She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting till she could trust her voice; then she said, looking straight at Parvis: ‘Will you answer me one question, please? When was it that Robert Elwell tried to kill himself?’
‘When – when?’ Parvis stammered.
‘Yes; the date. Please try to remember.’
She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her. ‘I have a reason,’ she insisted.
‘Yes, yes. Only I can’t remember. About two months before, I should say.’
‘I want the date,’ she repeated.
Parvis picked up the newspaper. ‘We might see here,’ he said, still humouring her. He ran his eyes down the page. ‘Here it is. Last October – the –’
She caught the words from him. ‘The 20th, wasn’t it?’ With a sharp look at her, he verified. ‘Yes, the 20th. Then you did know?’
‘I know now.’ Her gaze continued to travel past him. ‘Sunday, the 20th – that was the day he came first.’
Parvis’s voice was almost inaudible. ‘Came here first?’
‘Yes.’
‘You saw him twice, then?’
‘Yes, twice.’ She just breathed it at him. ‘He came first on the 20th of October. I remember the date because it was the day we went up Meldon Steep for the first time.’ She felt a faint gasp of inward laughter at the thought that but for that she might have forgotten.
Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her gaze.
‘We saw him from the roof,’ she went on. ‘He came down the lime-avenue towards the house. He was dressed just as he is in that picture. My husband saw him first. He was frightened, and ran down ahead of me; but there was no one there. He had vanished.’
‘Elwell had vanished?’ Parvis faltered.
‘Yes.’ Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. ‘I couldn’t think what had happened. I see now. He tried to come then; but he wasn’t dead enough – he couldn’t reach us. He had to wait for two months to die; and then he came back again – and Ned went with him.’
She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has worked out a difficult puzzle. But suddenly she lifted her hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her temples.
‘Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned – I told him where to go! I sent him to this room!’ she screamed.
She felt the walls of books rush towards her, like inward falling ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, through the ruins, crying to her and struggling to get at her. But she was numb to his touch, she did not know what he was saying. Through the tumult she heard but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair speaking on the lawn at Pangbourne:
‘You won’t know till afterward,’ it said. ‘You won’t know till long, long afterward.’
On the Brighton Road
by Richard Middleton
Slowly the sun had climbed up the hard white downs, till it broke with little of the mysterious ritual of dawn upon a sparkling world of snow. There had been a hard frost during the night, and the birds, who hopped about here and there with scant tolerance of life, left no trace of their passage on the silver pavements. In places the sheltered caverns of the hedges broke the monotony of the whiteness that had fallen upon the coloured earth, and overhead the sky melted from orange to deep blue, from deep blue to a blue so pale that it suggested a thin paper screen rather than illimitable space. Across the level fields there came a cold, silent wind which blew fine dust of snow from the trees, but hardly stirred the crested hedges. Once above the skyline, the sun seemed to climb more quickly, and as it rose higher it began to give out a heat that blended with the keenness of the wind.
It may have been this strange alternation of heat and cold that disturbed the tramp in his dreams, for he struggled for a moment with the snow that covered him, like a man who finds himself twisted uncomfortably in the bedclothes, and then sat up with staring, questioning eyes. ‘Lord! I thought I was in bed,’ he said to himself as he took in the vacant landscape, ‘and all the while I was out here.’ He stretched his limbs, and rising carefully
to his feet, shook the snow off his body. As he did so the wind set him shivering, and he knew that his bed had been warm.
‘Come, I feel pretty fit,’ he thought. ‘I suppose I am lucky to wake at all in this. Or unlucky – it isn’t much of a business to come back to.’ He looked up and saw the downs shining against the blue like the Alps on a picture-postcard. ‘That means another forty miles or so, I suppose,’ he continued grimly. ‘Lord knows what I did yesterday. Walked till I was done, and now I’m only about twelve miles from Brighton. Damn the snow, damn Brighton, damn everything!’ The sun crept up higher and higher, and he started walking patiently along the road with his back turned to the hills.
‘Am I glad or sorry that it was only sleep that took me, glad or sorry, glad or sorry?’ His thoughts seemed to arrange themselves in a metrical accompaniment to the steady thud of his footsteps, and he hardly sought an answer to his question. It was good enough to walk to.
Presently, when three milestones had loitered past, he overtook a boy who was stooping to light a cigarette. He wore no overcoat, and looked unspeakably fragile against the snow. ‘Are you on the road, guv’nor?’ asked the boy huskily as he passed.
‘I think I am,’ the tramp said.