across the floor on my hands and knees and dragged myself
,ili] up on the bed beside her. Her bare arms felt unnaturally
l hot and I realized that I was shivering.
'You mean - there isn't - there never was a child in the
garden?'
Yet as I spoke I felt that we were being watched between
the curtains from outside, and thought I should go mad with
fear.
She replied listlessly, 'Perhaps; perhaps not. Ich bin nicht
sicher. But don't go outside.'
A humming mist seemed to cover my ears and eyes. I
shook her in frenzy and cried,
'But Mrs Taswell heard it too! She heard it! She heard it!'
'She didn't see it, though,' said Kathe, in the same resigned,
empty tone. 'Are all the windows shut downstairs?'
'Would it make any difference if they were? Would it,
Kathe?'
'I don't know. But we'll go down together.'
Only after she had opened the bedroom door and was
already out on the landing could I force myself to totter
after her and to stumble down the stairs. There were windows
open in the kitchen and the drawing-room. We shut
them and then drew every curtain in the house.
To me, our progress seemed to take place in a kind of
waking trance where, as in a dream, all was figmental and
what might happen was no longer governed or restricted by
any physical laws. The garden had vanished. There was
nothing tangible outside the house - there was nothing but
the darkness stretching away into infinity. External reality
did not exist and only my flickering consciousness, as we
moved on from room to room, shed, like a candle, a dim
circle of perception upon what merely appeared to be around
us. All I thought I saw was projected from within myself, and
what we left behind ceased to exist on the instant. I dreaded
not to find, beyond each door, the room which had always
been there, and at each step expected to hear or see some
terrible thing which I myself had brought into being, as a
dreamer creates his own nightmare. The stairs, the windows,
the furniture wavered before my eyes. I groped and scrabbled
334
at the walls for switches I had always known. I could not
recall into which rooms we had already been. And all the
while I knew that there could be no escape, for the fear, like
an icy spring, was welling up from a source within myself,
drowning all that had once been harmless and domestic.
When at last we returned upstairs I took off my coat and
shoes and huddled myself in the bed beside Kathe, silently
repeating again and again, 'God have mercy! 0 God, have
mercy!'
At first I covered my head with the bedclothes, but soon
threw them back, the better to listen: for to listen, though
a torment, was more bearable than not to know whether
there might be anything to hear. I dared not desist from
listening, and to listen was to be afraid. The effort of listening
was like running, faster and faster, until, exhausted by
listening, I once more thrust my head beneath the blankets.
Kathe said, 'Alan, let's sit up. It will be - less bad so,' and
we got out of bed and sat facing each other, she at the
dressing-table and I in the armchair. She was trembling,
but more composed than I.
After a time - I say 'time', but perhaps the greatest
horror of that place was that the word had no meaning;
time did not pass there, and all that night it never once
occurred to me to look at my watch - it was borne in upon
me that what we were doing was waiting. My mind seemed
like cloudy water slowly clearing, while I myself remained
outside it, watching to see what would be revealed as the
stirred silt sank. I was expecting a visual image - some
memory, perhaps, or the semblance of something I would
thereupon feel compelled to do. Yet what at last came looming
out of that swirling, inward storm were two abstract
ideas, more stark and menacing than any that could have
presented themselves in imagic form - the ideas of Approach
and of Culmination. 'Come, for all things are now ready.' I
think I knew, then, what had been appointed to happen,
though not how it would: but there is no saying, in words,
what I knew. The Kraken was awake and moving, and more
dreadful than any tale of it ever told.
I had closed my eyes, and when I felt my hand clasped
335
by another cried out in terror before realizing that it was
Kathe's.
'Alan,' she said, 'listen to me. You should go away. Don't
stay here. Take the car and go away. That will be - allowed.'
'You want me to take you away?' My mind, flotsam tossing
back and forth above the black depth below, could not educe
from her words their exact meaning.
'I told you, mein Lieber, it doesn't matter where I go.
But you should go. Go outside, go away.'
'I - I won't do that, Kathe. I'll -' My thoughts, groping
towards speech, were shattered and dispersed by a sudden,
vivid recollection of the sound of the weeping. I realized,
now, when I had heard the voice - that same voice - before:
on the telephone to Denmark, three days earlier. I understood
also that earlier that evening, when Mrs Taswell and I
had gone into the garden, I had already known this.
'- I'll stay and - attend you.' And as I said this I saw myself,
in my mind's eye, pacing behind her, halting beside her;
receiving from her her trinkets, her jewels and last messages;
bending forward to arrange her hair and kneeling to clasp
her hand as she too knelt down to place her head 'What's
that noise?' asked Kathe suddenly. 'Can you hear
it, Alan -or only I?'
I listened. It was like forcing oneself to use an injured arm
to perform yet again the act that has injured it. For a few
moments I could hear nothing. Then I became aware of a
soft but growing, multifoliate flow of sound - rustlings,
tappings, creakings - all about the house. A sash window
began to shake and chatter and outside, in the yard, something
fell with a sharp, slapping noise. Whimpering, I pressed
my hands over my ears.
Kathe was beside me, shaking my shoulder. 'Alan! It's the
wind! The wind, Alan, outside!'
A high wind had begun to blow. I could recognize the
sound, now, rushing over the walls and gutters of the house,
rattling the dustbins in the yard, creaking the branches
of the trees, the wistaria tapping and scraping against the
panes of the room beyond.
336
'It'll blow away-' I cried, putting my arm round her shoulders.
'Kathe, it'll blow away-'
She only shook her head.
'Yes, yes! In a sack - dump them in the sea-' I was
babbling. 'In the Roary Water - the millstones, Kathe, the
millstones -'
'The uttermost farthing,' she answered quietly, and smiled,
'A very far thing - it was - but not any more.'
Her dignity and self-possession were like dark, inanima
te
masses - crags on a headland, pines on a bleak moor. They
were present not by her will, but because they could no more
depart from her, now, than she could have discarded her eyes
or her limbs. Looking at her, my head cleared. I stood up and
took her in my arms.
'Were you waiting for this, Kathe?'
She paused. 'Yes, I think so.'
'I wish you'd told me. You never told me.'
'There would have been no point. There was nothing you
could have done.'
T used to think that - that things were separate from one
another; each one itself and not another thing. I know better
now.'
I went across to the window, drew back the curtain and
looked out. Thin clouds were blowing very fast across a
setting half-moon. The garden and the distant field were
dappled in scurrying, swiftly-changing moonlight. Everything
was in commotion and turmoil, hedges and trees thrashing,
the tall border-clumps of leopard's bane, monkshood and
delphinium leaning all one way, two or three of them broken
and dragged half out of the ground. The conical shadow of
the cypress swayed across the lawn and back like a great,
pointing finger. A shed door banged and banged, then shut to
with a slam.
Suddenly I noticed something moving through the laurels
at the front of the long bank. In the gloom I could not see
what it was, but it was big - not a cat, not a hare - and
conspicuous; that is to say, its movement among the shadows
was conspicuous because, unlike that of everything else,
337
independent of the wind. The laurels, faintly glossy in the
moonlight, were shaken into a kind of turbulence as it pushed
its way beneath them like a big fish moving under water. As
it reached the far end of the bank the moonlight was once
more obscured by cloud. Peering, I could just make it out as
it emerged and raced across the few yards of open ground
to the wilderness. It was a black Alsatian dog.
I felt no return of the terror that had filled me before
standing up and embracing Kathe, for this, I now understood,
was a real dog, while that beside the Gibbet had been
an illusion. 'I am becoming used to this place,' I thought.
'Indeed, it has always lain within me. Once, when I pretended
that it did not, I was mad, believing myself to be
sane.'
I formed the intention of going out into the garden, and
would have done so if it had not meant leaving Kathe. For
me to leave Kathe was no part of what was appointed. I
went back to her chair, sat on the floor beside it and leant
my head against her knee.
'Hullo, Desland,' I said. 'You feel all right, don't you?
There's nothing to get upset about, you know."
'Was sagst du?'
'Nothing. Mrs Cook was a pretty girl, but nothing so beautiful
as you. Kathe, do you remember the shark at Cedar
Key?'
'I remember. That was the day I said we'd go home to start
our real life.'
Much later, I sensed that the wind had fallen. I went to
the window but then, suddenly afraid once more in the
stillness, knelt below the sill, peering between the curtains.
The moon had set and it was pitch dark. Garden, field and
downs - all were lost in thick darkness. Only the shapes of
the trees, when my eyes had become accustomed to the
blackness, showed against a sky in which, try as I would, I
could perceive no trace of dawn.
The crying, when it recommenced, seemed to come from
very far away, as though from among the invisible stars. But
I did not imagine it, for I could hear Kathe sobbing in the
room behind me. It was faint, and as it were residual, like
338
the embers of a fire or the last drainings from an emptied
pool; and before long it died away.
'It must be morning soon,' I said.
'What is soon?' Holding her hands in front of her, palms
forward, she smiled down at me, where I knelt on the floor,
between her steady fingers. 'Poor Alan! You should try to
pass the time. The wind's dropped - it won't be long now.
You should be prepared, like me.' She gave a little laugh.
'Why don't you read the Bible? That wouldn't be out of place
- not out of this place.'
'Yes. Yes, I'll get it. Where is it, can you remember?'
'On the bookshelf in Flick's room.'
I got up and went out once more on the landing, where
the light still burned as it had all night. I half-expected
to find the dog crouched at the head of the stairs, but the
landing was empty and I went along to Flick's room, opened
the door and switched on the light.
The green tortoise was lying in its place against the back
of the armchair. It was in shadow, but its shape and markings
were plain enough and I, staring back at its bead eyes,
realized how dull and imperceptive I had been ever to have
mistaken it for a cushion. Familiar it seemed now; yes and
complicit too, for had we not each our appointed role in
what was to take place? It was not the sight of the tortoise,
therefore, which overcame me where I stood, but the palpable
grief and misery flowing from it into the room, filling
it like a bitter pool. The curtains were moving slowly, like
huge fronds of seaweed, and from where I was, in the doorway,
I could not distinguish the books on the shelves, because
of a refraction flattening them into a distorted, sloping
plane. Nor, I now realized, could one breathe here, for the
room was flooded with grief as sands by an incoming tide.
Choking, I felt myself sink and pitch forward, just as I had
fallen in Cook's drawing-room. My hand remained clutching
the door-handle, but when my arm was at full stretch
it was pulled away by the weight of my body. My head
struck the floor and I became unconscious.
When I came to myself Kathe was kneeling beside me,
shaking my shoulder.
339
'Alan! Alan, listen and tell me what you can hear! Listen,
Alan!'
I realized that she was beyond sympathy for me - nor did
I care. Something more immediate was impelling her - something
new and urgent. Dazed and in pain, I sat up, leaning
against the frame of the door. The room was clear, the tortoise
was a cushion, the books were rows of plainly-lettered
spines side by side upon their shelves.
Somewhere there was a distant noise - not the wind, not
the weeping - a familiar, accustomed noise; downstairs, in
the house. My forehead was bruised and I saw that somehow
or other I had cut the back of my hand. I desperately
wanted to void my bowels.
'Alan, tell me! Can you hear it, or not?'
The telephone was ringing in the hall. I sat listening and
staring down at the floor. The sound, as it seemed to me,
was the pressure in my loins, unrelenting, a mounting torment
that must be relieved at all costs.
'Yes,' I said, 'I can hear it. Wait!'
&nbs
p; I struggled up, and as I did so she caught me by the wrist.
'Don't answer it, Alan! Don't go down!'
'I'm not going down.'
I lurched across the landing to the lavatory, dragged at my
clothes and sat there, leaving the door unclosed as I poured
out a stinking flux that seemed to tear me apart. The sweat
ran down my body and I felt ready to faint again with
nausea and the churning in my bowels which, as often as I
was able to ease it, returned as agonizingly as before. Kathe
knelt beside me, holding my hands, caring nothing for the
foul reek. At last I was able to gasp out, 'Are you going to
answer it?'
She flushed the bowl and through the sound of the pouring
water cried in my ear,
'I forbid you to go down!'
'But it might be - it might be -'
'Who? Who might it be? What?'
So we remained where we were, huddling together in our
squalid misery, while the telephone rang on and on. The
shrill, repetitive sound became like a hammer beating us
340
down, destroying the last shreds of dignity to which each,
for the sake of the pther, had tried to cling. I remember
Kathe moaning, 'Make it stop! O God, make it stop!'; while
I knew that my hand, clasped in hers, was conferring no
solace but rather entreating, abjectly, some least grain of
reassurance which she was powerless to give.
Incredible though it seems, I must have slept - a kind of
collapse, I suppose, from sheer exhaustion. I remember waking
to the sensation of Kathe's body against my own, the
scent of her flesh and an illusion of clambering slowly upward,
cramped and cold, from the crevice where I had been
hunched asleep. My sight grew clear and then my hearing.
The telephone had stopped and to its sound had succeeded
another, gentle and sweet. Outside the window a blackbird
was letting fall the first slow notes of morning.
'It's light,' I said.
We looked at each other. What relief I was capable of
feeling was like that of a castaway. I was alive and I was not
mad.
Kathe's face was dark-ringed, pallid, streaked with sweat
and tears. I took her hand in my hands and pressed it to my
shoulder.
'Whatever's yours is mine, Kathe. I promise. I won't leave
you.'
'Will you - will you do anything I ask, Alan?'
'Whatever you want. It's for you to say.'
'Then take me away from here.'
'Now?'
'Yes, now.'
So I got up, and stripped and washed myself, and drew
the curtains. The morning was dark, closely overcast and
threatening rain. The wind had broken a great ash bough,
which lay spread across the grass, its leaves already hanging
lustreless, the split wood white and stark against the trunk
of the tree. It seemed easy to go about ordinary things easy
to do merely what was necessary. I ran a bath for
Kathe, shaved and dressed, got out two suit-cases and filled
one with my pyjamas, sponge-bag and so on.
'Will you have breakfast, Kathe?'
341
'Yes. Anything - whatever there is. What time is it?'
'Not quite five.'
'Alan. One thing.'
'Yes?'
'We won't talk about it - last night. Not at all - nothing.'
I nodded, laid my hand for a moment on her shoulder
where she sat in the bath, and went downstairs to the kitchen.
The shop - the visit to Bristol - when or whether we
should return - these things would take care of themselves.
'I have to attend,' I kept repeating. 'I have to attend.'
It was twenty to six when I got out the car, put the suitcases
in the boot and helped Kathe into her coat, for the
morning, under the low, grey clouds, was bleak and chilly.
She was searching in her bag and did not look back as I
began to drive away, bumping over sticks and debris littering
the drive. Just before we got to the gate she said, 'Stop one
moment, Alan, please.'
I drew up. 'Something you've forgotten?'
Tm sorry. There's a tube of codeine tablets - Veganin - I
thought it was in this bag. I'd like to have it, please. My head
is aching. Can you go back and get it for me, or shall I come
with you?'
'Where is it?'
'Upstairs, in the top drawer of the dressing-table. There
are two other handbags there. It will be in one of them.'
I went back to the house. Crossing the hall a sudden
anguish overcame me and I fell on my knees, praying, '0
God, help me! Good Jesus Christ, help me! Only give me
strength!' Yet as I went on up the stairs I felt no comfort in
my heart.
The dressing-table was full of her scarves, handkerchiefs
The Girl in a Swing Page 39