Eltonsbrody

by Edgar Mittelholzer

Before this incident on the fourth night of my stay, there was nothing about Mrs. Scaife’s behaviour, nothing in her speech or manner, to suggest that she might be flighty or in any way eccentric. She had treated me very well. At meal-time (I saw practically nothing of her at other times because I was always outdoors) she would ask me how I was enjoying myself, or how I liked the countryside, or had I climbed to the top of Bissex Hill yet?—just the ordinary, polite enquiries of a hostess eager to make her guest feel at home. Now and then, on direct prompting from me, she had told me about her late husband or her grandson, and had related a trifling incident of the past.

  Through these conversations I learnt that Eltonsbrody was her own property, though it was entailed and would pass on to her son, Mitchell. She was the widow of Doctor Michael Scaife, a negro who had had a wide practice in this district and also, for some years, in Bridgetown and its environs thirteen miles away on the other side of the island. When her husband had died eight years before she had continued to live at Eltonsbrody, a well-off person whose only friends—or, for that matter, acquaintances of any sort—were her dogs and her servants. She herself was white—she came of Red Leg stock. The Red Legs are a small group of inbred whites, the descendants of the early Scottish-Irish settlers.

  The tale of the gossips was (she told me this with an amused twinkle) that she had married Doctor Scaife for his money and he her for her white skin, and the argument was that the doctor had been such an ugly negro that even the women of his own race would not look at him twice, professional man though he was. And she, the daughter of lobster-fisher-folk in Martin’s Bay, had been so ambitious for a better life and education that she had shut her eyes and said yes when the doctor met her at Bathsheba one Easter Monday and proposed. In actuality, she said, there was no truth in any of this. The marriage had resulted from a sincerely mutual fondness and a comradeship that had developed out of a similarity of outlook and ideas: ‘the simpler human ideas, Mr. Woodsley—the plain, basic dreams and conceptions of two members of the same species.’ Throughout married life, she assured me, relations between herself and her husband had been as harmonious and pleasant as it was within the capabilities of any human couple to achieve such a state.

  Mitchell, the one child of their marriage, was a solicitor and a Member of the House of Assembly (the local Parliament). I gathered indirectly that he had fallen into disfavour with his mother a year after his father’s death when he married a creole Portuguese girl from British Guiana. Or Trinidad (I am not sure which). With his family, he lived at a place called Bank Hall, a district on the outskirts of Bridgetown, and at irregular intervals (‘any time he feels like it—I never try to persuade him’) he came to Eltonsbrody to visit his mother, bringing with him his six-year-old son, Gregory. ‘My grandson is the only interest I have in life, Mr. Woodsley.’ Her eyes had become soft and doting when she said this. In fact, I got the impression that it was only because of Gregory that she tolerated Mitchell’s visits. ‘I happened to see the little fellow by accident when he was seven months old,’ she told me, a far-away look in her eyes, ‘and from that instant I knew he would always be very dear to me.’

  I did not feel particularly sleepy, so sat staring out into the darkness of the casuarinas whose flimsy needle-like foliage kept wavering indistinctly against the starry sky. The wind zoomed and bellowed in monotonous fury round the house. Only subconsciously I heard it, for my senses had long grown accustomed to the sound. It was a sound that was never absent, for Staden (or as, I understand, it is more often called, Staden Hill) is one of the highest prominences in this north-eastern section of Barbados. Very rugged country it is—rugged and majestic. Austere, too. The very names of places have a bricky, stern sound. Hackleton’s Cliff, Bissex Hill, Pico Teneriffe, Edgecombe Cliff. Only Bathsheba (where the two hotels and the rest-house are) falls with any softness on the ear.

  For the most part of coralline limestone and clay, with ferruginous deposits, the land descends in whorled humps and tiers, studded with jagged, threatening boulders, to the narrow pebbly beach upon which the sea dashes itself minute after minute and hour after hour, every day, every week, with force and persistence.

  Staden, where Eltonsbrody stands, though known as a hill, is, in actuality, a kind of plateau whose comparatively level top eventually slopes away in gentle undulations towards the south and west. On the seaward side it falls off rather steeply in desolate ledges and escarpments and occasional grass- or cane-grown patches down to the sea.

  Eltonsbrody (where it got such a name from even Mrs. Scaife could not tell me) is a two-storeyed house with aged-looking grey limestone walls. It was built, if the date over the front door can be trusted, in 1887. Despite its isolation amid wide grounds bounded by patches of lonely canefields on the land side and the jagged descent on the sea side, Eltonsbrody, when I first saw it on that evening of Maundy Thursday, 1958, did not have a forbidding look. Rather it inspired something of the idyllic—and the trees that surrounded it were responsible for this: two or three mahogany trees, many tall, flimsy casuarinas—my favourite trees, incidentally, among all those I saw in the West Indies—and a few stunted flamboyants.

  I had already decided that before I left I would transfer Eltonsbrody on to canvas, and I was thinking about the picture I had already started featuring the house when I heard the deep, brief bark of a dog. The sound came from the kitchen-garden, near the poultry-run, and I assumed it must be Walter. The kennel was near the poultry-run, and Walter had just such a bark. He had Great Dane blood in him. Patrick was a mongrel­.

  I yawned, and was on the point of rising when I heard a rustle amid some shrubs which I knew grew along the path that led round the corner of the building to the driveway and the front garden. Somebody seemed to be walking along the path. I heard a chuckle. Mrs. Scaife’s voice called up: ‘Still not in bed yet, Mr. Woodsley? I’m going for a short walk.’

  ‘A walk?’

  ‘Yes. I’m not very sleepy to-night. I’m taking Walter and Patrick with me.’

  ‘It’s after eleven.’

  ‘Oh, no harm will come to me. A short constitutional will help to induce sleep. It’s an excellent habit to take walks before bed, my boy.’

  I told myself it was no business of mine.

  After I had put out the lamp and got into bed it suddenly came upon me that I was alone in Eltonsbrody. I admit I am imaginative and very susceptible to atmosphere. Lying there in bed, hearing the wind moaning and whooping round the house, I felt an eeriness descend upon me. Sounds that I had only a few minutes before taken for granted and accepted for what they were now took on a special significance. The soft swishing rustle of the casuarinas might have been a spirit-voice warning me of danger. And there was the old wardrobe in the room across the corridor that creaked occasionally. This creaking now seemed a sly, deliberate noise produced by some unknown presence that lurked behind the closed door of the unused room.

  At this point I should explain about this room and about the other one that adjoined it, for it is important in view of what happened during the next few days.

  There are five bedrooms at Eltonsbrody—two large ones on the windward side and two large ones on the leeward, with a corridor separating windward from leeward. The fifth room consists of a cut-off portion of the corridor. Instead of the corridor continuing right through to the eastern end of the building, a part of it had been walled in to make a small bedroom (there is a connecting door between this room and Mrs. Scaife’s room which is one of the two on the leeward side). During the time of my stay, only the leeward rooms and this small room were in a fit state to be occupied. The two windward rooms were in disuse. The windows were kept closed and the doors were always locked (even though, as I came to learn later, they were both fully furnished). On the second day of my stay I happened to remark on this fact, and Mrs. Scaife told me with a sigh: ‘This house is a real burden to me sometimes, Mr. Woodsley. I simply can’t be bothered with those two rooms, and I think the servants have enough work
as it is without having to keep clean two large rooms which nobody ever uses. You see, I have no friends—no friends at all. The people my son Mitchell would want to bring here are not the sort of people I’d like to know. I have no use for the artificial society in which Mitchell moves. I’ve always been a simple woman.’

  A little later she explained about the wardrobe. It was the doctor’s old wardrobe, and the base of one of the corner-supports was rotten, so that whenever a stray draught struck it the whole thing lurched a trifle and creaked.

  And lying in bed now hearing it, I thought it sly and full of meaning—even found myself wondering if there could not be some sinister reason for those two rooms being locked up as they were.

  I lit the lamp again and began to frown round the room. The walls were pale blue, and in places the plaster was flaked and cracked. The furniture was old-fashioned—except for the bed. Near the marble-topped washstand there hung a framed picture of the battle of Jutland. And just behind the bed, the smiling eyes of a girl of the rustic English type (circa 1880) gazed down upon me with sentimental persistence. The big four-sectioned wardrobe loomed along the eastern wall like a dark-brown monument saturated with Victorian austerity, and the chest of drawers that stood between the two southern windows had the air of a stout, corseted matron frowning in disapproval at the ultra-modernity of the Simmons bed.

  Something made me spring up quickly and cross to the door.

  I opened the door a trifle, and listened.

  After about a minute, the sound I had detected repeated itself, and my fears subsided. It was only the flapping of the piece of canvas sacking that Tappin, the man of all work, had hung out of the pantry window. The night before, I had come in late, and, in passing through the dining-room, had got quite a start on hearing this muffled flap-flap, like stealthy footsteps. I had investigated on the spot and solved the mystery.

  I shut the door, and was turning to go back to bed when the tele­phone began to ring. The telephone was in Mrs. Scaife’s room.

  2

  The obvious thing was to answer it, so I went in to answer it.

  The door of her room was wide open (she kept it open all day). The big fourposter with tester and lace-frills dominated the scene. It had not been slept in for the night, I noticed. On a small table beside the bed the lamp was alight but turned low. It was on this table that the telephone stood. A male voice replied to my ‘Hallo’. It sounded surprised, and wanted to know if this was Eltonsbrody.

  ‘That’s right,’ I told it. ‘I suppose you want to speak to Mrs. Scaife?’ And it came back at me: ‘Yes. Isn’t she . . . look here, would you mind telling me who you are?’

  When I explained who I was and what I was doing here, he said: ‘Oh,’ and became quite affable, asked me if I was related to the Trinidad Woodsleys. I told him no, the Antigua Woodsleys, and he introduced himself as Mitchell Scaife. ‘But where is Mother?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Gone for a walk.’

  ‘For a walk! At this hour!’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Said she couldn’t sleep. She’s taking a constitutional. She’s got the dogs with her.’

  There was a pause while he seemed to consider something. Then in a voice become abruptly reserved, he said: ‘Very well. I’ll phone again later. Sorry to have disturbed you, Mr. Woodsley­.’

  ‘No need to worry about that. I was awake. Any message you’d like me to give her?’

  A hesitation. Then: ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘No, it’s all right. I’ll ring again later when I think she’s returned home. Most un­usual, her going out at this time of the night.’

  ‘Our opinions coincide remarkably,’ I murmured before hanging up.

  The wardrobe in the doctor’s room creaked, and the wind seemed to hum with a new mournfulness. I looked about the dimly lit room, and began to feel not too comfortable, as though I were being watched. I saw the door that opened into the small room, and found myself wondering what could be in there. Why had the corridor been cut off so that this room could be added to the four already in existence?

  I turned up the lamp, very curious of a sudden. Was it my imagination or did the wind howl with a new fury as the light spilled redly round the room? I swore at myself for my fancifulness.

  I took note of the wedge of wood that kept the door open. She only shut her door at night, but evidently to-night had brought a change in the routine. I shook my head and felt sure that something was wrong.

  Though I had had many glimpses of her room from the corridor in passing, I had never come in here before. Looking round now, I saw nothing that might support the theory that my hostess was a person of eccentric habits. It was precisely the sort of room you might expect of an old lady like Mrs. Scaife. Neat, clean, smelling slightly of moth balls and lavender water, austere but restful and cosy. The big wardrobe and the easy chair by the window, the book-shelf over the washstand and the little table by the bed provided the cosiness.

  Near the telephone on the bedside table I noticed what looked like a photograph album. I took it up and began to look through it. It was not one of these ponderous old-fashioned things. It was a modern snapshot album with accommodation for four small pictures on each page. All the pictures, I noticed, were of a child, and I took it for granted it must be her grandson, Gregory. This was confirmed on one page. Under one picture I read: ‘Gregory, at two years.’

  The pictures were in chronological order. The first four pictures on the first page showed Gregory as an infant recumbent, the second page showed him a little older; he was standing. Flicking through the pages, I watched him grow up to a little fellow of about six or seven.

  I raised my head, listening.

  No. Imagination. I could have sworn, though, I had heard a soft footstep in the corridor. Or could it have been in the small room? I put down the album and turned my gaze towards the connecting door. It was shut. I wanted to cross over and try it to see if it was locked. Was it a furnished room? What was kept in there? Had the sound of the footstep come from in there?

  Only the wind seemed to know everything. I thought I could detect something intelligent in its whining drone—a cold, detached intelligence from which nothing in this dismal old house could hide. I could feel probing draughts twining round me, dissecting my thoughts—perhaps muttering inarticulate warnings that I was too stupid to catch and understand.

  I had just glanced at the book-shelf when Mrs. Scaife’s voice said: ‘Having a look round, Mr. Woodsley?’

  I started, of course—but in moments like this my nervous system has a peculiar habit of adjusting itself in a flash from shock to normality. The greater shock, it seems, the more abrupt the switchback to a state of presence of mind. I turned and smiled. ‘Yes. I was glancing at this snapshot album of yours. I suppose it’s Gregory, isn’t it?’

  She nodded, and advanced into the room in as silent-footed a manner as she must have come up the stairs and along the corridor. ‘Yes, that is my dear little grandson. Didn’t you notice his name under some of the pictures?’

  ‘So I did.’

  ‘He’s much better to look at in real life. I’m sure there’s no camera that can do him justice.’

  ‘By the way, I haven’t come in here out of inquisitiveness. Your son Mitchell phoned.’

  She nodded again. ‘I was expecting the call.’

  ‘You were?’

  ‘Yes. And, please, Mr. Woodsley, you must never consider it inquisitive to come in here. You’re always welcome. I have nothing to hide.’

  I thanked her, then said: ‘You say you were expecting this phone call. Then why did you go out?’

  She took up the photograph-album. ‘I should have thought the reason was obvious. I wanted to be out when the phone rang.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘Did he say if he’d ring again?’

  ‘He did. He said he’d call later—I don’t know how late that means. But, like myself, he was a bit puzzled at your going for a walk at this time of the night.’

  Her m
anner vaguely abstracted, she asked: ‘Were you puzzled­, too?’

  It might have been the heightened state of my fancifulness—or it might have been the draught that swirled through the room at this instant—but I shuddered. And I thought that there was something in her voice very peculiar. She somehow made her words sound weighted with menace and prophecy; yet, at the same time, there was a sympathetic note somewhere in it. Yet sympathetic in a way that revolted me. It was just as though she had not a moment ago committed a disgusting act, and now was whispering to me: ‘Why do you pretend to be puzzled? Aren’t we both in the same category?’

  ‘Of course I was puzzled,’ I replied, a little resentfully. ‘Who wouldn’t be puzzled at your behaviour? Going for a walk at eleven o’ clock at night when you knew your son would be ringing you up. Very puzzling I call it. Anyway, it’s your business. What right have I to criticise you!’

  I began to move towards the door, but she said quickly: ‘You’re such a hasty young man. So hasty and plain-spoken! Please don’t hurry off. Won’t you like to look through my book-shelf? When I came in you appeared to be interested in it. Don’t hesitate if there’s anything you see and think you’d like to borrow.’ She spoke with a touch of anxiety—almost ingratiatingly, as though the last thing she wanted to do was to offend me.

  I paused and said: ‘As a matter of fact, I’d barely glanced at your books when you appeared like a ghost at the door.’

  ‘Yes, I did move silently. A habit of mine sometimes. Never mind, my boy. Indulge me. Come and have a closer look at my books.’

  I moved over to the book-shelf, and she took up the lamp and brought it. As she stood behind me I thought I sensed something breathless about her. She seemed in some peculiar way rigid with excitement. Or perhaps anxiety would be the better word. It made me very uncomfortable, though I tried not to show it.

  ‘All these books were given to me by my husband during our courting days.’ she said. ‘With the exception of one.’