‘It is forbidden to ask, dear Esther,’ he said, in his low, slightly mocking voice. ‘It is in the language which cannot be taught – one knows its meaning when the time comes, without translation.’
‘And when does the time come?’ asked Esther.
‘When one is ready. Therefore, be ready to be ready.’
He smiled again, sipping his brandy. And now came the mummery, you see. He said slyly:
‘There is a curious legend about that vase. It is probably why it has survived so long in this house of mine, when it might shatter to pieces in any other. It is said that it will stand so, quite intact, until the end of time itself, no matter what blows may be directed against it. But if once – if once – it is so much as caressed by a virgin, Esther, then it will break in a thousand fragments.’
We laughed: and Esther rose solemnly at once and laid her finger on the ugly rim of the thing.
‘You see?’ said Korder.
And we laughed again. One or two of the others went over in the spirit of it all – one girl, I remember, as an extension of the whole absurd joke, took up a heavy iron poker and struck the vase as hard as she could, and it only rocked a little on its pedestal.
Then Viola, with an incredible childish coyness on that pale face of hers, minced across the room from where she had been sitting all alone, as always, in a dark corner. I don’t think I shall ever forget that little mincing way she walked, like a seaside girl on an eternal esplanade, or the gleam of her dyed hair in the fireshine, the spindly legs thrust out from that sacklike frock of hers that was far too short.
She put out her hand with the immense home-made jewellery on it – and even then, you know, I saw her poor finger-nails bitten down to the quick.
The vase seemed to crumple and collapse, almost before her fingers reached it. The jagged pieces of it rocked and slithered across the floor about her feet.
There was a gale of laughter – and she was trying to laugh too, you know. She cried out, again with that edge of awful dated coyness, and blushing so painfully, and laughing and blushing and stamping her foot pettishly:
‘It’s a liar – oh, such a whopping liar, Mr Korder! It’s a fibber – oh, such a fibber!’
. . .You know, dearest Patsy, I couldn’t laugh, suddenly. There was something in me which couldn’t laugh after all. The green field had come off like a lid, as Auden says somewhere. I suppose, because I couldn’t laugh, that I was the one who escaped from it all – from all that callow bleak world of ours – before any of the others. Where are they now, I wonder? I’ve lost touch except with one or two. Guy Mitcham the sculptor, of course – trying to be a pale shadow of old dead Korder himself these days. And Geoffrey Glaspell, who is a monument of respectability at Motspur Park or somewhere like that – but there are strange tales. And Esther, who died last year, you know – do you remember? – those appalling circumstances of it all? . . . but it was never her fault, never for a moment. One tries to forget – or remember: one remains younger than one thinks . . . or grows older than one thinks.
It was that same Guy Mitcham, the sculptor, who built the snowman, I remember. At least, we all helped, but it was Mitcham who added the expert finishing touches. The snow had gone crisp and hard in the bitter frosts, it was like a crust over the great lawns and gardens, weighting the trees down, hanging pendulously at all the eaves. There was a terrible waiting stillness in the air, before the thaw we knew must come soon. It was as if the whole great process of the world had come to a little deathly pause that icy Sunday, the very quick of things had been mortally chilled for a moment . . . How strange it is, my dear, that I should find myself talking like this in this friendly room with you! – as if I were writing an elaborate pastiche of a style out of those past days themselves. This is not what I am – you know that. I am that comfortable person Mrs Carpenter described, to whom you might cheerfully confess your sins – except that you have none, sweet heart, and I would not like to have hers confessed to me. But you see, as I remember it all, I find myself changing very strangely, under the spell. Let me finish and rid myself – there’s little enough left; and I shall be simple Andrew again – we shall go out into that good snow, among the children. You will recognise me for the man you know.
. . . Our snowman was huge and absurd on the lawn there, before the big blind house. It had begun as a romp – even we, you know, shut up there for so long, had begun to feel the need for exercise. Some of the girls had wrapped themselves up and started a snow-fight, and there was a sudden kind of fleeting young healthiness in each one of us – we streamed out to join them. We bombarded each other as we saw Paul’s children doing outside there a moment ago – the whole spell was broken – something died in that house for a moment. But it crept back again. I can remember Korder standing quietly watching us through the french windows with a glass of his eternal brandy in his hand. He was wrapped about the shoulders in a black shawl, his face very white among the shadows – and for once he was not smiling. But we went on, in the sudden release we all felt.
I remember that Esther had started to roll a gigantic snowball – I remember that Viola, even Viola, had joined with her, and they were both laughing as it crunched over the lawn and grew so vast that they could no longer move it – tilted it over on its side so that it rocked for a moment, then settled, as hard and smooth as a marble boulder.
Glaspell shouted: ‘A snowman – we’ll make a snowman!’ – and in a moment, still in the mood of it all, we had set to rolling another ball, smaller, to heave on top of the first, and were scooping up the snow with our hands and making the thing shapely in the old traditional way. It was to conform, you know, as snowmen always have conformed, as the one the children are building across the field out there will conform: the classical squat pyramid, with pebbles for buttons, and the round face on top with nuts of coal for eyes, and an old pipe in the mouth, and a hat found from somewhere, and a broom beneath the bulge of the arm . . . and it was almost done, it grew very quickly with so many of us at work on it, adding touches here and there and moulding the primitive legs and the fat paunch. But suddenly Mitcham, in his quick deft professional way, gave it a face, a real face . . . and everything changed, and I remember Korder smiling at us again and raising his glass a little in a ghostly toast as he looked out at us through the window.
We still laughed, you know, but now it was a different kind of joke. We saw the sudden possibilities, with the snow so sculpturally hard. We helped Guy Mitcham as he shouted orders, like students in his atelier. His face was flushed as he went to work, there was a real momentary artist’s excitement in him. I remember the grey cold evening as the snowman grew before us there, the Snow Man, no longer the snowman. I remember its completion to every last naked masculine detail, and the face a travesty of some old Greek statue almost, yet with a hint in it – a hint, I suppose as a kind of jest from Mitcham at the very end – of . . . Korder’s face.
Someone – it was Esther – had garlanded some laurel leaves, and we set them over the shoulders and round the brow. It stood immensely there, in the first moonlight now; and we were suddenly silent and tired. But Viola, before we went in – and I shall never forget – Viola suddenly laughed again and skipped forward with her long furs dangling; and she went up on an impossible tiptoe and pecked forward with her sharp cold nose. She kissed it on the hollow mouth.
‘Watch out!’ cried Glaspell. ‘He’ll melt beneath your passion, Viola – he’ll crumple like the vase!’
And she said, giggling, in that voice . . . God forgive me, Patsy! – she said: ‘He’s such a pretty boy – yum-yum! He’s such a pretty big cold boy, and needing comfort in the snow. He’s such a pretty boy – yum-yum!’
She skipped back to join us. She took my arm as we went in to where Korder had the drinks waiting for us.
We were the last to enter and so I closed the door behind us and made to lock it.
‘No, no,’ cried Viola playfully, tapping me on the arm. ‘No, no, Mr Bell – don�
�t lock the door. He may want to come in in the night.’
Andrew, in his story-telling, paused, he suddenly paused. Outside they heard the boisterous banging of doors as Paul Gaywood came in from the milking parlour. They heard him shout something to one of the men, then his steps in the hallway outside the kitchen. Andrew abruptly rose.
‘That’s all, Patsy – that’s all. I know nothing. I told you it was as insubstantial as a dream. Except that as I lay awake that night, in that house, I heard – oh, I thought I heard . . . God knows! They were the most insubstantial of all: those large soft shufflings along the corridor, icy in the darkness. They stopped outside her room, beyond mine. And there was one small soft scream, of pain, I think, or dreadful pleasure. But I dreamed that too.
‘I said – long ago, when I began, my dear – I said, do you remember? that all prayers are always answered. They are. But God forgive me, it is why I never pray!’
They went across the snow in the yard and over the meadow. Paul, discovering them in the dusky kitchen, had bustled them into clothes and rubber boots to find the children and bring them in to supper. ‘You need air,’ he had cried. ‘You’re so pale, the pair of you, sitting there! Damned city lives you lead!’
He strode out ahead, his red farmer’s face uplifted happily as he breathed in the crisp evening. Andrew and Patsy followed arm in arm, both very quiet, she shivering a little. Behind, awakened from her doze, enormous in her furs and galoshes, Mrs Carpenter plunged and floundered like a galleon in a white sea.
‘It was someone in that house, of course,’ Andrew was saying in a whisper, so that Patsy had to strain a little more closely to hear him. ‘It was someone nearer death than life. It must have been. It was Korder – I dreamed that it must have been Korder somehow. Yet was it? – for as I lay there, there was one thing that I did hear that I knew was no dream: from that locked room of his downstairs the high-pitched dreadful whine of one of his beastly mummeries, some kind of unholy incantation . . .’
Paul beckoned them forward. There were distant voices beyond the rim of the small hollow they now were mounting. The snow gusted round them as they trudged. Mrs Carpenter, behind, called out puffily:
‘One forgets, of course, how inexpert one is in the face of such natural phenomena as snow. One has become too civilised, perhaps.’
She slipped and nearly fell, assembled herself with a shrill self-conscious laugh, and thrust on through the drifts again.
‘I only saw Viola once again – years later,’ said Andrew. ‘I went to call on her in a studio I heard she’d rented in Camden Town. Her boy was three, four perhaps. She had nearly died in the bearing of him that old September. She was still very ill. She knew, quite plainly, that she hadn’t much longer – I could tell: she knew. She sat shivering in shawls, talking to me about a thousand things but the one thing. Her eyes were always on that boy, who sat very quietly beside the empty fireplace. From first to last he said nothing, only sat there so calmly, unmoving in all the cold.
‘I didn’t stay long – I couldn’t. I knew as I left that I would never see Viola again. I knew also that I would never, in all my life, see anything like the dreadful, hungry, overwhelming love in that square pale face in its frame of dyed bobbed hair as she looked and looked and only looked at him: her boy.
‘And I cursed old dead Korder’s memory, with his mummery, his black, white magic. And yet I didn’t. And yet I did.’
They were over the rim of the hollow. Paul had stopped, very strangely. Before them, in the gusting snow, the children had all fallen silent. They stood back in a wide ring from the snowman they had made, looking towards it even fearfully a little.
The boy with white hair stood close to it, peering up into the blank round face, his small black eyes, like nuts of coal, all bright with tears. Even as they gazed he spread his spindly arms and clasped them tightly round the squat effigy, and buried his thin face almost ferociously in the icy breast, his lonely shoulders shaking.
Mrs Carpenter loomed forward, gasping.
‘Look at him – just look at him, Mr Bell,’ she puffed. ‘I told you – he gives me the creeps, that boy. What normal child would behave so? One may not care for him particularly, but someone had better get him away from that thing quickly – he’ll catch his death of cold.’
The small unloved and loveless thing still clung there tightly to the snowman.
‘He’ll catch,’ whispered Andrew to the trembling Patsy beside him, an immense and helpless sadness in his tone, ‘he’ll catch – he’s caught – his life of cold.’
Simon Raven
THE BOTTLE OF 1912
Like James Purdy, Simon Raven (1927-2001) was something of a literary outsider and iconoclast, whose works, many of them unabashedly gay-themed, often featured a wicked sense of humour. But although best known for his novels satirizing the English upper class, a persistent interest in horror and the supernatural runs through Raven’s work, from his innovative vampire novel Doctors Wear Scarlet (1960), hailed by Karl Edward Wagner as one of the thirteen best supernatural horror novels of all time, to his macabre short fiction, collected in Remember Your Grammar and Other Haunted Stories (1997). ‘The Bottle of 1912’, a short, poignant tale, written in Raven’s trademark elegant style, first appeared in 1961. Raven’s classic first novel, The Feathers of Death (1959) is available from Valancourt, and his Doctors Wear Scarlet is forthcoming.
In the spring of 1947 I returned, you might say, from the dead. Never mind what I had been doing. I suppose you would call me a spy; I had penetrated into a world so remote that it was a long time before I learned of the end of the war, and even longer before my task was done and I could make my way back, by slow and careful stages, to the Headquarters in Delhi. Here they were in the fever which precedes departure, for India would be independent in a few months; and besides being thus preoccupied, they were rather embarrassed to see me.
‘We didn’t expect to see you again,’ said Stetson accusingly; ‘we gave you up last summer.’
‘It all took longer than we thought.’
‘Evidently. How long will it take you to make out your report?’
‘A week . . . ten days. And then I suppose I can go home?’
‘Yes,’ said Stetson, ‘you can go home.’
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘you should have all my mail here. I gave this as my holding address.’
‘We did have it. But we sent it off to your next of kin when we ceased to expect you back. A married sister in Kent, I think?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You’ll just have to wait a few days longer for your bills. After all, you’ve waited some years already . . .’
Yes, I thought: four years. Ever since 1943 when I left England, reported to Stetson, and went off into the hills. A few days more would hardly matter. But I should like to have read those letters from my sister; to have heard the news of her husband and my little nephew and the farm in Kent. And there was another thing – something that had not really occurred to me in the mountains but was obvious now that I was back in the familiar world: my sister would think I was dead. Or at best missing. In 1946 she would have received the parcel with my mail in it, along with a polite letter from Stetson ‘. . . Very much regret . . . has failed to report back . . . must reluctantly conclude . . .’; so that for all I knew there was a tablet bearing my name on the church wall by now. How awkward it was coming back from the dead. No wonder Stetson had been so put out. But it would be easier with my sister: I would not shock her with a cable but would send her a long, soothing letter. She wouldn’t have time to reply, but that didn’t matter. She would have been prepared . . . and gently. I would tell her to keep my mail and to expect me in about ten days – I should be flown home, Stetson said – and that I should warn her as soon as I reached London.
So I wrote to my sister; then I settled to my report for Stetson; and nine days later I left by air for home.
And so now at last I was to see them all again – the only fami
ly I had. My sister Anne, Richard her husband, my nephew (and my godson) Robin. Robin had been five when I left in 1943, a merry, bubbling infant; now he would be nine, gravely dressed in grey shorts and knee-stockings, rather reserved I anticipated, in his smart prep. school blazer. Very different from the trusting baby who had trotted round the room in his blue pyjamas on my last night at home.
‘Robin can stay up a little longer,’ Anne had said. ‘This is a special occasion.’
‘Yes,’ said Richard; ‘we must have a bottle of the 1912.’
On any special occasion, grave or gay, Richard would open a bottle or two of the famous 1912. There had been, Richard would say, no year to equal it. If only his father had realized soon enough and bought more . . . I remembered how, on that distant evening in 1943, he had said:
‘I’ve only a dozen left now. But I shall save a bottle for the day you come back.’
‘When will uncle Jonathan come back?’ asked Robin.
‘Quite soon,’ I said.
‘How soon is quite soon?’
‘When the war’s over. The time will pass very quickly.’
‘Sometimes it does,’ said Robin reflectively, ‘sometimes not. What makes the time go slow and then suddenly fast?’
‘You’ll be busy,’ I said, ‘busy learning things at school. Time always goes fast for busy people.’
‘Will you be busy, Uncle Jonathan?’
‘I expect so.’
‘So the time will go fast for both of us till Uncle Jonathan comes home again. Robin is very glad,’ said Robin.
Then he gave me a hug and a kiss and was taken away to bed by Anne.
‘The government is going to take this place over as a hospital,’ Richard had said later, gently tilting the decanter of 1912 over my glass. ‘I’m not really too upset. It’s very difficult for Anne just now with no servants and Robin at a demanding age. It’s next August they’re coming, I think.’
The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories Page 18
