I did not visit the hospital that morning, from complete perplexity as to what there to do or say; but instead, during the afternoon, wandered back to the house. Despite my horror of the place, I thought that I might hit upon something able to suggest a course of action. I would look more closely at those grimy papers; and even at the books in the library. The idea of burning the place down was still by no means out of my mind. I would further ponder the inflammability of the house, and the degree of risk to the neighbours . . . All the time, of course, I was completely miscalculating my own strength and what was happening to me.
But as I hoisted the fallen gate, my nerve suddenly left me; again, something which had never happened to me before, either in the course of these events or at any previous time. I felt very sick. I was much afraid lest I faint. My body felt simultaneously tense and insubstantial.
Then I became aware that Mr Orbit’s delivery boy was staring at me from the gate of the dentist’s house opposite. I must have presented a queer spectacle because the boy seemed to be standing petrified. His mouth, I saw, was wide open. I knew the boy quite well. It was essential for all kinds of reasons that I conduct myself suitably. The boy stood, in fact, for public opinion. I took a couple of deep breaths, produced the weighty bunch of keys from my handbag, and ascended the steps as steadily as possible.
Inside the house, I made straight for the basement, with a view to a glass of water. With Mr Orbit’s boy no longer gaping at me, I felt worse than ever; so that, even before I could look for a tumbler or reach the tap, I had to sink upon one of the two battered kitchen chairs. All my hair was damp, and my clothes felt unbearably heavy.
Then I became aware that steps were descending the basement staircase.
I completed my sequence of new experiences by fainting indeed.
I came round to the noise of an animal; a snuffling, grunting cry, which seemed to come, with much persistence, from the floor above. I seemed to listen to it for some time, even trying, though failing, to identify what animal it was; before recovering more fully, and realising that Sally was leaning back against the dresser and staring at me.
‘Sally! It was you.’
‘Who did you think it was? It’s my house.’
She no longer wore the stained grey slacks, but was dressed in a very curious way, about which I do not think it fair to say more. In other ways also, the change in her had become complete: her eyes had a repulsive lifelessness; the bone structure of her face, previously so fine, had altered unbelievably. There was an unpleasant croak in her voice, precisely as if her larynx had lost flexibility.
‘Will you please return my keys?’
I even had difficulty in understanding what she said; although doubtless my shaky condition did not help. Very foolishly, I rose to my feet, while Sally glared at me with her changed eyes. I had been lying on the stone floor. There was a bad pain in the back of my head and neck.
‘Glad to see you’re better, Sally. I didn’t expect you’d be about for some time yet.’ My words were incredibly foolish.
She said nothing, but only stretched out her hand. It too was changed: it had become grey and bony, with protruding knotted veins.
I handed her the big bunch of keys. I wondered how she had entered the house without them. The animal wailing above continued without intermission. To it now seemed to be added a noise which struck me as resembling that of a pig scrabbling. Involuntarily I glanced upwards to the ceiling.
Sally snatched the keys, snatched them gently and softly, not violently; then cast her unblinking eyes upwards in parody of mine, and emitted an almost deafening shriek of laughter.
‘Do you love children, Mel? Would you like to see my baby?’
Truly it was the last straw; and I do not know quite how I behaved.
Now Sally seemed filled with terrible pride. ‘Let me tell you, Mel,’ she said, ‘that it’s possible for a child to be born in a manner you’d never dream of.’
I had begun to shudder again, but Sally clutched hold of me with her grey hand and began to drag me up the basement stairs.
‘Will you be godmother? Come and see your godchild, Mel.’
The noise was coming from the library. I clung to the top of the basement baluster. Distraught as I was, I now realised that the scrabbling sound was connected with the tearing to pieces of Dr Tessler’s books. But it was the wheezy, throaty cry of the creature which most turned my heart and sinews to water.
Or to steel. Because as Sally tugged at me, trying to pull me away from the baluster and into the library, I suddenly realised that she had no strength at all. Whatever else had happened to her, she was weak as a wraith.
I dragged myself free from her, let go of the baluster, and made toward the front door. Sally began to scratch my face and neck, but I made a quite capable job of defending myself. Sally then began to call out in her unnatural voice: she was trying to summon the creature into the passage. She scraped and tore at me, while panting out a stream of dreadful endearments to the thing in the library.
In the end, I found that my hands were about her throat, which was bare despite the cold weather. I could stand no more of that wrecked voice. Immediately she began to kick; and the shoes she was wearing seemed to have metal toes. I had the final awful fancy that she had acquired iron feet. Then I threw her from me on the floor of the passage, and fled from the house.
It was now dark; somehow darker outside the house than inside it; and I found that I still had strength enough to run all the way home.
I went away for a fortnight, although on general grounds it was the last thing I had wanted to do. At the end of that time, and with Christmas drawing near, I returned to my parents’ house; I was not going to permit Sally to upset my plan for a present way of life.
At intervals through the winter I peered at Sally’s house from the corner of the cul-de-sac in which it stood; but never saw a sign of occupancy or change.
I had learned from Miss Garvice that Sally had simply ‘disappeared’ from the Cottage Hospital.
‘Disappeared?’
‘Long before she was due for discharge, I need hardly say.’
‘How did it happen?’
‘The night nurse was going her rounds and noticed that the bed was empty.’
Miss Garvice was regarding me as if I were a material witness. Had we been in Miss Garvice’s room at the hospital, Serena would have been asked to see that we were not disturbed.
Sally had not been back long enough to be much noticed in the town; and I observed that soon no one mentioned her at all.
Then, one day between Easter and Whitsun, I found she was at the front door.
‘Hallo, Mel.’
Again she was taking up the conversation. She was as until last autumn she had always been; with that strange imperishable untended prettiness of hers, and her sweet absent smile. She wore a white dress.
‘Sally!’ What could one say?
Our eyes met. She saw that she would have to come straight to the point.
‘I’ve sold my house.’
I kept my head. ‘I said it was too big for you. Come in.’
She entered.
‘I’ve bought a villa. In the Cyclades.’
‘For your work?’
She nodded. ‘The house fetched a price of course. And my father left me more than I expected.’
I said something banal.
Already she was lying on the big sofa, and looking at me over the arm. ‘Mel, I should like you to come and stay with me. For a long time. As long as you can. You’re a free agent, and you can’t want to stay here.’
Psychologists, I recollected, have ascertained that the comparative inferiority of women in contexts described as purely intellectual is attributable to the greater discouragement and repression of their curiosity when children.
‘Thank you, Sally. But I’m quite happy here, you know.’
‘You’re not. Are you, Mel?’
‘No. I’m not.’
‘Wel
l then?’
One day I shall probably go.
Ringing the Changes
He had never been among those many who deeply dislike church bells, but the ringing that evening at Holihaven changed his view. Bells could certainly get on one’s nerves he felt, although he had only just arrived in the town.
He had been too well aware of the perils attendant upon marrying a girl twenty-four years younger than himself to add to them by a conventional honeymoon. The strange force of Phrynne’s love had borne both of them away from their previous selves: in him a formerly haphazard and easy-going approach to life had been replaced by much deep planning to wall in happiness; and she, though once thought cold and choosy, would now agree to anything as long as she was with him. He had said that if they were to marry in June, it would be at the cost of not being able to honeymoon until October. Had they been courting longer, he had explained, gravely smiling, special arrangements could have been made; but, as it was, business claimed him. This, indeed, was true; because his business position was less influential than he had led Phrynne to believe. Finally, it would have been impossible for them to have courted longer, because they had courted from the day they met, which was less than six weeks before the day they married.
‘“A village”,’ he had quoted as they entered the branch-line train at the junction (itself sufficiently remote), ‘“from which (it was said) persons of sufficient longevity might hope to reach Liverpool Street.”’ By now he was able to make jokes about age, although perhaps he did so rather too often.
‘Who said that?’
‘Bertrand Russell.’
She had looked at him with her big eyes in her tiny face.
‘Really.’ He had smiled confirmation.
‘I’m not arguing.’ She had still been looking at him. The romantic gas light in the charming period compartment had left him uncertain whether she was smiling back or not. He had given himself the benefit of the doubt, and kissed her.
The guard had blown his whistle and they had rumbled out into the darkness. The branch line swung so sharply away from the main line that Phrynne had been almost toppled from her seat.
‘Why do we go so slowly when it’s so flat?’
‘Because the engineer laid the line up and down the hills and valleys such as they are, instead of cutting through and embanking over them.’ He liked being able to inform her.
‘How do you know? Gerald! You said you hadn’t been to Holihaven before.’
‘It applies to most of the railways in East Anglia.’
‘So that even though it’s flatter, it’s slower?’
‘Time matters less.’
‘I should have hated going to a place where time mattered or that you’d been to before. You’d have had nothing to remember me by.’
He hadn’t been quite sure that her words exactly expressed her thoughts, but the thought had lightened his heart.
Holihaven station could hardly have been built in the days of the town’s magnificence, for they were in the Middle Ages; but it still implied grander functions than came its way now. The platforms were long enough for visiting London expresses, which had since gone elsewhere; and the architecture of the waiting rooms would have been not insufficient for occasional use by foreign royalty. Oil lamps on perches like those occupied by macaws lighted the uniformed staff, who numbered two and, together with every native of Holihaven, looked like storm-habituated mariners.
The station-master and porter, as Gerald took them to be, watched him approach down the platform, with a heavy suitcase in each hand and Phrynne walking deliciously by his side. He saw one of them address a remark to the other, but neither offered to help. Gerald had to put down the cases in order to give up their tickets. The other passengers had already disappeared.
‘Where’s the Bell?’
Gerald had found the hotel in a reference book. It was the only one allotted to Holihaven. But as Gerald spoke, and before the ticket collector could answer, the sudden deep note of an actual bell rang through the darkness. Phrynne caught hold of Gerald’s sleeve.
Ignoring Gerald, the station-master, if such he was, turned to his colleague. ‘They’re starting early.’
‘Every reason to be in good time,’ said the other man.
The station-master nodded, and put Gerald’s tickets indifferently in his jacket pocket.
‘Can you please tell me how I get to the Bell Hotel?’
The station-master’s attention returned to him. ‘Have you a room booked?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Tonight?’ The station-master looked inappropriately suspicious.
‘Of course.’
Again the station-master looked at the other man.
‘It’s them Pascoes.’
‘Yes,’ said Gerald. ‘That’s the name. Pascoe.’
‘We don’t use the Bell,’ explained the station-master. ‘But you’ll find it in Wrack Street.’ He gesticulated vaguely and unhelpfully. ‘Straight ahead. Down Station Road. Then down Wrack Street. You can’t miss it.’
‘Thank you.’
As soon as they entered the town, the big bell began to boom regularly.
‘What narrow streets!’ said Phrynne.
‘They follow the lines of the medieval city. Before the river silted up, Holihaven was one of the most important seaports in Great Britain.’
‘Where’s everybody got to?’
Although it was only six o’clock, the place certainly seemed deserted.
‘Where’s the hotel got to?’ rejoined Gerald.
‘Poor Gerald! Let me help.’ She laid her hand beside his on the handle of the suitcase nearest to her, but as she was about fifteen inches shorter than he, she could be of little assistance. They must already have gone more than a quarter of a mile. ‘Do you think we’re in the right street?’
‘Most unlikely, I should say. But there’s no one to ask.’
‘Must be early-closing day.’
The single deep notes of the bell were now coming more frequently.
‘Why are they ringing that bell? Is it a funeral?’
‘Bit late for a funeral.’
She looked at him a little anxiously.
‘Anyway it’s not cold.’
‘Considering we’re on the east coast it’s quite astonishingly warm.’
‘Not that I care.’
‘I hope that bell isn’t going to ring all night.’
She pulled on the suitcase. His arms were in any case almost parting from his body. ‘Look! We’ve passed it.’
They stopped, and he looked back. ‘How could we have done that?’
‘Well, we have.’
She was right. He could see a big ornamental bell hanging from a bracket attached to a house about a hundred yards behind them.
They retraced their steps and entered the hotel. A woman dressed in a navy-blue coat and skirt, with a good figure but dyed red hair and a face ridged with make-up, advanced upon them.
‘Mr and Mrs Banstead? I’m Hilda Pascoe. Don, my husband, isn’t very well.’
Gerald felt full of doubts. His arrangements were not going as they should. Never rely on guide-book recommendations. The trouble lay partly in Phrynne’s insistence that they go somewhere he did not know. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said.
‘You know what men are like when they’re ill?’ Mrs Pascoe spoke understandingly to Phrynne.
‘Impossible,’ said Phrynne. ‘Or very difficult.’
‘Talk about “Woman in our hours of ease”.’
‘Yes,’ said Phrynne. ‘What’s the trouble?’
‘It’s always been the same trouble with Don,’ said Mrs Pascoe; then checked herself. ‘It’s his stomach,’ she said. ‘Ever since he was a kid, Don’s had trouble with the lining of his stomach.’
Gerald interrupted. ‘I wonder if we could see our rooms?’
‘So sorry,’ said Mrs Pascoe. ‘Will you register first?’ She produced a battered volume bound in peeling imitation leath
er. ‘Just the name and address.’ She spoke as if Gerald might contribute a résumé of his life.
It was the first time he and Phrynne had ever registered in a hotel; but his confidence in the place was not increased by the long period which had passed since the registration above.
‘We’re always quiet in October,’ remarked Mrs Pascoe, her eyes upon him. Gerald noticed that her eyes were slightly bloodshot. ‘Except sometimes for the bars, of course.’
‘We wanted to come out of the season,’ said Phrynne soothingly.
‘Quite,’ said Mrs Pascoe.
‘Are we alone in the house?’ enquired Gerald. After all the woman was probably doing her best.
‘Except for Commandant Shotcroft. You won’t mind him, will you? He’s a regular.’
‘I’m sure we shan’t,’ said Phrynne.
‘People say the house wouldn’t be the same without Commandant Shotcroft.’
‘I see.’
‘What’s that bell?’ asked Gerald. Apart from anything else, it really was much too near.
Mrs Pascoe looked away. He thought she looked shifty under her entrenched make-up. But she only said, ‘Practice.’
‘Do you mean there will be more of them later?’
She nodded. ‘But never mind,’ she said encouragingly. ‘Let me show you to your room. Sorry there’s no porter.’
Before they had reached the bedroom, the whole peal had commenced.
‘Is this the quietest room you have?’ enquired Gerald. ‘What about the other side of the house?’
‘This is the other side of the house. Saint Guthlac’s is over there.’ She pointed out through the bedroom door.
‘Darling,’ said Phrynne, her hand on Gerald’s arm, ‘they’ll soon stop. They’re only practising.’
Mrs Pascoe said nothing. Her expression indicated that she was one of those people whose friendliness has a precise and never-exceeded limit.
‘If you don’t mind,’ said Gerald to Phrynne, hesitating.
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