Appointment with Yesterday (18 page)

Milly finished the last of the ornate Victorian cakestands, pushing her cloth in and out of the now-shining scrolls and curlicues, and realised, with a shock, that it was already nearly five. No time for the bathrooms now: even the hall and stairs would have to be skimped. Oh, well; that’s what came of possessing two bathrooms
and
a lot of valuable silver: you couldn’t expect to have all of them clean at once. She’d give the bathrooms a real good do, Milly promised herself, next time she came.

Next time? When she got home that night, she found Jacko sitting on the stairs, waiting for her.

“Thank God!” he greeted her dramatically. “We thought you were never coming!”

A man, it seemed, had called to see her that afternoon. No, he hadn’t said what it was about—just that he wanted to make some enquiries. Sort of po-faced he’d been, like he might be from the Town Hall: Jacko hadn’t liked the look of him at all.

T
HE POLICE
! I
N
that instant of certainty, it was not fear that engulfed Milly’s consciousness, but fury—speechless, impotent, fury.

After all this time! Just when I’ve really put it all behind me! Just when I’ve discovered that I don’t even feel guilty! Just when it’s all properly over, and my new life has really got going! It’s not fair! It’s not fair!

“… but it’s all right,” Jacko was saying—and his voice, which had seemed infinitely far away, suddenly snapped near again, and hope twanged back. “It’s all right, Barney! I told him you didn’t live here! I told him we’d never heard of you!”

He looked so pleased with himself: Milly felt the shock subsiding. Surely, if it had been the police, they wouldn’t just have accepted the word of a long-haired student, and gone meekly away? Come to that, how had Jacko guessed …?

“Jacko, that was sweet of you: but how could you know that I didn’t want to see him?” she asked, warily. She tried to remember which of her life-stories it was that she had told to Jacko and Kevin: not one that included being on the run from the police, that was certain.

“Well—‘enquiries’, of course,” explained Jacko
knowledgeably
. “It’s just another word for ‘trouble’, everyone knows that. I mean, they aren’t going to be enquiring whether you want five thousand pounds, gift-wrapped, for your birthday, are they? Besides, it wasn’t just you, Barney: it was the Mums I was worrying about. She can’t bear tenants who attract officials to the house, it’s like if they brought in lice, or leprosy. And you can’t blame her, really …” here he lowered his voice, and his eyes took on a nostalgic, faraway look, as of battles long ago: “Like the time Miss Childe got a man in to look at why her food cupboard wouldn’t shut properly, and it all ended in a van-load of inspectors swarming in to measure whether there was sixteen cubic feet of space in the downstairs loo … the Mums never got over it. So you see, Barney, we must keep him away from the house at all costs—or else pretend that he’s your long-lost
brother, and even that not after 11 pm. But not to worry—” here Jacko got to his feet, and squared his rumpled shoulders proudly—“I’ll look after you, Barney. If that creep comes back, I’ll see that he gets what’s coming to him!—I say—” the knight-errantry faltered a bit as they set off up the stairs towards Milly’s room, “You don’t mind do you? I thought I’d better stay in your room for the evening in case anything happens, so I’ve moved some of my things in.”

He had, too. The hi-fi set—the tape-recorder—a pair of shiny boots—half a dozen books on economics lying open on the chairs and on the bed. Milly looked around doubtfully, wondering if she wanted protection on quite this scale.

“No, I suppose I don’t mind,” she said. “It’ll save gas, anyway.” This was magnanimous, because it was most decidedly not
her
gas that was being saved: a fug like this could not possibly have been built up by less than three of her precious shillings from the saucer on the mantelpiece. “Is Kevin coming in too?” she added, mentally dividing her bread, milk, and tin of Scotch broth into three, and adding a third of a banana each.

“No, well. That’s the thing, actually.” Seeing him now clearly, under the glare of the bare electric light bulb, Milly noticed for the first time that he looked pale and tense: the jaunty manner sat uneasily on him, as though Jacko was finding the part of Jacko suddenly rather a strain.

“What’s happened?” she asked: and suddenly it all came out. Nothing to do with the Town Hall man at all—he had evidently been a mere incident in Jacko’s harrowing afternoon, no more than a convenient excuse for button-holing Milly the moment she came in. No, his real preoccupation was quite other than this, and centred (so Milly at last gathered from his circumlocutory narrative) on the presence—yes, she was still there—of a certain Janette in Kevin’s and Jacko’s joint
bedroom
. She had, it seemed, been closeted there with Kevin for “hours and hours”, while Jacko had had to camp out like a refugee in Milly’s room, with nothing to do but write his essay on Statistical Method (which anyway didn’t have to be in till
next week, and so it was a cock-eyed waste of time working on it now), and to brood on what was going on behind the
forbidden
door. It was lucky, he conceded in a choked voice, that there happened to be all those spare shillings in the saucer or he would have frozen to death, on top of everything else.

Milly had heard of this Janette before. She was the shadowy, amorphous girl-friend who always seemed to have come yesterday, or to be coming tomorrow, but was never here today. When Jacko or Kevin mentioned her, which was not often, they spoke of her with a sort of off-hand resignation as if she was a neighbour’s cat for which they felt a vague responsibility: and now here was Kevin triumphantly locked in the bedroom with her, and Jacko, white and near to tears, locked outside it.

“There hasn’t been a sound since teatime,” he gulped. “They must be…. They’re….”

Kid’s stuff, Milly remembered: and now here was the jaded veteran of a thousand sexual encounters not even daring to pronounce the correct words.

She consoled him as best she could. Yes, she had to agree, they probably
were,
but so what? This Janette, she wasn’t specially
J
acko’
s
girl-friend, was she? No, no, of
course
she wasn’t! Nor Kevin’s either! That was the whole
point,
didn’t Milly see? It wasn’t
serious,
they’d
agreed
it wasn’t serious, and now … and now …!

It wasn’t that it was boring: far from it: but Milly was getting hungrier and hungrier, and flattered though she was by being chosen as Jacko’s confidante, she found herself watching, with increasing fervour, for some gap in the jeremiad into which it wouldn’t be too heartless to insert a suggestion about opening the tin of soup. In the end she got her way by roundabout means: by first getting Jacko to put some sad music on the record-player, then something a bit less sad, and by the time a loud pop song was drumming through the room, and Mrs Mumford had yelled up to them to turn that noise down, the mention of food no longer seemed blasphemous. It was just then, as it happened, that Kevin and Janette reappeared,
very cheerful and friendly, with a bottle of cider and a packet of frozen kippers. With these substantial supplements to Milly’s tin of soup, there was plenty for everyone, and even Jacko began to cheer up. Soon, Mrs Mumford was yelling up the stairs a second time. She expected
some
consideration, she shrieked, and did they know what the time was? The third time, she didn’t yell, but stamped up with a tray of tea and freshly-baked mince-pies, and demanded that a waltz be put on the record-player. If they were determined to shake the house to pieces with their great elephant feet, she scolded, they might at least do it dancing something that
was
a dance. What, they didn’t know
how
to waltz?—she’d show them, if it was the last thing she did! And though it
wasn’t
the last thing she did, not by a very long way, she
did
show them; and they showed her how to gyrate to
their
rhythms, and by the end of the evening Milly was finding it incredible that anyone could ever want to make Enquiries about anything. Life is so simple, if only you don’t make Enquiries about it, and if the Town Hall man had turned up then and there, Milly would have told him.

He didn’t, though: nor was there a summons for her in the post next morning, nor a policeman waiting outside Mrs Graham’s flat to arrest her as she went in. And though Mrs Graham’s phone went several times during the morning, it was never for Milly. Through the wall, she could hear Mrs Graham’s voice, bored and irritable, exactly as if it was her husband each time, but of course it couldn’t have been.

Only when she arrived at Mrs Day’s that afternoon did something happen which forced Milly to think again about her unknown visitor of last night. As usual, there was a note waiting for her, in Mrs Day’s wild writing, but this time it wasn’t about the
strrt
grr,
nor about rinsing the
hwrf
grool
in three lots of cold water: it was a telephone message. A Mr
Loops,
it seemed, had
phouled
asking for Mrs Baines, he wanted to get in touch with her
ooplardy,
and would
phoul
again this
umpternoon.

He wouldn’t, though. Milly made sure of
that
by taking the receiver off. Then she set about her work with unusual speed
and concentration. No reading today; no lounging about on sofas, or speculating on why there should be a scarlet
dog-harness
on top of the deep-freeze, and no dog. Mrs Day’s new flower-patterned tights, slit neatly open all down one leg, left her incurious. She just wanted to get finished, to get out of the place. Even though the telephone was effectively silenced, she still felt uncomfortable every time she caught sight of it. She pictured Mr
Loops
(or was it
Soap,
or
Reeves
?)
fiddling about right now, at the other end of the wire, dialling and re-dialling, calling the operator … It seemed to bring him horribly near.

She finished her work much earlier than usual, while it was still just light, and as she hurried home through the damp, gusty twilight, her nerves were all on edge, as if she knew, already, the news that she was going to hear.

Yes, the man had been here again; and this time he had not been so easily put off. He had attempted to start an argument about Milly’s non-existence, and Jacko had only managed to get rid of him by pretending that he, Jacko, was in a fearful hurry, already late for a lecture. At this, the man had given up—but not before looking at Jacko in a very funny way, and saying he would be calling back later on.

“Well—thanks, Jacko,” said Milly dazedly. She was still in her outdoor things, she had not yet closed the front door, and now there was no need. Turning around, she walked out into the night.

*

At first, she could not decide where she was walking, or why; but gradually, as her dazed wits cleared, she realised that she was after all doing quite a sensible thing. She only had to stay out until Mrs Mumford’s locking-up time, and her persecutor would be foiled, at least for tonight. After the magic hour of eleven, Mrs Mumford would admit nobody, on any pretext, and Milly would be able to sleep in peace. Briefly, she thanked heaven for the pockets of narrow-mindedness that still linger on, especially in small towns like this. With a permissive London landlady, she would have been doomed.

Doomed? What a drama she was making of it all! Why was
she allowing a second visit from this same man so to throw her?—it was no more, and no less, sinister than the first one. He was no more likely to be a policeman or a detective today than he was yesterday—less, if anything, because surely police working on a murder case move faster than this? Having alerted their victim by a first visit, surely they wouldn’t just leave her to her own devices for another twenty-four hours? Not that it wasn’t prudent to make herself scarce for the evening, all the same. “Like he might be from the Town Hall,” Jacko had said: and if she was going to have to make up a whole new batch of lies about her insurance stamps, or her tax-assessment, or something, then she didn’t want it to happen at home, with Mrs Mumford hovering attentively in the background, checking the new lies against the old.

Milly felt that she had walked a very long way, but it couldn’t actually have been more than a mile or two, because she was only now coming into the straight, wide road that led to the station. It couldn’t be very late, either—not more than half past six or seven—because the brightly-lit little
booking-hall
was alive with commuters just off the London train. They were pouring out from the lighted entrance, pulling up their collars, re-tying their scarves as the wind caught them: and Milly was suddenly and disconcertingly reminded of her own arrival here, nearly four weeks ago. For a moment, as she watched the hurrying, anonymous people fanning out into the dark, she had the strangest feeling of going backwards in time. Just as she had arrived here on a night of damp, gusty cold, the station lights flickering weakly in the wind, so, now, she seemed to be returning, on just such a night, by the way she had come … back into the train … back to Victoria Station, joining once again the creeping queues, head down, scarf once again pulled across her mouth to avoid recognition … back, back, into the Underground, circling round and round,
backwards
, backwards, spiralling back and back until she was thrust out into the icy streets of the January dawn, her heels once again clattering in the emptiness as she ran. Ran, and ran, but the other way, this time, towards and not away from that
basement in Lady Street, where Gilbert was still waiting, watch in hand, checking on how long she had been away.

Milly rubbed her eyes. She shook herself, and stamped her cold feet. It was all right: that old crone silhouetted against the lighted tobacconists was not Mrs Roach, she couldn’t be, this was Seacliffe, not Lady Street. As she blinked, and stared around, trying to get her bearings once again, she had a swift impression of a crest of white hair, glimpsed above the heads of the hurrying crowd; but in a moment it was gone, and the nightmare was gone too. She was here! She was now! The awful power of the past was receding, slipping back into the dark as suddenly as it had come, and she could scarcely even feel, now, the places where its icy fingers had momentarily touched her soul.

Idly, to fill in some of the time till eleven o’clock, she wandered into the station cafeteria, buying a newspaper as she went. As before, she found herself a table by the radiator; but this time, she had a cup of coffee and a roll and butter of her own, properly paid for. Her own newspaper to read, too. No need, this time, to peer and twist this way and that to catch a glimpse of other people’s. Her feelings, too, were changed, and although she scanned carefully every column, every paragraph, for something about the Lady Street Murder, there was a curious lack of urgency about it. It was as if she knew, already, that this was not the direction from which the blow would come.