Designs on Life (6 page)

Running upstairs, Margaret started calling, “Is anyone there?”

She thumped on each of the doors of the first floor flat.

There was no answer.

She tried the handle of the sitting-room. It was unlocked, as Paul Wragge’s rooms usually were, but the room inside was in darkness. Water was spouting somewhere in the room and from the kitchen beyond she could hear a swirling and splashing.

It was the same on the top floor, except that all the doors were locked and that it sounded as if it were raining everywhere. Turning, she ran downstairs again.

She was almost down to the ground floor when she heard a voice calling, “Mrs. Haddow! Mrs. Haddow!”

A long, pale face with pince-nez and carefully brushed, scanty grey hair was peering up at her over the banisters.

“Mrs. Haddow, whatever shall we do?” It was the tenant from the basement. He was a borough councillor, Chairman of the Baths and Cemeteries Committee, and his name was Ferdinand Shew. “It’s come through in my basement in three different places and soon everything’s going to be soaked. Soaked! Whatever shall we do?”

“I think the tank in the roof must have burst,” she said.

“Oh dear,” he said, “oh dear!” His eyes, of a yellowish brown, which might have been cat-like had they not been so vague, were full of apprehension. “Is Mr. Wragge in?”

“No, nor’s Mr. Boyle, and he’s left his flat all locked up, so we can’t go up to the loft to see if there’s anything we could turn off.”

“How like him. How like him always to be inconsiderate!”

“D’you know where the main tap is, Mr. Shew?”

“No—no, I don’t. But come downstairs, Mrs. Haddow, come down to my basement and see how terrible it is. If it goes on, everything’s going to be ruined.”

She went downstairs with him to the fussily, lacily over-furnished flat where the councillor lived with his housekeeper, Miss Pattison.

Standing in his small hall, a tall, drooping figure in bedroom slippers, he flapped his hands at the runnels of water down his walls, at the pools at his feet. He had placed buckets and basins to catch as much as he could, but the pools were extending over the floor.

“Look, it’ll get into the sitting-room soon,” he said, “and then it’ll ruin things,
ruin
them. I wonder what we can do. I wonder, if you took a mop and I took another, whether perhaps we could stem it. And my poor Miss Pattison’s in bed with bronchitis, you know. I’ve been spending the afternoon so peacefully, reading to her.”

Margaret replied, “I’ve my own puddles to think about.”

“But
look
how it’s pouring down! And I can’t disturb poor Miss Pattison. Just look at it!”

“Isn’t there a main tap somewhere down here?” she asked. “There usually is in the basement.”

“There
is
a tap of some sort in the coal-cellar,” he said. “D’you think that’d be it? I’ve never turned it on or off, that I can remember, but perhaps I might try. We couldn’t make things any worse, could we?”

“Not much,” Margaret agreed.

“Very well, I’ll try.” He disappeared through one of the doors.

In a moment he was back.

“There,” he said, looking round hopefully at the water that poured with ever increasing force. “Is that any better?”

“It wouldn’t get better for some time,” Margaret said.

“How awful it is,” he said, “how truly awful.”

“The next thing,” Margaret said, “is to try to get hold of a plumber. D’you know one? I’ll go for him—though with the thousands of burst pipes there probably are everywhere, I don’t suppose we’ll be able to get one.”

“Why doesn’t Mr. Boyle come home, or Mr. Wragge, or your husband?” moaned Mr. Shew. “Look, Mrs. Haddow, here’s a cloth. D’you think you could start mopping up? Look, if you could mop up over there, so that it doesn’t spread into the sitting-room …”

She said briskly, “Michael won’t be home for another couple of hours. And I’m going for a plumber.”

“Oh no,
I’ll
go for a plumber.” He thrust the cloth into her hand. “I couldn’t dream of letting you go out at this time of night. I’ll go at once. And if only you’d mop up a little … You know, it really is like Mr. Boyle to leave things locked up. He’s always inconsiderate. And I’m always doing little things to oblige him, but he’s most rude and unappreciative—most.”

“His place must be in a far worse state than ours.” She had stooped and was mopping at the edge of a pool, but it was growing far faster than she could diminish it.

“Perhaps we might be able to get in upstairs somehow,” he said, standing watching her. “Suppose I go up and try.” Suddenly he gave a giggle. “You know, this is really very amusing. I dare say if we could see ourselves … Now, I think I’ll just go up and see if I can get in upstairs somehow. I think that’s the best thing to do.”

She watched him go, then with an irritated gesture, flung down the mop and followed him.

He was saying, “ ‘If seven maids with seven mops …’ D’you know, Mrs. Haddow, I think it’s coming through in your sitting-room too?”

He was right.

“And it’s just occurred to me,” he went on, “that we ought to turn off the lights, or they’ll be going anyhow. Just a minute, I’ve got a torch downstairs. I’ll fetch it. There!” Suddenly the hall was in darkness. “I knew that would happen. Just a moment. I’ll get my torch.”

He disappeared down the stairs again.

When he returned at last with the torch, Margaret said, “I wish you’d go for that plumber.”

“I’m going, I’m going immediately.” He started up the stairs.

Muttering, “It’s no good whatever,” she followed him.

Though Margaret had left all the lights on the staircase burning, it was dark now all the way up. The sound of water pouring through the house was like rain in a forest. The torch cut into the darkness with a long cone of light. They went on up the stairs.

They were almost at the top landing when Mr. Shew exclaimed, “That was my bell ringing. Didn’t you hear it?”

“I didn’t hear anything,” she said.

“I’m sure it was,” he said. “Someone at the door. I’d better go down, or Miss Pattison will be getting out of bed to answer it. I can’t allow that. It might set her back seriously. You can’t think how inconvenient for me it is when she’s ill in bed.”

Taking the torch with him, he plunged down into the darkness.

Margaret sighed. She stayed where she was, about three steps from the top of the staircase. Her feet were cold inside her soaked slippers. Her hands, encountering dampness whatever they touched, were numb.

There was something uncanny about standing there in that drenched darkness. She started shivering, and it was not all because of the cold. The darkness was so deep, the spouting of all that water around her so unnatural. After about five minutes it was suddenly too much for her. She turned and ran downstairs.

Between the two upper floors there was a half-landing. It was as she reached this that Margaret fell. She did not hurt herself much. Had her weight been flung to the left, the fall might have been a serious one, but it was flung to the right, and instead of toppling down the rest of the flight, she merely bruised her shoulder against the door of a cupboard that opened on to the small landing. Sliding to the floor in front of it, she felt a gush of water full in her face.

The ice-cold water made her disregard the question of how much she was hurt. Scrambling to her feet, she dashed the water from her eyes and hurried on downwards. Ferdinand Shew was back in the hall, putting a package on the shelf by the front door.

“I don’t want to complain,” he said in a voice shrill with exasperation. “I don’t like to disoblige anybody. But that man Boyle has no sense of proportion in the way he imposes on one. He has no thought for others at all. I’ve just taken in a bottle of whisky for him. Whisky! And he’d had the impertinence to tell them at the shop to take it round to my door because he knew he wouldn’t be there to take it in himself. I take his laundry in for him every Friday and put it on the shelf there. Every afternoon of my life I take in his loaf of bread. Why, I should like to know,
why
should I have to come upstairs every afternoon with his loaf of bread? And I pay for all those things too. I’ve just paid nearly five pounds for this whisky. I don’t mean he doesn’t pay me back—he does, of course—but it’s so selfish of him, so utterly selfish, to assume he can make use of me like that. And then he leaves his door locked and doesn’t come home just when he might be useful.”

“Mr. Shew, are you going for that plumber?” Margaret asked; rubbing the shoulder that had hit the door.

“I’m going,” he said, “immediately, immediately.”

“If you don’t, I will.”

“I’m going, I’m going.”

But before it was possible for him to go in search of a plumber, he had to put on a mackintosh and cap and find his umbrella, though the evening outside the house was fine. Margaret went halfway down the stairs into his basement to make sure that he actually set off. The floor of his little hall was a-swim now. His lights, however, were still burning.

Looking up at her, he tittered.

“You look just like the boy who stood on the burning deck,” he said. “I wonder, while I’m gone, couldn’t you just try mopping up a little? Just a little. Just to stop it spreading into the sitting-room.”

Wearily she came downstairs and picked up the mop.

It was as she came into the light that Ferdinand Shew, giving a shrill cry, snatched up one of her hands and exclaimed, “Why, look, Mrs. Haddow, you’ve hurt yourself!”

“I fell,” she said, “but I didn’t hurt myself much.”

“But you’re bleeding.”

Margaret pulled her hand away from him and looked at it.

“And on your trousers,” he said, pointing.

“But I didn’t feel anything,” Margaret said.

Yet there was blood on her hands and a long red stain down the side of her slacks.

“I’m
not
hurt,” she said. “There’s nothing, not a scratch. I bruised my shoulder, but …”

She stopped. She lifted her eyes. Slowly they sought those of the councillor.

“Do you think … ?” she began.

He was still looking at her hand, at the narrow line of red that was drying round the edge of her fingernail.

“Do you think perhaps,” she said, “that we ought to go and see … ?”

But she stopped again. There was a curious constriction about her mouth.

“I fell,” she managed to say in a whisper,
“on that half-landing.”

“I’ll go for the plumber
and
the police,” Councillor Shew said when they had seen what the cupboard on the half-landing contained.

At last he seemed in a hurry.

Reminding Margaret that she was not alone in the house—there was Miss Patdson in the basement—he gave her the torch and darted off down the slushy pavement. Margaret went to her sitting-room. Water was pouring into it, the carpet soaking up the pools. The light was still on there, but her gaze saw nothing of the spoiled and streaming walls. As she perched uneasily on the arm of an easy chair, the sensation that gripped her was unlike anything that she had ever experienced. Mr. Shew had told her that for safety she ought to turn off the lights, but nothing, no command, no caution, could have made her reach for the switch.

But she had been sitting there only a few minutes when the light above her head went out. Water came trickling down the cord itself.

Suddenly there was a tearing sound and a crash. Margaret leapt about a yard from where she was sitting. A lump of the ceiling had fallen just beside her chair. As she fled to the doorway, another heavy chunk of plaster came down. Margaret leant against the doorpost. She stuffed her fingers into her mouth, bit into them, almost choked herself with them, while her whole body shuddered.

Gradually the danger of the scream that had almost burst from her receded. All at once she was steady, decided, certain of what she wanted to do.

She went into the kitchen. Rummaging through a drawer, using the torch, she picked out a knife with a long, thin, flexible blade. She went upstairs. Before she came to the half-landing, she was trembling again, but she managed to pass the closed cupboard door and went on to the door of Mr. Boyle’s sitting-room, slid the point of the knife in beside the spring lock and did her best to break into his flat.

Because the door was only an old attic door, fitting very loosely, she succeeded.

Mr. Boyle’s sitting-room was not as wet as might have been expected. The floor was swimming, but it was through the kitchen ceiling that most of the water was pouring down. Following the beam of the torch, she picked her way amongst the chairs, ashtrays and newspapers into the kitchen. Here she found an untidy litter of about three days’ dirty dishes. There was food on the table, a half-empty bottle of milk, a butter-dish, some rashers of bacon, a loaf of sliced bread in a paper wrapper, a jar of marmalade. Everything was drenched in water. The most concentrated stream came from a crack at one corner of the trap-door that led up into the loft.

When she saw that, Margaret gave up. She did not know what deluge might fall upon her if she moved the trap-door. But the expedition had at least distracted her. For a few minutes she had almost forgotten that she shared a solitude with that battered thing in the landing cupboard.

When Mr. Shew returned, coming up from the basement and tapping on the door of her bedroom, where she had taken refuge because as yet no water was leaking into it, he told her that the police would be there immediately, the plumber shortly.

“Mr. Shew,” Margaret said, standing steaming in front of the gas fire, “have you ever seen that—that man upstairs before?”

“Never in my life.”

“I have.”

His eyebrows popped up above the rims of his pince-nez.

She nodded grimly. “Yes, going upstairs with Mrs. Wragge.”

“What, before … ?”

“Yes, before she left Mr. Wragge.”

“Of course, of course.” There was an excited gleam in the yellowish eyes. “Well, the police will see to that, no doubt.”

“Mr. Shew …” She was speaking slowly, thinking between the words. “When I went upstairs the first time … the lights were still on… . I’m sure… . I’m absolutely certain … there wasn’t any blood on the landing then.”