The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories

by Joan Aiken

  Engines and presses in the factories had ceased their clanging and thudding; workers had gone home; in the centre of Rumbury Town the only sound to be heard was the distant, muted roar of London; and a nearer surge of pop music, sizzle of fish frying, and shouts of children from the few inhabited streets. Dr. Smith parked her car in one of these, locked it carefully, and went in search of her friend, Miss January Lestrange.

  Rumbury Town seemed a curious environment for a spinster who taught the harp. And Miss Lestrange was a real spinster of the old-fashioned kind; she walked very slowly, with small, precise steps; she wore tight, pointed button boots, very shiny, which ended halfway up her calf, and long serge skirts, trimmed with rows of braid, which hung down over the boots; it was pure chance that Miss Lestrange’s style of dressing was now once more the height of fashion, and a circumstance that she would certainly not have noticed; had she done so she might have been mildly irritated. Her grey hair was smoothly drawn back into a bun, and she wore pince-nez; all the children of Rumbury Town wondered how she managed to make them balance on her nose. Miss Lestrange kept herself to herself and never troubled her neighbors; many of them, if they had thought about it, would not have been surprised to be told that she was a thin, grey old ghost, occasionally to be seen gliding out on her small shopping errands. And the children, though they were not exactly frightened of her, never chalked on her door, or threw ice-lolly sticks after her, or sang rude rhymes about her, as they did about most other adults in the neighbourhood. Miss Lestrange, however, was no ghost, and although she had lived within sound of St Griswold’s bells for forty years, was not a born citizen of the district; she still did not venture into the twilit heart of Rumbury Town.

  “Why do you live here?” Dr. Smith asked, when she had knocked on the faded blue door with its postcard, j. lestrange, harp tuition, and had been admitted, passing a small frantic-looking boy on his way out with a music-case under his arm.

  “It amazes me the way some of them keep on coming,” murmured Miss Lestrange, zipping its case over the harp, which was as tall, gaunt, and worn-looking as she herself. “I’ve told them and told them that you don’t get a first-rate harpist once in a generation, but they all think they have the seed of it in them.”

  “What about that boy? Is he any good?”

  Miss Lestrange shrugged.

  “He’s the same as the rest. I don’t hold out false hopes and sweet promises. I send him away at the end of the lessons utterly despondent, limp as rhubarb, but by next time he’s always plucked up heart again and thinks he’ll be a second David. Well, Jane, it is nice to see you. What brings you here?”

  “Suppose I said that I wanted some more lessons?” Dr. Smith asked with a small, grim smile.

  “I should tell you what I told your parents. It would be a waste of their money, my time, and yours, to teach you for another five minutes.”

  “And they at least believed you. So I went away and trained for a doctor.”

  “And have turned into a good one, from what I hear.” Miss Lestrange nodded at her ex-pupil affectionately. “I hope you will stay and take your evening meal with me and tell me about your work.”

  But her glance strayed a little doubtfully to the screened corner of the room where she cooked over a methylated-spirit lamp; she had been about to brew herself a nourishing or at least vitamin-rich soup, made from hot water, parsley, grown in her window-box, and salt.

  “No, no, I came to invite you out. I have to pay one call on a patient not far from here, and then I thought we’d go to the Chinese restaurant at the corner of Inkermann Street. Put on your coat and let’s be off.”

  Miss Lestrange was always businesslike.

  “Well, that would certainly be a more enjoyable meal than the one I could have offered you,” she said, put on her coat, and a black hat which had the shape though not the festive air of a vol-au-vent, and ushered out her visitor, locking the door behind them.

  The little grimy street was silent and watchful. Half a dozen children stared, to see Miss Lestrange setting out at such an unwonted time of day, in such an unwonted manner, in a car, with a friend.

  Dr. Smith reverted to her first, unanswered question.

  “Why do you live here?”

  “The rents are very low,” Miss Lestrange said mildly. “Five pounds a year for my room.”

  “But in a better part of town you might get more pupils—bright ones . . .”

  “The world is not that full of gifted harpists,” Miss Lestrange said drily. “And this neighbourhood suits me.”

  “You have friends here?”

  “Once I did. One friend. We have not seen each other for some time. But as one grows older,” Miss Lestrange said calmly, “one requires fewer friends.”

  Reflecting that it would be difficult to have fewer friends than one, Dr. Smith brought her car to a halt by a large, grim tenement with a dozen arched entrances. The road that passed it was an old, wide, cobbled one, and on the opposite side began the cluttered, dusky jumble of piled-up factory, warehouse, shed, storehouse, office, factory and lumber-yard that like a great human badger-warren covered the heart of Rumbury Town.

  “My patient lives just through here; I shan’t be long.”

  “Who is your patient?” inquired Miss Lestrange, as the doctor turned to lift her black case from the rear seat of the car.

  “Well, as a matter of fact he’s quite well-known—the writer Tom Rampisham. Why, like you, he chooses to live in this godforsaken spot I don’t know, but here he’s lived for goodness knows how many years. He has a ground-floor flat in that gloomy block.”

  “Tom Rampisham,” Miss Lestrange said musingly. “It is some time since he did one of his broadcasts. What’s his trouble?”

  “Heart. Well, I probably shan’t be more than a few minutes. But here’s a spare car-key in case you want to stroll about.”

  It looked an unpromising area for a stroll. But when Dr. Smith’s few minutes lengthened to ten, and then to fifteen, Miss Lestrange, who seemed restless and disinclined to sit still, even after a long day’s work, got out of the car, locked it, and stood irresolutely on the pavement.

  For a moment she stared at the large, forbidding block into which the doctor had vanished. Then, with decision, she turned her back on it and struck off briskly across the road. Almost immediately opposite the car was a little opening in the cliff-like façade of warehouses, one of those narrow lanes which the denizens of Rumbury Town call hackets, which led inwards, with many angles and windings and sudden changes of direction, towards the heart of the maze.

  Along this alley Miss Lestrange rapidly walked. It seemed as if she walked from rather than to anything in particular; her head was bent, her eyes fixed on the greasy cobbles, she ignored the entrances with their mysterious signs: Wishaw, Flock Sprayers; Saloop, Ear Piercing Specialists; Ample Tops; The Cake Candle Co.; Madame Simkins, Feathers; Sugg, Ganister Maker and Refractory Materials Manufacturer; Toppling Seashell Merchants; Shawl, String, and Sheepskin Co.; Willow Specialists and Wood Wool Packers. One and all, she passed them without a glance, even the Shawl, String, and Sheepskin office, which was in fact the source of her new harp-strings when the old ones had snapped under the inexpert fingers of the youth of Rumbury Town.

  Miss Lestrange walked fast, talking to herself, as elderly people do who lead solitary lives.

  “If he were ill he might ask for me,” she muttered, going past Gay Injectors and Ejectors without sparing a thought to wonder what obscure goods or services their name denoted. “He once said he might; I remember his saying that if he were taken ill he might get in touch with me; it’s queer that I can hardly remember what we quarreled about, and yet I can remember that.”

  The alley took a turn, widened, and led her into a melancholy little area of street market: crockery stalls, cheap clothing stalls, vegetable
stalls, second-hand book and junk stalls. The traders were just closing up for the night, piling their unsold wares—of which there seemed to be a great many—back into cartons; the way was impeded by boxes of rubbish, and slippery with squashed vegetables, but Miss Lestrange stepped briskly round and over these obstacles without appearing to notice them.

  “What did we quarrel about, all that long time ago?” she mused, neatly by-passing a pram loaded with dusty tins of furniture polish and stepping over a crate labeled supershine wholesale: we promise dazzling results. “It was something to do with his poetry, wasn’t it?”

  The lane narrowed again and she went on between overhanging cliffs of blackened brick, frowning a little, over her pince-nez, as she tried to summon up a young, lively, impatient face. What had he looked like, exactly? At one time she had known his face by heart—better than her own, for Miss Lestrange had never been one to spend much time gazing at herself in mirrors. Noticeable cheekbones, a lock of hair that always fell forward; that was all she could remember.

  We Promise Dazzling Results.

  “I don’t know anything about poetry, Tom. How can I say if it’s good or bad?”

  “You’ve got an opinion, haven’t you, girl? You can say what you think?”

  “You don’t really want me to say what I think. You just want me to praise them.”

  “Damn it, that’s not true, January. January!” he said bitterly. “There never was a more appropriate bit of classification. If ever anybody was ice-cold, frozen hard, ungenerous, utterly unwilling to give an inch, it’s you!”

  “That’s not true!” she had wanted to cry. “It’s just that I can’t praise what I don’t understand, I won’t make pretty speeches just to encourage. How can I tell about your poetry? How can I say if I don’t know? It wouldn’t be right.”

  But he had already stuffed the disputed poems into an old black satchel and gone striding off; that was the last time she had seen him.

  She passed a café with an inscription in what looked like white grease on its window-glass: Sausages, potatoes, onions, peas; frying now, always frying. Why not try our fry?

  A staggeringly strong, hot waft of sausage and onion came from the open door; inside were boys with tiny heads, tiny eyes, and huge feet in black boots; as she hurried by, Miss Lestrange felt their eyes investigating her and then deciding that she was not worth the trouble. The hot smell of food made her feel sick and reminded her that she was trembling with hunger; for her lunch at midday she had eaten half a hard-boiled egg, for her breakfast a cup of milkless tea.

  “I suppose I shall have to put my fees up,” she thought, frowning again.

  A shrill whistle, with something familiar about it, disturbed her chain of thought, and she glanced ahead. It was the tune, not the whistle, that was familiar: in a moment she identified it as a tune she had written herself, an easy tune for beginners on the harp; she had called it Snowdrops.

  And, rollerskating heedlessly in her direction, whistling it shrilly, but in tune, came the boy to whom she had just finished giving a lesson earlier that evening when Dr. Smith arrived.

  Their surprise at meeting was equal. He had almost run into her; he skidded to a jerky stop, braking himself with a hand on the alley wall.

  “Miss Lestrange! Coo, you’re a long way from home, aren’t you? You lost your way?”

  “Good evening, David. No, I have not lost my way,” Miss Lestrange replied briskly. “I am simply taking a walk.” What is there surprising in that? her tone expressed.

  David looked startled; then he gave her a teasing, disbelieving grin, which made his crooked eyebrows shoot off round the corners of his face. She had never noticed this trick before; but then of course in his lessons he never did grin; he was always sweatingly anxious and subdued.

  “I don’t believe you’re just out for a walk; I think you’re after that there buried treasure!”

  “Buried treasure? What buried treasure, pray?”

  “Why, the treasure they say’s buried somewhere under the middle o’ Rumbury Town. That’s what you’re after. But you won’t find it! They say the old Devil’s keeping an eye on it for himself. If I were you, Miss Lestrange, I’d turn back before you do get lost!”

  “I shall do no such thing,” Miss Lestrange said firmly, and she went on her way, and David went skating zigzag on his way, whistling again the little tune, Snowdrops—“Mi, re, doh, Snowdrops in the snow . . .”

  But Miss Lestrange did turn and look once after David, slightly puzzled. He was so different, so much livelier and more sure of himself than during her lessons; he had quite surprised her.

  But as for getting lost—what nonsense.

  Nevertheless, in a couple of minutes, without being aware of it, Miss Lestrange did lose herself. She came to a point where five alleys met at an open space shaped like a star, chose one at random, walked a fair way along it, came to another similar intersection, and chose again. Rumbury Town folded itself round her. The green sky overhead was turning to navy-blue.

  And all around her was dark, too; like the crater of an extinct volcano. An occasional orange streetlight dimly illuminated the alleyway. Not a sound to be heard. It was a dead world.

  Suddenly Miss Lestrange felt uneasy. Her thoughts flew to the professional visit taking place behind her, from the vision of which she had so determinedly started away. Jane must have left him by now. Probably in the car, wondering where I’ve got to. I had better turn back.

  She turned back. And came to the first of the star-shaped conjunctions of lanes.

  “Which was mine?” She stood wondering. All four openings facing her looked blank, like shut drawers; she could find no recognizable feature in any of them. The names were just visible: Lambskin Alley, New Year Way, Peridot Lane, Hell Passage; none of them did she consciously remember seeing before.

  “I’d surely have noticed New Year’s Way,” she thought, and so chose Hell Passage—not that it looked any more familiar than the rest. What may have caught her unwitting ear was the faint thrum and throb of music, somewhere far away in that direction; as she proceeded along the narrow passage the sound became steadily more identifiable as music, though Miss Lestrange could not put a name to the actual tune; but then the world of pop music was unfamiliar territory to her. At least, though, music meant people, and inhabited regions; just for a minute or two, back there, although she would not have admitted it to anybody, Miss Lestrange had felt a stirring of panic at the vacuum of silence all around her.

  On she went; crossed another star-shaped conjunction of alleys and, by the light of one high-up orange sodium tube, hung where the youth of Rumbury Town were unlikely to be able to break it by throwing bottles, saw that Hell Passage still continued, bisecting the angle between Sky Peals Lane and Whalebone Way.

  “Curious names they have hereabouts; it must be a very old quarter. I shall look up the names on the map if—when I get home. Did I come this way?” Miss Lestrange asked herself; another surge of anxiety and alarm swept over her as she passed the closed premises of the Prong, Thong, and Trident Company—surely she would have noticed that on the way along?

  But the music was much louder now; at least, soon, she must encounter somebody whom she could ask.

  Then, without any question, she knew she was lost. For Hell Passage came to a stop—or rather, it opened into a little cul-de-sac of a yard out of which there was no exit. Miss Lestrange could see quite plainly that there was no other exit because the yard was illuminated by a fierce, flicking, variable light which came from bundles of tarry rags stuffed into roadmenders’ tripods and burning vigorously. These were set against the walls. There were about a dozen people in the yard, and Miss Lestrange’s first reaction was one of relief.

  “It’s one of those pop groups,” she thought. “I’ve heard it’s hard for them, when they’re starting, to find plac
es to practice; I suppose if you can’t afford to hire a studio, somewhere like this, far off and out of earshot, would be a godsend.”

  Somehow the phrase out of earshot, though she had used it herself, made her feel uncomfortable; the beat and howl of the music, failing to fight its way out of the narrow court, was so tremendous, that it gave her a slight chill to think what a long way she must be from any residential streets, for people not to have complained about it.

  She glanced again at the group; decided not to ask them her way, and turned to go quickly and quietly back. But she was too late; she found somebody standing behind her: an enormously large, tall man, dressed in red velvet trousers and jacket, with a frilled shirt.

  “Hey, now, you’re not thinking of leaving, are you—when you just got here?” His voice was a genial roar, easily heard even above the boom of the music, but there was a jeering note under its geniality. “Surely not going to run off without hearing us, were you? Look, boys and girls,” he went on, his voice becoming, without the slightest difficulty, even louder, “Look who’s here! It’s Miss Lestrange, Miss January Lestrange, come to give us her critical opinion!”

  A wild shout of derisive laughter went up from the group in the court.

  “Three cheers for Miss January Lestrange—the hippest harpist in the whole of toe-tapping Rumbury Town!”

  They cheered her, on and on, and the tall man led her with grinning mock civility to a seat on an upturned Snowcem tin. The players began tuning their instruments, some of which, trumpets and basses, seemed conventional enough, but others were contrivances that Miss Lestrange had never laid eyes on before—zinc washtubs with strings stretched across, large twisted shells, stringed instruments that looked more like weapons—crossbows, perhaps—than zithers, strange prehistoric-looking wooden pipes at least six or seven feet long—and surely that was an actual fire burning under the kettle-drum?