Sweetheart, Sweetheart

by Bernard Taylor

  It was the not knowing that was impossible to live with. Perhaps before I could have been happy in my ignorance; I could have learned to live with the memory of the tragedies that had taken place—but now it had gone far beyond that stage. If the mystery, even though unsolved, had somehow come to an end I could perhaps have learned to live with that too. But it had not ended. How could it end, I asked myself, when Helen’s spirit, in malevolence, was still roaming the house?

  The girl of twelve or thirteen who answered the door to my ringing had blonde hair held at the sides in bunches. She smiled up at me.

  “Is Mrs. Barton in, please?” I asked.

  “Just a minute . . .” She turned back into the hall and called out, “Aunt Liz . . . Aunt Liz . . . There’s someone to see you . . .”

  A minute went by and then above my head a window opened. I looked up and stared into the eyes of Elizabeth Barton. For moments our glances were locked. I moved to speak, but she cut in quickly:

  “Please . . . go away.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, “but could I talk to you for a minute . . . ?”

  “. . . There’s nothing to talk about.”

  And then her head had gone back inside and the window came down. The next thing was the little girl standing before me again, her hand on the door.

  “I’m sorry. Auntie says she can’t see you now . . .”

  “It’s very important. Please tell her.”

  She hesitated, looking back over her shoulder. Then, gathering her courage, she said:

  “. . . I’m sorry . . .”

  “. . . Okay.” I smiled at her; what else could I do. “Thanks, anyway.”

  I should have found some other way of getting to see her, I told myself as I crossed the street. She’d made it clear before that she didn’t want to talk to me, so I had no reason to think I’d do any better on a second attempt. But somehow I would have to find a way. Her avoidance of me made me all the more determined.

  A few yards along past a telephone kiosk I turned a corner and stopped at a small café where I bought a cup of coffee I didn’t want and let it grow cold before me while I sat thinking over every­thing. I sat there for half-an-hour, then, unable to ignore any longer the glacial glances I was getting from the woman behind the counter (was I taking up valuable space?), went outside. I had told my father to expect me around four o’clock. I was already late.

  Taking change from my pocket I went back around the corner to the phone box and started to dial his number. I had only got through the first three or four digits when I saw Elizabeth Barton and the girl appear on the opposite pavement. The girl held a tennis racquet. For a second they stood there while the woman looked about her. She didn’t see me. They began to walk away up the street. Only briefly did I hesitate before I replaced the receiver, left the kiosk and started off cautiously behind them. My father, for the moment, didn’t get another thought.

  Up ahead of me they turned a corner and I quickened my steps so as not to lose them. I saw that we were heading towards a park. I relaxed a little then, and kept safely behind while they crossed at the lights and entered through the gates.

  The park was teeming with people, all taking advantage of the warm sunshine. They lounged on the paper-scattered grass, licked ice-creams, laughed, talked, kissed, or wandered among the trees, away from the crowds, doing the little they could to get back to nature, yet at the same time shielding themselves from it with their tinny transistor radios and cassette players. For a moment or two there I panicked, losing sight of the woman and the child, but then I saw them again, separate, the girl running on ahead, the woman keeping to her leisurely, steady pace.

  Approaching some tennis courts the girl came back to the woman, spoke briefly to her and then dashed off to where another girl, also holding a racquet, waited near a park bench. Elizabeth Barton called out some words I didn’t catch and then moved on some forty yards to a fairly isolated spot and sat down. For a while she watched, and I watched too, as the girls went onto a vacant court and started to play. Turning my attention back to the woman I saw her take a book from her bag and begin to read. In the cool shadow of the trees I stood, getting up my nerve to take the heaven-sent opportunity that was offered me. After a while I went over to her across the grass, stood looking down at her.

  “. . . Mrs. Barton . . .”

  Even as I spoke she was turning to me, aware of someone’s presence at her side. And as her head came up and she heard my words I saw the fear and distress flash into her eyes.

  She gave a very slight gasp, then averted her gaze. She said softly, but with intensity:

  “Do you want me to start shouting for a policeman?”

  I said nothing. She added quickly:

  “I will if you don’t stop bothering me.” Her voice rose slightly. “Please—leave me alone. I’ve got nothing to say to you. Nothing.” With her clenched fist she hit at the dry grass.

  I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t give up and just go away—as I wanted to, but neither did I want to add to that anguish I saw there in her eyes.

  “Please,” I said, “I’ve got to know . . .”

  She gave me another look, full of anger, full of hurt, then got purposefully to her feet. Her hands were clenched, her whole body tense. She looked wildly about her, and I braced myself.

  24

  She didn’t yell. She turned back to me. Her breath came out in a deep sigh. I saw her shoulders sag and the tears well up in her eyes. I stayed quite still. Her glance moved away from me. For long, long moments there was no movement, no sound from either one of us. Then slowly, tiredly she sank down on the grass again.

  Looking at her I could understand why there had been rumours. The paleness of her skin, the dark smudges beneath her eyes couldn’t take away from the considerable beauty that was hers. She really was beautiful. Her honey blonde hair fell in loose, casual waves. Her green eyes, so sad when she lifted them to me, were enormous.

  “I’m sorry,” she breathed, “but you don’t know what it’s been like.” She paused. “What is it . . . that you want to know . . . ?”

  I sat down, just a couple of feet away. “About my brother,” I said.

  “Of course . . .” Then her eyes roamed my face in a kind of wonder. “Seeing you—it brings it all back. You’re so like him . . .” A hand lifted, fingers fluttering, brushing her cheek. Her eyes blinked nervously. She said, “I’d decided never to talk about it. But you can’t stop yourself thinking, can you? And I do. All the time.” She shook her head. “I can’t get over how like him you are. When I saw you first it was the most terrible shock. I knew he had a twin brother, but I never thought about you, and then when I saw you it—it was as if he’d—come back . . .”

  I waited. She said suddenly:

  “Have you got a cigarette, please?”

  I gave her one, took one myself, lit them. Then I said:

  “I had to find you—to talk to you—to find out what happened.”

  “He was a good man—Colin . . .”

  “Yes . . .” I paused. “And Helen?”

  “It was harder to know her. She was a more—private person.”

  “Did you know them long?”

  “I met Helen first. Not long after she moved there. And we became good friends—I thought, in spite of her more—private self. Colin . . . well, he was much easier to get to know.” She nodded. “I really liked them both. When I left the village for London in the early spring we—we kept in touch.”

  “Sometimes you went back.”

  “Yes. Quite often—at first.”

  I could read nothing in her expression. “Why did your visits—end?” I asked.

  She gave a little shrug, plucked at a blade of grass. “There were certain—difficulties.” She added quickly: “Mine, not theirs.”

  I didn’t understand. After a moment I said: “You were there on the night Helen died . . .”

  She puffed at her cigarette, and all the time her free hand n
ever stopped working; she tugged at her skirt, the grass; fingers turning, twisting, weaving. “He phoned me,” she said, “from a public phone box and asked me to go down and see them. It was quite late, but he was insistent that I go straightaway. I was surprised—hearing him.”

  “Surprised? How?”

  “He sounded so—well, distraught—upset. All he would say was that he was worried about Helen . . .”

  “So you went.”

  “I got into the car and drove down there at once. Helen was in bed when I got there—apparently she hadn’t been well for some days. Jean Timpson was there too; she’d been helping to look after her . . .” She came to a halt. Gently I prompted her.

  “Yes . . . ?”

  “I went in to see Helen, but she was asleep. Even so I could see that something was wrong.”

  “How? In what way?”

  “Just the way she lay there. Tossing and turning in her sleep. Colin said he didn’t know what to do. Then he said he wanted to talk to me—but not there inside the house. So we went outside, through the garden and into the orchard—right away from the house.”

  “And what happened? What did he say?”

  “He said very little. I remember it came on to rain but he didn’t seem to be aware of it. We just stood out there in the rain. There were lots of long pauses . . . awkward . . . I knew he was desperate to talk, but he just didn’t seem able to—or else he couldn’t find the right words—I don’t know. He asked me if I’d noticed anything about Helen.”

  “Noticed what?”

  “Anything—odd about her, he said. Anything—strange. Not just then—that night—but before—over the past weeks . . .”

  “What did he mean?”

  “That’s what I asked him. He said she was so jumpy and nervy. Hysterical sometimes, he said. He said he thought . . . thought that she was losing her mind. Well, I said perhaps she was a bit overwrought. Perhaps she’d been working too hard. I had noticed a gradual change in her but I had thought it was probably something to do with her pregnancy. I wasn’t aware that she was that bad . . .” She stopped, then went on: “Anyway, he suddenly turned to me and said, ‘There’s something I want to show you,’ and he took my arm and led me out of the orchard into that little copse that runs by it. He took me to the spot where a summer-house used to be. It was quite dark, but even so I could see he’d been working there.”

  “Working?”

  “He’d promised to build her a summer-house—right next to the site of the original one. I could see he’d started. The ground had been marked out and he’d been digging. It was still raining but he said to me, ‘Stay here,’ and turned back towards the house.” She paused. “He said a strange thing. Just before he actually ran off he asked me whether I was afraid . . .”

  “Afraid?”

  “I don’t know what he meant. But I said no, and he ran off. I waited there by the little stone seat . . . and it was only minutes later that I heard Helen screaming out.”

  “Colin wasn’t with you at that time . . .”

  “No, I told you—he’d gone back to the house. I ran back as well then—and found him holding her in his arms at the bottom of the sunken garden.” Her eyes closed as if there were pictures in her mind she would shut out. When she opened them again she said: “It was awful. There was . . . blood coming from her mouth and . . . oh, there was so much blood. And she was still conscious. She kept talking—wild, rambling words. But she was dying. I knew it.” She shook her head several times. “God, it was terrible.”

  “Was there nothing anyone could do?”

  “Nothing. Jean came out, I remember. She said, later, that she’d been taking a bath, I think. I remember Colin saying something about the kitten—Helen’s kitten; apparently she’d tried to get it down from the roof. Colin was in a dreadful state. We all were; it’s not easy to remember what was said at the time. Or later.”

  “Later?”

  “At the inquest.”

  “Oh, yes.” I nodded. “I’d forgotten that.”

  “Of course, it was all explained then. Though I know there were some people who didn’t believe us. Either of us. But it was the truth.”

  “. . . What did he say—at the inquest?”

  “He just told them what had happened. The truth. He’d just gone into the house, he said, to get a torch, and while he was in there he heard her outside, screaming. And then—then she fell.”

  “Trying to get her kitten down from the roof . . .”

  “Yes. She told him that herself, just before she died. The kitten was up on the roof, she said, and couldn’t get down . . .”

  I hesitated, then asked abruptly: “Did you see the kitten?”

  “No.” She looked at me sharply. “Why do you ask that? The fact that I didn’t see it doesn’t mean anything. Dear God, remember what had happened! To start looking around for some kitten wasn’t the first thing on our minds.”

  “No . . .”

  “It was like a nightmare. The phone wasn’t working so I had to drive down to the village to get the doctor. When I got back with him it was all over. Colin and Jean had wrapped her in a blanket and taken her inside out of the rain. But she was quite dead.” She gave a kind of dry little sob, her breath catching in her throat. I looked into her eyes but I could see no tears.

  “I stayed with him that night,” she went on. “He wasn’t fit to be left alone. He took some tablets the doctor left him, but they didn’t help. He didn’t sleep at all, I know. Neither did I—hardly. We sat up most of the night; not saying anything really, just—sitting there, and when we did go to bed I could hear him, moaning, crying out in anguish in the next room.” She sighed. “And that was it. There were the police, questions, the inquest, the funeral. That was it.”

  “Did he talk at all—to you—about that night?”

  “No. As I said, I heard him raving and going on in his room—all sorts of things—but nothing made any sense to me. I went back to London the next day. I had to. I only saw him—twice more; at the inquest and at the funeral. After that I didn’t—didn’t see him again.” She stubbed out her cigarette, eyes cast down. “Now you know it all. That was it.”

  She continued to grind the cigarette-end into the dry grass. Against the silence between us now the shouts, murmurs of the other people seemed a sudden thing, a wave; and I became aware, just briefly, of all those other lives going on around us. Over on the tennis court the two girls laughed and squealed in anguish as they served and backhanded into the net. I watched them for a moment, half-seeing; half my mind acknowledging that for all their energy and go they wouldn’t ever give Chris Evert any sleepless nights. I turned back to the woman.

  “But that wasn’t it, was it?”

  “What do you mean?” She didn’t look at me.

  “You did see him again. You were there too on the night he was killed.”

  “. . . You know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know a good bit more than anyone else.” She still didn’t look up.

  “Jean Timpson saw your car that night, where you’d parked it behind the trees. She heard the crash of Colin’s­ car—and saw yours was still there—later, much later. Why didn’t you tell the police?”

  “I couldn’t. I’d already been—involved to an extent in Helen’s death. I didn’t want to be involved again. Anyway, they wouldn’t have believed me.”

  “Why not?”

  “They wouldn’t. I know that.”

  “But you were involved.”

  “They didn’t know that.” She looked at me suddenly, and the question was there so plainly in her anxious eyes.

  “No,” I said, “they still don’t know. Jean never mentioned it to anyone. Only me, I think.”

  She gave a little sigh—relief, then said, almost in a whisper:

  “But mostly it was . . . because I was afraid. Oh, God, I was so afraid.”

  “Of the police?”

  “No. Of her. Helen.”

  Her loo
k told me she feared to go on—that I would think she was mad.

  “It’s all right,” I said, “I know about Helen.”

  “. . . You know . . .”

  I nodded. “She’s been there all the time since I got to the house.” I added, before I could stop myself: “She’s cruel. She’s evil.”

  “Yes. I know that now.”

  “But why should you be afraid of her? She was your friend.”

  “That was before—when—when . . .” Her voice tailed off and I finished the words for her.

  “When she was alive.”

  Across the grass a ball rolled and came to rest against my shoe. I picked it up, threw it to the little boy who came in hot pursuit. When he had gone away again I said to her:

  “That night when Colin died . . . Tell me about it.”

  She hesitated as if making up her mind whether or not to speak—or perhaps she was just getting the courage—then took a deep breath and began. She spoke for the most part haltingly, and then sometimes very rapidly—as if the flow of her memories gathered momentum over which she had no control.

  “Somehow,” she said, “once Helen was dead I never thought I’d hear from him again. There are certain things that happen in your life when you think that a—a certain point has been reached, and for the sake of the—survivors it’s best not to meet again. That’s how it was with me. I—I wanted to see Colin, but I felt too much had happened. With Helen dying like that—so violently—it all seemed somehow so—final. I thought he and I would never meet again . . . But then he came to see me late one afternoon. Soon after the funeral. He’d come up to stay with his—with your father for a few days, he said. He said he wanted me to help him. That I must help him.”

  “How?”

  “He wanted to go back to the cottage—and he wanted me to go with him.”

  “. . . Is that all?”

  She nodded. “He wouldn’t go alone.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” she said very simply, very quietly, “he was afraid.” She looked at my face as I waited, then said emphatically, “Oh, yes, he was afraid, I could see. On the surface he appeared almost—calm, but I knew him, and I could see what was happening underneath. He was so tense. He was terrified at the thought of going back alone.”