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  “Yes,” said Milly.

  It still wasn’t clear who had won: but all the same, they couldn’t go on standing here in the hallway for ever: so after a bit, Mrs Mumford led the way upstairs, explaining, from long habit, that no one was allowed to run a bath after eleven p.m. because of the cistern. Only after she had completed this little admonition did she realise that every word of it had been insiduously strengthening Milly’s hitherto tenuous claim on the tenancy.

  “And of course, no late visitors!” she snapped, hitting out at random now, as she felt the initiative slipping from her grasp: and “No, of course not,” said Milly heartily. “I say, what a gorgeous room!”

  Nothing in her twelve years of landladyhood had prepared Mrs Mumford for this sort of reaction to her First Floor Back, Business Lady or Gentleman Only: and for a moment she stopped dead in the open doorway, staring first at Milly and then at the room, as if wondering who it was who was going mad. She couldn’t, of course, guess that the dingy little carpetless room was irradiated with the primeval, almost-forgotten glory of having four walls, and a roof strong enough to keep out the rain and the savage winter wind: nor that the narrow lumpy bed with its old-fashioned white counterpane was holding out the promise of that most voluptuous of all human joys: lying down in safety, with blankets.

  “Oh, I’m going to be so happy here!” cried Milly, feasting her eyes on the four solid walls holding up so marvellously against the sleet, and snow, and the bitter wind from the sea. The heartfelt sincerity in her voice seemed to bewilder her prospective landlady. After all these years in the business, Mrs Mumford knew well enough when she was being “got round”. She could have taken her PhD any time, in identifying “soft soap” and “flannel”, and all the other rent-postponing tricks that the wit of tenants could devise. But this sincere and unqualified admiration for one of her ugliest and most over-priced rooms was something that she could not place.

  If you can’t place it, it’s dangerous. She watched Milly’s incomprehensible enthusiasm through narrowed eyes. It was unnatural. And suspicious. And heart-warming.

  “Yes, it’s a nice little room, isn’t it?” she found herself saying, proudly. “And if you look at those curtains, Mrs Barnes, you’ll find they’re lined. Properly lined. I had them done professionally, I don’t believe in stinting, not where my tenants’ comfort is concerned….”

  Was it those lined curtains that decided the issue in the end? Neither Milly nor Mrs Mumford could have put their finger on it, but by the time Milly had obediently examined the said linings, stroked them with her forefinger, and agreed about the superior quality of the material, not like the rubbish they sell you these days—by this time, the whole argument was plainly over. Milly was here to stay. Both of them knew it. Milly had won.

  Aggrieved, and not a little bewildered at this turn of events, Mrs Mumford looked uneasily around for some small way of punishing Milly for whatever it was she had done to thus worm her way into the establishment. She expected co-operation from her tenants, she told Milly sharply: and she hoped Milly hadn’t brought a radio? They caused a lot of trouble radios did, and she, Mrs Mumford, had always been one for avoiding trouble. Did Milly quite understand?

  Having thus re-established her ascendancy, Mrs Mumford took her leave, and Milly was left in undisputed possession of the small cold room, with its bare electric-light bulb and the pale damp winding its slow tides among the brown criss-cross pattern of the wall-paper.

  Victory! At last! The sense of victory was like a fever, and Milly was aware neither of cold nor of hunger as she pulled off her blouse and skirt and slid between the icy sheets. And as she lay there, in the darkness, she felt as an athlete must feel as he stumbles, exhausted, past the tape, with the cheering from a million throats ringing in his ears. Only for Milly there was no cheering, only the distant, changeless roaring of the winter sea, and the rattle of her ill-fitting windows as the wind battered against them out of the night.

  Oh, but the triumph of it! The glory of lying here, safe, and dry, and victorious, her whole soul glowing, expanding with the consciousness of having faced almost impossible odds, and of having overcome them! What wonders she had performed in the past thirty-six hours! Had she not succeeded in disappearing, without trace, from the heart of a great civilisation which checks and counter-checks, which lists and dockets and supervises its citizens as no civilisation has ever done before? And had she not survived, and survived in perfect health, thirty-six hours of exposure and starvation such as might have brought a trained soldier to his knees? She, a flabby middle-aged woman, with no training, no money, and in a state of total shock, had succeeded not only in surviving, but in finding herself a job, a home, and a new way of life, and all without rousing a moment’s suspicion in any of the people involved!

  If only Julian could know! “Not fit to be out alone!” he used to say, with such withering scorn, when she happened to have left her gloves somewhere, or to have forgotten the special Polish olives, or whatever, for one of his important parties. “Out alone,” indeed! Just let him look at her now!

  The dim, unfamiliar shapes of the strange furniture in the Strange room began to melt and swim before Milly’s eyes as the deep drowsiness of prolonged fasting stole over her. How clever I am! she congratulated herself sleepily: and as she lay there, basking in the contemplation of her own cleverness, it never dawned on her that, for a person planning to vanish without trace, she had already made two glaring and awful mistakes: one of them so foolish that, really, even a child might have thought of it, and taken more care.

  CHAPTER VI

  MILLY WOKE FROM a long, dreamless sleep with a vague sense that something was going on. For a while she lay, inert and tranquil, too sleepy to care. Then, slowly, recollection of yesterday’s events came flooding back, and with it a realisation of where she was and how she had got here. Slowly, and with a degree of awakening curiosity, she opened her eyes.

  At first, the sickening terror almost made her faint, right there as she lay. And the most ghastly thing of all was that the terror was so familiar: familiar like a madman’s nightmare, that has to be lived through over and over again, for ever, and from which there is no escape. The shuffling, slippered footsteps: the striped pyjamas sagging from bony shoulders as the tall, stooping figure fumbled its way across the curtained room…. The long hands groping, softly reaching into drawers and cupboards … searching, fumbling…. The terror was so great that at first Milly could neither move nor cry out.

  Had her escape all been a dream, then? Had these last two days never happened at all? All that cleverness, all those stratagems and strokes of luck by which she had launched herself so miraculously into a new life—had it really all been too good to be true, as it had at moments seemed?

  A dream? A mere fevered, wishful fantasy, bred of the sick, stagnant air of that South London basement—an air thick with obsession, with strange miasmas of the mind, soaked up over the years into the very walls …?

  So it was all to do again? Her decision—her escape? Had she still to face it all in reality, having gone through it once in dreams …? Milly forced herself to look again into the almost-darkness: and now, with the first shock beginning to subside in her limbs and in her knotted stomach, she was able to observe that the figure was not quite as she remembered. Where was the crest of white hair, gleaming moth-like through the darkness no matter how black the night or how closely-fastened the ancient, creaking shutters? And where was the low, barely audible mumbling, on and on without end or outcome, that always used to accompany these nightly prowlings …?

  Nightly? Why, it wasn’t even night! At that very moment the pyjama’d figure had reached the windows … was drawing back the curtains, knocking over something as he did so, letting in the first white glitter of a winter day. In the cold, sharp light, the figure was revealed to be young, and lanky: tousled, fairish hair flopped this way and that around his ears, and in his right hand he swung a large, battered aluminium kettle. With unspea
kable relief, Milly recognised him as one of the young men who had been peering over the banisters last night while she and Mrs Mumford fought out their life-and-death battle of wits.

  “Oh!” said the young man, apparently noticing Milly’s head on the pillow for the first time: and then “I say!”

  He paused, as if for an answer, and then resumed his own train of thought: “I mean. That is. I say, I’m sorry! I didn’t think there was anybody here.”

  Milly still couldn’t think of anything to say. She was limp and speechless from relaxation, the aftermath of fear, so she just lay there, contentedly enough, waiting for some sense to emerge from the encounter. He looked quite a nice young man; bearded, and with amiable greenish eyes under shaggy beige eyebrows. Just now his mouth was open.

  “It’s the hotplate, you see,” he volunteered at last, hitching up his pyjama trousers as he spoke. “I suppose you don’t know what’s happened to the hotplate?”

  “I’m afraid—well, you see, I only came last night,” essayed Milly, still dazed: and then she watched, quite unsurprised, while the intruder, with a muttered exclamation, flung open the door of a huge yellow-varnished wardrobe, and began rummaging in its depths. Clanking sounds … muffled thuds … and then he emerged, wild-eyed, and pushing the tumble of hair back from his face. For a second he glanced despairingly round the room, then he turned, and strode without a word to the door.

  “Kev!” he yelled. “I say, Kev! The silly old cow’s gone off with the hotplate! Now what are we going to do?”

  Which hotplate? What silly old cow? Before any guesses could begin to form themselves in Milly’s mind, there were suddenly two young men filling her doorway. The second one (Kev, presumably) was darker, and distinctly better groomed than his companion. His beard was trimmed, and his pyjamas firmly corded.

  “I say, I’m sorry about this,” said the newcomer to Milly. “Jacko had no idea there was anyone here, you see.”

  He paused, and looked thoughtfully round the room. “I say, do you mind if I come and have a look?—It must be somewhere.” He paused politely for just long enough for Milly to have said “Yes, that’s quite all right”, if she had so wished: and then he set himself to flinging open drawers and cupboards, delving among hair-curlers, outworn gloves, and long-ago relics of somebody’s gracious living—lace-edged table-mats, embroidered nightdress-cases—the sort of things that are too good to throw away and too bothersome to use, and so just right for lodgers.

  ‘You see?” said the first boy, Jacko, with a sort of melancholy triumph, when it became clear that his friend’s search was destined to be as fruitless as his own: and, “I told you you should have helped her pack!” retorted Kevin, “Then she’d never have….”

  At this point, both seemed to recall simultaneously the existence of Milly, who was by now sitting up in bed with her winter coat clutched round her. They looked at her consideringly.

  “Miss Childe,” observed the one called Kevin, with just the faintest touch of reproach in his voice, “always used to let us make our tea in here. On the hotplate.”

  “Yes. On the hotplate.”

  Milly was beginning to hate the hotplate, whatever it was. She met the two pairs of mildly reproachful eyes boldly.

  “I don’t know anything about it,” she declared. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What hotplate?”

  “For our morning tea,” explained Kevin patiently. “We always made our morning tea on it. In here,” he added explanatorily, and still with that more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger note to his voice. “Now, I don’t know how we’re to make our tea at all! That’s the point.”

  “Yes. That’s the point,” agreed Jacko.

  Both were now looking at her with a sort of guarded appeal, like puppies who know that they aren’t really allowed to be fed at table. Jacko was clutching the big, useless kettle to his breast, just where his middle pyjama button was missing.

  But what could Milly do?

  “What about the gas-ring?” she suggested, her eyes lighting upon this appliance as she spoke. “I don’t mind you using my gas-ring, if you like.”

  “You mean there’s some money in it? In the meter?”

  They both spoke together, and with such eager hope that Milly hated to have to disappoint them.

  “No,” she said regretfully, “I’m afraid not— That’s to say, I didn’t put any in, and I’m afraid, just at the moment, I haven’t …”

  “No. Oh, well…” Jacko shrugged, sadly, but no longer with any reproach in his manner. During the last minute or two she had imperceptibly become one of them, all in the same boat.

  The three of them regarded each other sadly.

  “Ah, but it was a great little gadget, that hotplate!” sighed Kev, nostalgically, like an old man reminiscing about the vanished joys of his youth. “You could plug it into the lights, you see, and it would hot up a treat, and never cost anybody a penny! I can’t imagine what the old cow was thinking of, going off with it like that! I mean, whatever would make her do such a thing?”

  “Perhaps it was hers?” suggested Milly mildly: and both boys stared at her as if she had taken leave of her senses. Clearly, the concept of private property simply wasn’t applicable to something they wanted as much as this.

  “But we’ve got nothing to make our tea on!” Jacko cried indignantly; while Kevin, with the inventiveness born of necessity, suddenly cried out: “The bed! Like she might have shoved it under the bed, with all the junk….”

  By now, both of Milly’s visitors were full-length on the floor, grovelling under her bed, throwing up debris like terriers in a rabbit-hole. Shoes. Laddered tights. More shoes, A copy of Nova. Half a candle….

  “Hey!” came Kevin’s voice, muffled by dust and blankets, “Hey! Look! Ricicles! Anybody like Ricicles?” He squirmed out and up into a sitting position, holding up his find in triumph.

  How old they were, there was of course no way of guessing: but the packet was nearly full, and Milly, who till this moment had felt no sensations of hunger at all, was suddenly faint with longing.

  “Yes!” she answered. “Oh yes …!” and when one of the boys recalled the existence somewhere among his belongings of half a tin of condensed milk, left from the time Janette was here, she felt that happiness could go no further.

  Five minutes later she was sitting on Jacko’s unmade bed in the cluttered barrack of a room that the two boys shared, and listening to the story of their lives while she shovelled spoonful after spoonful of ageing Ricicles into her starving frame.

  The two life stories, it seemed to Milly, were both unusual and surprisingly similar. Both lads, it seemed, came of prosperous families: both had always wanted to be artists, but had unfortunately ended up like this, studying economics at a provincial university. So far, the story seemed a familiar one to Milly. In her young days, too, budding geniuses had been forced by soulless and insensitive parents into training for something dull and practical. But apparently, with these two, it wasn’t quite like that. Far from being soulless and insensitive, both sets of parents had eagerly begged to be allowed to finance their budding young geniuses through art school for as many years as they wanted. Paris … Rome … Anywhere they liked … money should be no object.

  “But of course,” explained Kevin, “that would have been just art-school stuff. Not my scene at all.”

  “No,” agreed Jacko. “That was the thing. It’s a matter of integrity, you see. Personal integrity.”

  Integrity, it seemed, had stopped them doing a lot of things, such as getting a vacation job, or studying hard for their exams. As far as Milly could make out from the narrative, it was integrity, plus their abhorrence of material possessions, that had stood in the way of success at every turn.

  “You see, Mrs Barnes, we just don’t want success,” Jacko explained, waving his spoon about to emphasise the point. “Success is a form of death. You know—material possessions, and all that jazz. It’s just not our scene.”

  But wasn�
��t a hotplate a material possession? Milly asked, rather ill-advisedly—and there was a moment of pained silence, as if she had enquired after some unmentionable relative. Then Jacko pointed out, rather stiffly, that it was their Ricicles she was eating: they, Kev and himself, believed in sharing, and non-violence, and in respecting the beingness of every human person.

  Milly, defeated by all this logic, humbly apologised.

  They were very nice about it: and soon she felt that the three of them had been friends for years. She told them the fictional story of her life (the very same concoction that had been so insultingly brushed aside by Mrs Graham yesterday), and their rapt credulity went far to soothe the frustrated creative artist in her: so much so that the selling-up of the family heirlooms almost brought tears to her own eyes: and the thought of the non-existent haunts of her childhood being trampled now by the equally non-existent feet of strangers was wonderfully bitter.

  Her good-natured hearers seemed to believe every word of it, and to have all the time in the world to listen: and when she came to the only truthful bit, about how hungry she was, their concern was quite touching. They rummaged around among their hi-fi equipment and their unironed shirts, and found her two starch-reduced rolls and some peanut butter. These, on top of the Ricicles, made her feel wonderful.

  After this, they told her about sex, and how they were through with that sort of thing: kids’ stuff. Yes, homosexuality too, and the perversions, and all that drag—they’d tried the lot: nothing to it. Integrity, that was the thing. Kevin, it seemed, was through with drugs as well: and when Milly asked if that was kids’ stuff too, he said no, it wasn’t quite that, but he’d been turned right off by going home one vacation and finding his grandmother smoking pot and saying she thought the younger generation was marvellous. It had turned him right off, it really had: and anyway, he informed Milly kindly, integrity, and the discovery of the true self, were possible without the aid of drugs. He knew, because he’d tried.