One Foot in the Grave Read online

  Dark and chill. Waiting, hour after hour, motionless, just in case. Smell of fresh-sawn timber and river reek from the wharf. Unfamiliar constant nudge of pistol holster against ribs. “They might come back,” Dickie Foyle had said. “I’ve a bit of a hunch they won’t, but we’ve got to give it a go. We’ll tell the press Monday we’ve found where it all happened.” Two young men had died, very slowly, in this rickety office, their screams drowned by the squeal of the sawmills. No sense of horror or haunting, only the blankness of waiting. No one came. Dickie’s hunch right, as usual, but not suspiciously right. Not yet.

  The double click of heels on the parquet snapped him out of his doze. He could sense her nearness. She was looking through the panel at the dummy. If it had been him lying there, and if he had still been awake, he would have moved a hand above the bedclothes to acknowledge her watchfulness and then the heels would have clicked and gone; of course, he had no way of knowing how long she waited on nights when he had already dropped off; but tonight she left barely time for the signal to begin before the heels clicked again—a disturbingly unfamiliar sound, heard from this angle—and she was gone.

  He felt an absurd rush of disappointment and knew that a large part of his disjointed will had still been hoping that she would notice something wrong with the dummy, would come in, find him dressed and waiting in the dark—and then he would have to explain, and she would understand, and then. … Deliberately he refused to consider possible thens. Absurd, disgusting. The storm thundered in and out of his mind and left him with regret, now shading into relief and on into vanity that his central will was still in command. No less absurd, but not quite so disgusting.

  He looked at his watch and found that his doze had lasted two minutes, so he had barely made it to the bathroom before she had come by. Lucky, again. He eased himself off the stool and leaned his weight on the basin while his legs became used to their function. His shoulders squared. His hand rose unbidden to adjust his neck scarf and hat, just as if he were about to step out and face the world. He left—as easy as that—and without being aware of any conscious decisions, found himself outside his own door, closing it, peeping through the panel at the dummy, grunting with satisfaction, walking down the corridor. The shock of light made him blink a couple of times but did not bother him.

  He even took a deep and manly breath, to savor the curiously clashing odors of Flycatchers, the opulence of flowers and expensive perfumes and haute cuisine, all threaded through with the sharp medical smells that arose from the endless, and always losing, battle against old age.

  It seemed natural to glance in through the panel of the next door, as if to assert his new apartness from its occupant, Air Commodore Sir Cyrus Turnbull—“My poor old vegetable,” Jenny called him. The mimed gesture of farewell stuck halfway through. She was there, standing by the bedside to take the old man’s pulse but frowning at the door … no, not at it but through it, through him and the wall beyond … she had sucked her lower lip under her teeth … she looked like a child doing sums. …

  He found he had stopped and was clutching the door-jamb, staring back. It was as though he were truly a ghost now. He could see her, but she could never see him, never … and she should not have been there!

  He lurched on at a panic shuffle, reached the fire doors and leaned his way through. His stick rattled loudly as it caught in the closing timber. He tugged it free and plunged for the stairs.

  Sense seeped back while he stood gripping the banister rail, willing the bubbling dismay to settle. It might be a bit of routine she had forgotten to tell him about. Perhaps she had had to heave the inanimate old hero around while she cleaned him up and remade his bed, and so could not take his pulse till he had settled—or perhaps she had simply found something wrong on her earlier visit and had come back to check; that would account for her hurrying through with Mr. X and Lady Treadgold. Yes, that would be it.

  The stairs steadied him still further, a known task. He was strangely fond of them. They were a refuge from the brightness and luxury of Flycatchers, and from the factitious liveliness for which the staff were instructed to strive. There was an aura of deadness and drabness about them which were proper to old age. The same cobweb had dangled from the ceiling for weeks; the carpet was worn; the lower light bulb had blown and not been replaced. … As far as he knew he was the only person who used the stairs, originally because the upward rush of the lifts drained his blood from his brain and caused him to black out, but later, as the plan took shape, in training for this one night. He put the training into practice—stick down, left leg down, shift grip on handrail, right leg down, stick down. …

  At the fringe of the near dark below the busted light bulb he stopped and looked at his watch again. Five minutes still before the man was due back—the unseen figure, known only by footsteps, whom Pibble had nicknamed the Liberator. Hamming self-confidence, he paced out of the dark, his shoes squeaking on the super-hygienic rubber stuff that covered this lower passage. At the kitchen door he hesitated. Because of the storm noises he hadn’t actually heard the kitchen staff leave, nor the Liberator’s first appearance to lock the outer door behind them. All seemed hushed. He opened the door, gave a tiny sigh of relief at seeing the expected darkness beyond, checked his bearings by the light from the passage, and walked in. Once the door was closed he shuffled through blackness until his stick rapped the leg of the big table. Now, as he’d expected, he could see the pale rectangle of the scullery door, outlined by the reflection of the floodlights from the low cloud layer. Still shuffling in case some stumbling block lay hidden in the floor-level darkness, he moved through the scullery. A jutting cupboard cast a patch of black. During his one reconnaissance visit—affable, dotardly, returning a fork which had somehow got missed from his breakfast tray—he had seen a tall stool standing in the niche. Yes. Perfect.

  As he inched his buttocks onto the stool, it tilted on some unevenness, only a bit, but enough to make him fling out a steadying arm. His hand rapped against something which itself began to move. Without orders the fingers clutched, caught, closing on a sticky mess. The thing or things stopped their slither and he detached his hand, holding it forward into the faint light, where it glistened with a long smear across the palm. Blood. Feeling into the wastebin at the little furrier’s. Hand easing down through the catlike caress of scraps till it touched a different sort of softness. Withdrawing it. Staring at the red smear. Sniffing the known reek. He sniffed at the mess, touched it with his tongue, smiled at the shock of sweetness and began to lick the mess clean. Raspberry jam and little suety crumbs. Jam-roll remains. Staff supper. Yes, he’d almost knocked over a pile of plates stacked ready for Mrs. Finsky to come and wash in the morning. That was part of the whole routine, listened for day after day and night after night, studied in the alteration of lights on the tiles of the kitchen courtyard below his window, smelt for, even … and now in three or four minutes the Liberator would come across the courtyard and unlock the outer door of the kitchen with a rattle of keys. The mortise and then the Yale. The door would open and the kitchen lights go on for a few seconds. There would come the snap of a big switch, the kitchen lights would go out a moment later. Then the man would leave, pulling the door shut behind him but not locking it. Six minutes later he would return, unlock the Yale, come in and lock up properly. Another switch would snap and the floodlights would go out. Then he would cross the kitchen and squeak out of hearing along the passage. …

  Six minutes during which the kitchen door was locked only with the Yale, and so could be opened from the inside without a key.

  Rest now. Gather energies. Hardest part still to come. Nearly there, though, nearly there. Deliberately he invited into his mind the retinue of nonsense. … There’s that Frenchman … and for many a time I had been half in love with elephants … the boiler house is blowing in the wind … monosex cricket club … there’s that Frenchman. The storm boomed. He was half aware of cold and without
thinking about it shrank further into himself, as if withdrawing the frontiers of consciousness to more defensible positions. Like a dance of conjured souls, the wraiths of meaning moped and gibbered round and round inside his skull. … I dare say, I daren’t say … the boiler house. …

  Cold squeezed in, shaking him from his doze. Had he really slept? The sense of something unfinished was pungent in his mind, like an aftertaste in the mouth. He stood up hurriedly from the stool, bringing the darkness roaring down, but came to and found himself leaning against the cupboard, still mercifully upright. His watch was hard to read in the half-light. He craned back into the shadow, screwed up his eyes and tried to pick out the feeble gleams of luminosity. Five minutes past! The Liberator had come and he hadn’t heard! But the floodlighting was still on!

  With a lurching stagger he blundered out of the scullery and into the blackness of the kitchen, slowed as though the dark were an actual thickening of the air that clogged his passage, and stood, groping at nothing. A monotonous thin whisper of air squeezed through a crack. He plunged toward it, tripped sickeningly at the doormat, banged into the door, clutched at nothing but somehow stayed upright. Already, before he had willed his feet into their proper place beneath him, his free hand was patting for the latch. There, now. No doorknob. Higher. There! No grip in fingers, no feeling of shape. Hang stick on crook of elbow, left fingers close on right hand, forcing grip tight, twist with whole body. …

  The storm blasted the door open. Wind thumped round the kitchen like an unleashed dog. He leaned himself round the door and along it, through the gap, tottering against the inrushing turmoil. A sudden lull almost toppled his forward-leaning weight, but his hand was still on the doorknob and he found himself pulling the door shut as if that was what he’d been trying to do. He let it happen. As the catch clicked, the storm came howling through the cedar branches once more.

  Clutching his hat down with his left hand, he prodded his stick forward, leaned his weight on it, shuffled his feet a few inches and prodded again. God send no gusts from sideways! There were chips of ice in the wind. His eyes raced with tears. The flaps of his coat whipped and wrapped round his thighs, like arms clutching, imploring. He was running into the wind but making no progress, a race in a nightmare. His heart was talking now, murmuring its little bubble of strain at the top of each pulse, which would be in a few moments a gulp of pain, and then. …

  Then, abruptly, the wind was still. It screamed across the courtyard, but he was out of it, standing gasping by a plain brick wall dimly lit from an upper window on the other side of the courtyard. All wrong. There was no wall in the plan! And the Liberator! Where was he? In front? Behind? The dream struggle, disorientation of time and place, seemed to close down completely, but the residual will gave a feeble little shrug of irritation. Somehow it was enough to shrug the world back into place. The fight against the wind had become a fight into the wind, so that instead of aiming at the corner of the garage he had slanted across to meet its main wall. Now he eased his stick into his left hand and with his right elbow propping his weight against the brickwork, worked his way along to the water butt at the corner. Beyond it the floodlights glared. When he huddled round out of the lee of the wall, the storm seemed to be made of light. The rain that had fallen all day lay in glittering pools in the weathered hollows of the York paving, but now what was falling was the finest of fine snow, racing in brilliant streaks across the lit arena. Through this dazzling space the colonnade reached out toward the wall of night beyond, and the storm hissed between the square brick pillars as if through the teeth of a vast comb.

  When she had first wheeled him round the gardens, before he’d been strong enough to walk more than a yard or two, it had been one of those still, gleaming afternoons peculiar to mid-September. He had not actually looked at Flycatchers from the outside before. The path had turned a corner behind a monstrous hummock of rhododendron and there it was. Amazing.

  “Well, that’s Flycatchers,” she said. “Stupid sort of name for it, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know—old men dozing in deck chairs with their mouths open.”

  “I’d never thought of that—only the birds. There are lots of them about in summer. They sit on the croquet hoops and make little mounds of doings in the fairway.”

  “My room’s round the other side, I suppose.”

  “That’s right. You have to be absolutely stinking rich to see the downs from your bedroom. Look—do you see those shutters? They’re bulletproof steel, electrically operated. The shareholders had them put in so that sheikhs can convalesce here without getting shot at. Why does it always make me think of a ship? It’s nothing like, really. Something to do with the tower, d’you think?”

  She had been right. A long white building with low-pitched purple slates, large, proportionless windows, a glass-roofed, iron-pillared veranda running half its length, odd niches in the facade dictated apparently by sudden changes of mind about the shape of the rooms within—a typical Edwardian white elephant, built for the select few to enjoy the douceur de vivre and now adapted to let their children die pleasantly. There was nothing shiplike about it, and yet it was a great liner, a veteran of imperial cruises, at anchor on this green swell of the downs. The shared perception made him think of her for the first time as anything other than the neat young woman who made her living in geriatrics.

  “What’s the tower?”

  “Only a water tower, but you can see the Channel from the top. It’s prettier than the house, isn’t it? The ship’s gone to Italy, sort of.”

  She was right again. The tower was essential to the image—an Italianate fantasy, a campanile built of different colored brick in gaudy layers, and joined to the house by a brick colonnade. The sharp foreign accent created the harbor where the ship was moored, Naples, reeking in the sun, displaying its slums to these well-to-do foreigners like a beggar displaying his sores.

  Now the ship was moored no longer. The gale made it heave and plunge as he loosed himself from the water butt and flung himself in a tottering rush for the first pillar. The paving lurched like a deck, but before he totally fell he was hugging the brickwork, hauling himself upright and readying himself, still panting, for the next swirling rush. Miraculously there was a rhythm: It was a game—he was a toy in the hurl and harshness of the wind, but provided he did what the wind wanted, it would not hurt him. He used his arms to push off from one pillar across the path of the wind, and let the wind force him back in a staggering curve against the next. The first two were black against the floods, and the third one part of the sudden dark beyond, but even so he seemed to know where it was, to clutch at an exact location in the hurtling blackness and find it still and solid. He felt, but did not see, his hat whirl into the darkness; its going seemed only part of his own. Hat and he were leaves in the wind, weightless, toys of the storm. He was laughing aloud, like a child on a stormy beach, in a high hysterical cackle he had never heard himself make before. When the storm fooled him with a sudden lull, so that he caught his stick between his legs and collapsed onto the paving, he lay for some time, gasping with laughter.

  The hysteria died. His body became heavy. The storm was outside him, jostling at flank and shoulders, trampling over his body. His legs were too numb for feeling. Perhaps he’d broken one. Careless. She wouldn’t like that. Tsk tsk.

  The sense of her disapproval was so strong that he was unaware of forcing his body up onto hands and knees and beginning to crawl along the paving, and then it changed into relief that if he was able to do this he mightn’t have broken a leg after all, and she wouldn’t be so angry with him. Then he remembered that she was going to be angry with him whatever happened, and that memory slid him back onto the tracks of the plan. Nearly there, nearly there, he mumbled, nodding and grimacing to himself as he inched through the storm.

  Something groaned in the wind. Vaguely he’d heard it before, but had thought it was just another storm noise
, a branch of the great cedar near to breaking, perhaps; but now he grasped that it was close ahead, was in fact the door of the tower, wide open, swinging in the wind, hinges groaning. All wrong. Not part of the plan. He shook his head disgustedly, but crawled up the single step and into the tower.

  Now he was in unexplored territory. There would be stairs going up—eighty-two; the sort of fact people told you. Garden furniture stored. “It’s locked so people don’t go jumping off the top, but everybody knows the key’s on a nail in the ivy there so we can get the deck chairs out. So it’s just strangers can’t jump. Club members only.”

  Out of the wind he was much more aware of the cold. The effort of resisting it had given a sort of illusion of warmth, but now, as he paused to try to guess the position of the stairs, he felt a fresh sense of urgency. His reserves were running very low. Over there, it must be. He crawled across dry paving, brushed against a stack of light wooden objects, followed an apparently clear route, and there, yes, hard and straight as a tree trunk, the newel of a spiral stair. Twisting himself onto the lowest step, he immediately began to climb.

  He had invented the technique for himself in his Hackney lodgings. Sit on bottom step; palms on edge of step above; lean back, shove with legs, heave with arms; neat as a tin toy, the buttocks slide onto the second step. Hold pose, careful in case the sudden lengthening of the body drains the blood down and brings in the roaring blackness. … No. Then palms on edge of step above, etcetera, and this time use hands to lift legs onto the first step, so that feet start next cycle two steps below buttocks … by the end of his time in lodgings he had needed to rest every three steps; but with returning strength he had worked up to eight at a time in his training sessions on the stairs beyond Turnbull’s room. He was not so strong now. Start in sixes. Then …