Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  Standish stopped moving, aware that he was, after all, in England. No addled American tramp would quote Thomas Wyatt at you. The English teacher in him was piqued and delighted. “Go on,” he said.

  “I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, That now are wild and do not once remember, That sometime …” He paused, then intoned, ‘Timor mortis conturbat me’ quoting from another poem. Evidently he was a ragbag of disconnected phrases.

  “Hah! Very good,” Standish said, smiling. “Excellent. You’ve been very helpful to me. Thank you.”

  The man closed his eyes and began to chant. “In going to my naked bed as one that would have slept, I heard a wife saying to her child, that long before had wept, She sighed sad and sang full sweet, to bring the babe to rest, That would not calm but cried still, in sucking at her breast.”

  “Urn, yes,” Standish said, and quickly got into the car. He turned the key in the ignition and glanced sideways at the man, who had come out of his trance and was shuffling toward the car, reaching for the handle of the passenger door. Standish cursed himself for not locking the doors as soon as he had gotten in. The engine caught, and Standish pulled away before the man reached the handle. He looked in the mirror and saw the creature staggering up the middle of the road, gesturing with both hands. Standish looked ahead quickly.

  He drove through the emptiness for perhaps five minutes before coming to a small green sign which read huckstall 10 km.

  It was, when he came to it, a village of narrow lanes lined with brick cottages, so ugly and uninviting that he nearly decided to pass through it and continue on. But the next village appeared to be at least twenty kilometers away, and it would take forty-five minutes to drive that distance over the country roads. And when he came up to the market square in the center of town, Huckstall did not seem so grim.

  Triangular plastic pennants on strings marked off separate areas of the cobbled square—on market days, each area would belong to a separate stallholder. Beyond the strings of pennants lay reassuring signs of civilization, a bow-fronted shop called Boots the Chemist, the imperial stone facade of a Lloyds Bank, and the plate-glass window, filled with brightly colored paperbacks, of a W. H. Smith bookstore. On the corner opposite Standish and his Escort crammed with luggage stood a large double-fronted half-timbered building with bay windows, a small blue sign with the words take courage below a golden rooster, and a much larger sign depicting crossed dueling pistols which bore the legend the duelists. The windows sparkled, the blue paint and white trim gleamed. Standish had a sudden vision of a roasted pig on a serving platter, thick wedges of crumbly yellow cheese, overflowing tankards of ale, a fat smiling man in a toque carving slices of rare roast beef and pouring thick brown gravy onto Yorkshire pudding.

  He could make it to Beaswick and Esswood in another three or four hours. Stopped off for a pub lunch, he would say. Beautiful little place in Huckstall called The Duelists, Do you know it? Ought to be in the guidebooks, if you ask me.

  Standish left his car parked on the side of the square and walked through the chill gray air toward the glistening pub. His stomach rumbled. It came to him that he had driven a strange car hundreds of unfamiliar miles, he was the recipient of a distinguished English literary fellowship, he was about to enter an English interior for the first time. He fairly bounded up the steps and opened the door.

  His first impression was of the pub’s size, his second that it must have closed for the afternoon. The interior of The Duelists was divided into a series of enormous rooms furnished with round tables and padded booths. A red plaid carpet covered the floors, and the walls were artificially half-timbered. In the hazy light from the windows, Standish saw a stocky black-haired man washing glasses behind the bar on the far side of the rows of empty tables. The air stank of cigarette smoke. The bartender glanced up at Standish hovering inside the door, then resumed pulling large, vaguely pineapple-shaped glasses out of hot water and setting them up on the bar.

  Standish wondered if he still had time to get a sandwich. He walked to the bar. The tops of the tables were slick with beer, and most of the ashtrays were filled. Crumpled packs of Silk Cut and Rothmans lay beside the ashtrays.

  “Yes,” the barman said, looking up sharply before plunging his hands into the water again.

  “Are you open?”

  “Door’s not locked, is it?”

  “No, I thought maybe the licensing laws—”

  “Been a change then, has there? And about bloody time, too.”

  “Well, I wondered—”

  The man fixed Standish with an impatient stare, wiped his hands on a towel, and leaned against the bar.

  “You’re not closed,” Standish said.

  The man held out both hands palm-up and moved them outward in a gesture that said: See for yourself. “So if you’ll place your order, sir…”

  “Well, I was hoping to get a beer and something to eat, I guess.”

  “Menu’s behind the bar.” He tilted his head toward a chalkboard advertising steak and kidney pie, shepherd’s pie, ploughman’s lunch, ham sandwich, cheese sandwich, Scotch egg, pork pie, batter-fried prawns, and batter-fried scallops.

  Standish was charmed all over again. In this list he saw how far he had come from Zenith. He suspected the food might be humble by English standards, but he wanted to taste it all. Here was the simple nutritious food of the people, shepherds and ploughmen.

  “It all looks so good”“ he said.

  “Oh, aye?” The barman frowned and turned around to look at the chalkboard himself. “You’d better order some of it then, hadn’t you?”

  “Ploughman’s lunch, please.” Standish envisioned a big steaming bowl with potatoes and leeks and sausages all mixed up in a rich broth. “It’s good, is it?”

  “Good enough for some,” the barman said. “Chutney or pickle?”

  “Why, a little of both.”

  The man turned and disappeared through a door at the far end of the bar. After a moment Standish realized that he had gone into the kitchen to place the order. The bartender returned as abruptly as he had left—his face had an odd flinty concentrated look that made him seem always to be performing some unwelcome task. “And, sir?”

  “And?”

  “And what did you want from the bar? Pint of bitter? Half pint?”

  “What a wonderful idea!” Standish exclaimed, knowing that he sounded like an idiot but unable to restrain himself. A pint of bitter. Standish was suddenly aware of the smallness of England, of its coziness, the snugness and security and warmth of this island nation.

  The bartender was still staring at him with that tense flinty expression.

  “Oh, a pint, I guess,” Standish said.

  “A pint of what, sir?” He swept his hand toward old-fashioned pump taps with ceramic handles. “The ordin’ry?”

  “No, what’s the best one? I just got off the plane from the States a couple of hours ago.”

  The man nodded, picked up one of the pint mugs he had set out to dry, set it beneath a tap marked Director’s Bitter, and hauled back on the tap. Cloudy brown liquid spurted out into the glass. The man pushed and pulled the pump until the glass had filled. His face still seemed stretched taut, immobilized, as if a layer of cells deep within had died.

  “You folks still drink warm beer over here, is that right?”

  “We don’t boil it,” the bartender said. He thumped the pint on the bar before Standish. “You’ll let that settle, sir.”

  What was still swirling around in the glass looked like something drawn up from a swamp. Little brown silty fecal things spun around and around.

  “We don’t see many Yanks up this way,” he said.

  “Oh, I’ve still got a long way to go,” Standish said, watching his beer spin. “I’m on my way to a village called Beaswick. Lincolnshire. I’m invited to a, I guess you’d say, manor house called Esswood.”

  “The fellow was murdered there,” the barman said. “That’ll be three pounds forty altogether.
”

  Standish counted out four pounds from his stash of English money. “You must be mistaken,” he said. “It’s a kind of foundation.

  Every year they invite someone—you’d have to say it’s a kind of honor.”

  “Funny kind of honor.” The barman gave Standish his change. “American, he was. Like yourself, sir.” He turned away. “Take a seat, sir. The food will be out directly.”

  Standish carried the heavy glass to a table in the second rank and sat down. He examined the beer. It was calmer now. A thin layer of foam lay on its top like scum. The spinning brown things had dissolved into the murk. He sipped cautiously. Over a strong clear bit of alcohol rode a sharp deep tang more that of whiskey than of beer. It was like drinking some primitive tribal medicine. Standish felt a healthy, cheering distance between himself and the standards of Zenith. He took a longer swallow and told himself he was getting to like this stuff.

  “That’s strong, that is, the Director’s,” said a female voice behind him, and Standish jerked his hand in surprise and soaked his cuff with beer.

  “Beggin’ your pardon,” the girl said, smiling at Standish’s sudden consternation. She was a pretty blonde in her late teens or early twenties with wide, rather blank eyes of an almost transparent pale blue. She wore a red woolen sweater covered by a stained, bulging white apron that for some reason reminded Standish of a nurse’s uniform. He noticed that she was very pregnant before he saw that she was carrying a plate with a large wedge of cheese and the heel of a loaf of French bread. “Your food.”

  “I’m sorry, but that isn’t what I ordered,” Standish said.

  “Of course you ordered it,” she said, all her amusement gone in an instant. “You’re the only bloody customer in the place, d’you think I could make a mistake like that with but the one order?”

  “Wait. This is cheese and—”

  “Ploughman’s lunch, that is. With pickles and chutney.” She thrust it before him so that he could see the two puddles of sauce, brown and yellow, beside the wedge of cheese.

  She set the plate roughly on the table and rapped a knife and a fork down beside it. “Wouldn’t you call that right?” A glance at him. “He came into the kitchen and said, ‘Ploughman’s lunch, pickle and chutney,’ and I said, ‘Wants both, does he?’ because I’d looked out the window and seen you making for the pub and I knew you were a Yank by your clothes and the way you walked, just like a Yank it was, you needn’t think I’m ignorant just because I live in Huckstall and work in a pub, I’m educated better far than your great ignorant American girls, I’ve two A levels and two O levels, and my husband owns this pub, you should see the envy on their faces when we go home, you should see—”

  About midway through this astonishing speech Standish became aware of the meaning of the rigid expression on the barman’s face: Not this, not again. The girl was breathing hard, and she placed one hand on her chest.

  “Enough,” the barman said from behind Standish.

  The girl glared down at Standish and turned away to move quickly through the empty tables, tugging at the tie of the apron as she went. She dropped the apron at the door and pushed through to the outside.

  Standish looked up in amazement at the barman. He was wiping his hands on a white towel, and he looked back down at Standish with a stony rigidity.

  “Closing time, sir,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You’ll be leaving now. Time.”

  “But I haven’t even—”

  “Your money will be refunded, sir.” He took a crumpled wad of bills from his pocket, found four single pound notes, and set them down on Standish’s table, where they immediately wilted in a puddle of spilled beer.

  “Oh, come on,” Standish said. “I could wait here if you want to go out and bring her back. Honest, I understand—my wife’s pregnant too, she said a lot of crazy things just before I left—”

  “Time,” the man said, and put a hand as heavy as a bag of cement on Standish’s shoulder. “Take the cheese. I am closing now, sir.”

  Standish gulped down a mouthful of the awful beer. He stood. The barman slid his hand down Standish’s arm to his elbow. “Now, sir, please.”

  “You don’t have to push me out!” Standish grabbed the wedge of cheese as the barman began to move him toward the door. The man’s face was concentrated and expressionless, as if he were moving a heavy piece of furniture.

  He permitted Standish to open the door of the pub.

  Outside in the bright gray air, Standish looked down at the empty market square with its fluttering flags. The pregnant girl had disappeared. Standish heard the clanking of heavy bolts behind him.

  “Jesus,” he said. He looked down at the pie-shaped wedge of cheese. From somewhere came a pervasive distant thunder like the noise of a hidden turbine. It seemed to him that people were peering at him from behind curtains.

  He looked across the square. A shiny, half-flattened bag flipped across the cobbles in a moist breeze, dribbling out crumbled potato chips and white chunks of salt. The cheese in his hand had begun to adhere to his fingers.

  Of course, he thought. In a place this size everybody knows everything—that crazy woman chased them all out of the pub before I showed up. They were waiting to see how long I’d last.

  The homely little turquoise mule across the square sat in a dazzle and sparkle of water or of quartz embedded into the cobbles. Standish walked toward it along the perimeter of the square. Other people’s lives were like novels, he thought. You saw so little, you had only a peek through a window and then you had to guess about what you had seen.

  For a moment, he quite clearly saw before him the pretty quadrangle, crisscrossed by intersecting paths, that was the center of the Popham campus.

  At a scuffle of movement behind him he turned around and nearly stumbled. The crowd he had imagined was not there. In an arch between The Duelists and a tobacconist’s shop he glimpsed two people watching—a blonde woman in a red jersey and a tall man in a cap and a long muddy coat. It took Standish a moment to realize why this man looked familiar: he was the tramp who had startled him on the road to Huckstall. They vanished beneath an arch. Standish heard the footsteps of the tramp and the publican’s wife clattering down the hidden street.

  But the tramp had been twelve kilometers out of town, something like ten miles. He could not have walked so far in the short time since Standish had seen him.

  They flee from me that sometime did me seek. He jumped at a sudden noise, and saw only the shiny bag flipping over the stones. The odd rumbling of unseen engines persisted.

  Standish looked at the darkened pub and saw the source of the mysterious sound. Beyond the top of the pub, the distance of a field away, a steady stream of trucks and cars rolled north on an elevated road. It was the motorway he had managed to lose at one of the roundabouts.

  The rest of the drive to Lincolnshire passed with what seemed to him surprising ease. The motorways swept him uneventfully toward his destination; the tangle of lines on Robert Walls’ map resolved itself, after frequent inspection, into actual roads with actual identities that led to actual places; he lost his way only once, by overshooting a badly marked intersection. By all his earlier standards, it was a difficult and confusing journey, but by the standards of the morning, it was nearly painless.

  The light faded. In the growing darkness Standish began to see dikes and canals in the fields, which even in the diminishing light were of a glowing, almost electrical green. The map led him past tiny Lincolnshire villages and through broad marshes. A pale phosphorescence, as of something dead come back to uneasy life, now and then glowed far off in the marshes.

  He came to Beaswick in the dark, at ten o’clock at night. The village was a mean affair of ugly row houses interspersed with pubs and chip shops. In ten minutes he had passed through it, still following his map.

  A few minutes later he came to an unmarked road that led into a darkness of massive oaks, tie drove through an iron gate opened
onto a drive that went looping through the monumental trees. He rounded a final curve and saw before him an immense white house at the top of a wide flight of steps. Behind the house his headlights shone upon a descending series of terraces before they flashed across the windows of the house. Standish pulled up before the steps and got out of his car. When he took his first long look at Esswood House, an entirely unforeseen thing happened to him. He fell in love with it.

  THREE

  Standish had never been to France or Italy, he had never seen Longliet, Hardwick Hall, Wilton House, or any of the twenty country estates that were Esswood’s equal; it would have made no difference if he had. Esswood struck him as perfect. The clear symmetrical line of the house, broken regularly by great windows, delighted him. He tried to remember the name for a facade like this, but the word would not come. It did not matter. The whole great white structure seemed balanced, in harmony with itself and the countryside around it. What might have been forbidding—the whiteness and severity of its facade, the flight of steps that might have reminded him of a government building— had been humanized by constant use. A single family, the Seneschals, had lived here for hundreds of years. People had moved familiarly up and down these steps and through every one of the rooms. Generations of children had grown up here. Even in the darkness the stairs showed worn patches, eroded by generations of Seneschals and hundreds of poets and painters and novelists. Here and there the paint was flaking, and water damage had left dark linear stains at the corners of some of the noble windows. These small blemishes did not disturb Esswood’s perfection.

  Standish opened the trunk of the car and lifted out two of his large suitcases. They seemed much heavier than they had in Zenith, and Standish dropped them one after the other onto the gravel before he closed his trunk. Then he picked them up and trudged toward the staircase.