Don't Go to Sleep in the Dark Page 9

  “He’s even found a baby-sitter.” The chill, uncertain dread trickled again down her spine as the lights dimmed and the curtain rose once more upon a blur of moving figures; and voices as meaningless to Daphne as if they were speaking Hindustani beat once more upon her ears.

  I’m being ridiculous, she told herself for the hundredth time that night. I’ve got absolutely nothing against the woman. Tim’s boss says she’s marvellous—surely he’d know if there was really anything queer about her? Surely he wouldn’t have recommended her to Tim as a babysitter if he hadn’t been absolutely sure…?

  Daphne racked her brains to remember everything Tim had told her about this Mrs Hahn.

  “She’s a refugee from Poland, or Hungary, or somewhere,” he’d said cheerfully. “And she works for the Children’s Something-or-Other. So it stands to reason she must be good with children.”

  Daphne had pointed out drily that plenty of people work in the offices of Children’s Something-or-Others without ever setting eyes on a child, but Tim had brushed this aside:

  “Well, anyway, Barker says she’s marvellous, he’s known her for years. A most reliable woman, he says, very efficient, and wonderful in any kind of emergency. I’ve rung her up, and she says she can come as early as we like on Saturday—she’ll even put the kid to bed for you! Just think, Daphne—we can get away early and have a slap up dinner before the show! We’ll make this a real celebration!”

  Touched and excited by all these plans for her pleasure, Daphne had allowed Tim’s enthusiasm to override her uneasiness at the idea of leaving Sally with someone, however well-recommended, whom she herself had never met. And in the excitement of altering the evening dress she had not worn for three years; of having her hair shampooed and set at the hairdressers for almost the first time since Sally was born, the uneasiness faded. It did not return until the very evening they were to go. Not, in fact, until she heard the strange footsteps clicking up the front steps and heard the short, sharp ring piercing peremptorily through the house.

  The first thing that shocked her when she opened the door was that Mrs Hahn should be so tall. Nearly six feet she must have been, and wearing high-heeled shoes as well. So at first, peering up at her in the fading evening light, Daphne could get very little idea of her face. The gruff, foreign voice seemed to Daphne far from reassuring; so also did Mrs Hahn’s movements, so swift and large, her arms flailing like great wings as she took her coat off in the hall.

  “She looks like a windmill!” thought Daphne ungraciously as she hung up the heavy coat and led the visitor into the living-room. There, under the bright light, she got a second shock. For though Mrs Hahn was barely forty, her hair, eyebrows and eyelashes were quite white; and her huge dark eyes seemed to glitter with extraordinary brilliance against such a background. And what an odd way she does her hair, too, thought Daphne—quite short and straight, and brushed back and up from both sides to form a sort of ridge on top, making her look even taller than she was already. What with that, and her long sharp nose and sallow skin—she really is terribly plain, thought Daphne pityingly, and yet with a disconcerting qualm of fear.

  It had been arranged that Mrs Hahn was to come early, so that Sally could get to know her before being left in her charge. The moment the little girl came into the room, Daphne knew exactly what was going to happen.

  “I don’t like that lady!” said Sally, loudly and clearly, and backed against her mother’s skirt.

  “Come along, darling, she’s a very nice lady, she’s going to have a nice little game with you….”

  Daphne wondered as she spoke if her words sounded as hollow to Sally as they did to herself. But before Sally had time to make any more protests, Mrs Hahn’s voice broke in:

  “I wish to draw a picture,” she announced, and taking a pencil and paper from her bag, she set to work with an air of complete absorption, apparently unaware of Sally’s presence. After a moment Sally’s curiosity overcame her fears, and she began to sidle across the room towards Mrs Hahn. Daphne seized the opportunity to dash upstairs to Tim. She found him plunged half inside the wardrobe, looking for his tie.

  “Tim!” she gasped in an urgent undertone; “Tim, I don’t like her!”

  “Don’t like who?” Tim’s voice came muffled from among the hanging garments.

  “Her. This woman. Mrs Hahn. I don’t like her.”

  “You’re as bad as Sally!” said Tim cheerfully, emerging from the wardrobe. “Why don’t you like her? What’s wrong with her?”

  “Well—I—” Daphne was taken aback. If you couldn’t see at a glance what was wrong with her, how could one explain?

  “Well—she’s so tall….” she began weakly, and was silenced by Tim’s roar of laughter:

  “Well—that’s good, I must say! I never heard there was a maximum height for baby-sitters! You’re mixing them up with jockeys, darling!”

  Daphne wriggled away from his caress.

  “It’s all very well to laugh! You must know what I mean! She’s so—so sort of queer…. Her hair’s all white, and done that queer way!”

  But Tim was laughing again, louder than ever.

  “Well, honestly, darling, if women are to be judged by whether they do their hair a queer way there won’t be many of them left to approve of! Look at your friend Brenda! First she had it all bits and pieces as if a two-year-old had been at it with the dinner-knife, and now she’s got it all scraped up in that queer lump…!”

  Daphne gave it up. How could you explain to a man the difference between Brenda’s gay enthusiasm for odd fashions and the unbecoming queerness of this woman’s hair—the unfeminine indifference with which it must be brushed back every morning, those long, flapping arms brandishing the brush….

  “Tim—I’m sorry. I’m frightened of leaving Sally alone with her. Sally says she doesn’t like her, and they say children can always tell….”

  Tim interrupted again, this time with a note of irritation in his voice.

  “Look, Daphne, you know as well as I do that Sally always makes a fuss about strangers. That was the whole idea of getting the woman to come early. They’re probably getting on like a house on fire by now. Let’s go down and see.”

  Though “getting on like a house on fire” was an exaggeration, Sally did seem to have got over her first dislike of Mrs Hahn. She was standing, solemn and a little guarded, beside the small table at which Mrs Hahn sat drawing a cat with swift, strong strokes. As they watched, Mrs Hahn paused to sharpen her pencil. It seemed to Daphne that the blade of her out-size pocket knife flashed with uncanny speed, and in seconds the pencil was needle-sharp.

  The clapping and laughter broke in on Daphne’s thoughts, but only for a moment. The sounds of the theatre faded again, and all she could hear was the slam of the front door—that awful final slam as they set off, leaving Sally alone with Mrs Hahn. Even then, thought Daphne, even then I could have turned back. Shall I regret all my life long that I didn’t have the courage then and there to ignore Tim’s anger and disappointment, to ignore Mrs Hahn’s shocked resentment, and to run back up the road into the house and say: No, I’m not going. I’m staying with my child tonight.

  Daphne stirred in her seat. No, she thought, no, I couldn’t have done that, because at that point I hadn’t begun to be really frightened. Uneasy, yes, but not frightened as I am now. Not filled with this growing dread, this mounting certainty that something is wrong—something has happened to my child.

  Do I believe in presentiments? Daphne pondered the question. Do I believe that once or twice in a lifetime between human beings bound as closely together as mother and child, there can be a mysterious communication, beyond the understanding of science? Do I believe that in extremity of fear or danger a desperate voiceless message can be carried from mind to mind—a last frantic appeal for help?

  Daphne’s mouth was dry. I must pull myself together, she told herself; I must be reasonable. How could anything possibly be wrong? Mr Barker knows the woman; he’s recommend
ed her. She looks a bit odd, it’s true, but after all Tim has explained that….

  Suddenly her heart seemed to stop beating. Suddenly Tim’s cheerful words came back to her with a new, a terrible implication. What was it exactly that he’d said as they stood together in the foyer before going up to their seats?

  “You know, Daphne, I didn’t tell you before, but since you’re worrying so much about her white hair and so forth, I’d better tell you, she’s had a pretty bad time in her life. During some revolution or other she was involved in helping to get a party of children across the frontier under the noses of the sentries. Most of them got through all right, but one of them—her own little girl—was killed. I don’t know the details, but I believe they were pretty harrowing. About Sally’s age, the child was. So you can’t wonder that she looks older than her age. Who wouldn’t, after an experience like that?”

  At the time the explanation had seemed reassuring; but now, sitting in the darkened theatre, weighed down by an intangible foreboding, a new and horrible thought came into Daphne’s mind. If a woman’s own child had been killed—perhaps brutally murdered; perhaps under her very eyes—what is that woman going to feel at the sight of another child of the same age, happy and healthy in a warm safe home? What black feelings of hatred and jealousy are going to stir in that woman’s heart—what rage and bitterness? What actions might she not be capable of, perhaps even against her conscious will … driven by dark subterranean impulses beyond her control? Daphne saw again the gleam of the great pocket knife as it sharpened the pencil with such swift, such deadly skill.

  And Sally. Sally asleep in bed, rosy and trusting. Or perhaps was waking—frightened—calling for comfort after a dream about the Hen with Great Big Eyes.

  Another thought came to Daphne, a thought so sickening in its horror that she began to tremble from head to foot.

  “Tim!” she whispered frantically, “Tim, what’s Hahn the German for?”

  Tim frowned.

  “Ssh-ssh!” he hissed back.

  But driven by terror Daphne persisted, oblivious of disapproving glances from neighbouring seats.

  “Is Hahn the German for hen?” she whispered, hoarse with fear.

  “Ssh! I expect so. Shut up!” whispered Tim peremptorily, and turned back to the stage.

  The Hen. The Hen with Great Big Eyes. Those long arms, flapping like wings … the long sharp nose like a beak … even the hair brushed up in a ridge like a chicken’s comb … and the huge dark eyes, shining. Was it this that had haunted Sally’s dreams all these months—some strange foreknowledge such as perhaps can come in the very young, their minds receptive and open to impressions of which we know nothing? A knowledge that one day it would happen: one day—no—one night—there would come creeping up the stairs a beaked, inhuman creature, its grey comb quivering, its great arms raised like wings, and in one of them a knife, shining. And what strange cackling noise might it not make in its gruff throat as it crept towards the bed….

  Daphne was on her feet. The curtain had fallen after the second act, and she dragged Tim from his seat.

  “Tim!” she almost screamed, “Tim, we must go home now, this moment. Something’s happened to Sally! I know it! I can feel it in my bones!”

  Ever afterwards she remembered the drive in the taxi through the lighted streets, Tim sulky and protesting beside her; drawing up outside the house, dark and silent, and Tim’s caustic comment: “You see? No flames coming from the windows; no blood running under the door!”

  But when they got inside the front door, something in the darkness and the silence arrested even Tim’s attention. Suddenly he was serious, alert; he was up the stairs three at a time, and a second later they were both in Sally’s room.

  Somehow, Daphne had known what she would see. The tumbled bed, the scattering of toys and papers on the floor round it; and that was all. Sally was gone.

  Tim’s voice was hoarse and strange.

  “She must have got her downstairs,” he said; but Daphne could tell that he knew as well as she did that there was no one anywhere in that silent house. Her attention was riveted by the papers scattered on the bed and over the floor; and as she stepped nearer she could see that they were from Mrs Hahn’s writing pad. Sheet after sheet of them, all with pictures drawn on them. Pictures of hens. Hens with big eyes; hens with huge, fantastic eyes; hens with eyes so grotesque that it was hard to conceive of a sane adult mind having perpetrated them.

  How had the woman known? By what loathsome subterranean channel of the mind could she have found out the child’s secret terror and tormented her thus before—

  Before what?

  It was the telephone shrilling through the house that roused her from her paralysis; but Tim reached it before she did.

  “Yes,” he was saying. “What? St Luke’s Hospital? Yes. Yes, of course. No, we had no idea.”

  Daphne leaned close in time to hear the bland professional voice the other end saying:

  “… Acute appendicitis, she has had the operation, and everything is going very well. And may I say you were extremely fortunate to have such a sensible, quick-witted woman in charge of the little girl. Anyone less experienced would never have realized how seriously ill she was. Sometimes, you know, with young children, you don’t get severe pain with it at all—it can be most misleading. There can be a number of mild attacks—just waking at night, or nightmares—perhaps a little sickness—and then—well—the last attack. I must say again how very fortunate it was that you had a woman of such experience and presence of mind. She is with us now at the hospital. You would like to speak to her, I expect.”

  How reassuring the gruff foreign voice sounded to Daphne now; how full of kindliness and hard-won wisdom.

  “She cry, the little one, I go to her. She is hot, she cries of bird with great eyes, of great hen. She is sick, and I know it is something with her stomach, something bad. I call the doctor, and while we wait for the doctor I try to take her fear away of the great hen, of the great eyes. I draw funny pictures of hen, and she laugh. She draw in funny eyes. I draw more funny hens, she draw in more funny eyes, we laugh together about funny hen with funny eyes … I think she will be no more frightened of hens and eyes….”

  “And actually,” remarked Tim, much later in that eventful night, “the German for ‘Hen’ isn’t ‘Hahn’ at all. It’s ‘Huhn’.”

  THE HATED HOUSE

  NOW THAT SHE had it to herself, Lorna felt that she could almost enjoy hating her home so much. She flung her school coat and beret on to the sofa, dumped her satchel down in the middle of the floor, and watched with satisfaction as the books and papers spilled out over her mother’s spotless, well-vacuumed carpet. It was nice to be able to mess it up like that, without risk of reprimand. She gazed round the neat, firelit room with contempt. Hideous ornaments—houseplants, bric-à-brac of all kinds; and on either side of the fire those two neat, well upholstered armchairs were drawn up, for all the world as if a happily married couple habitually sat in them; a contented couple, smiling at each other across the hearth; not a couple like Lorna’s parents, wrangling, bickering, squabbling, the long evenings filled with temper or with tears….

  With slatternly, spread-eagled violence, Lorna flung herself into the nearest of the two chairs, sending it skidding and scratching under her weight across the polished wood surround.

  That was better! Lorna spread out the length of her legs untidily, in the luxurious abandonment of solitude: real, reliable, long-term solitude, a whole glorious evening of it, and a whole night to follow!

  Such a fuss there had been, about this simple business of leaving her alone in the house for a night! Just as if she had been a baby, instead of a young woman of nearly sixteen!

  “Be sure you bolt all the doors,” her mother had said, not once but fifty times: “Be sure you put the guard in front of the fire before you go to bed…. Be sure you turn off the oven…. Be sure you don’t answer the door to anyone you don’t know…. Remember you can a
lways go in to the Holdens if you feel in the least bit nervous….”

  Go in to the Holdens, indeed! Lorna would have died—yes, she would willingly have lain right here on the carpet with her throat cut—before she would run for help to that dreary Holden woman, both boring and sly, chatter chatter over the wall to Mummy about the problems of teenage daughters. Ugh!

  Ah, but this was the life! Lorna slid yet deeper and more luxuriously into the cushioned depths of the chair. Tea when she liked; supper when she liked; homework when she liked; music when she liked. Lorna’s eyes turned with lazy anticipation towards the pile of pop records stacked under the record player. Ah, the fuss there usually was over those records, with Mummy twittering in and out, trying to stop Daddy being annoyed by them…. “Can’t you turn it down lower, dear?… Can’t you play them in the afternoons when Daddy’s not here? You know how it annoys him.”

  What Mummy didn’t realize was that actually it was quite fun annoying Daddy—a real roaring bellowing row instead of all these anxious twitterings! And afterwards Daddy would go on yelling at Mummy for hours, long after the records were finished and done with. And then next day Mummy would scuttle about with red eyes, polishing things, as if a tidy polished house was some sort of protection against quarrelling! Honestly, adults! That’s why I hate the smell of polish, thought Lorna, deliberately jolting the chair on its rusty castors back and forth across the polished boards, making deep dents and scratches in the wood. It’s misery-polish that Mummy puts on everything, it’s dishonesty-polish, trying to make this look like a happy home when it isn’t! It’s because she’s too cowardly, too much of a doormat, to stand up to Daddy’s tempers, so she tidies the house instead…. I bet she’s tidied the kitchen even better than usual today, just because she’s nervous about leaving me alone! She thinks tidiness is a substitute for everything! Stirred by a flicker of resentful curiosity, and also by a mounting interest in the thought of tea, Lorna dragged herself from her luxurious position, and went to the kitchen to investigate.