by Joan Aiken
“I don’t believe I have it wrong,” I said, and stepped out of the toreadors.
With utter panic and bewilderment, the nasty man said, ’’But William said you’d—” And stopped.
We both stopped. I stared at the nasty man in sudden comprehension. All at once I understood how it was he had known so much about me, how it had been possible for him to take those pictures.
So William couldn’t live on the amount I gave him willingly. Mother was right, all men are beasts.
As I stood there, trying to get used to this new realization, the door burst open and Robert came bellowing in, waving that huge and ugly pistol of his.
I still wasn’t recovered from my shock. To think, to think I’d been trying to save William from being killed, to think I’d been willing to sacrifice both Robert and the nasty man for William’s sake. And all the time, all the time, William had betrayed me.
But then I did recover from the shock, and fast, because I saw that Robert had stopped his enraged bellowing and was glaring at me. At me. And pointing that filthy pistol at me.
At me.
“Not me!” I cried, and pointed at the nasty man. “Him! Him!”
The first shot buzzed past my ear and smashed the glass over the woodland painting above the bed.
I ran left, I ran right. The nasty man cowered behind the dresser. Robert’s second shot chunked into the wall behind me.
“You lied!” I screamed. “You lied!”
All men are bea—
The Front Room
Michael Butterworth
You know the English and their front rooms. Here is a front room that will outdo them all.
On the last Saturday of that hot September, the brown bus put down Naomi and Bevis in the sun-faded holiday hamlet at the end of the naked stretch of new concrete road that ran parallel to the sand dunes, because this was as far as it went.
Top End, the bus driver told them, was at the far end of the new road and a little way on. You couldn’t miss it; there was a pub and a shop, and the chalets and bungalows were up on the sand hills off the narrow road. Anyone would tell them where their place was, he said.
There was a little clump of people at the bus stop; flowered print dresses and baggy shorts, peeled noses and pale varicosed legs. It was mostly the older folk who came to this unfashionable coast. Before the war it had teemed, and it was still cheap.
The people got into the bus, and it rattled off round the semi-circle of wooden-fronted buildings: the chemist’s shop with the handwritten ticket about printing and developing snapshots, the picture postcard stand and the dusty piles of children’s buckets and spades, the amusement arcade with the pin tables and the pop music: past all these and back the way it came—to where the sky met the flat, raw sweep of fenland behind the sea, and crazy lanes zig-zagged the great dyked fields.
Naomi felt suddenly forsaken. “Wouldn’t there be any chance of getting a taxi, darling?” she said, and wished she hadn’t, because it always annoyed Bevis when she seemed to take the initiative in things. Yes, the suggestion had prickled him; he breathed heavily through his nose when he looked about them. There was no sign of a garage; apart from an old red sports car parked at the end of the buildings, where the road gave way to sand, at the deep cutting through the sand hills leading to the beach, there was nothing on wheels.
“Well, what do you think?” he snapped, and stooped to pick up their cases. “Come on, let’s get on with it.” He set off up the straight, hot road—and Naomi followed him.
The blare of the pop music faded behind them, and they were walking in tandem in the middle of the empty road to a point up ahead, with whispering hay in the fields at either side; on their right the high dunes shielding the sea, and the endless fens on their left. And all the while she watched this man she had married that spring.
It will be all right, she told herself. We haven’t made a good start, but it hasn’t been easy, what with both of us having to go out to work to scrape together the money for the mortgage on the house. This fortnight’s going to make all the difference. Two inexpensive weeks by the sea with just the basic joys of sunshine and idleness. Time to find ourselves again. Next year, maybe, we’ll start a family...
Strange how thin and frail Bevis looked with his arms tautened by the weight of the cases. They had met and courted in the winter, and he had looked almost burly in winter clothes. Quite different now. She would have to fatten him up during the holiday. Only trouble was he had an appetite like a little bird, and smoked far too much. The strain of carrying the heavy cases was telling on him already; he was breathing heavily, and tendrils of his wispy, fair hair were sticking to his pale brow.
No use offering to carry one of them, though they both knew she was basically the stronger. And that was another thing he detested.
He dumped down the cases in the sandy grass at the road verge and lit a cigarette, avoiding her gaze. There was a frosting of sweat around his mouth, and his fingers holding the match trembled with fatigue.
Naomi said: “That’s right, darling. Have a bit of a rest, there isn’t much further to go.” And she crossed to the fence and looked across a narrow field to the sand hills, where the wind from the sea was ruffling the spiky crests of the grass up there, and some of it reached her because she felt its languorous breath mold her dress, lightly, to her body. She wondered if Bevis was watching her.
She stretched herself lazily, and suddenly felt very alive. “It really is a most wonderful September,” she said. But he didn’t reply, and when she turned he was already hefting the cases and setting off again down the middle of the road.
Top End was how they had been told it would be, and the pub was closed, so they enquired at the shop, which was really only a glass lean-to on the end of a weatherboard bungalow, and the woman had to call her husband in from the garden, and after some thought he remembered that the Leevis place was the last house along the sand hills. How far? Perhaps half a mile or a bit more.
In the end, the man offered to deliver their cases in his van later on in the afternoon, so they set off again unencumbered, and Bevis’s spirits rose; he took Naomi’s hand, and they swung along gaily, speculating on what the place was going to be like, not to mention Mrs. Leevis, who was no more to them than a semi-illiterate, pencilled note telling them that in reply to their advertisement she could offer her bungalow, et cetera.
“Well, at any rate, however awful the place is, we’re right on the beach,” said Naomi.
The narrow road hugged the foot of the sand hills, and the bungalows were set on the crests, among the dry grass and the straggling gorse, each plot bounded by a wire fence. They were spaced at haphazard intervals, and none of them were close together. Weatherboard, concrete, and flaking paint with the silvery wood showing through. Bijou verandahs of fretted wood peering over the crests to the grey, crawling sea below, where the seagulls swooped. Seedy, small monuments of insularity, and not a soul in sight; everywhere seemed deserted. But then it was nearly October.
“It can’t be much further,” cried Naomi, and she slipped off her shoes and ran barefoot to the top of the next rise in the narrow road. “Yes, there it is!” calling back to him as he strode up to join her.
The last roof lay half-hidden by a copse of tall gorse, and beyond that the road wound on to an infinity of solitude.
“It’s terribly isolated out here,” she said, and suddenly wished she hadn’t.
The bungalow, when they came to it, was a crouching block of salt-bleached concrete in a sand declivity, with a low-pitched roof of grey slate. Naked-looking iron pipes; eyeless, curtained windows; an uncompromising back door with an empty milk bottle on the step.
Quelling a sudden stab of disappointment, Naomi said: “Come on, darling. This is really the back of the house. The front of it will be facing the sea, and that might be quite nice.” And they walked together through the warm, yielding sand round the small building. “Yes, it’s not too bad at all. There’s a ver
andah and a French window looking right out to sea.”
They were standing together, in the open space of sand in front of the verandah, when the woman came out of the gate in the wire fence from the gorse copse.
“Are you the people?” she called to them. “Yes, I can see you must be. I’ll get Ned to carry your cases indoors. Where’s your cases?”
Bevis was no good with strangers, so Naomi walked the few paces to meet her, smiling.
“The man from the village shop’s going to deliver them later,” she said, adding interrogatively: “Mrs. Leevis?”
She was about fifty-five, and wore a gillyflower-colored dress and beads to match, and a large hat of shiny black straw under which the straggly tendrils of white hair were scraped back into a bun that pushed out the hat at the back. Broken veins crazed her cheeks pinkly under a heavy tan, and her eyes were palest blue and disconcertingly watchful. She was tall, and moved with a memory of straightness and strength.
“Yes, that’s right dear,” she said. Her teeth were white, and her own. “Well, I expect you’d like to go inside and get settled in.” And she led them round to the back door and unlocked it standing aside to let them pass, her eyes flickering over the slender girl and the pale young man. “I think you and your husband will find everything quite comfortable.”
There was a narrow, dark-wallpapered passage with four doors leading off. First, a kitchen. “It’s not big, but very convenient, you’ll find,” said Mrs. Leevis. And Naomi looked at her doubtfully: cramped as a ship’s galley, with painted whitewood table and two chairs; a dresser with plates and a row of dusty, hanging cups; a food cupboard. There was no fridge, and the cooker worked with bottled gas.
“There’s plenty of gas for your fortnight,” said Mrs. Leevis, opening the cupboard, “and you’re welcome to the bits and pieces in here.” These comprised half empty packets of rice and sugar, some condiments and preserves, and a bottle with dried sauce lacquered around the stopper. Naomi made a mental resolve to consign the lot to the waste bin and wipe out the shelves as soon as the woman’s back was turned.
“Well, it’s a lovely bright kitchen,” she made herself say. And indeed the afternoon sun came full into the narrow room, mellowing its dusty rawness.
Mrs. Leevis nodded dismissively; she seemed to want to hurry on with the tour of the bungalow; eager, like a child, to reach the best part which lay just around the next corner, through another door.
She showed them the bedroom opposite the kitchen, with the double bed, and drew back the blinds to show the tangled thicket of gorse beyond the fence.
“You’re not overlooked here,” she said.
The second bedroom was only a windowed cupboard with an iron cot covered by an army blanket. There was a musky smell of maleness in the room, and Naomi winced to see a spider scurry across the bare floorboards and disappear in the wainscoting.
“Well, that just leaves the front room,” said Mrs. Leevis, and there was no mistaking the edge of pride in her tone. “I’ll go first, ’cos I keep it locked always.”
It lay at the end of the passage; the last remaining door, and Mrs. Leevis unlocked it, casting them a sidelong glance as if to say: “This is what you’ve been waiting for, and you won’t be disappointed.”
Naomi tried to catch Bevis’s eye, but he was watching the woman gravely, and she was able to quench a wayward impulse to giggle.
“There!” exclaimed Mrs. Leevis, moving aside to let them pass. “This is where you’re going to spend many a happy evening, I shouldn’t wonder.”
It’s hideous, thought Naomi. Hideous in every possible way, and I hate it! She looked to Bevis for a confirming glance, but he was still regarding the woman, and nodding as she spoke. “All my treasures. And you’ll live amongst them, and they’ll become part of you also…”
It was dark, to begin with. The French window at the end was shaded by the verandah roof, which cut off the view of sea and sky, so that there were only the sand hills to be seen, and they were in deep shadow from the wall of the building. There were no other windows in the room.
And it was shaped like a cube. Five paces to the window and five paces across (heaven knows, it might have been five paces up the maroon-papered walls to the high, dark ceiling). Mrs. Leevis pressed a switch, and a single bulb burned starkly inside a raw glass cone, picking out the hotchpotch of heavy furniture that crammed the space beneath it: boggle-tasselled Victoriana and tubular steel side by side; spindly small tables loaded with domed, wax fruit, pale photographs in silver frames and passepartout. They followed Mrs. Leevis across to the fireplace, turning and weaving through the maze of objects that lay between.
“This is a pretty thing,” said Mrs. Leevis, taking an object from the cluttered mantelpiece. “I had it since I was a girl like you, dear, and I often pick it up and turn it over in my hands to remind me...”
What she was holding was small and brightly colored, but it remained a glazed blur on the edge of Naomi’s vision. Her whole shocked attention was on the thing she could see under the woman’s arm, among the jumble of knickknacks, between the swelling base of a lustre vase and a brass bell shaped like a crinolined lady.
In a sealed, liquid-filled cylinder of glass lay slackly turned coils of ochre and brown, ending in a tiny, v-marked head, and the dead eyes were opaque like drowned seed pearls.
She screamed as she tripped and fell back over something, and Bevis steadied her; shocked at first, then irritated to see the cause of her sudden terror.
Mrs. Leevis stooped to right the footstool that Naomi had overturned. “Well, I never saw such a fuss,” she said disapprovingly. “It’s only a little adder our Ned killed up in the sand hills when he was a lad. He put it in pickle. I’m sure it couldn’t harm a soul, and it always looks so pretty in the light. All those soft colors.”
“I can’t bear—such things,” faltered Naomi, looking to Bevis for support, but he only pursed his lips and fumbled for his cigarette packet.
There was not much else to say after that. Mrs. Leevis was last out of the room. She looked back adoringly before she turned off the light and relocked the door. They went outside with her, and stood to watch her go.
“Anything you want, just call,” she said, pointedly addressing Bevis. “We’re not far away, and Ned is always very willing.” She went out through the gate in the wire fence and into the dappled sunlight of the gorse. And now they could see it: half-hidden there a stone’s throw away: an old railway carriage with a green-painted roof and steps leading up to a door with a rustic arch. And then they heard the heavy rasp of a big saw biting into wood. It came from somewhere behind the strange building.
“That must be her son,” said Bevis, and then he growled: “What did you have to go and make that ridiculous scene for? The old girl thought you’d gone crazy.”
Naomi didn’t answer. Still grumbling, he followed her into the kitchen and watched her fill a kettle and put it on the stove for tea.
She shut her mind to him, telling herself that it would be all right soon, and that she had to make this holiday work for both their sakes—and it would be she who would have to make all the allowances.
Only—one thing—she would never be able to use that awful front room. It wasn’t just the thing in the glass cylinder, but something about the whole room that was infinitely disturbing.
Later, when the man from the shop had delivered their cases, she suggested a swim—their first that year—but he had found a deck chair in the toolshed and was reading a paperback, sulkily, in the sunlight at the back of the bungalow. “All right, then, I’ll go on my own,” she said.
It was while she was changing in the bedroom that she had the sensation of being watched. The curtains were still open, and she rushed to close them. Before the folds shut her in secretly, she peered along the blank mass of gorse hedge ten feet away from the window; no sign of anyone.
But later, when she glissaded down the far side of the sand hills, and walked alone acros
s the empty shore to the distant, murmuring sea—and even when the sea’s coolness closed about her and greenly bid her—there was still the sensation that she was being watched.
In the days that followed, the unsubstantial relationship between the young couple faltered and broke under the strain of their nearness to each other. Five months of married life in a mortgaged semi-detached suburban house, where they had met over breakfast and the radio weather forecast, and parted outside the insurance office where Naomi worked, to meet again in the evening for supper and television, had been the only background they had known together before; three days and nights of the small bungalow on the sand hills sundered them.
Naomi quickened to the sun and the sea, and came alive. She lived in her bikini, her rounded limbs browned and free. Bevis, fair and pale-skinned, kept out of the sun; sat reading all day on the verandah, outside the open French window. And on the third night he went to sleep alone in the small bedroom.
On the morning of the fourth day, the mares’ tails came in from the west. By mid-afternoon, the sky was tumbled grey ness, and the rain slanted down, pockmarking the sand. He sat alone in the front room—where she had never set foot since that first time—and Naomi was hunched at the kitchen table, tapping a fingernail nervously on the rim of an empty teacup and staring out through the window across the inland fens.
Around five o’clock, the downpour slackened and retreated in a line across the sand hills. A thin fan of sunlight burst through a widening patch of cerulean blue, and Naomi scraped back the chair and went out into the passage.
“I’m going to walk down to the shop,” she called, taking down her mackintosh. “Coming?”
No reply. She went out, slamming the door behind her; across the damp sand to the narrow road that wound back to the village.
