Last Act of All by Aline Templeton Page A

flat as he said, ‘No, Helena. No, I don’t think we will.’
    Suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, his mouth curved in Harry’s malevolent, mocking smile. ‘Come on, darling, give us a good-night kiss. It’s every wife’s duty to kiss her husband good-night.’
    He bent over, the smell of whisky raw on his breath, and tipped her face urgently to his, bruising her lips with a hard, unloving kiss. ‘“Good-night, good-night! Parting is such sweet sorrow,”’ he said. ‘Sleep well, won’t you, my pet?’ and he was laughing as he walked to the door of the bedroom and went out, leaving it open behind him. She heard his footsteps cross the landing, his tap on the door –‘Lilian?’ — and a gurgle of laughter from the other side.
    She threw herself out of bed to slam the door against their mingled voices and stood, leaning against it, shuddering and scrubbing her mouth with her hand, like a child. She need no longer imagine there was any humiliation too gross for him to commit upon her. The metamorphosis was complete: Neville was gone, swallowed up by the monster he had created.
    Indeed, in her first wild unreason, it seemed that Lilian, too, was a mutation; that Helena and the Neville she had once loved had no more substance than wraiths, adrift forever in the limbo of things past.
    *
    She did not know how long she had huddled, cramped against the door into a tight, agonized ball of suffering, but the sound of footsteps brought her to instant awareness.
    The tap on the door, when it came, was gentle, even tentative, but still she fumbled for the awkward old key, persuading it to turn in the lock.
    She succeeded, but the handle was not tried. Instead, Chris’s voice spoke softly but urgently through the thick panels. ‘Helena – Helena—’
    ‘ Go away,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘If this is all part of the plot, I can only say that you disgust me. For god’s sake, leave me alone.’ She heard what sounded like a sigh, but he said nothing and the footsteps retreated. In a sudden frenzy, she rushed to the wall of cupboards, flinging open doors, dragging out suitcases and filling them, almost at random, with all that they would hold.
    It was seven o’clock when at last she crept out to ferry her cases down to the garage. She was on her way by ten past seven, leaving no note, and driving through the sleeping village as if all the devils in hell were at her heels.
    *
    Sandra Daley, sifting listlessly at the uncleared breakfast table on Tuesday morning, did not jump to answer the phone when it rang. It was more than a week since she had last scurried eagerly to pick up the phone.
    Now her voice was flat as she said, ‘Hello?’ indifferently.
    ‘ And what sort of greeting is that?’
    A shockwave seemed to course down her spine as she recognized the teasing, familiar, dark-brown voice.
    ‘ Enough to make a fellow think you didn’t want to speak to him!’
    ‘ N–Neville!’ she stammered. She struggled to sound cool, sophisticated, in control. ‘I – I wasn’t expecting to hear from you.’
    ‘Now, how can you say that?’ His voice was caressing. ‘Not expecting to hear from me, when we haven’t had a chance to talk for ten days? I’ve been thinking of nothing but how to make time to call you, but I haven’t had a moment alone when I didn’t know Jack would be at your end with his hand out, ready to pick up the phone.’
    ‘ Oh, Neville!’ Her eyes filled, and she didn’t care any longer that he would hear the tears in her voice. ‘What was I to think? Never a word from you, and all those pictures in the papers—’
    ‘ Oh, my sweet, I forget what a precious innocent you are! Look, the world I live in — it’s different. Lilian’s part of my job, and my public life — well, that belongs to my public, and to a large extent, I’m their slave. They have to get what they want, or that’s the end of the track for me.
    ‘ But my private life — our private life — that’s another