one end, then the other, watching the scored surfaces grow bright.
The light was growing brighter, too. She was facing to the right, towards the sea, and the layer of mist that floated above the water thinned before her face into diaphanous wisps, and dissolved in light. She looked down towards the inlet, her eyes drawn by a tiny point of colour and movement. Out of the boat-house a graceful blond shape slipped demurely, all pale, smooth woodwork and gleaming brass and bright blue paint, stealing along like a cat to rub itself delicately against the jetty. Of course, how lucky for him that he knew somebody with a secluded cottage on the coast, and a boat that could make it, in the right hands, over to the Low Countries. Somewhere at any rate, on the way to a much more distant place where a man could vanish.
He was there in the boat, she saw the thin dark figure step ashore and make the boat fast. He was bringing something in his arms from the foot of the path. What it was she could not see at first, though she saw him stoop to hoist it, and could easily recognise that it was heavy, and filled his arms. Only when he stowed it aft, and went to drag up a tarpaulin cover over it, did she realise how simple and significant a thing it was. A large, jagged stone. That was all.
She stood at the window, the file arrested in her hand. Of course, that was one of the simpler essentials. He would need a weight.
No, she corrected herself, two weights. And here he came with the second one, placing it carefully, to avoid disturbing the trim of the boat. There would be two bodies, a double burial at sea. No use hiding the first without at the same time disposing of the second, and rendering it silent for ever.
She was looking on at the final preparations for her own death and burial.
She was probing desperately at the lock with a straightened hair-grip, two of her nails broken and a fingertip bleeding and raw, when she heard her enemy enter the house and begin to climb the stairs. The key turned in the lock; the door opened.
“Come down, when you’re ready.”
His voice was level and dull. His eyes, though they did not avoid her, hardly seemed to see her, but she had no doubt that they would give him notice sharply enough if she made a false move. Nor could she see the gun, but it must be ready in his pocket in case of need. The dimness on the landing sheltered him a little, turned him into a mere lay figure, a cardboard cut-out in shades of grey. She picked up her handbag from the bed, walked steadily past him to the bathroom, and bolted the door; and after a moment she heard him go slowly down the stairs, step by heavy step like a lame man.
All the time that she was in there, making up her face with almost superstitious care to get everything right, and with a flat, dream-like sense of saying good-bye, she could feel his eyes down below, never swerving from the staircase, penning her in. When she had done her extended best for her appearance she would have to go down and face him. You can’t just crouch in a corner and close your eyes, and wait for a miracle. She made sure that her make-shift dagger was disposed at the right angle at the top of the jumbled possessions in her bag, with a fold of her handkerchief covering it. If you have to go down, you go down fighting.
Sunday morning breakfast she thought numbly, on a brief week-end jaunt before the winter sets in! Where was I yesterday? Safe at home in all that autumnal oppression, with nothing to do but wait for everything to be all right again. If it had been a clear, sunny morning like this, nothing need ever have happened, all those cobwebs would have melted from me like mist. She counted the years now, and they were nothing, a triviality, dropped petals, with illimitable wealth still to fall. She took her sights from the past resolutely, and set them on the shrunken future.
With a step as slow and drugged as his, she went down the stairs; and he was there, as she had known he would be, waiting for her. He held open the second white door in the hall. The living-room of this spectacular little house would obviously be designed to overlook the sea. A remnant of curiosity remained to her. She looked round the room with remote, unreal interest. There was a picture window, with the dawn sun framed in it in impossible beauty, for they were looking almost due east. There was a narrow white door beside it, no doubt leading into a tiny, built-in kitchenette. Everything was white wicker and orange corded silk, bright, inexpensive and gay, cushioned chairs, a light settee, a small dining-table with an orange-coloured cloth.
Her sense of unreality grew extreme. There must be a store of non-perishable and tinned foods left in the cottage. He had made tea, and produced tinned ham, cheese and crispbread. For himself, no doubt, and he must have needed it, but he had laid two places. Either he was gone beyond the boundary of reason, or the cottage exerted on him the compulsions to which he was accustomed within its walls, and the first of them was hospitality, even to his victim.
She lost touch with her own destiny then, the unreality of that room was too much for her. She knew the facts, she knew what they predicted, but she could no longer behave in accordance with what she knew. Beyond a certain point you abandon carefulness, because it is so patently of no more use, and silence, because it makes no difference any more, and because caprice may by some freakish chance hit the jackpot you’ll never get by taking aim. She began to range the room, paying no attention to him, examining everything that bore witness to the absent owners. And there on the small white bookcase, stocked with Penguins and other paperbacks for their guests, was their double photograph, a studio portrait of man and wife in their comfortable fifties, he in white open-necked shirt and silk scarf, with a round, amiable face and receding hair, she in the ageless Paisley silk shift, with a modish new shingle and a good-humoured middle-aged smile.
“Your parents?” she asked with deliberate malice; for she was quite sure that they were not his parents.
“Friends,” said the heavy voice behind her. “Louise is my godmother,” he added, with shattering calm.
“Ah, so that’s why you’re so at home here,” she said. “What’s their name?”
“Alport. Reggie and Louise Alport.” Why care enough now to make secrets of these details? He answered her because it would have taken more energy and effort to keep silence than to speak. “If you want some tea,” he said remotely, “help yourself.”
She turned to look at him then, and even came to the table and sat down, suddenly aware how desperately she wanted some tea. The suggestion of the laid table was too strong to be resisted, even though all this was a pointless interlude on the way to something else, something final.
“Do they live in Comerbourne, too?”
“No, in Hereford.” A dreary and desperate wonder sat upon him; and now that she saw him in the full light from the eastern window he was pale and insubstantial as paper, perished paper, so brittle that it might crumble to dust at any moment. “That’s where my family come from.”
“Then you work in Comerbourne.” She could not have explained why it was so important to keep talking, to keep drinking tea, and swallowing mouthfuls of sawdust food that stuck in her throat; to maintain, not a pretence, but a hypnotic suggestion, that everything here was normal, and had to be preserved, so that scoring through its
