Nightmare

by Lynn Brock

  His feet stopped in the long, coarse grass for the time of a step. She was there—not ten yards from him—at his mercy. Three strides would reach her. He glanced swiftly back along the long bare slope which he had just ascended. Far away, down by the road, the houses were already indistinct. No one in sight there. No one along the last hole. No one to the left, back along the path. No one to the right. What was beyond the hedge at the other side of the path? A field of some sort. Elsa and he had looked through the hedge … cabbages … There would be no one in a cabbage-field at this hour.

  But he turned away from the seat. Nothing was ready. There must be no hurry this time—no botching. Fifty yards from the seat, round a curve of the path, he met two farm labourers clumping home. Each of them carried a muddy cabbage tucked under his arm.

  2

  When Marjory Prossip had one of her headaches, her left eye kept twitching. It was twitching now as she sat looking down the slope towards the little distant houses along the Leatherhead Road. It had been twitching, on and off, ever since the last time she had sat on this seat. For a whole fortnight she had had a headache—nothing but a headache. That was all that had been left behind by the most extraordinary, terrible, enthralling, untellable thing that had ever happened her—a headache as dull as ditchwater and a twitch under her left eye. What rotten little houses those were down there—smelly little backyards where hens picked at old cabbage-stalks …

  A Mr Chappell—he had been the first Claude she had ever known—had come to stay at the Deepford two weeks before—a quiet, middle-aged man with a limp and a charming voice which had been able to say quite extraordinary and—well uncomfortable—things in a detached, casual, cultured way which had made them seem the most ordinary things in the world to talk about. His voice had been the most noticeable thing about him. He had been rather plain, though his smile, in profile, had sometimes been quite attractive, and a little out of it at the Deepford on account of his limp—the result, he had said, of a shooting-accident in Burmah where he had owned plantations of some sort. They had had a long talk in a quiet corner of the lounge one evening, about all sort of things—Freud and birth-control and homosexualism and totemism and infinity and things of that sort—and he had promised to lend her a novel by someone called D. H. Lawrence. Next day he had proposed an afternoon walk, and after tea they had come up on to the Down by the back roads, slowly on account of his limp, talking about something called the Mendelian Theory and the Berlin night-clubs. It had been quite dark when they had arrived at the seat.

  She had been telling him about her mother’s heart-attacks when, suddenly, he had gone mad. Mad was the only word she could find for it—ferocious, panting, grunting, glaring-eyed mad. His arms had grabbed her and pulled her off the seat down on to the grass and there, while they struggled in the darkness, he had grunted and panted insane, crude, beastly things which, after a while, had made her feel vile and debased and willing to surrender. He had torn her clothes and bitten her—she had nearly stopped struggling then. But she had kept her head and jabbed both her thumbs into his eyes. That had ended the affair. He had uttered a little childish, frightened cry and let her go. She had left him there, sitting on the grass in the darkness, and, somehow, got back to her bedroom at the hotel, with a violent headache and a twitch under her left eye.

  Mr Chappell had gone away next day. She had not seen him again—probably never would see him again—never wanted to see him again. He had come into her life to do that to her and leave her with the worst headache she had had for years. He was simply a part of the headache.

  And yet it had certainly been a most extraordinary, terrible, exciting thing while it had lasted. It seemed impossible that it could have happened for no purpose—with no result. That sort of thing had never come near her before. There had been no necessity to keep it away; men’s eyes had always told her that they had no use for her. That man who had come up across the grass just now had turned his back after a glance at her. These two working men coming up the path—they would glance at her, tell her that she was no use for that sort of thing, and look away at once. A curious thing that one man should appear, try to do that sort of thing to her, and disappear.

  That sort of thing had often happened on that seat, she supposed. Dreadful, gawky, smirking young men from the town and dreadful squealing little shopgirls must often come up there in the evenings and maul and carry on … Disgusting.

  She thought of her violin lying in its nest of amber velvet, the rich, soft brown gleam of its varnish, the clean, sharp strings, the familiar smell of resin and varnish when she opened the case. Dear old friend—always there to go back to; honest, clean, pure; far, far away from all that sort of thing. It knew what poor old plain, pasty, lumpy Marjory really was.

  Her walk had done her headache no good—if anything the headache was a little worse. She didn’t know why she had come up to this beastly old seat. Heaven knew who had sat on it last—some tramp perhaps; she had passed the workhouse on her way up.

  She sprang up, brushed her broad stern vigorously with both hands, shook herself, and hurried off down the slope towards the road to catch a ’bus which would bring her back to the Deepford in time for an hour’s practice before dinner. She would practise in her bedroom. They might kick up a fuss, but they wouldn’t stop her. They wouldn’t silence that one dear old, kind, trusty friend.

  Mr Prossip had been having a hell of a time of it for the past three weeks or so. The police had been pestering the life out of him about Agatha Judd and that trip of his to Rockwood. He had had to tell them that he had been thrashed and that he had been drinking in public-houses and that he had spent the night with the girl with the cough. They had treated him, not at all as a sahib, but as a liar and a drunkard and a seducer of servant-maids. They had conveyed to him that, if they came back to the Deepford and asked him the same questions often enough, they would be able to treat him as a murderer. They had come in plain clothes and he had smuggled them up to his bedroom, but he had felt, and felt now, perfectly sure that the whole hotel knew that they had been policemen. The manager had become distant and he had found difficulty in getting a game of bridge. In the end he had had to tell Emma who those queer-looking men had been and what they had come pestering him about. That had been a hell of a thing to have to do. Emma hadn’t spoken to him since. Marjory hadn’t spoken a word to him either for days. It was the very devil to have to sit opposite their two glum faces all through dinner and feel that everyone in the dining-room knew why they didn’t speak to him.

  He was standing by his dressing-table, scowling at his thoughts and wondering whether he wouldn’t run up to town for a show, when he heard Marjory’s violin. For the past three weeks he had felt cowed and bullied, and now a savage impulse to cow and bully someone else sent him pounding along the corridor and into Marjory’s bedroom. He snatched her violin away from her chin, wrested it from her hand, and threw it on the bed.

  ‘Now, damn you,’ he snarled. ‘Will you stop it? Do you want to have us turned out of the hotel? Do you? Do you, I say?’

  For a moment Marjory stared at the violin, then she turned, picked up the carafe from the washstand and threw it at him. It missed him, passed out through the open door, and crashed against the opposite wall of the corridor. The crash excited her to bare-gummed fury and she followed the carafe with the soap-dish and the tooth-glass. They were struggling for the possession of the slop-pail-cover when the boots intervened.

  3

  Mr Knayle hadn’t been able to settle down. The weather since his return had been depressing—a succession of grey, damp days on which he hadn’t felt inclined to do anything in particular. His time had been frittered away in visits to his dentist, his oculist and his optician, his bank-manager, his stockbroker, and his tailor, and almost every day, at an inconvenient hour, he had had to keep some appointment which had involved waiting in more or less depressing surroundings and produced more or less depressing results. There had been no time to do anyt
hing of any real pleasure or interest.

  A curious and rather sinister thing had been happening to him since his return. As if they had lain in wait for his homecoming, several causes had suddenly combined to compel him to an uneasy interest in his body.

  It had been necessary to get another new plate and have three teeth stopped. The dentist had been gloomy about the failure of his first effort and had attempted to lay the blame for it on Mr Knayle’s mouth. After fifty, he had said, everyone must expect that his mouth would change and keep on changing—shrinking processes set in. Mr Knayle had been depressed by the idea of his gums keeping on shrinking indefinitely and by the prospect of never being able to eat again with complete comfort and grace. The dentist had observed his depression and becoming cheerfully vindictive, had tapped two back teeth and said they would probably have to come out very shortly. That, of course, would involve another new plate.

  The oculist had also been depressing. He, too, had spoken of changes which must be expected when a man reached fifty, and had not only prescribed more powerful lenses for reading purposes, but, to Mr Knayle’s consternation, had told him that the wearing of glasses for long-distance ranges would be henceforward an imperative necessity. He had been quite exultant over his discovery that Mr Knayle’s astigmatism had grown much more pronounced since he had last examined it, two years before, and had used the ominous word ‘atrophy.’ It had never occurred to Mr Knayle before that his eye-muscles, or any of his muscles could atrophy and keep on atrophying quietly without his being able to do anything to stop them.

  His tailor had been rather familiarly jocose concerning an increase of an inch and a half in his waist measurement. His hair-dresser had found some dandruff in his hair, advised him to part it in a new place, and, without asking permission, had snipped away the hairs in his ears—a thing which no hair-dresser had ever done or offered to do to Mr Knayle’s ears before. A ’bus conductor had helped him on to the step of a ’bus—another thing which had never happened to him before. He had discovered a small patch of eczema under one of his eyebrows. And, suddenly, one morning in his bath, he had noticed his toenails. He had always taken meticulous care of his toenails, but, in the course of a few weeks, in which he had not been able to pay so much attention as usual to them, they had gone utterly to seed. Some of them had split, others had begun to grow into the skin of the toe, most of them had turned yellow, all of them had developed a hard, chalky inner growth which had forced them outwards and twisted them in the most repulsive way. It had not been possible to dislodge this unpleasant substance with any degree of satisfactoriness. He had thought of going to a pedicurist, but had been able to discover no male pedicurist in Rockwood. The exhibition of those distorted yellow ruins to a female of any sort had appeared to him out of the question.

  His body had always conducted its affairs satisfactorily; he had never had to think about it. But now it had suddenly become unreliable and treacherous. He thought about it at night in bed—of all the complicated, disagreeable things that were hidden under the deceptive envelope of his skin—any of them liable to break down at any moment. The discovery of definite symptoms of decay had merged themselves into and pointed the vague dissatisfaction with himself awakened by close contact for three weeks with a number of healthy, vigorous, quick-minded young people. He had thought about those young people on the ship a great deal since—about their smooth skins, their tireless limbs, their elastic movements, their gay indifference to risks, the quick play of their minds, their capacity for liking and disliking strongly and vividly. There was no doubt about it, they had thought of him as old. They had been quite nice and jolly about it, but they had decided at once that he was done with it and out of it—something between a nuisance and a joke—something that was merely in their way. It was useless to argue that they had been merely thoughtless, stupid young people; he knew that their thoughts had been as clear as crystal, their judgment unerring. They, who owned life, had told him that he was old and would have no more share in it. He was, and always would be now, old and out of it. Eyes going, teeth going, toenails going, hair going from where it should be and coming where it shouldn’t be, a pot sticking out in front. Good God! What an old scarecrow—falling to pieces …

  Then a most distressing thing had happened at the club. He had been talking to Charlie Housall and some other men in the smoking-room about the extraordinary number of well-known people who had died in the neighbourhood that year. Poor old Charlie (he had been at Winchester with Mr Knayle) had said ‘Good-night,’ walked out into the hall, and dropped dead while a waiter had been helping him into his overcoat.

  His income tax for 1932 had already become an anxiety. He had never overdrawn his bank-account since he had had one; but a very considerable overdraft would be absolutely necessary in January unless he sold some of his securities—at a very serious loss. His stockbroker, on the whole, had been of opinion that securities would continue to depreciate gradually until the crash came—perhaps at the end of February.

  And so, as he sat in his sitting-room, Mr Knayle’s thoughts had darkened. When they looked out on the world through the Morning Post they saw only a ghastly mess. When they looked at Mr Knayle they saw only his toenails. And when they looked up at the ceiling they saw only a ceiling.

  Not a pang had fallen from it—only a gentle, painless regret, like the regret one felt when one thought of steady, cold rain pattering down on some place that one had known in sunshine. Some times it was quite impossible to remember what she had actually looked like—what the total effect of her face had been. And there was always the feeling that one had forgotten a little more of her—that it was safer not to tease and test what one still remembered.

  Well … one could think of others …

  A sprinkling of elderly people, contemporaries and friends of his parents, many of them invalids and most of them in reduced circumstances, still lived in Rockwood. He found them out in their lodgings and boarding-houses, brought them boxes of chocolates and magazines, and drank their washy tea while they maundered on of people and things which he had forgotten for thirty years. When he discovered that Charlie Housall’s widow was in difficulties over the payment of succession duties and probate fees, he sold some of his stock and lent her three hundred pounds. Meeting Whalley in the garden on the day after his return from Bournemouth, he had another kindly thought. There was room in his garage for a second car, and no sense whatever in Whalley’s paying ten shillings a week unnecessarily. He was extremely glad that he had thought of making this little suggestion. Whalley had been wearing a most deplorable old pair of shoes.

  Old Ridgeway … What little kindly thing could one think of for him?

  Mr Knayle bought a set of chessmen and a board and a book of the rules and invited Mr Ridgeway up for a game. Neither of them had played chess for forty years. It was a massacre. They made wrong moves, recalled moves, forgot where they had moved from, upset the pieces and put them back on the wrong squares. Their knights sprang round corners like boomerangs. For a long time Mr Knayle used his bishops as queens, and at one point, in a moment of excitement, took Mr Ridgeway’s king with his own. Ultimately only the two kings were left stalking round the board, and they began afresh with portentous caution, considering each move with paralysed intentness, losing in the end all notion of what they were attempting to do, and subsiding into drowsy boredom. They gave it up finally and seated themselves by the fire and Mr Knayle talked for a while about his trip and the National Government, which he considered doomed to failure.

  ‘Had any more visits from the police?’ Mr Ridgeway asked presently, as he refilled his gurgling pipe.

  Mr Knayle laughed. ‘No. They’ve been worrying Chidgey a bit, but I think they’ve given him up as a bad job now. He was able to produce some friends who saw him in a cinema that night. And they had a violent disappointment over his garage-boots.’

  ‘Garage-boots?’ Mr Ridgeway repeated, yawning. ‘I didn’t read the accounts. What had Chidg
ey’s garage-boots to do with it?’

  ‘Oh, they found a lot of footprints. Whoever did the job wore an out-size in boots, apparently, and so my friend, Inspector Bride, had a bright idea and made a bee-line for Chidgey’s garage-boots. Unfortunately, however, they didn’t fit the footprints, so I rather think he’s decided to leave poor old Chidgey in peace.’ Mr Knayle poked the fire. ‘No. I must say this whole question of war debts and reparations is extraordinarily difficult. Of course, one can quite understand France’s attitude, looking at it as a Frenchman would look at it …’

  Mr Ridgeway lighted his pipe and threw the match into the fire. Extraordinary jumpy little chap, Knayle, always changing the subject that way … What on earth did anyone ever want to play chess for?… Big boots? What had he thought about big boots lately? Where had he seen big boots lately? Or had he seen them—or only heard them—and thought that they must be very heavy, big boots? What was Knayle chattering about now. Unemployment in America. Well, let him chatter away. All one had to do was to say ‘yes’ and ‘I suppose so.’ … Big boots? Bo—the sound of big boots, going up …

  Then Mr Ridgeway remembered. It had been that night that he had gone up to the top of his little flight of steps to smoke another pipe before he smoked another pipe and went to bed. Whalley had come into the garden from the road and passed him and gone up the outside staircase, and his boots had made a large, heavy, clumping noise as they had gone up. Mr Ridgeway remembered that he had looked up the steps after them and thought that they must be a very large, heavy pair of boots. A curious thing—that must have been the night of the murder. It had been the night before the night on which Knayle had come down and told him about the murder and about a police-inspector having come bothering him—What on earth was Knayle talking about now? What did it matter what he was talking about? It wasn’t even necessary to say ‘yes’ and ‘I suppose so.’ He hadn’t known what shame and fear and searing, hopeless remorse were. He hadn’t skulked in the ashpits of hell for eleven years. Let him chatter away. A grunt would do.