Where Nothing Sleeps

by Denton Welch

  Because I knew nothing of them as they were today, because I did not even know for certain that it was Bob who had gone with Phyllis, my picture seemed squalid and meaningless and dead. It was the counterfeit of a counterfeit. The bare fact that Phyllis had run away with a lover was in itself papery and unreal. I had been given no reason, only told that it was so; therefore my mind kept teasing and plucking at ideas.

  At last I made myself turn from them and from the house; I would strain no more after reasons, just let thoughts float through my head, while I wandered in the garden.

  It was a relief to plunge into the bushes. Somehow they were not fearful, as they might well have been at nightfall; they seemed to offer warmth, a protection against the balefulness of the house. I pushed and threaded my way blindly, till I came out on a ridge of the ravine, some way from the house. To the left I could see the great window of the octagon room gleaming palely against the sky. There was no proper path here, only a sort of gardener’s track along the ridge. I walked to the end, then began climbing down from terrace to terrace, avoiding the plants by standing on the rocks. The garden was still being tended; I could see patches of softly crumbled, weedless earth. Birds were scudding across the sky, calling forlornly, as though the coming of night were some sort of catastrophe for them. When I reached the foot of the ravine, I was hot and tired; sweat had begun to sting in the scratches I had received from the shrubs and trees. I sat down on a rock enjoying the cold moistness that was already coming from it. The stream flowed near me, industriously, secretly, like some man who, thinking he is alone, sings and mutters and swears at his work.

  I sat listening for some moments, then stood up and walked towards the bridge. From the other bank I looked up the tortuous path. All at once I thought of Mrs Slade as she must have been when she ran down to drown herself. I saw her crying, crying, stumbling over the artfully uneven stone steps, chattering madly all the time. Nothing could stop her; if she fell, she was on her feet again in a moment, stockings torn, knees bleeding. She was like a wingless bat, wrapped round in a little whirlwind. Her greying hair flared out in a tangle wilder than Beethoven’s, and her eyes had grown into pools of boiling tar. They were still growing; suddenly I was caught up in them, so that I plunged into the stream with her and heard them sizzle as we struck the water.…

  I was standing now on the very brink of the stream, looking straight down into the black water. The night wind ruffled the surface into little fish scales. One of the birds kept up its perplexed lost flying and calling. Darkness was gathering in the branches of the trees behind me, thickening under the rocks, turning them into grotesques and derelicts standing in puddles of ink. One was a man with an elephant’s trunk which he clutched to himself desperately. Another had huge monkey ears; all the rest of him had sunk into a belly like a giant’s teapot. The biggest was an ancient pugilist who had given up hope and died at last by the side of the road. He was a vast lump of sagging muscles and despair.

  High up above them the dark bow of Mr Mellon’s window jutted out. I thought of him sitting there, taking snuff, staring blankly, waiting for Bob or Phyllis or Mrs Slade to come. I saw him as a great sick bird, a turkey wrapped in flannel. How long was it before he realised that he had been deserted by all three of them? Did he watch the gardeners bringing the body up the twisting path? Where was he now? Had he found other people to look after him?

  Then I remembered how fond he was of the stream, how he had stocked it with trout and told Phyllis not to bathe there.

  And all the way up the cliff, back to my bicycle in the drive, I kept wondering if the fish had been very disturbed when Mrs Slade plunged in and drowned herself.

  MR CLARKE

  Last week I and my mother went to stay with Mr Clarke. He lives in a big house at Guildford and we ran so hard to catch the train in London that my mother nearly fainted. She is very pretty, with fat pink cheeks and fair curls; she looked awful lying on the cushions, nearly fainting. I pretended it was not her at all until she was all right. She is really very thin, all made of small bones, and it is only her cheeks that are fat. She does not put on rouge because they are quite pink anyhow. She has plenty of very pretty clothes and my father doesn’t mind when she buys more, because he says women are no good if they don’t look pretty. Sometimes he gives her very nice diamonds, but she says to me afterwards, ‘Don’t tell Daddy, but his taste isn’t quite the same as mine, as I should like to swop this thing for something else.’ She doesn’t like the dangling sort of earrings and he has given her three pairs now. She wants to swop them for a bracelet. I say wait until he gives you one pair more and then you can get a better bracelet with bigger diamonds.

  We were very lonely in London because my father had gone back to America and so we were very pleased when Mr Clarke asked us to stay. He was one of my father’s business friends until his legs got paralysed.

  When we got out at Guildford, there was a black man waiting for us and he drove us to Mr Clarke’s house. It is called Aurora, and when you go in at the gate it is all thick bushes and dripping leaves. The drive is very long and the tyres crunched a lot on the gravel, but as it was night I couldn’t see very much.

  When we got to the front door the black man rang the bell, and somebody inside switched on the porch light and then let us in. It was another black man, only this one was wearing a red turban and white coat. Behind him was Mrs Wallis, who is Mr Clarke’s Eurasian housekeeper-companion. She has black hair and Chinese eyes and wears very proper English clothes.

  She smiled a lot when she saw us and said to my mother, ‘The Indian servants are new since you came last. Mr Clarke was so tired of trying to find good English ones that he thought he’d try these as an experiment.’

  My mother said that she thought they looked romantic, and then we went into the small room where Mr Clarke was. He was sitting in his wheelchair by the fire with a rug over his legs and he looked wedged in, as if he couldn’t get out, because he is rather fat. He has fairly white hair and says he likes boys and girls very much. He was very pleased to see us and laughed and talked a lot while he was shaking our hands; then we all sat down and my mother took off her gloves and I looked at the room. It was quite small with a very big window which had pale curtains.

  SOME MEMORIES EVOKED BY MUSIC

  I have heard three shapes of music tonight 1. ‘Je cherche, je cherche Titina’, 2. something to do with ‘amour’ and ‘Martini’, I think, and 3. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. ‘Je cherche Titina’ takes me straight back to the Van Dyck Hotel drawing-room in the autumn of 1924.

  The room looks on to the Natural History Gardens. I am nine years old and am sitting with a sort of friend who is poor and so is acting as a sort of playfellow-companion to me. This arrangement is chiefly made, I think, because my mother wants to help her friend, but I have the sneaking fear that it may also be because my mother is bored with me. This makes me a little resentful and wilful with Molly, although I am really fond of her. Although she is middle-aged, I am told to call her Molly—just like that—nothing before or after. It strikes me as daring and rather nice, but a little embarrassing. I always have to say it very quickly and quietly. On the other hand, I would be disgusted if told to call her Aunt Molly, or worse still Auntie Molly. This strikes me as peculiarly middle class and plebeian. I have very queer snobbish taboos. One is to do with ‘Auntie’, and the other, an even earlier one, is to do with the tonic sol-fa scale. If anyone should sing or say ‘Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do’ I would yell out or say to myself vehemently, ‘Don’t sing that vulgar song. Stop it! Stop it!’

  I can remember belabouring my eldest brother’s legs while he stood on a chair and sang these words. This must have been early in 1919 or perhaps it was in 1918 when I was only three years old. I shall never know what caused me to think these words so ‘vulgar’, or what caused me to dislike a person for calling an inanimate object, like a boat or a car, ‘she’.

  To go back to the Van Dyck drawing-room. Molly is readi
ng to me, Stalky & Co. (chosen by her, of course, as suitable literature). But at the other end of the room, beyond the lace-backed sofas with their chintz frills, sits an old lady in an upright chair. She is fat, rather shapeless, with two little black currants pressed into the dough of her face.

  The black currants keep swivelling in our direction until, at last, she says, ‘Excuse me but would you mind—?’ She does not finish her sentence, but leaves it in mid-air.

  Molly turns to her and asks, ‘Are we disturbing you?’

  ‘Reading aloud in the public drawing-room is a little—don’t you think?’ says the old lady with an apologetic smile.

  I am thoroughly exasperated by her objection. This is what being fussy means, I think. Then up through the closed windows comes the crazy, tinkling churning of a barrel-organ—‘Je cherche, je cherche Titina, Titina, Oh Titina!’

  The music is so beautiful, and bringing with it that awful and all-enveloping depression of popular tunes. The gayer and more sprightly they are, the more evocative they seem to be of gloom and despair. I listen as the song grates out of the machine. The notes seem to be dancing on rusty metal feet, awkwardly, and yet with such perfect timing that they make or dance their sound just in the nick of time. I wait nervously, fearing that the ‘teeth’ of the machine will be caught and the music broken.

  Molly turns to me and says, ‘Come on, Denton, we’ll go on reading upstairs.’

  I come out of my trance of listening and follow her upstairs. ‘What a troublesome old thing!’ she says playfully, and I do not like her for criticising the old lady, although I quite agree in my heart.

  We shut the door of the bedroom, turn on the gas-fire and Molly sits down in the armchair while I settle at her feet on the ‘pouf’. It is altogether cosier up here and I am pleased that we left the drawing-room. We have come to the bit in the story where the dead rat is under the dormitory floor, or ceiling. I suddenly have the awful realisation that I may one day have to live with such barbarians in some such slum called a public school. The looming horror is too much for me. I turn away and jump up. Molly says, ‘What’s the matter, Denton? Are you tired of it?’ But before I can answer, the door opens and my mother comes in. Her cheeks are red and some of her curly hair has blown out from under her hat.

  ‘Hullo Molly, hullo darling,’ she says gaily, kissing us both. She takes off her fur coat and her little embroidered hat and I see that she is wearing her favourite agate brooch which always reminds me of a square of solidified beef-tea.

  She sits down on the bed and we all talk for a little; then Molly gets up to go. I follow her down and say good-bye at the front door. People sit about in the lounge as if their behinds were striking roots into the cushions and they were keeping perfectly still so as not to disturb the operation. I climb up the stairs again and pass along the white-doored corridor. I go into our room and find my mother lying on the bed in the half-light. I go up to her and see that she is clearly not well, for her face is buried in the pillows and I think that she has been crying.

  ‘Love me, darling,’ she says, turning towards me. ‘Love me, love me, and I shall be all right.’

  I am terribly disturbed. Tears start to run down my cheeks and my mother sees them shining on my face.

  ‘Don’t cry, darling, I didn’t say cry.’ My mother laughs and teases me so that it is unbearably sad.

  ‘Sing to me,’ she says. ‘Sing ‘O Gentle Presence, Peace and Joy and Power’ or ‘Saw ye my Saviour? Heard ye the glad sound?’

  I try to sing the Christian Science hymns, but break down completely and hug my mother fiercely. Gradually she seems to get better. At last she sits up and says laughingly, ‘How silly to behave like that! It’s only Error trying to get hold of me!’

  Now when I think of this—the beginning of my mother’s death—the first faint inkling of what was coming—I remember my father’s death again. It means nothing like this and never will do to me.

  2. The tune about ‘amour’ and ‘Martini’ conjures up something in me but I cannot pin it down. I cannot even remember the tune—I have forgotten it already—so soon after hearing it. It must be linked with something that was once significant. It comes and goes through my life like a water-logged ball, just rising to the surface when the water stirs.

  3. Beethoven’s ‘Fifth’ flicks me straight back to the Saunders’ Edwardian Gothic halt in Shanghai, 1932. The records are being changed one after another by Jane, the simple-minded daughter. She does it laboriously and lovingly, breathing hard through her Mongolian nose. Pocetta and Enid and I listen religiously. And at the stirring parts I stir and want to fight, and break down everything that hampers me, I want to be free of everyone and great. I am seventeen and have no direction. I stifle because nobody believes in me at all. This is quite the worst feeling, because it makes me not believe in myself.

  Fighting and clawing at the rocks and cages—I seem to see people doing this. Beethoven and I are doing it. We are like figures in Blake’s drawings and the rocks and chains are like Blake’s. We are in a fiery hell that is all a white-hot and white-cold picture. The fiery icicles are nothing but a picture. Everything is a picture and nothing is ‘real’.

  The music stops. We sigh and smile and eat large slices of Bianchi’s cream cake for our tea.

  A VISIT TO MY BOIS RELATIONS

  Then there has been the great scandal of my great-uncle Percy Bois, who as been sole trustee to his sister, Aunt Bertie, for several years. She has died and it has just come to light he has taken between £10,000 and £13,000 of the £48,000 odd on the interest from which she lived. The money is now to be divided between sixteen nephews and nieces, and so they are each to receive £1,000 less than they would otherwise have done. It appears that Uncle Percy, who everyone thought was quite rich, had only £200 of his own for the last few years, and so he took Aunt Bertie’s money to keep up his large house near Peters-field, his mentally deranged wife, his unmarried daughter and his widowed and penniless married daughter and her children. Now they have to leave the house. There is a sale on 7th September. Uncle Percy is ninety, frail and a little senile, his wife is quite unbalanced and peculiar, so the two daughters will have to manage on their legacies of about £2,000 each and Uncle Percy £200 a year. They are trying to find a small house.

  I remember once staying with them when I was nine. They had a long, low house on the side of a hill somewhere in Surrey or Sussex. It was autumn-winter, I know, and Marjorie, the unmarried daughter, invited me into the old schoolroom one day, where she had a little saucepan simmering on a spirit stove. She said, ‘Let’s make coffee and fudge, shall we?’ I was excited, but a little bewildered.

  She was a governessy, blue-stocking girl, quite ten years older than I was. I wondered if she was doing the sweet-making to amuse me on a dull afternoon.

  She poured condensed milk in, added sugar and butter. I remember stirring the mixture, then watching it harden and glisten on the flat tin tray. I often think of that room and that moment. The low lattice and the glum sky outside, the smell of methylated spirit, and the enticing smell of the fudge (although I was afraid that the condensed milk which she had put in and which I hated would spoil everything), Marjorie’s intent, peering, rather fierce face.

  The whole house seemed rather too heated for me, and there was a load and jumble of objects. A chain-mail veiled helmet with a cross nose piece hung over the stairs, and I was told, I think untruly, that it was a crusader’s. It was probably Persian. Then in the drawing-room were cabinets of satinwood in the Adam style as seen through late Victorian eyes—eplodgy roses and bows with perhaps a cupid on a cloud. I remember the cabinets because my great-uncle explained at length to my mother that one was French-polished and one wasn’t. He asked her which she liked best. I remember preferring the French-polished one—it made the wood look silkier. I did not like the coarser, open grain of the other—but both cabinets seemed quite ugly to me. I could never quite make out whether my uncle wanted eventually to have both Fre
nch-polished or both only waxed. He seemed to make a great business of them as specimens of different treatment.

  It is curious that the harsh glass of French polish should have appealed to me as a child, when I could not bear the lacquer put on brass bed knobs and fittings and other fierce hard processes.

  It was just at the time of our visit to these Bois relations that I had been given an easel and oil paints. I went into the drive and picked spiky holly with red berries. Then I picked a sprig of tawny beech leaves and went upstairs to paint them on a little canvas block.

  I secretly disliked the canvas board because I knew the canvas was only paper and the board only cardboard. Now I know that these seemingly impermanent boards are one of the best things to paint on—far better than real canvas or plywood.

  I had the picture of the leaves for a long time. I can see it now—the red berries with the whipped-cream whorl of thick flake white for the highlight.