Moon Eyes

by Poole, Josephine

  Every spring Mrs. Beer cleaned it out: otherwise Kate was assumed to be old enough to keep it clean and tidy, so dust lay undisturbed over the furniture. There was no shade for the low-powered electric bulb that dangled from a long black cord pinned across the ceiling, and no carpet on the brown linoleum, bar a hairy maroon mat not comfortable to bare feet. A large green silk curtain (with rings still attached), a remnant from her parents' Chelsea days, was in use as a counterpane: half the time her bed was unmade beneath it She kept her clothes in and out of a dark chest of drawers with several knobs missing, while her school dress and coat hung in a wardrobe whose door was always ajar as its catch was uncertain and she did not like the way it would slowly creak open, for no apparent reason and sometimes in the middle of the night.

  A rather bad portrait of her mother by her father hung on one wall, and the mantelpiece was littered with Thomas's cutouts. Various old shoes, a skirt and a couple of holey jerseys lay about, and she had angrily stuffed a pair of jeans that did not fit her any more into the fireplace. Under her mattress she kept two black notebooks, in which she was writing alternative beginnings for a historical novel. Books lay in heaps all around her bed, books given, bought and borrowed, magazines lent by other girls (she seldom had the extra fourpence to buy her own), and volumes two, three and seven of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  There was a clever woman living near Scoop who gave private coaching for public examinations to a few pupils, so Kate did not have to go to an ordinary school. She was supposed to work hard during the holidays, but this Easter she had not even finished reading The Ancient Mariner. And lessons started again tomorrow.

  Now it was Sunday. Kate rolled out of bed, stretching and yawning -- there was a large hole under the arm of her pajama jacket.

  But Mrs. Beer was already at work. When Kate and Thomas came down at last, and galloped, piggyback, into the kitchen, they could hear the sizzle of frying and there was the blue steam and smell of cooked breakfast. The yellow cat sat in front of the stove, cleaning himself with care.

  Afterwards there was just time to go into the garden and have a look at the statue before they went to church. It was shiny outside and there were little gusts of wind, and some clouds small and gay in the sky. She pushed between the bushes and jumped the steps three in one, and stopped with a jerk on the edge of the pool.

  On the other side of the water a large black dog stood staring at her.

  She was not frightened, but it is always startling to see something unexpected. In fact she liked dogs, especially big ones, and she went round to talk to it. What struck her immediately was the color of its eyes. Most dogs have brown or yellow ones. These were very pale, whether gray or blue it was hard to tell almost white, in fact, and gave it an odd, blind look. However, it was not blind, and it did not want to be talked to: it turned back up the bank and slipped through the azalea bushes quite silently. Kate was reminded of the one she had seen in the road last night: it was remarkably silent for such a large dog.

  The writing was still around the statue. “Perhaps the dog did it “ she said to herself, smiling -- but some of the kick had gone out of this morning. “'First we'll wait, then we'll whistle, then we'll dance together,' “ she whispered, and she had the strangest feeling that if she turned her head sharply she would catch somebody watching her.

  Anyway, now she knew why Thomas had torn the picture out of Father's book. He had seen that dog in their garden, and hadn't liked it Although it was not really like a retriever, which has a soft mouth even when there is a bird in it. This dog had more of a wolfish look it would not carry birds, it would eat them.

  She would get Mr. Beer to repair the fence between their garden and the woods.

  In the valley the sky could change in a quarter of an hour. The little gusts of wind had strengthened while she was by the pool, and she must hurry or they would be late for church. Thomas was waiting by the gate; she rushed into the house, snatched a battered felt hat and crammed it on her head. Together they ran down the hill, Thomas gasping, his legs working madly to keep up with hers. The second bell stopped, just as they reached the gate and pulled up to walk soberly through the churchyard, and they crept into the back pew feeling that the whole congregation could hear them panting.

  It was good to sit at the back of the church. Thomas was quiet then, he liked to look along the length of the nave with its stout pillars, each of which was decorated with an angel playing a different musical instrument. (One of them had a bugle, which always seemed to Kate quite out of place in a celestial choir.) And the wooden ceiling was carved with fruit and flowers, and birds and animals poking their heads between the leaves: he would stand with his head back, staring at it for minutes on end. As it was difficult to hear the sermon from the back of the church, Kate did not feel obliged to listen to it; instead, she had a complete and guiltless view of everyone else. And she felt free to sing, for it did not matter so much if she missed a high note, or started accidentally on a verse that the organist had decided to omit.

  Thomas sidled into the pew, having tripped, as he always did, over the little step at the end. He turned around to have a good stare at the font, with its carved wooden lid suspended on three chains from the arch above, and at the giant marble plaque to the first Sir Henry Plentipot, embellished with draperies and an urn. Kate was meanwhile observing Walter Wyatt, old Farmer Wyatt's prosperous son: he was broad, with a rounded red neck in two folds above his collar, and his clothes creaked when he moved. His wife was thin and sandy, and made her own hats; they had three daughters and a fat little boy, and only just fitted into their pew. Across the nave from them sat Mr. Morris of the shop, his sister, his fat fair wife, and son who was two years old and regularly, every sermon, dodged down the aisle and had to be hauled back by his jacket.

  The Reverend Hughes was a little Welshman with black hair and a red face, who raised his voice to a shout at the end of his sentences. When he read the lessons only his head could be seen above the lectern, which was rather high, and had been carved into the shape of an eagle by Kate's grandfather. This morning the sun slanted through the arched windows and touched up the flowery altar behind him to the brilliance of stained glass.

  The sermon was about sin and the devil. “Little children, let no man deceive you,” read Mr. Hughes in a terrible voice, making it sound as though the devil waited, just outside the church, to pounce on whom he could; but Mr. and Mrs. Morris and Walter Wyatt sat comfortably in their folded flesh and thought of this and that; while Kate dreamed with her prayer book open on her knee at the Table of Kindred and Affinity. It reminded her that her grandfather had made a second marriage, to a woman also making her second marriage, and of what Mrs. Beer had said about their not being able to get on, and dividing the house in two. There was a tablet to her grandfather in this church, and to her grandmother; but none to the second wife. She wondered where she had gone, and what became of her and her daughter. The ends of Mr. Hughes's sentences impinged upon his thoughts: “. . . like a two-edged SWORD! … fall into SIN! … deception is TERRIBLE!” and she heard, and agreed, that sin and evil were dreadful; but so often seemed to happen by accident, as when she lost her temper with Thomas because he was being exasperating. And surely no one believed in the devil now -- a black, horned thing. Mr. Hughes was too dramatic; he exaggerated. The sun shone through the colored window above them, through the cloak that St. Martin was giving to the beggar, and lighted scarlet stains on Thomas's bare knees.

  A spider had made his web in the bottom right-hand corner of this particular window, and when Kate had exhausted the possibilities of the Table of Affinity she watched him creeping on the edge of it, quite remote in his own important world of sticky web and colored glass. There were some loose crumbs of mortar or lead just below him, and she wondered whether, in his labor, he would knock one of them to the floor before the end of the sermon. She found herself waiting for him to do it as anxiously as though she had staked a large amount of money on him; and
in fact, just before the sermon ended, one of his weaving legs touched a crumb and sent it rolling down the sloping sill, onto the floor. When they all knelt for the last prayers she could not resist picking it up, and put it in her pocket. It was a scraping of lead from the church window.

  When they got outside the sun had gone, quite swallowed by thick cloud that hung over the valley like dirty wool, and made the congregation glance nervously over the tombstones, calculating whether they would make it home before it started to pour. “Hello Kate; how's Kate? Hello, Thomas; how's Thomas?” Mr. Wyatt bounced out at them. “Now then, ladies and gents, who's for a lift home?” and he stuffed the Morrises into his shiny blue car for a ride to the top of the hill. Kate and Thomas held hands and began to run, but the rain started almost at once; so they walked and kicked up the puddles because their shoes were wet anyway, and the water ran down inside the hedges and along the edges of the road with a scum of dry dust on it, and down their faces and onto their lips in faintly salty streams.

  “You'd a long sermon, then,” remarked Mrs. Beer. She was straining greens in the sink, chopping and pressing and sending a little pale green water down the drain.

  “Yes, or else lunch is early,” said Kate, throwing her hat at the cat, who got up and stretched, looked at her with contemptuous yellow eyes, and stalked slowly from the room, dignity in every hair.

  “Just a bit, because Father's coming down for his, to get it here. That's something I can’t do, two Sunday lunches tumultuously.”

  “No one could,” said Kate. “Do you think Mr. Beer would have a look at one of our fences for me?”

  “Yes, I will,” said Mr. Beer himself, making her jump: there he stood in the open doorway and he might have been a black man with what light there was behind him.

  “Hurry on, then, because it'll be lunch in five minutes: or will you wait till after?” But they had already gone, so she put things on the oven, clicking her tongue and complaining to Thomas, who had lifted up a corner of the linoleum and was drawing with a stick on the dusty flagstone underneath.

  Mr. Beer stopped between the rhododendron bushes to light his pipe. The first pink flowers had unrolled in the rain, which hung on their curly petals and fell secretly among their dark, shiny leaves. Kate wondered whether the black dog would be standing again by the pool; but it was not.

  “There must be a hole in this fence behind here,” she explained, “because a huge dog got in this morning. I think something ought to be done about it: it'll pull the fence right down if it goes on, and Thomas doesn't like it.”

  Mr. Beer was a man of few words. He climbed up the bank between the azalea bushes and was soon lost behind branches of foliage, but she could hear twigs snapping as he worked his way slowly along the fence that divided their place from the woods. At last he reappeared by the rockery, and came carefully down with bent knees and earthy boots.

  “Could you repair it, Mr. Beer, possibly, please?”

  He dusted various leaves and twigs from his jacket, scraped his boots on the edge of the pool and finally replied, with deliberation :

  “There's no holes in it.”

  “But there must be, That dog must have got in somehow.”

  “Did you see it, then?”

  “Yes, this morning, I told you, it was standing here, by the pool.”

  Mr. Beer looked at her with his small gray eyes. She could not tell whether or not he believed what she said.

  “Well, there's no hole in the fence. Couldn't possibly have got in that way, it's rotten enough, but all held up by brambles, tangled together: couldn't possibly have got in by there.”

  “Then it must have jumped down the wall, from the common.”

  “What sort of a dog, would You say?”

  “About like a Labrador, black, but with more of an Alsatian's head, pricked ears like an Alsatian’s, and the same sharp nose, and very pale eyes.”

  “Was it blind?”

  “No, it wasn't, for it found its way up among those bushes without making any noise.”

  “'Well, should have left some marks behind it, anyway.”

  “No,” said Kate, remembering. “The ground was quite dry, I saw it before we went to church, before it rained.”

  “Then it's a mystery,” said the gardener, straightening up and smiling at her.

  “And there's another,” and she pushed past him, and pointed at the statue. “Who did that writing, do you think?”

  He shoved his cap to the back of his head, “What's it say?”

  “'First we'll wait, then we'll whistle . . . then we'll dance together.” She spoke hesitantly, as though she did not know these words by heart. Repeating them, she had the oddest feeling that she was agreeing to something almost inviting something. She felt again that she was watched.

  “That's not sense.”

  “No. But who did it? Can you think of anyone who would go to all that trouble, stand in our pool and get their feet wet, to write that sort of nonsense?”

  He scratched his head, staring at the statue of the little boy who looked down at nothing in his cupped hands. “Young Wyatt's son, maybe or one of the boys from down Long Lead. Looks like a practical joke to me.”

  “It's a funny thing to write, to be a joke. Besides, they've never been here, they don't know about our pool.”

  “Well, someone must've.”

  “Yes.” And she felt cold in her middle, as though a piece of ice was gradually getting bigger and heavier there.

  It rained again. Drops spattered between the overhanging boughs, spotting the water. They heard Mrs. Beer howling from the house: “Lunch's ready! Lunch's ready!” But first they looked in the kitchen garden.

  “This is the easiest way down,” said Mr. Beer, leading the way along the path, under the wall that held back the common. In the far corner was the compost, which he nurtured with pride. Every possible scrap he added to it, so that now it made a sizable heap. Certainly it was an easier jump down onto it from the hill above. “Look here.”

  Some lawn clippings had been scattered about, and there were marks about the heap that might have been the prints of a large dog.

  “But it went up from the pool into the azalea bushes.”

  “Very likely, but couldn't find a way out, so got out later the same way it came in.”

  “But can you think of a way to keep it out?”

  “Oh yes, I’ll put up a bit of fencing along the top of the wall. I'll not have beasts mauling my heap.” They went back to the house.

  It was a wet afternoon. The Beers and Thomas sat in the kitchen, and Kate went to her room. She read the whole of The Ancient Mariner at top speed, and made some haphazard notes under the title, “English Narrative Poetry in the Nineteenth Century"; then, balanced somewhat uncomfortably on the narrow windowsill, leafed through several copies of Big Girl's Weekly, until her head ached from reading small print. She suddenly longed for a cup of tea, and ran downstairs.

  “We had ours an hour ago,” said Mrs. Beer, scarlet in the heat of the stove. “Put the kettle on again, though, if you want more. I can always fill up the pot with hot water.”

  “No I might as well go for a walk.”

  “Well, put on a mac, it's pouring, you'll get your death.”

  “I'm all right, it'll stop in a minute,” and Kate, who was usually a stolid, even-tempered girl, bounced out into the garden feeling thoroughly rubbed up the wrong way.

  She went down the hill, past the church and a couple of bungalows, over the little hump bridge, and on up the hill opposite, bearing right through Long Lead. The rain was not hard, but penetrating: however she did not mind getting wet, she did not care, at that moment, whether she got a cold. She splashed in and out of puddles, feeling the water soaking up through her sandals. But gradually it slackened and stopped, the clouds parted, and pale yellow sunlight fell over the valley. The houses which a moment ago had hunched under the rain now seemed to expand, to soak up warmth, and wet flowers held up their heads to the sun. Esp
ecially brilliant was a long field of buttercups, where a magpie hopped about with a piece of bread in his beak. “One for sorrow” Kate reminded herself, miserably; but just then a second magpie few down to fight over the bread. She walked on. Here in the same field were some apple trees that had once made an orchard to the ruined cottage where Mrs. Beer said her grandfather's second wife had lived after she left him. Now it was a dismal place, with no glass left and no door; a giant ivy plant had grown up in what must have been the living room; and pushing through the ceiling and room above, hung down over the tattered thatch. The fence that had separated the house and orchard from the field had been broken down or stolen; half a dozen bullocks stood under the apple trees, and planks had been nailed across the open doorway to prevent them from getting into the house where they might have been hurt. One of them was trying to break off a low bough of apple, gnawing it, and licking it with his long tongue. She leaned over what had been the front gate, wondering again what had become of the second Mrs. Pawley and her daughter.

  And the sky cleared, as though the sun made two invisible hands to push back the clouds. She walked slowly back to Hurst Camber. It was time her father came home, she was tired of being alone with Thomas. She almost looked forward to school tomorrow.

  As she came down the hill before the bridge, she saw people coming out of evening prayers at the chapel: she recognized Mrs. Beer's broad back in a gray plastic mackintosh. She had stayed out longer than she realized; she ran a few yards, and caught up with Mrs. Beer.

  “I left Father putting Thomas to bed,” said the good woman, “and now, I must tell you, you'll never guess who I met on the bridge as I was coming to chapel!”

  “'Who?”

  “Guess! Somebody I was telling you about only yesterday, what you would call one of my promotions.”

  “Father!” said Kate, in a spurt of hope.

  “No -- guess again. Someone I never would have thought to see.”