Take My Life (4 page)

But this evening he was out of step. Elizabeth's reappearance had left him irritable and humourless and defensive. He knew that with Elizabeth engaged for at least a week there would be other confoundedly awkward meetings. He would have liked to talk it all over calmly and pleasantly with Philippa, feeling that Philippa was on his side, not ranged against him. He could
not
be kind and tolerant and apologetic.

She came into the bedroom, changed into a scarlet tailored house coat and sat at the dressing-table putting cream on her face. He lay on one of the beds smoking and pretending to read.

There was silence for some time until two fire engines went past, when Philippa, who had been staring at the elephant he'd bought her, said on a more palliative note, oh, she was tired, and what a noisy flat this was, there would be traffic rumbling outside again by seven. Nick, knowing the endless pains Joan had been at to get them the flat on a short lease, pointed out that there was still a housing shortage. He did not point it out angrily or tartly, but he pointed it out.

Philippa splashed a little skin lotion in each palm.

‘You seem very much out of sorts tonight, Nick.'

‘On the contrary. I've never felt better in my life.'

‘Perhaps,' she said, ‘you don't like me to surprise you making an appointment with one of your earlier lady friends. I'm sorry, but you should choose somewhere less public than just outside my dressing-room door with all my friends looking on.'

‘I'll remember next time,' he told her.

There was silence while Philippa watched him through the glass, her lovely hazel eyes a little perplexed and troubled. But he made no move of reconciliation and, moth to flame, she could not leave it alone.

‘Have you known her long?' she asked.

‘Who, Elizabeth? No. I told you, I haven't seen her for five years.'

‘Did you know her long before that?'

‘About three months.'

‘Only three months?'

‘Anything strange in that?'

‘No,' she said, ‘except that it seems a short time for working up to a violent love affair.'

‘Does it?' He sat up and walked slowly across to the bathroom. ‘No, I don't think so,' he added judiciously as he went out.

She heard the water running. Presently he came back wiping his hands on a towel.

‘I've been wondering,' Philippa said.

‘What now?'

‘Are you any good at mathematics?'

He stared angrily at her. ‘Why?'

She said: ‘I've been working it out. If we meet one of your discarded mistresses every three weeks of our stay in England, it'll work out at nearly twenty a year.'

‘Well, my God!' he exploded. ‘This conversation – makes – me – sick!'

He rolled the towel into a ball and flung it at her.

A corner of the towel flicked her face, but the body of it hit the bottle of lotion, which fell over on the dressing-table before her and the contents flooded into her lap.

She stood up, stared at him with angry tears welling into her eyes. Then she snatched up the empty bottle of lotion and threw it at him. It burst like a bomb against the wall beside his head and cascaded him with broken glass.

He stared at her, a startled expression in his eyes, a thin line on his temple slowly turning red and becoming blood.

She was the first to move then, starting forward, her anger quite gone.

‘
Nick!
I …'

But an anger, rare in him and the more dangerous, had already followed his surprise. He turned his back on her and took a handkerchief from his pocket to dab at his head.

She said breathlessly: ‘Nick, I'm so very sorry. Listen, I didn't
mean
it to hit you. You know that.'

Without a word he walked past her into the bathroom. He turned on the tap and damped his handkerchief.

She had followed him. ‘Let me look, Nick, please. Is it a deep cut? I'm terribly, sorry. Perhaps I could …'

‘Will you kindly leave me alone,' he said. He had not begun to undress, and he pushed past her, went back into the bedroom to get two clean handkerchiefs and then went through to the living-room and took down his coat and hat.

She stood in the door of the bedroom. ‘Darling, do be sensible and let me see. Nick,
please
. You know I never
meant
to hit you. Where are you
going
?'

If he had looked at her then, with her expression so concerned and entreating, he might have stayed and all would have been different. But instead he opened the outer door of the flat and her last appealing ‘ Nick!' was half inaudible in the banging of the door as he left.

Elizabeth Rusman did not go straight home, but had a bite of supper at one of the little cafés in Soho. There would be nothing to eat when she got home and, besides, tonight she was excited. First there had been the luck of her job with the opera, thanks to Mr Till who had befriended her, four years out of the professional world and then a tiptop offer within a month of trying to get back into it; thank God for influenza. Then there was Nick. She'd been down on her luck and down in the mouth, never more so; she'd sat in her miserable bed-sitting-room and thought what a mess she'd made of her life: taken all the bad chances and missed all the good. Thirty-one next month and heartily sick of herself and everyone else; figure broadening a bit, skin not quite so fine as a few years ago; she was that sort, fond of the wrong foods. On her own again and sick of it after only a month. Sometimes she'd looked at the smutty gas-ring in the fireplace and thought extravagant thoughts about turning it on and shutting the windows. That would be one way. But she knew really she'd never have the guts for that. Besides, nobody would be sorry. Nobody would lose a night's sleep. Nobody would suffer. And she meant somebody to suffer.

Well, her luck had changed today. She was on the upgrade again. It was so nice to feel that one could be quite independent in this way whatever the outcome of other things. And Nick. And Nick. He was most important of all. She was alive and tingling to her finger-tips after meeting him. And she would see him again. However much he might try to avoid her, she would be bound to see him again. And after a while perhaps he would no longer try to avoid her. She shut her eyes to the bitter thought that he was married. It had to be ignored. When you got in a mess it was really only a question of keeping going, pegging away, stonewalling until something turned up. Now something had turned up.

She paid for her meal and left the café, and the man with the dark trilby hat watched her go from across the street. She walked home, not begrudging a taxi if she had felt like it, but content with her spreading thoughts.

Loften Street is a long shabby brick cleft in the strata of western London. Featureless except for a few eating houses – ‘
Pop's Parlour; Steak and Chips 11d.
' – a draper's shop, and two public houses from which now and again shouting women are escorted by patient policemen, it stretches its mean length from one of London's busiest thoroughfares at its east end to a neighbourhood of expensive residential flats at the other. Dry and drab as a bone to the casual eye, there is enough of the rich marrow of human experience behind its shabby curtains to occupy an English Zola for the length of his natural life.

No. 46 is nearer the west and nearly opposite the smaller of the two public houses. The rain had turned to a fine grey mist as Elizabeth went in, glancing a moment half-defensively towards the sub-basement sitting-room where Mr and Mrs Grieve were usually on watch. There was a light and the door was half open, but nobody was to be seen. She hastened up the first flight of stairs, for if Mike Grieve was there alone he might come out and begin one of his leering conversations.

The 15-watt bulb on the landing was still burning – a sure sign that Mrs. Grieve was out – and the sour smell of cooked greens followed her up to the second flight and into her room.

From the first day she had hated it, everything about it: the mirror on the mantelshelf, cracked across the corner, ornate with faded gilt; the big iron bedstead with the ends like prison bars; the dirty lace curtains falling from window-top to floor; the imitation Japanese bric-à-brac; the carpet with the hole where one caught one's foot; the view through the window to a warehouse with wooden platforms for lowering goods into drays in the alley below.

But tonight all this did not seem to matter so much. She would soon be out of here. She pushed the door to behind her with her foot and pulled off her coat and hat, fluffed out her long dark hair, and sat on the bed. There was no sound from above and she remembered that the Allisottis were away for the week visiting an aunt, so she might expect an undisturbed night. And she needed it. All this day had been tiring. She lay back and closed her eyes.

She opened them at the sound of a knock.

‘Come in,' she said, forgetting Mike Grieve.

A man came in.

She sat up. Her eyes changed their expression, drowsiness fled before surprise. Startled, wary, suddenly hostile, she slipped off the bed and stood up.

‘What do you want?' she demanded.

The swing door of the public house opposite opened suddenly to emit a gust of laughter and Mike Grieve.

He staggered a little as he came out, not because he was drunk – he couldn't afford that at present – but because four of his friends had given him a hearty shove as he reached the door to make sure that he went home in style. The force of his going had made him spill some of the froth out of the quart jug he was carrying, and as he walked towards his own door he changed hands to lick the beer off his fingers.

Ma Grieve had gone to see her mother, but would be back about eleven, and it would be more than his life was worth to be found in the White Horse while the lodgings were unattended. It might be Buckingham Palace and the Crown Jewels the way she watched over it, afraid of someone pinching off without paying the rent, Mr Allisotti always said, when Ma wasn't around.

Mike reached the door safely and was about to turn down into their own room when he saw someone coming down the ill-lit stairs. He drew aside to let the man pass. He was a stranger and wore a mackintosh and a dark trilby hat. He had a handkerchief held to his face and kept his head well down.

‘Good night, guv'nor,' said Mike, feeling friendly.

‘ 'Night,' the stranger said, passing Mike on the handkechief side.

‘ 'Urt yer ' ead?' Mike asked solicitously, but he had no reply. The stranger passed on and went out into the street. There the damp mist swallowed him.

Grieve grunted and went down into the sitting-room. He had forgotten to switch off the electric, but he had only meant to slip out for a minute, not stay half an hour. Good job Ma hadn't come home early.

He picked up the paper and began to read the racing form, his feet on the table, his left hand stretching out now and then for the mug of beer. When he finished a draught his bottom lip came out and sucked the beads of dampness off his drooping moustache.

But after a moment or two he put down the paper and stared at the photograph of himself as a virile young man on the opposite wall. The Allisottis were away this week and the second floor front hadn't been let since Old Man Thomas walked out. Third floor back, Hartley, was on night shift. That left only Miss Rusman. What was she doing having gentlemen friends at near on midnight?

Well, it was hardly his business. Mike was all for tolerance. He'd tell Ma, who wasn't, and let her worry. He picked up the paper again but did not read it. It was hardly his business, but the Rusman girl, sawing away at her violin, with her stuck-up airs and her sulky mouth as if ordinary folk wasn't good enough for her … The way she'd acted to him. ‘I'm not interested in what you think or feel, Mr Grieve. Kindly get out of this bedroom or I'll call the police.' And she
had
called young Hartley, who happened to be passing. Flag-flying, haughty little so-and-so. And now it seemed that after all she was no better than a high-class what's it. Men coming out of her room late at night. He'd a mind to go up and see what it was all about.

Perhaps tonight she wouldn't look on things in quite the same way. Anyway, she'd better not come the high and mighty now. He stared at his own photo again. A pity Ma would be back any minute. But he'd a fair excuse for going upstairs. Ma wouldn't have any funny business going on in her house. He knew that well enough, for she was always saying so.

He'd go and have a little talk with Miss Rusman.

He drained his beer and sucked the ends of his moustache and got up. Outside, the clock of St Andrew's Church by the market was just striking eleven.

As he reached the first landing he was about to switch out the light but thought he would leave it till he came down, otherwise he might catch his head on the bracket. He'd done it before. He wondered if the stranger had banged his head there.

He puffed up to the second landing, looking out for the creaking boards, and approached the door of the second floor back. No sound. Maybe she was in bed. That seemed very likely. But not asleep. He raised his hand to knock.

His nostrils twitched. Funny smell. She must be cooking something on the gas-ring and it had boiled over. Or …

He knocked. No reply.

He switched on the other light on the landing and saw smoke curling unpretentiously round the bottom of the door.

He turned the handle sharply and found the door was not locked. A cloud of smoke came out and made him choke. Then he went in.

The bed was on fire.

Something dark was lying on the bed.

He lost his head and ran back upon the landing, calling, ‘Help! Help!' down the stairs.

But it was no good shouting when he was alone in the house – except for whatever lay in that room. The bed was on fire, the window curtains smoking: those curtains Ma was so proud of.