They Call Me Patrice

Chapter Nine

Not a word passed between them during the drive back. He didn’t say anything, for he was content. She didn’t say anything, for she felt completely destroyed.

Nothing was left, no recourse remained. Even flight with the child, that was futile, meaningless now. Her withdrawal from the scene would abet his purpose, rather than hinder it. He would remain behind, to batten on those she had turned over to his mercies. He didn’t need her any more; she was his legal accessory now, whether present or absent.

She didn’t even feel much pain, any more. Struggle was ended. She was numb.

She rode with her eyes held shut, like a woman returning from a funeral at which everything worth keeping has been interred. They stopped, and she heard the car door open. She raised her eyelids. He was sitting there, waiting for her to get out. They were two blocks down from the house. He was being tactful, letting her out at distance far enough from it to be inconspicuous.

She stepped down.

The door closed.

He spoke then. He tipped his hat. “Good night, Mrs. Georgesson,” he said ironically. “Pleasant dreams to you.”

The car went on. Its red tail light coursed around a lower corner and disappeared.

She was at her own door now. She must have walked up to the house, though she couldn’t remember doing so.

She opened her handbag and felt inside it for her door-key. Hers, was good. The key they’d given her. It was still there. For some reason this surprised her. Funny to come home like this. To still come home like this.

My baby’s asleep in this house, she thought. I have to go in here.

She put on the lights in the lower hall. It was quiet, so quiet in the house. People sleeping, people who trusted you. People who didn’t expect you to bring home treachery and blackmail to them.

She got as far as the foot of the stairs. Then the last desperate strength that had brought her from the car to this point died out. She stood there immobile.

Nothing left. Nothing. No home, no love, no child. She’d even forfeited her child’s love, tarnished it for a later day. She’d lose him too, when he was old enough to know this about her.

This had to end. This couldn’t go on. This had to end, right tonight. Now. There was one way left of stopping it—

She turned aside and went into the library, and lighted that. She wondered why. She didn’t know yet. She thought she didn’t know yet, but there must have been something making her do it, already guiding her subconscious mind.

They’d signed the will in here, she remembered that. The table where the lawyer sat. The chairs they’d sat in. She in this one. The desk over there, the drawers in it. Father Hazzard sitting under the reading-lamp here one night, lingering late over a book.

No, I won’t forget to lock up. But don’t be nervous, there’s a revolver in one of the drawers here. We keep that for burglars. That was Mother’s idea, once, years ago—

Now she knew why she’d come in here.

She opened the upper drawer. Some papers were in a confused mass on top. But then she found it; it was under them.

This was the way. This was what you got for waiting so long. This was the price of earlier indecision. This was the compounded interest for cringing, for cowardice, in the past. This was the ultimate. This was the pay-off.

She wondered if the revolver would fit into her handbag. She tried it side-wise, the flat way, and it did. She closed the handbag, pushed the drawer shut, and came out of the room.

She put out the hall light, and went on out of the house.

She could see the thin line the light made under his door. She knocked again, softly as she had the first time. But clearly enough to be heard.

They said you were frightened at a time like this. They said you were keyed-up to an ungovernable pitch. They said you were blinded by fuming emotion.

They said. What did they know? She felt nothing. Neither fear nor excitement nor blind anger. Only a dull, aching determination.

He didn’t hear, or he wasn’t answering. She tried the knob, and the door was unlocked; it gave Inward. Why shouldn’t it be? What did he have to fear from others? They didn’t take from him, he took from them.

She closed it behind her.

The room was warm with occupancy. The coat and hat he’d worn with her in the car just now were slung over a chair. A cigarette that he’d incompletely extinguished a few short moments ago was wrinkled and bent into a V, but one end of it was still stubbornly smouldering in a dish. The drink that he was coming back to finish in a moment, the drink with which he’d celebrated tonight’s successful enterprise, stood there on the edge of the table. But he wasn’t in the room. He must have stepped into the next one, beyond, just as she arrived outside at the door. He must be in there now, offside light was coming through the open doorway.

“Steve,” she said quietly in the stillness, “come out here a second.”

No fear, no love, no hate, no anything.

She opened her handbag, and took out the gun, and fitted her hand to it.

Then she went forward.

“Steve,” she said dully, “your wife is here.”

She made the turn of the doorway. The second room was at a right angle to the first. The light was less in here, just a shaded nightlamp over by his empty bed.

The rug bunched up around her foot, impeding her. She tried to dislodge it. She looked down and it wasn’t the rug. He was lying there, still, looking up at her, Indolence, his attitude seemed to express — too much trouble to get up. There was a cigarette between his outstretched fingers, she noticed. It had burned down to the skin, adhered, and then gone out, and miraculously failed to ignite the carpet.

You could hardly tell anything was the matter. There was a little dark line by the outside of his eye, where something had run down— His eyes seemed to be fixed on her, watching her, with that same mockery they’d always shown toward her.

It was that that made her cower back and strangle on a scream. The way his eyes seemed to be fixed on her. Not the thin dark line, nor the way he lay there, relaxed and still.

She was in the outside room now. She must have gone into it backward, not daring to take her eyes off that empty doorway, for she was still facing that way, when it came, The knock came.

It wasn’t soft and tempered, as hers had been. It didn’t space itself, and wait between. It was aggressive, demanding, continuous — already angered, and feeding on its own anger at every second’s added delay. It drowned her second choked scream, the scream that held real fear. Agnonizing fear, trapped fear such as she’d never known existed before. For the voice that riddled it, that sounded through it and with it and over it, in stern impatience, was Bill’s. She would have known it anywhere.

“Patrice! Open this door. Patrice! Do you hear me? I know you’re in there. Open this door and let me come in there, or I’ll break it down—”

In a moment, in a second, he’d discover that it was unlocked, just as she had earlier. She flung herself bodily against it, with a cry of despair, just as the knob turned and the door started to spring open.

“No!” she breathed. “No!” She threw the full weight of her body against the door.

“Patrice, you must let me in. You must!”

He could see her now, and she could see him, through the fluctuating gap the opening door made, now narrow, now wider. And still she tried to bar him, pressing against it, hands straining to hold it on the inside.

“No, Bill, no!” she wailed. “Stay out of here. Oh, if you love me, don’t come in here! Don’t Bill, don’t!”

Then suddenly she was swept back on the arc of the whole door, like a leaf, and he was standing beside her.

“Where is he? I’ll kill him—” he said breathlessly.

She clung to him now, and his arm went around her, tight, firm. There is a point beyond which you can’t be alone any more. You have to have someone to cling to. You have to cling to someone, even if they are to reject you again in another moment or two.

“Somebody has — already.” She shuddered, hiding her face against him. “He’s in there, dead, Bill!”

Suddenly his arm dropped and he’d left her. It was terrible to be alone, even just for a moment. She wondered how she’d stood it all these months, these years.

Then he reappeared in the doorway. She saw his head give a grim nod, before her face had found refuge against him again. That sanctuary that all her life she’d been trying to find.

He was turning her, propelling her, within the curve of his protective arm. “Come on, you have to get out of here! You can’t be found here. You must be out of your mind to do such a— What the devil got into you to make you—?”

She was struggling against him a little now, short of the door. She pried herself away from him suddenly, and stood there facing him.

“No, wait! Listen to me! There’s something you must hear first. Something you have to know.”

“Not now! Can’t you understand? Any minute somebody’s likely to stick his head into this place— Let me get you out of here! Patrice, if you won’t think of yourself, think of Mother, Don’t you know what it means if you’re found here?”

“No — this is the time, and this is the place. Before we go a step further. I’ve waited too long to tell you. I won’t move an Inch over that doorstep. Bill, I’m not entitled to your protection—”

“I’ll pick you up and carry you out of here, if I have to!” His hand suddenly clamped itself to her mouth, sealing it. His other arm gripped her waist, viselike, as he forced her toward the door. Her eyes strained at him in mute pleading, above his stifling hand.

“I know,” he said almost impatiently. “I know what you’re trying to tell me. That you’re not Patrice. That you’re not Hugh’s wife. Isn’t that it?”

He swept her through the doorway with him.

“I know that already. I’ve always known it. I think I’ve known it ever since the first few weeks you’d been here.”