Uncle Paul

by Celia Fremlin

  It was not until after tea that Meg realised that there would no longer be room for her to stay at the caravan. This thought, in itself, could hardly cause her much distress after the experiences of the last hour or two, but what was the alternative?

  Isabel, when consulted, had clear advice to give on only two points: first, that Meg must on no account consider going back to London; second, that it would be hopeless to try and get into a hotel, they’d all be full. Having steered the problem to this point, she seemed to feel that she had done her share of the thinking, and that it was Meg’s turn to take over; which Meg, in some irritation, proceeded to do.

  “I know!” she exclaimed after a few moments’ thought, broken only by Isabel’s final contribution to the problem—namely, that it would all be easier if only it wasn’t raining—“I know! The cottage. Mildred’s still renting it I know, and I’m sure she won’t mind my staying there. I should think she’d be quite glad to have it used. I’ll ring her up and ask her.”

  The ten-minute walk to the telephone box through the rain rather quelled Meg’s enthusiasm; and inside the box it seemed to be raining more than ever. The chilly, shut-in dampness, enclosed by rain-spattered glass on every side, gave an illusion of wetness wetter than anything outside.

  And after all Mildred was not at the hotel. No, the unknown masculine voice had no idea when she would be back. Would Meg like to leave a message?

  Meg hesitated. Wetness, like cold, blurs the outlines of life, makes decisions difficult. But, after all, Mildred couldn’t possibly mind; asking her permission was just a formality.

  “Yes, please,” she said. “Could you tell her that I—that her sister Meg rang up, and that she—that I hope she won’t mind, but I’ve nowhere else to go, and so I’ll have to spend the night at her cottage.”

  A silly message to leave with a stranger. Apologetic—over-explanatory. The sort of message that Isabel would leave. But then, everything was so wet. Perhaps Isabel felt all the time the way other people feel when they are soaked to the skin?

  With which unedifying reflection Meg collected a few of her belongings from the caravan, and set off on her walk to the cottage.

  CHAPTER IX

  EVEN THE SHELTERS were empty this evening. Meg was no longer trying to keep to the lee side of trees and buildings, nor to keep her face turned away from the rain driving in from the sea. Instead she had thrown back her plastic hood, and with head lifted to the wind was allowing the skirts of her raincoat to blow where they would. For, if you had to be wet, there was an exhilaration in being completely, unreservedly wet; to abandon yourself to the rain as to drunkenness, with never a thought of the wearisome aftermath of drying and pressing clothes and of stuffing your shoes with newspaper.

  It was not really late yet, but dusk seemed to have been falling for hours, and to be falling still over the great colourless hump of the cliff-side. It was only when she turned inland, away from the wind, that Meg began to realise that it really was growing darker, and lonelier, too. These stunted hedges, dividing into squares the grey wastes of beaten-down corn, brought a sense of desolation that had been quite absent from the screaming, windswept cliffs. Meg was no longer aware of infinite wetness, but of individual trickles of water running off her hair and down her neck. She was aware, too, that she was alone in this empty, darkening countryside; and that when she reached the cottage, it too would be empty, and darker still.

  It was odd, really, that you couldn’t see the cottage from farther off in this bare, almost treeless landscape. The flatness of the land must be deceptive; by some trick of undulation it was impossible from this angle to see even the rough, cinder-strewn track that led past the cottage until you were almost upon it; and then there were several twists and bends before you came upon the cottage itself, set far back from the path in a shadowy tangle of garden.

  The rain was slackening now, and the steady plopping of great drops from the eaves was the first sound Meg heard as she approached the tiny, dilapidated building. At her first sight of it, grey and dripping in the encroaching dusk, she could have fancied that it had stood uninhabited for the whole of the time since that ill-starred honeymoon fifteen years ago. For the weeds stood waist-high in the garden, and the front door and windows were closed with a finality as chill and forbidding as the landscape itself.

  Forbidding indeed. For it was at this moment that Meg realised that she hadn’t brought a key. Like a fool, she had never thought of this difficulty when she had decided so high-handedly to leave Mildred a message instead of waiting and asking her permission. Mildred presumably still had the key in her possession, three miles away through the rain and the fast-falling night; there was no way of communicating with her now.

  The little rickety gate squeaked wildly, resentfully, as Meg pushed it open, and again as—she did not know quite why—she closed it carefully behind her. Then, pushing her way past the huge nettles and burdocks that almost met over the path, and discharged great sullen drops of water as she approached, Meg reached the front door.

  It was locked, of course; she had known it would be. With small hope of any better success there, she now made her way round to the back of the cottage. Here, the evening seemed to have slipped another couple of rungs towards night. The shadowy chill seemed to envelope her more completely, and the drops from the eaves sounded plumper, more succulent, as they fell in great smacks on to the worn, hollowed brickwork outside the back door.

  And the back door, to Meg’s astonishment, simply opened at the lift of the latch, and she found herself in a dim, stone-flagged space that became almost completely dark as she closed the door behind her.

  She had to open it again, unwillingly, letting in the wild wet air and the powerful, indescribable smell of a neglected garden, where the weeds grow huge and victorious as their hedgerow counterparts can never be. And now the watery light seemed almost bright, and she could see that she was in a small kitchen, over-full of buckets, zinc baths, and receptacles of all kinds, and with a huge cold stove filling the whole of one wall. On the stove, among a medley of newspapers, jam jars and enamel jugs, stood a candle congealed into its own wax, and beside it a box of matches.

  The matches would strike; the candle would burn; and, somewhat reassured, Meg fixed the candle as securely as she could into an old saucer, and set off to explore the place.

  Not that there was much to explore. There was only one other room downstairs, containing a much smaller, more usable looking stove, a horsehair sofa, and a number of straight-backed chairs. On a round table covered by a heavy green cloth stood an oil lamp, ready filled. When Meg had coaxed this into smoky, muttering life, the low room began to look relatively cosy, though still over-full of chairs, whose air of chilly expectancy was unnerving.

  Up above there were another two rooms—the short wooden stairs seemed to lead almost straight into both of them, for there was scarcely a landing at all, both doors being made to open on to the top steps of the stairs. Opening outwards, too, as Meg discovered when she pressed the rusty latch of the right-hand door, and almost pitched herself backwards down the dim wooden steps as the door swung out towards her.

  What an awkward, dangerous, arrangement! Though no doubt you got the knack of it after a day or two. Meg edged her way round the door and into the room beyond. Her candle guttered and blew out in the sudden draught; but enough watery twilight still shone through the tiny lattice window to show up the main features of the room.

  And what ugly features they were! In imagining this cottage of Mildred’s, Meg had pictured worm-eaten oak beams; a four-post bed; shining copper warming-pans here and there on the whitewashed walls. But this room was papered; papered with what seemed like olive green paper covered with blobs and coils of some indeterminate colour—probably pink, you couldn’t quite tell in this half-light. A huge brass-ended double bed almost filled the room; and squeezed in beside it—wedged in between wall and bed so that it seemed impossible that it should ever be opened—stood a great ward
robe of yellow varnished wood, whose monumental shoddiness seemed even in this light to dominate the room.

  And everything was damp, with that clammy, permanent dampness which has little to do with the season. Standing in this room, you felt that the dampness was its own, and had always been. Neither sun nor rain, neither winter nor summer, would ever lessen or increase it.

  Meg found that she was shivering. Her wet clothes, which she had scarcely noticed outside in the rain, now clung to her with icy insistence, and forced her to recognise her second mistake of the evening. She had not only forgotten the key, but she had also failed to bring anything to change into except a nylon nightdress, the very thought of whose flimsy inadequacy made her shiver the more.

  She wondered if there were any of Mildred’s things left here. If so, they would be in the other bedroom—nothing, certainly, could be kept in that great purposeless wardrobe, trapped eternally between wall and bed, with doors that could never be opened. Stepping gingerly from the room and across the wooden stairs, now in complete darkness, Meg entered the room opposite.

  This room seemed altogether more habitable than the first —drier, more recently used. A small single bed, more in keeping with the proportions of the place, stood against one wall, and some sort of rug, Meg could just see, was spread across the uneven boards. Here, no doubt, Mildred had slept; and here, with any luck, would still be some of her clothes, in that chest of drawers by the window.

  Meg re-lit her candle, and, setting it down on the dimly shining mahogany, she began her search through the drawers.

  How faint the light from a candle flame seems to modern eyes! How on earth, Meg wondered, did the women of olden times manage not only to identify their garments, but to put them on; to adjust them this way or that in front of scarcely distinguishable mirrors; to rejoice in their becomingness or to lament the reverse? No wonder there were all those famous beauties, about whom very old gentlemen sometimes wax nostalgic. A blemish of feature or complexion would have to be marked indeed to show up in a light like this. Perhaps it was no coincidence that the universal use of cosmetics followed so closely on the universal adoption of electric light….

  At this point in her reflections, Meg felt rather than saw that her search was to be rewarded. In this last drawer her exploring hands no longer met the stiff, unwelcoming texture of folded curtains, nor the clammy lumpiness of those lengths of coarse lace, for no imaginable purpose, with which strange chests of drawers are so often filled. Her hands now, in the bottom drawer, met the comforting feel of woollen garments.

  Yes, they were Mildred’s. Kneeling down and holding the candle low over the open drawer, Meg recognised several of them. But she had better find something as old as possible. Mildred, unless she happened to be in one of her rare moods of expansive, even silly, generosity, would not readily forgive the borrowing of anything she valued.

  Well, this faded yellow jumper was old enough, in all conscience! It must be years since Mildred had worn it—or that shapeless tweed skirt, either. It was surprising, really, that Mildred, usually so fussy and extravagant about her clothes, should have possessed such garments at all, let alone have brought them away with her on holiday. Still, Meg supposed, Mildred must have dug them out while at the height of her back-to-nature mood. They would really have been quite suitable to the sort of life Mildred was pretending she wanted to live.

  Anyway, they were warm. Bundling herself into the dowdy, over-large garments, Meg felt warmth coming back into her limbs, and she laughed a little at the queer, droopy reflection cast back by the little spotted mirror, which could be tipped this way and that on its stand, flinging the little room and its shadowy furniture into wild, seasick slopes and angles before her eyes.

  But it does not do to laugh, however softly, when you are alone. Laughter calls for answering laughter; and when there is none, it is not like silence, but more like a very special kind of sound. A sound that must be listened for, attended to, with every faculty suddenly alert.

  For a moment Meg stood absolutely still, her hand clapped to her mouth, as if the idiotic, schoolgirlish gesture could recall and re-imprison the laugh which had escaped into the expectant silence.

  The silence. But, of course, there wasn’t any silence. There never is, when once you begain to listen as Meg was listening now. There was not a board, nor a door, in the whole place that was not faintly moving; stirring, swelling, creaking in its death-long progress through the decades towards final and utter decay. Outside the wind had fallen, but not to absolute stillness; an enveloping haze of sound, devoid of quality or definition, made Meg remember all over again the gigantic, well-nourished weeds that filled the cottage garden and grew, luxuriant and satisfied, to the very doors. And over all, yet somehow obliterating nothing, was still the sound of the slackening rain on the low roof, light and continuous, like the pattering of tiny, busy birds.

  A drop of hot wax, spilling on to her wrist, roused Meg from her uncomfortable reverie. Righting the candle, which she had allowed almost to slip from its saucer as she stood, Meg determined to go downstairs to the lamplit sitting-room. There she would look for something to read—it was just one more oversight, on a par with the others, that she hadn’t brought a book with her. But there would surely be something; and the companionable familiarity of the printed word (any printed word, no matter how dull) would soon restore her courage. Her common sense, rather; for nothing had happened, after all. What need was there for courage?

  Any printed word, she had thought; but naturally she had not reckoned on the possibility that the only book she could find would be in German. Boredom she had been prepared for—would even have welcomed. To have spent the rest of the evening poring more and more drowsily over some religious essay by an unknown author of the late nineteenth century—that might have been just what she needed to soothe her nerves before going to bed. But this German book, though boring enough (so far as her half-forgotten G.C.E. standard German would take her) was somehow not soothing. The pages were yellow; the printing, strange in any case to an English eye, looked stranger still under the yellow flaring light of the lamp; and the whole book had that curious, indefinable smell of being a hundred years old.

  Meg turned the pages uncomprehendingly. She soon gave up trying to puzzle out any of the sentences. Those endless, wearisome words, syllable piled on syllable until you felt the whole thing might topple over if you tried to pronounce it: that queer, ornamental lettering … if you half closed your eyes and let them drop out of focus, it looked like hundreds and hundreds of little people running along roads, all in straight lines, one behind the other, their steps making a crunching noise as they ran….

  Suddenly, terrifyingly, all Meg’s drowsiness was gone. She stared at the dry, innocuous volume as if it were a scorpion.

  Unjustly. Unreasonably. Verbose and tedious that long-dead Teutonic author might be; but it was not his fault that Meg should suddenly, out of her half-doze, realise that printed letters, however ornate, cannot make a crunching sound.

  Only footsteps could do that. Footsteps, still distant, but coming nearer along the cinder track towards the cottage.

  CHAPTER X

  OF ALL THE vast and inexplicable capabilities of the human mind, perhaps the most remarkable of all is its power to encompass, in a few vivid seconds, such a variety of images and trains of thought as would take many hours to describe; and the fact that some of these coexisting thoughts may be quite incompatible, even directly contradictory to one another, only adds to the wonder of it all.

  Thus in the minute or so that it took for the footsteps to reach the cottage gate, Meg had time not only to assure herself positively that they were only the footsteps of some passer-by who would tramp on anonymously into the night, but also to prepare a complete plan of action against the conflicting certainty that they would stop at the cottage gate and move up the path towards the front door. She knew which window she would address the stranger from; and in what terms. Knew, too, in another com
partment of her mind, that what she must really do was to keep quite still, let him think that the cottage was empty. At the same time, of course, she knew that this would be useless, with the lamp burning, and herself probably clearly silhouetted through the cheap cretonne curtains. And, as an accompaniment to these decisions, and seeming not to conflict with them in any way, her mind was reviewing the whole story told her by Isabel—the story of Mildred, alone here as Meg was now alone, and hearing footsteps crunching their way out of the night; shuffling mysteriously round the cottage, and then crunching their way back into the darkness.

  And Mildred had thought the steps were Uncle Paul’s. How could she tell? Could one recognise a person’s steps with such certainty? With the strange omnipotence of fear, Meg seemed able to hold back time itself while she pondered; and during those advancing seconds, as the steps grew louder, more purposeful, she seemed able to meditate in an almost leisurely manner the subject of the recognition of footsteps.

  What was it that distinguished one footstep from another? Unbidden, like tiny hammers in her brain, footstep after footstep immediately presented itself for inspection. Freddy’s footsteps first: light, quick, with a sort of bouncing, extravagant quality, as if his weight were not quite sufficient to keep him on the ground. Philip’s footsteps next, brisk and heavy, fraught with purpose. Yes, and Uncle Paul’s footsteps too. Across the years she could remember them still, almost birdlike in their swift delicacy as they clicked across the polished parquet floor towards the drawing-room.