Authors: Celia Fremlin
“How she got wind of it I don’t know. Sometimes I think she’s got second sight, that woman. Anyway, there we were, it was about ten o’clock, and we were just sitting down to eat—I’d fixed us quite a meal, I may say, lobster and such. And just then there was a ring on the door. I was for not answering: just let them ring, I said. But Mervyn has never had the nerve for that kind of thing; he soon had the door open, and there, if you please, was Mrs Almighty Redmayne! She took it all in—me, the candles, the whole set-up, and then—listen to this—she told him it was time to come home! You know—like he was a kid—Thank-Sonja-for-the-
lovely-party
sort of stuff!
“I just couldn’t credit it was happening. ‘Tell her to go
drown herself!’ I said, trying to punch a bit of guts into him; and I think it shamed him, just for a minute, because: ‘Mother,’ he said, all stiff and pompous. ‘You must go away and stop interfering. This is my business.’
“‘Stop interfering’!—apparently this was the toughest line he’d ever taken with the little vixen, because he looked frightened to death the moment he’d spoken, and he and his Mummy stared at each other as if a bomb had dropped. Her face sort of swelled up, I thought she was going to burst; and then Mrs Erskine, she began to scream. And I mean
scream.
She went on and on, neither of us could stop her, and in half a minute the neighbours were pounding on the door of my flat, and someone was yelling for the police. You won’t believe the next bit: I wouldn’t myself if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. There she was one moment, screaming and bellowing like a madwoman—and then, the moment someone got the door open and they all surged in—in that very second, if you’ll believe it, she stopped
screaming
. Between one breath and the next, she had become calm and prim as the Lady of the Manor.
“‘I’m
so
sorry for the disturbance,’ she says, ‘But this young lady has been having an attack of hysterics. My son and I have been trying to quieten her—would one of you be kind enough to telephone for a doctor?’
“‘For God’s sake!’ I yelled. ‘Mervyn,
you
tell them …!’ And would you credit it, Mrs Erskine, not one word did the rat say on my behalf! He let them go on thinking that
I
was the one who’d been screaming! He let the doctor come, and the police, he let the doctor give me some goddam injection, I was as near as nothing put into a Bin that very night! And the more I ranted and raved and tried to set the record straight, the more they were sure it was me who’d been screaming, and the rat, the snake, he stood by and let it happen! That I ended up getting turned out of my flat was the least of it! And that’s why, Mrs Erskine, now that I can see an amusing way of getting my own back on the pair of them …!”
She stopped. The door opened, and Liz’s face appeared round it.
“Clare? Oh, you
are
there. I’m sorry to barge in, but there’s someone on the phone for you, she says it’s urgent. She’s been trying all morning to get you at home, she says….”
The familiar, breathless voice was no surprise to me. I had guessed it would be Mrs Redmayne. But the fury behind her words
was
a surprise. For a moment, I could hardly take in what she was saying.
“You lied to me!” she shrieked. “You lied to me last night when I was helpless, when I trusted you! You told me you’d rung Mervyn at his hotel, but you were lying! You couldn’t have rung him because he wasn’t there! He wasn’t there last night, and he still isn’t there this morning! He and your precious Sarah, they’ve disappeared!”
I
T WAS IMPOSSIBLE
to quieten her over the telephone. It seemed to me that there could be a dozen soothing and perfectly reasonable explanations of the couple’s
non-appearance
at the hotel, but I could not get beyond the first two words of any of them before being swamped by further floods of vituperation. She had every right to be angry, of course. I
had
lied to her; and any explanation would be worse than useless because, from her point of view, my motive for lying would appear even worse than the lie itself. What seemed to me to be a wholly benevolent intention—namely, the freeing of an over-conscientious young man from the octopus-clutch of his possessive mother—would seem to her to be wholly malicious—the encouraging of a son in deceit and undutifulness towards his ailing and devoted parent. There was nothing to be done but to go and
apologise
in person, and to try, in any way I could, to undo the harm I had done. The thing to remember was that the poor woman was not only angry; she was also hurt, and frightened: and while I might deserve her anger, I also might be able in some degree to allay the hurt and the fear. That she was a changeable little thing I already knew, and also that she was pathetically easily swayed by kindness and a little cossetting. I decided to go to her straight away and do my best. First I rang up my long-suffering family to tell them they must get their own lunch. Did I say long-suffering? Actually they were both thoroughly sulky and fed-up, and I can’t really blame them, seeing that I had deserted them last night as well. Ralph remarked, icily, that if I was leaving him, why couldn’t I say so outright, and leave a proper note propped on the mantelpiece, like other wives? Janice said what about her revising? If she was to be expected to run the
whole
house, and cook
all
the meals, for ever, then how could she ever get through her Mocks next term? I pointed out that, actually, she hadn’t cooked anything so far, I’d left last night’s meal in the oven: and that anyway, she hadn’t even been in. She retorted, aggrieved, that that was all very well, but if she
had
been in then she
would
have had to cook it; and without being in, how could she possibly do any revising?
The logic of this defeated me—Janice’s logic often does. I told her sharply that she could either cook something or go without: or even, I suggested, she could try being nice to her father for a bit, then he might take her
out
to lunch. I then rang off quickly, so as not to hear any more about the revising. Clearly, I was going to have a heavy day on Sunday smoothing down ruffled feelings; meantime, I must lay out my ill-gotten freedom to the best advantage.
I refused Liz’s cordial invitation to stay to lunch; for one thing it didn’t look as if there was going to
be
any lunch, there were so many people still having breakfast; and for another I wanted to get to Mrs Redmayne as quickly as possible. I felt that if I didn’t calm her down without delay, she would be calling out the whole Bristol police force after her errant son.
Peggy walked along to the tube with me in order to be regaled with a rapid resumé of my situation, and of the conversation I had had with Sonja. She was intrigued, eager to hear more details when we were properly at leisure. Meantime, she said, she must hurry back as she had accepted Liz’s invitation to lunch—if lunch it should turn out in the end to be. She was accepting it, anyway, she declared, even if it should prove to be ships’ biscuits with weevils in, because she and Liz were having such a lovely time telling each other what a frightful time they were both having. She’d been hearing all about the time when Liz had at last got Bernie to throw Giles and Pete out of the house: “
Literally
throw
them out, Clare,” Peggy retailed gleefully “Into the street! With all their tape recorders and pools coupons and fancy shirts—the lot! But by the time Bernie got in
from work the next evening, there they both were again, quite amiable, just as if nothing had happened. Giles was having a bath. That’s what made them give up, Liz says, that bath; I know just what she means, don’t you? There’s something so final about someone having a bath; it knocks all the fight out of you; you just
know
they’re here to stay. She’s been telling me about Tony going to live in
Wolverhampton
, too. They were so thrilled, she says, when they heard he was living with this girl; they thought it meant he’d really left home; especially when he wrote and asked to have his record-player sent on, and a lot of his books. It was the most marvellous fortnight of her life, Liz says, until the afternoon when he turned up again with
two
record-players, and this girl, and hundreds of extra books. They’ve been here ever since, more or less. She’s back—did you know—this Susan girl? And this time she
can’t
go back to
Wolverhampton
, even if she wants to, because she’s quarrelled with her father. Oh, Clare, what will I do if
Adrian
turns out like that? I mean of course he will—boys from good homes with enlightened parents always do—but I mean if he
stays
at
home
turning out like that? I always pictured him
running
away
and getting into mischief; but Liz says she used to picture that, too, once upon a time. She says it doesn’t happen that way, not any more. It seems, Clare, that none of the young people nowadays want to get away from their parents the way
we
used to. Now it’s the parents who want to get away from
them
. She says she feels she’s spent her whole life so far in a trap: first she was trapped by possessive parents, and now she’s trapped by possessive children. They’re
furious,
she says, if she’s ever not there, to lay on food, and wash their shirts, and everything. Oh, Clare, we’ve been having a
marvellous
time, I
must
get back and hear the rest! Pray for me, though. Pray that whatever else Adrian does or doesn’t do, that at least he’ll
run
away
! You will, won’t you, there’s a dear. Because if he doesn’t, it won’t be just bedlam in our house, like it is at Liz’s; it’ll be bloody murder! So long, then. Get all the pickings you
can off your Mrs Redmayne, and I’ll do the same with Liz; tomorrow we’ll piece it all together. Yes? Bless you! The more frightful our lives become, the more fun we can have talking about them, can’t we, that’s one thing!”
With a cheery wave she was gone; and I went on down into the wild, warm, windy tube. I willed the trains to go fast, fast, to get me to Mrs Redmayne’s before she made any mad, silly, irrevocable phone calls to Bristol.
The flat was hot and airless. The central heating—I suppose to provide some sort of primitive, infantile comfort—had been turned full on, in spite of the warm, muggy winter’s day outside. Mrs Redmayne—not surprisingly—looked flushed; but I could see at once that it was not from anger. Since telephoning me, her first fury seemed to have wilted, and she welcomed me with a sort of desperate thankfulness.
“Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come, Mrs Erskine! But why have you been so long? You said you were coming at once! At once, you said! I began to be afraid that you had changed your mind. I was afraid you had decided to let me down! Oh, I was so frightened!”
“I wouldn’t do a thing like that—!” I began indignantly; but realising that such self-righteous protestations were hardly becoming to the bare-faced liar that I seemed
overnight
to have become, I changed my tone.
“I’m sorry,” I said meekly. “I’m most terribly sorry—about everything. Please believe me when I say I didn’t mean—I never meant—”
“I know. I realised afterwards that of course you didn’t know what you were doing. I daresay you even thought you were protecting me—saving me from worry!” She laughed, a small, metallic sound. “But you didn’t know how
much
worry, did you? If you’d known … how much I was
really
worrying …!”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, helplessly. We were still standing there, awkwardly, in the hot little carpeted hall. She had closed the front door behind me, but she still made no move
to invite me into any of the rooms, or to offer me a chair. Yet she did not seem unfriendly: It was more as if she was totally at a loss, cut off from her social moorings, and hanging like a person in space, without guidance from any known laws or forces. She seemed no longer to recognise herself as hostess, or me as visitor; it was as though we had moved, via some vast, silent, topsy-turvy circle, onto some plane where such rôles were obsolete, signifying nothing. In front of her small, trim body her hands clutched each other, the strong little fingers lacing and interlacing in silent, miniature dance.
“It’s not your fault,” she said at last. “It’s mine. There’s something I should have told you, you see: something I
would
have told you, only I kept hoping…. That is, I kept thinking perhaps it would all somehow come to an end of its own accord. You remember that day—that Sunday—when I came to your house, and—and made Mervyn see that he must break off the engagement?—Well, I was going to tell you then—I had come intending to tell you, but then, when Mervyn gave in like that, it seemed unnecessary. It seemed that the whole thing was over, and I would be able to keep my secret. But then, when it all started again … when I realised there was nothing I could do to stop it … when I found that no threats, no persuasions, would turn him from his course…. It was then that I knew I was going to have to tell you. But I still kept putting it off…. I couldn’t bring myself…. But now—Now all I can do is to tell you the truth. My son, Mrs Erskine, is a murderer.”
I
WILL TELL
Mrs Redmayne’s terrible story, not as she told it me herself that afternoon, interrupted by telephone calls, muddled by tears and terror, darting backwards and forwards across the years as memories flared in her mind, sudden and fearful, and in no coherent order. Instead, I will tell it as I managed to piece it together afterwards, when the tumult of its first impact had subsided, and when I was no longer hanging distraught over the telephone, waiting for faceless, countless hordes to ring us back: the Bristol A.A.: the Bristol branch of Mervyn’s firm: the Queen’s Hotel: those friends of Sarah’s that she had stayed with one
holidays
…. I shall never again, I think, be able to stare into that motionless face of a telephone dial—which doesn’t even mark the passing of the time—without remembering that afternoon, and the sick, stupefying sense of disaster not yet fully realised. Always I shall remember that little narrating voice running on and on like a clockwork toy, as if it could never stop; as if something had been released which would go pounding on and on towards the end of time.
This was the story.
In a quiet little house, in a quiet little street, in a quiet little town, there once lived a quiet couple called Mr and Mrs Redmayne. Mr Redmayne was doing well in a quiet way in his chosen career—the police force; and Mrs
Redmayne
was as orderly and affectionate a little housewife as you could hope to find. This happy couple had a nice little boy called Mervyn. A polite little boy with nice clothes, nice manners, and often top in Latin: the sort of little boy any parents might be proud of. Until, that is, he was fifteen or sixteen years old. Then the trouble began.
Of course, trouble with a boy of that age is no remarkable
phenomenon; and it was with this well-known fact that the anxious parents kept consoling each other, as their son’s behaviour began to seem—to them—more and more odd. He became idle where he had once been industrious; rude where he had once been polite: and whereas he had once been a biddable, considerate son to them, he now seemed to go out of his way to hurt and shock his parents. And odd ways he sometimes found to do it, too; the day came when—whether with deliberate intent to shock or not will never be known—he suddenly began playing with dolls. To his parents’ unutterable horror, the dolls he had had when he was a toddler were dragged out from the back of the old nursery cupboard, and were dressed and undressed, put to bed and got up again, as if he was four years old.
Take no notice, said the school doctor, bluff and blasé, up-to-the-minute even if it killed him (or his patients). Take no notice … adolescent sexual fantasies … pay no attention. Above all don’t criticise or jeer … let him work through it … grow out of it in his own time.
They were an earnest couple, the Redmaynes, with a profound faith in experts: they tried to follow the doctor’s advice. Even when one of the dolls was found hanging by its neck from a beam in the boy’s bedroom … and then another … and another.
“The doctor said take no notice,” said the couple anxiously to each other. “He says Mervyn’ll grow out of it, and he’s the expert, he
knows
.”
And apparently he did; for now, at seventeen, Mervyn suddenly turned to girl-friends—
real
girl-friends, from the local school. The dolls grew dusty, hanging neglected from their beam, and still the parents did not venture to take them down. To do so would hardly—would it?—constitute “taking no notice?” Expert advice must be followed—and besides, at the moment the expert advice seemed to be paying-off. Mervyn was at last leading a life appropriate to his age, going out with girls, bringing them home:
particularly
, after a while, a sexy little creature called Avril. It
began to seem, indeed, that the old problems were merely to be replaced by other—albeit thoroughly normal—new ones. This Avril girl, although she was made-up to the nines, couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Her parents—adoptive parents that is—seemed to take no interest in her activities, or even her safety: she would be out with Mervyn till
midnight
or later, and then he would bring her back to his own home, and still no one rang up or made any enquiries as to her whereabouts.
It seemed all wrong to the orderly Redmayne parents: and when reprimands and exhortations failed, Mr Redmayne finally made a habit of waiting up for the young couple and driving the girl home himself across the deserted, midnight country town: a charitable deed which was, of course, noted by his country neighbours who put a less charitable country interpretation on it: hence the rumours which had come to the schoolgirl Sonja’s ears.
And then, one morning, the girl Avril was found, hanged, in a shed behind the block of flats where she lived: hanged like those dolls growing dusty as they dangled from the beam in Mervyn’s room. The Redmaynes learned about it from the headlines in the next day’s papers. It was too much, at last, for the tortured, conscientious mother: in defiance of all that expert advice, she tore down the gruesome throng and threw them in the dustbin.
Was it this that first showed Mervyn that his parents suspected him? Not a word was said by the anguished pair, not even to each other, about the black fears that were beginning to beset them. They went on treating Mervyn (they thought) exactly as usual. And if Mr Redmayne, in his professional capacity, was keeping a closer, more desperate eye on the progress of this case than of any other he had handled, no one would have guessed it.
And, in fact, official suspicion never veered in Mervyn’s direction. It turned out that in her short life Avril had embroiled herself in undertakings of such sordidness and outright criminality that her passing association with a
pimply schoolboy working for A-levels went unnoticed. Blackmail—robbery—drug-peddling—her precocious little fingers had already been scorched by so many of the
variegated
fires of hell that suicide might have been the only way out for her. According to her foster-parents she had in fact threatened suicide on more than one occasion: but they had ignored it, imagining (so they claimed) that it was just a piece of teenage dramatics, one more trick for frightening people into giving her her own way. It was true that plenty of unsavoury characters had good reason for wanting to get rid of her; but since the crime could be pinned on none of them, and since her body showed no signs of violence, suicide was finally the verdict reached.
Mr Redmayne, of course, could guess what the outcome was likely to be long before it was publicly reached in court. Whatever his private suspicions, he knew, before anyone else could, that his son was likely to get away scot-free. And it was just then that Mervyn, knowing nothing of the (to him) favourable progress of the case, suddenly cracked. Overwhelmed, I suppose, by the long-drawn-out suspense of guilt and fear, he went to his father, blubbering like a baby, and confessed everything. Sobbing with sheer panic, he begged his father to save him; to use his position to suppress evidence, to cook alibis, to incriminate, if necessary, some other, innocent, person.
He counted, of course, on the undoubted fact that he was the apple of his father’s eye. Unluckily he failed to take into account also the fact that his father was a professional man of high integrity. While it had been possible (just) for such a man to keep his suspicions to himself, it was not possible for him to do the same with a piece of actual, incontrovertible evidence, in the form of an unsolicited confession. His training, his conscience, his high standards of duty and responsibility made it utterly impossible for him to accede to the request: but on the other hand his love for his son made it impossible for him not to do so. There was only one thing he could so. Before he went out to the garage to take
the only course left to him, he wrote a long, loving and courageous farewell to his wife. He begged her to understand; to forgive; to keep their son from temptation through all the long years that were ahead.
*
After fourteen years, the ink was already faded, and the paper was growing yellow. She showed it to me just as the day was changing into twilight through the well-fitted windows, and I had to hold it close to my face to see it. I skimmed through it quickly, guiltily, knowing that it had been meant for no eyes but hers. The other note—the public note that he left to be found by the police—was of course quite different; but it would seem to have been convincing to the authorities. He was, of course, an expert dealing with experts, and he used his expertise, at the very end, to ensure that his death should incriminate no one.
Mrs Redmayne was trembling as I handed back the tragic, ageing document. She sat crouched in the gathering dusk, and little moans broke from her, like a child in the grip of a nightmare from which it cannot wake.
“I
have
tried, I
have
!”
she moaned at last. “All these long years I’ve tried to keep him from going out with girls. I’ve even tried to give him some sort of a happy life at home, to be a companion to him, to make his home a lively, jolly place. But how can I? It’s not natural, it’s not right. People think I’m a monster, keeping him tied to my apron strings like this; and so I am! I have to be. I have become a monster, Mrs Redmayne, so as to keep him safe!”
I won’t say that I tried to comfort her, because what comfort was there to give? But I held her hand, and I let her talk on and on while the silvery square of the window seemed to grow brighter as the room grew darker. At last, timidly, and not knowing myself if what I suggested was cruel, irresponsible optimism, I suggested that Mervyn was a grown man now: might it not have been some ghastly teenage aberration which he had now outgrown?
She looked at me out of the dimness with huge, tearless eyes.
“Do you think I haven’t thought of that, Mrs Erskine? Do you think I haven’t wondered, every night and every morning, for fourteen years, whether I couldn’t let up, and let him lead a normal life? Do you think I haven’t been
tempted
to do so, in the long, boring evenings, and in the awful nights, when I lie in bed, alone, waiting for it to be morning? Do you think I never picture what my life
could
be like—even now, even at my age—if I was freed from all this? Do you think I couldn’t have married again—found happiness with some other man? Do you think I couldn’t have made another man love me—yes, even now! My legs are still good, aren’t they? My waist, my bust? Even my face is still something, because I have good eyes!”
She swivelled towards me in the darkening room,
displaying
her remnants of beauty instinctively, like some cocky little bird; and though I could hardly see her face any more, I recognised the defiant little gesture of unquenchable femininity, and knew that she had spoken the truth. She
was
an attractive little thing, even now. She could have had lovers—a husband—a proper home. For her son’s safety, she had sacrificed it all.
“Don’t you
understand
?”—she turned on me as if my silence had betokened disagreement—“
Of
course
I know that Mervyn may have changed!
Of
course
I realise that he may be quite—normal—by now. He
may.
But—don’t you see?—I can’t
know
! I could only know by taking the risk. By letting some lovely young girl take the risk….”
She stopped. Somewhere, out in that dark, winter night, beyond the range of all our plans and pleadings, Mervyn and Sarah were together. Whatever the risk was, it was being taken now, by my own daughter. The awful, helpless terror of it lapped against my consciousness, and was repelled by an almost physical act of rejection. It
couldn’t
be … it couldn’t … in a minute now something would happen to show that it was all right … that my arrogant, patronising lies and bogus messages had after all done no harm to
anyone
. Good intentions such as mine just
couldn’t
lead to utter,
irreversible tragedy. Except that of course they could; just like other people’s good intentions.
The telephone screamed out into the silent room, and we both leaped to our feet. Even though we had consciously and intently been waiting for just this sound, the shock was beyond description. I snatched up the receiver, and for a few moments I not only couldn’t speak, I also couldn’t hear. A great wall of fear seemed to stand between my senses and the outside world.
“Mummy? Is that you, Mummy? You sound so funny. Yes, of course it’s me—it’s Sarah. What is it? Is something the matter?”
She sounded quite anxious, and I nearly screamed with hysterical laughter into the telephone. That
she
should be feeling anxious about
me!
“No—nothing, darling,—everything’s all right,” I managed to gasp. My heart was beating so loud with relief that it was like trying to talk against an electric drill. “Then what is it?” I heard her saying. “We’ve just been getting millions of messages, from absolutely everybody, that you’ve been trying to get hold of us.”
We were worried, I explained, because we’d heard that they hadn’t been at the hotel last night. Sarah hastened to explain it all. The car had broken down; they’d got to Bristol very late; they’d tried to ring the hotel, but no one was on duty, so they’d stayed in a funny little place near the station. Yes, Mervyn’s interview had gone off all right; and yes, they were having a lovely time. “But what’s the matter, Mummy? Why all these frantic telephone messages? Is Daddy all right? And Janice?”
“Yes—yes, they’re fine!” I assured her. “But listen, Sarah. I know you’ll say I’m insane, but I want you to come home now. Tonight. I can’t explain—not over the telephone. But it’s
terribly
important. Please believe me.”
I sounded just like Mrs Redmayne on all those many, many occasions when I had so scornfully listened to her pleading with
her
child. I recognised in my voice the same
note of hopeless apology, of guilty, frantic determination. Sarah must have recognised it, too.
“Mummy,” she said gently. “Has Mervyn’s mother been talking to you? About Mervyn?”