by Nina Bawden
It was very cold, and the room looked sordid and unfriendly with my clothes all over the place. I found my dressing-gown and went into the passage. I switched the light on in the bathroom. Sebastian was huddled on the floor between the basin and the wall. He was covered by a pile of towels, but his feet stuck out of them and they were bare and blue with cold.
I said, “What on earth are you doing here?”
He was blinking at the light and pressing himself back against the wall. When he saw me, he stopped crying, and I think he was relieved that it wasn’t one of the others in the house. I pulled him to his feet and the towels tumbled to the floor. He was wearing pyjamas that were too small for him; his bony wrists looked clumsy at the end of skimpy sleeves. His glasses were misted with crying, so he took them off and peered at me. He was shivering with crying and cold.
I held open the bathroom door. “Come along,” I said.
Back in my bedroom I lit the gas fire and made him sit close to it with the eiderdown over his shoulders. Then I fished about in my suitcase until I found the brandy flask. I poured a little into a toothmug and gave it to him.
“You’ll have to take it neat, old chap,” I said.
He didn’t like it. He coughed and choked, but he got it down, and after a minute he looked better and smiled shyly at me.
I squatted down beside him and said:
“What was the matter, old man?”
He started to sniff again. “I dunno,” he said. “I was frightened. Dorry stayed with me for a bit and then I went to sleep and when I woke up she’d gone and I was frightened again.”
“Why didn’t you call someone?” I asked.
There was a sullen, defensive look on his face.
“I dunno,” he said.
“Did you go and look for Dorry?” I said.
He nodded. “I couldn’t find her room.” He gave a hiccoughing sob. “I couldn’t find the light and I heard things.”
“What sort of things?” I asked.
His eyes widened and darkened. “Jus’things,” he said. “There was someone outside in the garden. It was a burglar. I wouldn’t have minded if Childe Roland had been there.”
Suddenly his face puckered up and he started to cry. “I didn’t give Childe Roland my supper. I didn’t. I thought it might be poisoned, so I didn’t eat it. But I wouldn’t have let Childe Roland have it. I once gave my dinner to my mice and they died. I didn’t mind about them. But I didn’t want Childe Roland to die. I jus’ put the tray on the floor when I went to the bathroom and he must’ve ate it then. An’then he died.”
I said, “It may not have been your supper, you know. He was awfully old. Maybe he just died.”
He shook his head obstinately, and his mouth set into a queer, hard line. Just then he didn’t look like a child.
“They poisoned him,” he said. “He wasn’t old at all. He was an awfully good ratter. He wouldn’t just have died.” Then he gave me a sly look. “You took some of my supper, didn’t you?” he said. “You took some of what was left on the plate when Mummy was putting me to bed. You put it in an envelope.”
He was staring at me intently, and I felt uncomfortable.
“Perhaps I did,” I said. “But you mustn’t tell anyone about it.”
He smiled, showing his yellow buck teeth. “Perhaps I won’t, then,” he said.
Then he yawned and rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “You can go to sleep in my bed if you want to,” I said.
He looked alarmed. “They wouldn’t know I was here, would they?” he said.
“No,” I said. “No one will know except me.”
“I don’t mind you,” he said unexpectedly. “You don’t hate me. Nor does Dorry. She knows … about the others. They all hate me, you know.”
Poor pathetic little beast, I thought, living in a nightmare. I picked him up and he weighed very little. He looked very small in the middle of the bed. He looked up at me and said solemnly, “You know, I thought I might find you if I couldn’t find Dorry. When I woke up, I mean. But I went past Aunt Venetia’s room, and she wasn’t there. She hadn’t been to bed. I was frightened, so I hid in the bathroom.”
“Are you sure she wasn’t there?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Her bed was tidy and the light was on. The door was wide open so I could see.” Then he opened his eyes wide. “What does she do with her leg at night?” he said.
“She takes it off,” I said.
He nodded to himself and yawned and shut his eyes. I stayed with him until he was breathing evenly. I left the bed lamp burning and went into the passage and shut the door.
The corridor was freezing; through the window at the end of the passage it was beginning to get light. I looked out and saw that the snow on the ledge was frozen over with a glassy skin. I went along the passage and up a flight of stairs to Venetia’s room. The door was open and the light was on. The bed was turned down and a nightdress lay across it. Everything was tidy; Venetia was always tidy. The only thing that was not in its place was the top of the powder bowl on the dressing-table. The top was on the floor, broken into two pieces, and the powder was spilt over the glass top of the table. A lipstick, without its cap, had fallen on to the dressing-stool. I picked it up, idly, and smelt it.
I went out of the room and stood in the corridor. The house was deathly quiet; there was not even a ticking clock to give the silence friendliness.
I wasn’t sure where Henry’s room was, so I opened the door of the first one I came to, and called him softly. I listened, but I couldn’t hear anyone breathing. Then the light snapped on, and I saw Rella sitting up in bed and looking at me. I hadn’t heard her move, so she must have been awake when I opened the door. Her eyes were alert, not muzzy, and her hair was tidy. She was wearing something black that pressed against her body in the draught from the door, and I could see the whiteness of her skin beneath it. She said, “Hallo,” and smiled at me.
It was, unmistakably, an invitation, and I felt the pulse quicken in my throat. But I said:
“I’m looking for Venetia. She’s not in her room.”
Her face stiffened, and the smile faded. She looked much older. “As you see,” she said, and gestured at the room, “she isn’t here.”
She put her hand to the switch of the bed lamp and waited. There was nothing I could do but go. I wondered if it was Rella who had been smoking so recently, and whether she always smoked a pipe in private.
The next room was the right one. I turned on the light. Henry was heavily asleep. I had to shake him hard before he woke and sat up, his spiky hair standing on end.
“What the hell?” he said, and I told him.
“You must be mad,” he said, when I’d finished. “She’s probably in the bathroom.”
“And been there since we all went to bed?” I said. “But don’t bother yourself. I only came to see if she was with you.”
That fetched him. Henry turned scarlet, and I thought of the smell of tobacco in Rella’s room and reflected that it would be too much to expect, even of such an English gent as Henry, that he should stay celibate for ever. Thinking like that, the whole tragedy of Venetia’s marriage came back to me, and I was coldly, deadly angry. I hated Henry; I could have put my hands round his thick red neck and strangled him.
I said, “I had expected you to show some concern for your wife’s safety.”
He got out of bed and faced me, looking portly and pompous in his pyjamas.
“Her safety?” he said.
I said weakly, “I didn’t mean it like that. Only she should be in her room, shouldn’t she?”
We walked to her room in stiff silence. I had said the unforgivable, mentioned the unmentionable, and Henry showed it in the rigidity of his back. We went as if we marched to martial music. The room was as I had left it.
I said, “Where could she be?”
Henry wasn’t looking angry any longer. His eyes were alarmed. We went downstairs; the ground floor of the house was empty. In the d
rawing-room the long windows were open and the wind came in, ballooning the curtains. It was a raw, treacherous wind, and the carpet was covered with blown snow. Henry looked at the windows incredulously.
“She can’t have gone out,” he said.
I reminded him, “They were shut when we went to bed.”
His face was bewildered and unhappy.
“We’d better call Brigid,” he said.
We went upstairs again and knocked on her door. When we went in she rolled over like a fat seal and blinked up at us with her enormous, cow’s eyes, pulling the bedclothes up round her chin, and blushing as though there was something immoral in being seen in bed. We left the room like a pair of gentlemen while she got into a thick Jæger dressing-gown and came out to join us in the passage. Her skin was damp with sleep and she looked like a hockey-playing schoolgirl. It was difficult to remember that she had ever married and borne a child; impossible to associate her with the neurotic little specimen sleeping in my bed.
“She must be in the house,” she said. “I mean, she wouldn’t have gone out. Not on a night like this. Why should she, anyway.”
“For God’s sake,” I said, and she bit her lip. Henry eyed me wrathfully.
“We’ll look over the house,” said Henry, playing with his moustache. “Then we’ll look outside. She can’t have gone far. The whole thing’s absurd.”
Looking at the solid rock of him standing there it really did seem absurd; the whole situation seemed a fantastic charade that we were playing at a Christmas party. But I was sweating in spite of the cold.
Except Sebastian, the whole house was awake. Dorry was making coffee in the kitchen; Brigid had woken Rella and said that she was getting dressed. Tom Adlesburg had appeared without being called; he was wearing trousers under his dressing-gown, and he had the air of a man who has been smoking quietly before going to bed.
Somehow it was his arrival that gave the whole business a feeling of reality. He leant against the banisters in the hall, his clipped, nasal voice giving directions, making an end of our aimless searching. He despatched Henry to the outbuildings, Brigid to the bedrooms, and me to the attics. When we had finished we were to go to the drawing-room.
There was one of those open grates where you burn logs instead of coal, and the mound of white ash was still smouldering. I kicked at the logs and they started to blaze. Brigid crouched by the fire with the bellows, her dark hair falling round her face. Dorry had put coffee on the small table in front of the fire, and I poured it out and gulped at my cup thankfully. Henry came in with snow on his shoes.
“The car’s gone,” he said. “The garage door was open. There aren’t any tracks.”
“It’s been snowing most of the night,” I said.
“She can’t have gone far,” said Brigid. “There was hardly any petrol in the tank.”
It was seven o’clock, and we sat and looked at each other like fools.
I said, “We must look outside.” No one said anything; we all got coats and boots and went into the garden. It was almost light now. The ground was thick with snow and slippery. I had never known it could be so cold in England. We separated; I went westwards, across the wooded garden to the farm. At first I could hear the others behind me, their voices small and very clear. Then there was silence, a kind of hush that made me want to tread softly on the ground. I went across a field and came to the gate that led to the farm-yard. In the farm buildings I could hear the cattle stamping. That sounded very loud in the dead world. In the empty yard the muck heaps steamed in the icy air. Suddenly a cock crew, a clarion, starting echoes in the stillness.
I was very cold and my mouth was sore with the wind. I opened the gate and went through the yard into the empty lane. Now there was nothing except whiteness and dead cold. My eyes started to ache. I walked a little way down the lane, and then turned back to the house.
They had all come back except Henry. They were huddled by the fire and they all had the same stunned look on their faces. I poured out some more coffee and drank it. No one said anything.
Henry came in. He stood in the doorway, stamping the snow from his shoes. It melted on to the carpet. His eyes, with a look of alarm in them, raked the room and rested on Brigid. Brigid was standing by the fire, quite still. She held his look for a long moment, and then I knew they were in love with each other. Somehow I had not thought either of them capable of passion, and yet it was passion that was between them now. I had seen their blundering affection for each other, but never anything like this. There was naked love in their faces.
Henry said, as if they were alone in the room, “Brigid.” And she went across the room to him and put her hand on his arm. Then Henry said:
“I think we should ring up the police.”
We found the car abandoned in a side lane. There were no footsteps leading from it, but we had not expected them. The young policeman who had ridden up to the house on his bicycle had said that it had snowed until four o’clock in the morning.
In the afternoon it grew a little warmer; the wind was gusty, and the surface of the snow thawed a little. We searched the lanes and ditches near the car in widening circles. Brigid came with me; she clung to my arm, and there was a faint, awed look on her face as if she were a child at an entertainment arranged for her benefit.
At about four o’clock we heard someone shouting. On the far side of the field the policeman was waving his arms and shouting something we could not hear. I pushed Brigid’s arm away and ran, stumbling, over the snow. The policeman was standing at the edge of a quarry, a small, steep hole at the end of the farm land. There was a tangle of bushes at the bottom of it, and down the sides were the marks of his slipping feet. He was a very young man, and his face was as white as the snow.
She was there in the bottom of the quarry. She lay on her back, her arms outspread, her stiff hands clutching a mound of twigs and frozen snow. We cleared away the bushes that had hidden her body, and knelt down beside it.
Later they let me carry her back to the house. She was very light; I held her with her lovely, disfigured face turned into my coat, and her yellow hair streaming over my arm. They walked beside me, talking. I heard them dimly as though I were dreaming it all. There was no doubt, they said, as to what had happened. She had taken the car for a night drive, the car had run out of petrol, and she had tried to walk home across the fields. It was dark, and she had slipped into the quarry. The strap that held her leg had broken; her numbed fingers could not mend it. She had tried to get out of the quarry, dragging herself with her hands and her one leg, but it was dark and cold and the quarry sides were steep. That she had tried, was clear from the state of her hands; the kid gloves she wore were torn and the hands beneath them lacerated. She had slipped, at last, into the deep bottom of the quarry and lain there, exhausted with cold. She had died there.
The doctor said she must have died some time in the early hours of the morning.
I put her on her bed and covered the blotched and hideous face. I stayed with her for a long time. She had been a part of me for so many years, and I felt as if I too had died.
I remembered the day when the bomb had fallen and she had been buried beneath the debris. A beam had fallen across her leg; it took the rescue squad ten hours to get her out. She lay, waxen-faced on the pavement, in her own slow-welling blood. And in the hospital where they had taken off her leg, the nurses cried, and said how sad it was because she was so pretty. She was just fourteen years old.
Afterwards she had a wooden leg because she was growing so fast and the mechanical kind were too expensive. She wore dungarees to hide it. It was made very simply so that she could put it on and take it off herself. She would never let anyone else help her.
Her stepmother had tried to be kind; she was a fat and silly woman, blunderingly affectionate, unfitted for tragedy. She liked life to be a mixture of jolly, fat babies and women’s magazines. Things like little girls losing their legs belonged to the cinema screen where you could have a
good cry and then go home and make a cup of tea. She had done her best; she had tried to be tactful and kind. She wanted to mother Venetia, poor motherless child. But Venetia did not want to be mothered.
One day she said, white round the mouth, “She tried to get into the bathroom last night. She said she wanted to help me and that it wasn’t safe for me to lock the door. But she just wanted to look. Do you know what I look like, Paul, without it? I look like an animal. I have to crawl along the floor like an animal. They’re all like that. They want to see. At school it’s horrible. They’re all so nice to me, Paul, just because they think that I’ll show them in the lavatories.”
I remembered that all the time she had never cried.
I remembered how proud she had been the day that she had raced me upstairs.
I remembered how beautiful she had been and how much I had loved her. How she was the only one I had ever loved.
Then Brigid stood beside me. She said:
“Paul, dear Paul, come and have some supper. You must have something to eat.”
Her face was swollen and ugly, her mouth puffed up with tears. She did not seem to mind what she looked like. I wasn’t used to women who cried without caring what it did to their faces.
I remembered how Venetia and I had always teased her, silly, slow Brigid, and marvelled that she could cry for Venetia.
She said softly, and with pity in her voice, “She was so young, Paul, and so lovely.”
I don’t know why I put an arm round her shoulder, but I did.
“She was young,” I said. “And lovely. And very, very rotten, so you mustn’t cry too much.”
Chapter Three
The Adlesburgs had gone. We dined, Brigid and Henry and I, alone in the massive Victorian dining-room. It was lit by one of those darkly shaded lamps that hang low over the table, lighting up the hands of the diners and leaving their faces in shadow. I was hungry, and I ate well. I think that shocked Brigid. She said nothing, but she sat like a solid, disapproving image in the dusky red twilight beyond the pool of light. Henry was nervous; his plump hands played with the bread at the side of his plate, crumbling it with his fingers and patting the crumbs into little mounds.
