‘Now, listen. This coppice isn’t so big. We should at least have caught sight of your car lights.’
‘Lights. Yes, lights,’ she repeated, and began turning round and round again.
‘Stop it, you’ll make me giddy. Now, what we’ll do, we’ll go back to the road and we’ll walk all round these trees. Come along.’
‘But wouldn’t it be quicker if we went —’
‘This way,’ he said unyieldingly, taking her elbow and guiding her.
They did exactly as he said and eventually arrived back at the spot they had started. There was no car.
‘But this is ...’ For the first time her flow of chatter dammed up; she gave a series of twitches conveying bewilderment. Then she peered down at the ground.
‘It’s no good looking for tyre marks, it’s too dark to see anything. Did you leave the keys in your car?’
‘Keys? Let me see, keys ...’ She thrust her gloved hands into the pockets of her suit; there seemed to be a great many pockets, full of bits and pieces she found it necessary to search through. Unavailingly. ‘My handbag ...’ She swung it from her shoulder and plunged into its depths.
Oh. God ... Henry breathed. A woman careless enough to mislay a car could scarcely be relied on to produce its keys. ‘Fasten, are you sure this is the right place?’
‘Isn’t it? I mean ... itmust be.’
‘You said wood. This is just a small coppice.’
‘The wood itself does touch the edge of the common, farther on.’ He pointed along the road where it was just possible, in the darkness, to make out the shapes of more trees.
‘Yes! Oh, yes. That must be it. I seemed to be running for ages and ages before I found a house. Miles and miles. I’d have come past here and not ...’
‘Come on,’ Henry said resignedly.
They set off along the road. The woman, trotting beside him, did not apologise for the trouble she was causing or express concern for the man she might have injured; she simply chattered, breathless and self-absorbed, about her nerves and the inconvenience of it all. Henry gave up any attempt to question her, the information he gained added nothing to what he had already learnt. Apart from any shock she might be suffering she was undoubtedly a chronic prattler, the type who maddeningly never listens and just keeps saying the same thing over and over again.
They reached the edge of the wood where the road forked, and here she cast about between left and right, making helpless noises, at last admitting — to his ‘Which way?’ — that she could not remember. ‘My mind’s in a turmoil. I can’t stand upsets ...’
‘Where were you comingfrom?’
‘That’s it, you see ... I was lost.’
Naturally, he thought.
‘If we go through this bit of wood’
‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Listen. Just stand and listen.’
‘You mean we might hear someone shouting for help? But supposing it was the other place, back there. And I must have left my keys in the car; he could easily just have got in and driven off,stolen it, and ...’
‘Be quiet. Listen.’
The tone of his voice startled her into doing as she was told. The silence of the night folded about them. ‘I can’t hear athing,’ she said urgently, after a moment.
‘Exactly. Quiet as the grave. Any sound either of us makes will probably carry for miles. Now, you go to the left. I’ll go to the right. If you find anything — shout. I’ll hear you.’
‘Ican’t,’ she said, aghast. ‘Alone, in the dark —’
‘You’ll be perfectly safe. After you’ve been walking about ten minutes — providing you don’t find anything on the way — you’ll come to some houses, on the left, set back from the road. There’s some street lighting there, it’s quite civilised. Wait for me there.’
‘No. No, I’m far too upset to be left alone.’ She held out her hands pleadingly, the bracelet clattering at her wrist. ‘I’ll have to stay with you. I’ll tell you what’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ he interrupted grimly. ‘We’ll do it my way.’
‘But Ican’t —’
‘You’ll have to. I don’t intend to spend the night arsing about. Off you go.’
‘Well ...really.’
He turned and left her quivering with offence. She would probably do as he said; if not, it was too bad. Her silliness, her limpet quality, had pushed him to the end of his patience.
The entire evening, he thought as he went swiftly along the road, had taken an absurd turn from the moment the first woman had walked into his garden. It was a coincidence verging on the farcical that two strange women should choose to turn up within minutes of each other and play out their charade in the dusk for his diversion.
Diversion. Charade.
He halted between one stride and the next.
Charade. Diversion.
He was turning, sprinting back the way he had come, cursing inside his head. There was no car, no injured man and — of course, when he took the left fork of the road and ran a short way down it — no sight or sound of a small, trotting woman. He stood still, looking about. She had melted into the darkness, it would do no good searching for her, if she was determined to elude him she could do it easily amongst the trees.
Running, he took a short cut across the common. They had made as big a fool of him as he had made of himself; one luring him out, the other, alone in his house ...
Hishouse, he thought, pained, possessive.His house that he loved, that needed his protection, undefended now to prying eyes and hands ...
What did the bloody woman want, anyway? What did shewant?
The lights from his neighbours’ windows twinkled a welcome to him through the trees. Lydia’s were in darkness; but in his house, he was infuriated to see, the lights had been switched on on the ground floor and the first floor.
He took the low wall from the side, leaping over it between a gap in the bushes. He had left his front door pulled to, it needed only a touch of his hand to prove it was now shut and locked. He went back over the wall the way he had come and round the side of the house, still running, but lightly, in the hope that she would not hear him and he could surprise her at whatever she was doing.
His precaution was wasted. He went so fast at the back gate, its resistance was so unexpected, he crashed into it. Bolted on the inside. He cursed, retreated a few steps and ran at it, springing, hauling himself up and over, making enough noise to be heard half a mile away. He sprinted clown the garden and on a last minute caution slowed his pace as he grabbed for the handle of the kitchen door. That resisted him, too. That, too, was locked.
He backed away. Feeling an utter fool did not prevent him from thinking clearly. She could have gone before he arrived, or she could have slipped out of the front door in the few moments he was crashing over the back gate. If that was the case, it was worth spending a little time looking for her; by luck, he might just choose to follow the way she had gone.
But his hunt was unsuccessful, the roads and common were deserted, and at last he walked back through the summer night, angry and perplexed.
He still had to get into his house, which was not too difficult. One of his first jobs had been to make the lower windows safe against intruders, it was no use trying those. However, he had been decorating upstairs and left the landing window’ open to clear the smell of paint; his neighbour, three doors down, had a ladder he could borrow’.
His neighbour was a retired naval captain who loved to talk; borrowing the ladder usually meant an hour’s exposure to far-ranging reminiscences and, if the hour was right, a glass of hideously sweet sherry. Fortunately, the captain had a visitor, and although he hospitably pressed Henry to join them, Henry could claim as an excuse the disreputable state of his working clothes and the necessity of getting back into his house. It cost him an effort to smile at the captain’s jokes about his carelessness in locking himself out; an anxiety that had nothing to do with his own stupidity had begun to twist, sour as sickness, deep insid
e him.
When he had negotiated the ladder and window, he went straight to the stairs, calling, harsh with anxiety, before he was halfway there, ‘Wanda ... Wanda ...’
She crept along the hall, half-crouching, her ears flattened; she was not used to raised voices, his tone frightened her.
‘I’m not angry with you. You haven’t done anything wrong,’ he said gently. He sat at the foot of the stairs, coaxing her. When she came to him he picked her up, hugged her quickly and set her down beside him. Tentatively curious, she sniffed at his hand, at the new smells it had acquired in the time he had been away from her.
He watched her, saw the slight tremor of his hand.
‘This won’t do at all, will it, dog?’ The fear that had clutched at him had been irrational — perhaps. What he knew of the death of his aunt’s dog had, unwelcome, unbidden, sprung into his mind, and it was not until he saw that Wanda was unharmed he allowed himself to acknowledge the leap of intuition that linked that savage act with the two women.
‘Odd,’ he said aloud to Wanda, who studied him, bright-eyed, interested. ‘I wish you could talk, little thing, you could tell me what that old cow was up to in here. Well ... I’d better try and find out.’
*
He was no wiser when, later, he set out with Wanda to meet Lydia off the last bus.
From the houses lights shone softly out into the darkness, silhouetting the tracery of the verandah; the whole row looked secure in its Victorian primness, proof against irregularities of any kind. But this staid, self-respecting air had been sullied by the two women, their strategies and deceits, and Henry felt a measure of guilt, as if he had deliberately been careless with something he cherished and put it in danger. It occurred to him for the first time that in spite of the broad comedy of impersonation there had been something sinister about the women: they had come and gone without trace, only he had seen them and spoken to them, they might never have existed.
... and they didn’t, not as they appeared to him. In their ordinary lives they would look, speak, walk in a totally different manner. Mrs Enderby-Smythe, minus her spectacles, doughy complexion, padding to bulk out her tweeds ...
Tweeds, he thought disgustedly, tweeds at this time of year. That should have told mesomething.
No, stripping them of their disguise, as a mental exercise, was a sheer waste of time, it merely meant superimposing an imagined image on a fraudulent one. The betrayal had, necessarily, to be physical: some woman, some day, would move, gesture, speak in a particular tone, and his mind would be jogged into recognition. Because he was quite sure he had not seen the last of them, and he would always be on the look-out now, now that he had something tangible to go on.
On the main road that ran to the right of the houses he called Wanda to him and put her on her lead, noting absently that she looked like a mouse on a piece of string. The noise of the bus came groaningly round the corner. Should he tell Lydia about the two women? She had known something about the puzzling business of the break-in that had occurred before his arrival, and there had to be some connection. She might be able to help him, if only he could persuade her.
She hobbled off the bus in her lop-sided way, smiling with pleasure to see Henry waiting, Wanda dancing in excited welcome beside him.
‘I’ve had a lovely day.’
‘Have you? Good.’ He would not spoil it. He would talk to her tomorrow.
*
The next morning he drove into town for some paint. The sky lowered, threatening rain; the narrow streets were airless, boiling with summer visitors.
As he waited in a queue to get into the car park his attention was drawn to a woman who was walking towards him on the opposite pavement. She was too tall and too thin, but the elegance of her movements turned what might have been an overstrung look to a supple poise. She walked with her head up, her green and white dress cool in the stifling day; she had cloudy dark hair and a half-hidden smile on her face.
He wondered if he had seen her somewhere before — but he would have remembered. He was always attracted to tall, narrow women; perhaps because, long ago, in the fervent, frustrated curiosity of his schooldays, someone with an air of authority had told him that thin women were sexier than plump ones. In his experience he had found it to be true, but that was probably more a matter of mutual responsiveness.
I could respond to you, he thought, making a soft growl in his throat and watching her with gently approving lust as she swung gracefully along, keeping to the outer edge of the pavement, free of the crowds. She was not particularly fashionable, her dress was simple, her accessories discreetly toning; but she had style, and that indefinable quality always impressed him. His own vanity was confined by dread of the rumpled, soup-stained appearance of the man who looks after himself; he bought expensive clothes, cared for them, and wore them with pride. That he himself possessed the quality he admired was something of which he was unaware.
The car in front of him moved just as she drew level with him and he had to drive on and lost sight of her.
He bought his paint, dumped it in his car, went back to the market to buy some provisions and then, leaving the busy centre of the town, took a detour down cobbled back streets to a book shop. It was the favourite shop of people for miles around, the second-hand section was in the basement, windowless, vast and shadowy; once Henry had got on a ladder to search among shelves high up in darkness and found the books there shrouded by what he took to be a layer of inch-thick grey felt; as he investigated and visibility deteriorated he discovered, too late, that the grey felt was dust.
He browsed contentedly for a while amongst the gardening books. For the first time in his life he had a garden, his ignorance about it was appalling, his enthusiasm excessive. He knew if he let Lydia loose she would take over and he wanted to find out things for himself, even if he did pull up half the plants in the belief they were weeds.
When he had chosen some books he went round the shelves to take a look at the local history section. There were people about, standing reading or chatting quietly; one man was eating sandwiches and making notes out of an enormous encyclopaedia. From a murky corner near the stairs a glimmer of colour took Henry’s eye: a green and white dress, rustling softly to the movement of her body as she reached up for a book. The woman he had seen earlier.
She stood with her back to him; above her, tilted at an angle, was a large mirror. It presumably had something to do with security against shop-lifting and was completely useless as it was in the wrong position and so dirty no one could see anything in it if they were more than a few feet away.
She was holding the book up at eye level to catch the light that shone over her shoulder; her handbag swung from her arm, a bag of shopping was at her feet. In a leisurely way he studied her: the graceful neck, the long, gainly back and small waist. It troubled him, the thought that he had seen her before; but would he, he asked himself, have forgotten that neat bottom, those fine ankles?
In bookshops strangers often talked to each other. There was something about their both being there, sharing a common interest, that removed normal social barriers and yet left respectability intact. Henry had often done it, spoken and been spoken to, and he prepared to do it again, mentally running through some suitable opening remark.
Something made him glance up, into the mirror; there, with a tremor, his gaze encountered hers. She was looking straight into his eyes with the deliberate, arrogant defensiveness that signified she had been watching him as he studied her; just as deliberately, as his gaze held hers in helpless apology, she looked away, dismissing him.
He grabbed a book and opened it, embarrassed, cursing himself for being so clumsy, so caught out. He dared not approach her now. He was conscious of her picking up her bag, moving to the narrow stairway.
A moment later there was a flutter of voices:so sorry...can you manage? ... so little room ... Two of the voices unmistakably those of the Misses Tack who lived in the village and who had once (Henry was convin
ced it was in the reign of Victoria) run an academy for dancing, deportment and elocution. Bird-like, their manner of dress vaguely bringing to mind Palm Court orchestras, they went to him with small cries of greeting. He could say, with sincerity, how pleased he was to meet them. They were dedicated gossips.
When he had the opportunity of not making it too obvious, he said, ‘That woman who was going out as you came in ... I’ve a feeling I’ve seen her somewhere before, but I can’t think where.’
‘In the village, of course,’ one Miss Tack said. ‘Naturally,’ the other chirruped.
‘Oh ... is that where?’ But they were wrong, he had not seen her there, he would have remembered. ‘Who is she?’ The Misses Tack looked up at him in their yearning way and, their faces brimming with eagerness, prepared for a good gossip.
5
The hall had a macabre splendour, an echoing coldness of stone: floors and walls and staircase. Fantastic, yet gloomy, dredged by shadows that the lighting seemed merely to stir and thicken, for all its solidity it had the flimsy look of a stage set, its contrived perspectives dwarfing the human figure.
Some freak of acoustics drew his voice from the gallery, sent it slithering over the surface of stone to whisper around the hall his meticulous, obsessive directions.
And down there in the hall, cloaked and hooded and masked, they moved with ceremonial courtesy; upon the staircase took up their starkly ritualistic poses, or passed, like shadows themselves, between shadow and light.
How many were there?
Did it matter?
As he looked down he saw not the people they were but people long dead, the ones who dwelt in his mind, lingered at the edge of his vision, spoke to him from the dark; and when he found it necessary to summon them, they, time-confounding, answered his call.
It took all his strength to bring them back, and yet he drew strength from his ability to manipulate, command. It took other things, too: a long hatred, the desire for revenge, and the terror of death.
*
The rain washed the dust of the summer days from the trees, the bushes, the grass; the world turned to a green weeping, iridescent with the softest blue towards evening.
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