Death Lives Next Door Read online

  “Bad heart there I shouldn’t wonder,” decided the Major. But he was a soldier, he had seen men after battle, overwrought, on the edge of unbalance, teetering towards an explosion, about to maul others and themselves too, and he frowned.

  The man rang the bell of the house in Little Clarendon Street. Rang it and rang it again. No answer. He was puzzled. This had not been expected. There was a hole in his plan.

  The Major spoke up. “You won’t get an answer. No one at home.” At ten o’clock the previous night an ambulance had drawn up outside the old house and a stretcher had been carried out bearing the little figure of the old landlady. No more would she enliven the night air with her tipsiness.

  The man hesitated. “But I’m going to live there.” He spoke in a husky voice.

  “Not be able to do that, I’m afraid. Old lady’s gone to hospital. Had a stroke. Thrombosis they call it now.” The Major prodded at a weed with his foot and glanced, automatically and disapprovingly, at Marion’s wilderness.

  “Have you come a long way?” he asked.

  “Long enough.”

  The Major saw that the man’s clothes were very neat and clean, his white collar spotless but a good deal creased. Did he sleep at all? he asked himself, looking at the darkly shadowed eyes.

  He looked down at the man’s feet; they were dusty, and the man was lifting them alternately as if they ached.

  “They couldn’t let you know,” he said sympathetically. “Happened so suddenly. Old lady went off last night. Lodgers cleared out this morning. She didn’t have many anyway. Been getting dottier and dottier. Still you won’t want to hear that.”

  “I only fixed it up yesterday,” said the man.

  “Did you indeed?” said the Major, rapidly taking in the significance of that. In that case the man must have been in the neighbourhood yesterday and not, as one might have thought, travelling a long distance. This reinforced his impression there was something rum about this fellow. “Been away myself,” he added, “heard all about it from the old lady’s cleaner.”

  “Oh.” The man glanced doubtfully up at the house.

  “She won’t let you in, I’m afraid. Can’t really. Old lady took all the keys to hospital. Daresay the police or the fire brigade could do it for you. But ’tisn’t as if you’d been living there already, is it? None of your things there?”

  The man shook his head.

  “Won’t do then. Have to try somewhere else. Lots of places,” and the Major turned back to his brass door knocker.

  He did this deliberately; an old sergeant whose experience included almost all things that can happen to men, had said to him, “If you’re doubtful about a man, make an opportunity to turn your back on him and watch him without him knowing. It may be dangerous” (and indeed the Major had once been knocked out while doing it) “but you can learn a lot.”

  Behind his back there was no sound. For a moment the Major felt a cold apprehension. He knew what that meant.

  “Dammit, the fellow’s watching me.”

  He turned gingerly, regretting that in the brass he could see only a blurred distorted image. Indeed, not an image at all, only the impression of movement. But the movement had been one of exhaustion and not of violence; the man was sitting on his case, looking at his feet. His fair hair was clinging to his scalp, and the sun caught the yellow cuff-links.

  “Quite a natty little dresser,” thought the Major wryly. The figure on the case swayed. Against the background of all his other feelings, a wave of pity rose. He trotted down the garden path and put a hand on the thin shoulder.

  “Ever so sorry, sir,” mumbled the man.

  The Major spoke with sympathy. “You’re clean tuckered out.” As he spoke he was already gathering up the hat from the ground and the raincoat over one hand, he put a hand under an elbow and hoisted him up. “Better come in with me.” He got the case in his hand as well and together the two of them stumbled up the path.

  Afterwards, he said, “I’d never have let him in if I’d known, but how could I?” As it was, his white head wagging with sympathy, he put the man in the back bedroom so lately vacated by the last student. It was a corner room with two windows, A man’s room full of highly polished dark old wood. A big chest of drawers, a small bed, a thin little rug, spartan yet homely.

  “When did you last sleep?” asked the Major, but not expecting an answer. He looked down at his sleeping visitor.

  As he went quietly down the stairs to make himself a cup of tea he reflected: “If you can’t look after yourself at your age you’ll be a fool?”

  All the afternoon and on into the evening the man slept, but not dreamlessly, in the narrow borrowed bed. Sometimes he threw out a hand and called.

  Down in the kitchen the Major listened and wondered.

  When the visitor woke he raised himself on one elbow and looked across the room; it was now dark and he could see across the few feet of garden into Marion’s sitting-room. Through the lighted window he could see a vignette: Marion, Ezra and Rachel sitting round a table. He could see them outlined clearly against the white walls, and framed in Marion’s green and white striped curtains. He could even see the redness of the geranium on the window shelf, but he saw it as a point of brightness against a dark green plant. He could even see that they were at dinner; his own stomach rolled emptily. He looked at them dreamily, sketching a different picture for himself: he was in the room but not with them nor was he at meat with them.

  Marion, on hearing that Ezra and Rachel wished to talk to her, had firmly asked them to a meal. She knew from experience that good food could assist the most rending emotional discussion. She saw emotion ahead. Rachel and Ezra created for themselves a problem out of Ezra’s way of life and Rachel’s reaction to it, and in Marion’s opinion would involve all their friends in it before they were done. She had summed up Ezra’s position accurately enough in her own mind: he was a perpetual scholar; she herself saw nothing dangerous or wrong in this; Rachel did: that was the difference between them.

  “Nothing serious before the meal,” she said, handing them sherry. And then, “After we’ve eaten,” she said as they sat down at the round table with the long white cloth and the ivy-patterned plates. Let them wait, she thought with amusement, to get at each other.

  She was surprised to discover it was herself who was under discussion.

  “I’d rather you hadn’t worried Rachel with this,” she said, frowning. What she meant was “I wish you hadn’t let her into our secret.”

  “Look, Marion, Rachel knew,” said Ezra, leaning forward. “She saw.”

  “Oh, did she?” She crumbled her roll on the table-cloth and arranged the breadcrumbs in a pattern. “Well, really, my instinct is to say nothing about this affair. To make nothing of it and to let it be nothing, to let nothing come of it. The man is seen, but I shall pretend he isn’t. Then he will go away.”

  “Oh, don’t be so Alice in Wonderland, dear.” Ezra was impatient.

  “You should go to the police,” said Rachel, as dogmatically as if she had not been full of Marion’s pigeon casserole.

  “What about?” Marion shrugged, and produced cheese and fruit to be eaten on the old painted plates that had belonged to her grandmother. “He’s not there now.”

  “You ought to go to the police. Or else get hold of the man. Ask him. Go on and face whatever it is.”

  Marion rejected that with scorn. “Only someone who has never been in any danger could say that. You don’t rush out and shake hands with it. You hide as long as you can.” She peeled an apple carefully. “Besides, have you ever been to the police? No? Well, they’ve got ways of their own of making you feel a fool.”

  “Strange words, coming from a woman of your education and training,” commented Ezra.

  Marion got out the brandy and smiled.

  “There’s something unreal about all this conversation,” said Ezra, “and it’s coming from you!” You of all people, he implied. He thought of all the times he had bee
n with Marion when she had been a rock, a guide to him; the time she had dealt with the young woman who very nearly got Ezra arrested on the Swiss border by making what the young chubby Ezra could tell were most indelicate advances, the time she stood between him and disaster in the shape of the University Proctors when he produced a performance of Samson Agonistes with Becky Neumann wearing gold tights and golden high-heeled boots in the University Church and the Vicar accompanied by the Vice-Chancellor walked in, both of them expecting a quietly reverent performance, and got the full glory of Becky’s massive but well-proportioned body wobbling along a sort of tight-rope with trumpets sounding and Ezra as Samson baying dismally in the background: the pair of them closely resembling, as looking back Ezra had to admit, two grossly over-painted dolls. Ezra smiled: Becky’s day had been a pleasant and amusing one but short: and now she was beguiling the last Maharajah of Lissapore.

  “What I can’t understand,” said Rachel, looking thoughtfully down at her plate, “is it being you and a man, Marion.”

  “What do you mean?” replied Marion tartly. “Think I look too virginal or something?”

  “No,” for indeed the word was not one to connect with Marion’s fine but battered appearance. Her hair was sometimes such a strange colour that one wondered if she could be dyeing it, except that with Marion one knew she never would. “No. I suppose it’s because you’ve never been married,” said Rachel tactfully and relentlessly following her train of thought.

  There was a moment’s pause. Then:

  “I have had a husband once, as a matter of fact,” said Marion, as calmly as if she was not throwing a bombshell at them.

  “I had no idea,” said Ezra, after a stunned pause.

  “I know that” – there was a flash of amuseemnt in Marion’s eyes. “Oh well, it was a long time ago. It’s no secret particularly, a good many of my own generation know about it, but at the time it was too painful for me to talk about and then later, well, there seemed no point. What was there to say?”

  Immediately Ezra remembered what she had said to him earlier: she had seen a man die.

  “Yes, he was killed,” said Marion. “On that long-ago trip to Central America. At the time I was bitter because I thought he had been killed because some other members of the party had been careless and slack. Now I don’t know. Time seems to have blurred the details. I no longer have the same certainty.”

  “Well, I’m blowed,” said Ezra. “And I thought I knew you as well as I knew anyone.”

  “You shall know everything in future,” apologised Marion, looking at him with humorous eyes.

  For a moment they paused, considering the picture of this young man falling to his death thirty years ago in the Gran Chaco. I wonder what his name was, thought Ezra. And then he remembered the name of the young man who had died. Funny nothing was made of the fact he was Marion’s husband, he thought. To protect Marion, I suppose.

  “Francis Eliot,” he said aloud.

  “Yes.” Marion looked towards the wall where there was a snapshot of the whole expedition. “Oh, I expect he would have been intolerable as a husband really as he grew older, and certainly I wasn’t much cop as a wife, but it seemed lovely to us then and perhaps if he’d lived I’d have been different.”

  They looked at each other with the affection and respect that can grow up between two people of different generations but alike in spirit and ways of thinking.

  Rachel saw them and a shiver of jealousy ran through her. She put it from her angrily. “I don’t really care for Ezra,” she said to herself.

  Marion dismissed them suddenly, with the food still sweet in their mouths. “I have to work.” And she put on her great spectacles and looked wistfully at a pile of books and papers.

  “You shouldn’t eat in the room you work in,” said Ezra, as they rose to go. “It’s uncivilised.”

  “I am uncivilised. Didn’t you know?”

  Rachel strode through Chancellor Hyde Street, she had thrown off her swathed bands for Marion’s dinner and was dressed in the green silk dress she naïvely described as her best. Ezra looked at her with his usual mixture of irritation and admiration: any one of his pretty little pupils could have done the dressing better, but without Rachel’s poise. “I cannot suppose she buys those clothes,” he decided. “They couldn’t come ready made. She retrieves them somewhere. Or her mother, her grandmother probably, gives them to her.” But only his own true love could endow them with that air of having been dragged on anyhow and the devil take the hindmost.

  “Wait for me,” he said, running behind her like a dog that hasn’t grasped that it’s not coming on this walk.

  Rachel looked at him silently and, alas, churlishly. If I’m not careful, she told herself, I shall behave like one of those juicy magazine heroines and quarrel so provokingly with my Ezra, biting the hand I really love. But damn it, I don’t love that hand. And she looked even more crossly at Ezra’s long thin cigarette-stained hand. The hand clasped her firmly just above the elbow.

  “I’m worried about Marion.”

  “I’m worried, too. But don’t let’s talk about it now. I’m too happy walking along here enjoying the Oxford evening. I love the seediness of Wellington Square, don’t you? And you merge so well with it, my love.”

  In his dark room the watcher stirred in his bed and got up. He saw them go past. He could hear the Major walking carefully up the stairs, he was being quiet but the stairs creaked all the same. He stood up.

  Meanwhile Ezra had almost walked himself into the quarrel Rachel had waiting for him.

  “At moments like this I know I couldn’t leave the dear old place.” He gripped Rachel even more tightly. “I’m doing the work I want to do. Quietly delving into texts, long morning’s teaching, long afternoons in the Bodleian. And then I’ve got my acting.”

  “You’re a rotten actor,” said Rachel. “And you know it.”

  “That’s not true.” Ezra was hurt. “I’ve come on a lot. All the critics say I speak verse beautifully.”

  Rachel snorted.

  “And my Polonius was praised everywhere.”

  “Polonius!” said Rachel. “Merely being yourself.”

  “I don’t know why you’re being so nasty to me,” said Ezra. “I should think you’d be glad I was happy.”

  “Because I can’t bear to see anyone like you wasting yourself, that’s why,” said Rachel in a rising voice. “Be the prototype of the modern wastrel. Be the perpetual scholar.”

  Ezra gripped her shoulders angrily. It was his first step as a man of action, and he was surprised to see how easy it was.

  And Rachel’s shoulder felt warm and smooth beneath the thin silk; she had very little on underneath it. He realised then why the dress had looked so odd, it was meant to be worn upon a thick stiff foundation of petticoat to hold out the skirt; Rachel had just slipped it on, and over nothing by the feel of it.

  “Lovely soft shoulders you’ve got,” he said absently.

  “Let go,” said Rachel indignantly.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Ezra, and bent his head towards her. He did kiss her, whether it was against her will or not he was never sure, but afterwards they raised their heads and looked at each other like a pair of indignant and bewildered young ponies. Then Rachel kicked Ezra hard and deliberately on the shins.

  “Oh, pooh,” said Ezra letting her fall back against her door. “The game’s not worth the candle.” He turned his back on her and strode away. Rachel crept upstairs.

  Ezra as he walked home was furiously angry but at the same time pleased with himself. Instinct told him that he had taken a step forward with her. But only if he could stop himself apologising tomorrow.

  He passed the Professor of Morphology who was also slowly returning home to North Oxford. He seemed glad of company and talkative.

  “I’ve just been sending off references for a pupil for a scholarship in America.” He wagged his head. “They ask such extraordinary things. In your opinion does the candida
te adjust well to group activities? Is he likely to make a negative or positive contribution to seminar discussion?” The Professor looked thoughtful, he tried to diminish himself, to slip through a key-hole into a world where group activities and negative and positive seminars really mattered, he found it difficult, but he could just do it. “I always answer yes to everything,” he announced.

  “And do you have any luck? I mean do any of your students get scholarships?”

  “Oh invariably. I believe they don’t read what I put.”

  An undergraduate cycling past, academic gown flying, nearly knocked him over. The young man stopped, apologised with graceful courtesy, and sped on, very nearly knocking the Professor over again.

  “My ideal university,” said the Professor dreamily, “would be one without any undergraduates in it. A quiet, scholarly, happy world where one need never see a young face again.”

  “But who would you talk to?”

  “Ourselves, of course.”

  “And what about?”

  “Again ourselves.”

  But Ezra was quite unable to keep off the subject which preoccupied him.

  “I never knew till today,” he said, “that Marion Manning was married.”

  “Had been married,” said the Professor, his eyes still apprehensively on the cyclist, who was wobbling. “Didn’t last long you know. Charming fellow he was.”

  Ezra made a noise of assent as if he had known.

  “Surprising thing that was. Never thought of him as a marrying man.”

  “Wasn’t he young then?” asked Ezra disappointed.

  “Lord no. Quiet neat little chap, twenty years older than Marion. Mystery she married him. We could all see what he saw in her though. Great buxom girl she was then,” and he gave a deep laugh.

  “Don’t be coarse,” said Ezra coldly. Really, quite a mistake that dons lived remote detached sexless lives. Never forget old Sir Charles Buffon.

  “Coarse? My dear Ezra!” and the Professor opened his eyes wide. “Nothing coarse about marriage. You ought to read the marriage service on the causes of matrimony.”