‘Of course!’ said the affable Dr McElroy.
Edith went up the stairs as Cliffie came into the hall.
‘Hey, what’s up?’ Cliffie asked.
‘Nothing!’ Edith was in a hurry.
She took her diary from the table corner and carried it to her chest of drawers in the bedroom. She opened the bottom drawer, which held folded old white sheets, clean but worn-out table-cloths, and stuck the diary all the way back in the right-hand corner, had to pull something out to make it lie reasonably flat, and found a cluster of old Christmas cards. The one upper-most said ‘Love from Brett’ and below it in a different hand-writting ‘and Carol.’ She disliked having found it. It seemed a bad omen, and she thought of dropping it in a wastebasket now, and yet didn’t want it even that visible when the two men came upstairs, so she left the card where it had been, but pulled the whole batch (she must throw them out) forward so they would not touch her diary.
Her workroom was quite all right, table even neater than usual, the head of Cliffie looking particularly handsome with the sunlight glowing golden on one polished lobe of his forehead. People in fact said, ‘Why don’t you put it in the living-room, Edie?’ But Edith somehow didn’t want it down there. One of the kids – maybe. Or Melanie even, but Cliffie no. Edith started for the stairs to call the men up, when she changed her mind about the diary. Why not in its usual place, which certainly didn’t catch the eye, and which seemed safer somehow than the drawer? And anyway, why should she take pains to hide her rightful possessions? Edith went into her bedroom again, got the diary from the bottom drawer, and was hurrying out with it to replace it under the stack of papers on the corner of the worktable, when she saw that Carstairs and McElroy were halfway up the stairs, Carstairs coming into the hall.
‘Edie?’ he said.
‘Sorry. I’m a little slow.’ Trembling, Edith carried the diary in both hands to her worktable, calling, ‘Wait, please!’ and got it back where it had been, straightened the papers atop it with a shove of her palms. The men were at the threshold. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want you to come in. Do you mind?’ She was walking toward the door. ‘What’s there to see anyway?’ With feeble gestures she was backing them out of her room, feeble only because she was still trying to be polite, and resented that she had to be, because both Carstairs and McElroy might have realized that she damned well didn’t want them or anybody setting foot in her workroom or even looking in.
Somehow – she succeeded. Murmuring, smiling, they were all descending the stairs again, and Edith relaxed proportionately.
‘So, Edith,’ Carstairs said when they were all sitting down again, having taken their former places like well-trained school-children, ‘how about making a date now with Phil? Some time this week?’
‘No,’ Edith said, tired of even saying ‘thank you’.
‘Edith – I have a request from Brett to order you to see a psychiatrist, whether you want to or not.’
‘From Brett. I like that! What’s he got to do with me? He’s no longer my husband, and even if he were —’
‘Edith, Edith, listen for a minute. I’m a doctor, and I’ve known you and your family a long time. Phil’s a doctor too. Now both of us…’
The rest of it Edith switched off. And Dr Carstairs went on mumbling, making gentle gestures, for quite a long time. She again imagined the little men-in-white dashing up the stairs, invading her workroom – finding the diary. The Paul Prys! Barbaric snoops! Why weren’t they content with porn? No, just because they were doctors, they claimed the right to intrude on other people’s privacy!
Edith drew herself up in her chair – the rose-sprigged armchair – and said, ‘Would you like to see my head of Cliffie? A piece of my sculpture? I’ll bring it down for you.’ She was almost in tears, but she thought of Melanie. Melanie would somehow maintain her politeness in the face of anything, anything.
‘Love to!’ said Carstairs.
‘Can I help you?’ McElroy was on his feet.
‘Oh, no, thank you. Doesn’t weigh much.’ Edith went out. Appease them a little, she thought. Make a gesture of goodwill!
Upstairs, she lifted the head, which was now fastened to its square oak base. A fine head. They would give her a word of praise for this, and it would even be genuine, Edith believed.
But what came next, she wondered, as she walked with the head toward the stairs. The date with McElroy – or someone – sponsored by Brett, the swine. Edith hated Brett at that moment. Hadn’t he done enough damage? Smug, self-righteous, inflicting unhappiness on other people, grabbing everything for himself. A tear zipped down her cheek, and she tried to wipe it with a movement of her shoulder. Then her heel caught on the third step – Damn it, of all the awkwardness! Flat shoes too, sandals, not due to bell-bottoms either, because her corduroys were rather narrow.
She was falling, the head in her hands weighing a ton, suddenly, pulling her forward, and she had no hand to catch the banister rail.
She was aware that she didn’t scream, although she was terrified. It seemed a slow motion fall, she saw herself slanting head downward now at the same angle as the stairs, and she thought of Cliffie as a small boy of eight and ten, potentially handsome as he was now potentially handsome, like the statue she held in her two hands. She thought of injustice, felt her personal sense of injustice combined now with the crazy, complex injustice of the Viet Nam situation – a country in which corruption, as everyone knew, was a way of life, normal. Tom Paine. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot… Her head struck hard, yet gracefully (she believed) on one of the bottom steps or the floor, and the light went out for her.
A little more than an hour later, Cliffie stood in the silent living room, alone. They had taken his mother away in a long car, maybe an ambulance, maybe a hearse, Cliffie hadn’t looked closely, but the same kind of car they had taken old George away in. Dead. Cliffie couldn’t believe it. His mother dead. Old Carstairs had said he would tell Brett. Hadn’t he said that?
And Norm Johnson was coming in about half an hour to pick him up to take him to dinner at their place, and he was to spend the night there. Even Frances Quickman – yes – had come over a few minutes ago, and she was feeding the cat tomorrow morning.
His mother dead. It wasn’t sinking in, as yet, even though the police – two of the old Keystone Kops – had been standing right in the downstairs hall, staring at his mother and making notes, just a few minutes ago. Cliffie had had a bracing straight scotch just five minutes ago. It hadn’t helped much. Now the house was his. Hadn’t somebody said that? Carstairs? Of course it might be partly his father’s too, Cliffie wasn’t sure how those things worked, but maybe his father wasn’t or wouldn’t be interested in the house. Cliffie was in no mood to think of the fact that the house was now his responsibility.
He found himself leaping up the stairs with the objective of taking a look at his mother’s room. Best to do it now, best not to be afraid of it. Cliffie stood up straight and walked in. The sculptures. Those two little kids’ heads. Why had she wanted to do something like that? Boring little beasties, Cliffie thought. And the typewriter, its blue paint and part of the metal worn away at the bottom corners, typewritten pages everywhere. Gosh! She would never touch the keys again. And it looked like she’d just got up from there.
‘All right, all right!’ Cliffie said aloud. ‘It’s not true!’ But his own voice frightened him, rather than helped. And what he had said was false. He knew that. His mother was gone, forever.
And the dictionary. And the diary. He saw the diary, the big brown thing on the corner of the desk, as usual. She had had that since before he was born, Cliffie thought, and he thought he remembered his mother saying so. His own birthdate would be there – all the stories, the things that had happened, the judgement of him would be there, written for all to see. Who was going to see it? Brett? Yes, maybe. His father was the type. His father would hold it against him, the little details his mother might have put down, th
e little bad things. Cliffie decided to keep that diary himself. Yes, dammit! And get it out now, he thought.
Cliffie pulled the diary carefully from under the stack of papers. The leather binding was starting to crumble at the top and bottom. It weighed more than he had thought it would.
He carried it down, carefully down the stairs, up the hall to his room. He had decided to put it in a back corner of his closet, the drawers in his chest of drawers being so weak now, they probably wouldn’t hold the weight without collapsing. Cliffie thought, as he pulled away a pair of sneakers, old socks, to make room on his closet floor, that he would never open this diary, never read anything in it. The idea shocked him, scared him. It would be worse than seeing his mother naked suddenly – something he certainly never had wanted to do, and never had done, even by accident. He realized that he had a respect for the diary and a fear of it also. He would take care of the diary, he decided, and this thought gave him comfort. He wouldn’t let anyone else look at it, ever. He had thought, a minute or so ago, that he could burn it now in the fireplace, maybe finish burning it before Norm arrived, at least finish burning it tomorrow. But even that took or would take a courage that he knew he hadn’t. No, much better to keep it hidden, to keep it from the others, other people. Maybe always. Maybe for all his life. He would never tell anyone that he had it. He would carry it around with him, hidden. Yes, even if he got married, his wife would never know. Somehow, he would manage that. Unless in some moment of extraordinary courage he would rip it to pieces and burn it.
There was a knock on the door, sound of the front door opening, a step. ‘Cliffie? – It’s Norm!’
Cliffie straightened up, half closed his closet door. Norm had arrived to take him to Washington Crossing. Cliffie opened a drawer and found pajama pants, couldn’t find the top, and snatched from the floor a different colored top he was currently wearing. ‘Right there, Norm!’
THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY
Patricia Highsmith
Introduced by Hossein Amini
Patricia Highsmith draws us deep into a cross-European game of cat and mouse in this masterpiece of suspense from the author of The Talented Mr Ripley.
Two men meet in the picturesque backstreets of Athens. Chester MacFarlane is a conman with multiple false identities, near the end of his rope and on the run with his young wife Colette. Rydal Keener is a young drifter looking for adventure: he finds it one evening as the law catches up with Chester and Colette, and their lives become fatally intertwined.
This special edition includes a foreword by the director and screenwriter of the film, Hossein Amini.
‘Highsmith is a giant of the genre’ Mark Billingham
‘The No.1 greatest crime writer’ The Times
THE GLASS CELL
Patricia Highsmith
Introduced by Joan Schenkar
‘The original, the best, the gloriously twisted Queen of Suspense’ Mark Billingham
Prison is no place for an innocent man.
Phillip Carter has spent six years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. On his release, his beautiful wife is waiting for him. He has never had any reason to doubt her. Nor their friend, Sullivan. Carter has never been suspicious, or violent. But prison can change a man.
‘One closes most of her books with a feeling that the world is more dangerous than one had ever imagined’Julian Symons, New York Times Book Review
‘To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability’ Sunday Times
Edith's Diary Page 36
