‘What do you want?’
‘There’s a woman crying out. What’s going on?’
‘Going on?’ she said in a high astonished voice. ‘What’s it to you?’
‘What’s the matter with the woman?’
But she stood silent, and the screams continued. The constable ran heavily upstairs.
In the dirty room he found Elaine, her arms raised, beating her head against the wall by the window. She had torn her nightdress, which fell from her shoulders. She banged her head rhythmically and screamed and screamed in agony.
‘Jesus Christ!’ said the man behind the policeman, who ran forward and tried to drag her away from the wall. Blood was running down her face. She was very strong, resisting wildly, still screaming. The workman went to help him. They succeeded in turning her round and grasped her, still writhing and twisting, between them.
By now Mrs Grose was in the doorway. ‘What is it?’ the workman cried out. ‘Are you hurt? Is she hurt?’
‘Speak up woman – what’s going on here?’ demanded the policeman. ‘Try to help us!’
But Mrs Grose merely held out a letter. Seeing it, Elaine became rigid. Her lips folded back like an animal’s. Reaching out for the letter and somehow managing to keep his grip on Elaine’s arm, the workman got hold of it. Elaine howled, ‘No – no!’ and leaned towards him, clawing for the letter. He let her have it, saying over her head as she began yet again to try to twist herself free of them, ‘Letter from the father, saying don’t come near the family – the young man’s been killed in action.’
‘Poor lass,’ he said. ‘Poor lass. Help me get her downstairs. Get a doctor,’ he ordered Mrs Grose.
But she did not move. She said, impeturbably, ‘It’s a mistake. Tom Brett’s not dead. I’ve been trying to tell her he’s not dead. He’s coming back. They said so.’
‘Whatever they said, whoever they are, she believes he’s dead,’ the policeman said. ‘Will you get a doctor?’
‘They promised,’ she told him.
‘Please move, madam,’ he said, and with great difficulty they pushed past Mrs Grose’s big but unresisting figure and got Elaine, still screaming and crying out, down the narrow stairs.
At the foot, still gasping, they held her. The workman said to the constable, ‘In the corner – did you see something …?’
The policeman looked at him in horror. ‘I thought it was my eyes, playing tricks.’
‘Let’s get her out of this place.’ They dragged her into the street, a coat draped over her. The crowd outside stared.
An hour later the neighbours smelled smoke. This time the fire brigade broke down the front door. They managed to get up the burning staircase and found, in the back bedroom, Mrs Grose sitting in the smoke-filled room, where flames were already charring the floorboards. She would not move, so had to be carried downstairs into the street. Upstairs the flames began to lick up the legs of the table, on which the letters of the alphabet were still arranged and the tumbler still lay.
* * *
That evening, the workman who had entered the house with the constable said to his wife, ‘There was something horrible in the corner of the room.’
‘What then?’ she said, fetching his supper.
He said nothing for a moment. ‘Shapes,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t put your finger on it. It was knee high. Bulging shapes, moving about, like fog. Or say you had an animal in a sack – but all grey, misty. It was horrible,’ he repeated. ‘It wasn’t so much what it was, it had a horrible atmosphere about it, like when you wake up from a nightmare.’
‘You said the curtains were drawn.’
‘There was light coming in. I saw it. Bulging in and out, like it was trying to get bigger. Yes, that was the worst part. It was trying to grow.’
His wife was silent. Then she asked, ‘What was it?’
‘That’s the worst thing,’ he told her. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it. But it was there, in that corner, trying to grow. I hope it burned up in the fire.’ He stood up.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
‘To the pub. I need a drink. I need several – to wipe out the thought of that unfortunate woman and that horrible thing in the corner.’ He repeated, ‘I hope to God that fire killed it.’
It was left to Marguerite and Henry Reeve to fetch Elaine and Mrs Grose to a quiet sanatorium further down the coast. Calmed, they lay side by side in two white beds in a white bedroom overlooking the sea. The sound of the waves was ever present.
White-nightgowned, in their white beds in a white room, they lay motionless most of the time. The staff nurses could not know that for Mrs Grose and Elaine the room contained other presences, misty figures, sometimes dimly seen, but always heard, even above the sound of the sea. They could not know that the dead were drawing their sustenance, their being, from those two prone white figures, nor that the two women had gladly abandoned themselves to them, to Peter Quint, Miss Jessell – and Miles.
Fifty-Four
Flora Kilmoyne lay in her flower-decked bedroom. Though a fire burned in the grate, the room was full of daffodils, snowdrops and hyacinths, and was beautifully scented by them. Little sound entered the room, high over Grosvenor Square. Beside her in the cradle lay her son, born the day before.
She gazed at the pastoral scene on the painted ceiling. She was at peace.
It had not been a hard birth. It had been carefully managed by a kindly doctor and midwives, to spare the mother as much pain as possible. At the end they had given her ether. Flora had emerged from the anaesthetic to find a plump, ivory-skinned child with a cap of black hair crying beside her in a white cradle. Later, figures wreathed in smiles, her uncle and aunt, her parents-in-law, came to visit.
While Flora had been in labour Beth had been almost as nervous, as if she had been bearing the child herself. Lady Kilmoyne had been much the same, though too well-controlled to betray it. However, after the doctor came in with the good news, her straight back had sagged a little, and she sat down with a bump. The men had been little calmer and shown less courage than Lady Kilmoyne. Kilmoyne, with Geoffrey in the study, waiting, wept when the doctor came in to impart the news of the birth. He wiped his eyes and said, half apologetically, to Geoffrey, ‘With two boys under fire in France …’
‘Just so,’ Geoffrey had agreed, turning his back, to pour the new grandfather a brandy.
Justin had leave and was even now probably setting out from France for the journey home.
Flora thought dreamily how pleased Justin would be, how lucky she was. When the war was over they would return to Italy, not Venice, where things had gone so badly wrong, but Florence, where there would be golden sunshine, great buildings, cypresses, olive groves, mighty paintings …
But by the marble fireplace to her right a movement caught her eye. In that soldier’s uniform, alas now so familiar to her, and now the clothing of so many young men, was the figure of Miles, his face pale. He wore stained puttees. His boots were muddy. A stench, of foul water and rot, overlaid the sweet smell of hyacinths in the room. Flora gave a cry. ‘Oh what – oh what – Miles! Miles! What do you want?’
‘To be with you, my dear. You and the child.’ He paused, then said, with pleasure, ‘The boy.’
‘No, Miles, no. You must rest now.’
‘There’s no peace for me, Flora,’ he said, as if this was something she should have known. ‘No peace for me, or for Miss Jessell, or Quint.’
Flora, now propped on one arm, gazed at him in horror, ‘No – no—’
‘You see,’ he told her, ‘Quint wants another boy.’
She screamed. He put his finger to his lips. ‘Hush,’ he said, ‘and listen.’ The door was thick, but from downstairs came a dreadful, wounded cry, the voices raised in horrified exclamation. ‘Now, wait,’ he said. And, as if hypnotised, she obeyed him.
Soon came the reluctant tread of Lady Kilmoyne on the stairs.
‘What is it?’ Flora gasped. ‘Oh – wha
t?’
‘Justin – dead, I’m afraid,’ Miles told her without regret. ‘It had to be. I need you, you see. And Quint – Quint needs your boy.’
Flora was already screaming as the door opened and Lady Kilmoyne came into the room, the Bennetts behind her. Lady Kilmoyne’s face was rigid and grey. Tears ran down her cheeks. In her hand was the yellow telegram form informing them of Justin Kilmoyne’s death. Flora’s mouth was open in a howl, her eyes fixed, unblinking, on the corner by the white screen where her brother Miles, Miss Jessell and Peter Quint stood, ashenly staring at her in calm triumph.
A Note on the Author
HILARY BAILEY was born in 1936 and was educated at thirteen schools before attending Newnham College, Cambridge. Married with children, she entered the strange, uneasy world of ’60s science fiction, writing some twenty tales of imagination which were published in Britain, the USA, France and Germany. She has edited the magazine New Worlds and has regularly reviewed modern fiction for the Guardian. Her first novel was published in 1975 and she has since written twelve novels and a short biography. She lives in Ladbroke Grove, London.
Discover books by Hilary Bailey published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/HilaryBailey
After the Cabaret
All the Days of My Life
As Time Goes By
A Stranger to Herself
Cassandra
Connections
Elizabeth and Lily
Fifty-First State
Hannie Richards
In Search of Love, Money and Revenge
Mrs Rochester
Polly Put the Kettle On
Mrs Mulvaney
The Cry from Street to Street
Miles and Flora
The Strange Adventures of Charlotte Holmes
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1997 by Simon and Schuster
Copyright © 1997 Hilary Bailey
All rights reserved
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make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
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The moral right of the author is asserted.
ISBN: 9781448209484
eISBN: 9781448209491
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Miles and Flora Page 23