The Secret House of Death (13 page)

The trench cut halfway across the road now and, having collected the mugs, the boy stationed himself on a pile of earth, a flag in his hand, to direct what little traffic passed. He swaggered, fancying himself a policeman on crossing patrol, but presently, after only two cars had passed, the blue-jersey man beckoned him back into the hole with fierce gestures. Susan felt that she was watching a silent film that would launch soon into knockabout farce, or perhaps some modern epic from Italy or Sweden, fraught with symbolism, where movement and facial expression are of deep significance and the human voice a vulgar intrusion.

And it was thus that Doris found her when she brought Paul home to put him to bed at six. The workmen had gone home and Susan lay back, looking dreamily at the dull crimson lights they had left behind them. She was absurdly disappointed that it was Sunday tomorrow, resentful like an avid viewer who knows he must wait two days for the next instalment of the serial.

‘I've brought you a visitor,' Doris said on Sunday afternoon. ‘Guess who.'

It couldn't be Julian, for he was staying in the country with Lady Maskell, part, no doubt, of a jolly gathering that would include Minta Philpott, Greg and Dian, and heaven knew who else. Besides, Julian avoided sickrooms.

‘It's Bob.' Doris glanced nervously over her shoulder as his tread sounded on the stairs. ‘He
would
come. I told him that in his low state he was vulnerable to every germ that's going, but he
would
come.'

His arms were full of daffodils. Susan was sure they were the ones that grew in the Braeside front garden and now she pictured that big square bed covered with the stubble of broken stalks. Louise had loved her bulbs and Bob's action in picking these flowers reminded Susan of a story she had once heard of the gardeners at Lady Jane Grey's home lopping the heads off all the oaks on the estate when she was killed. She said nothing of this to Bob. At first the sight of him embarrassed her and she wondered if he regretted his lack of reserve on Friday evening. But he showed no awkwardness, although his manner, until Doris had left them, was somewhat guarded.

‘I rather expected you'd have gone away,' Susan said. ‘Not exactly for a holiday, but just for a change.'

‘There's nowhere I fancy going. All the places I've ever wanted to go to, I went with her.' He fetched a vase and arranged the daffodils, but clumsily for so graceful a man, crowding the stalks together and snapping them off roughly when they were too long. ‘I'm better here,' he said, and when Doris thrust her head round the door with a bright smile. ‘I've a lot of things to see to.'

‘You're unlucky with your holidays, anyway,' Doris said. ‘I remember last year Louise was ill and you were in that boat disaster.' Bob didn't say anything but his face darkened dangerously. ‘Poor Louise had just what you've got now, Susan, and Bob had to amuse himself as best he could. Poor Louise said the holiday was just a dead loss as far as she was concerned. Oh dear, would you rather I didn't talk about her, Bob?'

‘Please,' Bob said tightly. He sat down by Susan's bed, scarcely concealing his impatience as Doris twittered on about Paul's refusal to clean his teeth, his insistence on keeping the new watch under his pillow. ‘Thank God she's gone,' he said when at last the door closed. ‘Doesn't she drive you mad?'

‘She's a good friend, Bob. Awfully kind.'

‘She doesn't miss anything that goes on in this street. That dog of hers nearly sent me out of my mind when the funeral cars came.' He gave an unhappy sigh and suddenly Susan had for him what he had seemed to want all along, a fellow-feeling. Pity welled up in her so that, had she been well, she would have wanted to take him in her arms and hold him close to her as she might have held Paul. The thought startled her. Had it come to her because he looked so young, so pitiably vulnerable? He was older than she, four or five years older. For a moment she was embarrassed, almost dismayed.

He went to the door, opened it a fraction, then closed it softly. She thought he moved like a cat. No, like something less domestic. Like a panther. ‘Got rid of those letters all right, did you?' His voice had the elaborate casual lightness of someone asking a question intensely but secretly important to him. ‘That scum Heller's letters,' he said. ‘You said you'd burn them.'

‘Of course I did,' Susan said firmly. But the question jolted her, bringing the singing back to her head as if her temperature had swiftly taken a sharp rise. Until now she had forgotten all about the letters. They had been distasteful to her, she thought, and perhaps what had taken place in her mind was what Julian called a psychological block. Now, in spite of what she had said so reassuringly to Bob, she simply couldn't remember whether she had burnt the letters or not. Had she before, after or even during that dream-filled two-hour sleep that had almost been a coma, dropped the letters into the disused fireplace and set fire to them with her lighter? Or could they possibly be still on the table, exposed for Doris or Mrs Dring to read?

‘I knew I could rely on you, Susan,' Bob said. ‘Sorry if I was a bore the other night.' He picked up the book she had left face-downwards. ‘Highbrow stuff you read! When I'm ill I only want to lie still and look out of the window.'

‘That's what I did yesterday. I just watched the workmen most of the day.'

‘Fascinating pastime,' he said rather coldly, and then, ‘A rotten lonely life you lead, Susan. All these months you must have been lonely and I never gave it a thought.'

‘Why should you?'

‘I lived next door to you. I should have realised. Louise might have realised . . .' He paused and said, his voice charged with a dull anger, ‘Only she was too busy with her own affairs. Or should I say affair? How old are you, Susan?'

‘Twenty-six.'

‘Twenty-six! And when you're under the weather you're stuck in a suburban bedroom with no one to look after you and nothing better to do than watch four or five labourers dig up the road.'

It would be useless to tell him that for a few hours that suburban bedroom had been like a theatre box and the men actors on a distant comedy stage. Bob was such a physical, down-to-earth person, a prey to strong emotions but hardly the sort of man to get pleasure from the quiet observation of human behaviour. With his looks and his extrovert attitude to life, he had probably seldom experienced the taking of a back seat. He was looking at her now with such concern that she wondered why she had ever thought him selfish. She tried to laugh but her throat was too sore.

‘But I'm not alone all the time,' she said, her voice rapidly disintegrating into a croak. ‘And Doris is looking after me beautifully.'

‘Yes, you said she'd been a good friend. I wish you'd said it of me. I wish things had been different so you
could
have said it of me.'

There was no reply to that one. He got up abruptly and when he came back, Paul was with him, the watch still strapped round his wrist at the edge of his pyjama sleeve.

‘I can't kiss you, darling. I'm all germs.'

‘You haven't got a clock in here,' Paul said. ‘Would you like my watch, just for tonight?'

‘That's a kind thought, but I wouldn't dream of depriving you.'

His look of relief was unmistakable. ‘Well, good night, then.'

‘Here, let's see if I can lift you.' Bob put out his hands to clasp the boy's waist. ‘You've got so tall. I bet you weigh a ton.' It gave Susan a faintly sad shock to see that hard bitter face so suddenly tender. He had no children of his own, but now . . . Of course he would marry again. Perhaps because it was too soon to have such hopes for him, the thought was vaguely displeasing.

Paul let Bob pick him up, but when the man's arms tried to swing him high as if he were a tiny child, he struggled and said babyishly, ‘Put me down! Put me down!'

‘Come on now, don't be silly.' Susan was tired now. She wished they would all go and leave her. Paul would take a long time getting off to sleep tonight. Let Bob think her son had protested because he didn't care to be babied; she knew that there was another, darker reason.

‘Good night, Susan.' The rejection hadn't upset him at all and now he gave her the charming boyish smile that made her forget how sullenly that dark face could cloud. It was such a frank, untroubled smile, ingratiating almost. She felt strangely that he had made these overtures to her son to please her rather than from a fondness for children.

‘Good night, Bob. Thank you for the flowers.'

‘I'll come again soon,' he said. ‘Don't think you've seen the last of me.' They were alone now. He went to the door and hesitated. ‘You've been my lifeline, Susan. You've been a light in the darkness.'

Less than a week ago she had been prepared to go to any lengths to avoid him. Now it seemed a cowardly, impossibly exclusive way to have behaved. Far from being selfish, he was kind, thoughtful, impulsive, all those things that Julian had never been. But she didn't know why she should compare him with Julian at all—they were so utterly different, in looks, in temperament, in manner to her—unless it was because her former husband was the only other man she could truthfully say she knew.

When the repetitive sing-song, the ‘Tick-tock, tick-tock', softly chanted from Paul's bedroom ceased, Susan put on her dressing-gown, checked that her son was asleep, and made her way downstairs. Her legs were weak and each step sent a throbbing through her body up into her head.

The living-room was neater than Mrs Dring ever left it. Susan's eyes went immediately to the coffee table where she last remembered having seen Heller's letters, but there was only a clean ashtray on the polished circular expanse. She moved slowly about the room, leafing absurdly through a pile of magazines, opening drawers. This, she thought, putting her hand to her forehead, was how an underwater swimmer must feel, struggling to make a free passage through a cumbersome, unfamiliar heaviness. The air in this room seemed thick, dragging her limbs.

Doris would have loved to read those letters.

It was an unforgivable thought to have about so kind a friend. Besides, Doris would never have taken them out of the house. Susan moved aside the firescreen and peered into the grate. There was no paper ash on the clean bars.

For all that, she must have burnt them herself. And now as she cast her mind back to those dazed fever-filled hours, she could almost convince herself that she remembered holding the letters in the fireplace and watching her lighter flame eat across the pages to devour Heller's words. She could see it clearly just as she could picture Doris tidying the grate, dustpan and brush in her hand.

Her relief nearly equalled total peace of mind and if she was again shivering uncontrollably it was only because she was still ill and had disobeyed the doctor's instructions to stay in bed.

The soft insinuating voice at the other end of the line was peculiarly persistent. ‘Bernard thought such a lot of you, David. He often talked about you. It seems a pity to lose touch and I know Carl wants to meet you again. We were both disappointed when you couldn't stay and have a meal on Friday, so I wondered if you'd make it another time. Say tomorrow?'

‘I'm afraid I couldn't make it tomorrow.'

‘Tuesday, then?'

‘I can't make it this week at all. I'll ring you, shall I?' David said good-bye firmly and hung up. Then he went back into the untidy, cluttered but interesting room he called a studio and thought about it.

She had a face like Goya's
Naked Maja,
full-lipped, sensuous. It didn't attract him. He was always finding resemblances between living people and people painted long ago. Portraits were pinned all over his walls, Ganymede reproductions, picture gallery postcards, pages cut out of Sunday paper colour supplements. Vigee Le Brun's
Marie Antoinette
was there, stuck up with Sellotape next to an El Greco
Pope
; Titian's
L'homme aux Gants
had a frame which was more than he had accorded to his Van Gogh peasants or the Naked Maja herself.

A peculiar inconsistent woman, he thought, and he wasn't thinking about the Goya. She had been surly to him on the night before her husband's death and actually dismayed to see him in The Man in the Iron Mask. And then, after five minutes stilted courtesy on his part and absent-minded rejoinders on hers, she had changed her entire personality, becoming sweet, seductive and effusive. Why?

They said that no man can resist a pretty woman who throws herself at him. His nature is such that he succumbs, unable to believe such good fortune. And if he has not himself made the slightest overture, he congratulates himself, while despising the woman, on his irresistible attractions. But it hardly ever happens that way, David thought. It had never happened to him before. There had been no difficulty at all in resisting. From the first he had been bewildered.

And yet he would have done nothing about it. The incident would have been dismissed to the back of his mind, along with various others of life's apparently insoluble mysteries. People were peculiar, human nature a perennial puzzle. You had to accept it.

But she had telephoned him, talking like an old friend who had every hope and every justification for that hope of becoming much more. From a vague uneasiness, his bewilderment grew until it crowded everything else from his mind. No matter how carefully he thought about it, going over and over the events of Friday night, he could only justify Magdalene Heller's conduct by assuming her to be not quite sane. But he knew that this conclusion is always the lazy and cowardly resort of a poor imagination. Mad she might be, but there would be method in her madness. Young widows do not go into West End pubs on the day of their husband's inquests; they do not dress in tight trousers and tight sweaters; above all they do not make inexplicable unprovoked passes at casual acquaintances.