Home through the Dark (13 page)

“I see. Well, you've made it clear enough now. There's no need for any further histrionics. If that wasn't your reason for coming here, I should be grateful if you'd tell me what it was. I assure you I have a very good reason for wanting to know, quite apart from my responsibility as your husband.”

I said shakily, “Isn't it a bit late to start talking about responsibility in that direction?”

His mouth tightened but the arrival of the waiter with the avocado pear prevented an immediate reply. As he moved away, Carl said brusquely, “I wasn't intending to get involved in a personal discussion this evening, but since you've brought it up, who was that fellow at the flat the other night?”

“Just a friend,” I answered noncommittally.

“He seemed bloody officious to me.”

“If you remember,” I said coldly, “you were molesting me at the time.”

“Molesting! My God, Ginnie –”

I dug the spoon viciously into the firm, creamy flesh of the avocado. “Anyway, what's the point of this catechism? Why should it matter to you how involved I am with Marcus, the theatre or anything else?”

He said tiredly, “I think you know the answer to that.”

“You mean you don't like me straying from the fold? I'm supposed to stay meekly at home knitting and arranging flowers, while you leap in and out of bed with whoever takes your fancy?”

“Ginnie!”

I dropped the spoon with a clatter. I hadn't meant to say any of that but I wasn't thinking very clearly and was only aware of a primitive need to lash out, to hurt him as he'd hurt me. His hand shot out and closed bruisingly round my wrist.

“Now just you listen to me.” His voice was low, shaking with the effort to control himself. “I knew something like this would happen if we let personal grievances come out, but what I want to say is simply this. You're to keep away from that theatre, do you hear?”

“Why?” I flung at him.

“I'm getting more and more convinced that there's something shady going on and I won't have you mixed up in it.”

“Oh, you won't?” I was struggling to free my hand.

“No, I won't. You little fool, can't you just accept that there are some things you shouldn't meddle in?”

“If you'd only stop being so mysterious I might have some idea what you're talking about.”

“It's safer for you not to know. You'll just have to take my word for it.”

I'll never know what made me say it. Probably just an irresistible desire to shake his superiority, his air of knowing more than I did. For whatever reason, say it I did, and the repercussions were immediate and total. “I suppose you're referring to Madame Lefevre?”

I realized my mistake at once. He withdrew his hand from my wrist as though it had burned him. His face whitened and his eyes were unreadable.

He said incredulously, “You know? You? Ginnie, what is this?” And then, his eyes boring into mine, “You little bitch! God, you bloody little bitch!”

There was no point now in trying to retract, to insist that I didn't understand the relevance of Madame's name nor why it should have such violent reactions whenever I mentioned it. In Carl's eyes I was utterly damned, and nothing else mattered.

The waiter hovered over my barely touched plate. “Perhaps madam would prefer something else? Some soup or prawns?”

I shook my head blindly. Carl, seemingly as incapable of speech as I was, gestured for him to take the plates away. After an aeon of silence he said in a low voice, “He's in it too, isn't he? That was the conclusion we came to.”

“Oh yes,” I said ringingly, uncaring for Marcus's reputation since my own was gone, “he's in it all right.”

I looked up and met his eyes, a bright and bitter blue.

“Forgive my curiosity,” he said, “but which of them was it you knew beforehand?” I stared at him blankly. “Obviously you must have known at least one of them. Was it from the university?”

I shook my head, unsure what he was referring to.

“Honour among thieves!” he said, and his voice cracked.

It was too much. I said in a rush, “Carl, I don't really –”

“Spare me the excuses. At least you can save me the trouble of seeking them out again. Just tell them, will you, that it won't work. They won't get one penny out of it.”

The steak had come, fragrant with garlic butter, garnished with mushrooms and tomatoes. I pushed my chair back. “Don't bother to see me home. I'll get a taxi.”

He stood up quickly, fumbled in his pocket and dropped a five-pound note on the table. He caught me up on the staircase and his fingers dug into my arm. “Ginnie, get out of it, for God's sake. Now. I won't tell her you're involved. Go away, anywhere, until it's all blown over. If the police do eventually come in, heaven help you.”

“I imagine the adverse publicity wouldn't help your career.”

“Do you think I care about that? If I really drove you that far, I deserve all that's coming.” He didn't let go of my arm until, shivering uncontrollably, I was in the car. Neither of us spoke again until without any help from me he had driven directly to the Beeches. I pushed open the car door and this time he made no attempt to get out with me.

“You will tell them, won't you, that she's not going to pay? There's no point in carrying on with it any longer.” He sat staring up at me. “God, Ginnie, I still can't believe –”

“Good night, Carl.”

“Goodbye.”

Somehow I was undressed and in my dressing gown. The shaking had lessened a little but not enough to enable me to think clearly. Carl's words were a meaningless jumble in my head. The memory of the expression with which he had looked at me across the table turned every bone in my body to water. What in heaven's name did he think I had done?

Helplessly I walked through the flat from one room to another, picking up books and ornaments and laying them down again. The hands of the clock pointed to twelve – twelve-thirty – one. I was very cold and wrapped my dressing gown more tightly round me. It was October now; perhaps I should think about switching the heating on. I didn't know how to go about it. Carl had always seen to such things. I sank to the floor in the middle of the drawing room, my head in my hands. Sometime during that brief and terrible meal our positions had shifted. After my own half-suspicion of his involvement in the mysterious happenings, he now had no doubt about mine. What had happened to us, that we were apparently able to believe such things about each other? His vehement condemnation echoed in the depths of my being.

Sometime later I rose unsteadily to my feet and went through to the bedroom, switching off the lights. I lay down on top of the bed, pulled the quilt over me and stared up at the ceiling. I don't know how long it was before the turmoil of my thoughts subsided enough to allow me to become aware of the light. My eyes swivelled sharply to the long windows at the end of the room. There was a faint chink where the curtains had not properly come together and it was from this gap that the wavering, uncertain glow poked into the room like a probing finger. Silently I slipped off the bed and padded over to the window.

The room behind me was in darkness and as the light moved away a little, I lifted a corner of the heavy curtain and fearfully peered out. At first I could see nothing, then my eyes made out erratic, spasmodic flashes moving about in the darkness of the park, as though someone were flashing a torch to see his way. But why had its light been playing on the windows of my bedroom?

Suddenly, as I stood watching, a dark figure materialized down to my right and with a little clutch of additional fear I pressed back against the window frame. Someone was coming from the Beeches! Had the light been a signal, an assignation? The dark figure merged into the shadows as it swiftly crossed the road and became lost in the greater blackness that was the park. There were no more flashes of light. Nothing moved again, even I, for five, ten minutes or more. Then at last a shadow detached itself into the figure of a man coming back across the road. And at that exact moment, with the timing of expert stage management, the moon slid without warning from behind the clouds and its light, surer and more revealing than the uncertain beam of the torch that had summoned him, shone full onto his face. It was Marcus Sinclair.

I REMEMBER very little about that Friday. I went into the office, of course – it was my last day there – and mechanically typed out requests for planning permission and particulars of houses. The world was a hostile place and Rachel's sullen, wary face across the room was a constant reminder of the fact.

“And how did our poor little play appeal to the great one?” she had asked obsequiously when I first arrived.

“He was quite impressed,” I replied quietly. We barely spoke again. Despite the faint possibility of meeting Marcus, I went to the usual café for lunch. I was counting on the fact that he was unlikely to come after my tone at our last meeting, nor did he, which was fortunate, because superimposed on all the images of Carl which were branded on my brain that day was one of Marcus in the moonlight. At five o'clock Mr. Holding thanked me warmly for my help during the last three weeks and expressed the hope that he might contact me again during the holiday season next year. But I couldn't begin to contemplate next year.

There was as usual a man on the bench opposite when I reached home just after five-thirty. I felt an urgent need of fresh air myself, and was also curious to know how he would react if I suddenly trespassed into his domain. Accordingly I put the car away and went straight out across the road before I could change my mind. Surprisingly, I had never been in the park before. The untidiness of autumn was strewn over it; drifts of golden brown leaves lay scattered on the grass, splashed with the pink spikes of dahlia petals and the dry, rust-red of dying hydrangeas. Acorns and beechnuts littered the paths and crunched under my footsteps and the scent of bonfire drifted in the air.

Slowly, my hands deep in my coat pockets, I walked round the outer perimeter, studying the houses that faced the park on the other three sides of the square. There was a bowling green with a little wooden hut at the far side from the Beeches and further round a rose garden, now dug neatly over with all the bushes pruned and only the occasional vermilion gash of a late flower against the rich brown soil. A gardener, raking over one of the lawns, paused to nod to me as I passed. Then I had completed the circuit and was back opposite the Beeches. And the man who had been sitting on the bench had gone. A pity. I sat down myself instead and stared over the low railings across the road. From this seat bushes screened the main part of the house, but the east wing was clearly visible. In the upper window I could see Stephanie moving about, probably laying the table for the evening meal. Below, the long Georgian windows of my own flat presented their mirrored glass blandly behind the wrought-iron balconies. The sun, low in the sky behind me, reflected prisms of refracted light in a myriad gems of blue, green, red and gold. Not a good time of the day for spying. It would be better in another half hour, when it would be dark enough for the lights to go on inside but too early to draw the curtains.

After a few minutes I got up and went slowly back across the road. “Tell them she won't pay.” So Madame Lefevre had been the recipient of the ransom note – but who was the victim? And whom should I tell? I smiled involuntarily at the thought of Stephen's reaction to such a message. She won't pay. I wondered uneasily how kidnappers would react, faced with this ultimatum. “This has dragged on far too long,” Laurence had said. Their nerves were being rubbed raw. How many of them were involved? And what would happen if they suddenly collapsed into panic?

“If I really drove you that far, I deserve all that's coming.” Trust Carl, I thought resentfully, slamming the oven door shut, to put everything on a personal basis.

Saturday morning. With what dreary inevitability the weekends came round, waking in me a frenzied desire to fill the limitless hours. And now that my job at Culpepper's had finished, the weekdays would be no better. I should have called at the secretarial bureau before this and found myself somewhere else. At least I shouldn't have to bear Rachel's sullen company any longer.

I embarked on a thorough cleaning of the flat and finished by filling the washing machine with the sheets I had taken off the bed. I set the dial, picked up my basket and shopping list, and was actually pulling the front door to behind me when the telephone called me back.

“Miss Durrell? This is Suzanne Grey.”

“Good morning.” I waited with a flicker of interest. I had not seen her since her outburst at the end of the last production three weeks ago.

“I wonder if you could meet me for a coffee or something?” Her voice was staccato, vibrant with strain. “There's something I have to ask you.”

Another one wanting a part in Carl's new play, I thought resignedly. “I'm just going shopping. How about eleven o'clock at McVities?”

“Fine,” she confirmed jerkily. “Thanks.” The phone clicked. I dropped it back on its rest and went out.

She was there before me, elegant in grey cashmere with a coral blouse showing at the neck and cuffs. Her lovely eyes were hidden behind a pair of huge round sunglasses. “I've ordered coffee,” she said, and, after a pause as I seated myself beside her, “It's good of you to come.”

“Not at all.” I put the full basket on the floor against the wall. “What can I do for you?” I could see that she was trembling and felt a flicker of alarm. Suppose she had hysterics or something? I should be at least partially responsible for her. Her fingers were pleating and unpleating the paper napkin on the plate in front of her.

“As you probably know, I haven't been at the theatre for a while,” she began at last, “so I don't know you as well as the others seem to. I – understand you're married to Carl Clements?”