Compulsory Games Read online

  Aickman did not attend university. Supported by a small inheritance, his mostly bachelor adult existence (engaged in art, theater, and opera reviewing, and literary agenting as well as his passion, the inland waterways of England) holds echoes of an earlier era and the bachelor lives of two Edwardian writers of ghost stories who preceded him, both surnamed James: Montague Rhodes, the Eton headmaster, and Henry, the popular London dinner guest from America. Now it is no contradiction to be both an introvert and a convivial man-about-town since group interaction, for one thing, carries little threat of emotional intimacy. A frequent guest of married couples and a cultured, handsome escort to the many young women he squired platonically in his later years, this socially adept Isolato (to use Melville’s term) was also married for a time and was a gracious host himself. Though Aickman states that he was always drawn to “ethereal and nonattainable” women (who coalesce as a recurring character in his stories), his wife, Ray, was outgoing and vivacious, as was the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard, his lover and collaborator in the early days of the Inland Waterways Association. Aickman and Ray also served as Howard’s literary agents for her first novel, and as she chronicles in her memoir, Slipstream (a more unflattering portrait of Aickman features in her novel Casting Off ), Howard encouraged him to write his first stories as he in turn encouraged her to write ghost stories. Their joint collection, We Are For the Dark, was published in 1951. “Raising the Wind” in this volume is his counterpart to her magnificent waterways story “Three Miles Up” in that collection.

  Aickman’s longtime friend Graham Smith mentions his “administrative skills” cofounding and leading the conservationist Inland Waterways Association and his “ability to inspire hundreds of volunteers.” Yet Aickman also alienated many in the organization with his need to impose his own views unilaterally. His own mordant opinions on the tedious business of committee work are memorably set forth in “Residents Only,” a meticulously detailed account of bureaucratic incompetence around a neglected cemetery whose discreet sidebar of disturbing peripheral phenomena gradually surrounds and eventually swallows up the sober narrative like the profane marginalia in a medieval manuscript. The story builds inexorably to a bravura double-left-turn finale in which the dead, seemingly, complete their task of merging with the living.

  Aickman was sixty-seven when he died of stomach cancer in 1981.

  •

  This volume contains eleven stories from his eight original collections that are not included in the Faber four-volume set issued in 2014, along with four stories unpublished during Aickman’s lifetime.† Superlatively written and psychologically acute, these sophisticated modernist tales merit a much higher ranking in the literary canon than the genre ghetto they currently occupy—a ranking at least as high, I believe, as the supernatural stories of that second James, first name Henry, or the works of Ronald Firbank, both respectably situated in the “Literature” section of your local bookstore.

  Yet Aickman’s centenary in 2014 was an occasion celebrated almost exclusively in the fantasy fandom world. The few nods it received in the mainstream press (sample headline, from The Guardian: “Cult Horror Stories Resurrected for Centenary”) were hardly likely to attract the more literary reader. Nor were the gentle children’s fantasy covers gracing the Faber reissues, found only under “Horror/Fantasy” in that same bookstore.

  “The successful ghost story,” Aickman once said, “does not close a door and leave inside it still another definition, a still further solution. On the contrary, it must open a door, preferably where no one had previously noticed a door to exist; and, at the end, leave it open, or, possibly, ajar.”

  This is the very door Henry James’s hero Spencer Brydon uses in “The Jolly Corner” to frame a “quaint analogy” that will become literally true in the course of the story: “that of his opening a door behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk.” Brydon is actively summoning a ghost, the specter of the man he might have been, in the empty house of his youth. Eventually a real door stands ajar, the apparition does appear (described with delicate Jamesian indirection), and all is beautifully, as James would say (perhaps too beautifully?), explained: By confronting his abhorrent alter ego, Brydon finds his true self at last, along with the love that’s been patiently waiting for him. With this happy solution James firmly shuts the door again.

  Aickman has his own style of indirection, or more precisely misdirection, and I do love imagining the kind of mind-bending coda, the sheer aesthetic disjuncture, he would have added to this very proper ghost story.

  Speaking of codas, what happens after the centenary? Books have their own fates, Horace reminds us. Will the Aickman tales stay locked in the Gothic cellar, or will they be allowed to tiptoe up to the parlor? Or will they simply be “reforgotten,” in Iain Sinclair’s not to be forgotten phrase?

  The best answer, I think, is another question: If the reception of Robert Aickman’s works were the subject of one of his own stories, how would it end?

  Most likely, with the door left confoundingly ajar.

  —VICTORIA NELSON

  * Though rivers do—rivers named Waste, rivers that were never there before, the Avon, all kinds of rivers. In The River Runs Uphill: A Story of Success and Failure, Aickman describes being hoisted up on his father’s shoulders to view the lock at Cassiobury Park. Though he declares he cut all things personal from this second volume of his autobiography, which focuses on his cofounding of the Inland Waterways Association with L. T. C. Rolt, he cannot resist detailing the dire real-life events that led to the haunting of the lock cottage.

  † “The Strangers,” “The Coffin House,” “A Disciple of Plato,” and “The Fully-Conducted Tour.” Commissioned and recorded by the BBC Radio Four’s Morning Story in 1976, “The Fully-Conducted Tour” was never broadcast. The reason given to Aickman by the program’s producer, Barbara Crowther (“I’m sure you appreciate that this kind of script is very difficult indeed to put over”) suggests some of the difficulties his works faced in gaining public acceptance during his lifetime.

  COMPULSORY GAMES

  SOME PEOPLE are capable of pleasure, of enjoying themselves, but none are truly capable of content. A conviction of content can be sustained only by consistent coercion, outer or inner; and, even then, the underlying reality, the underlying mystery, inevitably seeps through, sooner or later, via some unforeseeable rift. Colin Trenwith was, in a sense, brought to destruction by his own best impulses, and yet, and yet . . .

  There they were, he and Grace, in a little house (of which a long lease had been bought in a fortunate hour, because now it would have been hopelessly too expensive) between Kensington High Street and the Cromwell Road: fortified, as well as might be, against all things, except sickness, death, inflation, revolution, and chance. Colin had even evaded the perils of independent practice, and had taken a salaried job with a large firm. Children have come to symbolise such an unprecedented demand upon their parents (conflictual also), while being increasingly unpredictable almost from their first toddlings, as to be best eschewed; nor did the spouses of the Trenwiths’ friends commonly tempt either of them to adultery. The Trenwiths, therefore, met life squarely. They knew about many of the dangers only too well, and saw no point in meeting any of them half way. The dismal Mrs. Eileen McGrath seemed about as far removed from a threat as anyone or anything could be, nor were the Trenwiths wrong in this assessment, unconscious though it doubtless was. It would be difficult to blame Eileen, either, for what happened.

  The Trenwiths had a tiny garden between their front door and the fairly quiet street, but years ago it had been crazily paved all over by the outgoing tenant, and, though the Trenwiths did not care for the effect, they had not yet gone as far as to lift the stones and plant roses. Starting from the gate, the visitor t
o Mrs. McGrath’s establishment had first to turn right, then to turn left, but for a crow there would have been less than two hundred yards in the trip.

  None the less, Mrs. McGrath lived in a different world. Some would point out that once the gentry had lived where she lived, and the servants of the gentry where the Trenwiths now lived—perhaps their gardeners. The former residences of the gentry (or near-gentry) were towering grey masses stuck together in twos. Each house had three storeys, with high rooms, and, even then, there were basements and, within the slated roofs, attics. Now, the houses were cut up into flats, and sometimes even into bedsitters.

  Colin Trenwith at some fairly early period realised that one reason why Eileen had such difficulty in finding tenants was that, without quite knowing it, she expected from each such person a faintly familial, a quasi-mutual mode of life. She required, as it were, emotional as well as financial references; though emotional only in the quietest, soberest way. Colin sensed that in Eileen’s loneliness was included the demanding element that loneliness fosters. When on one occasion he found words for this trait of Eileen’s, however, Grace, to his slight surprise, denied it. Possibly she was in this matter too akin to Eileen for any demandingness to be recognised.

  When things began to be really bad in his life, Colin found that he could simply not recollect how Grace and he had first met Eileen. As a matter of fact, he never recollected. It was certainly no regular “Good morning” in the street as they sped to work, because Eileen, as a senior civil servant, had to leave earlier than anyone else. “What about Austin Dobson and Edmund Gosse?” asked Colin, who had a mild interest in the fin de siècle. “They joined the Civil Service precisely because it allowed them time for their writing.”

  Eileen would smile and say that things had changed, without necessarily implying that she disapproved of the change. On most occasions, Eileen’s smile was that of one who, in the nature of her position, knew very much more than could be accessible to the person smiled at. This had always been a thing about Eileen which annoyed Colin, especially as sometimes he doubted the implication. Once more, when he put something of his annoyance into words for Grace’s benefit, she made a remark about “all of us needing our defences,” and for the moment he found her almost as irritating as Eileen. Indeed, he brooded for some time on the trifle, and in the end wondered whether shared by Grace and Eileen was not something specifically feminine and intractable.

  There was of course understood once to have been a Mr. McGrath. He was referred to by Eileen as Bobby. On the other hand, she never clearly stated what had become of him. Naturally, the Trenwiths probed, but the relationship with Eileen was not of a kind to authorise a straight question, and for Colin it never became so, never could become so. There seemed to have been something more or less artistic about Bobby, because Eileen cited him as the authority for any view of her own on such questions, whenever such questions might arise. Bobby, it was clear, had once lived with Eileen in that same house. Colin found this hard to visualise. The house itself was regularly referred to as having been acquired for investment; to supplement Eileen’s future pension, and to enable her fully to lead the free life which her present responsible position precluded, but which was none the less her lodestar.

  It was not that the Trenwiths and Eileen were ever on absolutely settled visiting terms with one another. The grim truth was that while the Trenwiths had their regular friends, Eileen had not. It was hard to explain exactly why this was, and all surmise seemed to include unkind elements which were doubly unkind because there was no positive proof of them. The way it settled down was that the Trenwiths did sometimes go to Eileen’s dinner parties, where almost all the other guests were either important in the Civil Service or importantly attached in some way to the Civil Service network of employ, the women all in long dresses, the men all in dark suits, though not in dinner jackets, the conversation resolutely general and far-ranging; but that Eileen came to Trenwith social gatherings only three or four times in all, because, as Grace (this time) put it, she cast such a blight.

  This blight was another mystery. It was not that Eileen made no attempt to contribute; nor was it that her general attitude was in any way unusual. Furthermore, she was by no means lacking in accomplishments. She could speak French, play golf, mountaineer, and even hold forth with authority on “fashion.” It was simply that, do what she might, she seemed, from her first, almost elegant, entry into the room, never to “fit in,” never to fit in at all, not even for a given period of five minutes. Perhaps it was the fact that always she came by herself; leading, moreover, to the alarming suspicion that almost always she was by herself. Could it have been that she stood, influential but forlorn, at the centre of a strictly metaphorical vicious circle?

  The usual thing was that she dropped in when the Trenwiths, having dined (which they made a point of doing as nicely as possible), were otherwise alone. They brewed more coffee for her, gave her a liqueur and then another, ended with whisky nightcaps all round; and in these gestures acted gladly. On other evenings, their telephone would ring, and, a little more reluctantly, they would wend their winding way to Eileen’s substantial abode, never more than half tenanted and seldom as much as that—at times, indeed, while it was between tenancies, quite empty except for Eileen. God knows, there was never anything much to talk about, but it was seldom that actual silence descended for very long, and, in any case, what could the Trenwiths do about the situation? What recourse had they? For years, they fraternised with Eileen in the ways described, only, perhaps, on three nights in a fortnight; but very slowly and gradually, the frequency increased. Both Trenwiths noticed this, individually and severally.

  “If only she wasn’t so boring.”

  “If only she wasn’t so lonely.”

  “If only she wasn’t so dependent.”

  “After all, she draws down more than seven thousand quid, she ought to be able to do something with that. Her name’s in Whitaker’s Almanack.”

  “But not in Who’s Who.”

  Then—or somewhere around that time—Grace’s mother collapsed in India. For some time, Grace’s mother had been taking up cults, cultivating them, in fact; so India was almost inevitable. Grace received a telegram from an Indian, completely out of the sky. Her mother, said the telegram, was very ill in an Indian hospital. Could she come at once? Grace had a quiet little job of her own, but she gave it up and went. Eileen McGrath brought influence to bear in obtaining her some kind of priority flight to the right spot at a convenient hour. The Trenwiths were impressed. It was the first time they could recollect Eileen displaying her prowess in such a way.

  Eileen rang up again the same evening, and Colin always recalled that what struck him most was that Eileen’s tone should have changed so immediately, albeit indefinably. Somehow he would have expected a running-in period, especially as there was no knowing how long Grace might have to be away: quite possibly months. All Eileen said on the telephone, however, was to point out that as they were both now solitaries, he might as well come round and she would see what she could do in the way of a scratch meal. This was spoken from her office to his office; and she said that he had better not arrive until about half-past eight, because she would have to work late that evening, as on so many evenings. Never before had she expressed (at least to the Trenwiths) any awareness that she was a solitary. Quite the contrary, in fact, all down the quiet years. At least as far as words went, Eileen was a magnet.

  Colin, on his way home from work, bothered less about rushing, and stood himself an evening paper, which was not his usual practice (he could not help reading newspapers when once he had spent money on them). After entering the house, he stretched out his legs on the sofa for an odd and unwonted interlude: at one moment lost in whatever he was reading from the paper, at the next looking up at the ceiling and thinking about nothing. Thus a good hour passed. If this was not relaxation, Colin speculated, he did not know what could be. It was a matter he had often felt anxious about, as do
so many people. He even reflected that regular, normal life with Grace might be happier still if interwoven with phases, flowing and ebbing unbidden, when he merely stared at the ceiling, or the sky, and thought about nothing. He poured himself a whisky and soda, and then a refill: unaccustomed procedures yet again, as he disliked solitary drinking, because he had long, long ago found he never got anything out of it.

  In the exact circumstances, he must change into either a good suit, better than when they were all three together; or, alternatively, into some much more informal garb than he would normally have assumed for dinner with a lady, thus symbolising the “scratch” element in the occasion. He simply could not remember whether he had ever before had a meal of any kind alone with Eileen. But he was distinctly out of the way of meals alone with a woman (he overlooked Grace for the moment). He wished it could be more of an adventure, just this one time; and he realised vaguely that this adventure sensation was powerful enough in its own right to be in some degree attaching itself even to Eileen, however absurdly. For the present, and until put to the imminent real-life encounter, the sensation was perceptibly better than nothing. He decided on the good suit.

  Eileen was wearing not merely one of her long skirts but an entire long dress, quite sleek and tight. Colin could tell that it had not been worn often before, and could not decide what he felt about the situation. Eileen must be well over fifty, though it was hard to be sure, as she was not in Who’s Who; but her figure remained modestly striking, her features were quite acceptable, her hair, more white than grey, had been cleverly confected, even her skin was reasonable. Colin had thought all this out for himself long ago, difficult though it always was to concentrate upon Eileen; but now, implicitly, it signified far more. And of course there was always the other side to Eileen: the inexpressive eyes of no particular colour, the large hands, the sudden movements.