‘Murder?’ Mrs Liebig said. ‘Don’t talk nonsense. You don’t know what you are talking about. A boy of your age mixed up in all this. Where’s her own people, anyway? What’s her mother doing? My God, what a rotten world we live in.’
At his grandmother’s words, all Maurice’s heroic mood shrivelled inside of him. He felt that he had simply muddled the whole affair; he had never inquired about Sylvia’s parents. ‘She’s very young,’ he said hesitatingly; he could think of nothing else to express what he felt for Sylvia.
‘Young,’ Mrs Liebig echoed scornfully. ‘That’s the trouble. A lot of children’s nonsense, the lot of you. Well, where is the girl?’ And when Maurice moved towards Sylvia’s door, she pushed past him and brusquely forced her way in.
Sylvia was lying back on the pillows – a ghostlike little waif. To Maurice’s eyes she seemed to have faded surprisingly far out of life in the short while he had been gone.
‘Well,’ said Dr Waters, ‘she’s going to be all right. Aren’t you, young woman? If she’d taken anything but aspirins she’d be dead. As it is I’ve given her an injection just to help nature along.’
Maurice who was sceptical of the knowledge of general practitioners assumed the air of an educated mission schoolboy before the tribal witch doctor; but Mrs Liebig exclaimed knowingly, ‘Ah, there you are.’
Dr Waters now assumed a stern look. ‘I need to know a bit more about all this, though. I’ll have to examine the patient a bit further. I must ask you to wait outside,’ he announced.
‘Yes, yes,’ Mrs Liebig cried, ‘you can’t be here when doctor’s examining her, Maurice. That wouldn’t do at all.’ Maurice moved towards the door. ‘I’ll call you when doctor’s done,’ Mrs Liebig said.
Dr Waters swung on her angrily. ‘Will you kindly follow him. I want to talk to the young woman alone.’
Mrs Liebig’s face was crimson, ‘Don’t you order me about,’ she cried, ‘I’ve no intention of leaving this girl in here with you.’
It was Dr Waters’s turn to approach apoplexy. ‘I would remind you, Madam,’ he said, ‘that it may well be my duty to turn this matter over to the police with unpleasant consequences for those responsible for this girl’s welfare.’
Mrs Liebig was too astonished to reply. Maurice looked for some contradiction of the doctor’s innuendo from Sylvia, but she had only faded further away into the ghost world. ‘Now then,’ Dr Waters cried sharply. ‘Out with the lot of you.’
In the passage Mrs Liebig gave it to Maurice good and proper. ‘Can’t you behave like a gentleman?’ she asked. ‘Good God! What would your father say? So I’ve had to wait for my old age to watch my grandson stand by and see me insulted. How do you know he’s a doctor?’ she asked. ‘What’s he doing in there with that girl? They’re pretty filthy, some of these doctors; I could tell you stories. What does Victor think I am? To be at the beck and call of every little tart he picks up off the street – his own mother!’ And so on.
Maurice said nothing; indeed he heard very little – his thoughts were entirely upon Sylvia, a little puzzling at her sudden languishing, but in the main just dwelling on her.
It was over ten minutes before Dr Waters emerged from the room. Mrs Liebig was already urging that they should leave. ‘Let her stew in her own dirty juice,’ she said. ‘She got what she was after with her tricks. Good God! I should think Victor has left her, and if he never takes up with her again, good riddance to bad rubbish.’
Dr Waters cut into all this abruptly. ‘I think she’ll be all right now,’ he said. ‘I apologize if I seemed rude but one must have a free hand in these affairs. I should like,’ he added, ‘someone to stay with her. She’s still a little hysterical, and I can’t say that I’m surprised. Besides, when that husband of hers comes back, heaven knows what may happen. Can I rely on one of you to stop with her?’
Mrs Liebig’s expression was so unpromising that Dr Waters seemed finally to decide on Maurice as his assistant, despite his youth. He took him by the arm and drew him aside, ‘If that brute comes back and pesters her,’ he said, ‘you may tell him that I shall be over in the morning and that I shall have one or two very unpleasant words to say to him. You can say,’ he chuckled sardonically, ‘that if he’s so anxious for a thrashing he may well get it from an unexpected quarter. Filthy brute! Keep her quiet,’ he added. ‘Poor little creature!’
Before he left the house, he bowed to Mrs Liebig. ‘Good-night to you, Madam,’ he said. But she did not acknowledge his salute.
Back in the bedroom, Maurice had scarcely time to register the charm of Sylvia’s wan smile, before the old crab-sidling woman came hobbling in. Like Dr Waters, she disregarded Mrs Liebig, so that Maurice began to wonder whether his grandmother’s trousers, so unsuitable to her age, had robbed her of all claim on public respect.
‘Mr Morello wants to see you right away,’ the old woman mumbled to him.
‘I shan’t be a few minutes,’ he said to Mrs Liebig and, determined on his new authority, he was gone from the room before she could protest.
Mr Morello seemed also to accept Maurice’s authority; indeed he appeared anxious to counter with a demonstration of his own powers of command. He had changed his dressing-gown for a dark, rather too carefully ‘city’ suit and had seated himself at a large roll-topped desk which loomed incongruously in the obvious bed-sitting-room. His stature as landlord was asserted only in the neat divan bed and the unvarnished ‘modernistic’ wardrobe and chest-of-drawers – a setting two whole ‘bed-sitter’ social grades above the furnishings he provided for his tenants. Even to Maurice’s eye Mr Morello seemed ill at ease in his authority. His plump young face was smooth with massage, the bluish stubble of his heavy jowl was carefully powdered; but on his neck was an angry boil and his fingers seemed unable to leave it alone.
‘I’m afraid this can’t go on, you know,’ he said. His voice was surprisingly light for so heavy a man; his accent was Birmingham.
Maurice looked round the room and sat down on the divan. ‘Of course, of course,’ Mr Morello said. He was clearly embarrassed at his failure as host. ‘You’ll excuse this spot,’ he said, and when Maurice did not answer, he added in extenuation, ‘It’s a boil, you know. There’s nothing to do but wait for them to come to a head.’ Feeling that he had gone too far perhaps in excuses, he sat back in his swivel chair and folded his hands over his stomach. ‘I know things are difficult,’ he said with paternal pomposity. ‘It’s a very bad time indeed for artists.’ He spoke with the authority of a gamekeeper pronouncing on the partridge season. ‘We all get to the end of our tether at times. Some quite small trouble or other comes along and we break. I’ve felt like that with this boil.’ He laughed deprecatingly but it was clear that he did not feel the irritation to be a small one. To Maurice he seemed so like a vulgar parody of his form master that he expected him to add, ‘But do I break down and try to commit suicide?’
Instead Mr Morello pushed out his thick underlip, looking like a sea elephant. ‘This house is a good part of my living,’ he announced, ‘and I can’t have it getting a bad name. This sort of thing might easily lose me tenants. Good tenants. Paying tenants,’ he added ominously. ‘With all due allowance and having every sympathy I hope, if it happens again they’ll have to go. Will you please tell Mrs Liebig that, when she’s recovered enough to face the facts of the situation.’ He paused and then as though resolving the situation from superior wisdom, he said, ‘It may well be a good thing to frighten her a bit.’
Maurice was annoyed at the man’s patronizing tone; he felt dissatisfied too with his own lack of command over the situation. He searched for some means of asserting himself; then, ‘I think it was quite unnecessary of Miss Cherrill to have shouted my aunt’s private affairs about the house.’
Only his dislike of Mr Morello had made him speak and he immediately expected a sharp rebuff, but the landlord only pouted like a fat, cross baby. ‘I don’t want any trouble wit
h Miss Cherrill, please,’ he said pleadingly. ‘She’s a good, paying tenant. I’m sure I’m glad to have made contact with one of Mrs Liebig’s family,’ he smiled. ‘It’s a thousand pities she’s had such bad luck. There’s money to be made in dancing today. Really good dancing.’ He was clearly a man who prided himself on knowing how things stood in the world of today. ‘But there you are, accidents may happen to anyone.’
Maurice could make nothing of this so he did not reply.
‘Well,’ Mr Morello cried cheerily, ‘she’ll be all right with you there, I can see.’ He got up and opened the door for Maurice; he was clearly anxious to efface his previous insufficient manners. ‘I feel a lot happier for our little chat,’ he said. ‘You really must excuse me receiving you in this state.’ Once more his fingers went up to the boil on his neck. ‘If there’s hot water or anything needed I’m sure Martha will be glad to oblige.’
Mrs Liebig was standing in the hall when Maurice came out. ‘Ah, good God, there you are,’ she cried, ‘do you think I’m made of money? Keeping that taxi there all night.’
As though to underline her anxiety, the door-bell buzzed loudly; and when Maurice opened it, there was indeed the taxi-driver.
‘All right, all right,’ Mrs Liebig cried, ‘I’m coming. Do you think you’re going to lose your money?’
The little, greyfaced old taxi-driver seemed so cowed by her that he only said, ‘Well, it’s a long time, lady.’
‘A long time?’ Mrs Liebig cried, ‘there’s illness here; of course it’s a long time. Well, Maurice are you ready?’
‘I must stay here. The doctor asked me to.’ Maurice tried to sound as casual as he could manage, but he felt, though he could not explain why, that his whole future happiness depended upon his getting his way about this.
‘Stay here? Good God! The girl’s all right now. Stay here? Of course you can’t stay here with that girl alone in her bedroom, a young man of your age. What good would you be anyway, a boy like you?’
‘The doctor …’ Maurice began, but she broke in furiously.
‘What do we know about the doctor, anyway? You and your doctors – you wait until you know a bit more about life,’ she added darkly.
Maurice’s thin face was tensed. ‘Either you or I must stay,’ he said, ‘unless we’re to risk a death on our hands.’ Perhaps it was the sibilance of his voice betraying to her his emotional state, or perhaps it was the fear that she might indeed have to stay; whatever the cause Mrs Liebig gave a hard little laugh. ‘All right,’ she cried, ‘I wash my hands. You and your morbid ideas. But you must explain to your mother. I hope you enjoy upsetting everybody like this, for that’s what you’re doing.’
To Maurice’s surprise she then went into Sylvia’s room and, crossing to the bed, kissed the girl warmly on both cheeks. ‘Maurice is staying to see you’re a good girl,’ she said. ‘Now, don’t you worry. You’re a good girl, even if you are a little fool. Victor’ll find his luck again. You don’t have to blame yourself. That Paula must give him a divorce. You’ll see, it’ll turn out all right. Oh, yes,’ she cried, turning to Maurice, ‘I know. Happy endings aren’t good enough for your clever ways. It’s all got to be deaths and suicides and wild ducks. But Sylvia isn’t such a little fool as that. She’ll be all right.’ She kissed the girl again.
Once more Maurice felt surprise, for Sylvia looked at Mrs Liebig with little girl’s rounded eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered gently, ‘you’ve been so very kind. You’ve helped me to believe again a little.’
Mrs Liebig only said, ‘Now you sleep, my dear, and you let her sleep, Maurice.’
Now that he was alone with Sylvia, Maurice was completely bewildered. He had asserted his right to remain on the stage, but of what the play was about he was entirely ignorant. For two years now, since his sixteenth birthday, he had been schooling himself to the sense of authority, the power of command, the heroic role which he and his friends in the Upper Sixth were determined to assume. They had discussed it so often, schooled themselves for the task of leadership which would fall to their generation – leadership out of the desert of the television world, out of the even more degrading swamps of espresso bar rebellion. They had fed themselves on high purposes and self discipline, on gallantry and panache, on Carlyle and Burke. Now for the first time he was called upon to control a situation, however paltry the occasion, and yet the situation seemed to drift by while he stood, like a night stroller on the towing-path scarcely able to distinguish water from land. He was emerging not as the hero leader but as that feeble figure, the homme moyen sensuel – the ‘hero’ type of all the literature that he and his friends most despised. And he saw no way out of it.
Sylvia accepted his silence at first, lying back on her pillows. With the eyes closed, her face seemed strangely smooth and empty of life; she looked both older and lost. Gradually her underlip protruded in a silky pout and her forehead wrinkled in a frown. To Maurice she now appeared like a sullen, bored child; but as he could make no sense of all that he had seen and heard of her, he tried to ignore this new ugly impression that she made on him. Suddenly the frown and the pout disappeared; opening her eyes, she looked at him tragically. ‘Why do you think God hates me so?’ she asked.
A question based on so many doubtful premises shocked Maurice deeply; such melodramatic speech from such attractive lips disturbed him even more.
Sylvia sensed his disquiet, she let her hand fall on the eiderdown in front of her in a gesture of hopelessness. ‘Oh God! always trying to find a way out, always trying to find someone else to put the blame on, even poor old God. Do you ever hate yourself like hell?’ she asked.
This question was somewhat easier for Maurice to answer, although he found its formulation hardly more to his taste. ‘Quite often,’ he said. ‘I should think most people of any intelligence or feeling do at some time or other.’
Sylvia seemed to ponder for a moment. ‘You understand things so well and yet you’re so young,’ she said simply.
It was so exactly what Maurice had hoped to think of himself, and yet so exactly what he now doubted, that he looked at her covertly to see if she was speaking sarcastically; but her expression was one of childlike wonderment.
‘How old are you?’ she asked.
‘Almost eighteen.’
‘Almost,’ she said, and she smiled. ‘That makes me terribly old. I’m twenty-three,’ she said.
‘That’s not old, really,’ Maurice tried not to sound a little disappointed.
‘Almost eighteen and you know so much. I wish you could teach me some of it.’ Sylvia’s wondering far-away voice would not have disgraced a performance of Marie Rose.
His age was not exactly what Maurice wished to harp upon, and her praise, though pleasing, was an indulgence high purpose did not allow him. ‘I’m afraid there isn’t much point in our discussing these things unless you tell me why you wanted,’ he paused a moment and then, determinedly realistic, ended, ‘to kill yourself. Something Miss Cherrill said made me think …’ he went on and then stopped again – to speak about pregnancy was embarrassing, but then Dr Waters’s suggestion about Uncle Victor’s depraved sexual tastes was an even less possible topic of conversation.
Sylvia’s pupils contracted to two minute forget-me-nots. ‘What did Miss Cherrill say?’ she asked, her husky voice now edgy.
‘That you were going to have a baby …’
Maurice wished now that he had set about assuming control in a different way, but he was left little time to regret, for Sylvia burst out in fury, ‘That lying cow,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I’ve got a bloody sight better chance than her. No man would give her one. How dare she open her filthy mouth about my affairs? I’ll have it out with her now.’ She began to lift herself with difficulty from the bed.
Maurice put his hand on to her arm. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you must stay where you are. Perhaps I misunderstood her.’
For whatever reason, Syl
via seemed willing to accept his restraint. ‘And if I were going to, as if I shouldn’t know where to go to get rid of it. Better than that silly bitch would,’ she said and lay back on the pillows once more, smiling to herself.
Maurice’s silence weighed down upon her satisfaction, however, and broke it. She turned to him angrily again, ‘You think I’m pretty sordid, don’t you?’ she asked.
‘I wasn’t making any judgement. I was just trying to understand, that’s all,’ he replied. The words came out automatically and he blushed not only for their priggishness but for their untruth – he had been thinking the whole episode sordid.
‘Well, you should think it sordid – sordid and disgusting. For that’s what it is. You’ve no idea of the foul things …’
‘I think I have,’ Maurice said. ‘Dr Waters told me something.’
Sylvia began to giggle. ‘What did he say?’
Maurice found this quite difficult; to begin with he wasn’t quite sure if he had interpreted Dr Waters aright, and then he was also very uncertain if his interpretation might not be nonsense. He knew there were such sexual deviations, but applied to Sylvia and Victor it seemed absurd. He did not want to make a fool of himself.
‘Come on,’ said Sylvia sharply. ‘What did he say?’
So urged, Maurice blurted it out crudely, ‘He said Victor made you beat him and that was why you’d …’
Sylvia, to his consternation, roared with laughter. ‘Dr Waters is a fool,’ she said. ‘Dr Waters made a pass, and that was naughty of Dr Waters, so Sylvia told him where he could put his pass.’
It was, perhaps, the theatricality of her manner that suddenly decided Maurice. All his bewilderment suddenly vanished as a pattern formed before him. ‘That’s not true. None of what you’ve been saying is true – to Dr Waters or to Morello or to Grandmother or to me. You just make up stories about yourself.’
Sylvia leaned quickly out of the bed and smacked his face. ‘You get out of here,’ she said, ‘go on, get out.’
The Second Penguin Book of English Short Stories Page 31