Starlight

by Stella Gibbons

  One evening towards the middle of June, while her sister had ventured out to Joneses, Gladys suddenly marched out on to the landing and stood, arms akimbo, looking challengingly up Mr Fisher’s stairs.

  Ever so queer to think he had gone … and where? Gladys turned her thoughts away from that, and ran them rapidly over the situation in the cottages.

  Mrs Pearson asleep; she had made certain by a cautious peep round the door … Annie chin-wagging round at Joneses (not that I grudge her, thought Gladys … making up for lost time) … Erika off out somewhere … been more like herself since the old gentleman went … so long as she don’t take up with some beast in a caff. However, reflection assured her that Erika was dowered with that mysterious capacity for ‘looking after herself’ which could handle even a beast in a caff. The rackman …

  Gladys actually shivered. Lord send the rackman didn’t choose this evening to come nosing up to Mr Fisher’s room. Oh well, she thought, take my chance, that’s all. She felt the key in her overall pocket.

  The calm evening light covered ancient woodwork and grimed paint with its benison. A faded pearl sky looked in through the landing’s one window. The house was quite quiet. Gladys, rather slowly, began the short ascent.

  Eight stairs; carpetless; splintered at the treads. They ended, abruptly, before the comfortably-shaped broad door of an old house, yet its filthy brown paint made it seem forlorn. A heavy lock, with black paint rusting off. Gladys put the clumsy key into the keyhole, and briskly turned it. It moved easily – ‘Oil,’ muttered Gladys and pushed open the door, and went straight in.

  ‘Well I never,’ she muttered in a moment, after a standing survey, the key dangling from her fingers, ‘ever so bare …’

  It was the only word she had to express the stripped, dedicated poverty of the attic.

  The bed was a pile of old blankets, their coverlet Mr Fisher’s dressing-gown. There was no bed-linen, no pillow. A row of nails held a few thick old clothes. The floor was carpetless, the grate overflowing with the peculiarly white ash that is left by a wood fire. There was a large cupboard, and a big old zinc tub in one corner with a chipped jug standing in it; one of those that used to go with a basin when there were wash-stands, wreathed with poppies in a pallid red, and in front of the uncurtained window, where the stars must look in, winter and summer, a kitchen table.

  On it a large old suitcase, shut.

  Gladys went straight across to it, and, nodding to herself in triumph, tried the catches.

  Ah! The second one slid back. She lifted the lid – and her eyes leapt, burrowed, darted, into the contents.

  It was a full minute before she could take in the fact that they were nothing but piles of used envelopes; all kinds; their torn edges meticulously trimmed and the original addresses carefully scratched out. Evidently a pair of scissors, so tiny, so spidery, so rusted that they must have been at least a hundred years old, had been used, and the Biro, which lay beside them in one of the small compartments in the lining, had readdressed them.

  There were also many odd sheets of paper, apparently torn from magazines or paperbacks with a blank half or quarter sheet; these were stacked, as neatly as their irregular shape permitted, with the envelopes.

  It was an address on one of the latter that caught Gladys’s eye as she was slamming the lid shut with a violence that expressed her bitter disappointment.

  ‘His Excellency the Prime Minister of Eire’ – what on earth …?

  She snatched up another from the pile. ‘The Hon. Mrs Eyles, 53 Brogan Street, W.4.’ And another, ‘Sir John Formby, The Sheridan Theatre, Birmingham.’

  Gladys had heard of begging-letter writers. She instantly decided that this was how Mr Fisher had ‘kept himself going’.

  She had never believed that his sale of the straw dolls in their beads could bring in enough money, added to his pension and money from the Assistants, for even an old man to live on in these days, and here, in the case, was the proof of his real source of income.

  The discovery made up, in a little, for her disappointment. And there was still the cupboard!

  She had just started to rummage enjoyably through the mass, when there was a step outside, and a man’s voice said, ‘Hullo, Miss Barnes.’

  Gladys, as she afterwards described it to Annie, jumped almost out of her skin. She added that just for a minute she had thought it was him come back again – a thought not pleasant to one engaged as she was. But it was that curate from up the church; a visitor hardly more welcome.

  ‘Oh … hullo … good-evening, ever so nice now, isn’t it, I was just …’ she said, with false welcome gleaming in teeth and eye.

  Gerald said nothing. He was not yet capable of rebuking someone, of background different from his own, whom he found in suspicious circumstance; also – he must be fair to her – she might have been deputed to go through the old man’s possessions, though her manner did not suggest it.

  ‘Mrs Pearson give me the key,’ said Gladys, as if thought-reading, ‘poorly to-day, nerves I suppose but what good do you do lying up, I often ask myself, suppose we all did, many’s the time, you keeping well?’

  ‘Yes, thank you … er … I came to see if I could be of any help … er … use?’

  ‘Help me go through this here old rubbish if you’d be so kind,’ cried Gladys merrily, having decided at lightning speed that there really were no notes concealed in the envelopes, ‘day’s work here, if you ask me, won’t keep you long not if you’re busy, always plenty to do isn’t there?’

  She ruffled her hands in the suitcase, as if rinsing clothes, while Gerald cautiously approached.

  Together, standing side by side in the bare, haunted, room, they turned over the envelopes, commenting on the addresses in tones touched with a curiosity that grew ever stronger.

  ‘Her … Majesty … Queen … Elizabeth … the … Second, Buckingham … Palace …’ read out Gladys slowly, ‘whatever next! Begging off of the Queen. Cheek … not that I ought to say it, him being passed over, but did you ever?’

  Gerald gently lifted the now confused mass of papers until the bottom of the suitcase was revealed, and as gently, after a survey, set it down again.

  ‘I’m … not sure … it is – was – begging,’ he said absently. ‘Have you looked in the cupboard?’

  Gladys had been hoping he might overlook the cupboard. While that remained unexplored, there was hope.

  ‘Haven’t not only just got up here,’ she stated sunnily.

  ‘Well … let’s look, shall we?’ and he crossed towards it and turned the catch on its door.

  There was some crockery, and a brown teapot and half a loaf of wholemeal bread on a plate, under a ragged scrap of gauze. But all the other shelves (six of them, for the cupboard ran the height of the room) were filled with those same carefully trimmed and readdressed envelopes; hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, stacked with exquisite neatness, filling every niche except about a square foot of the floor, which was occupied by an old wooden box containing bundles of straw and reels of thread and some small transparent packets that glittered.

  ‘Stuff for making them rubbishing dolls,’ said Gladys, pointing. But Gerald did not answer. He was looking at something else.

  It was a card, tacked on to the inner side of the door, bordered by hand-drawn wreaths of flowers painted in delicate colours and gilt, which surrounded some words written in copperplate:

  ‘My Life’s Work’ he read in a low voice, and stepped back, slipping his thumbs into the leather belt confining his cassock. ‘How … Miss Barnes, how strange.’

  He put out a finger, as if to touch the card, then withdrew it. ‘How very strange.’

  They stood in silence, staring.

  The fading light fell into the attic; the dreadful roar from shaken houses and streets came up to them faintly and without cease; there was a sensation of someone’s absence that was strong as a presence. For once, Gladys Barnes had nothing to say.

  ‘Look …’ Gerald
said at last, lifting out some envelopes and ruffling through them, ‘they’re all addressed to people in one street – right along, from 1 to 102 – in every house, too – he must have walked thousands of miles, over the years, collecting the names, and then delivering the envelopes … and here, look, these are all for another street – and here – the streets are in alphabetical order … what can it all be?’

  ‘Must have brought him in a regular fortune,’ Gladys cried, willingly shaking off the silence and the feeling of that absence strong as a presence, ‘question is, where’s he hidden it?’

  Gerald rather energetically shook his head; as if defending something from the crass stupidity of the world.

  ‘No, no, it isn’t that, of course it isn’t that, Miss Barnes, it isn’t getting money – “My Life’s Work”, how could that be –’ he broke off. He was silent.

  ‘Must have been mental, then,’ suggested Gladys who, in the pause, had also had her thoughts about money, ‘never would believe it, always said he wasn’t. But writing envelopes all round the place, must have been.’

  ‘What was in them?’ Gerald was muttering, as he knelt before the lowest shelf and carefully lifted and replaced each pile, after glancing beneath, ‘that’s the answer, what was in them?’

  ‘’Ullo, ’ere’s something,’ and Gladys, who had been using her eyes while he used his hands, pounced on a piece of folded paper lying half-hidden at the end of a shelf, ‘that’s been through a bit of wear, hasn’t it?’

  The paper was almost cracked in two with use; it fell open limply in Gerald’s scrupulous hands.

  ‘Well, tell us,’ said Gladys impatiently, as he continued to study it without speaking, ‘does it say where it is?’

  Still Gerald made no reply, and when he did at last hand it to her, he had not spoken. Gladys studied the paper impatiently, while he, slowly rocking on his heels, stared out of the window into the fading light.

  ‘Kind of a letter,’ Gladys said finally, spelling out under her breath the ceremonious copperplate:

  ‘Dear, Missus, Mister – I beg you never to give thoughts to war, in no way, not to work for it, not by writing nor by reading about it nor by looking at the pictures nor on the television about it. Not in any way ever, at all. Not by being a soldier, sailor, airman, work in factory or above all at atom bombs. Above all atom bombs. No obligation for this, dear fellow creature. Signed Your Fellow Creature.’

  ‘P.S.,’ said Gerald slowly, without turning from the window, ‘If we all do this, we shall succeed.’

  The last of the silences that had fallen between them that afternoon fell between them now.

  ‘Funny …’ Gladys said at last, ‘must have been mental. Going on about war and atom bombs. Must have been. Oh well, it’s all a lot of rubbish, the dustman’ll create if he sees it, ever so arbitrary they are if there’s a bit extra, get the place cleaned up quick then Mrs P. can let it, hope we get someone nice that’s all, not much room except for one, is there, what say we take it all downstairs and burn it in the yard?’

  ‘What?’ he asked, slowly turning, ‘I’m sorry, Miss Barnes – what were you saying?’

  ‘Take it down, burn it in the yard,’ Gladys repeated impatiently; her lowish opinion of Gerald Corliss, formed on that first afternoon when she had called at the Vicarage to ask for advice about the rackman, had been strengthened by this evening’s work. ‘Best thing to do.’

  ‘No – not yet,’ he exclaimed, ‘look, Miss Barnes, I’d just like to look over these papers, it won’t take long, if you’ll give me twenty minutes? They’re – interesting.’

  Gladys dismissed a suspicion that he might have found a clue to the hiding-place of Mr Fisher’s fortune which she had overlooked. He wouldn’t be likely to do that, not a curate – might want it for the church, though, but then – no. She rapidly decided in his favour.

  ‘All right, then. What say I make us a cup of tea? You could do with one, I expect and I’m sure I can.’

  ‘Thank you … er … what a splendid idea.’

  Gladys went off, not with her usual haste. Suspicion lingered.

  In the dusk that had now crept into the room Gerald found candles, lit several, and began to turn over the envelopes stacked along the shelves. They were in perfect order: every house in two streets named Waterman and Ellis, lying next to one another in the south-eastern part of the Borough of Camden, were covered; and apparently every family living in them had its letter; in the same earnest formula.

  The words of Mr Fisher’s letter seemed to sound silently through the twilight and the silence as he read.

  ‘Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?’ and the answer, as it always had been and always would be, was nothing.

  Yet, for a Christian, despair was a sin.

  The finish of the enormous, dotty, noble dream was there; in the old suitcase on the table.

  Gerald shut the case and went away, leaving behind him a fortune indeed, but not of the kind to be recognized by Gladys Barnes.

  If he had trusted God, he thought, as he went down the stairs, if only he could have trusted.

  But God did not give to everyone the gift of trusting in Him, and what had to be said was, ‘Though Thou slay me, yet will I trust Thee.’

  That was what had to be choked out somehow, from the human heart and in the human voice.

  32

  Arnold’s memory for landmarks was excellent. He recalled, as he approached Sedgemere in its small valley, having noticed on the Easter Day visit a large, smart public house, lying back from the road, perhaps a mile on the London side of the village. He made towards it.

  The saloon bar was full. It was a prosperous-looking crowd of commuters, known to each other, exhausted after the day spent in London’s pressures, and noisy with nervous tension. Arnold ordered a pink gin, and, by a stroke of luck, caught the barman’s further attention amidst the loud voices and the smooth red necks.

  ‘Any chance of a bed here. Do you let rooms?’

  ‘We do, sir; but the place is smaller than you’d think. We’ve only got three rooms, and they’re occupied.’ He was hovering, almost on the wing, as he spoke.

  ‘Do you happen to have a Miss Pearson staying here?’

  It would be too much to say that the man leered or brightened; but there was a change in his expression, a kind of masking of suddenly aroused interest.

  ‘Yes, sir, Room Three.’ He added, ‘But she’s out this evening … three double whiskies, yes, sir, thank you,’ to a face, larger, smoother and more carmine than the surrounding ones, that suddenly loomed between them.

  This face, too, had showed a change as its owner caught Peggy’s name. He looked with concentration at Arnold, who noticed the look, and afterwards saw him rejoin a group near the door, which, after he had said something, turned as one man to stare. The expressions were something less than amiable.

  ‘No idea where she might have gone, I suppose?’ Arnold went on, unhurriedly and ignoring the row of faces, and the voices clamouring for same-agains along the curve of the bar. The voices now faltered, unmistakably, and died off into a noticeable hush.

  ‘Couldn’t say, sir,’ answered the barman, into what was certainly an interested and hostile silence – yes, it was hostile – ‘but she may be up at Rattrays’. The riding-school in the village. Understand she used to work there, sir. Good-evening, Mr Burroughs, the usual?’ He turned away.

  ‘Thanks,’ Arnold said.

  He strolled out into the dusk – through the crowd that did not quite make room for him to pass and did not quite stare at him. The stares were furtive. The atmosphere was like a strong smell.

  So Peggy’s been making herself unpopular, he mused, setting out along a dim white lane between poisoned hedges in the direction of the riding-school. It’s that little girl. She looked sweet. I bet they’re on her side. Oh well, all the better. I can do with some local support. He wondered if he ought to have brought the car; it must be less than a mile to the riding-school but she migh
t be upset, and need transport … if he found her.

  But he did not doubt that he would find her; he did not even wonder if he would have to go up to the school itself or how he should approach the people there if he did. My star’s guiding me, he thought wryly, casting a cynical glance up at a particularly brilliant one; he had once or twice thought of his strong sensation of guidance as his star. It was almost dark; the line between downs and sky was barely visible. The stars were the ‘isles of light’ that Byron once called them.

  Suddenly, coming round a sharp turn in the lane, he saw her coming slowly towards him; a tall figure in a white coat, moving slowly in the dusk, and crying quietly as she came. Crying! Women! Oh yes, twenty years of loneliness made you cry sometimes, whisky or not, but you didn’t cry out loud. He began to walk more quickly. Soundlessly, save for the muffled noise of her sobbing, they approached one another. In a moment he saw the lights of a car, approaching fast, and as it passed him, caught a glimpse of the furious, gesticulating, backward-glancing occupants; they had just missed killing her, and naturally this had irritated them.

  After the noise of the engine and the reek of petrol fumes and the impression of anger and resentment had passed, silence and night flowed back into what had formerly been a lonely lane. She was still coming towards him, unshaken, apparently, by her escape, a white moving shape, weeping but more softly now, with her face lifted to the stars. He quickened his step.

  ‘Peggy?’

  She let out a full shriek – but almost instantly it stopped. ‘Oh – it’s you –’ She stood, arms hanging, limply, staring at him. He could see her face clearly by the light of the stars, and it was swollen, ravaged, wild.

  ‘Did you think I was going to murder you?’

  ‘Oh – I don’t know – a car just nearly knocked me down – there is a man on the run somewhere, they want him for murdering a girl in Brighton yesterday – for a minute I did think –’