Michael Dibdin - The Dying of the Light

‘Stop!’ cried Rosemary, getting to her feet. ‘I won’t have you talking like that! I won’t stand for it!’

With a howl of fury, Miss Davis flung her glass at Rosemary. It shattered against the wall a few inches away. Miss Davis advanced, screaming obscenities, her spittle flying into Rosemary’s face.

‘Easy, Letty!’ warned Anderson, grasping her arm.

‘Let’s leave Mrs Davenport with fond memories of the old place, eh?’

Miss Davis’s body went limp. She breathed in and out deeply several times.

‘Of course, William,’ she said eventually. ‘Whatever you say.’

Ignoring Rosemary and Dorothy, she flounced out of the room, singing merrily.

‘And that’s why I mean what I say when I sing, O bugger the flowers that bloom in the spring. Tra-la-lala-la-ha! Tra-la-lala-la-haaaaaaa!!!!!’ Bugger the flowers of spring!’

Anderson inspected the rainbow of liqueurs splashed across the wall.

‘Drambuie, Green Chartreuse, Cherry Brandy, Blue Curagao, Advocaat,’ he murmured, shaking his head sadly. ‘Poor Letitia! She suffers so greatly.’

He glanced pointedly at Rosemary.

‘One more outburst like that from you, Miss Travis, and you’ll be spending the rest of the week in bed with Mr Channing.’

He drained the rest of the whisky from his glass.

‘Life is one thing, ladies, and art quite another. Far from being a story which alternately excites and consoles, life is an endless slurry of computer print-out, a pie chart of statistical trends in which you, I fear, have been allotted the slimmest of slices. Always remember, however, that even that might be taken from you.’

Favouring them both with a smile, he walked out.

The light outside seemed to have faded completely, yet when the fluorescent ceiling strip suddenly died the darkness turned out to be hollow. There was still an afterglow of radiance, too faint to compete with the synthetic glare but enough, once their eyes had widened to take it in, for Rosemary and Dorothy to make out, if not everything, then quite as much as they had any real need or wish to see.

“That’s better,’ murmured Dorothy.

The bed springs squeaked as she snuggled down.

‘Much,’ Rosemary replied from her chair by the window.

Each was aware of the other as a vague, benevolent presence in the dimness, barely visible but very definitely there. The electricity on the first floor was switched off at nine thirty every night, except when Anderson and his sister were too drunk to remember, but this abrupt transition had never felt so welcome before.

Dorothy’s room was ugly enough in itself, its proportions mutilated by the partition, the original features badly dilapidated and the new ones scruffily utilitarian, but tonight its charmlessness was intensified almost unbearably by their shared, unspoken knowledge that it would never again be Dorothy’s room. This was the last time they would sit there in the darkness, adding yet more strands and complications to the murderous web of intrigue they had woven around themselves. Next day the room would be locked, like those of the residents who had died.

Under the pitiless glare of the neon light these facts had been impossible to evade or ignore, but the darkness arrived as a balm, waiving the imperatives of space and time. In that dimensionless obscurity there was only here and now, an endless present and everything within reach.

‘Aren’t you going to drink your cocoa?’ Rosemary suggested gently.

‘Not yet.’

‘It’ll get cold.’

‘It already is. All those people. Still, it was nice, wasn’t it?’

Rosemary said nothing. The phrase seemed so far from the mark, so grossly inadequate to the situation, that she might have suspected Dorothy of irony if she hadn’t known that her friend was literal-minded to a fault. Whatever else it might have been, the incident certainly hadn’t been nice. It had been bizarre, embarrassing, unpleasant, sad, and finally rather moving. But Rosemary’s most vivid impression, both at the time and now, was of utter astonishment that it had ever taken place.

The scale of the transgression involved had been made clear when Miss Davis burst into the room, having been tipped off by Belinda Scott. By that time they were all there. Mavis Hargreaves had been the first to arrive, having ‘just popped in on the way back from the loo’. While she was standing there at rather a loss, wondering what to say next or how best to leave, there was a timid knock at the door, followed by Weatherby’s voice asking if Dorothy were ‘presentable’. Grace Lebon and Charles Symes appeared next, accompanied by Alfred Purvey, and it was at this point that Belinda Scott put her head round the door, gasped, and promptly disappeared. Rossiter, who arrived shortly afterwards, reported having met her running along the corridor calling for Miss Davis.

This news might have been expected to break whatever spell had descended on the residents that evening, but-much to their mutual surprise-it did not. Not only did they all stay, but on the face of it they seemed less flustered by the risks they were running than by the embarrassment of bidding Dorothy goodbye. It thus initially came as something of a relief when the door flew open and Miss Davis stormed in, with Belinda Scott at her heels.

‘Right, back to your rooms!’ she barked at them. ‘No fraternisation permitted! Contrary to fire regulations! Break it up, break it up!’

But against all expectations the party refused to be broken up. Perhaps it was their very terror which impelled them to the unprecedented step of defying Miss Davis. The thought of what she might do if she were to get them alone merely increased their determination not to be separated. The outcome was equally startling. Never having had to face a situation like this before, Miss Davis proved to be at a loss as to how to deal with it.

When threats and orders had no effect, she tried hitting one or two of the nearer residents, but was at once disabled by the others. No word was spoken, yet all seemed to understand what they must do. Aged and frail as they were, they could not offer active opposition, but they could and did very effectively get in the way, hampering the younger woman’s freedom of action, pushing her off balance, holding her back and hemming her in, until with a cry of mingled rage and panic she broke free and forced her way back to the door.

‘Very well, then!’ she shouted furiously. ‘Go ahead and wish your precious chum goodbye before she’s packed off to the abattoir. But just remember this! She’ll be strip-searched before she leaves, and if I find any begging letters, billets-doux or other foreign matter concealed in her cracks and crevices, the person responsible will get it for lunch, with the rubber gloves as afters!’

Belinda Scott tried to say something, but Miss Davis slapped her across the face and stalked out, leaving her rejected acolyte to run off in tears. The others remained, the awkwardness which had briefly been dispelled now returning in full force. To Rosemary, the scene appeared increasingly grotesque and disgusting, a hideous caricature of everything hateful about their lives: the cruel light, the sordid room, the men and women variously disabled in mind and body, strangers both to themselves and to each other, reciting their impotent good wishes and empty formulas of farewell.

Then everything changed. Exactly how and when was something Rosemary was not sure of even now. Perhaps it had been when Purvey stumbled against the bedside table, spilling some of the cocoa, and everyone rallied round to help with the clean-up. Or it might have been when Dorothy, her face flushed and her eyes brilliant with tears, thanked them all for coming and urged them to give her friend all the help she would need in the coming days.