Laughter in the Dark (7 page)

“I sent you a letter this morning,” she said, settling down again and gazing at him curiously. “I reckoned you’d get it by the evening post and come to see me straightaway.”

“You didn’t!” cried Albinus.

“Of course, I did. And I can tell you exactly what it was I wrote: ‘Darling Albert, the wee nest is ready, and birdie is waiting for you. Only don’t hug me too hard, or you’ll turn your baby’s head more than ever.’ That’s about all.”

“Margot,” he whispered hoarsely, “Margot, what have you done? I left home before I could possibly get it. The postman … he doesn’t come until a quarter to eight. It’s now—”

“Well, that’s no fault of mine,” she said. “Really, you are hard to please. It was such a sweet letter.”

She shrugged her shoulders, picked up the book and turned her back to him. On the right-hand page was a photographic study of Greta Garbo.

Albinus found himself thinking: “How strange. A disaster occurs and still a man notices a picture.” Twenty minutes to eight. Margot lay there, her body curved and motionless, like a lizard.

“You’ve shattered …” he began at the top of his voice; but he did not end his sentence. He
ran out, rushed downstairs, jumped into a cab and while he sat on the very edge of the seat leaning forward (winning a few inches that way), he stared at the back of the driver and that back was hopeless.

He arrived, he jumped out, he paid as men do in films—blindly thrusting out a coin. By the garden-railing he saw the familiar figure of the gaunt, knock-kneed postman talking to the short stout hall-porter.

“Any letters for me?” asked Albinus breathlessly.

“I’ve just delivered them, sir,” answered the postman with a friendly grin.

Albinus looked up. The windows of his flat were brightly lit, all of them—an unusual thing. With a tremendous effort he entered the house and began to go upstairs. He reached the first landing—and the second. “Let me explain … A young artist in need … Not quite right in head, writes love letters to strangers.” … Nonsense—the game was up.

Before reaching his door, he suddenly turned round and rushed down again. A cat crossed the garden path and slipped nimbly between the iron bars.

Ten minutes later he was back in the room which he had entered so gaily a short while ago.
Margot was still curved on the couch in the same posture—a torpid lizard. The book was still open at the same page. Albinus sat down at a little distance from her and began to crack his finger joints.

“Don’t do that,” said Margot without raising her head.

He stopped, but soon began again.

“Well, has the letter come?”

“Oh, Margot,” he said, and cleared his throat several times. “Too late, too late,” he cried in a new shrill voice.

He rose, walked up and down the room, blew his nose and sat down on the chair again.

“She reads all my letters,” he said, gazing through a moist haze at the toe of his shoe and trying to fit it into the trembling pattern of the carpet.

“Well, you ought to have forbidden her to do that.”

“Margot, you don’t understand … It was always like that—a habit, a pleasure. Mislaid them sometimes before I had read them. There were all sorts of amusing letters. How could you do it? I can’t imagine what she’ll do now. If, by a miracle, just this once … perhaps she was busy with something … perhaps … No!”

“Well, mind you don’t show yourself when
she comes along here. I’ll see her alone, in the hall.”

“Who? When?” he asked, dully remembering the drunken hag he had seen—ages ago.

“When? Any moment, I suppose. She’s got my address now, hasn’t she?”

Albinus still failed to understand.

“Oh, that’s what you mean,” he muttered at last. “How silly you are, Margot! Believe me, that, at any rate, is utterly impossible. Anything else … but not that.”

“So much the better,” thought Margot, and suddenly she felt extremely elated. When she had sent off the letter she had anticipated a far more trivial consequence: he refuses to show it, wife gets wild, stamps, has a fit. So the first suspicions are roused and that eases the way. But now chance had helped her and the way was made clear at one stroke. She let the book slip to the floor and smiled as she looked at his downcast twitching face. It was time to act, she supposed.

Margot stretched herself out, was aware of a pleasant tingling in her slim body and said, gazing up at the ceiling, “Come here.”

He came, sat down on the edge of the couch and shook his head despondently.

“Kiss me,” she said, closing her eyes. “I’ll comfort you.”

B
ERLIN
-W
EST
, a morning in May. Men in white caps cleaning the street. Who are they who leave old patent leather boots in the gutter? Sparrows bustling about in the ivy. An electric milk van on fat tires rolling creamily. The sun dazzling in an attic window on the slope of a green-tiled roof. The young fresh air itself was not yet used to the hooting of the distant traffic; it gently took up the sounds and bore them along like something fragile and precious. In the front gardens the Persian lilac was in bloom. Despite the early coolness white butterflies were already fluttering about as though in a rustic garden. All these things surrounded Albinus as he walked out of the house in which he had spent the night.

He was conscious of a dull discomfort. He was hungry; he had neither shaved nor bathed; the touch of yesterday’s shirt against his skin was exasperating. He felt utterly spent—and no wonder.
This had been the night of which he had dreamed for years. The very way in which she had drawn her shoulder blades together and purred when he first kissed her downy back had told him that he would get exactly what he wanted, and what he wanted was not the chill of innocence. As in his most reckless visions, everything was permissible; a puritan’s love, priggish reserve, was less known in this new free world than white bears in Honolulu.

Her nudity was as natural as though she had long been wont to run along the shore of his dreams. There was something delightfully acrobatic about her bed manners. And afterward she would skip out and prance up and down the room, swinging her girlish hips and gnawing at a dry roll left over from supper.

She fell asleep quite suddenly, as though she had stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence, when the electric light was already turning a death-cell yellow and the window a ghostly blue. He made his way into the bathroom, but only a few drops of rust-colored water could be coaxed from the tap. He sighed, picked a dejected loofah out of the bath with two fingers, dropped it gingerly, examined the slippery pink soap and reflected that he must instruct Margot in the rules of cleanliness. His teeth chattering, he dressed;
spread the eiderdown over Margot, who was sweetly sleeping, kissed her warm, tousled dark hair, left a penciled note on the table and stepped softly out.

Now, as he strolled along in the mild sunshine, he realized that the reckoning was about to begin. When he saw again the house in which he had lived for so long with Elisabeth; when he went up in the lift in which the nurse with his baby in her arms, and his wife, looking very pale and happy, had gone up eight years before; when he stood before the door upon which his scholarly name gleamed sedately, Albinus was almost prepared to renounce any repetition of the previous night, if only a miracle had happened. He was sure that if Elisabeth had not read the letter, he would be able to explain his absence somehow—he might say he had tried, in jest, smoking opium at the rooms of that Japanese artist who had once come to dinner—that would be quite plausible.

But now he had to open this door, walk in and see … What would he see? … Would it not be best perhaps, not to enter at all—just to leave everything as it was, to desert, to vanish?

Suddenly he remembered how, during the War, he had forced himself not to stoop too much when leaving cover.

In the hall he stood motionless, listening. Not
a sound. Usually at this hour of the morning the flat was full of noises: somewhere water would be running, the nurse would be talking loudly to Irma, the maid rattling crockery in the dining room.… Not a sound! In the corner stood Elisabeth’s umbrella. He tried to find some comfort in that. All at once, as he stood there, Frieda, apronless, appeared from the passage, stared at him, and then said wretchedly:

“Oh, sir, they all went away last night.”

“Where?” asked Albinus, not looking at her.

She told him everything. She spoke fast and unusually loudly. Then she burst into tears as she took his hat and stick.

“Will you have some coffee?” she wailed.

The disorder in the bedroom told its tale. His wife’s evening gowns lay on the bed. One drawer of the chest was pulled out. The little portrait of his late father-in-law had vanished from the table. The corner of the rug was turned up.

Albinus turned it back and walked quietly to the study. Some opened letters lay on the desk. Ah, there it was—what childish handwriting! Bad spelling, bad spelling. An invitation for lunch from the Dreyers. How nice. A short letter from Rex. The dentist’s bill. Splendid.

Two hours later Paul appeared. I see he has
shaved himself clumsily. Crisscross on his plump cheek was some black sticking plaster.

“I’ve come for the things,” he said as he went by.

Albinus followed him, jingling coins in his trousers pocket and looked on in silence while he and Frieda hastily packed the trunk as though they were in a hurry to catch a train.

“Don’t forget the umbrella,” said Albinus vaguely.

Then he followed them again and the packing was repeated in the nursery. In the Fräulein’s room a portmanteau stood ready. They took that too.

“Paul, just a word,” murmured Albinus and he cleared his throat and went into the study. Paul came in and stood by the window.

“This is a tragedy,” said Albinus.

“Let me tell you one thing,” exclaimed Paul at length, staring out of the window. “It will be exceedingly lucky if Elisabeth survives the shock. She—”

He broke off. The black cross on his cheek went up and down.

“She’s like a dead woman, as it is. You have …You are … In fact, you’re a scoundrel, sir, an absolute scoundrel.”

“Aren’t you being rather rude?” said Albinus, trying to smile.

“It’s monstrous!” shouted Paul, looking at his brother-in-law for the first time. “Where did you pick her up? How did this prostitute dare to write to you?”

“Gently, gently,” said Albinus, and licked his lips.

“I’ll thrash you, I’m hanged if I don’t!” shouted Paul still louder.

“Remember Frieda,” muttered Albinus. “She can hear every word.”

“Will you give me an answer?”—and Paul tried to catch hold of the lapel of his coat, but Albinus with a sickly grin slapped him on the hand.

“I refuse to be cross-examined,” he whispered. “All this is extremely painful. Can’t you think it’s some dreadful misunderstanding? Suppose—”

“You’re lying!” roared Paul, thumping the floor with a chair, “you cad! I’ve just been to see her. A little harlot, who ought to be in a reformatory. I knew you’d lie, you cad. How could you do such a thing? This is not mere vice, it’s …”

“That’s enough,” Albinus interrupted almost inaudibly.

A motor lorry drove past; the window panes rattled slightly.

“Oh, Albert,” said Paul, in an unexpectedly calm and melancholy tone, “who would have thought it …”

He went out. Frieda was sobbing in the wings. Someone carried out the luggage. Then all was silent.

T
HAT
afternoon Albinus packed his suitcase and drove to Margot’s rooms. It had not been easy to persuade Frieda to remain in the empty flat, Finally she agreed when he proposed that her young man, a worthy police-sergeant, should occupy what had been the nurse’s bedroom. And if anyone rang up she was to say that Albinus had unexpectedly left for Italy with his family.

Margot received him coldly. That morning she had been roused by a fat irate gentleman who was looking for his brother-in-law; he had called her names. The cook, a particularly hefty woman, had pushed him out, thank goodness!

“This flat is really only meant for one person,” she said, glancing at Albinus’ suitcase.

“Oh, please,” he murmured miserably.

“Anyway there’s a lot of things we must talk about. I’ve no intention of listening to the insults of your idiotic relations”—and she walked up
and down the room in her red silk wrapper, her right hand at her left armpit, and puffed hard at a cigarette. With her dark hair falling over her brow she looked like a gypsy.

After tea she drove off to buy a gramophone. Why a gramophone? On this of all days … Utterly exhausted and with a splitting headache, Albinus lay on the sofa in the hideous drawing room and thought: “Something unspeakably awful has happened, but I’m really quite calm. Elisabeth’s swoon lasted twenty minutes, and then she screamed; probably it was terrible to hear her; and I’m quite calm. She is still my wife and I love her, and I shall, of course, shoot myself if she dies by my fault. I wonder how they explained to Irma the move to Paul’s flat and all the hurry and upset? It was disgusting the way Frieda described it: ‘and madam screamed, and madam screamed.’… Odd, because Elisabeth had never raised her voice before in her life.”

The next day, while Margot was out buying records, he wrote a long letter. In this he assured his wife quite sincerely, although maybe in too florid a style, that he treasured her as before, despite his little escapade “which has bruised our family happiness as the knife of a madman slashes a picture.” He wept, listened to make sure that Margot was not coming back and wrote on,
sobbing and muttering to himself. He begged his wife’s forgiveness, but his letter gave no indication as to whether he was prepared to give up his mistress.

He received no answer.

Then he realized that, if he was not to go on tormenting himself, he must erase the image of his family from his memory and abandon himself utterly to the fierce, almost morbid passion which Margot’s gay loveliness excited in him. She on her part was always ready to respond to his love-making; it only refreshed her; she was playful and without a care; the doctor had told her two years before that she could never have a child, and she regarded this as a boon and a blessing.