Nell Alone

by Jennie Melville

  Across the garden Charlotte and Amabel slept comfortably, undisturbed by dreams. The rain beat into Amabel’s window and made a little pool on the floor. Her mother, coming in to see that her distinguished child was really asleep, as she always did each night, closed the window and mopped up the water, all without waking the sleeper.

  Downstairs in the flat below Nell, Mrs Richier sat up late. She sat with a book on the table by her side and her bandaged hands resting on her lap but she had not read a page in two hours. Nor did she seem to be thinking. She sat there with her face quite vacant of thought.

  Jordan Neville was up late working. He was in a temper. Several times that evening he had tried to telephone Nell but her number never answered. He was quite sure she was at home, though.

  William Abel was working late also. However he was in his usual good temper. For Abel to be in a good humour was, in the circumstances, particularly striking, because he was standing in the rain in the road outside the house where Nell lived, and staring up at her window.

  Chapter Eleven

  Behind her closed and darkened windows Nell and her prisoner were still awake and alert. They still sat side by side, and after a pause Nell was speaking again.

  ‘You know they have found my sister’s body?’

  Her brother-in-law looked at her, frowning, as if he had not quite comprehended what she said.

  ‘You remember burying her, I suppose?’

  ‘No. She wasn’t buried. Just laid away.’

  ‘Yes, that’s how it was. I can see you really remember.’

  ‘No.’ To her surprise and perhaps to his own, his answer rang completely genuine. ‘No. I don’t really remember. I know how it was. But as if I’d been told. I do not remember.’

  ‘Don’t worry. That memory block will soon disperse,’ Nell told him coldly. ‘It may have been the shock of disposing of the body of the woman you had killed that precipitated your own collapse. Your memory will return.’ She added cruelly: ‘I expect soon you will remember how she felt when she was cold and stiff and dead.’

  He looked sick. ‘Why aren’t the police …’ he started to say when Nell cut in.

  ‘Why aren’t they looking for you? They will be soon. But they haven’t identified her yet. I’m one jump ahead of them. They didn’t have my advantages, you see.’

  ‘I wish the police had found me before you did,’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Nell judicially. ‘You are quite right to wish they had you. They would only help you to a few years in prison. You could do it nicely, working in the prison library, I dare say. My plans are more fundamental.’

  ‘I think I’d like to make a telephone call,’ he said huskily, reaching out a hand.

  ‘Well, this is once you can’t,’ said Nell, whisking the instrument far beyond his reach. ‘All these days you’ve been free to call the police but now you can’t. I told you this competition had a closing date. You’ve passed it.’

  ‘You can’t keep me prisoner. Not here, in this country!’

  ‘I can’t? You mean I can’t in this land of love of liberty?’

  He looked at her warily, not liking the note in her voice.

  ‘Because you’ve heard that a dicky-bird in a cage puts all heaven in a rage?’ she went on mockingly. ‘But that’s animals. I don’t believe people mind so much about men in cages.’

  She looked at him, bright-eyed.

  ‘And then of course there’s habeas corpus and so on. Perhaps you had that in mind? But I think that only applies to dead people, and you won’t be dead.’ She was really smiling at him.

  ‘I mean because I’ll shout and scream and make myself heard.’

  She was really laughing at him. ‘I think you will. But that will come later.’

  At this moment the telephone rang and although she had ignored all its earlier pleas she now answered it.

  ‘Rumour has it,’ said Jordan, ‘that you and I had better meet.’

  ‘Oh Jordan, not today.’

  ‘It’s already tomorrow. Or hadn’t you noticed?’

  Nell looked at the clock: well after midnight. ‘I’m tired,’ she said.

  ‘So am I. Where have you been and what have you been doing?’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Nell saw her lodger trying to edge his chair towards his walking stick.

  With a quick movement of her foot she kicked it well away from him.

  ‘What’s that noise?’ asked Jordan sharply.

  ‘Just something falling,’ she answered, giving her lodger a bleak smile.

  ‘What a funny voice you’ve got, Nell,’ said Jordan wonderingly.

  ‘What big ears you’ve got, grandfather,’ answered Nell.

  ‘Nell,’ protested Jordan. Nell was never rude or ill mannered, usually she was courteous even when angry. He couldn’t believe she really meant to be offensive now; he thought she must be ill. ‘Nell, are you all right?’

  Watching her companion Nell could see that he was making desperate efforts to rise to his feet again; she saw his jaws clench with the effort. She almost admired him. Such a man could have killed her sister!

  ‘I’ll write you a letter,’ she said absently to Jordan.

  ‘A letter,’ cried Jordan aghast. ‘Where from?’

  ‘Or see you when I get back,’ she murmured, her attention really fixed on her lodger, who was once again making strenuous efforts to get at his stick. Without thinking what she was doing, hardly even noticing that he was still talking, she put the receiver down on Jordan’s voice.

  She went over to her prisoner and gently pushed him back into his chair.

  ‘You really shouldn’t,’ she said. ‘And anyway, it’s no good.’

  She saw his hand sink back into his lap and was at once reminded of her visit to the Insurance Company. After visiting the police she had tried them for help in finding Louise. But they had declined to help her, saying that it was altogether in the hands of Louise’s husband. ‘ It is in the hands of her husband,’ the man she saw had repeated. As it turned out, Louise’s fate had been very literally in the hands of her husband. The interview at the Insurance Company’s city office had been most painful to her, because Louise herself had seemed to sit there beside her all the time. Nor had she been silent. On the contrary, she had seemed to offer her own point of view.

  ‘I am very anxious about my sister,’ Nell had said.

  ‘Half sister,’ Louise had seemed to contradict. ‘Same mother, different father. The seed counts.’

  ‘We were very close.’

  ‘Not so close. Like I said: the seed counts.’

  ‘I am deeply worried about my sister. It’s not like her to vanish, to lose touch.’

  ‘But that’s not what’s truly worrying you, is it, Nell?’ her counterpart had asked. ‘What’s worrying you is that I might have meant to do it. That I might have gone away and left you. Isn’t that it, Nell? Because our mother left us.’ Thus her echo harped on the theme that had maimed their childhood. Poor Louise. She had probably been dead for days by then.

  ‘People do move away and lose touch with their families. It happens every day,’ the businessman to whom Nell was speaking had very reasonably pointed out. ‘Your sister will turn up again.’

  ‘Like I did last time, eh?’ Louise had seemed to say from the side-lines. ‘I ran away when I was ten to join mother and I found her. But you were the one she liked best. She would rather you had found her.’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry, Miss Hilton,’ the man in the Insurance Office had said, giving her a kindly smile. He looked as if he didn’t care much one way or another.

  ‘But I am all she has,’ cried Nell.

  —‘And I am all she has,’ said the peeping little voice in the corner.

  ‘Except her husband,’ said the official, with an odd look at Nell, although it was unlikely he could hear that voice too.

  ‘Except my husband,’ said Louise. ‘ I’m the one with the husband and Nell is the one with nothing.’
>
  —After years and years of such unspoken judgment from Louise, Nell didn’t know but what it might be true. Perhaps she really was the greedy little sister. Perhaps she did resent Louise going off and having a husband. Perhaps it did all go back to their mother’s flight so many years ago.

  She realised that she had made a very queer impression on the man, probably worse on the police. She had felt sick and she felt sick now as she looked down at Black Douglas who was not Black Douglas but Robert Lang her sister’s husband.

  Then her intelligence, which was always dominant in Nell, rallied and she rejected the sickness. Whatever its origin in childhood disappointments and fears, the adult emotion for Louise had been love. No matter where the force behind the feeling came, she loved Louise.

  ‘I’d better tell you your name, in case you haven’t remembered,’ she said. ‘ Robert Lang, or that’s the name Louise said she was marrying. A Scottish name. Black Douglas was the name of a Scottish hero. That was a joke.’

  ‘Not my joke.’

  ‘No, you don’t make jokes. Put your hands behind your back. I don’t want to see them.’

  ‘Are you frightened of me?’ he asked slowly.

  Nell smiled. ‘Are you frightened of me?’ she asked. ‘Are we frightened of each other? I suppose the answer is yes.’ Then she added: ‘But that won’t make me any easier to deal with.’

  ‘I want to get away.’

  ‘Of course you do. I can’t allow it. I shall have to get rid of you in the end, of course.’

  ‘What are you going to do with me? Are you going to kill me?’

  ‘Bring out your hands.’

  Silently he put his hands on his knees.

  Nell sat down beside him and took his wrist, once again feeling his pulse.

  ‘You’re still under my control, aren’t you? I can do anything I like.’

  The room was quiet and dim. Nell had lit the table lamp but lowered the shade.

  ‘You haven’t been much success as a man, have you? You look like a man, you talk like a man, but no, there’s nothing here inside really. So what shall I make you?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘An idiot? A raving lunatic?’

  The room was quiet except for Nell’s voice.

  ‘Or would you prefer to be a plain drooling imbecile?’

  He was beginning to understand, but incredulously, what she meant.

  ‘Or would you fancy to be something more animal-like? Say a dog? You could bark a little. No? You’re against making a noise.’

  She patted him on the arm as if to encourage him.

  ‘Say a simple vegetable then? A silent, sleepless cabbage?’ ‘You couldn’t.’ He had found his voice, but it was unsteady.

  ‘Oh yes.’ Nell scrutinised him. ‘Probably I could. With drugs.’

  ‘They’d wear off. I’d cry for help.’

  ‘Of course. But think of the havoc you’d have caused before they did.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘And if I was careless—’ she shrugged, ‘over enthusiastic, say – the drugs might well do permanent damage to the brain.’

  She got up and walked to the window, looked out and then came back to look down on him.

  ‘Or shall I alter you physically?’

  ‘Drugs can’t do that.’

  ‘Oh, not really, of course. No. But I could make you think they had.’

  ‘It wouldn’t work,’ he said desperately.

  She ignored this. ‘What shall I do? Shall I make you a bat-man? Give you claws and wings?’ Her voice became passionate. ‘Guilty, furtive, unhappy?’

  She held out her hands to him. ‘Come on, try and get up. I ask you to get up.’

  He gripped her wrists fiercely and slowly dragged himself to his feet. They faced each other. Nell was as tall as he was and was supporting him. He had to lean on her.

  ‘You have absolutely corrupted me.’

  ‘Well, something has,’ she said lightly. ‘But let us not say what.’

  As they stood there nursing each other perhaps Nell thought for a moment how nice it would be not to be enemies. Perhaps for a second they were not enemies but lovers. But treachery and deceit were built into their relationship and did not let them down now. Over Nell’s shoulder his eyes focussed on his stick.

  ‘Now lean on me and take one or two steps … No, not towards the door.’

  He managed to take a few steps. ‘Why do you want me to walk?’

  ‘I’ve told you before, I don’t want you here for ever. I may need you to walk out of here. In due course.’

  Another yard and he would be able to reach his stick, which Nell seemed momentarily to have forgotten. He had only a very faint hope of getting it, though, he felt too drugged, too much under her control.

  ‘Is it possible you could have made me remember things I didn’t do?’ he cried suddenly. ‘Could you do that to me?’

  They stared at each other, trying to assess what he had said. Nell frowned.

  ‘If that’s true,’ he said feverishly, ‘you’ve not only corrupted me, you’ve lost me as well. I shall have to look for myself.’

  ‘It might be a monotonous task,’ observed Nell.

  He put his arm round Nell’s waist and reached out and got a grip on the stick and dragged it towards him.

  At the movement Nell turned her head and saw his hand with the stick in it.

  ‘If you tap with this magic little wand will your fairy godmother appear?’ asked Nell. Her hand closed gently over his.

  She got no answer.

  ‘Will she?’ Nell asked again.

  He was still silent.

  ‘She will, won’t she?’ breathed Nell.

  Angrily she wrenched the stick from him and began to bang on the floor. Quietly at first and then with increasing noise and fury.

  Chapter Twelve

  Next morning it was still raining. No one could say when it would stop. The wet looked as if it was there for ever. On this sodden morning the Institute seemed actually hostile to human life; there were plenty of mornings when it did not welcome, today it seemed almost to repel. Jordan felt repelled, anyway. He had drunk black coffee for breakfast, he had a faint headache, and he was worried about Nell.

  He lit a cigarette and paced about his little office, reluctant to start work. He had to start soon, though: it wasn’t going to be declared a public holiday. Very soon people would start popping in, putting their bright little queries and giving him the news. There was always news of some sort going round the Institute. Sometimes it was utterly false news, like the time that they were going to receive A Very Famous Child to work upon (hasn’t said a word but bloody since he was born. No one knows, of course, all hushed up, but the newspapers are getting on to it; and it’s going to be very difficult when he grows up, almost any other word would be better. They want us to help him find a better word). Sometimes the news was true, like the time Dr Lensky dropped dead in the stacks below the library and they discovered he’d built himself a little hut there and had been living in it for days.

  Miss Aumerez poked her head round the door and exclaimed at the sight of Jordan, as if she was surprised he was just where he ought to be. Jordan scowled.

  ‘You didn’t come to the opera last night,’ she said.

  ‘What opera?’

  ‘L’Incoronazione di Poppea. There was a special performance. We were all invited.’

  ‘I’ve never even heard of the opera.’

  ‘Oh splendid, splendid.’ Mrs Aumerez clapped her hands together. ‘You’ve come through my test splendidly. A beautiful reaction – from my point of view, of course.’

  ‘Reaction?’

  ‘I’m going round asking everybody why they weren’t at the opera. I record the answer on my little tape.’ She coolly brandished apiece of miniature equipment. ‘Quite a few admit they never heard of the invitation. But you’re the first I’ve had to admit that he’s never heard of the opera. Culture, you see. The Culture Lie. Very import
ant.’

  ‘You made it all up then, opera and all?’ said Jordan, thinking that Miss Aumerez easily qualified for the position of Most Irritating Woman I Know: she and her tiny tape recorder which was a kind of deputy Miss Aumerez and probably just as capable as she was of going round doing tests if left to itself, and even machines had their rights.

  ‘No, it’s a real opera,’ explained Miss Aumerez. ‘By Monteverdi. It isn’t me that tells the lies.’ Miss Aumerez was always running her little tests on people in the Institute. It was amazing how often they were caught out, considering how regularly she came round. ‘It’s for my book, of course,’ she explained gravely. ‘The Lie.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ agreed Jordan. Fame at last; he was going to be a statistic on the side of honesty in Miss Aumerez’ book. ‘You’ll let me see it? Give me a preview?’

  ‘It’s nowhere near finished yet,’ she said wistfully. Miss Aumerez had been working on The Lie for as long as Jordan had known her and would probably still be at it when their ways parted. There was so much scope for her. As soon as she had completed a chapter on one sort of lie she discovered another. People and their lies always kept one jump ahead of her.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry you didn’t catch me out in a lie,’ he said. ‘I suppose it would have been more interesting for you.’

  ‘Oh no, not at all,’ she said politely, preparing to depart. She didn’t quite go, however.

  ‘What is it?’ Jordan saw her there still hovering at the door.

  ‘About Dr Hilton. I haven’t seen her today, have you?’

  ‘It’s early yet.’

  ‘I’d be glad to see her,’ said Miss Aumerez unhappily. ‘I’d be glad, that’s all.’

  Jordan remembered that Miss Aumerez had always been fond of Nell.

  ‘She’s been so odd lately.’

  Jordan sighed and made a deprecating gesture with his hands. Miss Aumerez frequently reduced him to silence.

  ‘Of course we’re all odd here. I’m odd. You’re odd.’ Miss Aumerez was always bleakly honest. Naturally. It was her great interest. If she did tell you a lie she always took you aside afterwards and let you know why and how. People had been known to reel blushing from these sessions. ‘But all the same, Nell has not been as usual.’