The Hours Before Dawn Page 12

  ‘I’m afraid Mrs Henderson is mistaken,’ she said pleasantly. ‘That’s the trouble about having a namesake in my own field. It’s always leading to this sort of confusion. However, I’m delighted to meet you now, Dr Baxter.’ She gave him a distant, conventional smile, looking straight into his face. Louise looked up into his face, too, and watched it slowly growing red. Red from collar to hairline, from one greying temple to the other. Embarrassment? Humiliation at not being recognised? Or was there something more?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was Michael’s sudden and opportune protest from upstairs that helped to tide over the moment of speechless embarrassment. Louise leapt thankfully to her feet, and left to her mother-in-law the task of reviving some sort of conversation. Mrs Henderson rose to the occasion with cheerful efficiency:

  ‘Nice to see you again, Miss Brandon,’ she said composedly. ‘Keeping busy as usual?’

  ‘Pretty busy,’ replied Miss Brandon, a little guardedly. ‘Term’s over, of course, but I do quite a lot of lecturing in the holidays. And then, I’ll be going abroad quite soon.’

  Louise hovered in the doorway, hoping to hear more. Did Miss Brandon mean that she was leaving them altogether, or did she just mean she was going away for the Easter holidays? But before Miss Brandon could say anything more – if indeed she intended to do so – Beatrice had intervened:

  ‘Lucky you! Where are you going? We went to France last year, but everything was terribly expensive. We had to sleep out most of the time.’

  ‘But it cost more to sleep out in one of those châlets than if we’d stayed in the main hotel,’ objected Humphrey, his discomfiture of a few minutes earlier apparently forgotten. ‘The whole idea of the châlets—’

  Louise smiled, and slipped out of the room. Poor Humphrey was always inadvertently frustrating his wife’s attempts to keep down with the Joneses, just as she was always frustrating his attempts to appear as a wolf. It was almost as if it was some game they were playing between them, neither of them aware of the rules, and yet both enjoying it. As she went up the stairs she could still hear Humphrey’s voice droning on about some meal they’d had in Paris. The wines and the sauces were forming a sort of bass accompaniment to Beatrice’s shrill claims to have lived on nothing but bread and sausage.

  When Louise came back she was greeted by that sudden silence which meant that they had all been talking about her. Miss Brandon, she was thankful to see, was no longer there, and in her place sat Mark who had either condescended to reappear or else had been dragged out of the kitchen by some over-zealous guest. Probably the latter to judge by his expression of gloomy non-existence.

  ‘We’ve just been telling your husband how lucky he is,’ observed Beatrice brightly, but without evoking the faintest flicker of response from the glum figure in the armchair. ‘And,’ she essayed, hoping perhaps that this would sound more plausible: ‘We were saying what a lovely baby you have. What a pity we haven’t been able to see him this time.’

  ‘I’ll bring him down if you like, he isn’t asleep yet,’ threatened Louise, which had the effect of rousing at least one of her guests to a sense of the passing of time. Mrs Henderson’s headlong departure was followed by the rather more leisurely withdrawal of Beatrice and Humphrey. This unhurried manoeuvre began at 10.45 in the sitting-room, with an account of Flora Curtis’ emigration to Australia (complete with her chastened return eighteen months later). It ended at the front gate, an hour later, with Sybil Pratt’s failure to run a mink farm in Berkshire. It was nearly midnight before the final details of Lydia Carver’s miscarriage had faded on the night air, and Louise returned to the sitting-room. To her surprise, Mark was still there. He looked up as she came in, smiled not quite into her eyes, and then watched her face in an odd, strained sort of way, as if trying to learn something.

  ‘I’d never thought of you as a jealous woman, Louise,’ he suddenly jerked out, the clumsiness of both words and manner giving an aggressive quality to the situation which had not been there before. ‘I do think,’ he went on, gaining confidence as men do from the cleansing introduction of anger into any situation, ‘I do think that you might talk to me before you discuss our affairs with the whole neighbourhood. Haven’t I any right to know what you’re thinking?’

  Louise stared. ‘What do you mean?’ she faltered, too sleepy to burst out with the anger that might have brought her close to him. ‘What do you mean? What have they all been saying?’

  But she knew, of course, what they would all have been saying. Humphrey, with conscientious persistence, would have been labouring with untiring coyness at his thesis that Louise had been making enquiries about Vera Brandon because she suspected her of some past intrigue with Mark. Beatrice, in the interests of many a future telephone conversation with old school-fellows, would have been encouraging this point of view as much as (and probably more than) was decently possible. Mrs Henderson, with her airy and up-to-date reluctance to take her own child’s part about anything whatever, would have been displaying an absent-minded sympathy with her daughter-in-law which could only make matters worse. Altogether they would between them have given Mark the impression that she, Louise, had been making a jealous scene and accusing Mark, behind his back, of some sort of liaison with Vera Brandon. Perhaps, indeed, he had been imagining for some time that she was jealous – that she was resenting the classical interests that Vera Brandon could share with him and that she, his wife, couldn’t. Perhaps, if it came to that, she was jealous. Not that she had ever felt jealous – she could not remember having felt anything about Mark’s tête-à-tête conversations with Miss Brandon other than the vague satisfaction that any wife feels when her husband is happily occupied with something that doesn’t spread glue or sawdust all over the sitting-room carpet. But don’t they say nowadays that what you think you feel doesn’t count for anything? In fact, if anything, it only goes to prove that you are really feeling the exact opposite. If you don’t feel jealous of another woman, it simply proves that subconsciously you are feeling so madly jealous of her that you just can’t face it. But surely there must be a limit to this theory somewhere? If you don’t feel interested in stamp collecting, or netball, or the annual rainfall in Turkestan, does it really prove that you are so desperately interested in these things that your conscious mind simply can’t face it …?

  ‘Louise! Can’t you say something? Don’t just stand there, as if you were asleep!’

  Louise blinked. She had been nearly asleep, of course. She was nearly asleep most of the time nowadays. It would be no wonder if Mark did find some other woman better company. Any other woman. ‘What has she got that I haven’t got?’ ‘Just that she can stay awake while he speaks to her. Nothing else.’

  Again Louise forced her eyes open. She was swaying a little as she stood, her elbow resting on the mantelpiece, and Mark’s figure looked huge and blurred; his voice sounded painfully loud.

  ‘It’s impossible to discuss anything with you!’ he seemed to be shouting. ‘Anyone would think you were half-witted!’ If there was anxiety as well as exasperation in his words, Louise did not hear it, and she made no attempt to recall him as he slammed out of the room. She only wanted to go to bed. Wanted it so much that as she sank into the armchair in front of the fire, she half thought that she had gone to bed. That the light had been switched off, that all her tasks were over, that she was free to fall into a deep, deep sleep to last for hours – for days – for weeks….

  At first it did not seem like a dream. It seemed more as if her thoughts were marshalling themselves with a brilliant, rational clarity which they never achieved in waking life. ‘Of course he is attracted by her,’ they began. ‘And that is why he is so annoyed when you keep on puzzling about who she is and where she has come from. She has come out of his past. That’s why he half remembered her at first. She has been searching and enquiring for him for years, and at last, through Humphrey, she has tracked him down. But for what? To start a new love affair? To blackmail him about an o
ld one? Has she some hold over him? Was that why she was searching his desk last night – to get possession of some document with which she could threaten him? Or was she seeking some photograph – some love letter – with which to revive past memories – past obligations – past love?’

  ‘But she’s not attractive enough for that sort of thing.’ ‘Oh, but she is. Your busy, preoccupied daytime mind doesn’t see it, but your sleeping mind knows it well enough. By day you see her as a middle-aged schoolmarm; too intellectual – too muscular – too efficient for romance. But now, in the vividness of sleep, you know that her intellect is a feminine intellect; and if it has grown powerful through great learning, then its femininity has grown powerful too. Her big-boned body is strong indeed, but not with a masculine strength; rather with the strength of a tigress….’

  A tigress. Why should Louise be thinking about tigers? There were no tigers here, in these narrow, shadowy streets. It was tiring, too, pushing the heavy pram. It confused her thoughts, just when they had been growing so clear. What miles she had walked through these mean streets, for hours and hours, with never a break in the small, dull houses, and with never a soul passing by. It was growing dark, too, and her back was aching with the weight of the pram. No – not aching – what was this feeling? Right in the small of her back? She had never felt it before, but she recognised it quickly enough, for it was the most ancient feeling in the world – the feeling of the hunted. The feeling that warns you when eyes are watching from behind; when stealthy footsteps are following….

  But you must not run. For the sake of your very life you must not run. Indeed you cannot run; the weight of the pram is like lead; the pavements are soft like dough, and the wheels sinking slowly in. The baby in the pram is screaming now; you cannot see his face because of this glaring redness before your eyes, you can only hear him. He is screaming – screaming – screaming….

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was several seconds before Louise was sure that the redness before her eyes was only the redness of the dying fire; longer still before she was sure that this feeling in the small of her back was only the ache and stiffness that comes from falling asleep in an armchair. But there was no mistake about the screaming. Louder and louder it sounded from the floor above, and still half-dazed Louise looked at the sitting-room clock. Two o’clock, of course. She struggled to her feet and stumbled upstairs to Michael’s room.

  He did not seem to have woken anyone yet. Mechanically, as if she had pressed some button to set this maternal robot of a self in motion, Louise scooped him out of the cot and carried him downstairs to the scullery.

  While she fed him he was quiet, eyeing her impassively over the curve of her breast, and he sucked down the milk in great satisfied gulps. And then, when he had finished, he began to cry again.

  How he cried tonight! Worse, it seemed to Louise, than he had ever been before. Struggling, kicking, threshing about on her lap; pulling himself up, as if with desperate purpose, into a standing position against her shoulder, and then, once there, crying more desperately than ever. He did not seem to be exactly angry – nor frightened – nor in pain. His crying had that senseless, timeless quality that she remembered from the occasional bad nights of Margery and Harriet’s babyhood. If only they could tell me what’s the matter! she remembered thinking, and now, at eight and six, they were able to tell her what was the matter. Able, and indeed willing, to tell her for hours on end and with scarcely a pause for breath. And how blessedly comprehensible it all was. How utterly different from this senseless, soulless noise which seemed to destroy all possibility of human contact. When a baby was like this, nothing could be got across to him, nothing at all, not even the warm primitive contact of hugging him to her breast….

  Louise became aware of a sharp, insistent knocking on the wall. It must have been going on for a minute or more, but she had at first drowsily supposed it to be the dripping tap; now, with sickening certainty, she knew what it was. It was Mrs Philips. Mrs Philips, who was having a new hot-water system put in upstairs, and who would therefore be sleeping in the downstairs back room – the one that adjoined Louise’s kitchen. Now, for whatever length of time that leisurely, chain-smoking plumber chose to spend on the hot water system, for so long would Louise’s kitchen and scullery cease to be a refuge at night.

  The knocking grew more insistent; and, with no plan in her head other than to get out of range of Mrs Philips, Louise blundered with her baby through the kitchen and into the hall. The sitting-room? But that was directly below hers and Mark’s bedroom; within five minutes he would be down, distracted and irritable, to bombard her with that mixture of ill-timed criticism and impractical advice which was the last straw on these weary nights. And Miss Brandon’s door would be heard, opening and shutting reproachfully….

  Louise looked this way and that, like a cornered rat, and her eye fell on the pram.

  Well, why not? An outing in the pram always soothed Michael by day – why not by night too? And here she was, already dressed after falling asleep in the armchair. Only her coat to put on, and in two minutes she could be out of hearing of Mrs Philips – of Mark – of Miss Brandon – of all the censorious lot of them!

  The night air was cold and exhilarating. Louise felt suddenly awake – vividly, poignantly awake, as she had not felt for weeks. Michael was quiet now; he stared wide-eyed at the wonder of the street lamps as they passed above his face. How wise he looked, how ageless under the ageless night! Louise could scarcely keep from running, so light, so strong had she grown through sleeplessness. The pram was no burden to her; it seemed endowed with a half-life of its own as it raced along before her. She could have imagined that she wasn’t pushing it at all; that instead it was pulling her along the sleeping streets. But that, of course, couldn’t be happening; it would be against the laws of nature.

  Yet the laws of nature seem different at night, when there is nothing – nothing at all – between you and the Milky Way. At such times the laws that rule the movements of the stars come very close; and yet their very closeness may make them unrecognisable – as a much-photographed celebrity might be if he suddenly walked into your kitchen. For a moment it seemed to Louise ridiculous to doubt the existence of miracles; how could any sane person imagine that a power that could set the nebulae in motion should be unable to push a pram along a suburban road without Louise’s help …?

  All at once, the disembodied lightness, the sense of vision, were gone, and Louise looked about her, shivering and a little scared. She had not come so very far after all – that skimming, birdlike swiftness of movement must have been mostly imagination – but she was approaching the main road already. Any moment now she might meet somebody – a policeman maybe – who would ask her what she was doing, taking a baby out at this hour of the night, and then what would she say? That the baby wouldn’t sleep – that he was disturbing the neighbours? But that sounded ridiculous – people just don’t take babies out in the middle of the night for such a reason. Yet it had seemed at the time a sufficient reason – it still seemed so. How could she have ignored Mrs Philips’ knocking? How could she have allowed her own household to be kept awake all night? Taking the baby out in the pram had been the only possible thing to do. She had been driven to it. She had had no alternative.

  In that case, why did she fear having to explain it to a policeman? If her action was really sensible and necessary, why should it sound so silly? More than silly; mad. Perhaps it was mad. Perhaps this was just the way mad people did feel – that they were being logically and inevitably driven to their crazy actions; that they had no alternative.

  Louise stood still, and with her hand resting lightly on the handle of the pram she gazed up at the night sky, which held no faintest glimmer of dawn. Wasn’t it during the hours before dawn that sick people were most likely to die? Perhaps it was during those same hours, too, that sane people slipped over into madness …?

  She was roused by a fretful wail. Michael had no intention of pu
tting up with a motionless pram any more than a motionless cot; and Louise obediently jerked herself into movement once more. She was deadly sleepy again now, and she did not notice in which direction she was going. She knew only that she must keep walking about, walking about, until Michael should fall asleep….

  But what was the matter? Why was he that ghastly colour? With a little moan of sheer terror, Louise lunged forward – and then began to laugh, weakly, and without amusement. For he was all right. It was only the lights. Those ghastly, bloodless lights of the main road that sucked all the colour from everything. Even after she had realised this, Louise could still scarcely bear to look at the grey, corpselike pallor of the child’s face. She hurried him along, in absurd distress, until she came to a side turning. And it was as she plunged up this turning, heedless and unseeing, that she first became aware that she was falling asleep. Falling asleep even as she walked, and that it was beyond her control.

  It was tiring, pushing this heavy pram. What miles she must have walked through these mean streets, for hours and hours, with never a break in the small dull houses, and with never a soul passing by. Her back was aching with the weight of the pram. No – not aching – what was this feeling …?

  Just as in her dream, Louise dared not run. Neither did she dare to stand still. Nor to turn round.

  ‘It’s a dream!’ she told herself wildly. ‘Just a dream. The same dream all over again, and in a moment I shall wake up. In a moment the pram will become too heavy; I shall see that red light before my eyes, and it will be the sitting-room fire dying down. Or am I asleep in the scullery, my feet on the mangle, my head leaning against the draining-board? In that case, I shall wake up and see that barred window. It will look like teeth at first, but I must remember it’s not teeth, only bars. Nothing to be frightened of. Not teeth, only bars…. Not teeth, only bars….’