Compulsory Games

by Robert Aickman

  He is never unkind, not at all, but I cannot be at ease with him. He is a total stranger. Often I do not follow what he says, and it seems to make him sad. But I am not unhappy. There is goodness everywhere, and many compensations. Thank you for writing. Please keep in contact. No more than that, under any circumstances. It seems that I am not free. Give me your solemn undertaking. Your

  ROSETTA

  The words blurred as Robin read, keeping the water out of his eyes with an old handkerchief. The letter had virtually pulped in his hands before he had finished it. Also, the act of reading takes, at the best, two or three times longer when even light rain is falling.

  Equally, Robin had no shelter in which to indite his reply, let alone to meditate. Rain was dripping from the circumference of his sou’wester. He grubbed out another form, dashed down, “I undertake. Back as usual. POSTMAN,” and plunged the damp paper into the box.

  In other circumstances, he might have essayed more warmth of expression; though, even then, “Your Postman” would surely have stuck the wrong, improperly Yuletide, note, against which he had been indirectly cautioned? At that point, Robin realised that so far there had duly been no second communication for delivery to the remote little abode.

  For that matter, the first communication was yet to be delivered. Robin supposed it to be lost. He had to acknowledge that he seemed to think of it only at the wrong moments. But, probably, non-delivery of a questionnaire made little difference to Miss Fearon or to her obscure feelings.

  The third letter, discharged the due week later, read:

  I cannot deny that sometimes it is pleasant. If only I knew more about him! I should wish to trust myself to him without reserve, but it is impossible. Do you understand what I am saying to you, Postman? Often I see him wrestling with himself. I do not understand how he came into my life. Accept these confidences, but expect no more. Surely I am committed to him? You have sworn. Your

  R.

  Now it was zephyrous weather again, and Robin gave way to impulse. “I am your true friend,” he wrote, and that alone; and he signed with the bare initial, “P.”

  The larks were chiming to the pulses in his body; the waves whispering. Everything set up a temptation to poke and pry, but Robin had his round to resume. Neither this week nor last had he any working business to be here at all, unless belatedly to deliver the original communication, which was probably gone for ever.

  Before mounting his bicycle, Robin looked at the other side of the letter. Last week, it had been impossible to look as the letter had melted in reading. Now Robin saw that there was no superscription. Whether or not this was proof of advancing intimacy was hard to say; but it is permissible always to hope while breath is with us, and breath was much with Robin that morning as he pedalled away.

  •

  Soon the days were opening out wonderfully, and Lastingham was filling with summer visitors, as Brusingham could never hope to do. There were lengthening queues outside the small public lavatory block, outside the picturesque little snack bar, beneath the LOST CHILDREN sign, all round the miniature bus station. Cars were parked right to the cliff edge, regardless of the Parish Council’s warning notice, regardless of the witness offered by the ruined church and deserted post office. Men were arguing on all sides as to which filling station was nearest; which was cheapest; which could still supply. Women were beginning to suffer and to long for home. Children raged and rampaged. The larks flew higher than ever. The waves lapped erotically.

  Robin might possibly have forgotten Rosetta Fearon. He could have taken his pick, it may be supposed, from the girls and women flat on the shingle; first, of course, discarding his uniform. He and Nelly had paid odd visits to Lastingham during bygone summers, but that was very different from seeing the sights daily. One trouble was that too many visitors were themselves there for the day only, as the Parish Council ceaselessly lamented. If a romantic relationship was to be sustained, Robin might have had constantly to travel to Stroud Green or Smethwick or Chorlton-on-Medlock. That he simply could not afford. Nor at the moment was it practicable to migrate for the rest of his life to one of those places, however ardent he might find himself. Rosetta Fearon was on the spot; even, up to a point, on his round.

  Among the loitering throng Robin began to notice a woman always in a summer dress, different each day, that made her look more beautiful, still more beautiful. Sometimes she wore a loose summer coat; often a tilted summer hat. Her hair was perfect. Her complexion was perfect, perhaps because the hat kept off the worst of the sun. Her step was swift and sparkling. Her shoes and ankles were such as Robin had never dreamed of. For example, these were not among his own mother’s assets, and it was doubtful whether they ever had been. Nelly had bicyclist’s limbs.

  No such woman as this would come to Lastingham as a visitor; not even by the week. Robin could never have supposed it. Robin thought that she was Rosetta Fearon immediately he spotted her.

  That was two days after he had received Miss Fearon’s third letter. There had always been one last claim made by the old postman and fisherman that needed to be confirmed. And now? Good old postman and fisherman! Salt of two elements in equal parts! It was sad that according to Mrs. Truslove, the poor old chap was now suffering from urticaria as well. She wondered what would happen to him, all alone.

  Robin made no attempt to draw close. That would have been to challenge fate, to upset made arrangements. Furthermore, he would have had to be quick, even though the crowd might well have made a passage for the postman. But he was able to see that the woman, often or always, was carrying what might have been an elegant, foreign bag in which, presumably, to place purchases. Like any other woman, she was shopping, forever shopping. No further explanation of what she was doing was really needed. Sometimes he glimpsed the lovely vision at least twice in a single day—and not within ten or twenty minutes, but at wide intervals, sometimes when he was still delivering, sometimes during an approved rest period. The woman wore long gloves, stretching up casually over her wrists, or over the sleeves of her slim dress, different every day. Always she seemed about to smile.

  •

  Bicycling round the unadopted roads was hot work as the sun began to burst itself; and the trouble was that no winter satchel would contain the rigmarole demanded by the weekly visitors: cans of babyfood, flasks of anti-diuretic, grandma’s Botticelli wig in tissue paper, picture postcards by the bushel each day of identical places in interchangeable weather. If all the daily visitors had become weekly visitors as the Parish Council wished, then acting supplementary postmen or post-women would have been unavoidable, and perhaps a motor scooter. More likely would have been the dreaded transfer of delivery and dispatch to that unpredictable distance. Frequently removing his cap for a moment or two, Robin toiled on, staving off the inevitable.

  When for the fourth time he leaned his machine against Miss Fearon’s boundary, he saw that all the buds were proclaiming and all the thorns mobilised. He ventured to lay his cap on the hedge top, and the pencil within it.

  He mopped at his face and his neck with one hand, and held Miss Fearon’s letter in the other.

  He is behaving more and more weirdly. Though it may not be weird at all for those who have the key, which I have not. I feel that he would like to confine me here. Even when I wash my hair, there is challenge. And yet he is always so kind, so gentle to me. I may have to make an appeal. Ask no more of me at this moment. Your own

  R.

  And the initial was followed by what Robin could only take to be a kiss; a single kiss; a very tiny St. Andrew’s Cross. By then, Robin was almost fainting from the heat.

  Certainly he was staggering as he stumped back up the cracked path to the sinking gate. Certainly he sank upon his back as if the stony road outside had been the shingly beach below. Certainly he lost all count of time, all sense of eyes peeping through bargain binoculars from the middle distance, all recollection of hearts that hated him for having received an actual paper kiss from gor
geous Miss Fearon.

  Strenuously, Robin tried to integrate himself and his thoughts. He swallowed a couple of the quick-revival pills with which his father kept his family always supplied, and constantly had recourse to himself. Robin put the big summer postage sack, fabricated by reluctant convicts, under his burning head. It seemed to him that the main definable development or advance in the correspondence had been in the expression of regard for him, the postman. What development could be more to the point? In the end, Robin managed to extract one of the usual forms from his overheated pocket. For the burning of boats this was precisely the weather. Robin rose to get his official pencil. Then he sat again in the bad thoroughfare and simply wrote: “I shall answer your appeal. I ask nothing more. POSTMAN.” It was a moment for the word in full.

  He thought for a long time, back and forth; sometimes even sucking the official pencil. Then he subscribed not one St. Andrew’s kiss, but two. He might as well be hanged not for filching a single postal order but for seizing the entire General Post Office, as in Ireland. Robin almost ran to deliver the note. Now that the decision was made, his step would be light for a whole hour or two hours. He would hardly notice the heat. He would breathe like a young boy.

  The larks had ascended so high that they were inaudible. The sea was so unnaturally flat that no wave broke anywhere. Holidays were to dream of; in retrospect as in advance. The one chimney still emitted faintly viridian smoke.

  •

  Two days later, with the lovely woman floating about everywhere, like a blue bird, a parcel turned up at the temporary post office addressed to “Miss Rosetta Fearon, Lastingham,” and no more.

  “If it’s too heavy, wait till tomorrow, dear,” suggested kindly Mrs. Truslove.

  “I’ll manage,” responded Robin, as if he had been the postman in a publicity film.

  He had spoken before lifting the parcel.

  “What do you think’s in it?”

  “Something on appro. You’re lucky it’s not C.O.D.”

  Robin toiled out into the heat with the heavy summer bag and the heavy parcel, the heaviest parcel he had yet struggled with. In more advanced places, there was of course a different postman for the parcels. Robin found it difficult to keep his burdened bicycle on course. The heat had been doing something to the tyres.

  In order to unload the parcel as swiftly as possible, Robin rode past a number of structures at which he should have stopped. So to proceed might be in the interests of good and imaginative personal organisation, but he left a series of disappointed and weeping children; at least temporarily.

  If there had ever been a bell at or in Miss Fearon’s front door, it had been taken out or boarded up. The letter-box flap was so hung that it would not rattle properly, though Robin tried several different methods. He was reduced to thumping on the door itself, like the police in a film. He still hesitated to thump loudly. The nearest neighbour was not more than a third of a mile away.

  Fortunately, there was no need. Robin could hear steps.

  He tore off his cap. Postmen were not supposed to do this, but not every postman had to confront lovely Miss Fearon for the first time, or for the first time acknowledged; and in so remote a place. Robin just had time to pick the pencil off the ground and hide it in his shirt.

  The door opened, and it was no Miss Fearon who stood there, but a man in old checked shirt and dirty trousers, like any other Englishman.

  “Parcel,” said Robin.

  He got the word out, as the regulation prescribes, but was so taken aback that he omitted to lift the package from the step.

  The man was under no obligation to lift it for him. “What’s in it?” he asked, with extraordinary suspicion. He was a suspicious-looking man, at best: brown-whiskered, small-eyed, unfeatured.

  “It’s on appro.,” said Robin.

  “Don’t know about that,” said the man.

  “It’s very heavy,” said Robin, volunteering a trifle more, though under no requirement to do so. Correspondents must accept or refuse items as they are delivered. The right of refusal may soon be withdrawn. It goes back to the days before the penny post.

  “So what?” enquired the man suspiciously.

  Things were approaching a deadlock. Robin had learned by now that this sometimes happens, but in the present case he could have cried from disappointment. However, a lifeline was thrown to him; whether frail or stout was difficult to say.

  A woman’s voice spoke from within the abode: a most musical voice, Robin thought, though he really knew little about music, and though the voice uttered merely a monosyllable.

  “Paul!”

  “All right,” said the man irritably, and without turning towards the loveliness within, or ceasing to glare at poor Robin.

  “I don’t want it,” said the man, and gave the parcel a heavy kick. It came to Robin at once that this might be a dangerous thing to do, when neither of them apparently knew what the parcel contained; dangerous and silly.

  “It’s not addressed to you,” Robin pointed out; whether or not so required.

  “Paul!” cried the musical voice from within. Robin was almost certain that it came from nearer. In seconds, something most unexpected might happen.

  Robin put his hand on the door. Now might be his moment; possibly his finest hour as yet.

  “You can keep the —— thing,” bawled the brown-whiskered man.

  Robin could see that both the man’s eyes were bloodshot. Living in the country he had never before seen such eyes. He continued to lean his slightly extended arm against the open door, though as unobtrusively as possible.

  “Paul!” cried the musical voice; nearer still, as Robin would have sworn.

  “—— you, postman,” bellowed the man. At the same time, he struck down Robin’s right arm with a blow as from a crossbar, and stamped on his left foot with a heavy boot that might very well have been soled in iron. It was as if Robin had “put his foot in the door” like a travelling salesman; which postmen are bade never to do in any circumstances whatever. The door was shut with a slam that should have torn a door like that from its hinges, and must certainly have travelled that third of a mile on such a still day as every day now was.

  Robin, injured in two places, was left with the heavy and enigmatic parcel. He half hoped, half feared that the door would open again, but it did not. There was the total silence within the house that by now he could almost describe as usual. Vulnerable though his position was, he was too upset to move for what seemed to him a long time.

  Then, something really strange happened. Robin, without thinking, put his hand into one of his jacket pockets, and, from among all the official forms and other documents, drew forth the communication from the Rating Authority that he should have delivered to this very house weeks ago! He reflected that he must have been looking unconsciously for his pencil.

  It was time for Robin to pull himself together. He rose to his knees, and, in the kneeling position, but the questionnaire timidly into the box.

  As he did so, the usual letter fluttered out, though nothing like a week had passed since the last one.

  This time, Robin was seated on the actual step as he read.

  I lie crushed beneath his weight, and I ask Who is he? Nothing he does for me reconciles me. Postman, I have this to say: there is no lasting happiness anywhere. Your true

  R.

  And Robin’s two kisses had been exchanged for two others. He noted particularly that for the first time no assurance had been sought from him. None at all. Either his word had been accepted, or, by implication, his past promises were now waived. As in the matter of his career, he was left free himself to decide for the best.

  How had the man, Paul, not seen the replies that the postman had already made, and had delivered unsealed? How had such a man left unslain the musical-voiced woman, if he had seen them? How, living with such a man, and, as she claimed, knowing almost nothing about him, had the musical-voiced woman the courage to continue such a correspondenc
e with a postman she could only have examined, if at all, through some crevice? The most likely explanation came to Robin even as he stood there. It was simply that such a man might not be able to read; and probably not.

  Robin managed to drag another of the familiar forms from his pocket, together with the familiar pencil. “Live with me instead,” he wrote. At the moment, his injured arm hardly permitted him to write more. He mused about the signature. He returned to “P.” That seemed best; and with a single, almost austere, little cross. The completed form followed the municipal missive into the house.

  Robin resumed his cap and limped to the gate. He left the parcel on the step. That was often done, in the absence of an alternative. Robin might bicycle back later in order to see if anything had happened to it.

  Where were the larks now? What the waves?

  •

  On his way home that evening, Robin diverged (a fair distance, too) in order to look. As far as he could see, certainly as far as his duty went, the parcel had been “taken in.” He fancied that the normal thieving hypothesis hardly arose here. The little house might be kept under observation from afar, let alone the fabulous occupant; but there were no callers other than the postman, no visitors. That simple probability explained in itself several aspects of what had happened. However, the greenish smoke could this evening hardly be seen. Swarming gnats would have tinged the air more noticeably.

  Very soon, Rosetta Fearon might be emerging, quite differently arrayed, to gather peat.

  Robin decided that it would be both unwise and impracticable to take a chance on it.

  •

  Robin had been keeping the three surviving letters in a red betel nut box which his Uncle Alexander had brought back from the East as a young man and had given to Robin on Robin’s thirteenth birthday.

  Uncle Alexander lived in retirement at Trimingham. His continuing contribution to life was a ceaseless lament for Trimingham railway station, and for the entire M. and G.N. network that once served the region so sparklingly. He spoke always of the bright yellow rolling stock, immaculate time-keeping, and totally painless fares. Uncle Alexander had hardly left the house since the line closed, but cronies of his own generation came to see him almost every evening for negus and talk about the past. Two of them had worked in the M. and G.N. yard at Melton Constable; two others in the timetable department; one old fellow on the track itself, in and around the Aylsham area.