‘I wish you could have seen him,’ said Emily. ‘I think I dreamed of him last night. The man is on my mind.’
‘Why not sit down, my dear? Why not rest and try to forget?’ As he spoke, Edward prayed for a day that was to come, a day that God, he felt, had promised him. His sister said:
‘Perhaps on Wednesday night it was, or early on Thursday morning, that he slipped into the old woman’s house to do what he had to do. And in his madness, Edward, he could not resist returning later to the scene of all the violence. I have read of this kind of thing. It has happened with other men.’
‘Come along now –’
‘Not at all unusual,’ said Emily. ‘Criminal history is not being made in Dunfarnham Avenue, if that’s what you’re thinking. He came and acted and returned, as others have in a similar way. D’you understand? D’you follow me?’
What was there to follow? Edward thought. What was there to understand except the facts from the past? – the quiet child of four and the son who was suddenly born in the house and allowed to go his way. The son growing up and his sport becoming the game he played with her, until her days were filled to the brim with his cunning smile and the baby tricks that everyone excused. Wasn’t the simple truth that those cruelties in their thousands had fallen like a blight upon her nature in the end, wrenching some bit of it out of shape, embittering the whole?
When Edward was seventeen their parents had died, one after the other within a month. He remembered still standing at his mother’s funeral, the second funeral of the pair, and seeing on his sister’s face the look that by now he had become familiar with, a look of reproach and sorrow. They had returned together to the dark house with the oatmeal wallpaper and Emily had said: ‘There was a woman in a red coat, Edward. Did you see her? I thought it odd, you know, a woman dressed in red at the grave of another woman.’ Edward had seen no woman in red and had said so at once, but Emily, making tea, had continued about this figure, and then had ceased to make tea and had stood quite still, gazing at him and talking at length, on and on, about the woman. ‘What should we do?’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t we try to find out a thing or two?’ And then, in a moment, she had seemed to forget about the woman and had poured boiling water into a china teapot that both of them had known as a family possession all their lives. Afterwards, in the back garden, Edward had examined in detail his early sins against his sister, and he had closed his eyes and prayed to God. He prayed for forgiveness and he prayed that she in turn might forgive him and he prayed that the damage might not mark her for ever. From the garden, that day, he returned to the house, having found his duty, to live there with her, in that cool and silent place, to keep an eye on her for ever, and to atone as best he might. God had spoken harshly to Edward in the garden, and God had spoken harshly since. Every morning and evening Edward Tripp prayed at length, kneeling by his bed, and during the day he prayed as well, seeing her before him, she who never now walked out into Dunfarnham Avenue, who dressed herself in black and forgot her beauty. No longer children, they were reticent now in what they said one to another; they were polite in their relationship as their thoughts filled the rooms of the house and were not spoken. She played her game in a vengeful way, acting a madness and saying to him in silence that this was the state she should be in, warning him that her bitter nature needed his tenderness. And Edward prayed and often wept, accepting the punishment as his due.
‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ said Edward now. ‘Mrs Mayben is quite all right.’
‘You have a callous mind,’ murmured Edward’s sister, looking at him. ‘You can know of a thing like this and stand there cutting ham and saying it doesn’t matter that a lunatic has walked in Dunfarnham Avenue and brought an old woman to a grim full-stop. It doesn’t matter what’s in that house this morning, is that it? Edward, she has not come back from church because today she’s never been there; because she’s been dead and rotting for eighty-four hours. We have buried our parents: we know about the deceased. They’re everywhere, Edward. Everywhere.’
‘Please,’ muttered Edward. ‘Please now, my dear.’
‘Death has danced through Dunfarnham Avenue and I have seen it, a man without socks or shirt, a man who shall fry in the deep fat of Hell. For you, Edward, must put a finger on him.’
‘There’s nothing I can do,’ said Edward, feeling his size, five foot four, as his sister towered in the room with him.
‘Cross the road,’ said Emily, ‘and go to the back of Mrs Mayben’s house. Climb through some small window and walk through the rooms until you come to the woman.’
Edward sighed. He would cross the road, he knew, as he had known when first she mentioned Mrs Mayben, and he would tell Mrs Mayben the truth because she had a face that was kind. He would not stand on her doorstep and make some lame excuse, as he had with all the others. He would not today prevaricate and pretend; he would not dishonour the woman by meting out dishonest treatment to her. ‘I will ease your mind,’ he said to his sister. ‘I’ll go and see that Mrs Mayben’s quite all right.’
‘Carry that ham knife with you, that you may cut her down. It’s wrong, I think, don’t you, that we should leave her as she is?’
‘Stand by the window,’ said Edward, already moving to the door, ‘and watch me as I cross the road to ring her bell. You’ll see her appear, my dear, and if you strain your ears you may even hear her voice.’
Emily nodded. She said:
‘Telephone the police when you have cut the cord. Dial 999 and ask to speak to a sergeant. Tell him the honest truth.’
Edward walked from the room and descended the stairs of the house. He opened the front door and crossed Dunfarnham Avenue, to the house of Mrs Mayben. He rang the bell, standing to one side so that his sister, from the dining-room window, would be able to see the old woman when she opened the door.
‘I was trying to repair this thing,’ said Mrs Mayben, holding out an electric fuse, ‘with a piece of silver paper. You’ve been sent to me, Mr Tripp. Come in.’
Edward entered the house of Mrs Mayben, carrying the ham knife. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘to bother you.’ But Mrs Mayben seemed not to question his presence on her property. ‘My husband could mend a fuse,’ she said, ‘with silver paper; yet I can make no hand of this.’ Edward placed the ham knife on a table in the hall and took the ineffective fuse from her hand. He said there was stuff called fuse wire, and Mrs Mayben led him to a cupboard where the electric meters were and in which he discovered the wire he sought. ‘I was cooking a chop,’ said Mrs Mayben, a woman of eighty-two, ‘when all the heat went off.’
‘I was cutting ham,’ said Edward, ‘and I was interrupted too.’ He repaired the fuse and replaced it in its socket. ‘Let’s go and see,’ said Mrs Mayben, and led the way to her kitchen. They watched the chop for a moment, still and uninviting in the centre of a frying pan on the electric stove. In a moment a noise came from it, a spurt of sizzling that indicated to them that Edward had been successful with the fuse. ‘You must take a glass of sherry,’ said Mrs Mayben. ‘I have one always myself, on Sundays.’
Edward followed the old woman to her sitting-room and sat down, since she wished that he should, in a comfortable armchair. She poured two glasses of Dry Fly sherry and then, holding hers formally in the air, she reminded Edward that she had lived in Dunfarnham Avenue for fourteen years and had never actually spoken to him before.
‘I see you feeding the birds,’ said Edward, ‘from your sitting-room window.’