The Parasite Person (15 page)

The place was very quiet. The cat went on licking itself, the sun moved inch by inch towards the butter, which would soon be squashy and yellow, its own special way of celebrating the return of spring. In the far corner, above the sink, a tap dripped steadily, needing a new washer. This was another thing that Martin wouldn’t have been able to stand. The mincer, too, with scraps of raw meat still adhering, standing on
today’s
newspaper. That was something else that he had a thing about, using today’s paper for household tasks; never mind the cat having had a go at the mincer, as well.

The place was untidy, certainly; even neglected, in a way; but not in the way that a place is neglected when the owner is actually away. This was current, day-to-day neglect, mere sloppiness, a general Beatrice-way of doing things. Soon, the remains of supper would be joining the remains of lunch, and no doubt Beatrice would get around to washing up as soon as there was nowhere to put anything down except on the floor.

*

And then she saw them. Sticking out from under the table-cloth, with one down-at-heel slipper off, the other still covering the laddered toes of her stocking—Beatrice’s feet. You could have thought they were dummies, a stage-set, except that you knew they couldn’t be.

Helen’s first impulse was to scream. Her second, to smash the window with the nearest hard implement—her fist, if necessary—and scramble to the rescue.

Rescue? But it was too late for rescue. Those feet … so still … so lifeless … so unresponsive to the sharp little sound of terror
which Helen knew she had made…. Beatrice must be already dead.

Ruth’s
third
victim? For hadn’t that been an “interview” of sorts that Beatrice had been describing in such trenchant terms just before the phone went dead …?

Dead. Helen shuddered, and with the sun still beating on her back she felt icy cold.

Was that the precise moment when it had happened? Had she, Helen, actually been present at the murder, albeit on the end of a telephone? And had just shrugged her shoulders, assuming a fault on the line, and bothered no more about it?

There was a roaring in her ears now, she felt as if she was choking, but Helen forced herself to batten down the panic, to pull herself out of shock, and to try to think rationally.

The thing she was imagining was impossible. Whatever had happened, it couldn’t have happened all those days ago. Look at those remains of an obviously recent meal; look at the opened bottle of milk, not yet curdled and yellow. And what about the contented cat, washing itself? Surely no cat would sit licking itself in this leisurely way if its mistress had been lying dead for a week less than a yard away?

Or would it? Helen knew so little about cats. Were they truly attached to their owners, other than by cupboard-love? Did they
care
?

And even if they did care, would they necessarily show their caring by not getting on the table to wash themselves, by refraining from licking the butter …?

*

“Beet! It’s all right, Beet, you can come out now!”

The voice, screeching from an upstairs window, startled Helen almost out of her senses, though even in that first moment of shock she still managed to recognise it: it was the voice of the Pocock woman from across the road, Beatrice’s bosom friend, and
Martin
’s No. 1
bête
noir.
The black, shining scrolls of hair bobbed and quivered above the window-ledge up there, and the face was so red with excitement and glee that the over-rouged cheeks looked almost natural.

“It’s
all
right,
Beet!” the voice howled again; and then, full of explanatory gusto:

“It’s not
her,
Beet, this time! It’s only
her
!”

A
T THE SECOND
exhortation—“You can come out now, Beet”—the feet protruding from beneath the table began, reassuringly, to stir, one of them groping ineffectually for the lost slipper, the other withdrawing itself from sight as its owner, heaving herself around in her cramped quarters like a beached sea-monster, prepared to emerge into the light of day. The crisis was over, evidently. Beatrice, sheepish and dishevelled, but no longer scared, crawled out from her hiding place, and with much cracking of joints scrambled up to a standing position. She turned to face Helen, blinking into the sunlight.

“Oh. It’s you,” she said, still a bit dazed; and then, vaguely hospitable: “Do come in.”

Through the window? Or round to the back door? Beatrice, still blinking, seemed oblivious of the problem: just looked at Helen expectantly, waiting for her to materialise indoors. But at this point the problem was solved by Marjorie Pocock bursting in at the back door agog with neighbourly joy at the prospect of something happening, but not to her.

“It’s
her
!”
she exulted, for the third time, though on this occasion lowering her voice a little in deference to Helen’s proximity, “Martin’s fancy piece! Do you want to let her in?”

By now, Beatrice had dusted herself down, had both her slippers on, and was already padding to the back door.

“Oh, there you are,” she said, amiably enough, as Helen appeared round the corner of the house. “It’s funny you should turn up just now, we were just talking about you.”

Since the two of them must have talked of little else for the best
part of eighteen months, the coincidence was not startling; but Helen took the remark as it was meant, as a sort of “come-and-
join-the
-club” invitation, and soon the three of them were seated round the kitchen table drinking mugs of inordinately strong tea. The crumbs were still there, and the liquefying butter, but the cat had made itself scarce, doubtless calculating, with that universal feline wisdom, that visitors nearly always prove a threat, bringing with them fearsomely un-cat standards of hygiene with which to
intimidate
your normally easy-going owner. “Down, puss!” she will cry, in tones of wholly factitious horror, and will even push you off the table quite sharply, in that nasty, showing-off way, trying to make them believe that this was what she normally did.

Really, humans! What traitors they became to your cosy
working
relationship whenever there was another human around.

Helen sipped the nasty and none-too-hot tea, accepted a slice of swiss roll out of a cardboard packet, and wished heartily that Marjorie would go so that she could have her private conversation with Beatrice about Ruth Ledbetter. This was what she had come for, and she did not want to waste time on social chit-chat.

She need not have worried. Marjorie did not want to waste time on social chit-chat either, she plunged straight in.

“You must be wondering,” she said to Helen, before even biting into her swiss roll, “why Beet was under the table when you arrived? A bit funny, didn’t you think?”

“Well, a bit,” Helen agreed cautiously, adding “But of course it’s none of my business …”

“None
of
your
business?”
shrieked Marjorie, slapping her mug of tea down so hard that it slopped over on to the (luckily) plastic table-cloth. “But
of
course
it’s your business!
I’d
damn well think it was
my
business if my partner’s Ex was hiding under the kitchen table when I called! But, of course, she never would be … she’s not like that….”

She sighed, as if having a rival in love who doesn’t hide under tables at your approach was one of life’s minor deprivations. Then, cheering up, she continued:

“She wasn’t hiding from
you,
Helen, don’t think that. You weren’t, were you, Beet?” and Beatrice, her mouth full of swiss roll,
nodded emphatic assent. “She was hiding from that
other
one. The Leadswinger one. Weren’t you, Beet? The one who keeps coming round persecuting her. A dozen times she’s been here, I should think. Tell her about it, Beet. Go on.”

Beatrice nodded, swallowed the remainder of her mouthful, and took up the narrative.

“That’s right. Well, perhaps not a
dozen
times, but at least twice. I told you, Helen, don’t you remember, how rude she was that time? Badgering me about Martin’s work, just as if
I
knew anything about it, why should I? His
work
!—that always makes me laugh, anything to do with Martin working! I’m sorry, Helen, but it does. I’ve know him longer than you have.

“So anyway, about this ghastly girl. I got rid of her that time, and I thought that was the end of it. But not two days later—something like that, anyway—there she was again. The nerve of it! Crack of dawn it was that time, I wasn’t even up. So that’s when I phoned you, Helen. Enough is enough, I thought—and I think that scared her a bit, hearing me telling you all about it on the upstairs extension. She maybe thought Martin was listening, I don’t know, anyway, she cut us off half through a sentence, and when I ran downstairs to ask what the hell, she’d gone. Since then I haven’t let her in, and I think she’s given up now. Thank goodness. Long time no see, that’s what I’m praying for.”

In all this, there wasn’t much that Helen didn’t already know, and the questions she could think of asking didn’t elucidate much more. No, Beatrice
didn’t
know the girl’s address, how should she? Nor anything at all about her background, it wasn’t quite that sort of a friendly chat, was it? Just a lot of nosey-parkering about Martin, and the stuff he was working on just now….

And talking of Martin’s stuff, she continued, somewhat tartly, what about all that junk of his in the back bedroom? When was he coming to move it? Because now that she wasn’t going to get a bloody penny from him, just the house, she was going to have to think about making an income from it, wasn’t she? She was planning to take in lodgers; she could make thirty pounds a week, easily, out of that back bedroom once Martin’s clobber was out of it.

“Forty pounds,” interposed Marjorie, who liked to see
dissension
escalating.

“And so,” reasoned Beatrice, “every week he doesn’t take that bloody stuff away is costing me thirty pounds.”

“Forty pounds,” said Marjorie.

“And so in fact,” continued Beatrice, “If you work it out, he owes me ninety pounds already—”

Hastily, before Marjorie could work out what three forties were, Helen intervened.

“I’m sorry, Beatrice, I really am. I do see what a nuisance it is for you; but the point is, my flat isn’t very large, and I’ve already taken quite a few of his things. The desk, for instance, and that nest of tables. It isn’t as if we
need
any more furniture.”

Rivalry, temporarily in abeyance, was astir again. As much as they had once fought to possess Martin’s person, so did they now fight not to possess his filing-cabinets, his overflowing cardboard boxes, his mounds of obsolete papers pertaining to long-abandoned projects.

“You could have them put in store,” suggested Helen, as she always suggested when the subject came up, “and send us the bill.”

“
He
can have them put in store!” Beatrice snapped back, again in the identical words she had used on previous occasions. “They’re
his
bloody things!”—and there, once again, the matter was allowed to rest. Since each of them felt herself to be the loser in this battle, it was never allowed to go on very long.

One way and another, it seemed about time for Helen to go. It was plain by now that Beatrice had nothing useful to contribute to the problem; also, for some minutes Helen had been aware of an increasing restlessness in her two companions. They were longing to get her out of the house so that they could start talking about her again; and taking pity on their impatience, and not wanting to outstay her welcome, Helen took her leave.

M
ARTIN HAD BEEN
more perturbed by the two announcements in the Deaths Column than he had allowed Helen to see. He knew as well as she did that they couldn’t be coincidence. But the reason for his anxiety was quite different from hers. Not for one moment did he suspect that Ruth might have somehow brought about the deaths of these two subjects; in fact he had reason to be certain that she had not. His fears related to a possibility quite other than this.

For he, too, in his student days had worked off-and-on as a part-time, partially-trained interviewer on various projects. He knew all the dodges, and this was one of them, it came in very useful in those surveys where a name and address was demanded as well as a complete set of answers. The reason for this demand was, of course, to enable check-ups to be made, and thus to deter the unscrupulous interviewer from doing the whole job in the comfort of his own armchair, making up answers out of his head.

A reasonable precaution, given the motley collection of people commonly employed as interviewers. But all the same, the system failed to take account of the ingenuity of some of the resourceful young people who got themselves employed, especially those of them who worked in teams, egging one another on,
Us
against
Them.
Whatever new obstacle
They
might set up to obviate cheating was taken as a challenge; and this particularly mean-spirited device of making you extract names and addresses from the people you accosted in the street, so that the supervisor could call back on one in ten of them (Helen had been absolutely right, as usual) and check that the interview had in fact taken place—this device had stretched the team’s ingenuity to its exciting limit.

There had been various ploys; and this one, of picking names out of the Deaths Column of the local paper had been found to work surprisingly well, if used in moderation. No supervisor, finding herself (it was usually a her in this kind of work) in a house of mourning, the subject of her enquiries barely cold in his grave, would ever have the nerve to pursue the matter: she would just fall over herself apologising, and beat a hasty retreat.

Of course, you couldn’t do too many like this, too consistently, or they’d begin to spot it. Ruth had been rather pushing her luck with as many as two out of nine. She was also foolish in not realising that whereas in a vast, impersonal Market Research Survey the chances were very small indeed that any of the far-off staff at headquarters would be regular readers of the local paper of your particular area, in this small-scale survey of Martin’s, in and around the campus, the chances of this being the case were really quite high.

It was worrying. Not only worrying in itself, but it set you wondering what else the naughty girl had been up to?

He tried to remember the other ploys they’d used; and as he recalled them, one after another, from the golden, dare-devil days, he could hardly refrain from smiling.

There was the “Fifth Girl” trick, for example. If you were short of an “F 25 C” to complete your quota, you simply looked through the Accommodation Vacant columns for “Fifth Girl Wanted” for some communal flat or other; then copied out that address (or rang up for it, if it was a box-number), invented a name at random, and then effortlessly filled in your questionnaire, confident that if the supervisor
should
choose this address as one of her one-in-tens, there would not be a single inhabitant who could say with certainty that there had or had not been such a character temporarily in residence at such-and-such a time: still less whether any among the myriad of recent callers had or had not come from Market Investigations Ltd, or whatever.

Removal vans were good, too. The team kept each other posted about addresses outside which removal men had been observed carrying furniture. By the time the supervisor did her rounds, the newcomers would be safely installed, and naturally could not be
expected to know anything much about the doings of their
predecessors
.

Of course, you couldn’t do
all
your interviews like this; there was tacit agreement in the team that at least 50% of your stuff had to be genuine. How else could there be any basis from which to calculate a plausible proportion of “Yeses” and “Nos” and “Don’t knows” in the various categories? Besides, with any reasonably short, straightforward, and un-embarrassing questionnaire, it just wasn’t worth the bother, it was easier and quicker to do the job properly. Where these dodges really came into their own was when you were landed with a long and complicated questionnaire to be administered by the Quota Method—so many C-class F’s aged under 35, so many D-class M’s of over 60, and so on, all of them to be accosted in the street with nothing better to go
on than their appearance. Often, your guess could be quite absolutely wrong, and you could get quite desperate, picking on perky young girls who turned out to be over fifty, or down-and-out old wrecks who turned out to be headmasters of public schools of Peers of the Realm.

Though, of course, if you were
looking
for headmasters of public schools or Peers of the Realm (A-class males) to complete your quota, you could scour the streets for days and never come across a single one: and this was where “Round the World Cruises” came in so useful. You got hold of a glossy mag, full of gossip about who was just off for a 3-month yachting trip, and down his name would go, among your over-50 As. The supervisor, patiently doing her rounds, would be confronted by the butler, who naturally could not be expected to know whether or not his master/mistress had recently been interviewed in the street about toothpaste or whatever; and by the time the said master/mistress returned from the jaunt, the whole thing would be ancient history, sunk without trace.

What fun it had been! And how very nearly always it had worked!

Somehow, it had never really seemed like cheating—more like winning in a game of skill and daring against opponents worthy of your mettle. Or, looked at in another way, it could seem like the
improvising of a set of labour-saving devices conducive to higher productivity per man-hour: an outcome for which any sensible employer should surely be grateful?

And, of course, way back of it all, there was the solid, reassuring fact that 50% of the stuff was genuine. The final results couldn’t be all that wildly out while this remained the case, and provided you calculated your proportions of “Yeses” and “Nos” correctly. Usually, this was simply a matter of doubling-up on your genuine figure in each category, even the biggest moron could hardly get it wrong.

Also, working in a team helped. It was vitally important that they should all of them get approximately the
same
proportions—if you turned in results more than 10% or so different from your colleagues, then you really
were
on the carpet, and so the team took every precaution to ensure that this should not occur.

And so, by and large, no real harm was done to anyone, certainly not to the advancement of human knowledge. Apart from anything else, the topics being researched were usually of such piddling idiocy—whether “Banana-flavoured ice-cream” was a phrase more appealing to the consumer than “The ice-cream with
banana-flavouring
”; or whether blue pictures on the packet sold detergent faster than pink ones—so that the concept of advancing (or, indeed, retarding) the march of science was simply laughable.

*

And this was where the whole difference lay. This was why Martin was both angry and worried. His concern about Ruth’s cheating in the very same ways that he himself had been accustomed to cheat wasn’t just a matter of the pot calling the kettle black; for this was something quite, quite different.
This
survey was an important, scientific survey: it was
Martin
Lockwood’s
survey, and the results were of the most crucial importance not only to him, but to the whole future of research in this field. His theory of the Parasite Person (he had almost forgotten by now that the phrase was Ruth’s originally, but of course he would give her due credit for this in the preface)—this theory of his needed to be supported by a mass of evidence substantial enough to hold its own against the
Establishment
opposition it was bound to encounter. And it
was
substantial
enough, more and more of it was flowing in, day after day, from the answers to the amended questionnaire as administered by Ruth.

He picked up one of her latest interviews and glanced through it. An M 45 B, formerly a highly successful business man, whose depression had been growing steadily worse over a number of months, and the business was beginning to suffer. By now it would have been on the rocks altogether, he claimed, if it hadn’t been for his wife “turning up trumps” when the depression struck.
Formerly
a rather dim, ineffectual sort of woman, she had immediately summoned up reserves of energy such as he’d never dreamed she had in her.

“She’s been marvellous—really marvellous! So cheerful, so patient, so full of courage! I don’t know what I’d have done without her!”

You’d have got better, Mr M 45 B, that’s what you’d have done. Gleefully, Martin skimmed through the interview—which was a long one, and full of highly significant quotes. Definitely, he would use it, perhaps among the case-histories.

And then he thought again about his recent doubts. Could Ruth really have made all this up? And
would
she? Whatever for?
She
wasn’t getting anything out of the thesis, not even a decent wage. Not a wage at all, in fact; and as he recollected this Martin felt a surge of reassurance. For surely this fact nullified any possible motive for cheating? Why on earth would she be working for him at all, except (as she herself had claimed) from a genuine interest in the project, a genuine wish to discover the truth?

She
couldn’t
have cheated, she just couldn’t. Looking through the last batch of interviews, so detailed and so thorough, with verbatim replies so natural and convincing, Martin felt quite ashamed of himself for ever having doubted his capable and zealous assistant.

All the same, he must have a word with her about those two names in the Deaths Column. She mustn’t be allowed to get away with it, even though she probably
wasn’t
cheating in any important sense. He could guess exactly what had happened, because it had often enough happened to him in his interviewing days.

The way it went was this. You would get a marvellous and perfectly genuine interview off someone, by scrupulously honest
means, and then, at the very end, when the whole thing was virtually in the bag, they’d turn around and refuse to give their name and address: sudden cold feet, perhaps, or they were illegal immigrants, or something. When this happened, what you were supposed to do was to scrap the whole interview; an absurd procedure, in Martin’s view. Apart from the awful waste of labour involved, the practice could be held to be actually distorting the sample by introducing a bias against the type of people who like to remain anonymous. And so, a name and address on the form being a
sine
qua
non,
it was only common sense (or so it had always seemed to Martin) to provide one.

Yes, this was what must have happened to Ruth. Thrilled as she obviously was about how well the survey was going, and having in her hands two honestly-obtained interviews that so superbly vindicated the hypothesis, she just couldn’t bear to scrap them for the sake of a mere formality like the obtaining of names and addresses. And so (just as he would have done in her place) she’d resorted to the time-honoured device of picking someone of appropriate age and sex out of the Death Column….

But all so unnecessary! The silly girl! Did she really think he was the sort of boss who would tear strips off her for turning in an anonymous interview now and again? He must tell her that next time this happened, all she had to do was write “name and address withheld” at the top, and he would accept it unconditionally. As soon as she came in—which should be quite soon now, it was gone three—he’d raise the subject with her: quite amicably, of course, even laughing a bit, making it clear that he wasn’t accusing her of cheating.

Softly, softly catehee monkey!

*

The monkey wasn’t quite so easily caught.

“
What
Death Column? What do you mean?” she demanded; and when Martin explained—very gently, and smiling all the time to show her how lightly he took the whole matter—she proceeded, with one of those awful twists of feminine logic, to turn the tables on him, and put
him
on the defensive.

Who says?
Which
bloody paper? Well, go on, show me!—and of
course he couldn’t show her, because Helen had taken the paper back to school with her so as to return it to the colleague from whom she had purloined it.

“Helen
!”
She made the name sound like a new swear-word. “I might have known that it was Miss Bloody Nosey-Parker at the bottom of all this! She’s been out to get me right from the start! Listen, Prof, I
will
not
have this goddam whore of yours interfering with my work! I’ll kill her if she does it again! Get it? Fuck her all you like, I don’t care, but if she ever again gets her bloody claws on to any of my interviews, then I’m off! Finished! Vamoosed!—and you can do the rest of your effing interviews yourself. Right? There’s at least forty of them still to do,” she added spitefully, to frighten him; and it did; and she saw that it did. She lowered herself on to the couch, the short skirt riding up above her knees as usual, the thin mottled legs sticking out in front of her almost like weapons.

“Get it?” she repeated, eyes fixed on his face. “That bloody woman’s not typing my interviews any more, is that understood? Not one more word of any of them. Ever again. Okay?”

Martin agreed at once, because he couldn’t for the moment think of anything else to do. Then he began to consider what he had let himself in for.

“You mean
I’m
to type them?
Myself
?”
he asked, horrified; and Ruth, sitting there like a small, newly-crowned empress on her throne, revelling in her sudden power to say “Off with his head” whenever she liked, nodded.