Along the shore-line more children played, making dangerous leaps from the sea-washed break-waters, while the less adventurous contented themselves by fishing for crabs in the small pools left by the out-going tide.
Further along, on a part of the beach where the sea never encroached, Harold Miller had set up his Punch and Judy show and was performing to a semi-circle of small children, who joined in the fun by calling out to the puppets and squealing with delight at Mr Punch’s nefarious crimes. Turner stood at the back of the semi-circle; rubbing shoulders with the indulgent parents of the children, content to watch Harold Miller work his magic for a while. The squawking voice of Mr Punch rang out across the sands as he battered the long-suffering Judy with a stick, avoided being eaten by the crocodile and killed a policeman.
Turner found he was gradually being drawn into the drama that was unfolding on the tiny stage. He watched the puppets as they went though the familiar pantomime. He had seen the show many times before and, as always, was mildly shocked by the incredible violence of it all. Now he listened to the dialogue between the puppets and slowly realised the script had been changed.
He stood like a statue, eyes wide in disbelief, as lines of dialogue from D’arcy Blake’s awful play issued from the mouths of the puppets. The entire first scene of Nocturne was being enacted in that gaily-striped theatre, the actors and actresses nothing more than wood and cloth creations.
The sound of laughter filtered through into his consciousness and he looked around at the delighted faces of the children. They seemed oblivious to the changes in the familiar story line. Couldn’t they hear what he was hearing? Were they unaware of the corruption of their traditional seaside treat?
He jerked himself out of his trance-like state and started to run, back towards the pier, back to the safety of the theatre. Breathless, with his heart pounding in his chest, he pushed through the doors and ran along the corridor to his office. He collapsed into a chair and buried his face in his hands. Eventually he regained his composure and tried to rationalise what he had heard and his reaction to it. He spent an hour trying to tell himself that it had not really happened, that it was only in his imagination he had heard lines from D’arcy Blake’s play issuing from the puppets of Punch and Judy. At the end of the hour he had failed to convince himself. Exhausted he slept on the couch in the corner of his office.
Turner spent much of the next morning on the telephone, confirming what he already knew; he would not be able to replace the departing actors easily, if at all. Somehow it didn’t really worry him, as it should. He saw it as inevitable. The feeling was drawing upon him that the end of his era was approaching.
He returned to his house to wash and eat and was met at the door by Mrs Ellory. She had a duster in her hand and her apron was smeared with lavender polish. “Will the young man be staying long, Mr Turner?” She said, as Turner took off his mackintosh and hung it from a hook on the coat-stand. “Because if he is, I can always make up a bed in the spare room.” There was the distinct edge of disapproval in her voice.
Turner carried the bag containing his costume through to the sitting room. “I’m sorry, Mrs Ellory, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The housekeeper followed him into the room and continued dusting the mantelpiece. Turner watched her work, watched the tension knotting at her shoulders. After a moment she put down her duster and turned to face him. “I’m sorry, Mr Turner. I know it’s none of my business how you live your life, but I do feel you should have given me some warning.” She dry washed her hands and pushed a strand of hair back into the paisley silk turban she wore on her head. “I mean, it was a devil of a shock going in to dust your bedroom and finding him curled up under the eiderdown.”
Turner shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry, Mrs Ellory, I really have no idea…” His voice trailed off and the colour drained from his face. “Oh my God!” He rushed from the room and ran up the stairs to his bedroom. He paused for just a second outside the door before throwing it open with a cry. Mrs Ellory was half way up the stairs but stopped dead when Turner cried out. “Is everything all right?” she called timorously. After, what seemed to her, an eternity Turner appeared at the top of the stairs.
“Everything’s fine,” he said calmly. “I think you were mistaken, Mrs Ellory.”
She frowned at him and bustled up the stairs, pushing past him at the top and striding into the bedroom. “But I don’t understand it. He was there, in the bed.”
Turner joined her in the room. “Well if he was in the bed, then he made it after him when he left. And,” he added with a smile, “he even had the decency to fold my pyjamas and leave them on the pillow in exactly the same place I left them this morning.”
It was a very disgruntled Mrs Ellory who left the house later that day. Ready to swear on the Bible that there had been someone in Turner’s bed, and completely nonplussed by his disappearance. “But he would have had to come past me to leave the house,” she said half a dozen times during the course of her afternoon cleaning. Turner, whilst making light of it in front of Mrs Ellory, was a deeply troubled man when he turned in for bed that night.
He was as convinced as she that there had been someone in his bed earlier, despite all evidence to the contrary. It was with some trepidation that he left the bathroom and walked the five paces to his bedroom. He opened the door and switched on the light. The bed was as he had left it earlier. With a deep sigh of relief he took off his robe and slipped into his pyjamas. Then, throwing back the sheets and blankets, he climbed into bed.
His cry as his body met the bed echoed through the house. He leapt out and stood staring down at the water sodden under-sheet. Strands of sea-weed were draped across his pillow, and the pillow itself was indented with the unmistakable imprint of a head.
He fled the room and spent the rest of the night on a chair in the sitting room, huddled under a blanket, wide awake and staring at the closed door, convinced that at any moment it would open and the drowned, bloated body of D’arcy Blake would walk in and take his revenge on him.
The next morning Turner was walking along the pier to the theatre when he spotted Blake standing alongside the candyfloss stall. Standing, tapping his foot impatiently, staring hard at the theatre. Turner ducked into Madame Rosa’s fortune-telling booth, interrupting a sitting between Rosa and a matronly woman with a broad Yorkshire accent. Rosa shooed him away but not before he persuaded her to look out from the curtained doorway to see if there was a young man standing by the candyfloss stall. Realising it was the only way to get Turner out of her booth; she did so, and reported back that the only people by the stall were a group of school children, queuing up for the sticky treat.
Turner left the booth and hurried to the pier railing. There was nothing pressing at the theatre that could not wait for an hour or so, and he felt the need to settle his nerves. The weather was returning to its former miseries. There was a fine drizzle falling on Eastmouth as he stood looking out at the sea, his thoughts in turmoil, despair and fear battling for supremacy. A watery sun was beginning to show itself from behind the clouds. Turner turned to look back at the town that had been his summer home for over twenty-five years. A single decker bus threaded its way past parked cars on the esplanade, half empty, the holidaymakers forsaking the town now that the season was all but over. The pier’s car park, normally full to over-flowing, was empty and Hodges, the car-park attendant, was walking around the macadamised quadrangle with a pointed stick and a basket, spearing litter left by the departing masses.
Turner always felt sad when a season ended, like a small part of him had died. This year the sadness was magnified a thousand times. He looked at the town and knew it was the last time he would see it. In years past he had spent the winter months living with his widowed sister in a three storey town-house in Crystal Palace, taking work where he could find it, filling in his time until the next April when he could return to Eastmouth once more to prepare for the next season. His sister was now
dead. This year there would be no Crystal Palace, no part-time work as Father Christmas in one of the capital’s department stores, no preparation for next year’s theatrical triumphs and disasters.
With sagging shoulders he turned away from the town and walked along the pier. The theatre at the end looked even more depressed than usual. The roof seemed to sag under the weight of its years. Its windows appeared lifeless as though they had adopted the senseless guise of senility. Its paintwork looked cracked.
He heard his name called by that voice, the voice whispering in his ear. Henry Turner swung round, flailing at the empty air behind him with his rolled up umbrella. “Leave me alone, damn you. Leave me alone!” With a sob he started to run, towards the theatre that had been such a large part of his life for over a quarter of a century.
Then his name again, ahead of him now, the faint hissing voice, terrifying in its malevolence. Turner could see the theatre in the distance, but the building seemed blurred, out of focus, as if his eyes were covered in gauze. He ran on, as the silence of the pier overwhelmed him. There was no sound on the pier at all, no people to be seen. He was conscious of a slapping sound as his feet hit the decking, but even that sound was sucked away until all he could hear was the blood rushing in his ears.
Progress was painfully slow. Although he was conscious of running with all the speed his sixty year old body could muster, the theatre never seemed to get any nearer, and gradually he became aware that the decking under his feet was becoming soft. He seemed to be sinking into the boards with each step he took. Almost as if he was running through sand, and at the edge of the sand was water, deep water waiting to claim him.
The voice whispered in his ear again, joined this time by other voices, each calling him name, cursing him, vilifying him.
Too exhausted to reply to them he ran on, wanting only to reach the theatre; his world, his sanctuary.
The decking boards of the pier confounded him. They were rippling and buckling, pitching and twisting, sucking at his feet, tripping him. His foot caught on the edge of a board and he tumbled forwards, splinters of wood embedding themselves in his palms as he stretched out his hands to break his fall, his umbrella skidding across the boards and falling with a splash into the sea. His great fear was that he would fall into the sea after it. All around him the air was alive with whispers and cries, and gradually the visibility was diminishing.
He looked back to the entrance of the pier and screamed. A pillar of mist was spinning towards him, thrusting forward along the pier. A grey swirling vortex coming at him with great speed, all the while hissing his name over and over again in a whispered chant.
As the vortex drew nearer Turner saw that it was far more solid than he had imagined. The mist was not spreading across the pier, as would be normal, but was confined to its centre, with a definite purpose about its course, which was directly towards him. The mist had a raw shape, which Turner realised he had witnessed before. It was the shape of a man, though the edges were indistinct, with flailing arms and the appearance of a roughly defined mouth. The sea mist had him trapped, pushing him along the pier; he was terrified to touch it or to let it engulf him. It was moving him across to the pier’s railings. He felt the rail at his back, and looked down in horror at the sea below him. His fear of the sea was great, developed over many years, but his instinctive dread of the mist, and what it might contain was greater. He pulled himself onto the railings, and then screamed out as the water waited for him.
He hit the water and the breath rushed from his body as the waves closed over his head. He sank deeper and deeper, his legs kicking wildly, his arms thrashing, forcing himself upwards. He saw sunlight above him, filtering through the murky water and, as he surfaced, it glared into his eyes.
The mist had cleared but all around him were white rectangles of paper, floating flaccidly on the still surface of the sea. On each of the sheets, neatly typed was, “Nocturne, a play in three acts by D’arcy Blake.” He gulped air into his lungs in a huge, desperate sigh of relief and started to swim, back towards the stanchions of the pier. “It’s over,” he thought as he reached a steel support at the end of the pier and wrapped his arms around it. “All over.” He opened his mouth to call out, to let someone, anyone, know he was down here in the water.
The words died in his throat as something broke the surface next to him. A twisted, gnarled knot of seaweed the size of a man’s head. For a second Turner stared at it incomprehensibly, then two fronds of seaweed lifted and a pair of white, dead eyes stared out at him. Below the eyes a gash opened in the seaweed mass to form a thin, lipless mouth. Turner had no more time for thought, before weed-covered arms encircled him and dragged him screaming down beneath the waves.
AN OFFICE IN THE GRAYS INN ROAD
The Grays Inn Road, as many a visitor to London may tell you, is a long straight thoroughfare, with the tarnished splendour of the old railway station of Kings Cross at one end, and the understated importance of the many legal buildings of Holborn at the other. It is the home of the Eastman Dental Hospital, several pubs, countless snack bars, and hundreds of apartments and offices. Like many London streets away from the West End it bustles with movement all day, yet, once evening arrives, it settles into a quiet, nearly deserted somnolence. It cannot be called one of the more attractive parts of London. The closer you get to the Kings Cross end, where many of the apartment blocks look seedily run down, a definite air of menace hangs over the place; menace with an undercurrent of latent violence, which makes walking alone at night an uncomfortable experience.
The offices of the Phillips Theatrical Agency occupied the top floor of a turn of the century building at the Holborn end. It was close to the junction with Clerkenwell Road, about a fifteen-minute walk from Kings Cross station. It was a walk Joanna Phillips took one Saturday afternoon, two days after her husband's death.
The transition from wife to widow, at thirty-three, was not an easy one to make. It was the suddenness of it that she found so difficult to cope with. No preparation, no final words, no last goodbyes.
At breakfast on Thursday she was trying to persuade Hugh to take a holiday with her later in the year; an autumn break, perhaps Italy, to visit Florence again, the setting for their honeymoon. Running the agency had been taking all his energies recently. He had been working long hours, sometimes seven days a week, not arriving home until late, and he seemed so tired that Joanna was beginning to fear for his health.
By lunchtime she was sitting at home, numb with shock, as a young policeman, a dab of shaving-foam behind his ear, told her there had been a car accident and Hugh had been killed. There was no one else in the car and no other vehicles were involved. It appeared he had lost control of the car on a bend, perhaps he had fallen asleep at the wheel for a few seconds. The occurrence was apparently quite common. Before he left she wiped the shaving foam away with her finger.
The rest of the day and the next saw her wandering around the house, feeling lost and alone. The house seemed empty and cold, despite the spring sunshine pouring in through the windows. The identification of the body was bad enough, made worse by his mother who showed almost no emotion at all. For Joanna, even seeing the body and realising the physical fact of the death was not sufficient to persuade her he was gone. She still expected to see him in the room, to smell the aroma of the cigars he used, to feel him next to her in bed. She kept repeating his name over and over, kept feeling unreasonable guilt that she was to blame. If only she had been more firm and forced him to reduce his work load, to work less hours. The feeling of numbness overshadowed everything, leaving her thinking, hoping it was all a dream.
When Saturday came she knew she needed to be close to Hugh, to feel his presence, and she couldn't manage that in the house. Whilst they had shared some memorable times there, the office was the centre of Hugh's life, it was where he came alive. The agency had been his passion, and it was in the office in the Grays Inn Road where he had proposed to her eight years ago. Her parents had been
worried by the fact that he was ten years older than she was, but Hugh had won them over, as he did everyone, with his well-practised charm.
She opened the envelope the police had given her after the accident, which contained all the items found in his pockets. Taking out his office keys, she walked to the station and caught the train to London. It was about a forty-minute journey from the house in Cambridge. All she could think of on the train was the way they had talked about the future. Hugh had always maintained that he would leave her well provided for, assuming because he was older that he would be the first to die. Only he couldn't have imagined it would be like this, so suddenly.
She found the agency to be much more run down than she remembered. The lift that ferried visitors from the dour Victorian foyer to the floors above had probably been installed in the 1920's. It still had the old style brass lattice gates that fold like a concertina when opened, and close with a loud metallic clang, making people feel they are shut in a prison. Such lifts can be claustrophobic and Joanna took the stairs instead.
The offices themselves were three fairly small rooms, each leading off from a central reception area, and each used by one of the partners. The decor in Hugh's own office, like the rest of the place, was shabby and smelled musty. The windows were grimy and badly in need of a clean, the glass patinated by a brown film from the thin cigars. On the walls hung photographs of some of the agency's more famous clients, jostling for space with framed diplomas and dog-eared theatre playbills.
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