Rose in Darkness

by Christianna Brand

  ‘But who else, who else? I mean, of course, I know it wasn’t really Nan, but who else?’ For a moment a smooth brown hand crossed her line of vision, reaching for a glass and she said sharply, ‘Charley?’

  ‘What, darling?’ Charley was in the seventh heaven, all these wonderful, wonderful people, and the great, the distinguished top-storey surgeon from Harley Street, and he, Pakki Charley from Liverpool, a favourite guest.

  ‘Charley, you didn’t go down to Wren’s Hill, that night?’

  ‘To the cinema? No, darling, I told you, I was working in the library.’

  ‘Nobody there recognised you.’

  ‘Nobody is ever recognising us,’ said Charley. ‘To your people we are like a lot of sheep. Black sheep,’ he added, laughing; but the look on her face of unreasoning fear made his laughter uneasy.

  A brown hand, passing money through the grille at Vi Feather; accepting a ticket. ‘Well, I have an idea you were there, Charley, why not admit it?’

  The years of mindless oppression had taught Charley a quick resentment, tempered by his own innate dignity. ‘Do you say I am lying, Sari. Of what are you accusing?’

  ‘Sari, keep your voice down,’ said Sofy, anxiously murmuring. ‘Leave him alone, he’s done nothing; he loves you. He’d do anything for you.’

  ‘He loves us all; he’d do anything for any of us. You were there, Charley, weren’t you?—with the green gravy-boat, and you drove her home and she said things against us, one of us, me, Rufie, anyone who was in the film, she could say vile things about all of us...’

  ‘Sari, are you saying that I am strangling this woman?’

  ‘How do I know how people like you react? I wouldn’t blame you.’

  ‘And then I put her in your car, Sari—made trouble for you, made trouble for you, Sari...?’

  ‘Well, you could have chucked her out, dead or alive, what does it matter? and we know the Followers were there—’

  But he had stumbled to his feet. He made her a little bow, he repeated his little bow to the company. ‘Virryvirry sorry, suddenly not feeling too top-storey, you forgive if I must hurriedly taking departure...’ Two tears tumbled down the smooth brown cheeks of his young boy’s face. ‘Virryvirry sorry, not feeling at all top-storey...’ He stood at the door and bowed once again and was off and away down the corridor outside, and into the lift before anyone could catch up with him. Sofa said, sotto voice again. ‘No one else heard. Better just carry on.’

  ‘I never said he actually—’

  ‘I’ll ring him up later,’ said Sofy, ‘when he’s got home.’

  ‘I’m frightened, darling. I’m absolutely on the brink, everything makes me suspicious.’

  ‘I’ll ring him later,’ said Sofy, and turned away.

  Phin, practised in reactions, saw with distress the increasing whitening of the beautiful face as the evening wore on, pale as a wax candle now, beneath the bright flame. ‘You’re tired, my sweet. Had I better start an exodus?’ After all, he said laughing, they had not got much sleep last night.

  ‘Oh, Phin, you will never leave me? You’ll never un-love me?’

  ‘I am caught in the net of Orpheus,’ said Phin, ‘and I do not want to go free,’ and wondered what magic there was in his princess to evoke such poetry in him; and exactly what, in fact, he meant by it.

  Sofy did nothing to discourage the exodus. Half an hour must be spent in earnest discussion of Sari’s chances of happiness—he was great, he was simply super, so fantastically good-looking, a bit conventional of course but you’ll soon cure him of that, darling, and we’ll all do our level best to help you; get rid of Nanny and they’d all rally round, about the kid, because, underneath, all kids were human beans and it was just a question of what other people made them into, ... The bungalow with the Bad Habitat, the Chinese-patterned curtains and all that, oh, and the bar, darling—of course Phin wouldn’t make her live there, they could even live here in the flat, after all the whole of Hampstead Heath for Ena Mee, ponds and the lot; and Phin could commute to Wren’s Hill, he came up to London for his Harley Street stuff, just do it the other way round; and they could all be together still.... Whether or not any of them believed it could ever come true, might be problematical; for the moment it was all excitement and enthusiasm and devoted good wishes for her everlasting happiness....

  And the shawls and the ponchos were collected and the tambourines, and they drifted away. Sofy waited till all had left but Etho and Rufie and went into Sari’s bedroom to telephone.

  ‘She’s ringing Charley. I was rotten to him, I saw somebody Indian at the cinema that night and I got it into my head...’

  ‘My dovey-darling, not Charley!’

  ‘I didn’t say anything, I only asked him—’

  Sofy came back from the bedroom. ‘Well, OK Sari—that’s another one gone. He was sobbing his heart out, I could hear him over the telephone.’ She was in tears herself. ‘All that long, slow build-up of confidence; and now I don’t think Charley will ever put his trust in anyone, ever again.’

  ‘Oh, dear God, I didn’t mean it like that, I didn’t mean to accuse him, poor Charley, poor darling, shall I ring him up and tell him?’

  ‘No, Sari, I wouldn’t. Charley worshipped you like a goddess; and once the image is broken, it’s for ever. I don’t think a nice little telephone chat even from you would do much good. Etho, would you mind?—I’d like to be going. I’ll get my coat.’

  Sari looked after her miserably. ‘I saw his hand and I was startled, the whole thing rushed through my mind. Of course I know it was ridiculous. I’ll find a way back to him.’ She repeated, ‘It was only that I got a glimpse, down at the cinema I got this glimpse of a—this glimpse of a—’

  Her voice faltered. Sofy had appeared in the bedroom doorway, wrapped in the Jade Elephant. Sari said, slowly: ‘And another glimpse. A glimpse of—green.’

  You could not miss the sudden shock, the look of apprehension. ‘Sofy, you were there. It’s been at the back of my memory all this time—the flash of jade green.’

  Sofy stood, a fat, trembling pink and white jelly, in the jade green coat. ‘Anybody can wear green.’

  ‘But not hide behind a corner in it.’ She stared round wildly at the three of them. ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it...’ She burst into tears. ‘I’m terrified...’

  ‘Sari, you can’t think I would ever, ever do you one moment’s harm?’

  ‘Oh, Sofy!—what can I know, who can I believe...? Someone has been my enemy, someone’s been in league with them. And, after all, you’ve been in it all from the beginning; you knew me in Rome where it all began, you knew Aldo...’ And she raised her head. ‘You knew Aldo, you knew him first, Sofy; he was in love with you, till I took him away from you. I didn’t mean to but I did. You could have been... How do I know...? Do you know Aldo still?—for all I know you’ve stayed friends with him all along and now when he needed you to help him, about his marriage, about the ring...’

  The three exchanged swift glances; Etho almost imperceptibly shook his head, but his look said, only, Not yet! Sofy said dully, ‘I was working at home.’

  The beautiful face was growing dark, dark under its incandescent light. ‘That’s not true, that’s a lie. Vi Feather said something about you. She said...’ Her hand clawed itself in her effort to recollect. ‘She said it was a pity you’d put on so much weight—’

  ‘She’d seen me on the telly, for God’s sake!’

  Sari put her face in her hands and wept afresh. ‘She said she’d never have recognised you; she said she didn’t have television.... You’re telling lies.’

  Rufie crouched beside her, his arm around her shoulders, his hand pressing her wet cheek against his own. ‘What could Sofy have done, darling? You can’t dream for one moment that she’d kill the woman?’

  ‘How do I know?’ said Sari, sobbing. ‘If she was on Aldo’s side, if she knew the Followers were there, she could just—just get her outside and hand her over. If not,
why is she telling lies?’

  ‘And what did I do then?’ said Sofy, hanging on tight to her control. ‘Step into the Intertown bus and travel home, totally unobserved, me at my size, with my jade green elephant coat and my telly-famous face?’

  ‘The Juanese would have seen to all that. Money’s like water to them. And money! You had money, Sofy, you had money; the other day when I was going to Rome, you offered to lend it to me—’

  ‘Every penny I’d got in the world, plus the faint hope of a sub from the BBC. I must say, Sari, when you are a bitch you are God’s own bitch!’

  The terrible tears. ‘Oh, Sofy, Sofy, I don’t want to believe it, I don’t want to believe anything against you. But it’s someone, there’s someone... Who can I trust, how can I ever be sure...?’

  Etho’s eyes again consulted the other two. ‘Sari! Hush, darling, be quiet now, and listen. Yes, all right Sofy was there; and I was there too. We went down together, Sofy wanted to see herself as she was then and I wanted to see you as you were then—and you are even more lovely, far more lovely now. But we went there together in my car and we drove back together in my car; and Sofy spoke to nobody else but me till I dropped her at the flats and came on home.’

  She lifted her tear-stained face. ‘You drove her home?’

  Quiet and cool, he fished out his handkerchief, passed it across to her, went on quietly speaking. ‘Yes, to her flats. We left well before the picture was over—we knew how it went, there was nothing after that but pictures of the stand-in in large concealing hats, you wretch! We had a perfect right to go, Sari, you haven’t got a monopoly The Spanish Steps, but we didn’t want you to know and be upset. So we skipped the end, and got by long before the tree fell and that’s all there was to it.’

  She thought about it. ‘But Etho... You said you were at home—and Rufie was with you.’

  ‘The ‘phone was ringing when I got in. Rufie’d been ringing the whole evening—’

  ‘And trying to ring Sofa,’ said Rufie. ‘I was so bored, darling—’

  But she said, quickly: ‘So you knew neither of them was at home, when they said they were?’

  ‘I knew they’d been together the whole evening, so there was no point saying anything about it, and making a fuss with you and a fuss with the police. Etho answered at last, having got home early, like he says, and said come on round, because of course I was made to know how the film had worn, how you’d looked in it, and Sofy and my dresses and everything. So I whizzed over and he told me all about it and I came home.’

  She said, heavily: ‘Yes, I see. So in fact it is true—you’ve all been deceiving me?’

  ‘But, my darling, darling, not to do you any harm. For your good, in fact—not to let you get upset about Etho and Sofy nipping down and seeing the film, when you wanted to keep it private to yourself.’

  ‘I can only think how easy it is to be deceived. Even by people you trust. In fact especially, I suppose, by the people you can trust—well, people you believe you can trust.’ She pushed back the soft hair, lack-lustre, with the back of her hand. ‘Well—I think Etho’s right, you’d better go now, I’ll just go to bed.’ As Etho stood up she went to him, put her hands on his shoulders and laid her cheek against his. ‘Goodnight, love.’ And to Sofy, still standing in the doorway, ‘Darling—forgive me! Sometimes I think with all this terror, this—dread—I think I’m going out of my mind.’

  The sweet, pleading face, beautiful as it had ever been, pleading through its ravishment of tears. ‘I’m so bitterly sorry. These things come breaking out like a sort of—like a sort of caged-up horror breaking out from all the terrors inside my mind...’

  But for Sofy, the end had come. Sweet natured, warmhearted, in her shocked grief she allowed herself the one vicious moment of her life. ‘All I can say, Sari, is that you should put rather stronger bars around your mental cage. Right, left and centre you accuse us of lying to you and cheating you and deceiving you! Some miracle you are, yourself, of honesty!—I wonder how much your dear Phin would like it if he knew your story to us, of how you got his ring? Or would he prefer the other version, that that was all just one of your fantasies and the reality is, you simply pinched it from the shop?’

  She was paralysed, speechless with a perfectly genuine indignation. ‘Oh, come off it, Sari!—you’re always pinching things, you’ve got no more moral sense than a cat: it’s just a bit of naughtiness and fun to you and then you make up some nonsense to amuse yourself and us. But I wonder how much it’s going to amuse your dear Phin?’ Etho went across to her but she beat down his restraining hand. ‘And he’ll need something to amuse him during his long years in prison, won’t he? When you accuse all of us, Sari, who’ve been your friends all these years, just ask yourself about your precious Phin, whom you’ve hardly known a week. Because you needn’t think the police aren’t asking!’

  ‘Sofy, darling—!’

  ‘Shut up, Etho, you know it too, we all know it was Phin—wide open to blackmail, at the cinema that night, out in the storm. Of course he was the man at the tree, she knows that herself; of course he killed the woman, of course he simply, God knows how, but he did it—simply returned Sari’s car with the body in the back of it; left her, whoever she was—because he didn’t know then—to carry the can. So put that in your treacherous, bloody little pipe, Sari, and smoke it!—and please God I never have to set eyes on you again for as long as I live...’ She slammed out into the corridor, and leaning against Etho’s shoulder, broke into tears of remorse and shame; and dried her eyes and said again, ‘God damn her! I’ll never bloody see her again!’ and wept afresh. She flung back the leafless jungle with its curious creatures in all their unwonted colours, crept into her bed and laid her weary head against the great, square, down-filled pillows; and with the turning out of the light, the darkness flooded in—a darkness deeper and blacker and more filled with night-stirrings of the unknown, than any mere darkness of the closing of the day. That Phin was a murderer, she knew in the depths of her heart to be untrue; but that Phin was even yet lying to her, deceiving her, deceiving them all—? That Phin was in danger from the police—? Oh, God, she prayed, to that God whom so recently she had denied, oh Christ, don’t let me lose him, don’t take him away from me! So little left to her now. Like wounded animals, those she loved, those who had loved her, before the mindless outbreakings of her caged terrors, were tearing themselves away out of her life, and she knew they would return no more. I betray them, she thought; I betray their loving and trusting me when I know, I know, the accusations aren’t true...

  But the Followers...

  Sleepless through the terrible silence of the long night. And yet throughout it all, with no conscience as Sofy had truly said, for the everyday virtues of ordinary, everyday men—it had never so much as entered her mind to commit the one, ultimate betrayal that would long ago have brought an end to all her fears.

  The rose in darkness: with the last darkness, closing, closing in.

  14

  AND NEXT MORNING... ALAS, no great ringings round, for who was there left to call? ‘Etho? Yes, soundo. I don’t know, I was a dud last night, I couldn’t go on any more; I took a lot of stuff and quietly passed out. I was a bit hopped anyway, well, but natch, at a party.’

  ‘I’ve already rung Sofy. No hope. She says to be kind, say she’s not furious any more but she just won’t come back. So it’s you and me, Rufie; but there’s still precious Phin—and if he can take her away out of all this, well she can begin again and maybe with the atmosphere a bit more straightened out...?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Essentially very sound. To us he’s a bit stuffed but it’s the other side of the coin and it could be right for her, after all. She’ll soon shake out enough of the stuffing and, you know Sari, she can get away with anything. She’ll have Harley Street painting its faces in stripes and practising witch-doctoring before you know it, everyone simply loving it. And he’s mad about her, it’s pretty real this time.
But meanwhile?’

  ‘A Dunkirk I should think, wouldn’t you?’ said Rufie. The retreat. Refusing to leave the flat, to leave her bedroom, to leave her bed: the retreat to the womb. ‘Well, he’s a doctor, Rufie, the wife was a bit of a psychopath, he must have an understanding mind. Tell him she had a bad shock after he left, one of her friends quarrelled with her and walked out, and she takes things hard; just not to question her or bother her but simply love her and she’ll come to. You know, Rufie,’ said Etho, slowly thinking it over, ‘I believe this may be the right one at last. One can only pray. Meanwhile—Dunkirk. Be at home as much as you can; I’m snowed under myself this week, but I’ll try and help out.’

  Rufie accordingly stayed in, rang up Phin and declared a state of ‘flu and when Phin said he’d chance it, wear a mask and all that, most brilliantly transmuted the ‘flu to suspected German measles. Phin would not subject his patients to such risks, and Sari was said to feel too sick and miserable to telephone, so quiet reigned all round. She remained in bed, plied by an understanding doctor with large doses of sedative, Rufie propped his little paint-pots along his pillow and worked upon ever more enchantingly bizarre designs. To Mr Cecil, anxiously enquiring, he replied that for the moment he was going to be reticent, but they’d all go beresk when they saw them—based on the yellow robes that those people wore, hopping along Oxford Street with tambourines...

  The retreat lasted its normal three days and on the Thursday Sari awoke, refreshed and calmed by the long quiet rest, and rang up Phin with the glad news that it had never been German measles at all, just a bit of the snuffles and a lot of exhaustion from far too much happiness. Phin was deeply thankful but for the moment hung up by two special cases, terribly tricky, and no cajolements (his love was going to have to learn) would persuade him to desert anyone in need of his professional care. And tomorrow was frantic. The ladies would be safe by then but now Nanny had ‘gone down, what with her tooth’ and was going to have to spend the day in hospital for a minor anaesthetic and dental operation—and it was Mummy’s Day to have Ena Meena. Mummy, though insisting fiercely upon her rights, in exercising them was capricious to a degree and upon this occasion, the Day was to last from three o’clock in the afternoon till half-past five. ‘I’ve rearranged my cases at Harley Street and got them to postpone the first one till a quarter to twelve, so I can bring Ena Meena up with me and she can hang about in the waiting-room, the porter will look after her; and then I’ll have to take her out to lunch and hand her over and then come back to Harley Street. And then pick her up and take her home. So I don’t see how we can possibly meet, my darling...’