The Hunter and the Trapped (10 page)

“Is anything wrong?” she asked, gently, wishing she did not feel the queer impatience with his moods that had grown on her in the last few days. “Isn't there anything I can do?”

He put out a hand to touch her neck, but drew back almost at once.

“You must put up with me, Penny,” he said. “Don't try to work everything out in terms of common sense. Be content to feel.”

“I do try.” She did not at all understand what he wanted.

“One of the best brains …” he murmured, “… could take you as far – but always beset – so demanding – so greedy …”

“Darling,” she tried again. “Where are you? Come back to me.”

She was astonished by what she had just said, but she meant every word of it. His empty shell was before her, the blank eyes stared mournfully into her own.

While she struggled to find a way to him he was suddenly back, with an arm about her shoulders and a look almost of tenderness.

“You are kind,” he murmured. “And patient. So much more patient than Diana. I think you might do me a great deal of good.”

A little shiver of anticipation ran through her. Against all reason, all probability, all warnings, her deepest wish, to love and serve him always, rose again to the surface of her mind. She moved closer, looking up and waiting.

“There's something I want to ask you,” he said, staring now into the distance above her head.

“Yes,” The wish moved towards conviction, certainty.

“If you feel you can't, just say so and we'll say no more about it.”

She nodded.

“Can you lend me thirty pounds?”

The blow to her heart made her stupid.

“Lend?”
she said, thickly.
“Thirty pounds?”

She met his eyes and recoiled from them. Quite plainly he knew she had expected an offer of marriage and he was taking a malicious pleasure in the anticlimax he had created. She felt a wave of sick faintness pass over her as reality, sad, sordid reality, closed down.

But she had not yet lost all wish to serve him. She still wanted to prove her love, for it had filled her life for nearly a year and she could not lightly abandon it.

She got to her feet, moving away from him in order to make some attempt to think clearly. Her father had never stopped her personal allowance, which was generously in tune with his prosperity. It was paid monthly into her bank account, so as this was the last day of August she could afford, with some economies in her own living, to give Simon what he asked.

She found a chair near the table, took her cheque book from her handbag.

“When can you let me have it back?” she asked, determined not to give away more than she had done already, though the dead weight of humiliating disappointment was crushing her. “They pay you at the beginning of term, don't they?”

He did not bother to answer this, nor did she insist upon an answer. At the back of her mind she knew that this was a gift, not a loan. His pride would not allow him to owe her money, but a gift would turn from charity to a tribute. She was quite unprepared for the savagery of his next mortal assault upon her.

He took the cheque she brought to him where he still sat by the fire: looked first at it and then up at her.

“Now I know,” he said, with bitterness, “what it feels like to be a paid man.”

Penelope's hand flew up, but Simon was on his feet with a steely grip on her wrist before her instinctive move to strike him had even registered in her own mind. She tore her arm from his hold, stumbled back to her chair near the table and dropping her face into her hands broke into harsh sobbing.

“Why should you mind my poor little joke?” Simon asked and when she did not answer or move, repeated the question.

Penelope controlled herself at last, but could not look at him.

“It was not a joke,” she said, in a low dead voice. “It was not funny.” She went on, “Give me back that cheque, please.”

“You're all alike,” Simon complained, not angry, but exasperated. “So
serious
. So
tiresome
.”

He put the cheque, which he still held, into his wallet and the wallet into his pocket.

“Very well,” said Penelope, surprising herself by her own calmness. “I shall stop the cheque tomorrow, so you might just as well tear it up or give it back to me now.”

“I will do neither,” he said. “When you have stopped being so angry over nothing …”

“Nothing!”
she cried, as her love entered its death agony. “You call it
nothing?
”

“You're all alike!” Simon repeated, passion in his voice now. “So greedy – so grasping! You are disappointed because I can't marry you. But I cannot be possessed by anyone – Send them all away – Cast them out – Flying about your head like vultures – like poison gas – like clouds of angry mosquitoes – Beat them off – Beat …”

She was on her feet, snatching up her handbag, hurrying into her coat, lifting her suitcase, dragging open the door. Fear drove her and total disillusionment and an overwhelming confusion, behind which pain raged and tore at her, filling her eyes with tears so that she could hardly see what she was doing. But she escaped at last and closing the door behind her went clattering down the stairs, her heels sounding a hollow echo from the steps as she fled.

Simon made no attempt to stop her. When she had gone he went into his kitchen to find a bread knife and then to the table to gather up the food she had brought and take it back to the fire. Then he began to eat, hacking off pieces of bread and meat and stuffing them into his mouth, spreading butter thickly with the bread knife, crumbs and fragments falling all round him. He knew he was hungry; the food was good. He rejoiced that he was alone at last.

Poor Penny. What a silly child. But she would get over it. They all did –

They nearly all did – A fleeting shadow of pain passed across his face and was gone. How Diana would laugh at the joke that had so offended Penny. Diana loved to hear the details of his affair with Penny. She would laugh and then she would be kind.

He stuffed some more food into his mouth and sat munching it, staring at the red glow of the fire, while his whirling thoughts spiralled down into the mist where fantasy and fact joined hands in an intricate, delicate dance over which he presided, enshrined, participating, both the whole and the parts, the giver and the receiver, the worshipper and the worshipped.

The door bell, pressed with a firm, impatient finger, broke painfully through Simon's withdrawal. At first he simply ignored it, taking up an apple and biting into it as if there had been no insistent clamour to disturb him. But when the sound continued, without a break, he came to himself suddenly and furiously, leaping across the room to the door and flinging it open with a wide gesture.

John Allingham stood there.

“I want to talk to you,” John said, quietly and politely, “May I come in?”

Simon moved away, biting again at his apple. He said, indistinctly, his mouth full, “I can't prevent you.”

Then, swallowing quickly, he recovered his usual manner with strangers. “You must excuse the state of my room and my very primitive meal. I'm just back from France – only an hour or two ago. Famished. Horrible crossing. Such a bad sailor, but I never eat when I'm travelling, so I avoid being sea-sick, which would be too unbearable.”

Disregarding all this and still not moving forward into the room, though Simon shut the door behind him, John said, with his back to it, “What have you done to Penny?”

“I
beg
your pardon?”

“What have you done to Penny?”

Simon went back to his chair by the fire, sat down, held out his hands to the warm glow. Without looking round at his visitor he said, with tolerance. “ I do understand that you are an old friend of Penelope Dane, so I expect you feel you must keep an eye on her now that her father has –well, abdicated from his position of guardian.”

He glanced round quickly as he finished and seeing that John's anger had made him speechless, went on, “Penelope was in our college party in France. A number of us travelled back together …”

“I know all that. Careful, reasonable cover. You needn't explain. I know Penny too well to need explanation from you What did you do to her today?”

“Nothing.”

“You brought her back here to your flat.”

“We shared a taxi from Victoria. As it was such a cold wet evening she came in for a bit to warm up and have something to eat.”

“You sent her out to get food for you and then in some way you hurt her so badly that she left at once.”

Simon smiled gently.

“If Penelope has just given you an account of our last conversation why do you need to ask me? You won't believe my side of it, will you?”

This was said with considerable charm, which baffled John, making him angrier than ever.

“I went round to Caroline's flat because I knew Penny was due home today. I'm on twenty-four hours leave, as it happens. She wasn't there. Then she arrived. You know what sort of state she was in. We couldn't do anything with her.”

“We?”

“Caroline and I. So I came here.”

Simon got up and leaned against the end of the mantelpiece.

“Penelope is disappointed because I don't marry her,” he said, gravely. “I have never deceived her. I have never implied that I might marry her. In fact, quite the opposite. I shall never marry. But she would not accept it. Women always despair if they can't get their own way. I repeat, I shall never marry. I could never live with anyone – continuously. Now do you understand?”

“I understand that no one is ever likely to want to live with
you
– continuously.”

Simon made an impatient gesture with his hand.

“Why are you still so angry? You should be pleased that I don't marry her. Do you really mean you would like to see her married to me?”

“I would rather see her dead!” said John, speaking in the melodramatic fashion inseparable from strong, simple emotion.

Simon began to walk across the room. When he reached the table he put his apple core down on it carefully and looked round at John.

“Penelope ought to get married,” he said, half kind, half contemptuous. “You ought to marry her yourself.”

“You swine!”

At John's sudden violent movement towards him, Simon's control broke. All his hatred, his fear of this emotional involvement, his sick disgust at it, his horror of the ultimate, persecuting confinement, possessed him. He snatched up the bread knife and rushed at his enemy.

John met the onslaught coolly. Both inclination and training fitted him for the occasion. He rejoiced in it, because it broke down an impossible, bewildering situation into something he not only understood, but welcomed. Simon's attack was sudden, executed with surprising speed. But it was both unplanned and unskilful. John had little difficulty in side-stepping to avoid the downward stroke of the knife, at the same time gripping the arm that held it. Simon proved stronger than he expected, but was quite unpractised. After a short struggle the knife fell to the floor, John kicked it to the other end of the room and with a single, well-directed blow sent his enemy crashing to the floor.

“Might – have expected – dirty methods,” he panted, looking down at Simon, who lay with his face hidden, perfectly still. “Why don't you get up? I shan't touch you again.”

As the prone figure made no movement, the last of his anger ebbed away. He had not hit the chap hard. But you never knew – thin skulls –

“Look,” he said, almost pleading. “You insulted
me
, so you had no excuse for picking up that knife. Anyway, I was coming to see you to warn you, as a matter of fact. D'you hear me?
Warn
you. Against Hubert Dane. He's out for your blood. I happen to know he's got his agents watching you for evidence that'll break you at the college. So you'd better look out. Oh, my God!” he said, as Simon still lay at his feet, motionless. “Can't you take in what I'm telling you and stop this bloody play-acting?”

If it
is
play-acting, he thought, shrinking from his fear. He knelt quickly, picked up the limp wrist nearest to him and felt for the pulse. It was full, regular, perfectly normal. He rolled Simon on to his back. There was no expression of any kind on the still face and the eyes were closed, but the breath went softly and regularly in and out.

“O. K.,” John said, his fear changed, but undiminished. “O. K. But remember what I've told you. Hubert will break you if he can.”

He waited a few seconds longer, then turned and went swiftly from the flat. There was something here that he did not understand, but it made his blood run cold.

As soon as the door closed behind John, Simon got slowly to his feet and moved unsteadily to the fireplace, where he stared long and anxiously at his image in the mirror.

The blow that felled him had caught him on the side of the head as he was ducking to avoid it. There was a tender lump there but it did not show through his hair. His face was untouched, except for a small red patch on the left temple where it had struck the floor. He felt this tenderly. No swelling yet, so perhaps it would not develop into a noticeable bruise. He had tried to break his fall with his hands, but not altogether successfully.

The young barbarian, with his vile, shocking temper! A warning! The fool! As if he did not know all that already.

He sent his gaze slowly round the shabby room, over the bookshelves with their rows of paper-backs and a few inherited leather and cloth bound classics: over the dingy chairs, also inherited, in loose covers dark with age and London dirt. He saw none of the squalor, but was proud of his possessions. He noticed the knife, lying beside one of the bookshelves.

It meant nothing to him, for the recent fight with John was quickly fading from his mind. But he picked up the knife and put it back on the table. Then, noticing his suitcase near the door he gathered it up and took it into his bedroom to unpack.