The White Room

by L. P. Davies

  “A few days.” He turned to take hold of the back of a chair, asking: “May I?”

  “What formality.” Her eyes twinkled. “If we don’t get together at the same table now, we will later, when Mary brings the supper in. Knowing her, she won’t bother about laying separate tables.”

  Axel sat down facing her.

  “You look tired,” she observed sympathetically. “A hard day?”

  “I suppose you could call it that.”

  She reached down to her side to bring up a handbag, opening it and offering him a cigarette case.

  “Thank you.” He shook his head. “I don’t smoke.”

  But his hand had reached out to the case. He stared down at it as if it was something that didn’t belong to him. And staring, remembered that only a short while ago he had accepted a cigarette from the landlord without any hesitation, had taken it, smoked it and enjoyed it.

  The girl put her own construction upon the wavering of his hand.

  “Trying to give them up?” She closed the case without taking one herself. “Then I won’t tempt you. I don’t use them very often myself. It’s just that I couldn’t resist buying my duty-free quota on the boat.”

  The feeling of emptiness was there, hovering, waiting. Axel fought to keep it at bay.

  “You’ve been on a boat?” he asked with an effort.

  “All the way from St. Anatole.” She smiled again. “And now you’re going to say you’ve never heard of the place.”

  “I don’t think I have.”

  “No one ever has. But then it’s only a speck on the ocean. You can walk from one side to the other in half a day. Belongs to France. Uncle Vince has a sort of hospital there. A clinic. You may have heard of him. Dr. Vincent Salter. He’s written several books.”

  Axel had won the fight against the emptiness, but the struggle had increased the murkiness in his mind.

  “I don’t know the name,” he said.

  She mistook the strain in his voice for embarrassment.

  “There’s no need to feel bad about it. It wasn’t fair of me to ask you, anyway. He writes medical books. Unless you happen to be connected with the profession you wouldn’t have come across them.” She turned with some relief as the door opened. “Ah—supper.”

  “On its way,” Mr. Loveday assured her. “Five minutes, and your suffering is over.” Wearing a jacket in place of the apron, he put a pile of books and papers on the other table and drew up a chair.

  “I hope you won’t mind me working while you eat. I’d take this junk in the bar, only it’s still like the Black Hole of Calcutta in there. You need a clear head for accounts, else you make mistakes and have the brewery down on you like a ton of bricks.”

  “Accounts—” Miss Salter wrinkled her nose. “Don’t talk to me about accounts, Bert. You don’t know when you’re well off. I’d rather work out how much beer’s been drunk any day than have to try to figure out how come I’m a couple of thousand aspirin tablets short.”

  The landlord grinned wickedly. “Headaches all round, as it were.”

  She threw up her hands in mock horror. “That’s a stinker. You can do better than that, Bert.”

  “I can if I try.” He brooded over his littered table. “And I need a magnifying glass to read some of Mary’s writing.”

  The girl turned back to Axel. “Arc you here on holiday, Mr. Carter?” she asked pleasantly.

  Axel, gazing over her shoulder without seeing what he was looking at, listening to the conversation without paying any attention to it, forgetful too, for the moment, of the name he had assumed, heard the question without realising it had been addressed to him. The sudden silence that followed brought him back to the present. He blinked, focussing his eyes on her face.

  “Were you talking to me?”

  “You were miles away.” Her smile was inclined to be fixed, her eyes curious, a little puzzled. “I only asked if you were holidaying like me.”

  “It’s a holiday of a kind.” Because he was tired and didn’t want to have to think, he spoke more shortly than he had intended. He was aware he must have sounded stiff, standoffish.

  Her smile faded. “I’m sorry, Mr. Carter. It was only that—” Flustered, she sought help from the landlord, but he was deep in his papers. “It was just something to say. I wasn’t trying to pry.”

  It was his turn to apologise.

  “Forgive me. I didn’t mean to sound abrupt. Put my bad manners down to my tiredness. Yes, this is a holiday for me, Miss—” He had forgotten her name.

  “Where I come from”—her smile was back again—“they don’t bother about formality. I’m used to being called Louise.”

  “Axel.” He gave his real name automatically, without thinking. And then he remembered, and could have bitten his tongue off. He glanced covertly in the landlord’s direction, but Mr. Loveday’s nose was still buried in his papers.

  “It sounds vaguely Scandinavian,” mused Louise.

  “A family name,” he said quickly. “To be honest, I don’t use it very often. Heaven knows why it slipped out then. My friends call me Arnold.”

  Head on one side, she weighed the merits of both names. “I think I prefer Axel.”

  “No—Arnold!” And again he had spoken far more sharply than he had intended. She was clearly taken aback. He was spared yet another apology by the sound of a car pulling up outside.

  Louise looked at her watch. “At this time of night?”

  The sound had penetrated Mr. Loveday’s little world of accounts. He paused, pen poised, listening, then coming to his feet as a knock came to the front door.

  “I’ll get it, Mary!” he called in the hall.

  “When you go in a pub and ask for a drink,” Louise remarked, eyeing the littered top of the vacated table, “you never think of what goes on behind the scenes.”

  Axel, straining to hear what was going on outside, didn’t bother to reply. A man’s voice, no doubt about that. He couldn’t catch what was being said. There was the thud of the door being closed. The car started up again, moved away. Mr. Loveday came back into the lounge, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands, yawning, commenting: “I don’t know what can be keeping Mary.” He reseated himself at the table. “Back to the grindstone. Ah”—as his wife appeared, carrying a laden tray—“at last. I thought you were dead.”

  Louise went to help, taking a folded cloth from the tray. Axel leaned back so that she could arrange it over the table.

  “Who was that at the door, Bert?” Mrs. Loveday asked, dealing out cutlery.

  “Gent asking about a room.” Her husband was back at work again, riffling through papers, jotting down figures. ‘Told him we was packed to the doors.”

  “What sort of man?” Axel tried to keep his tone flat, unemotional.

  “Now you’re asking.” Mr. Loveday looked up, scratching his cheek with the end of his pen. “Didn’t pay all that much attention to him. Local, I’d say, by the way he spoke. Not all that old—about thirty. Dark hair, going a bit thin in front. I put him down to be a commercial gent.” He paused as a thought occurred to him. “It wouldn’t likely be anyone you know, Mr. Carter? You weren’t expecting anyone?”

  “I’m certainly not expecting anyone,” Axel said. “It’s just that I wondered what sort of person would be after a room so late at night.”

  The description matched no one he knew or had had dealings with. But that didn’t mean to say the stranger wasn’t someone sent after him by Carla. All the same, it didn’t seem possible that he could have been tracked down to this out-of-the-way place. All they knew, the members of the conspiracy, was that he had jumped on a moving bus. They might be able to discover the ultimate destination of the bus, but they had no way of knowing at which point he had left it. Even if they found and talked to the conductor they would be none the wiser. A woman had dismounted at Littledene Corner, and a man the conductor knew by sight and whose name was Adrian Wolfax. Axel relaxed, the tension smoothing away.

 
The table laid, Mrs. Loveday bustled away.

  “Have you been here long?” Axel asked Louise.

  She had to think. “I’ve lost track of the days. It seems like weeks. Four days, Arnold. No—” She corrected herself. “Five. Uncle dropped me off here early on Tuesday morning. With today, that makes five.”

  Tuesday. The day on which Romaine and Kendall had got back from Cannes. But that wasn’t five days ago—

  “Only four, if you came on Tuesday,” he said.

  “Is it?” She made a moue. “See what staying out in the wilds does for you. Where are we—?” She counted the days off on the tips of her fingers. ‘Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday—”

  “It’s only Friday today,” he pointed out, smiling.

  “It is?” Her brows arched into perplexity. “Are you sure?” “I’m sure. When you’re in business you can’t afford to lose track of the days.”

  “I don’t suppose you can.” But she still wasn’t satisfied, turning to look round the room. “No newspapers as usual. They don’t seem to bother about them here. Nor radio or television.” She raised her voice. “Bert, what day is it?”

  The landlord looked up. “That’s a thing to ask.” He grinned. “The sort of question I like to hear from my guests. When you’ve no cares on your mind, you’re apt to forget what day it is.” He held up the ledger he had been writing in. “Accounts day, lass. End of the week. Saturday as ever was.”

  Earlier that same day Axel had sat at the desk in his study starting a letter to Norville. He had known what day it was— Friday—but had still checked with the calendar as he always did. A few short hours ago it had been Friday, August 8.

  “Saturday, August the ninth,” added Mr. Loveday, putting his ledger down. “And the older you get, the quicker these Saturdays come round.” -

  The emptiness was back, inside his mind and outside it, a solid thing, a pit into which Axel was falling, a black pit with steep sides that came closing in until they met high above his head, shutting off the last little glimmer of light.

  4

  It appeared that he hadn’t actually fainted.

  “Not far off it, though,” said Mr. Loveday, face dark with concern, standing back, bottle in one hand. He nodded encouragingly. “Finish the lot, Mr. Carter. It’ll do you good.”

  Axel drained the glass. Brandy, good brandy, by the smoothness and flavour.

  “I’m sorry for all the fuss.” He put the empty glass into Louise’s waiting hand. “I don’t know what could have brought it on.”

  “I do,” the girl said knowledgeably. “I’ve seen Uncle Vince look just like you did. You’ve been overworking, driving yourself too hard.”

  Mrs. Loveday was there too, flustered, worried, fluttering helplessly in the background, wondering diffidently about supper, if Mr. Carter would be ready for it.

  “I think I’d better give it a miss,” Axel told her, trying to transmit reassurance with his smile. “I have the feeling that sleep is the important thing right now.”

  The landlord insisted upon accompanying him up the stairs. “Only to make sure the bed’s made up.” It was, and turned back ready. “If there’s anything at all you need, Mr. Carter—a hot drink, maybe—”

  “You’ve all been very kind,” Axel told him. “Let me assure you that what happened down there is most unusual for me. I’ve never had a turn like that before in my life.”

  “At it from morning to night,” said the other with quiet savagery. “No letting up. We can take so much of it, the strongest of us, then snap—blackout. The hospitals is full of them.” He shook his head, gaze remote. “Life gets faster each bloody day that passes. Dog eat dog. God knows where it’s all going to end.”

  Dog eat dog …

  “One day,” Axel said, “I’m going to call it a day and buy myself a little place in the country. Just like this one. You don’t know when you’re well off, Mr. Loveday.”

  “Bert,” corrected the other, and smiled gently, almost pityingly. “I do, Mr. Carter. I haven’t always been here. Not all that long ago I used to work in an office. Good night, Mr. Garter.”

  The few things had been taken from the brief case. His pyjamas were on the pillow, his razor and toothbrush on the window ledge. Axel undressed and slid between sheets that were cool and fresh and smelled faintly of lavender.

  A day, a whole day, had been taken out of his life. It had been all right up to the moment when he had looked at the calendar on his study desk. Up until then he could account for every day, for every minute of every waking day. Sometime between then and now he had lost twenty-four hours.

  He tried to bring back the scene in the study, the pen in his hand, Carla suddenly at his side, the letter to Norville unwritten. It was like trying to recapture a dream. That would be because the drug had started to do its work.

  Carla had left. So had the others. He had gone quickly through the house trying to find them. Then he had done the same again, only slowly, making his plans to get away. He had lain on the bed to wait for darkness. And he had fallen asleep.

  He had lost the missing day while he had been unconscious in drugged sleep. He had slept not for a few hours but all through the night and tire whole of the next day. Comforted, satisfied by the only possible explanation, Axel closed his eyes to fall asleep almost straight away.

  And to dream. To see Carla, cool and aloof, standing in the lounge, asking: “What are you going to do?”

  And then he was in a room—he didn’t know where or how he had come to be there. A small room with the nightmare horror of shining white walls, flat white ceiling, white-tiled floor. Whiteness everywhere, terrifying, unbearably oppressive, pressing in remorselessly. A voice. You are going to kill—

  His own voice. I am going to kill—

  Axel opened his eyes and sat up. Morning, bright morning, the room filled with sunshine. His pulse was throbbing in his throat, he could still hear the sound of his own voice, he could still feel the terror of the nightmare white room.

  The memory paled and faded. The morning shouldered the night aside. He could hear voices, smell food.

  There was no plug for his electric razor in the bathroom. He had to take out the bulb from the ceiling light. The razor hummed gently over his cheeks and chin. Something was wrong … Holding the razor away from his face he leaned forward, staring closely at his reflection in the mirror.

  A man’s face is the most familiar thing to him there can ever be. He knows even- small crease, the exact shade of flesh, even- infinitesimal blemish. And because he shaves almost every morning of his life, he knows exactly the feel and texture of the beard to be removed.

  Something was wrong … Two things. The first came to Axel as he looked in the mirror, because it was to do with his reflection. In some subtle way his features seemed changed, different off key. Why he should have that impression, he didn’t know. There was no part of his face on which he could set his finger and say: this is different from yesterday.

  And the second … Something positive, no question of vague impressions. It came to him as he was reaching up to unplug his razor. He had just finished doing what he did every morning. He had shaved off one day’s growth of stubble. One day’s growth, not two. Not the two there should have been if he had slept through the missing day.

  His mind was still confused, his thoughts sluggish. The night’s sleep hadn’t washed away the effect of the drug as he had hoped. He still wasn’t capable of thinking clearly, of trying to reason the problem out.

  He ran water into the bowl and plunged his face into its steamy softness. Afterwards, drying himself, he watched himself in the mirror, trying again to find out the cause of the disturbing, unidentifiable change. Engrossed, he used the towel longer than was necessary, continuing to rub his face after it was dry. And when he came to put the towel down he saw where a faint brown mark marred the green and white pattern. Not grime—he had washed too thoroughly for that. It was the same towel that he had used last night. He tur
ned it over, discovering a similar stain on the other side. But they were both marks that could have been on the towel before he came to use it.

  In his bedroom he finished dressing, having no choice but to put on the same underclothes and shirt as yesterday, something he hated having to do, something he had never had to do before. Clothes—he would have to buy new things. Shirts, socks, handkerchiefs. He passed his fingers through his hair. A brush and comb. Smoothing his hair into shape as best he could, he went down the stairs.

  Mrs. Loveday followed him into the lounge. “I heard you knocking about, Mr. Carter. And how are you feeling this morning?”

  Louise was already seated at the table. She waited until plates had been set in front of them, overladen plates by Axel’s standards, before delivering her judgement on his appearance.

  “I must say you do look better.” She considered him carefully, head on one side, fork arrested in mid air. “Almost younger-looking.”

  “Call if you want anything,” Mrs. Loveday said on her way out.

  The girl looked at the closed door and then down at her plate. She spoke in a low voice, quickly, not having to pause to think, a pre-rehearsed little speech.

  “I was born quite close to here, in a small place called Compton Basset. No brothers or sisters. When I was little my parents took me with them to the States. Uncle Vince was already living there. My mother and brother were both killed in an automobile accident when I was only nine. Uncle Vince took me to live with him. Two years later, when he was offered the clinic on St. Anatole, I went with him. I’ve been I here ever since. This is really my first visit to England. It’s almost the first holiday I’ve ever had. Uncle Vince gets some of his drugs and serums from a place in Norwich. That’s where he is now, enjoying himself with the scientists there. We were supposed to stay at a house called Green Ladies at Compton Basset. It’s owned by friends of Uncle Vince. But they’re away for a week or so, and the place is empty. They sent us the key—I have it now and told us to move in. But Uncle Vince said he didn’t see why I should have to do housework and cooking while I was on holiday. He wanted me to stay at one of the Norwich hotels, but I said I’d rather have somewhere quieter. I don’t like noise and bustle after St. Anatole. So he sent me here. Bert Loveday used to work for the people who own Green Ladies.” Louise looked up. “End of story.”