A Suspension of Mercy Read online

  ADDITIONAL BOOKS BY PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

  PUBLISHED BY W. W. NORTON

  Strangers on a Train

  The Blunderer

  People Who Knock on the Door

  The Glass Cell

  Deep Water

  This Sweet Sickness

  A Dog’s Ransom

  Small g: A Summer Idyll

  Little Tales of Misogyny

  The Animal-Lover’s Guide to Beastly Murder

  Slowly, Slowly in the Wind

  The Black House

  Mermaids on the Golf Course

  The Talented Mr. Ripley

  Ripley Under Ground

  Ripley’s Game

  The Boy Who Followed Ripley

  Ripley Under Water

  The Price of Salt (as Claire Morgan)

  Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith

  ADDITIONAL TITLES FROM OTHER PUBLISHERS

  Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda (with Doris Sanders)

  A Game for the Living

  The Cry of the Owl

  The Two Faces of January

  Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

  Those Who Walk Away

  The Tremor of Forgery

  The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories

  Edith’s Diary

  Found in the Street

  Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

  A Suspension of Mercy

  Patricia Highsmith

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK LONDON

  For

  Betty, Margot, Ann,

  and all the old gang.

  Contents

  Begin Reading

  1

  The land around Sydney and Alicia Bartleby’s two-story cottage was flat, like most Suffolk country. A road, two-laned and paved, went by the house at a distance of twenty yards. To one side of the front walk, which was of slightly askew flagstones, five young elms gave some privacy, and on the other side a tall, bushy hedge provided a better screen for thirty feet. For this reason, Sydney had never trimmed it. The front lawn was as untended as the hedge. The grass grew in tufts mostly, and where it didn’t, fairy rings had eaten circles exposing green-brown earth. The Bartlebys took better care of the ground behind the house, and they had besides a vegetable and flower garden an ornamental pond some five feet across that Sydney had made with a cemented pile of interesting stones in its center, but they had never succeeded in keeping goldfish alive in it, and two frogs they had put there had decided to go somewhere else.

  The road led to Ipswich and London in one direction and toward Framlingham in the other. Behind the house, their property trickled off vaguely, bounded by nothing visible, and beyond lay a field belonging to a farmer whose house was out of sight. The Bartlebys were supposed to live in Roncy Noll, but Roncy Noll proper was two miles away toward Framlingham. They had had their house a year and a half, almost as long as they had been married, and it was mostly a wedding present from Alicia’s parents, though she and Sydney had contributed a thousand pounds toward its three-thousand-five-hundred pound price. It was a lonely neighborhood from the point of view of people and neighbors, but Sydney and Alicia had their own pursuits—writing and painting—they had each other’s company all day, and they had made a few friends who were scattered as far away as Lowestoft. But they had to drive five miles to Framlingham to get so much as a shoe repair or a bottle of Chinese ink. It was the loneliness of the neighborhood, they supposed, that kept the house next to theirs empty. The sturdy, two-story house with its facing of flintstone and a pointed gable window was in better shape than theirs to look at, but they had heard that there were all sorts of things to do on the inside, as it had not been occupied for five years, and then by an aging man and his wife who hadn’t had the means to put in any improvements. The house stood two hundred yards from the Bartlebys’, and Alicia liked looking out a window now and then and seeing it, even if it was empty. Sometimes she did feel geographically lonely, as if she and Sydney lived at some deserted pole of the earth.

  Through Elspeth Cragge who lived in Woodbridge and knew Mr. Spark, a real estate dealer there, Alicia learned that a Mrs. Lilybanks had bought the house next door. She was an old lady from London, Elspeth said, and expressed her regret that it couldn’t have been a young couple who might have been more fun as neighbors.

  “Mrs. Lilybanks moved in this afternoon,” Alicia said brightly one evening in the kitchen.

  “Um. You get a look at her?”

  “Not any more than I did before. She’s rather elderly.”

  Sydney knew that. They had both had a look at Mrs. Lilybanks a month ago, when she had come with the rental agent. For more than a month, workmen had been prowling over the place, hammering and banging, and now Mrs. Lilybanks had moved in. She looked about seventy, and she would probably write a short note of complaint if they had any noisy parties this summer in the back garden. Sydney carefully made two martinis in a glass pitcher and poured them.

  “I would’ve gone over to see her, but she had a couple of people with her and I thought they might be staying the night.”

  “Um,” Sydney said. He was making the salad, which was his usual job at dinner. He braced the metal cabinet with his hand automatically before jerking open the sticky door to get the mustard. Then forgetting, he raised straight up and hit his head on a slanting rafter. “God’s teeth!”

  “Oh, darling,” said Alicia absently, checking her steak-and-kidney pie in the oven of the Baby Belling. She wore pale blue narrow slacks, made like blue jeans, but with a V slit in the cuffs. Her shirt was of blue denim, the real McCoy sent by an American friend. She wore her streaky blond hair carelessly and it hung almost to her shoulders. Her face was slender, well-bred and pretty, her eyes wide-set and blue-gray. A smudge of darker blue paint streaked half across her left thigh, still there after many washings. Alicia painted in an upstairs back room of the house. “Tomorrow, though, I probably will,” Alicia said, still going on about Mrs. Lilybanks.

  Sydney’s mind was miles away, back on his afternoon with Alex in London. He resented the third intrusion of Mrs. Lilybanks. Why didn’t Alicia ask him about his afternoon, about his work, the way any wife would have done? Sometimes she deliberately hung onto subjects that she knew bored him. Therefore Sydney didn’t answer now.

  “How was London?” Alicia asked finally, when they were seated at the table in the dining room.

  “Oh, the same. Still there,” Sydney said with a forced smile. “Alex is just the same, too. Meaning no new ideas.”

  “Oh. I thought you were hammering out one today.”

  Sydney sighed, vaguely irritated, yet it was the only subject he wanted to talk about. “We were going to. I had an idea. It just didn’t get off the ground.” He shrugged. The third serial that he and Alex had doped out—mostly he had doped out, Alex simply wrote it in television form—had been rejected last week by the third and last possible purchaser in London. Three or four weeks of sweat, at least four sessions in London with Alex, a complete detailed synopsis and Installment One of one hour written, neatly bound and dispatched to one, two, three possible buyers. All that down the drain now, and add today also. Seventeen shillings for the day-excursion fare from Ipswich to London, add eight hours’ time and a certain amount of physical energy, add the frustration of watching Alex’s big, dark face grow cloudy with thought and dense silence, followed by, “Ah, no, no, that won’t do,” and the result was a day that would make a man tear his hair out, throw his typewriter in th
e nearest creek, then jump in himself.

  “How was Hittie?”

  Hittie was Alex’s wife, a blond, quiet girl totally absorbed in the care of their three small children.

  “As usual,” Sydney said.

  “Were you talking about your new idea, the one about the man on the tanker?” Alicia asked.

  “No, darling. That was the one that just got rejected.” How could she forget that, Sydney wondered, since she’d read the installment and the synopsis? “My new idea, I don’t know if I mentioned it, was about the tattoo. The man who has a tattoo faked to resemble the tattoo of a man who’s supposed to be dead.” He hadn’t the energy to launch into the complicated story. He and Alex had a sleuth-hero named Nicky Campbell, a young fellow with an ordinary job and a girlfriend, and Nicky kept running into crime and solving mysteries and capturing crooks and winning fistfights and gunfights—and the stories kept not getting bought. But Alex was sure they would make it one day, and then they’d both be set. Alex had had one television script accepted two years ago, and since then had written five or six that hadn’t been accepted, but they had been straight hour-long dramas, and Alex was confident that what television needed now was a good serial. Fortunately for Alex, he had a steady job in a publishing house. Sydney had no job, and hadn’t succeeded in placing his last novel, though he had had two novels published a few years ago in the States. As a reliable income, he had about a hundred dollars a month which came in four times a year from some stocks an uncle in America had bequeathed him. On this and on Alicia’s more substantial fifty pounds a month, they lived, buying oil paint and canvas, typewriter paper and ribbons and carbon paper, the tools of their trades that returned them so little. Alicia’s income to date from painting was five pounds, though she didn’t take painting so seriously as a money-making activity as Sydney did his writing. They bought nothing in the way of luxury items but liquor and cigarettes, though since these items were so costly in England, buying them at all seemed luxury to the point of madness, cigarettes being like rolled up ten-bob notes going up in smoke and liquor molten gold. They had not bought a new gramophone record in months. Their television set was rented from a Framlingham shop. Most English rented their sets, since new models appeared rapidly, and a set that one bought was soon out of date. Sydney reasoned that he needed a television set for his work with Alex.

  “Are you going to keep on trying with Alex?” Alicia asked, her last bite poised on her fork.

  “What else? I hate to waste days in London like this one, but if it breaks for us, it breaks.” A sudden anger swept over him, a hatred of Alicia and the house, and he wanted to drop the subject, wished that he could erase every word and thought of today, of Alex, of their damned plots. He lit a cigarette, just as Alicia passed him the salad, and mechanically he helped himself to a little. Tomorrow would find him tackling his synopsis anew, trying to incorporate or improve on the flimsy ideas Alex had come up with today. After all, he was supposed to think up the stories, he was the mainspring.

  “Darling, the garbage tonight. Don’t forget,” Alicia said with such gentleness, Sydney might have laughed if he had been in a better mood, if there had been other people present.

  Alicia probably meant him to laugh, or smile, but he only nodded absently and seriously, and then his mind focused on garbage, as if it were a vital and very large problem. The dustmen came only once a fortnight, so it was a serious matter if they forgot to put all the garbage out at the edge of the road. Their one dustbin of inadequate size was always at the edge of the road, and into this went tins and bottles only. Papers they burned, and vegetable and fruit parings they threw on their compost heap, but since orange juice and tomatoes and lots of other things came in cans and bottles, this department was always bulging at the end of two weeks, and a couple of cartons stood full in the toolhouse for days before the dustmen arrived. Usually it was raining on the eve of garbage day, so Sydney had to carry the cartons out across muddy ground, drop them by the dustbin, and hope they would not dissolve by morning.

  “It’s annoying that one has to feel ashamed of having garbage in the English countryside,” Sydney said. “What’s so abnormal about having garbage, I’d like to know? Do they think people don’t eat?”

  Alicia calmly girded herself for the defense of her country. “It’s not shameful to have garbage. Who said it was shameful?”

  “Perhaps it isn’t, but they make it so,” Sydney replied just as calmly. “By taking so long between collections, they focus people’s attention on it—rub it in their faces, practically. Just like the drinking hours. You find a pub door locked in your face, so you want a drink more than ever and drink two or three the next chance you get.”

  Alicia defended the pub hours on the grounds that it cut down drinking, and the infrequent garbage disposal on the grounds that more frequent disposal would up the rates, and so this discussion, which they had had before, went on for about two minutes more and left them both in a rather irritated mood, as neither had convinced the other of his point.

  Alicia was less irritated, and in fact her irritation was mostly a pretense. It was her country, she liked it, and often it crossed her mind to say that if Sydney didn’t like it, he might leave, but she had never said this. She loved teasing Sydney, even on the delicate subject of his writing, because the answer to his problem seemed so simple to her: Sydney should relax, be more natural, more happy, and write what he pleased, then it would be good and it would sell. She had said this to him many times, and he came back at her with some complex and masculine answer, upholding the virtue of hard thinking and of aiming at markets. “But we decided to live in the country just so we could relax,” she had said to him a few times, but this was like oil on the fire, and Sydney would really flare up then, asking her if she thought living in the country with a million bucolic chores was more conducive to relaxing than a flat in London, however small. Well, rents in London were high and getting higher, and if she pinned Sydney down, he didn’t want to live in London really, because he preferred a country landscape and preferred to wear chinos and shirts without a tie and old plimsolls, and he actually liked mending a fence occasionally and pottering around in the garden. What Sydney needed, of course, was either to sell a serial with Alex or sell his novel, The Planners, that he was still tinkering with. Alicia thought he had tinkered with it enough, and that he ought to show it to every publisher in London, if necessary. He had shown it to six here, including Verge Press, where Alex worked, and to three in the United States, and they had all turned it down, but there were a lot more publishers, and Alicia had heard of books that had had thirty or more rejections before they were finally accepted.

  As she washed the dishes, she looked out now and then at Sydney, prowling about in his plimsolls that he had put on as soon as he got home. He had carried the garbage cartons out, and now he was looking at the garden in the dusk, bending now and then to remove a weed. The lettuce had just come up, but nothing else so far.

  Sydney kept glancing at the solitary light in the back upstairs corner of Mrs. Lilybanks’ house. An early retirer, he supposed, or very economical with the electricity. Probably both. It was strange to have another person living so close to them, able to look out now, for instance, and see him, vaguely at least, walking around in the backyard. Sydney didn’t like it. Then he realized he was not glancing at the lighted window to see Mrs. Lilybanks, about whom he was not at all curious, but to see if she were looking at him. But he saw absolutely nothing at the window except two vertical yellowish curtains, almost closed on whatever was going on behind them.

  2

  At that moment, 9:17 P.M., Mrs. Lilybanks was not thinking about going to bed, in spite of the strenuous day she had had. She was arranging her night table in the most convenient position beside her bed, and debating whether to hang her painting of Cannes (done nearly fifty years ago on her honeymoon) over the fireplace, or a still-life of apples and a w
ine bottle that her friend Elsie Howell (who had died twelve years ago) had painted especially for Mrs. Lilybanks’ London flat to which she had moved when her husband Clive Lilybanks had died. Mrs. Lilybanks moved slowly, putting her sewing basket into a top drawer, straightening her silver-backed comb and brush on the top of the chest of drawers, aware that she was so tired she was no longer being very efficient, but she felt particularly happy and content, and wanted to stay up a little longer to enjoy it. It was strange, she thought, to be fixing up a house—Mrs. Lilybanks had fixed up at least twenty houses in her long life, because her husband’s work had caused them to travel quite a bit—a house that would definitely be the last house she would ever bring into order, because in all probability, she was not going to live two more years. Mrs. Lilybanks had a bad heart, and had already had two strokes. The third would kill her, her doctor told her quite frankly. Mrs. Lilybanks appreciated frankness, even in such matters. She had enjoyed live, quite a long life, and she was ready for the end when it came.

  Mrs. Lilybanks turned down her bed, which Mrs. Hawkins had made up for her that afternoon, went into the bathroom and took her two pills, a ritual before retiring, then she went downstairs, holding firmly to the banister as she descended. She turned on some more lights, sliding her hand along unfamiliar walls until she found them, took her torch and went out into the small and now unkempt front garden and picked a few pansies. She put them in a small plain glass and carried them upstairs and put them on her night table. Then she brushed her teeth, which were still her own teeth, complete in front, though six molars had been drawn. She had had her bath earlier in the day at her Ipswich hotel.

  But she did not get to sleep immediately. She thought of her daughter Martha in Australia, of her granddaughter Prissie, in London now, probably saying to a lot of her young friends, who would be sitting around her flat on the floor, drinking red wine, “Well, I got Grannie bedded down in the country today. Whew! Don’t you think she’s out of her ever-loving mind? An old thing like that all alone in the country?” Because Prissie secretly approved of what her Grannie had decided to do, and wanted her friends to approve of it, too, or maybe to defend her Grannie in case her friends disapproved. “Mrs. Hawkins is coming over every afternoon, Prissie, even Sundays for a cup of tea. And after I’m gone, the cottage is yours, you know,” Mrs. Lilybanks had said that afternoon. Mrs. Lilybanks smiled now in the darkness. She wasn’t worried about loneliness. Friendly people were never lonely, she thought, and she had been in many strange places in the world, so she felt she knew. Mrs. Hawkins said she wanted to introduce her to a couple of her former employers in the neighborhood. Mrs. Lilybanks had been quite touched by that. The couple next door was young, Mr. Spark had told her, and hadn’t been here very long. Mrs. Lilybanks thought that in a few days she’d ask them over for tea. She’d have to go to Framlingham this week to buy odds and ends like potholders and curtain rods. That meant a taxi to Roncy Noll and a bus from there. Frannegan, they had called Framlingham in the old days in Suffolk, and perhaps the farm people still did . . .