Strange Stories (7 page)

Stephen flung the book back on the table. It fell with a heavy clang.

‘Meant for my brother. It’s always happening. People don’t seem to know there’s a difference between us.’

He gazed at her. He wanted to see nothing else.

She looked unbelievably strange in her faded trousers and

the sweater Elizabeth had made. Elizabeth would have seen a ghost and fainted. Elizabeth really did tend to faint in the sudden presence of the occult.

‘We are not going to take it to him. It’ll have to be posted. I’ll get the Department to do it tomorrow.’

He paused. She smiled at him, late though it was.

Late or early? What difference did it make? It was not what mattered.

‘I told you that I should have to go to the Department tomorrow. There’s a lot to explain.’

She nodded. ‘And then we’ll go back? ’ She had been anxious about that ever since they had started. He had not known what to expect.

‘Yes. After a few days.’

Whatever he intended in the first place, he had never made it clear to her where they would be living in the longer run. This was partly because he did not know himself. The flat, without Elizabeth, really was rather horrible. Stephen had not forgotten Elizabeth for a moment. How could he have done? Nor could Stephen wonder that Nell did not wish to live in the flat. The flat was disfigured and puny.

Nell still smiled with her usual seeming understanding. He had feared that by now she would demur at his reference to a few days, and had therefore proclaimed it purposefully.

He smiled back at her. ‘I’ll buy you a dress.’

She seemed a trifle alarmed.

‘It’s time you owned one.’

‘I don’t own anything.’

‘Yes, you do. You own me. Let’s go to bed, shall we?’

But she spoke. ‘What’s this?’

As so often happens, Nell had picked up and taken an interest in the thing he would least have wished.

It was a large, lumpy shopping bag from a craft room in Burnham-on-Sea, where Elizabeth and he had spent an unwise week in their early days. What the Orient was to Harriet, the seaside had been to Elizabeth. Sisters-in-law often show affinities. The shopping bag had continued in regular use ever since, and not only for shopping, until Elizabeth had been no longer mobile.

‘It’s a bag made of natural fibres,’ said Stephen. ‘It belonged to my late wife.’

‘It smells. It reminds me.’

‘Many things here remind
me
,’ said Stephen. ‘But a new page has been turned.’ He kept forgetting that Nell was unaccustomed to book metaphors.

She appeared to be holding the bag out to him. Though not altogether knowing why, he took it from her. He then regretted doing so.

It was not so much the smell of the bag. He was entirely accustomed to that. It was that, in his absence, the bag had become sodden with dark growths, outside and inside. It had changed character completely.

Certainly the bag had been perfectly strong and serviceable when last he had been in contact with it; though for the moment he could not recollect when that had been. He had made little use of the bag when not under Elizabeth’s direction.

He let the fetid mass fall on top of the book on the brass table.

‘Let’s forget everything,’ he said. ‘We still have a few hours.’

‘Where do I go? ’ she asked, smiling prettily.

‘Not in there,’ he cried, as she put her hand on one of the doors. He very well knew that he must seem far too excitable. He took a pull on himself. ‘Try this room.’

When Elizabeth had become ill, the double bed had been moved into the spare room. It had been years since Stephen had slept in that bed, though, once again, he could not in the least recall how many years. The first step towards mastering time is always to make time meaningless.

It was naturally wonderful to be at long last in a fully equipped deep double bed with Nell. She had shown no expectation of being invited to borrow one of Elizabeth’s expensive nightdresses. Nell was a primitive still, and it was life or death to keep her so. He had never cared much for flowing, gracious bedwear in any case; nor had the wonder that was Elizabeth seemed to him to need such embellishments.

But he could not pretend, as he lay in Nell’s strong arms and she in his, that the condition of the spare room was in the least reassuring. Before he had quickly turned off the small bedside light, the new marks on the walls had seemed like huge inhuman faces; and the effect was all the more alarming in that these walls had been painted, inevitably long ago, by Elizabeth in person, and had even been her particular domestic display piece. The stained overall she had worn for the task, still hung in the cupboard next door, lest the need arise again.

It was always the trouble. So long as one was far from the place once called home, one could successfully cast secondary matters from the mind, or at least from the hurting part of it; but from the moment of return, in fact from some little while before that, one simply had to recognize that, for most of one’s life, secondary matters were just about all there were. Stephen bad learned ages ago that secondary matters were always the menace.

Desperation, therefore, possibly made its contribution to the mutual passion that charged the few hours available to them.

Within a week, the walls might be darkened all over; and what could the development after
that
conceivably be?

Stephen strongly suspected that the mossiness, the malady, would become more conspicuously three-dimensional at any moment. Only as a first move, of course.

He managed to close his mind against all secondary considerations and to give love its fullest licence yet.

***

Thread was in the office before Stephen, even though Stephen had risen most mortifyingly early, and almost sleepless. It was a commonplace that the higher one ascended in the service, the earlier one had to rise, in order to ascend higher still. The lamas never slept at all.

‘Feeling better?’ Thread could ask such questions with unique irony.

‘Much better, thank you.’

‘You still look a bit peaky.’ Thread was keeping his finger at the place he had reached in the particular file.

‘I had a tiresome journey back. I’ve slept very little.’

‘It’s always the trouble. Morag and I make sure of a few days to settle in before we return to full schedule.’

‘Elizabeth and I used to do that also. It’s a bit different now.’ Thread looked Stephen straight in the eyes, or very nearly. ‘Let me advise, for what my advice is worth. I recommend you to lose yourself in your work for the next two or three years at the least. Lose yourself completely. Forget everything else. In my opinion, it’s always the best thing at these times. Probably the only thing.’

‘Work doesn’t mean to me what it did.’

‘Take yourself in hand, and it soon will again. After all, very real responsibilities do rest in this room. We both understand that quite well. We’ve reached that sort of level, Stephen. What we do nowadays,
matters
. If you keep that in mind at all times, and I do mean at all times, the thought will see you through. I know what I’m talking about.’

Thread’s eyes were now looking steadily at his finger, lest it had made some move on its own.

‘Yes,’ said Stephen, ‘but you’re talking about yourself, you know.’

Stephen was very well aware that the sudden death some years before of Arthur Thread’s mother had not deflected Thread for a day from the tasks appointed. Even the funeral had taken place during the weekend; for which Thread had departed on the Friday evening with several major files in his briefcase, as usual. As for Thread’s wife, Morag, she was a senior civil servant too, though of course in a very different department. The pair took very little leave in any case, and hardly any of it together. Their two girls were at an expensive boarding school on the far side of France, almost in Switzerland.

‘I speak from my own experience,’ corrected Thread.

‘It appears to me,’ said Stephen, ‘that I have reached the male climacteric. It must be what’s happening to me.’

‘I advise you to think again,’ said Thread. ‘There’s no such thing. Anyway you’re too young for when it’s supposed to be. It’s not till you’re sixty-three; within two years of retirement.’ Thread could keep his finger in position no longer, lest his arm fall off. ‘If you’ll forgive me, I’m rather in the middle of something. Put yourself absolutely at ease. I’ll be very pleased to have another talk later.’

‘What’s that mark?’ asked Stephen, pointing to the wall above Thread’s rather narrow headpiece. So often the trouble seemed to begin above the head. ‘Was it there before? ’

‘I’m sure I don’t know. Never forget the whole place is going to be completely done over next year. Now do let me concentrate for a bit.’

***

As the time for luncheon drew near, another man, Mark Tremble, peeped in.

‘Glad to see you back, Stephen. I really am.’

‘Thank you, Mark. I wish I could more sincerely say I was glad to be back.’

‘Who could be? Come and swim?’

Stephen had regularly done it with Mark Tremble and a shifting group of others; usually at lunchtime on several days a week. It had been one of twenty devices for lightening momentarily the weight of Elizabeth’s desperation. The bath was in the basement of the building. Soon the bath was to be extended

and standardized, and made available at times to additional grades.

‘Very well.’

Stephen had at one time proposed to tear back; to be with Nell for a few moments; perhaps to buy that dress: but during the long morning he had decided against all of it.

His real task was to put down his foot with the establishment; to secure such modified pension as he was entitled to; to concentrate, as Thread always concentrated; to depart.

He had not so far said a word about it to anyone in the place. The two seniors changed in the sketchy cubicles, and emerged almost at the same moment in swimming trunks. There seemed to be no one else in or around the pool that day, though the ebbing and flowing of table tennis were audible through the partition.

‘I say, Stephen. What’s that thing on your back?’

Stephen stopped dead on the wet tiled floor. ‘What thing?’ ‘It’s a bit peculiar. I’m sure it wasn’t there before. Before you went away. I’m extremely sorry to mention it.’

‘What’s it look like?’ asked Stephen. ‘Can you describe it?’ ‘The best I can do is that it looks rather like the sort of thing you occasionally see on trees. I think it may simply be something stuck on to you. Would you like me to give it a tug?’

‘I think not,’ said Stephen. ‘I am sorry it upsets you. I’ll go back and dress. I think it would be better.’

‘Yes,’ said Mark Tremble. ‘It does upset me. It’s best to admit it. Either it’s something that will just come off with a good rub, or you’d better see a doctor, Stephen.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Stephen.

‘I don’t feel so much like a swim, after all,’ said Mark Tremble. ‘I’ll dress too and then we’ll both have a drink. I feel we could both do with one.’

‘I’m very sorry about it,’ said Stephen. ‘I apologize.’

***

‘What have you been doing all day?’ asked Stephen, as soon as he was back and had changed out of the garments currently normal in the civil service, casual and characterless. ‘I hope you’ve been happy.’

‘I found this on the roof.’ Nell was holding it in both her hands; which were still very brown. It was a huge lump: mineral, vegetable, who could tell? Or conceivably a proportion of each.

‘Your father would be interested.’

Nell recoiled. ‘Don’t talk like that. It’s unlucky.’ Indeed, she had nearly dropped the dense mass.

It had been an idiotic response on Stephen’s part; mainly the consequence of his not knowing what else to say. He was aware that it was perfectly possible to attain the roof of the building by way of the iron fire ladder, to which, by law, access had to be open to tenants at all hours.

‘I could do with a drink,’ said Stephen, though he had been drinking virtually the whole afternoon, without Thread even noticing, or without sparing time to acknowledge that he had noticed. Moira, the coloured girl from the typing area, had simply winked her big left eye at Stephen. ‘I’ve had a difficult day.’

‘Oh!’ Nell’s cry was so sincere and eloquent that it was as if he had been mangled in a traffic accident.

‘
How
difficult?’ she asked.

‘It’s just that it’s been difficult for me to make the arrangements to get away, to leave the place.’

‘But we
are
going?’ He knew it was what she was thinking about.

‘Yes, we are going. I promised.’

He provided Nell with a token drink also. At first she had seemed to be completely new to liquor. Stephen had always found life black without it, but his need for it had become more habitual during Elizabeth’s illness. He trusted that Nell and he would, with use, wont, and time, evolve a mutual equilibrium.

At the moment, he recognized that he was all but tight, though he fancied that at such times he made little external manifestation. Certainly Nell would detect nothing; if only because presumably she lacked data. Until now, he had never really been in the sitting room of the flat since his return. Here, the new tendrils on the walls and ceiling struck him as resembling a Portuguese man of war’s equipment; the coloured, insensate creature that can sting a swimmer to death at thirty feet distance, and had done so more than once when Elizabeth and he, being extravagant, had stayed at Cannes for a couple of weeks. It had been there that Elizabeth had told him finally she could never have a child. Really that was what they were doing there, though he had not realized it. The man of war business, the two victims, had seemed to have an absurd part in their little drama. No one in the hotel had talked of anything else.

‘Let’s go to bed now,’ said Stephen to Nell. ‘We can get up again later to eat.’

She put her right hand in his left hand.

Her acquiescence, quiet and beautiful, made him feel compunctious.

‘Or are you hungry?’ he asked. ‘Shall we have something to eat first? I wasn’t thinking.’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve been foraging.’