Cat and Mouse (9 page)

To be hunted… Nothing on God’s earth was so terrible as this—to be hunted like a wounded animal, struggling sobbing and panting up the steep mountainside, rough and bare with no hiding place on all its limitless slopes—sobbing with the pain in her injured ankle, with the pain where the breath caught at her aching side, fighting her way on and up the unendurable way, and all the time with the knowledge that no sanctuary lay beyond—no rock, no tree, no hiding place, no refuge, no respite. She had had a good start, but Dai Trouble was gaining fast upon her; she could not match him on the upgrade and she turned and made off along the mountain, circling the house and leaving it behind. Now shale slithered beneath her stumbling, agonized foot, progress was impeded, she was thrown back ever in her own tracks; it was like trying to run under water, with the strong tug of the tide against her legs. Slipping and stumbling, she struggled across the wide landslide of shale that imperceptibly slithered down the mountainside; and suddenly saw in front of her the mouth of a cave. And towering up, two hundred feet above her, cut into the mountainside, the great Red Precipice, the Tarren Goch.

Mr. Chucky had told her about the cave—about the chain of caves that had been formed by the tumbled boulders piled upon one another up the steep edge of the long-abandoned quarry, a corridor formed of the hollows beneath the piled rocks, lit only by “windows” looking down into the lap of the quarry from ever-increasing heights. As children they had played up and down the corridor under the rocks, coming out suddenly at the top of the precipice, onto a tiny ledge from which the unwary might hurtle two hundred feet down to their death. He had said it was “dangerous,” but to Katinka, now, it seemed a very haven of safety and peace. She dragged herself into the kindly dark of the cave and for a moment gave herself over to exhaustion.

But the slipping and slithering of the shale that had impeded his progress, as surely as hers, was ended; he must be coming across the brief patch of grass between the shale and the mouth of the cave. She forced herself up to her feet again, and stumbled on upwards into the cave above her, climbing on through the glimmering corridor under the tumbled boulders towards an unobtainable haven of darkness that seemed always a little ahead of her. At the bottom of the passage, the light was blotted out; she saw him clearly for a moment, framed in the entrance to the lowest of the caves, against a background of river and valley a thousand feet below. He paused for a moment, as she herself had done; and then began, panting, to claw his way up the mountainside, through the narrow cleft of the rocks, struggling up after her. On and on and up and up, she clambered away from him; and on he came.

And suddenly she was in darkness—deep, sweet, total darkness, hiding her, covering her up, equalizing her with the hound on her trail. She was in a cave so hemmed in with rocks that no glimmer of light could reach it. She crouched against its dank wall and heard his labouring breath as he stood at the entrance not six feet from her.

After a moment, he said, quietly: “May as well come out now. I got you trapped.”

She crouched against the slimy wall, fighting with all her power to stifle the sobbing of her breath.

He began to move. He was feeling his way softly along the rough, rounded, slimy wall of the cave. He must come to her. Slowly, relentlessly, he was feeling his way towards her; soon, his hands outstretched like a blind man’s in the dark, must touch her face. … Must close round her throat. … She dropped to her knees and, with infinite care, began to crawl out towards the centre of the cave. She heard him cursing under his breath as his hands brushed along the sides of the rock walls. After a bit he said suddenly, “Ugh!” and then: “I got you!” and there was a sound of sudden movement and a stamping on the floor and he said: “Where ever you are—look out! That was a snake.”

Her nerve gave way. She scrambled to her feet and made for the single exit from the cave, and he burst into triumphant laughter and came after her.

The chain of caves led steeply up again. She could see, as she scrambled over the slime-covered rocks, that to her left the side of the quarry fell sheer away; could see, through a break here and there in the heaping of the boulders, how, at a right angle from the corridor of rocks, the Red Precipice fell in a sheer, vertical drop down to the lap of the quarry where the strewn boulders now looked like pebbles tossed down by a child. Above her light glimmered, beckoning. With torn hands and bursting heart, she fought her way up and, filling the cave with the echoes of his voice, Dai Trouble came up steadily behind her. And where the light glimmered she knew there must be the tiny ledge that Chucky had told her of; and the two-hundred-foot drop. But she must go on; he was close behind her and there was no room for turning back.

Twenty feet. Fifteen feet… Her legs began to fail her, she was sick and dizzy, her throat and chest were rasped with the agony of her labouring breath. She felt his hand on the hem of her skirt, whisked the skirt away and stumbled on, but knew that in one moment he would be upon her again. Above her—ten feet, five feet—the blessed light; the will-o’-the-wisp that beckoned her out of the slime and the darkness that had once seemed comforting, into the light of day. Precipice or no precipice, she must get out of this horror of darkness into the clean light of day. The mouth of the corridor shone before her like a star.

And suddenly the star was blotted out. Up and up came the creature after her; and now, like a huge black crow, a figure stood in the mouth of the corridor of rocks and barred her way with outflung arms.

She could not turn back. Her failing legs, unbidden by failing consciousness, toiled on. Blinding light. The precipice, falling away beneath her tottering feet. And a man’s arms caught out at her and grasped her and flung her to the ground.

Neat and precise as ever in his horrid brown suit, Mr. Chucky looked down at her.

The edge of the precipice had crumbled away a little, and now formed a narrow ledge a few feet below the main cliff-top, jutting out over the perpendicular drop of the Tarren Goch; it was almost as though a builder’s wooden cradle had been slung on ropes over the edge of the cliff, and on to this cradle the corridor of rocks debouched. Mr. Chucky took her by the arm and hauled her to her feet. She could not look back at the dizzy drop to the foot of the precipice, but climbed up after him off the ledge and onto the rolling grassland of the mountain and away from the edge of the cliff. Dai Jones came up quietly after them and stood with Mr. Chucky looking down at her as, released, she fell again exhausted to the ground, and lay there sobbing and gasping on the rough brown grass. Mr. Chucky said, as though it were all the most natural incident in the world: “Well, well, then, Dai bach—playing a bit of hide and seek on the mountain, is it—you and Miss Jones.”

“Duw, duw! Miss Jones indeed!” said Dai, standing over her, anxiously shaking his head. Whatever will Miss Jones do next, his tone implied.

“Good thing I happened to be here, mun,” said Mr. Chucky quite reproachfully. “One step to the left when she come up out of those caves, and she’d have been over the edge. Just strolling over the mountain from the Neath road, I was. I like a bit of a walk now and then, for exercise sake, and I thought rather than take the old bus back into Pentre Trist I’d come back over the mountaintop. …”

Katinka sobbed exhausted on the rough grass. Her knees ached, her ankle was now one vast, throbbing, burning stab of agony, her hands were sore, her head swam, she was sick with fear and dread.

“I kept yelling to her to watch out,” said Dai. “She would go on.”

“What were you doing, both? I saw you running across the ridge and down to the bottom of the caves. Better stand here, I says to myself, in case they come popping out at the top, not thinking of the precipice. Not a bad thing I was there, mun; she’d have gone over sure as eggs!”

“Duw, duw!” said Dai Trouble, quite overcome at the thought of it.

“What were you doing, both—for goodness sake?”

“I caught her hanging round outside the place,” said Dai. “Supposed to be in her room, but outside and looking round. Mr. Carlyon doesn’t like that, Mr. Chucky, you know full well. I started off to tell her, but away she runs across the mountain like an old partridge. So I goes after her. And I must say,” said Dai, looking down at the prostrate Katinka, falling now into a more steady rhythm of breathing, “all my boyhood I played over this old mountain and up and down them caves, and I never met a gamer one, and her with her broken wing!” He squatted down beside her. “What were you so frightened of, Miss Jones, bach?”

“You chased me. …”

“I chased you because you ran away, girl.” He put out a square hand to her. “Come on, then. Better you and I go back to the house.”

But she shuddered away from it. “I’m not going back through that passage. I’m not going where there are snakes!”

Dai Trouble sat back on his heels and roared with laughter. “Snakes! Don’t you know that old boy’s trick for smoking a man out? Anyway,” he suggested to Mr. Chucky, standing there nonchalant and perfectly at ease in his too-brown suit and too-town shoes, up on the rough mountainside, “we can take her back along the ridge and down to the house that way.”

He kept his hand on her wrist, but she went with them docilely, her spirit broken. It was true that he had shouted after her; it might be true that he had cried a warning. Anyway, she wanted to believe it, she could not be bothered with terror any more. Hardly able to drag herself along, she followed them, limping along the top of the mountain, plunging down the side of it from above the house, breaking at last on to the beaten path up which a little while ago she had fled; scrunching across the gravelled space beneath the broken window and so into the suburban porchway, into the chocolate-coloured hall.

Something was standing in the hall. A halo of soft gold hair half veiled by a grey-green chiffon scarf; and where a face should have been, a round of flesh, white and bloated, seamed across like a sort of albino football, into innumerable patches—soft pink, dead white, waxy yellow, all prickled like a joint of pork with little yellow hairs. … A cobbled lump in the centre with two flaring holes for nostrils; two little pig-like pale blue eyes; and a round hole set with broken teeth, a hole that seemed sewn into the face, a patch torn from the face with the bleeding edges turned in and hemmed with dreadful cobbled stitches of wiry black thread. Something that stood slavering in the centre of the horrible, suffocating little brown hall, snuffling like a bulldog, peering into the mirror among the distended eyes of the wooden hatstand that stood out, snail-like, on their wooden stalks: grunting in terrible little choking sobs, advancing with animal bleatings, holding out a shrivelled white claw, dreadfully tipped with red. … In the doorways, on the stairs, with outstretched arms, Carlyon, Mrs. Love, Dai Trouble, Chucky, prisoned her in with it.

C
ARLYON STOOD BESIDE THE
wood fire, leaning against the cool, hideous, mottled marble mantelpiece, looking down at his toes. Katinka wept drearily on the horsehair sofa. He said at last: “Well—don’t break your heart over it. You couldn’t know.”

“If I hadn’t interfered…”

“If you hadn’t interfered, she wouldn’t have come down into the hall and looked into the mirror; if you hadn’t interfered, the shawl would still have hung across the mirror and she wouldn’t have seen…” He broke off. He said, with bitter sarcasm: “Never mind. Little things can’t touch her any more: she’s suffered too much. This is only a crown of thorns rammed down on top of her agony for good measure—too bad you couldn’t arrange for the blood to run down into her eyes and blind her before she looked into the glass!”

Katinka rocked her head on the pillow in an agony of repudiation. “How could I know? I didn’t understand. Do you mean that she had never—never seen herself in a glass before?”

“We tried not to let her,” said Carlyon. “She was—you see, she used to be very pretty; very pretty and gay and foolish—and a bride. We had been married just a few weeks when—the accident happened.”

It was like being stoned, a hail of blows coming from every direction—the agony of knowing that she had so unwittingly dealt out this suffering to a fellow creature, the agony of enduring Carlyon’s cold fury, the agony—the agony of knowing that Carlyon’s rainbow had not been for herself after all; that his “love at first sight” had been for this “very pretty, very gay and foolish” little bride. She blurted out: “It was terrible for you; ghastly and terrible. And of course you would be so very much in love with her…?”

“No,” said Carlyon. It seemed a necessity to him now to speak, to get it all out of himself in hard, bitter, hurtful words. “No. If anything were wanted to set the seal of horror on the whole thing, it was that I’d already found her out, I wasn’t in love with her any more. Not ‘found out,’ I don’t mean that, exactly.” He stared down miserably into the fire, and, having said so much, was forced into saying more. “She was—she was a chocolate-box—an exquisite chocolate-box tied up with pink ribbons. The chocolates were wonderful, every one was as sweet and sound and delicious as it could possibly be—God forbid that I should say one word against her, against the chocolate-box and the very best quality chocolates inside. But—well, a man can’t live on chocolates, a man begins to crave for bread and butter, good, solid bread and butter that’ll fill up his belly and stimulate his mind.” He looked at her sombrely. “I wonder if any woman can understand that?”

“I can,” said Katinka. Give a man good solid bread and butter to fill his stomach and satisfy his mind, and he sighed for chocolates and pink ribbon. She knew—she had been bread and butter to too many men.

But Carlyon, the apprentice in the confectioner’s shop, had made the most of what was, after all, not at all a bad job; had laughed and had fun and made love and gone tearing along in the beautiful big black Rolls—London, Paris, the South of France, thundering along the winding coast, up the twisting coils of the Grande Corniche. And taken his hand for a moment from the wheel, and mounted a bank and sent the car rolling over and over down into the chasm below—himself thrown out unharmed on the soft grass, and Angela… Angela was alive; but she had been better dead.