Bewildered, he found himself staring at the garden, up at the overhanging gables, down at the wet broken paving.
"Me, I mean," she said with savage impatience. "You've been telling tales to the police about me and you don't even know what it's all about." Again she snapped forward and shamelessly—he was horrified—pulled up her skirt and exposed her thigh above her stocking top. The white skin was covered all over with needle punctures. "Asthma, that's what it's about. Asthma tablets. You dissolve them in water—and that's a hell of a job on its own—and then you fill up a hypodermic."
Archery did not think himself easily shocked. But he was shocked now. He felt the blood run into his face. Embarrassment silenced him, then gave place to pity for her and a kind of diffiused indignation with humanity.
"Does it have any effect?" he asked as coolly as he could.
"It gives you a lift, if you follow me. Much the same as you get from singing psalms, I expect," she jeered. "There was this man I lived with, he put me on to it. I was in the right place for getting supplies, you see. Until you sent that bastard Burden down and he put the fear of God into my mother. She's got to get a new prescription every time she wants them now and she's got to collect them herself."
"I see," he said, and hope went. So that was what Mrs. Crilling had meant. In prison there would be no tablets, no syringe, and because she had become addicted to them she would have to reveal her addiction or...
"I don't think the police can do anything to you," he said, not knowing whether they could or not.
"What would you know about it? I've got twenty left in a bottle so I came here. I've made myself a bed upstairs and..."
He interrupted her. "It's your raincoat?"
The question surprised her, but only for a moment, then scorn returned to make her look twice her age.
"Sure it is," she said scathingly. "Whose did you think it was, Painter's? I went out for a bit to get something from my car, left the door on the latch and when I came back you were here with that tarty piece." He kept his eyes on her, controlling himself. For the only time in his life he felt an urge to strike another person's face. "I didn't dare come back for a bit," she said, returning to the only other mood she had, a self-pitying childishness. "But I had to get my raincoat—the tablets were in the pocket." She inhaled deeply and flung the cigarette away from her into the wet bushes.
"What the hell were you doing, returning to the scene of the crime? Trying to get under his skin?"
"Whose skin?" he whispered urgently.
"Painter's of course. Bert Painter's. My Uncle Bert." She was defiant again, but her hand shook and her eyes glazed. It was coming now. He was like a man awaiting bad news, knowing it was inevitable, knowing even exactly that it was going to be, but still hoping that there would be some detail, some fact to mitigate it. "That night," she said, "he stood there just like you. Only he was holding a piece of wood and there was blood on it and all over him. 'I've cut myself,' he said. 'Don't look, Lizzie, I've cut myself.' "
16
When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places seeking rest and finding none. He saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out.
She told it in the second person, "You did this," "You did that." Archery realised he was hearing what no parent and no psychiatrist had ever heard, and he marvelled. The peculiar use of the pronoun seemed to draw his own mind into the child's body so that he could see with her eyes and feel with her overweening terror.
She sat in the damp dusk on the spot where it had all begun for her, utterly still now. Only her eyelids moved. Sometimes, at agonising moments in the narrative, she would close her eyes then open them again with a slow exhalation of breath. Archery had never been to a seance—would indeed have disapproved of such a thing as being theologically untenable—but he had read of them. Elizabeth Crilling's steady outpouring of terrible events told in a flat monotone was reminiscent, he thought, of mediumistic revelation. She was coming to the end now and a weary relief crossed her face as of one shedding a load.
"...You put your coat on, your best coat because it was your best frock, and you ran across the road, down the sideway and past the greenhouse. Nobody saw you because there was no one about. Or was there? Surely that was the back door closing softly.
"You came very quietly around the side of the house and then you saw it was only Uncle Bert who had come out of the house into the garden.
" 'Uncle Bert, Uncle Bert! I've got my best frock on. Can I go and show it to Tessie?'
"Suddenly you were very frightened, more frightened than you had ever been in all your life, because Uncle Bert was breathing in such a funny way, gasping and coughing like Daddy did when he had one of his attacks. Then he turned round and there was red stuff all over him, on his hands and all down the front of his coat.
" 'I've cut myself,' he said. 'Don't look, Lizzie. I've just cut myself.'
" 'I want Tessie! I want Tessie!'
" 'Don't you go up there!'
" 'You're not to touch me. I've got my new dress on. I'll tell my mummy.'
"He just stood there with the red stuff on him and his face was like the face of a lion, big thick mouth, thick nose, curly tawny hair. Yes, it was like the lion in that picture book Mummy said you must not look at...
"The red stuff had splashed on to his face and trickled to the corner of his mouth. He brought that dreadful face down close to yours and shouted righl at you: 'You tell her, Lizzie Crilling, you stuck-up little snob, and d'you know what I'll do? Wherever I am—wherever, d'you hear me?—I'll find you and I'll give you what I gave the old girl.' "
It was over. He could tell that by the way she came out of her trance, sat up and gave a kind of moan.
"But you went back," Archery murmured. "You went back with your mother?"
"My mother!" Weeping would not have surprised him. This violent bitter laughter did. On a high discordant peal, she stopped suddenly and rushed into her answer. "I was only five, only a kid. I didn't know what he meant, not then. I was much more frightened of letting her know I'd been over there." He noted that "her" and knew intuitively she would not mention her mother by name again. "You see, I didn't even know it was blood and I reckon I must have thought it was paint.
"Then we went back. I wasn't afraid of the house and I didn't know what he meant by the old girl. I think when he said about giving me what he'd given the old girl I thought he meant his wife, Mrs. Painter. He knew I'd seen him hit her. I found the body. You knew that? God, it was terrible. I didn't understand, you see. D'you know what I thought at first? I thought she'd sort of burst." "Don't," said Archery.
"If you can't take it now, what d'you think it was like for me? I was five. Five, my Christ! They put me to bed and I was ill for weeks. Of course, they'd arrested Painter, but I didn't know that. You don't tell children that sort of thing. I didn't know what had happened at all, only that Granny Rose had burst open and he had made it happen and if I said I'd seen him he'd do the same to me."