hatred of me, all your real hatred, into—’
‘Immortal,’ he shouted in a sudden blaze of fury. ‘The only sort of immortality you’ll ever get—in my plays. Now will you go home?’
She went home.
Mrs. Wraxall heard her arrive, as she invariably did. There was something unnerving in the precision with which that woman timed her tap on the door of the small drawing room, her little nod so undeferential in its brusqueness, and the setting down of the silver tea tray at Elaine’s elbow. Once or twice Elaine had childishly tried to catch her out by creeping in and closing the door without, she could have sworn, the faintest sound; or lingering, at night, in her room an extra fifteen minutes or so in the hope that when she got down, the coffee or cocoa would be cold, and she could draw attention to the fact. It never worked.
‘A trying rehearsal, miss?’
And always the significant, gently emphasized miss.
‘Very trying.’
‘Perhaps you’d care for a small brandy, Miss Mancroft?’
She shook her head. Surely the old harridan wasn’t slyly tempting her down the same road which Adelaide had trodden—towards those steps down which Adelaide had pitched to her death?
Poor lost Adelaide. Nothing to be afraid of. There had been nothing to fear when she was alive, incapable of keeping up with her husband on his ascent to success, such pitiful competition as a woman, and so pitiful in defeat when she had laid her hands—and her lips—on too much gin. So much less to fear now she was gone.
As the door closed behind Mrs. Wraxall, Elaine raised her teacup. ‘Rest in peace.’ She tried to deliver the line with the brittle offhandedness she would have given to some line from a new Pinero comedy.
Not that she had ever been given the chance of appearing in any of Mr. Pinero’s successes. Daniel had long since claimed exclusive rights over her.
Perhaps he was now anxious to relinquish the claim. She began to shiver again. After this afternoon’s débâcle, what could she be sure of?
Hazily she tried to think herself back into her role, to declaim the lines that had eluded her this afternoon.
‘We have shown our honour to be more truly honourable than theirs. But don’t you see how she has tainted us? Her disease has run its course. Ours may be just beginning....’
All Daniel Clegg’s plays had been autobiographical: so much so that it had become a favourite game among those-in-the-know to guess just what domestic conflict he was exposing this time, what bitterness he was squeezing from his system, and what scandal might be expected next. Acting his leading roles, as she had done since the year before she moved into his life and then into his bed, Elaine felt herself more and more acting out a cruel parody of the most intimate moments of their life, acting as if in a shop window under the gaze of every prurient passer-by.
This time the story had been twisted to display his own self-justification over Adelaide’s death—Adelaide, wife and goad, whose coarse antagonism had inspired some of his best scenes and most telling lines. The character written for Elaine was that of a woman who, watching the man she loved plunge into a disastrous marriage with just such a foul-tongued shrew, stood by him and gave him the courage to fight each battle of his political career, though this meant she had no life of her own and was shunned by society. The climaxes of each scene were provided by the stratagems through which her selfless motives were turned against her by the self-righteous wife, unscrupulously feeding lies to friends, and paving the way to a murderous conclusion. In the last act came retribution: attempting to kill her husband, the wife brought about her own death. But Daniel had chosen to end his drama not with a promise of happiness, but with a farewell speech in which the woman who had remained faithful through every adversity now renounced the man she loved, denying the hope of any future for the two of them after so much had been contaminated.
Again it nagged at her: was it Daniel’s prediction for the future, that she should follow Adelaide out of his life?
Not, surely, the same way. Not like Adelaide, too full of gin, sliding down the steps of the steep terrace onto the crazy paving, which she herself had insisted should be laid there. Food for malicious gossip and speculation; but an accident. It could have been nothing else but an accident: no other ending was conceivable.
‘You know it’s not right.’ The flat Midlands voice whined through the faint whistle of the gas fire.
‘Leave me alone.’
‘Elaine, you know he has cheated on the ending. Always cheating, our Daniel. Always.’
A shadow curled under the mantelpiece. Elaine tried to out-stare it but lost it in a mist, which ran along the wall and reassembled in a corner, tantalizing the corner of her eye.
‘Go back where you came from.’
Back, she thought, to the dank grave and dissolution. To the earth and darkness and the worms. In spite of her resolves and in spite of Mrs. Wraxall, she went to the wine cupboard and found the brandy decanter. Burning spirit cut a swathe through the congestion in her throat.
She conjured up a picture of Adelaide’s grave, with the earth above it become suddenly transparent, so that she could see Adelaide’s thin body swarming with maggots. They ran into unseeing eyes, but the brain hadn’t died: it still felt every writhing movement of each and every maggot, taking the flesh to pieces.
Adelaide lay there, knowing that sooner or later Elaine would be dragged down to join her.
‘No.’ She could not die, she must not. Death would bring her face to face with Adelaide again—for eternity.
She drank, and refilled the glass. The nightmare of Adelaide’s vengeance wove itself into her other, most repetitive nightmare: the torment of being buried alive, of trying to struggle out but being weighted down, trapped forever while the mind still went screaming on and on. How can we know we die at once? How can we know the mind isn’t immortal, still feeling and understanding everything, but impotent in a decaying body, which at last refuses to answer further commands?
Or a mind strong enough to escape now and then, roaming, disembodied, mocking....
‘Go back!’
‘What was that, miss?’
Elaine started, and slopped brandy over the rim of her glass.
‘Do you have to creep in on me like that?’
Mrs. Wraxall glanced at the level in the decanter. ‘Will Mr. Clegg be in for dinner, miss?’
‘I’ve no idea what Mr. Clegg’s plans are.’
Elaine knew suddenly that she, in any event, would not be dining at home. ‘I shall be going out,’ she said, as much to herself as to the housekeeper. A summons lying dormant in her mind was all at once active.
She must insist on fulfilment of the promise. It must surely be her turn soon, very soon now.
To the end—you will not turn back?
When she was in her bedroom, changing, she said, ‘I shall not turn back,’ and said it aloud so that Adelaide should be left in no doubt.
*
