Buffet for Unwelcome Guests

by Christianna Brand

  She was sick and cold, the familiar room swam round her as though she saw it through water. She started to gibber, backed up, violently trembling, against the oak dresser. ‘Don’t touch me! Don’t come near me!’ But the sad, heavy face came closer; regretful—implacable. She sobbed and stammered: ‘Please don’t hurt me, please—!’

  He stopped again; stood there, earnestly, humbly explaining. ‘I wouldn’t, you see: if you’d only be kind and easy. I’m—just an ordinary man, you must understand that; in other ways perfectly ordinary. Bachelor, yes; but a lovely old mother, looks after me like a king. Good job, solid, respectable, no one ever suspecting a thing. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t want anything—dirty. Just the usual, just to be—a man.’ He fell silent again and into the silence, ash falling in the grate, coal resettling itself, sounded harsh and loud; the grandfather clock struck a single rasping note. ‘If they wouldn’t struggle,’ he insisted, ‘they wouldn’t get hurt. I sometimes think it’s really only the struggling that—excites me: the hope of the struggling. It’s all leading up to that, the ’phone calls, everything, it’s liking to get the better of them because no one seems to—want me. If only just once, one of them was kind—was kind and easy and—even a little bit loving—I sometimes think I’d be cured of it, I’d give the whole thing up for ever.’

  A desperate hope rose in her of temporising, of reasoning with him. ‘Can’t you get some nice girl of your own?’

  ‘But that’s it,’ he said. ‘They won’t have me. I suppose they—sort of sense this other thing. I suppose I sort of—smell of it.’

  ‘There are—well, prostitutes.’ Poor sad girls, living so dangerously, taking such terrible risks. But…‘They would be easy; and I suppose kind?’

  ‘But not loving,’ he said. ‘And I want some love with it. That’s what I go about looking for. If… If, even after all the muck and the filth, the calls and all that—if one of them was just to bring herself to understand, if one of them really understood and forgave, really accepted that I’m—just an ordinary man, only with this sickness…’ He thought it over. ‘Quite a nice man, really, I suppose, as men go. Honest, dependable, decent—in all other ways, at any rate, decent. And kind, you know, considerate, good to my mother, there never was a better son, I don’t suppose.’

  ‘I think you are nice,’ she said. ‘I think you’re right. You’re just a—a nice, ordinary man; only you’re ill, you need help.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I need help. And what help can I look for now, except from a woman? I think if I found that, I could begin life all over again, I really do. But till then…

  Till then! She started to move, edging her way along the dresser, her hands spread out behind her, feeling their way along the polished ledge. It brought him sharply out of his absorption. He said: ‘That’s no use. If you think you’re going to get to the door, get away from me—I’m afraid that’s no use. I wouldn’t want to kill you, not like that poor girl; or harm you, like some of the others. I mean, I like you, I like you very much, no one else has ever been so kind as you have, listening and understanding. But that won’t stop me. You could be an angel out of heaven and it wouldn’t stop me. When the fit’s on me, I can’t help myself. And it’s on me now.’

  ‘My husband—’ she faltered.

  ‘Your husband won’t be home for hours. You know that. He was ringing you from Hampshire.’ He said again, in his humble, earnest way: ‘I don’t want anything—dirty. Just what any man wants.’

  She knew now what she must do. It was terrifying, hideous, dangerous—but there was nothing else for it. She had pulled herself together, the room no longer swam about her, her hands grew steady, dropping from the ledge, hanging motionless at her sides, resistance-less. She said, ‘I understand. You can’t help it; you can’t help yourself. And neither can I help myself. Neither of us can.’ And she tore herself from the shelter of the dresser and, moving very slowly, went towards him.

  He did not stir, just stood there waiting for her. But she saw with a sort of heartbreak that his whole face had become transfigured with an incredulous, inarticulate, grateful joy.

  She’d had no idea where to strike. Simply, the sharp kitchen knife thrust itself in and to a vital spot. She found herself weeping, kneeling over him as he lay there, harmless now and pitiful in his harmlessness. So terrible a price to have exacted from him! She and all those other women—if they could but have been ‘easy and kind’. Easy and kind—understanding, forgiving, ‘even a little bit loving’. But they could not; and she found herself weeping, kneeling there beside him, sobbing it out to the upturned, trustful face. ‘I didn’t mean to kill you! I had to save myself, I had to save all those other girls to come. The knife was there on the dresser. But I didn’t mean it to kill you…’

  After all—except for that one thing, he had seemed such a nice man.

  The Whispering

  SHE LEANED AGAINST THE counter and the empty glass made a tiny chattering against the mahogany with the shaking of her ringless left hand. They were whispering about her over there in the corner. She said so to the barman. ‘They’re whispering about me over there.’

  ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake!’ he said. ‘You always think people are whispering.’

  ‘Why do they whisper? Why don’t they just talk to me straight out?’

  ‘Perhaps they don’t wish to talk to you straight out,’ he said, ‘or any other way. And I’ll be frank with you—neither do I.’

  Tears welled up into her large blue eyes. She said with maudlin dignity: ‘In future I’ll go to some other bar.’

  ‘You do that,’ he said, ‘God knows we’re fed up with you in here.’

  But she stayed. She always stayed. Where ever else she went, it would be the same. ‘It was all such a long time ago,’ she said to the man. ‘Why should they whisper still?’

  But they whispered: and the whispering grew and grew.

  Such a long time ago…

  Of course Simon should never have taken her there in the first place. But she’d begged and pleaded and he never could resist her. ‘You know I’d take you if I could, Daffy. I’d do anything for you, you know I would, I’d die for you…’

  And so would they all, all the others, all the boys—they’d lie down and die for Daffy Jones. And not only the young ones. ‘My Pa,’ Daffy used to say, ‘he’d go out and get himself run over if it would do me any good. No, honestly he would—he’d die for me.’ His Daffodil, he called her, his Golden Daffodil.

  Talk about daffy! Simon thought—but there it was, she did remind one of a daffodil, so slender and fresh in the little narrow green frocks she so often wore, with that bell of bright yellow hair.

  ‘All the same, Daffy, I couldn’t take you to the Blue Bar. It’s just what it says, it’s off-colour, it’s an awful place. I couldn’t.’

  But it sounded thrilling and the other girls at school would have fits when they heard she’d been there. ‘Oh, Simon, don’t be so stuffy! Please.’

  ‘Honestly, I couldn’t. What would your father say? He’d have a heart attack.’

  ‘My father has heart attacks the whole time,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I don’t mean that. I mean he’d do hand-springs.’

  ‘If my father did hand-springs he’d have a heart attack,’ she said laughing, ‘so it comes to the same thing.’

  ‘I just meant that he wouldn’t like it. He’d murder me!’

  Daffy was his cousin, her father was his Uncle John.

  ‘It’s a dreadful, sordid place, sailors and tarts and people like that, everybody drunk or hashed up, some of them even on the hard stuff.’

  He had, in fact, been there only once himself, taken by two much older boys who had left school—his own school. He went to boarding school; not Daffy’s. It had shocked and scared him; scared him even more to think it might ever come out that he had been there.

  And she recognised that. She was a fly one, little Daffy Jones.

  She said: ‘But you
go there,’ and added with the smallest slyest of meaningful glances, ‘what would your Pa say?’

  So he took her. Never mind the threat implicit, he loved her, he had always loved her, always, since they’d been small children together: Daffy so fresh and dewy-eyed, Daffy irresistible.

  ‘Gosh!’ she said when they got there, ‘isn’t it frightful? Fancy you!’

  ‘Oh, well,’ he said, casually sophisticate, ‘one grows up.’

  But when his neighbour on the close-packed bench against the greasy wall offered him a drag, he said at once: ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Oh, do!’ said Daffy. ‘I’d love to have a try.’ Not for nothing was she known at school, with double meaning, as the Sex-Pot, but he was not to know that. ‘Only I don’t like sharing,’ she said to the man.

  ‘Plenty more where that came from,’ said the man, producing a handful of ready-rolled untidy cigarettes. He suggested to Simon, ‘Only it’ll cost you bread, man, bread.’

  Of all the phoneys! But poor Simon fell for it all like a ton of bricks and forked out twice as much for the stuff as Daffy could have got it for, any day, from the school gardener.

  ‘Do let me have a—a drag, do they call it?—Simon. I’d love to try it.’

  The stuff takes you different ways. Simon it wafted into a beautiful dream, sitting huddled on the bench gazing before him into a brilliance where beautiful people danced and hugged and did beautiful things, right out there in the open before everyone. He awoke to the sound of her screeching. She was shaking him, screaming at him.

  ‘Look at me! Look what he did to me.’

  She looked beautiful, he thought, standing there with her dress half ripped off her body, showing the lovely white nakedness underneath, her hair all torn and tousled, her eyes so strangely bright—she must have been having a beautiful, beautiful time.

  ‘You look beautiful, Daffy,’ he said. ‘Did you have a good time?’

  ‘Good? It was horrible. Look what he did to me!’

  ‘You shouldn’t have gone with him if you didn’t like it.’

  But she had liked it. For most of the time. She had never before been with a real, grown-up man. But then…

  ‘He wanted it all wrong,’ she said. ‘I thought he was going mad. I didn’t know what he was up to.’ She went into details. ‘So I tried to make him stop because, after all, there are limits; and he went berserk—it was absolutely frightful.’

  And indeed when he looked at her again, fighting his way up out of his euphoric self-absorption, she did perhaps look rather a mess.

  ‘I’d better take you home. We’d better both go home.’ Lovely, blissful home, warm bed, comfortable dreams…

  She was hugging together her ripped dress, trying to comb out her torn and tangled hair, scrabbling in her handbag for lipstick and little tubes of shiny eye make-up: spitting into an oblong box of mascara, thickening her lashes with great blobs of it, with some vague idea of getting back to normal, making herself ‘look good’.

  ‘What’ll I tell them? How’ll I explain to Mummy and Daddy? They’ll go mad.’

  ‘Tell them what happened,’ he said comfortably. ‘You couldn’t help it. Say he made a pass at you and, of course, you wouldn’t and he beat you up.’

  ‘They’ll say what was I doing here?’ Out of her anxiety, grew belligerence. ‘You should never have brought me to a place like this.’

  He protested: ‘You made me bring you.’

  ‘You, my own cousin! What will my Pa say?’ Her father was a simple man: simple and gentle. But when he saw her like this, his little pet, his darling, his innocent flower…‘He’ll murder you,’ she said.

  ‘You went with the man. I told you not to.’

  ‘You should have stopped me.’

  ‘How could I?’ he said, simply. ‘I was stoned.’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t have got stoned and let me.’ She sat hunched up beside him on the bench. Now and again, vaguely, curious glances swept over them and swept on. She looked a bit young for the Blue Bar—too young and too—well, different—to have been outside, having it rough with that sailor chap they called The Butcher; for that matter, both of them looked much too young, two silly kids out of place, from another world. Still, that was their affair. She, in her turn, looked back at them: dirty, raddled women, too remote from long-past youth and beauty to be of use to anyone but the rough, drunken, drug-soaked degenerates that would come to such a place.

  ‘Simon, if my father knew! Swear you won’t ever tell him I was here.’

  ‘What shall we say to them, then?’

  ‘Say that we—say that we were walking along, say we were coming home from the Singing Café, that’s harmless enough, along the river path. And just by that bench, the bench in front of Mardon’s hotel, say it was there; we must stick to the same story exactly—say there were these three boys and they jumped up and started making passes at me. And you fought them off—I’ll say you were terribly brave—but it was three to one and one of them got me away. Here, pull out your tie, mess up your clothes, look as if you’d been in a fight.’ But he’d have no scratches and bruises, no black eyes, he wouldn’t look a bit as if he’d been in a fight; and what was more, he didn’t look as though he were taking in a word she said. Anyone would see that he was stoned, even her innocent father would recognise that much. He’ll be at the zombie stage, she said to herself, he’ll never stick to anything. She said: ‘No, after all, skip it. I’d better go alone.’

  Her light summer coat covered her ripped clothes. She got home at last, going the direct way, not along the river path. It was late, but the later she got home, the more likely her father would be anxiously waiting to see that she was safe. And, sure enough, at the first scrape of her key in the lock, the landing light went on and he was creeping downstairs so as not to wake her mother, wrapped in his old brown checked dressing-gown, the tassel of his cord following him with tiny muffled bumps from step to step.

  ‘Daffy? Where’ve you been? You’re awfully late.’

  The coat covered her clothes but the pale, bruised face told its own story and the torn, tousled yellow hair. She had been thinking all the way home what best to say. His face, always so thin and worn, now turning to a bad colour she too well knew, gave her her cue. She tumbled into his arms. ‘Oh, Daddy!’

  ‘What is it, darling, what’s happened? Oh, my God—you haven’t been…? They haven’t…?’ He led her, as she sobbed and shuddered, into the sitting-room, lowered her on to the sofa, fell on his knees before the electric fire to switch it on, as though offering a prayer to it for warmth and comfort for her; came back to sit beside her on the sofa, circling her shoulders with a trembling arm.

  ‘Don’t cry, sweetheart. You’re safe now, sweetheart. Tell Daddy, darling, it’ll be better when you’ve told.’ But he left her again for a moment, ran to the door, called up the stairs: ‘Hester!’, darted back to the cupboard, found brandy and a glass. ‘Here, darling, try, just a sip. Then you can tell me.’

  His hand was shaking as he held the glass, his face was a terrible colour, that ugly blue-grey, rather frighteningly patched with a dusky red. He fumbled almost surreptitiously in the breast pocket of his pyjamas, shook a small pill into his hand and swallowed it.

  She sobbed and shivered and at last burst out with it all. ‘Oh, Daddy! It was Simon.’

  ‘Simon?’ he said; stupefied at the sound of that name.

  ‘On that bench by the river, Daddy. You know, the bench in front of Mardon’s Hotel—’

  ‘Mardon’s?’ he said. ‘That’s not on your way home.’

  ‘No, but he—he wanted to go there. So we went and then we stopped and sat on the bench and we were just looking at the river and talking—at least I was just talking; and then…’ She buried her face against his shoulder. ‘Don’t make me tell!’

  ‘Oh, my God, Daffy!’ he said; and you could sense reaction to her plea, humble and gentle: it’s her mother she needs, not me. He left her again for a moment and went out into
the hall, calling more urgently up from the foot of the stairs. ‘Hester! Wake up, come down! Hester, it’s Daphne: come down.’

  And she came, hurry-scurrying, anxious, trembling, her dressing-gown clutched with a shaking hand tight up against her throat as though to shut out some bitter cold wind in that well-warmed house.

  ‘What is it, my darling, what’s happened? Oh, God, darling!—your face, all those marks—your hands, your hair.’ And she cried out, as the father had cried out, voicing the nameless fear never far from their hearts: ‘You haven’t…? They haven’t…?’

  ‘It was Simon,’ she said dully.

  ‘Simon? What Simon? Which Simon? You can’t mean your cousin, Simon, Daffy?’

  ‘Mummy, I tried not to let him.’

  The mother could not—would not—take it in. ‘Simon? He’s only a boy, he’s only seventeen.’

  ‘Boys of seventeen nowadays…’ said her husband.

  ‘But Simon?—he’s her own cousin, he’s like her brother.’

  ‘No, Mum,’ said Daphne. ‘He isn’t. He’s never been.’ But how would she, innocent blossom, have recognised that? ‘I mean, he was always sort of—sloppy, sort of lovey-dovey, you know.’ And she searched in her keen little mind for a phrase from her mother’s own courting days. ‘I mean he’s always sort of carried the torch for me.’

  ‘But, Daffy, what happened?’

  What had happened? He hadn’t taken her to that place, no; for any investigation might produce someone who had observed her going off outside, so flirtatious and willing, with the sailor, Butch. But Simon would soon admit that they had been there: would confess to having taken her there—to having given way to her entreaties and taken her there. And to having smoked that wicked pot and so been unable to control her when she had insisted upon leaving him. Simon in his silly innocence would give it all away. Well, then, Simon must be discredited in advance. ‘He was stoned, Daddy. He didn’t know what he was doing. He was stoned out of his mind.’