The Vanishment (4 page)

I could not sleep. The wind and the rain and my own thoughts prevented it. About two o'clock, I gave up the struggle and slipped out of bed. That evening, I had left a story half-finished; sleeplessness had more or less completed it for me, and I wanted to get it down on paper while my thoughts were still fresh. I knew I should not sleep until I did so. I dressed in the dark and went downstairs. Sarah did not stir.

The study was cold. I lit the electric fire and sat down at my desk, rubbing my hands together. It was not, I thought, so much cold as a memory of cold. What that meant I could not then have said, though I might now. Everything leaves its trace.

The room was ill lit. Little shadows clung to the walls. I went straight to work. The compulsion to write was on me with as much strength as ever.

Outside, the rain continued, growing in intensity as the night progressed. The wind, too, kept rising, and I fancied I could hear waves dashing against the cliff. Inside, the sounds were muffled. From time to time something would bang or rattle. I would look up occasionally at some creak or scratch, then bend back to my writing. When I first looked at the clock, it was nearly three; By the time I looked again, it was half past.

I leaned back and stretched. The story was almost finished. I was starting to grow drowsy, but I determined to get to the end before going back to bed. I yawned and leaned forward again. That was when I noticed that something was wrong, that something had changed, though I did not know what. The wind and rain had stopped while I was writing. The night was silent. A great stillness held everything, and the house seemed to be unnaturally without sound.

For a moment I was sure I had heard someone breathing. I would have to get out of Sarah whatever it was that the interfering Margaret had told her. Not far to go now, I would be finished by four.

Suddenly, the fire and the lights went out. I swore, realizing I had omitted to feed the meter that morning, not knowing it would grow cold later. I had left my tiny reading lamp in the bedroom. There was nothing for it but to grope my way to the meter in the dark. I scraped my chair back and began to make my way across the room. It was pitch-dark, I could see absolutely nothing. And in spite of the warmth that had been generated by the fire, it had grown cold again suddenly.

I must have been about halfway across the room, very nearly at the door, when I heard a voice behind me, a woman's voice, not Sarah's, low yet distinct. Only one word was spoken, a name: "Catherine.''

I spun around.

"Who's there?" I demanded.

No one answered.

"Who's there?" I said again.

Still no reply.

There was a sound of footsteps, quick, running footsteps in the hall. My eyes had by now grown a little better accustomed to the dark, and I could make out, if only with the greatest difficulty, the rough contours of the room in which I stood. I hurried to the door and flung it open.

A little moonlight crept into the hall through the transom window. I could see no one there or on the stairs. None of the downstairs doors were open, with the exception of the one I had just stepped through. This time I did not call out.

I found the meter under the stairs and hurried to cram it with the pound coins I had been carrying in my pocket. The lights in the hall and study came on again at once. Nervously, I went back to the study and looked inside: there was no one there. Behind me, the hall was still empty.

For no good reason, I felt suddenly anxious about Sarah. I had left her alone in the bedroom for longer than I should have done. What if she had wakened, brought out of sleep by the wind or the rain, or more gently by their ceasing, and found me gone? Considering her fear of the house, I knew she might well have been panic-stricken. Had those been her feet in the passage just now?

I climbed the stairs quietly, not wishing to waken her if she was still asleep. The lights did not flicker, but I felt an unaccountable fear lest they dim or cut out again. The sound of the woman's voice calling "Catherine" was still ringing in my head, I could hear it as plainly as if it had just been uttered, and I was sure it had been real. It had brought back difficult memories.

The silence was so strong, I longed for the wind and rain to return, for some sound other than my own breathing to be there beside me. I opened the bedroom door gently and stepped inside, letting a little light from the landing fall through. It was enough to see by. Enough to see that the bed was empty. I switched on the main light. Sarah was not there.

Nor was she in the bathroom. I called loudly, going back on to the landing. I thought she might have gone up to the room where her paintings were kept, and I went there. It was empty, too. Calling her name, I went through the house room by silent room. I did not find Sarah in any of them. They were cold and unwelcoming. It was as though she had vanished into thin air. I began to grow afraid. As yet I did not really know what I was frightened of. My heart was beating unpleasantly. My hands felt clammy and unwashed. I told myself she had only gone for a walk.

I went straight outside. The car was there, of course, as I had known it would be. If Sarah had taken it, I would have heard the engine starting up, seen the headlights as it turned to go down the drive. I reckoned that she must have called a cab from St. Ives, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour. Then I realized that I would have heard and seen that, too. Which meant that she must be on foot.

Pausing only to fetch the keys, I got in the car and drove down to the main road, where I turned left for Tredannack. My guess was that she would have headed that way. Having no precise idea as to when she had wakened or how soon after that decided to leave, I could only guess how far she might have gone. She might just have reached the village, though I thought it highly unlikely. And just what she intended to do there in the middle of the night was anybody's guess.

The road was empty and melancholy. It swooped through shadows into yet more shadows. I drove slowly, afraid I might hit Sarah if she was on the wrong side wearing her dark raincoat. Hedgerows flashed past on either side, and I kept turning my gaze from right to left, not knowing where she might be. Twice, rabbits stood at the roadside, frozen in my headlights, and once a fox ran out from the cover of a ditch. But of Sarah there was no sign.

Almost without realizing it, I saw that I had arrived at the outskirts of the village. I drove down the main street slowly, but Sarah was still nowhere to be seen. The houses and shops lay huddled in a uniform darkness. The pub was shut up. A handful of dim streetlights illuminated the narrow pavements, still wet and glistening with rain.

Dispirited, I drove slowly back, then five or six miles west, in the Land's End direction. I gave up when I came to a crossroads and had no means of guessing which fork to take. I was warm by now, but outside, the countryside was still wet and cold. To the east, a faint light had started to touch the edges of the sky. I drove back to Petherick House in low spirits.

The same lights were on that had been shining when I left. I called loudly, but still no one replied. I began for the first time to feel a sense of apprehension. For all I knew, she was out in the garden somewhere, shivering in the dawn breeze, thinking things over. She had her moods, as I had mine, and she would often take to isolation as a means of escape.

I climbed the stairs to the bedroom. I felt exhausted, drained of energy. More people die at dawn than at any other time of day. The atmosphere is thinned out then, the spirit is at its weakest. Drained, etiolated, almost without substance.

None of the suitcases or bags had been touched. I looked in the wardrobe: all Sarah's clothes were there, as far as I could see. Her underwear was in its drawer. Her makeup stood on the dressing table. I found that reassuring, for it all suggested that she planned to return, that she had merely wanted to be out of the house for one night.

I switched off the lights downstairs and returned to bed. The sheets were cold. Damp had returned, making the bed unpleasant to lie in. Outside the window, still dimmed by the curtains, daylight was seeping across the wet world. I lay with my eyes tightly shut, trying to calm my thoughts enough to sleep. The bed would not grow warm. I turned, now onto my right side, now onto my left, then I tried sitting upright. Two things above all troubled my thoughts and kept sleep far away: the sound of feet running quickly in the downstairs passage, a strange woman's voice calling "Catherine" with great distinctness.

Once or twice I opened my eyes involuntarily and looked around at the ill-proportioned room, just visible in the pale morning light. I half expected to see Sarah standing there, watching me, though why she would have come back to watch me like that I could not have said.

In the end, exhaustion got the better of me. Without quite knowing it, I dreamed I was in the corridor outside our bedroom. Something about the house had changed, though I was unable to say exactly what. I was listening for something. Or someone. On either side of me, the doors to the other rooms on the first floor stood open, but all the interiors were in darkness, and I could not see farther than the doors.

Suddenly there was a sound of light footsteps behind me, approaching slowly. I tried to turn, to face whoever was approaching me, but to my horror found I could not move my neck, and that my feet were rooted to the floor. The next moment there was a series of ear-shattering crashes as the doors in the house slammed shut—first those on the first floor, where I was, then those above, and finally those underneath.

The last bang woke me. I was sitting bolt upright and was sweating profusely. I looked anxiously around the room, but it was still empty. The daylight had grown in strength, though it was still considerably dulled by the thick curtains.

On my second attempt, I realized that sleep was impossible. I could not sleep, and I did not want to. The dream had left a foul sense of uneasiness. I half expected to hear the doors in the house bang shut in succession as they had done in my imaginings. Abandoning even the urge to sleep, I climbed out of bed again and dressed. It was just after seven o'clock.

Sarah had not come back. There was no sign of her in any of the downstairs rooms. I made a hot breakfast, washed down with three cups of strong black coffee. From time to time I found myself listening for footsteps. Sarah's footsteps, or so I told myself. There were no others, could not have been any others.

Sarah's straw hat was not on the nail on the back of the door where she had hung it every evening on coining in from the garden. I looked around, but it was nowhere in the kitchen. It puzzled me that she should have taken it with her, when she had left everything else behind.

Fortified by breakfast, I went out to the garden. The grass was still wet from the night before, but the sun was steadily growing stronger, and it looked set for a return of the fine weather. At least that would lift Sarah's spirits, I thought. Every so often I looked up, expecting to see her coming across the lawn, wearing her straw hat and smiling.

I strolled down to the cliff edge, where she normally painted. There was no sign of her. There were five or six acres of grounds altogether, much of them covered in trees and bushes. I made a thorough search of the entire area, but nowhere could I find a trace of Sarah. Now I started to grow anxious again. If she was not in the house and not in the gardens, if she had not been on the road to Tredannack or the road leading in the opposite direction, where on earth could she be?

There was one unpleasant possibility that I did my best to banish from my thoughts. But it kept nagging me until I could no longer ignore it. I made my way back to the cliff, and this time I looked deliberately and apprehensively over its edge, to the rocks below. A great sense of relief swept over me. There was nothing there. Sarah had not stumbled to her death in the dark.

All day I waited, but she did not return. Somehow, she had given me the slip—stayed in the garden, perhaps, until she saw me leave, waited for my return from Tredannack, then set off in that direction after all. It all seemed so calculated, so calculating—that was the only problem. It was not in Sarah's nature to think things out like that, coldly, step-by-step. She was intuitive, given to impulses, never deliberate. And if her departure from the house had been as precipitate as I guessed, I could see little likelihood of her having hung about merely to play a trick on me.

She could be anywhere by now, I thought. Most likely she was on her way to London and would ring me when she got there. The first trains from Penzance to Paddington arrived at 10:00, 11:45, and 1:40. The times were printed in the timetable we had brought with us in case one or the other might need to go back in a hurry without the car. I had thought to bring it; as I say, I was always the provident one.

After each of the times a train was due, I waited for the phone to ring. We had rented a cellular for two months, knowing there would be none in the house and not wanting to be wholly incommunicado. I did not sit by it like a worried parent, but I waited nonetheless. It did not ring.

The day passed, marked invisibly by these points of possible connection between Sarah and myself. There was a long gap between the 3:00 arrival and the next, at 7:43. I had started to grieve inwardly by now, though I kept telling myself it was much too early for that. All the same, I knew her strength of spirit, her ability to make a decision when she had to, her tenacity in sticking to it once it had been reached. If she had left me this time, bringing her back would not prove easy; I knew that with the dull, aching certainty of the newly bereaved. But I had seen no corpse, no farewell letter, no concrete indication that she intended to leave me.

From time to time I tried to write, but the thing was not on me, not that day, not for some time after. My thoughts were constantly torn apart by speculation about Sarah, above all the vexed question of whether she had decided to walk out on me or not. She had done it twice before, but only for short periods, and each time she had left a note saying where she was going.