Suspension of Mercy (3 page)

Alicia had put the gramophone on with a Sinatra record, and the Polk-Faradays were dancing. “I hope you don’t mind this much noise, Mrs. Lilybanks,” Alicia said, bending over her with concern. “We would go out on the lawn—we have an extension—but it just started to rain.”

Mrs. Lilybanks said she didn’t mind at all.

“Maybe you’d even like to dance, Mrs. Lilybanks,” Sydney said, springing to his feet from the floor by Mrs. Lilybanks’ chair. “This is a nice song.” It was a slow torch song.

“No, thank you. Heart condition, alas,” Mrs. Lilybanks said. “That’s why I move at the snail’s pace I do. It’ll keep me living longer than anyone I know, probably.” Half her words were drowned out by the volume of the music, she was sure.

Sydney took Alicia in his arms, and off they went, slowly shuffling over the floor that was bare now since Alicia had rolled back the carpet. It was a very worn Oriental, Mrs. Lilybanks noticed, bought probably because it fitted the square living room. She studied the quartet of young people casually, not staring at any of them more than a few seconds, as she lit and smoked the last of the four cigarettes a day she permitted herself. Sydney was a nervous type, perhaps better fitted to be an actor than a writer. His face could show great changes of feeling, and when he laughed, it was a real laugh, as if he enjoyed it to his toes. He had black hair and blue eyes, like some Irish. But he was not a happy man, that she could see. Financial worries, perhaps. Alicia was far more easygoing, a bit of a spoilt child, but probably just the kind of wife he needed in the long run. But the Polk-Faradays were still better matched, looked as if they sang each other’s praises constantly, and now were gazing into each other’s eyes as if they had just met and were falling in love. And the Polk-Faradays were raising three small children, children raising children, Mrs. Lilybanks felt, and yet she and Clive had been no older when their two had been born.

Without being noticed, Mrs. Lilybanks arose and found her way to the facilities upstairs. She passed Sydney’s workroom, a bleak, pictureless room with a homemade bookshelf along one wall and a work table for a desk, a green typewriter on it, dictionary, pencils, a stack of paper, a curtainless window beyond. A crumpled page had missed the basket and lay on the floor. The bedroom was gayer, to the left, and since the door was open, Mrs. Lilybanks paused a moment and looked in. She saw a rather sagged double bed with a blue counterpane, a banjo or mandolin fixed aslant on the wall above the bedstead, a striped wallpaper of raspberry vine pattern, more abstract pictures by Alicia, a chest of drawers and a straight chair with a pair of cotton trousers tossed across it. On the chest of drawers was a large rabbit doll of the kind Prissie still kept from her childhood days, and a silver-framed mirror of good quality. Mrs. Lilybanks went on into the bathroom which was between Sydney’s study and the bedroom. Here the purple towels with one big yellow flower on them attracted her eyes, and following this the pinned-up newspaper photograph which she thought she remembered from an
Observer
front page about a year ago. It was of a group of public school-boys in boaters and carrying umbrellas, and one was making a remark, inserted in a balloon, that made Mrs. Lilybanks start, blush, and then smile. It
was
rather funny. Mrs. Lilybanks washed her hands at the basin, while her eyes swam over the confusion of bottles on the glass tray below the medicine cabinet. Perfume, aspirin, iodine, deodorant, nail polish, shaving brush, talcum, shampoo, toothache solution, Enterovioform—looking like an aerial view of Manhattan skyscrapers, Mrs. Lilybanks thought, and no doubt this was only the overflow from the sizable cabinet above. She went downstairs again, was noticed and pressed to have a Drambuie or another cup of coffee, but she declined.

“I’ll just stay ten minutes, then I must go, thank you,” Mrs. Lilybanks said.

“It just came to me tonight that I’d love to do a portrait of you,” Alicia said to her. “Would you mind? It’s been so long since I’ve tried anything realistic. I mean, recognizable.”

“I’d be delighted,” said Mrs. Lilybanks.

“You really wouldn’t mind sitting? I mean, not reading. I like people to look at me or into space. Some people don’t like to waste the time.”

“I’ve got time,” Mrs. Lilybanks assured her.

Sydney insisted on seeing Mrs. Lilybanks home, and with his own torch, though she had brought one in her handbag.

The Polk-Faradays went to bed shortly afterward, as they were tired from the drive, and Alicia told Hittie she didn’t need to help her with the dishes. Alicia and Sydney did the dishes.

“Was it a decent dinner, darling?” Alicia asked sleepily, her hands in the sink.

“It was great. Too bad the conversation didn’t quite match it.”

Alicia smiled slyly, anticipating a small row, but not a big one, because the Polk-Faradays were in the house. Once Sydney had tripped her deliberately and sat her down in a carton full of orange skins and potato peelings. “That’s because we’re not all Sydney Smiths, I suppose. We just have to do the best we can conversation-wise.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Sydney said with even more vicious sweetness. “I mean the charming, the wifely crack about my writing being my first love, but she died several years ago, or something like that.”

“What?” asked Alicia, who really didn’t remember.

Sydney took a breath. “Died years ago, or my muse isn’t living here any more. You ought to remember, because you said it. Everyone else heard it.” Sydney remembered the brief silence, the smiles at the table, and he recalled it not so much with pain as with pleasure in his resentment of Alicia, his continued resentment for her saying it.

“What?” on a higher note, and a chuckle. “I think you’re making it up. Or it’s your inner voice. Really, Sydney, anyway it’s true, isn’t it? Otherwise it wouldn’t bother you. Did you ever think of—”

He gave her a backhanded slap across the face with the damp dishcloth—which she called in the English manner a glass cloth.

Alicia started, straightened a little, then hurled at him the cup she had been about to put in the drying rack. The cup missed him, but smashed against the refrigerator.

“Number two today,” Sydney said, bending to pick up the pieces. His heart raced. As he stood up with the glass fragments, he noticed with pleasure the pink streak on Alicia’s cheek.

“You’re barbaric,” she said.

“Yes.” Yes, and one day he’d go just a little too far and kill her. He had thought of it many times. One evening when they were here alone. He’d strike her in anger once, and instead of stopping, he’d just keep on until she was dead. Then as he looked again at Alicia, she smiled at him, and turned again to the sink. She smiled because she had gotten the last word, Sydney supposed, the thrown cup.

“Perhaps it’s time I took another little trip. Let you cool off and get some work done,” Alicia said.

“Why not?”

She had several times taken trips to Brighton and stayed two or three days, and once she had gone to London and stayed with the Polk-Faradays, each time in sort of a huff and not saying clearly where she was going.

“Excuse me—” Alex stood at the kitchen door in an old Sherlock Holmesian dressing gown, oversized pajamas, and soft felt shoes, which were why they hadn’t heard him. “Could you spare a glass of milk? One of Hittie’s bedtime habits.”

“Oh, certainly, Alex. Syd, get a glass, would you?”

4

A
bout ten days later, in the first week of June, Alicia finished her portrait of Grace Lilybanks. It was three-quarter length, a three-quarter view of Mrs. Lilybanks just under life size. Mrs. Lilybanks was holding some black and yellow pansies. Alicia had done it in her old style—starting with background first, closing in to the face, doing the face in quick strokes once she got there, the last touch of all the light that showed across the irises of Mrs. Lilybanks’ strongly blue eyes. Alicia was quite proud of the portrait—realistic to be sure, and realism was something to be looked down on, to apologize for, among people she knew, people who painted and people who didn’t, but it was hardly more realistic than Picasso’s famous portrait of Gertrude Stein, which Alicia and lots of her friends, too, considered a masterpiece.

“It’s better than the one over the fireplace,” Sydney said, “so why not put it there?” Alicia had not let him see it until it was completely finished. She had worked in her studio upstairs, where Mrs. Lilybanks had come every morning at ten to sit for an hour or so.

But Alicia’s pride in it did not go that far; it was still realistic, and therefore less of a work of art, somehow, than her most inferior abstract. She hung it on a side wall in the living room, removing the abstract that had been there.

“Yes, I do like it,” Alicia said pensively, gazing at it. “I’ll pick up a frame at Abbott’s or somewhere.” Abbott’s was the large, barnlike, secondhand furniture place in Debenham, where the Bartlebys had acquired Sydney’s work table, their living-room sofa, chest of drawers, and many odds and ends around the house. “It’s funny not to know somebody for very long and succeed in getting a likeness, isn’t it? But I’ve heard of writers who say that to write about a place they’ve known all their lives is harder than to write about a place they’ve known just three weeks, because they can’t choose the right details about a place they’ve known so long.”

True, and Sydney knew exactly what she meant, but the words touched him like a personal, directly aimed criticism: he had been stewing too long over
The Planners
, he knew, and so did Alicia know. He couldn’t really see any more details about it, or the whole of it, either, couldn’t
see
it. And yet it was the best bet he had for making money in the near future, so he was sticking with it.

They went to Ipswich that evening for a Chinese dinner, then to the cinema. And when they came out, their Hillman had a flat tire. Sydney took off his jacket so as not to soil it, and went to work with the jack and a wrench. Meanwhile, Alicia found a soft drink machine and came back with containers of sick-making orange pop. Sydney would have liked a bottle of lager after his exertions, but he couldn’t have gotten one, because it was eleven, and the pubs closed at 10:30
P.M.

“Isn’t it good Mrs. Lilybanks didn’t come,” Alicia said, “with this flat. I wouldn’t have known what to do with her.”

“Um-m.”

They were taking off again, after Sydney had left half his container of pop standing up on the curb, because he could not see a rubbish can anywhere. Alicia was still sipping hers. They had rung Mrs. Lilybanks around six and asked her if she would like to go with them tonight, but she declined, saying she had had a hard day in the garden.

“She’s got a gardener,” Sydney said. “She must be pretty delicate.”

“Just a part-time gardener. Twice a week. Mr. Cocksedge from Brandeston.”

“Cocksedge?” Sydney smiled. “What a name. Cock sedge or cock’s edge?”

“Oh, Sydney, I don’t know.”

And Alicia’s maiden name was Sneezum. Her whole name sounded like a sneeze, the inhaled suspense of Alicia, the confirmation of
Sneezum!
Sydney had used to tease her about her name and make them both laugh, using her name to sneeze by when he had to sneeze.

“She told me she had a bad heart. She may not live another two years,” Alicia said in a tone of quiet respect, as if she spoke about a relative.

Alicia had become very close to Mrs. Lilybanks during the painting sessions. They had both talked now and then in a quiet, absent way that had been curiously revealing, Alicia thought, and very good for her, at least. She had told Mrs. Lilybanks about Sydney’s difficulties with his work, his discouragement just now, and even hinted at her fears their marriage would not last. Mrs. Lilybanks had talked about habit, daily life leading to lasting love, and of the crucial second to fourth year in marriage. Mrs. Lilybanks said she had had something of the same feeling in her marriage, though her husband had been very successful as a naval engineer.

“Not so nice for the daily. Coming in one afternoon and finding Mrs. Lilybanks dead in her chair,” Sydney said.

“Oh, Sydney! How awful! What a thing to think about!”

“It could happen. Couldn’t it? She’s alone most of the time. Why should you think she’d be so obliging as to kick off when the daily or somebody else is there? . . . She’ll probably die in bed, like my grandfather. Died in an afternoon nap. Certainly must’ve been peaceful, because no one in the house knew it until they tried to wake him up.”

Alicia felt uncomfortable and vaguely annoyed, also. “Do we have to keep talking about dying?”

“Sorry. I’m a plotter,” Sydney said, slowing down to avoid hitting a rabbit that was zigzagging all over the road. The rabbit ran off to the left, up a grassy bank. “I think of a lot of things.”

Alicia said nothing, not wanting to prolong the conversation. It would happen, of course, probably while she and Sydney were still living in their house. Alicia’s eyes filled with tears—sentimental and dramatic tears, she thought reproachfully. She’d never be able to look at Mrs. Lilybanks again without thinking she might die any minute, and it was thanks to Sydney’s unnecessary remarks. “I wish you could put some of your plotting into your work where it belongs,” she said. “Some in your novel, for instance.”

“I’m working on the damned novel. What do you think I’m doing?”

“You’re working on the back part. Maybe it needs a plot all the way through. If you’re going to work on it for a while, why not try putting some plot in all the way through?”

“And why not stick to your painting and let me do the writing?”

“All right, but something’s the matter with
The Planners
, or it’d sell. Isn’t there?” she asked, unable to stop herself now.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Sydney said, speeding up a little.

“Not too fast, Syd.”

“First it’s a pep talk about the best of novels getting kicked around for years, then it’s ‘something’s the matter with it or it’d sell.’ What’m I supposed to believe? Or are you just trying to be nasty tonight?”

“Nasty? I’m throwing out a suggestion about plotting. You say you’re so full of plotting—off paper.”

It hit home, and Sydney smiled with a grim appreciation. “Yes,” he said emphatically. Yes, and sometimes he plotted the murders, the robbery, the blackmail of people he and Alicia knew, though the people themselves knew nothing about it. Alex had died five times at least in Sydney’s imagination. Alicia twenty times. She had died in a burning car, in a wrecked car, in the woods throttled by person or persons unknown, died falling down the stairs at home, drowned in her bath, died falling out the upstairs window while trying to rescue a bird in the eaves drain, died from poisoning that would leave no trace. But the best way, for him, was her dying by a blow in the house, and he removed her somewhere in the car, buried her somewhere, then told everyone that she had gone away for a few days, maybe to Brighton, maybe to London. Then Alicia wouldn’t come back. The police wouldn’t be able to find her. Sydney would admit to the police, to everyone, that their marriage hadn’t been perfect lately, and that perhaps Alicia had wanted to run away from him and change her name, maybe even go to France on a false passport—but the last was sort of wild, France involving complications not in character with Alicia.

“Sydney!”

“What?”

“You went right past the house?”

“Um.” Sydney braked and turned around.

Mrs. Lilybanks’ house was a dark lump in the milky light of the half-moon, but to Sydney it did not seem blind. It seemed to be staring intently at their car as he drove it up the short driveway and into the shelter of their wooden garage. He’d have to plan his murder of Alicia more carefully and be far more cautious about removing the body because of Mrs. Lilybanks’ nearness, Sydney thought automatically and as impersonally as if he were thinking about the actions of a character in a story. Then in due time, he would get Alicia’s income, which would be nice. He would silence her voice permanently, that voice forever sabotaging him. Sydney thought of his rewards in a detached manner, too—freedom and a little more money—as if they were coming to someone else.

S
YDNEY’S AND
A
LEX’S JOINT
N
ICKY
C
AMPBELL EFFORT
,
Mark of the Killer
, the tattoo story, was turned down by the third and last possible buyer with a note saying,
“It isn’t bad, but it’s been done before.”
The tired, terse rejection churned in Sydney’s brain for days. He took aimless walks along roads, always wanting to find some woods, to walk into the fields, yet he found no woods, and the fields, deserted as they were, looked to him as if they belonged to some watchful farmer who would ask his business if he set foot in them. Well, what was his business? Nothing. That would sound more suspicious than anything, Sydney supposed. Better to have an answer like, “I’m interested in rabbits and I thought I saw one disappear down a hole here.” He finally did venture into a few fields, but was never challenged. He would walk for miles, slowly, not thinking of food until he became hungry, which was always after 2:30
P.M.
, when the pubs were closed and he could get nothing. Then sometimes he would find a small grocery store and buy a package of Kraft’s sliced Cheddar and an apple. It was out of anger and a sense of irony that his idea for The Whip came. When it came, Sydney turned and began to walk quickly toward home, thinking as he went.

The Whip would be a criminal character who did something ghastly in every episode, and this wouldn’t be a serial, but something that could go on and on, a complete story in every program. The audience saw everything through The Whip’s eyes, did everything with him, finally plugged for him through thick and thin and hoped the police would fail, which they always did. He wouldn’t carry a whip or anything like that, but the nickname would be suggestive of depraved and secret habits. Might have a cigarette lighter with a whip design on it. Whip cuff links, S-shaped. His first exploit might be a robbery, the robbery of a plush house belonging to some moneybags with whom the audience wouldn’t be in sympathy, anyway. The police wouldn’t know his real name, but they suspect he is one of three known criminals whose dossiers they have. The Whip is none of them. He has no police record, because he has
always
been too clever for the police. And he started young, of course. No, that couldn’t be conveyed, because The Whip had no intimates with whom he talked. That would be part of the fascination: the audience wouldn’t know what was on The Whip’s mind until he started doing things. Satisfy the public’s appetite for corn, take-off, and violence beyond control of the law, all in one.

Sydney’s thoughts collapsed and vanished suddenly, he smiled and looked up at the blue but sunless sky. He had decided that the disposal of Alicia’s body required a rug, which he would be carrying over his shoulder with the apparent intention of taking it to the cleaners, for instance, which meant he’d have to get one, because he couldn’t leave the floor of the living room or one bedroom naked. But his sensibilities balked at asking Alicia to come with him to choose one, and he thought of going to Abbott’s by himself and bringing one home on his own. He’d say he was tired of looking at the threadbare thing on the living-room floor, which he was. Sydney’s mind went back to The Whip again. Near the house, he began trotting, and once in the house, he went straight to his typewriter.

He put a carbon in the machine, because he wanted to send a copy to Alex. Then he wrote:

THE WHIP STRIKES

The Whip: No one knows his real name. Even his bills come to his London flat addressed to six different people. He is 35, suave, slender, brown-haired, brown mustache, no distinguishing marks except those of a gentleman. Belongs to an exclusive club in Albemarle Street. Speaks French, German, Italian. He detests police and his gorge rises at the sight of any bobby, though The Whip has never killed one; he simply outwits and defies them. He has no partner, no confidant, though many in the underworld (and upperworld) are willing to cooperate with him because a) he has helped them in the past or b) he pays well for favors. These will be hour-long shows, each complete in itself.

As our first story opens, The Whip is getting low in funds, as we see from his scanning of bills in his chic mews flat in St. John’s Wood. An amused smile plays over his face. His face is eloquent, but not hammy, and The Whip never stoops to soliloquies by way of making his intentions clear. The Whip acts. He goes out and hails a taxi, asks the driver to drive him through certain moneyed neighborhoods. His manner is relaxed as he cases these spots, making a note now and then in a small moroccan notebook. Driver chats with him. He has no destination, but says he is looking at places where he used to live, tells driver he has been in India for the past fifteen years. It dawns slowly on the audience that he is putting on an act of being an elderly man. He has aged thirty years since getting into the taxi. The Whip dismisses the driver, and we have the feeling the driver would not be able to identify him, if his life depended on it. The Whip walks two streets, gazes at house he intends to burgle. He has the man’s name in his little book: Rt. Hon. Dingleby Haight, Q.C. Fade-out.

Fade-in on a mid-morning scene at tradesmen’s entrance of the Haight mansion. The Whip is now nearly unrecognizable in the guise of a plumber, and is quite amusing to look at. The butler at the Haight house insists that they didn’t send for a plumber, and The Whip insists just as firmly that they did. His workman’s accent is impeccable. The Whip is admitted, and is shown to the bathroom on first floor. Whip observes maid in milady’s boudoir. No matter, his kit contains chloroform, and his first victim is the butler, whom he conks with a spanner as the butler leaves bathroom. Maid comes to investigate reason for butler’s (slight) outcry, and The Whip steps from behind bathroom door with ready handkerchief full of chloroform which he claps over maid’s face. Maid swoons to ground. The Whip then takes his large kit, empty except for chloroform and