The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories

by Robert Aickman

  Mrs. Iblis felt none too helpful. “You should have put something on.”

  “Yes. I suppose I should.” Mavis vaguely clasped her pajamas about her.

  “Have my dressing gown?”

  “Thank you.” Rather halfheartedly, she donned it. “Forgive my coming to you. Mrs. Coner’s right out.”

  “Out?”

  “Stuff she takes to make her sleep. She’s never compos mentis till midday.”

  “What about the other guests? Not that I don’t want to help,” Mrs. Iblis added. Still, she did feel that this was the last straw.

  “That’s just it. They’re not in their rooms. I’m frightened,” repeated Mavis. “It’s bloody awful.”

  Mrs. Iblis was now sitting up in bed and herself feeling none too warm. “Tell me exactly what’s the matter.”

  “There’s a queer light.” Mavis crossed to the window and slightly drew back one of the curtains. “Look!”

  “It’s the moon.”

  “There’s no moon.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We compost the garden. You need to know for that. It’s left to me, like most other things. I do know.”

  “Do you think it’s a fire?”

  “No.” Mavis further withdrew the curtain. “Do you?”

  A white radiance filled the air.

  “It was beginning when I went to bed. I thought it was the moon. Are you quite sure?”

  “Quite sure. It comes from the other side of the house.”

  “Searchlights?”

  “It’s not in beams. It’s everywhere.”

  Mrs. Iblis felt no particular eagerness to leave her bed and investigate further.

  “Have you looked on the other side of the house?”

  “No. I wanted some moral support. Things go on here, you know.” Mavis looked around the room so as to seem in part to localize her reference in a way which Mrs. Iblis found rather unpleasant. “I went to Ruth’s room and it was empty. Then I went to several other rooms. They are all empty.”

  “So then you thought of Sister Nuper?”

  “No. I thought of you. Will you come down with me?”

  “Yes, of course, if you wish it.” Mrs. Iblis got out of bed. “But why do we have to go down? Is that the first thing?”

  “They’re all in the hall. I can hear them.”

  Mrs. Iblis was reduced to putting on her overcoat. “Well now, let’s see.”

  In what was precisely a half-­light, the house did seem to Mrs. Iblis somewhat eerie. A life-­sized figure of Buddha stood on the half landing, serenely menacing.

  Through the thick brown curtains below and up the stairwell ascended a wavering hubbub. Then, just as Mrs. Iblis and her companion reached the bottom, a woman screamed sharply. She controlled herself almost at once.

  The scene in the hall was certainly the strangest Mrs. Iblis had yet seen. The entire Forum (or so it seemed) were packed in, like refugees from some catastrophe. All appeared to be in their nightclothes, and there were the usual contrasts, comic and revealing. Professor Borgia’s friend, the rotund young man, Mrs. Iblis noticed, was wearing a rich Oriental dressing gown. The leader of the New Vision Movement was wearing a nightshirt. Mrs. Iblis looked at once for Coner but could not see him.

  In the poor light the throng appeared all to be gazing at the front door. They were now quite silent. Ruth, in the loose sweater and trousers she had worn by day, was elbowing her way forward, her face like that of St. Joan en route to the stake. Mrs. Iblis realized that she was going to open the door and deduced that someone had screamed when Ruth had made clear this intention.

  All their faces were wrung in a conflict between a dreadful curiosity and the instinct to flee. A grim figure of the Kingsley Martin type collapsed upon his knees and, sinking his tortured face in his hands, began to pray. The rotund young man glanced at him and smiled faintly. A tall woman in an ulsterlike garment began to emit crooning sounds. Her face was stony with dread. Mrs. Iblis suspected that it had been she who had screamed.

  Ruth had now struggled through to the door. With a final self-dedicatory gesture she lugged it open.

  The strange luminosity fell upon her martyr’s face. The doorway was filled with light. Behind could be seen a huge luminous shape. The light filled this shape and seemed to go towering upwards. The shape recalled in Mrs. Iblis’s mind some common quotation: something about the feet of the gods on the mountains.

  The Forum began to creep out into the garden, silently like snails under the moon.

  “Come away,” said a voice quietly to Mrs. Iblis. “Come upstairs.” Mr. Stillman, in white silk pajamas and a black dressing gown, had gently touched her arm. He still carried a copy of the Jewish Monthly, his finger between the pages. Round his neck was a scarf with the colors of some good club.

  Mrs. Iblis glanced at Mavis.

  “You come too,” said Mr. Stillman.

  “I wonder what’s become of Mr. Coner?”

  “He’s in good hands,” said Mr. Stillman; and Mavis seemed willing to leave it at that.

  The trio ascended to the first floor. There Mrs. Iblis had expected them to stop. But Mr. Stillman said: “We’re going on the roof.”

  They went up two more stories; then by a Slingsby ladder to the roof, which Coner had laid out for sunbathing and deck games. Inflatable rubber objects lay about, once bright and crude, now discolored. Every now and then one stumbled over a quoit. The house was L-­shaped, so that, by looking over the rail, Mrs. Iblis could see the Forum still issuing slowly from the front door. The light kept burning all night in Mrs. Coner’s bedroom could also be seen.

  Once outside, members of the Forum seemed to lose initiative and to accumulate in a mass against the wall of the house. The entire atmosphere was filled with the strange light, but Mrs. Iblis began to realize that the light nonetheless had a distinct source, a source independent of the general air. It was like the concentration and narrowing of the perceptions which often follow emergence from an anesthetic. The cause of the confusion was simply the vastness of the source. Up here it looked as if the air was alight: but in fact it was a vast shining figure which filled the entire visible earth and sky. As each member of the Forum realized this fact, he or she drew back into the company of the other members against the wall.

  Although the members of the Forum might have been frightened, Mrs. Iblis found the scale of the occurrence simply too large for fright. She quite consciously rehearsed this fact over to herself in her mind. Mavis, however, was shaking more than ever and looked about to faint. Mrs. Iblis drew forward a striped deck chair and seated Mavis upon it, whispering some comforting words to her. She noticed that the strange light drew all the strong color from Mavis’s pajamas. Mr. Stillman was looking on at these particular workings of the universe with apparently complete equipoise. The paper in his hand might have been a program of events.

  The light suddenly increased around and upon the Forum huddled against the wall to the left of the front door. It was as if an immense spotlight picked out a group of the opposition about to be laid low with machine-­gun fire. But in fact it was that the vast figure was looking downwards from the empyrean.

  Mr. Stillman had placed his forearms on the railing round the roof. Mavis had sunk her head between her knees. It was only Mrs. Iblis who looked upwards, and what she saw nearly finished her.

  When Mrs. Iblis came round, the radiance in the air was much diminished. Mavis and Mr. Stillman had lifted her into Mavis’s deck chair. It was cold.

  Mrs. Iblis peered through the railings. There was no one in sight. Only the light in Mrs. Coner’s bedroom burned reddish through the glimmer.

  “Where are they?”

  “They have merged,” said Mr. Stillman. “They are at one.” He was rubbing her left wrist. Mavis, now apparently much recovered, was rubbing her right.

  “Where have they gone to?”

  Mavis made a slight gesture away from the house. “We shan’t see them any more.”


  Mrs. Iblis hardly dared to follow with her eyes. Then she saw that the radiance had entirely faded. It was a starry, moonless night without a cloud in the sky.

  “I no longer feel frightened.”

  “Nor I,” said Mavis. “Only cold. Why don’t we?”

  “Why should you?” said Mr. Stillman. “They’ve got what they wanted. As everyone does.” He retied the cord of his dressing gown. “Shall we go down?” He led the way.

  “I must look for Mr. Coner,” said Mavis as they descended. Mrs. Iblis realized that she had not noticed her host among the group in the garden.

  They found him sitting in the empty hall. He was drunk and still drinking. The key of his private spirit store was gripped tightly in his hand. The hall looked as if recently swept by a cyclone.

  Mr. Stillman shut the open front door.

  “Please God,” said Coner in weak and sozzled accents, “please God give me something larger than myself.”

  He dropped into stupor, knocking a full glass to the floor. The disordered room began to reek of whiskey.

  “Let me give you a hand,” said Mr. Stillman to Mavis. They began to ease Coner toward the lift. “I think you’d better get some sleep,” said Mr. Stillman to Mrs. Iblis. “Good night. See you in the morning.” Mavis merely smiled at her.

  Just as the cortège had passed through the brown curtains, the front door burst open once more. It was Sister Nuper and her friends. Their clothes seemed much damaged and covered with mud. It was as if they had been riding to hounds. But they all seemed as cheerful and gay as ever.

  Mrs. Iblis had withdrawn into the shadows. She rather gathered that the revelers were contemplating final drinks.

  Sister Nuper, graceful even in fatigue, dropped into the armchair just vacated by her employer. The bad light fell upon her beautiful features. Her face was glistening in a way Mrs. Iblis did not like. Her eyes were filled with such happiness that Mrs. Iblis was thoroughly scared all over again.

  Unnoticed by the group of companions, Mrs. Iblis slipped away. Rather than pass what was left of the night with such a happy woman, she hastened to that room with the painted Crucifixion in it, she stuffed her possessions into her suitcase, and she left the house by a window at the back which had been carelessly left open by the hired staff.

  A ROMAN QUESTION

  It was that cursed and special boredom of middle married life that made us go to the so-called conference at all. In the early period, you spend most of your time desperately struggling (working, a serious-minded friend of mine calls it) to accommodate to one another—if you are both people of goodwill, that is, which Marguerite and I most certainly were, and are. In the final period, you are both too sunk for anything really to matter, except trivialities like food, drink, and shelter. It is in the long middle years that the feeling of all-round frustration is consciously dominant. Anything that either of you really wants to do seems spoilt even to think about by the fact that the other has to do it with you; and by the fact that the other cannot possibly be held to blame, except at moments of really complete unreason. You sink together, yet apart, into tighter and tighter quicksands, while your faces grow blanker and blanker, and your children either struggle to get away (ours were at boarding-school), or make no attempt to get away at all. But I find that I never like the middle period of anything. I start things rather too easily, and find that I grow quite cheerful when the end comes into sight. Middles are dead nothings.

  The so-called conference was one of the things I entered upon too easily, dragging Marguerite with me. Our circle included a woman artist named Neptuna Adams. She drove forward along the borderline between commercial art and real art, and therefore did quite well financially, especially as, throughout the world, the two regions came more and more to overlap. She was a square, flat woman, who had had three separate husbands, none of whom ever married again, and all of whom dropped in to see Neptuna at frequent intervals, sometimes, by chance, two at a time. She was not the kind of artist non-specialists would hear of, but, as I say, she did pretty well for herself, and she also had a kind and open heart, quite open enough to know people like Marguerite and me, who could neither talk constructively about Jackson Pollock, nor bring forward friends who might commission decorating jobs in branches of banks.

  Neptuna was a committee member of a society of business artists. One evening, after dinner in her studio (always a good square meal), she pressed us very strongly to come with her to the society’s forthcoming conference in Birmingham. It was the first such event, she explained, though the society had now been in existence for almost seven years, so that she was under a considerable obligation to contribute to its success. She would drive us up in her car (a huge, thirty-year-old Daimler), and arrange for our accommodation. It would cost only a few pounds for each of us, as there was substantial aid both from the rates and from the Ministry of Education, Rawley, her second husband, would be coming too, as her assistant; and perhaps one or two others. I cannot say that I was really eager to go. Possibly I was more eager just to please. Marguerite, when we discussed it that night, said she was sure I should not like it; implying that, therefore, she would not like it either. It was true enough, as a segment of the total problem, but on that basis we should never have done anything; so away we went.

  We were greatly delayed on the journey by a wheel coming off the car as we descended the hill between Banbury and Warwick on the A41. Neither Rawley nor I were very quick at repairs, and the third man, whom Neptuna had dragged in at the last moment, never seriously offered to help at all, but sat hugging his girl-friend in a corner of the back seat while we worked.

  It would be absurd to say that the time thus lost really mattered, as the conference was hardly a conference at all. Half the total number of advertised speakers (three out of six) failed to appear, though two of them did send eloquent apologies: these three were to have been the spokesmen for business and industry. The three spokesmen for the arts who did appear, were in two cases so short of material that they petered out long before their announced times (and without apology), and in the third case so humourless and axe-grinding as to be unendurable, at least by Marguerite and me. “Debates” followed, which could have been of interest, we thought, only to close friends of the contributors. The general inarticulacy came to a climax on the first evening, at the reception by the Lord Mayor, where no one seemed able to say anything. At the two conference lunches, Marguerite and I had as neighbours people (different people at each) who took no interest in us, and could hardly have been expected to. Over all lay a pervasive uncertainty as to what was going to happen next, a recurrent, ever-unsatisfied call for improvisation. And so I could continue. But I do not want merely to be catty about Neptuna’s conference. Doubtless it was simply not adapted to outsiders. Neptuna herself did apologize to us several times. “These things are always like this,” she said, “but people insist on having them, and one has to play ball or lose face.” We absolutely understood. It was we who had been weak.

  That was the background for something quite different.

  It will be remembered that Neptuna had said she would arrange for our accommodation. The plan was that committee members and speakers should be housed in the Queen’s Hotel; other attenders in private houses. The Queen’s Hotel group was, of course, paid for by the society; and I take it that the feeling, perhaps in some way the experience, was that most of the others would balk at modern hotel prices. A local group had accordingly made an appeal of some kind to householders. I am not sure that the operation had been handled much more skilfully than the other aspects of the conference. At least, Neptuna confided to us during the void left by the absence of the first afternoon’s speaker that, owing to a muddle, three of us had been housed together: Marguerite and I, and the last-minute man’s girl-friend, but not the last-minute man himself. The last-minute man was so furious, said Neptuna, that he had sulked right off, gone home by British Rail. It was not the kind of thing that was easy to adjust, added Neptuna, u
nless you knew the people.

  “Do you mean we’re all going to be together in one room?” asked Marguerite, who had already enjoyed the conference even less than she had expected.

  “Who’s to say? Do you mind?”

  Of course Marguerite minded, and I was none too keen myself. The kind of thing that might once have been a mild adventure was nowadays a mere perturbation and nuisance.

  We should really have looked at the place in the morning, the conference having been timed to start at midday in order to make this easier. As it was, the three of us set off that evening in Neptuna’s huge car, with me at the wheel, Neptuna being unable to get away. It was about six o’clock: an official break, or “Delegates’ Free Time”, between the afternoon paper, one which had miscarried, and the municipal reception in the evening. Marguerite sat beside me, the other girl in the back. Her name was apparently Deirdre. She was small, silent, dark, and not very well dressed.

  Fortunately, I have known Birmingham quite well for a number of years, as, never the simplest place to find one’s way about, it has been made almost impossible by the new regulations. Before leaving the Matthew Boulton Hall, where the conference was based, I had looked up the address we had been given on the street plan I had brought with me. Now Marguerite had the plan and gave me directions. She was, and is, good at this. Any kind of firm, practical enterprise brings out the best in both of us. It would have been alarming to have had to seek directions from people in the street, because, even without that, a cluster of children tended to gather and jeer at the antique car every time we stopped for the lights. We were bound for some street out behind Alum Rock. Marguerite never missed a trick and brought us there beautifully. Peevers, we had been told, was the name of the people. Major and Mrs. Peevers.

  It had struck me in advance as not necessarily a fertile area for field rank, but it proved to be rather different from what one had expected.

  No. 47 was indeed semi-detached, but the entire locality seemed to have been cleared at some time, probably just after the First World War, and tidily redeveloped by a charitable trust or public authority. Indeed, there really was something military about the uniform houses in dark red brick: quite large, solidly built, sparsely adorned, blackened by Birmingham; some distinct suggestion of married quarters. The straight road was quite empty both of vehicles and people, unlike all the others we had come through. The front garden of No. 47 offered no flowers, but only dark green bushes, small and tight; with patchy grass, indifferently trimmed. The path from the very heavy gate in ornamental wrought iron was paved with square slabs of concrete, every one badly chipped at the corners and all sooted. The house next door, the other semi-detached, was obviously empty; really quite dilapidated. It was late September and getting dark.