The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories

by Robert Aickman

  “No. It is true that you can only see her at night. But I can talk to her sometimes by day.”

  “Could I?”

  “I don’t know. It depends.”

  “On what?”

  But Louise was reflecting and did not answer directly. “Yes, Griselda,” she said. “I think that you could see and talk to Stephanie. It occurs to me that it may have been because you also were here that she has come at this time. She hadn’t been seen or heard of before, they tell me, for more than twenty years. Not since the time something happened during that bloody silly war. I don’t precisely know what.” She was on her feet again.

  “I’m afraid,” said Griselda, “that nothing you say makes me very much less frightened of Stephanie. I’m not sure that I shall find thought very enjoyable—I mean, even after the dance, to which I’m not looking forward at all. She was even responsible for the poor Duchess losing her dog,” added Griselda as an afterthought.

  “It’s difficult about animals,” replied Louise. “But you can’t say that ghosts really treat them worse than we do.”

  “What colour is her hair?” asked Griselda.

  “A gorgeous golden red,” answered Louise. “And her eyes are, of course, green.”

  “I have never seen really green eyes outside a book.”

  “I think that Stephanie must be a mixture of races,” said Louise. “Probably she has some Jewish blood. I should say quite a lot.”

  She lifted Griselda’s dress from the bed where she had laid it. “Now for it,” she said.

  It was done.

  “You are truly beautiful,” said Louise.

  “The girl who designed the dress should get most of the credit,” said Griselda, looking away from Louise, and into the mirror.

  “What was her name?”

  Griselda told her.

  “I might have known it,” said Louise. “In fact, I really did know it. One of Hugo’s.”

  “I haven’t heard her mention him.”

  “No. Hugo is a very secret man.”

  “Oh. Anyway I don’t know her very well. I wish I were a better dancer.”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “I wish something else. I so much wish, Louise, that you were coming to the political dance with me.”

  Stretching out her hand, she touched Louise’s grey silk neck.

  “Yes,” said Louise gravely. “To my utter surprise, I wish that too.”

  CHAPTER IX

  “We mustn’t let things go to our heads,” remarked Mrs. Hatch as she seated herself at the dinner table. They settled to a substantial meal.

  Griselda, for some reason, had come down rather late, and Mrs. Hatch, whose practice as hostess it was always to appear for dinner last, had entered the dining room only just behind her. The absence of Louise might in any case have retarded her preparations.

  Griselda, to whom Louise’s good opinion of her dress had given more confidence, carefully examined the company. The Duchess, in a very tight dress which, it had to be admitted, suited her much better than something looser would have done, was certainly the most striking; but Mrs. Hatch, in a sense (not a sense that Griselda particularly cared for), ran her close, wearing a dress after the style favoured by Madame Récamier, but dark blue, and elaborated, perhaps somewhat inappropriately, with a full display of the famous Procopius jewellery, a fabulous, multi-­coloured mêlée. Pamela, in one of the quieter garments approved by “Vogue”, seemed slightly outshone by her seniors; and to be in a state of sulky suspicion, though her appetite remained good. Altogether Griselda felt rather pleased.

  With the men it was simple: the Duke (bearing on his dress coat a tiny but conspicuous token of some ancient chivalrous Order particularized in the Almanach de Gotha), and Edwin (in a dress suit the colour of night on the Côte d’Azur, and wearing a rare flower in his buttonhole, which Mr. Cork said grew only on the island of Tahiti and in his conservatory at Beams) were well-dressed; Mr. Leech and George Goss were not. George Goss had not even brought a tail coat.

  There was soup with wine in it; a large, but excellent, sole; roast duck, with apple sauce, and salad; a confused but rather rich concoction described as “Summer Pudding” (though, as someone pointed out, it was not yet quite summer); mushrooms on toast; and dessert. “No cheese tonight,” announced Mrs. Hatch, “in view of what is before us. Those who are still hungry must make do with nuts; or go and see Brundrit privately in his pantry.”

  Pamela had refused to take duck on the ground that her Father had always said that ducks were garbage eaters; and had had to have a small exquisite point steak specially cooked for her. When it came, she ate it, without a word, almost in a couple of mouthfuls.

  It was not the gayest of meals. The Duchess, upon whom so much depended in that direction, was cast down by the death of Fritzi, though she struggled pathetically hard with her feelings, and though the slight air of grief (like most things) distinctly became her. The Duke, though he did all that could be expected of him with Griselda, complimenting her upon her dress and describing clothes worn by beautiful women he had met at now extinct German courts, was concerned about the Duchess. Mr. Leech was concerned about his speech, apologizing to Griselda for his inattention to her remarks, apologizing to his hostess for making notes during dinner, dropping his food on his clothes, and from time to time muttering a possible rhetorical effect under his breath, then changing it with a stub of pencil and muttering it again. Edwin seemed almost more concerned than the Prime Minister, and his concern seemed more active or transitive; it was not that he deflected in the slightest from his habitual perfection of appearance and behaviour, but that a score of unconscious details disclosed his inner distress, and made him less than a contributor to the sodality of the occasion. Once even he had to ask for a second access to the salad, being unable to eat any more duck. Pamela was as negative as usual; and even Mrs. Hatch seemed strung up, in her not very suitable dress and dangerously valuable jewels. It hung over all of them, perhaps, even over Mrs. Hatch, dearly though she appeared to love a dance, that the gaiety ahead had an ulterior, and presumably important, end. George Goss merely leered at the Duchess’s bare bosom and ate, crouched over his plate like an octopus.

  Mrs. Hatch left the table early in order to receive the first guests, commanding the others to remain and give their digestions time to work. Edwin, however, sprang up, and, exclaiming “I am sure there must be something I can do,” followed his hostess, having bestowed a final uncertain glance upon Mr. Leech.

  “It’s bad news about our friend Austin,” remarked the Duke, after a pause.

  “I hadn’t heard, darling,” said the Duchess.

  “Same old trouble,” grunted George Goss.

  Griselda had meant to enquire further of the Duke, but after George Goss’s remark, felt quite unlike doing so.

  “I hope we have a schottische,” said the Duchess, brightly making conversation. “Mentioning Austin made me think of it.”

  “I doubt whether the younger generation have ever heard of it,” said Mr. Leech. He was at his very gloomiest.

  Griselda had to admit that she had not.

  “I’ve heard of it,” said Pamela, gnawing round an imported nectarine. “All those Victorian things are coming back in, you know. Chaperones, petticoats, and all that.”

  For Pamela it was quite a speech.

  CHAPTER X

  “Hallo, Griselda. What a dress!”

  The first person she had met was Kynaston, and she was not as pleased as immediately after she had last left him, she would have expected to be.

  “Hullo, Geoffrey. Don’t think me rude, but I’m on my way upstairs.”

  Probably it was rude, but she could not help it. Her mood was expansive, something she could not recall having previously felt; and about Geoffrey there seemed an enclosed and private air unsuited to a large convivial gathering. Though, she recollected, she did not know him very well; so that possibly this was wrong.

  Approaching her ro
om she felt unreasonably agitated; and entering it, much more unreasonably disappointed. The room was empty. From one of the dressing-­table drawers she took the dance programme Mrs. Hatch had given her; and looked at it for the first time. There were three names inserted in Mrs. Hatch’s clear handwriting (one of them twice), none of them known to Griselda, except that of Edwin Polegate-­Hampden, inserted not, as he had hoped, for the first but for the supper dance. There were no names inserted after supper. Griselda was wholly ignorant of the procedure on these occasions, but had thought that dance programmes were obsolete. She wondered whether it was usual for the hostess, unasked, to arrange in this way partners for her guests. It might be important to ascertain whether it was the custom or merely a peculiarity of Mrs. Hatch’s. Then Griselda thought of Stephanie des Bourges and hurried from the room, her final preparations abbreviated. This, she felt, was no time to meet a ghost. She wondered where Louise was; and shivered slightly.

  Suddenly hundreds of people had arrived. The hall was full and quite a queue extended down the long passage, lined with palms and baskets of flowers, which extended to the resuscitated ballroom, recently the scene of Doris’s dusty labours. At the entrance to the ballroom Mrs. Hatch was shaking hands with people, and introducing them to Mr. Leech, who stood on her right, himself looking rather in need of a dust, and to another man, standing on her left, whom Griselda divined to be Mr. Minnit, the Leader of the Opposition. Mr. Minnit was a determined-­looking elderly man with sparse black hair and a raucous penetrating voice. His evening suit made an even poorer impression than Mr. Leech’s, because, besides having been worn for longer, it had cost less in the first place. Grouped round the trio were a number of men whom Griselda, identifying one or two of them, took to be some of the new Cabinet. Few of them made a more favourable impression than did either of their leaders.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to come down.” It was Kynaston again. “I’m quite as terrified by all this as you are.”

  Griselda realized that she wasn’t terrified at all. She considered herself much better dressed than most of the other women; and, quite possibly, no less generally attractive. Looking round her, she even began to wonder whether she would show herself much inferior as a dancer. She smiled at Kynaston to give him confidence, and because she still felt she might have been rude to him.

  Just then the band struck up. “You hear that?” said Kynaston. “You’d better get your hostess’s moneysworth.”

  They began to make their way along the crowded passage. Kynston shook hands with Mrs. Hatch, who asked after his poetry. Then they entered the ballroom.

  It was a fine large room, though not very inspired architecturally, and expensively decorated not only with vegetation of various kinds but also with a number of patriotic motifs. At one end of the rectangle, the platform occupied by the band was banked with hundreds of carnations which pleasantly perfumed the other­wise already slightly smoky air. At the other end was another, smaller platform, now unoccupied but the purpose of which was clear, as it was swathed in red, white, and blue fabric, and bore an ominous green baize-­topped table, with three hard chairs. Above this platform were two oval plaques, edged with laurel, and bearing lively messages from Lord Beaconsfield and John Burns. Presumably many of the guests were not expected to take the floor, as round the walls was ranged a triple rank of gilt chairs with crimson seats, their thin red line becoming disordered as people sat upon them; but already the enthusiastic and the impetuous were in action, their faces settling down to ecstasy or boredom. The long far wall of the room contained a line of big French windows, uncurtained against the chance that later the growing heat might require them to be opened. Griselda wondered who might be without these windows, unseen but all-­seeing.

  As Kynaston led Griselda on to the floor, they encountered Edwin with a fascinatingly beautiful young partner. Briefly he introduced her as the Marchioness of Wolverhampton. “See you later,” he said to Griselda, in an accent of warm significance. Griselda watched them glide away. Obviously Edwin’s dancing was as flawless as everything else about him. Griselda wondered why he should elect to sup with her instead of with the incomparable Marchioness; or whether this also was Mrs. Hatch’s doing.

  Griselda danced three times with Kynaston, not precisely with elation, but certainly with competence. Her ancient inhibition against being intimately clasped by a little-­known male had not disappeared, but was perhaps in abeyance. In practice, the whole curious transaction seemed, at least with Kynaston, unexpectedly impersonal. They said little, the monotonous music thrummed in Griselda’s brain, and she felt completely mistress of the situation, while still unclear why such store was commonly set by the pastime. Possibly things would be different in the circumstances advocated by the Duchess; but surely it must be only occasionally that the habitual dancer could dance with a partner whose body inspired to passion? Griselda wondered whether possibly she suffered from some physiological deficiency akin to tone-­deafness. She then listened with her conscious ear to the music, and deemed that the matter was not worth undue concern.

  The business had its social problems, however. Griselda’s fourth dance had been allocated by Mrs. Hatch to an unknown named Mr. Coote. She did not know who Mr. Coote was, but when she announced his imminence to Kynaston, she was startled to learn that Kynaston had taken it for granted that she would be dancing with him (Kynaston) throughout the evening.

  “You said you wanted me to ward off other males.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You couldn’t abide being pawed.”

  “Mrs. Hatch has arranged the next dance for me.”

  “What do you think I’m going to do? I don’t know a soul here—if anybody here has a soul; and they’re not the kind of people I want to know. Not that I’m likely to be introduced. I’m a mixture of a poor relation and the local tradesman.”

  “What would you have done, if you hadn’t met me?”

  “Contrived to bring Doris. Of course, I much prefer you, but I’ve made a very fair dancer out of Doris, and she’s vastly better than having to talk about the state of the nation with a string of politicians.”

  The situation was dissolved by Mrs. Hatch appearing with Mr. Coote.

  “Let me introduce Mr. Coote, Griselda; your next partner. This is Griselda de Reptonville. I told Mr. Coote about you while you were out of the house and he asked me for a dance with you.”

  “The reality exceeds the description,” said Mr. Coote.

  It was a waltz and Mr. Coote was heavy on other people’s feet. While dancing, however, he maintained a steady flow of conventionally complimentary verbiage, of a type which Griselda was surprised to find still existed, but which began heavily to pall in an astonishingly short period of time. Griselda had always understood that men preferred to talk about themselves and tried to direct the conversation in that likely direction. But Mr. Coote was unexpectedly reticent. Griselda could only gather that though not in the political limelight, he occupied an entirely indispensable position far behind the scenes.

  “Sort of Chief Foreman, you know. The chap who sees that the roundabout is oiled. Poor sort of job at times, I find it. Let’s talk about something pleasanter. Our excellent hostess told me you had short hair but I never knew short hair could be so attractive.”

  Suddenly Griselda noticed something odd. Mrs. Hatch was dancing with (and much better than) Pamela.

  Mr. Coote was, Griselda recollected, the one of her three allotted partners who recurred. He was due to reappear for the next dance but one. Apart from anything else, it seemed poor planning, like selling all the adjoining seats in a theatre, instead of spacing the audience about.

  This little trouble solved itself, however, in the very instant that Griselda had thought of it.

  As the dance number (it was a bagatelle entitled “Mooning with the Moon”) neared its point of cessation, Mr. Coote suddenly crumpled up in the most dramatic possible way. He dropped his partner, clutched the lower part of his belly
with both hands, became instantly green in the face, and lurched groaning to one of the gilt chairs which had strayed out among the dancers. There he sat, odd pairs of dancers occasionally navigating round the back of him, until two muscular and efficient footmen assisted him away, their hands under his armpits. Now that the music had stopped, his dreadful groans were clearly audible above the hubbub of talk; but so expertly was the incident disposed of, that few were clearly aware of what had happened, and none sustained any notable setback in jollity.

  Griselda had been left isolated not far from the centre of the floor, and, so thick were the dancers, could not reach Mr. Coote before he was whisked away.

  “If that doesn’t teach you, I cannot imagine what will. You see what happens when you try to fraternize with the people.” It it was, of course, Kynaston. Griselda could have struck him. Then she saw the large shape of George Goss coming towards her, solitary and menacing.

  “Better me, don’t you think, after all?” said Kynaston, comprehending the entire situation. Griselda, really furious at his deliberate or careless misunderstanding of the need for her to dance with Mr. Coote, placed her hand on his arm; and the music started once more, this time a number entitled “You Twisted Me Before I Twisted You.”

  “You don’t have to do this the whole time, of course,” said Kynaston.

  “Indeed no. Later I am partnering a Mr. Mackintosh, and after that Edwin Polegate-­Hampden for the supper dance.”

  “To hell with them. I didn’t mean that. I meant that we could sit out sometimes.”

  Absurdly, Griselda had overlooked this possibility.

  Out of the corner of her eye she observed George Goss lumber off the floor disappointed.

  “Don’t I seem to know your unlucky friend?”

  “George Goss,” said Griselda.

  “I’m flattered that you prefer me. George Goss is the only really first-­rank painter now alive in England. Probably in the world. When I looked at his Holy Family at the Leicester Gallery last autumn, I cried like a child.”