Nightmare

by Lynn Brock

  Whalley went up to London and paid five guineas to a nerve specialist who told him that there was nothing whatever wrong, organically, but that rest and change were necessary. The book for the following spring had been begun and Whalley was unwilling to move until it was at all events well on towards completion. They remained on at Puttiford. One day, while he was writing in the hotel garden, he became aware of a point of sharp pain at the tip of his right thumb. Next day the tips of the fingers of both hands were numb. In a week the numbness had spread to his feet, which felt as if jagged sprigs were stretched along their soles, inside the skin. He had grown so used to partial disablement now that these new symptoms did not perturb him greatly. But he decided that it was time to look for some air more bracing than that of Surrey, and they set off, rather hurriedly, for the little inn on the Quantocks, at which they had engaged rooms by wire.

  Stealthily, yet with incredible swiftness, his body began to wither. At the end of a month he was unable to ascend a short flight of stairs without utter exhaustion. His ribs became compressed as if by an iron corset, and he crawled about, bent like a man of eighty. Chronic indigestion and nausea, accompanied usually by violent palpitation, assailed him. His sunburn faded to a yellow pallor. From his waist to his toes he was numb, yet always sensible of incessant jarring, aching discomforts. Despite a ravenous appetite, his flesh wasted until it seemed that his bones must burst through the tautly-strained skin. Sitting was an intolerable agony; he could lie in no position for longer than a few minutes at a time; when he stood upright the weight of his pelvis and his legs exhausted him. Elsa, in consternation, at last summoned two doctors from Bridgwater. They were obviously completely perplexed, advised absolute rest, and prescribed a nerve tonic. Whalley, however, went on with his book, Elsa typing from his dictation. He had lost all interest in everything—his own symptoms included—save the necessity of finishing the novel. Within a cloud of sick impotence, his brain still continued to perform one function with extraordinary accuracy and swiftness. Sometimes he dictated five thousand words in a day.

  One afternoon, while they were working, he collapsed like a punctured tyre. Elsa telephoned to Dunpool for an ambulance and carried him off to a nursing-home in Rockwood, where a blood-test revealed that he had pernicious anæmia. He had probably had it for a number of years back, they told her; his supply of red corpuscles was down below two million. Yes—he might die, but they hoped not. The new Minot-Murphy treatment had proved very successful in America, even in bad cases. Liver … and hydrochloric acid … he began to eat liver—eight ounces of it a day—two platefuls of grey, greasy, rank-smelling little lumps of offal which froze to the plate before a quarter of them had been forced, one by one, down his gulping throat. Each gorge was followed by the pungent horror of the hydrochloric acid and violent cramps in which he lay sweating, sometimes for an hour, unable to move a muscle. At the end of a week the mere sight of the loathed stuff made him retch. He chewed away grimly, however—there was no other salvation. After thirteen weeks of the nursing-home—at seven guineas a week—he was able to walk, very slowly, across his room and insisted upon leaving. Half an hour after arriving at the near-at-hand lodgings in which Elsa had been living, he asked for the typescript of the unfinished novel and for a while turned over its pages desultorily and with increasing speed.

  ‘My God,’ he said listlessly, ‘what tripe. Well, I suppose it’s got to be finished.’

  Three chapters, only, remained to write. Less than ten thousand words more would secure four or five hundred pounds, defray the expenses of the nursing-home and of the long breathing-space which, he had been warned, would be absolutely essential. Twenty times a day he settled himself on the sofa with a writing-block. But words had ceased to be significances that flowed from the point of his pen in formed phrases and sentences. They had become little, detached, unmeaning weights which had to be lifted on to the paper one by one—odd, useless pieces of some immense, futile old puzzle the rest of which had been lost. He became doubtful about their spelling—perplexed by their sound and meaning. ‘When,’ for instance. W-h-e-n. An extraordinary-looking word, when one really looked at it. An extraordinary sound, when one really listened to it. ‘When.’ What did one mean when one said ‘when?’ He could never arrange the little weights in sentences. When he had lifted eight or nine of them on to the paper he always saw that it would take at least thirty or forty more of them to bring the sentence to an end—crossed out what he had written, and cast about for another beginning. But a new little weight at the beginning completely obliterated the vague thought with which he had started and replaced it with another equally vague. Another sentence entangled itself hopelessly. An immense, yawning fatigue overpowered him. He dropped the block to the floor, picked it up again, began again to lift the little weights one by one. He could see them as he lifted them—little visible blocks of letters, very heavy for their size.

  He chewed away at his liver doggedly—six ounces a day now. Elsa cooked it herself, on an oil-stove in their sitting-room and the sickly smell hung about the room all day. He made steady progress, however, though he knew now that for the rest of his life he could hope for no more than a thirty-per cent bodily efficiency. The damage to nerves and muscles was irreparable, they told him. His hands and legs and feet and spine would remain numb and partially crippled, and, of course, he would have to eat liver until he died. But the summer had come. Elsa drove him all over the West Country; it was good to be alive. Gradually a placid, cheerful calmness replaced the dejected anxiety of his early days of convalescence. In the autumn he would rattle off those last few chapters; his publishers had written sympathetically. They still had over two thousand pounds. Once more for a little while they were perfectly happy. Except, perhaps, about Mr Loxton.

  Mr Loxton had called at the nursing-home once or twice to make enquiries. His sympathy with Elsa in her trouble had, however, been almost at once clouded over by a chilly offence, whose cause, she had divined, had been resentment of the fact that a niece of his should live in lodgings in Rockwood. For a long time the Whalleys had heard and seen nothing of him. Later he had expressed a wish that they should dine at his house on Sundays—a command with which prudence had advised compliance. But, while ostentatiously avoiding any slightest reference to their affairs, past, present or future, he had remained solemnly disapproving. Occasionally, in place of his usual curt, ‘Whalley,’ he elected to employ a ‘Mr Whalley’ of icy remoteness. When he looked directly at him—he rarely did so—he pursed his lips and looked at him exactly as if he were a doubtful egg. His conversation during dinner was addressed almost exclusively to Mrs Canynge and her husband who, exhaling wealth and success, usually attended those weekly functions. Whalley and Elsa, with their two thousand pounds and their dog-eared typescript, sat listening to easy, intimate talk of a South American contract for a hundred thousand—a deer-forest for which Canynge and a friend had paid twenty thousand—a new Rolls that had cost £2500—extensions of premises and plant at the firm’s Cardiff branch. ‘It will run us in, I reckon, just a quarter of a million,’ Canynge estimated, while he selected a cigar from the box which Mr Loxton always offered him first. Mrs Canynge, always in the very latest of frocks and hats, had a trick of regarding her sister’s modest toilettes through half-closed eyes. The Canynge’s chauffeur watched the departure of the shabby little old two-seater with a contemptuous leer. It took a lot of starting now. Sunday was rather a trial.

  In July they decided, somewhat hastily, to get a dog, and paid four guineas for a very handsome, well-bred cocker pup, then aged ten months. Because of his blackness, his erect top-knot and his trick of gazing ferociously at imaginary enemies, they called him Bogey-Bogey. He was an affectionate, immaculately clean little creature, and in twenty-four hours became the engrossing interest of their lives. After three days, however, he discovered that he disliked aprons and, whenever the maid entered, rushed at her, barking furiously. At the end of a week their landlady asked them to find ro
oms elsewhere.

  This was a serious upset. Their lodgings had been comfortable; the cooking had been good; Whalley’s books had arrived from Ireland in thirteen large packing-cases and been arranged in book-cases. They would have to be repacked—and unpacked again. It was difficult to find good rooms where a dog was permissible, and, within a few days of their installation in fresh quarters, their new landlady gave them notice. She couldn’t have cooking done in her best sitting-room, and she couldn’t have a dog with paws the size of a young elephant’s trespassing all over her house. The books were repacked—unpacked in another sitting-room. Bogey-Bogey upset Elsa’s pan of boiling lard during her absence from the room. He escaped scatheless, but Whalley paid fifteen pounds for a new carpet, and had to pack his books again. Another sitting-room—another unpacking. Their fourth Rockwood landlady, they discovered too late, kept two dogs and Bogey-Bogey hated other dogs even more than he hated aprons. All day long he barked and growled at his enemies in the basement. A fifth flitting seemed inevitable. Whalley began to talk of looking for a small flat.

  Autumn came and went. One morning at the end of October a bulky packet arrived from the agent. It contained all the typescript copies of the nine plays, for none of which, it was regretted, an opening seemed now probable. Although Whalley had long abandoned all hope of them, this formal final damnation of the plays dejected him a good deal. He became silent and restless—got out the battered typescript of the unfinished novel and brooded over it—wrote some pages of a new chapter and tore them up.

  ‘You know, old thing,’ he said one night in the darkness, just as Elsa was falling asleep, ‘these books that I’ve been writing have been the most fearful rot. They’re all about nothing—just odd people and things we’ve come across faked up into a weak, would-be-funny little story. I can’t go on writing that sort of stuff. I’m sick of it. I’ve got to make a fresh start—get in touch with actual life—write about people who live and suffer—write books with some meaning and purpose in them … something to say …’

  ‘Well, but, dear,’ urged the practical Elsa, ‘all the stories are silly old stories. They’re all faked—all as old as the hills. Life itself is a silly, faked-up old story. What does it matter so long as you give pleasure for a little while to a few other people? The great thing for us is that they bring us in enough money to live on, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. I can’t go on with it. I know now that the reason I can’t write is that I know the stuff I’ve been writing is rot—weak, silly, dishonest piffle. Death … I can’t go on with it.’

  For three or four weeks he wandered about the east end of Dunpool, exploring its grim, dingy squalor, getting into talk with dock-labourers and factory-hands, bribing foremen to smuggle him into deafening workshops, straying through festering courts and alleys and still more heartrending warrens of little houses, all the same, where thousands of people, all the same, lived the same, drab, ugly, hopeless lives. He was shown over a gigantic workhouse reeking with disinfectant—waylaid some of the inmates of its casual ward—caught glimpses of a degradation beyond the belief of sanity. After a fortnight of these investigations the world became a hive of mean, dirty streets, half-smothered in the smoke and stench of huge, threatening factories, peopled by burly, sullen-eyed, foul-tongued men, slatternly, shrill-voiced women, swarms of screaming children—all clothed in the same shapeless, sour-smelling shabbiness. Beauty, grace—all those useless illusions of the spirit—all those artificial decencies … of what account were they? This was life—its business. Dismay fell upon him. For the first time he realised how slight a barrier stood between him and Elsa—and a destitution of appalling horrors. Two thousand pounds—a sick brain—a body that could not earn even the wages of a common navvy. He turned his back upon the gloomy, menacing landscape of realism. There was nothing for him in that wilderness of grime and noise and stench and bitter, merciless struggle. Nothing at all—except amazement that human beings endured living in it. To Elsa’s great relief, he abandoned his slumming.

  ‘After all,’ he said, ‘it is something to amuse a few other people.’

  And he got out the unfinished typescript once more, asked Elsa to retype the tattered first pages, and made several attempts to begin a new chapter. Elsa caught a bad cold, however, just before Christmas and Bogey-Bogey for some weeks fell to Whalley’s sole charge. It was always time to take Bogey-Bogey out—to prepare Bogey-Bogey’s dinner (it was cooked in the sitting-room) or supper—to comb him and brush him—to make up his bed. December’s ending was very wet. After every outing (he had five a day, regularly, beginning at 7.30 a.m. and ending at 10.30 p.m.) Bogey-Bogey’s paws had to be washed and his coat dried with a towel. The towel had to be dried. The typescript of the novel was thrown one day, somewhat irritably, into the sideboard and remained there until, in February, the Whalleys again changed their lodgings.

  Once more Bogey-Bogey had done the wrong thing—he had found in the hall a large meat-pie belonging to one of the other lodgers and, in a few miraculous seconds, had eaten all of it save one very small piece of gristle. Another sitting-room—another unpacking of the books. Meeting Mr Knayle one afternoon at a friend’s house, Elsa happened to mention to him that her husband and she were looking out for a small flat—preferably, for the sake of Bogey-Bogey’s exercisings, close to the Downs. Mr Knayle happened to know of quite a nice little flat above his own, which, he believed, would become vacant at the end of March. He undertook to make more exact enquiry.

  On the last day of March, 1929, the Whalleys moved once more. By that time their new quarters had been furnished and looked very gay and fresh and homelike, though some repapering and repainting would be necessary presently. This the landlord had promised to do in the following spring. Mr Knayle came up the steep outside staircase and had tea with them one day shortly after their arrival. For some reason on the occasion of this visit he substituted ‘Mrs Whalley’ for ‘Elsa’ and adhered to this form of address ever afterwards.

  Their rent was £100 a year, and their lease was for three years. It would be necessary to get in a woman for some hours each day, at an estimated £1 a week. Their weekly housekeeping account could not be expected to amount to less than £3 a week. They had spent nearly £200 of their capital upon furniture and equipment and they had committed themselves, for three years, to an annual expenditure of over £300, which did not cover clothes, amusements, or possible doctor’s bills. There would be the garaging of the little old car—its licence—running costs—repairs. And their income at the moment was Elsa’s £50—and save for some small driblets of royalties from past books—nothing at all.

  But Whalley had decided that they must gamble—must have a place of their own—space, quiet—their own things around them. He had been all eagerness. He had bought a roll-top desk. It had always been such an infernal nuisance, in lodgings, having to put away one’s papers and things. You just slammed down the cover of a roll-top desk, leaving everything as it was—out of sight. Then, when you wanted to go on again, there was everything just as you had left it.

  For a little while, at the last moment, he had hesitated over the prospect of spending three more years in Rockwood. Rockwood was dull—dowdy—suburban—a long way from London. Two important considerations, however, had prevailed—Mr Loxton and liver, Elsa must keep in touch with Mr Loxton; and it might be difficult, he had discovered, to find elsewhere a butcher who would supply liver with the daily regularity of the shop at which they dealt in Rockwood. Rockwood decided upon, he was as enchanted with the flat as was Elsa. No more landladies—no more pilfering, perspiring sluts of maids—no more complaining fellow-lodgers. For their £100 a year they had now at their disposal a large sitting-room, a good sized dining-room, a large bedroom, a bathroom, and a delightful little kitchen. Bogey-Bogey, despairing of occupying all these possessions simultaneously, retired, on the day of their homecoming, to one of the gay eiderdowns of the bedroom. Whalley dislodged him rather peremptorily and smoothed out the eiderdown ca
refully.

  ‘We can’t have him messing up everything, dear. He mustn’t be allowed to get up on the beds or the chairs. He has marked this quilt already.’

  The roll-top desk arrived just then. When the men had gone away and Elsa had admired and returned to her kitchen, he seated himself at it with her pen and a writing-block and the typescript of the unfinished novel. The part of it on which one wrote was a little higher than he had expected. And one couldn’t cross one’s legs comfortably in the narrow recess into which they had to fit. He always liked to cross his legs when he was working. But he would get used to it.

  He lighted a fresh cigarette from the old one and wrote, very carefully and largely, the heading:

  CHAPTER XXI.

  He looked round the room. How delightful it all was—gay and fresh—and their own. How extraordinarily sure and shrewd Elsa had been about everything—measurements and materials and colours. How quiet the room was—one heard only the pleasant hum of the passing traffic. Above them, they had discovered, lived a quiet, elderly couple named Hobson; below them lived the quiet Mr Knayle; below Mr Knayle lived a very quiet Mr Ridgeway. It was delightful to raise one’s eyes and look out on the sunlit Downs. The trees were dusted with green already. Just the sort of room he had always wanted.

  Then he remembered that Elsa wanted some hooks put in along the edges of the kitchen dresser’s shelves, to hang cups and jugs on.

  Mr Loxton—he was surprisingly vigorous and young-looking for seventy-three—came to lunch at the flat one day—thought everything very nice indeed, praised Elsa’s cookery, and was, generally, quite affable.

  ‘Writing away, I suppose, Simon,’ he said just before he went away. ‘Reeling it off …’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Whalley smiled brightly. ‘No rest for the wicked.’