Читать книгу Death Lives Next Door - Gwendoline Butler - Страница 6

Someone had once called Rachel the girl who knows everybody and there was a lot of truth in this. Rachel was of academic stock: a member of a real old Oxford family, as yet another friend had said. In fact, you might have said of three important Oxford families, all of them inter-married into one famous clan. The families were: the Leavers, the Boxers and the Hansoms; all equally distinguished and equally clever. Old President Leaver had had the honour, way back in the nineteenth century, of leading his college forward into the world of science; he was not a scientist himself, but he had seen the advisability of electing an eminent scientist to a fellowship at a time when this was not so common in Oxford. He had thus established himself for ever as an advanced man and his family were bound to be advanced and liberal also. It had sometimes been difficult for his descendants to be advanced and liberal enough, they had sought for causes to show their progressive minds, they had advocated votes for women and birth control, they had fought in the Spanish Civil War, and since then they had signed peace pledges, denounced colour bars and marched upon rocket bases. It was difficult for their fellow-citizens to deny that they were very often right in what they proclaimed, but all the same they were irritating people.

The Boxers had brought plain dottiness into the clan; it was a highly intellectual dottiness and, therefore, much prized in Oxford circles. Dr. Boxer was famous as the man who failed to remember the face of his own wife after an exceptionally dull dinner party at his own house and thrust her out into the cold after the departing guests with the remark: “Go home, dear lady!” He did not drink, so it was not to be explained that way. He was also noted for his command of seven different languages and for the polite abuse he could utter in all of them. He had been heard to boast in his high sweet voice when in the seclusion of his college common-room when his colleagues were occupied with port and thick cigars that he knew the verb “to …” (and here he would leave a blank and wag his wicked old white head and titter) in all European languages. His friends believed him and were impressed.

The Hansoms were something different again: they were the heavy-weights, the men you could be sure of. They went into the Foreign Service and had important embassies abroad, they were in the Treasury or the Cabinet Office, and just lately they had taken an interest in Television. But the Hansoms, scattered by their duties as they necessarily were, remembered that above everything they were an Oxford family. If any issue of importance came before Convocation, that vast gathering together of all Oxford Masters of Arts by which Oxford in theory alone rules itself, then you could be sure that the Hansoms would come cycling in from their country livings, or drive down in fast cars from London, or even fly in to prevent some disaster such as women taking degrees or W. H. Auden becoming Professor of Poetry; they were usually unsuccessful.

This ancestry had given Rachel great assurance, not social assurance, she hardly recognised the need for that, but intellectual assurance. With four generations of right thinking behind her, she felt convinced beyond the need even to consider it that the standards, values and judgements of her group and people like her were forever right.

Physically she took after her grandfather Boxer who had been a very beautiful man. In addition she had a sense of humour which may have come from him, too.

The combination of all these qualities, Boxer, Leaver and Hansom, was pretty paralysing and there were many who found Rachel a paralysing problem.

“I’d as soon make love to a man-eating spider,” declared the young man who had complained that Rachel knew everyone.

Rachel had become an anthropologist and this was how she came Marion’s way. She had read and admired the young Marion’s study of the Alpha tribes of Central America and had sought her out. No one knew how Marion felt about being remembered as an anthropologist, Rachel was the first person who had had the courage to speak about it to her face. However, even Rachel found that Marion had her reserves; and yet a steely friendship grew up between the two.

In this friendship Joyo by no means shared, although there was a lot about Rachel that she ruefully admired. Together with a lot she didn’t. She was sharp enough, however, to see that this cut both ways and that equally there was a lot Rachel would not like in her. She was careful as a result, so that while she knew Rachel it would be true to say that Rachel did not know her.

She watched the girl now, and wondered what she was about, standing there in the street. She looked cold, too, poor child. Joyo would have liked to call Rachel into the warm kitchen, but caution restrained her. Let Marion, kind old Marion, do that. Let her be the one to stick her neck out.

Ezra was thinking of Rachel as he stood on the corner of Chancellor Hyde Street. Behind his thoughts about Marion ran the steady stream of his preoccupation with Rachel.

He was horrified to see her suddenly walk forward from the corner and go straight up to the watcher.

“What did you say to him?” he asked.

“I asked him the time,” she looked up. “Go on, ask me why I asked him that?”

“Well, why?”

“I wanted to hear his voice.”

Ezra raised his eyebrows.

“I’m pretty fond of Marion. The fact that I don’t think she’s good for you is another matter. She’s not the only one who noticed him. I went to Stoke with her, you know. I saw him before Marion did.”

“So—what about his voice?”

Rachel was impatient. “I wanted to hear what sort of a person he was. Not the sort of person to be remotely connected with Marion at all.”

Ezra nodded. “But you make Marion sound a snob. She’s known a pretty wide range of people in her day. She knew …”

“Yes, but they were clever people, or interesting people, or out-of-the-way people. This man is ordinary.”

Ordinary, thought Ezra, remembering the kitten. Is he so ordinary?

“You’re pretty much of a prig yourself, Rachel,” was all he said, mildly. He looked up at Marion’s window and saw that she had gone back to work at her table by the window. He could see her intent profile as she bent over a book. No good going back there now. Marion was miles away.

He turned his attention to his love.

“Why do you have to go round looking like the retreat from Moscow?” he asked her irritably. “You’d be quite a good-looking girl if you didn’t get yourself up like that.”

“It’s so cold.” The huge aquamarine eyes stared at him over the edge of a scarf. “Freezing. I’ve just come back from the Sudan, don’t forget.”

“Yes, I always forget you’re the little anthropologist.”

“Not a very good one.” Rachel sighed. “Trouble with me is,” she said wryly, “that I like the people I go to live and work among. And I want them to like me. Won’t do. To be a good anthropologist you’ve got to be quite detached. I minded that those last people, the Berboa, didn’t like me.”

“Seems a reasonably human sort of thing to mind,” said Ezra.

“It does, doesn’t it? But that’s it. Anthropologists are not human. Or only remotely, men-in-a-machine human.”

“You must have picked up that style of dress from he Berboa,” said Ezra, observing her affectionately.

Rachel ignored this. “Anyway who cares? To hell with intellectuals.” This was the Hansom strain coming out—hotted up by the Boxer.

“Do you think I’m an intellectual?”

“Oh, so so,” said Rachel absently from the security of her own intellectual eminence.

“You’re honest, anyway,” exclaimed Ezra, more than a little hurt.

“Let’s look at it this way,” said Rachel, coming back to earth with a start. “You’re more of an intellectual than me, for I sometimes think that I simply inherit my way of life and that left on my own …”

“I think so, too,” interrupted Ezra with satisfaction. So Rachel did sometimes see herself.

“But you’re less of an intellectual than my Uncle Bertie,” went on Rachel. Uncle Bertie was a professional philosopher, and although many philosophers are very practical men and keep a remarkably sharp eye on the world and its benefits, Uncle Bertie Boxer did not. He was so constantly engaged in his battle with words that to the lay observer he sometimes seemed not quite in his right mind. It is alarming to come across a middle-aged gentleman running through the University Parks muttering: Are questions constitutionally nosey?

“Thank God for that,” said Ezra.

He wondered what Rachel got from him. Nothing more, probably, than an irresistible impulse to tidy him up. She wasn’t at this stage in the least in love with him. He felt a desire to show off.

“In six years I shall be a Doctor of Philosophy, the acknowledged master of my little corner of research, cock of my own dunghill.”

“In six years you will be forty-odd. You may be dead.”

“You may be right,” he admitted dolefully. But he had to go on.

“I have an idea about the figure behind a small group of Early English epic fragments. I think you can pick out some individual points about the writer. A sort of little Homer, well perhaps I exaggerate there, but still he was a real person. Anyway I want to reconstruct this lost man.”

“A sort of Anglo-Saxon quest for Corvo?”

“Oh, that wonderful book!” Ezra was just the sort of person to be caught in the spell of Corvo: he liked lost souls. “But I can never make up my mind whether it is fact or fiction.”

“Never much interested in Corvo, I must say. He must have been a dreary little chap.”

“I told you you were a prig. But, of course, what makes it so fascinating is what it reveals of the author.”

While they were talking they had both been watching the man who stood there, oblivious to everything except the one house. His very concentration made Ezra feel uneasy.

“Could he be a detective?”

“Why should a detective watch Marion?”

“That’s something we shall have to ask Marion,” said Ezra, a trifle grimly.

“He’s not a detective,” said Rachel. “I’ll swear to that. I’ve spoken to him and you haven’t. He’s not sharp enough.” She had convinced herself anyway. “Besides, Marion’s good. There can’t be anything in her life that needs detecting.”

Ezra was thinking.

He was remembering what he knew about Marion, what he had heard and what she had told him. With the interest in anthropology had gone a wide interest in people, everything had been grist to her mill. She had no more been able to avoid gathering up the curious, the strange and the lost people than now she could help gathering up the lame dogs she had known.

“Has it struck you that Marion must have known some pretty wicked sort of people in her time? Crowley and Beasley and Rosa Farmer and so on. Not a little bunch of honeys really.”

Rachel frowned. “Silly rather than wicked,” she said loftily.

Ezra sighed. “That’s exactly you all over. Silliness doesn’t rule out wickedness. Rather the reverse. Someone silly and wicked could be very dangerous.”

“Do you think this man is dangerous?” Rachel was surprised.

Ezra nodded. He was convinced there was danger for Marion, and what was more he felt sure Marion knew it, too, in her heart.

They threaded their way through the crowds of undergraduates on bicycles and approached the School of Anthropology, which was housed in a large sunny building.

“I have to leave a note,” explained Rachel, although she had no need to offer any explanations to her companion, who would have trotted along happily beside her to the moon if she had happened to suggest it. “And I’ve a book to pick up in the library. Do wait for me.”

Ezra tucked his feet under a chair and sat down to wait. He was thoroughly happy in this atmosphere of leisurely learning. He realised anew how unsuited he was to leave it.

A few students drifted in and out, exchanging a word with the porter in his little cubby-hole as they did so. He was a round fat agreeable man and an old friend of Ezra’s, who had waited here many times for Rachel. He came out now to talk to Ezra.

The porter and his wife knew both Marion and Ezra well.

(“I suppose she feels sort of maternal to him,” the wife had suggested.

“Oh no,” said the porter.

“Not … anything else?” queried his wife doubtfully. She didn’t want to think badly of Marion.

“Oh no, mother, you’ve got it all wrong. People like them have interests in common. That’s how they put it. Things in common. Age doesn’t count. It’s their minds.”

“Well I can’t help thinking it’s all a bit—” She hesitated: “Comic”)

“I’d be glad to have a word with you, sir.”

“Do,” said Ezra, looking up in surprise.

“I live in Little Clarendon Street, sir, as you know, just around the way from Chancellor Hyde Street, I’m often up and down the road, I usually go that way to the Parks to exercise my little dog. You’ve seen us perhaps, sir?”

Briefly Ezra let his mind rest on the dog; the ‘little dog’ was a great loutish retriever with teeth like a tiger’s fangs and a temper notorious among even the ill-tempered dogs of North Oxford.

“Yes, I know him.”

“And you being a particular friend of Dr. Manning’s, sir, I thought I’d mention it.”

“Mention what?” There was something coming.

“She’s a decent sort. She was very kind to me and the wife when we lost the kiddie.”

Ezra remembered that the porter’s little daughter had died of a rare form of diphtheria.

“And we’re not the only ones, she’s always had a helping hand for people like us. And I mean a real helping hand. Have you ever noticed Dr. Manning’s hands, sir? They’re hands that work. Oh, I know you work, sir, what I mean is that Dr. Marion works with her hands. That’s the side of her people like us see. And fat gratitude she gets for it sometimes. Like that cousin or sister of hers she helped. What does she get but the woman coming here making scenes? She came here once, I wasn’t here. I was out helping Monty get Rommel.” He grinned. “But I remember my wife telling me all about it. A shocking performance it was.”

“I had noticed her hands,” agreed Ezra.

“She’s sharp though. You can’t pull the old soldier on her.”

He frowned. “Real cross with myself I was. I ought to have done better.” He looked shyly at Ezra. “You know my little hobby, sir.” Ezra did. The porter had tried very hard to get into the Police Force, and not succeeding on account of his shortness, had turned himself into an amateur policeman. He had read countless books on criminology, kept a card index of famous criminals, with pictures, in the hope that he might one day meet one (he never had yet), and kept an alert eye open for any signs of trouble in his own neighbourhood. If anyone could be relied upon to notice detail, he could.

He and Ezra swopped detective stories. Have you read Ransome’s latest? Pretty good you know. What about the new Punshon? No Daly for a long time. Is she dead? And the new Innes? Not up to standard.

But now the porter was preoccupied with Dr. Manning herself.

“There’s been a shut-up look to the house lately. Doors always closed. Windows up. Not like Dr. Manning. She’s nearly always kept them wide open. Like a country woman in that. My wife was a country girl and she always says we don’t shut doors so much in the country; me and Dr. Manning we were both brought up on farms. Did you know Dr. Manning had grown up on a farm?” Ezra nodded. He knew about Marion’s youth and how she had hated it. Cutting herself off from it had been the first of her big steps forward, the first of her revolutions in transforming herself.

“I didn’t like the look of it. Made me think perhaps Dr. Manning was getting nervous of something. I kept a look-out.”

“Well?”

“There’s been a man hanging about. There were his hands, too, sir. I noticed them. They’re wiry hands.”

Ezra nodded.

“Then last night. I was passing Dr. Manning’s house last night on my way home from the Parks and I saw this man right up inside the garden. He was trying the door, sir, and as I came running up he shook a window. He saw me, I’m afraid, and nipped round the side and off.” He paused. “I didn’t like the look of it, sir. I’m afraid he may get in. Yes, I’m afraid he may get in.”

“He’s there now,” admitted Ezra. “I’ve just seen him. And I’m just as worried as you.”

“Do you think Dr. Manning’s noticed?”

“I wish I knew.” He realised that it was important to know if Marion had noticed or not. “I’ll talk to her.” But it was not going to be so easy for him to talk to Marion; the figure of Rachel stood between them. “But I promise you I’ll look after Dr. Manning.”

Rachel came hurrying through the glass doors from the library. Ezra got up to help her with the books.

The porter watched them go away. He remained worried.

“Perhaps I ought to have told him. And yet it was only an impression. Still I did get the impression: that he was whispering to someone inside the house.”

The man walked down St. John Street, through the crowded Cornmarket, and down St. Ebbes to Pratt’s Place where he entered a house which was one of a grubby grey stone terrace. He had a key and let himself into a dark and smelly hall. There was an upright yellow oak hallstand just behind the front door on which lay a few letters and a bottle of milk. He turned the letters over, but there were none for him. He picked up the milk and listened for a few minutes to the noises of the house. He could hear a baby crying and the shriek and scream of his landlady’s voice, he could hear someone banging away as if chopping wood, not that anyone ever chopped wood in that house, but banging was a necessary part of life there. After listening for a moment, he went upstairs.

His own room was tidy, dusted and neat. His landlady, oddly enough, had her standards. In her own way she liked her lodger and regarded him as an improvement on the last man, an itinerant seller of leather bags and shoe laces, who had left a few weeks ago, without paying his rent but taking with him her youngest daughter. It was not yet clear which of them would ultimately be the loser on this transaction. To please her present tenant she put an occasional duster round the room and usually made the bed; she had plenty of time in which to work, as he was out a good deal. He had not told her what he worked at, and, tactfully, she had not asked.

The man sat down at a small table by the window and arranged various things on the table before him. He had a yellow packet of photographs, a newspaper cutting, and a carefully tied-up bundle of documents. He opened the packet of photographs and carefully set out a line of photographs almost as if starting a game of Patience. Four cards in a line and one below. They were pictures of women.

He looked at them in silence, then stuffed them back into the packet, which was already greasy and much thumbed, as were the pictures themselves. He put all the things on the table back into the inside pocket of his blue raincoat.

There was a pause while he sat on the bed and drank the bottle of milk to the bottom. Then he got up, opened the drawers of the old chest of drawers and took out a few layers of shirts and underclothings. He packed this into a small suitcase. He looked into the wardrobe, but it was empty. He was wearing his one suit.

He looked round the room, but it was now quite bare of any sign of his presence except for a book by his bed, and this he did not notice.

He went downstairs and knocked on his landlady’s door. She opened it at once. She was not pleased to see the suitcase or to hear that her visitor was leaving. She was a large lazy woman of about forty; the only swift thing about her was her temper, as each of her three successive husbands had found in turn. She emerged with a cigarette in her lips and her expensive and bad-tempered Siamese cat clinging to her shoulders. They were both slightly cross-eyed.

“Well, you’d better come in and talk it over,” she said, holding the door open. “I can’t say I’m pleased about this, as you led me to believe you’d be a permanent. I’ve let slip several good offers, one very nice undergrad” (this was a complete lie, no undergraduate would step into her house) “and one from a very well-to-do lady as would have done for herself. You’ve let me down. Well, come on in.”

Although the house was dreary enough, the landlady had created a certain comfort in her own room. Everything was placed just where it could contribute most to its owner’s comfort. The round table, perpetually covered in a white and blue check tablecloth was so placed that it caught both the warmth from the fire and a good view from the window. On the table were a newspaper, a radio, and a box of cigarettes. By the fire was a teapot and another cat.

“I’ve kept the cats out of your way, as you said you hated them. I thought you liked it here,” she said in a hurt voice.

“I’m afraid I have to leave, though,” repeated her visitor, his mouth setting in firmer lines than his usual mild expression had led her to expect. She saw this, and abandoned her hopes of getting a month’s rent from him. “It’s unfair, though,” she said, with a genuine sense of grievance. “You’ll have to pay up for this week,” and she held out a hand.

As he got out the money to pay her, his envelope of photographs fell to the floor. One picture slid out.

“Why, you’ve got a picture of Dr. Manning,” she said in surprise.

“You know her?” Her lodger sounded not too pleased.

“Not half! Used to work there. As a lady help, you know. Just to oblige. But I didn’t stick it. Couldn’t do with her. Always following me about to see if I worked properly. Looked as frail as a feather, she did, but her energy! Had me beat. All her friends used to say, ‘Oh Marion, I don’t know how you do all you do, with your health, and your headaches. You ought to rest more, dear.’ Tough as an old boot she is really. See me