Appointment with Yesterday (7 page)

It was ridiculous, of course: why on earth
shouldn’t
Mrs Graham’s phone ring now and again? Why in all the world should it be anything to do with Milly? And yet, as she stood there, behind the closed door of the dining-room, Milly felt her pulse quicken. Her palms began sweating … soon her heart was leaping in her throat with great, panicky thuds, and her legs trembled so that she could hardly go on standing. She heard Mrs Graham cross the room, lift the receiver….

“Seacliffe 49901,” Milly heard her say briskly, and held her breath as she listened. In a moment now it would be all right. She would hear Mrs Graham saying something like: “Oh hul
lo
,
Christine …!” or “Thank you
so
much, Tuesday will do splendidly …!” something of that sort, something to show conclusively that it was nothing whatsoever to do with Milly. Well, of course it wasn’t. How could it be? No one in all the world knew she was here … how ridiculous to panic like this about nothing!

“Ye-es,” she heard Mrs Graham saying, in a guarded sort of voice: and then, more decisively: “Yes, she’s been here since ten o’clock….” And after that came a pause, which to Milly’s ringing ears seemed to last a lifetime. Then Mrs Graham’s voice again: “Well, I can’t help that, can I? But who told you about her? How did you know?”

By this time, if only her legs would have carried her so far, Milly would have been out of the dining-room window and sliding down whatever drainpipe there might or might not be to the ground three storeys below: but so paralysed was she with the sheer, incredible horror of it, that she could only stand there. Who had traced her …? How …? Or had it all been a plot, a police trap carefully laid for her? What a fool she had been …! Why hadn’t her suspicions been aroused by the incredible ease with which she had walked into this job …? Why hadn’t she realised that it was a trap, that Mrs
Graham must be in league with the police …? Even as these speculations rang and rattled through her whirling brain, she realised that the telephone conversation had broken off: Mrs Graham was crossing the hall … opening the dining-room door … and now she was standing there, in the doorway, fixing Milly with a hard, suspicious stare: and behind the suspicion, there was the faint, unmistakeable flicker of fear….

“A phone call, Mrs Er,” she said accusingly, “from a neighbour of mine. She’s heard I’ve got a new woman, someone seems to have seen you coming in this morning, and she wants to know if you’ve got any time left to work for
her
? She wants to talk to you about it. Now, you will remember, won’t you, Mrs Er, that you undertook to do mornings for
me.
You won’t let me down, will you? From what Mrs Day tells me, I think she may be going to offer you forty-pence an hour, but you
will
remember, won’t you, Mrs Er, that you get your
lunches
here. A really good lunch, every day….”

Luckily, Mrs Graham was so thoroughly wrapped up in these anxieties that she did not notice the way Milly almost danced across the hall to the telephone: nor did she hear the breathless relief in Milly’s voice as she settled for three afternoons a week with this Mrs Day. It was her
own
sense of relief, not Milly’s, that was engaging Mrs Graham’s whole attention: the colour was visibly returning to her cheeks as it slowly became clear from Milly’s side of the conversation that there was to be no real betrayal. It was only
afternoons
Mrs Er was engaging herself for with the perfidious Mrs Day!

But the suspense, while it lasted, had made Mrs Graham irritable.

“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” she grumbled, as Milly put the phone down. “The way you can’t keep anything to yourself in a place like this!
I
never told anyone I’d got a woman … I don’t know how these things get about! I mean, you’ve hardly been in the place two hours, and she has to phone up …! Oh, well….”—Mrs Graham made a visible effort to recover her poise. “It’s not that I
mind
Mrs Day having you in the afternoons, Mrs Er, not a bit, I’m only too glad, if that’s what
suits you both. It’s only that I do wish people wouldn’t go round
telling
everybody…. You
won’t
let me down, Mrs Er, will you?”

And Milly, graciously, as became the great lady she had so recently become, promised that she would not.

M
ILLY
HAD RARELY
in her life felt happier than she did that afternoon, as she walked home along the
sea-front
with one pound forty in her pocket, and with a lunch of lamb chops, mashed potatoes and sprouts still warming her through and through, like remembered joy. The wind had dropped, and through the gathering mist of the winter afternoon Milly could hear the invisible small waves slapping and sighing along the shingle, and she felt herself alive, and tingling with hope, in a way that she had not known since her teens. Oh, she had experienced hope all right, in adult life: wild, desperate, frenzied hopes, sometimes to be fulfilled for a while, more often to be disappointed, to be shattered and destroyed under her very eyes. But this was something different. Adult hopes are hopes
of
something … that this or that will happen or not happen. What Milly was experiencing now was the sort of hope that belongs normally only to the very young: not hope
of
anything in particular, but just Hope, its very essence, huge, unfocused, as undefined and as ungraspable as Eternity itself.

It was because she
was
young, of course: younger than she could ever remember, only three days old. Propelled by disaster grown too big to grasp, she had finally been hurled like a thunderbolt out of all her worries, all her fears, out of all the burden of her mistakes and crimes, and had crashed down into peace: into the still, golden winter mist, by the side of the quiet sea. It was like dying and going to
heaven … it was like dying as a peculiarly intense form of life … it was new, new! And in all this new heaven or new earth, whichever it might be, Milly was the newest thing of all!

What a success she had made of her new life, so far! Last night’s euphoria was still with her, quite undiminished by that brief panic over the telephone call this morning. Rather, that moment of overwhelming terror and guilt seemed to have done something to her which had wiped out guilt and terror for ever. Because her fears at that particular moment had proved unfounded, she now felt immunised against fear.

It was like being vaccinated—something like that. She was innoculated, now, against trouble, in some way that the doctors don’t know of. The sea-mist gleaming all around her was like the lifting of the anaesthetic after an operation … there was that same dazed, exalted feeling that the pain is all over … when in fact it may sometimes be only just
beginning.

But not all the gains were illusory: Milly was sure of that. She
had
done well as a Daily Help: astonishingly,
unprecedentedly
well, considering how few things she had succeeded in doing well in her former life. She had cleaned Mrs Graham’s kitchen and dining-room really thoroughly: she had kept Alison quiet: she had helped cook lunch; and (she was sure of it) provided real moral support to her employer when, at twelve-fifty or thereabouts, disaster struck, in the form of Professor Graham coming home to lunch a full ten minutes earlier than expected.

“Oh, God!” his wife had greeted him, glancing up from her typewriter with a hunted look. “What’s happened, Arnold? You said one o’clock! You said you wouldn’t be back for lunch till one!”

Milly, peering through the kitchen door, saw a tall, scholarly-looking man with greying hair settling his umbrella carefully in the umbrella stand. Then he straightened up and walked towards the sitting-room door. At the door he paused, took off his horn-rimmed glasses, all steamed-up from the
sudden change from outdoors to the central-heated flat, and set himself to polishing them assiduously with his
handkerchief
. His mild brown eyes blinked owlishly without them, creating a barrier of gentle non-seeing-ness between himself and his aggrieved wife. Only after he had settled the glasses on his face again and returned the handkerchief to his pocket, did he seem constrained to answer her.

“I got a lift,” he explained. “Carstairs has to go to the Library Committee lunch, and so he offered to drop me on the way. But don’t worry, dear, finish what you’re doing, I’m in no hurry.”

“Finish what I’m doing!” His wife, with a huge sigh, pushed her papers aside and ostentatiously fitted the lid back on to the typewriter. “I sometimes think I’ll
never
finish
anything
I’m doing! First Alison woke up early from her morning sleep—and now
you’re
home! You don’t know how lucky you are, Arnold, being allowed to
work
when you’re working! How I envy you that room of yours at the University … all your things to hand…. No one bothering you …!”

“They
do
bother me, you know, dear, sometimes,” he pointed out mildly. “The telephone goes a lot in my room, you’d be surprised. Committees. Visiting lecturers. Trouble in the typing pool. All sorts of things. I can’t always get on with my work as I’d like to.”

“But you don’t have Alison screaming her head off!” countered Mrs Graham. “And lunch to see to … and then I’ve got this new woman this morning, I’ve had to settle
her
in. It’s amazing how many questions they seem to have to ask …
Mrs
Er
!
”—here she raised her voice to a ringing shout to reach Milly in the kitchen—though in fact Milly could already hear every word of her clear, carrying,
complaining
voice.—“Mrs Er! Could you hurry the potatoes a bit? Professor Graham is back earlier than he planned….”

How one hurried potatoes, Milly wasn’t quite sure. They boiled at the speed they did boil, no matter who went down on their knees to them. But she judged (rightly) that the shouted
instruction was meant more as a reproof to Professor Graham than as a command to Milly: and so she simply went on with her preparations for the meal as quickly as she could, and radiated respectful sympathy—on, off, on, off—as Mrs Graham flapped in and out of the kitchen bemoaning her unfinished correlations.

Thanks to Milly, lunch was on the table, and Alison strapped in her high-chair, on the dot of one, and so Professor Graham had nothing to complain of, as his wife assured him, three or four times in succession. He’d
said
one o’clock, hadn’t he?

And indeed he wasn’t complaining. He sat consuming his lamb chops, mashed potatoes and sprouts with obvious
enjoyment
, a copy of
Scientific
American
propped against the bottle of ketchup in front of him, and on his face the look of a man at peace with the world: a look off which his wife’s barbed attempts at conversation bounced harmlessly.

So after a bit she turned her attention to Milly, and began explaining to her about Alison’s diet, and how important it was that she should have plenty of salad now that she was eleven months old and on mixed feeding. She pointed out to Milly, with modest maternal pride, that a tomato and a shredded lettuce leaf had been added to Alison’s share of the meal: and Milly murmured suitable words of approval, meanwhile
watching
with fascinated admiration, Alison’s skill in extracting from the mush in front of her every scrap of tomato and lettuce leaf and throwing it on the floor. Like most babies in this
diet-conscious
age, she had a passion for all non-protein, non-vitamin foods, and it seemed to Milly that she and her mother had evolved a very good working arrangement: Mrs Graham talked fluently and enthusiastically to all comers about how much salad she gave Alison and how many vitamins it contained, and what a good effect they had on the child’s teeth and
complexion
(which were indeed perfectly all right), while Alison stuffed herself contentedly on mashed potato flavoured with ketchup. This way, they were both happy. The only loser was Milly, whose task it proved to be to sweep, wipe and scrub
Alison’s vitamins from the floor after the meal was over.

Still, one pound forty! Not to mention Mrs Graham’s heartfelt “Well, thank you, Mrs Er! You
will
be back
tomorrow
, won’t you? Ten o’clock, as usual?”

Rich, and successful, and sought-after, Milly had sailed down in the lift to the ground floor, and swept like royalty out of the central-heated building and into the sudden,
exhilarating
cold of a January afternoon, with the white, glittering fog rolling in from the sea.

By the time she had re-lived this triumphant morning in every detail, as she strolled along, Milly had reached the point where she must leave the sea front and turn inland. Actually, this was by no means the quickest way from Mrs Graham’s to Milly’s lodgings, but somehow she had wanted, in her
happiness
, to walk along by the side of the sea; to let the sea share it with her, its soft waves rippling in through the mist, just as it had shared with her, thirty-six hours ago, the long night of storm, and darkness, and despair.

W
HEN
M
ILLY
ARRIVED
home—for this was how she already felt about No. 32 Leinster Terrace—she was greeted by a wonderful smell of freshly-baked cakes. Very tentatively—because she didn’t yet know what, apart from not having baths after eleven, lodgers were allowed to do or where they were allowed to go—she peered in through the half-open kitchen door. Mrs Mumford, in a torn but
colourful
print overall, was at that moment up-ending a large round cake-tin over a rack on the scrubbed wooden table. Delicious steam, like incense, rose all around the tin and on either side, intent as acolytes at some holy rite, sat Jacko and Kevin, sniffing the sacred fumes and watching the mystic procedures with reverent adoration.

“I tell you, I’m not touching it till Sunday!” Mrs Mumford was scolding. “It’s for Sunday, this cake, d’you think I’m going to be shamed in front of them all by serving a cake for Sunday tea that’s been cut into? What d’you think I am? And it’s not a scrap of good the two of you looking at me like that, you can keep sitting there till they come and take you away in your coffins, I’m not giving you a single crumb …!”

All the while this tirade had been pouring from her lips, Mrs Mumford had been scrabbling about in the table drawer. Now she brought out a long, sharp knife, and, still scolding, she proceeded to cut two generous slices from the big golden-brown cake. Steam surged up from the incisions, and as Mrs Mumford plonked the slices in front of her two devotees, Milly could see the lightness of the texture and the thick scattering of raisins.

“Ah, that’s the stuff!”

“Good old Mums!”

Both boys spoke with their grateful mouths already crammed; and Mrs Mumford pursed up her lips in an attempt to hide the smile of pleasure and culinary pride that was threatening to undermine her authority.

“Not a scrap more, not one scrap!” she was beginning threateningly when Jacko at that moment caught sight of Milly hovering outside the door.

“Barney!” he managed to choke out hospitably through his mouthful of cake. “Hi! Barney!” Then, turning back to Mrs Mumford, he cleared a space in his mouth to enunciate more intelligibly: “Hi, Mums, Mrs Barnes is back! Let’s have her in to the tea party! Come on in, Barney!”

At this, Milly could hardly do less than put her face round the door and apologise (for what, she was not quite sure, as she had done nothing at all, but it was obvious that an apology was called for). Mrs Mumford meantime
contemplated
this new arrival with an air of both irritation and relief. “There goes another slice of my cake!” she seemed to be thinking sourly: and also “Thank goodness, another
woman,
she’ll
understand how put-upon I am!” Accordingly, she set a large slice of cake before Milly, put on the kettle for tea, meanwhile enlarging on the trials and tribulations of being landlady to a pair of idle layabouts who thought that cakes grew on trees, and that three pounds fifty a week entitled them to pester the life out of her all day long, and to eat her out of house and home into the bargain. “See what I mean?” she finished, planting two further slices of cake on to the boys’ plates. “Now I’m going to have to make another cake for my son and that minx on Sunday! I can say goodbye to this one, that’s for sure!” She gazed with ill-concealed satisfaction at the remnant of her much-appreciated creation, poured Milly a cup of strong, hot tea, and then settled down to telling her visitor about the price of raisins, and how her daughter-in-law had never even written to thank her for the Christmas pudding she’d taken over last year. “Full of best brandy, too!” she grumbled. “It’s the last time I’m making the Christmas pudding for
that
lot, and that’s a promise …!”

Milly, beginning to suspect that this was a promise that had been made, and broken, ever since the son’s marriage, answered non-committally, but with all due sympathy. She was beginning to like this snappy little woman and her warm, untidy kitchen: and as for Jacko and Kevin, she felt that she had known them all her life. This was her home. This was where she belonged.

So it was all the more of a shock, when she went up to her room half an hour later, to find a strange suitcase standing just inside her door. It was large, and shabby, tightly strapped, and covered with foreign labels …
Geneva
… Beirut … Delhi … Milly stared at the exotic names in a sort of trance of dismay, while her mind slowly came to grips with the idea that someone else must be moving into her room! Some horrible person with real money instead of a dud cheque-book … with real luggage instead of an implausible story about the left-luggage office! The sense of betrayal rose in Milly’s throat like sickness. Why had Mrs Mumford said nothing?—Why had she welcomed
Milly into the kitchen to cake and tea, like an old friend, and never a word about this plot to throw her out into the street? Out into the street, right back to the beginning, all her efforts, all her achievements, fallen about her like a house of cards! Had Mrs Mumford heard some rumour about her new lodger—had she guessed something? There had been nothing in the papers this morning, of that Milly had made sure: but what about the evening papers? The evening papers from London? Had there been a
photograph
? Had Mrs Mumford, seeing the likeness, decided that Better Safe than Sorry, that When in Doubt, Don’t—any one of those countless depressing maxims which make life so difficult for anyone trying to get away with
anything
, and so boring for everyone else? But in that case, why the cake and tea, and the friendly conversation? … Least Said, Soonest Mended, no doubt … Milly felt fury boil up inside her, only to curdle slowly into despair. To roam once again homeless through the winter night…. To fight death off yet again, for what, for what …? And at this moment a clatter of feet on the stairs announced the arrival of Kevin and Jacko from the kitchen. Were
they
in the plot, too? After all their friendliness this morning, after all that exchange of inmost thoughts, of life-stories true and false, not to mention the Ricicles … had they, too, connived at her betrayal? She came out on to the landing to confront them: she tried to speak, but something as big as a billiard-ball in her throat seemed to choke her.

“What ho, Barney!” Jacko greeted her gaily: and Kevin, close behind, added: “Have you looked in your room, Mrs Barnes? There’s a surprise for you!”

“A surprise …!” Milly almost gagged on the word … but now the two young men were upon her, almost dragging her into her room.

“See?” Jacko was swinging the alien suitcase above his head like a trophy: and Kevin added, more soberly: “It was my idea, Mrs Barnes. I got it from a chap I know in
Medical School. Old Mums fell for it like a monkey falling off a log….”

“Yes,” interrupted Jacko, “she’d been going on half the morning, you see, about how funny it was that this Mrs Barnes hadn’t fetched her luggage yet: and when the Mums starts saying something’s funny, then you know it’s serious. So we thought it over, Kev and I, and we came up with this idea—”

“
I
came up with it,” Kevin interposed. “
You
only—”

“Yes. Well. Anyway.” Jacko looked momentarily aggrieved at this interruption to the flow of his narrative: then his native ebullience took over again. “Anyway, like I said, we got this idea of borrowing some luggage for you. Something real classy, to stop the Mums in her tracks! And it so happens that Kev has this classy friend in Medic., so—”

“He’s not a friend, I just happen to know him,”
interrupted
Kevin defensively: and Milly understood at once that to admit to upper-class friends would be damaging to his status in the student community. Lads like Kevin and Jacko, busy trying to live-down their glaringly non-working-class backgrounds, had to be careful about this sort of thing.

“He’s not a bad guy, though, in some ways.” Kevin resumed. “He said it was OK about the suitcase, so long as he could have it back for the summer, and so—”

“We lugged it in as if it weighed a ton.”—Jacko took up the story again, swinging the empty suitcase this way and that to emphasise the cleverness of the trick. “We made sure that the Mums heard us coming in, and when she stuck her nose out to see what was going on, we told her we’d fetched your case from the station for you. It was too heavy for you to fetch yourself, we said! Oh, you should have seen us, Barney, humping it up the stairs, gasping and straining at nothing—Look, like this!”

Swinging the empty case to the floor, Jacko reproduced the pantomime for Milly’s benefit, bending to the imaginary weight, and panting for breath. “Good, isn’t it?”

“As a comic turn, yes,” observed Kevin drily. “But as a
serious attempt to kid Mrs Mums that it was a respectable item of luggage belonging to a respectable lady—well, I don’t know why you didn’t dress up as a clown and sling
custard-pies
around as well, just to make sure! I was scared every minute she was going to ask us what was in it to make it so heavy—That’s all we needed, to have the Mums searching it for bombs, when the whole idea was to lull her suspicions!”

“Oh, gee, it was the best bit of acting outside of the West End for years! It had the Mums eating out of our hands! And was she impressed! Look, Barney! See the labels we’ve given you!”

Looking closer, Milly saw now that on each of the
flamboyant
foreign labels, some unknown name had been carefully erased, and “Milly Barnes” had been substituted, in small, neat capitals.

Her two knights-errant seemed so pleased with themselves, and were so obviously waiting for little cries of admiration and gratitude from her, that she hadn’t the heart to reveal her qualms about the whole business, or to point out to them that the fictitious story of her life—hard enough to make watertight anyway—was henceforth going to be further complicated by the necessity for fitting into it spells of globe-trotting on this daunting scale. How was a life of devotion to her invalid father in the depths of the country to be reconciled with a giddy round of visits to half the capitals in Europe? Lisbon—Copenhagen—Athens—Madrid … her eyes scanned the array warily, and she tried to remember how much of the
invalid-father
stuff she had given Mrs Mumford…. Or was that the story for Mrs Graham …? Had she told Mrs Mumford merely that she was a widow …? From now on, she would keep notes—if necessary in columns, on squared paper—so that she could see at a glance whom she had told what to. System and orderliness were clearly as necessary to a career of deception as to any other calling.

Meanwhile, the two eager young faces were beaming on her expectantly, awaiting suitably fulsome expressions of gratitude
and of admiration for their cleverness: and she proferred both, wholeheartedly. The genuine friendship and concern for her that had gone into the prank were heartwarming: as to its wisdom, she kept her doubts to herself. She could only hope that the shrewd-eyed Mrs Mumford was as easily deceived as these two lads seemed to imagine.

After they had gone, all puffed-up and glowing with their good deed for the day, Milly kicked off her shoes, and settled herself on her bed to think. It was cold, but not unbearably so. With the eiderdown over her knees, and her coat clutched about her shoulders, she was comfortable enough, except for her feet, which were aching and tired. She had not noticed her tiredness while she was bustling about at Mrs Graham’s, with one eye on Alison and the other on the clock: but she realised now how unaccustomed her body was to hard work. The months that lay behind her had seemed, in the living, to be months of almost intolerable strain; but in point of fact they had been months of rotting; of slow, insidious decay, a slackening of all the fibres, of mind as well as body, under the encroaching shadow of fear.

*

Shadows … shadows … a blotting out of daylight, a
barricade
, thicker than death itself, between herself and the sun … this had been Milly’s first impression of the basement flat in Lady Street, when she and Gilbert Soames had returned to it after the strained, registry-office wedding, and the nearly silent wedding lunch which had followed for the two of them in the dark, expensive restaurant, both of them sunk in thoughts unmentionable to the other, and scarcely able to eat. Gilbert had paid the huge, futile bill for the uneaten food without the faintest quiver of dismay on his aristocratic face, and had then summoned a taxi and handed Milly into it as though she was a queen. In silence, they had driven back through the tired August streets, heavy with the fag-end of summer, and with the faint. South London haze blurring, ever so slightly, the heat of the afternoon. Milly (already she was thinking of herself, in retrospect, as Milly: her old name had become as
remote as a dream)—Milly remembered how she had sat in the corner of the taxi feeling very tidy and compact, and vaguely
surprised
to find that she was feeling nothing else of any kind. She wasn’t even feeling too hot, in spite of her new cream-coloured crimplene suit with its high neck and elbow-length sleeves. So she sat, staring out at the shopping crowds of the Brixton High Road, and at the heavy, muted sunshine, and waited to feel something. For she had not, as yet, given a name to the small, nagging sensation that had awakened somewhere inside her at the moment when she was saying “I will!” She had not recognised it as dismay, still less as horror: and she had, indeed, found it easy to forget about it, after those first few moments. What with the necessity for looking her best and happiest in that photograph that was to go to Julian; and then the difficulty of persuading the photographer to have the prints ready before the weekend—all this gave little time for speculation on such trivial matters as whether her marriage would be a success, and whether the rest of her life, and Gilbert’s, was going to be worth living. If only the prints could be ready on Friday, before noon, then there was every chance that Julian would get his copy on Monday. The air-mails were pretty good, usually: letters often crossed the Atlantic faster than they crossed London, that’s what everyone said. With luck, the photograph, proof of the wedding, would reach Boston (where Julian—the brightest star in all the glittering brain-drain of that year—had recently landed some kind of high-powered research job)—it would reach Boston first thing on Monday morning. That would be good. Monday morning, going off to work with the shock of it still raw in him, and with no time to go over it all with Cora, the two of them consoling themselves by thinking up catty remarks, and looking for secret strains in the brightness of the pictured smiles.