Don't Go to Sleep in the Dark Page 7

  Half-guiltily, as if afraid that he could read my thoughts, I averted my gaze from my unlikely-looking healer, and wished desperately that I had never come. Why had I been such a fool as to telephone for an appointment in the first place? And why, having once done so, did I not turn back hastily as soon as I saw the kind of street in which “Dr” J. Morton Eldritch had his “consulting rooms”? I had seen at once that it was a dead street. There were no corner shops, no prams: just tall, blackened houses with secretive lace curtains, and in each doorway were displayed a row of lifeless bells, each bearing the faded traces of some vanished name, relic of grey anonymous weeks in some life or other that has long gone hence, and the street knows it no more. At No. 27 I had to ring four of these phantom bells before a fat, bedraggled crone in carpet-slippers dragged herself from some fastness in the bowels of the house to answer the door. She blinked at the unaccustomed daylight, stared with an apathy that went beyond rudeness as I explained my errand, and then, with a jerk of the thumb indicating that my destination was somewhere on one of the upper floors, she crept back into the dark hollows of the house, leaving me to find my own way upstairs.

  And now, here I was. The tortuous, despairing courage which had brought me thus far was failing me, and I longed to escape. The room was sour and sunless; unwashed cups and milk bottles in which the last dregs of milk had long gone bad, stood about on ledges. The owner of the room himself looked sickly and defeated, unable to succour himself, let alone anyone else. But I could think of no excuse for leaving which did not sound insane. Already Mr—or “Dr” I suppose he would wish to be called—Eldritch was beginning to take down the particulars of my case in a dog-eared exercise book.

  “Forty-one years old,” he murmured aloud as he wrote. “Married—Husband in love with much younger woman—Tell me about her!” His rather high, nasal voice sharpened suddenly on the words, and he sat, pen poised, watching me from his bleary eyes.

  “About her? About Edith?—Oh—Well. Let me see. She’s very young, of course—about eighteen I’d guess—and very pretty, in a blonde, fluffy sort of way.” As I began talking, I felt a certain optimism seeping back into my soul. After all, in a situation like mine there was nothing to be lost, and it might be that this odd, unprepossessing little man might have hit upon some trick, some dodge, that could help a woman—even if it was only a patent hormone cream neither more nor less useless than the rest. “It’s her youth, I’m certain, that’s the attraction,” I continued, “because she’s got nothing else. She’s not intelligent, or amusing; she has nothing to talk about…. Whatever you say she just smiles, in a silly, empty sort of way….”

  Edith’s smile. I was describing it as well as I could, but there are no words, no phrases, which will quite convey the sickly idiocy of that smile. It may be just my jealousy, but I shall never forget the actual physical revulsion I felt when I first realized that Ronald—my husband—actually found that smile attractive. It was on a summer Sunday, and we were having tea on the lawn—strawberries and cream, if I remember rightly, and little sandwiches, and home-made raisin cake—anyway, quite a spread, because we had several neighbours in that day. I forget who brought Edith along—she was a niece?—family friend?—something like that—of one or other of our guests. Certainly I didn’t invite her, I’d never met her before in my life. She came tripping across the lawn with a funny, light, half-running movement, bending forward slightly from her slender waist, for all the world as if she were about to fall forward into a pair of outstretched arms.

  Ronald’s. Not that Ronald’s arms were outstretched, at that date; he was simply the man standing there, the man directly in line with the direction in which she moved. He caught her elbow, laughing, and helped her into a deckchair. And I mean helped. From where I sat, I could see how she was contriving to lean her fragile young weight full against him…. What had started as an automatic gesture of gallantry became, in that moment, something more. From then on, all that long, hot afternoon, Ronald stayed at her side, as if enchanted, dancing attendance on her in all sorts of ridiculous ways; arranging cushions at her back; draping and re-draping the absurd wisp of lacy stole that she affected—I suppose to protect those delicate white shoulders from the sun: I don’t know—I thought all the girls tried to get sunburnt these days. Anyway, it proved to be a good gimmick for a man like Ronald; he was fascinated by all this delicate-plant pantomime, and utterly taken in by it. He told me afterwards how refreshing it was to meet a really feminine young woman at last; one who makes a man really feel like a man!

  I don’t know; he may not have meant it nastily; but anyway, I took it as a snide comment on my sturdy build and independent ways. I stormed at him for his unreasonableness in first expecting his wife to be able to redecorate the house, drive the car, and earn half the family income, and then turning round and sneering at her for not being a delicate, wilting little—

  “I wasn’t sneering!” he protested—truthfully or not, I do not know—but I took no notice. “A delicate, wilting little nincompoop,” I concluded. “Like your precious Edith!”

  “Leave Edith out of it!” he roared; and from then on I knew that I was lost. Oh, that particular row simmered down all right; and Ronald did not leave home; but from that moment onwards, he belonged to Edith. He knew it; I knew it; and, I suppose, she knew it. I say “I suppose”, because even now I don’t know if she realized how completely he was her slave all through that long, hot summer. She knew, of course, that he liked her company, because he was for ever calling on her, taking her for outings in the car, inviting her to our place for meals. Evening after evening, I remember, she would come tripping along up the garden path, leaning heavily on Ronald’s arm; and smiling, eternally smiling, while he smiled down at her. God, what a pair of grinning fools they looked! What they found to talk to one another about I cannot imagine, because whenever I was there listening they would be exchanging remarks of such stupefying banality that I cannot conceive how Ronald—who is an intelligent man—could possibly endure it. “Not quite so damp today, is it, dear?” she would say, smiling up at him with her great goo-goo eyes; and he would beam, and squeeze her arm, as if she had said the wittiest thing in the world. And on the rare occasions when we did have any sort of reasonably intelligent conversation in her presence, she was far too cunning to expose her ignorance by taking part in it. Oh no. She just sat there, smiling and nodding like one of those nodding toys—and afterwards Ronald would tell me what a marvellous listener she is! Ugh! I hate the way she picks at her food, too, she won’t ever eat a proper hearty meal at our table, but picks and pecks like a little bird, twittering about she can’t eat this and doesn’t eat that, until I, eating a normal helping, begin to feel like a great hog-like omnivore—and a bad cook into the bargain, because whenever Edith says in her little peevish-baby voice that she can’t eat steak pie, or whatever, Ronald looks daggers at me for having cooked it, and pretends he doesn’t like it either; so that I am grossly liking steak and kidney pie all by myself, while they smile their sickly, sensitive smiles at each other.

  “And you feel,” broke in Dr Eldritch gravely, “that by making yourself look just as young as this—Ah—this Edith—you will be able to recapture your husband’s love?”

  I stared. So absorbed had I become in the recounting of my troubles that I had almost forgotten where I was and for what purpose I was recounting them.

  “Well, I—Well, it would help, obviously,” I began. “But I wouldn’t want—I mean, I have to think about it. Please tell me what the treatment consists of—”

  “Oh, just a simple injection,” said the little man, reaching absently on to a shelf in the alcove by his chair. “My syringe is already filled,”—and to my horror he unearthed from among the dusty piles of books and papers a naked, unsterilized syringe.

  “Push up your sleeve,” he ordered casually, “and come over here.”

  “No! No!” I cried. The man was not merely a fraud; he must be raving mad. “I can’t—I don’
t want to! I mean,” I added, desperately trying to humour him, “I need to think it over … I’ll let you know …”

  “It may be too late then,” he said, judicially, looking me up and down with his dull eyes. “You see, it only works on women who are still in fair shape, even though middle-aged. In your case—yes. I believe I could make you look, after one single injection, just as you did when you were eighteen. But once the body has really begun to deteriorate—” he shook his head. “No, it can’t be done with a really ageing body. It has to be done by the time you are forty or thereabouts, or it’s no good. And remember, Madam,”—he made a visible effort to instill some sort of enthusiasm into his flat, nasal voice—“Once you have been transformed by my method, you stay transformed. I mean, once the injection has taken effect, you will go on looking eighteen for the rest of your life, even if you live to be a hundred! Wouldn’t you like that? Of course you would! Any woman would!”

  I played for time. I was less frightened now. Madman though he was, he did not seem to be proposing to inject me against my will.

  “I suppose you’ve tried it out?” I said chattily. “I’m not your first patient?”

  He hesitated. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “This substance was invented by my grandfather, nearly a hundred years ago: and he tried it out, as you put it, with the most marvellous success on quite a number of people, including himself. If you want proof, let me show you a photograph of my grandfather, taken at the age of eighty-four….” He crossed the room and began rummaging among a huge pile of dusty volumes on an old horsehair sofa. “Look.” He fished out an old photograph album and brought it over to me. “See? Not bad for eighty-four, eh?”

  I looked at the picture of the eighteen-year-old boy in front of me, and wondered what to say. It could have been any eighteen-year-old boy of the nineteen-thirties. It proved nothing.

  “He’s very good-looking,” I said feebly; and then: “If it worked so well, how was it that he didn’t become famous, your grandfather? Why didn’t this method spread all over the world?”

  Dr Eldritch shook his head sadly. “The usual story. The world wasn’t ready for such an invention. He was reviled—slandered—spent years in prison: and when he came out, he did not dare go on. He hid away his secret—and only by chance, and only recently, did I come upon it. I am hoping that now, perhaps, the world is ready for it; and that perhaps you, good lady, will have the courage….”

  “No! No!” I stepped back a pace, and racked my brains for some way of keeping him talking while I watched my chance to dart out of the door.

  “What happened to the others?” I gabbled. “The other people he rejuvenated?”

  “I’m glad you asked that.” The little madman was beginning to sound almost cheerful. “I can show you some ‘Before and After’ photos of his clients which will certainly convince you.”

  He flipped over the pages of the album until he came to a page where pictures of half a dozen middle-aged women, dressed in Edwardian styles, were juxtaposed to pictures of their younger selves—taken, evidently, at around the age of eighteen or so.

  “You see?” he said triumphantly. “The older pictures were taken first, you see, and then….”

  I did not question his topsy-turvy logic, or the validity of his argument. I did not dare to. Within seconds my mouth had gone too dry for me to be able to speak at all. For one of the pictures was known to me already—so well, so well. Out of the yellowing old print of seventy years ago, Edith’s face smiled sweetly at me.

  “Well, never mind,” he concluded. “I’m not going to press you: I am only sorry, for your own sake, that you have decided not to avail yourself of my treatment. However, no doubt you know your own business best.”

  He bowed me out most politely; and he was right; I do know my own business best. All I have to do now is wait, and watch. When Edith smiles her baby-kitten smile, and clings to Ronald’s arm, I can recognize, though he can’t, the vacuous, empty smile of encroaching senility; I can see, in that cute, tripping little walk of hers, the gait of an old, old woman, keeping her balance as she goes; and when he helps her in and out of chairs, he thinks she is sweetly playing up to his masculinity; I know that she cannot get up without him, now that she is nearly a hundred years old. When she makes her little, artless remarks that he loves so much, I can see her second childhood coming.

  He is taking her to a dance tonight; how sweetly she will lean on him, clutching him for support as her old limbs struggle to keep up with the music, and her lovely smile hides the confusion of dying thoughts that tumble through her fading mind. His arm will encircle a lovely, slender form so helpless with age that it can hardly stand. How soon will he realize that behind that lovely face the brain is going? How soon will the meandering, muddled fancies of old age break into the conversation in such a way that they no longer seem quaint and sweetly simple even to him? Soon, she will be dribbling over her meals as well as picking and pecking at them; soon, she will be incontinent, and will roam bewildered round the house at night, muttering of grievances that no one can understand.

  But today she still smiles her sweet, vacuous smile, she still clings sweetly to his arm, and Ronald still loves her for it. He must wonder, sometimes, why I sit so relaxed and content now, watching them.

  THE IRONY OF FATE

  FOR A MINUTE Frances sat very still, the dry, stubbly grass of the embankment pricking through her thin dress, her fist still tightly clenched round the handbag that was no longer there.

  A railway accident! I’ve been in a railway accident! She repeated to herself with a sort of bewildered pride. A real railway accident, and I wasn’t frightened at all. It was—fun!… Wasn’t it? She tried with all her might to remember exactly what had happened, but it was difficult. It had all been so quick—so noisy—and yet so quiet. That moment of absolute stillness before the carriage began to tilt … before the white, contorted faces opposite her had begun to scream … before the fat old gentleman who had spent the journey complaining wheezily about the service on this line had wrenched the door open and yelled to her “Jump! Jump for your life!” and had half dragged, half pulled her out with him.

  Frances laughed a little to herself, dazedly, gratefully. Who would have thought that the old boy would have been so agile! I wonder what he thinks of the service on this line now! she thought shakily; I wonder if he is all right?….

  It was only when she turned her head to look for him that Frances realized that she still had her eyes closed. With an effort she opened them and looked round.

  Dusk was falling, and the first things she saw were her own feet, looming up out of the grass in their smart little red sandals. And her nylons! Wonder of wonders, her best nylons were unladdered—perfect! She giggled a little. Fancy being flung out of a train in a disastrous accident and not even ladder your nylons! I must be the cat with nine lives she thought—no, my stockings must be cats with nine lives—kittens with nine lives … stockings. … kittens … kittens … stockings … stockittens … She giggled again. That’s rather good, she thought; I must tell someone….

  To her annoyance, she found that her eyes were again closed, and again she opened them. This time she roused herself properly and looked about her, taking note of her surroundings. On either side of her stretched the steep bank of dusty grass; in front lay the wrecked carriage, its complicated and hitherto unimaginable underside exposed to view. It reminded her of a beetle fallen on its back … at any moment one expected to see the upturned wheels kicking helplessly in the air….

  But I must do something, thought Frances; I can’t sit here all night. What do people do after an accident…? From the other side of the carriage, invisible to her, came a confused clamour … hammering … voices … shouts. If you’ve been hurt, of course, they come and rescue you; but if you haven’t … if you’re just sitting on the embankment, a bit dazed but without a scratch …?

  Frances shook herself. Why, of course, if you can’t do anything to help—and f
aced by the hugeness of the upturned carriage in the darkness Frances felt quite, quite sure that she couldn’t do anything to help—you walk back to the nearest station and telephone your family, and …

  Your family. Michael and baby Susan. Michael, who had once loved her so tenderly, who would once have done anything in the world she cared to ask. Michael, who at this very moment must be waiting impatiently for her to get home and take over the care of Susan while he went to his wretched art class. Frances clutched angrily at the dry grasses. This art class of Michael’s—that was what was coming between them and causing all the quarrels; not her “absurd possessiveness” as Michael called it. Was it “absurd possessiveness” for a wife to object to being left alone three evenings a week while her husband went and stared at who knows what beautiful models for hours on end? Hadn’t she a right to feel neglected and ill-used? And it wasn’t only the three evenings at the art class either, thought Frances resentfully; every moment of Michael’s spare time at home was given up to the wretched business too. If he wasn’t actually painting, with a grim concentration which excluded Frances and her conversation completely, then he would be messing about with his brushes at the sink, dripping oily splashes all over everything. Or he would be “doing up frames”—perhaps that was the worst horror of all, mused Frances. Scarcely a Saturday passed without him coming home in triumph with some huge cobwebby monstrosity under his arm which he had “picked up for a song—perfect when I’ve cut it down a bit for that seascape of mine.”

  “Cutting it down a bit” of course meant sawdust and plaster-of-paris all over the kitchen, and then having the thing lying about somewhere hopelessly in the way for the best part of a week while the glue dried.

  When Michael had first got this craze for painting—nearly a year ago now—he had been eager to discuss it all with Frances and to show her all he did. But Frances, hoping to bring home to him his selfishness and neglect of her, had refused to take any interest; and of late he had spoken of it very little to her. Instead he had taken to bringing that frightful woman with the earrings back with him after the classes and arguing with her till all hours about post-impressionism, or about so-and-so’s pre-Raphaelite tendencies. Frances usually went to bed on these occasions, to show her boredom and disapproval; but more often than not he didn’t even notice, so engrossed was he in talking to this creature….