The Collected Short Fiction Page 4

  'Hullo,' said Mimi cheekily. 'You've been a long time.'

  For a moment Margaret felt like giving the situation a twist in her direction (as she felt it would be), by relating some of the reason for her long absence; but, in view of the mystery about Miss Roper, managed to abstain. Could it be that Miss Roper was not dead at all? she suddenly wondered.

  'Mind your own business,' she replied in Mimi's own key.

  'I hope you found your way,' said Roper politely.

  'Perfectly, thank you.'

  There was a short silence.

  'I fear Beech has gone to bed, or I'd offer you both some further refreshments. I have no other servant.'

  After the initial drag of blood from her stomach, Margaret took a really hard pull on her resolution.

  'Do you live alone here with Beech?'

  'Quite alone. That's why it's so pleasant to have you two with me. I've been telling Mimi that normally I have only my books.' It was the first time Margaret had heard him use the Christian name.

  'He leads the life of a recluse,' said Mimi. 'Research, you know. Dog's life, if you ask me. Worse than ours.'

  'What do you research into?' asked Margaret.

  'Can't you guess, dear?' Mimi had become very much at her ease.

  'Railways, I'm afraid. Railway history.' Roper was smiling a scholar's smile, tired and deprecating, but at the same time uniquely arrogant. 'If you're a Roper you can't get it quite out of the blood. I've been showing Mimi this.' He held out a book with a dark-green jacket.

  'Early Fishplates,' read Margaret, 'by Howard Bullhead.' The print appeared closely packed and extremely technical. The book was decorated with occasional arid little diagrams.

  'What has this to do with railways?'

  'Fishplates,' cried Mimi, 'are what hold the rails down.'

  'Well, not quite that,' said Roper, 'but something like it.'

  'Who's Mr. Bullhead?'

  'Bullhead is a rather technical railway joke. I'm the real author. I prefer to use a pseudonym.'

  'The whole book's one long mad thrill,' said Mimi. 'Wendley's going to sell the film rights.'

  'I can't get it altogether out of my blood,' said Roper again. 'The family motto might be the same as Bismarck's: Blood and Iron.'

  'Do you want to get it out?' asked Margaret. 'I'm sure it's a fascinating book.'

  But Mimi had leapt to her feet. 'What about a cup of tea? What do you say I make it?'

  Roper hesitated for a moment. Margaret thought that disinclination to accede conflicted with desire to please Mimi.

  'I'll help.' Normally tea at night was so little Margaret's habit that Mimi stared at her.

  'That would be very nice indeed,' said Roper at last. Desire to please Mimi had doubtless prevailed, though indeed it was hard to see what else he could say. 'I'll show you the kitchen. It's really very nice of you.' He hesitated another moment. Then they both followed him from the room.

  Before the kettle had boiled in the square cold kitchen, Margaret's mind was in another conflict. Roper no longer seemed altogether so cultivated and charming as towards the end of dinner; there were now recurrent glimpses in him of showiness and even silliness. The maddening thing was, however, that Margaret could no longer be unaware that she found him attractive. Some impulse of which her experience was small and her opinion adverse, was loose in her brain, like the spot of light in a column of mercury. Upon other matters her mind was perfectly clear; so that she felt like two people, one thinking, one willing. Possibly even there was a third person, who was feeling; who was feeling very tired indeed.

  Mimi, sometimes so quick to tire, seemed utterly unflagging. She darted about the strange domesticities, turning taps, assembling crocks, prattling about the gas cooker: 'Your gas doesn't smell. I call that service.'

  'The smell is added to coal gas as a safety precaution,' said Roper.

  'Why don't they choose a nice smell, then?'

  'What would you suggest?'

  'I don't mean Chanel, but new-mown hay or lovely roses.'

  'The Gas Board don't want all their customers in love with easeful death.'

  'What's your favourite method of committing suicide?'

  Though this was one of Mimi's most customary topics, Margaret wished that she had chosen another. But Roper merely replied, 'Old age, I think.' He seemed fascinated by her. Neither he nor Margaret was doing anything to help with the preparations. In the end Mimi began positively to sing and the empty interchange of remarks came to an end.

  As Mimi was filling the teapot, Roper unexpectedly departed.

  'Do you like him?' asked Margaret.

  'He's all right. Wonder if there's anything to eat with it.' Mimi began to peer into vast clanging bread bins.

  'Have you found out anything more about him?'

  'Not a thing.'

  'Don't you think it's all rather queer?'

  'Takes all sorts to make a world, dear.'

  'It seems to take an odd sort to make a railway. You yourself suggested –' But Roper returned.

  'I thought we might end this delightful evening in my den; my study, you know. It's much warmer and cosier. I don't usually show it to visitors. I like to keep somewhere quite private. For work, you know. But you are no ordinary visitors. I've just looked in and there's even a fire burning.' This last slightly odd remark was not to Margaret made less odd by the way it was spoken; as if the speaker had prepared in advance a triviality too slight to sustain preparation convincingly. 'Do come along. Let me carry the tray.'

  'I've been looking for something to eat,' said Mimi. 'Do you think Beech has laid by any buns or anything?'

  'There's some cake in my den,' said Roper, like the hero of a good book for boys.

  This time the door was open and the room flooding the hall with cheerful light.

  It was entirely different from any other room they had entered in that house: and not in the least like a den, or even like a study. The lamps were modern, efficient, adequate, and decorative. The furniture was soft and comfortable. The railway blight (as Margaret regarded it) seemed totally absent. As Roper had said, there was an excellent fire in a modern grate surrounded by unexciting but not disagreeable Dutch tiles. This seemed the true drawing-room of the house.

  'What a lovely lounge!' cried Mimi. 'Looks like a woman in the house at last. Why couldn't we come in here before?' Her rapidly increasing command of the situation seemed to Margaret almost strident.

  'I thought the occasion called for more formality.'

  'Dog in the manger, if you ask me.' Mimi fell upon a sofa, extending her trousered legs. 'Pour out, Margaret, will you?'

  Margaret, conscious that whereas Mimi ought to be appearing in a bad light, yet in fact it was she, Margaret, who, however unjustly, was doing so, repeated with the tea the office she had already performed with the coffee. Roper, who had placed the tray on a small table next to an armchair in which Margaret proceeded to seat herself beside the fire, carried one of the big full cups to Mimi. He poured her milk with protective intimacy and seemed to find one of her obvious jokes about the quantity of sugar she required intoxicatingly funny. He moved rather well, Margaret thought. Mimi, moreover, had been right about his voice. His remarks, however, though almost never about himself, seemed mostly, in the light of that fact, remarkably self-centred. It would be dreadful to have to listen to them all one's life.

  Suddenly he was bearing cake. Neither of the women saw where it came from but, when it appeared, both found they still had appetites. It tasted of vanilla and was choked with candied peel.

  In the kitchen Margaret had noticed that despite the late hour the traffic on the railway had seemed to be positively increasing; but in the present small room the noise was much muffled, the line being on the other side of the house. None the less, frequent trains were still to be heard.

  'Why are there so many trains? It must be nearly midnight.'

  'Long past, dear,' interjected Mimi, the time-keeper. The fact seemed to give her a
particular happiness.

  'I see you're not used to living by a railway,' said Roper. 'Many classes of traffic are kept off the tracks during ordinary travelling hours. What you hear going by now are the loads you don't see when the stations are open. A railway is like an iceberg, you know: very little of its working is visible to the casual onlooker.'

  'Not visible, perhaps. But certainly audible.'

  'The noise does not disturb you?'

  'No, of course not. But does it really go on day and night?'

  'Certainly. Day and night. At least on important main lines, such as this is.'

  'I suppose you've long ceased to notice it?'

  'I notice when it's not there. If a single train is missing from its time, I become quite upset. Even if it happens when I'm asleep.'

  'But surely only the passenger trains have time-tables?'

  'My dear Margaret, every single train is in a time-table. Every local goods, every light engine movement. Only not, of course, in the time-table you buy for sixpence at the Enquiry Office. Only a small fraction of all the train movements are in that. Even the man behind the counter knows virtually nothing of the rest.'

  'Only Wendley knows the whole works,' said Mimi from the sofa.

  The others were sitting one at each side of the fire in front of which she lay and had been talking along the length of her body. Margaret had realised that this was the first time Roper had used her Christian name. It seemed hours ago that he had called Mimi by hers. Suddenly, looking at Mimi sprawling in her trousers and tight high-necked sweater, Margaret saw the point, clearer than in any book: Mimi was physically attractive; she herself in all probability was not. And nothing else in all life, in all the world, really counted. Nothing, nothing. Being cleverer; on the whole (as she thought) kinder; being more refined; the daughter of a Lord: such things were the dust beneath Mimi's chariot wheels, items in the list of life's innumerable unwantable impedimenta. Margaret stuck out her legs unbecomingly.

  'Can I have another cup of tea?' said Mimi. Her small round head was certainly engaging.

  'There you are,' said Margaret. 'Now will you both forgive me if I go to bed? I think I could do with some sleep after my soaking.'

  'I'm a beast,' cried Mimi, warmly sympathetic. 'Is there anything I can do? What about a hot water bottle, Wendley? Margaret is always as helpless as a butterfly. I have to look after her.' She was certainly rather sweet too.

  'Not a hot water bottle, please,' replied Margaret. 'They're not in season yet. I'll be all right, Mimi. See you later. Good night.'

  Between sympathy and the desire to get her out of the room, Margaret thought on her way upstairs, Mimi had absolutely no conflict whatever; she merely took her emotions in turn, getting the most out of all of them, and no doubt giving the most also.

  This time there was no vague figure which crept back from the stairs: or possibly it was that Margaret's thoughts attended a different will-o'-the-wisp. Immediately she entered the bedroom, she noticed that the promised second bed had arrived, as lean and frugal as the first. In the long room the two beds had been set far apart. Margaret was unable to be sure whether the second bed had or had not been there when she had last entered the room.

  Her mind still darting and plunging about the scene downstairs, she selected the bed which stood furthest from the door. At that moment Mimi seemed to her in no particular need of consideration. Margaret dashed off her clothes in the clammy atmosphere, dropping the garments with unwonted carelessness upon one of the two dark, thin-legged chairs; then, as a train pounded past, rattling the small barred windows at each end of the room and causing the curtains to shake apart, letting in the infernal glare outside, she climbed into her pyjamas and into the small, tight bed. She now realised for the first time that there were no sheets, but only clinging blankets. To put out the single oil lamp was more than her courage or the cold permitted. She buttoned her jacket to the top and wished it had long sleeves. It had been only an absurd dignity, a preposterous aggression, which had led her to reject a hot water bottle.

  She was quite unable to sleep. Her mind had set up a devil's dance which would not subside for hours at the best. The bed was the first really uncomfortable one in which Margaret had ever slept: it was so narrow that blankets of normal size could be and were tucked in so far that they overlapped beneath the occupant, interlocking to bind her in; so narrow also that the cheap hard springs of the wire framework gave not at all beneath the would-be sleeper's weight; and the mattress was inadequate to blur a diamond pattern of hard metallic ridges. Although she liked by day to wear garments fitting closely at the throat, Margaret found that the same sensation in bed, however much necessitated by the temperature, amounted to suffocation. Nor had she ever been able, since first she could remember, to sleep with a light in the room. Above all, there were the trains: not so much the periodical thunder rollings, she found, as the apparently lengthening intervals of waiting for them. Downstairs the trains had seemed to become more and more frequent; here they seemed to become slowly sparser. It was probably, Margaret reflected, a consequence of the slowness with which time is said to pass for those seeking sleep. Or perhaps Wendley Roper would have an answer in terms of graphicstatics or inner family knowledge. The ultimate effect was as if the train service were something subjective in Margaret's head, like the large defined shapes which obstruct the vision of the sufferer from migraine. 'No sleep like this,' said Margaret to herself, articulating with a clarity which made the words seem spoken by another.

  She forced herself from the rigid blankets, felt-like though far from warm, opened the neck of her pyjama jacket, and extinguished the light, which died on the lightest breath. What on earth was Mimi doing? she wondered with schoolgirl irritation.

  Immediately she had groped into the pitch-dark bed, a train which seemed of an entirely new construction went past. This time there was no blasting of steam and thundering or grinding of wheels: only a single sustained rather high-pitched rattling; metallic, inhuman, hollow. The new train appeared to be descending the bank, but Margaret for the first time could not be sure. The sound frightened Margaret badly. 'It's a hospital train,' her mother had said to her long ago on an occasion of which Margaret had forgotten all details except that they were horrible. 'It's full of wounded soldiers.'

  In a paroxysm of terror, as this agony of her childhood blasted through her adult life, Margaret must have passed into sleep, or at least unconsciousness. For the next event could only have been a dream of hallucination. The room seemed to be filling with colourless light. Though even now this light was extremely dim, the process of its first appearance and increase seemed to have been going on for a very long time. As she realised this, another part of Margaret's mind remembered that it could none the less have been only a matter of minutes. She struggled to make consistent the consciousness of the nearly endless with the consciousness of the precisely brief. The light seemed, moreover, the exact visual counterpart of the noise she had heard made by the new train. Then Margaret became aware of something very horrible indeed: it began with the upturned dead face of an old woman, colourless with the exact colourlessness of the colourless light; and it ended with the old woman's crumpled shape occultly made visible hanging above the trap-door in the corner of Margaret's compartment-shaped room. Up in the attic old Miss Roper had hanged herself, her grey hair so twisted and meshed as itself to suggest the suffocating agent.

  Margaret's hands went in terror to her own bare throat. Then the door of the room opened, and someone stood inside it bearing a light.

  'I don't think you heard me knock.'

  As when she and Mimi had arrived she had noticed in Roper's first words the echo of the man at the Guest House, so now was another echo – of Beech's cool apology for that bedroom contretemps which had so fired Mimi's wrath. To Margaret it was as if a nightmare had reached that not uncommon point at which the sufferer, though not yet awake, not yet out of the dream, yet becomes aware that a dream it is. Then all was deep nig
htmare once more, as Margaret recalled the shadow woman on the stairs, and perceived that the same woman was now in the room with her.

  Margaret broke down. Still clutching her throat, she cried repeatedly in a shrill but not loud voice. 'Go away. Go away. Go away. Go away.' It was again like her childhood.

  The strange woman approached and, setting down the lamp, began to shake her by the shoulders. At once Margaret seemed to know that, whoever else she was, she was not the dead Miss Roper; and that was all which seemed to matter. She stopped wauling like a terror-struck child: then saw that the hand still on one of her shoulders wore a dull coal-black ring; and, looking up, that the face above her and the thick black hair were Beech's, as had been that indifferently apologetic voice. Nightmare stormed forward yet again; but this time only for an adult speck of time. For Margaret seemed now to have no doubt whatever that Beech was indeed a woman.

  'Where's your friend?'

  'I left her downstairs. I came up to bed early.'

  'Early?'

  'What's the time? I have no watch.'

  'It's half-past three.'

  The equivocal situation returned to life in Margaret's mind in every detail, as when stage lights are turned on simultaneously.

  'What business is it of yours? Who are you?'

  'Who do you think I am?'

  'I thought you were the manservant.'

  'I looked after old Miss Roper. Until she died.'

  'Did that mean you had to dress like a man?' The woman now appeared to be wearing a dark grey coat and skirt and a white blouse.

  'Wendley could hardly live alone in the house with a woman he wasn't married to. Someone he had no intention of marrying.'

  'Why haven't you left, then?'

  'After what happened to Miss Roper?'

  'What did you do to Miss Roper?' Margaret spoke very low but quite steadily. All feeling was dead in her, save, far below the surface, a flickering jealousy of Mimi, a death-wish sympathy with the murdering stranger beside her. So that Margaret was able to add, steadily as before, 'Miss Roper was mad, wasn't she?'