Compulsory Games

by Robert Aickman

  I must have shouted out quite loudly, because, suddenly, my mother was in the room. She was soothing me, offering me a warm herbal drink which she always had by her in a flask, retucking the messed up bed. There would now barely have been lodging for Clarinda, even had she remained, even had I not merely been dreaming.

  I say that I must have shouted, because my mother’s room was a fair distance away. I realise, however, that quite probably she had been listening for a cry, and either not sleeping at all, or sleeping as mothers sleep.

  We could still hear the sound of my father’s rather old-fashioned calculating machine downstairs; and glanced at one another with understanding.

  “My own sweet darling cuddly possum,” said my mother, kissing me tenderly in many different places. “Here’s something will make you sleep.” She fished for it in the pocket of her penoir. “My grandmother told me, and her grandmother told her, and back and back we go to the days of the whispering sisters.”

  I took the thing, but not very eagerly.

  “What about the smell?” I asked.

  “That helps you to sleep,” my mother said.

  “Where do I put it?”

  “Against your skin and keep it there every night you are in the house, which I hope will be lots and lots of nights, and every night after that for a long long time.”

  “How long?” I asked. Then I wavered. “Well, approximately. How long in all?”

  “Until I ask for it back, sweety-pie. It’s only a loan. Remember it’s mine and don’t you lose it.”

  Naturally, I promised.

  •

  I suppose I was hanging about in my dear mother’s care for at least three weeks on that occasion; and, whatever the reason, I have to admit that I did not dream of Clarinda again. In fact, I did not resume dreaming about her for nearly a year, though ever since then I have done so frequently, and glad I am of it.

  Some time during the three weeks, I had a letter from a firm of solicitors. I knew about them. They were Bream & Ladywell’s solicitors. Clarinda, raised in finance and in disaster, had not omitted to make her will; and she had left me £100 and a little box from Goa, whence, as she had told me, her real family had long ago come, for all her pale hair and fragile frame. I hardly knew what to think. But not even that incident made me dream again of Clarinda; not yet awhile.

  However, there was something else that happened; something that would have given anyone a turn. Among other things, it showed how swiftly the word could get about, and not only the mere word.

  As the days passed, I had taken to strolling about the local roads and woodlands, partly because my mother said it would be good for me and I wished to please her, partly in order to think hard about what it would be best for me to do next in my life. It was November now, with snow imminent but never quite falling, and my mother wrapped me up so tightly that I could hardly have strolled at all if I had not each afternoon surreptitiously discarded the half of it in my father’s small, disused shed before I set out.

  I had to stroll alone. My mother’s friends were elderly, and of course the youth of the district were normally hard at it during my strolling hours, when they were not laid up themselves. My father liked only precise and purposeful activity, as on the Cowholt golf course, or in the Coolins. My mother could not go out for long, as my father, like many men in retirement, did not like it. Fortunately, I had no objection to strolling alone. I took it that I could think better.

  The immediate neighbourhood was made up of huge houses, in many different styles, which people could no longer afford fully to maintain, so that they were two-thirds shut up, or which had already been divided and sub-divided, or sold out to the bureaucrats. One of these, six or seven houses down the hill from Scarsdale, and on the same side of the road, was a particularly fine edifice in the Dalmatian style, or perhaps the Illyrian, which seemingly had never been occupied at any time during the short period I had known the district. The crenellations were crumbling, and the elaborate stackpipes parting from their ornamental cramps. Such desolate structures were also a common feature of the area by that time: no-one quite knew what was happening to them. The particular house I describe was named Umberslade. I see no reason why I should not impart that. Perhaps it had not been the original name.

  I had always liked to include a glimpse at Umberslade in my strolling itineraries. The building was full of suggestions as to what my future career might be. Ornamental brickwork, ironwork, and stone-work were the coming thing, if they could be marketed in small enough lots.

  On one of those afternoons during my rest cure, and for the first time ever, I heard a sound in the house. It was the sound of a piano being played, and I could hear it even though the house was set well back and none of the windows seemed to be open. At first, I thought, as one would, that it was the radio turned on by the cleaner; but what I thought next, as I stood there, was very different. I knew whose playing it was. There could be no mistake. It was as distinctive as the playing of Mark Hamburg or of Myra Hess: all three in their different ways, of course.

  The curious thing was that I did not turn aside immediately and retreat the short distance up the road to the home-made teacakes that were awaiting me. On the contrary, I entered the actual grounds of Umberslade for the first time in my life, and stole quite rapidly, though gingerly, up to the nearest groundfloor window. I had not even needed to open the heavy gate, because the heavy gate was always open; indeed, impossible to shut, almost certainly.

  The windows, more or less as in a villa by the sea at Ragusa or Fiume, were set so high in the stuccoed wall that I could not see through them without standing on a brick; but there were plenty of bricks lying about on the lawn, all dank and black. One additional trouble was that the fairly wide horizontal gratings which admitted light to the servants’ quarters below, were so cracked and rusted that I had to stand well back from them, which made interior inspection unreliable. No doubt this fact should be borne in mind. And all the time of course I could hear the unintermitting, clattering melody: the unforgettable music.

  The first room was empty. Distanced as I was, I could not even make out the decorations, let alone describe them. I moved my brick. The second room was empty. I moved my brick again, though worm-casts were now adhering to it. The third room was empty, and this time there was some kind of unpleasant mist inside. That mist upset me considerably. But I moved my brick once more, and, through the fourth window, I hit the jackpot, or relatively so.

  Now I have emphasised that it was impossible for me to see anything inside Umberslade very clearly. None the less, I am perfectly certain that there, inside that fourth room, were not merely the pianist brother, evenly hammering out the same black-and-white notes (and by God knows whom), till hell freeze or the Flying Dutchman turn up; not merely the glamorous Vera, whose hair was now quite white, sitting close behind the brother, presumably on a second stool; but also the languid husband, spattered forever against a wall, obviously with hardly a bone in his body; and, worst of all, worst at least as far as I was concerned, the shifting cloud of black female rags that might or might not have an independent existence, but that, according to the publicity, executed tricks, and that had already made me take to my heels once, to my fleetest form as a one-time amateur quarter-miler.

  Vera’s dank hair was yellow as rotted vegetation; or as far as I could make out through an uncleaned window. Perhaps the marks on the brother’s face were different too. It was hard to say. I clutched hard at the thing my mother had given me to make me sleep, and which I found I was now carrying everywhere.

  I have said that I could discern only the vaguest hints of interior fittings anywhere, but I was as sure as I could be that the Z—— family was occupying unfurnished accommodation, as always: in the strictest sense of the term. A piano could be readily hired in Suddington, and this one was a mere tinkly upright. As for friends such as themselves, it took time to find congenial people in Suddington, as the experience of my own, perfectly normal and or
dinary, flesh and blood had confirmed.

  •

  I did, to a certain extent, speak up over the teacakes.

  “Everyone says the house has been empty for years,” said my mother, “but, now you mention it, Theresa Baldock told me that there was to be an entertainment for charity. She gave me a leaflet. I’ll see if I can find it.”

  “How do you know Mrs. Baldock?” I asked rudely.

  “Only because she’s a friend of poor Mrs. Ground.”

  “Who’s Mrs. Ground?”

  “She’s a good friend of Muriel Ransome’s. Susan Halston’s friend. You remember.”

  We both paused. I myself was trying to swallow a hot teacake at a moment when my throat muscles were like metal sheets.

  My mother spoke again. “How do you know Mrs. Baldock, lamb-kin?”

  “Only charitably,” I mumbled. “And long ago.”

  “There’s no long ago for you, pet, yet awhile, and thank God for it.”

  I cleared as best I could the muscles needed for speech. “Are you thinking of being there?” I asked.

  My mother tumbled her locks. “Nowadays your father goes mad if he’s left quite alone all the evening.”

  When making such an observation to a son, a mother either looks brassy or she looks conspiratorial. My own mother looked conspiratorial. We might almost have exchanged a wink.

  “I sometimes think we’re all mad,” I said vaguely. “Everyone in the world, I mean.”

  “That shows it’s beddybyes time for you again,” said my mother, dimpling.

  “Try to finish the last two before you go up. I’ll watch quietly.”

  •

  The specific re-entry of the Z—— family into my life was far too much to be explained by coincidence. I admit that I panicked. Or not far short of it. Should I ever cast them off? Even if I became a mountaineer, like my father; or a polar explorer, like my father’s onetime friend, the captain? Neither of which had I any intention of becoming? It was a very natural question.

  What I actually did was withdraw to a certain town in our own sleepy West Country. I had answered an advertisement for a qualified auctioneer’s assistant.

  And, years later I had built up my own successful art rooms and sale galleries: not equal as yet, I admit, to Satterthwaite & Organblack, nor likely to be while Dalton Pinemould remains in control there; but far ahead (and this is the truth) of at least nine out of ten of even the better provincial establishments, and with vastly more education than most can offer at the bottom of the detailed work. It is a type of business in which education can be very advantageous, though many seem to thrive without it.

  I admit that I took to reading in a bigger way than before, and precisely because of what had happened to me. For a spell, I was not so keen as I had been on taking different women out in the evening. In any case, all the women in that particular town were identical. I know that matters very little to many men.

  I myself became more normal and ordinary again before very long. I am sure of it. Though never completely so. My business gained accordingly. My state of soul lost. It is an old story.

  In the end, I was even composing little brochures of my own; one brochure about those iron, steel, and plastic discs that hold buildings up, and that come in an amazing variety of sizes and patterns, where an investigator cares to go into the matter; another about firebricks, in all the many forms that find their way on to the market. And now comes this narrative of my own experiences at a period of my earlier life: a decisive period. I once read all the novels of Sir Walter Scott, but I doubt whether even he went to more trouble than I have.

  Ultimately, as I have stated, I began to dream about Clarinda once more; and quite often. But I never again lighted upon the Z—— family after my eavesdropping at Umberslade. Not knowingly, that is. I feel there could be other ways.

  Perhaps, however, as the Guy Fawkes man said in his address to the Club, there is a geographical circumference beyond which such as the Z—— family have no power to range. The man said that there “appeared” to be such a boundary. Very little indeed is fully known about anything, as I suppose the man tried in his own way to make clear; not even, in many cases, whether an individual is fully alive or properly dead. There are misconceptions on all hands. At the Vittoriale, I learned from M. Jullian, Paul Valéry conversed to Gabriele D’Annunzio about the “Third Place,” the state between life and death. So there it is.

  I come to London frequently, though I seldom stay for very long. I go to the Club almost every time—among other things, of course. But I doubt whether I, or anyone, will learn much more. Being neither sage nor prophet, that is. Not yet awhile.

  THE COFFIN HOUSE

  DURING the thirties Jessica Yarrow had found a publisher for no fewer than four volumes of verses, and the pleasant little parties in her studio had led to her being regarded with affection by many of the more subdued Bohemians; but now, it being 1941, she had been in the Women’s Land Army for nearly a year, and seemed to have only a single friend in the world, her resigned fellow-sufferer, Bunty Baines, daughter of a veterinary surgeon in Shropshire, and one to whom animals and the land seemed truly the order of nature. Mr. Honister, the farmer, a widower and a Methodist, worked both of them as strenuously and as systematically as he could. At Christmas, even Bunty had revolted at the sombre, elderly festivities (to which, moreover, they had barely been invited); and the two women found themselves on a long lonely walk together across the bulrush-green fells. Their land girls’ costume stood them in good stead against the heavy, ranging gusts which blew from horizon to horizon every other minute, but they had been able neither to bring much food nor to find shelter in which to eat with comfort the little they had. They had eaten as they walked; but they had started early in the hope of avoiding arguments, and once more were hungry when, shortly after half-past three, the heavy wind fulfilled its threat of heavy rain.

  Jessica had never seen such rain. “We must get out of this.”

  “Where?”

  “Look!” Jessica pointed to a small wooden cabin which stood alone and exposed on the hillside.

  The two women ran towards it, down and up the intervening fold in the hills.

  The windows were boarded up, but there were the remains of a primitive verandah. The two women pressed themselves against the black dilapidated woodwork while the rain beat at them. It was darkening all the time with the premature-seeming darkness of Christmas Day.

  Suddenly Jessica noticed that the door of the hut was open. Standing in it was a very large elderly woman with grey hair drawn back into a bun, and strong bony features. She was muffled in a vague, navy-blue wrapper, and appeared indifferent, perhaps habituated, to the weather. She was looking at the two land girls from grey commanding eyes.

  “I should come in if I were you.” She spoke in the accents of the district, but with much self-possession.

  They entered. The cabin, small though it was, appeared to be divided into at least three compartments by partitions of dark wood. The outer door led into a centre section; from which other doors opened on either side. The windows being boarded up, the tiny chamber was lighted, it was to be presumed at all times, by a single oil lamp hanging from the roof. The lamp was cheap, crude and old; its chimney grimed; its illumination wavering.

  “I should take off your coats and sit down.”

  Although the room seemed unheated, they removed their heavy waterproof. The only place to sit was on planks, unusually dark and roughly hewn, which stretched between trestles on the far side of the room. Jessica expected the planks to bow when they sat on them, but in fact they remained as firm as the trunk from which they had been cut. Jessica now perceived that the table which filled the rest of the room was a carpenter’s bench. It was deep in dust.

  “I should have some tea.”

  “We couldn’t possibly trouble you on Christmas Day,” said Jessica.

  But Bunty’s knee struck her sharply; and in any case the elderly woman had disappe
ared through the door on the right.

  “I’m dead,” said Bunty. She looked around. “Do you think she lives here permanently?”

  Jessica, faithful to the habits of a lifetime, was combing her wet hair. She found it impossible to see in her little mirror. She said nothing but “God knows.”

  “I wonder if she’s good for an egg,” continued Bunty. “I could use an egg.”

  “No hens,” said Jessica, trying to smarten her tie.

  In a moment the elderly woman was laying tea on the dusty carpenter’s bench. The cheap white china was chipped and cracked; the teapot spout jagged as a broken tooth. The genteel penny bazaar knives were serrated and rusty.

  “I should start.”

  Jessica lifted the pot to pour. Immediately she realised that it was empty. Plainly, also, there was no food of any kind. Even the sugar basin contained only a discoloured slime.

  The elderly woman was silently watching them from her grey commanding eyes.

  Jessica perceived that she could prevent them from working round the heavy carpenter’s bench and reaching the door. For a moment she thought; then she put down the teapot.

  “I’m so sorry. My friend and I both take milk.”

  The elderly woman nodded and retired.

  “Come away,” said Jessica, more softly than a mouse. “Bring your mackintosh.”

  But Bunty was tightening her belt, and this delayed them, so that before they could reach the door the woman was back. Bunty screamed sharply. The woman had discarded her navy blue wrapper and was dressed in the uniform of an old-fashioned policewoman, with tunic and long skirt. Jessica associated the costume with the previous world war.

  “I shouldn’t try any funny business.”

  She had her back to the door. In the heavy clothes she looked more massive than ever. Her voice was sharply menacing.

  “When my father passed away, his job became mine. I’m the only village policewoman in England. You didn’t know that, did you?”