Strange Stories Page 13

  I noticed that my mother made no comment. But one day my father complained of my ingratitude in never playing with my handsome birthday present. I said I was occupied with my holiday task: Moby Dick. This was an approved answer, and even, as far as it went, a true one, though I found the book pointless in the extreme, and horribly cruel.

  “I told you the Grange was the wrong thing to buy,” said my father. “Morbid sort of object for a toy.”

  “None of us can learn except by experience,” said my mother.

  My father said “Not at all,” and bristled.

  ***

  All this, naturally, was in the holidays. I was going at the time to one of my mother’s schools, where I should stay until I could begin to train as a dancer, upon which I was conventionally but entirely resolved. Constantin went to another, a highly cerebral co-educational place, where he would remain until, inevitably, he won a scholarship to a university, perhaps a foreign one. Despite our years, we went our different ways dangerously on small dingy bicycles. We reached home at assorted hours, mine being the longer journey.

  One day I returned to find our dining-room table littered with peculiarly uninteresting printed drawings. I could make nothing of them whatever (they did not seem even to belong to the kind of geometry I was—regretfully—used to); and they curled up on themselves when one tried to examine them, and bit one’s finger. My father had a week or two before taken one of his infrequent jobs; night work of some kind a long way off, to which he had now departed in our car. Obviously the drawings were connected with Constantin, but he was not there.

  I went upstairs, and saw that the principal spare room door was open. Constantin was inside. There had, of course, been no question of the key to the room being removed. It was only necessary to turn it.

  “Hallo, Lene,” Constantin said in his matter-of-fact way. “We’ve been doing axonometric projection, and I’m projecting your house.” He was making one of the drawings; on a sheet of thick white paper. “It’s for home-work. It’ll knock out all the others. They’ve got to do their real houses.”

  It must not be supposed that I did not like Constantin, although often he annoyed me with his placidity and precision. It was weeks since I had seen my house, and it looked unexpectedly interesting. A curious thing happened: nor was it the last time in my life that I experienced it. Temporarily I became a different person; confident, practical, simple. The clear evening sun of autumn may have contributed.

  “I’ll help,” I said. “Tell me what to do.”

  “It’s a bore I can’t get in to take measurements. Although we haven’t got to. In fact, the Clot told us not. Just a general impression, he said. It’s to give us the concept of axonometry. But, golly, it would be simpler with feet and inches.”

  To judge by the amount of white paper he had covered in what could only have been a short time, Constantin seemed to me to be doing very well, but he was one never to be content with less than perfection.

  “Tell me,” I said, “what to do, and I’ll do it.”

  “Thanks,” he replied, sharpening his pencil with a special instrument. “But it’s a one-man job this. In the nature of the case. Later, I’ll show you how to do it, and you can do some other building if you like.”

  I remained, looking at my house and fingering it, until Constantin made it clearer that I was a distraction. I went away, changed my shoes, and put on the kettle against my mother’s arrival, and our high tea.

  When Constantin came down (my mother had called for him three times, but that was not unusual), he said, “I say Sis, here’s a rum thing.”

  My mother said: “Don’t use slang, and don’t call your sister Sis.”

  He said, as he always did when reproved by her, “I’m sorry, Mother.” Then he thrust the drawing paper at me.

  “Look, there’s a bit missing. See what I mean?” He was showing me with his stub of emerald pencil, pocked with toothmarks.

  Of course, I didn’t see. I didn’t understand a thing about it.

  “After tea,” said my mother. She gave to such familiar words not a maternal but an imperial decisiveness.

  “But Mum-” pleaded Constantin.

  “Mother,” said my mother.

  Constantin started dipping for sauerkraut.

  Silently we ate ourselves into tranquillity; or, for me, into the appearance of it. My alternative personality, though it had survived Constantin’s refusal of my assistance, was now beginning to ebb.

  “What is all this that you are doing?” enquired my mother in the end. “It resembles the Stone of Rosetta.”

  “I’m taking an axonometric cast of Lene’s birthday house.”

  “And so?”

  But Constantin was not now going to expound immediately. He put in his mouth a finger of rye bread smeared with home made cheese. Then he said quietly: “I got down a rough idea of the house, but the rooms don’t fit. At least, they don’t on the bottom floor. It’s all right, I think, on the top floor. In fact that’s the rummest thing of all. Sorry Mother.” He had been speaking with his mouth full, and now filled it fuller.

  “What nonsense is this?” To me it seemed that my mother was glaring at him in a way most unlike her.

  “It’s not nonsense, Mother. Of course. I haven’t measured the place, because you can’t. But I haven’t done axonometry for nothing. There’s a part of the bottom floor I can’t get at. A secret room or something.”

  “Show me.”

  “Very well, Mother.” Constantin put down his remnant of bread and cheese. He rose, looking a little pale. He took the drawing round the table to my mother.

  “Not that thing. I can’t understand it, and I don’t believe you can understand it either.” Only sometimes to my father did my mother speak like that. “Show me in the house.”

  I rose too.

  “You stay here, Lene. Put some more water in the kettle and boil it.”

  “But it’s my house. I have a right to know.”

  My mother’s expression' changed to one more familiar. “Yes, Lene,” she said “you have a right. But please not now. I ask you.”

  I smiled at her and picked up the kettle.

  “Come, Constantin.”

  ***

  I lingered by the kettle in the kitchen, not wishing to give an impression of eavesdropping or even undue eagerness, which I knew would distress my mother. I never wished to learn things that my mother wished to keep from me; and I never questioned her implication of “All in good time.”

  But they were not gone long, for well before the kettle had begun even to grunt, my mother’s beautiful voice was summoning me back.

  “Constantin is quite right,” she said, when I had presented myself at the dining-room table, “and it was wrong of me to doubt it. The house is built in a funny sort of way. But what does it matter?”

  Constantin was not eating.

  “I am glad that you are studying well, and learning such useful things,” said my mother.

  She wished the subject, to be dropped, and we dropped it. Indeed, it was difficult to think what more could be said. But I waited for a moment in which I was alone with Constantin. My father’s unhabitual absence made this difficult and it was completely dark before the moment came.

  And when, as was only to be expected, Constantin had nothing to add, I felt, most unreasonably, that he was joined with my mother in keeping something from me.

  “But what happened?” I pressed him. “What happened when you were in the room with her?”

  “What do you think happened?” replied Constantin, wishing, I thought, that my mother would re-enter. “Mother realised that I was right. Nothing more. What does it matter anyway?”

  That final query confirmed my doubts.

  “Constantin,” I said. “Is there anything I ought to do?”

  “Better hack the place open,” he answered, almost irritably.

  ***

  But a most unexpected thing happened, that, had I even considered adopting Co
nstantin’s idea, would have saved me the trouble. When next day I returned from school, my house was gone.

  Constantin was sitting in his usual corner, this time absorbing Greek paradigms. Without speaking to him (nothing unusual in that when he was working), I went straight to the principal spare room. The vast deal table, less scrubbed than once, was bare. The place where my house had stood was very visible, as if indeed a palace had been swept off by a djinn. But I could see no other sign of its passing: no scratched woodwork, or marks of boots, or disjointed fragments.

  Constantin seemed genuinely astonished at the news. But I doubted him.

  “You knew,” I said.

  “Of course I didn’t know.”

  Still, he understood what I was thinking.

  He said again: “I didn’t know.”

  Unlike me on occasion he always spoke the truth.

  I gathered myself together and blurted out: “Have they done it themselves?” Inevitably I was frightened, but in a way I was also relieved.

  “Who do you mean?”

  “They.”

  I was inviting ridicule, but Constantin was kind.

  He said: “I know who I think has done it, but you mustn’t let on. I think Mother’s done it.”

  I did not enquire uselessly into how much more he knew than I. I said: “But how?'

  Constantin shrugged. It was a habit he had assimilated with so much else.

  “Mother left the house with us this morning and she isn’t back yet.”

  “She must have put Father up to it.”

  “But there are no marks.”

  “Father might have got help.” There was a pause. Then Constantin said: “Are you sorry?”

  “In a way,” I replied. Constantin with precocious wisdom left it at that.

  When my mother returned, she simply said that my father had already lost his new job, so that we had had to sell things.

  “I hope you will forgive your father and me,” she said. “We’ve had to sell one of my watches also. Father will soon be back to tea.”

  She too was one I had never known to lie; but now I began to perceive how relative and instrumental truth could be.

  ***

  I need not say: not in those terms. Such clear concepts, with all they offer of gain and loss, come later, if they come at all. In fact, I need not say that the whole of what goes before is so heavily filtered through later experience as to be of little evidential value. But I am scarcely putting forward evidence. There is so little. All I can do is to tell something of what happened, as it now seems to me to have been.

  I remember sulking at my mother’s news, and her explaining to me that really I no longer liked the house and that something better would be bought for me in replacement when our funds permitted.

  I did ask my father when he returned to our evening meal, whistling and falsely jaunty about the lost job, how much he had been paid for my house.

  “A trifle more than I gave for it. That’s only business.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “Never you mind.”

  “Tell her,” said Constantin. “She wants to know.”

  “Eat your herring,” said my father very sharply. “And mind your own business.”

  And, thus, before long my house was forgotten, my occasional nightmares returned to earlier themes.

  ***

  It was, as I say, for two or three months in 1921 that I owned the house and from time to time dreamed that creatures I supposed to be its occupants, had somehow invaded my home. The next thirty years, more or less, can be disposed of quickly: it was the period when I tried conclusions with the outer world.

  I really became a dancer; and, although the upper reaches alike of the art and of the profession notably eluded me, yet I managed to maintain myself for several years, no small achievement. I retired, as they say, upon marriage. My husband aroused physical passion in me for the first time, but diminished and deadened much else. He was reported missing in the late misguided war. Certainly he did not return to me. I at least still miss him, though I often despise myself for doing so.

  My father, died in a street accident when I was fifteen: it happened on the day I received a special commendation from the sallow Frenchman who taught me to dance. After his death my beloved mother always wanted to return to Germany. Before long I was spiritually self-sufficient enough, or said I was, to make that possible. Unfailingly, she wrote to me twice a week, although to find words in which to reply was often difficult for me. Sometimes I visited her, while the conditions in her country became more and more uncongenial to me. She had a fair position teaching English language and literature at a small university; and she seemed increasingly to be infected by the new notions and emotions raging around her. I must acknowledge that sometimes their tumult and intoxication unsteadied my own mental gait, although I was a foreigner and by no means of sanguine temperament. It is a mistake to think that all professional dancers are gay.

  Despite what appeared to be increasing sympathies with the new regime, my mother disappeared. She was the first of the two people who mattered to me in such very different ways, and who so unreasonably vanished. For a time I was ill, and of course I love her still more than anybody. If she had remained with me, I am sure I should never have married. Without involving myself in psychology, which I detest, I shall simply say that the thought and recollection of my mother, lay, I believe, behind the self-absorption my husband complained of so bitterly and so justly. It was not really myself in which I was absorbed but the memory of perfection. It is the plain truth that such beauty, and goodness, and depth, and capacity for love were my mother’s alone.

  Constantin abandoned all his versatile reading and became a priest, in fact a member of the Society of Jesus. He seems exalted (possibly too much so for his colleagues and superiors), but I can no longer speak to him or bear his presence. He frightens me. Poor Constantin!

  On the other hand, I, always dubious, have become a complete unbeliever. I cannot see that Constantin is doing anything but listen to his own inner voice (which has changed its tone since we were children); and mine speaks a different language. In the long run, I doubt whether there is much to be desired but death; or whether there is endurance in anything but suffering. I no longer see myself feasting crowned heads on quails.

  So much for biographical intermission. I proceed to the circumstances of my second and recent experience of landlordism.

  ***

  In the first place, I did something thoroughly stupid. Instead of following the road marked on the map, I took a short cut. It is true that the short cut was shown on the map also, but the region was much too unfrequented for a wandering footpath to be in any way dependable, especially in this generation which has ceased to walk beyond the garage or the bus stop. It was one of the least populated districts in the whole country and, moreover, the slow autumn dusk was already perceptible when I pushed at the first, dilapidated gate.

  To begin with, the path trickled and flickered across a sequence of small damp meadows, bearing neither cattle nor crop. When it came to the third or fourth of these meadows, the way had all but vanished in the increasing sogginess, and could be continued only by looking for the stile or gate in the unkempt hedge ahead. This was not especially difficult as long as the fields remained small; but after a time I reached a depressing expanse which could hardly be termed a field at all, but was rather a large marsh. It was at this point that I should have returned and set about tramping the winding road.

  But a path of some kind again continued before me, and I perceived that the escapade had already consumed twenty minutes. So I risked it, although soon I was striding laboriously from tussock to brown tussock in order not to sink above my shoes into the surrounding quagmire. It is quite extraordinary how far one can stray from a straight or determined course when thus preoccupied with elementary comfort. The hedge on the far side of the marsh was still a long way ahead, and the tussocks themselves were becoming both less fre
quent and less dense, so that too often I was sinking through them into the mire. I realised that the marsh sloped slightly downwards in the direction I was following, so that before I reached the hedge, I might have to cross a river. In the event, it was not so much a river, as an indeterminately bounded augmentation of the softness, and moistness, and ooziness: I struggled across, jerking from false foothold to palpable pitfall, and before long despairing even of the attempt to step securely. Both my feet were now soaked to well above the ankles, and the visibility had become less than was entirely convenient.

  When I reached what I had taken for a hedge, it proved to be the boundary of an extensive thicket. Autumn had infected much of the greenery with blotched and dropping senility; so that bare brown briars arched and tousled, and purple thorns tilted at all possible angles for blood. To go farther would demand an axe. Either I must retraverse the dreary bog in the perceptibly -waning light, or I must skirt the edge and seek an opening in the thicket. Undecided, I looked back. I realised that I had lost the gate through which I had entered upon the marsh on the other side. There was nothing to do but creep as best I could upon the still treacherous ground along the barrier of dead dogroses, mildewed blackberries, and rampant nettles.

  But it was not long before I reached a considerable gap, from which through the tangled vegetation seemed to lead a substantial track, although by no means a straight one. The track wound on unimpeded for a considerable distance, even becoming firmer underfoot; until I realised that the thicket had become an entirely indisputable wood. The brambles clutching maliciously from the sides had become watching branches above my head. I could not recall that the map had showed a wood. If, indeed, it had done so, I should not have entered upon the footpath, because the only previous occasion in my life when I had been truly lost, in the sense of being unable to find the way back as well as being unable to go on, had been when my father had once so effectively lost us in a wood that I have never again felt the same about woods. The fear I had felt for perhaps an hour and a half on that occasion, though told to no one, and swiftly evaporating from consciousness upon our emergence, had been the veritable fear of death. Now I drew the map from where it lay against my thigh in the big pocket of my dress. It was not until I tried to read it that I realised how near I was to night. Until it came to print, the problems of the route had given me cat’s eyes.