The Fallen Curtain (12 page)

She sat down, drew her chair to the mirror.

“Where’s my handbag?” Merle screamed. “I left my handbag here! Someone’s stolen my handbag. Daphne, Daphne, someone’s stolen my handbag!”

  The oyster satin sofa sagged under Merle’s weight. Daphne smoothed back the golden curls and put another pad of cottonwool soaked in cologne on the red corrugated forehead.

“Bit better now?”

“I’m quite all right. I’m not one of your neurotic women to get into a state over a thing like that. Thank God I’d left my spare key with the porter and I hadn’t locked the mortice.”

“You’ll have to have both locks changed, Merle.”

“Of course I will, eventually. I’ll see to it next week. Nobody can get in here, can they? They don’t know who I am. I mean, they don’t know whose keys they’ve got.”

“They’ve got your handbag.”

“Daphne dear, I do wish you wouldn’t keep stating the obvious.
I know they have got my handbag.
The point is, there was nothing in my handbag to show who I am.”

“There was your cheque book with your name on it.”

“My name, dear, in case it’s escaped your notice, is M. Smith. I haven’t gone about changing it all my life like you.” Merle sat up and took a gulp of walnut-brown sherry. “The store manager was charming, wasn’t he, and the police? I daresay they’ll find it, you know. It’s a most distinctive handbag, not like that great black thing you cart about with you. My little red one could have gone inside yours. I wish I’d thought to put it there.”

“I wish you had,” said Daphne.

  Daphne’s phone rang. It was half past nine and she was finishing her breakfast, sitting in front of her little electric fire.

Merle sounded very excited. “What do you think? Isn’t it marvellous? The store manager’s just phoned to say they’ve found my bag. Well, it wasn’t him, it was his secretary, stupid-sounding woman with one of those put-on accents. However,
that’s no concern of mine. They found my bag fallen down behind a radiator in that cloakroom. Isn’t it an absolute miracle? Of course the money had gone, but my cheque book was there and the keys. I’m very glad I didn’t take your advice and change those locks yesterday. It never does to act on impulse, Daphne.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“I’ve arranged to go down and collect my bag at eleven. As soon as I ring off, I’m going to phone for a taxi and I want you to come with me, dear. I’ll have a bath and see to my plants—I’ve managed to catch a bluebottle for Venus—and then the taxi will be here.”

“I’m afraid I can’t come,” said Daphne.

“Why on earth not?”

Daphne hesitated. Then she said, “I said I hardly know anybody in London but I do know this one man, this—well, he was a friend of my second husband, and he’s a widower now and he’s coming to lunch with me, Merle. He’s coming at twelve and I must be here to see to things.”

“A
man?”
said Merle.
“Another
man?”

“I’ll look out for your taxi and when I see you come in I’ll just pop up and hear all about it, shall I? I’m sorry I can’t…”

“Sorry? Sorry for what? I can collect my handbag by myself. I’m quite used to standing on my own feet.” The receiver went down with a crash.

Merle had a bath and put on the orange dress. It was rather showy for day wear with its sequins and its fringes, but she could never bear to have a new dress and not wear it at once. The ocelot coat would cover most of it. She watered the peperomias and painted a little leaf gloss on the ivy. The bluebottle had died in the night, but
Dionaea muscipula
didn’t seem to mind. She opened her orange strandy mouths for Merle and devoured the dead bluebottle along with the shreds of fillet steak.

Merle put on her cream silk turban and a long scarf of flame-coloured silk. Her spare mortice key was where she always kept it, underneath the sanseveria pot. She locked the Yale and
the mortice and then the taxi took her to the store. Merle sailed into the manager’s office, and when the manager told her he had no secretary, had never phoned her flat, and had certainly not found her handbag, she deflated like a fat orange balloon into which someone has stuck a pin.

“You’ve been the victim of a hoax, Miss Smith.”

Merle pulled herself together. She could always do that, she had superb control. She didn’t want aspirins or brandy or policemen or any of the other aids to quietude offered by the manager. When she had told him he didn’t know his job, that if there was a conspiracy against her—as she was sure there must be—he was in it, she floundered down the stairs and flapped her mouth and her arms for a taxi.

When she got home the first thing that struck her as strange was that the door was only locked on the Yale. She could have sworn she had locked it on the mortice too, but no doubt her memory was playing her tricks—and no wonder, the shock she had had. There was a little bit of earth on the hall carpet. Merle didn’t like that, earth on her gold Wilton. Inside her ocelot she was sweating. She took off her coat and opened the drawing-room door.

  Daphne saw the taxi come and Merle bounce out of it, an orange orchid springing from a black bandbox. Merle looked wild with excitement, her turban all askew. Daphne smiled to herself and shook her head. She laid the table and finished making the salad she knew her friend would like with his lunch, and then she went upstairs to see Merle.

There was a mirror on each landing. Daphne was so small and thin that she didn’t puff much when she had to climb stairs. As she came to the top of each flight she saw a little grey woman trotting to meet her, a woman with smooth white hair and large, rather diffident grey eyes, who wore a grey wool dress partly covered by a cloudy stole of lace. She smiled at her reflection. She was old now but she had had her moments, her joy, her gratification, her intense pleasures. And soon there was to be a new pleasure, a confrontation she had looked forward
to for weeks. Who could tell what would come of it? With a last smile at her grey and fluttery image, Daphne pushed open the unlatched door of Merle’s flat.

  In the Garden of Eden, the green paradisal bower, someone had dropped a bomb. No, they couldn’t have done that, for the ceiling was still there and the carpet and the oyster satin furniture, torn now and plastered all over with earth. Every plant had been broken and torn apart. Leaves lay scattered in heaps like the leaves of autumn, only these were green, succulent, bruised. In the rape of the room, in the midst of ripped foliage, stems bleeding sap, shards of china, lay the Venus’ Fly-trap, its roots wrenched from their pot and its mouths closed for ever.

Merle tried to scream but the noise came out only as a gurgle, the glug-glug agonised gasp of a scream in a nightmare. She fell on her knees and crawled about. Choking and muttering, she scrabbled among the earth and, picking up torn leaves, tried to piece them together like bits of a jigsaw puzzle. She crouched over the Fly-trap and nursed it in her hands, keening and swaying to and fro.

She didn’t hear the door click shut. It was a long time before she realised Daphne was standing over her, silent, looking down. Merle lifted her red, streaming face. Daphne had her hand over her mouth, the hand with the two wedding rings on it. Merle thought Daphne must be covering her mouth to stop herself from laughing out loud.

Slowly, heavily, she got up. Her long orange scarf was in her hands, stretched taut, twisting, twisting. She was surprised how steady her voice was, how level and sane.

“You did it,” she said. “You did it. You stole my handbag and took my keys and got me out of here and came in and did it.”

Daphne quivered and shook her head. Her whole body shook and her hand flapped against her mouth. Quite whom Merle began to talk to then she didn’t know, to herself or to Daphne, but she knew that what she said was true.

“You were so jealous! You’d had nothing, but I’d had success and happiness and love.” Her voice went up and the scarf with
it. “How you hated me, hated, hated … !” Merle screamed. “Hate, hate, poisonous jealous hate!” Huge and red and frondy, she descended on Daphne, engulfing her with musky orange petals, twisting the scarf round the frail insect neck, devouring the fly until the fly quivered into stillness.

  An elderly man in a black homburg hat crossed the forecourt and went up the steps, a bunch of flowers in his hand. The boy in the leather jacket took no notice of him. He blushed earth and bits of leaf off his hands and said to the girl with the long hair, “Revenge is sweet.” Then he tossed the scarlet handbag into the back of his car and he and the girl and the dog got in and drove away.

The girl was hanging by her hands from the railings of a balcony. The balcony was on the twelfth floor of the high-rise block next to his. His flat was on the ninth floor and he had to look up to see her. It was half past six in the morning. He had been awakened by the sound of an aircraft flying dangerously low overhead, and had got out of bed to look. His sleepy gaze, descending from the blue sky, which was empty of clouds, empty of anything but the bright vanishing arrow of the aircraft, alighted—at first with disbelief—on the hanging figure.

He really thought he must be dreaming, for this sunrise time was the hour for dreams. Then, when he knew he wasn’t, he decided it must be a stunt. This was to be a scene in a film. There were cameramen down there, a whole film unit, and all the correct safety precautions had been taken. Probably the girl wasn’t even a real girl, but a dummy. He opened the window and looked down. The car park, paved courts, grass spaces between the blocks, all were deserted. On the balcony rail one of the dummy’s hands moved, clutching its anchorage more tightly, more desperately. He had to believe then what was obviously happening—unbelievable only because melodrama, though a frequent constituent of real life, always is. The girl was trying to kill herself. She had lost her nerve and now was trying to stay alive. All these thoughts and conclusions of his occupied about thirty seconds. Then he acted. He picked up the phone and dialled the emergency number for the police.

The arrival of the police cars and the ultimate rescue of the girl became the focus of gossip and speculation for the tenants of the two blocks. Someone found out that it was he who had alerted the police and he became an unwilling hero. He was a modest, quiet young man, and, disliking this limelight, was relieved when the talk began to die away, when the novelty of it wore off, and he was able to enter and leave his flat without
being pointed at as a kind of Saint George and sometimes even congratulated.

About a fortnight after that morning of melodrama, he was getting ready to go to the theatre, just putting on his overcoat, when the doorbell rang. He didn’t recognise the girl who stood outside. He had never seen her face.

She said, “I’m Lydia Simpson. You saved my life. I’ve come to thank you.”

His embarrassment was acute. “You shouldn’t have,” he said with a nervous smile. “You really shouldn’t. That’s not necessary. I only did what anyone would have done.”

She was calm and tranquil, not at all his idea of a failed suicide. “But no one else did,” she said.

“Won’t you come in? Have a drink or something?”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t think of it. I can see you’re just going out. I only wanted to say thank you very, very much.”

“It was nothing.”

“Nothing to save someone’s life? I’ll always be grateful to you.”

He wished she would either come in or go away. If this went on much longer the people in the other two flats on his floor would hear, would come out, and another of those bravest-deeds-of-the-year committee meetings would be convened. “Nothing at all,” he said desperately. “Really, I’ve almost forgotten it.”

“I shall never forget, never.”

Her manner, calm yet intense, made him feel uncomfortable and he watched her retreat into the lift—smiling pensively—with profound relief. Luckily, they weren’t likely to meet again. The curious thing was that they did, the next morning at the bus stop. She didn’t refer again to his saving of her life, but talked instead about her new job, the reason for her being at this bus stop, at this hour. It appeared that her employers had offices in the City street next to his own and were clients of his own firm. They travelled to work together. He left her with very different feelings from those of the evening before. It was hard to believe she was thirty—his neighbours had
given him this information—for she looked much younger, small and fragile as she was, her skin very white and her hair very fair.

They got into the habit of travelling on that bus together in the mornings, and sometimes she waved to him from her balcony. One evening they met by chance outside her office. She was carrying an armful of files to work on at home and confessed she wouldn’t have brought them if she had known how heavy they were. Of course he carried them for her all the way up to her flat and stayed for a drink. She said she was going to cook dinner and would he stay for that too? He stayed. While she was out in the kitchen he took his drink out on to the balcony. It gave him a strange feeling, imagining her coming out here in her despair at dawn, lowering herself from those railings, then losing her nerve, beneath her a great space with death at the bottom of it. When she came back into the room, he noticed afresh how slight and frail she was, how in need of protection.

The flat was neat and spotlessly clean. Most of the girls he knew lived in semi-squalor. Liberated, independent creatures, holding down men’s jobs, they scorned womanly skills as debasing. He had been carefully brought up by a houseproud mother and he liked a clean home. Lydia’s furniture was beautifully polished. He thought that if he were ever asked again he would remember to bring her flowers to go in those sparkling glass vases.

After dinner, an excellent, even elaborate meal, he said suddenly, the food and drink lowering his inhibitions, “Why did you do it?”

“Try to kill myself?” She spoke softly and evenly, as serenely as if he had asked why she changed her job. “I was engaged and he left me for someone else. There didn’t seem much to live for.”

“Are you over that now?”