Eye of the Needle (27 page)
L
UCY WOKE UP SLOWLY. SHE ROSE GRADUALLY,
languidly, from the warm void of deep sleep, up through layers of unconsciousness, perceiving the world piece by isolated piece: first the warm, hard male body beside her; then the strangeness of Henry’s bed; the noise of the storm outside, as angry and tireless as yesterday and the day before; the faint smell of the man’s skin; her arm across his chest, her leg thrown across his as if to keep him there, her breasts pressed against his side; the light of day beating against her eyelids; the regular, light breathing that blew softly across her face; and then, all at once like the solution to a puzzle, the realization that she was flagrantly and adulterously lying with a man she had met only forty-eight hours before, and that they were naked in bed in her husband’s house. For the second time.
She opened her eyes and saw Jo. My God…she’d overslept.
He was standing beside the bed in his rumpled pajamas, hair tousled, a battered rag doll under his arm, sucking his thumb and staring wide-eyed at his mummy and the strange man cuddling each other in bed. Lucy could not read his expression, for at this time of day he stared wide-eyed at most things, as if all the world was new and marvelous every morning. She stared back at him in silence, not knowing what to say.
Then Henry’s deep voice said, “Good morning.”
Jo took his thumb out of his mouth, said, “Good morning,” turned around and went out of the bedroom.
“Damn,
damn
,” Lucy said.
Henry slid down in the bed until his face was level with hers, and kissed her. His hand went between her thighs and held her possessively.
She pushed him away. “For God’s sake, stop.”
“Why?”
“Jo’s seen us.”
“So what?”
“He can talk, you know. Sooner or later he’ll say something to David. What am I going to do?”
“Do nothing. Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters.”
“I don’t see why, the way he is. You shouldn’t feel guilty.”
Lucy suddenly realized that Henry simply had no conception of the complex tangle of loyalties and obligations that constituted a marriage. Any marriage, but especially hers. “It’s not
that
simple,” she said.
She got out of bed and crossed the landing to her own bedroom. She slipped into panties, trousers and a sweater, then remembered she had destroyed all Henry’s clothes and had to lend him some of David’s. She found underwear and socks, a knitted shirt and a V-necked pullover, and finally—right at the bottom of a trunk—one pair of trousers that were not cut off at the knee and sewn up. All the while Jo watched her in silence.
She took the clothes into the other bedroom. Henry had gone into the bathroom to shave. She called through the door, “Your clothes are on the bed.”
She went downstairs, lit the stove in the kitchen and put a saucepan of water on to heat. She decided to have boiled eggs for breakfast. She washed Jo’s face at the kitchen sink, combed his hair and dressed him quickly. “You’re very quiet this morning,” she said brightly. He made no reply.
Henry came down and sat at the table, as naturally as if he had been doing it every morning for years. Lucy felt very weird, seeing him there in David’s clothes, handing him a breakfast egg, putting a rack of toast on the table in front of him.
Jo said suddenly, “Is my daddy dead?”
Henry gave the boy a look and said nothing.
Lucy said, “Don’t be silly. He’s at Tom’s house.”
Jo ignored her and spoke to Henry. “You’ve got my daddy’s clothes,
and
you’ve got mummy. Are you going to be my daddy now?”
Lucy muttered, “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings…”
“Didn’t you see my clothes last night?” Henry said.
Jo nodded.
“Well, then, you know why I had to borrow some of your daddy’s clothes. I’ll give them back to him when I get some more of my own.”
“Will you give my mummy back?”
“Of course.”
Lucy said, “Eat your egg, Jo.”
The child went at his breakfast, apparently satisfied. Lucy was gazing out of the kitchen window. “The boat won’t come today,” she said.
“Are you glad?” Henry asked her.
She looked at him. “I don’t know.”
Lucy didn’t feel hungry. She drank a cup of tea while Jo and Henry ate. Afterward Jo went upstairs to play and Henry cleared the table. As he stacked crockery in the sink he said, “Are you afraid David will hurt you? Physically?”
She shook her head no.
“You should forget him,” Henry went on. “You were planning to leave him anyway. Why should it concern you whether he knows or not?”
“He’s my
husband
. That counts for something. The kind of husband he’s been…all that…doesn’t give me the right to humiliate him.”
“I think it gives you the right not to care whether he’s humiliated or not.”
“It’s not a question that can be settled logically. It’s just the way I
feel
.”
He made a giving-up gesture with his arms. “I’d better drive over to Tom’s and find out whether your
husband
wants to come back. Where are my boots?”
“In the living room. I’ll get you a jacket.” She went upstairs and got David’s old hacking jacket out of the wardrobe. It was a fine grey-green tweed, very elegant with a nipped-in waist and slanted pocket flaps. Lucy had put leather patches on the elbows to preserve it; you couldn’t buy clothes like this anymore. She took it down to the living room, where Henry was putting his boots on. He had laced the left one and was gingerly inserting his injured right foot into the other. Lucy knelt to help him.
“The swelling has gone down,” she said.
“The damned thing still hurts.”
They got the boot on but left it untied and took the lace out. Henry stood up experimentally.
“It’s okay,” he said.
Lucy helped him into the jacket. It was a bit tight across the shoulders. “We haven’t got another oilskin,” she said.
“Then I’ll get wet.” He pulled her to him and kissed her roughly. She put her arms around him and held tightly for a moment.
“Drive more carefully today,” she said.
He smiled and nodded, kissed her again—briefly this time—and went out. She watched him limp across to the barn, and stood at the window while he started the jeep and drove away up the slight rise and out of sight. When he had gone she felt relieved, but also empty.
She began to put the house straight, making beds and washing dishes, cleaning and tidying; but she could summon up no enthusiasm for it. She was restless. She worried at the problem of what to do with her life, following old arguments around in familiar circles, unable to put her mind to anything else. She again found the cottage claustrophobic. There was a big world out there somewhere, a world of war and heroism, full of color and people, millions of people; she wanted to be out there in the midst of it, to meet new minds and see cities and hear music. She turned on the radio—a futile gesture, the news broadcast made her feel more isolated, not less. There was a battle report from Italy, the rationing regulations had been eased a little, the London stiletto murderer was still at large, Roosevelt had made a speech. Sandy Mcpherson began to play a theater organ, and Lucy switched off. None of it touched her, she did not live in that world.
She wanted to scream.
She had to get out of the house, in spite of the weather. It would be only a symbolic escape…the stone walls of the cottage were not, after all, what imprisoned her; but the symbol was better than nothing. She collected Jo from upstairs, separating him with some difficulty from a regiment of toy soldiers and wrapped him up in waterproof clothing.
“Why are we going out?” he asked.
“To see if the boat comes.”
“You said it won’t come today.”
“Just in case.”
They put bright yellow sou’westers on their heads, lacing them under their chins, and stepped outside the door.
The wind was like a physical blow, unbalancing Lucy so that she staggered. In seconds her face was as wet as if she had dipped it in a bowl, and the ends of hair protruding from under her hat lay limp and clinging on her cheeks and the shoulders of her oilskin. Jo screamed with delight and jumped in a puddle.
They walked along the cliff top to the head of the bay, and looked down at the huge North Sea rollers hurling themselves to destruction against the cliffs and on the beach. The storm had uprooted underwater vegetation from God only knew what depths and flung it in heaps on the sand and rocks. Mother and son became absorbed in the ceaselessly shifting patterns of the waves. They had done this before; the sea had a hypnotic effect on both of them, and Lucy was never quite sure afterward how long they had spent watching silently.
Its spell this time was broken by something she saw. At first there was only a flash of color in the trough of a wave, so fleeting that she was not certain what color it had been, so small and far away that she immediately doubted whether she had seen it at all. She looked for it but did not see it again, and her gaze drifted back to the bay and the little jetty on which flotsam gathered in drifts only to be swept away by the next big wave. After the storm, on the first fine day, she and Jo would go beachcombing to see what treasures the sea had disgorged and come back with oddly colored rocks, bits of wood of mystifying origin, huge seashells and twisted fragments of rusted metal.
She saw the flash of color again, much nearer, and this time it stayed within sight for a few seconds. It was bright yellow, the color of all their oilskins. She peered at it through the sheets of rain but could not identify its shape before it disappeared again. Now the current was bringing it closer, as it brought everything to the bay, depositing its rubbish on the sand like a man emptying his trouser pockets onto a table.
It
was
an oilskin: she could see that when the sea lifted it on the crest of a wave and showed it to her for the third and final time. Henry had come back without his, yesterday, but how had it got into the sea? The wave broke over the jetty and flung the object on the wet wooden boards of the ramp, and Lucy realized it was not Henry’s oilskin, because the owner was still inside it. Her gasp of horror was whipped away by the wind so that not even she could hear it. Who was he? Where had he come from? Another wrecked ship?
It occurred to her that he might still be alive. She must go and see. She bent and shouted in Jo’s ear: “Stay here—keep still—don’t move.” Then she ran down the ramp.
Halfway down she heard footsteps behind her. Jo was following her. The ramp was narrow and slippery, quite dangerous. She stopped, turned and scooped the child up in her arms. “You naughty boy, I told you to wait!” She looked from the body below to the safety of the cliff top, dithered for a moment in painful indecision, discerned that the sea would wash the body away at any moment, and proceeded downward, carrying Jo.
A smaller wave covered the body, and when the water receded Lucy was close enough to see that it was a man, and that it had been in the sea long enough for the water to swell and distort the features. Which meant he was dead. She could do nothing for him, and she was not going to risk her life and her son’s to preserve a corpse. She was about to turn back when something about the bloated face struck her as familiar. She stared at it, uncomprehending, trying to fit the features to something in her memory; and then, quite abruptly, she saw the face for what it was, and sheer, paralyzing terror took hold of her, and it seemed that her heart stopped, and she whispered, “No, David, no!”
Oblivious now to the danger she walked forward. Another lesser wave broke around her knees, filling her Wellington boots with foamy saltwater but she didn’t notice. Jo twisted in her arms to face forward. She screamed, “Don’t look!” in his ear and pushed his face into her shoulder. He began to cry.
She knelt beside the body and touched the horrible face with her hand. David. There was no doubt. He was dead, and had been for some time. Moved by some terrible need to make absolutely certain, she lifted the skirt of the oilskin and looked at the stumps of his legs.
It was impossible to take in the fact of the death. She had, in a way, been wishing him dead, but her feelings about him were confused by guilt and the fear of being found out in her infidelity. Grief, horror, relief—they fluttered in her mind like birds, none of them willing to settle.
She would have stayed there, motionless, but the next wave was a big one. Its force knocked her flying, and she took a great gulp of sea water. Somehow she managed to keep Jo in her grasp and stay on the ramp; and when the surf settled she got to her feet and ran up out of the greedy reach of the ocean.
She walked all the way to the cliff top without looking back. When she came within sight of the cottage, she saw the jeep standing outside. Henry was back.
Still carrying Jo, she broke into a stumbling run, desperate to share her hurt with Henry, to feel his arms around her and have him comfort her. Her breath came in ragged sobs and tears mixed invisibly with the rain on her face. She went to the back of the cottage, burst into the kitchen and dumped Jo urgently on the floor.
Henry casually said, “David decided to stay over at Tom’s another day.”
She stared at him, her mind a disbelieving blank; and then, still disbelieving, she understood.
Henry had killed David.
The conclusion came first, like a punch in the stomach, winding her; the reasons followed a split-second later. The shipwreck, the odd-shaped knife he was so attached to, the crashed jeep, the news bulletin about the London stiletto murderer—suddenly everything fitted together, a box of jigsaw pieces thrown in the air and landing, improbably, fully assembled.
“Don’t look so surprised,” Henry said with a smile. “They’ve got a lot of work to do over there, although I admit I didn’t encourage him to come back.”
Tom. She had to go to Tom. He would know what to do; he would protect her and Jo until the police came; he had a dog and a gun.