The Breaking Point Read online

  The car drew up before the familiar house, and they all got out. He led the way through the gate and round to the back door, and opened it. As soon as they entered the passage the smell of gas was unmistakable.

  ‘It’s leaking again,’ he said. ‘It does, from time to time. She tells the men, but they never come.’

  Nobody answered. He walked swiftly to the kitchen. The door was shut, and here the smell of gas was stronger still.

  The Inspector murmured something to his subordinates. ‘Mrs Fenton had better stay outside in the car with her friends.’

  ‘No,’ said Fenton, ‘no, I want my wife to hear the truth.’

  But Edna began to walk back along the passage with one of the policemen, and the Alhusons were waiting for her, their faces solemn. Then everybody seemed to go at once into the bedroom, into Madame Kaufman’s bedroom. They jerked up the blind and let in the air, but the smell of gas was overpowering, and they leant over the bed and she was lying there asleep, with Johnnie beside her, both fast asleep. The envelope containing the twenty pounds was lying on the floor.

  ‘Can’t you wake her?’ said Fenton. ‘Can’t you wake her and tell her that Mr Sims is here? Mr Sims.’

  One of the policemen took hold of his arm and led him from the room.

  When they told Fenton that Madame Kaufman was dead and Johnnie too, he shook his head and said, ‘It’s terrible . . . terrible . . . if only she’d told me, if only I’d known what to do . . .’ But somehow the first shock of discovery had been so great, with the police coming to the house and the appalling contents of the parcel, that this fulfilment of disaster did not touch him in the same way. It seemed somehow inevitable.

  ‘Perhaps it’s for the best,’ he said. ‘She was alone in the world. Just the two of them. Alone in the world.’

  He was not sure what everyone was waiting for. The ambulance, he supposed, or whatever it was that would take poor Madame Kaufman and Johnnie away. He asked, ‘Can we go home, my wife and I?’

  The Inspector exchanged a glance with the man in plain clothes, and then he said, ‘I’m afraid not, Mr Fenton. We shall want you to return with us to the station.’

  ‘But I’ve told you the truth,’ said Fenton wearily. ‘There’s no more to say. I have nothing to do with this tragedy. Nothing at all.’ Then he remembered his paintings. ‘You haven’t seen my work,’ he said. ‘It’s all here, in the room next door. Please ask my wife to come back, and my friends too. I want them to see my work. Besides, now that this has happened I wish to remove my belongings.’

  ‘We will take care of that,’ said the Inspector.

  The tone was noncommittal, yet firm. Ungracious, Fenton thought. The officious attitude of the law.

  ‘That’s all very well,’ said Fenton, ‘but they are my possessions, and valuable at that. I don’t see what right you have to touch them.’

  He looked from the Inspector to his colleague in plain clothes - the medical officer and the other policeman were still in the bedroom - and he could tell from their set expressions that they were not really interested in his work. They thought it was just an excuse, an alibi, and all they wanted to do was to take him back to the police station and question him still further about the sordid, pitiful deaths in the bedroom, about the body of the little, prematurely born child.

  ‘I’m quite ready to go with you, Inspector,’ he said quietly, ‘but I make this one request - that you will allow me to show my work to my wife and my friends.’

  The Inspector nodded at his subordinate, who went out of the kitchen, and then the little group moved to the studio, Fenton himself opening the door and showing them in.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’ve been working under wretched conditions. Bad light, as you see. No proper amenities at all. I don’t know how I stuck it. As a matter of fact, I intended to move out when I returned from my holiday. I told the poor girl so, and it probably depressed her.’

  He switched on the light, and as they stood there, glancing about them, noting the dismantled easel, the canvases stacked neatly against the wall, it struck him that of course these preparations for departure must seem odd to them, suspicious, as though he had in truth known what had happened in the bedroom behind the kitchen and had intended a getaway.

  ‘It was a makeshift, naturally,’ he said, continuing to apologize for the small room that looked so unlike a studio,‘but it happened to suit me. There was nobody else in the house, nobody to ask questions. I never saw anyone but Madame Kaufman and the boy.’

  He noticed that Edna had come into the room, and the Alhusons too, and the other policeman, and they were all watching him with the same set expressions.Why Edna? Why the Alhusons? Surely they must be impressed by the canvases stacked against the wall? They must realize that his total output for the past five and a half months was here, in this room, only awaiting exhibition? He strode across the floor, seized the nearest canvas to hand, and held it up for them to see. It was the portrait of Madame Kaufman that he liked best, the one which - poor soul - she had told him looked like a fish.

  ‘They’re unconventional, I know that,’ he said, ‘not picture-book stuff. But they’re strong. They’ve got originality.’ He seized another. Madame Kaufman again, this time with Johnnie on her lap. ‘Mother and child,’ he said, half-smiling, ‘a true primitive. Back to our origins. The first woman, the first child.’

  He cocked his head, trying to see the canvas as they would see it, for the first time. Looking up for Edna’s approval, for her gasp of wonder, he was met by that same stony frozen stare of misunderstanding. Then her face seemed to crumple, and she turned to the Alhusons and said, ‘They’re not proper paintings. They’re daubs, done anyhow.’ Blinded by tears, she looked up at the Inspector. ‘I told you he couldn’t paint,’ she said. ‘He’s never painted in his life. It was just an alibi, to get into the house with this woman.’

  Fenton watched the Alhusons lead her away. He heard them go out of the back door and through the garden to the front of the house. ‘They’re not proper paintings, they’re daubs,’ he repeated. He put the canvas down on the ground with its face to the wall, and said to the Inspector, ‘I’m ready to go with you now.’

  They got into the police car. Fenton sat between the Inspector and the man in plain clothes. The car turned out of Boulting Street. It crossed two other streets, and came into Oakley Street and on towards the Embankment. The traffic lights changed from amber to red. Fenton murmured to himself, ‘She doesn’t believe in me - she’ll never believe in me.’ Then, as the lights changed and the car shot forward, he shouted, ‘All right, I’ll confess everything. I was her lover, of course, and the child was mine. I turned on the gas this evening before I left the house. I killed them all. I was going to kill my wife too when we got to Scotland. I want to confess that I did it . . . I did it . . . I did it . . .’

  The Blue Lenses

  This was the day for the bandages to be removed and the blue lenses fitted. Marda West put her hand up to her eyes and felt the crêpe binder, and the layer upon layer of cotton-wool beneath. Patience would be rewarded at last. The days had passed into weeks since her operation, and she had lain there suffering no physical discomfort, but only the anonymity of darkness, a negative feeling that the world and the life around was passing her by. During the first few days there had been pain, mercifully allayed by drugs, and then the sharpness of this wore down, dissolved, and she was left with a sense of great fatigue, which they assured her was reaction after shock. As for the operation itself, it had been successful. Here was definite promise. A hundred per cent successful.

  ‘You will see,’ the surgeon told her, ‘more clearly than ever before.’

  ‘But how can you tell?’ she urged, desiring her slender thread of faith to be reinforced.

  ‘Because we examined your eyes when you were under the anaesthetic,’ he replied, ‘and again since, when we put you under for a second time. We would not lie to you, Mrs West.’

  This reassurance cam
e from them two or three times a day, and she had to steel herself to patience as the weeks wore by, so that she referred to the matter perhaps only once every twenty-four hours, and then by way of a trap, to catch them unawares. ‘Don’t throw the roses out. I should like to see them,’ she would say, and the day-nurse would be surprised into the admission, ‘They’ll be over before you can do that.’ Which meant that she would not see this week.

  Actual dates were never mentioned. Nobody said, ‘On the fourteenth of the month you will have your eyes.’ And the subterfuge continued, the pretence that she did not mind and was content to wait. Even Jim, her husband, was now classed in the category of ‘them’, the staff of the hospital, and no longer treated as a confidant.

  Once, long ago, every qualm and apprehension had been admitted and shared. This was before the operation. Then, fearful of pain and blindness, she had clung to him and said, ‘What if I never see again, what will happen to me?’ picturing herself as helpless and maimed. And Jim, whose anxiety was no less harsh than hers, would answer, ‘Whatever comes, we’ll go through it together.’

  Now, for no known reason except that darkness, perhaps, had made her more sensitive, she was shy to discuss her eyes with him. The touch of his hand was the same as it had ever been, and his kiss, and the warmth of his voice; but always, during these days of waiting, she had the seed of fear that he, like the staff at the hospital, was being too kind. The kindness of those who knew towards the one who must not be told. Therefore, when at last it happened, when at his evening visit the surgeon said, ‘Your lenses will be fitted tomorrow,’ surprise was greater than joy. She could not say anything, and he had left the room before she could thank him. It was really true. The long agony had ended. She permitted herself only a last feeler, before the day-nurse went off duty - ‘They’ll take some getting used to, and hurt a bit at first?’ - her statement of fact put as a careless question. But the voice of the woman who had tended her through so many weary days replied, ‘You won’t know you’ve got them, Mrs West.’

  Such a calm, comfortable voice, and the way she shifted the pillows and held the glass to the patient’s lips, the hand smelling faintly of the Morny French Fern soap with which she washed her, these things gave confidence and implied that she could not lie.

  ‘Tomorrow I shall see you,’ said Marda West, and the nurse, with the cheerful laugh that could be heard sometimes down the corridor outside, answered, ‘Yes, I’ll give you your first shock.’

  It was a strange thought how memories of coming into the nursing-home were now blunted. The staff who had received her were dim shadows, the room assigned to her, where she still lay, like a wooden box built only to entrap. Even the surgeon, brisk and efficient during those two rapid consultations when he had recommended an immediate operation, was a voice rather than a presence. He gave his orders and the orders were carried out, and it was difficult to reconcile this bird-of-passage with the person who, those several weeks ago, had asked her to surrender herself to him, who had in fact worked this miracle upon the membranes and the tissues which were her living eyes.

  ‘Aren’t you feeling excited?’ This was the low, soft voice of her night-nurse, who, more than the rest of them, understood what she had endured. Nurse Brand, by day, exuded a daytime brightness; she was a person of sunlight, of bearing in fresh flowers, of admitting visitors. The weather she described in the world outside appeared to be her own creation. ‘A real scorcher,’ she would say, flinging open windows, and her patient would sense the cool uniform, the starched cap, which somehow toned down the penetrating heat. Or else she might hear the steady fall of rain and feel the slight chill accompanying it. ‘This is going to please the gardeners, but it’ll put paid to Matron’s day on the river.’

  Meals, too, even the dullest of lunches, were made to appear delicacies through her method of introduction. ‘A morsel of brill au beurre?’ she would suggest happily, whetting reluctant appetite, and the boiled fish that followed must be eaten, for all its tastelessness, because otherwise it would seem to let down Nurse Brand, who had recommended it. ‘Apple fritters - you can manage two, I’m sure,’ and the tongue began to roll the imaginary fritter, crisp as a flake and sugared, which in reality had a languid, leathery substance. And so her cheerful optimism brooked no discontent - it would be offensive to complain, lacking in backbone to admit, ‘Let me just lie. I don’t want anything.’

  The night brought consolation and Nurse Ansel. She did not expect courage. At first, during pain, it had been Nurse Ansel who had administered the drugs. It was she who had smoothed the pillows and held the glass to the parched lips. Then, with the passing weeks, there had been the gentle voice and the quiet encouragement. ‘It will soon pass. This waiting is the worst.’ At night the patient had only to touch the bell, and in a moment Nurse Ansel was by the bed. ‘Can’t sleep? I know, it’s wretched for you. I’ll give you just two and a half grains, and the night won’t seem so long.’

  How compassionate, that smooth and silken voice. The imagination, making fantasies through enforced rest and idleness, pictured some reality with Nurse Ansel that was not hospital - a holiday abroad, perhaps, for the three of them, and Jim playing golf with an unspecified male companion, leaving her, Marda, to wander with Nurse Ansel. All she did was faultless. She never annoyed. The small shared intimacies of night-time brought a bond between nurse and patient that vanished with the day, and when she went off duty, at five minutes to eight in the morning, she would whisper, ‘Until this evening,’ the very whisper stimulating anticipation, as though eight o’clock that night would not be clocking-in but an assignation.

  Nurse Ansel understood complaint. When Marda West said wearily, ‘It’s been such a long day,’ her answering ‘Has it?’ implied that for her too the day had dragged, that in some hostel she had tried to sleep and failed, that now only did she hope to come alive.

  It was with a special secret sympathy that she would announce the evening visitor. ‘Here is someone you want to see, a little earlier than usual,’ the tone suggesting that Jim was not the husband of ten years but a troubadour, a lover, someone whose bouquet of flowers had been plucked in an enchanted garden and now brought to a balcony. ‘What gorgeous lilies!’, the exclamation half a breath and half a sigh, so that Marda West imagined exotic dragon-petalled beauties growing to heaven, and Nurse Ansel, a little priestess, kneeling. Then, shyly, the voice would murmur, ‘Good evening, Mr West. Mrs West is waiting for you.’ She would hear the gentle closing of the door, the tip-toeing out with the lilies and the almost soundless return, the scent of the flowers filling the room.

  It must have been during the fifth week that Marda West had tentatively suggested, first to Nurse Ansel and then to her husband, that perhaps when she returned home the night-nurse might go with them for the first week. It would chime with Nurse Ansel’s own holiday. Just a week. Just so that Marda West could settle to home again.

  ‘Would you like me to?’ Reserve lay in the voice, yet promise too.

  ‘I would. It’s going to be so difficult at first.’ The patient, not knowing what she meant by difficult, saw herself as helpless still, in spite of the new lenses, and needing the protection and the reassurance that up to the present only Nurse Ansel had given her. ‘Jim, what about it?’

  His comment was something between surprise and indulgence. Surprise that his wife considered a nurse a person in her own right, and indulgence because it was the whim of a sick woman. At least, that was how it seemed to Marda West, and later, when the evening visit was over and he had gone home, she said to the night-nurse, ‘I can’t make out whether my husband thought it a good idea or not.’

  The answer was quiet yet reassuring. ‘Don’t worry. Mr West is reconciled.’

  But reconciled to what? The change in routine? Three people round the table, conversation, the unusual status of a guest who, devoting herself to her hostess, must be paid? (Though the last would not be mentioned, but glossed over at the end of a week in an envelope.)
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  ‘Aren’t you feeling excited?’ Nurse Ansel, by the pillow, touched the bandages, and it was the warmth in the voice, the certainty that only a few hours now would bring revelation, which stifled at last all lingering doubt of success.The operation had not failed. Tomorrow she would see once more.

  ‘In a way,’ said Marda West, ‘it’s like being born again. I’ve forgotten how the world looks.’

  ‘Such a wonderful world,’ murmured Nurse Ansel, ‘and you’ve been patient for so long.’

  The sympathetic hand expressed condemnation of all those who had insisted upon bandages through the waiting weeks. Greater indulgence might have been granted had Nurse Ansel herself been in command and waved a wand.

  ‘It’s queer,’ said Marda West, ‘tomorrow you won’t be a voice to me any more. You’ll be a person.’

  ‘Aren’t I a person now?’

  A note of gentle teasing, of pretended reproach, which was all part of the communication between them, so soothing to the patient. This must surely, when sight came back, be forgone.

  ‘Yes, of course, but it’s bound to be different.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  Even knowing she was dark and small - for so Nurse Ansel had described herself - Marda West must be prepared for surprise at the first encounter, the tilt of the head, the slant of the eyes, or perhaps some unexpected facial form like too large a mouth, too many teeth.

  ‘Look, feel . . .’ and not for the first time Nurse Ansel took her patient’s hand and passed it over her own face, a little embarrassing, perhaps, because it implied surrender, the patient’s hand a captive. Marda West, withdrawing it, said with a laugh, ‘It doesn’t tell me a thing.’