Strange Stories (14 page)

"I
am
looking forward to
Careless Rapture
," said Helen. "I adore Dorothy Dickson's clothes."

Laming had never to his knowledge seen Dorothy Dickson. "She's very fair, isn't she?" he asked.

"She's like a pretty flower bending before the breeze," said Helen.

"Isn't she married to a man named Souchong?" "Heisen," said Helen. "I thought it was
some
kind of tea."

"After a week without leaving the department, it's so wonderful to talk freely and intimately."

There it was! A week without leaving the department, and he had supposed himself to have seen her yesterday, and twice the day before, and all over London!

As well as feeling hot and tortured, Laming suddenly felt sick with uncertainty; it was like the very last stage of
mal de mer
, and almost on an instant. Probably he had been feeling a little sick for some time.

"Laming!" said Helen, in her matter-of-fact way, "if I were to take off my petticoat, would you take off your coat and pullover?"

If he had spoken, he would have vomited, and perhaps at her, the flatlet being so minute. "Laming! What's the matter?"

If he had made a dash for the bathroom, he would have been unable to stop her coming in after him, half-dressed, reasonable, with life weighed off-and more than ordinary people, it would seem, to judge by her excessively frequent appearances. So, instead, he made a dash for the staircase.

Holding in the sick, he flitted down the stairs. At least, he still had all the clothes in which he had entered. "Laming! Darling! Sweetheart!"

She came out of the flatlet after him, and a terrible thing followed.

Helen, shoeless, caught her stockinged foot in the nailed-down landing runner and plunged the whole length of the flight, falling full upon her head on the hall floor, softened only by cracked, standard-colored linoleum. The peril of the fall had been greatly compounded by her agitation.

She lay there horribly tangled, horribly inert, perhaps with concussion, perhaps with a broken neck, though no blood was visible. Her petticoat was ripped, and badly, whatever the guarantee might have been.

Laming could well have been finally ill at that point, but the effect upon him was the opposite. He felt cold and awed, whatever the hall thermometer might show; and he forgot about feeling sick.

He stood trembling lest another tenant, lest the wife of a caretaker, intrude upon the scene of horror. There was a flatlet door at this ground-floor level, and a flight of stairs winding into the dark basement. But there was no further sound of any kind; in fact, a quite notable silence. It was, of course, a Saturday, the weekend.

Laming opened the front door of the house, as surreptitiously as one can do such a thing in bright sunlight.

There was no one to be seen in the street, and about eyes behind lace curtains there was nothing to be done before nightfall. Laming could scarcely wait until nightfall.

When outside the house, he shut the door quietly, resenting the click of the Yale-type fitment. He felt very exposed as he stood at the top of the four or five North London steps, like Sidney Carton on the scaffold, or some man less worthy.

He dropped down the steps and thereby hurt his leg even more. Nonetheless, he began to run, or perhaps rather to jogtrot. It was hot as Hell.

He cantered unevenly around the first corner.

And there stood Ellen; startled and stationary at his apparition. She was in a little blue holiday singlet, and darker blue shorts, plain and sweet. Apart from Ellen, that thoroughfare seemed empty too.

"Laming!"

She opened wide her arms, as one does with a child.

Matted and haggard, he stared at her. Then he determinedly stared away from her.

"I waited and waited. In the American Garden. Then I thought I'd better come on."

She was adorable in her playgirl rig, and so understanding, so truly loving.

But Laming was under bad influences. "Who's Kelly?" he asked.

"A friend," she replied. "But you haven't seen him."

He glared brazenly at the universe.

Then he pushed rudely past her, and all the way home his head sang a popular song to him, as heads do in times of trouble.

His mother spoke with urgency. "Oh, Laming. I'm so glad to see you back."

He stared at her like a murderer who had the police car in the next street.

"You look tired. Poor Laming! It's a girl isn't it?"

He could only gaze at the floor. His leg was about to fall right off. His brain had gone rotten, like an egg.

"There's always the one you take, and the one you might have taken."

He continued to stare at the eroded lentil-colored carpet

"Lie down and rest. I'll come back for you soon."

Agonizingly he flopped onto the hard chesterfield, with its mustard-and-cress covering, much worn down in places.

In the end, she was with him again. She wore a short-sleeved nightdress in white lawn, plain and pure. Her hair had long been quite short. She looked like a bride.

"It's too hot for a dressing gown," she said, smiling. He smiled wanly back.

"Let me help you to take your things off," she said.

And when they were in bed, her bed, with the windows open and the drawn blinds carelessly flapping, she seemed younger than ever. He knew that she would never change, never disappoint. She did not even need to be thought about.

"Laming," she said. "You know who loves you best of all."

He sank into her being.

His leg could be forgotten. The heat could be forgotten. He had sailed into port. He had come home. He had lost and found himself.

It was never less than half an hour after the engine stopped running that my father deigned to signal for succour. If in the process of breaking down, we had climbed, or descended, a bank, then first we must all exhaust ourselves pushing. If we had collided, there was, of course, a row. If, as had happened that day, it was simply that, while we coasted along, the machinery had ceased to churn and rattle, then my father tried his hand as a mechanic. That was the worst contingency of all: at least, it was the worst one connected with motoring.

I had learned by experience that neither rain nor snow made much difference, and certainly not fog; but that afternoon it was hotter than any day I could remember. I realised later that it was the famous long summer of 1921, when the water at the bottom of cottage wells turned salt, and when eels were found baked and edible in their mud. But to know this at the time, I should have had to read the papers, and though, through my mother’s devotion, I had the trick of reading before my third birthday, I mostly left the practice to my younger brother, Constantin. He was reading now from a pudgy volume, as thick as it was broad, and resembling his own head in size and proportion. As always, he had resumed his studies immediately the bumping of our almost springless car permitted, and even before motion had ceased. My mother sat in the front seat inevitably correcting pupils’ exercises. By teaching her native German in five schools at once, three of them distant, one of them fashionable, she surprisingly managed to maintain the four of us, and even our car. The front offside door of the car leaned dangerously open into the seething highway.

“I say,” cried my father.

The young man in the big yellow racer shook his head as he tore by. My father had addressed the least appropriate car on the road.

“I say.”

I cannot recall what the next car looked like, but it did not stop.

My father was facing the direction from which we had come, and sawing the air with his left arm, like a very inexperienced policeman. Perhaps no one stopped because all thought him eccentric. Then a car going in the opposite direction came to a standstill behind my father’s back. My father perceived nothing. The motorist sounded his horn. In those days horns squealed, and I covered my ears with my hands. Between my hands and my head my long fair hair was like brittle flax in the sun.

My father darted through the traffic. I think it was the Portsmouth Road. The man in the other car got out and came to us. I noticed his companion, much younger and in a cherry-coloured cloche, begin to deal with her nails.

“Broken down?” asked the man. To me it seemed obvious, as the road was strewn with bits of the engine and oozy blobs of oil. Moreover, surely my father had explained?

“I can’t quite locate the seat of the trouble,” said my father.

The man took off one of his driving gauntlets, big and dirty.

“Catch hold for a moment.” My father caught hold.

The man put his hand into the engine and made a casual movement. Something snapped loudly.

“Done right in. If you ask me, I’m not sure she’ll ever go again.”

“Then I don’t think I’ll ask you,” said my father affably. “Hot, isn’t it?” My father began to mop his tall corrugated brow, and front-to-back ridges of grey hair.

“Want a tow?”

“Just to the nearest garage.” My father always spoke the word in perfect French.

“Where to?”

“To the nearest car repair workshop. If it would not be troubling you too much.”

“Can’t help myself now, can I?”

***

From under the back seat in the other car, the owner got out a thick, frayed rope, black and greasy as the hangman’s.

The owner’s friend simply said “Pleased to meet you,” and began to replace her scalpels and enamels in their cabinet.

We jolted towards the town we had traversed an hour or two before; and were then untied outside a garage on the outskirts.

“Surely it is closed for the holiday?” said my mother. Hers is a voice I can always recall upon an instant: guttural, of course, but beautiful, truly golden.

“’Spect he’ll be back,” said our benefactor, drawing in his rope like a fisherman. “Give him a bang.” He kicked three times very loudly on the dropped iron shutter. Then without another word he drove away.

It was my birthday, I had been promised the sea, and I began to weep. Constantin, with a fretful little wriggle, closed further into himself and his books; but my mother leaned over the front seat of the car and opened her arms to me. I went to her and sobbed on the shoulder of her bright red dress.

“Kleine Lene, wir stecken schon in der Tinte.”

My father, who could pronounce six languages perfectly but speak only one of them, never liked my mother to use her native tongue within the family. He rapped more sharply on the shutter. My mother knew his ways, but, where our welfare was at stake, ignored them.

“Edgar,” said my mother, “let us give the children presents. Especially my little Lene.” My tears though childish, and less viscous than those shed in later life, had turned the scarlet shoulder of her dress to purple. She squinted smilingly sideways at the damage.

My father was delighted to defer the decision about what next to do with the car. But, as pillage was possible, my I mother took with her the exercises, and Constantin his fat little book.

We straggled along the main road, torrid, raucous, adequate only for a gentler period of history. The grit and dust stung my face and arms and knees, like granulated glass. My mother and I went first, she holding my hand. My father struggled to walk at her other side, but for most of the way, the path was too narrow. Constantin mused along in the rear, abstracted as usual.

“It is true what the papers say,” exclaimed my father. “British roads were never built for motor traffic. Beyond the odd car, of course.”

My mother nodded and slightly smiled. Even in the line-less hopsacks of the twenties, she could not ever but look magnificent, with her rolling, turbulent honey hair, and Hellenic proportions. Ultimately we reached the High Street. The very first shop had one of its windows stuffed with toys; the other being stacked with groceries and draperies and coal-hods, all dingy. The name “Popular Bazaar,” in wooden relief as if glued on in building blocks, stretched across the whole front, not quite centre.

It was not merely an out of fashion shop, but a shop that at the best sold too much of what no one wanted. My father comprehended the contents of the toy department window with a single, anxious glance, and said “Choose whatever you like. Both of you. But look very carefully first. Don’t hurry.” Then he turned away and began to hum a fragment from The Lady of the Rose.

But Constantin spoke at once. “I choose those telegraph wires.” They ranged beside a line of tin railway that stretched right across the window, long undusted and tending to buckle. There were seven or eight posts, with six wires on each side of the post. Though I could not think why Constantin wanted them, and though in the event he did not get them, the appearance of them, and of the rusty track beneath them, is all that remains clear in my memory of that window.

“I doubt whether they’re for sale,” said my father. “Look again. There’s a good boy. No hurry.”

“They’re all I want,” said Constantin, and turned his back on the uninspiring display.

“Well, we’ll see,” said my father. “I’ll make a special point of it with the man... He turned to me. “And what about you? Very few dolls, I’m afraid.”

“I don’t like dolls any more.” As a matter of fact, I had never owned a proper one, although I suffered from this fact only when competing with other girls, which meant very seldom, for our friends were few and occasional. The dolls in the window were flyblown and detestable.

“I think we could find a better shop from which to give Lene a birthday present,” said my mother, in her correct, dignified English.

“We must not be unjust,” said my father, “when we have not even looked inside.”

The inferiority of the goods implied cheapness, which unfortunately always mattered; although, as it happened, none of the articles seemed actually to be priced.

“I do not like this shop,” said my mother. “It is a shop that has died.”

Her regal manner when she said such things was, I think, too Germanic for my father’s Englishness. That, and the prospect of unexpected economy, perhaps led him to be firm.

“We have Constantin’s present to consider as well as Lene’s. Let us go in.”