The Wine-Dark Sea (12 page)

She was quite unable to sleep. Her mind had set up a devil’s dance which would not subside for hours at the best. The bed was the first really uncomfortable one in which
Margaret
had ever slept: it was so narrow that blankets of normal size could be and were tucked in so far that they overlapped beneath the occupant, interlocking to bind her in; so narrow also that the cheap hard springs of the wire framework gave not at all beneath the would-be sleeper’s weight; and the mattress was inadequate to blur a diamond pattern of hard metallic ridges. Although she liked by day to wear garments fitting closely at the throat, Margaret found that the same sensation in bed, however much necessitated by the
temperature
, amounted to suffocation. Nor had she ever been able, since first she could remember, to sleep with a light in the room. Above all, there were the trains: not so much the
periodical
thunder rollings, she found, as the apparently
lengthening
intervals of waiting for them. Downstairs the trains had seemed to become more and more frequent; here they seemed to become slowly sparser. It was probably, Margaret reflected, a consequence of the slowness with which time is said to pass for those seeking sleep. Or perhaps Wendley Roper would have an answer in terms of graphicstatics or inner family knowledge. The ultimate effect was as if the train service were something subjective in Margaret’s head, like the large defined shapes which obstruct the vision of the sufferer from migraine. ‘No sleep like this,’ said Margaret to herself,
articulating
with a clarity which made the words seem spoken by another.

She forced herself from the rigid blankets, felt-like though far from warm, opened the neck of her pyjama jacket, and extinguished the light, which died on the lightest breath. What on earth was Mimi doing? she wondered with schoolgirl irritation.

Immediately she had groped into the pitch-dark bed, a train which seemed of an entirely new construction went past. This time there was no blasting of steam and thundering or grinding of wheels: only a single sustained rather high-pitched rattling; metallic, inhuman, hollow. The new train appeared to be descending the bank, but Margaret for the first time could not be sure. The sound frightened Margaret badly. ‘It’s a hospital train,’ her mother had said to her long ago on an occasion of which Margaret had forgotten all details except that they were horrible. ‘It’s full of wounded soldiers.’

In a paroxysm of terror, as this agony of her childhood blasted through her adult life, Margaret must have passed into sleep, or at least unconsciousness. For the next event could only have been a dream of hallucination. The room seemed to be filling with colourless light. Though even now this light was extremely dim, the process of its first appearance and increase seemed to have been going on for a very long time. As she realised this, another part of Margaret’s mind remembered that it could none the less have been only a matter of minutes. She struggled to make consistent the
consciousness
of the nearly endless with the consciousness of the precisely brief. The light seemed, moreover, the exact visual counterpart of the noise she had heard made by the new train. Then Margaret became aware of something very horrible indeed: it began with the upturned dead face of an old woman, colourless with the exact colourlessness of the
colourless
light; and it ended with the old woman’s crumpled shape occultly made visible hanging above the trap-door in the corner of Margaret’s compartment-shaped room. Up in the attic old Miss Roper had hanged herself, her grey hair so twisted and meshed as itself to suggest the suffocating agent.

Margaret’s hands went in terror to her own bare throat. Then the door of the room opened, and someone stood inside it bearing a light.

‘I don’t think you heard me knock.’

As when she and Mimi had arrived she had noticed in Roper’s first words the echo of the man at the Guest House, so now was another echo – of Beech’s cool apology for that bedroom contretemps which had so fired Mimi’s wrath. To Margaret it was as if a nightmare had reached that not uncommon point at which the sufferer, though not yet awake, not yet out of the dream, yet becomes aware that a dream it is. Then all was deep nightmare once more, as Margaret recalled the shadow woman on the stairs, and perceived that the same woman was now in the room with her.

Margaret broke down. Still clutching her throat, she cried repeatedly in a shrill but not loud voice. ‘Go away. Go away. Go away. Go away.’ It was again like her childhood.

The strange woman approached and, setting down the lamp, began to shake her by the shoulders. At once Margaret seemed to know that, whoever else she was, she was not the dead Miss Roper; and that was all which seemed to matter. She stopped wauling like a terror-struck child: then saw that the hand still on one of her shoulders wore a dull coal-black ring; and, looking up, that the face above her and the thick black hair were Beech’s, as had been that indifferently
apologetic
voice. Nightmare stormed forward yet again; but this time only for an adult speck of time. For Margaret seemed now to have no doubt whatever that Beech was indeed a woman.

‘Where’s your friend?’

‘I left her downstairs. I came up to bed early.’

‘Early?’

‘What’s the time? I have no watch.’

‘It’s half-past three.’

The equivocal situation returned to life in Margaret’s mind in every detail, as when stage lights are turned on simultaneously.

‘What business is it of yours? Who are you?’

‘Who do you think I am?’

‘I thought you were the manservant.’

‘I looked after old Miss Roper. Until she died.’

‘Did that mean you had to dress like a man?’ The woman now appeared to be wearing a dark grey coat and skirt and a white blouse.

‘Wendley could hardly live alone in the house with a woman he wasn’t married to. Someone he had no intention of marrying.’

‘Why haven’t you left, then?’

‘After what happened to Miss Roper?’

‘What did you do to Miss Roper?’ Margaret spoke very low but quite steadily. All feeling was dead in her, save, far below the surface, a flickering jealousy of Mimi, a death-wish sympathy with the murdering stranger beside her. So that Margaret was able to add, steadily as before, ‘Miss Roper was mad, wasn’t she?’

‘Certainly not. Why do you say that?’

‘Her father preventing her marrying. The bars on the windows.’

‘You can be crossed in love without going mad, you know. And madhouse windows are not the only ones with bars.’ The large white hand with the black ring on the
engagement
finger had continued all this time to rest on Margaret’s shoulder. Now with a sharp movement it was withdrawn.

‘So this was simply a prison? Why? What had Miss Roper done?’

‘Something to do with the railway. Some secret she had from the old man and wouldn’t tell Wendley. I never asked for details. I was in love. You know what that means as well as I do.’

‘What sort of secret? And why did it have to be a secret?’

‘I don’t know what sort of secret. I don’t care now. She wanted to keep it secret from Wendley because she knew what he would do with it. She spent all her time trying to tell other people.’

‘That’s why …’ Margaret was about to say ‘that’s why she waved’, then stopped herself. ‘
What
would Wendley have done with it?’

‘Your friend should have some idea of that by this time.’ This unexpected remark was delivered in a tone of deepest venom.

‘What do you mean? Where is Mimi?’ Then a sudden hysteria swept over her. ‘I’m going to find Mimi.’ She
struggled
out of the crib-like bed, bruising herself badly on the ironwork. The trains seemed to have long ceased and everything was horribly quiet in the Quiet Valley.

The woman, approaching the cheap little bedroom chair on which Margaret’s clothes lay tumbled where she had dropped them, picked up Margaret’s tie, and held it between her two hands twelve inches or so apart.

In the negligible light of one oil lamp there began a slow chase down the long narrow room.

‘You’re not on his side really,’ cried Margaret, everything gone. ‘You know what’s happening downstairs.’

The woman made no answer, but slightly decreased the distance between her hands. Margaret perceived how foolish had been her error in deliberately selecting the bed furthest from the door. None the less, a certain amount of evasion, as in a childhood game of ‘Touch’, was possible before she found herself being forced near the end wall, being corralled almost beneath the trap-door in the ceiling above. If only she could have reached the other door, the door of the room! Much would then have been possible.

As they arrived at the corner beneath the trap, Margaret’s heel struck Mimi’s open rucksack, dropped there by its casual owner, hitherto forgotten or unnoticed by Margaret, and
concealed
by the dim light. Margaret stooped.

Three seconds later her adversary was lying back downwards on the floor, bleeding darkly and excessively in the gloom, Mimi’s robust camping knife through her rather thick white throat. ‘Comes from Sweden, dear,’ Mimi had said. ‘Not allowed to sell them here.’

It did not take Margaret long, plunging into the pockets in the dead woman’s jacket, to find Beech’s bunch of keys. This was fortunate, as the scream of the murdered woman, breaking into the course of events below, was followed by running footsteps on the murky stairs. The agile Mimi burst into the room crying, ‘Lock it. For God’s sake lock it’; and Margaret had raced the length of the Rafters Room and locked it before Wendley Roper, heavy and unused to exercise, had arrived at the landing outside. The large key turned in the expensive, efficient lock with a grinding snap he could not have mistaken. The railway hotel door was enormously thick, a beautiful piece of joinery. Margaret waited, her body
drooping
forward, for Roper to begin his onslaught. But it was a job for an axe, and nothing whatever happened; neither blows on the door, nor a voice, nor even retreating footsteps.

Mimi, ignorant that the room had a third occupant, was seated on the side of her bed with her hands distending her trousers’ pockets. She was panting slightly, but her hair was habitually cut too short ever to show much disorder. Margaret had previously thought her manner strident; it was now beyond bearing. She began to blow out a stream of curses, particularly horrible in the presence of the dead woman.

‘Mimi, my dear,’ said Margaret gently. ‘What are we going to do?’ Still in her pyjamas, she was shivering
spasmodically
.

Mimi, keeping her hands in her pockets, looked round at her. ‘Catch the first departure for hell, I should say.’

Though she was not weeping, there was something
unbearably
desolate about her. Margaret wanted to comfort her: Mimi’s experiences had been unimaginably worse even than her own. She put her cold arms round Mimi’s stiff hard body; then tried to drag Mimi’s hands from her pockets in order to take them in her own. Mimi, though offering no help, did not strongly resist. As Margaret dragged at her wrists, one of her own hands round each, a queer little trickle fell to the floor on each side of her. Mimi’s pockets were tightly stuffed with railway tickets.

Dropping Mimi’s wrists, Margaret picked up one of the tickets and read it by the light of the strange woman’s lamp: ‘Diamond Jubilee Special. Pudsley to Hassell-wicket. Third Class. Excursion 2s. 11d God Save Our Queen.’ Mimi’s fists were clenched round variegated little bundles of pasteboard rectangles.

It was impossible to tell her about the dead woman.

‘I’m going to dress. Then we’ll get out.’ Margaret began to drag on the clothes she had worn for dinner. She buttoned the collar of her shirt, warm and welcome about her neck. She looked for her tie, and could just see it in one hand of the dead woman as she lay compact on the floor at the end of the room behind Mimi’s back.

‘I’ll pack our rucksacks.’ Fully dressed, Margaret felt more valiant and less vulnerable. She groped at the feet of the corpse for Mimi’s rucksack and assembled the scattered contents. But, though feeling the omission to be folly, she did not go back for Mimi’s knife. In the end, she had packed both rucksacks and was carefully fastening the straps. Mimi had apparently emptied her pockets of tickets, leaving four small heaps on the dark carpet, one from each fist, one from each pocket; and was now sitting silent and apparently relaxed, but making no effort to help Margaret.

‘Are you ready? We must plan.’

Mimi gazed up at her. Then she said quietly, ‘There’s nowhere for us to go now.’ With the slightest of gestures she appeared to indicate the four heaps of tickets.

No argument that Margaret used would induce Mimi to make the least effort. She just sat on the bed saying that they were prisoners and there was nothing they could do.

Feeling that Mimi’s reason might have been affected, though of this there was no sign, Margaret began to
contemplate
the dreadful extremity of trying to escape alone. But apart from the additional perils to body and spirit (there was no knowing that Roper was not standing outside the door), she felt that it would be impossible for her to leave Mimi alone to what might befall. She set down her rucksack on the floor beside Mimi’s. When filled, she always found it heavy to hold for long.

‘Very well. We’ll wait till it’s light. It should be quite soon.’

Mimi said nothing. Looking at her, Margaret saw that for the first time she was weeping. Margaret once more put her arms round her now soft body, and the two women tenderly kissed. They came from very different environments and it was the first time they had ever done so.

The desperate idea entered Margaret’s mind that help might be obtained. Surely there must be visitors to the house of some kind sometimes; and neither she nor Mimi was a powerless old woman. Margaret’s eyes unintendingly went to the knife in the victim’s throat.

For a long time the two women sat close together saying little.

Margaret had not for hours given a thought to the railway outside. Since that strange and dream-like new train, nothing had passed. Then, from the very far distance, came the airy ghost of an engine whistle: utterly impersonal at that hour and place, but, to Margaret, filled with promise.