Katharine spoke brightly, trying to make it sound like a lovely treat, though she knew as well as Mary that being the one to have the joint bonfire for the two families also meant being the one to have mud all over the carpets, the lawn trampled bare, and hundreds of sodden fireworks cases to clear up the next morning, as well as the wet forbidding remains of the bonfire. It also meant being the one to find stuffing for the guy, to supply paraffin when the bonfire wouldn’t light, and to produce endless mugs of cocoa which would get left about, half-drunk, in various obscure corners of the garden. Still, Katharine had done it last year, and fair’s fair. Besides, the prospect of all this might take Mary’s mind off her present troubles, curtail her profitless brooding over it all.
But it didn’t. Mary began to sip grimly at her tepid coffee, as if it was a medicine whose sheer nastiness must somehow cure something.
“I can’t think about bonfires with all this hanging over me,” she complained. “And I still can’t decide whether to tell Auntie Pen about what I did. Shall I? Or not? Would it be better not?”
Katharine suddenly felt curiously strong, curiously certain on her friend’s behalf.
“Definitely not,” she said firmly. “You see, Mary, it seems to me that you must think first and foremost of Alan, and never mind your conscience. You have to look at it like this: There are two possibilities. One is that Alan has genuinely forgotten how it happened—what with the fainting and the anaesthetic and everything—in which case I can’t see any point whatever in upsetting him by telling him the truth. The other possibility is that he does know, but wants to put it out of his mind as quickly and completely as possible. And out of your mind, too, so that you can both carry on with the marriage as if it hadn’t happened. Which seems to me a very sensible way of taking it——”
“But how on earth can he suppose that this extraordinary carry-on will put it out of my mind?” protested Mary. “It just makes me worry about it more and more——”
“Only if you let yourself,” interrupted Katharine eagerly. “Honestly, Mary, you’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll forget about the whole thing if you’ll only let it all slide, as he obviously wants you to. It’s not as if you can do him or anyone else any good by letting yourself be weighed down by guilt for evermore. Why, if you’ll only accept his story, back him up in it—even tell it to yourself in your spare time!—why, then, before you know where you are, you’ll find yourself actually believing it—and him too! Really you will! And then the whole thing can fade into oblivion for ever—only with both of you that much wiser for the experience. So do stop tormenting yourself, Mary. Please!”
There was something dreadful in the way Mary swallowed the cold remnant of coffee skin, as if it was some delicious titbit. Her empty cup clattered down into its saucer, and she stared across at Katharine with large, questioning eyes, seeking, it seemed, to be convinced. For surely Katharine’s advice, whatever one might think of its ethics, was offering her far and away the easiest escape from her situation. As she stared, slowly, miraculously, the uncertainty flickered and faded from her eyes, leaving them clear and brilliant, empty of doubt.
“You’re quite right, Katharine,” she said slowly, almost luxuriously, as if savouring to the last mouthful her victory over her own conscience. “After all, I mustn’t be selfish, must I? Alan’s own self-respect is at stake as well as mine. I mean, he’d hate it to be known at his job that he had a wife—like that. For a man like Alan—it would hit him very hard. You’re right, Katharine; I’ll do it! I’ll repeat his story to everyone. To him—to myself——”
“Even to me, just for practice!” laughed Katharine; and it was with a feeling of enormous relief—of pride in a job well done, in an important victory gained—that she hurried back to her office that afternoon.
CHAPTER IX
THAT NIGHT Katharine had a curiously vivid dream. Once again she seemed to be in the deserted cafeteria, but this time it was not Mary who was her companion, but a dark man in a raincoat. The raincoat was lightish in colour, shabby, and hung shapelessly from his sloping shoulders; and the man himself was dark, not merely in the sense of having dark hair and complexion, but more as if his whole face was enveloped in darkness; as if a deep shadow was thick upon him, hiding his features. At the beginning of the dream, Katharine was not paying much attention to the man; it seemed natural that he should be there. Her attention was wholly taken up with anxiety about the time. For before she could go back to the office, she must clear these tables; pile on to trays all those dirty cups and plates, and wipe away the crumbs, the flakes of pastry, and the sugary spills of tea. Not just from her own table, but from all the tables—dozens, scores, hundreds of them, scattered in derelict emptiness all over this great, echoing room. And it was then that she noticed that not a single other customer remained—no waitresses—nothing. Just herself and this man. And for some reason, inexplicable to the ordinary waking mind, she knew that she could not start on her task of clearing up while the man was still sitting there. She was impatient for him to go—to leave her—to get out of her dream: for somewhere, already, long before waking, there was growing in her brain a flickering awareness that all this was only a dream.
But the man would not go: and as Katharine turned to look at him more closely, perhaps even to speak to him, the darkness about him grew thicker … it was spreading … the whole cafeteria was in twilight now, as if night was already falling. And already the man was not quite there any more…. Only the raincoat, sitting there, upright and empty, still breathing, and somehow this, too, seemed perfectly natural, and not in the least surprising. What else would a raincoat do if its wearer was suddenly no longer there?
“A figment of knives!”
The senseless words leapt into Katharine’s brain with that strange, precise clarity, that more than natural importance, that meaningless phrases sometimes acquire in dreams. The phrase seemed to explain, to answer everything—the vast room, her own presence there, and even the alert, near-living raincoat … which now, after all, lay limp and ordinary over the back of the chair. Only the great, encroaching darkness seemed unexplained … the vast, swift twilight swooping …
Katharine woke with a feeling of having been roused by a wild storm blowing round the house; a sense of roaring wind, of rattling window frames, of strange, howling hollow sounds in all the boarded-up fireplaces in all the upstairs rooms.
But everything was still, and in darkness. The stillness forced itself upon Katharine’s waking mind with strange emphasis; with a shock of sudden stillness like the shock of sudden sound. She lay very still, alert, the dream running out of her, full consciousness swiftly taking over.
And then, clear and unmistakable, there came through the open window the sound of the dustbin lid being replaced on the bin. Quickly, and very quietly, Katharine was out of bed, out on the landing, and peeping, automatically and absurdly, and from an instinct too deep to question, into each of her children’s rooms. She knew it was absurd herself; for why in the world should the sound of a dustbin being tampered with outside in the back garden mean that some disaster was being enacted in one of the upstairs bedrooms?
Reassured that all her three children were sleeping peacefully, Katharine set off down the stairs to investigate. Lightly, tensely, she tiptoed down, with feelings more akin to exhilaration than to fear.
The back door was unlocked—was it she or Stephen who had forgotten to lock it?—and in a moment Katharine was standing on the soft, spongy grass of the lawn, the wetness already soaking through her slippers, and the damp, windless air chill and soft about her face. The dustbin stood at the entrance to the side passage; its battered curves shone greyly in the shaft of moonlight that speared through the narrow gap between the houses. Katharine approached it gingerly, wondering what, exactly, she meant to do? What did she hope to discover by lifting the lid and peering into the confusion below?
It was a newspaper parcel, right on top of everything else—but had she put it there h
erself, last night? There were heaps of things she might have wrapped in newspaper during her hurried evening chores—potato peelings—ashes—the contents of the sink tidy. No—those were still visible just below the newspaper—egg-shells, orange-peel, and a mass of sodden tea-leaves gleaming in the moonlight like seaweed in silvery shallows.
Katharine softly replaced the lid. She would have another look in the morning, when she would be able to see properly. Or—it suddenly occurred to her—had she been mistaken in thinking that the sound came from her own dustbin at all? Didn’t the Prescotts keep theirs in almost the same place, just across the dividing wall? It was rather odd of them, of course, to be emptying rubbish at three o’clock in the morning, but it was harmless, and certainly none of her business.
Just to satisfy herself that their dustbin was where she was imagining it, and that the noise might therefore have come from their garden and not from hers, Katharine moved softly across the lawn towards the wall, meaning to look over.
But how was it that these few steps should have set her heart beating in this way? Why should she suddenly feel so weighed down by dread that it was almost impossible to raise herself on tiptoe sufficiently to look over the wall? Was there indeed such a thing as premonition? Or had the misty autumn moon, now shining full across her face, triggered off some ancient fear of leaving cover … of showing oneself defenceless in the open … a target for watchers in the surrounding darkness?
Slowly, clutching with both hands on the damp, rough surface of the brickwork, Katharine raised herself on tiptoe, and found herself staring into a face so hideous, so motionless, that for a moment her wits completely left her. Just as in her dream, the shabby fawn raincoat drooped from sloping shoulders; but now the wild, mad eyes stared straight into hers with crazed expectancy; the whole figure sagged and drooped against the wall in an attitude of dreadful, senseless leisure. It was a dream again. It could only be a dream because there was Stephen’s old frayed yellow scarf knotted round the creature’s throat.
It was this final touch of horror that brought Katharine to her senses. It was not madness, after all, which lay behind those expectant cardboard eyes; it was not even sense, nor life of any kind. It was just Jane’s and Angela’s guy that they’d been making yesterday evening, over in Angela’s playroom. They must have brought it outside to work out some way of propping it up on the bonfire, and left it here. It would spoil, left out like this all night. Those painted eyes would run in black and orange streaks; the cardboard cheeks would warp and buckle; it should be brought in at once.
And I wouldn’t touch it for a thousand pounds.
Katharine amazed herself with the suddenness and definiteness of this conclusion. After her surge of relief at finding the thing was only a guy, why should she still feel this repugnance—yes, this sickening fear—at the very thought of touching it?
Katharine crept softly back into the house, fastening the back door behind her, bolting it, putting up the chain—locking out the moonlight, and the guy, and her own strangely beating heart as she had stared into its eyes.
But when she crept back to her darkened bedroom, tiptoeing, holding her breath so as not to wake Stephen, she suddenly knew that Stephen wasn’t there.
“Stephen!” she cried sharply, and switched on the bedside light “Stephen——!”
“What is it? Hush Katharine, you’ll wake everyone!”
Stephen, blinking in the sudden light, was standing in the doorway behind her.
“Where have you been?” they both asked simultaneously—then both laughed a little, uneasily. And then a sort of paralysis descended on them, which took the form of a halting stilted sort of conversation. Katharine, it seemed, had thought she heard a noise in the garden and had gone to investigate: Stephen, it seemed, had woken and found her gone, and had been looking for her. As simple as that. And with this simplicity they both had to be satisfied, and, much later, in the far, fag-end of the night, to fall asleep.
CHAPTER X
“I THINK YOU OUGHT to discourage Jane from playing with Angela Prescott,” pronounced Stephen; and Katharine felt as if he had pushed her roughly out of the way. For when she had started telling him all this recent gossip about Mary and Alan Prescott, it hadn’t been with any intention of asking his advice, or indeed of reaching any practical conclusion of any sort. She had simply been saving it as a possible topic of conversation with which to break the terrible ice of Saturday morning breakfast. This habit of saving up snippets of conversation was one which had been growing on her of late. As her relationship with Stephen deteriorated, she found herself storing up remarks and anecdotes that might form the basis of a conversation with him; hoarding them, like shillings for the gas-meter, furious to see any of them wasted on any other purpose. For one of the most intractable features of a tottering marriage is the swift, relentless narrowing of the range of subjects that can be discussed without causing a row. Months ago it had begun to be impossible to discuss the children in any aspect whatever without starting a row about either Stephen’s irritability with them or Katharine’s spoiling of them; and not long after, in quick succession, it had become impossible to discuss anything about holidays, or new equipment for the house, or Katharine’s job. By now it seemed impossible even to comment on an item in the paper without disaster. Only the other day Katharine had read out a bit about the high rents in the district, and Stephen had commented wearily: “Well, it is depressing for a man to feel he’s paying out four-fifths of his income to maintain an establishment in which he’s never even comfortable, let alone happy.” Even the weather was taboo; if Katharine remarked on its being a cold morning, the chances were great that Stephen would start all over again about why couldn’t she light the fire before she went to work, and leave it banked up. Like other women, of course; and that, however hard she tried to prevent it, would bring the resentful look back into Katharine’s face….
But amid all these encroaching conversational perils, Katharine had thought that gossip about the neighbours was still safe. Particularly gossip about the Prescotts, since nearly every story about that pair served to underline the pleasing fact that Katharine wasn’t nearly such an ineffectual wife as Mary, and that Stephen wasn’t nearly as forbidding a husband as Alan. Thus they each tended to emerge from a Prescott anecdote a little mollified; a little better pleased with themselves and with each other. This was precisely why Katharine had saved her story for the difficult Saturday morning breakfast. She was therefore disconcerted in the extreme that Stephen should take her narration not as a pretext for a little much-needed mutual admiration, but as an occasion for positive and disruptive action: action which could only precipitate tears, scenes, recriminations and offence in every direction.
“It sounds to me,” pursued Stephen, “as if the atmosphere next door must be very—peculiar. I don’t like the sound of it; and I don’t want Jane mixed up with it.”
Katharine could not allow herself to see that there might be some truth in what Stephen was saying. All she could see was the trouble and upheaval that would be caused in the two families if his suggestion was taken seriously: trouble and upheaval so monstrous, from her point of view, as to swamp all other considerations.
“But Stephen, I can’t!” she protested. “Jane and Angela have played together, in and out of each other’s houses, ever since they can remember. I can’t break it up—make it different—suddenly. And Mary would be so dreadfully hurt. Besides, whatever for? After all, anyone can have a burglar breaking in….”
So engrossed was Katharine in making her point, that she almost forgot that there hadn’t been a burglar. She scarcely remembered even to feel thankful that she hadn’t told Stephen the whole truth—and naturally she hadn’t. How could she when Mary had made her confession in confidence, to Katharine alone? By the time she had convinced Stephen that nothing had occurred next door that could be classed as “peculiar”, she had nearly convinced herself also. Her only anxiety now was that Jane shouldn’t parade her f
riendship with Angela under her father’s nose for a while: not until it had all blown over.
It was lucky, from this point of view, that Jane wasn’t down to breakfast yet—she’d be sure to have been chattering about the guy at Angela’s house last night. But of course you couldn’t expect Stephen to see how lucky it was; he was already looking at the clock irritably and asking where were they all? Stephen hated the children’s habit of getting up late on Saturdays—or, to put it more fairly, Katharine’s habit of letting them. He seemed to set great store by sitting down to breakfast punctually with his family round him, and he apparently didn’t notice that this happy family scene nearly always ended in rows, or tears, or both. It must be, thought Katharine, that he had eternally in mind some other, more biddable, family than he actually possessed. He must ever and again be picturing himself sitting down to the breakfast table with three pleasant, well-behaved girls who would ask him (one at a time) intelligent questions that he knew the answer to, like: How high is the Eiffel Tower? Girls who would listen with eager but quiet interest while he explained to them about the inside of a termites’ nest.
That this improbable morning vision of his family should still be sustaining her husband after more than a decade of evidence to the contrary, would have seemed unbearably pathetic to Katharine, if only it hadn’t been so inconvenient. If only Stephen would accept, once and for all, that breakfast with the children was absolutely frightful, and would avoid it as sedulously as she tried to avoid it for him, life would be much simpler. But no: he was continually urging her to make the girls get up at a proper time at week-ends; and she, not exactly disagreeing with him, was continually compromising by calling them at the proper time and then doing nothing more about it. The net effect of this, of course, was that they didn’t get up, and it wasn’t exactly her fault, nor yet exactly theirs; and this, she supposed—rather shocked when she actually faced it—was the whole purpose of the manœuvre.
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