The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  Two days later his wife, breaking his injunction, appeared again at the studio. Her reason for coming happened to be sufficient – just sufficient – but a glance at her told him that again it was not her real reason. She would have to take her real reason back to the country with her. But now she had a weapon as well, and as she looked round the studio her eyes by fell chance on a second one. It was a half-full whisky bottle, for when your alarm-clock buzzes in your ear at four in the morning and you wish it wouldn’t, a stiff half-tumbler of whisky will kick you up to work again. She made no comment on the bottle, but allowed herself a half-serious one on his personal appearance.

  ‘John, you haven’t shaved today!’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he answered, and after a moment added, ‘nor yesterday.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought that took very long. How did you enjoy your party?’

  ‘What party?’

  ‘The one you wanted your evening clothes for. I hope you shaved for that!’ She laughed a little as she said it, but it was not the kind of laugh that mends matters. ‘Do you know, for a few minutes that evening I was almost jealous!’

  ‘It was very far from being what you’d call a party if you only knew,’ he informed her, his mind running over it again.

  ‘Anyway you went, but when Mara and I want you to come home for a weekend – ’ she did not finish.

  And of course it was all plain enough the way she saw it. It was now nearly a month since he had been near his home. No public announce­ment had yet been made that an international competition of magnitude among a few chosen artists was under way. Except to a very few his absence was therefore unexplained. When his neigh­bours in Surrey asked what had become of him it was she who had to answer as best she could. Mara too would doubtless be stopped and asked pleasantly, ‘how her father was getting on’. And more than all that. A desirable and still young woman with many friends, capable at a pinch of earning her own living, with no more encumbrance than a daughter well on the way to young womanhood herself and a house to whom she can ask anybody she pleases, need not find time hang heavy on her hands. It is not unknown that her husband will even pay her an occasional visit by way of a pleasant surprise. John Brydon knew that she had the cards in her hand if she chose to play them.

  Yet he knew too that a more menacing shape than any hanging-about young man stood between himself and his wife. They happened to be standing side by side in front of the turntable. At the farther end of the studio was a tall, moveable glass in which he was able to see the effect of his work at double the distance the actual size of the studio allowed. And lifting his eyes he saw them in the glass, her, himself, with the statue between them. And the distance was not so great but that he saw too the expression on her face. It was not he who was jealous, but she, and this work of his was the hated rival. She was hardening her heart against the thing that was served before her, that had broken up his days and nights, was shaking the foundations of his health, for the trouble in his feet was no better, and even when she did bring the gift of her arms to him thrust her out of the place. Again she could claim to be right – and all at once her eyes met his in the distant glass. That they should meet all those yards away when they stood shoulder to shoulder was in itself a further widening of the gulf that had opened between them. In that moment his heart was bursting to close that gulf again, to tell her that trusting to his strength and constitution he had perhaps begun a little immod­er­ately, that staleness had come on him before he had been prepared for it, that he had shouldered a burden bigger than had been asked of him – but oh, if she only realised the importance of it to them all, how much it mattered to him, how little the future would hold for him if he failed in this! . . . But she had turned abruptly away and tucked the fair hair under the little bergère hat. Almost gaily she acted her little part.

  ‘Well, I’ll get along,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be too late because of Mara. Besides, I have the Phillipsons coming in tonight. They’re bringing that young nephew who’s just back from Kenya; you remem­ber him, don’t you? Bertie. Before he went away he used to think he was a little in love with me. He must be twenty-six now. Don’t come down. Let me know if you want anything else sent, and good hunting. Of course if you don’t win the thing after all this it will be simply tragic, but don’t let’s think of that. Shall I give your love to the Phillipsons? All sorts of people are asking what’s become of you. Goodbye –’

  The door closed behind her, and a few moments later he was thumbing and paring his clay again, but his heart was heavy. Poor, shut-out, hurt, gallant little Winifred, ready to fight back, with nothing better than her flimsy little invention of Bertie Phillipson to fight with! But no finger-tipping, after-tea-calling, young man had made the breach between them. She might pretend it was Bertie. Pique her enough and presently she might even make it Bertie. But John Brydon, looking at his statue, knew what it really was.

  The Wax

  1

  One morning John Brydon woke on his couch, put his foot to the ground, and then, drawing it back again, found it swollen out of recognisable shape. Its fellow was the same. He made his way to the telephone and rang up a doctor.

  The doctor diagnosed its condition as one of oedema, and oedema is also sometimes known as waterlogging. In the form in which it had fastened on John Brydon his blood, helped by gravity, had determined to his feet and his heart was not strong enough to pump it back again. For a heavy man he had been standing too much, the doctor said, and he must lie up and give his feet a complete rest. He then asked whether his patient had been drinking to excess lately.

  John Brydon cursed this latest piece of ill-luck and made such answers as he could. He had been drinking, he replied, not to excess but according to necessity, and as for lying up, that at present was not possible to be done. Whereupon the doctor pointed out that in that case that oedema also was likely to follow as a necessary con­sequence, and it was much that John Brydon did not lose his temper. He dismissed the doctor, and in his socks, moving carefully on the outer edges of his feet, hobbled back to his turntable.

  But oedema or no oedema, one weight was now off his mind. Over the Embassy’s head he had received a telegram granting him a month’s extension of time. But against that there was to set that more-than-enough on which he had embarked, that began to open up fresh vistas of labour with every step his work advanced. Well, there was nothing for it but to go on going forward, and, standing there before his group, he saw that his toil had not been for nothing. Sketch or more than sketch, it was a comely birth. It was not now something upon a base; had the base been taken away its proportion and intention would still have been invisibly there, had the super­structure been removed the base would have beckoned that other half of itself back again. And seeing all this he allowed himself ten minutes of luxurious nothingness. Closing his eyes he saw the processes still to come. He saw his work, not in the sober-hued clay, but as if the clay had put on its winding-sheet; it was blank white plaster, cold as a cold heart, raw, upstart, at the unloveliest stage of all. Then the plaster too disappeared; it was embedded in a shapeless boulder-like mass within which was the mould, as if the child and the womb had changed places. Again, and the matrix was a matrix of gelatine for the image in foundry-wax. Translation and re-trans­lation, the stuff of the child now the womb, the womb’s shape now the child again, but ever a step nearer to the end that had been the first conception of all . . . and suddenly he gave an exclamation of pain. He had closed his eyes once too often and given a little stumble. With his feet in that condition it would not do for him to go to sleep standing up. Awake again he felt behind him for a chair and sank into it. A cigarette and a few minutes with his feet up on the banker there and he would be all right. Half an hour perhaps. His alarm clock was over there on the mantelpiece, but he could trust himself to wake.

  An hour later his telephone bell rang, but he did not hear it. He was
dreaming that he was in his Surrey garden, lying out on a long chair with his head on a pillow, and Winifred and Mara were bringing out tea. He remembered the dream when, two-and-a-half hours later, he woke.

  Since his wife had left him with that sprightly little reminder that a young man called Bertie Phillipson was back home from Kenya she had not been near the studio. Only once had she even telephoned, and that was about something he had now forgotten. Unless some model rang his bell, to have the door shut in her face the moment he learned her business, his daily woman was the only woman he saw, and even she was in trouble of her own and often had to leave her work to accumulate. But one afternoon his bell rang, and going to the door he saw on the landing not Winifred, but his daughter Mara. Or was something the matter with his eyes that she stood there alone? But no, it was Mara, looking at him with startled but unafraid eyes. He made a sign for her to come in, for for the moment he did not trust himself to speak. Then when he had closed the door again, and with his hand on the edge of a banker to steady himself, he eased himself down to his knees and stretched out his arms.

  ‘My little girl!’ he laughed to himself. ‘I mean my big girl. You see you’re getting so big – and heavy – I can’t take you up in my arms. Let me look at you,’ and, kneeling, he held her away at arms length.

  ‘Father, aren’t you well?’ she asked, looking at him steadily. His nose stood out above a three-days’ growth, the eyes on either side of it were bloodshot, so bloated were his feet that his socks would pull on no higher than his ankle bones, and his working blouse, which he had not changed, was patterned with nameless stains.

  ‘I shall be all right in a few days, dear. I’ve been working rather hard. What good wind brings you here?’

  ‘Mother was coming up to do some shopping and I said might I come. I said I wanted to see it,’ and she glanced up at the turntable. ‘She said she didn’t think she’d have time to see you because she’d such a lot of things to do, but I said couldn’t I have half a crown, because I know the way, so she dropped me outside, and it’s only a shilling in a taxi to the Bannisters’, and I’ve got the half-crown.’

  ‘Do you mean she’s not coming back here for you?’ Because as long as he and the Bannisters had each a telephone she was, whether she knew it or not.

  ‘She didn’t say so. Perhaps she thought you’d come with me in the taxi.’

  He did not reply, but helped himself to his feet again. ‘It’s lovely of you to come, Mara. There’s the thing. Can you see from there?’

  And she was his, his, not only in the shape of her firm body, but in her intelligence and understanding too. He must not expect too much of her yet, but what she did say he could lean on with his full weight; she wouldn’t be sometimes right and sometimes wrong without knowing the difference herself. He dreaded the day when she should be grown up. He would have had her grow up just so far and then stop, his. She stood in her still-short skirt and straw hat, looking at his group.

  ‘Is that bottom part granite?’ she asked.

  ‘No, darling. Granite would have taken too long and cost rather a lot, especially if the men had happened to make a mistake, as they did before. That’s only imitation.’

  ‘Did they make a mistake because of the batters?’

  ‘Exactly. They look simple, but they’re very, very complicated.’

  ‘But I thought the rest was going to be in bronze.’

  ‘It is. We haven’t come to the bronze yet. The bronze comes last of all. It has to die first.’

  ‘To die? What has it got to die for?’

  ‘First it has to be turned into wax, the same thing you’re looking at now, but wax, hollow, only about so thick, with a thing called a core inside it so it doesn’t break. And then you bury it and you never see it again.’

  ‘Why must you bury it?’

  ‘You bury it in fireclay, that sets hard like plaster. It’s just a shell of wax, held fast between two walls of fireclay, but exactly the shape you’re looking at now.’

  ‘I don’t think I quite understand about the burying.’

  ‘Listen. When they’ve done what I say they put the whole thing into a furnace. There are holes and places for the gases to escape out of and every scrap of wax is melted away. Then there’s nothing between the two walls of fireclay.’

  She looked puzzled, but he went on.

  ‘They have the bronze ready melted, terribly hot and as thin as milk, and they run it into the space where the wax used to be. Then days later, when it’s got cool again, they break the mould away and there it is, bronze. Have you understood?’

  ‘I think I have now.’

  ‘Could you tell me what they do?’

  With no more than a falter or two she repeated the lost-wax process as he had just described it to her.

  ‘Good. Would you like to see it done when everything’s ready?’

  ‘Oh yes! Can I bring Sammie?’ Sammie was her spaniel dog.

  ‘If you keep him on a lead.’

  ‘Will mother be there?’

  ‘Of course, if she’d care to come. I should like her to come.’

  He watched her as she turned away and began to walk about the studio and saw that she was looking at the floor. It was unsightly with ash and the trodden ends of cigarettes, papers he had been using, unwashed glasses pushed aside. Then she went into the kitchen, and it was from the kitchen that she called to him.

  ‘Oh, father! There is such a lot of washing-up!’

  ‘I know. Mrs Day hasn’t been able to do it. Her baby’s very ill.’ Then a few minutes later, as he heard the clatter of crockery and the running of water, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m going to wash them up,’ she replied.

  He let her. His heart was full that he should be served by her. And he thought he knew why she had been allowed to come that after­noon. Winifred’s setting of her down at the door had been an olive-branch. Not for a moment had he believed in her figment of young men back from Kenya. She felt it more than he did, for he always had his work, and it was an indignity to both of them that she should come as far as the door and let the child come up alone. She must come and fetch her. He crossed to the telephone and got the Bannisters’ number.

  But the understanding must still hold till the statue was out of the studio for good. If she would agree to that her presence once more would be a comfort and a promise. It was not much of a life as things were, but surely between them they could make the best of it for a little longer.

  In the little kitchen Mara continued to wash up.

  She came that same afternoon. She came with a little air of being almost a stranger that was very taking. And she would have accepted almost any condition if only because of her shock at his stumbling walk and altered appearance. Had she known he was like that (she told him) she would have been long before. Now if he would let her she would bring him soup in a thermos and things to eat that only needed warming up and she would be as quiet as a mouse while he worked. Should she bring their own doctor with her? But at the mention of the doctor he shook his head quickly. No, no doctors. He knew what doctors would say about him. Doctors were of no use to John Brydon at this juncture. What matter if he collapsed completely as long as the work was finished? Winifred and Mara did not leave till nearly seven o’clock, and then only because of the car’s lights. And his first four hours’ sleep that night were among the purely peaceful things he afterwards remembered.

  2

  She was as good as her word. During the first week she came twice, bringing Mara again on the second occasion, and it made the place home to see her moving here and there, sitting in a chair reading one of her magazines, scribbling for an hour perhaps, cool, fresh, with the air of her Surrey garden about her, trying not to let him know she was there. But he was now past the stage when he had wanted to throw something if anybody spo
ke to him, and it was good for him too that he had to shave and to pull himself a little together. But alas, there was still no sitting down for him. He must be on those swollen, aching, bandaged feet every hour he was at work. Sometimes he suffered so that he had to ring her up early and to ask her, if she had thought of coming up that day, not to do so. But sometimes, when his moulder came in with his assistant and the bronze-founder to see whether he could be given a date yet – for the wax and the sub­sequent stages were rapidly approaching – the studio had almost a festive air, so many people seemed to be assembled. Cavani the master-moulder, despite his advancing years, was a fount of merri­ment in himself. He would solemnly admonish Mara that if she wished to be happy she must on no account marry anybody but a good Italian, who would play the mandolin under her window and show her Venice by moonlight and make love to her that would be like quicksilver in her veins; and when Mara with an unsmiling face asked what this last meant Winifred would laugh and play with the child’s hair and say that she wasn’t to take any notice of Mr Cavani, for she would know all about it one day. She would then glance softly across at John.

  The first time since the truce that he saw one of these glances he turned his head away. One of his reasons for doing this was that she must not think his work was at an end even when it was delivered over to the moulders. What about his set-up, those worrying per­spectives, the margin he must allow for the possible mistakes of others, the final stages on the bronze itself? But there came a day when she appeared, not with Mara, but alone. A parcel addressed to her had preceded her; she had asked whether it might be sent there, for it was from a dressmaker, and to have it sent straight to the studio would save time in case alterations had to be made. On her arrival she proceeded to open the parcel there and then. And a young man from Kenya or elsewhere, though he may hope for no profit of it himself, can set something aglow, for this time the frown above his great nose was a deep one. That was outside the bargain, that that he had no choice but to see now. Never did a model show herself quite like that. And many a man would have turned away with indifference, telling himself that it was only his wife. Not so John Brydon. It was because she was his wife that she had this power. Immodest modesty of those we marry, so to play on us and afterwards if needs be to turn round and ask us what then we married them for! Had she advanced to him like that, with those cool bare arms and that less cool breast, anything might have happened. But having kindled the torch she hid its light away again without allaying its heat. She slipped the new frock over her head and stood before him.