Strange Stories (26 page)

But as I hoisted the fallen gate, my nerve suddenly left me, again, something which had never happened to me before, either in the course of these events or at any previous time. I felt very sick. I was much afraid lest I faint. My body felt simultaneously tense and insubstantial.

Then I became aware that Mr. Orbit’s delivery boy was staring at me from the gate of the dentist’s house opposite. I must have presented a queer spectacle, because the boy seemed to be standing petrified. His mouth, I saw, was wide open. I knew the boy quite well. It was essential for all kinds of reasons that I conduct myself suitably. The boy stood, in fact, for public opinion. I took a couple of deep breaths, produced the weighty bunch of keys from my handbag, and ascended the steps as steadily as possible.

Inside the house, I made straight for the basement, with a view to a glass of water. With Mr. Orbit’s boy no longer gaping at me, I felt worse than ever, so that, even before I could look for a tumbler or reach the tap, I had to sink upon one of the two battered kitchen chairs. All my hair was damp, and my clothes felt unbearably heavy.

Then I became aware that steps were descending the basement staircase.

I completed my sequence of new experiences by fainting.

I came round to the noise of an animal, a snuffling, grunting cry, which seemed to come, with much persistence, from the floor above. I seemed fo listen to it for some time, even trying, though failing, to identify what animal it was, before recovering more fully and realizing that Sally was leaning back against the dresser and staring at me.

“Sally! It was you."

“Who did you think it was? It’s my house.”

She no longer wore the stained grey slacks, but was dressed in a very curious way, about which I do not think it fair to say more. In other ways also, the change in her had become complete: her eyes had a repulsive lifelessness; the bone structure of her face, previously so fine, had altered unbelievably. There was an unpleasant croak in her voice, precisely as if her larynx had lost flexibility.

“Will you please return my keys?”

I even had difficulty in understanding what she said, although doubtless my shaky condition did not help. Very foolishly, I rose to my feet, while Sally glared at me with her changed eyes. I had been lying on the stone floor. There was a bad pain in the back of my head and neck.

“Glad to see you're better, Sally. I didn’t expect you’d be about for some time yet.” My words were incredibly foolish.

She said nothing, but only stretched out her hand. It too was changed: it was grey and bony, with protruding, knotted veins,

I handed her the big bunch of keys. I wondered how she had entered the house without them. The animal wailing above continued without intermission. To it now seemed to be added a noise which struck me as resembling that of a pig scrabbling. Involuntarily I glanced upwards to the ceiling.

Sally snatched the keys, snatched them gently and softly, not violently; then she cast her unblinking eyes upwards in parody of mine, and emitted an almost deafening shriek of laughter,

“Do you love children, Mel? Would you like to see my baby?” Truly it was the last straw, and I do know quite how I behaved.

Now Sally seemed filled with terrible pride. “Let me tell you, Mel,” she said, “that it’s possible for a child to be born in a manner you'd never dream of.”

I had begun to shudder again, but Sally clutched hold of me with her grey hand and began to drag me up the basement stairs.

“Will you be godmother? Come and see your godchild, Mel.”

The noise was coming from the library. I clung to the top of the basement baluster. Distraught as I was, I now realized that the scrabbling sound was connected with the tearing-to-pieces of Dr. Tessler’s books. But it was the wheezy, throaty cry of the creature which most turned my heart and sinews to water.

Or to steel. Because as Sally tugged at me, trying to pull me away from the baluster and into the library, I suddenly realized that she had no strength at all. Whatever else had happened to her, she was as weak as a wraith.

I dragged myself free from her, let go of the baluster, and made towards the front door. Sally began to scratch my face and neck, but I made a quite capable job of defending myself. Sally then began to call out in her unnatural voice: she was trying to summon the creature into the passage. She scraped and tore at me, while panting out a stream of dreadful endearments to the thing in the library.

In the end, I found that my hands were about her throat, which was bare despite the cold weather. I could stand no more of that wrecked voice. Immediately she began to kick, and the shoes she was wearing seemed to have metal toes. I had the final, awful fancy that she had acquired iron feet. Then I threw her from me onto the floor of the passage, and fled from the house.

It was now dark, somehow darker outside the house than inside it, and I found that I still had strength enough to run all the way home.

I went away for a fortnight, although on general grounds it was the last thing I had wanted to do. At the end of that time and with Christmas drawing near, I returned to my parents’ house: I was not going to permit Sally to upset my plan for a present way of life.

At intervals through the winter I peered at Sally’s house from the corner of the cul-de-sac in which it stood, but never saw a sign of occupancy or change.

I had learned from Miss Garvice that Sally had simply “disappeared" from the Cottage Hospital.

“Disappeared?”

“Long before she was due for discharge, I need hardly say."

“How did it happen?”

“The night nurse was going her rounds and noticed that the bed was empty.”

Miss Garvice was regarding me as if I were a material witness. Had we been in Miss Garvice’s room at the hospital, Serena would have been asked to see that we were not disturbed.

Sally had not been back long enough to be much noticed in the town, and I observed that soon no one mentioned her at all.

Then, one day between Easter and Whitsun, I found she was at the front door.

“Hullo, Mel.”

Again she was taking up the conversation. She was as until last autumn she had always been, with that strange, imperishable and untended prettiness of hers and her sweet, absent smile. She wore a white dress.

“Sally!” What could one say?

Our eyes met. She saw that she would have to come to the point.

“I've sold my house.”

I kept my head. “I said it was too big for you. Come in.”

She entered.

“I’ve bought a villa. In the Cyclades.”

“For your work?”

She nodded. "The house fetched a price, of course. And my father left me more than I expected."

I said something banal.

Already she was lying on the big sofa and looking at me over the arm. “Mel, I should like you to come and stay with me. For a long time. As long as you can. You’re a free agent, and you can’t want to stay here.”

Psychologists, I recollected, have ascertained that the comparative inferiority of women in contexts described as purely intellectual, is attributable to the greater discouragement and repression of their curiosity when children.

"Thank you, Sally. But I’m quite happy here, you know.”

“You’re not. Are you, Mel?”

“No. I’m not.”

“Well, then?”

One day I shall probably go.

...that subtle gauzy haze which one only finds in Essex.

— Sir Henry Channon

When Millicent finally broke it off with Nigel and felt that the last tiny bit of meaning had ebbed from her life (apart, of course, from her job), it was natural that Winifred should suggest a picnic, combined with a visit, “not too serious,” as Winifred put it, to a Great House. Millicent realized that there was no alternative to clutching at the idea and vouchsafed quite effectively the expected blend of pallor and gratitude. She was likely to see much more of Winifred in the future, provided always that Winifred did not somehow choose this precise moment to dart off in some new direction.

Everyone knew about Millicent and Nigel and took it for granted, so that now she was peacefully alotted an odd day or two off, despite the importance of what she did. After all, she had been linked with Nigel, in one way or another, for a long time; and the deceptively small gradations between the different ways were the business only of the two parties. Winifred, on the other hand, had quite a struggle to escape, but she persisted because she realized how much it must matter to Millicent. There are too many people about to make it sensible to assess most kinds of employment objectively. In one important respect, Winifred’s life was simpler than Millicent’s: “I have never been in love,” she would say. “I really don’t understand about it.” Indeed, the matter arose but rarely, and less often now than ten or twelve years ago.

“What about Baddeley End?” suggested Winifred, attempting a black joke, inducing the ghost of a smile. Winifred had seldom supposed that the Nigel business would end other than as it had.

“Perfect,” said Millicent, entering into the spirit, extending phantom hands in gratitude.

“I'll look on the map for a picnic spot,” said Winifred. Winifred had found picnic spots for them in the Cevennes, the Apennines, the Dolomites, the Sierra de Guadarrama, even the Carpathians. Incidentally, it was exactly the kind of thing at which Nigel was rather hopeless. Encountering Nigel, one seldom forgot the bull and the gate.

“We’d better use my car,” continued Winifred. “Then you’ll only have to do what you want to do.”

And at first, upon the face of it, things had all gone charmingly as always. Millicent could be in no doubt of that. It is difficult at these times to know which to prefer: friends who understand (up to a point) or those who do not understand at all and thus offer their own kind of momentary escape.

Winifred brought the car to a stand at the end of a long lane, perhaps even bridle path, imperfectly surfaced, at least for modern traffic, even though they were no further from their respective flats than somewhere in Essex. She had been carrying a great part of their route in her head. Now she was envisaging the picnic site.

“It’s a rather pretty spot,” she said with confidence. “There’s a right of way, or at least a footpath, through the churchyard and down to the river.”

“What river is it?” enquired Millicent idly.

“It’s only a stream. Well, perhaps a little more than that. It’s called the Waste.”

“Is it really?”

“Yes, it is. Can you please hand me out the rucksack?”

In hours of freedom, Winifred always packed things into a rucksack, where earlier generations would have prepared a luncheon basket or a cabin trunk.

“I’m sorry I’ve made no contribution,” said Millicent, not for the first time.

“Don’t be foolish,” said Winifred.

“At least let me carry something?”

“All right, the half bottle and the glasses. I couldn’t get them in.”

“How sweet of you,” said Millicent. Potation was normally eschewed in the middle of the day.

“I imagine we go through the kissing gate.”

From even that accepted locution Millicent slightly shrank.

The iron kissing gate stood beside the wooden lich gate, opened only on specific occasions.

With the ancient church on their right, little, low, and lichened, they descended the track between the graves. The path had at one time been paved with bricks, but many of the bricks were now missing, and weeds grew between the others.

“It’s very slippery,” said Millicent. “I shouldn’t like to have to hurry back up.” It was appropriate that she should make a remark of some kind, should show that she was still alive.

“It can’t really be slippery. It hasn’t rained for weeks.”

Millicent had to admit the truth of that.

“Perhaps it would be better if I were to go first?” continued Winifred. “Then you could take your time with the glasses. Sorry they’re so fragile.”

“You know where we’re going,” responded Millicent, falling into second place.

“We’ll look inside the church before we leave.”

Though ivy had begun to entangle the mossy little church like a stealthily encroaching octopus, Millicent had to admit that the considerable number of apparently new graves suggested the continuing usefulness of the building. On the other hand, the plastered rectory or vicarage to their left, behind the dangerous-looking hedge, was stained and grimed, and with no visible open window on this almost ideal day.

Whatever Winifred might say, the churchyard seemed very moist. But then much of Essex is heavy clay. Everyone in the world knows that.

At the far end was another kissing gate, very creaky and arbitrary, and, beyond, a big, green, sloping field. There were cows drawn together in the far, upper corner: “a mixed lot of animals,” as Millicent’s stepfather would have put it in the old days — the very old days they seemed at that moment.

Down the emerald field ran no visible track, but Winifred, with the dotted map in the forefront of her mind, pursued a steady course. Millicent knew from experience that at the bottom of Winifred’s rucksack was a spacious ground- sheet. It seemed just as well.

Winifred led the way through an almost nonexistent gate to the left and along a curious muddy passage between rank hedges down to the brink of the river.

Here there were small islands of banked mud with tall plants growing on them that looked almost tropical, and, to the right, a crumbling stone bridge, with an ornament of some kind upon the central panel. Rich, heavy foliage shaded the scene, but early dragonflies glinted across vague streaks of sunlight.

“The right of way goes over the bridge,” remarked Winifred, “but we might do better on this side.”

Sedgy and umbrous, the picnic spot was romantic in the extreme; most unlikely of discovery even at so short a distance from the human hive, from their own north side of the Park. After the repast, one might well seek the brittle bones of once-loitering knights; or one might aforetime have done that, when one had the energy and the faith. Besides, Millicent had noticed that the bridge was obstructed from end to end by rusty barbed wire, with long spikes, mostly bent.