Dark Entries (12 page)

‘I have had to waste too much time in more general practice. Scientific harlotry.’

They had reached Marble Arch. The cinema queues were beginning to flinch and stamp. Unexpectedly the car turned up
a side street to the left. It was quite enough to disarrange Fenville’s unreal calm.

‘Where are we going?’ His voice evinced panic and dread.

The Doctor looked at him for a moment. A street light showed his wise, tired eyes.

‘Home,’ said the Doctor. ‘Where else?’

‘This isn’t the usual way.’

‘My son,’ said the Doctor proudly, ‘knows all the short cuts.’

Immediately he entered his unlovely room Fenville knew that his brief anaesthesia was ended. He had known that of course it
must end before long; but had expected it
to last longer than it had, if only in proportion to the shocks which had caused it. Within a minute of the door being shut, frustrated passion and confused terror were once more upon him, mangling his brain. It was almost as if Dr Bermuda had indeed been a steadying influence.

He sat upon his high stool and sank his head upon his small, second-hand drawing desk. The gas fire was unlighted, and he had hardly eaten for three days.

After an uncertain interval there was a knock at his door. Fenville made no response.

The door was gingerly opened.

‘Why ever don’t you put the light on, Mr Fenville?’

Mrs Stark repaired the omission. Fenville found that his very muscles were congealed into despair.

‘Don’t you want any supper?’ Supper was an extra.

‘No thank you, Mrs Stark.’

‘You can’t expect to get better if you don’t do what the Doctor says.’

‘I don’t expect to get better.’ As so often, he spoke his thought without discretion.

Mrs Stark looked at him balefully. ‘Then you’ll have to live somewhere else. I’m not matron of a hospital.’ This put her in mind of her real business. ‘Don’t suppose you even knew about Miss Terrington?’

‘What about her?’ Fenville had hardly given a thought to Ann since the Doctor’s reference to her in
his note.

‘Made away with herself. Overdose of stuff to make her sleep. You’ve got a lot to do with it if you ask me.’ Mrs Stark crossed her arms in order to pass judgment.

Fenville sank upon his bed.

‘You’ve every right to look upset. Weren’t you engaged to her? By what I’ve seen I’m sure I hope you were.’

Fenville’s mind was upon Ann’s love of life and upon the Doctor’s routine words: ‘I have prescribed for Miss Terrington.’

‘When did it happen?’ he said in a low voice. ‘How do you know about it?’

‘It happened yesterday. It’s in all the papers.’ She looked at him more malevolently than ever. ‘What have you been doing with yourself, Mr Fenville, that you haven’t even seen a paper?’

‘I often don’t see a paper.’ But plainly for Mrs Stark such a statement was hard to believe. ‘Is there going to be an inquest?’

‘Of course there’s going to be an inquest.’ The whole framework of society found in her an oracle.

‘I don’t believe she killed herself for a moment.’

‘Miss Terrington didn’t strike me as the kind to have an accident.’

‘Accidents can happen to anyone,’ replied Fenville, forlornly. He was thinking of his visit to the Entresol.

That night he fell into a heavy sleep as soon as he got into bed. He dreamed that he was being married to Dorabelle in a vast sooty building lighted by numberless glowworms embedded in the soot. At the climax of the service a hand fell from behind on his shoulder and Fenville awoke. He could still feel the hand, and saw that a nightlight was burning by his bedside. He was unable to account for this attention: it was exceedingly unlike Mrs Stark. Possibly, he reflected, the Doctor had given orders.

The grip of the dream hand was weakening, as if a real hand were in dissolution. Fenville sat up, his thoughts tearing
at his throat. Under the nightlight was a piece of paper. He pulled it out, and just managed to read it. It simply read,  ‘I want you.’

Fenville got out of bed and turned on the electric light. The paper was pale blue, and embossed at the top was a pale blue sphinx. There was no signature.

He dragged on his clothes like a criminal, and faltered out of the house. He was a little surprised to see that a light still burned in Mrs Stark’s cubby-hole; which also exuded a smell of charred bloaters. Outside he looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes to two.

It was drizzling slightly, so that Fenville half ran through the back streets to Holborn. There he saw an all-night bus going in his direction, which, by a lung-bursting sprint, he managed to catch. He heard the conductress passing an unfavourable comment on his appearance to the man seated confidentially by the door.

At Notting Hill the rain stopped, but at the top of Arcadia Gardens Fenville was addressed by a policeman on his beat.

‘Everything all right?’

‘Of course.’

‘Live round here?’

‘Yes,’ said Fenville; then foreseeing the next question, changed his mind. ‘No. I live off Holborn.’

‘You’re going the wrong way.’

‘Can’t I go which way I like?’

Perhaps this made the policeman decide that Fenville was harmless. ‘I only said you’re going the
wrong
way,’ he said and resumed his patrol.

Fenville had been wondering if Dorabelle herself would open the door. This did not happen: the very instant he had pulled the big iron bell-handle, the door swung wide and Fenville saw the man in fancy dress. His handsome shape stood out against a background of lighted candles in massive silver candlesticks.

Instantly Fenville
drew back, but it
was useless. The man’s arm shot out, and dragged him in. It was elegantly done, like a move in ju-jitsu. Then the man had shut the door and was standing with his back to it.

‘Thief!’ The man’s voice was deep and musical.

Fenville could think of nothing to say.

‘Thief!’ said the man again.

‘What have I stolen?’ But Fenville knew the question was useless; because he already knew the answer. His wits made incandescent by danger, he saw the significance of the missing ‘almonry’, realised that much else was doubtless missing.

‘It was Gunter,’ he cried. ‘I am sure it was Gunter.’

‘Coward also,’ said the man. It was a simple statement of fact.

Fenville tried to pull himself together. ‘I had nothing whatever to do with it,’ he said. An endless line of indicted men stretched before his mind, all making the same assertion.

‘Then,’ said the man, ‘you will fight.’ Again it was a statement of fact. ‘You may have the choice of weapons,’ he added sneeringly, and lifted the tasselled cane from a broken chair.

Now it so happened that Fenville’s father had been an amateur fencer in his youth, and had given his son a few lessons.

‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Fenville. ‘Don’t take fancy dress too far.’

The man’s face did not change. ‘There are rapiers,’ he said, ‘behind the clock. Or pistols in my bedroom.’

‘Rapiers,’ said Fenville. His idea was to corner his antagonist, and contrive his own escape. Strangely, his heart was rising.

The man locked the front door and threw the key on the high mantelpiece above Fenville’s head. Fenville heard it strike one of the heavy candlesticks. Then the man strode lightly over to a tall clock, the size of a sentry box and long silent. In an instant he had thrown it to the floor, where it fell with a terrifying, echoing crash, scattering glass and rusted spidery springs. Then he stood with a discoloured rapier in his hand.

‘Can you catch?’ he enquired brutally, and cast the rapier at Fenville’s head. Oddly enough, Fenville could catch, although he injured one of his fingers on the metal hilt.

The ruined clock lay between them. The man appeared to have no weapon but his thick cane; then he made a movement, and Fenville realised that the cane was a swordstick. The next second the man had crossed the clock and was attacking. Fenville could see the tasselled sheath lying on the torn carpet behind him.

The man was fighting with wild ferocity, light on his feet and diabolically quick of eye. Fenville found time to be astonished by the viability of his own defence; but he was rapidly forced to the staircase end of the hall, and then, in order to gain ground, up the stairs themselves.

Not only the hall but the staircase, and indeed, as it seemed, the whole house, were illuminated by the candles in silver candlesticks: Fenville, amateurishly defending himself, retreated upwards step by step between two tiers of them. The other man fought silently and methodically, his firm lips just parted before his sharp teeth.

Their weapons tapped like the castanets of death. The momentary elation was over: this was the reckoning.

Fenville knew that he could not last much longer. In another minute, or perhaps two, the strange, impossible fight would be ended, and with it his life. Then an idea came to him. He leaped backwards up the two remaining steps to the almost familiar landing; hurled one of the candlesticks with his left hand into the other man’s face; and in the instant passed his rapier right through his body. The other man dropped backwards without a word and with a momentous thud: and Fenville himself sagged unconscious to the floor.

When he came round, the misty eyes of Dr Bermuda looked into his.

‘Try to stand,’ said the Doctor. ‘There’s very little time.’ His face was fraught with grave tidings.

Fenville found that one of the big chairs had been drawn from Dorabelle’s room, and he seated on it. This time he did not trouble to ask the Doctor how he came to be there. The Doctor’s undersized son was shambling about in the background.

‘Try to walk,’ said the Doctor to Fenville. ‘You are in no way injured.’

Fenville crossed to the landing rail and looked downwards. There was no sign of the body. For the first time he noticed that the floor was littered with stale confetti.

‘This way,’ said the Doctor. ‘Come with me.’

Fenville followed the trail of confetti.

On the long gilt sofa before her fire, lay Dorabelle. The light of many candles shone on her white face and wild hair. She had been wrapped in a blanket, but already the blanket was stained with blood from her breast . . . Singularly, Fenville was not surprised: Dorabelle had herself told him; and part of his brain, what the Doctor might have called his magnetic undermind, had known all along.

‘You must be quick,’ whispered the Doctor in his ear. Then, beckoning away his attendant son, he left them together.

Fenville sank upon his knees and lightly touched Dorabelle’s lips. Her lovely arms lay outside the blanket, and she was able to wind them about his neck.

‘Darling,’ she said. ‘My only love.’

As once before, he kissed her frenziedly. This time she seemed to respond; and Fenville was swept by a hysterical surge of joy. He kissed her again and again; until he realised that her lips and throat were cold, and that she was dead beneath his kisses.

Tired beyond tears, he sank his cheeks on her spoilt body. He heard a thumping at the front door below; and presently a voice spoke beside him.

‘Dad says its the police.’

Fenville looked up, his face blotched with Dorabelle’s blood.

But Dr Bermuda stood in the doorway.

‘Modern science’, he said, ‘has failed to cure you; but she will not leave you to the outmoded harlequinade of the law.’ He smiled tenderly and again beckoned his son. ‘Go to the bedroom,’ he said. ‘Look behind the mirror. Bring what you find. And hurry.’

Against such interventions of fate as this, reflected Edward Pendlebury, there was truly nothing that the wisest and most farsighted could do; and the small derangement of his plans epitomised the larger derangement which was life. All the way from Grantham it had been uncertain whether the lateness of the train from King’s Cross would not result in Pendlebury missing the connection at York. The ticket inspector thought that ‘they might hold it’; but Pendlebury’s fellow passengers, all of them businessmen who knew the line well, were sceptical, and seemed to imply that it was among the inspector’s duties to soothe highly strung passengers. ‘This is a Scarborough train,’ said one of the businessmen several times. ‘It’s not meant for those who want to go further north.’ Pendlebury knew perfectly well that it was a Scarborough train: it was the only departure he could possibly catch, and no one denied that the timetable showed a perfectly good, though slow, connection. Nor could anyone say why the express was late.

It transpired that the connection had not been held.

‘Other people want to get home besides you,’ said the man at the barrier, when Pendlebury complained rather sharply.

There were two hours to wait; and Pendlebury was warned that the train would be very slow indeed. ‘The milk-and-mail we call it,’ said his informant.

‘But it does go there?’

‘In the end.’

Already it was late at night; and the refreshment room was about to close. The uncertainty regarding the connection had made Pendlebury feel a little sick; and now he found it difficult to resume reading the Government publication the contents of which it was necessary for him to master before
the next day’s work began. He moved from place to place, reading and rereading the same page of technicalities: from a draughty seat under a light to a waiting room, and, when the waiting room was invaded by some over-jolly sailors, to the adjoining hotel, where his request for coffee seemed to be regarded as insufficient.

In the end it was long before the train was due when he found his way to the platform from which his journey was to be resumed. A small but bitterly cold wind was now blowing through the dark station from the north; it hardly sufficed to disturb the day’s accumulation of litter, but none the less froze the fingers at a touch. The appearance of the train, therefore, effected a disproportionate revival in Pendlebury’s spirits. It was composed of old stock, but none the less comfortable for that; the compartment was snugly heated, and Pendlebury sat in it alone.

The long journey began just in time for Pendlebury to hear the Minster clock clanging midnight as the train slowly steamed out. Before long it had come to rest again, and the bumping of milk churns began, shaking the train as they were moved, and ultimately crashing, at stately intervals, to the remote wayside platforms. Observing, as so many late travellers before him, that milk seems to travel from the town to the country, Pendlebury, despite the thuds, fell asleep, and took up the thread of anxiety which he so regularly followed through the caves of the night. He dreamed of the world’s unsympathy, of projects hopefully begun but soon unreasonably overturned, of happiness filched away. Finally he dreamed that he was in the South of France. Although he was alone, it was beautiful and springtime; until suddenly a bitter wind descended upon him from nowhere, and he awoke, hot and cold simultaneously.

‘All change.’

The door of the compartment was open, and a porter was addressing him.

‘Where are we?’

‘Casterton. Train stops here.’

‘I want Wykeby.’

‘Wykeby’s on the main line. Six stations past.’

‘When’s the next train back?’

‘Not till six-thirty.’

The guard had appeared, stamping his feet.

‘All out please. We want to go to bed.’

Pendlebury rose to his feet. He had cramp in his left arm, and could not hold his suitcase. The guard pulled it out and set it on the platform. Pendlebury alighted and the porter shut the door. He jerked his head to the guard, who clicked the green slide of his lantern. The train slowly steamed away.

‘What happens to passengers who arrive here fast asleep?’ asked Pendlebury. ‘I can’t be the first on this train.’

‘This train’s not rightly meant for passengers,’ replied the porter. ‘Not beyond the main line, that is
.
’

‘I missed the connection. The London train was late.’

‘Maybe,’ said the porter. The northerner’s view of the south was implicit in his tone.

The train could be seen coming to rest in a siding. Suddenly all its lights went out.

‘Casterton is quite a big place, I believe?’

‘Middling,’ said the porter. He was a dark-featured man, with a saturnine expression.

‘What about a hotel?’

‘Not since the Arms was sold up. The new people don’t do rooms. Can’t get the labour.’

‘Well, what
am
I to do?’ The realisation that it
was no business of the porter to answer this question made Pendlebury sound childish and petulant.

The porter looked at him. Then he jerked his head as he had done to the guard and began to move away. Picking up his suitcase (the other hand was still numb and disembodied), Pendlebury followed him. Snow was beginning to fall, not in flakes but in single stabbing spots.

The porter went first to a small office, lighted by a sizzling Tilley lamp and heated to stuffiness by a crackling coke stove. Here he silently performed a series of obscure tasks, while Pendlebury waited. Finally he motioned Pendlebury out, drew the fire, extinguished the light, and locked the door. Then he lifted from its bracket the single oil lamp
which illuminated the platform and opened a door marked ‘General Waiting Room’. Once more he jerked his head. This time he was holding the light by his dark face, and Pendlebury was startled by the suddenness and violence of the movement. It was a wonder that the porter did not injure his neck.

‘Mind you, I’m not taking any responsibility. If you choose to spend the night, it’s entirely your own risk.’

‘It’s not a matter of choice,’ rejoined Pendlebury.

‘It’s against the regulations to use the waiting rooms for any purpose but waiting for the company’s trains.’

‘They’re not the company’s trains any more. They’re supposed to be
our
trains.’

Presumably the porter had heard that too often to consider it worth reply.

‘You can keep the lamp while the oil lasts.’

‘Thank you,’ said Pendlebury. ‘What about a fire?’

‘Not since before the war.’

‘I see,’ said Pendlebury. ‘I suppose you’re sure there’s nowhere else?’

‘Have a look if you want to.’

Through the door Pendlebury could see the drops of snow scudding past like icy shrapnel.

‘I’ll stay here. After all, it’s only a few hours.’ The responsibilities of the morrow were already ranging themselves around Pendlebury, ready to topple and pounce.

The porter placed the lamp on the polished yellow table.

‘Don’t forget it’s nothing to do with me.’

‘If I’m not awake, I suppose someone will call me in time for the six-thirty?’

‘Yes,’ said the porter. ‘You’ll be called.’

‘Goodnight,’ said Pendlebury. ‘And thank you.’

The porter neither answered, nor even nodded. Instead he gave that violent twist or jerk of his head. Pendlebury realised that it
must be a twitch; perhaps partly voluntary, partly involuntary. Now that he had seen it in the light, its extravagance frightened him. Going
,
the porter slammed the door sharply; from which Pendlebury deduced also that the lock must be stiff.

As well as the yellow table the waiting room contained four long seats stoutly upholstered in
shiny black. Two of these seats were set against the back wall, with the empty fireplace between them; and one against each of the side walls. The seats had backs, but no arms. There were also two objects in hanging frames: one was the address of the local representative of an organisation concerned to protect unmarried women from molestation when away from home; the other a black-and-white photograph of the Old Bailey, described, Pendlebury observed, as the New Central Criminal Court. Faded though the scene now was, the huge blind figure which surmounted the dome still stood out blackly against the pale sky. The streets were empty. The photograph must have been taken at dawn.

Pendlebury’s first idea was to move the table to one side, and then bring up one of the long seats so that it stood alongside another, thus making a wider couch for the night. He set the lamp on the floor, and going around to the other end of the table began to pull. The table remained immovable. Supposing this to be owing to its obviously great weight, Pendlebury increased his efforts. He then saw, as the rays of the lantern advanced towards him across the dingy floorboards, that at the bottom of each leg
were four L-shaped metal plates, one each side, by which the leg was screwed to the floor. The plates and the screws were dusty and rusty, but solid as a battleship. It was an easy matter to confirm that the four seats were similarly secured. The now extinct company took no risks with its property.

Pendlebury tried to make the best of a single bench, one of the pair divided by the fireplace. But it was both hard and narrow, and curved sharply upwards to its centre. It was even too short, so that Pendlebury found it difficult to dispose of his feet. So cold and uncomfortable was he that he hesitated to put out the sturdy lamp. But in the end he did so. Apart from anything else, Pendlebury found that the light just sufficed to fill the waiting room with dark places which changed their shape and kept him wakeful with speculation. He found also that he was beginning to be
obsessed with the minor question of how long the oil would last.

With his left hand steadying the overcoat under his head (most fortunately he had packed a second, country one for use if the weather proved really cold), he turned down the small notched flame with his right; then lifting the lamp from the table, blew it out. Beyond the waiting room it was so dark that the edges of the two windows were indistinct. Indeed the two patches of tenuous foggy greyness seemed to appear and disappear, like the optical illusions found in Christmas crackers. If there was any chance of Pendlebury’s eyes ‘becoming accustomed to the light’, it was now dissipated in drowsiness. Truly Pendlebury was very tired indeed.

Not, of course, that he was able to sleep deeply or unbrokenly. Tired as he was, he slept as all must sleep upon such an unwelcoming couch. Many times he woke, with varying degrees of completeness: sometimes it was a mere half-conscious adjustment of his limbs; twice or thrice a plunging start into full vitality (he noticed that the wind had began to purr and creak in the choked-up chimney); most often it was an intermediate state, a surprisingly cosy awareness of relaxation and irresponsibility, when he felt an extreme disinclination for the night to end and for the agony of having to arise and walk. Pendlebury began to surmise that discomfort, even absurd discomfort, could recede and be surmounted with no effort at all. Almost he rejoiced in his adaptability. He seemed no longer even to be cold. He had read (in the context of polar expedition) that this could be a condition of peculiar danger, a lethal delusion. If so, it
seemed also a happy delusion, and Pendlebury was surfeited with reality.

Certainly the wind was rising. Every now and then a large invisible snowflake (the snow seemed no longer to be coming in
bullets) slapped against one of the windows like a gobbet of paste; and secret little draughts were beginning to flit even about the solidly built waiting room. At first Pendlebury became aware of them neither by feeling nor by hearing; but before long they were stroking his face and turning his feet to ice (which inconvenience also he proved
able to disregard without effort). In a spell of wakefulness, still surprisingly unattended with discomfort, he began to speculate upon the stormy, windswept town which no doubt surrounded the lifeless station; the yeomanry slumbering in their darkened houses, the freezing streets paved with lumpy granite setts, the occasional lover, the rare lawbreaker, both withdrawn into deep doorways. Into such small upland communities until two or three centuries ago wolves had come down at night from the fells when snow was heavy. From these reflections about a place he had never seen, Pendlebury drew a curious contrasting comfort.

Suddenly the wind loosened the soot in the chimney; there was a rustling rumbling fall, which seemed as if it would never end; and Pendlebury’s nostrils were stuffed with dust. Horribly reluctant, he dragged himself upwards. Immediately his eyes too were affected. He could see nothing at all; the dim windows were completely gone. Straining for his handkerchief, he felt the soot even on his hands. His clothes must be smothered in it. The air seemed opaque and impossible to breath. Pendlebury began to cough, each contraction penetrating and remobilising his paralysed limbs. As one sinking into an icepack, he became conscious of deathly cold.

It was as if he would never breathe again. The thickness of the air seemed even to be increasing. The sooty dust was whirling about like a sandstorm, impelled by the draughts which seemed to penetrate the stone walls on all sides. Soon he would be buried beneath it. As even his coughing began to strangle in his throat, Pendlebury plunged towards the door. Immediately he struck the heavy screwed-down table. He stumbled back to his bench. He was sure that within minutes he would be dead.

But gradually he became aware that again there was a light in the waiting room. Although he could not tell when it
had passed from imperception to perception, there was the tiniest, faintest red glow, which was slowly but persistently waxing. It came from near the floor, just at the end of Pendlebury’s bench. He had to crick his neck in order to see it at all. Soon he realised that of course it was in the fireplace.
All this time after the commencement of the war, once again there was a fire. It was just what he wanted, now that he was roused from his happy numbness into the full pain of the cold.

Steadily the fire brightened and sparkled into a genial crepitation of life. Pendlebury watched it grow, and began to feel the new warmth lapping at his fingers and toes. He could see that the air was still thick with black particles, rising and falling between floor and ceiling, and sometimes twisting and darting about as if independently alive. But he had ceased to choke and cough, and was able again to sink his head upon the crumpled makeshift pillow. He stretched his legs
as life soaked into them. Lethargy came delightfully back.