Possession

by Celia Fremlin

“Oh! Oh no! Oh, please, Mrs Erskine, can’t you help me? The address? The address of the hotel where they’ll be staying?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know it,” I lied; then wondered how much use the lie would be. There must be only a finite number of hotels in Bristol: I wouldn’t have put it past her to ring round the lot. I was determined that she should not—absolutely should not—spoil this, their first weekend together since the reconciliation.

  “Mrs Redmayne,” I said firmly. “I’m sorry you’re ill, and I’d like to help you, if I can. I can’t get your son for you, because he’s already gone” (the lie became more convincing each time I told it, as is the way of lies). “But listen. I’ll come round and look after you myself, with pleasure. I’ll be there in an hour—”

  “Oh no!”—she began; but I was listening to no protestations. Serve her right to be landed with my company for an evening; that would teach her to invent bogus illnesses! I put the receiver down sharply, and just in time, for here already was Mervyn, just drawing up outside the house. For the next twenty minutes my whole energies were concentrated on getting the two of them off on their travels as speedily as possible—for who knew if Mrs Redmayne might not have suspected me of lying? I certainly would have, if I’d been in her place. She might ring up again; she might arrive in a taxi; anything.

  I think the young couple were somewhat puzzled at the zeal with which I ran errands for them up and down the stairs—undertook messages—carried things out to the car—anything to hurry them up, to save precious moments. They must get off while it was still daylight, I kept saying, in explanation of my unwonted helpfulness. The impending rush hour … the roads just before Christmas … Sarah accused me, though kindly, of being an absolute old hen; and she was perfectly right. At last, at long last, the car door slammed, the engine started up, and they were off. There was one more awful moment when I saw the car stopping forty or fifty yards down the road, and I thought they were coming back for something. But no; they must have been just consulting the map, or kissing each other, or something; because half a minute later they set off again, and in a few more seconds were blessedly out of sight.

  The danger was over; now I could attend to my own preparations. I had promised Mrs Redmayne that I would be there in an hour, and the least I could do, after telling her all those lies, was to keep my promise, even though it meant taking a taxi. I scribbled notes for Janice and the long-suffering Ralph, I hustled a rice pudding and some scrubbed potatoes into the oven, and in a few minutes I was sailing in expensive, unaccustomed luxury through the darkening suburbs. By the time I reached Bayswater the winter night had come into its own: the block of flats in which the Redmaynes lived loomed square and black like a fortress against the reddish glow of the London sky. It was a luxury block, and so the windows were dark as only the windows of the rich can be, with thick expensive curtains overlapping in heavy folds, and shutting out every chink of darkness, every breath and emanation of the night.

  Mrs Redmayne opened the door to me in a dressing-gown; and to my amazement she really did look ill. The fluffy pinkish hair was limp and dull; it lay in damp little curls around her scalp, and you could see now how thin it really was. Her face with no make-up looked yellow and sagging; for the first time, and with a little sense of shock, I saw in her the beginnings of a helpless old woman.

  She apologised for her disarray, and for that of the hall, which was dusty and untidy; and, going ahead of me, tinier than ever in her flat bedroom slippers, she led the way into her bedroom, which I had never seen before.

  It was a pretty room—or should have been. White rugs on the floor: rosebud coverlet; and lovely thick curtains of an old-rose colour, hanging right to the floor. But at the moment it was untidy and ill-cared for; bottles and jars littered the dusty dressing-table; clothes and shoes were everywhere; and on the little table beside the unmade bed stood a squalid little array of dirty cups and glasses; remnants of orange juice; half-finished cups of tea. More and more each moment was I forced to contemplate the possibility that perhaps she really had been taken ill? This possibility, I have to admit, had never till now crossed my mind, and I felt a moment’s compunction.

  “I’ll make you some fresh tea, shall I?” I suggested awkwardly. “You get back into bed. You’re not well—you should be in bed.”

  She obeyed my suggestion with alacrity, scrambling back into the big, soft bed, and arranging herself against the pillows with a speed that suggested long practice. Oddly, she looked stronger now—more imposing—as she relaxed, tiny and fragile, against the plump, pink pillows. The old-woman look was quite gone.

  “I shan’t be long,” I murmured; and collecting up all that I could carry of the dirty cups and glasses, I made my way into the small kitchen.

  I had said I wouldn’t be long; but you know how it is in other peoples’ kitchens; there seems to be nothing to light the gas with; no tea-pot; no spoons; and the jar marked “Tea” has odds and ends of string in it. I didn’t want to disturb the invalid—rightly or wrongly, I had already begun to think of her as such—so I prowled about looking for the necessary implements and ingredients by myself; by the time the tray was ready, a quarter of an hour had passed, and when I carried it into the bedroom, I found that she had fallen asleep.

  Yes, she truly must be ill. I studied the sleeping face. It looked limp, and sunken, but not relaxed. On the contrary, a ceaseless, uneasy twitching animated the unconscious features; the lips moved a little, as if trying to speak; the eyelids quivered constantly. A faint dew, as of fever, glistened on the skin of her forehead.

  Very gently, trying not to wake her, I set the tray down; at the slight sound a spasm crossed her face.

  “No! No!” she cried. “It’s her feet! I can see her feet!”—and in the same moment she woke. For a moment, while consciousness slowly returned, she stared at me, in blank non-recognition, her mouth, strange and senile, still sagging open.

  Full consciousness snapped back while I watched: her eyes knew me; control returned to her muscles, and she closed her mouth.

  “Oh, Mrs Erskine! Thank you for waking me! Oh, thank you! It’s these nightmares! They’re the worst part of my illness. That’s why I’m so terrified of being alone; that’s why I need Mervyn….”

  A sly look had come into her eyes even while she spoke. Of the genuineness of her distress there could be no doubt; but she was trying to mislead me somehow; to distract my attention from some aspect of her predicament.

  “Well—never mind!” I was all nurse now, and she all patient. I rearranged her pillows for her, poured her a cup of tea, drew up a chair for myself at her bedside, and then—what?

  I’ve never been much good at hospital visiting. There you sit, trying to entertain the patient with your conversation; and there lies the patient, trying to be entertained. He has to avoid shock and excitement, this you know. But if a conversation neither shocks nor excites, how can it possibly entertain? And on this occasion matters were rendered even more difficult by the fact that Mrs Redmayne seemed able to fix her mind on nothing—absolutely nothing—except her son’s expedition to Bristol. I don’t mean she was worrying about the important aspects of it—the interview for the job; the prospect of his making his home there; no, it was the boring details of it that seemed to obsess her. What time, exactly, had they started? What time did they plan to arrive? Did they mean to have dinner on the road, or after they got there? Had Sarah taken a suitcase? What sort of clothes had she packed in it?

  I could answer none of this. The only thing I knew for certain about Sarah’s packing was that it had included my only unladdered pair of fifteen-denier stockings. This I told Mrs Redmayne, hoping mildly to amuse her; but she did not seem to be listening. Or, rather, she did seem to be listening—and very intently—but not to me. Suddenly she clutched my arm.

  “Mrs Erskine!” she gasped, in a low voice. “Listen! Don’t you hear something?”

  I sat very still, and listened. Through the closed windows, through t
he heavy, beautiful curtains, came faintly the blurred murmur of the London night. A car starting up: a girl’s laugh. Footsteps clicking impatiently along the damp December pavements. A plane mumbled in some distant quarter of the sky, and nearer at hand could be distinguished the muted underground mumblings of the District Line.

  “No, I don’t hear anything,” I said; but she shook her head, frowning; and again we were silent, listening.

  “There!” she gave a low, sudden cry. “There! Didn’t you hear it? There’s someone up there! Listen! In the empty room, upstairs!”

  CHAPTER XIV

  “UPSTAIRS? IN THE flat above? But it must be the people who live there,” I said, with all the stupidity of logic in the face of terror. “Are they supposed to be away, or something?”

  She shook her head: she swung it attentively from side to side, like a budgerigar, and for a moment I thought she had not heard me. Then:

  “No, Mrs Erskine,” she contradicted me, though still softly. “No, there aren’t any flats above this. Only lumber rooms. No one has any reason to go up there—no one!”

  She thumped her little fists on the pink coverlet, trying to give these last words an emphasis she had not dared to put into her hushed voice.

  We listened again. I even went to the door of the flat, and stood there with it ajar, listening. The silence upstairs was absolute; and after a while even Mrs Redmayne seemed a little reassured.

  “I’m sorry, she said at last, in a normal tone of voice, “I really am sorry, I must have scared you. I get like this sometimes, when I’m alone up here. I get so that I keep hearing things…. It’s my nerves, you see, and being alone so much in this great empty flat.”

  “Alone!” I really had to protest at this. “But Mervyn is always staying in for you! Over and over again, to my knowledge, he’s given up his own plans so as to stay with you! He—”

  “He’s a wonderful son to me, yes, Mrs Erskine, I agree with you. He is; he’s marvellously attentive, and I know how other mothers must envy me.” This wasn’t what I had meant at all, but I had to let it pass; the penalty of introducing controversial topics at a bedside is that the one propped against pillows has to be allowed to win—“I’m not complaining about Mervyn, not for one moment. I’m not saying one word, for example, about his having gone off, leaving me ill and alone, for the whole of this weekend. But the fact remains, Mrs Erskine, that I do get left alone a lot. He’s out at work all day; often he has to stay late at the office. I’m not blaming him, you understand; I know his work has to come before his old mother. But it does mean that I’m alone too much. It’s not good for a person, is it? I don’t mind so much during the day, I have my little trot down to the shops in the morning, and sometimes a little constitutional as well, in the afternoon, if it’s fine. But it’s when the evening begins, Mrs Erskine; when the sun goes off the wall opposite, and the shadows come, and I know that the night is coming … that’s when my nerves start playing me up. And worst of all is if I doze off, like I did this evening…. I wake up with those footsteps in my ears, and that awful coughing, and I don’t know whether I’m still dreaming, or whether, at last, it’s real….”

  Her face was contorted; I could feel the pretty pink bed vibrating under the shuddering sobs that she was trying to control I jumped to my feet, agog with urgent, useless activity. Another cup of tea. A new arrangement of the fat pillows. “There,” I said: and “Don’t worry,” and “Everything’s all right,” and in a few minutes she became calmer.

  “You’re kind,” she said, in tones of faint bewilderment, and peered up at me, wonderingly, under her tear-stained eyelids. “Sometimes I almost wonder….” She stopped, dabbed at her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief, crushed and damp in her small fist. Then:

  “Tell me I’m a fool, Mrs Erskine!” It was almost a command. “Tell me I’m imagining it all! Tell me there weren’t any sounds in that room up there! No footsteps, no coughing…. Tell me I’m a silly, selfish, neurotic old woman, who’s just trying to get attention!”

  She was, of course. Every word of her self-indictment was true, and thus compelled contradiction. A fool? I found myself laughing aloud at the very idea. Silly? Selfish? Neurotic? Nonsense! She was just highly-strung, that’s all; more sensitive than most. And on top of this she had been ill…. How often, I suddenly wondered, had Mervyn been manoeuvred into making just these protestations? For the first time, I realised how easily, how almost luxuriously, one can slither into this sort of rôle, and how hard—nay, how impossible—it is to crawl up out of it again. The way into these cloying, stagnant emotional pools is smooth and easy as a toboggan-run; but the only way out is the cruel way: if you come out at all, you come out hard-hearted, muddied, with your self-image in shreds. I felt that at last I understood the magnitude of Mervyn’s problem, and the reasons for his subservience. If I, who owed this woman no duty, no affection, could find myself stuck here patting her little hand and assuring her of her worth, then what must it be like for her only son? Her strength, I now realised, lay not in her hypocrisy but in her sincerity; in the fact that she was really frightened, really in need of support, and—probably—really ill.

  I kept reassuring her as best I could. No, I hadn’t heard a sound from the room upstairs, I truly hadn’t. Would she like me to go and look, just to make sure?

  At this a look of such horror flashed into her face as took me totally by surprise. I jerked away, involuntarily; but a moment later she was clutching my arm, pleading, apologising, and explaining.

  “I’m sorry! Oh dear, I am sorry. It’s my nerves, you see; it’s being up high like this, I think; the feeling that there’s nothing but those empty rooms between me and the sky. High flats—they do have that effect on some people. Don’t they? Haven’t you read about it? You must have! It’s in the papers. It’s on television. There was a long thing about it on television, didn’t you see it? All these women saying how frightened they were, up there with nothing but the sky? Surely you watched it? Oh, you must have! Everybody was talking about it!”

  She was determined that I should have watched the programme; the fact that I hadn’t weighed as nothing against her conviction that I had; she talked on and on about it, and all the time the clutch of her thin, strong little fingers seemed to tighten on my arm; tighten, and yet with a curious delicacy of touch; it was like being clutched by a grasshopper.

  Gradually—and, I flatter myself, with a good deal of skill, I led her on to talk of other television programmes; and then of plays, of films, and of books.

  She didn’t seem to have seen much, or to have read much, in the course of her odd, lonely life. Her little head seemed, I am sorry to say, somewhat empty, and the conversation grew more and more boring. Or was she preoccupied? Once again I began to get the feeling that her mind was elsewhere. That strange, self-absorbed, listening look was back. And then, suddenly, the telephone rang.

  She had been right about her nerves. I have never seen anybody jump like that. Her face, as she clutched at the bedside extension, was white like a crumpled piece of expensive writing paper.

  I prayed that it should not be Mervyn. In my imagination I could already hear the pathetic, breathy little voice winging its way across the dark fields and cities to Bristol, compelling him back with its twanging, mouse-thin power. I wondered how I could best intervene, come between mother and son for the good of both … and then I realised that it was not Mervyn at all. Some woman friend … a cancelled meeting for next week … a mislaid knitting pattern…. The deadly little conversation seemed to be doing her good: a faint colour was returning to her cheeks: her voice had become quite cheerful and normal again. This seemed to be my chance; as she put the receiver down, I stood up, and said that really I must go, it was getting late.

  She at once agreed that she mustn’t keep me, and then proceeded to do her best to do so. It was at this hour—eleven o’clock at night—when she began feeling worst of all. The loneliness, the long sleepless night ahead; the feeling of isolati
on, because of the way people in flats keep themselves to themselves: she had no one to turn to….

  Listen! What was that? Didn’t I hear a board creaking….

  “Mrs Redmayne!” I felt powerful now—the Ward Sister at least—after a whole evening of attending to this patient—“Mrs Redmayne, you know what you’re going to do? You’re going to get out of that bed, and you’re going to put on your slippers and dressing-gown, and you’re coming upstairs with me to this wretched lumber room, and satisfy yourself once and for all that there’s no one there. Now, come along. No nonsense! Quick march!”

  It worked. I was both appalled and triumphant at the ease with which I could wield this sort of discipline. Meekly, a little tremulous, Mrs Redmayne got out of bed, shuffled into her garments. I guessed that by now she was as certain as I was that there would be no one there. However genuine her terror had been earlier in the evening, it had by now, I felt, subsided; there had been something mechanical about that last little flutter of panic. It occurred to me, suddenly, that perhaps this was the only way she knew of not boring people to death—this laying on of bogus excitements and alarms? This would explain everything—including her desperate clinging to the one human being who had a duty to keep her company. A bore. A crashing, empty-headed little bore, making—as we are all entitled to do—the best of her poor self. I smiled a little as I led the way up the steep stairs.

  The luxury of the lower floors ebbed away at every step. The deep, pile carpet petered out, the spruce white paintwork became brown, and chipped with age. At the top, a bare fifteen-watt bulb threw its mean glimmer onto a doorway in front of us. The door was slightly ajar, and even as we stood there, there emanated from it a low, uneven gurgling sound.

  I recognised it at once. Before my companion had even had time to draw in her breath, I had flung the explanation at her like a bucket of water, stifling her emergent terror.