Possession (16 page)

The commotion continued. “Mum! Mum!” echoed frantically through the house. I decided to get out while the going was good.

I wasn’t the only one who had so decided. Outside the front gate, under the shelter of a tall laurel bush, well away from the light of the street lamp, I saw two figures lurking.

Liz and Bernard. Each clutched a suitcase; and from each emanated a sort of carefree, wondering radiance such as I had never beheld.

“We’re leaving!” whispered Liz to me excitedly. “We’re going to live in a hotel aren’t we, Bernie? And then later we’re going to find a little cottage in the country with only two rooms….”

“Only
one
room!” corrected Bernard joyously. “Nobody—not a single living soul—will ever be able to come and stay with us again! You see, Clare, we can’t make the boys leave home, we’ve tried, no end of times; and so now
we’re
leaving
them
!
They can
have
the damned house! They can pay the rates; and the insurance; and the electricity bill….”

“They can buy the fruit, and the cornflakes, and the peanut butter! They can pay the butcher, and the
milkman
….”

“They can repair the roof!”

“They can make the beds!”

“They can mow the lawn….”

“Or find a gardener….”

“And
pay
him!”

The exultant chorus had to be kept down to a whisper, and now here was the taxi drawing up. With a last furtive look backwards at their one-time home, the two figures
scrambled breathlessly into the vehicle; the door slammed; and then, holding each other’s hands, and staring into each other’s eyes with the first, incredulous awareness of freedom, the poor little rich pair sailed away into the night.

I
GOT HOME
to find the house in darkness. Ralph, of course, was away tonight, and Janice was still at the Hardwick’s. But where was Sarah? She had gone shopping, she had said; but the shops would have been long shut by now. Or had the shopping expedition been a fabrication to cover her tracks for a few hours while she ran off with Mervyn to Gretna Green, or something?

It wasn’t like Sarah to tell lies. If she had been planning to do anything like that, she would have told me so, and would have faced all the opposition I could offer.

What else, then? She must have gone on somewhere after her shopping was finished. To the Redmaynes’ flat, very likely. She was probably with Mervyn right now: she might at least have telephoned to tell me she wouldn’t be in.

But perhaps she had? I had been out since four o’clock, after all … and just then I heard a crunching of steps on the path, a key turned in the door.

In spite of all the turmoil of decisions and
counter-decisions
that had been tormenting me throughout the last twenty-four hours, I had made no plans at all about how I was to confront Mervyn the next time I met him. Mervyn the murderer. How are you supposed to greet a murderer? What is the etiquette of it? When he smiles, and bends to kiss your cheek, and says “Brr. .rr! What a night!”: when he closes his umbrella, and walks into the house like one of the family, with your daughter hanging lovingly onto his arm? At what stage in this commonplace little tableau do you scream: “Get out of my house, you murderer, you, and never darken my doors again!”

Have you ever tried to scream something like this,
unprovoked
,
to someone who looks and behaves exactly as he did last week, and the week before that, and all the other weeks before you knew what he really was?

“Hullo, Mervyn,” I said: and to Sarah: “Did you have a good day, dear? Are you terribly wet?”

“Not too bad. We’ve been in the car, mostly. Mervyn was a darling, he took the afternoon off to come and help me, he was marvellous at finding places to park the car.” She looked up at him, full of love and admiration, and he laughed down at her, pleased by the small compliment.

Well, was
this
the time, then, to start the “Get-out-of-
my-house
” routine?

“Have you both had a meal? … Well, I’ll put some coffee on,” I said, and raced for the kitchen as a swimmer might race for the beach when he sees some fantastic monster of the deep, unknown to science, surging towards him through the waves.

For my situation—it seemed to me—was fantastic in just this sense: it had no precedent. There were no rules to govern it, no conventions on which I could fall back. Coffee for a murderer. Do you take sugar? Cream? Arsenic? And how’s your dear old uncle keeping? What, dead already, and left you a fortune? Dear, dear; but a merciful release, no doubt…. How on earth
was
I going to talk to the man, now that I knew the truth about him?

I turned the kettle down low, so that it would take a long time to boil, and give me time to think. Just as if thinking would somehow alter the situation, make it possible for me to avoid the showdown.

For I knew I would have to have it out with him. There was no escape anywhere. I would have to tell him that we were forbidding the marriage—that Ralph would see it exactly as I did when he knew the truth—and that he, Mervyn, would have to take himself out of our lives. I would have to say all this to the friendly, well-mannered young man sitting on our sofa, drinking our coffee, and I would have to say it in front of Sarah. Through the closed door and
across the hall I could hear them both laughing, a warm, intimate sound.

No. Not coffee. For God’s sake, not coffee! Disaster was upon us, and unavoidable, but at least I could keep farce out of it. I turned the kettle off, and strode into the
sitting-room
.

“Mervyn,” I said, before I had time to think, to confuse myself with cerebration “Mervyn, there’s something I’ve got to say to you…. I imagine you won’t be very surprised…. I think you will realise that
any
parent….”

But he
was
surprised. He stared at me with gaping,
dumbfounded
amazement: and it was only then that it dawned on me that of course he didn’t know that I knew. Sarah would have kept his secret absolutely; in her loyalty he would have placed (rightly) absolute confidence; and he probably had never dreamed that his mother would actually carry out her threat of betraying him—for this is what the threat must have been that I had heard through the closed door, that first evening at the Redmaynes’ flat: she must have been warning him that if he persisted with his plans she would tell me, Sarah’s mother, the truth.

He stared: and as I went on talking, his expression changed in an odd way: he gently disengaged his hand from Sarah’s, and at the end of my speech he gave a strange little laugh.

“My dear Mrs Erskine,” he said. “I’m sorry my mother’s been worrying you with these silly fancies of hers. You really mustn’t take them so seriously, you know. She has turns like this every so often … has done ever since my father’s death.”

“You mean—you mean it’s not
true
!”
I cried. “You mean you
didn’t
murder that girl?”

“Of course I didn’t,” he said coolly—though I could see that his face had gone very white. “It’s just one of my mother’s delusions. As I say, she suffers from this sort of thing on and off, that’s why I dare not leave her alone too much….”

“Mervyn! Stop it!” Sarah broke in sharply. “Don’t tell lies to
Mummy.
There’s no need. She knows all about it. She’ll never, ever betray you, I swear she won’t.
I
didn’t tell her, because you asked me not to; but it doesn’t matter her knowing, I promise you it doesn’t. You mustn’t tell lies to her, I can’t bear it. Not to
Mummy
.”

He stared down at her with a strange, still, calculating look.

“My dear Sarah,” he said. “You’re just being a silly little girl. I’m
not
telling your mother lies. It’s the simple truth I’m telling her: that it’s all nonsense, the story about that girl: that I’ve never murdered anyone, any more than she has.”

“
Mervyn!
” Sarah’s voice was a little cry of incredulous horror. “What do you mean? You told me—you said…. You broke off our engagement because of it…. We’ve talked and talked about it, all this time….”

“My dear girl, it was only a joke!”

If Sarah had been sobbing less wildly, I think she would have heard the terror behind the cool, mocking words: she would have recognised that the shock of discovering that I, too, knew his secret, had temporarily deprived Mervyn of all his tiny stock of courage and loyalty: he was behaving like a rat because he felt himself trapped like a rat: his rat-eyes glittered through the bars, and
I
could see the blind, animal panic behind them, whereas she, in her distress and bewilderment, was aware only of the sneer, and of the enormity of the betrayal.

“A
joke
!” she shrieked. “You mean—you mean you made it all up? You let me think…. You let me feel….”

Her voice failed, and she flung herself sobbing across the arm of the sofa.
I
could have finished her speech for her, though: ‘You let me think I was saving you, rescuing you from the long years of guilt, giving you new life, new hope: and all the time you were laughing at me. You let me expend on you all I have of faith, of love, of courage; and all the time you were mocking me, you thought it was funny. A
joke
…!’

Suddenly quietly, she stood up. Gently she slipped the ring off her finger, and smashed it down into his lap with such controlled intensity of violence that she hardly seemed to have moved; and a second later, swift as a deer in flight, she was gone from the room. I was aware of her fleeing up the stairs…. I heard the door of her bedroom slam … and then I turned once more to the shivering figure that still cowered on the sofa, fingering the ring that was now all his. Even now he eyed me slyly, trying to guess how much I knew, how much he could still make me believe.

“I didn’t do it! I never did anything! My mother has delusions! She makes things up! My father never hanged himself. He died of a heart attack….” The defensive, futile lying went on and on, a repetitive, endless wailing, like bagpipes. It was as if he had to convince me not once but twenty, thirty times. It seemed like hours before I was able to quieten him, and get him out of the house. I watched him stumble down our path, never to return.

That night I betrayed my daughter. You see,
I
knew that the story of the murder was true, and that it was what he had said tonight that was the lie. With my own eyes I had seen the father’s suicide note: with my own ears I had heard Mrs Redmayne’s story, with its ring of total, heart-broken veracity. I could have told Sarah this: and then she would have known that Mervyn had not been deliberately making a mockery of her love and faith; he had simply been lying to me out of panic; and since she was in the room as well, he had found himself—coward that he was—obliged to lie to her as well, regardless of her feelings.

And this, I think, she would have been able to forgive. Cowardice and weakness like this she would have taken in her stride; she would have taken him back and loved him perhaps even more for this new display of weakness. She would have faced, with love and courage, the prospect of a lifetime of bolstering up a man of such shameful cowardice, of such shabby, scheming selfishness. She would have given to him with both hands the strength he could not find for
himself, the loyalty he could not return. She would have been a light to his darkness, a warmth to his chill spirit, and would have spent her radiance, willingly, in a cause which seemed to me at best worthless and at worst leading to total, irreversible ruin.

And so I betrayed her. I sat on the edge of her bed and wept with her, and offered all the comfort of the whole earth, except for the one thing that would really have comforted her: the truth. The knowledge, that is, that her lover was a scheming coward, but nevertheless still loved her and needed her.
I
knew all this, and I didn’t tell her, even when her arms were round my neck and both our hearts were breaking. I sat there, betraying her trust, and to this day I do not know whether my betrayal was right or wrong. Had I the right, by my silence, to swindle her out of spending her great gifts of sympathy and generosity on a cowardly, perverted scoundrel? After all, qualities like sympathy and generosity are talents like other talents; if, instead of these, she had had a rare talent for painting or for music, would I then have considered it my duty to supervise the pictures she painted, the music she composed? Of course I would not; but this, I tell myself, is different.

She will get over it, of course. She is young; in a few weeks or months she will be serene and gay again. The bitterness will fade, and the disillusionment; she will be happy again, our own Sarah, warm-hearted, generous and lovely. By my silence I have saved for her her youth, her innocent integrity, her hope of a happy, successful marriage. In due course, she will find some other man to love.

Will she love him as she loved Mervyn? Here I shut my eyes, and cover my face with my hands; for who can tell? And who can tell if, under the influence of her unshakeable faith in him, Mervyn might not in the end have changed, become a worth-while person?

But on the other hand, he might not. Leaning on her strength, confident of her forgiveness, he might equally well have grown more childish rather than less; the
long-suppressed impulses of his teens might have come creeping back, leading them both, step by inevitable step, to a hideous culmination.

At last, worn out with crying, Sarah fell asleep, and I sat for a while looking down at her tired, young, tear-stained face, temporarily at peace. Had I that night saved her from a ghastly fate? Or had I deprived her of the supreme chance of using her great gifts to bring about a magical
transformation
of another human being? I can guess. I can feel fairly sure. But I can’t
know
.

I
T WAS LONG
after midnight when I tiptoed out of Sarah’s room, closing the door softly behind me. The grandfather clock in the hall had come into its own now, down there in the sleeping hollows of the house, and its tick sounded loud and masterful.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Suddenly, as I stood there, I realised that Janice was still not home. I had not thought of her for one moment during all this harrowing evening.

No, not true. I
had
thought of her, once or twice, right at the beginning, but only to say to myself: “Thank God that at least Janice isn’t here!” Her tears, her tactlessness, her dislike of Mervyn—they could only have made a ghastly situation even more ghastly, and it had been with fleeting but profound thankfulness that I had reflected that she would probably stay gossipping at the Hardwicks’ for most of the evening.

Since then, I hadn’t thought of her at all. In my
concentration
on Sarah, I had virtually forgotten that I
had
another daughter. And now it was nearly one o’clock in the morning.

Was she staying the night, then, at the Hardwicks’? She had never done this before: surely she would have rung up and told me—especially since the scolding we had given her yesterday for merely staying there for supper without telling us?

I had no compunction about telephoning them at this hour of the night. There was always
someone
awake in that household, just as there was always someone asleep, at any hour of the day or night.

It was Giles who answered.

“Mum?” he said at once, without giving me a chance to speak more than the first syllable of “Hullo”. “Mum, where
are
you? The boiler’s out; we’ve had nothing to eat. There’s not even any bacon! Honestly, Mum, I do think you might at least see there’s something left in the fridge….”

I explained that I was not his mother. Not being Giles’ mother must surely rate as one of the more solid of life’s pleasures; but I was too anxious about Janice to dwell on this happiness. “Is Janice there?” I kept saying. “Is she staying the night at your place?”

“Well where the hell
is
she, then?” Giles kept on
answering
, referring to his truant mother: and for a while we talked thus at cross-purposes, neither of us able to break out of our cocoon of self-absorption enough for communication to begin. “IS JANICE THERE?” I yelled for the fourth time, and at last Giles’ eardrums must have jerked the words into his brain willy nilly, for he answered me at last.

“Janice? Janice Erskine? The girl with the hair? Yes—I think I’ve seen her around. Yes, that’s right”—his faculties seemed to be warming slowly to the unaccustomed task of thinking about someone other than himself—“She ate the last of the bacon. Somebody’d cooked it for her. There wasn’t so much as a bit of rind left by the time
we
got there. And they’ve finished the Camembert, too….”

“Listen,” I said. “I’m
worried
. I don’t want to hear your tomorrow’s grocery order; I want to know if Janice is
still
there
?
Now?”

“Shall I go and see?” he said at last, quite meekly—I must have succeeded in sounding almost as much of a dragon as I had intended—“I’ll ask Sonja, shall I? It’s her that Janice is always coming to see, isn’t it?”

“I don’t care
who
you ask—” I began; and only as he went off, leaving me with my ear clamped to a buzzing emptiness, did I begin to take in the significance of his last words.

It was
Sonja,
then, whom Janice had been calling on all this time? But why on earth …? And then, suddenly, like two bits of magnetised metal, the two separate ideas began to slide towards each other in my mind; at first hesitantly,
and then with headlong acceleration towards the inevitable, blinding revelation.

Janice must have known! Right from the beginning, long before I had begun to suspect anything, Janice must have learned from Sonja’s spiteful hints and reminiscences that some sordid and terrible mystery surrounded Mervyn. Hence her tears, and her sullen refusal to join in the general rejoicings over her sister’s engagement. Probably she had talked to Sarah about it; probably Sarah had asked her not to tell anyone; and Janice, with sulks and temper, but otherwise with all the nobility of the boy-on-the-
burning-deck
, had kept to this promise, and held to it even under the pressure of being scolded for her ungracious and apparently jealous behaviour. With no one to confide in, her anxiety for her sister must have mounted day by day. She must have gone back and forth to Sonja (just as I had) for further information, and have reaped from these visits (again just as I had) a growing harvest of frightening rumour, spiteful innuendo, and distorted fact.

But it was Susan, not Sonja, with whom I had seen her conferring this evening. Did Susan, then, know about it too? Of course she did: the whole Hardwick household probably knew by now—in that maelstrom of tears and telephones, of jumbled bedrooms, of quarrels shouted up and down the stairs, it would be impossible for anything to remain a secret for long. Probably, I thought wryly, they
all
had heard Sonja’s story about Mervyn, but only Susan was interested. A mere threat of murder (for someone else) would make little dent in the overpowering self-absorption of the rest of them.

“Sonja’s not there.” Giles’ voice broke into my thoughts. “Pepita says she went off in the car with Tony, ages ago. I think Janice must have gone home,” he added helpfully. “Nobody seems to have seen her for hours!”

“Fetch Susan!” I ordered. “Tell her I must talk to her. I’m sorry if she’s asleep, but it’s urgent. You must wake her up.”

“O.K. But what
is
all this?” Giles’ inert curiosity was
roused at last: he really wanted to know. I explained to him once again how Janice was still out … how it was one in the morning….

He didn’t get it, I knew. ‘Out’ seemed to him the natural place for a seventeen-year-old girl, especially at one in the morning. I sensed his bored bewilderment as my anxious queries poured along the line and into his ears. Still, I must hand it to him, he humoured me. He said he’d fetch Susan if he could find her—and I could imagine that the search from sleeping-bag to sleeping-bag through the whole height, length and breadth of the house must be quite an
undertaking
. Thin and far off, I heard his voice yelling: “Susan! Telephone!”—followed in a few seconds by: “No! Just some old cow looking for Janice!” and then his footsteps echoed cheerily away into the distance.

Susan’s sleepy voice was not reassuring. No, she had no idea where Janice was. She—Janice—had left just after ten—yes, to go home, that’s what Susan had understood. No, she had no idea what could have happened. Oh dear. What could she do? Would I like her to do anything?

Had Janice seemed worried, I asked her? Had they been discussing anything special this evening?

The child hesitated. “I promised …” she began—but I wasn’t standing for any more of such Bravest Girl in the Fourth nonsense, and I told her so. She had
got
to tell me. Janice might be in danger.

As it turned out, she knew very little. She knew, from Sonja, that Mervyn and his family had been mixed up in a horrible murder case: sometimes Sonja hinted one thing and sometimes another as to who had murdered who: anyway, over the past weeks Sonja had worked Janice up into a terrible state of anxiety over her sister’s fiancé.

“On purpose, I think!” said Susan indignantly. “Sonja’s a horrible, evil woman. She loves upsetting people and making them miserable! She pretends to love Tony, but actually she just torments him! He’s been ever so miserable, he really has, Mrs Erskine, ever since she got him into her
clutches! She hurts people for fun!
And
she’s forty! I’ll swear she is! Not twenty-nine at all!”

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned; nor, in my experience, is there any creature more difficult to keep to the point. Susan did her best, I suppose, but her answers to my questions about Janice tended to burgeon into colourful but repetitive accounts of Sonja’s character, appearance, and prospects. However, I did in the end elicit the main facts as follows:

(a) that Susan really had no idea of where Janice had gone.

(b) that yes, they
had
been discussing the Mervyn-
and-Sarah
situation this evening, and Janice had certainly seemed worried: but no more so than she had been for ages. Nothing special (so far as Susan knew) had happened to make her extra worried tonight.

(c) that she, Susan, would stay up all night if necessary, and ring me if she heard any news from anyone about Janice.

(d) that if I’d like her to
kill
Sonja for upsetting Janice so, then she would willingly do so.

Regretfully, I declined this last offer, but accepted with gratitude her other, more practical suggestions. Then I rang off.

Tick, Tock. Tick, Tock.

Kind little Susan was once again a mile and a half away, and I was alone. My mind whirled helplessly, like a powerful piece of clockwork detached from the mechanism in which it is designed to function. Who else could I telephone? Where could I start looking? Where, in all this wide city, might Janice be roaming? Why, Oh why had I not taken more seriously, long ago, her blatant and undisguised hostility to Mervyn, and persuaded her to talk to me about it? Why had I simply assumed that her ungracious behaviour must be due to jealousy and bad manners, and never even wondered if there might not be some objective reason for it?

I know why. It was because Janice is, by nature, a
tempestuous
sort of a girl, given to sulks and dramatics. It is so easy, once a person’s failings are thus stereotyped in your mind, to assume that all their troubles can be explained by their particular shortcomings, and to look no further into the material circumstances. One assumes that bad tempered people are never actually exposed to intolerable provocation: that touchy people never suffer genuine insults: that stupid people are never confronted by genuinely insoluble problems. “Just the sort of jam an idiot like that
would
get into!” we say cheerfully: or: “Don’t worry, she always takes offence at the least thing,” and we do not look to see if, this time, the “least thing” was a piece of undoubted cruelty; or if the “jam” in question is one that anyone, and not merely an idiot, would have found inescapable.

For a minute or two I sat in a state of bitter, helpless remorse. Clear as daylight now I could see the S.O.S. signals that Janice had been putting out over the past weeks, couched in the irritating form of haughty silences and bursts of arrogant ill-humour. I hadn’t recognised these signals, hadn’t bothered about them, partly because they were so annoying, and partly because I was so engrossed in Sarah’s concerns. In trying to help my elder daughter, I had failed my younger one utterly. And now she was gone. Where? Why? Was she embarked on some wild, quixotic escapade? Or had something happened to her as she walked quietly home from the Hardwicks’ through the lamplit streets, hours and hours ago?

Suddenly, I was shaking from head to foot. Mervyn! I had seen with my own eyes the lengths to which he had been driven by the terror of discovering that I knew his secret. To what other lengths might he be driven if he knew that Janice knew it too …? If, half-mad with fear of discovery, he had met her in the quiet streets … if she had challenged him, provoked a showdown on her sister’s behalf? It was exactly the sort of thing she might do: but what, in such a case, was the sort of thing that
he
might do in retaliation …?

I must call the police. But even as I reached out towards the receiver, the bell suddenly began to ring, yelling like a mad thing into the darkness of the house.

I snatched it up. Police … Police …; the word was still hammering away inside my head, and I could not imagine it was anyone but them, ringing to tell me God knows what.

“Mummy? Is that you, Mummy? Listen, I’ve got to be terribly quick….”

“Janice! Thank God! Darling, where
are
you …?”

“In a phone box. But listen, I’ve got to tell you quickly, I haven’t any more sixpences, and an awful thing has happened. That horrible Sonja has got Tony to help her to play some horrible trick on Mrs Redmayne! I don’t know what it is, but it’s something to frighten her terribly. They were just getting into someone’s car as I came out of the house to come home. They were laughing, and carrying a great parcel, and they asked me wouldn’t I like to join in with them, because they know I hate the Redmaynes. Well, I
do
hate the Redmaynes, but not like that. I mean, I’d never want to play a horrible trick on them just because I hate them. So of course I said No. And then they laughed some more, and they wouldn’t tell me what the trick was, they just kept giggling about it in a horrible sort of way, and Sonja was saying how beautifully it would pay her out—Mrs Redmayne, I mean; and how it would give her the fright of her life. And then they drove off—I couldn’t stop them. But I knew they must be going to the Redmayne’s flat for whatever it was they meant to do, so I went after them. But I had to go by tube, I hadn’t any money for a taxi, and by the time I got there it was miles too late. They weren’t there; and the flat was all locked and dark; and I don’t know
what
they’ve done! Nobody answered when I knocked. I don’t know whether Mrs Redmayne is there asleep, or dead of fright; or whether she’s still out, and will find the trick when she comes back…. I don’t know
what
to do!”

“Janice. What phone box are you in? … At the corner
of the Redmaynes’ road? Where it joins onto the main road, you mean? Well, now look along to your left. There’s a taxi-rank just along there. Can you see any taxis waiting? Oh, good! Well, go and get one at once, and come straight home…. Oh, don’t be silly, darling, you don’t
need
any money,
I’ll
pay him when you get here! Do you understand? Come at once. Then
I
’
ll
go back, in the same taxi, and I’ll get into the Redmaynes’ flat somehow, and see what’s happened, and make sure that Mrs Redmayne hasn’t come to any harm. Right? Off you go, then: I’ll be here, waiting, ready to start off the moment you’re safely home.”