Designs on Life (12 page)

“It’ll never work,” she said shrilly.

“It’ll have to.” Harry Evitt’s voice was as empty of feeling as hers was charged with it. His nervousness was in his feet. With one heel he was trying to kick a hole in the costly grey rug before the fire. “Yes, it’ll have to,” he said without excitement, without doubt, without eagerness.

Rina dropped her head into her hands. Her hair tumbled over them as her fingers clawed her bursting temples. She had thick, bleached hair, with a sheen that was bright but lifeless. Her face was long, with slackly handsome features and big, wide-spaced eyes.

“I’ll make a mess of it—there isn’t time—there’s too much to remember.”

Knowing what she could do when she tried, her husband was not much troubled.

“You’ll remember all right,” he said. “It’s just the timing that matters. The rest’s easy. But make sure you get the timing right.”

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, dug the back of one heel into a new patch of rug and gave a fierce twist to his foot. A faint dent remained in the springy pile for a moment.

“You’ve got to be sure the others leave on time,” he said. “And you’ve got to be sure you get Minnie out into the drive with them, to see them off, so that you can come back in here and change the clock and make that telephone call without her knowing. And you’ve got to time that exactly. But the rest of it’s easy.”

Rina jerked her head up, staring at him again.

He was a man of middle height, softly covered in flesh, dressed in a dark grey suit, a white shirt, a dark blue tie, all good, all inconspicuous. He had a round, white face, moulded into features as insignificant as the dent that he had made in the carpet, and with thinning dark hair brushed back from a low, curved forehead.

With her eyes on that calm, dull face, Rina said, “You haven’t just thought of this, Harry—not just today. You’ve had it ready for a long time, in case George ever found out about the money.”

“All right, I’ve had it ready,” Evitt said. “And a good thing I did, I’d say.”

“You’ve had it ready, yet you never told me …”

“You know that’s what I’m like,” he said. “You ought to be used to it by now.”

She swayed her head from side to side, not quite shaking it, not quite nodding. Crouched in her chair, shrunk into herself, she looked small, helpless and harmless. In fact, she was a tall woman, thin, but big-boned and strong.

“I’m not used to it,” she said. “I never shall be.”

Evitt’s pale pink lips twitched at the corners in a faint expression of satisfaction. But life never remained long in his face.

“Remember—get them all out into the drive,” he said, coaching her again with patience, with understanding, but with relentlessness. “Then run in and change the clock and make the telephone call. Make sure Minnie stays outside long enough for you to do that. Get her worrying about the roses. Or fertilizers. Anything. You can handle her.”

“But the other part of it,” Rina said. “Suppose
that
doesn’t work.”

“It will.”

“No, it’s too difficult, it’s too complicated, there are too many things to go wrong.” Her voice had leapt again into shrillness.

After a short silence, Evitt answered evenly, “All right then, what do we do instead?”

When she did not answer, he said, “Go and get changed now, Rina. Put on your green dress. Get the room ready. There isn’t much time to spare.”

She looked round dazedly. “The room’s all right, isn’t it? Just as usual.”

“The room’s fine.” His pride in the room escaped into his voice for a moment.

It was a room of which they were both proud. The floor was of mahogany woodblocks. The picture window showed them a sweep of lawn, some early daffodils blooming in rough grass under bare trees, only distant roofs and still more distant hills. The antique furniture had been bought after careful study of the best magazines. There was excellent central heating.

“The tea’s all ready,” Rina said. “I’ve just got to get out the bridge-table and the cards.”

“Get them out then,” Evitt said. “Keep busy. Don’t sit and think. It won’t help you.”

“And you…?”

He walked over to her. He put his hands under her elbows and hauled her out of her chair.

“Don’t think about me either.”

She was slightly the taller of them, even without her high heels. Face to face with him now, she could look over his head to the window, to the cluster of leafless trees and the grey-green line of the low hills beyond them.

“You can do it, Rina,” he said, his hands tight on her arms.

“I suppose I can,” she said, “but I don’t like it.”

“Do you think I like it?”

He did not like it. He was terrified of what he had to do and of what might result from it for himself and for Rina. He was a calculating rather than a violent man. But calculations can go wrong, and when they do, what is there left but violence?

Rina’s bridge-party broke up at six o’clock. It always did. Two of the four women who met every Wednesday to play had to catch a bus home from the end of the road at ten minutes past six. So when the hands of the grandfather clock in the corner of the room pointed to ten minutes to six, the losers groped in their handbags, paid out what they owed to the winners, re-hashed the blunders and disasters of the last rubber and made peace with each other.

“Not my lucky afternoon,” Minnie Hobday said in a tone of unusual heaviness. She smoothed back one of her straying locks of grey hair, but left others, disturbed by the high wind of play, to droop around her square, mild face and support its gentle, sheep-dog quality. “I’m getting too old for this game.”

Rina, sitting on her left, scribbling on a scoring-pad before her, tapped Minnie on the wrist with her pencil, a gesture that Rina seemed to be fond of. The pencil was of emerald green, tipped with gilt, and matched the emerald green woollen dress and the heavy gold bracelet that she was wearing.

“It isn’t age that’s the trouble,” she said, smiling. “You’ve got something on your mind, Minnie.”

“No, it’s just age,” Minnie Hobday said insistently. “I never had much of a memory for cards, and soon I suppose I shan’t have any at all.”

But the truth was that she had a great deal on her mind, that she was very worried, because for the last three days her husband, George, had barely spoken to her, and today he had gone to London without telling her the reason, all of which was quite unlike him.

Even if Minnie had reached the stage of wanting to confide in someone the terrible suspicion that had been torturing her all day, the suspicion that George was not well, that he had symptoms so fearful that he had not been able to bring himself to tell her about them, but had gone off alone to London to consult a specialist, it would never have occurred to her to confide in Rina Evitt. Though the two women had never had a quarrel, and during the five years since Rina’s marriage to George’s partner in the firm of Hobday and Hobday, auctioneers and estate agents, had made a habit of these weekly bridge afternoons, and of performing all sorts of small neighbourly acts for one another, Minnie had never even begun to grow intimate with the younger woman.

She was sorry for this. It would have been far better for all of them if she and Rina had been able to become as friendly as George was with Harry. But Rina, so Minnie, blaming herself, explained it, was young, was smart, had travelled, and apparently, in other places, had known really interesting people. So she could hardly be expected, could she, to be anything but bored by Minnie Hobday?

Minnie had always been aware of the boredom in Rina, of the emptiness, of the need for something more than she had. It was Minnie’s belief that it would always be for more and more. Whatever Rina had would never be enough. Still, it had been clever of her to realise that Minnie had something on her mind. Ordinarily she seemed so wrapped up in herself, so like a child in a daydream, that you would no more expect her to notice a shade of worry on an elderly face than, come to think of it, you would expect her, all of a sudden, to be interested in the names of two undistinguished shrubs, growing near the gate, and which had been growing there for years.

So perhaps something was happening to Rina, some change, some development. That would be nice, Minnie thought, walking out to the gate with the other two women, and identifying the shrubs as a
laurustinus
and a
hypericum uralum.
But turning to Rina to tell her this, Minnie found that she had just gone back into the house.

Minnie did not leave then, for George had said that he would call for her on his way home from the station, and Rina was expecting her to wait for him. Returning to the house, Minnie found her setting a tray with a decanter of sherry and four glasses on it on a low coffee-table.

“I didn’t see why we should wait for the men,” Rina said. “A drink is what you need to cheer you up a bit. I suppose it’s Michael you’re worrying about, but you shouldn’t, you know. He’s all right, that boy.”

Michael was the Hobdays’ son, and because of a certain carelessness that he had sometimes shown in the handling of a fast car, he had more than once given his parents cause to worry about him. But recently he had been almost sensible.

“No, I’m not worried about Michael,” Minnie said. “Really, I’m not worried about anything.” She took the glass that Rina held out to her and glanced at the clock. George should be here at any moment, she thought. The suspense of the long day would soon be over.

However, it was not as late as she had thought that it must be, or so she believed until, a minute or two later, she happened to glance at her watch.

In surprise, she exclaimed, “That clock’s wrong, Rina!”

“Not
that
clock,” Rina said.

“It is, it’s ten minutes slow,” Minnie said. “George ought to be here.”

Rina shook her head. There was a smile in her wide-spaced, candid eyes. “It’s the most reliable thing on earth, Minnie, and so it should be, considering what care Harry takes of it—and what he paid for it.”

“But this watch of mine is quite reliable too. I’ve had it for twenty-two years, and I never have to adjust it more than about two minutes in a month.” Because of her worry, Minnie sounded querulous. “It’s a very good watch.”

Rina turned to the fire. She stirred the smouldering logs with the toe of her shoe. Her pale hair, swinging forward, hid her face.

“Perhaps it needs cleaning,” she said.

“I had it cleaned two months ago. No, I’m sure it’s the clock that’s wrong. George ought to be here...” The sound of strain in her own voice checked Minnie.

“All right,” Rina said equably. “I’ll tell Harry. But talking of Michael, he’s a crazy thing, but really so nice. Everyone thinks so. And even if he and George do get across one another, you shouldn’t make up your mind it’s all Michael’s fault.”

Frowning vaguely, Minnie wondered why Rina kept dragging Michael in. “I don’t know what you mean about him and George getting across one another,” she said. “They’re ever such good friends nowadays. Of course, Michael went through a difficult phase. All boys do.” She stopped, because she thought that she had heard footsteps outside on the gravel of the drive.

Rina had heard them too. “There’s Harry,” she said.

“Or George.” Relying on her watch rather than on the Evitts’ clock, Minnie believed that his train must have reached the station about ten minutes ago, and she knew that by the shortcut across the fields, he needed only five minutes to reach the Evitts’ house.

“Yes—or George,” Rina said, and went quickly out of the room.

Nervous and impatient, thinking of the dire news that he might be bringing her, Minnie made one of her random selections of an untidy lock of hair and smoothed it back from her forehead. At the same time she did her best to arrange a placid smile on her face. But it was Harry Evitt, not George, who received the smile.

“Ah, Minnie!” he said with evident pleasure.

“Good evening, Harry,” she said. “You haven’t seen George, I suppose? He was going to call in for me.”

Evitt looked at the clock.

“Wasn’t he coming on the six-twenty? That’s only just due now.”

“But that clock’s slow,” Minnie said. “It’s half past six.”

“That
clock isn’t slow,” Evitt said, almost as Rina had said before him.

In a shriller voice, as if it mattered which was wrong, the Evitts’ clock or her watch, Minnie said, “Well, by my watch it’s half past six already. George ought to be here. He said he was going to come straight here from the station and not go to the office.”

The Evitts exchanged glances.

“Well, let’s check it on the telephone,” Harry Evitt said. “You may be quite right, Minnie. If you are, I expect it’s just that the train’s late, but if you like I’ll walk to the station and make sure… make sure...” He stopped, as if he were uncertain of what, in the circumstances, he ought to make sure.

Rina had already gone to the telephone. She picked it up, spoke into it and put it down again.

“The operator says it’s six twenty-one by the clock in the exchange,” she said, and picking up the glass of sherry that she had left behind when she had gone out to meet her husband, she drank it down and began to choke.

Evitt hit her between the shoulders. The sound of his hand, striking her, was surprisingly loud.

Wiping moisture from her eyes, Rina said hoarsely, “It’s really Michael Minnie’s worried about. That row they had.”

“That was nothing,” Evitt said. “Nothing at all. Have some more sherry, Minnie. George’ll soon be here.”

But even an hour later, George had not arrived at the Evitts’ house.

The Evitts said that he must be coming on a later train. Minnie agreed with them and decided not to wait for him any longer. Evitt saw her down the short lane to her home. He went with her as far as her gate, then walked off into the darkness, while Minnie walked up the path to the door, a door set in a jutting Victorian porch and opening into a roomy but drably papered hall, across which an electric clock faced her, whirring softly. Comparing her watch with the clock, she saw that her watch was fast, but only by three minutes.

That was at seven-forty.