Mansfield with Monsters (6 page)

“Zombie,” she stammered, wishing she could turn away but unable to move her eyes from the disturbing sight.

The black cat hissed and swiped at its monstrous foe, its swift claws tearing fur and flesh off the groaning grey cat as it stiffly closed in. Again and again its paws struck the grey cat, and Bertha wondered why the black cat didn't run, why it kept fighting when its attacks didn't slow or deter the other.

The grey cat, its face mangled from the fight, one cloudy eye dangling loose from its socket and strips of decaying flesh hanging from its throat, seized the black cat with its jaws. The poor animal shrieked and raked its claws into its undead attacker but it couldn't struggle free from the grey beast's rigid brute strength. It wriggled and fought, howling in fear and in pain, but inevitably fell back on the grass as the feline zombie gnawed through its face with a savage hunger.

A shout rang through the garden and Bertha snapped out of her frozen horror to see the groundsman and one of the corporals assigned to guarding the house racing across the lawn. The grey cat was too absorbed in chewing its way through to the black cat's brain to notice their approach. It didn't even look up as they stopped a pace from it, and shot it in the back of the head.

Bertha backed away from the window. There was a second shot. The black cat. It wouldn't be left to turn after its wretched death.

She closed her eyes. How strong the jonquils smelt in the warm room. Too strong? Oh, no. She flung down on a couch and pressed her hands to her eyes.

“It's fine. It was only cats fighting. I'm happy, too, too happy!” she murmured.

And she seemed to see on her eyelids the lovely pear-tree with its wide open blossoms as a symbol of her own life.

Really, she had everything. She was young. Harry and she were as much in love as ever, and they got on together splendidly and were really good pals. She had an adorable baby. They didn't have to worry about money. They had this absolutely satisfactory house and garden which were patrolled day and night by armed soldiers. And friends, modern, thrilling friends, writers and painters and poets or people keen on social questions, just the kind of friends they wanted. And then there were books, and there was music, and she had found a wonderful little dressmaker, and their new cook made the most superb omelettes…

“I'm absurd. Absurd!” She sat up; but she felt quite dizzy, quite drunk. It must have been the spring.

Yes, it was the spring. Now she was so tired she struggled to drag herself upstairs to dress.

 

 

A white dress, a string of jade beads, green shoes and stockings. She wasn't intentionally avoiding her new red silk dress. She had decided the white and green was more flattering hours before she stood at the drawing-room window.

Her petals rustled softly into the hall, and she kissed Mrs Norman Knight, who was taking off the most amusing orange coat with a procession of lumbering grey figures round the hem and up the fronts.

“… Why! Why! Why is the middle-class so stodgy, so utterly without a sense of humour! My dear, it's only by a fluke that I am here at all, Norman being the protective fluke. For my little coat so upset the train coming into the city. One little man across from us couldn't stop staring as though he were eating me with his eyes. Didn't laugh, wasn't amused. No, he just stared and bored me through and through.”

“But that's not the half of it,” said Norman, pressing a large tortoiseshell-rimmed monocle into his eye. “You don't mind me telling this, Face, do you?” (In their home and among their friends they called each other Face and Mug.) “The cream of it was when one of those ridiculous zombies somehow had stumbled onto the tracks just before the border tunnel. One whiff of living flesh and the blasted stiff flung itself on the barbed wire over the window opposite us. Made rather a mess as you can imagine.”

“It must have been a fresh one,” Face added. “The flesh hadn't dried out at all. I haven't seen such a hideous assortment of red, green, and mauvey-grey splattered together since poor old Margaret Duckwell showed me her curtains!”

“There was a rather dull thud as we entered the tunnel but it wasn't until we came out the other side that we realized what had happened.” Mug paused and cast a theatrical eye around his captive audience. “The tunnel had knocked the stiff's head clean off! The cream of it was Face, without a moment's hesitation, turned to the woman beside her, who had turned a good deal greener than the creature had been, and she said: ‘What ever is the matter? Haven't you ever seen a zombie before?' ”

“Oh, yes!” Mrs Norman Knight joined in the laughter. “Wasn't that too absolutely creamy?”

The bell rang. It was lean, pale Eddie Warren (as usual) in a state of acute distress.

“It
is
the right house,
isn't
it?” he pleaded.

“Oh, I think so. I hope so,” said Bertha brightly.

“I have had such a
dreadful
experience with a taxi-man; he was
most
sinister. I couldn't get him to stop. You'd think the city walls had been breached! The
more
I knocked and called the
faster
he went. And
in
the moon-light this
bizarre
figure with the
flattened
head
crouching
over the
lit-tle
wheel…”

He shuddered, taking off an immense white silk scarf. Bertha noticed that his socks were white, too—most charming.

“But how dreadful!” she cried.

“Yes, it really was,” said Eddie, following her into the drawing-room. “I saw myself
driving
through Eternity in a
timeless
taxi.”

He knew the Norman Knights. In fact, he was going to write a play for N.K. when their theatre was up and running.

“Well, Warren, how's the play?” said Norman Knight, dropping his monocle and giving his eye a moment in which to rise to the surface before it was screwed down again.

And Mrs Norman Knight: “Oh, Mr Warren, what happy socks?”

“I
am
so glad you like them,” said he, staring at his feet. “They seem to have got so
much
whiter since the moon rose.” And he turned his lean sorrowful young face to Bertha. “There
is
a moon, you know.”

Bang went the front door open and shut. Harry shouted: “Hullo, you people. Down in five minutes.” And they heard him swarm up the stairs. Bertha couldn't help smiling; she knew how he loved doing things at high pressure. What, after all, did an extra five minutes matter? But he would pretend to himself that they mattered beyond measure. And then he would make a great point of coming into the drawing-room, extravagantly cool and collected.

Harry had such a zest for life. Oh, how she appreciated it in him. And his passion for fighting—for seeking in everything that came up against him another test of his power and of his courage—that, too, she understood. Even when it made him just occasionally, to other people, who didn't know him well, a little fierce perhaps… For there were moments when he rushed into battle where no battle was… She talked and laughed and positively forgot until he had come in (just as she had imagined) that Pearl Fulton had not turned up.

“I wonder if Miss Fulton has forgotten?”

“I expect so,” said Harry. “She strikes me as rather unreliable.”

“Ah! There's a taxi, now.” And Bertha smiled with that little air of proprietorship that she always assumed about her new and mysterious women friends. “She lives in taxis.”

“She'll run to fat if she does,” said Harry coolly, ringing the bell for dinner. “Frightful danger for blonde women.”

“Harry, don't!” warned Bertha, laughing up at him.

Came another tiny moment, while they waited, laughing and talking, just a trifle too much at their ease, a trifle too unaware. And then Miss Fulton, all in silver, with a silver fillet binding her pale blonde hair, came in smiling, her head a little on one side.

“Am I late?”

“No, not at all,” said Bertha. “Come along.” And she took her arm and they moved into the dining-room.

What was there in the touch of that cool arm that could fan—fan and start—blazing—the fire of bliss that Bertha did not know what to do with?

Miss Fulton did not look at her; but then she seldom did look at people directly. Her heavy eyelids lay upon her eyes and the strange half-smile came and went upon her lips as though she lived by listening rather than seeing. But Bertha knew, suddenly, as if the longest, most intimate look had passed between them—as if they had said to each other: “You too?”—that Pearl Fulton, stirring the beautiful red soup in the grey plate, was feeling just what she was feeling.

And the others? Face and Mug, Eddie and Harry, their spoons rising and falling, dabbing their lips with their napkins, crumbling bread, fiddling with the forks and glasses and talking.

Harry was enjoying his dinner. It was part of his—well, not his nature, exactly, and certainly not his position, his… something or other—to talk about food and to glory in his “shameless passion for the white flesh of the lobster” and “the green of pistachio ices, green and cold like the eyes of an Egyptian cat”.

When he looked up at her and said: “Bertha, this is a very admirable
soufflé
!” she almost could have wept with child-like pleasure.

Oh, why did she feel so tender towards the whole world to-night? Everything was good, everything was fine. All that happened seemed to fill again her brimming cup of bliss.

And still, in the back of her mind, there was the pear-tree. It would be silver now, in the light of poor Eddie's moon, silver as Miss Fulton, who sat there turning a tangerine in her slender fingers that were so pale a light seemed to come from them.

What she simply couldn't make out—what was miraculous—was how she should have guessed Miss Fulton's mood so exactly and so instantly. She was savouring every moment. Bertha never doubted for a moment that she was right and yet what had she to go on? Less than nothing.

“I believe this does happen very, very rarely between women. Never between men,” thought Bertha. “But while I am making the coffee in the drawing-room perhaps she will ‘give a sign'.”

What she meant by that she did not know, and what would happen after that she could not imagine.

 

 

It was over at last.

“Come and see my new coffee machine,” said Bertha.

“We only have a new coffee machine once a fortnight,” said Harry. Face took her arm this time; Miss Fulton bent her head and followed after.

The fire had died down in the drawing-room to a red, flickering “nest of baby phoenixes,” said Face.

At that moment Miss Fulton ‘gave the sign'.

“Have you a garden?” said the cool, sleepy voice.

This was so exquisite on her part that all Bertha could do was to obey. She crossed the room, pulled the curtains apart, and opened those long windows.

“There!” she breathed.

And the two women stood side by side looking at the slender, flowering tree. Although it was so still it seemed, like the flame of a candle, to stretch up, to point, to quiver in the bright air, to grow taller and taller as they gazed so that they might almost touch the rim of the round, silver moon.

How long did they stand there? Both, as it were, caught in that circle of unearthly light, understanding each other perfectly, creatures of an unspoilt world where the dead did not rise to devour the living, and wondering what they were to do in this one with all this blissful treasure that burned in their bosoms and dropped, in silver flowers, from their hair and hands.

How long had it been? Forever? For a moment? And did Miss Fulton murmur: “Yes. Just
that
.” Or did Bertha dream it?

Then the light was snapped on and Face made the coffee and Harry said: “My dear Mrs Knight, don't ask me about my baby. I never see him. I shan't feel the slightest interest in him until he's old enough to shoot a rifle.”