The Collected Short Fiction Part 56

Thelma locked the door.

'I'm not locking you in. You can leave any time you like.'

And Millie could indeed see that the key was still there.

Thelma lifted the crystal and placed it on the floor. Sure enough, it was much smaller than Millie had always supposed such gadgets to be. Perhaps they came in different sizes, according to the purchaser's needs and resources?

The only light was from under the door and from the small yellow gas fire. The room was odorous as well as stuffy.

Thelma signalised this fact by throwing off her dark-blue tunic. Beneath it she wore a fragile pinkish garment with big rents in it, through which her brown skin could be seen by what light there was. Her mop of hair was uncombed and uneven in length.

'Do what I am doing,' directed Thelma; and added, 'If you really must go on with this.'

When Millie made no answer, Thelma wriggled down on the floor until she lay at full length upon her front with the crystal about two inches before her eyes.

She looked ridiculous; or any other woman in her position would have looked ridiculous. Millie had supposed that crystal-gazing was done seated at a table. Moreover, a very suitable table was in the room with them.

'I advised you to take off your sweater,' said Thelma. 'Why not be more friendly?'

Millie continued calm. Upon the pa.s.sage to truth, crosscurrents are to be expected.

'I'm all right,' she said, and lay down upon her front on the diametrical other side of the small crystal. She rested her chin upon her two hands, as Thelma was doing. At these close quarters, Thelma's lupine aroma was very pungent. Millie tried to concentrate upon gazing into the crystal. She a.s.sumed that to be the right thing to do. If only the crystal had been proportioned for a mature woman instead of for a waif!

But that matter began to adjust itself, and before Millie had had time even to begin feeling physically uncomfortable. As she gazed through the crystal at Thelma's rock-pool eyes, the yellow light from the gas fire turned blue; and the circ.u.mference of the crystal expanded and expanded, as did Thelma's...o...b.. on the other side of it. Indeed, Millie realised quite clearly that it must always have been impossible for her to have seen Thelma's eyes through the actual crystal. All anyone could really have seen through it, would have been Thelma's nose and a small distance on either side of it.

Incandescent with darting blue lights, the crystal grew until it filled the room, until it was the room, and Thelma's eyes were no longer there, as if her face had split vertically down the middle and her eyes had rolled away round the polished sphere, each in a different direction.

But by now Millie was in a room no longer. Nor was she lying inconveniently upon her front. On the contrary, she was in a small woodland clearing and was observing with perfect ease what therein transpired.

The two boys were sitting, rather absurdly jammed together, on a tree trunk. It was not a whole fallen giant of the forest, but a neatly sawn-off section, awaiting the arrival of the timber float and its tractor, or perhaps left there by intention as a nature seat for wooers, an accessory to picnics. In fact, the boys, ravenous as ever, were at that moment engaged upon a picnic of their own.

Each boy held in his hand a very large, very red bone, from which he was gnawing in the frenzied manner that Millie remembered so well.

On the worn, wintry gra.s.s before them lay what was left of a human body.

The boys had already eaten their way through most of it, so that it could not even be described as a skeleton or semi-skeleton. The disjoined bones were everywhere strewn about at random, and only the top part of the frame, the upper ribs, remained in position, together with the half-eaten head.

It was Phineas's head.

Things swam.

Millie felt that her soul was rus.h.i.+ng up a shaft at the centre of her body. She knew that this is what it was to die.

But she did not die.

She realised that now she was lying on her back in the still-darkened room. Thelma must have moved her. The gas fire was as yellow as before, no doubt because there was something wrong with it; and Thelma in her pink rags and dirty jeans was standing before her, even looking down at her.

'You've been out a long time.'

'I wish I were still out.'

'You may, but I don't. I've things to do. You forget that.'

Millie hesitated.

'Did you see them too?'

'Of course I saw them. Remember, I asked you whether you really had to go on with it.'

'What else could I do?'

'I don't know. I'm not your nursemaid.'

Millie sat up. 'If you pa.s.s me my handbag, I'll pay you.'

Thelma pa.s.sed it. It did not seem to have been rifled during Millie's anaesthesia.

'Perhaps we could have a little more light?' suggested Millie.

Thelma threw on her tunic and, without fastening it, began to draw back or take down the window coverings. Millie did not examine which it was.

She rose to her feet. Had Thelma been behaving differently, she, Millie, would have been shaking all over, still prostrate. She seated herself on one of the dusty black chairs. She counted out forty-nine pounds on to the black table in the corner. Then she gazed for a moment straight into Thelma's vatic eyes. At once the sensations of a few moments before (or of what seemed a few moments) faintly recurred. Millie felt dragged out of herself, and turned her face to the dingy wall.

'You can stay if you wish. You know that.' Thelma made no attempt to take up the money; though Millie could be in small doubt that the sum would make a big difference for Thelma, at least temporarily.

'You can't expect me to keep open house for you always.'

Millie turned a little and, without again looking at Thelma, attempted a smile of some kind.

'I shan't be around much longer,' said Thelma. "Surely you can see that?'

Millie stood up. 'Where will you go?'

'I shall go back to decent people. I should never have left them.'

'What made you?'

'I killed a girl.'

'I see.'

'I did right.'

There was a pause: a need (perhaps on both sides) for inner regrouping. It was a metaphor that Uncle Stephen might have approved.

Millie gathered herself together. 'Is that the sort of thing I ought to do?'

'How can I tell? Why ask me? You must decide for yourself.'

Millie gathered herself together a second time. It was difficult to pet.i.tion. The forty-nine pounds still lay untouched on the hocus-pocus table. 'You can tell, Thelma. I know you can. They're obscene, monstrous, all those words. You know as well as I do. You're the only one who does. I feel responsible for them. Is that what I ought to do? Tell me.'

Thelma seemed actually to reflect for a moment; instead of darting out a reply like the double tongue of a snake, the flick of a boxing second's towel, as she usually did.

'You're not the kind,' said Thelma. 'It would be beyond you.'

'Then what? Help me, Thelma. Please, please help me.'

'I told you before. Run away.'

Millie stared blankly at the entire, round, empty, world.

'Be more friendly and you can lie up with me. I keep saying so. But soon I shan't be here. I have debts.'

Millie wondered with what currency Thelma proposed to settle.

'Hurry up and put the money away somewhere,' Millie said.

But Thelma again spoke to the point: 'I'll place my right hand on your heart and you'll place your on mine. Then we'll be friends.'

Millie glanced at Thelma's ragged pink garment, but all she said was, 'It wouldn't be fair.' Then she added, 'Thank you all the same.' What a depraved, common way to express grat.i.tude, she thought.

There was a tapping at the locked door.

'Who's that?' asked Millie, as if she really did live there.

Thelma had leapt upon the money like a cheetah and shoved it hugger-mugger into her jeans.

'It's Agnes Waterfield. She comes every day at this hour.'

'G.o.d! I don't want to meet her,' cried Millie.

'Well, you'll have to,' said Thelma, and unlocked the door on the instant.

Millie could only s.n.a.t.c.h her garments and scuttle away like a cat, hoping that Agnes might be too involved in her own troubles and preoccupations to recognise her, though not really believing it.

Outside, it had begun to snow. The big open car was spattered with separate flakes.

Millie sped away. Soon the suburb which had once been home was miles behind.

The straggling and diminis.h.i.+ng woodlands touched the road at several places before one reached the main section in which lay Uncle Stephen's house. The ground was hummocky here, and nowadays the road ran through several small cuttings, ten or twelve feet high, in order to maintain a more or less constant level for the big lorries, and to give the tearaway tourists an illusion for a minute or two that they were traversing the Rocky Mountains. There were even bends in the road which had not yet been straightened, and all the trees in sight were conifers.

Thinking only of sanctuary, Millie tore round one of these bends (much too fast, but almost everyone did it, and few with Millie's excellent reason); and there were the two boys blocking the way, tall as Fiona Macleod's lordly ones, muscular as Gogmagog, rising high above the puny banks of earth. It was a busy road and they could only a moment before have dropped down into it. Beneath the snow patches on their clothing, Millie could clearly see the splashes of blood from their previous escapade. The boys were so placed that Millie had to stop.

'Got any grub, Mum?'

Quite truthfully, she could no longer tell one twin from the other.

'That's all we ask, Mum,' said the other twin. 'We're hungry.'

'We don't want to outgrow our strength,' said the first twin, just as in the old days.

'Let's search,' cried the second twin. Forbearance was extinguished by appet.i.te.

The two boys were now on the same side of the car.

Millie, who had never seen herself as a glamorous mistress of the wheel, managed something that even Uncle Stephen might have been proud of in the old, dead days at Brooklands. She wrenched the car round on to the other side of the highway, somehow evaded the towering French truck charging towards her, swept back to her proper lane and was fast on her way.

But there was such a scream, perhaps two such screams, that, despite herself, she once more drew up.

She looked back.

The snow was falling faster now; even beginning to lie on the car floor. She was two or three hundred yards from the accident. What accident? She had to find out. It would be better to drive back rather than to walk: even in the modern world, the authorities would not yet have had time to appear and close the road. Again Millie wheeled.

The two vast figures lay crushed on the highway. They had been standing locked together gazing after her, after the car in which there might have been sweets or biscuits; so that in death, as in life, they were not divided. They had been killed by a police vehicle: naturally one of the heavier models. Millie had under-estimated the instancy of modernity. The thing stood there, bluely lighted and roaring.

'It was you we were after, miss,' remarked the police officer, as soon as Millie came once more to a standstill. All the police were ignoring the snow completely. 'You were speeding. And now look what's happened.'

'If you ask Detective-Sergeant Meadowsweet, he will explain to you why I was going fast.' Millie s.h.i.+vered. 'I have to go fast.'

'We shall make enquiries, but no individual officer is empowered to authorise a breach of the law.'

By the time the usual particulars had been given and taken, the ambulance had arrived, screaming and flas.h.i.+ng with determination; but it was proving impossible to insert the two huge bodies into it. The men were doing all they could, and the police had surrounded the area with neat little objects, like bright toys; but anyone not immediately involved could see that the task was hopeless.

The snow was falling more heavily every minute, so that by the time Millie was once more left alone among the traffic surging round the frail barrier, the two boys were looking like the last scene in Babes in the Wood, except that the babes had changed places, and changed roles, with the giants.

Hand In Glove (1979).

...that subtle gauzy haze which one only finds in Ess.e.x.

- Sir Henry Channon.

When Millicent finally broke it off with Nigel and felt that the last tiny bit of meaning had ebbed from her life (apart, of course, from her job), it was natural that Winifred should suggest a picnic, combined with a visit, "not too serious," as Winifred put it, to a Great House. Millicent realized that there was no alternative to clutching at the idea and vouchsafed quite effectively the expected blend of pallor and grat.i.tude. She was likely to see much more of Winifred in the future, provided always that Winifred did not somehow choose this precise moment to dart off in some new direction.

Everyone knew about Millicent and Nigel and took it for granted, so that now she was peacefully alotted an odd day or two off, despite the importance of what she did. After all, she had been linked with Nigel, in one way or another, for a long time; and the deceptively small gradations between the different ways were the business only of the two parties. Winifred, on the other hand, had quite a struggle to escape, but she persisted because she realized how much it must matter to Millicent. There are too many people about to make it sensible to a.s.sess most kinds of employment objectively. In one important respect, Winifred's life was simpler than Millicent's: "I have never been in love," she would say. "I really don't understand about it." Indeed, the matter arose but rarely, and less often now than ten or twelve years ago.

"What about Baddeley End?" suggested Winifred, attempting a black joke, inducing the ghost of a smile. Winifred had seldom supposed that the Nigel business would end other than as it had.

"Perfect," said Millicent, entering into the spirit, extending phantom hands in grat.i.tude.

"I'll look on the map for a picnic spot," said Winifred. Winifred had found picnic spots for them in the Cevennes, the Apennines, the Dolomites, the Sierra de Guadarrama, even the Carpathians. Incidentally, it was exactly the kind of thing at which Nigel was rather hopeless. Encountering Nigel, one seldom forgot the bull and the gate.