The Tunnel Page 5

  “This,” said Bob with pride, “is my wife, and yuah daughter, Mistress Robert Helms. She minds me well.”

  “A likely filly!” the colonel got out between kisses of Natalie’s hand.

  “Yessuh,” said Bob, “a good brood mare. High spirited and well blooded. Most any moment now she’ll present you and mother with a grandson.”

  “Hallelujah!” yelled Mrs. Helms, who looked like the late Mrs. Horace Sherrett.

  “Amen!” came the chorus from Bob and the colonel and Andy, the ancient servitor.

  The martinis were dying in Natalie, and Mrs. Helms was dying, too, for her skin had begun to turn a bluish gray. From somewhere off in the mansion an organ began to play. Mist rolled in. Rain started to fall, gutting all the candles, and then turned into teardrops making ink spots on paper. If this was real, then no woman could bear such unutterable fulfillment. No mind was strong enough to find that its imaginings were really true.

  But it wasn’t real, and neither was it true. Perhaps she’d find the strength and will to write the truth of her visit to Richmond and her meeting with Bob Helms’ parents some other day.

  Chapter 8

  Sun struck the side of the house and slanted in through the window, announcing a beautiful day. Heat hissed in the radiator. The seven-thirty express for the city, carrying Trevil, saluted Nat with its usual reveille. She got up, buried herself in the warmth of a fleecy robe and watched the puffing train vanish into the tunnel.

  When the train had vanished, she sat at her desk and unlocked her drawer. There were papers there, covered haphazardly with her fine, neat script. She started to read, and her lips set tight when she came to the part where Dr. Olessa had made the remark, “The human mind is a funny thing. Do people do the things in life that their bodies do, or do they do what they dream?”

  Almost verbatim, she had written that scene. Would a reader believe it if she suddenly died and left it behind her? She started to write and her words poured forth. An hour later, she had covered some pages, the record of what had happened to her the night before. At the end, rereading, doubt seized her. Was it fact or fancy? Whichever it was, she had lived all through it, and if she died from poisoning, it might well send Trevil on a one-way trip to the electric chair.

  Olive knocked at the door.

  Natalie called, “Come in,” and locked her papers back in the drawer.

  The maid came in with a tray. Olive was black and fat and comforting looking, and followed by the whining Rags.

  “Good morning, Mis’ Sherrett. It’s sure a beautiful day.”

  “Yes,” said Nat, “it’s beautiful, and I’m hungry. Thank you for the tray.”

  She sat by the window and ate it all, dreaming out at the apple orchard and other stark trees on the hillside across the railroad tracks. It was much like sitting in a train, except she wasn’t moving. She let her fingers touch the pane, icy from the cold outside with a small patch of frost in one corner. The sun through the window and the warmth of the room were deceitful, carrying her back to California again.

  Bob had always been mysterious, even when she was closest to him. There was nothing about his background that she didn’t know, but she had never been free of the feeling that each time of parting was the last, that whenever he kissed her and left her she might never see him again.

  Could she really have loved him as much as she thought, and married Trev so shortly after? Maybe her last few days with Bob were so close to Heaven that earthly life was jealous.

  “I have four days, darling. Where do you want to spend them?”

  “Los Angeles. We’ve seen enough of San Francisco together, and anyhow it’s going to rain.”

  “Fine with me, punkin. We’ll take a plane.”

  They roared aloft for an hour or so and settled down in the sunlit valley. Somewhere Bob had found a car. They had driven down to Riverside and spent a night at the Mission Inn, holding hands over cocktails in the tiny secluded bar. Dinner in the courtyard with palm trees all around them, and parakeets swinging on perches, touches of India in red and orange and green.

  Maybe it was at Riverside, in that beautiful replica of a monastery, that the thought of death first touched her as they walked toward their bedroom down the length of the cloistered hall. Everything was so well done, a strident voice seemed out of place, and laughter seemed a sacrilege. She expected the old man who showed them upstairs to be some ancient monk, deprived of frock and cowl.

  She brought herself to ask a question after the heavy bedroom door with its massive lock and wrought-iron hinges had shut out the tired war-torn world and made the modem bedroom a chapel, pious with stained-glass window.

  “Have you any idea where you’ll be going, Bob?”

  He was an officer again for an instant, instead of a lover. “Even if I knew, darling, I wouldn’t be allowed to tell you. Let’s try to forget it. Wherever it is, the time will be too long while I’m gone. What’s for tomorrow?”

  “Palm Springs,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to see it.”

  “Palm Springs it is.” He held her tightly and kissed her.

  “Yes,” she said breathlessly, “it will be too long while you’re gone.”

  They drove the next day past the groves, feeling the coolness give way to heat as they dipped down into the desert. He drove too fast, but with a matchless skill, skimming by lines of snorting Diesels belching smoke as they pulled along the accoutrements of war.

  She had a chance to study his face and really, for the first and last time, know him. Crisp, curly hair, and eyes of blue and his constant laugh, as though mocking life. They stopped at the snake farm, and his very presence robbed her of any fear at the crawling reptiles. Surprised at its warmth and inoffensiveness, she even bravely picked one up, allowing it to coil in a beautiful bracelet of black around the whiteness of her arm. With Bob along, not even a snake could bring her harm.

  “Scared?” he asked, as they came outside.

  “I’m never scared of anything.”

  “Except crabs,” he reminded, and gave her a kiss on the tip of her nose.

  “You’d be scared yourself,” she protested, “if you’d ever had a big blue one grab your foot with both his claws and hang on when you were a little girl.”

  “That’s a fate I’ve escaped, but when we have our first, I’m going to keep her out of the water.”

  In the desert town, they shopped the single long main street, had a swim in the crystal pool of the big hotel, and ate dinner at the Chi Chi. The night was spent in a balconied room, overlooking the swimming pool. It was something that had never started and had no end, a single moment picked piecemeal out of existence to be looked back on with fierce nostalgia.

  They left at dawn to drive through the valley and across the mountains to San Diego, then south for a few short hours in Tia Juana. Only the sailors and marines packing the streets of the scrubby town served as reminders of death and war. Bob bought her perfume and extravagant nylons, huaraches, and post cards and cigarettes, which they smuggled across the border.

  They ate Mexican food and drank Mexican beer, and at night started northward, stopping only for a moment in La Jolla to look at the darkened buildings of her school. After that, they drove in silence along the ocean, busy watching the pathway of the moon.

  “You’ll come back?” she asked.

  “Certainly.”

  “And let me hear wherever you are?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I love you.”

  “How long do you think you’ll be away?”

  “I wish I knew.” He drove awhile in silence. “I don’t think it will be too long. I think this all must end very soon.”

  “You’ll get my letters?”

  “Certainly,” he said. “I gave you the number of the San Francisco A. P. O.”

  There was nothing the matter with her memory. She could put down on paper every word that she’d written to him every day, but not a word that he’d written in return, for none had eve
r come. Except, of course, the single message delivered to her in Bedroom “A” from some impersonal War Department who found themselves extremely sorry—a simple message, stereotyped and one of many, saying that the letter-writing days of Captain Robert Helms were done.

  Olive came in, cleared the tray away, and began to do up the room. She made the bed, straightened and dusted, and started the vacuum cleaner whirring with its noisy hum.

  Natalie stared down in the valley. Like the party the Saturday night before—or was it the Saturday night before?—the night that Bob had left her in San Francisco would never be quite clear. There were neon signs on Market Street and dinner and wine and dancing with another couple, names unknown. There was emptiness in the pit of her stomach and moments crowded with tight despair that she wanted to forget and couldn’t. There was a trip to the Chinese phone exchange and rows of girls with shining black hair who tended the thousand little lights without emotion, speaking in whining singsong voices.

  Out of it all, they had walked together and stopped on a comer near a square, somewhere close by the Francis Drake. There he had seized her and roughly and fiercely kissed her without warning.

  “I’ll come back some day, wherever you are. They’ll never take you from me, for, living or dead, I’ll find you.”

  He had walked off through the usual fog, and she’d ridden upstairs to sit alone and listen to laughter while she stared out over the harbor through the windows of the Skytop Bar.

  There were lights in the harbor, blurred by the fog.

  A road ran down from in front of the Sherrett house and crossed the tracks at the westward end of the tunnel.

  “I’ll come back and find you wherever you are.”

  Had he kept his promise? Fog-blurred lights had rocketed down the hill to death on the night that the man in uniform who looked the way that Robert looked and drove the way that Robert drove had been smashed to death by the train in his speeding car.

  Chapter 9

  Suicide Note.

  No. Better head it Unsuccessful Suicide Note. This was real resistance for every hidden impulse in you cried out against writing about yourself, particularly when you were trying with unbiased candor to prove that you had been a fool.

  But had you been a fool? Wasn’t there the barest creeping possibility that Trev had tricked you? Be honest with yourself, Nat. Nobody else is ever going to see what you’re saying here. Can you recollect taking those sleeping pills, or can’t you?

  Oh, yes, you remember very well crawling up out of that unfathomable abyss. You can recall pushing aside that sea of red dots and swimming through the tar, but how the hell did you get into that mess? Come now, reason it out, argue sanely with yourself. Writing down words such as hell and damn isn’t going to help you. You’d better go back to Virginia again and listen to the organ. At least the colonel and Andy were pleasant and flowed in comfortably out of nowhere without giving you a pain in the stomach.

  But if you are to become entirely the subject of this discourse, then Natalie Sherrett the Analyzer, or the Author, or the Narrator, or whatever you want to call her must stick to you. She wants to find out what is going on in her own mind. If she really tried to kill herself, then the cause must be real. She’s had stomach-aches and headaches and dizziness and general discomfort before, and worse; yet they’ve never been bad enough for her to want to drop six feet underground and then be dug up again to face Trev’s pained look, Mona’s scorn, Sarah’s benignity, and Cam’s owlish professional air and carefully concealed commiseration.

  Nat’s a fairly capable woman. If she wanted to find an end to a stomach-ache or even a heartache, she’d go ahead and die—hang herself, or blow her head off with a shotgun. Trev has one in his room. Whatever the means, she’d do a nice clean job of it, instead of crawling back to write down a lot of unpleasant suppositions.

  Okay, then Trev did it. Somehow he loaded up your ordinary dose of nembutal with enough to knock you out completely. Maybe he put it in your food. Nembutal is pretty bitter without the capsules, but didn’t you write down something once about the Bitter Gin of Natalie Sherrett? You’d better look back and see.

  There was first that fear of the man on the train the last time Nat went into town to have dinner with Trev at Luigi’s. (This must be set forth calmly and dispassionately, analytically, as though another being were concerned, some other entity possessing mind and body. Only in this manner, looking through the wrong end of the telescope can reactions, true and false, be properly dissected.)

  Nat was right to be afraid. The weather was very cold, and she had only accepted Trev’s pleading invitation to have dinner with him in town because she was certain that otherwise Mona would eat with him. Nat had put on her new blue tailored suit and topped it with her mink coat and smartest hat. A look in the full-length mirror before she left the bedroom gave her assurance. She really looked distinguished, able to cope with Mona or anyone.

  There would have been no trouble if the train had been on time, but it was late and the man kept following her up and down the station platform. At first glance he looked nice, and Nat thought she must have met him at some party, but after the second turn on the platform, his air became furtive. When he chose the same coach, climbed the steps and took the seat immediately behind her, Nat had incarnated ruffianism in the stranger.

  It required tremendous effort to keep from screaming when the train went into the tunnel. All through the brief darkness she felt him reaching for her, moving slowly with sinister purpose, ready to close his powerful hands about her throat and choke the breath from her body.

  How easily he could do it, and move without detection! The conductor would never know she was dead. He would merely think her asleep, take the commutation ticket from out of her lifeless fingers, punch it and move on.

  Her forehead was damp and her heart pounding madly when the train swept out and she found herself alive once more in the dim late light of the afternoon. She dared not move. All the way into the city she could conjure up no pretext for turning around.

  Tunnels weren’t built of stone. They were blocks of fear pressed tightly together to shut out the light, and cemented by dubious knowledge. She had no reason to be dubious of her knowledge when Trev met her in the city. His startled expression as he greeted her at the gate was all too real. He was surprised to find her alive, and surely not very clever about it.

  “Hello, sweetheart! Did you have a good trip?”

  “Very,” said Nat staring at him levelly. “What did you expect—that I’d be killed or something?”

  “Scarcely.” He looked flustered, or perhaps it was frustrated, as he took her arm and fell into step beside her. “The equipment’s so old on the Kenwood line that I was afraid you might have frozen to death.”

  “Not that I might have choked to death?” she asked him.

  “A drink will help clear the cinders away.” He glanced at her oddly.

  How well she was learning to interpret his glances, his naive airs of puzzlement, his poorly concealed moments of frustration! But she had to be cautious and not betray her cleverness.

  She needed courage to face a life that was full of danger. Her problem was how to be courageous when every step she took, every move she made, every word she said, and every bite she ate carried her that much closer to the brink of disaster. Right this minute, stepping outside the sanctuary of the station into the roar of the city traffic, she was engulfed again in that frightful ocean of fear.

  The city was in Trev’s employ and all against her. Every bus swirling into muddy, slushy gutters was destined only to slosh her stockings, or better still to knock her down. The mob on the street was out to get her, jamming elbows into her ribs, setting clumping feet down firmly to crush her slender toes. Every brutal face that passed her noticed her unwelcome survival with a frown. The taxi driver, intent only on suicide and murder, restrained from crashing her into disfigurement and death only because Trevil Sherrett, his employer, was riding with her.


  She reached Luigi’s tired and wilted and clung to Trev’s arm for support as he paid the driver. The obsequiousness of the maitre d’hotel served to alarm her further. Trev must have passed him money unseen by her. Such bowing and scraping could only serve to cover some purpose most foul.

  When they were seated at the flower-decked table, Trev said, “I ordered champagne cocktails as we passed the bar.”

  Nat stiffened, twisting her napkin. “Why champagne cocktails?”

  This time he beamed solicitude. “I thought you needed one.”

  “I want a double martini,” said Nat. “Ask him to bring the bottles and ice and I’ll mix it here. No Italian bartender living makes a decent dry martini.”

  “Just as you like, darling.”

  Now Trev was disappointed. Nat didn’t care. When she was scared, she was on her guard and not to be poisoned by any of Trev’s employees working in back of a bar.

  She mixed her martinis with caution, warily tasting both gin and vermouth before she blended them. Trev kept his eyes away from her, showing no signs of being disconcerted, but Nat knew him well enough to recognize that he was seething under his light demeanor.

  A waiter brought menus. Nat passed hers to Trev without looking at it. “You order, Trevil.”

  “What about—” He broke off abruptly and she knew that the crab cocktail had caught his eye.

  “It doesn’t make any difference, really. I’m tired and I’d rather not have to think.”

  “I was about to suggest the turtle soup—or we might start with the hot hors d’oeuvre.” He was speaking with deliberation, studying the menu.