Reginald Hill - Death of a Dormouse

Next day a letter came with the firm’s name on its envelope. She let it lie unopened with all the other mail, mainly junk, which had dropped through the letter box. That day the phone rang at regular intervals from morning to night. In the end, she picked it up and let it dangle over the edge of the table without putting it anywhere near her ear.

That night the dream came as usual. Trent turned, she fled, he followed. She crouched on the bed and watched the door handle slowly turn.

She awoke, and lay bathed in sweat, waiting for the terror to recede and the dull, deadening silence to rise around her.

But this time there was a noise, a real noise. Like a door opening below. Still savouring the relief of escape from her dream, her first reaction was to treat it like all the noises of this so-called real world – people talking, cars passing, wind and weather – which to her were an empty buzz.

But now there was another sound, a sound all too familiar to her straining ears, the sound of the slow tread of feet coming nearer and nearer. She knew in that instant that the ultimate horror had been born and the walking corpse of her husband had at last broken through from her sleeping world to her waking.

She lay quite still, not unable to move but unable to think of anywhere to move to. There was only the window and what help lay there? Her cries into the night air would only reach the ears of her unknown neighbours like the high wail of some restless night creature. And in any case she knew with a certainty beyond faith that when she opened the window, Trent would be there already, standing on the unkempt lawn, his pale face raised towards her.

Now the footsteps were at her door. The handle moved fractionally. She put her hands to her ears and closed her eyes and opened her mouth in a silent cry of terror.

When she opened her eyes, it was broad daylight. She had no recollection of fainting, less of falling asleep, but did anyone ever have such recollections? Anyway, it meant nothing. The crisis had come as she had known it must. Her defences had been breached, the barrier of her indifference lay in ruins. Trent had broken through into her waking life, and the consequences were unthinkable. She was not yet mad, but she could go mad. Grief, terror, guilt, she did not know how to itemize her emotions; all she knew was that she was ready now to give anything for peace. Including life itself.

She sat in the lounge and like a little girl with her birthday sweets she considered her tablets. So she had sat at her father’s feet with a teatray before her on which she counted and classified dolly-mixtures, jelly-babies and chocolate buttons.

The supply of sleeping pills she had brought from Vienna was sadly depleted, but there was a good number of Valium and an assortment of other tranquillizers from her old agoraphobia treatments. A mixture of these washed down with whisky, which she had heard intensified the effect, must surely do the trick.

She started off very slowly, thinking for some reason that she ought to savour the experience. Then a sudden fear struck her that this leisurely approach would give the tablets time to put her to sleep long before she had taken a fatal dose. Panic-stricken she began to take them in twos and threes, gulping them down with mouthfuls of raw whisky. Eventually, with most of the tablets gone, she found she could manage no more. Surely she had done enough. Now there would come that delicious, easy, drifting off into oblivion she longed for.

Time passed, perhaps a little, perhaps a lot, she couldn’t tell. Where she was, it was timeless. Something was definitely happening, some great change was about to take place. But it was not going to be easy, it was not going to be delicious! Her body felt as if it were being racked apart. She was leaving not in peace and quiet but in turbulence and agony. But she had to go. She could hear somewhere last night’s noises again: the door opening, the footsteps approaching, a voice calling her name. She looked up and saw the door handle turning and she willed herself to die.

The door opened; a last spasm convulsed her body. In the doorway stood a woman, middle-aged, strikingly good-looking with a full, sensuous figure and shoulder-length black hair framing a heart-shaped face which was wearing an expression of incredulous horror.

‘Trudi?’ she said. ‘Trudi! For God’s sake.’

‘Janet?’ gasped Trudi. The word brought relief. She double up and vomited over the carpet. Her stomach which had received practically no food for days gladly gave up its mixture of bile and whisky in which lay scattered like daisies on a summer lawn a myriad of little white pills and tablets.

Thy wee bit housie, too in ruin; Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin’! An’ naething, now, to big a new ane . O’ foggage green! An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin ’, Baith snell and keen!

BURNS: To a Mouse

Frank Carter was a reasonable man; reasonably tall, reasonably tempered, reasonably good at his work in a Manchester estate agency.

He tiptoed out of the spare bedroom in which Trudi was lying with her eyes screwed up tight as if to keep out more than just the light. And he asked the reasonable question.

‘How long’s she staying?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Janet. ‘Frank, I’m sorry. I know we didn’t plan starting married life with a non-paying guest, but she’s nowhere else to go.’

‘Hospital; nursing home,’ said Carter, moistening his lips as though at the start of a long list.

‘No good. Look, she needs someone she knows , that one. Always has done, though she’s come on a bit since I first met her, I reckon. God, Frank, you should have seen her at school, little Trudi Shoesmith! She never went out at playtime, special medical permission. If it hadn’t been for her funny name, she’d have been completely invisible. It was her name first made me take notice of her. Janet Evans was so ordinary, I thought! I really envied her being called Trudi, especially when I found out it should really have been Trudi Schumacher!’

‘Schumacher? That’s German, isn’t it?’

‘Austrian. Her father was a Jew, non-practising, but that didn’t matter evidently in 1938. He got out, came to England. I gather her mother died giving birth, so her dad brought her up more or less single-handed. That was half the bother, I reckon. Lots of substitute mums, lots of moving about, and a father who never got over his suspicion that everything in uniform was a storm-trooper and every knock at the door was the Gestapo! It’s no wonder she was such a timorous little thing. Her father changed their name to Shoesmith when he was naturalized, but I reckon he never stopped thinking of himself as a refugee. Anyway, I took little Trudi in hand, didn’t I? Looked out for her at school, got her a job later on, even introduced her to Trent Adamson, though that turned out a mistake!’

‘How do you mean?’ said Carter, puzzled.

‘Well, just that if she’d not met and married Trent, she wouldn’t be here now,’ said Janet, not altogether convincingly.

Trudi, half hearing but totally unresponding to this conversation drifting through the open door, could have told Frank Carter exactly what Janet meant.

Most of what her friend said was true. Before the Evanses moved to Surrey from Cardiff, no one had paid any attention to the slight, pale, self-effacing child with the funny name. Janet Evans on the other hand was instantly the centre of interest. Voluble, impassioned, darkly attractive, she was admired or resented but never ignored. There was no shortage of applicants for the position of ‘best friend’ but to the amazement of everyone she plucked Trudi out of obscurity and gave her the job. Trudi was more taken aback than anyone. Nor was she much assured by overhearing a spiteful peer declare, ‘It didn’t surprise me . What else would a cat look to play with but a dormouse?’