Don't Go to Sleep in the Dark Page 10

  Yes, it was immaculate. Every surface scrubbed and shining; a delicious little dish of cold chicken and salad all ready for Lorna’s supper; and for her tea—just look! a big, expensive, once-in-a-lifetime meringue, bursting with cream! A treat! Another of Mummy’s pathetic attempts to provide Lorna with at least the shell of a happy home! Irritation fought in Lorna with eager appetite. Does she think I’m a baby, or something, who needs to be consoled for its Mummy being away? I love Mummy being away! I love it! I love it!—and with each “love” her teeth sank deeper into the rare, luscious thing; the cream spurted with bounteous prodigality across her cheeks, and she didn’t even have to wipe them, because she was alone. Alone, alone, alone: the nearest thing to Paradise.

  *

  Outside, the spring evening was fading. The sob and thrum of Lorna’s favourite records mingled first with a pink sunset light in the pale room; then with a pearly, silvery greyness against which the firelight glowed ever more orange and alive; and at last, curtains drawn, lamps switched on, coal piled recklessly into a roaring blaze, it was night; and still the records played on, over and over again. It was too lovely a time, this time of firelight and perfect solitude, to waste on anything less beautiful than the music which her parents hated so.

  It was nearly nine o’clock when the telephone began to ring. It began just as Lorna had settled herself cosily by the fire with her tray of chicken salad, new rolls, and a huge mug of boiling hot, sweet black coffee, whose deliciousness was enhanced by the fact that Mummy would have said: Don’t have it black, dear, not at this time of night, it’ll keep you awake.

  Damn! she thought, setting down the mug just in the middle of the first glorious sip. Damn! and then: Why don’t I just not answer it? Why don’t I ignore it? I bet it’ll just be Mummy, fussing about something. Yes, driving along those monotonous miles of motorway, she’ll have been thinking up some new things to fuss about: Have I latched the kitchen window? Have I brought the milk in off the step? Will I be sure and shut the spare room window if it rains? Fuss, fuss, fuss, an expensive long-distance fuss from a roadside callbox…. I won’t answer, why should I? I’ll just let it ring, serve her right, teach her a lesson, show her I’m not a baby…. Defiantly, Lorna raised the mug to her lips once more, and calmly, leisurely, she resumed her sipping.

  But how the telephone kept on! It was irritating, it was spoiling this solitary, delightful meal which she had planned to savour to the full. She laid down her knife and fork restlessly. Weren’t they ever going to ring off? How long do people go on ringing before they finally give up? … and just then, at last, with a despairing little hiccup, the telephone ceased ringing.

  Silence swung back into the room, and flooded Lorna with relief. She picked up her knife and fork once more, and prepared to recapture her interrupted bliss. Having a meal alone by the fire like this; Alone! The joy of it! No table-manners. No conversation. Just peace, delicious peace.

  But somehow it had all been spoiled. The slow, savoury mouthfuls tasted of almost nothing now; the new, favourite magazine propped against the coffee-pot could not hold her attention; and she was conscious of an odd tenseness, a waiting, listening unease in every nerve. She finished the meal without enjoyment, and as she carried the tray out to the kitchen the telephone began again.

  The shock was somehow extraordinary. Almost dropping the tray on to the kitchen table, Lorna turned and ran headlong back into the sitting-room slamming the door behind her as if that would somehow protect her from the imperious, nagging summons. All her sense of guilt and unease at not having answered before seemed to make it doubly impossible to answer now; and the longer she let it ring, the more impossible it became. Why should anybody ring so long, and so persistently? If it was Mummy, then surely she would have assumed by now that Lorna had gone in to the Holdens? Who else could it be who would ring, and ring, and ring like this? Surely no one goes on ringing a number for ever? Oh, please God, make it stop!

  And at last, of course, it did stop; and again the silence filled her ears in a great flood, but this time there was no relief in it. She felt herself so tense, so tightly listening, it was almost as if she knew, deep in her knotted stomach, just what was going to happen next.

  It was a light, a very light footstep on the garden path that next caught at her hearing; lightly up the steps, and then a fumbling at the front door. Not a knock; not a ring; just a fumbling, as of someone trying to unlock the door; someone too weak, or too blind, to turn the key.

  “Be sure you bolt all the doors….” In her head Lorna seemed to hear these boring, familiar instructions not for the fiftieth time, but for the first…. “Be sure you latch the kitchen window…. Don’t answer the door to anyone you don’t know….”

  Lorna tiptoed out into the hall, and for a few moments she fancied that she must have imagined the sounds, for all was quiet. No shadowy silhouette could be seen looming against the frosted panels of the door, palely glittering in the light of the street lamp. But even as she stood there, the flap of the letter-box began to stir, slowly. Lorna was looking into an eye.

  A single eye, of course, as it would be if anyone is peering through a letter-box; and yet, irrationally, it was this singleness that shocked most, carrying one back, in an instant, beyond the civilized centuries, right back to the Cyclops, to the mad, mythical beginnings of mankind. Lorna began to scream.

  “Don’t be frightened,” came a voice from outside—a young voice, Lorna registered with gasping thankfulness and surprise. Why, it was a girl’s voice: a girl no older than herself by the sound of it! “Don’t be frightened, Lorna—but do please let me in!”

  Reassured completely by the sound of her own name, Lorna ran to the door and flung it open.

  “Oh, you did give me a fright—” she was beginning, but then stopped, puzzled. For though the girl standing there looked vaguely familiar, and was roughly her own age, Lorna did not know her. She had taken for granted, when she heard herself addressed by name, that she would be bound to recognize the speaker.

  “Hallo! I—that is, I’m awfully sorry, I’m sure I ought to know you—?” she began uncertainly.

  “It’s all right; I didn’t think you would recognize me at once,” answered the girl, stepping confidently into the hall, and looking round her. “I hope you don’t mind my coming out of the blue like this; but I used to live here, you see.”

  She was a forceful looking girl, Lorna could see now, standing there under the hall light; with strong black hair springing from a high, very white forehead, and her eyes were dark, and snapping bright; as if, thought Lorna, she had a quick temper and a quick wit, and very much a will of her own.

  “Oh, I see.” Lorna tried to collect her wits. This must be the daughter of the family who had lived here before Lorna’s family had moved in, seven or eight years ago. “Oh, I see—Fancy you remembering my name! Do come in—I expect you’d like to look at everything, see how it’s changed since you were here.” Already she felt that she was going to like this girl, who was looking round with such bright interest, and seemed so friendly. “I’ll show you my room first, shall I; I wonder if it was the same one you had? It’s the little back one that looks out on the garden.”

  By the time they had explored the house, Lorna felt as if she and this other girl had known each other for years. They seemed to have so much the same tastes, the same loves and hates; and as they sat over the fire afterwards, with a newly made pot of coffee between them, Lorna found herself confiding in her new friend all her troubles: Daddy’s tempers; Mummy’s doormat submission to him, her anxious, fussy housekeeping.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” she explained, “if Mummy was really a houseproud sort of person—if she really got any pleasure out of making the house look nice. But she doesn’t. She does it in a desperate sort of way. She clutters everything up with flowers, and hideous ornaments—”

  “—as if it was a substitute for making you and your father happy, you mean?” put in the other girl quickly. “You mean,
since she can’t give you a happy home, she’s determined to give you a neat, clean one, full of things?”

  “That’s it! That’s it exactly!” cried Lorna. “How well you understand! But why such ugly things?” Her eyes swept the mantelpiece and the crowded corner cupboard. “It’s as if she collected ugly things on purpose.”

  “I don’t think so,” said the other girl quickly, glancing rapidly round the room. “They’re not actually ugly, you know—not each of them taken singly. It’s just that nobody loves them—your mother and father never chose any of them together, in a little dark shop, on holiday when they were enjoying themselves. I expect your mother bought them pretending it was like that when it wasn’t.”

  “Why, yes! I expect she did! That would be exactly like her!” cried Lorna, enchanted. Never had she found anyone before who could understand the way this girl understood. “That’s why I hate them so—”

  “So let’s smash them,” said the other girl, in the same quiet, thoughtful tones. “Let’s bash them to pieces on the marble fireplace there. Think how they’d crash and shatter!” There was a strange gleam in her dark eyes, and Lorna stared at her, for the first time uneasy. But she was joking—of course she was.

  “Wouldn’t I just love to!” Lorna gave a little laugh appropriate to such nonsense. “Have some more coffee?”

  “No. I mean it. Let’s! You hate them—you are right to hate them. Hateful things should be s-s-s-s-mashed!” And snatching a china shepherdess from the mantelpiece, the girl flung it with all her force into the grate.

  The splintering, shocking, unimaginable crash shocked Lorna speechless. “Stop!” she tried to cry as a teapot and two vases burst like spray across the hearthrug; and then, even as she gasped out her protests, something extraordinary began to seep into her soul. Shock, yes; but what was this joy, this exultation, this long pent-up anger, as crash followed crash and splinters of china rebounded across the room like hail?

  “Smash them! Smash them!” the girl was crying, her dark face alight with extraordinary joy. “Rip up the cushions! Tear down the curtains—they were sewn in misery, not in love, every stitch was stitched in misery!” With a great rending, ripping sigh, the curtains huddled to the floor; and by now both girls were upon them, ripping, tearing. A madness not her own was in Lorna now, and she too was tearing, smashing, hurling, in an ecstasy of shared destruction such as she had never dreamed.

  Dreamed? Was she dreaming, then? Was this the telephone waking her, ringing, ringing, ringing across the devastated room? This time, Lorna ran instantly to answer, snatched it from its hook and waited.

  Yes. Yes, this was the home of Mrs Mary Webster. Yes, I’m her daughter. No, I’m afraid my father is not in. You rang several times before? Oh. Yes what is it? What is it?

  An accident. My dear, I’m very, very sorry to have to tell you … an accident … your mother. Yes. Your mother … a lorry out of a side road … it must have been instantaneous…. And a lot more, kindly, helpful, sympathetic, kind people on their way to Lorna right now. Lorna couldn’t really take it in.

  She was not surprised, when she went slowly back to the sitting-room, to find that her new friend was gone. She had known that she would be gone, for she knew, now, who it must have been. For who else was there who could have hated the room as Lorna hated it, and would have come back, at the last, to destroy it?

  And, after all, the destruction was not so very great; for a ghost, even using all its strength, is not strong as a living person is strong. A few things were broken, the curtains crumpled and awry; and as Lorna sat down among the mussed cushions she was crying: crying with happiness because she and her mother—her real mother, the one hidden beneath the doormat exterior for all these years—had understood each other at the last.

  ANGEL-FACE

  “BUT THERE ARE angels, Mummy. Miss Sowerby says there are. She says they have wings, too, and bright lights round their heads. Ever so bright! As bright as the headlamps of Daddy’s car, Miss Sowerby says!”

  I sighed. Bother Miss Sowerby! And bother Daddy, too, for that matter!—if Philip wanted his son to be brought up in his own humanist-rationalist opinions, then where was the sense in sending him to an old-fashioned little village school, where the last of the world’s Miss Sowerby’s are bound to be still quietly flourishing? But of course I would never argue about it: right from the moment of marrying him, I had resolved never to argue with Philip about Simon’s upbringing. The important things for a six-year-old—or so I reasoned—were consistency—continuity—stability. The task of a new stepmother, it seemed to me, was to keep things going for the child as nearly as possible as they had always been. No change was as important as no change, if you see what I mean; and this had been my policy throughout these first, difficult months.

  And difficult, indeed, they had been. It would have been easier if Simon had been, quite simply, a more attractive child: if he had been a bouncing, handsome, extrovert little boy, who could be made happy by treats, and toys, and ice-cream: a little boy with muddy knees and football boots and lots of noisy little friends. I had come into my marriage all set to be tolerant about that sort of thing; to smile as I patched torn dungarees, swept mud off the carpets, and accustomed my ears to the clatter and yells of Cowboys and Indians up and down the stairs and in and out of the back door.

  But Simon isn’t like that at all, I am sorry to say. He is a pale, mopish little creature, who reads a lot (yes, at six he reads voraciously, fluent as an adult), and his eyes are always red-rimmed, sometimes from eyestrain, sometimes, I suppose, from crying. Personally, I think he oughtn’t to be allowed to read so much; but, as I say, I never interfere; I keep my opinions to myself. If he was my child—that is to say, if I was his real own mother, and didn’t have to be so careful all the time not to upset him—I would insist on him going out more, and leading a more active life. I would take him for long walks whether he liked it or not; I would invite little boys to tea myself, and make him play with them. I just couldn’t endure to see a son of mine so pallid, and unsociable, and full of fancies. But since he isn’t my son, and since Philip seems to see nothing amiss, I let him go his own way, and just try to be very, very kind to him. I think I can honestly say that in all these months I have never once slapped him, or even raised my voice in anger. All my friends say it’s marvellous, how patient I am with him, even when he is at his most whiny and tiresome; and I am glad to be told this, because, believe me, I don’t always feel patient! There are times, there really are, when Simon would try the patience of an angel, particularly when he is in one of his argumentative moods. Of course, I know that six-year-olds are always argumentative—I’m not complaining of that—it’s right and natural that they should be. But with Simon it’s different. With him it’s not the normal, aggressive, “I’m right and you’re wrong!” sort of attitude, that is typical of bright little boys. On the contrary, it’s as if he doesn’t want you to be wrong—is afraid of it, somehow—and he’s all twisted up with anxiety to put you right.

  Like this angel business, for instance. They have Religious Instruction on Friday afternoons, and it seems that on this particular Friday Miss Sowerby had seen fit to stuff the kids’ heads with even more fairy-tale nonsense than usually goes under the heading of “Religion”. Of course, it should all have slid off him like water off a duck’s back as soon as the lesson was over—that’s what happens with any normal child. But Simon is not like that. Perhaps for the very reason that he has been brought up in an atheistic household, all this religious claptrap actually means something to him. He actually listens, I mean, and thinks he is learning some new and extraordinary fact about the world: a child from an ordinary religious home would never dream of paying that much attention.

  And so then, of course, being Simon, he comes home all het-up and anxious about it, and lets his tea grow cold, and the nice hot-buttered toast that I always have ready for him on winter afternoons congeals on his plate, while he worries at the topic like a terrier with
a bone.

  “But Mummy, they’ve got great wings, Miss Sowerby says, as—as big as right across this room! That’s how big they’d have to be, to fly an angel right off the floor!”

  His eyes were round with awe as they took in the size of our sitting-room and visualized the wing-span that would reach from wall to wall. This solemn, objective assessment of such a piece of fairy-tale rubbish made me want to laugh; but of course I was careful not to do so; one should never laugh at a child.

  “No, Simon,” I said gently. “You’ve got the wrong idea. Miss Sowerby didn’t mean there really are such things as angels (she did, of course, the silly cow, but what else could I say?). She just meant that—well—that you can imagine such creatures, as symbols of goodness. You know what a ‘symbol’ is?”

  He did, of course. Simon always knows the meanings of words. I sometimes think he’d be a more lovable child if he didn’t—and a happier one, too. Already that irritating little nervous pucker was coming and going on his forehead as he talked—a sure sign that he was working himself up into one of his states. I don’t ever let him see that it irritates me, of course, because I know he can’t help it. So I just smiled at him reassuringly and said: “That’s all angels are, Simon, just a fanciful way of talking about goodness! You mustn’t start thinking about them as if they were real.”

  But Simon wouldn’t let it go—he never will. He gets his nerves wound round something, like a spider’s web round a fly, and there is nothing you can do.

  “No,” he said, with his own special air of anxiety-ridden obstinacy. “That isn’t what Miss Sowerby meant. She meant there are angels. She says you can see them sometimes. People who are very, very good, they can see them, she says. Am I very, very good, Mummy?”

  I sighed. I could see that it was hopeless.