Marriage Bed

by Dixon, H. Vernor

  Vivien left the couch for a moment and walked unsteadily to the small table holding the mixing tray. She poured a large shot of bourbon into a water glass and drank it neat and gagged on it. She had to lean against the table for support. When the coughing fit had passed she wiped the tears from her eyes, mixed herself another highball stronger than John had been making, and dropped back onto the couch. She was deliberately drinking more than she could hold. I thought that if I had to face Scott Chandler on the warpath I would be doing the same.

  John watched her over the rim of his glass and I sensed that drive within him as he said, “If I thought Jeff would be happier with you than with Carol, I’d be on your side. His happiness is more important than some small ambition of mine.”

  That amused Vivien. “Small ambition?” She smiled.

  “Well, yes, in comparison. I don’t know how he gets away with it, but Jeff is not the person everyone thinks. Even Carol confuses his personality with his character. Until recently, his personality was so dynamic that no one could believe that under that beautiful shell was a character rotten to the core. Believe me, Vivien, he’s been involved in dozens and dozens of nasty affairs.”

  “I don’t believe anything you say. Jeff is honest.”

  “No,” said John, shaking his head, “he is not honest. That’s a front he assumes.”

  “You’re lying. You forget how long I’ve known you two.”

  “Nevertheless, Jeff is a thoroughly dishonest person. You don’t hear about the trouble he’s had with women — most of them married, by the way. No one hears, because we pay off.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I wish I were. I wish I had the fortune I’ve had to pay out for his escapades.”

  Vivien cried, “You’re a liar. I know him better than that.”

  “Furthermore,” John continued, not to be dissuaded from making his point, “Jeff’s physical condition is — Well, I can’t bring myself to say it, but he should never have married anyone and should never marry again.”

  Vivien stared at him, then laughed hysterically and got to her feet. “Now, that,” she cried, “I happen to know is a dirty rotten lie.” She drew her arm back and threw the half-filled highball glass at him with all her strength. It missed him by a mere fraction of an inch and shattered on the bricks. The liquid spattered his clothes. He brushed a hand across his wet shoulders and stared at her with murder in his eyes.

  Vivien swayed before him and then her eyes closed and her lips curved into a foolish smile and she collapsed to the floor. The alcohol she had consumed would not blend with violent emotion. She was out cold. John swore out loud and stooped over to shake her. There was no response, not even when he slapped her face and rolled her head about. He lifted her to the couch, pulled her skirt down, and rang for Brannen.

  When Brannen came into the room the expression on his face was almost comical. He tried to be blasé, but his eyes were popping from his head.

  John stood there for a moment, looking down at Vivien and wondering what to do, then said to Brannen, “As you can see, Mrs. Chandler is in no condition to leave.”

  “Obviously, sir. But perhaps I could drive her home?”

  John tugged at an ear lobe and thought about that, then shook his head. He was not considering Vivien. He was thinking of Scott. He said, “I don’t think that would be advisable. Suppose you get Miss Laura and one of the maids and put Mrs. Chandler in a guest room.”

  “I believe the only one ready for such occupancy, sir, is the one next to Mrs. Hamlyne’s apartment.”

  “Well, that will be all right. It will have to do. Anyway, I don’t think she’ll be spending the entire night.”

  “As you say, sir.”

  He was about to move away, but John stopped him and said, “By the way, Brannen — uh — you may caution the others that it isn’t necessary to mention our guest to Mrs. Hamlyne. Is she at home?”

  “Yes, sir. She went up to her apartment some time ago.”

  “And my brother?”

  “I don’t know if he is in, sir. It is so difficult,” he smiled, “to know which of you is at home.”

  John nodded. “I think Jeff was wearing a brown sport coat. But if you see him or Mrs. Hamlyne, tell them I’m going to remain in my rooms.” He permitted a half-smile to creep into his eyes as he said, with a wink, “I’ve had a fairly trying evening.”

  Brannen said, with a chuckle, “Yes, sir!”

  Brannen left the library and John followed on his heels, without another glance at Vivien. I stepped back from the draperies and made my way into the dark solarium. I hurried to the far end of the solarium, at the other side of the house, switched on one of the single lamps, and stood by the windows. It would appear as if I had been there for some time.

  But my legs were shaking and would not support me. I lowered myself into a rattan chair and buried my face in my hands. Lynecrest was more than ugly; it was evil.

  Chapter Twelve

  I REMAINED in the solarium only until I had regained control of my nerves and Miss Laura had seen me there. She gave me an oddly mysterious smile; she had a secret I did not know about. I felt like laughing. Evidently she and the other maids had just put Vivien in the guest room. I wondered what they were supposed to do with her car — set fire to it? When she asked, I told Miss Laura that I would have dinner in an hour or so, then left the solarium.

  I went up to the second floor and gently opened the door of the guest room a few inches. I could barely see Vivien’s blonde head on the pillow. She was still unconscious. I closed the door and returned to the landing. The silence of Lynecrest was complete. The help always had a radio blaring in the service quarters, but the thick walls hid any sound. For once, I was glad of that.

  I looked down into the great staircase well, then went up to the third floor and to Jeffrey’s rooms. I stepped inside and turned on the lights. The apartment was empty. I stood there quietly drinking in the atmosphere and the material manifestations of a man’s personality and, in spite of all that John had to say, his character.

  Every object expressed a vigorous spirit and a healthy mind. The minor touches counted most: snapshots of Jeffrey at a polo game, laughing, his arms about the shoulders of two other men; Jeffrey at a party, a testimonial of some kind, raising a glass toward the camera; the clean condition of his guns; the shine of his boots; the loving attention given to good leather; the tasteful arrangement of his prize cups and ribbons; and an album composed entirely of animals, with little notations below each inscribing their best features and even their personalities. Nothing whatever to indicate a brain diseased with the thought of suicide.

  I was afraid of John’s walking in, but I resolutely opened every bureau drawer and examined the contents and searched through the two small desks. I found a great deal of correspondence and a number of my letters and a few from other women written prior to our marriage. They were ordinary. I went through them all as quickly as possible. Nothing.

  It seemed reasonable to me that a man laboring under some great emotional strain with self-destruction as the end result would become careless, or at least inattentive, concerning his person and the material objects around him. But neither in those rooms nor in anything they contained was there a hint of carelessness.

  I switched off the lights, satisfied that there was nothing to be found in those rooms. I returned to the second floor, stood there indecisively for a moment, then went down the curving stairway to the main hall. I slipped out through the front door, unlocked it, and closed it softly. The night had cleared of fog, a cold wind was sweeping across the porch, and chill moonlight flooded the gardens. Vivien’s car, I noticed, had been moved from the driveway. It had probably been placed in the garage.

  I tiptoed through the gardens (why on tiptoe I don’t know, except that was the way I was feeling) and around the corner of the house. The ledge was a black band in the dark and the wind whipped viciously at my skirt. I kept close to the house, even though the drop-of
f at the edge could be seen plainly. I was afraid of the wind. When I reached the two benches I sat down, weak with relief. When some strength had returned I pulled the box from under the bench. I took out all of the manuscripts and tucked them under my arm, then returned the box to its proper place.

  Even exposed to the sweep of the chill wind, the ledge was somehow a sanctuary and I stayed there a while. It must have been Jeffrey’s sanctuary, too. I could picture him sitting there, looking out to sea, feeling the beat of the surf against the foot of the cliff and divorcing himself from all else to put into words the children of his mind. There was nothing out of focus in that picture.

  I looked out over the black ocean and along the silver ribbon made by the moon and at the moon itself, a liquid part of the sea, mating with the tides. The magnetic attraction was powerful. I left the bench and moved cautiously to the edge of the cliff and looked down. It was a vertical drop of about two hundred feet, and at the bottom were blue-black swirls and phosphorescent green and an angry murmur and white fingers climbing the face of the cliff and blown away in the wind and climbing again. It was beautiful and it was horrible. I stepped back.

  It was then that a blinding truth burst in my brain. I had considered it as a possibility and even that afternoon had based some faith on it, but it had never seemed a fact in my mind. Suddenly, there on the ledge, it became clear. I had gone after Jeffrey’s poetry to study it more closely and leisurely and to search it again for personality traits or character maladjustments. That was ridiculous. The truth was pounding in my ears with every rush of the surf against the cliff. It was all so plain that John had been lying about Jeffrey’s attempting suicide on three different occasions. The ledge was Jeffrey’s private sanctuary. If he wished to commit suicide he had only to take a few steps forward and it was accomplished. It was too easy, much too simple, and it would be his obvious course if self-destruction were anywhere in his mind.

  John had been lying. I was convinced. He had been lying to Vivien, too. John had been lying about almost everything concerning Jeffrey since I had arrived at Lynecrest.

  There was something cohesive about those lies. They had a certain tangible form and direction. They were meant to travel toward a certain goal. The one thing certain about those lies was that they were also designed to hide a fact that I could no longer avoid — John was playing two roles, his own and that of Jeffrey.

  The truth, which had actually been screaming at me for days, was inescapable. Not once had I seen the two brothers together. Jeffrey was not at Lynecrest, nor had I seen him or spoken with him at any time. Always it had been John, sometimes playing his own role, sometimes masquerading as Jeffrey. Intuitively, I had known that all along, but it had been so illogical that I had been unable to face it. Now I was forced to face the issue squarely.

  I felt faint and leaned against the stone foundations of the house for support. I thought of all the lying John had been doing. There had to be a reason for those lies. John was the kind who would keep his own counsel, otherwise. He was lying for a very definite purpose. One reason seemed clear enough. He was painting a picture of his brother that was at variance with the truth, a man diseased, unstable, caught in a horrible mess, and with a mind that seemed on the verge of snapping.

  I tried to close the fingers of my mind further on the substance of his lying and easily grasped two implications that virtually screamed at me. The false image of Jeffrey that John was enacting was going to be driven into committing suicide. John had set the stage painstakingly for suicide and was placing upon it the character of a man ghost-ridden and haunted with the frightfulness of his own ego. That was definitely meant to be the final chapter of the masquerade.

  My heart became a heavy weight. The staging of a phony suicide could have but one meaning — Jeffrey was already dead and probably had been dead for some time. Why, I didn’t know. Nor could I even guess at what had happened. But I knew. Somehow, for some cruel reason, it had happened. Jeffrey, my husband, was no longer alive. I was as positive of that as I was of the ocean pounding against the cliff far below. Horribly, terrifyingly, it was the only thing that made sense.

  For a moment I thought of running wildly to the police, to someone, to anyone. But what could I say? Actually, I knew nothing that could be put into words as accusation, or even suspicion. And I would be laughed at. Why, Jeffrey Hamlyne had been seen here, there, and everywhere, by close friends, acquaintances — everyone. They would all swear to it and wonder what was wrong with my sanity.

  And whom could I accuse, and for what reason? An accident? Suicide? Murder? Intuitively, again, I knew it was the latter and was this time helped by some logic. Only the man who had murdered would go to such extreme lengths and take such wild chances with a masquerade to cover up. It was also the only logical reason why that same man would be compelled to stage a phony suicide. It had to be murder and John had to be the murderer.

  Yet I was trapped, not alone by my inability to convince anyone of what I felt to be true, but also through fear. John was not a normal person and was obviously laboring under tremendous pressures that had to be always exactly at the boiling point. If he had killed once, he could do so again; he would, in fact, be compelled to do so if I should make the slightest move to unmask him. My own life was very much in danger and I was afraid.

  I suppose that at that moment I was really a coward, yet I don’t know what action I could have taken. Later, I thought; I’ll figure it all out later. I’ll do something about it when Sam arrives.

  I shook with a sudden chill and desired nothing more than to be inside the house, at once. I placed a hand against the house to steady myself, then started to leave the ledge. I was looking down at the ground, watching my step, but as I neared the corner of the house I looked up and came to a halt.

  The figure of a man, dark in the lighter night, was standing at the entrance to the ledge.

  My nerves were in bad condition for such a shock. The ledge narrowed, the house pressed upon me, the wind sucked around my body with greedy fingers, and I felt myself going over the edge and hurtling down to the ocean. It was as real as a nightmare from which you awake in a cold sweat and grasp for reality, not knowing in which direction it lies.

  The shadow of the man was reality. It moved and the nightmare was broken and the ledge seemed to widen and I was no longer falling through space. The servants’ quarters were directly above my head and I could hear, soft but recognizable, the voices of Brannen and Miss Laura.

  A window opened and Brannen was saying, “What a God-awful wind!” To a question of Miss Laura’s that I could hear but dimly, he replied, “I’ll just leave it open a few minutes. Get all this steam out of here. Now, as I was saying — ”

  He moved away from the window, still talking, but his words were a mumble. However, they restored my sense of balance. They were real voices in a real night and that before me was a man, a real man, and not a shadow.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but my throat was dry. I swallowed and managed to ask, “Well, who are you?”

  The shadow stirred faintly. The voice was flat, toneless. “Good evening, Mrs. Hamlyne.”

  The voice sounded familiar. I clutched the manuscripts tightly under my arm and took a few steps forward. The man’s head was on a level with my own. He was not tall. And there was a slapping sound, the slap of a riding whip against a leather boot.

  “Oh,” I said, “Mr. Dodd.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Kind of a bad night, don’t you think?”

  Now I could see Luke Dodd’s eyes in the faint light and the way his feet were planted wide apart, as if blocking my escape from the ledge. Nonsense, I thought; now I’m beginning to imagine things. Yet when I took another step closer to him he did not change his position.

  He nodded his head at me and his eyes were on the bundle under my arm. “Find something?” he asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Looks to me like you found something on the ledge.”

  “Oh,�
�� I replied, furious with myself for feeling the need to explain, “that’s just poetry; manuscripts.”

  Dodd chuckled coldly. “Is that a hobby of yours, reading poetry by moonlight?”

  I stammered, “Well, I — I haven’t — ”

  “I don’t think the moon’s strong enough to read by.” He held out his hand. “Let me see.”

  I was on the verge of handing him the manuscripts and then was suddenly angry and withdrew them. I asked him, “What are you doing here at this time of night?”

  “I’m wondering the same thing about you. What are you doing here?”

  “That, Mr. Dodd, I consider an impertinence. I resent your attitude.”

  “That so?” He stepped closer, his hand still extended, almost touching me. “Mind if I have a look at what you got?”

  I glanced up at the slightly open window above my head, then back at Dodd. I said, “I certainly would mind.”

  He looked toward the edge of the cliff and then his eyes swung back to me. I could not see them well enough to read their expression, but I could feel their malevolent coldness. I shuddered. It was ridiculous, but I felt that I had come very close to plunging from the ledge.

  Dodd stepped back and leaned against the foundation of the house. He scratched a match on the wall and lit a cigarette. His face was a sharply etched hatchet in the brief flames of the match, a yellow-red portrait of concentrated evil. He flicked the match into space and a tiny spark went over the edge like a meteor and disappeared.

  He drawled, “Just thought I’d take a stroll in the moonlight. Never thought I’d run into anyone on the ledge. You shouldn’t come out here, Mrs. Hamlyne. You know how dangerous it is. You could slip and — ah — fall off.”

  “I am well able to take care of myself.”

  “Sure. Sure. We all are. But accidents happen.” He asked casually, “I guess you like it out here?”

  “In a way. It was private.”