Complete Short Stories (VMC) (103 page)

‘Good-bye.’

‘Good-bye, miss.’

The children, with their hands, their clinging ways, seemed to influence their mother away from the house and the stranger. Across the grass, slowly, she returned with the filled bucket, the baby and the child, who stumbled in the tussocky grass and held her skirt bunched in its fist. And Alison took
her four clothes-pegs and laid them on the window-sill in the sun and began to brush her hair. It fell cool and sweet-smelling before her face and in this dark and fragrant tent she was smiling to herself.

That night it was still and frosty. She opened the windows and got into bed – ‘This is the last night,’ she thought. It is true that seven days’ leave will not last for ever, but with the end of it she had not begun to concern herself. Outside, a rimed leaf loosened itself and fell, some creatures rustled in the wood, an owl hooted. The branches stood motionless as if printed upon the sky. Half a moon with a scarred face freed itself from the curd-like cloud. Her eyes, filled with that vision of laced branches, closed and she slept.

Swung in a hammock of sleep, she rocked, warm, suspended, slipping into darkness and warmth, curved with crossed arms and knees drawn up, the first attitude of humanity.

Into this safety came something alien. At first, she accepted it and then her mind refused the sound, it became strange, unearthly, she denied it, she awoke. ‘I screamed in my sleep,’ she thought. But while she lay, still in bed, the screaming continued. It could not be a woman screaming, for there was no woman to scream. Yet it was. Very close to the house it sounded in the frosty air, and there was nothing else, not a rustle, nor any movement, nor another voice

If it had been tomorrow, she thought foolishly and suddenly. Then Eric would have been here. The sweat had sprung from her hands and back and was damp on the sheet beneath her. The cold struck her body sharply as she crept out of bed and went to the window.

The horrifying sound went on – a woman who tried to mouth words as she screamed. Each cry chilled the blood, was uncontrolled, instinct with horror and bestiality. There was no other sound, except that Alison suddenly and boldly, so that she amazed herself, called out: ‘Is anyone in trouble?’ ‘Inadequate!’ the cool part of her noted, the unfrightened part. At once, the scream seemed to form into words, which came from the fence on the wood side. ‘It’s my man. All night he’s been beating me. Can’t I have no peace? Can’t I have no peace?’

These words came brokenly again and again, grew fainter, receded, were accompanied now by plungings, rustlings, twig-snappings. She was going away. It was as if she had gained an objective. Still she cursed, her voice clotted with hatred and fear, but growing fainter.

Alison crept back to bed, lay rigid and shivering. Her reason still seemed to refuse what her ears told it – that Rose, that quiet, timid squirrel, to whom the children clung, who spoke softly and gave presents shyly and silently, should become so transformed, so horrifying.

She was too cold now to sleep. The sea roared in her ears and the sound
of a leaf moving startled her. She lay rigid and alert, but now could hear nothing.

‘The police,’ she thought: and then, but the police could do nothing. For a man – she remembered that much of the law – must be allowed to beat his own wife. It is not for the police to interfere. She tried to sleep, desiring desperately that dawn should come, for that pallor to creep over the furniture and lighten the curtains and restore her to common sense, to the proportions proper to the day. It did not come. The world was caught up and frozen in darkness and the moon is an illumination which does not inspire common sense. As soon as the silence had settled once more, it was broken again into fragments by a small cry, lower than the first, but more heartbroken, little agonised bleatings.

‘Oh, no God, no!’ she cried, sitting up in bed, covering her ears with her hands. Now that the mother had wandered away had he begun to beat his children?

‘Then I can’t bear it,’ she sobbed. Sickened by that sound she crawled from the bed and began to look for clothes. There was nothing else for her to do. One grown-up cannot lie in bed while another is hurting little children. Over her pyjamas, she pulled slacks and a jersey. Forcing her shoes on, she became desperately frightened. ‘I must go quickly,’ she thought, ‘before I am too afraid.’ She stood in the room, thinking, ‘No one will come if I scream. There is no one to hear me!’ She had no weapon. Things like pokers seemed too foolish to take. She crept down the stairs thinking of Eric, not knowing what she was going to do; then she let herself out of the back door. The cold solid air filled her throat and chest.

‘I won’t creep,’ she thought, ‘I will run. I will go loudly, be aggressive.’ Then, perhaps, she would not hear the beating of her heart, feel all the platitudes coming true – the blood being frozen, the limbs turned to stone. So she broke through the undergrowth, leapt the fence, tore her way through brambles and plunged knee-deep sometimes into ditches of leaves. She could hear clearly now the strangled, reedy sound of the children crying and as she went she called, ‘Stop it. Stop it.’ She felt, like a soldier going into battle, that it was only possible to act in hatred and with the ears filled with some noise other than the whispers of fear.

And now she saw how big the woods were, how different from the daytime and she thought – and the thought irrelevant as it was silenced her and checked her – ‘It is always like this at night when I am in bed’ – large, menacing, watchful. From each tree – watchful.

She stood there facing the great dark clump of holly bushes and listened, but there was no sound – until one of the trees seemed to detach itself and step forward. It did not spray up leaves on all sides as she had done, yet it was a man. He came closer to her – in the moonlight she saw the dark,
level eyes, even a faint shine on the dark suit over his thighs, a belt of plaited leather with a bright buckle. She watched the buckle as it came towards her, and then up went her eyes to meet his. ‘I must speak first,’ she thought. Her instinct told her this. At the same time, she saw that his hands were towards his back and thought of knives, remembering his way of getting a living.

‘You can stop this,’ she cried loudly. The wood echoed, the sound was shocking. ‘If I hear one more sound from those children I shall call the police.’ He smiled, but she had a feeling that she mustn’t let him speak, that she could not endure to hear his voice. ‘You see?’ she cried. ‘You see? That’s what I shall do. I will not be disturbed in this way and I will not have those children hurt.’

He said nothing, but now his bare hands came forward, the thumbs were stuck inside the plaited belt. She felt only partial relief at this, for the difficulty was now to go. She could not. Courage to turn she had not.

‘Now remember,’ she challenged him, but it was ridiculous, like a child’s game. He would not answer. In his eyes, she saw what she was – hysterical, shrill, a woman; middle-class, so taking for granted comforts he knew nothing about; trying to make temper hide fear, but he knew and she knew through him that there was no anger, only terror.

At last – only just in time – for she was at the point of dropping to her knees and sobbing for mercy, for permission to go – he turned slightly and listened, having heard what she had not. It was someone coming up through the wood. It was Rose. As she approached them she came more slowly. A man’s jacket was buttoned to her throat over her long dress, her hair on one side had fallen to her shoulder.

‘Come here,’ he said softly. And then nodding sideways at Alison, ‘Friend of yours,’ he added and slouched off, spitting into the leaves, his hands on his belt.

The wide timid eyes sought Alison’s in the moonlight. ‘I’m sorry, miss.’

‘Not you,’ she said quickly. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Oh, yes, miss.’

‘And the children?’

‘Oh yes.’ Shocked, the eyes looked back. ‘He’s ever so good really – I think he …’ she whispered, glanced, ducked her head, buttoned and unbuttoned, brushed back her hair.

‘All right,’ said Alison sternly. ‘I’m going now.’

He had stopped and was standing looking back, his head on one side, mocking her, she thought, listening. Then, ‘I can’t think why you’re not in the army,’ she suddenly called out, and turned and went, trying not to scramble or run, but there was no dignity in how she went. (She felt fingers
locked round her ankles, daggers between her shoulder blades.) Across her own lawn she ran without pretence and let herself in. Now the house frightened her. She bolted and barred, and put on lights, then she went into the living-room and sat by the clock with
The Diary of a Nobody
in her lap, and her eyes on the door.

In the morning they were gone. Eric came home at tea-time. There was the log fire, the home-made cakes, the little sandwiches, the book he had brought for her, his approval, his kindness, their quiet intellectual understanding. They had a serene pleasant evening, talking, listening to the gramophone, supper by the fire, with chops and a little omelette laced with rum. Everything went peacefully as of old, until he said: ‘Our minds are like brother and sister, close, sympathetic. Nothing could ever part us,’ and she burst into tears.

Miss Partridge came back to the house after the funeral, with her solicitor walking on one side of her and the family doctor on the other – although he could scarcely now be called a ‘family’ doctor as, apart from her, the family had gone.

‘You should take a holiday,’ Dr Jenkins said, looking round the dingy drawing-room, feeling depressed for her. ‘You’ve had a long stretch of …’ As his voice trailed off, he was thinking of all the old-age pensioners looking after aged parents. This was the way it was going. Soon they would be looking after grandparents.

‘A holiday?’ Miss Partridge looked startled, but she gave a little smile as if the doctor had made a naughty suggestion. ‘I couldn’t afford it.’ Because it was out of her reach, she could daringly consider it. She had not had a holiday for twenty years.

Dr Jenkins looked at the solicitor, who leant back as far as he could in his frail chair, said, ‘Ellie, my dear, you’re a rich woman now – a comparatively rich woman. You can go wherever you wish.’

She became at once alarmed, shrugged her wealth away, shuddering. ‘Too late,’ she said.

Having no servants, when she asked: ‘Tea, or whisky?’ her voice seemed to urge whisky on them. It was less trouble, and she was quite exhausted.

Even when they agreed to drink whisky, she was obliged to go through the hall and down a passage to the kitchen to fetch water.

In the sink squatted a large spider. He seemed to own the place. ‘We’ll be alone together tonight,’ she thought – ‘the spider and I!’ She suddenly contorted her face and turned on the tap with a gush, washing the poor thing – all broken legs and frantic reluctance – down the plug hole. It was as if that long-bedridden mother upstairs had protected her from such horrors until now when, untrained and unprepared, and full of a new brutality, Miss Partridge must face them on her own.

She returned, trembling, with the jug of water. The drawing-room conversation of low voices broke off as she crossed the hall.

‘Quite a number in church,’ Mr Mavory, the solicitor, was saying as she came through the door.

But five wreaths only! she thought. It was a disgrace really. If she died,
when
she died, there would be only four.

‘So, a little holiday, then,’ Dr Jenkins said robustly. ‘I practically insist. You deserve it if anyone does.’

After a very short time they set down their glasses and stood up.

‘Oh, don’t, don’t go!’ she cried.

‘I’ll be back within a day or two about business matters,’ Mr Mavory said.

She stood at the front door and watched them walk down the drive. Across the road was the church: and Mother in her new grave. The church clock struck four, although it was nearly half-past.

She turned back into the house, closed the door softly, and stood looking about her, hoping not to see spiders, for it was the time of year when they did their house-invading, as if finding their way back to a place of ancestry.

‘I am a rich – a comparatively rich woman,’ she said aloud. All the things she did not want and had not wanted, for many years, lay now within her grasp.

The night was no more dreadful than she had foreseen. Her little luminous bedside clock took her slowly towards morning through her snatches of sleep.

‘Why not move to a more convenient place?’ asked Mr Mavory. ‘This must be an expensive house to keep up.’

‘Oh,
no
!’ she said. ‘It hasn’t cost us a
penny
, for years.’

He looked at a great dark patch of damp on the faded William Morris wallpaper.

Following his glance, she looked, too, and saw the stains as if for the first time. Those powdery willow leaves had been there all her life. There were familiar Morris wallpapers elsewhere in the house – of honeysuckle, or of white-and-bile-green chrysanthemums. It was true that nothing had been spent on the house for years; but not, she realised, because nothing had needed to be spent. Paint had flaked off window-frames and sills, the high ceiling was dark and shadowy – with dirt, perhaps.

Mr Mavory watched her looking about the room, and held his tongue. He wondered if the house were clean, thought probably not. Miss Partridge
knew
that it was not. Cross-patch Mrs Murphy came up from the village twice a week, and flicked about with dusters, but would never climb steps or move furniture because of dropped womb trouble. She was always in such a temper that Miss Partridge shut herself in her bedroom until she had gone.

Apart from the doctor’s and Mr Mavory’s occasional visits, no one else
came. Mrs Partridge, before and during her illness, had not encouraged visitors.

The house was not large, but had rooms into which no one went. Sometimes, Miss Partridge’s sense of isolation seemed to become a physical thing, pressing into her ears, and choking her. ‘I will have a glass of Dutch courage,’ she would say – for she often thought aloud. She drank the whisky in gulps, as if it were medicine; but felt better afterwards.