by A. L. Barker
Ralph lost sight of the rose-coloured pimple, in its place was Pecry’s fish-shaped eye.
“There will be a change of policy at the end of this year. It might help Krassner to endure the strain of waiting two more months if you tell him that he is unlikely to have to do so again.”
In the second place there was the absence of the cat. It was not waiting for him when he returned to the flat on Sunday night and did not appear on Monday or Tuesday. He missed it, as much as he would have missed any part of his routine. Routine had crystallised round him. When he realised that not only could he tell what was going to happen, he could ensure that it did happen, it seemed to him next to godliness.
But he had always had an ungodly dread that it couldn’t last. A slight deviation in the Monday to Friday chain was insidious. The slighter it was, the more insidious, and the more dangerous. In a chaotic world any semblance of order was suspect and people would like to dissolve his – Bertha and Emmeline for the best possible reasons, others, like Krassner, because they were simply doing what came naturally.
He couldn’t blame Bertha and Emmeline for the defection of the cat but he saw it as a move against him, another move, for Krassner was already doing his part. Perhaps it was a move by the cat itself. He had never actually liked the animal.
On Wednesday evening he went looking for it. The back garden, which none of the tenants used or tended, was a mash of long grass and laburnum pods. Ralph poked about half-heartedly, resentful more than anxious. He got his feet wet and rubbed off some green slime from the wall with his sleeve. He found a mattress and a cache of empty bottles, but not the cat.
He called, “Put, put, put,” and looked at the house, conjecturing which sills the cat came up by. There was none within cat-jumping distance from ground level, so it must jump from the dividing fence between the gardens on to Madame Belmondo’s sill on the first floor. Not a straight leap, it would require concentration with the bay to negotiate and not much purchase on the top of the fence.
Ralph went to the fence and tried to look through. From his window he had seen a grating in the next-door yard: it gave into the cellar and was broken. Old Miss Hanrahan used to say that she watched the rats going in and out of the grating like Christians. Why Christians? Going in and out of church could be the ultimate in decorum, decorous rats would be sinister. While he was beating the elder bushes to get to the fence Marise opened her window and called to him.
He looked up and there she was, shining out of the bricks and he knew that he had been waiting all the time – all his time – for this. Perhaps he had actually been cut out for it, it was perhaps the only situation he hadn’t drifted into. There could be just so many gratuitous events in a life and one that was essential, just one, whatever form it took. Some people’s essentials never came about, their throws in the dark went unredeemed. He was lucky.
He let the tough twigs of the elder slap back on the fence. “I’m looking for the cat.”
“Your cat?”
“It’s not mine, it isn’t anyone’s.” He had to be absolutely truthful. Afterwards, he remembered that strange necessity.
“What colour is it?”
“Tabby. It comes every night for food but it hasn’t been since Friday. It may have fallen down the grating in the next door garden.”
“What are you going to do?”
He had thought that something might already have been done and that he need not expect to see the cat again. The event of Marise, of seeing her and realising that he had come into the garden for that purpose and in that hope, flustered him profoundly. In order to acclimatise a little, he put the event off, put it back, and concentrated on the cat.
There would be no need to buy any more food for it. He had gone on, the last two days, buying tins as if he expected it to come back and demand to eat all the meals it had missed.
He knew himself, he couldn’t be trusted, he would ruin everything. If he didn’t have a moment to fear he would trample in ahead of the angels.
“I must keep looking.” He stared down as if he meant to go over the ground with a microscope.
“I can see into the next-door garden if I stand on the chest of drawers,” said Marise. “But you’re tall, you wouldn’t have to stand on anything.”
Ralph held his tongue, lesser events than this had fallen apart at a word, at one of his words.
“You’d better come in,” said Marise sharply. She was thinking that he ought to frighten her. He ought not to be standing there with his head down and the seams of his suit shining, as if he had never done anything. Perhaps he was hiding – of course he was hiding. He had given himself another name and another manner, a quiet manner to fool everybody but it didn’t fool Marise. She had to smile at herself for expecting to be frightened, waiting for a bogeyman. Naturally he wouldn’t let her see what he was. Not yet. Pretending to look for his cat.
“I’ll open the door,” she called and watched him slowly cross the garden, pausing to prise open the tussocks of grass with his foot. What was he looking for? She felt a thrill of conviction and she too moved slowly to the door, savouring the consequences of opening it to him.
She was excited. But she could stand back and marvel at herself. She had on her red dress, the one which Tomelty said made her look like a glass of blood, and a pearl necklace was twined round her elbow.
“Come in,” she said, “I’m all alone.”
No-one would understand how she could do such a thing. She did not fully understand herself, it was simply one of the things she could do and it was going to be the biggest and possibly the last.
Looking into the mirror after she had let John Brown in, she knew that she would never see her face grow old. This was July, she might not see her face in August, she certainly wouldn’t see it at Christmas. She touched her cheek and turned to him.
No-one could understand. She was a mystery, no-one ever knew what she would do next. There were people who thought they could tell her, people who wanted her to stop living while they weren’t looking at her.
John Brown was two-faced and now that they were so close she could see the two sides of his face. Turn over any feature and there was the converse, there was John Brown.
“I wish you’d keep your hat on,” she said. “Your bowler hat.”
He put a hand to his head and blushed.
“You don’t look anything without it.” What would Uncle Fred say if he could see John Brown now? Uncle Fred would say no because Jack had said yes. Which meant that they had both said yes. It was as simple as that. Marise did not mind being thought a fool when she was actually cleverer than any of them. “Why did you say the cat isn’t yours?”
“It’s a stray.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Thank you.”
She observed him while she lit the gas under the kettle. He stood waiting, a big neat man in a respectable and respecting City suit. He had everything packed away, he was a quiet one, the quiet ones were the worst. Thinking of Tomelty who was a riot and was merely not good, she could see that a murderer would be very, very quiet.
“Aren’t you going to look out of the window? Isn’t that what you came for?”
He started to move, cautiously, like a giant in a doll’s house, but nothing here was as small as that. Marise laughed: embarrassed, he put his hand to his head and smoothed his hair.
“What’s the matter? You look all right, you look very nice.” She was feeling great pleasure. The situation was perilous and she would be taking her life in her hands, taking and throwing it away in style. She had felt this undercurrent of passion coming to her from other people and now it was coming to her from a murderer. There couldn’t be anyone more passionate than this murderer. “Go and look out of the bedroom window, it will set your mind at rest.”
He went quickly into the bedroom, glanced through the window and came back.
“Well?”
He shook his head.
“I don’t think you car
e about the cat. I wanted to be friends with it. Where we lived before there was nothing to be friends with except the birds. I used to feed them on the window-sill. They ate out of my fingers.” It was a picture she had seen, of herself covered with loving birds. Once in Victoria Station a pigeon blundered on to her bare arm but she had hated the sight of its dirty old mauve feet on her skin.
“We can be friends,” he said, “you and I.”
She frowned. “I don’t know.”
“But surely, surely –”
She did not miss the pleading in his voice. “Friends have to trust each other.”
Then he gave her what she described to Tomelty as a funny look. Oh, he knew what she meant, John Brown knew that she knew and that was how she could suddenly see what he saw – no Marise, no charmer, just a tender pink parcel for tearing open. Suddenly she was frightened in a plain, cold way. “I don’t like his eyes,” she told Tomelty, “I look at the holes in his chin while he talks.” She added, “He doesn’t talk much.”
Not that he was another Uncle Fred. This man would tell her anything she asked, he wanted to, she could see that, but he did not know where to begin. She tried to help him. She explained about herself and the life she lived. It was necessary to go into a few details about Jack Tomelty.
“He’d like to stop me living when he’s not here. He’d like to switch me off until he comes back so that he needn’t bother about what I was doing. Of course I don’t do anything, I’m very happy.”
She took a cup from the china cabinet. It had a pattern of green peacocks and would still have been pretty if the glaze had not cracked. Inside the rim was dust which she forgot to wipe off.
“I love this cup, I don’t know what I see in it – just about everything. I bought it the last time Jack took me out. That would be last Christmas, he took me to see the Christmas tree. A shilling was all I had, and that’s what the cup cost.”
Tomelty had picked it out of the china cabinet the day they moved in and told her it was genuine Spode. It was when he was talking to her about graciousness and Marise had asked if Spode meant a cracked old cup and Tomelty said she had to learn that things need not be new to be good.
Tea ran out of the crack and made a pool on the table. “It’s very old, old things are best. Except me, I don’t want to be more than twenty, ever.” She watched him take up the cup, trying to catch the drips in his hand and putting his lips to the rim to drink the dusty tea. “Are you married?”
He nodded.
“Why haven’t I seen your wife?”
“She lives with her sister.”
“Why not with you?”
“Her sister’s a widow. They lived together since before Emmeline married.”
“Emmeline Shilling? Is that what she calls herself?” Somewhere at the end of the newspapers, not on the front pages, would be a mention of Mrs Emmeline Brown, alias Shilling, the murderer’s wife.
“Her name’s Openshaw, Emmeline Openshaw.”
“But she’s married to you?”
“Bertha’s married to me, not Emmeline. Bertha’s name’s the same as mine, but Emmeline is my wife’s sister and her name is Openshaw.”
“Do make up your mind!” Marise picked up Barbra-Bear. “Emmeline Bertha, Bertha Emmeline – I don’t like either.” She was bouncing the toy on her knee and his eyes followed it as if mesmerised. “Marise Tomelty is my married name. I’m not really used to it. When people say ‘Good morning, Mrs Tomelty,’ I look to see who is behind me.”
He gathered up the cubes of rubber that were falling out of Barbra-Bear and gave them to her. Marise shut her hand and suddenly opening it let them jump out and spill to his feet.
“Jack threw her out of the window and she burst open. He’s so jealous, he hates me having anything of my own.” How about John Brown’s wife? she was thinking, how stupid the woman must be to be married to him. “I suppose she’s pretty –” she did suppose that because he had the pick of women and would choose the best looking one to keep – “Bertha’s pretty, isn’t she?”
“No, she’s not pretty.”
“Why did you marry her then?”
“I needed her.”
“I can see you’d need someone, but why her especially?”
“It’s a long story.”
“We have plenty of time.” She stuffed Barbra-Bear behind the cushions. Then she knelt up in the chair, smoothing her dress under her thighs. “Tell me.”
He stood up violently, like a man coming up for air rather than leaving a tea-table. “I’ll go next door and ask to look in their cellar. The cat may have gone in after rats and not be able to get out.”
“It’s gone courting,” said Marise. “It’s waiting for the she-cat, it will wait for weeks.”
“Weeks?”
“It will sit in one place waiting and waiting. The grass will grow up into its fur.” She laughed and he had to smile, but then she said, “You’d think they’d get past it, a man couldn’t wait so long, could he?” and he looked away.
Marise never considered that she might have gone too far, she simply grew tired of going in the same direction. She plumped herself deep into the chair. “You were going to tell me a long story. About Bertha, Bertha-who-isn’t-pretty.”
“She’s kind,” he said hurriedly, “the kindest person I know.”
“Not now, I’m the kindest person you know now. Do you think I’m pretty?”
“Yes!”
The ferocity of his answer amused her, as did the way he avoided looking at her while she was looking at him. He wouldn’t meet her eye because of what she knew. She hoped he wasn’t ashamed, an ashamed murderer.
“Very well, I am pretty and kind. Now tell me about Bertha.”
“What do you want to know?”
“If she’s big and fat or small and thin. Where you met her, when you married her.” Whenever she took her eyes off him he looked at her. She gazed down into her lap to give him time to get a good look. “What was it like before –” she started to say “before anything happened,” but it struck her that things had happened to this man all his life and she wanted to know about all of them – “before you were married?”
“Like? It wasn’t much different. I tended to do certain things over and over again. Now I do other things over and over again.”
“So do I,” said Marise, “shut up here and virtually a prisoner.”
He had a changeable face, she was able to change it with whatever she said. When he smiled, as he did now, Jack wouldn’t have recognised John Brown.
“Bertha’s short and plump, Emmeline’s big but not fat. You couldn’t call her fat.”
“I couldn’t call her anything, could I, I haven’t seen her. You’re not married to her too, are you?”
“Sometimes I think so.”
“Are you a bigamist as well?”
“As well as what?”
“Where did you find them and when did you marry them?”
“We met on a boat, crossing from the Isle of Wight. There was a storm and they thought the boat would sink. I found them on deck, waiting beside the life-boats.”
“What did you think about them?”
“It was pouring with rain. I made them go down into the saloon –”
Still more she wanted to know, “What do you think about me?”
She was watching him closely for his unspeakable thoughts, but after one glare of dismay his face turned wooden.
“I think you’re very kind.”
“You’re a nice one to keep talking about kindness,” she said crossly. “I don’t call that a long story. What were you doing on the Isle of Wight.”
“I went for a day trip. I like the sea, I wanted to go to sea as a boy, in the Merchant Navy. But things turned out otherwise – and I think for the best. The last five years have been the best for me.”
“Not before? Ten, eleven, twelve, fifteen years ago, wasn’t it nice for you then?” Fifteen years ago he should have been dead.
“I
’ve only known Bertha about five years. It was Bertha you wanted to hear about.”
“Five years?” So that was it, and if the woman had married him and stayed married without knowing what he was she must be even stupider than Marise had supposed. Perhaps she had found out too late, perhaps he wouldn’t let her go. What kind of private fun had he had in the last five years, the best years for him?
“So it all happened before Bertha. And this is the best you can expect now.” Marise nodded, any time was better than none, any living was better than hanging. “You can tell me if you like. And if you like I’ll promise not to tell anyone else. If,” she added scrupulously, “there’s anything you don’t want anyone else to know. I would never break my promise without your permission. You’d have to come to me and say, ‘Marise Tomelty, I release you from your vow, you may talk without fear or favour about me and anything I told you’.”
“I didn’t come here to talk about myself.”
“You came to talk to me and what I want to hear about is yourself.”
He sighed, the sigh provoked her, she hated people standing away and sighing at her. “I have been the receiver of confidences from very important people. Like my uncle. If I mentioned his name you’d get a shock.”
“I’ve nothing to confide.”
“I could surprise you.”
“You do surprise me,” he said.
“But while I’m under a vow of silence wild horses can’t drag anything out of me. I shan’t tell you what I know about my uncle.”
“I wouldn’t want you to break a promise – to me or to anyone.”
“My Uncle Fred Macey –” Marise threw at him and waited.
“I ought to be going.” He lifted the cracked cup from its pool of tea. “I’m afraid I’ve made a mess.”
“He was at Scotland Yard until he retired. Detective-Inspector Macey. He was constantly in the Sunday papers.”
Wiping his fingers with his handkerchief he seemed about to wipe the table with it as well. The tea was seeping steadily out of the cup, overwhelming a grain in the wood it rolled to the edge of the table, caramel-coloured. “Hadn’t we better mop it up?”