The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories

by Joan Aiken

  It was soon after Fred’s departure that Humblepuppy arrived, and from my point of view he couldn’t have been more welcome. Taffy missed Fred badly, and expected me to play with him instead; it was very sad to see this large elderly tabby rushing hopefully up and down the stairs after breakfast, or hiding behind the armchair and jumping out on to nobody; or howling, howling, howling at me until I escorted him out into the garden, where he’d rush to the lavender-bush which had been the traditional hiding-place of Whisky, Tetanus, Charity, and Fred in succession. Cats have their habits and histories, just the same as humans.

  So sometimes, on a working morning, I’d be at my wits’ end, almost on the point of going across the town to our ex-neighbours, ringing their bell, and saying, “Please can Fred come and play?” Specially on a rainy, uninviting day when Taffy was pacing gloomily about the house with drooping head and switching tail, grumbling about the weather and the lack of company, and blaming me for both.

  Humblepuppy’s arrival changed all that.

  At first Taffy considered it necessary to police him, and that kept him fully occupied for hours. He’d sit on guard by the deedbox till Humblepuppy woke up in the morning, and then he’d follow officiously all over the house, wherever the visitor went. Humblepuppy was slow and cautious in his explorations, but by degrees he picked up courage and found his way into every corner. He never once made a puddle; he learned to use Taffy’s cat-flap and go out into the garden, though he was always more timid outside and would scamper for home at any loud noise. Planes and cars terrified him, he never became used to them; which made me still more certain that he had been in that deedbox for a long, long time, since before such things were invented.

  Presently he learned, or Taffy taught him, to hide in the lavender-bush like Whisky, Charity, Tetanus, and Fred; and the two of them used to play their own ghostly version of touch-last for hours on end while I got on with my typing.

  When visitors came, Humblepuppy always retired to his deedbox; he was decidedly scared of strangers; which made his behavior with Mr. Manningham, the new rector of Riverland, all the more surprising.

  I was dying to learn anything I could of the old rectory’s history, so I’d invited Mr. Manningham to tea.

  He was a thin, gentle, quiet man, who had done missionary work in the Far East and fell ill and had to come back to England. He seemed a little sad and lonely; said he still missed his Far East friends and work. I liked him. He told me that for a large part of the nineteenth century the Riverland living had belonged to a parson called Swannett, the Reverend Timothy Swannett, who lived to a great age and had ten children.

  “He was a great-uncle of mine, as a matter of fact. But why do you want to know all this?” Mr. Manningham asked. His long thin arm hung over the side of his chair; absently he moved his hand sideways and remarked, “I didn’t notice that you had a puppy.” Then he looked down and said, “Oh!”

  “He’s never come out for a stranger before,” I said.

  Taffy, who maintains a civil reserve with visitors, sat motionless on the nightstore heater, eyes slitted, sphinxlike.

  Humblepuppy climbed invisibly on to Mr. Manningham’s lap.

  We agreed that the new rector probably carried a familiar smell of his rectory with him; or possibly he reminded Humblepuppy of his great-uncle, the Rev. Swannett.

  Anyway, after that, Humblepuppy always came scampering joyfully out if Mr. Manningham had dropped in to tea, so of course I thought of the rector when summer holiday time came round.

  During the summer holidays we lend our house and cat to a lady publisher and her mother who are devoted to cats and think it is a privilege to look after Taffy and spoil him. He is always amazingly overweight when we get back. But the old lady has an allergy to dogs, and is frightened of them too; it was plainly out of the question that she should be expected to share her summer holiday with the ghost of a puppy.

  So I asked Mr. Manningham if he’d be prepared to take Humblepuppy as a boarder, since it didn’t seem a case for the usual kind of boarding-kennels; he said he’d be delighted.

  I drove Humblepuppy out to Riverland in his deedbox; he was rather miserable on the drive, but luckily it is not far. Mr. Manningham came out into the garden to meet us. We put the box down on the lawn and opened it.

  I’ve never heard a puppy so wildly excited. Often I’d been sorry that I couldn’t see Humblepuppy, but I was never sorrier than on that afternoon, as we heard him rushing from tree to familiar tree, barking joyously, dashing through the orchard grass—you could see it divide as he whizzed along—coming back to bounce up against us, all damp and earthy and smelling of leaves.

  “He’s going to be happy with you, all right,” I said, and Mr. Manningham’s grey, lined face crinkled into its thoughtful smile as he said, “It’s the place more than me, I think.”

  Well, it was both of them, really.

  After the holiday, I went to collect Humblepuppy, leaving Taffy haughty and standoffish, sniffing our cases. It always takes him a long time to forgive us for going away.

  Mr. Manningham had a bit of a cold and was sitting by the fire in his study, wrapped in a shetland rug. Humblepuppy was on his knee. I could hear the little dog’s tail thump against the arm of the chair when I walked in, but he didn’t get down to greet me. He stayed in Mr. Manningham’s lap.

  “So you’ve come to take back my boarder,” Mr. Manningham said.

  There was nothing in the least strained about his voice or smile but—I just hadn’t the heart to take back Humblepuppy. I put my hand down, found his soft wrinkly forehead, rumpled it a bit, and said,

  “Well—I was sort of wondering: our old spoilt cat seems to have got used to being on his own again; I was wondering whether—by any chance—you’d feel like keeping him?”

  Mr. Manningham’s face lit up. He didn’t speak for a minute; then he put a gentle hand down to find the small head, and rubbed a finger along Humblepuppy’s chin.

  “Well,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Of course, if you’re quite sure—”

  “Quite sure.” My throat needed clearing too.

  “I hope you won’t catch my cold,” Mr. Manningham said. I shook my head and said, “I’ll drop in to see if you’re better in a day or two,” and went off and left them together.

  Poor Taffy was pretty glum over the loss of his playmate for several weeks; we had two hours’ purgatory every morning after breakfast while he hunted for Humblepuppy high and low. But gradually the memory faded and, thank goodness, now he has found a new friend, Little Grey Furry, a nephew, cousin, or other relative of Charity and Fred. Little Grey Furry has learned to play hide-and-seek in the lavender-bush, and to use our cat-flap, and clean up whatever’s in Taffy’s food bowl, so all is well in that department.

  But I still miss Humblepuppy. I miss his cold nose exploring the palm of my hand, as I sit thinking, in the middle of a page, and his warm weight leaning against my knee as he watches the commercials. And the scritch-scratch of his toenails on the dining-room floor and the flump, flump, as he comes downstairs, and the small hollow in a cushion as he settles down with a sigh.

  Oh well. I’ll get over it, just as Taffy has. But I was wondering about putting an ad into Our Dogs or Pets’ Monthly: Wanted, ghost of a mongrel puppy. Warm, welcome, loving home. Any reasonable price paid.

  It might be worth a try.

  Listening

  He had been walking up Fifth Avenue for about ten minutes when the cat fell. He had been walking along, minding his own business, not looking about him—though it was a beautiful day, the first of spring, with a warm, keen wind ruffling the vapor trails in the sky and dislodging the pigeons from cornices where they sat sunning. He was preoccupied, to tell the truth, worrying over what he could ever find to say about Mrs. Schaber’s lesson, which he was on his way to observe.

&nb
sp; Listening, she taught. “What in God’s name is listening? ” he had asked Mark Calvert, who worked in the same department. “Oh, it’s a form of musical appreciation—little Schaber’s a bit of a nut, but she’s quite a fine musician, too, in her way.” He had not even met her, so far as he was aware—she was just another of the two-hundred-odd faceless names on the college faculty list. So now he had to give up his free day, this beautiful mild, melting, burgeoning day, to go and invigilate her class and decide whether or not she was able to teach kids to listen. Is there a craft about listening—an art that has to be learned?—he wondered. Don’t we begin listening from the very moment we are born?

  At that moment the cat hit. He was approaching the Twenty-eighth Street intersection when he heard the horribly distinctive sound—a loud, solid smack, accompanied by a faint, sharp cry; indeed he had seen it also, he must have seen about the last six inches of its fall, as he glanced up from his moody stride, and so was able to verify that cats do not always land on their feet—this poor beast, which must have come from about twenty floors up, landed flat on its side and then lay twitching. Its eyes were open but it must, please heaven, be on the point of death—ought he to do something about it? What could one do?

  In no time a small crowd had collected.

  “It fell from way up there,” a woman kept saying hysterically. “I saw the whole thing—I was just crossing the street—”

  “Do you think we should take it to a vet?” someone suggested.

  “Oh, what’s the use? The poor thing’s dying anyway.”

  “Tell the super in the block? That looks like a valuable cat—”

  “Lucky it didn’t land on somebody—could probably kill a person—”

  As they discussed it, the cat twitched again. Its eyes closed definitively.

  “Oh, its poor owner. She’ll wonder what happened to it—”

  “Shouldn’t have left her window open if you ask me—”

  He left them and walked on. He was going to be late if he didn’t hurry. It had looked like a valuable cat. Its fur was a rich mixture of browns and creams in which dark chocolate predominated, its eyes a wild fanatic blue. It seemed to belong to the luxury class, along with costly monogrammed luggage, gold accessories and jeweled watches: objects of conspicuous expenditure. And yet, poor thing, it had been alive, had its own nature—that faint piteous cry still hung in his ears, an expostulation against undeserved agony.

  He had seen Mrs. Schaber before, it turned out; he recognized her as soon as he entered the classroom. She was the odd little woman whom he had passed one day in the main lobby while she was deep in conversation with a deaf and dumb student. He had been much struck by her at the time, two or three months back. She was quite short, only about five foot, with her dark hair coiled in a bun low on her neck. She wore jeans, a flannel shirt, a sweater tied by the arms around her waist, espadrilles; she looked like a student. But her face was that of a woman in her mid-forties—somewhat lined, especially around the mouth. Her eyes were large, brownish green, almond shaped, set wide apart; and her face was long and oval, with a particularly long jaw and upper lip, and a lower lip that extended, sometimes above the upper one, giving her a look of comical pugnacity. But what had attracted his attention on that occasion was the extreme vivacity of her face—dozens of expressions chased each other across it: sympathetic, hilarious, grave, intent, sorrowful, ecstatic, ferocious—while her hands, meanwhile, twinkled away with unbelievable speed, flicking their soundless deaf-and-dumb-language to the student she was addressing.

  “Is she deaf and dumb too?” he had asked Charlie Whitney, with whom he had been walking on that occasion.

  “Schaber? Lord, no! Talk the hind leg off a mule!”

  She was doing so now, addressing her students in a flood of loquacity. But she broke off to greet him with a rather constricted smile.

  “Oh—Professor Middlemass—good morning! Would you like to sit here? Or would you rather walk about? Please do just what you want—make yourself at home! I was—I was beginning to explain to the students that this morning I am going to play them tapes recorded on my trip to Europe and Africa last year. I shall analyze the background of each tape before I play it. Then, later in the lesson, I shall demonstrate the relation of the sounds they have heard to musical patterns and structures and explain how this in its turn demonstrates the relevance of music to language.”

  Nodding vaguely—she had rattled this out so fast that he hardly took in her meaning—he settled down to listen, observing that eighteen out of her nineteen students were present, and that they were watching her with expressions that ranged from indulgent amusement through skepticism and mild boredom to absorbed devotion. Only one boy looked wholly bored: he was stretched back in his seat with his blond hair stuck out in front, his head bowed forward. He appeared to be studying his shoelaces through the strands of his hair.

  The tapes, when Mrs. Schaber began to play them, were a bit of a surprise: they were so extremely quiet. She had been allotted a soundproof music studio for her demonstration, and this was just as well, for some of the sounds were just barely audible. “Now, this is the Camargue: you can hear grasses rustling and, very far off, the noise of the sea. And after five minutes you will notice a faint drumming in the distance. That is the sound of hoofs: the wild horses. They never come very close; you will have to listen carefully.

  “Now this recording was taken in Denmark, in the bog country: you can hear reeds and dry rushes; the sound is not dissimilar to the tape of the Camargue that I played you earlier, but this one was taken inland; there was a different quality to the air; it was less resonant. Also, after about three minutes of tape, you will hear a stork shifting about in its nest; I was standing close to a cottage that had a stork’s nest on its roof.”

  Mrs. Schaber went on to describe in some detail what materials storks used in building their nests and then played her tape. As she listened to it herself, her face wore a recollecting, tranquil, amused expression.

  Gradually, while the lesson proceeded, Middlemass observed how the students were becoming polarized by her exposition. The ones who had looked indulgent or bored at the start were now gazing drearily at the ceiling, picking their noses or their teeth, chewing gum, manifesting exasperation and tedium; others were watching Mrs. Schaber with fanatical attention. The blond boy still stared at his feet.

  Toward the end of her batch of tapes came some that had been recorded in the Congo rain forest. Middlemass had always been fascinated by the thought of the jungle, ever since reading Duguid’s Green Hell; he had not the least intention of ever walking into a jungle himself, but he occasionally liked to imagine doing so. Now he listened with careful interest to the rich silences, the ticking, cheeping, chirring, shrilling, buzzing, scraping sibilances that Mrs. Schaber had collected; for the first time he began to feel some groping acceptance of what she was proffering. He noticed, also, that the blond boy had taken his hands out of his pockets and had his head cocked in an attitude of acute attention.

  During the second half of the lesson, Mrs. Schaber proceeded to play short snatches of music and demonstrate their resemblance to vocal patterns and to some of the natural sounds that she had presented earlier. This, Middlemass thought, was really interesting; the whole lesson began to cohere for him, and he changed his mind about what he would say in his report, which, half-phrased in his head already, had not been particularly enthusiastic. “Too divorced from reality—students did not seem very engaged—Mrs. Schaber has a gift, but it seems devoted to inessentials—” Now he resolved to say something more favorable.

  At this point there came an interruption to the lesson. A secretary tapped at the door to say that Mrs. Schaber was wanted in the main office. “The police have just called up from your home, Mrs. Schaber; I’m afraid your apartment has been broken into, and they want you to go home and say what has been ta
ken.”

  “Oh my god!” The poor little woman looked utterly stricken; her expressive face changed to a Greek mask of tragedy, mouth wide open, eyes dilated.

  “Shall I go with you to the office?” Middlemass offered, touched by compassion because he had been filled with rather disparaging thoughts about her during the first half of her lesson and because she did seem as if she had sustained a mortal blow. The blond boy had already risen to his feet, moved compactly forward, and taken her arm. But Middlemass accompanied them anyway; he felt the need somehow to demonstrate his friendly feeling and sympathy.

  While Mrs. Schaber talked on the phone in the secretary’s room, it became plain that matters were even worse than she had feared.

  “Oh no, not all my tapes?” she cried out. “What could they want those for? Smashed—wrecked—oh, no!”—pressing her clenched fist against her thin chest as if she were trying, forcibly, to push her anguished, expanded heart back into position. Wordlessly, the secretary went to fetch her a cup of coffee. The blond boy stood silent with his eyes fixed on her face. When she had laid the receiver back in its rest and was staring across the room, quite dazed, with fixed, sightless eyes, Middlemass asked her gently:

  “Is it very bad?”

  “They have taken a whole lot of stuff,” she muttered, “and all the rest they have destroyed—smashed up. Everything—”