Death Lives Next Door Read online

  “And who’s been suggesting all this to you?”

  “No one,” said Ezra, deeply troubled; he was doing this so badly.

  But Marion knew the answer to her own question. “Rachel, I suppose. John Farmer knows her father, of course.”

  She sat down at her desk and drew a thin brown hand across it for a cigarette. “Dusty,” she observed. “I don’t keep this house the way I should.” On the top of her desk was a picture of a young man wearing an open-neck shirt and nursing Sammy.

  Ezra walked over and picked up his photograph. “I was quite chubby then, wasn’t I?”

  Marion nodded.

  “You were good to me then, Marion. I wonder why? I must have been a boring boy.”

  “Not so bad as some,” said Marion philosophically. “And very attractive. I couldn’t help noticing that.” She smiled, and the bright brown eyes were set in a lace of little crinkles.

  “I do depend on you, Marion.”

  “Not in all things,” she said sharply.

  “No. But to keep me on a straight level.” Did Marion depend on him? And in a moment he knew she did.

  It came to Ezra sharply then that Marion was one of the people he most loved in the world. Until six months ago he would have said the person.

  And she had aged. Grown thinner, tenser, more strained.

  “What’s done this to you, Marion?” he heard himself say, to his embarrassment.

  He saw great tears fill the brown eyes and it was like seeing the Pyramids weep.

  “Marion!” he cried.

  She mumbled something he could not hear. Then she repeated it.

  “I’m being watched.”

  The words struck him unpleasantly.

  “I saw a man killed once. I saw his eyes crossed in death. I felt he was watching me. Since then I’ve hated people watching me.”

  Ezra knew she referred to the death so many years ago of the man on the expedition. It came as a shock to him that Marion should refer in tones which so clearly showed that the wound was still there, raw and unhealed, to an incident he had thought long buried, far back in her past.

  “No need to be so upset,” he said, startled into unsympathy.

  “You try it some time.” Marion dried her eyes. “It’s unnerving. I don’t know this man from Adam. Or I didn’t.”

  “Oh, it’s a man?”

  “Yes,” said Marion shortly.

  “Is he always there?”

  “No.” In spite of herself Marion laughed. “Only human. Not all the time.”

  “Are you sure? I mean, supposing he really is watching, are you sure it is you?”

  “Quite, quite certain. He follows. Last week I went to London for the day. I saw his taxi follow mine to the station. Thursday I went to Stoke-on-Trent to give that lecture. He came, too. Don’t say I should tell the police.”

  “No, I wasn’t going to.”

  “There’s been no threat, you see, no nuisance. He never tries to talk to me. Never comes even very close. But he’s always there. Why?” She said slowly, “And yet I don’t feel any malice in him. He’s just interested. In me.”

  “Well, so are a lot of people, Marion.” Ezra was thinking hard. So this was the basis behind all the rumours. Somehow it had got out. “Who have you told, Marion?”

  There was silence.

  “I have told no one. I swear. I have told no one at all.”

  But this rumour was all over the town. Marion must have let it out. Or perhaps the neighbours had noticed.

  “What about the neighbours?” he asked. “Do you think they’ve noticed? Or have you told them?”

  Marion looked surprised. “I don’t know them.”

  Ezra was half irritated, half amused. “You must know them, Marion.”

  “Why? I’ve never even seen them.”

  “Oh, you must have seen them. In the garden, digging or something.”

  “Oh, but I never go in the garden,” said Marion, looking placidly at the jungle beneath her window. “Can’t stand it. No, I tell you the neighbours are out. I haven’t told them, and I don’t believe they’ve noticed.”

  “People do know, though.”

  Marion had walked to the window. “Look out there.”

  Ezra pulled back the curtains and looked across the road to the junction of Chancellor Hyde Street and Little Clarendon Street. The wind that nipped that corner was usually chill and he was not surprised to see the figure standing there put its collar up. It was a small dark man with spectacles; he was wearing a mackintosh and underneath it a neat blue suit.

  “He doesn’t look like a detective,” murmured Ezra.

  “I’m sure he’s not that.” Marion spoke with decision.

  Ezra looked round her quiet, green book-lined room. It was so difficult to associate Marion with all this.

  “You stay here,” he said. “I’m going out to have a closer look at him.”

  He shut Marion’s front door behind him, shutting in a stray creeper or two as he did so. As he pushed his way through the massed vegetation to the gate, it occurred to him that while Marion might not know her neighbours, the neighbours almost certainly knew Marion and her weeds.

  In the street, a lorry was drawn up discharging a load of coal and Ezra was able to come round the back of it and get close to the man before he had a chance to observe him.

  The man was standing there, his feet planted a little apart, and his hands in his pockets. He was making no pretence of having a purpose in being there, and yet he was very unobtrusive, he slipped neatly into the background. There was something vaguely familiar about him, some quality that Ezra thought he knew. But it remained elusive. As Ezra watched, the man shifted his feet, scratched his hair, and settled his hat more comfortably on his head. Clearly he meant to stay where he was.

  “I suppose he is watching Marion?” wondered Ezra.

  At that moment a window slammed in Marion’s house and the man swung his head round promptly to see.

  Ezra stepped out from behind the coal lorry, and walked down Chancellor Hyde Street. The man watched him indifferently, although he must have observed him come from Marion’s house and had probably been watching him. Ezra saw that the hands now rolling a cigarette were neat and not swollen by manual labour, there was a gold ring on the left hand; they trembled slightly.

  At the corner Ezra turned and looked back. The road was quiet and empty except for the lorry and the watcher. A little ginger kitten ran across the road, it was calling out in shrill kitten’s shrieks. It halted unsteadily in the gutter. The man called it to him, and stood for a few minutes with it in his hand, looking at it and stroking it. Ezra watching from a distance could have sworn there was liking, even affection, in the movements of those hands.

  Till the kitten screamed. Ezra could not help thinking of Marion’s narrow bones beneath those hands.

  It was true, although Marion would not admit it, that she had from the first been much more aware of the man than had been apparent. She had noticed him before anyone else. She had such a quiet constricted life that a new face stood out at once. Besides, there was another reason.

  It was not the first time: he was only one in a succession of such people. In her life she had had an inconvenient trick of picking up hangers-on in a way she could not quite account for.

  There had been the man in Monte Carlo. An unlikely place for Marion the austere to be, but she had been on a visit to an old sick aunt. In the intervals between listening to Auntie’s reminiscences of the Prince of Wales (she meant Edward VII, of course) and administering her medicine, she had escaped for long walks by the sea. The sea in spring there could be lovely and this had been in 1939 when people’s nerves were on edge and perhaps inclined them to do odd things, but she did not think this quite explained the man. She had noticed him looking at her first in the rose garden by the Casino: he had been looking at her expectantly as if he waited for her to speak. The oddest thing about him was that he knew where she lived; he was back there before
she was, loitering again, expectantly. Expectant of what? Marion asked herself. Nothing that she was prepared to give anyway: he was a more rakish, selfish-looking man than Marion would have ever trusted herself to.

  And there had been others, faces in queues that had grinned and nodded at her; hands waved from doors that she had never opened; feet that seemed to expect hers to fall in step with them.

  Probably it was her appearance: Marion considered that she had a very usual, humdrum appearance; she was simply mistaken for someone else.

  Even Ezra had his place in this queue. She recalled the young earnest Ezra wearing his scholar’s gown over a duffle-coat so that he looked as square as Tweedledee. He had waited outside the lecture-room to speak to her after her justly celebrated, and often repeated, lecture on “The Myth of Guthrum”.

  Then she laughed.

  Perhaps it was unfair to number Ezra among them: admittedly he had seemed to know exactly what he wanted from her. A reference to a book she had mentioned in her lecture; was she certain she had got it right? Marion was certain; faced with such unusual assurance she was at first angry, then amused, and finally friendly. Afterwards she had understood that it was the assurance of utter ignorance; once Ezra had learnt the way around his world he would never have dared approach a lecturer with such a comment. By nature he had too little assurance, not too much.

  Marion shook her head; no, Ezra was something else again, and not one of the strange people who seemed to pop up in her life. After all he was still in her life, and the marked thing about the others was that after a time they disappeared. They lost heart, gave it up, and went.

  Or they had done so far. Unhappily this man seemed more persistent. She tried to laugh it off, to see it in its proper proportions. She told herself that some people had allergies, others had second sight, or what their best friends wouldn’t tell them, or some other social drawback; she had this.

  Only it had not happened for some time, indeed had never before happened in Oxford.

  Perhaps this was why for the first time she was taking it seriously instead of half dismissing it, as she had always done up to now, as imagination or coincidence.

  And also this man seemed so quiet but determined. She really couldn’t doubt that he was watching her, Marion.

  She was aware of him throughout the quiet routine of her day. She usually got up early in the morning, went down, got in the papers and milk, then returned to bed with coffee and toast. She slept lightly and badly and was always glad to begin the day again. Marion was an optimist; however tiresome yesterday had been, and however unpromising today looked, she always started off the day with a little glow of happiness. The man was never at his post in Chancellor Hyde Street as early as this, but by about eleven in the morning he had arrived unobtrusively and was watching her. Some days if she went off on a journey he followed, on other days she was able to leave him behind. He had, for instance, twice come after her to London and once when she went to the Midlands to give a lecture. It had occurred to her once or twice that it was a question of money whether the man travelled with her or not: when he had enough, he came; when he had not, he stayed behind. What she could not arrive at was his motive. She thought he was trying to observe all he could about her; he wanted to know exactly what she was like. “He seems to want to know if I am me,” thought Marion indignantly.

  She for her part was watching him, but she never could get very close. She had once, on Oxford station, taken her courage in both hands and marched up to him.

  “Well,” she said fiercely. “Do you know me?” She had been close enough to him then to see the slight jaundiced yellow under his pallor and to see the fine little lines round his eyes and mouth. He was younger than she was but still not young.

  He had said nothing, nothing at all.

  “Someone should teach you not to stare,” she had snapped, and she had felt herself grow red and cross.

  It was at this moment she swore she saw recognition in his eyes.

  Later she had looked at herself in her bedroom mirror and shaken her head. “Poor battered tired old Marion. Do you imagine you are still a femme fatale?”

  It had been one of her old bitter jokes to call herself a fatal woman. She had been fatal enough for poor Francis, in her fashion.

  From then on she had dismissed any thought of going to the police. She could imagine only too well how she would be received: the raised eyebrows, the sceptical smiles; the advice to see a doctor.

  She was under the care of a doctor in any case. Dear Dr. Steiner had been fumbling about, trying to find a cause and hence a cure for her headaches, for about a year now. “I can give you aspirins, Marion,” he had said. “I can alleviate the pains but we must find out what is causing them.” Marion had answered that she would be quite glad just to have alleviation. “It’s hindering my work, you know.” Dr. Steiner had looked at her for a long time before answering. “Ah yes, your work. You think a good deal about that?”

  Marion had nodded. It had been a rather one-sided conversation, as it was more or less bound to be, considering the doctor was peering down her throat with a light. “And do you dream a great deal, Marion?” This time Marion had shaken her head in a no. But it was not true; she did dream; she dreamt a great deal.

  She thought she could blame herself for this. There was another side to Marion of which her colleagues knew nothing, of which Ezra knew nothing, and of which the doctor knew nothing; she had another world, and it was this world which had triggered off her dreams.

  Every week she visited the children’s wards in the tall, old hospital near where she lived; she played with them, talked to them and tried to distract them. Boredom is a great hindrance to recovery. In this world she was a different person, she was slow moving, almost phlegmatic, calm. She was better tempered, too. So there was the academic Marion, the home Marion, the poetic Marion, and the hospital Marion. She had no name there; she was known as the Play Lady. Presumably someone, somewhere, in that great building knew her as Dr. Manning, but the name was lost.

  She valued this world of hers; she had found the entrance to it herself. She had gone to visit a friend and had wandered by mistake into the wrong ward. Her entrance was welcomed, and since Marion was at heart an entertainer, she could not help but respond. She amused them. She promised to return next week and she did so, and the week after. Very soon she was an accepted institution. She took them books, odd toys, and games, and wandered round from child to child. This period was the best time of all and would probably have gone on if some child had not discovered that Marion’s stories and talk were better than any book.

  She was missed when she was away. The children were accusing, with the unashamed egotism of those who know beyond a shadow of doubt that they are the centre of all possible worlds. “Why were you away last week? We missed you.”

  “Like me to read?” asked Marion, always equable with them. “Or play card games? Or sing to you?”—She did sing sometimes in a low, tuneful, untrained voice.

  “Talk.”

  “That’s the hardest work of all.” But she sat down with a smile. The children asked her ‘just to talk’ more often than anything else. She told them the most wonderful things and although they did not always believe them they drank in every word. She told them of things that had happened to her and stories she had heard. They were real life stories, and although the children were sceptical in fact she invented nothing; she would have preferred to read or play dominoes but very well, if they wanted her to talk, then she would talk.

  As the weeks went on Marion’s talks got more and more vivid but she did not notice. The children noticed, however, and their excitement was reflected in their quickened pulses, raised temperatures and restless nights.

  It took some time for the nursing staff to relate all this to Marion’s visits, but they did so in the end. Even then they could not at first guess why such a quiet person could have such a stimulating effect. A nurse lingered one afternoon to listen and observe.r />
  “It’s all quite harmless,” she reported afterwards. “That is, she only tells them stories from her travels in South America and so on, and it is absolutely fascinating, and educational as well. I don’t wonder they love it. But still,” and she shook her head, “it’s the way she tells it: as if she was there, she’s reliving that past of hers. And I don’t think she even knows she’s doing it.”

  So a gentle hint was passed on to her and Marion woke up to what she was doing. All story-telling from her own experiences was stopped and she stuck wryly to Cinderella. But inside her the stories went on. The past which she had comfortably laid away all those years ago was still alive and kicking.

  It shook her up and reminded her that life was not a Pandora’s box which you could put the lid on and forget. Her headaches started again and drove her to seek the doctor’s advice. She thought his remark about dreams acute, but she was inclined to resent it. He could confine himself to her pains and leave her to cope with her dreams. So she shook her head.