The Haunting of Toby Jugg (41 page)

Sally is much better born than I am. She comes of a long line of Naval people, one of whom was a Cavalier who commanded a ship in Charles I’s time. She was brought up to understand and appreciate nice things, although her family has fallen on hard times and lost nearly all their money. She is quite philosophical about the fact that she would have to earn her own living even if the war did not make that compulsory; but at times I am sure
she thinks it a little hard that she should have to, while all her ancestors for many generations back have enjoyed the comfort, elegance and freedom to live as they chose, which was the natural birthright of the English gentry.

I could give her all that, and with no strings attached. If only she will get me away from Llanferdrack I’ll be as rich as Croesus this time next week. However right Helmuth may be in his prediction that the Socialists will reduce the whole nation to the level of beggary in a few years’ time, the Jugg millions are still mine at the moment to do what I like with, if only I can get my hands on them. I’ll offer to make over to her a sum which will keep her in luxury for the rest of her life. But I have no time to lose. I must tackle her tonight, after dinner. She is bound to accept; she would be mad to refuse.

Tuesday, 16th June

Last night I was stymied. When Konrad brought my dinner up he told me that Nurse Cardew had asked him to say that she felt a little indisposed, so she was going early to bed and would not be coming up again.

Poor Sally. I love her so much that I could not help feeling sorry for her, despite the annoying set-back to my own plans. She certainly had a packet the night before, and even I don’t know quite how big a one it may have been; it was very natural that she should feel that she wanted to sleep the clock round.

Perhaps, after all, so far as I am concerned, it is all to the good that I should have been compelled to postpone my offer to her of a thundering fat bribe. She is in a much better mood this morning and, although a bit stand-offish, at least civil to me.

I have decided not to rush my fences, but to be on my best behaviour all day, so as to try to win her back to a really friendly mood; then take the plunge just after tea, when we do my second daily standing exercise.

We haven’t got very far with that. I can just bear my own weight for about a minute, but I fear it will be quite a time yet before I can take even a single step, as, directly I attempt to lift one foot from the ground, the other leg crumples up. Still, Sally
remains extremely persistent and quite optimistic about me; and, as she regards this business as her own special contribution towards my recovery, she is always most patient and sympathetic during our sessions at it. I shall do my very damnedest this evening to show some progress, so as to please her; then offer her a life of luxury for the rest of her days to become my ally.

Later

I have bogged it. I don’t think it was my fault. The exercise was a success. I stood erect for two minutes by Sally’s watch without support, and she was delighted.

As soon as I had recovered from the effort, I put the matter to her as tactfully as I could. I did not go into a long speech about Helmuth, much less make any apparently wild statements about his possessing occult powers derived from the Devil and having deliberately wished spiders on to me. I simply said that, mad or sane, I was thoroughly fed up with Llanferdrack, and had come to the conclusion that it was bad for my nerves to remain here.

I added that, if I could get to London, I was perfectly prepared to go straight to the Air Ministry and ask to be taken back into one of their hospitals; and that as I was one of their own types, and a D.F.C. to boot, I felt certain they would take me—provided I was willing to pay my own expenses. That seemed to me a pretty reasonable proposition.

Then I went all out, and mentally transporting Sally to the mountain top, spread all the riches of the earth before her. For several minutes I dilated on what an ample supply of money could still do in the world for a personable young woman. Freedom from work and care, the opportunity to meet an endless succession of men with charm, ability and wealth; clothes, beauty-treatments, furs, jewels, travel, horses to ride in the country and parties to go to in town, winter sports in Switzerland and sunbathing in the West Indies, but she did not let me get as far as making the actual offer.

Having listened to me with an intent expression for a bit, she suddenly got what I was driving at; and, coming to her feet with a jerk, she told me to ‘Shut up’.

But I went through with it; I had to, as things I value more than my life depend on my getting away from here before Helmuth gets back.

She went red in the face, stamped her foot, and declared that nothing in the world would induce her even to consider such a proposition. Looking back on it, I realise that she presents the most adorable picture when she is flushed and angry; but I was in no mood to think of that at the time. I told her that she was crazy; and that for her to reject such a future out of loyalty to Helmuth could only mean that he had bewitched her.

She replied that Helmuth had nothing to do with it, apart from the fact that he had engaged her and she was responsible to him. Then she got on her high horse about having been left in charge of me, and her honour as a professional nurse.

Again, looking back, I really believe she meant that; and, when one considers the temptation I was holding out, one does not have to be a born cynic to believe that very few young women would have shown such splendid integrity. Whether she is still a virgin, or has been Helmuth’s mistress and had a dozen lovers before him, weighs as nothing in the scales against such a flat rejection of a colossal bribe; and I know now that I am very right to love her as I do.

But, at the time, my bitter disappointment, and the awful sense of impending fate that now weighs upon me all my waking hours, overmastered all other emotions. My filthy temper got the better of me again, and I cracked at her:

‘Oh, be your age; and stop talking hot air about your professional honour! You won’t have any honour of any kind left if you have much more to do with Dr. Helmuth Lisický.’

Her blue eyes blazed, and she retorted: ‘If you were not, one—a cripple; two—my patient; and three—suffering from erotomania, I would slap your face.’

Wednesday, 17th June

I have blotted it again. Last night I decided that since there seems no possible chance of securing Sally’s conscious aid, I must attempt to hypnotise her, and force her into helping me unconsciously.
The idea was intensely repugnant to me, but desperate ills call for desperate remedies; and if ever a man was desperate, I am.

This morning, after we had been out on the terrace for about ten minutes, I tried the trick that had worked so well with Deb. I said that I had got a fly in my eye, and asked her to fish it out.

In an instant she rounded on me, called me an ‘unscrupulous young brute’ and proceeded to flay me with her tongue. I suppose that before Helmuth sacked Deb he got out of her particulars of how I had gone to work in her case. Anyhow he had told Sally about it the first night that she dined with him and warned her to be on her guard in case I attempted the same trick on her. Worse, he inferred that I had not only used the hypnotic control that I succeeded in acquiring over Deb to force her to help me to escape, but had used it before that to secure her unwilling cooperation in indulging my immoral aberrations.

Of course I hotly denied it; but that got me nowhere; and I don’t wonder now that Sally takes such a dim view of me. She said that she would have thrown up the case and gone back to London days ago if she had not realised that when these fits seize me I am not responsible for my actions. So all I have succeeded in doing is to strengthen her conviction that I am an erotomaniac, and, this morning, made a most despicable attempt to make her my unwilling victim.

By this afternoon Helmuth will have been gone two days; and that is just half the period of grace that I have been granted. I have shot both my bolts with Sally, and have not another round of any kind left in the locker.

Later

It was Sally’s afternoon off and she went down to the village; but there is nothing much to do there, so after tea she came up to sit with me. She was in a much more pleasant mood and, without exactly apologising, she inferred that she was sorry about having flared out at me as she did this morning. She said that I am so normal most of the time that she is apt to forget that my mind is unbalanced, so goes off the deep end when these occasional
evidences of my malady occur, instead of calmly ignoring them. So I think her early return to keep me company was partly a gesture of the
amende honourable
variety.

I accepted it as such only too willingly, and after we had talked of trivialities for a bit, she said:

‘I met your ex-nurse, Deborah Kain, in the village post-office this afternoon.’

‘Did you?’ I exclaimed. ‘I thought she had gone back to London.’

‘No. I gather that she is engaged to the village schoolmaster, a man named Gruffydd, and is staying with him and his mother.’

‘What did you think of her?’ I asked.

Sally smiled. ‘Rather a flashy type, isn’t she? I mean not at all the sort of person one would expect to find in these parts; or anyhow, not dressed the way she was. Her off-smart clothes, silk stockings, high heels and hair-do might have looked all right in Oxford Street, but they were a bit startling for Llanferdrack. I had no idea who she was until she came up and introduced herself. I suppose somebody had pointed me out to her as your new nurse. She asked me how I was liking it up at the Castle.’

‘And what did you say to that one?’ I smiled back.

‘Oh, I was very non-committal,’ Sally shrugged. ‘I’m quite good at minding my own business, and other people’s. I said that Helmuth was charming and you were a pet—which is by no means true all of the time—and asked her why she had chucked up such a pleasant job. That shook her rather; but she took refuge in the fib that, although she had liked both you and the Doctor immensely, when she had become engaged her fiancé had insisted on her leaving so that they could be together more often.’

We laughed a lot over that, as it was so absurdly far off the facts; but it suddenly occurred to me that Sally did not know the real truth about Deb’s relations with Helmuth and myself—only a small part of it, with a number of entirely false additions given her by Helmuth. I knew that it was useless to give her my own version, as she would never believe me, and only get in an ill-humour again from supposing that I was once more attempting to blacken Helmuth in her eyes. But there
was
one way which, if it did not entirely convince her of the respective parts we had
played, might at least arouse doubts in her mind about Helmuth’s veracity.

‘Sally,’ I said, ‘can you keep a secret?’

She nodded.

‘I mean
really
keep it,’ I went on. ‘To me this one is of vital importance. I want you to give me your word that in no circumstances whatsoever will you disclose it to Helmuth or anyone else without my permission.’

‘I’ll give you my word, then,’ she agreed. ‘All this sounds very mysterious.’

‘No. It’s very down-to-earth, really.’

While I had been speaking the idea in my mind had swiftly developed. I realised that if I was to make this final bid to convince her that Helmuth was a rogue, to give her only the part that Deb had played in the story would be like producing a single slice of a large cake. So I decided to go the whole hog, and went on:

‘Ever since the beginning of May I have been keeping a journal. You must often have seen me scribbling away with one of my stamp albums open on my knees. But I was not making long notes about water-marks, perforations and freak issues, as I pretended; I was entering up my diary, which now runs to over three hundred loose sheets.

‘You believe me to be mad; but you admit that for much the greater part of the time I am perfectly sane, so the great bulk of my writing must have been done when I was normal. My reason for writing the journal was because
I
believe myself to be the victim of a conspiracy to
drive
me insane. I hoped that if the conspiracy succeeded, and I was put in a lunatic asylum, some honest person might come across my papers, realise the truth, and take steps to get me out. That is why I have taken considerable pains to prevent anyone here knowing of the existence of this document. You see, they might destroy it; and I regard it as my only remaining lifeline.

‘If you read what I have written you may consider much of it to be the ravings of a lunatic; but it will tell you a great deal about me that you don’t know, and of which independent proof is easily available. It will tell you all about my family and my early life;
of the part that Helmuth played in it and of the great financial issues that hang upon the question of my sanity or madness; of the strange school, at which Helmuth was a master, where I was educated, and of how much he has to gain by making people believe that I am mad.

‘If I told you this story myself I’m afraid you would think that I was making great chunks of it up as I went along; but you won’t be able to think that of this account which has been written day by day as a record of events, and of the hopes and fears which have made my life one long battle for these past two months.

‘If I give you these papers will you read them through this evening, and, whatever conclusions you come to, promise faithfully to let me have them back tomorrow morning?’

‘Yes, Toby,’ she said. ‘I promise. And whatever I think I won’t give away what you have been doing. I’d like to read the biographical part especially, as it may help me to help you to get well more quickly if I know more about you. If there are over three hundred pages of it, though, it is going to take a long time to read, so perhaps I had better take them downstairs and start on it now.’

I asked her to get me the albums, extracted the pages I have written in the last few days so that she should not read the entries in which I have confessed my love for her, and gave her the rest.