Designs on Life (21 page)

No, that was all nonsense. She was letting her nerves get on top of her, allowing herself to be overcome by senile suspiciousness. Of course she was not a prisoner. She was being devotedly looked after. She ought to feel nothing but gratitude. All the same, she must think, she decided. She must think very clearly, without getting lost amongst hysterical thoughts and fancies.

Lying still, except that her fingers plucked at the edge of the flowered sheet, she gazed at the ceiling and presently began to make what she thought was really a rather clever little plan. She meant it as something just to set her own mind at rest, and it would be so easy, so simple even for her to carry out that it seemed very sensible to try it. She would do it tomorrow. Having decided on that, she dropped off almost at once into a pleasant doze, from which she did not waken until Evelyn came into the room to settle her for the night and to give her her sleeping-pills.

Mrs. Gosse put her plan into execution next day as soon as she heard Evelyn leave the house to do some shopping. Oliver, of course, had gone off to London some time before. So while Evelyn was out Mrs. Gosse had the house to herself. Moving carefully and slowly, leaning on her crutches, she crossed her room to the door, opened it, went out into the passage and hobbled along it to the door of Oliver’s and Evelyn’s bedroom. For there was a telephone extension in there. She had overheard both of them talking on it. She had never suggested using it herself because this had never been offered and she regarded bedrooms as private places into which one did not intrude without an invitation. Yet really, with no one to see her, what was to stop her going in and ringing up, say, good Mr. Deane, her solicitor, and asking him to visit her?

She put a hand on the handle of the bedroom door. It did not open. It was locked. The Hassalls did not intend to let her reach that telephone extension to call Mr. Deane or anybody in the outer world. So her fears had not been crazy. She was in fact being held a prisoner.

With her heart beating in a way that frightened her, she made her way back to her room.

At the head of the stairs she stood still and looked down. There was the front door. There was escape. If she gritted her teeth at the pain, could she somehow get down the stairs and reach the street?

But what would she do when she got there? Wave her crutches at passing cars? Hope that the driver of one of them would not think she was mad and would give her a lift of fifty miles to her home?

Probably before a car stopped Evelyn would be back and gently forcing her back into the house and her captivity. And anyone who saw it happen would be on Evelyn’s side.

For the moment there was nothing for it but patience.

It was soon after this that a subtle change came over Evelyn’s attitude to Mrs. Gosse. All at once she seemed to have become very tired of looking after the old lady. She hardly spoke to her, there were no pretty tray-cloths on the trays and the meals that she brought up as often as not consisted of meat of some sort out of a tin and a lump of mashed potato that had certainly come out of a packet. And Evelyn’s face seemed to have become all bony jaw and veiled, resentful eyes.

One day, just as she was leaving the room, Mrs. Gosse said on an impulse, “Evelyn dear, don’t you think it’s time I was going home?”

Evelyn paused in the doorway. “So you want to leave us,” she said.

“It’s just that I think I’ve imposed on you long enough,” Mrs. Gosse answered.

“You can go home tomorrow, if you want to,” Evelyn said.

Mrs. Gosse tried hard not to look startled. “Just whenever it’s convenient for you, dear,” she said.

“Only tell me one thing first.” Evelyn’s voice suddenly grated. “Let’s stop pretending, both of us. Oliver and I want to know if you’ve left us anything in your will, or does it all go to Judith?”

“I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to talk about,” Mrs. Gosse replied. “I’d sooner not discuss it.”

“But we want to know where we are. It won’t hurt you to tell us. We aren’t as well off as we look. Oliver isn’t as clever as he thinks about money.”

Mrs. Gosse considered her answer carefully.

“Well, you know everything I have was left to me by Andrew,” she said. “And Judith is his daughter. You’re actually no relation of his at all. I wouldn’t say you’ve any right to his money.”

“Didn’t he leave half of what he had to Judith and half to you, without any strings to it?” Evelyn said. “I remember him saying so once. You can do what you like with your share.”

“And you think I ought to make a will, leaving it to you.”

“I do. We’re your only blood relations.”

“And if I make this will, I can go home?”

“As soon as you like. If not…”

“Yes, if not?” Mrs. Gosse asked quietly.

Evelyn hesitated, then seemed to make up her mind.

“After all, why should you ever go home?” she said with a tight little smile. “Your friends are already beginning to forget you. When you first came here they were always ringing up to ask how you were, but it was quite easy to put them off, and now they just think you’ve settled down with us and they’ve stopped worrying about you. You could stay on here in this nice room for ever and ever and no one would ask any questions. And as I really find carrying trays up and down the stairs rather a tiring job, perhaps I might not bother with them quite as often as I do. And I might forget to change your library books. I don’t mean, of course, that I’d ever do anything actually unkind, but you might find your life not quite as comfortable as it has been. And still no one would dream of interfering.”

“But suppose I make a will of the kind you want,” Mrs. Gosse said, “what’s to stop me changing it as soon as I get home?”

“If you promised you wouldn’t change it, you wouldn’t,” Evelyn said. “That’s what you’re like.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh yes, I’m sure. You’d never change it.”

“No,” Mrs. Gosse said thoughtfully, “perhaps not.”

For, promise or not, once she had made that will she would be given no chance to change it. She would never get home. What she understood clearly as the result of this extremely upsetting conversation was that the Hassalls were going to see to it that she never left the house alive. Melodramatic as it sounded, that was the simple truth. It must be. No other explanation of their actions made sense. And she was in their hands, at their mercy.

After that day, as if she were already putting her threat into practise, Evelyn became more and more neglectful of Mrs. Gosse. Her food was often hardly eatable. She had to struggle to make her own bed. The room was left to grow dusty and the sheets were not changed. And as she became better able to walk about she found, not much to her surprise, that she was locked into her room. In a way she was glad to be left alone. She liked it better than those times when the Hassalls tried to make her discuss her will. But sometimes she sat and cried from sheer loneliness and fear and hopelessness. The thought of giving in to them, trusting that at least the manner of her end would be merciful, began to seem almost attractive.

Then one afternoon, when she was in the bathroom, a noise in her bedroom startled her. It sounded as if the window had just been opened and closed. Then distinctly she heard footsteps and someone began to sing thickly and hoarsely.

“‘When they call the roll up yonder,

When they call the roll up yonder,

When they call the roll up yonder,

I’ll be there...’”

A burglar?

A burglar who came in daylight and sang hymns? Hardly likely. Yet burglars seemed to do the oddest things nowadays. One was always reading about it. And perhaps this one might turn out to be a friend. Limping into the bedroom as fast as she could, she saw a small, stout, red-faced man busily cleaning her window.

The window-cleaner. The one intruder whom the Hassalls had forgotten to keep out. And luckily, just then, Evelyn was away from the house, doing the shopping.

“Oh, good day,” Mrs. Gosse exclaimed excitedly. “What a beautiful day it is, isn’t it?

For almost every conversation with a stranger should begin with a remark about the weather, shouldn’t it? It always eased things. Besides, for the first time for some weeks, she had just noticed how brightly the sun was shining.

He took no notice.

“Good day,” Mrs. Gosse repeated, louder. He went on polishing and singing to himself. She went closer to him and tapped him on the shoulder with a crutch.

He whirled, his hands coming up as if to defend himself. Then, seeing her, he gave a loose-lipped smile and said, “Oh, good afternoon, missus. Didn’t know anyone was in. Mrs. Hassall always says, if I come when she’s out, go ahead on my own, she’ll pay me next time. Nice day, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Gosse’s heart sank. She could smell the beer on his breath. He was, she realised, both drunk and deaf.

She tested how deaf he was by raising her voice and repeating as loudly as she could, “It’s a beautiful day.”

He gave her a dubious stare, considered the situation, then said, as if he knew that it was a safe thing to say in almost any circumstances, “That’s right.” Then he returned to polishing the window.

Mrs. Gosse stumbled hastily to the table where her writing paper and envelopes were. She lowered herself into the chair there and began feverishly writing. Before she was half finished, the window-cleaner began to climb out of the window on to his ladder. She reached out with one of her crutches and jabbed him sharply. He turned with a look of hurt protest. She held up a finger, beckoning to him, and shouted, “Wait!”

He stayed where he was uncertainly while her ballpoint jabbed at the paper.

Under the address that she had scrawled at the top, she wrote, “Dear Mr. Deane, I am being kept here against my will. I am in fear of my life. Please come and rescue me. This is very urgent. Yours sincerely, Margery Gosse.”

She folded the sheet of paper, slid it into an envelope and addressed it. She had an uneasy feeling that what she had written might sound merely insane. If she had had more time to think, she might have written more temperately. But the window-cleaner was looking as if he might decide to descend his ladder at any moment. Then she realised that she had no stamps. Taking fifty pence out of her handbag, she handed it to him with the letter, pointed at the corner where the stamp should have been and shouted, “Please! Please post it for me!”

At the sight of the fifty pence his face split open in a grin.

“Thank you, missus,” he said. “Very good of you. Thank you.”

“But please post the letter!” In her own ears her pleading voice sounded hopelessly thin and ineffectual.

“That’s right,” he said cheerfully, pocketed the money and holding the letter, disappeared.

Mrs. Gosse got up, lurched to the window and looked down after him.

She saw him reach the bottom of the ladder, look at the letter in his hand in a puzzled way as if he wondered how he had come by it, then crumple it into a ball and drop it on a flowerbed.

Mrs. Gosse tugged at the window to open it, to shout down to him to post the letter at all costs. But the catch of the window stuck and by the time that she had somehow managed to undo it, the man had moved on out of sight.

She collapsed into a chair. For a few minutes she gave in to helpless sobbing. The bitter disappointment after the few minutes of exalted hope left her feeling far more desperate than she had before. She felt more exhausted than she ever had in her life. A cloud of blackness settled on her mind. Utter despair enveloped her. Now there was nothing left for her, she knew, but the gamble that she had been thinking about recently. A most fearful gamble. The thought of it terrified her. For it was only too likely to fail. But if it did, did she really care? Might that not be better than letting things go on as they were now? All the same, but for the agonizing disappointment of having seen her letter crumpled and dropped on the earth, she would probably never have had the courage to act.

As it was, she sat still, thinking, for what seemed a very long time. She had never been a gambler by nature. She enjoyed her bridge, but never for more than twopence a hundred, and once, when she and Andrew had been in Monte Carlo, she had become very agitated when he had risked a mere twenty pounds at roulette. Yet here she was, thinking of risking all that she had. Literally all. Her life.

At last she got up, and staggering more than she usually did now, from nervousness and a kind of confusion, she went into the bathroom, took her sleeping-pills out of the cabinet and counted them. There were forty-seven in the bottle. And the lethal dose, she had been told some time, was around thirty. But when you were eighty-two, perhaps it would not take so many to kill you. How could you tell? You must just guess and hope for the best. Above all, you must not take too few. That would be useless. Counting out thirty, she flushed them down the drain. Then with shaking hands she filled a glass of water and set herself to swallowing all the pills that remained.

She was surprised at how calm she became while she was doing it. Walking back into her bedroom, she turned the cover of the bed down neatly, took off her shoes and lay down. While she was waiting for the drug to begin to affect her she found the words of the hymn that the window-cleaner had sung going round in her head. Dimly, they comforted her.

She was far gone by the time that Evelyn came in with her supper tray. Loud snoring noises came from the inert figure on the bed and the aged face on the pillow was paper-white. Evelyn Stood still, staring, then shouted, “Oliver! Oliver, come at once!” He came pounding up the stairs.

“Look!” Evelyn cried.

“Oh God, what’s happened, what’s she done?” he gasped.

Evelyn dumped the tray that she had been clutching on the table and shot into the bathroom. She came out with the empty bottle.

“It’s her pills. She’s taken the lot. What fools we’ve been, leaving them here! Why didn’t we think she might do this?”

“How many were there?”

“Nearly fifty, I think.”

“Then she hasn’t a hope.”

“What are we going to do? This isn’t how we planned things. There’ll be questions, a post mortem… Oh, Lord, when I think of all the time I’ve spent on her—”