Appointment with Yesterday (13 page)

The first thing Milly noticed, when she arrived on this particular Thursday, was that
Education
for
Death
was still there. She recognised it from right across the room, sleek and successful-looking, with its shiny red lettering and the crude silhouette, in vivid black, of a child with round white eyes, and round white buttons all down his front, and his hair sticking up all over his head—presumably with horror at the education he was receiving.

Milly noted its presence with relief (Mrs Day had a maddening habit of returning her books to the library just as Milly was getting properly into them), but before she settled down to it, she took a quick look round the flat to assess the nature of her afternoon’s tasks. It was different every time. Sometimes the bedroom was a shambles, and the sitting-room virtually unused: sometimes the other way round. Sometimes the kitchen was so cluttered with dirty crockery that you could
hardly move, at others the washing up had been done, but there were beer bottles all over the bathroom. You never knew. And what made it more complicated was that Mrs Day sometimes made hasty, last-minute efforts to make the place look a bit better—shoving dirty glasses behind the
window-curtains,
kicking crumpled paper handkerchiefs under the bed, or tossing a clean newspaper lightly over the place where the cat had been sick.

None of this helped at all, of course, but Milly presumed that her employer meant well. Anyway, it wasn’t too bad this time. A saucepan had been burnt and not left to soak: and whichever character it was who threw his cigarette-ends into the electric fire as if it had been an open grate, had been visiting again: but otherwise everything was much as usual. There was one of Mrs Day’s scribbled notes, though, propped up for Milly’s attention against the flour-bin:

Milly sighed. Mrs Day was always leaving notes like this, and Milly often wondered what happened about them.

Please
wash
the
strt
grr
thoroughly
had been the first one, followed, the very next Tuesday, by
Please
be
careful
not
to
rdvool
the
qumqmvruin
gra
pllooll
without
removing
the
plug.

Milly had done her best. She had washed thoroughly everything that looked in the least like a
strt
grr
;
and as to the
qumqmvruin
gra
pllooll
,
she had played for safety, and avoided anything that had a plug on it at all, for fear of
rdvooling
it.

So far, the method seemed to have worked all right. Anyway, she had not as yet found any fierce notes pointing out that the
strt
grr
was still
filthy.
Thus it was with a fairly tranquil mind that she tossed this latest specimen into the
waste-paper basket (if and when this Mr
Plzpwrdge
did
phone, he would presumably know himself what he was talking about), and settled herself happily on the sofa to read.

B
OTHER
M
R
Plzpwrdge
! The telephone was
already
shrilling through the flat before Milly had read so much as a page of her chosen volume. Why couldn’t the wretched man have rung later on, when she’d only have been working? Dragging herself from her comfortable couch, she got herself reluctantly across the room, and picked up the receiver.

“I’m sorry, Mrs Day’s not in,” she said. “Can I give her a message?” She did not make her voice very encouraging. He had not even said he
was
Mr
Plzpwrdge
yet; with any luck she could avoid learning his name altogether, and then none of it could possibly be her fault. “She’ll be back about half past six,” she added, cautiously, and waited for the pleasant middle-aged voice to say very well, it would call again later.

But it didn’t go like that at all.

“Who’s that speaking?” the voice asked—and it seemed to Milly that a slight sharpness had come into it. “Who is it, please?”

“I—Oh, I’m just visiting here, I’m just—well—just a friend …” gabbled Milly, some instinct—or was it by now just habit?—preventing her telling the simple, innocuous truth about her rôle here.

“Oh. Oh, I see. Well, look, I’m sorry to bother you, but perhaps you can help us. Do you happen to know of a Mrs Barnes who works for Mrs Day? A Mrs Milly Barnes? We’ve been given to understand that she comes two or three
afternoons
a week and …”

“She doesn’t! She isn’t! There must be some mistake! Mrs Day doesn’t know anyone called Barnes …!”

Only after she had got the receiver back on the hook did Milly realise what a complete fool she had made of herself. This man, whoever he was, might have been ringing up about something perfectly harmless—an offer of another job,
perhaps
, or to ask some market-research questions about
detergent
.
Now
what was he going to think? Frantically, she tried to recall the exact wording of her wild, muddled assertions, and to work out what an outsider would deduce therefrom. That she was lying, obviously: or else that she was
half-witted
. How could she—or anyone—know for certain that Mrs Day didn’t know anyone called Barnes? You can know of your friends that they
do
know a Mrs Barnes, but how can you possibly know that they don’t?

Oh, she had been a fool! A fool! And after her resolutions of only a couple of hours ago, too! Milly sat with her head in her hands, staring down at a crumb of ginger biscuit on the carpet, trying to understand what it was that had driven her to behaviour so insane.

Fear, of course. Some people might prefer to call it guilt. The ever-present knowledge that she was wanted for murder.

Murder. This was the first time that Milly had allowed the word to come into her mind uncensored. Murder. She waited for guilt, long repressed, to burst from her subconscious and wash over her in an intolerable tide.

Nothing happened. She said the word again, aloud, this time, into the empty flat. Murder. I have committed murder.

Still nothing. Nothing that could be identified as guilt, anyway. Fear, yes; and a lively determination not to be caught. These were familiar feelings by now, almost old friends, but they could not possibly be described as guilt.

This was ridiculous! Summoning up all the honesty she possessed, all the power of self-scrutiny, Milly probed deep into her inmost heart, searching for the black core of guilt that must lie there.

No good. The most profound and earnest piece of
soul-searching
that she had ever undertaken revealed absolutely nothing except a vague, generalised resentment about the
whole business. “It’s not
fair,
” something inside her was childishly complaining, “why should
I
be a murderer when other people aren’t? It’s not
fair
!”

She tried again. “I have killed. I have committed the ultimate crime. I have taken a human life.”

Still nothing. Human lives are being taken all the time, some by disease, some by cars, some by over-eating. To have contributed to one of these commonplace events seemed—well, not exactly trivial, but lacking in some essential element of evil. Somehow there was nothing there for guilt to feed on—it was like one of those imitation foods with no
nourishment
in them, that are designed to make you slim.

What was wrong? Why did she have no proper feelings? Was it that Gilbert’s life had, in the end, been so divorced from reality that it was not a life at all? And did it follow from this that his death could not be a real death?

Was
this
the immortality that men have dreaded in their hearts since the beginning of time—the immortality conferred upon Tithonus as the ultimate vengeance of the gods?

Had Gilbert brought this ultimate vengeance upon himself as he sat in the thickening darkness behind the closed shutters in Lady Street? Towards the end, darkness was the only thing he trusted: he screamed at Milly, sometimes, if she so much as switched on the light in the scullery so that he could see it shining under the crack of the door. After such a denial of life, how could Death get him when the time came? On what could Death’s skeleton hand get a sure grip in such a case? When bony hand encountered bony hand in the darkness, who would have been the one to flee in terror …?

*

She should never have let her husband get into such a state: that’s what the overworked young doctor had said, reprovingly, a month or two before Gilbert died. She should have brought him round to the surgery: and no, of course he couldn’t prescribe anything without actually seeing the patient, how could he, it would be most unethical…. And then, when the old man never turned up, and the wretched, jittery wife
stopped pestering at the surgery, he must thankfully have written-off the whole business. What could he have done, anyway? One more marriage foundering in the familiar welter of recriminations and mutual accusations of paranoia. What did people think doctors
wer
e
?

And perhaps, if Milly had recognised the nature of her problem a little earlier, while Gilbert was still willing to walk in the light of the sun, she might perhaps have persuaded him, on some pretext, to go along to the surgery with her. Or even to allow the doctor to visit him at the flat, which had not yet become a fortress, barricaded against all comers. And perhaps, at that stage, medical treatment might have been able to achieve something. But while Gilbert was no worse than this, Milly was still viewing her disastrous marriage as just this—a disastrous marriage, which she must learn to live with and to alleviate as best she could. And unfortunately it so happened that the very ways she devised to improve her husband’s spirits might just as well have been so many carefully graded provocations, each one a little more traumatic than the last—so little did she comprehend, at the beginning, the nature of the shadows she could feel gathering about her.

First, the matter of friends. According to her not very penetrating observation, it seemed obvious beyond all question that Gilbert was suffering from too dull and solitary an existence. Pottering about in this dreary flat all day … never seeing anyone but each other, no wonder it was driving them both up the wall!

Cheerful, varied company, then: that was the first
necessity
. A lively to-ing and fro-ing of visitors to brighten the poor chap up, take him out of himself.

Milly was not so blind, even in those days, as to suppose that she could let loose a chattering horde of her own former acquaintances on a man like Gilbert, with any hope of success: and so she tried, tactfully, to find out who
his
friends were, preparatory to bombarding them with invitations.

There were none. Absolutely none at all. When this fact was finally borne in upon Milly, she could not think what to do.
Naturally, she hadn’t supposed that Gilbert could boast any very scintillating circle of acquaintances, but she
had
imagined that there would be at least an old colonel or two, bumbling on about polo in the nineteen-twenties, and perhaps offering Gilbert an occasional game of chess, lasting for hours and hours under the green lamplight. She had expected to be bored by Gilbert’s friends, but not as bored as she was by Gilbert on his own; and she was therefore quite ready to put a good face on it and make them warmly welcome.

But now it seemed that no sort of face, good or bad, was to be required of her: and when she pressed him, saying that there must be
someone
he’d like to have round, he gave her a strange, considering look, and did not answer. By evening he was in one of his sulks. He did not speak to her all through supper, and straight afterwards he retired to his armchair with the newspaper. He opened it and held it outspread before his face, as usual, but Milly knew that this time he wasn’t reading it. Nor was he dozing, or letting his mind wander: rather he seemed to be more than usually alert and awake, as if he was waiting for something.

By the next morning he was his usual self again: and perhaps if Milly had taken the hint, and forthwith laid aside her plans for livening up his social life, things might have turned out differently. But unfortunately her enthusiasm for changing his way of life was only whetted by this setback, and she set her ingenuity to work to overcome it.
Her
friends were out, obviously:
his
didn’t exist: so what remained but to take matters into her own hands and invite, without consulting him, a pleasant, middle-aged couple who had been at the Industrial Archaeology class last term? Whether they were still there this term Milly didn’t know, because she and Gilbert no longer went. Why they didn’t she wasn’t quite sure, and something warned her that if she asked him about it he would go into one of his moods. As yet, she was far from understanding what lay at the root of these “moods”, but she was beginning to be just a little bit scared of them, and to have a vague sort of
instinct about the things that would be likely to trigger them off.

Thus she said nothing to Gilbert of what was in her mind: instead she quietly wrote a letter to the Davidsons, c/o the Institute, and when Mrs Davidson’s reply came, saying that she and her husband would be delighted to come to tea on Saturday, she made sure that she took it from the postman herself, without Gilbert seeing it. It would be better, she calculated, to spring it on him at the last minute, then he would not have time to work up a lot of silly objections.

Rarely can wifely miscalculation have had such disastrous consequences. That Saturday afternoon tea-party proved to be one of the most shocking experiences of Milly’s whole life. Even now, months later, the thought of it still made her face grow hot. The scene was still as vivid in her memory as if it had only just happened … the scalding tea streaming in a brown tide across the clean white tablecloth and on to the floor … the two visitors, stiff as waxworks with shock … and herself, first stunned, and then rousing herself to a flurry of apologies … and then the mopping-up, as if it had been an ordinary accident, with the unfortunate Davidsons doing their appalled best to pretend that nothing much had happened….

*

It had been unfortunate, perhaps, that Gilbert had happened to be out when the visitors arrived. If he had been there when they came through the door, all smiles and hand-shaking, he might have reacted differently. As it was, even the brief forewarning that Milly had planned was denied him, and he walked into his wife’s tea-party utterly unprepared.

For a moment, he just stood there, staring; just as he had stared when Milly had brightened his flat with flowers and cushions a week or two before. There was nothing actually very remarkable about his demeanour, and only Milly noticed the curious brightness that was coming into his eyes, a luminous look, as if a light had been switched on from within. The Davidsons, already giving little chirrups of appropriate
greeting
, noticed nothing: and so, as he padded swiftly towards the
table, it was only Milly who was so paralysed with fear that she could not move. The Davidsons, naturally enough, assumed that their host was approaching to shake hands, and Mr Davidson had in fact already half-risen to his feet, and was saying something like “Ah, Soames, good to see you again—”—when Gilbert picked up the large earthenware teapot and smashed it down into the middle of the table: and then, without a word, turned on his heel and walked with the same soft, swift steps out of the room.

Of the flurry, and panic, and embarrassment which ensued, Milly could not remember much detail: the next thing that was clear in her mind was Gilbert’s coming back into the room—was it ten minutes?—half an hour?—later, and mumbling some sort of apology, explaining, confusedly, that he “had had a lot of worries lately”. She remembered the desperate eagerness with which everyone had seized on this, and had pretended frenziedly that it was an adequate explanation: and then, shortly afterwards, the Davidsons had left, in a whirl of gabbled politenesses and glassy smiles. She remembered how she had longed for them to go, and never to see them again: and at the same time had dreaded, with a growing, sickening terror, the moment when she should be left alone with her husband.

But strangely, when they were at last on their own, Gilbert had not turned on her in fury as she had expected. On the contrary, he treated her for the rest of the evening with even more consideration than usual, jumping up to open doors for her, to carry trays; and all of it done with a sort of pitying affection which Milly could not understand at all, and which filled her with unease. Only just before bedtime did he refer to what had happened, and when he did it was in terms so extraordinary that Milly was awake the rest of the night puzzling about it.

“I don’t want you to think, my dear, that your friends are not welcome under my roof,” he began, seeming not to notice the way Milly’s mouth fell open at this understatement of all time. “But I would just ask you to be a little bit more careful. Those
two today—I know you didn’t realise it, my dear, and I’m not blaming you—but those two have been on my tracks for a long time.”