Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (36 page)

‘The house?’

‘Remote houses, hidden away places, like this. I’ve got to be careful, you see, haven’t I?—I wouldn’t want to get caught. I find a good house and who lives in it; and then I drive over and ring up from some call box, locally. After that, it depends how they react. Sometimes they’re cool, they just say, ‘Wou’re mad,” and ring off. That kind I don’t bother with any more. But if they’re upset and disgusted—well, I’m afraid it’s better then.’ He looked down at his hands, fisted, white and bulging, on the table before him. ‘Perhaps I
am
mad. It’s dreadful, really. But when it comes on—well, it’s like I said, like a drug or something, I can’t resist it. And that’s why I have to be careful, I mustn’t let myself be caught. I couldn’t stand prison. What would I do, locked away, if a fit came on me? I really
would
go mad then.’

She grasped at a faint hope. ‘The police know about you. We told them about the calls.’

‘They can’t do a thing,’ he said. ‘Not unless they was to tap the line day and night. And you’re not the only one. I keep several going at a time, just for safety’s sake; well, to keep the cops confused, you see.’ He was silent for a moment, withdrawn from the present, musing. ‘They nearly did get me once, but that was different. That time I killed the poor girl.’

She gave a little jerked out, chopped off scream, bunching her fingers against her mouth. ‘Oh, no! Oh,
no
!’

‘I didn’t mean to,’ he said, unhappily. ‘I didn’t want to. In fact, that part I didn’t enjoy at all, I was horrified. Such a pretty young thing, she was. I’d been ringing her up: like you say, filthy, obscene, I don’t know what makes me do it, I feel bad about it afterwards…’

‘Couldn’t you have treatment or something? Couldn’t you get help? Nowadays, they’re understanding.’

‘Yes, I know, and I wish I could,’ he said. ‘I honestly do wish it. But—how can I now? It would mean giving myself up; and there’s too much against me. I mean, first they’d have me on a murder charge, over that poor girl.’ He looked at her, almost imploringly. ‘If only they wouldn’t struggle, I wouldn’t hurt them. I don’t mean to hurt them but I’m—strong. And this girl, you see—I went to see her, I pretended I’d lived in the house once, like I did with you. I talked to her, like I’m talking to you; I explained it. But… Well, she wouldn’t—and I suppose it’s dreadful but it’s the struggle I like.’ He began to move, sidling towards her round the table, slowly and quietly, thick fingers white-tipped and spatulate, pressed along the wooden edge.

She was sick and cold, the familiar room swam round her as though she saw it through water. She started to gibber, backed up, violently trembling, against the oak dresser. ‘Don’t touch me! Don’t come near me!’ But the sad, heavy face came closer; regretful—implacable. She sobbed and stammered: ‘Please don’t hurt me,
please
—!’

He stopped again; stood there, earnestly, humbly explaining. ‘I wouldn’t, you see: if you’d only be kind and easy. I’m—just an ordinary man, you must understand that; in other ways perfectly ordinary. Bachelor, yes; but a lovely old mother, looks after me like a king. Good job, solid, respectable, no one ever suspecting a thing. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t want anything—dirty. Just the usual, just to be—a man.’ He fell silent again and into the silence, ash falling in the grate, coal resettling itself, sounded harsh and loud; the grandfather clock struck a single rasping note. ‘If they wouldn’t struggle,’ he insisted, ‘they wouldn’t get hurt. I sometimes think it’s really only the struggling that—excites me: the hope of the struggling. It’s all leading up to that, the ’phone calls, everything, it’s liking to get the better of them because no one seems to—want me. If only just once, one of them was kind—was kind and easy and—even a little bit loving—I sometimes think I’d be cured of it, I’d give the whole thing up for ever.’

A desperate hope rose in her of temporising, of reasoning with him. ‘Can’t you get some nice girl of your own?’

‘But that’s it,’ he said. ‘They won’t have me. I suppose they—sort of sense this other thing. I suppose I sort of—smell of it.’

‘There are—well, prostitutes.’ Poor sad girls, living so dangerously, taking such terrible risks. But…‘They would be easy; and I suppose kind?’

‘But not loving,’ he said. ‘And I want some love with it. That’s what I go about looking for. If… If, even after all the muck and the filth, the calls and all that—if one of them was just to bring herself to understand, if one of them really understood and forgave, really accepted that I’m—just an ordinary man, only with this sickness…’ He thought it over. ‘Quite a nice man, really, I suppose, as men go. Honest, dependable, decent—in all other ways, at any rate, decent. And kind, you know, considerate, good to my mother, there never was a better son, I don’t suppose.’

‘I think you
are
nice,’ she said. ‘I think you’re right. You’re just a—a nice, ordinary man; only you’re ill, you need help.’

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I need help. And what help can I look for now, except from a woman? I think if I found that, I could begin life all over again, I really do. But till then…

Till then! She started to move, edging her way along the dresser, her hands spread out behind her, feeling their way along the polished ledge. It brought him sharply out of his absorption. He said: ‘That’s no use. If you think you’re going to get to the door, get away from me—I’m afraid that’s no use. I wouldn’t want to kill you, not like that poor girl; or harm you, like some of the others. I mean, I like you, I like you very much, no one else has ever been so kind as you have, listening and understanding. But that won’t stop me. You could be an angel out of heaven and it wouldn’t stop me. When the fit’s on me, I can’t help myself. And it’s on me now.’

‘My husband—’ she faltered.

‘Your husband won’t be home for hours. You know that. He was ringing you from Hampshire.’ He said again, in his humble, earnest way: ‘I don’t want anything—dirty. Just what any man wants.’

She knew now what she must do. It was terrifying, hideous, dangerous—but there was nothing else for it. She had pulled herself together, the room no longer swam about her, her hands grew steady, dropping from the ledge, hanging motionless at her sides, resistance-less. She said, ‘I understand. You can’t help it; you can’t help yourself. And neither can I help myself. Neither of us can.’ And she tore herself from the shelter of the dresser and, moving very slowly, went towards him.

He did not stir, just stood there waiting for her. But she saw with a sort of heartbreak that his whole face had become transfigured with an incredulous, inarticulate, grateful joy.

She’d had no idea where to strike. Simply, the sharp kitchen knife thrust itself in and to a vital spot. She found herself weeping, kneeling over him as he lay there, harmless now and pitiful in his harmlessness. So terrible a price to have exacted from him! She and all those other women—if they could but have been ‘easy and kind’. Easy and kind—understanding, forgiving, ‘even a little bit loving’. But they could not; and she found herself weeping, kneeling there beside him, sobbing it out to the upturned, trustful face. ‘I didn’t mean to kill you! I had to save myself, I had to save all those other girls to come. The knife was there on the dresser. But I didn’t mean it to kill you…’

After all—except for that one thing, he had seemed such a
nice
man.

S
HE LEANED AGAINST THE
counter and the empty glass made a tiny chattering against the mahogany with the shaking of her ringless left hand. They were whispering about her over there in the corner. She said so to the barman. ‘They’re whispering about me over there.’

‘Oh, for Pete’s sake!’ he said. ‘You always think people are whispering.’

‘Why do they whisper? Why don’t they just talk to me straight out?’

‘Perhaps they don’t wish to talk to you straight out,’ he said, ‘or any other way. And I’ll be frank with you—neither do I.’

Tears welled up into her large blue eyes. She said with maudlin dignity: ‘In future I’ll go to some other bar.’

‘You do that,’ he said, ‘God knows we’re fed up with you in here.’

But she stayed. She always stayed. Where ever else she went, it would be the same. ‘It was all such a long time ago,’ she said to the man. ‘Why should they whisper still?’

But they whispered: and the whispering grew and grew.

Such a long time ago…

Of course Simon should never have taken her there in the first place. But she’d begged and pleaded and he never could resist her. ‘You know I’d take you if I could, Daffy. I’d do anything for you, you know I would, I’d die for you…’

And so would they all, all the others, all the boys—they’d lie down and die for Daffy Jones. And not only the young ones. ‘My Pa,’ Daffy used to say, ‘he’d go out and get himself run over if it would do me any good. No, honestly he would—he’d die for me.’ His Daffodil, he called her, his Golden Daffodil.

Talk about daffy! Simon thought—but there it was, she did remind one of a daffodil, so slender and fresh in the little narrow green frocks she so often wore, with that bell of bright yellow hair.

‘All the same, Daffy, I couldn’t take you to the Blue Bar. It’s just what it says, it’s off-colour, it’s an awful place. I couldn’t.’

But it sounded thrilling and the other girls at school would have fits when they heard she’d been there. ‘Oh, Simon, don’t be so stuffy! Please.’

‘Honestly, I couldn’t. What would your father say? He’d have a heart attack.’

‘My father has heart attacks the whole time,’ she said.

‘Well, I don’t mean that. I mean he’d do hand-springs.’

‘If my father did hand-springs he’d have a heart attack,’ she said laughing, ‘so it comes to the same thing.’

‘I just meant that he wouldn’t like it. He’d murder me!’

Daffy was his cousin, her father was his Uncle John.

‘It’s a dreadful, sordid place, sailors and tarts and people like that, everybody drunk or hashed up, some of them even on the hard stuff.’

He had, in fact, been there only once himself, taken by two much older boys who had left school—his own school. He went to boarding school; not Daffy’s. It had shocked and scared him; scared him even more to think it might ever come out that he had been there.

And she recognised that. She was a fly one, little Daffy Jones.

She said: ‘But
you
go there,’ and added with the smallest slyest of meaningful glances, ‘what would
your
Pa say?’

So he took her. Never mind the threat implicit, he loved her, he had always loved her, always, since they’d been small children together: Daffy so fresh and dewy-eyed, Daffy irresistible.

‘Gosh!’ she said when they got there, ‘isn’t it frightful? Fancy you!’

‘Oh, well,’ he said, casually sophisticate, ‘one grows up.’

But when his neighbour on the close-packed bench against the greasy wall offered him a drag, he said at once: ‘No thanks.’

‘Oh, do!’ said Daffy. ‘I’d love to have a try.’ Not for nothing was she known at school, with double meaning, as the Sex-Pot, but he was not to know that. ‘Only I don’t like sharing,’ she said to the man.

‘Plenty more where that came from,’ said the man, producing a handful of ready-rolled untidy cigarettes. He suggested to Simon, ‘Only it’ll cost you bread, man, bread.’

Of all the phoneys! But poor Simon fell for it all like a ton of bricks and forked out twice as much for the stuff as Daffy could have got it for, any day, from the school gardener.

‘Do let me have a—a drag, do they call it?—Simon. I’d love to try it.’

The stuff takes you different ways. Simon it wafted into a beautiful dream, sitting huddled on the bench gazing before him into a brilliance where beautiful people danced and hugged and did beautiful things, right out there in the open before everyone. He awoke to the sound of her screeching. She was shaking him, screaming at him.

‘Look at me! Look what he did to me.’

She looked beautiful, he thought, standing there with her dress half ripped off her body, showing the lovely white nakedness underneath, her hair all torn and tousled, her eyes so strangely bright—she must have been having a beautiful, beautiful time.

‘You look beautiful, Daffy,’ he said. ‘Did you have a good time?’

‘Good? It was horrible. Look what he did to me!’

‘You shouldn’t have gone with him if you didn’t like it.’

But she had liked it. For most of the time. She had never before been with a real, grown-up man. But then…

‘He wanted it all wrong,’ she said. ‘I thought he was going mad. I didn’t know what he was up to.’ She went into details. ‘So I tried to make him stop because, after all, there are limits; and he went berserk—it was absolutely frightful.’

And indeed when he looked at her again, fighting his way up out of his euphoric self-absorption, she did perhaps look rather a mess.

‘I’d better take you home. We’d better both go home.’ Lovely, blissful home, warm bed, comfortable dreams…

She was hugging together her ripped dress, trying to comb out her torn and tangled hair, scrabbling in her handbag for lipstick and little tubes of shiny eye make-up: spitting into an oblong box of mascara, thickening her lashes with great blobs of it, with some vague idea of getting back to normal, making herself ‘look good’.

‘What’ll I tell them? How’ll I explain to Mummy and Daddy? They’ll go mad.’

‘Tell them what happened,’ he said comfortably. ‘You couldn’t help it. Say he made a pass at you and, of course, you wouldn’t and he beat you up.’

‘They’ll say what was I doing here?’ Out of her anxiety, grew belligerence. ‘You should never have brought me to a place like this.’

He protested: ‘You made me bring you.’

‘You, my own cousin! What will my Pa say?’ Her father was a simple man: simple and gentle. But when he saw her like this, his little pet, his darling, his innocent flower…‘He’ll murder you,’ she said.

‘
You
went with the man. I told you not to.’

‘You should have stopped me.’

‘How could I?’ he said, simply. ‘I was stoned.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t have got stoned and let me.’ She sat hunched up beside him on the bench. Now and again, vaguely, curious glances swept over them and swept on. She looked a bit young for the Blue Bar—too young and too—well, different—to have been outside, having it rough with that sailor chap they called The Butcher; for that matter,
both
of them looked much too young, two silly kids out of place, from another world. Still, that was their affair. She, in her turn, looked back at them: dirty, raddled women, too remote from long-past youth and beauty to be of use to anyone but the rough, drunken, drug-soaked degenerates that would come to such a place.