The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories Read online

  ROBERT AICKMAN

  THE LATE BREAKFASTERS

  and other strange stories

  With a new introduction by

  PHILIP CHALLINOR

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories by Robert Aickman

  First Valancourt Books edition 2016

  The Late Breakfasters was originally published by Gollancz in 1964

  ‘My Poor Friend’, ‘The Visiting Star’, ‘Larger Than Oneself’ and ‘A Roman Question’ originally appeared in Powers of Darkness, published by Collins in 1966

  ‘Mark Ingestre: The Customer’s Tale’ originally appeared in Dark Voices, edited by Kirby McCauley, published by Viking in 1980

  ‘Rosamund’s Bower’ originally appeared in Night Voices: Strange Stories, published by Gollancz in 1985

  Copyright © Robert Aickman, 1964, 1966, 1980, 1985

  This compilation copyright © The Estate of Robert Aickman, 2016

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

  Cover by M. S. Corley

  INTRODUCTION

  A few weeks after Robert Aickman’s birth, the end of the world began. He never stopped mourning its demise: the sense of loss is central to his fiction, along with the sense of a vast immanent reality full of deathly, dehumanising peril – and, for an ambiguously lucky few, erotic or awe-inspiring mystery.

  “I do not regard my work as ‘fantasy’ at all, except, perhaps, for commercial purposes,” Aickman wrote. “I try to depict the world as I see it; sometimes artistically exaggerating no doubt.” His style is a model of clarity, elegance and understated wit, but his plots often operate on a level that confounds common sense. He can glide over what most of us would consider major points, or skip them altogether for his readers to contrive as best they can, while dwelling on seemingly incidental details that are home, as it eventually turns out, to some rather powerful devils.

  He was born in June 1914 on the fringes of the English aristocracy, to hopelessly mismatched parents: “the doomed couple” he calls them in his autobiography. At the time of their marriage, Aickman’s father was a spoilt child of fifty-three; his mother, thirty years younger, discovered her husband’s age only at the signing of the register. Impractical, inconsiderate, utterly self-centred and prone to daily tantrums, the father was an object of dread to his son and festering resentment from his wife. The specific doom in question was the consummation, at which Robert Aickman was presumably conceived, since his mother hinted strongly that the ordeal was never repeated.

  In August the Great War broke out: “Nothing that has happened in modern history, perhaps in all history,” asserted Aickman, “has approached in importance the strange débâcle of 1914, when man ceased to run his own world.” Whatever the traumas of his childhood, Aickman believed that he had lived through the end of a golden age, and that the mechanisation and social levelling of twentieth-century Britain represented a disastrous shrinking and coarsening of everything he valued most. Many of his stories, and almost every page of his autobiography, resound with lamentations for the solidity and largeness of the world that was lost, and the hollowed-out pettiness of the one he was forced to inhabit. His characters lose their innocence, their illusions, their dreams, their realities and, not infrequently, themselves; only a select few are able to fill the resulting void with a larger and deeper reality.

  Aickman published reviews and magazine articles from the mid-1940s, but he emerged as a fiction writer relatively late in life, and the style and quality of his work remain remarkably consistent throughout his career. Three stories appeared in a 1951 collection, We Are for the Dark, alongside three by Elizabeth Jane Howard; Aickman’s first solo collection, Dark Entries, did not come out until thirteen years later. It included one of his early masterpieces, “Ringing the Changes”, which had so impressed a literary agent and publishing executive named Herbert van Thal that he wrote to Aickman asking to see more. With van Thal’s encouragement, Aickman also produced his only published full-length novel, The Late Breakfasters (1964), which for many years has been virtually impossible to obtain. Four of the stories in the present book appeared in Aickman’s next collection, Powers of Darkness (1966); the other two are from the posthumous Night Voices (1985). Between 1968 and his death in 1981, Aickman produced five more collections, almost all subtitled “Strange Stories” or “Strange Tales”: one comprising reprinted and revised stories and the rest made up of original works. A short novel, The Model, appeared in 1987.

  To those who have read his stories and novellas, Aickman’s novel may seem a bit anomalous. The Late Breakfasters begins as a rather old-fashioned comedy of manners featuring eight or ten vivid eccentrics in a country house, and develops into a largely amiable Bildungsroman with an undertone of grief, a few hints of the fantastic and various side-swipes at the minions of modernity. Despite his otherworldly reputation, Aickman’s dislike of his times often makes for direct and pungent social comment: his narrative voice and his characters’ remarks frequently express the author’s own opinions as set forth in his essays and autobiography, and The Late Breakfasters repeatedly contrasts the carefree, whimsically kindly upper classes with the coarse common ruck, who substitute resentment for generosity and sloganeering for conversation. The novel shares with Aickman’s other work his urbane and brilliantly suggestive style, his typically comic or symbolic character names, and the exemplary strangeness of such episodes as the lovers’ separation at the end of Part One, and the old aristocrat’s death in Part Two. At the old aristocrat’s mansion, the product of a mute dwarf’s labours echoes the name of the hostess at the house-party which opens the book; and, in accordance with the best Aickman logic, it is at this mansion that the heroine at last discovers someone who may have knowledge of her lost true love.

  Aickman’s satire is often delightfully on target. The passage of half a century has done little to dull his dissection of Britain’s political administration in the early pages of “My Poor Friend”, whatever one may think about the suggested solution of a return to hereditary aristocracy. Presumably drawn from long and tedious experience as chair of the Inland Waterways Association, a society which he helped to found for the preservation of Britain’s canals, Aickman’s tale conveys the grinding futility of parliamentary procedure – verbose, labyrinthine and interminable – without once becoming boring to read. Meanwhile, behind the ludicrous and frustrating foreground, the narrator glimpses the half-visible horrors of a father haunted and humiliated by the little angels he has spawned.Although he proclaimed that the ghost story “need offer neither logic nor moral”, Aickman’s best tales operate according to a precise and intricate logic of poetic symbolism; and he certainly was not afraid to moralise. “Rosamund’s Bower” offers two morals, one at the beginning and one at the end; although it’s debatable how seriously either is meant. Still, for a writer whose subtlety and indirection are deservedly renowned and occasionally denounced, Aickman can also be remarkably heavy-handed. “Bowel Discipline, by a prominent member of the Labour party,” a throw-away line from “Larger Than Oneself”, is doubtless a concise expression of his gut feelings about the political left, but indirect and subtle it is n
ot. More fruitfully, the story attacks the varieties of ersatz spirituality, which are so grindingly trivial and mundane that not even the Devil’s own wife – herself the very soul of banality – can put up with them for long. But mystery and awe sit alongside the comedy: like several other Aickman stories, “Larger Than Oneself” climaxes in a transcendent illumination, accessible to a select few among the characters and comprehensible to even fewer.

  Aickman was an erudite and conscientious student of the weird tale, although his work is quite free of the genre box-ticking and name-dropping that now beset us. Between 1964 and 1972 he edited the first eight volumes in the paperback anthology series The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, selecting seventy-six tales by seventy-six different authors without ever relaxing his exacting standards of quality, and providing incisive and provocative introductions. He is capable of using the hoariest genre tropes, from vampires to country-house hauntings to “midnight callers” on the telephone; but always in a style uniquely his own. “Mark Ingestre: The Customer’s Tale”, one of Aickman’s last stories, employs the penny-dreadful myth of Sweeney Todd to flash a brief, sharp light on the murky sub-cellars of the brashly commercial English consciousness. “A Roman Question”, perhaps the nearest thing to a conventional ghost story in this book, is full of characteristic touches: the precise and poetic depiction of “uniform houses in dark red brick: quite large, solidly built, sparsely adorned, blackened by Birmingham”; the séance carried out with the perfectly logical aid of sugar lumps; the apparently extraneous oddity (in this case, the dead body of a horse), which later takes on a new and chilling significance.

  Besides his work for the Inland Waterways Association, Aickman chaired the London Opera Society and Balmain Productions, which administered a ballet company; he also worked as a theatre critic for a monthly journal, The Nineteenth Century and After. His fiction contains many cultural allusions, drawn not only from English and other literatures but from painting, theatre, music and architecture. Ironically enough considering Aickman’s likely opinion of the internet, such references are easier to decode today than ever before. If you don’t know your Plutarch, or have never heard of Hero and Leander, or haven’t a clue why people would joke about Griselda de Reptonville being patient, it is the work of a few minutes to find out. Aickman would almost certainly not approve – there are, he would affirm, several worlds of difference between worthwhile knowledge and Wikipedia – but it does make the textual richness of his work more accessible for those who are interested.

  Aickman claimed that “The Visiting Star” is “closely based on fact, whatever else may be surmised”. In the same essay, he wrote that a good ghost story, by transcending mechanical modernity, “can bring real joy. The reader may actually depart from it singing.” Having enticed the narrator under the earth and lost their only light, the title character in “The Visiting Star” reveals the secret of her Faustian existence and ghostly allure “because I wanted you to stop being frightened”. Her creator conceived the weird tale to be an art form related to poetry; and his own best fictions are less stories of supernatural events than stories which induce a sense of the supernatural, whether threatening, transcendental or both. Anyone can write about a ghost, but with Aickman’s work it is the tales themselves that haunt. Like all the best ghosts (and some of the best comedy), they violate the normal rules while obeying laws of their own: elusive and rigorous and infinitely strange.

  Philip Challinor

  April 2016

  Philip Challinor was born in 1969 and lives in London, England. His critical studies of Robert Aickman’s stories have appeared in Studies in Weird Fiction, All Hallows and Wormwood, and some have been collected in the Gothic Press chapbooks Akin to Poetry and Insufficient Answers. He also posts fiction, verse and assorted grumbles on a weblog, The Curmudgeon, and publishes his longer fiction at Lulu.com.

  THE LATE BREAKFASTERS

  I dedicate this book to

  Herbert van Thal

  Magician

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER I

  Griselda de Reptonville did not know what love was until she joined one of Mrs. Hatch’s famous house parties at Beams, and there met Leander. Her brief and blighted association with Leander­ led rapidly, as a reaction, to her marrying the unsatisfactory Geoffrey Kynaston. After Kynaston’s death, she took up with an unpopular baronet, and lived with him very happily. There may have been one or two earlier episodes, none of them important. She is now twenty-­five and has never wholly forgotten Leander; their ecstatic community of thought and feeling is something she fears she has lost for ever. She knew its worth at the time; she never for a single moment doubted it: but society was inevitably too strong for her, and ate her improper passion at a gulp. Leander doubtless never expected anything else, and therefore possibly suffered less, but of this there is little record.

  A woman of less spirit would have blushed at being named de Reptonville; wearied of being called patient, and of the remarkably general assumption that by reason of her name she would always be so. De Reptonville, when Mr. Repton assumed the name (early in the nineteenth century), was quizzed as the apogee of unwarranted pretentiousness; now it is written off as a meaningless relic of conquest feudalism. Griselda, however, merely smiled sometimes when she looked at her visiting card, newly printed in flawless italics by Parkin and Gotto. The repetitive jokes about her patience only led her to think that in the absurdity of human nature lies much of its charm.

  Beams was not an enormous house but it was approached from the insanely noisy main road through Hodley village by a drive two miles long. There had been a car to meet her and the other guests at Hodley railway station; but the season had called to Griselda, and the other guests alarmed her. She had sent on her suitcase, and was now following on foot. As the weather looked settled for an hour or so, her jacket and handbag had gone on with the luggage: she was now wonderfully unencumbered. She wore a white silk blouse, a short skirt of black linen, and substantial shoes. She walked fast, swinging her arms and singing “Now that I have springtime.” This song came from “The Three Sisters” by Hammerstein and Kern, which she had seen at Drury Lane the previous evening with a girl whom she had known since childhood. The drive was lined with poplars, slightly discoloured with dust from the new works of the North Downs Cement Company, which now gave good employment to the village.

  Beams had a glorious situation (once or twice a year it was possible to see the English Channel from the top of the tower); but as architecture it was unremarkable. Run up by the Duke of St. Helens, owner at that time of Hodley Park (since demolished), to provide accommodation for a great Belgian actress named Stephanie des Bourges, whom he had loved frenziedly until her premature death, it was soon acquired by Mrs. Hatch’s grand­father, a rising merchant banker, called Eleutherios Procopius. His son John Procopius represented the Division in Parliament for the remarkable period of sixty-­one years. At his death he left Beams to his only child Melanie, together with more than three million pounds, which would at that time have enabled either of them to live in something larger. The Procopiuses had never, it seemed, been lucky in love: of Mrs. Eleutherios there is no record at all; Mrs. John died in childbirth the year after her marriage to a man aged nearly sixty; Melanie married during the Boer War a certain Captain Hatch of the C.I.V.s, who almost immediately proceeded to drift away from her and in one way and another to resist recapture during a period of time not expired at the date now under construction. Beams, none the less, had eighteen reasonable bedrooms and was a wonderfully comfortable place to visit. It was, however, haunted: quite seriously, even, on occasion, dangerously, by the apparition of Mademoiselle des Bourges, beautiful even in death.

  After glancing at the view, which only burst upon the visitor as he or she reached the lovely gravel waste before the house, Griselda pulled the elaborate bell handle. Though apparently designed to operate an old-­fashioned bell wire, the handle proved, in fact, to have been connected with a modern electr
ic system. Before the servant could reach the door, it opened and an elderly gentleman passed out of the house into the garden. He was wearing rather shabby tweeds, leggings, and a black homburg hat. On seeing Griselda he jumped considerably, and nervously raised his black hat; then, without a word, linked hands behind his back and shambled off towards the rose garden. Griselda noticed that he was still shaking perceptibly with the shock of their encounter. By now a middle-­aged footman had arrived. Griselda had never before seen a servant in appropriate livery except in musical comedy.

  “Good afternoon, miss.”

  “Good afternoon. I’m Miss de Reptonville. Mrs. Hatch is expecting me.”

  “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, miss. It’s the new bells. The Prime Minister got to the door first, I’m afraid.”

  “Was that Mr. Leech?” Griselda had thought there was something familiar about the quivering figure.

  “Regular visitor, miss. In office or out. Mrs. Hatch makes no distinction. Would you care for me to show you to your room?”

  “Thank you.” The front door closed behind her. “I sent on my luggage in the car. Also my handbag and jacket.” After the spring sunshine, the house seemed cold.

  “They have been taken to your room, miss. This way please.”

  The large hall, though filled with comfortable armchairs and sofas (a little like a furniture shop window, Griselda thought), was completely empty. She followed the footman up the wide stair­case. A royal blue carpet completely covered the shallow risers. The mahogany balusters were expensively hand-­carved. After the soft spring tumult outside, the house seemed silent.