The Ebony Tower-Short Stories - John Fowles

by John Fowles

  Nor did some faint last hope that the clinking sound might have had a natural explanation survive long. There came a scrape, as of a chair being moved aside. I had to face the reality: Holly Cottage was being 'done'. It was only too easy to guess why despite Maurice's statistics--it had been selected. Its isolation was obvious; and it must have been common knowledge locally that it was owned by London weekenders, whose more extended stays were confined to the summer. The day was a Wednesday now a Thursday, since my watch told me it was after one--and the month November. I do not drive, there was no motor-car outside to warn of occupation; and I had gone to bed early in order to be fresh for a long first day's work.

  So far as I knew, there was nothing of great value in the cottage--certainly not by a professional thief's standards. The place had been furnished with Jane's usual simplicity and good taste. I knew there were one or two pieces of nice china, some paintings of the nineteenth-century na•ve-pastoral genre that (for reasons beyond my personal comprehension) fetch a price these days. I could recall no silver; and I supposed Jane would hardly have left anything very precious in the jewellery line there.

  Yet another sound came to my small relief, from below still. It seemed vaguely pneumatic, perhaps caused by the sticking of some cupboard door. I lacked the familiarity with the native sounds of houses one gains only from prolonged living in them. However, I did at last take some positive action--that is, I groped for my glasses in the darkness and put them on. Then I got my legs from under the bedclothes and sat on the edge of the bed. No doubt it was symptomatic that I did all this with the greatest caution, as if I were the burglar. But I simply did not see what I could do. I was certain to come off worse if it came to a struggle. I could not reach the telephone without a confrontation and the youth--I had determined it was some long-haired village lout, with fists like hams and a mind to match--would hardly let me use it without a fight. And then I was also listening for something else--for the sound of a low voice. I didn't feel at all sure that I had to deal with just one person. The cheapest form of Dutch courage is an accomplice.

  I must confess too, in retrospect, to a purely selfish motive. It was not my property that was being stolen. The only things of overwhelming value to me personally were the papers and the rest to do with my Peacock. I had laid them out on a table in the other downstairs room, the one furthest from me, the sittingroom. They would hardly be in any danger from the semi-illiterate who was rummaging down below. They might conceivably have warned a more intelligent person that the cottage was not after all empty, but as to more obvious signs of occupation.. I had fallen a victim both to my laziness and my always incipient neatness--having cleared away and washed up after the light supper I had cooked for myself, and not having bothered, as Jane had recommended, to light a log fire in the hearth to 'cheer the place up'. The weather was muggy, mild after London, and I had also not bothered with the central heating--merely switched on an electric fire, which would now be quite cold. The refrigerator remained off, since I had not yet shopped for perishables. The red light of the water-heater glowed in the cupboard beside my bed. Then I had re-opened the curtains downstairs ready for the morning, and brought my other suitcase upstairs with me. Even consciously, I could not have erased signs of my presence more effectively.

  The predicament grew intolerable. Further sounds came that showed the person below was quite confident that he had the house to himself. True, however much I strained to hear, I caught not the faintest murmur of another voice; but it was increasingly obvious that sooner or later the thief would try his luck upstairs. All my life I have had a hatred of violence, indeed of most kinds of physical contact. I had not been in a fight since early childhood. A master at my preparatory school had once, in the callous manner of his kind, referred to me as a shrimp, and the sobriquet was unanimously adopted by my then friends. It never seemed to me very accurate, since shrimps have at least a certain speed of movement and agility and I had never had even those small compensations for a puny stature and a total lack of 'muscle'. It was only comparatively recently in my life that I had outgrown the family belief that I was constitutionally condemned to an early death .1 like to class myself--in no other but a physical sense, I hasten to add--with Pope, Kant and Voltaire. I am trying to explain why I did nothing. It was not so much fear of injury or death as the awareness of how futile any action that provoked them was certain to be.

  And then there was that sense of fertile concentration I spoke of just now--it had been an assurance of a still vigorous intellectual life ahead. I felt so eager to kill off the final draft, to have my fascinating and still grossly under-rated subject alive and on the polished page. I had seldom been so confident at the threequarter stage of a book; and I felt an equal determination now, as I sat on that bed, to let nothing in this ridiculous present situation endanger my bringing it to its due completion.

  But my dilemma in the quick remained painful. I expected at any moment to hear footsteps mount the stairs. Then there came a sound that made my heart jump with unexpected relief- a sound that I could place. The cottage front door was closed by a wooden latch. There was a bolt, which could be opened in silence. But the latch was a shade stiff and tended to clack as one forced it up. That was what I had heard. To my joy the next sound came from outside. I recognized the small squeak of the little wicket-gate that led from the narrow front garden to the lane. It seemed that against all expectation my unwelcome visitor had decided that he had got enough. I do not know what impulse made me stand up at this point and feel my way carefully to the bedroom window. It had been very dark outside when I took a brief breath of fresh air with that smug sense of illegal proprietorship people who have been lent houses have--at the front door before going up to bed. Even in broad daylight my shortsightedness would have made any kind of useful identification dubious. Yet something in me wished to catch a glimpse of a dark shape... I cannot say why. Perhaps it was merely to be quite sure I was now left in peace.

  So I peered down cautiously from beside the small window that overlooked the lane past the cottage. I expected to see very little; to my surprise, and consternation, I could see quite well and for a very simple reason. The lights in the living-room below were evidently still on. I made out the white slats of the gate. Of the man who had left, no sign. For a few seconds all was still. Then there was the sound of a car door being closed--lightly, with care, but not the absolute care someone who might have suspected my presence would have used. I risked opening the curtain wide, but the car, van, whatever it was, was hidden behind the overgrown clump of holly that gives the cottage its name. I had a brief puzzlement as to how it could have been driven up and parked there without my being woken. But the lane is gently on the mount past the cottage. Very probably it had been coasted down with the engine switched off.

  I did not know what to think. The closing car door suggested departure. But the lights left on--no thief, however inept, would make such a blunder if he were really leaving the scene of the crime. I was not kept in suspense long. There was suddenly a shape at the wicket-gate. It passed through and towards the house, out of my sight, almost before I could start back. Events moved with a chilling rapidity. Quick footsteps mounted the stairs. I had an abrupt access of panic: I must do something, I must act. Yet I stood by the window in a kind of catatonia, quite unable to move. I think I was more frightened of my own terror than of its cause. What kept me frozen there was the saner knowledge that I must not act upon it.

  The steps reached the small landing across which the doors to the cottage's two bedrooms face each other. What I should have done if the intruder had first turned to the right instead of the left... in some strange way it was a distinct mercy to hear the handle of my own door turn. All was darkness, r could see nothing and my state of paralysis endured, as if I still futilely hoped that this unknown presence would turn away. But a torch came on. It discovered at once the disturbed bed I had just left; and a fraction of a second later I was discovered myself by the w
indow--in all my foolishness, barefooted, in pyjamas. I recollect I raised an arm over my eyes to shade them from the dazzling beam, though the gesture must also have seemed one of helpless self-defence.

  There was a silence, in which it was evident that the person holding the torch was not going to run. I made a feeble attempt to normalize the situation.

  'Who are you? What are you doing here?'

  The questions were respectively stupid and nugatory, of course, and received the answer, or lack of it, they deserved. I tried again.

  'You have no right to be here.'

  I was spared the torch for a moment. I heard the door of the bedroom opposite open. But then almost at once I was dazzled by the glare of the mirrored bulb again.

  There was another pause. Then, at last, a voice.

  'Get back into bed.'

  The tone reassured me a little. I had expected a Dorset, at any rate an aggressively uneducated accent. This was flat and quiet.

  'Go on. Into bed.'

  'There's no need for violence.'

  'Okay. So like I say.'

  I hesitated, then went back to the bed and sat nervously on its edge.

  'Cover your legs.'

  Again I hesitated. But I had no alternative. At least I was being spared physical brutality. I put my legs beneath the bedclothes, and remained sitting upright. The torch still blinded me.

  There was more silence, as if I were being deciphered and assessed.

  'Now the goggles. Take 'em off.'

  I removed my glasses and put them on the table beside me. The torch left me for a moment, searching for the switch. The room was filled with light. I made out the blurred shape of a young man of medium height with the most bizarre yellow hands; then that he was in some kind of bluish blouse suit, I think denim. He crossed the room to where I sat in bed. I detected a kind of loose athleticism, and judged him to be in his early twenties. A certain ectoplasmic quality about his face that I had first put down to my myopia now explained itself. It was covered to his eyes with a woman's nylon stocking. The hair was dark, beneath a red knitwear cap; the eyes brown. They now surveyed me for a long moment.

  'Why you so shit scared, man?'

  The question was so absurd that I did not attempt to answer it. He reached and picked up my glasses, then tried the lenses briefly. I realized the incongruous yellow of the hands was that of kitchen gloves--of course, to avoid fingerprints. Again the eyes above the mask, like those of some concealed and suspicious animal, stared down at me.

  'Never happened to you before?'

  'It most certainly has not.'

  'Nor me. We'll play it by ear. Right?'

  I gave some kind of nod of assent. He turned and went to where I had been standing when he came in. There he opened the window, then casually tossed my glasses into the night--at least I saw the gesture of his arm that could only mean that. I did feel anger then; and the folly of expressing it. I watched him close the window, then re-latch it and draw the curtains. Now he came back to the foot of the bed.

  'Right?'

  I said nothing.

  'Relax.'

  'I do not find this a relaxing situation.'

  He folded his arms and contemplated me for a few seconds; then he pointed a finger, as if I had asked him the solution to some problem.

  'I'll have to tie you up.'

  'Very well.'

  'Don't mind then?'

  'I unfortunately have no choice.'

  Another silence: then he gave a snuffle of amusement.

  'Jesus. The number of times I've imagined this. Thousands of ways. But never like this.'

  'I'm sorry to disappoint you.'

  Again there was a pause for assessment.

  'Thought you only used the place weekends.'

  'I happen to be borrowing it from the owners.'

  He devoted more thought to that, then pointed a yellow finger down at me again.

  'I get it.'

  'You get what?'

  'Who wants to get bashed for just friends. Right?'

  'My dear young man, I am half your size and three times your age.'

  'Sure. Only kidding.'

  He turned and looked round the room. But I seemed to intrigue him more than its professional opportunities. He leant against a chest-of-drawers and addressed me again.

  'Just what you read. How the old crumblers always have a go. Come tottering at you with their pokers and carving-knives.'

  I drew a breath.

  He said, 'Property. What it does to people. Know what I mean?' He added, 'Doesn't apply in your case. So.'

  I found myself staring at my feet beneath the blankets. Of all the fictional horrors connected with the situation that I had ever seen or read of, not one had included motivational analysis of the victim from its prime cause. He gestured with the torch.

  'Should have made a noise, man. I'd've been out like a dose of salts. Wouldn't have known who you were.'

  'May I venture to suggest you get on with what you came to do?'

  Again there was a snuffle. He remained staring at me. Then he shook his head.

  'Fantastic.'

  I had imagined various forms of action, swift and purposeful, and distinguished only by their degrees of unpleasantness; not this obscene simulacrum of a quiet chat between chance-met strangers. Heaven knows I should have felt relieved; yet I would have preferred a devil I knew--or who at least conformed better to one's general notion of his kind. He must have perceived something of this in my face.

  'I knock off empty houses, friend. Not tiny people.'

  'Then kindly stop gloating over it.'

  I had spoken sharply; and we went a further step in absurdity. There was almost a gentle reproach in his voice.

  'Hey. I'm the one who's supposed to be jumpy. Not you.' He opened the yellow hands. 'Just had a terrible shock, man. You could have been up here loading a shotgun. Anything. Blown my guts out the moment I opened that door.'

  I gathered strength.

  'Isn't it sufficient that you've broken into the house of two decent, law-abiding and not particularly well-off people and intend to rob them of things that have no great value, but which they happen to love and cherish... 'I did not finish the sentence, perhaps because I didn't quite know how to say what it was that was superfluous in his manner. But my own had grown too belatedly indignant. The quietness of his voice was all the more galling for having been invited.

  'Nice house in London as well, have they?'

  I had realized by then that I was dealing with someone who belonged to that baffling (to my generation) new world of the classless British young. No one detests class snobbery more sincerely than I do and that the young of today have thrown out so many of the old shibboleths does not disturb me in the least. I wish merely that they did not reject so many other things--such as a respect for language and intellectual honesty--because they mistakenly believe them to be shamefully bourgeois. I was familiar with not undissimilar young men on the fringes of the literary world. They too generally had nothing to offer but their airs of emancipation, their supposed classlessness; and so clung to them with a frightening ferocity. In my experience their distinguishing trait was a needle-sharp sensitivity towards anything that smacked of condescension, a phrase that comprehended all that challenged their own new idols of confused thinking and cultural narrowmindedness. I knew the particular commandment I had just transgressed: thou shalt not own more than a grubby backstreet pad.

  'I see. Crime as the good revolutionary's duty?'

  'Not just the bread alone. Now you mention it.'

  Suddenly he picked up a wooden chair from beside the chestof-drawers, reversed it and sat across it, his arms perched on the back. Again I was accused by the finger.

  'Way I see it, my house has had burglars in since the day I was born. You with me? The system, right? You know what Marx said? The poor can't steal from the rich. The rich can only rob the poor.'

  I recalled then an oddly similar--in tone if not in content co
nversation I had had only a week or two before with an electrician who had come to do some rewiring in my London flat. He had chosen to harangue me for twenty minutes on the iniquity of the trade unions. But he had had the same air of sublime irrefutability. Meanwhile, the present lecture continued.

  'Tell you something else. I play fair. I don't take more than I need, right? Never the big stuff. Just places like this. I've had the real class. In my hands. And left it right where I found it. Dear old fuzz, they shake their heads, tell the bereaved owner he's lucky to have had such a ham job done. Like only a clown could have missed the Paul de Lamerie salver. The first-period Worcester teapot. The John Sell Cotman. Right? Except the real clowns are the ones who don't know class is ten to one red-hot from the moment you touch it. So any time I'm tempted, I just think of the system, you with me? What's killing it. Greed. Me too. If I ever let it. So I'm never greedy. Never done time. Never will.'

  I have had a good many people try to justify bad behaviour to me; but never in such ridiculous circumstances. Perhaps the greatest absurdity was that red woollen hat. It had to my poor vision a distinct resemblance to a cardinal's biretta. To say that I began to enjoy myself would be very far from the truth. But I did begin to feel that I had the makings of a story to dine out on for months to come.

  'Another thing. What I do. Okay, it hurts people... what you said. Stuff they love. All that. But maybe it helps them see what a fucking fraud the whole business of property is.' He slapped the back of the chair he was sitting across. 'I mean, you ever thought? It's mad. This isn't my chair or your chair. Your mates' chair. Just a chair. Doesn't really belong to anyone. I often think that. You know, I take stuff home. Look at it. I don't feel it's mine. It's just whatever it is, right? Doesn't change. Just is.' He leant back. 'Now tell me I'm wrong.'

  I knew any attempt at serious argument with this young buffoon would be like discussing the metaphysics of Duns Scotus with a music-hall comedian: one could only become his butt. His questions and baits were clumsy invitations to a pratfall; yet I had a growing sense that I must try to humour him.