CHAPTER 9

Although he'd been preoccupied with thoughts of money throughout that long journey, it wasn't until he was back at the hovel that he remembered his mother's will. Under it, he was to inherit half her property. Well, he wouldn't dwell on that, it was too base. Pushing away the thought with all its attractions and all its attendant guilt, he packed some clothes, put his royalty statement into the strong-box and got out his passport. There didn't seem any point in locking the strong-box, so he just closed the lid, leaving the key in. Was there anything else he had to do before leaving for France, apart from putting the phone back on the hook? He did this, but at the back of his mind there remained something else. What? Not put Jeff off. He'd be back by next Saturday, and Francis would take him in all right when he knew he was heir to half his mother's money. No, this was some engagement, some duty--. Suddenly he remembered--Miss Platt's party. On his way back down the lane he'd call on Miss Platt and tell her he wouldn't be able to go. Seen from the gate, the hovel looked as if it hadn't been inhabited for years. It's weatherboard soaked by seasons of rain, scaled and bleached by sun to the texture of an oyster shell. It lay deep in its nest of bracken, a decaying shack behind whose windows hung faded and tattered cotton curtains. Silver birches, beeches with trunks as grey as steel, encroached upon it as if trying to conceal its decrepitude. It had a lost abandoned look as of a piece of rubbish thrown into the heart of the Forest along with the rest of the tripper's litter. But it was worth fifteen thousand pounds. Miss Platt had said so. If Mal were to put it up for sale, he'd get rid of it that same day for this huge, this unbelievable, sum. He found the lucky vendor in her front garden, cutting early roses. 'Aren't we having a lovely warm spell, Mr Lanceton? It makes me more sorry than ever I have to leave.' Gray said, 'I'm afraid I shan't be able to come to your party. I've got to go to France. My mother lives there and she's dangerously ill.' 'Oh, dear, I am sorry. Is there anything I can do?' Miss Platt put down her scissors. 'Would you like me to keep an eye on The White Cottage?' But for the letters to Tiny, Gray might have forgotten this was the hovel's real name. 'No, thanks. I haven't anything worth pinching.' 'Just as you like, but it wouldn't be any trouble and I'm sure Mr Tringham would take over from me. I do hope you'll find your mother better. There's no one like one's mother, is there? And worse for a man, I feel.' As he went down the lane, past the Willises' churned-up lawn, past the new estate and out into the High Beech Road, he thought about what she'd said. There's no one like one's mother... Since Honor� phone call, he'd thought a lot about money, about Drusilla and money, about his mother's money but he hadn't really thought about his mother herself at all. Did he care for her? Did it matter to him at all whether she lived or died? In his mind he had two mothers, two separate and distinct women, the woman who had rejected her son, her country and her friends for an ugly little French waiter, and the woman who, since her first husband's death, had kept a home for her son, loving him, welcoming his friends. It was of this woman--lost to him, dead for fourteen years--that Gray tried to think now. She had been a friend and companion rather than a parent and he had mourned her with the bitter bewilderment of a fifteen-year-old, unable to understand--he understood now all right--the power of an obsessive passion. Understanding doesn't make for love, only for indifferent forgiveness. He'd mourned her then. But, because she wasn't really two women but only one, he couldn't grieve now for the broken creature who was dying at last, not his but Honor�, the property of Honor�nd of France. Flying to Paris was nothing to Tiny, no more than driving down to Loughton High Road. He flew to America, Hong Kong, Australia; to Copenhagen for lunch and back home for dinner. Once, Gray remembered now, he'd flown to Paris for the weekend-- 'You'll be able to come and stay with me at the hovel. We can have the whole weekend together, Dru,' he'd said. 'Yes, and it'll give us a chance to take the acid.' 'I thought you'd forgotten all about that.' 'How little you know me. I never forget anything. You can get some, can't you? You said you could. I hope you weren't just bragging to impress.' 'I know a bloke who can get me some acid, yes.' 'But you're going to be all moralistic and bloody upstage about it? Damn you, you make me sick! What's the harm? It's not addictive, it's anti-addictive. I know all about it.' From reading pop paperbacks he'd thought, with sections entitled The Weed and Club des Haschischins and A New Perception. 'Look, Dru, I just happen to believe it's wrong to use a drug like L.S.D. just for playing, for sensation-seeking. It's quite another thing when it's used in psycho-therapy and under supervision.' 'Have you ever taken it?' 'Yes, once, about four years ago.' 'Christ, that's marvellous! You're like one of those crappy old saints who went to orgies every night until they were about forty and then turned on everybody else and told them sex was sin just because they'd got past it themselves. God!' 'It wasn't a nice experience. It may be for some people but it wasn't for me.' 'Why shouldn't I try it? Why you and not me? I've never done anything. You're always stopping me when I want to have experiences. I shan't come here at all if you won't get the acid. I'll go to Paris with Tiny and, my God, won't I live it up while he's at his stupid old seminar. I'll pick up the first guy that makes a pass at me.' She leaned towards him then, wheedling, 'Giay, we could take it together. They say it makes sex wonderful. Wouldn't you like that, me even more wonderful than I am?' Of course he'd got the acid. There was very little he wouldn't have done for her except that one thing. But he wasn't going to take it himself. That was dangerous. One to take it, one to be there and watch, to supervise and, if necessary, to restrain. For, although the stable personality may react no more than to see distortions (or realities?) and experience a heightening of certain senses, the unstable may become violent, manic, wild. Drusilla, whatever she was, however much he might love her, was hardly stable. It was early May, just over a year ago, the east wind sharp and chill. On the Saturday morning they had gone into his bedroom and he'd given her the acid while the wind howled around the hovel and, up above them somewhere, Tiny's plane flew away to France. Massive Tiny in his eighty-guinea suit leaned back in his first-class lushly cushioned seat, taking his double Scotch from the air hostess, opening his Financial Times, reading, having no idea, no idea at all, of what was taking place those thousands of feet below him. Serene, innocent Tiny, who had never for a moment suspected-- 'And many a man there is, even at this present, Now while I speak this, holds his wife by th'arm, That little thinks she has been sluiced in's absence, And his pond fished by his next neighbour, By Sir Smile, his neighbour...' Gray felt a shiver run through him. It was ugly when put like that, for he had been Tiny's neighbour, in the geographical as well as the ethical sense, had even pointed out the fact in the first of those letters. He'd been Sir Smile, Tiny's neighbour, who had fished his pond in his absence--how coarse and clinical was that Jacobean imagery!--and had scarcely considered the man as a person except when it came to drawing the line at the furthest limit. Well, it was past now, and he and Tiny, the sparer and the spared, perhaps both betrayed in their absence by a neighbour, that smiling tennis player. Gray blocked off his memories. Beneath him now he could see the lights of Paris. He fastened his seat belt, put out his cigarette and braced himself for further ordeals ahead. The aircraft was late and the one available bus took him only as far as Jency, ten miles from Bajon, but he thumbed an illegal hitch the rest of the way. The only lights still on in Bajon were those of the Ecu d'Or, haunt of Honor�the mayor and M. Reville, the glass manufacturer. Honor�however, would hardly be there now. Gray looked at his watch, striking a match to do so, and saw it was close on midnight. Strange to think that at this time twenty-four hours before he'd been in Marble Arch Tube station phoning Drusilla. He went past the clump of chestnut trees, past the house called Les Marrons and down the little side road which would, after the bungalows, finally peter out as miserably as Pocket Lane itself into fields, woods and the farm named Les Fonds. Honor� was the fourth bungalow. A light was on in a front room. By this light Gray could see the sheet of green concrete spread over and crushing every growing thing that might have protruded its head, the plastic-lined pond, and around the pond, the brightly coloured circus of gnomes, frogs fishing, coy naked infants, lions with yellow staring eyes and fat ducks, which was Honor� great pride. Mercifully, the light was too dim to show the alternating pink and green bricks of which the bungalow was built. Not for the first time Gray reflected on this extraordinary anomaly in the French nation, that they who have contributed more to the world's art in music, in literature, in painting, than perhaps any other race and have been the acknowledged arbiters of taste, should also possess a bourgeoisie that exhibits the worst taste on earth. He marvelled that the French who produced Gabriel and Le N�tre should also have produced Honor�uval, and then he went up to the door and rang the bell. Honor�ame running to answer his ring. 'Ah, my son, at last you come!' Honor�mbraced him, kissing him on both cheeks. He smelt, as usual, very powerfully of garlic. 'You have a good fly? Don't be unquiet now, ce n'estpasfini. She lives. She sleeps. You see her, no?' 'In a minute, Honor�Is there anything to eat?' 'I cook for you,' said Honor�nthusiastically. It was a fervour, Gray knew, which would soon wane and be replaced by wily suspiciousness. 'I make the omelette.' 'I only want a bit of bread and cheese.' 'What, when I not see you three, four years? You think I am that bad father? Come now to the kitchen and I cook.' Gray wished he hadn't mentioned food. Honor�though French and an ex-waiter, one who had moved for two-thirds of his life among French haute cuisine and in the ambience of its tradition, was an appalling cook. Aware that French cooking depends for much of its excellence on the subtle use of herbs, he overdid the rosemary and basil to an inedible degree. He also knew that cream plays an important part in most dishes but he was too mean to use cream at all. This would have been less unbearable if he had cooked egg and chips or plain stews but these he scorned. It must be the time-honoured French dishes or nothing, those traditional marvellous delicacies which the world venerates and copies--only with the cream and wine left out and packet herbs thrust in by spoonfuls. 'Extinguish, please,' said Honor�s Gray followed him tiredly into the kitchen. This was Honor� way of telling him to put the light out. Every light had to be put out when one left a room to keep the electricity bills down. Gray extinguished and sat down in one of the bright blue chairs with scarlet and blue plastic seat. It was very quiet, nearly as quiet as m the hovel. In the middle of the kitchen table was a pink plastic geranium in a white plastic urn and there were plastic flowers all over the window-sill. The wall clock was of orange glass with chrome hands and the wall plates which ringed it showed ch�teaux in relief and glorious Technicolor. All the tints of a tropic bird were in that kitchen and every surface was spotless, bathed in the rosy radiance of a pink strip light. Honor�who had tied an apron round himself, began beating eggs and throwing in pinches of dried parsley and dried chives until the mixture turned a dull green. Cooking demanded concentration and a reverend silence and neither man spoke for a while. Gray eyed his stepfather thoughtfully. He was a thin spare man, rather under middle height, with brown skin and hair which had been black but now was grizzled. His thin lips were permanently, even when relaxed, curled up into a sickle-shaped smile, but the small black eyes remained shrewd and cool. He looked what he was, a French peasant, but he looked more so: he looked like a French peasant in a farce written by an Englishman. Gray had never been able to fathom what his mother had seen in him but now, after three years' separation, he began to understand. Perhaps this was because he was older or perhaps it was because he had only in those years really known the power of sex. To a woman like his mother, sheltered, refined even, this dark and certainly vital little man with his sharp eyes and his calculating smile, might have been what Drusilla had been to him, Gray, the embodiment of sex. He always reminded Gray of one of those onion sellers from whom his mother used to buy when they called at the house on Wimbledon Common. Could it be that Enid Lanceton, outwardly cool and civilised, had been so drawn to these small brown men with onion strings hanging from their bicycles that she longed to find one for herself? Well, she'd found him, Gray thought, looking at Honor�his plastic flowers and his curtains patterned with yellow pots and pans, and she'd paid very dearly for her find. 'Voil�!' said Honor�slapping the omelette down on a green and red checked plate. 'Come now, eat her quick, or she grow cold.' Gray ate her quick. The omelette looked like a cabbage leaf fried in thin batter but it tasted like a compost heap and he gobbled it down as fast as he could, hoping in this way to avoid those pauses in eating in which the full flavour might make itself felt. There was a faint sound in the bungalow which reminded him of the regular whirr, rising and falling, of a piece of machinery. He couldn't think what it was but it was the only sound apart from the clatter Honor�as making at the sink. 'Now for some good French coffee.' Good coffee was the last thing one got at Le Petit Trianon. Honor�corned instant which all his neighbours now used but his avarice jibbed at making fresh coffee each time it was needed. So once a week he boiled up a saucepanful of water, coffee and chicory, and this mixture, salt and bitter, was heated up and served till the last drop was gone. Gray's stomach, which digested Swedish meatballs, ravioli and canned beef olives with impunity, revolted at Honor� coffee. 'No, thanks. I shan't be able to sleep. I'll go in and see Mother now.' Her bedroom--their bedroom--was the only room she had managed to keep unscathed from her husband's taste. The walls were white, the furniture plain walnut, the carpet and covers sea-blue. On the wall above the bed hung a painted and gilded icon of a Virgin and Child. The dying woman lay on her back, her hands outside the counterpane. She was snoring stertorously, and now Gray knew what was the dolorous, regular sound he had heard. It had been machinery, the machinery of Enid Duval's respiration. He approached the bed and looked down at the gaunt, blank face. He had thought of her as two women, but now he saw that there were three: his mother, Honor� wife, both absorbed in this third and last. Honor�aid, 'Kiss her, my son. Embrace her.' Gray took no notice of him. He lifted one of the hands and held it. It was very cold. His mother didn't stir or change the rhythm of her breathing. 'Enid, here is Gray-arm. Here is your boy at last.' 'Oh, leave it,' said Gray. 'What's the point?' His English deserting him, Honor�urst into an excited Gallic tirade. Gray caught only the gist of it, that AngloSaxons had no proper feelings. 'I'm going to bed. Good night.' Honor�hrugged. 'Good night, my son. You find your room O.K., hem? All day I run up and down, the work is never done, but I make time for arranging clean drapes for you.' Used to Honor� curious and direct rendering of French terms into English, Gray knew this meant he had put clean sheets on the bed. He went into 'his' room which Honor�ad furnished as suitable for the son of the house. It was mainly blue-blue for a boy-magenta roses on the blue carpet, yellow daffodils on the blue curtains. The one picture, replacing a piet� Gray had once told his stepfather he loathed, showed Mme Roland in a blue gown standing on the steps of a red and silver guillotine and uttering, according to the caption beneath, o Libert�que de crimes on commis en ton nom! The truth of this was evident. Many crimes were commited in the name of liberty, his mother's marriage for instance. For liberty Drusilla had contemplated a crime far more horrible. Gray thought he would probably stay awake dwelling on this, but the bed was so comfortable--the best thing about Le Petit Trianon, the most comfortable bed he ever slept in, vastly superior to the one at the hovel or Francis's or the one by the window at the Oranmorethat he fell asleep almost immediately.

CHAPTER 10

He was awakened at seven by a racket so furious that at first he thought his mother must have died in the night and Honor�ave summoned the whole village to view her. Surely no one could make so much noise getting breakfast for three people. Then, under the cacophony, as it were, he heard the rhythm of her snoring and understood that Honor�who never seemed tired, was using this method of indicating it was time to get up. He rolled over and, though he couldn't get back to sleep, lay there defiantly till eight when the door flew open and a vacuum cleaner charged in. 'Early to bed and early to rise,' said Honor�errily, 'make him wealthy, healthy and wise. There, I know the English proverb.' Gray noticed he'd put 'wealthy' first. Typical. 'I didn't get to bed early. Can I have a bath?' At Le Petit Trianon you couldn't count on there being hot water. A bathroom there was, with fishes on the tiles and a furry peach-coloured cover on the lavatory seat; a large immersion heater there was also, but Honor�ept this switched off, washing up from heated kettles. If you wanted a bath you had to book it some hours or even days in advance. 'Later,' said Honor�In very colloquial French he went on to say something about electricity bills, the folly of too much bathing and--incredibly, Gray thought--that he had no time at present to turn on the heater. 'Sorry, I didn't get that.' 'Aha!' His stepfather wagged a finger at him while energetically vacuuming the room. 'I think you don't know French like you say. Now you are here you practise him. Breakfast waits. Come.' Gray got up and washed in water from a saucepan. The cheap cheese-coloured soap Honor�rovided stung his hand so that he almost cried out. In another saucepan was coffee, on the table half a baguette. The custom of the French is to buy these sticks freshly each morning but Honor�ever did this. He couldn't bear to throw anything away and old baguettes lingered till they were finished up, even though by then they looked and tasted like petrified loofahs. After Dr Villon had called and pronounced no change in his patient, Gray went down to the village to get fresh bread. Bajon hadn't altered much since his last visit. The Ecu d'Or was still in need of painting, the brown-grey farm buildings still slumbered like heavy old animals behind brown-grey walls. The four shops in the post-war parade, wine shop, baker, butcher and general store-post office, were still under the same management. He walked to the end of the village street to see if the bra advertisement was still there. It was; a huge poster on a hoarding showing two rounded mountains encased in lace, and the words, Desir� Votre Soutien-gorge. He retraced his steps, went past Honor� turning, past two new shops, past a hairdresser ambitiously called Jeanne Moreau, Coiffeur des Dames, and came to the road sign, Nids depoule. When he'd first come to Bajon he'd thought this really meant there were hen's nests in the road, not just potholes, but Honor�ad corrected him, laughing with merry derision. The day passed slowly and the slumbrous heat continued. Gray found some of the books his mother had brought with her from Wimbledon and settled down in the back garden to read The Constant Nymph. The back garden was a lawn ten metres by eight on which Honor�ad erected three strange objects, each being a tripod of green-painted poles surmounted by a plaster face. Three chains hung from the poles bearing a kind of urn or bucket filled with marigolds. Gray couldn't get used to these elaborate and hideous devices, designed with such care and trouble to display very small clusters of flowers, but the sun was warm and this a way of passing the time. At about eight Honor�aid that a poor old man who was on his feet from morning till night, worn out as cook, nurse and general manager, deserved a little relaxation in the evenings. Gray, he was sure, would stay with Enid while he went to the Ecu for a fine. Several neighbours had called during the day to offer their services as sitters, but Honor�ad refused them, saying Gray would like to remain with his mummy. Enid maintained her regular unbroken snoring while Gray sat beside her. He finished The Constant Nymph and began on The Blue Lagoon. Honor�ame in at eleven, smelling of brandy and with a message from the mayor that he longed to meet the author of Le Vin d'Etonnement. In the morning Father Normand appeared, a stout and gloomy black figure whom Honor�reated as if he were at least an archbishop. He was closeted for a long time with Gray's mother, only leaving the bedroom on the arrival of Dr Villon. Neither priest nor doctor spoke to Gray. They had no English and Honor�ad assured them that Gray had no French. The week-old concoction was served and the two elderly men drank it with apparent pleasure, complimenting Honor�n his selfless devotion to his wife and pointing out to him (Fr Normand) that he would find his reward in heaven, and (Dr Villon) that he would find it on earth in the shape of Le Petit Trianon and Enid's savings. Since Gray wasn't supposed to be able to understand a word of this, they spoke freely in front on him of Enid's imminent death and Honor� good fortune in having married, if not for money, where money was. Gray wouldn't have put it past him to help Enid towards her end if she lingered on much longer. He showed no grief, only a faint unease at the mention of money. The priest and the doctor praised him for his stoical front, but Gray didn't think it was stoicism. Honor� eyes flashed with something like loathing when he was feeding Enid or sponging her face, and when he thought Gray wasn't looking. How many husbands and wives were capable of murder in certain circumstances? A good many, maybe. Gray had hardly thought of Drusilla since he'd arrived in France. There was nothing here to evoke her. He hadn't been to France since becoming her lover, so he hadn't even the memory of remembering her while there. Nor had she ever been near the place. She and Tiny holidayed in St Tropez and St Moritz--those patron saints of tourism--or further and more exotically afield. But he thought of her now. When he considered spouses as murderers he could hardly fail to think of Drusilla. When had she first mentioned it? In March? In April? No, because she hadn't taken the acid till May. It took about half an hour to work. Then she began to tell him what she saw, the old beamed bedroom vastly widened and elongated so that it seemed to have the dimensions of a baronial hail. The clouds outside the window became purple and vast, rolling and huge as she had never seen clouds before. She'd got up to look more closely at them, distressed because the window wasn't a hundred feet away but only two yards. She was wearing an amethyst ring, its stone a chunk of rough crystal, and she described it to him as a range of mountains full of caves. She said she could see little people walking in and out of the caves. H wouldn't make love--it seemed wrong to him, unnatural--and she didn't seem to mind, so they went downstairs and he cooked her lunch. The food frightened her. She saw the vegetables in the soup as sea creatures writhing in a pool. After that she sat still for a long time, not telling him any more until at last she said: 'I don't like it. It's bending my mind.' 'Of course. What did you expect?' 'I don't feel sexy. I've got no sex any more. Suppose it doesn't come back?' 'It will. The effects will wear off quite soon and then you'll sleep.' 'What would happen if I drove the car?' 'For God's sake, you'd crash! Your sense of distance would be all messed up.' 'I want to try. Just in the lane.' He had to hold her back by force. He'd known something like that might happen but he hadn't realised she was so strong. She struggled, striking him, kicking at his legs. But in the end he got the car key away from her, and when she was calmer they went for a walk. They walked in the Forest and saw some people riding ponies. Drusilla said they were a troop of cavalry and their faces were all cruel and sad. He sat down with her under a tree but the birds frightened her. She said they were trying to get at her and peck her to pieces. Early in the evening she'd fallen asleep, waking once to tell him she'd dreamed of birds attacking Tiny's aircraft and pecking holes in it till Tiny fell out. One of the birds was herself, a harpy with feathers and a tail but with a woman's breasts and face and long flowing hair. 'I can't understand people taking that forfun,' she said when she left for home the next night. 'Why the hell did you give it to me?' 'Because you nagged me into it. I wish I hadn't.' Many times he'd wished he hadn't, for that wasn't the end of the nagging but only the beginning. That was when it had begun. But it didn't matter now; it was all the same now-- 'Raise yourself, my son. You are having the dream?' Honor�poke jovially but with a hint of reproof. He expected young people-especially young people without means of support--to leap to their feet whenever their seniors entered or left a room. Dr Villon and Fr Normand were leaving, lost in admiration apparently of Honor� linguistic ability. Gray said au revoir politely but remained where he was. Out in the hall he could hear Honor�aving away their compliments with the explanation that anyone who had been for years in a managerial situation in the international hotel business was bound to have several languages at his tongue's end. After the evening meal--canned lobster bisque with canned prawns and bits of white fish in it that Honor�alled bouillabaisse--he went for a walk down the road as far as Les Fonds. There were nearly as many gnats and flies as in Pocket Lane. In fact, the place reminded him of Pocket Lane except for the persistent baying of the farmer's chained dog. Gray knew that French country people like to keep their dogs chained. Presumably the animals get used to it, presumably this one would be let loose at night. But for some reason the sight and sound disquieted him deeply. He didn't know the reason. He couldn't think why this thin captive sheepdog, straining at its chain, barking steadily, hollowly and in vain, awakened in him a kind of chilly dread. When he got back Honor�as spruce in dark jacket, dark cravat and beret, ready for his fine. 'Give my love to the mayor.' 'Tomorrow he come here to call. He speak good Englishnot so good as me, but good. You must stand when he come in, Gray-arm, as is respectable from a young boy to an old man of honour and reason. Now I leave you to give Mummy her coffee.' Gray hated doing this, hated supporting Enid, who smelt and who dribbled, on one arm while with the other hand he had to force between her shaking lips the obscene feeding cup with its spout. But he couldn't protest. She was his mother. Those were the lips that had said--long, long ago'--How lovely to have you home again, darling,' those the hands that had held his face when she kissed him good-bye, sewn the marking tags on his school clothes, brought him tea when he awoke late in the holidays. As he fed her the hot milk with a trace of coffee in it, watching perhaps a quarter of the quantity go down her throat while the rest slopped on to the coverlet, he thought she was weaker than she had been on the previous evening, her eyes more glazed and distant, her flesh even less pliant. She didn't know him. Probably she thought he was someone Honor�ad got in from the village. And he didn't know her. She wasn't the mother he'd loved or the mother he'd hated, but just an old Frenchwoman for whom he felt nothing but repulsion and pity. The relationship between mother and son is the most complete that can exist between human beings. Who had said that? Freud, he thought. And perhaps the most easily destroyed? She and Honor�nd life itself had destroyed it and now it was too late. He took away the cup and laid her down on the pillows. Her head lolled to one side and she began to snore again, but unevenly, breathily. He'd never seen anyone die but, whatever Honor�r the doctor might say, whatever false alarms, reassurances, anticlimaxes, there had been in the past, he knew she was dying now. Tomorrow or the next day she would die. He sat by her bed and finished The Blue Lagoon, relieved when Honor�ame back and she was still alive. All the next day, Wednesday, Enid went on dying. Even Honor�new it now. He and Dr Villon sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee, waiting. Honor�ept saying something which Gray interpreted as meaning he wouldn't wish it prolonged, and he was reminded of Theobald Pontifex in The Way of All Flesh who had used those words when his own unloved wife lay on her deathbed. Gray found The Way of All Flesh among his mother's books and began to read it, although it was a far cry from his usual reading matter, being a great novel and such as he used to prefer. Fr Normand came in and administered Extreme Unction. He left without taking coffee. Perhaps yesterday's dose had been too much for him or else he thought it a frivolous drink and unsuitable to the occasion. The Mayor didn't come. By now the whole village knew that Enid was really dying at last. They hadn't loved her. How could they love a foreigner and an Englishwoman? But they all loved Honor�ho had been born among them and who, when rich, had returned humbly to live in the village of his birth. That night Honor�idn't go to the Ecu, though Enid slept a little more peacefully. He vacuumed the whole house again, made more green omelettes and finally switched on the heater for Gray's bath. Wrapped in a dragon-decorated dressing gown belonging to his stepfather, Gray came out of the bathroom at about eleven, hoping to escape to bed. But Honor�ntercepted him in the hall. 'Now we have the chat, I think. We have no time till now for the chat, hem?' 'Just as you like.' 'I like, Gray-arm,' said Honor�adding as Gray followed him into the living room: 'Extinguish please.' Gray turned off the hall light behind him. His stepfather lit a Disque Bleu and re-corked the brandy bottle from which be had been drinking while Gray was in the bath. 'Sit down, my son. Now, Gray-arm, you know of--how do you say?--Mummy's legs?' Gray stared at him, then understood. For one grotesque moment he'd thought Honor�as referring to Enid's lower limbs, the French for legacy having eluded him. 'Yes,' he said warily. 'Half for you and half for me, yes?' 'I'd rather not talk about it. She's not dead yet.' 'But, Gray-arm, I do not talk of it, I talk of you. I am unquiet only for what become of you without money.' 'I shan't be without money after... Well, we won't discuss it.' Honor�rew deeply on his cigarette. He seemed to ponder, looking sly and not altogether at ease. Suddenly he said loudly and rapidly, 'It is necessary for you only to write more books. This you can do, for you have talent. I know this, I, Honor�uval. Just a poor old waiter, you say, but a Frenchman, however, and all the French, they know.' He banged his concave chest. 'It is in-built, come in the birth.' 'Inborn,' said Gray, 'though I doubt that.' He'd often noticed how Honor�as a poor old waiter when he wanted something and an international manager when out to impress. 'So you write more books, come rich and undependant again, hem?' 'Maybe,' said Gray, wondering where all this was leading and determined to let it lead nowhere. 'I'd rather not talk about any of this. I'm going to bed in a minute.' 'O.K., O.K., we talk of this at other time. But I tell you it is bad, bad, to hope for money come from anywhere but what one works. This is the only good money for a man.' People who live in glasshouses shouldn't throw stones, thought Gray. 'We were going to talk of something else.' 'O.K., very good. We talk of England. Only once I visit England, very cold, very rainy. But I make many friends. All Mummy's friends love me. So now you tell me, how goes Mrs Palmer and Mrs 'Arcoort and Mrs Ouarrinaire?' Resignedly. Gray told him that while the first two ladies were no longer within the circle of his acquaintance, Mal's mother was, as far as he knew, still well and happy in Wimbledon. Honor�odded sagely, his composure recovered. He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. 'And how,' he said, 'goes the good Isabel?'

CHAPTER 11

Gray too had been lighting a cigarette. He'd taken the match from Honor�nd held it downwards to steady the flame. Now he let it fall into the ashtray and took the cigarette from his lips. 'Isabel?' he said. 'You look unquiet, Gray-arm, like you see the phantom. Perhaps you have too much hot water in your bath. Take a blanket from your bed or you will be enrheumed.' Gray said automatically, the words having no meaning or sense for him, 'I'm not cold.' Honor�hrugged at the folly of the young who never take advice. Speaking French, he began to extol Isabel, praising her English strength of character, her intrepidity as a spinster d'un certain age in going by herself to Australia. Getting up stiffly, Gray said, 'I'm going to bed.' 'In the centre of our chat? I see. O.K., Gray-arm, do as please yourself. Manners make man. Another English proverb. Strange that these English proverbs make nonsense to English persons.' Gray went out and banged the door, ignoring Honor� command to extinguish the hall light. He shut himself in his room and sat on the bed, his body really cold now and convulsed with gooseflesh. Isabel. Christ, how had he come to forget about Isabel? And he'd only just forgotten. He'd almost remembered as he was leaving the hovel. He'd known there was something to remember and he'd thought it was Miss Platt's party. As if it mattered a damn whether he went to her party or not. All the time it was Isabel. Shades of memory had flitted across his mind, making him faintly cold and sick, as when he'd walked down to the farmyard at Les Fonds. Was it possible he'd made another mistake, got the wrong weekend? In the kitchen there was an old copy of Le Soir, Friday's. He went out there and found it lining the scarlet pedal bin. Vendredi, le quatre juin, and there the photograph of the floods in some remote antipodean city that had certainly been last Friday's main news. If Friday was the fourth, today, the following Wednesday, was June the ninth and Monday had been the seventh. Anyway, it was pointless checking. Isabel's day was the day he'd been due back from Francis's party. He slumped down at the table, pressing his hands so hard against his head that the burnt palm began to throb again. What the hell was he going to do, trapped here in Bajon, without money, with his mother dying? He tried to think coolly and reasonably about what must have happened. At midday on Monday, June the seventh, Isabel must have driven down Pocket Lane in her Mini. She'd have let herself into the hovel with the key he'd given her, opened the kitchen door, left on the bath cover a dozen or so cans of meat, placed on the floor a small pan of water and, after kisses and farewells, gentle pats and promises to return after not too long a time, left Dido, the labrador bitch, alone and waiting. Gray will be back soon, she'd have said. Gray will take care of you. Be a good dog and sleep till he comes. And then she'd hung the key up on the hook, shut the kitchen door and driven to Heathrow, to an aircraft, to Australia-- It was unthinkable, but it must have happened. What was there to have stopped it happening? Isabel knew she'd find an empty house, closed up, neglected, shabby. That was how she'd expect to find it. He'd left nothing to indicate he'd gone to France, told no one but Miss Platt who, even if she'd been in her garden, wouldn't know Isabel, still less accost a stranger to gossip about her neighbours. The dog, that was the important thing. Dido, the dog with the lovely face and what he'd thought of as kind eyes. God, they wouldn't be kind now, not after she'd been locked in that hole without food and only about half a pint of water for more than two days, but wild and terrified. There was food beside her, food ironically encased in metal which even the most persistent fangs and claws couldn't reach. At this moment those fangs and claws would be tearing at the bolted back door, the larder door, the cellar door, until in exhaustion she took refuge in baying, roaring with far more need and agony than the farmer's chained dog. There was no one to hear her. No one would come down the lane till Mr Tringham passed on Saturday evening--Gray got up and went back to the living room where Honor�as still sitting, the brandy bottle once more uncorked. 'Honor�can I use the phone?' This was a request far more momentous than merely asking for a bath. Honor�sed the phone to speak to his stepson perhaps three times a year on matters of urgency and, almost as rarely, to summon Dr Villon. It stood in his and Enid's bedroom, between their beds. Actually getting one's hands on it was more difficult than obtaining the use of the phone trolley in a crowded hospital. Having cast upon him a look of reproachful astonishment, Honor�aid in elementary slow French that the phone was in Enid's room, that to disturb Enid would be a sin, that it was ten minutes to midnight and, lastly, that he had thought Gray was asleep. 'It's urgent,' said Gray, but without explanation. Honor�asn't going to let him get away with that. Whom did he wish to phone and why? Answering his own question, he suggested it must be a woman with whom Gray had made a date he now realised he couldn't keep. In a way this was true, but Gray didn't say so. Honor�roceeded to tell him, first, that calls to England were of a cost formidable and, secondly, that any woman one could phone at midnight couldn't be virtuous and the relationship he supposed Gray was having with her must therefore be immoral. He, Honor�uval, wouldn't give his support to immorality, especially at midnight. Gray thought, not for the first time, how absurd it is that the French whom the English think of as sexy and raffish should in fact be morally strict while believing the English sexy and depraved. 'This,' he said, trying to keep his patience, 'is something I've forgotten to do in the rush of coming here, something to do with Isabel.' 'Isabel,' said Honor�'has gone to Australia. Now go to your bed, Gray-arm, and tomorrow we see, hem?' Gray saw it was useless. Whom could he phone, anyway? In his panic he hadn't thought of that. At this hour there wasn't anyone he could phone and he told himself, still feeling sick and cold, that there was nothing to be done till the morning. He couldn't sleep. He tossed from side to side, sometimes getting up and going to the window until the dawn came and the chained dog began to bark. Gray flung himself face-downwards on the bed. A doze that was more dream than sleep came to him at about five, the dream he often had in which Drusilla was telling him she wanted to marry him. 'Will you ask Tiny to divorce you?' he'd said as he was saying now in the dream. 'How can I? He wouldn't, anyway.' 'If you left him and stayed away for five years he'd have to whether he wanted to or not.' 'Five years? Where'll we be in five years? Who's going to keep me? You?' 'We'd both have to work. They talk about unemployment, but there's plenty of work if you don't mind what you do.' Her white hands, beringed, that had never done heavier work than put flowers in a vase, whisk cream, wash silk She stared at him, her thin pink mouth curling. 'Gray, I can't live without money. I've always had it. Even before I was married I always had everything I wanted. I can't imagine what life'd be if I couldn't just walk into a shop and buy something when I wanted it.' 'Then we go on as we are.' 'He might die, ' she said. 'If he, dies it'll all be mine. It's in his will, I've seen it. He's got hundreds of thousands in shares, not a million but hundreds of thousands.' 'So what? It's his. What'd you do with it if it were yours, anyway?' 'Give it to you,' she said simply. 'That's not my tough little Dru talking.' 'Damn you! Damn you! I would.' 'What can I do about it? Kill him for you?' 'Yes,' she said. He lurched awake, bathed in sweat, muttering, 'I couldn't kill anyone, anything. I couldn't kill a fly, a wasp--' and then he remembered. He couldn't kill anything but he was now, at this moment, killing a dog. With that thought came simultaneously a tremendous relief, a knowledge, sudden and satisfying, that it was all right, that Isabel wouldn't have left Dido there, after all. Because she'd have met the milkman. She was coming at twelve and she was always punctual; the milkman too was always punctual and came at twelve, except on Fridays when he was later. The milkman knew he was away and would have told Isabel. She'd have been very cross and put out but she wouldn't have left the dog. He fell at once into a profound and dreamless sleep from which he was awakened at about eight by the pompous measured tones of Dr Villon. The snoring was no longer audible. Gray got up and dressed quickly, rather ashamed to be so relieved and happy when his mother was dying and perhaps now dead. Enid wasn't dead. A spark of life clung to that otherwise lifeless body, showing itself in the faint rise and fall of her chest under the bedclothes. He did what Honor had urged him to do but what he wouldn't do in his stepfather's presence, kissed her gently on the sunken yellowish cheek. Then he went into the kitchen where Honor�as repeating to the doctor that he wouldn't wish it prolonged. 'Bonjour,' said Gray. 'Je crois qu'il fera chaud aujourd'hui.' The doctor took this to indicate Gray's having received a miraculous gift of tongues and burst into a long disquisition on the weather, the harvest, tourism, the state of French roads and the imminence of drought. Gray said, 'Excuse me, I'm going out to get some fresh bread.' His stepfather smiled sadly. 'He does not understand, mon vieux. You are wasting your breath.' Bajon lay baked in hard white sunlight. The road was dusty, showing in the distance under the bra advertisement (Desir�Votre Soutien-gorge) shivering mirages above the potholes. He bought two bread sticks and turned back, passing a milkman on a cart. This milkman wore a black tee-shirt and a black beret but, in spite of his Gallic air, he had something of the look of Gray's own milkman, and this impression was enhanced when he raised one hand and called out, 'Bonjour, Monsieur!' Gray waved back. He'd never see his own milkman again and he'd miss him more than anyone else in Pocket Lane. It had been rather nice and touching the way his milkman had shaken hands with him when they'd said good-bye and--God! He'd forgotten that. Of course Isabel wouldn't have seen the milkman because he wasn't calling any more. Gray had paid him and said good-bye. And he wouldn't even be down that end of the lane. He'd said that was the one good thing about losing Gray's custom, not having to go all the way down the lane again. Oh, God. He'd snatched those few hours of sleep on the strength of utter illusion. Things were just as they'd been last night, only worse. Dido was in the hovel and now--it was half past nine--she'd been there for nearly seventy hours. He felt almost faint, standing there in the heat, the baguettes under his arm, at the enormity of it. He wanted to run away and hide somewhere, hide himself for years on the other side of the earth. But it was ridiculous thinking like that. He had to stay and he had to phone someone and now. But who? Miss Platt, obviously. She lived nearest. She was a nice kindly woman who probably loved animals but wasn't one of those censorious old bags who'd relish lecturing him on his cruelty and then broadcasting it about. And she was practical, self-reliant. She wouldn't be afraid of the dog who had by now very likely lost all her gentleness in fear and hunger. Why had he been such a fool as to stop Miss Platt when she'd offered to keep an eye on the hovel? If only he'd agreed none of this would have happened. Useless thinking of that now. The only thing to think of was somehow getting hold of Miss Platt's number. 'How pale is your face!' said Honor�hen he put the bread down on the kitchen table. 'It's the shock,' he said in French to Dr Villon. 'He mustn't be ill. What will become of me if I have two malades on my hands?' 'I'd like the phone, Honor�please.' 'Ah, to telephone the bad lady, I think.' 'This lady is seventy years old and lives next door to me in England. I want her to see to something at my house.' 'Mais le t�phone se trouve dans la chambre de Mme Rival!' exclaimed Dr Villon who had picked up one word of this. Gray said he knew the telephone found itself in the room of his mother but the lead on it was long and could be taken out into the hail. Muttering about formidable expense, Honor�etched the phone and stuck it on the hall floor. Gray was getting directory enquiries when he remembered that Miss Platt wouldn't be there. Today was Thursday and she'd moved. He mustn't despair over a thing like that. There were other people. Francis, for instance. Francis wouldn't like it but he'd do it. Anyone but a monster would do it. No, on second thoughts, Francis couldn't because he'd gone to Devon with Charmian. Jeff, then. Jeff had the van to get him there fast. Good. After a long delay, Gray heard the distant burr-burr of the phone ringing in Tranmere Villas. Jeff was the perfect person to ask, not censorious or thick either, not the kind to want a string of explanations or to make a fuss about breaking in. Whoever went would have to do that as he, Gray, had one key, the other was on the hook and the third-- When he'd heard twenty burr-burrs and got no answer, he gave up. No use wasting time. Jeff must be out with the van. Who else was there? Hundreds of people, David, Sally, Liam, Bob--David would be at work and God knew where he worked; Sally had gone to Mull; Liam among the dozens of friends Jeff said had left London; Bob would be at a lecture. There was always Mrs Warriner. He'd heard of her from Mal but not actually seen her for three years. He couldn't bring himself to phone a sixty-year-old Wimbledon lady who had no car and ask her to make a twenty-mile journey. Back to Pocket Lane, review the scene there. Pity he hadn't chatted up the library girl or got to know some of the people on the estate. Mr Tringham had no phone. That left the Willises. His courage almost failed him, but there was no help for it. A quickly flashing picture of Dido collapsed on the floor, her swollen tongue extended from bared teeth, and he was asking the operator to find him Mrs Willis's number. 'Oueeleece,' repeated the operator. Surely there could hardly be a more difficult name for a Frenchwoman to get her tongue round. 'Will you please spell that?' Gray spelt it. Burr-burr, burr-burr--She was going to be out too or on holiday. The whole world was away. He slumped on to the floor and put his hand up to his damp forehead. Click, and she answered. 'Pocket Farm.' 'I have a call from Bajon-sur-Lone, France.' 'Yes, all right. Who is that?' 'Mrs Willis? This is Graham Lanceton.' 'Who?' 'Graham Lanceton. I'm afraid we had a bit of a disagreement when last we met. I live at the White Cottage and the thing is--' 'Are you the person who had the nerve to let the cows into my garden? Are you the man who insulted me with some of the vilest language I ever heard in my--?' 'Yes, yes, I'm extremely sorry about that. Please don't ring off.' But she did. With a shrill 'You must be mad!' she crashed down the receiver. Gray cursed and kicked the phone. He went back to Honor�nd the doctor and poured himself a cup of coffee. Honor�ave him a sideways smile. 'So? You succeed?' 'No.' He longed to tell someone about it, to have the views of someone else, even someone as hopelessly unsuitable as his stepfather. Honor�as narrow and bourgeois, but the bourgeois often know what to do in emergencies. Sitting down, he told Honor�hat had happened and how he had failed. Utter mystification clouded Honor� face. For a moment he was stupefied, silent. Then he translated everything Gray had said for the benefit of the doctor. Rapidly and incomprehensibly they discussed the matter for a while, shaking their heads, shrugging and waving their hands about. Finally Honor�aid in English, 'Your mummy die and you are unquiet for a dog?' 'I've told you.' 'For a dog!' Honor�hrew up his hands, cackled, said to Dr Villon in slower and readily understandable French, 'I know it is a clich�o say so, but the English are all mad. I who married one am forced to admit it. They are mad and they love animals more than people.' 'I shall go and attend my patient,' said Dr Villon, casting upon Gray a frown of contempt. Gray returned to the hall. All warmth had passed from his body and he was shivering. He must rescue the dog and he must phone someone to effect this rescue for him. There was only one person left. She was the obvious person and, strangely, the best fitted for the job. She wouldn't hesitate or be afraid. She had a key. She lived near enough to be there in a quarter of an hour. It was a Thursday. On a Thursday they had first become lovers and on a Thursday they had parted. Thursday had always been their day, Thor's day, the day of the most powerful of the gods. He sat on the floor, not touching the phone, not yet, but confronting it, facing it as if for a duel he knew it would win. It was immobile, expectant, complacent, waiting for him to yield to it. And, though silent, it seemed to be saying, I am the magic, the saviour, the breaker of hearts, the go-between of lovers, the god that will give life to a dog and draw you back to bondage.

CHAPTER 12

A stream of sunshine poured through the frosted glass of the front door, almost blinding him. In such bright, early summer light she'd stood that morning in the hovel kitchen where Dido now was. She was so beautiful and the light so brilliant that the dazzlement of both had hurt his eyes. Wide-eyed, undisturbed by the sunlight because it was behind her, she'd said, 'Yes, why not? Why not kill him?' 'You're joking. You're not serious.' 'Aren't I? I've even worked out how to do it. You'll get him here and give him some acid like gave you me, only he won't know. Give it to him in tea. And then when he leaves--you'll have to time that carefully--he'll crash. He'll go over the top of the Wake roundabout.' 'Apart from the fact that I wouldn't, it's absurd. It's so old hat, freaking people out with acid for a joke.' 'Damn you, it's not a joke! It'd work.' He'd laughed as one laughs with embarrassment at other people's fantasies, and said with a shrug, shifting out of the light into sane cool shadow, 'You do it, then, if that's the kind of thing you fancy. He's your bloke. You give him acid and let him crash his car in Loughton High Road, only don't expect me to get it for you.' 'Gray--' The hand in his, the thin scented lips against his neck, his ear. 'Gray, let's talk about it. As a joke, if you like but let's see if it could be done. We'll pretend we're the sort of unhappy wife and her lover you read about in murder books. Mrs Thompson and Bywaters or Mrs Bravo and her old doctor. Let's just talk, Gray.' He jerked to his feet and out of the blazing light as his mother's own old doctor came out of the sickroom. Dr Villon threw up his hands, sighed and went into the kitchen. Gray squatted down again, took off the phone receiver and immediately replaced it. He couldn't talk to her. How could he even have considered it? There must be other people, there must be someone--. But he'd been through all that before and there wasn't. The only thing to do was to put the whole thing into cold practical terms, to forget all those dreams he'd had of her and those total recall reconstructions, and tell himself plainly what had happened and what he was doing. Well, he'd had a love affair and a very satisfying one, much as most people do sometime in their lives. It had ended because the two of them weren't really compatible. But there wasn't any reason why they couldn't still be friends, was there? If he was going to go through life being afraid of meeting every woman he'd had any sort of relationship with, it was a poor look-out. It was ridiculous to get neurotic over talking to an old friend. An old friend? Drusilla? No more of that--He could sit here all day arguing with himself and all the time the dog was in there, starving, maybe going mad. Once more he'd talk to her, just once. In some ways it might actually do him good to talk to her. Very probably hearing her voice-talking to him, not like that Marble Arch one-sided thingand hearing the stupid ignorant things she'd say would cure him of her once and for all. With a half-smile, blas�a little rueful (the rake giving his discarded mistress a ring for old times' sake) he picked up the receiver and dialled her number. He dialled the code and the seven digits. It was all so simple. His hand was trembling which was rather absurd. He cleared his throat, listening to the number ringing, once, twice, three times 'Yes?' His heart turned over. He put his hand to it as if, stupidly, he could steady its turbulence through ribs and flesh. And now the temptation to do what he'd done on Saturday night, to breathe only, to listen and not to speak, was nearly overpowering. He closed his eyes and saw the sunshine as a scarlet lake, burning, split by meteors. 'Yes?' Again he cleared his throat which felt bone dry yet choked with phlegm. 'Drusilla.' That one word was all he could manage but it was enough. Enough to cause utter deep silence, broken at last by her sigh, a long rough sound like a fingernail drawing across silk. 'You took your time,' she said slowly, enunciating each word with great care; then briskly, shockingly, and in her old way, 'What d'you want?' 'Dru, I--' Where was the rake, the casual caller-up of old girl friends? Gray made a grab at this errant Don Juan who had never really been an alter ego, tried to speak with his voice. 'How are you? How have you been all these months?' 'All right. I'm always all right. You didn't ring me up to ask that.' Don Juan said, 'No, I rang you as an old friend.' 'An old what? You've got a nerve!' 'Dru--' Firmly now, remembering nothing but the dog, 'I'm ringing you to ask you to do me a favour.' 'Why should I? You never did me any.' 'Please listen, Dru. I know I've no right to ask anything of you. I wouldn't do this if it wasn't--terribly urgent. There's no one else I can ask.' It was easy after all, easy after the first initial shock. 'I'm in France. My mother's--well, dying.' And then he told her about it, as he'd told Honor�ut more succinctly. A sort of soft vibrant moan came down the line. For a moment he thought she was crying, not at the pathos of the story, but for them, for what they'd lost. There came a gasp and he knew she was laughing. 'What a fool you are! You make a mess of everything.' 'But you will go there, won't you?' A pause. A gust of smothered laughter. He was talking to her quite ordinarily and pleasantly and she was laughing also quite ordinarily and pleasantly. It was hard to believe. 'I'll go,' she said. 'Haven't much choice, have I? What am I supposed to do with it when I get it out?' 'Could you get her to a vet?' 'I don't know any bloody vets. Oh, I'll find one. I think you've lost your mind.' 'Quite possibly. Dru, could you--will you call me back at this number? I can't call you because my stepfather freaks out if I keep using the phone.' 'I'll phone you. Tonight some time. I'm not surprised about your stepfather. You haven't any money, that's your trouble, and when people haven't any money other people treat them like children. It's a rule of life.' 'Dru--?' 'Yes?' 'Nothing,' he said. 'You'll call me back?' 'Didn't I say I would?' The phone went down hard. He hadn't had a chance even to say good-bye. She never said it. Not once could he remember her ever saying the word good-bye. He scrambled to his feet, went into the bathroom and was sick down the loo. Enid was snoring irregularly. Otherwise the house was silent. Gray lay on his bed in the blue room whose closed curtains couldn't shut out the blaze of noon. Mme Roland remarked to him scornfully, aloof in the face of the scaffold, '0 Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!' Well, he'd done it and it hadn't been too bad. The sickness was only natural after the release of so much tension. He'd spoken to his discarded mistress and the dog would be rescued. Cool and practical, he was becoming almost what Honor�r Isabel would call a mature grown-up person. Well, well. C'est le premier pas qui coite, as Honor�ight say, and he's got over the first step which counted. No harm would be done at this juncture, however, in reminding himself by another one of those reconstructions of the ugliness he'd escaped and the pitfall there still might be. 'Suppose we were serious,' he'd said, 'I don't see how we'd get him here.' 'That's easy. You write him a letter.' 'What sort of letter? "Dear Tiny, if you'll pop over one afternoon, I'd like to give you some acid to make you crash your car. Yours truly, G. Lanceton."?' 'Don't be so bloody stupid. He collects coins, doesn't he? He's always advertising for coins in some rag called Num ismatists' News. Get the typewriter, go on.' So he'd got the typewriter to humour her. 'Now I'll dictate. Put your address and the date, June the sixth.' She'd looked over his shoulder, her hair against his face. 'Now write, "Dear Sir, As a fellow numismatist..." No, that won't do. "Dear Sir, in reply to your advertisement..." Sometimes he advertises in The Times. Oh, God, get a fresh bit of paper.' How many attempts had they made before they got the letter that satisfied her? Three? Four? At last, the final, perfect one. 'Dear Sir, in reply to your advertisment in The Times, I think I have just what you are looking for. Since my home is not far from yours, would you care to come over and see it? Four o'clock on Saturday would be a suitable time. Yours faithfully--' 'And how am I supposed to sign it?' 'Better not put your real name.' He signed it Francis Duval. She folded it up and made him type the envelope: 'Harvey Janus Esq., Combe Park, Wintry Hill, Loughton, Essex.' His indulgent smile growing rather stiff, rather sick, he'd said, 'I don't have any old coins, Dru.' 'I'll give you one. He's got lots of worthless coins he keeps in a box, things he thought were valuable when he first started collecting. I'll give you a Roman denier.' 'Then he'd know I wasn't serious.' 'Of course. So what? He'll think you just don't know. He'll say that's not what he wants and you'll say you're sorry but now he's here can you give him a cup of tea?' 'Dru, I'm getting a bit tired of this game.' O, Liberty, what crimes--The doorbell was ringing. Gray got off the bed because no one was answering it. There was a note on the hail table: 'Depart to village for shopping. Make care of mummy. Honor� He opened the door. A stout elderly man in a grey suit and grey Homburg stood there. Gray recognised the mayor whom Honor�n some previous occasion had pointed out to him across the street. '*Entrez, Monsieur, je vous en prie.*' The mayor said in English which was very beautifully pronounced, very nearly perfect, 'Mr Graham Lanceton? I saw your stepfather in the village and he told me it would be convenient to call. How is your poor mother?' Gray said there was no change. He showed the mayor into the living room. After what Honor�ad said, the mayor's command of English struck him almost dumb. But that was typical of Honor�ho, with unbounded arrogance, had probably convinced himself he was the superior linguist. Sensing his astonishment, the mayor said, with a smile, 'Many years ago I spent a year in your country. I was attached to a company in Manchester. A beautiful city.' Gray had heard otherwise but he didn't say so. 'I believe you--er, wanted to give me your views on my book.' Might as well get it over at once. 'I should not presume, Mr Lanceton. I am not a literary critic. I enjoyed your novel. It recalled to me happy memories of Manchester.' Since The Wine of Astonishment was set exclusively in Notting Hill, Gray couldn't quite understand this, but he was relieved to be spared the criticism. The mayor sat silent, smiling, apparently perfectly at ease. Gray said, 'Would you care for some coffee?' 'I thank you, no. If there were perhaps some tea?' If only there were! No packet of tea had ever found its way into Le Petit Trianon. 'I'm afraid not.' , it is of no importance. It was not for coffee or tea or the discussion of contemporary literature that I came.' Why had he come, then? The mayor sat in easeful silence for quite a minute. Then he leant forward and said slowly, 'Your stepfather is a gentleman of great vitality. Ebullience is, I think, the word.' 'Well, it's a word.' 'A man of impulse and one who, I think I may say, is inclined somewhat to our national vice, common among our peasantry of--shall I name it?--avarice. What matters one small vice among so many virtues?' The mayor's English grew more expert and semantically involved with every sentence. It recalled to Gray the speech of solicitors in Victorian novels. He listened, puzzled but fascinated. 'A desire too to acquire something for nothing or almost nothing, a need to cast bread upon the waters and harvest whole loaves.' 'I'm afraid I don't follow you, Monsieur.' 'Ah, perhaps not. I will abandon metaphor, I will make a long story short. You expect. I understand, when something happens to your mother--this English euphemism I find so tactful, so gentle--to be her heir?' Taken aback, Gray said, 'I shall inherit half, yes.' 'But half of what, Mr Lanceton? Listen, if you will be so good. Let me explain. Half of what your poor mother leaves when she passes on--you see, I know you English do not care for the strict cold expression--half will be, to put it bluntly, half of this bungalow!' Gray stared. 'I don't understand. My mother had a good deal of money invested when she remarried and--' "Had" ', interrupted the mayor urbanely, 'is the operative word. Let me be quite open and above-board with you. M. Duval reinvested this money, speculated, if you will. There was a mine, I believe, a railway to be built that, alas, was not built. You may imagine.' Gray imagined. He knew nothing about the stock market except what everyone knows, that it is easier to lose there than to gain. But he didn't feel at all sick or angry or even very disappointed. How had he believed there would ever be any real money from any source for him? 'So you see, Mr Lanceton,' said the Victorian solicitor, 'that were you to claim your inheritance, as you would be within your rights to do, you would only deprive an ageing man of the very roof over his head. This, I am sure, you would not do.' 'No,' said Gray rather sadly, 'no, I wouldn't do that.' 'Good. Excellent.' The mayor got up, still smiling. 'I was sure my words would be effectual. We speak,' he added with a slight pedantic laugh, 'the same language.' 'How will he live?' asked Gray, shaking hands. 'He had the forethought, poor gentlemen, to purchase a small annuity.' He would. 'Good-bye,' said Gray. 'I will not be so optimistic as to wish your mother recovered health, Mr Lanceton, but say only that we must hope her suffering will not be prolonged.' They must have arranged to meet somewhere and chew over the results of the interview, for when Honor�eturned with his full shopping bag, he was truly, to use the mayor's word, in an ebullient mood. He actually embraced Gray. 'My son, my boy! How goes the bad lady? You make contact with her? And the poor animal?' Gray said, with a sense of unreality, that everything was all right now. 'Then I make the lunch. Croque Monsieur for us today.' 'No, I'll do it.' Even this simple, though grandly named, dish wasn't safe in the hands of Honor�who would be sure to add herbs and garlic to the cheese. 'You go and sit with Mother.' Poor Honor�Poor, indeed. Slicing up cheese, Gray reflected on the strange calm he felt, the lightness of heart even. Honor�hile rich had been hateful to him, a kind of king to his Hamlet. For Honor�oor he had a fellow-feeling. The bathwater watching, the shouts of 'Extinguish, please!', the phone fanaticism--weren't they, after all, only the sort of economies he too was forced to practise? It amused him to think of those two, Honor�nd the mayor, screwing up their courage to tell him the truth, afraid of his righteous anger. But it hadn't angered him at all. Probably he'd have done the same in Honor� place, blued all his money on a bubble and then sent some braver deputy to confess it to his judge. No, he wasn't angry. But he was a bit ashamed of himself for mentally accusing Honor�f wanting to make away with his wife. Not every marriage partner was a Drusilla. 'Drusilla,' he'd said, 'I've had enough of this. It's as stupid as mooning over what you'd do if you won the pools.' 'No, it isn't. You can't fix the pools. You can fix this. Just let me post that letter. I've still got it. 'It's out of date.' 'Write another, then. What's the date? July the first. "Dear Sir, In reply to your advertisement.. 'I'm going out. I'm going for a walk. It's no fun being with you if all you can do is play this stupid game.' 'It's not a game, it's serious.' 'All right,' he'd said. 'So it's serious. Once and for all, will you listen to me? Leaving morality out of it, it wouldn't work. Probably he wouldn't die. He'd feel strange, see distortions and park the car. He'd ask the first motorist he saw to go to the police and the first person they'd come to'd be me.' 'You don't know him. He always drives very fast. He wouldn't be able to stop in time. And they wouldn't know about you because I'd get hold of the letter and burn it.' 'Burn it now,' he'd said. He shook himself and looked at Honor�ho sat at the opposite side of the table, eating toasted cheese. His eyes were bright and darting but not, Gray suddenly realised, the malicious eyes of a potential killer. Honor�acked the intelligence to be wicked. And Gray realised too that all the time he'd been at Le Petit Trianon he hadn't done a thing to help until today when he'd made the lunch. Honor�ad done it all and, on the whole, done it well. 'Why don't you go out for a bit?' he said. 'You need a change. Take your car.' The Citroen was hardly ever used. It lived in the garage under a nylon cover, coming out once a week to be polished. But Gray understood that now too. 'Where will I go?' 'See a friend. Go to the cinema. I don't know.' Honor�hrew up his hands, smiled his monkey smile. 'I don't know too, Gray-arm.' So they sat together in Enid's room, waiting for her to die. Gray read The Way of all Flesh intermittently. He held his mother's hand, feeling very calm, very tranquil. His mother was dying but he no longer had any reason to hope for her death. He had no money to keep him from working, to lull him into idle security. The dog would be safe now. Drusilla would phone him soon, he'd thank her and they'd say their last dignified good-byes. Even she would say good-bye. It was wonderful to feel so free, to know that no crimes need be committed to secure liberty. The evening was close as if a storm threatened--not tonight perhaps or tomorrow but soon. Honor�ad gone to the Ecu, assured by Gray that this would be good for him, that no useful purpose could be served by his staying with Enid. Gray, who had been at peace since noon, as if his physical sickness had provided a more than physical catharsis, began to feel a gradual mounting of tension. He had meant to sit outside among the gnomes or the tripods. Provided he left the doors open, he'd hear the phone when it rang, for he'd placed it on the hail floor near the kitchen door. But, although be went into the garden, he couldn't concentrate on the last chapters of his book. It was Thursday and Tiny went to his Masons on Thursdays at about six. She could have phoned him then. Why hadn't she? He told himself that it was only the dog's fate that was worrying him. He was concerned only for the dog and for Isabel. Drusilla was what he'd called her that morning, a discarded mistress, interesting only as an old friend might be when doing him a favour. It was Thursday. Very likely she still turned her Thursday evenings to good account, possibly with what's-his-name, the tennis guy, Ian Something. Perhaps she was with him now and wouldn't phone till he'd gone. Gray pondered this idea, found it particularly unpleasant and went back into the house. The farmer's dog had stopped barking. No doubt it had been let off its lead. It was almost too dark to make out the shape of the phone which, dog-like, was also attached to a lead, a wire stretched through the crack in the door. Ten o'clock. He looked in on his mother who had ceased to snore, who lay on her back with her mouth open. Suppose Drusilla didn't phone? Suppose, in order to be revenged on him, she'd promised to see about the dog and then deliberately done nothing? He could phone her. If he was going to he'd better be quick, for another half-hour and it would be too late for safety. But she'd phone him. She never changed her mind and she always did what she undertook. He stood over the phone, directing his will on it, telling it to ring, ring. He clenched his fists, tensed his muscles, said to it, 'Ring, damn you. Ring, you bastard!' It obeyed him immediately and rang.

CHAPTER 13

When he had coped with the stream of idiomatic French which issued from the receiver, when he had told M. Reville, the glass manufacturer, that his mother remained the same and that Honor�ad gone to the Ecu, he uncorked the brandy bottle and drank some. Honor�as getting everything else, after all. He oughtn't to grudge him a drop of brandy. If she didn't phone he wouldn't be able to sleep. That was ridiculous, though, because if she hadn't been to the hovel Dido would be dead by now and all further worry pointless. He had some more brandy and put the bottle away. He wished he knew exactly what he was worrying about. Honor�as out and he could easily phone her. There was a good half-hour, before danger time and Tiny got home. He'd phoned her before, twice if you counted the Marble Arch time, and it was the first step that counted. Surely he wasn't still afraid of getting involved with her again? Or maybe afraid of not getting involved with her? Remember what she is, he told himself, remember what she wanted you to do--. "Dear Sir, In reply to your advertisement--!" Put the date. It's November the twenty-first. Oh, come on, Gray. Get up then and I'll do it. Any fool can type, I suppose. My God, it's freezing in here. When he's dead and we're together all the time we'll never be cold again. We'll have a flat in Kensington and if the central heating doesn't go up to eighty we'll have it all taken out and new in.' 'We aren't going to be together all the time and you know it. We're going to go on like this till one of us gets tired of the other.' 'What's that supposed to mean? I didn't see any signs of tiredness upstairs just now.' He'd turned away, warming his hands at the oil heater, looking wearily at the window scummed with frost, the skeletal trees beyond rooted in pools of water thinly crusted with ice. Round her shoulders she'd slung the red fox, coarser and brighter than her hair. 'There's more to life than sex,' he said. 'Like what? Like living in a frozen slum? Like brooding about the books you don't write and the money you can't make. I'm going to do this letter and by the spring--March, say--we can be living together with all his money in a joint account. God, but my fingers are too cold to type. You do it.' 'Dru, you said just now you didn't see any signs of tiredness. All right, I'm not tired of sex. I don't think I'd ever get tired of sex with you. But I'm sick and tired to my soul of you balising on about killing your husband. It's grotesque.' She'd crashed her hands down on the keys so that they tangled and stuck together. Her eyes were white fire. 'D'you mean me? D'you mean I'm grotesque?' 'I didn't say that but--yes, you're grotesque and stupid and a bit mad when you talk of making that poor bloke crash his car.' 'Damn you! Damn you!' He'd had to hold her off, seize her hands and force them behind her to stop her long nails tearing at his face. She'd crumpled and softened, the fur falling from her shoulders, leaving her vulnerable in the thin clinging dress that was so unsuitable for the hovel. And then, of course, the inevitable. Because this was Drusilla who, naked, warm and sinuous under the piled blankets, was anything but grotesque, anything but stupid. The tape that was playing in his brain switched off sharply. Stop, stop, remember the bad times. Forget that the bad times always ended in good times until that last time. Twenty past ten. She wasn't going to phone. That bloody thing, straining on the end of its wire leash, wasn't going to ring again tonight. He was halfway back to the cupboard where the brandy was when the bell brayed at him. He jumped, and the jump was so galvanic that it actually pained him. Then he was on the phone at a leap, crouched over it, gasping out, 'Yes, Dru, yes? 'Hi,' she said. The coolness of her voice chilled memories, blew away longing and dreading. 'What happened?' he said. 'Did you find her?' 'I found her.' There was a long pause. 'God, Gray,' she said with an almost refined distaste, quite unlike her, 'God, how could you?' 'Is she dead?' He sat on the floor, resting his head against the wall. 'No. She was alive--just.' He exhaled on a long sigh. 'What happened?' he said again. 'I took some milk and chicken with me. I was a bit scared to open the kitchen door but I needn't have been, she was too weak to move. God, the stink and the muck in there! She'd got up on the sink and plastered the window with her muck and saliva--the lot.' 'Oh, Dru--'His head had begun to bang. It was the brandy partly, and partly the shock, though he ought to have been relieved. This was the best that could have happened. She said harshly, 'Someone ought to lock you up in a cell for three days without food or water and see how you'd like it. Why didn't you phone the police, anyway?' Why hadn't he? It was the obvious thing. 'I never thought of it., 'You haven't phoned them today?' 'No, of course not.' 'You just left it to me? Typical. D'you want to hear the rest? I carried her out to the car and, Christ, was she heavy. In the car I gave her some milk but she couldn't take the chicken. Then I got her to this vet.' 'Which vet?' 'A guy in Leytonstone.' 'Leytonstone? Why on earth--' 'Because I was going up to town.' 'I see,' he said. She always left her car in the car park at Leytonstone Tube station when she was going to London. But to have gone today? It seemed heartless, too casual. And why had she gone? To buy clothes? To--meet someone?, You went to London?' 'Why not? It's not my dog, as I hastened to tell the vet. I didn't want him thinking I'd do a thing like that. You'd better have his address and see him as soon as you get back. It's twenty-one George Street. Got that?' 'Yes. Thanks. I'm very very grateful, Dru. I ought to have phoned the police, of course. I ought...'He broke off, fumbling in his mind for suitable words to end the conversation. She'd done the favour he'd asked of her and now was the time for those dignified good-byes. Thanks, no hard feelings, maybe we'll meet again someday, and meanwhile thanks--'Well, Dru, maybe after all this trauma we'll be able to meet one of these days and--well, you know what I mean. I'll never forget what you--I mean I'll never--' 'After I got back from town,' she said as if he hadn't spoken, 'I went in and cleaned up a bit for you.' 'You did what?' He remembered once having told her that the only brush she ever lifted was the one she used for mascara. And now she, those white hands of hers, had cleaned up his filthy kitchen. He could hardly believe it. 'Why did you do that?' 'Why did I get the dog? Why do I do anything for you? Don't you know yet?' Good-bye, Drusilla. Good night, sweet lady, good night. Say it, say it, Don Juan hissed at him. A tremor rose in his throat, choking him, taking away the power of speech. He rested his cheek against the wall to cool his bloodheated face. 'You don't know, do you?' Her voice was very soft now. 'You don't think about my feelings. I'm O.K. when you want someone to get you out of a mess, that's all. As far as you're concerned, the rest is over and done with.' 'And you know why,' he whispered, 'it had to be over and done with.' Clinging to a shred of sanity, he said, 'We had to split up. I couldn't take it.' 'That? I've given all that up. It would never have worked. I see that now.' She paused and said in a very low childlike voice, almost as if reluctantly, 'I tried to phone you a lot of times.' His heart was pounding. 'On Thursday nights?' 'Of course.' 'I left the receiver off.' 'Oh, you fool, she sighed. 'You hopeless fool. I wanted to tell you back in January I'd given all that up. God, I was so lonely. I wanted to talk to you so much. The line was always engaged, always engaged. I thought... Never mind.' 'Why didn't you come to me?' 'And find you with another girl?' 'There's been no other girl, there's been no one. I was alone too.' 'Then we've been a pair of hopeless fools, haven't we? Frightened of each other when all the time we really--Oh, what's the use? You're in France and I'm here and Tiny'll be in in a minute. We'd better stop this before we say too much.' His voice returned to him powerfully and he almost shouted at her. 'Too much? How could we say too much? Don't you see we've been apart all this time over a stupid misunderstanding? We've tortured ourselves over nothing...' 'I've got to ring off. I can hear Tiny's car.' 'Don't ring off, please. No, you must. Of course you must. Listen, I'll phone you in the morning. I'll phone you at nine as soon as he's gone. God, Dru, I'm so happy...' A sighing whisper cut him short. 'Tomorrow, then,' and the phone slid delicately into silence. In the dark warm hall he sat on the floor, cradling the receiver in his hands, hearing still an echo or a memory of her voice. His heart quietened, his body relaxed like a taut spring set free to uncoil, and as happiness, pure joy, swamped him he wanted to dance and shout, run outside and sing, embrace the tripods, yell to the whole of sleeping Bajon that his love had come back to him. Instead of doing that, he got to his feet and went into his mother's room. Enid lay on her back, breathing shallowly, her eyes closed. Once, when he'd had nothing much to tell, he'd been able to tell her everything, and she'd listened and understood. If she were aware now, conscious, would she understand? Wouldn't her own experience of passion give her empathy? He bent over her. He said, 'Mother, I'm so happy. Every thing has come right for me.' Her lids moved. The wrinkled black-stained hoods lifted and half-showed her eyes. In his euphoric state he fancied he saw recognition there, comprehension even, and in that moment he loved her again, forgiving her entirely. He took her face in his hands and pressed his lips against the corner of her mouth, kissing her as he hadn't kissed her since he was a little boy. Mme Roland gave him a cynical glare and he turned her picture to the wall. He didn't want her shouting her predecapitation liberty nonsense at him any more. He knew all about liberty, he'd had enough of it in the past six months. He'd taken his liberty to avoid committing a crime and now he thought he'd committed a crime against himself and Drusilla. Let Mme Roland make what she liked of that with her histrionic salon philosophy. He got into bed naked because of the heat. How long was he going to have to stay here? Days? Weeks? If only he'd got money he could fly home and see her and then come back again. That wasn't possible--but to wait here on and on while she was in England longing for him as he was longing for her? It was a pity, he thought, that uncomplicated joy lasts so short a time, that it must always give way rapidly to practicalities and plans. In the morning when he phoned her they'd have to start making plans. In the morning, too, he'd phone Jeff and tell him not to come on Saturday. Maybe he wouldn't be moving flow, after all. In a couple of weeks' time, perhaps less, she'd be visiting him at the hovel again just like she used to before Christmas. And they'd discuss the dead months with laughter at their own folly, reducing Christmas, as they looked back on it, to a row not much bigger than any of their rows, a momentary frown on the face of love. In the hot stuffy bedroom where no wind lifted the curtains at the open window, where the air was warm and dry at midnight, it was hard to imagine snow. But snow had come before Christmas, and on the night before the Eve Drusilla, the red fox lady, had pelted him with snowballs, screaming, laughing, as they walked in the frozen forest. He caught her in his arms and, mouth to mouth, the snow cystals melting on warm lips, they'd fallen to make love in the drifts under the sealskin branches of the beech trees. That was a good memory, one to hold on to now, one he wouldn't have dared recall till now when she was back with him. But the quarrel that came after? How many times had he played that tape over and over, following as it did their final act of love? The last time, he'd thought, the last time. Now it wasn't going to be the last time. It would even cease to be associated with the quarrel, and the quarrel itself would fade down one of the alleys which debouch from the avenue of time. He turned over, spreadeagled under the crumpled sheet. A Thursday, of course. Exactly twenty-four weeks ago tonight. No Christmas decorations at the hovel, for Christmas was to be spent in London with Francis. But the present she'd given him on the bath cover in the kitchen, the present of a silver chain on which hung a silver Hand of Fortune (since sold) and all around it the red and gold wrappings he'd torn off in his love and gratitude. He'd drawn out a ridiculous amount, far more than he could afford, to buy her Amorce dangereuse and she'd laughed with delight, spraying it on her red fur, although she could have bought gallons of the stuff herself and not noticed. Into the hovel to take her perfume before driving back to Combe Park. He'd worn the chain to go out in the forest and it had fallen icy against his chest, but now, under his shirt and Arran, it was warm with his body warmth. Tiny, of course, had paid for it. Her father didn't send her a cheque more than once a year. 'So what?' she'd said, and that had been the beginning. No, for it had begun long before, but just the beginning of the final quarrel, of the end. 'I'm entitled to some of what he makes, I suppose? You could look on it as wages. Don't I keep house for him and cook and sleep with him. He only pays me two thousand a year and I'm cheap at the price.' 'Two thousand?' One year he'd managed to make almost that himself, but never before and never after. 'Ah, come on, Gray. Five pounds for a silver neck thing? It's only an advance, anyway. It'll all be yours soon.' 'Don't start that again, Dru. Please don't.' Don't start that, he warned himself, reaching out for the glass of water he'd put by the bed. Why remember that quarrel now? She'd given it all up, she'd said so. He'd never hear her say those things again. 'Look, Gray, you sit down and listen to me. You never thought that was a game I was playing. You were as serious as me, only you haven't got as much guts as I have.' 'Please don't come the Lady Macbeth bit, Drusilla.' 'Well, he did it in the end, didn't he? And so will you. We'll do another letter and you can buy the acid while you're up in town.' '"Up in town". You sound like the chairman of the Women's Institute off for her annual shopping spree.' She was more sensitive to this kind of insult than any other, but she took no notice. 'I'll give you the money.' 'Thanks. The poor bastard's going to pay for his own poison, is he? I like that. It reminds one of the Borgias. A judge'll make a lot of that: "The unfortunate Harvey Janus, murdered by his wife and her lover with a hallucinogen purchased out of his own money." Charming.' In her red fur, water drops gleaming on its spikes, she sat down at the typewriter to compose another letter. The oil heater on, blue flame, incandescent; snow falling thickly, silently, against the dirty window-pane. 'Dru, will you give up this idea now? Will you promise me never to mention it again?' 'No. I'm doing it for you. You'll thank me afterwards. You'll be grateful to me all the rest of your life.' The watch she'd given him showing ten past ten; the Hand of Fortune she'd given him warm against his breastbone; melted snow lying on the floor in pools. 'It's no good, Gray. I'll never give this up.' 'Will you give me up?' She was folding the letter, sliding it into an envelope. 'What's that supposed to mean?' 'That I can't go on like this. It doesn't matter what we're doing, what we're talking about. With you all roads lead to killing Tiny.' 'You can put a stop to that by killing him.' 'No, there's another way.' He didn't look at her. 'I can put a stop to it by not seeing you.' 'Are you trying to say you're tired of me?' 'No, I can't imagine any man being tired of you. I'm tired of this. I've had it, Drusilla. As it is, I'll never be able to look back on what we had, you and me, without this poisoning it all.' 'You're just a spineless coward!' 'That's true. I'm too much of a coward to kill anyone and too much of a coward to stay being your lover. You're too much for me. I hate it ending like this but I knew it would. I've known it for weeks, I shan't see you again, Dru.' 'Christ, you bastard! I hate you. That's what I think of your filthy Christmas present!' The flagon broke against the heater, glass flying, scented steam rising. 'I was going to make you rich. I was going to give you everything you wanted.' He felt sick. The perfume made him feel sick. 'Good-bye, Drusilla. It was nice--once. It was the best I ever had.' 'You bloody liar! You ungrateful, bloody liar!' Good-bye, Drusilla, good night, sweet, sweet lady, good night, good night. 'Good night, Drusilla,' he said aloud. 'Good night, my love. I'll talk to you in the morning.' He fell at once into a dream. He was with Tiny in the fast red car. There wasn't much room for him because Tiny was so huge, filling up his own seat and half the passenger seat, and he was driving fast, zigzagging the car from side to side of the forest road. Gray tried to make him slow down but no voice me when he tried to speak. He couldn't speak and when he put fingers to his tongue, he found it--Oh, horrible!--divided and forked like a snake's tongue, dumb, speechless, unhuman. Then the green hillock of the roundabout was upon them, green but capped with snow, and Tiny was going over it. The red car and Tiny were going over the mountain and he, Gray, was going with them. He too was trapped in the hurtling burning car, the fire engulfing him as he struggled to get out. And now someone was hammering on the roof of the car, not a rescuer but she. Drusilla was pounding on the roof of the red Bentley to make sure that both of them were dead. He gasped, 'Don't, don't--I've had enough. I want you to give me up,' and then, as the dream and the flames and the snow faded, as French smell and light and stuffiness burst back, 'What...? Who is it? What is it?' Broad daylight in the bedroom and someone knocking on the door. He wrapped himself in the twisted sheet. He staggered to the door and opened it. Honor�tood outside in the dragon dressing gown, his face yellow and drawn. 'What--?' Vest fini.' 'I don't--I was asleep.' 'C'est fini. Elle est morte.' 'She can't be dead,' he said stupidly. 'It can't be finished, it's only just beginning--' And then he knew that Honor�eant his mother, that Enid Duval had died at last.

CHAPTER 14

In a thin high voice Honor�aid, 'You come and see her?' 'All right. If you like.' The yellowness had gone from Enid's skin and death had erased most of the lines. Already she looked waxen, her open eyes glazed blue china. 'You ought to close her eyes,' Gray began, and then he looked at Honor�ho stood at the opposite side of the bed, dulled, silent, tears falling weakly down his cheeks. 'I--Jonor�are you all right?' Honor�aid nothing. He fell across the bed and took the dead woman in his arms. He lay there and clung to her, making soft animal moans. 'Honor� Gray lifted him up gently and helped him into the living room. His stepfather huddled into an armchair, shaking, his head turned against the lapel of his dressing gown. Gray gave him brandy but Honor�hoked on it, sobbing. 'What shall I do?' he said in French. 'What will become of me?' And then Gray saw that he'd been wrong, that his stepfather had loved her. The love hadn't been all on his mother's side but had been reciprocated to the full. Not a cynical purchase but true love. And that hatred, that disgust, he'd seen in Honor� eyes while feeding her? Wasn't that what any man would feel? Disgust not for her but for life, for the world in which such things happened, in which the woman he loved became a helpless dribbling animal. He had loved her. He wasn't a caricature, a sick joke, but a man with a man's feelings. Gray forgot that he'd resented Honor�hated him. He felt a great surge of guilt for misunderstanding, for laughing and despising. He forgot too, just for a moment, that he wasn't Honor� son and--although he'd never before held a man so--he took Honor�n his arms and pressed him close against himself and forgot everything but Honor� grief. 'My son, my son, what shall I do without her? I knew she was dying, I knew she must die, but death.. 'I know. I understand.' 'I loved her so. I never loved any woman like her.' 'I know you loved her, Honor� Gray made coffee and phoned the doctor and then, when it was nine and the Marseilles shop where he worked would be open, he phoned Honor� sister. Mme Derain agreed to come. Trilling r's, swallowed vowels assaulted Gray along a crackly line, but he gathered that she'd come by Monday when she'd made arrangements with her employer. The day was going to be close and oppressive but cooler, the sun veiled by cloud. The doctor came, then Fr Normand, then an old woman, a very French little old woman looking like something out of Zola, whose job was to lay Enid Duval out. Gray, who had always been treated in this house as if he were a recalcitrant fifteen-year-old, fixed in Honor� estimation at the age he'd been when Honor�ad first met him, now found himself forced to take charge. It was he who received the mayor and M. and Mme Reville, he who interviewed undertakers, prepared meals, answered the phone. Broken, weeping intermittently, Honor�ay on the sofa, calling to him sometimes, begging him not to leave him. His English, of which he had been so proud and which he had used as a means of defying his stepson and demonstrating his authority, deserted him. He spoke only French. And now, using his native tongue exclusively, he ceased to be a farce Frenchman. He was the dignified bereaved who commanded respect. To Gray his stepfather appeared quite different and he realised he had never known him. 'You will stay with me, my son? Now she is gone you are all I have.' 'You'll have your sister, Honor� 'Oh, my sister! Forty years have passed since we lived in the same house. What is my sister to me? I want you to stay, Gray-arm. Why not? Stay here where you have a home.' 'I'll stay till after the funeral,' Gray promised. He was surprised at the intensity of his own grief. Even last night, when he'd loved his mother again and fully forgiven her, he'd thought that her death, when it came, wouldn't touch him. But he was weighed down, as he busied himself with the hundred and one things that needed doing, by a quite irrational feeling. He realised that during all those years there had existed at the back of his mind a hope that one day he'd be able to have it all out with her. He'd put his case and she hers, they'd explain to each other, and in those explanations their pain would be resolved. Now she was dead and he mourned her because that day could never come. He could never tell her now how she'd hurt him and she could never tell him why. Drusilla seemed very far away. He hadn't forgotten to phone her but only deferred it. Later in the day, when all these people had gone, when the phone had stopped ringing and he'd finished the letters to England Honor�ad asked him to write, then-- 'Mrs 'Arcoort and Mrs Ouarrinaire and our dear Isabel.' 'Isabel's in Australia, Honor�I'll be back in England before she is.' 'Change your mind. Stay here with me.' 'I can't but I'll stay while you need me.' He took his letters to the post. It had begun to rain. The great camions travelling along the road to Jency splashed muddy water against his legs. The funeral had been fixed for Monday, so he could go home on Tuesday and maybe see Drusilla that same night. It was getting a bit late to phone her now, nearly half past five, and the weekend was coming. Maybe it would be better to delay phoning her till Monday morning--she'd understand when she knew about his mother. But would she? Wasn't the real reason for his not phoning her a fear that he couldn't take the sharp comment he was likely to get? The 'So she's popped off at last' or 'Has she left you anything?' He couldn't quite take that now, not even though it came from his Dru that he loved, his Dru who had changed and was going to be his for ever. He heard the phone bell before he was inside the house. Another local sympathiser probably. Honor�asn't in any fit state to answer it. He went quickly into the room where the phone was, not looking at the empty bed whose blue cover was drawn taut and straight over a bare mattress. The window was open to blow in rain and blow out the smell of death. He picked up the receiver. 'Hi.' 'Dru?' he said, as if it could be anyone else. 'Dru, is that you?' 'You didn't phone,' she said in a voice that seemed to contain a world of desolation. 'No.' He knew his tone sounded clipped but he couldn't help it. He was bracing himself for the unkind retort. 'No, I couldn't,' he said. 'Dru, my mother died this morning.' Not an unkind retort but silence. Then, as if she had received a shock, almost as if the dead woman had been someone she had known and loved, she said, 'Oh, no!' He was moved, warmed, by the consternation in her voice. All day, strangely when they were on the point of renewing their love affair, she had been more removed from him, less present, than at any time since Christmas. She'd been--he confessed it to himself now--almost a burden, an extra problem to cope with. But that appalled 'Oh, no!' which seemed to contain more feeling and more sympathy than any long speech of condolence, touched his heart and brought a tremor to his voice. 'I'm afraid so, Dru. My stepfather's taken it very hard and I--' She wailed, 'You won't be able to come home now!' She sounded sick, despairing. 'I can tell by your voice, you're going to stay for the funeral!' It was wonderful, of course, to be wanted, to know she needed him so much. But he'd have felt happier if her sympathy had been pure and simple, without strings. Yet for her to be sympathetic at all. 'I must, Dru darling,' he said. 'Try to understand. Honor�eeds me till his sister comes. I've promised to stay till Tuesday.' 'But I need you!' she cried, the imperious child whose wishes must always be paramount. 'God, and don't I need you? But we've waited six months. We can wait four more days. You must see this changes things.' Please God, let her not be difficult about it, not now. Let her not make a scene His happiness at rediscovering her couldn't take storms just yet. He felt he needed to carry that happiness undisturbed, unalloyed, through the next few days like a talisman; to have it there as a quiet place to retreat to when the sadness of bereavement grew sharp and the practical tasks exasperating. He listened to her ominous silence that seemed charged with protest, petulance, resentment. 'Dru, don't ask me to break my promise.' He dreaded the phone going down, the angry crash as she hung up on him. But there was no crash, no stormy outburst, and when she broke the silence her voice had grown hard with the chill of Thursday morning. 'I'm afraid,' she said, 'I'll have to. I haven't told you why I phoned yet.' 'Did we ever need a reason?' 'No, but this time there happens to be one. This vet wants to see you.' 'Vet?' he said obtusely. 'Yes, vet. Remember?' Dido. He hadn't forgotten Dido but somehow he'd thought that now she'd been rescued from the hovel and fed and given attention, everything would be all right. 'Why does be want to see me?' 'I phoned him today to check up. He says the dog's got something wrong with her liver, something bad, and she's in a very bad way. He has to talk to the owner or someone taking the place of the owner before he operates on her. Gray, you can't just leave all this to me. Don't you see, you have to take the responsibility?' Gray sat down heavily on Honor� bed. He was remembering Dido as he'd last seen her, so vigorous, so vital, rippling with health. There was something sickeningly ugly in the idea that he'd destroyed all that by his lack of responsibility. 'How can she have something wrong with her liver?' be said. 'I mean, malnutrition, I could understand that. But something wrong with her liver? What can I do about it? How can I help by coming home?' 'He wants to see you tomorrow,' she persisted. 'Gray, I said you'd come. I didn't see why not. It isn't very far just to come to London. Tiny often flies to Paris and back in a day.' 'Dru, don't you see how fantastic it is? You can tell him to go ahead and operate, do anything to save the dog's life. I'll pay. j'l manage to borrow the money somehow and I'll pay.' 'You'll do that but you won't come home and see to it yourself? Not even if I promise to meet you at the hovel afterwards?' His hand closed hard on the receiver and a long thrill that was almost pain passed through his body. But it was impossible--'I don't have the money to go in for this jet-set flying about. All I have is about three quid.' 'I'll pay your fare. No, don't say you won't take Tiny's money. It won't be his. I've sold my amethyst ring. And Tiny didn't give it me, my father did.' 'Dru, I don't know what--' 'I told the vet you'd be there at about three. Go and ask your stepfather if it'll be all right to leave him for a day. I'll hold on.' Dry-mouthed, he laid the receiver on the pillow and went into the living room. 'Honor�I've got to go home tomorrow. I'll go in the morning and be back by night.' A bitter but very non-farcical argument ensued. Why did he have to go? Where was the money to come from? What would Honor�o on his own? Finally, why didn't Gray get a job, settle down (preferably in France) marry and forget about mad, bad Englishwomen who loved animals more than people? 'I promise I'll be back by midnight and I'll stay till after the funeral. Your friends will be with you. I'll ask Mme Reville to come to you for the whole day.' Gray left him, feeling sick because Honor�as crying again. He picked up the phone. 'All right, Dru, I'll come.' 'I knew you would! Oh, God, I can't believe it. I'm going to see you tomorrow. I'm going to see you!' 'I've got to see this vet first and that won't be pleasant. You'd better tell me the the set-up.' 'You've got the address. Just go there and talk to him at three.' 'And when and where do I see you?' 'If it were only a weekday,' she said, 'I could come to the airport. That's not possible on a Saturday. Tiny's going to look at some house he wants to buy for his mother in the afternoon. I'll get out of that and I'll see you at the hovel at five. O.K.?' 'Can't you--can't you meet me at the vet's?' 'I'll try, but don't count on it. I should be able to drive you back to Heathrow.' 'But we will have...' He couldn't frame what he wanted to say in the right words, the words that would make her understand. 'We will have a little time together?' She'd understood. She gave an excited chuckle. 'You know me,' she said. 'Ah, Dru, I love you! I'd go a thousand miles to be with you. Say you love me and that everything that's happened doesn't matter any more.' He held his breath, listening to her silence. A long long silence. He could hear her breathing shallowly as he'd breathed that night he rang her from Marble Arch. Suddenly, coolly and steadily, she spoke: 'I love you. I've decided, if you still want me, I'll leave Tiny and come and live with you.' 'My darling.. 'We'll talk about it tomorrow,' she said. Bang, the phone went down and he was left holding the emptiness, savouring the fulness, hardly daring to believe she'd said. But she had, she had. And he was going to see her tomorrow. At the end of the long lane she'd be waiting for him. He'd run the length of it. He'd let himself in by the front door and the scent of her would meet him, Amorce dangereuse. And she'd come out to him, her arms outstretched, her hair like a bell of gold, her white hand bare of the ring she'd sold to fetch him back to her-- Honor�ad stopped crying but he looked very sad. 'I have been thinking, you must take the car. Si, si, j'insiste. It is the quickest way to fetch you back soon.' 'Thank you, Honor�it's kind of you.' 'But YOU must remember that in France we drive on the correct side of the road and--' 'I'll take great care of your car.' 'seigneur! It is not of the car that I am thinking but of you, my son, you who are all I have left.' Gray smiled, touched his shoulder, Yes, he must stop seeing the worst in everyone, attributing to people selfseeking motives. He must try to understand the power of love. Drusilla would have killed for love, was leaving Tiny for love just as he was abandoning Honor�or love .0 Love, what crimes are committed in thy name. 'Let us have a little glass of cognac,' said Honor�

CHAPTER 15

The plane got to Heathrow at one-fifteen. Gray bought a London A-Z Guide, leaving himself with just enough money for his Tube fare to Leytonstone and his train fare to Waltham Abbey. By ten to three he was at Leytonstone station, one of those pallid, desert-like and arid halts that abound on the outer reaches of the Tube lines, and had walked round the curving tunnel into the street. Drusilla had said nothing about a chance of meeting him there and he didn't expect her, but he couldn't help eyeing the cars parked by the kerb in the faint hope that the E-type might be among them. Of course it wasn't there. He thought of how often her feet must tread this very spot where he now was, how often she must come to this tunnel entrance on her way to London, and then he began to walk down the long street of biggish late Victorian houses, his A-Z in his hand. Taking the back doubles that filled the area between the road where the station was and the last far-flung finger of Epping Forest, he found George Street, a curving, respectable looking terrace, which lay under the shadow of an enormous Gothic hospital. Number twenty-one bore no brass plate or anything else to indicate that a vet occupied it, but he went up the steps and rang the bell. Expecting that at any minute the door would open and an aggressive middle-aged man in a white coat, his pockets bristling with syringes and steel combs, would fall upon him with threats of the RS. P. C. A. and certain prosecution, Gray mentally rehearsed his defence. But when the door did open--after he'd rung twice more--no mingled smells of dog and disinfectant rolled out, no veterinary veteran was waiting to excoriate him with his tongue. Instead, a smell of baking cakes and a girl holding a baby. 'I've an appointment with the vet at three o'clock.' 'What vet?' said the girl. 'Isn't there a vet has his--' What did they call it? '... his surgery here?' 'You want the place up the road. It's on this side. I don't know the number. You'll see the name up.' Surely Drusilla had said twenty-one? But maybe she hadn't. He hadn't after all, written it down. Perhaps she'd said fortynine which was, in fact, the number of the house on which the vet's name-plate was. He was quite used to forgetting things and he no longer really wondered at his forgetfulness. His lapses were all due, he thought, to psychological blocks, defences put up by his unconscious, and these would soon go away now. The really important things he never forgot. Nothing could have made him forget his date with Drusilla at five. The doggy smell was here all right, a thick animal reek. Finding the door on the latch, he'd walked in without ringing and was standing in the waiting room, contemplating the copies of The Field and Our Dogs and wondering what the correct procedure was, when a woman in a khaki smock came in to ask what he wanted. 'Mr Greenberg doesn't have a surgery on Saturday afternoons,' she said curtly. 'We're only open for clipping and stripping.' Distant squeaks and grunts, coming from the upper regions, testified that these operations were at present being performed. 'My name is Lanceton,' he said, pausing to allow for the expression of hatred and disgust which would cross her face. when she realised she was in the presence of an animal torturer. 'My dog--well, a dog I was looking after--you've got it here.' Her face didn't change. She simply stared. 'A yellow labrador called Dido. She was brought to Mr--er, Greenberg last Thursday. 'Brought here? We don't board dogs.' 'No, but she was ill. She was left here. She was going to have an operation.' 'I will check,' said Khaki Smock. She came back after quite a long time, more than five minutes. 'We've no records of what you say happened. What time on Thursday?' 'Around lunchtime.' Khaki Smock said triumphantly, 'Mr Greenberg wasn't here after twelve on Thursday.' 'Could you phone him or something?' 'Well, I could. It's very inconvenient. It won't be any use. He wasn't here.' 'Please,' said Gray firmly. He sat down and leafed through The Field. Twenty-five past three. He'd have to get out of here in five minutes if he was going to make it to the hovel by five. He could hear her phoning in another room. Was it possible he'd got the name of the street wrong as well as the number? She came back at last, looking exasperated. 'Mr Greenberg knows nothing about it.' He had to accept that. He went back into the street, utterly at a loss. The E-type wasn't there. Drusilla hadn't managed to come and meet him. Or was she, at this moment, waiting somewhere else for him, parked outside another vet's in another street? There must be dozens of vets in Leytonstone. Well, not dozens but several. As he walked down the street the way he'd come he had the sensation of being in a dream, one of those nightmares in which one is already late for an urgent meeting or rendezvous, but everything goes wrong. Transport is irregular or delayed, people antagonistic, addresses mistaken and simply reached goals hideously elusive. The obvious thing was to try and get Drusilla on the phone. Tiny would be out house-hunting and maybe she'd be there and alone. He dialled her number but no one answered, so he looked through the yellow page directory for veterinary surgeons. Immediately he saw the mistake he'd made, a mistake possible only when two suburban and contiguous townships have closely similar names. Greenberg was a vet at 49 George Street, Leytonstone; Cherwell a vet at 21 George Street, Leyton. Dido was in Leyton, not Leytonstone. Twenty to four. Well, he'd come over for the sake of the dog, hadn't he? That was the real purpose of his trip, and it was no good giving up just because time was getting on. Yet even now, if he gave up now, he wouldn't get to the hovel before fivefifteen. He was aware of that pressure, engendering panic, which affects us when we know we shall be late for an allimportant, longed-for appointment. The air seems to swim, the ground drags at our feet, people and inanimate things conspire to detain us. He opened his A-Z. George Street, Leyton, looked miles away, almost in Hackney Marshes. He didn't know how to get there but he knew it would take at least half an hour. That wasn't to be thought of, out of the question when Drusilla would already be dressing for him, scenting herself, watching the clock. Instead, he dialled Cherwell's number. Nothing happened, no one replied. Vets, obviously, didn't work this late on Saturdays. But the dog--Surely this Cherwell guy would act on his own initiative? Surely, if an operation were necessary, he'd operate with or without consent? All he, Gray, could do was phone him from France first thing on Monday morning. And now put all this vet business behind him, waste no more time on it, but get to Liverpool Street fast. There must be, he thought, a quicker way of making this trans-forest journey of seven or eight miles than by going all the way back into London and out again via sprawling northern suburbs. There must be buses, if only he knew their routes and their stops. If he'd had money he could have phoned for a mini-cab. As it was, he had just enough for his train fare. The Tube seemed to go exceptionally slowly and he had to wait fifteen minutes for a train to Waltham Cross. By the time it came and he was in the carriage his watch he had kept checking with station clocks to make sure it wasn't fast, showed twenty-five minutes to five. Only once had she ever been late for a date with him and that had been that first time in New Quebec Street. She wouldn't be late now. By now she'd have been waiting half an hour for him, growing bewildered perhaps, distressed, as she paced the rooms, running to the window, opening the front door to look up the lane. Then, when he hadn't come and still he hadn't come, she'd say, I won't look, I'll go away and count a hundred and by then he'll have come. Or she'd go upstairs where she couldn't see the lane and scrutinise herself again in the mirror, once more comb her flying fiery hair, touch more scent to her throat, run her hands lightly, in sensuous anticipation, over the body she'd prepared for him. Count another hundred, go slowly down the stairs, walk to the window, lift the curtain, close her eyes. When I open my eyes I shall see him coming. At half past five he was at the Waltham Abbey end of the lane. There had been an accident on the corner and the police signs were still up, the police cars still there. In the middle of the road black skid marks met and converged on a heap of sand, flung down perhaps to cover blood and horror. He didn't stop to look or enquire but quickened his pace, telling himself that a man of his age ought to be able to run two miles in twenty minutes. He ran on the hard flat surface of the metalled road, avoiding the soggy grass verges. Pocket Lane had never seemed so long, and the twists and turns in it, the long straight stretches, with which he was so familiar, seemed multiplied as if the lane were made of elastic which some hostile giant had stretched out to frustrate him. The blood pounded in his head and his throat was parched by the time he came to the point where the tarmac petered out into clay. Under the trees where the E-type should have been was a big dark green Mercedes. So she'd changed her car. Tiny had bought her a new one. Gray was exhausted with running but the sight of her car brought him a new impetus and he raced on, his trousers covered with yellow mud. The rain that had fallen on the other side of the Channel had fallen here too, and in the deep ruts the clay was almost liquid. This last stretch of the lane-how short it had always seemed on those nights when he had walked her back to her car! Had it really been as long as this, hundreds of yards long surely? But he could see the hovel now, the pallid hulk of it, white as the overcast sky. The gate was open, swinging slightly in the faint breeze that set all those millions of leaves trembling. He stopped for a moment at the gate to get his breath. The sweat stood on his face and he was gasping, but he'd made it, he'd done it in just under twenty minutes. He unlocked the front door, calling before he was inside, 'Dru, Dru I'm sorry I'm so late. I ran all the way from the station.' The door swung to and clicked shut. 'Dru, are you upstairs?' There was no sound, no answer, but he thought he could smell her scent, Amorce dangereuse. For a second he was sure he smelt it, and then it was gone, lost in the hovel smells of dust and slowly rotting wood. Breathing more evenly now, he dumped his case and shed his jacket on to the floor. The 'lounge' was empty and so was the kitchen. Of course she'd be upstairs, in bed even, waiting for him. That would be like her, to tease him, to wait for him silently, giggling under the bedclothes, and then, when he came into the bedroom, break into a gale of laughter. He ran up the staircase two at a time. The bedroom door was shut. He knew he'd left it open-he always did-and his heart began to drum. Outside the door he hesitated, not from shyness or fear or doubt, but to let himself feel fully the excitement and the joy he'd been suppressing all day. Now, when he'd reached his goal at last, he could yield to these emotions. He could stand here for ten seconds, his eyes closed, rejoicing that they were together again; stand on the threshold of their reunion, savour it and what it would mean to the full, then open the door. Opening his eyes, he pushed the door softly, not speaking. The bed was empty, the dirty sheets flung back as he'd left them, a cup half full of cold tea dregs on the bedside table as he'd left it, as he'd left it--The breeze fluttered the strips of rag that served as curtains and swayed a dust-hung cobweb. A hollowness where that full pounding heart had been, he surveyed the empty room, unable to believe. The spare room was empty too. He went downstairs and out into the garden where the bracken now grew as high as a man and where little weeds already greened the ash patch of his fire. No sun shone out of the white sky. There was no sound but the muted twitter of songless birds. A gust of wind ruffled the bracken tops and rustled away into the Forest. But she must be here, her car was here. Perhaps she'd got tired of waiting and gone for a walk. He called her name once more and then he walked back down the lane, splashing through the yellow mud. The car was still there, still empty. He went up to it and looked through its windows. On the back seat was a copy of the Financial Times and, lying on top of it, a spectacles case. Drusjlja wouldn't have those things in her car. She wouldn't have a black leather head-rest for her passenger or a pair of very masculine-looking string-backed driving gloves on the dashboard shelf. It wasn't her car. She hadn't come. 'You won't come? Not even if I promise to meet you at the hovel afterwards?' That's what she'd said. 'Oh, God, I can't believe it. I'm going to see you tomorrow. I'm going to see you!' He resisted a temptation to kick the car, the innocent inanimate thing that had nothing to do with her but probably belonged to some bird-watcher or archaeologist. Dragging his feet, his head bent, he didn't see Mr Tringham until the old man was almost upon him and they had nearly collided. 'Look where you're going, young man!' Gray would have gone on without making any answer but Mr Tringham, who was for once not carrying a book and who had apparently come out of his cottage especially to talk to him, said rather accusingly, 'You've been in France.' 'Yes.' 'There was a man in your garden earlier on. Little short chap, walking round, the place, looking up at the windows. Thought you ought to know. He could have been trying to break in.' What did he care who broke in? What did it matter to him who'd been there if she hadn't? 'I couldn't care less,' he said. 'Hmm. I went out for my walk early, thinking it might rain later. There was this rough-looking long-haired chap sitting under a tree and this other one in your garden. I'd have called the police only I haven't got a telephone.' 'I know,' Gray said bitterly. 'Hmm. You young people take these things very lightly, I must say. Personally, I think we should use your phoneor Mr Warriner's, I should say-and get on to the police now.' Gray said with irritable savagery, 'I don't want the police messing about the place. I want to be left alone.' He walked away sullenly. Mr Tringham grunted something after him about decadence and modern youth, after the manner of Honor�Gray slammed the hovel door shut and went into the lounge, aiming a kick at the golf clubs which fell over with a clang. She hadn't come. He'd travelled all this way to see her, travelled hundreds of miles, run the last bit till he'd felt his lungs were bursting, and she hadn't come.

CHAPTER 16

The phone clicked, then began to ring. He lifted the receiver dully, knowing it would be she, not wanting her voice or any part of her, but the whole of her. 'Hi.' 'What happened?' he said wearily. 'What happened to you?' 'Dru, I got here at five to six. I ran like hell. Couldn't you have waited for me? Where are you?' 'I'm at home,' she said. 'I just got in. Tiny said he'd be home at six and I couldn't think of an excuse for not being home too. I left it till the last moment and then I had to go. He's out in the garden now but we'd better be quick.' 'Christ, Dru, you promised me. You promised you'd be here. You were going to drive me to the airport. That doesn't matter but if you could have made the time for that, surely you could have--I wanted you so much.' 'Can't be helped. I did what I could. I should have known you're always late and you always make a mess of things. You didn't even find the vet, did you?' 'How can you know that?' 'Because I rang Mr Cherwell myself to check if you'd been.' 'So it was Cherwell--'Of course it was. Twenty-one George Street, Leyton. I told you, didn't I? It's no use, anyway. The dog's had to be destroyed.' 'Oh, Dru, no!' 'Oh, Gray, yes. You couldn't have done anything if you had seen Cherwell, so it's no good worrying about it. What are you going to do now?' 'Lie down and die too, I should think. I've come all this way for nothing and I haven't got a bean. If ever anyone made a pointless journey, this is it. I haven't had anything to eat all day and I haven't got my fare back. And you ask me what I'm going to do.' 'You haven't found the money, then?' 'Money? What money? I've only been here ten minutes. I'm plastered with mud and dead tired.' 'My poor Gray. Never mind, I'll tell you what you're going to do. You're going to change your clothes, take the money I left you-it's in the kitchen-and get the hell out of that hole back to France. Just write the day off, don't think about it. Quick now, I can see Tiny coming back up the garden.' 'Tiny? What the hell do we care about Tiny now? If you're joining me next week, if you're coming to live with me, what does it matter what Tiny thinks? The sooner he knows the better.' He cleared his throat. 'Dru, you haven't changed your mind? You are going to come to me next week?' She sighed, a fluttery trembly sound. Her words were firm but not her voice. 'I never change my mind.' 'God, I feel sick when I think I've come all this way and I'm not going to see you after all. When will I see you?' 'Soon. As soon as you get back. Tuesday. I'm going to ring off now.' 'No, don't. Please don't.' If the receiver went down now, if she ended as she always did without a farewell--But she always ended like that. 'Dru, please!' For the first time she said it. 'Good-bye, Gray. Good-bye.' On the bath counter he found the electricity bill, the phone bill, the cheque from his publishers-the first two cancelling out the third-a postcard from Mal and, strangely enough, one from Francis and Charmian in Lynmouth. Beside all this correspondence she'd left the money for him in an untidy heap. It seemed a small heap until he looked again, saw that the notes were all tenners and that there were ten of them. He'd expected thirty pounds and found a hundred. There was no loving note with them. She'd left a hundred pounds in a careless heap as someone else might have left twenty pence in small change; she'd sold her amethyst ring to get him money and he felt a warm, heart-beating gratitude, but he'd have liked a letter. Just a word to tell of her love for him, her distress at not seeing him. He'd never received a letter from her in all their time together and he didn't know what her handwriting looked like. Still, he wouldn't need handwriting, mementoes, recorded evidence of her, after next week. It was getting on for half past six and he ought to be on his way. Change these filthy clothes first, though. He went upstairs, wondering what he could find to put on, for he'd left everything dirty just as he'd taken it off. He hadn't looked round the bedroom at all beyond looking at the bed itself. Now he saw that his dirty jeans and shirt had been washed and actually ironed and were draped over the back of the bedroom chair with his clean Arran. She'd done that for him. She'd cleaned up his kitchen and washed his clothes. Changing quickly, he wondered if she'd done that to show him she could do it, that she wouldn't be helpless, the bewildered rich girl uprooted from luxury, when she came to him. He rolled up his clay-spattered trousers and thrust them under the bath cover. The window had been polished, the paintwork washed in places. She'd done all that for him and sold her precious ring too. He ought to be on top of the world with happiness, but disappointment at not seeing her still weighed him down. Nothing she could do for him or give him made up for the lack of her. But once back in France, he'd phone her and ask her to be waiting for him when he got home on Tuesday night. She still had her key. The one he could see hanging over the sink must be Isabel's, left there when she'd brought Didoguilt for the dog's death welled up inside him. His own absent-mindedness had brought that about and led him to make a mistake that almost amounted to criminality. But once Drusilla was with him all that would be changed. He'd have to plan, remember, make decisions. Just time for a pot of milkless tea and something out of a tin before he set off back to the station. The phone was on the hook, his correspondence examined, the back door bolted. Now was there anything he ought to remember? Perhaps he'd better take that spare key with him. If the little man Mr Tringham had seen had really been a burglar, the key was in a very vulnerable position. Break one pane of glass in the window, insert a hand and reach for the hook, and the hovel, Mal's hovel, would be anyone's to do as he liked with. Mal wouldn't be too happy to have his golf clubs pinched or any of that tatty old furniture which was, after all, all he had. Congratulating himself on this unprecedented prudence, Gray unhooked the key and was slipping it into his pocket when he paused, surprised to see how bright and shiny it was. Surely he'd given Isabel the spare key Mal had left him? This key looked more like the one he'd had specially cut for Drusilla when she'd been visiting him so often that there was a chance she'd have to let herself in before he got back from the shops. But perhaps he hadn't given her the new one. Perhaps, in fact, she'd had the old one and the shiny key had been kept for spare. He couldn't remember at all and it didn't seem to matter. He drank his tea and left the dirty crockery on the draining board. The hundred pounds in his pocket, the two keys, he closed the front door behind him. A thin drizzle, not much more than a mist, was falling and heavier drops popped rhythmically from waterlogged beech leaves. He walked on the wet grass to avoid the paintbox mud. The green car was still there. Probably it was a stolen car, abandoned in this out-of-the-way spot. Or its owner had gone on some nature ramble in the forest depths. Both the Willises were in their front garden, standing on their lawn which now looked as good as new to Gray, arguing about something or commiserating perhaps with each other over a case of mildew or leaf blight. They saw Gray and turned away very stiffly, ramrod-backed. At the corner the police cars had gone and the sand been removed. He walked quickly on towards the station. Over France the moon was shining. Had the sky cleared in England too and was this same moon shining down on Epping Forest and Combe Park? She and Tiny would be in bed, the gross man in his black and red pyjamas reading some company chairman's memoirs or maybe the Financial Times, the slender girl in white frills, reading a novel. But this Saturday night there wouldn't be a phone call from a strange man, saying nothing, breathing heavily. And she wouldn't be lonely any more but thinking about how she'd have to tell the husband in the next bed she'd be leaving him next week. Dream of me, Drusilla. He drove past the last nids de poule sign and entered sleeping Bajon, skirting the clump of chestnut trees and the house called Les Marrons. The moon gave him enough light to see by as he covered the car once more in its protective nylon. But the hail of Le Petit Trianon was pitch dark. He felt for the light switch and stumbled over something that was standing just inside the door, a bouquet of funeral lilies in a plastic urn. Afraid that the noise might have awakened his stepfather, he pushed open the bedroom door which Honor�ad left ajar. The thin moonlight, which had transformed the gnome circus into a ghostly ballet, edged the furniture with silver and made little pale geometric patterns on the carpet. Honor�his greyish-black hair spiky and tousled, lay curled in his own bed but facing the one where Enid had slept, one arm bridging the space between, his hand tucked under her pillow. He was deeply asleep, serene, almost smiling. Gray supposed that they had always slept like that, Honor� hand holding Enid's, and he saw that his stepfather, reality and its awfulness alienated by dreams, made belief that she lay there still and still held his hand under her cheek. Touched, awed by the sight, Gray thought how he and Drusilla would sleep like that but in same the bed, always together. And he dreamed of her, the most tender untroubled dreams he'd ever had of her, throughout the night until the baying of the farmer's dog awoke him at eight. Then he got up and took coffee to Honor�ho was neither smiling nor serene in the mornings now and whose methodical early-to-rise habits seemed to have died with Enid's death. Mine Reville called and carried Honor�ff to Mass. Gray had the house to himself and he was alone with the phone. What did she and Tiny do on Sundays? Searching in his mind for some recollection, some account she might have given him of their usual Sunday activities, he found only a blank. Certainly they wouldn't go to church. Did Tiny perhaps play golf or drink with some equally affluent cronies in the pub that crowned the summit of Little Cornwall? There was just a chance she might be alone, or a chance even that she'd told Tiny by now and would be glad of a call from him to back her up and give her confidence. Without further hesitation, he dialled the number. It rang and rang but no one answered. He was trying again an hour later when Mme Reville's car drew up outside and he had to abandon the attempt. Well, he'd said Monday and surely he could wait till Monday? The day passed slowly. Every hour now that he was away from her seemed endless. He kept thinking of the scene which might at this moment, at any moment, be taking place at Combe Park with Drusilla declaring her intention to leave and Tiny his intention of stopping her at all costs. He might even use violence. Or he might throw her out. Still, she had her key and she could take refuge at the hovel if necessary. Honor�ay on the sofa, reading the letters Enid had written to him during the short period between their meeting and their marriage. Weeping freely, he read bits of them aloud to Gray. 'Ah, how she loved me! But so many doubts she had, my little Enid. What of my boy, she writes here, my friends? How shall I learn to live in your world, I who speak only the French I learned in school?' Honor�at bolt upright, pointing a finger at Gray. 'I crushed all her doubts with my great love. I am master now, I said. You do as I say and I say I love you, so nothing else can matter. Ah, how she adapted herself! She was already old,' he said with Gallic frankness, 'but soon she speaks French like a Frenchwoman born, makes new friends, leaves all behind to be with me. With true love, Gray-arm, it can be so.' 'I'm sure it can,' said Gray, thinking of Drusilla. 'Let us have a little cognac, my son.' Honor�undled up his letters and rubbed at his eyes with his sleeve. 'Tomorrow I shall be better. After the funeral I shall-what is it you English say?-Pull me together.' After the funeral, while the company drank wine and ate cake in the living room, Gray slipped away to phone Drusilla. She'd be waiting impatiently for his call, he thought, had possibly tried to phone him earlier while they were at the church. Very likely she'd be sitting by the phone, feeling lonely and frightened because she'd had a terrible row with Tiny and now might think, because she hadn't heard from him, that her lover had deserted her too. He dialled the code and the number and heard it start to ring. After about six double peals the receiver was lifted. 'Combe Park.' The coarse voice with its cockney inflexion, the voice that obviously wasn't Drusilla's, almost floored him. Then he realised it must be the daily woman. He and Drusilla had always had an arrangement that if he phoned and the woman answered he was to put the phone down without speaking. But not any longer surely? That didn't apply any longer, did it? 'Combe Park,' she said again. 'Who's that?' Better try again later. Better not do anything now to interfere with what might be a delicate situation. He put the receiver back very carefully and quietly as if by so doing he could make believe he hadn't called Combe Park at all, and then he went back into the room where they were all talking in hushed voices, sipping Dubonnet and nibbling at Chamonix oranges. Immediately the mayor took him to one side and questioned him closely as to his visit to England. Had he been able to watch a Test match or, better still, managed a trip to Manchester? Gray answered no to both, very conscious of the glare Mme Derain had fixed on him. Her eyes were beady like her brother's and her skin as brown, but in her case the small Duval bones were concealed under a mountain of hard fat and her features buried in dark wrinkled cushions. *'Id.*' she said like a notice in a shop window, *'on parlefrancais West ce pas?*' She had taken over the management of the household. It was evident that she intended to stay, to give up her job and her flat over the Marseille fish shop, for the comparative luxury and peace of Le Petit Trianon. Even more parsimonious than Honor�she was already making plans to take in a lodger, already talking of removing the marigolds and the tripods and growing vegetables in the back garden. And English stepsons who contributed nothing to the household expenses weren't welcome to her. One glass of Dubonnet per head was all she allowed and then the mourners were hustled away. Gray tried to phone Drusilla again and again the daily woman answered. His third attempt, made at five-thirty, the last safe moment, didn't stand a chance, for Mme Derain actually wrested the phone from his hand. She didn't moan at him or talk of formidable expense but said stonily that she planned to have the apparatus disconnected as soon as possible. He'd have to try again in the morning while she was out buying bread, he thought, but when the morning came, when Honor�as drinking coffee in the kitchen, he entered the bedroom to find her already there. Ostensibly removing signs from it which would be painful to her brother, she was in fact, Gray thought, sorting out which of Enid's clothes she could convert to her own use. Gray guessed he was the type of man who would have liked to keep his dead wife's room as a shrine, each little possession of hers treasured as a reminder of their happiness. But this wasn't Mme Derain's way. She had allowed her brother to keep Enid's wedding ring--although suggesting it would be more prudent to sell it--and Honor�eld the ring loosely in his horny brown hands. It was too small to go on any of his fingers. 'I want to give you back the money you sent me,' Gray said. 'Here it is, thirty pounds. I want you to have it.' Honor�xpostulated, but feebly and not for long. Gray foresaw his stepfather's future life as a way of crafty deception in which money would have to be slyly wrested from his sister and windfalls concealed. This was the first of them. Honor�lipped the money into his pocket, but not before he had glanced, already surreptitiously, already fearfully, towards the door. 'Stay another week, Gray-arm.' 'I can't. I've got a lot of things to do. For one thing, I'm going to move.' 'Ah, you will move and forget to give old Honor�our new address and he will lose you.' 'I won't forget.' 'You'll come back for your holidays?' 'There won't be room for me when you've got your lodger.' Gray wondered suddenly if he should tell Honor�bout Drusilla, give him an expurgated version perhaps, tell him there was a girl he hoped to marry when she'd got her divorce. And that was true. One day they'd be married. He wanted it that way now, open, above-board for all the world to see, no more secrets. He glanced at Honor�ho was eating and drinking mechanically, whose thoughts were obviously with his dead wife. No, let it remain a secret for now. But it struck him as strange that he'd even contemplated telling his stepfather, his old enemy. All those years when they might have had a happy relationship they had gone out of their way each to antagonise the other, each obstinately insisting on speaking the other's language. And now, when the relationship was ending when it was probable--and both knew it--that they would never meet again, Honor�poke French and he English and they understood each other and something that was almost love had grown up between them. Still, one day he might come back. He and Drusilla could have their honeymoon in France, drive through Bajonhitch through more likely, he thought--and call and see Honor� Should he try to phone her from the village? Call at the cu and use the phone in the bar? That way they'd be able to fix a definite time for their meeting and he could have a meal ready for her and wine when she came at last to her new home and her new life. But it would be hard to explain this action to Honor who seemed to have an id�fixe that his stepson had formed a liaison with an elderly dog-breeder. Why go to all that trouble, anyway, when in three of four hours he'd be in London? 'You will miss your plane,' said Mme Derain, coming in with one of Enid's scarves over her arm, a scarf that Honor�inced at the sight of. 'Come now, the bus leaves in ten minutes.' 'I will drive you to Jency, my son.' 'No, Honor�you're not up to it. I'll be O.K. You stay here and rest.' 'J'insiste. Am I not your papa? Now, you do as I say.' So the nylon cover was removed from the Citro'n and Honor�rove him to Jency. There they waited, drinking coffee at a little pavement caf�nd, when the bus came, Honor�mbraced him tenderly, kissing his cheeks. 'Write to me, Gray-arm.' 'Of course I will.' And Gray waved from the bus until the little figue in the dark beret, the French onion seller, the waiter, the thief of his happy adolescence, the killer of his dream, had dwindled to a black dot in the wide dusty square.

CHAPTER 17

London lay under a heavy, almost unbreathable, humidity. Like November, Gray thought, but warm. The sky was uniformly pastel grey and it seemed to have fallen to lie on roofs and tree tops like a sagging muslin bag. There was no wind, no breath of it to move a leaf or flutter a flag or lift a tress from a woman's head. The atmosphere was that of a greenhouse without its flowers. He dialled her number from the air terminal and got no reply. Probably she was out shopping. She couldn't be expected to stay in all day just on the chance that he'd phone. At Liverpool Street be tried again and again at Waltham Cross but each time the bell rang into a void. Once, maybe twice, she could have been out shopping or in the garden--but every time? He hadn't said he'd call her but surely she'd guess he would. There was no point, though, in getting into a state about it, rushing into every phone box he saw on every stage of his journey. Better wait now till he got home. pocket Lane had attracted to its moist dim shelter what seemed like all the buzzing insects in Essex. Slumbrously they rose from leaf and briar, wheeled and sang. He brushed them off his face and off the carrier bag of food he'd bought at a delicatessen in Gloucester Road, cold meat and salad for their supper, and a bottle of wine. Maybe she was out because she'd done what he'd wistfully envisaged, taken refuge from Tiny at the hovel. He hadn't thought of ringing the hovel. She might be there waiting for him. But no, he wasn't going to let himself in for that one again, for the hideous Saturday nightmare of half-killing himself running to her and then finding she wasn't there. Until he was inside the house and had been upstairs he couldn't rid himself of the very real hope of it. Hope doesn't die because you tell yourself it is pointless. He dropped the food on to the iron-legged table and lifted the phone. Then, before he dialled, he saw that the golf clubs were standing up, resting once more against the wall. But he'd kicked them over and left them in a scattered heap--. So she had been there? Five-O-eight, then the four digits. He let the bell ring twenty times and then he put the receiver back, resolving to keep calm, to be reasonable and not to try her number again for two hours. She'd said Tuesday but she hadn't said anything about getting in touch with him before she came. And there were all sorts of explanations to account for her absence from Combe Park. She might even have gone to the airport to meet him and they had missed each other. He went out into the front garden and lay down in the bracken. It was slightly less stuffy than the house, slightly less claustrophobic. But the atmosphere, thick, stills warm, was charged with the tension characteristic of such weather. It was as if the weather itself were waiting for something to happen. No birds sang. The only sound was that of the flies' muted buzzing as they rose and fell in their living clouds. And the trees stood utterly immobile around the hovel, their green cloaks motionless, their trunks like pillars of stone. He lay in the bracken thinking about her, crushing down each doubt as it rose, telling himself how resolute she was, how punctual, how she never changed her mind. The front door was ajar so that he would hear the phone when it rang. He lay on his side, staring through the bracken trunks, through this forest in miniature, towards the lane, so that he would see the silver body of her car when it slid into the gap between thrusting fronds and hanging leaves. Presently, because it was warm and he had lulled himself into peace, he slept. When he awoke it was nearly half past five but the appearance of the Forest and the light were unchanged. No car had come and the phone hadn't rung. Half past five was the last safe time to ring her. He went slowly back into the house and dialled but still there was no answer. All day long she'd been out, for the whole of this day when she was due to leave her husband for her lover, she'd been out. Those reassuring excuses for her absence, her silence, which had lulled him to sleep began to grow faint and a kind of dread to replace them. 'I never change my mind,' she'd said. 'I'll leave Tiny and come and live with you. Tuesday,' she'd said, 'when you get back.' But she'd also said good-bye. She'd never said that before. Two or three hundred times they'd talked to each other on the phone; they'd met hundreds of times, but she'd never terminated their conversations on their meetings with a true farewell. See you, take care, till tomorrow, but never good-bye-- But wherever she was, whatever she'd been doing all day, she'd be bound to go home in the evening. Tiny demanded her presence in the evenings except when he was out on Thursdays. Well, he'd try again at six-thirty and to hell with Tiny. He'd try every half-hour throughout the evening. If she hadn't come, of course. There was always the possibility she'd promised Tiny to wait till he came home before leaving. Although he hadn't eaten since he left Le Petit Trianon, he wasn't hungry and he didn't fancy starting on the wine he'd bought. Even the idea of a cup of tea didn't attract him. He lay back in the chair, watching the inscrutable phone, chainsmoking, lighting, smoking and crushing out five cigarettes in the hour that passed. Tiny'd have been in half an hour by now. Whatever happened, unless he was away on a business trip--and if he'd been going away she'd have said--Drusilla's husband drove the Bentley through the Combe Park gates just before six. Perhaps he'd answer the phone. So well and good. He, Gray, would say who he was, give his name and ask to speak to Drusilla, and if Tiny wanted to know why he'd tell him why, tell him the lot. The time for discretion was past. Five-O-eight--He must have made a mess of it, for all he got was a steady high-pitched burr. Try again. Probably his hand hadn't been very steady. Five-O-eight. The bell rang, twice, three times, twenty times. Combe Park was empty, they were both out. But it wasn't possible she'd go out with her husband, the husband she was on the point of leaving, on the very day he and she were due to start their life together. 'I love you. If you still want me I'll leave Tiny and come and live with you. As soon as you get back, soon, Tuesday.. He went to the window. Standing there, gazing through a web of unmoving, pendulous branches, he thought I won't look out of the window again till I've counted a hundred. No, I'll make a cup of tea and smoke two cigarettes and count a hundred and then she'll be here. He'd do what he'd thought of her as doing while she waited for him on Saturday. But instead of going into the kitchen he sat down once more in the chair and, closing his eyes, began to count. It was years since he'd counted up so high, not since he was a little boy playing hide-and-seek. And he didn't stop when he reached a hundred, but went obsessively on, as if he were counting the days of his life or the trees of the Forest. At a thousand he stopped and opened his eyes, frightened by what was happening to his mind, to himself. It was still only seven o'clock. He lifted the phone, dialled the number that was more familiar to him than his own, making the movements that were so automatic now that he could have made them in the dark. And the bell rang as if it were echoing his counting, on and on, emptily, pointlessly, meaninglessly. Tiny must have taken her away. She'd told Tiny and he, aghast and angry, had shut up the house and taken away his wife from the lures of a predatory young lover. To St Tropez or St Moritz, to the tourists' shrines where miracles took place and in the glamour of high life women forgot the life they had left behind. He dropped the receiver and pushed his hand across his eyes, his forehead. Suppose they were away for weeks, months? There seemed no way to find out where they'd gone. He couldn't very well go questioning the neighbours and he didn't know Tiny's office number or her father's address. The thought came to him horribly that if she died no one would tell him; no news of her illness, her death, could reach him, for nobody in her circle knew of his existence and no one in his knew of hers. There was nothing he could do but wait--and hope. After all, it was still Tuesday. She hadn't said when on Tuesday. Perhaps she'd postponed telling Tiny till the last minute, was telling him now, and their quarrel was so intense, their emotions running so high, that they scarcely heard the phone, still less bothered to answer it. In a little while she'd have said all there was to say and then she'd fling out of the house, throw her packed cases into the car, drive furiously down the Forest roads-- He was seeing it all, following the phases of their quarrel, the two angry frightened people in their beautiful loveless house, when the phone, so dead and silent that he had thought it would never ring again, gave its preliminary hiccup. His heart turned over. He had the receiver to his ear before the end of the first peal and he was holding his breath, his eyes closed. 'Mr Graham Lanceton?' Tiny. Could it be Tiny? The voice was thick, uncultured, but very steady. 'Yes,' Gray said, clenching his free hand. The voice said, 'My name is lxworth, Detective Inspector Ixworth. I should like to come over and see you if that's convenient.' The anticlimax was so great, so sickening--far worse than when be had answered Honor� phone to M. Reville--that Gray could hardly speak. It was as hard to find words as to find, from his dry constricted throat, the voice with which to speak them. 'I don't...' he began thinly. 'Who--? What--'Detective Inspector Ixworth, Mr Lanceton. Shall we say nine o'clock?' Gray didn't answer. He didn't say anything. He put the phone down and stood shivering. It was fully five minutes before he could get over the shock of simply realising it hadn't been she. Then, wiping the sweat off his forehead, he made his way towards the kitchen where at least he'd be out of the sight of that phone. On the threshold he stopped dead. The window had been broken and forced open and the cellar door stood ajar. All his papers were now stacked in as neat a pile as a new ream of typing paper. Someone had been here and not she. Someone had broken into the house. He shook himself, trying to get a grip on reason, on normalcy. Vaguely he began to understand the reason for that policeman's phone call. The police had discovered a burglary. might he had to fill in the time till she phoned or came, and he might as well look round to see if anything had been pinched. It would be something to do. His typewriter was still there, though he had a feeling it had been moved. He couldn't remember where he'd left the strong-box. Having searched the downstairs rooms, he went up to the bedrooms. Everywhere smelt musty, airless. He opened windows as he went across the landing and his own bedroom but there was no breeze to blow Stale air out and fresh in. There was no fresh air. He longed to draw into his lungs great gulps of oxygen--something to relieve this tightness in his chest. But when he put his head out of the window the thick atmosphere seemed to stick at the rim of his throat. The strong-box wasn't in either of the bedrooms. He no longer retained much faith in his own memory, but he was certain he'd left the box somewhere in the house. What else would he have done with it? If it wasn't there, the intruder must have taken it. He searched the 'lounge' again and the kitchen and then went down the cellar steps. Someone had disturbed and turned over those mounds of rubbish and the iron was gone. Its trivet stood on a heap of damp newspapers but the iron which had burnt him, which had left a still clearly visible scar on his hand, had disappeared. He kicked some of the coal aside, mystified by this strange robbery, and saw at his feet on the moist flagstones, a spattered brown stain. The stain looked as if it might be blood. He remembered Dido again and thought that perhaps she'd succeeded in getting into the cellar and had fallen from the steps or wounded herself against one of the oil drums or the old unusable bicycle. It was an ugly thought that made him wince and he went quickly back up the steps. The box wasn't there, anyway. The garden was crushed now by rising mist, cottony white and oppressive, hanging immobile on nettle and fern bract. The broken window made the kitchen look more derelict than ever. He put the kettle on for tea but he went out of the kitchen while he waited for it to boil. After what had happened there, he was never going to be able to bear that kitchen for long. Dido's ghost would be behind him. He'd fancy he could hear her padding steps or the touch of her moist nose against his hand. Shivering, he reached for the phone again and dialled carefully but fast. They said that if you dialled too slowly or left too long a pause between two of the digits, something could go wrong and you'd get the wrong number. They said a hair across the mechanism or a grain of dust--suppose he'd been dialling the wrong number all this time? It could happen, some Freudian slip could make it happen. He put the receiver back, lifted it again, and dialled with calculated precision, repeating the seven figures over to himself aloud. The ringing began, and yet from the first double peal he knew it would be useless. Give up now till ten. Try again at ten and at midnight. If they weren't there at midnight he'd know they were away. He'd made a cup of tea and carried it into the 'lounge'--for all his resolve, he couldn't bear to be more than a yard from that phone--when he heard the soft purr of a car. At last. At last, at twenty past eight, a perfectly reasonable time, she'd come to him. The long and terrible waiting was over, and like all long and terrible waiting times would be forgotten immediately now that what he had waited for had happened. He wouldn't run to the door, he wouldn't even look out of the window. He'd wait till the bell rang and then he'd go there slowly, hoping he could maintain this calm fa�ade even when he saw her, white and gold and vital in the closing twilight, keep his rushing emotion down until she was in his arms. The bell rang. Gray set down his tea cup. It rang again. Oh, Drusilla, at last--! He opened the door. Appalled, every muscle of his body flexing into rigidity, he stared, for it was Tiny who stood there. In every imagined detailnow proved correct by the too real reality--this man was Drusilla's husband. From the black curly hair, cropped too short and crowning, with coarse contrast, a veined dusky-red face, to the gingery suede shoes, this was Tiny Janus. He wore a white raincoat, belted slackly over a belly made thick with rich living. They eyed each other in a silence which seemed immeasureable but which probably lasted no more than a few seconds. At first Gray, by instinct rather than by thought, had supposed the man was going to strike him. But now he saw that the mouth, which had been so grim and so belligerent, was curling into an expression of mockery, too faint to be called a smile. He stepped back, losing his sense of conviction, because the words he was hearing were wrong, were the last conceivable words in these circumstances. 'I'm a bit early.' A foot over the threshold, a briefcase swung. 'Nothing wrong, I hope?' Everything was wrong, everything unbalanced. 'I wasn't expecting...' Gray began. 'But I phoned you. My name's Ixworth.' Gray held himself still then nodded. He pulled the door wider to admit the policeman. There is a limit to how long anticlimaxes remain anticlimactic. One grows to accept them, to take them as part and parcel of nightmare. It was better, probably, that this man should be anyone but Tiny, intolerable, just the same, this his caller was anyone but Drusilla. 'Just got back from France, have you?' They had got themselves into the 'lounge'--Gray hardly knew how--and Ixworth moved confidently as if he were familiar with the place. 'Yes, I was in France.' He had spoken mechanically, had simply answered the question, but there must have been in his reply some note of surprise. 'We talk to friends and neighbours, Mr Lanceton. That's our job. All part of the job of investigating this sort of thing. You went to France to see your mother before she died, isn't that it?' 'Yes.' 'Your mother died on Friday and you came home on a flying visit on Saturday, going back again that same night. You must have had a very pressing reason for that trip.' 'I thought,' said Gray, remembering, recalling the least significant shocks of the day, 'you came to talk about my house being broken into.' 'Your house?' The thick black eyebrows went up. 'I understood this cottage was the property of a Mr Warriner who is at present in Japan.' Gray shrugged. 'I live here. He lent it to me. Anyway, there's nothing missing.' Why mention the strong-box, when to mention it would only keep the man here? 'I didn't see anyone. I wasn't here.' 'You were here on Saturday afternoon.' 'Only for about half an hour. Nobody'd been here then. The window wasn't broken.' 'We broke the window, Mr Lanceton,' said Ixworth with a slight cough. 'We entered this house with a warrant yesterday and found the body of a man lying at the foot of the cellar steps. He'd been dead for forty-eight hours. The wristwatch he was wearing had broken and the hands stopped at fourfifteen.' Gray, who had been standing limply but with a kind of slack indifferent impatience, lowered himself into the brown armchair. Or, rather, the chair seemed to rise and receive him into its lumpy uneven seat. The stunning effect of what Ixworth had said blanked his mind, but into this blankness came a vision of a little man prowling round the hovel garden. The burglar or burglars, the brown stain--Who were these intruders who had forced their way into his own nightmare and made, with a kind of incongruous sub-plot, a littler yet greater nightmare of their own? 'This man,' he said, because he had to say something, 'must have fallen down the steps.' 'He fell, yes.' Ixworth was looking at him narrowly, as if he expected so much more than Gray could give. 'He fell after he'd been struck on the head with a flat-iron.' Gray looked down at his right hand, at the blister which had become a cracked and yellow callous. He turned his hand downwards when he saw that Ixworth was looking at it too. 'Are you saying this man was killed here? Who was he?' 'You don't know? Come outside a minute.' The policeman led him into the kitchen, as if the house were his, as if Gray had never been there before. He opened the cellar door, watching Gray. The switch for the cellar light didn't work, and it was in the thin pale glow from the kitchen that they looked down into the depths and at the brown stain. It was strange that he should feel so threatened, so impelled to be defensive when none of this was anything to do with him. Or was it a case of any man's death diminishes me? All he found to say was, 'He fell down those steps.' 'Yes.' Suddenly Gray found he didn't like the man's tone, the expectancy, the accusatory note in it. It was almost as if Ixworth were trying to tease him into some sort of admission; as if, fantastically, the police could do no more unless he confessed to some defection or omission of his own--that he hadn't, for instance, taken proper precautions against this kind of thing or was deliberately failing to give vital information. 'I know nothing about it. I can't even imagine why he'd come here.' 'No? You don't see any attractions in a charming little weatherboard cottage set in unspoilt woodland?' Gray turned away, sickened at this inept description. He didn't want to know any more, he couldn't see the point. The intruder's identity or business was nothing to him, his death an ugliness Ixworth seemed to use only as an excuse for curious glances and cryptic words. And Ixworth had been so suave, so teasing, that Gray felt a jolt shake him when, after a brief silence, the policeman spoke with a clipped brutality. 'Why did you come home on Saturday?' 'It was because of a dog,' Gray said. 'A dog?' 'Yes. D'you think we could go back into the other room?' He wondered why he was asking Ixworth's permission. The policeman nodded and closed the cellar door. 'I went to France, forgetting that someone had left a dog, a yellow labrador, shut up in my kitchen. When I realised what I'd done I phoned a friend from France and got them to let the dog out and take her to a vet.' Silently, Gray blessed English usage which permitted him to say 'them' instead of 'her' in this context. Drusilla wouldn't thank him for involving her in all this. 'It was a stupid mistake to make.' Suddenly he saw just how stupid all this would sound to someone else. 'The dog died,' he went on, 'but--well, before that, on Saturday, the vet wanted to see me. He's called Cherwell and he lives at 21 George Street, Leyton.' Ixworth wrote the address down. 'You spoke to him?' 'I couldn't find him. I spoke to a woman at 49 George Street, Leytonstone. That would have been just after three.' 'You aren't making yourself very clear, Mr Lanceton. Why did you go to Leytonstone?' 'I made a mistake about that.' 'You seem to make a lot of mistakes.' Gray shrugged. 'It doesn't matter, does it? The point is I didn't get here till six.' 'Six? What were you doing all that time? Did you have a meal, meet anyone? If you left Leytonstone at half past three, a bus or buses would have got you here in three-quarters of an hour.' Gray said more sharply, 'It's a long walk and I can't afford taxis. Besides, I went back into London and caught a train.' 'Did you meet anyone, talk to anyone at all?' 'I don't think so. No, I didn't. When I got here I spoke to an old boy called Tringham who lives up the lane.' 'We've interviewed Mr Tringham. It was five past six when he spoke to you, so that doesn't help much.' 'No?' said Gray. 'Well, I can't help at all.' 'You haven't, for instance, any theory of your own?' 'Well, there were two men, weren't there? There must have been. Mr Tringham said he saw another bloke.' 'Yes, he told us.' Ixworth spoke casually, laconically, returning to his old manner. Once more it was as if he had ceased to take Gray seriously. 'The Forest,' he said, 'is full of picnickers at this time of year.' 'But surely you ought to find the other man?' 'I think we should, Mr Lanceton.' Ixworth got up. 'Don't you worry, we shall. In the meantime, you won't go popping off to France again, will you?' No, said Gray, surprised. Why should I? He saw the policeman to the gate. When his car lights had died away, the Forest was impenetrably black. And the moonless Starless sky was densely black except on the horizon where the lights of London stained it a dirty smoky red. It was nearly ten o'clock. Gray made tea, and as he drank it the interview with Ixworth, irritating and humiliating rather than alarming, began to fade, becoming a distant instead of a recent memory. It seemed less real now than those dreams of his, for that which supremely mattered had returned to engulf him. The light bulb in the 'lounge', one of the last in the hovel that still worked, flickered, shone briefly with a final bold radiance, fizzed and went out. He had to dial her number in the dark but it was as he'd thought, his fingers slipped automatically into the right slots. There was no reply, and none at midnight when he tried for the last time and Tuesday was over.

CHAPTER 18

Gray and Tiny and Drusilla were travelling together in a tourist coach along a road that led through a thick dark forest. The husband and wife sat in front and Gray behind them. She wore her cream lawn dress and on her finger the amethyst ring. Her hair was a red flower, a chrysanthemum with fiery points to its petals. He touched her shoulder and asked her how she came to be wearing the ring she'd sold but she took no notice, she couldn't hear him. The forest thinned and opened on to a plain. He knew they were in France from the road signs, but when they came to Bajon it wasn't the Ecu outside which they stopped but the Oranmore in Sussex Gardens. In one hand Tiny held the case containing his coin collection, with the other he grasped a passive and meek Drusilla, shepherding her up the steps, under the neon sign and into the hotel. He was going to follow them in but the glass doors slid closed against him and, although be beat on the glass begging to be admitted, Drusilla turned her head only once before going up the stairs. She turned her head once and said, 'Good-bye, Gray. Good-bye.' After that he woke up and couldn't get to sleep again. Soft hazy sunshine filled the room. It was half past eight. He got up and looked out of the window. The mist was still there but thin flow, diaphanous, shot through with shafts of gold and veiling a blue sky. Gradually the events of the previous day came back to him, the events and the non-events. He stretched, shivered, quite unrefreshed by his eight hours of uneasy, dream-filled sleep. He went downstairs. The kitchen was beginning to fill with leaffiltered sunshine and for the first time it didn't smell stale. Fresh air came in with the sunlight through the broken window. Gray put the kettle on. It was strange, he thought, how, since Christmas, day had followed day without anything ever happening in a terrible monotony, and then had come a week filled with ugly violent action. Wasn't it Kafka who'd said, no matter how you lock yourself away, shut yourself up, life will come and roll in ecstasy at your feet? Well, it was hardly ecstasy, anything but. And it was very far from the kind of life and ecstasy he'd envisaged. He couldn't see how the intruders had got in. The doors had been locked and the spare key hanging at that time over the sink. Probably the police wouldn't bother him any more now they knew he hadn't been here and couldn't assist them. Strange to remember how bitterly disappointed he'd been at not finding Drusilla here on Saturday. He was glad now, he thanked God, she hadn't been here when the men had broken in. He'd try her number just once more and if he got no reply think of ways and means to get hold of her. Why not ask her neighbours, after all? Someone would know where she and Tiny had gone. The daily woman would come in whether they were there or not and she'd be bound to know. He dialled the number just before nine, listened this time without much disappointment and no surprise to the ringing tone, put the receiver back and made tea. While he was eating some of the bread he'd bought, spreading it with vinegar-tainted melting butter, the phone rang. It must be she. Who else would know he was home? He gulped down a mouthful of bread and answered it. A woman's voice, a voice he didn't begin to recognise, said, 'Mr Lanceton? Mr Graham Lanceton?' 'Yes,' he said dully. 'Oh, hallo, Graham! It didn't sound a bit like you. This is Eva Warriner.' Mal's mother. What did she want? 'How are you, Mrs Warriner?' 'I'm fine, my dear, but I was so distressed to hear about your mother. It was nice of you to write to me. I'd no idea she was as ill as that. We were very close in the old days, I always thought of her as one of my dearest friends. I hope she didn't suffer much?' Gray didn't know what to say. It was a struggle to speak at all, to make a recovery from the bitterness of knowing this wasn't Drusilla. 'She did for a while,' he managed. 'She didn't know me.' 'Oh, dear, so sad for you. You said you'd be back at the beginning of the week so I just thought I'd phone and tell you how sorry I am. Oh, and I rang Isabel Clarion and told her the news too. She said she hadn't heard from you at all.' 'Isabel?' he almost shouted.' You mean she's come back from Australia already?' 'Well, yes, Graham,' said Mrs Warriner, 'she must have. She didn't mention Australia but we only talked for a couple of minutes. The builders that are doing her flat were making so much noise we couldn't hear ourselves speak.' He sat down heavily, pushing his fingers across his hot damp forehead. 'I expect I'll hear from her,' he said weakly. 'I'm sure you will. Isn't it wonderful Mal coming home in August?' 'Yes. Yes, it's great. Er--Mrs Warriner, Isabel didn't say anything about--? No, it doesn't matter.' 'She hardly said anything, Graham.' Mrs Warriner began to reminisce about her past friendship with Enid but Gray cut her short as soon as he politely could and said good-bye. He didn't replace the receiver but left it hanging as it had so often hung in the past. That would stop Isabel for a while, at any rate, Isabel who'd stayed in Australia barely a week. Probably she'd quarrelled with her old partner or hadn't liked the climate or something. Vaguely he remembered reading in Honor� newspaper, on that dreadful night when he'd realised Dido was at the hovel, about floods in Australia. That would be it. Isabel had been frightened or made uncomfortable by those floods and had got on a plane as soon as she could. She'd very likely got home yesterday and today she'd want her dog back-- Well, he'd known he'd have to tell her sometime and it would be as well to get it over. But not today. Today he had to sort out his life and Drusilla's, find where Drusilla was and get her back. He eyed the receiver that was still swinging like a pendulum. Better make one more attempt to phone. By now the daily woman would have arrived. Five-O-eight and then the four digits. The double burrs began. After the fifth the receiver was lifted. Gray held his breath, the fingers of his left hand curling into the palm and the nails biting the flesh. It wasn't she. Still, it was someone, a human voice coming out of that silent place at last. 'Combe Park.' 'I'd like to talk to Mrs Janus.' 'Mrs Janus is away. This is the cleaner. Who's that speaking?' 'When will she be back?' 'I'm sure I couldn't tell you. Who's that speaking?' 'A friend,' Gray said. 'Have Mr and Mrs Janus gone away on holiday?' The woman cleared her throat. She said, 'Oh, dear--' and 'I don't know if I should--' and then, gruffly, 'Mr Janus passed away.' It didn't register. All it did was bring back a flashing memory of the mayor and his euphemisms, those idiomatic polished understatements. 'What did you say?' 'Mr Janus passed away.' He heard the words but they seemed to take a long while to travel to his brain, as such words do, as do any words that are the vehicles of news that is unimaginable. 'You mean he's dead?' 'It's not my place to talk about it. All I know is he's passed away, dead like you say, and Mrs Janus has gone to her mum and dad.' 'Dead...' he said and then, steadying his voice, 'D'you know their address?' 'No, I don't. Who's that speaking?' 'It doesn't matter,' Gray said. 'Forget it.' He made his way very slowly to the window but he seemed half-blind and, instead of the forest, all he saw was a blaze of sun and hollows of blue shadow. Tiny Janus is dead, said his brain. The words travelled to his lips and he spoke them aloud, wonderingly: Harvey Janus, the rich man, the ogre, is dead. Drusilla's husband is dead. The phrases, the thoughts, swelled and begun to take on real meaning as the shock subsided. He began to feel them as facts. Tiny Janus, Drusilla's husband, is dead. When had it happened? Sunday? Monday? Perhaps even on Tuesday, the day she was to join him. Now her absence was explained. Even her failure to phone was explained. Dazed but gradually coming to grips with the news, he tried to imagine what had occurred. Probably Tiny had had a coronary. Heavy fat men like Tiny, men who drank too much and lived too well, men of Tiny's age, often did have coronaries. Perhaps it had happened at his office or while he was driving the Bentley, and they had sent her a message or the police had come to her. She hadn't loved Tiny but still it would have been a shock and she would have been alone. She'd have sent for her parents, the father she loved and the mother she never mentioned. It was hard to imagine Drusilla having a mother, Drusilla who seemed man-born. They must have carried her off to wherever they lived. He realised he didn't know their name, her maiden name, or anything about where they lived except that it was somewhere in Hertfordshire. But her failure to phone him was explained. He would just have to wait. 'Wouldn't it be nice if he died?' she'd said. 'He might die. He might have a coronary or crash his car.' Well, she'd got what she wanted. Tiny was dead and Combe Park and all that money hers. He thought how she'd said that when she got it she'd give it to him, that they would share it, put it into a joint account and live happily on it for ever. And he'd wanted it, if it could have been his more or less legitimately, reaching a zenith of desire for it when he'd stood outside the gates of Combe Park in the spring and seen the daffodils that seemed made of pure gold. Strange that now the impossible had happened and Tiny was dead, now it would all be his and hers, he no longer cared at all about possessing it. He tested his feelings. No, he wasn't happy, glad that a man was dead. Of course, he had nothing to do with Tiny's death, no more than he had to do with the death of the man who had fallen down his cellar stairs, yet he felt a heavy weight descend on to his shoulders, something like despair. Was it because in his heart he'd really wanted Tiny to die? Or for some other reason he couldn't define? The two deaths seemed to merge into one and to stand between him and Drusilla like a single ghost. His body smelt of the sweat of tension. He went back to the kitchen and began heating water for a bath. All the time he was waiting for happiness and relief to dispel his depression, but he could only think of the repeated shocks to which he'd been exposed. He couldn't take any more. Another shock would send him over the edge. He lifted the lid of the bath cover and tugged out the tangle of mould-smelling sheets and towels. The mud-stained trousers he'd put in there on Saturday were gone but he didn't worry about their disappearance. Too many strange things were happening in his world for that. He poured the boiling water into the bathtub, chucked in a bucketful of cold. Getting into the bath, soaping himself, he thought of Tiny dead. At the wheel of his car perhaps? In so many dreams he'd seen Tiny crash in his car, blood and flames pouring scarlet over the green turf. Or had he died in bed after a drinking bout while Drusilla) unaware and dreaming of her lover, slept a yard from him? There were many other possibilities. But the only one that came vividly to Gray, the only one he could see as a real picture, was of Tiny lying crumpled at the foot of a flight of stairs. If he went up the lane just before twelve, he might be able to catch the milkman and buy a pint off him. Tea was the only sustenance he felt he could stomach. The food in the carrier bag smelt unpleasant, and the sight of it brought him a wave of nausea. Downstairs the hovel seemed full of death, the intruder's, Tiny's, the dog's, and yet the rooms gleamed with sunlight. Gray could never remember the place so bright and airy. But be longed to get out of it. If once he got out, would he have the courage to come back? Or would he wander through the glades of the Forest, on and on until weariness overcome him and he lay down to sleep or die? The chance of her phoning seemed to have grown very remote. Days might pass before he heard from her. He couldn't envisage those empty days and himself passing through them, waiting, waiting, and all the time this tension mounting until, before she phoned, it cracked. He went upstairs and put on the dirty shirt he'd taken off the night before. The sound of a car engine a long way up the lane froze him as he was combing his hair. Holding the comb poised, utterly still, he listened for the whisper of sound to grow into the powerful purr of a Jaguar sports. He'd passed beyond feeling joy at her coming. All these deaths, anticlimaxes, shocks, blows to his mind had removed the possibility of delight at their coming meeting. But he would fall into her arms and cling to her in silence when she came. It was not to be yet. The engine noise had become the thinner jerkier rattle of a small car. He went to the window and looked out. Much of the lane was obscured by bracken at ground level and by branches above, but there was a space between wide enough to make out the shape and colour of a car. The Mini, small and bright red, edged cautiously along the btill sticky surface and slid to a halt. Isabel. His first instinct was simply to hide from her, go into the spare room, lie on the floor and hide till she went away. Inside each one of us is a frightened child trying to get out. The measure of our maturity is the extent to which we are able to keep that child quiet, confined and concealed. At that moment the child inside Gray almost broke loose from its bonds, but the man who was nearly thirty held it down, just held it down. Isabel might go away but she'd come back. If not today, tomorrow, if not tomorrow, Friday. Weak as he was, trembling now, he must face her and tell her what he'd done. No hiding, defiance, blustering, could make his act less of an outrage than it was. She was getting out of the car. In the bright, sun-flooded segment between dark green fern and lemon-green leaves, he saw her ease her thick body in pink blouse and baby-blue trousers out of the driving seat. She was wearing big sun-glasses with rainbow frames. The black circles of glass levelled themselves upwards towards the window and Gray turned quickly away. He retreated to the door, to the top of the stairs, and there he stood, trying to command himself, clenching his hands. He was still a child. For more than half his life he'd fended for himself; he'd got a good degree, written a successful book, been Drusilla's lover, but he was still a child. And more than ever he was a child with these grown-ups, with Honor�with dead Enid, Mrs Warriner, Isabel. Even in telling himself he wouldn't conciliate them or play things their way but be honest and himself, he was a child, for his very defiance and rebellion was as childish as obedience. In a flash he was aware of this as never before. One day, he thought, when the present and all its horrors were the past, when he'd got over or through all this, he would remember and grow up-- Sick, already tasting the nausea on his tongue, he went down and slowly pulled open the front door. Isabel, still at the car, bending over to take milk and groceries out of the boot, lifted her head and waved to him. He began to walk towards her. Before he was halfway down the path, before he could fetch a word out of his dry throat, the thicket of bracken split open. It burst with a crack like tearing sacking and the big golden dog leapt upon him, the violence of her embrace softened by the wet warmth of her tongue and the rapture in her kind eyes.

CHAPTER 19

The bright air shivered. The myriad leaves, lemony-green, silk-green, feathery, sun-filtered, serrated, swam in swirling, parabolas, and the ground rose in a hard wave to meet him. He just kept his balance. He shut his eyes on the green-gold trembling brightness and thrust his fingers into warm fur, embracing the dog, holding her against his shaking body. 'Dido!' Isabel called. 'Leave Gray alone, darling.' He couldn't speak. Shock stunned him. All his feeling, all thought, were crystallised into one unbelievable phrase: she is alive, the dog is alive. He drew his hands over Dido's head, the fine bones, the modelling, as a blind man passes his fingers over the face of the woman he loves. 'Are you all right, Gray? You do look peaky. I suppose you're just beginning to feel what this loss means.' 'Loss?' he said. 'Your mother, dear. Mrs Warriner told me last night and I made up my mind to come over first thing this morning. You ought to sit down. Just now I thought you were going to faint.' Gray had thought so too. And even now, when the first shock had passed, he seemed unable to get his bearings. Following Isabel into the house, he tried to feel his way along that other path that should have led into the reaches of his mind. But he came against a blank wall. Experience and memory had become a foreign country. Logic had gone, and lost too were the processes of thought by which one says, this happened so, therefore, this and this happened too. His mind was an empty page with one phrase written on it: the dog is alive. And now, slowly, another was being inscribed alongside it: the dog is alive, Tiny Janus is dead. Isabel was already sitting down in the 'lounge', pouring out platitudes on life, death and resignation. Gray lowered himself carefully into the other chair as if his body, as well as his mind, must be guardedly handled. Speed, roughness, would be dangerous, for, lying beneath the surface, was a scream that might burst out. He rubbed his hands over the dog's pelt. She was real, he knew that for certain now. Perhaps she was the only real thing in a tumbling, inside-out world. 'When all's said and done,' Isabel was saying, 'it was a merciful release.' Gray lifted his eyes to her, to this fat pink and blue blur that was his godmother, and wondered what she was talking about. 'You haven't got your receiver off now, I see. Really, there's no point in having a phone if the receiver's always off, is there?' 'No point at all,' he agreed politely. He was surprised that he could speak at all, let alone form sentences. He went on doing it, pointlessly, just to prove he could. 'I wonder sometimes why I do have one. I really wonder. I might just as well not have one.' 'There's no need,' Isabel said sharply, 'to be sarcastic. You've no right to be resentful, Gray. The first thing I did was try to phone you. As soon as I knew I couldn't go to Australia-I mean, when I read about the floods and Molly cabled me to say she'd literally been washed out of her home-I made up my mind there was no point in trying to go. I tried to phone you that Friday and goodness knows how many times on the Saturday, and then I gave up in sheer despair. I thought you'd realise when I didn't turn up with Dido.' 'Yes,' said Gray. 'Oh, yes.' Well, then. Really, it was a blessing I didn't go to Molly's. All the responsibility of getting Dido boarded would have been on your shoulders, and you had quite enough with your poor mother, I'm sure. (Lie down, darling. You're just making yourself hot.) I shall write to Honor�oday, poor man, and tell him I've seen you and how upset you are. It cheers people to knowing others are unhappy, don't you think?' This crass expression of schadenfreude, which once would have made Gray laugh, now washed over him with most of the rest of Isabel's words. While she continued to burble, he sat as still as stone, his hands no longer caressing the dog who had sunk into a somnolent heap at his feet. Memory was beginning to come back now, returning in hard thrusts of pain. 'Is she dead?' he'd asked, relying on her, utterly in her hands. 'No, she was alive--just.' His hand fell again to fumble at the dog's coat, to feel her reality. And Dido turned her head, opened her eyes and licked his hand. 'I took some milk and chicken with me. I was a bit scared to open the kitchen door but I needn't have been. She was too weak to move. Someone ought to lock you up in a cell and see how you'd like it.' Oh, Drusilla, Drusilla. 'It's no use, anyway, the dog's had to be destroyed.' Oh, Dru, no... 'Anyway, dear,' said Isabel, drawing breath, 'you can have your key back now. Here you are. I'll go and hang it on the hook, shall I?' 'I'll take it.' An old blackened key, twin of the one he always carried. 'And put the kettle on, Gray. I brought some milk in case you didn't have any. We'll have a cup of tea and I'll run into Waltham Abbey and get us something for our lunch. I'm sure you're not fit to take care of yourself.' Not fit... 'I went in and cleaned up for you,' she'd said. 'Why did you do that?' 'Why do I do anything for you? Don't you know yet?' The bright key that had been Drusilla's hung on the hook, glittering like gold in the sun. She'd left her key and said good-bye. Alone, free of Isabel for a moment, he laid his face, his forehead, against the damp cold wall and the scream came out into the stone, agonising, uncomprehending, silent. 'I love you. If you still want me I'll leave Tiny and come and live with you.' I love you... No, he whispered, no, no. Good-bye, Gray, good-bye. I never change my mind. Punctual, relentless, unchanging in any fixed course, she never wavered. But this--? Red fur, red fox hair, perfume rising like smoke, that low throaty laugh of hers--the memories spun, crystallised into a last image of her, as hard and unyielding as the stone against his face. 'A watched pot never boils, dear,' said Isabel brightly from the doorway. She peered inquisitively at his numb blind face. 'There's a car pulled up at your gate. Are you expecting anyone?' He had been so adept at optimism, at supposing with Uncrushable hope that every car was hers, every phone bell ringing to bring her to him. This time he had no hope and in realising his deep stunned hopelessness, he knew too that he was living reality. He'd never see her again. She'd left her key and said good-bye. Betraying him systematically and coldly for perhaps some purpose of revenge, she'd brought him to this 'climax. Without speaking, he pushed past Isabel and opened the door to Ixworth. He gazed speechlessly but without dismay or even surprise at the policeman whose coming seemed the next natural and logical step in this sequence of happenings. He didn't speak because he had nothing to say and felt now that, all words would be wasted effort. Why talk when event would now, in any case, pile upon event according to the pattern she had designed for them? Ixworth looked at the flattened bracken. 'Been sunbathing?' Gray shook his head. This, then, was what it felt like to have the mental breakdown he'd feared all those months. Not manic hysteria, not fantasy unbridled or grief too strong to bear, but this peaceful numb acceptance of fate. After the liberating silent scream, just acceptance. It was possible even to believe that in a moment he would feel almost happy--Gently he held the dog back to keep her from springing lovingly at Ixworth. 'Another yellow labrador, Mr Lanceton? D'you breed them?' 'It's the same dog.' Gray didn't trouble to consider the implication of his words. He turned away, indifferent as to whether Ixworth followed him or not, and almost collided with Isabel who was saying in sprightly tones: 'Aren't you going to introduce me?' Grotesquely girlish, she fluttered in front of the dour inspector. Gray said, 'Miss Clarion, Mr Ixworth.' He wished vaguely that they would both go away. If only they would go away and leave him with the dog. He'd lie down somewhere with kind Dido, put his arms round her, bury his face in her warm, hay-scented fur. Ixworth ignored the introduction. 'Is that your dog?' 'Yes, isn't she gorgeous? Are you fond of dogs?' 'This one seems attractive.' Ixworth's eyes flickered over Gray. 'Is this the animal you were supposed to be looking after?' 'I'm sure he will when I do finally go away.' Isabel seemed delighted that the conversation was taking such a pleasant sociable turn. 'This time my trip fell through and poor Dido didn't get her country holiday.' 'I see. I rather hoped I'd find you alone, Mr Lanceton.' Quick to warm, equally quick to take offence, Isabel tossed her head and stubbed out her cigarette fiercely. 'Please don't let me intrude. The last thing I want is to be in the way. I'll run into Waltham Abbey now, Gray, and get our lunch. I wouldn't dream of keeping you from your friend.' Ixworth smiled slightly at this. He waited in patient silence till the Mini had gone. Gray watched the car move off down the lane. Dido began to whine, her paws on the windowsill, her nose pressed against the glass. This, Gray thought, was how it must have been when Isabel left her alone here that Monday--Only that had never happened, had it? None of that had happened. 'None of that really happened, did it?' Ixworth was saying. 'Your whole story about the dog was untrue. We know, of course, that no animal answering this one's description was ever taken to Mr Cherwell on Thursday.' Gray pulled the dog down gently. The sun's glare hurt his eyes and he pulled the chair away from the slanting dazzling rays. 'Does it matter?' he said. 'Tell me,' said the policeman in a tone which was both puzzled and bantering, 'what you think does matter.' Nothing much flow, Gray thought. Perhaps just one or two small things, questions to which he couldn't supply the answers himself. But his brain was clearing, revealing cold facts to which he seemed to have no emotional reaction. The dog had never been there. Working onwards from that, recalling certain phrases of hers in this new context--'I never change my mind, Gray'--he began to see the pattern she had designed. He saw it without pain, dully, almost scientifically. 'I thought,' he said, 'that Harvey Janus was a big man, but then I'd never seen him, and I thought he had a Bentley still, not the Mercedes he left in the lane. Strange, I suppose they called him Tiny because he was tiny. Would you like some tea?' 'Not now. Right now I'd like you to go on talking.' 'There was no need to drug him, of course. I see that now. It was only necessary to get him here. That was easy because he was looking for a house in the Forest to buy his mother. And easy to overpower such a small man. Anyone could have done it.' 'Oh, yes?' 'She had her key then. But I don't quite see--' He paused, sticking at betraying her even though she'd betrayed him. 'But I suppose you've talked to Mrs Janus? Even--' He sighed, though there was very little feeling left to make him sigh. 'Even arrested her?' he said. Ixworth's face changed. It hardened, grew tough like that of some cinema cop. He reached for his briefcase and opened it, taking out a sheet of paper from a thin file. The paper fluttered in the sunbeam as he held it out to Gray. The typed words danced but Gray could read them. He'd typed them himself. His address was at the top: The White Cottage, Pocket Lane, Waltham Abbey, Essex. Underneath that was the date: June the sixth. No year. And at the foot, under those terrible words he'd thought he'd never see again: Harvey Janus Esq., Combe Park, Wintry Hill, Loughton Essex. 'Have you read it?' 'Oh, yes. I've read it.' But Ixworth read it aloud to him, just the same. "Dear Sir, In reply to your advertisement in The Times, I think I have just what you are looking for. Since my home is not far from yours, would you care to come over and see it? Four o'clock on Saturday would be a suitable time. Yours faithfully, Francis Duval." The letter was the first they'd written. 'Where did you find it?' Gray asked. 'Here? In this house?' 'It was in his breast pocket,' said Ixworth. 'It can't have been. It was never posted. Look, I'll try to explain.. 'I wish you would.' 'It's very difficult to explain. Mrs Janus...' He didn't wince at her name, but he hesitated, searching for a form into which to fit his sentence. 'Mrs Janus,' he began again, wondering why Ixworth was frowning, 'will have told you we were close friends. At one time she wanted me to--' How to describe what she'd wanted to this hard-faced inscrutable judge? How make him understand where fantasy ended and reality began? '--To play a trick on her husband,' he said, lying awkwardly, 'to get money from him. She had no money of her own and I'm always broke.' 'We are aware of the state of your finances.' 'Yes, you seem to be aware of everything. I did write that letter. I wrote a whole lot more which were never sent and I've still got them. They're.. 'Yes?' 'I burnt them. I remember now. But that one must have got--Why are you looking at me like that? Mrs Janus--' Ixworth took the letter and re-folded it. 'I thought we were really getting somewhere, Lanceton, till you brought Mrs. Janus's name up. Leave her out of this. She doesn't know you. She's never heard of you either as Duval or Lanceton.' The dog moved away from him. It seemed symbolic. She lay down and snored softly. Ixworth hadn't stopped talking. Steadily, he was outlining details of the events of Saturday afternoon. They were precise circumstantial details and they included his, Gray's, arrival at the hovel just before four, his greeting of Tiny Janus, their subsequent journey round the house and to the head of the cellar stairs. There was nothing wrong with the account except that it was inaccurate in every particular. But Gray didn't deny it. He said flatly, 'She doesn't know me.' 'Leave her out of it. On Saturday afternoon she was playing tennis with the man who coaches her.' 'We were lovers for two years,' Gray said. 'She's got a key to this house.' No, that wasn't true any more--'Does she say she doesn't even know me?' 'Can you produce witnesses to prove she did?' He was silent. There was no one. Nobody had ever seen them together so it had never happened. Their love had no more happened than the dog's death had happened. And yet-- Without heat or the least emotion, he said slowly, 'Why would I have killed Janus except to get his wife?' 'For gain, of course,' said Ixworth. 'We're not children, Lanceton. You're not a child. Credit us with a little intelligence. He was a rich man and you're a very poor one. I'll tell you frankly we have it from the French police you didn't even gain by your mother's death.' The hundred pounds--Had there been more hidden in the house? 'He brought the deposit with him.' 'Of course. You banked on that. Mr Janus was very unwisely in the habit of carrying large sums of money on him, and these things get around, don't they? Even without seeing it, he was pretty sure he'd want this place and he was going to secure itWith cash.' Ixworth shrugged, a heavy contemptous gesture. My God, and it wasn't even yours to sell! I suppose you worked out the sort of price it would fetch from looking in estate agents' windows.' 'I know what it's worth.' 'You knew what it would fetch, say. And you knew a good deal about human greed and need too. We found the three thousand pounds Mr Janus brought with him in your strong-box with a copy of The Times and his advertisement marked. The box was locked and the key gone, but we broke it open.' Gray said, 'Oh, God,' very softly and hopelessly. 'I don't know if you're interested in knowing how we got on to you. It's obvious, really. Mrs Janus knew where her husband had gone and how much money he was carrying. She reported him missing and we found his Mercedes in the lane.' Gray nodded at the inexorability, the neatness of it. 'Someone ought to shut you up in a cell,' she'd said. And perhaps there was a rightness in it somewhere, a harsh justice. He felt too weak, too unarmed, to argue and he knew he never would. He must accept. In writing the letters at all, he must always have hoped for an outcome of this kind; only his higher consciousness had struggled, deceiving him. He'd hoped for Tiny's death and, caught in her net, done as much as she to bring it about. Who spun, who held the scissors and who cut the thread? Had the traffic light made his fate, or Jeff, or the buyer who hadn't got the paper in? Who made Honor� marriage but the night phone caller? And who had made Tiny's death but he by meeting on that winter's day Tiny's wife? Who but Sir Smile, his neighbour? 'You'll want to make a statement,' Ixworth said. 'Shall we go?' Gray smiled, for blank peace had returned. 'If we might just wait for Miss Clarion?' 'Put the door on the latch and leave her a note.' Ixworth spoke understandingly, almost sympathetically. His eye, satisfied now, no longer mocking, glanced on the sleeping Dido. 'We can--er, shut the dog up in the kitchen.'

AFTER

There were only six beds in Alexander Fleming Ward. The Member hesitated in the doorway and then made for the one bed around which the curtains were drawn. But before he reached it a nurse intercepted him. 'Mr Denman's visitors are restricted to ten minutes. He's still in a serious condition.' Andrew Laud nodded. 'I won't stay long.' The nurse lifted one of the curtains for him and he ducked under it apprehensively, wondering what he was going to see. A hideously scarred face? A head swathed in bandages? Jeff Denman said, 'Thank God you could come. I've been on tenterhooks all day,' and then the Member looked at him. He was as he had always been, apart from his pallor and his hair which had been cropped to within an inch of his head. 'How are you, Jeff?' 'I'm much better. I'll be O.K. It's a strange sensation to wake up in the morning and find that yesterday was six months ago.' The bed was covered with newspapers which the nurse stacked into a neat pile before swishing out through the curtains. The Member saw his own face staring out from the top one and the headline: 'M. P. Acts in Forest Murder Appeal.' 'I haven't acted very much,' he said. 'They've let me see Gray a couple of times but he seems to have a kind of amnesia about the whole thing. He either can't or won't remember. All he talks about is getting out and starting to write again but that, of course, unless this Appeal.. Jeff interrupted him. 'I haven't got amnesia, surprisingly enough.' He shifted in the bed, lifting his head painfully from the pillow. 'But first I'd better tell you how I come to be here.' 'You explained that in your letter.' 'I had to get the sister to write that and I couldn't get my thoughts straight. You see, when I recovered consciousness and saw the papers it was such a shock. I couldn't believe Gray had got fifteen years for murder and I dictated that letter very incoherently. I just prayed you'd take me seriously and come. Give me a drink of water, will you?' Andrew Laud put the glass to his lips and when Jeff had drunk, said, 'I've gathered that your van crashed into a lorry somewhere in Waltham Abbey on June the twelfth and you were seriously injured. As soon as I read that I knew you might have something important to tell me, but you didn't explain what you were doing there.' 'My job,' Jeff said. 'Moving furniture, or trying to.' He coughed, holding his hands to his ribs. 'The Sunday before that Gray asked me to move his stuff for him on the following Saturday. He said he'd phone if anything went wrongthings are liable to go wrong for him--and when he didn't I drove over there like I promised. It was the day after I'd had that letter from you asking me to dinner. You must have wondered why I didn't accept your wife's invitation.' 'Never mind that. Tell me what happened.' Jeff said slowly, but quite clearly and coherently, 'I got there about three. I left the van on the metalled part of the lane because it was muddy and I thought the wheels might get stuck. When I got to the cottage there was a key in the lock and a note pinned up beside it. It was typed on Gray's typewriter--I know that typewriter--but it wasn't signed. It said something like Have to go out for a while. Let yourself in and have a look round. I thought it was meant for me. 'I went in, made a sort of mental note of the things he'd want me to move--which is what I thought he'd meant in the note--and sat down to wait for him. Oh, and I went all over the house. If there's any question of Gray's having been there then, I can tell you he wasn't. 'You remember everything very clearly.' 'Not the accident,' said Jeff, and he winced slightly. 'I can't remember a thing about that. But what happened before is quite clear to me. The place was very stuffy and musty-smelling,' lie went on after a pause, 'and when it got to be nearly four o'clock I decided to go outside again, leaving the key and the note where they were. I thought I'd sit in the garden but it was so overgrown that I went into the Forest and walked about a bit. But the point is I never went out of sight of the cottage. I was pretty fed-up with Gray by this time and I wanted to get the job over and done with as soon as he got back.' 'He didn't come?' Jeff shook his head. 'I sat down under a tree. I decided to give him ten minutes and then I'd go. Well, I was sitting there when I saw two people come down the lane.' 'Did you now?' The Member leaned closer towards the bed. 'In a car? On foot?' 'On foot. A little short bloke of about forty and a much younger woman. They went up to the door, read the note and let themselves in. They didn't see me, I'm sure of that. I realised then that the note was meant for them, not me. And I felt very strange about that, Andy. I just didn't know what to do.' 'I don't quite follow you there,' said the M. P. 'I recognised the girl. I knew her. I recognised her as a former girl friend of Gray's. And I couldn't understand what she was doing there with a bloke I was somehow certain must be her husband. He looked like a husband. I wondered if they'd come to have some sort of a scene with Gray. No, don't interrupt, Andy. Let me tell you the rest' The sick man's voice was beginning to flag. He rested back against his pillows and gave another painful dry cough. 'I can tell you precisely when and where I'd seen her before. Gray brought her back to Tranmere Villas. Sally was living with me then. Gray had forewarned her and she kept out of the way when he and this girl came in, she never even saw them. But I'd been at work, I didn't know, and I opened the door of his room without knocking as soon as I got in, There was a review of his book in the evening paper and I was so pleased I rushed in to show him. They were on the bed making love. Gray was so--well, lost, I Suppose you'd say--that he didn't even know I'd come in. But she did. She looked up and smiled a sort of look-how-daring-and-clever I-am smile. I got out as fast and quietly as I could.' Andrew Laud said over his shoulder as the curtain was drawn aside, 'Just two more minutes, Nurse. I promise to go in two minutes.' 'Mr Denman mustn't get excited.' 'I'm the one that's getting excited, Jeff,' said the Member when they were alone again. 'Go back to June the twelfth now, will you?' 'Where was I? Oh, yes sitting under that tree. After a while an old boy came along the lane, reading a book, and then the bloke I'd seen go into the cottage came out and walked around the place, looking up at the windows. I thought they were going and I waited for her to come out too. Well, the bloke went back into the house and about ten minutes later the girl came out alone. She didn't put the key back in the door and the note had gone. I thought she looked a bit shaken, Andy, and she wasn't walking very steadily. I nearly called out to her to ask if she was all right, but I didn't, though I was beginning to think the whole thing was a bit odd. She walked away into the Forest and when she'd gone I went too. I thought I'd drive down to Waltham Abbey to see if I could find Gray and tell him about it. There was a big green car parked near the van. I didn't notice the make or the number. 'It must have been about half past four then because they tell me I had the crash at twenty to five. And that's all. Since then I've been asleep and what I've told you has been asleep with me. Christ, suppose I'd died?' 'You didn't and you won't now. You'll have to get well fast so that you can tell all that to the Appeal Court. It's a pity you don't know who the girl was.' 'But I do. Didn't I say?' Jeff was lying down now, exhausted, his face grey. But he spoke with a feeble intensity. 'I'd know that face anywhere and I saw it again yesterday. There was a picture in the paper of Mrs Drusilla Janus, or Mrs McBride, as I suppose I should call her. The Standard said she got married to some tennis coach last month. You'll have to go now, Andy. Keep in touch?' Smiling, a little dazed, the Member got up. Jeff reached out from under the bedclothes and, silently, rather formally, the two men shook hands.

The End

About the author

Since her first novel, *From Doom With Death*, was published in 1964, Ruth Rendell has won many awards, including the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for 1976's best crime novel with *A Demon in My View* and the Arts Council National Book Award--Genre Fiction for *Lake of Darkness* in 1980. In 1984 Ruth Rendell won her second Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for best short story with *The New Girl Friend*, and in 1985 received the Silver Dagger for *The Tree of Hands*. Her books have been translated into fifteen languages and are also published to great acclaim ir the United States. Ruth Rendell is married and lives in a sixteenth-century farmhouse in Suffolk.