Cat's Eyes

by Alan Scholefield

  “I’ll make tea,” Penny said urgently.

  “All right, love,” her mother said. “Make it good and strong.”

  She and Rachel chatted comfortably as though they had been friends for a long time. She gave a feeling of relaxation to the place and Rachel felt herself responding. Now she had met Mrs. Mason, her affair with Alec — if, indeed, the story was true — did not seem so squalid. His wife had been ill for years. It was not unnatural that he should turn to this warm, generous woman for comfort.

  “I’m lucky to have Penny,” she said.

  “She loves being with you, Mrs. Chater. Sometimes I used to worry about her. She’s a good girl but ... you know ... not too bright. Being with you has made all the difference to her. She really loves Sophie.”

  14

  Rachel drove home slowly. She had purposely left all the lights on so she would not go back to a dark and gloomy house. It was lonely, but there was a compensating factor: she no longer felt quite so vulnerable. If anything happened to Sophie it would be far worse than anything that could happen to herself.

  The telephone rang at nine o’clock. She walked deliberately into the study, picked it up then, without listening, set it back on its stand, breaking the connection. After a moment, she took it off the hook and left it lying on the desk. Then she made sure the house was locked, went up to her bedroom, took two sleeping-tablets and passed out with her light still on.

  She awoke slightly muzzy but with every muscle of her body relaxed and flaccid. She felt rested for the first time in weeks. The day stretched out before her. There were things she could be doing but she had four days in which to do them.

  She had a leisurely bath and went into the empty kitchen for a cup of coffee. Curiously, she found she was no longer frightened of the house. Even in broad daylight its dark corners had made her uneasy but, knowing that she would be escaping in a few days, she found herself looking around it almost with affection. She and Bill had been happy here. But now she had to anticipate confronting him in the company of his first wife, and if she did so, her own life with him, in this or any other house, would end. She felt tears rise as her mind’s eye saw him, suddenly, smiling down at her the way he had the day he had brought her home from hospital. She remembered how eagerly she had limped up the steps towards the open door, where Nurse Griffin stood ...

  Nurse Griffin!

  Her heart lurched as she remembered the woman’s unsmiling eyes and tight mouth. She had never thought of Nurse Griffin! She had not bothered to hide her dislike of Rachel. She had shown no obvious affection for Sophie. She had left suddenly, in anger. Could she ... ?

  Quickly, Rachel reviewed what she knew of the nurse, and realised it was nothing more than that she had retired and lived in Chichester. She was a spinster in late middle-age. Strange things sometimes happened in the minds of such women. Mrs. Leech had talked about her resentment of Rachel’s comfortable, protected life. Could Nurse Griffin, too, have resented it, and allowed her resentment to build up into such hatred that she would do anything to destroy the Chaters? If it was her, it would not alter the problem of Bill and Sally, but at least some of the happenings of the past weeks would be explained.

  She went to the pile of telephone books on a shelf beside Bill’s desk and pulled out a grey-green one which included Chichester. She ran her finger down the columns and there it was: Griffin, E.A., S.R.N., and a Chichester address.

  *

  It was a small bungalow on the far side of Chichester. The tiny garden was painfully neat and a few roses still struggled against the winter cold. Rachel rang the bell but did not hear any peal inside the house. She waited a few moments and pressed it again. No one answered.

  A cinder path led around the house between the wintry rose-beds and she made her way to the back. Curtains were drawn on one of the windows and she thought she could see a chink of light between them. She went on past a small garden hut and a tiny vegetable patch where long-stemmed Brussels sprouts drooped in the cold.

  She walked completely round the house and came back to the front door, where she stood uncertainly for a moment. She had steeled herself to come, had whipped up her courage on a froth of anger; and now there was no one to confront. Her anger was very near the surface and it burst out in a spurt as she thought of what Nurse Griffin might have been doing to her. Then, remembering the drawn curtains at one of the back windows, she banged with her hand on the glass panels of the door.

  It could not have been quite closed, for it swung slowly open.

  Dusk was already falling and the inside of the house was in semi-darkness, except for a light at the end of the short passage. She wondered if the woman was there, ignoring her. Perhaps she had seen her from a window and decided not to answer the door, hoping Rachel would go away. Or was she ill? In bed?

  Rachel looked about, but there seemed to be no one in the street, and the windows of the houses directly opposite were already curtained against the swiftly-falling evening. She moved into the house.

  “Nurse Griffin!” she called.

  There was no answer.

  Immediately to her right was the sitting-room. She switched on the light. She was not an intruder, she told herself, she wanted everyone to know she was there. An anthracite fire burned against the far wall. The room, in shades of brown against dead-white walls, with a dark, claret-coloured carpet, was clinically tidy and impersonal. There was a lack of human warmth about it. The three-piece suite had wooden arms and looked uncomfortable. On a low table was a copy of the magazine New Society. The room told her nothing at all.

  She went on down the passage. To the left was the kitchen, facing her a bathroom, and to the right of that a bedroom. She stopped in the doorway. It was the room she had seen from the outside. The curtains were drawn and the light by the bed was on. It seemed that Nurse Griffin had saved all her femininity and any frivolity that may have been in her character for this room.

  Unlike the bare and impersonal living-room, it was decorated in girlish pinks and white; it was frilly and fluffy and seemed to bear no relationship to the grim, grey woman Rachel remembered.

  On the satin counterpane was a toy giraffe, the kind that children unzip and stuff with their night-clothes. From the ceiling hung a large mobile of Babar the Elephant. There was a chest of drawers and a wardrobe and a small, white-painted desk. It was the sort of room a child would have loved.

  “Nurse Griffin!” Rachel said again, loudly, but the only answer was silence.

  On top of the chest of drawers was a collection of small china animals that reminded her of the stage set for The Glass Menagerie.

  Unlike the living-room, the bedroom was not neat. A blouse was lying on the bed and a pair of house-shoes had been kicked off on the carpet. Against one wall there was a pile of old magazines. She looked through the top copies. They were all called Babycare. On the desk lay a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches.

  She had a sense of schizophrenia: if the Nurse Griffin she knew inhabited the living-room, who lived in this pink and white nursery? Who lay in bed smoking and reading about babies and playing with little china animals?

  She felt suddenly chilled. What else would this room tell her about Nurse Griffin? She opened the desk drawers but they contained only old bills and receipts, paper clips and rubber bands. The wardrobe, too, was just a wardrobe with dresses and skirts hanging in it. It was the chest of drawers that finally answered her questions.

  The top drawers contained practical underwear, long warm night-dresses, thick stockings and several starched white coats. She opened the bottom drawer and it was neatly filled with jerseys and cardigans. She was about to close it when she saw underneath the jerseys a large cardboard box. She moved the clothes aside, pulled up a corner of the lid and found herself looking at a pair of tiny, white, crocheted baby bootees.

  Her hands were shaking as she pulled the box out onto the floor and opened it. It was filled with baby things: there were more bootees, there were tiny, lacy
nighties, there were little frocks with broderie anglaise on the front, there was a squashy teddy-bear. Her fingers darted in and out of the beautiful, laundered clothing.

  And then they touched an envelope. She took it out and drew from it a series of old and yellowing newspaper cuttings. Her body went rigid as she read the headlines: BABY SNATCHED IN PARKING LOT. And again: NO CLUE IN BABY SNATCH. POLICE CHIEF WARNS OF PSYCHOPATH. And again: SNATCHED BABY FOUND DEAD. And another: BABY-SNATCH MOTHER ATTEMPTS SUICIDE.

  There were others, but as Rachel crouched to read them, she felt a draught on her legs, and turned. Nurse Griffin was standing behind her.

  From Rachel’s viewpoint, she looked huge. She was dressed for walking, in tweeds and heavy shoes, and carried a stick in her hand. Her short grey hair was shaped round her face like a Crusader’s helm. They stared at each other for a second and then she took a step into the room.

  “What are you doing here?” she said slowly.

  Rachel rose to her feet, still clutching the newspaper clippings. She knew she had to get to the police. She was frightened, but she depended on her anger to keep her from falling apart. Remember what she did, she told herself.

  “Well?”

  She could not stop herself. “You tried to kill my baby!” she said.

  “What!”

  “Don’t try to lie! You’re insane! It says so here!” She shook the cuttings in Nurse Griffin’s face and some of them fell to the floor. “You did it once before. You stole someone’s baby. You killed it!”

  For the first time the woman seemed to see the scattered baby clothes. She dropped her stick and knelt down. “How dare you!” she hissed. “How dare you touch those things!” She began to pick up the clothes and the cuttings, folding them as neatly as they had been before.

  Unchecked, Rachel moved past her towards the door. But there was something in the way the older woman was behaving that made her hesitate. Nurse Griffin put the cuttings back in their envelope and tucked it under the baby clothes, closed the lid of the box and replaced it where it had been. When she looked up Rachel could see that tears had squeezed under her thick, pebble glasses and were running down her cheeks.

  In a voice no louder than a whisper, she said: “It was my baby.”

  *

  Rachel drove towards Addiscombe, sickened by the tragedy her suspicions of Nurse Griffin had uncovered. She had, stumblingly, tried to explain her actions, but the woman had simply stared at her, wet-faced, saying nothing, and after a few moments she had turned towards the door. As she went along the passage, Nurse Griffin had spoken, almost as though she was picking up an interrupted conversation: “I thought I was over it, you see, after all these years. But I wasn’t. Your baby was the same age as she was when ... So I left, because I couldn’t bear it any longer.” Then she had gone back into the nursery-bedroom, and closed the door behind her.

  In Addiscombe Rachel stopped at the Masons. The entire family was in the sitting-room. The television was on and they were loudly playing cards. In the centre of the floor, chewing a rusk and unworried by the noise and the people, was Sophie.

  For the next hour Rachel played with her daughter, drank tea, chatted and felt normally cheerful for the first time in weeks. She was even able, for a time, to forget that she was no further ahead in her search for her persecutor.

  15

  Once again that night she unhooked the telephone and slept undisturbed. With neither Penny nor Sophie, the house the next day was huge and silent, but she kept herself occupied planning her travel wardrobe and the hours passed quickly as she sorted, washed and ironed. It was not until early afternoon that she remembered she had forgotten to replace the telephone and felt a pang of apprehension as she thought that Mrs. Mason might have been trying to ring her about Sophie. But when she called, all was well and the rich Sussex accent was instantly comforting.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table, sipping a cup of coffee, when the door-bell rang. She half-expected to see Alec, but it was a delivery boy with an envelope in his hand. He handed it to her. “Chater?” he said. “Telegram. Tried to phone it but there must be something wrong with your line. They couldn’t get through.”

  “Oh ... thank you.”

  She closed the door and turned the envelope in her hand. She had always hated telegrams. A telegram had brought her news of her father’s death. Michael had sent telegrams more than once when he had been unable to leave his wife to meet her.

  She walked slowly back to the table and tore it open. For a moment she could not believe her eyes and had to read it a second time: “Have been trying to ring you stop line constantly engaged stop am on my way home stop take care all love Bill.”

  Paralysed by the flood of pure happiness that swept over her, it was minutes before she could think clearly and begin to work out what the telegram meant.

  He was coming home. He had never meant to stay away. He had not met Sally in California. He probably did not even know she was there. As she had already suspected, the notes she had read were no more than that: notes for a novel. She, Rachel, had imagined the entire situation. Based on what? One casual remark by a woman who had been Sally’s friend, who had told her about Sally only because, as she had said, she did not want any subsequent embarrassment.

  And if that were so, Alec had been right. Every single rational explanation he had produced for what had been happening must have been correct, including the suggestion that Penny’s memory had been at fault. She had even suspected Celia! In her euphoria she could recognise the absurdity of that, for no one had been persecuting her. Her cat had been several cats. The phone calls were from some crank who had stumbled accidentally on to words to which she could relate.

  “Am on my way home.” When could she expect him? He had sent the telegram before leaving California but the time-stamp was too blurred for her to make out. He could be back any time.

  She ran upstairs, heedless of a warning pain in her knee, and began setting the bedroom to rights, dresses back in the wardrobe, underwear returned to drawers.

  She had almost finished when, once again, the door-bell rang. This time it had to be Alec and on the way downstairs she rehearsed her news. She flung open the door: “Alec! Bill’s ...” She stopped. Celia was standing there, tall and elegant in a green, suede coat with a mink scarf tucked in the neck, and high-heeled tan boots.

  “Oh ... I’m sorry! I was half-expecting Alec.” She felt a sudden constraint, but Celia was smiling.

  “Rachel, I was an absolute bitch over that business about Penny,” she said. “I’ve come to say sorry. Forgive me?”

  “Of course! And there’s really nothing to forgive,” Rachel said. “You were upset about the ring. It was all a mistake. Come in. It isn’t too early for a drink, is it?”

  “It’s not much after five. How about tea?”

  As she was taking her coat off, Rachel said: “Celia, Bill’s on his way home!”

  Celia was unwinding her scarf and it was a second before she replied. “How lovely for you. But I thought he wasn’t due for some time.”

  “So did I, but I had a telegram a couple of hours ago. He’d been trying to ring me but I’d taken the telephone off the hook because of some damn anonymous caller and he couldn’t get through.”

  “When do you expect him?”

  “Tomorrow at the latest, I hope.”

  “Then I mustn’t stay too long. You’ll be wanting to get things ready for him. Where’s Sophie?”

  “Oh ... staying with some friends in Addiscombe. We can fetch her together when he gets back.”

  “How about all your other problems — the cat? And those calls?”

  She shrugged. “The calls were from some nut. The cat? Pure imagination. I guess it was a sort of delayed shock after the car accident. As soon as I knew Bill was coming home, everything fell into perspective. Anyway, enough of that. Have you seen anything of Alec lately?”

  “Why do you ask?” Her voice was sharp and Rachel looked at her in surpri
se.

  “No special reason.”

  Uncomfortably, she remembered what she had said to Alec. Fortunately, he had not appeared to take her suspicions seriously. Looking at Celia’s calm, beautiful face, she realised anew how grotesque her fantasies had been.

  “I haven’t seen him for a while,” Celia said. “He seems to have been avoiding me for some reason.”

  “Now that’s your imagination!” Rachel said.

  Celia smiled, but she changed the subject and they chatted comfortably over their tea until she stood up to leave. It was just after six. As she reached the front door she said, casually: “So you’ve lost your fear of the cat, have you?”

  “More or less. I just hope the wretched thing is dead. Alec says it was my feelings of guilt about — about Charlie, and having injured it that made me imagine it was deliberately terrorising me.”

  “Oh, it isn’t dead,” Celia said. “I saw it on the snow near those rhododendrons of yours as I drove in. It’s a huge creature.”

  A cold finger, a residue of fear, seemed to touch Rachel’s heart.

  “Where did it go?”

  “Under the bushes. It’s clearly crippled. Funny thing, it actually seemed to be watching the house. Still, you can always get Bill to shoot it for you, can’t you? See you soon. Bye.”

  *

  The cat had passed into a state where even its highly-developed brain had difficulty functioning in any behavioural way, though the flame of instinct still flickered in its conscious mind. Its body, too, was only half-alive. Its back legs were almost paralysed and when it moved it had to pull itself on its front paws.

  It had been lying near the rhododendron bush for two days without food.

  It was a bitterly cold evening. Powder snow had fallen and a north-easterly gale was blowing, bringing in icy air from Russia. The wind had blown snow under the bush and was piling it against the cat’s body.

  The house represented something in its brain. It could not know that it was a pattern from the past, for it could not have analysed the stimuli. But the stimuli were there nevertheless: warmth, safety. They triggered off a response in its brain and it began to drag itself over the thin coating of snow towards the house. It sought entry by the front, but there was none. It turned the corner and slowly moved along the side of the house. A scent of food, coming through the cellar window, was reaching it.