Don't Go to Sleep in the Dark Read online

  “Of course you are, Simon, dear,” I said brightly—and I wasn’t lying, either. He is a good little boy—too good. Naughty little boys are more lovable, to my way of thinking.

  “Of course you’re good!” I repeated reassuringly. “Very, very good! We’ll tell Daddy how good you’ve been, shall we, when he comes in?”

  “No!” Astonishingly, the little pallid face was puckered almost into tears, and I was filled with a familiar, baffled irritation. Here I was, trying my hardest to be nice to him, to show approval, and all he could do was to look as if I’d kicked him! “No, don’t tell Daddy that!” he begged, clutching at my sleeve with his weak, damp little fingers. “Please don’t tell Daddy I’m good! Please, Mummy!”

  When you can’t understand, the thing to do is to smile, and be very, very kind. So I patted the perverse little creature’s head—his hair is always a little greasy, and unpleasant to the touch, however often I wash it—I smiled my brightest, and suggested a game of draughts before bedtime. It’s a boring game, made even more boring for me by the fact that I always play so as to let Simon win; but it’s the sort of sedentary game that seems to suit him, and as I’m only playing for his sake anyway, it doesn’t matter that I’m bored.

  Well, his bedtime came at last, and he went off meekly enough and Philip came in, and we had dinner; and it wasn’t until we were sitting over the fire drinking our coffee that a sudden shriek of “Mummy! Mummy!” sent me racing up the stairs.

  Believe it or not, it was the angels again! Apparently that fool of a Miss Sowerby had told the kids that if they were good children an angel would watch over them at night while they slept! And Simon—trust him! — had managed to convert this hackneyed drivel into a vision of terror! It seemed that he had had a dream—or had let his imagination run riot in the darkness, there was no way of telling which—but anyway, he had opened his eyes and fancied he saw a circle of light in the half-open doorway, and had heard a rustle of wings.

  “It was coming up the stairs, Mummy!” he gasped, half in and half out of his nightmare; “It was coming in the door! It was all bright, like a headlamp, and I could hear its wings rustling!”

  I soothed him as best I could; and then Philip came up and talked to him too, telling him all the comforting Rationalist doctrines about things not being real unless scientists have measured them and taken photographs of them and that sort of thing; and gradually Simon became calmer, and presently he fell asleep, a secure, cared-for little boy, with one of his parents on each side of his bed, just as it should be.

  The Tightness of this picture struck both of us; and when we got down to the sitting-room, Philip put his arms around me and told me how marvellous I was with Simon. “He’s ours now, isn’t he?” he said, covering my face with kisses. “Not just mine. Our son! And did you notice how he called ‘Mummy!’ tonight? Not ‘Daddy!’? It’s you he wants now when he’s frightened. He has really accepted you at last!”

  It was true; it really was a step forward. At the beginning, Simon had balked at calling me “Mummy”—it almost seemed that he must still remember something of his real mother, who had died when he was three. We hadn’t forced him, of course—that would have been wrong. We had simply and firmly referred to me as “Mummy”—Philip in talking of me in his presence and I in referring to myself, and at last Simon had got used to it. And now, here he was calling to “Mummy!” for comfort in the night! It was one of my moments of triumph.

  But I have to admit that as night followed night, this sense of triumph began to wear a little thin. Because it turned out that Simon’s nightmare that evening—or hysterical fancy, or whatever it was—was not just an isolated little episode, to be laughed off and forgotten; it was the beginning of a long and worrying obsession which was to try my patience to the limit. At first it was just in the evenings. Around nine o’clock, just as it had been the first time, the cry “Mummy! Mummy!” would ring down the stairs; and I would have to leave my coffee, or my book, and run up to calm him down. Over and over again, evening after evening, I found myself mouthing the same soothing rigmarole: “But Simon, dear, there can’t be such things as angels, because….” “No, dear, there wasn’t an angel standing by your bed when I came in….” “No, dear, it isn’t true that anyone has ever seen one, it’s just a story…. No, I can’t hear a rustling sound, only the wind in the trees; and no, that light isn’t coming from the stairs, it’s only the moon outside the window … and no, it isn’t getting brighter, of course it isn’t….”

  Each night it seemed to take longer before he settled down; each night I had a harder struggle to hide my impatience and irritation. And my scorn, too, really; a boy, even a little boy, should surely have more pride than to give way so helplessly to such idle fancies? Not that I ever suggested such a thing to the child, or urged him to be “a brave boy”, as I would have done if he had been my son, and I had needed to be proud of him. I knew, you see, that he couldn’t help it, he’d been born with these morbid and cowardly tendencies, and all one could do was to be sorry for him, not angry or reproachful. Anger, or any sort of disapproval, would only have made him worse, the poor spiritless little thing.

  But it was a strain, and I don’t mind admitting it; and instead of getting better as the days went by it got worse. Presently he began waking up in the night too, as well as in the evenings. I would have to drag myself from my bed and go in to him at one in the morning, or two, or three. Shivering in my dressing-gown, half dead with drowsiness, I would stand at his bedside and recite the familiar sentences almost in my sleep…. “No, Simon, dear, there can’t be such things as angels…. No, there isn’t a rustling noise coming up the stairs….”

  Sometimes, to give me a rest, Philip would go to him instead of me; but all that happened then was that Simon would go on crying “Mummy! Mummy!” until finally I had to go. Quite often, actually, he would do the same with me—I mean, he would go on crying “Mummy! Mummy!” after I was already there, and doing my best to soothe him! It was puzzling, this: but Simon is a puzzling child, as I am sure I have made clear by now.

  Time went by, and my nights grew ever more hideous with weariness and broken sleep; and now Simon’s obsession began to spill over into the daytime as well. He began searching our bookshelves for references to angels, and one evening, coming on a picture of an angel in some book or other—a book on medieval history, I think it was—he said something so odd that it really gave me quite a shock.

  “Look, Mummy!” he exclaimed, bringing the book over to me “Look, this one hasn’t got a beak!”

  “A beak?” I said, mystified; and it turned out—would you believe it?—that he had all this time been imagining that angels had beaks! Because they had wings—that was the connection in his mind—and he’d pictured their beaks as huge and curved, like a vulture’s. He thought they had vulture’s eyes, too—hooded eyes, peering out from among their haloes and gauzy draperies and whatnot! Oh, and claws, too, where their hands should be. Can you credit it? An intelligent child of nearly seven!

  Well, you might suppose—you who don’t know our Simon—you might suppose that the discovery that angels don’t have beaks and claws would have dispelled the nightmares. But Oh, no! He decided—with his usual obstinacy—that the picture was wrong!—just as he’d decided that we were wrong in saying there weren’t such things as angels at all. It was no use arguing—it never is, with him: and, to be fair, I have to admit that people who say there aren’t such things as angels are on rather shaky ground when they start saying also that angels haven’t got beaks.

  So the nightmares continued; and the crying out in the night; and the daytime obsession grew, if anything, worse. He began about this time to make dreary little attempts to be naughty—Miss Sowerby’s fatuous assertion that it was the “very, very good” children who were liable to see angels at their bedside—this seemed to be fixed in his mind for ever, and nothing would dislodge it. So he took the (admittedly logical) course of trying to be naughty. I say “trying�
��, because he was far too timid and anxious a child ever to bring it off. He would take a cup, sometimes, or a saucer, and tap it feebly against the kitchen floor trying to break it—but not daring, you understand, really to break it, by banging really hard. Or he would play truant from school—for five minutes, hanging about in the lane—and then run in, crying, and not even late for prayers!

  And still—though I say it myself—I kept my temper with him. Philip said I was marvellous, an angel of patience; it was only his praise and encouragement that made it possible for me to carry on, I feel sure of that. Thanks to him, I stuck it out, night after night, shivering at Simon’s bedside, swallowing down my impatience and resentment; never letting it show in my voice, or in my face, or in the gentle touch of my hand as I stroked his hot little forehead and his horrid, greasy hair.

  One night, after Simon had called me up three times, it seemed silly to go to bed again; he would only call me up again. So I went downstairs and sat by the dead fire, with my head in my hands, and my dressing-gown pulled tight around me against the cold. My head drooped with weariness, my eyelids were heavy like two stones; and upstairs—asleep, I hoped—lay the little slave-driver who had established the right to keep me from my rest for ever. The sickly, neurotic little beast: the morbid, loathsome little milksop: the apple of his father’s eye….

  “Mummy! Mummy!”

  The cry woke me: that’s how I knew that I had been asleep. They were only dreams, then, those dark, unruly thoughts, which ordinarily I would never think. I still seemed to be half-dreaming as I stumbled up the stairs; my eyes seemed dazzled, as if by a great light; and yet everything was in darkness. My dressing-gown had grown longer, somehow, and heavier; it rustled stiffly behind me, catching softly on the steps of the stairs as I went up and up.

  “Mummy! Mummy!” Yet more urgent came the cry. “I’m coming!” I called in answer, and began to summon up the soothing, comforting smile which I always try to force on to my face for Simon.

  But why wouldn’t the smile come? What was this stiffness where my lips should be? I tried to open my mouth to call out again; but it was not my mouth that opened; it was a great beak, jutting out of my face, cruel and curved like a bird of prey; and I knew now that my eyelids, so heavy with lack of sleep, were heavy and hooded, above my yellow vulture’s eyes. My robes were gauzy and beautiful, floating round me like a mist, and my great wings quivered restlessly, ready for flight. The dazzle in my eyes grew brighter, and now I knew that it came from within; my beaked face was blazing, bright as the headlights on Daddy’s car, and in that awful radiance I could see that my hands had become claws, yellow and crooked as they clutched the banisters. They looked eager, somehow, as they pulled me upwards and onwards, compensating for my useless clawed feet that clattered and slithered on the polished stairs.

  “Mummy! Mummy!”

  “I’m coming, dear, I’m coming!” I called—but how harsh and eerie the words sounded as the beak mouthed them, clumsily: so I tried again.

  “I’m coming!” I squawked; and, with a final clumsy spurt I slithered and rattled on my claws across the landing. With a rustle of half-raised wings, I swooped into Simon’s darkened room, and leaned over his little bed, just as I always do, to comfort him.

  THE FATED INTERVIEW

  EVER SINCE SHE had started the new job, Lydia had suffered from these awful dreams. No, not really dreams, for even now she was not really asleep—Lydia turned her throbbing head yet again on the pillow, seeking a coolness, a relaxation which was nowhere; never to be found again.

  No, she was not asleep, and these whirling, compulsive visions were not dreams, but just the fevered, obsessional thinking of insomnia, hammering on and on, hour after hour, giving her no rest….

  “Excuse me, we are doing a survey of hair colorants; I wonder if I might ask you a few questions…?”

  “Excuse me, do you mind telling me how often you watch television? … Very interesting, fairly interesting, rather uninteresting, very uninteresting…?”—the word “interesting” seemed to go round and round under her eyelids, like the lettering on a spinning coin— “And, lastly, I wonder if you’d mind telling me which of these age-groups you belong to—35-44, 45-64…?”

  One after another the pursed-up disapproving faces of the respondents loomed out of the darkness:

  “… Well, really! Don’t you think it’s a little impertinent, asking these sort of personal questions of a complete stranger?”

  “I’m sorry, I really haven’t the time for this sort of thing….”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t go on answering these questions. I’ve already told you that I don’t smoke, so how can I tell you what I think of your wretched brand?”

  And then the face of Lydia’s supervisor flashed on the awful inner screen: “I’m sorry, Miss Steele, I’m afraid we can’t accept an incomplete interview like this. It was explained quite clearly at the Briefing on Monday that non-smokers as well as smokers must answer all the questions. What, you can’t make them answer? But my dear woman, it’s your job to make them answer. That’s what we pay you for. The other interviewers manage it!”

  Lydia pushed the stifling blankets away from her face, and stared up into the darkness. The Other Interviewers! The Enemy! Smart, calm, and unafraid, they always managed everything. With bright, impervious, battering-ram tenacity they pushed ahead with page after page of questions whose repetitive idiocy often made Lydia want to crawl out of sight down the nearest manhole.

  How did they do it? Most of them, of course, were younger than Lydia: perhaps the brash cheekiness of youth was what was needed? Or was it perhaps not so much that they were young as they were married? One and all, they exuded the supreme, impenetrable confidence of the woman who is wanted: the woman who has someone to go home to. As Lydia had once had. In the days when her life was a real life; in the days before she had had to give up her well-paid, interesting job at the advertising agency, and had moved into this dreadful, sunless bed-sittingroom.

  She sometimes wondered if the heartbreak would have been less if she had stayed to endure it in her well-paid job, weeping the weekends away in her expensive, pretty flat, with the familiar fitted carpet and the sun streaming in at the big windows? But no—it would have been impossible. Even if she had known how difficult it would be, for a woman of her age, to get another job of the same sort; even if she had known that she would be reduced to this awful Market Research work in order to stay alive—even if she had known all this in advance, she still could not have contemplated staying on in the same firm as Clive, now that he had left her. Left her after fifteen years. Left her just when his divorce had at long last come through, and he was free to marry her. The moment for which they had—apparently—been waiting all those long years, during which he had seemed to love her so faithfully. Seemed? No, he had loved her, Lydia felt sure of it: had loved her truly, with all the feeble strength of his selfish, vacillating soul.

  Oh yes, she had not been blind to his faults; how could she be, after fifteen years? But she had loved him in spite of them—or was it even because of them? For what man is so easy to please as the selfish man—the man who can be caught and held by such simple things as good cooking, by shameless flattery, and by being given his own way about absolutely everything? can be held, that is, so long as no one else comes along who can cook even better, can cosset even more skilfully, can give him his own way on even more occasions?

  Was Paula such a person? Lydia knew—had wanted to know—nothing about the girl except her name; but round this name her imagination had woven a figure blonde and beautiful, of infinite sweetness and unselfishness—a figure which was also, and above all, young. Young, that was it. The familiar, angry tears pricked into Lydia’s eyes as she faced yet again the cruel fact that this was the one thing she could no longer give to Clive. She, who through all the long years had given him everything, could no longer give him youth.

  Somehow, as she lay there, the anger, the bitternes
s and the grinding jealousy all combined together to produce a misery so clear-cut as to be a sort of peace: the whirling panorama of questionnaires and faces … faces and questionnaires … began to blur, and at last, just as the dawn was beginning to lighten in the blank square of the window, Lydia fell asleep.

  She woke late, to the accusing sound of busy, mid-morning traffic; and even though no gleam of sunlight ever reached this horrid little north room she could sense that the morning sun was already high.

  Nearly eleven! Too late, already, to catch the mothers depositing their offspring at the gates of the primary school—always a good hunting ground for D-class F’s aged 25-34. Already, after only six weeks of this work, Lydia found herself classifying her fellow-beings in these sort of terms. She knew that this was going to be a dreadful day, she was coming to the end of her quota, so that only special categories of people would do. You had to size up each victim before you pounced: is he over 45? Is he an AB—a doctor, or a barrister, or something like that? Or is he a schoolteacher, a mere C?

  The AB men were the worst. By teatime, Lydia was still short of three of them, all to be between the ages of 45 and 64. How could one possibly expect three such exalted beings to be loafing about the Kilburn High Road at four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon? She was hot; she was exhausted; her feet seemed to be swelling out of her shoes; and she had just had four failures in succession—three polite but icy refusals, and one merry little man in a deceptively well-cut suit, who was very ready to be interviewed but who proved to be an out-and-out unmistakeable D.

  Lydia clenched her teeth, summoned up her last shreds of courage, and stepped up to yet another possibility—a tall greying man who was staring abstractedly into the window of a camera shop.

  “Excuse me—” the words came parched and parrot-like from her lips after the long, desperate day. “Excuse me, we are doing a survey on smoking habits, and—”