A Little, Aloud

by Angela Macmillan

  There were no papers in his pockets, and no tailor’s name on his clothes, but there was a note-case, with nine pounds in it. Altogether a most unpleasant business. Of course, it doesn’t do to question the workings of Providence, but one couldn’t help wishing it hadn’t happened. It was just a little mysterious, too – er – who had killed him? It wasn’t likely that the girl had or she wouldn’t have been joy-riding about the country with him; and if someone else had murdered him why hadn’t she mentioned it? Anyway, she hadn’t and she’d gone, so one couldn’t do anything for the time being. No telephone, of course. I just locked up the garage and went to bed. That was two o’clock.

  Next morning I woke early, for some reason or other, and it occurred to me as a good idea to go and have a look at things – by daylight, and before Mrs Selston turned up. So I did. The first thing that struck me was that it had snowed heavily during the night, because there were no wheel-tracks or footprints, and the second was that I’d left the key in the garage door. I opened it and went in. The place was completely empty. No car, no body, no nothing. There was a patch of grease on the floor where I’d dropped the candle, otherwise there was nothing to show I’d been there before. One of two things must have happened: either some people had come along during the night and taken the car away, or else I’d fallen asleep in front of the fire and dreamt the whole thing.

  Then I remembered the whisky glasses.

  They should still be in the sitting-room. I went back to look, and they were, all three of them. So it hadn’t been a dream and the car had been fetched away, but they must have been jolly quiet over it.

  The girl had left her glass on the mantelpiece, and it showed several very clearly defined finger-marks. Some were mine, naturally, because I’d fetched the glass from the kitchen and poured out the drink for her, but hers, her finger-marks, were clean and mine were oily, so it was quite easy to tell them apart. It isn’t necessary to point out that this glass was very important. There’d evidently been a murder, or something of that kind, and the girl must have known all about it, even if she hadn’t actually done it herself, so anything she had left in the way of evidence ought to be handed over to the police; and this was all she had left. So I packed it up with meticulous care in an old biscuit-box out of the larder.

  When Mrs Selston came, I settled up with her and came back to town. Oh, I called on the landlord on the way and told him I’d ‘let him know’ about the bungalow. Then I caught my train, and in due course drove straight to Scotland Yard. I went up and saw my friend there. I produced the glass and asked him if his people could identify the marks. He said: ‘Probably not,’ but he sent it down to the finger-print department and asked me where it came from. I said: ‘Never mind; let’s have the identification first.’ He said: ‘All right.’

  They’re awfully quick, these people – the clerk was back in three minutes with a file of papers. They knew the girl all right. They told me her name and showed me her photograph; not flattering. Quite an adventurous lady, from all accounts. In the early part of her career she’d done time twice for shop-lifting, chiefly in the book department. Then she’d what they call ‘taken up with’ a member of one of those race-gangs one sometimes hears about.

  My pal went on to say that there’d been a fight between two of these gangs, in the course of which her friend had got shot. She’d managed to get him away in a car, but it had broken down somewhere in Norfolk. So she’d left it and the dead man in someone’s garage, and had started off for Norwich in a lorry. Only she never got there. On the way the lorry had skidded, and both she and the driver – a fellow called Williams – had been thrown out, and they’d rammed their heads against a brick wall, which every one knows is a fatal thing to do. At least, it was in their case.

  I said: ‘Look here, it’s all very well, but you simply can’t know all this; there hasn’t been time – it only happened last night.’

  He said: ‘Last night be blowed! It all happened in February, nineteen-nineteen. The people you’ve described have been dead for years.’

  I said: ‘Oh!’

  And to think that I might have stuck to that nine pounds!

  SILVER

  Walter de la Mare

  Slowly, silently, now the moon

  Walks the night in her silver shoon;

  This way, and that, she peers, and sees

  Silver fruit upon silver trees;

  One by one the casements catch

  Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;

  Couched in his kennel, like a log,

  With paws of silver sleeps the dog;

  From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep

  Of doves in a silver feathered sleep;

  A harvest mouse goes scampering by,

  With silver claws, and silver eye;

  And moveless fish in the water gleam,

  By silver reeds in a silver stream.

  READING NOTES

  The first thing a group in a day centre for the elderly wanted to talk about after hearing this story was the unreliability of old cars. There was much amusement remembering the pains of starting handles, double-declutching and having to push a car that would not start.

  Dorothy liked the fact that this was a partly humorous ghost story as she did not believe in ghosts but was able to enjoy the story because of its comedy. There was plenty of general talk about ghosts. While not many actually believed in them, everyone felt that houses retain something, a spirit perhaps, of the people who have lived and died in them.

  ‘Silver’ is a well-loved poem and many will know it by heart. Readers have enjoyed choosing favourite lines and images in an effort to understand what makes the poem so atmospheric. Darkness and moonlight change the way we experience our surroundings and there is much to say about the part the moon plays in our lives, both scientifically and emotionally.

  Dark Stairs and Empty Halls

  THE DEMON LOVER

  Elizabeth Bowen

  (approximate reading time 17 minutes)

  Toward the end of her day in London Mrs Drover went round to her shut-up house to look for several things she wanted to take away. Some belonged to herself, some to her family, who were by now used to their country life. It was late August; it had been a steamy, showery day: at the moment the trees down the pavement glittered in an escape of humid yellow afternoon sun. Against the next batch of clouds, already piling up ink-dark, broken chimneys and parapets stood out. In her once familiar street, as in any unused channel, an unfamiliar queerness had silted up; a cat wove itself in and out of railings, but no human eye watched Mrs Drover’s return. Shifting some parcels under her arm, she slowly forced round her latchkey in an unwilling lock, then gave the door, which had warped, a push with her knee. Dead air came out to meet her as she went in.

  The staircase window having been boarded up, no light came down into the hall. But one door, she could just see, stood ajar, so she went quickly through into the room and unshuttered the big window in there. Now the prosaic woman, looking about her, was more perplexed than she knew by everything that she saw, by traces of her long former habit of life – the yellow smoke stain up the white marble mantel-piece, the ring left by a vase on the top of the escritoire, the bruise in the wallpaper where, on the door being thrown open widely, the china handle had always hit the wall. The piano, having gone away to be stored, had left what looked like claw marks on its part of the parquet. Though not much dust had seeped in, each object wore a film of another kind; and, the only ventilation being the chimney, the whole drawing room smelled of the cold hearth. Mrs Drover put down her parcels on the escritoire and left the room to proceed upstairs; the things she wanted were in a bedroom chest.

  She had been anxious to see how the house was – the part-time caretaker she shared with some neighbours was away this week on his holiday, known to be not yet back. At the best of times he did not look in often, and she was never sure that she trusted him. There were some cracks in the structure, left by the last bombing,
on which she was anxious to keep an eye. Not that one could do anything –

  A shaft of refracted daylight now lay across the hall. She stopped dead and stared at the hall table – on this lay a letter addressed to her.

  She thought first – then the caretaker must be back. All the same, who, seeing the house shuttered, would have dropped a letter in at the box? It was not a circular, it was not a bill. And the post office redirected, to the address in the country, everything for her that came through the post. The caretaker (even if he were back) did not know she was due in London today – her call here had been planned to be a surprise – so his negligence in the manner of this letter, leaving it to wait in the dust, annoyed her. Annoyed, she picked up the letter, which bore no stamp. But it cannot be important, or they would know . . . She took the letter rapidly upstairs with her, without a stop to look at the writing till she let in light. The room looked over the garden and sharpened and lowered, the trees and rank lawns seemed already to smoke with dark. Her reluctance to look again at the letter came from the fact that she felt intruded upon – and by someone contemptuous of her ways. However, in the tenseness preceding the fall of rain she read it: it was a few lines.

  Dear Kathleen: You will not have forgotten that today is our anniversary, and the day we said. The years have gone by at once slowly and fast. In view of the fact that nothing has changed, I shall rely upon you to keep your promise. I was sorry to see you leave London, but was satisfied that you would be back in time. You may expect me, therefore, at the hour arranged. Until then . . . K.

  Mrs Drover looked for the date: It was today’s. She dropped the letter onto the bedsprings, then picked it up to see the writing again – her lips, beneath the remains of lipstick, beginning to go white. She felt so much the change in her own face that she sent to the mirror, polished a clear patch in it, and looked at once urgently and stealthily in. She was confronted by a woman of forty-four, with eyes starting out under a hat brim that had been rather carelessly pulled down. She had not put on any more powder since she left the shop where she ate her solitary tea. The pearls her husband had given her on their marriage hung loose round her now rather thinner throat, slipping in the V of the pink wool jumper her sister knitted last autumn as they sat round the fire. Mrs Drover’s most normal expression was one of controlled worry but of assent. Since the birth of the third of her little boys, attended by a quite serious illness, she had had an intermittent muscular flicker to the left of her mouth, but in spite of this she could always sustain a manner that was at once energetic and calm.

  Turning from her own face as precipitously as she had gone to meet it, she went to the chest where the things were, unlocked it, threw up the lid, and knelt to search. But as rain began to come crashing down she could not keep from looking over her shoulder at the stripped bed on which the letter lay. Behind the blanket of rain the clock of the church that still stood struck six – with rapidly heightening apprehension she counted each of the slow strokes. ‘The hour arranged . . . My God,’ she said, ‘what hour? How should I . . .? After twenty-five years . . .’

  The young girl talking to the soldier in the garden had not ever completely seen his face. It was dark; they were saying goodbye under a tree. Now and then – for it felt, from not seeing him at this intense moment, as though she had never seen him at all – she verified his presence for these few moments longer by putting out a hand, which he each time pressed, without very much kindness, and painfully, on to one of the breast buttons of his uniform. That cut of the button on the palm of her hand was, principally, what she was to carry away. This was so near the end of a leave from France that she could only wish him already gone. It was August 1916. Being not kissed, being drawn away from and looked at intimidated Kathleen till she imagined spectral glitters in the place of his eyes. Turning away and looking back up the lawn she saw, through branches of trees, the drawing-room window alight: she caught a breath for the moment when she could go running back there into the safe arms of her mother and sister, and cry: ‘What shall I do, what shall I do? He has gone.’

  Hearing her catch her breath, her fiancé said, without feeling: ‘Cold?’

  ‘You’re going away such a long way.’

  ‘Not so far as you think.’

  ‘I don’t understand?’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ he said. ‘You will. You know what we said.’

  ‘But that was – suppose you – I mean, suppose.’

  ‘I shall be with you,’ he said, ‘sooner or later. You won’t forget that. You need do nothing but wait.’

  Only a little more than a minute later she was free to run up the silent lawn. Looking in through the window at her mother and sister, who did not for the moment perceive her, she already felt that unnatural promise drive down between her and the rest of all humankind. No other way to having given herself could have made her feel so apart, lost and forsworn. She could not have plighted a more sinister troth.

  Kathleen behaved well when, some months later, her fiancé was reported missing, presumed killed. Her family not only supported her but were able to praise her courage without stint because they could not regret, as a husband for her, the man they knew almost nothing about. They hoped she would, in a year or two, console herself – and had it been only a question of consolation things might have gone much straighter ahead. But her trouble, behind just a little grief, was a complete dislocation from everything. She did not reject other lovers, for these failed to appear. For years, she failed to attract men – and with the approach of her thirties she became natural enough to share her family’s anxiousness on the score. She began to put herself out, to wonder, and at thirty-two she was very greatly relieved to find herself being courted by William Drover. She married him, and the two of them settled down in the quiet, arboreal part of Kensington: in this house the years piled up, her children were born, and they all lived till they were driven out by the bombs of the next war. Her movements as Mrs Drover were circumscribed, and she dismissed any idea that they were still watched.

  As things were – dead or living the letter writer sent her only a threat. Unable, for some minutes, to go on kneeling with her back exposed to the empty room, Mrs Drover rose from the chest to sit on an upright chair whose back was firmly against the wall. The desuetude of her former bedroom, her married London home’s whole air of being a cracked cup from which memory, with its reassuring power, had either evaporated or leaked away, made a crisis – and at just this crisis the letter writer had, knowledgeably, struck. The hollowness of the house this evening cancelled years on years of voices, habits and steps. Through the shut windows she only heard rain fall on the roofs around. To rally herself, she said she was in a mood – and for two or three seconds shutting her eyes, told herself that she had imagined the letter. But she opened them – there it lay on the bed.

  On the supernatural side of the letter’s entrance she was not permitting her mind to dwell. Who, in London, knew she meant to call at the house today? Evidently, however, that had been known. The caretaker, had he come back, had had no cause to expect her: he would have taken the letter in his pocket, to forward it, at his own time, through the post. There was no other sign that the caretaker had been in – but, if not? Letters dropped in at doors of deserted houses do not fly or walk to tables in halls. They do not sit on the dust of empty tables with the air of certainty that they will be found. There is needed some human hand – but nobody but the caretaker had a key. Under the circumstances she did not care to consider, a house can be entered without a key. It was possible that she was not alone now. She might be being waited for, downstairs. Waited for – until when? Until ‘the hour arranged’. At least that was not six o’clock: six has struck.

  She rose from the chair and went over and locked the door.

  The thing was, to get out. To fly? No, not that: she had to catch her train. As a woman whose utter dependability was the keystone of her family life, she was not willing to return to the country, to her husba
nd, her little boys, and her sister, without the objects she had come up to fetch. Resuming her work at the chest she set about making up a number of parcels in a rapid, fumbling-decisive way. These, with her shopping parcels, would be too much to carry; these meant a taxi – at the thought of the taxi her heart went up and her normal breathing resumed. I will ring up the taxi; the taxi cannot come too soon: I shall hear the taxi out there running its engine, till I walk calmly down to it through the hall. I’ll ring up – But no: the telephone is cut off . . . She tugged at a knot she had tied wrong.

  The idea of flight . . . He was never kind to me, not really. I don’t remember him kind at all. Mother said he never considered me. He was set on me, that was what it was – not love. Not love, not meaning a person well. What did he do, to make me promise like that? I can’t remember – But she found that she could.

  She remembered with such dreadful acuteness that the twenty-five years since then dissolved like smoke and she instinctively looked for the weal left by the button on the palm of her hand. She remembered not only all that he said and did but the complete suspension of her existence during that August week. I was not myself – they all told me so at the time. She remembered – but with one white burning blank as where acid has dropped on a photograph: under no conditions could she remember his face.

  So, wherever he may be waiting, I shall not know him. You have no time to run from a face you do not expect.

  The thing was to get to the taxi before any clock struck what could be the hour. She would slip down the street and round the side of the square to where the square gave on the main road. She would return in the taxi, safe, to her own door, and bring the solid driver into the house with her to pick up the parcels from room to room. The idea of the taxi driver made her decisive, bold: she unlocked her door, went to the top of the staircase, and listened down.