Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Frank Baker

  He waited, near the door. Then suddenly there was a snap in his mind. Reaching down, he plucked up from their stems a cluster of daffodils growing wild in the clefts of rock. The flowers were hateful to him. They represented life, new life, spring, all springs, and told him that all springs lead to autumn; and winter.

  Leila stopped playing. The door had been flung open. Julian stood there, his face white, his hands clutched round the flower stems.

  ‘Here’s a present for you!’ The flowers came in a scatter of blurred sunshine across the room, and some fell on the keyboard. His voice rang out, wild and desperate. ‘That’s all I’ve got for you, Leila. Flowers. Just flowers. And that’s all there’ll ever be. Flowers. . . .’

  She sat very still, her head bowed over the keyboard. She saw the long green stalks, the milky-white moisture, the crushed flowers, on the keys. There was a silence. Julian looked at her as she still sat there, her silky dark brown hair drooping down over the keys. Then, very slowly, her fingers moved. With no supporting harmony, the melody emerged. It came very quietly; yet, to Julian, it was almost like a defiant shout into the silence.

  Then she stopped and slowly turned her eyes towards him. The late sun sent a glow over his head. She smiled.

  ‘You look wonderful,’ she said. ‘There, in the sun. I shall call you Sunshine.’

  ‘What is that tune?’ he asked. His voice was thick, choked with self-anger.

  ‘What is that tune, dear?’

  In the London suburb, Lilian’s husband, returning from a bad day in the city when he had been told that his firm was closing down in a week’s time, stood in the doorway of the brown brick house. He could not bear to bring her bad news.

  ‘Oh that!’ Lilian sniffed in her scornful manner. ‘It’s a new song – “Where my caravan has rested”.’

  ‘The piano sounds lovely.’ He put his neat bowler hat on the hatstand and laid his paper and umbrella on the hall chair. He was tired. But it had been good to hear his young wife singing and playing the piano he had given her.

  ‘It’s a good piano,’ said Lilian. ‘I wish I could play it better. But thank you, dear. Thank you for it.’

  She sat on the chair in the hallway, looking lost and yet grand. He was touched to see her sitting thus, so defenceless. He wondered when he would be able to tell her his bad news. Not yet, he thought; not yet.

  ‘Had a good day?’ she asked. She knew he had not.

  ‘Up and down,’ he said. He hummed a little tune. ‘You know how it is. But the weather – never been lovelier, has it? Everybody was saying in the City – we’ve never had a spring like it.’

  ‘There’s a letter from Philip,’ she said. ‘He’s coming on well with his music.’

  And as she spoke and he looked at her, so mysteriously sitting there, looking lost and faraway in their suburban home they would soon have to leave for a cheaper one, she felt as though she had glided away into some other country.

  ‘What is that tune? You were playing it in the night.’

  ‘Sunshine, darling. I don’t know. But it’s nice, isn’t it? It kinda grew from my funny little mind.’

  ‘No,’ said Julian. ‘It didn’t grow from you. From the piano.’

  Going to the keyboard, he carefully picked up the half crushed flowers, moulded them all in the palms of his hands, then dropped the moist remains before her.

  ‘You’re together,’ he said. ‘You’re really together. I’m not. I wish I were.’

  Late that night Julian was polishing the wood of the piano. ‘This thing has had a long life behind it,’ he said. ‘And I reckon it’s got plenty of life before it.’

  As he spoke, in a beam of moonlight Lilian floated away from the chalet, and merged into the dark and streaming richness of the spring life in the valley. Leila felt the same tremor ripple over her body.

  ‘That moonlight!’ she cried, ‘It’s alive. It’s really alive!’

  Going to the piano, she tried to find the melody that had dissolved their problems. But she had lost it.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It’s the kind of thing you remember when you get quite old.’

  But the piano still contained the song.

  IX

  Coombe Morwen

  It’s almost dark. It has taken me over an hour to copy most of what Morgan Foster wrote, here at Coombe Morwen. I have to admit to myself (there’s nobody else here to admit to) that I wish I was back in my dreary but warm bedsitter in Exeter and had never come out here at all today. Certainly I would not have stayed to copy this extraordinary outpouring had I not realised I’d missed the three-thirty bus and was left with a three hour wait before me. I wish now I’d shoved the thing back to the keeper and gone for a walk. And now it’s raining. I find it hard to remember clearly the early part of this afternoon, I’ve been so engrossed in Foster’s story.

  Here I am at St Breward’s. The Folk Museum has become a kind of a haunt of mine for the last few months, ever since my stay in Exeter. I wanted to make a last visit before I leave Devon next week. More than the exhibits in the old manor it was the cottages and farmhouses reconstructed in the grounds which fascinated me – and this one more than the others. Coombe Morwen, a seventeenth-century farmhouse. More ‘atmosphere’, I thought – though maybe this was really due to the keeper who fastened on to me at once, God knows why. I never liked him, with his slow way of speaking, his heavy awkward body, ingratiating manner. And the limp. Something wrong with his right leg which makes him drag it about as though it weren’t part of him. He’s been here for years, I’m told, and I can’t imagine him anywhere else. Certainly Foster got him all right.

  Today, I made straight for the house. It lies near a spinney, far from the manor. I had a bit of a problem, I wanted a quiet place to chew it over, and this seemed to be it. But the keeper wasn’t going to have this. The moment I appeared on the scene he must have said, ‘Here he comes; I’ve got him.’ (God! How like poor Foster that sounds!) Although I wandered from room to room to try to escape, this only served to emphasise my interest in the house and its time-worn furniture. It was in the small cold kitchen – a very dark room – where he finally nailed me.

  I was looking at an exhibit new here since my last visit. Amongst the butter-mixers, flour bins, copper saucepans, other friendly domestic chattels, this had a grating incongruity which cast a shadow over the slumbering peace of the old place.

  ‘Ah. That’s the mantrap, sir.’

  He had limped up behind me. I did not turn round, only murmured I was aware of it. A notice attached to the black chains of the grisly iron contraption told me what it was.

  ‘Punishing things, sir,’

  I agreed it was punishing, and turned as though to go back to the comparative warmth of the living-room, where a wood fire burned. But he went on.

  ‘It’s part of the house, you might say, though it was found in the old barn. They decided to bring it here. Of course, it wouldn’t have been kept in the kitchen, sir; not the sort of thing they’d want the children to see, if there were any children. No. Out in the woods you’d have stepped on it, if you’d been a poacher. And I don’t suppose you’d forget that step for a long time.’

  I said it was odd that the authorities should bring such a diabolical device to the peace of Coombe Morwen.

  ‘Odd, sir? Maybe. I always think poor Foster’s case had something to do with that.’

  I asked who ‘poor Foster’ was.

  ‘Gone now, sir; so I’m at liberty to talk about him. Morgan Foster, a journalist chap, worked on the Exeter Guardian, about thirty-five he was when he first got into the way of coming here. I took to him at once, I did. Like yourself, sir, I could see this old place meant something more to him that it meant to most. And he kept it all to himself, too; never told a soul of his visits here. Even his sister, Adelaide
– she never knew. I got to know Miss Foster, you see, sir, after he’d been put away; I felt sorry for her, like. I don’t know what it is, but I’m sympathetic to other people’s troubles. I reckon I convinced him I really was his friend those times I went to see him afterwards, whenever I could manage it. That must have been why he gave me what he’d written here.’

  I remembered nothing of Foster, not being a native of Exeter. But making a mental note that he had been ‘put away’ I asked the keeper what it was he had written here.

  It might have been the question he was asking for.

  ‘I’ll show you, sir. What you’ll make of it, I don’t know. But you mustn’t take no notice of what he says about me. Confused, that’s what he was. No wonder too, with what he had on his mind, or what was left of it.’

  We went back to the living-room. From a little oak cabinet he took a grubby students’ exercise book. Then he pointed to a gatebacked chair by the heavy oak table, under the low four-paned window.

  ‘You read that, sir. Read it where he wrote it.’

  It must have been then that a man’s voice called from the garden, startling in the quietness.

  ‘Tom, they dam’ sheep are all over your garden.’

  The keeper called back. ‘Coming, Joe.’ And he went to the door.

  ‘I’ll leave you to peruse that, sir. I know it’s safe with you.’

  I felt flattered. Sitting at the table I lit a cigarette and opened the notebook. The earlier pages are clearly and carefully written. Once I had started I had to read on. And now I shall read again what Foster wrote and what I have just copied, in the place where he wrote it.

  ‘I must describe the house. It is an L-shaped farmhouse with a dark pink distemper wash and a weight of heavy thatch on the roof. It once stood in a remoter countryside of north Devon, and was taken down, beam by numbered beam, stone by numbered stone, and rebuilt as one of the specimen houses in the estate of St Breward. The greatest care has gone into the reconstruction of Coombe Morwen, as far as possible all the original material being used. Each room has the furniture of its period and even came with the house, so that when you step over the threshold you take a long step back – into the past. I was drawn to it from the first time I saw it and was shown over it by the keeper, who seemed to regard it as his own place. I often came on summer days when many other visitors trailed in and out; and I began to want to be alone here.

  ‘The day I am writing about, that day in November, I was alone, and had a great need to be. I had guessed that here at Coombe Morwen, with only the keeper for company, I could come to terms with myself. I was deeply in trouble; but of that I am not going to write. I had returned to the house to take stock of myself, thinking I could do it more easily here.

  ‘As I approached the solitude of the house and saw the woodsmoke from its chimney ascending towards the cold bloom of the winter sky, my troubles seemed to recede with every footstep. I remember I hurried, as though time and the falling sun would cheat me of my objective – whatever that was.

  ‘But I must make it clear. I am writing this in Coombe Morwen itself, three weeks after the visit I intend to describe; and I must make it clear also that I do not think I am ever likely to be able to put this place behind me. Nobody will mind my being here, that is certain; even the summer visitors will hardly notice me. By then I shall be a part of the place, a fixture, numbered like stones and beams. The keeper seems to know this; he glances at me now, then looks away, pretending I do not exist. I must accept this, I know I must accept it. But I would like. . . . There are moments when I want to get away and back again – or should I say ‘forward’ again? – to the world of movement which still drones on, in the City. But I must stay, stay here; this is my world. As I sit writing on the polished oak table, dark in a room sweet and heavy with the scent of straw, beeswax and woodsmoke, I feel myself going back to that first winter visit, when the others came into my life, or I into theirs – I don’t, even now, know which way round it should be. The keeper knows. But not for anything would I ask him. I must be careful what I say to him. He is quite near me now. Let him wait. He is fulfilled, like a monk with his silence. He has me.’

  (Here, Foster leaves a blank of half a page. Then:)

  ‘Unlike today, three weeks ago was clear, and glittering with frost. But now a grey mist swarms up from the river bed, the air is humid and dank, nothing has solidity. As I write, sitting under the small window to catch the last of the afternoon’s meagre light, I try to catch back the feel, the growing pressure of the other visit. Sometimes I stop and look around me, searching for a word; and I know that the keeper is watching me. If I were to go through the cold little kitchen to the back door, he would be there; and if I were to go to the front door, he would be there.

  ‘I remember his first words, last time. “So you’ve come back to us, sir.”

  ‘It was not a question; it was a statement. “Yes,” I agreed, “I’ve come back. I wanted to get the feel of the place, with nobody else here – alone, you understand?”

  ‘Perhaps my voice was strained, for the trouble I have mentioned was heavy on my mind.

  ‘He repeated my words. “The feel of the place? Ah. You’ll get that all right, sir.”

  ‘I wanted to lose him. So I said, “Well. . . . now I’ve got it to myself, at least I assume so. Nobody else here, is there?”

  ‘ “I’ve been here a long time, sir; and I wouldn’t rightly say you ever have Coombe Morwen to yourself.”

  ‘Then he moved away to the room at the back, adjoining the kitchen, leaving me to what little heat came from the fire of ash logs which smouldered on the stone hearth, where sullen smoke was drawn up the deep well of the gaping chimney. And after a little while I heard, as I expect to hear again, the whispering.

  ‘First, the woman. I remember, just before, the hissing of a crumbling log and a last filter of weak sun drifting down into the dusty silence. I remember the western sun and the comforting log because neither are here now. It is all mist outside, and the fire sluggish, with a wounded red ruin at its heart.

  ‘It is difficult to go on writing. For I am trying to remember the whispering and listen for it to come again. I must be very quiet. . . .

  ‘I stopped writing. For one half minute I stopped, timing it by my watch, the watch Adelaide gave me for my twenty-first birthday. I let thirty seconds chase themselves away. And now I ask myself – why am I writing this? Who am I writing it for? Is it because I want to communicate something of— No. Nothing of that must come into it. I came to Coombe Morwen today only to check up, only to note a few details, only – yes, that’s all.

  ‘No good pretending. Not true. I came, because I had to come, because nothing could have stopped me. In the Guardian office where I worked, there is an empty desk. I am always aware of that vacant place; I hear people asking – what has happened to Morgan Foster? They may never know the truth, yet I want them to know I am here, and why I had to come here.

  ‘I am calmer, having written that. And now I can put down, quite objectively, what I heard whispered.

  ‘ “He has come then?” Those were the four words. At first they hardly penetrated my mind.

  ‘A man’s voice answered the woman. “Yes. He has come.”

  ‘It was then that I thought – the keeper has lied to me. There are others in the house. And then I remembered – the keeper had never said there was nobody else. His phrase had been, “I wouldn’t rightly say you ever have Coombe Morwen to yourself.”

  ‘I got up and moved very quietly to the door of the other room. It was half open, and in the gloom I could see the keeper, standing with his back to me, solid and still, his hands behind him playing with a length of picture cord. He was facing a blackened chimney corner, where an old spit hung unturning and no fire burned. I could see nothing of the woman. Yet it seemed that it was from a stool, below
the keeper, that her voice came.

  ‘ “What makes you so sure he is the right one?”

  ‘It was his answer which I can never forget – those words which drove me to action and gave me freedom, of a kind, from the burden I carried and carry no more; and words which drew me back here today to play out the rest of the scene.

  ‘ “Because he desires what I desire and is prepared to be damned for it. Because I said that not till this one came would I do what I have to do. And now he has come, and I am ready.”

  ‘ “What do you desire, brother?”

  ‘When she called him “brother” I knew of a certainty that I had been caught into action beyond any control. In my mind I had sought justification for what I wanted to do; and this was it – a double justification, for him, for me.

  ‘He spoke again. (And when I write ‘he’ I do not mean it was the keeper, although the keeper was standing there.)

  ‘ “You know what I desire. Coombe Morwen is yours, father left it all to you. You know well what I desire.”

  ‘Yes, I knew too – oh, so well!

  ‘He went on. “You have poisoned my life, sapped my manhood, driven your rot into my soul.”

  ‘She spoke again, bitter, pitiful. “I am sick. Who have I got but you?”

  ‘His voice rose, thick with passion. The whole house seemed to tremble with it.

  ‘ “Yes, you are sick. Sick of a disease you call love. But you could never love any man but me, the man from the same womb. I tried to get away from you. I left Coombe Morwen and went to sea. Then father died, and you were ill, so I came back to nurse you. And you had the house and the land; but you were never content, you must have me as well. You wanted to lock us both away from the world. You made me lover, not brother. You even desire children by me.’