Dark Companions

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Dark Companions Page 20

by Ramsey Campbell


  Our first disagreement—quite minor, it seemed at the time—was about Mr Ince.That evening I’d played her a record of Mahler’s Third. As we strolled towards her house, we were content to be quiet together for a while. The hedges that walled the path were quivering in breezes; overhead, clouds flooded by. The dimness merged our surroundings like a spoiled painting, and I had almost passed Mr Ince’s cottage before I saw the theatre.

  Though she resisted, I turned back. The striped booth faced the cottage; I had to crane over the hedge to distinguish the stage. My first hallucinatory glimpse had been accurate. On the dark stage, beneath miniature curtains that fluttered in the wind, Punch and Judy were performing.

  They weren’t squabbling now. Indeed, they made no sound at all. They seemed to be dancing: bowing to each other, twirling gracefully though their flapping costumes tugged at them, retreating a few precise steps then gliding together again. Perhaps the dimness helped smooth their movements, made them appear more lifelike, as it did their faces. Their only audience was the trees that loomed above the cottage, shifting restlessly and hissing, dissatisfied giants.

  “Come on, Jim,” Rebecca was murmuring urgently. “I should be home by now.”

  “Wait just a minute.” There was some aspect of the pirouetting figures I wanted to define. Once I’d seen Mr Ince gazing wistfully at birds that splashed in the birdbath, then sailed away on the wind. Did he wish he could create movements as tiny and perfect as theirs? But tonight’s rehearsal didn’t look much like that; in an obscure way I was reminded of a dance of trees.

  “I’m going, Jim. We’ve been staying out too late. My parents will be angry again.”

  Again? It was the first I’d heard of it, and it seemed far less important than the puppets that were dancing just for us. “You want to watch this, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t.” She pulled away violently. She must be frightened of her parents, surely—not of the puppets. But good God, we were adults: I was eighteen, she was twenty.

  I caught up with her in the middle of the green. She was very tense; for a moment I thought she would flinch away. Instead she said in a tone which offered both consolation and, vulnerably, trust: “I want you to come home tomorrow night and hear me play.”

  By the next evening I was nervous. Until recently I’d hardly noticed her parents. Now I sometimes encountered them when I met Rebecca at their shop, where they were guardedly polite to me; I was sure they didn’t like me very much. I cut myself while shaving, and had to waste five minutes dabbing at myself. If I had visited the antique shop in that state, heaven knows what I would have broken.

  Mr Ince was sitting in a homemade chair as I hurried past his garden. He was staring into the entangled dimness beneath the trees. A large figure he had begun to carve lay abandoned at his feet. Stumps of branches protruded from the faceless head, like boils.

  I was shocked by how much he had aged. Had this been a gradual process that I’d been too preoccupied to notice? He looked drained, exhausted, past caring about the large figure he had agreed to carve for the pageant. My passing must have roused him, for he swayed to his feet and dragged chair and figure into the cottage, beneath the dark wings of the trees.

  When I reached Rebecca’s my carefully combed hair was snatching at my face, my armpits were prickly from hurrying. Her father gazed at me as though I were a salesman whose unwelcomeness he was too polite to show. He said nothing as he ushered me down the oak-panelled hall, which was barnacled with horse brasses.

  If he and his wife tried to make me feel at home, in the large stony room where the panels of the walls were as heavy and dark as the piano, it was only for the sake of Rebecca, whose strain was painfully apparent. She seemed afraid to venture near me—because of her parents or because, like an examiner, I’d come to hear her play? She wore a severe black dress, a musician’s uniform. Together with everything else, it robbed me of all sense of the times we’d shared.

  Eventually her father sat down at the piano. As soon as she tucked the violin beneath her chin she seemed to forget everything except the technical problems of the music. It was as though she and her father were helping each other with tasks set by Mozart and Beethoven; I felt she would never be enough at her ease to let the music flow. Of course, at the end of each piece I applauded wildly.

  I drank a lot of sherry in an attempt to calm my nerves; her mother’s lips grew more pursed each time she refilled my glass. Mostly to show that I was quite at home, I sang fragments of Verdi in the bathroom, and perhaps that prompted Rebecca’s mother to ask me “What are you doing in the pageant?”

  Though Rebecca had tried to coax me into participating, I’d managed to avoid the whole thing, in which her parents were heavily involved. “I hadn’t really thought,” I mumbled.

  “We have a song for you.” She sat waiting for me to stand up and take the music from her. “Rebecca will accompany you.”

  “I thought you didn’t like to play for audiences,” I said to Rebecca.

  There was an appalled and wounded silence, which I tried to ignore by glaring at the music, an Elizabethan ballad. “Shall I play it for you?” Rebecca said.

  “Can’t he sight-read?” Her father made me sound no longer worth noticing. She played the melody for me, and I managed to follow it through the staves. “Now you sing it, James,” her mother said.

  Could she tell I disliked my full name, because it made me sound like a butler? When at last I finished, and the throbbing of my red-hot face began to lessen, she said “You’ll need a lot of practice.” She sounded almost accusing, though I had never claimed to be a musician.

  After an awkward half hour, during which Rebecca’s parents and I confirmed we had nothing in common, I said that I thought I’d better go. “Oh, Rebecca is going to be very busy. She may not see you before the pageant. She’ll need to make you a costume.” To Rebecca, with an emphasis I thought vindictive, she said “I’ve invited Alan for his fitting tomorrow. I expect you’ll want him to stay for dinner.”

  Though Rebecca tried to say goodbye at the door, I made her walk along the tree-lined drive. As soon as we were out of earshot of the house I demanded “Who’s Alan?”

  “Just the son of some friends of theirs.” She halted me and squeezed my hand. “They’re trying to match us, but you mustn’t worry. He and I are friends, that’s all. It’s you I want.” Gripping my shoulders hard and gazing into my eyes, she said “I’ve always done what they want, but not over this.”

  Her lingering kiss convinced me more than her words, yet before I reached home I was wondering how, if she had always obeyed her parents, she could be sure of changing now. Was love enough? I felt like Mr Ince’s cottage, brooding darkly in its cage of trees.

  I saw little of her during the next week, though her mother spent five minutes brusquely measuring me in the shop. If her parents answered the phone, she was in the bath, or too busy to be called, or not at home. Once she suggested that I could sit with her while she worked, but that would have entailed suffering her parents. I preferred to go to Liverpool or Manchester; somehow the violence I felt towards her parents seemed appropriate to city streets.

  The night before the pageant, her mother summoned me to try on my costume. Since Rebecca was watching eagerly, I had to conceal my dismay. In the doublet and hose I felt less like an actor than a transvestite. The following day I felt even worse.

  Almost the whole of the village was there, either trudging in procession towards the green or lining the square and the main street to watch. Perhaps all this was meant to celebrate the village anniversary, yet I suspected the pageant of trying to show that the village was an enclave of craftsmanship and culture, not just the site of the fair that would be opening next week.

  Rebecca clearly enjoyed wearing her crinoline. I thought of how seldom I’d touched her, how she seemed happiest concealing her body. Alan, a burly fellow several years older than I, was wearing doublet and hose. Worse still, her mother had made us walk together b
ehind Rebecca, like rival suitors. His round face resembled a football I would have loved to kick.

  When we took our places on the green, and he began to declaim an Elizabethan description of the village, I realised that he belonged to the village repertory company. No wonder he was so good at posing, I thought bitterly: no wonder he looked so convincing in drag. He was rewarded with an outburst of applause—and then it was my turn.

  Though at least I had Rebecca, whereas he had been alone, I didn’t do as well. I’d been practicing last night and the whole of this morning, but her father had refused to let me rehearse with her; he said it would be less genuine. Did he want me to embarrass her? When I sang, my voice in the middle of the green sounded thinner than a bird’s. Children tittered, at me or at Rebecca, who was strumming her violin like a lute.

  At the end, which was received by a drizzle of applause, Rebecca told me “You were super. So were you,” she said to Alan, and doled out a kiss to each of us.

  I was furious. I hardly spoke to her for the rest of the day, except to complain that the pageant was pretentious, trivial, a waste of time. When the festivities began, I drank pint after pint of beer from the table which Mr Blundell of the Acorn kept replenishing; then I loitered near Alan in the hope that he would say something to which I could take exception, so that I could knock him down. When at last I grew tired of loitering, I found that Rebecca had gone.

  I wandered until it grew dark. Trudging home, I thought for a moment that Mr Ince had come back; as usual, he’d gone touring in his van once the fair was due on the green. No, he must still be away, for the cottage was dark and grass sprawled over the garden path—but then what had I heard in the cottage? It had sounded rather like brooms falling over in a cupboard, then falling again. No doubt branches were tapping the cottage; I really didn’t care.

  Next morning, when my head had stopped drumming savagely, I went to the shop to apologise to Rebecca, while her parents looked forbidding in the background. That night at the fair she refused to go on most of the rides, and when I persuaded her into a Dodgem car she felt withdrawn, stony within the clasp of my arm. As I walked her home I nagged her until she agreed to go to a concert in Manchester the following week.

  At least she was grateful for the concert. It was Beethoven’s Ninth; I’d learned she was happiest with familiar things, though I refused to believe that summed her up. The applause was so rapturous that it provoked an encore, and we missed the train.

  I couldn’t see that it mattered; there would be another in less than an hour. I tried to keep her occupied on a bare bench as far as possible from the sullen yellowish lights, but she kept starting up to peer along the line, a couple of sketched gleams embedded in sooty darkness. Overhead a large metallic voice announced trains to places I’d never heard of. Could she hear other voices, demanding what she meant by coming home so late? “They’ll have to get used to it eventually,” I said.

  “Why will they have to?”

  “Because you’re an adult,” I said incredulously. “You can’t let them tell you what to do.”

  “Is it adult to behave irresponsibly?”

  I thought she was growing pompous. Besides, we were wasting time when we could be necking. “If you always did what they wanted,” I pointed out, “you’d never see me again.”

  “I know that.” She seemed close to tears. All at once I saw how to cheer her up and clear the way for myself. “Look,” I said, “if they bother you so much, why don’t you move away and get a job?”

  “A job?” She made it sound insulting. “I don’t want a job. I’m only helping in the shop to keep my parents happy.” She added more gently “When I’m married I’ll want to devote my time to my music.”

  That stopped me. Were we planning marriage all of a sudden? She’d said she would resist her parents’ choice; who else could she mean except me? I wasn’t ready to discuss marriage—and besides, I’d realised at last that her dream of seeing the world was nothing but a dream; Manchester was about as far as she cared to venture.

  The romantic mood seemed worth preserving. “You know, I’d wanted to meet you for years,” I said. “I could never work out how to, until that day you had to come for treatment. And then I’ll bet I suffered more than you did. I never told you,” I laughed, feeling that a secret ought to bring us closer together, “but when someone I didn’t like was in there, I used to stand outside and listen to the drill.”

  When she pulled away from me and hurried to the edge of the platform, I thought she was going to vomit, but she was only hoping for the train. Nevertheless she looked sickened when I tried to coax her back to the bench. On the train she tolerated my embrace, but shook her head dismally when I demanded what was wrong. Her parents were waiting on the lit stage of the porch, and I left her at the gate; I’d had enough.

  I didn’t see her for days. I yearned to, yet I was afraid she might insist on talking marriage; that would force me to ponder our relationship, which I didn’t want to do. Why couldn’t we just enjoy it, forget our differences and enjoy each other as we had at first? If I’d thought beyond that, I would have had to wonder how, since she insisted on staying at home, we could stay together once I went to University.

  As I wandered brooding around the village, I saw Mr Ince. He was pushing his barrow, which was laden with the theatre, towards the green, but it looked almost as though the barrow was dragging him. Not only his elbows but the rest of his bones appeared ready to tear his skin, which resembled tissue paper. Now that the workmen’s booth had gone from outside the post office, there was nothing to take the children away from Mr Ince’s show, but they may have been as distressed by the performance as I was: Punch and Judy seemed to drag themselves limping along their ledge, their heads nodding as if they were senile, their limbs moving hardly at all.

  The following day I received the card. Though the envelope bore Rebecca’s return address, it was not in her handwriting. I knew instinctively that the sharp severe letters were her mother’s. When I made myself tear open the flap, I found a printed invitation to Rebecca’s twenty-first birthday.

  I hadn’t realised it was so close. What other secrets had she kept from me? I replied that of course I would come, and rushed to Manchester to buy her a present that I hoped would let us share a happy memory: a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth.

  The birthday reception was at the country club, a converted mansion amid fields overlooked that night by flocks of stars. A uniformed girl took my coat, a livened usher led me to the party, and Rebecca’s mother tried to gain possession of my present. I wanted to hand it to Rebecca, who was surrounded by expensive-looking friends, but her mother said firmly “Leave it on the table.”

  A long table laden with presents stood against one wall. I stared for a while in dismay; then, remembering the memory it was supposed to evoke, I dumped the record on the table and made in despair for the bar. The table already bore a complete set of Beethoven’s symphonies.

  I managed to kiss Rebecca before her mother steered her away. For a while I hung about on the edge of conversations, listening as Rebecca’s friends agreed what was good (hanging, the birch, repatriation) and bad (unions, comprehensive education, the state of the world outside the village). What upset me most was that her young friends, Alan and the rest, sounded exactly like their elders. I don’t know who or what provoked me to say “Why don’t you just build a wall around the village?”

  “It strikes me you don’t care much for our village,” Rebecca’s father said. “You seem happiest when you’re away from it. Like that fellow Ince.”

  “Don’t mention him,” his wife said. “Letting us down like that over the pageant, not even bothering to stay.”

  “He wants locking up,” Alan said. “God only knows what he thinks he’s doing—I don’t think he knows himself. I had a look at his show today. No wonder people are keeping their children away. It isn’t entertainment, it’s monstrous.”

  Before I could ask him what he was talking abo
ut, Rebecca said “He’s so restless. All that travelling. Like a gypsy.” She wrinkled her nose as though at a bad smell.

  “What’s wrong with gypsies?” I managed not to blurt, restraining myself not only because I could imagine the sort of reply she would make but because I’d suddenly realised the trap that had been set for me. Her parents had wanted her to see how out of place I was; perhaps they’d hoped I would make a scene to estrange her once and for all. Instead I drank and smiled and nodded, and cursed what I thought was my cowardice.

  In the morning I had a mission: to save Rebecca from herself, from the attitudes of her parents and friends. She couldn’t be as ingrown as they were, not yet; otherwise, how could she appreciate Beethoven’s Ninth? But I couldn’t reach her all day, and next morning a notice in the antique shop said that they had gone on holiday for two weeks.

  Had her parents arranged this swiftly, or was it another secret she had kept from me? My anger couldn’t feed on itself for more than a couple of days; before the week was over I felt almost guiltily free, able to do things I wanted to do without thinking of Rebecca. I walked all day through the spread countryside, towards a promise of hills that I never quite reached, and my mind grew attuned to the pace of the clouds. I stood beneath an oak in Delamere Forest and watched a storm fill, then burst, the sky.

  The day after she returned, my nervousness infuriated me. I keyed myself up to braving the shop and her parents, only to find that they hadn’t opened the shop. Whenever I called her house the phone was engaged, tooting monotonously. There was nothing for it but to go to the house.

  I couldn’t go in. I’d used up all my courage in braving the shop. I paced back and forth outside the gates, and grimaced furiously at myself in the dark. Wind rushed down the drive, trying to shoulder me away; along the drive, trees roared at me. Twice I strode halfway up the drive before I faltered.

 

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