Where Nothing Sleeps

by Denton Welch

The Old Boy, in a funny gulpy voice, started talking about the European situation. I could not listen. I was nervously fluttering my eyelids. He saw this, and putting his face close to mine he said, ‘Don’t be frightened of me, dearest.’ The endearment shocked and thrilled me. I could feel his eyelashes tickling my face and the extraordinary damp warmth of his cheek (it was a very hot day). This humid warmth is with me still, I can feel it as I write. (That—and the feathery spidery touch of the eyelashes—seemed amazing, and still seems so to me.)

  My one thought was to behave properly, not to give myself away in this fantastically difficult situation. I was like wood or stone—utterly unmoving.

  Gradually he saw my complete ignorance. He sighed and got up, lifting me with him.

  ‘Time to go back, I expect,’ he said, ‘We’ll go and find the others.’ We walked arm in arm out of the wood; the others joined us in a moment. As they walked in front, laughing and hitting about with their sticks, my companion held me back until several yards were between us; then, still holding my arm, he started to walk again.

  There seemed to be now a curious, everlasting sort of silence about him.

  He sighed again, and so powerful was his hold that he seemed to be more or less completely supporting me.

  ‘What would the Headmaster do if he could see us now?’ he asked. ‘He’d beat you like hell I expect, and God knows what would happen to me.’

  For some reason I was not bit alarmed at the idea. You see, I had not entirely got the shallow import of the wood, only the deeper one. ‘Oh, he wouldn’t do anything, why should he mind?’ I said with assurance. ‘Aren’t you allowed to take me out if you like?’

  And in this way we made our way back to the car, through the corn and potato crop. I thought once, as I looked up at the hugh white clouds in the blue sky, ‘I will remember this day always.’ And I have.

  A week afterwards I had a letter from this old boy, quite elaborately romantic, the sort of letter that only generous unwise people write. Through it ran a nostalgia to be back at school; to have a job in a rich friend-of-the-family’s brewery seemed a degradation. And he had no games. I saw in a flash that leaving school was not freedom for this sort of person.

  In the mid-morning break, as we stood round the ‘Hole in the Wall’, waiting to get at the counter of the Grubber, I had a desire to look at my letter again. I took it out of my breast pocket and started to read, saying the extravagant words and phrases to myself with pleasure.

  Of course it was stupid, but I think I almost half wanted to be questioned about the letter. As Geoffrey approached I held the letter down, against me, quickly.

  ‘What are you so engrossed in?’ he jeered, rolling the ‘r’ stagily. ‘A tart-note I bet. You’ve had a tart-note.’

  He snatched the piece of paper and read it avidly. He had not expected anything like it. He seemed hardly able to believe it.

  ‘Christ, what an absolute marvel,’ he said, handing it back to me. ‘But the only trouble is that now you’ll think you’re Cleopatra, or the Face that Launched a Thousand Ships or something. There’ll be no holding you.’ He gave my ankles a vicious little kick to quell my pride in advance.

  Swiftly I tucked the letter away; but it must soon have lost its significance for me or caused me too much anxiety, for I know tore it up within the week.

  GHOSTS

  The first story I ever wrote was a ghost story. I wrote it at school for the last English lesson of the term. I remember the tremor of excitement that ran through me when I heard the master, so like a rather strong-smelling black retriever, giving out the announcement for preparation.

  As I had been taken to see Knole in the holidays, my mind immediately turned to those wonderful rooms for material. I stole the ostrich plumes off James I’s bed, the silver sconces off the walls, the brass locks presented by William III to the Cartoon Gallery, and the eighteenth-century proportions of the Venetian Ambassador’s bedroom.

  I panelled my imaginary room in pine and finished it with a heavy cornice. From a cracked punch-bowl came the faint scent of mildewed rose leaves, and a hissing fire of green branches spat and danced on the scratched marble hearth. The hangings of the fantastically high bed were of rose madder damask, faded in parts to tawny, dried-blood colour, and they were so rotten that they had to be held together on a new foundation by countless lines of cross-sewing. It gave me great pleasure to describe all these remembered details.

  In this grand bed I put myself to sleep, after having blown out the eight candles in the four sconces. As I wrote, I became more and more involved in my own story.

  Suddenly, in the middle of the night, I awoke and found myself staring up into the dome of the terrifying bed. I lay sweating, wondering what was going to happen.

  I remembered a line, perhaps from Ecclesiastes or the Psalms, ‘the hair of my flesh stood up’, and it seemed such a perfect description of my feeling that I put it down word for word.

  Gradually, from the depths of the room beyond the bed, a lighted figure emerged. It was no ordinary ghost, rattling bones and chains, but a beautiful woman, tall and sweeping and not young—ageless, like the queens in fairy-tales.

  She glided up to the bed and stood there, twisting her rings and mouthing painfully. She wanted to tell me something and she was dumb!

  I can’t remember how I ended my story, but I suspect that I left it dangling in the air, as most true ghost stories are left.

  I liked my story too well not to feel alarm when the time came for it to be read out by the black retriever. What if he should maul it and make it appear ridiculous!

  I sat near the back of the class, and he took several other stories first. One he refused to read in its entirety because a great parade had been made of visiting nightclubs and ‘coming home with the milk’.

  I looked at the ‘unwholesome’ boy who had so successfully added to his reputation for wickedness by writing in this way, and was amazed to see how calm he kept under the master’s contemptuous glance.

  With an exasperated crackling of pages the black retriever spat, ‘I can’t read out any more of this appalling stuff!’

  Such scorn would have withered me for days, but the boy who specialised in vice just wore a bored expression; ‘blasé’ I think he would have called it.

  When at last my story was reached, I stopped breathing and waited for some dreadful pronouncements; therefore I was astonished when I heard the master say, ‘Now this at least has something good about it. The writer has tried to create a romantic atmosphere, and whatever he has described he has first seen very clearly in his mind.’

  This was intoxicating enough from the black retriever, who, I thought, disliked me. To be called ‘the writer’! But when he began to read my story soberly, as though it were ‘real literature’, my heart was filled with gratitude. I listened to my own sentences with only a bearable amount of embarrassment, and knew in a moment that I wanted to be a writer.

  All went well until ‘the hairs of my flesh’ was read out. Instantly laughter broke out all over the room and voices called out, ‘Oh, I say, Welch, do they really stand up?’ ‘Oh Welch!’

  Unwisely rushing to my own defence as a writer by referring them to my august source, I protested, ‘But it’s in the Bible! You can read it there.’

  This started a second storm of laughter, groans and mockeries. I thought, ‘Let them laugh. Everything is ridiculous if you like to make it so.’ I even began to laugh myself.…

  Then I forgot all about this story, until some time later when I had left school and was staying at a friend’s house near the sea in Sussex. Besides myself there was one other guest, and as we sat on the sunlit lawn, shelling peas for supper, she started to tell me of this true experience.

  She had gone up to stay at a large old house, I think in the Midlands. Her room was in the eighteenth-century part, with walls panelled to the ceiling, and heavy sash windows.

  Immediately my mind flew back to my own story, and although she told me that
her bed was modern, uncanopied and very comfortable, I still saw her in my ancient plumed bed with the crimson curtains moving in the draught like furtive animals.

  She read a little as she lay in bed, then she switched off the lamp and went to sleep.

  In the middle of the night she was woken, just as I had been in my story; although it was not a beautiful woman that she saw, but a huge filmy egg, made out of mucous membrane and lighted from within. It floated slowly through the darkness until it was above her in the bed. She saw with horror then that the egg-shaped glow encased the face and shoulders of a man. The shoulders were naked and just below them the body dissolved into stringy, phosphorescent mucus. Round his head was a squirming halo of the same. The flesh was of an extraordinary ruddiness, and exaggeratedly tight, as if the image had been blown up with a bicycle-pump.

  The young man was grinning at her, showing his white, animal teeth. On his forehead were hot brown curls and the needle points of his eyes bored into her.

  Fascinated, she watched the face until it disappeared on the other side of the bed, then she lay still, wondering what it could be, until, most surprisingly, she fell asleep again.

  In the morning her host and hostess told her that the image appeared in various parts of the house, not only in that room. Sometimes it sailed down the passages. The face and shoulders were all that could ever be seen. They had no explanation to give for the appearance of the image, except a rather unconvincing tradition about a young man, a villain and an ancestor of theirs.

  For a moment after the end of the story we went on shelling peas in silence. The pods, as they were ripped open, made a sucking noise, like mouths gasping for air. My mind was busy comparing the true experience with my invented one. I could think of nothing but ghosts; I was filled with the idea of them.

  And jumping up restlessly, I left my companion, and the peas in the china basin, and the empty pods on the lawn; and I wandered a long way until I came to a black pool almost surrounded by tangled thickets. I knelt down and dipped my hand in the still water. My fingers were magnified into fat, curling grubs. Baring my arm, I stretched down till I felt rotting branches and twigs soft as horses’ noses. I pulled, and a mossy, peeling antler rose dripping from the pond. Delving still deeper I came to a pie of excrement and leaves, layer on layer, and limp and black as chow dogs’ tongues.

  It was evening now, with the sun setting. I looked up at the turquoise sky, then down at the stirred-up water where black motes like pepper starred the pinkness of my tingling arm. From across the pool a dull blind window suddenly flashed back the dying fire of the sun, and a rush of birds streamed out above me. I saw the woodman’s ruined shelter of branches tied together, and his pile of bark peelings turned now into a mass of dead mottled snakes.

  Everything at that moment held a secret. Everything was haunted. But human eyes were not the right eyes, and my ears would never hear.

  THE EARTH’S CRUST

  When I first went to an art school, it was decided that I should live with my eldest brother in Adam Street, off Portman Square. His two rooms were at the top of the little Georgian house and my bedroom was on the ground floor. Between us we had a woman with a tightly held mouth and contemptuous eyes, and a curate viscount who ran up the stairs and usually carried a music-case stuffed with papers. In the basement lived the owner of the house and her children. She had a harsh dry cough which tickled the back of my throat whenever I heard it.

  In houses where people live behind closed doors, unknown to one another, some emanation broods in the passages and especially on the stairs. Perhaps it is just vague, diffused suspicion. This house had it in particular. The embittered woman, going to the bathroom with her sponge, moved almost furtively, as if afraid of eyes staring down from the top landing; and the curate, as he bustled past me with his papers, seemed to be escaping from someone or something. Even the landlady appeared to be affected by the atmosphere. She climbed up from her basement with a look of deep anxiety and secretiveness on her face. One had the impression that she had something to hide which gave her a great deal of trouble. Yet it was all illusion, for she was a conscientious woman who kept good rooms and gave excellent breakfasts.

  These were brought to our rooms on trays. I would have mine before I bathed or dressed. I usually began with iced grapefruit already sugared, then went on to scrambled eggs, toast, coffee, and marmalade. And all the time I would be reading a book with the lamp on, because my old room had only one window and was dark. Although it was dark, it could have been a charming room, for it still possessed its high wainscot and old L-shaped hinges on the door; but the landlady’s stained oak Cromwellian furniture and cretonne curtains had almost completely overlaid its original character.

  At the last moment I would run out of the house to catch my bus, without even going upstairs to see my brother. The art school that had been chosen for me was in the south-eastern suburbs. It had been chosen by my aunt, because she had once bought a print from the man who taught wood engraving there. The journey out to it was long. The bus crossed the river, passed under thundering Vauxhall railway bridge and came to Kennington, where the blackened acanthus railings of the Regency church were covered with yellow and red placards, asking for money. I would be sitting on top of the bus, right in front in order to see everything. On the other side of the road was a park with screaming children standing in the paddling pond and splashing one another. The girls had their dresses bunched up above their thighs or tucked into their bloomers. Little boys, clad only in braces and trousers, ran amok, shooting off water pistols. Girls screamed more piercingly than birds, lolled out their tongues and rolled their eyes like epileptics. There was madness in the air.

  When the children had been left behind, my eyes turned to the small factory, which advertised for women to work sewing machines.

  I pictured the sweat shops: the scores of pedalling feet, the darting needles, snapping thread. I saw the girls’ bent heads, their hair cascading down. I smelt the sweat, the strain, the powder, the knitting, and the buns in paper bags.

  Then there were the butchers’ shops with pink lamps on all day to make the meat look rosy and good. I saw pigs’ faces with bunches of parsley in the scalded mouths.

  Along the pavements thronged the people, like bottles walking; their heads as inexpressive as round stoppers. What if some god or giant should bend down and take several of the stoppers out, I thought. Inside there would be black churning depths like bile, or bitter medicine.

  So many of the people still carried sleep in their faces. Grey skin, bleary eyes, rough hair seemed to show that they had been forced from their beds and were only waiting for the day’s work to be done, when they would throw themselves down again.

  The lunatic asylum at Peckham, so remote in its old building behind high walls, cut off from trams and buses and crowds and posters, was dreaming of another age and time. I peopled it with lunatics who knew that they were great historic figures. Queen Victoria was there with a tray of silver paper medals, which she graciously bestowed on the nurses and doctors who pleased her. Napoleon brooded; and Joan of Arc smiled in ecstasy as the flames licked up.

  I always hoped to see a face appear at one of the top windows—just the glimpse of a face looking up at the clouds; but there was no sign of life.

  I next tried to penetrate the walls of a great warehouse. There was furniture that had been stored there for fifty years, I told myself. Mice ran between the legs of the tables and nibbled at the doors of the huge sideboards, misled by a ghostly smell of cheese and biscuits. Moths silently munched through green baize and damask wool. The tickless clocks kept watch. The chairs held out their arms. The rolled Turkey carpets were like giant cocoons, waiting to burst open. Everything had life, but it was muffled, furtive, secret.

  The Marquis of Granby was my stop. I would get off the bus, cross the road and enter a large building which had dusty evergreen bushes round the door. The main part was devoted to the training of schoolteachers, so I woul
d run down a long, dark passage till I reached the stairs which led to the art school. I would climb up as quietly as possible, for I was usually late, get my drawing-board and pencil, and glide silently into the Antique Room. Students already astride their ‘donkeys’ would glance up at me, then down again. They seemed both curious and uninterested. I was too new to have any friends. I thought that they would talk about me, but not to me. Sometimes there were only two or three girls in the room, and then they would talk about men, as if I were just another plaster cast. I was left to get down on my paper something that looked a little like the Hermes of Praxiteles.

  The master, when he appeared, would perhaps say, ‘This is just fun—you are amusing yourself.’ Me would say it mildly, even tolerantly, but my cheeks would tingle, and I would crouch over my drawing, as if to conceal and protect it. I had not yet learnt to enjoy an art school. I would long for the end of the morning.

  At lunch-time most of the students ran down to the refectory on the ground floor and had a large lunch with the schoolteachers-to-be, but I had found a shop which sold crisp rolls and butter and slices of good liver sausage. Further down the street a baker kept strange fig biscuits that I liked. With this food I used to walk down a side street of early-Victorian houses—one with plaster eagles on each side of the door—until I came to a later, stone church that blocked the end. Plane trees and small patches of grass surrounded it. I had discovered that if I sat on the steps of the great west door, which was never opened, I could be in the sun and yet hidden from the road. In front of me was a trim garden and a house. I would crunch my roll and biscuits as I gazed at the beds of tortoiseshell wallflowers or at the railway line beyond, and for a few moments would feel happy and content; even the curiously rude Victorian contractor’s gargoyle nearest to me would add to my pleasure. But then the isolated feeling and the useless feeling and the imprisoned feeling would sweep back over me and I would know that I was alone on a stone step with no idea of how my life was to be lived.