Myra Carrol

by Noel Streatfeild

  “We must see nothing worries him, and then perhaps it won’t happen.”

  Myra took to waiting on the stairs instead of going up to bed. She sat on the top step on the first landing, from there she could hear her uncle’s door if it opened; from there by listening very carefully she could hear the soft opening of Aunt Lilian’s little sitting-room door, and the whisper of steps along the passage and the opening and shutting of the front door.

  Frightened for him, she spent more time with Uncle John. He was getting queer; for all her fondness for him she could not deny it to herself, and indeed she never attempted to. Connie’s training stood her in good stead; she accepted Uncle John as mentally ill, she accepted that if a doctor knew he might be sent away, and worked to keep his mind at ease, and so make him better, and keep Aunt Lilian from sending for a doctor. To help she called in Andrew. She could not, of course, ask him to tell lies, he was not the sort who would, but she persuaded him not to argue.

  “If Uncle John says you and I go to dances every night don’t say we don’t. He’s not well and being argued with fusses him.”

  Andrew knew that Myra went out a great deal, and was jealous of the hours spent with others.

  “Well, how about you coming dancing? I’m free in the evenings.”

  “I have to go with Aunt Lilian.”

  “Well, she can come too. Seems a bit boring for her watching us dance, but I suppose she’s used to it.”

  They were walking Fortesque round the Serpentine. Myra looked at Andrew and felt terribly cold. What on earth would he say if he knew what she knew? He probably didn’t know things like that happened. She must make him do what she wanted without understanding anything; how marvellous if she could tell him the truth! How gorgeous to talk to somebody about it all, perhaps it wasn’t as disgusting and frightening as it seemed to her. Perhaps it was just she was being young and silly. She slipped her arm through his and squeezed it, and smiled up at him.

  “No, having Aunt Lilian is a nuisance, she has to have somebody else to talk to. When I’m allowed to go out alone then we’ll go together. But don’t argue with Uncle John, will you?”

  He was like dough in her hands when she wheedled him. He agreed to do whatever she wanted, and every Saturday and Sunday after that they had tea with Uncle John, and when Aunt Lilian was going to be in they took him out with them. They went to Kew and Richmond and one fine Sunday as far as Sonning. To Andrew, having Uncle John was a cruel bore, but Myra was so pleased and, a very unusual trait in her, grateful, that he supposed it was worth while, and anyway he could not alter his position; if there were no Uncle John there would be no Myra. She was all that made colour and happiness in his life, and seeing her was as necessary as food, so he accepted things as they were.

  Uncle John repaid Myra’s efforts. Hardly ever when she and Andrew were with him did he get excited or pray or talk about Hell. Aunt Lilian, without being interested, seemed to have discovered that Myra and Andrew were friends. Myra suspected that she had also discovered that Andrew was supposed to be dancing with her most evenings, and that she played this idea for all it was worth. The season was drawing to a close. Myra and Uncle John were going home to stay at “The Dragon”; they would see Connie and they would fish. Myra built on this holiday as a cure, and ticked off the days on her calendar. Aunt Lilian was supposed to be going alone to France to have a rest and then to buy some clothes. It was unlike her to travel without a maid, but Miriam had learnt from Skinner that this was going to happen. Myra, growing shrewder every day, guessed that Brian was going with her. She did not care. The thought of being out of the house with Miriam, Fortesque and Uncle John sent her heart leaping. They would laugh and enjoy themselves and forget for a bit all that she had learnt and did not want to know.

  It was a gala night. Myra was the sort of figure adored by owners of night clubs. The best favours came to her. She had made a fuss of the doll, and everybody had been silly about it, ordering it drinks, and offering it food, and somebody had described its history: it had lived an amusing and extremely gay life in Spain, and there had been a very queer adventure which had brought it to England. Afterwards, at home on the top step of the landing stair, it sat on Myra’s knee. It was then everything happened. She had gripped the doll and got up, her teeth chattering with fright.

  The forty-one year old Myra came back to the barn. What a ghastly time that had been! What ghoulishness had made her keep that doll all these years. Well, now was the moment to scrap her. A child would enjoy playing with her, and the child would not know the horrors that doll had seen. What idiocy had made Aunt Lilian drop so important a receipted bill in her bathroom! What ill-luck that nobody had been in to pick it up! What a coincidence that Uncle John should have run out of aspirins and gone to Aunt Lilian’s bathroom to look for some! That, from finding the receipt, his poor brain had ceased to function normally was clear. It was unlike him to hide and pry, and yet it was all so clearly thought out and planned. What had he expected? Not Brian, of course, in spite of the tailor’s bill. Probably a scene and a showdown with Aunt Lilian and perhaps with herself. He had meant to shoot Aunt Lilian, else why the revolver? Or hadn’t he? Had he only meant to shoot himself? Was killing Aunt Lilian an accident? What a dreadful thing that he had stayed hidden behind the curtains for so long. What horror was crammed into those last minutes of his life. He had even probably suspected that she, Myra, knew for what reason she was hurried off to bed. How quickly Brian had disappeared. It was only a split second after the first shot before she was down the stairs, and he must have already reached the front door. Uncle John shot himself as she came into the room.

  Myra sat the doll against the fender. She had re-shocked herself thinking of that night. She spoke out loud. “Idiot! It’s over now. Snap out of it!” and then, since hard labour is obviously the right distraction from morbid thinking, she unstacked a pile of chairs and, after a moment, began to sing, “Any old chairs,” using the tune of “Any old iron.”

  Unstacking chairs when you are wearing a lot of clothes to keep out the cold makes for shortness of breath. Myra sang jerkily and then not at all. The reiterated words had not held her mind, but they had stopped her thoughts from taking shape; now they formed a statement and a question. “And then I married.” “Why did I?” She would have changed her thoughts, found any employment for her mind, had not the angel been facing her. That strained, anxious face brought back Connie so vividly. Connie, bless her heart, with her belief in her clear-mindedness; what a shock to her it would be if she knew how great a part she had played in persuading her pupil into that foolish marriage. It was ridiculous really how people could influence your life by just being about at some important moment. Connie would have sewn her lips together rather than even question. She had taught her pupil to think, or at least so she believed, she must know what she wanted. Why then should she marry unless she wanted to? Why, indeed? That part of her story, though unpleasant to contemplate because no one likes seeing themselves being a fool, even when they are over forty and the fool-making happened at eighteen, was yet so far from the core of Myra’s present suffering that she gave in, and while resting and smoking a cigarette considered it.

  The bungalow was congested almost past endurance. Miriam was boarded out at a cottage nearby, but was about all day. A woman from the village came in to cook. There was Connie and there was the district nurse, and taking up an appalling amount of emotional space, George’s ghost. Nurse did not hold with ghosts. “We all know,” she said, “that this was Miriam’s home, but it’s downright ridiculous to give way now about that husband of hers. It’s hysteria and I shall treat it as such.” Though she had not stated so in words it was implied that it was particularly tiresome of Miriam to give way at this time, when, if there was any giving way to be done, there were others who might be led into doing it. Nurse’s treatment for hysteria was cold water for an acute attack, and to ignore a mild one. She helped out the
ignoring by statements which had no bearing on truth, but which might encourage the patient. “Looking better every day. We’ll soon blow those pale London cheeks away.” “This is the morning to make one say, ‘splendid to be alive.’ You were thinking that, I know, Miriam. I read it in your face.”

  No treatment made any difference to Miriam. It was as if, because it had been more than she could bear at the time, she had shut her grief in a box, but returning to the bungalow the lock of the box had sprung open and the grief spilled out, and, as it flowed, it mirrored the exquisite happiness of the dead past, and the barren chill present and future. She was always crying, not easy tears but great tearing sobs which she had no power to control. When she was not crying she went about her work in silence.

  In the original plan for the bungalow there had been a room which Uncle John had said could either be a second bedroom or another living-room. George and Miriam had not used it at all. Nurse had fixed it up as a dining-room. She had scarcely used it as that, for her life was hard and she had no time for carrying trays about, and ate her meals in the kitchen. In case her mother or sister came to stay she had a bed ready, camouflaged under a rug. This dining-room had become entirely a bedroom for Connie, and the sitting-room had been given the dining-room table. Myra slept on a camp bed in the sitting-room. Nurse had offered her bedroom.

  “It’s as cosy as cosy, dear, though I’d like to have had a little white fur rug by the bed. I always fancied one; it gives you a right feeling somehow, but I’ve never got round to it, you know how it is.”

  Myra refused Nurse’s room, as she refused Connie’s. She was sleeping badly, suffering from nightmares. Often in the night she would turn on the light and gaze at the red rep curtains with their velvet border, the plant in the window in its green bowl, the photographs of nurse’s family, the dining-room table already partially laid for to-morrow’s breakfast, and the small upright piano with a piece of Chinese embroidery hanging from one end of it, and feel as if she were trapped, part of the furnishings of the bungalow, and would never escape. All that she most dreaded seemed suddenly to have rolled together and fallen in a lump on her, and where she slept was a very small matter when weltering in such a sea of trouble. It was ghastly to be cooped up with people who watched her to see how she reacted to what had happened. What had happened was awful, but she could have dealt with it and accepted what had to be accepted, but not under prying eyes, not when there was whispering. Miriam, who could have helped, had to be avoided; it was an added horror that she might cry about George. The tenants of the house had been kind, they had begged her to come in whenever she liked. She had been once but had run into the family, who had shown her round, and asked her to admire their improvements and alterations. Until she actually saw other people in her house, on her land, she had not realised that it had gone from her. In London it had been possible to feel the Devon she loved, waiting. From the bungalow it was not only forced home that it was not waiting, but the place seemed changed: the beauty dimmed, the magic thinned. Had it changed, or had she changed? Was this what growing-up meant? The crowning horror was that she had lost her happiness with Connie. Connie was the same; Connie seemed unaware that things had changed, but Myra had grown so far away from her that it was as if there were a wall between them. To add to her mental sufferings, nurse had strong ideas on how people of Myra’s age should be handled after a shock. “Keep her busy.” “Keep jollying her along.” “Don’t let’s have any brooding,” were her sayings. One of the ways of jollying plus keeping busy was to cover what she intended Myra to do, by turning what she had to say into a form of baby talk. Looking at Fortesque she would remark:

  “Time for boysies to go walkies and girlsies too. I know a kind girlsie who will take boysie over to the town to buy nursie some lint.”

  Since, at the time of the shootings, every paper in the country had blazed with the story, nurse thought any interest shown by Myra in a paper unhealthy. Myra never had read papers except in a casual way, but now she did not dare even to read about the birth of a five-legged calf in the local.

  “Girlsies shouldn’t tire eyesies with silly old papers. I know a boysie who says it would be much better if little missie would spend her time taking him for a runsy.”

  Myra, her nerves quivering, was flung back on the only defence she knew. She was truculently gay, rude at even a hint that she might have anything to be sorry about. She accepted every invitation from old friends and neighbours, simply because Connie suggested that she would probably rather refuse them; and shocked the friends and neighbours by her seeming callousness when they tried to be kind. Countering, “We are only just ourselves, we thought you would rather,” by “I don’t mind how many people I see. I’m used to crowds.” She hired horses and rejoined the local hunt, but she gave a bad impression of herself, because of her too well-acted performance of a girl without a care in the world; she also upset the women by her methods with the men. Her enfant terrible act was a success with them, just as it had been in London, but it utterly failed to amuse the women who knew that she had been carefully brought up, and thought it “very sad” that she had profited so little from Miss Fogetty’s care.

  Apart from the actual miseries of life in the bungalow, Myra had to contend with the confusion of her mind, and a lot of sorting and arranging it took. Uncle John’s death had been a shock. She had seen him shoot himself, seen his forehead mashed and blood covered; it had been horrible, and re-living it was one of the nightmares which was continually waking her. But more disturbing than his death, or the manner of it, was the fact that she did not mind enough. She had always loved Uncle John, she had disliked and feared his queerness during the last two or three months, but at the same time his need of care had stimulated the already maternal feeling she had for him. He had wanted looking after so badly, and it had been lovely when through her he was calm and happy. Yet on the whole relief was what she was feeling now. The bogey of his getting so queer he had to be shut up in a home was removed. She had felt almost disgust at seeing gentle, wise Uncle John so unlike himself; she had hated feeling disgusted, it was a comfort not to have to feel it any more. Yet once more she was upset with herself; it was worse in a way than not minding when her parents had been drowned. She had not seen them for some time, they were outside her life. Uncle John was not, he had always been part of it. Why did she not mind more? Walking across the moor, riding, climbing up the paths through the valley woods, with only Fortesque for company, she asked herself that question in vain. Only sometimes when by the river did she care as she felt she ought to care. Then she would remember him as he used to be, gentle, patient, so pleased at little things others did for him, unaware that he was loved. She would see him in her memory, standing in the river, absorbed, throwing a beautiful line. Then her eyes would mist with tears and she would call Fortesque to her and say violently, in a tone daring him to argue: “I was very, very fond of him. Nobody can say I wasn’t.”

  One of the most difficult of her reactions for her to understand was that she no longer wanted to live in her own house. It had taken a great deal of thinking to reach the point of admitting to herself that she did not want it. There was more money now, for she inherited quite a lot from Uncle John. The lawyer who had been to see her had asked whether she wanted it back; the lease could not be broken yet but something might be arranged. He was one of her trustees and had been a friend of Uncle John’s and was very anxious to find out exactly what she would like to do with her life. He was full of suggestions, but the one that filled Myra’s mind was the house. During the months she had lived in London she had told herself, and told Miriam, that her home was what she wanted. Now she could have it, and to find that she did not want it was very hard of acceptance. It was little more than six months ago that she had driven down the drive to the station, and had known absolutely and definitely that she was living through the depths of suffering. It was so few years ago that she had felt such love for every blade o
f grass that she had wanted to make a blood sacrifice for her land, as she had felt only something violent and out of the common rut could express all she felt; and here she was able perhaps to go back, to live there just as she used to, and she did not want to. It took some weeks to face this fact. You can’t with every fibre of you know that you want something one minute, and accept that you do not want it the next. Having at last broken her own resistance and admitted this queer truth, her mind was clearer and other thoughts could flow in. There were the other suggestions of the lawyer’s. He thought she should visit her grandparents. Her mother’s mother in Guernsey had been ill ever since she had heard of her daughter’s death, and she longed to see Myra and was continually writing to beg her to come over and, of course, bring Miss Fogetty with her. Her father’s parents, too, asked her to visit them. They had not seen her since before the war, they wrote, and could not now face an English winter, but wouldn’t Myra come to them for a few months. They lived very quietly but the weather would soon be getting nice. She must bring her governess and they must go for long walks and watch the mimosa come out. France was promptly ruled out because of Fortesque, but Fortesque did not cut out Guernsey, nor did he cut out the other suggestions of the lawyer’s; the classes, the training to “take up” something, everything the lawyer thought of had Connie attached to it; his mind seemed to work very like Uncle John’s in that way.

  Myra and Fortesque were out walking when Myra found herself framing a thought out loud. “I don’t want Foggy. She doesn’t understand.” Exactly what Connie did not understand Myra did not bring to the front of her mind. She had a hazy conglomeration of ideas. Foggy was dull and liked dull things. Foggy was not interested in clothes and thought it awful when other people wanted to look nice. Foggy couldn’t see that people didn’t want to be poked away where there weren’t other people. Deplorably dull as her life was in the bungalow, Myra loved Devonshire too much to admit she was bored, and in a way it was not true. She still could be absorbed on her walks by the interests of the countryside, but save for these moments of absorption she was bored. Life with Aunt Lilian had at least been exciting. She wanted excitement. She missed the daily joy of causing a sensation. What fun it was when people craned their necks, and stared and obviously admired! Of course, people stared and admired in Devonshire, but there were not nearly enough of them and there was no competition. It was the fun of being outstanding when there was the highest standard of looks about.