I lay there sleepless. It was the cold. It was the tension of middle marriage. But it was also fear. I slept from time to time, and one usually much exaggerates the duration of unwanted wakefulness, but certainly I had long enough to work myself into a horrible state of nerves. My hearing grew sharper and sharper, until every creak of the furniture made me jump. Every time I woke after dozing off I felt a shock of terror run quite slowly through my whole body, almost making me sick; and sometimes a second shock, as I confirmed to myself that indeed I was not dreaming. Sensibly, there was no sufficient reason for such alarm: I suppose it was the familiar stress of my relationship with Marguerite enhanced by something in or about the house and by what had happened there.
Anyhow, when I first heard the scratchings and slippings of someone trying to climb the wall outside, I was absolutely wide awake. Oddly enough, Marguerite was snoozing rather breathily. The sounds were far from loud, because we had not opened the bedroom window, but I had no doubt of what they implied. Someone was down there in the garden (if one could call it a garden) and coming up, or trying to come up.
And again, it was faint dawn; the faintest and earliest Birmingham dawn, hardly discernible at all, especially through the lace. Snatch and scramble; rise, fall, and try again: so it went, against the dark brickwork and, as it sounded, below our own window. Marguerite was now breathing unevenly, nearly inaudible for two or three minutes, and then almost sobbing and gurgling. There was, in fact, every evidence that her sleep was very shallow and that she would wake at any moment. I stopped myself from positively rousing her. I was not sure whether or not I wanted her awake.
So I was alone when I heard the climber at long last reach the sill; faintly discolour the faint dawn through the lace curtains; stand for a moment on the ledge, no doubt recapturing his breath and recouping his strength; then go on up.
I was alone when he reached the roof and began to move about up there, stumbling and crawling from point to point. He seemed to lumber around for at least ten or fifteen minutes, sometimes noisier as he passed immediately overhead, sometimes quieter as he moved over to other areas, but always audible, though sometimes so indistinctly as to be confusable with other sounds of the night. Once I even thought I heard him talking.
It went on and on, coming and going, so that in the end I woke Marguerite as gently as I could, then put my hand on her mouth.
“We’re going,” I said. “Now. When I put on the light, dress quickly, while I do the same, and we’ll get out.”
Immediately there was a light, the noises seemed to stop entirely. I am not sure that Marguerite heard them at all this second morning. She always said she didn’t.
She did what I said without a word. We were always at our joint best when in a tight spot. She was packed and ready to dash even before I was.
“Do you think we should leave a note?” she asked, quite calmly.
“No,” I replied. “We’ll write to them when we get home.”
“What about the car?”
“It’s an all-night garage.”
So we crept down the narrow staircase, leaving our bedroom light on.
And at once in the room below we saw that the light was on also.
It was Deirdre; standing there alone, dressed and packed, in so far as one could apply the words.
“I want to go too. Will you please take me?”
I looked at Marguerite, but she said nothing.
“Come on, then.”
We turned out the light in the room with the faded green paper and the dropping yellow plant, and we quietly shut the front door. We set off up the cracked, concrete road in the first light of morning; shivering and silent.
It was impossible to speak of anything but practicalities. I suggested that we drive Neptuna’s car to London, as we had all had enough of Birmingham, and that I try to persuade one of Neptuna’s husbands to drive it back and collect her. None of the husbands had regular work, and it would be easily possible for the car to be back in Birmingham once more by mid-day. This plan was briefly accepted, and we fell silent again. I was required, however, to pay a still larger special charge for taking the car from the chain garage at that peculiar and suspect hour. A policeman who was gossiping there even asked to see my licence.
It was in the absurd context of a coffee on the motorway that some of our real thoughts found expression, and it was Marguerite who put forth certain of the words.
“At No. 47,” she began to Deirdre. “The night before last. What was that light you used! I wondered very much. Could you tell us? Now that it’s all over.”
“It was a horse’s eye,” said Deirdre, looking at the floor and away from the transport roughs who were staring at her. “I thought you knew.”
“I assure you I never thought of it,” said Marguerite. “And what did you do to the sugar?”
“That’s my business.”
“And the horse? How did it come to be there at all? So conveniently, I mean?”
“I expect it just felt tired and died, Mrs. Wakefield,” said Deirdre, distinctly in her former manner. Some tag came to me about opportunities varying widely in their incidence, but the important thing being the capacity to seize them, when offered.
“I expect so,” I said. “But tell us something else. What made you want to leave this morning? Surely everything was going to plan from your point of view?”
Deirdre looked at the floor again. “There were two of them,” she said. “Two of them came back. Didn’t you hear them talking? Harry brought someone back with him. I thought it might be that Jim Tate.”
“Well?” I said. “Harry’s mother told us they were inseparable. You might almost expect them to be still together.”
“She told me that Jim Tate was killed in the war. Harry wasn’t, but Jim Tate was.”
Deirdre had never at any time seemed to have much real imagination (at least at any normal time), and even now she appeared more embarrassed and uneasy than scared or upset. But Marguerite, who hitherto had been so good, had turned dangerously white. I tried to get her a brandy at the counter, but, of course, it was illegal. They suggested instead some chemical from the first-aid box, and I had difficulty in warding off a trained volunteer.
“I’m sorry to have upset Mrs. Wakefield,” said Deirdre, when I returned. “You did ask me.”
“There is no evidence at all that it was Jim Tate,” I said.
“Not what you’d call evidence,” said Deirdre. “But I don’t take chances on funny business. I just don’t like it, if you’ll excuse me. I only wanted to help those poor Peeverses.”
“If there were two of them, something must have gone wrong, according to your own account. We only called for Harry.”
“If something went wrong, it wasn’t my fault.”
It would have been difficult to miss the implication that it was ours; but it is never any use arguing with young people when they are set to do good.
All went well about returning the car to Birmingham.
I reminded Marguerite to write and thank the Peeverses, and she did so almost at once. Naturally, we had not expected any reply, but we received one. Mrs. Peevers explained that she and the Major were only able to offer hospitality to people attending conferences in Birmingham on the understanding that a small payment would be made. The rate which most of the married couples among her guests found acceptable was thirty shillings per night; much less, Mrs. Peevers pointed out, than a hotel. I sent off a cheque for three pounds. I can’t remember whether or not we ever wrote to thank Neptuna.
In the end, Marguerite and I calmed down about the whole incident; and sooner rather than later, as one usually does. Even the capacity for shock is among the things that steadily diminish as life goes on. We came to making an occasional joke about it: “It’s surprising,” I might say, “what one can do with a horse’s eye and a little human—” well, I won’t finish that sentence, because one says these silly things in married life, which are not worth repeating to the wide w
orld.
As will be gathered, we never learned whether Harry really had returned: our sole communication from No. 47 was entirely a matter of business.
But then one evening, two or three years later, we told the story, or some of it, to a man who came with his wife to dinner with us, and who, like Harry, had an interest in anthropology, though, again as with Harry, it was not his real business.
“That’s one of Plutarch’s Roman questions,” the man said when we had finished. “It’s not uncommon, I believe. Even in Plutarch’s time it seems to have been quite old hat. Not that I mean any offence, of course.”
And when the man’s wife wrote to thank us she enclosed a slip of paper with the following, which she had typed out in double spacing:—
“Question No. 5. Why are they who have been falsely reported dead in a strange country, although they return home alive, not received nor suffered to enter directly at the doors, but forced to climb up to the tiles of the house, and so to get down into the house from the roof?”
It had been Marguerite, of course, who had opened the letter of thanks. But I had picked up the typed slip as it fluttered out, and I read it aloud to her.
“But—” said Marguerite, struck by a phantom thought and chasing it.
“Yes?” I said.
“But if we believe that, it might mean that only one of them could have come back, and that the one was Jim Tate. He was the one who was reported dead, and Harry wasn’t. It could quite easily mean that when you think about it.”
“I thought I heard voices myself. I’ve told you.”
“Or a voice. So you said.”
“He would hardly be talking to himself; one would suppose. Not all alone up on the roof. But I haven’t finished.” I went on reading. “In his book, The Temple and the House, Lord Raglan, President of the Royal Anthropological Institute, writes of Plutarch’s Question No. 5: ‘A satisfactory explanation seems not to have been suggested.’ ”
“Perhaps Deirdre could suggest one?”
But after we deposited her early that morning between Chalk Farm and Camden Town, we never saw or heard of Deirdre again.
MARK INGESTRE: THE CUSTOMER’S TALE
I met an old man at the Elephant Theatre, and, though it was not in a pub that we met, we soon found ourselves in one, not in the eponymous establishment, but in a nice, quiet little place down a side turn, which he seemed to know well, but of which, naturally, I knew nothing, since I was only in that district on business, and indeed had been in the great metropolis itself only for a matter of weeks. I may perhaps at the end tell you what the business was. It had some slight bearing upon the old man’s tale.
“The Customer’s Tale” I call it, because the Geoffrey Chaucer implication may not be far from the truth: a total taradiddle of legend and first-hand experience. As we grow older we frequently become even hazier about the exact chronology of history, and about the boundaries of what is deemed to be historical fact: the king genuinely and sincerely believing that he took part in the Battle of Waterloo; Clement Attlee, after he was made an earl, never doubting that he had the wisdom of Walpole. Was Jowett Ramsey’s Lord Chancellor of Clem’s? Which one of us can rightly remember that? Well: the old man was a very old man, very old indeed; odd-looking and hairy; conflating one whole century with another whole century, and then sticking his own person in the center of it all, possibly before he was even born.
That first evening, there was, in the nature of things, only a short time before the pubs closed. But we met in the same place again by appointment; and again; and possibly a fourth time, too. That is something I myself cannot exactly recollect; but after that last time, I never saw or heard of him again. I wonder whether anyone did.
I wrote down the old man’s tale in my beautiful new shorthand, lately acquired at the college. He was only equal to short installments, but I noticed that, old though he was, he seemed to have no difficulty in picking up each time more or less where he left off. I wrote it all down almost exactly as he spoke it, though of course when I typed it out, I had to punctuate it myself, and no doubt I tidied it up a trifle. For what anyone cares to make of it, here it is.
Fleet Street! If you’ve only seen it as it is now, you’ve no idea of what it used to be. I refer to the time when Temple Bar was still there. Fleet Street was never the same after Temple Bar went. Temple Bar was something they simply couldn’t replace. Men I knew, and knew well, said that taking it away wrecked not only Fleet Street but the whole City. Perhaps it was the end of England itself. God knows what else was.
It wasn’t just the press in those days. All that Canadian newsprint, and those seedy reporters. I don’t say you’re seedy yet, but you will be. Just give it time. Even a rich journalist has to be seedy. Then there were butchers’ shops, and poultry and game shops, and wine merchants passing from father to son, and little places on corners where you could get your watch mended or your old pens sharpened, and proper bookshops too, with everything from The Complete John Milton to The Condemned Man’s Last Testimony. Of course the “Newgate Calendar” was still going at that time, though one wasn’t supposed to care for it. There were a dozen or more pawnbrokers, and all the churches had bread-and-blanket charities. Fancy Fleet Street with only one pawnbroker and all the charity money gone God knows where and better not ask! The only thing left is that little girl dressed as a boy out of Byron’s poem. Little Medora. We used to show her to all the new arrivals. People even lived in Fleet Street in those days. Thousands of people. Tens of thousands. Some between soft sheets, some on the hard stones. Fancy that! There was room for all, prince and pauper; and women and to spare for almost the lot of them.
Normally, I went round the back, but I remember the first time I walked down Fleet Street itself. It was not a thing you would forget, as I am about to tell you. There were great wagons stuck in the mud, at least I take it to have been mud; and lawyers all over the pavement, some clean, some not. Of course, the lawyers stow themselves away more now. Charles Dickens had something to do with that. And then there were the women I’ve spoken of; some of them blowsy and brassy, but some soft and appealing, even when they had nothing to deck themselves with but shawls and rags. I took no stock in women at that time. You know why as well as I do. There are a few things that never change. Never. I prided myself upon living clean. Well, I did until that same day. When that day came, I had no choice.
How did I get into the barbershop? I wish I could tell you. I’ve wondered every time I’ve thought about the story, and that’s been often enough. All I know is that it wasn’t to get my hair cut, or to be shaved, and not to be bled either, which was still going on in those days, the accepted thing when you thought that something was the matter with you or were told so, though you didn’t set about it in a barbershop if you could afford something better. They took far too much at the barber’s. “Bled white” meant something in places of that kind. You can take my word about that.
It’s perfectly true that I have always liked my hair cut close, and I was completely clean-shaven as well until I suffered a gash from an assegai when fighting for Queen and Country. You may not believe that, but it’s true. I first let this beard grow only to save her Majesty embarrassment, and it’s been growing and growing ever since.
As a matter of fact, it was my mother that cut my hair in those days. She knew how I liked it and how she liked it. She was as thorough as you can imagine, but all the while kissing and joking too. That went on until the episode I am telling you about. Never again afterward.
Often she had been shaving me too; using my dead father’s old razors, of which there were dozens and dozens. I never knew my father. I never even saw a likeness of him. I think my mother had destroyed them all, or hidden them away. If ever I asked her about him, she always spoke in the same way. “I prefer you, Paul,” she said. “You are the better man. I have nothing to add.” Always the same words, or nearly the same. Then she would kiss me very solemnly on the lips, so that there was nothing
I could do but change the subject.
How, then, could I possibly have entered that shop? I have an idea that the man was standing outside and simply caught hold of me. That often happened, so that you had to take trouble in looking after yourself. But, as I have told you, I truly do not know. I suspect that things happen from time to time to everyone that they don’t understand, and there’s simply nothing we can do about them.
I was in the chair immediately, and the man seemed to be clipping at my locks and lathering my face, both at the same time. I daresay he had applied a whiff of chloroform, which, at that period, was something quite new. People always spoke about a whiff of it, as if it been a Ramón Allones or a Larraniaga.
There were three chairs in the shop, but the man had firmly directed me to a particular one, the one to my left, because that was the one where the light was, or so I supposed was the reason. The man had an assistant, it seemed, in case the shop might suddenly be packed out. The assistant struck me as being pretty well all black, after the style of a Negro, but that might have been only because the whole shop was so dark and smoky. In any case, he could only have been about four feet two inches high, or even less. I wondered how he managed at the chairs. Probably, when at work, he had a box to stand on. All he did now was lean back against the announcements in the far-right-hand corner; waiting until he was needed. The master was as tall as the assistant was short; lean and agile as a daddy longlegs. Also, he was completely clean-shaven and white. One could not help wondering whether anything grew at all, or ever had. Even his hair could well have been some kind of wig. I am sure that it was. It was black and slightly curly and horribly neat. I didn’t have my eyes on the pair of them for very long, but I can see them both at this very moment, though, in the case of the assistant, without much definition. Sometimes we can see more without definition than with it. On the marble slab in front of me was a small lighted oil lamp and a single burning candle; smoking heavily, and submerging the other smells. This in the very middle of an ordinary weekday morning. Probably, of course, it was only imitation marble. Probably everything in the shop was an imitation of some kind.
The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories Page 42