The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories

by Robert Aickman

  “I suppose most of us are vulnerable somewhere if only people knew.”

  “No doubt,” said Enright. “But in my case it was my wife. She simply went to them and told them.”

  “It’s hardly my business, but in that case it would seem to be a good thing she’s left.”

  “On the contrary, my dear fellow,” said Enright, suddenly sitting down beside me. “On the contrary, I am simply not alive without her. Now do let me get you another drink, and we’ll talk about something more interesting.”

  I agreed, accepting a whisky neat, though only a small one. Enright now seemed easier in his mind. We talked of local electricity. I was once more impressed by his approach to the subject. He entirely avoided the usual procedure of talking about how to do it before knowing whether or not it was to be done at all. He spent no time, as most of them did, on trying to impress me with how important it was to do things parliamentary in exactly the right way, treading on no toes, rolling the pitch, and so forth. After half an hour, and a third small whisky, I began to think that soon he would be speaking of such down-­to-­earth techniques as bribery and battery.

  “You will stay and have something to eat?” asked Enright abruptly, breaking off a list we were making of Members of Parliament whom he considered to be in his debt for past favors of one kind or another.

  “Would that really be all right?”

  “Of course it would. I’ll dig out my mother and introduce you. Help yourself to some more whisky.”

  Whisky is not a favorite drink of mine, but I thought I had better show willing.

  In a moment, Enright came charging through the door.

  “Curse it. I’ve got to go and vote. I didn’t realize it was so late. But I’ll be back soon, and then we’ll eat. Here’s Mother.” He dashed away.

  Mrs. Enright was a thin, gray lady: her hair, her eyes, her expression, her face, even the dressing gown she was wearing were gray.

  “How do you do, Mr. Grover-­Stacey,” she said in a gray voice. “Please forgive my dressing gown. I always spend the evening lying down before preparing Walter’s supper. He usually comes in for it after the ten o’clock division, you know, and late hours make me so tired.”

  “In that case, Mrs. Enright, I am sure I should go. I shall be perfectly all right and I really must not trespass on your kindness. My wife will run me up something.”

  “Not at all, Mr. Grover-­Stacey. I am certain that Walter would never forgive me. So few people come here nowadays, and then only constituents. Such terrible creatures. You are more fortunate than Walter in having a wife. Do please sit down and tell me about her.”

  “Really there’s nothing much to tell.”

  I subsided reluctantly and swilled off the remains of the fourth whisky.

  “My poor son’s domestic life has brought him nothing but sadness. Such sadness.” Her voice was shaking like pampas grass.

  “I can’t pretend I don’t know something about it,” I replied, “because your son has just been telling me.”

  “Everyone knows about it by now,” said Mrs. Enright. “She was nothing but a common harlot.”

  It was obviously embarrassing, but it would have been inhuman not to be curious.

  “From what your son was saying, it seems particularly terrible about the children.”

  “It is beyond even the forgiveness of God,” said Mrs. Enright in her tired, gray voice.

  “Surely these cases are not matters for forgiveness exactly?”

  “I just said that forgiveness was impossible. Unthinkable.”

  Of course it was not what I meant. But there was one thing I particularly wanted to know.

  “Tell me, if you think you should, where are the children? Where are they now?”

  Mrs. Enright said nothing but merely jabbed sideways with her gray thumb toward the wall behind where I sat. It seemed an unusually large, bony thumb, but that was probably because the whole visit was beginning to get on my nerves.

  “You mean they’re in the next room?”

  Mrs. Enright nodded with careful gravity. The way in which she did it slightly irritated me.

  “I can’t hear anything,” I said.

  “They have to be put to sleep for most of the time. My son couldn’t possibly do his duty as a Member of Parliament if they weren’t. Have you children of your own, Mr. Grover-­Stacey?”

  “Yes, I have. Twin girls.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Seven last month.”

  “Don’t you find them destructive, Mr. Grover-­Stacey?”

  “No more than other children.”

  “Very likely not. Most children are the same. It is often difficult to distinguish. But Walter’s children are really different. When you go into the bathroom to wash your hands, you will see. And it’s the same in many other places. It is going to be difficult if ever we have to leave the flat.”

  I think I can only have stared at her because she spoke again.

  “Go and look for yourself.”

  The room we were in was entered by a door at the end of a longish passage, as often in flats of that period; the front door being opposite it at the passage’s other end. Leading off one side of the passage were a number of other doors. Mrs. Enright got up and, opening the door of the sitting room, stood pointing to one of the green doors along the passage. I went to look.

  It was too absurd, especially as the room really was the bathroom. I opened the door with considerable caution, expecting some frightful chaos, but really there was little unusual to be seen. At first, indeed, when I had switched on the light, I thought there was nothing, and the idea was passing through my mind that both Enright and his mother were a little queer, when I saw some odd marks round the window. It was a single square sheet of glass, hinged at the top, and opening onto a well. Round the edge were scratches in the paint work. As I have said, they were not very noticeable, but, when examined, they proved to be surprisingly deep. They crisscrossed one another irregularly, as if made with perhaps a sharply pointed file. They were possibly a quarter of an inch wide, and the most remarkable thing, it suddenly struck me, was that they went all round the window. It was as if some small, flying, clawed thing had been scratching to get out. I am sure that many other explanations were possible, but that one was so real to me that I could almost hear the thing buzzing as it came and went, battering and scraping. Or even, possibly, things.

  “Now you believe it.”

  Mrs. Enright stood in the doorway behind me. I realized that the window was quite high in the wall, and that I had been standing on the edge of the bath in order to examine it closely enough. I descended without dignity.

  “It hardly amounts to wrecking the flat,” I said soberly.

  “They did that in under a minute. Under two minutes, anyway.”

  We seemed to be returning to the untidy sitting room.

  “How did it happen?”

  “She let them out in order to upset my son. We had to use all kinds of things to get them back in again: the bag in which my son’s special post arrives, old army blankets, worn-­out mackintoshes, things like that. We had the most frightful time, and she just stood there screaming with laughter and scarcely half-­dressed.”

  At this point I should perhaps mention that I wrote down the main heads of this conversation that same evening. I happen always to keep a fairly careful diary. In fact, that night, I wrote it up not very long after the time I have now reached.

  I was then deciding that I could not stand the Enright flat much longer.

  “Tell me, Mrs. Enright,” I said, “why are you saying all these things to me?”

  We were standing opposite one another, somehow unable to resume our seats. She looked away.

  “I am not sure that I know, Mr. Grover-­Stacey. Please forgive me if I am embarrassing you.”

  “If I can’t help in any way, I’m sure I had better go. Your son may be a long time coming back.”

  “He seems to have to stay later an
d later. All night quite often.”

  “Yes, I read about it in the papers, and sometimes hear about it too, from other Members of Parliament”

  “Then you know some other Members of Parliament?”

  “Lots of them.”

  “I believe they used to come here often, many of them, when she was here. I fear it seems not to have been my son they came to see, because none of them come now. Though, of course, a Member of Parliament who is the subject of a scandal, as my son is, however undeserved, becomes a leper, an untouchable.”

  We were still on our feet, but I found it difficult quite to conclude the conversation.

  “Oh, surely not as bad as that. Indeed, your son was telling me that he had thought of resigning but had actually been stopped by his friends.”

  Mrs. Enright smiled; a gray smile, needless to say.

  “They think it better to keep their claws in him than let him get away scot-­free.”

  Circumstances made her metaphor peculiarly unpleasant.

  “I am going,” I said with conviction. “I suppose it would only be ironical to say that I hope things turn out better than you and your son may think. I am so sorry.”

  “Of course,” said Mrs. Enright, delaying me, “of course she was beautiful.”

  “I imagine she must have been.”

  “One of the papers said she was the most beautiful of all the Members of Parliament’s wives.”

  I in my turn smiled. Not that there are not one or two M.P.s who have beautiful wives.

  “It became quite the accepted idea.”

  “Forgive me. I haven’t even told them at home that I should be so late back.”

  “Look.” Mrs. Enright went over to the mantel above the electric heater and began to fish about behind the invitation cards to embassies, business promotions, and voluntary societies that descend continuously upon all Members of Parliament. “Just look.”

  In her hands was a thick tress of very fair hair. She held it, short of the two ends, between the thumb and first finger of her hands; then moved the hands outwards, until the tress was fully extended. It was about two feet long but seemed as fat as the cable of a liner.

  “People said they were like two angels when they were married. Owing to them both having such fair hair and blue eyes. They were married in the Crypt, of course. You can see the sheen now.”

  As a matter of fact, I thought I could, even in the artificial light. It was as if the all but silver hair were phosphorescent. It gleamed like a nimbus.

  “Hold it in your hands.”

  It surely was fascinating. I took the hair and held it as Mrs. Enright had held it. I then looked at the two ends, just for something to do with it, while Mrs. Enright watched me. At one end of the tress, the separate hairs passed away into infinity, as hairs do. At the other end, I could not but notice some very unpleasant brown marks. It would be a great exaggeration to speak of matting with blood, but blood I was sure it was and quite a bit of it.

  I laid down the tress on the huge gray sofa. The hair was so heavy that even now it seemed to cling or stick together just as it had been last cut and, I think the word is, set.

  I said a firm and final farewell to Mrs. Enright and fled.

  I must admit that when I got home, Virginia did not believe a word of all this. I do not mean that she was vulgarly suspicious of where I had been. She knew quite well that I was incapable of deceiving her in that sort of way. I mean that she accepted my sincerity but was sceptical herself.

  “Do I gather,” she asked, plunging a tablespoon into the remaining sector of sponge, “that the young woman is now to be regarded as alive or dead?” Virginia picked up that way of speech at a university, where she did much better than I could ever have done.

  “Alive, surely,” I replied, dissociating a sultana from the general alluvium. “Enright said that the separation was only temporary. He could hardly have been more emphatic in the way he spoke. I can well believe that it’s not true, but it does seem to mean that she’s still alive.” But the brown sultana spot in the yellow trifle made one wonder all the same.

  “It would be interesting to hear her side of the story,” said Virginia, kissing the lobe of my left ear.

  A few minutes later, she went off to bed with a thick paperback, and I wrote it all down in my diary, as I have described.

  Enright did telephone me the next morning in order to apologize for depriving me of my supper, as he put it (“You should have insisted,” he said), but the next weeks of my association with him were entirely parliamentary. Biggles was, none too constitutionally, propelled out of the committee chairmanship, and Enright installed. Most of the other committee members, as usually happens, had just faded away without specifically withdrawing. Enright found replacements, who seemed much keener, brisker, and neater than their predecessors—at least for the first month or two. He also found a new committee secretary: a young furniture dealer from the suburbs, whose first Parliament this was. His name was Barker. He was incredibly clean-­limbed at all hours, and he had learned to stumble and stutter fashionably as he spoke. His gusto for local electricity seemed to be almost unsurpassable. Bessemer, however, did not take to him. I think he found him too optimistic.

  At the peak of our effort (in this phase), we got down four Questions in the Commons and six in the Lords. My diary contains the pasted-­in Hansard records of all of them and of what happened to them. I was so keen at this time that I bought Hansard for myself on the days in question to supplement the copy supplied on annual subscription to the general office, and there put to store in the dark basement, by arrangement with the antiwrestling group which leased the ground floor.

  At the very climax, Enright got us an adjournment debate, which I attended. It came on at just after 1 a.m., which was considered quite early for such nongovernment business, and it continued for more than forty minutes. There were eleven people in the public gallery besides myself, more or less equally divided between representatives of interests liable to be damaged by local electricity and the usual pathetic figures with nowhere else to go. On the floor of the House, there were as many as nine M.P.s who were not actually compelled to be there. To the infrequent attender at Westminster, this may seem a small number, but it is above average for such an occasion and proved that Enright had done quite well for us. Enright spoke first and was truly eloquent, describing in broad terms what local electricity could do for England’s future and not omitting reference to his own constituency. Barker followed him but was compelled by the conventions of the rules (I forget which) to speak for so short a time that he could not be expected to contribute anything very definite. Most of the debate was occupied, as often, by the parliamentary secretary, who applied much of his speech to reading extracts from the previous official utterance on our subject, made before the war, and expanding widely on the theme of how times had changed so much since then that comparisons were difficult and almost certainly dangerous. The debate was concluded unexpectedly (and yet not, when one has gathered experience of these occasions) by an interloper: a radiantly bald honorable and gallant who informed the house in some detail of the experiments in the generation of electricity which he and his friends, all, alas, killed in one or other of the wars, had started in the early 1900s. The experiments had never been brought to a conclusion. Might not this be the moment? Rather, of course, than a lot of airy-­fairy stuff (though the honorable and gallant did not wish to be offensive) about streams and ditches. They had used streams and ditches for something else when he was a boy. Laughter—though one rather wondered at what.

  We all know how it goes when one really cares about anything, and I must agree that neither the outburst of parliamentary questions nor the adjournment debate suggest anything in Enright that was exceptional. At this point, however, he began to change. I noticed it first in the central lobby.

  The central lobby, as it is called, of the Houses of Parliament is about the last place in London really to recall Hogarth. Sights of such a
stonishment are to be seen, and so many of them, that one might almost be said to learn more by just sitting there solitary, looking and listening, than from supposedly more intimate converse with the residential owls and badgers. In my time, there was still that peeress, since consumed by fire in a foreign casino, who was taken to be in quest of justice but who was really in quest of girls, simply girls; and that all but daily, in and around the central lobby. There was Old R. (everyone called him Old) who came in ever-­new disguises to hand out pamphlets demanding the impeachment of the income tax and who had been thrown out by the police more often than anyone else, and always by a whole posse, as he knew how to thrash about. There were the vendors of parfaits and macaroons—almost all war veterans, limping, torn, half-­mad. There were the bishops in the white lawn of God, bowed down by six-­pound crucifixes. There was the daily Speaker’s­ procession with chaplain and headsman, for which bells toll, and all, upon police order, fall motionless and silent. There were the call girls, often working in the typing pool or the snack bar. There were the fashionables in hats, angling for tea on the terrace, for that at least, and often displaying their charms, as it is called, more abundantly than in any other place I for one have ever got to. Traditionally, they have causes to advance, though I found it hard to believe that they or anyone else made much progress with anything serious. No matter: they are the flowers of Parliament, and the compost makes them bloom more red.

  And, of course, there are the divine victims themselves. When I was there, Attlee still stole around, distinguishable from Lenin only by the lesser efflorescence of whisker; you could see Cripps, rigidified into near-­sainthood by psychosomatic illness; Shawcross, handsome as the morning. There were the philanderers on the right, the homosexuals on the left (Parliamentary privilege came in here, to judge by the things one saw), and the alcoholics everywhere (and no wonder). There were also the incorruptibles, bearing each his or her thumbscrew and rack; and the nobles, electorally free men, turning to the south from the central lobby, where the conscripts turn to the north.