The Long Shadow (11 page)

R
EAL
? W
ITH THINGS
that have happened during the night, it is sometimes hard to tell. The coming of the morning does something to them, like light getting into a camera. Imogen lay staring at the square of yellow dawn across from her bed, and was amazed at how little perturbed she now felt. She had gone back to bed after all the excitement not expecting to sleep at all—not, indeed, intending to, so puzzled was she, and so fearful of what might happen next. Strange, terrifying possibilities had swirled together in her mind, foregathering noisily, like a football crowd in an ugly mood: and next thing she knew, it was morning, and the whole thing just looked silly.

*

A cruel trick of some kind? Masks? Dressing-up? These were the lines on which her last conscious thoughts had been moving; but now, by the light of day, it all seemed preposterous. Who would be capable of such senseless cruelty towards a small boy, and what for?

Robin? He, of course (so he often boasted), was capable of anything; but only if it was convenient. “Unselfish cruelty isn’t my thing,” he’d have pointed out, explaining to her that
wickedness
, like anything else, has to be made to pay.

Piggy, then?
Her
qualifications for the deed were simply that no one knew anything about her at all. This by itself would surely never have got her a job as, say, a computer-programmer, and so why should it be held to qualify her for so complex and specialised an act of villainy as had been perpetrated last night?

The rest of the household would seem to be out of the question. Unless, perhaps, Timmie …? A piece of childish, melodramatic idiocy? Imogen cast her mind back. Apart from a brief feeling of thankfulness that his brother’s yells didn’t seem to be waking
him, Imogen hadn’t thought about Timmie at all last night, or even looked in the top bunk to make sure he was there. He
could
… Yes, he just could, as some kind of silly joke … but surely not without a lot of subsequent giggling and horseplay and general showing off? He would never have slipped unobtrusively out of sight, claiming no credit for all the drama and uproar. Not
Timmie
….

The square of light brightened under the impact of the morning, and Imogen felt the whole problem slipping from her grasp, like something you are trying to fish out of a drain, scooping and prodding feebly with bent sticks against the slithery sides. And now, reassuring as bird-calls, she began to hear the sound of quarrelling in the room below:

“No, it’s
my
go, you’ve had your go!”

“It isn’t, shut up, it’s not fair!
I
found it….”

Eeeeee! Ooooooo! Thump. Thud. Brrumph.

So all was well. Imogen sighed with relief. Whatever it was that had upset Vernon during the night, it was plain that by this morning he had quite recovered.

Not so Herbert’s umbrella. After serving as a parachute in commando raids off the top bunk for nearly an hour before
breakfast
, it just wasn’t quite the umbrella it had been; and poor Herbert, after a brief and fruitless struggle with its mysterious disorder of the spokes, went dismally off to catch his train without it, protecting himself as best he could from the wintry downpour by clutching over his head an un-read copy of
The
Times.
The thought of the sodden crossword puzzle, untouched, and growing more and more illegible, saddened him, but he hadn’t dared scold the boys as another father might because Dot was still going on about the peppermints; and you never knew. After all, little research has actually been done on the effect of peppermints on umbrella spokes, and Herbert liked to be on the safe side.

*

Herbert off to work, with all the other commuting husbands: Dot on the phone about the re-covering of an eiderdown: the boys squabbling idly about the dinosaur on the cornflake packet.
As normal a slice of family life as you could hope to witness, Imogen thought warily, scenting problems as a deer scents danger.

All this normality was getting a bit much. It was beginning to seem altogether too settled, too permanent. How long
were
they planning to stay? They’d come for Christmas, and now here they were on—what was it?—January 11th, and still not a word about leaving. Admittedly, the visit had purported to be for Imogen’s sake, a deed of mercy, undertaken out of the goodness of Dot’s heart—at the thought that goodness and mercy
might
follow her all the days of her life—and certainly would if Edith and Dot had their way—Imogen gave a little, involuntary shudder. She decided to speak to Dot this very morning, and pin her down to a definite date of departure.

Dot was not an easy person to pin down. It wasn’t so much that she evaded one’s questions as that she answered them so precisely that in the end one rather lost the gist of the thing.

No, there was no great hurry about getting back to Twickenham, not actually. Everything was under control, and no, she and Herbert weren’t missing any New Year parties or anything,
Twickenham
wasn’t like that. No, Herbert wasn’t finding the travelling too much of a strain, not really. Sixty-five minutes on the
mainline
train wasn’t really any more strain than crossing London by Tube in the rush-hour; less, if anything, thank you very much for thinking of it all the same.

The children’s school? Well, term hadn’t started yet, had it? And anyway, missing a bit of school doesn’t do a child any harm, not at this age. Besides, that Fawley Road school wasn’t the only school in the world, was it? In fact, if Imogen wanted her to be quite, quite frank, Dot had never really thought much of that school in the first place: all that Baby Jesus stuff, and plimsolls kept in the desks—unhygienic, in Dot’s opinion. Not enough
emphasis
on art, either, you’d think they would at least have clay modelling….

Imogen found herself agreeing with everything, and no further on at all. That was the trouble about discussing anything with Dot: with every exchange of question and answer, the next
move became increasingly unclear. The only thing less productive than a discussion with Dot was a discussion with Herbert, which was like cornering a rabbit, and made you feel both heartless and ineffectual.

And in any case, it wasn’t precisely that Imogen didn’t
want
Dot and her family staying here. In some ways it was rather nice, and provided a sort of impromptu barricade against the Future, that arch-enemy of all new widows. Suddenly, she realised that this, actually, was what the whole random, untidy set-up of her present household was all about. All these temporary,
ill-assorted
people—Cynthia, Piggy and the rest—had arrived as
reinforcements
in a life-and-death battle that she had not realised she was waging. They had formed around her a tight little
makeshift
garrison protecting her against ever having to decide anything at all about anything.

If only they could be temporary permanently. This was the paradox; difficult enough to resolve even without Dot’s logic thrown in for good measure. Because the temporary carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. If it lasts, it thereby becomes permanent, changing traitorously, under one’s very eyes, into the very enemy against which it seemed to be giving protection. All those indecisions which were designed to keep the future at bay are suddenly seen to have been decisions, albeit negative ones. And—ye Gods—this
is
the Future. This that I’ve got—
now
!

Imogen began to panic a little. Dot and Herbert… Robin… Cynthia and Piggy … were they going to stay
for
ever
?
I’ll have lodgers, she’d said, and there
were
lodgers. Had God, perhaps, felt like this when, not knowing His own power, He’d said “Let there be light”?

And it wasn’t just the lodgers themselves, either; for hot on the heels of lodgers come their things. Their lamp-shades and their hair-dryers and their peculiar coffee-percolators. Their tooth-brushes too, and their bottles of this and that in the
bathroom
… her home was silting up with other people’s possessions; they came like sand blowing in under the door: Cynthia’s sunray lamp, Herbert’s galoshes, Piggy’s Eat-and-Love Cook Book. And
as for Dot, she’d brought just about everything: her
sewing-machine
, her carpet-sweeper, her special Eesi-Fold ironing board. And out there, in the hall, the alien coats were mustering, like a barbarian army at the gates. Every day there were more of them hanging on the pegs—suede coats, fur coats, battered old
raincoats
; coats that she’d never seen in her life before were behaving as if they
lived
here. Their owners were even becoming possessive and territorial about them. “What’s my burnous doing here, I’ve been looking for it for days,” Piggy had complained only
yesterday
, just exactly as if her wretched burnous had a
right
to be somewhere…. At the thought of it all, Imogen felt a sort of panic rising within her, she was actually trembling. An ailment common enough, though little recognised by orthodox psychiatry, had her in its grip: landlady-panic. The thought of all these people actually
living
here, under her roof, became terrifying. The assorted faces—anxious, kindly, self-absorbed, indifferent—began to coalesce in her mind into a single monstrous entity, an unstoppable force, nosing its way into her home, blindly and brainlessly devouring everything in its path … was
this
the face that Vernon had seen last night, she wildly wondered? This monstrous, collective face of take-over and destruction?

*

The Hoovering calmed her down. It is a soothing occupation, as well as noisy enough to drown one’s thoughts.

Drawing-room … dining-room … Meccano-off-the-floor-
please
-children-
yes-I-said-
now
. Hall, corridor … by the time she came to Ivor’s study, the procedure was so automatic that she had picked up a dozen or more of the papers scattered on the carpet before she glanced at them, and realised just how strange it was that they should be there.

To start with, she had never seen them before. She had thought herself to be familiar with all of Ivor’s manuscripts, past and present. Wasn’t it she who had typed them, proof-read them,
parcelled
them up for the publisher? Who had written diplomatic letters about them, explaining why they were too long, too late, too insulting to Professor So-and-So? Even his very earliest
efforts—schoolboy poems and such—had passed through her hands in one way or another; photo-copying them, pasting them into scrap-books, getting them re-printed in the Old Boys Magazine. And as for a manuscript like this—part of a full-length book, evidently, for “CHAPTER V” had just caught her eye at the head of one of the pages—why, she would have expected to know it almost by heart. At the very least, she’d have typed it, answered telephone calls about it, helped with the proof-reading.

On top of which, this wasn’t a mere typed duplicate; it was the original draft, in Ivor’s looped, boldly-sloping handwriting. Ivor had always treasured his own hand-written drafts: they were part of his persona, bricks in the edifice he was building for posterity. He hated to part with them, but on the other hand there were all these American libraries always after just such scrawled originals, the messier and the more illegible the better, and there was nothing Ivor enjoyed more than playing hard-to-get across the Atlantic.

A manuscript like this would have set the bargaining going in a big way. It had taken Imogen some time to accustom herself to the idea of muddle as a marketable commodity; but having once accepted the notion, she was now quite a connoiseur, and could see at once that all these crossings-out, these looped balloons and arrows swooping incomprehensibly this way and that across the page, would have been exactly what was wanted. She
couldn’t
have missed the trans-Atlantic fuss and arguing.

She
had
missed it, though. Had the whole thing been before her time, perhaps? So long before that she hadn’t come in even for the revisions, and the re-printings, and the arguments about the new lay-out? But surely, even in that case, she would at least have
heard
of the book, seen it on the shelves? A dozen copies at least, that was Ivor’s rule with his own works. What with foreign translations, paper-back editions and the rest, they filled up the whole of one wall, from floor to ceiling.

Crete. Minoan Crete. That was funny, too. The Minoans weren’t Ivor’s subject at all, he’d never touched them. Imogen stared thoughtfully at the little clusters of strange angular-looking
symbols that cropped up here and there in the text, and
wondered
about it more and more. Linear-B, perhaps? Ivor had never, so far as she could recall, involved himself in this controversy or in its historical repercussions; and yet here, in his own
unmistakable
handwriting, was a whole book—or at least a
substantial
section of a book—centring on this very theme. Not a text-book, either, or any kind of a hack job. This was a book written from the heart, vibrant with the sense of new discovery:

“To date.” Was there a clue here, perhaps? Shuffling through the untidy little bundle of pages she had by now assembled, Imogen came upon one which must have been the end-page of a chapter or section, for it was marked with the date on which it had been completed: May, 1936.

1936! Why, Ivor could have been scarcely more than an undergraduate at the time! Imogen had a sudden poignant vision of a young and as yet insignificant Ivor, his Finals already hanging over him, and yet finding the time to scribble furiously away under the summer trees, or far into the night, at his first and still-born book.

Because, of course, the book must have been a failure. How could it have been otherwise, with an author barely twenty years old pitting his wits against mature scholars all over the world? Maybe it never even found a publisher at all?