As he stood there, bathed in the drum-beat rhythm, and with the pale, glittering young surging past him out of the night, William didn’t feel forty-eight. He didn’t feel married, either; and least of all did he feel like the saintly, devoted paragon of a husband that his wife’s illness had forced him into becoming.
Yes, forced. All through the years when Eleanor had been well and strong, and like anyone else’s wife, William had been like anyone else’s husband—cheerfully selfish, casually loving, and full of complaints, as is a man’s right.
But Eleanor’s illness had finished all that. It had silenced his complaints, pole-axed his selfishness. All that was left was the loving—casual now no longer, but nursed and coddled like an overfed cat, bloated with pity and good intentions.
“What a wonderful husband!” the neighbours were beginning to say of him. “Whatever would she do without him?” “The patience of an angel!” they were saying. “Never a cross word, even now that she’s grown so trying, poor thing!” He had been hustled into being wonderful as a man might be hustled into a plain-van; inch by inch, and fighting all the way. Slowly, inexorably, Eleanor’s aching back, her worsening stomach pains, had forced him back and back, blocking first one exit and then another, until at last here he was, like a man trapped by the advancing tide, finally and irrevocably at the mercy of her encroaching illness. By attacks of vomiting, by bouts of uncontrollable shivering, her sickness had got him into its power; bit by bit, day after day, it had moulded him, twisting and transforming his common-place flesh into an angel-substance, the stuff of which martyrs are made. He had accepted his role of martyr because he could not fight it; he nursed Eleanor with tenderness and devotion because these seemed to be the only tools that were left to him; and his reward for all this was a monstrous, ever-increasing tedium, as Eleanor grew more and more boring, more and more in pain.
Someone had put on another record. It roared out from the russet darkness of the discotheque like a trumpet-call to Youth, and William’s nostrils quivered like those of an old war-horse at the summons. Youth, youth! His forty-eight years seemed to slide away into the night, and so did all thought of his dreary middle-aged wife, hollowed out by her dreary middle-aged operations.
He was free, free of it all, for one whole golden evening! Free like these bearded striplings, like these dozy, half-grown girls, delicious in their ignorance of pain! Free …! … Free …! His magic Tuesday evening had begun.
William pushed open the swinging door, and marched, head held high, into the very shrine of youth; marched as of right, because had he not a girl in there of his very own? A girl as gloriously young as the rest, and as delectable, and waiting for him?
“Willy! There you are! I was beginning to think something had happened! I was afraid you’d had to stay with Her! Oh, Willy, darling!”
With some such words as these she always welcomed him, reaching out her silver-tipped little fingers to draw him down beside her, into the place she had been guarding for him on the red plastic cushions. He loved the feel of her soft hands, not yet touched by work; and he loved too her never-failing surprise, Tuesday after Tuesday, at his successful arrival at the rendezvous. The predictability of her every word and gesture was infinitely soothing to him: it gave these Tuesday evenings a luminous quality, the precious minutes sliding through his fingers like a necklace of well-loved jewels. He knew already what her next words were going to be, and how he was going to answer them. He waited, joyously expectant as a child awaiting his familiar bedtime story.
“Is She any better?”
Coral’s voice held just the note of anxious melancholy that is appropriate for asking after a hopeless invalid; but behind the sweet concern in her grey eyes, William could see dancing an eagerness for morbid details that exactly matched his own aching need to confide. Coral loved to hear of Eleanor’s petulance, her sickroom fads and fancies, her endless aches and pains; loved to hear of them every bit as much as William longed to tell of them. It made them both feel so healthy, he and Coral; so vital, and so united in the singular glory of not being ill. And so William shook his head, sadly, as he always did in answer to Coral’s enquiry; he looked into her sparkling, expectant eyes, and to keep that enchanting eagerness dancing for him, he raked his wearied memories for the things she most loved to hear.
She loved to hear that Eleanor had refused to take her medicine again; that she had scolded William for not responding quickly enough to her night-bell, endlessly dragging him from sleep. She loved to hear that Eleanor had asked him, perhaps, for dry toast, or a glass of orange juice; and then, when he brought it to her, all daintily set out on a pretty lace cloth, had turned her face away in disgust, refusing to eat.
“Oh dear!” Coral would say, licking her little silver lips. “Oh dear, I am sorry! But the pain’s better, is it? The pain in her back?”
Coral loved to hear about the pain in Eleanor’s back, it made her own spine feel so straight, and strong, and youthful. She gave a lissom little shrug with it now, while she breathed her condolences, and William watched the small movement with delight. He leaned forward, and kissed the smooth, unlined cheek under the fall of gleaming hair.
“How marvellous it is to touch a woman who is well!” he murmured; and Coral glowed, and flaunted her wellness before him for just the right length of time before gently prompting him; for after all, their time was short.
“She’s not worse, though, is she?” she suggested, laying her little hand on William’s, with sweet concern: “The doctor doesn’t think she’s worse?”
The sweet, secret zest in the young voice was to William like the forked flame of desire itself, and he responded to it like a lizard in the sun, his mind coming alive, darting this way and that among the sordid sickroom trivia for the kind of nourishment on which his and Coral’s relationship flourished and grew fat.
“Not worse—not really—” he said, with studied fairness, and whetting Coral’s appetite by the tiny delay. “But it’s the sickness, you see, she can’t keep anything down. No matter how carefully I prepare it….”
Coral’s silvery, knowledgeable voice broke in, right on cue.
“You know why that is, Willy, don’t you? You do realise why she is doing it? Unconsciously, of course—I don’t mean she’d deliberately do such a thing to you. But subconsciously she is equating food with love. By rejecting the food you offer her, she is rejecting your love. Rejecting it out of jealousy, because she can’t bear not to have all of it, every minute of the day! Her demands on your love have gone beyond all reason….”
Darling Coral! She never failed him, never! Aloud he said:
“Oh, Coral, how wonderful it is to be with someone who understands! I couldn’t talk about this to anyone else in the whole wide world, because it seems such a dreadful thing to say of one’s own wife. But I have wondered myself, sometimes, if it isn’t psychosomatic, some of it …?”
How the silver earrings bobbed and danced, in a sort of ecstasy of understanding!
“Yes,” Coral murmured: “Yes, that’s what I mean! Poor Eleanor! I’m sure she doesn’t realise it herself, but after all, illness is a way of keeping a husband at home, isn’t it, when a woman hasn’t—well, hasn’t much else to hold him with, to make him want to stay with her….”
She sipped her coffee delicately, watching him over the rim of the cup with grey, thoughtful eyes. The most wonderful part of the whole evening was just beginning; this moment when they got on to Eleanor’s unconscious motivations. Like gods they soared together over the sick woman’s disintegrating personality, pouncing on a complex here, a neurosis there, handing them back and forth to each other like jewels, with little cries of admiration.
“Of course, looking back, I can see that she always had these incipient hypochondriac tendencies….”
“… she can’t help it, of course, it’s no use blaming her….”
“… lying in bed all day … it’s no wonder her back hurts her….”
“… and
it’s not as if the doctor wasn’t giving her plenty of pain-killers….”
“You know, I’ve sometimes wondered whether that pain of hers is really as bad as she fancies it is…. I once read an article which said that jealousy, especially sexual jealousy …”
“… and all that vomiting in the night…. Unconscious demand for attention….”
“… because she can’t bear her husband to escape from her, even into sleep….”
The coffee in the two cups cooled in front of them as they talked. They needed no stimulant, for the thought of Eleanor, ugly and repellent on her bed of sickness, filled them with such a sense of their own health that it was like wine: it was like immortality itself.
But all too soon it was over. At eleven o’clock, William must be home again, his weekly respite at an end. And only then did they look away from each other, a sort of shyness rising between them.
“If only …!” began William; and stopped: and at the same time Coral murmured, “How long …?” and checked herself. They moved out of the discotheque in silence, for they could not trust themselves to say another word.
*
When William got home that night, he found that Eleanor had been sick again. As happened more and more frequently now, she had failed to get her head properly over the enamel bowl at her bedside, and as William, teeth clenched in a ghastly smile, set himself to his disgusting task, it suddenly flashed through his mind: This could be the last time! I don’t have to go on like this!
And that night, as he tipped the allotted two sleeping pills into his wife’s bony, outstretched palm, the bottle shook and shuddered in his hand, and he felt the sweat springing on his forehead, so that he had to turn his face away.
The impulse subsided almost as suddenly as it had assailed him, but it had left its mark, and during the ensuing week it would not leave him alone.
It would be so easy! Several times, as the days went by, he looked at the bottle as it stood on the bathroom shelf, and had fantasies of pounding up the pills and stirring them, all of them, into his wife’s night-time cup of gruel. He had visions of rushing into the discotheque next Tuesday, crying, “She’s dead! She’s dead!” and flinging himself into Coral’s arms, and both of them sobbing for very joy.
But he knew, really, that it was only a vision. One night, he tipped a whole lot of pills out into the palm of his hand, handled them, and knew, for certain, that he would not dare. Why, the very feel of them on his bare skin set his heart pounding; and dizziness so blurred his vision that he could scarcely get the pills back into the bottle. Two—three—several of them—went pitter-patter across the floor, and as he bent to retrieve them he felt the breath choking in his lungs, and his heart thudded as if it would burst through his ribs.
No, he, William, was not the sort of which murderers are made. He was the sort who would suffer, who would let Coral suffer. The months, the years would go by, their love would slowly wither, and still Eleanor would live on….
“William! William!”
The weak yet urgent voice twanged against his nerves, and he gave a guilty start.
“William, where are my pills?” the voice demanded, peevish and despairing. “Why are you being so long?”
Hastily, hands still trembling, he stuffed the last few pills back into the bottle.
“Coming, dear, coming!” he called, and hurried into his wife’s room. He looked into the grey, sunken face in which no spark of beauty or gaiety was left; he looked at the yellow, stick-like arms that once, in their bloom, had held him close in love.
“If only I had the courage!” he thought.
But he reckoned without Eleanor’s courage. The next morning, the Tuesday morning, the bottle of pills was empty, and Eleanor was dead. Dead on a Tuesday. Dead on his glorious day. Had she known? And had she, knowing, chosen this day on which to release him?
He did not call the doctor, or indeed do anything at all.
“Coral!” he kept repeating to himself; “When I see Coral …!” And he sat all day in the silent house, waiting for the relief and the joy to wash over him; waiting for the moment when he would rush through the crowded discotheque crying, just as he had in his dreams, “She’s dead! She’s dead …!”
*
The discotheque was more crowded and noisier than ever, and at first Coral could not seem to hear what he was saying.
“She’s what?” she kept asking; and as he leaned forward to repeat the news, he saw that her face was white.
“She’s—she’s …” He stopped, and he knew in that instant that he could never tell her.
For where now would be that sense of united well-being, that glorious sense of their joint health in contrast to Eleanor’s sickness? What would they talk about, he and Coral, now that Eleanor’s symptoms, her complaints, and her unreasonableness were gone? Where would be Coral’s marvellous sympathy and understanding now that Eleanor had escaped them for ever, had moved on into a realm where the barbed insights of pop psychology could not follow her? What was Coral, anyway, now that she was no longer a bulwark against his dying wife? He stared across the table at the empty-faced little blonde, who was waiting so impatiently for him to speak.
“She—she’s worse,” he stammered. “She … She …”
“Oh, my poor Willy! She kept you up again last night, did she? Oh, I can see she did, you poor darling, you look so tired! But you shouldn’t give in to it, Willy, you really shouldn’t! After all, we know, don’t we, that she’s not really in pain, it’s only her unconscious aggression and jealousy….”
It was all right! It was the old Coral again, just as she had always been! Nothing had been changed, nothing spoiled! Their Tuesday conversation could go on exactly as before!
But for how long? For how long can you keep your dead wife propped against the pillows, never calling a doctor, never letting the neighbours in? He, William, too much of a coward to be a murderer, was going to be transformed, as the days went by, into a creature far, far worse than a murderer. A monster … a ghoul … the horror of it blazoned across the front page of every Sunday paper: and all because he didn’t dare do anything.
He wondered, dreamily, whether any others of the ghouls and monsters of the world had attained their awful status in just this way? By just doing nothing, while the facts creep nearer?
DON’T TELL CISSIE
“FRIDAY, THEN. THE six-ten from Liverpool Street,” said Rosemary, gathering up her gloves and bag. “And don’t tell Cissie!” she added, “You will be careful about that, won’t you, Lois?”
I nodded. People are always talking like this about Cissie, she’s that kind of person. She was like that at school, and now, when we’re all coming up towards retirement, she’s like it still.
You know the kind of person I mean? Friendly, good-hearted, and desperately anxious to be in on everything, and yet with this mysterious knack of ruining things—of bringing every project grinding to a halt, simply by being there.
Because it wasn’t ever her fault. Not really. “Let me come! Oh, please let me come too!” she’d beg, when three or four of us from the Lower Fourth had schemed up an illicit trip to the shops on Saturday afternoon. And, because she was our friend (well, sort of—anyway, it was our set that she hovered on the fringe of all the time, not anyone else’s)—because of this, we usually let her come; and always it ended in disaster. She’d be the one to slip on the edge of the kerb outside Woolworth’s, and cut her knee so that the blood ran, and a little crowd collected, and a kind lady rang up the school to have us fetched home. She’d be the one to get lost … to miss the bus … to arrive back at school bedraggled and tear-stained and late for evening preparation, hopelessly giving the game away for all of us.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that after a few such episodes she’d have given up, or at least have learned caution. But no. Her persistence (perhaps one would have called it courage if only it hadn’t been so annoying)—well, her persistence, then, was indomitable. Neither school punishment
s nor the reproaches of her companions ever kept her under for long. “Oh, please let me come!” she’d be pleading again, barely a week after the last débâcle, “Oh, plee-ee-ease! Oh, don’t be so mean!”
And so there, once again, she’d inexorably be, back in action once more. Throwing-up in the middle of the dormitory feast. Crying with blisters as we trudged back from a ramble out of bounds. Soaked, and shivering, and starting pneumonia from having fallen through the ice of the pond we’d been forbidden to skate on.
So you can understand, can’t you, why Rosemary and I didn’t want Cissie with us when we went to investigate the ghost at Rosemary’s new weekend cottage. Small as our chances might be of pinning down the ghost in any case, Cissie could have been counted on to reduce them to zero. Dropping a tray of tea-things just as the rapping began…. Calling out, “What? I can’t hear anything!” as we held our breaths trying to locate the ghostly sobbing…. Falling over a tombstone as we tiptoed through the moonlit churchyard…. No, Cissie must at all costs be kept out of our little adventure; and by now, after nearly half a century, we knew that the only way of keeping Cissie out of anything was to make sure that she knew nothing about it, right from the beginning.
*
But let me get back to Rosemary’s new cottage. I say “new”, because Rosemary has only recently bought it—not because the cottage itself is new. Far from it. It is early eighteenth-century, and damp, and dark, and built of the local stone, and Rosemary loves it (did love it, rather—but let me not get ahead of myself). Anyway, as I was saying, Rosemary loved the place, loved it on sight, and bought it almost on impulse with the best part of her life’s savings. Their life’s savings, I suppose I should say, because she and Norman are still married to each other, and it must have been his money just as much as hers. But Norman never seems to have much to do with these sort of decisions—indeed, he doesn’t seem to have much to do with Rosemary’s life at all, these days—certainly, he never comes down to the cottage. I think that was part of the idea, really—that they should be able to get away from each other at weekends. During the week, of course, it’s all right, as they are both working full-time, and they both bring plenty of work home in the evenings. Rosemary sits in one room correcting history essays, while Norman sits in another working out Export Quotas, or something; and the mutual non-communication must be almost companionable, in an arid sort of a way. But the crunch will come, of course, when they both retire in a year or so’s time. I think Rosemary was thinking of this when she bought the cottage; it would become a real port in a storm then—a bolt-hole from what she refers to as “the last and worst lap of married life”.
By Horror Haunted Page 3