VISITORS TO THE CRESENT Page 6

  ‘But I want it,’ he insisted in a soft, almost childish voice.

  He edged closer to her; she could feel his breath on her cheek, the sour smell of whisky and bad teeth sickened her. Across the room, Vickers was watching them, his glass half-way to his lips, his eyes narrowed, no longer amused.

  ‘No,’ Jessica said, and her voice trembled. ‘No, you shan’t have it.’ She might, by now, have been defending the Grail itself.

  Ames put his arm on her shoulder. ‘Now, be kind, girlie.’ His face came down towards her, big and bloated like some terrible carnival mask through which eyes peered, greedy, devouring her face. Sweat pricked on her forehead. ‘Be kind,’ he whispered again, kneading her shoulder.

  She looked round in panic; the faces of the guests had receded into the shadows, there was no one but herself and Ames. The room seemed to shift out of focus. Then, just as her vision began to blur, something jangled urgently in her brain. The telephone was ringing in the hall.

  She pushed Ames out of the way and almost ran out of the room. She was trembling and still dizzy when she picked up the receiver, but the voice at the other end brought the world sharply back into focus. A little too sharply.

  ‘That’s Miss Holt, isn’t it?’

  He sounded gruff, but pleasant, and the north-country inflection was pronounced. She had a picture of him, sitting at a desk in some dingy little office, a substantial figure symbolizing a world that was real, but demanding. While she was thinking these things, she was saying, absurdly:

  ‘Who is that?’

  He told her; he said that he was sorry to bother her again, but he wondered whether Mr. Saneck was in?

  ‘Mr. Saneck?’ For a moment she could not think who he meant. Then she said; ‘He won’t be back until tomorrow morning. He had to go down to Cambridge.’

  ‘Get’s around a bit, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Is there any reason why he shouldn’t?’

  ‘None at all, Miss Holt, none at all.’ She sensed that he was glad to have made her bite. ‘No doubt I shall catch up with him sooner or later.’

  Now that she had been rescued, she felt an ungrateful desire to hit out at her rescuer.

  ‘I hope you’re not having to work so late on our burglary?’

  Her tone was provocative and he did not like it. He said that he would not trouble her any more. She was both pleased and disturbed to have got under his guard.

  The encounter left her more uneasy than ever. She remembered how he had behaved when he came to the house. At first, he had been very much the master of the situation, but towards the end there had been something baffled, even a little resentful, in the glances he had directed at her. Why should she arouse this feeling in him? More important, why should she be so aware of his reactions?

  As she stood in the dark, shrouded hall she could hear the noise of the party. She had never realized before how alien these people were to her. Vickers and Ames, in particular, jarred on her nerves. They must carry on their grotesque charade without her. She went to the front door and opened it. The night air flicked her face. She sat down on the step, leant against the door-post, and closed her eyes. She could hear the sounds of the city very clearly: a late-night bus cruising leisurely and unhindered down Park Road East, the pneumatic barrage of a scooter, jazz music played very loud in a house somewhere at the back, the rumble of an underground train away in the Shepherd’s Bush direction, hidden laughter near by followed by the soft scamper of feet and a gently scolding West Indian voice calling to a child to come in. She was aware, as she hid not been aware for a very long time, of the sounds of London all around her. She wondered why she had ever thought the Crescent so peaceful.

  III

  Later that night, Jessica sat up in bed, her hand to her breast. Waking suddenly like this always took her back to the time of her father’s illness. The cry of pain: was it this that filled the night so suddenly with violence? As her mind cleared, she realized that the last guests were leaving; it was their voices which had awakened her, Ames’s soft and slurred and Vickers’s high-pitched with anger. What were they talking about? It sounded so urgent. But when she listened, it seemed that they were only quarrelling because Ames had drunk too much. She lay back in bed. There was the sound of footsteps on the stairs and a knock on the door. Paddy came in. She had been drinking, too; her face was a putty colour, her lipstick smudged, and there were dark weals beneath her eyes,

  ‘Are you all right, Jessica?’ she whispered,

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  Paddy hesitated, and Jessica said:

  ‘I’m sorry. It must have seemed very rude of me to leave like that.’

  But this was not what was bothering Paddy.

  ‘I’m going on to a party, kind of,’ she muttered. ‘And I couldn’t leave you alone in the house if you were ill.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ Jessica said. At that moment, she wanted only to be alone.

  The hours passed slowly after Paddy had gone. The house seemed to have a life of its own: doors rattled, stairs creaked, once Jessica heard something that sounded like a light being switched on but decided that it must be the people in the house next door moving around. In spite of the noises, the house seemed lonelier and emptier than ever before.

  As she lay staring at the dark square of the window, she found herself thinking more and more of what Anna Pevrik had said. ‘. . . he is so fortunate to have you to help him.’ The more she repeated the words, the more the emphasis changed until the sentence, so innocent in intention, became a stinging reproach. Yet how could she have helped him? Jessica wondered. Edward’s face wavered in her mind, pale and shadowy, the tentative smile lifting the corners of the mouth; a charming face, but insubstantial. Was it possible that anyone could have helped him to adapt himself to life here, to make the almost incredibly difficult readjustment, to risk putting down more roots which might be torn up, bloodily and painfully? Perhaps. But that person would have needed to understand him. She was not sure that she and Edward were capable of mutual understanding of that order, even had they desired it. On what then had their relationship been founded?

  It was easy enough, lying here, to think it all out, calmly, analytically; but in the morning, she would have to live in this new, questioning world. Edward would return. She turned over and thrust her face into the pillow as though she had suddenly become ashamed.

  In the flat above the antique shop, Paddy also lay awake. She watched the light flicker across the ceiling as a car passed along Park Road East; she listened to a few youngsters singing as they stumbled home, the harsh bray of adolescent laughter. A tear trickled down her cheek and she pushed the back of her hand quickly across the already smeared make-up.

  ‘You’ll do that for me, then?’ George had said.

  God, he need not have asked at a time like that, almost as though it were some kind of payment she had to make him for going to bed with her! Of course, he had not realized that she would take it that way; probably he would be sorry to know how much he had upset her. Her mind, which was honest in such matters, wavered a little uncertainly away from the image of George being sorry. But she found comfort in the reflection that something obviously bothered him deep down, and when that happened, odd thoughts had a habit of popping to the surface when you least expected them.

  She forced back the tears. The night wore on; even Park Road East was quiet and the traffic along Holland Park Avenue became intermittent. Paddy lay quite still, staring up at the ceiling.

  She was thinking of her mother. Her mother had been a dance hostess and one night she had been seduced by a drunken young architect at the club where she worked. His father, a rigid nonconformist minister, had insisted that he should marry the girl he had betrayed. It had not worked out. The man started drinking; he lost his job and began to go with other women. The wife whined and whined and soon he started knocking her about. Paddy hated her mother for her continual snivelling and she could understand her father’s desperation. But she could no
t bear seeing her mother hurt; the woman never tried to fight back, but just cringed like a dog that knows it is going to be whipped. It was Paddy who fought him at such times. When she was fourteen, he ordered her out of the house and she had never been back.

  If there was one thing she had learnt from all this, Paddy thought, it was that when the bit begins to pull a man will want to be free of it. And why not? Love was for delight, wasn’t it? Not something to be worked at like a blasted endurance course. That was where her mother had gone wrong; her mother had been very much in love with her father and she had clung to him even when he ceased to desire her. Paddy looked at George, lying beside her. He was not the faithful kind, and she did not blame him for that; she liked a man to be a bit of a buccaneer. Whatever it was that he felt for her, it would not last; she could tell from the way that he made love that he drained excitement quickly. So, sooner or later it would all be over. And he would not be easy to forget, there was no doubt about that. But just the same, she would not whine and snivel as her mother had done; she would let him go without tears and reproaches. She felt very resolute. But as she lay watching the sky gradually darken before the dawn, she was surprised to find how much pain there was in her resolution, and she began to understand something of what her mother had felt.

  Chapter Four

  I

  ‘I hear you had the police?’ Mrs. Green said to Jessica the next morning as she redistributed the dust in the study.

  ‘Who told you that?’ Jessica asked, without looking up from the paper.

  ‘The dark gentleman next door.’

  Jessica, who seemed to be searching for something, made no comment and Mrs. Green removed a couple of books from a shelf, studied the titles and put them back again.

  ‘I had a nephew in the Flying Squad,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No future in it, though. Always getting himself bashed about and no promotion just because he couldn’t pass his examinations. He’s got a tobacconist’s shop now. Had to have a special medical, too.’ She flicked the duster across the top of the bookcase and caught a vase as it tilted precariously. ‘Or perhaps that was for the marines.’

  Jessica ran her eyes down a column, found something that interested her and read it through carefully.

  ‘I learnt a lot from him,’ Mrs. Green went on. ‘You don’t ever want to tell them when you’re going on holiday.’

  Jessica turned to another page. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about the police.’

  But she was doing her best to catch up on them. Usually when she took up the morning paper she turned first to the arts and entertainments page, and then studied those bits of foreign news in which she was particularly interested. Home affairs she found rather dull and she had never, hitherto, read the crime reports. She was, of course, aware of crime and from time to time she pondered on such matters as the increase in juvenile delinquency and the state of the prisons; but the actual details or crimes always seemed to her to be matters with which well-adjusted, healthy people need not concern themselves. She was distressed to find that almost overnight she had ceased to be a well-adjusted, healthy person. She read, with avid curiosity, every paragraph in the paper which concerned police activity. The activity was surprisingly varied: in Derbyshire they were stalking a pack of wild dogs which a salesman had reported seeing on his return from a fleet air arm reunion, a sergeant in a seaside resort had rescued a tame dog from drowning, and an enterprising new recruit in the west of England had booked his chief constable for a parking offence; an inspector was reported as spending quite a fabulous amount on drinks outside licensing hours in a London club, and detectives in Kent had been conferring for twenty-four hours with a man who they thought could assist them in their enquiries. There was, however, no reference to any investigation connected with a series of robberies involving antique shops.

  ‘They have a sort of record book they keep at Scotland Yard,’ Mrs. Green was saying. ‘Lists all the crimes that were ever committed and how they were done. And that means that if you try the same trick twice, you’ve had it.’ She eyed Jessica hungrily. ‘I expect they asked you all sorts of funny questions?’

  ‘Some of their enquiries were rather irrelevant,’ Jessica said coldly.

  ‘Ah! But they mean something to them,’ Mrs. Green assured her, and added comfortingly: ‘You probably told them more than you think you did.’

  Jessica put down the newspaper.

  ‘I wonder if you would run the vacuum cleaner over the carpet in my bedroom when you’ve finished in here, Mrs. Green? I spilt some powder on it yesterday.’

  When Mrs. Green had gone, Jessica went on to the landing and finished the painting; she tidied up the hall and went back to her study. She lit a cigarette, intending to relax in a comfortable chair for a few minutes; but the chair had suddenly ceased to be comfortable and she found that she could not relax. She went across to her desk and took out the first chapters of her book; she had intended to put it to one side for a time, but the urge to lose herself in the unfettered world of childhood was strong. At twelve o’clock, when Edward arrived back from Cambridge, the world of childhood still eluded her.

  She half-expected that he would come up to her room and for a time she sat listening for his footsteps on the stairs, dreading this meeting because he seemed to have become remote from her and she was afraid that she would be unable to greet him naturally. He did not come, however, and after a time relief became tinged with annoyance. The party had been a nuisance; the least he could do was to enquire how it had gone. She made herself a snack lunch, tidied up the study and decided to go to the jumble sale at the Church of St. Barnabas in Holland Park Avenue. She no longer wanted Edward to enquire about the party; he had left it too late to propitiate her now. She shut her bedroom door firmly and went down the stairs. To her annoyance, she found herself pausing before the mirror in the hall, smoothing her hair back and listening for sounds from Edward’s flat. Silence. She went across to the door of his sitting-room and knocked. No reply. She knocked louder. He shouted something in Polish in a strange, ragged voice that she had never heard before.

  ‘You’re back then?’

  After a moment, he said wearily; ‘I was asleep. The journey tired me.’

  ‘Don’t bother to get up.’ She was anxious now to get away. ‘I thought I should tell you that the police were enquiring for you. You had better ring that superintendent and put him out of his misery.’

  She did not wait for an answer.

  Edward lay back on the bed and pressed his hand against his chest, trying to muffle the wild beating of his heart. His shirt was wet with sweat and his body felt filthy, soured with the depravity of terror. The nightmare was still more real than anything else; the quiet, drab room was a trap, an illusion which would soon fade into the reality of the dark cell. He was lying very still, not daring to move and stir the agony in his torn flesh. Beyond the bars was the dark corridor leading to the stairs; he was waiting for the moment when the footsteps sounded on the stairs and he would know that they were coming to beat him again. This time he would not be able to stand it, because his mind, and not his body, would betray him. He could not remember what it was that was so important that this terrible pain must be endured; he could not understand the arguments, the principles at stake were beyond his grasp, he cared about nothing . . . It was idiocy to suffer so much for nothing, for a few dusty ideals, a handful of worn phrases which had lost their currency in the immediacy of this violent physical challenge. He could not pray, because Sonya had explained God away. He could only scream her name as the lash ripped across his back.

  Before the lash descended again, the front door slammed behind Jessica. He heard her footsteps going down the steps, he counted them, one, two, three; he heard the creak of the front gate; he listened to her brief exchange of trivialities with the coloured woman next door. Slowly, he dragged himself back from the nightmare.

  He got up, took off his stained shirt and went
into the bathroom. He filled the basin with water and plunged his face in, holding his breath. The water was blessedly cold and it seemed to press against his eyeballs, there was a moment when consciousness began to waver and recede; then the face of the man in the punt swam into his mind, taking its place quite naturally among the other faces that he had hoped to forget. Edward jerked his head back and stood gasping for breath. He had learnt over the years to adjust his vision of the people he had left behind in Poland, he had softened them, rounded the harsh outlines, removed the sting from memory; now, the man in the punt had sharpened the focus and for a moment Edward saw the lost faces clearly, naked in their torment.

  Edward was moved to fear rather than pity. He dabbed the towel at his face, pressing his eyes into its soft, fluffy darkness. There was nothing to be alarmed about, he told himself; it was simply that he had come too close to the man in the punt, for a moment there had been a danger that he would become involved in this man’s nightmare. Fortunately, the man himself had destroyed the moment with his questions. ‘Won’t you tell me how you came to make your decision, what it was that first made you feel you had to do this . . .?’ But Edward had finished with that kind of enquiry: he had turned away and disaster had been averted.

  Uneasiness persisted, however. He went into his bedroom to search for a clean shirt. He had dealt with the man in the punt. The important policeman remained; it would not be so easy to turn away from his questions. There must be a way of keeping him at bay. Edward buttoned up his shirt, his eyes flicking anxiously round the room. He decided that he would go to the shop and start checking through the stock; there would be no point in getting in touch with the police until he had discovered whether the burglars had in fact taken anything of value. There was a tremendous amount of stuff there, and it would take him a long time to go through it.

  He was still working at the shop in the evening when Paddy came along Park Road East. She knocked on the window and called out: