The Breaking Point (2 page)

 

It is difficult to judge exactly how close Daphne came, that year, to breaking point. Judging by the incoherence of some of her letters written then, and the testimony of friends who witnessed episodes of paranoia in which she believed herself watched, followed and plotted against, she came perilously close to the edge of insanity, and perhaps, on occasion, slipped over. But she was able to claw her way back, and the route she took, powered by her imagination, resonates throughout these eight
Breaking Point
stories.

In the first, the troubling and terrifying ‘The Alibi’, a man, James Fenton, adopts a new and secret identity. He embarks on a double life, toys with the idea of an
acte gratuit
(a motiveless murder), and then displaces that ugly violence into art. Instead of killing his chosen victims, a woman and her heartbreakingly neglected son, he
paints
them - and the unskilled fury he exhibits as he stabs oil on to canvas echoes the rage with which Daphne, trapped in her husband’s Chelsea flat, painted her own ‘strident’ and ‘screaming’ canvases.

In the second, ‘The Blue Lenses’, a near-blind woman in a nursing home has an operation on her eyes - and acquires abnormal, yet truthful vision. Now she can see the treachery of her husband and her nurse; now she can understand that her own nature condemns her to be a victim, plotted against and perhaps to be disposed of. In both stories, there is possible gender adjustment; in both, there is a subterranean river of autobiography, a dark underground torrent that flows under and through the work, occasionally breaking the surface - and this flow can be perceived throughout, right to the last, ‘The Lordly Ones’, in which an afflicted terrorised boy, born dumb, desperate to communicate, speaks to the reader with heart-rending eloquence.

All of du Maurier’s central concerns can be found in these eight strange works: the preoccupation with double lives, split personalities and divided loyalties; the unflinching investigation of perversity, of purpose (and purposelessness) in art. There is the same clear-eyed scrutiny of love and its potential rapacity that we find in her novels. There is the subtle questioning of the nature of crime, whereby the victim and perpetrator constantly switch roles, until it is almost impossible to judge which is the guilty party - a preoccupation, this, that can be seen in du Maurier’s
Rebecca
and
My Cousin Rachel.

These stories do not make easy reading.They are shot through with darkness, terror and anger. They occupy that danger zone where the distinctions between health and sickness, sanity and madness are blurred. Not by any means technically perfect, they are nonetheless extraordinary.

 

The Alibi

T
he Fentons were taking their usual Sunday walk along the Embankment. They had come to Albert Bridge, and paused, as they always did, before deciding whether to cross it to the gardens, or continue along past the houseboats; and Fenton’s wife, following some process of thought unknown to him, said, ‘Remind me to telephone the Alhusons when we get home to ask them for drinks. It’s their turn to come to us.’

Fenton stared heedlessly at the passing traffic. His mind took in a lorry swinging too fast over the bridge, a sports car with a loud exhaust, and a nurse in a grey uniform, pushing a pram containing identical twins with round faces like Dutch cheeses, who turned left over the bridge to Battersea.

‘Which way?’ asked his wife, and he looked at her without recognition, seized with the overwhelming, indeed appalling impression that she, and all the other people walking along the Embankment or crossing the bridge, were minute, dangling puppets manipulated by a string. The very steps they took were jerking, lopsided, a horrible imitation of the real thing, of what should be; and his wife’s face - the china-blue eyes, the too heavily made-up mouth, the new spring hat set at a jaunty angle - was nothing but a mask painted rapidly by a master-hand, the hand that held the puppets, on the strip of lifeless wood, matchstick wood, from which these marionettes were fashioned.

He looked quickly away from her and down to the ground, hurriedly tracing the outline of a square on the pavement with his walking-stick, and pin-pointing a blob in the centre of the square. Then he heard himself saying, ‘I can’t go on.’

‘What’s the matter?’ asked his wife. ‘Have you got a stitch?’

He knew then that he must be on his guard. Any attempt at explanation would lead to bewildered stares from those large eyes, to equally bewildered, pressing questions; and they would turn on their tracks back along the hated Embankment, the wind this time mercifully behind them yet carrying them inexorably towards the death of the hours ahead, just as the tide of the river beside them carried the rolling logs and empty boxes to some inevitable, stinking mud-spit below the docks.

Cunningly he rephrased his words to reassure her. ‘What I meant was that we can’t go on beyond the houseboats. It’s a dead-end. And your heels . . .’ he glanced down at her shoes . . . ‘your heels aren’t right for the long trek round Battersea. I need exercise, and you can’t keep up. Why don’t you go home? It’s not much of an afternoon.’

His wife looked up at the sky, low-clouded, opaque, and blessedly, for him, a gust of wind shivered her too thin coat and she put up her hand to hold the spring hat.

‘I think I will,’ she said, and then with doubt, ‘Are you sure you haven’t a stitch? You look pale.’

‘No, I’m all right,’ he replied. ‘I’ll walk faster alone.’

Then, seeing at that moment a taxi approaching with its flag up, he hailed it, waving his stick, and said to her, ‘Jump in. No sense in catching cold.’ Before she could protest he had opened the door and given the address to the driver. There was no time to argue. He hustled her inside, and as it bore her away he saw her struggle with the closed window to call out something about not being late back and the Alhusons. He watched the taxi out of sight down the Embankment, and it was like watching a phase of life that had gone forever.

He turned away from the river and the Embankment, and, leaving all sound and sight of traffic behind him, plunged into the warren of narrow streets and squares which lay between him and the Fulham Road. He walked with no purpose but to lose identity, and to blot from present thought the ritual of the Sunday which imprisoned him.

The idea of escape had never come to him before. It was as though something had clicked in his brain when his wife made the remark about the Alhusons. ‘Remind me to telephone when we get home. It’s their turn to come to us.’ The drowning man who sees the pattern of his life pass by as the sea engulfs him could at last be understood. The ring at the front door, the cheerful voices of the Alhusons, the drinks set out on the sideboard, the standing about for a moment and then the sitting down - these things became only pieces of the tapestry that was the whole of his life-imprisonment, beginning daily with the drawing-back of the curtains and early morning tea, the opening of the newspaper, breakfast eaten in the small dining-room with the gas-fire burning blue (turned low because of waste), the journey by Underground to the City, the passing hours of methodical office work, the return by Underground, unfolding an evening paper in the crowd which hemmed him in, the laying down of hat and coat and umbrella, the sound of television from the drawing-room blending, perhaps, with the voice of his wife talking on the phone. And it was winter, or it was summer, or it was spring, or it was autumn, because with the changing seasons the covers of the chairs and sofa in the drawing-room were cleaned and replaced by others, or the trees in the square outside were in leaf or bare.

‘It’s their turn to come to us,’ and the Alhusons, grimacing and jumping on their string, came and bowed and disappeared, and the hosts who had received them became guests in their turn, jiggling and smirking, the dancing couples set to partners in an old-time measure.

Now suddenly, with the pause by Albert Bridge and Edna’s remark, time had ceased; or rather, it had continued in the same way for her, for the Alhusons answering the telephone, for the other partners in the dance; but for him everything had changed. He was aware of a sense of power within. He was in control. His was the master-hand that set the puppets jiggling. And Edna, poor Edna, speeding home in the taxi to a predestined role of putting out the drinks, patting cushions, shaking salted almonds from a tin, Edna had no conception of how he had stepped out of bondage into a new dimension.

The apathy of Sunday lay upon the streets. Houses were closed, withdrawn.

‘They don’t know,’ he thought, ‘those people inside, how one gesture of mine, now, at this minute, might alter their world. A knock on the door, and someone answers - a woman yawning, an old man in carpet slippers, a child sent by its parents in irritation; and according to what I will, what I decide, their whole future will be decided. Faces smashed in. Sudden murder. Theft. Fire.’ It was as simple as that.

He looked at his watch. Half-past three. He decided to work on a system of numbers. He would walk down three more streets, and then, depending upon the name of the third street in which he found himself, and how many letters it contained, choose the number of his destination.

He walked briskly, aware of mounting interest. No cheating, he told himself. Block of flats or United Dairies, it was all one. It turned out that the third street was a long one, flanked on either side by drab Victorian villas which had been pretentious some fifty years ago, and now, let out as flats or lodgings, had lost caste. The name was Boulting Street. Eight letters meant Number 8. He crossed over confidently, searching the front-doors, undaunted by the steep flight of stone steps leading to every villa, the unpainted gates, the lowering basements, the air of poverty and decay which presented such a contrast to the houses in his own small Regency square, with their bright front-doors and window-boxes.

Number 8 proved no different from its fellows. The gate was even shabbier, perhaps, the curtains at the long, ugly ground-floor window more bleakly lace. A child of about three, a boy, sat on the top step. white-faced, blank-eyed, tied in some strange fashion to the mud-scraper so that he could not move. The front door was ajar.

James Fenton mounted the steps and looked for the bell.There was a scrap of paper pasted across it with the words ‘Out of Order’. Beneath it was an old-fashioned bell-pull, fastened with string. It would be a matter of seconds, of course, to unravel the knotted strap binding the child, carry him off under his arm down the steps, and then dispose of him according to mood or fancy. But violence did not seem to be indicated just yet: it was not what he wanted, for the feeling of power within demanded a longer term of freedom.

He pulled at the bell. The faint tinkle sounded down the dark hall. The child stared up at him, unmoved. Fenton turned away from the door and looked out on the street, at the plane tree coming into leaf on the pavement edge, the brown bark patchy yellow, a black cat crouching at its foot biting a wounded paw; and he savoured the waiting moment as delicious because of its uncertainty.

He heard the door open wider behind him and a woman’s voice, foreign in intonation, ask, ‘What can I do for you?’

Fenton took off his hat. The impulse was strong within him to say, ‘I have come to strangle you. You and your child. I bear you no malice whatever. It just happens that I am the instrument of fate sent for this purpose.’ Instead, he smiled. The woman was pallid, like the child on the steps, with the same expressionless eyes, the same lank hair. Her age might have been anything from twenty to thirty-five. She was wearing a woollen cardigan too big for her, and her dark, bunched skirt, ankle-length, made her seem squat.

‘Do you let rooms?’ asked Fenton.

A light came into the dull eyes, an expression of hope. It was almost as if this was a question she had longed for and had believed would never come. But the gleam faded again immediately, and the blank stare returned.

‘The house isn’t mine,’ she said. ‘The landlord let rooms once, but they say it’s to be pulled down, with those on either side, to make room for flats.’

‘You mean,’ he pursued, ‘the landlord doesn’t let rooms any more?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He told me it wouldn’t be worth it, not with the demolition order coming any day. He pays me a small sum to caretake until they pull the house down. I live in the basement.’

‘I see,’ he said.

It would seem that the conversation was at an end. Nevertheless Fenton continued to stand there. The girl or woman - for she could be either - looked past him to the child, bidding him to be quiet, though he hardly whimpered.

‘I suppose,’ said Fenton, ‘you couldn’t sublet one of the rooms in the basement to me? It could be a private arrangement between ourselves while you remain here.The landlord couldn’t object.’

He watched her make the effort to think. His suggestion, so unlikely, so surprising coming from someone of his appearance, was something she could not take in. Since surprise is the best form of attack, he seized his advantage. ‘I only need one room,’ he said quickly,‘for a few hours in the day. I shouldn’t be sleeping here.’

The effort to size him up was beyond her - the tweed suit, appropriate for London or the country, the trilby hat, the walking-stick, the fresh-complexioned face, the forty-five to fifty years. He saw the dark eyes become wider and blanker still as they tried to reconcile his appearance with his unexpected request.

‘What would you want the room for?’ she asked doubtfully.

There was the crux. To murder you and the child, my dear, and dig up the floor, and bury you under the boards. But not yet.

‘It’s difficult to explain,’ he said briskly. ‘I’m a professional man. I have long hours. But there have been changes lately, and I must have a room where I can put in a few hours every day and be entirely alone. You’ve no idea how difficult it is to find the right spot. This seems to me ideal for the purpose.’ He glanced from the empty house down to the child, and smiled. ‘Your little boy, for instance. Just the right age. He’d give no trouble.’