BY THE END of the second week, Milly’s life had fallen into a pattern which she already felt had been going on for ever. The day started with Kevin’s and Jacko’s arrival in her room for their morning tea; and always, as part of the ritual, there was the fuss about the gas. The boys seemed to take a pride in never having a shilling for the gas—it made them feel like genuine poor students, and subtly removed the stigma of wealth from the Hi Fi set, and the piles of LP’s, and the cine-camera that Jacko’s father had given him for Christmas. And since the non-possession of a shilling seemed to mean so much to them, Milly went along with it, and listened obligingly each morning to the small fuss about it, followed by the small injustice of her always being the one to produce the shilling. Thirty-five pence a week—only an hour’s work, when all was said and done. Rarely has so comfortable a friendship been bought so cheaply.
Then, at nine thirty, under the attentive gaze of Mrs Mumford (who always managed to be flicking a duster around the hall at just this hour) she set off for work.
“Well, goodbye, Mrs Mumford,” she would say, as she unbolted the front door: and, “Ta ta,” Mrs Mumford would reply if she was in a good mood, and, “Goodbye, Mrs Barnes,” if she was not. Either way, she always added, “Back at the usual time, then?”
How lovely, already to have a usual time to be back at!
“Yes!”—Milly would cry jubilantly: and then, off into the icy winter morning.
She loved this morning walk to Mrs Graham’s: she loved the cold, salty air on her face, and the sensation in her limbs of not being tired yet. This was now a positive, joyous sensation such as she had never before experienced: but then she had never experienced, either, the leaden, desperate tiredness that regularly assailed her in the middle of her working afternoons. Since taking up manual work, she seemed to be living in a new dimension of physical awareness: every muscle in her body seemed to have come alive, to be alert to the stresses and joys of movement; and she was conscious, as never before, of herself in charge. It was she, and she alone, who could give the order—“Move!” to an exhausted limb—and it would move.
But at this time, in the bright morning time, nothing of this sort was necessary. Her rested body would swing along through the low mist, or maybe the gleams of struggling sunshine, like the body of a dancer. That’s how it felt, anyway; and if it looked more like the body of a middle-aged woman in a head-scarf plodding off to work, what cared Milly? The more unremarkable she looked, the better she was pleased. Then no one would bother to notice the way she always stopped for a few moments at the newsagent on the corner, glancing along the headlines, turning a page here, giving a quick look at the back of a copy there, as if trying to decide which of them all to buy … and then moving on, with a new bounce in her step, a new assurance in the set of her shoulders, without having bought any of them at all.
And as the days passed, and the headline Milly was dreading never appeared, the morning ritual became gradually more and more perfunctory until, by the fourth week, her assurance had become so great that she hardly bothered to look at the papers at all. Now, she pranced past the newsagent with only the most cursory glance. Yes, they were still on about the London bus strike—as if anyone cared—where was London, anyway? She felt remote from it all, and marvellous, and at last totally secure. Nearly a month now, and still nothing about her at all! She must have got away with it—though how, she could not imagine.
And it was then that the first signs began to appear that all was not quite as she hoped.
The day had started just like any other day. She set off for Mrs Graham’s in as carefree a mood as ever, with no weightier problem on her mind than the question whether Mrs Graham would, or would not, be going to the library this morning. It was Mrs Graham’s habit, once or twice a week, to spend a morning at the University library looking up the current sociological journals, leaving Alison in Milly’s care. On these occasions, she evinced so much maternal anxiety, and gave Milly so many instructions, that anyone would have thought that Milly didn’t always look after Alison anyway. Because by now it was part of the routine of Milly’s mornings that at eleven-fifteen, just as Milly and Mrs Graham were settling down with their coffee, Alison would start crying: and Mrs Graham would frown, and set her cup down, and stare at Milly in a dazed sort of way.
“But she never wakes up till lunch time!” she would exclaim, incredulously. “She always sleeps through! Look, Mrs Er, would you mind, just this once …?”—and Milly, just as on all the other mornings, would reluctantly gulp down the rest of her coffee, go and get Alison out of her cot, change her, and thereafter endure her unrelieved company for the rest of the morning, while trying to get the work done.
The only difference about the library mornings was that the drama began earlier. At half past ten, or thereabouts, Mrs Graham would start scuttling softly about the flat, glancing at the clock, stuffing papers secretively into her briefcase, speaking to Milly in whispers … for all the world as if she was plotting an escape from the Tower. What she was really plotting, of course (as Milly soon realised), was to make her getaway from the flat before Alison began crying. She liked to be safely out of the front door and calling over her shoulder…. “And Alison will sleep till lunch-time….” before the first wails rent the air.
All the same, Milly preferred the library mornings, on the whole. For one thing, it meant that she could plan her coffee-break to suit herself—if necessary leaving Alison to scream for five minutes while she reclined in luxury, sipping coffee that she had made exactly as she wanted it, with exactly the right amount of sugar. For another—and this was the big thing—it meant that she didn’t have to use any of the labour-saving equipment in the kitchen at all, and could get on with the work as fast as she liked. On the mornings that Mrs Graham was at home there was always the risk that she would grow bored with the correlations, and come wandering in to say: “But Mrs Er, why aren’t you using the …?”—dragging from its hiding-place yet another bulky, grease-caked contraption for making a simple task complicated. And by the time that had happened, there was never any going back. In general, and for most of the time, Mrs Graham was as vague and abstracted an employer as one could hope to find, drifting through her housewifely duties with her degree in Sociology clinging about her like a mist, blurring her awareness of any but the most glaring deficiencies on Milly’s part. But once she had a labour-saving appliance in her hands she was like a gangster with a gun, nothing could turn her from her purpose. On such occasions she would quite forget how busy she was, and how nobody ever gave her any peace, and would ungrudgingly devote half a morning to following Milly about making sure that she used the Dust-Rite instead of a duster: and while the dust puffed leisurely this way and that around the rooms, and the correlations languished un-cared-for in the typewriter, Mrs Graham would deliver long lectures to Milly about the principle of suction, and how the furniture wasn’t really clean unless you’d used the Dust-Rite. Nor really dirty unless you hadn’t—this last provoked by Milly’s incautious demonstration of how much less dusty the table looked after she had done it with an ordinary duster.
So the game, as Milly saw it, was to get the dusting finished before Mrs Graham got around to noticing what she was doing: to get the potatoes peeled with the nice little sharp knife before Mrs Graham came and unearthed the potato-peeler: to wrap the resultant peelings in newspaper and rush them out to the dustbin before Mrs Graham wandered in and caught her not using the waste-disposal unit. She had caught Milly thus on her second morning: and snatching the newspaper-full of peelings just as Milly was about to put it in the dustbin, she had tossed the whole lot triumphantly into the sink.
“There, Mrs Er!” she had exclaimed. “No need to bother with the dustbin! It all just goes down the sink! See?”—and at the flick of a switch an awful whirring noise filled the room. The potato peelings stirred faintly, as if in their sleep, and then settled down again.
“Sometimes it needs both taps on!” Mrs Graham screamed into Milly’s ear, above the racket: and they both leaned over the sink and watched the water cascading down among the potato peelings. They were moving around nicely now, and Mrs Graham and Milly leaned over further still. The suspense was awful.
“Look, look!” Mrs Graham cried excitedly. “See? There’s one going down! But you have to work them towards the outlet, Mrs Er, don’t you see? … Isn’t there a stick, or something?”
An old mop handle was pressed into service; and after that a wooden spoon; and gradually, with coaxing and prodding from both women, the mound of potato peelings began to diminish. Presently there were only a very few, very obstinate ones left, and Mrs Graham’s exultation knew no bounds.
“See?” she screamed, at the top of her voice, in order to be heard above the uproar: “See that, Mrs Er?”—as she spoke, she switched off the machine, so that the final syllable gouged into the sudden silence like a pneumatic drill—“See? They’re almost all gone! No need to bother with dustbins in my flat, Mrs Er! Everything goes down the waste-disposal!”
But not dead matches. Or milk-bottle tops. Or paper bags. Or chicken-bones. And so each day, when she arrived, Milly’s first duty was to extract these and similar items from the horrible mush that Mrs Graham always had waiting for her in the sink. With the sort of unquestioning faith that an Early Christian might have envied, Mrs Graham hurled everything, including rancid fat, into the precincts of her waste-disposal unit, and then waited, in total trust, for the magic to begin.
Which it did, of course, punctually every morning when Milly arrived. Since there was no way of scooping it out at this stage in the process, Milly usually spent the first twenty minutes of her working day poking and prodding at it with assorted implements, with taps and machinery all on at full blast.
Mrs Graham loved it. Often she would leave her typewriter and come and watch, screeching advice and encouragement like a supporter of Manchester United; and the longer it all went on, the better she was pleased. She seemed to feel that having the thing on for twenty minutes was somehow twenty times as labour-saving as having it on for only one.
And so, what with one thing and another, Milly was distinctly relieved to find on this particular morning, that it was to be a library morning. Mrs Graham was on the telephone telling someone all about it when Milly arrived (she had her own key to the flat now, as she had to the homes of all her employers: lucky, really, that her crimes had been what they were, and did not include burglary). As she came into the flat, she heard Mrs Graham’s voice, loud and clear, from the sitting-room:
“I shan’t be back till one,” she was saying. “But my woman will be here. She’ll let you in, and then you can pick up the lot. And the yellow wool as well, if you like, I don’t ever wear it. No, really: it’s only cluttering up the wardrobe. As a matter of fact, I’d thought of giving the whole lot to my woman, but you know what they are these days. I daren’t risk offending her!”
How do you make a noise like not being offended? Outside the door, Milly was wringing her hands. A yellow wool dress, and who knew what else besides, all going to waste to someone down a telephone! She thought forlornly about the endless drip-drying of her only garments in front of the coin-devouring monster of a gas-fire: she thought of Mrs Mumford’s ever more speculative eyes watching her as she set off to work in the same outfit every morning: any day now, she would be prowling round Milly’s room, drawing her own conclusions from the empty drawers, and from the locked, feather-light suitcase with its absurd labels.
But what could Milly do? Rush into the room crying “No offence! No offence!”? Or simply “I want them!”, like a spoilt toddler? Or how about: “My other lady always used to give me her old dresses”? When you came to think of it, there was no reason why “My Other Lady” should not be built up into just as powerful a folk-image as “My Other Woman”.
But while Milly was still debating her unusual social dilemma, the “ping” of the phone told her that her chance was over: and now here was Mrs Graham out in the hall, and telling Milly all about this Mrs Innes, and how she would arrive at midday, and must be persuaded, somehow, to take the lot.
“She’s getting fat, that’s the trouble,” Mrs Graham confided. “It’s compensatory eating, I keep telling her, but she won’t do anything about it, and now she’s going to start complaining, saying everything’s too small….”
By this time, they had reached the bedroom, and Milly’s shoulders under her thin blouse fairly shivered with longing when she saw the pile of woollen garments on the bed. Wool dresses … cardigans … all near enough the right size!
“Get her to take them all, won’t you, Mrs Er?” her employer was urging. “Don’t let her pick them about … she’ll have this … she won’t have that … all that sort of nonsense! Oh dear, it’s so difficult getting rid of things these days, isn’t it, Mrs Er?”
Since this was not really a problem for Milly, now or in the foreseeable future, she made no answer. Besides, her mind was already full of scheming … If only this Mrs Innes could have grown as fat as fat, and fussy with it!
“If you really can’t get rid of them—” she opened the subject cautiously, improvising as she went along. “I mean, if you want just to give them away, then I wonder if the Bring-and-Buy sale at our Church—they have one every,” (here she did a quick calculation)“—every third Saturday in the month, and I’ve been asked—”
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.