Compulsory Games Read online

  “My instructor’s going on holiday shortly afterwards,” she explained breezily.

  “But what about me?” Colin was palpably losing his grip. “You can do whatever you like, Colin. I don’t want to interfere with your plans in any way.” As if she were not his “plans”; as she had been, so reliably, for a steady number of years.

  “Don’t you care for me, Grace, any more?”

  “Of course I do.” She smiled widely. “I love you very much and I always shall.”

  •

  A year ago, all the words that matter had suddenly changed their meanings and changed them for ever. Nor was this process of change going to cease. Colin felt that he would never even die. Rather was he to be endlessly dragged out of himself; moulded, melted, and miniaturised: while all the time, his real self remained entirely conscious but entirely powerless, like a discarded chrysalis still with feeling. A manikin was materialising while the man watched, having first been paralysed. But perhaps most marriages are like this in the end, thought Colin one night. And soon the current of events sliding towards his final devastation began to race. On one and the same day, Grace told him she was now permitted to fly “solo” and that Eileen McGrath and she were buying their Moth.

  “You can’t afford it, Grace.” Colin at least knew that very well.

  “I’ve always had a little package under the bed that I didn’t tell you about. And if that’s not enough, Eileen’s going to help me out, as I told you.”

  “Do you mean to say that you’ve had sources of income that have been omitted from my tax returns? That’s a serious offence, Grace, and it’s I who am liable for it, not you.”

  “Fuss, fuss, fuss.” She chuckled at his torment. Yet it was not that she was treating him with direct contempt. It was more that she evinced entire lack of interest in his needs and life-patterns; though doubtless she would have protested, with all the sincerity of indifference, that he was perfectly entitled to whatever life-patterns he pleased, just as she was.

  He could not speak to her.

  “Colin. I never said a word about sources of income.”

  He stared. “Do you mean you’ve got a large sum of capital which you’ve not even bothered to invest? Really, we’re hardly as rich as that!” All his bitterness concentrated upon this visible aspect of the travail.

  “I’m investing it now. In a beautiful scarlet Moth.”

  •

  And soon, there it was, in the sky: snarling and puttering round the area between Kensington High Street and the Cromwell Road, converging in diminishing spirals upon the Trenwiths’ house (and Eileen’s house too, of course), much less a moth than a wasp, a wasp closing in on a pot of marrow jam or bowl of rum punch. Whoever it was up there, whichever of the two, had come to greet him, to recognise his existence. It was a sunny Sunday morning. The buzzing horror was so rubicund, so vibratory, so malign that Colin, who had at first dashed out of the front door on to the crazy paving, put his hands over his eyes after the briefest glance at it. Indeed, he actually screamed. His scream was audible above the pandemonium from the empyrean, or so the neighbours’ children said. They were thoroughly acclimatised to even the rowdiest aircraft, but less so to grown men loudly screaming. Only machines are entirely real for children today.

  Colin fled back into the house, sat on the narrow staircase, and tried to think. Surely small private planes, amateur aircraft, did not churn the slates off roofs as this machine must be doing? He even recollected something about General de Gaulle having forbidden all overflying of Paris. But had it been all, or only the overflying of vast airliners? More important: was it legal, even in Britain, for private aviators to circle above dense residential areas? To no question that concerned aviation, legal, technological, or metaphysical had he the ghost of an answer; because his mien had silenced Grace, who might have been well pleased to enlighten him.

  •

  Nor did he find himself in a position to make good any such omissions when she returned. This was because she never did return. Neither did Eileen McGrath return; if “return” was, in her case, the word.

  Colin was, of course, distraught about Grace’s unexplained absence that Sunday night, though he had not yet decided to telephone the police, the hospitals, and whoever else is to be telephoned when people have to be accepted as “missing.” He had positively resolved not to ring up any of them. Grace was a middle-aged woman, perfectly able to look after herself. (Indeed, one of his routine remarks in recent months had been “You’re a middle-aged woman and can’t carry on like a crazy girl.”) And he himself by this time knew the way round his own twilight life.

  It proved to be just as well that he had done nothing sudden or rash; because on the Monday morning a letter arrived from Grace saying, perfectly pleasantly, that she and Eileen were taking a house near the flying club. He would be sure to find it noisy, she remarked, with a glint in her eye, or at least in her writing instrument. Perhaps for that reason, she gave no address.

  After reading this epistle, Colin had to leave for the office almost immediately; but that evening he strolled round to Eileen’s abode, first right, then first left. When he arrived there, he found that the front door was painted purple instead of green, and, when he rang, that Eileen had apparently sold the house months before. It was now occupied by a different class of person altogether, and there was little to be communicated, at least to Colin. Colin reflected that perhaps Grace and he should have had children. It was a thought that had often come to him during the past twelve months. How many children? he also wondered. The children in the street stopped playing about and gawped silently at him as he passed.

  Grace failed to return, and Eileen failed to return, but, to compensate, the big, red, noisy Moth came back often. It can’t really be big, thought Colin: it must really be quite small. The enormous shadow it cast must be a trick of the light: refraction or something of that kind. Colin remembered the term from the Children’s Encyclopaedia—his own childhood set. All the same, he deemed it unwise to challenge that shadow, to “let it fall on him.” In fact, he would dodge from side to side of the street to prevent any chance of this happening; and drifting round Kensington Gardens had become impossible, because his dartings about made the children giggle and follow. The simplest and most obvious thing was to remain, as far as possible, indoors—“at home,” as it is called. When he was safely shut up with the curtains drawn, there was only the noise to worry about, though that could be very unpleasant indeed.

  Not that these things happened all the time. Colin could hardly have continued his normal life (new pattern) if they had. Perhaps twice a week was the average for the present; or some frequency greater by a decimal addition if the period chosen was a month. Moreover, he rarely heard, let alone saw, anything when he was actually in the office. This had the natural consequence that he became fonder and fonder of office life. The solitude in which he otherwise dwelt (he lacked both the heart and the talent to entertain without Grace) helped here also. He became warmly aware of desirable qualities in fellow workers whom previously he had not even noticed. The females, in particular, had become quite charming and interesting; even the ones in middle life, long married and settled, not in a position to worry much about men like Colin.

  Mostly, therefore, it was when he was in his house or in the street that the trouble came; sometimes distantly buzzing, sometimes suddenly swooping, so that, on occasion, he had to run really fast in order to avoid the shadow. He had been a quite successful quarter-miler when at school, but nowadays he was glad when there was no sun, for then there could be no shadow. Moreover, sunshine always brought back that sunny Sunday morning when the Moth first intruded upon him. . . . It couldn’t really be a Moth, he supposed. Not by now. But Grace had always termed it a Moth and he knew too little to propose an alternative.

  There was a tiny garden at the back of the house also, but that had long been something of a compromise. In the days when the houses had been occupied by servants, there had doub
tless been regular crops of cabbages, a few geraniums, and plenty of mint all the year round. The Trenwiths had been less industrious, and, no doubt, less needy. Grace, as it happened, had not been very fond of gardening. Colin recalled what Eileen had said of herself when last he saw her: “My fingers are not green fingers.” It was becoming quite difficult to detach, or even distinguish, the memory of Grace from the memory of Eileen. Incredible! But after life has begun to run away from us, nothing is ever again really credible, nor does it matter.

  Colin was obliged to enter the back garden from time to time in order to reach the dustbin (the men emptied it by drawing it through a hatch in the back fence). That evening on which he first became aware that Grace and Eileen were becoming confused in his memory, he had just lifted the lid, when the Moth (or whatever it really was) swooped catastrophically from the highest of high heavens. It had dropped on him with no warning at all, unless Colin’s thought about the two women had amounted to a premonition. Perhaps that was so, because this time the machine came low enough for him to identify the pilot, that matter he had wondered about from the first, because a thing he had understood was that there could be only one pilot.

  And at these newly close quarters, the answer was simple: there appeared to be no pilot. The monstrosity was in perfectly free flight; though another (and possibly more hopeful) way of putting it might be that the machine was out of control.

  Its inhuman breath and the tremendous swirl of its passage laid Colin low. The children at the windows of the houses at the back saw him shrink and collapse, possibly striking his head on the hard rim of the dustbin. If that happened, there was no sound of it detectable by the children, because there was so much other sound. On most days and nights in Kensington there is aircraft noise of some kind, somewhere: sometimes louder than at other times, according to the direction of the wind and other circumstances more remote. It was pitch dark when Colin came to himself again (if truly he ever did).

  He resolved to take a grip and see what a week in the country could do; and he even managed to obtain the necessary leave of absence. Possibly some in the office had had enough of the new Colin’s anxious fraternisation. Almost at random he selected a hotel he did not know in a place he did not know (though harmless enough). As people do at such times, he thought he needed novel surroundings; and, in any case, places he did know were saturated with memories of Grace.

  The Trenwiths had at one time owned a small motor car, but it had been unexpectedly costly to house, in that their little abode had no garage; and they found that, in any case, they were using it less than they had expected, doubtless because they fared perfectly well (or so it had seemed) without unnecessarily leaving home.

  So Colin set off for the countryside by train. There are few slow trains nowadays, linking one real place with another real place; but Colin’s train did stop several times before reaching his destination. Each time the noise of the wheels ceased, Colin became aware of its place being taken by aircraft noise above. The idea that each time it was the same noise from the same machine was so unlikely that Colin decided to dismiss it. The fact that to him it certainly each time sounded exactly the same, probably implied (or confirmed) that his mind was giving way: now a quite minor consideration.

  Instead of stopping at stations now closed and useless, the train regularly stopped in the middle of the landscape. At those times, the aircraft noise without was particularly like the distinctive noise with which he was so familiar. There had always been occasional days, however few, when even at the office there had been a fairly steady, very individual, buzzing above and around. Colin’s ears had learned to discriminate.

  At his point of arrival, Colin found that he could hardly move. All his strength, all his identity were being drawn out of him—and, throughout, some part of him had to watch it happening, the main part of him, the real man, the implicit ghost. He was being mashed up and transmogrified before his own inner eyes; and the new entity, deprived of all egoism, would live for ever.

  Still, the unknown hotel seemed quite nice, as far as one could tell; though Colin had not altogether grasped before his departure from Kensington, how expensive hotels had become.

  The machines cost enormous sums to maintain; and every day there are more of them, and huger, and more intricate, more bossy. One cannot expect there to be much wealth left over for obsolete patterns of life.

  It would have been quite jolly in the hotel room, had Grace been with him; but, without her, it was lonely. Nor did the buzz-buzz on the horizon show much prospect of easing off.

  Common sense suggested that, from that day forward, it would never ease off. Colin wondered if henceforth it would not be continuously louder, or virtually so; even in the office. He felt sick.

  Question one: What had he done or not done to bring all this about? Question two: What had Colin’s actions or inactions to do, in any case, with why things happened to Colin? Life was gross and head-strong, and when set to destroy, proffered its own virulent fatality.

  At the edge of the country town was the big house, with a high wall round its curtilage. A card at the hotel Reception stated that the gardens of this house were open to the public. Colin was passionate neither for botany nor for horticulture, but as a visit to the gardens was doubtless usual, thought he might as well have a look. Also, there was not an enormous amount else to do, even though he was in the place for a week.

  Soon after he had paid to enter the gardens, Colin realised that the distant buzzing roar had stopped. There had been no queue at the improvised cash desk; which took the form of a battered kitchen table, manned by a crouched figure with sparse whiskers, an old-age pensioner. Moreover, Colin seemed to be the only person within the gardens. It was an “ordinary weekday” and on ordinary weekdays people are not free to visit gardens. Possibly, also, these particular gardens had been open too continuously for too long. The maintenance struck Colin as scamped and scanty; and if there were no visitors, there were no gardeners either. The terra cotta edgings to the flower-beds were much chipped, and sometimes whole sections were missing. Weeds were beginning to be noticeable on the once-gravelled paths, like mould on bread. Not one of the statues appeared to be complete, and all of them were black. The ornamental waters were full of sewage.

  Colin tried to make the best of the afternoon. He essayed a real effort in that direction; even if it were to be his last. And, after all, at least it was quiet here. Not only had the one particular noise ceased. It seemed to Colin as if all noise had ceased. It was like heaven in the moments before the music is heard. Even the pensioner had been palpably deaf, perhaps totally so. Colin had been able to submit the exact sum specified on the poster and had not needed to converse with him.

  Colin soon came to the house. It was obvious why only the gardens were open to the public. The house, though once beautiful, looked as if it had been unoccupied for a generation. Neglect was approaching the well-known point of no return. Even the weed growth was thicker on the wide walk which ran the length of the garden front, and much further in both directions. At one point among the weeds were a round can that had once contained an American beverage and a red, romper-type garment, discarded, dirty, and diminished by the weather.

  Colin thought he might as well continue to the back. It would be as well to see everything, and what else was there to do which might promote recuperation?

  The back of the house, being the part in which so much of the living had gone on, looked more blighted and less beautiful than the front. But the neglected lawns (the mowing schedule needed to be at least doubled) and the wide grey paths spread out at the back as at the front. A drive for the owners of the house and their visitors went off to Colin’s leftward, and a delivery drive for tradesmen also wandered away among concealing bushes and low, necessary structures. The first and main drive was barred by a length of circular pipe, dark brown with rust, and extended between battered trestles. No doubt the other and working approach was still in occasional use. Surely somethin
g was being done; from time to time?

  There seemed no clue or guidance as to the expected next step. The visitor was very much “on his own.” Of course, there were many things to be said in favour of that. At some distance away, half-left from where Colin stood, was a walled kitchen garden. Colin was in no doubt about what it was (or had been), but next he noticed that a number of small heads rose in a line above the faded brick wall. The same complete silence continued, but it was difficult to doubt that the heads were observing what Colin might do next, even if because there was so little else that was mobile to gaze at. By instinct, Colin went forward along a line which diverged from the back of the house at an angle more or less similar to the angle which led to the kitchen garden, though in the other direction. He even crossed lawns to do it, as the paths had been laid largely parallel with the house.

  On and on he went, traversing the half-mown near-prairie. When he considered that the kitchen garden was sufficiently far behind him, he picked up the system of paths again, though many of them were lumpy and stony from insufficient attention and insufficient use.

  Ah! Three other visitors!

  •

  They were not together either. Quite far from it, indeed: even though all of them had come into view simultaneously, at least where Colin was concerned. Nor did any of them seem to be in movement. They were all some way off, and Colin saw no need to stare at them. On the contrary, Colin’s need, as ever nowadays, was to hold on, if possible, to whatever might be left of his own mere being. Dotted about, was the way Colin might have described those other visitors. He continued with calm on his previously decided way, allotting to the others no especial attention.

  But, despite everything, he became aware that they were encroaching. It was the only word for it. Not only were they no longer where they had been, but much, much closer: they were also, very positively, intruding and ousting. He could feel the combined thrust of them and that he was shrinking beneath it, while, very curiously, at the same time he could see them standing over there: still keeping their distance apparently, albeit so much nearer than before. Moreover, the horizon had begun once more to buzz.