Death Lives Next Door

What would they have said, she wondered, if they knew the real cause for her silence? She was silent because there was practically nothing she could say. She could never speak professionally again about her old subject: she had forgotten everything she knew. When she came round to life again after her husband’s death she had found that all her knowledge, all her carefully acquired techniques had been erased from her mind. Six years of work had gone in a few hours. She was not only ignorant, she was worse than ignorant, her mind blocked all further studies on this subject. Marion knew when to take a hint from the Gods; she rebuilt her life on different foundations.

But it was not a story she wanted her sober, realistic, feet-on-the-ground companions to know.

Down in the kitchen below Marion’s sitting-room Joyo was also watching the man from the window. She was as aware of his presence as Marion, but in a different kind of way. But Joyo was a different sort of person. She was small and sturdy and given to wearing bright peasant clothes. Joyo was not her real name, of course, but one she had adopted in defence against her real one, about which she preferred not to think; she had got it as a matter of fact from a gay Australian in the canteen where she had worked during the war. The war had been Joyo’s apogee, frankly she had never had it so good again. The laughter, and the crowding together, and the tension, even the danger, had suited her. She had been out, free. And then, the war over, back she was obliged to pop like Cinderella. She had a gay volatile temperament, although in her bad moods or when her head ached it was as well to keep out of her way.

But it was a bright cheerful face which stared from the window now. She was passionately interested in the Watcher, and unlike Marion would have liked to have asked him into the house. But being more worldly than Marion she could also see the danger.

She moved across the kitchen idly picking up a bit of pastry off the cinnamon apple tart as she passed, and then suddenly doing a little dance in the middle of the kitchen, just because the floor was bare and sunny. She looked at her face in the mirror. The bright orange lipstick which had so captivated her in the advertisements shone on her lips. Joyo kept a supply of make-up in the kitchen cupboard in a box labelled Oxo. It made her feel gay when the world was dull. It was a little secret she kept from Marion, although privately she thought Marion must be pretty slow not to have discovered it. She poked at her treasures, lipsticks, nail varnish, powder and scent. There was also a photograph in there which she studied with interest. It was not of anyone she was fond of, or indeed of anyone she had ever known, but it had won a money prize for her and Joyo, who was a frugal soul, appreciated that. She tucked the money into her purse. She dabbed a little scent behind her ears before going to look in the oven. She would have liked to have her hair dyed that deep mauve she so much admired, but she feared that it might embarrass Marion, not that Marion and Joyo always saw eye to eye by any means, but they had lived together for so long now that Joyo had learnt how far she could go.

Joyo looked wistfully at the coalman delivering coal next door but one. She fancied she knew his face. He turned, and she was quite sure: she had seen him at the little café down by the station where they played music and where she enjoyed herself so much when she got the chance. She had been there last Wednesday and unless she was much mistaken so had the coalman. He looked cleaner, of course (not so much cleaner as the honesty which lay close to the surface in Joyo obliged her to say), and he looked happier. Indeed he had been very happy dancing the cha-cha to a tune which had set Joyo’s feet tapping. She regretted that she had not been dancing herself but her companion at the time, a morose man from Manchester that she had met on the railway station, had not, as he himself put it, been much of a dancer. Joyo would never see him again and she did not care. She liked men and their company but she tried, as far as possible, to avoid permanent relationships. She would not, in any case, have wanted to know the Mancunian any longer. He had been tactless.

“You don’t want to dance that sort of thing, my dear,” he had said, patting her hand, “not at our age.”

One offence: for Joyo did not care to be touched unless she said. Double offence: he was at least ten years older than Joyo. So she moved her hand hastily away and upset a cup of coffee over him. It was one of those things that Joyo could never be quite sure she had done on purpose or not. The coffee did him no harm so far as Joyo could see, but it had an immediate and savage effect upon his emotions. From a nice, polite, quiet if boring man who was just buying Joyo a friendly cup of coffee while he waited for his train, he was transformed into a loud talker and hard knee-gripper. Poor Joyo was horrified and at once began to think of ways to keep his voice and his hand down; she was experienced and worldly enough to recognise that it was for her to cope. Sadly she recalled the man in Bow who had climbed up the window curtains and the man in Southend who had crawled under the table. Neurotics seemed to be her lot.

Fortunately the stain of coffee on the cloth, long and boot-shaped, reminded him of Italy, and Italy of the Battle of Cassino.

“Here was us,” he said, sprinkling sugar in a circle lavishly round the table. “Here were the Jerries,” and a large amount of salt went down. “Here’s the mountain,” and he staggered over with the coffee urn, then to Joyo’s horror began to look around for the Benedictine Monastery. There was a bottle of Benedictine on a shelf within his reach and his hand stretched out for it. “Here we are,” he said cheerfully, “very suitable.” And the bottle went on top of the coffee urn. Joyo was heartily glad that the proprietor was on the telephone, and got to her feet with a view to slipping out.

Unluckily the coalman, who had finished his dancing, had also been at the Battle of Cassino.

“Here,” he said. “Here, chum, you’ve got it all wrong. We were here.” He sugared yet another area of the cloth. “And the Jerries were here.” This time he used pepper and Joyo at once began to sneeze loudly.

“Naw,” said a third man also coming over. “That’s not right. What you want …”

“Were you there?”

“Naw,” said the man, “never left England, not me. In a reserved occupation. But I’ve been watching Monty on television, see. He ought to know. You’ve got the monastery in the wrong place … It was lower down.”

Joyo was desperately embarrassed, and tried to look as though she had nothing to do with them, but they would not let her get away with this, and pressed her into service to stand between them as the Tenth German Army Group. A dangerous thing to be she began to feel as it looked as though the believer in the Up Monastery and the believer in the Down Monastery might come to blows over this issue before they could fight out the battle proper.

“You don’t know nothing about it,” sneered the coalman, rapidly seizing the bottle of Benedictine. “Everyone knows the ruddy old monastery was at the top. That’s what the battle was about.” As he spoke his fingers were quickly but almost absently undoing the bottle. He sniffed. “Only a dummy,” he said, disappointed.

Joyo was under the table by this time, hoping that no one would notice her, but as she was still sneezing she was afraid they might. But the disappointment over the bottle, in which all three seemed to share, reconciled them and they sat down and began to talk over the Italian campaign. No one took any more notice of Joyo and after a bit she crept out from under the table and went home. But she saw the proprietor emerge fiercely as she left. It might be as well, reflected Joyo, to keep out of the Mocha Mecca for some time. Besides, she had a small memento of the Mecca in her pocket.

The coalman finished his job and the van moved off. It was easier now for Joyo to see across the road.

Yes, the watcher was still there. What was he doing? What was he doing in Marion’s life? She felt sure he had come to see Marion. She felt a little premonitory thrill of terror.

And from her kitchen window she could see, what Ezra could not see, that Rachel was lurking in the corner between the house and high wall.

Chapter Two (#ulink_09d983bc-76ef-5610-a38f-853dc1343908)

Someone had once called Rachel the girl who knows everybody and there was a lot of truth in this. Rachel was of academic stock: a member of a real old Oxford family, as yet another friend had said. In fact, you might have said of three important Oxford families, all of them inter-married into one famous clan. The families were: the Leavers, the Boxers and the Hansoms; all equally distinguished and equally clever. Old President Leaver had had the honour, way back in the nineteenth century, of leading his college forward into the world of science; he was not a scientist himself, but he had seen the advisability of electing an eminent scientist to a fellowship at a time when this was not so common in Oxford. He had thus established himself for ever as an advanced man and his family were bound to be advanced and liberal also. It had sometimes been difficult for his descendants to be advanced and liberal enough, they had sought for causes to show their progressive minds, they had advocated votes for women and birth control, they had fought in the Spanish Civil War, and since then they had signed peace pledges, denounced colour bars and marched upon rocket bases. It was difficult for their fellow-citizens to deny that they were very often right in what they proclaimed, but all the same they were irritating people.

The Boxers had brought plain dottiness into the clan; it was a highly intellectual dottiness and, therefore, much prized in Oxford circles. Dr. Boxer was famous as the man who failed to remember the face of his own wife after an exceptionally dull dinner party at his own house and thrust her out into the cold after the departing guests with the remark: “Go home, dear lady!” He did not drink, so it was not to be explained that way. He was also noted for his command of seven different languages and for the polite abuse he could utter in all of them. He had been heard to boast in his high sweet voice when in the seclusion of his college common-room when his colleagues were occupied with port and thick cigars that he knew the verb “to …” (and here he would leave a blank and wag his wicked old white head and titter) in all European languages. His friends believed him and were impressed.

The Hansoms were something different again: they were the heavy-weights, the men you could be sure of. They went into the Foreign Service and had important embassies abroad, they were in the Treasury or the Cabinet Office, and just lately they had taken an interest in Television. But the Hansoms, scattered by their duties as they necessarily were, remembered that above everything they were an Oxford family. If any issue of importance came before Convocation, that vast gathering together of all Oxford Masters of Arts by which Oxford in theory alone rules itself, then you could be sure that the Hansoms would come cycling in from their country livings, or drive down in fast cars from London, or even fly in to prevent some disaster such as women taking degrees or W. H. Auden becoming Professor of Poetry; they were usually unsuccessful.

This ancestry had given Rachel great assurance, not social assurance, she hardly recognised the need for that, but intellectual assurance. With four generations of right thinking behind her, she felt convinced beyond the need even to consider it that the standards, values and judgements of her group and people like her were forever right.

Physically she took after her grandfather Boxer who had been a very beautiful man. In addition she had a sense of humour which may have come from him, too.

The combination of all these qualities, Boxer, Leaver and Hansom, was pretty paralysing and there were many who found Rachel a paralysing problem.

“I’d as soon make love to a man-eating spider,” declared the young man who had complained that Rachel knew everyone.

Rachel had become an anthropologist and this was how she came Marion’s way. She had read and admired the young Marion’s study of the Alpha tribes of Central America and had sought her out. No one knew how Marion felt about being remembered as an anthropologist, Rachel was the first person who had had the courage to speak about it to her face. However, even Rachel found that Marion had her reserves; and yet a steely friendship grew up between the two.

In this friendship Joyo by no means shared, although there was a lot about Rachel that she ruefully admired. Together with a lot she didn’t. She was sharp enough, however, to see that this cut both ways and that equally there was a lot Rachel would not like in her. She was careful as a result, so that while she knew Rachel it would be true to say that Rachel did not know her.

She watched the girl now, and wondered what she was about, standing there in the street. She looked cold, too, poor child. Joyo would have liked to call Rachel into the warm kitchen, but caution restrained her. Let Marion, kind old Marion, do that. Let her be the one to stick her neck out.

Ezra was thinking of Rachel as he stood on the corner of Chancellor Hyde Street. Behind his thoughts about Marion ran the steady stream of his preoccupation with Rachel.

He was horrified to see her suddenly walk forward from the corner and go straight up to the watcher.

“What did you say to him?” he asked.

“I asked him the time,” she looked up. “Go on, ask me why I asked him that?”

“Well, why?”

“I wanted to hear his voice.”

Ezra raised his eyebrows.

“I’m pretty fond of Marion. The fact that I don’t think she’s good for you is another matter. She’s not the only one who noticed him. I went to Stoke with her, you know. I saw him before Marion did.”

“So—what about his voice?”

Rachel was impatient. “I wanted to hear what sort of a person he was. Not the sort of person to be remotely connected with Marion at all.”

Ezra nodded. “But you make Marion sound a snob. She’s known a pretty wide range of people in her day. She knew …”

“Yes, but they were clever people, or interesting people, or out-of-the-way people. This man is ordinary.”

Ordinary, thought Ezra, remembering the kitten. Is he so ordinary?

“You’re pretty much of a prig yourself, Rachel,” was all he said, mildly. He looked up at Marion’s window and saw that she had gone back to work at her table by the window. He could see her intent profile as she bent over a book. No good going back there now. Marion was miles away.

He turned his attention to his love.

“Why do you have to go round looking like the retreat from Moscow?” he asked her irritably. “You’d be quite a good-looking girl if you didn’t get yourself up like that.”

“It’s so cold.” The huge aquamarine eyes stared at him over the edge of a scarf. “Freezing. I’ve just come back from the Sudan, don’t forget.”

“Yes, I always forget you’re the little anthropologist.”