Laughter in the Dark (6 page)

“That’s enough, Paul,” said Albinus huskily.
“There is no point in going on. It’s quite clear he hasn’t taken anything.”

“How shaken you look,” exclaimed Paul, as they returned to the study. “My poor chap! Look here, you must have your lock changed, or always keep the door bolted. And what about the police? Would you like me to—”

“Ssh,” hissed Albinus.

Voices drew near and Elisabeth came in, followed by Irma, her nurse and one of her little friends—a fat child who, in spite of her shy stolid expression, could be most boisterous. Albinus felt as if it were all a nightmare. Margot’s presence in the house was monstrous, unbearable … The maid returned—with the books—she had not found the address, and no wonder! The nightmare grew wilder. He suggested going to the theater that night, but Elisabeth said she was tired. At supper he was so busy straining his ears for any suspicious rustle that he did not notice what he was eating (cold beef, in fact, with pickles). Paul kept on looking round, giving out little coughs, or humming—if only, thought Albinus, the meddlesome fool would remain in his place and not potter about. But there was another dreadful possibility: the children might start romping through all the rooms; and he dared not go and lock the door of the library; that might lead to unimaginable
complications. Thank God, Irma’s little friend soon left, and Irma was popped to bed. But the tension remained. He felt as if they all—Elisabeth, Paul, the maid and himself—were sprawling over the whole place instead of keeping huddled together, as they should, in order to give Margot a chance of slipping out; if, indeed, she had that intention.

At length, at about eleven o’clock, Paul left. As usual, Frieda chained and bolted the door. Now Margot could not get out!

“I’m awfully sleepy,” said Albinus to his wife and yawned nervously, and then could not stop yawning. They went to bed. In the house all was silent. Elisabeth was just about to turn out the light.

“You get to sleep,” he said. “I think I’ll go and read a bit.”

She smiled drowsily, heedless of his inconsistency. “Don’t wake me up when you come,” she murmured.

Everything was too quiet to be natural. It seemed as if the silence was rising, rising—would suddenly brim over and break into laughter. He had slipped out of bed, and in his nightsuit and felt slippers was walking noiselessly down the passage. Strange: all dread had gone. The nightmare
had melted into the keen, sweet sensation of absolute freedom, peculiar to sinful dreams.

Albinus undid the neck of his pyjamas as he crept along. He was trembling all over. “In a moment—in a moment she will be mine,” he thought. Softly he opened the door of the library and turned on the softly shaded light.

“Margot, you mad little thing,” he whispered feverishly.

But it was only a scarlet silk cushion which he himself had brought there a few days ago, to crouch on while consulting Nonnenmacher’s
History of Art
—ten volumes, folio.

M
ARGOT
informed her landlady that she would soon be leaving. It was all going splendidly. In his flat she had realized the soundness of her admirer’s wealth. Also, to judge by the photograph on his bed table, his wife was not at all as she had imagined her—a large stately woman with a grim expression and a grip of iron; on the contrary, she seemed a quiet, vague sort of creature who could be got out of the way without much trouble.

And she quite liked Albinus: he was a well-groomed gentleman smelling of talcum powder and good tobacco. Of course, she could not hope for a repetition of the ecstasy of her first love affair. And she would not let herself think of Miller, of his chalk-white hollow cheeks, unkempt black hair and long skilful hands.

Albinus could soothe her and allay her fever—like those cool plantain leaves which it is so comforting
to apply to an inflamed spot. Then there was something else. He was not only well-to-do, but also belonged to a world which afforded easy access to the stage and the films. Often, behind her locked door, she would make all sorts of wonderful faces for the benefit of her dressing-chest mirror or recoil before the barrel of an imaginary revolver. And it seemed to her that she simpered and sneered as well as any screen actress.

After a thorough and painstaking search she found quite a pretty suite of rooms in a very good neighborhood. Albinus was so upset after her visit that she felt sorry for him and made no further difficulty about taking the fat wad of notes which he crammed into her bag during their evening walk. Moreover, she let him kiss her in the shelter of a porch. The fire of this kiss was still around him like a colored glory when he returned home. He could not lay it aside in the hall as he did his black felt hat, and when he came into the bedroom he thought that his wife must see that halo.

But it never even occurred to Elisabeth, placid, thirty-five-year-old Elisabeth, that her husband might deceive her. She knew that he had had little adventures before his marriage, and she remembered that she herself, as a small girl, had been secretly in love with an old actor who used
to visit her father and enliven dinner with beautiful imitations of farmyard sounds. She had heard and read that husbands and wives constantly deceived one another; indeed, adultery was the core of gossip, romantic poetry, funny stories and famous operas. But she was quite simply and steadfastly convinced that her own marriage was a very special, precious and pure tie that could never be broken.

Her husband’s evenings out, which, he explained, were spent with some artists interested in that cinema idea of his, never afforded her the least suspicion. His irritability and jumpiness she put down to the weather, which was quite unusual for May: at one moment it was hot, at the next there would be icy torrents of rain, mixed with hailstones that bounced on the window sills like tiny tennis balls.

“Shall we go for a trip somewhere?” she suggested casually one day. “Tyrol? Rome?”

“You go, if you want to,” replied Albinus; “I have lots to do, my dear.”

“Oh, no, it was just a fancy,” she said, and set off with Irma to the Zoo to see the baby elephant, which turned out to have hardly any trunk at all and a fringe of short hair standing on end all along its back.

With Paul it was a different matter. The episode
of the locked door had left him with a strange uneasiness. Albinus had not only failed to notify the police, but he was actually annoyed when Paul returned to the subject. So Paul could not help brooding over the thing. He tried to recall whether he had, perhaps, seen any suspicious character when he came into the house and walked toward the lift. He was very observant, he thought: he had, for instance, noticed a cat which sprang as he passed, and slithered between the bars of the garden railings, a schoolgirl in red for whom he had held open the door, broadcast laughter and song from the porter’s lodge where the wireless was turned on as usual. Yes, the burglar must have run down while he was going up in the lift. But what gave him that nasty feeling?

His sister’s married happiness was to him a sacred thing. When, some days later, he was put through on the telephone to Albinus, while the latter was still talking, and so overheard certain words (fate’s classical method: eavesdropping), he almost swallowed a piece of matchwood with which he was picking his teeth.

“Don’t ask me, just buy what you like.”

“But don’t you see, Albert …” said a vulgar, capricious feminine voice.

With a shudder Paul hung up the receiver as
though he had inadvertently caught hold of a snake.

That evening, as he sat with his sister and brother-in-law, he could not think of anything to talk about. He just sat there, self-conscious and fidgety, rubbing his chin, crossing and re-crossing his plump legs, looking at his watch and putting the blank handless thing back into his waistcoat pocket. He was one of those sensitive beings who blush guiltily when someone else makes a blunder.

Could this man whom he loved and revered be deceiving Elisabeth? “No, no, it’s a mistake, some silly misunderstanding,” he kept telling himself, as he glanced at Albinus who was reading a book with unruffled countenance, clearing his throat now and then, and very carefully cutting the pages with an ivory paper knife … “Impossible! That locked bedroom door put it into my mind. The words I heard doubtless admit of some innocent explanation. How could anyone deceive Elisabeth?”

She was cuddled in a corner of the sofa, relating slowly and minutely the plot of a play which she had seen. Her pale eyes with the faint freckles under them were as candid as her mother’s had been, and her unpowdered nose shone
pathetically. Paul nodded his head and smiled. She might have been speaking Russian for all he knew. Then suddenly, and for one second only, he caught sight of Albinus’ eyes looking at him over the book he was holding.

M
EANWHILE
Margot had rented the flat and proceeded to buy a number of household articles, beginning with a refrigerator. Although Albinus paid up handsomely, and even with a certain pleasurable emotion, he was giving the money on trust, for not only had he not seen the flat—he did not even know its address. She had told him that it would be such fun if he did not see her home until it was complete.

A week passed. He fancied that she would ring him up on Saturday. The whole day he mounted guard over the telephone. But it gleamed and was mute. On Monday he decided that she had tricked him—had vanished forever. In the evening Paul came. These visits were hell for both of them by now. Still worse—Elisabeth was not at home. Paul sat in the study opposite Albinus, and smoked, and looked at the tip of his cigar. He had even become thinner of late.
“He knows everything,” thought Albinus dismally. “Well, and what if he does? He’s a man; he ought to understand.”

Irma trotted in and Paul’s countenance brightened. He took her on his lap and produced a funny little grunt as she prodded him with her small fist in the stomach while making herself comfortable.

Then Elisabeth returned from a bridge-tea. The thought of supper and of the long evening afterward suddenly seemed to Albinus more than he could endure. He announced that he was not supping at home; his wife asked him good-naturedly why he had not said so before.

He had only one wish: to find Margot immediately, no matter what the cost. Destiny, which had promised him so much, had not the right to cheat him now. He was so desperate that he resolved upon a very daring step. He knew where her old room was, and he knew that she had lived there with her aunt. Thither he went. As he walked through the back yard, he saw a servant-girl making a bed at an open window on the ground floor and questioned her.

“Fräulein Peters?” she repeated, holding the pillow she had been thumping. “Oh, I think she has moved. But you’d better see for yourself. Fifth floor, door on the left.”

A slatternly woman with bloodshot eyes opened the door a little way without taking off the chain, and asked what he wanted.

“I want to know Fräulein Peters’ new address. She used to live here with her aunt.”

“Oh, did she?” said the woman with sudden interest; and now she unhooked the chain. She led him into a tiny parlor, all the objects in which shook and rattled at the least movement. On a piece of American cloth with brown circular stains stood a plate of mashed potatoes, salt in a torn paper bag and three empty beer bottles. With a mysterious smile she invited him to be seated.

“If I was her aunt,” she said with a wink, “I’d not be likely to know her address. No,” she added with a certain vehemence, “she hasn’t got no aunt.”

“Drunk,” thought Albinus wearily. “Look here,” he said, “can’t you tell me where she has gone?”

“She rented a room from me,” said the woman pensively, as she bitterly reflected on Margot’s ingratitude in hiding from her both the rich friend and her new address, though there had not been much difficulty in sniffing out the latter.

“What can I do?” exclaimed Albinus. “Can’t you suggest anything?”

Yes, sadly ungrateful. She had helped her so; now she did not quite know whether by telling she would be doing Margot a service or the reverse (she would have preferred the second), but this big, nervous, blue-eyed gentleman looked so unhappy that with a sigh she told him what he wanted to know.

“They used to be after me, too, in the old days,” she muttered, nodding her head, while she let him out, “that they did.”

It was half past seven. Lights were being put on, and their soft orange glow looked very lovely in the pale dusk. The sky was still quite blue, with a single salmon-colored cloud in the distance, and all this unsteady balance between light and dusk made Albinus feel giddy.

“In another moment I shall be in paradise,” he thought, as he sped in a taxi over the whispering asphalt.

Three tall poplars grew in front of the big brick house where she now lived. A brand-new brass plate with her name was affixed to her door. A huge female with arms like lumps of raw meat went to announce him. “Got a cook already,” he thought lovingly. “Walk in,” said the cook, coming back. He smoothed down his sparse hair and went in.

Margot was lying in a kimono on a dreadful
chintz-covered sofa, her arms crossed behind her head. On her stomach an open book was poised, cover upward.

“You’re quick,” she said, languidly extending her hand.

“Why, you don’t seem surprised to see me,” he murmured softly. “Guess how I found out your address.”

“I wrote you my address,” she said with a sigh, raising both elbows again.

“It was rather amusing,” Albinus continued without heeding her words—just gloating over the sight of the painted lips which in another moment … “Rather amusing—especially as you’ve been pulling my leg with that ready-made aunt of yours.”

“Why did you go there?” inquired Margot, suddenly very cross. “I wrote you my address—in the top right-hand corner, quite clearly.”

“Top corner? Clearly?” repeated Albinus, puckering up his face perplexedly. “What on earth are you talking about?”

She shut the book with a bang and sat up on the couch.

“Surely you got my letter?”

“What letter?” asked Albinus—and suddenly he put his hand to his mouth and his eyes opened very wide.