Dark Entries Page 8

‘I’ll tell the porter to call mademoiselle a taxi.’

  The girl shook her head more vigorously, and made a gesture as of pushing the waiter aside. She had reached the screen with the painted glass.

  Fenville looked at Ann. His appearance made Ann not merely touch his arm but clutch at it. He drew himself away from her.

  ‘Ann,’ he said, ‘forgive me. I’m so very sorry.’ He could say no more, because by now the other girl would be out of the restaurant.

  He fled from the table and pushed his way through a noisy business party which had just entered. There seemed to be at least a dozen of them, and Fenville trod upon their feet.

  Outside, despite the waiter’s solicitude, it did not seem cold. Fenville could see the girl walking along the street about a hundred yards away. Overwhelmed with relief at not having lost her, his mind became very clear. An immediate approach, he reflected would be disastrous. If, as was almost certain, he were rebuffed, she would walk out of his life. He resolved to follow her and discover where she lived.

  At first the streets were crowded, and Fenville could see that people turned as she passed; but soon they reached a square which was almost empty, and Fenville could just hear her footsteps. She never looked back, but appeared to be using her hands to hold the big shawl in place over her head. The silhouette of her skirt projected on either side of her knees, and Fenville knew that were he closer he would hear it rustle.

  She crossed Oxford Street, by which time Fenville was less than thirty yards behind her. On the north side she stopped and summoned a taxi. Fenville was little more used to taxis than to such restaurants as the Entresol, but he shouted for one which he saw in the distance, and told it to follow that which the girl had taken.

  ‘What for?’ asked the driver.

  ‘For this,’ replied Fenville, resourcefully pulling a pound note from the packet assigned to the entertainment of Ann.

  The driver grabbed it.

  ‘Get inside.’

  Fenville was relieved by the alacrity of his acceptance. Preoccupied though he was, he began to realise that doors open to the rich.

  Surprising also was the fact that the other taxi was still in sight. It had been mercifully delayed by the traffic lights.

  ‘Hell of a street for this game,’ remarked the taxi driver through his sliding window.

  Fenville sat on the edge of the slippery seat, his gaze devouring the taxi ahead. If they were not to lose it, he too must keep his eyes on it.

  Somewhere near the top of Bond Street, a boy fell off his bicycle. Fenville’s taxi slowed.

  ‘Go on,’ shouted Fenville, his voice piping and strained.

  The taxi failed to accelerate.

  ‘Go on, you fool.’

  The driver looked at Fenville, dissociating himself witheringly from what he plainly regarded as his lack of common decency, but said nothing, and went faster.

  Fenville realised that the chase was made possible by the fact that the other taxi was not of the latest type. He came nearest to losing it when at the far end of Bayswater Road it turned into a Notting Hill side street.

  But Fenville’s driver found the right turn. Possibly he had more experience of the job in hand than Fenville had supposed. At the other end of the street, the girl was getting out.

  ‘Stop,’ cried Fenville.

  The driver swore and stopped.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Fenville.

  The driver said something unflattering. His mind was still upon the boy and the bicycle. He felt guilty because Fenville’s money had made him overrule what he regarded as his finer instincts.

  Fenville alighted and waved the cab away. He was afraid it might not go. It was difficult for him to draw nearer, and the noise of his arrival might call the girl’s attention to him. But the cabman clicked his flag, spat, and departed.

  The difficulty now was to determine the exact house. The girl’s taxi was also moving off, and she herself had vanished. They were shapeless, bulky houses, iced all over with elaborately decorated stucco. Every alternate mass was a single house, the others being pairs of houses gummed together. The night was overcast, the street slenderly lighted, and the windows muffled. Whereas, earlier, the girl’s tapping heels had been hard to hear, now even the furtive footfalls of a darting cat stirred the patchy dimness. Fenville felt that he should tiptoe.

  He walked slowly towards the region where the girl’s taxi had come to rest. When he deemed that he was nearing the spot, he peered at each separate front door. The houses seemed identical: withdrawn, but only as if ashamed of their unfashionableness. Fenville began to panic and to walk faster. Better to complete the miserable business and not try to defer the admission of failure. Then he came to a house which was unlike the rest.

  It was a single house, set further back than its neighbours, and even more substantial and elaborate. A shallow carriage-sweep led from each side to a columned porte-cochère, above which rose a line of decorative obelisks, miniatures of Cleopatra’s Needle, and varying in size as if they were pieces in a game. On each side of this projecting porch were two smooth and polished sphinxes: half-tamed in order to guard the secrets within. Fenville saw that everywhere the stucco had been moulded into dusty images from Egypt and Assyria. The house might have been a provincial museum and art gallery; and it had a similar air of nocturnal inanimation.

  Fenville moved on. The few houses beyond resembled those which had gone before. It was impossible to know which among eight or ten the girl had entered; and almost certainly impracticable to wait until she might again emerge. Fenville returned to the house with the porte-cochère, and seated himself on the rump of one of the domesticated sphinxes. He had nothing to lose by waiting at least until a policeman found him.

  Within a few minutes he felt not only frustrated but frozen. He rose and began to pace up and down the pavement; but his quiescence had chilled him more than the exercise could warm him, especially in that he dared not extend his promenade beyond a short stretch of the street. Although doubtless the girl was now on her way to bed, she might, on the other hand, come out and turn in the opposite direction. Gradually, however, he began to enlarge his beat, until he was reversing at a spot fifty yards from the first house at which the girl’s taxi could possibly have stopped.

  He was nearing this point on one occasion when he heard a door bang. He swung round and saw that a man was coming towards him. Embarrassed, Fenville felt compelled to quicken his pace. The other man was also walking briskly, so that Fenville’s observation of him was limited. When about twenty yards away, however, he passed beneath one of the dim street lights, and Fenville was startled. The man appeared to be in fancy dress. He wore a brown tailcoat, a frilled cravat, and narrow black trousers. He had dark, profusely curling hair falling on his neck, fine features, and a bearing which Fenville thought distinguished. As he passed he seemed for a second to glare at Fenville disdainfully. Beneath his arm was a stout cane with a long tassel.

  Fenville could not but turn and look after him; but was mortified when in a second the man did the same thing. This time it was hard to doubt that the man was scowling at him. It was the man’s appearance of hostility, in fact, which for a moment held Fenville’s gaze, and presented him from instantly continuing on his way, as manners demanded. In the next moment, it became worse: the man seemed almost to snarl. Fenville turned, much shaken, walked rapidly past all the remaining houses, and out of the street. He caught a bus to his lodging, and wondered all night if he were going mad.

  Earlier than usual the next morning, his landlady rapped at his door.

  ‘Are you all right, Mr Fenville?’

  Fenville had not slept, and now had heard her approaching slippers. He put on his dressing gown and opened the door. Most unexpectedly, Ann was standing in the passage behind her. She smiled at him.

  ‘Miss Terrington’s been telling me a long tale about you were taken ill last night,’ said the landlady. ‘You look all right to me.’

  ‘Of course, I’m all
right. Ann, come in. I must explain to you.’

  ‘No visitors in bedrooms,’ said the landlady. ‘You know that as well as I do.’

  ‘See you later?’ asked Ann understandingly.

  Fenville nodded.

  But he had no idea what he could explain. He met the situation by absenting himself from the School of Architecture. He had no idea that he would ever see the other girl again, but he felt unable to face the kindness and imagination of Ann. The sensation of hopeless loss crunched through his nerves and froze his heart. Every simple movement required forethought and effort. Now and then, however, the image of the girl, the dire recollection of her voice and her scent and of the sound of her feet tapping across the square were replaced by the memory of the man who had passed him in the street, of his menacing expression, alert step, and strange costume.

  The rules of the house would compel Fenville to leave it before ten o’clock, and he had nowhere to go. He told his landlady that after all he wasn’t very well; and what he said gained credence from his manifest lack of appetite. An exemption was grudgingly made of him: he was permitted to remain in his room.

  ‘But you must have a doctor.’

  ‘I’m not as ill as all that.’

  ‘Then you can’t stay here.’

  ‘All right. But I haven’t got a doctor.’

  ‘I’ll send for Dr Bermuda. He’s a specialist.’

  ‘Truly, I don’t need a doctor.’

  But by the time Dr Bermuda appeared, Fenville was in such straits that he rose avidly to enquiries as to whether he was worried about anything. Dr Bermuda was an unkempt, sympathetic little man, made shapeless by stretching points in favour of his patients. Not only did Fenville tell the story of his love, but he also found a conscientious and expert listener. Once when the landlady rapped at the door, the Doctor cried out: ‘Please, Mrs Stark. Apply yourself to your own duties, and leave me to mine.’ Fenville realised that he had not heard her approaching, and deduced that she had been eavesdropping. He lowered his voice, even though he heard her shuffling away.

  ‘I have no idea what to do next.’

  ‘That’s easy enough,’ said Dr Bermuda. ‘You go after her. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.’ He quoted gently, like an elderly country priest who sought no monsignorate but only to serve his tiny simple flock.

  ‘But what can I do?’

  The Doctor produced a large dingy wallet from the gaping inner pocket of his jacket, and from it extracted a card.

  ‘The name of the street. Write it on the back.’ He gave Fenville the card between his third and fourth fingers, tarry with nicotine; then laboriously stooped to gather up the cigarette papers he had let drift to the floor.

  ‘I don’t know the name of the street. I didn’t notice.’

  ‘Ah, you are still unaccustomed to romance. One soon learns.’

  Fenville said nothing. He was too cast down even to resist this justified reflection upon his manhood.

  Dr Bermuda rose fumblingly to his feet. ‘Lie back,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want any further examination.’

  ‘Back,’ repeated the Doctor, with a short sharp flicker of his left hand. Fenville saw that he was wearing a big ring with a stone the colour of old-fashioned sugar candy. He lay back.

  ‘Watch me,’ said Dr Bermuda, waving his left hand, like a dwarfish policeman calling on traffic. ‘Keep your eyes on mine.’

  Fenville realised that he was being hypnotised; but it was too late to demur.

  A moment later he was awake again, and the Doctor was writing on the card.

  ‘Arcadia Gardens. Which end?’

  ‘The far end,’ said Fenville.

  The Doctor looked at him.

  ‘There’s a house with sphinxes outside. That end.’

  The Doctor stared into his eyes and wrote it down.

  ‘How do you know I’ve got the right street?’ asked Fenville.

  ‘You noticed the name of it without being conscious of doing so. By modern science the suppressed memory has been recovered.’

  ‘Suppressed? I didn’t do that.’

  The Doctor looked at him gravely. ‘Didn’t you?’ he said. ‘A man in fancy dress? Who looked at you strangely? Whom you did not mention to me?’ He raised his hand. Now it was as if he were stopping the traffic. ‘I see you remember him.’ Only the back of his ring was visible to Fenville. He became the physician giving orders. ‘Do not leave the house until you hear from me again. I shall speak to Mrs Stark. I shall also speak to that other young woman; the one who so unluckily accompanied you to the restaurant. I must have her address too.’ Fenville supplied it and the Doctor wrote it down. ‘After that I shall institute some enquiries. We have resources nowadays for dealing with such matters. You may consider yourself to be dangerously ill; far more so than if you had a more conventional disease. Unless you meet this woman again and get to know her and masticate her and bite upon her and fully digest and eliminate her, you will be unlikely to recover. It is a rare disease you have; and fatal unless it is permitted to run its full course.’ He smiled into his withered beard. ‘Good-bye, my friend,’ he said, drawing on his shabby brown leather gloves. ‘Modern science will do its best to cure you.’

  At half past twelve Mrs Stark brought luncheon: spaghetti au gratin, followed by ground rice and prunes, and a large white cup of piebald Camp coffee. At half past three, she reappeared with a letter. The writing was faint and shaky. The letter proved to be from the Doctor; written on his prescription paper.

  ‘Her name is Dorabelle. Your magnetic undermind has already led you to her house. I have prescribed for Miss Terrington. May eloquence attend you.’ The Doctor enclosed his account for two and a half guineas.

  By four o’clock Fenville could remain in bed no longer. Physical energy was wrestling with spiritual malaise. As the church clock struck, he rose and crept to the bathroom, there to shave in water which at that hour was scarcely tepid. He dressed and stole downstairs. In the hall he heard Mrs Stark snoring in her little back den. For many years the bottom of the front door had dragged on the lumpy linoleum, sometimes shaking the whole house; and now, as soon as Fenville had opened it, a gust of wind snatched it out of his hand and slammed it shut. He stood silent for a moment, but Mrs Stark’s afternoon dreams were unbroken. At the second attempt, he was outside the house.

  He walked through to Holborn and took a number 17 omnibus to Notting Hill. Then with some difficulty and several retracings of his path he made his way to the house with the sphinxes in Arcadia Gardens. As he walked between that noncommittal double file of portly residences, now, as he saw, divided and sub-divided within themselves, the wind lifted torn sheets of cheap newspaper, tossed in from other less desirable quarters, glanced at them, and blew them away. One of them tangled itself round Fenville’s trousers. The street was empty and passé.

  At the now-familiar front door, he rang the bell. More than once he lugged at the big iron knob without a sound reaching him. He began to shiver in the rising wind. But doubtless the bell had long since ceased to work. Then he heard slowly approaching steps. Their rhythm seemed to be erratic.

  The door opened. A very tall, elderly man, with a pale, lined face, and dressed in black, spoke to Fenville.

  ‘The tradesmen’s entrance is round at the side.’

  Fenville took a pull on himself. ‘I want to see your mistress.’

  The man looked at him. His aspect was so frail that he seemed in danger of blowing away.

  Then he spoke in weary tones. ‘There was another man last week.’ He seemed resentful. Then he said, ‘Wait a moment. I’ll look in the almonry.’

  He retreated into the gloom within. Fenville saw that he walked with difficulty. Soon he was back; and his long bony hand held a five-pound note.

  ‘What’s it for? Can’t see what need there is for giving to charity nowadays.’

  ‘I’m not collecting for charity,’ said Fenville. ‘I want to see your mistress. Is
she in?’

  ‘That’s different,’ replied the man sharply. ‘You mean is she at home?’

  Fenville realised that this was his first encounter with a butler.

  ‘As you wish. Anyway I mean to see her.’

  Again the man looked at him. ‘Mean to see her, eh? What name?’

  ‘Fenville.’

  ‘Any business?’

  Fenville hesitated.

  But the man came to his rescue. ‘Oh never mind,’ he said sulkily. ‘I can’t wait about all day in the cold.’ And indeed he was beginning to cough. ‘I’ll have to shut the door.’

  Fenville involuntarily withdrew half a step. Instantly the door was closed.

  The man was gone for so long that Fenville was contemplating ringing again. His heart and pulses were all the time beating so fast that he felt he would be sick. He wondered whether he possessed the reserves for a second sortie. In the street beyond the encrusted porte-cochère, an old grey woman, stooped and shrouded and spent, was stumbling towards him against the wind. She seemed the female counterpart of the decrepit butler.

  ‘Come in.’ The door had re-opened a few inches, and its custodian spoke grudgingly through the crack. Fenville had to push it back. As soon as he was in, the door was shut again; and the butler moaning on about the cold.

  Now that he was inside, Fenville was so completely unnerved that he was unable to speak. It was no moment for sympathetic small talk about the impact of the weather upon old blood.

  ‘This way,’ said the man, ungraciously as ever, and limped feebly forward.

  The murky hall was in the same involved, derivative style as the exterior of the house, but here sustained in dark yellow stone. On the tiled floor was an immense rug, obviously once valuable, but now discoloured and torn. There was a large pyramidal fireplace, but no fire. Furniture was sparse, and what there was looked unused and dusty. A small chest stood open in a corner.

  Behind the range of yellow columns to the left ascended a black wooden staircase. The butler slowly led the way, step by step drawing himself forward and upward by the immense moulded handrail. Fenville followed him. Two or three minutes seemed to pass before they reached the first landing. The stair carpet was as worn as the rug below, and there were no pictures on the walls. The house seemed extraordinarily draughty, until Fenville realised that several diamond panes were missing from the vast window which lighted the stairwell. The butler’s cough became distressing. The stairs, it was clear, were not to be undertaken lightly. Fenville imagined that he should apologise for the trouble he was causing, but could find neither voice nor words.