Once again, on leaving Mr Porter, Beatrice bumped into Lilac, who was on her way to meet Jerome.
“Lilac? What’re you doing here?”
Lilac, nervous, gestured vaguely in the direction of Paddington Street. “Dance class. I couldn’t find a parking place round there. How are you, Beatrice?” She quailed in the heat of Beatrice’s fierce glare. Then, “I may be getting a job,” she offered placatingly.
“Oh, really?” Beatrice felt a glow of triumphant vengeance. “What sort of job?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know anything about it yet. It’s just the vaguest possibility. But it might mean I can do something at last. I must rush. Excuse me …”
She went first to her car, to put Beatrice off the scent, praying that Beatrice would not run into Jerome. She called, “Do you want a lift?”
Beatrice shook her head and pointed to her own car parked further up the street.
When Lilac told Jerome of Stephen’s offer, he said, “Don’t trust him. He’s a nasty bit of work.”
“No,” said Lilac doubtfully, “I won’t.”
Nevertheless she hurried home to change. She left this note for Joshua: “I’ve had to go out. It’s business. Please don’t worry. I’ll be all right. I’ll be back when I can. It may be late.”
Then she kissed Emily and ran from the house, in order to be gone before Joshua came home.
To her surprise, Stephen greeted her wearing a creased T-shirt and a pair of not-very-clean jeans.
“Aren’t we going out?” she asked. “I thought you said dinner.” Her own elaborate clothes looked ridiculous.
“Come in, Lilac, sit down. Would you like a drink?”
She entered nervously and waited. Then she said, “Yes. I’ll have a drink, please.”
He came and sat beside her, pushing the drink into her hand. He said, greedily, “You look very pretty, Lilac.”
“Thank you.” She edged away from him. “Where’s Giuseppi?”
“There’s no such person,” said Stephen calmly.
“Well!” Lilac was taken sharply aback. “That’s not very nice.”
“I’m not a very nice person, Lilac. I got you here because I wanted you to myself, by yourself.”
Lilac stood up in alarm.
“Sit down, Lilac.” He pulled her down beside him. “I got you here for a purpose.”
Now she knew that the hunter was after her, the predator pursuing his victim. But instead of the flashing of knives, poisoned arrows flew through the air of the pretty sitting room.
“I got you here to tell you to leave Jerome alone. This is a warning. I gather married men are your speciality—but not your brother-in-law, Lilac! Leave him alone.”
She jumped to her feet, her heart racing.
“You’re just a whore, aren’t you, little Lilac? A whore like your mother …”
These words echoed and pounded in Lilac’s ears as she fled.
She ran and ran. At last a taxi. She could think only that she must find Mr Porter, must reach him, must get him to hold her and comfort her, wash the poison from her and bind her wounds.
Jumping from the cab, Lilac saw that, as if by a miracle, the door of the house on Wimpole Street had been left ajar. She paid the cabby and ran swiftly up the stairs.
Eighteen
The same evening, Jerome arrived home to find Beatrice in a tormented mood. She said, immediately, trying to be casual but with a tremor in her voice, “I hear Lilac may be getting a job.”
“I believe so,” said Jerome, falling into the trap, while also trying to sound noncommittal and careless. “Who told you?” He knew, with a pang of fear, that he had made a mistake.
“Joshua, I think.”
He turned his head away from Beatrice’s accusing eyes. After a while she asked, “Where were you this afternoon? I telephoned. Judy didn’t know where you’d gone, she said.”
“Oh? What did you want?”
“Where were you?”
He became irritated, partly from guilt. “Beatrice! I’ve told you before, I don’t always need to inform my secretary exactly where I’m going. I go out of the office for all sorts of reasons, professional and private.” He glared at her defiantly. “Why did you telephone?”
She did not say, “I was feeling ghastly. I was afraid, because of Lilac.” Instead, “I wanted to ask if you were free for a dinner party …”
He said, sharply, “Write down the date and I’ll let you know tomorrow, when I get to the office.”
But now he was aware that Beatrice suspected, or even had proper grounds for knowing, that he and Lilac were meeting secretly. He knew also that Beatrice would not rest until she’d discovered the truth and that some fearful vengeance would follow.
He began to panic. He couldn’t think what to do next—how to stop Beatrice—how to save Lilac—how to save himself. In the flurry of his agitation, he saw the kind face and searching eyes of Mr Porter. He called to Beatrice, who had moved into the kitchen, “I forgot to tell you—I have to go out for a while …”
“Go out?” Beatrice, looking thunderous, appeared in the doorway again.
“I have to take a design up to the client’s house in Hampstead. It won’t take long. I’ll go after dinner—or before, if that suits you better …”
They ate in silence. Great waves of anger, reproach and distress emanated from Beatrice—but at least, she thought, he can’t see Lilac, because Lilac would be occupied with Stephen tonight.
Jerome drove straight to Wimpole Street. Peering up at Mr Porter’s windows, he was thankful to see a light. Not surprisingly, Mr Porter did not answer the street door buzzer. Jerome ran, then, to the nearest telephone booth. To his intense relief, Mr Porter answered the ring.
“May I come up and see you, please—now?”
“What is it?”
“I think Lilac may be in serious trouble—and I, also … please—may I come up?”
They sat together in the amber light of Mr Porter’s ornate sitting room. Mr Porter looked a little dishevelled, having only just emerged from his bathroom.
“I feel,” said Jerome, “that Beatrice is planning some diabolical move—some trap. I think she will try and trap Lilac—or me—or both of us. Whatever it is, I don’t think Lilac will be able to cope with it—”
A little ripple of fear stirred Mr Porter’s blood—a little shudder of premonition. Here it was at last—here, in some form, as yet unknown, was Lilac’s fate. Then he took a grip on himself. “Wait a minute. Let’s not get too dramatic. What could Beatrice do? A trap, you said? What kind of trap?”
“She won’t rest until she’s found out about Lilac and me. When she does, all hell will break loose!”
In the ensuing silence, Mr Porter’s front doorbell rang—the door on the landing, not the street—a loud and electrifying peal.
Frozen in horror, Mr Porter and Jerome stared at one another.
“That could be Beatrice,” said Jerome. “She might have followed me here, it’s quite likely. I may have left the street door ajar.”
“Go and see,” instructed Mr Porter. “I’ll get my dressing gown.”
Jerome had indeed, in his distraught state, failed to close the street door properly. But it was Lilac who had entered the house.
Before he opened the landing door, Jerome, peering through the spyhole, tried to see who was there. He could only see the figure of a woman. Lilac, having flung herself on the bell, then stepped back and stood anxiously at the top of the stairs. She waited in silence.
At last, Jerome flung the door wide and, in the expectation of finding Beatrice, confronted the visitor with a furious scowl.
Meanwhile, Mr Porter prepared himself by wrapping himself carefully in his best silk dressing gown and brushing his hair. He arrived at the landing door just in time to hear Lilac’s cry, to see her fall.
“Oh!” Lilac had gasped at the sight of Jerome. Taken completely by surprise, she recoiled, stepped backwards, caught her heel in the carpet
, lost her balance on the stairs, toppled … and fell.
As she fell, she screamed. The scream was a high, pitched, terrified cry, a soft wailing shriek, which held in it a lifetime of Lilac’s sadness, her pathos, her bewilderment, her despair.
Down she went, hitting the back of her head on the stairs—one, two, three stairs down. Then, her body askew, she lay still, silent.
“Lilac!” shouted Mr Porter in wild panic. He ran to pull her up, but could not lift her. Jerome, instantly beside him, grasped her shoulders and, together, they gently raised her limp body. She seemed a dead weight. Deeply unconscious, her face had the pallor of death. Staggering a little, manoeuvring through the door and down the corridor, they carried her into the bedroom and laid her carefully on Mr Porter’s bed.
Stricken as he was, Mr Porter could not help noticing that Lilac was dressed as if she had just been—or was about to go—to a party. Her pallid face was unusually made up with heavy eye shadow and mascara, a bizarre streak of rouge, and shiny pink lipstick. Her full-skirted dress was of soft silk, grey and black, low-cut on the shoulders, and she was wearing a great woollen cape that Mr Porter had never seen before. Strangest of all, her legs were sheathed in the finest, most elaborate lacy black stockings and her patent-leather shoes had high, very high, heels.
She lay like a corpse, scarcely breathing, he thought, and he could not find a pulse at her thin wrist.
A sense of dreadful confirmation came over Mr Porter, a sickening and terrible conviction. He sat rigidly erect, holding her cold hand until the ambulance came. This, finally, he knew, was Lilac’s fate.
As the men lifted her onto a stretcher, hurried her into the ambulance, and set the life-saving machinery going, three vivid memories flooded into Mr Porter’s mind. One was of the crushed body of the grey field mouse, an angular gash encircling its blood-streaked chest. The second was of Lilac’s joyful voice when she had telephoned him from Switzerland after her adventure with the Italian. “I’m living!” she had cried, “and there are some risks involved.” And the third was the clear recall of a dream, when a woman, who was standing on a balcony beside him, high above the sea, leant towards him, lost her balance and, with a haunting cry, fell to her death on the rocks below.
Mr Porter went in the ambulance with Lilac. Jerome telephoned Joshua and hurried to fetch him. From the hospital, he telephoned Beatrice. “Beatrice! Something awful has happened. I dropped in at Mr Porter’s on my way back—suddenly Lilac turned up without being expected—we don’t know why—and then …”
He could not speak.
“Oh, my God!” cried Beatrice. “She didn’t try to kill herself?”
He forced himself to talk. “We don’t know. She fell on the stairs—not very badly—but it’s serious. I’ll get home when I can.”
Not long afterwards, they learned that Lilac was dead.
Towards morning, when they had finished the formalities at the hospital, Joshua insisted on being driven home. He needed to be there, he said, in case Emily awoke. After they had stayed with him for a little while, he told them he wanted to be alone. He sat in his room with his numbed head in his hands, mindless thoughts pursuing one another in distraught confusion. Just before dawn, the telephone rang, a shrill omen of disaster, tearing apart the last of the darkness.
An hysterical Beatrice was on the line. Hearing her news, Joshua ran to his car and drove to her house as fast as he could.
After leaving Joshua, Jerome had taken Mr Porter back to Wimpole Street. He helped the silent and almost fainting Mr Porter into his flat and began opening cupboards to find some brandy. He came across a bottle of ancient cognac on a shelf covered with priceless wines. He poured them each half a tumbler of the stuff and insisted on Mr Porter emptying his glass.
Mr Porter sat with eyes closed, his face white, his breath coming in short, painful, gasps.
After a while, Jerome said, “I have to get back to Beatrice. Will you be all right?”
Mr Porter nodded slightly. Jerome, on an impulse, poured himself another shot of brandy and swallowed it fast, staggering a little as he left and stumbling into his car. A great tumult of guilt and despair roared in his mind like a cyclone. He could scarcely see or hear. His fingers fumbled for the key as he tried to start the car. The numbing brandy left him without skill, without judgement.
He drove straight through a red light as he crossed Baker Street. A late-night traveller, speeding down the road towards Oxford Street, careered recklessly into the side of Jerome’s car with vicious and monumental abandon.
When they lifted him from the wreckage, Jerome was dead.
“It was no one’s fault,” said Dr Katzenheimer patiently, “no one’s. Certainly not yours. As we’ve heard, Lilac had a weakness of a blood vessel in her brain—a flaw in the wall of the artery—a little bulge which gave way. She was born with that flaw. The artery was likely to burst at any time. Poor Lilac had been living on the brink of death for some time—as you quite rightly sensed in some mysterious way …”
“I shall never get away from the certainty that I murdered her,” said Mr Porter, ghost-like and obstinate, “and possibly him as well.”
“His death was the consequence of hers, I think,” said Dr Katzenheimer softly. She looked at him with an expression of deep anxiety, deep sympathy.
“Come, Mr Porter,” she said gently. “We shall start again. Let us begin at the beginning. But first you must grieve.” And she sat in silence while he wept.
Nineteen
Mr Porter spent three long days at the hotel on the seashore, three days during which he slept and dreamed and woke and ate and slept again, steeped in his thoughts of the past year.
On the fourth day, he felt that he had somehow come to terms with the death of Lilac, the death of Jerome, the sad and strange relationship between four unhappy people.
They had, after all, little to do with him. He had met them accidentally. They had brushed tragically across his life, they had gone—or rather, the two he cared about had gone. Perhaps he would see Joshua and Beatrice again and possibly the child Emily—but the passion and love would never be felt again. Yet there had been a shake-up in the unconscious depths of him. Those ancient patterns had shifted a little—a turn of the kaleidoscope—a faint clatter, a flicker of colors and shapes as the fragments settled into a different constellation. Perhaps he could go forward from here.
After breakfast on the fourth day, Mr Porter took a long walk. He strode along the shore, as Jerome had done, in the direction of the town. The black sand was littered with debris, seaweed, driftwood, flotsam, dead fish, broken bits of colored plastic, old tyres and, to his horror at one point, a poor drowned cat.
He remembered that Dr Katzenheimer, in one of her generalising moods, had once said, “This planet is no place for obsessionals. Nature, whoever she may be, is prolific and wasteful, uncaring and crude. It’s very uncomfortable for us obsessionals—but I suppose we make some contribution to the survival of our species—in evolutionary terms, evolution in Darwin’s sense, I mean …”
Mr Porter looked at the great sea and sky, then at the great mountains. He saw himself, a puny figure on the shore. Yet he felt that he had a place in the giant landscape. He was curiously comforted at the thought of obsessionalism making some contribution to the survival of the species—(if this was a correct assumption)—and, at the same time, he could place the deaths of Lilac and Jerome in the context of Nature’s wastefulness and cruelty.
This mood of peace wouldn’t last, of course, but he was grateful for the respite.
He turned back. When he reached the hotel he went to the desk and asked for his bill, packed his clothes, and loaded his bags into the car. The white Jaguar turned in the narrow road and could be seen driving along the shore. Mr Porter took the turn that led up into the mountains, towards the motorway, towards England. At the motorway café he stopped. He drank a cup of coffee and bought a postcard which he would send to Dr Katzenheimer.
Meanwhile, fre
ed of his cleansing rituals—albeit temporarily, he thought—he would make the most of things. He would drive back via the Italian lakes and spend a few days, if his mood still allowed this, on the shore of Lago Maggiore or Como.
Had he banished Lilac’s ghost? He thought not. Even as he made his decision about the lakes, he could hear Lilac’s tinkly little laughterless laugh, her slightly cockney voice … “Oh! The lakes! That’s nice … I’ve never been. Would you take me with you?”
He supposed he’d have to. He’d take Lilac with him forever, till the end of his life.
This realisation seemed suddenly to produce a change in him. His pain diminished. In his longing to protect her, he was able to glimpse his strength as a benign force rather than a destructive one.
A burst of energy followed. Regaining the motorway, Mr Porter pressed a firm foot on the car’s accelerator. The Jaguar surged forward, heading north, sped on and on, faster and faster.
Acknowledgments
With my most sincere thanks to Françoise van Naeltwijk for her help with the manuscript.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2001 by Margaret Reinhold
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2489-1
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Mr. Porter and the Brothers Jones Page 16
