The Fallen Curtain (16 page)

She looked awful, as if she had got a bad cold coming or had just been sick.

“I tried to wake you up in the night,” she said.

“I thought you had,” I said. “Did you have a dream?”

She shook her head. “I woke up and I heard the clock strike one and then I heard footsteps on the path down there.”

“In this garden, d’you mean?” I said. “Going or coming?”

“I don’t know,” she said oddly. “They must have been coming.”

“It was a burglar,” I said. “We ought to go down and see if things have been stolen.”

“It wasn’t a burglar.” Mop was getting angry with me and her face was blotchy. “I did go down. I lay awake for a bit and I didn’t hear any more, but I couldn’t go back to sleep and I wanted a drink of water. So I went down.”

“Well, go on,” I said.

But Mop couldn’t go on. And even I, insensitive and unsympathetic to her as I was, could see had been badly frightened, was still frightened, and then I remembered what had wakened me in the night, exactly what had happened. I remembered being brought to brief consciousness by the choking gasps of someone who is screaming in her sleep. Mop had screamed herself awake and the words she had spoken to me had been, “The vinegar mother! The vinegar mother!”

“You had a nightmare,” I said.

“Oh, shut up,” said Mop. “You never listen. I shan’t ever tell you anything again.”

But later in the day she did tell me. I think that by this time she had got it into some sort of proportion, although she was still very frightened when she got to the climax of what she insisted couldn’t have been a dream. She had, she said, gone downstairs about half an hour after she heard the footsteps in the garden. She hadn’t put a light on, as the moon was bright. The dining-room door was partly open, and when she looked inside she saw a hooded figure crouched in a chair by the window. The figure was all in brown, and Mop said she saw the hood slide back and disclose its face. The thing that had made her scream and scream was this face which wasn’t a face at all, but a shapeless mass of liver.

“You dreamed it,” I said. “You must have. You were in bed when you screamed, so you must have been dreaming.”

“I did go down,” Mop insisted.

“Maybe you did,” I said, “but the other bit was a dream.
Your mother would have come if she’d heard you screaming downstairs.”

No more was said about the dream or whatever it was after that, and on Saturday Mr Felton arrived and took us to the Young Farmers’ Show at Marks Tey. He brought me my parents’ love and the news that my eldest brother had passed his exam and got seven O Levels, and I was happy. He went shooting with Peter Elsworthy on Sunday afternoon, and Peter came back with him and promised to drive me and Mop and Mrs Felton to the seaside for the day on Tuesday.

It was a beautiful day that Tuesday, perhaps the best of all the days at Sanctuary, and I, who, on the morning after Mop’s dream, had begun to wonder about making that deceitful phone call from the village, felt I could happily remain till term began. We took a picnic lunch and swam in the wide shallow sea. Mrs Felton wore a proper dress of blue and white cotton which made her brown skin look like a tan, and had smoothed down her hair, and smiled and was gracious and once called Mop dear. Suddenly I liked Peter Elsworthy. I suppose I had one of those infatuations for him that are fused in young girls by a kind smile, one sentence spoken as to a contemporary, one casual touch of the hand. On that sunny beach I was moved towards him by inexplicable feelings, moved into a passion the sight of him had never before inspired, which was to die as quickly as it had been born when the sun had gone, the sea was left behind, and he was once more Mrs Felton’s friend in the front seats of the car.

I had followed him about that day like a little dog, and perhaps it was my unconcealed devotion that drove him to leave us at our gate and refuse even to come in and view the progress of the vinegar mother. His excuse was that he had to accompany his mother to an aunt’s for dinner. Mrs Felton sulked ferociously after he had gone and we got a supper of runny scrambled eggs and lemon barley water.

On the following night there appeared on our table a bottle of claret. The phone rang while we were eating, and while Mrs
Felton was away answering it I took the daring step of pouring my wine into the vinegar mother.

“I shall tell her,” said Mop.

“I don’t care,” I said. “I can’t drink it, nasty, sour, horrible stuff.”

“You shouldn’t call my father’s wine horrible when you’re a guest,” said Mop, but she didn’t tell Mrs Felton. I think she would have poured her own to follow mine except that she was afraid the level in the vessel would rise too much, or was it that by then nothing would have induced her to come within feet of the culture?

I didn’t need wine to make me sleep, but if I had taken it I might have slept more heavily. A thin moonlight was in the room when I woke up to see Mop’s bed empty. Mop was standing by the door, holding it half open, and she was trembling. It was a bit eerie in there with Mop’s long shadow jumping about against the zigzag beams on the wall. But I couldn’t hear a sound.

“What’s the matter now?” I said.

“There’s someone down there.”

“How d’you know? Is there a light on?”

“I heard glass,” she said.

How can you hear glass? But I knew what she meant and I didn’t much like it. I got up and went over to the doorway and looked down the stairs. There was light coming from under the dining-room door, a white glow that could have been from the moon or from the oil lamp they sometimes used. Then I too heard glass, a chatter of glass against glass and a thin trickling sound.

Mop said in a breathy, hysterical voice, “Suppose she goes about in the night to every place where they’ve got one? She goes about and watches over them and makes it happen. She’s down there now doing it. Listen!”

Glass against glass….

“That’s crazy,” I said. “It’s those books you read.”

She didn’t say anything. We closed the door and lay in our bed with the bedlamp on. The light made it better. We heard
the clock strike twelve. I said, “Can we go to sleep now?” And when Mop nodded I put out the light.

The moon had gone away, covered perhaps by clouds. Into the black silence came a curious drawn-out cry. I know now what it was, but no child of eleven could know. I was only aware then that it was no cry of grief or pain or terror, but of triumph, of something at last attained; yet it was at the same time unhuman, utterly outside the bonds of human restraint.

Mop began to scream.

I had the light on and was jumping up and down on my bed, shouting to her to stop, when the door was flung open and Mrs Felton came in, her hair a wild heathery mass, a dressing gown of quilted silk, black-blood colour, wrapped round her and tied at the waist with savagery. Rage and violence were what I expected. But Mrs Felton said nothing. She did what I had never seen her do, had never supposed anything would make her do. She caught Mop in an embrace and hugged her, rocking her back and forth. They were both crying, swaying on the bed and crying. I heard footsteps on the garden path, soft, stealthy, finally fading away.

Mop said nothing at all about it to me the next day. She withdrew into her books and sulks. I believe now that the isolated demonstration of affection she had received from her mother in the night led her to hope more might follow. But Mrs Felton had become weirdly reserved, as if in some sort of long dream. I noticed with giggly embarrassment that she hardly seemed to see Mop hanging about her, looking into her face, trying to get her attention. When Mop gave up at last and took refuge in the garden with Dr James on demons, Mrs Felton lay on the dining-room sofa, smoking and staring at the ceiling. I went in once to fetch my cardigan—for Mrs Potter was taking me to the mediaeval town at Lavenham for the afternoon—and she was still lying there, smiling strangely to herself, her long brown hands playing with her necklace of reddish-brown beads.

She went off for a walk by herself on Friday afternoon and she was gone for hours. It was very hot, too hot to be in a garden
with only thin apple-tree shade. I was sitting at the dining-room table, working on a scrapbook of country-house pictures Mrs Potter had got me to make, and Mop was reading, when the phone rang. Mop answered it, but from the room where I was, across the passage, I could hear Mr Felton’s hearty bray.

“How’s life treating you, my old Mop?”

I heard it all, how he was coming down that night instead of in the morning and would be here by midnight. She might pass the message on to her mother, but not to worry as he had his own key. And his kind regards to jolly old Margarine if she hadn’t, by this time, melted away into a little puddle!

Mrs Felton came back at five in Peter Elsworthy’s car. There were leaves in her hair and bits of grass on the back of her skirt. They pored over the vinegar mother, moving it back into a cool, dark corner, and enthusing over the colour of the liquor under the floating liver-like mass.

“A tender plant that mustn’t get overheated,” said Peter Elsworthy, picking a leaf out of Mrs Felton’s hair and laughing. I wondered why I had ever liked him or thought him kind.

Mop and I were given rosé with our supper out of a dumpy little bottle with a picture of cloisters on its label. By now Mrs Felton must have learned that I didn’t need wine to make me sleep, so she didn’t insist on my having more than one glass. The vinegar mother’s vessel was three-quarters full.

I was in bed and Mop nearly undressed when I remembered about her father’s message.

“I forgot to tell her,” said Mop, yawning and heavy-eyed.

“You could go down and tell her now.”

“She’d be cross. Besides, he’s got his key.”

“You don’t like going down in the dark by yourself,” I said. Mop didn’t answer. She got into bed and pulled the sheet over her head.

We never spoke to each other again.

She didn’t return to school that term, and at the end of it my mother told me she wasn’t coming back. I never learned what happened to her. The last—almost the last—I remember of her
was her thin sallow face that lately had always looked bewildered, and the dark circles round her old-woman’s eyes. I remember the books on the bedside table:
Fifty Haunted Houses
, the
Works of Sheridan Lefanu, The Best of Montague Rhodes James.
The pale lacquering of moonlight in that room with its beams and its slanted ceiling. The silence of night in an old and haunted countryside. Wine breath in my throat and wine weariness bringing heavy sleep….

Out of that thick slumber I was awakened by two sharp explosions and the sound of breaking glass. Mop had gone from the bedroom before I was out of bed, scarcely aware of where I was, my head swimming. Somewhere downstairs Mop was screaming. I went down. The whole house, the house called Sanctuary, was bright with lights. I opened the dining-room door.

Mr Felton was leaning against the table, the shotgun still in his hand. I think he was crying. I don’t remember much blood, only the brown, dead nakedness of Mrs Felton spread on the floor, with Peter Elsworthy bent over her, holding his wounded arm. And the smell of gunpowder like fireworks and the stronger sickening stench of vinegar everywhere, and broken glass in shards, and Mop screaming, plunging a knife again and again into a thick, slimy liver mass on the carpet.

The manageress of the hotel took them up two flights of stairs to their room. There was no lift. There was no central heating either and, though April, it was very cold.

“A bit small, isn’t it?” said Nina Armadale.

“It’s a double room and I’m afraid it’s all we had left.”

“I suppose I’ll have to be thankful it hasn’t got a double bed,” said Nina.

Her husband winced at that, which pleased her. She went over to the window and looked down into a narrow alley bounded by brick walls. The cathedral clock struck five. Nina imagined what that would be like chiming every hour throughout the night, and maybe every quarter as well, and was glad she had brought her sleeping pills.

The manageress was still making excuses for the lack of accommodation. “You see, there’s this big wedding in the cathedral tomorrow. Sir William Tarrant’s daughter. There’ll be five hundred guests and most of them are putting up in the town.”

“We’re going to it,” said James Armadale. “That’s why we’re here.”

“Then you’ll appreciate the problem. Now the bathroom’s just down the passage, turn right and it’s the third door on the left. Dinner at seven-thirty and breakfast from eight till nine. Oh, and I’d better show Mrs Armadale how to work the gas fire.”

“Don’t bother,” said Nina, enraged. “I can work a gas fire.” She was struggling with the wardrobe door, which at first wouldn’t open, and when opened refused to close.

The manageress watched her, apparently decided it was hopeless to assist, and said to James, “I really meant about working the gas
meter.
There’s a coin-in-the-slot meter—it takes fivepence pieces—and we really find it the best way for guests to manage.”

James squatted on the floor beside her and studied the grey metal box. It was an old-fashioned gas meter with brass fittings
of the kind he hadn’t seen since he had been a student living in a furnished room. A gauge with a red arrow marker indicated the amount of gas paid for, and at present it showed empty. So if you turned the dial on the gas fire to “on” no gas would come from the meter unless you had previously fed it with one or more fivepence pieces. But what was the purpose of that brass handle? There were differences between this contraption and the one he’d had in his college days. Maybe, while his had been for the old toxic coal gas, this had been converted for the supply of natural gas. He looked enquiringly at the manageress, and asked her.

“No, we’re still waiting for natural in this part of the country and when it comes the old meters will have to go.”

“What’s the handle for?”

“You turn it to the left like this, insert your coin in the slot, and then turn it to the right. Have you got fivepence on you?”

James hadn’t. Nina had stopped listening, he was glad to see. Perhaps when the inevitable quarrel started, as it would as soon as the woman had gone, it would turn upon the awfulness of going to this wedding, for which he could hardly be blamed, instead of the squalid arrangements in the hotel, for which he could.