Mr Splitfoot (Dr Basil Willing)

by Helen McCloy

  “The boy who just left?”

  “Yes.”

  So that was why the boy had said “Dr. Willing” so glibly. These weren’t ordinary children. Not if they spent their summers reading books on criminal psychology.

  “Vanya lives just up the road with his mother,” went on Lucinda. “She has quite a library. He and I read a lot there last summer because They wouldn’t let us go anywhere. There was an epidemic. Polio. Of course we’d been inoculated, but so were some of those who got polio. They weren’t taking any chances.”

  He noticed her odd inflection when she said “They.”

  It sounded as if the word were capitalized. Her world seemed to be that of the primitive clansman, divided into We and They. He surmised that anyone over twenty-five was They.

  “What other books did you read?” asked Gisela.

  “Oh . . . all sorts.” She wasn’t practiced at evasion. She might as well have said: I’m not telling. She hurried on as if to divert Gisela and Basil from those other books. “That was an old one of yours. About 1938, I think. Something about psychopathology and politics.”

  A rustle of silk from the chimney nook where Ginevra was sitting filled the little pause.

  “Lucinda, what’s all this about a bedroom that’s never used? Your father simply wouldn’t talk about it.”

  The girl’s eyes grew wary.

  “Daddy thinks I’ll never find out if people don’t talk about it. That’s silly, because I know already.”

  “Why doesn’t he want you to know?”

  “He thinks I’d be frightened. That’s silly, too. It takes more than that to frighten me.”

  And yet you are afraid, thought Basil. Of something . . .

  “How did you find out?”

  “Vanya told me all about it when we first came here last Spring. That’s something else that Daddy doesn’t know.”

  “Don’t you think you ought to tell him?” Gisela’s voice sounded unusually gentle after Lucinda’s thin, sharp tone. Her voice, like her body, was all angles.

  “Why should I?”

  “I have a daughter about your age. It would bother me if she didn’t tell me things like that.”

  Lucinda laughed. “You mean lack of communication and all that? I don’t think there’s ever real communication between parents and children. I suppose I’ll think differently if I ever have children of my own.”

  Ginevra wasn’t interested in generalizations.

  “What’s the story, Lucinda? Your father would hardly say a thing.”

  Lucinda regarded the flames in the hearth. “Just how much did he tell you?”

  “Me? Nothing. He told the Willings they’d have to spend the night in the living room because there was no empty bedroom. Naturally I reminded him that there was one at the head of the stairs. He answered quite brusquely: ‘That bedroom is never used.’ Before I could ask why, the Crowes arrived and I didn’t have a chance to talk to your father again before they all went upstairs.”

  “He’s never done that before,” said Lucinda.

  “Done what?”

  “Told people they had to sleep in the living room because there was no empty bedroom when there was. Of course the situation has never come up before. The house has never been so full of people. Still . . . I wonder if he’s beginning to believe it himself?”

  “Believe what?”

  “The story about the room. It’s really not like him to believe a ghost story.”

  “Nobody believes in ghosts, but everybody is afraid of them,” retorted Ginevra. “Like Madame du Deffand. Come on, Lucy! Give! Unless your father has actually forbidden you to talk about this.”

  “He’s never mentioned it to me at all.”

  “I sometimes think all parents are crazy,” said Ginevra. “What would be more likely to rouse any girl’s curiosity than locking up a perfectly good bedroom and never using it, even when the house is full of guests? And not even talking about it!”

  “I suppose there’s only one explanation.” Lucinda was pensive. “He really does believe the story himself sort of halfway. Like the polio last summer. He said: ‘There’s no danger. You’ve been inoculated.’ But still he wouldn’t let me go anywhere.”

  Ginevra sighed. “We’re still waiting for that story, Lucy.”

  “Well, it started in 1870 and—”

  “What started in 1870?”

  Basil had never heard a more tired voice. A man was standing in the hall doorway where Ginevra had stood before. A certain familiar note in his voice as he spoke to Ginevra made it clear that he was her husband, though he looked much older. His disenchanted eyes were hardly in focus. They managed to suggest that there was hardly anything in life worth their focusing for. His lips parted silently now and then as if he were short of breath, but he gave no impression of haste or anxiety. The effect he produced was closer to exhaustion. Why breathe? Scarcely worth the effort, really . . .

  There was arrogance in such impenetrable ennui. Every languid tone, every indolent gesture seemed to say: I have already seen everything worth seeing, done everything worth doing, and met everyone worth meeting. Why should I bother with you?

  Basil wondered if he realized that a manner which so deliberately excluded the other inhabitants of this planet was hardly likely to endear him to the most promiscuously egalitarian generation the world has yet seen.

  He was resigned, but to what? Not financial failure, apparently. The lichen-gray tweeds and everything else in his appearance suggested a carefully disciplined elegance. How odd that a man should take such pains to please the eye and then make no effort to please the heart.

  “My husband, Bradford Alcott,” said Ginevra, and Basil remembered that Alcott and Blair were Francis Swayne’s publishers.

  So he wasn’t resigned to failure. He must be resigned to success, and perhaps that was harder to bear in old age. Failure can console itself with so many ifs . . . If I had made more money . . . If I had married someone else . . . But there are no consolations for success. I did make money . . . I did marry the woman, or women, I wanted . . . And now . . . is this all?

  Basil’s glance shifted to Ginevra. By firelight you had a glimpse of what she must have been years ago when the silvery hair was dark and the withered cheek round and velvety as a peach. In this light you couldn’t see the cobweb-fine wrinkles. Just the brilliance of heavy-lidded eyes, deep and dark as purple pansies, the fluent grace in every gesture, the elegance of the Edwardian tea gown, crystal-beaded lavender banded with fur dark as her eyes.

  “Dr. Willing?” Alcott repeated Basil’s name with a rising inflection of simulated interest that only emphasized the weariness at the back of his voice. “Aren’t you a criminologist?”

  “Forensic psychiatrist,” said Basil. “I sometimes work with the district attorney’s office in New York.”

  “I thought so.” Alcott drifted to a chair and collapsed with a sigh. “You’ve been mixed up in some curious cases. Wasn’t there one at Brereton School years ago?”

  Ginevra Alcott pounced. “Brereton School? That funny business about Faustina Crayle? I remember that. I had a cousin, Beth Chae, who was there at the time. Brad! Dr. Willing is just the person to lay the ghost here!”

  “I didn’t know there was a ghost here.” Words left Alcott’s lips reluctantly as if there were not quite enough breath to send them on their way.

  “Oh, darling, everyone knows that when a bedroom is locked up and never used, no matter how full the house is, there must be a ghost in it somewhere.”

  Before Alcott could respond, the hall doorway framed another figure. Her après-ski array was too luxurious for Basil’s taste—black velvet slacks, white mink shirt, pearls twisted in her bleached and braided hair. Her eyes were dull as two opaque gray agates under shallow water. She had paused by a lamp on the central table. Its light thrust upward, painting shadows in all the wrong places, revealing lines that would not have been visible in kinder light, and more—fine threads of scar tissue a
t the corners of mouth, nose, eyes and ears.

  This was not cosmetic face-lifting. The scars were too many and too conspicuous. They had been placed by necessity, not art. Her whole face was such a carefully reconstructed mask of flesh that it was impossible to tell her age or even guess how she had looked before the operation. The same result would have been produced whether the face had been smashed at sixteen or sixty.

  “Ghost?” Her voice was high-pitched, abrasive. “Don’t tell me this house is haunted! How absolutely crashing! How totally tripwise!”

  Ginevra spoke sharply. “Serena, did you meet Dr. and Mrs. Willing when you came in?”

  “I’m afraid we were in rather a rush to get upstairs. I’m Serena Crowe.” She smiled vaguely in Gisela’s direction.

  Serena. The name her parents gave her? Or A qwerty assumed in afterlife as more romantic than Mary or Jane or Susan? If so, she had chosen badly. There was nothing serene about her. She was as uneasy as a little animal who has wandered too far from the familiar part of the forest where it knew which predators to avoid. This suggested the secretary who had married the boss or the boss’s son and found herself lonely in the alien environment

  Ginevra was making conversation rather laboriously.

  “The Willings had an accident in the snow. Their car broke down and Mrs. Willing hurt her ankle, so they are spending the night. Frank said they’d have to sleep in the living room. I’m trying to find out why they can’t have the bedroom at the head of the stairs. I know it’s empty. Is there a ghost story? You ought to know. After all, Frank and Folly only lease this house. It still belongs to your husband, and it’s been in his family a long time, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes, but you’ll have to ask him about the ghost. I never heard of it before.”

  “‘He hasn’t come down yet.”

  “But he has. He came down with me a moment ago.”

  “We haven’t seen him.”

  “He must be here. David?”

  Serena’s eyes moved in a circular glance around the room.

  “Yes, darling?”

  He came through the door from the hall as if he had been standing just outside it. Listening? He smiled. It was just as if someone had suddenly switched on an electric light with higher candlepower. Everything in the room seemed brighter, clearer, more stimulating. The dark eyes were dancing with gaiety. Yet, behind the smile, there were lines in the face that were anything but gay.

  Basil looked back at Serena’s dead eyes and wondered, as he so often wondered when he met married couples for the first time, what had brought two such dissimilar beings together in the first place.

  “What is it, dear?”

  “Can you answer Ginevra’s question? Or didn’t you hear it? She wants to know if there’s a ghost at Crow’s Flight.”

  “Crow’s Flight?” echoed Basil.

  “That’s what this place is called.” David Crowe smiled again. “Much better than Crow’s Nest, don’t you think?”

  “Much better.”

  “I don’t know the reason for the name of the house. I like to think that some one of us Crowes fled here in disgrace long ago and came cross-country as the crow flies.”

  “And the reason for the family name?” asked Ginevra.

  “God knows! After all, surnames are pretty recent, historically speaking. There are dozens of English surnames that come from birds—Peacock, Dove, Hawke, Nightingale, Parrott, Drake, Partridge. Some scholars derive Swayne from Swan. There are thirty-four birds in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules. All but four survive as surnames today. Crow comes in many forms—Corb, Corbett, Corbin, Crake, Coe. They all sound rather like its cry, that ‘vois of care’ which makes it a bird of ill omen.”

  “Don’t be morbid!” said Ginevra briskly. “And don’t divert me from my original question. Is there a ghost?”

  “I’ve never lived in this house myself, so I don’t know much about it, but I’ve heard . . . stories.”

  “About the bedroom at the head of the stairs?” persisted Ginevra.

  “Yes. That room has been locked up for about fifty years.”

  “But why?”

  “Oh, the usual sort of reason. Everyone who has ever slept in that room has been found dead in the morning.”

  Chapter Five

  THE DINING ROOM was obviously an addition to the original house and a conscious effort to get away from its spirit and style. Perhaps this was an old terrace that had been roofed and walled. That would explain why the floor was brick. Three of the walls were glass masked now by drawn curtains of unbleached, raw silk. The fourth wall had been used by some artist to paint a mystical landscape in the Chinese manner, all airy space with a few sharp, precise suggestions of reality: a mountain peak without a mountain, a tree branch without a tree, and, in the foreground, a little man in a little boat on water otherwise undefined, so little that the empty space all around him seemed supernaturally vast, a whisper of infinity.

  The sideboard was an old Korean chest, black lacquer and brass, polished by centuries of use. Each brass was a different, abstract design, shaped inside the limits of an invisible square, with all the deceptively improvised dash of the best Chinese calligraphy.

  “I bought it in Seoul in 1950,” said Swayne, noticing Basil’s appreciative glance. “I had the rest of the room designed as a setting for it last spring. It’s the only architectural change I’ve made in the house.”

  “Rather an extensive change to make in a rented house,” said Basil.

  Swayne smiled. “I intend to buy it.”

  “In spite of the ghost?”

  David Crowe was looking down the long table toward his host. “Sorry I talked about that. I didn’t realize you were trying to make a secret of it.”

  Swayne smiled. “Trying is right. Apparently I did not succeed.”

  He looked at his daughter. Her blood rose to meet his glance, reddening throat, cheek and forehead.

  It was a long time since Basil had seen a girl blush. The occasion for this blush seemed insufficient. She must be in a state of high tension. She hadn’t spoken at all during dinner, but she had seemed remarkably watchful, especially of Serena Crowe.

  Basil believed that the best thing for the girl now would be to drag the whole business out into the light of reason. This was in his mind when he asked bluntly: “How did these people in the room upstairs die?”

  “No one knows.” Crowe’s glance down the table shifted to Basil, but it was so oblique at that angle Basil could not read his expression. “The poor devils couldn’t tell anyone what happened. They were dead.”

  “And the doctors?”

  “Oh, they said ‘shock.’ It’s like ‘virus.’ A word that means: ‘I-don’t-know.’ ”

  “How many died?”

  “Three altogether.”

  “Oh . . . must we?” It was Folly’s dramatic voice.

  “Don’t worry about me,” said Lucinda. “I’ve heard most of it.”

  “Oh? In that case . . .” Folly sighed.

  As if she had read Basil’s thoughts about her masculinity, she had assumed extravagantly female dress for dinner— harem trousers of jade green taffeta and a velvet bolero of sapphire blue that exposed a girdle of sun-tanned skin at the waist, in the fashion of the moment. She was shod in gilt— little Turkish slippers that curled up at the toes. In her ears and on her fingers were superb pieces of acid green jade that were probably Korean, too. She looked like a romantic Victorian’s daydream of an odalisque, Dulac or Loti, Manet or Flecker, the Near East without smells and hunger, blood and tears.

  The fact that she was so obviously Occidental, tall and athletic and blonde with a classically handsome face more like a boy’s than a woman’s, was all part of the make-believe role she had elected to play.

  “Better bring it all out into the open now,” said Swayne. “Much better than making a mystery of it. Pas de mystère, pas de culte. Let David tell the story and then it will be forgotten by all of us in twenty-four hours. If he
doesn’t, we’ll imagine a lot of things worse than the truth. Trust the human mind for that.”

  Crowe took a sip of white wine from the glass beside his plate and then sat back in his chair. “I’ll have to start with the house. The oldest part of it was built in 1840. It was a farm then, but it was not occupied by people who were farmers and nothing else. Jonathan Crowe was a woolen manufacturer who later sold the cloth to the Union armies for uniforms. The family were proud of the fact that he didn’t make a fortune. The manufacturers who did sold shoddy cloth, and soldiers died of exposure because of it. But Jonathan made enough to live comfortably and he retired from active business in his fifties, as people liked to do in those days if they could. The farm was a hobby for his old age.

  “He is the first of my forefathers whose letters and books have come down to us, so he’s more than just A qwerty in the family Bible. He’s a solid, three-dimensional figure with a character of his own. He was an original, rather ahead of his time. Before the Civil War, he helped runaway slaves escape to Canada by hiding them in the cellar during the day so they need travel only at night. That was called ‘having a station on the underground railway.’ He embraced the Darwinian theory when it was still a heresy. In the library you’ll find the Vestiges of Creation, a book that anticipated Darwin and Wallace by a few years, with notes on the margin in his own hand. He seems to have been a man who embraced anything that was new. His was the first house in the county to have central heating, and he dabbled in what we now call parapsychology—what the nineteenth century called psychic research and the eighteenth century called mesmerism. It was he who gave this place its romantic name, Crow’s Flight. Until then it had been known simply as the Crowe farm, or the Crowe place.”

  “Did he have a family?” asked Gisela.

  “By the end of the Civil War, he was a widower with three daughters, who had rather odd names. I wonder if you can guess what they were?”

  “Faith, Hope and Charity?” ventured Ginevra Alcott.

  “Oh, no. I told you he was a heretic. He had quarreled with all the clergy in the neighborhood. I think it must have been in a spirit of defiance that Jonathan Crowe gave his three daughters Christian names that were hardly Christian— Clotho, Atropos and Lachesis.”