Cat's Eyes

by Alan Scholefield

  “We used to do this in North Africa whenever we overran a village where there had been Eyeties or Jerries,” he said. “Once I fixed one like this in a villa in Libya. The Jerries had evacuated it, but we knew they’d come back as soon as we left, not through the door, they’d be too suspicious to do that. So I set the gun up to cover one of the windows. Any clever chap who thought he’d avoid the door got his head blown off when he climbed in through the window.”

  He talked with boyish enthusiasm as he worked, the fascination of the booby-trap outweighing any scruples he might have had about assassinating what was, to him, a harmless animal. Rachel watched as he tapped in several staples along the beam and window frame. He fixed one end of the string to the window and ran it across the hole. Then he threaded it through the staples on the beam and looped it around the trigger of the shotgun.

  “See? Any pressure on the string pulls the trigger,” he said. “And the cat can’t avoid the string when it comes through the window.”

  He went outside to the window, crouched down and said, “I’m the cat. Now watch.” He put his hand through the mesh, touching the black string. He pushed and there was a click as the gun fired on an empty breech. “Right,” he said. “When it gets dark I’ll put in the cartridge.”

  But the cat did not appear that night, nor the following one. Alec arrived each afternoon at about half-past four, as darkness fell. He would check the gun, she would give him tea and he would return to his cottage.

  Apart from this, her life became like the cat’s, almost totally isolated, for she saw nothing even of Celia. She telephoned once but she sounded aloof and unwelcoming and Rachel realised that she must still be annoyed about the incident involving Penny and her ring.

  She noticed that Alec, too, had become more taciturn and often seemed preoccupied. The former ease appeared to have gone from their relationship. She did not even know whether he had patched up matters with Celia and, with her uncomfortable knowledge of his affair with Penny’s mother, did not dare to ask.

  She seemed always to be waiting: waiting for the dark, waiting for something to happen. She had letters from Bill and she wrote to him, but in the background as she wrote now was the spectre of Sally. Had they met? Could she, even, be with him in the cabin, leaning over his shoulder as he read his letters, laughing quietly at the way they were fooling Rachel? Her letters became briefer, stilted. She wrote about Sophie and Penny and Alec, but she did not mention the cat nor her fears. Almost unconsciously, she was determined not to reveal herself to him — to them.

  His communications, too, were short, though apparently warm and loving, and in one he protested about her lack of news. He wrote, “Darling, I can’t believe you have nothing more to tell me than that Sophie is well, that it is cold, that Penny dusted the decanters this morning without being asked. Can’t you understand that I want to know about you. It’s only the knowing that keeps me from going crazy out here. For instance, you said you were going to London with some woman you met at the Renshaws. Tell me about London, and what you bought and where you went and how you felt. Everything!”

  So she devoted an entire letter to London and, as she wrote, some of the inhibitions faded and she could almost feel she was talking to him, that nothing had changed. The next morning she went to the post-box a few hundred yards down the lane. It was a lovely day and, for once, she allowed herself to think about him: not about Sally’s husband, but about the Bill she knew. By the time she reached the house again, she was almost desperate with longing for him and, as she passed his garden work-room, she remembered that at least there was a way she could hear his voice. His tapes must be there somewhere, because he had said before he left that some of the dictation had already been typed and he would be taking the manuscript with him to America. She looked on his shelves, then went through the desk drawers, but there were no cassettes and eventually she decided that he had probably taken them with him to re-use. But simply being in his room gave her comfort and she wandered about it, touching the things he had touched, remembering how he had looked.

  And then, as she sat at his typewriter and slid her fingers over the keys, she noticed a sheet of paper almost hidden under the thick felt cushion on which the machine stood. She pulled it out. It was a creased sheet of the A4 bank paper he used for his first drafts, and there was typing on it. Her eyes moved down the page and she began to tremble uncontrollably. She was reading her dream.

  “The tapping at the window ... the man’s face with blood pouring from a wound ... dark holes for eyes ... the wife screams, because she sees the cat ...”

  The notes became even scrappier: “The story is about a woman who has a car crash and kills ... not kills: someone is killed. Not her fault. She filled with guilt ... has dreams. An easy victim. Her husband having it off with another woman ... Husband and other woman decide to drive wife insane. Why ... ?” There was a scratching out here as though he had had an idea and then dropped it. “No ... better still: they hope she will push herself over the edge. Kill herself. Is this believable? Don’t know. There was a case like this which Spilsbury handled ... look it up. Husband and mistress ...”

  The stream of consciousness ended abruptly. There was a series of blank lines, then at the bottom of the page he had scribbled: “Setting: Californian coast around San Simeon and Carmel.”

  That was all. As she stared at the paper, the words blurred: this was her story. She was the wife and the reference was to her accident. But what was the talk of another woman and attempts to drive ‘the wife’ insane? Oh, God, she thought, Bill and Sally. Her mind flew back to the days when she had been in hospital: he could have been seeing Sally then. They could have arranged to meet in America. And were planning to drive her, the unwanted second wife, to the point of insanity, so they could be together again.

  At this point, something seemed to explode in her mind and commonsense burst through her horror. You stupid bitch! she heard herself saying into the silence of the little room. People don’t do such things! This is a page of notes for Bill’s new book. Then she thought: but how had he known about the dream? She was sure she had not told him about it when she got home. And she had not told him in hospital. Or had she? Think. She tried to recreate the environment. The small hospital room took shape in her mind: the window, the chair, the bed. Someone was in the bed — herself — and someone was sitting in the chair: Bill. She was coming out of the anaesthetic. She was talking, mumbling. She was crying. Why? Because of the dream. It had first come to her when she was under the anaesthetic. She remembered now. She had dreamed of the cat, of the face at the window. That’s why she had been crying. She had been frightened. And she had woken to find Bill beside her. The relief had been tremendous. He had comforted her, and she had told him about the dream.

  So he had used it as an idea for the novel. But that still left the lovers to explain. She remembered that he had refused to tell her the plot, using the excuse that he wanted her to read the finished manuscript.

  Clutching the piece of paper, she went back into the house. Penny was upstairs with Sophie. She could hear the baby gurgling, and Penny’s giggle.

  In the sitting-room, she lit a cigarette and, as she had done after the accident, she began, deliberately, to go over everything that had happened since she arrived home. It was as though the shock of her discovery had cleared away a mist in which she seemed to have been moving during the past weeks.

  Put it together, she told herself. Recognise that something has been happening here that can be explained. You are a rational woman, and yet you live in constant fear. Think it out ...

  She had come home from hospital and Bill, almost immediately had left for California. Then she had learned about Sally, the first wife of whom he never spoke but who had, according to Celia, been very much in love with him. He had not even mentioned the child they had had. Why? And Sally was said to be in America.

  The cat: Was it her own guilt after the accident that made her exaggerate the part the cat
was playing? But it had attacked her in the cellar, and it had been watching her through the window. It had scratched Sophie ...

  Leave that for a moment. The mere thought of the black, triangular face and the brilliant eyes made her shudder.

  There had been the words added to her ‘welcome home’, the smashed cherub, the mysterious telephone calls. The pillow over Sophie’s face.

  It was at that moment that she became convinced that she was being deliberately terrorised, not only by the cat — it became suddenly less important — but by a human enemy as well. But who? And why?

  Her mind, trained as Bill’s was to the development of ideas, began to race: What if, in seeking a plot for his novel, he had given her the clue. Its inspiration had been her accident. A woman and a man are in a car. They crash and the man is killed. But instead of Bill’s thesis, suppose the dead man’s wife thinks he has been having an affair with the woman who drove the car, and she wants revenge. Revenge was a common enough motive. Prisons all over the world were filled with people who had taken revenge on their mothers, on their fathers, their sisters, brothers, on society. She could imagine such a dark emotion flourishing in Lexton, for it was part of the tradition of the Great Forest, of the ancient tribe of the West Saxons. She had attributed the revenge motive to the cat, but suppose a human being also sought revenge on her?

  The memory of Sophie’s face covered by the pillow returned to her. She felt the surface of her skin crawl as she began to rewind the tape of her mind to that day. It had been the morning after the first abortive attempt to kill the cat. She had seen the animal in the snow. Alec had fired and hit nothing. Then he had gone to bed and she had gone to bed, though not to sleep. She had taken him home in the morning, had fetched Penny and then felt so tired she had lain down and fallen asleep almost immediately. She had wakened sweating and shaking from dreams which eluded the memory. She remembered the blocks of orange sunshine on the bedroom carpet. She had gone into Sophie’s room and seen the empty cot. The legacy of the dreams had made her terrified that something had happened. She had shouted for Penny. She remembered her relief when Penny told her she had put Sophie outside because it was such a lovely day. But relief had turned to horror as she found her baby more dead than alive.

  Stop.

  She stopped the memory tape, for this was where detail was vital and she needed Penny.

  She ran upstairs. Penny was sitting cross-legged on the carpet, tickling Sophie, whose legs and arms were waving like flowers in a high wind.

  “Penny, can you remember the morning when Sophie had her ... her accident?” Rachel said.

  The picture was clear in her mind: Sophie had been lying on her back, her arms tucked in, the blankets tucked tightly under the mattress. It was the blankets that had held her immobile so she had been unable to fight off the smothering pillow.

  “Of course I can, Mrs. Chater.”

  “Something has occurred to me. Tell me again exactly what happened.”

  “Well, you was asleep and Sophie started to cry,” Penny said. “Not for devilment, but for company, like. So I changed her and brought her down and I played with her in the kitchen for a little while, but I had my work. So seeing as it was such a lovely day I took her outside and put her in her pram and gave her a rusk — ”

  “Stop there,” Rachel said. “You gave her a rusk?”

  The anxious look came over Penny’s large, doughy face again. “Yes ...”

  “It’s all right. I don’t mind. They’re good for her teeth. What I’m getting at is, you didn’t tuck her in, did you?”

  Penny looked puzzled. “I couldn’t tuck her in with a rusk in her hands,” she said finally.

  There it was, Rachel thought, the indisputable fact. Sophie could not have eaten a rusk if her arms were tucked under the blankets and she could not have tucked herself in because she was a tiny baby, and if Penny hadn’t tucked her in and Rachel hadn’t tucked her in ...

  ... heard you call from the stairs,” Penny was saying, continuing her account because Rachel had not told her to stop. “And I remember thinking: funny. I thought I’d heard you go out. I thought I heard the car.”

  “And then I went out and found Sophie.”

  Her thoughts were chaotic but they always returned to the same point: Who had tucked Sophie in and then placed a pillow over her face?

  It could not have been Penny. She loved the child. Or was there some dark aspect of her mind that Rachel had not fathomed. Or Alec? He might have come back and strolled around the house. He might have seen Sophie in her pram and thought she was cold. He might, in all innocence, have tucked her in, but would be put a pillow over her face?

  The more she thought, the more she realised that there was only one person with a rational motive for doing such a thing, one person who might want to take revenge on Rachel herself: Mrs. Leech.

  Without giving this new idea more than a few moments’ thought she called to Penny that she was going out and drove furiously through the lanes to the Leech cottage. She banged on the door and it was opened by the little girl she had seen before. She held a broken doll and her face needed a wash.

  “Mum!” she shouted. “Mum, it’s that lady!”

  Rachel pushed past her and went into the kitchen. Mrs. Leech turned away from the stove, where she was heating a tin of spaghetti.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “I got nothing to say to you.”

  “I have a lot to say to you and I can’t say it in front of your daughter.”

  The room was in the same filthy condition. The damp above the sink was worse and there was a smell of urine that Rachel had not noticed before. Mrs. Leech hesitated, then said, “Go and read your comic.”

  “Don’t want to.”

  “You hear me?”

  “Don’t want to!”

  “I’ll give you such a smack if you don’t do what I say!”

  The child’s eyes began to fill with tears. Normally Rachel would have been touched, but now she stood stiffly, waiting. The little girl ran out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

  “Well?” her mother said.

  “You tried to kill my baby!”

  Mrs. Leech was taken aback as much by the statement as the force with which it was said. Rachel came forward a pace or two and Mrs. Leech seemed to think she might be physically attacked, for she retreated until her back was almost against the stove.

  “You’re mad!” she said.

  “You came to my house and you took a pillow and you put it over my baby’s face. You tried to smother her.”

  “You’re round the twist! I never done nothing like that. I never heard such rubbish in my life. You get out of my house before I call the police.”

  She started for the kitchen door but Rachel grabbed her wrist. “If you go to the police I’ll tell them that you came to my house and that you tried to smother my child. I’ll tell them I saw you! I’ll tell them I was looking out of a window and I saw you!”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  “I’ll tell them that you did it because you were taking revenge on me for what happened to your husband.”

  Mrs. Leech jerked her hand away and gathered her courage. “They’d never believe it!”

  “Why wouldn’t they? You believe I was having an affair with your husband. Why wouldn’t they believe it?”

  The woman blinked and moved away, putting the kitchen table between them. “I don’t know what you’re on about. I don’t know what you want, but I swear to you I ain’t never been near your house except just that twice. I never even seen your baby!”

  “So you have been to my house!”

  The spirit seemed to drain out of her. It was a physical as well as a mental collapse. Her body shrank. She slumped into a chair, put her elbows on the table and held her head in her hands.

  “I know it was bad,” she said. “And I was sorry afterwards. As true as God, I was sorry. I never done nothing like t
hat before. But Charlie ... he meant everything to me. He was my life. We knew each other since we were five years old. We were always going to get married. We had pretend weddings when we were kids. He never looked at another girl, I never looked at another boy, all the way through school. We was married young. Charlie was eighteen and me just turned sixteen. And then ...” She paused and when she spoke again Rachel heard total misery in her voice. “And then I started having kids and it was difficult for Charlie to ... well, you know ... so he started having other women.” She looked up. “Like you.”

  “Go on.”

  “It was when you was coming back from the hospital. I seen that sign up on the gate. I dunno why I did it, something just come over me. You was alive and there was your husband and your house and Charlie was dead and me left with the kids and everything. And so ...”

  “So you wrote, ‘you bitch’ under it.”

  She nodded. “I thought you’d just think it was kids.”

  “You said you came twice.”

  “It was a day or two after that. I was going past your gate again and I saw the little statue and I thought you bloody bitch, and I pushed it over and its head came off and, I dunno why, but I picked up the head and I carried it a little way up the lane and threw it in the ditch. And that’s all. That’s all I ever done to you. I’m sorry for it, but I couldn’t help myself.”

  Rachel stared down at her. There was a ring of truth in what she had said. “You swear to me that you never came to my house again?”

  “I swear I’ve never been near your house except that twice.”

  Rachel hesitated. “All right,” she said finally. “I guess that may be the truth. So is this: I never had an affair with your husband. I never wanted to have an affair with him.” For a brief second her mind visualised the scene in the kitchen, Charlie’s hands under her arms, cupping her breasts. “He never touched me,” she said. “And I never wanted him to.” She turned on her heel and left the cottage.