Appointment with Yesterday

by Celia Fremlin

  But now it seemed that no sort of face, good or bad, was to be required of her: and when she pressed him, saying that there must be someone he’d like to have round, he gave her a strange, considering look, and did not answer. By evening he was in one of his sulks. He did not speak to her all through supper, and straight afterwards he retired to his armchair with the newspaper. He opened it and held it outspread before his face, as usual, but Milly knew that this time he wasn’t reading it. Nor was he dozing, or letting his mind wander: rather he seemed to be more than usually alert and awake, as if he was waiting for something.

  By the next morning he was his usual self again: and perhaps if Milly had taken the hint, and forthwith laid aside her plans for livening up his social life, things might have turned out differently. But unfortunately her enthusiasm for changing his way of life was only whetted by this setback, and she set her ingenuity to work to overcome it. Her friends were out, obviously: his didn’t exist: so what remained but to take matters into her own hands and invite, without consulting him, a pleasant, middle-aged couple who had been at the Industrial Archaeology class last term? Whether they were still there this term Milly didn’t know, because she and Gilbert no longer went. Why they didn’t she wasn’t quite sure, and something warned her that if she asked him about it he would go into one of his moods. As yet, she was far from understanding what lay at the root of these “moods”, but she was beginning to be just a little bit scared of them, and to have a vague sort of instinct about the things that would be likely to trigger them off.

  Thus she said nothing to Gilbert of what was in her mind: instead she quietly wrote a letter to the Davidsons, c/o the Institute, and when Mrs Davidson’s reply came, saying that she and her husband would be delighted to come to tea on Saturday, she made sure that she took it from the postman herself, without Gilbert seeing it. It would be better, she calculated, to spring it on him at the last minute, then he would not have time to work up a lot of silly objections.

  Rarely can wifely miscalculation have had such disastrous consequences. That Saturday afternoon tea-party proved to be one of the most shocking experiences of Milly’s whole life. Even now, months later, the thought of it still made her face grow hot. The scene was still as vivid in her memory as if it had only just happened … the scalding tea streaming in a brown tide across the clean white tablecloth and on to the floor … the two visitors, stiff as waxworks with shock … and herself, first stunned, and then rousing herself to a flurry of apologies … and then the mopping-up, as if it had been an ordinary accident, with the unfortunate Davidsons doing their appalled best to pretend that nothing much had happened….

  *

  It had been unfortunate, perhaps, that Gilbert had happened to be out when the visitors arrived. If he had been there when they came through the door, all smiles and hand-shaking, he might have reacted differently. As it was, even the brief forewarning that Milly had planned was denied him, and he walked into his wife’s tea-party utterly unprepared.

  For a moment, he just stood there, staring; just as he had stared when Milly had brightened his flat with flowers and cushions a week or two before. There was nothing actually very remarkable about his demeanour, and only Milly noticed the curious brightness that was coming into his eyes, a luminous look, as if a light had been switched on from within. The Davidsons, already giving little chirrups of appropriate greeting, noticed nothing: and so, as he padded swiftly towards the table, it was only Milly who was so paralysed with fear that she could not move. The Davidsons, naturally enough, assumed that their host was approaching to shake hands, and Mr Davidson had in fact already half-risen to his feet, and was saying something like “Ah, Soames, good to see you again—”—when Gilbert picked up the large earthenware teapot and smashed it down into the middle of the table: and then, without a word, turned on his heel and walked with the same soft, swift steps out of the room.

  Of the flurry, and panic, and embarrassment which ensued, Milly could not remember much detail: the next thing that was clear in her mind was Gilbert’s coming back into the room—was it ten minutes?—half an hour?—later, and mumbling some sort of apology, explaining, confusedly, that he “had had a lot of worries lately”. She remembered the desperate eagerness with which everyone had seized on this, and had pretended frenziedly that it was an adequate explanation: and then, shortly afterwards, the Davidsons had left, in a whirl of gabbled politenesses and glassy smiles. She remembered how she had longed for them to go, and never to see them again: and at the same time had dreaded, with a growing, sickening terror, the moment when she should be left alone with her husband.

  But strangely, when they were at last on their own, Gilbert had not turned on her in fury as she had expected. On the contrary, he treated her for the rest of the evening with even more consideration than usual, jumping up to open doors for her, to carry trays; and all of it done with a sort of pitying affection which Milly could not understand at all, and which filled her with unease. Only just before bedtime did he refer to what had happened, and when he did it was in terms so extraordinary that Milly was awake the rest of the night puzzling about it.

  “I don’t want you to think, my dear, that your friends are not welcome under my roof,” he began, seeming not to notice the way Milly’s mouth fell open at this understatement of all time. “But I would just ask you to be a little bit more careful. Those two today—I know you didn’t realise it, my dear, and I’m not blaming you—but those two have been on my tracks for a long time.”

  “On your tracks? What on earth do you mean, Gilbert?” The words were out before Milly had had time to weigh them, and a flicker of irritation crossed Gilbert’s face.

  “Now, don’t pretend to me, my dear,” he warned her gravely. “That is something I don’t like, particularly from my wife. You know—you must know—that many people would like to get at my memoirs. Many, many people!” The last words were spoken with a strange mixture of regret and a sort of unholy triumph: and Milly could only stare.

  “Your—your memoirs?” she got out at last.

  “Yes, yes—” he gestured impatiently at the piles of newspapers that still lay in yellowing heaps on the table‚ untouched since the day he had forbidden Milly to move them. “It’s all in there—all the material for my life’s work. As soon as the material is complete, I shall start on the writing. Till then, I want no one—I repeat, no one, not even you, my dear—to look at a single word of what is in those papers. Do you realise,” (and here the strange brilliance was coming back into his light eyes, and his arms gestured in a wide arc), “do you realise that in every one of those papers there are articles about me? Did you realise that? No? Well, now you see why they mustn’t get hold of any of them. They mustn’t see one single line. They could use it against me, you see….”

  Milly refrained from asking “Who could?” She was beginning to see, as in a glass darkly, what sort of a thing it was that she was up against, but she would not, as yet, give a name to it. What nonsense! —was all she allowed herself to think. He’s talking nonsense! How could there be articles about him in all those thousands of papers! And with this thought, the worm began to wriggle in the bottom of her mind, the Bluebeard worm, and she knew she would not rest until she knew what was in those old papers, so carefully saved, and parcelled up, and arranged….

  It was on the Monday, over a week later, that she got her chance. Gilbert was going out, as he still did at times, “to see a man”; and as soon as the shadow of his progress up the area steps had ceased to swing in sweeps of darkness and grey light against the dining-room window, she siezed on the nearest and most accessible of the packages, and began tugging delicately at the string. It must all be done to perfection. She had already noted the exact position of this package among the rest, and now she must so undo the knot that she would be able to do it up again exactly the same….

  The Times, of June 15th, 1935. Milly pored over the faded pages with a kind of tense, shapeless expectancy, with no faintest
idea of what it was she was expecting. Her eyes scanned news of wars, and of wars to come; of fashions; of political speeches, and of cricket; but nothing, anywhere, about Gilbert Soames, in any shape or form. Here and there a passage was marked by a light pencilled line down the side: but never was it anything that (as far as Milly could see) could possibly have been connected with her husband, at any stage in his career. The marked passages weren’t even interesting in themselves—just a few lines of a parliamentary speech here, or an announcement about the sales of pet food there…. Milly shook her head baffled, and moved on to June 16th. Only the same sort of thing again…. Likewise June 17th … and 18th….

  *

  It was when she was halfway through July 12th that she became aware that the print was harder to read than it had been at first. The grey light had become greyer while she wasn’t noticing … and only now did she look up to see why.

  *

  Gilbert’s face, flattened and expressionless against the glass, was watching her through the area window.

  CHAPTER XVI

  STRANGELY, THE EXPLOSION of rage that Milly was waiting for never came. Gilbert simply set to work to parcel the papers up again, applying himself to the task with the same meticulous care that he had shown before, putting on his gold-rimmed glasses now and then to examine a passage more closely, or to check on the number of a page. He did not seem to be listening to Milly’s muddled lies—how the string had broken… the bundle had fallen off the table … she had only been trying to get them back in the right order…. As the implausible excuses tumbled from her lips, he neither silenced her nor made any comment on what she was saying, but simply went on with his task, peering and muttering, as if he was alone. And when it was finished, and the bundle re-tied to his satisfaction and replaced among the others, he settled himself in his big chair as usual, with his green lamp at his elbow, and the pages of The Financial Times hiding his face.

  Sitting opposite him in the green shadows, not daring to read or to pick up any sewing, Milly kept waiting for the expected explosion, but still it did not come. It seemed that, for some inscrutable reason, she had got away with it: and it was only gradually, as the days went by, that she realised that this was not the case at all.

  The first thing she noticed was that her morning trip down to the shops in the High Road was no longer the free-and-easy affair it had been hitherto. Up till now, Gilbert had given her a generous weekly allowance for housekeeping, and had left her to spend it when and as she liked. But now all this was changed. Now, he wanted to know exactly which shops she was going to … what she was going to buy … when she would be back … and at the end of a fortnight she discovered, with a strange cold feeling in her stomach, that he had been keeping a record of it all … the exact time she had left the house each day, and the exact time she had returned….

  But by then there were already other changes that had forced themselves upon her awareness. Each day he had been closing the shutters and fastening the doors a little earlier, at first imperceptibly, and then at an increasing rate, as if he was trying to win some mysterious race against the golden October days, and reach the dark ahead of them. Soon, it was barely two o’clock when the flat was plunged in lamplight, and evening was upon them.

  Evenings had always been the worst part of the day, and this gratuitous extension of them was terrible. Milly did not know how she was going to endure the hours till bedtime, with Gilbert silent behind his newspaper, and herself sitting in tense and bitter idleness in the chair opposite. Sometimes she would let her eyes wander along the worn leather backs of the books on the shelves at her side, and lay plans for slithering this or that volume out without a sound in the hope of reading for a little without Gilbert noticing. But rarely did she manage it. At the faintest sound of movement—or sometimes even before that, when the whole thing was still only a plan churning in her mind—he would lower his paper, or rouse himself from his doze, and look across at her.

  “Are you bored, my dear?” he would ask politely. “Then let us talk,” and laying down his paper he would sit waiting for her to say something. She tried: sometimes she tried quite hard, racking her brains for something that might amuse him, but it grew harder and harder. Their life was narrowing daily: they were cut off more and more from anything that might have provided conversation. Milly could almost hear the creaking as the walls closed in on them.

  “Let’s have a cup of tea,” she sometimes said, as an excuse for darting into the kitchen: but lately he had taken to coming out after her, ostensibly to help her carry the tray, but in fact, Milly knew, it was to check up on her. Because several times lately, when she had made the tea by herself, he had questioned her when she came back to the dining-room. What had she been doing? Why had she been so long? How could it take—here he would consult his old-fashioned gold watch—twelve and a half minutes to make a cup of tea? She was filling the kettle too full on purpose, he accused, so as to spend extra minutes away from him.

  This was so exactly the truth—and yet it sounded so mad when put into words—that Milly denied it hotly, with a sense of genuine indignation: and at last he seemed mollified. But it was only a few days after this that she found, under his pillow, with the record of her shopping expeditions, another, newer record: a list of all the times that she had spent alone in the kitchen each day, worked out to the nearest half minute. Some of the items were mysteriously underlined in red, and marked with a small cross in Gilbert’s neat, cramped hand.

  It was on the morning when she made this discovery that Milly made up her mind that she had had enough. This was it. Packing only her night things and a spare cardigan, Milly set off for the shops at her usual time that morning, promising to be back by twelve at the latest. She walked, briskly as always, until she was out of sight, and then she began to run: to race, as fast as bus and tube would carry her, to Felicity’s.

  Felicity was one of her old acquaintances from happier days: an old acquaintance of Julian’s, too, of course, but that couldn’t be helped. As she hurried through the watery November sunshine towards Felicity’s flat, Milly toyed longingly with the idea of making a clean breast of everything: of pouring into Felicity’s sympathetic but over-enthusiastic ears all the pent-up follies and miseries of the past months.

  But it wouldn’t do. Felicity would no doubt be all kindness and concern, and quite uncensorious (well, after her own three divorces, she could hardly be otherwise) but the trouble with kind, uncensorious people is that they are incapable of keeping anything to themselves. Their kindness makes them want to share the delights of gossip with all and sundry, while their uncensoriousness makes them blissfully unaware that the spicy news they are spreading is particularly discreditable to the victim. Within days—hours, very likely—of Felicity’s learning that Milly had left her new husband, a dozen versions of the story would be winging their way across the Atlantic, each one more scurrilous than the last. How Julian and Cora would enjoy taking their gleeful pick from the rich and varied menu thus set before them free of charge!

  Felicity was naturally surprised to see Julian’s ex-wife after so many months of non-communication, but she seemed quite pleased, and agreed amiably enough to Milly’s plea to be allowed to stay for a few days: and if, out of her long and varied experience of matrimony, she took with a pinch of salt Milly’s story about Gilbert being away for a few days “on business”, and about being nervous of sleeping alone in the flat—well, there had been times when Felicity herself had been driven to dishing out this sort of rigmarole on her own account, and the last thing she would do would be to call another woman’s bluff. She did not know yet what this Gilbert character had been up to, but she knew very well from her own personal experience that when women told lies it was always the man’s fault, he drove them to it, the sod, and so the least they could do was to back each other up. Besides, that way you got the whole story, drama-side up. So she urged her visitor most cordially to stick around for a while. It would be quite a convenience, actu
ally, to have someone here, as she, Felicity, had to be out such a lot, and her current boy-friend (an absolute sweetie, you must meet him) had recently given her a Siamese cat: and it so happened that Felicity absolutely adored everything about Siamese cats except looking after them, and so, if Milly didn’t mind …?

  The matter having been thus arranged to the satisfaction of both, the two women settled down to a pleasant afternoon of gossipping, answering the telephone to Felicity’s friends, and watching television. It was about eight o’clock, and they were idly discussing the question of whether to go out to dinner, and, if so, which of Felicity’s admirers should be invited along to pay the bill, when there was a knock on the door: and when Felicity went to open it, Gilbert walked in.

  Milly did not even feel surprised. It was as if she had known this was going to happen. She could not even bring herself to wonder how her husband had traced her—whether he had followed her, or had simply gone to the phone box at the far end of Lady Street, and kept phoning all the numbers in her address book until he hit on someone who knew she was here. It wouldn’t have taken long. Felicity had been chattering to friends on the telephone all the afternoon, by now half London probably knew of Julian’s ex-wife’s escapade.

  But in any case, there seemed to be no need of a natural explanation. Standing there in the doorway, so straight and still, his hair gleaming like the wings of a white bird, Gilbert radiated a strange power, and it was easy to imagine that he had been guided by some sense not quite of this world; even that he had been magically transported by the powers of darkness through the November night.

  What had happened next? All Milly could remember afterwards was that from the moment she saw her husband standing there, so quiet and tall, his eyes glittering like cats’ eyes, she had known she would be going back with him. Not for one moment had there seemed to be any choice. She supposed she must have said goodbye to Felicity; must have apologised, and made up some face-saving story to explain Gilbert’s sudden appearance when he was supposed to be away “on business”. Anyway, the next thing she could clearly remember was sitting in the corner of a taxi, in the dark, with Gilbert sitting very straight and still beside her, and not speaking a single word. She remembered the bright lights of the West End reeling away behind them, to be replaced by the dim sodium lights across the river, fewer and further between as the taxi wove its relentless way towards their home.