Suspension of Mercy (6 page)

Alicia went to get it, and Sydney unpacked the rest of the groceries.

Then Alicia came to the kitchen door, smiling, and said, “It’s Alex again. He forgot to ask us if we want to come to a party Saturday night. They’ll be glad to put us up, he said.”

They had stayed at the Polk-Faradays’ before. The living-room couch opened into a double bed. “I don’t care to go. You go, if you like.”

“Oh, Syd. Hotchkiss is going to be there, Alex said. He wants you to meet him.”

Hotchkiss was a new young writer Alex’s publishing house had discovered. Aged twenty-six, Sydney remembered Alex saying. Like Keats. “I just don’t care to go, but take the car and go. Or take the car to Ipswich and take the train.”

“Please, Syd . . . He’s on the line still.” Alicia gestured helplessly toward the telephone.

“I don’t want to go,” Sydney said stubbornly. “Go yourself.” The repetition of it made him want to scream. “Tell him I’ve got to work.”

Alicia went back to the telephone. She talked a minute more, then came back to the kitchen. He avoided her eyes, though he had to walk toward her to go out the door.

Somehow lunch was forgotten by both of them, and Sydney could tell from Alicia’s manner in the house—though he did not even see her after he went to his study—that she was not going to the party on Saturday night.

Alicia, that morning around eight, had been putting out some empty milk bottles on the front doorstep, when the postman arrived and handed her the post, a bill from Eastern Electric and a letter addressed to her which she had sensed at once was from Edward Tilbury. She had stuck the letter folded into the pocket of her dressing gown, and read it later in her studio, after breakfast. The letter made her giggle with its exaggerated formality and thanks for the delightful and salubrious day at the sea in Brighton, and he trusted that by now she was home again, refreshed by her brief excursion.

. . . I find you a refreshing companion and would be most pleased to accompany you or join you if you are planning another outing down Brighton way . . .

He gave his address and telephone number in Sloane Street, but there was no return address on the envelope, and she knew it was because he hadn’t wanted Sydney to see it and ask her any questions. The secrecy, plus Edward’s statement that he would like to see her again, made Alicia feel pleasantly excited and happy all that morning, even when she was getting soaked in the rain in Ipswich. Then Sydney’s refusal to go to the Polk-Faradays’ party had soured everything. There was no reason for Sydney to refuse, he wasn’t working all that hard, he simply wanted to be grim, nasty—and like himself. She went over to see Mrs. Lilybanks at four for a much-needed change of atmosphere. She had told Mrs. Lilybanks that she had had a very good time in Brighton, and she showed her a few sketches she had made, but she had not mentioned Edward Tilbury.

But she thought about Edward a great deal, and that evening she wished she were cooking dinner for him instead of for Sydney. There were times when Alicia felt that Sydney absolutely loathed her, that he hated her enough to kill her, if he dared. She felt that he considered himself trapped by their lack of money, and that he felt she was some kind of jinx on his work. His silly, trite Whip thing was going to fall through, she was sure, and she dreaded being around Sydney when it would, in a month or six weeks.

Sydney came down to the kitchen around 7:30 for a drink—Alicia had just made herself a scotch and soda—and his face was like dark, unexploded thunder as he stared at the liver and bacon and the marrow (squash to Sydney) that she had lined up on the kitchen table. He carried a lettuce and a tomato in his hands from the garden.

“Anything the matter?” Alicia asked.

“That liver. A bit sick-making.” Once in a while, Sydney felt disturbed by the sight of raw meat.

“I agree. Pity it’s so good for us,” she said with an irrepressible edge in her tone. “You must’ve had a sick-making afternoon.”

“Not particularly.” He started on the salad dressing.

“If I weren’t here, I suppose you’d go to the Polk-Faradays’ party, wouldn’t you?” she asked.

He lifted his head and looked at her. “No. Why do you say that?”

Because without her, he wouldn’t play games of trying to hurt her, Alicia thought. He’d have liked to go to the party, but he liked more to keep her from going. For an instant, she had an impulse to go by herself, then it left her, because she wouldn’t really have enjoyed it by herself, plus the long trip up to London and back alone. “You’d really like to kill me sometimes, wouldn’t you, Syd?”

He stared at her, looking tongue-tied.

She could tell she had touched the truth. “You’d like me out of the way sometimes—maybe all the time—just as if I were some character in your plots that you could eliminate.”

He looked at the half-peeled potato in her left hand, the paring knife in her right. “Oh, stop being dramatic.”

“So why don’t we pretend that for a while? I can be gone for weeks. Work as hard as you like—” Her voice shook a little, to her annoyance. “And we’ll see what happens, all right?”

Sydney pressed his lips together, then said, “All right.”

“You’ll—stay on here, I suppose?”

He nodded. “Yes. I suppose you’ll go to your mother’s? It’s cheaper for any length of time.”

“I suppose. I do think, Syd, we’ve had such awful times—such real
crises
—that it’ll take something pretty drastic to get us really over them. Or not. As the French say,
pour les grands mals, les grands remèdes
.”

“I agree.”

“We won’t communicate. Let’s make a promise.”

“I promise.”

“No matter how long I’m gone. I’ll get in touch with you—when I want to. And when I do, you may not want to see me again, anyway.” Now her voice really shook, and Sydney turned away, embarrassed.

“All right, Alicia. I agree. It’s a promise. Stay away as long as you—as you think you want to,” he said gently, more gently than he had said anything to her in a long while.

9

“O
h, say I’m at Mother’s,” Alicia had said that morning, in answer to the only question Sydney had put to her, where should he say she was.

It hung in the silence of the living room and repeated itself like an echo. Sydney walked about slowly. Now he was alone, and for the next several weeks, probably. They had talked a little more since Thursday night. It was not to be a break-up, not to be a trial period, or a separation, or anything one could label, to any of their friends. If anything, said Alicia, he should say they both wanted to try working apart for a while. Sydney looked at a brass-rubbing he had made of Sir Robert de Bures’ mailed feet crossed upon a small worried lion. It was from the church in Acton. He and Alicia had been together that day, very much together, picnicking in the car because it had started to rain, coming home, making love, trimming and matting the brass-rubbing on purple velvet ready for the framer. They had also visited Lavenham and Long Melford churches, Alicia making sketches, Sydney scribbling notes that he thought he might use sometime. He had even scribbled a poem.

He trudged upstairs toward his study, remembering he was on page two hundred and sixty-two of his manuscript, and had only five more pages to type. Then a reading through, and off to new publishers, the original to America, the carbon to London, and one copy for safety here. He paused in the hall, and stared through the open door of the spare bedroom. The rolled end of the old red and blue carpet just showed against the far wall. All right, go through with it, he thought. See how it feels. He might use it sometime in a book. And also, he might purge himself of his rather petulant hostility against Alicia, as the psychiatrists would say. He made a movement toward the stairs, to go off now and start the hole he meant to dig, but that was absurd. He was supposed to do it in the morning, early tomorrow morning, because it was the only logical time to do it. If he overslept, bad luck. Or rather, he just wouldn’t do it.

Though he had a perfectly good day from a working point of view, and a quiet evening of reading, he lay a long time awake. There was an occasional
bump-bump
from downstairs, and at last he got up to investigate, and found that the little window which opened like a door in the larger window of the living room had come unlatched and was swinging in the summer breeze. He went foggily back to bed and slept. A couple of hours later, he woke up, alert as he seldom was on waking. The dawn was gray at the window, and it was still so dark, he could barely see the time on his wristwatch. Ten past four. Now or never, he thought, though there was nothing urgent in his thinking, only a quiet compulsion. He went downstairs, put on coffee, then went up again to dress in old chinos, tennis shoes, and a woolen shirt. Sydney drank some coffee in the kitchen, then went to the toolhouse and got the pitchfork which he put on the floor of the car. He backed the car out of the garage into the driveway and stopped near the back corner of the house.

In the guest room, he carefully lifted the rolled carpet to his shoulder, as if it were heavier than it was and contained the body of Alicia, walked out the back door, and laid the carpet on the back seat of the car. It was no light weight even empty, and with a body in it, it would have been a staggering matter, Sydney thought. Remember that for a future book. Sydney glanced around him. Nobody in sight. Nothing but a few twittering birds. No light at Mrs. Lilybanks’ windows. Sydney drove off. It was five miles or so to the forest he had in mind. At last he turned off the Framlingham road onto the straight level road with its border of tall trees that suggested the Route Napoleon. On either side lay woods. Nothing passed him as he drove along except a lorry going in the opposite direction. Sydney pulled up on a green verge at the left side of the road.

He got out the pitchfork, and walked perhaps fifty yards into the woods before he found an area of fifteen square feet without trees on it, where only grass and bare, moist earth showed. He began to dig at the far edge of this. It was slow, hard work, despite the softness of the ground, and he wished he had brought a shovel as well. He would have liked to fold the rolled carpet in half and barely cover it with earth, but he forced himself to make a long trough as if he had to bury a real body that wouldn’t fold so easily, and he made himself dig deep, nearly four feet. When a car passed—three did—Sydney could not even see them through the foliage, only heard their motors. Therefore, he thought, no one could see him. When the grave was nearly deep enough, he went back to the car for the carpet. By now, it was much brighter, and the sun was touching the tops of the trees. He lifted the carpet onto his shoulder again, and pushed the car door to with his knee. A big green truck thundered down the road just then and sped past, ruffling his hair a little. Sydney trudged into the woods. He put the roll of carpet down, then doggedly made the trench six inches deeper its whole length, hacking vainly at the tough roots that crossed it, finally jumping in and stomping on the roots to slacken them. He rolled the carpet in, by now so tired in the arms the carpet seemed really to contain a great weight. But if there had been a body in it, he thought, his fear would have given him more strength, and the task would have been easier. Sydney shoveled and pushed the dirt in with his pitchfork. And like a real criminal, he began to feel more sure of himself with the body underground and out of sight. He walked about on the loose dirt to pack it down, and dragged the pitchfork across the grave to obliterate the tracks of his tennis shoes.

Then he walked back toward the car, turned once to look behind him in the direction of the grave, and saw nothing unusual. He realized he had torn open the butt of the one cigarette he had smoked, and scattered the bits in the breeze. And what other signs of himself might he have left? Flattened grassblades where he had walked? Well, it would take a super-Sherlock Holmes to find those after a rain, and a genius at extrasensory perception to attach the bent grassblades to him. Of course, there was the carpet itself, which Abbott’s might have a record of selling to him, and there were their friends who could identify it, but after all, there wasn’t any corpse in it. Sydney started the car. Ahead, the sunlight lay bright on the road, speckled with blurry shadows from the leaves of the trees. It promised to be a lovely day.

The Sunday passed quietly. Sydney began the reading through of
The Planners
, and with some optimism. Now the front part seemed to be tending toward the back part—which at last showed some plot and a winding up of events.

Monday at 6
P.M.
, Mrs. Lilybanks knocked on the back door with a pound of gooseberries for him. Sydney invited her in.

“They were two pounds for three and six, and I can’t possibly use more than one pound,” she said. “Do you like making gooseberry fool, or do you think it’s too much trouble?”

“I like it. I’ve never made it,” Sydney said. “Alicia sometimes makes it.”

“If you’d like, I can make your fool with mine. Two won’t be any more trouble than one. It’s just topping and tailing and straining them, you know.” She looked up at him with a smile. “Then you can stop by for it around seven thirty this evening, and I’ll just poke it at you, and you won’t have to lose any time with me delivering it.”

Sydney was touched by all the kindness. “I’m not losing time. I’ve lots of time.”

“Alicia said you wanted to work very hard these days, so I didn’t want to interrupt you. Otherwise I’d have asked you to dinner yesterday.”

“Thank you,” Sydney said awkwardly. He was still in a daze of
The Planners
.

Mrs. Lilybanks tugged her green cardigan down, and picked up the bowl of gooseberries. “How’re you finding bachelor life?” She moved toward the door.

“Won’t you sit down for a minute?” He realized with embarrassment he had not yet asked her.

“No, I’ll be off, thanks. Alicia’s at her mother’s house in Kent, she told me.”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if you’d give me the address? I’d like to drop her a note.”

“Of course. Just a minute.” Sydney went into the living room to get a pencil from the telephone table.

“It’s silly of me not to have asked her for the address,” Mrs. Lilybanks said, following him slowly. “Oh, I see you’ve got a new carpet. This is very pretty.”

“Yes,” Sydney said as he wrote. He felt a rise and fall of his heart at her words. Like real guilt, he thought. “Here we are. Mrs. Hartley Sneezum, Poke’s Corner, Rayburn, Kent.”

“Sneezum,” said Mrs. Lilybanks, reading.

“Yes.” Sydney smiled. “I used to kid her about that. Until I heard several funnier names.”

“One of my favorites is Bultitude,” said Mrs. Lilybanks. “Covers a Bultitude of sins and all that. Then Smelly I like, and Giddy and Snook. These are all local names, you know.”

“And Oxborrow,” Sydney contributed feebly, grinning. He couldn’t come out with Cocksedge.

Mrs. Lilybanks laughed, her small, substantial figure rocking back a little. “Lilybanks isn’t far behind, I hope. Lovely name for a tombstone, I always think. My husband used to be ragged unmercifully as a boy, he told me. In school, they called him ‘the Undertaker.’ ”

Sydney saw her smile diminish as she looked at him, because he hadn’t smiled. For a second, he had seen a vision of Alicia’s grave in the woods banked with white lilies. He felt he actually went pale. “It is funny. A funny name.”

“I’ll be off so you can work, and don’t forget to collect your fool before eight.” She started back through the kitchen to the door.

T
HAT WEEK,
I
NEZ RANG FROM
L
ONDON
to ask if she and Carpie and a couple of friends could drive by Saturday, and bring a picnic lunch.

“You’re very welcome,” Sydney said, “but Alicia won’t be here.”

“Oh. That’s too bad. I ran into Alex and Hittie at the Gondola the other day. They said she was back.”

“Yes, but she went off again. Wants to stay down at her mother’s for a while, I think.”

“Oh. Well, you sure it’s okay if we come by? We’ll bring the eats, never fear, and you and I can hol’ the American fort!”

“Okay,” Sydney said. “And I’ll provide the liquid refreshment.”

“Oh, some wine’ll do for us. This liquor stuff runs into dough.”

Inez and Carpie gave only wine parties, Sydney remembered. “Leave it to me.”

“Say, you got Alicia’s address handy before this call runs out? I mean her phone number.”

Sydney gave it to her.