The Collected Short Fiction Part 7

'Just one look, darling.'

Edmund was trembling all over with hunger and loneliness and terror.

'You must look, you know, darling.' The puppet-like voice seemed nearer. 'If you knew how hard it's been to reach you '

Edmund was groping for his last charges of willpower.

'Now turn your head, darling.'

There was a rat-tat-tat at the door. Edmund clenched his fists and leapt towards it. He was sobbing as he flung it open.

'Bread.'

The shop in the next street had taken pity on him.

When Teddie arrived home, full of evil surmises, she duly found that Edmund was not only in hospital but on the danger-list. Immediately she put on her pinkest Transatlantic frock, and, accompanied by Toby, a note from whom, left in the studio against her arrival, had given her the news, went to visit him. She found him unbelievably thin, and his face a cadaverous dirty yellow, but immediately she approached, he clutched her hand and croaked, 'I love you, Nera. Forgive me, Nera. Please please forgive me.'

Teddie withdrew her hand. The nurse was looking at her penetratingly.

Toby shrugged, as if he had known all the time. 'Name mean anything to you?'

'A little,' said Teddie, and changed the subject. Edmund said nothing further, but lay glazed and panting.

'I think you'd better go now, Miss Taylor-Smith. You have your own health to take care of.' Toby must have told her.

'He looks like a poet,' said Teddie. 'Will he get better?'

'Naturally we shall do all we can.'

'No, Toby. It's quite impossible. She can't even paint. Not even as well as me.' All the children smiled benignly; Toby did not care how well or badly Teddie painted.

'Nothing like that's impossible. Particularly not with a cove like St. Jude.'

'Well, this is impossible.' She thought for a moment. 'Look, Toby. If you still doubt me, I'll introduce you.'

'OK by me. I'm only trying to save you from making a big mistake.'

'She's always at home in the evening.'

On the way to Nera Condamine's flat, which was in another part of London, he put his arm round her.

'Of course I know she was lonely.'

'There you are.'

'She used to ring me up at all hours. She always wanted me to ring her back. Where she worked. Some number or other Extension 281.'

'Now that does cut out St. Jude. Never known a chap so scared of the telephone.'

Teddie wriggled herself free for the moment. 'I'm going to introduce you anyway. You were at the hospital, and this must be stopped.'

'What's that on the floor?'

They had been standing for several minutes in the dim pa.s.sage, unavailingly manipulating Miss Condamine's small bra.s.s knocker. The design was a jester's head.

'Telephone Directory,' reported Toby. 'A to D volume with her in it. Issued in July.'

They looked at one another.

'They bring it round, you know. If there's no answer, they leave it.'

Teddie raised the flap of the letter-box.

'Toby!' Now she clutched his arm.

Toby squared up to the door. 'Shall I?'

Teddie was coughing. But she nodded emphatically.

Both door and lock were cheap and nasty; and Toby was through in a minute. Inside the sun came mistily through the drawn magenta blinds. It was simpler to switch on the light.

The details it revealed were most horrible. Dressed in decaying party pyjamas of cerise satin, and regarded by several academic but aphrodisiac studies of the nude, lay on a chaise-longue the elderly body of Miss Condamine, a bread knife in one mouldering, but still well-shaped hand. With the knife she appeared for some reason to have amputated the telephone from the telephone system; but none the less the unusually long flex was wound tightly round her again and again and again from neck to ankles.

Ringing The Changes (1955).

He had never been among those many who deeply dislike church bells, but the ringing that evening at Holihaven changed his view. Bells could certainly get on one's nerves, he felt, although he had only just arrived in the town.

He had been too well aware of the perils attendant upon marrying a girl twenty-four years younger than himself to add to them by a conventional honeymoon. The strange force of Phrynne's love had borne both of them away from their previous selves: in him a formerly haphazard and easy-going approach to life had been replaced by much deep planning to wall in happiness; and she, though once thought cold and choosy, would now agree to anything as long as she was with him. He had said that if they were to marry in June, it would be at the cost of not being able to honeymoon until October. Had they been courting longer, he had explained, gravely smiling, special arrangements could have been made; but, as it was, business claimed him. This, indeed, was true; because his business position was less influential than he had led Phrynne to believe. Finally, it would have been impossible for them to have courted longer, because they had courted from the day they met, which was less than six weeks before the day they married.

'"A village,"' he had quoted as they entered the branch-line train at the junction (itself sufficiently remote), '"from which (it was said) persons of sufficient longevity might hope to reach Liverpool Street."' By now he was able to make jokes about age, although perhaps he did so rather too often.

'Who said that?'

'Bertrand Russell.'

She had looked at him with her big eyes in her tiny face.

'Really.' He had smiled confirmation.

'I'm not arguing.' She had still been looking at him. The romantic gas light in the charming period compartment had left him uncertain whether she was smiling back or not. He had given himself the benefit of the doubt, and kissed her.

The guard had blown his whistle and they had rumbled into the darkness. The branch line swung so sharply away from the main line that Phrynne had been almost toppled from her seat. 'Why do we go so slowly when it's so flat?'

'Because the engineer laid the line up and down the hills and valleys such as they are, instead of cutting through and embanking over them.' He liked being able to inform her.

'How do you know? Gerald! You said you hadn't been to Holihaven before.'

'It applies to most of the railways in East Anglia.'

'So that even though it's flatter, it's slower?'

'Time matters less.'

'I should have hated going to a place where time mattered or that you'd been to before. You'd have had nothing to remember me by.'

He hadn't been quite sure that her words exactly expressed her thought, but the thought had lightened his heart.

Holihaven station could hardly have been built in the days of the town's magnificence, for they were in the Middle Ages; but it still implied grander functions than came its way now. The platforms were long enough for visiting London expresses, which had since gone elsewhere; and the architecture of the waiting-rooms would have been not insufficient for occasional use by Foreign Royalty. Oil lamps on perches like those occupied by macaws lighted the uniformed staff, who numbered two, and, together with every other native of Holihaven, looked like storm-habituated mariners.

The stationmaster and porter, as Gerald took them to be, watched him approach down the platform, with a heavy suitcase in each hand and Phrynne walking deliciously by his side. He saw one of them address a remark to the other, but neither offered to help. Gerald had to put down the cases in order to give up their tickets. The other pa.s.sengers had already disappeared.

'Where's the Bell?'

Gerald had found the hotel in a reference book. It was the only one the book allotted to Holihaven. But as Gerald spoke, and before the ticket collector could answer, the sudden deep note of an actual bell rang through the darkness. Phrynne caught hold of Gerald's sleeve.

Ignoring Gerald, the stationmaster, if such he was, turned to his colleague. 'They're starting early.'

'Every reason to be in good time,' said the other man.

The stationmaster nodded, and put Gerald's tickets indifferently in his jacket pocket.

'Can you please tell me how I get to the Bell Hotel?'

The stationmaster's attention returned to him. 'Have you a room booked?'

'Certainly.'

'Tonight?' The stationmaster looked inappropriately suspicious.

'Of course.'

Again the stationmaster looked at the other man.

'It's them Pascoes.'

'Yes,' said Gerald. 'That's the name, Pascoe.'

'We don't use the Bell,' explained the stationmaster. 'But you'll find it in Wrack Street.' He gesticulated vaguely and unhelpfully. 'Straight ahead. Down Station Road. Then down Wrack Street. You can't miss it.'

'Thank you.'

As soon as they entered the town, the big bell began to boom regularly.

'What narrow streets!' said Phrynne.

'They follow the lines of the medieval city. Before the river silted up, Holihaven was one of the most important seaports in Great Britain.'

'Where's everybody got to?'

Although it was only six o'clock, the place certainly seemed deserted.

'Where's the hotel got to?' rejoined Gerald.

'Poor Gerald! Let me help.' She laid her hand beside his on the handle of the suitcase nearest to her, but as she was about fifteen inches shorter than he, she could be of little a.s.sistance. They must already have gone more than a quarter of a mile. 'Do you think we're in the right street?'

'Most unlikely, I should say. But there's no one to ask.'

'Must be early closing day.'

The single deep notes of the bell were now coming more frequently.

'Why are they ringing that bell? Is it a funeral?'

'Bit late for a funeral.'

She looked at him a little anxiously.

'Anyway it's not cold.'

'Considering we're on the east coast it's quite astonishingly warm.'

'Not that I care.'

'I hope that bell isn't going to ring all night.'

She pulled on the suitcase. His arms were in any case almost parting from his body. 'Look! We've pa.s.sed it.'

They stopped, and he looked back. 'How could we have done that?'

'Well, we have.'

She was right. He could see a big ornamental bell hanging from a bracket attached to a house about a hundred yards behind them.

They retraced their steps and entered the hotel. A woman dressed in a navy blue coat and skirt, with a good figure but dyed red hair and a face ridged with make-up, advanced upon them.