Appointment with Yesterday Read online

  *

  The Outside struck her full in the face, like a breaking wave. The cold, the speed, the people, and above all the bedlam of sounds, pounding against ears that had registered nothing all the live-long day except the endless soothing rumble of the Underground. She, Milly, new-born and newly christened, had been thrust forth from the safe womb of the Inner Circle, and must start living her new life.

  Here. Now. In the Edgware Road. In the middle of the rush-hour, with darkness falling, and with two pounds twenty-five remaining in her bag.

  Gradually, as she stood there, she realised that there wasn’t anything she dared do. Not anything at all. Even if she had had the money for a hotel, she knew that she would never dare to push open any swing-door or walk up to any receptionist’s desk. Imagine standing there, mouth open, while a polished, glittering girl insolently took it all in, from wispy, uncombed hair to lack of suitcase in grimy, un-gloved hand!

  *

  And a job—even worse! Imagine an interview right now … “Yes, Miss—er?” (Goodness, she hadn’t even decided what her surname was to be yet, and whether she was to be Mrs or Miss!) “Yes, Miss K, and what was your last employment? What are your typing speeds? … Are you familiar with the use of a Something-ator? … Have you had experience on the sales side …?”

  As she ambled, almost in a trance, amid the pushing, scurrying crowds, Milly suddenly caught sight in a shop window of someone walking just as slowly as she was herself: an old woman with hair sticking out like straws from under her battered hat. For almost a second she didn’t recognise her: and when she did, she stopped, her heart pounding. So that is what you looked like, after a single day on the run …! She must buy a comb … a lipstick …! Wildly she looked round for a Woolworths—a chemist—a supermarket.

  But everywhere the shops were closing. London’s day was over: night, and lights, and swarming people swept over the city as over a battlefield when the carnage is finished: and, more desolate than all, Milly knew that by now she not only didn’t dare go into a hotel or apply for a job: she didn’t even dare to go into a shop and ask for a comb.

  *

  A bus labelled VICTORIA was drawing up beside her, and instinctively, without any thought at all, Milly scrambled on to it. As a deer runs for cover to the undergrowth, or a mouse to dark holes in the wainscotting, so did the new-born Milly dart automatically into places packed tight with tired people. Anonymous, bored, preoccupied people, laden with parcels, fumbling for money, pushing and shoving, blank as zombies. Such places were her home from now on: and when the bus reached Victoria, she recognised another of them. The evening crowds, the queues, hundreds of feet long, for tickets, for taxis, for trains … Milly didn’t mind which queue she stood in, provided it was very, very long: and when at last she neared the head of one, she just wandered off and joined in at the tail again.

  *

  What must her hair look like by now! And her haggard, sleepless face, devoid of make-up! She pulled her hat tight down over her forehead, and hung her head, so that presently all she could see was legs. Vistas of legs, like columns in a cathedral. No, like trees, like neat pollarded trees, rooted into the stone … and yet creeping … yes, the trees were creeping… flowing, growing, going, across the barren surface, wherefore ….

  Wherefore what? Was it some quotation from the Bible drifting into her mind? … “wherefore they shall creep upon the face of the earth” … something like that …?

  *

  “Where for?” yelled the man in the ticket office, for the third time. “Where d’you want to go, lady?”

  “Well—I—” In her horror at finding that she had inadvertently allowed herself to reach the head of the queue, Milly’s mind had become a blank. “Well—I—Well, where do the trains go to?” she asked idiotically.

  “Seacliffe and South Coast, this office,” the man snapped tiredly. “Suburban line, opposite Platform Six. Now, come on, lady. Take your time! There’s only a coupla thousand people waiting behind you!”

  His weary sarcasm stung Milly to panic.

  “Oh! Oh dear! Yes!—Seacliffe, please!” she gabbled, seizing like a drowning man on the name that the booking clerk had tossed her. “I want to go to Seacliffe!”

  “Single or return?”

  “Oh! Oh, single! Yes, single, please!”

  Single. What a lovely word. It meant no return! No return at all, ever! Fancy being able to buy that, just for money, at a Southern Railway ticket office! With a strange, singing joy, Milly saw her last two pound notes in the world disappearing, to be replaced by a small handful of change, and a small oblong of cardboard. But what cardboard! Passport, visa, birth certificate all in one! “Single fare, £1.40” is what it said, but Milly worked out the translation fast enough. It meant that the new-minted Milly was now a citizen of Seacliffe, now and for ever. There, in that unknown town, she was to work, and live, and die, and no one she had known in all her former life would ever find her.

  CHAPTER II

  IT WAS NOT quite ten when Milly stepped out of the train on to the dark, gusty platform of Seacliffe Station. Already it seemed late at night, as it could never have done in London, and the straggling remnant of passengers who had got off the train with her were scurrying head-down towards the ticket-barrier, as if they feared that the last buses, the last taxis, were already leaving.

  Milly followed more slowly. Of what concern to her were last buses and last taxis—she who had no destination, nothing to be late for or in time for? If you are going nowhere, it cannot possibly be too far to walk; and so Milly strolled through the ticket-barrier like a queen, insulated from all the haste and anxiety by a despair so complete as to be indistinguishable from peace.

  But once outside, she was compelled to rouse herself. The night wind howled in from the sea with a force which set her gasping for breath and clutching at her hat, her hair, her wildly billowing coat. Around her loomed a width of unknown road, dark and completely deserted, with here and there a street lamp glimmering greenly in the fury of the wind.

  Milly set off, exactly as if she was going somewhere. Not with any idea of averting suspicion—whose suspicion was there to avert in this storm-swept emptiness? Rather, it was because there was nothing else that she knew how to do. All one’s life, one has been doing things with some sort of small purpose; the mechanisms are built-in, and they cannot cease just because all purpose has suddenly disappeared.

  So she plodded on, and though her legs ached with a dull weariness, it did not occur to her to stop; and presently she knew, from the dampness whipping against her face, that she was getting very near the sea.

  Ah, here it was! In what a glory of desolation it shouldered its black vastness against the ramparts of the parade—again … again … again, with all its ancient strength! The spray stung against her face, the wet wind screamed round her icy, aching ears, and tugged and wrestled with the wild, damp strands of her hair. Heavens, what must she be looking like by now! Anyone passing by would think she was a mad-woman, dawdling along like this in the wind and storm, with her hair flying out like seaweed!

  Well, and why not be mad? The newspapers could put that in the headlines, too! Let them! Why not? Why not dance, and laugh, and scream with the screaming wind? Why not hurl herself like spray into the darkness, until her laughter and her screams became one and the same, one with the thunder of the black waves against the stonework, and the long, grating suck of the shingle as the water drew back, pausing for slow, incredible seconds while it gathered up fresh fury from its secret, inexhaustible store?

  Oh, but the cold was wicked! Milly pulled up the collar of her coat round her aching ears, and set off walking again. But already the collar itself was soaked with spray, and the wind whistled through her earache as if laughing at this fatuous attempt at protection. She could no longer see any glory in the black waves rolling in; they looked icy and horrible, and she crossed the road to the side where she Couldn’t see them; where the blank fronts of hotels and shut-u
p amusement arcades gave at least an illusion of shelter.

  As she walked, Milly presently became aware of a strange sense of nostalgia. Some memory, as of a dream, long, long ago, was all about her: and as she came abreast of a little lighted fish-and-chip shop, still open and busy, she realised what the memory was. It was the memory of food. How long was it since she had eaten? Yesterday? The day before? She couldn’t remember: and even now she wasn’t feeling hungry. She felt no temptation to spend any of her few remaining coins in that bright little bar. But all the same, the momentary smell of food as she passed had been comforting, like a stranger’s smile: a reminder that for some people, somewhere, life was still going on.

  It must have been after midnight when she finally came to rest, aimless as a blown leaf, in a shelter on the sea-front, a little way outside the town. It was a glass and iron-work affair, three-sided, and by creeping into the furthermost corner, Milly found a little protection from the spray, and from the black, terrible wind screaming in off the sea.

  Oh, but the cold! It seemed almost worse in here than outside. Gusts of icy air whirled round her knees, and pierced the soaked fabric of her coat as if it was paper: and presently it began to dawn on her that if she went on sitting here throughout the bitter January night, she was quite likely to die.

  Die. She tried to make the word mean something, and became aware, for the first time, of how much she had deteriorated since this morning. Then, she had been shocked, terrified, but biologically intact. She had been reacting to fear as a healthy mammal should—by flight, and by an overwhelming determination to survive. It seemed incredible now, that determination to survive, and all the trouble she had been prepared to take for it! She remembered, wonderingly, how it had made her run, gasping, panting, for the nearest Underground, like a mouse running for its hole. Like the mouse, too, she had been upheld and guided by sturdy and marvellous instincts, handed to her intact and perfect across millions of years of evolution. These instincts, basic to every living thing, had still been strong and vital in her even while she had sat paralysed—defence by immobility—going round and round the Inner Circle: as she had scanned, tirelessly, the relays of insurgent passengers, with every muscle tensed ready for further flight if she should catch sight of an acquaintance, however remote. How anxiously, and with what zestful sanity, she had counted and re-counted the money in her bag, trying to make it come to more than two pounds twenty-five just as if it actually mattered! And as she trundled round and round on the tube, hour after hour, how she had schemed, and daydreamed, and worried about how to establish a new identity, how to get a job, how to find a room…. It seemed like a dream, now, that fantastic will to live, and all the effort she had been prepared to make for it! Now, it seemed too much trouble even to pull the draggled edges of her coat together over her frozen knees: and as for the idea of getting up and walking again, of stirring the circulation in her numbed limbs—such purposeful effort seemed incredible now; it was beyond anything she could imagine….

  *

  She became aware, presently, of an ominous lethargy, creeping up from her frozen limbs, and beginning to probe, tentatively, into the very centre of her being. These were the fingers of death. She knew it. Strange how she had seemed to recognise them immediately, as though she had known, all her life, exactly what death would be like when it came.

  She had stopped shivering, too, in the last few minutes, and that was the most sinister sign of all. One by one, the marvellous mechanisms for preserving body-heat were breaking down. Soon, her temperature itself would begin to drop, and the blood-supply to her brain would fall to a point where anoxia set in. How easily and naturally the old, familiar medical phrases still slid into her mind, even after all this time! A legacy from her first marriage, this: and from the time even longer ago when she had been trying to train as a nurse. Dropping things: mishandling sterilised instruments: so clumsy and nervous over injections that the patients would plead, with real fear in their eyes, for “the little nurse to do it!” Or “the tall nurse”, or “the blonde nurse”—any nurse at all, so long as it wasn’t Milly!

  Only she hadn’t been Milly then, of course, she had been Nurse Harris: soon—if only she had guessed it—to become Mrs Waggett, wife of Julian Waggett, the promising young house-surgeon.

  No one in the hospital could understand why he had picked on her. With his dark, arrogant good looks, his charm, his air of absolute assurance, he could have had any girl in the hospital—or outside it, for that matter. All the young student nurses were more or less in love with him; some, like Milly, with a day-dreaming adolescent passion that declared itself solely by tongue-tied paralysis whenever he appeared on the ward: others, bolder and more experienced, were seriously out to get him. These were the girls who knew how to flash provocation from their cool downcast eyes as they stood by a bedside receiving instructions about a saline drip: who knew how to wear their sober uniform as if it was part of a strip-tease. Some of these sorceresses even managed to date the great man, now and again, and subsequently dined out (or perhaps cocoa’d out would be more accurate) for weeks afterwards on tales of wine and orchids and whispered words of passion.

  Not that Julian Waggett had been rich—not in those days. He was only a house-surgeon, two years qualified, and earning such a salary as protest marches are based on. But it made no difference. Although he was only twenty-six, and among the lowest-ranking doctors at the hospital, the indefinable bloom of success was already upon him. Already one felt that the deep-pile carpets of Harley Street were unrolling under his feet as he trod the wards; and when he glanced off-handedly at the bed-end chart, or threw out a casual syllable that would light up a pain-racked face, you knew, you knew without any doubt at all, that those unhurried steps were taking him into his future swifter than the speed of sound.

  *

  And the woman who was to step into the future with him? Not for her would be the harried existence of an overworked GP’s wife—tied to the telephone, meals drying in the oven, never a night’s unbroken sleep. No, whoever finally succeeded in capturing Julian was in for a life of pampered luxury and ease. Service-flats. A town house and a country house. Luxury holidays in the Bahamas. Did he know, Milly (Nurse Harris, that is to say) sometimes wondered, how many thousands of rollers were rolled into how many acres of hair at the Nurses’ Home each night, just for him? How many little pots of eye-liner, eye-shiner, skin freshener, pore-cream and all the rest were lined up in sacrificial array on his hundreds of unknown altars in little cell-like bedrooms? And could he ever have believed that those fluffy little heads, which seemed to find it so impossible to understand the blood-plasma tables, were nevertheless capable of compiling timetables far more complicated than anything dealt with at head office, when it came to engineering “chance” meetings with him on corridors or in doorways? And did he know—did it perhaps even amuse him to know—that several young lives had been drastically reshaped—for good or ill—simply by the fact that it was rumoured that he didn’t like virgins?

  And after all the sound and fury, what happened? He married Milly—Nurse Harris, that is to say! Nurse Harris of the gingery hair, and the freckles. Nurse Harris of the thick waist, and the stubby fingers, who couldn’t wear eye-make-up because it brought her out in styes. And a virgin to boot. It was no wonder that when the engagement was announced, the whole, vast humming hospital seemed to stop in its tracks for a moment, from the top consultant to the lowest-paid washer-up, all of them asking the same question. Why? Why?

  All their guesses were wrong. Nurse Harris wasn’t pregnant. She hadn’t inherited half a million pounds from a deceased uncle. Nor was Julian trying to call the bluff of some disdainful glamour-puss by making her jealous. He really did want to marry Nurse Harris. He did marry her. There were flowers, champagne, congratulations, and after that, of course, all that the mystified well-wishers could do was to sit back and wait for the marriage to crack up. Six months, most of them gave it.

  But it didn’t br
eak up. Not in six months, nor even in a year. Two years passed—three—even five; and during this time Julian went from strength to strength. House-Surgeon, Registrar, Senior Registrar…. Before he was thirty-five he was a consultant, and with a private practice on the side that was rapidly becoming fashionable. His name, now and then, began to appear in the papers, in connection with some tricky operation on a minor celebrity. By now the prophets of doom were having to eat their words: they had to admit that a man isn’t likely to achieve success like this if he is all the time wresting with an unhappy marriage. In some inexplicable way, drab little Nurse Harris must have been right for him. But why?

  Milly, of course, knew why. She had known all along, but had had no intention of allowing the knowledge to mar her joy and excitement over her extraordinary good fortune. She had known right from the start that what Julian wanted—nay, needed—was a wife who would serve as a foil for his own brilliance. A woman so retiring, so inconspicuous, that in contrast to her dullness his own wit, his own charm, would shine out with redoubled radiance. A woman who never, ever, in any circumstances, would draw attention away from him and on to herself.

  And for a while—indeed for a number of years—the lopsided bargain seemed to work very well. Milly was not an ambitious woman, she had no desire for the limelight for herself. Besides, she loved Julian, and rejoiced genuinely to see him where she knew he so loved to be—in the centre of an admiring crowd. She was proud of his success, proud to know that this dazzling, sought-after figure was her husband: and she felt, too, a deep and not unjustified pride in the thought that it was she, herself, who in all sorts of dull little inconspicuous ways had provided the background against which his wit and charm could sparkle their brightest, and his talents be displayed to best advantage.