Strange Stories (24 page)

The bell was in order.

Sally was, of course, alone in the house.

Immediately she opened the door (which included two large tracts of colored glass), I apprehended a change in her, essentially the first change in all the time I had known her, for the woman who had come to my parents’ house a fortnight or three weeks before had seemed to me very much the girl who had joined my class when we were both children. But now there was a difference...

In the first place she looked different. Previously there had always been a distinction about her appearance, however inexpensive her clothes. Now she wore a fawn jumper which needed washing and stained, creaseless grey slacks. When a woman wears trousers, they need to be smart. These were slacks indeed. Sally’s hair was not so much picturesquely untidy as in the past but, more truly, in bad need of trimming. She wore distasteful sandals. And her expression had altered.

“Hullo, Mel. Do you mind sitting down and waiting for the kettle to boil?’’ She showed me into the ground-floor room (although to make possible the basement, it was cocked high in the air) with the bay window. “Just throw your coat on a chair.” She bustled precipitately away. It occurred to me that Sally’s culinary aplomb had diminished since her busy childhood of legend.

The room was horrible. I had expected eccentricity, discomfort, bookworminess, even perhaps the slightly macabre. But the room was entirely commonplace, and in the most unpleasing fashion. The furniture had probably been mass-produced in the early twenties. It was of the kind which it is impossible, by any expenditure of time and polish, to keep in good order. The carpet was dingy jazz. There were soulless little pictures in gilt frames. There were dreadful modern knickknacks. There was a radio set, obviously long broken... For the time of year, the rickety, smoky fire offered none too much heat. Rejecting Sally’s invitation, I drew my coat about me.

There was nothing to read except a prewar copy of "Tit-Bits,” which I found on-the floor under the lumpy settee. Like Sally’s jumper the dense lace curtains could have done with a wash. But before long Sally appeared with tea: six uniform pink cakes from the nearest shop and a flavorless liquid full of floating “strangers.” The crockery accorded with the other appurtenances.

I asked Sally whether she had started work of any kind.

“Not yet,” she replied, a little dourly. "I’ve got to get things going in the house first.”

“I suppose your father left things in a mess?”

She looked at me sharply. "Father never went out of his library.”

She seemed to suppose that I knew more than I did. Looking round me, I found it hard to visualize a "library.” I changed the subject.

"Aren’t you going to find it rather a big house for one?”

It seemed a harmless, though uninspired, question. But Sally, instead of answering, simply sat staring before her. Although it was more as if she stared within her at some unpleasant thought.

I believe in acting upon impulse.

"Sally,” I said, “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you sell this house, which is much too big for you, and come and live with me? We’ve plenty of room, and my father is the soul of generosity.”

She only shook her head. “Thank you, Mel. No.” She still seemed absorbed by her own thoughts, disagreeable thoughts.

"You remember what you said the other day. About being glad I was living here. I’m likely to go on living here. I’d love to have you with me, Sally. Please think about it.”

She put down her ugly little teaplate on the ugly little table. She had taken a single small bite out of her pink cake. She stretched out her hand towards me, very tentatively, not nearly touching me. She gulped slightly. “Mel—”

I moved to take her hand, but she drew it back. Suddenly she shook her head violently. Then she began to talk about her work.

She did not resume eating or drinking, and indeed both the cakes and the tea, which every now and then she pressed upon me in a casual way more like her former manner, were remarkably unappetizing. But she talked interestingly and familiarly for about half an hour—about indifferent matters. Then she said, "Forgive me, Mel. But I must be getting on.”

She rose. Of course I rose too. Then I hesitated.

“Sally . . . Please think about it. I’d like it so much. Please."

“Thank you, Mel. I'll think about it.”

"Promise?”

“Promise... Thank you for coming to see me.”

“I want to see much more of you.”

She stood in the open front door. In the dusk she looked inexplicably harassed and woebegone.

“Come and see me whenever you want. Come to tea tomorrow and stay to dinner.” Anything to get her out of that horrible, horrible house.

But, as before, she only said, “I’ll think about it.”

Walking home it seemed to me that she could only have invited me out of obligation. I was much hurt, and much frightened by the change in her. As I reached my own gate it struck me that the biggest change of all was that she had never once smiled.

When five or six days later I had neither seen nor heard from Sally, I wrote asking her to visit me. For several days she did not reply at all; then she sent me another picture postcard, this lime of some ancient bust in a museum, informing me that she would love to come when she had a little more time. I noticed that she had made a slight error in my address, which she had hastily and imperfectly corrected. The postman, of course, knew me. I could well imagine that there was much to do in Sally’s house. Indeed, it was a house of the kind in which the work is never either satisfying or complete: an ever-open mouth of a house. But despite the tales of her childhood, I could not imagine the Sally I knew doing it... I could not imagine what she was doing, and I admit that I did want to know.

Some time after that I came across Sally in the International Stores. It was not a shop I usually patronized, but Mr. Orbit was out of my father’s particular pickles. I could not help wondering whether Sally did not remember perfectly well that it was a shop in which I was seldom found.

She was there when I entered. She was wearing the same grimy slacks and this time a white blouse which was worse than her former jumper, being plainly filthy. Against the autumn she wore a blue raincoat, which I believed to be the same she had worn to school. She looked positively unkempt and far from well. She was nervously shoveling a little heap of dark-blue bags and gaudy packets into a very ancient carryall. Although the shop was fairly full, no one else was waiting to be served at the part of the counter where Sally stood. I walked up to her.

“Good morning, Sally.”

She clutched the ugly carryall to her, as if I were about to snatch it. Then at once she became ostentatiously relaxed.

"Don't look at me like that,” she said. There was an upsetting little rasp in her voice. “After all, Mel, you’re not my mother.” Then she walked out of the shop.

“Your change, miss,” cried the International Stores clerk after her.

But she was gone. The other women in the shop watched her go as if she were the town tart. Then they closed up along the section of counter where she had been standing.

“Poor thing,” said the clerk unexpectedly. He was young. The other women looked at him malevolently and gave their orders with conscious briskness.

Then came Sally’s accident.

By this time there could be no doubt that something was much wrong with her, but I had always been very nearly her only friend in the town, and her behavior to me made it difficult for me to help. It was not that I lacked will or, I think, courage but that I was unable to decide how to set about the task. I was still thinking about it when Sally was run over. I imagine that her trouble, whatever it was, had affected her ordinary judgment. Apparently she stepped right under a truck in the High Street, having just visited the Post Office. I learned shortly afterwards that she refused to have letters delivered at her house but insisted upon them being left poste restante.

When she had been taken to the Cottage Hospital, the matron, Miss Garvice, sent for me. Everyone knew that I was Sally’s friend.

"Do you know who is her next of kin?”

“I doubt whether she has such a thing in this country.”

“Friends?”

"Only I that I know of." I had always wondered about the mysterious informant of Dr. Tessler’s passing.

Miss Garvice considered for a moment.

“I’m worried about her house. Strictly speaking, in all the circumstances, I suppose I ought to tell the police and ask them to keep an eye on it. But I am sure she would prefer me to ask you.”

From her tone I rather supposed that Miss Garvice knew nothing of the recent changes in Sally. Or perhaps she thought it best to ignore them.

“As you live so close, I wonder if it would be too much to ask you just to look in every now and then? Perhaps dailv might be best?”

I think I accepted mainly because I suspected that something in Sally’s life might need, for Sally’s sake, to be kept from the wrong people.

“Here are her keys.”

It was a numerous assembly for such a commonplace establishment as Sally's.

“I'll do it as I say, Miss Garvice. But how long do you think it will be?”

“Hard to say. But I don’t think Sally’s going to die.”

One trouble was that I felt compelled to face the assignment unaided, because I knew no one in the town who seemed likely to regard Sally's predicament with the sensitiveness and delicacy—and indeed love—which I suspected were essential. There was also a dilemma about whether or not I should explore the house. Doubtless I had no right, but to do so might, on the other hand, possibly be regarded as in Sally’s "higher interests." I must acknowledge, nontheless, that my decision to proceed was considerably inspired by curiosity. This did not mean that I should involve others in whatever might be disclosed. Even that odious sitting room would do Sally’s reputation no good...

Miss Garvice had concluded by suggesting that I perhaps ought to pay my first visit at once. I went home to lunch. Then I set out.

Among the first things I discovered were that Sally kept every single door of the house locked and that the remains of the tea I had taken with her weeks before still lingered in the sitting room, not, mercifully, the food, but the plates and cups and genteel little knives and the teapot with leaves and liquor at the bottom of it.

Giving onto the passage from the front door was a room adjoining the sitting room and corresponding to it at the back of the house. Presumably one of these rooms was intended by the builder (the house was not a kind to have had an architect) for use as a dining room, the other as a drawing room. I went through the keys. There were big keys, the doors and locks being pretentiously oversized. In the end the door opened. I noticed a stale cold smell. The room appeared to be in complete darkness. Possibly Dr. Tessler’s library?

I groped round the inside of the door frame for an electric light switch but could find nothing. I took another half step inside. The room seemed blacker than ever, and the stale cold smell somewhat stronger. I decided to defer exploration until later.

I shut the door and went upstairs. The ground-floor rooms were high, which made the stairs many and steep.

On the first floor were two rooms, corresponding in plan to the other two rooms below. It could be called neither an imaginative design nor a convenient one. I tried the front room first, again going through the rigmarole with the keys. The room was in a dilapidated condition and contained nothing but a considerable mass of papers. They appeared once to have been stacked on the bare floor, but the stacks had long since fallen over, and their component elements had accumulated a deep top-dressing of flaky black particles. The grime was of that ultimate kind which seems to have an actually greasy consistency: the idea of further investigating those neglected masses of scroll and manuscript made me shudder.

The back room was a bedroom, presumably Sally’s. All the curtains were drawn, and I had to turn on the light. It contained what must truly be termed, in the worn phrase, "a few sticks of furniture;” all in the same period as the pieces in the sitting room, though more exiguous and spidery looking. The inflated size and height of the room, the heavy plaster cornice, and even heavier plaster rose in the center of the cracked ceiling emphasized the sparseness of the anachronistic furnishings. There was, however, a more modern double-divan bed, very low on the floor, and looking as if it had been slept in but not remade for weeks. Someone seemed to have arisen rather suddenly, as at an alarm clock. I tried to pull open a drawer in the rickety dressing table. It squeaked and stuck, and proved to contain some pathetic-looking underclothes of Sally’s. The long curtains were very heavy and dark green.

It was a depressing investigation, but I persisted.

The second floor gave the appearance of having been originally one room, reached from a small landing. There was marked evidence of unskilled cuttings and botches, aimed, it was clear, at partitioning off this single vast room in order to form a bathroom and lavatory, and a passage giving access thereto. Could the house have been originally built without these necessary amenities? Anything seemed possible. I remembered the chestnut about the architect who forgot the staircase.

But there was something here which I found not only squalid but vaguely frightening. The original door, giving from the small landing into the one room, showed every sign of having been forcibly- burst open and from the inside (characteristically, it had been hung to open outwards). The damage was seemingly not recent (although it is not easy to date such a thing), but the shattered door still hung dejectedly outward from its weighty lower hinge only and, in fact, made it almost impossible to enter the room at all. Gingerly I forced it a little more forward. The ripped woodwork of the heavy door shrieked piercingly as I dragged at it. I looked in. The room, such as it had ever been, had been finally wrecked by the introduction of the batten partition which separated it from the bathroom and was covered with blistered dark-brown varnish. The only contents were a few decaying toys. The nursery, as I remembered from the exterior prospect, Through the gap between the sloping door and its frame, I looked at the barred windows. Like everything else in the house, the bars seemed very heavy. I looked again at the toys. I observed that all of them seemed to be woolly animals. They were rotted with moth and mold, but not so much so as to conceal the fact that at least some of them appeared also to have been mutilated. There were the decomposing leg of a teddy bear, inches away from the main torso; the severed head of a fanciful stuffed bird. It was as unpleasant a scene as every other in the house.