Nell Alone

by Jennie Melville

  ‘I’ll be there,’ he answered.

  Abel was just seating himself as Jordan arrived. He had placed a newspaper and briefcase on the bench beside him, which he removed as Jordan approached. He smiled.

  ‘You needn’t move them,’ said Jordan briefly. ‘ I’ll sit opposite.’ He didn’t want to nestle next to Abel, flesh too close to flesh.

  ‘Thank you for coming. I’m glad you could make it.’

  ‘It was easy,’ said Jordan.

  ‘We hadn’t really finished, had we?’

  ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever do that,’ said Jordan, beginning to feel exasperated.

  ‘Oh, let’s not be theoretical,’ answered Abel with a slight smile; he was a clever man. Jordan observed this and was silent.

  ‘Let me tell you what I want,’ continued Abel.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Just to talk to you a little and for you to fill in the background.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jordan thoughtfully, giving himself time to consider, ‘and I think that is what frightens me.’

  ‘No need.’

  ‘I suppose I don’t agree really with the word “background” when you use it about people and their lives. When you look at a person truly, everything is foreground. There isn’t much “background” to life as you live it, it’s all immediate.’

  Abel managed to look both sceptical, incredulous and encouraging at the same time. Jordan wanted to bare his teeth and snarl: and what you really want me to do is to talk about Nell, ramble on, let something drop that will give you a handle, that’s all your talk about background means. You’re an enemy and I know it. All the same, he couldn’t stop talking to Abel.

  ‘When you ask me to describe background you’re really asking me to describe rigor mortis.’

  Abel’s eyes widened. Perhaps he hadn’t realised he’d meant this exactly.

  ‘I can’t just separate me and Nell Hilton out and say this is important and relevant, this is trivial and unimportant. It all connects, we’re making it happen and it is part of us.’

  ‘You’re talking about being involved,’ said Abel. ‘We get plenty of involvement in our business too. With us it’s usually guilty involvement.’

  ‘You haven’t understood a word I’ve said,’ groaned Jordan. ‘ What goes on in a group may not be intended by anyone.’

  ‘It’s a criminal investigation not a philosophical one I’m engaged on. I want to discover the identity of the dead woman.’

  ‘A woman? You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes, a woman, and her connection with Dr Hilton.’

  ‘There can be no connection,’ said Jordan mechanically.

  ‘There is some connection already,’ pointed out Abel. ‘A piece of paper mentioning her name connects Dr Hilton with the dead woman. Moreover, Dr Hilton is the only member of your group who has reported a woman missing. Never mind what woman. I’m bound to find that fact interesting.’

  Jordan stared at him. Suddenly he was remembering Nell as she had been that morning and for several mornings before that, withdrawn, thoughtful, and strangely sad. The truth of his own words came home to him. She was alone, all right.

  ‘She’s all alone. She’s Nell-alone,’ he thought. ‘Nell alone.’

  ‘I’ve remembered what I wanted to tell you,’ said he aloud, still speaking in that strained thick voice.

  ‘Was there something?’

  ‘Louise came to see me before she left. Didn’t like leaving Nell alone.’

  Abel raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I think that’s important,’ muttered Jordan. He was remembering the scene vividly. Louise had made it seem important. She had to go. ‘Because I don’t think I’ll be keeping my husband if I don’t,’ she’d said jokingly. Jordan had dismissed this insinuation at the time. Louise was jealous. She was bound to be jealous of Nell. It was her only way of rationalising her bond with her sister.

  Louise had worn a bright silk scarf tied high round her neck, but the pale bruises were perfectly apparent above it. Someone had tried to strangle Louise. It was strange (and yet possibly not strange) that his mind should have refused to recognise this fact then but was willing to do so now.

  ‘She asked me to say goodbye for her to Nell. I didn’t really do that adequately. It wasn’t easy.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This dead woman,’ went on Jordan in that thick voice. ‘Was she in her early thirties, dark, curly-haired, quite tall and really thin? Did she have a prominent square mole on her left cheek? Was she wearing a wedding ring?’

  Abel simple shook his head. ‘What a lot of questions.’

  ‘And how did she die?’ Jordan asked.

  There was a pause while Abel decided. ‘She was strangled, I think,’ he said.

  Jordan rubbed his forehead as if trying to clear his thoughts. ‘ I never really said good-bye to Louise myself,’ he said sadly.

  Abel looked down at him with sympathy, he was standing up, preparing to go. ‘Don’t take it so much to heart. You can try again. Anyway, with Miss Hilton. And get her to talk to you. That’s another thing I was going to ask you to do. You must get her to start talking.’ He sounded urgent, but Jordan did not take this in, he still sat gazing into Abel’s face.

  ‘No,’ he said, raising his voice a little, as if anxious to make himself clear. ‘No. You don’t grasp it. She’s changed. Nell-alone is someone I cannot talk to.’

  Abel had started to move away. ‘I’m sorry. I have to go now. I haven’t as much time as I thought. But I’ll call you if we need to meet again, shall I?’

  He was beginning to act as if he and Jordan had been meeting this way for years. He moved off with his usual confident walk. Jordan had been right in his first impression of him. Abel was an important person.

  Chapter Eight

  Nell’s boarder heard her step on the stairs and was waiting for her. She was quite right, his senses were sharpening as his immobility deepened. He tried to move his left leg but only the muscles of the thigh responded sluggishly. The right leg seemed even weaker. His arms, however, increased in strength.

  ‘Hello, friend,’ he said, watching Nell’s entrance.

  She nodded.

  ‘You’re early.’

  ‘That alarms you?’

  ‘I don’t know about alarms.’ He looked put about, disconcerted. ‘I heard you coming.’

  ‘Of course.’

  They eyed each other.

  ‘I came home early on purpose.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘We’ve been apart long enough.’ She sat down beside him, their eyes on a level. ‘ Still love me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He turned away.

  Nell smiled: she didn’t seem disappointed. ‘The emotion comes and goes? I can understand that. I understand very well. Don’t think it means it isn’t real. No, the contrary. It is proof of its strength.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Nell laughed. ‘ Oh, I always manage to reassure you, don’t I? Look at me.’

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘Not this time.’

  He made an effort to control himself. He turned and faced her. She could see that his tan was fading and a prison pallor was beginning to develop underneath.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s been the day I’ve had. Endless. Time stretching out all round with no end to it.’

  ‘There must always be an end,’ said Nell in a gentle voice.

  ‘Do you mean—?’ He stopped, perhaps because he did not quite know how to finish the question. Or did not know what question to ask.

  ‘Oh yes, there’s a closing date to this competition,’ said Nell, getting up.

  She went into the kitchen to prepare supper, leaving her visitor to brood on what she had said. It had sounded a little ominous. She had meant it to do so.

  ‘Getting supper,’ she called from the kitchen, not so much to soothe him down as to give him something else to think about.

  She bustled about, clinking china and silver and banging the cooking pans togethe
r but not actually doing much. In fact she wasn’t sure if she would give him supper at all tonight. Let him go hungry for a while. Meanwhile it would do him no harm to believe she was engaged in cooking his supper, while in fact she was thinking and deciding what to do. She banged a little harder at a saucepan and put some bacon under the grill to make a smell of cooking.

  Perhaps she overdid the parade, because presently she looked up and found that Black had wheeled his chair to the door and was silently looking at her.

  ‘You mustn’t be restless,’ she said kindly. ‘ It’s bad for you.’

  ‘Perhaps restlessness, irritability, is a sign of recovery.’

  ‘Are you irritable?’ asked Nell with interest. ‘I’m sorry. No, it is not a sign of recovery. I wish it was. No, I fear it cannot be regarded as an altogether favourable sign.’

  ‘You talk that way just to frighten me,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you want me to get better.’

  ‘Do you think I want you here for ever?’ she said smiling.

  ‘I’m trying to find out what you do want,’ he cried.

  ‘You said you loved me,’ said Nell.

  ‘That doesn’t help.’

  ‘But is it true?’

  There was a long pause. She saw that Black was wretchedly struggling to understand what he felt and to express it. It would have been easy to her at that moment to offer him sympathy but this she refused to do.

  ‘Is it true?’ she repeated, walking towards him.

  ‘That bacon’s burning,’ he said unhappily.

  ‘But tell me about loving me. Haven’t I a right to know?’ But no one has a right to such knowledge, as she was well aware.

  ‘I think I must have loved you a long time,’ he said slowly.

  ‘I think you have.’ She was watching him closely.

  Without speaking again, she pushed his chair back into the sitting-room.

  ‘Have I said something important?’ he asked nervously.

  ‘Well, in a sense, everything you say is important,’ she answered, in that kindly, maddening way she used to him at times. ‘But I will not tease you; yes, you have said something important.’

  He watched her, fascinated, while she drew up a chair and sat down beside him.

  ‘In fact, I think it would be worth talking about it more.’

  ‘I cannot understand why I should love you and feel frightened of you at one and the same time.’

  ‘There’s a logical reason for everything.’ She really believed it. ‘And that’s what we have to discuss.’

  Black looked at her warily. He would certainly have moved away from her had this been physically possible to him.

  ‘Let me begin by telling you how I got you.’

  The dead body having transmitted one part of its secret still had to find a means of unburdening itself of the rest. In this task it had, of course, by now got cooperation. The police were helping. Now that the lines of communication were open the task was going to get easier and easier. But it is strange how swiftly the human habits are lost.

  One of them was relevance. When functioning, the human mind likes to arrange what it has to say with at least an air of logic. Underneath, embedded in the unconscious may be a confusion and a disturbance, but superficially the mind prides itself on getting its facts straight.

  But dead, the body could only offer all it knew un-arranged, the irrelevant and the unimportant, side by side with the vital fact. Now it required an interpreter as well as an audience.

  The police know well enough how to ‘ con’ a suspected man. Give them time and they can get anything they want. But they are strictly limited by their intentions, which are to find a culprit. How could they then create the right picture from the display of facts that was now offered to them? This body required not an investigation but a requiem.

  Charlotte and Amabel had a system of communication that no one knew about. They lived next door to each other and their bedrooms adjoined. In fact they were so close that you could lean out of one window and talk to someone standing in the next one. But this wasn’t how they communicated. Naturally. There would have been nothing secret, nothing private in standing at a window shouting at each other. Instead they wrote messages on bits of paper and put them in an old cocoa tin. The cocoa tin was then drawn in a bag from room to room by a length of cord. Sometimes they communicated by morse code rapped out on the wall, but this took a long while, and they preferred the cocoa tin. It was a rather draughty activity on a cold night as you had to keep the window open in order to draw the cord through. Communication was established by means of two sharp raps on the wall. Months might go by without the cocoa tin being in use and then it might be used nightly. It depended how interesting life was.

  Bedtime was variable for Charlotte, according to how her parents felt and what her relations were with them at the moment. (They were an emotional household and scenes were frequent there.) Amabel set her own bedtime; her parents were too much in awe of her to interfere. Amabel was prudent and sensible, however, and rarely went late to bed. This solemn self-discipline impressed her mother and father. ‘ Do you think we’ve made her feel insecure?’ mourned her mother. ‘And that’s why she’s so disciplined?’ ‘Secure’ was Amabel’s mother’s big word at the moment. ‘She’ll blow up one day,’ prophesied her father. ‘Or we will,’ he added gloomily.

  Amabel therefore was already lying in bed reading when she heard Charlotte arrive next door. It was easy to hear when she came because Charlotte always banged the door and stamped over to draw the window curtains. Then followed a moment when she seemed to deliver two hard kicks at the wall, but Amabel thought this was probably in fact the opening and shutting of her clothes cupboard door. After she had heard Charlotte clean her teeth there was usually peace for a time.

  Tonight Charlotte did not clean her teeth and Amabel frowned. Her own teeth got the full treatment every night. ‘Lazy,’ she said.

  She returned to volume three, Balfour to Both, of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which she was reading steadily with great enjoyment.

  As she read methodically through Baroque Architecture, the undercurrents of her mind were occupied with what Charlotte had told her about Mrs Richier burning baby clothes. She moved uncomfortably against her pillows. The hunting of Mrs Richier began to seem poor fun. She was beginning to discover that if you stare hard at the everyday life of anyone, you notice things that are distasteful. She stopped her thoughts at this point, for she knew, with a premature sophistication, that she couldn’t afford to go too far with them.

  Her own window curtains were not drawn against the night, and from where she lay she could see out across the garden to the house where Nell lived. Only one corner was visible, because the rest was shielded by thick trees. One window shone out like an eye.

  Amabel returned to her study of post-baroque architecture and the age of Enlightenment. She was reading quietly when she was aroused by two sharp raps on the wall.

  Reluctantly she got out of bed and reached out a hand to grasp the length of cord already dangling from Charlotte’s window. They always used green cord on the grounds that this was invisible at night. They themselves were, of course, not invisible and each girl could be clearly seen outlined against the lighted room behind her. Amabel fixed the double cord to the hook below her window and began to draw it in. Very soon she heard the cocoa tin begin its progress.

  She shivered as she stood there in her thin nightdress. Then a drop of water splashed on her hand. It had begun to rain. The cocoa tin seemed very slow in arriving.

  She heard Charlotte say: ‘Damn.’

  ‘Hurry up,’ she called.

  ‘It’s stuck.’

  Amabel gave an impatient jerk.

  ‘Wait a min.,’ hissed Charlotte. ‘ Go on, it’s free now.’

  The cocoa tin continued its journey and made a triumphant landing. Amabel drew out the piece of paper and read it.

  ‘Look out of the window!’ it commanded. ‘What can you see?’r />
  Amabel looked and then scribbled her reply.

  ‘Nothing,’ she wrote.

  ‘That’s precisely it. Nothing,’ came back Charlotte’s reply when she got it. ‘ Don’t you see the significance?’

  Amabel looked again. And now she came to think of it the house across the garden did look strangely dead, dark and empty. The one light had gone. Usually you could see at least the glint of others. Perhaps they’d gone away.

  Surely not together? asked the analytic questioner who always lived inside Amabel. Surely not together?

  ‘They never have any time for each other at all,’ thought Amabel firmly. ‘Whatever they’re doing over there, it’s in no sense “together”.’

  Even as she watched the light in the one window came on, winked like an eye, then went off again.

  ‘Is it money you want?’ asked Black.

  ‘Money? What could money do for me?’ asked Nell in scorn.

  ‘Money? What could money do for me?’ asked Nell in scorn.

  ‘And yet I must make some money. I know that,’ muttered Black. It was his first spontaneous remark in the whole time he had been with her, and it surprised them both.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ asked Nell at once.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said it.’ He sounded confused. ‘I don’t know why I did.’

  ‘It’s the things you shouldn’t say that I want to hear.’

  ‘I believe you’ve doped me.’ He put his hand up to his head.

  ‘Only with food and love and security,’ said Nell.

  ‘Love and security,’ he cried out. ‘ Is that what it’s been? It’s been murder.’

  The word dropped between them cold and hard. His voice was husky, but the word was clear.

  ‘What an odd word to use,’ said Nell, her eyes very bright.

  ‘I believe you have drugged me.’

  ‘You are in a state of shock,’ said Nell.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘You have been in this state of shock for some time,’ observed Nell. ‘Quite as long as I have had you.’