The Collector - Страница 46

She was lying with her head to one side and it looked awful, her mouth was open and her eyes were staring white like she’d tried to see out of the window one last time. I felt her and she was cold, though her body was still warm. I ran and got a mirror. I knew that was the way and held it over her mouth but there was no mist. She was dead.

Well, I shut her mouth up and got the eyelids down. I didn’t know what to do then, I went and made myself a cup of tea.

When it was dark I got her dead body and carried it down to the cellar. I know you’re meant to wash dead bodies, but I didn’t like to, it didn’t seem right, so I put her on the bed and combed out her hair and cut a lock. I tried to arrange her face so it had a smile but I couldn’t. Anyway she looked very peaceful. Then I knelt and said a prayer, the only one I knew was Our Father, so I said some of that and God rest her soul, not that I believe in religion, but it seemed right. Then I went upstairs.

I don’t know why it was one little thing that did it; you’d think it would be seeing her dead or carrying her down the last time, but it wasn’t; it was when I saw her slippers in the room where she was upstairs. I picked them up and suddenly I knew she wouldn’t ever wear them again. I wouldn’t ever go down and draw the bolts again (funny, I had still bolted her in, though), and none of it would ever happen again, the good or the bad. I suddenly knew she was dead and dead means gone for ever, for ever and ever.

Those last days I had to be sorry for her (as soon as I knew it wasn’t acting), and I forgave her all the other business. Not while she was living, but when I knew she was dead, that was when I finally forgave her. All sorts of nice things came back. I remembered the beginning, the days in the Annexe just seeing her come out of the front door, or passing her the other side of the street, and I couldn’t understand how it all happened so that she was there below, dead.

It was like a joke mousetrap I once saw, the mouse just went on and things moved, it couldn’t ever turn back, but just on and on into cleverer and cleverer traps until the end.

I thought how happy I was, feelings I had those weeks I never had before and I wouldn’t ever have again.

The more I thought about it, the worse it seemed.

It came to midnight and I couldn’t sleep, I had to have all the lights on, I don’t believe in spirits but it seemed better with the lights.

I kept on thinking of her, thinking perhaps it was my fault after all that she did what she did and lost my respect, then I thought it was her fault, she asked for everything she got. Then I didn’t know what to think, my head seemed to go bang bang bang, and I knew I couldn’t live at Fosters any more. I wanted to drive away and never come back.

I thought, I could sell up and go out to Australia. But then there was all the covering up to do first. It was too much. The next thing was I got the police on the brain. I decided the best thing was to go to the police and tell them the lot. I even got my coat on to drive down.

I thought I was going mad, I kept on looking in the mirror and trying to see it in my face. I had this horrible idea, I was mad, everyone else could see it, only I couldn’t. I kept remembering how people in Lewes seemed to look at me sometimes, like the people in that doctor’s waiting-room. They all knew I was mad.

It came to two o’clock. I don’t know why, I began to think her being dead was all a mistake, perhaps she had just been asleep. So I had to go down to make sure. It was horrible. Soon as I went down in the outer cellar I started imagining things. Like she might step out of a corner with a hatchet. Or she would not be there — even though the door was bolted she would have vanished. Like in a horror-film.

She was there. Lying there, all in the silence. I touched her. She was so cold, so cold it gave me a shock. I still couldn’t understand it was true, how she’d been living only a few hours before, and just a few days back walking about, drawing, doing her knitting. And now this.

Then something moved at the other end of the cellar, back by the door. It must have been a draught. Something broke in me, I lost my head, I rushed out and fell up the stair in the outer cellar and out. I locked the door down double quick and got into the house and locked that door and all the bolts home.

After a while the shaking stopped, I calmed down. But all I could think was how this was the end. I couldn’t live with her down there like that.

It was then I got the idea. It kept on coming back, this feeling that she was lucky to be done with it all, no more worries, no more hiding, no more things you want to be and won’t ever be. But finished, the lot.

All I had to do was kill myself, then the others could think what they liked. The people in the waiting-room, the Annexe people, Aunt Annie and Mabel, all of them. I would be out of it.

I started thinking how I could do it, how I could go into Lewes as soon as the shops opened and get a lot of aspros and some flowers, chrysanths were her favourite. Then take the aspros and go down with the flowers and lie beside her. Post a letter first to the police. So they would find us down there together. Together in the Great Beyond.

We would be buried together. Like Romeo and Juliet.

It would be a real tragedy. Not sordid.

I would get some proper respect if I did it. If I destroyed the photos, that was all there was, people would see I never did anything nasty to her, it would be truly tragic.

I thought it out, and then I went and got the photos and the negatives, all ready to burn first thing in the morning.

It was like I had to have some definite plan. Anything, so long as it was definite.

There was the money, but I didn’t care any more. Aunt Annie and Mabel would get it. Miranda talked about the Save the Children fund, but she was already half off her rocker. All those charities are run by crooks. Save the Trustees, more like.

I wanted what money couldn’t buy. If I really had got a nasty mind I would not have gone to all the trouble I did, I would have just visited the women you read about on the boards in Paddington and Soho and done what I wanted. You can’t buy happiness. I must have heard Aunt Annie say that a hundred times. Ha ha, I always thought, just let’s have a try first. Well, I had my try.

Because what it is, it’s luck. It’s like the pools — worse, there aren’t even good teams and bad teams and likely draws. You can’t ever tell how it will turn out. Just A versus B, C versus D, and nobody knows what A and B and C and D are. That’s why I never believed in God. I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.

About three o’clock I dozed off, so I went up to get a last sleep, I lay in bed seeing it all, the going into Lewes when I woke up, coming back, having a bonfire, locking up (one last look at my collection) and then going down. She was waiting for me down there. I would say we were in love, in the letter to the police. A suicide pact. It would be “The End.”

4

AS IT HAPPENED, things turned out rather different.

I didn’t wake up till after ten, it was another nice day. I had breakfast and then I went into Lewes and I got the aspros and flowers and came back and went down and then I thought I would just have a last look through her things. It was lucky I did. I found her diary which shows she never loved me, she only thought of herself and the other man all the time.

As it so happens, anyway, as soon as I woke up I began to have more sensible ideas, it’s just like me to see only the dark side last thing at night and to wake up different.

These ideas came while I was having breakfast, not deliberate, they just came. About how I could get rid of the body. I thought, if I wasn’t going to die in a few hours, I could do this and that. I had a lot of ideas. I thought how I would like to prove it could be done. Nobody finding out.

It was a lovely morning. The country round Lewes is very pretty.

I also thought that I was acting as if I killed her, but she died, after all. A doctor probably could have done little good, in my opinion. It was too far gone.

Another thing that morning in Lewes, it was a real coincidence, I was just driving to the flower-shop when a girl in an overall crossed the crossing where I stopped to let people over. For a moment it gave me a turn, I thought I was seeing a ghost, she had the same hair, except it was not so long; I mean she had the same size and the same way of walking as Miranda. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and I just had to park the car and go back the way she was where I had the good fortune to see her go into the Woolworth’s. Where I followed and found she works behind the sweet counter.

Well, I came back with the stuff and went down to see Miranda, to arrange the flowers really; I could see I wasn’t in the mood for the other thing and I thought I had better think it over first and then in any case I found the diary.

The days passed, it is now three weeks since all that.

Of course I shall never have a guest again, although now Aunt Annie and Mabel have decided to stay Down Under, it would not be difficult.

Still as a matter of interest I have since been looking into the problems there would be with the girl in Woolworth’s. She lives in a village the other side of Lewes from here, in a house a quarter mile or so from the bus-stop. You have to go along a country lane to get to it. As I say, it would be possible (if I hadn’t learnt my lesson). She isn’t as pretty as Miranda, of course, in fact she’s only an ordinary common shop-girl, but that was my mistake before, aiming too high, I ought to have seen that I could never get what I wanted from someone like Miranda, with all her la-di-da ideas and clever tricks. I ought to have got someone who would respect me more. Someone ordinary I could teach.