually scream,” said Jenny following her contritely, “not over mice, anyway. It’s just that so many frightening, uncanny things have happened to me lately.”
The rat hadn’t gone. He still lay there, very large, very dead and grinning.
“Ugh,” said Margaret briskly. “Not a nice sight, but nothing to get upset about. I expect one of the Forrests’ cats brought him in. Look, we’ll carry him down in the bedspread, it’ll have to go to the laundry.” They tipped him out on a flower bed. “We’ll leave him there and show him to Nigel,” decided Margaret. “Now for a stiff drink. And do cheer up, Jenny, don’t you realize that that was your third thing?”
Jenny said, “It couldn’t have been the cats. The window was only open about two inches at the top and the door was shut, I remember opening it as I went in.”
“Of course it was the cats,” said Margaret pouring gin. “They’re always doing it. When I was a child we had one that brought in baby rabbits – we spent summers in tears over them.”
“But the door was shut, so why isn’t the cat there now? I think someone put it there while we were out, someone who knows the way about the house and which is my room. The same person who pushed the boulder and broke the well cover.”
“A person? Oh Jenny dear, do stop being so absurd, both doors were locked and there’s no sign of a break-in.”
“But quite a few people know where you put the key, don’t they? The Forrests know, Robert knows, I imagine that most of your friends know that it lives under the stone by the water tap, and anyone who knew that could have got in with no trouble at all.”
“Here, drink this,” said Margaret, “and then you’ll feel better.”
“But I don’t care about feeling better,” protested Jenny, “I want to know what’s going on.”
6
The Breakdown
Nigel never saw the rat. Next morning, it had vanished, removed, obviously, Margaret said, by its cat killer. Thereafter in all Margaret’s accounts, it shrank until it was barely more than mouse-size, but in Jenny’s mind it became gigantic, threatening, while the evil grin seemed to promise that further evils would follow.
“You’re thoroughly overwrought,” Margaret told her. “I think you ought to get away for a day or two. The truth is that you arrived in a nervous state because of this boyfriend trouble and now you’ve magnified a series of quite ordinary little mishaps, the sort of thing that happens every other day in the country, into – well, I don’t quite know what you do suspect, but some sort of vendetta. Now what about this friend of yours in Penzance, do you think she’d have you for a few days?”
“I could ask,” agreed Jenny. “She said to let them know any time I had a weekend off. She’s married to a man called John. He works in a bank and they’ve a baby. Nina’s five years older than I am, I met her at my first
job and I had been at school with her sister.”
“To the telephone then,” said Margaret. “A jaunt is the only cure for this prickling of your thumbs…”
“It isn’t my thumbs which prickle,” Jenny told her, “it’s my spine.”
Nina said that, of course, they would love to have her and that she would be able to see Edward who was the most beautiful baby in the world though not, unluckily, the best behaved. When would she like to come?
“Tonight,” muttered Margaret, who was standing over Jenny determined to arrange the trip, “you can start after lunch.”
Jenny felt a great sense of relief as she drove away from the brooding half-houses of Kilruthan. No more looking over her shoulder or watching where she put her feet, no more fear of entering her bedroom, no more keyed-up listening to the night creakings of the house. And she’d be able to talk it over with Nina, hear an outsider’s opinion on all that had happened. You couldn’t tell parents about the complications of your life, because they were too involved in you to look at things coolly. They felt impelled to act, to rush to the scene and snatch their child away. Nor did she feel that Robert and Margaret were capable of unbiased advice. Robert might tease her, Margaret accuse her of an overwrought imagination, but she had a feeling that they knew more about the possible causes of her persecution than they were prepared to admit. And then there was Mrs. Gethin’s warning.
Margaret had forbidden her to drive like a sheep along the A30 and, providing a map, had insisted on a route that followed the Southern coast and took in Falmouth, preferably by ferry. So Jenny found herself driving gently along small empty roads in faint, but strengthening sunshine and with sudden glimpses of the sea when the lie of the land and the trees allowed it. She thought of Colin but his image had faded over the last two days. Now it was the boulder hurtling down the slope, straight for her, the well-mouth gaping in the dark, the dead rat, on the pink coverlet, which haunted her. And each time her mind’s eye paraded them before her, she relived every second of the original horror. Perhaps Margaret is right, she thought, perhaps I am becoming neurotic. Should I leave? If any more happens I shall have to; I couldn’t stand anymore. I’ll ask Nina about jobs in Penzance, I don’t want to go back to London yet.
She was driving inland after a look at Mevagissey, and was rather lost in the network of country roads when she smelled burning rubber. A bonfire, she thought, unalarmed until she realized that she seemed to be taking it with her. The smell grew stronger and, half a mile further on, the Mini began to fill with smoke. She stopped hastily and turned off the ignition; the engine continued to run. Petrol tanks and explosions, thought Jenny, unfastening her seat belt, abandoning the car and retreating to what she hoped was a safe distance on the other side of the road. The engine ran on, black smoke and the rubber smell came from underneath the car, rising around it in every direction. Then the engine stopped and gradually the smoke subsided.
Jenny approached apprehensively. Only the smell of disaster lingered. She turned the ignition key but, as she had feared, there was no sign of life. She sat in the driver’s seat and thought despairingly that nothing went right for her nowadays. This on top of everything else. Whatever had happened was obviously serious and would take time and money to put right. She could see no hope of getting to Penzance now. On the A30, she would have been certain of a hitch, but here, nothing but birds and sheep. She tried to start the car once more, filled with an irrational hope of spontaneous recovery, but there was no spark of life. A telephone, she thought, weighed down by despondency at the effort of recovery and reorganization which lay before her. A village and a telephone and a garage first. At least it wasn’t raining, she thought, trying to discover precisely where she was on the map. The village was a two mile walk, but when she reached it the man in the post office was helpful, with a garage-owning brother-in-law in the next village who agreed to collect Jenny in a pickup truck in twenty minutes.
That settled, she telephoned Nina who seemed regretful but helpless. She didn’t think there was any public transport left – if only Jenny had stuck to the main road. And she couldn’t do anything, because, apart from Edward, they were having car trouble too. Theirs had failed its inspection and was sitting at the garage while they decided if they could afford the repairs. Jenny had better go back to Bodmin, “and better luck next time,” she finished brightly, unconcerned and unaware of Jenny’s need.
The verdict on the Mini was that an electrical short had caused the entire wiring to burn out and that it was a bit of luck the whole car hadn’t gone up in smoke. The rewiring would take a few days, the garage owner explained vaguely as he had a couple of other jobs on hand. She accepted a lift to the garage in the truck for, apparently, there was still a bus from that village to St. Austell and though it meant waiting until five-thirty she felt this was the only thing to do. Slightly ashamed of failure, she rang Kilruthan to tell Margaret that she was on her way back, but there was no reply. So, buying chocolate and a paperback book, she took herself and her suitcase to the bus stop to wait, grateful for fine weather and a primrose-covered bank on which to sit.
Jenny rang Kilruthan again from St. Austell, but there was still no reply and as she ate chicken and chips in an unintimidating restaurant, she wondered what she would do if Margaret had gone away for the night and not left the key under the stone. Beg a bed from the Forrests, she decided, though that would be almost more frightening than a night alone in Margaret’s house, where at least she could stay up and spend her time making tea. After her supper, she telephoned Kilruthan again and then, as the Bodmin bus didn’t leave until nine-thirty, retreated to the cinema.
She had hoped to find a taxi or car rental service to take her on the last part of her journey, but they all seemed to have been booked beforehand or to have stopped work for the night. However, someone produced a friendly farmer and his wife who would make a small detour and drop her in St. Marla. And, by the time Jenny found herself alone on the Kilruthan road, her suitcase in one hand, her stout rubber flashlight, which she had unpacked in the other, she felt far too tired for any but commonplace fears. It was a fine clear night but dark, for the moon had not yet risen. Her longing for arrival, for an end to this tedious journey buoyed her up to the point where she plunged into the black tunnel of the Kilruthan shrubbery with scarcely more than a quickened step and a shudder. There was no light in either of the halfhouses. She dumped her suitcase on the porch and went to the water tap for the key.
It was there, but as she picked it up a strange, slow rhythmical chant caught her ear. It seemed to be floating up from the valley. Human voices, mixed, men and women, she decided as she advanced stealthily across the lawn. She looked back at Margaret’s bedroom window, it was as dark as the rest of the house. Keeping her flashlight well down she came to steps over the sunken fence. She could hear the chanting more clearly, but did not recognize the tune nor could she distinguish the words, the rhythm had grown faster. The chanters were out of sight, down in the valley foot, beside the stream. Cautiously, she climbed the steps. It didn’t occur to her to be afraid because singing was such a communal, cheerful and unaggressive pastime, entirely without sinister connotations, but she kept her flashlight down because she was uninvited, almost spying. She crept down the hillside congratulating herself on having bought a red raincoat and not one in white or yellow or orange. Weren’t those the colors that one could see in the dark?
Then she stopped dead, switched off her flashlight and stood gazing at the scene below her in shocked astonishment. There were two candles on a rock slab and several lanterns standing on the grass, which threw an eerie light on an even eerier scene. The chanters were dancing in a ring, holding hands like children but they were plainly adult and stark naked. As she watched the rhythm of dance and chant grew faster and faster. The ghostly figures spun around and around; just as their speed seemed unbelievable a cry rang out and there was suddenly silence as the chanters flung themselves to the ground. Then the voice rang out a
gain, clear and prophetic against the background of running water. It was a woman’s voice and Jenny could see her, high-breasted, long-haired, standing by the candle-lit stone slab pointing a dagger to the sky. Then a man, naked but for a loincloth took over. He looked upwards and, in a powerful voice addressed religious-sounding incantations to the sky. The fallen figures were sitting up, gradually they got to their feet and began to chant again, softly and slowly. Now they were forming up in pairs, male and female, hand-in-hand. Something had been placed in the center of their ring, a coal-scuttle-like object, dark and metallic, and as blue and yellow flames bubbled up from it the chanters, still in pairs, crossed the circle to jump over it.
A Place With Two Faces Page 6