The Secret House of Death (12 page)

Why won't you make up your mind to tell him? It's no good saying something may happen to make everything come right for us. What can happen? He is not an old man and may live for years and years. I know you say you don't wish him dead but I can't believe it. Everything you say and the very look on your face shows me you feel he's just a burden to you. The rest is superstition and in your heart you know it. He has no rights, no hold over you that anyone would recognise these days.

What it boils down to, what you're really saying is that we just have to hang on and wait till he dies. No, I'm not trying to persuade you to put something in his tea. I'm telling you for the hundredth time to make him understand you have a right to your own life, to take it from him and give it to your loving but very miserable,

Bernard

No, it wasn't a disgusting letter—unless you happened to know the man Heller referred to as a tiresome encumbrance. And if you didn't know the man, you might even find the second letter poignant. If you didn't know the man and hadn't lived next door to the wife from whose betrayal Heller had drawn his insinuations.

The address was the same, the date nearly a month later. December 2nd, ‘67, Susan read, and then:

My sweet darling,

I can't go on living without you. I can't go on existing and working miles and miles away from you, thinking of you with him and wasting your life being a slave to him. You must tell him about me, that you have found someone who really loves you and will give you a proper home at last. You half promised you would when we met last week, but I know how weak you can be when actually with him.

Does he really need all this care and attention and wouldn't a housekeeper be able to do everything you do now? He has always been harsh and ungrateful, God knows, and you say sometimes violent. Tell him tonight, darling, while you are with him in what I can only call your prison.

Time goes on so quickly (it seems slow to me now but I know it really flies) and what will you be like in a few years time, growing older and still tied to him? He will never come to appreciate and love you now. All he wants is a servant. You will be bitter and soured, and do you really think our love can still last under those conditions? As for me, I sometimes think that without you I can only make an end to myself. I just can't envisage life dragging on like this much longer.

Write to me or, better still, come to me. You have never seen me happy yet, not happy as I will be when I know you have left him at last.

Bernard

Susan folded the letters and they stared at each other in a deep, sickened silence. To break it, she shied away from touching on the emotional content of the letters and, seizing on something mundane, said, ‘Were there only these? Didn't he write any more?'

‘Aren't they sufficient?'

‘I didn't mean that. Only that I should have expected more, a whole series.'

‘If there were more, she didn't keep them.'

‘She may have been ashamed of them,' Susan said bitterly. ‘They aren't exactly couched in deathless prose, not literary gems.'

‘I hadn't noticed. I'm no judge of that sort of thing. Their meaning is clear enough. Louise hated me so much she was prepared to tell any lies about me.' He took the letters from her hand and kept hold of the hand, clutching it sexlessly, desperately, like a lifeline. ‘Susan,' he said, ‘you don't believe it, do you, that I was a violent, harsh, slave-driver?'

‘Of course I don't. That's why I don't think there's any point in keeping the wretched things. You'll only read and re-read them and torture yourself.'

For a dreadful moment she thought he was going to cry. His face twisted and it was almost ugly. ‘I can't bring myself to destroy them,' he said. ‘Susan, would you do it, would you—if I left them here?'

Slowly she took them from his lap, expecting her wrist to be seized again. She felt rather as she did when each night she surreptitiously slipped the watch from Paul's hands while he slept. Here was the same held-breath caution, the same fear of a cry of protest. But Paul loved his watch. Was a kind of love curiously combined with Bob's hatred of these letters?

He let her take them. ‘I promise, Bob,' she said, and a trembling weariness washed over her. ‘I promise, as soon as you've gone.'

She thought he would go then. It was still early, but she had forgotten about precedents, about giving in to depression and tiredness. Now she only wanted to sleep.

But, ‘I ought not to bore you with all this,' he said in the tone of someone who has every intention of doing so. Evidently her tiredness didn't show. ‘I've got to talk to someone. I can't bear to keep it all to myself.'

‘Go ahead, Bob. I understand.'

So she listened while he talked of his marriage, his once great love for Louise, their disappointment at their childlessness. He speculated as to where Louise and Heller had met, what they could have had in common and how strange it was that Louise's faith had deserted her. He spoke with violence, with passion, with incredulity and once he got up to pace the room. But instead of exhausting him as they exhausted Susan, his outbursts seemed to invigorate him. Cleansed and renewed, he talked for half an hour, while Susan lay back, nodding sometimes and assuring him of her sympathy. The stubs in her ashtray piled up until they looked like the poster picture in the doctor's surgery. Her throat had become rasping, rubbing sandpaper.

‘My God, I'm sorry, Susan,' he said at last. ‘I've worn you out. I'll go.' She was beyond polite dissuasion. He took her hands impulsively and as he bent over her his dark vivid face went out of focus and swam above her. ‘Promise I'll never see those foul things again,' he said. She nodded. ‘I'll let myself out. I'll never forget what you've done for me.'

The front door closed and the sound of its closing rever-berated in her head to settle into a steady throbbing. Long shivers were coursing through her now and her back had begun to ache. She closed her eyes and saw Bob's face suspended before them. Heller's spidery writing danced and the beating in a corner of her brain became the sharp clicking of Louise's heels.

When she awoke it was midnight. The air was foul with smoke. The heating had shut itself off and it was the cold which had awakened her, eating into her bones. Sometime before she slept she must have taken the glasses to the kitchen and emptied that spilling ashtray. She remembered nothing about it, but as she staggered to her feet she knew very well that her inertia and the sharp pain in her throat had little to do with the emotional vicissitudes of the day.

Symptoms like these had real physical cause. She had the flu.

Since Julian's departure Susan had slept in one of the two spare bedrooms at the back of the house. It was a small room with a north light but now she was glad she had chosen it. To be ill in a bedroom that was the twin of Louise's bedroom, to lie in a bed placed just where hers was, was the worst medicine Susan could think of.

She had passed a miserable night, getting sleep only in short snatches. By morning the bed was piled with every surplus blanket in the house, although Susari only dimly remembered fetching the extra ones. She took her temperature and found it was a hundred and three.

‘Go over to Mrs Winter, darling,' she said when Paul pottered in at eight. ‘Ask her to give you breakfast.'

‘What's the matter with you?'

‘I've just got a bad cold.'

‘I expect you caught it off Roger Gibbs at the party,' said Paul, adding as if praising a friend for remarkable altruism, ‘He gives his colds to everyone.'

The doctor came, arriving simultaneously with Doris who stood at the end of the bed, confirming his diagnosis and chipping in every few seconds with suggestions of her own.

‘I don't want you to catch it, Doris,' Susan said feebly after he had gone.

‘Oh, I shan't catch it. I never catch things.'

It was true. For all her vulnerability to low temperatures and her huddling into cardigans, Doris never even had a cold. ‘I got immune to all that in my nursing days,' she said, punching pillows like a boxer. ‘Just listen to my dog. He's kicking up a racket because all the funeral cars have come next door.' Cocking her head, she listened to the distant barking and what might have been an undertaker's subdued footfall. ‘One thing, I've got an excuse for not going and it'd be suicide for you to get up.' She clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh dear, that's a dirty word round here, isn't it? I've heard the Catholics won't have Louise in their cemetery. Shame, really, when it was Heller who did it.' The dog barked hollowly, a door slammed. ‘I've seen Bob and he sent his best wishes for a speedy recovery. Fancy, with all his troubles, he wanted to know if there was anything he could do. I said to John, Bob North's got a terrific admiration for Susan in his way, and John agreed with me. I've turned your heating full on, my dear. I hope you don't mind, but you know what a chilly mortal I am. I wonder if he'll get married again.'

‘Who?'

‘Bob, of course. Well, marriage is a habit, isn't it, and I should think it would be funny adapting yourself to the single life. Oh God, there I go again, both feet in it!' Doris blushed and hugged herself in her big double-knit jacket. ‘Could you eat a cut off the joint? No, better not. By the way, I tidied up for you and dusted through. Not that it needed it, was was all as neat as a pin.'

‘You're being awfully kind.'

‘Just bossy and managing, lovey.' Doris's sudden unexpected self-analysis endeared her to Susan more than all her expert attention. She wished her painful throat and her huge weariness would allow her to speak her gratitude. She croaked out something about Paul, and Doris said, ‘He's gone with Richard. You can leave him with us for the weekend. What are you going to do with yourself? Maybe we could have the telly fetched up here.'

‘No, really, Doris. I might read a bit later on.'

‘Well, if you get bored, you can always watch the workmen slogging themselves to death.' And, twitching the curtain, Doris laughed loudly. ‘They're as bad as I am, must have their fire and their tea.'

Watching three workmen fill in a trench and dig another one six feet up the road would hardly have been Susan's idea of compelling entertainment when she was well. She had often thought, as most people do, that if she was ever confined to bed, mildly sick, she would use the time to read one of those classics that demand uninterrupted concentration. So when Doris returned at lunchtime she asked her to fetch
Remembrance of Things Past
from the collection of books Julian had left behind him.

But Proust defeated her. She was uninterrupted, but her powers of concentration were so diminished as to leave her mind a vague blur of half-remembered worries, disjointed fears and thoughts of her removal from Matchdown Park. She put the book down after ten minutes of peering at the dancing print and, impatient to find herself yielding to Doris's silly suggestion, turned her eyes to the window.

The sky was a pale cloudy blue across which the elm branches spread their black lace tracery. She could just see the sun, a yellow puddle in the clouds. It all looked dreadfully cold and she could understand the workmen's need of a fire. The three of them were standing round it now, stirring tea in mugs Susan could see were coarse and cracked. Louise had given them china cups with saucers.

She propped the pillows behind her so that she could see better. Oddly enough, there was something peculiarly diverting in watching three unknown people moving about and talking to each other. That she couldn't hear what they said only increased the piquancy. There was an oldish man, a younger man and a boy. The two older men seemed to be chaffing the boy, but he took their shoving and their laughter good-humouredly. It was his task to collect the three mugs and take them back into the shelter of the hut. Susan saw him shake the dregs on to the clay-plastered pavement and wipe the insides of the mugs out with newspaper.

Presently they clambered back into their trench and the old man bowed his body over the broad handle of the drill. The boy had got hold of a muddy tangle of cables and capered about with them at which his companion started a mock fight. Only their heads and their flailing hands were visible over the ridge of the trench, but the boy's laughter was so shrill that, far away as she was, Susan could hear it above the reverberations of the drill.

Then a girl in a short red coat appeared around the corner of O'Donnells' fence and immediately, ceasing their sparring, the two younger men whistled her. She had to pass the roadworks and she did so with her nose in the air. The boy ogled her and shouted something.

Susan relaxed against her pillows. She had forgotten Louise and Bob, Paul's terrors, Julian's flippant unconcern. A much older woman crossed the road this time, but she too earned a heartening whistle. Susan smiled to herself, a little ashamed of getting amusement from something so puerile. How old did a woman have to be, she wondered, to escape this salute, thirty-five, forty,
fifty?
Certainly there was an open-hearted generosity in this lack of discrimination. Perhaps you were never too old or perhaps the old man, silent and grim while the other two acknowledged passing femininity, reserved his personal whistles for his female contemporaries.

At three the boy fetched a black kettle from the hut and began to boil it on the fire. Did they know Louise was dead? Had the news reached them somehow on the winged winds of gossip? Or had one of them come innocently to the back door on Thursday to be met by Bob's bitter staring eyes and Bob's abrupt dismissal?

The tea was made, the mugs refilled. The amount of tea they drank, they obviously preferred brewing their own to fetching it from the café two hundred yards away. No doubt it had been a blow to them when their emissary had gone to bang on Louise's door on Wednesday and got no reply. They hadn't sent the boy that time, Susan thought, but the man in his twenties who was pulling a blue jersey over his head as he crouched by the brazier.