Cuckoo in the Night

by Pamela Kent

  “Your doctor?” Janine asked. “What does he say?”

  Chris shrugged.

  “Not much. A month ago he insisted on my seeing a psychiatrist, but that, too, didn’t bring forth very much result. The psychiatrist simply said what almost anybody else could have said in the circumstances, that I was overwrought and a bit unbalanced—oh, not badly,” laughing shakily—“and that the best thing Stephen could do was take me away for a while.”

  “And what did Stephen say to that?”

  “He couldn’t possibly spare the time. He’s awfully busy, you know. I honestly hardly see anything of him nowadays.”

  Janine nodded thoughtfully.

  “So much I gathered. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t be sent away somewhere.”

  But the very idea seemed to throw Chris into a frenzy of disapproval.

  “Oh, no, I don’t want to go away by myself!” she declared. “I see little enough of Stephen as it is, and if I went away I might not see him for ages. He’d probably think it a good idea, and tell me I must stay away … Besides,” growing more controlled, “I don’t want to leave my home, and all it’s come to mean to me. I want to get strong and well again, make this place so attractive that Stephen will be happy when he’s here, and perhaps … have another try at starting a family when I’m fit for it.”

  Janine sat down in the chair opposite her and studied her with concerned eyes.

  “You said something about being afraid,” she said, knowing that she had to mention it.

  Instantly Chris’s whole expression altered. Her smooth, pale mask of a face seemed to become secretive, furtive. Her luminous green eyes avoided the other girl’s.

  “That’s true,” she said, speaking hurriedly, unconvincingly. “I am afraid sometimes—usually at night, when Stephen’s away—but I’m also afraid sometimes in the daytime, and—and when Stephen’s here.”

  “What are you afraid of?” her sister asked, watching her.

  Chris shrugged again, and laughed foolishly.

  “Oh, the kind of things that the psychiatrist said—or implied—were pure imagination. I hear sounds that other people don’t hear, footsteps walking under my window in the night. Once or twice I’ve thought there were footsteps in my room. This is a very old house, you know,” speaking still more hastily, “and there’s a door to my room which is now sealed up, and which used to connect with a passageway leading to a disused wing of the house. Of course, I know it’s my imagination, but sometimes when I wake up suddenly in the night I know the door is standing open, and that someone is standing there and looking at me …” She clapped both hands up to her face in a terrified gesture. “That’s why I asked you to come home!”

  Janine ignored this.

  “Where does Stephen sleep?” she asked.

  “In the room next to mine. We share a bathroom and it’s between our rooms.”

  “And when you call out in the night does he come to you at once?”

  “If he’s at home, he does. At least, sometimes … But Stephen,” she added miserably, “sleeps very heavily, and it’s difficult to wake him when he is asleep.”

  “And you don’t—” putting the question delicately—“think it would be a good idea if you shared a room?”

  “Oh, no,” Chris answered, the colour rising to her cheeks. “You see,” she explained, “I’m so restless, and I sleep so badly, poor Stephen wouldn’t get any rest at all if we reverted to our old practice of sharing the same bedroom. And as he has to be mentally alert for his job it would never do if he didn’t get enough rest.”

  “Of course not,” Janine agreed in a sympathetic voice.

  It was her turn to get up and walk restlessly about the room.

  “Of course,” she said, at last, “it’s obvious to me your nerves are in an extremely bad state, and the best thing would be for you to go away … a sea voyage, or something. But if you won’t go away, well …I’m here now!” going up to her sister and gripping her shoulder comfortingly. “And this room of mine?” glancing round it. “How far away is it from yours?”

  “It’s in what we call the old wing, but it isn’t really very far away.”

  “Good!”

  “And I feel better already now that you’re here.”

  Janine felt inexpressibly touched. The old Chris would never have made such an admission.

  “Well, I’ll do my best to cheer you up now that I’m here,” she promised. And then a thought occurred to her. “But what about your neighbours? Aren’t any of them nice, friendly people who come and call on you sometimes? You used to be very keen on dinner-parties and cocktail-parties.”

  But once again Chris shook her head.

  “Most of them are bridge fiends,” she explained, “and I don’t play bridge. Our nearest neighbour—and, incidentally, the nicest—is old Lady Hannaford, who lives at Tor Park. But she’s almost a complete invalid nowadays and doesn’t get out very much. But when I do meet her she gives me a lot of excellent advice,” smiling wryly. “She has a nephew, Tim, who visits her sometimes, and if I was young and unmarried I’d probably think him unusually attractive. She also has a nurse-companion whom I do not like.”

  She spoke emphatically.

  “Anybody else?”

  “Only Colonel Dyson at Sandalford Shaws. It’s a lovely house, but the Colonel, like Lady Hannaford, is getting on in years, and he’s very deaf. He was once, I believe, in love with Lady Hannaford, although you wouldn’t guess it if you saw them together. He bullies her … or he tries to.”

  “And that’s the lot?”

  “If you exclude the vicar. He doesn’t take a very active part in parish affairs.”

  Janine felt inclined to throw up her hands.

  “No wonder you’ve got a bit edgy. Personally, I can do without social exchanges, but in a spot like this I’d like to feel I had a few friends. I simply do not understand why Stephen brought you here.” Chris rose somewhat hurriedly, as if she had no wish to pursue the subject further … for the time being, at any rate. She forced a bright smile to her lips as she looked at her sister.

  “Well, darling, I’ll leave you to get unpacked,” she said. “If you need anything just ring the bell, and one of the maids will answer. They don’t go off duty until we’ve had dinner. I don’t bother to change every night, but I will tonight, because you’re here. And Stephen!”

  Janine nodded.

  Chris moved impulsively closer to her. She put out a hand and laid it on her arm.

  “You don’t hold it against me any longer because I—took Stephen from you, do you?” she said. “In your heart, I mean! I know you never made any fuss at the time, and you’ve said more than once that you didn’t really blame me … but it was a mean thing to do. After all,” studying her sister closely, “I might have ruined your life!”

  Janine reassured her on that head.

  “If you did, it’s patched itself up again very nicely. I got over the whole thing more than a year ago.”

  “But you do still think Stephen is attractive?”

  “To some women, yes … but never again to me!”

  Chris turned away with a half sigh. It could have been that she didn’t entirely believe her sister.

  Chapter IV

  MUCH later that night Janine stood looking out of her window at the unexpected blackness that seemed to crouch like some human creature below her in the garden. Although the moon had risen, and she had glimpsed it before she came upstairs to bed, it now seemed to have become entirely obscured by the trees that crowded close to the house … On that particular corner of it, at any rate.

  She remembered Chris had talked about the new plantation of firs at dinner. Far from being a “new” plantation it was already a coppice at least fifty years old, and some of the trees were exceptionally well grown. When she opened her window and leaned out into the velvety blackness she could smell the aromatic scent of the pines, mixed with the enticing sweetness of roses.

  She leaned there
for several minutes. It was curiously still, until she remembered the close proximity of the moor. According to Stephen it was the simplest thing in the world to get lost on the moor, even in broad daylight, so she had given her word not to indulge any too venturesome impulses. All the same, the thought of all those lonely expanses out there, the brackish pools of silent water, the great stones, the high tors, the lonely clumps of trees, provided her with an odd sensation as she leant on her bedroom window-sill.

  She felt shivery all at once, and uneasy … and at the same time she was thrilled because it was an entirely unknown world, and she had yet to make its real acquaintance.

  She started to undress in the dark, because she didn’t wish to draw her curtains, and she could watch the moon climb above the tops of the trees and finally pour its silver flood of light right across her carpet. She knew that the drive wound itself through the blackness outside, so she kept well away from the window, but it seemed hardly likely that anyone would be using the drive at that time of night.

  It had been quite a pleasant evening, and she was still wondering whether Chris’s letter hadn’t been inspired by her loneliness, and for no more valid reason. Loneliness could be put right, and Stephen had seemed so attentive to his wife both before, throughout, and after dinner that the girl who had once fancied herself desperately in love with him was more or less convinced that Chris still held him in the hollow of one of her fragile hands. They had talked quite openly about the problem of Chris’s general health and her loneliness when dinner was over and the maid had brought their coffee to the drawing-room, and it had seemed to Janine that Stephen was genuinely striving to hit upon some solution that would result in his wife being restored to health, and enjoying life again.

  Every time he passed Chris’s chair he had touched her cheek affectionately, and it was he who insisted that she transfer to a couch when she looked as if she was growing weary. Because she complained of feeling cold he had turned on the powerful electric fire, and had also tucked a light rug over her knees. He insisted that she drank a small whisky before going to bed, and had carried her up the stairs to her room himself.

  When Janine last saw her she was lying luxuriating in the feel of her silk sheets and oyster satin eiderdown, and a diffused pink light was pouring over her and her lace-edged pillows from the shaded light above her bed.

  She had called out an almost gay goodnight to her sister.

  “Sleep well,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning!”

  Janine climbed into bed, and she was glad now that she had omitted to put on the light, for her room was that much brighter now that the moon had cleared the trees. She lay listening to the odd sounds that broke the silence occasionally … calls of night birds, the fluttering of wings amongst the branches, the far-off bark of a fox. They sounded uncannily clear in the all-pervading stillness. Especially the sound of a car on the distant main road.

  The lonely hoot of an owl that must have been just outside her window brought her upright on her elbows just as she was beginning to grow a little drowsy, and the effect of moonlight and shadows inside her room was beginning to bemuse her a little. And then when she almost laughed at herself for being alarmed by an owl a new sound quivered in the atmosphere. It cut the silence like a knife, was repeated three times, and ended in a soft, silvery whistle.

  “Cuckoo … cuckoo … cuckoo!”

  And the whistling was like the full-throated melody of nightingales.

  She found it difficult to believe that a cuckoo and a nightingale could share the same branch outside her bedroom window. And yet the throat that produced the cuckoo sound was undoubtedly responsible for the liquid altercation amongst a colony of nightingales.

  Bewildered, she lay back on her pillows and tried to sort the problem out. Either she had slept without realising it and dreamed the sounds, or extraordinary things were happening out there under cover of the night.

  Some lines of doggerel, familiar in childhood, came back to her:

  In May he sings all day,

  In June he changes his tune,

  In July he flies away …

  So that disposed of cuckoos. On a hot August night it was most unlikely she would be hearing one, and nightingales were usually heard in the heart of a wood or thicket. Or so she understood.

  After five minutes of complete silence she decided that it didn’t matter in any case, and composed herself for sleep again. Her long eyelashes fluttered, her eyes closed. Between sleeping and waking she allowed her mind to dwell on Chris and her husband, and she thought what a very real pity it was their marriage seemed about to come unstuck. They were such a handsome couple, and they must have been very much in love with one another when they risked shattering another human being’s happiness in order to live their lives together. Now, apparently, they were no longer consumed with the burning desire to be together always, and although that was partially natural in a couple who had been married for two years it was not an omen for a happy future.

  Unless, of course, it was merely a phase—part of the process of adjustment—they were going through.

  Janine’s eyelids felt as if they were weighted with lead, and her thoughts became confused. Just before she actually drifted into sleep some stealthy movements below her window almost brought her to the verge of wakefulness again, but they were so exceptionally stealthy that they failed to penetrate to her inner consciousness.

  She was awakened without the least idea of how much later it was by the light being switched on in her room, and to her utter astonishment a man was standing with his hand on the switch just inside the door and staring at her as if he was as surprised as she was. He was about the same height as Stephen, and he was wearing a dinner-jacket. His hair appeared to be a trifle unruly—warm and brown, with a fiery note in it—and his face was brown, and his eyes, and the hand that had snapped the light on …

  In fact, in that moment of first awakening, the predominant impression she received was of a brown man with startlingly white linen, who appeared to be gazing at the bed in a kind of horror, and saying something unintelligible to himself. If she had been wider awake she would have realised that he was swearing in consternation.

  So much she took in, and then she sat bolt upright in bed and started to scream. Or she would have screamed had not the man forsaken the electric light switch and darted across the room towards her and the bed, after which she felt his hand clamped down remorselessly over her open mouth.

  “Be quiet,” he ordered. “Shut up, you little fool! Do you want to rouse the entire house?”

  If it had been possible for her to answer him Janine would have assured him feverishly that that was precisely what she would have chosen to do above everything else. But the sustained pressure of his hand made it impossible, almost, for her to breathe. She gazed up at him with wild and distended eyes, while thoughts of escaped prisoners and the lonely stretches of the moor outside the bedroom window raced through her head and increased her panic. It was only afterwards—some considerable while afterwards—that the idea of an escaped prisoner wearing a dinner-jacket that was obviously his own because it fitted him so perfectly, and that impeccable linen, struck her so forcibly as absurd that it brought a smile to her lips.

  But before she was able to smile she struggled frantically to free her mouth. His hand pressed against it so forcibly that he practically forced her back on to her pillows, and it smelled of antiseptic soap, tobacco and engine oil.

  “Sorry to mishandle a lady—particularly one in a nightdress!—so inconsiderately,” he apologised. “But unless you’re prepared to give me your word that you won’t make a sound I can’t let you go!”

  Janine fought furiously and managed to free her mouth.

  “How can I give you my word while you try to smother me?” she demanded, with so much uncontrolled indignation in her voice that he smiled with a flash of excellent white teeth.

  “There’s something in that,” he agreed, and he actually bent to st
raighten her pillows having released her. “And you appear to be more rational now, so we won’t pursue the matter. What are you doing in this room?”

  “It’s my room,” she answered. “That is to say, it’s one of the guest rooms here, and it’s been allotted to me to sleep in. But what’s that got to do with you, anyway? And, in any case, who are you?”

  “Not a burglar,” he replied. “Not even an unwelcome and unwanted intruder, or a violent male bent on depriving you of your virtue. The name’s Hannaford, Tim Hannaford, and I usually occupy this room when I stay here. My car broke down a quarter of a mile from here and I decided I’d have to seek hospitality. But I didn’t expect to find a female sleeping the sleep of the just—or the unjust!—in the place where I proposed to stretch myself out for the night!”

  Janine gaped at him.

  “That’s cool, isn’t it?” she said. “Or do you have some sort of a prior claim to this bed? And did it never occur to you to ring the front door bell and announce your arrival in the normal manner?”

  He shook his head.

  “I didn’t want to rouse the house. I could see there were no lights, and from that I deduced that the entire household had retired. I’ve done this sort of thing before, so there’ll be no astonishment when I’m found here to-morrow morning.”

  “Really?” Janine said faintly. And then, with more venom: “Well, perhaps that’s just as well, since you’ve given me the fright of my life!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said penitently.