The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories Read online

  Again there was a disturbance at the window. Such noises were likely to continue throughout the night, and Griselda took no notice, but went on staring at the knife. But the disturbance took on definition. It seemed to be rapping and crying. Someone appeared to be seeking entrance through Griselda’s first floor window.

  Supposing that it might be Stephanie, Griselda felt utterly appalled. But the noises continued; and, as when a bird enters one’s bedroom, it was impossible indefinitely to ignore them. In the end, Griselda took the little knife, crossed the room, and once more drew back the curtain. Crouched on the sill outside was indisputably a figure. After a moment’s terror, Griselda realized that it was Louise. She opened the window.

  “What’s that you’ve got?”

  “I thought you might know. I found it on the dressing-­table. It seemed to appear when my back was turned.”

  Cascades of water were pouring through the open window, soaking everything. Louise’s white mackintosh was the colour of clay; her long hair bedraggled like a corpse’s.

  She stood sniffing the charged air. “I wonder if it’s a good sign or a bad one. Revenge or rescue. Pity it’s so hard to know.”

  Griselda shut the window, becoming seriously wet in the process. She redrew the curtains and stood in the centre of the room.

  “I’m so very glad to see you, Louise. On my last night.”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t come?”

  Griselda gently shook her head.

  “Even if I had to swim the Hellespont like Leander visiting Hero.”

  “Dear Leander.” Griselda put down the little knife. “As you’ve been so long in the sea, you’d better take off your wet clothes.”

  Louise began to remove her soaking mackintosh. She was wearing trousers like Mrs. Hatch’s.

  “Are you locked out?”

  “No. I’ve been waiting in the Pavilion for your light to appear. I didn’t want us to waste time and the house is swarming, which makes communication difficult. Everyone seems to have gone to bed very early tonight.”

  “Mrs. Hatch is doing sums, and didn’t want us. You’re soaked. Undress. I’ll lend you some clothes.”

  Louise undressed. It took only a minute.

  “Which clothes would you like? Which of my poor silly garments?”

  Louise smiled. Then she crossed to the bed and put on Griselda’s­ pyjamas, laid out by Mullet.

  As Louise put on Griselda’s pyjama’s, a great wave of feeling swept through Griselda like a wall of flame. She was unable to doubt that this was passion. It left her muddled and stupid.

  Louise sat down and dried her glasses on one of Griselda’s handkerchiefs. Then she untied her hair and began to rub it. Seated in Griselda’s pyjama’s, and rubbing her long thick hair, she looked very beautiful.

  “May I stay?” she asked, smiling like a representation of the Madonna, really the painter’s mistress.

  Griselda had herself begun to undress, but slowly. “Of course,” she said. “But there is one thing . . . dear Leander. Mrs. Hatch said something at breakfast. . . .”

  “This is true love, my Hero,” replied Louise, rubbing her hair energetically. “Love is only possible where there is like feeling. Sometimes that can be found in a body which is unlike: more usually it cannot. Love without like feeling is something best left to little Fritzi. Do I make things reasonably clear to you?”

  “Perfectly clear, darling. Not that it was really necessary.”

  “Then I may stay?”

  Griselda shivered. “If you don’t mind the haunted room.” It was growing seriously cold; and she began to hasten the day’s last rites.

  “Really and truly I don’t mind anything now.”

  The clock in the hall below struck ten. Louise was scenting herself with Griselda’s scent, which made her smell very strange.

  CHAPTER XIII

  The clock in the hall below struck six.

  Griselda, happier than she had ever been or would ever be again, heard it strike. Shortly afterwards there ensued, and quickly terminated, a train of events which she never in her life wholly understood; never, so to speak, got to the bottom of. Actual enquiry or close investigation were, in the nature of things, forever debarred to her. Later on in life she concluded that this applied to most mysteries she really cared about. This particular train of events took place, moreover, largely in silence, at least as far as concerned human utterance; and the crucial events largely in darkness also, as the bedroom curtains were still drawn, it was not yet fully daylight, and no one turned on the electric light until the crucial events were over.

  There were steps outside, the bedroom door opened, and someone entered with a firm step in the uncertain light. Louise who was still asleep, was dragged from bed on to the floor, then hauled along the floor towards the door; all by the person with the firm step. On the way to the door, Louise, however, sufficiently realized the position to tear herself loose. There was a scuffle in the vicinity of the dressing table and a sharp groaning cry. Griselda guessed that one of the combatants had got hold of the dangerous little knife. At the cry a second intruder entered the room; and the two of them succeeded in dragging Louise away, still struggling valiantly but in utter silence. Griselda could hear the contest continuing down the passage outside. There was a lapse of time before courage enough came to enable her to leave the warm bed for the cold world, especially as, having brought only a single pair of pyjamas to Beams, she was naked. She put on her dressing-­gown and went, trembling, to the open door. Outside all was now unexpectedly and frighteningly quiet. But suddenly the figure of Mrs. Hatch, in trousers and her usual heavy grey sweater, loomed up and came towards her.

  “Get yourself dressed and packed immediately,” said Mrs. Hatch in a voice of matter-­of-­fact command. “You will leave the house within half an hour: before anyone else is up. Maghull is already waiting with the car to take you to the station. When you have joined the train, he will drive to your Mother with a letter I have written her. She will have had time to read the letter carefully and, if necessary, repeatedly, before you arrive. I am sorry I cannot offer you breakfast, but the kitchen staff will not be down before you go. Hurry: or you will have to leave as you are.”

  She walked away.

  It never occurred to Griselda not to do what Mrs. Hatch had ordered. She shut the door, turned on the light, and groped into her garments. Shaking all over, she packed. She packed Louise’s letter. She noticed Louise’s glasses, still on the bedside table. She wondered what had become of the little knife, and even perfunctorily searched for it. It was missing. Griselda recollected that she did not even known upon whom it had inflicted hurt. Whether the knife was meant to revenge or to rescue, remained unknown.

  When, carrying her suitcase, she descended the familiar staircase to the hall, she saw that the front door stood open, the car waited outside, and that discoloured daylight was creeping into and around the house like mist. There was no sign of Mrs. Hatch, or of anyone else other than Maghull on his box; but upon the hall table the large ledger lay open, the final balance, reached at no one could tell what small hour, ruled off and repeatedly underlined in gay scarlet ink. Entering the lavish vehicle, Griselda noticed that Maghull’s left hand was largely concealed by a newly tied bandage.

  In the car Griselda wondered whether it would help Louise if she were to go to the Police. But she was not even sure whether her love for Louise might not be taken as an offence against the law. Griselda, in fact, felt at the moment too scared and ill to do anything effective. She began to weep, her tears spreading across the soft blue upholstery. She had to be assisted by Maghull into the railway compartment. He had the grip of a fanatic. No one asked to inspect the return half of her ticket.

  It was only in the train that she clearly realized, in a series of horrifying shocks of perception, that neither she nor Louise had any means whatever of making contact with the other. Later it occurred to her that much trouble might have been saved, indeed two hearts from
breaking and two lives from ruin, had either she or Louise thought to lock the bedroom door.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER XIV

  But it was useless to continue weeping after the train had passed Clapham Junction. Not only was the compartment now filled with early wage-­earners, looking pugnacious and embittered at their unjust destinies (one of them, a middle-­aged woman, shapeless and sagging with repeated mismanaged maternity, stood for much of the journey upon the toe of one of Griselda’s shoes); but it had become clear to Griselda that a broken heart does not annihilate routine necessities, but merely makes them considerably more difficult to contend with.

  Griselda’s Mother being the woman she was, it was now out of the question to return home, especially considering the trouble which had attended Griselda’s last year at school. This circumstance gave Griselda a marked feeling of relief. It was no comfort at all for having lost Louise that she was also rid of her Mother; but her new freedom from her Mother comforted her for much else. As the train passed Queen’s Road station, Griselda disentangled her left arm, opened the purse in her handbag, and was surprised to count three pounds, fourteen shillings, and seven­pence. Her Mother had made provision for her to tip: and she had not tipped. She had not even tipped Maghull. On the other hand, the clothes in her suitcase were appallingly inadequate as equipment for life: that is to say for what her Mother’s brother, Uncle Bear (his first name was Pelham, but he had never lived down a hit he once made in a school play), for what Uncle Bear termed “real life.” On the other hand again, it was spring, and summer stretched ahead, warm and endless.

  By the time the train had passed Vauxhall and had settled down for the wait common to all trains entering Waterloo, a brief spell enabling the traveller the better to meet the massed claims of the terminus, Griselda had resolved firstly to seek out the Great Exhibition Hotel and secondly to seek out Lord Roller. The Great Exhibition Hotel had been strongly recommended to her by a schoolfriend who had the habit of spending odd nights in Town. Lord Roller had offered employment.

  At the other side of the compartment, four labourers, their clothes smeared with yesterday’s earth, were playing a simple form of nap, easing the run of the cards with monosyllabic obscenities. The train jerked into motion: as it racketed across the barricade of points, every second, it seemed, about to be derailed, the regular passengers rose to their feet and pressed towards the doors, hypnotized by routine into an appearance of striving to meet life halfway. Before the train had stopped, they were leaping on to the platform and running towards the sliding iron gates. The ticket collector had difficulty in controlling them. Until one looked again at their faces, it was for all the world as if they had an incentive in their existences.

  Griselda, to whom the morning rush hour was a new experience, remained seated for a moment, fighting back the instinct to run with the herd. Then she drew down her suitcase from the rack and stepped from the train to find the platform deserted, and the ticket collector, a few seconds ago flustered and perspiring under the stampede, now irate and resentful of her dilatoriness.

  “Come along there. You’ll be late for work.”

  Having delivered up her ticket, Griselda sent her Mother a telegram from the station telegraph office.

  “Taking job in London please don’t worry get better quickly much love Griselda.”

  It seemed to be in the tradition of messages sent on these occasions, though it was Griselda’s first of the kind.

  She knew her Underground, and proceeded to South Kensington, changing at Charing Cross. Each train was again abominably crowded; and the only excuse for a crowd, collective conviviality, conspicuously absent. At every station men and women fought in the doors and on the platforms. Between stations they joylessly read newspapers. The whole grim business was utterly orderly.

  The Great Exhibition Hotel proved larger than Griselda had expected, and distinctly more pretentious. She booked a room for a week, thereby (after some firm bargaining) incurring a liability of three pounds ten shillings, supposing she passed seven days without eating. A porter in his shirtsleeves took her in a tiny, slow lift to the fifth floor and to 79A.

  “They knocked 79 in half,” he explained, hanging about for recognition. Griselda gave him sixpence: which he regarded with a look which meant that women were all the same. The process of adaptation had proved fatal to the proportions; but the room was not exactly dirty, but offered a good view in the direction of Earl’s, possibly even Baron’s Court, the busy Inner Circle railway being in the foreground. The furniture was bright yellow but capacious. The bed bore a far-­flung counterpane, hand-­wrought in patterns of sheep-­coloured wool, entirely different on the two faces. It was unbelievably heavy, the labour, obviously of years; superfluous labour Griselda thought. Beneath it was a flat and slithery eiderdown, covered in livid patchwork; and no fewer than four good blankets, tightly wrapped in on each side. Griselda deduced that many elderly ladies spent the evening of their days looking out towards the ghosts of old Earl’s Court and its Great Wheel from the casements of the Great Exhibition Hotel: possibly, as they gazed, they matted coverlets heavy as lead sheeting, sewed gaudy scrap to gaudy scrap.

  As in a royal palace, the water closet was of the gracious valve type. Small trays sprinkled with small breakfasts, were beginning to fidget towards the bedrooms as Griselda descended. In the Lounge sprawled several residents of a different type: one of them even whistled through his front teeth as Griselda passed. It was hard to believe that these residents needed bedrooms of their own: they seemed to live in the Lounge talking shop; and when they needed a bedroom, to have recourse, inevitably, to someone else’s.

  Griselda had noticed a Tariff in the Hotel which stated “Breakfast 3/6. With Meat 5/6. Preserves Extra”; and set out to look for a teashop. She found one open, and breakfasted excellently for one shilling and sevenpence plus twopence gratuity (forbidden but extracted). She then found that she lacked twopence with which to telephone Lord Roller, and had to return to the cash desk a suppliant. A further sixpence having been reluctantly converted into four pennies and four halfpennies (it was clear from her manner that the harridan in the little box lost hopelessly on the transaction), Griselda realized that she did not know the name of Lord Roller’s firm. Nor was Lord Roller himself in the Telephone Directory, even at a private residence.

  At a loss, Griselda peered through the glass of the telephone cabinet. The morning rush was over; the crowds had vanished into air. There were much refuse, two dogs, an ineffective cleaner, and a belated young man with a bowler hat and umbrella, obviously bound for the City.

  “Excuse me,” cried Griselda, breaking out from her place of confinement. “Could you very kindly tell me where I might find Lord Roller?”

  The young man immediately stood quite still, staring round him, and blushing almost purple. “I—don’t—know,” he said after a long pause, forcing out the words through lips shuddering with embarrassment. “Sorry.” He lifted his hat, looked at his wrist watch, and hastened on towards his world of familiar things.

  The cleaner was also standing immobile, regarding. Suddenly she spoke: “You try Arkwright and Silverstein. That’s where you’ll find ’is lordship, dear. Arkwright and Silverstein. London Stone double two double two. You try and you’ll find ’im.”

  “Thank you very much,” said Griselda.

  “Don’t forget to remember me to ’is lordship.” She gave a gurgling laugh and began to clatter furiously with her bucket. This made telephoning difficult, but Griselda did not care to complain.

  Lord Roller had not yet arrived, but his secretary, on learning that Griselda had met him at the All Party Dance, made an appointment for her at ten forty-­five.

  “Ask for Miss Guthers,” said the secretary.

  The Inner Circle, which bore Griselda back to Charing Cross and then on to the Mansion House, was now almost deserted. Apart from a small intrusion of foreign tourists at Victoria, the clanking train had become a very fair place
for hearkening to the inner voice. Griselda’s inner voice remarked to her that she was wrongly dressed for seeking a job.

  This contention received support when Griselda encountered Miss Guthers. Miss Guthers was dressed expensively and fashionably, though she did not look expensive or fashionable owing to years of overwork and the effort to control cheeky and lazy subordinates upon always just too little authority for the purpose. She regarded Griselda kindly, and seated her in a minute mahogany waiting-­room like a large coffin, lined entirely with bound volumes of “The Merchant Banker”. A small table bore a single newspaper, a copy of “The Times”. Griselda opened it and read the principle headline: “Aftermath Of The Roller Report”. She looked at the first leading article: “The Roller Report: What Next?” She turned to the Court News: “Reception for Lord Roller” (provided two nights previously, she read, by Edwin’s dazzling friend, Lady Wolverhampton). The paper contained only one photograph: a special study by a staff photographer of the typical English village of Lydiard Bust, with an entirely new crop of oats filling up the foreground, and much of the background also. Griselda began to read Mr. Morgan’s glittering comments on last night’s play.

  “Lord Roller will see you now.” Miss Guthers almost conveyed concern that the interview should go well. There is no one it is easier to like than a first class woman private secretary; and Griselda liked Miss Guthers.

  Lord Roller, however, wore an expression of extreme gravity. He rose as Griselda entered, and personally offered her a mahogany chair.

  “I must tell you quite frankly, Miss de Reptonville,” he said, “that I did not expect to see you quite so soon. That, none the less, would have been entirely in order, and I should have been pleased to assist you in your project of leaving the Secretariat of Sociology. But under the circumstances which now obtain, you will, I am sure, understand that any help from me is out of the question. Please do not hesitate to smoke.” He extended an open cigarette case: it was made of gold and was one of a consignment sent out the previous year as Christmas presents by the Ministry of Mines.