Death Lives Next Door

by Gwendoline Butler

  Rachel moved restlessly in bed, snuggling deeper into the blankets, she always slept with only a tip of her nose showing, and ignoring the ringing bell. She turned over, her thoughts swinging towards Ezra in that state between waking and sleeping when fantasies are real; in such dreams Rachel had murdered her father, borne twin-headed monsters, trudged through sanded deserts dragging her feet, and wagged her head solemnly on waking, fully seeing the significance of her dreams, and at once distressed and proud to have such a dark subconscious. Now she and Ezra were swinging hand in hand from garlanded trees with apes and birds of paradise around them. Sleepily she decided that there was something funny there all right; she shuddered to think what her erstwhile subjects the Berboa tribe, who had curious notions about dreams, would have made of it.

  Next door, her neighbour, a stalwart geographer of about twenty who was still sitting over her books, reluctantly put down her pen and padded out in her slippers to the telephone. She listened, grunted and put the receiver down. “Wait a minute, I’ll get her.”

  “Hi Rachel,” she said sternly from the door. “The ’phone’s for you.” She looked at Rachel accusingly. She usually did look accusingly at Rachel; the accusation being that she did not take her opportunities: she did not make the best of her looks, her brain, or her young men. The geographer herself had no looks and knew it, but she was determined to take all her opportunities, and had already got a good degree, knew more about cod-fishing than anyone in the country, and was engaged to a young doctor who would certainly become either a Regius Professor of Medicine or else, should he decide to be worldly, extremely well off. She had even, for she had a thoroughly nice nature, fallen in love with him. So between her and Rachel there was a curious friendship, she bullied and Rachel let herself be bullied. Rachel felt the unexpressed reproach and was shy about it. She opened her eyes now, wondering what fresh sins of omission Joan (the geographer was called Joan) had discovered and wanted to remind her of. “It’s pretty late for a call,” Joan said gruffly. Then she relented. “It’s a woman.”

  Rachel looked at the clock. Twelve-thirty. Not late really by Marion’s standards. Only late by hers and the Berboa, they both kept early hours. She knew it was Marion.

  She heard Marion’s voice, at first faint and far away as though she wasn’t holding the telephone near enough, and then closer and stronger. “Please come round to me,” Marion said and her voice was urgent. “Come at once. I’m asking you instead of Ezra.”

  “But why, Marion? What’s wrong?”

  “He’s here.” Marion’s voice had a little hiccough in it. “He’s in. In the house.”

  “I’ll come, Marion. Of course I’ll come, but Marion, ring the police, too.”

  “No I can’t do that. I can’t do that.” Marion’s voice was growing far-away again. “I’ll tell you why when you come. And why I need a woman.”

  The line was dead. Rachel turned round to meet Joan’s worried eyes.

  “You heard?”

  “Yes. You can’t go out now, Rachel.” The rules of the establishment laid down that the women, whether graduates or undergraduates, should be in for the night by twelve-thirty. A night porter was provided to see that this rule was kept.

  “I shall have to bribe old Tashkent, I suppose.” The night man at the moment was an elderly white Russian known (it was not his real name) as Tashkent.

  “Tashkent is not to be bribed at the moment,” Joan reminded her. “Not since Sally Fisher …”

  “No need to compare me with Sally Fisher,” said Rachel stiffly; in spontaneous reaction to her carefree parents Rachel inclined to primness and propriety; it came natural to her to respect rules, and she would no more have broken one now than she would have gambled. Emergency, however, had spoken to her in Marion’s voice and she obeyed it.

  Tashkent had been appointed largely on the strength of his monumental, austere and handsome appearance, and the fact that he claimed to have been porter to the last British Ambassador accredited to the Czar. The fact that this would have put him well up to the eighty mark mattered not at all: Tashkent could have been eighty, he could have been a hundred. He was not so respectable as he looked, as generations of undergraduates had discovered.

  “Oh well, I shall have to climb in,” said Rachel with a sigh. “Or else stay out all night. The way Marion sounded points to the latter.”

  “I don’t know why you let that woman run you,” said Joan. “My fiancé says …” But by the set of Rachel’s lips she could tell that whatever her fiancé” had said was not going to be well received.

  Rachel cycled rapidly and nervously down Little Clarendon Street towards Marion. In spite of all her travels she was still frightened of the dark and the street was narrow and badly lit. Her bicycle hissed slightly as she sped along. She turned the corner and saw Marion standing by her gate. She slithered to a stop: her borrowed bicycle had no brakes. As she did so, far away in the distance she heard Christ Church’s clock strike the hour, one o’clock.

  Marion took her arm. “You’ve been a long while.”

  “I was as quick as I could be. I was in bed, Marion.” Rachel tried to speak calmly, but inwardly she was shocked, never before had she seen Marion look like this, so flushed, so moved. The absurd thought came to her that what Marion looked above everything was embarrassed.

  “We won’t go into the house, let’s stand here for a moment. I’ll tell you.”

  Marion had been working, hardly noticing, so she said, that time had gone so quickly. “I seemed to come round suddenly about ten-thirty to hear a noise,” she said. “My head was aching badly.” In her room, lit only by the one lamp on her desk, the door and the window faced each other, and there was a mirror hanging over Marion’s head in which both were reflected. As she lifted her head from what she was writing, so little done and she had been at it so long, she saw movement in the mirror. Then the movement stopped and she could see a hand, glinting whitely like the underbelly of a fish, and curling away into shadow the flesh of an arm. For a second she did not recognise it for what it was, and then the hand came in at the bottom of the open window and she saw long fingers.

  Acting instinctively she turned off the light on her desk and stood as immobile as an animal in fear. Now the only light came from the street lamp outside. She could see the clear and empty silhouette of the window. The intruder had gone. But his hand had been inside.

  In the next moment, although she heard no noise, she was aware that the front door had opened. But I locked it, she had time to think. (But how was she to know that since then Joyo had slipped out and come back in again?) She was still standing by the desk, still staring into the gilt-framed mirror. She saw her own face with more make-up on than usual, her hair was in disorder, freed from the tight pins she usually held it back with. She saw at the same minute the door swing forward an inch, then more, and still more. She saw a foot.

  The door swung wide.

  First a hand, then a foot, like some dreadful backward process of birth. Now the whole man.

  What happened afterwards Marion did not clearly remember, she never remembered, big shocks are like that. She remembered vivid isolated incidents. The man himself sitting in her own kitchen on one of her white and red kitchen chairs, she herself standing helplessly looking on from the hall outside. The telephone call to Rachel from the telephone on the stairs, and just before this, her short conversation with the man, and the strange, unexpected, frightening words he had spoken.

  She had walked down the path to wait for Rachel, knowing that she was not the same person she had been before she heard those words, that she would never be quite the same person again.

  Rachel strode on ahead and into the house. Briskly she turned on all the lights she could find … Let there be some light in this, somewhere, somehow. All the same she was nervous. There was Marion talking away behind her like a demented thing and there, to be faced in the kitchen, was the man. In spite of the fact that she thought of herself as unimaginative R
achel was in fact an extremely apprehensive and imaginative person and she wished profoundly that Marion had not summoned her of all people to deal with the stranger.

  “Why not the police, Marion?” she repeated irritably.

  Marion halted her rush towards the kitchen. “That’s what’s so extraordinary, that’s why I got you, someone who knows me, a woman, Rachel. He says he’s my husband.” She repeated the words. “My husband.”

  Rachel was taken aback. “What did you say?”

  “I said ‘My husband is dead’, and he laughed, and said ‘Dead but won’t lie down’.”

  “Whoever he is, I don’t think he can be a very nice man,” said Rachel slowly. Or one who likes you very much, she thought to herself.

  “Nice is not a word that applies to him,” said Marion as if it could not possibly matter. “The only thing is: is he my husband?”

  “Don’t you know?” asked Rachel cruelly. “Can’t you remember?”

  Marion looked at her, wide-eyed. Rachel stared back: she was suddenly very conscious of Marion as a woman, she could smell the slight scent of her hair and her skin, feel her warmth and her vitality. The guard around Marion had cracked, she was eager and younger, changed, as if the person she had kept constrained within her had burst forth. “So that is what she is like underneath,” thought Rachel. “That is the real Marion. I knew there was another one.”

  “You don’t understand, Rachel, how I feel. You think you do but you don’t. You’re so frigid.” People were always saying this of the Boxers, a judgement belied, if you thought about it, by their remarkable fertility.

  “Oh, but I’m not,” began Rachel and then stopped. What was the good? Marion wouldn’t believe her.

  Again there was that mixture of embarrassment, and, yes, pleasure, on Marion’s face. To her horror she realised that Marion was pleased.

  “And that’s why I asked you to come, Rachel. He may be just some madman, and then we must get rid of him somehow, without fuss. But supposing it’s true? I couldn’t treat my own husband like that, could I? But I needed someone here, and I knew only another woman would understand. You do understand?”

  Rachel did not answer. She was looking through the kitchen door.

  The man was sitting at the table, his hands by his side, leaning back against the high woven cane chair. He had opened his tweed jacket.

  There was a girlish flush on her face. “Do you think he could be?” she asked. “Do you think a miracle could have happened. Could it possibly be? My husband come back to me.”

  “Marion, Marion, what are you saying?” whispered Rachel. “Can’t you see that he is dead?”

  Ezra was not asleep either on that strange night; he was sitting at his work-table contemplating the whole corpus of his thesis spread out in nicely typewritten sheets before him; behind were arranged row upon row of books, the authorities he had consulted, would consult and hoped to consult; Ezra was a slow quiet ruminative worker, chewing over his thoughts as contented as a cow. Morning was just as likely to discover him, still one shoe on and one shoe off, having written two words, crossed out three, and discovered some fifty books that must be consulted before he wrote another one, having discovered in addition that his hair needed cutting and that he must buy some new shoes, the exact shade of his new jacket. This was how the years passed, this was Ezra, part of the phenomena of the post-war period, the perpetual student, for whom there can always be raised just enough money from grants and funds for one more year’s research: Ezra had on his table pamphlets and application forms for the Henry Hamburger Fund for Advanced Research, the Imperial Trust Fund, and the Lowther Research Scholarship Committee. He had been in his time Senior Scholar, Humphrey Research Fellow, Empire League Travelling Fellow, and temporary Assistant Research Professor at Carog University, U.S.A. (this latter in spite of the splendour of its title had in fact been the humblest and worst paid of the lot, it had come as a surprise to Ezra to discover the very low place in the scale that an Assistant Associate Professor rated in the U.S.), and was at the moment enjoying a Rankheim grant: there seemed no reason why it should ever end. This, of course, was what annoyed Rachel, but for no reason that could honourably be put into words. Basically the reason, which remained suppressed, was that at his age, Ezra should be a breadwinner: Ezra, full of idealism, affection, and romantic love, had no idea that the chief barrier to success was her unconscious, but quite accurate belief that he could never support her. The resulting irritation between them was completely misunderstood by both.

  Ezra, perpetual scholar, sat dreaming over his books. At the top of the house his landlady, an elderly philosopher from Somerville, was also dreaming.

  Far away over the trees of Park Town and beneath the roof-tops and towers and clocks of Oxford, the Vice-Chancellor, and the Presidents, and the Masters, and the Wardens, and all the slumbering Fellows, dreamt too, of quarrels and friendships, feuds and alliances, work and play.

  But between Ezra and his work, and his temper over Rachel, which he had by no means forgotten, there kept intruding a face, the face of the watching man: the stray thought kept picking at him that he knew this man: irritably he refused to take it seriously. The truth was that he had thought about the man so much that his face, a pinched white little face, too, had begun to seem like that of an old friend. But I don’t really know him, Ezra assured himself, I don’t really; naturally not.

  Then he heard himself remarking that the face had not, on the last occasion of his seeing it, been so pale. It had been sunburnt. Because of the open-air job, he said.

  And at once he remembered. A picture formed clearly before him. A picture of Oxford in summer. It was early on a June morning, and he was one of a group of five young people; three young men and two girls, they were walking along the High arm-in-arm, in full evening dress, and, if Ezra remembered rightly, they were singing.

  “Jolly fun,” reflected Ezra, even though Rachel would certainly have pointed out to him that he was ten years too old for such undergraduate behaviour; twelve months ago he had not known Rachel and so was not in love and unhappy in his love; but what delicious unhappiness, he decided, he would not part with one precious painful drop.

  He could see the swirl of the girls’ great bouffant skirts and the way the bow bounced about on Susan Connolly’s neat little bottom; he had his arm round her waist. He wondered what had happened to the gay Susan. Married probably, girls always did marry, even the most surprising ones; not that it would have been surprising if Susan married, surprising if she didn’t, he thought, seeing the way that bow had bounced. They had danced all night in the flower-scented marquees at the House Commemoration Ball with the heat inside so terrific that you mopped your brow, the usual cold wind of an Oxford June nipping the girls’ bare shoulders whenever you emerged to drink champagne in the floodlit cloisters. There had also, he seemed to remember, been a gentle drizzle; this, too, was quite the thing at a summer ball. It had not damped their fun. He remembered how they had still been giggling as they emerged for breakfast into a grey cold morning. The few passers-by looked at them with the usual mixture of amusement, tolerance and contempt that the citizens of Oxford reserve for the goings-on of the undergrads, especially after a ball.

  A Commemoration Ball is one of the most charming of Oxford occasions and moreover it is an undergraduate occasion which the far grander Encaenia Luncheon for those receiving honorary degrees in June or the occasional garden parties for visiting Royalties or Russian leaders are not. A college reckons to give a ball of this sort once every three years so that every generation of undergraduates can hope to attend at least one in his own college. And it is an important occasion to which you go, if you can, en grande tenue, the girls in full billowing ball dresses and the young men in tails. There was even a fashion one year for cummerbunds. After the ball there is breakfast with coffee and bacon and eggs which somehow helps to settle a stomach queasy after a great deal of indifferent champagne. Or instead of breakfast, you can go in a punt on t
he river Cherwell, a weedy but much loved little stream which runs round North Oxford before draining into the Thames; along the reaches of the Cherwell you can persuade yourself that Oxford is still a rustic city rather than what it is, a city with a lovely ancient heart set in new industrial suburbs.

  As they advanced arm-in-arm down the High Street towards the City Church a lean figure had appeared in front of them with a small camera. He was one of those itinerant photographers who haunt Oxford during the tourist season, taking snaps of passers-by, concentrating on children, dogs and young women in sundresses.

  This figure had, till now, been faceless. Ezra would have taken an oath that he could not remember, had never even noticed, the photographer’s face. But now the face hung before him, as if, thought his theatrical mind, it had been caught in limelight. He could see it in a pale intense light like Banquo’s ghost. He could see the pallor, the narrow eyes, the thick lips, and he even smelt, something he had thought obliterated from his memory, the faint odour of garlic coming from those lips.

  He had every reason, he thought uneasily, to remember the face. It had all been rather loutish. The trouble was that Anthony, charming, amusing, and well born, was a lout and drunk. Ezra supposed they had all been mildly tight, but Anthony was a dangerous lout.