Here Be Dragons

by Stella Gibbons

  At some point in his tirade he had taken her arm, and now she was matching her swift pace to his leisurely one as they dawdled up and down the dim little alleys of lanky white cottages and past silent gardens whose spring flowers glimmered through the thinning fog.

  “I shall get five pounds a week,” Nell said.

  “Well? Is that so necessary?”

  They had paused in a hilly road whose end simply went off into the darkness. “It’s patchy, isn’t it,” he murmured, meaning the fog, and indeed here it had almost gone, “look, that’s the Heath. You can see the lights in the Vale of Health pond.”

  She looked at the strip of bright, wild, emerald grass edging the dark, then beyond it, off and away, into airy blackness. The wind blew in her face a smell of coldness and earliest leaves. Low down, lights of crystal and gold were reflected in still water; farthest away of all, some glittered so high that they might have been up in a cloud.

  “Yes, I’ve got to earn some money for the parents,” she said.

  “Oh … parents.” But the outburst which she had impatiently expected did not follow, and they strolled on, Nell remembering how she had looked at her mother that evening and it had been as if she had seen her for the first time.

  Anna had been standing in the cold, crowded hall under the unshaded bulb of the light, wearing the shabby woollen clothes which had been her only style of dress ever since Nell could remember, and her hands had looked red and her hair grey, and the lines in her vigorous, weather-roughened face harsh and deep. Nell had just come down from speaking to her father where he lay in bed with his detective story under the light of another unshaded bulb (all their lampshades at Morley Magna vicarage had crackled into pieces when they were taken down for the move) and he had looked unkempt and listless and old. The two of them had looked old. And it had occurred to Nell, while she was putting on her béret at the despised angle in the icy bedroom where she had been warned not to light the electric fire, that if she did not set to work to feed and clothe the elder Selys properly, they would quietly expire. She had told herself not to be silly: that her mother was unusually strong, and her father recovering, in body at least, from the illness which had nearly taken him, but the feeling had remained, and she intended to act upon it as soon as possible. She had felt a warmer element entering into her rather reserved relations with her parents as a result, but her aunt’s high-handed action had damped it all down, and now she could feel nothing but impatience and an anticipatory boredom about her shorthand.

  “Here we are …” she said, as they turned into Arkwood Road.

  “I know that. I was born here, you know.” He was looking up at the comfortable ugly red-brick fronts trimmed with white stone.

  “Where are you living now?” she asked, and as she was making conversation from slight embarrassment at the possibility of being seen by her mother arm-in-arm with a practically new cousin, rather than seeking information, she became justifiably annoyed when he replied repressively that she would not know where the room he shared with Benedict was, even if he told her. It was an unmistakable snub, and at the same time he withdrew his arm.

  They had stopped in front of Number Twenty-five. As she made to open the gate, he stepped back.

  “I don’t think I’ll come in after all, do you know. Do you mind very much—I do so hate seeming rude.”

  “Of course I don’t,” Nell declared with briskness, “I’ve got shorthand to do, and we haven’t even started to get straight yet.” She bit soberly on her disappointment. She added, “Good night. Thank you for the coffee, it was awfully good,” and was turning away when he said slowly:

  “I don’t know … perhaps I will come in after all. May I?” and began to follow her up the front steps.

  Nell shrugged, and put her key into the front door. Then she stopped. She turned and looked down at him. “John, how did you know that your mother had found me the job? I didn’t say so, and she said you haven’t seen her for a week.”

  He looked up at her as he stood with one foot advanced upon the step. “Didn’t you say so? I think you did, you know,” but Nell shook her head.

  “Oh well, I heard it somehow. Perhaps she told me before I walked out. Does it matter? It is so boring. Are you going to keep me standing here for the rest of the evening?”

  She turned away and put the key in. He was lying; she had not said so. But this caused no equivalent decline in certain feelings she already had for him. She opened the front door. Behind her, she heard him coming leisurely up the steps.

  Anna Sely had gone back to her book. She was sitting at the kitchen table, leaning forward with hands pushed into her curly grey hair, walking about in the mind of François de Chateaubriand.

  The kitchen was painted chalk-white and raspberry-pink, and if she had been imaginative she would have felt an atmosphere of Continental pleasures lingering there; created by foreign travel posters pinned on the walls and by the ghosts of olives and gnocchi, Brie and salami, which had been eaten there by the Palmer-Groves, those admirers of the Continent and its ways. There might also have silently echoed the discussions about art, and, towards the end, the deathly bitter arguments about who was to have the children …

  Anna felt nothing of this. She was roaming the red-draped, spice-scented chambers of a long-dead Frenchman’s imagination, and even so she was hearing the mellifluous French and following the thought expressed, rather than receiving a series of pictures, but beneath her customary slightly drugged pleasure in the act of reading (for Anna read as chain-smokers smoke) something unusual was going on.

  For many years, now, she had observed only those facts connected with herself which were practical and could be dealt with by an action; such as her need for a clean overall, or for her shoes to be mended, while thoughts and feelings passed within herself unobserved. When occasionally they threatened to be painful (and for months now the word unhappy had been rising nearer and nearer to the surface of her consciousness) she turned them off instantly; without hesitation; as if they had been some mechanical device. Only the restlessness which drove her without pause from one clumsily-performed domestic task to the next might have hinted, to that observer interested in psychology whom nowadays she never encountered, that she was not at peace. Few of us are, but Anna seemed so unaware of her own lack—and yet to need peace so much.

  Her quick, well-bred voice, summarizing the contents of a paragraph full of complex facts in the newspaper while her long fingers, stained with garden and kitchen work, moved undeftly among the tea-cups, sounded full of strain. She sewed with big clumsy stitches while crouching forward in her chair—or blundered about the series of cavernous cold rectories, ceaselessly at work, keeping them reasonably warm and clean. She gardened, growing splendid flowers and vegetables which she regarded with a critical satisfaction; she even carpentered, and mended fuses; and once, during the three months that someone had lent the Selys an old car, drove it and repaired it and changed its tyres. In church, and of course she went to church automatically and often, her thoughts were busy with details of house-running. She was never still or quiet except when she was asleep.

  This had been her state of body and mind for a very long time: almost since, inexplicably giving up those prospects of an academic career of solid cleverness which had caused her professors at the London School of Economics to approve and be proud of her, she had suddenly married Martin Sely, five years her senior, and newly ordained, and just established in his first living.

  This evening, while she sat reading in the kitchen, she had been remembering. That was a most unusual thing for Anna to do; and she was also uneasy, which was even more unusual. Memories were flocking into the grey head sunk between the roughened hands; drifting, lightly touching her spirit, troubling her faintly. She had actually got so far as giving herself a reason for her odd mood; it was coming back to Hampstead that was responsible; that first sight of the Heath yesterday, looking just as green and brown and blue under the cold spring rain as it us
ed to look thirty years ago, had—upset her. She had felt herself as two people, while the car was going up the familiar High Street: the cheerful, handsome, clever girl living in The General’s House with her parents, and the shabbily-dressed, ageing wife of a silly old parson who had lost his faith and been turned out of the Church, on her way to live in a house lent by his sister out of charity.

  It was most confusing and Anna did not like it at all.

  It had made her feel so peculiar that it had prevented her from starting work on the house. Their furniture, deprived of the familiar background which had somehow lessened its shabbiness, was scattered up and down the pale blue staircase and on the navy-blue or black floors, with old chairs, whose forlorn state had been taken for granted for years, looking fit only for the rubbish-heap as they stood against the raspberry walls.

  “I’d no idea we owned such a collection of junk,” Anna had remarked to Nell while the removal men were carrying the things in, but she had not added I wonder what the neighbours must think, because such an idea would never have entered her head. Miss Meredith, of The General’s House, had had no neighbours in the usual sense, surrounded as she had been by old friends of her parents, and their children with whom she had grown up, living in Hampstead’s old white mansions shaded by Hampstead’s beautiful old trees; and in the country the Selys had for years been separated by poverty, the fact of their being a parson’s family, and something in Anna’s own temperament, from making casual acquaintanceships. Even her dutifully performed parish work had brought her neither liking nor friends.

  At this moment the wife of the no-longer Reverend Martin Sely felt a strong disinclination to begin arranging those threadbare carpets and slowly-disembowelling chairs and curtains faded to mere drabness. She had been out that morning to the public library, which she had found astonishingly good, and come back with an armful of books for herself and her poor old Martin, and now she wanted only to read. Outside, coming into the quiet of the house, she could hear a bell ringing sadly through the fog for some late Lenten service (Compline, perhaps; she had heard that during the soon-to-be-relinquished guidance of Dr. Wand many London churches had tended to grow Higher). And the sound added a vague feeling of guilt to her thoughts. There was another sound which had been coming to her for nearly two hours now; ever since she had impatiently pushed aside the remains of their scanty tea and settled herself, with a sense of relief, to read; a sound deep, persistent and soft which might almost have been her own thronging memories made audible; muffled; diffused; throbbing very faintly over the quiet gardens where white and yellow spring flowers glimmered through the drifting mists; coming up through the fog lying on the marsh to Hampstead, outspread upon its hills. Of course, thought Anna, not lifting her head to listen nor taking her eyes from the page, it’s the traffic down in London. I’d forgotten. I used to hear it when I was a child.

  Upstairs the front door closed. In a moment she heard footsteps coming down the kitchen stairs; then Nell’s voice—“Mother? Are you there? Here’s John—John Gaunt, you know. John, here’s my mother,” and they came into the kitchen; a plain young person and a beautiful one, both noses pink with cold and fog.

  “Hullo, John. It must be quite ten years since we met. How are you?” Anna got up, pushing Chateaubriand aside, “How is your mother?”

  “I really don’t know, Aunt Anna, I haven’t seen her for nearly ten days. All right, I imagine; she usually is. Margie, that’s my new mamma, says she looks like an advertisement for Cornflakes (Margie has to make these bitchy remarks; she’s naturally rather a nice little thing but my papa encourages her to be spiteful because he feels it’s more interesting).”

  “I see.” Anna had a habit of saying this when her thoughts had gone to practical details while anyone was talking, and she had not heard what was said; in this case, it was just as well. “Nell, are your feet wet?”

  She also had the habit of fussing mildly over Nell, who had been a small and unusually white baby whose difficult rearing had added considerably to the toil of Anna’s days and nights. She was by no means ‘wrapped up’ in her daughter, but she still saw to it that Nell herself was ‘well wrapped-up’.

  Nell shook her head.

  “You look cold. I’m sorry there’s no fire … do sit down, John … we can’t go upstairs, there’s nowhere to go … what have you done to your béret, Nell? It’s falling off you.”

  “I made her wear it like that, Aunt Anna. It looks more elegant,” said John. Nell snatched off the offender and cast it on the dresser.

  “Nonsense,” Anna said. She looked at him as he lounged on the chair into which he had sunk. “Don’t loll like that, my dear boy, you’ll get curvature.”

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Anna,” sitting meekly upright.

  There was silence for a moment. Anna was trying to think of something to say. She was not at a loss generally but his appearance was really so peculiar that it seemed to increase the bewilderment of her feelings. She found herself wishing suddenly that she were knitting in the drawing-room at Morley Magna. What had he done to his hair?

  John said suddenly. “It’s simply freezing in here. Shall I make some tea?”

  “Tea? But we had tea hours ago.” Anna did not catch Nell’s irritated glance. “There’s a piece of cake in the tin if you’re hungry.”

  “I am rather. I’ve had nothing all day. I would really rather have tea. Where do you keep the tin? I’ll make it.”

  Anna had not prepared an impromptu meal for anyone since the days when she had visited the studios of her college friends with the Poetry Book Shop rhyme-sheets on their whitewashed walls. She laughed now, but said, “Very well, if you really want some and don’t think it’ll keep you awake. Why haven’t you had anything to eat all day? Is your mother away?”

  “I’m not living at home now (are these the cups? … and the sugar’s in here, isn’t it … I know my way about because I used to come here when old Miss Lister …)”

  “What did you say?” Anna’s tone was impatient. “Don’t mutter, please. Where are you living, if not at home?”

  Nell heard him, while she superintended the kettle, giving a cautious and vague account of his lodgings (somewhere east of Camden Town, wherever that was) followed, under questioning, by a list of the things he was not doing. She could see that her mother thought it odd, but she was convinced that Anna did not know how very odd it in fact was. Nell, who had been followed in the fog, felt that she herself did at least suspect the advanced state which the oddness had reached.

  “Then if you only work occasionally (no, I won’t have any, thank you, it keeps me awake) and aren’t taking classes anywhere or training for anything, what on earth are you doing with yourself?” Anna demanded at last, sitting upright with elbows on the table and looking at him rather severely. She detested idling, especially idling and planlessness in the young; although some of her friends in youth at L.S.E. had been idle and indecisive, their brilliance had excused them. Was John brilliant? She would have been prepared to swear that he was not. He seemed half-asleep.

  “Oh … I wander about London, looking at things … I work quite hard sometimes too. I’ve just finished a job slicing bacon at Selfridges for three pounds a week … that was hard enough work and hours to satisfy even an adult. And I’m writing a novel, you know.”

  “I didn’t know. It sounds very grand,” Anna said dryly. She began to gather together the tea-things. “Nell, you’re drinking that tea much too strong. It will give you indigestion. Put some more milk into it.”

  “Doesn’t it? That’s exactly the right word.” He beamed with satisfaction and glanced affectionately towards his portfolio, lying on the dresser.

  “What’s it called? What is it about? Will it be a best-seller?” Anna, slapping the cups into the sink, darted a ‘comical’ glance at Nell.

  “It hasn’t a title yet. It’s about London. Yes, one day it will be a best-seller, only not quite in the sense that you mean, Aunt Anna. Would you call Dante�
��s Inferno a best-seller?”

  “Dear me! You are aiming high, aren’t you. I should call that a classic and a work of genius.”

  “Precisely,” said he politely, and got up from his chair. “I must go, I’m afraid. I’ve got to meet someone who’s going to give me a job … Thank you so much for the tea, Aunt Anna, I hope you’ll let me come again, often.” He picked up his portfolio, and Nell saw him glance quickly, almost stealthily, round the kitchen. “I wish the bloody Palmer-Groves—” and then, as Anna stared at him coldly—

  “I beg your pardon … the idiotic Palmer-Groves hadn’t painted it this sickly colour.”

  “I think it’s rather jolly,” said Anna, excusing his slip with the thought showing off, “even your Uncle Martin thinks so.”

  “It was nicer before. How is Uncle Martin? Can I look in on him before I go?”

  “Oh, getting better. But he still isn’t himself. No, better not, I think. He may be asleep. I’ll tell him you asked after him. (Nell, see John out, will you?) Good-bye, John. Come and see us again soon. Perhaps you’ll condescend to read us some of your masterpiece.”

  They left her laughing to herself over the cups in the sink. When they were in the dim, cluttered hall he said very quietly to Nell: “I’ll go at once, because you’re wanting to tell her about your job … (if you’re really bent on turning up there; I think you’re being bloody silly) … But you don’t mind if I just fly up and look at our flat, do you? I won’t be two seconds.”

  Before she could speak, he was gone. She had no idea that he could move so fast. He darted up the faintly-lit stairs without making a sound in his rubber-soled sandals on the uncarpeted boards, and she stood there staring after him, feeling vaguely uneasy. She did not know why. Somewhere, at the back of her mind, there was a sensation of warning.

  He could not have been as long as ten seconds, if he was longer than the promised two. When he reappeared he was smiling.