Designs on Life (3 page)

“But she
is
awfully helpful,” Colin said. “You were asking what we’re going to do about cleaning the flat. Well, of course, I can manage that, but I met her on the staircase just now and she told me the address of an agency where we may be able to get a daily. I’ll go and see them this afternoon—no, I’ll have to leave it till tomorrow. This afternoon I’m going to go and see that doctor she told me about. We want him to come and see you as soon as possible.”

“Damn the woman, is she going to run our lives?” Helen exploded, suddenly unaccountably angry. “Can’t we do anything without her?”

He gave her a startled look, and they stared at one another blankly. Then Colin’s face assumed his deeply hurt look, which changed almost at once into one of rage, and in a high, furious voice, he cried, “Christ, you’re jealous of her! She’s eighty at least, but you’re jealous of her! You can’t stand it if I talk to anyone. If this sort of thing goes on, don’t you realise what it’s going to do to us? I can’t stand it—get that into your head—I can’t stand it!”

“But of course I’m not jealous of her,” Helen said, “and I’m sure she means well. It’s just that if I have to have too much to do with her, I may go slightly mad.”

“That’s the kind of thing you said about Naomi. And that’s why we’re here—just to get away from Naomi. I told you she meant nothing to me—”

“You meant plenty to her,” she interrupted swiftly.

“Did that matter? Could I help it? And didn’t I agree to come here just to satisfy you that the thing wasn’t important?”

“I thought we came here because we’d agreed there was no future for whites in Africa.”

“Oh yes, that’s what we told everyone else. But Naomi was the real reason. And now you’re jealous of an old woman of eighty, who’s only been doing her best to help us.”

“Well, d’you realise she tried to put it into my head that my accident was your fault, even though I’d told her it was mine? Is that helping us?”

“So that’s it! That’s the grievance you’ve been nursing against me all this time! I knew there was something. But didn’t I tell you not to take the car out till I’d had the brakes checked?”

“You know, I thought you’d had them seen to. You didn’t try to stop me taking it out.”

“I didn’t know you were going to.”

“I could have been killed.”

“And you think I wanted that!”

They were equally angry, but while Colin’s voice had stayed loud, Helen’s was low and bitter. As she always did, once she had become involved in a quarrel with him, she almost at once started wondering desperately how to put a stop to it. She could have drawn back from it herself in an instant, apologising, even grovelling, but once Colin was sufficiently angry, it took hours, sometimes even days, to persuade him to forget it. He was looking at her with a strange look in his eyes, which she found peculiarly disturbing.

“I’m not a murderer,” he said, suddenly speaking only just above a whisper, “but for God’s sake, don’t provoke me too far.”

Then he picked up the overcoat that he had dropped on a chair, struggled into it and walked out of the room. Helen heard the outer door slam as he let himself out of the flat.

She knew that he would be gone for most of the rest of the day, perhaps going to a cinema, or pottering about bookshops, or merely walking along the slushy streets, encouraging the black mood that had gripped him, assuring himself over and over again that he was in the right, which, as it happened, this time he really was, or so Helen thought, as she turned her anger, once he was gone, against herself. Of course Naomi had been the real reason why they had come home. And hadn’t she sworn to herself that whatever happened she would never blame him for her accident? If she loved him, she had to accept him as he was, moody, casual, forgetful, but after his fashion loving her.

Or could that be wrong?

Sooner or later, after one of their quarrels, she always arrived at this point. Did he really love her, or did he merely feel entangled in something from which he could not break free? Was that the explanation of his moods? Did they mean something far more important than she had ever let herself believe?

She ate most of Mrs. Lambie’s sandwiches for her lunch. She was halfway through them when she heard the rattle of the letter-box, and leaning on her sticks, made her way along the hall to the front door to see what had been delivered. One letter lay on the mat inside the door. She picked it up, looked at the address on it, then grew stiff with shock. It was addressed to Colin, and the handwriting was Naomi’s, and the postmark was London.

For a moment Helen could not believe it, thinking that she must be mistaken about the handwriting. But she knew it well. There had been a time when Naomi, who had been a secretary working for the High Commission, had been her friend rather than Colin’s, and Helen had often had notes from her. It was a distinctive writing, not easily mistaken.

Limping slowly back to the sitting-room, she put the letter down on a table, where it would catch Colin’s eye when he came back again, then returned to the sandwiches.

Dusk came early, only halfway through the afternoon. The days were just at their shortest. Going to the windows to draw the curtains against the deepening darkness, Helen stood for a moment, gazing down into the street, which just then was empty of traffic. She thought how noble the old houses looked when the light was too dim to show up their state of decay. It was easy to imagine coaches driving along the street, and fine ladies alighting from them and sweeping grandly in at one of the handsome old doorways.

But then, as she drew the curtains, she found herself thinking of a young woman who had once lived here, and perhaps had worn a hoop and powdered her hair, and who might have stood at this window long ago, just as Helen was doing now, watching for her husband to come home, then perhaps seen him hurrying along, but not for her sake, A young woman who had gone to her death down the long stone stairs, because of her jealousy.

Helen looked at the envelope lying on the table and felt an impulse to destroy it and say nothing to Colin about its having arrived, but the impulse was followed by a chilling little tremor of fear. Leaving the envelope lying where it was, she sat down and picked up a newspaper that Colin had brought in with him, and did her best to read.

The doctor called soon after four o’clock. Though Colin had not returned, he had not omitted to call on the doctor recommended by Mrs. Lambie and ask him to visit Helen as soon as possible. He was a short, square man, with a loud, hearty manner, full of reassurance. He wanted the address of the doctor who had treated Helen after her accident, so that he could send for her x-rays and records. Then he stayed chatting for a little, commiserating with her for living at the top of a staircase that would keep her virtually a prisoner until the plaster came off her leg, and for the weather that had welcomed her to Edinburgh. Then he went away, saying that he would call again in a few days.

Colin returned about six o’clock, with a parcel of fish and chips for their supper. He said nothing about how he had spent the day, and looked tired and sullen. Seeing the letter on the table, he ripped it open, read it quickly, then held it out to Helen.

“Here, d’you want to read it?” he asked.

“Not unless there’s some reason why I should,” she answered, looking away.

He tucked the letter into his pocket and said no more about it.

He was not openly antagonistic to her that evening, but he hardly spoke. They went to bed early. In the morning, soon after he had washed up the breakfast things for her, he left the flat, without telling her where he was going or when he would be back. Helen would have given a great deal at that time to be able to leave the flat too, to be able to go rapidly down the stairs and along the street to investigate the local shops and perhaps take a bus to Princes Street and see how much everything had changed since she had been here last. She felt restless and tense. There had been a partial thaw in the night and most of the white covering of the roofs had slid down on to the pavements, lying there in dirty heaps, but the sky looked low and heavy, as if more snow might be coming soon. Helen sat down in her usual place, near to the electric fire, and wondered how she was going to pass the time.

It was only a few minutes later that she felt the draught on her neck which meant that the door behind her had swung open. It did it so silently that she still found it eerie. Looking towards it and gripping the arms of her chair, she started to heave herself to her feet so that she could go and close it. But as she did so, a slim, ethereal figure in grey moved into her line of vision in the hall. She dropped back into her chair, wanting to scream, and shuddering from head to foot in helpless panic.

The figure moved forward.

“Did I startle you, dear?” she asked. “I’m sorry. The gentleman gave me the keys and said it would be all right if I came straight in, else I might disturb you.”

She was a young woman of about twenty-five, tall and vigorous-looking, with short auburn hair and a bright, healthy complexion, and she was wearing a transparent white plastic raincoat, which she started to unbutton as she came into the room. Under the coat she was wearing dark brown slacks and a heavy Aran sweater. She was not in the least ghost-like.

“I said to the gentleman, I said I’m not sure you should give me the keys,” she said. “Who kens, I might be anybody, you never ken what I might do with them, but he said it would be better than having me ring the bell and making you come tae the door with your sore leg, and he seemed tae think he could trust me. So I came in, like he said, and if you’ll just tell me what you want me tae do, I’ll get ahead with it.”

“Who are you?” Helen demanded. “What are you talking about?”

“My name’s Mrs. MacNab,” the girl answered “but most folks call me Fiona.”

“Why have you come?”

“Because I just happened tae meet the gentleman in the agency yesterday afternoon, when I went in tae see if they’d a wee job for me, and he said how you couldn’t get around yourself because of your leg being broken, and he wanted someone tae keep the Hat clean and I said I could manage, and he gave me the keys and I let myself in, like he said. Were you not expecting me?”

“Yes—yes, of course I was,” Helen said. “I’d just forgotten about it. I don’t think he told me what time you’d be coming, or if he did, I didn’t remember. It’s very good of you to come.”

“He was so awful anxious about you, I couldn’t say no to him,” the girl said. “Now, where will I start?”

“Oh, anywhere you like. If you can, just give the place a general clean-up. That would be fine.”

“Will do,” the girl said cheerfully, and disappeared to the kitchen to look for brooms and dusters.

Helen found herself wanting to laugh helplessly, but she felt that there was a danger of hysteria getting into the laughter and took hold of herself, not to let it escape her. How like Colin it was to have taken the girl on after only a few minutes’ talk in an employment agency, almost certainly without asking a single question about her references, and then, on the spot, to have handed over the keys of the flat, and then to have said nothing to Helen about what he had done. That had probably been because when he had returned to the flat the evening before he had still been angry with her, and had half hoped that the girl’s sudden appearance would frighten her. He could sometimes be remarkably cruel. But also it demonstrated to her that even when the two of them had quarrelled, he could still be magnanimous enough to go to the trouble of finding this girl to help her.

And of course he had charmed the girl. It had not been concern at Helen’s helplessness that had brought her here to work this morning, but Colin’s smile, his diffidently courteous manner, his appearance of interest in her. Helen had seen this in operation so often that she could imagine exactly how the scene had gone. She herself was the only person on whom he hardly ever troubled to exercise his charm, and when he did, she found that she had lost the ability to respond to it. She preferred him to be what she considered his natural self, with all his difficult moods, since she was accustomed to them and thought that she understood them reasonably well.

Halfway through the morning Fiona brought her a cup of coffee, then stayed to chatter about herself for a time. She was an unmarried mother with a child of five, she said, whom she had left for the morning in a nursery school. She spoke of the child’s father with an amused kind of contempt, but no bitterness, seeming to be glad that he had removed himself from her life. With only a little more warmth she mentioned someone whom she called her boy-friend. Her attitude to men seemed to be placidly uncomplicated. Helen envied her. When the girl had gone, promising to come again in three days’ time, Helen thought how comic it had been to confuse someone so robust, even for a moment in the dim light of the hall, where she had looked grey and wraith-like, with the beautiful maid of long ago, who had been the cause of murder.

Colin again returned to the flat at about six o’clock in the evening, bringing with him some packages of Chinese carry-out food, and told Helen that he had spent the day in the National Library, reading up on Scottish social history.

“It’s appalling how little I know about it,” he said. “If you’re educated in England, it’s extraordinary how little you learn about the rest of the British Isles. I’ve a lot to catch up on.”

He seemed to be in a better mood this evening than he had been the evening before, glad that Fiona MacNab had arrived to clean the flat, as she had promised, and he presented Helen with two paperback thrillers that he had bought for her during the day.

“You must be getting pretty bored,” he said. “Isn’t there anyone here whom you used to know in the old days whom you could ask to come and see you?”

“I thought of trying that,” she said, “but it’s more than ten years since we moved away and I haven’t kept in touch with anyone.”

“Let’s see, all the same.”

But something gave Helen the feeling that he was forcing himself to be amiable, to make up for their quarrel the day before, and when they had eaten their king prawn chow mein and drunk some tea, he seemed to have forgotten his suggestion. Helen did not remind him of it. When she thought about the schoolgirls whom she had once known in Edinburgh, they seemed utterly remote. Even if they still lived here, they had very likely got married and changed their names, and if she tried to find them in the telephone directory, there would be no trace of them. In any case, the chances were that they had completely forgotten her. She must face it, her only acquaintance here was Mrs. Lambie. She settled down to read one of the thrillers that Colin had brought her, while he picked up a history that he had bought for himself, but which he left unopened on his knee while he gazed broodingly at the fire.