The Long Shadow (10 page)

It didn’t. Not because either Cynthia or Imogen were being wilfully unsympathetic; it was just that it was all so complicated. Dot and Herbert’s morning routine (so far as Imogen could make it out) seemed to go something like this: the alarm went at
six-forty
-five, and thereupon Dot proceeded to wake Herbert in
time for him to wake her in time for her to nag him into bringing the cup of tea which was essential for enabling her to wake up sufficiently to wake him in time to eat his breakfast and catch his train.

It was all too much, especially at this time of night; and so “good night” was all that any of them said, and Dot plodded off to bed with a familiar sense of being vaguely disappointed, vaguely let-down. The sense of grievance was so vague, and so familiar, that she scarcely noticed it. Almost, it gave her a sense of security, like an old and well-worn dressing-gown wrapped about her.

I
T MUST HAVE
been between two and three in the morning when Imogen was suddenly awakened, and she knew at once that what had woken her was something out of the past. Something familiar.

A voice? A touch? Too sleepy to be frightened, she lay quietly, waiting for it to happen again.

“Mummy! Mummy!”

The voice rang up through the floor of her attic room and jolted her wide awake, her mind a-whirl with the old familiar conflict: to interfere, or not to interfere? “Mummy”, the child had called, not “Daddy”, or “Granny”; and this put everyone in a spot. For it so happened that Mummy combined an acute sense of the sanctity of motherhood with a remarkable capacity for sleeping like the dead through absolutely anything. Both
interference
and non-interference got you into almost exactly equal degrees of trouble.

“Mummy!”

Imogen sat up, and listened intently, hoping any moment to hear the irritable flip-flop of Dot’s slippers along the corridor below. Mummy, I’ve been sick. Mummy, my eiderdown’s
disappeared.
Mummy, he says I’m a … No I didn’t, yes he did …

But it wasn’t happening. No peevish sing-song of grievance and reproof floated up through the wooden floor. There was one moment when, in the waiting silence, she thought she had caught the sound of Dot’s footsteps; but she couldn’t have, for almost at once the darkness rocked with an absolute crescendo of screaming.

“Mummy! Daddy! Granny!”

Such an unselective volley of desperation could be ignored no longer. In a matter of seconds, Imogen was out of bed, down the
twisting attic stairs, and racing along the corridor below, thickly carpeted and almost silent beneath her bare, running feet.

“Timmie? Vernon?”

She stepped softly into the room, fell over the electric train set, recovered herself, and peered anxiously towards the shadowy scaffolding of bunks at the far end of the room. She didn’t turn the light on, not wishing to rouse whichever one it was that wasn’t crying; not that the precaution was really necessary: like most children, Timmie and Vernon tended to sleep peacefully through one another’s shrieks and screams.

“What is it?” she whispered, beginning to pick her way cautiously across the littered, glimmering floor. “What’s the matter?”

No answer. The room was bright with moonlight through the uncurtained windows, and she could see clearly the humps of the small bodies under the blankets—both, at the moment quite motionless. No telling which was which, either, as they were in the habit of taking “turns” with the top bunk each night—usually with much shrieking and squabbling. Vernon, in his
systematic
way, would make lists, for days ahead, of which bunk would be whose each night: but it never worked. “Sunday doesn’t count, because I was feeling sick,” Timmie would
resourcefully
argue: or, “You swopped your Wednesday turn for my two-colour biro, don’t you remember?”—and battle would be joined; Vernon, list in hand, shrieking out the claims of justice, reason, and the written contract, while Timmie, bland and giggling, would clamber on to the coveted bunk and prepare for the assault.

And so when the dark shape in the bottom bunk lurched suddenly into a sitting position and began to sob, Imogen still couldn’t tell with any certainty which of them it was.

Except that of course it was Vernon. This sort of thing always was. Even when they were toddlers, it had always been he, not Timmie, who had had the nightmares, and the stomach-aches, and had heard the wolves howling in the wind. But it hadn’t
happened for some time now—not for a couple of years at least—and everyone had assumed he had grown out of it.

*

A face. Not a wolf at all. He had dreamed of a face leaning over him and staring down at him as he slept. As is the way of
nightmares
, nothing much had actually happened: the face had not even scowled, or uttered threatening words: but the aura of terror accompanying the apparition was something which Vernon could find no vocabulary to describe.

“So awful Granny … so awful!” he kept repeating. He babbled of lips shining wet in the moonlight: of a wet, shining chin, bristly; and wild hair dangling. The face had come nearer as he lay in the paralysis of nightmare; he had smelt its breath as it tried to speak. It was saying something, telling him something, but the syllables were nonsense syllables, and he could not understand. He could feel the spit, though, sputtering from the consonants: he could feel it still, he could, he could! Desperately, he scrubbed at his cheeks with his fists, with his blankets….

“Feel it, Granny,
feel
it!” he sobbed. “Feel my face, it’s all wet!
Is
it, Granny? Is it all wet?”

Gently, reassuring, she stroked the flushed cheeks. They were wet, all right, but that was with crying, and with the sweat of fear.

“It’s all right, darling, it was only a dream. It’s all right … Granny’s here….”

He was a baby again, clinging to her with the despairing,
infantile
strength of any baby primate, dragging her down,
pinioning
her against the pillow.

“… Only a dream, Granny? It
was
only a dream, wasn’t it?” he pleaded, his body shuddering beneath the blankets; and “Of course it was!” she kept answering him, over and over again.

*

Only a dream. Only a dream. At last she felt his trembling
subside
; the arms around her neck released their grip, and he was a baby no longer, but eight years old, and drawing politely away from her.

“Yes, of course, Granny. Yes, I know,” he agreed, his brow puckered with concentration in the moonlight. “It must have been a dream, mustn’t it, because a person’s face couldn’t really be like that, could it? All staring, and not talking properly, and with eyes as big as saucers….”

*

So that was it. Damn Timmie and his eternal melodramas, giving his brother nightmares like this. As if the encounter on the river bank hadn’t been quite upsetting enough in the first place—the more so, of course, since no sensible adult explanation of it all had subsequently been forthcoming. Imogen blamed herself for not having given the children some simple, reassuring answer—but how could she when there wasn’t one? Adult omniscience had cracked, and this is a state of affairs more frightening to children than any amount of danger.

Still the crisis seemed to be over now.

“I was silly, wasn’t I, Granny?” said Vernon smugly, pulling the covers up to his chin; and when she offered to stay with him till he fell asleep, he shook his head.

“No, thank you, Granny. I’m O.K. now.” He looked small and vulnerable on his moon-drenched pillow, and she hesitated.

“I’m O.K.,” he repeated. “It was only a dream, wasn’t it? A silly dream.”

Good night, then, darling.

Good night. Granny.

Sleep well.

Good night. Good night.

*

And then—less than a minute later, and before Imogen had even reached the head of the stairs—scream after scream, such as she had never heard or imagined:

“Granny!
Granny
! GRANNY!”

T
HIS TIME, THE
whole house was awakened. Along they came flocking, pale and ramshackle in the moonlight, clutching their pyjama-cords and their half-donned dressing gowns, and gathered in the doorway of the boys’ room.

What is it? What’s happened? Why? How do you mean?—while Vernon, half-hysterical with fear, lay face downward on his pillow, choking and sobbing.

“No…. No …!” he gasped once, when Dot, leaning solicitously over the bed, asked him where it hurt? Enthusiastic though Dot was about psychological explanations in general, at night-time she preferred something that could be silenced with an aspirin. Herbert, tweaking futilely at her sleeve and murmuring, “Let
me
…” got the full brunt of her bewilderment.

Peppermints
! That bag of peppermint bullseyes Herbert had passed round yesterday evening—
that
was the cause of it all! Peppermints on an empty stomach—well, all right, a
full
one, then, don’t quibble—peppermints were well known to cause …

Well, to cause …

To cause whatever it was that Vernon had got, for Heaven’s sake. That’s what peppermints were well known to cause: and if only Herbert had had the faintest understanding of his own child….

Meanwhile Cynthia, a fluttering vision of whitely moonlit hair and floating negligée, had undertaken to ring the doctor; in less than a minute she was back again to ask what his telephone number was, she couldn’t find it in the local directory; and did he spell his name Grieves or Greives?

He’ll never turn out at this hour of the night, predicted Herbert: and drugs, drugs, drugs, I don’t believe in drugs countered Dot, as if contradicting him. By this time, Piggy too was in the
doorway
,
blinking and censorious, and wanting to know if something had happened? On being told that it had, she shrugged
contemptuously
and departed, apparently satisfied.

By now, Dot and Herbert, united by anxiety for their eldest child, were locked in deadly,
s
otto
voce
combat about who it was who hadn’t bought any aspirins last Saturday; while Cynthia, ping-pinging away on the telephone downstairs really seemed settled for the night. “It couldn’t be GREAVES, could it?” she shouted up the stairs once; and on receiving no clear answer went back, apparently happily, to her dialling. “
Who
?” she would squeal occasionally, on a startled yelp; or “But I thought … Oh, I’m
so
sorry …”, and then, nothing daunted, would try again. Of all the neighbourhood, Imogen reflected, only the doctor could be sleeping peacefully that night. Robin, of course, had been no trouble at all right from the start. He’d just looked in once and remarked “Oh, Christ!” and gone away again.

And in the midst of all this turmoil the prime mover of it all crouched, white-faced and almost unnoticed on his bunk, waiting for someone to make it not have happened.

They got the story out of him at last—Dot, Herbert, and Imogen between them—and it was no wonder he had been so scared. It is no joke to have the same nightmare twice in the space of a few minutes, falling back into it the moment you close your eyes, for all the world as if it had been there all the time, quietly waiting.

“And I didn’t even know I was asleep,” Vernon sobbed. “I thought you’d only just gone out of the room, Granny … I just shut my eyes, and opened them again, and it was
there.
Just like before … sort of looking down at me … and sort of talking … and oh, Granny, Mummy, this time it had
teeth
….”

It must have had them in the previous dream, of course, or Vernon would have remarked on it being toothless. But Imogen could guess what it was he was trying to describe. It was what teeth look like when the lips are drawn back from them in laughter, or in horror. Yellow teeth in the moonlight, long and
sharp they must have seemed to Vernon, for here he was
describing
them as “fangs”, and from the wet, loose lips the slobber had hung in strings, swinging, as the face came nearer. He had tried to scream … to hit out … and then, suddenly, he
was
screaming,
was
hitting out … and the terrible face was gone.

*

Two
aspirins, Dot decided, and a cup of hot milk. While she went in quest of these remedies, driving Herbert before her like a delinquent hen, Imogen stayed sitting on Vernon’s bunk and assuring him all over again that yes, of course it was only a dream, and that no, of course he wouldn’t dream it again, nobody ever dreams the same dream more than twice.

“Don’t they really, Granny? Not ever?”

Vernon’s interest seemed to have been caught by this
tendentious
piece of arithmetic, and Imogen found herself having to assemble impromptu bits of supporting evidence from far and wide, starting with the Bible. Soon, to make him smile, she was telling him of various silly dreams
she
had had in the course of her life—carefully-selected dreams, of course, about kittens, and the seaside, and headmistresses bicycling up lamp-posts.

Vernon listened gratefully, smiling sometimes, seeing through his step-grandmother’s rather transparent intentions, but
nevertheless
trying to go along with it all. Trying to be bamboozled, to be manœuvred out of the darkness and the terror, and to be palmed off with the light of common day.

Only a dream. Only a dream. By the time Dot came back with the hot milk and the aspirin, Vernon seemed to be quite tranquil again, though inclined to be argumentative about the milk.

“No, that’s not skin, it’s cream, it’ll do you good,” Dot admonished him; and then, to Imogen: “Why don’t you go off to bed, Imogen, and get some sleep? There’s nothing more you can do, he’ll be fine now, he’ll have forgotten all about it by the morning. Now, come on, dear, drink it up….”

Milk. The Milk of Forgetfulness. Dot was pouring it into him like petrol into a car, confident of getting results.

Would
he forget, though? From the bottom of her heart, Imogen willed that it should be so. Willed him to forget the nightmare; to forget all the fuss and commotion it had caused. And, above all, to forget that moment when his eyes had met hers, and she had known, and he knew that she had known, that it hadn’t been a dream at all. It had happened.