Where Nothing Sleeps

by Denton Welch

  While Taff ran about rooting and sniffing, I stood in my little house, gazing at the wreckage, hating the man with all my might. I felt that I would never have the heart to work at it again. No one would ever give me new cups and saucers. The books were dirtied. The wallpaper, which had been so difficult to cut and fit and paste, was spoilt for ever.

  Without picking anything up, I sat down on the window seat and waited. I don’t know what I was waiting for; I suppose it was for someone to tell me what to do. My own mind had gone dead.

  Taff found me there and jumped up, putting his paws on my knees and trembling. He seemed to want me to go out to play with him. Mechanically I got up and followed. He ran into the dark bushes behind the house and began to make loud growling snorting noises. I took very little notice, because I was trying to imagine the scene of last night, when the thief broke in. Another boy had once told me that thieves sometimes stripped naked, then covered their skin with black oil to make themselves almost invisible in the night, and to make it very difficult for anyone to hold them if they were caught.

  Because of this story, I imagined my thief creeping up to the house, all naked and black, smashing the padlock—here my imaginings were broken into by Taff’s return. He was determined that I should go into the bushes with him.

  He had been digging in the ground, pretending, I suppose, that he was unearthing a rabbit or a buried bone; but when I bent down I saw that he had half-buried under his pile of earth two round pads of old green baize. I picked one up, but could not think what it was, until it flashed on me that it was the covering for the base of one of the old Sheffield plate candlesticks. I had often turned them up and seen the stained green cloth.

  I knelt down at once and started to feel under the pile of earth, but there were no candlesticks there. It was clear that the thief had just pulled off the baize to discover if the candlesticks were of solid metal.

  I was thrilled by the find and kept saying to Taff, ‘Good dog, good dog, go on, seek him out.’

  By ‘him’ I meant any other things that may have been dropped in the garden. I was about to give up hope and to feel that the two round pads, like pen-wipers, were all that we should find, when Taff began sniffing along the back of the house, where there was a crack, between the ground and the bricks on which the house stood.

  I was the first to see a gleam of yellow, and I darted forward just as his nose reached it and he began to pull at the corner of the cloth with his teeth. It was the missing curtain, done up into a Dick Whittington bundle.

  I shall always remember sitting on the ground there under the dark bushes, with Taff dancing about, scratching me when he put his paws on my thin pyjamas, and my hands shaking and being clumsy as I tried to undo the knot.

  The first thing I saw was the mustard spoon, long and curving like a whip. Under it were three salt spoons and, greatest find of all, one of the four boat-shaped salt-cellars.

  As I held it in my hand, gloating on its smooth gleam, longing to spring it on my mother, then watch her face, yet saving up the moment as something precious, not to be thrown away in a hurry, I felt happy for the first time that morning. It seemed wonderful to me that even these few things had been saved. Why had the burglar tucked them into the crack under my house? I could only guess that he had had too much to carry, and that he meant to return for the bundle later.

  I thought again of how my house had been spoilt for no reason, and although I still had great bitterness, I felt, too, a strange new satisfaction. I was pleased that my house had not escaped, was almost proud that it had been damaged. It made it even more real to me, deeper and more interesting.

  As I ran back to the big house to show my mother what had been found, new thoughts were bubbling up in me.

  ‘I can do it all over again,’ I told myself, ‘if I take time. I know how to do the papering now, and someone will give me some china.’

  Then the delightful thought came to me that I would be able to tell my father that Taff had found the missing things.

  Before I end my story I shall just say that nothing else was ever recovered. The police came, took some fingerprints and scratched about in the garden, but that was all they did. The rest of the table silver, the cigarette boxes and other little objects in the drawing-room were gone for ever. This made my mother treasure the one remaining salt-cellar very much indeed.

  Just in case the thief should return, I waited one night in my house for what seemed a long time. I was a little fearful, but I had Taff with me and a good sailor’s whistle. But nothing happened. The clouds hurried across the night sky. There was a bird calling sometimes from the bushes. I sat in the doorway with my arm round Taff, thinking of all that my house had seen.

  MRS HOCKEY

  I went out of the school door and ran down the drive to meet my mother. She turned to pay the taxi and then saw that she had no small change in her bag. So we carried her suitcase into the headmaster’s porch and opened it there to find her other bag.

  She had just come back from Paris and I saw her beautiful palegreen underclothes lying on the top. I pulled one towards me to look at the silk and lace more carefully, and my mother, suddenly remembering the respectabilities, said, ‘Don’t pull it out, darling, the taxi-driver might see.’ But I did not let it go because I loved to feel it—one side rough, crystallised crêpe de Chine and the other liquid-smooth satin.

  Suddenly I saw the two little boxes of chocolates nestling in the corner of the suitcase, one of rosebuds and one of langues de chats. I knew they were for me. I thought of the delicious French coffee-chocolate taste. Then Wilmshurst silently opened the front door and waited for us to go in. As I passed him I smelt that lardy smell which seems to hang round even the most senior school servants. I pictured him getting butter on his black cuffs, smearing his waistcoat with grease from the joint. I thought, as I had thought many times before, how nice it would be to be able to draw one’s nostrils together as one did one’s lips and yet still be able to go on breathing.

  Mrs Hockey met us at the foot of the stairs. She had just come down in a new dress. It was brilliantly patterned and coloured, and she carried an eighteenth-century quizzing glass with an enormously thick lens through which she peered. The legend in the school was that she was so blind that she had given the prize for the best boy’s garden to a quite neglected one almost completely overgrown with huge dandelions. I wondered how much her eyes hurt her and whether she would ever go quite blind.

  As she saw the blur of my mother and myself approaching, the slightly bewildered look left her face and she held out her hand with a charming yet patronising grace. Her scarlet scarf fluttered with her movement. I sensed in a minute that my mother was quite equal to her. It gave me delight to think that she was mistress of the situation.

  ‘I hope my brat’s been good,’ she said playfully.

  All the patronage and some of the charm evaporated. Mrs Hockey was not used to mothers who were playful and called their children brats.

  ‘I expect that you’ll want to be alone with him so that you can have a good long talk,’ she said.

  ‘How clever of you to guess!’ my mother exclaimed; and even I could not tell if she were being ironical or not.

  ‘Would you like to take him out for a walk or would you rather sit here in the lounge?’

  At the word ‘lounge’ I pinched my mother’s arm, which I was holding. I knew how she hated it. She said that it ought always to be pronounced with an Australian accent to give it its full flavour. I was so pleased that Mrs Hockey had used it, yet sorry for her too, because she did not know my mother’s feelings.

  ‘I think we’ll go out for a walk,’ my mother said.

  ‘Then Harold will see you when you come back,’ Mrs Hockey announced with importance.

  ‘Yes, there’ll be plenty of time then,’ my mother answered lightly, with a sweet smile.

  I tugged at her arm to get her through the baize door, into the boys’ quarters and so out of the hateful building.


  ‘Darling, are you happy?’ she asked urgently, as we walked over the asphalt to the cricket fields.

  ‘Oh, it’s miles better than I thought it would be,’ I said; but then no one knew what depths of misery I had imagined for myself. I knew that we must not talk about school. It was a closed subject—taboo in some curious way.

  I danced along, holding tightly to her hand, flaunting my lovely mother and protector. Today I was safe and I did not care what questions and jeerings I saved up for myself tomorrow. But my mother did, for she said, ‘Darling, don’t let’s hold hands till we get out of the playing fields,’ in the same voice as she had said, ‘Darling, don’t pull them out, the taxi-driver might see.’

  ‘But Mummy, it doesn’t matter what they think,’ I shrieked joyfully.

  We walked down by the ‘gardens’, each one a square bed filled with browning autumn flowers and surrounded by little hard mud paths. Being a new boy I had not been allotted one yet.

  I took my mother to the gap in the hedge which I had already discovered, then we were out of the school grounds, on free soil at last.

  I danced and swung on my mother’s arm. People seeing me would have thought that I was eight, not eleven.

  ‘Mummy,’ I said, ‘the last few days I’ve been wanting to “go” all the time. Why do you think it is?’

  My mother saw that I was interested from a scientific point of view.

  ‘I expect it’s the sudden change to cold weather, darling. Also, you’ve probably been frightfully excited about all the new things you’re doing.’

  We were climbing the hill now. I let go of her hand and pushed into the bracken, and she waited while I ‘went’.

  A CHILD MEETS CHURCH AND STATE AND POETRY IN STRANGE PLACES: LADY ASTOR

  Before the play began we sat on the lockers round the edge of the playroom, scraping our feet in nervousness on the parquet, so worn and roughened into hillocks and splintery parts by the roller-skaters. We had our Mikado clothes on and were made up wondrously. My blue eyelids and slanting brows gave me intense pleasure. I paid unnecessary visits to the lavatory to see myself in the great sinister, filmy, changing-room glass.

  I was one of the Three Little Maids from School, Peep-Bo, the least important. Michael Astor was Pitti-Sing and the heroine was an atavistic monkey-faced boy called Bell.

  I held my script tightly in my hand, mouthing my few precious lines half to myself, half out loud. ‘I must be perfect,’ I thought, ‘quite perfect.’

  During this concentration I noticed a shuffling of feet. I vaguely wondered what it meant, but took no notice, as people had been twitchy with nervousness in all corners of the room. Then suddenly, with the strange and unusual swish of their flowered kimonos, everyone stood up and I saw that a thin tailor-made woman with steely hair and no hat, carrying a large box under one arm, had come in. She was at the far end of the long room, alone, with no master accompanying her. I thought that she was some strayed parent and felt sorry for her, and annoyed that she should disturb our feverish concentration. I felt that she must be very embarrassed to see us all standing there before her sheepishly.

  But as she advanced with sharp, bird-like steps I saw that there was no mistake and that she was not in the least embarrassed. Each one of her movements was intended and challenging.

  ‘Sit down all of you!’ she called, again, I thought, like a sharp bird.

  We subsided obediently into crumpled, coloured bundles on the lockers. I resented our docility. It was so slavish to sit down because a stranger told us to!

  The woman put down her cardboard box, took off the lid; then, holding the uncovered box in both her hands, she came towards us.

  ‘Choose!’ she ordered, presenting it to the first boy of the long row on the lockers. He ducked his humble head, dived with his hand into the box and brought out a most rich-looking chocolate, utterly delicious with red cherry and pistachio nut.

  ‘But our lipstick!’ I thought. ‘What are we going to do? We’ve all got lipstick on!’

  The box was rapidly coming down the line. With each chocolate went a bright, metallic injunction; not to be greedy, not to be slow, not to smear our make-up or forget our parts; all half serious, severe, poking fun at us.

  Then, when each boy had his chocolate, came the questions, mostly answered by herself, for we were all too shy to do more than smile and giggle. Even her son wore an uneasy, anxious smile.

  I began to think how full of bounce and fun she was, how ‘showingoff’, and I admired her. ‘Not many people would dare to behave like that, would dare to tease and persecute and amuse sixty or seventy boys all at once. Does she do it in Parliament?’ I wondered.

  A master came in to tell the chorus to get ready for the stage. They shuffled out and I buried myself in my script again, picking out the tiny lines I had to memorise.

  ‘Soon, soon,’ I thought, ‘the Little Maids will have to trip from the back of the stage to the audience, singing their stupid song.’

  I could feel the sweat pricking in tiny pin-points through my heavy paint.

  When at last we did stand at the head of the three steps, there was a slight mishap; Bell clumsily made them rock in some way, and we in all our heavy black wigs and paint and artificial flowers rocked with them.

  There was an unfeeling, quite animal titter from the audience of parents which amazed and frightened me. I could not believe that they were laughing at us after all these months of rehearsal and effort. We, who looked so thoroughly beautiful and romantic. Even Bell’s monkey face was transformed, and I had heard someone raving over Michael Astor. I remembered again how furious I had been, because I was vain as only boys can be vain and knew that I was the pick of the bunch.

  Now as we stood there, tremulous from the accident and their coarse giggle, I wondered what would happen. I wondered if we should begin our song properly or not. Bell gently mouthed ‘Three …’ a second before Astor and myself, then we broke in unison into the dance song. Even then I thought it was horrible for so-called schoolgirls to be so arch—as depraved as prostitutes in gym tunics with golden pigtails down their backs.

  The opera gradually unwound itself until another mishap brought a sweep and gulp of sound from the bestial audience. Nanki-Poo, in throwing the rope when he attempts to hang himself, pulled his wig awry so that his own bright hair showed. I watched this in terror from the wings.

  Now the play was spoilt indeed. Two such pieces of unintentional comic relief were too much to bear, especially as the audience had shown such amazing and disgusting appreciation.

  After it was all over, the finale, the encores, the curtains, I crept into the big schoolroom, heavy with disappointed pride. A staring-eyed boy called Cochran, looking exactly like the picture of Queen Caroline in my history book, from the brick-dust grease-paint all over his face, tried to attract my attention by pinching my behind. I took no notice, but walked on to the High Desk, which was the Three Little Maids’ appointed changing-place. Bell had just left, taking his clothes with him, but Astor was there being helped by his mother out of his wig and kimono. Lady Astor gave me an unmasked, penetrating stare, as if she were trying to read who and why I was, and what I might become. For one moment she seemed to me like a not very well-informed fortuneteller bent on solving a riddle and preserving her reputation. There was a little scorn too and a feeling of scant consideration.

  ‘Come here and turn round and I’ll undo you too,’ she said briskly.

  Her clever fingers explored my kimono, making me acutely self-conscious. She found the pins, drew them out and clicked them together with the neatest gesture; but there was no love or giving about her actions, only efficiency and the sort of impatience which inhabits someone who gets outside herself to lead back in an inexorable circle to herself.

  THE DEATH OF MY MOTHER

  The day I heard of C.’s death was the day my mother died twenty years ago. C. came then in the car with Irene to the school to fetch me away to the Oast House for a few da
ys. I went into the headmaster’s drawing room. I didn’t cry. I was very stiff and still and smiling. I held my gloves, straightened my coat and waited to be taken out to the car.

  The chauffeur, Garrard, was there holding open the door. We got into the rather old-fashioned Humber and lay back on the large, loose, puffy cushions. We swept away from St Michael’s down the steep drive, and I was watching, watching all the time the streets, the houses of Uckfield, the people walking, shopping. Then we were in the country—old houses, new ones, fields, the schoolboys at Tonbridge running in their red and white striped football vests, the black and white house near the road before Ightham, then the slum of Borough Green and we were down the narrow road to Trottiscliffe. There was the lovely Elizabethan brickwork of Ford Place, the old sign board with the spelling Trotterscliffe. Now we were at the Oast House with its cerulean front door, and we were breathing the curious Carpmael air of oil stoves, radiators, flower bulbs and woollen wraps.

  That night I sat with the earphones on my head—the new loudspeakers were no use to Cecil in her deafness. There was some music on the wireless, romantic music, and I remembered the ancient gramophone in China which had played a record of just such music. Why can I not remember what it was now? It seemed alive to me for ever then. The music floated to me and melted me, and I wanted to listen to it, but Irene saw me there so near to tears, sitting by the stove in the long, low room that had once been the bottom story of the barn, and she smiled and gently put her hand up to take the earphones off my head. I did not want her to, I wanted to listen; but I let her. And then I began to cry and gulp, and she began to tell me Christian Science truisms and words of comfort. She did it very well, with great conviction.

  Later, when I went to bed in the little larkspur blue room with its oblong flowery-painted lampshade, I cried and cried again and thought that I was lost.