I swerved out to the right much too impulsively, though fortunately it was a road with little traffic. I even stopped dead, in the middle of the road, with the black heap over on our left. The ancient engine stopped as we did: a habit it had. I realized that I was probably not in the middle of the road, but far over on the right of it.
“Whatever is it?” asked Marguerite. There was a cold thread of fear in her voice, which made her sound like someone else. It quite frightened me. I thought that she might have seen or gathered more than I had. Deirdre, of course, was quiet and dark in the cavernous back of the car.
We all got out through the two doors on the offside of the car; almost on to the right-hand pavement. The pavement was composed of the same cracked slabs as the pathways up to the houses; and the road itself of naked, dirty concrete.
“It’s a horse,” cried Marguerite, “a huge black horse.”
We stood around looking at it. It spread from almost the centre of the road to the gutter, and overlapped on to the other pavement. Some little time passed.
“I’ll get Neptuna’s torch out of the car,” I said.
“No, don’t.” It was Deirdre.
Marguerite spoke. “But the horse might still be alive. We might be able to do something.”
“The horse is dead.” Deirdre sounded very strung up, but one felt she was strung up precisely because somehow she knew the truth of what she had said.
“I must say I think so too,” said Marguerite.
“If there’s nothing to be done, we’d better go on,” I said.
“Yes,” said Deirdre. “Let’s go.”
But she didn’t come at once. As she spoke, Marguerite and I went round to the other side of the car and climbed back into the front seat, quite a business for Marguerite, who had to dodge round the wheel and the levers.
“Where’s Deirdre?” Marguerite asked, when we were settled.
There was a further quite definite passage of time as we sat there in the dark, then Deirdre appeared and got into the back of the car without a word. I was slightly relieved: it had occurred to me that she might have lost her head in some way, or even fainted.
The engine re-started at once, which it by no means always did; and we completed the short remainder of the journey. Another thing about which I felt slightly relieved was that we appeared not to have awakened the neighbours: a colloquy about the horse in Black Country dialect would have been formidable indeed. As a matter of fact, No. 47 was only a few hundred yards down the same road. The estate descended from the Alum Rock region, and then rose again to the main road just beyond the ridge, where the garages were.
Marguerite had seemed so shaken, and Deirdre also, that I thought I had better take them inside before disposing of the car. The unpleasant episode of the horse had, among other things, possibly confirmed the Major’s suggestion of a threat to Neptuna’s machine: and the idea of Marguerite and me going to the party at the Queen’s seemed more unlikely than ever.
Marguerite however, would not hear of it. “We’re perfectly all right now,” she said. “If you once come in, you’ll never get out again, and the garage will shut.”
So I wasn’t there to hear the matter of the horse raised in its first freshness, with the Peeverses. When I returned from the garage, where a special late arrival charge had been levied upon me, although it was only a little after ten, what I found was Marguerite and Deirdre seated on either side of Mrs. Peevers, who was showing them an album of snapshots, while the Major sat opposite and watched their reactions.
“I don’t know whether my wife has told you,” I said, “but there seems to be a dead horse in the road.”
“Probably a stray,” said the Major. “We were just looking at a few photographs.”
“Shouldn’t something be done about it?”
“What?”
“We might telephone the police.”
“The nearest telephone is up the hill, near where you’ve left the car. We don’t need a telephone ourselves.”
Naturally, I gave it up.
“I’ll make some more tea,” said the Major. “We’ve got some special Darjeeling from Brooke Bond.”
“Have you any lump sugar?” asked Deirdre. It was a simple enough question, but, coming from Deirdre, unexpected.
“Why, certainly we have, Deirdre,” replied Mrs. Peevers, using a Christian name for the first time in my hearing. “It’s still done up in a parcel, but Gregory shall open it, if you would like it very much.” It was true that at tea-time there had been only a little granulated.
“If you can give me some lump sugar,” said Deirdre, “I will try to bring Harry back. But I shall need quite a lot; and everyone must join in. I learnt how to do it when I was working at the hospital. Of course I can’t promise anything.”
“My boy Harry is not something to make game of,” said Mrs. Peevers.
“No, indeed,” confirmed the Major, blowing hard.
“It’s not a game. More like an experiment. It’s called Absent Friends. We often did it at the hospital. It helped to pass the evenings. We got lots of people back.”
“Deirdre,” said Marguerite, “you mustn’t upset Mrs. Peevers.”
“I’m not in the least upset,” said Mrs. Peevers sharply. “I think it is a very nice thought of Deirdre’s. If she learnt about it at the hospital, it’s sure to be all right, and we must all do it.”
“I’ll go and get the sugar,” said the Major, rather astonishingly, and stumped off.
“We’d do anything to bring Harry back,” announced Mrs. Peevers, with defiance.
“How far away were the people you brought back to the hospital?” I asked Deirdre.
“All kinds of distances.”
“Do you mean they were sick people?” asked Marguerite.
“Not all of them.”
“Isn’t this sorcery?” persisted Marguerite. “Like the witch of Endor?”
We could hear the Major tearing at the packing in the back regions.
“Not quite. Harry’s not dead. Is he, Mrs. Peevers?” It was an acute rejoinder, in its way.
“Of course Harry’s not dead. Missing, not dead.”
“You don’t understand, Mrs. Wakefield.” The Major had returned with the sugar. “When we say that Harry’s missing, we mean that he’s missing. Harry had his reasons for being missing, if you follow me.”
“I see,” said Marguerite. “But this still seems to me like witchcraft. If we’re really expected to take it seriously, that is.”
I noticed, and Marguerite must have noticed too, that a considerable flush of rage passed over Deirdre’s somewhat nondescript face. It came and went in a moment, but, while it was there, it was murderous.
“You can call it what you like, Mrs. Wakefield,” was all she said, and quite quietly. “Or me. The question is simply do we want to help Major and Mrs. Peevers, or don’t we?”
“I very much hope you will,” said the Major breezily. “What do I do with the sugar? Do we all suck it?”
“We really want a bigger table,” said Deirdre.
“We could go in the dining-room if you’ll all give me a hand with Mrs. Peevers.”
“No, the picture of Harry will help to bring him back. We should work in the same room with it. The coffee-table will do if we sit close together.”
In the end, and after moving almost every piece of furniture in the room except Mrs. Peevers’s chair, we disposed the coffee-table in such a way that Mrs. Peevers required only to be turned slightly on her own axis, and was seated between her husband on her left and Marguerite on her right. Deirdre, placed beneath Harry’s portrait, came next to the Major, with me on her other hand. The big blue bag of sugar stood in the middle. We were assuredly very close to one another, the table being small and Mrs. Peevers large.
“You do really need all of us?” asked Marguerite.
“Even sceptics, if we can’t do any better,” replied Deirdre, and I was almost certain that she pressed my knee slightly. “Ther
e are not really enough of us, as it is. If Harry is a long way away, we may not make enough power.”
“How do you make power, dear?” asked Mrs. Peevers.
“There are lots of different ways of making power, Mrs. Peevers, some of them not polite, but tonight we are going to make it out of sugar.” Deirdre did seem quite changed.
“That’s right,” said the Major. “Sugar’s pure energy. The purest there is. We used to suck lumps of it when we went over the top.” He drew several lumps from the bag and put them in his mouth. “God, it takes you back.”
“What do we do now?” asked Marguerite.
“Just what I tell you,” replied Deirdre. “We first make what is called the General Disposition. The General Disposition we’re going to make tonight is called The Straits. The men and the women do different things. The women make the ocean and the men make the ship.”
“Bless my soul,” said the Major. “I forgot about the tea. Would you all like some?”
“There must be nothing on the table but the sugar.”
“Then we’ll have some tea later.”
“The women take thirty lumps of sugar each, and set them out in two parallel straight lines, a little way apart but not too much, with three lumps on each side curving outwards at the end nearest you.”
“And what do the men do?” asked the Major, his eyes popping.
“The men take thirty-one lumps of sugar each, and they lay out two columns, close together, with the odd lump coming first, also at the end nearest you; the sharp prow of the ship.”
Inevitably, she had to say most of it again, but all of us started doing it.
“It would be so much simpler if you would show us, dear,” said Mrs. Peevers, when each of us had counted out the appropriate quota. “Instead of just describing.”
“I’m not allowed to show you,” said Deirdre. “It’s forbidden. You have to work it out for yourselves from what I have told you. I do something quite different.”
“What do you do?” asked the Major.
“I have to work on my own. I draw the power from what you are doing.”
In the end, we had laid out the two longboats and the two channels. Owing to the smallness of the table, they had become rather jumbled up,
“Not bad,” said Deirdre, who had done nothing. “But Mrs. Peevers’s lines are too far apart, and Mr. Wakefield’s ship is too far from its course.”
We tried to adjust.
“Now,” said Deirdre, “listen carefully. What you have to do is this. The man steers his ship through the straits. He does it by moving two lumps of sugar at a time from the bottom end of the ship, up to the top end, just under the prow. Each time he does it, he pushes the prow that much forward. In this way he enters the straits at the bottom end, goes through to the top, and then comes out the other side. At the same time the woman moves one side of the strait over to the other, one lump of sugar at a time, taken from each side alternately. She begins by moving the end lump from the left-hand curve to the top of the right-hand column, and sets about making a similar curve there. Then the end lump from the right-hand curve goes to the top of the left-hand column and does the same thing. When the woman has completely interchanged the two sides, and moved the two curves to the other end, so that the ship comes out between them, the work is done. I shall explain it all over again in a moment, but there are two more things.”
“I shall never remember,” squeaked Mrs. Peevers.
“You’ll find it easier than you think when you come to do it. But the first thing is this. You all take it in turns to move, and every time you move a lump of sugar, every single time, you must say ‘Harry, come down’; each one of you, every time. If one of you misses even once, Harry can’t come. So it’s very important. You see, the General Disposition can be used for other things than bringing people back, and you wouldn’t want one of them to happen.”
It suddenly struck me that in just such soothing but steely accents must Deirdre have talked at the hospital.
“What’s the second thing?” I asked.
This time I was absolutely certain about the pressure on my knee. In fact, I could feel it all up my leg.
“The second thing—and you mustn’t let this frighten you, Mrs. Peevers—is that you have to do it all in the dark; or rather by special light only, which you will find rather faint. I’ve got this special light with me in my handbag, but I mustn’t tell you anything about it.”
Just so: doctors, surgeons, nurses, cleaners, and all the legion of supplementary easers in and out; so spake they, all minutely and fractionally charged with power of life and death.
And just as they do, so Deirdre explained again.
“Every time the man moves two lumps of sugar, and every time the woman moves one lump, he or she says ‘Harry, come down’. Speaking right out boldly. Do you understand, Mrs. Wakefield?”
“I understand perfectly,” said Marguerite. “If someone fails, even once, anything may happen.” No doubt she was being sarcastic, but she sounded quite peaceful.
“That’s how it is,” said Deirdre. “And the point is that I cannot remind you when the time comes. So don’t forget. Because we can’t just stop, either. Now give me the sugar bag. It has to stand in front of me, and now I’ll explain what I do.”
“What do you do?” asked the Major.
“Every time one of you moves, I take a new lump out of the bag.”
“Suppose we hadn’t had all this sugar?” I asked.
“Then we’d have had that much less power.”
“And suppose there’d been more sugar?”
“That wouldn’t have mattered. You can’t make more than a certain amount of power without more people. It’s the people who make the power, not the sugar.”
“Like the Romans looking into the entrails of animals to see the future.”
“What’ve animals got to do with it?” asked Mrs. Peevers.
“Simply that it was something in the soothsayers which did the foretelling. The animal’s inside was merely an instrument, like a crystal, or like tea-leaves.”
“A medium, in fact,” said Marguerite.
“Those old soothsayers were a lot of cock and bull,” said the Major. “At least for the most part.”
“Animals are quite serious,” said Deirdre. “Hospitals use them the whole time.”
“What do you do with your lumps of sugar,” I asked.
“I pile them up. They draw in the power from the rest of you, or they should. At the end, I do something to them, which I can’t tell you about. Then we just wait. My sugar ought to go into a silk bag, but I don’t expect you’ve got one, Mrs. Peevers.”
“A silk bag. I don’t think I have, Deirdre.”
“An unused stocking will do. Have you got that, Mrs. Peevers, because I know I haven’t? Not here.”
“I don’t think I’ve got that either, not just now.”
“An unused stocking I can contribute,” put in Marguerite neatly. “Shall I get it now?”
“It’ll do quite well at the end, Mrs. Wakefield. Shall we start, then? Major Peevers, will you make it dark?”
During the fuss caused by the Major’s stumbling return through the murk, Deirdre produced her “special light”. Suddenly it was on the table in the midst of us, glowing pale blue.
“What is that?” asked Marguerite through the murk.
“Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies,” replied Deirdre, pressing against my leg again. “Now: through the straits. You start, Major Peevers. Harry’s your son.”
And away we all went: everyone word and motion perfect, as far as I could tell. It was the first time I had ever attended such a session in my whole life, and I must acknowledge there was soon a certain excitement. I should be surprised if all of us did not feel it. Marguerite actually admitted to it later. At first, the incantations of “Harry, come down” sounded self-conscious and half-hearted, but they quickly became almost agitating. At least that was my experience. One really wa
nted to say it. One could hardly wait for one’s turn. It was apparent, too, that the Peeverses particularly were becoming more and more emotional in their calling; which, in the near darkness, probably infected Marguerite and me. The faint blue glow; the simple, ordered movements, however ridiculous; the crying and shouting; the unaccustomed sensation of involvement, even though only with Marguerite and the two elderly Peeverses: all built up to an atmosphere which made me feel pleasantly irresponsible, much as if under the influence, I thought, of some light drug.
Deirdre kept putting her free hand on my thigh, and even about that there was something odd. At first, naturally, I found it embarrassing and squalid, as most people, I imagine, usually do find such things. It had certainly never occurred to me that there was anything attractive about Deirdre as an individual, and this was hardly the way to make me feel otherwise. But before the session ended, there was a moment, more than just one moment, when I felt that Deirdre was totally and wonderfully different from what I had supposed. It was as if I saw into, or had even momentarily entered into, her soul. I also recalled that a man had gone back alone by railway to London solely because he had not been allowed to share a room with her. For a spell, then, Deirdre’s pawings and pressings, Deirdre herself, seemed transfigured. It was soon over, needless to say, and I never felt anything like it again; but then the session itself was soon over—far too soon, as I was surprised to find my self thinking.
“It is for the women to say when the work is done,” cried out Deirdre, speaking for the first time since the Major had switched off the light.
“I have finished what you said,” replied Marguerite. “Is that all there is?”
“And the ship has come out the other side?” Deirdre was stacking her own heap of sugar with both hands.
“Pretty well. Anyhow, I’ve played my part.”
“Then you must stop,” said Deirdre. “What about you, Mrs. Peevers?”
There was no answer.
“Come on, old girl,” said the Major. “What about it?”
The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories Page 40
