The Tunnel Read online

  What a lot of effort to find a seat where one might look from the windows of the observation car.

  Chapter 6

  Sarah came up to say good night and took the untouched tray away. Sarah was unimaginative, but her stolidness was comforting. If you didn’t want to eat, Sarah took it for granted that you weren’t hungry, avoiding embarrassing questions, never trying to pin you down into admitting that your husband was trying to kill you in order to marry your closest friend.

  “Have I been drinking too much lately?” Natalie inquired frankly.

  “No. Certainly not.” Sarah sat on the foot of the bed and busied herself with her knitting. “What gave you that idea?”

  “The party Saturday night …” said Nat. “I must have gotten frightfully crocked, for none of it’s very clear.”

  “Maybe you did,” said Sarah. “Cam and I weren’t here.”

  “Oh!” Nat sat up straighter in bed. “The kitchen’s full of dirty dishes and crab shells. I found them there when I was fixing tea this afternoon.”

  “Mine is always full of such things.” Sarah paused, counting stitches. “Your colored woman, Olive, comes in to clean tomorrow, anyhow.”

  “Yes,” said Nat. She had forgotten about Olive. She was troubled by the thought that Mona unquestionably wove the pattern of her life with the same artistic care that went into the designing of her fabrics. Mona would never pass out at a party. Her kitchen and house would always be in order and scrupulously clean.

  Sarah finished a row and asked if there was anything she could get and said good night for herself and Cam.

  Nat fell to thinking about the party. It was rarely that she indulged too much. Never in her life had she drawn a blank. If she had passed out, she must have done it very quietly without creating a scene.

  She switched off the light and lay listening. She could remember everything clearly from the days of her childhood. Her brilliant lawyer father who had always compared her unfavorably to the beautiful talented mother who had run away. Her recollections of school days in La Jolla were very clear, and of her college years at Stanford, where she had roomed with Mona Desmé. She hadn’t forgotten a single detail of the narrow fashionable house her father had taken near Dupont Circle when he was called to Washington by the government. She could remember playing hostess to a gathering of notables and the names of everyone who attended when she was only sixteen.

  Every day and night she had spent with Bob was sweetly lucid. His death was a shock, but had diminished with her love for Trevil—a love that lasted and would still be strong if Trevil hadn’t changed so when Mona Desmé usurped the scene.

  But she couldn’t remember a party the night before.

  Drugs!

  She lay rigid in the dark as Trevil came down the hall, opened her door and stepped inside for a moment to stand without speaking before retiring to his own room across the hall.

  The clocks downstairs struck midnight, then one, then one again. Much later they struck another one, and for an instant she shivered, thinking they should have struck two. Not until they did strike two was Natalie able to realize that they struck the half-hour as well as the hour and that she had listened without moving to half-past twelve and one o’clock and half-past one, and that she, not the clocks, was wrong.

  She got out of bed very slowly, determined to find where her memory of the party had gone. She felt for her mules in the darkness, then found a silken dressing gown and slipped it on.

  The old house had been built with a single bathroom down at the end of the hall. Later the one which served Natalie’s room had been added on.

  She stepped out into the blackness of the corridor, and chill swept against her. Trev must have fixed the thermostat for the night. The heat had gone down. It was easy to remember, hard to forget. She had made such a journey searching for a bathroom in a second-rate hotel in San Francisco, the only place she could find to stay after Bob had been ordered overseas. The same clamminess pervaded the Sherrett house, the same semi-darkness, the same urge to be quiet that she might not awaken others sleeping about her. It was the same sharp sense of uncomfortable cold, the identical sensation of going through a narrow tunnel as she made her way to the bathroom down at the end of the hall.

  The room was overly large and heavy with its trim of dark wood, stagelike with its accoutrements of old-fashioned plumbing. She bolted the door, using caution, then groped for a light-string that hung above the basin. A bulb came on, shedding light directly upon her, but its glow lit only the basin and shaving mirror. Beyond that small radius, it vanished into the ancient theatrical setting.

  She stared at herself in the mirror and gasped. There were many Natalies standing in an endless diminishing row, all looking large-eyed, frightened, and pale, as though expecting choking hands to reach out from behind them. She whirled and saw that another mirror hung behind her on the wall. It was in the door of a wardrobe. Natalie opened it and stared at shelves still housing the fortune in medicines used while Trevil’s mother was ill.

  Drugs? They were there by the score.

  Her lips formed questions she couldn’t answer. Why had Trevil kept them? Certainly nobody would ever dare to take those powerful unknown concoctions marked with the Kenwood Drug Store’s yellowing labels—two pills before retiring—Mrs. Horace Sherrett—two teaspoons after meals—this prescription cannot be refilled—one capsule three times a day—Dr. Harding.

  Even the cheerful white-haired Dr. Harding was gone, carried off by pneumonia or some such thing a few months before, leaving only memories of his red face, white mustache, and breezy assurances, and the shiny expensiveness of his chauffeur-driven car.

  Natalie started uncorking bottles and smelling them. Some were sharp, some sweet. She moistened her finger against a wet cork and touched it to the tip of her tongue. The taste seemed vaguely familiar and she began to think that for some time past the same reminiscent flavor could be detected in everything she ate and drank. She tried another, then more.

  Futility overcame her. She could stand there all night tasting bottles, and still only cover a tenth of the cluttered shelves. Their tastes were merging, becoming identical, turning into the cabinet’s medicinal smell until she was back once again drinking a soda at the counter of a Washington drugstore. The soda tasted like medicine. In the future, everything she ate and drank would taste that way.

  There was consolation in the fact that it couldn’t last long. If Trevil put enough in her food, she must die some day. At least, those left would know she was dead and how she died or where she died. They wouldn’t be left wondering if her body lay unidentified out in the vast Pacific, or if she had been smashed up at the railroad crossing while driving her car. It might be easier to swallow the contents of all the bottles right now and finish such indecision forever.

  Except for one thing. She was the daughter of Emanuel Strong. She hated weakness. She didn’t want to die. Better kill than be killed yourself. Life was pleasant and full of fun, and she intended to live it long. There were ways of finding out things.

  She was back in the hall and walked its length while thinking. Its chill was deadlier than before. Like the corridor in the hotel in San Francisco, the chill and the new unfamiliarity gave it the illusion of being endless. She reached the stairs, but like the hall in the darkness, they were lacking in palpable form.

  Could a single sip from a hundred bottles affect you? If so, she would certainly try it again, for descending was delicious. The stairs seemed to be made of bouncy rubber as she tiptoed down. She could jump if she wanted, sail without effort over the rest and land unscathed in the lower hall. Instead, she clung tight to the balustrade and crept along. The clocks all struck, but she missed the hours. The hours held no interest when trains weren’t due, and no trains ran so late in the darkness.

  Trevil had felt guilty about the party, for the kitchen was clean, except for the food on her untouched tray, placed on the drainboard of the sink to wait for Olive in the morning. She d
idn’t need to grope underneath the sink, for the smell of the crab shells was missing.

  Fur moved sinuously against the bareness and cold of her ankles. She had forgotten Rags, the cat, who slept in a basket in a comer. The touch of the smooth, sleek body was homelike, comforting and warm. There were ways of finding out things, except that she wouldn’t, even to save her life, do Rags any harm. Still, she had to know.

  She dipped her fingers daintily into hardened remnants of scrambled eggs and held them down. Rags kept rubbing against her and purring.

  “Kitty,” she whispered softly. “Kitty.”

  Rags sniffed with feline delicacy, walked to the refrigerator and gave a hungry, “Meow.”

  Nat washed her hands at the kitchen sink, scrubbing until her skin was raw before she dried with a paper towel. She poured some milk in a saucer, put it on the floor, and Rags lapped it, purring loudly.

  In her bed, Nat began to cry, clutching tight to her comforting pillow. The cat had refused her poisoned food. She knew everything now.

  Chapter 7

  So, now, Natalie Helms—

  How foolish a slip there! Of course she knew her right name. It was Natalie Sherrett. Someone had told her, maybe it was Cameron Olessa, that your mind blanked out those things you wanted to forget, and retained only pleasant memories. Such a slip was easy enough to correct with a scratch of the pen—Helms changed into Sherrett—but what of the condition that caused it? Cam had said that a writer knew the true from the false when he started writing. Helms had come with ease, leading her mind off into devious channels, and Helms was false, for now her name was Sherrett, and her life was Sherrett.

  She must try again.

  She, Natalie Sherrett, knew everything now.

  Everything about what?

  Obviously, nothing. Except, possibly, that the truth was always difficult to think or speak or set down.

  Then why not write only the things that were pleasant? Why weary oneself with useless resistance? Why not pack up right now and run away from the stuffy, obnoxious Sherrett home in West Kenwood? …

  She felt better already, just breathing in the pure Virginia air. The country was rolling, networked with busy, rushing streams, spanned by crazy, narrow bridges. The fields were fertile, the meadows lush, and everywhere within her vision the trees spread wide and green.

  Bob shaved a car as they crossed a bridge. Unwittingly she flinched, moving closer to him.

  “Did I scare you?”

  “No. You only scare me when you’re mean…. Smoke?”

  “Yes.” His eyes were on the road ahead “You like me to be mean.”

  “I do not!” She shivered delightedly at the brittleness of his tone and busied herself with the lighting of two cigarettes, and placing one of them between his lips.

  The car went over a bump.

  “You’re an awful fraud, darling,” he told her, “and an awful liar. Instead of being scared of me, you really love me when I’m mean.”

  “That’s not so,” she protested. “You’re a devil!”

  “I wonder.” He took the cigarette from between his lips and glanced at her sidewise. “I wonder how you’d like it if I made you take all your clothes off and ride home beside me with nothing but a raincoat on?” (She was putting these stilted, awful words in his mouth herself … an author revealing his weakness through characters in a play.)

  “Bob!” She felt her heart flutter and skip a beat. “Please don’t talk like that—it isn’t decent.”

  “I’d do it if it weren’t so cold—and you’d mind me, too,” he said speculatively. Then his voice changed as he gave a grin. “God, I love you, Nat! You’re a pervert in your adoration of decency.”

  “I hate you when you talk like that.” (She could stop him if she stopped herself.)

  “You couldn’t ever hate me.” His voice turned caressing. “I bet your old man used to whip you and make you take your panties off.”

  “Robert Helms, if you don’t behave, I’m getting out of this car!” (Why not just destroy the paper she was writing on?)

  “You’ll break your neck.” He increased the speed and put a hand on her knee.

  An electric tingling attacked her skin.

  “How’s that little monkey inside of you?” he asked quite seriously.

  “If it’s a monkey,” said Nat, “it comes by it quite honestly from its father who’s an ape if I ever married one.”

  Bob grinned and squeezed her knee.

  “And furthermore,” Natalie told him, “if you don’t slow down this automobile, there’ll be nothing left of the monkey or me!”

  From the top of a hill you could see the house down in a little valley. It was just as she had pictured all houses in Virginia, or all houses in the south, a rambling mansion of two or three stories with great white pillars and ivy toning down the walls which were weathered by time. Some distance behind it, the stables stretched away, and the kennels. There were servants’ houses and a large garage to house the many cars.

  A soft white mist drifted up from the valley, enshrouding the mansion. It looked like the same white mist which had enshrouded the house in Kenwood of late, but Natalie found that by reaching out with both her hands, she could move it aside in the manner one parted lace curtains.

  This helped the house take form, and instantly as its outline cleared, horses began to neigh, and hounds began to bay.

  “Like it, punkin?”

  “Of course.” She didn’t ask him how any woman could help liking her own creation. What mother dislikes her baby after it’s born?

  “You’ll like my father and mother, too.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  The car rolled smoothly down a gravelled drive and stopped underneath the porte-cochere. Natalie smiled at the bent and white-haired Negro who opened the door. His name was Andy and he called her husband Massa Bob. Nat knew him well, but she couldn’t quite place where she had seen him before.

  Andy carried their bags upstairs. It appeared that Mr. and Mrs. Helms were out driving, but would return at five. Sherry and cakes would be served in the living-room.

  Nat’s momentary pique at the absence of Bob’s parents was forgotten when he closed the bedroom door. She thought for a minute that he was going to follow up on their disturbing conversation in the car, and was glad when he didn’t. Here, somehow, such things seemed very out of place, a desecration of the cathedral-like qualities of the house and bedroom.

  The gleaming canopied four-poster was high, with steps by its side to aid entrance. The spread, pulled up to mold the outlines of a bolster, was of the heaviest crimson satin. Nat stroked its texture as she might have caressed the skin of a baby. The dressing table, flanking a ceiling-high pier mirror, was bright with silver toiletries. Nat hoped someday to own them. Had she been asked about a wedding gift, such a set would have been her choice. She sat down before the table and touched each article with a loving finger, an even more affectionate caress than that bestowed on the counterpane.

  It was delightful to be in a place where you had never been before, although you had been there many times. The idea was a pretty paradox which you could stroke with affection as you had stroked the silver and the counterpane. It produced in Nat a feeling of delightful languor which she was certain must help her digestion. How nice and cozy to be married to two men at once, one of them dead, the father of your prospective baby, the second alive and wanting to be rid of you because he was suspicious that you were visiting the parents of the first man!

  She could hear his footsteps outside in the hall right now, listening with solicitude to assure himself that his wife was home and not down in Virginia visiting. How surprised he would be to learn that Natalie’s unborn child was really not his own! Neat idea, except for the fact that there wasn’t any unborn child, never had been and never was going to be one.

  Trev would be surprised to know several other facts: (a) that his cautious footsteps really belonged to Andy, the ancient servitor bearing a tray of m
artinis from the dining-room below; (b) that the mother of Captain Robert Helms was really a cleaned-up and well-polished edition of the late Mrs. Sherrett. Natalie could check on that with more precision when Mrs. Helms returned from her afternoon drive accompanied by Colonel Calhoun Helms, her mustached and goateed husband. A worthy pair, to cherish and love their nonexistent grandson.

  “Shall we drink these, Bob, or should I tell you about my innermost thoughts?”

  “Drink them now, punkin, before they get warm. A warm martini is worse than warm beer—and I already know your innermost thoughts.”

  “And what might they be, Mr. Mastermind?”

  “Elemental, perhaps, my dear Mrs. Watson, but certainly not elementary. You’re a lady in the parlor and a cook in the kitchen.”

  “Bob!”

  “What have I said now?”

  “It’s what you haven’t said.”

  “Come here, punkin!”

  “I’ll do no such thing! You’re much too brute male in those evening clothes. Do you realize it’s the first time I’ve ever seen you out of uniform?”

  “Heavens, Nat, have you kept your eyes closed all night long for the past thirty nights?”

  “Bob, please get your mind on something decent while we’re visiting your parents. You know perfectly well what I mean.”

  Yes, without a doubt, Mrs. Natalie Helms Sherrett knew practically everything that went on in everybody’s mind except her own.

  There was some confusion about the element of time. Perhaps that was one of the elements in her mind of which Bob had spoken. She couldn’t figure how Robert Helms had donned his evening clothes so quickly, nor remember exactly when she had gotten into her evening gown. It was a silly gown, billowing down to the floor in a cascade of flounces. Halfway down the baronial staircase she realized to her horror that somehow Bob had tricked her and that the gown was the only thing she had on. She had to rush back to the bedroom to don underthings, followed by Bob’s mocking laughter.

  What was left of the martinis helped her courage, but not for long. Once downstairs, standing in the middle of the gigantic ballroom aglitter with candles, the silly gown seemed even more out of place in front of Mrs. Helms’ smart, hand-knit gray suit, an incongruous flash of modernity contrasted to Colonel Calhoun Helms’ neat but worn uniform of Confederate gray. Not until the colonel lifted Nat’s trembling hand to his white goatee did she remember that the ice-cream gown was one that Mona had lent her to attend a prom at school.