The Watch Tower (29 page)

‘Might you be home for lunch?’

‘Mmm?’ A high sweet note of enquiry, another deaf look.

‘Nothing. It’s all right.’

Felix remarked, not censoriously, ‘You’re not wearing your ring.’

‘My ring?—Oh! Neither I am. I’m all out of
routine. It must be—it’s in the bedroom. Isn’t that funny? I always take it off to have my shower and then put it on at once.’

But Felix was walking away, slowly mounting the steps. Laura watched him, blinking, the thumb of her right hand pressed like a tourniquet against the ringless fingers of her left.

A few minutes later she was wandering distraught through the house. Clare and Bernard sat in the sunroom compiling the shopping list, having volunteered to collect the weekend food. They both rose when they saw her, prepared instantly for calamitous news. She looked like someone who had just received tidings of death.

‘Have you seen my ring?’ she called in a high voice.

‘What? Your ring? What ring? What’s the matter?’

‘My ring. I’ve lost my ring. My diamond ring. I’ve lost it. I’ve looked everywhere.’

‘Oh.’ Her listeners adjusted to this serious but less than grievous intelligence. No one was dead. But Laura was suffering from shock, her movements were vague and uncoordinated as if she had been struck blind.

‘We’ll find it. We’ll find it,’ Clare promised, grasping one of Laura’s helpless hands. ‘When were you wearing it last?’

‘This morning. I was sure it was in the bedroom.’

Bernard was already on his knees, cheek pressed to the floor, looking under the chest, acutely relieved that this was all the tragedy. He jumped up. ‘That’s one
place it isn’t. We’ll start at the front and work through. We’ll sift the garbage. It’s too big to have fallen through the grate in the sink.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’ll find it before Felix comes back.’

No sign of the ring. No Felix. Every square inch of carpet and polished board stared at with eyes beginning to burn. Everything movable moved and the candid horizontal exposed.

‘Unless it’s fallen into something it isn’t in the house.’ Bernard looked up from the salad that had been no more than disarranged by their pretence of eating lunch.

Clare shoved back her chair and left the table unceremoniously. ‘We haven’t done the laundry.’

‘It can’t be there,’ Laura called after her without energy. She had a feverish pallor and appeared to have lost weight in the course of the morning. She watched Clare’s back-view cross the courtyard.

‘Clare can make certain. I’ll help you take the dishes inside, if you’ve finished.’

Tasting her cold tea as if under instruction, Laura put the cup down and rose. ‘No, it doesn’t take two. Thank you all the same. Just you go ahead with whatever you want to do, and I’ll—’

Warded off, Bernard backed away three steps and turned and walked from the flagstones on to the grass, and turned and looked again at Laura, who, with an entirely uncharacteristic clumsiness, was attempting to
gather together on the tray all the substantial remains of their meal. His memory stirred unpleasantly. Laura had forgotten him, was unaware of his eyes on her, was so far removed from the light movement of the air, the scent of freesias, the shimmering of leaves, that she suddenly seemed to Bernard, who had seen many victims, to represent them all. She was unapproachable as the condemned are unapproachable and he was responsible as the free always are.

Clare came towards him from the laundry. She shook her head. Between them, Laura pushed the cast iron chairs, painted white, with blue cushions, precisely under the table.

In the street above the level of house and garden, a car turned the corner and ground with a whine into Felix’s garage. Laura flinched to life. The crumbs she had been collecting fell at her side. Fright exploded in her, and her flesh fell from her bones. She gave a single shiver. As metallic slams sounded from the garage above, Clare and Bernard on the right and left flanks moved up. Clare stooped to adjust the cushion on the chair behind which she stood. Disingenuously they sought each other’s eyes. A tiny sparrow, round as a ping-pong ball, hopped between their feet.

The door in the side of the garage opened and Felix was heard to step out on to the path, was heard to stumble, heard to curse. And this was all to be expected. What else had his unscheduled absences ever meant?

Bernard had seen Felix sober but piqued, sober and not amused, he had seen Felix affected by three glasses of beer. He was aware of Laura beside him, breathing through her slightly parted lips, of Clare, concentrated, unknowable. And all at once the bright day, his new good fortune, plans for the future, collapsed like flimsy toys the wind had blown on. And he was conscious of having returned to a familiar place—
reality
,
where human beings had to contend with what they had to be.

‘A reception committee. Very nice. Very nice.’ Felix emerged round the curve of the ramp from a jungle of leaves and stood, swaying ever so slightly, looking down with an expression of maniacal self-satisfaction and contempt on the three raised faces below. And his own conception of himself, in addition to his extraordinary appearance, made him impressive, even uncanny, to his alert but mesmerised audience, upward gazing.

‘Thank you for waiting to have lunch with me. It shows your good manners. Waiting to have lunch with Mr. Shaw in his own house. Thank you so much. So kind of you.’ His pronunciation no less than his manner was elaborately sarcastic. He towered over his subjects, his wide lips, his broad nose, his entire face drawn down in a sneer of fantastic hauteur.

‘It’s three o’clock,’ Laura said, smouldering. ‘You wouldn’t say if you were coming home. Your lunch is here.’

His dark eyes flashed joyfully. ‘The scraps? I am to
be allowed to eat the scraps you leave? How gracious!’ His manner changed. His face jerked forward, chin extended on his short neck, as if the life in his eyes was a panther on a leash. He rapped out, ‘But Mr. Shaw doesn’t care to eat the garbage while you stuff your bellies with food he’s worked for. Not at all. He doesn’t like that. Eating the scraps. Working while you play ladies and gentlemen and wait for him to provide you with the luxuries of life. Mr. Shaw is very hostile about this, very hostile. Yes. Yes.’ His head receded as if the panther, momentarily baffled by its restricting chain, had paced back from its limit, and now padded from side to side trailing the slack metal, re-collecting its instincts.

‘That’s not true. That’s not true.’ Laura spoke confusedly. ‘Everyone works.’ She cast about. Floods of words moved in her seeking release. But how to select? And there was no outlet. And the injustice. None of it true.

Clare begged her, ‘Don’t argue with him.’

‘What’s that? What’s that?’ Sound without meaning had reached Felix on his platform. He stepped close to the edge and, eyes attempting to re-focus, thrust his face forward again saying, ‘What’s that?—
Vermin
.
Gee, I’d like to see you all in strife. Bloody lazy, guzzling—’

If his vituperation left its objects unmoved, the purplish-red of his face and his teetering steps on the brink of the twelve-foot drop did not. Bernard leapt up the steps two at a time. It was obvious that Felix would
descend alone at considerable risk to his neck.

Snarling dark-red face and dark disordered eyes jumped at him. ‘Get away from me,
you
.
Bloody gigolo. Sucking up to these things. Not like a man at all. Bloody rat.’

Bernard hesitated, his bright slanted eyes on Felix’s. There was a slight silence. Everyone watched him. His hand was extended. Sunlight clear and gold as honey. Laura cried, ‘At least leave the boy alone. He’s had enough to put up with without this.’

‘Please, Bernard. Don’t listen. Take no notice. I’ve told you. Please.’ Clare grasped the warm edge of the step on which he was standing.

Felix’s attention was still hooked to the boy. Slowly he was growing calmer. The ape-like projection of himself which had appeared like lunacy to the frozen onlookers retreated slowly. Though still very drunk and possibly dangerous, he was no longer maniacal, and this was a relief. Bernard turned and bounded, loose-limbed, downstairs to the courtyard.

‘You’ve found your ring.’ Felix addressed his wife conversationally, and with something approaching sweetness, his heavy eyebrows raised in enquiry. ‘I say—I take it you’ve found your diamond ring?’ He had the confidence of a barrister interrogating his social inferior.

‘No.’ Laura could feel his advantage, but its nature was obscure to her. ‘No. Clare and Bernard are still
looking for it.’

‘Is that so?’ Eyes greatly enlarged and concentrating on Laura with difficulty, eyebrows lifted higher. ‘How considerate of them,’ he went on with increasing sweetness, ‘since they probably know where it is. I should imagine,’ he paused as if to induce his tongue to even further punctiliousness in enunciation, ‘that they are the best ones to look. Out of work. Hoboes. Big ideas. No cash. Why wouldn’t they have an inkling where it might be?’

It seemed to Clare that a very long silence followed this speech, during which each word fell deeply into her, weighted like a bell. Half-smiling, she looked about at the others. He was traducing Bernard! But he was drunk. She knew better than to speak.

Approaching the ramp she asked, ‘What do you think you’re saying?’

He gave an odd laugh and kicked a small stone at her. It hit her shoulder and bounced off.

‘What do you think you’re
saying
?’

He scuffed some dust at her and grinned. ‘You and your baby boyfriend. You could do with the money.’

She turned away and put a hand on her sister’s thin arm. ‘Laura, we’ll go. From the house, I mean. You come, too. Why stay here?’

Bernard’s young face was stern, the look he gave Laura fierce and purposeful. ‘Clare’s right. We’d better go. Will you come with us?—I’ll leave you to talk,
then. Collect my stuff. Call if you want me.’ He went off towards the house.

Above them all, king of the castle, Felix was performing a little dance in his efforts to kick dust on their heads, and muttering.

Retrieving her arm from Clare’s touch, Laura stared at her obsessively. ‘You don’t mean it, both of you. You’re not going now, just because of what he said, are you? He’s not responsible. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.’ The skin of her face was a damp and bloodless white. The look her blue-grey eyes turned on Clare was at the same time tenacious, evasive and uncertain.

‘I know that. It has nothing to do with this. You knew I’d go soon. “He’s not responsible.” I want people who are. There must be some. Leave all this. You’re young. Nothing could be worse. Nothing could be worth it. You’re young. You could do anything. All this—’ Clare looked dazedly about—‘senselessness. Don’t waste your whole life.’

‘I can’t go.’ Laura shook her head.

‘Why?’

Up on the ramp Felix staggered, tried to regain his balance, failed and fell to the ground. The women paused, looking at him, somehow rested in the pause, estimating suddenly incalculably more than Felix’s next move. He soon gave up his attempts to rise and rolled in towards the grass on the other side of the path.

Laura muttered, ‘He’s going to sleep.’

‘Why can’t you go? Look at me. Why can’t you? I can’t believe you want to stay,’ Clare resumed mechanically. ‘What is there here for you? Nothing but misery. He hates you. He tortures you. All of us. It’s his only pleasure. For God’s sake, Laura. Are you hypnotised?’

Dully, for the second time, Laura shook her sister’s hands off. ‘I couldn’t go away,’ she said, looking dully ahead. ‘He wouldn’t let me go. He’d find me. I wouldn’t be safe. I’m safer when I know where he is.’

‘You’d be afraid,’ Clare whispered, staring at Laura’s face with bitter sadness. So it was beyond discussion. There was nothing to be done. Because what Laura said was comprehensible, and even in some excessive way justified, reasonable. She was afraid herself, in a way. He was like a sorcerer. Not clever like a sorcerer, but wicked like one. ‘Yes,’ she agreed vaguely. ‘But
I
’ll go.’

‘All right. If you want to.’ Laura was stunned, indifferent. She added, ‘I don’t want a back room with a gas-ring. A home is something you can’t give up just like that, when you’ve worked—You’ll realise that if you have one of your own some day.’

As the two women spoke they glanced desultorily over the garden as sick people might have looked at the forbidding lushness engulfing a sanitorium.

‘I hope not,’ Clare answered without expression,
assessing the future. ‘I don’t believe so.’ In a moment she asked, ‘What about your ring?’

‘Oh, the ring—’ Laura lifted her head and gazed at Felix stretched on the path. ‘Bernard might help me get him into bed before you go.’

‘We wouldn’t leave you with him like this.’

‘All right.’

They looked at each other in silence for several seconds. Then Clare went inside and Laura picked up the tray and followed her.

Laura and Felix stood together in the doorway of the sitting-room, with the silence and emptiness of the house like a third and overpowering physical presence beside them. Almost haunted the place felt to Laura, and had felt all day. And now in the late afternoon, with its shadows and the loss of the sun’s heat, a chill and empty melancholy was apparent in the separate rooms of the house, in the inimical stretches of sky and ocean to be seen through its windows; and the half-light of the clouds, the moody shade on the sea, was queerly menacing. Yet she was undisturbed by yesterday’s departures. She felt a glacial calm.

Yet there was something sinister. The ceilings of the house were high. There was too much space above her. And even when the lamps were switched on, at this indeterminate time of day, large areas of enclosed space remained in dusk. Shady, white and silent, cool and
dim, the house was like the shrine of some forgotten religion, overrun by barbarians, sacked, and overrun by time.

‘There it is,’ Felix asserted rather than said, pointing a tobacco-stained finger.

By the skirting-board under the windows, the diamond ring lay ingenuous, winking and blazing.

‘I left it there so you could see where it was,’ Felix again asserted. ‘They couldn’t have looked too hard, eh?’