“I’ve finished too,” said Mrs. Peevers in a very low voice.
“Speak up,” said the Major.
“And the ship has come out the other side?”
Again Mrs. Peevers did not speak.
“You bet it has,” said the Major, after a tiny pause.
“Everyone scramble the sugar,” cried Deirdre. “All of it. Carefully.”
We conscientiously scrambled. Deirdre, I am sure, watched to see that we did it properly.
“Major Peevers,” said Deirdre in her hospital voice, “will you please turn on the light?”
The Major’s left leg had gone to sleep, but he managed it. There we all were: somehow quite different people. Mrs. Peevers was as red and strangled as if she had been crying. The Major was bending and straightening his leg. Marguerite’s hair, always conspicuously neat, was wispy and straggly. I discovered, to my humiliation, that I was shaking all over, even shuddering. I could not stop it for several minutes at least, though I tried hard. Deirdre just sat there, looking calmer than any of us, with her two hands flat on her own heap of sugar.
“Mrs. Wakefield,” she said. “Could you bring me that unused stocking? It really is unused?”
“Quite unused,” said Marguerite, putting her hand to her hair. “I’ll get it.” She seemed glad to go.
“There is one more thing to be done,” said Deirdre, “but I do it in private.”
“I’ll get the tea,” said the Major, walking like a war hero of old. “I’m sure we’d all like some.”
“That’s very good of you,” I replied.
“Sorry I can’t offer you something stronger, Wakefield.”
“Don’t think of it.”
Mrs. Peevers had become even redder. The Major seemed not to notice it, for he departed and began to clatter.
Immediately he had gone, Mrs. Peevers stood up. It was the first time we had seen her on her feet.
“Well?” she asked in the low, suppressed voice in which she had spoken before. “Where’s Harry?”
“It doesn’t work as quickly as that, Mrs. Peevers. We found at the hospital that it often took days, weeks sometimes. Besides, I haven’t finished yet, as I told you.”
“It’s all a fraud,” said Mrs. Peevers in her low voice, and taking two steps towards Deirdre. “A tale.”
Deirdre moved not at all.
“Oh no, not necessarily,” said Marguerite, returned with a dark stocking in her hand and her hair instantaneously restored. “We must give it more of a chance than that, I am sure.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Wakefield,” said Deirdre. “For the stocking, I mean.”
“I suppose I don’t get it back? I was going to wear it at the dance tomorrow night.”
How far away all that seemed!
“Yes, you can have it back,” said Deirdre. “I’ll wash it for you.”
“Will that be necessary? Of course we don’t know what you’re going to do with it.”
“I think you’d prefer it,” said Deirdre. She was putting her heap of sugar into the stocking, holding it at the more coarsely woven top and letting each lump drop to the pendant toe.
“You two might help with putting your own sugar back into the bag. Unless Mrs. Peevers would rather you didn’t put it back?”
Marguerite and I looked at Mrs. Peevers.
She walked across to the dry, yellow plant in the corner of the room, lifted up the dark green earthenware pot, which must really have been quite heavy, and began to shake and agitate it. Dry, yellow leaves fell in a shower to the carpet.
“I’d like the sugar thrown away. All of it, including what’s still in the bag.”
“Oh, surely not, Mrs. Peevers,” said Marguerite. “No harm’s been done.”
“I should say not,” shouted the Major, off. “I overheard that one. You people should know that it’s jolly well all the sugar we’ve got. All the real sugar, I mean. The old woman’s not herself.” He reappeared, much agitated.
“Elsie,” bawled the Major. “You’ll fall.”
Mrs. Peevers stopped shaking the plant, and put it back on its stand. “I don’t think so, Gregory. I’m quite firm.”
“Excuse me,” said Deirdre, disappearing with Marguerite’s stocking.
“My wife hasn’t walked without support for three and a half years,” explained the Major,
Mrs. Peevers strode back, quite steadily, to her seat. “Well, where’s the tea, Gregory?” She was speaking more normally again.
The Major brought it, and in a moment we were all lapping it up.
“Not that sugar,” said Mrs. Peevers. “I said so. Throw it away.”
“She must think we’ve come into money,” said the Major. But he departed and returned with the dreary granulated.
Not long after, Deirdre came back, “I’ll let you have your stocking in the morning. It’ll be almost as good as new.”
“Thank you very much,” said Marguerite.
Soon it was the end of the evening, and we went to bed.
“What do you make of all that?” I asked Marguerite as she took off her dress.
“It certainly gave Deirdre a chance to come out of her shell.”
“Odd thing about Mrs. Peevers’s legs.”
“Psychosomatic. ”
“So they always say. But, nonetheless, it happened, it worked.”
“What worked?”
“Deirdre’s miracle. Perhaps Harry will come back in the same way?”
“I shouldn’t think so. It’s obvious that Harry knows when he’s well off. Anyway, would you come back?”
She was seated in her underclothes, manicuring her toes in the bad light.
“Perhaps little Deirdre leaves one no choice.”
That, needless to say, is more or less how people talk in middle married life. Not unintelligent, simply familiar. Not hostile; but not loving. With full mutual understanding; but little mutual interest. Never radical, or perhaps always radical. Not really bad at all; but not at all good. Not antagonistic, except for tiny runs of frustration; merely hopeless. There was shapely Marguerite sitting there in her pretty pants, and I could not even weep.
“Deirdre,” said Marguerite, “is simply the medium. Like the sugar.”
“What do you suppose she did to the sugar? The sugar she took away, I mean.”
“I’ll ask her.”
“Not that it really matters.”
Marguerite looked up from her toes and smiled. “It would be amusing to know,” she said.
I got into bed first, and when Marguerite ultimately joined me, I realized that it was quite late, especially for such a household as the Peeverses. We fell untidily asleep.
During the night, I was awakened by Marguerite hitting at me.
“Sorry to wake you up,” she said very quietly, “but there’s a funny noise.” Everything that had occurred that evening came back to me, as happens at such times. But I could hear no particular noise.
“It sounded just like someone on the roof,” said Marguerite. “Above our heads.”
I now realized that the first grey light was filtering through the protective lace curtains.
“I can’t hear anything.”
“Listen a little longer. I heard it several times.”
We waited.
“I’m sorry,” said Marguerite, “to have woken you up. I was frightened.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll get up and have a look.”
I suppose I intended it simply as a gesture of willingness to take action on her behalf. It was hard to imagine what anyone could possibly expect to see. But as soon as I parted the lace curtains on the creepy autumn dawn, there was something to see; of a kind.
The window looked on to the depressing concrete road, with its line of identical semi-detacheds on the other side, dark-red by nature, but black in the early light. Up the road to the left was a big vehicle, grey as the dawn, and bearing on its side the words BIRMINGHAM CORPORATION DISPOSALS and a coat of arms; and on to it a
group of men, black shadows like the houses, were elevating the great black horse.
“They’re taking away the dead horse,” I cried. “Come and look.”
“Must I?”
“Yes, you should.”
Marguerite came and stood beside me in her nightdress.
“That’s a nice thing to see at four o’clock in the morning, or whatever it is,” she said.
“It explains the noises you heard.”
“I don’t think so. The noise I heard was quite different, and much nearer. It sounded like someone in the house, or, as I said, on it.”
“It must have been something to do with the horse. It’s only logical. You think you hear noises, and then something as odd as this proves to be going on. It’s obvious that there’s a connection.”
“If you say so,” said Marguerite. “Anyway, I’m going back to bed.”
I stayed to look a little longer at the silent heavings and lurchings up the road. It seemed likely, I thought, that some kind of crane would have helped. But in the end the cold became impossible, and I too returned to bed.
There had still been no odd noises that were audible to me. I found Marguerite lying on her front, with her face sunk hard into the big pillow with its wide edge of trimming.
“I don’t suppose there’ll be anything more,” I said rather vaguely, but trying to reassure her.
She made no reply, but went on lying there. I pulled up the bedclothes over her back, and over myself too.
“It was quite a frightening evening in its way,” I went on, putting on display the obvious explanation.
She still made no move. It struck me that very possibly there had never been any noises, not serious noises anyway, so to speak, and that Marguerite had really wanted something quite different. Possibly she was upset by the evening, as she had been at least momentarily when we first saw the horse.
If so, it was difficult, as the trouble with me was Deirdre, and what she and I had been doing together during a brief period earlier; and this despite the fact that I did not care in the least about Deirdre, not in any way, as I knew perfectly well. Of course one commonly encounters such fleeting paradoxes in the difficult matter of sex.
Maybe, however, I was still wrong about Marguerite. The odd evening could cause later disturbances of more than one kind. I tried again to rally her, but the warmth of the bed crept back over me, and I fell compulsively back into sleep. I did not even consciously hear the Disposals vehicle drive away.
“Clean as a baby’s bottom,” said Deirdre the next morning, half throwing the dark stocking back at Marguerite. She was wearing the same dull dress. I thought that Marguerite was very tolerant of her continuous near-rudeness.
The second day of the so-called conference was even flatter than the first. After another tiresome lunch, I went so far as to suggest to Marguerite that we cut the afternoon session and go to Dudley Zoo instead. She replied that she thought we had better not, meaning socially, but I divined from her look that the horse was in her mind, and that I had tactlessly proposed the very least suitable thing. I suppose, indeed, that it was the horse which had been on my mind too, and had unconsciously led to my suggestion, though all I had remembered had been visits to Dudley with my uncle and cousins when a child. The matter was settled by Neptuna coming up and strongly confirming that we had better not. She actually asked us, in so many words, not to abandon the conference. “I know it’s awful, but I very much hope you’ll see me through.” She seemed genuinely dependent on us in some way. Perhaps we really were more to be depended upon than the professional rivals who otherwise surrounded her, largely commercial artists at that. And, of course, we were her guests.
“We hope to rig something up for this afternoon, as Lord Boothroyd apparently can’t come.”
It seemed incredible that any human enterprise could be run quite like that, for so long, and by university graduates, as many of these people were, but in fact, of course, it is quite common, and I daresay the casualness, which Marguerite and I found so irritating, really serves a useful purpose of some kind, possibly quite as useful as any other kind of administrative attitude.
So we endured, we remained, we actually went to the conference dance, which was not even to be dressed up for, though Marguerite wore her famous unused stockings. We slapped and hopped around as best we could. We ate cipolate, drank Sauternes and gin, sucked at ice-cream bricks. Deirdre seemed to have returned to her original quiet unobtrusiveness, but she did come back with us to the dance, still in the same dress. I must say also that I was very tired of being unable to leave Neptuna’s car outside the house, even while we changed. No real reason for this ever emerged, except that, as Marguerite pointed out, the car was Neptuna’s. That constant walking up or down the hill seemed an additionally unreasonable nuisance, to say nothing of the increasing familiarity at the chain garage, but old Peevers remained adamant, and Marguerite was pursuing a determined policy of fitting in with everyone.
There I was doing it for the last time but one, after we had returned from the dance; and there were Marguerite and Deirdre going inside to first pull on the Major’s tea. It was remarkably cold too, as I descended the hill: with frost very obviously closing in, and also the beginnings of that freezing haze which is a Birmingham speciality, and which can chill one right through almost before one is aware that it is there. I wished I had included an overcoat in my luggage, even a heavy one. As usual, there was no one about and no lights in the houses: Peevers had explained to me that most of the people liked to save the money. The cold Birmingham mist seems always to carry sounds rather than to muffle them, improbable sounds too sometimes; so that now I clearly heard the big clock of the distant Town Hall strike midnight. The grimy road and pavement stood out as almost white, and it was just as well. There were distant stars, but no moon; and the faster I walked, the colder I grew. I must say I looked forward to the tea.
But that night there was no tea.
The atmosphere inside was little warmer than outside. Marguerite and the two Peeverses were just standing about waiting for me.
“Ah, there you are, Wakefield. I gather you didn’t enjoy the dance. Don’t blame you, either. I’ve just been explaining to Mrs. Wakefield that I’ve grown too old to take two late nights running. So do you mind if we all go to bed? Sorry I can’t offer you something strong.”
“Bed would be just the thing.”
“You know the way.”
They bade us firm good nights and up we went.
“She’s still walking,” I said to Marguerite.
“So it seems.”
“You’d think they’d show more gratitude.”
“Gratitude’s difficult. It would probably send her off again. Look at us. Are we grateful to Neptuna?”
It was literally cold in the house, as well as figuratively. I could almost hear my teeth chattering.
“What happened to Deirdre?”
“She took the hint when we came in and disappeared. Why?”
“I was just thinking of Mrs. Peevers’s legs. You know, I’m going to bed in my dressing-gown.”
“There are plenty of blankets.” Marguerite was completely refined at almost all times. It was second nature to her, if not first.
“All right, then I won’t.”
“Please yourself; of course. It’s a pity there’s no hot-water bottle.”
“Or even a heater of some kind.”
“Or thicker roof and walls.”
“I should say they are quite thick. For a house of this type, of course.”
Marguerite was climbing into bed, having left several things undone that she usually did. She began attending to her hair, which more often came at an earlier stage. She wore her hair tighter at night than by day, so that it should not lose its daytime shape. This motive was absolutely reasonable, and one had only to look at Marguerite to see it, but I should have found her tight night hair positively attractive, if only her motive for making it tight had been entirely dif
ferent. Such is the familiar complexity of sex-appeal. “The roof didn’t sound very thick last night,” said Marguerite.
“I’m sure that what you heard was something to do with the horse,” I replied, shivering into my pyjama legs. “It stands to reason.”
“You might hear it yourself tonight if you will keep awake and listen.”
“I’m not very likely to do that if I can help it.”
“Quite right,” said Marguerite, making her hair tighter and tighter. “It’s a terrifying sound. Probably the most awful sound I ever heard. Well, since I was a child.”
Cold though I was, I stopped and looked at her. “As bad as that?”
“Quite as bad. I kept trying to tell you.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
I wanted to comfort her, as I had failed to do the night before. I went to her and put my arm round her shoulders. But it was little good. It is always extraordinarily difficult to be affectionate in that kind of way with a person to whom one is bound for life; and now I was both too late and too frozen, she too preoccupied with her hair.
“Come to bed,” she said, neutrally but nicely. “I shall be finished in a few minutes.”
“I’ll wait until I can put out the light,” I said; the only switch being, of course, by the door.
“Sorry, I’ll be as quick as I can.”
“Perhaps it was the cold coming on that made the noises. Timbers contracting, brickwork settling, and all that.”
She said nothing.
“Besides there’s the empty house next door. Noises might easily come from there.”
“Yes,” said Marguerite. “People could wait there—hide there—until it was night.”
“That’s absurd,” I said. “Going too far.”
“It happens everywhere nowadays. Harry, for example, might have waited in there for years without anyone knowing whom he didn’t want to know.”
“But why should he hide himself away from his own parents?”
“Why does anybody?”
“Marguerite,” I said, “this is what is called letting your imagination run away with you.”
She simply replied “Of course it is,” and I didn’t at all know what to make of it.
Then she said “I’m finished now.” Her head was as trim as a newly opened horse-chestnut. I killed the dim light and joined her.
The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories Page 41