Where Nothing Sleeps

by Denton Welch

  ‘Do you mean, ride pillion behind you?’ I asked, very taken aback, but rather pleased at the idea. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘You jump up.’

  I approached the horse, slung my rucksack up to him, and was about to try to struggle up behind, when he changed his mind and told me to get up in front. He took his feet out of the stirrup, and pulled me up with his hands. I now sat before him like a small child; he was so large that he made me feel like that. I could smell his clothes—the mingled tobacco, beer, horse and sweat that clung to them; and I could tell how hot he was, for I was pressed hard against him as he reached round me for the reins. I could even feel his heart beating into my back.

  ‘Is that all right?’ he asked, straddling his legs a little farther apart, so that I could sit more in the saddle. The leather creaked; I felt the hard press of his thighs and legs along my own.

  ‘Now, shall we go hunting?’ he suggested. ‘Could we, like this?’ I asked, half pleased, half fearful. It seemed an amazing adventure to me. I wondered if I’d be able to keep my seat when we really started moving. The thought of jumping hedges or walls thrilled me with horror, yet I hoped he might attempt it.

  We were still ambling down the rough road; just as I thought we were about to turn into a field, to catch up the hunt, the young farmer bent over me and said cajolingly but with a certain menace, ‘What are you going to give me for the ride, it’s worth something to you, the ride, isn’t it?’

  This was so new and so unpleasant a turn of events that I could only answer aggrievedly, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you wanted money.’ I was very hurt, since I thought that he had picked me up entirely for fun and amusement; I was also rather alarmed, for I now seemed to be in his power. I could not see myself escaping from between these two huge arms or throwing myself off that horse with any success. I decided to take up as light and indifferent an attitude as possible.

  ‘What do you want?’ I said coldly. ‘I’ve got very little money, so perhaps I’d better get off at once.’ ‘No, don’t do that,’ he said, holding me on firmly. ‘You give me something,’ he wheedled. ‘It’s worth it to you, isn’t it?’ The wheedling from the strong lusty man enraged me; everything had been spoilt by his trying to extract money, and I had been enjoying myself so much.

  ‘Put me down now and I’ll give you sixpence; I want to go on walking.’

  ‘Sixpence, what’s sixpence!’ he exclaimed. ‘We’ve only gone a few yards, and I’m not going any farther, since you want to be paid. I can’t pay,’ I said, stressing the word.

  ‘Oh, come on, give me a bit more than that and I’ll take you a long way.’

  I did not answer, but held the sixpence over my shoulder, hardly expecting him to take it. When I felt his hand on mine, grasping the sixpence, I decided to jump down; avarice that would accept sixpence was too disgusting.

  I got my feet both to one side, and then jumped. The horse was still moving, but very slowly. I landed on my feet and then fell backwards over a little bush, which annoyed me. As I picked myself up, I held my hands out for my rucksack; he pretended not to notice, and I thought for one moment that he was going to gallop away with it. Filled with horror (for it contained everything I needed for my journey) I ran after the horse and said, ‘Chuck me my rucksack please.’ My voice sounded very firm and severe and artificial.

  At last he turned round; he was smiling. ‘Catch!’ he said as he swung it out to me. I caught it by the straps. When I looked up again, I was just in time to see him hit his horse, making it break into a fast trot. ‘Goodbye,’ he shouted jovially, as he disappeared across the fields. I did not answer; I was trying to understand the whole episode.

  That night I slept in a loft with two other youths. It was clean and whitewashed, with straw mattresses on the floor. We lay on the creaking canvas and talked far into the night.

  I made my way from Exmoor to the edge of Dartmoor. I had yet another great-aunt in view to provide my next night’s bed. She was the sister-in-law of the uncle I had stayed with at Petersfield, and she had a house not very far from Okehampton. She had spent a few days at my grandfather’s house and had told me then to be sure to visit her if ever I were in Devonshire. She wrote her address on a piece of paper and gave it to me.

  I had it with me now. The name of the house was something unpronounceable and Chinese, for my aunt had spent her early life in that country. I remembered her telling me that she and her daughter had designed the house between them; I wondered what it would be like.

  It was not easy to find, for it was in no village or town. When at last I discovered it, quite late in the evening, I saw that it lay on the very edge of the moor. The setting was truly lovely—on three sides wild, rolling ground, tightly wigged with heather, a stone wall climbing up a hill and ending in a tumbledown shed which might have been a shrine—but the house was as hideous as white paint and turrets could make it. At each corner was a turret with an iron cross or weathervane on top. Windows all round showed heavy lace and draperies within. The Chinese name on the gate seemed to suit. The whole thing was such a woolly mixture and degradation of ideas that a name in quite unknown language seemed the most appropriate.

  I walked up through the shrubs. All the things with various coloured leaves I did not like seemed to be growing there.

  I rang the bell and waited. A rather harassed maid came to the door and I explained who I was, asking if my aunt were at home. The maid bustled away to fetch her and I was left to gaze at the hall. It was furnished with those tables that have little Chinese men in ivory inlaid into the tawny wood. On the tables stood aggressive, thrusting ferns with frilly leaves. They grew from brass vessels which are used as chamber-pots in India. I wondered if my aunt knew this.

  I put the thought away when I saw her coming towards me. She looked just the same, with winking glasses held in her hand and far too many things pinned to her shapeless black dress. There were watches, brooches, pieces of lace and ribbon; yet the whole effect was gloomy, and dowdy in the extreme.

  She greeted me in rather a dazed way, saying, ‘Of course we must find a bed for you, only we’re full up here. I must ask my daughter Kathleen.’

  She took me into the drawing-room where her other guests were sitting with her daughter. They all gaped politely, but seemed to give me very little attention. The daughter said that I could have a room at her house, although she was not living there herself.

  When I had time to look about me, the ugliness of the room almost numbed me. It was hardly possible to believe that it had been concocted by sane people. Nothing seemed to have any significance at all. The tinted photograph in the silver frame seemed just as useful or useless as the horrible tortured fire-irons. Nothing had a place, and so nothing could be in its place. The tide of photographs and hideous Worcester vases might have swept off the tables and swamped the floor without giving one a more uncomfortable feeling than they did already. The liver-coloured curtains and white net might have festooned themselves all over the ceiling and the lamp-bracket without causing a more inconsequent effect. It was a mad-house scene.

  Looking down at the flaming, rude shapes on the bile-green carpet I listened to what the male guest was saying. It appeared that he and his sister were connections of my aunt’s family, but I had never heard of them. The man looked in the early thirties. He had a flat pale face, fair hair, and wore glasses. I thought that I might like him, when he stopped telling donnish stories to amuse my aunt. She, meanwhile, was being made quite kittenish by the stupid jokes. Her daughter, watching for a pause in the conversation, inserted her anecdote about the farm labourer at the political meeting.

  ‘I’d been talking for some time,’ she began, ‘and in the course of my speech I used the phrase ‘I’m only a plain woman’, as one might on such an occasion.’ Here she shrugged her shoulders a little too modestly. ‘As soon as I’d said the phrase, up jumped a big fellow in the back of the room and shouted out, ‘That’s a lie—you’re not a plain woman, you’re a lovely lady.’ She smile
d with satisfaction at the end of her story. I looked at her, wondering if she’d ever been beautiful (she must have been nearly fifty at this time). But even if she had been beautiful, which seemed extremely doubtful, I still wondered how she dared tell such a story. It seemed asking for trouble.

  Suddenly my great-aunt, who must have heard this story many times before, broke through the laughter with some high-pitched remark of her own. She seemed very excited and her eyes were glistening with water. I did not hear the remark, but the other man did, and it seemed to shock him. The smile left his face and a disdainful and repressive look took its place.

  ‘Don’t be lewd, Auntie,’ he said coldly, ‘there’s no cause for lewdness.’ He pronounced the ‘u’ sound very thinly, making the word into something most unpleasant.

  It was my turn to be shocked; I had been wondering for some time whether my aunt were not a little senile (chiefly because of the hideousness of her rooms); now I felt certain of it. I wondered what dreadful words she had uttered. Coming from an old lady, dressed all in black, a rude word or phrase would have far more significance and power to disconcert than from any other type of person. I was glad I had not heard, for even as it was my cheeks were scarlet and sweating.

  My aunt, still crying with laughter and heaving like a not quite extinct volcano, turned to her nephew and said, ‘Don’t be strict, like a governess.’ She dried her eyes and looked all round, babyishly, for approval.

  Her daughter rose to her feet, evidently thinking that it was time for me to go to bed. ‘Calm yourself, Mother,’ she said firmly, then, turning to me, ‘Come along: I’ll lead you up to the house and see that you have everything you need.’

  I said goodnight to my aunt, and the other two followed us out of the room. In the hall we collected an iron lantern with an electric bulb in it, and started to walk on the edge of the moor, close to a stone wall. We followed the tracks of sheep through the dwarfed, wind-shaped bushes. Little piles of black droppings were everywhere, shining like Pontefract cakes in the light of the lantern. The other three began to talk quite animatedly. I liked them better, out in the open, away from that disgusting house. Kathleen took me up through the dark house to a room on the top floor, overlooking the moor. The bed was already made, so all she had to do was to fetch me a towel. She told me that the caretaker slept down below, so that I would not be entirely alone. She said goodnight and left me without telling me where the lavatory or bathroom were. I saw that there was a hand-basin in my room, but still, that would not fulfil every need, unless one became very uncivilised. I went to the window wondering if perhaps that might be more suitable for my purpose. The others saw me standing there, and called up softly, ‘Goodnight, sleep well.’ I saw the lantern rocking gently until it disappeared round the bend of the wall.

  In the morning I walked back to my aunt’s house for breakfast. The moor now looked so enticing that I longed to be off, across it, leaving all houses behind. The air was softer, warmer, more milky than ever, and all the blended, tweed colours of the hills seemed to be floating on this haze.

  I entered the fantastic hall and the maid took me to the dining-room. I was early, no one else was yet down. I looked with amazement at all the food on the sideboard. When the maid left me, I lifted the electroplate lids one by one: sausages, mushrooms, eggs, bacon, tomatoes, kippers. I thought of the poor cook, and felt that the list was almost disgusting; but this did not prevent me from digging into the tomatoes, eggs, and mushrooms, until I had a greedy pile on my plate. As I ate hungrily, I thought it very pretentious of my aunt to keep up Edwardian breakfast practices. I hoped that she only did it when she had guests; I could not bear to think of her all alone with so many dishes of food in front of her, though I realised that the mental picture fitted perfectly the mad-house profusion of everything else in the terrible rooms.

  The man and his sister came in, and then Kathleen, smoothing her grey dress and bringing with her an air of bustling and management.

  ‘Have you got all you want?’ she asked us all, rather reminding me of a colonel or a matron, making an inspection. My aunt followed her closely.

  ‘Come on, Mother,’ she said brightly. ‘We’ve all begun.’

  My aunt sat down and started to eat an egg. ‘Did I ever tell you about the curate who came to stay with us when we were girls?’ she asked, turning specially to me. The others evidently had heard the story before; they went on talking. ‘Well, the vicar had asked my mother to put this curate up for a night or two—there was to be some conference or something. We all wondered what he’d be like for several days before he arrived. I’d privately decided that he’d be very high-church and very good-looking. You can judge how disappointed I was when I saw him; his ears stuck out, he wore steel-rimmed glasses, and to cap all, he was extremely low-church.

  ‘Next morning at breakfast I could hardly bring myself to talk to him. I noticed that my mother was making signs at me but at first decided to ignore them; then I looked down and saw that a big black fly was sitting in the very middle of the curate’s fried egg. He started on the very edge of the white and was gradually working in to the yolk.

  ‘In spite of my mother’s signs, which were becoming almost frantic by now, I decided to do nothing. I just watched as that curate worked nearer and nearer to that black fly. He was far too short-sighted to notice it, and with the last mouthful he put it in his mouth and swallowed it. I wasn’t going to warn such a creature, who had disappointed me so.’

  My aunt ended on a note of girlish triumph painful to hear. The story was so very unpleasant and so very improbable that I did not know quite what to say. My one idea now was to escape.

  ‘You’ll need something to take with you, won’t you?’ asked Kathleen from her place. I thanked her and she got up and went to the sideboard; there, she cut large pieces of bread, and said, ‘What would you like to put between them?’ But without waiting for an answer she started to heap sausage, egg, tomato on to a slice of bread, squashing another piece on it. She made several of these huge sandwiches, then told the maid to find her some grease-proof paper, and handed me the parcel with a sweet smile. ‘That ought to keep you going,’ she said heartily.

  I thanked her, I thanked my aunt; I almost thanked the man and his sister in my eagerness to get away. They waved goodbye to me at the front door as I made straight across the moor. ‘Don’t get bogged,’ was Kathleen’s last cheerful warning.

  To get away and to rid myself of the flavour of the house was my one idea. I walked up the hill where the stone wall led to the ruined shed. Sheep were everywhere, bleating and chewing degradedly. They made a dirty place of the charming hill, but their bells tinkled prettily and there was something patriarchal about their faces.

  I sat in the ruined shed and gazed across the moor for some time. There seemed to be a curious shaped rock, crowning one of the hills in the distance. I decided to walk straight across the moor to it and eat my lunch in its shadow. Running down the hill, I found a sheep path and began to follow it in the direction of the hill; but it soon lost itself and I was left to pick my way as best I could.

  After some time I struck a patch of quaking, bubbling ground; as I stood on a tussock, the brown bubbles burst round my feet. I became alarmed, remembering all the stories I had ever heard of men being sucked down by bogs. I walked round the edge of the treacherous piece, hoping to be able to skirt it. At one point I had to jump from tussock to tussock; they swayed a little from side to side as I landed, but otherwise were solid enough.

  I left the bog behind me, gladly enough, and turned my face towards the rock again. If I found no more bogs in my way, I would soon be there.

  At last I climbed up and leant my back against the flat slab. The wind was blowing but it was hot; I seemed the only person on the whole face of the moor. Taking out Kathleen’s parcel, I unfolded the greaseproof paper and looked at the sandwiches. They had not travelled very well; the egg and the tomato had bulged out and burst through the bread in places. I took a larg
e bite and, at the first taste, saw the breakfast table very clearly with my aunt telling her stupid story. I tried to follow my journey across the moor from the ruined shed. I thought I saw it shimmering in the distance, but as I looked I saw something else as well. A band of people seemed to be approaching; I could see a bobbing white shirt and something red.

  As I munched my food I watched the group until I could make out four figures. They seemed to be coming straight towards me. I thought of them as two girls and two men, until I was finally able to see that they were all women. Two of them wore shorts and two tweed skirts.

  They climbed up to me, laughing and talking noisily.

  ‘Now we know,’ the largest and boldest said. ‘Know what?’ I asked politely.

  ‘Which you are. All the way across the moor we’ve been laying bets; man, woman, man. It’s really been quite exhausting. We haven’t been able to tell until this last minute.’ I felt rather embarrassed.

  ‘How queer,’ I said, ‘because I’ve been wondering about you too, as I watched you. I’d paired you off as two men and two girls.’

  They all laughed, as if this were an uproarious joke; and I did notice then that one of the girls, at least, looked masculine. She was the one who had spoken first; her hair was short and she had a full face with heavy eyelids. She was not one of the ones wearing shorts, but her tweed skirt had something very workmanlike about it. She swaggered too; one could tell that she was the leader of the party.

  We all sat down together to eat our lunch. I offered the remains of my sandwiches rather tentatively, but they all said that they had more than enough of their own. I learnt that they were staying nearby and went walking every day. I found myself wondering if they really were lesbians. The bold one seemed to treat me as a joke. She was quite good-natured, but I was obviously not to be taken seriously in her eyes.