Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  She had passed under the peep-hole about a dozen times when Rance seemed to warm up and take a more positive part in the ritual. Leaning forward as she moved a step beyond him he delivered a heavy smack on her buttock and another to match it as she passed on the way back. She took no notice whatever of the assault but it seemed to destroy his gravity for he threw back his head and howled with laughter.

  The two blows broke the spell that the repellent spectacle had cast over me. I managed to choke back the shout of rage and grab the carbine, bringing it into position and waiting until Diana was at the blind end of the room, then pulling the trigger with about three times as much pressure as is consistent with accurate aim.

  The roar of the gun filled the loft and set my ears ringing. There was a tinkle of falling glass and I saw that I had missed him by a yard.

  He did not throw himself down or reach for a weapon, or do anything that a man at whom someone is shooting might be expected to do. He just sat back in his chair and looked inquisitively at the ceiling and his inertness gave me a moment or so to pull myself together and work the bolt.

  I was quick but not nearly quick enough. Almost before the glass had fallen into the room Diana leaped into vision and hurled herself at Rance and in the very act of leaping, God knows how, she had seized a paper-knife that lay in the ink tray. It was a ridiculous weapon and could hardly have done more than break the skin of a man wearing clothing but as the two of them crashed over she lunged at him again and again.

  I saw all this during the second or so that it took me to level the carbine and at the same time I saw that to shoot into the melée behind the desk might be fatal to the wrong person. For the time being the carbine was useless and I knew that I was obliged to break out of the loft at once. There was only one means of doing this, to burst through the ceiling and I grabbed at the cross-beam connecting two rafters, swung myself up and projected myself down with every ounce of strength in my body.

  The space between the joists yielded readily enough but the lath and plaster did not break as completely as I had hoped. For a few seconds I was held by my waist, my legs swinging free in the vast cloud of dust that the puncture had released into the room. Then, as I threw my arms above my head, my weight carried me down and I fell within a few feet of them, striking the desk top and rolling against the curtained window.

  I suppose the whole incident only occupied about seven or eight seconds but it seemed much longer and a good deal had happened while I was on my way down. Diana’s leap had carried her over and beyond Rance, so that she had landed face downward beyond him and overset a tall standard lamp, the main source of light after Rance had dimmed the others. What light remained came through the clouded glass panels of the hall door and it was by no means adequate for in-fighting among broken and overturned furniture. Rance must have been an extremely active man. In spite of Diana’s spring, which had knocked him over the back of the chair and full-length on the parquet floor, he was up in a flash and had pinned her down before she could rise on hands and knees. He had her in a vicious neck-lock, his forearm under her chin and in a matter of seconds he would have broken her neck.

  In what must have been a reflex action I found my automatic and whipped it out, struggling violently to free myself from the curtain which had ripped away from its rings and brought down pelmet and pelmet board. I rolled about helplessly for a moment, wrestling with the heavy folds and cursing at the top of my voice. Then I managed to free myself, dive across the surface of the desk to grab Rance by the hair, groping for a place to jam the muzzle of my gun. In that moment we must have looked like the characters in his postcards. Diana was stark naked and Rance almost so, his shirt and singlet having been torn the length of his back. Then I found his temple and pressed the trigger.

  I heard no explosion so I pressed it twice more and he shuddered so violently that I lost my grip and was left with a handful of his hair.

  Diana was screaming and I screamed back at her, shouting for light and ultimately scrambling to the door and switching them on. Rance lay on his back among the folds of the curtain with half his head blown off. Diana was leaning against the tilted cocktail cabinet and there was blood on her shoulder and down her left leg. Some of the bottles had tipped over and the room reeked of spirits. The desk chair was splintered, the curtains lay in a heap and dust from the ruined ceiling was spreading into every corner of the room. And all the time the radiogram continued to wail its off-beat, tuneless rhythm.

  “Are you hurt? Are you okay?” I shouted, grasping her shoulder. It did not occur to me that the blood might be Rance’s.

  She made a hopeless gesture and I realised that she was still fighting for breath. I picked up the purple gown but she shook her head so I dropped it, picked her up and carried her into the bathroom where I pushed her under the shower and sluiced her with warm water. She neither assisted or hindered me. Only when I began to dry her did she rouse herself and take the towel, so I left her there, returned to the big room and helped myself to a drink. I needed one badly but I didn’t take one into Diana. What she needed more was time to pull herself together and a pint of black coffee.

  A few minutes later I heard her go into the bedroom and I switched off the lights, partly because the scene sickened me, but also because the large window was now without a curtain. Raoul had stressed the fact that he wanted Rance eliminated tidily and I began to wonder what he would say when he called for the body in the morning. After another drink, however, I felt a good deal better and, working by pocket torch, I started collecting Rance’s papers and stuffing them back into his briefcase. I wasted no time examining them, there was far too much to do.

  I went through Rance’s pockets and emptied them of everything, wallet, identity papers, letters, fountain pen and loose change. I also took his wrist watch and cuff links and would have peeled off the remains of his clothing but it was blood-soaked and no use to anyone. I did, however, take his shoes which fitted me tolerably well. Then I rolled him in the remains of the curtains and tried to tidy the room. There was nothing I could do about the gaping hole in the ceiling but I lowered the stairs and retrieved the carbine. I mopped the floor and rolled up the bloodstained rug and the remains of the chair, stuffing them into a cupboard pending final disposal. By this time it was getting on for dawn and I heard Diana stir, so I went into the kitchen and brewed coffee. I would have preferred to have disposed of Rance’s body at once but I did not know where to put it. In the end I pushed it behind a divan and locked the living-room door. Then I banged on the bedroom door and told Diana to hurry. I was already ashamed of the botch I had made of things and I did not want to annoy Raoul further by keeping him waiting.

  When Diana joined me in the kitchen she was subdued and very composed. She wore a high-necked sweater which only partly concealed the bruising left by Rance’s grip and her voice, when she tried to talk, was not much above a whisper. For a time we sipped our coffee in silence but I could see that she was groping round for some explanation of the miscarriage of our plan. She kept looking at me with a half-smile, then flushing and looking away again. At last she said:

  “Don’t blame yourself, Jan, it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t mine either but you’d better pretend it was, otherwise Raoul might call the whole thing off!”

  “You mean he’ll have no confidence in me after this balls-up?”

  “The idea was to make Pierre disappear. The police would not have known where to begin. Now they’ll get a headstart right on his doorstep.”

  “Then Raoul should have got one of his bloody hatchet men to do the job in a back alley,” I grumbled, “I warned him I wasn’t his man!” After another long pause, I cleared my throat and went straight to the point. I had to know two things, how much she remembered of what had happened after she had returned to the room in that idiotic Chinese gown, and whether it was possible to hope that Rance was now out of her system for good.

  “Were you doped, Di? Did you slip anything into that first drink yo
u had, after I went up to the hideout?”

  She looked at me slyly, still half smiling.

  “Don’t you know? You were watching, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, but you could have taken dope just before or just after he got here! My guess is that you pepped yourself up for the occasion!”

  “You’re getting to be quite a sleuth, Jan,” she said, and reaching into the pocket of her slacks she produced a small phial containing a yellowish powder and threw it on the table.

  “What is it, for God’s sake?”

  “Does it have to have a name?”

  I took the phial, extracted the cork and sniffed the contents. It had no smell but I sensed a sharp pricking sensation in my nostrils and my eyes watered violently. When my vision cleared I had an extraordinarily heightened sense of color. Everything in the room seemed to be made up of dazzling blues and pinks and yellows.

  “It’s got a long South American name,” she said, watching me. “I never could pronounce it and I can’t even spell it! I only know that its effect is just what he said it would be, a reversal of values. That was its original purpose in Central America when the Aztecs used it. Everyone inhaled it before a religious festival.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it converted the leery old priests into minor Gods fit to minister to the Almighty Gods! You can see how useful it was if you had to do business with someone like Rance!”

  “Is this all you have?”

  “It’s all I have, there may be more in his baggage.”

  I got up and fetched Rance’s grip from the hall. I had already been through it but I gave it a thorough going-over, feeling the lining of his spare suit, examining toilet accessories and probing the lining of the case. Finally I was satisfied that there was nothing among his effects that matched the powder in the phial.

  “He didn’t take much himself, he preferred giving his women the pushover,” she said when I returned to the kitchen.

  “How the hell …?” I began angrily but she cut in, placing both hands on the table and looking straight into my eyes.

  “Don’t look so ‘holier than thou’, Jan! If you want to hear I’ll try and tell you!”

  “You could have done that days ago,” I said, bitterly.

  “I couldn’t,” she said quietly, “because I thought I was over it! I was really. That was the last shot.”

  “That’s what they all say!”

  She sighed and got up.

  “It’s no use, Jan, maybe you’d better tell Raoul when he gets here!”

  “Doesn’t he already know?”

  She looked at me with surprise.

  “Good God, of course he doesn’t! Do you think he’d have a junkie in his outfit?”

  I thought about this for a moment and decided that she was probably right; I said:

  “Look, Di, I honestly believed we were on the level this time, really on the level! No lies, no half-truths, no reservations! A one hundred per cent fresh start.”

  “So we were,” she said.

  “We weren’t, Di! You told me about the drink and the boy-friends, you didn’t add that you were a dope addict!”

  She was silent for a moment and I noticed that all traces of the drug had disappeared. She was calm and rational and her natural colour was returning. I was prepared to believe she had only taken a minute dose, enough perhaps to enable her to face Rance.

  “I’m not an addict,” she said, at length, “I took one shot about an hour before he got here. You saw what he was like. Maybe even you will concede that he rated that much in the circumstances!”

  “I can understand you taking the stuff, Di,” I said, “but what I don’t suppose I shall ever understand is how a person with your kind of guts ever got tangled with him in the first place! Do you have enough words to make me understand that?”

  “One word—‘penance’ maybe!”

  “Penance! Great Scot! On my account?”

  She was involving me again, even in her drug-taking, even in her subjugation by a rat like Rance, and as she said this I remembered how mercilessly I had been involved in everything she had ever done or thought or experienced in her triumphs, frustrations and dreams, her emotions and madcap adventures, in every damned thing she had ever attempted, right back to the days when she had used me as an excuse to play truant from school.

  “Well, Di, say what you have to say but for pity’s sake let it be the truth! Don’t leave the usual rabbit in the hat for the next crisis.”

  “There won’t be another crisis, Jan, not our type of crisis. We’re back together, really together now that that swine is dead. And we’ll get back to Sennacharib again, you can depend on that!”

  I couldn’t but it did me good to hear her say we might. I poured fresh coffee and we sat in the airless little kitchen facing one another. It occurred to me that it was a distorted reflection of the night after our first quarrel, when she sought me out in the middle of the night and came into my aunt’s kitchen dripping wet to make her peace.

  “There’s a great deal you do understand about me, Jan,” she said, “but a lot more you don’t! My obsession with Pierre Rance is something I might be able to make you understand over the years, but I couldn’t do it now, not in a single sitting, I could only rough it out, maybe.”

  “All right, then rough it out before Raoul shows up.”

  “The Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde theme isn’t a literary cliché, pointing the good and evil in people,” she said, “it’s real enough, particularly in a person like me, whose early life has been cushioned. You know how I was brought up, cut off from every normal emotional experience, fenced round with nannies, chauffeurs and banker’s drafts!”

  “They didn’t worry you all that much, Di, you found plenty of holes in the wire!”

  “They had their effect, nevertheless. Why do you suppose so many of my set kicked over the traces in the Thirties?”

  “You got over that, Di. I ought to know, I nursed you through it, or thought I had, God help me!”

  “That’s where you really came in, Jan! I daresay that surprises you but it’s true for all that. Until then and throughout all the time we were kids you were just one more hole in the fence! Did you ever realise that?”

  I had not realised it because my pride had never let me. All the same, it made sense, it explained her fiendish unpredictability and the way she would disappear for months at a time only to return every time she needed a shoulder to cry upon.

  “What about your eighteenth birthday?” I reminded her. “You’re not going to tell me you weren’t a virgin after all!”

  “No,” she said, evenly, “I was a virgin and you were certainly my first lover but what took place then was prompted by curiosity more than anything else. You demanded the whole truth, Jan. It’s not my fault if you find it indigestible.”

  I did find it so; it stuck in my throat like a sponge soaked in vinegar.

  “And after that? The time Yvonne was conceived, and again when we agreed to get married at the cottage?”

  “Good God!” she exclaimed, “why be so morbid about it? Why the hell do men have to put such a premium on an act of physical gratification? I’m not talking about isolated acts of sexual communion, Jan, I’m talking about spiritual desolation, the kind I experienced when I renounced every chance I ever had of living a decent, normal, healthy, happy life! That’s what I mean when I say you didn’t really mean anything until I turned my back on you, finally and irrevocably and found myself married to a queer! That’s when I began fighting back and went into training for a man like Pierre Rance. Can’t you begin to understand?”

  “Not really, Di,” I said, “at least not to that extent! If it had been a matter of finding a normal man or half-a-dozen normal men, yes; but a pervert like him, someone who could only see a woman through a twisted mirror and get warmed up on pornographic pictures, a man who could want a woman to parade up and down while he walloped her behind! Not that, Di! Not a person with your pride and vitality! I
t isn’t simply obscene, it’s a contradiction of every law in the universe!”

  “That’s just what it isn’t, Jan,” she said, “and I should know because I’m the person who experienced it! I couldn’t get the good so I reverted to the evil and being the kind of person I am I dredged as deeply as I could! I’ll tell you something else! There were times when I actually enjoyed Pierre Rance, enjoyed his warped inventiveness and his twisted approach, enjoyed being beaten and humiliated by him, because somehow or other he was the ultimate evil, just as sharing Sennacharib with you was the ultimate delight! When I was parading for him last night I had completely forgotten you were in the house. I only remembered you when I heard the shot and saw him glance upward. Then I came to and I wanted to stamp him out of existence! Well, that’s about the middle and both ends of it and I’m done with him at last but if you still think I’m too big a security risk then maybe you’d better tell Raoul and carry on alone, if he’ll have you after the mess we made of everything!”

  I was silent for a moment but there was no real decision to make. All the time she had been talking my mind had been finding excuses for her that stood up, and making allowances for all she had been through since she had turned her back on Sennacharib. I knew that I wasn’t going to mention the drugs to Raoul, that I was going to invent an attempt on Rance’s part to kill her which had necessitated my leap through the ceiling. I knew also that this confession of hers was indeed the whole truth and that we might still break through into Sennacharib again and find the sun.