by John Wyndham
I could see Mary’s fingers fidgeting, but her mask of impersonal interest remained unaltered. I said:
‘I think I understand what you mean, Matthew. You sort of hand over to Chocky. But I should think that feels a bit funny, doesn’t it?’
‘Only the first time or two. Then I felt a bit like – well, no brakes. But after that it gets more like…’ He paused for some moments searching with furrowed brow for a simile. His expression cleared slightly, ‘… it gets more like riding a bicycle, no hands.’ He frowned again, and amended: ‘Only not quite, because it’s Chocky doing the steering, not me – sort of difficult to explain,’ he added apologetically.
I could appreciate that it would be. More to give Mary some reassurance than on my own account I asked:
‘I suppose it doesn’t ever happen when you don’t want it to? By accident, I mean?’
Matthew shook his head emphatically.
‘Oh no. I have to make it happen by thinking of nothing. Only now I don’t have to keep on thinking of nothing all the time it’s happening. The last few times I could watch my hands doing the pictures – so all the real doing them is mine. It’s just the seeing what to do that isn’t.’
‘Yes, dear,’ Mary said. ‘We understand that, but…’ she hesitated, searching for a gentle way to make her point, ‘… but do you think it is a good thing to do?’
Matthew glanced at the pictures.
‘I think so, Mummy. They’re much better pictures than I do, when they’re all mine – even if they do look a bit funny,’ he admitted candidly.
‘That wasn’t quite what I…’ Mary began. Then she changed her mind, and looked at the clock.
‘It’s getting late,’ she said, with a glance at me.
‘That’s right. It is,’ I backed her up. ‘But just before you go, Matthew, have you shown these to anyone else?’
‘Well, not really shown,’ he said. ‘Miss Soames came in one day, just after I’d done that one.’ He pointed to the view of the play-ground through the window. ‘She said whose was it, which was a bit awkward because I couldn’t pretend it was anyone else’s, so I had to say it was mine, and she looked at me, the way people do when they don’t believe you. Then she looked at the picture, and then back again at me. “All right”, she said, “let’s see you do a – a racing car, at speed”. So then I had to explain that I couldn’t do things that I couldn’t see – I meant that Chocky couldn’t see for me, but I couldn’t tell her that. And she looked at me hard again, and said: “Very well, what about the view through the other window?”
‘So I turned the easel round, and did that. She took it off the board and stared at it for a long time, then she looked at me very queerly, and said did I mind if she kept it? I couldn’t very well say I did, so I said no, and, please, could I go now? And she nodded, and went on staring at it.’
‘It’s funny she said nothing about it in your report,’ I told him.
‘Oh, it was right at the end of term; after reports,’ he explained.
I felt a premonitory twinge of misgiving, but there was nothing to be done about it. Besides, it was, as Mary had said, getting late.
‘Well, time you were off to bed now, Matthew,’ I said. ‘Thanks for telling us about the pictures. May we keep them down here a bit so that we can look at them again?’
‘All right, but please don’t lose them,’ he agreed. His eye fell on the famine-victim portrait. ‘That isn’t a bit like you, Daddy. It really isn’t,’ he assured me. Then he said his good nights, and ran away upstairs.
We sat and looked at one another.
Mary’s eyes slowly brimmed with tears.
‘Oh, David. He was such a lovely little boy…’
Later, when she was calmer, she said:
‘I’m afraid for him, David. This – this whatever it is, is getting more real to him. He’s beginning to let it take control of him.… I’m afraid for him…’
I shook my head.
‘I’m sure you’ve got it wrong. It isn’t like that, you know. He was pretty emphatic that he is the one who decides when and whether it shall happen at all,’ I pointed out.
‘Naturally he’d think that,’ she said.
I went on doing my best to soothe her anxiety. It didn’t, I pointed out, make Matthew unhappy, not a bit. He’d had the sense not to tell any of his young friends about it, so there was no persecution element. Polly did not believe in Chocky at all, and preferred to regard the whole thing as a kind of forgery of Piff. He really was just an ordinary boy of his age – plus something he chose to call Chocky, and we really did not have a scrap of evidence that this Chocky was doing him any harm at all…
I might just as well have saved my breath…
I looked in on him on my way to bed. He was asleep, with the light still on. A book he had been reading lay as it had dropped from his hands, face down on his chest. I read the title, then bent a little closer to make sure I had read aright. It was my copy of Lewis Mumford’s Living in Cities. I picked it up, and in doing so woke Matthew.
‘I don’t wonder you fell asleep. A bit heavy for bedtime reading, isn’t it?’
‘Pretty boring,’ he acknowledged. ‘But Chocky thinks it’s interesting – the parts of it I can understand for her.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well… well, time to go to sleep now. Good night, old man.’
‘Good night, Daddy.’
Seven
For our holiday that summer we took a cottage jointly with Alan and Phyl Froome. They had married a couple of years after we did, and had two children, Emma and Paul, much of an age with our own. It was an arrangement, we thought, which would give the adults opportunities to go off duty for a bit, and have some holiday themselves.
The place was Bontgoch, a village on an estuary in North Wales, where I had enjoyed several holidays in my own childhood. In those days it was simply a small grey village with a few larger houses outside it. During summer it had a scatter of visitors who were for the most part the children and grandchildren of the owners of the larger houses; they affected it very little. Since then it has been discovered, and bungalows now dot the shoreline and the lower slopes about the village. Their occupants are mostly seasonal, transitory, or retired, and during the milder months the majority are addicted to messing about with boats. I had not expected that. Bontgoch is by no means ideally situated for it, for the tides run fast in the estuary and navigation can be tricky; but the crowded state of the small boat world with its five-year queues for moorings in many more favoured waters had overridden the disadvantages. Now it even had a painted-up shed with a bar at one end called the Yacht Club.
We were, perhaps, a little odd in not having even one boat amongst us, but for all that we enjoyed it. The sands are still there for children to dabble around on at low tide and catch shrimps and flat fish. So, too, on both sides of the estuary are the not-too-steep mountains on which one can climb and explore the pockings of old workings fascinatingly reputed to have been gold mines. It was good to be able to go off in the car for the day and leave Phyl and Alan in charge of the children – and quite good, too, to take charge when it was their turn for freedom. Everything was, in fact, a great success – until the Monday of the second week…
On that day it was Mary and I who were free. We drove almost off the map by very minor roads, left the car, walked along a hillside and picnicked by a stream with the whole Irish Sea spread out below us. In the evening we had a good dinner at a roadside hotel and dawdled back to Bontgoch about ten o’clock. We paused a moment by the gate to admire the serenity of a superb sunset, and then went up the path.
One had only to set foot on the threshold of the cottage to know that something had gone wrong. Mary sensed it at once. She stared at Phyl.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘What’s happened?’
‘It’s all right, Mary. It’s quite all right,’ Phyl said. ‘They’re perfectly safe and sound. Both upstairs in bed now. Nothing to worry about.’
‘What
happened?’ Mary said again.
‘They fell in the river. But they’re quite all right.’
She and Mary went upstairs. Alan reached for a bottle and poured a couple of whiskies.
‘What’s been going on?’ I said as he held a glass towards me.
‘It’s quite all right now, as Phyl said,’ he assured me. ‘Near thing, though. Shook us to our foundations, I can tell you. Not stopped sweating yet.’ He pressed a handkerchief to his brow as if in evidence, said ‘Cheers’, and downed half his glass.
I looked at him, and looked at the bottle. It had been untouched that morning, now it was three-quarters empty.
‘But what happened?’ I insisted.
He put down his glass, shook his head, and explained:
‘Pure accident, old man. They were all four of them playing around on that rickety landing stage. The tide was a bit past the turn, and running out fast. That hulking motor-boat of Bill Weston’s was moored about fifty yards up-stream. According to old Evans who saw the whole thing its mooring line must have broken. He says it came down too fast to be dragging. Anyway, it socked the landing-stage at full tilt, and the far end of the damned thing collapsed. My two happened to be standing back a bit, so they were only knocked down, but your two went straight into the water…’
He paused, exasperatingly. But for the repeated assurances that they were quite all right I could have shaken him. He took another swig at his glass.
‘Well, you know the way it runs, on the ebb. They were yards away in a few seconds. At first Evans thought they were done for, then he saw Matthew strike out towards Polly. He didn’t see any more because he started haring off to the Yacht Club to give the alarm.
‘It was Colonel Summers who went after them, but even with that fast motor-boat of his they were well over a mile downstream before he found them. Matthew was still supporting Polly.
‘The old boy was tremendously impressed. He says that if he ever saw anything that deserved a medal, that did; and he’s going to make sure Matthew gets one.
‘We were in here when it happened. My two never thought to tell us until they had seen the Colonel’s boat chase off after them. Not that we could have done anything. But lord-oh-lord, waiting for him to come back.… I hope I never have to spend an hour like that again…
‘Anyway, it came out all right, thank God – and thanks to young Matthew. There’s no doubt at all your Polly’d have been a goner, but for him. Damn good show, and if the Colonel needs any backing for that medal idea, he’ll certainly get mine. Here’s all the best to him: he deserves it.’
Alan finished off his drink at a gulp, and reached for the bottle again.
I finished mine, too. I felt I needed it.
Everybody ought to be able to swim. It had worried me at times for the last year or two that Matthew could never succeed in swimming more than three consecutive strokes…
I was shushed away from the room Polly was sharing with young Emma.
‘She’s fast asleep,’ Mary told me. ‘She’s got a nasty bruise on her right shoulder. We think she must have hit the boat as she fell. Otherwise she seems only tired out. Oh, David…’
‘It’s all right, darling. It’s over now.’
‘Yes, thank God. Phyl told me all about it. But, David, how did Matthew do it…?’
I looked in on Matthew. The light was still on. He was lying on his back staring at it. I had time to catch his worried look before he turned his head and saw me.
‘Hullo, Daddy,’ he said.
Momentarily he looked pleased, and relieved, but the anxious expression soon came back.
‘Hullo, Matthew. How are you feeling?’ I asked.
‘All right,’ he told me. ‘We got jolly cold, but Auntie Phyl made us have a hot bath.’
I nodded. He certainly looked all right now.
‘I’ve been hearing great things about you, Matthew,’ I told him.
His look of worry grew more marked. His eyes dropped, and his fingers began twisting at the sheet. He looked up again.
‘It’s not true, Daddy,’ he said, with great earnestness.
‘It did rather make me wonder,’ I admitted. ‘A few days ago you couldn’t swim.’
‘I know, Daddy, but…’ Again he twisted at the sheet. ‘… but Chocky can…’ he finished, looking up at me uncertainly.
I tried to show nothing but sympathetic interest.
‘Tell me about it,’ I suggested.
Matthew looked a little relieved.
‘Well, it all happened terribly quickly. I saw the boat just going to hit, and then I was in the water. I tried to swim, but I was awfully frightened because I knew it would be no good, and I thought I was going to be drowned. Then Chocky told me not to be a fool, and not to panic. She was sort of fierce. She sounded rather like Mr Caffer when he gets angry in class, only more. I’ve never known her get like that before, and I was so surprised that I stopped panicking. Then she said: “Now think of nothing, like you do with painting.” So I tried. And then I was swimming.…’ He frowned.’ I don’t know how, but somehow she showed my arms and legs the way to swim, just like she makes my hands go the right way to draw. So, you see, it was really her, not me that did it, Daddy.’
‘I see,’ I said. It was a memorable overstatement. Matthew went on.
‘You, and lots of other people, have shown me how to swim, Daddy, and I tried, but it kept on not happening until Chocky did it.’
‘I see,’ I lied again. I reflected for some moments while Matthew watched my face attentively.
‘I see,’ I said once more, and nodded. ‘So, of course once you found you could swim, you struck out for the shore?’
Matthew’s attentive look turned to an incredulous stare.
‘But I couldn’t do that. There was Polly. She’d fallen in, too.’
I nodded again.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There was Polly, too – that does rather seem to me to be the point…’
Matthew considered. I think he went back to those first frightened moments in the water, for he shuddered slightly. Then his face took a look of determination.
‘But it was Chocky who did it,’ he asserted, obstinately.
Alan met my eye uneasily the next morning.
‘I’m afraid I – well, it was the tension, I suppose. Waiting for that bloody boat to come back.… It seemed hours.… Not knowing whether he’d found them.… Not able to do a damn thing about it.… Bit of a reaction, I’m afraid…’
‘Forget it,’ I told him. ‘I’d have felt the same myself.’
We sat in the sun, waiting for the call to breakfast.
‘What’s getting me,’ Alan said presently, ‘is how did he do it? According to the Colonel he was still supporting her when the boat came up with them. Nearly a mile and a half, he reckons, in that fast ebb. Matthew was tired, he says, but not exhausted; And only a couple of days ago he was telling me, as if he were ashamed of it, too, that he couldn’t swim.… I tried to teach him, but he didn’t have the knack.’
‘It’s quite true. He couldn’t,’ I told him, and then, since he knew already about the Chocky problem and been responsible for bringing Landis into it, I gave him Matthew’s version of the affair. He looked at me incredulously.
‘But – well, hang it, and no disrespect to Matthew – but do you believe that?’
‘I believe that Matthew believes it – and how else can one explain it? Besides…’ I told him about the pictures. He’d not heard of them before. ‘They, somehow, make it not quite as difficult to accept, or half-accept,’ I said.
Alan became thoughtful. He lit a cigarette, and sat silently smoking it, gazing out across the estuary. At last he said:
‘If this is what it seems to be – and I can see that it’s difficult to explain it any other way – it opens up a whole new phase of this Chocky business.’
‘That’s what we thought,’ I acknowledged. ‘And poor Mary’s not at all happy about it. She’s afraid for him.’ Alan shook his hea
d.
‘I can’t see that she needs to be. After all, whether Chocky exists or not – and Landis, incidently seems to think that in some way she does – but whether she does, or not, it is because Matthew believes she does that your two are alive today. Does Mary realize that? It ought to help her a bit.’
‘It ought,’ I agreed. ‘But – oh, I don’t know – why do people always find it easier to believe in evil spirits than in good ones?’
‘Self-preservation?’ he suggested. ‘It’s safer to treat the unknown as inimical until it has proved itself. Hence the instinctive opposition to change. Perhaps this Chocky is in the process of proving itself. It doesn’t seem to have made a bad start, either.’
I nodded. I said:
‘I wish Mary could see it that way – but she worries…’
Matthew was late for lunch. I went in search of him. and found him sitting on the remains of the wrecked jetty, talking to a good-looking, fair-haired young man I did not remember seeing before. Matthew looked up as I approached.
‘Hullo, Daddy – oh, is it late?’
‘It is,’ I told him.
The young man got up, politely.
‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m afraid it’s my fault for keeping him, I should have thought. I was just asking him about his exploit: he’s quite a local hero, you know, after yesterday.’
‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but he still has to eat. Come along now, Matthew.’
‘Good-bye,’ Matthew said to the young man, and we turned back to the cottage.
‘Who was that?’ I asked.