It was at this point that I noticed that the couple were not alone in the corridor. A little girl of about five or six was standing just beside the woman. She was a lovely little creature, with big solemn eyes and masses of fair wavy hair. I smiled at her, but she only stared at me in a serious, shy way.
While I was still trying to win the child’s confidence, the woman advanced towards me again.
“Maybe we could squeeze you in,” she said. “There’s an attic. It’s only a little room—I don’t use it normally. But I’ll have to get it ready. And it’ll cost you—” (she hesitated) “—a pound.”
“A pound!” said I. “For one night!”
“Oh, you needn’t come if ye don’t want,” she said quickly. “I’m not forcing you. But it’s a pound if you want it.”
“Can you give me a meal?” I asked.
“Breakfast in the morning. But I can’t cook for you at this time of night. I’ll give you a cup of tea.”
A pound for one small room for one night was fantastic. But I thought of lying all cramped in my car—with the important deal to look forward to in the morning.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll take it.”
I made to enter the corridor, but she held up her hand.
“Wait,” she said. “I can’t let you in yet. I’ve got to get the room ready. You’ll have to go away and come back in half-an-hour. And it’s money in advance, please.”
“Isn’t there somewhere I could sit down?” I asked. “I’m dead beat.”
But she shook her head. “You’ll have to go away and come back,” she repeated. “There isn’t a corner—we’re full up with folk—every room: and they’re all abed.”
There was nothing for it but to do as she suggested. I reluctantly gave her a pound note and went away down the path. As I closed the gate behind me I noticed the name on it: “Fairweather.” And I thought—My God! Fairweather!—and a couple of sourer-faced so-and-sos I never saw in all my life!
As I walked up the street towards the town I saw, peeping at me from the almost-shut door, the little girl with the solemn eyes. I waved to her cheerily, and had the impression that she was thawing a little: she gave me a small half-smile before she closed the door completely.
I wandered disconsolately about the town. A few drunken men were abroad, and some courting couples, standing close together—mere huddled shapes in doorways and close mouths. I was desperately hungry, but of course no restaurants or even public houses were open. Fair Week notwithstanding. The Scots, you know, take their pleasures solemnly: even when they are off the leash they must circumscribe themselves with rules and regulations. The licensing laws laid it down that places of public refreshment should close at half-past nine, and so, no matter how holiday a spirit was abroad, at half-past nine the town packed up.
In the end I found, in a side street, a small fish and chip shop. The smell of vinegar and hot tallow was nauseating, but I was desperate and went in. A huge Italian woman lolled her sagging bosom on a zinc counter. She was dressed in a greasy white overall and was talking to a girl in an incredibly short and tight skirt. When I asked for chips she said there wasn’t any—nothing left but “black puddings” (mottled, sausagy things, made of oatmeal and pig’s blood). I said I would have one, and she went to the big tin friers at the back of the shop to get it. While she was gone the brassy girl in the short skirt leered at me horribly. She was a tart of the worst sort, with a little gold chain round her left ankle and hair all streaked and patchy with peroxide. In the naphtha-flare lighting of that beastly little shop she looked ghastly.
I made my escape with the hot and slippery pudding wrapped up in a bit of old newspaper. The only place to go was the beach. And here I had to pick my way among reclining couples, searching timidly for an unoccupied dune to sit on. Once or twice I was heartily cursed—at other times there would be a rustle and a furtive scampering as two dark shapes made off into the dusk from beneath my feet: I think they thought I was a spy from the Watch Committee.
Eventually I found a corner and sat down disconsolately, munching at my black pudding. There was by this time a considerable nip in the air, and I was far from happy. There I was, you see, stranded in that small town, with people enjoying themselves in a dull sordid way on all sides—and I with no real guarantee of even a good night’s rest. I distrusted the Fairweathers—there had been something grim and avaricious in their whole attitude. Unpleasant people—except for the sweet-faced little girl.
It was her, I must confess, that I was thinking about as I made my way from the beach back to the small detached villa. Overhead, the sky was a clear cold blue, with a thin crescent moon just rising above the sea. The roar of the incoming tide fell faintly on my ears, and winging away across the damp sands, flying low, was a little flock of wild ducks.
It was all strange—unreal—like a dream. Except for the little girl. I looked forward to seeing her again—it was the only bright spot in the whole programme before me. I loved children, you see—people told me I had “a way with them.” And I had seen, even in the small glimpse I had had of her, that the little girl was very sweet—not in the least like her parents . . .
Well, back I went. And I did succeed in drawing the little girl out and having a chat with her. And she was altogether enchanting—not in the slightest bit shy once I had broken down the first barriers. When I got to the house Mrs. Fairweather grudgingly asked me in, and led me through the dim passageway to a small squalid kitchen. It was an appalling room—untidy, with a lingering smell of cooking and washing about it. There were two wall beds—big cupboard-like things, with heaps of dirty-looking blankets on them, and patchwork rag coverlets. A clothes-horse stood before the range, with some damp flannel nightgowns and semmits on it, and on a pulley drier at the ceiling there hung, in clusters, some socks of coarse grey wool, brown and discoloured about the feet, and a few sets of long men’s drawers, all baggy and darned at the knees—hairy and shapeless things, horrible in the dim light from the gas bracket above the mantelshelf.
Mrs. Fairweather gave me a cup of stewed tea in a cracked and badly-washed mug. Then she went upstairs—I could hear her shuffling along the passageway, grumbling as she went. There was no sign of Mr. F.—I took it he was helping his wife to get my room ready. I was left alone in the kitchen with the little girl.
For some time we looked at each other, smiling. I was distressed at seeing her out of bed so late—in a corner of the kitchen was a small tumbled cot that I took to be hers. I asked her what she had been doing.
“Playing,” she said cheerfully.
“With your dolls?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. I’ve got a lot of dolls—so has Janet.”
“And who is Janet?” I asked.
“She’s my little sister—not so old as me.”
“And what’s your own name?”
“Marjorie.”
(It struck me as strange that the sour Fairweather should have two little daughters. Somehow one didn’t expect it of them—with their hard yellow faces they weren’t the family type.)
“Where were you playing?” I asked her.
“Upstairs and outside. Father made Janet a little house, you see—he’s a carpenter. And I’ve been playing there beside her with my dolls.”
I felt, I must confess, a bit warmed towards Mr. Fairweather. If he could find time to make dolls’ houses for his children, perhaps he wasn’t so bad after all. I remembered that his face had not seemed so thin and cruel as his wife’s—I remembered the way she had whispered to him in the corridor, he acquiescing: perhaps he was just henpecked?
“And where is Janet now?” I asked the little girl. “Is she in bed?”
“Oh yes—she’s been sleeping for a long time. Out there,” she added, nodding towards the back door of the kitchen. I took it that there was some sort of little out-house in the yard that the carpenter Fairweather had converted into a nursery for the younger child.
“You ought to be in bed yourself,” I sai
d with a smile to the little girl.
“Oh, I’m just going,” she said. “I was helping mother with Janet, you see, so I couldn’t go earlier.”
At this moment Mr. and Mrs. Fairweather shuffled into the kitchen.
“Your room’s ready,” muttered the woman. “You’d better go up. It’s late—we want to bed ourselves.”
I gave Marjorie a good night and followed Mr. F. upstairs, he holding a candle in his cupped hand, so that the shadow of his crooked and stooping frame leapt grotesquely on the wall as we mounted. We climbed to the very top of the house, and then he led me along a short corridor. From behind the doors on either side of it I heard snoring—the other guests, I supposed.
There was another very short flight of steps at the end of the corridor, and at the top of them a small door, painted a dull brown colour. Fairweather pushed this open and stood aside for me to go in.
“Here y’are,” he said gruffly. “It’s no’ palatial but it’s a bed. The wife’ll call ye in the morning. What time would suit?”
“Half-past seven,” I answered. Then I added: “Your little daughter is charming, Mr. Fairweather. You must be very fond of her. Is the other one as nice?—Janet?”
“Janet?” he said, in a strange, stupid tone. “Oh—her . . . Oh, yes—yes . . .”
He stood for a moment peering at me. I had the impression he wanted to say something. Then suddenly he turned abruptly away.
“Good night,” he said, and shut the door—with, I thought, unnecessary violence. I heard his footsteps going down the little flight of stairs and along the corridor.
I shrugged, then turned to survey the room. A gas bracket was on at a peep above the mantelshelf and I turned it up full.
It was a tiny room, very bare. The bed was small, covered with a white heavy lace counterpane, badly in need of ironing. The wallpaper was faded and wan—a design of small pink flowers on a yellow background. There were two pictures—one a dark oil painting in a gilt frame of some sort of landscape, the other a tinted photograph, bound in passe-partout, of a little girl of three or four. She was rather like Marjorie—the same wide solemn eyes. I took it to be Janet.
I undressed, turned the light out, and got into bed. And there I lay for a long time, unable to sleep. I don’t know what it was—there was a strangeness, an uneasiness all about me. I had a recurrence of my previous impression that I was living a dream. The Fairweathers were not quite real—the house was not quite real. My whole impression of the dark little town, with the cold sea creeping up to it, was curiously nightmarish. I was haunted by a vision of the two squalid women of the fish and chip shop—the gross Italian with her sagging bosom, the tart leering hideously in the naphtha light. And the black pudding lay heavily on my stomach, giving me heartburn, so that the greasy taste of it kept coming back into my mouth.
To crown all, I was cold. There was an unwelcome chill in the bed. I remembered the Fairweathers saying that the room was not often used, and certainly it had, all about it, the unhappiness of an unlived-in place. Yet there was even something more than that—an atmosphere—a clamminess. The cold was not an ordinary cold—it was the bleak, impersonal cold of the sea I could hear in the distance outside. I wondered who had occupied the room in the days when it had been used. Had they felt this penetrating chill?—was that, indeed, why the room was out of use?—because it was incurably damp? And the Fairweathers had let it to me, for the sake of the money they were getting—knowing I was desperate for a bed, and therefore willing to run the risk of a cold or rheumatism?
In the end, exhausted as I was, I fell asleep. My last thoughts, I remember, were of Marjorie. I hoped I would see her in the morning—she seemed the one sane, healthy thing in the whole peculiar set-up. Perhaps I would see Janet too? I had a vision of them playing pleasantly and innocently with their dolls in the little house that Fairweather had made—grotesquely out of place in all the squalor of Mrs. Fairweather’s kitchen.
There it was, then. That was the most of life, it seemed to me—things in juxtaposition. That’s what it all boils down to in the end. Good things and bad things side by side—the sophisticated and the innocent rubbing shoulders . . .
Well, I am nearing the end of my little story. It is not really a story at all, I suppose—an incident, a situation, no more. It is basically very simple—but, as in the silicosis episode I mentioned, it is the idea that compels me: it is the attitude the situation implies and subtends. All I wanted to do was to set down this happening—this adventure, if you will—as an illustration of the point I made when I started writing. Perhaps my own sense of values has got a bit twisted? It may be the old Scottish sensibility: perhaps, when I think of Janet and Marjorie, I go over-sentimental (I always was so fond of children, you see); or perhaps, when I think of the Fairweathers, I go cynical—as a result of the insurance years. Oh well—it doesn’t matter. I’m out of insurance now—retired these past eighteen months . . .
Mrs. Fairweather banged surlily on my door at half-past seven. I got up, feeling cramped and stiff and not particularly well rested. I washed and shaved as best as I could in cold water in a little bathroom I found at the foot of the small flight of stairs. Then, at a quarter-past eight, I went down for breakfast.
It was served in the front downstairs room of the villa—converted suddenly, I could see from the bundled mattresses and blankets in a corner, from somebody’s temporary bedroom. One or two guests were already eating when I arrived—a small man with pince-nez, unshaven, who hid himself behind a morning paper, a large woman with a set, grumbly face, and two young girls (one of them, to the large woman’s plain disgust, in a wrap and mules).
Mrs. Fairweather put some lumpy porridge before me, and a pot of weak tea, and then a pair of dry salty kippers, cooked in vinegar. The memory of the black pudding of the night before was still closely with me—I did not relish the food in the slightest.
Just before I finished my breakfast the four other guests got up and went out, the small man leaving me his newspaper. I was left in the dining room alone—the other guests in the house were plainly late-risers. I glanced through the paper, finishing my tea, and was on the point of getting up to go myself, when I saw a small figure regarding me from the doorway.
“Marjorie!” I cried—brightening immediately at the sight of her small solemn features. “You’re up and about early.”
“Oh yes,” she said, advancing a little way into the room. “I have to be up, you see, when mother begins to get the breakfasts.”
“And what about Janet?” I asked. “Is she still asleep?”
“Oh yes. She’s outside.”
“With the little house?”
“Oh yes.” She nodded vigorously.
“I’d like very much to see Janet’s little house,” I said. “I’ve got to go in a few minutes—do you think it would disturb her terribly if you and I went round to visit her?”
“Oh no,” she answered solemnly. “It would be all right. We could go out the front door and then round,” she added, after a moment’s pause. “Maybe mother wouldn’t like us to go through the kitchen when she’s busy with the breakfasts.”
I nodded and rose. She took me by the hand quite confidently and led me to the front door. I was, I must confess, looking forward to seeing Janet—and also, strangely enough, to seeing the doll’s house. The more I thought of it the more intrigued I was at the idea of the surly Fairweather going to the trouble to make toys at all for his daughters. Perhaps his acrimonious manner was only some kind of shyness?—he was, maybe, quite gentle and domesticated underneath?
Marjorie, chatting cheerfully all the time about the various dolls I would see, led me round the house and into a small yard at the back. There were various sheds and outbuildings and many planks of timber lying about—a notice at a back entrance to the yard read, I perceived: “C. Fairweather, Practical Joiner.”
“Now,” said Marjorie, lowering her voice to a whisper, “this way. She’s in here.”
She made for the smallest of the sheds—the one nearest the house. It was hardly, I remember thinking with some indignation, the sort of place I would want to put my daughter to sleep in, no matter how crowded I was for accommodation. It suddenly dawned on me that it must have been Janet’s nursery I had spent the night in—the Fairweathers’ greed had done the child out of a bed! Yet I suddenly remembered their saying that the room had been out of use for some time—and I remembered the clammy dampness I had felt in the sheets.
Marjorie pushed open the door of the shed and we went in. I blinked in the sudden dusk.
“There it is,” said Marjorie, “—over there. That’s the little house.”
She pointed over to a corner away from the door. By this time my eyes were a little bit accustomed to the gloom, and I saw, lying on a bench, the little house—a small boxlike thing of plain wood. From the position of its sloping roof it seemed to me to be lying on its side.
“But where’s Janet?” I asked, looking round.
“Oh, she’s in the house,” said Marjorie. “Come over and look—it’s all right, you won’t disturb her.”
She dragged me towards the bench. Then suddenly I shuddered and released her warm little hand. I stopped dead and stared—at the small, calm waxen face, so like Marjorie’s, that I could see before me in the little house!
The little house, my God! I saw what sort of a little house it was that Fairweather had made for his younger daughter. A little house she would live in for a long time.
It was a plain small coffin!
And all the time, as I stared, Marjorie was chattering on:
“She was upstairs, in the attic, sleeping in bed there, till Mummy and Daddy heard you were wanting the room. Then Daddy brought her down here, and we put her in the little house he’d made for her just after she’d fallen asleep. She’s been asleep for an awful long time—and she was terribly ill before she fell asleep—I wish she’d wake up. But I think they’re going to take her away somewhere today—I heard Mummy and Daddy saying so this morning. But I hope she comes back, and then we’ll both be able to play with our dolls in the little house, the way I was doing before we put her in it last night.”
The Other Passenger Page 18