The Wine-Dark Sea

by Robert Aickman

  ‘Most certainly not. I meant only that if you’d arrived a few minutes later, I might have lost the pleasure of your company. Will you sit here?’ He was drawing back the heavy chair for Mimi to sit on his right. Beech performed the like office for Margaret. ‘I should have been utterly disconsolate. You both look remarkably attractive.’

  Beech disappeared and returned with a tureen so capacious that neither of the women would have cared to lift it. Roper ladled out soup into the huge plates. As he did so, a train roared past outside.

  ‘I suppose the railway came after the house had been here some time?’ asked Margaret, feeling that some reference to the matter seemed called for.

  ‘By no means,’ answered Roper. ‘The man who built the railway, built the house. He was my grandfather, Joseph Roper, generally known as Wide Joe. Wide Joe liked trains.’

  ‘There’s not much else for company,’ remarked Mimi, engulfing the hot soup.

  ‘This was one of the last main line railways to be built,’ continued Roper. ‘Everyone said it was impossible, but they were keen all the same, partly because land in this valley was very cheap, as it still is. But my grandfather was an engineering genius, and in the end he did it. The engravings in this room show the different stages of the work.’

  ‘I suppose he regarded it as his masterpiece and wanted to live next to it when he retired?’ politely enquired Margaret.

  ‘Not when he retired. As a matter of fact, he never did retire. He built this house right at the beginning of the work and lived here until the end. The railway took twenty years to build.’

  ‘I don’t know much about railway building, but that’s surely a very long time?’

  ‘There were difficulties. Difficulties of a kind my grandfather had never expected. The cost of them ruined the company, which had to amalgamate in consequence. They nearly drove my grandfather mad.’ Margaret could not stop herself from glancing at Mimi. ‘Everything conspired together against him. Things happened which he had not looked for.’

  Beech reappeared and, removing the soup, substituted a pile of sausages contained in a rampart of mashed potato. As he manœuvred the hot and heavy dish, Margaret noticed a large, dull coal-black ring on the third finger of his left hand.

  ‘Primitive fare,’ apologized Roper. ‘All you can get nowadays.’

  None the less, the two women found it unbelievably welcome.

  ‘I do see now what you might call railway influences about the house,’ said Margaret.

  ‘My grandfather lived in the days when a railway engineer was responsible for every detail of design. Not only of the tunnels and bridges, but the locomotives and carriages, the stations and signals, even the posters and tickets. He had sole responsibility for everything. An educated man could never have stood the strain. Wide Joe educated himself.’

  At intervals through dinner, passing trains rattled the heavy table and heavy objects upon it.

  ‘Now tell me about yourselves,’ said Wendley Roper, as if he had just concluded the narrative of his own life. ‘But first have another sausage each. There’s only stewed fruit ahead.’ They accepted.

  ‘We’re civil servants,’ said Mimi. ‘That’s what brought us together. I come from London, and Margaret comes from Devonshire. My father is a hairdresser and Margaret’s father is a Lord. Now you know all about us.’

  ‘An entirely bankrupt Lord, I regret to say,’ added Margaret quietly.

  ‘I gather more Lords are bankrupt in these times,’ said Roper sympathetically.

  ‘And many hairdressers,’ said Mimi.

  ‘Everyone but civil servants, in fact?’ said Roper.

  ‘That’s why we’re civil servants,’ replied Mimi, eviscerating her last sausage from its inedible skin. ‘Though you don’t seem altogether bankrupt,’ she added. Food was increasing her vitality.

  He made no reply. Beech had entered with a big glass bowl, deeply but unbeautifully cut, filled with stewed damsons.

  ‘The local fruit,’ said Roper despondently.

  But they even ate stewed damsons.

  ‘I am absolutely delighted to have you here,’ he remarked when he had served them. ‘I see almost no one. Least of all attractive women.’

  His tones were so direct and sincere that Margaret immediately felt pleased. Having, until this year she took a job, lived all her life against a background of desperate and, as she thought, undeserved money troubles, and in a remote country district, she had had little to do with men. Even such a simple compliment from a good-looking and well-spoken man still meant disproportionately much to her. She observed that Mimi seemed to notice nothing whatever.

  ‘I don’t know what would have become of us without you,’ said Margaret.

  ‘Food for the crows,’ said Mimi.

  Suddenly the conversation loosened up, becoming comparatively cordial, intimate, and general. Roper disclosed himself as intelligent, well-informed, and a good listener to those less intelligent and well-informed, at least when they were young women. Mimi’s conversation became much steadier and more pointed than usual. Margaret found herself saying less and less, while enjoying herself more.

  ‘Beech will bring us coffee in the drawing-room,’ said Roper, ‘if drawing-room’s the right expression.’

  They moved across the hall to another bleak apartment, this time walled with official-looking books, long series of volumes bound in dark-blue cloth or in stout, rough-edged paper. Again there were two complicated but not very efficient lamps hissing and spurting from the coffered ceiling. The furniture consisted in old-fashioned leather-covered armchairs and sofas; and, before the window at the end of the room, a huge desk, bearing high heaps of varied documents, disused and dusty. About the room in glass cases were scale models of long-extinct locomotives and bygone devices for ensuring safety on the railways. Above the red marble mantel was a vast print of a railway accident, freely coloured by hand.

  ‘You do keep things as the old man left them,’ said Mimi.

  ‘It is a house of the dead,’ said Roper. ‘My aunt, you know. She would never have anything touched.’

  Beech brought coffee: not very good and served in over-large cups; but pleasantly warm. Margaret still found the house cold. She hoped she was not ill after the soaking and strain of the day. She continued, however, to listen to Mimi and Roper chatting together in surprising sympathy; every now and then made an observation of her own; and, thinking things over, wondered that on the whole they had turned out so well. It was Margaret who poured out the coffee.

  What were Mimi and Roper talking about? He was asking her in great detail about their dull office routine; she was enquiring with improbable enthusiasm into early railway history. Neither could have had much genuine interest in either subject. It was all very unreal, but comfortable and pleasing. Roper, many aspects of whose position seemed to Margaret to invite curiosity, said nothing of himself. Every now and then a train passed.

  ‘A pension at sixty doesn’t make up for being a number all your life. A cipher. You want to get off the rails every now and then.’

  ‘You only get on to a branch line, a dead end,’ said Roper with what seemed real despondency. ‘It’s difficult to leave the rails altogether and still keep going at all.’

  ‘Have you ever tried? What do you do?’ It was seldom so long before Mimi asked that. She despised inaction in men.

  ‘I used to work in the railway company’s office. All the Ropers were in the railway business, as you will have gathered. I was the only one to get out of it in time.’

  ‘In time for what?’

  ‘In time for anything. My father was the company’s Chief Commercial Manager. Trying to meet the slump killed him. Things aren’t what they used to be with railways, you know. My grandfather was run over just outside that window.’ He pointed across the dusty desk at the end of the room.

  ‘What a perfectly appalling thing!’ said Margaret. ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘He never had any luck after he took on
this job. You know how two perfectly harmless substances when blended can make something deadly? Building the railway through this valley was just like that for my grandfather. A lot of things happened…. One thing the valley goes in for is sudden storms. On a certain night when one of these storms got up, my grandfather thought he heard a tree fall. You noticed the trees round the house? The original idea was that they’d provide shelter. My grandfather thought this tree might have fallen across the line. He was so concerned that he forgot the time-table, though normally he carried every train movement in his head. You can guess what happened. The noise of the approaching train was drowned by the wind. Or so they decided at the inquest.’

  When a comparative stranger tells such a story, it is always difficult to know what to say, and there is a tendency to fill the gap with some unimportant question. ‘And was the tree across the line?’ asked Margaret.

  ‘Not it. No tree had fallen. The old man had got it wrong.’

  ‘Then surely they were rather lax at the inquest?’

  ‘Wide Joe had always been expected to meet a bad end, and the jury were all local men. He was pretty generally disliked. He made his daughter break off her engagement with a railwayman at Pudsley depot. Marrying into the lower deck, and all that. But it turned out he was a bit wrong. The man got into Parliament and ended by doing rather better for himself than my grandfather had done by sticking to the railway. By then, of course, it was too late. And my grandfather was dead in any case.’

  ‘That was your aunt?’ inquired Mimi.

  ‘Being my father’s sister, yes,’ said Roper. ‘Now let us change the subject. Tell me about the gay world of London.’

  ‘We never come across it,’ said Mimi. It’s just one damn thing after another for us girls.’

  The moment seemed opportune for Margaret to get her pullover, as she still felt cold. She departed upstairs. In some ways she would have been glad to go to bed, after the exhausting day; but she felt also an unexplained reluctance, less than half-conscious, to leave Mimi and Roper chatting so intimately alone together. Then, ascending the dim staircase with its enormous ugly polished banisters in dark wood, she received a shock which drove sleep temporarily from her.

  The incident was small and perfectly reasonable; it was doubtless the dead crepuscularity of the house which made it seem frightening to Margaret. When she reached the first-floor landing she saw a figure which seemed hastily to be drawing back from her and then to retreat through one of the big panelled doors. The impression of furtiveness might well have resulted solely from the exceedingly poor lighting. But as to the opening and shutting of the door, Margaret’s ears left her in no doubt. And upon another point their evidence confirmed the much less dependable testimony of her eyes: the withdrawing feet tapped; the half-visible figure was undoubtedly a woman’s. She appeared to be wearing a dark coat and skirt, which left her lighter legs more clearly discernible.

  Stamping on absurd fears, quite beyond definition, Margaret ascended the second flight and entered the bedroom. After all, it was quite probable that Beech did not do all the work of the house: most likely that Roper’s staff should consist of a married couple. Margaret sat upon one of the hard chairs Beech had brought, and faced her fear more specifically. It took shape before the eyes of her mind: a faceless waxwork labelled ‘Miss Roper’, mad, dead, horribly returned. The costume of the figure Margaret had seen was not that of the tragic Victorian in Wendley Roper’s narrative: but then Miss Roper had died only recently, and might have kept up with the times in this respect, as more and more old ladies do. That would be less likely, however, if she had really been mad, as Mimi had suggested, and as the tale of the broken engagement would certainly require had it been told by one of the period’s many novelists.

  The room Margaret was in had seen it all. Suddenly, as this fact returned to memory, the grimy dingy papered walls seemed simultaneously to jerk towards her, the whole rather long and narrow attic to contract upon her threateningly. Though enormously larger, the room suddenly struck Margaret as having the proportions of a railway compartment, a resemblance much increased by the odd arrangement of the windows, one at each end. Old-fashioned railway carriage windows were commonly barred, Margaret was just old enough to have noticed. This recollection brought rather more comfort than was strictly reasonable. Relaxing a little, Margaret found that she had been seated motionless. Her muscles were stiff and she could hear her heart and pulses, whether or not proceeding at the normal rate it was hard to say. Some time must have passed while she had sat in what amounted to a trance of fear. But their only watch was on Mimi’s wrist, her own having been stolen while she washed in the Ladies Lavatory of an expensive restaurant to which her father had taken her for her birthday. Above all, she was colder than ever. She extracted the pullover from her rucksack and put it on. It was V-necked and long-sleeved. The warmth of its elegant, closely woven black wool was cheering. Before once more descending, Margaret adjusted the lamp which had been left in the bedroom. Then she recalled Roper’s remark that the whole first floor of the house was occupied by his grandfather’s collection; which for some reason did not make the actions of the woman she had seen seem more reassuring. But a minute later she crossed the first-floor landing firmly, though certainly without making any investigation; and reached the door of the preposterous ‘drawing-room’ without (she was quite surprised to realise) any particular incident.

  Immediately she entered, however, it was obvious that the atmosphere in the room had very much altered since she had left. Her fears were cut off like the change of scene in a film, to be replaced by a confused emotion as strong and undefined as the very different sensations which had accompanied the short period between her glimpsing the woman on the stairs and reaching the chair in her bedroom. Not only were Mimi and Roper now seated together on the vast leather-covered sofa before the empty fireplace, but Margaret even felt that they had vulgarly drawn further away from each other upon hearing her return.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Mimi cheekily. ‘You’ve been a long time.’

  For a moment Margaret felt like giving the situation a twist in her direction (as she felt it would be), by relating some of the reason for her long absence; but, in view of the mystery about Miss Roper, managed to abstain. Could it be that Miss Roper was not dead at all? she suddenly wondered.

  ‘Mind your own business,’ she replied in Mimi’s own key.

  ‘I hope you found your way,’ said Roper politely.

  ‘Perfectly, thank you.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘I fear Beech has gone to bed, or I’d offer you both some further refreshments. I have no other servant.’

  After the initial drag of blood from her stomach, Margaret took a really hard pull on her resolution.

  ‘Do you live alone here with Beech?’

  ‘Quite alone. That’s why it’s so pleasant to have you two with me. I’ve been telling Mimi that normally I have only my books.’ It was the first time Margaret had heard him use the Christian name.

  ‘He leads the life of a recluse,’ said Mimi. ‘Research, you know. Dog’s life, if you ask me. Worse than ours.’

  ‘What do you research into?’ asked Margaret.

  ‘Can’t you guess, dear?’ Mimi had become very much at her ease.

  ‘Railways, I’m afraid. Railway history.’ Roper was smiling a scholar’s smile, tired and deprecating, but at the same time uniquely arrogant. ‘If you’re a Roper you can’t get it quite out of the blood. I’ve been showing Mimi this.’ He held out a book with a dark-green jacket.

  ‘Early Fishplates,’ read Margaret, ‘by Howard Bullhead.’ The print appeared closely packed and extremely technical. The book was decorated with occasional arid little diagrams.

  ‘What has this to do with railways?’

  ‘Fishplates,’ cried Mimi, ‘are what hold the rails down.’

  ‘Well, not quite that,’ said Roper, ‘but something like it.’

  ‘Who’s Mr. Bullhead
?’

  ‘Bullhead is a rather technical railway joke. I’m the real author. I prefer to use a pseudonym.’

  ‘The whole book’s one long mad thrill,’ said Mimi. ‘Wendley’s going to sell the film rights.’

  ‘I can’t get it altogether out of my blood,’ said Roper again. ‘The family motto might be the same as Bismarck’s: Blood and Iron.’

  ‘Do you want to get it out?’ asked Margaret. ‘I’m sure it’s a fascinating book.’

  But Mimi had leapt to her feet. ‘What about a cup of tea? What do you say I make it?’

  Roper hesitated for a moment. Margaret thought that disinclination to accede conflicted with desire to please Mimi.

  ‘I’ll help.’ Normally tea at night was so little Margaret’s habit that Mimi stared at her.

  ‘That would be very nice indeed,’ said Roper at last. Desire to please Mimi had doubtless prevailed, though indeed it was hard to see what else he could say. ‘I’ll show you the kitchen. It’s really very nice of you.’ He hesitated another moment. Then they both followed him from the room.

  Before the kettle had boiled in the square cold kitchen, Margaret’s mind was in another conflict. Roper no longer seemed altogether so cultivated and charming as towards the end of dinner; there were now recurrent glimpses in him of showiness and even silliness. The maddening thing was, however, that Margaret could no longer be unaware that she found him attractive. Some impulse of which her experience was small and her opinion adverse, was loose in her brain, like the spot of light in a column of mercury. Upon other matters her mind was perfectly clear; so that she felt like two people, one thinking, one willing. Possibly even there was a third person, who was feeling; who was feeling very tired indeed.

  Mimi, sometimes so quick to tire, seemed utterly unflagging. She darted about the strange domesticities, turning taps, assembling crocks, prattling about the gas cooker: ‘Your gas doesn’t smell. I call that service.’

  ‘The smell is added to coal gas as a safety precaution,’ said Roper.

  ‘Why don’t they choose a nice smell, then?’