AFTER THAT EVENING, Gilbert’s deterioration was swift and terrible. It seemed to Milly that there was something almost purposeful about the way he forged onward towards the abyss, as though nothing and no one should stop him. He seemed, at times, to be seeking the Dark Night of the soul with an intensity and passion that other men have devoted to the search for gold.
She knew by now, of course, that he was ill; and when her belated resort to the local doctor produced nothing helpful, she tried to calm her growing panic by telling herself that it was an illness, like any other illness.
But it wasn’t like any other illness; that was the trouble. And then there was always the feeling—inescapable for the trapped onlooker—that the patient has somehow chosen to be ill in just that way rather than in any other: that if he had been a nice kind person to start with, he would have gone mad in some nice kind way….
Maybe there is some grain of truth in this: Milly had no means of knowing, as she had been acquainted with her husband for less than a year, and had anyway devoted precious little of her time so far to trying to understand him. Now, when it was too late, she did try to make some sort of contact with his disintegrating mind, if only for her own safety: but by now such efforts were futile.
It was the day after her abortive attempt at escape that Gilbert nailed up the area door; and that same evening he fixed bolts on the dining-room door, inside and outside. Now, when Milly wanted to go shopping, she had to go up the dark basement stairs to the ground floor, and wrestle with the bolts and chains and double locks on the ancient, peeling front door. Often, as she struggled, Mrs Roach, who inhabited that floor, would hear the groaning and the grinding of the rusty metal, and would shuffle in her slippers out of her fusty bed-sitting-room, and stand watching, almost like Gilbert himself. Milly knew that Mrs Roach disapproved of her—she would hardly even exchange a “good morning” on most days—and this made her nervous and clumsy: it was sometimes five minutes before she finally got the creaking old door open on to the blessed light of day.
But soon even these brief excursions came to an end. Gilbert had taken recently to coming up the basement stairs with her, and taking his stand in the doorway to watch her as she set off down the street. When she came back she would often find him still standing there, watch in hand, and if she had been longer than half an hour or so he would sometimes be actually trembling, with a terrible, silent rage.
Half an hour. Then twenty minutes was all he would stand for: and then ten; and presently there came the time when he forbade her to go shopping at all. He had arranged for Mrs Roach to do it, he informed her, coldly, since she, his wife, was not to be trusted. Thereafter their diet was restricted mainly to things that could be bought at the poky little corner shop—sliced bread and tins of things mostly—since Mrs Roach was reluctant to drag her bloated body further than this, even for generous pay. Soon the milk was tinned too, for Gilbert would no longer allow the milkman to call, insisting that Milly left messages for him hidden among the empty bottles.
And now the time came when Gilbert would no longer open the window shutters at all, for fear “They” would look in. The era of the long night had arrived: and now that it was here, Milly realised that she had been waiting for it for a very long time. She seemed to have known, all along, that this was how it would all end.
End? It was only December even now: and the strange thing was that no sooner had Gilbert achieved the timeless, unbroken night towards which he had been so quietly and purposefully moving all these weeks, than he became passionately, obsessionally preoccupied with the passing of time. A hundred times a day he would ask Milly what the time was, drawing out his watch to check on her answer: comparing his watch with the clock in the kitchen: checking and counter-checking.
Sometimes he would scream at Milly that she was deceiving him, telling him the wrong time on purpose. She would be bringing the lunch in, say, at one o’clock, and he would suddenly heave himself round in his great chair to scold and storm, confronting her with his heavy gold watch with its hands pointing to three, or four or even five…. No matter how closely she tried to watch, Milly never seemed to catch him tinkering with it; and so presently, in the weird, darkening world that was closing in on her, she began to feel that the watch itself might have become malignantly alive, in league with its master to put her in the wrong.
*
And now his time sense began to swing like a great pendulum in the dark, gathering momentum. Sometimes he would call for his supper thinking that night had fallen when in fact the bright, frosty day beyond the shutters was only just beginning. At other times—and these were the most terrible of all—he would think that night was day, and would come creeping into his wife’s room at dead of night to find out why she was asleep. She would wake, then, from strange uneasy dreams, to find him shuffling around her room, softly opening drawers, peering into boxes, fumbling about among her clothes and other possessions with his old fingers.
The first time this happened, she had called out to him, in spontaneous terror:
“Gilbert! What is it? What are you doing?”—but she had never done so again. So strange had been the look in his shining eyes as he strode swiftly to the bed and leaned over her: and so strange had been the things he’d said:
“Why, my dear, I just wondered if you were ill?” he began, softly. “It seems so strange of you to be lying here, at past midday! It’s nearly time for lunch! Aren’t you going to cook me any lunch?”
This first time, Milly had argued, and shown him her watch in some indignation: and at last, in reckless determination to prove herself right, she had wrenched open the window shutter and shown him the moonlight filtering down, grey and silent, from the deserted street above.
At first, she thought it was a tom-cat setting up his caterwauling, very suddenly, from the silent area steps. Then she realised that it was Gilbert screaming. He wrenched the shutter from her hand, and slammed it shut, shooting the bolt home, and slotting in the great metal catch.
“So this is how they get in!” he jabbered, his voice cracked and shrill with fury. “This is how I am being betrayed! In my own house …! By my own wife …!”
Less than five minutes later, Milly was only too willing to agree humbly that it was lunch time. That she had overslept. That she was sorry. Anything…. Anything at all. And thus it came about that, in the small hours of that December night, she had cooked him one of his beloved curries, rice and all, and had served it with a trembling smile, carefully referring to it, in a small, shaking voice, as “lunch”.
After this, she had pretended to be asleep, always, when she heard the nightly roamings beginning. Sometimes she would watch, through barely opened lids, as he peered and poked among her belongings, his white hair gleaming and bobbing in the faint light through the open door. At others, she kept her eyes tight closed, listening, willing the soft rustlings to cease, that she might know he had gone away.
And sometimes he had: and then that would be the end of the night’s terror: but more often than not he would end by rousing her, and insisting that it was lunch-time. After that first night, Milly never argued again. She got up and cooked his curry, or whatever he might fancy, immediately.
There was something strangely inert, she sometimes felt, about the way she allowed herself to be thus carried along with his insane delusions, and sometimes she was puzzled by it. Fear of him did not seem to be quite the whole explanation, for even her fear, now, was beginning to have a strange passive quality about it, as if she was no longer a real, autonomous being with a real life to be lost or saved. Wherever it was that Gilbert was going, she knew now that he was beginning to drag her with him: already she could feel the tug and pull of it. Before long, as the black storms rose higher in his disintegrating mind, she, too, was going to lose her footing and be sucked along, irrelevant as a spinning twig, towards the darkness where his spirit boiled and churned….
*
It was towards the end of December when Gilbert began to imagine that Milly was trying to poison him: and at first Milly did not take in the significance of the new symptoms. She noticed a slight tightening-up of his surveillance of her activities in the kitchen, she was never alone there at all now, for even a minute. But this was a difference in degree, not in kind, and anyway she was beginning to be used to it now. As she bustled from cooker to sink, she took it for granted now that out of the corner of her eye she would be aware of the tall, waiting figure in the doorway, just as she would be aware of the roller towel hanging white and motionless in its usual place. In some ways, it was less disturbing than it used to be, because he did not pad around helping any more. Instead, he just watched—or sometimes, as it seemed to her, listened. This puzzled her at first: and then one day, she stopped and listened too. She became aware, as he had been aware all along, of the faint, endless tap-tapping of footsteps on the pavement far above. Tap-tap-tap, they went: or tappity-tap-tap-tap … and suddenly she knew, in sick terror, that she must never stop and listen like this again. For she had heard the sounds, just for one telepathic second, through Gilbert’s ears, and—just fancy! —they were in code, tapping out messages! So that was why he never took his eyes off her—he was watching for the moment when she would begin to understand, and to tap messages back! How terrifyingly easy it would be! —three cups placed in quick succession on the draining-board—tap-tap-tap … or the wooden spoon knocking too rhythmically against the side of the pan—trr—trr—trr—as she stirred! After this, she carefully blurred and muddled the sounds she couldn’t help making, and hummed noisily as she worked.
Perhaps it was not surprising if, after all this, she should have taken little note of the fact that Gilbert was gradually becoming more and more fussy over his food. Such a trifle it seemed, in comparison with all the other problems. It was an odd kind of fussiness, though, and seemed to have little to do with the quality of Milly’s cooking—she had, in fact, long since learned how to please her husband (in this department at least) by producing highly spiced, highly flavoured dishes, hot with pimentoes, and peppers, and green chiles. He didn’t seem to mind much about the basic ingredients, and thus had noticed no deterioration in the menu since Milly had been limited to the tins and packets of stuff that were all Mrs Roach could be bothered to buy. No, he still liked his food, and ate it with appetite: but he had developed an annoying habit—that’s all it seemed to Milly at first—of changing plates with his wife just as the meal was about to begin. Just as she had it all served out, and was already picking up her own knife and fork, he would lean across and slide her plate away from under her very hand, and deftly substitute his own. Usually he would murmur, deprecatingly, some sort of explanation—“You must have the bigger one, dear, I’m not very hungry today”: or “Do you mind—I’d rather have the one without so much rice.” Sometimes one or both of them might already have started when the long, gnarled fingers slid across the table and closed upon her plate. She never protested, even though she often found it impossible to eat the food thus exchanged. The thought of his fork having touched it, straight from those old lips, turned her stomach. And so there she would sit, pushing the food around her plate, and trying to look as if she was eating. And when she glanced up now and then, and noticed him watching her, his features narrowed with cunning, she did not understand the significance of what she saw.
*
She had been noticing a peculiar unpleasant smell in the dining-room for some days now: and one evening, early in the New Year, she siezed her chance to investigate. Gilbert was for once out of the room for a few minutes, as Mrs Roach had just come down with the week’s shopping, and he was busy in the scullery examining the purchases and putting them away. This was a task he would no longer trust to his wife: and Milly calculated that it would be some minutes before he returned. She knew his slow movements, and the punctilious thoroughness with which he would examine every package: she could hear the low mumbling of his voice even from this distance, as he checked and re-checked each item against the list. Swiftly, she pushed the heavy dining-room door almost shut, and made for the corner of the room from which she was sure the smell emanated. The corner behind Gilbert’s great leather chair…. Somewhere among those ancient leather-bound books…. Behind them, perhaps, right at the back of the shelves….
*
What she had expected to find, she did not know. When she pulled out the first matchbox, full of old boiled rice, she simply felt that there had been some sort of a mistake. It just didn’t mean anything. But when she found the next one, with dried remains of scrambled egg in it … and then the one full of mince that had gone green … and the one oozing with decaying stew … then, indeed, she knew that she had crossed the border into madland, and that there might be no return … and now here was the king of madland himself, come back into his own … leaning over her, blotting out the last of the light. Darkness blazed from him as from a black sun, and she prostrated herself before it in gibbering, slavish terror. The time of the blackness was come, the black dawn was breaking and there would be no more day. The shrieks and howls from the bottomless pit were already loud in her ears, they came from Gilbert’s lips … and now she began to feel her sanity itself twisting from her grasp. He was upon her … his bony fingers danced like lace … he was screaming like a madman—because, of course, he was a madman: and at this thought, strangely, her mind snapped back, like good quality elastic, and she was sane again.
*
He had not killed her, nor even injured her in any way. She could feel no pain anywhere. He must, at some point, have hauled her to her feet from behind the chair, because here she was, standing, with his hands gripping her shoulders, while he howled and shrieked with fear, right into her face.
Fear. This was the first time she had ever observed that fear was what racked and tore him, a degree of fear beyond the comprehension of the sane. And even now, the fact hardly registered. So great was her own terror that she could not even understand his words, let alone the nature of the passion that lay behind them.
Presently, it all seemed to have been going on for hours, her standing there, and his voice streaming into her face. She found she was taking in the gist of it: how she had been putting poison in his food for a long time now; but he had foiled her—ha ha, how he had foiled her! —by changing round the plates each time! Did she think he hadn’t noticed the way she always refused to eat her helping after they had been changed?
Milly listened almost with interest. And sometimes, Gilbert himself seemed quite to forget that his listener was also the arch-villain of his fantasy, and spoke as if she was a sympathetic outsider, to whom he was confiding his wrongs. He explained how he had been collecting these samples from his wife’s uneaten platefuls to send off for analysis: and how the analysis would prove that she had been stealing his sleeping-pills and crushing them up into his food. He had noticed, he confided, that his hidden store of sleeping pills, which he had had by him for years, was diminishing, and he knew his wife had been stealing them, but he could not find where she hid them. He had searched her drawers and cupboards over and over again…. She was very cunning … that was why they had chosen her for the job, because she was so cunning….
*
Barely an hour later, Gilbert was in his usual chair, with the newspaper held in front of his face, as if nothing had happened. Everything was as usual again, except for one small detail: he would not have the light on any more. In the darkness, Milly could hear the twitchings of the paper, and the familiar rustlings, as he turned the pages, and folded them this way and that as if to make them more convenient to read.
*
He never mentioned the poisoning again. Indeed, there were not many more days, now, for him to mention anything. Already it was the fifth of January.
He seemed to have forgotten his suspicions. He ate the meals Milly gave him, and dozed, and seemed disturbed by nothing, except the light. He hated to have any lights on now. Even his own green lamp he would only switch on now and then, for meals, or to check on the time: and when it was borne in upon him that without a light Milly simply could not cook his meals, he fumbled among his belongings and found her a torch. And thereafter, groping and fumbling, to all appearances as mad as he, Milly produced her meals by torchlight, humbly thankful for this insane concession which spared her total darkness. She knew, and somehow did not mind, that her behaviour had gone beyond humouring him, and that she had become a madman’s puppet, battered by terror into a subservience that was close to idiocy.
That way, a ghastly, twilight peace was brought into being: and by giving in to all his mad whims, by following at heel, like an obedient dog, down the twisting path that led to the black caverns of the insane, she managed to maintain this peace, precariously, for four whole days.
And then, on the fifth day, it all began again. For the first time in several successive nights, Gilbert once again roused his wife in the small hours, and demanded lunch. As he flashed the torch into her dazed eyes, and shook her by the shoulder, he seemed strangely eager and alert, like a child bursting with some wonderful surprise that he has been forbidden to tell. Milly had only once before seen his eyes as bright as this, and their strange, silvery brilliance sent a chill through her, like the touch of the finger of death.
Worn out with terror and despair, Milly staggered from her bed at his bidding, threw on some clothes, and stumbled across to the kitchen. And as she stood at the cooker, numb with hopelessness, stirring curry powder and turmeric into the mess of tinned mince and dehydrated vegetables, it came to her, quite suddenly, and with a strange, quiet certainty, that she would never be doing this again.
The feeling faded as quickly as it came, but it left her with a curious sense of power, of being in control of what was going to happen, whatever it might be. And so when she saw that Gilbert was back at his old tricks again—changing the plates round when he thought her back was turned—she almost laughed. She felt that it would be fun—yes, fun! —to jerk him out of his idiotic suspicions. By placidly eating the helping he had allotted to her, she would make him see, once and for all, that he was mistaken, and it couldn’t have been poisoned.
It was horrible. It made her feel sick and awful at this hour in the morning, but she was determined to go through with it. But she had barely had a couple of mouthfuls, when Gilbert’s gnarled hand, green in the lamplight, flashed like a snake across the white tablecloth.
“You’ve changed them back!” he hissed between his teeth. “You’ve changed the plates back while I wasn’t looking!”—and before she had time to protest, the plates were once more changed round, and she now had in front of her the plate from which Gilbert had already begun eating.
So. She had made him see his mistake, all right, but the mistake he saw was one which fitted nicely with his picture of the situation, not with hers. Within his system of thought, a wife who could double-cross him by magically re-changing plates under his very eyes, was far more credible than one who merely wasn’t trying to poison him at all.
Triumphant, full of sly glee at the thought of having outwitted her, Gilbert fell to, smacking his lips, and plying his fork greedily. Milly did not try to protest, or to point out that she couldn’t have changed the plates back, even if she had wanted to, since he had been watching all the time. She didn’t even try to make any further show of eating what he had so gleefully placed before her. It wouldn’t do any good. His delusion was complete now, perfected by months of skilful toil. It was unassailable now by the assaults of reality in any form.
So she just sat, quietly, her hands in her lap, waiting for what she knew was coming.
“Not feeling well, my dear?”
Gilbert’s voice, gentle and solicitous as always on these occasions, came to her across the dimly illumined table. “Don’t you like this delicious curry, that you made yourself?”
She could not see the sly sarcasm in his eyes, for they were downcast to his plate, from which he was still eating hungrily. But she saw the vulpine look come into his face, and the champing jaws. She watched the familiar narrowing of his features, as suspicion worked inside him like yeast.
Familiar? Well, of course it was, after all these months. But what was not so familiar was the way his face not only narrowed, but then swelled out like a balloon … and then narrowed again … out, in … out, in … for all the world as if his skull was breathing, instead of his lungs! For a moment—so accustomed was she by now to helplessly confronting new and terrifying symptoms—she found herself accepting it, raking among her half-forgotten nursing expertise for the significance of a breathing skull. It meant that the brain was breathing too, of course. Breathing-brain, or cerebropulmonosis, was one of the early symptoms of … and at this point she noticed, dimly, that her thoughts had become nonsense. She was half-dreaming, on the edge of sleep, right there as she sat. And now—what do you know?—her skull was breathing too, in, out, in, out, just like his, swelling as if it would explode. And it was then that she knew, without any doubt at all, that she was drugged.
The curry. Gilbert, in his madness, had imagined that it was poisoned, and it was! He had fancied, in his deluded state, that sleeping pills were crushed into the plateful she had given him, and they were! And in heavy dosage too, for she had only had a couple of mouthfuls before he had changed the plates round all over again. Everything had been done in exact accordance with his mad fantasy—but by whom?
Strangely, with her brain pulsating like a dynamo, and already awash with sleep, she was able to understand it all more clearly than she was ever to do again. It was Gilbert who had done it, naturally. In this moment of drugged dizziness, she could follow his train of thought with perfect ease. What is the most certain way of proving that your wife is trying to poison you? Why, by actually discovering poison in the food she serves to you, of course! And what is the most certain way of actually discovering poison in the food she serves you? Why, by putting it there, of course! The simple, unassailable logic of it struck her as forcibly as it must, a little earlier, have struck him.
Too clever by half, though: that was his trouble! It was going to be funny when he found out how he had double-crossed himself, changing the plates round a second time, as soon as he saw her beginning to eat her share! He’d landed up with the poisoned one himself! She giggled weakly, wondering how soon he would find out, and what he would say.
Wait, though. He wouldn’t say anything, because by the time he found out he would be dead. That took the edge off the joke, rather. Still, it would be quite funny, all the same. She watched, fascinated, while a bit of rice dribbled down his chin and on to his tie, as it sometimes did when he was over-eager about his food. This time, she wasn’t even disgusted. It was almost interesting, to watch it happening for the very last time.
*
He had laid down his fork. He was staring, first at her plate, and then at his own, as though trying to work out what had happened. Milly watched his puzzlement in a detached sort of way, as if he was already dead, as if it was already no concern of hers. She watched his face grow pinched and grey as some new and monstrous suspicion began to work inside him like a digestive juice, breaking down data from the outside world and re-constituting it into the special kind of nourishment needed by his fantasy. She watched his eyes narrow, and knew herself to be watching, as if it was a physical process, the building of the new suspicion into the old. She could see him joining, dove-tailing, filling in the cracks, until the job was perfect: and then, and only then, did he speak:
“You’re lying!” he said to her, very softly, and leaning towards her across the table, intimate as a lover in the dim light. “You’ve lied to me all the time! You’ve pretended to put poison in my food to frighten me! You thought it would frighten me into letting that precious doctor come! You knew he was after me. You knew he was in league with them, he’s been trying for years to worm this way into my house, only I’ve been too clever for him! And now you, my own wife, thought you’d trick me into letting him in by telling me I’d been poisoned! Didn’t you? Now, don’t lie to me, my dear, it is no use at all, I can see into your mind. I’ve seen into it all the time! Do you think I haven’t seen you slinking off to his surgery, when you’d sworn to me you were only going shopping? Do you think I haven’t watched, and waited, and timed you, and found out just how long you spent in there plotting against me? I have a record of it, I’ve kept a record … and of the phone calls, too. Did you think I didn’t know what you were up to, sneaking off to the phone box, and betraying my whereabouts to him … promising to let him in when he came to get me…. You, my wife, betraying me….”
Gilbert’s slow rising from his chair was like a snake uncoiling. Never taking his eyes from his wife’s face, he worked his way round the table towards her, holding on to the edge of it with one hand, and feeling for his keys in the depths of his trouser pocket with the other.
Was the drug beginning to take effect at last? He must have had ten—twenty—times the dose that she’d had. When he spoke, his voice was still firm, but strangely monotonous:
“You thought you’d tricked me, didn’t you? You thought I was fool enough to believe that you really had given me poison! What sort of a fool do you take me for? Do you think I couldn’t see right into your evil, treacherous mind, right from the very beginning? I knew what you were up to—of course I did!” Here the strange and terrible laughter began: it rocked him, silently, from deep within, until he had to clutch at the back of her chair for support. As he stood thus, half leaning over her, his next words seemed to hiss down into her ears like wind.
“That is the last trick you will ever play, my dear. What I am going to do to you now will make it quite, quite certain that you will never be able to play any more tricks, ever again. But first, we must fix the door. We must fix it so that no one will go in or out any more. There will be no need. After this, there will be no need….”
Snatching the keys from his hand was surprisingly easy. So was the push she gave him, which sent him staggering backwards, right across the room, and before she could know where or how he had fallen, she was gone. Outside the door … locking and double-locking it, and shooting home the great bolts that Gilbert had fixed there only a few weeks ago. From inside, she could hear a floundering, thumping sound, but by the time she dashed past the door again, with coat and handbag, it had ceased. She fancied she could hear another sound now, fainter and much more sinister: a scratching noise, a small scrape of metal, as if he was fiddling, somehow, with the lock …
The next thing Milly knew, she was in the street, running, running, through the icy January dark: and although she knew it could not be true—for had she not locked the door, fixed the great bolts, and hurled the keys, the only set of keys, far away into the night?—even though she knew all this, every nerve in her body, every cell of her racing blood, told her that Gilbert was already on her track. Why wasn’t he dead? Or in a drugged coma at least? What was the strange strength of his madness, that could fight off the onslaughts of such a dose? Let him die! —let him die quickly she prayed, as she raced along. Let him die before he can get the door undone … before he can somehow break down the bolts … master the lock …! The sound of her own footsteps echoing in the empty streets seemed to have multiplied, until now it seemed that there were footsteps everywhere, racing as she was racing through the winter blackness that was not yet morning. A race, a race to the finish, between her, and Gilbert, and Death. The three of them, strung out along the dark streets, with her (so far) in the lead; then Gilbert, gaining on her relentlessly with his long, stiff stride, the lamp posts spinning away behind him; and lastly Death, pounding along in the rear, the icy air of the January dawn whistling through the sockets of his eyes.
*
It was only after she had been travelling round on the tube for quite a while that Milly’s heart began to slow down, and she gradually took in that she was safe. Gilbert must be dead by now, or so deep in coma that nothing would ever rouse him. And it was not until later still that the implications of this began, gradually, to force themselves upon her slowly clearing consciousness. When they found him—when the police came to investigate—they would find the door locked and bolted on the outside: they would learn the cause of death, and that the dead man’s wife had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. In the face of all this evidence, how could she ever convince them that she hadn’t murdered him?
She had, of course. That was the trouble.
By sitting watching while he ate the drugged meal: by locking him in the room so that he could not go for help: by taking no steps herself to inform doctor or police: by all these omissions and commissions, she had killed her husband as surely as if she had done it with her bare hands.