Gaslight

by William Drummond

  BELOVED A.B. FROM C.B.

  1851

  A.B. must, she imagined, be the old lady from whom Jack had got the brooch. It was strange that she had not explained to him the secret of its opening. Once the box was open, its mechanism was simple to understand. The pin pulled up, ran in a trip to one side, then up and back in a trip to the other. This unlocked the catch. To close it, it was only necessary to reverse the procedure.

  To say that Bella returned to Angel Street in high spirits would be to state only half her mind. In the other half she felt full of guilt. The failure of her marriage must be as much her fault as Jack’s; and if only there could be some act of faith on her part, might she not be able to redeem it? She refused to admit that she had developed a growing fear of him.

  When she came in, Nancy met her and took over Cerberus. “The master, madam, wants to see you in the drawing room, without the puppy, ’e says.”

  Jack was seated at his desk, wearing his eyeglasses. He looked up. “Oh, so you’re back,” he said, rather coldly. He stood up with a sheaf of bills in his hand. “I think you’re well enough now to take over the household accounts. I’d be obliged if you would check these accounts with Elizabeth this afternoon and have the details entered up. I really haven’t the time any longer to conduct the domestic business as well as my own, you know.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” she said. “But you had only to tell me earlier.”

  “Earlier it was quite plain that you were in no fit condition,” he answered, “and I don’t want you to undertake it now, unless you’re really certain you can do it. It would be altogether too tiresome to have to resume it again.”

  “How can you say that, when you know how I always did all the housekeeping in the old days?”

  “Because these are unfortunately not ‘the old days,’ ” he said with a sigh. He looked at his watch. “Gracious! I did not realize it was so late! I shall be out to lunch and dinner. Impossible to say when I will be back. Just leave all the papers on my desk and I’ll go through them before I go to bed.”

  It was not a task which Bella could do to her own satisfaction. She had to trust Elizabeth as to what had been ordered and delivered. But it gave her the opportunity tactfully to check the stores and find out what needed to be ordered in future. She was determined to do the work really well, in contrast to Jack’s rather slapdash methods. So chaperoned by Cerberus, she visited for the first time the store of William Whiteley, the Universal Provider, in Westbourne Grove.

  As she went there, she was aware that she was being followed, not by some masher, but by the man whom she remembered having seen through the window of the dining room that first evening of her arrival on Angel Street. Such was the distrust that had grown between Bella and her husband, that she imagined this creature to be some private agent whom Jack had employed to spy upon her. As she heard his footsteps closing behind her, she quickened her steps with Cerberus racing ahead, until the dog found, alas! an interesting lamp-post just outside the store.

  The man slowed his pace and as he approached, he raised his hat. “Mrs. Manningham?”

  Bella turned away, dragging the puppy after her on the leash. She swept into Whiteley’s. It was intolerable that a lady should not be able to go shopping in broad daylight without being molested by strangers. But, as she asked a shopwalker to be directed to the stationery department, Bella reflected that it was unlikely that anyone employed by her husband to keep a watch on his wife would openly approach her. Nor was this man of an age or the appearance to be an accoster of respectable ladies. Bella almost regretted that she had not waited long enough to learn his business.

  At the stationery counter, she selected an account book and a notebook, each of which had perforated top sheets, interleaved with thin tough paper on which a carbon copy could be made. In this way, she could detach her accounts and shopping lists and at the same time preserve a permanent record for herself. She bought also an indelible pencil and a package of brass paper clips.

  Then, having spent half an hour examining the variety of merchandise displayed by this new type of shop, Bella left by another door and returned to Angel Street without further incident.

  By half past nine that evening, her domestic business was completed with a thoroughness that her husband, with the worst will in the world, would find hard to criticize. Individual accounts, summaries, lists of immediate and future requirements, with exact prices when known and queried approximations, when not. The whole, a dozen sheets in all, fastened with a paper clip, was carefully laid upon Jack’s desk in a prominent position.

  Feeling tired, she put out Jack’s tray of milk and biscuits on the desk beside the accounts and retired to bed, taking with her Cerberus, who had his own basket and cushion beside the hearth. There were no sounds from the floor above and Bella soon fell into a gentle sleep.

  She came down to breakfast before Jack. There was still no letter from Cousin Alfred, but there were eight pages from Minty Jameson, covered with enormous spidery writing which said nothing more than that she and her husband were worried not to have heard from her and they hoped that no news was good news. Bella had in fact written eight days before and given Nancy the letter to post. “Didn’t you post that letter I gave you to Mrs. Jameson?” Bella asked Nancy.

  “Mr. Manningham took it from me, madam,” Nancy said. “He was going out and would put it in the box. I couldn’t say ‘no’ very well, could I?”

  “No, I’m afraid that you couldn’t.”

  Her husband came in, fussing with his tie. Bella knew it was one of his black mornings, even before he curtly nodded to her, “Good morning!” and then beamed on Nancy. “And good morning to you, Nancy!”

  Nancy waited at the table throughout breakfast, a meal which Jack Manningham conducted like the master of a four ring circus. He ate his food with the concentration of a solitary man engrossed in mastication. At the same time, whenever some service was required from or performed by the maid he turned on her the full sunshine of his charm, while keeping her mistress (to whom he addressed no single word) in the outer darkness of his disapproval. Meanwhile, he worked steadily through the mail, slitting the throats of successive envelopes with a murderous-looking paper knife. The unopened letters were in a pile stacked to the left of his side plate. He read them in his left hand, passing food and liquid to his mouth with the right. The letters were then refolded, replaced in their envelopes and stacked in a pile to the right of his tea cup. He was the monarch of all that he was too ill-tempered even to survey, thought Bella, with a spurt of malice. But she did not possess the spiritual reserves to wait behind the tea cozy for the onslaught which Jack was mobilized to deliver at the moment of his choice.

  She rose quietly, taking Minty’s letter with her, and had reached the door, when he said, “Little girls should ask permission to leave the room.” His eyes were as hard as stones.

  She answered, “Little boys should not read at table.” As she went out, she saw Nancy’s face dissolve into a snigger and then freeze at her awareness of the disrespect.

  Bella was trembling as she mounted the stairs. The retort had left her mouth involuntarily. She knew that Jack Manningham would not forgive her until she had paid for his humiliation tenfold. She went to her bedroom, where she found Elizabeth just finishing the making of her bed. “Will you ask the master on the way down, if he intends to take any meals at home today? If he should ask where I am, will you say that I am writing some letters and will be down upon their completion?”

  There was no time for the delivery of that message, however, because Nancy came tripping up to say that the master was in the drawing room and would like a word with her.

  “Tell him I shall not be longer than a quarter of an hour,” Bella said.

  “But ma’am . . .”

  “Madam,” Bella corrected. “A quarter of an hour or twenty minutes at the most.”

  The girl shook her head in admiration for her courage or pity at her foolhardiness.

&n
bsp; As Nancy went down the stairs, Bella shot home the bolt. She wondered whether her husband had come to regret the fitting of this assurance of her privacy. She walked over to the escritoire and took out writing paper and pen. But her hand was trembling too much for her to write even the date and her mind was so taken up with the encounter ahead that the composition of a letter was unthinkable. She just sat waiting for the summons, which, sure enough came almost immediately.

  Nancy rapped on the door. “Mr. Manningham says ’e’s goin’ out prompt, ma’am, an’ could you come down right away.”

  Bella went to the door and opened it. “Tell the master that I shall be with him.”

  She went back to the looking glass and put the last touches to her hair. Her nose was rather shiny and she applied powder. She held herself very upright. Though so much shorter than Jack, she had the dignity of superior breeding. It could add inches to stature. She reached for her jewel box for the Persephone brooch. It should serve as a talisman. She called Cerberus from his basket and he came over wagging his tail as she opened the box. The Persephone brooch, being large, was kept below the tray. But the moment she lifted out the tray, she saw not the brooch, but the accounts which she had laid on Jack’s desk the night before!

  So that was what he was up to! That was the reason why he had come down to breakfast late! What a child he was, a diabolical child!

  She put on her fur hat, as an excuse for wearing the muff to match and in it she hid the accounts. But she did not wear the cameo brooch. As she was leaving her room, she had a second thought and gathered Minty Jameson’s letter. Then calling to Cerberus, she went down to the drawing room. She was in better heart. Two could play at amateur theatricals. For once, she had the better script.

  She opened the door and Cerberus scampered in. Jack was bent over his desk, wearing his steel eyeglasses in a posture of absorption. He was prepared to make Bella wait, like a headmaster, until he was ready to cope with her, the delinquent schoolchild.

  But just as a cat may look at a king, the puppy Cerberus knew no reason why he couldn’t explore Jack’s lamp-post legs, and he put his paws up and sniffed at Jack’s knee. Jack looked abruptly up and removed his eyeglasses.

  “I’m glad you could see me so soon,” Bella said, going to his desk, “because you can explain this letter, no doubt.” She placed the letter from Minty in front of him, and as he replaced the eyeglasses to read it, she extracted the accounts and placed them in the wastepaper basket by the side of his desk. Then she called to Cerberus, who came and worried her hand as if it were a toy bone.

  “Not a very interesting letter,” Jack commented.

  “The only interest is that I wrote to Mrs. Jameson eight days ago and gave the letter to Nancy to put in the mail box. She tells me that you took it from her, saying that you would do so. But it never arrived. I cannot imagine the reason why. Perhaps you can explain.”

  “You look at me very accusingly,” her husband said. “I certainly took the letter, as I was going out, and I mailed it. Do you think I didn’t?”

  “I don’t know,” Bella said. “It just seems to me mysterious that none of the letters I write, which you mail, ever seem to arrive.”

  “You accuse me of not posting your letters?”

  “I just say that I find it strange.”

  “But you don’t think that it is possible that you might have wrongly addressed these letters? Knowing the confused state of mind you seem still to be in?”

  “Confused state of mind? Now?” Bella asked. “I admit that when I was under all those drugs, I was confused. And so would you have been. But the accounts which I did for you yesterday, surely those didn’t argue confusion. I prided myself that I had done the figures as well, or better than, most men.”

  “But where are they?” Jack asked. “I specially asked you to leave them for me last night on the desk here against my return. But there were no accounts.”

  “No accounts! It’s impossible,” Bella rose from her chair. “But I remember putting them in the center of your desk. I put your milk and biscuits here, on the side. You’re not going to tell me they were not there either, I hope, because the maids can easily confirm that they were.”

  “I’m not talking about the milk and biscuits. Of course they were there. You do this as a sort of routine. I am talking about the accounts! What I had specially asked for!”

  She turned and looked at Jack, at his black beard, which she knew he had begun to dye. What really lay beneath all that dyed hair? What sort of skull lay beneath the flesh she had never seen? What sort of brain beneath the skull? “What time did you come home last night, Jack?”

  “I left the club shortly before eleven.”

  “And you were sober?”

  “Have you ever seen me the worse for liquor?”

  “Only too often,” she said, “though you would never admit it. You would be more lovable, if you could.”

  He looked very patient. “I don’t say that you didn’t produce those accounts. In fact I know you did, because I asked Elizabeth. I gather you put in a great deal of work. This is what worries me. After putting in all that work, you just can’t deliver it. It disappears. There is a sort of blank. Where are these wonderful accounts of yours now?”

  “You must have been very, very drunk last night,” said Bella. “No wonder you were so churlish this morning.” She bent down and picked the accounts out of the wastepaper basket. “To think that you can’t even remember seeing them, before you threw them away!” She slapped them on the desk in front of him and then, with a call to Cerberus, she sailed out of the room.

  It was only as she went down to the basement that she reflected what extreme folly she had committed. Jack Manningham would never forgive such humiliation.

  That afternoon her letter to Mrs. Jameson was returned. She had addressed it not to the Jamesons’ house, but to the one which she and Jack had occupied in York.

  CHAPTER TEN

  This was only the beginning of a series of incidents which made Bella question her faculties.

  That evening, having dined at home, Jack went out to his club as usual. Some ten minutes later Bella noticed a lowering of the gas pressure and had to adjust the lamps to make the mantles incandescent. It was to Bella’s mind strange that the gas engineers should not have laid mains large enough to maintain an equal pressure however many points were being used in the house. As it was, flames either sank to a lazy flicker or, with the turning off of some point in another part of the house, leapt into an angry life which cracked the glass globes by overheating. Bella took little notice of this at the time, because it was one of the awkward aspects to which she had become accustomed. Nancy had probably put the kettle on to boil.

  Some twenty minutes later, however, the drawing room shook and there was a deep boom from above.

  It sounded as though the heavy looking glass affixed to the wall of Bella’s bedroom had become dislodged and had crashed to the floor, but without shattering.

  The stairs were illuminated by fishtail jets. But there were also candlesticks for each member of the household so that they could guide themselves to bed when the gas was extinguished. Bella’s stood on an occasional table outside the drawing room. She lighted it and went up to her bedroom.

  She could see immediately that the looking glass hung where it always had and holding the candle high she could see nothing out of place. She went over and lit one of the gas lamps to make a closer inspection, but the room was exactly as she had left it.

  If the boom had not come from her room, then it must, she realized with a chill of fear, have come from the floor above.

  She stood holding the candlestick, listening, looking at herself in the glass. The rustling silence was broken by a voice, calling “Kittykittykitty!” over and over again and in the intervals there was the sound of Bella’s breathing. But from upstairs, nothing, not even the squeak of a mouse. She was terrified.

  She sat down at her escritoire. There was still the sheet o
f letter paper which she had taken out to write to Minty Jameson. She took up her pen and wrote:

  Dear Mrs. Jameson,

  I enclose the letter which I wrote to you, but sent in a fit of absent-mindedness to our old address in York.

  Since I wrote it, I have been trying to take up the threads of life. I feel more myself now that I have stopped taking those pills which Dr. Frost prescribed and which made me so drowsy. But I find it hard to meet Mr. Manningham’s requirements. They are so unpredictable, not to say willfully capricious.

  Sometimes I think that they can only be explained on the principle that he wishes to prove to me that I am utterly useless and incompetent. Even to be sure of this would be consoling, for it would mean that I had something to fight against. But just when I have convinced myself that he wishes me nothing but humiliation and misery, he will confound me with some unexpected kindness. For example, on my pointing out my dissatisfaction at walking abroad without companionship, he presented me with what he called ‘a watchdog,’ the most adorable of black and white spaniel puppies, so full of mischief and high spirits that my desire for life was restored. Lest you think that phrase melodramatic, let me assure you that I had reached such an abyss that not merely was life unwelcome, but the prospect of death ardently desirable.

  Such talk must, my dear Mrs. Jameson, appear to you as morbid. I do not pretend it to be otherwise.

  My husband appears to fear that I am going, or have gone, out of my wits. I fear sometimes that he is trying deliberately to drive me out of them; at others, that we are temperamentally so at odds with each other that I will lose my sanity as the result of the strain. (I told you, I think, that my poor mother, who was most happily married to the best of men, had to be confined in an institution and, when still a young woman, younger than I am now, died a raving lunatic.)

  How I wish that you and Mr. Jameson were living but in the next street and I could come round for a cup of tea, a slice of your delicious lardy cake and the tonic of your wholesome company!