The Wine-Dark Sea

by Robert Aickman

  ‘I don’t think it’s meant for children, Liebchen,’ said my Mother, smiling her lovely smile. ‘We shall have to consult the Victoria and Albert Museum.’

  ‘Of course it’s not meant for children,’ I replied. ‘That’s why I wanted it. I’m going to receive, like La Belle Otero.’

  Next morning, after my mother had gone to work, my father came up, and wrenched and prodded with his unskilful hands.

  ‘I’ll get a chisel,’ he said. ‘We’ll prise it open at each corner, and when we’ve got the fronts off, I’ll go over to Woolworths and buy some hinges and screws. I expect they’ll have some.’

  At that I struck my father in the chest with my fist. He seized my wrists, and I screamed that he was not to lay a finger on my beautiful house, that he would be sure to spoil it, that force never got anyone anywhere. I knew my father: when he took an idea for using tools into his head, the only hope for one’s property lay in a scene, and in the implication of tears without end in the future, if the idea were not dropped.

  While I was screaming and raving, Constantin appeared from the room below, where he worked at his books.

  ‘Give us a chance, Sis,’ he said. ‘How can I keep it all in my head about the Thirty Years War when you haven’t learned to control your tantrums?’

  Although two years younger than I, Constantin should have known that I was past the age for screaming except of set purpose.

  ‘You wait until he tries to rebind all your books, you silly sneak,’ I yelled at him.

  My father released my wrists.

  ‘Wormwood Grange can keep,’ he said. ‘I’ll think of something else to go over to Woolworths for.’ He sauntered off.

  Constantin nodded gravely. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I understand what you mean. I’ll go back to my work. Here, try this.’ He gave me a small, chipped nail file.

  I spent most of the morning fiddling very cautiously with the imperfect jemmy, and trying to make up my mind about the doll at the window.

  *

  I failed to get into my house, and I refused to let my parents give me any effective aid. Perhaps by now I did not really want to get in, although the dirt and disrepair, and the apathy of the dolls, who so badly needed plumping up and dispersing, continued to case me distress. Certainly I spent as long trying to shut the front door as trying to open a window or find a concealed spring (that idea was Constantin’s). In the end I wedged the two halves of the front door with two halves of match; but I felt that the arrangement was makeshift and undignified. I refused everyone access to the principal spare room until something more appropriate could be evolved. My plans for routs and orgies had to be deferred: one could hardly riot among dust and cobwebs.

  Then I began to have dreams about my house, and about its occupants.

  One of the oddest dreams was the first. It was three or four days after I entered into possession. During that time it had remained cloudy and oppressive, so that my father took to leaving off his knitted waistcoat; then suddenly it thundered. It was a long, slow, distant, intermittent thunder; and it continued all the evening, until, when it was quite dark, my bedtime and Constantin’s could no longer be deferred.

  ‘Your ears will get accustomed to the noise,’ said my father. ‘Just try to take no notice of it.’

  Constantin looked dubious; but I was tired of the slow, rumbling hours, and ready for the different dimension of dreams.

  I slept almost immediately, although the thunder was rolling round my big, rather empty bedroom, round the four walls, across the floor, and under the ceiling, weighting the black air as with a smoky vapour. Occasionally, the lightning glinted, pink and green. It was still the long-drawn-out preliminary to a storm; the tedious, imperfect dispersal of the accumulated energy of the summer. The rollings and rumblings entered my dreams, which flickered, changed, were gone as soon as come, failed, like the lightning, to concentrate or strike home, were as difficult to profit by as the events of an average day.

  After exhausting hours of phantasmagoria, anticipating so many later nights in my life, I found myself in a black wood, with huge, dense trees. I was following a path, but reeled from tree to tree, bruising and cutting myself on their hardness and roughness. There seemed no end to the wood or to the night; but suddenly, in the thick of both, I came upon my house. It stood solid, immense, hemmed in, with a single light, little more, it seemed, than a night-light, burning in every upstairs window (as often in dreams, I could see all four sides of the house at once), and illuminating two wooden wedges, jagged and swollen, which held tight the front doors. The vast trees dipped and swayed their elephantine boughs over the roof; the wind peeked and creaked through the black battlements. Then there was a blaze of whitest lightning, proclaiming the storm itself. In the second it endured, I saw my two wedges fly through the air and the double front door burst open.

  For the hundredth time, the scene changed, and now I was back in my room, though still asleep or half-asleep, still dragged from vision to vision. Now the thunder was coming in immense, calculated bombardments; the lightning ceaseless and searing the face of the earth. From being a weariness the storm had become an ecstasy. It seemed as if the whole world would be in dissolution before the thunder had spent its impersonal, unregarding strength. But, as I say, I must still have been at least half-asleep, because between the fortissimi and the lustre I still from time to time saw scenes, meaningless or nightmarish, which could not be found in the wakeful world; still, between and through the volleys, heard impossible sounds.

  I do not know whether I was asleep or awake when the storm rippled into tranquillity. I certainly did not feel that the air had been cleared; but this may have been because, surprisingly, I heard a quick soft step passing along the passage outside my room, a passage uncarpeted through our poverty. I well knew all the footsteps in the house, and this was none of them.

  Always one to meet trouble half-way, I dashed in my nightgown to open the door. I looked out. The dawn was seeping, without effort or momentum, through every cranny, and showed shadowy the back of a retreating figure, the size of my mother but with woolly red hair and long rust-coloured dress. The padding feet seemed actually to start soft echoes amid all that naked woodwork. I had no need to consider who she was or whither she was bound. I burst into the purposeless tears I so despised.

  *

  In the morning, and before deciding upon what to impart, I took Constantin with me to look at the house. I more than half-expected big changes; but none was to be seen. The sections of match-stick were still in position, and the dolls as inactive and diminutive as ever, sitting with their backs to me on chairs and sofas in the Long Drawing Room; their hair dusty, possibly even mothy. Constantin looked at me curiously, but I imparted nothing.

  Other dreams followed; though at considerable intervals. Many children have recurring nightmares of oppressive realism and terrifying content; and I realised from past experience that I must outgrow the habit or lose my house – my house at least. It is true that my house now frightened me, but I felt that I must not be foolish and should strive to take a grown-up view of painted woodwork and nine understuffed dolls. Still it was bad when I began to hear them in the darkness; some tapping, some stumping, some creeping, and therefore not one, but many, or all; and worse when I began not to sleep for fear of the mad doll (as I was sure she was) doing something mad, although I refused to think what. I never dared again to look; but when something happened, which, as I say, was only at intervals (and to me, being young, they seemed long intervals), I lay taut and straining among the forgotten sheets. Moreover, the steps themselves were never quite constant, certainly too inconstant to report to others; and I am not sure that I should have heard anything significant if I had not once seen. But now I locked the door of our principal spare room on the outside, and altogether ceased to visit my beautiful, impregnable mansion.

  I noticed that my mother made no comment. But one day my father complained of my ingratitude in never playing with my ha
ndsome birthday present. I said I was occupied with my holiday task: Moby Dick. This was an approved answer, and even, as far as it went, a true one, though I found the book pointless in the extreme, and horribly cruel.

  ‘I told you the Grange was the wrong thing to buy,’ said my father. ‘Morbid sort of object for a toy.’

  ‘None of us can learn except by experience,’ said my mother.

  My father said, ‘Not at all,’ and bristled.

  *

  All this, naturally, was in the holidays. I was going at the time to one of my mother’s schools, where I should stay until I could begin to train as a dancer, upon which I was conventionally but entirely resolved. Constantin went to another, a highly cerebral co-educational place, where he would remain until, inevitably, he won a scholarship to a University, perhaps a foreign one. Despite our years, we went our different ways dangerously on small dingy bicycles. We reached home at assorted hours, mine being the longer journey.

  One day I returned to find our dining-room table littered with peculiarly uninteresting printed drawings. I could make nothing of them whatever (they did not seem even to belong to the kind of geometry I was – regretfully – used to); and they curled up on themselves when one tried to examine them, and bit one’s finger. My father had a week or two before taking one of his infrequent jobs; night work of some kind a long way off, to which he had now departed in our car. Obviously the drawings were connected with Constantin, but he was not there.

  I went upstairs, and saw that the principal spare room door was open. Constantin was inside. There had, of course, been no question of the key to the room being removed. It was only necessary to turn it.

  ‘Hallo, Lene,’ Constantin said in his matter-of-face way. ‘We’ve been doing axonometric projection, and I’m projecting your house.’ He was making one of the drawings; on a sheet of thick white paper. ‘It’s for home-work. It’ll knock out all the others. They’ve got to do their real houses.’

  It must not be supposed that I did not like Constantin, although often he annoyed me with his placidity and precision. It was weeks since I had seen my house, and it looked unexpectedly interesting. A curious thing happened: nor was it the last time in my life that I experienced it. Temporarily I became a different person; confident, practical, simple. The clear evening sun of autumn may have contributed.

  ‘I’ll help,’ I said. ‘Tell me what to do.’

  ‘It’s a bore I can’t get in to take measurements. Although we haven’t got to. In fact, the Clot told us not. Just a general impression, he said. It’s to give us the concept of axonometry. But, golly, it would be simpler with feet and inches.’

  To judge by the amount of white paper he had covered in what could only have been a short time, Constantin seemed to me to be doing very well, but he was one never to be content with less than perfection.

  ‘Tell me’, I said, ‘what to do, and I’ll do it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he replied, sharpening his pencil with a special instrument. ‘But it’s a one-man job this. In the nature of the case. Later I’ll show you how to do it, and you can do some other building if you like.’

  I remained, looking at my house and fingering it, until Constantin made it clearer that I was a distraction. I went away, changed my shoes, and put on the kettle against my mother’s arrival, and our High Tea.

  When Constantin came down (my mother had called for him three times, but that was not unusual), he said, ‘I say, Sis, here’s a rum thing.’

  My mother said, ‘Don’t use slang, and don’t call your sister Sis.’

  He said, as he always did when reproved by her, ‘I’m sorry, Mother.’ Then he thrust the drawing paper at me. ‘Look, there’s a bit missing. See what I mean?’ He was showing me with his stub of emerald pencil, pocked with toothmarks.

  Of course, I didn’t see. I didn’t understand a thing about it.

  ‘After Tea,’ said my mother. She gave to such familiar words not a maternal but an imperial decisiveness.

  ‘But Mum –’ pleaded Constantin.

  ‘Mother,’ said my mother.

  Constantin started dipping for sauerkraut.

  Silently we ate ourselves into tranquillity; or, for me, into the appearance of it. My alternative personality, though it had survived Constantin’s refusal of my assistant, was now beginning to ebb.

  ‘What is all this that you are doing?’ enquired my mother in the end. ‘It resembles the Stone of Rosetta.’

  ‘I’m taking an axonometric cast of Lene’s birthday house.’

  ‘And so?’

  But Constantin was not now going to expound immediately. He put in his mouth a finger of rye bread smeared with homemade cheese. Then he said quietly, ‘I got down a rough idea of the house, but the rooms don’t fit. At least, they don’t on the bottom floor. It’s all right, I think, on the top floor. In fact that’s the rummest thing of all. Sorry, Mother.’ He had been speaking with his mouth full, and now filled it fuller.

  ‘What nonsense is this?’ To me it seemed that my mother was glaring at him in a way most unlike her.

  ‘It’s not nonsense, Mother. Of course, I haven’t measured the place, because you can’t. But I haven’t done axonometry for nothing. There’s a part of the bottom floor I can’t get at. A secret room or something.’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘Very well, Mother.’ Constantin put down his remnant of bread and cheese. He rose, looking a little pale. He took the drawing round the table to my mother.

  ‘Not that thing. I can’t understand it, and I don’t believe you can understand it either.’ Only sometimes to my father did my mother speak like that. ‘Show me in the house.’

  I rose too.

  ‘You stay here, Lene. Put some more water in the kettle and boil it.’

  ‘But it’s my house. I have a right to know.’

  My mother’s expression changed to one more familiar. ‘Yes, Lene,’ she said, ‘you have a right. But please not now. I ask you.’

  I smiled at her and picked up the kettle.

  ‘Come, Constantin.’

  *

  I lingered by the kettle in the kitchen, not wishing to give an impression of eavesdropping or even undue eagerness, which I knew would distress my mother. I never wished to learn things that my mother wished to keep from me, and I never questioned her implication of ‘All in good time’.

  But they were not gone long, for well before the kettle had begun even to grunt, my mother’s beautiful voice was summoning me back.

  ‘Constantin is quite right,’ she said, when I had presented myself at the dining room table, ‘and it was wrong of me to doubt it. The house is built in a funny sort of way. But what does it matter?’

  Constantin was not eating.

  ‘I am glad that you are studying well, and learning such useful things,’ said my mother.

  She wished the subject to be dropped, and we dropped it.

  Indeed, it was difficult to think what more could be said. But I waited for a moment in which I was alone with Constantin. My father’s unhabitual absence made this difficult, and it was completely dark before the moment came.

  And when, as was only to be expected, Constantin had nothing to add, I felt, most unreasonably, that he was joined with my mother in keeping something from me.

  ‘But what happened?’ I pressed him. ‘What happened when you were in the room with her?’

  ‘What do you think happened?’ replied Constantin, wishing, I thought, that my mother would re-enter. ‘Mother realised that I was right. Nothing more. What does it matter anyway?’

  That final query confirmed my doubts.

  ‘Constantin,’ I said. ‘Is there anything I ought to do?’

  ‘Better hack the place open,’ he answered, almost irritably.

  *

  But a most unexpected thing happened, that, had I even considered adopting Constantin’s idea, would have saved me the trouble. When next day I returned from school, my house was gone.

  Constantin
was sitting in his usual corner, this time absorbing Greek paradigms. Without speaking to him (nothing unusual in that when he was working), I went straight to the principal spare room. The vast deal table, less scrubbed than once, was bare. The place where my house had stood was very visible, as if indeed a palace had been swept off by a djinn. But I could see no other sign of its passing: no scratched woodwork, or marks of boots, or disjoined fragments.

  Constantin seemed genuinely astonished at the news. But I doubted him.

  ‘You knew,’ I said.

  ‘Of course I didn’t know.’

  Still, he understood what I was thinking.

  He said again, ‘I didn’t know.’

  Unlike me on occasion, he always spoke the truth.

  I gathered myself together and blurted out, ‘Have they done it themselves?’ Inevitably I was frightened, but in a way I was also relieved.

  ‘Who do you mean?’

  ‘They.’

  I was inviting ridicule, but Constantin was kind.

  He said, ‘I know who I think has done it, but you mustn’t let on. I think Mother’s done it.’

  I did not again enquire uselessly into how much more he knew than I. I said, ‘But how?’

  Constantin shrugged. It was a habit he had assimilated with so much else.

  ‘Mother left the house with us this morning and she isn’t back yet.’

  ‘She must have put Father up to it.’

  ‘But there are no marks.’

  ‘Father might have got help.’ There was a pause. Then Constantin said, ‘Are you sorry?’

  ‘In a way,’ I replied. Constantin with precocious wisdom left it at that.

  When my mother returned, she simply said that my father had already lost his new job, so that we had had to sell things.