Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

Bascombe, with that seventh sense of his which made him the best valet my old father ever had, and certainly the best servant that any young K.C. could wish for, had in his miraculous way anticipated my arrival. He was actually standing under the arch of Dr. Johnson’s chambers waiting for the taxi. He took my bags, and paid the driver. He shepherded me upstairs like an old hen getting chickens back into the run. He gave me a drink. Told me that my bath was ready. That he presumed I would like to dine early, and could do so within an hour. That no one had called, rung up, or written that day. That Simpson — my chief clerk — had told him there were seven new briefs. That he had taken the liberty of paying two bills. That he hoped I was feeling refreshed and exhilarated by my holiday...

And that’ll show you the sort of fellow Bascombe was. One of the best, if not the best.

I had that bath and that drink. In pyjamas and dressing-gown I went to the telephone. Bascombe was just leaving the room, a tray in one hand, an empty tumbler in the other. I said to him:

“Any telephone messages, Bascombe? Special messages?” I didn’t look at him. I knew perfectly well that he knew I meant Claire. And he knew perfectly well that I knew. He shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. “Had there been, sir, I should have taken the liberty, of informing you over the wire.” A good fellow, Bascombe.

I took up the receiver. As always, when it was Claire to whom I was telephoning, I got the most ridiculous little lump in my throat. A small lump, but in a way a painful lump. One moment it wasn’t there, and then it was, so that I couldn’t swallow. I told Claire about it once. I tried to make a joke of it because I really thought she’d think it silly. But Claire — and this’ll show you what sort of a girl she was — Claire didn’t even smile. I said, with rather a painful attempt to laugh it off: “Perhaps you’ll realize now how much I love you. When a man gets to a state when a ’phone number’ll make him go choky, he’s in a pretty bad way.”

But as I say, she didn’t even smile. She put an arm round my neck and pressed my face into that delicious hollow between shoulder and breast. She said:

“It doesn’t need that, old boy. Nothing could make me love you any more. But that does all the same...”

I picked up the receiver, and then let it drop; left it until the small lump had gone. I picked it up again, and asked an angry exchange girl for the number. I then waited. After what, by the clock, said two minutes, but was really in the time of my mind at least half an hour, I began “depressing the receiver continuously and slowly.” I always start like that, and it never works. Always keep it up for about two minutes, and then turn it into a kind of fury of rattling.

But this time nothing was any good. I mean as far as Claire was concerned. She obviously wasn’t in the flat. I thought at first that the exchange girl wasn’t trying — I always did if they couldn’t get Claire — so I got on to the supervisor. But supervisor, who was also supercilious, couldn’t get any reply either. So I hung up.

I had had the drink, and the bath, in double quick time. But I dressed in double slow. I got through nearly an hour putting on a dinner jacket, I think. But at last I wandered towards the meal.

I began to make some show of drinking the soup, more to please old Bascombe than anything. But the stuff tasted like ink. I’d just managed to force the last spoonful down my resisting gorge, when the ’phone rang. Bascombe went to it. He came back saying:

“A lady for you, sir.” His face was expressionless and his voice meant to be. But there was in it a nuance which spelt Claire as plainly as did that lovely word’s own six letters. I made a dash for the library. A dash with more speed about it than dignity; but who was I to think of being dignified where Claire was concerned? Dignity’s all right when you’re all figged out in wig and gown; but otherwise I’ve not much use for it...

Her voice came to me over that blessed wire like a thin and silver and magic stream of water to a desert-bound fool, almost at the point of drinking his own blood. She said:

“You are back, then!...”

She hadn’t had my wire. She’d been out all day, and even now was telephoning from some restaurant or somewhere. She had, she said, been lonely. She had thought, she said, so lonely had she been, of going that night to a theater by herself. But somehow, she said, she had known, or hoped anyhow, that I was back in town. I said:

“How long will it take you to get back to the flat? My wings’ll do it in twenty-five minutes.”

Her laugh came to me like a disembodied picture of all the fire and sweetness of her. She said: “You’d better clip them then, because I won’t be ready for you till ten.”