Strange Stories (28 page)

The retainer, if such she was, saved the situation. “I’ll go for madam,” she said and withdrew without inviting them to seat themselves on one of the haphazard sofas or uncertain-looking chairs.

“I suppose we shut the door,” said Winifred, and did so.

They stood about for a little. There was nothing to look at apart from a single colored print of lambs in the Holy Land. At each corner of the frame, the fretwork made a cross, though one of the crosses had been partly broken off.

“None the less, I don’t think it’s still the rectory,” said Winifred. "Or the vicarage.”

“You’re right.” A middle-aged woman had appeared, wearing a loose dress. The color of the dress lay between oatmeal and cream, and round the oblong neck and the ends of the elbow-length sleeves ran wide strips of a cherry hue. The woman’s shoes were faded, and she had taken little trouble with her bird’s nest hair. “You’re perfectly right,” said the woman. “Hasn’t been a clergyman here for years. There are some funny old rectories in this county, as you may have heard.”

“Boreley, you mean,” said Millicent, who had always been quite interested in such things.

“That place and a number of other places,” said the woman. “Each little community has its specialty.”

“This was a rectory,” Winifred enquired in the way she often did, politely elevating her eyebrows, “not a vicarage?”

“They would have found it even more difficult to keep a vicar,” said the woman in the most matter-of- fact way. Millicent could see there was no wedding ring on her hand. Indeed, there was no ring of any kind on either of her rather massive, rather unshaped hands. For that matter, there were no gems in her ears, no geegaws round her neck, no Castilian combs in her wild hair.

“Sit down,” said the woman. “What can I do for you? My name’s Stock. Pansy Stock. Ridiculous, isn't it? But it’s a perfectly common name in Essex.”

Winifred often went on in that very same way about “Essex,” had indeed already done so more than once during the journey down, but Millicent had always supposed it to be one of Winifred’s mild fancies, which it was up to her friends to indulge. She had never supposed it to have any objective metaphysic. Nor had she ever brought herself to address anyone as Pansy and was glad that the need was unlikely to arise now.

They sat, and because it seemed to be called for, Winifred introduced herself and then Millicent. Miss Stock sat upon the other sofa. She was wearing woolly, midgreen stockings.

“It’s simply about this glove,” went on Winifred. “We explained to your servant, but we couldn’t quite make her understand.”

“Lettice has heard nothing since it happened. That was the effect it had on her.”

“Since what happened?” asked Winifred. “If we may ask, that is.”

“Since she was jilted, of course,” answered Miss Stock.

“That sounds very sad,” said Winifred, in her affable and emollient way. Millicent, after all, had not exactly been jilted, not exactly. Technically, it was she who was the jilt. Socially, it still made a difference.

“It’s the usual thing in this place. I’ve said that each community has its specialty. This is ours.”

“How extraordinary!” said Winifred.

“It happens to all the females, and not only when they’re still girls.”

“I wonder they remain,” responded Winifred smilingly.

“They don’t remain. They come back.”

“In what way?” asked Winifred.

“In what is known as spirit form,” said Miss Stock.

Winifred considered. She was perfectly accustomed to claims of that kind, to the many sorts it takes to make a world.

“Like the Willis in Giselle?” she enquired helpfully.

“I believe so,” said Miss Stock. 'I’ve never been inside a theater. I was brought up not to go, and I’ve never seen any good reason for breaking the rule.”

“It’s become so expensive too,” said Winifred, if only because it was what she would have said in other, doubtless more conventional circumstances.

“This glove,” interrupted Millicent, actually dropping it on the floor because she had no wish to hold it any longer. “We saw it lying by itself on the churchyard path.”

“I daresay you did,” said Miss Stock. “It’s not the only thing that’s been seen lying in and around the churchyard.”

Winifred politely picked up the glove, rose, and placed it on Miss Stock’s sofa. “We thought we should hand it in locally.”

“That’s good of you,” said Miss Stock. “Though no one will claim it. There’s a room half full of things like it. Trinkets, knicknacks, great gold hearts the size of oysters, souvenirs of all kinds, even a pair of riding boots. Things seem to appear and disappear just as they please. No one ever enquires again for them. That’s not why the females come back. Of course it was a kind action on your part. Sometimes people benefit, I suppose. They say that if one finds something, or sees something, one will come back anyway.” Miss Stock paused for half a second. Then she asked casually, “Which of you was it?”

At once Millicent replied, “It was I who saw the glove first, and several other things too.”

“Then you’d better take the greatest possible care,” said Miss Stock, still quite lightly. “Avoid all entanglements of the heart, or you may end like Lettice.”

Winifred, who was still on her feet, said, “Millicent, we really must go, or we shall never get to Baddeley End.”

Miss Stock said at once, “Baddeley End is closed all day on Thursdays. So wherever else you go, there’s no point in going there. ”

“You’re right about Thursdays, Miss Stock,” said Winifred, “because I looked it up most carefully in the book before we left. But this is Wednesday.”

“It’s not,” said Millicent. “It’s Thursday.”

“Whatever else it may be,” confirmed Miss Stock, “it indubitably is Thursday.”

There was an embarrassing blank in time, while an angel flitted through the room, or perhaps a demon.

“I now realize that it is Thursday,” said Winifred. She turned pale. “Millicent, I am sorry. I must be going mad.”

“Of course there are many, many other places you can visit,” said Miss Stock. “Endless places. Almost every little hamlet has something of its own to offer.” “Yes,” said Winifred. “We must have a look round.”

“What, then, do they come back for,” asked Millicent, interrupting again, “if it’s not for their property?”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t for their property. It depends what property. Not for their gloves or their rings or their little false thises and thats, but for their property, none the less. For what they regard as their property, anyway. One’s broken heart, if it can be mended at all, can be mended only in one way.”

“And yet at times,” said Millicent,“the whole thing seems so trivial, so unreal. So absurd, even. Never really there at all. Utterly not worth the melodrama.”

“Indubitably,” said Miss Stock. “And the same is true of religious faith, or poetry, of a walk round a lake, of existence itself.”

“I suppose so,” said Millicent. "But personal feeling is quite particularly—” She could not find the word.

“Millicent,” said Winifred. “Let's go.” She seemed past conventions with their hostess. She looked white and upset. “We’ve got rid of the glove. Let’s go.”

“Tell me,” said Millicent. “What is the one way to mend a broken heart? If we are to take the matter so seriously, we need to be told.”

“Millicent,” said Winifred, “I’ll wait for you in the car. At the end of the drive, you remember.”

“I’m flattered that you call it a drive,” said Miss Stock.

Winifred opened the front door and walked out. The door flopped slowly back behind her.

“Tell me,” said Millicent. “What is the one way to mend a broken heart?” She spoke as if in capital letters.

“You know what it is,” said Miss Stock. “It is to kill the man who has broken it. Or at least to see to it that he dies.”

“Yes, I imagined it was that,” said Millicent. Her eyes were on the Palestinian lamblets.

“It is the sole possible test of whether the feeling is real,” explained Miss Stock, as if she were a senior demonstrator.

“Or was real?”

“There can be no was. if the feeling’s real.”

Millicent withdrew her gaze from the gamboling livestock. “And have you yourself taken the necessary steps? If you don’t mind my asking, of course?”

“No. The matter has never arisen in my case. I live here and I look on.”

“It doesn’t seem a very jolly place to live.”

“It’s a very instructive place to live. Very cautionary. I profit greatly.”

Millicent again paused for a moment, staring across the sparsely endowed room at Miss Stock in her alarming clothes.

“What, Miss Stock, would be your final words of guidance?”

“The matter is probably out of your hands by now, let alone of mine.”

Millicent could not bring herself to leave it at that.

“Do girls — women — come here from outside the village? If there really is a village? My friend and I haven’t' seen one and the church appears to be disused. It seems to have been disused for a very long time.”

“Of course there’s a village.” said Miss Stock, quite fiercely.

“And the church is not entirely disused, I assure you. And there are cows and a place where they are kept; and a river and a bridge. All the normal things, in fact, though, in each case, with a local emphasis, as is only right and proper. And, yes, females frequently come from outside the village. They find themselves here, often before they know it. Or so I take it to be.” Millicent rose.

“Thank you. Miss Stock, for bearing with us and for taking in our glove.”

“Perhaps something of your own will be brought to me one day,” remarked Miss Stock.

“Who knows?” replied Millicent, entering into the spirit, as she regularly tried to do.

Millicent detected a yellow collecting box on a broken table to the right of the front door. In large black letters a label proclaimed JOSEPHINE BUTLER AID FOR UNFORTUNATES. From her trousers pocket Millicent extracted a contribution. She was glad she did not have to grope ridiculously through a handbag while Miss Stock smiled and waited.

Miss Stock had risen to her feet but had not advanced to see Millicent out. She merely stood there, a little dimly.

“Good-by, Miss Stock.”

In the front door, as with many rectories and vicarages, there were two large panes of glass, frosted overall but patterned en clair round the edge, so that in places one could narrowly see through to the outer world. About to pull the door open, which Winifred had left unlatched, Millicent apprehended the shape of a substantial entity standing noiselessly without. It was simply one thing too many. For a second time that day, Millicent found it difficult not to scream. But Miss Stock was in the mistiness behind her, and Millicent drew the door open.

“Nigel, my God!”

Millicent managed to pull fast the door behind her. Then his arms enveloped her, as ivy was enveloping the little church.

“I’m having nothing more to do with you. How did you know I was here?”

“Winifred told me, of course.”

“I don’t believe you. She’s sitting in her car anyway, just by the gate. I’ll ask her.”

“She’s not,” said Nigel. “She’s left.”

“She can’t have left. She was waiting for me. Please let me go, Nigel.”

“I’ll let you go, and then you can see for yourself.”

They walked side by side in silence down the depressing, weedy drive. Millicent wondered whether Miss Stock was watching them through the narrow, distorting streaks of machine-cut glass.

There was no Winifred and no car. Thick brown leaves were strewn over the place where the car had stood. It seemed to Millicent for a moment as if the car had been buried there.

“Never mind, my dear. If you behave yourself, I’ll drive you home.”

“I can’t see your car either.” It was a notably inadequate rejoinder, but at least spontaneous.

“Naturally not. It’s hidden.” “Why is it hidden?”

“Because I don’t want you careering off in it and leaving me behind. You’ve tried to ditch me once, and once is enough for any human being.”

“I didn’t try to ditch you, Nigel. I completed the job. You were smashing up my entire life.”

“Not your life, sweet. Only your idiot career, so-called.”

“Not only.”

“Albeit, I shan’t leave you to walk home.”

“Not home. Only to the station. I know precisely where it is. Winifred pointed it out. She saw it on the map. She said there are still trains.”

“You really can’t rely on Winifred.”

Millicent knew that this was a lie. Whatever had happened to Winifred, Nigel was lying. Almost everything he said was a lie, more or less. Years ago it had been among the criteria by which she had realized how deeply and truly she loved him.

“You can’t always rely on maps either,” said Nigel.

“What’s happened to Winifred?” How absurd and schoolgirl-ish she always seemed in her own eyes when trying to reach anything like equal terms with Nigel! The silly words leapt to her lips without her choosing or willing them.

“She’s gone. Let’s do a little sightseeing before we drive home. You can tell me about the crockets and finials. It will help to calm us down.”

Again he put his arm tightly round her and, despite her halfsimulated resistance, pushed and pulled her through the kissing gate into the churchyard. Her resistance was half-simulated because she knew from experience how useless with Nigel was anything more. He knew all the tricks by which at school big boys pinion and compel small ones, and he had never hesitated to use them against Millicent, normally, of course, upon a more or less agreed basis of high spirits, good fun, and knowing better than she what it would be sensible for them to do next. His frequent use of real and serious physical force had been another thing that had attracted her.

He dragged her down the uneven path. “Beautiful place. Peaceful. Silent as the grave.”

And, indeed, it was quiet now, singularly different in small ways from when Millicent had been there with Winifred. Not only the owls but all the hedgerow birds had ceased to utter. One could not even detect an approaching aircraft. The breeze had dropped, and all the long grass looked dead or painted.