“Oh, no.” Shiela’s eyes widened. “Tom, work tomorrow night.”
“Well, I don’t know.” He did, but liked to be persuaded.
“Go on, Tom, keep Shiela company.”
“All right, pussycat, I’ll stay with you,” he said, not minding Tina’s knowing grin.
The moon grinned down mysteriously. Lying in the stripe of moonlight painted on his bed, Tom closed his eyes; behind his eyeballs all was white, as if before a vision. He thought of Thursday night. Then he frowned. Why had Tina been unable to work? He could not recall that she had previously said so. He sorted through the last few days, and, as he drowsed, a pattern seemed to form. Was Tina giving him a chance to ask Shiela out? Could Shiela have herself arranged for him to be alone with her? He had never considered that she might want to go out with him. But as he searched — the way she let him touch her, the way she laughed off Tina’s suggestions of a relationship between them, the perfume she wore to the office (surely only for him, for Tina, married, wore none when at work) — each incident yielded evidence. Tomorrow night. He must not let this opportunity pass. They would be alone, and he would ask her casually to meet him Friday night. He slept. The moon still grinned.
The morning chilled him. Last night’s resolution seemed as distant as the sun behind the fog, visible when he squinted as a white-hot sixpence dulled by grey breaths. But at work, snug with Shiela while the fumes receded deceptively outside the window, he began to anticipate the evening. There was no call for Shiela, nor did she touch the phone; this seemed a favourable sign. The day drew on; the fog crept back, unnoticed. It was almost five o’clock. “Make some coffee, Tom,” called Shiela, “to keep us awake.”
“See you in the morning, children,” said Tina, bundled up inside her coat, as she returned to collect her handbag. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” She winked at them, then frowned at Mr Tubb, and left.
“Want a sandwich, Shiela?”
“No thanks, got my own.”
“Come here a minute.” He pulled her down toward him. Surprised, she resisted briefly. “What about old Peeping Tom there,” he hissed, “when’s he going?”
Shiela glanced at Mr Tubb, now caressing his nostrils with a handkerchief. “I thought you knew,” she whispered back. “He’s not. He’ll be on till eight o’clock like us.”
“What? But you said you’d — you said you’d be alone…”
“Well, I would be if I was alone with him! He’s looking, I’d better get back.” And she abandoned Tom to his thoughts. At first he felt tricked, and hated Shiela; he began to curse her under his breath as his nails scraped on the mesh of the stocking. Then Mr Tubb coughed, recalling Tom; it wasn’t Shiela’s fault, she’d wanted to be with him, it was that swine Tubb’s for staying. Surely he would leave the two of them together before eight o’clock. Tom settled down to wait.
He looked up. It was five to seven. Shiela’s head was bent upon her writing; Mr Tubb had disappeared. Tom watched Shiela’s long blonde hair, brushed back, shining; out of the corner of his eye he sensed the lurking fog. Now was the time to ask. He would have to speak her name; would he be able to bring out the invitation when she looked up? Unsureness gagged him. But if he did not speak she might glance up and destroy the moment. “Shiela,” he called; he tried to catch it, but too late. She met his gaze. He struggled. “I was wondering if you’d — ”
“Spare me a minute, Shiela, will you?” Mr Tubb rose from behind his desk, returned triumphant from a search for his Vick inhaler.
“Hang on, Tom.” Tom’s expression did not change as he watched her cross to Mr Tubb, but out of sight his nails ground into his palms. He glared blindly at his desk. “All right, just as soon as I’ve finished what I’m doing,” Shiela said. Then Mr Tubb called after her: “Oh — if you’re making coffee, would you get me a cup?”
My God, no, it’s too ludicrous, thought Tom. “What were you saying?” Shiela asked, taking his cup.
The opportunity was past. “I forget,” he said.
The first gulp of coffee burned his throat; he gritted his teeth and enjoyed the pain. Then he began to work obsessively, unable to dull his awareness of Shiela as she rustled papers, picked up her drink and after a dainty sip set it down with a clunk, dropped her pen and retrieved it, tripped away to the washroom — When she returned Tom reached for his coffee, found it stagnant, and was able to look up at her. Behind her Mr Tubb was struggling into his overcoat. As he passed them he croaked: “Now, don’t get into mischief.” This effort proved too much; coughing, he exited beneath the clock, which showed a quarter to eight. The door caught his cough and muffled it.
“Well, if he’s going, I’m off,” Shiela said. With a lurch of the heart Tom realized that a quarter of an hour was left to him, which he must grasp. Shiela was stretching and yawning preparatory to getting up. Tom wrenched out the pin from which the stocking dangled and moved behind her, the nylon taut between his hands. “Are you going to strangle me, Tom?” she asked. He held the top of the stocking and fitted it over her forehead.
“Don’t, Tom, you’ll mess my hair.”
“Come on, put your nightcap on.”
“No, you wear it.” She stood up, pushing him back, removed the stocking and lifted it over his head. Her arms were high, delicious with perfume; for a second her breasts touched him. His hands hung loosely at his sides. She pulled the stocking down over his eyes.
“You think I’m going to commit a crime or something?” The nylon cramped the bridge of his nose, but he could not take off the stocking; it was Shiela’s, she had put it there. Instead, he began to draw it over his face.
“Now you can go out and frighten someone.”
“Maybe I will.” As she made for the cloakroom she glanced back to see him standing undirected, fingering the edge of the stocking.
She lifted her coat from the hook; her fingers brushed the cloth of Tom’s. She waited to hear his footsteps approaching, but there was only silence. She was a little disappointed, for she had had the impression at least twice tonight that Tom was about to kiss her. In fact, just before she had tried to make it easy for him; she felt rather sorry for Tom — she was sure he had no girlfriend — and if he wanted to kiss her, she would let him now and then, while making it clear that she could not go out with him. As a matter of fact, she was rather excited by the idea of such a secret relationship; she and Tom would be secretly united against Tina’s morning reports. Where was Tom? Perhaps she could take his arm as they left. She returned to the office; it was empty. She peeked under the desk; Tom might be planning to leap out at her. But he was nowhere to be found. Well, she could play games too; she turned off the light. He would scarcely have gone home without his coat.
But she reached the street without finding Tom. Momentarily, as she imagined him standing silently beyond the edge of the lurid fog beneath the sodium, she shivered. Then the blurred hands of a clock which hung above the alley across the street caught her eye; it was eight o’clock. If she hurried she could catch the early bus. She ran across the road, no car engines threatening the fog, and into the alley.
Her heels clipped on the cobbles. The fog edged in front of her, darkening, drawing back along the walls, passing over drainpipes climbed by rusty barbed wire like vines; then something loomed behind it, blocking at least half the alleyway. Shiela stopped but almost falling, was carried forward, and the shape resolved into a door and the figure which held it wide open; a figure with a crushed face.
“Tom, what are you doing?”
Without speaking, he indicated the open doorway. The stocking, now pulled down to his chin, dragged his features out of shape. Shiela told herself that Tom was still there beneath the mask. Why should she hesitate? What could there be beyond the door to harm her? The mouth moved; the lower section of the nylon billowed out.
“Don’t be frightened,” he said, “Shiela.”
She stepped forward to the doorway; the fog peered over her shoulder. In the dimness she made o
ut the beginnings of what appeared to be an abandoned storage room, shattered beer-barrels, broken bottles, misshapen lengths of wood and metal against the wall. She entered a few paces, and the door closed behind her.
She froze; her sense of direction had deserted her, and she no longer knew where she might step without falling on glass. Then she heard movement behind her, approaching. “Where are you?” asked Tom.
“I’m here, Tom.” Her voice was in front of him. He advanced one foot; it kicked a piece of glass, which tinkled in the silence. If only there were some light! He searched for his matches, then remembered that they were in his overcoat pocket. He lifted his hands and shuffled forward. Her perfume reached him, almost suffocated by a stench of stale alcohol which had been shut in with them. Then his hands found her body.
“No!” Shiela screamed, her lips pressed tight in horror. This was not what she had meant. She tried to wrench his hands away, but he was already pulling her toward him. She forced her hands up between his arms and reached his face. She expected to encounter the stocking, but he had rolled it up to his forehead. Before she knew what she was doing, she had raked his face.
Pain seared his cheeks like trickles of acid. He backed away toward the wall, and tripped.
Shiela heard something fall, and a crack of glass. She whirled, but no glimmer of light outlined the door. She bit her lip. “Tom, let me out,” she called desperately, “or I’ll scream.” A piece of wood clattered, and again glass cracked.
His silence terrified her; she thought she could hear him breathing painfully. Suddenly it occurred to her that he might be injured. “Tom, I’m sorry,” she said. Still there came no answer; another plank fell to the floor, and she thought she could glimpse a shape rising to its feet. A final intuition came to her. “Come on, Tom, I won’t tell anyone,” she called. The movement stopped; so did the breathing. At last feet shuffled toward her, and she heard a tight brushing followed by an elastic snap, as of a garment being pulled off; it was the stocking.
THE SECOND STAIRCASE
DELTAFILMS INTERVIEW MEET EUSTON 9.00 — But never having met Mike Parry, Carol bobbed above the crowd and thrust through trajectories as the clock edged on to 9.15, finding Mike finally beneath the clock, hopefully holding aloft as identification a copy of Castle of Frankenstein. Mike smiled recognition, then his mouth drooped as the minute hand turned downward.
“I’m awfully sorry, Carol,” he said. “Their front office phoned me last night; the interview’s off. They’ll be shooting exteriors all day. Schedules strike again.”
“But I brought my camera and everything,” Carol protested, “and I paid for the train and took the day off as soon as I got your telegram!”
“I know, but it isn’t my fault after all. When you’re doing interviews for Castle of Frankenstein I suppose you have to expect this sort of thing. What do you want to do now? Will you catch the midnight train?”
“I don’t have to go back till tomorrow, so I’m certainly not going to. But I haven’t got a hotel.” Carol waited for Mike to offer a room.
“Then we’d better find you one. Listen, Richard Davis has set up a special showing of his horror film tomorrow night if you’re interested. George Harrison and Ravi Shankar should be there, and John Campbell may be coming.”
“I’ve got to go back tomorrow!” Carol complained shrilly, thinking of the supervisor at the duplicating firm, shuddering.
“All right, then, we’ll find you a hotel, and then I suggest a movie.”
At Lancaster Gate the grinding lift deposited them before a scanty bus-stop queue, its indifferent curiosity unwelcoming as the drained November light. Mike led Carol past towering girders which sketched some future hotel, into streets of hotels and boarding-houses staked out by bare black trees. In the Underground, among commuters suspended from the ceiling, reading swaying newspapers, Carol had been surprised how easy it was to talk to Mike, to flatten the flickering screen into words; while their correspondence, initiated by Carol on seeing Mike’s name signed to a magazine article, had been friendly, Carol had known too many conversations in which the other had soon withdrawn on some pretext. Mike must have been unable to offer a room. She liked Mike.
“Good Lord, where’ve you left your suitcase?” Mike halted by a lone parked Mini marbled by frost.
“I haven’t brought one. I don’t need it for one night.” Carol slept naked: a proof of virility, he told himself.
“Hmm, some hotels don’t like that. That’s if we can find one.” Glass doors, pillared porches: “Hotel Full”. Hostile stations abruptly interrupted by a side street, its corner marked by one Fiat whose owner fought its engine behind the windows, steamy as a bathroom with his breath. “Any port,” Mike suggested, indicating a protruding plastic sign halfway down the Victorian line: HOTEL DOCHERTY — Bed and Breakfast.
“I hope it isn’t squalid,” Carol commented, following.
“Vacancies”! Mike rang the bell and peered into the pastel vista fragmented by the frosted glass. “A horror film, of course,” said Carol, leafing through What’s On in London.
“I thought the Bergman at the Academy — never mind, I can see that next week.”
“Here’s a good one — behind the Charing Cross Road, it says. Oh, I’d love to-see this — ”
A blonde in a short blue dress and white apron let them into the dull-red carpeted hall. “A single room for one night?” Mike enquired, turning to Carol for confirmation.
“One moment please, I will go for the manager,” she said, faintly Swedish.
“I’d love to see this — House of Dr Jekyll, sounds great.”
Mike turned from the visitors’ book, which was overshadowed by a vase of dusty plastic flowers. “Sounds vintage,” he agreed — or was it irony? Carol wasn’t sure. About to argue, Carol heard voices descending the stairs at the end of the hall; two women beneath a stained-glass window robbed of brilliance, arm in arm as they aided each other: a statement, an audible breath, a step down. “In the river,” one wheezed, her voice faltering with her foot in space like a senile soundtrack. Mike glanced up, then returned to the vase; Carol watched and listened. “She fell into bad company, I’ll wager. That’s the trouble with servants. And of course you don’t need me to tell you what happened next.” A tinny hymn rose from a radio beyond the door through which the girl and manager were conferring hurriedly. The women wavered on the gulf’s edge two steps up. “What do they expect, letting foreigners in?” The women rested panting in the hall, then sidled suspiciously past Carol into and out of a passage at right angles to the hall, leading to what must be its twin. “She couldn’t even speak English. The manager’s wife, if that’s what she is and I have my doubts, had to tell her what to cook in French! Isn’t that wasteful planning?”
“And that sort of girl, if a man got hold of her…The women drew closer together and fumbled the front door closed behind them.
“If he doesn’t mind, he can take 3,” the manager said and emerged to confront Carol. He was stout, ringed with fat; bloodshot eyes in a face red under sweat. The Swedish girl watched from the doorway. The manager glanced back at her, inflating his rings, and smirking, winked at Carol, the secret sign of the lechers” confraternity. Carol stared at him; he sympathized with the girl, felt she was degraded by the manager’s allusion. Men always degraded women; Carol wouldn’t if one ever came to him. Rebuffed, the manager told her: “You’ll not be moving into B until Mrs Docherty fits it out for you. She’s here replacing our French maid,” he persisted to Carol, and boisterously continued: “Nasty business, that!” Mike frowned at Carol; Carol waited.
“Can you wait a bit at all? I can give you 3, but it isn’t ready yet. An hour or so?” In the unseen office, a clock chimed ten and an announcer declared that it was five to ten. “No, that’s fine,” said Carol. Thirty shillings — well, the room should be acceptable, judging from the hall, and the Swedish maid was sweet. He scribbled his signature at the foot of the column of dehumanized names and excha
nged the notes for keys, keeping aloof from the moist red hand. “I’ll find the room tonight,” he said. “Top of the stairs,” explained the manager. “Top o’ the mornin’ to you gentlemen.” “God, I hate men like that,” said Carol in the street.
“I don’t hate anybody,” said Mike.
Mike couldn’t place the cinema. After a meal at the Wimpy they crossed Leicester Square; the Odeon collapsed with a crash beneath cranes. “Must be up here,” said Mike, indicating a street behind the hasty crowd, raindrops jewelling their shoulders. “You sure you wouldn’t like to see something more tasteful? What’s on with it?”
“Les Parapluies de Cherbourg,” Carol read phonetically. “Now that is beautiful. I’m with you for that.”
Squeezing between piled barrows, books toppling from one, apples rolling from another, they ignored the beckoning figures beneath Sex Films signs, passed a Turkish restaurant and turned up an alley. “Sex films,” Carol said. “Isn’t it degrading?” “How much more so than House of Dr Jekyll?” Mike retorted, pointing at the half-naked girl in the monster’s arms, the hunchback with the whip, the doctor fondling a skull.
The screen was grey and stained; at its side plaster cupids craned their necks to peer within the boxes of the converted theatre. The girl who had taken their tickets now donned an ice-cream tray and faced the auditorium. As Carol stared round at the seats — an old man snoring six rows behind, a scarved student reading Cahiers du Cinema — the faces dimmed and were extinguished. The ice-cream girl idled up the aisle. “Go away and let us concentrate,” hissed Carol.
“There’s no — people — left up at the castle,” the hero was told by a Transylvanian coachman from Brooklyn. Carol put his feet up; someone snored; someone splintered an ice-cream carton. A hunchbacked retainer hobbled down the hall, avoiding the plywood walls. “Who is the beautiful girl who stared from the window as I entered?” asked the hero. “’Tis my daughter and you’d best not forget it,” croaked the hunchback. Carol hated him; he hoped the monster would give him what he deserved. Cripples offended him: like the supervisor at the duplicating firm — stamping up the office, pretending to help Carol with his work, putting one arm around his shoulders, ruffling his hair — the sissy swine; Carol thought of him in bed, and shuddered back to the screen. The hunchback was beating his daughter; thunder rolled like bowls. “Leave the girl alone!” shouted the hero, snatching the whip, laying it across the hump; Carol rubbed his hands in glee. Someone felt his way along the shaking row of seats and plumped down in front of Carol. “A whole empty cinema — ” Carol complained and waited while Mike moved. He stood his camera between his feet and saw Dr Jekyll stride forth from a secret panel. “Fool!” he snarled to the hunchback. “You and your daughter will ruin my experiment! Get the girl, Karl — ” and the coachman carried her struggling against a sheet of lightning. “As for you, sir, perhaps you may have the privilege of donating your brain for my experiment — ” and the hunchback struck the hero from behind.
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