Compulsory Games

by Robert Aickman

  But then for the Committee began the task of deciding what to recommend for the cemetery’s longer term future. Left to themselves, they would have remained uninvolved in such high policy; but the Council issued an Instruction. Mr. Toller twisted and growled like a frustrated bear, and several abstained; but no one on the Council cared actually to vote Against.

  At the next Committee meeting but one, Mr. Toller disclosed that he had given so much thought to the matter as to be able already to announce the various possibilities for consideration by the other Committee members over, say, the next six months, though some, as he clearly recognised and accepted, might want longer than that. Mr. Toller then produced a sheet of the lined grey paper supplied by the Council and read out the possibilities as he saw them, in his usual clear voice.

  First, the cemetery might be left exactly as it was, involving no substantial expense to anyone.

  Second, it might be thoroughly dug over and rededicated for use as originally intended.

  Third, it might be rough-tidied, levelled (apart from the slight natural slope, which could not be remedied), and handed over to the splintered-off Open Spaces Committee, who, Mr. Toller remarked, were always full of bright ideas about everything.

  Fourth, it might be redeveloped by the Council for light industry and modern office accommodation, with a few residential units incorporated. The last-named would help with the problem of finding houses for the municipal officials, but a big new public loan would be needed, and it was hard to be sure that by now it could be satisfactorily underwritten.

  Fifth, the entire area could simply be put on the market with a view to a plan identical with the last being carried through under private enterprise. Planning permission could be made conditional upon the provision at the promoters’ expense of the housing units required by the Council, and indeed of such other public amenities and facilities as might be thought fit, such as covered parking space for councillors’ cars.

  Mr. Toller concluded that part of his address by laying down the foolscap sheet and observing that in his opinion there was another possibility still: which was that the whole matter be turned over to those people who never stopped complaining about the cemetery, and who might well benefit from practical experience of all that was involved when you had to handle public property.

  The curious thing was that, as it appeared to Crickmay, this last possibility was the one that seemed perceptibly to move his more mature colleagues in their dark suits. They turned fractionally in their chairs and silently glared at one another. Some faintly nodded. Almost all looked, for the first time that day, fully alive, though none actually spoke. Crickmay remembered that things said extempore and on the spur of the moment often touch the heart more deeply than things prepared in advance and then read aloud from a foolscap page.

  The secretary offered to draft a report for them when Mr. Toller should decide the time had come. The report would then be presented to the Full Council, who in due course would report back, or something like that. Crickmay always left the details of procedure to the officers; and it had been largely on that understanding that he had come to find himself where he now was.

  All the same, Mr. Toller’s assertion that it was the Committee’s duty to give preference to the interests of the living over those of the dead, continued to cause Crickmay a certain disquiet, even a certain guilt. After all, they were supposed to be a cemetery committee, not a committee arranging subsidies for unmarried mothers and deserted fathers and delinquent children and impecunious students: in fact, they were the only cemetery committee. Those whose work links them in any way with historical matters, tend to differ from their neighbours in their constant awareness of how greatly the dead outnumber the living and how little the living really think about that onerous majority. Possibly, however, a point might soon be reached where the number of living in the world at last exceed the entire quota of dead since the world began. Crickmay simply did not know. He had avoided enquiring too closely. He dreaded such statistical considerations. When that day came, history would turn itself inside out and cease to be history as hitherto understood. He knew it had already happened with art. Neither thing need, however, enormously affect him as a dealer.

  The Cemetery Committee resolved to set up another sub- committee.

  Crickmay evaded that further form of service, even though Mr. Toller’s voice, eye and, forefinger were all directed at him. Possibly Maurice Cheale had tipped Mr. Toller the wink that Crickmay was a man to be used, in that he had more youth left, more time on his hands, less self-will. But Crickmay simply said “No,” and then said “No” again. The sub-committee was there-upon herded and huddled together perfectly well without him. Now they were birds of a feather, one and all: bloodless, grizzled rooks, some might say, but homogeneous.

  On the stroll back to his flat, where a long night’s work at trying to do something with the accounts awaited him, Crick-may reflected that there was another possibility still, one which had not been mentioned by Mr. Toller, and probably not thought of. Right round the cemetery might be erected a high and solid wall with no door in it.

  But even then there would only be complaints that the Council had not made it impossible for the wall to be climbed; impossible even with ropes and crampons, impossible even for spidery half-formed limbs. As soon as the bodies of the missing lads were found within, and inevitably much disfigured, the familiar public anger would surge upwards in all the expansiveness of new moral certainty. Leaving the top of the wall sharp and jagged; building in a chevaux de frise; mortaring down the tops, bottoms, and sides of old bottles: none of these things would quench the wrath, because it would be self-justifying wrath, expanding like a gas.

  Indeed, the rest of that evening’s Committee meeting (“the remaining items on the Agenda,” as they were called) had been merely one set of public complaints after another, as was usually the case.

  •

  Within the cemetery, the holes in the earth were widening into dikes, which ran with wetness and decomposition; and then widening further into formations akin to First World War trenches, except that they lacked the smooth edges and level floors of trenches properly dug. Within these wider and deeper combes, the compost of extraneous matter duly recalled the matter found in trenches repossessed after a lapse of deadly months. As the young emerged from the cemetery with broken ankles, legs, and other appendages, the complaints multiplied. Some of the letters were written by neighbours in collaboration. Not even Mr. Toller raised the concept of parental discipline. Even he was long past that.

  Sometimes a pack of boys would come screaming out helter-skelter, because of what they had seen; sprinting where it was barely safe even to tiptoe, and plunging with all the blindness of youth, with all the extra velocity held in reserve for moments of terror. Several boys managed to crack their skulls, above or below the level of the eyes, on the stout iron horizontal that had once engaged all the vertical railings against the skyline, and still engaged many of them, warped though they were. Other boys came back from the cemetery with fevers so old-fashioned that the Health Service disclaimed them. Possibly they had been conveyed by graveyard parasites. For all this, and much more, the Council had to accept the blame, and the full, legal responsibility.

  There is no quarter upon which a Council can unload such things. In practice, even a government department is not understood and accepted by the majority as a scapegoat; not even the Government itself. Local councillors have this in common with African kings: at first they are popularly voted in and on all sides pampered with sweetmeats; but it is upon the unmentionable understanding that ultimately they are to be maltreated and slain. When things go well, all parties enter with enthusiasm into each act of the drama; giving little thought to the acts that follow.

  More and more, the pallid, trembling boys spoke of seeing figures that were certainly not figures of Count Dracula, or of Frankenstein’s sons or stepsons. Their eyes were entirely white, and their mouths were full of fire, rep
orted the boys. Less than ever were the parents eager to don wellingtons, pick up cudgels, and go and see for themselves. It was already admitted that property in the area was losing all value, though it was hardly a thing the tenants cared much about. The property owners were very likely in league with the Council.

  Crickmay knew perfectly well that he dreaded the entire district. The discontented groups standing at doors frightened him. The cemetery itself was a riddle. He did not know what he might do if he were to glimpse Rogerson, the man for whose presence he was so uniquely responsible.

  Crickmay had noticed that nowadays Rogerson’s name seemed never to be mentioned; not since debate had ceased about his hypothetical involvement with the visiting bereaved.

  The intense glow of the small reddish sphere that was Rogerson in winter was each year succeeded by the total parched stillness that was Rogerson during the short and gleamy summer.

  Might there not be a key to it all, Crickmay wondered, in one of his own locked-up incunabula? The trouble was that he seldom actually read the old documents right through. He lacked that kind of concentration. He also lacked the skills. There were many of the muniments that he was incapable of reading at all. He had only a pass degree: once regarded as an achievement with which only a minority bothered, but now merely passed over.

  Still, Crickmay’s sympathy was increasingly with the dead illuminators and amanuenses: men who ruled much of the world from the scriptorium and the painted cloister garth, with no one to humiliate and nag their persons or their thoughts; men with no cause for worry in this world or the next. He often wished that he was one himself, engaged upon steady, endless work in the scriptorium with a picture of Heaven all bright within him, and indeed spread forth, only a little less brightly, on the plastered wall, not two feet from his eyes.

  •

  The meetings of the Cemetery Committee were completely weighed down by the different categories of complaint. The secretary, the man who wrote down what everyone said, had come to be burdened like a Sicilian donkey. He laboured under directions as to how he should reply, or ask some other official to reply. Mr. Toller would not agree to leaving a single complaint less than firmly rebutted: “not while breath is in me,” as he sometimes expressed it. Mr. Toller had touched life at more points than had the colleagues with whom he was primus inter pares. He had many little tags of general knowledge, fanciful or otherwise, and was the one man who had probably at least heard of Duns Scotus and Paracelsus, of Occam and Ascham. Crickmay could not but regard him as having an inkling of a common language.

  Fewer and fewer observations were even being attempted upon the grand matter of policy sent down by the Full Council. Few on the Committee had spoken much about anything since Crickmay had joined the party; and even those few were now absenting themselves. The meetings, as with so many meetings of the kind, were becoming dialogues between Mr. Toller and the man who wrote down his words. Sometimes Crickmay put in a quiet confirmation. However, he was beginning more and more to grasp at least the names of those who made up the silent majority; and, equally important, to associate a specific name with a specific facial characteristic or mark. It was slow going; because when people do not speak, they are less frequently addressed by name.

  Progress in the matter was just as well in view of a particular encounter that took place at this time.

  Crickmay had received an unexpected evening visit from his cousin, Alban Ramage. Ramage, properly a cousin once removed, was a quite successful philatelist; so successful that for some years he had been going in for it semi-professionally. He had changed his name to Alban upon becoming a Roman Catholic; or, rather, had added the name, upon his reception, to the three names conferred at his imperfect baptism in infancy. He was a year or two older than Crickmay; slenderer, with more and brighter hair; wittier. Now he was passing through in the course of a complex journey, mainly on business. He talked the whole time of connections he had already made and missed; and of connections to which he aspired in the course of the succeeding seven days. In the end, he would have travelled all the way from Swanage to Peterhead and back via St. Anne’s-on-Sea, the residence in retirement of a widowed uncle the two of them shared. Ramage explained that the very survival of the line to Swanage had been in doubt for years.

  “Incredible!” cried Crickmay. In childhood, he had spent a week every summer at Swanage, and would remember the Strange Things on the cliff until the day he died.

  “If it closes, I shall have to move,” said Ramage.

  “Wherever would you go?”

  “Perhaps to Wareham. They’d never dare to cut the line there.”

  Crickmay could not imagine his cousin away from the sea. Surely the sea was everything to him: mother, mistress, matrix, as in the case of Swinburne? He bathed for ten minutes at dawn every day throughout the year, and the same again at sunset.

  “I suppose there’s the river?” adumbrated Crickmay, doubtfully.

  “I don’t want to live too far from the plot I’ve bought. People should think more of such matters. Besides,” added Ramage, smiling, and yet again smoothing his all but excellent hair, “it’s not fair to put one’s estate to unnecessary trouble and expense. Nor wise either.”

  Crickmay considered for a moment. He lifted from his knees the box of manorial deeds, and set it on the corner of his desk. He had been pricing the items in pounds and dollars with a pencil while Ramage spoke of his travels.

  “Alban. Did I ever tell you about my Committee?” Freed from the box, he shifted in his seat.

  “I don’t think so, Oswald. Is it something to do with the treasures looted by the heretics from the abbeys and convents? I see you have a fine set of them on the floor.”

  “Nothing of the kind. Those are copies, anyway. Lots of people prefer copies, because they’re often more decorative. No, I was referring to what you said about your plot. Believe it or not, Alban, I’m on the local Cemetery Committee. I’ve been on it for years. I rather thought I’d written to you about it.”

  “No,” said Ramage. “I’d no idea. I suppose it’s one of these secular burial grounds? Or perhaps there’s more than one?”

  “Only one,” said Crickmay. “Thank God.”

  “You should take care when you do that,” observed Ramage quietly.

  “The whole thing’s become a nightmare, Alban. I have no idea why I don’t resign. And yet somehow I don’t.”

  “We seldom know why we do or don’t,” said Ramage. “Without spiritual training, that is. In any case a cemetery is not so easy to resign from, I imagine.”

  Crickmay looked at him.

  “What I mean is that we do not end the fact and responsibility of immortality by setting up a committee.”

  “No,” said Crickmay. “I’ve noticed that.”

  “Are prayers being offered? Of course not. There should be numberless charities. There should be continuous supplication. There should be votive gifts. There should be ineffable peace.”

  “Not even the Church of Rome provides all those things nowadays.”

  “We pray that she once more may.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  There was a pause in the conversation, while the cousins both looked at the strewn floor.

  Ramage glanced up. “I suppose it’s a mere numbered wilderness?”

  “Not even numbered.”

  “I have to tell you that I detest the very word ‘cemetery.’”

  “Not more than I do, Alban.”

  Ramage looked directly at his cousin. “Tell me more,” he said, quietly as ever.

  “The place is completely overgrown. The outer railings have given way in several places. The public is officially shut out, but, on the other hand, all kinds of people are half living there. Camping there, anyway. There are things going on the whole time. You know what happens when there’s no proper superintendence. Black magic, I suppose, and all that. The whole area is overrun with semi-wild animals. They come from miles off and breed there. No one ever sees
the man who’s supposed to be in charge. Every member of the Cemetery Committee except the chairman and me is at least a couple of generations behind the times. There seems nothing one can do, and yet one can’t let go. Whatever would happen if one did? One can’t help asking oneself that. One has accepted a responsibility.” Crickmay’s eyes were begging Ramage to lift even a small part of it.

  “Tell me,” said Ramage. “Is the place full?”

  “Not altogether. The chairman of the Committee managed to get it shut a little before that happened. He said the burden on the rates had become disproportionate. God knows he was right there. I find my own rates a terrible business even though I am supposed to be on the Council.”

  “Yes,” said Ramage. “God will know. Of that we can be certain enough. I shudder to think of what is involved.”

  “I sometimes wish that I myself lived in the Middle Ages.”

  “Everyone who thinks at all, wishes that.”

  “The trouble, Alban, really is that there is nothing hypothetical about death.”

  Crickmay saw that his cousin’s face had set into a mask. Perhaps he was thinking about the plot he had purchased at Swanage.

  “Nor about the sequel to death,” Ramage said.

  “Precisely,” said Crickmay.

  There was another pause. Then Ramage spoke abruptly.

  “I must bustle off if I’m to catch the seven-thirteen. I have three changes before me. All in this one night.”

  “I’ll walk with you to the station. I’d like to, and it will help with carrying your bundles.”

  “That’s very douce of you,” said Ramage, who had done a couple of terms at Fettes. “If we could carry half each, we could walk faster, and perhaps take in your precious so-called cemetery. Something might occur to me.”