The Fallen Curtain (20 page)

A cold despair took hold of him. He bore the dog no malice, felt for him no anger, nothing more than the helpless resignation of a father whose child has come into a room and interrupted his love-making. The child comes first—inevitably.

Slowly he put away the cord. He lifted the silver head roughly and the man groaned. There had been a hard metal object in the pocket where the leash was, a brandy flask. Dick uncapped it and poured some of the liquid down the man’s throat. The hound watched, thumping its tail.

“Where—where am I? Wha—what happened?”

Dick didn’t bother to answer him.

“I had a—a bang on the head. God, my head’s sore. I was mugged, was I?” He felt in his pocket and scrabbled with a wallet. “Not touched, thank God. I’ll—I’ll try to sit up. God, that’s better. Where’s Bruce? Oh, there he is. Good boy, Bruce. I’m glad he’s all right.”

“He’s a fine dog,” Dick said remotely, and then, “Come on, you’d better hang on to me. I’ve got a car.”

“You’re most kind, most kind. What a blessing for me you came along when you did.”

Dick said nothing. He almost heaved when the man clung to his arm and leant on him. Bruce anchored to his leash, they set off down the steps to the car. It was a relief to be free of that touch, that solid weight that smelt of the sweat of terror. Dick got Bruce on to the back seat and stroked him, murmuring reassuring words.

The house he was directed to was a big one, almost a mansion on the East Heath. Lights blazed in its windows. Dick hauled the man out and propelled him up to the front door, leaving Bruce to follow. He rang the bell and a uniformed maid answered. Behind her, in the hall, stood a tall young woman in evening dress.

She spoke the one word “Father!” and her voice was sick with dismay. But it was the same voice. He recognised it just as she recognised his when, turning away from the glimpse of wealth in that hall, he said, “I’ll be off now.”

Their eyes met. Her face was chalk-white, made distorted and ugly by the destruction of her hopes. She let her father take her arm and then she snapped, “What happened?”

“I was mugged, dear, but I’m all right now. This gentleman happened to come along at the opportune moment. I haven’t thanked him properly yet.” He put out his hand to Dick. “You must come in. You must let us have your name. No, I insist. You probably saved my life. I could have died of exposure out there.”

“Not you,” said Dick. “Not with that dog of yours.”

“A lot of use he was! Not much of a bodyguard, are you, Bruce?”

Dick bent down and patted the dog. He shook off the detaining hand and said as he turned away, “You’ll never know how much use he was.”

He got into the car without looking back. In the mirror, as he drove away, he saw the woman retreat into the house while her father stood dizzily on the path, making absurd gestures of gratitude after his rescuer.

Dick got home by a quarter to ten. Monty was waiting for him in the hall, but the Chief was still in the sitting room on the settee. Dick put on their leashes and his best coat on Monty and opened the front door.

“Time for a beer before the pub closes, Mont,” he said, “and then we’ll go on the common.” He and the dogs sniffed the diesel-laden air and Monty sneezed. “Bless you,” said Dick. “Lousy hole, this, isn’t it? It’s a bloody shame but you’re going to have to wait a bit longer for our place in Scotland.”

Slowly, because Monty couldn’t make it fast any more, the three of them walked up towards the George Tavern.

It was Mother who told Marjorie about Pauline’s friend, not Pauline herself. Pauline never said much. She had always been a sulky girl, though hardly a girl any more, Marjorie thought. Mother waited until she had gone out of the room to get the tea and then, leaning forward in her chair, whispering, closing both her hands over the top of her walking stick, she said, “Pauline’s got a gentleman friend.”

“How do you know?” asked Marjorie—a stupid question, as there was only one way Mother could know, seeing that she and Pauline were always together.

“He was here last night. He came after I’d gone to bed but I could hear them talking down here. He didn’t stay long and when he was going I heard him say, ‘Speaking as a doctor, Pauline …’ so I reckon she met him when she was in
that place.”

Marjorie didn’t like to hear “that place” spoken of. It was foolish—narrow-minded, George said—but a lunatic asylum is a lunatic asylum even if they do call them mental hospitals these days, and she didn’t care to think of her sister having been in one. A mental breakdown—why couldn’t the specialist have called it a
nervous
breakdown?—was such an awful thing to have in the family.

“Maybe he came—well, professionally,” she said. “Didn’t you ask her?”

“I didn’t like to, dear. You know what Pauline is.”

Marjorie did. And now they had to stop talking about it, for Pauline had come in with the tea things. She buttered a scone for Mother, cut it into small pieces, tucked a napkin round Mother’s neck, and all this she did in silence.

“Why are you using the best china?” Mother said.

“What d’you mean, dear?” said Marjorie. “This is the old blue china you always use.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Marjorie started once more to protest, but Pauline interrupted her. “Leave it. She can’t see. You know how bad her
sight is.” She gave Mother one of her bright nurse’s smiles. “O.K., so we’re using the best china,” she said, and she wiped the corners of Mother’s mouth with a tissue.

Not long after they had finished, Marjorie left. She had the perfectly valid excuse of George and the children. It wasn’t possible for her to stay long—Mother understood that. And she had, after all, washed the dishes before she went, with Pauline’s eye on her and Pauline’s silence more difficult to bear than any noise. On Saturday afternoon she was back again, “just looking in” as she put it, on her way to the shops.

“He was here again last night,” Mother whispered.

“Who was?”

“That doctor friend of Pauline’s. He was here ever so late. I rang my bell for Pauline because I wanted to go to the toilet. It was gone eleven and I could hear him talking after I’d gone back to bed.”

Pauline had been in the garden, getting the clean linen, drawsheets and towels and napkins and Mother’s nightgowns, in from the line. When she re-entered the room Marjorie studied her appearance uneasily. Her sister looked exhausted. She was a tall, gaunt woman, dark and swarthy, and now she was so thin that the shapeless old trousers she wore hung loose against her hips. Dark shadows ringed her eyes, and those eyes had a glazed look, due perhaps to the drugs she had been on ever since she came out of “that place.”

“Have I got a spot?” said Pauline. “Or am I so lovely you can’t take your eyes off me?”

“Sorry, I was off in a dream.” Marjorie said she had better get away before the shops shut, and Mother thanked her for coming “to see an old nuisance like me.” After that one, Marjorie didn’t dare look at Pauline again. She did her shopping and went home in a troubled frame of mind, but she waited until the children had gone out before opening her heart to her husband. Seventeen-year-old Brian and sixteen-year-old Susan were apt, with the ignorance of youth, to remark when their grandmother was mentioned that Nanna was “a dear old love”; that they wouldn’t mind at all if she came to live with them;
and that it was “a drag for Auntie Pauline” never being able to go out.

“Pauline’s got a boy friend, George.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, I’m not. He’s a doctor she met when she was in that Hightrees place, and he’s called round twice in the evenings and stopped ever so late. Mother told me.”

“Well, good old Pauline,” said George. “She’s forty if she’s a day.”

“She’s forty-two,” said Marjorie. “You know very well she’s seven years younger than I am.”

“Doesn’t look it though, does she? People always take you for the younger one.” George smiled affectionately at his wife and took up the evening paper.”

“You’re to listen to me, George. Don’t read that now. I haven’t finished. George, suppose—suppose she was to get married?” The words came out in a breathless, almost hysterical rush. “Suppose she was to marry this doctor?”

“What, old Pauline?”

“Well, why not? I know she’s not young and she’s nothing to look at, but when you think of the women who do get married…. I mean, looks don’t seem to have much to do with it. I don’t care what these young people say nowadays,
all
women want to get married. So why not Pauline?”

“A man’s got to want to marry
them.”

“Yes, but look at it this way. He’s a doctor, and Pauline always wanted to be a doctor, only Mother wouldn’t have it so she had to settle for nursing instead. And she’s got a masculine sort of mind. She can talk way above my head when she wants. They might have a lot in common.”

“Good luck to her then, is what I say. She’s never so much as been out with a man all the time I’ve known her, and if she can get herself one now and get married—well, like I said, the best of luck.”

“But, George, don’t you see? What about Mother? A doctor’s bound to have a practice and be overworked and everything.
He wouldn’t want Mother. You don’t know how awful Mother is. She gets Pauline up five or six times some nights. She rings that bell by her bedside for the least little thing. And when she’s up she keeps Pauline on the trot, wanting her glasses or her knitting or her pills. Pauline never complains but sometimes I reckon she’d do anything to get away. I know I shouldn’t say it, and yet I wonder if she didn’t stage that breakdown when Mother had her first stroke in the hope she’d never have to go back and …”

“Aren’t you getting steamed up about nothing?” George said placidly. “As far as we know, the bloke’s only been there twice and maybe he’ll never go there again.”

But this was the major worry of Marjorie’s life: that the time might come when Mother would have to live with her. She hardly understood how she had managed to escape it so long. From the onset of Mother’s illness, she had been the obvious person to care for her. For one thing, she was and always had been Mother’s favourite daughter. Pauline was to have been a boy. Even now Marjorie could remember, as a child of seven, Mother saying to her friends, “I’m carrying forward, so it’ll be a boy this time.” Paul. The name was ready, the blue baby clothes. Mother had never really got over having a second daughter. There had been, Marjorie recalled, some neglect, some degree of cruelty. Scathing words for Pauline when she wanted to take up medicine, cruel words when she had never married. Marjorie had quite a big house, big enough for Mother to have a bed-sitting room of her own; she had no job; her children fended for themselves. How lucky it was for her Pauline hadn’t been Paul, for no man would have given up his job, his flat, his whole way of life, to care for an unloved, unloving mother….

While Mother lived, though, it would never be too late for a change. And Marjorie knew she couldn’t depend on George and the children for support. Even George would surrender quietly to the invasion of his home by a mother-in-law, for it wouldn’t be he Mother would get up in the night or nag about draughts and rheumatism and eyedrops and hot milk. He
wouldn’t be expected to listen to interminable stories about what things were like in nineteen-ten, or be asked daily in a mournful tone: “D’you think I’ll see another winter out, dear?”

She had always, in spite of her seniority, been a little afraid of Pauline. As a child, her sister had been a very withdrawn person, spending long hours shut up in her bedroom. She had had an imaginary friend in those days, one of those not uncommon childhood creations—Marjorie’s own Susan had behaved in much the same way—but Pauline’s Pablo had persisted almost into her teens, and had always been put forward as the mouthpiece of Pauline’s own feelings. “Pablo says he doesn’t want to go,” when some outing had been proposed on which Pauline herself didn’t want to go; “Pablo hates you,” when there was a need to express Pauline’s own hatred. Pablo from “Pablo the Fisherman,” a popular song of the time, Marjorie supposed. He had disappeared at Pauline’s puberty, and since then Marjorie couldn’t remember her sister once showing her feelings. No, not when Father died or Marjorie’s first baby was born dead. And when she had been told that the only alternative to Mother’s going into a sixty-pound-a-week nursing home was her abandoning her job and her home, she had said merely, with a blank face, “I suppose I’ve got no choice, then.”

Never once had she suggested Marjorie as an alternative. But the first time Marjorie called at the new Pauline-Mother ménage Pauline, who in the past had always kissed her when they met and parted, made a quiet but marked point of not doing so. And since that day they had never exchanged a kiss. Not when Mother had her second stroke; not when Mother was temporarily in hospital and Marjorie visited Pauline in Hightrees. No complaints about the arduousness of her duties ever escaped Pauline’s narrow-set lips, nor would she ever protest to Mother herself, however exigent she might be. Instead, she would sometimes enumerate in a cold, monotonous voice the tasks she had accomplished since the night before.

“Mother got me up at midnight and again at four and five. But she still had a wet bed. I got everything washed out by eight and then I turned out the living room. I went down to
the shops but I forgot Mother’s prescription, so I had to go back for it.”

Marjorie would cringe with guilt and shame during this catalogue and actually shiver when, at the end of it, Pauline turned upon her large, glazed eyes in which seemed to lurk a spark of bitter irony. Those eyes said, though the lips never did, “To her that has shall be given, but from her that has not shall be taken away even that which she has.” Marjorie could have borne it better, have worried less and agonised less, if they could have had a real ding-dong battle. But that was impossible with Pauline. Apologise to Pauline for a missed visit and all she said was “That’s O.K. Suit yourself.” Tell her to cheer up and you got “I’m all right. Leave me alone.” Offer sympathy combined with excuses about having your own family to attend to, and you got no answer at all, unless a stare of profound contempt is an answer. So Marjorie felt she couldn’t, as yet at any rate, tackle Pauline about her doctor friend.