by Joan Aiken
“Lie down again now, let you,” the doctor said. “You’re not well enough to be moving yet.”
Daisy wanted to go home, but he said no to this. He wanted to study her reactions, he said.
“Fine goings-on!” exclaimed Agnes, the doctor’s maid. “Half a dozen boluses and a pint of linseed oil, Mr O’Shaughnessy, if you please. He sits by her bed, the poor young creature, questioning away like the Judge himself, and she with no more strength to refuse than a day-old chick. All about did her mother shut her in a dark cupboard when she was a gossoon and suchlike.”
“Is this seemly, Phillimore?” Miss Merlwyn asked her brother gloomily. “Suppose some of our titled patients should come to the house?”
The doctor gave his wolfish grin. “I’ll worry about that when it happens,” he said. “Leave me alone now, my dear, will you, to cure the girl’s man-hate on her, and study the grandest case of obsessive fixation and traumatic syndrome it’s ever been my lot to meet.”
“Oh, traumatic fiddlestick!” Miss Merlwyn barked angrily. “That white-headed piece has you clean bewitched.” And she flounced back to her petit point.
The doctor sat down again beside Daisy. It may have been his questing his way through the whole of her life, or merely the human talk of a male creature, but devil a doubt she was looking better, the eyes brighter on her and the cheeks pinker than they had been for days.
“I feel sorry for that Con O’Leary,” she suddenly remarked. “I’m sorry I slapped his face.”
“Ah, never mind him,” said the doctor. “I want to try an experiment on you.”
“What’s that?” asked Daisy as he strapped a metal band studded with knobs into position on her arm.
“I invented it myself,” said the doctor, easy and affable, switching on a battery. “It’s a little thing to take the measure of your mood. I want to find out are you still in a state of shock.”
In his hand he held a dial with a needle that jerked and flickered, and now, keeping his eye on it, he reached and kissed Daisy’s cheek. She didn’t twitch an eyelid. The needle moved slowly from thirty to forty.
“Still some shock present,” said the doctor professionally, making a note. “We’ll try again.”
This time he kissed her on the lips, and the needle rose up to sixty.
Meanwhile old Mr Mulloon was feeling ill at ease. True, Daisy had put the Evil Eye on his hen. True, O’Leary had been ready to rescue her, so no great harm had been done, but had it been right, he asked himself, to smear axle-grease quite so thickly on that cable? He very much feared not.
Seeking guidance on the matter, old Mr Mulloon returned to the Deeps of Kilglore and sat brooding on the cliff. Maybe some means of atonement would come into his head.
The season’s heavy rains, washing and washing down the falls, had ended by turning St. Piumail’s pool to a whirlpool that swung and turned like a great cone of black glass beyond the dizzying roar of the waterfall. It was a wonderful thing, a thing of portent.
Gazing at it, Mr Mulloon observed something going round and round, and after a minute he recognized this as Daisy’s motorbike.
“All her livelihood, the poor colleen, God save her,” he said, shocked.
“Maybe if I climbed onto that rock and leaned out with my crooked stick I could fetch it to land.”
“Holy mercy!” exclaimed Daisy. The pointer on the dial leapt and quivered at a hundred and twenty, and she fetched the doctor a clip on the ear. Agnes, listening at the keyhole, decided it was time to intervene.
“Doctor, Doctor!” she cried, bursting in—and wouldn’t this make a grand tale for the town—“old Mr Mulloon’s fallen himself into the awesome great whirlpool! Half the town’s up at the pool of Piumail watching the poor man spinning round out of reach, and he the innocentest creature that ever breathed a word of malice in Killyclancy, bless his evil, drunken old heart.”
While she spoke she eyed with interest Daisy’s scarlet cheeks and furious eyes. The girl was struggling to free herself from the doctor’s contraption.
“You’re cured,” he said hastily, rubbing his ear. “Stay here quietly till I get back. Another night under sedatives—”
“I’m coming up to the pool,” said Daisy, and strode past him to the door.
Up at the pool of St. Piumail the townsfolk were gathered again. There had not been so many free spectacles since King Conor’s dairy show and the events leading up to the war of the Dun Cow.
Old Mr Mulloon went round and round, quite self-possessed—someone had thrown him a bottle of the stuff tied onto a piece of cork—but he was getting lower in the whirlpool all the time, and when he reached the bottom, what then?
“He’s done for,” said the doctor, staring down the long, black glass slope at the little foreshortened figure so far below. “Nothing can reach him down there.”
“Yes, it can!” cried Daisy. “Who’ll lend me a motorbike? I’ll go down for him myself!”
And before anyone could cry “Stop!” she had grabbed Danny Mayhew’s Smith-Rivers, kicked it into life, and plunged onto the lip of the whirlpool.
“Daisy!” shouted the doctor angrily. He had not planned to cure her for this.
But already she was swinging round, vertical to the glossy slope of the water, calm and debonair as ever in her act, and all the time going lower and lower in pursuit of Mr Mulloon, who sat below her as if in an armchair, gazing up with a disbelieving expression on his face.
She leaned over, she grabbed him, she dumped him behind her on the pillion.
“Isn’t it a wonderful thing,” he remarked to himself. “Seized up by the scruff, like she was the young Lochinvar coming out of the west to save him. Eh, it’s a wild age we live in.”
For the spectators above, though, it was plain that the weight of two riders was going to be too much for the aged Smith-Rivers. Daisy herself realized this and tried to coax more speed from the flagging machine. No use. Her despairing glance flung up, and then fixed. Overhead, calmly unloosing his catch-net as if this were old routine, was Con O’Leary, dropped as far down into the whirlpool’s maw as the spread of his rotors would allow.
“Holy Pate,” said the people of Killyclancy, “he’ll save the pair of them yet. Ah, it’s the grand lad he is, entirely. Watch him dangle for them now, ’tis as good as bobbing for apples. Wurra, he’s missed. Try on the next round, boyo! Cunningly does it, the way the monkey caught the alligator’s tail. Ah, he’s got them. Now, will she be dealing Con another of thim great tempestuous slaps? ’Twill be a gradle thing to see.”
But in this respect the onlookers were disappointed. Dropped from the helicopter, Daisy did not wait for Con’s cautious approach. She disentangled herself from Mr Mulloon, rushed on Con with open arms, enveloped him in a smothering hug, and cried out, “My hero!”
In the background the doctor scowled, defeated. His cure had been successful, but he was not the man to appreciate it.
Hair
Tom Orford stood leaning over the rail and watching the flat hazy shores of the Red Sea slide past. A month ago he had been watching them slide in the other direction. Sarah had been with him then, leaning and looking after the ship’s wake, laughing and whispering ridiculous jokes into his ear.
They had been overflowingly happy, playing endless deck games with the other passengers, going to the ship’s dances in Sarah’s mad, rakish conception of fancy dress, even helping to organise the appalling concerts of amateur talent, out of their gratitude to the world.
“You’ll tire yourself out!” somebody said to Sarah as she plunged from deck-tennis to swimming in the ship’s pool, from swimming to dancing, from dancing to Ping-Pong. “As if I could,” she said to Tom. “I’ve done so little all my life, I have twenty-one years of accumulated energy to work off.”
But just the same, that was what she had done. She had died, vanished, gone out, as completely as a forgotten day, or a drift of the scent of musk. Gone, lost to the world. Matter can neither be created nor destroy
ed, he thought. Not matter, no. The network of bones and tendons, the dandelion clock of fair hair, the brilliantly blue eyes that had once belonged to Sarah, and had so riotously obeyed her will for a small portion of her life—a forty-second part of it, perhaps—was now quietly returning to earth in a Christian cemetery in Ceylon. But her spirit, the fiery intention which had coordinated that machine of flesh and bone and driven it through her life—the spirit, he knew, existed neither in air nor earth. It had gone out, like a candle.
He did not leave the ship at Port Said. It was there that he had met Sarah. She had been staying with friends, the Acres. Orford had gone on a trip up the Nile with her. Then they had started for China. This was after they had been married, which happened almost immediately. And now he was coming back with an address, and a bundle of hair to give to her mother. For she had once laughingly asked him to go and visit her mother, if she were to die first.
“Not that she’d enjoy your visit,” said Sarah drily. “But she’d be highly offended if she didn’t get a lock of hair, and she might as well have the lot, now I’ve cut it off. And you could hardly send it to her in a registered envelope.”
He had laughed, because then death seemed a faraway and irrelevant threat, a speck on the distant horizon.
“Why are we talking about it, anyway?” he said.
“Death always leaps to mind when I think of Mother,” she answered, her eyes dancing. “Due to her I’ve lived in an atmosphere of continuous death for twenty-one years.”
She had told him her brief story. When she reached twenty-one, and came into an uncle’s legacy, she had packed her brush and comb and two books and a toothbrush (“All my other possessions, if they could be called mine, were too ugly to take.”), and, pausing only at a hairdressers’ to have her bun cut off (he had seen a photograph of her at nineteen, a quiet, dull-looking girl, weighed down by her mass of hair), she had set off for Egypt to visit her only friend, Mrs Acres. She wrote to her mother from Cairo. She had had one letter in return.
“My dear Sarah, as you are now of age I cannot claim to have any further control over you, for you are, I trust, perfectly healthy in mind and body. I have confidence in the upbringing you received, which furnished you with principles to guide you through life’s vicissitudes. I know that in the end you will come back to me.”
“She seems to have taken your departure quite lightly,” Orford said, reading it over her shoulder.
“Oh, she never shows when she’s angry,” Sarah said. She studied the letter again. “Little does she know,” was her final comment, as she put it away. “Hey, I don’t want to think about her. Quick, let’s go out and see something—a pyramid or a cataract or a sphinx. Do you realise that I’ve seen absolutely nothing—nothing—nothing all my life? Now I’ve got to make up for lost time. I want to see Rome and Normandy and Illyria and London—I’ve never been there, except Heath Row—and Norwegian fjords and the Taj Mahal.”
Tomorrow, Orford thought, he would have to put on winter clothes. He remembered how the weather had become hotter and hotter on the voyage out. Winter to summer, summer to winter again.
London, when he reached it, was cold and foggy. He shrank into himself, sitting in the taxi which squeaked and rattled its way from station to station, like a moving tomb. At Charing Cross he ran into an acquaintance who exclaimed, “Why, Tom old man, I didn’t expect to see you for another month. Thought you were on your honeymoon or something?”
Orford slid away into the crowd.
“And can you tell me where Marl End is?” he was presently asking at a tiny, ill-lit station which felt as if it were in the middle of the steppes.
“Yes, sir,” said the man, after some thought. “You’d best phone for a taxi. It’s a fair way. Right through the village and on over the sheepdowns.”
An aged Ford, lurching through the early winter dusk, which was partly mist, brought him to a large red-brick house, set baldly in the middle of a field.
“Come back and call for me at seven,” he said, resolving to take no chances with the house, and the driver nodded, shifting his gears, and drove away into the fog as Orford knocked at the door.
The first thing that struck him was her expression of relentless, dogged intention. Such, he thought, might be the look on the face of a coral mite, setting out to build up an atoll from the depths of the Pacific.
He could not imagine her ever desisting from any task she had set her hand to.
Her grief seemed to be not for herself but for Sarah.
“Poor girl. Poor girl. She would have wanted to come home again before she died. Tired herself out, you say? It was to be expected. Ah well.”
Ah well, her tone said, it isn’t my fault. I did what I could. I could have prophesied what would happen; in fact I did; but she was out of my control, it was her fault, not mine.
“Come close to the fire,” she said. “You must be cold after that long journey.”
Her tone implied he had come that very night from Sarah’s cold un-Christian deathbed, battling through frozen seas, over Himalayas, across a dead world.
“No, I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll stay where I am. This is a very warm room.” The stifling, hothouse air pressed on his face, solid as sand. He wiped his forehead.
“My family, unfortunately, are all extremely delicate,” she said, eyeing him. “Poor things, they need a warm house. Sarah—my husband—my sister—I daresay Sarah told you about them?”
“I’ve never seen my father,” he remembered Sarah saying. “I don’t know what happened to him—whether he’s alive or dead. Mother always talks about him as if he were just outside in the garden.”
But there had been no mention of an aunt. He shook his head.
“Very delicate,” she said. She smoothed back her white hair, which curved over her head like a cap, into its neat bun at the back. “Deficient in thyroid—thyroxin, do they call it? She needs constant care.”
Her smile was like a swift light passing across a darkened room.
“My sister disliked poor Sarah—for some queer reason of her own—so all the care of her fell on me. Forty years.”
“Terrible for you,” he answered mechanically.
The smile passed over her face again.
“Oh, but it is really quite a happy life for her, you know. She draws, and plays with clay, and of course she is very fond of flowers and bright colours. And nowadays she very seldom loses her temper, though at one time I had a great deal of trouble with her.”
I manage all, her eyes said, I am the strong one, I keep the house warm, the floors polished, the garden dug, I have cared for the invalid and reared my child, the weight of the house has rested on these shoulders and in these hands.
He looked at her hands as they lay in her black silk lap, fat and white with dimpled knuckles.
“Would you care to see over the house?” she said.
He would not, but could think of no polite way to decline. The stairs were dark and hot, with a great shaft of light creeping round the corner at the top.
“Is anybody there?” a quavering voice called through a half-closed door. It was gentle, frail, and unspeakably old.
“Go to sleep, Miss Whiteoak, go to sleep,” she called back. “You should have swallowed your dose long ago.”
“My companion,” she said to Orford, “is very ill.”
He had not heard of any companion from Sarah.
“This is my husband’s study,” she told him, following him into a large, hot room.
Papers were stacked in orderly piles on the desk. The bottle of ink was half full. A half-written letter lay on the blotter. But who occupied this room? “Mother always talks as if he were just outside.”
On the wall hung several exquisite Japanese prints. Orford exclaimed in pleasure.
“My husband is fond of those prints,” she said, following his glance. “I can’t see anything in them myself. Why don’t they make objects the right size, instead of either too big or too small? I like
something I can recognise, I tell him.”
Men are childish, her eyes said, and it is the part of women to see that they do nothing foolish, to look after them.
They moved along the corridor.
“This was Sarah’s room,” she said.
Stifling, stifling, the bed, chair, table, chest all covered in white sheets. Like an airless graveyard waiting for her, he thought.
“I can’t get to sleep,” Miss Whiteoak called through her door. “Can’t I come downstairs?”
“No, no, I shall tell you when you may come down,” the old lady called back. “You are not nearly well enough yet!”
Orford heard a sigh.
“Miss Whiteoak is wonderfully devoted,” she said as they slowly descended the stairs. “I have nursed her through so many illnesses. She would do anything for me. Only, of course, there isn’t anything that she can do now, poor thing.”
At the foot of the stairs an old, old woman in a white apron was lifting a decanter from a sideboard.
“That’s right, Drewett,” she said. “This gentleman will be staying to supper. You had better make some broth. I hope you are able to stay the night?” she said to Orford.
But when he explained that he could not even stay to supper, she took the news calmly.
“Never mind about the broth, then, Drewett. Just bring in the sherry.”
The old woman hobbled away, and they returned to the drawing room. He gave her the tissue-paper full of Sarah’s hair.
She received the bundle absently, then examined it with a sharp look. “Was this cut before or after she died?”
“Oh—before—before I married her.” He wondered what she was thinking. She gave a long, strange sigh, and presently remarked, “That accounts for everything.”
Watching the clutch of her fat, tight little hands on the hair, he began to be aware of a very uneasy feeling, as if he had surrendered something that only now, when it was too late, he realised had been of desperate importance to Sarah. He remembered, oddly, a tale from childhood: “Where is my heart, dear wife? Here it is, dear husband: I am keeping it wrapped up in my hair.”