The Poison Cupboard

by John Burke

  He was puzzled, but her smile reassured him. He got up with a disgruntled moan, and tried to kiss her again, but it was light and meaningless.

  They went back to the skiff. She felt, strangely, much closer to him on the journey back than she had done in the hut. When he said with a brightness that did not quite conceal his momentary uncertainty, ‘Free some evening next week — Tuesday, say?’ she nodded.

  ‘We’ll have more time on Tuesday,’ he said.

  She could foresee that by Tuesday he would have something organised. ‘Organised’ — it was a word he himself would use and approve of.

  She felt a tremor of anticipation. She had spent too long a time in the company of women. There simply had to be a change; there had to be something to keep her alive until Peter was released; there had to be somebody.

  Peter would have understood.

  And who was Peter to complain, after all she had learned about him recently?

  Peter was far away.

  Now that they were approaching the town, once more across the flashing surface of the water, she wished she could have been more responsive in the hut. But it had been so long — she had not been ready, not . . . not in practice, she wanted to giggle out loud.

  Next time would be different.

  Damn Laura, damn her cold eyes and her hard mouth, damn her for bringing Gil to the house and then sending him away.

  Going back in the bus, Charlotte found that for no good reason she was despondent and wanted to cry.

  Chapter Four

  Summer was dubious yet insistent. It hesitated and seemed about to succumb to discouragement, allowing a blustering wind and rain to gain the ascendancy. Then, a day later, there would be an appreciable advance: the grass would be dry under the suddenly aggressive sun, and the distances would shimmer like water.

  The older folk of the district developed their usual seasonal complaints. Their rheumatism, about which they had made such bitter prophecies at the onset of winter, began to give them even more trouble. There were streaming colds — ‘An’ no wonder, what wi’ rain one day and sun the next’ — and a minor epidemic of influenza. Laura predicted the deaths of two old women who had, some months ago, declared that they would not survive the winter. Her predictions were fulfilled. Having survived the winter, the patients viewed the coming of summer with a feeling almost of resentment, and decided to die.

  There was an outbreak of polio some ten miles away. It spread insidiously. Parents kept their children away from school — but not from the cinema — and Laura was called out to some few dozen urgent cases which proved to be no more than ordinary sore throats, stiff necks, or the result of sheer imagination. Also, she watched a child die.

  Someone was run over fifty yards from their front door. Charlotte saw the stains, shrouded in sawdust, after the casualty had been removed. It made her sick. She thought how Peter would have felt, and contrasted him with his sister.

  ‘I don’t know how you do it,’ she said to Laura.

  There was awe in her tones. She was prepared, Laura realised, to admire — prepared to look up to her.

  So many of them were like that. Even those not directly concerned were willing, even anxious, to idolise a doctor in the hour of need. One learned not to react to their worshipping eyes, their silly admiration. She had learned early. She had never gone through that sentimental stage of wanting to do good, to nurse the sick, to lay a cool hand on a fevered brow . . .

  For Laura, sickness was a challenge. She fought to save people’s lives merely in order to feel that she had cheated death: she battled to drive it from the room. Success gave her a thrill of power and achievement. When she lost, there would invariably be a moment of black frustration — then nothing. The dead were always so dead. Once life had fled, there was so clearly nothing left . . . nothing at all. The job was finished. She lost interest at once. They called her callous; yet they recognised, as she knew with pride, her untiring determination: they relied, those who became her patients, on that will of hers, preferring her unsparing, angry devotion to the pleasantly soothing ministrations of Dr. Whiting.

  Laura drew few generalisations from her work. A case was a case, she dealt with its various features, and she formulated no philosophy. Only now and then did she allow herself, impatiently, to resent the outcome of a particular struggle.

  ‘All the better people die,’ she once said to her mother, in a rare moment of confidence. ‘The ones who are useful, and who have responsibilities — they die. When I see those that are left, and think of what some of them deserve —’

  ‘You shouldn’t talk like that, dear. And besides’ — Mrs. Swanton threw it in as a consolation — ‘the bad ones go too, all in due time. We all come to it.’

  The bad ones go, too. Laura sat at her desk one bright afternoon and thought about that. Yes, they would all go in time; but some of them not soon enough.

  Charlotte, for example. How much better the world would be without Charlotte! She might so easily succumb to one of the many seasonal ailments — or to something far more serious. Other people did. But Charlotte went on unscathed. It was quite wrong.

  Laura rubbed her eyes. She was more tired than she cared to admit. She rarely enjoyed the summer months: warm languorous days had never appealed to her. In the cold weather she could be brisk and wide awake. Now she was too easily exhausted.

  She ought to be getting out that bottle and nasal dropper for Mrs. Thompson. And there were at least two other visits she simply must fit in this afternoon.

  There was a tap at the door. Her mother looked in with a placatory smile. In the passage, standing in shadow, was Charlotte.

  ‘Anything you want in Jury, dear?’ asked Mrs. Swanton.

  ‘Not that I can think of,’ said Laura, surprised. ‘Why?’

  ‘Charlotte’s going in on the next bus. We thought . . . she thought she might get anything you wanted. Save you a journey.’

  It was a blatant bid for affection. Who had thought of it — her mother, or Charlotte? Probably mother. This was one of her sporadic attempts to persuade the two of them (and herself; perhaps herself above all) that really they were getting on splendidly together.

  Mrs. Swanton looked anxious when she did not get an immediate reply. She ventured:

  ‘Charlotte was saying how tired you’ve been looking.’

  Charlotte, obviously making an effort, edged forward.

  ‘I thought if I could do anything while I was out shopping . . .’

  Laura pushed herself up from her chair. ‘If you mean you want a lift into Jury, why not say so?’

  ‘Really, Laura,’ protested her mother: ‘the way you twist things!’

  Laura reached up for the bottle and dropper for Mrs. Thompson, and walked towards Charlotte.

  ‘Coming, then?’

  Charlotte flushed, and her limp little mouth tightened. She swung abruptly round and walked out. They heard her cross the waiting-room, and the front door slammed behind her.

  ‘Really, Laura,’ said Mrs. Swanton again.

  Laura went out at a more leisurely pace. She got into the car, and turned towards Jury.

  On the corner by the church, Charlotte was standing at the bus-stop.

  Laura could not repress a smile. Flouncing out of the house in a flurry of indignation, Charlotte had forgotten that the next bus was not due for another twenty minutes. She had condemned herself to a long wait.

  Laura brought the car in to the kerb. Charlotte turned away.

  ‘Come on,’ said Laura. ‘Get in.’

  ‘I’m not in any hurry,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Get in.’

  There was no one about; no one to witness what would happen or not happen. Proud defiance meant nothing on an empty stage.

  ‘I’ve got to go through Jury anyway,’ said Laura. ‘You can get the bus back. It’ll give you a lot more time if you come in with me.’ Her amused contempt for Charlotte was so great that she found she could feel almost charitab
le towards her.

  Charlotte got in. The car swung round the corner and raced inland.

  The breeze was hot. Laura narrowed her eyes against the brightness of the glistening road. Charlotte sat bolt upright and stared straight ahead.

  A blaze of rambler roses fell in a torrent over a wall where the car slowed for a bend. Beyond a low gate shone a Georgian house, expansive in its ideal setting, its ideal summer afternoon.

  ‘That’s a lovely house,’ said Laura idly. She carried the picture of it in her mind as they drove on: a picture of this afternoon, given an added dimension by memory. ‘Peter,’ she said, ‘used to say he’d live there one day.’

  ‘Daydreams,’ said Charlotte. ‘I remember I —’

  ‘He used to make up stories about the place. He liked the shutters and the look of the front door. We never passed it without something new occurring to him.’

  ‘He’ll have forgotten all that by now.’

  ‘I don’t think so. You never forget things like that. Childhood impressions are much more important than anything that comes later. They cause a lot of trouble, one way and another.’

  ‘Peter’s got over being troubled by that sort of thing,’ said Charlotte tightly.

  Laura’s brief mood of tolerance faded. The pert hostility of Charlotte’s voice had begun once more to rasp on her nerves. She said:

  ‘No one can get away from the past. Certainly Peter can’t. I know him. His childhood, his family, his daydreams . . . they can’t be cancelled out. They’ll always be there. Whether you cling to your memories or repudiate them, they’ve had their effect on you. When Peter comes back here —’

  ‘Peter isn’t coming back here,’ said Charlotte.

  Jury scrambled up the hill ahead of them. Laura drove faster and faster, then slowed at the speed limit sign.

  She said: ‘Where do you suppose he can go, then?’

  ‘Not here,’ said Charlotte urgently. ‘Anywhere but here. He’s not going to come back. I won’t let him.’

  ‘He may have ideas of his own about that. We’ll see.’

  ‘No,’ said Charlotte. ‘No. This place has done him enough harm. It’s not going to do him any more. I’m never going to let him come back here, not now I know what it’s like. Never.’

  The swirl of traffic at the foot of the slope caught them up. A double-decker bus leaned out from the corner, and Laura drove with angry precision between its green wall and the rattling side of an oncoming builder’s lorry. She went up into the main shopping street, and stopped for a few seconds only to let Charlotte get out. Neither of them spoke again. Laura drove on, over the hill and out of the town, swinging back at last on to the marsh below.

  She visited Mrs. Thompson and two other patients, spent about five minutes in each house, and afterwards did not remember what she had said. She did not remember driving down the road to Brookchurch, but in a space of time which she could not have measured she found herself back at her desk.

  ‘Is that you, dear?’ Mrs. Swanton called from the back of the house. ‘There’s been a call for you. I’ve left the message on your pad.’

  Laura read the message and pushed it to one side. She pulled the filing tray towards her and went through the accumulation of letters and advertising pamphlets. Discarded material she stacked on one side, and then began to tear it up, four or five letters and glossy circulars at a time, folding them and tearing them across with a savage twist of her wrists.

  If only something would happen. If only fate would contrive an accident . . . something. But she did not believe in fate, beneficent or malevolent.

  Peter’s marriage to Charlotte was a thing which ought not to last. But Laura had in these recent years seen so much sickness, so much pain and stupidity, so much that was senseless, purposeless, that she knew the marriage would probably last for year after intolerable year. They were both healthy, and one felt they would avoid the more common accidents. Peter would be bound irremediably to Charlotte unless something happened — or, rather, unless something were made to happen.

  On the other side of the wall she heard a dull thump. Then there was a scrabbling noise that seemed to come up from under the floor, a noise like the rustling of innumerable beetles in the foundations.

  It was a familiar sound, but for a moment it puzzled Laura. She was not usually here when this part of the day’s routine was carried out. As a rule Gil had gone down to the cellar to fill the scuttle for the fire when she was out on her visits. Now that he no longer came, Laura’s mother did the job. It was Mrs. Swanton who at this moment was scraping and shovelling away in the cellar.

  I suppose, thought Laura — by no means for the first time — we ought to get an electric water heater and save all that clambering up and down. But — the answer came as it had come every time before — the stove does heat the house so beautifully, and once they started ripping it out there was no telling . . .

  She shook herself, and then got up. These disjointed thoughts were as irritating as the ramblings of some patient coming out from under an anæsthetic.

  She heard her mother’s feet dragging up the ladder, and the bump of the scuttle on the floor of the passage. Then the footsteps went heavily away.

  As usual, Mrs. Swanton had forgotten to close the flap of the cellar behind her. She seemed to have a rooted objection to doing so until she had carried the scuttle out to the kitchen. Gil had always been most meticulous about that, ever since Laura had given him the severe little lecture which she had also, so many times, without result, given to her mother.

  ‘The passage is very dark, Mother. You know yourself what it’s like for anyone coming in from outside. The whole thing is a case of real incompetence: it ought never to have been made in that way.’

  ‘It was your father, dear, who had it put in,’ her mother would gently remind her. ‘It was to save us going out of doors and down the steps at the back.’

  Gil had not argued or grumbled about bad design. He had nodded, and made a point of closing the flap as soon as he emerged.

  ‘Of course,’ Laura had said to her mother more than once, ‘if you want to get rid of me — if you want me to break my neck . . .’

  She was about to open the door now and go out and down the passage, to slam the flap so that her mother would hear it and feel guilty, when a sound made her stop.

  There were quick footsteps at the front of the house. She looked out of the window, and realised that several hours had somehow escaped her. The afternoon was at its end, and Charlotte was coming back towards the house.

  It was still sunny outside. Laura knew what it would be like to enter the house from that bright world — first the coolness of the waiting-room, with sunlight striking in at angles, and then the darkness of the passage to the kitchen. The eyes were not ready for that plunge into shadow: one screwed them up and walked into darkness towards the renewed brightness of the kitchen at the end.

  The flap over the steps down into the cellar was up. Propped sideways against the wall, it did not cut off the rectangle of light from the kitchen door. To leave that flap open like that was to invite an accident.

  Laura stood quite still with her hand on the doorknob. She heard Charlotte come in and cross the waiting-room, still walking quickly.

  Her shoes struck the floor of the passage.

  Laura did not move.

  Then she heard her mother’s voice. ‘Oh, goodness. Charlotte, wait. Wait a second. Oh, what a mercy . . . Just stay there a second.’

  Laura opened the door and went out. She said, ‘Mother, you don’t mean to say you’ve left the trap open again?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Mrs. Swanton with guilty cheerfulness. ‘I remembered. I was just on my way back. No harm done.’

  ‘Another few seconds,’ said Laura, ‘and it wouldn’t have been all right. It would have been too late.’

  The flap went down with a bang. Laura and Charlotte walked across it and on into the kitchen.

  Now Laura knew. Now she co
uld evade it no longer. Somehow, in the time of waiting for Peter to come home, she was going to get rid of Charlotte. It was no good shirking the full awareness of her intentions.

  She intended Charlotte to die.

  Chapter Five

  The school secretary knocked and went into the study.

  Mr. Cartwright, interrupted in the course of a carefully developed sentence which had reached its second parenthetical clause — ‘a state of affairs which, I fear, our County Council wilfully ignores, the Education Committee sidesteps, and my Governors are unwilling to face, to the detriment of the children’s welfare’ — cleared his throat very deliberately and turned his back on her.

  Miss Jones, too, cleared her throat. She smiled apologetically at the visiting H.M.I., who was in point of fact glad of the respite. He had been subjected to a long lecture on Mr. Cartwright’s need of money if the school was not to fall down, and the need for more plasticity on the part of those authorities who dealt with building allocations and the provision of teaching materials. Plasticity . . . ‘And there’s another word,’ Mr. Cartwright had said, ‘on the tip of my tongue.’ But then he had seen a piece of chalk on the window ledge, and it had prompted him to mention that even chalk was in short supply, thanks to the miserliness of the Education Committee, who most unhelpfully accused him of having spent all his allocation for the coming year.

  Recognising the phrases which she had caught on opening the door, Miss Jones knew that the headmaster had a lot more to say yet. She was sorry for the H.M.I., and sorry, too, for the staff, whose shortcomings would soon be summed up by Mr. Cartwright before the inspector was allowed to enter their classrooms.

  She said: ‘I’m sorry to break in, but —’

  ‘I’m very busy, Miss Jones.’

  His voice was sweetly reasonable. During her first year at the school she had been several times reduced to tears by that sweet, magisterially infallible voice; but now it had not the same power over her. Sometimes it provoked a mild nausea, but generally speaking she was immune. She ignored the gentle menace in his tone now, and said: