The Lethal Sex

by Christianna Brand

  “You might as well have,” I said. “They punished me, they sent me to prison.”

  She went into the old spiel. “Oh, darling, it wasn’t punishment, it wasn’t prison, do try to believe, do try to understand. It was only to make you better. And it did make you better, didn’t it, darling?”

  It did make me better!—locked up in that place with all those criminals, that Mrs. Whosit who killed her baby, that woman who called herself Gloria Swanson, but I knew she wasn’t Gloria Swanson, what would Gloria Swanson be doing in a place like that?—that girl always dreaming and moaning for “one little shot.” Well, Helen was going to get one little shot now; but not the same kind of shot.

  I told her this joke.

  She started to be kind and sweet and try to wheedle me. She said she hadn’t made things “even worse” for me that last time, by telling about the gun. She’d trusted me. Now for me to trust her and give her the gun. “I’ll give you the gun all right,” I said. I couldn’t help laughing. The jokes seemed to keep coming into my head. I went on and on laughing.

  She didn’t try to run away or anything. She just stood with her hands over her face. I think she was crying. She kept saying, “Oh, my poor Minna! My poor little Minna!”

  “What’s poor about me?” I said. “They can’t punish me twice for killing you, can they? And they punished me last time and you hadn’t even died. So I’ll kill you now.”

  “If you kill me,” she said, “who will you have? Who will look after you?” And she pleaded, “Darling, if you kill me, they’ll think you aren’t better after all and they’ll—they’ll take you back, they’ll have to, darling, do try to understand it—”

  “They can’t,” I said. “Not twice.”

  “Oh, God!” she said. “Oh, God, help her to understand, make her understand...!” But she gave it up. She tried again, a different way. “Minna,” she said, “if you kill me, who will look after you, darling?—who will there be to take care of you, to fight for you? There’ll be nobody, they’ll have to take you back to—to that place, because there’ll be nothing else for you.” I think she really meant it, I don’t think she was trembling about her own danger a bit; not then. It was all for me. She’s always looked after me as though I were a child, even before Father died—our mother was never there, she was away somewhere in some hospital, nobody ever seemed to talk about her. I think Helen knew, but she wouldn’t tell me. “Don’t worry, darling, I’ll look after you,” she used to say. Why? Why should I need looking after? It used to make me angry, it still does when I think of it, it’s one of the things that makes me want to kill her sometimes. Once she got angry herself and blurted out that just to look after me she’d given up marrying Jimmy Hanson, she’d “condemned herself forever to...” She broke off then and said she was sorry. I should think so. So did I give up marrying, one great love after another I gave up, I could have been rich and courted beyond the dreams of ordinary woman, the King of Roumania was at my feet in those days, and other men, other kings, wonderful, splendid men...

  I think I sort of dropped off to sleep for a moment then. When I woke up I went in and looked at her again. She’s still lying there. Her breathing’s quieter. She must be nearly dead.

  In the end, of course, I didn’t shoot her. She kept pleading with me not to. I felt more kind to her. After all, it’s hard to die just so that someone can write a story; though I kept explaining to her that you’ve asked me to write one and I simply don’t know any other story; and it seems such a good plot, how if you’ve been punished for killing a person you can’t be punished again so you may as well kill them anyway. So I said, “Well, how would you rather die?” because after all it didn’t matter to me, no clues to hide, nothing—I wouldn’t care who knew I’d done it. I said, “I could make you walk to the canal again and push you in, like the last time.” She said, “Yes—yes, you could do that,” but too eagerly. I realized she knew that we’d meet hundreds of people, they’d see me with the gun pointed at her, forcing her to go there. (Last time, of course, she had no suspicions till we got there; we were just going for a walk.)

  “A knife?” I said. “Or could I make you drink some poison?”

  This time she tried not to seem so eager. “Poison can be painful,” she said.

  “I don’t want you to suffer,” I said. “I don’t even want you to die. It’s only for my story.”

  She looked at me, very sadly. I suppose she was sad at having to die just for the story. She said, still not as though she were eager about it, more as though she were doubtful, “Of course not all poisons are painful.” Then she suddenly said, “There’s some rat poison in the kitchen. They say that that one doesn’t make the rats suffer.”

  “I don’t remember it,” I said.

  “I don’t think you knew about it,” she said. “It’s on the shelf. In a little tin, a white powder.”

  I made her pass in front of me, keeping apart from her so that she couldn’t jump at me and get the gun away (but I would have shot her if she had. She knew that.) She went to the shelf and sure enough there was the little tin. On the way back, I picked up a glass of water. I made her empty the powder into the water, all of it. She stood there with the empty tin in her hand and I stood and faced her, holding the little gun. I heard the church clock strike; it was half past eleven in the morning, three hours since I’d read the letter beginning “Dear Girl.”

  “This is your last moment, Helen,” I said. I felt quite sad but I knew I had to do it. “Now drink the poison,” I said.

  She took up the brimming glass with her left hand. She was trembling, and the poison slopped over the side. “Use your right hand,” I said. “You’ll spill it.”

  She had to do it. She had to put down the little tin. I saw then Bicarbonate of Soda on the label.

  It made me terribly angry. I do sometimes lose my temper. I don’t think I ever lost it worse than then. I don’t remember it very well, I went a sort of blank like I did just now when I was writing about the King of Roumania and all my lovers; but I know that I screamed and raged at her and afterward I had to rub my hands to get the torn hair away from my fingers and there was some blood in my nails; and I remember that her face was absolutely white, as white as when they got her up out of the water that other time, and streaked with my nail marks; I remember her being backed up in a corner, one arm over her face, and she was sort of gibbering, shaking all over and gibbering like a monkey, making little frantic dabs at me with the other arm, trying to fend me off. She kept praying, “Oh, God, no more, no more! Oh, God, help me; God, pity me; oh, God, don’t let me die, not like this, not like this...!” All for herself now; not for me any more, not a word about what will become of my poor Minna and all the rest of it...

  When at last I left her, I was shaking too and I went and sat in a chair, only still pointing the gun, and she was still crouched in the comer with her white, streaked face and her eyes half closed, taking great sobbing, gasping breaths. We stayed like that for a long time, even when she had grown quiet. I have only seen Helen afraid twice—really afraid, for herself alone. Once was in the split moment between my pushing her and her falling into the water; and the other was now. I think she gave up then, I think she saw at last that the time had come, and she really was going to die.

  At last I said, “I’m sorry. I think I lost my temper. You shouldn’t have tried to trick me. Now, Helen, this time you really have got to die; I have to write the story.”

  She said in a sick voice, “Minna, I’ve decided. Will you do it by gas?”

  “No more tricks,” I said.

  She said wearily, “No. I can’t struggle any more.” And she said it again, “I can’t struggle any more.” She said, “I’ll lie down here and you can turn the gas on and I’ll put my face close to it. You can keep the gun pointed at me.” And she said again in that weary, desperate, hopeless kind of voice, “I’m not fighting you, Minna. I give up. If I die—I’d rather die. God knows what will happen to you, but I cou
ldn’t go through—that—again. I’m finished. And the gas will be merciful.” She added, “To you as well as to me.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, sharply again.

  “Oh, I don’t mean that,” she said. “You’ll be safe enough from the gas if you keep well away from it, in a room of this size. I only meant that if you shoot me—it could be so ghastly. For me; but for you too.”

  “You’d be dead,” I said.

  “I might not be dead. You wouldn’t come close because you’d be afraid of my getting the gun away; and supposing you missed killing me, suppose I was just wounded, horribly, dreadfully, in—in the face or something…” She closed her eyes against the thought of it as though she felt sick. After all, she was talking about her own death and it was coming soon. I suppose she thought death by gas was a beautiful, peaceful affair. Well, it isn’t; that awful breathing and that scarlet face...

  So she lay down and I told her to turn on the gas tap and she did; and she put her mouth close to the leak and just lay there, drinking it in. But after a moment, she sat up. She shook her head as though she were already a little bit muzzy. She said, “Minna, I had better write a message.”

  “Another trick?” I said.

  “It will hardly help me,” she said bitterly. “It’s for your sake. Give me a piece of paper and a pencil and let me write a message.”

  “How do I know what you would write?” I said.

  “I thought you’d say that,” she said. “Well, write it yourself, and then just give it to me and I’ll hold it in my hand. If you die holding a thing, you hold it tight. They’ll find the message there, when they find me dead.”

  So, to please her, I wrote the message on a scrap of paper and gave it to her to hold and she lay down again quite quietly and I went back myself and sat near tire window, leaving it open just a crack, and kept the gun pointed at her. I won’t describe it, I don’t like horrors, but anyway it didn’t take long. Soon she was unconscious. I went over to her and rolled back her eyelids—I didn’t want her fooling me, nudging off the gas or something the moment my back was turned; and just to make sure, I pulled back her sleeve and dragged my nails down her arm. But she never moved, she just lay there heaving with those awful snoring breaths. She was out all right. She didn’t look pretty now. She looked horrible. And the smell of gas was getting very strong so I closed the window and the door and came out into the kitchen. I don’t know how long they take to die.

  Before I left her, of course, I took away the bit of paper with the message. It wasn’t going to do any good, she simply couldn’t see that I don’t need “saving,” I can’t be punished a second time. But it was kind of her; and typical of her, poor Helen—she was always trying to “protect me.”

  “I am taking my own life,” she’d made me write. She was going to lie there with it in her hand.

  It’s here on the kitchen table now, in front of me: a scrap of green paper with the message written on it.

  I see now that it’s the bit of paper that was lying on the hall table when the letter came.

  It says on the other side...

  It’s nothing to do with your story after all. It says...

  It’s some sort of a “Warning Notice.” It says...

  It says that at noon today “for some hours”—our gas will be cut off at the main.

  And now that I think of it—that kettle’s never boiled.

  She knew! Helen knew! It was just another trick. All this time I’ve been writing in here, she’s been lying there—with the gas turned off. All this time to recover from those first few inhalations, before it failed...

  Can she even have been shamming after all? When I bent over her, when I felt so sure she was unconscious, that she was going to die...?

  When I took away...

  When I took away from her this note that I’m holding now: this note that says, “I’m taking my own life.”

  This note—in my handwriting.

  Someone is stirring in the next room.

  The gun! The little gun! I have left the little gun in that room—with Helen...

  * * *

  (Dear Mr. MacDonald, I hope I didn’t unintentionally mislead you? I did say it was the dead woman who was holding this letter. C. B.)

  Snowball

  URSULA CURTISS

  The cottage had a gingerbread look in the last of the afternoon light: snow in a steep frosting on its tilted roof, frost rimming its small windowpanes. I remember now that we knocked, both secretly knowing the absurdity of it, and that walking into that living room was as shocking as opening a Christmas card to find an obscene verse inside.

  It wasn’t only the blood on the floorboards, or the brass gleam of the poker standing primly at attention on the hearth. Part of it was the table set for tea at the shadowy end of the room—napkins folded, teapot in a quilted cosy, crusts of bread in a savage litter on the braided rug. And on the window sill in the alcove, like a travesty of domestic comfort, the cat, Snowball.

  Beside me, Madden called in his high irritable voice, “Charles?” and in the same split second I shouted, “Anne?”

  That was symbolic. Both of us knew that only one of the Jethros could possibly answer, the one who had killed the other.

  It’s hard to explain about the Jethros. Even Madden, who had been Charles Jethro’s literary agent for eighteen years, confessed himself baffled. Maybe that was because each of them had two separate personalities, which made a total of four people living together for twenty years.

  You may have read some of Jethro’s essays, or attended one of the gatherings at which he was in constant demand as a speaker. He was a big man, about fifty, and handsome in a craggy disarming way. He was sensitive about his failing eyesight and never wore his thick glasses in public, but somehow he contrived a keen and twinkling air when he spoke at what must have been an indistinguishable blur. He had made two successful departures into the field of verse. Broiled Offerings, a sizzling parody of the obscurist school of poetry, was followed by Puzzles in Smoke, which the enlightened public bought with great anticipation and the critics circled as warily as a strange dog, because it might or might not be another parody.

  That was the Charles Jethro who sparkled at select cocktail parties and wrote witty inscriptions in his books for favored friends. You had to have known him a long time to be even acquainted with the brutal, vindictive, incredibly foul-tempered man who shared the same skin.

  His wife Anne, who was perhaps five years younger than he, was his right hand, his amanuensis, his quietly unerring critic. Someone had been unkind enough to call her his seeing-eye bitch; I often wondered if Jethro himself had thought that up. She was one of those willfully neglected-looking women, with tweeds that never quite fitted and tan hair strained back into a knot. Somewhere in her family there had been an admixture of some surprising blood; her mouth was heavy and her eyes as unfathomable as black bean soup. She did Jethro’s typing—he would trust it to no one else—and kept him to deadlines and defended him from nuisances like a tigress when he was working.

  But the steadiness and the constancy had its other side. No one could bear a grudge as implacably as Anne Jethro, or seethe as long, with the lid on tight, like some dangerous stew. When her hand was forced there was usually a hatpin inside—like the time when Jethro had insisted on her entertaining a trio of visiting Englishwomen at tea, and she had docilely cut watercress sandwiches and plum cake. Opened up, the dainty little napkins revealed, in indelible ink, an unrepeatable phrase about Jethro.

  “Charles?” called Madden again from the foot of the stairs, and turned back to me. He said, as though he could hold something at bay by his disapproval, “I don’t like this at all, I believe I’ll have a look upstairs. I wish that damned cat wouldn’t sit there like that.”

  The cat, Snowball, was a pledge of Jethro’s malice toward his wife just as certainly as a diamond pin was a pledge of another man’s affection. Anne hated and feared cats with the same violent reaction women us
ually reserve for rats, and I had seen her driven from the room more than once by this one. Jethro had taken it in as a stray, and named it sardonically—if he had adopted a dog he would have insisted on calling it Fido—and while he caviled at Anne’s housekeeping expenditures, he fed it on salmon and sardines. He took a perverse delight in its greed and selfishness and haughty tail-switchings, for the simple reason that the cat repelled and frightened his wife.

  Because the Jethros hated each other.

  Why did they stay together? Their few close friends advanced various theories. They were used to each other, they were actually stimulated by their weird domestic battles, Charles needed Anne emotionally andAnne was financially dependent on Charles—and so forth.

  Madden was much too clever to say anything that might be quoted behind his back, but I had always thought it was because at bottom they hated each other, and were bound in a mutual pact of revenge. Charles twisted Anne’s wrist in one of his ungovernable tempers, and Anne—silent, implacable—hid his glasses for a week while he begged piteously for them. Or Charles hid his glasses himself as an excuse for not making out a check for Anne’s housekeeping money, and Anne marched off to the nearest pawnshop with his mother’s heirloom silver.

  People who knew them laughed over these colorful irregularities—“Did you know Jethro hit Anne with one of those baked-bean casseroles?” “No, really? I thought she smashed them all the night those people from Boston came to dinner”—and any uneasiness they felt was slight. Charles could somehow emerge from one of these sessions at his blandest and wittiest, and Anne, sometimes nursing a wrist or a shin, would be calm and helpful with autograph seekers.

  But then they had moved to Byfield, the two of them—or the four of them?—into the snows and the silences and the confines of a cottage deep in the country, on the estate of a friend of Jethro’s. The move had been partly Madden’s idea, to coax out an evaluation of Joyce: Jethro on Joyce, he said in an authoritative squeak, would set the literary world by the ears.