Маргарет Миллар - The Cannibal Heart

Mrs. Wakefield said, “You’d better call the little girl.”

Hanging on a rusty nail in the shed was an old cowbell. Mr. Roma had found the cowbell years ago by the side of the road, but he had never been able to think of a use for it until Jessie came.

He brought the bell out and rang it loud enough to summon Jessie and to wake the dead.

“We’d have to ask her to have her meals with us,” Evelyn said.

Mark finished buttoning his shirt and reached for the tweed jacket Evelyn had put out on the bed for him. “Why?”

“Well, we’re sort of obliged to, aren’t we? It’d be very ungracious not to.”

Mark looked at her, rather irritably. “To be perfectly frank, I’ve never felt so ungracious in my whole life.”

“But you like her all right, don’t you?”

“I only exchanged two words with her. I don’t know whether I like her or not.”

“I actually thought you’d like company for a change. Instead of just Jessie and me.”

“It depends on the company. Under the circumstances you can hardly expect her to scintillate.”

“At least she’s under control, no matter what she’s feeling inside. Your collar’s sticking up at the back.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll fix it.”

Standing on tiptoe she smoothed the collar down and ran her hand along the back of his neck.

“You need a haircut,” she said. “We can drive into town some time on Monday.”

He turned around and gave her a long careful look. “First this jacket business and now a haircut. For Mrs. Wakefield’s benefit, I suppose?”

“Don’t be silly. You’ve been getting haircuts all your life, why should you suddenly balk at getting another one?”

“I’m not balking. I’m merely thinking that some of the female vanities are amusing, if inconvenient.”

“Vanity. Honestly, Mark!”

“That’s what I call it,” he said. “Enter Mrs. Wakefield and immediately you start dusting out corners and getting Jessie’s ears washed and arranging a haircut for me.”

“That’s not vanity,” she protested. “It’s perfectly natural. All women do it.”

“My point, exactly.”

“Anyway, we’re off the subject,” Evelyn said, a little coldly. “Do we invite her to have her meals with us, or don’t we?”

“Her plan was to eat with the Romas.”

“But he’s a... a —”

“Listen, these people have been living together for years. They’ve established their relationship, maybe a pretty subtle one. We’d better keep out of it. If Mrs. Wakefield wants to eat with the Romas, let her.”

“But it would seem terribly funny. I’d feel funny about it.”

“Well, when you feel funny everybody else usually ends up feeling funny, too, so do what you like.”

She would have liked to challenge the statement, but she closed her lips firmly and pretended to be engrossed in straightening the scarf on the bureau and arranging Mark’s brushes in perfect alignment. In the past week Mark had become less nervous and tense, but at the same time increasingly critical of her. She blamed it partly on herself and partly on the circumstance of their isolation. Mark had always been surrounded by people — his parents, and his sisters and the agents and writers and advertising men who streamed into his office wanting money or sympathy or reassurance or better contracts. Whatever they wanted Mark always tried to give them, but eventually he reached the point where his nerves began to crack and he had to get away for a while by himself. Once he was away from people, though, he began almost immediately to miss them. It seemed to Evelyn that she was expected to make up the loss and she couldn’t do it. She didn’t have the satiric intelligence Mark’s sisters had, nor the neurotic wit of some of the writers and the agents Mark brought home for dinner. In comparison, she thought of herself as a rather colorless, phlegmatic creature, and she was always a little surprised when Mark found her amusing.

She glanced at him rather shyly, trying to estimate his mood and to see if he’d be interested in what she’d found out. “She’s upstairs now, unpacking, in the room the nurse used to have.”

“What nurse?”

“The one who lived with her. She was a real nurse, too, not just a nursemaid.”

“How do you know?”

“She left some things in the cupboard — a broken hypodermic syringe, for one.”

“That isn’t proof.”

“There were other things, too. The room itself is odd. I mean, it’s so impersonal and bare, as if the person who lived in it had deliberately kept her personality out of it. It’s a — well, a sort of purposeful room.”

“You’re a great little snooper,” Mark said dryly. “So the nurse was a nurse. What of it?”

Evelyn looked faintly indignant. “I don’t call it snooping. Naturally, when you rent a house you’re curious about the people who own it and who used to live there.”

“So that’s why you’re inviting Mrs. Wakefield to eat with us. You’re going to pump her, eh?”

“That’s a nasty thing to say. I have no intention of asking her a single question.”

Mark moved across the room, half-smiling. “I think I’ll go for a walk. I’ll take Jess along if she wants to go.”

“I don’t think she will. She’s helping Mrs. Wakefield unpack.”

“I warned Jessie—”

“I know, but Mrs. Wakefield asked her to help. She seems fond of children.”

“All right, I’ll go alone. Unless you want to come along?”

She knew it irked him to have to slow his walk down to her speed, so she said, “No, thanks. I’m going to set the table.”

Every night before supper Mark used to climb down the cliff to the beach below the walk along the sand, or sit quietly by himself with the house and Jessie and Evelyn out of sight and out of mind.

There were two paths down the cliff. One was a hundred yards north of the house, where Mr. Roma had arranged a series of rough stone steps with a single guard rail of iron pipe. The other path was directly in front of the house and this was the one that Jessie and Luisa and, sometimes, Mark, used. It was almost perpendicular, and the only way anyone could descend was by half- sitting, half-sliding down, clutching at the chaparral or jutting pieces of rock.

At the bottom of this path lay a heap of rubble and boulders left by landslides. A little to the south there was a giant overhanging rock, where Mr. Roma kept the rowboat that he used for fishing. The high tides had worn away the bowels of the rock to make a cave whose walls were alive with scuttling crabs and mussels and baby abalones like little brown buttons glued to the walls of the cave.

It was on this rock that Mark liked to sit and listen to the gurgle of the water underneath and watch the cormorants that lived further along the cliff. There, the cliff was sheer rock, pitted with holes and ledges which housed the colony of sleek dark birds. Ceaselessly hungry, they clung to the ledges, their sharp eyes searching the sea for the splash of a fish.

By the time Mark reached the rock it was too dark to see the cormorants. The tide was out, and the sea seemed as quiet and thick as oil.

Whistling softly, he boosted himself up to the top of the rock. It was then that he saw Luisa. She was sitting cross-legged in the sand and in one hand, very elegantly, she held a cigarette.

First Luisa blew all the smoke out of her mouth, and then out of her nose. Then, by way of experiment, she held one nostril closed and let the smoke pour out of the other. After a violent attack of coughing she crushed out the cigarette in the sand and put the butt in the pocket of her blouse.

“Hello,” Mark said.