“Oh, darling, how awful for you!” Helen’s mind and body were by now propelling themselves rapidly upward into consciousness, ready to meet whatever demands were to be made upon them by the man they loved. Tea was it, this time? Then tea it should be. She slipped out of bed and into her dressing-gown.
“I won’t be a minute,” she assured him soothingly, though in fact she would be several minutes, the electric kettle having conked out and the teapot still being full of yesterday’s cold tea-leaves. “Would you like some biscuits as well?”
“If you like,” Martin muttered, meaning “Yes, only I don’t want to be the one who’s being demanding,” and buried his face in the pillow, an invalid, sick with insomnia, and entitled to be waited on by those who are not thus sick.
Helen, grovelling under the bed for her slippers, wondered, fleetingly, was it always like this? Did happiness always mean not getting enough sleep?
A most cursory survey of her own past experiences would seem to indicate that the answer was, indubitably, “Yes.” When you were happy, you got home after midnight. When you were happy, you had to get up and wash your hair before breakfast, because there was no other time. When you were happy, you spent the early hours of the night making love, and very often the early hours of the morning too. At those periods of your life when you have a man to sleep with, you don’t actually sleep much at all. This was something that no one ever told you, you had to find it out gradually, for yourself.
The old kettle shrieked in her ear, and she jumped. She’d got herself out into the kitchen almost unconsciously and now she’d more or less fallen asleep again, standing there.
With an effort of will, she pushed her relaxed muscles into appropriate action. Milk. Tea bags. Teapot. Rinse out the tea-leaves, swish it round with scalding water. Make the tea, set out the cups … it all seemed infinitely complicated. Should she set them out on the little light enamel tray with roses hand-painted on it, or should she use the great oblong wooden one, which was heavy and awkward to carry, but which balanced better on the bed? No matter how ready for his repast Martin might appear to be, propped up expectantly against the pillows, he would nevertheless always give one more almighty heave just as the tray was laid across his knees.
Tea-spoons. Sugar. Oh, and the biscuits. Peering into the tin, it seemed that only Oval Osbornes were left; what had happened to all the custard-creams? Or had she forgotten to buy any during that hurried lunch-hour dash round the supermarket?
A sudden, piercing din, stabbing straight into her brain, caused her to drop the tin with a clatter, broken biscuits everywhere. She stared around, wildly.
The telephone? Tha alarm-clock? Was she after all still in bed, dreaming? Sometimes, when she was very much over-tired, she did have these dreams; humdrum, horribly realistic dreams of the alarm having gone off, of herself having leapt out of bed, put on dressing-gown and slippers exactly as in real life; of hurrying out to the kitchen, putting on the kettle, setting the table for breakfast, checking the contents of her brief-case, sometimes, even, setting out to catch her bus—when suddenly the real alarm-clock would really go off, and there she would be, still in bed, and with the whole thing to do again.
*
The piercing sound seared her eardrums a second time, and almost simultaneously Martin’s voice sounded from the bedroom, aggrieved, urgent:
“What the hell …? Look, darling, you’re out there, do for God’s sake go and see …”
Of course. It was the front door bell. But who could it be, at this hour of the night?
Something awful must have happened. Her sister? One of her baby nephews? The police, breaking the news?
And if not a family tragedy, then a murderer? A rapist? And if the latter, should she scream for Martin to protect her, maybe getting himself knifed in the process? Or should she urge the rapist to get on with it quietly in the kitchen, leaving her lover safely out of it?
“Go on, darling! You can’t expect me to go, I’ve got nothing on!” came the agonised plea from the bedroom, and thus urged, Helen stumbled to the front door, unhooked the chain, drew back the bolt, and turned the latch.
*
The girl confronting her was small and dark; rather pale, and apparently perfectly at ease. Without waiting for an invitation, she walked past Helen and straight through to the kitchen. There she turned, speaking casually over her shoulder, “You out of a mental home, or something?”
Helen stood speechless; and the girl continued: “I just wondered. I thought maybe paranoia? All those bolts and locks on your front door, I mean. And a chain, for God’s sake! As well as the bolts! Who’re you expecting to break in and bash you up?”
Annoyance helped Helen to recover her voice.
“I’m not expecting anyone to—well—anything! It’s just—well, most people do bolt their doors at night, don’t they? And as for the chain—well, it just happens it’s there. It was there when I came. I didn’t have it put in….”
Why was she apologising to this total stranger, about a perfectly normal and ordinary precaution? “Most people lock up at night,” she repeated, more firmly. “It’s only common-sense. This is quite a rough neighbourhood, you know.” And then, almost as an afterthought: “Who are you, anyway? Who did you want to see?”
It occurred to her at this point that Martin had been keeping a remarkably low profile. He’d had plenty of time during this bizarre conversation to get himself out of bed and into some kind of garment and come and help deal with the intruder. After all, it might have been a murderer, albeit a female one. Or a gang, come to that, of which this young woman was the spokesman. For all he knew, lying cosily in bed, the rest of the gang might right now be standing around the kitchen in silence, knives poised…. Hang it all, he might at least come and have a look! Show a little curiosity! Whatever it was, a little moral support wouldn’t come amiss.
“Who did you want to see?” she repeated, turning back to her visitor, in some puzzlement. There was something vaguely familiar about the girl—her manner, something—though Helen could have sworn she’d never seen her before. The sharp, vivid little features, the heavy loops of unkempt hair, the large, wary, greenish eyes—it wasn’t a face you’d forget.
“You haven’t even told me your name yet,” she pointed out, “And it’s jolly late, you know, to be calling on people.”
“Late? Oh, that’s okay,” the visitor assured her airily, “I’m not hung up on ‘late’ and ‘early’ and all that crap. It’s all just Time, isn’t it, and what’s Time, anyway? Just one cross-section of eternity, or another one. What’s the difference?”
“The difference to me,” retorted Helen, “is that I have to get up and go to work in the morning. Perhaps you don’t? So please get on and tell me what you want, and why you’re here. Incidentally, you still haven’t told me who you are.”
The girl shrugged. “You haven’t told me who you are, either, if it comes to that. Or why you’re here. What are you doing in Martin’s flat?”
“Hey, it’s my flat!” Helen retorted indignantly. “And if it’s Martin you wanted to see, why couldn’t you have said so right away? I’ll go and fetch him.”
At the door she paused, still angry. “I don’t promise he’ll be too pleased, though. Being woken up like this in the middle of the night …!”
“He’s not being woken up. Don’t tell me lies. He’s awake already, I saw his light go on. That’s why I rang the bell.”
So the silly girl must have been lurking about in the street all this time, watching the windows. An ex-girlfriend of Martin’s presumably, still madly in love with him, and hell-bent on getting him back.
Helen could afford to smile. This wasn’t the way to recapture a man like Martin, absolutely not. He couldn’t stand scenes and dramas and hysterical pleadings, nothing turned him off faster. Whatever this girl’s hold on him might once have been, she’d ditched it good and proper by tonight’s carry-on.
“I’ll fetch him at once,” Helen offered
readily. “Why don’t you sit down? You and he can have a cup of tea together, I’ve only just made it, it’s nice and hot. Oh, and let’s switch on the fire as well, you must be frozen….”
Helen couldn’t but be aware that, as one Other Woman confronted by the other Other Woman, she was really behaving singularly well. With some complacency, she compared her own civilised hospitality with the kind of behaviour that might have been expected from Beatrice had an old flame of Martin’s turned up at Hadley Gardens at three in the morning, demanding to see him. She pictured the tears, the accusations, the jealous scenes…. Really, Martin could count himself lucky that it was all happening to him now with Helen around, instead of a few weeks ago with Beatrice.
Could count himself lucky; but would he bother to? Would it even cross his mind to think of it at all? That was the trouble with these sterling but somewhat negative virtues such as not being jealous, not being possessive, not throwing hysterical scenes: by their very nature they tend to go unnoticed, the beneficiary merely assuming that he is the one who is perfect, and never does anything to upset you.
The bedside light was still on, just as she had left it, but Martin was now to all appearances sound asleep, sunk guilelessly into his pillows as if he had merely dropped off while waiting for his tea.
He hadn’t though. From the bit of humped shoulder protruding from the blankets, Helen could see that he now had his pyjamas on. She had left him stark naked. So! All the while she’d been engaged in conversation with the pushy young visitor, he must have been sneaking around the bedroom in the half-dark, softly opening drawers, shutting them again, searching for the rarely-worn pyjamas; and then scrambling furtively back into bed again, all ready to be found innocently asleep, but nevertheless respectable, just in case the worst came to the worst and he was forced to do something.
Helen couldn’t help smiling. Such a typical male cop-out, and somehow she loved him the more for it. All the same, he wasn’t going to get away with it. Not this time.
None too gently, she shook her lover by the shoulder.
“Come on,” she said, “It’s no good shamming dead this time! It’s you she wants. Yes, now. You’ve got to get up and cope. I’ve put her in the kitchen, I’ve done the hostess bit, and now it’s over to you.”
“Who? What? What are you talking about?” Martin’s feigned puzzlement was as unconvincing as his feigned slumber. Helen felt quite sorry for him, he was so bad at this sort of thing.
“A girl. A human female. Something out of your past, catching up with you, I should think.” Getting a grip on his elbow, half-laughing, Helen dragged him out of bed, pushed him into dressing-gown and slippers, and set him off loping uneasily towards the kitchen, clutching his rarely-worn pyjamas around him, and looking—unless he was a much better actor than he had hitherto shown himself—like a man genuinely at a loss.
Although Helen had always prided herself on being above such sordid emotions as jealousy, possessiveness and the like, she nevertheless found herself hanging around the doorway, just as Beatrice might have done, in hopes of hearing what happened when Martin first presented himself in the kitchen.
Because you never knew. Despite all his protestations of bewilderment, who could tell whether his first exclamation might not be “Darling, at last!” or something of the sort. Even the man himself rarely knows in advance whether or not he is going to say this kind of thing, so you can’t really accuse him of real dishonesty.
Such, anyway, was Helen’s philosophy, and staunchly would she have stood by it, had it been necessary. But it wasn’t. On the contrary, the words that came to her through the half-open kitchen door would have been music to the ears of even the most possessive of mistresses or wives:
“Look, this is a bit much, you know!” Martin’s voice was loud and aggrieved. “How the hell did you get here? Who gave you my address?”
Then the door was pushed to, and Helen could hear no more: but she did not need to. Softly, glowingly, she slid into bed, and lay there, waiting happily for Martin, having got rid of the unwelcome intruder, to slip thankfully in beside her, take her in his arms, and tell her all about it. She was determined to stay awake until this happened: indeed, she thought she was staying awake, but somehow the next thing she knew the alarm-clock was screeching in her ear, and it was morning.
What had happened during the intervening three or four hours, she had no idea, except that Martin was by now back in bed, solid and inert, sleeping like the dead; though how long he’d been there, of course, she could not tell.
CHAPTER IX
DESPITE THE DISTURBANCES of the night, aggravating, so it might be supposed, her chronic shortage of sleep, Helen found herself unusually relaxed the next morning, and, for once, with time to spare before setting off to school. Martin was still sleeping—it had seemed a shame to wake him after his broken night—and so she had decided to go ahead and have breakfast by herself.
It was incredible, the difference it made. Even while she ate it, sitting at their usual little table with its blue and white check cloth, Helen already felt puzzled by the aura of leisure which had seemed to surround the whole operation. How could it be that making coffee and toast for one could take so very much less time than making it for two? And the cereal was even more puzzling. All she had to do in any case was to get the packet out of the cupboard and set it on the table: how was it that even this tiny chore seemed somehow so much easier and less complicated when Martin wasn’t sitting there waiting for it?
It was amazing. Disconcerting, really: and the net result was that well before eight o’clock here she was, breakfast finished and cleared away, and not even any typing to do, because with Martin asleep she did not know what to be getting on with.
It was a shame, it really was. Usually, it was quite a feat of organisation to fit in the half-hour’s typing that she had set herself as a regular task before going to work; and now here she was, at leisure for once, with the best part of an hour ahead of her, and nothing to do.
This was ridiculous. There must be something. Goodness knows, the work was behindhand enough already, without her missing out on her morning’s stint of typing.
Back in the living-room, she went over to Martin’s desk to see what he had been working on last night. If it was something new, then of course she must leave it, as inevitably there would be alterations and corrections still to come: but if, as she suspected, he’d merely been working on the revised version of the introduction, then there’d be plenty she could do.
The desk was in its usual muddle, but by now Helen knew well enough where to look for the current work-in-progress. It was always to the right of centre, on top of whatever else was piled there, and the pages were always in reverse order, just as he had tossed them, face upwards, as they came.
But this morning there seemed to be nothing. Just the same old piles of notes, of cuttings from learned journals, and off-prints of other people’s articles. Some of it was even growing dusty where it lay, like the accumulated hoard of an old, old man working on his autobiography which will never see the light of day, but meanwhile serves well enough as occupational therapy for his declining years.
Helen jerked her thoughts to a standstill, horrified. How could she allow such an image to come into her mind? She was the one with faith in Martin’s work, she had told him so repeatedly, right from the beginning. It was Beatrice, his wife, who had no faith in him, who mocked his ambitions, doubted his powers, and belittled his every effort to get somewhere in his career.
Martin had been very bitter about it.
“But you’re too old!” had apparently been Beatrice’s first reaction to the proposed PhD thesis; and when he had retaliated with a whole list of distinguished persons who had acquired their higher qualifications at advanced ages—including H. G. Wells at the age of seventy-five—she had laughed nastily.
“Conceited old fools!” she’d commented, adding, for good measure: “And anyway, you can’t even keep up with your routine work, l
et alone taking on anything else! They’re ringing up and complaining all the time that you’re late with this and late with that and when are going to let them have the other? How you can imagine that you’re capable of taking on anything extra …!”
And so on and so on. And then, when the sabbatical finally materialised and put paid to that line of argument, Beatrice had merely changed her ground.
“A ‘sabbatical’? What’s that when it’s at home?” she’d demanded; and when, painstakingly, he’d explained it to her she’d gone quite white.
“You mean you’ll be at home all day?” she’d shrieked. “Home for lunch? Every day? For a year? My God …!”
Or words to that effect. No wonder that Helen, hearing for the first time of this mean and despicable behaviour on the part of his wife, had fallen over herself to declare her total and unqualified faith in her lover, now and for ever.
“But of course you can do it, darling!” she remembered assuring him as they lay in the rumpled bed watching the evening sky change from green to violet, from violet to deepest purple through the square of her bedroom window. That had been in the days when they had still been very new-fledged lovers, meeting only once or twice a week, and when every word exchanged between them was charged with double, with triple significance because of the shortness of the time they had for talking at all. Thus it had almost the quality of a vow, this declaration of faith in his powers. “Of course you can do it, darling,” she’d repeated, over and over; and, “Of course people can go on having new and original ideas after they’re forty! Look at Newton! Look at Bertrand Russell! In fact, I remember reading somewhere that the human brain reaches its peak not in the late teens, as used to be believed, but somewhere between forty and fifty …” Helen was always reading things like that somewhere, and Martin was enchanted.
Anyway, with such a background of passionate assurances, such a history of unswerving confidence, how was it possible for Helen, now, to retract even an iota of this absolute faith in her lover’s abilities? It had been the bedrock of their relationship from the beginning: this it was that had marked her off from Beatrice even more surely than her beauty, her intelligence, her generosity. In her, Martin had found at last the woman he had always needed; the woman who believed in him, absolutely, and whose unwavering faith in him was going to carry him to undreamed-of heights of fame.
The Parasite Person Page 7
