Major and Mrs Strellbrigg sat either side of the fireplace in identical chairs. They looked frail but their expressions were alert. The Major was a big man with a blunt, military cast of countenance and a short moustache which stuck out under his nose like a hog’s bristle. His wife, Daphne, was a slender, delicate creature with thick, creamy white hair in a page boy cut. She wore a black velvet ribbon around her temples.
Though old couples are reputed to grow like each other this was not the case with the Strellbriggs, except for one curious feature: they both had a small black mole above the left eyebrow. They greeted Jane politely, he with bluff, soldierly courtesy, she with simpering charm. They also spoke to her mother in a friendly way to which she responded with a few broken sentences and a smile. She had accepted them.
Jane left soon afterwards not so much because she was confident that all would go well, as because she was beginning to feel that Mrs von Hohenheim wanted her to go. And, after all, her mother had come with all the necessary instructions, medication, equipment. There really was nothing more Jane could do to ensure the success of the venture.
All the same, as she drove back from Wiltshire to begin her three week break, Jane felt anxious. Something about the menage she had just left made her uneasy. Mrs von Hohenheim for example must have been the daughter of the Strellbriggs: were she a daughter-in-law, she would be Mrs Strellbrigg. Yet she had a foreign accent while her parents were so very English. Then there was her mannish appearance, her big clumsy hands, her strange voice. It was not exactly sinister, but it was odd.
When she got home Jane telephoned Martha Wentworth-Farrow at OPEN to express her misgivings. Martha was soothing. ‘You mustn’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s like your child’s first term at boarding school. You have to cut the cord. Now go and enjoy yourself. You deserve it.’
Jane did enjoy herself. She went with a friend to the Lake District. Perhaps the best time of all was when it rained and Jane spent a whole day in their rented cottage reading a novel. She had not indulged herself in this way since adolescence.
**
During the three weeks of her break she did not ring up to find out how her mother was doing. This was one of the rules that Mrs Wentworth-Farrow had laid down, that carers were to be contacted in dire emergencies, but otherwise they should take a complete holiday from their concerns. Jane had obeyed, but she became nervous again when she drove down to Wiltshire to collect her mother whom nevertheless she found in excellent order. The Strellbriggs, seeming rather less frail than they had appeared to be when Jane had first met them, were very pleasant but Mrs von Hohenheim, without any overt rudeness, made it clear that Jane should not delay, but take her mother and go. The visit of the Strellbriggs to Jane Capel’s house was to take place in a week’s time.
On the way back Jane tried to interrogate her mother about her stay, and received the barest monosyllables in reply. Had she had a nice time? ‘Yes.’ What was the food like? (This was an abiding concern with her mother.) ‘Not bad.’ Had they gone anywhere? Seen anything? Done anything special? ‘Oh . . .’ This was a new development for her mother who hitherto had always been talkative, if incoherent; but Jane was not too concerned. Her mother seemed quite placid and Jane, with an occasional pang of guilt, had stopped wanting anything from her other than placidity.
**
As the day approached for the Strellbriggs’ arrival Jane began to feel nervous again, though without much rational cause. The instructions she received through the post from Mrs von Hohenheim were of the barest kind. The Strellbriggs, much to Jane’s surprise, took no medication beyond a few vitamin supplements with which they travelled. Their dietary requirements were simplicity itself. The Major liked his daily paper and his whisky before the evening meal: that was it. They were capable of getting up, dressing themselves and putting themselves to bed at night. Jane, a natural worrier, found herself concerned about the apparent absence of difficulties. Was there something which she had not been told?
The Strellbriggs arrived promptly at the time appointed, driven by their daughter. Once their bags were in their room, Jane received the distinct impression that Mrs von Hohenheim did not want to stay. She did not even look in to greet Jane’s mother who was in the sitting room.
Over the next few days Jane got to know something about the Strellbriggs, for they were fond of reminiscence. He had been a Major in the King’s African Rifles, which he always referred to as ‘the old K.A.R.’, and they had spent much of his working life in Kenya which they pronounced ‘Keenya’ in the old-fashioned way. Their views on race startled Jane. While the Major was forthright, his wife, whose name was Daphne, was simperingly apologetic, but no less virulent.
‘I’m afraid Arthur and I are very against black people.’ she said at dinner on their first day. ‘We always have been. We saw what they did in the Mau Mau, you see.’
‘The thing about blacks,’ said the Major, ‘is that they’re not a fully developed species. They’re like little children. You have to treat them accordingly. Horses for courses, that sort of thing. Give them a bit of stick now and then and they’ll tow the line. My Sergeant in the old K.A.R. was a chap called Pigby. Terrific bloke. Know what he used to do to them?’
Jane did not want to know, but the Major was going to tell her, whether she liked it or not.
‘Whipped the soles of their feet with a bamboo whangee! And you know, they were grateful to him. Taught them discipline, you see. That’s what they ought to do here, you know, to keep them in line.’
‘Oh, Arthur, you are terrible!’ said Daphne indulgently.
‘I mean it! That’s why the Mau Mau happened. We got too soft. No. Whip the soles of their feet: that’s the ticket. They called it the bastinado in medieval Spain. It’s a time honoured form of torture.’ The Major’s conversation often ran on such lines. Whenever he began Jane tried to find an excuse to leave the room, which could be difficult at meal times. He often talked of his Sergeant Pigby who was with him ‘out in Africa’.
‘My Sergeant, Pigby. Terrific chap. He came from the gutter —Bermondsey, I believe—but salt of the earth. He’d do anything for you if you won his trust. Give you his right arm, his eye teeth. Find anything for you; God knows how. I’d say to him: “Pigby, I’m after a boot jack”, or a rhino hide whip, or whatever. And blow me, in a day or two the thing would be in my bungalow. How he got hold of it, damned if I know. No questions asked. Mum’s the word. That’s the sort of chap he was.’
Once, Jane, who did not quite believe in this amazing factotum, asked what had happened to Pigby and whether he were still alive. The Major sighed.
‘The Mau Mau got him. Strung him up on a tree by his feet and disembowelled him, damn their black hides. And after all he’d done for them! There’s no gratitude.’ But he spoke philosophically without any great emotion.
There was something about ‘The Major’, as he liked to refer to himself, which worried Jane. He did not seem quite real: he was like a caricature, a minor character out of a novel or play, crudely sketched in for knockabout purposes.
Daphne Strellbrigg had a similar effect on Jane, but not to the same degree. She gave the impression of living in another era. Her clothes vaguely suggested the 1920s and, at dinner, she often wore an ostrich feather attached by a brooch to the black velvet fillet she wore round her head. It gave her the look of a flapper at a society dance. She would often talk about the many admirers she had as a young woman. This did not seem to bother her husband, who listened to her recitals with the utmost complacency. On their second night there they were all watching an old film on television when Daphne suddenly pointed at one of the actors on the screen, a minor Hollywood star.
‘I had him once, you know.’ she said.
Jane who was not quite sure she had heard correctly asked what exactly she meant.
Daphne said: ‘It was when we were in Kenya. He’d come out to do some sort of filming. We met at the Muthaiga Club. I went to bed with him. Not up to much, I’m afraid
. Frankly, a great disappointment.’
The Major roared with laughter; Daphne simpered.
They had information and opinions, often of the oddest kind, to impart on most subjects, but about one they were reticent. Whenever Jane tried to ask about their daughter Mrs von Hohenheim they became vague and steered the conversation towards other topics.
In some ways they were untroublesome guests. They did not ask to be entertained, or to go anywhere. The Major went for a short ‘constitutional’ in the afternoon; Daphne spent long hours crocheting a strangely amorphous grey blanket. More importantly, they had no objection to her mother’s presence. She often sat with them in the living room, quite silent, often watching them with that mesmerised look so common to Parkinson’s sufferers. Occasionally Daphne or the Major would address some remark at her to which she would respond with a slow nod of the head.
‘All right, mother?’ the Major would ask. ‘Everything hunky dory?’ He always called her ‘mother’ which irritated Jane.
The Strellbriggs ate a surprising amount and, after a day or two, began to be particular about their food. It was that annoying kind of particularity which masquerades as unfussiness. ‘Really,’ said Daphne, ‘just the plainest of food for me. Just the simplest piece of beef or chicken cooked just so. No frills.’
‘That’s right,’ chimed in the Major, ‘None of your fancy muck for me either.’
There was one occasion when Jane had taken particular care to give the Strellbriggs what they wanted for lunch, a home-made steak-and-kidney pie. After much of it had been consumed in silence, Jane, hoping for some compliment, asked the Major if he was enjoying his meal.
‘Don’t think much of this grub, to be frank with you,’ he said.
Jane restrained herself and said in her mildest voice: ‘Oh dear, and I cooked it specially for you. What do you think, Daphne?’
‘Well,’ said Daphne with a tepid smile, ‘I’m rather afraid I have to agree with my husband.’
‘There you are! Told you!’ said the Major. Then, turning to Jane’s mother who was, as usual, toying dreamily with the food on her plate, he said: ‘What’s your view of the rations, mother?’
Jane’s mother looked up and said clearly: ‘I think it’s absolutely disgusting!’
The Major roared his approval and banged the table with a fork. Jane was astonished as it had been weeks since her mother had come out with a coherent sentence.
‘You mustn’t encourage her,’ she told the Major.
‘Why not?’ he said belligerently. ‘Somebody has to encourage her. I don’t see you doing a hell of a lot.’
This was true, and Jane knew it: the Major had landed a shrewd blow. The rest of the meal was eaten in silence, and thereafter Jane fed everyone exclusively on ready-made meals from the supermarket, about which there were no complaints.
Small concerns and annoyances began to build up. The strangest of these concerned their daily paper. Jane had the Daily Telegraph (approved by the Major) delivered every morning by the paper boy from Patel’s the local newsagent. One morning it did not arrive, so Jane rang Mr Patel to ask him why the paper had not been delivered. Mr Patel answered her enquiry with his usual precise courtesy.
‘I am sorry, Mrs Capel, but you will have to come and collect it from the shop.’
‘Why? Is your paper boy off sick?’
‘Not exactly, Mrs Capel.’ She could detect hesitancy and embarrassment in Mr Patel’s tone.
‘Well, what is it?’
‘I understand you have guests staying with you at the moment, Mrs Capel?’ He pronounced her surname with a stress on the last syllable, like his own.
‘The Strellbriggs, yes?’
‘One of them being, excuse me, an elderly gent with a moustache?’
‘Go on.’
‘He frightened my boy.’
‘Good God! How?’
‘Well, it sounds stupid speaking about it, but my boy, he said he was terrified. He is coming along the pavement, like as usual, up to your house. And you know there’s a hedge along your front garden?’
‘Privet hedge, yes.’
‘Well, my boy is walking along past your house. This is seven in the morning, you see. Hardly anyone about. And your guest, he suddenly put his head up above your hedge and sort of growls, forgive me, like a wild animal of some kind. That’s what my boy says. He was so scared he ran all the way back to the shop and he won’t go near your house again. I’ve spoken to him, but I am sorry, Mrs Capel, he won’t, and that is all there is to it.’
Jane put down the telephone in a rage. She went into the sitting room where the Strellbriggs were sitting with her mother. She gave them a précis of her conversation with the newsagent.
‘Good grief, what a palaver!’ said the Major. ‘I was just having a bit of fun with the lad!’
‘Apparently you frightened the life out of him.’
‘Young people today . . . ! Soft! Mollycoddled! You know what my Sergeant Pigby used to do with the young recruits out in Africa—’
‘Please! Major, I do not want to know what your Sergeant Pigby used to do. I am asking you please, while you are in my house not to do such a thing again.’
‘Okey dokey, ma’am!’ said Strellbrigg. He seemed quite indifferent to the whole affair.
This was the first incident which caused Jane real concern but she did not think of worrying Mrs Wentworth-Farrow with it, let alone Mrs von Hohenheim, whom distance had converted into a fearsome, almost mythical figure. By the beginning of the second week, however, Jane was becoming seriously agitated.
She had begun to sleep badly. Strange, repetitive dreams turned her hours of rest into unsettled fragments of fitful dozing. She would wake up suddenly as if alerted by some disturbance and lie in the dark straining to hear a noise. One night she did hear something. It was a low, human voice which she could not identify. She tiptoed to her bedroom door and opened it a fraction.
Now she recognised the voice: it was the Major’s, breathy, low, urgent, barely above a whisper. He was saying: ‘Come here, Pigby! Come here, sir! Come here, I say!’
There was a silence, then again, even more urgently this time: ‘Pigby! Come here, I say!’
After a long silence Jane thought she heard a snuffling, grunting sound somewhere in the house, like the noise made by a wild animal. Courage deserted her. She shut and locked her bedroom door, and scrambled back into bed. There she lay for the rest of the night frozen, guilty, wide awake, waiting for the recurrence of a noise which never came.
At breakfast the following morning Jane mentioned casually that she had thought she had heard an animal in the house during the night. The Major, intent on his second piece of toast, barely looked up.
‘Not a dog or a cat, I hope.’ he said.
Jane was surprised by his reaction. She said she didn’t think it was.
‘Arthur and I don’t care for dogs and cats,’ said Daphne.
‘Not proper animals,’ said the Major. ‘Not like lions and jackals, leopards and hyenas. You can respect them. You shoot ’em but you respect ’em. Know what I mean? I’ve bagged my fair share of big game in my time. Pigby and I used to go out into the Masai Mara and do it. Once got a brace of bull elephants with two successive rifle shots. Gave one of the heads to Pigby as a memento.’
The mention of Pigby made Jane scrutinise the Major closely. He did not look mad; in fact he looked extraordinarily healthy. Recalling his frail appearance when she first met him, she could not help congratulating herself on the beneficial effects of her hospitality. He looked ten years younger, and so did Daphne.
The following night Jane listened out for noises but heard nothing except for a faint pattering of feet at three o’clock in the morning. It sounded neither human nor elderly, but its indistinctness allowed Jane to put it down to illusion.
The next day Mrs Chicopera from two doors up came round to ask if Jane had seen her missing cat, Buzz. Jane had not. They talked on the doorstep and Jane did not invite her
in for coffee as she usually did because she did not want the Strellbriggs to meet Mrs Chicopera, who was from Zimbabwe.
When Jane came into the sitting room after this interview she was puzzled not to see her mother. The Major was reading the paper and Daphne was examining her crocheted blanket which she had draped over an armchair. Its grey colour, irregular stitching and indeterminate shape made it resemble the web of a giant spider. It took a few seconds before Jane realised that Daphne had draped the blanket over her mother’s chair and that her mother was under it.
Jane removed the blanket to reveal her mother who looked bewildered, but not greatly agitated. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Are we having lunch?’
‘Poor mother!’ said Jane, as lightly as she could without removing a hint of reproof. Daphne took the blanket from Jane with a smile but said nothing.
The Major said: ‘Having a bit of a lark, weren’t we, mother? Having a bit of a game.’
‘What sort of game?’ Jane asked.
‘Pigby,’ said her mother.
Jane looked at the three of them and they stared blandly back. It was as if they were all in a conspiracy against her. She left the room. There was another week to go and Jane was not quite sure whether she could stand it.
**
The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler Page 3
