Fear Read online

  Parvis broke off to fumble in an inner pocket. ‘Here,’ he continued, ‘here’s an account of the whole thing from the Sentinel – a little sensational, of course. But I guess you’d better look it over.’

  He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly, remembering, as she did so, the evening when, in that same room, the perusal of a clipping from the Sentinel had first shaken the depths of her security.

  As she opened the paper her eyes, shrinking from the glaring headlines, ‘Widow of Boyne’s Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid’, ran down the column of text to two portraits inserted in it. The first was her husband’s, taken from a photograph made the year they had come to England. It was the picture of him that she liked best, the one that stood on the writing-table upstairs in her bedroom. As the eyes in the photograph met hers, she felt it would be impossible to read what was said of him, and closed her lids with the sharpness of the pain.

  ‘I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down –’ she heard Parvis continue.

  She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other portrait. It was that of a youngish man, slightly built, with features somewhat blurred by the shadow of a projecting hatbrim. Where had she seen that outline before? She stared at it confusedly, her heart hammering in her ears. Then she gave a cry.

  ‘This is the man – the man who came for my husband!’

  She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she had slipped backward into the corner of the sofa, and that he was bending above her in alarm. She straightened herself and reached out for the paper, which she had dropped.

  ‘It’s the man! I should know him anywhere!’ she persisted in a voice that sounded to her own ears like a scream.

  Parvis’s answer seemed to come to her from far off, down endless fog-muffled windings.

  ‘Mrs Boyne, you’re not very well. Shall I call someone? Shall I get a glass of water?’

  ‘No, no, no!’ She threw herself towards him, her hand frantically clutching the newspaper. ‘I tell you, it’s the man! I know him! He spoke to me in the garden!’

  Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the portrait. ‘It can’t be, Mrs Boyne. It’s Robert Elwell.’

  ‘Robert Elwell?’ Her white stare seemed to travel into space. ‘Then it was Robert Elwell who came for him.’

  ‘Came for Boyne? The day he went away from here?’ Parvis’s voice dropped as hers rose. He bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as if to coax her gently back into her seat. ‘Why, Elwell was dead! Don’t you remember?’

  Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what he was saying.

  ‘Don’t you remember Boyne’s unfinished letter to me – the one you found on his desk that day? It was written just after he’d heard of Elwell’s death.’ She noticed an odd shake in Parvis’s unemotional voice. ‘Surely you remember!’ he urged her.

  Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it. Elwell had died the day before her husband’s disappearance; and this was Elwell’s portrait; and it was the portrait of the man who had spoken to her in the garden. She lifted her head and looked slowly about the library. The library could have borne witness that it was also the portrait of the man who had come in that day to call Boyne from his unfinished letter. Through the misty surgings of her brain she heard the faint boom of half-forgotten words – words spoken by Alida Stair on the lawn at Pangbourne before Boyne and his wife had ever seen the house at Lyng, or had imagined that they might one day live there.

  ‘This was the man who spoke to me,’ she repeated.

  She looked again at Parvis. He was trying to conceal his disturbance under what he probably imagined to be an expression of indulgent commiseration; but the edges of his lips were blue. ‘He thinks me mad, but I’m not mad,’ she reflected; and suddenly there flashed upon her a way of justifying her strange affirmation.

  She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting till she could trust her voice; then she said, looking straight at Parvis: ‘Will you answer me one question, please? When was it that Robert Elwell tried to kill himself?’

  ‘When – when?’ Parvis stammered.

  ‘Yes; the date. Please try to remember.’

  She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her. ‘I have a reason,’ she insisted.

  ‘Yes, yes. Only I can’t remember. About two months before, I should say.’

  ‘I want the date,’ she repeated.

  Parvis picked up the newspaper. ‘We might see here,’ he said, still humouring her. He ran his eyes down the page. ‘Here it is. Last October – the –’

  She caught the words from him. ‘The 20th, wasn’t it?’ With a sharp look at her, he verified. ‘Yes, the 20th. Then you did know?’

  ‘I know now.’ Her gaze continued to travel past him. ‘Sunday, the 20th – that was the day he came first.’

  Parvis’s voice was almost inaudible. ‘Came here first?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You saw him twice, then?’

  ‘Yes, twice.’ She just breathed it at him. ‘He came first on the 20th of October. I remember the date because it was the day we went up Meldon Steep for the first time.’ She felt a faint gasp of inward laughter at the thought that but for that she might have forgotten.

  Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her gaze.

  ‘We saw him from the roof,’ she went on. ‘He came down the lime-avenue towards the house. He was dressed just as he is in that picture. My husband saw him first. He was frightened, and ran down ahead of me; but there was no one there. He had vanished.’

  ‘Elwell had vanished?’ Parvis faltered.

  ‘Yes.’ Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. ‘I couldn’t think what had happened. I see now. He tried to come then; but he wasn’t dead enough – he couldn’t reach us. He had to wait for two months to die; and then he came back again – and Ned went with him.’

  She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has worked out a difficult puzzle. But suddenly she lifted her hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her temples.

  ‘Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned – I told him where to go! I sent him to this room!’ she screamed.

  She felt the walls of books rush towards her, like inward falling ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, through the ruins, crying to her and struggling to get at her. But she was numb to his touch, she did not know what he was saying. Through the tumult she heard but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair speaking on the lawn at Pangbourne:

  ‘You won’t know till afterward,’ it said. ‘You won’t know till long, long afterward.’

  On the Brighton Road

  by Richard Middleton

  Slowly the sun had climbed up the hard white downs, till it broke with little of the mysterious ritual of dawn upon a sparkling world of snow. There had been a hard frost during the night, and the birds, who hopped about here and there with scant tolerance of life, left no trace of their passage on the silver pavements. In places the sheltered caverns of the hedges broke the monotony of the whiteness that had fallen upon the coloured earth, and overhead the sky melted from orange to deep blue, from deep blue to a blue so pale that it suggested a thin paper screen rather than illimitable space. Across the level fields there came a cold, silent wind which blew fine dust of snow from the trees, but hardly stirred the crested hedges. Once above the skyline, the sun seemed to climb more quickly, and as it rose higher it began to give out a heat that blended with the keenness of the wind.

  It may have been this strange alternation of heat and cold that disturbed the tramp in his dreams, for he struggled for a moment with the snow that covered him, like a man who finds himself twisted uncomfortably in the bedclothes, and then sat up with staring, questioning eyes. ‘Lord! I thought I was in bed,’ he said to himself as he took in the vacant landscape, ‘and all the while I was out here.’ He stretched his limbs, and rising carefully