Birthday Party

by C. H. B. Kitchin

  Perhaps the reason I’ve been sleeping badly is because I take a nap in the afternoon. But I feel so sleepy after lunch. I can’t help dozing off. And I like it. When I’m alone here, there’s nothing to do but go to bed early. But even when I’m not alone and go to bed late I often don’t sleep either. Would it be any good seeing a doctor, I wonder? He’d only give me some feeble little powders and say I ought to have a change of air.

  They can’t help you with nerves. You’ve got to fight them alone. I must be getting to a nervy age. I’ve been feeling lately that I was in for a crisis—that some crash is bound to come soon. Well, there will be a crash—when Ronnie’s twenty-one, the month after next. I don’t care if there is. I’ve gone over all that so many times, there’s no use going over it again to-night.

  There’s Tan again. Was that a growl he gave? It couldn’t be. That would mean he’s heard something. People have often asked me if I wasn’t afraid of sleeping here alone, and I always laughed and said I wasn’t. That was untrue. I used to be terribly afraid, after Claude——, but then I got used to it. And when Tan was given to Ronnie six years ago and he slept up here, I didn’t think I should ever be bothered again.

  I shan’t get off to sleep at this rate. It really would be better to get up and see if there’s anyone about. I know what I’m thinking of really, but I won’t give in to it. I’ve settled all that, come what may. I shall simply say, “Here you are, Ronnie,” give him the box and have my suitcases brought down. When I’ve done that, I needn’t see any of them again.

  Only one more week here, thank God, before my cruise to the Northern Capitals. That ought to do me good. I’ll have dancing lessons on board. And play all the deck-games. We’ll have a splendid time. When she’s in the right mood, Dolly Headford is an awfully good companion. Perhaps I’ll be able to decide whether I could share a flat with her, though I don’t think it would answer, really. I’ve got too accustomed to having a place of my own—well, not my own exactly—but it certainly gives me a good deal of space to myself. I shall miss all these drawers and cupboards. But that’s about all. Of course, it’s nice to have the garden to walk in, but that’s never been my own. That belongs to Isabel. I’ve always felt it’s kept up for her benefit. I wonder what she’ll say if Ronnie does as he threatened, and turns the place into—what was it?—a political school. She won’t like that at all. But he doesn’t care what she likes. I really think he would take my side against her. I don’t know, though. Blood does tell. It’s no use counting on him.

  I won’t stay here for them to hiss me out of the house. I’ll be gone before they can do it, bag and baggage. I needn’t meet them or their set ever again. There, I’m hammering away at it once more. Well, I’ve got to go through with it. Even if I don’t sleep to-night, I can rest all to-morrow. I’ve nothing to do to-morrow. Oh, yes, Miss Eagre, about the church fête—but I can put her off. It’s funny how these moods take me, and how differently you feel about the same thing at different times. Until this year, that box seemed nothing to worry about. Well, this year seemed so far off. Ronnie seemed to go on being at school for ever. When he first went up to Oxford, it did give me rather a turn. It showed time was passing. But even then, you didn’t think of him as ever being twenty-one. No, I’ve been much worse lately. Not so bad as at first, of course. My word, I did go through it then! I ought to have talked to somebody, but I just couldn’t. The damp hand on the landing, that’s what did it.

  Before that visit to Leamington, ten years ago, how lovely and simple life seemed. Of course, I was ten years younger. I’d had my love-affair. Was that wrong, as I knew I couldn’t have a baby? Whether it was wrong or not, I’d had it, and it was over without anything terrible happening. Of course, I was melancholy at the thought of its being over. It was the day of my father’s funeral that I knew, really, that it was ended. But it was an easy, pleasant kind of sadness, as I see it now—something romantic to look back upon, not shattering to the nerves like what happened later. I remember that as we were going to Leamington, while Isabel, oh, so carefully, was giving me advice as to how to behave when I saw Ronnie at school, I was thinking to myself, “Now, Dora, you’ve had your fling. You must settle down—for a good while, anyhow. You’ve learnt a lot lately, and you must use it properly. You’ve got a nice husband and a lovely home. You must live up to your position and make something of it for yourself. Settle down, be a good wife, and take your proper place.” I was thinking like that even during the Sunday afternoon when Ronnie and his friend came to see us in our hotel, and let off those smelly fireworks and ruined the drawing-room grate. I was thinking like that when they’d gone and the page-boy came in and said I was wanted for a trunk call. And then—the tone of Eames’ voice was enough to break me up. I knew in a flash that it wasn’t an ordinary accident—that it was something which I should have to pay for. That’s why I sent Joan running for Isabel, and nearly collapsed when the telephone call was over. I remember Isabel saying, “If you faint, I shan’t come with you.” I suppose she meant to be kind. After all, it was her own brother. But I thought, “You poor fool! You don’t know what I know.”

  What an awful journey back we had together, with Joan crying and asking awkward questions, and Isabel being so considerate to me. Then those long talks with the solicitors and the doctors and the police-inspector, and those newspaper men. I don’t know how I lived through it. Then the inquest. And the night of the inquest—it was before dinner, I think—I couldn’t stay downstairs with Isabel any longer, and came up to my room—it had been Claude’s and my room—and began to go through Claude’s things, in case they were untidy when the Probate people came. I hadn’t the heart to go to his dressing-room where he kept things he usually wore, but I thought I’d look through the tallboy of his in here, where he kept his overflow stuff. And there I found the box, in the bottom drawer where he kept his old tennis clothes. I remember seeing the tennis clothes made me cry. It reminded me so of the time I first met him at the Grangeleigh tournament, and of all the games we had together that year, and the thrill of staying here for the first time. There the box was, humping up a pile of flannel shirts, a kind they don’t often wear now. What’s this, I wondered? As I took it out, I thought it must contain old studs, or broken links or the bits of whale-bone he stiffened his best collars with. Then I read the label: “For my son Ronald Carlice. To be given to him on his twenty-first birthday.” The writing was Claude’s, rather more spidery than usual. And I read the date too: “November 7th, 1926”—the day we left for Leamington and two days before Claude’s death.

  At first I was just frightened without knowing why. I put the box in a drawer full of my own things and locked it up. It was not till the middle of dinner that it dawned on me what the box really meant. I felt suddenly sick and asked them to excuse me, and went to lie down upstairs. I knew now that I’d been right in thinking that Claude had killed himself because he had found out about me and Don Rusper. The box was his punishment for me, and he’d put it where I should find it, or at any rate where someone would find it and tell me about it. On the other hand, I thought, if he was so sure that I should understand what he meant, how could he be sure I shouldn’t destroy the hateful thing? I could take it to London and drop it into the Thames, or go to France and drop it over the side of the steamer. Would it have floated and followed me round the world? Or I could open it—and really see——

  The idea of opening it didn’t come to me till Isabel and Joan had been up to say good-night to me, urging me to have the doctor and hoping I was better and so on. When they had left me, and I felt safely alone, I got up and took the box out of its hiding-place and looked at it for about an hour. I must have read the label, and the date, a hundred times. I felt Claude was there, watching me and daring me to open the box or destroy it. And I couldn’t do either. But some extraordinary instinct made me tear off the date, and burn it in the ashtray by my bed. It was ever so neatly written, “7.xi
.26,” right in the top corner, away from the rest of the writing. I don’t suppose I had to tear off more than an inch by half an inch. In any case, the label was an old one and ragged at the edges. No one, except a detective, would have known. And if anyone saw the box he would have thought that the label had been written at any time—perhaps when Ronnie was born, before Claude had ever heard of me. There was no outward connection, once the date had gone, between the box and Claude’s death—no connection between the box and me. That is to say, until the box was opened.

  Why didn’t I open it that night, and find out the worst? I was too upset and too frightened. I put it in the drawer where I kept my jewels and locked the drawer.

  I didn’t have any dreams that night. It was the next night, when Isabel was already talking of going back to her London house, that I had the dream.

  I dreamt that Claude and I were in our bedroom, but instead of being in bed we were in two coffins, side by side. I knew his mouth and face were shattered by the wound and felt I couldn’t bear to see him. If I counted a hundred before he spoke, I knew that he couldn’t speak or look at me. I got to eighty-seven, when he suddenly said, “Dora, you’ve found that box!” I said, “Yes,” and he went on, “And you’ve begun to destroy it. You’ve torn the date off the corner of the label. That’s as far as you’ll go. Swear that you’ll go no farther.” I said nothing, and then, very slowly he got up—or rather, the coffin he was in stood slowly up on its end and turned round towards me. “You will swear,” he said, “or I shall make love to you.” His face was jagged and bleeding, and his thin little moustache was dripping blood. A drop fell on my face as he leant over me in his coffin. I tried to put up my hands, but they wouldn’t move. “You’ll swear,” he said, still closer to me, “to guard this box till Ronnie’s twenty-one, and to give it to him yourself.” I said nothing, and Claude’s coffin slowly lowered itself towards mine till it was only six inches away. Then it moved back a little, and Claude said, “I shall do this three times, but the third time my coffin will rest on yours. They fit exactly, and you’ll never escape again. The worms in me are longing to eat you.” As he spoke, a horrible black worm with one yellow eye came out of Claude’s mouth and dangled over my breast. “That’s what I mean by love-making,” he said. Then I shut my eyes and swore, time after time, eighty-seven times, without knowing what I was swearing, and Claude’s coffin stood upright again and Claude said, “I’ve got your oath, here. If you break it, I’ll come again. Beware the damp hand on the landing as you turn out the light by your bedroom door. The damp hand over yours. . . .” Then I don’t know what happened.

  When I was nineteen I read Dracula all one night at Elmcroft, and the book became a mania with me. By day, it didn’t bother me at all. I went about in the ordinary way, and even laughed at the story when I thought of it. But at night I felt quite different and would lie still in bed, listening for the flapping of a bat’s wings against my window-pane. I was afraid to sleep in case the vampire broke in and sucked my blood. After about a week, Daddy noticed that I was looking ill and dragged it all out of me. He gave me a long talking to in his consulting-room and made me feel such a silly little fool that I was cured.

  But I daren’t talk to anyone about my dream of Claude. It gripped me like Dracula. In the daytime, I thought very little about it, but every night, when I went to bed, I hardly dared go to sleep for fear of dreaming it again. I did dream something of the kind again, but not so vividly as the first time. And then came the evening when Isabel went back to London. Joan had returned to her school and I was alone in the house, except for the servants. When I went to bed and turned out the landing light, I distinctly felt a damp hand closing softly over mine. It passed in a flash, but I went to my jewel-drawer, took out the box and went downstairs with it and put it in the bottom drawer of my writing-desk in the drawing-room, and hid it under a large piece of embroidery that I’d begun when I was expecting my baby, and knew I should never finish. I didn’t make any actual vows, as I put the box there, but I felt somehow committed to guarding it and carrying out the instructions on the label.

  Then gradually life became normal and cheerful again. It went on, and nothing terrible seemed to happen. Nice things even began to happen. I went to London for a few days and saw some of my friends, the shops and the shows. Friends began to come to Carlice. Major Inchley and his sister took me to the races—a lovely day, I remember. I got three winners. I began to get the hang of running the house. I saw to it that Joan had pretty dresses and that Ronnie had all the things he needed for school. He began to bring his school-friends back here, and Joan brought hers sometimes. A year went by, and another and another. You can’t go on worrying about anything for ever. I began to forget about 1926 and all its troubles. They’d come back at night sometimes, if I was nervy or out of sorts, but by day they disappeared completely. I was able to look in the bottom drawer of my writing-desk and make sure the box was still there without upsetting myself.

  “Oh, I’ll give it to Ronnie all right,” I used to say to myself, “but I really can’t bother my head now about what’s inside it. There are still—seven, six, five, four—years to go before I’ve got to do anything. And even if Claude did leave a writing behind telling Ronnie that he killed himself because of my love-affair with Don, what could any of them do? What would they want to do? It would be so long after Claude’s death. Isabel might be dead by then. So might I, or even Ronnie.”

  And so on, except for little passing bursts of worry, till Ronnie’s last birthday—when he was twenty, and there was such a lot of talk of his next birthday, and guessing as to what would happen then. At Isabel’s suggestion, I had asked some of our neighbours in—“Ronnie ought to be getting to know them,” she said—and I imagined them saying things about me when my back was turned and wondering what I’d do. As luck would have it, there was a big scandal in the papers round that time. Some woman was supposed to have been got hold of by a negro in a London night-club and her husband made an awful scene and smashed the place up. Most of the people I had invited to Ronnie’s birthday party knew the husband fairly well, as he used to visit one of the big houses in our neighbourhood. For nearly the whole of dinner, I had to listen to our men guests saying that he must have been a poorer creature than they’d supposed, ever to let his wife start such a beastly business, while the women guests blamed the wife and said they’d never liked her. And all the time both the women and the men were enjoying it.

  I felt quite sick when I got to bed that night. “In another year,” I thought, “they’ll all be talking about me like that, and Joan and Ronnie will have to bear it. And how Isabel will hate me!”

  I went over everything again, making my part out to be as bad as I could. “And while her father was dying!” It had never occurred to me before that my father’s illness made it worse, but I invented that little sentence and every time I put it into our friends’ mouths it sounded worse. “And while her father was dying!” I fitted it to each of their voices in turn. And I began to think that I shouldn’t only have to leave Carlice in a hurry—I was already more or less prepared for that—but that even my London friends wouldn’t have anything more to do with me, and that nobody would want to know me once they knew who I was. Even emigrating might be no use. My story would follow me.

  Then for some weeks I got back my old calm. What did it matter if people did talk about me? It needed more than anything I’d done to shock people nowadays. I might be pointed at for a week or so, but then I’d be allowed to live in peace. (And it was all so unjust—to be punished for what had happened ten years before. It was like being punished for a sin committed in a previous life.) I reminded myself of the stories I used to hear of the gay days before the war, all the scandals about grand country-house parties and the intrigues that went on. Nobody seemed to mind very much what happened then. Why should we all be so much more prudish now?

  (But it’s I who am prudish really.
It is I who am shocked with myself. That’s why I did so frightfully enjoy my love-affair with Don—my love-affair—while my father was dying.)

  I’ve thought this over so often, and given myself so many different answers to the same questions. But I’ve been getting worse lately. Each month that goes by makes me worse. And I’ve got a new fear—a more sensible one, I dare say some people would think. It’s the fear that I shall get so worked up suddenly, that I shall do something really silly—tell the whole story in public, or have hysterics as I nearly did with Ronnie, the night before Joan’s funeral.

  There are times when you feel you can’t go on any longer, when there are too many things against you, each one getting you down just when you’ve begun to recover from the last. I did nerve myself to speak to Joan. I’d decided some time ago that she was the only person I could possibly talk to, if ever a time came when I felt I simply must talk to somebody. Don, of course, is the obvious person, but for some reason it’s utterly impossible for me to talk to him. If it was to be anyone, it was Joan. And I did speak to her and show her the box. She touched it with her own hands and saw where I kept it.

  I thought, that evening, that somehow she’d take the responsibility from me—break the box open, perhaps, or throw it away. But she didn’t. She didn’t know what to make of it. (Why couldn’t she have guessed what must be inside it?) She was very kind and told me not to worry, but beyond that she didn’t help at all.