‘I seem to remember it pretty well.’
That’s all. We hadn’t any more to say. The nurse hadn’t shaved him well and his skin would be dark in another hour or so.
He said: ‘Have you let Roman know about the accident?’
‘No.’
‘Ring him, will you? Otherwise he may think you’re deliberately dropping off again.’
I said: ‘What happens to a horse when it’s shot, Mark? Do they – bury it, or what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I couldn’t bear to think of anything else, of it being sold . . .’
‘I don’t think there’s much likelihood.’
There were some flowers and grapes by the bed, and some magazines and two or three books. I suppose I should have remembered to bring him something.
He said: ‘It’s early days yet, of course, but . . . there are other horses. We can go round in the spring, pick up a good one.’
‘I don’t think I’d want one.’
‘We’ll see.’ He patted my hand.
I must say it was awfully queer. Sometimes since I married him he’d looked at me as if he hated me. Because I was friendly with Terry or because I drew away sometimes when he touched me he could fairly go white and angry. But after this, after I’d led him a wild chase over impossible country and landed him with something near a fractured skull, well, he didn’t seem to hold that against me at all.
Mrs Rutland went home on the Wednesday. I went to see Mark each day, and they said he could come home on the following Monday.
On the Wednesday night just as I was going to bed Terry rang. He said he was sorry about the accident and he hoped Mark was going on all right and that he’d inquired a couple of times about me through the Newton-Smiths and it was all too bad, wasn’t it?
I said yes, it was.
He talked for a minute or two and then said: ‘I suppose you know the take-over of Rutland’s is going through?’
‘I – haven’t had time to think of it.’
‘No, I suppose not. Or me.’
‘Or you. I’m sorry.’
‘Well, I suppose it’s no good gnawing over an old bone. We’ve got to live as we’ve got to live. When’s Mark coming home?’
‘Monday, I think.’
‘Come out with me Friday?’
‘Oh, Terry, I couldn’t.’
‘Feel ill?’
‘Just miserable.’
‘All the more reason to get away for a bit.’
‘No, thanks, I can’t. I couldn’t.’ By Friday I should be gone away.
‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘I’ll ring you again tomorrow when I get back from the works, see if you’ll change your mind.’
‘All right.’ I wouldn’t be here tomorrow evening either.
‘That’s my girl. By the way, did you hear the six o’clock news tonight?’
‘No, why?’
‘Warning of hurricane force gales in the south-east. Close your windows and hold tight. Is Mrs Leonard with you?’
‘Yes, she’s sleeping here till Mark gets home.’
‘Good . . . Look, I’m relying on you Friday evening, dear. Heaven knows, with all this take-over on our plate I shall need bucking up myself; and only you can do it. Shall we call it a date?’
‘Ring me tomorrow evening,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you definitely then.’
I saw Mark again on the Thursday morning, and he was sitting up in a chair although he still looked shaky. It was just an ordinary meeting, and I couldn’t quite believe it was the last.
I said he seemed cheerful and he said: ‘I’ve got a hunch this may be the beginning of a new start for us both.’ When I looked up he went on: ‘No special reason, no logical reason . . . I feel I’m making a fresh start where my job’s concerned, and it may be – once certain formalities are out of the way – that I can make a fresh start where my wife’s concerned.’
‘You’d still be willing to try?’
‘I am, yes, if you are.’
I liked him better when he was like this – or perhaps it was just the old funny human thing of liking more what you’re going to leave behind. Anyway just for a second or so there was this twinge of regret in me for all the life there might have been between us. It was like seeing something through a door, suddenly. It was like being in a foreign land and looking through a door at a life you don’t know anything about and have never led. You look in and then you sigh and move along. Perhaps for a minute you almost wish you could be a part of it. But really it’s a sort of sentimental cramp, because it can’t ever be your life at all.
When I got home I tried to write him some sort of note, just a line saying goodbye. But although I started six times nothing worth putting down would come at all, so I burned the lot. Maybe silence was best. That way he’d think the worst, and the worst was right.
I told Mrs Leonard I was going to stay with friends who lived near the hospital and would travel back with Mark on Monday. That way I could carry my bag out to the car without any hole in corner business, and she watched me go.
Just before I left I went into the stable and looked round for the last time. It still smelled of Forio. I seemed to remember reading somewhere that men often killed the thing they loved. That had happened to me.
It wasn’t Richards’s day in the garden, so I couldn’t say anything to him; but driving away I passed the two blind men out on one of their walks. Usually I stopped the car or at least blew my horn and they waved, but this time I sneaked past. I felt awful. I felt like a thief. I felt like a thief again.
It would take an hour from here to Barnet, half an hour to get into the works and open the safe and get out again, and about four or five hours to drive to Torquay. That would mean Mother’s before midnight. They were always late to bed and late up, so with luck I’d be there before they locked up. I’d sleep there and tell Mam everything in the morning, God help me. By noon or earlier I’d be away. I was going to take my chance at Exeter Airport.
I drove to Barnet.
As I drove I began to feel more and more queer. Not queer in the body but queer in the feelings. It was as if the death of Forio, the way he’d died, the fact that I’d killed him, was soaking into me all over again. Two or three times during the drive I had to wipe my eyes with my gloves, and once I nearly hit a cyclist. I wished my eyes had got screen-wipers.
It was a nasty evening with a thin fog every time you got away from the streets into a bit of open country, even if it was only a couple of fields. I missed my way once, and it took me more than an hour to get to Barnet.
I didn’t drive up to the works, but there was a narrow street running beside the retail shop so I parked there.
Now of course the mist was a help, and I wished it was thicker. The hardest part was going to be to get into the building without being seen, and I wasn’t sure which of three keys was the one that fitted the outer door. If you fiddle about there’s always the chance of the stray policeman; but there was no way but to risk it.
The front door of the works was on the corner, and there was a lamp on the opposite side. Whoever went in would be seen by anyone passing.
I went right across and up the two steps without looking either way. After all I was the wife of the managing director. The first key went in but wouldn’t turn, and then it stuck and wouldn’t pull out. I wriggled and fiddled while two cars went past. I got the key out and tried the second. It worked. I let myself in.
It was all dark inside, and the only light was from the fanlight over the door. At two paces was a second door, and when I had unlocked this I didn’t shut it behind me because of the bit of extra light that would come through. The passage beyond was dark, but I knew every inch of it. You walked down, turned right, and then there were the stairs.
At the foot of the stairs was the door leading to the printing shop. Usually it was shut at night but tonight it was open. I stopped in the doorway looking into the works.
There were a few shafts of light comin
g in through windows here and there, falling on the big machines and the bales of paper; but what got me most was the silence. I’d never been in the works before when it was shut, and somehow the quietness was twice as much because you expected and remembered all the noise.
Then in the absolute dead silence I heard a rustling. I stood there not moving and listened to it. It came from over by the paper. I found I was clutching the keys so they hurt. I let my hand relax. I went up the stairs.
I’d brought a torch but still didn’t use it, and groped my way along the corridor. I jarred against a bucket that one of the cleaners had left.
I got a nasty feeling any moment that instead of my hands groping along hard things like walls and filing cabinets and doors they’d come up against a warm arm or a body or a face. I suppose it was the dark giving me the jitters. That and me still being under the weather from shock. I thought if I stopped I’d hear breathing near to me.
I got to the office where the switchboard was and pawed my way across it. This time a chair got in the way; but a bit of noise didn’t matter, no one would hear noise, it was light that might show in the street outside.
The door of my old office, the cashier’s office was locked, but I found the key to fit and went in. A Miss Pritchett was doing my job now. Mark said she was middle-aged and efficient but slow. I wondered how many of the pay packets she and Susan Clabon would have done.
There were two windows in here but no proper blinds so it meant still working partly in the dark.
I went to the safe and put in the key. It slid in easily and the lock turned as if it was in Vaseline. I tugged the door open and switched on my torch.
Anyway none of the routine had been changed. The envelopes were stacked in their tray, the rest of the money was in the drawer underneath. I took out this money and emptied it into my bag. I took the notes, of course, and all the silver but left the copper. Then I pulled out the tray and began to flip the pay envelopes together.
I thought, so it’s nearly all the same as it would have been six months ago. I’m taking the same sort of money from the same safe. Mark interfering has only made half a year’s difference. Except that Mark interfering meant I was now known under my own name and would be wanted under my own name and would have to get out of the country to be safe. And Mark interfering meant I was married, not single, and Forio was dead, and Mark was in hospital, and tomorrow or the next day was in for a shock when he found I was gone.
I shovelled some of the envelopes into my bag and then stopped again. Just at that second for some forsaken reason all my grief about Forio was coming up more and more and I began to shake. God knows why I shook but I did. I felt mad with myself because I felt so weak. I felt so weak I could hardly walk out of here with this money and drive off to Torquay. But it wasn’t just muscle-weak, it was will-weak, that was what made me so mad.
I looked at the money and I looked at my bag and I dropped them both on the floor and sat down and tried to work it out. It’s awful when you get so turned up that you don’t know where you are.
D’you know, I thought to myself, this is the second or third time you’ve felt like this. It’s Forio’s death, that’s mainly what’s done it. But also there was one time before. It means something, but Lord knows what.
So I picked up the money and put it into the bag and scooped up the next lot of envelopes. And then I thought, something really has got into you because you can’t take this money.
I must have sat there half an hour in the dark fighting with myself. At the end of that time I’d worked it out that I didn’t in the least mind taking the money – I hadn’t suddenly gone all that soft – but there are just some things you can’t do. You can leave your husband – and the thought of leaving Mark was still a glorious one – but to rob him, to pinch his keys while he’s in the hospital, to take maybe a thousand pounds and leave him to do all the explaining, well, believe it or not, it wasn’t on.
Sometimes you can plan everything in your mind, and it looks perfect, and then when it happens it all happens differently and you’re in a jam. That wasn’t so now, and that was what made it all the more crazy. Everything had gone according to plan – except me and I had just gone all to Hell. Or maybe it was that I’d really made all my plans a week ago, and now, a week later, I’d been following them more or less blindfold and in betweens time something had changed. I sat there with all that money around me, in the safe, in my bag, on the floor, and wished I’d never been born, wished the sea had taken me at Camp de Mar. I tried to think of all the bad things I could about Mark and our marriage – I thought of quite a few – and once I got as far as shutting my bag. But I couldn’t even cheat myself now.
I opened my bag and started putting the money back and every bundle hurt just as much as taking teeth out. I cursed and cursed. Even while I put it back I couldn’t help but reckon it up. The notes were in bundles of fifty pounds and the pay packets, well, I could guess what they were worth within a pound or so each. I thought, every bundle I put back, that’s taken from Mother (because I’d intended to try to persuade her to take this lot and sit on it; it would have kept her for three years). But even that didn’t wash. Because like as not she’d have winced away in scalded horror from accepting a penny more of my money once she knew it was stolen.
So after all if I went to her empty-handed I don’t suppose it would make much difference. But it would make a difference to me.
All I had in the world now was about two hundred pounds. I had to keep that myself until I got some sort of a job in France, or wherever I ended up.
When all the money was back I began to swing the great safe door to, and then I had to stand there for several minutes again before I could work up the will to shut it. I was breathing so heavy I might have run a mile. I sounded to myself like an old woman I’d heard dying once. I felt so awful.
When it was done I turned the key and then groped my way out of the office. Somehow I got downstairs, and there I was looking through this open door again into the printing shop and listening for the sound of rustling among the paper like half an hour ago.
This time there was just silence.
I let myself out and drove away.
I was in Newton Abbot by eleven-thirty. The fog hadn’t got any worse. I never stopped all the way. Luckily there was enough petrol.
The only thing I was sure of was that the nearer I got to Cuthbert Avenue the less I liked the idea of telling Mother. I could just see her look. I was the apple of her eye, all she had. But if I didn’t tell her, the police soon would. If I told her at least I could try to explain.
Explain what? How I came to steal instead of being content to stay a wage slave in the same office all my life? How I came to know I was smarter than most people and could use my smartness? How I found out it was easy to lead a double life and go on multiplying lives so long as you took certain precautions? How I got married and never told her?
Well, I thought, all that’s going to take a lot of explaining between now and tomorrow morning. Explain it to yourself before you start on her.
It was raining in Torquay. I parked the old car in a municipal car park and took a taxi up.
There were no lights in the front of the house when I paid off the taxi, but there was a glimmer in the hall coming through from the back. I carried my suitcase up the three steps and rang the bell. There was a long wait and then footsteps. Lucy opened the door. Her face was all red and lumpy.
She gave a little scream and flung her arms round my neck. ‘Oh, Marnie! Oh, Marnie! ’Ere at last! We was looking for you everywhere! We didn’t know where you could’ve got to. It wasn’t right, leaving no address. They said to me, but she must have some address. Look in the telephone book, they said—’
‘Here, what’s this all about, Lucy? What’s the matter? What’s to do?’
‘Oh,’ she wailed, looking at me, and suddenly she spouted tears. Then behind her came Doreen, Uncle Stephen’s daughter.
‘Marnie,’ Do
reen said. ‘Your Mam died yesterday.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
There was a long stain down the kitchen wall. It looked like a map of the River Nile. I had to draw a map of the River Nile once and I remember it well. There was a nail in the wall just about the place for Cairo. ‘It was that storm,’ said Lucy. ‘You remember. It blew a slate off and the rain came in. First week in Jan. We sent down to Marley’s but they never came.’ One of the padded arms of the rocking chair had been recovered; it didn’t quite match the other, and somebody, it must have been Doreen, had hung a tea towel to dry on the fretwork pipe-rack. ‘She was took ill on Monday night,’ said Lucy. ‘A stroke, the doctor said. Down her side. She never spoke again, Marnie. But you know how she was about you. I thought, well, I got to find her; but I looked through your letters. No address. I found Doreen, that’s all. Doreen phoned Manchester and Birmingham, didn’t you, Doreen.’
‘Dad’s coming tomorrow for the funeral,’ said Doreen. ‘He’s in Liverpool, luckily. Why didn’t you leave an address, Marnie? We tried half a dozen Pembertons, but none of them was your man.’
‘Yesterday morning the doctor says she can’t last long,’ said Lucy. ‘So we went to the police. They says they can’t help us to find you, why not put an SOS on the BBC? So we done that. But she passed away peaceful yesterday five o’clock in the afternoon. Breathing heavy she’d been ever since Tuesday night, like she couldn’t catch ’er breath. I sat with ’er, and Doreen too.’
‘Funeral’s tomorrow at two,’ said Doreen. ‘I’ve got to go back right after because I’ve left my husband and he’s rushed off his feet. It’s the time of year, all this bronchitis. I hope I did right but somebody had to make the arrangements. There’s a policy. With the United Insurance. It was only a few pence a week but it’ll cover the cost. I didn’t know whether you’d be here or not.’
‘I thought you’d ’eard,’ said Lucy. ‘You coming like that I thought you’d ’eard. She was right as ninepence till Monday dinner-time; then she said she’d got a ’eadache so she’d lie down. She got up for tea again and baked. She was always one for saffron cake. She said to me, “Lucy, I’ve a feeling Marnie’ll be down this month.” Next thing you know she was on the floor, just where Doreen’s standing now. I tried to get ’er in the chair but she was a dead weight, so I ran for Mr Warner.’