Nightmare

by Lynn Brock

  5

  They became the prisoners of an unavoidable routine.

  Justice required that Bogey-Bogey should be taken out not later than 7.30 a.m. At 7 Whalley rose, made tea, shaved and bathed hurriedly and took Bogey-Bogey for his promenade on the Downs, returning at 8 to breakfast, which Elsa had prepared meanwhile. After breakfast she departed to market for an hour. Mrs Grant, the daily help, was busy already with her brushes and dusters, scurrying and blowing and sighing. The sitting-room was topsy-turvy. Any attempt to work was out of the question until her departure at 1 o’clock. Whalley read the Morning Post, did some odd jobs, and went out with Bogey-Bogey for a constitutional on the Downs. Two slow miles were the limit of his walking powers. Bogey-Bogey’s murderous hatred of the countless other promenading dogs was an incessant anxiety; he returned fatigued and white to the flat to find Elsa busy with the lunch which was actually dinner, and rested or did other odd jobs until it was ready at 1. When they had washed up, Elsa retired to the bedroom to darn and sew and, having taken Bogey-Bogey for another short walk, Whalley shut himself up in the sitting-room until teatime. After tea they went out together with Bogey-Bogey for another walk on the Downs. Their evening meal was at 7; Elsa had to get back to the flat to prepare it. At 8 Bogey-Bogey had another run out of doors and they settled down in the sitting-room until 10.30, when he was taken out for his final outing. By 11 he had been combed and brushed; by 11.30 they were asleep.

  It took Whalley some little time to realise that this tranquil programme was practically incapable of variation. Bogey-Bogey had to be taken out—Elsa’s cooking had to be done—he had to try to do his own work. These necessities compelled an unalterable time-table which took complete control of life. Save for the Sabbath dinner at Mr Loxton’s, occasional visits to or from Elsa’s friends, and a still more occasional cinema or concert, each day was an exact replica of the other, lived within the same narrow boundaries. The earth contracted to the Downs and the flat. Its entire population, for all practical purposes, consisted of Elsa, Whalley himself, Mrs Grant, and Bogey-Bogey.

  Presently, of course, Whalley became aware of this imprisonment and of its inevitable results. In three months his brain, still anæmic and fatigued by months of failure and growing anxiety, became a mere stagnant morass haunted by a few weary, stale old thoughts always the same. He sickened of them—of his failure—of himself—of that always-happening moment when, after lunch, he entered the sitting-room and shut its door behind him.

  Time flew. Towards the end of the summer he abandoned the unfinished novel definitely and, to Elsa’s dismay, destroyed the typescript. Another novel was begun in September and came to a standstill at its third chapter. At the end of 1929 his two thousand odd pounds had dwindled to sixteen hundred and forty, and he and Elsa decided that the daily woman must be dispensed with. She had cost a good deal more than they had anticipated. Whalley saw no reason why he shouldn’t be able to do the housemaiding of the flat in the mornings—do it just as well and with much less fuss and noise than Mrs Grant. As a matter of fact, he had noticed that she had scamped a good deal. For instance, she had never once moved the roll-top desk so as to get at the dust in the angle behind it.

  Elsa undertook to reduce the weekly bills a little. No other economy in their housekeeping appeared feasible. However, a little light work in the mornings, Whalley thought, was probably just what he wanted—exercise—distraction—something to take his mind off things for a while.

  On New Year’s Day, after breakfast, he changed into his oldest clothes and began his new duties by taking the Hoover into the sitting-room. Mrs Grant had always done the carpets with the Hoover, rapidly and, it had appeared, satisfactorily. But after a very little while he discovered that it failed to pick up some shreds of tobacco near the roll-top desk and, arming himself with dustpan and brush, went down on his knees to collect them. He saw then that the carpet was still thickly covered with Bogey-Bogey’s hair, and attacked it vigorously with the brush. A little cloud of dust rose from it. Why, the darned thing was filthy …

  Inch by inch he went over the carpet with the brush, pausing from time to time to glance upwards uneasily at the dense mist of dust which filled the room. All that dust would settle on the ceiling, the walls, the book-cases, the curtains. But the carpet must be done thoroughly. He found a number of small stains on it, and spent a lot of time removing them with soap and hot water. Returning from her marketing about eleven o’clock, Elsa found him on a step-ladder, dusting the ceiling with a feather-brush.

  ‘Don’t overdo it, dear … What about Bogey? It’s time for your walk, isn’t it?’

  ‘I shan’t be able to get out this morning. I must get this room done before lunch … Oh, very well, dear. I’ll take him out. Rather a nuisance, though. I shall have to change …’

  The sitting-room was finished by midday next day. It looked almost exactly as it had always looked. And of course there had been no time to do anything to the other rooms. Whalley began to see why Mrs Grant had rushed about and scamped corners. But, then, on the other hand, one knew now that the sitting-room had been thoroughly done.

  Two days later he thought it advisable to run over its carpet lightly with the dustpan and brush. It was thickly covered with Bogey-Bogey’s hairs, and at the first touch of the brush, a little cloud of dust sprang out of it.

  He remained on his knees for some time looking at it. It ought to be brushed, but the dust would settle on everything. The whole room would have to be gone round with a duster—every photograph and flower-bowl moved—a couple of hours’ work. There were still the dining-room, the bathroom, the hall, the kitchen to do. The sitting-room must be left. Reluctantly he transferred his paraphernalia to the dining-room, but the dust which he had left in the sitting-room carpet worried him until, three days later, all the other rooms had been done and he was able to attack the sitting-room again.

  Dust became an active, mocking, invincible enemy. Soon, when he looked at a chair in passing, he saw only the dust in the angles and small interstices of its back. When he switched on a light he saw the dust on its shade and made a note to clean it next morning. Greatly as he came to hate it, the collection of dust afforded him a curious satisfaction. He even preferred that the dust should be thick. It was a pleasure to watch the dustpan filling—to watch its contents fall into the dustbin when he emptied it. There was one variety of it which he hated, however. It was found in the bedroom only, under the beds—long woolly wisps which flew before the brush like thistledown and were difficult to capture. They stuck to the brush when one did capture them and had to be picked off and dropped into the dustpan, from which they kept escaping.

  He was always looking at a clock or his wrist-watch. There was never time to do things properly and thoroughly. Yet if one didn’t do them thoroughly it was hardly worth doing them at all. He had believed that if all the rooms were once thoroughly done to start with it would be a simple matter to run over them all in the morning. But he found that, really, every room required a thorough doing-out every day. He could never catch up with this ideal. He was always looking at his watch—always in a flurry. The brass plate on the front door had taken him twenty minutes, because the Brasso had caked in the ornamentation of the letter-box’s flap and had refused to be dislodged. In the end he always had to scamp—just do what showed.

  Of course he saw the absurdity of his over-scrupulousness and joked about it with Elsa. Five minutes later she would find him ‘making a thorough job’ of the bathroom linoleum.

  For a couple of weeks he made no effort to write. Then alarm seized him. For three days he did no housework, and shut himself up in the sitting-room morning and afternoon. Then he discovered that every room in the flat was filthy—everything covered with dust …

  Time flew. He was always looking at his watch. When he sat staring at his writing-block he thought of dust under the beds or finger-marks on the doorplates. While he polished the linoleum in the hall he thought of the time which he was wasting�
��time which should have been spent in there in the sitting-room—doing the one thing that mattered … that could avert disaster … extinction.

  Time flew. It was always hustling him and bustling him. And it was always time to take Bogey out. One had stop in the middle of something and change one’s old clothes.

  Clothes had become a serious problem. Everything he had was wearing out. The laundry frayed collars—tore shirts and handkerchiefs and vests and drawers. Only one of his suits was now really presentable, only one hat. His shoes had been resoled to the limits of their endurance. His older hats and suit would be soon too disreputable even for the Downs. The lining of his overcoat was torn beyond Elsa’s powers of repair. Simultaneously everything had fallen into shabbiness and decay. Nothing could be replaced—every shilling had to be thought of. As soon as he returned to the flat he changed back into his oldest things—put on the collar of the day before to save the clean one put on before going out. All this changing took an immense amount of time.

  He had always been particular about his clothes—abhorred trifling defects in his underwear. Shabbiness and dinginess depressed him; he came to loathe the old things which he wore about the flat. Before shutting himself up in the sitting-room he changed into his second best suit, which was reserved strictly for this purpose. His best suit was worn only on Sunday, when they dined at Mr Loxton’s. It was three years old now and Canynge always looked it over while he nodded his casual ‘how-d’you-do’.

  Soon even it would become too shabby to wear out-of-doors, despite every care to husband it. And it could not be replaced.

  Fear began to whisper to him as he swept and dusted and polished.

  The curtains began to fade—the chintzes soiled—the cushions lost their trim, firm shape—the corners of mats became permanently crumpled-up, their fringes began to come off. Bogey-Bogey’s big, tumultuous paws had left their marks everywhere. Everything in the flat retreated into a haze of dinginess. Cups and plates had been broken; the sets were incomplete. The landlord had failed to keep his promise. A lot of the paint was in a really shocking condition, and in places the wallpaper had actually peeled off.

  Everything was fading—decaying. And nothing could be replaced …

  He had long ago admitted the truth to himself: he had nothing to write about, no real talent for writing, no real desire to write save in order to make money. The material which he strove to work into trivial, artificial incident and laboured dialogue was all old stuff—the stale thoughts of ten years back—largely, he suspected, reminiscence of novels read before the War. His invincible desire for exactness tortured him. Sometimes he spent a couple of hours over the construction of a sentence of ten words. What he had written with laboured anxiety appeared to him ten minutes later flat, childish, utterly amateurish. He writhed and grew cold when he read it, laid down the writing-block and stared at it in a consternation which was all but panic.

  Two more novels were begun during that year. The first was abandoned definitely, the second temporarily in September. On the last day of 1930 Whalley went through his bank-book and found that he had thirteen hundred and sixty pounds. However, he had begun to write again now fairly steadily, and hoped to finish the novel on which he was working early in February.

  On the afternoon of that New Year’s Eve the Hobsons—the quiet elderly couple in the top flat—moved out of it, and on the following day some new tenants named Prossip (Mr and Mrs Prossip, their daughter and their rather too smartly-dressed maid) moved into it.

  6

  From Mr Knayle, whom they encountered frequently in the front garden and who sometimes came to tea with them, the Whalleys learned something of their new neighbours.

  Mr Prossip, it appeared, was one of three brothers who had inherited an old and very select and prosperous tailoring business in Rockwood. After a very short time, however, he had sold out his interest (there had been difficulties, Mr Knayle believed, with his brothers owing to his uncertain temper and his partiality for whiskies-and-sodas) and had now been for many years a gentleman at large, and a well-known figure in Rockwood. He had married money—the daughter of Dunpool’s best-known fish-merchant—and owing to the habitual richness of his attire, his monocle, and his distinguished walk, was known, generally, as ‘The Duke’. Mr Knayle rather thought that the Prossips had—like many other people—lost some of their money lately, since they had sold a very large house to move into a small top-floor flat.

  The Whalleys’ own observations informed them that Mr Prossip was a large, heavily-built man of incipient elderliness, always clothed in apparently brand-new suits of ultra-fashionable cut and material. He walked with a little troubled strut, sticking out his posterior, and looking straight ahead of him through his monocle with a fixed and rather truculent scowl. His voice—the Whalleys soon became familiar with it—was a booming drawl prone to sudden quickenings into irritability. Almost every day, after breakfast, he went off in a new suit of plus-fours, carrying an enormous bag of golf-clubs, and was not seen or heard again until lunchtime.

  Both Mrs Prossip and her daughter, too, were also large, heavily-built, and always superbly dressed. Mrs Prossip walked very slowly and ascended the outside staircase with frequent pauses. Subsequently the Whalleys learned that she had heart trouble of some sort which perhaps accounted for the fact that her thin, peevish face wore always a bluish flush. She was evidently nervous about dogs. Meeting Whalley in the front garden on the day following her arrival, she waved him away with her umbrella and stopped.

  ‘I hope you and your wife will keep that dog of yours under control when he meets me or Miss Prossip in this garden.’

  Unable to resist temptation, Whalley replied, a little tartly, ‘Me and my wife will do our best.’

  After that first meeting Mrs Prossip always passed him without looking at him.

  Miss Prossip—a sallow, sullen young woman of thirty or so—played the violin. For the first week or so, while the new tenants were settling in, she played it spasmodically and for very brief periods. At the beginning of the second week, however, it became clear that what the Whalleys had hoped an occasional dilatory amusement was a serious study. Twice a day for two hours at a time, the violin squeaked scales and arpeggios, wailed passionate double-stoppings, always slightly out of tune—squeaked and grunted in the effort to play an accompaniment and a melody simultaneously. Sometimes a passage of a few notes was repeated thirty or forty times. Whalley began to cluck when he heard the sound of its long-drawn preparatory tuning.

  Other noises overhead, too, made him cluck. The Hobsons had been inaudible; the Prossips were heard all day long. They were all large, heavy, apparently flat-footed, and apparently incapable of remaining still. From morning to night they thudded to and fro—it was impossible to conjecture for what purpose—shouting to one another from different rooms, slamming doors, pushing furniture about with furious energy, opening windows and shutting them again immediately, switching on a wireless set and, after a space of aimless howlings, switching it off again. They all hummed; their maid whistled; in his bath Mr Prossip bellowed like a bull. At night their voices rose—violent quarrels broke out—they all shouted together—doors banged. It was evident that Mr Prossip absorbed too many whiskies and sodas of evenings. His booming rose above Mrs Prossip’s nagging hum. ‘Oh, shurrup, will you. I’m shick of it.’ At half-past eleven Mr and Mrs Prossip thudded into the bedroom over the Whalleys’ and resumed their argument. It went on interminably, sometimes until two o’clock in the morning, with incessant trampling of feet and slamming of drawers. One night there was a scuffle. ‘Shurrup, damn you,’ roared Mr Prossip. Someone fell. Mrs Prossip sobbed loudly.

  Twice a week the Whalleys’ sleep was further curtailed. Mrs Prossip was an ardent church-worker and church-goer. On Tuesdays and Fridays she got up at 6 am. and, before departing to early service at a neighbouring church, charged about for half an hour, slamming drawers and doors and windows. Mr Prossip’s boom protested vainly. ‘Oh, do shurrup
that damn row, Emma, will you.’

  From the landing outside the Prossips’ hall-door their pert, whistling maid emptied ashtrays and shook mats on to the Whalleys’ landing, filled their dustbin with her garbage, and one day tossed the still lighted end of a cigarette on to Elsa’s fur coat as she passed beneath. The cigarette-end stuck and burned a small hole before Elsa discovered it. Meeting Mr Prossip one day in the garden—they had passed with guarded ‘good-days’ until then—Whalley ventured upon mild remonstrance.

  ‘I should be awfully obliged, Mr Prossip, if your maid wouldn’t throw cigarettes and dust her mats on to our landing. And, as regards the dustbins, perhaps you will kindly ask her not to put her stuff into our bin. Yesterday she filled it with cardboard boxes—’

  Mr Prossip scowled.

  ‘May I ask, sir, are you instructing me what orders I am to give my servant?’

  Whalley stiffened. ‘Not at all. But I should be greatly obliged it you would ask her to take a little more care.’

  ‘And I should be greatly obliged if you would mind your own business,’ said Mr Prossip, ‘and leave me to mind mine.’

  Whalley smiled, and the interview ended there. From that forward the Prossips scowled and glared. Their maid continued to empty ashtrays and shake mats on to the Whalleys’ landing. They moved their bin up from the front garden, however, and kept it outside their hall-door. It smelt a good deal, and the Corporation men made some difficulty about coming up the staircase for it. But at all events it was now available for their own use again.

  Probably, Elsa surmised, because he was not getting enough sleep, this slight friction worried Whalley a good deal. Hitherto relations with the tenants of the other flats had been of the most placid and tranquil kind. Mr Knayle was friendliness itself. The Hobsons had never been heard, rarely seen—had always stopped to exchange agreeably the usual remarks about the weather. The solitary Mr Ridgeway in the basement flat, too, was practically invisible; occasionally during the past two years Elsa had thought it kind to linger, when she met him in the garden, for a brief, hurried little chat. But he was shy, and clearly afraid that he was detaining her, and kept edging away while they talked. Sometimes he was not seen for weeks. The Prossips were always going in or coming out; it was impossible to dodge their ostentatious hostility always. And even when they were not seen, Whalley thought of them above his head, scowling and glaring. He kept watch so that Elsa could slip out without meeting them on the staircase or in the garden.