Compulsory Games

by Robert Aickman

  But it was at the personal level that the matter was resolved, as are most matters.

  Few transactions, in this world or any other, are more personal than a mediumistic séance. With great good fortune, the seeker may be told where to find the lost key to the medicine chest. He will not learn the secret of the universe, however qualified he may be, however guileless.

  Maurice Cheale’s father died, quite suddenly, at the age of ninety-three; and all were amazed by how hard Cheale took it. Though he never once missed a meeting of the Council, or of any committee in which he took an interest, not even on the day of the cremation that took place miles away and in clouds of rain, yet he began to neglect much else: his invalid wife (all the children were by now far away); his Masonic lodge; his quiet wagering; his game of golf. He left more and more and more of his professional work to his partners. He lost weight. He lost persuasiveness. He lost hair. He shrivelled and parched. He even began to dress himself imperfectly. No one had dreamed that Cheale of all people could be so mutable.

  One evening he turned up without warning at Oswald Crickmay’s poky little flat, now stuffed right to the doors and ceilings with stock in trade, authentic, facsimile, intermediate. Only one of Cheale’s shirt cuffs was visible and there was a large, dim splash on the right sleeve of his jacket. Even his trousers were not quite right.

  Crickmay at once began to tremble slightly.

  He had no previous knowledge of old Mr. Cheale’s passing; or, indeed, of the fact that the Cheale he knew had an old father. Crickmay at once assumed that Cheale’s distress was somehow connected with the cemetery, as had been his own upon seeing Cheale.

  “There’s something you might do for me, Oswald,” said Cheale, who by now was seated in the customers’ chair, and gasping slightly. “If you will.”

  “Of course, Maurice. What is it?”

  At least the old informalities endured.

  But Cheale seemed unable to continue.

  “Would you like a cup of water, Maurice? Or a small glass of port?”

  “Nothing to drink, Oswald. I’ve come to you because I feel you know about these things.”

  “I shouldn’t think I do, Maurice. But what things are they? I’m completely out of touch, you know.”

  “I believe they’re called mediums.” Cheale was making a dreadful effort. “Have you the address of a good one?”

  “My cousin, Alban Ramage, says it’s a great mistake to tamper. He knows much more about things like that than most of us.”

  “Give me some addresses, Oswald. There’s a good chap. I know you use them in your work.”

  “If you absolutely insist, Maurice.”

  “I do insist, Oswald. Remember what I once did for you.”

  Crickmay unlocked his book, and using a Sale Confirmation billet, wrote down two names and two addresses.

  “Hope you can read them. The old fist grows gnarled.”

  “Have you the telephone numbers?”

  “If you really want them.”

  “I see they’re both men.”

  “Men are better with old documents. Which is all I use these people for. You must understand that.”

  “I daresay, Oswald. Which of the two would be better in a more personal matter?”

  “I have no idea, Maurice. I can only follow my cousin and advise you not to tamper. I even admonish you.”

  “The Hell you do!” retorted Cheale. “It’ll be your turn one day.”

  Who could have conceived of Maurice Cheale speaking like that?

  “How’s Hubert Toller?” inquired Crickmay, quite cordially.

  “Need you ask?”

  However, Cheale did manage to say “Thank you, old chap” on the doorstep, if doorstep it could be called. He even added something kind about Crickmay’s little business, almost as if they were still near-colleagues.

  •

  In the end a public appeal was launched for the restoration of the cemetery as a Garden of Peace by way of memorial to the late Mr. Cheale. No one had previously realised how much the deceased had done for the community during a period of little less than a century. Why, at the beginning of that epoch the churchyard had been still in use! But donations were slow and small, so self-centred are the living; and, in the end, the ratepayers collectively had to find most of the money in the usual way.

  It was not that the agitators for a public garden surrounded by ground-floor flats for the aged were being allowed to get away with it. Not at all. The Memorial Committee consulted upon every detail the son of the deceased; who had consultations of his own to make.

  The Committee bought half-grown cypresses, and already- towering laurels, and huge, dusty shrubs. They planted arum lilies and mortality. They enquired everywhere for asphodel. They lined the narrow paths with thorns and paved them with granite chippings. They gave each dead person on Mr. Yarwood’s cramped list a new composition tombstone, sketched by a public design bureau, and not too large and vulgar, not too white. Even the seats were but penitential benches, not too wide and not too low. Those who were tall enough could rest their feet on grooved bricks.

  The pacification took many years to complete, because all had to be done with the decorum of other days. In the end a generation had passed since anyone had known the cemetery in full working order.

  There were special constables on guard, when the regulars failed; and at the very end of it all, a board was lettered out by the art school: THIS IS NOT A PUBLIC GARDEN.

  Maurice Cheale had suggested that, out of reverence for the dead, there be not even by-laws. Even that was accepted on the instant.

  Cheale further suggested that a specific opening ceremony would be unnecessary. Everyone at once perceived that the past should be allowed to merge into the future, with no official recognition given to an interregnum. It was obvious that the late Mr. Cheale would prefer it like that.

  So, at some indeterminate moment, the Memorial Committee itself dissolved into nothing, shaking hands all round for the last time, reflecting upon the narrowness of boundaries, the thinness of partitions.

  “There are only the young and the dead,” Maurice Cheale had on one occasion passed on to them in a burst of confidence.

  All the same, the others noted with quiet joy that he was wearing a new striped suit, and had parted and brushed what still remained of his hair. Perhaps one could hope that the Council would be once more in firm hands yet?

  For the long future, there was to be no special committee. Cheale was adamant; and no one wanted him to lose control of himself or of anything else. The Garden of Peace would be left to govern itself, assisted by a staff of elderly gardeners on half-pay, and a new man in The Lodge to examine passes at reasonable times. The Lodge had been rebuilt to a design of the local authority architect, combining tradition and modernity in very nearly equal parts and provided with central heating that originated in natural vapour. No one knew where the new man had come from.

  As the population returned to the houses and subsided around their television sets, some of the original mothers, infirm but imperishable, squinted at the man in The Lodge (now continuously visible through the plate glass) and remarked to one another that he was exactly like Mr. Yarwood. Others of their number, speaking at other times to others again, claimed a resemblance to Mr. Rogerson. In point of fact, the man had given his name as Smith; or so said Mr. Cheale, who was finding the money for the man’s salary out of his own pocket. Probably it was as well that passes to roam round the garden in private meditation were to be issued by the Town Hall, so that the man had only to check the date as best he could and, of course, carefully look for the signature. The man spent the rest of his time moulding white flowers for installation under cloches, and in repairing them when the need arose. People said that it had always been his hobby.

  “There are only the young and the dead,” Maurice Cheale had reported. With reasonable good fortune, the dead were once more quiescent for the most part. What was to prevent the young once more upset
ting that preferred state of being? Especially now that the green and spiky railings had been replaced by grey and stunted walling?

  Here, possibly, lay the fairy fellah’s master stroke: the master stroke of Maurice Cheale and his new adviser—or perhaps we may hope that it was still the same beloved and paternal adviser.

  When, with considerable difficulty, rising almost to the level of unethical coercion, Cheale persuaded Crickmay to inspect the new order from within, Crickmay at long last had no difficulty in identifying every single black-clad figure, seated one upon each seat, with fleshless fingers ever astretch, to silence, to subdue; if necessary, to split and stifle.

  WOOD

  SO MY NIECE, Elinor, has given me one of those weather houses, where the woman comes out when it is likely to be fine, and the man when it is going to rain! I did not think they were made any more. There is something about them that not many people know; at least nowadays. It is this: that just as dowsing can be used to trace many things other than water (which of course makes “water divining” quite the wrong name for it), so these little weather houses, or some of them, can be attuned to foretell more things than the merely literal state of the heavens.

  It is an odd story of which I am reminded by this, and until now I have not cared to make a note of it. There is always a risk of a written record coming into the wrong hands; and so perhaps reaching the eyes or ears of the people described. Moreover, I was always very uncertain how far I could depend upon my own impressions of what happened; and naturally I am even less confident now, nearly twenty years later. Also, one is superstitious about seeming to give a new life, by writing about it, to something which has frightened one. The curious business about Munn and his wife, whatever I thought about the reality of it, even at the time, certainly frightened me—so much that I was the last person to be surprised by what happened to them in the end. But old Pell and his wife are dead now too. So here goes.

  I suppose that if anyone at all reads what I am writing, it is more likely than not to be a stranger. A few sentences about myself had, therefore, better come first.

  I served my articles as an architect, in the days when that was how one learned a profession, by working at practical and immediate problems from the first, instead of merely listening to lectures and doing exercises; and for several years I worked as an architect’s assistant in a good office, doing well and having every prospect of starting in practice on my own. The tone was set in those days by architects such as Ernest George, and there seemed an unlimited number of costly country houses being built, pleasant work for all who had the social knack of getting it—which did not seem very difficult, as I look back on it. But then came the War, the first one, and the real one: the greatest mistake mankind ever made, in my opinion, but, curiously enough, one out of which I myself did quite well, at least in a sense. Before it was over, and to my considerable surprise, I found myself a lieutenant-colonel, though very much of the wartime kind, not the real thing, as I knew perfectly well; but then in the very last month, more or less when Wilfred Owen was killed, if I have it right, I was, not killed, but badly knocked out, since when I have never been quite right in any way, even though I made a good recovery, and a remarkably swift one.

  Of course I had always intended to go back into architecture, but I never quite did. There were several factors. One was that I began to receive a pension, which at first seemed fairly good: enough, anyway, to save one from having to rush at things, and to give one time to think. Another, and much more important, was that the profession had completely changed. We were fast on the way to the state of affairs when the word “art” was seldom mentioned, still less the word “beauty.” It is odd that the busy, slavedriving old offices, always with several pupils, had much to say about art and beauty—too much, many of the pupils thought; while these new Schools of Architecture lead to nothing but, for example, the buildings you can see beside and around the Festival Hall in London. A third thing was that I never succeeded in marrying and thus taking on a new incentive. The war seemed to do something to me there; or perhaps it was mainly my experiences at the end of the war. But what settled things at first was that I was offered the job of editing a series of architectural lives.

  I had always been interested in the actual lives and careers of the architects of history, and the work carried me away completely for a longish time. I was enabled to travel in a modest way (though, there again, I could not have paid for a wife to travel with me), and I was in a position to appoint myself as the author of two or three of the books. I did so, and these books proved to be among the most successful of the series, for what that meant. When I was in my mid-forties, I bought an old cottage outside this Suffolk village; without clearly realising that East Anglia is pre-eminently the part of England to which unattached and unattachable males with tiny but comparatively secure incomes tend to drift. They settle there on the outskirts of villages, and, I must admit, seem often to live on for ever, though no one quite knows what they do all day. Edward FitzGerald is the archetype and patron of us all; though, speaking for myself, I have so far managed to keep my hands off the local fishing lads. But then FitzGerald was a genius, even though an under-productive one. I, no genius, have managed to have many affairs of the more ordinary kind; mainly, indeed, with married women. It does not seem a thing one should proclaim: but it is no joke being a married woman in East Anglia, if the woman has the smallest imagination. I am, therefore, unabashed.

  That odd man, Munn, on the other hand, seemed, during the first years I knew him, to be genuinely uninterested in women. Of course I did not know him really well, then or ever; and one can be utterly mistaken in such assessments. Still, many English males are genuinely unconcerned about women; are without the need for them, especially after the age of thirty or so.

  Munn struck me in those days as one who instead of embracing a woman, embraced a grievance. Unlike most people with entrenched grievances, he was as reticent about the details as one normally is, or as one should be, about the details of a love relationship. He had been employed in the Inland Revenue, and there had been trouble of some kind, though it was hard to guess what, because he had emerged with a small allowance, upon which, like me, he lived; in his case, in rooms above the village post office. Possibly he unearthed some corruption or other, and had to be sacked, and silenced. If Munn had been still in the employ of the tax people, instead of on bad terms with them, I could never have known him even as an acquaintance; because, say what they will, I cannot accept that any kind of gentleman will, under any circumstances, make a career of prying into the private affairs of others and then mulcting them, commonly to the point of spoiling and destroying their entire lives and those of their families. Munn supplemented his allowance (which, comically enough, was “tax-free”) by making funny little figures out of straw and brass wire, which were offered for sale in the post office below under the name of “daffies.” It was an unusual occupation for a middle-aged man, but I mention it because it had a faint and obscure bearing upon what happened in the future. Meanwhile, the figures, though often quite clumsy, seemed to sell remarkably well; not only to passing motorists, of whom, from other points of view, there were soon far too many, needless to say, but even to the villagers and to rustics apparently from other villages. Sometimes one of our locals, having bought one of Munn’s straw figures, would later buy another. Perhaps the first figure had by then worn out, but at least it proved that Munn was meeting a demand, always the great thing in the world, we are told. I have described the figures as “little” and so most of them were; but always on view were a few larger ones, some, two or three feet high. Naturally, these cost more, and it was the smaller, cheaper figures that most of the motorists went for, and that must have provided most of the turnover—again, as is usual in commerce.

  Munn had taken up residence in the village before I arrived, and at first all I knew of him was his tweedy figure toddling about and sometimes bidding me Good-day. His tweeds were very hairy i
ndeed, and more than usually shapeless. One almost felt that he made his suits himself, as well as the straw figures; and perhaps wove the hirsute fabric also. He had profuse white hair under a scarecrow hat; a nose like a reversed peg for that same hat; and a darkly red face, which made one think neither of drink nor of exposure to the elements, neither of sickness nor of shyness. It struck one simply as how he was made, how he was coloured: several shades too red, as some are made too tall, and others too dwarfish.

  It was at one of the village inns (I refuse to employ the word “pub”) that I first exchanged more words with Munn than the time of day. I remember the occasion very well, but I have little recollection of what we said, then or, indeed, at most of our subsequent encounters. Of course he hinted at his troubles, and I at mine. But we were neither of us, perhaps to a fault, involved or much interested in what is called “the life of the village,” so that we undoubtedly ranged over wider fields: the newspapers, the world, and man’s future (though, as I have said, seldom woman’s). Munn seemed another who did not quite know what next to do in life, or even to aim at doing. He too was, more than anything else, marking time. The main thing we had in common was exile. All the remaining days of our lives seemed to drop upon us like dried-out snowflakes or like daily leaves from the dead calendar of a past and forgotten year. It was as well that the Marxists did not catch and roast us. Life has become more rigorous than it was then; though it is likely to become more rigorous still.

  And yet—

  I think I had been talking in a sketchy way to Munn, on and off, and every now and then, for as long as three or four years, when one morning, as I was on my way to something rather private, and was less than usually open to distraction, he hailed me from across the street and asked if I would look in at his place for a drink that same evening. I can see him as he did it, in my mind’s eye, quite clearly: the white shutters across Gabb the butcher’s window were behind him in the late autumn sunshine (so that it must presumably have been early closing day or the Sabbath). After all, it was a rather historic moment: I had never before been invited to enter the rooms above the post office. That which at the time I was about to undertake would be completed long before evening, so I accepted for half-past six.