The Complete Short Stories (51 page)

‘Their food’s in there,’
Hamilton says, not looking at the dogs but opening the door that leads from his
room to another, more cluttered room. He lets the dogs scuttle in to their food
without counting them. He does not remove their leads but throws them on to the
floor to trail behind them. Finally, he shuts the inner door on them. He sits
down in his chair and looks at Mamie as if to say, ‘Come here.’

‘I’ve got to go home.’

‘You’re wet through. Get
dry by the fire a minute. I’ll get you a lift home.

‘No, I’m late.’

He pats his knee. ‘Sit
here, dearie, lass.’ He has a glass and a bottle by him. ‘I want to give you a
drop. Come on. I don’t want sex.’

She perches on his lap.
He has not counted the dogs. Alice Long will be up to ninety-nine, but it’s
Hamilton’s fault from now. Hamilton has taken the dogs.

‘Now sip.’

She recognizes whisky.

‘Take a good swallow.’

He gives her a lemon
drop to hide her breath, then gives her a kiss on her mouth while she is still
sucking the sweet.

‘I’m going now. I hope
the dogs are all right.’

‘Oh, the dogs, they’re
all right.’

He takes her hand and
goes to find one of the workmen who are mending the House. Alice Long is not
home yet from her meeting, and she will not miss the workman for a few minutes.

Mamie climbs into the
foreman’s car beside the workman. The seat is covered with white dust, but she
does not brush it off the seat before sliding on to it. Her clothes will be
spoiled. She feels safe beside the driver. The whisky has given her back a real
afternoon.

‘What’s the time,
please?’ she asks.

‘About twenty past four.’

The man backs and turns.
Hamilton has gone into his quarters. The car skirts the House, turning by the
large new clearing where, in the summer, the tourists’ coaches come.

‘You can’t get many
up here in Northumberland. They all swarm to the old houses in the South. Here,
it’s out of the way
…’

‘Well, it’s an experience
for those who do come, Miss Long. Especially the Catholics.’

The House was once
turned into a hospital for the wounded English soldiers after the Battle of
Flodden, which the English won.

The House was a Mass
centre at the times of the Catholic Persecution. Outside the armoury, there is
a chalice in a glass case dating from Elizabethan times. It has been sold to a
museum, but the museum allows the family to keep it at the House during Sir
Martin’s lifetime. Mamie has been inside the priest hole, where the priests
were hidden when the House was searched for priests; they would sometimes stay
there several days. The hole is a large space behind a panel that comes out of
the wall, up among the attics. You can stand in the priest hole and look up at
the beams, where, in those days, food was always stored in case of emergency.

The workmen are mending
the roof.

‘Did you see the priest
hole?’ Mamie feels talkative.

‘What’s that?’

‘A place where the
priests used to hide, up in the roof. It’s historic. Haven’t you seen it?’

‘No, but I seen plenty
dry rot up there in that roof.’

The gates are closed.
The man gets out to open them; then he drives off again.

Is it possible that one
of the dogs is lost? Mamie is confused. There must have been five. I found the
lost one, tied to the tree. But then she sees herself again counting them
outside Hamilton’s door. One, two, three, four. Only four. No, no, no, it’s not
real. Hamilton has taken the dogs. It’s for him to count.

The workman says, ‘Do
you like the Beatles?’

‘Oh, yes, they’re great.
Do you like them?’

‘So-so. I’d like just
one day’s earnings that the Beatles get. Just one day. I could retire on it.’

Sister Monica has said
that there is no harm in the Beatles, and then Mamie felt indignant because it
showed Sister Monica did not properly appreciate them. She ought to lump them
together with things like whisky, smoking, and sex; the Beatles are quite good
enough to be forbidden.

‘I like dancing,’ Mamie
says.

‘Rock — ‘n’— roll stuff?’

‘Yes, but at school we
only get folk dancing. I’m learning the sword dance. It’s historic in the
Border country.

All the rest of the
week, she hurries home from school to see if Alice Long has been to see her
mother about the missing dog.

I counted. One, two,
three, four. But I had five when I left the wood. I brought five out of the
wood, and up the hill. I had five at the Lodge. I must have had …

Alice Long will be up to
ninety-nine. She will come to Mamie’s house to make inquiries:

‘Hamilton says she
only brought four
…’

‘Hamilton says he
didn’t count them, he just took the leads from her hand
…’

‘Hamilton must have
been drinking and let one of them slip out of the door
…’

‘I’ve only just
counted them. One must have been missing since Monday. When Mamie
…’

By Friday, Alice Long
has not come. Mamie’s mother says, ‘Alice Long hasn’t dropped in. I must take a
pie up to the House on Monday and see what’s doing.’

On Sunday afternoon,
Alice Long’s car stops at the door. ‘Come in, Miss Long, come in. Have you no
family down this weekend?’

Mamie’s father shuts
away the television, puts on his coat, says good afternoon, and goes upstairs.

Alice Long sits
trembling on the sofa beside Mamie while her mother puts on the tea.

She says, ‘It’s
Hamilton.’

‘The same thing again?’

‘No, worse. A tragedy.’
Alice Long shuts her lips tight and pats Mamie’s hair. Her hand is shaking.

‘Mamie, go out and play,’
says her mother.

When Alice Long has
driven her car away, Mamie comes in with the ends of her skipping-rope twined
around her gloves. Her father comes down, takes off his coat, and opens up the
television. ‘Oh, don’t turn it on,’ says her mother, in anguish.

Mamie eats some of the
remnants of cake and sandwiches while she listens.

‘Hanging in the priest
hole — all of them. She looked for them all night. Hamilton’s gone, cleared
off. It’s the drink. The police have got a warrant out. They were found hanged
on the beams after Mass this morning. Didn’t I say poor Alice Long was looking
bad at Mass? I thought it must be her father again. But she’d been up all night
looking for the dogs, and at Mass she still didn’t know where they were. It was
after Mass they found them, herself and Mrs Huddlestone. Think of the sight!
Five of them hanging in a row. Poor little beasts. Hamilton disappeared yesterday.
They’ll get him, though, just wait.’

‘He’s a bit of a
lunatic,’ Mamie’s father says.

‘Lunatic! He’s vicious.
He ought to be hung himself. They were all Alice Long had. But he’ll be caught!’

Her father says, ‘I
doubt it. Not Hamilton. Even the roe-buck called him Pussyfoot.’ He laughs at
his own joke. The mother turns away her head.

Mamie says, ‘How many
were hanging in the priest hole?’

‘All of them in a row.’

‘How many?’

‘Five. You know she had
five. You took them out, didn’t you?’

Mamie says, ‘I was only
wondering if there was
room
for five in the priest hole. Did she really
say there were five? It wasn’t four?’

‘She said all five of
them. What are you talking about, no room in the priest hole? There’s plenty
room. He’d have killed six if she’d had six. She was so good to him.’

‘A shocking affair,’
says her father.

Mamie feels weightless
as daylight. She waves her arms as if they are freed of a huge harness.

‘Five of them.’ I
counted wrong. I didn’t lose one. There were five.

She skips over to fetch
the shining brass pokers from the fender and places them crisscross on the
linoleum to practise her sword dance. Then she starts to dance, heel-and-toe,
heel-and-toe, over-and-across, one-two-three, one-two-three. Her mother stands
amazed and is about to say stop it at once, this is no time to practise,
children have no heart, Alice Long pays your school fees and I thought you
loved animals. But her father is clapping his hands in time to her dancing —
one-two-three, heel-and-toe, hand-on-hip, right-hand, left-hand,
cross-and-back. Then her father starts to sing as well, loudly, tara
rum-tum-tum, tara rum-tum-tum, clapping his hands while she dances the jig,
and there isn’t a thing anyone can do about it.

The Dark Glasses

Coming to the edge of the lake we paused to
look at our reflections in the water. It was then I recognized her from the
past, her face looking up from the lake. She had not stopped talking.

I put on my dark glasses
to shield my eyes from the sun and conceal my recognition from her eyes.

‘Am I boring you?’ she
said.

‘No, not a bit, Dr Gray.

‘Sure?’

It is discouraging to
put on sun-glasses in the middle of someone’s intimate story. But they were
necessary, now that I had recognized her, and was excited, and could only
honourably hear what she had to say from a point of concealment.

‘Must you wear those
glasses?’

‘Well, yes. The glare.’

‘The wearing of dark
glasses,’ she said, ‘is a modern psychological phenomenon. It signifies the
trend towards impersonalization, the weapon of the modern Inquisitor, it —’

‘There’s a lot in what
you say.’ But I did not remove my glasses, for I had not asked for her company
in the first place, and there is a limit to what one can listen to with the
naked eye.

We walked round the new
concrete verge of the old lake, and she continued the story of how she was led
to give up general medical practice and take up psychology; and I looked at her
as she spoke, through my dark glasses, and because of the softening effect
these have upon things I saw her again as I had seen her looking up from the
lake, and again as in my childhood.

At the end of the thirties Leesden End was
an L-shaped town. Our house stood near the top of the L. At the other extreme
was the market. Mr Simmonds, the oculist, had his shop on the horizontal leg,
and he lived there above the shop with his mother and sister. All the other
shops in the row were attached to each other, but Mr Simmonds’ stood apart,
like a real house, with a lane on either side.

I was sent to have my
eyes tested. He took me into the darkened interior and said, ‘Sit down, dear.’
He put his arm round my shoulder. His forefinger moved up and down on my neck.
I was thirteen and didn’t like to be rude to him. Dorothy Simmonds, his sister,
came downstairs just then; she came upon us silently and dressed in a white
overall. Before she had crossed the room to switch on a dim light Mr Simmonds
removed his arm from my shoulder with such a jerk that I knew for certain he
had not placed it there in innocence.

I had seen Miss Simmonds
once before, at a garden fête, where she stood on a platform in a big hat and
blue dress, and sang ‘Sometimes between long shadows on the grass’, while I
picked up windfall apples, all of which seemed to be rotten. Now in her white
overall she turned and gave me a hostile look, as if I had been seducing her
brother. I felt sexually in the wrong, and started looking round the dark room
with a wide-eyed air.

‘Can you read?’ said Mr
Simmonds.

I stopped looking round.
I said, ‘Read what?’ — for I had been told I would be asked to read row after
row of letters. The card which hung beneath the dim light showed pictures of
trains and animals.

‘Because if you can’t
read we have pictures for illiterates.’

This was Mr Simmonds’
joke. I giggled. His sister smiled and dabbed her right eye with her
handkerchief. She had been to London for an operation on her right eye.

I recall reading the
letters correctly down to the last few lines, which were too small. I recall Mr
Simmonds squeezing my arm as I left the shop, turning his sandy freckled face
in a backward glance to see for certain that his sister was not watching.

My grandmother said, ‘Did
you see —’

‘— Mr Simmonds’ sister?’
said my aunt.

‘Yes, she was there all
the time,’ I said, to make it definite. My grandmother said, ‘They say she’s
going —’

‘— blind in one eye,’
said my aunt.

‘And with the mother
bedridden upstairs —’ my grandmother said.

‘— she must be a saint,’
said my aunt.

Presently — it may have
been within a few days or a few weeks — my reading glasses arrived, and I wore them
whenever I remembered to do so.

I broke the glasses by sitting on them
during my school holidays two years later.

My grandmother said,
after she had sighed, ‘It’s time you had your eyes tested —’

‘— eyes tested in any
case,’ said my aunt when she had sighed.

I washed my hair the
night before and put a wave in it. Next morning at eleven I walked down to Mr
Simmonds’s with one of my grandmother’s long hat-pins in my blazer pocket. The
shop front had been done up, with gold lettering on the glass door: Basil
Simmonds, Optician, followed by a string of letters which, so far as I
remember, were FBOA, AIC, and others.

‘You’re quite the young
lady, Joan,’ he said, looking at my new breasts.

I smiled and put my hand
in my blazer pocket.

He was smaller than he had
been two years ago. I thought he must be about fifty or thirty. His face was
more freckled than ever and his eyes were flat blue as from a box of paints.
Miss Simmonds appeared silently in her soft slippers. ‘You’re quite the young
lady, Joan,’ she said from behind her green glasses, for her right eye had now
gone blind and the other was said to be troubling her.

We went into the
examination room. She glided past me and switched on the dim light above the
letter card. I began to read out the letters while Basil Simmonds stood with
folded hands. Someone came into the front shop. Miss Simmonds slid off to see
who it was and her brother tickled my neck. I read on. He drew me towards him.
I put my hand into my blazer pocket. He said, ‘Oh!’ and sprang away as the
hat-pin struck through my blazer and into his thigh.