Читать книгу Death Lives Next Door - Gwendoline Butler - Страница 5

Oxford, which presents so glamorous and beautiful a face to the world, has also its seedy side. The world of grey stone colleges and elegantly panelled common rooms is not the only one. Not all scholars are dons comfortably housed in college rooms with cheerful and dignified servants or live happily in North Oxford in a house with trees in front and a lawn behind. There is a sadder side made up of those who have not quite succeeded in the battle, a sort of sub-world of failures and hangers-on.

At the top of the scale are the newly graduated but not yet established, living outside college life but teaching for the colleges and looking at them with envious eyes. A fellowship is their ambition and they look at the possessors of them hopefully, longing for a death, an early retirement or a promotion. There are not nearly enough to go round. So for some hope dies, and some move away, while others obstinately linger on. If they linger long enough they sink towards the bottom of the scale where are all the people who should never have hung on at all, the people for whom Oxford represents a dream, a drug, an illusion. And these people you must pity because they are in thrall to a harsh deity who takes no notice of them and never will. Such people are the third class honours students, the women graduates who find an exciting world here they find nowhere else, the people who don’t want to go home. They take poor teaching jobs, hack coaching, a job as a porter, as Father Christmas, a warder in Oxford prison by night, a poet and scholar by day, or so they hope, in order to hang on.

To this group are attached all the people who should never have been in Oxford anyway and would be banished if the Proctors knew they were there: the refugee who is so rootless that he has no real home anywhere except an attic in Wellington Square and who fills in his time and his pockets with a little odd blackmail, spying, and petty theft, and who is on the black lists of half the Embassies of Europe, even if low down: the actress without a play who hovers hopefully around the Playhouse and Ma Brown’s café.

Prominent among this society is the perpetual scholar; the man who is always proceeding to the next and then the next degree. Labouring endlessly on theses which he may never present, eternally concerned with the minutiae of scholarship and losing the vitality, the perpetual scholar seems specially a product of the nineteen forties and fifties, of a society lavish with grants, eager to compensate for the security it cannot really provide.

Geographically this world centres on Wellington Square and Walton Street, although of course its members may be found anywhere. The hallmark of their lodgings is that they live in a contrived sort of way, with kettles hidden under the bookcase and dirty cups tucked neatly away in cupboards.

Because all the members of this world know each other or of each other, rumours spread rapidly; deliriously rapidly in the case of the rumour that the Dean of Gaveston was giving an open party which brought two-thirds of the members thirstily but mistakenly to the unhappy man’s rooms. This day was afterwards known as the Glorious Thirst of June. Or with sinister rapidity as in the case of the present rumour, which was that in Oxford at the moment one was liable to be followed.

The gossip snowballed. Everyone adding his share.

Ezra added his.

Ezra found passing on the gossip a useful relief from thinking. Thirty-five years of being Ezra had accustomed him to all the thoughts he was likely to have, he didn’t see much chance now of his thinking anything new, he was stuck with his old mind, with all its connections, associations and responses, and they were boring. He was even bored with his work. There was not the freshness to the study of Beowulf and Guthric that there had been ten years ago when he started it, he himself had not the same enthusiasm that he had felt when he had first landed in Oxford after five years in the army. That had been three years before starting on Beowulf so altogether he had been at it thirteen years now. Thirteen years too long possibly. It depended how you. looked at it. You could say he was adding to scholarship, which was how Ezra’s supervisor put it, or you could say he was wasting his time, which was how Ezra’s father put it. Ezra himself put it half way between: he had added perhaps half a dozen new facts to the study of Beowulf, he had suggested a new interpretation of the Grendel figure (another myth he thought) and he had enriched his own mind. If he had wasted any time it had been his own.

But so far it had not brought him any further in the world. He was still living in the same rooms in which he had set himself up ten years ago with an electric gramophone and an electric coffee pot as a student, he still had to hide his tea tray under the bed when his pupils came (he did a great deal of tutorial work for Prelims, grinding Anglo-Saxon into the heads of dull girls from St. Agatha’s). In all this time it had never dawned on Ezra that his pupils could see his tea tray perfectly clearly under the bed drape. He always sat in the same chair. He had noticed however that the girls who had once seemed more or less his own contemporaries now got younger and younger every year and that he himself had almost got to thinking of them indulgently as pretty young things. He did occasionally ask them out for a drink or for dinner but now they always seemed shy and nervous whereas ten years ago everything would have gone bouncingly. He had no idea that his young pupils regarded his sombre good looks with respectful and romantic eyes: to them he was an elderly, but attractive figure, and it was a great treat to be sent as a pupil to him.

Out early one morning doing his marketing, which he did himself and on foot, for the sake of his liver (Ezra was something of a valetudinarian and took his health seriously), he met a young man with whom he had a party acquaintance.

“Hello, Ezra dear,” said the young man. “Don’t pad behind me so in your crêpe soles.”

“You nervous? Believe in this creeper?”

“Oh my, yes.”

“Someone follows, you don’t know it, and then suddenly there he is.”

“Have you been followed?”

“Oh no, not me.”

“Who then?”

“Not sure. I’ve just heard about it.” The young man looked puzzled. Then his face cleared. “Everyone’s talking about it. It must be true.”

There were no details, but a sort of group conviction.

“This person watches,” said the young man.

Ezra raised his eyebrows and walked on thoughtfully.

At the delicatessen in the market the queue was standing peacefully reading and in one case apparently writing a book. Ezra took his place behind a large man whom he had certainly seen in the Bodleian working upon Bracton’s ‘De Legibus Antiquis’. Peeping, Ezra could see that his present study was the Newgate Calendar, which was roughly in keeping. But after a bit Ezra could see that he was really engaged in trying to make acquaintance with the tall girl in front, something of which he seemed to have small chance as she appeared at the moment to be interested only in Mrs. H’s liver garlic sausage and the Manchester Guardian.

“Would you mind stepping off my foot?” she said sweetly, turning round. But after this Ezra saw to his amusement that they went away amicably together. You could never tell. Ezra nodded in approval. Over the years a grandfatherly attitude had grown up in him, a feeling that love and marriage were not for him. It had been unconscious, he had hardly noticed it, he thought, until lately, when it had taken a beating. It had been a peaceful state to be in, he recalled wryly.

As he thoughtfully pinched the lettuce for his dinner and eyed the rye bread to see if it was stale, the subject came up again. Mrs. Hofmanstall leaned over the sauerkraut and breathed her fears and garlic at him in the same breath.

“Of course it may not be true, Mr. Barton, I do not say it is, but my customers tell me.” Mrs. Hofmanstall’s customers told her everything; there was certainly every opportunity to as shopping there was a slow business. There was time for life friendships to be built up.

“Have you been followed?”

Mrs. Hofmanstall drew herself up. “Me? No. Naturalich not.” She lowered her voice again. “All we hear is not right. It is not always follows. Sometimes he is there before.”

Ezra said seriously: “You know there’s a fallacy there somewhere, Mrs. H. But I get the feeling you describe. Nasty.”

He gathered up his shopping and went on.

He continued his walk, through Market Street, down Cornmarket, under the trees of St. Giles, casting a longing but declining look at The Playhouse beside whose doors he could see three of the people who amused him most and whom he most wished to impress. He squared his shoulders and assumed the stern look of a warrior king. One of the things Ezra did most was to act and they were casting for Henry IV, Part Two. He was longing to be the young Prince Hal. He realised however that he was most likely to get the part of the sick Henry IV. These were the parts he always got, he had been the King in Hamlet more often (he reckoned) than any man living. It was beginning to affect his character; you couldn’t be called lecherous so often without beginning to feel it.

He cleared his throat and began to recite the great lines from Henry IV,

Oh sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee?

going through the catalogue of the sick king’s symptoms and ending:

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Yes, he could see himself in the part. He could see Lamia Beauregard tossing her golden locks at the producer and he remembered how good, in a dreadful sort of way, she had been as Hamlet’s mother. But then to be good in a dreadful sort of way was just what was demanded of Hamlet’s mother. No doubt Lamia, an improbable but suitable name now he came to think of it, remembering Keats’ girl who was metamorphosed into a snake, was not at all worried about anyone following her. Probably she expected that someone would be following her, just as she expected (and certainly would get what she expected) that she would soon go to London and throw her lustre upon such totally unknown stars as Dorothy Tutin.

He could see that Lamia was beckoning and after wondering whether it would look undignified or not to turn round and go, curiosity took him. After all he could walk down St. John Street to pay the call which he intended to pay before lunch and the thought of which was making a little warm fire of pleasure burn in his mind.

“We are talking about doing Ibsen,” said Lamia at once.

“Well, I think I’m more of a Shakespeare man.”

“There are other actors.”

“Shakespeare’s always safe,” said the producer. “You can do him very badly indeed, and frankly we mostly do, and still get away with it.”

“How are you getting on with Henry IV, Part Two?”

“Very nicely. We’ve got a lovely Harry,” said the producer with enthusiasm, “just the right mixture of bounder and cad. No Henry IV yet though,” and he looked thoughtfully at Ezra who sighed. Old dying Henry was just made for him.

“What about King Lear?” he suggested, remembering that there were great parts for dying old men.

“No part for me in it,” said Lamia sternly. She knew her limitations, which included Cordelia.

“There are other actresses,” he reminded her. “And other parts; what about Goneril and Regan?”

“Oh, that old bitch.”

“I always think, Goneril and Regan, yes and Cordelia, too, are just the other faces of one personality,” said the producer. “That’s how I’d do it. All of them with the same face, only different. A triple split personality.”

“And then you might have them all looking exactly like Lear,” said Ezra entering into the spirit of the thing. “Which, when you come to think about it, is really most likely.”

“I’m afraid it might seem a little like a Crazy Revue,” said the producer regretfully. “Talking of Regan,” he said, looking doubtfully at Ezra, “have you seen anything of Rachel lately?”

“Yes,” said Ezra shortly. “And I don’t know why she reminds you of Regan.” The worst of being in love was that it made you so touchy.

“Oh, just the initials,” said the producer. “I wanted to talk to her.”

“She was at Marion Manning’s. I’m on my way round to Marion’s now.” Marion’s name produced the silence it usually did. She was a fabulous figure. But what did people really know about her? That she had been four years old when the First Great War started, in which her father had been killed, and only nine when it ended, and yet she had written one great poem on it which anyone would have been glad to have written, and then never touched the subject again. That she had become an anthropologist, been a member of a highly publicised and tragic expedition to Central America on which two men had died; that she had written a controversial book about it and then announced that anthropology did not provide the discipline she wanted, and turned herself into a philologist and a very good one at that, but that her name was still good for a paragraph in the Sunday newspapers. What did this young producer know about her? That he had seen her stocky grey-haired figure (with the slightly dragging left leg where the bomb had lamed her) at parties and heard her talking?

The three of them walked a little way with him before the producer looked at his watch and remembered a tutorial, and with an anxious look, which at once reduced his age by ten years (and, so Ezra thought, added them to his) disappeared.

“Give my love to Tommy,” Ezra shouted. He knew the producer’s tutor.

“Unless I have had some good things to say about the French Revolution I won’t dare,” called back the young man. The third member of the party was a silent young man from St. John’s who had never in all the time Ezra had known him spoken one word, but drew constantly upon an old pipe and looked deep. Lamia and the silent man, who was continuing to look deep, went off together.

Ezra continued on his way down St. John Street and through Wellington Square to where Chancellor Hyde Street runs into Little Clarendon Street. When the houses it contained were built there were fields where Walton Street now lies. The houses were old pretty red brick cottages converted at great cost into cosy little houses watched over by the Georgian Trust. Marion lived in the corner house and although Ezra had got used to it the house was unmistakably Marion’s.

Marion was standing in the window reading a book and her tom-cat, Sammy, was sunning himself in the garden. There was no love lost between Sammy and Ezra. Sammy raised his head as Ezra came past, and glared at him, slightly showing his teeth as he did so. All right, thought Ezra, if that’s how you feel, I don’t feel any better about you, and he bared his teeth back. The Professor of Morphology who was passing looked apprehensive, and Ezra realised sadly that the Professor, a nervous and humble man, had taken the threat as directed at himself. By the time he got to Marion’s he was in a bad temper.

“I find the human race difficult and incomprehensible at the moment, Marion,” he said, falling back into a chair.

Marion stood there running a hand through her short silver hair which seemed to shine with a light no one else’s had; her bright friendly brown eyes looked at him with inquisitiveness.

“I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you to number yourself among the unaccountable?” Marion’s tone was wry.

Ezra blinked.

“Oh, do you think so?” He considered. Perhaps this curious atmosphere he had noticed among his friends lately was coming from within him and not from without.

“I think I’m having an intellectual crisis!”

“What a luxury for you. I couldn’t afford one.” Marion was continuing in wryness. “Too old.”

“You’ve had them though,” pointed out Ezra, remembering the change-over from anthropology to linguistics. He looked at Marion and saw that she looked dry and thin. It struck him that he had not really observed Marion for a long time. She did look older.

“Oh, you have the special Oxford disease … Ennui, reluctance, it comes over everyone. Closely related, I always think, to the medieval ‘accidie’, one of the seven deadly sins, you may remember. Sloth is its other name.”

Ezra flushed. Marion could always sting.

“It especially attacks intellectuals. I suppose you count as that?”

“You’ve brought me up to be one.” Ezra regarded Marion as his intellectual mother. He hardly remembered his real one. Marion, however, was not obviously maternal. He had come to her for teaching in his first term, young and earnest, and she had moulded him. It was going to be difficult to tell Marion what he wanted to tell her.

“I begin to feel that perhaps I’d better get away and strike out in a new sea.”

Marion frowned.

“I’ve had a sort of offer,” he hurried on. “From Bridport. You know John Farmer has the new Chair, he’s sort of offered …”

“Oh, there! They have a vested interest in mediocrity there.”

“That’s unfair.” He wanted to say, “Hold back your blows, Marion,” but he could see she was deeply hurt.

“Go if you like.” She shrugged.

That was the trouble, Ezra did not know if he did like. He was happy here. He loved the rhythm of his life, the autumn and winter for quiet work, his acting in the spring and summer, the cheap trips abroad; in some moods he even loved his pupils. He knew all the little side streets of Oxford. Blue Boar Lane which lets on to the back premises of Christ Church and the houses, so like country mansions, of the Canons of the Cathedral. He knew and loved Magpie Lane and New College Lane and the tiny stretch of Catte Street. As a ghost, thought Ezra, this would be the world he would haunt, these loved little streets. He had walked them in the autumn when they smelt of wood smoke, and when they were frosty with snow, but he thought he liked them best in the summer. If condemned ever to be a revenant it would be to this summer world he would come back, walking the streets on warm moonlit evenings, dreaming of long-dead Commemoration Balls and evenings on the river. (In real life Ezra was a poor hand with a punt and hardly ever went near the water, but a ghost, of course, would be able to do everything.) Or perhaps the ghosts of the dancers and the musicians would be there, too, and he would hear music floating across the wall from Merton or over from the New Buildings at Magdalen which were new when Dr. Johnson was a young man. He loved all this and didn’t really want to be uprooted, but Rachel, with her acid clear judgements, had changed everything. His indecision was mirrored in his face and Marion saw it.

“And who’s been suggesting all this to you?”

“No one,” said Ezra, deeply troubled; he was doing this so badly.

But Marion knew the answer to her own question. “Rachel, I suppose. John Farmer knows her father, of course.”

She sat down at her desk and drew a thin brown hand across it for a cigarette. “Dusty,” she observed. “I don’t keep this house the way I should.” On the top of her desk was a picture of a young man wearing an open-neck shirt and nursing Sammy.

Ezra walked over and picked up his photograph. “I was quite chubby then, wasn’t I?”

Marion nodded.

“You were good to me then, Marion. I wonder why? I must have been a boring boy.”

“Not so bad as some,” said Marion philosophically. “And very attractive. I couldn’t help noticing that.” She smiled, and the bright brown eyes were set in a lace of little crinkles.

“I do depend on you, Marion.”

“Not in all things,” she said sharply.

“No. But to keep me on a straight level.” Did Marion depend on him? And in a moment he knew she did.

It came to Ezra sharply then that Marion was one of the people he most loved in the world. Until six months ago he would have said the person.

And she had aged. Grown thinner, tenser, more strained.

“What’s done this to you, Marion?” he heard himself say, to his embarrassment.

He saw great tears fill the brown eyes and it was like seeing the Pyramids weep.

“Marion!” he cried.

She mumbled something he could not hear. Then she repeated it.

“I’m being watched.”

The words struck him unpleasantly.

“I saw a man killed once. I saw his eyes crossed in death. I felt he was watching me. Since then I’ve hated people watching me.”

Ezra knew she referred to the death so many years ago of the man on the expedition. It came as a shock to him that Marion should refer in tones which so clearly showed that the wound was still there, raw and unhealed, to an incident he had thought long buried, far back in her past.

“No need to be so upset,” he said, startled into unsympathy.

“You try it some time.” Marion dried her eyes. “It’s unnerving. I don’t know this man from Adam. Or I didn’t.”

“Oh, it’s a man?”

“Yes,” said Marion shortly.

“Is he always there?”

“No.” In spite of herself Marion laughed. “Only human. Not all the time.”

“Are you sure? I mean, supposing he really is watching, are you sure it is you?”

“Quite, quite certain. He follows. Last week I went to London for the day. I saw his taxi follow mine to the station. Thursday I went to Stoke-on-Trent to give that lecture. He came, too. Don’t say I should tell the police.”

“No, I wasn’t going to.”

“There’s been no threat, you see, no nuisance. He never tries to talk to me. Never comes even very close. But he’s always there. Why?” She said slowly, “And yet I don’t feel any malice in him. He’s just interested. In me.”

“Well, so are a lot of people, Marion.” Ezra was thinking hard. So this was the basis behind all the rumours. Somehow it had got out. “Who have you told, Marion?”

There was silence.

“I have told no one. I swear. I have told no one at all.”

But this rumour was all over the town. Marion must have let it out. Or perhaps the neighbours had noticed.

“What about the neighbours?” he asked. “Do you think they’ve noticed? Or have you told them?”

Marion looked surprised. “I don’t know them.”

Ezra was half irritated, half amused. “You must know them, Marion.”

“Why? I’ve never even seen them.”

“Oh, you must have seen them. In the garden, digging or something.”

“Oh, but I never go in the garden,” said Marion, looking placidly at the jungle beneath her window. “Can’t stand it. No, I tell you the neighbours are out. I haven’t told them, and I don’t believe they’ve noticed.”

“People do know, though.”

Marion had walked to the window. “Look out there.”

Ezra pulled back the curtains and looked across the road to the junction of Chancellor Hyde Street and Little Clarendon Street. The wind that nipped that corner was usually chill and he was not surprised to see the figure standing there put its collar up. It was a small dark man with spectacles; he was wearing a mackintosh and underneath it a neat blue suit.

“He doesn’t look like a detective,” murmured Ezra.

“I’m sure he’s not that.” Marion spoke with decision.

Ezra looked round her quiet, green book-lined room. It was so difficult to associate Marion with all this.

“You stay here,” he said. “I’m going out to have a closer look at him.”

He shut Marion’s front door behind him, shutting in a stray creeper or two as he did so. As he pushed his way through the massed vegetation to the gate, it occurred to him that while Marion might not know her neighbours, the neighbours almost certainly knew Marion and her weeds.

In the street, a lorry was drawn up discharging a load of coal and Ezra was able to come round the back of it and get close to the man before he had a chance to observe him.

The man was standing there, his feet planted a little apart, and his hands in his pockets. He was making no pretence of having a purpose in being there, and yet he was very unobtrusive, he slipped neatly into the background. There was something vaguely familiar about him, some quality that Ezra thought he knew. But it remained elusive. As Ezra watched, the man shifted his feet, scratched his hair, and settled his hat more comfortably on his head. Clearly he meant to stay where he was.

“I suppose he is watching Marion?” wondered Ezra.

At that moment a window slammed in Marion’s house and the man swung his head round promptly to see.

Ezra stepped out from behind the coal lorry, and walked down Chancellor Hyde Street. The man watched him indifferently, although he must have observed him come from Marion’s house and had probably been watching him. Ezra saw that the hands now rolling a cigarette were neat and not swollen by manual labour, there was a gold ring on the left hand; they trembled slightly.

At the corner Ezra turned and looked back. The road was quiet and empty except for the lorry and the watcher. A little ginger kitten ran across the road, it was calling out in shrill kitten’s shrieks. It halted unsteadily in the gutter. The man called it to him, and stood for a few minutes with it in his hand, looking at it and stroking it. Ezra watching from a distance could have sworn there was liking, even affection, in the movements of those hands.

Till the kitten screamed. Ezra could not help thinking of Marion’s narrow bones beneath those hands.

It was true, although Marion would not admit it, that she had from the first been much more aware of the man than had been apparent. She had noticed him before anyone else. She had such a quiet constricted life that a new face stood out at once. Besides, there was another reason.

It was not the first time: he was only one in a succession of such people. In her life she had had an inconvenient trick of picking up hangers-on in a way she could not quite account for.

There had been the man in Monte Carlo. An unlikely place for Marion the austere to be, but she had been on a visit to an old sick aunt. In the intervals between listening to Auntie’s reminiscences of the Prince of Wales (she meant Edward VII, of course) and administering her medicine, she had escaped for long walks by the sea. The sea in spring there could be lovely and this had been in 1939 when people’s nerves were on edge and perhaps inclined them to do odd things, but she did not think this quite explained the man. She had noticed him looking at her first in the rose garden by the Casino: he had been looking at her expectantly as if he waited for her to speak. The oddest thing about him was that he knew where she lived; he was back there before she was, loitering again, expectantly. Expectant of what? Marion asked herself. Nothing that she was prepared to give anyway: he was a more rakish, selfish-looking man than Marion would have ever trusted herself to.

And there had been others, faces in queues that had grinned and nodded at her; hands waved from doors that she had never opened; feet that seemed to expect hers to fall in step with them.

Probably it was her appearance: Marion considered that she had a very usual, humdrum appearance; she was simply mistaken for someone else.

Even Ezra had his place in this queue. She recalled the young earnest Ezra wearing his scholar’s gown over a duffle-coat so that he looked as square as Tweedledee. He had waited outside the lecture-room to speak to her after her justly celebrated, and often repeated, lecture on “The Myth of Guthrum”.

Then she laughed.

Perhaps it was unfair to number Ezra among them: admittedly he had seemed to know exactly what he wanted from her. A reference to a book she had mentioned in her lecture; was she certain she had got it right? Marion was certain; faced with such unusual assurance she was at first angry, then amused, and finally friendly. Afterwards she had understood that it was the assurance of utter ignorance; once Ezra had learnt the way around his world he would never have dared approach a lecturer with such a comment. By nature he had too little assurance, not too much.

Marion shook her head; no, Ezra was something else again, and not one of the strange people who seemed to pop up in her life. After all he was still in her life, and the marked thing about the others was that after a time they disappeared. They lost heart, gave it up, and went.

Or they had done so far. Unhappily this man seemed more persistent. She tried to laugh it off, to see it in its proper proportions. She told herself that some people had allergies, others had second sight, or what their best friends wouldn’t tell them, or some other social drawback; she had this.

Only it had not happened for some time, indeed had never before happened in Oxford.

Perhaps this was why for the first time she was taking it seriously instead of half dismissing it, as she had always done up to now, as imagination or coincidence.

And also this man seemed so quiet but determined. She really couldn’t doubt that he was watching her, Marion.

She was aware of him throughout the quiet routine of her day. She usually got up early in the morning, went down, got in the papers and milk, then returned to bed with coffee and toast. She slept lightly and badly and was always glad to begin the day again. Marion was an optimist; however tiresome yesterday had been, and however unpromising today looked, she always started off the day with a little glow of happiness. The man was never at his post in Chancellor Hyde Street as early as this, but by about eleven in the morning he had arrived unobtrusively and was watching her. Some days if she went off on a journey he followed, on other days she was able to leave him behind. He had, for instance, twice come after her to London and once when she went to the Midlands to give a lecture. It had occurred to her once or twice that it was a question of money whether the man travelled with her or not: when he had enough, he came; when he had not, he stayed behind. What she could not arrive at was his motive. She thought he was trying to observe all he could about her; he wanted to know exactly what she was like. “He seems to want to know if I am me,” thought Marion indignantly.

She for her part was watching him, but she never could get very close. She had once, on Oxford station, taken her courage in both hands and marched up to him.

“Well,” she said fiercely. “Do you know me?” She had been close enough to him then to see the slight jaundiced yellow under his pallor and to see the fine little lines round his eyes and mouth. He was younger than she was but still not young.

He had said nothing, nothing at all.

“Someone should teach you not to stare,” she had snapped, and she had felt herself grow red and cross.

It was at this moment she swore she saw recognition in his eyes.

Later she had looked at herself in her bedroom mirror and shaken her head. “Poor battered tired old Marion. Do you imagine you are still a femme fatale?”

It had been one of her old bitter jokes to call herself a fatal woman. She had been fatal enough for poor Francis, in her fashion.

From then on she had dismissed any thought of going to the police. She could imagine only too well how she would be received: the raised eyebrows, the sceptical smiles; the advice to see a doctor.

She was under the care of a doctor in any case. Dear Dr. Steiner had been fumbling about, trying to find a cause and hence a cure for her headaches, for about a year now. “I can give you aspirins, Marion,” he had said. “I can alleviate the pains but we must find out what is causing them.” Marion had answered that she would be quite glad just to have alleviation. “It’s hindering my work, you know.” Dr. Steiner had looked at her for a long time before answering. “Ah yes, your work. You think a good deal about that?”

Marion had nodded. It had been a rather one-sided conversation, as it was more or less bound to be, considering the doctor was peering down her throat with a light. “And do you dream a great deal, Marion?” This time Marion had shaken her head in a no. But it was not true; she did dream; she dreamt a great deal.

She thought she could blame herself for this. There was another side to Marion of which her colleagues knew nothing, of which Ezra knew nothing, and of which the doctor knew nothing; she had another world, and it was this world which had triggered off her dreams.

Every week she visited the children’s wards in the tall, old hospital near where she lived; she played with them, talked to them and tried to distract them. Boredom is a great hindrance to recovery. In this world she was a different person, she was slow moving, almost phlegmatic, calm. She was better tempered, too. So there was the academic Marion, the home Marion, the poetic Marion, and the hospital Marion. She had no name there; she was known as the Play Lady. Presumably someone, somewhere, in that great building knew her as Dr. Manning, but the name was lost.

She valued this world of hers; she had found the entrance to it herself. She had gone to visit a friend and had wandered by mistake into the wrong ward. Her entrance was welcomed, and since Marion was at heart an entertainer, she could not help but respond. She amused them. She promised to return next week and she did so, and the week after. Very soon she was an accepted institution. She took them books, odd toys, and games, and wandered round from child to child. This period was the best time of all and would probably have gone on if some child had not discovered that Marion’s stories and talk were better than any book.

She was missed when she was away. The children were accusing, with the unashamed egotism of those who know beyond a shadow of doubt that they are the centre of all possible worlds. “Why were you away last week? We missed you.”

“Like me to read?” asked Marion, always equable with them. “Or play card games? Or sing to you?”—She did sing sometimes in a low, tuneful, untrained voice.

“Talk.”

“That’s the hardest work of all.” But she sat down with a smile. The children asked her ‘just to talk’ more often than anything else. She told them the most wonderful things and although they did not always believe them they drank in every word. She told them of things that had happened to her and stories she had heard. They were real life stories, and although the children were sceptical in fact she invented nothing; she would have preferred to read or play dominoes but very well, if they wanted her to talk, then she would talk.

As the weeks went on Marion’s talks got more and more vivid but she did not notice. The children noticed, however, and their excitement was reflected in their quickened pulses, raised temperatures and restless nights.

It took some time for the nursing staff to relate all this to Marion’s visits, but they did so in the end. Even then they could not at first guess why such a quiet person could have such a stimulating effect. A nurse lingered one afternoon to listen and observe.

“It’s all quite harmless,” she reported afterwards. “That is, she only tells them stories from her travels in South America and so on, and it is absolutely fascinating, and educational as well. I don’t wonder they love it. But still,” and she shook her head, “it’s the way she tells it: as if she was there, she’s reliving that past of hers. And I don’t think she even knows she’s doing it.”

So a gentle hint was passed on to her and Marion woke up to what she was doing. All story-telling from her own experiences was stopped and she stuck wryly to Cinderella. But inside her the stories went on. The past which she had comfortably laid away all those years ago was still alive and kicking.

It shook her up and reminded her that life was not a Pandora’s box which you could put the lid on and forget. Her headaches started again and drove her to seek the doctor’s advice. She thought his remark about dreams acute, but she was inclined to resent it. He could confine himself to her pains and leave her to cope with her dreams. So she shook her head.

Quite often she dreamt of the past but sometimes she dreamt of the future. She dreamt that the book she was working on was completed but that it had been burnt before she could get it to the publisher’s hands. She had dreamt this dream in varying forms more than once. Surely fire in dreams meant something rather nasty in Freudian terminology? It seemed a pity that it had to be associated with her poor little book. Characteristically Marion took her studies lightly. She knew her own value as a scholar and did not overrate it. She was a subordinate, a contributor, not an originator, not a hacker-away in new and virgin territory. She had had much praise, but it was beyond her deserts.

Marion had a keen idea that some of her colleagues were cautious, if not suspicious, of her. Sitting in the Common Room, or working in the Library, she felt their quick glances and their little silences. She was an outsider, never quite one of ‘them’; a changeling who had had too much publicity; more than was good for her perhaps.

A good deal of this feeling was caused by her change-over from one school of studies to another. She was only a tolerable English scholar but potentially she had been much more as an anthropologist. She knew this and everyone else knew it. So her transference puzzled them.

On this subject she had kept her own counsel. She never spoke of it. No one thought this odd of her. It was merciful that she lived among women who distrusted confidences and too much talk about self. They thought she was odd but not her silence.

What would they have said, she wondered, if they knew the real cause for her silence? She was silent because there was practically nothing she could say. She could never speak professionally again about her old subject: she had forgotten everything she knew. When she came round to life again after her husband’s death she had found that all her knowledge, all her carefully acquired techniques had been erased from her mind. Six years of work had gone in a few hours. She was not only ignorant, she was worse than ignorant, her mind blocked all further studies on this subject. Marion knew when to take a hint from the Gods; she rebuilt her life on different foundations.

But it was not a story she wanted her sober, realistic, feet-on-the-ground companions to know.

Down in the kitchen below Marion’s sitting-room Joyo was also watching the man from the window. She was as aware of his presence as Marion, but in a different kind of way. But Joyo was a different sort of person. She was small and sturdy and given to wearing bright peasant clothes. Joyo was not her real name, of course, but one she had adopted in defence against her real one, about which she preferred not to think; she had got it as a matter of fact from a gay Australian in the canteen where she had worked during the war. The war had been Joyo’s apogee, frankly she had never had it so good again. The laughter, and the crowding together, and the tension, even the danger, had suited her. She had been out, free. And then, the war over, back she was obliged to pop like Cinderella. She had a gay volatile temperament, although in her bad moods or when her head ached it was as well to keep out of her way.

But it was a bright cheerful face which stared from the window now. She was passionately interested in the Watcher, and unlike Marion would have liked to have asked him into the house. But being more worldly than Marion she could also see the danger.

She moved across the kitchen idly picking up a bit of pastry off the cinnamon apple tart as she passed, and then suddenly doing a little dance in the middle of the kitchen, just because the floor was bare and sunny. She looked at her face in the mirror. The bright orange lipstick which had so captivated her in the advertisements shone on her lips. Joyo kept a supply of make-up in the kitchen cupboard in a box labelled Oxo. It made her feel gay when the world was dull. It was a little secret she kept from Marion, although privately she thought Marion must be pretty slow not to have discovered it. She poked at her treasures, lipsticks, nail varnish, powder and scent. There was also a photograph in there which she studied with interest. It was not of anyone she was fond of, or indeed of anyone she had ever known, but it had won a money prize for her and Joyo, who was a frugal soul, appreciated that. She tucked the money into her purse. She dabbed a little scent behind her ears before going to look in the oven. She would have liked to have her hair dyed that deep mauve she so much admired, but she feared that it might embarrass Marion, not that Marion and Joyo always saw eye to eye by any means, but they had lived together for so long now that Joyo had learnt how far she could go.

Joyo looked wistfully at the coalman delivering coal next door but one. She fancied she knew his face. He turned, and she was quite sure: she had seen him at the little café down by the station where they played music and where she enjoyed herself so much when she got the chance. She had been there last Wednesday and unless she was much mistaken so had the coalman. He looked cleaner, of course (not so much cleaner as the honesty which lay close to the surface in Joyo obliged her to say), and he looked happier. Indeed he had been very happy dancing the cha-cha to a tune which had set Joyo’s feet tapping. She regretted that she had not been dancing herself but her companion at the time, a morose man from Manchester that she had met on the railway station, had not, as he himself put it, been much of a dancer. Joyo would never see him again and she did not care. She liked men and their company but she tried, as far as possible, to avoid permanent relationships. She would not, in any case, have wanted to know the Mancunian any longer. He had been tactless.

“You don’t want to dance that sort of thing, my dear,” he had said, patting her hand, “not at our age.”

One offence: for Joyo did not care to be touched unless she said. Double offence: he was at least ten years older than Joyo. So she moved her hand hastily away and upset a cup of coffee over him. It was one of those things that Joyo could never be quite sure she had done on purpose or not. The coffee did him no harm so far as Joyo could see, but it had an immediate and savage effect upon his emotions. From a nice, polite, quiet if boring man who was just buying Joyo a friendly cup of coffee while he waited for his train, he was transformed into a loud talker and hard knee-gripper. Poor Joyo was horrified and at once began to think of ways to keep his voice and his hand down; she was experienced and worldly enough to recognise that it was for her to cope. Sadly she recalled the man in Bow who had climbed up the window curtains and the man in Southend who had crawled under the table. Neurotics seemed to be her lot.

Fortunately the stain of coffee on the cloth, long and boot-shaped, reminded him of Italy, and Italy of the Battle of Cassino.

“Here was us,” he said, sprinkling sugar in a circle lavishly round the table. “Here were the Jerries,” and a large amount of salt went down. “Here’s the mountain,” and he staggered over with the coffee urn, then to Joyo’s horror began to look around for the Benedictine Monastery. There was a bottle of Benedictine on a shelf within his reach and his hand stretched out for it. “Here we are,” he said cheerfully, “very suitable.” And the bottle went on top of the coffee urn. Joyo was heartily glad that the proprietor was on the telephone, and got to her feet with a view to slipping out.

Unluckily the coalman, who had finished his dancing, had also been at the Battle of Cassino.

“Here,” he said. “Here, chum, you’ve got it all wrong. We were here.” He sugared yet another area of the cloth. “And the Jerries were here.” This time he used pepper and Joyo at once began to sneeze loudly.

“Naw,” said a third man also coming over. “That’s not right. What you want …”

“Were you there?”

“Naw,” said the man, “never left England, not me. In a reserved occupation. But I’ve been watching Monty on television, see. He ought to know. You’ve got the monastery in the wrong place … It was lower down.”

Joyo was desperately embarrassed, and tried to look as though she had nothing to do with them, but they would not let her get away with this, and pressed her into service to stand between them as the Tenth German Army Group. A dangerous thing to be she began to feel as it looked as though the believer in the Up Monastery and the believer in the Down Monastery might come to blows over this issue before they could fight out the battle proper.

“You don’t know nothing about it,” sneered the coalman, rapidly seizing the bottle of Benedictine. “Everyone knows the ruddy old monastery was at the top. That’s what the battle was about.” As he spoke his fingers were quickly but almost absently undoing the bottle. He sniffed. “Only a dummy,” he said, disappointed.

Joyo was under the table by this time, hoping that no one would notice her, but as she was still sneezing she was afraid they might. But the disappointment over the bottle, in which all three seemed to share, reconciled them and they sat down and began to talk over the Italian campaign. No one took any more notice of Joyo and after a bit she crept out from under the table and went home. But she saw the proprietor emerge fiercely as she left. It might be as well, reflected Joyo, to keep out of the Mocha Mecca for some time. Besides, she had a small memento of the Mecca in her pocket.

The coalman finished his job and the van moved off. It was easier now for Joyo to see across the road.

Yes, the watcher was still there. What was he doing? What was he doing in Marion’s life? She felt sure he had come to see Marion. She felt a little premonitory thrill of terror.

And from her kitchen window she could see, what Ezra could not see, that Rachel was lurking in the corner between the house and high wall.