She turned to look at him then, and even came to the table and sat down, suddenly aware how desperately she wanted some tea. The suggestion of the laid table was too strong to be resisted, even though all this was a pointless interlude on the way to something else, something final.
“Do they live in Comerbourne, too?”
“No, in Hereford.” A dreary and desperate wonder sat upon him; and now that she saw him in the full light from the eastern window he was pale and insubstantial as paper, perished paper, so brittle that it might crumble to dust at any moment. “That’s where my family come from.”
“Then you work in Comerbourne.” She could not have explained why it was so important to keep talking, to keep drinking tea, and swallowing mouthfuls of sawdust food that stuck in her throat; to maintain, not a pretence, but a hypnotic suggestion, that everything here was normal, and had to be preserved, so that scoring through its normality with an act of violence should be increasingly difficult. Nor could she have said why a grain of information added to her knowledge of him should seem to add to her meagre resources. The nail-file was surely a better bet. Yet she persisted. Of course, who else enjoys even one October week-end lasting until Wednesday morning? It was the half-term break; she ought to have known. “You teach,” she said, feeling her way, “at one of the schools in Comerbourne.”
“I did,” he said distantly.
“What did you teach?”
“Art… if it matters now.”
I wonder, she thought, feeling the shuddering undertones beneath these exchanges, whether he knows what I’m thinking as clearly as I know what’s going on inside him? Kill me here and now, and he’ll have the trouble of carrying or dragging me down to the boat, and the risk of being seen at it. Make me walk there to be killed on board, and he takes the chance that I may try breaking away, even at the last moment. Why not, with nothing to lose? The whole thing could go wrong then, even if it’s an outside chance. I might survive to talk. No, he’ll want to make sure. It will be here!
He’s just made up his mind!
“How odd,” she said, her eyes holding his across the table, her right hand in the open handbag on her lap, “to think that I don’t even know your name.”
“Why should you?” he said. And suddenly he set both hands against the edge of the table, and pushed back his chair. His face was more dead than alive, blue-stained at lips and eyes, cemetery clay, but he moved with method and certainty, like a machine.
“Yes, what are you waiting for?” she blazed abruptly, on her feet with the nail-file in her hand. Her handbag went one way, her handkerchief another. “Do you think I don’t know you’ve got everything ready? Even the stone for my feet?”
He got up slowly and started round the corner of the table after her, hooking a hand under the edge to hoist it aside from between them. She caught the brief reflection of light from eyes opaque and dead as grey glass.
“I’m sorry!” said the distant voice, from somewhere far beyond sorrow. “What can I do? You shouldn’t have looked in there. What choice have you left me? I liked you,” he said, wrenching at his own unavailing pain, “you were kind to me! But what can I do about it now?”
“You could let me walk to my grave,” she said, backing from him inch by inch, “and save yourself trouble.” Anything to spin out five more minutes, three, even one, to give time one more chance. And still, at this extremity, she had a corner of her mind free to wonder where the gun was, why it wasn’t in his hand. He couldn’t be afraid of the shot being heard, not here, there was no other dwelling in sight. If he’d had the sense to use the gun he needn’t even have come within her reach, she would have had no chance at all.
His hand swung the table round, shedding the tea-pot from its tilted edge, and drove it hard against the wicker arm-chair beside the wall. She dared not turn her head to look, but her hip rammed hard into the arm of the chair, and she could retreat no farther.
“Not you,” she heard his voice saying hopelessly, “you’d run, you’d swim for it, I know you. Why did it have to be you?”
Bracing her fingers round the hilt of her dagger, she had just time to feel one angry stab of amusement, involuntary and painful, at his appropriation of what should surely have been her question. And then the moment and he were on her together.
He took the last yard in one fast, light step, and reached for her with long hands crooked; and she stooped under his grasp instead of leaning back from him, and slashed upwards at his throat with all her weight, uncoiling towards him like a spring. She felt the impact, and sudden heat licked her fingers, but in the same instant he had her by the wrist, and had wrenched hand and weapon away from his grazed neck, forcing her arm back until her grip relaxed. Distantly, through the roaring in her ears, she heard the nail-file tinkle on the wood blocks of the floor, a light, derisory sound. Then his groping hands found their hold on her throat, and chaotic eruption of light and darkness blinded her eyes.
She put up her hands and clawed at her murderer’s face, until the pressure on her throat grew to an irresistible terror, and then an agony, and she could only fight feebly to drag his hands away. Her eyes burned, quite darkened now, there was nothing left in existence but a panic struggle for breath. A sound like sobbing thudded in her ears, the great breaths she could no longer drag into her lungs seemed to pulse through her failing flesh from some other source. Someone else was dying with her, she heard him in extremity, moaning and whining with pain, and long after she had no voice left to complain with, that lamentable sound followed her down into darkness and silence.
Consciousness began again in an explosion of fiery pain; the red-hot band of steel round her neck expanded, burst, disintegrated. She was dead, she must be dead. Or why the delirious cool rush of air into her body again at will, the abrupt withdrawal of pressure and fear, the sudden wild awareness of relief and ease? Nothing was holding her any more, nothing confined her, her own limp hands wandered freely to touch her bruised throat. Her knees gave way under her slowly, she slid down against the arm of the wicker chair, and collapsed into the cushions like a disjointed doll, and lay gulping in air greedily, tasting it as never before, experiencing it as a sensuous delight. The darkness lifted slowly. She opened her eyes, and colours and shapes danced dazzlingly before them. She saw sunlight reflected on the ceiling, and a shimmer that was the refractions of broken light from the motion of the sea.
Her eyes and her mind cleared together, into an unbelievable, unprecedented clarity. She lay still for a long moment, seeing the outlines of things round her with a brilliant intensity that was painful to her eyes after the darkness. The same room, the same signs of struggle, the fallen handbag on the floor, the broken tea-pot, the tablecloth dragged into disorderly folds. She was alive, she was intact. Not because of any miraculous intervention, but for solid reasons, in pursuit of which her mind stalked in silence within her recovering body. The clarity within there was as blinding and sharp as the clarity without.
She sat up slowly, clinging to the edge of the table, and looked round for her murderer.
Head-down in a dark huddle on the wicker settee, he lay clutching the orange-coloured cushions to his face with frantic energy, fingers, wrists, forearms corded with strain, as if he willed never to show himself to the light again. He had withdrawn from her the full width of the room when he snatched his hands away. Shuddering convulsions shook through him from head to foot; a touch, and he would fly apart and bleed to death. He was bleeding now, she saw the oblique graze on his neck oozing crimson, and staining the orange silk. Who had come nearer to killing?