Make Death Love Me (31 page)

She made a cup of tea and washed the teacup and tidied the kitchen again. The phone rang, but it was a wrong number. At seven she read the note again. Paul's handwriting wasn't very clear and that five could be an eight. Suppose he had thought the train went at eight-thirty, not five-thirty? He had been so preoccupied and strange these past few days that he might have thought that. Una combed her hair and put on her raincoat, and this time she took a taxi, not a bus, to Paddington. Paul wasn't there.

Although there was a later train, she took her case out of the left-luggage locker where she had left it at five-thirty, because she felt that to do so was to yield to, not tempt, Providence. The curious ways of Providence were such that if you bought an umbrella you got a heatwave for a month, and if you lugged a load of luggage from a station to your home, you were bound to have to take it back again. This thought cheered her, and by the time the taxi was taking her back through the stair-rod rain in the Bayswater Road she had convinced herself that Paul would be waiting for her in Montcalm Gardens with a long story of some tiresome happening that had held him up.

Her first real fear came when she got in and he wasn't there. She went down into the basement and found the bottles he had left outside Caesar's door with a note to Caesar to have them. Caesar hadn't come home, he had gone straight to Annie's. Una poured herself some brandy. It nearly knocked her over because she hadn't eaten since one. They had planned to eat dinner on the train. She tried to obey Ambrose's injunction not to think of imaginary disasters, and told herself that no one gets mugged in the afternoon or falls under trains unless they want to or has a car crash if they don't have a car.

But then her own experience of life showed her what could have happened. Neo-Empiricism, applied by her, showed her what men sometimes did and where men sometimes went after they had left notes and gone out alone. She pushed the thought away. He would phone, and then he would come. She took a piece of cheese out of the fridge and cut a slice off the new loaf she had bought for Ambrose. She tried to eat and she succeeded, but it was like chewing sawdust and then chewing the cud.

At ten she was in his empty room, looking at the tallboy in which there had been papers or letters or photographs he hadn't wanted her to see. It frightened her now that he had left his keys, though what more natural than that he should leave them?

While she had been out that afternoon he must have had a phone call. She knew who would have phoned, perhaps the only person to whom he had given this number. Hadn't she phoned once before to make an appointment? Since that appointment, that visit, Paul had been a changed man. Una went upstairs and sat in the immaculate exquisite drawing room. She picked up the phone to see if it was out of order, but the dialling tone grated at her. Stewart's letter was up on the mantelpiece. She had left it there for Ambrose to read. Now she read it again herself, the bit about hoping she would be happy with her new man.

For a while she sat there, listening to the rain that beat steadily against the windows and thinking that it was a long time since it had rained like that, a month surely. A month ago she hadn't even known Paul. She got out the phone directory. His name on the page made her shiver. Browning, Paul R. 15 Exmoor Gardens, NW2. She looked hard at his name on the page and touched the phone and paced the length of the room and back again. Then, quickly, she dialled the number. It rang, three times, four times. Just as she thought no one was going to answer, the ringing stopped and a woman's voice said:

‘Hallo. Alison Browning.'

‘Is Mr Paul Browning there, please?'

‘Who is that speaking?'

She had been told, hadn't she? It wouldn't be a revelation. And yet . . . ‘I'm a friend of his. Is he there?'

‘My husband is in bed, asleep. Do you know what time it is?'

Una put the receiver back. For a while she lay on the floor. Then she went upstairs and got into bed in the room where she hadn't slept for three weeks. Three weeks was no time, nothing, a nice period for an adventure or an interlude. It is anxiety, not sorrow, which banishes sleep, and at last Una slept.

She had never had a newspaper delivered since Ambrose went. Not since Christmas had she heard the sound the thick wad of newsprint made, flopping through the letter box on to the mat. Any sound from the front door would last night have made hope spring, but no longer.

Una went downstairs and picked up the paper. The headlines said,
Joyce Alive
and
Bank Girl Recovers in Hospital
, and there was a big photograph of a girl on a stretcher. But it was the other photograph, of a man in a garden with a woman and an older man, which caught Una's eye because the man looked a little like Paul. But any man, she thought, with wistful eyes and a gentle mouth, would remind her of Paul. It was bound to happen. She went into the drawing room and read the paper to pass the time.

Una read the rest of it, turned the page, waiting for Ambrose to come.