The Wine-Dark Sea (16 page)

None the less, the telephone now ceased to ring, as had happened on the previous occasion when Edmund had
grappled
with the Exchange. Instead the studio was filled by day and night with a silent hot airlessness into which the children on the walls stared with assertive insignificance. There were no more callers, no more money, and, Edmund realised, no more letters from Teddie. After a week of silence, Edmund brought himself to tear open the last of the heap. The contents appalled him. Alarmed by his long-continued failure to write, Teddie was on her way home. She had left the New Mexico sanatorium in defiance of a united medical commination. Edmund looked at the date. Clearly she might arrive at any moment.

He dialled the familiar number. One or another kind of climax was inevitable. He could hear the telephone ringing, but faintly and distantly, as if at the end of a very long corridor. Then, although the bell continued dimly audible, he heard a voice.

‘At last, darling, at last.’

‘Nera! Where have you been?’

‘There are terrible difficulties. We have to find a channel, you know.’

‘We?’ Edmund could still hear the bell, far off and minute. It was as if cushioned by a very thick fog.

‘I’ve been trying to reach you, darling, ever since you came here. Didn’t you know?’ She laughed coquettishly. ‘But here I am! You can ring off.’

As she spoke, the bell stopped ringing, and the line went quite silent.

‘The line’s gone dead.’

‘Already?’ She seemed unconcerned.

‘Where are you?’

‘What frightful-looking children? Put back the receiver, darling. You said the line was dead.’

Edmund’s arm slowly dropped, lowering the receiver to his waist, as he fell back against the window. ‘Where are you?’

‘As the line’s already dead, I suppose it doesn’t matter whether you put back the receiver or not.’ The worst thing was that her voice still sounded exactly as it had sounded over the telephone; attractive though it was, it retained the effect of having been filtered through the Exchange. Edmund let fall the receiver. It crashed to the floor.

‘For God’s sake, where are you?’

‘I’m
here,
darling.’ The voice, slightly dehumanised, seemed to come from no particular point. ‘You said you couldn’t live without me.’

‘I can’t see you.’ The breakfast-food faces of the children smiled brightly at him through the sunshine.

‘Not yet, darling. You said you couldn’t live without me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Darling, you said you couldn’t live without me.’ It was exactly like one of the telephone’s standard locutions: ‘Sorry you’ve been troubled,’ or ‘Number please’.

Edmund placed his hands before his eyes.

‘Now there’s no need to live without me. Don’t you understand? Darling, just look behind you. Over your shoulder.’

Edmund stood rigid.

‘Just one look, darling.’

Edmund was trembling all over with hunger and
loneliness
and terror.

‘You must look, you know, darling.’ The puppet-like voice seemed nearer. ‘If you knew how hard it’s been to reach you –’

Edmund was groping for his last charges of willpower.

‘Now turn your head, darling.’

There was a rat-tat-tat at the door. Edmund clenched his fists and leapt towards it. He was sobbing as he flung it open.

‘Bread.’

The shop in the next street had taken pity on him.

*

When Teddie arrived home, full of evil surmises, she duly found that Edmund was not only in hospital but on the
danger
-list. Immediately she put on her pinkest Transatlantic frock, and, accompanied by Toby, a note from whom, left in the studio against her arrival, had given her the news, went to visit him. She found him unbelievably thin, and his face a cadaverous dirty yellow, but immediately she approached, he clutched her hand and croaked, ‘I love you, Nera. Forgive me, Nera. Please please forgive me.’

Teddie withdrew her hand. The nurse was looking at her penetratingly.

Toby shrugged, as if he had known all the time. ‘Name mean anything to you?’

‘A little,’ said Teddie, and changed the subject. Edmund said nothing further, but lay glazed and panting.

‘I think you’d better go now, Miss Taylor-Smith. You have your own health to take care of.’ Toby must have told her.

‘He looks like a poet,’ said Teddie. ‘Will he get better?’

‘Naturally we shall do all we can.’

*

‘No, Toby. It’s quite impossible. She can’t even paint. Not even as well as me.’ All the children smiled benignly; Toby did not care how well or badly Teddie painted.

‘Nothing like that’s impossible. Particularly not with a cove like St. Jude.’

‘Well,
this
is impossible.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Look, Toby. If you still doubt me, I’ll introduce you.’

‘OK by me. I’m only trying to save you from making a big mistake.’

‘She’s always at home in the evening.’

On the way to Nera Condamine’s flat, which was in another part of London, he put his arm round her.

‘Of course I know she was lonely.’

‘There you are.’

‘She used to ring me up at all hours. She always wanted me to ring her back. Where she worked. Some number or other – Extension 281.’

‘Now that does cut out St. Jude. Never known a chap so scared of the telephone.’

Teddie wriggled herself free for the moment. ‘I’m going to introduce you anyway. You were at the hospital, and this must be stopped.’

*

‘What’s that on the floor?’

They had been standing for several minutes in the dim passage, unavailingly manipulating Miss Condamine’s small brass knocker. The design was a jester’s head.

‘Telephone Directory,’ reported Toby. ‘A to D volume with her in it. Issued in July.’

They looked at one another.

‘They bring it round, you know. If there’s no answer, they leave it.’

Teddie raised the flap of the letter-box.

‘Toby!’ Now she clutched his arm.

Toby squared up to the door. ‘Shall I?’

Teddie was coughing. But she nodded emphatically.

Both door and lock were cheap and nasty; and Toby was through in a minute. Inside the sun came mistily through the drawn magenta blinds. It was simpler to switch on the light.

The details it revealed were most horrible. Dressed in decaying party pyjamas of cerise satin, and regarded by
several
academic but aphrodisiac studies of the nude, lay on a chaise-longue the elderly body of Miss Condamine, a bread knife in one mouldering, but still well-shaped hand. With the knife she appeared for some reason to have amputated the telephone from the telephone system; but none the less the unusually long flex was wound tightly round her again and again and again from neck to ankles.

The first time it occurred to poor Millie that something might really be wrong was, on the face of it, perfectly harmless and commonplace.

Uncle Stephen, the boys’ great uncle, had found the words, conventional though the words were. ‘You’re much too big a boy to make messes like that, Rodney. And you too, of course, Angus.’

‘Angus wasn’t making a mess,’ Rodney had retorted. ‘There’s no need to bite his head off too.’

‘Keep quiet, boy, and clean yourself up,’ Uncle Stephen had rejoined, exactly as if he had been father to the lads, and a good and proper father also.

In reality, however, Uncle Stephen was a bachelor.

‘I’ll take you up to the bathroom, Rodney,’ Millie had intervened. ‘If you’ll excuse us for a few moments, Uncle Stephen.’

Uncle Stephen had made no effort to look pleasant and social. Rather, he had grated with irritation. When Millie took Rodney out of the room, Uncle Stephen was glaring at her other son, defying him to move, to speak, to breathe, to exist except upon sufferance.

It was certainly true that the boys lacked discipline. They were a major inconvenience and burden, overshadowing the mildest of Millie’s joys. Even when they were away at school, they oppressed her mind. There was nowhere else where they were ever away, and even the headmaster, who had been at London University with Phineas, declined to accept them as boarders, though he had also declined to give any precise reason. When Millie had looked very pale, he had said, as gently as he could, that it was better not to enter into too much explanation: experience had taught him that. Call it an intuition, he had experienced. Certainly it had settled the matter.

She had supposed that, like so many things, the
headmaster’s
decision might have related to the fact that the boys were twins. Twins ran in her family, and the two other cases she knew of, both much older than she was, did not seem to be happy twins. None the less, until the coming of Rodney and Angus, and though she would have admitted it to few people, she had always wished she had a twin herself: a twin sister, of course. Mixed twins were something especially peculiar. She had never herself actually encountered a case, within the family, or without. She found it difficult to imagine.

Now, Millie no longer wished for a twin. She hardly knew any longer what she wished for, large, small or totally fantastic.

All that notwithstanding (and, of course, much, much more), Millie had never supposed there to be anything very exceptional about her situation. Most mothers had troubles of some kind; and there were many frequently encountered varieties from which she had been mercifully spared, at least so far. Think of Jenny Holmforth, whose Mikey drank so much that he was virtually unemployable! Fancy having to bring up Audrey and Olivia and Proserpina when you had always to be looking for a part-time job as well, and with everyone’s eyes on you, pitying, contemptuous, no longer even lascivious!

But upstairs in the bathroom, it came to Millie, clearly and consciously for the first time, that the boys were not merely too big to make messes: they were far, far too big in a more absolute sense. Rodney seemed almost to fill the little bathroom. He had spoken of Uncle Stephen biting his head off. That would have been a dreadful transaction; like … But Millie drew back from the simile.

Of course, for years no one could have failed to notice that the boys were enormous; and few had omitted to refer to it, jocularly or otherwise. The new element was the
hypothesis
that the irregularity went beyond merely social
considerations
. It existed in a limbo where she and her husband, Phineas, might well find themselves virtually alone with it, and very soon.

Millie had read English Language and Literature and knew of the theory that Lady Wilde and her unfortunate son had suffered from acromegaly. That appeared to have been something that ran in Lady Wilde’s family, the Elgees; because Sir William had been quite stunted. But of course there were limits even to acromegaly. About Rodney and Angus, Millie could but speculate.

When all the clothes had been drawn off Rodney, she was appalled to think what might happen if ever in the future she had to struggle with him physically, as so often in the past.

*

Re-entering the drawing room, Rodney pushed in ahead of her, as he always did.

Angus seized the opportunity to charge out, almost knocking her down. He could be heard tearing upstairs: she dreaded to think for what. It mattered more when her respected Uncle Stephen was in the house.

She looked apologetically at Uncle Stephen and managed to smile. When her heart was in it, Millie still smiled beautifully.

‘Rodney,’ roared Uncle Stephen, ‘sit down properly, uncross your legs, and wait until someone speaks to you first.’

‘He’d better finish his tea,’ said Millie timidly.

‘He no longer deserves anything. He’s had his chance and he threw it away.’

‘He’s a very big boy, Uncle Stephen. You said so yourself.’

‘
Too
big,’ responded Uncle Stephen. ‘Much
too
big.’

The words had been spoken again, and Millie knew they were true.

Uncle Stephen and Millie talked for some time about earlier days and of how happiness was but a dream and of the disappearance of everything that made life worth living. They passed on to Phineas’s lack of prospects and to the trouble inside Millie that no doctor had yet succeeded in diagnosing, even to his own satisfaction. Millie offered to show Uncle Stephen round the garden, now that it had almost stopped raining.