It was then that she first heard the tapping.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
She stopped and listened. It came again.
Tap. Tap.
Could it be a branch at the window? A door rattling? She went downstairs. The tapping was coming from the sitting-room, where the light was on. And then she saw the face at the window: the black holes for eyes, the black hair plastered down by the rain and wind, the white knuckles against the glass. It was Charlie Leech. At this point, when she saw the blood running down his forehead and on to his cheeks, she screamed.
She stood, unable to take her eyes off him, and gradually regained control of herself. His lips moved but she could not make out what he was saying. Trembling, she opened a side window, too small for him to clamber through. He was soaked. The night outside was crashing with rain and wind.
“I rung the bell, but you didn’t answer,” he said. His voice was slurred and she saw that he had a cut just below the hairline.
“I didn’t hear. What is it?”
“Can’t get the van to start. I had the bonnet up but I can’t see in the dark.”
“What have you done to your head?”
“I caught it on a branch. You can’t see nothing out there.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Could you give us a lift? I’d walk, only I’m not feeling too good.” He indicated the cut and she realised he might be suffering from mild concussion.
“It’s only a mile down the road,” he said. “Take you three or four minutes.”
Still she hesitated. He must have known what she was thinking for he said, “Look, I’m sorry for ... I didn’t mean no harm.” She realised that for a man like Charlie, who cultivated machismo with a naive assiduousness, the apology must have taken an effort.
“Wait there, I’ll get a coat.” She closed the window, went into the hall and put on a mackintosh and one of Bill’s deerstalkers. Her car was standing.in front of the house.
“Which way?” she said.
“Turn right out of the gate.”
They did not speak. There was no sound except the swish of the wipers.
“Next one to the right,” he said.
She took the lane and drove on for a good mile. “Are we nearly there?”
“Not far now.”
But when, in the next few minutes, they did not reach his cottage, she began to get angry. She thought of Sophie in the empty house. She thought of her waking up and crying and no one there to answer her. She began to drive faster. She came suddenly on a bend and saw Charlie’s foot move as though covering a brake-pedal. But she drove well. The car hugged the shiny tarmac and she brought it safely around. A hill loomed up. She put her foot down and the car leaped forward. As she neared the top she saw a faint lightening of the sky above her and realised that a car was coming up the hill on the other side. At that moment she reached the crest, and in the same second, she saw the cat. It was sitting in the middle of the road, lit from the back, a huge shadow on the hedge. It seemed colossal. Automatically, she swung to avoid it. The wheels lost their grip and the car sheared away to its right, down the slope through a barbed-wire fence, and crashed into an ash tree, tipping over onto its side. The seat-belt held the body, but her right knee lashed against the steering wheel.
Charlie had not worn his belt. Perhaps, she was to think later, that was part of the machismo. His head smashed into the front screen, bulging and breaking it. The impact reaction had then thrown him backwards and he had come to rest sprawled in a tangle of limbs. She had lost consciousness then and did not wake until she was in hospital.
*
“That’s it. That’s everything,” she said out loud. She had smoked three cigarettes and had walked half a mile on the sitting-room carpet, reliving the events of that night. She was pleased with herself and experienced a sense of relief that she had managed to gouge each detail from her subconscious. She felt as though a great weight had been raised from her. She was exhausted, but it was a healthy exhaustion. She wanted her bed. She wanted to sleep. She did not even need a whisky, so she poured her untouched drink back into the decanter.
She went to the windows and flung back the curtains.
There was the face. Dark holes for eyes. Black hair. White cheeks. She opened her mouth to scream and a hole appeared in the face. She realised it was her own reflection. She should have laughed at her own fright. She should have said, “Fancy being frightened of yourself!” Instead, she put her hands to her cheeks and turned away and all the euphoria was gone as she realised that fear had taken root.
Outside on the lawn the cat watched the bar of light cross the lawn as Rachel opened the curtains. It had come to the house again searching for the food it had just found in the dustbin when the dog had started to bark, but it had been unable to dislodge the bricks Rachel had put on the lid. It was starving. Having easily eluded the dog which was still wandering in the forest, searching for it, it stared up at the light, then melted away into the shrubbery like a dark ghost. It would have to search the roads. Now it would eat anything.
5
Four days after he had left, Bill called from California. The telephone rang late in the evening, its bell strident through the silent house. For a moment Rachel sat, immobilised by irrational panic, until she identified the noise and went to his study to answer it.
“Darling?” The line was so clear she thought he must have come back.
“Bill! Where are you?”
“I’m ringing from Talini’s. Are you all right?”
Her voice steadied. “Fine! You?”
“The same. How’s Sophie?”
“No problems. How’s the screen-play going?”
“Slowly. That’s why I rang. There are too many interruptions here, so we’re moving out. Tomorrow we go up to the cabin Talini’s been lent. We’ll be there for at least three weeks, and there’s no telephone. I couldn’t resist the chance to hear your voice before we left. You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Quite sure. You mustn’t worry about us. I wrote to you this morning, but you’ll be gone from L.A. before the letter arrives.”
“I hoped you might have written and I’ve arranged for mail to be forwarded to the cabin. God knows how long it’ll take, though, the post isn’t what it used to be. I feel awfully cut off from you.”
“Me, too.”
“What’s been happening?”
Don’t tell him Nurse Griffin has left, she said to herself. Don’t mention the cat. Keep quiet even about the dog in case he should suspect you’re scared. Don’t say anything to worry him.
“I had drinks with the Renshaws the night you left. Alec came in for coffee one morning. Oh, and I’ve met a nice woman who has moved into a cottage nearby. She came here for a drink.”
She heard relief in his voice. “So you haven’t been too lonely. Darling, must go now. Talini’s waiting. We’re leaving at the crack of dawn tomorrow. Write often, won’t you?”
“Of course I will.”
When she heard the click of the receiver being replaced she put her own down slowly, feeling that her last tie with him had been cut. She had comforted herself more than once with the thought that if things became unbearable, he was at the end of a telephone, that she could dial Hollywood direct and be talking to him within minutes. Now, for at least three weeks, he would be out of reach. She realised that she did not even know where the cabin was.
That night she had the dream again and awoke, sweating and shivering.
*
The next morning, as she took Sophie around the drive in her pram something near the hedge caught her eye and she saw that it was the little stone statuette of a cherub which had held a bird-bath. It had stood on the lawn near the gate ever since she had come to live in the house. But now it had toppled over onto the drive and the bird-bath was smashed. The odd thing was that the head was missing. She searched the vicinity, but could not find it. How could such a thing have happened, she wondered? The statuette w
as heavy and no wind could have blown it over. With relief, she remembered Franco. He must have put his paws up, probably to drink from the bath, and pushed it. But where was the head? Suddenly, she remembered the ‘welcome-home’ sign. No animal had scrawled that message. No animal could have hidden the broken head. So who had taken it? She widened her search, finding nothing, but as she bent to push aside the branches of a straggling syringa she heard a hiss, and a black, animal shape ran across the drive and disappeared beyond the gates. It was the cat.
All desire to search for the head disappeared. She limped back to the house as quickly as she could, pushing Sophie’s pram, and did not feel safe until she had slammed the door behind her.
The days merged with one another, until a week had gone by, then two. During that time she struggled to come to terms with her life.
Physically, she was improving. She had seen her own doctor, who practised in Addiscombe, and now everything, according to him, depended on herself. If she did her exercises, if she took care, if she did not put the leg to any undue strain, it would continue to improve.
“It still aches,” she told him.
Dr. Williams was a short, florid man with a brush of grey hair, who wore half-lens glasses and had a way of peering over the top of them which disconcerted her. He had a slight Welsh accent which normally she would have found musical, but he was brisk and no-nonsense and had a reputation for being rude to patients who he thought might be wasting his time.
“Of course it still aches,” he said. “You’re lucky to have the leg at all.” He made her feel as though she was malingering. She decided not to tell him that twice since she had come back from hospital it had collapsed under her when she had inadvertently put it at a slight angle. The first time she had pulled herself up on a chair, the second time there was no chair and Penny had had to drag her upright.
It was, however, not the physical aspect of her life that bothered her, but the mental. Although she was an imaginative woman, she had always remained on the cheerful side of introversion. As a teenager she had greeted each day with enthusiasm and this habit had remained with her into adulthood. Now when she awoke she was grateful for the daylight hours, grateful to have Sophie and Penny and Franco. Each day shaped itself into a parabola. As it strengthened, so did she, until she was at her best around noon and in the early afternoon. But then, as the light began to fade and dusk crept in across the Great Forest, her spirits would sink.
Her fear of fear itself had begun to increase. She remembered, all too vividly, her post-natal depression which, at the time, had seemed so overwhelming, and so inexplicable. Then she’d had Bill by her side. Now the prospect of a similar bout of melancholy, combined with this curious, growing fear — of being alone, of nameless horrors that might never happen, even of, for God’s sake, a cat! — seemed always to be on her mind.
She found herself constantly listening for — and hearing — rustlings in the bushes and became familiar with the feeling that eyes were watching her, which she had experienced for the first time a couple of nights after Bill had left.
Each afternoon she would take Penny home and then come back to the lonely house. She had a routine. First she would inspect all the windows, making sure they were locked, then the doors. Then she would draw the curtains and switch on the lights. Often she would have the radio on in the kitchen when she prepared Sophie’s meal, and the television going at the same time in the sitting-room.
By seven o’clock it would be dark. In a week or so the clocks would be put back one hour and British Summer Time would give way to Greenwich Mean Time. There would be an hour’s less daylight. Darkness would arrive at six and soon five, then four.
She spent much of her time writing to Bill, long, cheerful letters telling him about the minutiae of her life, about Penny and Sophie. In her second letter, running short of subjects, she mentioned the cat, but turned it into a joke. “I seem to see it everywhere,” she wrote. “Or if not the cat itself, its goddamn traces. Bones and things. Spoor? Is that what they call it? You don’t know a good White Hunter, do you, to go on safari and shoot the darn thing for me?”
And again: “The stove is working beautifully. You’d love it. It’s so cosy. I have my drink in front of it. That’s when I miss you most, my darling. So I have two drinks. One for me and one for you.”
And again: “I told you about Penny in my last letter. Sophie has fallen for her like a ton of bricks. She seems to prefer her to me. I suppose it’s all the rusks. She’s getting plump. Her hair isn’t spiky any more. She doesn’t look like Chairman Mao. Penny thinks she is beautiful, and so do I.”
She took a long time writing the letters. The hours passed in total concentration, without any unease about what the night might bring. And because she had been thinking more and more about America, she decided to start a short story. She wrote for three days and gradually the influence of work took hold of her and she found she was not brooding so much.
But when she read over what she had written, she was not satisfied with it. Her central character was a woman who had been left by her husband and who lived alone in a remote house on the New England coast in winter. The story dealt with her thoughts, her longings and her fears. It was too subjective, too depressing. She tore it up.
She had letters from Bill, which she read and re-read. He described Talini’s house, which was Hollywood baroque with its pool and tennis-court, its manicured lawns, its fountain, its garden lights, its gas barbecue and its sauna. He made fun of it but to Rachel, brought up among the fakery of Southern California, it seemed to be infinitely desirable. For a whole morning after reading the letter she could see in her mind’s eye the gardens and the sprinklers of her youth and smell the scent of water on warm earth.
Her life became split into two: the good days and the bad days, and these largely depended on the weather — and on whether or not she saw the cat. As she had said to Bill, it seemed to be haunting her. Often, when she looked out of her window in the morning, she would see, or imagine she saw, a dark shape slink into the cover of the bushes. Once when she opened the front door, the branches of the rhododendrons were shaking, although there was no wind, and she knew the cat was there, somewhere, watching her.
Many of the trees around the edge of the paddock had lost their leaves, others retained them and the frosty nights had brought out the colours, every shade of brown, ox-blood and gold. On days when the sun shone the woods seemed to have an inner fire which burned in its rays. On such days she would take Sophie and Franco for walks along the lanes or she would drive carefully to the top of the Downs and sit in the car while the dog chased birds. She felt safe with Franco, knowing that when they returned home as dusk fell, he would scent the cat it is was around, and chase it away. Almost without realising it, she had come to love the dog, and depend on his companionship.
Sometimes she would drive to the beach, deserted now at the beginning of winter. It always reminded her of the coast near Nantucket: the lonely sands, the low dunes and the sea grass bending in the wind. On such days her fears would vanish. She would do her chores quickly and go out into the garden and prune the shrubs, or cut back the raspberry canes as the dog raced around the garden, or lay quietly in the drive. On most days, even those without sun, she would put Sophie in her pram in the sheltered angle of the house and the baby would sleep away the morning deep in her warm blankets, but breathing the clean country air by which Rachel set such store. It had become a substitute for the cleanliness and health-giving force of the sea.
It was on one of the good days that she decided she felt strong enough to see Charlie’s widow, but the experience was more dreadful even than she had anticipated.
The Leeches lived in a cottage, a rural slum with a rusting car squatting in the garden; a pathetic attempt at a vegetable garden; a lop-sided wooden gate opening on to a muddy path; and a front door in need of paint where children had been kicking it and dogs had been scratching at it.
Mrs. Leech must have been
about Rachel’s age, but looked at least ten years older. She had the care-worn, lined look of a woman who has had too many children in too brief a period without the resources to cope. She had stood in the front door carrying a baby in one arm while a little girl of about five clutched at her skirts.
Rachel could feel her heart pounding as she faced her. “I’m Rachel Chater,” she said. “May I come in for a moment?”
Mrs. Leech made no move. She had probably once been pretty. She had long dark hair held back by an elastic band. Her eyes were light blue but they had a faded, exhausted quality and had sunk deeply into her head. Her hands were bony and red and the skin was pitted with dirt.
“May I come in?” Rachel repeated.
“What for?”
“To talk.”
“What about?”
“I think you know.”
“You killed Charlie. That’s all there is to say.”
Rachel had not expected this. She had not known what to expect: tears, hysterics, perhaps. But not this, and she shrank under the steady stare of the woman’s blue eyes.
The little girl suddenly pushed her face forward and shouted: “My daddy’s dead! My daddy’s dead!”
“Shut up!” her mother said.
“Can’t we go inside?” Rachel said. “We can’t talk here.”
Mrs. Leech gave ground and she stepped into the tiny cottage. It was a two-up, two-down and, with a nod of her head, Mrs. Leech indicated that she should go to the right. The sitting-room was a mess. There were papers and toys on the floor and the three-piece suite, which was covered in a furry material patterned to resemble a tiger skin, had seen better days. Net curtains, yellow with age, hung askew over the small windows. One wall had been papered to look as though it was built of mountain stone and in the middle of this was the fireplace in which a small coal fire was burning. A clothes-horse, on which were drying a dozen or more diapers, stood in front of it. The smell of them permeated the house.
“May I sit down?” Rachel asked, and then discovered that there was almost no surface that was not covered in toys or papers.
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