The Shadow (16 page)

First there had been these long talks with Ranald. The old analytic method of speech, the assumption of intellectual calm, had seemed to free her, and she was conscious of rising to meet Ranald on his own plane. She had gone right back to the old days before her marriage, to the bright give-and-take discussion on education and the child mind. She had experienced again the sense of distinguished movement, of style. This sharply stimulated intellectual interest, with its mental excitement, had been like a bright armour. She had shown Ranald to his bedroom with a decisive care, covering any noises he might make with her own pronounced movements into and out of the bathroom. At last she was approaching Nan's door, the smile on her face, the heightening of the smile in her breast, when in an instant she was aware of a new objective attitude towards Nan and her illness, an attitude in which sympathy was lessened to the same degree as her intellectual or analytic interest had been aroused. This induced a feeling of competence, as though by its subtle depreciation of Nan's importance she herself was objectively strengthened. But in the next instant it aroused a feeling of guilt, for she realised she was now undergoing a withdrawal from Nan. She suddenly perceived the whole evening had been directed to that end. In bed at last (in Nan's room), with Nan asleep, this began to worry her, and she had resurgences of pure feeling in which, picture following fugitive picture, she visualised the analytic interest as a remorseless white face, like Ranald's face (there were also certain dismissive gestures of his, slight but now startlingly significant). This white taut face watched until sympathy was slain, until emotion withered. It's the slayer's face, thought told her in silence, and she was aware of being between the thought and the face, like a soul in an experiment. Then the really horrible thing began to happen. The figure of King Kronos came alive before her, the father who, in the Greek legend, devoured his own newborn sons lest some day they usurp his power. This, she realised, was the figure Nan saw. And now she was with Nan, looking at the figure, there before her, devouring a child. As the teeth tore at a knuckle—an elbow—there was no blood, as though the child had been boiled like a fowl. The lump of pale flesh stuck in her own throat, choked her, choked down her vomit, and the horrible revolting nature of the experience shook her and blinded her, for she saw more than she could let herself see. But all this was sickeningly complicated by the knowledge that she was at last at the hidden core of Nan's innermost experience or delusion. For the crowning horror lay in the resemblance of Kronos to Ranald. A quiver of vision, of thought, and the face
was
Ranald's, and the shoulders, the stooping shoulders. Ranald was devouring his own son—Nan's son—before Nan's face.

Aunt Phemie, turning over in her bed, smashed the abominable vision out of her head, cried to herself that this was a mad delusion of her own, and that, for Nan, Kronos had not been a devouring father in the literal image, but just a slayer of sons, of young men. He was the dictator who purged and killed wherever he saw a threat to his authority. The new multiple-Kronos of the world Nan had experienced in war, in the streets. He stood for the destructiveness which in Nan's world to-day would, in order to achieve its clear rational aim, coldly ignore emotion (the emotion Nan knew profoundly in her as the very pulse and warmth of creation) and so inevitably and fatally destroy life. To achieve, he would multiply himself and kill.

There followed a still, appalling moment, wherein Aunt Phemie dwelt with the utmost cause, the last dark root, of Nan's illness:
she wanted to save Ranald from becoming Kronos.

Mad—mad as the Oedipus legend—mad as all the legends; but, like them, absolutely haunting. Once a thing like that got a grip of you, Aunt Phemie saw, not as a theoretic or psychoanalytic formulation, but as an actuality, as an emotion,
a picture,
as something that rose undeniably out of your depths, out of what seemed the very essence of your being, you could only protect yourself by going neurotic, psychotic, and ultimately mad, lunatic.

Fear was the basis, but in Nan's case not only fear for herself, for her life instincts, but also fear for Ranald, for her love. She had had to break Fanwicke and the others—or get broken.

At this point Nan moved in her bed and instantly Aunt Phemie, as though still in the pulse of Nan's mind, experienced a sudden shift of anxiety, gripped now by an actual fear. She knew quite certainly that Nan would get up and go into Ranald's room. She would go looking for him, in a strange dream sense. From that moment, natural sleep had become impossible for Aunt Phemie.

Yet exhausted, she must have dozed, for some time during the night she came fully to herself to find Nan already standing by the small mahogany chest of drawers just inside the door. There was the creak of a top drawer. Aunt Phemie watched, knowing Nan kept her writing materials there. Outside, the moonlight must have been fairly strong, for Nan's bowed head was solid against the pale-daffodil wall. An elbow lifted; a hand moved in the drawer—paused and slowly withdrew. Slowly she shut the drawer, stood quite still for a little while, then moved to the door. As the knob was turning, Aunt Phemie called her in a low voice, at the same time getting out of bed and going towards her, but not touching her. Nan stood but never spoke. Aunt Phemie had an impulse to get over the moment, to make it easy for Nan, by asking her if she wanted to go to the bathroom. But something deeper restrained her and, instead, she suggested, “Won't you go to your bed, Nan?” And, as if acting on the suggestion in quite an automatic way, Nan went back to her bed, covered herself with the clothes, and lay quite still.

The whole night's experience was now in Aunt Phemie as she stood listening, after hearing what she thought was a cry from upstairs. But the cry was not repeated. Yet she could not go on with her kitchen work; she had to make sure.

Before Nan's room she took a deep breath, noiselessly turned the knob and put her head round the door. Nan was sitting up in bed and stared at her with a steady fixity as if watching what her visitor was going to do next.

“I was wondering if you were asleep,” said Aunt Phemie, smiling, closing the door behind her. After her first look at Nan she cast her eyes about the room as though to make sure the place was tidy, then in a natural companionable way went to the south window and said cheerfully, “The sun is shining.” She glanced about the fields and farther away, but Nan did not answer, did not move. Fear had touched Aunt Phemie with its sickly feather. The look on Nan's face had gone completely alien.

Turning from the window and still interested, remarking the room could do with a proper tidy-up, she now sat, as though only for a few minutes, on the foot of Nan's bed, and looked at her patient again to confirm what appeared her obvious impression that everything was going well. “And how are you, Nan?” she asked gently but cheerfully, smiling, with a frank look.

Nan held her look then removed her eyes, though it was indeed as if the eyes themselves had removed, like the eyes of a child who has grown unaccountably serious, who lives in another place and has found there what is outside time.

Aunt Phemie experienced the clutch at the mother's heart. Nan did not answer.

Aunt Phemie regarded Nan's face with an unconscious concentration. With its bright chestnut hair, in a wave-broken disorder which enriched its colour and depth, the face took on an arrested beauty that drew Aunt Phemie out of herself so that she was held in a moment of pure wonder. The eyes had grown larger, with the blue a shade lighter than Aunt Phemie's own blue, but miraculously clear, translucent, the light that no flower ever quite has, nor any sky. The face had a fragile firmness, not pale but cool. The quiet lines ran flawlessly down until they met on her chest for a moment then gathered to a deepening flow between her breasts, to disappear beneath her blue pyjama jacket which was plucked away on one side where the top button had come unfastened.

She was like a plucked flower, like a single daffodil in a vase, whose trumpet hears the quietness of the snow outside, the mysterious quietness that is known to it.

Aunt Phemie's eyes followed the arms to the hands which lay together on the light-blue satin quilt. The hands were relaxed, but then she noticed that every now and then they tremored slightly of their own accord. As she glanced up, she met Nan's full regard, which remained on her for quite a time, in a distant silence that yet had in it something of incommunicable speech.

“Tell me, Nan,” said Aunt Phemie, but speaking also through her eyes from the pressure of her emotion, “is there anything worrying you?”

Nan's eyes went away to the wall behind Aunt Phemie where there hung a framed water colour of a woman sitting with bowed head, as if asleep, before the sea. But the eyes found nothing in the picture and shifted to the blank pale-daffodil distemper of the wall. Then, without movement of the head, they were on Aunt Phemie again, but only for a moment.

“Won't you tell me?” begged Aunt Phemie.

“I saw him,” she said, quite suddenly and clearly.

Aunt Phemie was so completely taken aback, so instantly confused by the notion that she might have seen Ranald, that she had an impulse to bluster, to say it was quite impossible. Nan's eyes were on her like the eyes of the child who knows what it has done and is coolly curious, and yet incurious, about the effect.

“But,” said Aunt Phemie, “but—how could you? You were in your bed.”

Nan's eyes went back to the wall. “I wasn't,” she said.

Aunt Phemie had now got control of herself. “Where were you?”

Nan did not answer.

“Won't you tell me?” asked Aunt Phemie gently. “Do tell me.”

The subdued roar of a lorry as it took the brae to the steading came into the room; a lowing of moving cattle; a commotion and stamping movement; the shrill barking of Sandy's young dog; all was in that outside world, which seemed in a moment even more remote and strange than the world which Aunt Phemie was now in. The noises died away, leaving only the rumble of the engine as it idled over.

“They are moving some cattle to-day,” explained Aunt Phemie, under a sudden heavy weight of reluctance to find out any more.

Nan did not speak, but she stirred slightly, lifted her hand to her breast; but the hand trembled and she laid it down again.

The hand clutched at Aunt Phemie's heart, weakening her; but more gently and sensibly than ever she asked, “Won't you tell me, Nan? You know you can tell me anything.”

Nan shook her head slowly once.

Encouraged, Aunt Phemie asked, “Where did you go? Surely you can tell me that?”

“The sun,” she said, staring at the wall.

“Is the sun troubling you?”

“The sun came into the room.”

“Yes?”

“I went to see it.”

“Did you? Where?”

“At the window.”

“But you know you shouldn't be moving about. You had a high fever and that weakens you and makes you
imagine
all sorts of things. Besides you might get a dreadful relapse.” Aunt Phemie was preparing for what might come next.

But Nan did not go on.

“And what did you see?” asked Aunt Phemie inexorably driven.

“I saw him.”

“Who?”

“Ranald.” Nan regarded Aunt Phemie with waiting eyes, watching.

“Did you?” replied Aunt Phemie, with the veiled air of knowing quite well that Nan could not have seen Ranald. “Where was he?” She was not looking at Nan, asked the question lightly but quite solemnly.

“He came in sight from the gate. Then he stood by the trees and looked at me. He stood quite still. Then he turned and went away.”

All along Aunt Phemie was afraid that it
might
have been Ranald. Now she realised he could have been coming back to the house … or perhaps been taking a look at it from an angle that would show Nan's window, not from any romantic feeling but out of the strange curiosity which at such a moment haunts the very core of human nature. Anyone in the glen, knowing what was going on behind that window, would experience an urge to steal in and have a long look. In Ranald's case, the matter was profoundly involved. Aunt Phemie could see him, standing there by the trees, and going away.

Overpoweringly she perceived the dreadfulness of her dilemma—and of Nan's. For Nan, from her whole behaviour, did not expect to be believed. Yet she knew she had seen Ranald. If now Aunt Phemie were to persist that it was impossible for Ranald to have been there in the flesh, then Nan's hallucination or illusion had at last crossed the border and become for her the reality. Nan would know this.

The idling motor suddenly stopped and the world became extraordinarily still. A cock crew in the distance, an echoing and forlorn cry that arched and fell away over the edge of the world. Then, with incredible nearness, there were footsteps on the stairs. They were steadily mounting, muffled to a choking stealth by the carpet, yet deliberate and confident, a man's footsteps. Aunt Phemie's heart turned over in her and the skin of her face ran cold. The footsteps came to the door and paused. A hand knocked quietly. Aunt Phemie could not move. The knob turned, the door opened slowly and a face came round it. It was the doctor's face, red and smiling in a sort of peep-bo expression, smiling at Aunt Phemie with an amused greeting ready, when the eyes suddenly switched to the bed and the smile vanished. Aunt Phemie turned. Nan was slipping away against the back of the bed, her face deathly pale. She had fainted.

With a poker, Aunt Phemie tried to hurry the heat under the kettle.

“If she really did see him, if he was there,” the doctor said.

“You didn't see him at all as you were coming in?”

“No.”

“Where on earth can he have gone?” Aunt Phemie's anxiety and impatience were unconcealed. “I feel something should be done at once.”