The Hours Before Dawn (12 page)

His own name hissing across the room like an escape of gas could hardly fail to attract Humphrey’s attention, and he looked round amiably.

‘Now, now, now!’ he chided. ‘What are you ladies saying about me? Nothing very flattering, I’ll be bound.’

‘No, dear,’ said his wife, also amiably. ‘We’re just saying what a fool you are. I’ve been telling Louise it’s no good asking you, because you never remember anything, but what we want to know is: When that Brandon woman asked you for the Hendersons’ address, whether it was her or Mark she asked you for it of?’

This sentence baffled Humphrey for a moment; but
experience
of the unseen translations of his first year students stood him in good stead, and he was soon able to reply:

‘Why, really, I simply can’t remember—’ And then, like a good soldier answering the call of duty, he roused himself to grin coyly at Louise:

‘Aha! Aha!’ he enunciated with scholarly precision. ‘So that’s the way the wind blows! The little lady thinks Hubby may have a secret! Could be, could be. Husbands
do
have their little secrets, don’t they, Bee? Now admit it!’

‘I never said they didn’t,’ said Beatrice impatiently. ‘I’m not accusing you of being faithful, only of being forgetful. Now, do try to
think
, Humphrey. What did she
say
? What words did she use? Did she say “The Hendersons”? Or did she say “Louise Henderson”? Or “Mark Henderson”?’

‘Well, now,’ said Humphrey, wrinkling his brows obligingly, though not as if he thought the smallest enlightenment would result. ‘When I think about it, I think she must have said “Mark.” Or “Mr,” was it? – not that that makes any difference. Yes, that’s what she said. Must have done, because I remember now it made me madly jealous to think that no sooner had she met me than she wanted the address of another man.’ He turned and challenged his wife, a trifle absent-mindedly: ‘Didn’t I come home seething with jealousy that evening? I’m simply asking you – didn’t I?’

‘Yes,’ agreed Beatrice equably, ‘but that was because Dr Wilcox had managed to get out of taking the Second Year seminar and you hadn’t. But are you
certain
that she said—’

Here Mrs Henderson senior, who had been following the conversation with the amused tolerance of a grown-up at a children’s tea-party, broke in with mock dismay:

‘Children, children! Why can’t you be more modern? Why can’t any of you be up-to-date? Though I’ve noticed before that
no one under fifty ever is – I suppose up-to-dateness takes all that time to learn. Between you, you seem to be trying to make a triangle out of this Mark-Louise-and-Violet-What’s-
her-name
— Oh, all right, Vera, then— Out of this situation.
A
triangle!
Don’t you know that Triangles are absolutely out?
Out
, I tell you. Like the Sack Look. Besides, Mark’s far too lazy to get into much trouble. Always has been.’

Beatrice surveyed her interrupter without amusement. She was not sure on whose side this outburst was supposed to be, but she was in no doubt about one thing – that it had broken the thread of what was promising to be a first-class story.

‘Well, you know Mark best, of course,’ she allowed
grudgingly
. ‘But all the same, I think it’s funny that she should have sought out Humphrey simply to ask him for an address that she couldn’t know that he knew—’

‘Who says it
was
simply to ask me for the address?’ began Humphrey indignantly; and simultaneously Mrs Henderson raised her hand beseechingly:

‘Please –
please!
Haven’t we been through it all enough? Why did who tell whom what about which – really, anyone would think we were investigating a murder—’

Everybody heard the front door slam. Suddenly,
thunderously
, as if it was intended to arouse the whole street. But it was only Louise who imagined that she had heard another noise first. The faintest, faintest shuffle of a sound … down the stairs … and across the hall…. It was only Louise who now trembled and felt her face grow stiff and expressionless as the loud, ostentatious footsteps sounded across the hall and towards the stairs. Now, now, if she only dared to grasp it, was her opportunity to confront Vera Brandon with Humphrey; to stand over her, as it were, demanding:
Why
did you ask him for our address?

To the surprise of her guests, she jumped to her feet and ran
to the door. Flinging it open, she called into the dim hall: ‘Come in, Miss Brandon; won’t you come in and meet some friends of mine?’

Was it her fancy that Miss Brandon did not look as if she had just come in from outside? In spite of her tweed coat, her hat and her little case, she did not have the cold, brisk look of a person who has just walked up a windy street; she had the look of a person who has been sitting, hunched in a chair, all day long….

‘I think you’ve met Dr Baxter before,’ said Louise clearly; and watched the two faces. For a moment, both were devoid of expression; and she blundered on: ‘Dr Baxter tells me it was he who gave you our address. I’d no idea. I thought you’d got it from our advertisement….’

She had not meant it to sound like an accusation. Strange how so slight a deviation from a conventional introduction should sound so ill-timed, so aggressive….

Miss Brandon was looking at Louise now with slightly raised brows and that painfully tolerant smile (‘You’ve committed a fearful gaffe,’ it seemed to say, ‘but I, with my superior poise, will do my best to cover up for you’). She held out her hand to Humphrey.

‘I’m afraid Mrs Henderson is mistaken,’ she said pleasantly. ‘That’s the trouble about having a namesake in my own field. It’s always leading to this sort of confusion. However, I’m delighted to meet you
now,
Dr Baxter.’ She gave him a distant, conventional smile, looking straight into his face. Louise looked up into his face, too, and watched it slowly growing red. Red from collar to hairline, from one greying temple to the other. Embarrassment? Humiliation at not being recognised? Or was there something more?

I
t was Michael’s sudden and opportune protest from upstairs that helped to tide over the moment of speechless
embarrassment
. Louise leapt thankfully to her feet, and left to her mother-in-law the task of reviving some sort of conversation. Mrs Henderson rose to the occasion with cheerful efficiency:

‘Nice to see you again, Miss Brandon,’ she said composedly. ‘Keeping busy as usual?’

‘Pretty busy,’ replied Miss Brandon, a little guardedly. ‘Term’s over, of course, but I do quite a lot of lecturing in the holidays. And then, I’ll be going abroad quite soon.’

Louise hovered in the doorway, hoping to hear more. Did Miss Brandon mean that she was leaving them altogether, or did she just mean she was going away for the Easter holidays? But before Miss Brandon could say anything more – if indeed she intended to do so – Beatrice had intervened:

‘Lucky you! Where are you going? We went to France last year, but everything was terribly expensive. We had to sleep out most of the time.’

‘But it cost more to sleep out in one of those châlets than if we’d stayed in the main hotel,’ objected Humphrey, his
discomfiture
of a few minutes earlier apparently forgotten. ‘The whole idea of the châlets—’

Louise smiled, and slipped out of the room. Poor Humphrey was always inadvertently frustrating his wife’s attempts to keep down with the Joneses, just as she was always frustrating his attempts to appear as a wolf. It was almost as if it was some game they were playing between them, neither of them aware of the rules, and yet both enjoying it. As she went up the stairs she could still hear Humphrey’s voice droning on about some meal they’d had in Paris. The wines and the sauces were
forming
a sort of bass accompaniment to Beatrice’s shrill claims to have lived on nothing but bread and sausage.

When Louise came back she was greeted by that sudden silence which meant that they had all been talking about her. Miss Brandon, she was thankful to see, was no longer there, and in her place sat Mark who had either condescended to reappear or else had been dragged out of the kitchen by some over-zealous guest. Probably the latter to judge by his expression of gloomy non-existence.

‘We’ve just been telling your husband how lucky he is,’ observed Beatrice brightly, but without evoking the faintest flicker of response from the glum figure in the armchair. ‘And,’ she essayed, hoping perhaps that this would sound more
plausible
: ‘We were saying what a lovely baby you have. What a pity we haven’t been able to see him this time.’

‘I’ll bring him down if you like, he isn’t asleep yet,’
threatened
Louise, which had the effect of rousing at least one of her guests to a sense of the passing of time. Mrs Henderson’s
headlong
departure was followed by the rather more leisurely withdrawal of Beatrice and Humphrey. This unhurried
manoeuvre
began at 10.45 in the sitting-room, with an account of Flora Curtis’ emigration to Australia (complete with her
chastened
return eighteen months later). It ended at the front gate, an hour later, with Sybil Pratt’s failure to run a mink farm in Berkshire. It was nearly midnight before the final details of
Lydia Carver’s miscarriage had faded on the night air, and Louise returned to the sitting-room. To her surprise, Mark was still there. He looked up as she came in, smiled not quite into her eyes, and then watched her face in an odd, strained sort of way, as if trying to learn something.

‘I’d never thought of you as a jealous woman, Louise,’ he suddenly jerked out, the clumsiness of both words and manner giving an aggressive quality to the situation which had not been there before. ‘I do think,’ he went on, gaining confidence as men do from the cleansing introduction of anger into any situation, ‘I do think that you might talk to
me
before you discuss our affairs with the whole neighbourhood. Haven’t
I
any right to know what you’re thinking?’

Louise stared. ‘What do you mean?’ she faltered, too sleepy to burst out with the anger that might have brought her close to him. ‘What do you mean? What have they all been saying?’

But she knew, of course, what they would all have been
saying
. Humphrey, with conscientious persistence, would have been labouring with untiring coyness at his thesis that Louise had been making enquiries about Vera Brandon because she suspected her of some past intrigue with Mark. Beatrice, in the interests of many a future telephone conversation with old school-fellows, would have been encouraging this point of view as much as (and probably more than) was decently possible. Mrs Henderson, with her airy and up-to-date reluctance to take her own child’s part about anything whatever, would have been displaying an absent-minded sympathy with her daughter-
in-law
which could only make matters worse. Altogether they would between them have given Mark the impression that she, Louise, had been making a jealous scene and accusing Mark, behind his back, of some sort of liaison with Vera Brandon. Perhaps, indeed, he had been imagining for some time that she was jealous – that she was resenting the classical interests that
Vera Brandon could share with him and that she, his wife, couldn’t. Perhaps, if it came to that, she
was
jealous. Not that she had ever felt jealous – she could not remember having felt anything about Mark’s tête-à-tête conversations with Miss Brandon other than the vague satisfaction that any wife feels when her husband is happily occupied with something that doesn’t spread glue or sawdust all over the sitting-room carpet. But don’t they say nowadays that what you think you feel doesn’t count for anything? In fact, if anything, it only goes to prove that you are really feeling the exact opposite. If you don’t feel jealous of another woman, it simply proves that
subconsciously
you are feeling so madly jealous of her that you just can’t face it. But surely there must be a limit to this theory somewhere? If you don’t feel interested in stamp collecting, or netball, or the annual rainfall in Turkestan, does it really prove that you are so desperately interested in these things that your conscious mind simply can’t face it …?

‘Louise! Can’t you
say
something? Don’t just stand there, as if you were asleep!’

Louise blinked. She
had
been nearly asleep, of course. She was nearly asleep most of the time nowadays. It would be no wonder if Mark
did
find some other woman better company.
Any
other woman. ‘What has she got that I haven’t got?’ ‘Just that she can stay awake while he speaks to her. Nothing else.’

Again Louise forced her eyes open. She was swaying a little as she stood, her elbow resting on the mantelpiece, and Mark’s figure looked huge and blurred; his voice sounded painfully loud.

‘It’s impossible to discuss anything with you!’ he seemed to be shouting. ‘Anyone would think you were half-witted!’ If there was anxiety as well as exasperation in his words, Louise did not hear it, and she made no attempt to recall him as he slammed out of the room. She only wanted to go to bed.
Wanted it so much that as she sank into the armchair in front of the fire, she half thought that she
had
gone to bed. That the light had been switched off, that all her tasks were over, that she was free to fall into a deep, deep sleep to last for hours – for days – for weeks….

At first it did not seem like a dream. It seemed more as if her thoughts were marshalling themselves with a brilliant, rational clarity which they never achieved in waking life. ‘Of course he is attracted by her,’ they began. ‘And that is why he is so annoyed when you keep on puzzling about who she is and where she has come from. She has come out of his past. That’s why he half remembered her at first. She has been searching and enquiring for him for years, and at last, through Humphrey, she has tracked him down. But for what? To start a new love affair? To blackmail him about an old one? Has she some hold over him? Was that why she was searching his desk last night – to get possession of some document with which she could threaten him? Or was she seeking some photograph – some love letter – with which to revive past memories – past obligations – past love?’

‘But she’s not attractive enough for that sort of thing.’ ‘Oh, but she is. Your busy, preoccupied daytime mind doesn’t see it, but your sleeping mind knows it well enough. By day you see her as a middle-aged schoolmarm; too intellectual – too
muscular
– too efficient for romance. But now, in the vividness of sleep, you know that her intellect is a feminine intellect; and if it has grown powerful through great learning, then its
femininity
has grown powerful too. Her big-boned body is strong indeed, but not with a masculine strength; rather with the strength of a tigress….’

A tigress. Why should Louise be thinking about tigers? There were no tigers here, in these narrow, shadowy streets. It was tiring, too, pushing the heavy pram. It confused her thoughts,
just when they had been growing so clear. What miles she had walked through these mean streets, for hours and hours, with never a break in the small, dull houses, and with never a soul passing by. It was growing dark, too, and her back was aching with the weight of the pram. No – not aching – what was this feeling? Right in the small of her back? She had never felt it before, but she recognised it quickly enough, for it was the most ancient feeling in the world – the feeling of the hunted. The feeling that warns you when eyes are watching from behind; when stealthy footsteps are following….

But you must not run. For the sake of your very life you must not run. Indeed you
cannot
run; the weight of the pram is like lead; the pavements are soft like dough, and the wheels sinking slowly in. The baby in the pram is screaming now; you cannot see his face because of this glaring redness before your eyes, you can only hear him. He is screaming – screaming – screaming….