Where Nothing Sleeps

by Denton Welch

  Another evening, probably the next, I was wandering disconsolate about the upper barn that had been converted into a studio, and Cecil Carpmael found me there and with hardly any words knelt down on the floor near a large board and began to model something in Plasticine.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s make something.’ And I knelt down too and we made flowers and horses and little doll people. I remember the dull red, green, grey colours and dull sticky feel and smell of the stuff. Cecil was smiling as we played, a very far-away, sweet, amused smile. She was doing all she could to hold my attention to the present moment.

  THE BIG FIELD

  The two young boys walked round the Big Field arm in arm. This was not according to school habit, but the slightly older one with ‘dirty’ coloured fair hair had been so carried away with his own story, that he’d seized the other’s arm on an impulse and had not let it go again. Spitting very slightly in his excitement, he was saying, ‘And then they carried her up to the top of the tower and put her under the sky, and the vultures and all the other birds came and pecked out her eyes and her tongue and all the other parts of her. They built nests with her red hair and then nothing was left but the white skeleton, just like chalk, from the rain and wind. If you go up there now you can still see her skeleton. I know, because I’ve been.’

  The other boy said nothing for a moment—he seemed uneasy and restive—then broke out with, ‘But Thompson, how could your grandmother have been left buried on top of a tower instead of being buried properly? They’d never allow it in this country.’

  ‘A special licence was got,’ the older one said grandly. ‘If you don’t believe me, I’ll take you to the tower at the bottom of her garden, if you’re ever near Wokingham!’

  They walked on in silence. Thompson had not quite convinced his companion, but he knew that he had caught his interest and had intrigued him a little. He left his grandmother on top of the tower and returned to the subject of their dead mothers, the one thing that had bound the two rather dissimilar boys together.

  ‘Of course, when my mother died, I thought that I couldn’t go on,’ he said importantly, ‘Life seemed to mean nothing. There was only the horror of school looming in front of me. It wasn’t good enough. I suppose you felt that too.… But somehow one manages to get through the day and they say that time is the greatest healer of all.’

  The grown-up use of ‘one’ and the cliché ‘time the healer’ were to be expected from Thompson. He was nearly always searching for effect, trying out new words and mannerisms. Marshall, the younger boy, felt a little uncomfortable, but said nothing. ‘Of course, that’s why I failed my Common Entrance. I was all to pieces, and nobody realised it, until I told …

  AN AFTERNOON WITH JEANNE

  I was already designing dresses for my mother. True, she never had any of the designs carried out—they were always much too daring and ‘suggestive’. I had that passion for exaggeration which finally does away with the shoulder-straps and which splits the skirt almost to the very bust. The one thing I would never uncover in my drawings was the bosom. My favourite idea was a sort of Egyptian effect, with the arms and shoulders left completely bare and the rest of the dress gathered into a heavy collar which rose high up on the neck and encircled it.

  From this description you will gather what sort of little boy I was and how I am able to remember this particular ‘get-up’ so well.

  As I have already said, I shrank back into the bushes and watched with all my eyes. I wondered how I was going to be able to pluck up enough courage to enter the house for lunch. My eldest brother was a known evil, but how was I going to manage this terrifying vision added to him?

  I must explain here that my brother was, at this time, still at Oxford; in fact, he had only just gone up the term before. We only saw him on these occasions when he suddenly appeared in his fuming, roaring car, with its exhaust like a vacuum cleaner and its swollen bonnet held down with thick leather straps.

  My father, home from the East, had taken this house for the summer, and a friend, with her little daughter, had offered to keep house for him, as my mother had died the year before.

  Mrs Sparks, the friend, did not particularly care for me. I first realised this clearly when I overheard her trying to persuade my father to put my name down for boxing lessons for my next term at school. This was a diabolical way of getting her own back, I thought. I knew how vindictive she was, because she went on saying, ‘It will do him so much good!’

  I have always had a rather furtive taste for ‘scenes’. Something in me is ashamed of it, but something else tells me that it would be cowardly and weak-minded not to be open, blatant, extravagant and astonishing at the last moment.

  In this particular case I pushed open the study door noisily and stood there, saying nothing for a moment. Then I burst out with excitable phrases like, ‘Why haven’t I been asked about this?’, ‘What’s it do with you?’—this to Mrs Sparks with as much fierceness as I could muster.

  The result was, of course, that I was in disgrace for the rest of the day and, in a lesser degree, for the rest of the holidays. How my elders hated me for not wanting to learn to box, for not wanting to be taken down a peg by some other manly little boy.

  It is wickedly easy to make a child feel degenerate. Now that my mother was dead, both at home and at school I was made to feel lazy, unnatural, vain. The word ‘unwholesome’ rather describes the character they tried to pin on to me. I enjoyed eating sweets too much. I brushed my hair too much, enjoyed my clothes too much, tried to be ‘highbrow’. (This accusation was brought because I was fond of reading Oliver Twist! Foreigners have no idea to what lengths English children go to conceal the fact that they like reading ‘classics’.) Because I had not yet learnt the absolute necessity for secretiveness, I was open at all points to attack.

  Rapidly, in one horrible year after my mother died, I learnt that ‘no one must pretend to be anything but ordinary’. ‘No one must show that he is enjoying anything unless it be something that no human being could possibly enjoy; then he must make believe that he quite enjoys being beaten at school or being blown up with bombs.’ ‘Never say anything that is not a cliché, for it will be considered affected and stupid. If you expect any signs of affection or love you will only get looks of disgust. And if you show even the faintest spark of intelligence or pleasure in your appearance …

  … At last I drove myself into the house. They had already sat down. The girl was next to my father. She was talking animatedly and the crystal necklace reminded me of enormous drops of sweat trickling down her neck.

  Mrs Sparks was watching the servant anxiously as he passed the dishes. He had only come to us the day before and his previous experience had been in a school at Eastbourne. Consequently the dark clothes were greasy, the fingers black and generally firmly grasping the dish unpleasantly near the food.

  I looked at the lank hair flopping over his eyes and saw that he was nervous too. Mrs Lemon, the weird cook, had found him for us. If you went into the kitchen suddenly you would find her smoking. Sometimes she would put the cigarette behind her back, but with me she had given up even this gesture.

  Once, when the others were out, she had laid up my place in the servants’ hall of the kitchen. So we all sat down together and ate shepherd’s pie. I was secretly horrified and rather pleased at the same time.

  Now, as I came into the dining-room, I apologised for being late and sat down hurriedly. Mrs Sparks looked at me, but said nothing for some moments; then she criticised my hair, saying jokingly that I would soon have a long bob. I waited in horror for the witticism, ‘Why don’t you have an Eton crop like Jane?’ But it did not come.

  I took lots of egg sauce with my fish and tried to comfort myself.

  After lunch we all dispersed. My father and Mrs Sparks had their coffee in the study, where the owner of the house had spread a long range of bound Pink ’Uns and Dickens. My eldest brother took Jane into the drawing-room, which was stuffed wi
th late-Dresden, very lacy figures.

  I went through the garden, into the paddock, where behind some bushes was the cesspool. I lifted off one of the heavy lids and looked at the elephant-hide of filth below me. It moved about and swayed. I contemplated it for some time, even stirred it with a long stick; then I pushed back the lid, and wandered away.

  Jeanne, Mrs Sparks’s little girl, saw me across the lawn and came towards me. We walked together round the garden, ending up in the blackcurrant bushes behind the hard tennis-court. I suddenly had the impulse to shock her. I pulled open all the buttons of my shirt and spat, two things that did not come naturally to me at all. As I have already said, breasts, male or female, had to be covered in my eyes. Spitting too was a forbidden act, altogether filthy.

  Jeanne did not even seem to notice. She just went on eating the black fruit and smearing the purple juice over her hands until they looked horribly bruised.

  ‘Look at that!’ she said, holding up her hands in glee. ‘They’re covered in aristocrats’ blue blood. I’ve been guillotining hundreds of aristocrats this morning.’

  She smacked her lips and licked her chops, rubbing the stained hands together, as if in joyful anticipation of more bloodshed.

  At other times, of course, she would be on the other side. She would be the female Scarlet Pimpernel stealing all his thunder, or the beautiful Marquise de Bumfranche rescued at the last moment. (Jeanne always invented French names with an improper or risqué English sound embedded in them.)

  I looked at Jeanne. I disliked her because I envied her. She was a girl and was treated with politeness and humanity. However naughty she was at school, nobody would think of beating her.

  As I say, I looked at Jeanne and made an awful face; then I hit her hard. For one moment she looked blank and shocked and otherworldly, like a revenant; then her mouth broke into a yell, her eyes twisted and creased up, spurting tears brimmed over the lids, and with a whirl of arms she tore and scratched at my face viciously.

  Then we fought and tussled under the blackcurrant bushes, banging and bruising each other, biting and pinching. I could feel Jeanne’s breath on my face and I had hold of her knickers. I yanked at them until the elastic broke. Jeanne screamed and ripped my shirt from shoulder to waist at the back. We felt each other’s warm humid flesh; I her thigh and she my back. The terrible damage to our clothes sobered us. We each began to search desperately for suitable excuses to tell our elders. And the soft unprotected feeling of each other’s skin suddenly made us kind. We wanted no more violence.

  ‘Sorry, Jeanne,’ I said impulsively; ‘I’ll help you join the elastic, I know how to sew.’

  Jeanne held my hand tightly, dramatically, like a desperate aristocrat in the French Revolution.

  ‘I’ll mend your shirt, nobody need know. You can say the laundry did it and sent it back mended. I’ll put red criss-cross thread to mark it like they do.’

  We looked at each other’s faces. They showed the scars of battle.

  ‘We fell off our bikes into those brambles on the edge of the footpath just coming out of the wood. It’s very narrow and overgrown there, and we were going too fast and crashed. I went in first and you couldn’t stop and landed on top,’ I said decisively. We told each other this little story for some time to memorise it.

  We left the blackcurrant bushes arm in arm. This was a little self-conscious, but it was comfortable. We wandered towards the kitchen door. The servants were amusing themselves rather doubtfully. The new houseboy had taken off his black coat and was hugging himself to demonstrate the passionate embraces of the lovers on the beach at Eastbourne under the moon. His eyes were thrown up to the ceiling in ecstasy. Mrs Lemon and the two young maids were screaming with unfeigned delight.

  None of them stopped as we appeared at the door. We were not worth bothering about. Jeanne and I both assumed an outwardly haughty air, but we were both, I think, seething with curiosity and longing for Arthur to go one step further in his demonstrations.

  ‘We want an egg, some sugar and a little lemon juice,’ I said to Mrs Lemon in a lordly way. A lordly way means bored, grand, drawling, half asleep.

  We took these ingredients out in a little bowl, beat them with a fork and then ate the frothy cream.

  ‘Delicious!’ we said, trying not to taste the rawness of the egg through the lemon and the sugar.

  Suddenly I had another idea. I said, ‘Let’s go back into the house and have a bath in Lux; it’s marvellous—piles and piles of frothy lather like white-of-egg mountains.’ Quickly I added, at Jeanne’s anxious expression, ‘You can’t see anything but pink faces coming out of white-of-egg mountains.’

  Very quietly we went back into the house, through the servants’ quarters and up the back stairs. Everything seemed very still. Evidently my eldest brother had taken the girl Jane away somewhere to drink or dance. I thought again of her enormous crystal beads, and hoped that she had left.

  We made our way to the bathroom which was least used; it was at the end of a passage. I took the Lux out of a cupboard under the basin and emptied the complete contents into the bath; then I ran the water and watched the froth forming and the steam rising. We stirred with one of the scrubbing brushes with a long handle.

  When the time had come that the bath was completely filled with foam, Jeanne and I looked at each other awkwardly. Neither of us cared to undress in front of the other.

  ‘We’ll both turn our backs, then keep our eyes shut till we’re sitting down in the water,’ I said desperately and firmly.

  Ceremoniously Jeanne turned her back and I mine. Then, when we were undressed, we felt our way towards the bath and got in. At one point I nearly opened my eyes, because I thought that I had lost my direction; but I knew that if I did I would have terrible feelings of self-condemnation, so I didn’t.

  When I felt Jeanne’s toes against my thigh I opened my eyes. We were both enveloped in a wonderfully mountainous sea of froth. The millions of bubbles were continually bursting into a thousand pieces. And as we stirred and beat with our back and legs they re-formed to such an extent that we thought they would overflow onto the floor.

  Our faces were radiant with delight in the new situation.

  ‘Isn’t it marvellous!’ I said.

  Jeanne nodded. We rubbed our bodies all over with our hands and played and wriggled in the foam for a long time. Very gradually the suds began to subside. I looked at Jeanne anxiously.

  ‘We’d better get out, don’t you think?’ I said.

  Again we shut our eyes, after having measured the distance to our towels and clothes. We silently rubbed ourselves and got dressed. Then we turned round and decided with one accord to climb up onto the roof and sit away from everyone.

  We clambered out of the landing window and along the ridge outside three small bedrooms. After this was a dangerous place which I hated to cross. It seemed much easier now and we both did it gracefully, with no hesitating. We climbed up to the gable-point above Mrs Sparks’s bedroom and nestled down on the other side, in the charming nook made by the fanciful chimney-stack. Here was a secret place from all the world where we could sit in peace for hours. Far away down below, we heard the servants’ laughter—my father calling Mrs Sparks’s Christian name ‘Molly’ and then their quiet talking as they walked up and down, up and down, in the rose garden.

  Jeanne and I said unmentionable, malicious things about our nearest and dearest. I said that I thought my father smoked opium and she said that her mother had a lover. We knew they were lies, but we loved to bring our reading into our lives. It was the deepest tragedy, we both felt, that we could not link life to books, or books to life. We did our best. By the time we had finished, we had made my eldest brother and Jane into a pair of most unscrupulous villains. He had evidently taken certain frightful but unstated liberties with her person, which she allowed only because she was able, in this close proximity, to rifle his pockets and even steal the cufflinks out of his shirt.

  Suddenly we tired of
these lurid stories. We talked of tortures for a little, but that too palled. We sat silent; then Jeanne began to sing very softly:

  Frère Jacques, frère Jacques,

  Dormez-vous, dormez-vous?

  Sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines,

  Din, din, don,

  Din, din, don!

  I joined in a bar behind. We tried to keep the parts as clear as possible. We rose to a crescendo on the ringing of the bell. It was nice and clever to be singing French—really cultured and haughty and beautiful and grand. It was noble to be singing French high up on the roof in the afternoon sunlight. We were above and beyond and on top of everyone. And at that moment I loved Jeanne and she loved me because in no other way could we go down and face subjection again.

  WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN

  When I was thirteen, I went to Switzerland for the Christmas holidays in the charge of an elder brother, who was at that time still up at Oxford.

  In the hotel we found another undergraduate whom my brother knew. His name was Archer. They were not at the same college, but they had met and evidently had not agreed with each other. At first my brother would say nothing about Archer; then one day, in answer to a question of mine, he said, ‘He’s not very much liked; although he’s a very good swimmer.’ As he spoke, my brother held his lips in a very firm, almost pursed line which was most damaging to Archer.

  After this I began to look at Archer with more interest. He had broad shoulders, but was not tall. He had a look of strength and solidity which I admired and envied. He had rather a nice pug face with insignificant nose and broad cheeks. Sometimes, when he was animated, a tassel of fair, almost colourless hair would fall across his forehead, half covering one eye. He had a thick beautiful neck, rather meaty barbarian hands, and a skin as smooth and evenly coloured as a pink fondant.

  His whole body appeared to be suffused with this gentle pink colour. He never wore proper skiing clothes of water-proof material like the rest of us. Usually he came out in nothing but a pair of grey flannels and a white cotton shirt with all the buttons left undone. When the sun grew very hot, he would even discard this thin shirt, and ski up and down the slopes behind the hotel in nothing but his trousers. I had often seen him fall down in this half-naked state and get buried in snow. The next moment he would jerk himself to his feet again, laughing and swearing.