Compulsory Games

by Robert Aickman

  “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 pull-over?”

  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 the cracked, standard-coloured 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 groundfloor 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. None the less, he began to run, or perhaps rather to jogtrot. It was hot as Hell.

  He cantered unevenly round 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 Gardens. 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-coloured carpet.

  “Lie down and rest. I’ll come back for you soon.”

  Agonisingly he flopped on to 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 harmlessly 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.

  LE MIROIR

  If I persist in gazing,

  Myself I shall adore

  —WILLIAM CONGREVE, Semele

  CELIA’S father was old enough to be her grandfather, perhaps her great-grandfather. Notoriously, it is one of the advantages that men have over women.

  He had beautiful silvery hair, and a voice like a distant bell of indeterminate note; but, unfortunately, he could move only very slowly, and, even then, aided by a shiny black staff, with a most handsomely jewelled knob. Celia had never known her mother, and that lady’s portrait was always turned to the wall, from which position, in accordance with her father’s adjuration, she had never cared to drag it, or to set about dragging it, for it looked very heavy.

  The old house was crumbling now, and something beautiful was lost to it with every year that ended: even the drawing of an unknown, smiling woman by Raphael; even the tiny box found in the Prince of the Moskowa’s fob, and soaked in his blood. In the end, one would have thought that there remained only the mirrors; the looking glasses, if you insist. The mirrors or looking glasses, and the bare utilities for the bare living which has to substitute for life.

  All the looking glasses were, of course, mercury-silvered, so that, as well as reflecting, they embellished and discriminated. In each of the state rooms were three or four of the objects; on the walls, on floor stands, on bureaux and escritoires. In the state bedrooms, the looking glasses were even more subtly placed and more ingeniously set, in that long ago they had been offered more curious topics to touch upon. It is unnecessary to select from the lists of past guests, because the lists included everyone.

  Day by day, Celia’s father would toil round the rooms, struggling up the grand staircases, crawling perilously down them; in every room, on every landing, at every dark corner, gazing in the looking glasses, outstaring time. Sometimes, at a respectful distance, he was followed for much of the way by his old nurse, though more commonly Nurse was confined by neuritis and weak-headedness to her bed in the little apartment under the flaking tiles that she had occupied since first she came. How old Nurse could be, was a subject sedulously eschewed.

  Right from the cradle (and Celia’s cradle had aforetime cradled both the shapely John Dryden and the unproportioned Alexander Pope), Celia had vouchsafed her frail, dreamlike drawings; in pencil, even in chalk; and, later, with water-colour finely touched in. She had studied every urn in the park, and every ancient tree, by every condition of light: the Elizabethan oaks, the Capability Brown beeches, the single exotics planted with ceremony by Mr. Palgrave, by Bishop Wilberforce, by the Prince Imperial. The tenant farmer’s herds
served well as artistic auxiliaries; and, sometimes at dusk, the Mad Hunt, which all at these times could hear but only those with the Sight could behold. It was natural that when at length Celia had arrived at her sixteenth birthday, she should wish to go to Paris in order to increase her power and widen her range.

  Still in a dream, she found herself enrolled at a long-established and old-fashioned private atelier: Etienne’s it had been familiarly named by many generations of students, some of them always British. One felt that Watteau and Greuze must have been among the more recent pupils; Claude, among the earlier professors. But now, as is often found with ageing institutions, seven-eighths of the attendance were excessively youthful; too young to be taken quite seriously as yet by anyone. The remaining one-eighth was composed of shaky eccentrics and inadequates who had been attending (and, of course, contributing) since the year Dot. The professors were wayward, though one or two were geniuses, and merely at cross-purposes with the times in which they found themselves. Genius, however, comes normally in inverse measure to the capacity to impart. The two things are strongly opposed. One of the pupils, a very old, very tough American woman, brought a sackful of cakes and pastries for consumption by all during the two breaks each day.

  Celia, aged sixteen years and eleven days (“Give me back my eleven days,” she cried out in a brief moment of melancholy), was escorted to France by Mr. Burphy, the chief clerk in Totlands, her father’s solicitors, and of course her own too. They even consumed an evening meal of a sort in the restaurant at the Gare de Lyon, the most gorgeous in Europe. But all the arrangements had really been made by Celia’s distant cousin, Rolf, who lived with two other men of the same generation in a beautiful house up the hill at Meudon, and who knew all the ins and outs. Cousin Rolf fixed Celia up at Etienne’s and he even found her a nearby apartment: very high up, but with two rooms, though small ones, and with what amounted to a private staircase down to the sanitary facilities on the floor immediately below. Celia had no occasion ever to encounter in person her remote, though helpful cousin Rolf. It was unexpected that a girl of Celia’s age and background should be deposited on her own in Paris, and among artists; but she had requested it, she had always spoken quantities of French, and she could not see that there was anyone to make a fuss, as all her aunts were in Ireland, about 150 miles from Dublin, and in no position to go anywhere else, even had they wished to. Fortunately, Celia could depend upon an adequate allowance. This was mainly because her father did not understand the value of money, and, throughout his long life, had made a point of refusing all advice about it, or about anything else.

  The first things that Celia bought (apart from a few dresses, pairs of shoes and stockings, lovely lingerie, and even one or two hats, either very small or very large), were additional chattels for her miniature rooms, which, upon entry, she was surprised to find almost unfurnished, as if she had been living still in the days of Mimi, Musetta, Colline, and all those well-known people. In particular, there was not one single mirror or looking glass, not one; not even a cracked fragment in the downstairs cabinet, with, perhaps, MILTON at one corner, or, possibly, JEYES, such as one found in bathing machines.

  So Celia went out and purchased four or five looking glasses immediately. All but one would be merely for use each day and were backed with nitrate, though certainly not mass-produced or in any way commonplace; but the last of her acquisitions might have stood in any bedroom at home.

  Celia had spotted it in one of the low, dark, hopelessly untidy shops where, until recently, one bought such things in Paris; and its capture had been an impulse of the instant, as is everything that is in any way real. Elements of nostalgia, even of plain homesickness, no doubt entered in.

  The shop had proved to be run not by the usual very old man, but by an even older woman, though spryer and more grasping than Nurse at home. The aged tricoteuse had driven a terribly hard bargain, but Celia had to possess the glass, first, for the obvious reason that she could not live without it; secondly, because it bore extremely faded traces of mysterious male and female figures round the upper part of the frame; thirdly, because the face that had just looked back at her from its shallows and depths had not been her own.

  The short distance along which the glass had to be borne presented an even worse problem than the haggling; and the need for lugging it up so many narrow, winding and decrepit stairs, a worse one still.

  But the most complex of ordeals sometimes finds its own resolution, and now Celia sat before the beautiful mirror or looking glass, now in one new dress, now in another, and intermittently without troubling to put on a dress at all. She had to seat herself for these transactions, because the looking glass was so short in the frame. She had heard that our ancestors were more stunted than we are, though even this (she knew) had been contested by a woman who owned an immense collection of very old clothes, all of which she had measured anew, giving years to the work. Possibly the beautiful looking glass had been designed for the Gonzaga dwarfs, men and women even as the faded figures gambolling round the top of the frame? Celia wondered if she would ever visit their tiny suites at Mantua; of which her father had shown her small yellow photographs taken years before with early flashbulbs. In the meantime, she would have to find a chaise longue that was stumpier in the shanks. Her own limbs were as long as they were lovely.

  So life continued, for Celia could not quite say how long, as her father wrote letters of any kind only on formal occasions, and Totlands really had no business to transact with her beyond paying out her allowance, with their usual precise punctuality. She had been well aware that Mr. Burphy had been more frightened of her than anything else. How long ago it began to seem! Time flies when we watch it, but has no need to fly when we ignore it.

  One morning, Celia felt quite certain of something that of late she had more and more suspected: she was not merely looking older, but looking much older; more grained, more perceptibly skinny. The first bright light of spring must have wrought the trick.

  At least, Celia presumed it was the spring; which she had always distrusted, even artistically. She knew that spring is the season of maximum self-slaughter; and who could wonder? It was the season when doubt was no longer possible. Momentarily, she clutched at the neckline of her dress, and managed to inflict an actual rent. Even the fabric of her garments seemed to have weakened slightly; and this had been an expensive garment, once.

  Celia did not care to look very often in any of the glasses after that, but crept past and around them, her eyes on the jade or turquoise carpet.

  All the same, life has in some sense to go forward, as long as it bears with us at all; and Celia, despite her tendency to melancholy, was perfectly courageous. Moreover, she was finding more and more of herself in her art, and had been assured that soon she might quite easily win a medal of some kind. Of course, that had been said to her privately, in order not to upset the others.

  She bought many new dresses to replace the one she had torn. She even bought six fancy dresses, or costumes that were all but that; with a view to meeting life from time to time in different and selected disguises. She bought a silk tie and two pairs of silk socks for a man she knew; all in excitingly aggressive colours and patterns. Sometimes she dwelt upon what it would be like to nurture eight or nine children, the fruit of her womb; upon their complex teething and schooling; upon some brusque, shadowy figure to pay for it all and act as head of the household.

  How long could it have been before Celia, despite her precautions, caught her own eye in the glass and realised that she must be middle-aged and beyond all chance of concealment? And, needless to say, it had happened at that same dreadful morning hour when the brightness of the sun is equalled only by the blackness of the heart.

  Other faces had continued glinting back at her from time to time, but now she recognised that a stranger had intruded for ever.

  She opened a letter that morning, and even though dust had settled on it quite deeply. It was from David Skelt, the senior
partner in Totlands. He had never before been under any necessity to write to her personally, but had been able to leave the task to his staff, or at least to a partner who was greatly junior.

  Mr. Skelt informed her that her father had become so frail that Nurse would have to be supplemented by at least one other nurse; and that her own allowance would have henceforth to be halved at the least, in consequence. He referred to these new nurses as “trained nurses.” Presumably, that might make a big difference in some way.

  Prices in Paris were said to be rising and the people to be changing in character; but Celia knew that she still had her art, as well as her beautiful looking glass. She realised that her art must mean more to her with every day that sped past. Whether strangers cared for her art or not, the other pupils could be counted upon for loyalty without flaw. Moreover, most of the pupils were nowadays little more than children, so that all could not sensibly be described as lost. There could always be a completely new generation. The future was an open question yet.

  Celia even felt that she could hold her own with the looking glass by a continuous act of will: unremitting, resolute, robust. Long ago, Nurse had upheld virtues of that kind, and now the time was come to practise them. One never knew what one could do until one tried. If one tried hard enough, one could be any age one chose. In the library at home, she had come upon St. Thomas Aquinas’s promise to that effect, even though in Latin, and in Gothic type that grew faint and grey as one watched, and never had much shape to the letters at the best of times.

  Alas, there were crab-sized holes in Celia’s petticoat, and, up and down the staircase, rats on the rampage for food, however mouldy and mottled. Cousin Rolf could not have known. Their delicate paws were like swift kisses on one’s face and arms. It was just as in the attics at home.

  Celia took to attending each year the service at the Chapelle Expiatoire, and to painting pictures entitled Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven! At these times, she could feel the divine benediction cloaking her shoulders, like a soft stole.