Appointment with Yesterday by Celia Fremlin

ridiculous, of course: why on earth shouldn’t Mrs Graham’s phone ring now and again? Why in all the world should it be anything to do with Milly? And yet, as she stood there, behind the closed door of the dining-room, Milly felt her pulse quicken. Her palms began sweating … soon her heart was leaping in her throat with great, panicky thuds, and her legs trembled so that she could hardly go on standing. She heard Mrs Graham cross the room, lift the receiver….
    “Seacliffe 49901,” Milly heard her say briskly, and held her breath as she listened. In a moment now it would be all right. She would hear Mrs Graham saying something like: “Oh hul lo , Christine …!” or “Thank you so much, Tuesday will do splendidly …!” something of that sort, something to show conclusively that it was nothing whatsoever to do with Milly. Well, of course it wasn’t. How could it be? No one in all the world knew she was here … how ridiculous to panic like this about nothing!
    “Ye-es,” she heard Mrs Graham saying, in a guarded sort of voice: and then, more decisively: “Yes, she’s been here since ten o’clock….” And after that came a pause, which to Milly’s ringing ears seemed to last a lifetime. Then Mrs Graham’s voice again: “Well, I can’t help that, can I? But who told you about her? How did you know?”
    By this time, if only her legs would have carried her so far, Milly would have been out of the dining-room window and sliding down whatever drainpipe there might or might not be to the ground three storeys below: but so paralysed was she with the sheer, incredible horror of it, that she could only stand there. Who had traced her …? How …? Or had it all been a plot, a police trap carefully laid for her? What a fool she had been …! Why hadn’t her suspicions been aroused by the incredible ease with which she had walked into this job …? Why hadn’t she realised that it was a trap, that MrsGraham must be in league with the police …? Even as these speculations rang and rattled through her whirling brain, she realised that the telephone conversation had broken off: Mrs Graham was crossing the hall … opening the dining-room door … and now she was standing there, in the doorway, fixing Milly with a hard, suspicious stare: and behind the suspicion, there was the faint, unmistakeable flicker of fear….
    “A phone call, Mrs Er,” she said accusingly, “from a neighbour of mine. She’s heard I’ve got a new woman, someone seems to have seen you coming in this morning, and she wants to know if you’ve got any time left to work for her ? She wants to talk to you about it. Now, you will remember, won’t you, Mrs Er, that you undertook to do mornings for me. You won’t let me down, will you? From what Mrs Day tells me, I think she may be going to offer you forty-pence an hour, but you will remember, won’t you, Mrs Er, that you get your lunches here. A really good lunch, every day….”
    Luckily, Mrs Graham was so thoroughly wrapped up in these anxieties that she did not notice the way Milly almost danced across the hall to the telephone: nor did she hear the breathless relief in Milly’s voice as she settled for three afternoons a week with this Mrs Day. It was her own sense of relief, not Milly’s, that was engaging Mrs Graham’s whole attention: the colour was visibly returning to her cheeks as it slowly became clear from Milly’s side of the conversation that there was to be no real betrayal. It was only afternoons Mrs Er was engaging herself for with the perfidious Mrs Day!
    But the suspense, while it lasted, had made Mrs Graham irritable.
    “It’s incredible, isn’t it?” she grumbled, as Milly put the phone down. “The way you can’t keep anything to yourself in a place like this! I never told anyone I’d got a woman … I don’t know how these things get about! I mean, you’ve hardly been in the place two hours, and she has to phone up …! Oh, well….”—Mrs Graham made a