Familiar and Haunting

by Philippa Pearce

  They sorted and cleared for several days. Sure enough, under the mountain, there really had been a bed—narrow, but quite wide enough for Daisy (who was older and larger than Jim)—and there was a mattress on it, and pillows and blankets (only one moth-eaten enough for the dustbin). Grandmother made the bed up at once with sheets and pillowcases from her airing cupboard.

  “There!” she said. “My guest room!”

  Daisy and Jim loved it. The room seemed so small and private, with an old-fashioned wallpaper that must have been there before Grandmother moved in, all those years ago. The window looked over the garden and received the morning sun. (Of course, that meant that in the evening the room dimmed early.)

  All that remained was to clear the cardboard boxes still in Grandmother’s own bedroom. She said she could do this herself in the evening when the children had gone home. But Daisy thought her grandmother already looked tired. She made her sit down in a chair, and the two children began going through the boxes for her. “We’ll show you everything as we come to it,” Daisy said.

  Grandmother sighed.

  For the first half hour everything went into the wastebasket: the cardboard boxes themselves and their contents, which turned out to be certificates of this and that and old programs and views and other souvenirs. Then they came to boxes of photographs, some of them framed. These delayed the children.

  “Look, Daisy!” said Jim. “What a fat little girl!”

  “Here she is again,” said Daisy. “Just a bit older and even fatter.”

  “It’s me,” said their grandmother, and leaned forward from her chair to dart a hand between the two children and take the photographs and tear them in halves as rubbish.

  “Grandmother!” they protested, but it was too late.

  They found a framed wedding group of long ago with gentlemen in high-buttoning jackets and ladies wearing long dresses and hats toppling with feathers and flowers and fruit and bows.

  “Was this your wedding, Grandmother?”

  Grandmother said, “I’m not as old as that. I wasn’t thought of then. That was the wedding of my mother and father.”

  The children peered. “So that’s our great-grandfather and our great-grandmother. …”

  “And a couple of your great-great-aunts as bridesmaids,” said their grandmother. She snorted. “I preferred not to go in for bridesmaids.” She found them a photograph of her own wedding, with everybody still looking very strange and old-fashioned, but clearly their grandmother did not think so.

  The children thought that the quaint wedding group of their great-grandparents would suit the little guest room. With their grandmother’s agreement, they hung it there. Most of the other photographs went into the wastebasket.

  The last of the cardboard boxes was a squarish one, from which Daisy now drew out a barrel-shaped container. The staves of the barrel and the bands encircling them, and the lid, were all of the same tarnished metal.

  Grandmother said, “That’s a biscuit barrel.”

  “Is it real silver?” asked Daisy.

  “Yes,” said Grandmother.

  “How grand!” said Jim.

  “Yes,” said Grandmother. “Very valuable.”

  Daisy set the biscuit barrel respectfully on the floor, where they could all admire it.

  “It was in our house when I was a child,” said Grandmother. “I never liked it.”

  “There’s a curly H on it,” said Jim.

  “For Hill,” said Grandmother. “That was our surname. But I hated that biscuit barrel. I’ve always meant to get rid of it.”

  “Please, Grandmother!” cried Daisy. “You could stand it on the sideboard downstairs. It would look so nice. I’ll polish up the silver.” Their grandmother still stared unforgivingly at the barrel. “Think, Grandmother, you could keep biscuits in it for when we come to stay. Our favorite biscuits. I like custard creams best.”

  “I like pink sugar wafers,” said Jim.

  “Promise you’ll keep it, Grandmother, to keep our biscuits in,” said Daisy.

  Grandmother stopped looking at the biscuit barrel and looked at her grandchildren instead. Suddenly she jumped up to hug them. “Oh, yes!” she said. “For after all, I’m lucky. Very, very lucky. I’ve a guest room and two grandchildren who want to come and stay with me!”

  The little guest room, so small and private, was ready for its first guest.

  The first guest was Jim. Perhaps by rights it should have been Daisy, because she was the elder, but Jim was the one likely to be a nuisance during the family’s move. So the night before moving day and the first night afterward were spent by Jim in his grandmother’s guest room. Then his father drove over and fetched him back to their new home.

  In the new house, everyone was tired with the work of getting straight and might have been short-tempered with Jim’s little-boy bounciness. But Jim was quieter than usual. They asked whether he had had a good time with his grandmother. Yes, he had gone shopping with her, and she had bought him a multicolored pen, and he had had sparklers in the garden after dark, and peaches for both his suppers, and Grandmother had had pink sugar wafer biscuits for him—his favorite.

  “You’re lucky to have a grandmother like that,” said his mother.

  “Reminds me of my own granny,” said his father, “your grandmother’s mother. She was a good sort, too.”

  That night Daisy and Jim had to share a bedroom, because Daisy’s room wasn’t ready yet. Jim went to bed and asked his mother to leave the landing light on and the door ajar. “I thought you’d given that up,” she said. “You’re a big boy now.” But she let him have his way.

  Later, when Daisy came up, he was still awake.

  Daisy said, “I’ll be in my own room tomorrow night.”

  “I don’t mind sharing.”

  Daisy got into bed.

  “Daisy…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to sleep here alone tomorrow night.”

  “But—but, Jim, you always sleep alone!” There was no reply from the other bed. “Jim, you’re just being silly!”

  Still no reply, and yet a little noise. Daisy listened carefully. Jim was crying.

  She got out of bed and went to him. “What is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It must be something.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s nothing.”

  Daisy knew Jim. He could be very obstinate. Perhaps he would never tell her about whatever it was.

  “You’d feel better if you told me, Jim.”

  “No, I shouldn’t.”

  He was crying so much that she put her arms round him. It struck her that he was shivering.

  “Are you cold, Jim?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you shivering? You’re not afraid of something?”

  In answer, Jim gave a kind of gasp. “Let me alone.”

  Daisy was extremely irritated—and curious, too. “Go on—say something. I shan’t let you alone till you say something.”

  Still, he did not speak, and Daisy amended, “If you say something, I won’t argue; I’ll go back to bed and let you alone. But you must say something—something that is something.”

  Jim collected himself, said carefully, “I don’t want to stay the night in Grandmother’s house again—ever.” He turned over in bed with his back to Daisy.

  Daisy stared at him, opened her mouth, remembered her promise, shut it, went back to bed, and lay there to think. She tried to think what might have happened during Jim’s visit to make him feel as he did. It occurred to her that she might find out when her turn for a visit came. …

  How odd of Jim. There could be nothing to be afraid of at night in the house of the coziest, rosiest, plumpest of grandmothers.

  The moment she fell asleep, she was standing on her grandmother’s front doorstep, her suitcase in her hand. She had already knocked. The door opened just as usual; there stood her grandmother, just as usual. But no, not as usual. Her grandmother peered at
Daisy as if at a stranger. “Yes?” she said. “I’m Daisy Robinson,” said Daisy. “I’m your granddaughter. I’ve come to stay the night.” Without a word, her grandmother stood aside to let her enter. At once Daisy began to mount the stairs that led to that early-shadowed little guest room. She already saw the door ajar, waiting for her. Behind her, downstairs, she could hear her grandmother securing the front door for the night: the lock, the bolts, the chain. She shut the two of them in together for the night. Daisy could hear her grandmother’s little laugh; she was chuckling to herself.

  The rest of the dream—if there were any—had vanished by the time Daisy woke in the morning. All she knew of it was that she was glad she could not remember it.

  Daisy told no one about Jim, chiefly because there was so little to tell. He seemed all right again, anyway. By that evening the bedrooms had been sorted out, so that Jim had his to himself. Without protest, he went to sleep alone. It’s true that he screamed in the night, so that his mother had to go to him, but all children have nightmares sometimes. By the next night he had resumed his usual sound sleeping.

  So Jim had been making a strange fuss about nothing, Daisy thought, or perhaps he’d got used to the idea of whatever there might have been, or—not the most comfortable idea for Daisy—he had been able to shut it from his mind because he was now a safe distance from Grandmother’s little guest room.

  Their grandmother came to stay. She was her usual cheerful self, and everyone enjoyed the visit; Jim seemed to enjoy her company as much as usual. At the end of her visit, Grandmother said, “Well, which of you two is coming to sleep in my guest room next?”

  Jim said, “It’s Daisy’s turn.”

  “That’s very fair of you, Jim,” their mother said approvingly. Daisy looked at Jim, but Jim stubbornly looked past her. She knew that he would not have agreed to go under any circumstances.

  Only a few weeks later Daisy went.

  With her suitcase, she stood on her grandmother’s doorstep. Twice she raised a hand to the knocker and twice let it fall. The third time she really knocked. She heard the patter of her grandmother’s feet approaching. The door opened, and there was Grandmother, and all the uneasy feelings that Jim had given her vanished away. Her grandmother was laughing for joy at her coming, and the house seemed to welcome her. Even from the doorway Daisy could see into the sitting room, where the electric light had not yet been switched on: an open fire burned brightly, and by the fireplace stood a tea table with the china on it shining in the firelight, and beyond that glowed the polish of the sideboard with the objects on it all giving as much glow or glitter as they could.

  They had tea with boiled eggs and salad, as time was getting on and this had to be tea and supper together.

  “Anything more you fancy, Daisy, dear?”

  Daisy looked over to the sideboard, to the biscuit barrel. “Pink sugar wafers?” she said.

  “What an idea!” said her grandmother. “They’re not your favorite biscuits!”

  Daisy went over to the biscuit barrel, put her hand in.

  “Go on, dear, take whatever you find, as many as you want. I like you to do that.”

  Daisy drew out a custard-cream biscuit. “Grandmother, you’re wonderful! You never forget anything.”

  Grandmother sighed. “Sometimes I wish I were more forgetful.”

  Daisy laughed and munched.

  Later they went to bed. They stood side by side looking into the little guest room. With the curtains drawn and the bedside light glowing from inside a pink shade, the room looked as cozy and rosy as Grand mother herself. “I hope you sleep well, my dear,” said her grandmother, and talked about the number of blankets and the number of pillows and the possibility of noise from neighboring houses. Sometimes people had late parties.

  “Did the neighbors disturb Jim?” Daisy asked suddenly.

  “No,” said her grandmother. “At least—he’s a poor sleeper for such a young child, isn’t he? He slept badly here.”

  Daisy glanced sideways to see her grandmother’s expression when she had said this. She found her grandmother stealing a sideways glance at her. They both looked away at once, pretending nothing had happened.

  “Remember,” said Grandmother, “if you want anything, I’m just across the landing.” She kissed Daisy good night.

  Daisy decided not to think about that sideways glance tonight. She went to bed, slipped easily downhill into sleep, and slept.

  Something woke her. She wasn’t sure that it had been a noise, but surely it must have been. She lay very still, her eyes open, her ears listening. Before going to bed, she had drawn the curtains back, so that she would wake to the morning sun; now it was night, without moon or stars, and all the lights of the surrounding houses had been extinguished.

  She waited to hear a repetition of noise in the house, but there was none. She knew what she was expecting to hear: the creak of a stair tread. There was nothing, but she became sure, all the same, that someone was creeping downstairs.

  It could be—it must be—her grandmother going downstairs for something. She would go quietly, for fear of waking Daisy. But would she manage to go so very, very quietly?

  Whoever it was would have reached the foot of the stairs by now. Still no noise.

  It must be her grandmother, and yet Daisy felt that it wasn’t her grandmother. And yet again she felt it was her grandmother.

  She must know. She called, “Grandmother!” pitching her voice rather high to reach the bottom of the stairs. The sound she made came out screamlike.

  Almost at once she heard her grandmother’s bedroom door open and the quick, soft sound of her feet bringing her across to the guest room.

  “Here I am, dear!”

  “I thought I heard—I thought you were going downstairs, Grandmother.”

  Grandmother seemed—well, agitated. “Oh, did you? Sometimes I need a drink of water in the night, and sometimes I do go downstairs for it.”

  “But it wasn’t you. You came from your bedroom just now, not back up the stairs.”

  “What sharp ears you have, dear!”

  “I didn’t exactly hear anyone going downstairs, anyway,” Daisy said slowly.

  “So it was all a mistake. That’s all right then, isn’t it?”

  Not a mistake, more of a muddle, Daisy thought. But she let herself be kissed good night again, and her light was switched off. Her grandmother went back to bed. There was quiet in the house: not only no unusual sound, but no feel of anything unusual. Daisy slept until morning sunshine.

  The daytime was made as delightful for Daisy as her grandmother had made it for Jim. But evening came, and night, and this night was far worse than the previous one.

  Daisy woke and lay awake, knowing that someone was creeping downstairs again. But it’s my imagination, she told herself; how can I know, when I hear nothing?

  Whoever it was reached the bottom of the stairs and crossed the hall to the sitting room door. Had Grandmother left that door shut or open when she went to bed? It did not matter. Whoever it was had entered the sitting room and was moving across to the sideboard.

  What was happening down there in the dark and the silence?

  Suddenly there was no more silence. From downstairs there was a shrill scream that turned into a crying and sobbing, both terrified and terrifying.

  Hardly knowing what she was doing, Daisy was out of bed, through her bedroom door, across the landing to her grandmother’s room. The door was shut; she had to pause an instant to open it, and in that instant she realized that the crying from downstairs had stopped.

  She was inside her grandmother’s bedroom. The bedside light was on, and Grandmother, flustered, had just sat up in bed. Daisy said, “That crying!”

  “It was me,” said her grandmother.

  “Oh, no, no, no, no!” Daisy contradicted her grandmother with fury. She glared at her in fury and terror; the nicest grandmother in the world was concealing something, lying. What kind of grandmother was she then
: sly; perhaps treacherous? Wicked?

  At the look on Daisy’s face, Grandmother shrank back among the pillows. She hid her face in her hands. Between the fingers Daisy saw tears beginning to roll down over the dry old skin. Grandmother was crying, with gasping sobs, and her crying was not all that different, but much quieter, from the crying Daisy had heard downstairs.

  In the middle of her crying, Grandmother managed to say, “Oh, Daisy!” and stretched out her hands toward her, begging her.

  Daisy looked searchingly at her grandmother, and her grandmother met her gaze. Daisy took the outstretched hands and stroked them. She calmed herself even while she calmed her grandmother. “I’ll make us a pot of tea,” she said. “I’ll bring it up here.”

  “No,” said her grandmother. “I’ll come down. We’ll have it downstairs, and I’ll tell you—I’ll tell you—” She began to cry again.

  Daisy was no longer afraid. She went downstairs into the kitchen to boil a kettle. As she went, she turned the sitting room light on and switched on an electric heater. Everything was exactly as usual. The door had been shut.

  From downstairs she heard her grandmother getting up and then coming out of her bedroom. She did not come directly downstairs. Daisy heard her cross the landing into the guest room, spend a few moments there, then come down.

  Daisy carried the tea on a tray into the sitting room; she took the biscuit barrel off the sideboard and put it on the tray, in case Grand mother wanted something to eat with her tea. Grandmother was already waiting for her. She had brought downstairs with her the framed wedding photograph from Daisy’s bedroom and set it where they could both see it. Daisy asked no question.

  They sat together and sipped their tea. Daisy also nibbled a biscuit; her grandmother had shaken her head and shuddered when Daisy offered her the biscuit barrel.

  “Now I’ll tell you,” said Grandmother. She paused, while she steadied herself, visibly. “I brought the wedding photo down so that I could show you.”