In a line they stood—Aunt Hester, Danny, Mr Chisholm, Sister May, Mother, Father, Aunt Connie and Ella and Bridie. They stood without moving, though they were real enough; you could sense a bloom of living about each figure, as though beyond the immediate eye a small rising and falling of breath could be sensed, an emanation of breath that can be felt from the most immobile sleeper but never from the dead. And from each one, darker than the more luminous shade of the veranda, extended fur-black lengths of shadow propping them up against the pinked gilt of that falling sun behind. A solar exercise: of the nature of a photograph.
It is difficult to express the acceptance of these my dead that I felt at that moment—can one recollect, for instance, some almost parallel episode of unusuality and the way in which one’s sense of personal ignorance placed this firmly, in the first startling second, within the reasonable plan of expected existence? Say—you are sitting in a boat moored to the side of a creek. It is your boat. The oars drift at the rowlocks; the painter rope at the bows is knotted loosely round an old pole protruding from the mud. You are idling, enjoying the sun, waiting for the time when the lobsters will be on sale in the cottage up the track behind you. So far, so good … then abruptly a figure looms between you and the sun. Breathing heavily, this figure is—you find—stepping into your boat, rocking your boat, picking up your oars. With eyes now fully opened you see that this is an old man in a fisherman’s blue jersey, that already he has cast off the painter, and that the boat and the two of you are drifting out quietly over the leaf-green waters of the creek. The man picks up the oars. He rows! He says nothing. Once he looks at you, and without smiling, but gravely affable, nods. What, what do you do? … It’s simple. Nod back. There is no other answer. You might think you would be saying: ‘And who in heaven’s name do you think you are?’ or: ‘Don’t you know—you’re in the wrong boat?’ Or something similar. But these would be absurd, you could say nothing of the kind—for this mans’ absolute sureness of purpose, his passive calm, his lack of all effusive gesture, his nodding acceptance of yourself makes question impossible. He must, you admit, in that first upsetting second be right. It is you who probably have made some mistake. And so, though no reason as yet asserts itself, you decide to wait. Then—exactly then—is the moment of acceptance. No conscious reason has asserted itself. But since you admit his action to be right, you admit that somewhere, beyond your instant understanding, there is a reason quite logical for his visitation to your boat. You must assume your own ignorance, you give him a lien on a place, certain but as yet uncertified, in the scheme of things. In fact, although perhaps questioning the exact reason—you have nevertheless accepted it. So you are rowed across the creek.
It turns out of course that some minutes previously, when you waved away a fly, this man who was the casual ferryman of the creek thought you were beckoning to him. He expected no further word, the district was taciturn, visitors known to be superior and silent to the natives. Moreover, he had a tumour of the palate. And think of it as you will, that tumour was the only coincidental extraneity. It could all have happened, and doubtless every day does, without such tumours.
In such a way, then, it was necessary to accept for those first perplexing moments the phenomenon of this group of dead people. It may seem in retrospect to have been a far more difficult case of ‘acceptance’. But that is not so. The shock of sudden appearance was the same; the absence of all relation to usuality; the passive surety of their stance; the first moment of questioning one’s own senses—in fact, of admitting them to be right. So that in extension, alone in the garden and in such a queer evening sunlight, the immediate muddled assumption was that I was perhaps a fiction of my own imagining, my adolescence was a dream, these my known adult superiors were alive as they always had been. And even then, quickly confirming my own adulthood from the material shirt and trousers beneath my eyes—nevertheless I could only be sure that even if these people were in fact dead, that then it was my own conception, that death entailed disappearance, which was at fault. What, at that lonely moment in real fact, had I to prove that death meant that they should not be there? An idea in my mind—that only. Instinct? There was nothing to confirm instinct. No written letters, no orders, nobody at my side to agree me right or wrong. I was alone—that is important—alone in a deserted garden, and with a mind shocked and therefore in the first place, self-admittedly, not to be trusted.
So—they were there, nine old friends, in a row. But not for long did they remain passive. For a time—how long I cannot think, such periods expand and contract outside the ordinary measurements of reason—they stood motionless, caught in the solar moment, immobilized in the photograph. And as in a photograph, their insistence on being grew as one searched further into the picture. Now as the sun sank lower, the shadow of the house welled forward and overcast their few colours in a monochrome suspense. They became more of a photograph, more faded, pitched in the lesser light of a lilac evening shade. There seemed, to loom above as in many dulled paintings and photographs, an appalling cloud like the emanation of God—a weight not so much of darkness as of an exclusion of light. It was as though some giant jelly-fish of doom hung over us the little fishes: or as though a fine black wind were passing. But now it failed to pass, it remained, hung on the air, grew steadily more ominous. With it, my awareness of the character of my old friends asserted itself. I felt the awe of the dark days clouding again my adult temples.
If they remained so still—then there was a reason for this? Waiting? For what? It was beyond knowing—yet now the supposition of such a pause, the pause that cannot be without an active ending, insisted upon some future threat. They were waiting, in fact, for something to happen. Something growing within themselves? A quiet malevolence simmering, soon to leap into the thunder-flash of attack? Aunt Connie’s thin bone? Father’s dreadful butchery of the brows? The melancholy never-ness of my dear, unattainable Hester? The twilight was thickening, intensifying like the quiet mauve shadows in the dead hearts of these silent nine….
Midges danced like white powder-flecks in the low-angled glint of the sun. The dew seemed already to be falling. The leaves, the deepening shadows grew moist. An emptiness, premonitory of the long dead night, seemed to be echoing across the world. Still I waited—then abruptly the sun disappeared. The photograph turned to deeply-dusked violet. The white clothes began to glow, the dark gathered into garments of fustier gloom. My senses ached for movement, the long tension seemed to be redoubling itself, gathering, running like a dark wave mounting up into itself, rearing ever higher to its all-flooding, mountainous descent….
Now, at this last toppling, edge-heavy moment … out of the window came dancing, tumbling another figure. Absurdly short, round, bright-coloured ginger and purple and brown and pink! Simultaneously the sun blazed out again—it had been hiding behind a chimney! With a high whinny of laughter the little figure tumbled out, hands on hips—and proceeded then without pause to dance an in-and-out jig along and around the line of motionless figures! I could scarcely fix him, he moved so fast—but gradually he came together, a man, short, stout, chestnut-haired; with cheeks mauvely red with laughter; with hair thick-growing and waved on his head and round his devil-arched eyebrows; with gold teeth flashed in a white melon-laugh; with deep red side-whiskers cut square like long hatchets; with a blue shaved strength on his chin; with violet shirt, a pink tie, a gold-brown jacket and a summer promenader’s white trousers striped brown; with a huge red dahlia roaring from his buttonhole, diamonds glittering his fingers, a pearl studding his tie! Never stopping he grimaced and giggled, postured and roared, bent himself double, kicked his legs in the air—never for a second did he stop moving. He jigged, he danced, he tumbled. He flashed his smile up at Father, down at May. He threw kisses, slapped backs. The sweat you could see gleaming all over his round carmine cheeks, his stout belly held firm with effort. And all the time he kept singing: ‘Kunckle, Kunckle—Kunckle’s come!’—Then belabouring his balloon-pot with b
oth short arms: ‘Play some music on the big, bass drum!’ One moment he was a ball, the next a cupid spreadeagled in the air. He did tricks, trick after trick—he primp-walked suddenly away with his head turned backwards, you didn’t know whether he was coming or going! He balanced himself on his hands, scissoring his tubby legs in the air! He put his hands on his knees and waggled them to and fro so you didn’t know which hand was on what knee! He wiggled his feet only and travelled like a fat pillar of coloured salt sideways! He conjured a stream of flags from Aunt Connie’s open mouth, he took bright paper flowers from the seat of Mr Chisholm’s pants! Rabbits jumped from Father’s pockets, Aunt Hester’s bloomers fell elasticless to her feet! The two maids’ apron-bows were tied together behind, they went circling round like a blind sack-race! On thoughtful May’s head sat Kunckle’s gay trilby, while Kunckle himself now trailed the streaming bows of a bonnet! Kunckle! He blazed like a full brass band! He sang like a singing saw! Clown! Hofnacque! Hocricane!
And gradually, like wax melting, the stiffness left that line of figures, one after another they moved their heads, shifted their feet, turned their eyes from their queer lost horizons to Kunckle dancing around them; the stiffness left their shoulders, their erect necks—it was as if a thousand fibres and small muscles had eased each a thousandth of an inch. As rigidity declined, so did the premonitory dangers. Like the raising of a shadow, like that candle-red sun laughing out from behind the black chimney, disaster lifted and a warmth was kindled between them. No more could that stiff relationship—with its set afflictions and its hard rule, its aggressive tensions for fear the rule may be broken—no more could the dread casting of private position gather its cruel eminence: Kunckle had thrown it with his somersaults. So that now Father burst suddenly into a gigantic laugh, so that Mother’s strained face softened to a smile and she took three steps forward and round and back, then curtsied down to May. And Chisholm and Hester were linking arms in a skirl of lancers. Ella and Bridie were bent double back-to-back with red laughter, May was dancing like some long-legged fairy, and at the centre of this strange and tolerant momentum, this circling and posturing of amused figures on the lawn in the last summer sunglow, this graceful motion of people leaning together with the sway of their drapery surfing about the faster dance within—at the centre stood Aunt Connie conducting musically the movement with a white and slender wand, her bone!
Last, I caught sight of Kunckle—irrational lovable, tasteless Kunckle, like a tubby puffy steam-engine he was prancing off into the veranda, I saw his coat-tail flying and the white striped paunch of his bottom pistoning off into the dark doorway. He paused once—to look round, flourish his hat, blow a fine perspiring kiss back to the garden—and then he was gone! But his company remained long after. Long after, until, somehow, the figures of my old acquaintanceship melted—and I was again alone with this empty, human house.
Various Temptations
HIS name unknown he had been strangling girls in the Victoria district. After talking no one knew what to them by the gleam of brass bedsteads; after lonely hours standing on pavements with people passing; after perhaps in those hot July streets, with blue sky blinding high above and hazed with burnt petrol, a dazzled headaching hatred of some broad scarlet cinema poster and the black leather taxis; after sudden hopeless ecstasies at some rounded girl’s figure passing in rubber and silk, after the hours of slow crumbs in the empty milk-bar and the balneal reek of grim-tiled lavatories? After all the day-town’s faceless hours, the evening town might have whirled quicker on him with the death of the day, the yellow-painted lights of the night have caused the minutes to accelerate and his fears to recede and a cold courage then to arm itself—until the wink, the terrible assent of some soft girl smiling towards the night … the beer, the port, the meat-pies, the bedsteads?
Each of the four found had been throttled with coarse thread. This, dry and the colour of hemp, had in each case been drawn from the frayed ends of the small carpet squares in those linoleum bedrooms. ‘A man,’ said the papers, ‘has been asked by the police to come forward in connection with the murders,’ etc., etc. … Ronald Raikes—five-foot-nine, grey eyes, thin brown hair, brown tweed coat, grey flannel trousers. Black soft-brim hat.’
*
A girl called Clara, a plain girl and by profession an invisible mender, lay in her large white comfortable bed with its polished wood headpiece and its rose quilt. Faded blue curtains draped down their long soft cylinders, their dark recesses—and sometimes these columns moved, for the balcony windows were open for the hot July night. The night was still, airless; yet sometimes these queer cause-less breezes, like the turning breath of a sleeper, came to rustle the curtains—and then as suddenly left them graven again in the stifling air like curtains that had never moved. And this girl Clara lay reading lazily the evening paper.
She wore an old wool bed-jacket, faded yet rich against her pale and bloodless skin; she was alone, expecting no one. It was a night of restitution, of early supper and washing underclothes and stockings, an early night for a read and a long sleep. Two or three magazines nestled in the eiderdowned bend of her knees. But saving for last the glossy, luxurious magazines, she lay now glancing through the paper—half reading, half tasting the quiet, sensing how secluded she was though the street was only one floor below, in her own bedroom yet with the heads of unsuspecting people passing only a few feet beneath. Unknown footsteps approached and retreated on the pavement beneath—footsteps that even on this still summer night sounded muffled, like footsteps heard on the pavement of a fog.
She lay listening for a while, then turned again to the paper, read again a bullying black headline relating the deaths of some hundreds of demonstrators somewhere in another hemisphere, and again let her eyes trail away from the weary greyish block of words beneath. The corner of the papers and its newsprint struck a harsh note of offices and tube-trains against the soft texture of the rose quilt—she frowned and was thus just about to reach for one of the more lustrous magazines when her eyes noted across the page a short, squat headline above a blackly-typed column about the Victoria murders. She shuffled more comfortably into the bed and concentrated hard to scramble up the delicious paragraphs.
But they had found nothing. No new murder, nowhere nearer to making an arrest. Yet after an official preamble, there occurred one of those theoretic dissertations, such as is often inserted to colour the progress of apprehension when no facts provide themselves. It appeared, it was thought, that the Victoria strangler suffered from a mania similar to that which had possessed the infamous Ripper; that is, the victims were mostly of a ‘certain profession’; it might be thus concluded that the Victoria murderer bore the same maniacal grudge against such women.
At this Clara put the paper down—thinking, well for one thing she never did herself up like those sort, in fact she never did herself up at all, and what would be the use? Instinctively then she turned to look across to the mirror on the dressing-table, saw there her worn pale face and sack-coloured hair, and felt instantly neglected; down in her plain-feeling body there stirred again that familiar envy, the impotent grudge that still came to her at least once every day of her life—that nobody had ever bothered to think deeply for her, neither loving, nor hating, nor in any way caring. For a moment then the thought came that whatever had happened in those bedrooms, however horrible, that murderer had at least felt deeply for his subject, the subject girl was charged with positive attractions that had forced him to act. There could hardly be such a thing, in those circumstances at least, as a disinterested murder. Hate and love were often held to be variations of the same obsessed emotion—when it came to murder, to the high impassioned pitch of murder, to such an intense concentration of one person on another, then it seemed that a divine paralysis, something very much like love, possessed the murderer.
Clara put the paper aside with finality, for whenever the question of her looks occurred then she forced herself to think immediately of something else, to ignore wh
at had for some years groaned into an obsession leading only to hours wasted with self-pity and idle depression. So that now she picked up the first magazine, and scrutinized with a false intensity the large and laughing figure in several colours and few clothes of a motion-picture queen. However, rather than pointing her momentary depression, the picture comforted her. Had it been a real girl in the room, she might have been further saddened; but these pictures of fabulous people separated by the convention of the page and the distance of their world of celluloid fantasy instead represented the image of earlier personal dreams, comforting dreams of what then she hoped one day she might become, when that hope which is youth’s unique asset outweighed the material attribute of what she in fact was.
In the quiet air fogging the room with such palpable stillness the turning of the brittle magazine page made its own decisive crackle. Somewhere outside in the summer night a car slurred past, changed its gear, rounded the corner and sped off on a petulant note of acceleration to nowhere. The girl changed her position in the bed, easing herself deeper into the security of the bedclothes. Gradually she became absorbed, so that soon her mind was again ready to wander, but this time within her own imagining, outside the plane of that bedroom. She was idly thus transported into a wished-for situation between herself and the owner of the shop where she worked: in fact, she spoke aloud her decision to take the following Saturday off. This her employer instantly refused. Then still speaking aloud she presented her reasons, insisted—and at last, the blood beginning to throb in her forehead, handed in her notice! … This must have suddenly frightened her, bringing her back abruptly to the room—and she stopped talking. She laid the magazine down, looked round the room. Still that feeling of invisible fog—perhaps there was indeed mist; the furniture looked more than usually stationary. She tapped with her finger on the magazine. It sounded loud, too loud. Her mind returned to the murderer, she ceased tapping and looked quickly at the shut door. The memory of those murders must have lain at the back of her mind throughout the past minutes, gently elevating her with the compounding unconscious excitement that news sometimes brings, the sensation that somewhere something has happened, revitalizing life. But now she suddenly shivered. Those murders had happened in Victoria, the neighbouring district, only in fact—she counted—five, six streets away.
The Stories of William Sansom Page 7