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418
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William Sansom
in the stifling air like curtains that had never moved. And this girl
Clara lay reading lazily the evening paper.
She wore an old wool bed-jacket, faded yet rich against her pale
and bloodless skin; she was alone, expecting no one. It was a night
of restitution, of early supper and washing underclothes and stock-
ings, an early night for a read and a long sleep. Two or three maga-
zines nestled in the eiderdowned bend of her knees. But saving for
last the glossy, luxurious magazines, she lay now glancing through
the paper - half reading, half tasting the quiet, sensing how se-
cluded she was though the street was only one floor below, in her
own bedroom yet with the heads of unsuspecting people passing
only a few feet beneath. Unknown footsteps approached and re-
treated on the pavement beneath - footsteps that even on this still
summer night sounded muffled, like footsteps heard on the pave-
ment of a fog.
She lay listening for a while, then turned again to the paper, read
again a bullying black headline relating the deaths of some
hundreds of demonstrators somewhere in another hemisphere, and
again let her eyes trail away from the weary greyish block of words
beneath. The corner of the papers and its newsprint struck a harsh
note of offices and tube-trains against the soft texture of the rose
quilt - she frowned and was thus just about to reach for one of the
more lustrous magazines when her eyes noted across the page a
short, squat headline above a blackly-typed column about the Vic-
toria murders. She shuffled more comfortably into the bed and con-
centrated hard to scramble up the delicious paragraphs.
But they had found nothing. No new murder, nowhere nearer to
making an arrest. Yet after an official preamble, there occurred one
of those theoretic dissertations, such as is often inserted to colour
the progress of apprehension when no facts provide themselves. It
appeared, it was
thought,
that the Victoria strangler suffered from
a mania similar to that which had possessed the infamous Ripper;
that is, the victims were mostly of a 'certain profession'; it might
be thus concluded that the Victoria murderer bore the same ma-
niacal grudge against such women.
At this Clara put the paper down - thinking, well for one thing
she never did herself up like those sort, in fact she never did herself
up at all, and what would be the use? Instinctively then she turned
to look across to the mirror on the dressing-table, saw there her
worn pale face and sack-coloured hair, and felt instantly neglected;
Various Temptations
419
down in her plain-feeling body there stirred again that familiar
envy, the impotent grudge that still came to her at least once every
day of her life - that nobody had ever bothered to think deeply for
her, neither loving, nor hating, nor in any way caring. For a mo-
ment then the thought came that whatever had happened in those
bedrooms, however horrible, that murderer had at least felt deeply
for his subject, the subject girl was charged with positive attrac-
tions that had forced him to act. There could hardly be such a
thing, in those circumstances at least, as a disinterested murder.
Hate and love were often held to be variations of the same obsessed
emotion - when it came to murder, to the high impassioned pitch
of murder, to such an intense concentration of one person on an-
other, then it seemed that a divine paralysis, something very much
like love, possessed the murderer.
Clara put the paper aside with finality, for whenever the question
of her looks occurred then she forced herself to think immediately
of something else, to ignore what had for some years groaned into
an obsession leading only to hours wasted with self-pity and idle
depression. So that now she picked up the first magazine, and scru-
tinized with a false intensity the large and laughing figure in several
colours and few clothes of a motion-picture queen. However,
rather than pointing her momentary depression, the picture com-
forted her. Had it been a real girl in the room, she might have been
further saddened; but these pictures of fabulous people separated
by the convention of the page and the distance of their world of
celluloid fantasy instead represented the image of earlier personal
dreams, comforting dreams of what then she hoped one day she
might become, when that hope which is youth's unique asset out-
weighed the material attribute of what she in fact was.
In the quiet air fogging the room with such palpable stillness the
turning of the brittle magazine page made its own decisive crackle.
Somewhere outside in the summer night a car slurred past, changed
its gear, rounded the corner and sped off on a petulant note of ac-
celeration to nowhere. The girl changed her position in the bed,
easing herself deeper into the security of the bedclothes. Gradually
she became absorbed, so that soon her mind was again ready to
wander, but this time within her own imagining, outside the plane
of that bedroom. She was idly thus transported into a wished-for
situation between herself and the owner of the shop where she
worked: in fact, she spoke aloud her decision to take the following
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