The Poison Cupboard

by John Burke

  Mr. Drysdale said: ‘Damn it, if you don’t want to go there every night, you don’t have to.’

  Mrs. Swanton looked at Laura. Laura’s expression had not changed. She continued to look thoughtful and strangely remote as she picked up her bag and got ready to leave.

  Chapter Three

  Charlotte was waiting for the bus. This was the second time this week that she had been into Jury. The need to escape from the house grew more pressing every day.

  She looked down the Tapton Harbour road, along which the bus would come; and, looking in that direction, thought inevitably of Gil.

  She could not understand what had happened. That he should have returned home to look after his grandfather was only to be expected. But that he should have made it so clear that he did not want to see her again was humiliating. For a boy to look at her as he had looked at her, to turn away with that shiver as though disgusted with her or with himself . . . it was hateful.

  Even before he had got ready to leave it was plain that their agreeable, undemanding comradeship had been destroyed. Not only did he not seek her out, or turn to grin at her as she passed: he deliberately avoided her. She was surprised how much this rankled. There were evenings when she was at a loose end and would have welcomed his company. But either he was not to be found or he had some job to do for Laura — ‘Rather specially want to get it done right now,’ he would say, not looking at her, looking anywhere but straight at her.

  It was almost a relief when the time came for him to go home.

  Charlotte had intercepted him on his last evening in the Swanton house. She was angry that she should be forced to lie in wait for him, as though he were a man who had wearied of her, and she a woman who must make one last pitiful attempt to appeal to him. She stood in the waiting-room, not making a sound, for nearly ten minutes, and emerged as he came down the stairs.

  She said: ‘So you’re off, Gil.’

  He was holding a case in his right hand. It was heavy, but he did not put it down when she spoke to him. He stood at the foot of the stairs and looked towards the side door.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘I . . . I hope we don’t lose touch.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘I expect your grandfather will need you a lot at first,’ said Charlotte desperately. ‘But after that you’ll be coming in and out again, I suppose?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘We must go out for some more walks when you’ve got some time.’ Really, she ought to stop; but she could not. ‘Perhaps I can drop in and see you and your grandfather one week-end when you’re at home.’

  To this he absolutely refused to reply. The case swung slowly in his hand and jarred against his thigh.

  Charlotte said: ‘Gil, what’s the matter?’

  ‘The matter, miss?’ His innocence was blank, hard and unyielding.

  And so he went.

  Later, she learned that he would not be returning to the house at all: he would not even be calling in to do the odd jobs for which he had originally been engaged. This had all been decided a few days after he had gone, at some meeting, somewhere, at some time when she was not present. Laura told her the news with apparent indifference, but seemed to derive some satisfaction from studying her reaction.

  The bus appeared far down the road. It would take her to the town, and there she could look at the shops and have a cup of coffee and look at more shops, and fritter away an afternoon. Then there would be surgery, and then the radio — if Laura didn’t come into the sitting-room; Laura could not bear to have the radio on.

  The bus turned at the foot of the church tower, and slowed.

  She would much sooner have gone out across the marsh. But not alone. She would have been plagued by the recollection of Gil’s face and his earnest, sometimes derisive, explanatory voice; she would have remembered, against her will, the change in that voice — the contempt which had seeped into it. The town was better.

  The bus carried her away from Brookchurch.

  It stopped at a crossroads, and two women from a nearby farm climbed in. They were at once involved in shrill conversation with another woman who might, if one could judge from the enthusiasm with which she was greeted, have come from the other side of the world.

  They were strangers to Charlotte. She knew nobody who was not in the closest contact with the Swantons, and even then the acquaintanceship was sketchy in the extreme. The woman at Duckett’s farm, the grocer, and one of the girls beyond the post office counter were the only ones she spoke to at all regularly. She had not tried to make friends. Let them point her out as ‘Mrs. Swanton — you know, that Peter Swanton, the one who’s in gaol.’ They should come no closer.

  She stared unseeingly out of the window.

  Leave. You’re not wanted here.

  That had been made plain in so many ways, hadn’t it?

  The bus climbed from the marsh into Jury, through the ancient gateway, and at last into the market square.

  The first thing Charlotte did this afternoon was go and look at the times of trains for London.

  She had never been good at interpreting railway time-tables. Many a journey she had intended to make had been abandoned simply because those patterns of figures had refused to fall into coherent shape. A feeling of frustration came over her whenever she tried with a despairing finger to trace the progress of a train that came from one place into a junction to meet a connection which would, in its turn, head roughly in the direction she wanted.

  Today the hieroglyphics were as baffling as ever. A train that came from farther along the coast ought to stop at Jury and then, rationally speaking, go on to . . . where on earth did it go from here? She closed her eyes for an instant. Perhaps when she opened them again her forefinger would be resting on an intelligible column; perhaps, like someone picking out texts or horses with a pin, she would be given guidance and prodded into action.

  But departures from Jury and arrivals at Charing Cross just would not add up. It seemed that all trains leaving this town ran off the rails somewhere in the Weald of Kent and were lost from human sight.

  She tried to summon up the determination to go and make enquiries at the booking-office.

  From down the line came a whistle. The bridge over the river hummed, the level-crossing rattled, and then steam blew over the roof of the station. At the same moment an army lorry turned into the station approach and stopped with a jolt, its tailboard chains clattering.

  Charlotte moved away from the time-table. She was always disturbed and excited by people boarding or leaving a train. As they came through the door now, giving up tickets, she glanced swiftly at their faces as though waiting for someone she knew; in reality she was hoping to seize something that would help her — some message, some revelation from the world that lay far away down the railway line.

  A group of young soldiers squashed through the door. Their raw necks emerged querulously from their battledress. They humped their kitbags out of the way of a porter, and the driver of the three-ton lorry came towards them.

  ‘You lot for the egg farm?’

  Behind them came an older man in uniform, carefully separate from them. He looked idly round, jerked his head in Charlotte’s direction, and then said:

  ‘Long time no see. You wouldn’t be waiting for me?’

  She was startled by his jaunty, impudent smile. Then she remembered the pub at Tapton Harbour, and forced an answering smile.

  ‘Er, no,’ she said. ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Well, all right. Just my luck. I didn’t really think you would be.’

  He was deeply sunburnt, and his teeth flashed white. He seemed full of energy: he stood with his head thrust slightly forward, as though ready to provoke a fight or an argument. It would take a lot to shake that expression of aggressive self-satisfaction.

  Charlotte heard herself saying: ‘I owe you a drink, don’t I?’

  ‘Do you? Well, anyway, we’ve just got time for one.’
<
br />   There was no waste of time. He did not look flattered that she had remembered him or that she had not rebuffed him. His policy was to take everything for granted the moment it had happened, and to press on. He was already steering her across the station approach, with that swagger of his that had more in common with a sailor’s rolling gait than the usual army saunter.

  ‘I was really thinking of having a cup of coffee,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘Were you, now? This’ll do you more good. May as well celebrate the end of my leave in good style.’

  ‘You’ve just come back from leave?’ she banally said.

  ‘Back to the spud-bashing,’ he said.

  ‘Did you have a good time?’

  He smacked his lips lightly. ‘Good?’ he said with a grimace. ‘Good? You don’t know the half of it.’ The remark pleased him. ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he repeated, with a depth of meaning that was significant only to himself.

  His eyes flickered appraisingly over Charlotte, and he looked even more delighted with himself as they entered the saloon bar. Charlotte wondered what had prompted her to make that remark about owing him a drink. She had not really intended to come into a pub with him; had not meant to be drawn into anything at all.

  But his confident smile was soothing. Smug and irritating, yet soothing.

  She put her handbag on a vacant chair, and took out her purse.

  ‘Will you get them, please?’

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said.

  ‘Please.’

  He did not argue further, but took the money from her and went to the bar. Charlotte stretched out her right foot and looked down at her white shoe, coated with a slight film of dust. She tweaked at her flowered, light green skirt, and then ran her right hand thoughtfully up her bare left arm. She might have been gently restoring the circulation: she felt herself coming slowly, warily to life.

  When he had sat down opposite, grinning at her, she said:

  ‘I think you told me your name was Walter, last time we met.’

  ‘If I did, I was dead right. Didn’t have time to tell you much else, the way you hustled off.’ The window above them darkened as the three-tonner came in close to the kerb on the corner. ‘New batch,’ he said. ‘Poor blighters.’

  ‘Oughtn’t you to have been on that lorry?’

  ‘Not me. Not due back till twenty-four-hundred. It’s just that the train services to this dump are so lousy: you’ve got to get back early. Not that I’m sorry to be back, right now.’

  The compliment was offered in the certainty that it would be appreciated.

  Charlotte thoroughly appreciated it. She was in no mood to be critical. She felt a fleeting twinge of fear at the unlikely prospect of Laura appearing suddenly in the doorway, as had happened once before. Then it faded. She had no reason to be afraid of Laura. She was not going to accept Laura’s standards all the time. In a way, she would almost have been pleased to be seen here.

  Then the barman was calling, ‘Time, gentlemen, please. Time, ladies and gents.’

  She looked at Walter. He winked. ‘Nice afternoon,’ he said. ‘Just right for a boat on the river.’

  ‘I didn’t know they had any boats —’

  ‘Ah.’ He put his glass down and tapped the side of his nose. She noticed how thick and yellow his nails were. ‘Not for the general public. You’ve got to be in the know.’

  ‘And you’re in the know?’ She gave him his cue.

  ‘I can fix it,’ he said. ‘Leave it to me.’

  Fifteen minutes later they were floating out into the middle of the sand-cloudy river. Insects bounced across the surface, and the sun sparkled in the drops of water that fell from the oars.

  Walter’s delight was infectious. He had made some quick, efficient arrangement for leaving his case at a shop in the town, had joked with the man who owned the skiff, and was now pulling with strong rhythmical strokes on the oars. You could, as he had invited, leave it to him.

  ‘It’s pretty public,’ he said as the town slowly receded. ‘Not much privacy along here.’

  His head was lowered as he bent forward on the oars, so that he was looking up at her from under his eyebrows as though the sun were in his eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ she said non-committally.

  She did not want to think things out or talk about the possible consequences of this present situation. The drowsy plash of the water was enough. Enough for now.

  ‘Summer’s coming,’ said Walter brightly.

  The weather was not really warm, but there was no longer that chill which had lain on things for so many months. The river curled lazily in, away from the plain, and the long shallow valley twisted away into the hazy afternoon, its flanks sprouting an occasional cluster of farm buildings and white jutting oast-houses. Charlotte trailed her hand in the water, and shivered with pleasure.

  Walter pulled on one oar and steered them in to the bank. Pollarded trees rose like stunted sentinels above. There was no shade.

  ‘Well,’ said Walter expansively. ‘Well.’

  For the first time he showed a flicker of uncertainty. ‘Here we are,’ he said.

  Here they were. The river, the bank, the flat fields, the remote sky, the unsheltering hills: what did they add up to; to what were they supposed to provide a background?

  ‘We could get out,’ said Walter.

  ‘If you like,’ said Charlotte.

  He clambered on to the bank, and secured the boat to the bole of a tree. Then he helped her out, his right hand firm in hers. She stumbled. His left hand caught her at the waist and steadied her. She saw, closely, the odd configuration of wrinkles under his eyes, and the thickness of his lips, and she neatly released herself.

  They sat down.

  She had not expected to feel so utterly indifferent. The entire landscape had lost its colour: it stretched away in endless monochrome, and she closed her eyes against it. She sat upright on the grass with her eyes tightly shut. When, after a few seconds, she opened them, she saw that Walter had sprawled out beside her. He was fumbling in his pocket for a cigarette case and lighter.

  The background was meaningless; and the foreground, too, had lost its significance — if it had ever had any. She felt frightened. She had allowed herself to drift into this situation, and now was unable to jerk herself out of this mood of indifference.

  Walter grinned at her.

  Walter was real. He looked at her as though she, too, were real. She needed someone like Walter. He was gloriously, healthily uncomplicated. She wanted him to start talking again so that she could listen to the London echoes in his voice.

  She said: ‘What do you do down at the ranges?’

  ‘Ah, that’s hush hush. Official secrets. Anyhow, it’s not what I do down there that matters. What I do with my spare time is more interesting.’

  He spoke slightly more quickly, with a flattering urgency in his voice. They looked at one another, solemn for a moment. Then he pushed himself up, stubbed out his cigarette in the grass, and kissed her.

  She closed her eyes. His breath had the sourness of tobacco and a journey; he seemed to breathe life in through her parted lips.

  She was glad that her blouse was so flimsy, so that his hand was close to her.

  When he drew away, she smiled.

  ‘Well, now,’ he said huskily. ‘Well.’

  He got up and looked desperately across the flat landscape. She did not move. She waited, her palms pressed down against the grass, exulting in this tingling sensation of being fully alive and responsive.

  Walter was devoured by impatience. She was not troubled. Somehow she knew that this welcome hunger could not fail to be appeased.

  He said: ‘There’s a hut over there, isn’t there?’

  ‘A looker’s hut, probably,’ she lazily said.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A looker’s hut. A looker — one of the shepherds round these parts. I don’t know if they use them much.’

  ‘Not at this time of year, any
way,’ said Walter. He took her hand roughly. ‘Come on.’

  They walked across the blazing field, stumbling and beginning to laugh pointlessly.

  Charlotte said: ‘I hardly know you.’

  ‘No,’ he said, not looking at her. ‘No, you don’t, do you?’

  She sensed his apprehensiveness as they approached the tiny brick building. The door might be locked. The place might be filthy inside.

  But the door creaked and lurched open. There was some rather smelly straw on the ground, and a couple of tarpaulins or rolled sheets of some sort in one corner.

  Walter pushed the door shut. The atmosphere was warm, acrid, too long enclosed.

  Charlotte sneezed.

  Walter pulled her close to him. The button on his top pocket was hard against her breast. His fingers moved restlessly on her back.

  When she could get her mouth free she said: ‘I’m not going to get scratched by all that straw and stuff.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ He began to unfasten his battledress blouse.

  She watched him for a moment. Her knees felt weak. Then she put up one hand and unfastened the top button of her own blouse.

  Her shoulders were very white against his brown, rather leathery skin.

  ‘Suppose someone looked in at the window?’ she said, laughing.

  He looked up at the dusty pane. ‘I’ll breathe on it if you like, so they can’t see.’

  She went on laughing. He joined her, and then abruptly put his mouth on hers to silence her. For a moment they were quite still; then he moved upon her.

  She was, all the time, clearly conscious of the tilted roof and the cobwebs on the window. When his hard hands released their grip on her and she was free, she felt oddly unconcerned. Almost she wondered what circumstances had brought her into this queer little place.

  She sat up and said, with a matter-of-factness that was somehow nothing to do with her real self:

  ‘We really ought to be going.’

  ‘There’s no great panic,’ said Walter.

  She picked up his blouse and dropped it on him.

  ‘Come on.’