The Collected Short Fiction Part 12

I should probably have heard of Dr. Tessler's death in any case, for my parents, who, like me and the rest of the neighbors, had never set eyes upon him, had always regarded him with mild curiosity. As it was, the first I knew of it was when I saw the funeral. I was shopping on behalf of my mother and reflecting upon the vileness of things, when I observed old Mr. Orbit remove his hat, in which he always served, and briefly sink his head in prayer. Between the aggregations of Shredded Wheat in the window, I saw the pa.s.sing shape of a very old-fas.h.i.+oned and therefore very ornate horse-drawn hea.r.s.e. It bore a coffin covered in a pall of worn purple velvet, but there seemed to be no mourners at all.

"Didn't think never to see a 'orse 'ea.r.s.e again, Mr. Orbit," remarked old Mrs. Ring, who was ahead of me in the queue.

"Pauper funeral, I expect," said her friend, old Mrs. Edge, "No such thing no more," said Mr. Orbit quite sharply, and replacing his hat. "That's Dr. Tessler's funeral. Don't suppose 'e 'ad no family come to look after things."

I believe the three white heads then got together and began to whisper, but on hearing the name, I had made towards the door. I looked out. The huge ancient hea.r.s.e, complete with vast black plumes, looked much too big for the narrow autumnal street. It put me in mind of how toys are often so grossly out of scale with one another. I could now see that instead of mourners, a group of urchins, shadowy in the fading light, ran behind the bier, shrieking and jeering, a most regrettable scene in a well-conducted towns.h.i.+p.

For the first time in months, if not years, I wondered about Sally.

Three days later she appeared without warning at my parents' front door. It was I who opened it.

"Hullo, Mel."

One hears of people who after many years take up a conversation as if the same number of hours had pa.s.sed. This was a case in point. Sally, moreover, looked almost wholly unchanged. Possibly her l.u.s.trous hair was a half shade darker, but it was still short and wild. Her lovely white skin was un wrinkled. Her large mouth smiled sweetly but, as always, somewhat absently. She was dressed in the most ordinary clothes but still managed to look like anything but a don or a dominie, although neither did she look like a woman of the world. It was, I reflected, hard to decide what she did look like.

"Hullo, Sally."

I kissed her and began to condole.

"Father really died before I was born. You know that."

"I have heard something."

I should not have been sorry to hear more, but Sally threw off her coat, sank clown before the fire, and said, "I've read all your books. I loved them. I should have written.

"Thank you," I said. "I wish there were more who felt like you.

"You're an artist, Mel. You can't expect to be a success at the same time." She was warming her white hands. I was not sure that I was an artist, but it was nice to be told.

There was a circle of leather-covered armchairs round the fire. I sat down beside her. "I've read about you often in the Times Lit," I said, "but that's all. For years. Much too long."

"I'm glad you're still living here," she replied.

"Not still. Again."

"Oh?" She smiled in her gentle, absent way.

"Following a session in the frying pan and another one in the fire... I'm sure you've been conducting yourself more sensibly " I was still fis.h.i.+ng.

But all she said was, "Anyway, I'm still glad you're living here."

"Can't say I am. But why in particular?"

"Silly Mel! Because I'm going to live here too."

I had never even thought of it.

I could not resist a direct question.

"Who told you your father was ill?"

"A friend. I've come all the way from Asia Minor. I've been looking at potsherds." She was remarkably untanned for one who had been living under the sun, but her skin was of the kind which does not tan readily.

"It will be lovely to have you about again. Lovely, Sally. But what will you do here?"

"What do you do?"

"I write... In other ways my life is rather over, I feel."

"I write too. Sometimes. At least I edit... And I don't think my life, properly speaking, has ever begun."

I had spoken in self-pity, although I had not wholly meant to do so. The tone of her reply I found it impossible to define. Certainly, I thought with slight malice, certainly she does look absurdly virginal.

A week later a van arrived at Dr. Tessler's house, containing a great number of books, a few packed trunks, and little else; and Sally moved in. She offered no further explanation for this gesture of semiretirement from the gay world (for we lived about forty miles from London, too many for urban partic.i.p.ation, too few for rural self-sufficiency), but it occurred to me that Sally's resources were doubtless not so large that she could disregard an opportunity to live rent-free, although I had no idea whether the house was freehold, and there was no mention even of a will. Sally was and always had been so vague about practicalities that I was a little worried about these matters, but she declined ideas of help. There was no doubt that if she were to offer the house for sale, she could not expect from the proceeds an income big enough to enable her to live elsewhere, and I could imagine that she shrank from the bother and uncertainty of letting.

I heard about the contents of the van from Mr. Ditch, the remover, and it was, in fact, not until she had been in residence for about ten days that Sally sent me an invitation. During this time and after she had refused my help with her affairs, I had thought it best to leave her alone. Now, although the house which I must henceforth think of as hers, stood only about a quarter of a mile from the house of my parents, she sent me a postcard. It was a picture postcard of Mytilene. She asked me to tea.

The way was through the avenues and round the corners of a midnineteenth-century housing estate for merchants and professional men. My parents' house was intended for the former, Sally's for the latter. It stood, in fact, at the very end of a cul-de-sac: even now the house opposite bore the plate of a dentist.

I had often stared at the house during Dr. Tessler's occupancy and before I knew Sally, but not until that day did I enter it. The outside looked much as it had ever done. The house was built in a grey brick so depressing that one speculated how anyone could ever come to choose it (as many once did, however, throughout the Home Counties). To the right of the front door (approached by twelve steps, with blue and white tessellated risers) protruded a greatly disproportionate obtuse- angled bay window: it resembled the thrusting nose on a grey and wrinkled face. This bay window served the bas.e.m.e.nt, the ground floor, and the first floor: between the two latter ran a dull-red string course "in an acanthus pattern", like a chaplet round the temples of a dowager. From the second-floor window it might have been possible to step onto the top of the projecting bay, the better to view the dentist's office opposite, had not the second-floor window been barred, doubtless as protection for a nursery. The wooden gate had fallen from its hinges and had to be lifted open and shut. It was startlingly heavy.

The bell was in order.

Sally was, of course, alone in the house.

Immediately she opened the door (which included two large tracts of colored gla.s.s), I apprehended a change in her, essentially the first change in all the time I had known her, for the woman who had come to my parents' house a fortnight or three weeks before had seemed to me very much the girl who had joined my cla.s.s when we were both children. But now there was a difference...

In the first place she looked different. Previously there had always been a distinction about her appearance, however inexpensive her clothes. Now she wore a fawn jumper which needed was.h.i.+ng and stained, creaseless grey slacks. When a woman wears trousers, they need to be smart. These were slacks indeed. Sally's hair was not so much picturesquely untidy as in the past but, more truly, in bad need of tr.i.m.m.i.n.g. She wore distasteful sandals. And her expression had altered.

"Hullo, Mel. Do you mind sitting down and waiting for the kettle to boil?'' She showed me into the ground-floor room (although to make possible the bas.e.m.e.nt, it was c.o.c.ked high in the air) with the bay window. "Just throw your coat on a chair." She bustled precipitately away. It occurred to me that Sally's culinary aplomb had diminished since her busy childhood of legend.

The room was horrible. I had expected eccentricity, discomfort, bookworminess, even perhaps the slightly macabre. But the room was entirely commonplace, and in the most unpleasing fas.h.i.+on. The furniture had probably been ma.s.s-produced in the early twenties. It was of the kind which it is impossible, by any expenditure of time and polish, to keep in good order. The carpet was dingy jazz. There were soulless little pictures in gilt frames. There were dreadful modern knickknacks. There was a radio set, obviously long broken... For the time of year, the rickety, smoky fire offered none too much heat. Rejecting Sally's invitation, I drew my coat about me.

There was nothing to read except a prewar copy of "t.i.t-Bits," which I found on-the floor under the lumpy settee. Like Sally's jumper the dense lace curtains could have done with a wash. But before long Sally appeared with tea: six uniform pink cakes from the nearest shop and a flavorless liquid full of floating "strangers." The crockery accorded with the other appurtenances.

I asked Sally whether she had started work of any kind.

"Not yet," she replied, a little dourly. "I've got to get things going in the house first."

"I suppose your father left things in a mess?"

She looked at me sharply. "Father never went out of his library."

She seemed to suppose that I knew more than I did. Looking round me, I found it hard to visualize a "library." I changed the subject.

"Aren't you going to find it rather a big house for one?"

It seemed a harmless, though uninspired, question. But Sally, instead of answering, simply sat staring before her. Although it was more as if she stared within her at some unpleasant thought.

I believe in acting upon impulse.

"Sally," I said, "I've got an idea. Why don't you sell this house, which is much too big for you, and come and live with me? We've plenty of room, and my father is the soul of generosity."

She only shook her head. "Thank you, Mel. No." She still seemed absorbed by her own thoughts, disagreeable thoughts.

"You remember what you said the other day. About being glad I was living here. I'm likely to go on living here. I'd love to have you with me, Sally. Please think about it."

She put down her ugly little teaplate on the ugly little table. She had taken a single small bite out of her pink cake. She stretched out her hand towards me, very tentatively, not nearly touching me. She gulped slightly. "Mel-"

I moved to take her hand, but she drew it back. Suddenly she shook her head violently. Then she began to talk about her work.

She did not resume eating or drinking, and indeed both the cakes and the tea, which every now and then she pressed upon me in a casual way more like her former manner, were remarkably unappetizing. But she talked interestingly and familiarly for about half an hour-about indifferent matters. Then she said, "Forgive me, Mel. But I must be getting on."

She rose. Of course I rose too. Then I hesitated.

"Sally . . . Please think about it. I'd like it so much. Please."

"Thank you, Mel. I'll think about it."

"Promise?"

"Promise... Thank you for coming to see me."

"I want to see much more of you."

She stood in the open front door. In the dusk she looked inexplicably hara.s.sed and woebegone.

"Come and see me whenever you want. Come to tea tomorrow and stay to dinner." Anything to get her out of that horrible, horrible house.

But, as before, she only said, "I'll think about it."

Walking home it seemed to me that she could only have invited me out of obligation. I was much hurt, and much frightened by the change in her. As I reached my own gate it struck me that the biggest change of all was that she had never once smiled.

When five or six days later I had neither seen nor heard from Sally, I wrote asking her to visit me. For several days she did not reply at all; then she sent me another picture postcard, this lime of some ancient bust in a museum, informing me that she would love to come when she had a little more time. I noticed that she had made a slight error in my address, which she had hastily and imperfectly corrected. The postman, of course, knew me. I could well imagine that there was much to do in Sally's house. Indeed, it was a house of the kind in which the work is never either satisfying or complete: an ever-open mouth of a house. But despite the tales of her childhood, I could not imagine the Sally I knew doing it... I could not imagine what she was doing, and I admit that I did want to know.

Some time after that I came across Sally in the International Stores. It was not a shop I usually patronized, but Mr. Orbit was out of my father's particular pickles. I could not help wondering whether Sally did not remember perfectly well that it was a shop in which I was seldom found.

She was there when I entered. She was wearing the same grimy slacks and this time a white blouse which was worse than her former jumper, being plainly filthy. Against the autumn she wore a blue raincoat, which I believed to be the same she had worn to school. She looked positively unkempt and far from well. She was nervously shoveling a little heap of dark-blue bags and gaudy packets into a very ancient carryall. Although the shop was fairly full, no one else was waiting to be served at the part of the counter where Sally stood. I walked up to her.

"Good morning, Sally."

She clutched the ugly carryall to her, as if I were about to s.n.a.t.c.h it. Then at once she became ostentatiously relaxed.

"Don't look at me like that," she said. There was an upsetting little rasp in her voice. "After all, Mel, you're not my mother." Then she walked out of the shop.

"Your change, miss," cried the International Stores clerk after her.

But she was gone. The other women in the shop watched her go as if she were the town tart. Then they closed up along the section of counter where she had been standing.

"Poor thing," said the clerk unexpectedly. He was young. The other women looked at him malevolently and gave their orders with conscious briskness.

Then came Sally's accident.

By this time there could be no doubt that something was much wrong with her, but I had always been very nearly her only friend in the town, and her behavior to me made it difficult for me to help. It was not that I lacked will or, I think, courage but that I was unable to decide how to set about the task. I was still thinking about it when Sally was run over. I imagine that her trouble, whatever it was, had affected her ordinary judgment. Apparently she stepped right under a truck in the High Street, having just visited the Post Office. I learned shortly afterwards that she refused to have letters delivered at her house but insisted upon them being left poste restante.

When she had been taken to the Cottage Hospital, the matron, Miss Garvice, sent for me. Everyone knew that I was Sally's friend.

"Do you know who is her next of kin?"

"I doubt whether she has such a thing in this country."

"Friends?"

"Only I that I know of." I had always wondered about the mysterious informant of Dr. Tessler's pa.s.sing.

Miss Garvice considered for a moment.

"I'm worried about her house. Strictly speaking, in all the circ.u.mstances, I suppose I ought to tell the police and ask them to keep an eye on it. But I am sure she would prefer me to ask you."

From her tone I rather supposed that Miss Garvice knew nothing of the recent changes in Sally. Or perhaps she thought it best to ignore them.

"As you live so close, I wonder if it would be too much to ask you just to look in every now and then? Perhaps dailv might be best?"

I think I accepted mainly because I suspected that something in Sally's life might need, for Sally's sake, to be kept from the wrong people.

"Here are her keys."

It was a numerous a.s.sembly for such a commonplace establishment as Sally's.

"I'll do it as I say, Miss Garvice. But how long do you think it will be?"

"Hard to say. But I don't think Sally's going to die."

One trouble was that I felt compelled to face the a.s.signment unaided, because I knew no one in the town who seemed likely to regard Sally's predicament with the sensitiveness and delicacy-and indeed love-which I suspected were essential. There was also a dilemma about whether or not I should explore the house. Doubtless I had no right, but to do so might, on the other hand, possibly be regarded as in Sally's "higher interests." I must acknowledge, nontheless, that my decision to proceed was considerably inspired by curiosity. This did not mean that I should involve others in whatever might be disclosed. Even that odious sitting room would do Sally's reputation no good...

Miss Garvice had concluded by suggesting that I perhaps ought to pay my first visit at once. I went home to lunch. Then I set out.

Among the first things I discovered were that Sally kept every single door of the house locked and that the remains of the tea I had taken with her weeks before still lingered in the sitting room, not, mercifully, the food, but the plates and cups and genteel little knives and the teapot with leaves and liquor at the bottom of it.

Giving onto the pa.s.sage from the front door was a room adjoining the sitting room and corresponding to it at the back of the house. Presumably one of these rooms was intended by the builder (the house was not a kind to have had an architect) for use as a dining room, the other as a drawing room. I went through the keys. There were big keys, the doors and locks being pretentiously oversized. In the end the door opened. I noticed a stale cold smell. The room appeared to be in complete darkness. Possibly Dr. Tessler's library?

I groped round the inside of the door frame for an electric light switch but could find nothing. I took another half step inside. The room seemed blacker than ever, and the stale cold smell somewhat stronger. I decided to defer exploration until later.

I shut the door and went upstairs. The ground-floor rooms were high, which made the stairs many and steep.

On the first floor were two rooms, corresponding in plan to the other two rooms below. It could be called neither an imaginative design nor a convenient one. I tried the front room first, again going through the rigmarole with the keys. The room was in a dilapidated condition and contained nothing but a considerable ma.s.s of papers. They appeared once to have been stacked on the bare floor, but the stacks had long since fallen over, and their component elements had acc.u.mulated a deep top-dressing of flaky black particles. The grime was of that ultimate kind which seems to have an actually greasy consistency: the idea of further investigating those neglected ma.s.ses of scroll and ma.n.u.script made me shudder.

The back room was a bedroom, presumably Sally's. All the curtains were drawn, and I had to turn on the light. It contained what must truly be termed, in the worn phrase, "a few sticks of furniture;" all in the same period as the pieces in the sitting room, though more exiguous and spidery looking. The inflated size and height of the room, the heavy plaster cornice, and even heavier plaster rose in the center of the cracked ceiling emphasized the spa.r.s.eness of the anachronistic furnis.h.i.+ngs. There was, however, a more modern double-divan bed, very low on the floor, and looking as if it had been slept in but not remade for weeks. Someone seemed to have arisen rather suddenly, as at an alarm clock. I tried to pull open a drawer in the rickety dressing table. It squeaked and stuck, and proved to contain some pathetic-looking underclothes of Sally's. The long curtains were very heavy and dark green.