Buffet for Unwelcome Guests

by Christianna Brand

  ‘I’ll pay extra if that’s it,’ said Jo. ‘I could manage that. It’s only that I can’t find anywhere else, not at the price I could afford.’

  ‘Just between the two of us, then. Though how you put up with it,’ he said, as the boy sorted through his pocketbook, ‘I don’t know. The old girl’s round the bend. What’s this about your kid got a light around its head?—and your girl’s a—’ But the look came once more. A strange look almost—frightening. ‘Well, like that other lot, Jesus and all. She’s mad.’

  ‘She has some ideas,’ said the boy. ‘That doesn’t make her mad.’

  But not everyone agreed with him. The greengrocer’s wife tackled Marilyn one day when she went out for the shopping, Mrs. Vaughan left worshipping the baby at home. ‘They’re all saying she’s going off her rocker. You shouldn’t be there, what with the baby and all. It could be dangerous.’

  So still and beautiful, the quiet face framed in its veil of long, straight hair. ‘Mrs. Vaughan—dangerous? She’s kind. She’d do us no harm, she loves us.’

  ‘She told us last time that the baby lies with its arms stretched out like a—well, like a cross. She said it knows how it’s going to die. Well, I mean! It’s blasphemous.’

  ‘He does lie with his arms stretched out.’

  ‘Any baby does, sometimes. And she says he shines. She says there’s always a light around his head.’

  ‘I put the lamp on the floor once to keep the brightness out of his eyes. It did sort of gleam through a crack in the wood. We explained it to her.’

  ‘Well, she never listened then. And I say it’s not right. Everyone’s talking. They say…’ It took a little courage to insist, in face of that quiet calm. ‘They’re saying you ought to fetch a doctor to her.’

  Mrs. Vaughan rebelled, predictably, against any suggestion of seeing a doctor. ‘What for? I’m not ill. Never better.’ But it alarmed her. ‘You don’t think there’s something wrong with me?’

  ‘We just thought you looked a bit pale, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m not pale, I’m fine, never been better in my life. Even them arthritics nearly gone, hardly any pain these days at all.’ And she knew why. Alone with Him, she had taken the little hand and with it touched her swollen knees, had moved it, soft and firm, across her own gnarled fingers. ‘Look at ’em!’ she had insisted to Nellie next evening, in the pub. ‘Half the size! All them swollen joints gone down.’

  ‘They look the same to me,’ said Nellie and suddenly saw Mrs. Hoskins through in the Private and had to hurry off and join her. ‘Barmy!’ she said to Mrs. Hoskins. ‘I don’t feel safe with her. How do I know she won’t suddenly do her nut and start bashing me? It should be put a stop to.’

  Only one thing seemed to threaten Mrs. Vaughan with any suggestion of doing her nut and that was mention of her precious little family going away. If Jo searched for rooms now, he kept very quiet about it. To outside representations that she ought to let them go, that young people should be together in a place of their own, she replied that it wasn’t ‘like that’ between them; that Marilyn was ‘different’. All the same, they were young and shouldn’t always be cooped up with an old woman, and she fought to be allowed to move out to the shed and let them have her room; there was the bed out there now and in this weather it was warm and dry—she’d like it. In other days, she would have gone off to the pub in the evenings and left them free, but the Dog wasn’t what it had been, people didn’t seem so friendly, they looked at her funny and sometimes, she suspected, made mock behind her back of her claim to be housing God. Not that that worried her too much. In them old days—no one had believed in Him then, either. And I’ll prove it to them, she thought, and she would watch the children playing in the street and when she saw a tumble, bring in the poor victim with its bruises and scratches and cajole it into letting the baby touch the sore places with its little hand. ‘Now you feel better, love, don’t you?’ she would anxiously say. ‘Now it’s stopped bleeding, hasn’t it?—when the Baby touched you, it was all better in a minute? Now you tell me—wasn’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ the children would declare, wriggling in her grasp, intent only upon getting away. ‘It’s dangerous,’ said their mothers, gathering outside the shops in anxious gossip. ‘You don’t know what she might do, luring them inside like that,’ and a deputation at last sought out Jo. ‘You ought to clear out, you two, and leave her alone. You’re driving her up the wall with these ideas.’

  That’s just what we can’t do now,’ said Jo. ‘She gets upset if we even mention it.’

  ‘It could be the last straw,’ admitted Mrs. Hoskins, who knew all about it from Nellie at the Dog. ‘Properly finish her off.’

  ‘And then she’d be there without us to look after her.’

  ‘You can’t spend your whole lives in that one room.’

  ‘If we could get a place and take her with us… But we can’t find anywhere, not that we could possibly afford; let alone where she could come too.’

  ‘What?—you two kids, saddle yourselves for ever with a mad old woman? You couldn’t do that.’

  ‘She saddled herself with us,’ said Jo. ‘Where’d we be now, but for her?’

  All the same, clearly something must be done. With every day of her life with them, Mrs. Vaughan’s obsession increased. She could not bear the baby out of her sight, would walk with Marilyn when she carried it out for a breath of air and almost threateningly warn off the curious who tried for a glimpse of the now quite famous child. If they came to worship, well and good. If not…‘If you don’t make some arrangements about her,’ said the greengrocer’s wife at last, to Jo, ‘I will. She’s terrorising the whole neighbourhood.’

  ‘She wouldn’t hurt a fly. She believes our baby’s—something special. What harm does that do anyone else?’

  ‘You never know,’ said the greengrocer, supporting the missis, though in fact he was fond of Mrs. Vaughan—as indeed everyone had been in easier days. ‘They do turn queer, sometimes. Why not just take her to the doctor and ask him, or take her to the hospital?’

  ‘She won’t go to any hospital, she won’t go to any doctor.’

  ‘They can be forced,’ said the wife. ‘Strait jackets and that. They come and fetch them in a padded van.’ But anyway, she repeated, if something were not done and soon, she herself would ring up the police and let them deal with it. ‘She’s keeping custom from the shop. It can’t go on.’

  He promised hastily and later convened a little meeting of the malcontents. ‘Well, I’ve done what you said. I went to the hospital and they sent me to some special doctor and I told him all about it. They’re going to send her to a place where she won’t be too suspicious and they’ll have her under observation there, that’s what they call it, and then there’ll be psychiatrists and that, and she can have treatment. He says it’s probably only a temporary thing, she can be cured all right.’

  ‘Well, there you are! You and Marilyn can be finding somewhere else in the meantime and when she gets back and you’re not there, she’ll just settle down again.’

  ‘We’ll go anyway even if we don’t find anywhere. We couldn’t let it start all over again.’

  ‘These things aren’t as quick as all that. You’ll have time to look around.’

  ‘It’s not very nice,’ he said, ‘us there in her room and her in the bin.’

  ‘If you ever get her there. How’ll you persuade her to go?’

  ‘I’ve thought of that,’ he said. ‘Our last landlady—’

  ‘Oh, yes, that Mrs. Mace she’s always talking about. Mrs. Mace would understand, she keeps saying, Mrs. Mace knew all about it… You tell her she’s going to see Mrs. Mace.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Mrs. Mace is out in the country now and so’s this place, fifteen, twenty miles. I can drive her there in the car. She’ll go if she thinks Mrs. Mace is there. I think it’ll work.’

  And it worked. Mrs. Vaughan was prepared to leave even the precious Baby for a while, if she could go and talk to Mrs.
Mace. So many puzzling things that Mrs. Mace might be able to help her with. That about the Second Coming, for example, and then no Kings had arrived, not even a shepherd carrying a woolly lamb; and what about Herod killing off all them boy babies? Of course these were modern days, what would they have done with a live lamb, anyway?—and people didn’t go around killing babies any more. But you’d think there’d be something to take the place of these events, something—well, sybollick or whatever the word was and it might be important to recognise them. Mrs. Mace would understand, would at least be sympathetic and talk it all over; she had known them since before the baby even started, had been brushed by the very wings of Gabriel, bringing the message: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee… She could hardly wait to gather up her few shabby clothes and pack them into the cardboard box that must do for a suitcase. ‘You’ll look after things, Marilyn, love, just the couple of days? I’d like to have some good long talks with Mrs. Mace. You do think she’ll let me stay?’

  ‘It’s a big place; like, sort of, a hotel,’ said Jo. ‘But lovely, all them trees and flowers. And lots of nice people,’ he added, cautiously.

  ‘I thought it was a cottage? It’s only Mrs. Mace I want to see. I can be with her?’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. We’ve written and told her,’ fibbed Jo, ‘how good you’ve been to us.’

  ‘Me—good!’ she said. ‘When you think what you’ve done for me. Me being chosen! But still, there!—the last time it was only a pub-keeper, wasn’t it?’ The thought struck her that perhaps in fact it had been Meant that they should park outside the Dog that night, only a few doors down; that only through an error had they come to her. ‘Well, never mind, even if I wasn’t worthy to be chosen, fact remains it was me that got you; and reckernised you. First minute I saw you! I’ll never forget it.’ So beautiful, so quiet and undemanding, standing out there in the drizzle of the evening rain, Mary and Joseph and the promise of the Holy Child. And as they had been then, so they had remained: quiet, considerate, gentle; reserved, unemotional as she was emotional and out-giving; almost colourless, almost impersonal—a little apart from other human beings, from ordinary people like herself; and yet living with herself, close together in that little place with her for their only friend—the Mother and the Guardian of the Son of God; and the Word made flesh. She knelt and kissed the tiny hand. ‘I’ll come back to You, my little Lord. I’ll always love You and serve You, You know that. It’s only just that I want to know everything about You, I want to get things right, I want to ask Mrs. Mace.’ And all unaware of eyes watching from behind window curtains, balefully or pityingly or only with relief, she climbed into the battered little old car with Jo and drove away.

  Marilyn was nursing the baby when he got home. ‘You’ve got the place all cleared up,’ he said, astonished at the change in it. ‘You must have been slaving.’

  ‘It kept my mind off things,’ she said. But still she did not ask what must be uppermost in her mind. ‘Without Mrs. Vaughan here, I must say there’s more room. Not as much as we had at Mrs. Mace’s—’

  ‘We couldn’t stay at Mrs. Mace’s once the nephew was coming home.’

  ‘No, I know. I was only saying.’ And now she did ask at last: ‘Did it go all right?’

  ‘Yes, not a murmur. A bit surprised when we got there, of course, but I kept urging her on, saying she’d be with Mrs. Mace.’

  ‘You found the place again, no trouble?’

  ‘Yes, I found it. A lovely spot, perfect, in the middle of all those woods.’

  ‘And Mrs. Mace?’

  ‘Still there, quite O.K. A bit lonely, I daresay. She’ll be glad of company.’

  ‘They should get on fine.’ She smiled her own cool, quiet impersonal little smile, shifting the baby on her shoulder so that its fluffy head pressed, warm and sweet, against her cheek. ‘Well, she got her wish. You couldn’t call that a common grave.’

  ‘No, just her and Mrs. Mace; and right in the middle of them lovely woods like I told her, and all them flowers and the stream and all.’ He came across and ran a bent forefinger up the little channel at the back of the baby’s tender neck. ‘A shame to have to bash her,’ he said. ‘She was a kind old thing. But there you are, it’s so hard to find anywhere. We had to have the place.’

  Such a Nice Man

  WHAT A FOOL SHE HAD been to let him! Why must she be always so trusting?—so stupefied by her own too ready social instinct, never giving herself time to think. ‘At thirty-five years of age,’ her husband used to say to her, ‘surely you might have some sense?’ And hadn’t there been warning enough? Suppose this was the man…

  But it couldn’t be. Such a nice man! Such a nice man, he’d seemed, standing out there on the doorstep, so quiet and solid looking; middle-aged, respectable and behind him in the semi-darkness, the middle-aged, respectable car. On an impulse… Just passing… So many happy holidays in this old house when he’d been a boy…‘I ought not to trouble you.’ He glanced round him. ‘I hope the gentleman’s in, is he? If not, I won’t bother you, it wouldn’t be right, I’ll go away.’ But he didn’t come to that until he was well into the hall and the front door closed behind him.

  ‘No, he’s not, actually. But he—he’ll be back any minute…’ Helpless in the toils of her own convent-bred good manners, she led the way into the huge old farmhouse kitchen which to them was the centre of the house; moving away from him, however, backing away to the Welsh dresser against the far wall, leaving him standing uncertainly in the doorway. ‘This room you’ll remember if you were here as a child? And the grandfather clock?’ She felt that she sounded like a house-agent, showing him round.

  ‘Not too sure about the clock,’ he said—cagily? ‘But I was only a little lad then.’

  ‘But the dresser?—you remember this old dresser? They say it’s been here since the house was built.’ In fact they had brought it with them, two years ago.

  If he knew that it was a test, that no longer disturbed him. He seemed to abandon himself to discovery. ‘Oh, well, yes—the dresser I remember,’ he said.

  So now she knew. Her heart lurched, sick terror seemed to rise in her throat, thick as a vomit, choking her. She faltered: ‘My husband can show you the rest of the house—if you want to wait for him. He’ll be back any minute; any second. He never leaves me alone here after dark.’ And she blurted out: ‘There’s a man… He rings me up…’ She felt his eyes upon her, direct, appraising. ‘He says filthy things. Obscene.’

  He stood very quiet. He said at last: ‘Yes, I thought you’d rumbled me. Well—you’re right: it’s me. And about your husband—that isn’t true, is it? He won’t be back till late. I was outside the window, I heard you talking to him oh the ’phone.’ He had gone very pale, his broad, solid, pleasant face wore suddenly a grey, dead look. He explained, almost apologetically: ‘I’ve been spying on your house, you see. Waiting for the chance.’

  ‘The chance?’ she stammered. ‘The chance?’

  He stood there with that dreadful grey look, a sort of blank look as though he spoke from another world; motionless, except when now and again his thick white hands gave a sudden little twitch. ‘I can’t help myself,’ he said. ‘This ringing up and all. It’s disgusting, I know; afterwards I feel ashamed. But I can’t help it. It’s a sort of sickness, I suppose.’ He moved in a little from the doorway, came to the end of the big, scrubbed wooden kitchen table; stood there with it between them. She protested, as though with words she might stem his advance, might fend off for a little while longer the horror to come: ‘But why me? Why me? I’m not some young, pretty girl.’

  ‘It’s not personal,’ he said; almost as though that might bring some reassurance. And he explained it. ‘I just look them up in the telephone book. Different places, different counties, even; I couldn’t do it too near home. My job takes me about a bit and that helps. It’s more the house at first, really.’

  ‘The house?’

  ‘Remote houses, hidden away places, like this. I
’ve got to be careful, you see, haven’t I?—I wouldn’t want to get caught. I find a good house and who lives in it; and then I drive over and ring up from some call box, locally. After that, it depends how they react. Sometimes they’re cool, they just say, ‘Wou’re mad,” and ring off. That kind I don’t bother with any more. But if they’re upset and disgusted—well, I’m afraid it’s better then.’ He looked down at his hands, fisted, white and bulging, on the table before him. ‘Perhaps I am mad. It’s dreadful, really. But when it comes on—well, it’s like I said, like a drug or something, I can’t resist it. And that’s why I have to be careful, I mustn’t let myself be caught. I couldn’t stand prison. What would I do, locked away, if a fit came on me? I really would go mad then.’

  She grasped at a faint hope. ‘The police know about you. We told them about the calls.’

  ‘They can’t do a thing,’ he said. ‘Not unless they was to tap the line day and night. And you’re not the only one. I keep several going at a time, just for safety’s sake; well, to keep the cops confused, you see.’ He was silent for a moment, withdrawn from the present, musing. ‘They nearly did get me once, but that was different. That time I killed the poor girl.’

  She gave a little jerked out, chopped off scream, bunching her fingers against her mouth. ‘Oh, no! Oh, no!’

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ he said, unhappily. ‘I didn’t want to. In fact, that part I didn’t enjoy at all, I was horrified. Such a pretty young thing, she was. I’d been ringing her up: like you say, filthy, obscene, I don’t know what makes me do it, I feel bad about it afterwards…’

  ‘Couldn’t you have treatment or something? Couldn’t you get help? Nowadays, they’re understanding.’

  ‘Yes, I know, and I wish I could,’ he said. ‘I honestly do wish it. But—how can I now? It would mean giving myself up; and there’s too much against me. I mean, first they’d have me on a murder charge, over that poor girl.’ He looked at her, almost imploringly. ‘If only they wouldn’t struggle, I wouldn’t hurt them. I don’t mean to hurt them but I’m—strong. And this girl, you see—I went to see her, I pretended I’d lived in the house once, like I did with you. I talked to her, like I’m talking to you; I explained it. But… Well, she wouldn’t—and I suppose it’s dreadful but it’s the struggle I like.’ He began to move, sidling towards her round the table, slowly and quietly, thick fingers white-tipped and spatulate, pressed along the wooden edge.