Appointment with Yesterday (21 page)

G
ILBERT WAS DEAD
. At first, that was all she could take in of Julian’s tirade, as he sat beside her on the breakwater in the light of the dying moon, berating her for her folly, just as he always used to do.

Gilbert was dead, had been dead for nearly a month now. This was the third time Julian had repeated the information, and yet still she kept asking the same inane questions, seeking confirmation by repetition. What about the Mr Soames who had called at Mrs Mumford’s? Gilbert’s brother, naturally. Surely she knew he
had
a brother? The poor devil was nearly out of his mind with the worry and strain of dealing with his late brother’s affairs single-handed (he was quite a lot older even than Gilbert had been), and with the complications arising from the fact that he wasn’t legally the nearest relative.
She
was—and she had chosen to disappear! To go swanning off on a seaside holiday under a false name, leaving everyone in this mess! Did she, by any chance, realise just exactly how much trouble and expense she had caused? Lawyers—Bank managers—ground landlords—they’d all been going crazy trying to get in touch with her … and now, to crown everything, he, Julian, had been compelled to fly over from Boston, at vast inconvenience, to help sort it all out!

Gilbert was dead. The words drummed through her brain, deadening the sound of Julian’s scolding. He was dead, and no one, now, would ever know that she had murdered him.

For there had been no inquest—no awkward questions. The harassed, overworked young doctor had scribbled a certificate of Natural Causes (Gilbert was an old man, after all: what more likely than that he should suffer a stroke or a
heart-attack
?). And as to the door, locked and bolted on the outside, there was no mention of this at all in Julian’s story; and so it must be presumed that, somehow, no one had noticed it.

It would be Mrs Roach who had undone the bolts, for it was she (Julian had explained) who had found the body. She must have undone them without comprehension, her slow mind not
taking in their significance. No doubt Gilbert’s habit of locking and bolting everything was so familiar to her that it no longer made any impact: she must have failed to put two-and-two together and to realise that, on this occasion, it could not have been he, himself, who had fastened the door. And afterwards—naturally enough—the shock of finding him dead in his chair would have put the matter right out of her mind.

Dead in his chair. In his great leather chair, with the green-shaded lamp at his elbow. Strange to think of him sitting there, just as he had always sat, at peace for the very first time.

Far out across the black water the moon was setting. Staring out along the jagged silver track, Candida thought about her responsibility for Gilbert’s death, just as she had tried to think about it once before, when she was still Milly.

She had murdered him: that, she had already faced. What she had to face now was the knowledge that she was not going to be punished for it. No one, now, would ever know what she had done. No blame would ever attach to her, no penalty would ever be exacted.

Fixing her eyes on the magical silver track, that led from the infinite right to her very feet, Candida waited, as she had once waited when she was Milly, for the first pangs of the terrible, haunting guilt that would be with her to the end of her days. Guilt that would gnaw secretly at the dark roots of her being, giving her no rest. Guilt on this sort of scale must be waiting somewhere for her, somewhere under the glittering vastness of the sky?

All she could feel was an unutterable thankfulness that Gilbert was dead. Dead like the dinosaurs, and Shakespeare, and the kings of Babylon. Dead as she would one day be, and Julian, and the glistening ribbons of seaweed that today slapped so proudly against the timbers under the winter moon. Are we to ask of each and all of these deaths, Whose fault was it?—However did it happen? Under the shadow of the
millennia
, such questions dry upon our lips; they become a blasphemy against the benign cycle of birth and death, against
the miracle of evolution under the turning circle of the stars. Even the humming of a gnat contains more of truth and wisdom.

She could feel no guilt at Gilbert’s death: only a confused sense of participation. But his life—Ah, that was another matter! Whatever small wrong she might have done him by killing him paled into insignificance by the side of the wrong she had done by marrying him.

That was the wickedness. There, if anywhere, lay the lifelong guilt. She had married not merely without love—plenty of women have done
that
—but without the faintest desire for anything he could provide at all. She had not even married him for his money, or for the security he could offer—for even these motives can leave a man with some shred of self-respect, some shred of pride at having provided his woman with at least
something
that she needs.

No, she had left no shred of anything for Gilbert. She had not married him for anything he had, or was. She hadn’t married him as a person at all, but as a thing, a handy weapon, a stick with which to beat her former husband.

Well, and did a man like Gilbert deserve anything better? He was a crafty and bitter old man, even before he went mad. All his life he had quarrelled with everybody, distrusted everybody, destroyed every relationship that had ever come his way. What had he ever done, or been, that he could expect anybody to marry him for love?

She had never thought before of how it must have seemed to him. After a bitter, lonely life of enmities and hatred, now here, suddenly, is a woman who mysteriously seems to
like
him! Who actually seeks his company! Nobody has ever sought his company before—and good riddance, damn them! —but here, at last is someone who
does
! A woman, too … Not unattractive … not much over forty…. Can it be—can it possibly be—that something new and magical may yet be going to happen to Gilbert Soames, in this last decade of his life? Can it be that here, at last, is the woman who will break
down his frozen inhibitions, soften his bitter, vindictive spirit …?

No. Well, naturally not. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen. His new wife left his inhibitions exactly where she found them—and was thankful to do so. She shrank from his fumbling touch. Instead of love she gave him fear … instead of friendship, defensive withdrawal. Just as everyone had always done…. She was one of Them after all …!

Candida understood about Them now, as she had never done while Gilbert was alive. For now she, too, had known what it was to hear the faint, menacing whisper of their approaching battalions, had felt, once or twice, the first
tentative
touch of their icy hands. She had known what it was to hear Them down every harmless telephone … to see Them in every careless gesture.

It was because she had been on the run, of course, in fear of her life: for it is fear that brings Them flocking. They can smell it afar off, like vultures hungry for blood.

What fear was it, then, that had brought Them flocking around Gilbert, flapping and screeching, confounding his
judgement
and finally blotting out his sight? Fear of something he had once done? Some enemy he had once made, long, long ago? Perhaps, if she had been a quite different sort of a wife, he might have confided to her his dark story, or such of it as he still remembered, during the silent, deathly evenings. Now, no one would ever know.

*

It wasn’t her fault! It wasn’t
she
who had driven him mad: he was already far gone on the course of which she saw the terrible climax, long before she met him. Once she realised what a state he was in, she had done what she could. She had done her best, in the face of the awful odds.

Naturally, she couldn’t have been expected to do for him the things which a woman who actually loved him would have done: to have put her warm arms round his stiff, wary body: to have answered his cold, formal kisses with warm, spontaneous ones: to have said, sometimes, “Don’t be such an old silly!” or
“You
know
that that’s nonsense!” when his bizarre delusions first began peeping through.

Did he, in the beginning, imagine that Candida was going to love him like that? Did he daydream, like a foolish adolescent, of a real flesh-and-blood relationship, utterly beyond the capacity of his warped and frozen soul?

What right had he to dream such an impossible dream? Or to go to pieces when Candida couldn’t make it come true? No one could! Probably no one could even have given him ordinary friendship, or even companionship, so hollowed out was he by the long years of bitterness and suspicion.

All right, so they couldn’t. Then they shouldn’t have married him. To marry someone in the clear knowledge that nothing can be given, nothing received—that was the
wickedness
: and no wickedness on his side would ever cancel it out, or justify it. On that August day, in the Brixton registry office, she had committed a crime against Gilbert far worse than the crime of murdering him—and yet one for which the Law provides no penalty at all. Strange.

Suddenly, Candida felt herself Milly again: buoyant,
carefree:
impervious to remorse because she had only just been born. Candida felt in her own bones Milly’s toughness, her zest for survival, her hard-won capacity for cutting-off from her former self and living each moment as if nothing had ever happened before.

The Voices had been wrong. They had been talking
platitudes
, as Voices so commonly do. “You can’t run away from yourself” had been the theme of their discourse: but the truth is that you can. She had. She had become Milly, and as Milly she had acquired an entire new repertoire of strengths and skills—not least of which, she now realised, was the
recapturing
of some of the special qualities of childhood: above all the child’s untramelled eagerness to explore the next minute, the next hour, as though it was a voyage round the world. All these new skills and aptitudes, so painfully acquired by Milly, were now at Candida’s command, to use exactly as she wished. If she chose, now, to by-pass guilt and remorse, and to
concentrate on getting on with the rest of her life, she could easily do so. Milly had provided her with the techniques.

And in fact, when it came to the point, it hardly seemed a matter of techniques at all: it seemed the most natural thing in the world simply to put it all behind her, as Milly would have done.

Cautiously at first, and then with increasing boldness, Candida made herself face the things she had done. Without self-deception or self-justification she contemplated the full extent of her folly and wickedness in marrying Gilbert, and thereafter escorting him blindly to his death.

Still she felt nothing that could be identified as guilt. All she could feel was a vague and not unpleasing sense of her own superiority to the blinkered, self-centred bitch she had once been.

Was this a special sort of detachment peculiar to the
twice-born
, a privileged kind of opting-out? Or was it simply that it is almost impossible for anyone under fifty nowadays to
experience
guilt in the true, crippling sense in which our
grandparents
experienced it? Nowadays we are told constantly that we are all riddled with guilt-feelings, and that it is this
overdeveloped
sense of guilt that is at the root of all our ills: but surely, by now, this is more of a folk-memory than a fact? It was true once, no doubt: but can it possibly be true still? We have been told so often and for so long that no one is ever really to blame for anything: that it is all due to what Mother did, or Father, or Society. And what Mother did is itself the result of what
her
mother did, and of the pressures of Society in
those
days … cause behind cause, rolling in out of the infinite, as far as the eye can see or the mind can reach, leaving nowhere any place where guilt can come to rest, can settle and take root….

*

“And of course that Roach woman wasn’t much help!” Julian was saying—and Candida jolted herself out of her reverie to listen—“Apparently the old harridan had been going around telling everyone you weren’t married to Soames at all, that you were ‘No better than you should be’—I think that was her
phrase. And of course everyone believed her—why not, in this day and age?”

Why not indeed. In the darkness, Candida was smiling. How ironic that the old woman, in her would-be malice, should have done her victim such an utterly unlooked-for service! Because, of course, this misconception delayed considerably the moment when anybody began seriously to search for Candida. All the while they were assuming that it was merely Gilbert’s mistress who had (so conveniently for all concerned) seen fit to make herself scarce, no one evinced the least interest in her
whereabouts
. It was the missing brother they were after at that stage, for he was the presumed next-of-kin. It was he who must sign the papers, pay for the funeral, sort out the incredible chaos of Gilbert’s accumulated possessions. And it was only after this brother had been found, and had been ineffectually muddling with Gilbert’s papers for several days, that it came to light that Candida really
was
Mrs Soames, really
had
been married to Gilbert. Then, of course, the search for her started in earnest.

*

“… I hate to say it, my dear Candida, but I’ve never in my whole life encountered such an incompetent way of
disappearing
! First you give yourself some daft phoney name, and then what do you do but straightaway sign a cheque with it! So, of course, the first thing Brother Soames finds on the doormat is this letter from the Bank, asking who the hell is Milly Barnes?

“Mind you,
he
seems to have been pretty slow in
the
uptake
, too. Apparently he just shoved the letter in among the rest of the papers, and forgot all about it. It took
me
to point out that it might be an idea to find out who this Milly Barnes was—Not that I hadn’t already guessed, of course—who else would be acting so plumb daft? And anyway, I’d already heard from Felicity What’s-her-name that somebody’d seen you two or three weeks earlier hanging around Victoria Station, looking as if you’d committed a murder, or something. So, putting two-and-two together….”