Raising the flaccid plastex with my hands, I managed to lift it off Fay, who was spread-eagled into the cushions with only her feet protruding. She wriggled out and flung her arms around me, sobbing noiselessly.
‘Howard, this house is insane, I think it’s trying to kill me!’
‘For heaven’s sake, Fay, don’t be silly. It was simply a freak accumulation of senso-cells. Your breathing probably set it off.’ I patted her shoulder, remembering the child I had married a few years earlier. Smiling to myself, I watched the ceiling retract slowly, the walls grow lighter in tone.
‘Howard, can’t we leave here?’ Fay babbled. ‘Let’s go and live in a static house. I know it’s dull, but what does it matter—?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s not just dull, it’s dead. Don’t worry, angel, you’ll learn to like it here.’
Fay twisted away from me. ‘Howard, I can’t stay in this house any more. You’ve been so preoccupied recently, you’re completely changed.’ She started to cry again, and pointed at the ceiling. ‘If I hadn’t been lying down, do you realize it would have killed me?’
I dusted the end of the sofa. ‘Yes, I can see your heel marks.’ Irritation welled up like bile before I could stop it. ‘I thought I told you not to stretch out here. This isn’t a beach, Fay. You know it annoys me.’
Around us the walls began to mottle and cloud again.
Why did Fay anger me so easily? Was it, as I assumed at the time, unconscious resentment that egged me on, or was I merely a vehicle for the antagonism which had accumulated during Vanden Starr’s marriage to Gloria Tremayne and was now venting itself on the hapless couple who followed them to 99 Stellavista? Perhaps I’m over-charitable to myself in assuming the latter, but Fay and I had been tolerably happy during our five years of marriage, and I am sure my nostalgic infatuation for Gloria Tremayne couldn’t have so swept me off my feet.
Either way, however, Fay didn’t wait for a second attempt. Two days later I came home to find a fresh tape on the kitchen memophone. I switched it on to hear her tell me that she could no longer put up with me, my nagging or 99 Stellavista and was going back east to stay with her sister.
Callously, my first reaction, after the initial twinge of indignation, was sheer relief. I still believed that Fay was responsible for Gloria Tremayne’s eclipse and the emergence of Vanden Starr, and that with her gone I would recapture the early days of idyll and romance.
I was only partly right. Gloria Tremayne did return, but not in the role expected. I, who had helped to defend her at her trial, should have known better.
A few days after Fay left I became aware that the house had taken on a separate existence, its coded memories discharging themselves independently of my own behaviour. Often when I returned in the evening, eager to relax over half a decanter of scotch, I would find the ghosts of Miles Vanden Starr and Gloria Tremayne in full flight. Starr’s black and menacing personality crowded after the tenuous but increasingly resilient quintessence of his wife. This rapier-like resistance could be observed literally — the walls of the lounge would stiffen and darken in a vortex of anger that converged upon a small zone of lightness hiding in one of the alcoves, as if to obliterate its presence, but at the last moment Gloria’s persona would flit nimbly away, leaving the room to seethe and writhe.
Fay had set off this spirit of resistance, and I visualized Gloria Tremayne going through a similar period of living hell. As her personality re-emerged in its new role I watched it carefully, volume at maximum despite the damage the house might do to itself. Once Stamers stopped by and offered to get the circuits checked for me. He had seen the house from the road, flexing and changing colour like an anguished squid. Thanking him, I made up some excuse and declined. Later he told me that I had kicked him out unceremoniously — apparently he hardly recognized me; I was striding around the dark quaking house like a madman in an Elizabethan horror tragedy, oblivious of everything.
Although submerged by the personality of Miles Vanden Starr, I gradually realized that Gloria Tremayne had been deliberately driven out of her mind by him. What had prompted his implacable hostility I can only hazard — perhaps he resented her success, perhaps she had been unfaithful to him. When she finally retaliated and shot him it was, I’m sure, an act of self-defence.
Two months after she went east Fay filed a divorce suit against me. Frantically I telephoned her, explaining that I would be grateful if she postponed the action as the publicity would probably kill my new law office. However, Fay was adamant. What annoyed me most was that she sounded better than she had done for years, really happy again. When I pleaded with her she said she needed the divorce in order to marry again, and then, as a last straw, refused to tell me who the man was.
