Dark Entries (8 page)

Without returning his gaze, Phrynne finished her drink as she stood there. Gerald supposed that it was one of Mrs Pascoe’s concoctions.

It was so dark where Mrs Pascoe was working that her labours could have been achieving little; but she said nothing to her visitors, nor they to her. At the door Phrynne unexpectedly stripped off the overcoat and threw it on a chair. Her nightdress was so torn that she stood almost naked. Dark though it was, Gerald saw Mrs Pascoe regarding Phrynne’s pretty body with a stare of animosity.

‘May we take one of the candles?’ he said, normal standards reasserting themselves in him.

But Mrs Pascoe continued to stand silently staring; and they lighted themselves through the wilderness of broken furniture to the ruins of their bedroom. The Japanese figure was still prostrate, and the Commandant’s door shut. And the smell had almost gone.

Even by seven o’clock the next morning surprisingly much had been done to restore order. But no one seemed to be about, and Gerald and Phrynne departed without a word.

In Wrack Street a milkman was delivering, but Gerald noticed that his cart bore the name of another town. A minute boy whom they encountered later on an obscure purposeful errand might, however, have been indigenous; and when they reached Station Road, they saw a small plot of land on which already men were silently at work with spades in their hands. They were as thick as flies on a wound, and as black. In the darkness of the previous evening, Gerald and Phrynne had missed the place. A board named it the New Municipal Cemetery.

In the mild light of an autumn morning the sight of the black and silent toilers was horrible; but Phrynne did not seem to find it
so. On the contrary, her cheeks reddened and her soft mouth became fleetingly more voluptuous still.

She seemed to have forgotten Gerald, so that he was able to examine her closely for a moment. It was the first time he had done so since the night before. Then, once more, she became herself. In those previous seconds Gerald had become aware of something dividing them which neither of them would ever mention or ever forget.

Fenville had never been to the Entresol before, but he took it to represent the kind of restaurant to which Ann was accustomed. Ann seemed pleased to go there: which was fortunate, because the excursion was a serious undertaking for Fenville, and only possible because more money than was customary had reached him from his mother that quarter. And then as soon as he had entered the place, certainly before they were seated at their table, he had fallen in love with someone else.

He first glimpsed this other person through a painted glass screen. The screen, glazed only in
its upper part, separated the main area of the restaurant from an anteroom where drinks were brought to lacquered three-legged tables. While Ann was leaving her fur coat, Fenville sat at one of these tables warding off two solicitous youths in linen jackets. Right across the restaurant, which was not full, he saw this other woman seated alone at a table by the wall.

At present the distance, the shaded lights, and the fact that the glass in the screen was obscured by small bright flowers painted round its edges prevented Fenville from seeming to himself more than pleasantly disturbed; and when Ann returned he ordered drinks and consumed his own with what he took to be the aplomb their surroundings demanded.

Immediately he was beyond the screen, however, things
were different, and he knew it. The bald head-waiter, pleased by Ann’s softly luxurious appearance, led them the length of the room to a table against the far wall, and only three tables away from that occupied by the solitary woman. Even passing her table was for Fenville a strange ordeal.

Under-waiters began calling upon him to order, and such appetite as he might have had for the complex dishes listed had left him. Ann was talking to him more charmingly than ever before, but he was unable to respond to her skilful effort to lend him some of her own confidence. The wine itself, when it arrived, cased him in a shell of sobriety.

The woman at the other table he now saw was more truly to be described as a girl. She was younger even than Ann. She wore a topless black dress which made her shoulders and arms look more white and desirable than Fenville would have credited. She had a soft penumbra of hair tied with a black bow, and a small, sadly perfect face, with big, widely placed green eyes. Her hands fluttered about continuously, but she seemed to be eating as little as Fenville himself. Several courses arrived, lingered, and were removed, chilly, dispirited, intact. Fenville could hear her low musical voice as she addressed the waiters, but not her words. He was listening to her with pain in his heart as he tried to be attentive to Ann, under conditions to which in any case he was very unacclimatised. The other girl seemed quite assured, although the circumstances of her custom in the restaurant were surely unusual. Fenville noticed that she was not even drinking, which he had always understood to be a common complaint of waiters against women customers. On the other hand, she seemed unhappy; she was pale and unsmiling; and suddenly Fenville saw her produce a small gold bag and extract from it a minute wisp of handkerchief with which she touched one cheek, as if to blot out a tear.

Ann showed no sign of being aware how unused he was to fashionable restaurants, and continued to talk about what she was going to do when her studentship was successfully concluded. They were both studying architecture; and Fenville suspected that their professors considered Ann, favoured in so many ways, to be the more promising. He heard Ann
saying that she would go into practice with a partner; that her father would give
her all the capital she needed, and that it was simply a matter of finding the right person. He knew that Ann, whom a month ago he had hardly dared to speak to, and a week ago had thought he loved, was offering him a chance that was most unlikely ever to repeat itself: a whole life of common understanding and prosperity and security. But while she was gently amplifying the matter, the girl at the other table called for her bill.

Fenville sat staring at her. His hand shook so much that he could not hold the fork with which he had been trying to eat vol-au-vent. Ann stopped talking. Everybody else in the restaurant, which had begun to fill up, seemed to
be shouting at the top of their voices. Ann touched his arm. It was the first time she had ever done so.

The other girl paid. The waiter bowed very low before her munificent tip, and pulled away the table. The girl drew a black silk scarf round her shoulders and rose. Mysteriously her scent reached Fenville for an instant.

‘Mademoiselle has a coat?’

The girl shook her head, and began to walk away.

‘I’ll tell the porter to call mademoiselle a taxi.’

The girl shook her head more vigorously, and made a gesture as of pushing the waiter aside. She had reached the screen with the painted glass.

Fenville looked at Ann. His appearance made Ann not merely touch his arm but clutch at it. He drew himself away from her.

‘Ann,’ he said, ‘forgive me. I’m so very sorry.’ He could say no more, because by now the other girl would be out of the restaurant.

He fled from the table and pushed his way through a noisy business party which had just entered. There seemed to be at least a dozen of them, and Fenville trod upon their feet.

Outside, despite the waiter’s solicitude, it did not seem cold. Fenville could see the girl walking along the street about a hundred yards away. Overwhelmed with relief at not having lost her, his mind became very clear. An immediate approach, he reflected would be disastrous. If, as was almost
certain, he were rebuffed, she would walk out of his life. He resolved to follow her and discover where she lived.

At first the streets were crowded, and Fenville could see that people turned as she passed; but soon they reached a square which was almost empty, and Fenville could just hear her footsteps. She never looked back, but appeared to be using her hands to hold the big shawl in place over her head. The silhouette of her skirt projected on either side of her knees, and Fenville knew that were he closer he would hear it rustle.

She crossed Oxford Street, by which time Fenville was less than thirty yards behind her. On the north side she stopped and summoned a taxi. Fenville was little more used to taxis than to such restaurants as the Entresol, but he shouted for one which he saw in
the distance, and told it to follow that which the girl had taken.

‘What for?’ asked the driver.

‘For this,’ replied Fenville, resourcefully pulling a pound note from the packet assigned to the entertainment of Ann.

The driver grabbed it.

‘Get inside.’

Fenville was relieved by the alacrity of his acceptance. Preoccupied though he was, he began to realise that doors open to the rich.

Surprising also was the fact that the other taxi was still in sight. It had been mercifully delayed by the traffic lights.

‘Hell of a street for this game,’ remarked the taxi driver through his sliding window.

Fenville sat on the edge of the slippery seat, his gaze devouring the taxi ahead. If they were not to lose it, he too must keep his eyes on it.

Somewhere near the top of Bond Street, a boy fell off his bicycle. Fenville’s taxi slowed.

‘Go on,’ shouted Fenville, his voice piping and strained.

The taxi failed to accelerate.

‘Go on, you fool.’

The driver looked at Fenville, dissociating
himself witheringly 
from what he plainly regarded as his lack of common decency, but said nothing, and went faster.

Fenville realised that the chase was made possible by the fact that the other taxi was not of the latest type. He came nearest to losing it when at the far end of Bayswater Road it turned into a Notting Hill side street.

But Fenville’s driver found the right turn. Possibly he had more experience of the job in hand than Fenville had supposed. At the other end of the street, the girl was getting out.

‘Stop,’ cried Fenville.

The driver swore and stopped.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Fenville.

The driver said something unflattering. His mind was still upon the boy and the bicycle. He felt guilty because Fenville’s money had made him overrule what he regarded as his finer instincts.

Fenville alighted and waved the cab away. He was afraid it might not go. It was difficult for him to draw nearer, and the noise of his arrival might call the girl’s attention to him. But the cabman clicked his flag, spat, and departed.

The difficulty now was to determine the exact house. The girl’s taxi was also moving off, and she herself had vanished. They were shapeless, bulky houses, iced all over with elaborately decorated stucco. Every alternate mass was a single house, the others being pairs of houses gummed together. The night was overcast, the street slenderly lighted, and the windows muffled. Whereas, earlier, the girl’s tapping heels had been hard to hear, now even the furtive footfalls of a darting cat stirred the patchy dimness. Fenville felt that he should tiptoe.

He walked slowly towards the region where the girl’s taxi had come to rest. When he deemed that he was nearing the spot, he peered at each separate front door. The houses seemed identical: withdrawn, but only as if ashamed of their unfashionableness. Fenville began to panic and to walk faster. Better to complete the miserable business and not try to defer the admission of failure. Then he came to a house which was unlike the rest.

It was a single house, set further back than its neighbours, and even more substantial and elaborate. A shallow carriage-sweep led from each side to a columned porte-cochère, above which rose a line of decorative obelisks, miniatures of Cleopatra’s Needle, and varying in size as if they were pieces in
a game. On each side of this projecting porch were two smooth and polished sphinxes: half-tamed in order to guard the secrets within. Fenville saw that everywhere the stucco had been moulded into dusty images from Egypt and Assyria. The house might have been a provincial museum and art gallery; and it had a similar air of nocturnal inanimation.

Fenville moved on. The few houses beyond resembled those which had gone before. It was impossible to know which among eight or ten the girl had entered; and almost certainly impracticable to wait until she might again emerge. Fenville returned to the house with the porte-cochère, and seated himself on the rump of one of the domesticated sphinxes. He had nothing to lose by waiting at least until a policeman found him.

Within a few minutes he felt not only frustrated but frozen. He rose and began to pace up and down the pavement; but his quiescence had chilled him more than the exercise could warm him, especially in that he dared not extend his promenade beyond a short stretch of the street. Although doubtless the girl was now on her way to bed, she might, on the other hand, come out and turn in the opposite direction. Gradually, however, he began to enlarge his beat, until he was reversing at a spot fifty yards from the first house at which the girl’s taxi could possibly have stopped.

He was nearing this point on one occasion when he heard a door bang. He swung round and saw that a man was coming towards him. Embarrassed, Fenville felt compelled to quicken his pace. The other man was also walking briskly, so that Fenville’s observation of him was limited. When about twenty yards away, however, he passed beneath one of the dim street lights, and Fenville was startled. The man appeared to be in fancy
dress. He wore a brown tailcoat, a frilled cravat, and narrow black trousers. He had dark, profusely curling hair falling on his neck, fine features, and a bearing
which Fenville thought distinguished. As he passed he seemed for a second to glare at Fenville disdainfully. Beneath his arm was a stout cane with a long tassel.

Fenville could not but turn and look after him; but was mortified when in a second the man did the same thing. This time it was hard to doubt that the man was scowling at him. It was the man’s appearance of hostility, in fact, which for a moment held Fenville’s gaze, and presented him from instantly continuing on his way, as manners demanded. In the next moment, it
became worse: the man seemed almost to snarl. Fenville turned, much shaken, walked rapidly past all the remaining houses, and out of the street. He caught a bus to his lodging, and wondered all night if he were going mad.

Earlier than usual the next morning, his landlady rapped at his door.

‘Are you all right, Mr Fenville?’

Fenville had not slept, and now had heard her approaching slippers. He put on his dressing gown and opened the door. Most unexpectedly, Ann was standing in the passage behind her. She smiled at him.

‘Miss Terrington’s been telling me a long tale about you were taken ill last night,’ said the landlady. ‘You look all right to me.’

‘Of course, I’m all right. Ann, come in. I must explain to you.’

‘No visitors in bedrooms,’ said the landlady. ‘You know that as well as I do.’

‘See you later?’ asked Ann understandingly.

Fenville nodded.

But he had no idea what he could explain. He met the situation by absenting himself from the School of Architecture. He had no idea that he would ever see the other girl again, but he felt unable to face the kindness and imagination of Ann. The sensation of hopeless loss crunched through his nerves and froze his heart. Every simple movement required forethought and effort. Now and then, however, the image of the girl, the dire recollection of
her voice and her scent
and of the sound of her feet tapping across the square were replaced by the memory of the man who had passed him in the street, of his menacing expression, alert step, and strange costume.

The rules of the house would compel Fenville to leave it before ten o’clock, and he had nowhere to go. He told his landlady that after all he wasn’t very well; and what he said gained credence from his manifest lack of appetite. An exemption was grudgingly made of him: he was permitted to remain in his room.

‘But you must have a doctor.’

‘I’m not as ill as all that.’

‘Then you can’t stay here.’

‘All right. But I haven’t got a doctor.’

‘I’ll send for Dr Bermuda. He’s a specialist.’