by Paul Magrs
I can remember them talking about all sorts of things. I would pass back and forth, bringing and unloading trays, and I would try to look as if I was paying them or their conversations no heed. Of course I was, though. I was drinking up everything, whenever I went into that drawing room on those nights. All their peculiar conversations – all their learning, all the things they had made up. The dribs and drabs I heard in that room thrilled and disturbed me. They were talking about other times and other countries and, in my ignorance, I never knew if these things were real or not. To me, it was as if these clever men could bring just about anything into existence by the mere act of talking about it. They began to fascinate me and I was drawn to the stuffy warmth of the colloquy more than a servant should have been.
Edith scolded me out in the hallway. In that narrow passage, with stuffed fox heads and murky paintings in gilt frames, I hung my head as the coarse mistress of the house took me to task. I was to leave the Smudgelings in peace. No, they didn’t want any more cake or biscuits or cocoa. I wasn’t to find any more spurious excuses. They didn’t want interrupting by the likes of me.
‘Besides,’ Edith snarled. ‘A girl like you. What can you possibly understand about the things they say?’
‘I know they are writing books, all of them,’ I said. ‘They’re all writing about marvellous things. Impossible things. Professor Tyler is writing about the most marvellous of all. I have heard a little of his story, just a little . . .’
I watched the mistress’s face cloud over. It was past one in the morning and the men were still chuntering away in the drawing room. Edith could have done without my beaming enthusiasm. I watched her temper snap, and her tiny hand go up to slap me. Instinctively I protected myself. My own, rather larger mitt reached up and grasped her wrist. She quivered and shook with frustration.
‘Don’t you listen to them!’ she spat. ‘It’s not for the likes of you.’
I stared at her and let her wrist go. She rubbed it and glared back at me. ‘How dare you grab me like that?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘You mustn’t listen to what the men in there say, Brenda. It is wickedness. It is dangerous.’
Now, this was the first I’d heard of such an idea. ‘Wickedness?’
She bit her lower lip. I could see how young she was, the mistress of this place. Tyler had grabbed her up and brought her down here to this mildewy place and she was out of her element. She was going to the bad, and she knew it. The place was distorting her nature. And now she was filled with paranoid speculation, superstition. ‘I know they talk about magic. About terrible things. All of this . . . messing about with their manuscripts, with their made-up tales and so on . . . it is simply a cover. They are talking about sorcery, Brenda. You must stay away when they talk like this. And so must I. This isn’t for the likes of us.’
I remember my insides thrumming with excitement at her words. They were talking about sorcery and it scared poor Edith silly. But it had the opposite effect on me. The words were tantalising to me. They drew me to the very edge of their world and the dark things that they got up to.
‘Reginald won’t talk to me about it.’ The mistress was gushing now, looking to me as if for my help and my reassurance. ‘I ask him. He won’t tell me anything. He won’t say a word. He’s been like this for months. I think he hates me now . . .’
‘No, no, I’m sure that’s wrong.’ I found myself trying to calm her. Too soft-hearted, me. She’d just had a go at clouting me – and here I was, stroking her golden hair, which had dulled somewhat in recent weeks. I was hugging the wretched girl in the hallway of her big house. Trying to make her feel that her husband thought something of her. But I didn’t really think he did. Not any more. He was a cold old fish, Reg Tyler. All he cared about was that book of his.
RAT-TAT-TAT on the door. A late member arriving in a flurry of sleet and ice. Both Edith and I jumped at the sharp rapping of his silver-headed cane against the door’s paintwork. I hastened to answer.
And there stood a tall, impeccably dressed man of indeterminate age. He gave me a vulpine, suggestive smile. William Freer: the most recent addition to the Smudgeling roster. He was late because the London trains were delayed in this hellish storm. There were ice crystals on the black fur collar of his overcoat. As he whirled into the corridor I realised that the pang that went through me was one of fear, rather than attraction, though William Freer was a devilishly attractive man. Off came his coat for my safekeeping, and he was in a charcoal suit underneath, sharp as a pin. Edith hurried to welcome him. She stammered and she shook and she pretended to know Freer only slightly. This charade was obviously for my benefit. But I saw the looks they were giving each other and I knew it for a charade.
When I re-join Henry in my garden, the air has turned mellow. The sun slants through softly and lights up all the insects on the air. I’ll be bitten to pieces if I stay out here. Somehow they are always drawn to me. I must have very delicious blood.
Henry Cleavis is looking at me as if he can discern something interesting in my face. He knows straight away that he has triggered my memories.
‘You’ve started to remember.’ He smiles with some satisfaction.
I nod and smile and really, it feels as though he’s started an avalanche going in my head. A slow, stately avalanche, all rumbles and ominous trickles. Without him, I’d never have consciously thought back to being a housemaid. What’s the point? Those years have long gone. But now Cleavis has reminded me of Reg and Edith and William Freer and the words and pictures have resurfaced. Or started to, anyway. It’s shocked me that I can remember things word for word. My memories are like delicate bolts of lace: rotting with holes here and there, where they have been folded and stashed away. But in other places the fragile patterns and fine traceries are still discernible, holding the fabric in one piece.
I want Henry to go home now. He’s smiling at me, proud of himself as if he’s presented me with a wonderful gift. I find I can’t return his grin, or give him thanks for this sudden access to my past. He’s shown me a doorway, a hatchway leading further down into myself. My own savage interior. That’s what he’s done. Into a time when I was less good at being me, when I was so much younger. Why should I thank him for that? I want to concentrate on now. On today.
‘I wonder what it is about your memory,’ he muses. ‘I wonder why it works differently from . . . from most human beings’ . . .’
I shrug, and glower at him warningly. Surely, if he knows me so well, he knows better than to go into this. He should know I don’t like talking about such things.
‘The analogy would be with computer hardware, I suppose.’ Henry warms to his theme. ‘You’re the second owner of your mind, if you think about it. The first one must have been wiped, I suppose, so that you could fill it up with your own thoughts. Like a hard drive, as I suppose they would say today, hm?’ Another thought seizes him and his eyes light up. ‘I wonder if each of your constituent parts has its own memory? Hm? Of its original, um, owner? Wouldn’t that be marvellous? There’s no reason why not. The body and all its bits has its own intelligence, its own intuitions, does it not? There is a twitchy, deep-rooted wisdom to what our bodies know. My, Brenda! You must be a mass of conflicting emotions and ideas and feelings, why . . . all the time!’
‘Get out,’ I tell him. ‘Go home, Henry.’ I try to modify my sudden bellow, my evident crossness, by gentling my tone and yawning. ‘I’ve really come over very tired.’ It’s only early, but I don’t care. I’ve had enough of him and his whiffling by now. I hoist myself out of my deckchair and he follows, politely mystified by the vehemence in my tone.
‘Will you accompany me to Sheila’s first barbecue night?’ he asks. ‘It’s tomorrow evening and she wants to show off her new facilities.’
I nod quickly, feigning a migraine. He’s given me the creeps, the way he talked about me, my body and everything. What does he know about anything?
As he toddles off, so pleased w
ith himself, Cleavis doesn’t even know that he is spoiling things between us. Shooting Jessie. Grazing Effie’s temple with the same jet-tipped bullet and putting her into a coma. Reviving my unwanted memories. He goes up on his tiptoes to kiss my grease-painted cheek before he leaves.
I have an early night because I want to be up and about at the crack of dawn, in order to visit Effie. I’ve started to feel guilty for not going this afternoon. What if she woke and came to her senses? Remembered that the last thing she was aware of was Henry firing his gun into the crowd? Wildly, like a madman, like an assassin? And then she heard that I was giving him lunch? Going to such an effort for the silly old fool? What would she say?
She wouldn’t be impressed.
So my dreams come early. The shallow side of midnight. And I’m back in that silvery winter in Cambridge, when the ponds in the park were frozen black, and the denuded trees stuck out like strange Chinese writing. Those funny hieroglyphic things they use. There was writing everywhere in the snowy dark.
I dream about the suave William Freer. With the thrilling voice. The large, cool hands. The furry collar round his cloak. That way he had of talking to you, as if you were the only important person in the room. In the world, even. It was a seducer’s way of carrying on. A con-man, a charlatan, a proper Casanova. Well, I was never going to be taken in by him. I might have looked like a naive working woman to him. An uneducated servant. But by then I was a hundred and twenty years old, and I’d seen a thing or two.
Edith and the Smudgelings were taken in by him. He swooped into their lives, their homes and all the while he was mocking them. I can sense that so clearly in my dream of William Freer. He acted so solicitous and kind, but in my dream there’s a touch of the pantomime villain about him. The old silent movie feller, with his cloak and his twirling ’tache. He thought the Smudgelings – Henry, Reg, and all of them – were bumbling, parochial fools. Stuffed to the gills, self-satisfied and smug out there on the eerie, eely Fens, tamped down with useless knowledge. Writing silly fairy tales for each other. But there was something he wanted and something he desperately needed from them. Otherwise, why waste his time?
It was Edith. I woke with a shock in my dark bedroom. It was Edith he wanted.
I could see them plain as day. Not that night, some other night, deeper and later into that winter. Freer and Edith were canoodling in the hallway. Playing with fire. Anyone might have caught them. But it was just me, popping through with ginger cake and tea on a silver tray, and I hardly counted. I was barely sentient in Edith’s eyes, though Freer spared me a lascivious, tormenting smile as I edged past them. He had Edith clutched to him, under his cloak, and, until she noticed me passing through, she was squealing with pleasurable fear. Then they sprang apart.
She loved him. As I sit there in my bed, I remember that well. Edith hated Tyler by then. She once sat drunk at the kitchen table, demanding cooking sherry and unwisely telling me and Mrs Ford, the cook, how much she had grown to hate her professor.
‘My life was meant to be different. I was a nurse. I was his nurse. He promised me the world, you know. For bringing him back alive. For bringing him paper and pens so that he could work on the ward, even though he wasn’t allowed to. Not really. He needed to be resting. But I could see all this need in his face. He begged me. He was older than me. Not as much as you would think, looking at us now . . .’ Edith had burped softly at this, wafting away the cooking sherry fumes, and the cook and I stared at her dough-like face. The eyes like little dried fruits stuck into the softness. Her spiteful little mouth red as preserved cherries. We looked at her and neither of us liked her, really, since she had been so cruel to us. But her admissions – especially those about her love for the satanic Freer – completely thrilled us and held us rapt.
‘Will you run away with him, ma’am?’ asked the cook.
‘I should run away.’ Edith scowled. ‘I don’t belong here. This damp place. I belong on the northern coast. Where I grew up. Where I worked in the hospital and met my nemesis, my husband . . . I should go back to Whitby.’
Whitby! Of course! Of course that’s where Tyler met his nurse. Where he recuperated from his head injuries during the Great War. It was where he first started work on his opus, The True History of Planets. It was too neat to be just a coincidence, surely. I hadn’t made the connection up till now, sitting with the heavy bedclothes bunched about me, sixty years later. Here I am, in this town I was drawn to by supernatural means. Here is Cleavis, investigating, killing monsters, in the town where his great friend first started out on his momentous path into fantasy: into the world of the Smudgelings. There are lines and glimmers of connections here. I can’t quite see them properly. They’re like threads of tinsel, twisting and turning in the light. My brain’s all messed up, with the extra work I’m making it do. It isn’t used to digging around like this and—
Tap, tappety, tap-tap-tap.
All I need.
Skittering and scratting. Tiny feet falling over themselves in the dark. Drunken feet coming to get me in the dark. Breaking once more into the sanctuary at the top of my house. Skitter scatter tap tap tap. I’m so used to it now. It still sends a shock right through me, though.
Tap tappety tap.
Like having malign goblins dancing on your grave. Taunting you.
But I must sleep. I must show them they can’t scare me any more. I don’t care. I must sleep blithely, deeply, dreamlessly. No more digging around, no more of the past surfacing and washing up on the shore. Enough of that. I have to get up early and go to the hospital and see how Effie is.
Effie the poison pen letter perpetrator. But surely I can’t believe that?
No, I refuse to. Until she wakes and is in a position to defend herself. That’s only fair.
Who else but Effie knows the nature of my secrets? Who else could have written me that horrible note?
Tap tap tap.
Only Mrs Claus. Robert. Henry Cleavis.
Horrible mystery, when almost all of the suspects are your friends.
I’m so worn out with it all even my haunting can’t keep me awake. I slump into dreams again and, despite myself, I’m in the company of William Freer and Edith Tyler. They are smooching and canoodling in the gaslit hallway, while the other Smudgelings carry on their meeting elsewhere. I am watching them through a crack in the door that leads to the servants’ quarters. And I watch Edith giving herself away to this evil interloper. She also gives him a package tied up with string. A manuscript, thick with handwritten pages. I watch Freer stow it away in his carpet bag and he turns and leaves the Tyler residence hurriedly, into the night, without saying goodbye to his host or the others.
I remember Edith’s face. Stricken by the temporary loss of him. And wondering whether she had done the right thing. Too late now, girl, I thought at the time, and I would have loved to have known what was in the parcel.
After that, this night, there’s only swimming in darkness and voices I can’t quite make out. Then the sun is washing through my attic windows in a great tide of golden light.
I’m sitting with Effie and there’s no change. Her head’s all bandaged up as if she’s taken to wearing a turban, and she has retreated far into herself. That’s what the nurse has told me, putting a consoling arm on my shoulder as she goes round. My friend has gone far into herself, out of shock. I nod rather dumbly, and I’m wondering about the jet that Henry used to tip his bullets and how Effie told me several of her ancestors were seen off with just that noxious substance. Inimical to evil. But Effie isn’t evil, is she? She’s my friend.
Seems useless bringing fruit, but I did. I knew better than to bring flowers, of which she doesn’t approve. She once said something about the absurdity of placing genitalia in vases for display, only she mouthed rather than said the word ‘genitalia’. Not a very Effie word. She could be so harsh. So judgemental.
But I still don’t believe that she was typing out these nasty letters.
In the shop this morn
ing, Leena and Raf watching me warily. Bursting to ask. ‘You’ve had one as well, haven’t you? We heard on the grapevine. Do you know who sent it? Have you uncovered the culprit?’
I could do the proper detective thing, I suppose. While she lies here helpless I could get Effie’s keys out of her bag and I could get into her home. I could go there under the pretext of airing her rooms, guarding against intruders. But I should go up to the dusty office in her attic and have a good look at her clapped-out typewriter. I should compare the keys, the machine’s idiosyncrasies. Easy work to check out a typewriter, as Sherlock Holmes once pointed out. They each have their very own fingerprint. So I would easily be able to see whether it was the one which tapped out my letter. There was a dodgy s in the letter. A slightly misaligned key.
But somehow I can’t bring myself to go and do it. So I don’t. And why? Because I wouldn’t be able to bear it if the letter matched the machine. I couldn’t bear to find Effie out. I would rather not know. And so I put off the obvious solution as if it hasn’t occurred to me and, ironically, hear Effie’s caustic voice in my head: ‘You’ll never make a real investigator, Brenda.’
Well, in this case, I don’t want to. I don’t want to have my suspicions confirmed.
A gulf is separating Effie and me. More than the distance between the half-dead and the semi-alive. The undead and the unconscious. The revived and the comatose. A much bigger distance than that. Now that I have seemingly thrown in my lot with Henry Cleavis (though the last time I saw him I was throwing him out of my garden), a gap of sympathy has opened up between my friend and me. When she wakes up (and I just know she will: she has to) she’ll know that my man friend shot Jessie dead and she will not be able to forgive that. She will not be able to understand how I can.
What will I say? I was giving him Sunday lunch. I was treating him like an old and dear friend. We talked and talked for hours and I let him stir my memories round. Up they came like the murk at the bottom of a pond, turning the clear water cloudy. Effie will want to know why and how I can trust him. And give myself away to him.
