The Old Man and Me (16 page)

I started upstairs studying the back of the envelope. Then for the first time I turned it round and noticed with a shock that it had a Dublin postmark. I studied the handwriting closely. A woman’s? Lady Mary’s? Must be. I felt a sense of danger, a sense of urgency. Urgent unfinished correspondence. I mounted the steps two at a time.

I was standing outside C. D.’s room knocking at the door. Come in, he called to me and since he did not come to the door I had to open it myself and enter. Uneasily I took in nothing about the room except that he was in the bed. Or rather he was on the bed. He had taken off his dinner jacket and his tie and shoes. He appeared to be reading, several pillows propped comfortably behind his head. “My dear,” he said closing the book, letting it fall to the floor. “Sit down, do.” He indicated the bed.

Still ill at ease I sat on the edge of the bed facing him but as far away as possible, my back against the bed-post. I looked around me trying to think of something to say about the room. “It’s nice,” is the only comment I found myself making. C. D. began to smile at me. The smile came in two parts—first his angelic blue stare glacial and spiritual and then slowly, deliberately, he allowed it to catch fire and his eyes glow red and his mouth widen with lust. Instinctively I moved closer, close enough so that if he sat up he could have taken me in his arms, but he didn’t budge he just kept on smiling hot and avaricious until I found myself stretched out on the bed lying alongside him dazed at my surrender. Not two seconds before pressed against the bed-post I had decided my only motive for being here was to escape from the house-party and have a nice quiet talk with him. Talk above all talk, I loved talking with him. Yet now as we lay together in silence I felt no shame at my sudden reversal (it could hardly be called a capitulation), only peace at having finally burnt my bridges. He slipped his arm under me and I waited for the Occasion to begin. Still smiling he reached across me with his free hand (
there
was an expensive smell) and switched off the bedside light. He kissed me. My arms curled around at once. (Thank goodness they were long, he was so very large.) He slipped down the straps of my evening dress and began kissing my shoulders. I clung to him.

There was a knock on the door. I started up as a reflex but no, I cannot say that I was really surprised.

“Cos—?”

He switched the light back on. “One minute. Who is it?”

“It’s me, Pam.” As if we didn’t know.

“Tell her to go away,” I whispered.

“One minute, Pam. Hold on, will you?” He got off the bed, smoothing his hair and putting on his dinner jacket, tie and shoes, all the time giving me the look of fury and disgust that was meant for her. I scrambled quickly to my feet, grabbed my purse and dashed for the bathroom.

I could hear Lady Daggoner enter. Her voice was cool and musical and unnaturally clear—for my benefit no doubt. She wanted to know would Cos be an angel and make up the fourth for their bridge table. The doctor had to leave on a call. It’s as well, he plays atrociously and Rupert was winning so much it was embarrassing. Now perhaps Cos will change his partner’s luck. He can’t say no, he must look upon it as an act of mercy the same as the doctor’s call. My not-yet-lover attempted a feeble protest. Mutters about pressing unfinished correspondence. About his headache. About sleeping badly the night before and his desire to get a good night’s rest. Lady Dag wasn’t having any. He can finish off the rubber, it won’t take half an hour, it’s the least he can do to help them out. “Come on, slow coach, hurry.” She was all bustle and efficiency. “You’ve got your tie on crooked, silly, here let me.” Now I hear triumph and amusement and something else. Shared laughter. Sounds from the past. They’ve had their moments together, those two. Ready? Yes. Scuffle, scuffle. Out of the door.

I was sitting on the edge of the tub shaking with rage. Most of it at first was directed against myself for rushing off to hide like a serving wench—but quickly I switched to her. What business was it of hers what we were up to—or rather, why this insistence on making it her business—arriving in person, of all tactless things, instead of getting one of her million minions to deliver the message—that would have been the polite, the discreet and above all the ordinary thing to do. Of course he might have refused the maid where he could hardly have refused old Pamy-wam. But no. There was more to it than that. Her presence was an open declaration of war—nothing short.

I dashed cold water on my face and left the bathroom. I walked around the bedroom poking into everything but it was the desk that really interested me. Dare I open it? Those pussyfooting maids. “Unfinished correspondence,” he’d referred to it twice this evening, and, suddenly, I was sure that it actually existed. I opened a desk drawer and there—carefully hidden under a neat stack of blank writing paper—two pages of a letter: “Dearest Mary...”

My heart stopped as if stuck and then picked up again and went furiously pounding on. This was his writing. This was his handwriting in action to her. Saturday, said the date. Quickly I skimmed the page “...that now, incredibly, it should fall upon you to save me. Only save me, I implore you. Rome, Venice, Athens—anywhere you like; it doesn’t matter. It must be soon, there is no time to lose...” The pounding of my heart seemed to have affected my eyesight. The words blurred into meaninglessness. I sat down to catch my breath but when I started to read it again my hands were still trembling. “...there is no time to lose...” (and blurr went the print as another line disintegrated into chicken tracks before I could get my grip) “...must agree that after one American disaster another is out of the question. And this one would be truly dangerous, this one would finish me off; this
one would be fatal...” (a really big blurr and then) “...not in the very least straightforward, though to what purpose her lies, God alone knows. She professes to be rich—dresses well enough in that American style—yet it is obvious from those two infallible giveaways, her shoes and her handbags, that she is not. She professes to have come here for psychiatric treatment yet the story she tells of her unhappy love affair which, she claims, led to a nervous breakdown and subsequently to this decision struck me, upon consideration, as false and totally incompatible with anything else in her personality—though I must say she tells it well. In fact, I find I am constantly falling under her spell, ready and eager to believe anything she says—for the moment. She really is a most frightening blend of cynicism, implacable (though mysterious) purpose, and above all passion; a curious passion that seems to spring from my reminding her (I imagine unconsciously, of course) of someone she has been wronged by, or deprived of, in the past. I know. Always the complicated psychological reason. Of course, she may be after my money, that would be simple enough, but why not a rich man closer her age? There was a good one here today for luncheon. No, laugh all you like, it is getting me down. She makes a gesture which, even in the short space I have known her, has come to fill me with dread: she leans forward as though agog, one arm perched on her elbow, and with the thumb of her right hand she presses her front tooth and automatically, like one of those pinball machines, her eyes register first suspicion and then hatred. I have seen those eyes look upon me with such contempt and loathing I have almost feared for my life, the more so because I suspect this display of hostility to be entirely unconscious on her part.
Consciously
she is trying to attract me, seduce me, enslave me (fancy! an old man like me) but unconsciously...” and off it went into another mist straightening out only at the last sentence still left in mid-air...“help but feel that, in a life where we are allowed only a certain number of mistakes, I am already well past my quota and therefore I implore you, my dearest Mary—”

What did I feel? Appalled. Astonished. Bewildered. I thought I was doing so well. I thought I was charming the hell out of him. I thought I had him eating out of my hand. Well: I thought I was getting away with it. I might have known. There is always a catch. But suddenly I felt very very young, like a child. Suddenly I wanted to run to—God knows whom, maybe God Himself—why is there never a face I can put to whom I want to run?—and cry “But I thought he
liked
me. All I want is to be liked.” And then, thank heaven, cold rage and fury. Carefully I wiped the desk where the tear splashed. Carefully I put the letter back exactly where I had found it and closed the drawer. Quietly I slipped out of the room.

Back in my own room I locked the door behind me. If he was entertaining any thought for later on—! I was shivering with cold and started across to the glowing fireplace. On my way something tripped me up and I was flung headlong on to the floor murderously barking my shins and tearing my stockings to shreds. What was it? Some stupid old bric-à-brac, some eighteenth-century piece of crap, a footstool or something, anyway, now it was good and broken and in my exasperation I hurled it into the fireplace where it immediately combusted into crackling flames. Good. I collapsed into the chair by the dressing-table and fell into a blue funk. Shoes and handbags? I’ll kill him for that. What’s wrong with them, I’d like to know. They were in perfect taste like everything else about my clothes. They weren’t real alligator, I grant you, and I didn’t change them with every costume. Couldn’t afford to, that’s why. And the reason I couldn’t was because he happened to be sitting on a bundle of bread that happened to be mine. Athens, Rome, and Venice? Oh no you don’t, buddy boy, you’re not going anywhere until I’m finished with you. I’ve still got one card left unplayed (but with an old man—who can tell?) and if that fails— With a start I saw that I had gotten a hold of the green Buddha-shaped candle and had been jabbing pins from the pincushion into it.

What’s more I had developed a splitting headache. Maybe I was about to get the curse. Maybe that accounted for my loss of control, I’m never quite myself at the beginning of it. No. It was at least ten days off. I went to the medicine chest looking for aspirin, which they had (natch), and took two. O.K. So, cool it. Clear head, steady nerves, that’s what’s needed. Get undressed, get into bed. Unlock the door, don’t be a baby. Read something, help you unwind. The John Dickson Carr mystery. Well, well. Turns out it was done with an electric fire plugged in and dropped into the bathtub while the victim was having a bath, short-circuiting him. I mean how frightfully English, what? Like, where would you even get a hold of an electric fire in this day and age except in jolly old—. Watch it. Don’t get all worked up again. Sleep. It’s three-thirty. Sleep, that’s the thing. Out with the light and now deep breaths...C. D. is getting ready for his bath—no really deep breaths I said...no but wait, first I have managed to unscrew the electric fire from the wall above. (Stand on the bathtub to reach it.) Tools. Get tools from the tool shed. Breathe! And ah, good now, I’ve got it. Electric fire comes off the wall quite easily really, nice long wire attached to it luckily. Now, hiding it carefully behind me call out to C. D. “Your bath is ready, darling. Can I stay and watch you? I’ll scrub your back.” Lean against wall, he won’t notice anything of course, preoccupied as he is with um with um testing the water. In he goes. And in...breathe in, breathe out, breathe dammit. Unrelated objects unexpected faces materialise from nowhere. Don’t try to make sense of it, surrrrrrealiss—

Was I really awake? I think so. Anyway I recognized the bedroom, it’s where I went to sleep, but what is this sweet singing that fills the air? It’s like a Gregorian chant. The ghostly monks from the Abbey. I hear them, I hear them! I am not frightened. It’s curious—it’s as if I have lost my resistance to be frightened. Something strange is happening to me in England, in the Old World, that I am giving in to. It’s all right though, I told myself. When the cock crows the singing will stop and as the thought formulates itself the cock does crow, the singing vanishes, the atmosphere lightens. The spirits have passed but how did I know that about the cock? I am sure, I am positive I didn’t know it before and yet at the moment I made it up the singing stopped. And I fell back into a dreamless sleep.

When I awoke it was Sunday sunshine. I leapt out of bed simultaneously throwing on my clothes and gulping my tea. I felt like my own American self again in the Sunday sun and pooh-poohed the events of the previous night. Singing monks. How impressionable can you get? And that footstool fantasy. Well there was no sign of a footstool in the fireplace. There was no sign of it in the room either, so probably I made the whole thing up, don’t remember seeing it before. But combing my hair at the dressing table my eyes fell upon the Buddha candle and with a sinking heart I saw that the pin pricks were there. I held it in my hands until it got warm and tried to smooth them away.

And that is enough of
that
, I told myself sternly, no more morbid thoughts. No matter what.

C. D. had taken the children off to church, Lady Daggoner told me when I arrived downstairs. Wasn’t it sweet of him, he was for ever doing dear things like that.

“Would you care to take a turn around the rose garden?” she asked me pleasantly. Was she going to be nice to me finally?

Lady Daggoner walked me slowly around her rose garden, her conversation full of expertise cleverly disguised as apology. The wet weather in June had completely waterlogged the garden, the soil had compacted and the idiot gardener, the son of the old one who died last year, turned out to know nothing, absolutely nothing, had to be watched every second of the time, had gone and used some worm-killing compound. Oh dear, the blunders would be comic if they weren’t so tragic, the new trees almost drying
up because he forgot to remove the foliage after the plants had been lifted from the ground. And over there, look, turned her back for a minute and when she’d turned round again it was to discover he’d put the Royalists next to the Rubaiyats, the Crimson Glories next to the Brilliants. Did you ever? Filthy pruning-shears spreading rust...black spot...compost heap...caught using DDT against green-fly...mildew...bushes cut back...soil acidity. Eventually she broke off to remark “But I can’t think why I go on boring you with all this. You’re not very interested in gardening, are you? So few Americans are. I keep forgetting.”