In the Teeth of Adversity

by Marian Babson

  “What spare time?” I asked. “Running all those women simultaneously couldn’t have left him with much. It’s a wonder he had enough time left to work on any formulas.” And that was a thought – perhaps they were looking for the formula. Certainly, it was the most likely thing for Zayle to be searching for.

  During the thoughtful silence, the door of the waiting room opened. Models can have a curiously extinguished look in off-duty moments when the cameras aren’t clicking. Morgana Fane had this now as she slipped past us with a demure smile. The most vivid proclamation of life about her emanated from the glittering op art medallion around her throat. It seemed to whirl and pulse with a life of its own. It made me feel off balance and slightly dizzy just to look at it. It was the sort of thing she would have picked up on one of her working trips to the States. Undoubtedly, it was the next fad she was about to launch here. It ought to make the costume jewellery industry very happy – and the manufacturers of aspirin tablets delirious with joy.

  She went up the stairs, heading purposefully for the landing. As she reached it, the door opened and Penny came out while she went in.

  “You know” – Gerry had turned to follow Morgana’s progress up the stairs – “there’s something funny there.”

  “Considering her reputation,” I agreed, “she seems strangely subdued these days. Perhaps it’s a side effect of the new anaesthetic.”

  “In which case,” Gerry said, “a double fortune awaits the stuff’s debut on the open market. If it can subdue her, it can sell on its secondary properties alone.”

  “On the other hand, she may be practicing for her new station in life,” I reflected. “Or perhaps her brush with the Valley of the Shadow has shaken her enough to turn over a new leaf.”

  “How could it when she doesn’t realize how close she was?”

  “Perhaps her subconscious realizes it. Anyway –”

  “Attention!” We snapped into it automatically at the sharp command.

  Intent on analysing the situation with Gerry, I had been neglecting my vigil on the staircase. Now General Sir Malcolm Zayle stood before us, carrying out inspection.

  “Still no uniforms?” he demanded harshly of Gerry.

  “Neither has he –” Gerry was reduced to pointing at me.

  “That’s different,” Sir Malcolm told him. “His uniform is on the way. I know all about him – he’s Geoffrey’s adjutant. Good man, Geoffrey.” He nodded to me. “You’ll learn a lot from him.”

  “I feel I already have – sir,” I said. I felt quite grateful to Sir Geoffrey, whose timely intervention had saved me from the sort of problem poor Gerry kept encountering with the General.

  “At ease,” Sir Malcolm said.

  I relaxed, while Gerry tried to look as though he had never snapped to attention in the first place. General Sir Malcolm continued to survey us both.

  “Mission tonight,” he said. “Might be dangerous. I need a volunteer.”

  Gerry silently took two brisk steps backward, leaving me in the vanguard. Sir Malcolm nodded approval.

  “Good man,” he said. “I knew I could count on you.”

  I smiled weakly, resolving that, if the dangerous mission had anything to do with dentistry, I was going to go over the hill – and let them bring on their firing squad.

  “Right!” He nodded again. “Report to my quarters in two hours.” His mouth softened into almost a smile. “Mufti will do.” He turned and marched upstairs.

  “It’s all right for some,” Gerry said. “It’s lucky I haven’t any ambition to be the sweetheart of the regiment, or I might start getting jealous.”

  “Thank you for volunteering me,” I said. “I must do something nice for you someday.”

  “Now, now, what can you expect from a white-feather man? Go and serve your country, like a nice little hero. Perhaps you’ll win a VC.”

  I glanced at my watch. “Whatever this mission is, I’m not going to face it on an empty stomach. Let’s slide out and get a drink and a sandwich before I march to face the foe.”

  “Have fun with the Dawn Patrol,” Gerry said as we left the pub. “You never know your luck – you might run into Mata Hari or Tokyo Rose.”

  I was relieved to find the Zayle hallway empty, the waiting room deserted, the receptionist gone for the night. My footsteps seemed to thud against the carpet as I climbed the stairs. I might have been moving through an empty building; no sounds came from any of the living quarters, and only the faintest gurgle of running water from the surgeries where water perpetually squirted round the inside of the china spittoons beside the chairs, ready to whisk from sight the next expectoration of saliva, blood, and fragments of tooth. I shuddered and quickened my pace.

  A sliver of light beneath the door leading to General Sir Malcolm’s quarters was the first sign of life I had seen in the entire building. I hurled myself toward it thankfully and rapped on that door, telling myself it was silly to let my nerves play tricks on me. There was nothing sinister about the house; it was the surgery and living quarters of a perfectly respectable dentist, whose partner had met with an unfortunate accident. There was nothing sinister about it.

  If I told myself that often enough, I might believe it. As it was, I was delighted when the door swung open and Sir Malcolm’s tall, military figure was silhouetted by the light behind. I beamed at him, then realized this might not be the proper attitude for one of the ranks. I wiped the smile off my face quickly and saluted.

  “Good evening, sir.”

  “At ease.” He checked his watch. “You’re early. I like that. Eager. Ready for action. You’re a good lad. Come in.”

  I followed him into his quarters. They were military to the point of being Spartan. The only personal touch consisted of two photographs, both of extraordinarily beautiful women. I recalled reading that he had been married twice. One beauty was dressed in the costume of the 1916 era; the other in the more familiar clothes of the late 1930s. I wondered whether that was the key – or half of it – to the wanderings of his mind, continually harking back to the two eras when he had been triumphant in battle and in love. The days of glory – you could hardly blame him for not wanting to relinquish them.

  “Through here,” he said, leading me through a monastic cell with a single divan and through French windows onto the roof. “Over here.”

  It was a small shed which seemed to have been built as an afterthought sometime after the original roof had been topped and semi-landscaped. He opened the door and motioned me inside.

  “Just help me with these things. We’ll get them out and ready for action, eh?”

  Two buckets of water, two buckets of sand, a stirrup pump, a heavy blanket, a couple of chairs, a pair of binoculars, a chemical fire extinguisher – we took them out of the shed and arranged them at strategic points around the roof. I had gone into such a daze that I scarcely flinched when he suddenly plonked an ARP helmet on my head.

  “Sit down,” he said, taking one of the chairs for himself. I sank into the other one thankfully, wondering what was coming next. I hoped he didn’t start his own fires to help his fantasies along.

  He shot me a sly, penetrating look from those piercing blue eyes, which abruptly unsettled me. Did he realize then that the whole procession of his days was an elaborate charade? Was he behaving like this as some way of revenging himself on his family for something he’d imagined they had – or hadn’t – done to him? Old people sometimes got like that.

  “Think I’m mad, don’t you?” he demanded suddenly.

  “No more than most.” I shrugged. It was probably true. In PR, you seldom met the best-balanced portion of the citizenry. It stood to reason. When you get people with so much – or so little – ego that they demand a constant flow of their own names and doings through the columns, you’re more likely to be dealing with raving monomaniacs than with Nature’s gentlemen or gentlewomen. Sometimes you wonder whether they doubt their own existence without the constant proof before them in black and white.r />
  “Method in my madness,” he admitted, looking almost shy. “Knew a sporting young blood like you wouldn’t volunteer for a mission unless there was danger involved. I was like that myself. Knew the boring jobs had to be done, but didn’t want to be the one to do them.”

  “You mean,” I said, gesturing at the equipment deployed around the roof, “this is the mission?”

  “Fire watching,” he said. “Has to be done. No one else wants to know. They think just because the Jerries haven’t been over for the past few nights, they won’t be coming again.”

  “Silly of them,” I said absently, wondering if I was expected to remain on this roof all night. That blanket didn’t look any too warm. Apart from which, I had the nasty suspicion that it was intended only for smothering possible incendiaries, and not for human comfort.

  “I knew you’d see it my way.” Sir Malcolm hesitated and made an apologetic gesture. “You don’t mind my little deception, then? Letting you think there was going to be excitement, danger?”

  “No, no, of course not, sir.” I tried to look suitably chagrined. “I understand.”

  “There’s every good chance they’ll come over tonight,” he offered. “They’ve been lying doggo too long. And when they come, they’ll make up for the nights they’ve missed. There’ll be bombs falling all around us yet.”

  I realized he was trying to cheer me up. “Quite likely, sir,” I agreed.

  “Of course,” he said thoughtfully, “our boys do a magnificent job turning them back at the coast. But it’s just a question of time until some get through – law of averages. A few are bound to, sooner or later.” #

  “Yes, sir.” I tried to look happy at this view of the situation. It was a mistake; it seemed to egg him on to visualizing fresh terrors to inspire me.

  “I’m an old campaigner, m’boy, and sometimes you can feel things in your bones. You’ll know the feeling, too, after your first few sorties in enemy territory. I tell you, something’s going to happen tonight. I know it.”

  “Yes, sir.” What worried me was that I was beginning to feel it, too. A campaign is a campaign, and I’d back a few years in PR against any active service, any day. We were both battle-scarred veterans. I wished I didn’t have the feeling that we were about to gain a few more scars.

  “There it goes!” He sprang to his feet. So did I.

  A high-pitched shriek rose and fell around us. I found myself automatically scanning the sky and longing, for a wild moment, to snatch the binoculars from Sir Malcolm’s hands and use them myself.

  After a long unreal minute, common sense reasserted itself and I remembered which decade we were really living in. I pulled myself together and listened to the agonizing sound carefully. It was the ear-splitting variety which seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, but after another minute, I located it.

  “Downstairs!” I said. Sir Malcolm was still training his binoculars on the horizon. I took a step closer and shouted in his ear.

  “It’s coming from downstairs. A woman screaming. We ought to investigate – sir.”

  “Screaming?” Sir Malcolm lowered the glasses, his eyes shining with the light of battle. It seemed that any direct action would suffice.

  “Downstairs!” he ordered. “Immediately!” He charged for the open door, enemy aircraft forgotten. He even went down the stairs two at a time.

  Adele was in the first-floor hallway, her back to the wall beside the open door of Tyler Meredith’s surgery. The terrible high-pitched wail was coming from her.

  Endicott Zayle was standing beside her. He had obviously just reached her side and was trying ineffectually to quiet her. Sir Geoffrey Palmer was coming up the stairs from the ground floor, having evidently just arrived, and we all converged on Adele at once with various theories.

  “Slap her face!” Sir Malcolm ordered. “Only thing to do when they’re hysterical.”

  “Father, please,” Endicott said. “Adele, please –”

  “Here –” Sir Geoffrey shouldered his way through. He, after all, was the medical man. “Now, what’s the matter?”

  Adele gulped for breath; the sudden silence was astonishing. That soprano shriek seemed to have been sounding in our ears since time began. She gulped air again, but still didn’t seem able to speak.

  “Perhaps a glass of water –” I said.

  “NOO-OO-oo –” My innocent suggestion seemed to have set her off again. We all glanced at one another helplessly.

  I stood there, trying to comprehend her strange antipathy to water and gradually became aware of a certain squidginess about the carpet at my feet. In the uneasy silence, as Sir Geoffrey managed to calm her again, the sound of running, gurgling, splashing water was clear from the surgery.

  I let these facts seep in for a minute, then moved to the open door of the surgery reluctantly. In the silence, the others watched me.

  The hall carpet was wet. Sopping, in fact, just outside the surgery door, where a small tidal wave moved across the polished linoleum to meet the carpet at the threshold. The pool of water covered the entire surgery floor. How long, I wondered, had the water been leaking? Some considerable time, probably, to get everything this innundated. I tried to follow the sound of splashing to discover where the leak was originating.

  My gaze moved slowly across the rippling floor to the source of the splashing water beside the dental chair. It wasn’t a leak.

  Water spilled over the top of the china spittoon, flooding over the edge of the blocked bowl.

  A woman slumped, half-in and half-out of the dental chair, twisted awkwardly, so that her face was hidden in the basin.

  I began to wade across the room, my hackles rising. She was too motionless, her face too submerged in that bubbling spittoon. The amount of water lapping around my feet told me that she had been there for a considerable length of time.

  I heard the splashing as the others started across the room after me. From the doorway, Adele began to shriek again. How far into the room had she ventured? Far enough to see what I could see now and know that there was no hope for the victim?

  Her hair covered the base of her skull, but I knew that there must be a bruise beneath it. Otherwise, the Honourable Edytha would never have sat calmly in the dental chair and allowed someone to ram her head so far into the china spittoon that she could drown – practically in the proverbial cup of water.

  “Where’s that inspector?” Sir Geoffrey asked abruptly.

  “He left some time ago,” Endicott said.

  In the background, General Sir Malcolm Zayle spoke bitterly for all of us. “Why,” he demanded, “is there never a policeman around when you want one?”

  Chapter 10

  “There was no question of the kiss of life, or anything like that,” I told Gerry next morning. “She was gone. I think we all knew that, even without Sir Geoffrey’s confirmation.”

  It probably wasn’t the best subject for breakfast table conversation, but that didn’t appear to bother Gerry. This was the first chance I’d had to bring him up-to-date. By the time the police had been summoned and had carried out their preliminary inquiries, it was the early hours of the morning before I got home.

  Pandora was annoyed at me and showed her disapproval of such alley-cat hours by sitting over on Gerry’s side of the desk, which served us as a table outside of office hours. Also, Gerry was generally a more careless eater. He proved this now by looking across the desk at me, neglecting his boiled egg.

  “I suppose,” he said hopefully, “it couldn’t have been suicide? In the same dental chair as her dead lover and all that? She might have decided she didn’t want to go on without him and –”

  “Not a chance,” I said. “We had to break the bowl to get her head out, she’d been jammed in so tightly. And the drainpipe had been blocked – with those cotton rolls dentists stuff into your mouth – to make sure the bowl stayed full of enough water to do the job. She couldn’t possibly have –”

  “Please –” Gerry waved h
is spoon in the air in protest. I was getting too graphic.

  Pandora took the opportunity to dip into Gerry’s egg.

  “Oi!” He came back to reality with an indignant shout. “Get out of there! What do you think you’re doing?”

  Pandora backed away, licking egg yolk from her nose. She knew what she was doing – she was enjoying an extra bit of breakfast. It always tasted better when it was stolen.

  “Look at that!” Gerry said, aggrieved. He carefully scraped the surface of the egg with his spoon and held it out to Pandora. “Now you can just eat that bit, too. Who do you suppose wants your leavings?”

  Pandora licked the spoon meticulously, delighted with her luck. When it was shining, Gerry withdrew it. “That’s better,” he said. “Who do you think wants to eat something after you’ve left your germs all over it?”

  He then plunged the spoon back into the egg and transferred a large segment to his own mouth, with gusto. Pandora sat there alertly, waiting her next opportunity for another dip.

  He didn’t seem to notice the anomaly of his behaviour – and I didn’t bother to point it out. They were both perfectly happy and we were all undoubtedly impervious to each other’s germs by this time.

  “The thing is” – I was still intent on my own thoughts – “Adele claimed she’d been out for a walk and had just come back. She said she noticed water coming from the surgery as she got to the head of the stairs. She opened the door, looked inside – and began screaming.”

  “Quite rightly, too,” Gerry said. “I’ve always maintained that there are moments when a woman ought to be allowed a scream or two. That was quite definitely one of them.”

  “Maybe so,” I said, “but her story doesn’t –” I stopped. I’d been going to say “hold water,” but on second thought, it was going to be a long while before I tossed the word “water” around lightly again. I’d seen the Honourable Edytha’s drowned face when they freed it from the overflowing bowl.