The pronunciation of that pahshun was indescribable; it seemed the bogus essence of the whole damn silly occasion; and the brown girl and I, looking into one another’s eyes, twinkled, savouring together the supreme idiocy. Instinctively we moved towards one another, the twinkle widening to a smile, and I found myself getting dangerously full of similes again, for when she smiled the teeth in her brown face were like the milky kernel of a brown nut.
We sat together on a couch at the deserted end of the room, and I said: “Let me get you something to drink. What would you like? Though whatever it is, it would taste nicer in civilised surroundings.”
“I agree,” she said simply. “Come on.”
And so, ten minutes after I had entered the Magnifico, I was outside again, buttoning my overcoat warmly about me, and this girl was at my side. It was incredible. This is not the sort of thing I usually do; but it had happened so spontaneously, and to be out there in the street, with a little cold wind blowing about us, was such a relief after that gaudy Bedlam, that the girl and I turned to one another and smiled again. I could see she was feeling the same about it as I was.
Our eyes were towards the dazzle of Piccadilly Circus, when she turned and said, “Not that way,” so we went the other way, and down those steps where the Duke of York’s column towers up into the sky, and then we were in the park. To be walking there, with that little wind, and the sky full of stars huddling together in the cold, and the bare branches of the trees standing up against the violet pulsing of the night – this was indescribable, incredible, coming within a few minutes upon that screeching aviary.
Ruth Hutten was a typist – nothing more. Her father had been one of those old fogies who rootle for years and years in the British Museum to prove that Ben Jonson had really inserted a semi-colon where the 1739 edition or what not has a full-stop. Things like that. Somehow he had lived on it, like a patient old rat living on scraps of forgotten and unimportant meat. Ruth had lived with him – just lived, full of admiration for the old boy’s scholarship, typing his annual volume, which usually failed to earn the publisher’s advance.
When he died, the typewriter was all she had; and now she typed other people’s books. She had been typing a long flaming novel about Cornwall by Gregoria Gunson; and Gregoria (whom I had never heard of before, but who seemed a decent wench) had said, “I’ll take you along to a party. You’ll meet a lot of people there. Perhaps I can fix up some work for you.”
So there Ruth Hutten was, at the Magnifico, feeling as much out of it as I did, and as glad to escape.
She told me all this was we walked through the half-darkness of the park, and I, as naturally, told her all about myself. She was hard up, but I had never known anyone so happy. And I don’t mean gay, bubbling, effervescent. No; you can keep that for the Magnifico. I mean something deep, fundamental; something that takes courage when you’re as near the limit as Ruth was.
To this day I don’t know London as well as Londoners think everyone ought to know the place. I don’t know where we had supper; but it was in a quiet place that everybody else seemed to have forgotten. There was a fire burning, and a shaded lamp on the table. The food was good and simple, and no one seemed to care how long we stayed. I wanted to stay a long time. I had a feeling that once Ruth got outside the door, shook hands, and said “Good night,” I should be groping in a very dark place.
I crumbled a bit of bread on the table, and without looking at her I said: “Ruth, I like you. I’ve never liked anyone so much in my life. Will you marry me?”
She didn’t answer till I looked up, and when our glances met she said, “Yes. If you and I can’t be happy together, no two people on earth ever could.”
This was five years ago. We have had time to discover that we didn’t make a mistake.
We were married at a registry office the next morning. The taxi-driver, who looked like one of the seven million exiled Russian princes, and the office charwoman, who had a goitre and a hacking cough, were the witnesses. I tipped them half a sovereign each. I cling to these practical details because I find them comforting in view of the mad impracticality of what was to follow. Please remember that I am an unromantic northerner who couldn’t invent a tale to save his life. If I tried to do so, I should at once begin to try and fill it with this and that – in short with Something. The remarkable thing about what happened to me and Ruth was simply that Nothing happened. If you have never come up against Nothing you have no idea how it can scare you out of your wits. When I was a child I used to be afraid of Something in the dark. I know now that the most fearful thing about the dark is that we may find Nothing in it.
It was Ruth’s idea that we should spend the few days of our honeymoon walking in Cornwall. Everything was arranged in a mad hurry. Not that there was much to arrange. We bought rucksacks, stuffed a change of under-clothing into them, bought serviceable shoes and waterproofs, and we were ready to start.
Walking was the idea of both of us. This was another bond: you could keep all the motor-cars in the world so far as we were concerned, and all the radio and daily newspapers, too; and we both liked walking in winter as much as in summer.
Cornwall was Ruth’s idea. She had Cornwall on the brain. Her father had done some learned stuff on Malory; and her head was full of Merlin and Tintagel and the Return of Arthur. Gregoria Gunson’s novel helped, too, with its smugglers and romantic inns and the everlasting beat of surf on granite coasts. So Cornwall it was – a place in which neither of us had set foot before.
We made our first contact with Cornwall at Truro. Night had long since fallen when we arrived there on our wedding day. I have not been there since, nor do I wish ever to return. Looking back on what happened, it seems appropriate that the adventure should have begun in Truro. There is in some towns something inimical, irreconcilable. I felt it there. As soon as we stepped out of the station, I wished we were back in the warm, lighted train which already was pulling out on its way to Penzance.
There was no taxi in sight. To our right the road ran slightly uphill; to our left, downhill. We knew nothing of the town, and we went to the left. Soon we were walking on granite. There was granite everywhere: grey, hard, and immemorial. The whole town seemed to be hewn out of granite. The streets were paved with it, enormous slabs like the lids of ancestral vaults. It gave me the feeling of walking in an endless graveyard, and the place was silent enough to maintain the illusion. The streets were lit with grim economy. Hardly a window had a light, and when, here and there, we passed a public-house, it was wrapped in a pall of decorum which made me wonder whether Cornishmen put on shrouds when they went in for a pint.
It did not take us long to get to the heart of the place, the few shopping streets that were a bit more festive, gay with seasonable things; and when we found an hotel, it was a good one. I signed the book, “Mr and Mrs Edward Oldham, Manchester,” and that made me smile. After all, it was something to smile about. At this time last night, Ruth and I had just met, and now “Mr and Mrs Edward Oldham.”
Ruth had moved across to a fire in the lounge. She had an arm along the mantelpiece, a toe meditatively tapping the fender. She looked up when I approached her and saw the smile. But her face did not catch the contagion. “Don’t you hate this town?” she asked.
“I can put up with it,” I said, “now that I’m in here, and now that you’re in here with me.”
“Yes,” she answered, “this is all right. But those streets! They gave me the creeps. I felt as if every stone had been hewn out of a cliff that the Atlantic had battered for a thousand years and plastered with wrecks. Have you ever seen Tewkesbury Abbey?”
The irrelevant question took me aback. “No,” I said.
“I’ve never seen stone so saturated with sunlight,” said Ruth. “It looks as if you could wring summers out of it. The fields about it, I know, have run with blood, but it’s a happy place all the same. This place isn’t happy. It’s under a cold enchantment.”
“Not inside these four walls,” I said, �
�because they enclose you and me and our supper and bed.”
We fled from Truro the next morning. Fled is the word. As soon as breakfast was over we slung our rucksacks on to our backs and cleared out of the granite town as fast as our legs would take us. 23 December, and utterly unseasonable weather. The sky was blue, the sun was warm, and the Christmas decorations in the shops had a farcical and inappropriate look. But we were not being bluffed by these appearances. We put that town behind us before its hoodoo could reimpose itself upon our spirits.
And soon there was nothing wrong with our spirits at all. We were travelling westward, and every step sunk us deeper into a warm enchantment. Ruth had spoken last night of a cold enchantment. Well, this was a warm enchantment. I hadn’t guessed that, with Christmas only two days ahead, any part of England could be like this. We walked through woods of evergreens and saw the sky shining like incredible blue lace through the branches overhead. We found violets blooming in warm hedge bottoms, and in a cottage garden a few daffodils were ready to burst their sheaths. We could see the yellow staining the taut green. We had tea at that cottage, out of doors! I thought of Manchester, and the fog blanketing Albert Square, and the great red trams going through it, slowly, like galleons, clanging their warning bells. I laughed aloud at the incredible, the absurd things that could happen to a man in England. One day Manchester. The next London. The next marriage, Truro, and the cold shudders. The next – this! I said all this to Ruth, who was brushing crumbs off the table to feed the birds that hopped tamely round her feet. “It makes me wonder what miracle is in store for tomorrow,” I said. “And, anyway, what is Cornwall? I’ve always thought it was beetling cliffs and raging seas, smugglers, wreckers, and excisemen.”
We entered the cottage to pay the old woman, and I went close up to the wall to examine a picture hanging there. It was a fine bit of photography: spray breaking on wicked-looking rocks. “That’s the Manacles,” the old girl said. “That’s where my husband was drowned.”
The Manacles. That was a pretty fierce name, and it looked a pretty fierce place. The woman seemed to take it for granted. She made no further comment. “Good-bye, midear,” she said to Ruth. “Have a good day.”
We did, but I never quite recaptured the exaltation of the morning. I felt that this couldn’t last, that the spirit which had first made itself felt in the hard grey streets of Truro had pounced again out of that hard grey name: the Manacles. It sounded like a gritting of gigantic teeth. We were being played with. This interlude in fairyland, where May basked in December, was something to lure us on, to bring us within striking reach of – well, of what? Isn’t this England? I said to myself. Isn’t Cornwall as well within the four walls of Britain as Lancashire?
We breasted a hill, and a wide estuary lay before us, shining under the evening sun. Beyond it, climbing in tier upon tier of streets, was Falmouth. I liked the look of it. “This is where we stay tonight,” I said to Ruth. “We shall be comfortable here.”
A ferry took us across the harbour. Out on the water it was cold. Ruth pointed past the docks, past Pendennis Castle standing on the hill. “Out there is the way to Land’s End,” she said.
I looked, and low down on the water there was a faint grey smudge. Even a Manchester man would know that that was fog, creeping in from the Atlantic.
All night long we heard the fog-horns moaning, and it was very cold.
I hate sleeping in an airless room, but by midnight the white coils of fog, filling every crevice, and cold as if they were the exhalation of icebergs, made me rise from bed and shut the window. Our bedroom hung literally over the sea. The wall of the room was a deep bay, and I had seen how, by leaning out of the window, one could drop a stone to the beach below. Now I could not see the beach. I could not see anything. If I had stretched my arm out into the night the fingers would have been invisible. But though I could not see, I could hear. The tide had risen, and I could hear the plash of little waves down there below me. It was so gentle a sound that it made me shudder. It was like the voice of a soft-spoken villain. The true voice of the sea and of the night was that long, incessant bellow of the fog-horns. The shutting of the window did nothing to keep that out.
I drew the curtains across the window, and, turning, saw that a fire was laid in the grate. I put a match to it. Incredible comfort! In ten minutes we felt happier. In twenty we were asleep.
There seemed nothing abnormal about Falmouth when we woke in the morning. A fairly stiff wind had sprung up. The fog was torn to pieces. It hung here and there in dirty isolated patches, but these were being quickly swept away. There was a run on the water. It was choppy and restless, and the sky was a rag-bag of fluttering black and grey. Just a normal winter day by the seaside: a marvellous day for walking, Ruth said.
At the breakfast-table we spread out the map and considered the day’s journey. This was going to be something new again. There had been the grey in hospitality of Truro; the Arcadian interlude; the first contact with something vast and menacing. Now, looking at the map, we saw that, going westward, following the coast, we should come to what we had both understood Cornwall to be: a sparsely populated land, moors, a rock-bound coast. It promised to be something big and hard and lonely, and that was what we wanted.
We put sandwiches into our rucksacks, intending to eat lunch out of doors. We reckoned we should find some sort of inn for the night.
A bus took us the best part of ten miles on our westward journey. Then it struck inland, to the right. We left it at that point, climbed a stile, walked through a few winter-bare fields, and came to a path running with the line of the coast.
Now, indeed, we had found traditional Cornwall. Here, if anywhere, was the enchanted land of Merlin and of Arthur – the land that Ruth dreamed about. Never had I found elsewhere in England a sense so overpowering both of size and loneliness. To our left was the sea, down there at the foot of the mighty cliffs along whose crest we walked. The tide was low, and the reefs were uncovered. In every shape of fantastic cruelty they thrust out towards the water, great knives and swords of granite that would hack through any keel, tables of granite on which the stoutest ship would pound to pieces, jaws of granite that would seize and grind and not let go. Beyond and between these prone monsters was the innocent yellow sand, and, looking at the two – the sand and the reefs – I thought of the gentle lapping of the water under my window last night, and the crying of the fog-horns, the most desolate crying in the world.
Southward and westward the water stretched without limit; and inland, as we walked steadily forward all through the morning, was now a patch of cultivation, now the winter stretch of rusty moor with gulls and lapwings joining their lamentations as they glided and drooped across it, according to their kind. From time to time a cluster of trees broke the monotony of the inland view, and I remember rooks fussing among the bare boughs. Rooks, lapwings, and gulls: those were the only birds we saw that day.
It was at about one o’clock that we came to a spot where the cliff path made a loop inland to avoid a deep fissure into which we peered. In some cataclysm the rocks here had been torn away, tumbling and piling till they made a rough giant’s stairway down which we clambered to the beach below. We ended up in a cove so narrow that I could have thrown a stone across it, and paved with sand of an unbelievable golden purity. The sun came through the clouds, falling right upon that spot. It was tiny, paradisal, with the advancing tide full of green and blue and purple lights. We sat on the sand, leaned against the bottom-most of the fallen granite blocks, and ate our lunch.
We were content. This was the loveliest thing we had found yet. Ruth recalled a phrase from the novel she had typed for Miss Gregoria Gunson. “And you will find here and there a paradise ten yards wide, a little space of warmth and colour set like a jewel in the hard iron of that coast.” Farfetched, I thought, but true enough.
It was while we were sitting there, calculating how long that bit of sun could last, that Ruth said, “We wanted a lonely place, and we
’ve found it, my love. Has it struck you that we haven’t seen a human being since we got off the bus?”
It hadn’t, and it didn’t seem to me a matter of concern. I stretched my arms lazily towards the sun. “Who wants to see human beings?” I demanded. “I had enough human beings at the Magnifico to last me a very long time.”
“So long as we find some human beings to make us a bit of supper tonight . . .”
“Never fear,” I said. “We’ll do that. There! Going . . . Going . . . Gone.”
The sun went in. We packed up, climbed to the cliff top, and started off again.
At three o’clock the light began to go out of the day. This was Christmas Eve, remember. We were among the shortest days of the year. It was now that a little uneasiness began to take hold of me. Still, I noticed, we had seen no man or woman, and, though I kept a sharp lookout on the country inland, we saw no house, not a barn, not a shed.
We did not see the sun again that day, but we witnessed his dying magnificence. Huge spears of light fanned down out of the sky and struck in glittering points upon the water far off. Then the clouds turned into a crumble and smother of dusky red, as though a city were burning beyond the edge of the world, and when all this began to fade to grey ashes I knew that I was very uneasy indeed.
Ruth said: “I think we ought to leave this cliff path. We ought to strike inland and find a road – any road.”
I thought so, too, but inland now was nothing but moor. Goodness knows, I thought, where we shall land if we embark on that.
“Let us keep on,” I said, “for a little while. We may find a path branching off. Then we’ll know we’re getting somewhere.”
We walked for another mile, and then Ruth stopped. We were on the brink of another of those deep fissures, like the one we had descended for lunch. Again the path made a swift right-hand curve. I knew what Ruth was thinking before she said it. “In half an hour or so the light will be quite gone. Suppose we had come on this in the dark?”
The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories Page 56