by John Lodwick
The clothes drawers to begin with: two pairs of unworn Christmas nylons, many more of sober lisle much scarred by darning. Three handbags, the first two quite empty, but the third containing an old dance card dated 1939.
“Jim” . . . “Basil” . . . “Jim” again . . . then a long blank, the rest silence. Could she possibly have sat all that long period out, or had she been borne away to supper by some backwoods laird? Rumbold shut the drawer, proceeded further, fingering the heavy tweeds, ruffling the underclothes.
From the mantelpiece the husband, bristly of moustache and growing bald, stared down at the intruder.
“Ah,” said Rumbold, catching the cuckold eye. “You don’t like it, eh? Just go and plant some tea, there’s a good fellow. I’ll deal with you immediately.”
With a burglar’s extra and time-saving sense he continued with his search. The bills . . . dull, unambitious, and for the most part meaningless to him; the picture postcards . . . Gleneagles, Isle of Skye and technicolour view of Dundee docks; . . . some chemist’s receipts, dating back for several years and indicative of hard winters overcome by the judicious sipping of cough mixture and lung syrup. Bored, Rumbold was about to search for more amusing treasure when he came upon a last receipt of quite especial interest.
“Chesterton and Queen, Prince’s Street, Edinburgh . . . To Miss M. Macleod. 1 lb. Ars: Oxide, 11 June 1935.”
“How very, very queer,” he thought. “Can it be that the gift runs in the family?” and because it was not his way to abandon evidence which might later prove of use he tucked the receipt away in his pocket.
Now for the husband! The letters, chastely secured by much blue ribbon, were voluminous and prosy in the extreme:
“Such a sunset as we had this evening, old girl . . .” and there followed two pages of blank verse in which Longfellow and Walt Whitman made uneasy marriage. What a pedagogic planter it was, what a windbag, with its chatter of “burnished skins” and “lush vegetation yearning towards the monsoon ridden sky”. A breath of the Mysterious East in every line there was intended . . . and sure enough Rumbold could visualise a humid, lamp-lit room, the whisky in a toothmug by the bed, the oppressive drape of the mosquito net and the unhappy man scribbling with fountain pen to conjure the first sex-charged watches of the night.
“I don’t know how you feel, old thing, but I wish that I had you between these sheets, I can tell you.”
Bah! Rumbold returned the letter to its envelope, tied the blue ribbon, closed the drawer. A last quick glance round the room, ten seconds of listening behind the door and then off down the passage, still soft of toe, to pass a quiet half-hour with his homework.
He was in his own room now. He filled the fountain pen, drew the blank sheet of paper towards him and began:
“Fiona Lampeter . . . Fiona Lampeter . . . Fiona Lampeter.” Her signature, the serifed “F”, the rolling uplands of the consonants were child’s play. He had long since mastered that.
“Please be so good as to cash the enclosed . . . Please be so good . . . This is my last will and . . . is my last . . . I declare . . . is my last . . . testament.”
From a folder he took her bank statement. To credit: £7,318 . . . To E. Rumbold, £1,000. The income was received quarterly, tax already deducted in Australia. There had been a payment shortly before Christmas. There would be another at the end of March. She had not yet kept her promise to make the account a joint one with his name beside her own. Perhaps she was waiting until they should go to London together? While his own plans remained uncertain, he was unwilling to broach this subject.
What to do? The letter from the Embassy, received that morning, lay before him.
“Dear Mr. Rumbold,—With reference to our recent conversation I am happy to inform you that I have now received instructions to facilitate your passage. If my memory serves me well you mentioned mid-March as the date most suitable to yourself. This would also suit us, we shall have a courier plane leaving Lyneham on the 9th of that same month. Consequently, if you will come to London some days beforehand, contacting me by the usual means, I will provide you with an escort and the necessary papers.”
Quite so . . . very amiable, very civil . . . but what to do? The great adventure, or the smaller and more niggling one? He could forge a cheque, of course, and skip, but that was dangerous: enquiries might be made, telephone calls exchanged. He would have to pack his bag, leaving neither good suit nor favourite tie behind. Then he would have to travel with her to the station, flank against her flank, himself lying glibly:
“You promise that you’ll be back by Monday?”
“Oh, certainly . . . Monday at the latest.”
Better . . . oh, far better, cleaner, safer and more bold to kill her . . . to send the bitch to join the boy upon the seaweed-laden rocks. The will should not be difficult to fabricate.
“I bequeath. . . .”
They sold them, printed, nowadays in stationer’s; tenpence for a copy. Sufficient to imitate her hand, and to procure two witnesses, these latter to be found in any pub.
“So sorry to trouble you. I have a somewhat unusual request to make. A will, you know. I’m going East. That’s the position, but I don’t want my family to be alarmed. . . .”
The strangers, beset suddenly by visions of beri-beri, Tsetse-fly, pellagra, sign with alacrity, not noticing that blotting paper covers the terms of the last testament, the testator’s name.
Then towards the deed itself . . . but here no use denying that affection had begun to sap the original resolve . . . no use to deny either that “be kind to me” and “you’re so cruel” had both had their effect upon his resolve.
She employed, within the circle of her friends, a special terminology: the language of the nursery adopted to an adult end. Cats she loved and called them Putta-Woos. Affection mentioned by name above, and displayed by holding hands in cinemas, by a leg thrust crossways in the bed in search of warmth, was “feck”. Sexual relations, the twisting of moist hands and the pummeling of chests together was called “seck”. There were also distortions of the vowels—rahney, pahney, trahney: substituted, as no doubt the reader guesses, for rain and pain and train. But this was but the ordinaire of her conversation—which many a Britannic imitator of the Jewish Kafka might have envied.
Childish? Ah, but pardon me, who does not pray when the whistle of the bomb is heard . . . what smooth scoundrel skirting Long Acre, what business man within view of Cheapside but does not go down upon his pallid sun-forgotten knees? The safety of the womb is very much regretted; and that of the cradle with its rubber underblanket not much less so.
“I should like,” she had once said to him, “to lie in bed all day with lots and lots of lovely drinkies by my side and glossy magazines upon the counterpane. I can’t cope with life: I never wanted to. . . .”
“Anybody can cope with life upon your income.”
“Ah no, how wrong you are! When Rockefeller grew rich did he face existence with any more enthusiasm than I do at the moment? When he was young his strong adrenaline secretions kept him going, but when the money bags were filled, he had to turn to charity . . . had to find some other outlet for all that energy.”
“Well, I daresay he died happy. These dollar millionaires have curious powers of self-deception.”
“Exactly . . . but I have none. I don’t yearn for a better world, any more than I believe in the prospect of its achievement. Nor do the pleasures of materialist civilisation really tempt me very much. Of course I want my bed but I should like to have it on a magic mountain . . . not in horrid, bourgeois Switzerland, but in the Caucasus. Indeed, I often wished I were consumptive. I suppose that’s my shortage of adrenaline again.”
“All these clinicalities,” he said. “You ought to hold a kidney dish while talking. There’s only one solution and that’s to be an outright bastard.”
> “Yes, but even bastards have their party line. I’ve often seen you stop to check on it, and you’re such a pious bastard, too. Believe me, you’ll not go as far as you intend.”
A slight noise, the turning of a door handle. Quickly Rumbold removed his homework and bent down again, as if about to write a letter.
His visitor was Martha: “I have some tay for you,” she said.
“Well, where is it?”
“Ach, you wouldn’t want to drink it in this cold room, now would you? Come down to the kitchen, there’s a dear man.”
“All right,” he said, then, pulling a Burns, Oates and Washbourne envelope from his pocket, handed her a votive card.
“St. Raymond of Penafort,” he said. “Very rare. You just can’t get them nowadays.”
“Ah, the sweet fellow,” said Martha. “And what did he do now?”
“Well,” said Rumbold. “Opinions vary about that, but at any rate he was Confessor to the King of Aragon, and this King, who had some business there, took him on a trip to Majorca. Unfortunately the monarch had a mistress, a sin for which St. Raymond found it necessary to rebuke him publicly. The King was furious. He forbade his ships to re-embark the Saint. But that didn’t worry Raymond: he just stretched his sheepskin cloak upon the sea and returned to Barcelona by himself.”
“The angels must have blown the fair breeze behind him,” remarked Martha.
“Yes, I suppose they did.” Rumbold sipped his tea (for they were now in the kitchen). “The angels had a lot of work to do in those days. Here’s St. Agnes for you and St. Louis de Gonzaque, too. Both took the vow of chastity at the age of nine. Wicked people wanted to do all sorts of things to them, but the angels came and stopped it just in time.”
“Fancy that,” said Martha.
“I don’t fancy it at all,” he said, and watched her tuck the three cards in her missal.
Beneath the picture of the Sacred Heart upon the wall, the crucifix, and beneath the crucifix . . . which had been stained a rich brown by the fumes of countless soups . . . the stove; massive, knobbly, shining, hissing with a plenitude of Nicholson’s best ovoids. So large was this stove that the visitor, seeing it for the first time, would turn towards the doorway, wondering how it could ever have entered through an aperture so small. Perhaps the house had been built round it? No one knew and no one would ever know. Three fur-coated Russians might have stretched at ease upon that stove. Such aids to cooking are not built in our day.
And calendars of yester-year, and flour bins, bread bins, coal bins, jars of ginger. And rows of tomato chutney, sombre of colour, and pumpkins in a corner; and copper pans to boil or baste a brace of turkeys, and strings of bald and crinkled onions come from Brittany.
The kitchen was not modern. It was warm. Friendly, you might even call it, with the jammy finger-prints of long sacked tweenies still upon the wall and the boldly etched initials of grooms and butlers in the soft wood of the table . . . D. H. . . . H. J., and beneath that, a crudely incised heart.
Rumbold drew up an easy chair, leant forward, toasted toes and hands. Martha stood just beside him. She was boiling milk with which to make a tapioca pudding, her favourite, which she would eat at dusk.
“And why, please, Mr. Stay-At-Home, don’t you go out with the girls?”
“Because the girls are shopping,” he said briefly.
“Never a man I’ve known like you to laze about the house. Look at Peggy’s Simon now. . . .”
“All right,” he said, smiling. “Let’s look at him,” and because she did not answer, tugged her skirt. “Well?” he said, insisting.
“Ah, the poor creature,” she conceded.
“When did the old lady die?”
“The Mistress? 1935, I think, or may be thirty-four. No matter . . . it was in September. The figs were picked, the pears were in the jars. Then, one day, she was taken badly. She never left her bed again until I took her up to wash her cold, dead body. ‘Martha,’ she used to say. ‘Take heed. You’re spending far too much on eggs.’”
“And the doctors, what did they say . . . enteritis? . . . tummy trouble?”
“Gastric ’flu, they declared it and her fair moaning with the pain, poor woman. One night she called me: ‘I wish I had your faith, Martha,’ she said. ‘I wish you had it, too, Madam,’ I told her. ‘Do you think there’s any hope for me?’ she said then. ‘Not much,’ I said, for never were there any lies between us. ‘I’ve been a bad woman, Martha dear,’ she said. ‘Hush!’ I said, and what with hot coffee and little petting I soon get the poor thing to sleep. But what she let out there was true enough: strict in the home she was, religious in herself, but no churchgoer.”
“And Peggy? How did she take the thing?”
“Take it! The poor girl was in a dreadful state. ‘You stay here,’ I said. ‘Don’t go to the funeral, or I’ll not answer for the consequences.’ But she went, and fainted as they sent the coffin down.”
“Tell me,” he said, “what were they like as children?”
“Quiet.”
“Always quiet?”
“Very nearly always, too. The one . . . Fiona . . . with the books; Silas Marner she made me read her, and the other with her paints and plants and rabbits. Oh, there was not much trouble, very little mess. They were stu . . .”
“Studious?”
“Studious. Yes, that’s the word I mean. Quiet, studious little girls. . . .”
Fourteen
For some time now, although more than half asleep, he had been conscious of intense cold. Curious dreams assailed him. One, in particular, concerned a flat in which he had lived in Paris, in the Rue Dombasle. Lacking money for his rent, he had been obliged to leave this flat, departing by moonlight, down the fire-escape. Several journeys had been necessary but the Concierge, normally as watchful as a lynx, must have been at the cinema that evening. Nor, later, had the estate agents succeeded in tracing him.
In his dream, which ran in serial form (for, half-conscious, he made deliberate efforts to prolong it), he was back in clandestine occupation of this flat, approaching it nightly along the flat roof and entering through the skylight. The floors were dusty, in the kitchen, plates on which he had eaten a dozen surreptitious meals remained uncleaned. And behind the outer door the Concierge stood. He knew that she was there, could hear her breathing. Only the thickness of a plywood panel separated his own ear from hers. He flung open the door. The Concierge had gone. An icy blast of air swept past him and . . . sure enough . . . in this room, in Peterhead, years afterwards, the window had blown up as the night wind from Norway freshened.
How tiresome, dreams; how inescapably moral the never slumbering subconscious, laying down like fine wine in a cellar each small deceit and each ignoble action, to bring them forth hoary and encrusted with their shame, in the maturity of its time.
Utter darkness. Rumbold sat up; cold, and doubly cold because he never wore pyjamas. As usual, Fiona, with her rolling and her turning, had captured all the sheets, while with deft footwork she had sent the blankets to the floor. Mechanically, Rumbold fumbled for a cigarette, found it, lit it and watched the glow reflected on her linen-covered buttocks.
Her turn now? This was not certain. The Nembutol had done its work. Her sleep was very deep. Rumbold retrieved the fallen blankets, draped them Arab-wise about his shoulders, watched. Twenty minutes after three, the period of the night when the heart beats at its slowest.
All snore, but she snored like a dog; a sound half whistle, half complaint. On her cheeks the cold cream lay shiny; on the pillow a grey stain. Her fine, russet hair, which she so rarely troubled to brush smooth, lay now in coils, rats’ tails and clusters on her neck.
She stirred . . . yes, the nightly séance was beginning. With quickening pulse, Rumbold took his torch, focusing its beam upon the mumbling lips.
Don’t do what? Well, that, of course, was her secret: the performance seldom varied, never became any the less equivocal. She writhed now like some poor wild thing, the cloth of her pyjamas quite damp with perspiration.
Gently, he turned her over on her back. The torch showed tears; fat, limpid tears zigzagging from beneath closed eyelids to the corners of her nose. Unbuttoning her jacket he laid his head against her heart, the stroke of which was like that of some distant rustic water pump.
“I can’t bear it . . . I can’t bear it any more.”
Oftentimes, in spoken dreams, the words are unintelligible. Not so with hers: each syllable was clearly enunciated with great pathos.
To be awake alone, in these middle watches of the night, was insupportable to Rumbold. Maliciously, he pinched her arm. She groaned, then opened her eyes. Meanwhile, he had switched on the light.
“What is it?” she said.
“You were dreaming. You dream every night now. Also, you’ve taken every single blanket.”
“I’m sorry. . . .”
“What were you dreaming about?”
“Nothing . . . I don’t know . . . something horrible, I suppose.” Fully awake now, she roused herself, employing her elbows as leverage, and reaching for a cigarette.
“Get me some water, will you . . . please?” she said. “I’m so thirsty.”
“Naturally you’re thirsty,” he said, leaning above her, bullying, his eyes small and hard and hateful. “Naturally you’re thirsty. Whisky and Nembutol don’t mix.”
Not for the first time she had forgotten to place the carafe on the closet chest beside her: the quantities of water which she was able to drink in a single night were prodigious . . . three pints at the least. When lucid, she filled wine bottles as a kind of reserve catchment by the bed.