The Hours Before Dawn (9 page)

‘I thought he might as well walk over with me,’ explained Mrs Hooper hastily. ‘It’s such a nice evening. And, although my sister is so
very
fond of the children …’

‘She meant that her sister has refused to stay in the house another night unless Tony is kept out of her way for a bit!’
giggled
Louise, as she and Mark hurried to the bus-stop, suddenly carefree in the evening light. ‘That must be why she agreed to come to us this evening, so she could bring Tony with her. She daren’t risk him annoying her sister so much that she leaves before the Sunbather’s Week-end. Else she’ll have to take the children to it with her.’

‘I should have thought she’d want to take them,’ said Mark; ‘surely sunbathing is Natural, and Progressive, and all the things she approves of for them?’

‘Oh yes – it is,’ agreed Louise. ‘But she’d have to look after them, you see. She likes her children to be progressive in all the ways that don’t involve actually having them with her – look, shouldn’t we wait for a 196? The trolley-bus only goes as far as the station.’

But the one who doesn’t mind a half-mile walk is always in a stronger moral position than the one who does; and so Louise stepped meekly on to the trolley-bus behind her husband,
wishing
that her only pair of high-heeled sandals were smart enough to justify the discomfort they were causing. There is no proverb to comfort the woman who suffers and yet fails to be beautiful.

Mark had said that the film was one which Louise would enjoy; and before the end of it she knew that he was right. Not that she had managed to keep her eyes open for more than the first quarter of an hour – to sit on a comfortable seat in a
darkened
room with nobody asking her any questions was more than she had ever hoped to withstand. And yet, as she dozed guiltily in this unwonted peace and comfort, something of the film seemed to get through to her. Perhaps the mind, half
sleeping
, becomes receptive in some way to impressions that in full consciousness would be beyond its reach. Perhaps the emotions of the people sitting near were strong enough to act directly on
such a mind – all these hundreds of people, each experiencing the same skilfully-engendered emotion at the same skilfully gauged moment – did it add up to an emotion multiplied in power by hundreds? That would be powerful indeed – a
terrifying
power – no wonder if a sleeping mind should absorb it, just as a sleeping body can become tanned by the rays of the sun without ever being conscious of their warmth. No wonder that Louise, in her half-sleep, should be able to follow without
conscious
thought the story of the film. Should feel the mystery – the mounting tension – the impending tragedy – the tense, terrifying climax….

But where was the happy ending? Louise blinked, started up in her seat. But it was all right. There were the hero and heroine, alive and well, and just limbering up for that final kiss which one has learned to accept as a shorthand note for a
chapter
explaining that after that everything was all right for everybody. But why had the mass-telepathy broken off at just that point? Why were the deeper layers of Louise’s mind still pulsating in the midst of the unresolved climax? Why had the feelings of relief in all those hundreds of minds failed to break through?

Or had the telepathy, if such it was, come to her not from hundreds of minds, but from one mind? A mind fixed not on the film, but on Louise; a mind that followed her day and night, waking or sleeping; a mind that never rested, that could
contemplate
no happy ending; a mind that could look forward as far as the climax of fear and hatred, but could look no further …?

‘Louise! My dear! Fancy meeting you here! Do let’s go
somewhere
for some coffee, and have a real good talk.’

Louise had scarcely noticed that the film was over and that she and Mark were already making their way up the crowded gangway. For a moment she stared stupidly into the pleasant, eager face with the frame of fuzzy honey-coloured hair that
hadn’t changed since the days of the Upper Fourth…. Then: ‘Beatrice!’ she exclaimed, ‘how nice. Why, yes, we’d love to. Where – is Humphrey with you?’

‘Oh yes. That is, I’ve lost him for the moment – Oh, here he is.’ Beatrice turned as they reached the foyer, and a stooping, intellectual figure with greying hair extricated itself from the crowd and hurried towards them.

‘Ha!’ exclaimed Humphrey triumphantly as he caught up with his wife. ‘I
thought
you’d be on the watch for me. She watches me like a spider,’ he added happily, addressing himself to Louise. ‘She knows there was a nice little blonde just behind, and she won’t take her eyes off me!’

Unfortunately for the success of this remark, Humphrey’s wife had already taken her eyes off him to the extent of
disappearing
among the crowds that were surging out on to the rainy pavement; and by the time they found her again (which took some time, since both husband and wife held the theory that the best way to find someone lost in a crowd was to stand stock still and wait for
them
to find
you
) the little blonde was lost beyond recall. Louise felt sorry for Humphrey. Not because he had lost the little blonde – about that, she felt sure, he cared nothing whatever – but because he had lost the opportunity of keeping her in the conversation. Humphrey’s real interests, she felt fairly sure, were restricted to his car, his work at the University and the installing of gimcrack improvements in his ugly but comfortable home in Acton; but in company he always felt it a social duty to display an unselective and non-stop interest in the opposite sex. He wouldn’t be seen out without it, just as another type of man won’t be seen out without a rolled umbrella.

‘And how is the lovely Louise?’ he enquired, with
painstaking
archness, as the party settled themselves on stools in the crowded milkbar. ‘Lovelier than ever, eh? I’ll be getting myself
into trouble, won’t I?’ he added hopefully, glancing at Beatrice. ‘Shouldn’t say that sort of thing with the wife listening—’

But unhappily the wife wasn’t listening. She was hunting about in her handbag for a letter from an old school friend; and soon she was reading Louise extracts about someone called Muriel.

Muriel? Muriel? Am I supposed to have heard of her? And why is it so surprising that she should be living in Bristol …?

At this point Beatrice seemed to sense that her hearer was not quite appreciating the story; for she abruptly laid down the letter.

‘But of course!’ she exclaimed. ‘How silly of me! It’s such ages since I’ve seen you, I was quite forgetting: I don’t suppose you’ve even heard that Muriel was divorced?’

Nor that she was married, either, reflected Louise resignedly. Nor born, for that matter. She sipped her coffee uneasily; but before she was forced to admit her utter ignorance of all
concerning
the erratic Muriel, Beatrice fortunately began to follow up her second thread:

‘Yes, it must be months since I’ve seen you,’ she was saying. ‘You weren’t at the Fergussons’ Christmas party, I know. And we get about so little now that we’ve given up the car…. And then you know what it is with a house to run. All the washing, and the cleaning….’

‘But Mrs Groves does all that, surely, Bee?’ interrupted Humphrey in tactless bewilderment. He could never remember that his wife, while enjoying the leisure afforded by a full-time daily help, wished also to enjoy a picture of herself as a heroic, overworked housewife struggling to make ends meet. She frowned at her obtuse partner, and Louise hastened to change the subject.

‘It’s not
so
long since I saw you,’ she said. ‘Don’t you
remember
, you came to see me in hospital when Michael was born? You
and Humphrey both came, and brought me some marvellous peaches—’

At the sound of his own name Humphrey, drooping over the coffee that he feared would keep him awake tonight, brightened up again:

‘Shall I ever forget!’ he exclaimed, groaning in mock dismay. ‘A
maternity
hospital! And all the nurses staring at me, wondering which baby
I
was the father of! They looked terribly suspicious!’

Louise could not help smiling as she thought of the busy,
preoccupied
nurses bustling past poor Humphrey without a glance; and she changed the subject quickly, even at the risk of being landed with Muriel again:

‘How’s Eva?’ she asked. And Rhoda. And Alison. And the Heathcote twins. It was agreed that it was dreadful the way one lost touch with old friends; it was agreed, too, that the
reason
was that one was Too Busy. It struck Louise that most of the imperfections of life nowadays are attributed to being Too Busy, just as they were once attributed to the Will of God….

‘Which reminds me,’ said Beatrice suddenly – and it took Louise a moment to realise that Beatrice was not referring to the Will of God, but to some independent train of thought of her own: ‘That reminds me – Did that woman ever get in touch with you?’

‘What woman?’ Louise was guarded. ‘Do you mean the Old Girls?’ she added suspiciously. Even when you hadn’t belonged for years and years, the Old Girls always managed to track you down when it came to Appeals. New Wings; Enlarged Libraries; Another Hard Tennis Court; they loomed menacingly for a moment before Louise’s eyes.

‘No no. Nothing like that.’ Beatrice was reassuring. ‘No, it’s a woman who – Humphrey, you remember, don’t you? What was her name? That woman you met at an Educational Discussion Group, or something?’

Humphrey choked exultantly into his coffee, delighted at being accused of having met a woman his wife didn’t know the name of – even though he couldn’t remember her name either. To cover his ignorance he launched into an enthusiastic description of the lady.

‘A fine figure of a woman,’ he improvised manfully,
ransacking
his regrettably vague memory. ‘Juno-esque, you know. Splendid shoulders – Bee will kill me for this, won’t you, Bee,’ he added, winking conscientiously at his wife, who steeled
herself
to smile at him in absent-minded encouragement – just as she might have steeled herself to say ‘Isn’t that nice, dear,’ to a husband with a different sort of hobby – the sort that spreads glue and balsa-wood all over the sitting-room.

‘That’s right, dear,’ she remarked patiently. ‘But what we want to know is – what was her name? Don’t you remember, you told me she asked you for Louise’s address, and you couldn’t think what she wanted it for? Well, I was just wondering if she’d got hold of Louise all right and – well – what it was all about?’

‘I’ll bet you wanted to know what it was all about,’
interposed
Humphrey, with ponderous innuendo. ‘Doesn’t do to tell the ladies everything, does it, eh, Mark?’

Mark blinked up stupidly from the discarded evening paper to which the boredom of the last twenty minutes had driven him.

‘Doesn’t what?’ he was beginning unhelpfully, when Beatrice broke in:

‘I’ve got it! Brandon. Vera Brandon. Of course. I remember wondering if she was any relation of the Brandon-Smith’s, because of course they’re only Smiths really, but she insisted on tacking her own name on to his when she married him because she’s such a snob. So is he, of course, but he wouldn’t have thought of it on his own because he’d been a Smith all his life and sort of got used to it—’

‘If her name was Vera Brandon,’ interrupted Louise gently, ‘then she
did
get in touch with us. In fact, she’s come to live with us – she has our top room. But I thought she was just answering our advertisement. I don’t understand how she could have heard of us apart from that. Or why she should have asked you for our address. I don’t understand any of it.
I
don’t
understand
.’

Somehow her voice was suddenly much louder. Customers and waitresses alike turned to stare.

M
ark didn’t seem to think much of the Vera Brandon mystery as expounded to him by Louise on top of the 196 bus, damply rumbling through the hideous yellow lights of the suburbs. Why, he enquired obtusely, shouldn’t Miss Brandon ask for their address and then answer their advertisement? Or, alternatively, why shouldn’t she answer their advertisement and then ask for their address? Why, Louise didn’t even know which she’d done first, he pointed out triumphantly.

‘But either way it would be odd – don’t you see?’ protested Louise. ‘If she’d seen the advertisement first, then she’d know the address. And if she’d asked for the address first, then what an extraordinary coincidence that she should come across the advertisement afterwards? And why should she
want
our address before she knew us? And if she didn’t know us, how could she know that we knew Humphrey? How could she know that Humphrey knew— Don’t you see, it makes nonsense.’

‘Of course it does; that’s just what I’ve been saying,’ said Mark cheerfully as they stepped off the bus. ‘Come on – that kid’ll be yelling his head off by now, and Mrs H. will be
applying
the Natural Method with her feet up and a library book. Do you know it’s nearly eleven?’

Now that they were off the bus it became even more
difficult
to explain. Louise had been on the point of reminding Mark that only a few days before he had remarked himself on the feeling that somewhere, sometime, he had met Vera Brandon before. She wanted, too, to tell him of her own fancy that she had recognised the blue suitcase up in Miss Brandon’s room. And if she had only known, here and now, on this
drizzling
April night, with her sandals pinching so agonisingly – if she had only known how much might be at stake, then she would certainly have told him. Would have shouted at him – screamed at him – taken him by the shoulder and shaken him – until she had forced him to take her seriously.

But she didn’t tell him; and the reason why she didn’t was the street lighting. With its vampire glare it had sucked all the redness from her jacket, the whiteness from her sandals; and she knew that her face and hair were grey, as his would be too if she ventured to look at him. It was as if they were characters in a piece of Science Fiction: by merely stepping off a bus they had stepped across twenty years into a nightmare old age. How could she confide in this grey-headed stranger beside her? How could she encourage him to turn and look into her own grey and haggard face …?

The lights of their own road were the old-fashioned kind that allow your blood to flow once more; and as Louise felt the ghostly mask of senility slip from her under their friendly brightness, she might have spoken. But by now she could already hear Michael screaming. The noise rang down the empty street; and as she rushed up the path to the front door she was dimly conscious of Mrs Philips’ bedroom window closing, gently, but with shattering implications.

Michael was damp and scarlet with fury; and justly so, since it was more than an hour later than his usual supper time. A search through the house for Mrs Hooper, who had promised to
keep him at bay with orange juice and boiled water, proved vain. Vain, that is, except for the discovery of Tony reclining at ease on Louise’s bed, his sandshoes caked in mud, and manfully keeping himself awake with a volume on
Diseases
of
the
Central
Nervous
System,
and a tin of pineapple from Louise’s emergency store.

‘Where’s your mother?’ demanded Mark sternly; and Tony paused in the midst of stuffing an unbroken ring of pineapple into his mouth. He stared at Mark in mild surprise. Fancy anyone expecting anybody to know where their mother was.

‘Out,’ he said at last; and then added, with a boy-scout air which might have been more convincing if he had had less pineapple in his mouth: ‘I’ve been looking after the baby for you. Is it a boy?’

‘Yes – Look here, this is a bit thick!’ began Mark irritably. ‘Your mother’s got no business to walk off and leave you like this. You can’t take charge of a baby at your age – and anyway, you’ve done damn-all about him. Anyone can see he’s been yelling for hours.’

‘It’s not Tony’s fault,’ pointed out Louise. ‘He’s only a child—’ She stopped, for it seemed that Tony was well able to conduct his own defence.

‘I been in to him twice,’ he claimed indignantly. ‘But he kept right on yelling both times. So I reckoned that’s what he’d do if I went in a third time,’ he finished, showing such a
confident
grasp of one of the basic principles of scientific method that Louise couldn’t think of anything to say in reply. Mark could, however, and said it:

‘Get off that bed!’ he ordered. ‘And tell us how we can get hold of your mother. Is she proposing to come back here and fetch you? Has she gone home? Or what?’

Tony rolled off the bed, scattering mud from his sandshoes at every movement. He looked very small standing there in front
of Mark and his eyes, with dark smudges of tiredness under them, were bright and excited in his pale face.

‘I think p’raps it’s something to do with the spy,’ he hazarded, watching Mark guardedly to see how this suggestion would go down.

‘Spy? What spy? What the devil are you talking about?’ snapped Mark; and Tony hesitated, obviously torn between the incomparable joy of having a secret to keep, and the
unspeakable
rapture of having one to divulge. The decision was hastened for him by Mark’s next remark:

‘You’ve been dreaming!’ he said witheringly. ‘And no wonder – a little boy like you still up at this hour!’

‘I’ve not been dreaming!’ cried Tony indignantly. ‘I’ve been awake every minute of the time. I’ve been on the watch, and a jolly lucky thing for you, too! I been keeping guard for you. D’you know you’ve got a spy in the house?’

He addressed this last remark to Louise, sensing (and rightly) that she was likely to prove the more sympathetic audience for such a story.

‘Tell us about it,’ she said gently, sitting down on the edge of the bed; and to Mark: ‘No, dear, please! Leave him to me. Why don’t you go down and ring up the Hoopers and ask what’s happening?’

‘
Ask
what’s happening! I like that! I’ll damn well
tell
them what’s happening. Letting us down like this! It’s time someone told them a few home-truths, and I don’t mind being the one to do it!’

Louise felt a moment’s compunction about the unoffending sister who would probably answer the telephone and be taken for Mrs Hooper herself; then she turned her attention back to Tony, whose sandshoes were now being ground into the cushion of the armchair in which he was settling himself as elaborately as a cat.

‘Tell me all about it, Tony,’ she began. ‘Who did you see? And what makes you think he was a spy?’

‘It wasn’t a
him
,’ said Tony darkly. ‘It was a
her
. And I didn’t see her, not at first. I just heard her creeping around. She crept in at the front door, and then she crept in at the back door, and then she crept up here, into your bedroom. I heard her. That was before Mum – I mean Jean – went away,’ he added
awkwardly
. Ordinarily Tony blandly ignored his mother’s efforts to make him call her by her Christian name in the correct enlightened manner; but a confused feeling of loyalty often made him try to conform in the presence of strangers.

‘So she might’ve heard it, too,’ he concluded, rather vaguely.

‘Well, why didn’t you ask her, then – tell her about it?’ asked Louise. ‘If it sounded suspicious, I mean, and she was still here?’

Tony pondered this.

‘I think Mum – Jean’s – more interested in pottery,’ he said at last, with an odd touch of dignity. Then he went on:

‘So after she’d gone – Mum, I mean – I went on a tour of inspection. All round the house, with silent tread. Do you know how to walk real silent?’ he suddenly interposed, turning on Louise. ‘Most people think the best way is to walk on tiptoe, but it isn’t. Not indoors, anyway. You should always walk on the flat of your foot indoors. The whole flat of your foot – it distributes the weight, see, and then you’re not so likely to creak a board.’

Louise acknowledged this piece of information with the respect due to it, and Tony continued his story.

‘Well, I peeked into all the rooms, one after another, and into all the cupboards, until at last I came to your bedroom!’ Here came a dramatic pause, during which Louise reflected that it was hardly a logical procedure to go to the bedroom last, when that was the very room into which the intruder had been heard to go; however, she recognised the artistic necessity of exploring
the bedroom last, and waited with flattering interest for the denouement.

‘I peeked in,’ said Tony, ‘ever so quiet, see, not a breath. I peeked in, and I
saw
her! Poking about in your bureau. In that thing with drawers, I mean,’ he amended, scientific accuracy for the moment overmastering his literary style as he surveyed the nondescript piece of furniture which Mark and Louise shared as a ‘desk’. ‘Shared’ consisted of Mark throwing all his letters and papers on top of it, and Louise at intervals bundling them
pell-mell
into whatever drawers would still hold them; while her own, more meagre, affairs collected dust on a corner of the kitchen dresser.

‘She had all the drawers open,’ continued Tony with gusto, for the moment forgetful of the fact that if all the drawers were open then only the top one would have been displaying its contents – ‘and she was looking in and out of them all, shoving the papers about –
looking
for something. I knew at once that she was looking for something.’

‘Well, yes, it does sound like that,’ agreed Louise. ‘But
who
was, Tony? You still haven’t told me who this woman was.’

‘
She
was the one you keep upstairs
,’ hissed Tony. ‘The brown one.’

‘Brown—? Oh, you mean that brown costume Miss Brandon always wears. But, Tony, I don’t understand. What on earth did she want?’

‘The papers, of course.’ Tony’s reply was unhesitating. ‘The papers with the formulae.’

This expert diagnosis silenced Louise for a moment; and Tony continued: ‘Mr Henderson’s something to do with aeroplanes, isn’t he? Well, it’s his papers she’s after, see. A blueprint for a new kind of jet. Or p’raps a new fuel. Is that what he works on?’

After ten years of marriage, Louise still had only the
shadowiest
idea of what her husband did in the offices of the aircraft
factory by which he was employed; but all the same her
womanly
intuition told her that the documents for which he was responsible were unlikely to have much market value in the international underworld. And anyway, if they
were
important, they wouldn’t be in the ‘desk.’ Presumably Mark had enough sense by now not to put in the desk anything that he ever hoped to see again. But all the same, what
had
Vera Brandon been looking for?

‘I expect she’d lost something and thought I might have borrowed it,’ said Louise casually. ‘Don’t worry, Tony’ (just as if Tony had been worrying), ‘I’m certain she’s not a spy.’

Tony looked at her pityingly.

‘I knew you wouldn’t believe me,’ he said simply – after all, no grown-ups in any children’s book he had ever read ever believed anything that the children told them – ‘but, you see, I
know
she’s a spy. ’Cos I’ve seen her before.’

‘When? Where?’ Louise hoped that the little boy had not noticed the intensity of her interest. ‘What do you know about her?’

‘Oh, well, you see, she was at our house one evening. At one of Mum’s meetings. Supposed to be, but of course that’s not
really
what she’d come for. She’d come because she thought
we
had papers, too. I found her looking through Mum’s desk, just like she was looking through yours. She’d come out of the meeting early, see, so’s everyone else would be in the
dining-room
while she could have a look round. She didn’t find any papers, of course,’ he continued patronisingly. ‘If
I
had any secret papers I wouldn’t be fool enough to put them in a desk. I’d put them somewhere really unlikely. Like – like—’ But, of course, to a real connoisseur in spy fiction,
every
place seems likely, not to say hackneyed, and so Tony, with an adroitness worthy of his mother, changed the subject:

‘If I’d had a torch,’ he announced, ‘I’d have got a cast of her
footprints for you. I had a look round out the back, but it was too dark. It’s a swizzle, because there must have been some jolly clear prints. There’s some super mud just by the back door.’

Eyeing the traces of the super mud on her counterpane, Louise could not disagree; but she did point out that if a
footprint
were
found, it would only prove that Miss Brandon had been out to empty her rubbish that night.

Tony looked sceptical. This was just the kind of thing that the unenlightened grown-ups of children’s fiction always did think of; but he was getting too sleepy to remember how the enlightened children countered it. His head began to sway.

‘You wait and see,’ he essayed darkly. The grown-ups always
did
see in the last chapter. Or maybe the last chapter but one.