The Wine-Dark Sea

by Robert Aickman

She looked ridiculous; or any other woman in her position would have looked ridiculous. Millie had supposed that crystal-gazing was done seated at a table. Moreover, a very suitable table was in the room with them.

  ‘I advised you to take off your sweater,’ said Thelma. ‘Why not be more friendly?’

  Millie continued calm. Upon the passage to truth, crosscurrents are to be expected.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she said, and lay down upon her front on the diametrical other side of the small crystal. She rested her chin upon her two hands, as Thelma was doing. At these close quarters, Thelma’s lupine aroma was very pungent. Millie tried to concentrate upon gazing into the crystal. She assumed that to be the right thing to do. If only the crystal had been proportioned for a mature woman instead of for a waif!

  But that matter began to adjust itself, and before Millie had had time even to begin feeling physically uncomfortable. As she gazed through the crystal at Thelma’s rock-pool eyes, the yellow light from the gas fire turned blue; and the circumference of the crystal expanded and expanded, as did Thelma’s orbs on the other side of it. Indeed, Millie realised quite clearly that it must always have been impossible for her to have seen Thelma’s eyes through the actual crystal. All anyone could really have seen through it, would have been Thelma’s nose and a small distance on either side of it.

  Incandescent with darting blue lights, the crystal grew until it filled the room, until it was the room, and Thelma’s eyes were no longer there, as if her face had split vertically down the middle and her eyes had rolled away round the polished sphere, each in a different direction.

  But by now Millie was in a room no longer. Nor was she lying inconveniently upon her front. On the contrary, she was in a small woodland clearing and was observing with perfect ease what therein transpired.

  The two boys were sitting, rather absurdly jammed together, on a tree trunk. It was not a whole fallen giant of the forest, but a neatly sawn-off section, awaiting the arrival of the timber float and its tractor, or perhaps left there by intention as a nature seat for wooers, an accessory to picnics. In fact, the boys, ravenous as ever, were at that moment engaged upon a picnic of their own.

  Each boy held in his hand a very large, very red bone, from which he was gnawing in the frenzied manner that Millie remembered so well.

  On the worn, wintry grass before them lay what was left of a human body.

  The boys had already eaten their way through most of it, so that it could not even be described as a skeleton or semi-skeleton. The disjoined bones were everywhere strewn about at random, and only the top part of the frame, the upper ribs, remained in position, together with the half-eaten head.

  It was Phineas’s head.

  Things swam.

  Millie felt that her soul was rushing up a shaft at the centre of her body. She knew that this is what it was to die.

  But she did not die.

  She realised that now she was lying on her back in the still-darkened room. Thelma must have moved her. The gas fire was as yellow as before, no doubt because there was something wrong with it; and Thelma in her pink rags and dirty jeans was standing before her, even looking down at her.

  ‘You’ve been out a long time.’

  ‘I wish I were still out.’

  ‘You may, but I don’t. I’ve things to do. You forget that.’

  Millie hesitated.

  ‘Did you see them too?’

  ‘Of course I saw them. Remember, I asked you whether you really had to go on with it.’

  ‘What else could I do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not your nursemaid.’

  Millie sat up. ‘If you pass me my handbag, I’ll pay you.’

  Thelma passed it. It did not seem to have been rifled during Millie’s anaesthesia.

  ‘Perhaps we could have a little more light?’ suggested Millie.

  Thelma threw on her tunic and, without fastening it, began to draw back or take down the window coverings. Millie did not examine which it was.

  She rose to her feet. Had Thelma been behaving differently, she, Millie, would have been shaking all over, still prostrate. She seated herself on one of the dusty black chairs. She counted out forty-nine pounds on to the black table in the corner. Then she gazed for a moment straight into Thelma’s vatic eyes. At once the sensations of a few moments before (or of what seemed a few moments) faintly recurred. Millie felt dragged out of herself, and turned her face to the dingy wall.

  ‘You can stay if you wish. You know that.’ Thelma made no attempt to take up the money; though Millie could be in small doubt that the sum would make a big difference for Thelma, at least temporarily.

  ‘You can’t expect me to keep open house for you always.’

  Millie turned a little and, without again looking at Thelma, attempted a smile of some kind.

  ‘I shan’t be around much longer,’ said Thelma. “Surely you can see that?’

  Millie stood up. ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I shall go back to decent people. I should never have left them.’

  ‘What made you?’

  ‘I killed a girl.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I did right.’

  There was a pause: a need (perhaps on both sides) for inner regrouping. It was a metaphor that Uncle Stephen might have approved.

  Millie gathered herself together. ‘Is that the sort of thing I ought to do?’

  ‘How can I tell? Why ask me? You must decide for yourself.’

  Millie gathered herself together a second time. It was difficult to petition. The forty-nine pounds still lay untouched on the hocus-pocus table. ‘You can tell, Thelma. I know you can. They’re obscene, monstrous, all those words. You know as well as I do. You’re the only one who does. I feel responsible for them. Is that what I ought to do? Tell me.’

  Thelma seemed actually to reflect for a moment; instead of darting out a reply like the double tongue of a snake, the flick of a boxing second’s towel, as she usually did.

  ‘You’re not the kind,’ said Thelma. ‘It would be beyond you.’

  ‘Then what? Help me, Thelma. Please, please help me.’

  ‘I told you before. Run away.’

  Millie stared blankly at the entire, round, empty, world.

  ‘Be more friendly and you can lie up with me. I keep saying so. But soon I shan’t be here. I have debts.’

  Millie wondered with what currency Thelma proposed to settle.

  ‘Hurry up and put the money away somewhere,’ Millie said.

  But Thelma again spoke to the point: ‘I’ll place my right hand on your heart and you’ll place your on mine. Then we’ll be friends.’

  Millie glanced at Thelma’s ragged pink garment, but all she said was, ‘It wouldn’t be fair.’ Then she added, ‘Thank you all the same.’ What a depraved, common way to express gratitude, she thought.

  There was a tapping at the locked door.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Millie, as if she really did live there.

  Thelma had leapt upon the money like a cheetah and shoved it hugger-mugger into her jeans.

  ‘It’s Agnes Waterfield. She comes every day at this hour.’

  ‘God! I don’t want to meet her,’ cried Millie.

  ‘Well, you’ll have to,’ said Thelma, and unlocked the door on the instant.

  Millie could only snatch her garments and scuttle away like a cat, hoping that Agnes might be too involved in her own troubles and preoccupations to recognise her, though not really believing it.

  Outside, it had begun to snow. The big open car was spattered with separate flakes.

  *

  Millie sped away. Soon the suburb which had once been home was miles behind.

  The straggling and diminishing woodlands touched the road at several places before one reached the main section in which lay Uncle Stephen’s house. The ground was hummocky here, and nowadays the road ran through several small cuttings, ten or twelve feet high, in order to maintain a more or less constant level
for the big lorries, and to give the tearaway tourists an illusion for a minute or two that they were traversing the Rocky Mountains. There were even bends in the road which had not yet been straightened, and all the trees in sight were conifers.

  Thinking only of sanctuary, Millie tore round one of these bends (much too fast, but almost everyone did it, and few with Millie’s excellent reason); and there were the two boys blocking the way, tall as Fiona Macleod’s lordly ones, muscular as Gogmagog, rising high above the puny banks of earth. It was a busy road and they could only a moment before have dropped down into it. Beneath the snow patches on their clothing, Millie could clearly see the splashes of blood from their previous escapade. The boys were so placed that Millie had to stop.

  ‘Got any grub, Mum?’

  Quite truthfully, she could no longer tell one twin from the other.

  ‘That’s all we ask, Mum,’ said the other twin. ‘We’re hungry.’

  ‘We don’t want to outgrow our strength,’ said the first twin, just as in the old days.

  ‘Let’s search,’ cried the second twin. Forbearance was extinguished by appetite.

  The two boys were now on the same side of the car.

  Millie, who had never seen herself as a glamorous mistress of the wheel, managed something that even Uncle Stephen might have been proud of in the old, dead days at Brooklands. She wrenched the car round on to the other side of the highway, somehow evaded the towering French truck charging towards her, swept back to her proper lane and was fast on her way.

  But there was such a scream, perhaps two such screams, that, despite herself, she once more drew up.

  She looked back.

  The snow was falling faster now; even beginning to lie on the car floor. She was two or three hundred yards from the accident. What accident? She had to find out. It would be better to drive back rather than to walk: even in the modern world, the authorities would not yet have had time to appear and close the road. Again Millie wheeled.

  The two vast figures lay crushed on the highway. They had been standing locked together gazing after her, after the car in which there might have been sweets or biscuits; so that in death, as in life, they were not divided. They had been killed by a police vehicle: naturally one of the heavier models. Millie had under-estimated the instancy of modernity. The thing stood there, bluely lighted and roaring.

  ‘It was you we were after, miss,’ remarked the police officer, as soon as Millie came once more to a standstill. All the police were ignoring the snow completely. ‘You were speeding. And now look what’s happened.’

  ‘If you ask Detective-Sergeant Meadowsweet, he will explain to you why I was going fast.’ Millie shivered. ‘I have to go fast.’

  ‘We shall make enquiries, but no individual officer is empowered to authorise a breach of the law.’

  By the time the usual particulars had been given and taken, the ambulance had arrived, screaming and flashing with determination; but it was proving impossible to insert the two huge bodies into it. The men were doing all they could, and the police had surrounded the area with neat little objects, like bright toys; but anyone not immediately involved could see that the task was hopeless.

  The snow was falling more heavily every minute, so that by the time Millie was once more left alone among the traffic surging round the frail barrier, the two boys were looking like the last scene in Babes in the Wood, except that the babes had changed places, and changed roles, with the giants.

  THE FETCH

  In all that matters, I was an only child. There was a brother once, but I never saw him, even though he lived several years. My father, a Scottish solicitor or law agent, and very much a Scot, applied himself early to becoming an English barrister, and, as happens to Scots, was made a Judge of the High Court, when barely in middle age.

  In Court, he was stupendous. From the first, I was taken once every ten days by Cuddy, my nurse, to the public gallery in order to behold him and hearken to him for forty minutes or so. If I made the slightest stir or whimper, it was subtly but effectively repaid me; on those and all other occasions. Judges today are neither better nor worse than my father, but they are different.

  At home, my father, only briefly visible, was as a wraith with a will and power that no one available could resist. The will and power lingered undiminished when my father was not in the house, which, in the nature of things, was for most of the time. As well as the Court, and the chambers, there were the club and the dining club, the livery company and the military historical society, all of which my father attended with dedication and sacrifice. With equal regularity, he pursued the cult of self-defence, in several different branches, and with little heed for the years. He was an elder of a Scottish church in a London suburb, at some distance from where we lived. He presided over several successive Royal Commissions, until one day he threw up his current presidency in a rage of principle and was never invited again. After his death I realised that a further centre of his interest had been a club of a different kind, a very expensive and sophisticated one. I need not say how untrue it is that Scots are penny-scraping in all things.

  I was terrified of my father. I feared almost everything, but there was nothing I feared more than to encounter my father or to pick up threads from his intermittent murmurings in the corridors and closets. We lived in a huge house at the centre of Belgravia. No Judge could afford such an establishment now. In addition, there was the family home of Pollaporra, modest, comfortless, and very remote. Our ancestry was merely legal and commercial, though those words have vastly more power in Scotland than in England. In Scotland, accomplishments are preferred to graces. As a child, I was never taken to Pollaporra. I never went there at all until much later, on two occasions, as I shall unfold.

  I was frightened also of Cuddy, properly Miss Hester MacFerrier; and not least when she rambled on, as Scottish women do, of the immense bags and catches ingathered at Pollaporra by our ancestors and their like-minded acquaintances. She often emphasised how cold the house was at all times and how far from a ‘made road’. Only the elect could abide there, one gathered; but there were some who could never bear to leave, and who actually shed tears upon being compelled by the advancing winter to do so. When the snow was on the ground, the house could not be visited at all; not even by the factor to the estate, who lived down by the sea loch, and whose name was Mason. Cuddy had her own methods for compelling the attention of any child to every detail she cared to impart. I cannot recall when I did not know about Mason. He was precisely the man for a Scottish nursemaid to uphold as an example.

  My father was understood to dislike criminal cases, which, as an advanced legal theorist and technician, he regarded with contempt. He varied the taking of notes at these times by himself sketching in lightning caricature the figures in the dock to his left. The caricatures were ultimately framed, thirty or forty at a time; whereafter Haverstone, the odd-job man, spent upwards of a week hanging them at different places in our house, according to precise directions written out by my father, well in advance. Anybody who could read at all could at any time read every word my father wrote, despite the millions of words he had to set down as a duty. Most of the other pictures in our house were engravings after Landseer and Millais and Paton. Generations of Scottish aunts and uncles had also contributed art works of their own, painstaking and gloomy.

  I was afraid of Haverstone, because of his disfigurements and his huge size. I used to tiptoe away whenever I heard his breathing. I never cared or dared to ask how he had come to be so marked. Perhaps my idea of his bulk was a familiar illusion of childhood. We shall scarcely know; in that Haverstone, one day after my seventh birthday, fell from a railway bridge into the main road beneath and was destroyed by a lorry. Cuddy regarded Haverstone with contempt and never failed to claim that my father employed him only out of pity. I never knew what he was doing on the railway bridge, but later I became aware of a huge mental hospital near by and drew obvious conclusions.

  My mother I
adored and revered. For better or for worse, one knows the words of Stendhal: ‘My mother was a charming woman, and I was in love with my mother…. I wanted to cover my mother with kisses and wished there weren’t any clothes…. She too loved me passionately. She kissed me, and I returned those kisses sometimes with such passion that she had to leave me.’ Thus it was with me; and, as with Stendhal, so was the sequel.

  My mother was very dark, darker than me, and very exotic. I must suppose that only the frenzy of Scottish lust brought my father to marrying her. At such times, some Scots lose hold on all other considerations; in a way never noticed by me among Englishmen. By now, my father’s fit was long over. At least he did not intrude upon us, as Stendhal’s father did. I am sure that jealousy was very prominent in my father, but perhaps he scorned to show it. He simply kept away from his wife entirely. At least as far as I could see. And I saw most things, though facing far from all of them, and acknowledging none of them.

  Day after day, night after night, I lay for hours at a time in my mother’s big bed, with my head between her breasts, and my tongue gently extended, as in infancy. The room was perfumed, the bed was perfumed, her nightdress was perfumed, she was perfumed. To a child, it set the idea of Heaven. Who wants any other? My mother’s body, as well as being so dark, was sorter all over than anyone else’s, and sweeter than anything merely physical and fleeting, different and higher altogether. Her rich dark hair, perfumed of itself, fell all about me, as in the East.

  There was no social life in our home, no visiting acquaintances, no family connections, no chatter. My father had detached himself from his own folk by his marriage. My mother loved no one but me. I am sure of that. I was in a position to know. The only callers were her hairdresser, her dressmaker, her maker of shoes and boots, her parfumier, her fabricator of lingerie, and perhaps one or two others of the kind. While she was shorn, scented, and fitted, I sat silently in the corner on a little grey hassock. None of the callers seemed to object. They knew the world and what it was like: and would soon enough be like for me. They contained themselves.