Ah, but that was the point. You could recognise a footstep in its familiar setting—the polished floor it habitually traversed—the flight of steps up which it was accustomed to hasten. But could you recognise that same footstep when it sounded in unwonted places? On stony tracks along which you had never accompanied it? On grassy verges where you had never known it tread?
And now, in the brief clarity of fear, Meg found time to know that this applied not only to people’s steps, but to the people themselves. The familiar person faced by an unfamiliar challenge—who can know or predict his behaviour? It would have been well if, in those strange, lengthened seconds of panic, Meg had allowed herself to follow this train of thought to its conclusion; but at the time it was the footsteps that seemed so important … so loud … so near… And now they were stopping.
But there was no hesitating, no fumbling such as Mildred had once described. Whoever it was lifted the latch of the gate confidently in the darkness; moved along the overgrown brick path with the assurance of complete familiarity, and round to the back of the house where the door, Meg remembered, was still unlocked, might even be swinging open in the rainy evening air. Nothing now could save her from meeting the intruder face to face. She had two choices open to her. Either to cower here and wait to be discovered, or to march boldly through into the kitchen and face whatever had to be faced.
And, after all that, it was Mildred. Mildred, fumbling and fuming at the dead stove as she felt about for the candle and matches that Meg had removed earlier in the evening. Meg, holding the said candle perilously aslant in her right hand, stared dumbfounded, an extraordinary mixture of relief and disappointment struggling for precedence in her mind. A soul keyed up to imaginary feats of courage cannot but feel deflated when confronted by an unalarming and prosaic reality.
Mildred, her dark coat glistening with wet, had turned as Meg came in. For a moment neither spoke. But now, as the candle flared up and threw its light full on to Meg’s face, Mildred gave a great start.
“Meg! Why are you looking like that?”
Meg, too startled herself to recollect that her half-sister (assuming she had not received the telephone message) had every reason to be startled too, could only answer, stupidly, “Like what?” Then, as Mildred went on staring, she continued: “Oh, Mildred, you did give me a fright. I’d no idea you were coming tonight, you see, and so when I heard your footsteps—”
“Footsteps?” The word seemed to have sounded on Mildred’s ears in isolation, quite removed from the rest of the sentence. “What footsteps? Do you mean he’s been here?” The horror in Mildred’s face was unmistakable; but its intensity, and, in the circumstances, its silliness, struck Meg suddenly as quite disproportionately funny—the more so, perhaps, because she herself had been suffering from such similar apprehensions such a short time ago, and equally unreasonably. All her fears—her relief—her sense of anticlimax—found vent in a burst of uncontrollable laughter; in which, after a moment of baffled affront, Mildred suddenly and inexplicably joined. For half a minute, perhaps, the cold, ancient kitchen rang with their laughter, while the candle-light on the stone walls leaped and dipped with the shaking of Meg’s hands. And then, slowly, even while she was still laughing, there came to Meg the realisation that this laughter was all wrong. Neither of them thought anything was funny; and Mildred’s laughter was already beginning to take on the shrill, monotonous note of hysteria.
Hastily Meg controlled herself, steadied the candle, and took Mildred’s arm.
“Hush, Mildred,” she said. “I’m sorry, I must have startled you terribly. Come into the front room, the lamp’s on in there, and I’ll explain why I’m here.”
Mildred allowed herself to be led through the low warped doorway into the sitting-room, and stood, blinking stupidly, in the relative brilliance of the lamplight, while Meg plunged rather precipitately into explanations.
“You see, I did ring you up, but you were out, and I had absolutely nowhere else to go—”
“You’ve got that lamp turned too high. It’s smoking.” Mildred learned forward and began to adjust the wick, slowly and not very efficiently, with her plump, inexpert fingers. The flame lurched and gulped, then sank to a thin blue disk. Meg felt a stirring of irritation. Mildred had clearly not been listening to a word. She began all over again:
“You see, Philip’s arrived, and so there’s no room for me at the caravan—”
But Mildred was still laboriously fiddling with the wick, her powers of attention apparently as dim and flickering as the little flame itself. Biting her lip in annoyance, Meg gave it up and waited until the fidgety business was over; and now, with the flame burning blue and steady, and Mildred at last seated, heavily and uncomfortably, on the horsehair sofa, Meg set to work for the third time to apologise for her presence and to explain the circumstances of it in full detail. Mildred listened attentively till the very end. Then she said:
“I know. I got your message.”
There are few things more annoying to a narrator than those two words “I know” greeting the end of a tale; particularly when the tale has been of considerable length and complexity and has involved the teller in some embarrassment. It is not surprising that Meg’s next words were somewhat brusque:
“Why on earth didn’t you say so, then? And if you knew I was here, why were you so surprised to see me when I came into the kitchen?”
“I wasn’t surprised. It was just—” Mildred stopped. She leaned forward to flick at some invisible blemish on the green tablecloth. Then, suddenly, she threw up her head, her plump face strangely working, and gabbled:
“You can’t stay here, Meg! You can’t! Don’t you understand? You’re in terrible danger!”
Meg laughed; and this time her laugh was genuine. There is nothing that dispels fear so quickly as to encounter someone who is more frightened than oneself.
“Oh, don’t be silly!” she scoffed. “Honestly, Mildred, you’re not still worrying about those footsteps, are you? You know perfectly well that it must have been a tramp, or something.”
Mildred, from the opposite side of the table, had to lean sideways a little to see her sister clearly past the brightness of the lamp; and the intensity of her gaze, when it met Meg’s, was a little disconcerting.
“That’s not what you were thinking a few minutes ago,” she pointed out, with rare penetration. “When you were alone here, and you heard my footsteps. You thought you were in danger then. Didn’t you?”
“Well—” Meg laughed, a little self-consciously. “I was a bit scared, I admit. I mean, this is a lonely sort of place. It might have been anyone.”
“You didn’t think it was ‘anyone’. You know you didn’t. You thought it was Paul.”
Mildred’s tone was sombre but triumphant; and Meg guessed that with the pronouncing of the fatal name Mildred’s sense of melodrama was beginning to supersede her earlier genuine alarm. She sought to improve the occasion:
“Even if it was Paul,” she pointed out, “not this time, I mean, but that night when you thought you heard his steps. Even if it was him—which is quite fantastic—he didn’t do anything, did he? If he’d wanted to hurt you, what better chance could he have had—you alone in the cottage like that, and before your suspicions were aroused? It just proves there’s nothing to worry about. And as for saying that I’m in danger too—it just shows how illogical you’re being. Uncle Paul never had anything against me.”
This time Mildred did not lean sideways to meet Meg’s eyes. The brightness of the lamp was between them as she spoke:
“You’re very sure of that now, aren’t you? Have you always been so sure?”
Meg started.
“What on earth do you mean? Of course I’ve always been sure.”
“Yes, I suppose you have. You’ve always been sure about everything, ever since you were six years old. Quite different from me. Or Isabel.”
Meg could not see her sister’s face through the dazzle of the lamp, but it was c
lear that the words were not meant as a compliment.
“Mildred—are you trying to tell me something? Or are you just being disagreeable?”
“Me—tell you something! That would be funny!”
Mildred gave a short, hard laugh, which almost at once weakened into the familiar self-pitying sob which meant that a flood of tears was imminent. “You wouldn’t believe me if I did tell you,” she said sulkily. “You never believe anything I say. No one does.”
“Oh, come, pull yourself together, Mildred.” Meg strove to speak kindly. “Tell me what’s worrying you. I will believe you, I promise.”
The rashness, the patent hollowness, of such a promise shook even Meg herself. She wondered how, having heard whatever improbable revelations Mildred was about to indulge in, she would be able to get out of it without real unkindness. It was a stupid thing to have said; but Mildred always dissolved into tears so easily that in dealing with her one was always finding oneself in this sort of situation. Meg braced herself to put on a show of credulity; braced herself too to soothe the self-dramatising distress that must now be expected; braced herself, in fact, for everything except the possibility that she would in fact find herself believing, terrifyingly and completely, the thing that Mildred was to say.
“It was you who informed on Paul,” said Mildred.
“I didn’t! What do you mean? You’re crazy!”
Meg’s protests were mechanical, and she knew it. Already the sounds, the scents of a summer afternoon long ago were swirling round her. Memory, long buried, was clutching this way and that among the hot bright shadows; and a smell—overpowering—incongruous—seemed once more to be in her nostrils; the smell of raw haddock, just fetched from the fishmonger’s….
“I’d brought in the shopping,” Mildred was relating inexorably; “I’d dumped it on the kitchen table, and you were prying about among the parcels as you always did—‘What’s this, Mildred?’ ‘What’s that, Mildred?’ ‘Why didn’t you get any biscuits, Mildred?’ Oh, I can hear your little shrill voice even now! And then, suddenly: ‘Look, Mildred, look! That’s Uncle Paul!’ A blurred, bad picture, in an old Sunday paper, all wet with the fish inside it, but you recognised it. You showed it to me. That picture of a Wanted Man in an out-of-date newspaper—it was you who found it, not me. That’s how he was caught.”
Meg was silent, her memory reaching, straining to its very limits. Yes, it could have been like that. The smell of the haddock in its damp parcel; the sense of bewildered, uneasy triumph at having stirred up some adult commotion that she could not understand; it all came back to her now, confused and blurred, but unmistakable. It could have happened —had happened—just like that.
“But—Mildred—” Meg sought for words. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I was only a child—I could barely even read at the time. He—Uncle Paul—he must have known that. It was you, after all, who understood what it was; who took it to the police.”
“But it was you who found it,” Mildred repeated obstinately. “That’s what he’ll remember. It was you who found it. Oh, I’m the one who’s in the greatest danger, of course—” Mildred’s voice betrayed a certain satisfaction here—“I’m the one he’s really after, I know that. But, don’t you see, Meg, if he should come across you—especially if he came across you here, in this cottage—he wouldn’t have forgotten your part in it. I know he wouldn’t. That’s why you mustn’t stay here. I came to warn you.”
Meg was recovering herself. The strange, unnerving power of childhood memory was beginning to fade, and she was able to see the episode in proportion; as something long past, finished; something no longer of significance in their lives. She tried to explain this to Mildred.
“I do believe you, Mildred,” she said slowly. “About my share in it, I mean. I said I would believe you, and I do, honestly. But I still think the same as I did before—that it’s all over and done with. I’ve grown from a small child into a woman. You’ve been married to someone else for a dozen years. And Paul, if he’s still alive, and out of prison, he too will be leading an entirely new life by now, with an entirely new set of people. Why, he wouldn’t even recognise you now, I don’t suppose.”
She moved a little on her chair so that she could watch Mildred’s face. Relief? Argument? Tears? What would be her reaction?
“Why are you wearing my jumper?”
The question, at this particular juncture, was so unexpected that Meg looked, for a second, quite absurdly guilty. Then she laughed, apologised, and explained her plight; the wet and cold that had driven her to borrowing Mildred’s clothes.
“Well, you do seem to have made yourself at home!” observed Mildred, sourly. “Couldn’t you have borrowed something else?”
“Well—I chose this because it was so old,” explained Meg. “I didn’t think you’d like me to take any of your nice things.”
“I don’t like you to take any of my things,” said Mildred ungraciously; and then, suddenly swerving back to the former topic:
“Why do you think he wouldn’t recognise me?”
“Why—well—” Meg was suddenly embarrassed. How do you explain to your elder sister that in the last fifteen years she has grown fat; that the sparkle has gone out of her smile; that her face has begun to sag in lines of discontent and self-indulgence; that her hair, once a soft light brown, has grown coarse and brassy with too many perms, too much dyeing and bleaching.
You couldn’t, of course; and yet, looking unhappily at the older woman, Meg felt as guilty and unkind as if she had told her all this; as if the hurtful thoughts had carried across the green lamplit table as clearly, as cruelly, as if they had been expressed aloud. Uncomfortable, full of pity, she hastened to give a new twist to the discussion.
“But, Mildred, why don’t you simply go to the police and find out what actually has happened to him? You might hear that he was dead—still in prison—anything. Then you could set your mind at rest.”
“The police?” Mildred looked distraught. “But how could I, Meg? And why should they tell me? It’s not as if I really had been his wife and had a right to know. Besides—if I went to the police—and Paul found out that I’d been to the police—again…”
Meg could see all her sister’s fears returning in triple force. Hurriedly she began talking, almost at random.
“Well, never mind, you’re all right now anyway—I’m here with you. Let’s go to bed. You’ll feel quite different in the morning.”
“Yes, I suppose I will.”
But Mildred made no move. She sat on, staring fixedly at the green circle of light beneath the lamp as though it were a witch’s ball in which all the coming events lay revealed.
CHAPTER XI
MEG DID NOT sleep well that night. Perhaps it was the dampness of the sheets on the great bed, a dampness that the brief loan of Mildred’s hot-water bottle had done nothing to dispel. Or perhaps it was the uncomfortable, rather unnerving episode that had followed on the evening’s conversation.
Mildred had at first refused to go to bed at all; and then, having at last allowed herself to be persuaded, she had proceeded to insist on a number of complicated preliminaries that, it began to appear, must surely keep them both up till dawn. First, the doors must be locked; and not only locked, but bolted and chained, though the bolts were so stiff and the chains so mis-shapen with rust and disuse that it was quite an engineering feat to fasten them to Mildred’s satisfaction. Then, not content with this, Mildred went on to insist that a heavy piece of furniture should be moved in front of each; and it took Meg twenty minutes of exhausting argument, plus a number of cramped diagrams drawn on the edge of a yellowing newspaper to convince her sister that since the doors opened outwards, this precaution would be useless. Worn out, perhaps, rather than convinced, Mildred had at last abandoned this scheme in favour of a burglar alarm. This took the form of three or four tin saucepan lids balanced above the frame of the back door—which device went off with nerve-shattering efficiency every time either of
them made any sudden movement in any part of the creaking little building. The lids then had to be replaced by Meg, while she simultaneously soothed Mildred’s alarm. This ridiculous performance, repeated half a dozen times, succeeded in making Meg first irritable, and then almost as jumpy as Mildred herself; so that by midnight she was wide awake, cold and nervous, and very ready to welcome Mildred’s suggestion that they should make a cup of tea, even though it meant lighting the stove in the front room.
Coal and wood, Mildred explained, were kept in a shed at the back; so bolt, chain and burglar alarm had to be dismantled, and Meg, bucket in hand, stepped out into the damp, fresh darkness. Meanwhile Mildred, from the candlelit safety of the kitchen, pursued her with miscellaneous and belated directions:
“Be careful; the wind will blow the candle out,” she called, just after this very mishap had left Meg in darkness: and then, at the sound of a thud and an exclamation, Mildred continued: “Be careful, there’s a step down.” And again, at a crash of ironmongery: “Be careful, the tools are just inside the door.” Finally, as Meg was feeling her way about in the complete blackness of the shed, she heard her sister’s voice continuing on a different note: “Where are you, Meg? Are you still there? Oh, hurry up! Oh, watch out for those jamjars!”—this last as a crash of broken glass brought Meg’s explorations to a temporary standstill. And then, just as Meg had found the shovel and could feel that blunt insecurity of a mound of coal beneath her feet, she heard a scream.
Not a very loud scream, perhaps, but coming as it did, at the very moment when her hand touched the shovel, the effect was horrifying. It was as if the shovel itself had screamed, terrified by that groping, tentative touch of a human hand in the darkness. Meg dropped it as if it was an exploding bomb, and the bucket too; and, heedless of bumps and knocks, she blundered out of the shed and towards the back door, where Mildred, her hand on her heart, was already gulping apologies.
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