Appointment with Yesterday (11 page)

But Mrs Graham had clinched the deal before Milly could round-off the lie properly. “I wish I’d known!” she
exclaimed
, with just the faintest edge of reproach in her voice. “Then I’d never have bothered about this Innes woman at all. It only ends in having her stay to lunch, or something: you know what these people with troubles
are.
Look, Mrs Er, this Baptists’ Fête of yours, do you think they’d be interested in a few books as well …?” Her voice blurred abruptly as she swung open a cupboard door and dived into the dusty interior.

“There’s several volumes of the 1910 Children’s Encyclopaedia, that might interest them,” she called hopefully over her shoulder: “And a complete set of—I can’t read the name, the backs are a bit torn, but anyway, a complete set of Somebody’s Meditation and Reflections, in
twelve volumes. Oh, and my old sewing-machine, I’ve got one that works now, so perhaps this other one might come in useful to somebody….”

The semicircle of floor around Mrs Graham’s crouching form was filling up fast; but she continued her explorations with undiminished zest.

“Do they ski at all?” she continued, plunging deeper into the recesses. “There’s Arnold’s old skis somewhere at the back, he does hoard things so. Ah, here they are! And his army uniform, too, I’d forgotten about that. And what about the portrait of his mother, in oils? I could never stand having it on the walls, so if they’d like it …?”

She straightened up, pushing the hair back from her
forehead
, and surveying the chaos around her with a satisfied air.

“There you are, Mrs Er! you can take all those! Oh, and while you’re about it, the old carpet-sweeper—”

At last, Milly interrupted.

“But—but I can’t carry all that!” she protested: and at this Mrs Graham looked up, and stared at her in a sort of vague surprise, looking her up and down as if this was the first time she had really got around to counting how many arms Milly had.

“Oh,” she said: and thought for a moment, painfully, picking away at the bit of her brain, long-disused, which concerned itself with other people’s affairs.

“Yes, well,” she said at last, reluctantly. “Well, perhaps you could bring something round to put them in, could you, Mrs Er? I’ve been trying to get this cupboard clear for ages. Oh, and Mrs Er, are these Mission people at all interested in fossils? Arnold has….”

Mercifully, at this point the first tentative protests began to sound from Alison’s room. Straightaway Mrs Graham
abandoned
her discourse, and went into paroxysms of deafness: racing from room to room, head down, as if in a high wind, shovelling papers pell-mell into her briefcase … flinging on coat and scarf….

“And Alison will sleep till lunch-time,” she shrieked, in the
nick of time: and managed to get the front door closed before the first real yell of fury resounded through the flats.

*

Alison loved the old sewing-machine. She spent the whole of the two hours till lunch time contentedly wrecking it, screw by screw, and Milly was able to get on with her work in unprecedented peace and quiet.

By quarter to one, everything was clean, and the lunch was ready in the oven: and—to crown Milly’s satisfaction—the unknown Mrs Innes with her unknown troubles hadn’t turned up at all: and so Milly had gleefully parcelled up all those woollies for herself. They were already waiting, neat and inconspicuous, behind the kitchen door.

Now, with Mrs Graham’s return imminent, she stuffed the sewing-machine back into the cupboard with the rest of the things, silencing Alison’s screeches on the subject by a judicious mixture of savagery and blandishments. Then she washed the child’s black and oily face and hands, put her into a clean frock, and forced her (by dint of monstrous subterfuge and sleight of hand) to sit and play with a nice clean toy till Mummy returned.

*

Disconcertingly, it was Daddy who returned first. He looked for a moment utterly panic-stricken when he realised that his wife wasn’t back, and that he was therefore going to have to make conversation with the Daily Help. Then,
summoning
up all his resources as a gentleman and a scholar, he plunged recklessly into speech.

“Good morning!” he said: and fingered his folded
newspaper
longingly. Was that enough, he seemed to be
wondering
, or did one have to say something else before one could decently sit down and read?

“Nice day,” he ventured, plunging yet further into the uncharted territory of conversation with Daily Helps. “A bit cold, that is. Looks like snow.”

“It does,” agreed Milly modestly, wondering whether she ought to call him “sir”? Or was it going to be possible always
to frame her sentences in such a way that she never had to call him anything?

“Yes. Hm. Yes, indeed. Look, Mrs—” Professor Graham stopped unhappily, and Milly realised suddenly that her
problem
about what to call him was as nothing to
his
problem about what to call
her.
Unlike his wife, he seemed to be miserably aware that her name couldn’t really be Mrs Er, not possibly.

“Look, Mrs—” he began again, and this time Milly came to his rescue.

“Barnes,” she prompted cheerfully. “Milly Barnes.”

“Barnes. Ah, of course … Mrs Barnes…. So stupid, do forgive me. Look, Mrs Barnes, did my wife—did Mrs Graham say when she’d be back?”

One o’clock. You’ll be off the hook at one o’clock, Milly almost told him; but changed it, hastily, to “Mrs Graham told me she hoped to be back by one. Would you like to wait, or shall I …?”

“Oh no! No thank you! Oh, no, no!”—Professor Graham’s horror at the possibility of having to talk to Milly all through his lunch stuck out through his natural mildness like a snapped twig—“No, no! That’s all right. Don’t put yourself to any trouble. I’ll just …”—and under cover of such politenesses he succeeded in getting himself into the chair by the window, safely hidden behind the protective expanse of
The
Times
Business
News.

*

Silly, really, to let it affect her. There was no real
resemblance
at all. Just a man’s legs, topped by an outspread copy of
The
Times
—framed, this time, by an expanse of winter sky, swept white by the sea-wind, and empty of clouds. How could such a sweep of pure, unsullied distance bring back to her, as if it was right here and now, a choking sense of
claustrophobia
… of encroaching darkness …?

*

The back page of the paper quivered, just as Gilbert used to make it quiver, in the moment before he softly lowered it, and peered over the top to see, with those strange, silvery eyes of
his, what his wife was doing. And now the paper lurched, as it used to lurch in the greenish lamplight … it swung to the left … to the right … it swooped downwards, and once again eyes, questioning eyes, were fastened upon her….

“Did you want something, Mrs Barnes?”

Professor Graham’s pleasant, puzzled voice jerked Milly into an awareness of how oddly she was behaving … standing here staring, like a hypnotised rabbit, with no snake anywhere.

“No—no, it’s quite all right,” she stammered, and fled into the kitchen. Once there, she leaned against the sink for a minute, trying to steady her racing heart, to control her gasping breath. One of these days, she scolded herself, I shall be giving myself away! How many times, in these last weeks, have I let myself get into a panic over nothing? First that man in the café, and the headline in his paper about … FOUND IN FLAT. And then that first morning at Mrs Mumford’s, with Jacko—as it turned out to be—bumbling around her room in the dark. And after that the telephone call at Mrs Graham’s…. Oh, the occasions were too many to count: and each time, it had been sheer luck that no one had happened to notice her state of shock and inexplicable terror. One day, if she didn’t control these reactions, she would find she had given herself away, utterly and irrevocably. When would her body learn not to flood her system with adrenalin at every tiny surprise? When would her brain learn that these trivial little incidents, these chance reminders, were fortuitous, not aimed at her at all?

Aimed at her! How ironic that it should be
she,
now, who should find herself constantly interpreting the bright,
preoccupied
world in terms of her own fears! Would there not be a strange, twisted justice about it if, in the end, it should be just such an attack of irrational, deluded panic that brought her to her own doom? How Gilbert would have laughed, that strange, silent laugh of his, like a small clockwork motor jerking away somewhere inside him.

It was just as if he was still there, waiting for her, in the black, bottomless past; waiting, in the quiet certainty that, in
the end, she would lose her footing in the bright, precarious present, and come slithering back: back into the darkness, into Gilbert’s own special darkness, which at first had seemed to be merely the darkness of a gloomy London basement, and had only later been revealed as the black, irreversible darkness of his own disintegrating mind.

For many weeks after her marriage, Milly had refused to recognise the special quality of the darkness: she had tried to fight it off with new fabrics, and higher-watt bulbs. By the time she had nerved herself to go to the doctor about her husband, it was too late.

Perhaps it had always been too late. After waiting all that dark November morning in the overcrowded surgery, among the humped, coughing people, Milly had in the end seen the exhausted young doctor, eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep, for barely two minutes. He hadn’t said much, he was too weary and dispirited: and what he did say wasn’t really a lot of use. For by the time she had got around to consulting him, Milly already knew as much about delusional paranoia as any doctor. She knew more or less everything there was to know about it, except how to face it: and that no doctor could tell her.

H
E HADN’T BEEN
as bad as that at the beginning. Well, of course he hadn’t, or Milly would never have married him. And yet, even then, even in the days of the decorous,
best-behaviour
outings to tea-shops, there had been signs—tiny, warning flashes—which might have put a more astute woman on her guard. No, not a more astute one, necessarily; simply one who was more
interested
in Gilbert, as a person: one who was contemplating marrying him for himself, and not merely as a stick with which to prod her former husband into some sort of reaction.

Yes, the warnings had been there, all right; and Milly, in the throes of her plans for impressing Julian, had not given a thought to any of them. There was Gilbert’s life-story, for a start: swindled out of his inheritance, estranged from his only brother, bullied by his wife, deprived of his rightful pension—what sort of a man is it who has
all
these things happen to him, unrelieved by any spark of generosity from
anyone
? And then there was the matter of his friends—his lack of them, that is to say. It was this, actually—this strange, dignified solitariness—that had attracted Milly’s attention to him in the first place. Long before she knew who he was, or anything at all about him, she had noticed the way he always arrived at the Industrial Archaeology class alone: tall and silent, looking neither to left nor right, he would make his way to the furthermost desk of the back row; and throughout the session he would focus an almost disconcerting intensity of attention on the teacher: fixing his light grey eyes—so light as to be almost silvery, Milly had already noticed, before she knew so much as his name—fixing them on the teacher with unblinking concentration, broken only by the occasional need to copy a diagram off the blackboard, or the correct spelling of some little-known technical term. Since Milly herself was bored to death by the classes (her motive in enrolling had been the despairing one advocated in so many advice columns—“to meet people”) she thus found herself with plenty of time, in between doodling and daydreaming, to watch this mysterious, white-haired man, and idly to wonder about him. He seemed so alert, and attentive, and purposeful: and yet he never spoke—neither at question-time in the class, nor afterwards, when the rest of the students were gathering in twos and threes, chatting, comparing unfinished homework, waiting for one another to come out for a cup of tea, or to catch the same bus home. Instead of joining in any of this, the inscrutable Mr Soames (this much Milly had learned by now, from the class register) would silently gather up his notes and edge his way out of the classroom, without a word to anyone.

Milly had been intrigued: and, since she had come to the class with the sole purpose of meeting unattached men, she determined (since nothing better offered) to cultivate the acquaintance of this one; and so, for three classes in
succession
, she made a point of greeting him boldly, with a smile, as he came into the room. He had seemed startled—almost affronted—the first time: the second, he acknowledged her greeting with a politely embarrassed murmur: and on the third, he had actually paused to say “Good afternoon”, before retreating to the far corner of the room.

So far, so good. Slow-ish: but then, if the whole of the rest of your life is to spare, then where is the advantage of speed?

It was not until the next Class Outing that she really got a chance to speak to him. Twice a term, or thereabouts, on freezing winter Saturday afternoons, the whole group would go off in a coach to look at some blackish bit of brickwork at the edge of a canal, or something; and Milly would stand, bored to death and freezing cold, with her hands in her coat pockets, and sustained only by the thought that she was
out.
She was
doing
something: no sharp-eyed mutual friend would now have the chance of reporting-back to Julian that his poor ex-wife spent all her weekends moping about the flat, alone. It was as she stood thus, one February afternoon, that the silent Mr Soames had approached her, and, after some minutes’ hesitation, had asked her, in a voice stiff with unease but still smooth and cultivated, if she wouldn’t like a cup of tea? And she, filled with a mixture of triumph at the success of her campaign, and boredom at the prospect of carrying it any further, had followed him into a waterside café. They had sat opposite one another at the slopped, plastic-topped table, and sipped the strong, tepid tea; and he had let out for her—hesitantly, as through a rusty gate—little bits of information about his troubles.

Troubles, even the dullest, are always mildly interesting at the first hearing; and Milly had been mildly interested. He wasn’t too bad, he was better than nothing; and so, from then on, she had allowed the tepid relationship to take its course
without any special effort on her part, either to foster it or to bring it to an end. Until, suddenly—it would have been about the middle of June—she realised that under cover of her inattention, the thing had been surreptitiously growing: she realised, with a little shock, that if she chose she could now give Gilbert that last little push that would get him asking her to be Mrs Soames!

Mrs Soames …! Dear Julian, I am now Mrs Soames…. From then on, it had all been as irreversible as falling down a precipice.

Including the bump at the bottom. The utter, stunning shock … followed by the slow awakening … the painful
flexing
of limbs to see what has been broken, what merely bruised and sprained; and finally the dazed survey of the strange, utterly new landscape … the rocks, the boulders, with here and there the possibility of a path, to somewhere or nowhere, as the case might be.

It must have been two or three weeks after her marriage to Gilbert that Milly began thus to pick herself up after the shock, and to take stock of her situation. She began by facing the enormity of her own folly in marrying him at all: and then, when that quickly proved futile, she began looking for ways to escape.

There were none. None, that is, which would not involve Julian and Cora learning, with gleeful pity, of the failure of her new marriage.

“Poor thing, isn’t it pathetic?” Cora would say, tasting the words on her palate, like rare wine: and “The unwanted wife syndrome,” Julian would comment, with a shrug. He loved to put things in categories.

No. Escape was out of the question. What was left, then, was endurance. What she had brought upon herself, she must live with. Live, and make something of it.

Make something of it? Milly remembered how she had looked around the underground dungeon that Gilbert called the dining-room: she looked at the mountainous mahogany furniture looming out of the grey light that she must henceforth
think of as daylight; and for a moment she had covered her eyes. Make something of it? She must be mad!

Yet Milly was not without a certain dogged courage even then—even in those days, when she had not been Milly at all, and her body had not yet undergone the experience of being tested to the uttermost limit, and not found wanting. Yes, even in those days she had had inside her something almost as useful as courage—a defiant uncrushable pride. The sort of pride that can be used—as a mallet can be used if you haven’t got a hammer—as a useful substitute for courage.

And so Milly had uncovered her eyes, and looked again into the lowering shadows which, down here, was all you had of noonday.

“
I’ll
show you!
” she said out loud, into the gloomy great room, her voice sounding reedy and thin in the oppressive silence. “I’ll show you! You won’t defeat
me
! Just you wait …!”

And straightaway there came into her head a scheme of such boldness, of such devil-may-care bravado, that she caught her breath.

Cushions! For this black cavern of a room she would make bright cushions, scarlet, flame, and emerald! She would scatter them here and there on the black horsehair sofa, and in the shabby great chairs! And flowers, too—dahlias, asters—all the reds and golds and purples of late summer, massed in the centre of that gloomy great table! She would defy the great deathly room, she would hurl colour into its shadows, fling glory into the very face of its darkness: with her own hands, dripping brilliance, she would bring it to its knees!

For a moment, her spirit wavered. Surely there must be some ordinary, practical reason why she couldn’t do anything of the kind?

But there wasn’t. Gilbert was out today, on one of his mysterious errands “to see a man” about something (the days were as yet far off when Gilbert would no longer go out anywhere, but would stay at home, behind closed shutters, watching her) and he had left her plenty of money for the
household shopping. He wasn’t mean—one must allow him that, at any rate—and as she stuffed the wad of pound notes into her bag and bustled about getting ready to go shopping for the cushion material and the flowers, Milly found herself indulging in the pious exercise which she had been practising ever more frequently of late—that of listing Gilbert’s good qualities to herself in the faint hope that, if only she could make the list long enough, it might somehow add up to
liking
him.

Liberal with money. Undemanding. Unfailingly courteous, even when she had angered him. Affectionate—yes, she must allow him that—it was not
his
fault, after all, if her flesh shrank back at the merest brush of his hand in passing. Helpful about the house, too—sometimes taking over the entire cooking of an evening meal, closeting himself in the scullery for long, mysterious hours, at the end of which he would bring out strange, sour-smelling curries in covered dishes or bitter, spicy vegetable stews. And afterwards, all through the meal, he would watch her face, alert for some tiny grimace, some small, involuntary twist of her mouth, to belie her over-enthusiastic words of praise.

He was helpful, too, about the washing-up—if only she had appreciated that kind of help. It was her fault, not his, if irritation rose into her throat like heartburn as he padded softly about behind her, in and out of the scullery, putting things away, muttering to himself, sometimes, as he did so. Not much, as yet: the muttering seemed, in these early stages, like a mere mannerism, albeit an irritating one.

What else? As she made her way up the area steps, shopping basket in hand, into the unbelievable sunshine, Milly tried to add to the list.

Kind? Well, not
un
kind, anyway. He had awkward moods sometimes; occasional fits of explosive irritability about
nothing
; and strange, unpredictable spells of sulking—but in
general
he was quite nice to Milly, in his stiff, inhibited way. Considerate, too; opening doors for her, carrying trays,
inquiring
after her comfort. And as to sex, his demands were
absolutely nil—whether by his own choice or because he had sensed her distaste, Milly did not know, and the last thing she wanted was to find out. Mercifully, he belonged to a
generation
which does not expect to talk about these things, and Milly could only feel grateful for the repression—neurosis—whatever it was—which made it possible for them to go to their separate rooms each night without ever having to engage in one single word of discussion about it.

As she hurried through the golden September sunshine towards the main road, Milly added up these qualities for the twentieth time, struggling to make the answer come out different for once. She made herself visualise Gilbert’s
pleasure
and surprise when he saw the new cushions … and then—who knew?—the sight of his pleasure might make
her
feel pleased? For a few moments, they would be pleased in unison … and perhaps this would be the beginning of some vague sort of friendliness between them? Or something?

*

The new cushions gleamed out of the darkness like jewels in the deep earth; crimson, scarlet, gold and peacock blue: and the flowers on the great mahogany table seemed to be reflected in a deep pool of colour. She had polished the table as it hadn’t been polished in years, stacking the old bundles of newspaper all up at one end as she worked: and now the old wood shone darkly beneath the blaze of reds and purples, picking up the colours, and throwing them back with a strange, coppery sheen, as though they were on fire.

*

Gilbert stood in the doorway, not speaking, staring in what seemed to be a sort of trance. He stood there so long, and with such a complete absence of reaction, that Milly began to feel quite scared. In the quietness, she began to hear her own heart beating. Was he struck dumb with surprise? Shocked, in some way, by the sudden loss of familiar ugliness? Or was he pleased—so pleased as to be at a loss for words? He seemed to be looking with particular intensity at the table, in its
unaccustomed
glory.

At last he spoke.

“Why have you been disturbing my papers!” he barked out, in a voice Milly had never heard him use before. “What were you looking for?”

For a moment, Milly was so taken aback that she couldn’t speak. Then: “I wasn’t looking for anything, Gilbert! Truly I wasn’t!” (Why so defensive, though, like a schoolgirl accused of cheating?) “All I was doing…. That is …” (Again this idiotic inflexion of guilt.) “All I was doing was clearing the table…. To make it look nice, Gilbert, for the flowers! I’ve polished it, don’t you see? Don’t you think it looks nice, Gilbert? Now it’s polished? With the flowers …?”

Not even for one second did his glance flicker towards the flowers, to see if they looked nice. The light, shining, silvery eyes remained fixed on Milly. They were so bright, one might have imagined they were lit up by mercury lighting from within.

“You didn’t find anything, then? You didn’t untie any of the bundles?”—his voice was still high and strange—“Remember, my dear, it will be best if you tell me the truth!”

“But—but Gilbert, there isn’t anything to tell!
Of
course
I didn’t untie the bundles—why should I?—They’re only old newspapers …!”

Her voice stumbled into silence. Under the strange intensity of his gaze she found herself fidgeting, hanging her head. “I—I’m sorry, Gilbert!” she finished, absurdly humble.