I Shall Not Want (41 page)

The house itself had deteriorated sadly. The window boxes which in John Marco's day had been as full of flowers as a florist's window, were now empty, and only bare stalks and a handful of withered leaves showed where the blooms had been. Even the brass work on the door was neglected. The knocker, which he remembered as shining, was now something that was black and green.

The jangle of the bell in the basement brought memories of the house crowding back on him; already he felt the chill of it. But the sound of tired feet slopping along the tiled hallway left him no time for recollection. The door opened and there was Emmy standing facing him. She was more wispy and drabbish than ever.

“Is Mrs. Marco in?” he asked. “I want to see her.”

Emmy did not attempt to conceal her excitement: this was one of the few big moments—perhaps, for what it might portend, the biggest—of her life.

“I'll wait in the drawing-room,” he said. “Tell her I'm here.”

As he threw open the door, the musty, disused smell of the room rose up at him. The blinds were half way down already—they were apparently left hanging that way even by day—and he waited while Emmy fumbled at the gas bracket for a light. When the mantle finally popped into life and he could see the room, he noticed that the chairs and sofa were all covered in dust cloths, and that sheets of newspaper had been spread about open on the carpet. It was obvious that he was the first visitor who had gone into the room for months. But there was one thing that ordinary disuse did not explain. The pictures had been taken down and the long mirror over the fireplace was concealed behind a thick curtain. It was as though someone to whom light and brightness were distasteful had gone round the room deliberately subduing it.

He did not have to wait very long for Hesther. He had scarcely sat down—the covers disturbed themselves in fresh clouds of dust as he did so—when he heard her hand
faltering on the door handle; and then quietly, almost stealthily it seemed to him, she opened the door and stood there. She was still dressed all in black as he had seen her in the Park. But now she was wearing a close black bonnet as well. It drained the last, thin vestige of colour from her cheeks, leaving her pale and sexless. She seemed magically to have added a generation to her age.

“So you've come,” she said, not looking up at him but keeping her eyes to the floor all the time. “My prayers were answered.”

He saw as she spoke that her hands—they were long and white and thin-fingered—were pressed against each other as though she were still praying as she stood there.

“I'm not here in answer to your prayers,” he said. “I'm here because I want to talk to you.”

“You're here because you want to take John away from me,” she replied. “You can go away again.”

She raised her eyes to his for a moment as she spoke and he saw that hers were deep and burning. There was a new light in them. But she did not seem to be seeing him; it was as though she were looking through him and beyond.

“How did you know I was coming?” he asked.

“I saw you on Sunday,” she told him. “You were following us. I knew then that John was in danger. So I prayed.”

“To protect him from me?”

“Yes,” she said. “I've heard warnings. Voices.”

She had not crossed over from where she was standing. Her gaze was still cast down to the floor and her hands remained clasped in front of her. But her head was moving; it was shifting slowly from side to side as though she were listening. Was she even now hearing voices with him there in the room beside her? he wondered. And as he looked at her he saw that she was no longer quite of this world at all. His mind hardened: at all costs he must rescue the boy upstairs; do something for that silent child dressed in his mean clothes with the long stockings like a
girl's. He was careful, however, to keep his voice level and steady as he spoke to her.

“Does he go to school yet?” he asked.

“He doesn't need a school,” she said. “I teach him myself.”

“Has he got any friends?”

“He's got me,” she replied. “I'm his mother.”

She raised her eyes again for an instant as she said it. There was the same distant look in them, the same suggestion of being fixed on things invisible.

“He'll have to go to school sometime,” he said.

“Mr. Tuke will attend to that,” she answered. “He'll educate him.”

“Does he never go out alone?” he asked.

As he asked the question he saw Hesther's hands suddenly come close sharply together again. The blood was driven from them and the knuckles showed white and papery.

“Never,” she said. “There's always someone with him. Always. If you spoke to him he'd only run away. I've warned him about you.”

“So you don't even want me to see him?”

“I've got the key of his room here,” she said. She raised her hands and brought them up close to her bosom. “You couldn't get in to him if you tried.”

He paused and leaning back on the white dust sheet he continued to study her. She was still sitting there as though she were waiting to hear something that only her ears could catch.

“What do your voices say to you?” he asked abruptly.

The question did not seem to surprise her. Evidently the voices were her familiars, she had grown used to them.

“They tell me to do things,” she said. “They help.”

He rose.

“And do they tell you not to let me see my son?” he asked.

She nodded.

“They tell me that,” she said.

They did not speak again as he went towards the front door. Hesther stood behind it in the hall blocking it. It was not until the door was already open that she addressed him.

“Good-night,” she said. “I shall pray for you.”

Before he had reached the bottom of the steps he heard the sound of the heavy bolts being driven home and the chain being put up. Number twenty-three Clarence Gardens was a fortress that had repelled the invader, and was impregnable again.

v

It was a week later when he returned. They had been tortuous, difficult days, days that did not relate themselves to the ordinary conduct of life at all. He had spent whole hours of them first in the dingy obscurity of Dr. Hanson's surgery in Edgware Road and then in the prosperous magnificence of Dr. Yarberry-Blane's consulting-room in Harley Street. And now all three of them were seated in the Yarberry-Blane carriage and were clopping along through Bayswater.

“I shall go in first,” John Marco was saying. “And I shall tell her that you're simply two friends of mine. She'll let you come in as Mr. Tuke will be there.”

“Are you sure you can rely on this parson fellow?”

It was Dr. Hanson who spoke: he seemed apprehensive of having brought this aristocrat from Harley Street out to Bayswater for nothing.

“He'll be there,” John Marco answered. “I wrote to him myself and sent the note round by hand. He wouldn't miss a thing like this.”

“You didn't tell him our real object I hope,” Dr. Yarberry-Blane interposed. “I want to see the patient at her most natural.”

“I told him nothing,” John Marco replied. “Nothing except that I wanted to see him there.”

“Because this isn't quite the sort of thing that Dr. Yarberry-Blane is used to.” Dr. Hanson said suavely.

“You mustn't expect him to be ready to certify on the strength of one visit. She's not dangerous, remember.”

“Judge for yourselves,” John Marco answered. “Look into her eyes.”

They had reached the corner of Clarence Gardens by now, and the carriage was travelling more slowly as the coachman began searching for the number.

John Marco reached for the speaking tube that dangled against the edge of the seat beside him.

“It's here,” he said. “At the next lamp-post.”

“I hope that parson won't be late.” Dr. Hanson observed.

Mr. Tuke was not late, however. He was standing on the pavement staring up at the house when they got there. As John Marco dismounted and the others climbed out after him, he saw him—saw him first, and then saw the house.

But the house was empty and in darkness. The shutters were fastened and a large notice, “TO BE SOLD,” leaned vacantly over the gateway.

The Disappearance of Hesther and the child was final and complete; they had simply and astonishingly vanished.

The estate agent whose board was outside could say nothing except that he had been instructed to put the house on the market and accept any offer over fifteen hundred pounds that he could get. As soon as he had got the money, his instructions were to pass it on to a firm in Clifford's Inn. But the firm in Clifford's Inn did not know anything, they did not even have any address for their client except that of the empty house in Clarence Gardens; in short, they had not been advised. Nor could the bank be of any assistance. The bank manager was obviously disturbed by the whole affair. Mrs. Marco, he said, had called in on the previous Wednesday—the day after John Marco's visit—and had drawn out all she possessed: it was obvious that the man felt that in some obscure fashion he had been slighted.

After the bank manager, John Marco tried the local tradesmen. They knew just as little about the whole affair; so far as they were concerned, it was simply that Hesther had come in and paid off her debts right up to the minute, telling them vaguely that she was moving away somewhere. The milkman was the last to have seen her; his roundsman had been told to pay one more early morning visit and then stop for ever, and he had gone round to the house to find out why. But it was only Emmy he had been able to see. From behind the half-opened door—all transactions with tradesmen at number twenty-three Clarence Gardens were conducted only after the chain had been slipped into position—she had told him that they were going away into the country and not coming back.

It was nearly a week later before John Marco was able to discover the firm of removers who had taken away the stuff. And on the day he found out he went himself over to Clapham to interview them. The visit was wasted, however. They had still got the goods there in their warehouse. The lady, they said, had paid them for a whole year's storage in advance and had told them that they would be hearing from her. They offered, as soon as they got her new address, to forward any letter that John Marco cared to write to them.

John Marco returned to Bayswater, empty and depressed. It was obvious that Hesther had been too clever for him. With only a week in which to arrange everything, she had hidden herself so secretly that he would never be able to find her again. Like all frightened, hunted things, she had covered up her track as she went. And at this moment somewhere behind other locked doors she was guarding the boy that she had rescued so skilfully from the danger that was in pursuit.

But there were other things in John Marco's mind besides the disappearance. There was the Opening. It would not be long now. The whole of the long frontage of the shop was completed; Tredegar Terrace looked already as if it had a palace running down one side of it. Between the cracks in the hoardings could be seen the glitter of plate glass and the gleam of woodwork. And through the gap, where the revolving door, the most up-to-date of its kind was to go, could be seen the vast, shadowy interior. With its pillars and its galleries and its sweeping staircase, it was like looking on the reconstructed glories of Thebes.

John Marco nowadays spent a great part of his time wandering about this emptiness alone. He was like a Bishop, impatient for his Cathedral to be finished. But he was more than a Bishop; in this particular temple he was the little God himself. It was his name, JOHN MARCO, that was repeated in letters of gold two feet high all down the street and round the corner. Everyone who
came in to buy a piece of ribbon or a pair of stockings would really be making a suitable offering to this new, retail deity who had just installed himself.

In the whole place, it was the pneumatic change conveyors that pleased John Marco most; the bright brass pipe-work of the apparatus ran everywhere. The class of a shop, he had long considered, could be determined by the way in which it handled the customer's money. In really small establishments, the assistants left their stations and carried the money, spread out on their counter-books, to the cashier somewhere in the background. But in the rush of modern business that sort of thing was unthinkable. And so the overhead system of inclined slipways had been introduced. Along openwork tunnels of flimsy deal the bill and the money went trundling along in a hollow wooden ball like a conjuror's sphere. But to John Marco's mind there had always been something clumsy and rather childish about the system; and it had seemed like a new era in culture when he saw the first spring wire conveyor. All that the assistant had to do there was to pull an elastic cord and the message went tearing away through space like a captive rocket. He dreamed of, and lived for, his own spring wire conveyor until one day in a mammoth store in Oxford Street he saw the first pneumatic tube. And he stood entranced in front of it. The
whoosh
from the intake of air, and the abandon with which the little projectile hit the hanging flap at the end of the tube and fell limply into the reception basket, decided him. He would have been ready at that moment to found his own business simply for that pneumatic conveyor alone.

And in six weeks' time, he reflected, there would be money, real money, pouring along those tubes. The air inside them would be full of it. That bare parquet where he was standing would be scarred and dented under the passage of high, fashionable heels. And the counters, the naked, gleaming counters that at present were piled at one end of the building, would be covered with boxes
and lengths of material and books of patterns. The Mayor of Bayswater would cut the ribbon across the central doorway and the crowd—up till then held back by the commissionaire with John Marco's initials on his collar—would be free to surge in and fill the place.