As Aileen opened the front door, the murmur of the television revealed that Douglas was home, lapping up his daily instalment of the thinking man’s soap opera.
‘… further details as they become known. And that’s the six o’clock news from the BBC. Mrs Thatcher told her critics, “We must make ourselves rich enough to be able to afford to be compassionate”, and the Duchess of York made quite a splash as she became the first Royal to try out a water slide when she opened Britain’s biggest-ever theme park. She said …’
To Aileen’s surprise, however, the living room was empty. Seeing a light on, she walked across to the kitchen, but there was no sign of Douglas there either, nor a half-finished glass of Scotch on the table in the living room. Then she realized that his coat and umbrella had been missing from the rack in the hall. Her puzzlement was just beginning to turn to alarm when the phone rang.
‘Yes?’
‘Why don’t you give the number when you answer the phone? It’s no use just saying “Yes.” ’
‘Douglas? Where are you?’
‘At work. I’ll be late tonight. There’s a lot of things to do before I leave for Boston.’
‘Douglas, the television’s on, and the light in the kitchen — ’
‘Well, of course. They’re on the automatic timer, aren’t they?’
Then Aileen remembered that after the second break-in, three months earlier, Douglas had bought a complicated electronic box of tricks that switched on and off at random to simulate occupancy.
‘Well, it doesn’t normally happen,’ she protested.
‘That’s because normally I get home in time to switch it off before the cycle starts. There’s a button which overrides the timer. I explained all this to you when we got it.’
After he had hung up, Aileen stood quite still for a moment, feeling the house gradually expanding all around her, unfolding like a flower in the knowledge that her husband would be absent for several hours. All its spaces were open now, all the lines of tension smoothed away. She found the switch controlling the timer circuit and turned it off. Then she poured herself a glass of wine and took it upstairs to her study, which overlooked the rectangle of gardens enclosed by the houses on the adjacent streets. Overhead, the landing lights of the planes on their flight path into Heathrow were picked out against the livid grey sky, three of them in line and a fourth just turning out of the holding pattern like a star far off in the east. Douglas was flying off to Boston the next day. At the thought, the relaxed spaces of the house turned chilly. For the paradox of their relationship, the bitter truth that Aileen had finally been forced to accept, was that after twenty-four hours away from her husband she began to suffer from withdrawal symptoms, notably the most terrible depression. Without her domestic bully around, Aileen’s mind started to wander. His presence increasingly drove her to distraction, but to her dismay she had found that his absence was even less bearable. Perhaps he felt something similar. That would explain why, despite everything, they had never actually broken up. There seemed to be no reason now why they shouldn’t just carry on as they were, eventually turning into another old married couple, too exhausted and frightened to do each other much damage.
When she had finished her wine Aileen began to think about dinner. Only then did she realize that it was Thursday, when they normally did their weekly bulk buy, and so there would be little or nothing to eat in the house. She couldn’t face going to Waitrose, so in the end she decided to pop down to the Polish delicatessen at Turnham Green and get something simple for tonight. By the time she got back it was dark. She half-expected to see Douglas’s Volvo outside, but there was no sign of it. She got out of the Mini and started across the street, glancing up at the house. Aileen had never reconciled herself to the appearance of the place, quite unlike its neighbours, with fake Gothic doors and windows. The pointed arches and elaborate stone dressings, together with the slated roof and the black-painted trim, gave the place a look of hypocritical religiosity. The nearest street-lamp was some distance away, and largely screened by a large plane tree, but there was an almost full moon that night, as Aileen could have predicted from her recent insomnia. Its light silvered the path and the scrap of lawn, rendering them distinct but seemingly insubstantial.
Douglas Macklin regularly reminded his wife of her shortcomings, which included not giving the number when she answered the phone, not sheathing food in plastic before putting it in the fridge, leaving lights on and taps running, muddling his socks with hers in the wash, and slamming the front door so hard that it bounced open again. Since she had already been ticked off once that evening, Aileen was relieved that he had not come home while she was out, because when she reached the door she discovered that it was indeed open. She could just hear him say, ‘It does rather tend to undermine the value of having a sophisticated timing device to deter burglars if you’re going to leave the front door standing wide open, you know.’ This final exaggeration was designed to lure her into protesting that the door was not wide open, only a crack. ‘Oh, I see!’ Douglas would then reply, pulling out the sixteen-foot sarcasm stop. ‘Well, that’s all right, then, isn’t it? Perfectly safe!’
She pushed her way into the hall, set the bag of groceries down and groped for the light switch. It never ceased to surprise her that things in the dark remained where they were supposed to be, as though without the compulsion of the light they might go wandering about like untethered animals. The switch didn’t work, however. Aileen flicked the lever back and forth several times, but no light appeared. Then a sudden rush of sound in the darkness at her feet startled her as the bag of shopping subsided. The bulb must have gone, she thought. Unless in turning off the automatic timer she had somehow disturbed the rest of the circuits in the house. She stood there wondering what to do, listening to the murmurs of the night. A moment ago all had seemed dead quiet, but now she discovered that what she had taken for silence was in fact a patchwork of noises: the murmur of traffic from the main road, the fridge whining in the kitchen, the gurgles of the central heating, the rustle of her breath, her rapid heartbeats. And then, somewhere upstairs, a sound that made her skin crawl.
This time she knew that it was not the water pipes. The cry was brief and not repeated, but even in that instant it was piercingly familiar. To her amazement and horror, she found herself turning towards the stairs, putting her foot on the worn patch in the centre of the lowest step. As she moved upwards like a sleep-walker, the dimness of the hallway gradually closed up until it was wholly dark. Beyond the local clamour of the stairs and her thumping heart, all seemed silent, crouched and waiting. She was well aware that what she was doing was absolute madness, but she had no choice.
She continued to climb, one hand held out in front of her, until her groping foot could feel no further step. She could now see nothing, but knew she must be standing on the landing. Gradually her breath grew steadier and she felt her body relax. The reality of the sound she had heard began to grow abstract and doubtful. It must have been the pipes, she thought. What else could it have been? There was no baby in the house. Then a door opened and the accumulated darkness gathered itself up and rushed her. She was gripped by a terror so great that she could do nothing but stand there, trembling and ready to vomit, as it went barging past, sending her reeling backwards down the stairs, head over heels in a gradual graceless slither.
When she sat up, the front door was fully open and the hallway calmly illuminated by the moonlight. She crawled over to the phone and punched the numbered buttons. Only when Douglas came on the line, inquiring rather curtly what she wanted, only then, absurdly enough, did she begin to scream.