The Man in the Net (7 page)

He went out to join her. Looking up from the flowers, she gave him the same bright smile.

“So you’re up already. Do be an angel, will you, and keep in the studio this morning? When I’m through with the flowers I’m going to have a great house-cleaning project and I don’t want big feet tramping around.” The smile stretched even wider. “Or maybe you’d rather go out with the kids. I had to call Mrs. Jones about some dress pattern I’ve been promising to help her with for weeks. Emily answered the phone. She said they were expecting you at the swimming hole. You’d promised specially to go swimming, she said. But it’s just as you like, of course.”

So this was her way of letting him know she had capitulated? No recrimination. No references even. Just the busy cheerful housewife, the considerate neighbor, the model helpmeet. He was sure now that she’d had a drink in the barn. But it didn’t matter. Once she’d made the decision to be co-operative, she’d need the drink to fortify her.

She turned the nozzle shut and dropped the hose. “Now for the living-room.” She started away and, turning, asked with elaborate casualness, “Oh, are you going to New York?”

“Yes. I’m going.”

“I see. I just wanted to know about lunch. If you do go out with the kids, remember to be back by twelve-thirty. I’ll have to get your lunch a bit early for you to make the train.”

She started back toward the house and he went into the studio. Pictures were stacked against the walls. His latest canvas was on the easel. He stood a moment, looking at it. It made no sense to him, and he knew it would be hopeless to try to work. The kids, he thought. Why not? The morning had to be got through somehow. Linda had suggested it and probably that’s what she wanted—to get him out of the way. She was afraid of herself, scared that if they gave themselves any opportunity for another scene her good intentions might crack.

He returned to the house, put on swimming trunks and slipped his pants back over them. He could hear Linda running the vacuum in the living-room. Calling to her, “I’m off swimming”, he went out of the front door and started down the road.

The bend in the creek which the kids used as their swimming hole was only half a mile away toward Stoneville at a point where disused pastureland broke, for a while, into the vast acreage of woods.

When he reached the edge of the meadow he saw the kids’ bicycles piled against the rough stone boundary wall and, as he climbed over the wall into the knee-high weeds, he could hear their voices shouting down by the creek. The sound, high and clear, brought him a great relaxation of nerves, a feeling almost of security.

Except for Leroy, they were all there and all in the brook, their skin flashing, oiled with water—like seals. Emily, of course, saw him first while he was only half-way down the slope through the wild apple trees, the pine saplings, the clusters of choke cherry which, in a few years, would have swallowed up the pastureland again as if it had never been cleared. She climbed up on to the bank and came running to him.

“John, you came. I knew you’d come.”

She grabbed his hand and started running with him back to the creek. Soon he was in the water too. Frustrated father! He remembered Linda’s crack, but it had no sting any more. If he were a frustrated father, all the kids, in one way or another, were frustrated of parental love—the fatherless Emily and Angel with their harassed mother at the post office all day; Timmie, a victim of the Morelands’ thinly-veiled indifference; Buck, a pawn in his parents’ constant quarrels. Leroy’s parents loved him, but, working as servants in someone else’s house, they had little time for him. Yes, they all needed him as much as he needed them.

Just after eleven Leroy ran down through the meadow, stripping off his clothes, and jumped into the creek too. He was triumphant about his fishing expedition. He had caught three bass and Vickie had only caught one.

“And we were up at dawn. And I rowed. And … you should have seen the fish I almost caught. You could see it in the water. Boy, it was three feet long, I bet.”

As the other children crowded around him, wide-eyed and impressed, the sense of peace enlarged in John.

It was later, almost when it was time for him to leave, that it all went bad. Emily and Angel were lying with him in the sun on the creek bank. Emily suddenly said, “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell John the secret.”

“No,” cried Angel. “No, no, you’re not.” She hurled herself with savage fury at her older sister, beating at her with her fists. “It’s my secret. It’s my secret first.”

“It isn’t either.”

“It is. It is.”

The other kids all came out of the water and stood tensely around. John pulled the little girl off her sister. She struggled wildly in his arms. Her face, round and puffy with anger, glared up at him.

“You’re not—you’re not going to know the secret. You’re mean and wicked. You hit your wife.”

“Angel!” Emily had jumped up and was trying to grab at her sister again in John’s arms. “Don’t you dare … Don’t you dare …”

“He did,” screamed Angel. “He hit his wife. He beats his wife up. Timmie said so. Timmie saw. She came into the room with a great big beat-up eye and she said so. My husband hit me, she said, and Timmie …”

Bleakly thinking: So it’s got to the children now, John put her down. He glanced at Timmie. Timmie was squirming in agonized embarrassment. Suddenly he twisted round and started running away from them through the tall weeds.

Emily, John’s passionate advocate, was crying, “It isn’t true. I hate them. I hate Timmie. I hate Angel …” John went after Timmie. He found him behind a pine tree, lying on his face in the grass, sobbing. He knelt down by the boy’s side and put his hand on his shoulder.

“It’s all right, Timmie.”

“I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to tell them. Then I thought maybe if I told Angel a secret she’d tell me hers and I asked her and she said maybe if I told mine first. And I told and she wouldn’t tell me anyway. And I didn’t mean to …”

“Okay, Timmie. Let’s forget it. Come on.”

But the boy wouldn’t come. Lost in some child’s nightmare of treachery performed, he just lay on the grass, whimpering and kicking his toes against the ground.

John went back to the others. They were all awkward and shame-faced. The spell was broken. The shadow of Linda had stepped among them.

He left soon and walked back to the house.

And there was Linda, as brisk and bright as ever. She had his lunch ready and sat with him while he ate, not eating herself, smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching him from behind the sunglasses, and talking with a rather hectic casualness about trivialities.

She came up with him while he changed and packed an overnight bag.

“You don’t mind driving yourself to the station, do you? I won’t be needing the car while you’re away anyway. And …” She raised her hand to the glasses. “I don’t want to go through the village like this. I don’t want them to talk.”

That was the nearest she got to any reference to what had happened until she was standing by the car, waiting for him to drive off.

Then, suddenly, she said, “John, promise me one thing, please. It’s all right with Bill. I swear I’ll be all right. I’ll do everything if it’s Bill. But don’t go to anyone else. I mean, if he isn’t there or anything … please.”

“Okay,” he said.

“And, John …”

“Yes.”

“About Steve. You were right. What I said last night— it was a lie. I don’t know what got into me.”

“It’s all right, Linda. Well, see you tomorrow evening.”

“Yes, tomorrow. Goodbye, John.”

“Goodbye.”

And she’d stood outside the kitchen door, smiling and waving as he swung the car down the drive …

The conductor had already called the station and Brad had pulled their suitcases down from the rack. When the train stopped and they climbed out, John saw the old black sedan still parked where he had left it. Vickie was there too with the Careys’ Buick. They joined her and she kissed them both.

“Well, John, is the great deed done?”

“It’s done.”

She squeezed his hand. “Linda will understand, I’m sure. If you feel like it, come over, both of you, later. Father’s been off in Springfield and Mother stayed with me last night, two lorn females together. But he’s just got back and he’s whisked her off again. So do come.”

John drove home, trying not to think about Linda any more. What was the point of tormenting himself with speculations? He would know soon enough. In the village, he stopped off at the post office. He was expecting the monthly
Art Review
which should have a criticism of his show and he knew that Linda, without the car, probably wouldn’t have picked up the mail. Several of the villagers were lounging around inside. As he went up to his box, he nodded and said, “Good evening.” No one answered. His box was right by the window where Mrs. Jones was arranging a stamp book. He smiled at her as he took out his letters. For a moment she glanced right through him and then turned back to the stamps, and gradually he began to realize that the atmosphere was not just neutral, it was antagonistic. So news of the episode at the Careys’, distorted into God knows what, had spread through the village already. To Stoneville, he wasn’t just the slightly comic outsider any more. He was—what? The wife-beater? The degenerate city interloper?

As he walked out again to his car, the silence seemed to follow him like a threat. It didn’t matter, he told himself. He’d made no effort of friendship toward the village, any more than he had toward the Carey set. All he’d ever asked was to be left alone. But, as he climbed into the car and started off again, the memory of the rejection clung on, cold and faintly sinister. It was as if an invisible Linda had slipped into the car with him. Because this was all Linda, of course. The man they’d rejected hadn’t been he himself—the real John Hamilton. They didn’t even know him. It had been the image of John Hamilton which Linda had built up in their minds.

He was driving through the woods now. The road dipped down a hill and then up again to the corner. He turned it, passed over the wooden bridge and, suddenly dreading his wife, swung up the drive and parked outside the kitchen door.

Linda wasn’t in the kitchen. He passed through it, calling “Linda”. Then he moved into the living-room and stopped dead. The room was in total chaos. All his pictures were off the walls; all the records and boxes of tapes had been pulled out of the cabinet. The floor was a wild litter of them. Half the records were smashed and the pictures had been ripped savagely to and fro as if by a knife. Even the phonograph turn-table and amplifier and the tape recorder had been swept off the shelf and lay on their sides, spewing broken tubes.

As he stood there, gazing down at the confusion, it seemed to John as if this had happened before or rather as if something which he’d always half known would happen but had kept from admitting to himself had happened at last. And the dread became horror as an image came of Linda wielding a knife, Linda trampling on the records, Linda, her face wild, contorted, gibbering—a maniac’s face. He closed his eyes as if the vision were actually there in front of him.

And then suddenly he could feel her presence in the house or rather the presence of her madness. It seemed to permeate the air, infecting it, like a poisonous gas.

Where is she? he thought. I’ve got to find her. I’ve got to go and face …

That was when he saw his typewriter. It was usually kept out in his studio, but it was on a table in a corner, and propped on it was a piece of paper. He threaded his way through the ruin of records and canvases to the table. He picked up the message. It was all typed, even the signature.

you never thought i’d do it, did you? well, that’s where you fooled yourself, at last i’ve found the courage to escape. so—find yourself another woman to slave for you, to stick pins in, to torture. find another one if you can. it’s a cinch you’ll never find me. bad luck to you—for ever.

linda

SHE HAD gone. He stood looking at the note, not reacting to the insane, distorted spite of the words, just registering the fact that she had left him. But dimly behind the shock, his reasoning processes were working. Why had she typed the note? He never remembered her having typed anything. He hadn’t even known she could type. Why had she taken the trouble to go out to the studio and bring the typewriter here and … ? The image of her, mad, gibbering, plunging around the room with a knife came back. And he thought: She hasn’t really gone. This note is just another devious trick. She’s still here somewhere—in the house.

He picked his way through the havoc on the havoc, thinking, almost impersonally: She’s destroyed the pictures. Later I’ll be murderously angry. But what he felt now wasn’t anger; it was fear, a sliding miasmic fear that somewhere—upstairs maybe—madness was lurking, crouched in a corner to spring.

He went into the dining-room. Nothing. No one. Then he went up the stairs. It’s our bedroom, he thought with blinding certainty. But, when he went into the bedroom, she wasn’t there and the door of the closet was open. He could see into it to his suits and her dresses hanging there. No one was in the closet.

He investigated the other rooms. Then, with a sudden jitteriness, he thought of the pictures in the studio. He ran out through the kitchen door, across the lawn, serenely dappled with the evening shadows of the apple trees, and into the studio. The pictures stacked against the wall hadn’t been touched, nor had the one on the easel. That was something. But Linda wasn’t there.

So she really had gone—without the car? Without any clothes? He went back to the bedroom and started to ruffle through the clothes in the closet. Yes, her new green dress was gone and her grey suit—several other dresses, too. And the new suitcase which she kept on the top shelf wasn’t there. She’d gone. She’d walked out of the house with a suitcase.

He sat down for a moment on the bed. The feeling of evil, of infection, was still there. Was it perhaps he who was going mad—who was imagining all this? She had stood there by the car, watching him steadily, telling him, surely with sincerity, that she was all right, that she was ready to co-operate. “Anything’s all right with Bill. I’ll do anything Bill says.’' She had waved when he had gone. How could the plunge have happened from that—to this, to the frenzied chaos of destruction downstairs and that note with its appalling slashes of spite? Even if she’d drunk everything in the house, she’d never …