The Watch Tower (18 page)

He would reward himself before leaving with a special, extra-special, hoary old bottle of whisky. A whole bottle. All to himself. The thought made him solemn. Naturally he would pay the full retail price for it! What did they take him for? No one worth his salt would cheat a young publican of his just profits.

With his mind on nothing but the labour ahead, Felix took the cap off his fountain pen and began to work with the reverence of a backwoods scholar let loose in the Louvre.

‘Why
should
Felix pay social service taxes? He lost everything during the depression, but he picked himself up again. Then these others who’re too lazy to do the same expect to be spoon-fed by the State.’

‘Oh, Laura! Isn’t it possible to talk about anything without dragging Felix into it? Couldn’t we sometimes—’

Clare looked across the table at her sister. More and more Laura’s nature was being overlaid by the shadow of Felix’s. Almost wilfully she was retreating from herself.

It was Saturday afternoon. Felix was at the hotel. They sat polishing cutlery and plate. They had discussed their new neighbours, said to be called Parkes, but Felix had intruded there, so Clare began to maunder on about welfare states and the penal system and slum clearance programmes in the hope of shaking him off. If she used these topics as a soporific to her nerves and Laura’s and was disingenuous to this degree, it was not that her thoughts or feelings were the less genuine for that. Any subject not
Felix
was, to some extent, camouflage and dishonest. But she would not abandon everything in life, her own self, utterly. She would not be defeated as far as that, though she was frequently brought shamefully low as when, for instance, experience, prudence, Laura’s lowered eyes all counselled silence while her spirit said only, ‘Speak!’

‘Come on now, Clare, I’m catching up to you. You’ve still got those forks to do.’ Laura rubbed at a dessert spoon with a dull manic energy. ‘For heaven’s sake, Clare, are you going to finish the silver for me, or aren’t you? I don’t ask you to do very much! Here!’ Laura grabbed the polishing cloth from her hand; Clare pulled it violently back. ‘Well then, do it!’

‘I don’t even remember what we were talking about,’ Laura said, after a silence, glancing up at her passionate and alarming sister. ‘You’re so argumentative and moody—’ She almost bent a frail silver fork in an effort to make it gleam, or perhaps in the hope of moulding her sister into some more amenable girl. ‘Yes! Why
should
Felix help people who won’t help themselves?’

‘Who knows?’ Clare said flatly. ‘Can’t we just leave it?’

‘I agree with him, too.’ Laura’s expression was defiant and venomous as Felix’s was when he made some such coat-trailing remark.

‘Oh!’ Clare groaned, exhausted. ‘Oh, you don’t, Laura. Be natural. Be yourself,’ she suddenly pleaded. ‘Don’t be afraid. If you would just say to
me
what you really think, sometimes. If we don’t even speak the truth sometimes it makes me feel—I
feel I’ll go mad! Everything so false and deliberate! It’s like living in an asylum. The air even seems demented.’

Laura drew herself together in prim disapproval, but was satisfied somewhere to have brought about this collision. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’re too old to carry on like this now.’

Clare pushed her chair back and stood up. Haggardly, she looked about the pleasant lemon-and-white kitchen smelling of silver polish and bananas and pears, full of Saturday afternoon quiet and the meaningless and, it seemed as she noticed it suddenly, ghastly tossing of poplar leaves outside the window. Natural objects like trees and their sounds always signalled to and reproached her, reminding her of time, and her multitudinous obligations and wonders to perform before it was too late.

‘For God’s sake, at least agree that I should go away. Agree to let me go, Laura.’

‘If you’d get a tea-towel and dry these things it’d be more to the point.’ Laura dashed the silver into the sink and clashed it noisily through the hot foamy water.

‘Without any fuss—without quarrels—if I could go without discussions.’ If Laura would release her, say, ‘Go with my blessing. I choose to stay, but I willingly release your mind and person. Be free.’

‘The day you leave this house,’ Laura said rigidly, rattling the silver out onto the rubber mat, ‘will be the last day you’ll ever set eyes on me, Clare. If you go, don’t ever come back or try to get in touch with me for
any reason, because I won’t be here.’

Sombrely, Clare dried a handful of cutlery. ‘Why? —Where would you be?’

‘Somewhere far away. Far away.’ With her eyes fixed on the rainbowed suds with their minute reflections of small square window-panes, and her hands rushing about of their own initiative performing tasks, Laura answered on a note that stated warnings to Clare’s nerves.

She said, ‘Probably everything that’s wrong—it could all be my fault. You and Felix—I don’t know how you can bear to be treated—it—to
see
it—to have to watch—But there’d be no extra reason for you to do anything because I did. They’re quite separate.’

‘Yes. All right. Do what you like. But remember. I’ve told you. You can choose. You think you know so much. You’re not even married. When you marry, very well. Till then, as long as I have any say in it, we all stay together. With Mother in England hardly bothering to answer our letters, it leaves just the two of us and Felix. It’s only a small family, but if I can’t keep that together I’ll know I really am a flop. I’ll know I’m no good for anything. I might as well—’

Before she could finish speaking, she turned immobile as marble and Clare did, too. With fingertips, bones, nostrils, unmoving eyes, they listened to the approaching sound, the rasping sound of shoe leather grating over cement. Lurching and scraping, lurching
and mumbling to himself, Felix came down the path to the house.

Breaking their poses like trees snapping branches, the women urgently regarded each other, cleared away all signs of work in an instant, examined their souls for defects, in a sense crossed themselves, and waited.

At the top of their pitch, but like gladiators who had been thrown unnumbered times into the arena, they eyed each other. Laura seemed to say: ‘See! See how we’re both needed here in this emergency?’ and Clare was shame-faced as any deserter, suddenly recalled to duty and honour.

Felix came in, out for a little blood sport.

Dressing for a state ball, Blanche and Dick Parkes turned to regard each other with amused amazement.

‘Sounds as if our neighbours are having a slight brawl,’ Dick said, listening to the curious noises.

‘There had to be some snags to a house like this. Plebs next door.’

‘How do you know they’re plebs?’ Dick ran his eyes over his black-and-white reflection in the long looking-glass.

‘They’re everywhere.
Nouveau riche
.’
Blanche, who had only recently acquired this phrase, said it extremely well, really. And so saying, she applied
Arpège
with grandiloquent scorn to several nooks and
crannies of her person, and breathed it in with a sort of stern devotion. She was a very sumptuous woman and did take a natural pleasure in herself.

‘Oh-oh, there it is again. Sounds like a bull with the D.T.s,’ Dick muttered uneasily. ‘Some crazy coot—Can you hear any other voices?’

Blanche rolled her gold rope necklace between her fingers and listened with a little lopsided twist to her lips. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s a woman’s voice now.’

The extraordinary notes touched by the unknown voices in the distant house behind the poplars, made Dick Parkes feel queasy. ‘As long as there isn’t a murder.’ He excused himself by adding, ‘It’d send the value of this place down thousands in five minutes.’

‘Sweetie. Do you want to go and rescue some lady pleb in distress? People don’t murder each other.’ Blanche smiled and spoke with loving raillery, stood in the ambience of it just long enough, then coaxed, sinking her voice to its charming chest notes, ‘But do come on now, darling. It’s getting late.’

A single plangent cry of protest reverberated suddenly from their neighbours’ lighted house.

Dick looked as if he had toothache. His wife eyed him decisively. ‘The car’s waiting. That fellow of yours has been sitting out there waiting for us for half an hour. Come on, now. There’s a good boy.’

Clare ran to the bathroom. Her hair streamed down in separate strands; her fingers were extended and separated, too, to avoid the touch even of one another.

‘Laura! What’s happened? Laura! Are you all right?’ She pressed against the door, twisting the handle.

‘Yes. Yes.’ Laura’s voice was controlled, but tight with pain. She unlocked the door and stood with her back to the blue-tiled bathroom, nursing her hands together clumsily.

‘I heard a noise like someone falling—’

‘Felix fell.’

‘Is he—? What happened? Where is he?’

Laura moved her head. ‘In there. In the sitting-room. Even his iron constitution won’t stand this sort of abuse. He’s sodden. He won’t wake up tonight.’ She was white, fierce, shocked, tearless.

They stared urgently into each other’s eyes.

‘What’s wrong with your hands?’

‘Nothing. My wrists. Don’t shout. There’s been enough noise for one night.’

‘Was I?’ Clare looked at the thick white towels and glinting nickel rails confusedly. ‘I thought—’

‘He’s out of his mind. I thought I could manage him. He’s never been as bad as this.’

‘Did he just—collapse?’

‘No, he tripped, and then he couldn’t get up, and the next minute he was—dead asleep.’

‘Your wrists! Are they sprained? Let me see.’

They both stared at Laura’s thin bruised arms and reddened wrists.

‘I’ll get some bandages. Wait a moment.’

The excited chatter which was to each of them so much noise, like the rushing waves inside a shell, rushing in ears and mouths, gradually abated. They fell silent, standing with lowered eyes.

‘Well!’ Clare roused herself. ‘Sit on the edge of the bath here and I’ll tie them up—That too tight?’

Laura shook her head.

‘Will that do, then? Would you like a cup of tea?’

Laura shook her head again. They exchanged hard-eyed glances full of hatred, bitterly accusing on Clare’s part, guilty, baited, on Laura’s.

Leaving her sitting there with her bound-up wrists, Clare wandered away, stopping, dawdling a further step or two, stopping, staring, seeing nothing. At the door of the sitting-room she hesitated, then with a series of small jerks turned her reluctant head to look for him. Easily found. Full length on the floor in one of his many dandyish brown suits. The master of the torture chamber unconscious on the floor. A trap? (She knew it wasn’t.) A trap? A trap? Her feet cringed from the floor as from the ground where some atrocious crime had been played out. A little trap? Her legs ached with the effort of approaching him. With no surface feeling at all, she contemplated him where he lay, his
dark-red face so bloated, bulbous and corrupted that it resembled the face of a monstrous gargoyle.

He was helpless now. Not physically strong now. Stretched deeply unconscious at her feet. Really, at her mercy.

I could kill you, she thought, and wondered almost idly what prevented her. Merely the fear of retribution? (Leaving aside the fact that she could not kill.) No, it seemed that there was more than that to restrain her among many factors, fear of contamination. She would not willingly have touched a box of matches belonging to him. So erratic, vicious and dangerous, so inaccessible to reason and human feeling had he demonstrated himself to be, and so bent on the spiritual destruction of those about him, that the very artifacts he handled seemed to sicken. His eyes, merely by looking, spread the contagion, so that the fabric and foundations of the house were diseased; the silver Jaguar that he drove as though it were a weapon of war was diseased. She herself. She herself. She shuddered. What wasn’t? The wind? The sky?

Outside, in the dark garden, she walked over the quiet grass, under the trees.

Returning to the house, she passed the bathroom and through the open door saw Laura swallowing Veganin and drinking water with a feverish air of decision.

‘Don’t take any more of those things, Laura.’

‘I’ve got a headache.’

‘When haven’t you?’ she said unpleasantly. Though after all Laura’s dreadful and incessant headaches were hardly her fault, and she never complained. Only the tablets, the whiteness, the silence, and the careful way she moved with her lids down, entranced with pain, gave her away.

‘What are you going to do?’ Clare’s tone was conciliatory. She pulled a tiny ball of coral-coloured wool from her sweater.

‘You’ll see. You’ll see.’ Laura gave a sharp little nod. She wiped her lips over-precisely and Clare winced inwardly and had to look away while all her resolutions fell. No action of Laura’s now, no word, ever lacked this air of having been chosen with discretion, after prolonged thought. Deliberation was anathema to Clare. In her experience it was synonymous with hypocrisy, equivocation, as if the
real
which was always at hand, and clear to see, spontaneously presenting itself for use, was always mechanically rejected in favour of some cautious piece of strategy, some much-thumbed grubby piece of thought.

‘What will I see?’

‘A lot of changes. Everything’s going to be different, I can promise you that.’ Laura had a prophetic light in her eye, a fanatical look of purpose.

There was a pause.

Considering that Laura had made this statement on round about two hundred similar occasions, she
was remarkably unselfconscious. She went on to the effect that every dog had his day, and that the worm had finally turned.

‘Do you want to try to get him into bed?’ Clare asked, averting another of those annihilating discussions.

‘No. I don’t want to wake him. Not that I think we could. I loosened his collar and tie. He won’t choke.’ With an ambivalent expression, she said, ‘He’ll live to be a thousand.’

The following afternoon as they walked from the building at five, Janet Adams said to Clare, ‘A woman’s waving at you from that silver Jag.’