Possession (13 page)

W
AS THIS WHEN
I began to feel the first stirrings of
uneasiness
about Sarah’s safety? I am not sure: my immediate reaction, I know, was simply one of dismay at the immensity of complications that this was going to introduce into the comparatively simple web of falsehood which I had thought myself to be weaving.
Now
how was I going to get in touch with Sarah and Mervyn, and warn them of what I had done? And suppose the hotel rang again, later in the day, after I had gone, and Mrs Redmayne herself answered? The only way to avert this was to tell them something definite, now.

“Yes—I’m sorry: the booking is cancelled: they should have let you know,” I said firmly. I had a brief, guilty vision of the unlucky pair arriving there tonight, in heavy rain, and being turned away from their rightful, pre-booked lodging; but it couldn’t be helped. The answer I had given was the only one which would prevent the hotel ringing up again, and then again.

Serve them right, anyway! The tiresome pair, why couldn’t they organise their affairs more efficiently?

It did cross my mind, momentarily, that casual,
inconsiderate
behaviour like this was not characteristic of either Mervyn or Sarah; but the thought did not take root, and I did not attend to its implications. As I say, my mind at the moment was a whirling kaleidoscope of falsehood; new, supplementary lies to bolster up the old ones poured from my over-stimulated imagination in embarrassing profusion; selection and rejection of these, and the re-
weaving
of my tangled web, occupied all my faculties.

I decided I must get home, quickly. There might be a message from Sarah telling us where the two of them really
were
staying. Also, I felt that I could not face Mrs Redmayne
until I had got my new story thoroughly worked out; if I left now, while she was still asleep, then I could work on it in peace, and be ready to answer every question, meet every eventuality.

So I left her a note: I hoped she was quite recovered now, but if she was still worried about anything, she must ring me. If she liked, I wrote, I would come back in the afternoon; meantime I must go home and attend to my family.

And home indeed I went: but attending to my family proved to be an over-statement; for I had not been back two minutes before Peggy’s excited knuckles were rapping on the kitchen window; and a few moments later she was inside, agog with news.

Sonja had been here! Yes, already, before nine this morning! Yes, Peggy knew how impossible it was that the girl should be up and dressed, let alone out of the house at such an hour, but there it was. And if I thought that she, Peggy, had been “seeing things”, then all I had to do was to ask my own husband. He it was who had answered the door to the visitor and had informed her that I wasn’t in.

“Just like a man!” commented Peggy; and I knew exactly what she meant. What Ralph had told the girl was, of course, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; but who but a man would have left it at that? Who but a member of that incomprehensible sex would have failed to realise how extraordinary, at such an hour, was the apparition on his doorstep, and thus have failed to worm out of her at least
something
of the reason for her arrival? If it had been left to
him,
Peggy declared indignantly, Sonja might have just given up and gone away, and then we might never have known what it was all about! This unthinkable disaster had, it seemed, been averted by Peggy herself. She had (naturally) been craning out of her bedroom window throughout the brief interchange on our doorstep, and the moment Ralph closed the door she had rushed down, just as she was, in her nightdress, and had called to the departing Sonja to Wait, Wait!

“She seemed awfully upset,” continued Peggy, beginning proudly to enumerate the rewards already accruing from her promptness and presence of mind. “And she was wearing the weirdest slacks I’ve ever seen! I think she must have been up all night, she looked so sort of bedraggled. I told her you’d be back soon, and I tried to persuade her to stay at our place and wait for you, but she said No—she had such a funny, hunted look, Clare, as she said it! It was as if devils were after her! Isn’t it
weird
?”

Ralph’s subsequent account of the same episode was that yes, Sonja had called, but had gone away without leaving a message. When you compare his narrative with Peggy’s, and observe that in terms of objective fact the two accounts are identical, then at last you realise how unbridgeable after all is the gap between the sexes. Admittedly Ralph was still being somewhat cool with me because of last night, but even so….

“So I told her you’d ring her up
immediately
,” Peggy resumed. “Straight away, the moment you got back. But she said, Clare—and this is what’s so exciting—she said she couldn’t talk about it on the phone, it was private! So I said you’d go straight round there—you will, won’t you, there’s a dear! I’m dying to hear all about it. I’ll drive you there if you like: Harold’s not using the car this morning. He doesn’t go into the Lab. on Saturdays any more, it’s ghastly. He’s got all his microbes at
home
now, in horrid little greasy glass jars all over the dining-room. He says he can’t trust the Lab. girls to keep them at the right temperature! God knows why he thinks he can trust
me
—I’d murder the lot of them if I knew how, but how can you when they just look like a lot of dirty water? You can’t even
see
the little brutes! But anyway, it means we’ve got the car. So come on!”

Peggy’s undignified determination to be in on my
mysterious
dealings with Sonja was heart-warming: it sent my morale soaring. But all the same—

“Supposing she won’t talk to us, both together like this?”
I suggested reluctantly. “I mean, if it was so madly private that she couldn’t even phone …?”

“Oh, I don’t propose to muscle in on the actual tête à tête,” Peggy assured me. “I thought of all that: I quite see that my being there might spoil the whole thing, and then
neither
of us would ever know! No, I’ll just take you there, and then I’ll hang about gossipping with Liz until you’ve finished. Liz’ll love it, because do you know what?—Adrian is refusing to go back to school next term! He says A-levels are all a lot of balls, and he can get himself a job at thirty pounds a week any time he likes, doing psychedelic lighting in some club, or something. Liz’ll be in heaven. You know how she adores hearing of other people’s sons going to the bad just the way hers are: I’ll get a welcome like royalty, you see.” This was almost certainly true; and added to this there was, as Peggy explained, her own urgent need to get the hell out of her own home this morning.

“Birds in their little nests are
not
agreeing, as you can imagine,” she told me, as she steered the car into the main road. “Harold’s trying to put his poor harrassed little foot down, his voice has gone all shrill the way it does when he’s in a rage, and he’s squeaking sweet reason like a tin whistle into those deaf, teenage ears. And on top of everything, Mother’s there, trying to be madly progressive about it all—They’ll all have murdered each other, honestly they will, Clare, by the time I get back.”

She swung cheerfully round the corner into Liz’s wide, tree-lined road; and soon the familiar bedlam of her
once-gracious
Edwardian residence was washing over us. The little boy in the torn vest was in the hall, crying; the girl from Wolverhampton was there again, also crying; and Giles, the eldest boy, in his pyjamas, was yelling down the phone that the gear-box had had nothing the hell the matter with it at the time of the deal, and to tell them where they could stuff it. On the upstairs landing I caught a glimpse of poor Bernard, darting into his bedroom like a mouse into a hole; and in the kitchen was Liz, pleading with
a big, vacant-looking girl with bouffant hair to release one of the gas-rings so that she, Liz, could put on a kettle. “O.K.”, the girl kept saying, and went on dreamily prodding at some burnt-looking messes in various pans. Tony’s voice, loud and irritable, shouted something from upstairs;
someone
had given the little boy in the vest a toasted teacake, which he was now slowly and systematically picking to pieces on the bottom step of the stairs; Susan from
Wolverhampton
went on crying quietly.

“We’ve come to see Sonja. At least, Clare has,” Peggy made herself heard above the hubbub. “And Liz. I
must
talk to you about Adrian…. We’re so worried….” Liz brightened at once, as Peggy had known she would. She even seemed to derive a little extra moral strength from the good news, for she pushed one of the gently charring frying-pans to one side, and put the kettle on.

“Sonja’s in her room, I think,” she told me, offhand with relief at the prospect of a few minutes’ contemplation of troubles other than her own; and following these rather vague instructions, I set off in search of Sonja. I say vague, because almost every room in the house had at one time or another been Sonja’s room. Usually she was to be found on the front room sofa, but today it was occupied by Pete, stretched out full-length, watching television. Behind the door of the big back drawing-room I could hear a gabble of aggrieved Italian going on, and in a third room the
wireless
was on, loudly. So I set off upstairs, and, taking a chance, knocked on the door round which I had seen Sonja’s head appearing on my last visit. It seemed I was lucky.

“Come in!” came the husky, weary voice; and I opened the door onto an unmade bed, a tray of last night’s drinks, and Sonja herself, sitting hunched over the gas-fire. She was dressed in emerald green slacks, a heavy dark sweater, and her hair was piled loosely on top of her head, as if it would fall down at the slightest movement.

It didn’t, though. She turned round sharply as I came in, and it remained intact.

“Hullo,” she said guardedly. “You got my message?” I told her I had, and she looked me up and down for a moment, without expression. “Well—sit down, or
something
,” she said, vaguely gesturing. “Have a drink. Sorry everything’s such a mess, but—well—”

She abandoned her sentence. She knew, and I knew, that the mess that surrounded her had gone beyond explanation: it was a way of life; it was just simply the case. I sat down on the edge of the tumbled bed; I refused the drink, and waited while she sloshed into a tumbler some liquid that I think was whisky. She sat down again.

“I hear Mrs Redmayne’s ill?” she said abruptly. “You were with her last night. How is she?”

“Better, I think,” I answered cautiously. What was at the bottom of this sudden solicitude? “How did you know? I mean, I didn’t think she’d told anyone else.”

She shrugged.

“Everyone knows everything in this madhouse,” she pointed out, with some plausibility. “So she’s better, is she? Well, that’s good.”

“Yes,” I said. The conversation had reached an extreme of futility that amounted to paralysis. What was it that she wanted to know? She was obviously trying to pump me about something.

“What exactly was wrong with her?” She took a long, slow gulp of the whisky, eyeing me over the rim of the glass; and I wondered how much to divulge.

“Well—she seemed a bit feverish,” I said, cautiously. “And a bit nervous too—you know—”

“I’ll say I do!” she burst out viciously; and then,
controlling
herself, she went on in unnaturally casual tones: “Nervous, eh? Was it
about
anything, would you say?”

She was watching me closely. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing; but since I didn’t know what she was after, almost anything might be wrong—or, indeed, right.

“I think she’s nervous about intruders,” I said. “When Mervyn’s away, I mean, and she’s alone in the flat.” No
harm, surely, in admitting this much. Mrs Redmayne herself certainly made no secret of her dislike of being alone.

“Intruders? How silly!” Again the unnatural, offhand voice, this time followed by an unnatural little laugh. “How could there possibly be intruders? In a great block of flats like that!” Again I had the feeling of being scrutinised while I searched for a non-committal answer. “Don’t tell me,” she went on, more ostentatiously offhand than ever, “That there
was
an intruder? Or any sign of one?” Her laugh, deprecating and dismissive, indicated, just a little too ostentatiously, that she was only joking.

Suddenly, I realised that I had quite as much to learn from this interview as she said; without warning, I moved over to the attack.

“Sonja,” I said. “Every time we meet, you go out of your way to make uncalled-for insinuations about the Redmaynes. First you hinted a lot of unpleasant things about Mervyn’s father. And then last time you were dropping hints about Mervyn’s former girl friends. Now you’re hinting something about his mother. What it is, I don’t know, because you’re being purposely obscure; but it’s obviously something none too pleasant. Now, suppose you tell me exactly what it is you are getting at?”

She was startled. Plainly, this sudden reversal of rôles was something she hadn’t bargained for. Her face took on a sulky look, and she sipped her drink defiantly.

“Golly!” she said at last. “You don’t know you’re born, do you? And neither does your precious Sarah. I wonder what you’d say if I
really
told you all I knew …?”

“I’d say it was all old hat!” I declared boldly, shooting in the dark. “Because you see, Sonja, I know it all already. I know that you were Mervyn’s girl friend a few years back. I know that you ditched him….”

“I did
not
ditch him!”

My ruse had worked. The one infallible way to get people to tell you some story is to start telling it to
them
, and to get
it wrong. No one can resist it. Certainly no one as vain and egocentric as Sonja would sit back and let her precious
life-story
be thus mishandled.

“It was that fiend of a mother!” she burst out. “We were getting on fine, Mervyn and I, until
she
started poking her nose in! Not that he’s really my type, you know. All that gentlemanliness, it’s not what I’m used to, but all the same it was quite intriguing at the time. First running into him in London, after not having set eyes on him for over ten years, and having him recognise me straight away. And then his amazing way of going about things, it was out of this world, it was like something out of some soppy romance. Flowers, theatres, dinners in town, and still not a word about going to bed with me—it’s not what I’m used to, Mrs Erskine, it most surely is not. But I didn’t mind. I thought it was rather sweet, really, a nice change. Still, enough’s enough—wouldn’t you agree, Mrs Erskine—? and in the end he came to the point and we fixed that he was to tell his mother he was going to Bristol on business and would have to stay overnight—there’s some branch of his firm down there, or something, which comes in handy—and then he was to come nipping along to my flat, and there we’d be. Candles, soft music, the lot. I tell you, Mrs Erskine, I was really quite smitten at the time.