“Isn’t this nice?” Miss Connie said in a prim, scratchy voice, speaking for the first time in Redpath’s presence. “Very nice,” Albert and Betty York said in unison. “Very nice, indeed.” Miss Connie nodded and began to knit faster, signalling contentment. Redpath’s gaze was drawn to the work she was producing and he saw that what he had taken to be a grey scarf had rather uneven edges, as though no attention was being paid to maintaining a constant number of stitches. It also seemed to be of inordinate length, stretching down from her chair and into a dimly-seen heap in the shadowed corner behind her. Miss Connie intercepted his gaze and smiled at him with antique dentures. He looked away from her.
Perhaps she doesn’t knit anything in particular. There’s something you’ve forgotten to do. Perhaps she just knits. For the sake of knitting.
Redpath concentrated for a time on his tea and the sandwiches of canned pork loaf, suddenly aware of the fact that he had not eaten since breakfast. The uneasy feeling that he had forgotten something important persisted beneath all his other misgivings for several minutes until his thoughts were distracted by the smell of cigarette smoke. There was an aromatic tang to it which suggested that the cigarette was either French or American. Redpath glanced across the semicircle and saw that Albert, now finished with his tea, was smoking and that a pack of Lucky Strikes was projecting from a pocket of his overalls. There was one place in downtown Calbridge, Redpath knew, where it was possible to buy American tobacco and cigarettes, but he had an idea they were very expensive. Certainly they were an unusual choice for a man like Albert, who gave the impression of being a typical Four Towns artisan, born and bred.
I must have noticed him with the American cigarettes earlier, Redpath mused, and my subconscious must have locked on to that odd little detail. That’s why I put Albert into the dream about being in the American town. That’s the crazy way these things get built up in your mind.
Minutes went by and there was silence in the room except for the click of Miss Connie’s needles and the occasional popping and fretting of the gas fire. The drawn curtains breathed steadily in the bay window. Redpath, trapped like a fly in amber, found his mind ricocheting from one level of dread and despair to another. The knowledge that he had taken a human life, Leila’s life, was ever-present behind his eyes, pounding and heaving, a loathsome cancer which could never be excised. At times the focus of his thoughts would drift away from it and other things would become briefly prominent—red-oozing deathmasks, organic slurries advancing on glowing green tiles, blackened bodies like choice Pompeian obscenities, cellars whose walls reached out with yearning tentacles, nightmares all—and at those times he would try to escape, and in fleeing would run headlong into the most terrible spectre of the lot, that of Leila with her eyes turning into glass buttons, and the awful wheel would begin to grind again. The tumult of guilt and horror was emotionally exhausting, and in spite of the fact that he had been unconscious throughout the latter part of the day Redpath found himself wishing for sleep, even with the risk of further dreams. Yielding to the fuggy warmth of the room, he closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them Wilbur Tennent had leaned forward in his chair and was pointing at him in gleeful accusation. “Keeeeeeee…” Tennent intoned in a high-pitched whine, his eyes intent on Redpath’s, “…eeee plight on to the end of the road, kee…pright on to the end.”
Redpath stared back at him, transfixed.
“That’s a good idea,” Betty said, beginning to sing. “Though the way be long, let your heart beat strong, keep right on round the…Why aren’t you singing, love?” She gave Redpath an inquisitive nudge.
“I…” He looked from her to Miss Connie and Albert, both of whom were chanting almost inaudibly in time with Tennent, their faces wearing expressions of intemperate happiness. “I can’t sing.”
“You needn’t be shy in front of us—you’re a member of the family now,” Tennent said. “We often have a good old singsong at nights instead of watching that rubbish they put on the TV. Come on, John!” He gestured like a choir-master, his hands almost touching Redpath’s face. “Though the way be weary, still journey on, till you come to your hap…peeabode…”
I’m not a member of your bloody family, Redpath thought, but his lips had already begun to move in response to Tennent’s coaxing and he listened with acute embarrassment to his own voice following the words of the old song. This can’t be happening to me. What have I forgotten to do? Please let me go to bed.
He made up his mind to get to his feet and excuse himself from the company as politely as possible when the song had ended, but when the moment came he found himself in the grip of the same kind of paralysis he had known as a gauche child and which had held him prisoner through innumerable church services and school concerts. All he had to do was stand up, utter a meaningless pleasantry and go to bed—and yet that simple course of action was quite beyond him. The others in the group were exerting a psychic pressure which rendered him helpless, and if they wanted to sit around and sing until dawn he would have no recourse but to remain with them. Redpath looked at the clock on the mantelpiece, saw that it was more than an hour until midnight, and a groan almost escaped his lips as the company finished the first song and immediately merged it into the beginning of Lily Of Laguna with practised fluency.
Their voices were hushed, almost reverent, dominated by the incongruously musical tones of Albert, who smoked incessantly and grinned his acromegalic grin as song followed song. Miss Connie industriously added to the formless mass of grey wool in the corner behind her chair. Betty York smiled warmly and encouragingly at Redpath each time she caught his eye. Wilbur Tennent sat bolt upright and occasionally conducted the performance, gold cuff-links glistering, his neat, chubby, handsome features suffused with bonhomie. Redpath thought of alcoholics working desperately to convince themselves that they were glad to be sitting in a rented meeting room drinking cocoa, and his sense of suffocation increased. A crane-fly alighted on the wall opposite to him and began to vibrate in a steady and mindless palsy, minute after minute after minute, like a tiny machine which had developed some unbalancing and irremediable fault…
“Tomorrow’s another day, folks,” Betty announced abruptly when the hands of the clock stood at a quarter to twelve. “And I need my beauty sleep.”
She stood up, absent-mindedly smoothing her Liz Taylor torso with both hands in a manner which reminded Redpath that, incredibly, in the beginning he had thought of her as the partner for a sleazy sexual adventure. That beginning had been earlier in the same day, little more than twelve hours into the past, but he had come a long way since then. He got to his feet and turned towards the door, cautiously keeping his distance from Betty in case, through some gross misjudgement on her part, she tried to reintroduce the element of sexuality into their relationship. Wilbur Tennent had stood up also and now he was smiling at Redpath and frowning at the same time in an expression of rueful perplexity.
“John, old son,” he said, “you wouldn’t run out on us, would you?”
Redpath floundered for a moment, lost for a response. “Of course not. I mean …”
“Good boy, John. And don’t forget about Parsnip Bridge.”
“Good night,” Redpath said, addressing himself to the entire group, and in a few seconds he was ascending through the tall, narrow house with wraith-like speed and silence, taking the stairs two and three at a time. He reached the top landing, went into his room and closed the door. The pendant lamp stirred slightly, activated by his arrival, causing uneasy movements of shadows. Redpath’s relief at being alone was tempered by a sudden appreciation of the fact that all the long night lay ahead of him and that he was to spend it amid an assemblage of furniture which looked inhospitable and accidental, like items gathered in a shabby saleroom. It was highly unlikely that he would be able to sleep in such surroundings, tired though he was. He hesitated near the door, rubbing his arms to subdue the goose-pimples which had been brought out by the unheated air, then crossed to the bed and got underneath the quilt without undressing.