Don't Go to Sleep in the Dark Read online

  The grey face under the grey hair swivelled slowly round, and with sick, accustomed dread Lydia saw in it the familiar icy, aristocratic surprise.

  “I beg your pardon?” came the cool, expected snub. “No, not today, thank you,” and as he moved away, stiff with righteous affront, Lydia tried to hunch herself into invisibility in the nearest doorway, scarlet with familiar shame.

  “Were you looking for an AB, male, over 45?”

  The smooth pleasant voice, full of friendly interest, was so astonishing after the disheartening, day-long battle, that at first Lydia could only stare helplessly into the bronzed weatherbeaten face that smiled lazily down at her. She felt vaguely that he reminded her of someone, but she did not pursue the thought: who he was, was not important; what was important was that he was about 55, and an undoubted A. He was well-dressed, he spoke with a cultivated voice—he could be exactly right. So right that Lydia, dazed and exhausted, thought for a moment that she must be dreaming.

  “Oh yes!” she cried. “Are you—could I—? But how do you know—about my quota, I mean, and the AB’s…?” her voice trailed away in confusion, and her companion laughed and patted her arm.

  “I’ve been watching you for quite a while,” he admitted. “I could see you were having a bad day. I used to be involved in these market research things myself once upon a time, so I know what it’s like. Now then. What is it? Margarine? Leisure activities? Brands of toothpaste? Fire away!”

  He answered everything beautifully. He was a smoker; he had heard of all the brands of cigarette that Lydia had to ask him about, and he could also say instantly and without any fuss whether things were very important, rather important or not important at all to him, and whether they were less important, very much less important, or only rather less important than other things. He did not get bored or irritated with the monotonous triviality of the questions, and when it came to the final question—the open ended one, where he had to say exactly how he felt about cigarette smoking, and Lydia had to write it down word for word, he seemed to consider the question with real interest.

  “I suppose, for me,” he said thoughtfully, “smoking is a sort of tranquillizer. I wasn’t always a smoker, you know. I began to smoke at a time when I was young, and very, very unhappy—it seemed to take my mind off the miserable thoughts—the kind of thoughts one thinks when one is young. You know the sort of thing—Life has no more meaning? I’ve lost everything that made living worth while—all I want is to make an end to it all.”

  He stopped, letting Lydia’s flying biro catch up with him—shorthand was not allowed in this job, you had to write out everything in full, on the spot, that was one of the strictest regulations. Lydia wondered what she should do if his reminiscences should overrun the space allotted for this last question; but rather to her surprise his confidences seemed to stop short at this point.

  “Is that all?” she asked—against the rules, this, but somehow she had thought she was about to hear quite a long story. Tiresome in a way, when respondents embarked on the long story of their life, but also interesting.

  “That’s all,” he said, rather shortly: and then: “Don’t you want my name and address? So that they can check up on you, make sure you didn’t make it up?”

  “You are well up in it all, aren’t you?” laughed Lydia. “Yes, we do need it: would you mind—?” She looked up at him enquiringly, biro poised: but instead of answering, he reached out his hand.

  “You’d better let me write it in myself,” he said. “My name’s impossible to spell at first hearing, and my address is almost as bad.”

  Lydia handed him the form and the biro, and heaved a great sigh of relief. Not only was another questionnaire solidly filled in, but so pleasant and friendly an encounter would boost her morale tremendously for tackling the next comers.

  And only then did she realize that her companion had turned sharply on his heel and was walking away. Walking swiftly—hurrying, darting away into the crowd!

  For a couple of seconds astonishment held her absolutely motionless. Then, incredulous, she began to hurry after him.

  “Please!—Wait!” she cried. People turned and stared at her as she pushed her way through the crowds: but within seconds he was out of sight, lost irretrievably in the throng of afternoon shoppers. The precious questionnaire was gone for ever!

  For a few minutes the disappointment was so overwhelming that Lydia could have sat there on the kerbside and burst into tears. Her marvellous interview, fully and correctly administered to a man of exactly the right age and class—it was all wasted, lost beyond recall! So shattered was she by the disappointment that she hardly bothered to wonder at the man’s strange behaviour.

  Nor did the Team seem to wonder at it, when they all met at the end of the day to compare notes and hand in their work to the supervisor.

  “Oh, it’s always happening!” pretty Mrs Robens assured her airily. “They’re all nuts, the ones who actually answer. Well, I mean, no one would if they were sane, would they?” Approving laughter from the little group. “You should have seen my M.60!” she went on cheerfully. “He was a DE if ever there was one, but since he said he was the Duke of Wellington and lived at Buckingham Palace, what could I do but put him down as an AB? Especially as I wanted an AB to finish my quota. They won’t bat an eyelid, you see!”

  All very well for pretty Mrs Robens. She had at least kept hold of her mad interview and could add it to her quota. All very well for her, too, to be hurrying off now to cook chops and asparagus for her adoring husband and to tell him funny stories of her day. All of them, all except Lydia, hurrying home now to their other lives, their real lives, in the context of which all this was a joke, a trifle, an amusing source of evening conversation.

  The long evening light was still soft and golden in the street when Lydia let herself into her little room where the sun never shone. Even now, in July, it felt dank and clammy; Lydia switched on the light, and shivered, and sat down wearily in the ugly, uncomfortable armchair. Sat down to wait, to rest her swollen feet, to fill in the hours till it should be time to go to bed.

  And then, with the coming of the long night, her real life began; her life of sobbing into her lumpy pillow and thinking about Clive. His selfishness, his cowardice, his short-sighted greed were all Paula’s now; and if the girl had owned all the riches of the whole earth, Lydia could not have envied her more, or wept more bitter tears….

  At first, Lydia thought the supervisor was hissing at her like a snake: “Miss-sssss S-ssssteele, there’s a dis-sssss-crepancy in every s-ssssingle one…. You’ve s-spoiled the whole s-sssurvey, Miss-sss S-sssteele….”

  Lydia struggled up through the deep layers of sleep, and knew that, after all, it was not the supervisor speaking She was alone, in bed, in the deep night, in her dingy, solitary room. Or was she alone? The sense that something was happening, something was wrong, began to stir deep inside her. She struggled to wake, to think, but drowsiness came at her like a breaking wave, hurling her back into some strange uneasy limbo. She lay very still.

  There was no sound, except this quiet hissing; yet somehow Lydia knew that there had been another sound. Somewhere back among her dreams, there had been an uneasiness in among the furniture, across the linoleum, and then a softly closing door. Yet still she lay, heavy with uninterest: perhaps when she next opened her eyes it would be morning? Perhaps it was nearly morning already? The blank square of window would tell her, by its faint shade of lighter or darker grey, whether the dawn were breaking. Reluctantly, she forced her eyes open.

  For a moment, she thought she had gone blind. No grey square, neither dark nor light, was to be seen! Suddenly, crazily awake, she stared up and stared round into the blackness in all directions. Blackness everywhere, black, black, and a singing in her head…. She must have light, light! Light to breathe as well as light to see! Light to dispel this strange feeling in her lungs! Wildly, she reached out to her bedside lamp, and in a moment all was bright and sharp as i
n a vision. The curtains, which she always left open, were drawn close across the window; and an envelope, white and oblong, was propped against the alarm clock. And still the hissing sound went softly on, relentlessly, as the gas poured steadily from the unlit fire.

  With her last strength, Lydia stumbled across the room to turn it off, flung open the window and leaned out, taking in great gulps of the still night air.

  And when the dawn came, and her head cleared, she turned back into the room and opened the strange envelope. Inside it, in her own writing, was the message:

  “Life has no more meaning—I’ve lost everything that made living worth while. All I want is to make an end to it all.”

  Would anyone else who might have found it have realized that the slip of paper had been cut, neatly, from the end of a Market Research questionnaire?

  But why? Why? What could the strange man she had interviewed that afternoon have had against her? And why had his face seemed faintly familiar….

  *

  The answer came nearly a week later, when she learned that the death of an uncle had left her a rich woman—and that the legacy would have gone, in the event of her death, to a second cousin, a man of fifty-five whom she had not met since he was in his twenties and she a little girl. An ingenious way, she reflected wryly, of getting a suicide note in her own handwriting! And as to the motive, not one of her friends would have been in doubt—Clive, and his heartless desertion.

  Clive. A little smile quivered on Lydia’s lips as she thought of Clive’s face when it came to his ears that his discarded Lydia was now an extremely rich woman. He would quickly discover that Paula after all did not really understand him; that they were not really suited to each other; that Lydia was after all his own true love.

  And wasn’t she? The smile broadened on Lydia’s lips; it plumped her hollow cheeks, and sparkled up into her defeated eyes. All alone, in her little shabby room, Lydia began to dance.

  For when a woman can no longer hope to be loved for her beauty, or her youth, or her charm, is it so small a thing to learn that she may yet be loved for her money?

  THE LOCKED ROOM

  A DOOR BANGED in the empty flat upstairs.

  Margaret felt her fingers tighten on the covers of her library book, but she refused to look up. As long as she could keep her eyes running backward and forward along the lines of print, she could tell herself that she hadn’t given in to her fear—to this ridiculous, unreasoning fear that had so inexplicably laid hold of her this evening.

  What was there to be afraid of, anyway? Simply that the upstairs flat had been empty all this week, and that Henry was on duty tonight? But she had often been alone before—if you could call it alone, with Robin and Peter in bed in the very next room. Two little boys of six and eight sound asleep in bed can’t really be called company, but still …

  Leonora hesitated, wondering which way she should turn.

  Margaret realized that she was still reading the same sentence, over and over again, and she shut the book with an angry little slam. What was the matter with her? Was it that murder in the papers—some woman strangled by a poor wretch who had been ill-treated in his childhood? He had a grudge against women, or something—Margaret hadn’t followed it very carefully—had locked himself in an empty room in this woman’s house, and then, in the middle of the night, had crept out…

  All very horrid, of course; but then one was always reading of murders in the papers—anyway, they’d probably caught him by now. Now, what had she better do to put these silly ideas out of her head once and for all?

  Go upstairs, of course. Go upstairs to the empty flat, look briskly through all the rooms, shut firmly whichever door it was that was banging, and come down again, her mind set at rest. Simple.

  She put her book down on the little polished table at her side. But why was she putting it down so softly, so cautiously? Margaret shook herself irritably. There wasn’t the slightest need to be quiet. Nothing ever seemed to wake the boys once they were properly off, and poor deaf old Mrs Palmer on the ground floor certainly wouldn’t be troubled.

  Just to convince herself, she picked the book up again and dropped it noisily on the table. Then, with a firm step, she walked out to the landing.

  The once gracious staircase of the old house curved down into complete blackness. For a moment Margaret was taken aback. Even though old Mrs Palmer was often in bed before ten, she always left the hall light on for the other tenants—perhaps, too, for her own sake, from a deaf woman’s natural anxiety not to be shut away in darkness as well as silence.

  Margaret stood for a moment, puzzled. Then she remembered. Of course; the poor old thing had gone off this morning on one of her rare visits to a married niece. Tonight the downstairs flat was empty too.

  Margaret was annoyed to feel her palms growing sticky as she gripped the top of the banisters, peering down into the darkness. What on earth difference did it make whether Mrs Palmer was there or not? Even if she was there, she would have been asleep by now, deep, deep in her world of silence, far out of reach of any human voice … of any screams …

  Snap out of it, girl! Margaret scolded herself. This is what comes of reading mystery stories in the evening instead of catching up with the ironing as I meant to! She turned sharply round and walked across the landing to the other staircase—the dusty, narrower staircase that led to the empty flat above.

  The hall stairs were in bad enough repair, goodness knew, but these were worse. As Margaret turned the bend which cut her off from the light of her own landing, she could feel the rotten plaster crumbling under her hands as she felt her way up in the darkness.

  The pitter-patter of plaster crumbs falling on to the stairboards was a familiar enough sound to Margaret after six months in this decrepit old house; but all the same she wished the little noise would stop. It seemed to make her more nervous—to get in the way of something. And it was only then that she realized how intently her ears were strained to hear some sound from the empty rooms overhead.

  But what sound? Margaret stood on the top landing listening for a moment before she reached out for the light switch.

  Bother! The owners, who in all these months had never raised a finger to repair rotting plaster, broken locks, and split window frames, had nevertheless bestirred themselves in less than a week to switch off the electric light supply to the vacant flat! Now she would have to explore the place in the dark.

  She felt her way along the wall to the first of the four doors that she knew opened on to this landing. It opened easily; and Margaret again silently cursed the owners. If only they’d take the trouble to fix locks on their own property she would have been spared all this—the top flat would have been properly locked up the moment the Davidsons left, and then there would have been no possibility of anyone lurking there. Her annoyance strengthened her, and she flung the door wide open.

  Empty, of course. Accustomed as her eyes were to the complete blackness of the landing, the room seemed to be quite brightly lit by the dim square of the window, and she could see at a glance into every empty corner.

  The next room was empty too, and the next, except for the twisted, shadowy bulk of the antique gas cooker which Mrs Davidson so often declared had “gone funny on her,” and might she boil up a kettle on the slightly newer cooker in Margaret’s flat?

  But the fourth door was locked. Nothing surprising in that, Margaret told herself, turning the shaky china knob this way and that without success. Not surprising at all. All the rooms ought to have been locked like this—probably this was the only one which would lock, and the owners had lazily hoped for the best about the others. A perfectly natural explanation: no need to turn the handle so stealthily …

  To prove the point, Margaret gave the knob a brisk rattle, and it came off in her hand. Just like this house! she was thinking, and heard the corresponding knob on the other side of the door fall to the floor with a report like a pistol in the silence of the night.

  But what was t
hat? It might have been the echo of the bang, of course, in the empty room. Or—yes, of course, that must be it! Margaret let her breath go in a sigh of relief. That scraping, tapping noise—that was exactly the noise a china knob would make, rolling lopsidedly across the bare boards. Wasn’t it?

  Yes, of course it was. Margaret was surprised to find how quickly she had got back to her own flat—to her lighted sitting-room—to her own fireside, her heart beating annoyingly, and the dirty china knob still in her hand.

  *

  Leonora hesitated, wondering which way she should turn.

  Margaret pushed the book away with a gesture of irritation. She had thought that by facing her fear—by going up to the empty flat, looking in all the rooms and shutting the doors firmly so that they couldn’t bang, she would have regained her peace of mind. Yet here she was, sitting just as before, her heart thumping, her ears straining for she did not know what.

  What is it all about? she asked herself. Has anything happened today to make me feel nervous? Have I subconsciously noticed anyone suspicious lurking about outside? God knows it’s a queer enough neighbourhood! And leaning her chin on her hands, her thick black curls falling forward on to her damp forehead, she thought over the day.

  Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Henry had gone to work as usual. The boys had been got off to school with the usual amount of clatter and argument—Peter unable to find his wellingtons, and Robin announcing, at the very last moment, just as they were starting down the steps, that this teacher had said they were all to bring a cardboard box four inches wide and a long thin piece of string.

  Then had followed the morning battle for cleanliness against the obstinate old house. The paintwork that collapsed into dry rot if you wiped it too thoroughly. The cobwebs that brought bits of plaster down with them when you got at them with a broom….

  They weren’t going to be here much longer, that was one thing, reflected Margaret. They would be moving to the country soon after Christmas, and it hadn’t seemed worthwhile to look for anywhere else to live for such a short time. Besides, if they had to live in a flat with two lively small boys, this ramshackle old place offered some advantages. Among all this decay no one was going to notice sticky fingermarks and more chipped paint; no one was going to complain about what games the children played in the neglected garden, overgrown with brambles and willow herb. No one minded their boots, and the boots of their numerous small friends, clattering up and down the stairs.