The Flying Goat (12 page)

She did not say anything.

In a little while first Laurence, and then Mr. Arnoldson and then aunt Wilcox came back, and we made arrangements to play. Cribbage was the only card game all of us knew and we decided to play in two pairs, for a shilling a horse, man out scoring. We cut the cards, ace high, lowest out, and aunt Wilcox said:

‘It's you, Christiana. Mind now, no edging.'

The girl had cut a two of hearts, and I realised suddenly that it was the first time I had heard her name.

Aunt Wilcox and I played together. We were both rather quick, downright players, quick to
sense a hand. We always had the pips counted before we put them on the table. This was not the Arnoldson way. Deliberation, to me an increasingly irritating deliberation, marked everything Laurence and his father did. They weighed up their hands guardedly and put on poker expressions, giving nothing away. Just as the girl spoke with her eyes, they played with their eyes. Between the counting of the hands they did not speak a word.

The game was a near thing and it looked, for a moment, as if aunt Wilcox and I might die in the hole, but we got home and I noticed aunt Wilcox pocketing the shilling. The Arnoldsons were not at all satisfied, and Laurence went over the last hand again, architect fashion, checking up, before giving in.

Mr. Arnoldson looked at Christiana. I forgot to say that he had a large grey sheep-dog moustache. The expression of his mouth was thus hidden. The whole expression of his face was compressed into his eyes. They shone very brightly, with a rather queer glassy look of excitement.

For the second game aunt Wilcox dropped out and Christiana took her place, playing with me.
She was the quickest player I had ever seen. Every player gets now and then a hand he cannot make up his mind about, but that never happened to her. She played by instinct, second sight. She hardly looked at the cards. She kept her eyes on me. Yet she made up her mind before we began. I felt that, in some miraculous way, she could see through the cards.

All through the game she sat with her eyes on me. This constant but completely passionless stare had me beaten. It was hypnotic, so that whenever I looked away from her I was conscious of being drawn back. At first I thought it was deliberate, that she was simply trying hard to attract me. Then I got into the way of accepting her stare, of returning it. But where there should have been some response, there was only an unchanged anonymity, a beautiful brown wateriness filled with a remote, quietly hypnotic strength. I saw her as one of those composite pictures of two people. Two personalities are fused and there remains no personality, only some discomforting anonymity that fascinates.

During the game the tension between Christiana and her father increased. She was constantly one
leap ahead of us all. She knew; we guessed. She had good cards, twice a hand of twenty-four. All the time I could see Mr. Arnoldson fidgeting, his eyes generating new phases of resentment.

Aunt Wilcox seemed to understand this. The Christmas decorations were still hanging up in the house, sprays of holly, withering now, stuck up behind the pictures, and a wand or two of box and fir. Suddenly aunt Wilcox said:

‘Twelfth day to-morrow. We mustn't forget the decorations.'

‘Pancakes,' Christiana said.

‘Fifteen two and a pair's four and three's seven,' I said. ‘Pancakes?'

‘A north-country custom,' aunt Wilcox said. ‘You fry the pancakes with a fire of the evergreens.'

‘I think,' Laurence said, ‘I have a pair.' He slowly laid out his cards. ‘Mind you don't set the chimney on fire.'

Suddenly Christiana's hand was on the table. She counted it like a parrot saying something by heart. She had three sixes and a nine and a three was up and she rattled it off, running the words together, making eighteen. Eighteen was quite
right, but Mr. Arnoldson sprang to his feet, as though he had not heard it.

‘Nineteen, nineteen, you can't score nineteen!' he shouted. ‘It's not possible in crib!'

‘I said eighteen!'

‘Eighteen is right,' I began.

‘She said nineteen. I heard her. I distinctly heard her. You think I don't know her voice?'

‘Eighteen!' she said.

‘You said nineteen and now you're lying on top of it!'

He was on his feet, shouting at her, grey with anger. Suddenly he began to shake violently and I knew he had lost control. He turned round and picked up the heavy mahogany Yorkshire chair he had been sitting in and swung it about, over his head. Aunt Wilcox got hold of Christiana and half pushed, half dragged her out of the room, and I automatically went after her, shouting after her as she ran upstairs in the darkness.

When I went back into the room, a moment later, Mr. Arnoldson was lying on the hearth-rug, on his back, in a fit. The chair was lying smashed on the table where he had brought it down. He was clenching in his hands some bits of withered
holly he had torn down from one of the pictures. His hands were bleeding and it was a long time before we could get them open again.

The next morning Laurence, aunt Wilcox, Christiana and I sat down to a large and healthy breakfast, plates of porridge, lumps of rather fat beef-steak with fried mashed potatoes and eggs, thick toast and very strong marmalade, with the usual basins of tea. It was all very solid, very real. Unlike the behaviour of Mr. Arnoldson on the previous night it was something you could get your hands on and understand. Mr. Arnoldson did not appear at breakfast and no one said anything about him.

During breakfast Laurence read his letters and said he had a couple of hours' work to do and would I mind amusing myself? In the afternoon we could go and look at some houses; there were one or two good stone mansions in the neighbourhood. It was still bitterly cold that morning, but there had been no more snow. The snow of yesterday had
been driven, like white sand, into thin drifts, leaving exposed black islands of ice.

I decided to go for a walk, and after breakfast I asked Christiana to come with me. ‘We could look for the fox,' I said.

Except for refusing, she did not say much. She was going to help aunt Wilcox. About the fox she was very evasive. It might not have existed. She might not have seen it.

‘I'll have a look for it myself,' I said.

She looked at me emptily, not speaking. Her eyes had lost completely the natural ardour and candour, both very child-like, which had infused the picture of the fox with reality and which had made me believe in both it and her. At that moment she could not have made me believe in anything.

I got my overcoat and gloves and went out. It was an east wind, steady, bitter, the sky a dull iron colour, without sun. In the fields the grass had been driven flat by wind. The earth was like rock. In a scoop of the land a small stream flowed down between squat clumps of alder, catkins wind-frozen, cat-ice jagging out like frosted-glass from the fringe of frost-burnt rushes on both banks. Farther on a flock of pigeons clapped up from a field of white
kale, clattering wings on steel leaves, spiralling up, gathering, separating again like broken bits of the dead sky.

I went on until I found the pond. I knew it at once because, a field away, I could see the road, and because of what Christiana had said about it. She had described the black sloe bushes barricading one side, the speared army of dead rushes, and a broken-down, now half-submerged cattle-trough on which the fox, she said, had leapt and sat and stared at her. The pond was covered with ice and the ice in turn with the fine salt snow swept in a succession of smooth drifts across it.

I stood and looked at the pond. Then I walked round it. At the opposite point, by the cattle-trough, I stood and looked at it again. On the cattle-trough the light snow crusts were unbroken, and on two sides of it, away from the water, snow had drifted in long arcs, rippled and firm as lard. On the trough and in the snow drifted round it and all across the pond there were no marks of any fox at all.

When I got back to the house, about twelve, aunt Wilcox and Christiana were taking down the decorations. Most of the evergreens had been hung up in the hall, holly behind the pictures, sheaves of yew tied to the newel-posts of the polished pine staircase, and a very dry spray of mistletoe hung from the big brass oil-lamp. Aunt Wilcox and Christiana were putting the evergreens into a zinc bath-tin.

‘You're just in time,' Christiana said.

‘Last come must last kiss,' aunt Wilcox said.

‘And what does that mean?' I said.

‘You've got to kiss us both.'

Laughing, aunt Wilcox stood under the mistletoe and I kissed her. Her lips were solid and sinewy, like beefsteak, and lukewarm wet. As she clasped me round the waist I felt her coopered, with stays, like a barrel. Then Christiana stood under the mistletoe and I kissed her. Just before I kissed her she looked at me for a moment. Her eyes had the same remote anonymity as on the previous day, the same tranquil but disturbing candour. As I kissed her she was quite still, without fuss. Kissing
her was like kissing someone who was not there. It was a relationship of ghosts. For one moment I felt I was not there myself. The recollection of this unreal lightness of touch was something I carried about with me for the rest of the day.

That afternoon Laurence and I went for a walk. I asked after his father and he said he was better, but resting. We talked about him for a short time. He told me how he had begun as a pit-boy in a Yorkshire colliery, but had worked himself up, and had later become a schoolmaster. Then the war broke out and he felt suddenly that he was wasted in the classroom and had gone back to the pit, to become under-manager. After about six months there was a disaster in the pit, an explosion that had brought down a vast roof-fall, entombing thirty-five men. Arnoldson went down for rescue work. For two days he could hear the voices of the entombed men quite clearly, then for a whole day he could hear them intermittently, then they ceased. But though they ceased Arnoldson fancied all the time he could still hear them, the voices of the dead, of men he had known, screaming or whispering in his mind more sharply than in life. He went on hearing these voices for weeks, the
voices of people who were not there, until they broke him down. Christiana had been born about a year later.

Laurence spoke of his father with a slight impatience. He spoke as though, occupied himself with concrete things, the small matter of voices disturbing the spirit of another man had no material importance for him. It was clear that he did not believe in voices. From the subject of his father we went on to the subject of himself. I walked with head slightly down, mouth set against the wind, saying yes and no, not really listening, my thoughts in reality a long way behind me, like a kite on a string.

When we got back to the house, about four o'clock, I noticed a curious thing as we went past the dining-room. The door of the room was open and I could see that one of the china spaniel dogs was missing from the mantelpiece. At the time I did not take much notice of this. I went upstairs to wash my hands and came down and went into the drawing-room. Christiana sat reading by the fire, but for about half a minute I did not look at her. One of the china dogs was missing from the mantelpiece.

It was only about ten seconds after this that I heard Laurence coming downstairs. His way of coming downstairs was unmistakable. I heard his feet clipping the edges of the stairs with the precision of an engine firing in all its cylinders: the assured descent of a man who knew he could never fall down.

As he came down into the hall Christiana suddenly went to the door and said in a loud voice:

‘Tea's ready. You're just right.'

We went straight into the dining-room. Christiana was last. She shut the door of the drawing-room after her. On the mantelpiece of the dining-room the two china dogs sat facing each other.

All through tea I sat looking at Christiana. She sat looking at me, but without any relationship between the eyes and the mind. Her eyes rested on me with a stare of beautiful emptiness. It might have been a stare of wonder or distrust or adoration or appeal: I could not tell. There was no way of telling. For the first time I saw some connection between this expressive vacancy and the voices that Mr. Arnoldson had heard in his mind. Sitting still, eyes dead straight but not conscious, she looked
as though she also were listening to some voices very far away.

Just as we were finishing tea, aunt Wilcox said to me: ‘I hope you didn't get cold this afternoon. You look a bit peaked.'

‘I'm all right,' I said. ‘But I never really got my feet warm.'

‘Why don't you go and put on your slippers?' Christiana said.

‘I'd like to,' I said.

So I went upstairs to put on my slippers, while Laurence went to write his evening letters, and aunt Wilcox and Christiana cleared the table. It was Sunday and aunt Wilcox was going to chapel.

I came downstairs again in less than five minutes. Christiana was sitting by the fire in the drawing-room. The two china dogs sat on the mantelpiece. I looked at the dogs, then at Christiana, with double deliberation. She must have seen I was trying to reason it out, that perhaps I had reasoned it out, but she gave no sign.

I sat down and we began to talk. It was warm; the small reading lamp imprisoned us, as it were, in a small world of light, the rest of the room an
outer darkness. I tried to get her to talk of the fox. There was no response. It was like pressing the buttons of a dead door-bell. Once I said something about her father. ‘He's asleep,' she said. That was all. We went on to talk of various odd things. She lay back in the chair, facing the light, looking quietly at me. I fixed my eyes on hers. I had a feeling, very strong after a few minutes, that she wanted me to touch her. All at once she asked me had I ever been abroad? I said: ‘Yes, to France once, and Holland once. That's all. Holland is lovely.' She did not say anything at once. She looked slowly away from me, down at the floor, as though she could see something in the darkness beyond the ring of light. Suddenly she said: ‘I've been to Mexico, that's all.' I asked her for how long. She looked up at me. Without answering my question she began to tell me about Mexico. She told me about it as she had told me about the fox, speaking rather quickly, telling me where she had been, reciting the beautiful names of the places, talking about the food, the colour, the women's dresses. I had a feeling of travelling through a country in a train, in a hurry, getting the vivid transient panoramic effect of fields and villages,
sun and trees, of faces and hands suddenly uplifted. She described everything quickly, her voice certain and regular, like a train passing over metals. She described an episode about Indians, how she had gone up into the mountains, to a small town where there was a market, where thin emaciated Indians came down to sell things, squatting close together on the ground in the cold, with phlegmatic and degenerate eyes downcast. There a woman had tried to sell her a few wizened tomatoes, holding them out with blue old veined hands, not speaking, simply holding the tomatoes out to her. Then suddenly, because the girl would not have them, the woman had squeezed one of them in a rage until seeds and juice ran out like reddish-yellow blood oozing out of the fissure between her frozen knuckles. As the girl told it, I felt rather than saw it. I felt the bitter coldness of the little town cut by mountain winds and the half-frozen juice of the tomato running down my own hands.