The Tunnel Page 17

  She set the basket down, strode briskly to the bathroom to take off her dripping coat. Natalie peeked under the white napkin. She had always wondered what calf’s-foot jelly was and now she was going to find out.

  “Sarah! It’s a whole little chicken! Whatever possessed you!”

  Sarah eyed Natalie, her lips set grimly. “I’d like to know what’s possessing you,” she said. “I dare you to look me in the eye and tell me you’re afraid that bird is poisoned. Eat it. Here’s a knife and here’s a fork.”

  That was a bit too astute of Sarah, Natalie thought. What had Cam been saying to her? Or had she misjudged the woman? No; the remark had merely been typical of Sarah and her tactless humor. Poison to Sarah was a means of dealing with plant blight and cockroaches; she would never think of it in connection with the erasure of human beings. Natalie sliced off a bit of white meat and began to chew. It was good. She really was hungry; she’d been so busy writing she’d forgotten about lunch.

  “There!” said Sarah. “You were starved! Don’t eat too fast, Nat, you’ll ruin your stomach.”

  So this was what Sarah was like without Cam? Talkative, bossy, nervous? Her eyes, once so placid, lit with interest on Natalie’s manuscript.

  “What on earth’s that, Nat? That great stack of papers on your desk?”

  “It’s a book,” said Natalie calmly, beginning on a drumstick. “I’m writing a book. I can’t show it to you because it’s not finished yet.”

  “I didn’t know you wrote, Nat. You’ve always been so content just to—just to sit around,” she finished lamely. “And yet I might have suspected. Almost every woman wants to do something besides keep a house—or did want to, once.” There was a wistful note in her voice. Natalie looked at her in surprise. She was even more surprised to see tears in Sarah’s eyes.

  “What did you want to do, Sarah?” she asked softly. She, Natalie, was just another sick old lady, now, being entertained by her kindly caller. “Sweet,” she would say to herself when Sarah had gone. “Such a sweet woman. So nice to pay attention to an old lady …” Like an old woman, Natalie was avid for intimate disclosures to smack her lips over in private.

  “Why,” said Sarah, “I thought you knew. I told Mrs. Sherrett all about it one time, when she was—oh, several years ago. I wanted to be in the advertising business.”

  “The advertising business?”

  “In New York,” Sarah said. “I wanted to be an account executive, eventually. One of those people who thinks up big ideas and puts them down on paper and sells them. You wouldn’t know anything about advertising, Natalie, because you were never in it. But I was. I majored in it in school and then I got a job as a stenographer in one of the largest firms. I had worked up to being secretary to one of the executives, doing a little copy on the side, when I met Cam. He was interning at a hospital there.”

  “And you chose—between a career and marriage?” The whole thing was incredible, Natalie thought; fantastic. Incongruous to think of Sarah as she might have been; wearing black harlequin glasses, perhaps, brushed and polished, triumphant from landing a big account, dictating and talking on the phone at the same time. Not at all like Mona, but just as important in her own way. “I wish I could earn twelve thousand dollars a year.” Natalie could remember Sarah saying it, in some place, in some time. Of course; the night the voices from downstairs had come floating up to her room and she had thought Sarah incapable of mixing a good dry martini.

  “There really was no choice,” Sarah said simply. “Of course, I made a big thing of it at the time, but I loved Cam and I had no choice. I remember I sat up all night, the night he asked me to marry him, and tried to work it out. Women were just getting a start in advertising then, and I was deeply challenged. But I knew that Cam wanted to practice in a small town, and I knew that he—wouldn’t have wanted me to be a career woman. Cam is so brilliant, himself, he needs a lot of care. I decided to settle down with him and just be a kind of—vegetable woman, with nothing on her mind but food and dust cloths. And I’m glad I did, really glad. Though even now I look at ads with a professional eye. I’m sure I could have done better than most of them I see.”

  “You adjusted yourself,” Natalie said quietly. “You took what came, and made the best of it. Is that what you’re trying to tell me, Sarah?”

  “I wasn’t trying to tell you anything, Nat,” Sarah said with asperity. “But you’re right, all the same. When you love a man, as you do Trev, the changes you can make are limited to the little orb you live in. I mean, you decide what he wants most and then you fix up what you want to harmonize with it—with them—oh, heavens, I never was any good at expressing myself, not about things like this. But I know you’re unhappy; I couldn’t help gathering from Cam about the house. He didn’t tell me, not in so many words, but I’m used to him and I can tell.”

  The house again. The simple little matter of the house. Natalie wished she had thought of anything, anything at all to complain to Cam about but the house. When a doctor pressed you for facts, you had to tell him something. She wondered what Sarah would say if she were to tell her what was really on her mind? The house was a part of it, perhaps, but it was only a very small potato in her sack. If all Natalie had to do was to live in the house and be Trev’s wife, life would be simple indeed.

  It was a relief to find she was not in love with Dr. Olessa after all. Foolish man, with all his admiration of his own brains. To imagine for one moment that her sickness went no deeper than dissatisfaction with her living quarters. Foolish Natalie, to imagine herself primly in love with her confidant, the doctor. To believe there was more behind the bright eyes of her doctor than he was telling. She might as well admit it to herself, when she had thought she was in love with Cam she had been unnerved; she was flitting from flower to flower as a fickle butterfly, an empty-headed, addlepated, man-crazy dreamer. She had never fallen in love with a doctor before, but that privilege, she had heard, comes once to every woman. At least once. How nice to have it over with so quickly. How satisfactory, in view of Sarah’s wistful revelations, not to have poor Sarah for a rival as well as Mona.

  It would be dreadful and cruel to have to kill Sarah, too.

  The sack was empty again. She had solved nothing; she was right back where she started on the night she’d found the crab shells in the kitchen and Rags had refused the tainted scrambled eggs. The person to get was Mona, not Trev. With Mona gone, Trev might once again find her desirable.

  Mona was a shimmerer, a lovely jewel, as lovely as the diamond Trev had given her. Sarah had her sensible feet planted firmly on the ground and would not waver from the path she walked. Natalie herself was against the wailing wall, bereaved and ridden with fear, her mouth askew and gaping in an agony of torment.

  She heard the whistle of the late afternoon train. This brought her to her wily senses; she was able to escort Sarah to the door, thank her for the chicken, and go to the kitchen to see how dinner was coming along.

  Dinner for two.

  What would the kettle hold tonight?

  Chapter 29

  She had a lot of it down now, but it still didn’t seem to make a pattern. Natalie had known a man once who, after being in the newspaper business all his life, had started to write a novel. He had, he told her, written the first few chapters and then bogged down. He took the incomplete manuscript to a publishing house and found an editor there who liked what he had written and who told him by all means to go on and finish it.

  “But,” Natalie’s friend had said to the editor, “I can’t see where it’s going. I don’t know what the end’s going to be. I don’t know any of the answers. How do I …”

  “Never mind,” said the editor. “Just keep going. You’ll see the pattern, sooner or later.”

  Actually, the book had been three-quarters finished before the author saw the pattern, but he did see it eventually, just as the editor said he would.

  Natalie’s author had telephoned her exultantly. “Listen!” he yelled. “
Nat, I’ve got it, it’s coming out!” Then his tone had lowered to awed reverence. “There’s something mystic about it,” he said. “I had nothing to do with it. Natalie, the people in the book are making it end exactly the way they want it to!”

  But what did you do about a book that was composed of half fantasy and half truth? Or maybe all fantasy, or all truth? In Natalie’s book, what had happened and what hadn’t? What was going to happen? Would she, as the central character, be able to make her book end the way she wanted it to, and how did she want it to end, anyway? The trouble was, she didn’t know. She really didn’t want it to end any way at all. She was afraid of what the end would be.

  Afraid?

  When you go to the doctor with a suspected cancer, are you afraid of what the doctor will tell you after the examination?

  Terror might be more like it, but then again, Natalie knew that the human mind has ways of readjustment. Things that might once have seemed insupportable became bearable when the time to face them was at hand.

  Take herself, for instance. She had faced the idea that Trevil was trying to kill her in order to marry Mona Desmé. She had proof that he had put poison in her food, and proof that he loved Mona—viz. the diamond. Viz. Rags, the cat. Which side of the ledger ought that to go on, fact or fancy? For on the other hand, it might simply have been that Rags didn’t like cold scrambled eggs. It might have been, as Mona claimed, that the diamond ring had been substituted for a bonus Mona had refused to take.

  No answer there, no clue to the pattern, no potato in the sack.

  Idea number two. Robert Helms, Captain, killed in action in the Pacific, had returned to be with his wife in death as in life. The proof: she had seen and recognized him. He had left a token for her at the side of the road; his shoulder patch. She had seen him a second time in the village. On the other hand, had he been the man in the car that night, and had she seen him at the duck pond? Had she been to the duck pond at all? She must have been to the duck pond, because the things had all come from the hardware store: the hose, the milk can, the funnel, the brass curtain rings. They were all in the attic now, along with the little red lantern. She could go up and look at them any time, and they would be there, waiting for her, proving that she hadn’t dreamed that morning in Kenwood.

  Not so with the shoulder patch. That had disappeared completely. Had she buried it or not? Had she found it by the road or not? What about the swatches? Who had stolen them? What store had she bought them in?

  She couldn’t think. It hurt her head to think. It was like trying to add up somebody else’s hopelessly muddled bank statement. She was thinking too much in similes. She was thinking too much. No, she wasn’t thinking too much; she was totally unable to think at all.

  She pressed her hands against her aching eyes. Was it morning, now, or afternoon? She couldn’t remember. She ate at such irregular hours that time confused her. She knew she ought to look at the clock but she was afraid to. If a train whistled now, she wouldn’t have the least idea what train it was. It would catch her unawares and she wouldn’t know, and then the whole schedule would go off again.

  She wrenched her hands from her face with a physical effort and forced herself to look at the hands of the clock. They told her it was afternoon, three in the afternoon. But she had just been to see about dinner. Olive must have thought her mad, coming in to see how dinner was progressing at three in the afternoon. Not mad, no. No.

  It was too silly, she thought, staying in her room like this all day. She didn’t like the room much anyway. She had made it as much hers as it could ever be; she had painted the insides of her bureau drawers and closet with sachet; she had moved the chaise longue nearer the window; she had taken out some of the pictures. But she couldn’t change the spirit of the room, nor the spirit of the whole deadly house; no, no matter how many swatches she brought home from an anonymous department store or how much dismal furniture she ordered to be carted away or—no, she couldn’t break the house’s spirit if she had six children, two dogs and three cats marking up the walls, sliding down the banisters, and sleeping like angels in the bedrooms. There wasn’t any way. They had superimposed Natalie on the house and there she stuck, with the house laughing at her.

  With Mrs. Sherrett laughing at her.

  “My dear, what a childish idea! The things that go on in your quaint, independent little head! No, Natalie. Trevil will never leave this house. He loves it, you see. It has memories for him.”

  “He loved me, too,” Natalie had protested weakly. “I have memories for him, too. Mother Sherrett, you’re put-ting me on the defensive again. I’ve only said that some day I’d like it if we could have a little place of our own. A little place, one that would be ours.”

  “But he wouldn’t love that little place as he loves this one. My dear, believe me; it’s not for myself that I’m asking you to give the idea up. It’s for your husband.”

  And if Mrs. Sherrett had gone on, Natalie wondered, would she have said Trev loved the house more than he loved Natalie? Would Mona live in the house, after she had become Trev’s wife? Never, not if she knew Mona. They would have a smart apartment in town, sleekly modem, hung with fabrics of Mona’s design. The best Mona had been able to say for the rose velvet portières that gathered dust downstairs was that they had an old-world quaintness. Mona had dismissed them. Old-world quaintness was not for Mona. But after the children came? They might need the house then.

  Mona could have children …

  What was she thinking?

  What in the world was she thinking?

  She knew: she was making up thoughts and ideas to hide the monstrous idea that lay in the back of her head; the idea of all ideas, the idea she could not face. She hadn’t even dared to write the idea down in her book. She was afraid that if she wrote it down, it would be the truth. But you had to put truth into a book. Her author friend who finally saw the pattern had told her that. “You have to tell the truth,” he’d said, “as you see it. If you don’t tell the truth, you destroy the pattern. Something tells you that you’ve gone wrong; you look back and find out where the trouble is, and you discover that you haven’t told the truth somewhere, haven’t faced the problem. Then you have to fix it, or the book’s no good.”

  You’re no good. The country’s no good. The world’s no good.

  Natalie looked at herself in the ornate gilt mirror that hung over her bureau. She really looked very well, very well indeed. The faint blue shadows under her eyes emphasized the pallor of her clear skin against her dark hair. The powder blue sweater that she’d slipped on over her tweed skirt brought out the amber lights in her eyes. Her eyes had always been her best feature. They were set wide apart, heavily fringed. They were extremely candid. She had been ashamed one time when she’d paid too much for a suit; she hadn’t been able to look at Trev, and he had guessed what the trouble was. “Your face is about as masklike as a puppy dog’s,” he’d said. “Whatever it is, darling, we can afford it.”

  She would go downstairs and read. What else had Trev been able to read in her eyes, in her eyes that could hide nothing? Did he know she was planning to kill him? Or was she? She shook her head and propelled herself down the stairs by force. But when she got down, she was too restless to read. She stood by the French doors that faced the small terrace, with the useless apple orchard behind that, and behind that the hill, and beneath that, the end of the tunnel where the trains came out or went in.

  The snow had melted completely; the ground was sopping wet, the grass that unnatural green in spots, brown and dead in others. But there was a hint of spring, somewhere out there; she could feel it.

  She had to face it. Now. She would never get to the end of the book if she didn’t; never find out how the characters wanted the thing to finish.

  It wasn’t really so bad. A possible lifetime of never knowing the truth from the fancy, that was all. A lifetime of potatoes rolling underfoot; a lifetime of suspicions, of plots, of mists and rains and fog. But she didn�
�t have the verdict yet, so there was hope. She didn’t know; and she herself was the doctor.

  Natalie straightened her shoulders.

  “It’s my house,” she said aloud, almost defiantly, to someone who wasn’t there. “My house. My life. My husband. My—my mind.”

  Chapter 30

  Natalie took the 10:02 in to town. As she settled down in the green plush seat she told herself that she was very pleased with her appearance today. Everybody—the station master in Kenwood, the policeman stationed at the stop light, and now the conductor, had smiled at her, which showed she was wearing her best young-matron-off-for-a-day-in-town face. She was a dear sweet thing, flushed with pleasure at the idea of a day’s shopping, her purse stuffed with the money her adoring husband had bestowed on her at breakfast. She was just like anybody else; her smooth face revealed nothing but innocent happiness.

  She was glad she had worn her new gray suit, her green topcoat and her gray felt hat that was swathed in gray chiffon. Her hair done this new way, pulled forward over her ears, was becoming and chic. She decided she was almost as handsome as Mona. Trev had once said Mona couldn’t hold a candle to her. But it hadn’t taken him long to offer her a handsome salary and the run of the mill. Mona could have anything she wanted from the firm, just so she kept on turning out designs that made thousands of dollars. Or was it just so she kept on being Mona, lovely and desirable?

  Never mind it now, she told herself.

  The train was entering the tunnel that led past the Sherrett house; Natalie could imagine the white puff of smoke that hovered now over the road where the accident had happened, and she could imagine the house itself, watching over the activity on the tracks. The house knew she was on the train; the house was glad she was gone. It would have a day to itself now, a day to sigh and relax. Natalie sighed and relaxed in the green plush. She was thankful to be able to appreciate the darkness of the tunnel. But soon she had to grip the wooden arm tightly. It was time for the bright light to strike; this tunnel was very short. She would shut her eyes, and then perhaps nothing would happen to her when they were out.