I'm Dying Laughing (52 page)

Emily wiped away the tears of the unfortunate woman and took her trembling hands on her breast. She begged her to stay there that night, not to go back;

‘We’ll keep him somehow. We’ll see that he doesn’t get into the hands of such desperadoes.’

She wailed, clinging to Emily, ‘Oh no, no, no, then he’d kill me. He’d know I’ve been telling you; and his pride is so ferocious, so Spanish, so violent, he’d kill me at the mere thought that anyone knew.’

Emily argued that a lot of people must know, since there had been scandals in so many places. His family knew.

‘But he always prides himself on being able to carry it off and impress people, especially new people, with his cool head and his manners—’

Emily murmured, ‘So he does. I’m astonished, stunned. But you know he doesn’t show the slightest sign of drunkenness now. Well, perhaps he’s a little excited, but considering—well, that’s far from drunk. He’s not more excited than I am in hearing this story. I’m thunderstruck. I don’t know what to do.’

Emily was full of dread for the poor woman. ‘You’re in danger, don’t go home. We’ll say you’re sick, had to go to bed.’

Violet broke away from Emily, ‘No, no. He needs me. Perhaps if I’m there he won’t go. If I’m not, he’ll go certainly. He’ll stop at some place on the way home and that will be the end of him for days. He’s been warned several times by his chief No, no.’

She seemed scared beyond reason, ‘Oh, he loves me, he loves no one but me, in his own way. It’s just his temperament, his savage moods. Don’t give me away. He’d kill me.’

Emily promised she would not and again begged the woman to stay with them. Violet sat down, taking Emily’s hands in hers—Emily shrank back, not being of the clutching kind of woman, but she kept her hands there to help. Violet said, ‘Oh, I’m naughty; I’m hysterical, forgive me. I said too much. I betrayed him. Don’t betray me. It comes on me, almost like a longing, as the longing for honors comes on him. It’s being so long alone and tight-lipped and having to save our faces before everyone and yet knowing that everyone knows—or will soon know something worse. I run ahead of trouble sometimes. I want you to like us not to hate us, if there’s a scandal. Don’t shut me out. You’re sympathetic, you’re a writer. If the worst comes, at least I can come to you.’

Emily’s great heart swelled. She thought, Oh, heavens and I was on the point of sending this poor sufferer home, of saying we had guests to dinner. This is a lesson, never to refuse an appeal for help. We don’t know.

She felt ‘ashamed, bitterly ashamed’ as she said to herself, already composing what she was to write later in her
Journal of Days under the Sun.
To think she had never guessed what this smooth, nervous, elegant woman had been living with; daily horror. She thought to herself, and wrote it later, ‘I’m so smug, so satisfied, so happy with my darlings, such a real success as a woman, that the human race is just a passing show to me. Clapas is right. All writers care about is their work. But we ask more of a mechanic. We expect him to save the human race via socialism. Oh, my God, save me from being a philistine in my old age.’

While she had been thinking and composing these reflections, Violet had dried her eyes and now said in a strange voice, more distant, almost hateful, ‘Why do I say he loves me? He hasn’t been near me three times in seven years! Where are my children? I had one baby which died because he stifled it with a pillow; he was jealous. I must be the only love in his life, he loved me so passionately. He is beautiful but a monster. I am afraid of him. I sat at home frozen with terror like an ice-maiden, in an icefield in a glacier. Frozen to death, freezing—and it will always be so’(her voice rose higher) ‘always be so—sitting cold as ice till they bring him home to me dead from some den of vice. If you knew the dreadful cold—’

Emily exclaimed, ‘Oh, this is dreadful, appalling. I can’t stand it. We must do something for you. What? Say something. You must have thought out a hundred things.’ i cannot escape. I’m ruined. He ruined me. I don’t even dare touch another man or woman. Think of what kind of people are in those places? And the poisoned liquor they give him will turn his brain; it’s turned already.’

Emily went out on to the landing to make sure that Christy was not there, that no child was there to hear this sufferer. When she returned, Violet had recovered somewhat. She turned to Emily with a faint smile, ‘And you see I must go out every day or have people at home and pretend that we are a loving young married couple. When he dies or when he kills me—’ her voice wavered again, then she became morbid and in the end began to weep quietly, ‘our friends and our chief will hush it up, the scandal will never reach the papers; and they will say, Who would have thought it, such a happy couple? No, no one but you will ever know the truth. I will have to keep up the comedy for ever. I want you to know the truth. Oh, it is terrible to think of dying there alone, him killing me and no one knowing what I have suffered, he’s too charming to get the death penalty in any circumstances. It will turn out I am to blame. Five years later some other woman will begin to live in this hell.’

Emily heard the men moving downstairs. She was frightened and had not made up her mind what to do. Had she better consult Stephen now? For it was this night that Violet was afraid of, ‘Most of all this night, it’s a premonition, it’s precognition, as if I had lived through it all before and knew exactly what is going to happen.’

‘Oh, don’t go—or go anywhere but home.’

Violet said stormily, ‘No. If he wants to kill me, what is there to hope for anyway? I loved him. He was the love of my life. Let him kill me. There couldn’t be another one. I’ll just look into his eyes tonight and if I see it coming, and I think I’ve seen it coming, if I see that look in his eyes, I’ll lie quietly, sit quietly, I’ll say to myself, I always knew it, I’ve always heard in my brain since I was a little girl, that awful strangled yell—’

Emily got up and took her by the arms, ‘It’s madness. You’re going to your death.’

‘Yes, I am. He needs me. Leave me alone.’

They went downstairs, Violet tranquilly, Emily stony with her unaccustomed feelings. Violet was charming to her husband and Johnny was sweet, almost tender to her. Violet smiled kindly to them and when she held out her hand to say goodbye, she murmured, ‘Oh, thank you so much, we have enjoyed it so much,’ in quite the ordinary way, nor did she give Emily any but a casual glance.

Emily seized Stephen’s arm, led him into the sitting-room and threw herself suddenly into his arms, ‘Stephen, oh, Stephen, I have heard such a story! Listen, quickly. Perhaps we will have to save a life tonight. Can you get the car out? Listen!’ She told the tale. Stephen was puzzled. ‘I spent the whole evening with him and he seemed neither drunk nor crazy; very sensible. Is she crazy?’

Emily said of course, Violet was tormented; but anyone would be.

They discussed it. ‘It’s a dreadful mystery,’ said Emily.

They sat there for a long time going into details, worrying; and at last they took the car and rode out to Auteuil where the Trefougars at that moment lived and, having found the house, they rode round it for a while. There were lights in the house, windows were open, but no sounds were to be heard. Should they knock at the door? Perhaps she was already dead? Or were they drinking, thinking or—a word that rhymed, said Stephen.

‘Can you believe her?’ said Stephen.

‘Could she invent a story like that, even half of it?’

After some time they passed the same two bicycle police they had passed before. The police looked back at them. They decided to drive home and telephone. When they got home they had not the courage to telephone. Supposing a murder had taken place? They had been seen near the house and they were the first to telephone—and at that hour? Emily said they would telephone first thing in the morning.

She slept badly and when she thought Stephen was awake, she said, ‘We didn’t do our duty.’

They had got out in one of the streets, to come nearer to the house on foot. Coming down one of the streets, Emily heard a man shout from the third storey of an apartment house, in English.

‘He-elp, He-elp! Murr-der! Murr-der!’

Three doors away a policeman was standing at an immense carved door leading into a courtyard. He was talking amiably to the woman concierge.

‘Shouldn’t we tell him?’ said Emily.

‘He can hear it as well as you. I didn’t hear it.’

They rode home. On the way home Emily began to laugh and said, ‘That makes two murders tonight on our heads. Or do you suppose the streets ring with murder now, just the memory of the stones, the walls and doors? And supposing it’s some hashish dream?’ She began to laugh helplessly. ‘Oh, what a world. It’s funny and terrible.’

In the night, she said to Stephen whenever she thought he was awake, ‘No, it wasn’t fancy. It was real. Someone was killed in that house tonight, that other house. We didn’t do our duty. That’s why these things occur. It’s collusion. We’re all collusionists. That’s why they can take place. That man who chopped up little boys in Hanover, everyone in the house knew. Even that was collusion. And all those cops about. But they collude too. And Violet—oh, we should have gone in. Because what she said about precognition, a feeling of having lived through it before, which is a warning, she explained to me, one part of the brain is functioning faster than the other—that was terrifying. I hear her voice now. It’s running through my head.’

‘Take an aspirin and go to sleep. We can’t help it. Their friends are guilty, not us. Their friends, the officials know.’

‘Supposing we’re the last people to see them alive.’

‘What about the maid?’

‘Violet said Johnny had told the maid to take the evening off.’

‘Oh, Lord. Just like the stories.’

In the end, Emily took several tablets and slept heavily till past eight o’clock. Stephen had got up, got the boys off, and started the house going. Emily put on her dressing-gown before she remembered. She seized the telephone and called the Trefougars. The maid said that Mr Trefougar had already gone out and Madame was still in bed. She was not well. Emily asked if the maid had seen Madame. Yes, the maid took her tea.

‘How is she?’

‘She’ll be getting up soon.’

The maid was calm and correct. Emily said to Stephen, I’m baffled. Unless that maid plays along with the husband.’

Stephen shouted, ‘Quit building up your usual devil stories and get to work. And don’t first of all write a brief history of all the criminals in your life or your journal, or study Latin and French and algebra to keep up with the kiddies; or socialism or write squelchy letters to my mother—work, damnit. We spent enough time with lunatics and other sandwich-snatchers.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m writing an article for Vittorio, all right it isn’t economic, but I’ve got to have some reason for living.’

She said heartily, ‘Listen, Stephen, I think yesterday was a lesson, a sampling of what we oughtn’t to know. Let’s go back to being interested in the labour movement. I’ll go out of my head if I have to spend any more time and money on Sir Clapas, Sir Trefougar and their merry men. Even your mother—’

‘Leave my mother out of this: what next?’

‘Stephen, do we understand Europeans at all? Aren’t we like invertebrates crawling out on the primeval mudbank and looking up at primitive man and not knowing what he’s all about?’

‘Go and work.’

‘I had an idea in the night, Stephen. Why shouldn’t I write
The Personal History of Bill Blank,
one of the most original, fascinating, startling, gifted and delightful communists in America, so that people over here will know everyone over there hasn’t their finger in their eye and in the pie.’

‘It will find hundreds of publishers to turn it down. Go ahead! Christy can always go back to Grandma and Giles can sell newspapers!’

She said, beginning to cry, ‘Oh, all right. I’m tired of being the workhorse, always patiently jogging along in the shafts. One day I’ll break the traces and the cart can jolt downhill by itself into the ditch.’

He got up smiling and put his arms around her, ‘There, there, silly girl. Who loves you? But you aren’t practical. You’re lovely. I adore you. You’re a funnyface, and you’re a genius; but not practical. Now we have to eat first. I mean unless you want us to find some sort of a two-room hovel with wooden floor with a hole in it and chicken-shit on the boards, and newspapers on the walls down in the sunny south, a nice old crumbling stone hovel … you can wash the dishes, the floor, the clothes, the children’s behinds in the running brook, or tug water from the village pump, which is sure to be at the other end of the next hamlet; and we can grow our own food, with the aid of one pear tree gone wild, one crab apple tree, some turnips and three rows of straggling grapevines. Giles’s hair will stick up in dusty sticks, Christy will have to go out and steal hens at night. Olivia will get freckled and stupid, flies will blow in her nose, Giles will get sandy blight and when Christy goes down with his next attack of pneumonia or snakebite or appendicitis, there won’t be any penicillin for a hundred miles and we’ll bury them all by the henhouse.’

Emily laughed. ‘Oh, stop, stop! From drawing chalkmarks on the sidewalks, comes marijuana and then the electric chair, I know. I know, OK you’re worth it, darling: you’re all worth it.’

‘Oh, don’t pull that. I’m willing to sleep on sacks if you are.’

‘Oh, you brute. You know damn well I’m not.’

They went to their workrooms. Emily spent the whole day describing her adventures in her journal and fixing up her card file on her friends. In her journal she mentioned today as every day recently, her feelings for Vittorio. She thought about herself. She’d worked for her mother, then for a sick sweetheart, then for Stephen and the children. The life she was leading was not the life she wanted to lead. This journal and the letters she wrote to her friends were her real companions, she thought. She was glad she did not dream; she was afraid of dreams. One of the men she had known and been fond of, had said to her surprisingly enough, ‘Why don’t you break off from your job, go out and do something?’ She was very surprised; and mentioned it to a woman friend. ‘Oh, when a man says that—’ said the woman and stopped. What did she mean? It had taken her breath away. She’d been a firehorse all her life; but to him, this man, she’d done nothing; she was in leading-strings, like a toddler. ‘I guess I develop slowly; and here I am downhill to the forties, something missing I guess.’ She thought of her long years of ‘fire-eating, snorting, sweating, slogging.’ Now she was a lady, Madame. Still the same though. A great triumph, of course, considering her mother had been nothing but a floor-washer with pretensions and she’d worked her own way up with a pickaxe, no tears for bloodied heads. And Stephen—she smiled sweetly—a love, a darling, a great catch—her relatives were still thunder-struck in Arkansas, at Plain Jane, the Worry of the Wilkeses marrying into the 85% bracket. What a girl! When she did a job, she did it. She’d never fallen down on an assignment, failed to meet a deadline, turned in a bad job. Only—she died laughing thinking of her ways and means. What the hell! Die and let die is the good old American motto—what the hell, we’re banditti—people admire Corsicans for it.