Laura Possessed (19 page)

‘I believe you've nobly submitted to baring your soul to my sister?' Toby Hardy remarked idly.

A tremor shook him. His soul—who had charge of it? He heard in a daze Caroline's low laugh. ‘I trust it hasn't gone that far!'

‘But one has to confess all to a biographer,
surely?'
put in Janet in her clear, rather clipped voice.

‘Not that I'm aware of,' Lewis returned as steadily as he could. Especially not if she knew everything already.

‘Anyway,' observed Edward, ‘the whole point of Laura's deciding on Lewis was to exploit this incomprehensible longing she had to write about violence.'

‘Yes, did you ever get to the bottom of that? She's always been such a gentle little thing, it struck me as being entirely out of character.'

A wail interrupted them from the open window overhead.

‘Oh blast, Lucy's alarm has gone for the ten o'clock feed!' Janet stood up and stretched. ‘What joy it will be when she goes through from six to six!' She nodded vaguely in Lewis's direction. ‘Nice to have met you, Mr. Castleton, but I'm afraid I must ask you to excuse me. Duty calls.'

‘Want any help?' Toby offered without enthusiasm.

‘It would shake you if I said yes!' his wife retorted over her shoulder.

Lewis let their voices wash over him and felt some of the tenseness begin to dissolve. It was all so normal, so everyday, that anything as blatantly abnormal as the thoughts that had jostled in his head earlier simply could not be countenanced. He must take hold of himself. He might not survive a second nervous
collapse.
He realized that Edward was speaking to him.

‘How long do you think all this will take? We can hardly get a word out of Laura these days! It will be pleasant to be able to hold a normal conversation with her again!'

Normal—that word again. Lewis stirred uneasily. What would happen when the book was finished? Would Noel be reluctant, as Laura had hinted, ever to let them go?

He forced himself to answer Edward. ‘I'm not really sure. It seems to be going well, I think.' But at the mention of Laura, all his latent fears had risen again and it was impossible any longer for him to sit there calmly talking. He drained his glass. ‘I hope I'll be invited to the literary lunch to launch it!' he said with a forced laugh, getting to his feet. ‘No, don't get up, but I must be going. Thanks for the drink. Good night.'

His words embraced them all, but his eyes rested for a moment on Caroline's shadowed face. If only she had nothing to do with Four Winds, he might be able to anticipate a possible renewal of their relationship without all the attendant misgivings the house always conjured up. Perhaps after all it had been a mistake to return to Brocklehurst. But perhaps, again, the decision to return had not been his in the first place.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

Lewis did not sleep well that night. During the long dark hours his mind, refusing to be diverted, scuttled backwards and forwards over the sudden dangers this new development had opened up to himself as well as to Laura. Where would it end? After all this time, these five years of penal servitude he had forced himself to survive, for it all suddenly to blow up again—

He leant over the washbasin, peering into the shaving mirror as he scraped the cream off his face, and suddenly his hand jerked, nicking the skin and raising a tiny red bead in the whiteness. Behind him, reflected in the mirror, stood Laura.

‘Is it really you or just another of your apparitions?' he asked brutally, bending down to sluice his face under the tap. He reached for his towel and rubbed it vigorously round his face and neck.

‘I'm sorry if I frightened you,' she said quietly.

‘What the hell are you doing here at this time in the morning?'

‘It's ten o'clock.'

‘The devil it is! I must have fallen asleep after all.'

‘Shall I fix some coffee?'

‘It
might help.'

She moved from the doorway back into the kitchen and he could hear her turning on the tap, the plop of the gas jet and her low, inevitable humming of Noel's tune. The sane, everydayness of the cheap mirror, the soapy stick of shaving cream, wavered and blurred into the shifting miasma of uncertainty and fear. He gripped the edge of the washbasin, head down, wrestling with the doubts and terrors that assailed him. She couldn't know, and yet she did. The crucial point was, did she realize how much she knew?

‘Coffee's ready.' Was it Noel's voice, or Laura's? He could no longer distinguish between them. Slowly, lumberingly, he made his way through to the sun-filled kitchen. She held out his shirt and he put it on and absently began to button it. She sat down at the table, both hands clasped round the hot mug as though, in the warm airlessness of this June morning, she was cold.

He said with an effort, ‘You still haven't told me why you've come.'

‘She asked me to.'

‘Why?'

‘So that you can tell me the whole story.'

‘She's already told you herself.' This conversation—they must both be insane, he thought dazedly.

‘Only parts of it. I need to have it all clear.'

‘Oh, you do?' He leant forward belligerently
in
his chair.

‘Relax, honey.'

His face contorted as his hand snaked out, fastening over her wrist. ‘Noel?' His eyes searched her face with fanatical despair. ‘What do
you
want me to do?'

Under the laser beam of his concentration Laura's features shifted and blurred into a likeness of the face in the photograph in his desk.

‘I want you to stay with me, Lew. Always.'

Laura stirred and sighed, gently extracting her hand from his. His face was haggard as he stared at her. ‘Who are you now?' he asked raggedly.

‘You've got to stop her, Lewis, because I can't. I only wanted to help her, but she won't be content with that any longer. She's getting stronger all the time. I haven't any control now to stop her when she wants to take over.'

‘She was always strong,' he said slowly. ‘Once she made her mind up on something she would go through with it, whatever the cost.'

‘And whoever got hurt in the process?'

‘Yes.' He stared down at the table between them.

‘And she decided not to leave her husband?'

‘But he'd already left her—for four bloody years!'

‘That's not quite the same thing.'

‘Nevertheless, she was weakening. If we'd had another few months, perhaps even weeks,
I
think I could have talked her round, but time was running out on all sides. As soon as I'd attended the California primary, I was supposed to be flying to Paris. The Vietnam peace talks had started the month before and I wanted to be able to report first hand. It was one of the main issues in the election, of course. I was doing my damnedest to persuade her to come with me. I couldn't face the thought of leaving her with nothing definitely decided, and then, at that crucial moment, old Balfour had to get himself wounded.'

‘Balfour?' Her voice broke in on his attention like a clarion. She was staring at him wide-eyed as comprehension began to struggle to the surface.
‘She was General Balfour's wife?'

Too late, he realized what his slip had cost him. Yet surely in time Noel would have told her anyway. He could only watch as she slotted the information into place like the final missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

‘Of course,' she said softly. ‘His wife was killed in a car accident as he was being flown home. Who was talking about—? It was Mr. Sandilands, at the Howards' party, the day I met you.'

He waited, not breathing.

‘He said he thought her death wasn't an accident, that there'd been someone else with her—
you
, Lewis!'

His eyes held hers with a sick resignation.

She went on in a whisper, ‘It must have
been
the most fantastic shock for you, coming so unexpectedly after all that time.'

‘Yes,' he replied woodenly at last. ‘It blew up in my face that day without any warning. You, and Sandilands. At the time I didn't realize it was you who was the greater threat.'

‘You thought of him as a threat? Of course, he said he was going to look into the crash when he got back to the States.' There was a silence which stretched between them, taut as an elastic band which eventually must snap. ‘It was lucky for you he died, wasn't it?'

His eyes didn't leave her face. ‘I suppose you could say that.' He waited, every nerve screaming, for her next comment, but when it came, it was not what he was expecting and he raised his arm to brush away the sweat that was running into his eyes.

‘Did you kill her, Lewis?'

When he could speak, he said jaggedly, ‘I meant to kill us both. I still don't know how I came out of it alive. God knows, I didn't intend to.'

‘A suicide pact?'

‘Not exactly. I hadn't discussed it with her.'

‘Tell me.'

He took an automatic gulp of coffee and almost gagged at the unexpected coldness of it. ‘You know most of it. As I told you, she was slowly beginning to come round to my way of thinking. Not Paris, perhaps, but I think she might have written to Clark and told him the
position.
He'd always said he wouldn't stand in her way. It would have been unpleasant, of course, “Hero's wife deserts him as he fights for democracy”—all that crap, but we could have lived it down. We'd have left the States anyway.' He grimaced. ‘We might have come here and reclaimed Four Winds. That would really have appealed to her. Anyway, I heard on the radio that he'd been wounded and would be flown home as soon as he'd recovered enough to travel. I went straight round to her apartment.' He put his hands suddenly over his face. ‘Don't make me go through that again.'

‘She said that under the circumstances it was out of the question to leave him; that you should go to Paris as you'd intended and try to forget about her; that in time the worst of the pain would fade.'

‘Exactly,' he agreed. ‘You might have been there!' His eyes went over her dully. ‘Perhaps you were.'

‘What then?'

‘Oh, I lost my head. Said she couldn't really have loved me in the first place, all the usual recriminations. It was unfair. I knew how she felt, but I was so appalled at the thought of losing her. She was very white and composed and the more I ranted and raved, the calmer she became. In the end I flung out of the house.'

‘Yes?'

‘Well,
I drank myself insensible and went on drinking more or less continuously for two or three days. I did think of doing away with myself, but I knew she'd feel she was to blame. The only solution seemed for both of us to die, together. At the time it seemed quite logical. Then I heard they were flying Balfour home and I had to move quickly. I rang Noel, told her we couldn't part as we had and suggested she should drive out with me to a motel we'd used before for a last evening together. She agreed, of course, and picked me up in her car. I hadn't one in New York. The traffic frightened the daylights out of me.'

‘And you put something in the drinks?'

‘In hers, yes. I'd worked out it would take effect before we got back home.'

‘Why not in yours too?'

‘Because I wanted to be fully conscious of every minute that I had left with her. And because if something went wrong and she passed out earlier, I had to have my wits about me to get her out of the car.'

‘You didn't mind the thought of being conscious when you actually crashed?'

‘No. In a perverted kind of way I was almost looking forward to it—going out with one hell of a bang.'

She looked at him with a kind of wonder and then asked, ‘What did you use? Sleeping pills?'

‘Yes, ground down.'

‘It
didn't occur to you that you might have caused a serious accident involving other people?'

‘No,' he replied with devastating candour, ‘I didn't think of anyone but ourselves. I can remember every detail of that evening, with her breaking down at last as I seemed to be resigned, pleading with me to say that I understood, that in time we'd be able to think of each other without pain and just be grateful for what we'd had, that we weren't the first people to fall in love and have to part. You know the kind of thing.'

‘And none of it made you change your mind?'

‘No. Quite simply, I didn't believe it. I didn't want to live without her, and I convinced myself that despite what she said, she felt the same. It was just to be a way of putting us both out of our misery.'

‘When did the powder begin to take effect?'

‘Just before we left. She said she felt sleepy. It was very hot in the motel and we went out to the car. I held her for the last time—' His voice shook. ‘We both knew that, but for different reasons. We stayed there for quite a while, partly because I couldn't bear to let her go and partly to be sure the powder was working. She did say at one stage, ‘I don't think I'm fit to drive,' but I told her she was in better shape than I was. In a way it was true. And I think that by that time she didn't really
care
what happened either. I remember watching the silent tears pouring down her face, and I was glad,
glad
that neither of us had to go on much longer.' He was silent for a long time, then he said abruptly, ‘You know the rest—exactly as you dreamt it.'

‘You were flung clear?'

‘Yes, well clear into some bushes. I was knocked out cold but—can you believe it—except for a few bruises and scratches I wasn't hurt at all. Physically, that is. Can you begin to imagine how I felt when I realized what had happened? The car burst into flames almost immediately, apparently, when the petrol tank exploded, and someone was on the scene straightaway. They made a cursory examination round about, according to the next day's papers, but they didn't find me in my bushes and so obviously they assumed she'd been alone. By the time I came round, all the hoo-ha had died down, they'd taken her away and towed off what was left of the car. I remember wandering along in the middle of the highway waiting for some vehicle to knock me down, but I must have had the proverbial drunkard's protection, because none did. Eventually a car drew up alongside and the driver said, ‘You sure look in need of a lift home, buddy!' I tried to resist him but he hauled me inside and I remember mumbling the name of the hotel where I was staying. So that was that. I seemed unable to get myself
killed.'