Strange Stories Page 6

  ‘What’s that mark?’ asked Stephen, pointing to the wall above Thread’s rather narrow headpiece. So often the trouble seemed to begin above the head. ‘Was it there before? ’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know. Never forget the whole place is going to be completely done over next year. Now do let me concentrate for a bit.’

  ***

  As the time for luncheon drew near, another man, Mark Tremble, peeped in.

  ‘Glad to see you back, Stephen. I really am.’

  ‘Thank you, Mark. I wish I could more sincerely say I was glad to be back.’

  ‘Who could be? Come and swim?’

  Stephen had regularly done it with Mark Tremble and a shifting group of others; usually at lunchtime on several days a week. It had been one of twenty devices for lightening momentarily the weight of Elizabeth’s desperation. The bath was in the basement of the building. Soon the bath was to be extended

  and standardized, and made available at times to additional grades.

  ‘Very well.’

  Stephen had at one time proposed to tear back; to be with Nell for a few moments; perhaps to buy that dress: but during the long morning he had decided against all of it.

  His real task was to put down his foot with the establishment; to secure such modified pension as he was entitled to; to concentrate, as Thread always concentrated; to depart.

  He had not so far said a word about it to anyone in the place. The two seniors changed in the sketchy cubicles, and emerged almost at the same moment in swimming trunks. There seemed to be no one else in or around the pool that day, though the ebbing and flowing of table tennis were audible through the partition.

  ‘I say, Stephen. What’s that thing on your back?’

  Stephen stopped dead on the wet tiled floor. ‘What thing?’ ‘It’s a bit peculiar. I’m sure it wasn’t there before. Before you went away. I’m extremely sorry to mention it.’

  ‘What’s it look like?’ asked Stephen. ‘Can you describe it?’ ‘The best I can do is that it looks rather like the sort of thing you occasionally see on trees. I think it may simply be something stuck on to you. Would you like me to give it a tug?’

  ‘I think not,’ said Stephen. ‘I am sorry it upsets you. I’ll go back and dress. I think it would be better.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mark Tremble. ‘It does upset me. It’s best to admit it. Either it’s something that will just come off with a good rub, or you’d better see a doctor, Stephen.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Stephen.

  ‘I don’t feel so much like a swim, after all,’ said Mark Tremble. ‘I’ll dress too and then we’ll both have a drink. I feel we could both do with one.’

  ‘I’m very sorry about it,’ said Stephen. ‘I apologize.’

  ***

  ‘What have you been doing all day?’ asked Stephen, as soon as he was back and had changed out of the garments currently normal in the civil service, casual and characterless. ‘I hope you’ve been happy.’

  ‘I found this on the roof.’ Nell was holding it in both her hands; which were still very brown. It was a huge lump: mineral, vegetable, who could tell? Or conceivably a proportion of each.

  ‘Your father would be interested.’

  Nell recoiled. ‘Don’t talk like that. It’s unlucky.’ Indeed, she had nearly dropped the dense mass.

  It had been an idiotic response on Stephen’s part; mainly the consequence of his not knowing what else to say. He was aware that it was perfectly possible to attain the roof of the building by way of the iron fire ladder, to which, by law, access had to be open to tenants at all hours.

  ‘I could do with a drink,’ said Stephen, though he had been drinking virtually the whole afternoon, without Thread even noticing, or without sparing time to acknowledge that he had noticed. Moira, the coloured girl from the typing area, had simply winked her big left eye at Stephen. ‘I’ve had a difficult day.’

  ‘Oh!’ Nell’s cry was so sincere and eloquent that it was as if he had been mangled in a traffic accident.

  ‘How difficult?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s just that it’s been difficult for me to make the arrangements to get away, to leave the place.’

  ‘But we are going?’ He knew it was what she was thinking about.

  ‘Yes, we are going. I promised.’

  He provided Nell with a token drink also. At first she had seemed to be completely new to liquor. Stephen had always found life black without it, but his need for it had become more habitual during Elizabeth’s illness. He trusted that Nell and he would, with use, wont, and time, evolve a mutual equilibrium.

  At the moment, he recognized that he was all but tight, though he fancied that at such times he made little external manifestation. Certainly Nell would detect nothing; if only because presumably she lacked data. Until now, he had never really been in the sitting room of the flat since his return. Here, the new tendrils on the walls and ceiling struck him as resembling a Portuguese man of war’s equipment; the coloured, insensate creature that can sting a swimmer to death at thirty feet distance, and had done so more than once when Elizabeth and he, being extravagant, had stayed at Cannes for a couple of weeks. It had been there that Elizabeth had told him finally she could never have a child. Really that was what they were doing there, though he had not realized it. The man of war business, the two victims, had seemed to have an absurd part in their little drama. No one in the hotel had talked of anything else.

  ‘Let’s go to bed now,’ said Stephen to Nell. ‘We can get up again later to eat.’

  She put her right hand in his left hand.

  Her acquiescence, quiet and beautiful, made him feel compunctious.

  ‘Or are you hungry?’ he asked. ‘Shall we have something to eat first? I wasn’t thinking.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ve been foraging.’

  She seemed to know so many quite literary words. He gave no time to wondering where exactly the forage could have taken place. It would be unprofitable. Whatever Nell had brought in would be wholesomer, inestimably better in every way, than food from any shop.

  As soon as she was naked, he tried, in the electric light, to scrutinize her. There still seemed to be only the one mark on her body, truly a quite small mark by the standards of the moment, though he could not fully convince himself that it really was contracting.

  However, the examination was difficult: he could not let Nell realize what exactly he was doing; the light was not very powerful, because latterly Elizabeth had disliked a strong light anywhere, and he had felt unable to argue; most of all, he had to prevent Nell seeing whatever Mark Tremble had seen on his own person, had himself all the time to lie facing Nell or flat on his back. In any case, he wondered always how much Nell saw that he saw; how much, whatever her utterances and evidences, she analysed of the things that he analysed.

  The heavy curtains, chosen and hung by Elizabeth, had, it seemed, remained drawn all day; and by now the simplest thing was for Stephen to switch off what light there was.

  Nell, he had thought during the last ten days or ten aeons, was at her very best when the darkness was total.

  He knew that heavy drinking was said to increase desire and to diminish performance; and he also knew that it was high time in his life for him to begin worrying about such things. He had even so hinted to Arthur Thread; albeit mainly to startle Thread, and to foretoken his, Stephen’s, new life course; even though any such intimation to Thread would be virtually useless. There can be very few to whom most of one’s uttered remarks can count for very much.

  None the less, Nell and Stephen omitted that evening to arise later; even though Stephen had fully and sincerely intended it.

  The next morning, very early the next morning, Nell vouchsafed to Stephen an unusual but wonderful breakfast - if one could apply so blurred a noun to so far-fetched a repast.

  Stephen piled into his civil service raiment, systematically non-committal. He was taking particular trouble not to see his ow
n bare back in any looking glass. Fortunately, there was no such thing in the dim bathroom.

  ‘Goodbye, my Nell. Before the weekend we shall be free.’

  He supposed that she knew what a weekend was. By now, it could hardly be clearer that she knew almost everything that mattered in the least.

  But, during that one night, the whole flat seemed to have become dark green, dark grey, plain black: patched everywhere, instead of only locally, as when they had arrived. Stephen felt that the walls, floors, and ceilings were beginning to advance towards one another. The knick-knacks were de-materializing most speedily. When life once begins to move, it can scarcely be prevented from setting its own pace. The very idea of intervention becomes ridiculous.

  What was Nell making of these swift and strange occurrences? All Stephen was sure of was that it would be unwise to take too much for granted. He must hew his way out; if necessary, with a bloody axe, as the man in the play put it.

  Stephen kissed Nell ecstatically. She was smiling as he shut the door. She might smile, off and on, all day, he thought; smile as she foraged.

  ***

  By that evening, he had drawn a curtain, thick enough even for Elizabeth to have selected, between his homebound self and the events of the daylight.

  There was no technical obstacle to his retirement, and never had been. It was mainly the size of his pension that was affected; and in his new life he seemed able to thrive on very little. A hundred costly substitutes for direct experience could be rejected. An intense reality, as new as it was old, was burning down on him like clear sunlight or heavenly fire or poetry.

  It was only to be expected that his colleagues should shrink back a little. None the less, Stephen had been disconcerted by how far some of them had gone. They would have been very much less concerned, he fancied, had he been an acknowledged defector, about to stand trial. Such cases were now all in the day’s work: there were routines to be complied with, though not too strictly. Stephen realized that his appearance was probably against him. He was not sure what he looked like from hour to hour, and he was taking no steps to find out.

  Still, the only remark that was passed, came from Toby Strand, who regularly passed remarks.

  ‘Good God, Stephen, you’re looking like death warmed up. I should go home to the wife. You don’t want to pass out in this place.’

  Stephen looked at him.

  ‘Oh God, I forgot. Accept my apology.’

  ‘That’s perfectly all right, Toby,’ said Stephen. ‘And as for the other business, you’ll be interested to learn that I’ve decided to retire.’

  ‘Roll on the day for one and all,’ said Toby Strand, ever the vox populi.

  Mercifully, Stephen’s car had been restored to a measure of health, so that the discreet bodywork gleamed slightly in the evening lustre as he drove into the rented parking space.

  ‘Nell, we can leave at cockcrow!’

  ***

  ‘I forgot about buying you that dress.’

  He was standing in his bath gown, looking at her in the wide bed. The whole flat was narrowing and blackening, and at that early hour the electric light was even weaker than usual.

  ‘I shan’t need a dress.’

  ‘You must want a change sometime.’

  ‘No. I want nothing to change.’

  He gazed at her. As so often, he had no commensurate words.

  ‘We’ll stop somewhere on the way,’ he said.

  They packed the rehabilitated car with essentials for the simple life; with things to eat and drink on the journey and after arrival. Stephen, though proposing to buy Nell a dress, because one never knew what need might arise, was resolved against dragging her into a roadside foodplace. He took all he could, including, surreptitiously, some sad souvenirs of Elizabeth, but he recognized plainly enough that there was almost everything remaining to be done with the flat, and that he would have to return one day to do it, whether or not Nell came with him. In the meantime, it was difficult to surmount what was happening to the flat, or to him. Only Nell was sweet, calm, and changeless in her simple clothes. If only the nature of time were entirely different!

  ‘You’ll be terribly cold.’

  She seemed never to say it first, never to think of it.

  He covered her with sweaters and rugs. He thought of offering her a pair of his own warm trousers, but they would be so hopelessly too wide and long.

  Islington was a misty marsh, as they flitted through; Holloway pink as a desert flamingo. The scholarly prison building was wrapped in fire. Finsbury Park was crystal as a steppe; Manor House deserted as old age.

  When, swift as thoughts of love, they reached Grantham, they turned aside to buy Nell’s dress. She chose a roughtex- tured white one, with the square neck outlined in black, and would accept nothing else, nothing else at all. She even refused to try on the dress and she refused to wear it out of the shop. Stephen concurred, not without a certain relief, and carried the dress to the car in a plastic bag. The car was so congested that a problem arose.

  ‘I’ll sit on it,’ said Nell.

  Thus the day went by as in a dream: though there are few such dreams in one lifetime. Stephen, for sure, had never known a journey so rapt, even though he could seldom desist from staring and squinting for uncovenanted blemishes upon and around the bright coachwork. Stephen recognized that, like everyone else, he had spent his life without living; even though he had had Elizabeth for much of the time to help him through, as she alone was able.

  Northwards, they ran into a horse fair. The horses were everywhere, and, among them, burlesques of men bawling raucously, and a few excited girls.

  ‘Oh!’ cried Nell.

  ‘Shall we stop? ’

  ‘No,’ said Nell. ‘Not stop.’

  She was plainly upset.

  ‘Few fairs like that one are left,’ said Stephen, as he sat intimately, eternally beside her. ‘The motors have been their knell.’

  ‘Knell,’ said Nell.

  Always it was impossible to judge how much she knew.

  ‘Nell,’ said Stephen affectionately. But it was at about that moment he first saw a dark, juicy crack in the polished metalwork of the bonnet.

  ‘Nell,’ said Stephen again; and clasped her hand, always brown, always warm, always living and loving. The huge geometrical trucks were everywhere, and it was an uncircumspect move for Stephen to make. But it was once more too misty for the authorities to see very much, to take evidence that could be sworn to.

  The mist was more like fog as they wound through Harewood’s depopulated community. Harewood really should marry Doreen as soon as it becomes possible, thought Stephen, and make a completely new start in life, perhaps have a much better type of youngster, possibly and properly for the cloth.

  Stephen was struck with horror to recollect that he had forgotten all about the costly book which had been almost certainly intended for Harewood, and which Harewood would be among the very few fully to appreciate and rejoice in. The book had not really been noticeable at first light in the eroding flat, but his lapse perturbed Stephen greatly.

  ‘A fungus and an alga living in a mutually beneficial relationship,’ he said under his breath.

  ‘What’s that? ’ asked Nell.

  ‘It’s the fundamental description of a lichen. You should know that.’

  ‘Don’t talk about it.’

  He saw that she shuddered; she who never even quaked from the cold.

  ‘It’s unlucky,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Nell. I was thinking of the book we left behind, and the words slipped out.’

  ‘We’re better without the book.’

  ‘It wasn’t really our book.’

  ‘We did right in leaving it.’

  He realized that it had been the second time when, without thinking, he had seemed ungracious about the big step she had taken for him: the second time at least.

  Therefore, he simply answered, ‘I expect so.’

  He remained uneasy. He h
ad taken due care not to drive past the crumbling rectory, but nothing could prevent the nondelivery of Harewood’s expensive book being an odious default, a matter of only a few hundred yards. To confirm the guilt, a middle-aged solitary woman at the end of the settlement suddenly pressed both hands to her eyes, as if to prevent herself from seeing the passing car, even in the poor light.

  The ascending track was rougher and rockier than on any of Stephen’s previous transits. It was only to be expected, Stephen realized. Moreover, to mist was now added dusk. At the putative Burton’s Clough, he had to take care not to drive over the edge of the declivity; and thereafter he concentrated upon not colliding with the overgrown stony waymark. Shapeless creatures were beginning to emerge which may no longer appear by daylight even in so relatively remote a region. Caution was compelled upon every count.

  Thus it was full night when somehow they reached the spot where the track seemed simply to end - with no good reason supplied, as Stephen had always thought. Elizabeth would have been seriously upset if somehow she had seen at such a spot the familiar car in which she had taken so many unforgettable outings, even when a virtual invalid. She might have concluded that at long last she had reached the final bourne.

  The moon, still in its third quarter, managed to glimmer, like a fragrance, through the mist; but there could be no visible stars. Stephen switched on his flash, an item of official supply.

  ‘We don’t need it,’ said Nell. ‘Please not.’

  Nell was uncaring of cold, of storm, of fog, of fatigue. Her inner strength was superb, and Stephen loved it. But her indifference to such darkness as this reminded Stephen of her father, that wonderful entity, whom it was so unlucky ever to mention, probably even to think of. None the less, Stephen turned back the switch. He had noticed before that he was doing everything she said.

  As best he could, he helped her to unload the car, and followed her along the narrow paths through the damp heather. Naturally, he could not see a trace of the house, and he suddenly realized that, though they struggled in silence, he could not even hear the gently heaving spring. They were making a pile at the spot where the house must be; and Nell never put a foot wrong in finding the pile a second, third, and even fourth time. Much of the trip was steep, and Stephen was quite winded once more by his fourth climb in almost no moonlight at all, only the faint smell of moonlight; but when, that time, he followed Nell over the tangled brow, the mist fell away for a moment, as mist on mountains intermittently does, and at last Stephen could see the house quite clearly.