Possession (12 page)

“Mrs Erskine!” she gasped, in a low voice. “Listen! Don’t you hear something?”

I sat very still, and listened. Through the closed windows, through the heavy, beautiful curtains, came faintly the blurred murmur of the London night. A car starting up: a girl’s laugh. Footsteps clicking impatiently along the damp December pavements. A plane mumbled in some distant quarter of the sky, and nearer at hand could be distinguished the muted underground mumblings of the District Line.

“No, I don’t hear anything,” I said; but she shook her head, frowning; and again we were silent, listening.

“There!” she gave a low, sudden cry. “There! Didn’t you hear it? There’s someone up there! Listen! In the empty room, upstairs!”

“U
PSTAIRS
? I
N THE
flat above? But it must be the people who live there,” I said, with all the stupidity of logic in the face of terror. “Are they supposed to be away, or something?”

She shook her head: she swung it attentively from side to side, like a budgerigar, and for a moment I thought she had not heard me. Then:

“No, Mrs Erskine,” she contradicted me, though still softly. “No, there aren’t any flats above this. Only lumber rooms. No one has any reason to go up there—
no one!
”

She thumped her little fists on the pink coverlet, trying to give these last words an emphasis she had not dared to put into her hushed voice.

We listened again. I even went to the door of the flat, and stood there with it ajar, listening. The silence upstairs was absolute; and after a while even Mrs Redmayne seemed a little reassured.

“I’m sorry, she said at last, in a normal tone of voice, “I really
am
sorry, I must have scared you. I get like this
sometimes
, when I’m alone up here. I get so that I keep hearing things…. It’s my nerves, you see, and being alone so much in this great empty flat.”

“Alone!” I really had to protest at this. “But Mervyn is
always
staying in for you! Over and over again, to my knowledge, he’s given up his own plans so as to stay with you! He—”

“He’s a wonderful son to me, yes, Mrs Erskine, I agree with you. He
is
; he’s marvellously attentive, and I know how other mothers must envy me.” This wasn’t what I had meant at all, but I had to let it pass; the penalty of introducing controversial topics at a bedside is that the one propped against pillows has to be allowed to win—“I’m not
complaining about Mervyn, not for one moment. I’m not
saying
one word, for example, about his having gone off, leaving me ill and alone, for the whole of this weekend. But the fact remains, Mrs Erskine, that I
do
get left alone a lot. He’s out at work all day; often he has to stay late at the office. I’m not blaming him, you understand; I know his work has to come before his old mother. But it
does
mean that I’m alone too much. It’s not good for a person, is it? I don’t mind so much during the day, I have my little trot down to the shops in the morning, and sometimes a little constitutional as well, in the afternoon, if it’s fine. But it’s when the evening begins, Mrs Erskine; when the sun goes off the wall opposite, and the shadows come, and I know that the night is coming …
that
’
s
when my nerves start playing me up. And worst of all is if I doze off, like I did this evening…. I wake up with those footsteps in my ears, and that awful coughing, and I don’t know whether I’m still dreaming, or whether, at last, it’s real….”

Her face was contorted; I could feel the pretty pink bed vibrating under the shuddering sobs that she was trying to control I jumped to my feet, agog with urgent, useless activity. Another cup of tea. A new arrangement of the fat pillows. “There,” I said: and “Don’t worry,” and “
Everything’s
all right,” and in a few minutes she became calmer.

“You’re
kind
,” she said, in tones of faint bewilderment, and peered up at me, wonderingly, under her tear-stained
eyelids
. “Sometimes I almost wonder….” She stopped, dabbed at her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief, crushed and damp in her small fist. Then:

“Tell me I’m a fool, Mrs Erskine!” It was almost a command. “Tell me I’m imagining it all! Tell me there
weren’t
any sounds in that room up there! No footsteps, no coughing…. Tell me I’m a silly, selfish, neurotic old woman, who’s just trying to get attention!”

She was, of course. Every word of her self-indictment was true, and thus compelled contradiction. A fool? I found myself laughing aloud at the very idea. Silly? Selfish?
Neurotic? Nonsense! She was just highly-strung, that’s all; more sensitive than most. And on top of this she had been ill…. How often, I suddenly wondered, had Mervyn been manoeuvred into making just these protestations? For the first time, I realised how easily, how almost luxuriously, one can slither into this sort of rôle, and how hard—nay, how impossible—it is to crawl up out of it again. The way into these cloying, stagnant emotional pools is smooth and easy as a toboggan-run; but the only way out is the cruel way: if you come out at all, you come out hard-hearted, muddied, with your self-image in shreds. I felt that at last I
understood
the magnitude of Mervyn’s problem, and the reasons for his subservience. If I, who owed this woman no duty, no affection, could find myself stuck here patting her little hand and assuring her of her worth, then what must it be like for her only son? Her strength, I now realised, lay not in her hypocrisy but in her sincerity; in the fact that she was really frightened, really in need of support, and—probably—really ill.

I kept reassuring her as best I could. No, I hadn’t heard a sound from the room upstairs, I truly hadn’t. Would she like me to go and look, just to make sure?

At this a look of such horror flashed into her face as took me totally by surprise. I jerked away, involuntarily; but a moment later she was clutching my arm, pleading, apologising, and explaining.

“I’m sorry! Oh dear, I
am
sorry. It’s my nerves, you see; it’s being up high like this, I think; the feeling that there’s nothing but those empty rooms between me and the sky. High flats—they
do
have that effect on some people. Don’t they? Haven’t you read about it? You must have! It’s in the papers. It’s on television. There was a long thing about it on television, didn’t you see it? All these women saying how frightened they were, up there with nothing but the sky? Surely you watched it? Oh, you must have!
Everybody
was talking about it!”

She was determined that I should have watched the
programme; the fact that I hadn’t weighed as nothing against her conviction that I had; she talked on and on about it, and all the time the clutch of her thin, strong little fingers seemed to tighten on my arm; tighten, and yet with a curious delicacy of touch; it was like being clutched by a grasshopper.

Gradually—and, I flatter myself, with a good deal of skill, I led her on to talk of other television programmes; and then of plays, of films, and of books.

She didn’t seem to have seen much, or to have read much, in the course of her odd, lonely life. Her little head seemed, I am sorry to say, somewhat empty, and the conversation grew more and more boring. Or was she preoccupied? Once again I began to get the feeling that her mind was elsewhere. That strange, self-absorbed, listening look was back. And then, suddenly, the telephone rang.

She had been right about her nerves. I have never seen anybody jump like that. Her face, as she clutched at the bedside extension, was white like a crumpled piece of expensive writing paper.

I prayed that it should not be Mervyn. In my imagination I could already hear the pathetic, breathy little voice
winging
its way across the dark fields and cities to Bristol,
compelling
him back with its twanging, mouse-thin power. I wondered how I could best intervene, come between mother and son for the good of both … and then I realised that it was not Mervyn at all. Some woman friend … a cancelled meeting for next week … a mislaid knitting pattern…. The deadly little conversation seemed to be doing her good: a faint colour was returning to her cheeks: her voice had become quite cheerful and normal again. This seemed to be my chance; as she put the receiver down, I stood up, and said that really I must go, it was getting late.

She at once agreed that she mustn’t keep me, and then proceeded to do her best to do so. It was at this hour—eleven o’clock at night—when she began feeling worst of all. The loneliness, the long sleepless night ahead; the feeling of
isolation, because of the way people in flats keep themselves to themselves: she had no one to turn to….

Listen! What was that? Didn’t I hear a board creaking….

“Mrs Redmayne!” I felt powerful now—the Ward Sister at least—after a whole evening of attending to this patient—“Mrs Redmayne, you know what you’re going to do? You’re going to get out of that bed, and you’re going to put on your slippers and dressing-gown, and you’re coming upstairs with me to this wretched lumber room, and satisfy yourself once and for all that there’s no one there. Now, come along. No nonsense! Quick march!”

It worked. I was both appalled and triumphant at the ease with which I could wield this sort of discipline. Meekly, a little tremulous, Mrs Redmayne got out of bed, shuffled into her garments. I guessed that by now she was as certain as I was that there would be no one there. However genuine her terror had been earlier in the evening, it had by now, I felt, subsided; there had been something mechanical about that last little flutter of panic. It occurred to me, suddenly, that perhaps this was the only way she knew of not boring people to death—this laying on of bogus excitements and alarms? This would explain everything—including her desperate clinging to the one human being who had a duty to keep her company. A bore. A crashing,
empty-headed
little bore, making—as we are all entitled to do—the best of her poor self. I smiled a little as I led the way up the steep stairs.

The luxury of the lower floors ebbed away at every step. The deep, pile carpet petered out, the spruce white
paintwork
became brown, and chipped with age. At the top, a bare fifteen-watt bulb threw its mean glimmer onto a doorway in front of us. The door was slightly ajar, and even as we stood there, there emanated from it a low, uneven gurgling sound.

I recognised it at once. Before my companion had even had time to draw in her breath, I had flung the explanation at her like a bucket of water, stifling her emergent terror.

“A tank! A water-tank, that’s all!” I cried, pushing open the door; and there, sure enough, a huge, pale, galvanised iron tank loomed in the shadows ahead of us. Another slow gurgle shook its interior as we watched; and I turned triumphantly to the cowering little figure behind me.

“There! What did I tell you?
Those
must be the noises you’ve been hearing!”

Her eyes held mine. They looked huge in her pale face, as though they had responded, like a cat’s eyes, to the surrounding dimness.

“That isn’t what you told me at all,” she pointed out gravely. “What you told me was that you didn’t hear
anything
. That there weren’t any noises; that’s what you told me. And there are!”

She was right, of course. All the same, such logic-chopping seemed inappropriate, not to say ungracious. I was annoyed with her for not being wholly reassured by the solid,
incontrovertible
explanation that stood four-square in front of us.

“First you say there aren’t any noises, and then you say they’re caused by a tank!” she continued, in the same low, argumentative whisper. “So how do I know
what
to believe?”

“Your own eyes—that’s all. Come on, let’s get some light on it!” I felt about for the light switch, pressed it, and a dim bulb—fifteen-watt again—sprang on among the beams which criss-crossed the sloping ceiling. The room was windowless, bare. Apart from the great sighing tank, only a rusty iron bedstead was to be seen, leaning derelict against the wall, as if it had been there for a hundred years.

“See?” I said, turning truculently to my companion; but her eyes were fixed on the beams above.

“I don’t like them!” she said in a low voice; and then her gaze dropped to the tank: “And what’s behind there? What’s behind that tank?”

It was true, there
was
a space behind it. It stood out some inches from the wall, possibly leaving room enough—such was the calculation I seemed to read in those big, frightened eyes—for some intruder to be lurking behind it. A very small
intruder, but still…. Boldly, and in spite of her vague squeaks of protest and the restraining clutch of her little insect hands, I strode across the room and peered into the dark, choking space behind the tank.

There, on the tangle of dusty, ancient pipes, sat two brand new dolls. Quite big ones; the sort that a three-
year-old
can barely lug about. Their fixed, silly faces smiled endlessly at the blank metal wall in front of them; and just then, like a kitten clambering up my shoulder, I felt Mrs Redmayne’s hands, padding and pulling at me, as she tried to peer past me and see what was holding my attention.

Her screams set the tank ringing like a gong—or so it seemed to my ears, only a few inches from the vibrating metal. How I silenced her I do not know. Perhaps I didn’t. Perhaps she silenced herself, for some overpowering reason that conquered even her terror. I am not sure. We stood there, anyway, while the echoes of her screams sank to a ringing silence, and even after that, in the absolute silence that followed, we still stood there.

I
WOULD HAVE
thought that those screams must have woken half the block. But either I had misjudged the
loudness
of them, or else Mrs Redmayne had been right about flat-dwellers keeping themselves to themselves, and in a big way. For we regained Mrs Redmayne’s floor to find only two heads poked out of their front doors. One said: “Oh, my Lord!” and retreated smartly; the other asked half-heartedly—no, quarter-heartedly—if it could do anything? This one was covered with curlers and face-cream, its eyes were already glazed with sleeping-pills, so I said hastily that it was quite all right.

Of all the lies I told that day, this, I think, was the most excusable. What else could I say? I knew, of course, that it
wasn’t
‘all right’, but I didn’t know, then, what it was that was wrong.

She was ill, of course: that’s what I kept telling myself; and indeed by now she looked as if she might be feverish. Her eyes were too bright, and her face, instead of being pale, was suffused with heavy colour, like the outer petals of a rose past its prime. She kept saying she must phone Mervyn, Mervyn must come home; that was all she could think of, and it was with the greatest difficulty that I got her back to bed. Then I went out to the hall and rang Ralph. I told him that I would have to stay the night here, explaining to him as well as I could what had happened, trying to make him see that it was impossible to leave Mrs Redmayne in such a state.

He was annoyed. He didn’t see it at all. He said all the things to me that I had been accustomed to say to Sarah, about the folly of giving way to the tricks of a selfish,
hysterical
malingerer. But I hadn’t known, until now, the awful
power of such tricks; the power, in fact, of not being tricks at all, but genuine, desperate needs. I tried to convey this complicated and—at a distance—unconvincing idea to Ralph, but he was cross, he was sleepy, he wanted me home. Further to pile on the agony, he informed me that Janice hadn’t eaten her baked potatoes. She had come in late, and she hadn’t even bothered to turn the oven off, and so there they were, charred to cinders. Three of them.

He made it sound as if it was all part of my selfish decision to spend the night away from home. To have three charred potatoes thus thrown in randomly among my
misdemeanours
annoyed me.

“
Why
was she late?” I countered—trying to make it sound like
his
fault this time, in retaliation for the potatoes. “I thought she had such a lot of homework tonight?”

“I don’t know about the homework. She said she’d been to the Hardwick’s. I suppose they fed her there. She should ring up, Clare, when she goes off somewhere after school like that. It’s not good enough!”

My fault again? This was fast turning into a quarrel. And anyway,
why
was Janice suddenly frequenting the Hardwick household like this? I remembered now—though I had been too preoccupied to take it in at the time—that during our conversation on the bath-edge, Liz had referred casually to some visit or visits from Janice. Surely the girl was not getting herself enmeshed with one of those awful boys? She could be, though. I could see her—yes, all too easily I could see her—ending up as one of those nervy, tear-stained females sobbing down Liz’s telephone,
chain-smoking
, slumped in a dressing-gown over those day-long breakfasts in the Hardwick kitchen. There was a streak in Janice that could develop just like that…. Was I going to have to worry about
her
love-life, as well as Sarah’s?

Suddenly, I didn’t want to know. Not now. Not at
midnight
, and with so much on my mind, and with Ralph sounding so cross. We couldn’t possibly discuss it now.

“Yes, well, tell her off yourself, then,” I advised Ralph
crisply. We both habitually try to shuffle off the
reprimanding
of Janice onto each other’s shoulders, and this time I was in the strong position of both feeling annoyed with him and of not being there.

“Tell her she’s not to do it again,” I said, and rang off, quickly, before he could start arguing, saying it would come better from me, or would be better left till the morning—some such pusillanimous piece of paternal theorising.

When I got back to the bedroom, I found my patient sitting bolt upright in bed. As I came in, her too-bright eyes bored into me, with a wild, questioning look: she seemed, for a moment, afraid to speak. Then: “Did you get onto them? Are they all right? Did you tell them I was ill?”

For a moment I was quite bewildered. I nearly said: “Tell who?”—and then I realised that all the while I had been telephoning, her little, one-track mind must have been revolving round and round in the same old circle: Mervyn and how to manoeuvre him back to her side. So deep was her self-absorption, it seemed, that she could not conceive of anyone having any other preoccupation than this one of hers, and thus she had actually been imagining that I had all this time been ringing up hotels in Bristol!

Suddenly, it all seemed amazingly simple.

“Yes,” I said. “They’re both fine. They’re sorry to hear you’re ill, but I told them that I was here looking after you, and not to worry. I told them you wouldn’t hear of their changing their plans on your account.”

Would the bogus message succeed in calming her, in heading-off her determination to get in touch with Mervyn herself? Or was I just exposing myself to a volley of abuse for not having summoned the wretched young man back as to a death-bed?

I need not have worried. Her reaction to my story was one of total, overwhelming relief: a relief so intense as to be almost unnerving.

“Oh, thank God!
Thank
God!
So he
is
in Bristol after all! He really did go there! And here I’ve been, imagining that
I could hear….” She stopped. She passed her hand across her forehead.

“Forgive me, Mrs Erskine. I’m just a bundle of nerves tonight! And thank you—thank you a thousand times—for setting my mind at rest like this! You don’t know—you’ll never know—how much it’s meant to me, that telephone call of yours!”

Her gratitude seemed out of all proportion. It made me feel really mean. I had meant the lie to work, of course, but not to work as well as this. This frantic gratitude for my hastily botched-up story was something I hadn’t bargained for. But there was nothing to be done but to stick to my guns. It would be cruel to disabuse her now of the comforting illusions I had so recklessly engendered.

And anyway, I told myself, the deception was justified. I had not only
intended
nothing but good; I had also—which is much rarer—
achieved
nothing but good. I had saved the young couple from having their weekend spoiled; I had saved Mrs Redmayne—at least for the moment—from her obsessional anxieties. I felt pleased with myself, not guilty at all.

The wicked thing, of course, would be to be found out. This would be a cruelty to Mrs Redmayne that would be unforgiveable. I must remember to pick my way very
carefully
through the tangled aftermath of falsehood; to keep clear in my own mind exactly what story I had told, and to whom; and to forewarn Sarah and Mervyn so that they wouldn’t gape and say “What telephone call?” when they got back. Many a good and convincing lie has come to grief on this sort of thing.

Mrs Redmayne was as grateful as if she had sensed,
somehow
, that it was all my doing. I had been such a support to her, she said; such a comfort; she’d never forget it, no she really never would. And would I be very, very sweet and do just one more thing—fetch her sleeping pills from the
bathroom
? Oh, and a glass of water,
warm
water … she felt relaxed now, as if she could sleep…. Soon she was lying,
drowsily content, waiting for the pills to carry her
effortlessly
into unconsciousness. As I watched her slipping so peacefully over the borderland of sleep, I felt the sort of pride a surgeon must feel when the operation has been successful and the patient’s life is saved.

*

It was lucky that she had taken those sleeping pills, and that she had taken them so late. It meant that she was still deep in her drugged sleep when, at nine o’clock the next morning, the telephone rang.

It was the Queens’ Hotel, Bristol, calling. They were sorry to trouble me, but a Mr Redmayne, who was booked to arrive last night with his fiancée, had failed to turn up. Would he be arriving tonight, did I suppose, or was the whole booking to be cancelled?