Familiar and Haunting
Page 23
He took my hand, and we fought our way back to the house. The whole house was lit up, to light us home, and my mother stood at the open back door, waiting. She gave a cry of horror when she saw me with my father, and then she saw his face, and her own went quite white. He stumbled into her arms, and he sobbed and sobbed. I didn’t know until that night that grown men could cry. My mother led my father indoors, and I don’t know what talk they had together. My sisters looked after me, dried me, scolded me, put me to bed.
The next day the telegram came to say that Beany had been killed in action in Flanders.
It was some time after that that Jess came home. She was wet through, and my mother thought she was ill, for she sat shivering by the fire and for two days would neither eat nor drink. My father said, “Let her be.”
I’m an old man. It all happened so many years ago, but I’ve never forgotten my brother, Beany. He was so good to us all.
Her Father’s Attic
Rosamund was an only child and the apple of her mother’s eye. She resembled her mother: pink-cheeked, golden-haired, blue-eyed. She was going to be like her mother: pretty.
Mrs. Brunning had faith in her daughter’s looks. “She’ll be picked out,” she said. “She’ll go up to London and be a model. Or go on TV. She’ll make a name for herself, and money, and marry well. … What did you say, Geoff?”
But Mr. Brunning, who was hungry from working out-of-doors, had only grunted; his attention was entirely on his dinner. Besides, he knew the kind of thing that would come next.
“Anyway,” his wife said, “she won’t hang about here until some drudging clodhopper marries her, and she has to end her days where she began ‘em.”
This was a dig at her husband, who was a small farmer and an unsuccessful one; he worked hard on his land for very little return. He had inherited his father’s farm and farmhouse only because none of his four elder brothers had wanted to; they had had higher ambitions and achieved them. He had been the runt of the family, small, sallow, timid; he had been teased and persecuted all his childhood. He had married—so his wife considered—above him, and he would be teased and persecuted for the rest of his married life.
“Rosamund has more of me in her than she has of you, thank goodness,” said Mrs. Brunning. “She’s all me, is Rosamund.”
Rosamund, above whose head her mother wrangled, yawned inside her mouth and was glad that dinner was over. Her father got up and went back to his work outside, and Mrs. Brunning began washing up. There was no question of Rosamund’s helping; she was the only child, spoiled, her mother’s darling. Mrs. Brunning considered most of the local children unfit company for her, so as often before, Rosamund went off now to play alone indoors. Indoors, because her mother hated farm filth, as she called it, ever to be on her feet.
Brunning’s was an old house, although without any particular history; Geoffrey Brunning could say only that his father knew that his father had been born there. It was not at all a grand house, but it had been built for a time of many children and of farm servants living with their masters. Nowadays there were shut rooms and unused passageways, away from the central, lived-in part of the house; such outlying parts suffered the erosions of neglect and time. Since Geoffrey Brunning’s childhood, for instance, the highest attic, once a nursery, had been closed. Mr. Brunning said the floor was unsafe and, particularly to safeguard Rosamund, had locked the door that opened to the attic stairway.
So the door was already locked before Rosamund was old enough to roam the house on her own, and soon after that the woodworms had begun their invisible banquet upon the framework. Rosamund used regularly to bang at the closed door as she passed it, but without real curiosity. Perhaps her knock interrupted the woodworms’ gnawing for a moment; then they resumed. Neither she nor they, after the passage of years, were at all prepared for the day—this very day—when their world exploded in a flurry of wood dust, as her casual blow sent the metalwork of the lock right through the decayed woodwork of the frame. Abruptly the door swung open as if to open wide. Then its hinges creaked to a rusty standstill, and Rosamund was left with a sliced-off view of wooden stairs powdered with old plaster and new wood dust.
Of course, Rosamund had always known of the existence of the attic, but the opening of the way to it was new. She must—she must go up and see it for herself. Circumstances were favorable: her father was out on the farm; her mother would still be in the kitchen, either finishing washing up or beginning to prepare for a genteel visitor that afternoon. Between the kitchen and the attic lay a wasteland of empty rooms and passages. Rosamund listened carefully, but she could hear no sound from anywhere.
She took a deeper breath than usual and pushed firmly against the door. It offered surprising resistance but finally opened wide enough to allow her body to pass through. She began going carefully up into the darkness of the stairway, feeling before her with her hands.
At the top of the stairs, she stubbed her fingers against another door. It had a small round hole at the level of a handle, but a spider had been at work, and her peeping eye could see only a mesh illumined from beyond by a dim lemon-colored light.
For the first time, with darkness round her, and the unbroken silence of years, she nearly felt afraid but would not allow the feeling to grow upon her. She pressed very softly at the door. At once, with a kind of overeagerness, the door swung right back.
She stood on the threshold of her father’s attic nursery. Its bare length stretched uninterruptedly from her feet to a small window at the far end, where the afternoon sunlight shone weakly through dusty glass, greenish yellow where the last leaves of a creeper encroached upon the panes.
She was not afraid now. Being a practical child, she first considered the floor, which her father had said was unsafe. The bare boards looked firm, and she began to test them, one after another. They bore her weight. She knew that she was not as heavy as a grown-up person, yet she felt beneath her feet the solid assurance of timber that would outlast generations. The floor was sound, when her father had said it was not; she felt puzzled.
There was no other mystery to the room. It was quite empty, except for the low shelves and cupboards that had been built into the steep angle where the sloping roof met the floor. She examined the cupboards carefully; they were all quite empty, even the one with the door that appeared to be locked but was only jammed. Someone, at some time, had forced the door, and damaged it. Delicately she eased it open. She left that door standing ajar, because it had been so difficult. She might want to get in again. The cupboard was a roomy one, without shelves.
Rosamund went to the window next. With the stubbornness of disuse, it refused to open, but she cleared a pane of glass and could look through. She was charmed with the novelty of the view from here. She looked right across the roofs of the farm buildings to the fields and the spire of the parish church beyond. She thought that she could distinguish her father at work in one of the middle fields, but the light was failing. The setting sun stood in irregular red slices behind a thin copse of trees on the skyline.
Having gazed for so long into the last of the sun, she was surprised at the darkness of the room when she turned back to it. Shadows had gathered thickly at the far end, by the door, and inky blackness had settled in the depth of the one cupboard left open. She decided suddenly that it was time to leave the attic.
She started off across the safe, safe floor toward the stairway that led back to the peopled part of the house.
The attic was a long one, and Rosamund walked slowly—still with that careful, light step—because she could not quite put from her mind the idea that the place was dangerous. She drew level with the open cupboard, and looked deeply into it. She halted as it occurred to her—without surprise or pleasure—that this cupboard would make a good hiding place; it was large enough for a child of her age, crouching. Neither excitement nor pleasure; neither surprise nor speculation—she seemed to have remembered the possibilities of the cupboard rather than freshly to
have thought of them.
There she stood, staring into the cupboard.
The sun had gone, and the shadows of the room moved up toward the window. They lapped round Rosamund like a sea, and she began to sink into them like a drowning person. She sank to the floor and lay along it, quite still. Her eyes were wide open, fixed upon the darkness in the cupboard. Darkness and fear flowed from the cupboard and filled the attic from doorway to window.
Outside in the field Geoffrey Brunning was still working in the afterlight. Now he stopped abruptly; he told himself he had forgotten that he must go in early today. He must go.
He had forgotten nothing, but it was as if something had remembered him. He did not know why he was going, why he was hurrying. As he neared the farmhouse, he broke into an awkward, anxious trot.
He went in by the back door as usual, leaving his boots there, and so into the kitchen. It was empty and almost dark except for the red glow from the old-fashioned stove that his wife was always complaining about.
“Ros!” he called. There was no answer.
He decided to have some common sense. He switched on the light, filled the kettle and put it on to boil, and began to cut bread for toast. He cut one slice, then laid the knife carefully down and went to stand out in the hall. It was dark there, with only a line of light from underneath the door of the sitting room. That was where his wife would be entertaining. He could hear voices, but not Rosamund’s. He had not expected to hear it.
He turned away from the door of the sitting room, as he had turned away from the kitchen, and now he faced the main stairs. In the dark he could hardly see them. He stood peering, trying to make his mind work commonsensically, to think of the electric light switch that would banish darkness. But darkness increased moment by moment, filling his mind. Darkness and fear flowed round him like a sea, rose round him to drown him.
He gave a cry and turned quickly back to the light of the kitchen. Then, at the very door, he swerved aside and set off at a rush, but not firmly, stumbling and feeling like a blind man up the stairs, along walls, round corners. His course was directly up and toward the disused attic.
At the threshold of the attic he took a deep breath, like a man about to enter a smoke-filled room. He could see nothing, but he knew that Rosamund was there. He made one mistake, in thinking—in being sure—that she would be crouching in the cupboard with the jammed door. Even as his feet felt their way toward it, they met her body on the floor. He bent, took hold of her, and dragged her to the top of the attic stairway; then, having gathered her in his arms, he carried her down and away, to the kitchen. There he set her upon a chair, where she began to stir and blink in the bright light, like a dreamer waking, but she had not been asleep. She was very pale at first, but soon the pink began to reappear in her cheeks. She did not speak to her father, but her awakened gaze never left him.
Her father had collapsed upon another chair in the kitchen.
There Mrs. Brunning found them, having said good-bye to her visitor. Her daughter seemed as usual, but her husband was leaning forward in an attitude of exhaustion, his fingers dangling over the edge of his knees, his face white and sweaty.
“Don’t say you’re sickening for something, now!” Mrs. Brunning said sharply. “You’re a sight! What do you feel like?”
“Oh … I feel…”
What did he feel like?
Long ago, when he was a child, he had felt like this, once. His brothers had shut him into one of the nursery cupboards, just for their fun, and the cupboard door had jammed. That was all it had been, except for the darkness inside the cupboard, and his fear. The darkness and the fear had lasted forever. They said afterward that his being shut in had all lasted only a short time and that he had been stupid to be so afraid. They’d been able to force the cupboard door open in the end, and then they’d dragged him out. But the darkness had stayed behind in the cupboard, and his fear.
“Well, what do you feel like?” his wife repeated irritably.
“Nothing special.”
“Let’s hope you pass nothing special on to Rosamund then. But at least she’s not one of those easy-ailing children. Like me, in that.”
Rosamund was staring at her father, paying no attention to her mother’s refrain: “Yes, more of me in her than you, thank goodness. All me.” Rosamund was staring at her father as at somebody strange to her and of the strangest importance.
The Running Companion
Any day, over the great expanses of the common, you can see runners. In tracksuits or shorts and running tops, they trot along the asphalted paths across the grass, or among the trees, or by the ponds. On the whole, they avoid London Hill, toward the middle of the common, because of its steepness. There is another reason. People climb the hill for the magnificence of the view of London from the top, but runners consider it unlucky, especially at dusk. They say it is haunted by ghosts and horrors then. One ghost; one horror.
In his lifetime, Mr. Kenneth Adamson was one of the daily runners. This was a good many years ago now. His story has been pieced together from what was reported in the newspapers, what was remembered by neighbors and eyewitnesses, and what may have been supposed to have been going on in the mind of Mr. Adamson himself.
Sometimes Mr. Adamson ran on the common in the early morning; more often he ran in the evening after work. He worked in an office. He was not liked there; he was silent, secretive, severe. People were afraid of him.
The Adamsons lived in one of the terrace houses bordering the common. There was old Mrs. Adamson, a widow, who hardly comes into this story at all, and her two sons, of whom Kenneth, or Ken, was the elder. There were only two people in the world who called Mr. Adamson by his first name: they were his mother and his brother. He had no wife or girlfriend, no friends at all.
Mr. Adamson ran daily in order to keep himself fit. The steady jogtrot of this kind of running soothed his whole being; even his mind was soothed. While his legs ran a familiar track, his mind ran along an equally familiar one. Ran, and then ran back, and then ran on again; his mind covered the same ground over and over and over again.
His mind ran on his hatred.
Mr. Adamson’s hatred was so well grown and in such constant training that at times it seemed to him like another living being. In his mind there were the three of them: himself, and his hatred, and his brother, the object of his hatred.
Of course, Mr. Adamson’s brother never ran. He could not walk properly without a crutch; he could only just manage to get upstairs and downstairs by himself in their own house. He had been crippled in early childhood, in an accident, and his mother had not only cared for him but spoiled him. To Mr. Adamson’s way of thinking, she had neglected him. Jealousy had been the beginning of Mr. Adamson’s hatred, in childhood; as the jealousy grew, the hatred grew, like a poison tree in his mind. It grew all the more strongly because Mr. Adamson had always kept quiet about it; he kept his hatred quiet inside his mind.
He grew up, and his hatred grew up with him.
For years now Mr. Adamson’s hatred had been with him, not only when he ran but all day, and often at night, too. Sometimes in his dreams it seemed to him that his running companion, his hatred, stood just behind him or at his very elbow, a person. By turning his head, he would be able to see that person. He knew that his hatred was full-grown now, and he longed to know what it looked like. Was it monster or man? Had it a heavy body, like his own, to labor uphill only with effort, or had it a real runner’s physique, lean and leggy? He had only to turn his head and see, but in his dreams he was always prevented.
“Ken!”
His mother’s thin old voice, calling his name up the stairs, would break into his dreams, summoning him down to breakfast. Mr. Adamson breakfasted alone, listening to the sound of his brother moving about in his room above or perhaps beginning his slow, careful descent of the stairs. Listening to that, Mr. Adamson seemed to hear something else: a friend’s voice at his ear, whispering a promise: “One day, Ken…”
Mr. Adamson came home from work, and presumably the two brothers had supper, talked perhaps—although Mr. Adamson never spoke to his brother if he could help it—and prepared for bed. Just before bedtime, as usual, Mr. Adamson must have changed into his running shorts and top and training shoes and set off on his evening run.
Questioned afterward, the neighbors said that the evening seemed no different from any other evening. But how were they to know? The Adamsons lived in a house whose party walls let little noise through. Would they have heard a cry of fear: “Ken—no!” Would they have heard a scream? The sound of a heavy body falling, falling?
Sometime that evening Mr. Adamson’s brother fell downstairs, fatally, from the top of the stairs to the bottom. Whether he fell by his own mischance (but no, in all his life, he had never had an accident on those stairs) or whether he was pushed, nothing was ever officially admitted. But the evidence examined afterward at least pointed to his already lying there at the foot of the stairs, huddled, still, when Mr. Adamson went out for his evening run. Mr. Adamson must have had to step over his dead body as he came downstairs, in his running gear, to go out on the common.
It so happened that neighbors did see Mr. Adamson leaving the house. He left it looking as usual—or almost as usual, they said. One neighbor remarked that Mr. Adamson seemed to be smiling. He never smiled, normally. They saw no one come out of the house with him, of course. No one followed him.