The Secret House of Death (10 page)

David had considered whether he ought to write her the conventional letter of condolence, but because offering sympathy to a woman released by death from an obviously unhappy marriage seemed misplaced, he had thought better of it. Now, however, he felt it incumbent on him to say something, if only to show he was aware of Heller's death, and he embarked on a little stilted speech of regret. But after murmuring, ‘Yes, yes,' impatiently and nodding her head, she interrupted him inconsequentially.

‘I was meeting someone, but she hasn't come.'

She? David thought of all the possible meeting places for two women in London in the evening. An office where the other girl worked? One of the shops that stayed open late? A café? A tube station? Never, surely, a pub in Soho. Magdalene Heller got up and began buttoning her coat.

‘Can I take you to your station? My car's not far away.'

‘Don't bother. It's not necessary.'

David drank up his beer. ‘It's no bother,' he said. ‘I'm sorry your friend didn't come.'

Politeness wasn't her strong suit, but in everyone except the savage, convention forbids actually running from an acquaintance and slamming the door in his face. That, he thought, was what she would have liked to have done.

They approached the door and she fumbled in her bag with fingers he thought none too steady. The cigarette was eventually found. David got out his lighter and held the flame up to her face.

Behind her the door opened. It opened perhaps a foot and then stuck. Magdalene Heller inhaled, turning her head. David didn't know why he kept his finger pressed on the light, the flame still flaring. The man who had opened the door stood on the step, staring in.

Again Magdalene Heller faced him. Her lips parted and she said with an unexpected effusiveness, ‘Thank you so much, David. I'm glad we ran into each other.'

David was so taken aback by this sudden
volte-face
that he too stared into her beautiful, suddenly flushed face. Her cigarette had gone out. He lit it again. The man backed abruptly the way he had come, leaving the door swinging.

They were ready to go, on the point of leaving, but she opened her bag again, rummaging aimlessly in its contents.

‘D'you know that fellow?' David asked and then, feeling that he had been rude, added truthfully, ‘I'm sure I do. Might be someone I've come into contact with on television, of course. His face seemed awfully familiar.'

‘I didn't notice.'

‘Or I could have seen his picture in a newspaper. That's it, I think, in connection with some case or other.'

‘More likely on TV,' she said casually.

‘He seemed to know you.'

Or had it been that this girl was so outstandingly good-looking that even in the West End where beauty is common, men stared at her? She put her hand on his arm. ‘David?' She was lovely, the face close to his as they came into the street, flawless with its orchid skin and gold-specked eyes. Why then did her touch affect him strangely, almost as if a snake had flickered against his sleeve? ‘David, if you haven't anything better to do, would you—would you drive me home?'

All the way to the car she chattered feverishly and she clung to David's arm. She had an accent, he noticed, that wasn't from London or from the North. He couldn't quite place it, although he tried while he pretended to listen to what she was saying, whether she would be able to keep her flat, her future, her lack of training for any sort of job.

She didn't look like a new widow. The clothes she was wearing were not those he had seen in the inquest report picture, although those had been indecorous enough. Now she was dressed shabbily, casually and—he observed this for the first time as she got into the car—provocatively. He disliked fly-fronted trousers on women and these were far too tight. She took off her shiny jacket and draped it over the seat. Her breasts, though undoubtedly real, had an inflated rubbery look and they were hoisted so high as to suggest discomfort, but as if the discomfort were worth suffering for the sake of the erotic appeal. All this was fair enough in a beautiful girl of twenty-five, all this sticky seductive make-up, long cheek-enveloping hair, and emphasis given to a bold figure. But she wasn't just a girl of twenty-five. She was a widow who that morning had attended the inquest on her husband and who was supposed to be, if not grief-stricken, stunned by shock and subdued by care.

They had been driving along for perhaps a quarter of an hour when she put her hand on his knee. He hadn't the courage to remove it and he began to sweat when the fingers caressed and kneaded his flesh. She smoked continuously, opening the window every couple of minutes to flick ash out into the street.

‘Is it straight on,' he said, ‘or left here?'

‘You can take the back doubles. It's shorter.' She wound down the window and threw her cigarette-end on to the pavement, narrowly missing a little Chinese. ‘Take the next exit. I'll navigate for you.'

David obeyed her, going left, right, left again, and plunging into a web of mean streets. It was still quite light. They came to a bridge with huge concrete pillars at either end, carved columns vaguely Egyptian, that might have come from the Valley of the Kings. Underneath was a kind of marshalling yard, overlooked by factories and tower blocks.

‘Down here,' Magdalene Heller said. It was a narrow street of tiny slum houses. Ahead he could see a tall chimney, a gasometer. ‘What's the hurry?'

‘It's not exactly a beauty spot, is it? Not the sort of place one wants to hang about in.'

She sighed, then touched his hand lightly with one fingertip. ‘Would you stop a moment, David? I have to get cigarettes.'

Why couldn't she have bought them in London? Anyway, the three or four she had smoked had come from a nearly full pack. He could see a shop on the corner and he could see that it was closed.

Reluctantly he pulled into the kerb. They were quite alone and unobserved. ‘I'm so lonely, David,' she said. ‘Be nice to me.' Her face was close to his and he could see every pore in that smooth fungoid skin, mushroom skin, rubbery as he could guess that too-perfect, pneumatic body to be. There was a highlight on her lips where she had licked them. ‘Oh, David,' she whispered.

It was like a dream, a nightmare. It couldn't be happening. As if in a nightmare, for a moment he was stiff and powerless. She touched his cheek, stroking it, then curled her warm hands around his neck. He told himself that he had been wrong about her, that she was desperately lonely, devastated, longing for comfort, so he put his arms around her. The full wet lips he by-passed, pressing his cheek against hers.

He stayed like that for perhaps thirty seconds, but when her mouth closed on his neck with sea-anemone suction, he took his arms from her shoulders.

‘Come on,' he said. ‘People can see us.' There was no one to see. ‘Let's get you home, shall we?' He had to prise her off him, a new and quelling experience. She was breathing heavily and her eyes were sullen. Her mouth drooped pathetically.

‘Come and have a meal with me,' she said. Her voice had a dismayed whine in it. ‘Please do. I can cook for you. I'm a good cook, really I am. You mustn't judge by what I was giving Bernard that night. He didn't care what he ate.'

‘I can't, Magdalene.' He was too embarrassed to look at her.

‘But you've come all this way. I want to talk to you.' Incredibly, the hand came back to his knee. ‘Don't leave me all alone.'

He didn't know what to do. On the one hand, she was a widow, young, poor, her husband dead only days before. No decent man could abandon her. He had already abandoned the husband, and the husband had killed himself. But on the other hand, there was her outrageous behaviour, the clumsy seduction attempt. There was nothing cynical in concluding her offer of a meal was just eyewash. But was he justified in leaving her? He was a grown man, reasonably experienced; he could protect himself, and under the peculiar circumstances, do so with tact. Above all, he wondered why he need protect himself. Was she a nymphomaniac, or so unhinged by shock as to be on the edge of a mental breakdown? He wasn't so vain as to suppose against all previous evidence to the contrary, that women were spontaneously and violently attracted to him. The wild notion that he might suddenly have developed an irresistible sex appeal crossed his mind to be immediately dismissed as fantastic.

‘I don't know, Magdalene,' he said doubtfully. They passed the prison or barrack wall and they passed the lighted cinema. There was a long bus queue at the stop by the park. David heard himself let out a small sound, a gasp, a stifled exclamation. His hands went damp and slithered on the wheel. Bernard Heller stood at the tail of the queue, reading his evening paper.

Of course, it wasn't Bernard. This man was even bigger and heavier, his face more ox-like, less intelligent than Bernard's. If David hadn't already been jumpy and bewildered he would have known at once it was the twin brother, Carl who had borrowed the slide pojector. But they were uncannily alike. The resemblance made David feel a bit sick.

He pulled the car in alongside the queue and Carl Heller lumbered into the back. Magdalene had gone rather pale. She introduced them snappily, her accent more pronounced.

‘David's going to have dinner with me, Carl.' She added as if she had a part-share in the car and more than a part-share in David, ‘We'll drop you off first.'

‘I can't stay for dinner, Magdalene,' David said firmly. The presence of Bernard's twin both discomfited him and gave him strength. Here were capable hands in which he could safely leave the girl. ‘I'm afraid I don't know where you live.'

Magdalene said something that sounded like Copenhagen Street and she had begun on a spate of directions when David felt a heavy hand, grotesquely like the comedy scene hand of the law, lower itself on to his shoulder and rest there.

‘She's in no fit state for company tonight, Mr Chadwick.' The voice was more guttural than Bernard's. There was more in that sentence than a polite way of telling someone he wasn't wanted. David heard in it self-appointed ownership, pride, sorrow and—yes, perhaps jealousy. ‘I'll look after her,' Carl said. ‘That's what my poor brother would have wanted. She's had a bad day, but she's got me.'

David thought he had never heard anyone speak so ponderously, so slowly. The English was correct and idiomatic, yet it sounded like a still difficult foreign tongue. You would grow so bored, exasperated even, if you had to listen to this man talking for long.

Magdalene had given up. She said no more until they reached Hengist House. Whatever she had been trying on, she had given it up.

‘Thanks for the lift.'

‘I'm glad I saw you,' David said untruthfully. Carl's face was Bernard's, unbearably pathetic, dull with grief, and David heard himself say in a useless echo of his words to the dead man, ‘Look, if there's anything I can do . . .'

‘No one can do anything.' The same answer, the same tone. Then Carl said, ‘Time will do it.'

Magdalene lagged back. ‘Good night, then,' David said. He watched Carl take her arm, propelling her, while she tugged a little and looked back, like a child whose father has come to fetch it home from a dangerous game with the boy next door.

Julian and Susan had tried to be very civilised and enlightened. They had to meet for Julian to see his son. It had seemed wiser to try to maintain an unemotional friendship and Susan had known this would be difficult. How difficult, how nearly impossible, she hadn't envisaged. When life went smoothly, she preferred not to be reminded of Julian's existence and his telephone calls—incongruously more frequent at such times—were an uncomfortable disruption of peace. But when she was unhappy or nervous she expected him to know it and to a certain degree be a husband to her again, as if he were in fact a husband separated from his wife for perhaps business reasons, who had to live far away.

She knew this was an impossible hope, totally unreasonable. Nothing on earth would have made her disclose this feeling to anyone else. Julian had his own life to lead.

But was it so unreasonable to expect at this time some sign of concern from him? Louise's death had been in all the newspapers; tonight both evening papers featured the inquest. Julian was an avid reader of newspapers and the fact that the two Evenings had been delivered to her house, were now spread on the table before her, was a hangover from her marriage to Julian who expected his wife to be well-informed.

That he still hadn't phoned showed a careless disregard for her that changed her loneliness from a gathering depression to a panicky terror that no one in the world cared whether she lived or died. To spend the evening and night alone here suddenly seemed a worse ordeal to pass through than any she had encountered since her divorce. For the first time she resented Paul. But for him, she could have gone out tonight, gone to the pictures, rooted out a friend from the past. Here in this house there was nothing else to think about but Louise and the only conversation possible an interchange between herself and her
alter ego.
The sentences almost spoke themselves aloud, the answerless questions. Could she have helped? Could she have changed the course of things? How was she going to stand days, weeks, months of this house? Above all, how to cope with Paul?

He had gone on and on that evening about Louise and the man. Because someone had told him Louise had loved this man, he found curious childish parallels between her case and that of his parents. Susan too had found parallels and she couldn't answer him. She reproached herself for her inadequacy but she was glad when at last he fell silent and slid the beloved cars out of their boxes, playing with absorption until bedtime.