Eleven-thirty when we got in bed, and we both more or less realized at the same moment that we were unlikely to sleep. Leigh never used sleeping pills and I hadn’t for eight years, and all there was in the place were six aspirins and two Veganin. We tried one Veganin and two aspirins each, and we sat up and made tea and then read for a bit and the clock struck two and then three.
I dozed on his shoulder, and nightmare and reality took turn and turn about, the way it does when you’re a child and running a high temperature.
I suppose that way we slept, because much later I woke, warm and comfortable, the dark just giving way to the filtered light of dawn; I stretched my legs deliciously, the sheets where I parted them being just cool enough to give a sensuous pleasure to lassitude and ease. And it was minutes, or seemed minutes, before the drawn sword of the new day slid its cold steel between my ribs.
He was still sleeping. But I no longer slept.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The forecast was right: the fog was clearing. Still thick in the morning, a genuine pale sunshine had broken through by midday. There was a breeze at London Airport. A few ships left the docks and moved downriver.
I went out to lunch and, as I should get no supper, had a fairly substantial one. As usual I ate alone. The food didn’t go down but stayed in my stomach as if I had eaten clay. About three o’clock I felt so sick that I began to wonder if I should be ill and so wreck the whole plan before it started. We were still working on the Stockton china, and there were about a dozen pieces of valuable eighteenth-century stuff – jugs and mugs and vases – that I was almost certain were Lowestoft, in spite of the Meissen crossed swords on two of them – because factories were not above copying even trade marks. But Maurice Mills was out this afternoon, so, sooner than commit myself, I put the pieces aside for him to see.
I told Mary I was going out for tea, and this gave me a chance to walk a bit; then I went in a café and swallowed three cups of weak tea and waited to see if it would kill or cure.
It was nearly four when I got back, and someone said an old lady was waiting to see me, so I went to the counter at the back and found old Mrs Stevenson. She had brought another couple of pieces of china, which I accepted because they weren’t valueless; but I warned her she would be lucky to clear £30 for the two.
I thought, what would she think if she knew? What would John Hallows think? He’d probably pity rather than blame. Poor Deborah – so infatuated that she can no longer think straight at all. But after seven years . . . nearly eight. But he would be truly hurt – as most of the directors would be if they ever knew. It was such a betrayal.
On the way back I went through the showrooms. A satisfying number of people about, including several top-rank jewellers whom I knew by sight. It would be a highly successful sale tomorrow – if it ever took place.
Pains in my stomach. They seemed to be nerve pains, griping down the front of my belly and right into the groin. Nervous appendicitis. After working for twenty minutes I went into the ladies’ lavatory and sat on a creaking bentwood chair in front of the damp-stained mirror and made up my face again. My grandmother, whom I could just remember, used little cool tear-offs called papier poudré, and sometimes she’d wiped my face with them when I was a child. No modern compact seemed to have the same comforting, cooling feeling when one was hot or worried.
A girl called Madge Stevens came in. ‘Feeling all right, Deborah?’
‘Yes, why not?’
‘I just wondered. Is it the usual thing?’
‘Well, yes . . . I felt a bit green after lunch.’
‘I thought you looked it.’
‘Oh, I’m all right.’
Madge Stevens straightened her stocking. ‘Funny how things change, isn’t it? When I was at school we always used to call it the Curse. Now when it turns up I’m always so relieved that I call it the Blessing!’
I got up, smiling. ‘Well, it’s your turn at the mirror anyhow.’
Back to work, still fighting odd bouts of pain. Mary had been called away so I took the opportunity of pretending to have to go to the cupboard opposite Smith-Williams’s office. It was as I had seen it yesterday. Two mirrors, a folding camp bed, a copy of Rodin’s Le Baiser about quarter size, two buckets and a mop, and some overalls behind the door. But room enough for me. If I ever got there. I had just shut the door when Smith-Williams came out of his office.
‘Oh, Deborah, can you come here a minute?’
Like a criminal already caught, I went shakily into his office, answered some routine inquiry as if not properly awake. He had to ask me one question twice before I heard him, and I thought he looked at me appraisingly as I answered. Presently I escaped to my own office.
Five came and half past. Upstairs the showrooms would now be closed. In a few minutes John Hallows and probably Davidson, who had the longest service with the firm as a commissionaire, would go upstairs with strongboxes and open the cases and put the jewels in – the vivid viridian emeralds from Gwalpur, the diamonds collected by the late Jonathan Plouth, the paper millionaire – and bring them down and enter the strongroom and open the safe and put in the boxes and lock the safe and lock the strongroom; and then all would be secure for the night.
‘Look,’ Mary said, ‘I think I’ll slip off now, if you don’t mind. It was such hell getting home last night.’
‘Yes, of course, you go. I’m leaving myself in a few minutes.’
‘Where’s Mr Mills this afternoon?’
That was what I was wondering. ‘I don’t know if he’ll be back again. But anyway he won’t ask.’
‘OK. Thanks.’ She slid off her stool, tall and gaunt and graceless and young. ‘Thanks, Deborah. Bye.’
‘Bye.’
The directors usually went about six-thirty, though this was elastic either way. I wished I knew whether Maurice Mills would be back. If he came back he might well work on until seven-thirty, in which case it would be difficult to find an excuse to outstay him. On the other hand, if I left now and he came back at six he might be surprised to find us both gone. Or John Hallows might yet drop in about something and be similarly surprised. Also, the earlier I went to earth the more likely I was to be seen and the less unlikely it would be that by a thousand-to-one chance someone went to the cupboard.
I worked on.
At seven the guards arrived and the alarms were switched on. At that point the guards had to know if anyone was left in the building, because they had to switch off the alarms to let them out. Therefore if I was publicly in the building at seven I couldn’t just disappear. I was marked until I left.
In haste I got up, shut the reference book I’d been using, dropped my pen, groped under the desk and couldn’t find it. Starting up I jogged the desk and shook a cup and saucer to the edge. Rubbing my shoulder I looked out through the glass door and saw Smith-Williams talking to Davidson at the door of his office.
Put the cup and saucer in the cupboard out of danger. How long would they talk? Davidson, a big grey-haired ex-Guardsman – one of those who had defended Calais in 1940 – was explaining something. He was expressive about it, pointing upstairs and shaking his head. Look at my watch. Don’t panic. Do the Safeguards ever come early?
I got down on hands and knees and searched for the pen. It had rolled against one of the back feet of the desk. I stood up, wiping dust off my fingers. If Maurice Mills came back now he’d certainly stay on for an hour.
Smith-Williams was lighting a cigarette, holding his birdlike head sideways so that the flame didn’t go in his eyes. Davidson, like the other commissionaires, never smoked on duty.
If I put on my coat and went past, turned left toward the stairs but skirted them, there was an alcove with three or four enormous old oil paintings leaning half across it. The lights in the passages were still on, wouldn’t be dimmed until seven; but this alcove was halfway between lights and would be shadowy.
Twenty to seven. I put the ledger away, moved a few plates into places of safety, tur
ned the key in the glass doors of the cabinet, picked up my bag. I fiddled in the smallest pocket of the bag, found Jack Foil’s pill, put it back. I counted the money in the bag: about six pounds. I took out a compact, dabbed my face, dropped the compact in, shut the bag. I went to the cupboard by the door, took down my coat, struggled into it, tied a Spanish scarf round my hair. In the mirror my face looked pinched, the eyes out of proportion – like a bush baby or something. The pains in my stomach were coming and going like cramp.
They were still talking. I switched off the lights in the office and went out, walked toward the two men, ten paces.
‘You’ll never get young people to see it like that, sir,’ Davidson was saying. ‘There’s no discipline now, even like in my time . . .’
‘Good night,’ I said.
They both answered good night as I walked past my cupboard.
‘Well, you can’t have plain insolence, I agree,’ Smith-Williams said, his cigarette wagging. ‘Personally, I don’t see . . .’
Turn left toward the stairs and, on impulse, into the Ladies. Sensible precaution. No one there, fortunately; all the other women had probably gone. Wait five minutes. At twelve minutes to seven I came out. Passage empty. No one on stairs. Three steps back. Davidson had gone, but Smith-Williams’s office door was open. To go back and walk into the cupboard with that door open and Smith-Williams in his office was more than I could face.
Back past the stairs. Voices at the top of the stairs. Davidson and another man. Voices mumbling. Not coming down. At the end of the passage was the big furniture department, which was still lit up, but I couldn’t see anything of Grant Stokes or either of his assistants. Abreast of the alcove. It wasn’t as dark as I remembered: one of the paintings had been moved. I bent down to tie my shoe. Nothing moved either way. I straightened up, stepped over a nineteenth-century stool, round a rosewood trolley and slid behind the paintings.
Memories of childhood. Hide and seek with Sarah and little Arabella. The breathless, heart-thumping pain of crouching in a dark place while others searched for you! The stomach-twisting pains of fear. The giggling, half-hysterical leap when you were discovered. The hour-long times, the clever times, when you were not. Once I’d hidden in the chimney in the old washhouse that had then been attached to our house, and no one had found me. There’d been trouble then because everyone had got worried and been afraid I’d come to some harm. That was when I was nine, when confined spaces meant nothing to me at all.
At seven the lights went down. From now until morning pilot lights in the passages and single lights in the store rooms and display rooms. The minor offices, such as my own, were left dark.
So against all belief the first part of the plan had happened. Not as planned, of course, nothing ever did, it seemed; but I could get to my cupboard if I waited and chose the time.
Seven-twenty. Maurice Mills was clearly not coming back. Smith-Williams? On his way home to Canonbury and dinner? The commissionaires would all be gone. Think carefully. At seven the patrolling guard will have clocked in just near the strongroom in this basement. At twenty past he goes up two flights and registers in the cashier’s office. Therefore this basement should be empty of life at least until a quarter to eight. Wait then until twenty-five to eight – that gives everything time to settle down.
Fifteen minutes to crawl by. Count. Don’t look at your watch until you’ve counted a thousand. Slow now. Counting I reach five hundred and feel I must look in case I’m overrunning it. Six minutes have passed.
I look at my watch then until seven-thirty. Now.
How easy it is to stumble or kick against something merely by taking too much pains to avoid it. Out into the passage. The stairs are dark. Smith-Williams’s office in darkness. Turn corner, hand on handle of cupboard. Freeze . . . Our office is lighted.
Against the wall, trying to be invisible. Through the glass door I see Smith-Williams in there just coming out. I watch his hand on the door, then he turns back into the office and lights another cigarette.
Hand on cupboard door. Door open. It creaked. He’s taken down one of our reference books, is poring over it, blue smoke spiralling from the cigarette. Gently into the cupboard. One foot, the other, draw in one’s body, pulling the door with finger tips. Creak again. Through the narrowing gap I see him shut the book and return it to its shelf. Fingers on handle, turn slowly; shut, release handle very gently.
Darkness. Success. Footsteps close outside, another door shuts, a nick of light pierces a tiny crack in this door. He has gone back to his own office.
Smith-Williams left at eight. Before he left I heard him talking to the guard. It was Gaskell who was patrolling at present – I knew, from Monday night, the West Country voice. Gaskell was a much smaller man than his companion, McCarthy, red-faced, spectacles, with an expression as if he’d a nasty taste in his mouth. He’d been a prison officer and later a private detective. After Smith-Williams left, the tiny crack of light disappeared and utter silence fell.
I was at last able to grope about and find a comfortable position. I inched the buckets over to one side where there was less likelihood of accident. The copy of the Rodin sculpture was then eased gently after them. It was obviously impossible to get the camp bed unfolded, so I let it lie on the floor and squatted on it, letting my legs reach toward the Rodin, and trying to rest my back against the wall.
Not a great success, but time was passing. And the acute pains in my inside had temporarily stopped. Immediate emergency over.
I was a lot more comfortable than I had been in that chimney eighteen years ago. Odd I should have remembered that tonight; it had fallen into a deep trough of memory and had not been dredged up once in the last ten years. Possibly it had come up tonight because of hiding behind the pictures. Hide and seek, that was it. No claustrophobia in those days.
Don’t think of that word now. You’re not really confined here. You only have to turn the handle and the door will fly open. Only you daren’t touch the handle, that’s all.
Pity so dark. Even when one’s eyes grew accustomed it was still like near blindness. Strange that crack, which had allowed in the light from Smith-Williams’s office, let in none from the pilot light in the passage. Perhaps the light had failed. Odd if there was a power failure tonight of all nights.
Where was Leigh? Not yet nine o’clock. Perhaps eating a nervous meal on his own at the studio. And Jack Foil helping Doreen to wipe up and watering his indoor plants and then taking the dachshunds for a walk. Perfect domestic scene. Ideal husband. What excuse did he make to Doreen when he left the house later tonight? Or did she really know it all?
And Ted Sandymount? How did one tap a wire? What was more, how did one do it secretly? Presumably he knew. Post Office training? And the putty-faced, sunken-eyed Mr Irons, quiet-spoken, gentlemanly, gaunt. Was he by now gathering up his tools? Or did he have them in a special case, each instrument tempered and proved? And how would he bring them here tonight? In a private car, or by tube? Would he look like a commercial traveller, with a suitcase, seeking a hotel? Might he not be stopped by the police? They didn’t go about with their eyes shut.
Pity so dark in here. Wish one had brought a torch: this was a bad oversight. Open the door an inch? It would be quite safe to do so at regular times through the night, because one knew certainly there would be no one on this floor.
But safer not. Stay where you are. Stretch your legs a bit. Left knee is aching.
Funny if I’d never had this bad knee. Funny if none of that had ever happened. I had come home from school one afternoon; Erica petulantly: ‘Oh, Deborah, not another cold in the house! We seem to have only just got rid of Arabella’s.’ Next morning: ‘Did you remember the aspirin? Well, go to school, see how you are tonight. It’s a pity to miss games. Take two or three hankies with you.’ That evening: ‘Do your homework and then bed; I’ll bring you some hot milk. You’re running a temperature, I can see.’ Temperature 99.4 . Not alarming. Nasty night. Streaming nose. Douglas in
the morning, peeping in smiling. ‘What’s the temp? 99 ? Bed for you, I think; but get up for lunch, it’ll do you good. Minta will be in to see you later. Bye.’ I didn’t get up and didn’t want any lunch, and Minta was cross because she thought I was saucy and didn’t fancy what she brought up. Dreary afternoon, nose still running. Throat dry. Feeling mouldy. Missing the rehearsal for the school play. Miss James wouldn’t like that. Out of bed to the lavatory, felt quite breathless. Very odd. Erica back at eight. ‘Oh, dear, still in bed? You’re looking pinched. I’ll come and see you after supper.’ While they were having supper it got worse. ‘Mummy, I can’t breathe! Mummy, I can’t breathe!’ Sarah heard me. Douglas upstairs. One look at me. ‘Telephone for an ambulance.’
Funny how one remembered things after all this time. ‘Mummy, I can’t breathe!’ Didn’t do to dwell on it just now, the memory too vivid. How much air in this cupboard? If it kept out light, might it not keep out air? To have the door an inch open would be a wise precaution.
Footsteps. Gaskell round again. It must be ten. Three hours gone. Nearly halfway. Give him time to clock in . . . Think about something else. Music, painting, skating. Skating was lovely, smooth, sweeping, cold refreshing air, not like this stale cupboard air. Footsteps again; he was going back. I glanced at my watch to check, and was horrified to see that it had stopped. Stopped at ten past nine. Now what to do? I put the thing to my ear and heard it ticking.
Jogging in the ambulance. Erica came with me. Somebody in the darkness had said: ‘Hurry, she’ll not live another hour.’
Hospital – stretcher – wheel in. Room with a boxlike thing. Lift me in it. Only my head out. Torture? No, iron lung. Flat on back, head on pillow like a deck chair head rest, all body inside enormous metal coffin connected by tube to giant bellows slowly rising and falling. Pushing on your chest, pressing till you wanted to faint; then relaxing, then pulling instead, pulling till your mouth opened and air went in; relaxing, then pressing again, pressing till the air came out. ‘Ease this off a bit, nurse,’ said a voice. Then Douglas saying: ‘Naturally one did not anticipate . . . The symptoms were unidentifiable.’ Another voice: ‘You didn’t notice the loss of muscle tone?’