Selected Stories

He shook his head, meaning to indicate that he wasn’t claiming to be sure, only that reason implied what he suggested. During the months they were getting to know one another he had learnt that Liese’s imagination was sometimes a nuisance; she had said so herself. Purposeless and dispensable, she said, a quirk of nature that caused her, too often, to doubt the surface of things. Music was purposeless, he had replied, the petal of a flower dispensable: what failed the market-place was often what should be treasured most. But Liese called her quirk of nature a pest; and experiencing an instance of it for the first time now, Tony understood.

‘Let’s not quarrel, Liese.’

But the quarrel – begun already while neither noticed – spread, insidious in the stillness that the silent telephone, once more passed from hand to hand, seemed to inspire. Neither heard the mewing of the cat again, and Tony said:

‘Look, in the morning she’ll see that receiver hanging there and she’ll remember she forgot to put it back.’

‘It is morning now. Tony, we could go to the police.’

‘The police? What on earth for?’

‘They could find out where that house is.’

‘Oh, none of this makes sense!’ And Tony, who happened just then to be holding the telephone receiver, would again have replaced it.

Liese snatched it, anger flushing through her cheeks. She asked him why he’d wanted to do that, and he shrugged and didn’t answer. He didn’t because all this was ridiculous, because he didn’t trust himself to say anything.

‘The police couldn’t find out,’ he said after a silence had gone on. The police wouldn’t have a telephone number to go on. All they could tell the police was that in a house somewhere in London there was an old woman and a cat. All over London, Tony said, there were old women and cats.

‘Tony, try to remember the number.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake! How can I remember the bloody number when I didn’t even know it in the first place?’

‘Well, then it will be in the computers.’

‘What computers?’

‘In Germany all calls go into the computers.’

Liese didn’t know if this was so or not. What she knew was that they could do nothing if he had put the receiver back. Why had he wanted to?

‘Darling, we can’t,’ he was saying now. ‘We can’t just walk round to a police station at nearly three o’clock in the morning to report that an old woman has gone up to her loft. It was a harmless game, Liese.’

She tried to say nothing, but did not succeed. The words came anyway, unchosen, ignoring her will.

‘It is a horrible game. How can it not be horrible when it ends like this?’

The old woman lies there, Liese heard her own voice insist. And light comes up through the open trapdoor, and the stepladder is below. There are the dusty boards, the water pipes. The cat’s eyes are pinpricks in the gloom.

‘Has she struck her head, Tony? And bones go brittle when you’re old. I’m saying what could be true.’

‘We have no reason whatsoever to believe any of this has happened.’

‘The telephone left hanging -’

‘She did not replace the telephone because she forgot to.’

‘You asked her to come back. You said to do what you asked and to tell you if it was done.’

‘Sometimes people can tell immediately that it’s a put-up thing.’

‘Hullo! Hullo!’ Liese agitatedly shouted into the receiver. ‘Hullo . . . Please.’

‘Liese, we have to wait until she wakes up again.’

‘At least the cat will keep the mice away.’

Other people will see the lights left on. Other people will come to the house and find the dangling telephone. Why should an old woman in her night clothes set a stepladder under a trapdoor? The people who come will ask that. They’ll give the cat a plate of milk and then they’ll put the telephone back, and one of them will climb up the ladder.

‘I wish it had happened some other night.’

‘Liese -’

‘You wanted to put the receiver back. You wanted not to know. You wanted us for ever not to know, to make a darkness of it.’

‘No, of course I didn’t.’

‘Sometimes a person doesn’t realize. A person acts in some way and doesn’t realize.’

‘Please,’ Tony begged again and Liese felt his arms around her. Tears for a moment smudged away the room they were in, softly he stroked her hair. When she could speak she whispered through his murmured consolation, repeating that she wished all this had happened sooner, not tonight. As though some illness had struck her, she experienced a throbbing ache, somewhere in her body, she didn’t know where. That came from muddle and confusion was what she thought, or else from being torn apart, as if she possessed two selves. There was not room for quarrels between them. There had not been, there was not still. Why had it happened tonight, why now? Like a hammering in Liese’s brain, this repetition went on, began again as a persistent roundabout. Imagining was Gothic castles and her own fairytales made up when she was in Fräulein Groenewold’s kindergarten, and fantasies with favourite film stars later on. It became a silliness when reality was distorted. Of course he was right.