Mansfield with Monsters (5 page)

“Here, my lad,” said Father. “Have something to eat.”

But Sun did not move from the door. Suddenly he put up his head and gave a loud wail.

“I think it's horrid—horrid—horrid!” he sobbed.

“There, you see!” said Mother. “They're too young. They don't understand!”

“The feast is a great tribute and source of power,” said Father, no longer jolly. “Off you go. This moment. Off you go!”

And wailing loudly, Sun stumped off to the nursery.

Bliss

Although Bertha Young was thirty and it had been over five years since the first walking dead had stumbled out of their graves, she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at nothing.

What can you do if you are thirty and, strolling along within the towering barbed wire fortifications of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss—absolute bliss!—as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe?

Oh, is there no way you can express it without being ‘drunk and disorderly'? How idiotic civilisation is! Why have a living, breathing body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?

“No, that about the fiddle is not quite what I mean,” she thought, running up the steps and feeling in her bag for the key—she'd forgotten it, as usual—and rattling the letter-box. “It's not what I mean, because… Thank you, Mary.” She went into the hall. “Is Nurse back?”

“Yes, M'm.”

“And has the fruit come?”

“Yes, M'm. Everything's come.”

“Bring the fruit up to the dining-room, will you? I'll arrange it before I go upstairs.”

It was dusky in the dining-room and quite chilly. But all the same Bertha threw off her coat; she could not bear the tight clasp of it another moment, it reminded her of another pair of lifeless arms clutching at her shoulders as her husband calm as ever raised the rifle… The sudden memory of her late brother James chilled her more than the cold air on her arms. She pushed it back into dark recesses of her mind. She could not let this rare feeling of bliss be lost by what had happened back then. Too much had been sacrificed for the sake of survival, and what was the good of surviving if one could not enjoy being alive?

But the precious joy hadn't gone. In her bosom there was still that bright glowing place, that shower of little sparks coming from it. It was almost unbearable. She hardly dared to breathe for fear of fanning it higher, and yet she breathed deeply, deeply. She hardly dared to look into the cold mirror, but she did look, and it gave her back a woman, radiant, with smiling, trembling lips, with big, dark eyes and an air of listening, waiting for something divine to happen… that she knew must happen… infallibly.

Mary brought in the fruit on a tray and with it a glass bowl, and a blue dish, very lovely, with a strange sheen on it as though it had been dipped in milk.

“Shall I turn on the light, M'm?”

“No, thank you. I can see quite well.”

There were tangerines and apples stained with strawberry pink. Some yellow pears, smooth as silk, some white grapes covered with a silver bloom and a big cluster of purple ones. Fruit was such a rare treat these days. Protecting the few surviving farms beyond the city's defenses was proving increasingly difficult as more of the roaming dead abandoned their futile efforts to penetrate the city walls and turned their attentions to those brave families who refused to leave their orchards and fields. Bertha gazed at the glossy purple grapes. They looked too delicious and yet it would a pity to eat them. They would tone in with the new dining-room carpet. Yes, that did sound rather far-fetched and absurd, but it was really why she treasured them.

When she had finished the fruit arrangement and had made two pyramids of these bright round shapes, she stood away from the table to get the effect, and it really was most curious. For the dark table seemed to melt into the dusky light and the glass dish and the blue bowl to float in the air. This, of course, in her present mood, was so incredibly beautiful. She began to laugh.

“No, no. I'm getting hysterical.” And she seized her bag and coat and ran upstairs to the nursery.

 

 

Nurse sat at a low table giving Little B his supper after his bath. The baby had on a white flannel gown and a blue woollen jacket, and his dark, fine hair was brushed up into a funny little peak. He looked up when he saw his mother and began to jump.

“Now, my lovey, eat it up like a good boy,” said Nurse, setting her lips in a way that Bertha knew, and that meant she had come into the nursery at another wrong moment.

“Has he been good, Nanny?”

“He's been a little sweet all the afternoon,” whispered Nanny. “We went to the park and I sat down on a bench and took him out of the pram so he could see out over the river. It was such a beautiful day. The Boy Scouts were shooting targets on the old cricket pitch and they looked ever so smart in their little uniforms.”

“Shooting in the park? Are the children never to play as they used to?”

“Well, it's a different world nowadays, M'm. I'd only sat for five minutes before a mob of zombies started gathering on the other side of the river. All clustered round the old King's Arms they were, before they got whiff of us and came lumbering to the water's edge. Half mad with hunger, groaning and stretching their arms out at us.”

“How terrible.”

“But there wasn't any danger, M'm, not with the river as full as it is. Besides, the Scout Master, calm as you please, orders the boys to take aim and fire. Well bless my soul if they didn't hit every last one and there must have been at least a dozen or so of the wretches. And the little one didn't even flinch at the gunfire. He just smiled and watched the whole thing. He's his father's brave little boy, no mistake. Oh, you should have seen him.”

Bertha wanted to ask if it wasn't rather dangerous to venture out into the park at all. She wanted to beg the nurse to never take Little B there ever again. Everyone knew that people slipped over the river to trade a few things or escape the eyes of the soldiers, and in doing so they inevitably attracted fresh zombies with their scent. But she did not dare to. She stood watching the nurse and Little B, her hands by her side, like the poor little girl in front of the rich girl with the doll.

The baby looked up at her again, stared, and then smiled so charmingly that Bertha couldn't help crying: “Oh, Nanny, do let me finish giving him his supper while you put the bath things away.”

“Well, M'm, he oughtn't to be changed hands while he's eating,” said Nanny, still whispering. “It unsettles him.”

How absurd it was. Why have a baby if it has to be kept—not in a case like a rare, rare fiddle—but in another woman's arms?

“Oh, I must!” said she.

Very offended, Nanny handed him over.

“Now, don't excite him after his supper. You know you do, M'm. And I have such a time with him after!”

Thank heaven! Nanny went out of the room with the bath towels.

“Now I've got you to myself, my little precious,” said Bertha, as the baby leant against her.

He ate delightfully, holding up his lips for the spoon and then waving his hands. Sometimes he wouldn't let the spoon go; and sometimes, just as Bertha had filled it, he waved it away to the four winds.

When the soup was finished Bertha turned round to the fire. “You're sweet, you're very sweet!” said she, kissing her warm baby. “I wish I could keep you like this always.”

And indeed, she loved Little B so much, his neck as he bent forward, his exquisite toes as they shone transparent in the firelight, that her feeling of bliss came back again, and again she didn't know how to express it, what to do with it.

“You're wanted on the telephone,” said Nanny, coming back in triumph and seizing her Little B.

 

 

Down she flew. It was Harry.

“Oh, is that you, Ber? Look here. Something's come up. I'll be late.”

“You're not in any danger, are you? Those things haven't…”

“Of course not. Don't fuss, Ber. No zombie has been inside the city in two years and even if one did it'd be shot before it got within a hundred feet of Headquarters. Look, I'll take a taxi and come along as quickly as I can, but get dinner put back ten minutes, will you? All right?”

“Yes, perfectly fine. Oh, Harry!”

“Yes?”

What had she to say? She'd nothing to say. She only wanted to get in touch with him for a moment. She couldn't absurdly cry: “Hasn't it been a divine day!”

“What is it?” rapped out the little voice.

“Nothing.
Entendu
,” said Bertha, and hung up the receiver, thinking how much more than idiotic everything was.

 

 

They had people coming to dinner. The Norman Knights, a very sound couple, and he was about to reopen the old St James theatre on the fifth anniversary of the massacre when the theatre had been overrun during a performance of Faust. Mrs Norman Knight was awfully keen on interior decoration. The other guests were a young man, Eddie Warren, who had just published a little book of poems
Picked my Brain in Whispers
and whom everybody was asking to dine, and a ‘find' of Bertha's called Pearl Fulton. What Miss Fulton did, Bertha didn't know. They had met at the club and Bertha had fallen in love with her, as she always did fall in love with beautiful women who had something strange about them.

The provoking thing was that, though they had been about together and met a number of times and really talked, Bertha couldn't make her out. Up to a certain point Miss Fulton was rarely, wonderfully frank, but the certain point was there, and beyond that she would not go.

Was there anything beyond it? Harry said ‘no'. Voted her dullish, and “cold like all blonde women, with a touch, perhaps, of anaemia of the brain”. But Bertha wouldn't agree with him; not yet, at any rate.

“No, the way she has of sitting with her head a little on one side, and smiling, has something behind it, Harry, and I must find out what that something is.”

“Most likely it's a good stomach,” answered Harry.

He made a point of catching Bertha's heels with replies of that kind… “liver frozen, my dear girl”, or “pure flatulence”, or “kidney disease”, and so on. Harry couldn't resist attributing a biological cause for all human behaviour. His research was of course top secret, but with the long hours he worked and his rapid promotion from army doctor to heading his own research facility at H.Q. , he must have made some important discoveries indeed. For some strange reason Bertha liked his offhand remarks, and almost admired them more than his important work and ambition.

She went into the drawing-room and lighted the fire; then, picking up the cushions, one by one, that Mary had disposed so carefully, she threw them back on to the chairs and the couches. That made all the difference; the room came alive at once. As she was about to throw the last one she surprised herself by suddenly hugging it to her passionately. But it did not put out the fire in her bosom. Oh, on the contrary!

The windows of the drawing-room opened on to a balcony over-looking the garden. At the far end, against the wall, there was a tall, slender pear-tree in fullest, richest bloom; it stood perfect, as though becalmed against the jade-green sky. Bertha couldn't help feeling, even from this distance, that it had not a single bud or a faded petal. Down below, in the garden beds, the red and yellow tulips, heavy with flowers, seemed to lean upon the dusk. A grey cat, dragging its belly, slunk across the lawn, and a black one, its shadow, trailed. The sight of them gave Bertha a curious shiver. The black cat, so intent and quick, advanced on the smaller grey one as if to seize the back of its neck when the grey one turned round and let out a low growl, eerie and lifeless. There was no mistaking what the cat was—its eyes were glazed over with a milky film and its movements were slow and relentless.