The haunted dancers, p.4
The Haunted Dancers, page 4
They talked for a minute or two of trains and travel, but Beddoes had no feeling that he was actually leaving, and so soon. It was like reading a book—the words were all there, but he himself was not
The train trip down to London was longer than he had remembered. Fog hid the landscape, except for quick hideous flashes of factories and an occasional hedgerow leading thornily into more fog. He twisted and steamed alone in his compartment until about noon, when an old man in a silk hat climbed angrily in beside him and, after one bitter stare, hid himself behind a paper.
A waiter brought Beddoes a piece of ham with little pickles, and a bottle of stout. It tasted fine, and there was not enough of it. In spite of that, he was on the point of offering a part of it to the silent old man across from him when he saw a crumb or two fall between the discreetly striped thighs and realised that all the time the man had been eating, like a secretive rabbit, at bread and cheese, without another sign than the few crumbs from behind his stiffly held paper. Beddoes laughed to himself. Tea was the same—hot and bitter and welcome to the American, and a matter of hidden nibblings to the silent old man. British reserve, Beddoes decided; if he can stick it, I can.
Once, between luncheon and tea, something that had been mounting in him for more hours than he could count rose like a frightful wave, and for the first time since he had met Sarah MacLaren two days before, desire conquered him. He lay back palely against the cushions, his eyes closed. Every bone in his body ached as if he were catching influenza, and his brain swam. He was helpless, drowning, and he knew that although he had slept well with his slender wife, and would again, he had never felt passion for a woman until now. Gradually, he grew calm, resigned.
It was after dark, with steam on the windows and the old gentleman still inflexible behind his paper, when Beddoes first knew that Tom was in the compartment He could not remember later whether Tom spoke to him or not hut there he was. Beddoes, who was wondering whether it was worth a glare from his fellow-traveler to get up and open his suitcase and pull out the flask and take a good swig, clearly felt Tom say, “I’ll get it down for you, sir.”
“You will not,” he snapped.
“What’s that?” The paper finally lowered itself, and the old gentleman looked rather shyly over the top of it. “Did you speak, sir?”
Beddoes cleared his throat, rather like a butler being discreet in a bedroom farce, and smirked apologetically. It worked. The old man disappeared again.
From then on, the conversation was silent, but no less violent. “What in hell are you doing here, Tom?” Beddoes asked furiously.
“Well now, sir. Well, listen. I summed you up, see, Mr. Beddoes? And I figured—” .
“Oh, you figured, did you? And what do you suppose Mrs. MacLaren is going to do without you? Who’s going to keep them in line—Odessa and the old Duchess or whatever she is, and Agatha and all of them? So you walk out? A fine way to treat a woman who’s—”
“We’d say ‘lady’ here in England, sir,” Tom interrupted slyly, showing himself with a faint blue grin just above the seat level.
“Oh, you would, would you? ‘We,’ you say? You’re no more English than I am, damn it! What in—Tom, what am I going to do with you? That’s the hell of it.” Beddoes saw the old gentleman lower his paper perhaps an inch and peer at him with a timid bloodshot eye.
‘That’s just it,” Tom said softly. “You don’t know yet, sir. But you may some time. The hell of it, I mean.”
Beddoes felt him grow sad and dim, and he was humiliated to remember Sarah’s kind, tender ways. “O.K.,” he said gruffly. “O.K., Tom. But you’ll have to go back to Askhaven, you know. I mean it.” And that was the end of the incident, as far as Beddoes could remember later.
In London, he felt the muted exhilaration he always knew there, as if he were a happy ghost himself. He sent his bags on to the hotel, and took a cab to the New Clarges on Half Moon Street for a small bottle of rather warm champagne at one of the little green tables in the street bar. Then he went back to his room, with only a sleepy nod from the night clerk and not a thought in his head of Tom. Inside his room, though, he saw that the stolen ghoulie—lost, strayed, and stolen, he thought solemnly—had teen hard at work. Pyjamas lay neatly ready, and on the marble dresser top were his toothbrush, his tubes of toothpaste and shaving cream, and the cabinet photograph of Mrs. Beddoes.
He felt coldly furious. The nerve of the fellow, to follow him to London and then try to weasel his way into things so that he could stay, when all the time Sarah needed him in Askhaven, and God knows what his wife would think, to have him land home with a ghoulie! He stood for a minute before he closed the door, cursing. There was no sight of Tom.
At last Beddoes saw the letter, which was leaning up against the photograph. It was smudged and cheap-looking, and he turned it over curiously a few times before he saw that the postmark was Askhaven. Askhaven, Thursday. Then it had been written before he went up there—mailed a day before he even started. “Dear Mr. Beddoes and Honor’d Sir,” it said, in a sloping pompous hand:
“I regret to inform you that as postmaster and former keeper of the public house now known as ye Golden Duck now closed that your telegram being duly received re your visit I regret to inform you that the reverend Mr. Perry MacLaren our dear pastor and his good wife were immediately killed some eleven months five days ago in a dreadful motor accident in the highlands near us. Please believe me honor’d sir your ob’t servant and hoping to serve you if I but had the pub still but trade has gone to nothing lately so I remain,
Yours the postmaster,
JOHN GATES
P.S. The accident was in new car and all knew Mr. MacLaren was not a slow driver.
Yrs.
J. G.”
Beddoes sat quietly for a long time. Outside the windows, partly open, an occasional taxi tooted, and, inside, the little glowing tube of the electric fireplace glowed like a scar against the wall. He felt, without thinking about it, as if he had in the last few days or minutes lived more than a thousand years.
This letter lay like a grimy leaf upon his knee, and he looked dispassionately at it and at his hand beside it—his hand still firm and strong. He thought wearily of Mac and Sarah, and of the cold toast on the blue plate, and the whisky and the music.
“O.K.,” he said at last. “All right, Tom. Come on. My wife and I…”
FLORINDA
by
SHAMUS FRAZER
“Did you and Miss Reeve have a lovely walk, darling?” Clare asked of the child in the tarnished depths of glass before her.
“Well, it “was lovely for me but not for Miss Reeve, because she tore her stocking on a bramble, and it bled.”
“The stocking?”
“No, that ran a beautiful ladder,” said Jane very solemnly. “But there were two long tears on her leg as if a cat had scratched her. We were going along by the path by the lake when the brambles caught her. She almost fell in. She did look funny, Mummy, hopping on the bank like a hen blackbird a cat’s playing with—and squawking.”
“Poor Miss Reeve!.. . Your father’s going to have that path cleared soon; it’s quite overgrown.”
“Oh, I hope not soon, Mummy. I love the brambly places, and what the birds and rabbits’ll do if they’re cut down I can’t imagine. The thickety bushes are all hopping and fluttering with them when you walk. And the path wriggles as if it were living, too—so you must lift your feet high and stamp on it, the way Florinda does…”
But Clare was not listening any more. She had withdrawn her glance from Jane’s grave elfin features in the shadowed recesses of the glass to fix it on her own image, spread as elegantly upon its surface as a swan.”
“And if Daddy has the bushes cut down,” Jane went on, “what will poor Florinda do? Where will she play? There will be no place at all for the little traps and snares she sets; no place for her to creep and whistle in, and tinkle into laughter when something funny happens—like Miss Reeve caught by the leg and hopping.” This was the time, when her mother was not listening, that Jane could talk most easily about Florinda. She looked at her mother’s image, wrapt in the dull mysteries of grown-up thought within the oval Chippendale glass—and thence to the rococo frame of gilded wood in whose interlacing design two birds of faded gilt, a bat with a chipped wing and flowers whose golden petals and leaves showed here and there little spots and tips of white plaster like a disease, were all caught for ever.
“That’s how I met Florinda.” She was chattering quite confidently, now that she knew that it was only to herself. “I had been down to the edge of the lake where there are no brambles —you know, the lawn side; and I knelt down to look at myself in the water, and there were two of me. That’s what I thought at first—two of me. And then I saw one was someone else—it was Florinda, smiling at me; but I couldn’t smile back, not for anything. There we were like you and me in the glass —one smiling and one very solemn. Then Miss Reeve called and Florinda just went—and my face was alone and astonished in the water. She’s shy, Florinda is—and sly, too. Shy and sly—that’s Florinda for you.”
The repeated name stirred Clare to a vague consciousness: she had heard it on Jane’s lips before.
“Who is Florinda?” she asked.
“Mummy, I've told you. She’s a doll, I think, only large, large as me. And she never talks—not with words, anyway. And her eyes can’t shut even when she lies down.”
“I thought she was called Arabella.”
“That’s the doll Uncle Richard gave me last Christmas. Arabella does close her eyes when she lies down, and she says ‘Good night, Mamma,’ too, because of the gramophone record inside her. But Florinda’s different. She’s not a house doll. She belongs outside—though I have asked her to come to tea on Christmas Eve.”
“Well, darling, I’ve lots of letters to write, so just you run along to the nursery and have a lovely tea.”
So Florinda was a doll—an idea doll, it seemed, that Jane
had invented in anticipation of Christmas. Nine in the New Year, Jane was growing perhaps a little old for dolls. A strange child, thought Clare, difficult to understand. In that she took after her mother—though in looks it was her father she resembled. With a sigh Clare slid out the drawer of the mahogany writing-desk. She distributed writing-paper and envelopes, the Christmas cards (reproductions of Aiken prints), in neat piles over the red leather—and, opening her address-book, set herself to write.
Roger came in with the early December dusk. He had been tramping round the estate with- Wakefield the agent, and the cold had painted his cheeks blue and nipped his nose red so that he looked like a large, clumsy gnome. He kissed Clare on the nape, and the icy touch of his nose spread gooseflesh over her shoulders.
“You go and pour yourself some whisky,” she said, “and thaw yourself out by the fire. I’ll be with you in a minute.” She addressed two more envelopes in her large clear hand, and then, without looking round, said: “Have we bitten off rather more than we can chew?”
“There’s an awful lot to be done,” said her husband from the fire, “so much one hardly knows where to begin. The woods are a shambles—Nissen huts, nastiness and barbed wire. One would have thought Uncle Eustace would have made some effort to clear up the mess after the army moved out…”
“But, darling, he never came back to live here. He was too wise.”
“Too ill and too old—and he never gave a thought to those who’d inherit the place, I suppose.”
“He never thought we’d be foolish enough to come and live here, anyway.”
Roger’s uncle had died in a nursing-home in Bournemouth earlier in the year, and Roger had come into these acres of Darkshire park and woodland, and the sombre peeling house, Fowling Hall, set among them. At Clare’s urging he had tried to sell the place, but there were no offers. And now Roger had the obstinate notion of settling here, and trying to make pigs and chickens pay for the upkeep of the estate. Of course, Clare knew, there was something else behind this recent interest in the country life. Nothing had been said, but she knew what Roger wanted, and she knew, too, that he would hint at it again before long—the forbidden subject. She stacked her letters on the desk and went to join him by the fire.
“There’s one thing you can do,” she said. “Clear that path that goes round the lake. Poor Miss Reeve tore herself quite nastily on a bramble this afternoon, walking there.”
“I’ll remind Wakefield to get the men on the job tomorrow. And what was Jane doing down by the lake just now as I came in? I called her and she ran off into the bushes.”
“My dear, Jane’s been up in the nursery for the last hour or more. Miss Reeve’s reading to her. You know, she’s not allowed out this raw weather except when the sun’s up. The doctor said—”
“Well, I wondered … I only glimpsed her—a little girl in the dusk. She ran off when I called.”
“One of the workmen’s children, I expect.”
“Perhaps … Strange, I didn’t think of that.”
He took a gulp of whisky, and changed the subject: “Clare, it’s going to cost the earth to put this place properly in order. It would be worth it if … if …” He added with an effort, “I mean, if one thought it was leading anywhere …”
So it had come out, the first hint.
“You mean if we had a son, don’t you? … Don’t you, Roger?” She spoke accusingly.
“I merely meant … Well, yes—though, of course—”
She didn’t let him finish. “But you know what the doctor said after Jane. You know how delicate she is … You can’t want—?”
“If she had a brother—” Roger began.
Clare laughed, a sudden shiver of laughter, and held her hands to the fire.
“Roger, what an open hypocrite you are! ‘If she had a brother,’ when all the time you mean ‘if I had a son.’ And how could you be certain it wouldn’t be a sister? No, Roger, we’ve had this out a thousand times in the past. It can’t be done.” She shook her head and blinked at the fire. “It wouldn’t work out.”
Roger went into the nursery, as was his too irregular custom, to say good night to Jane. She was in her pink fleecy dressing-gown, slippered toes resting on the wire fender, a bowl emptied of bread and milk on her knees. Miss Reeve was reading her a story about a princess who was turned by enchantment into a fox.
“Don’t let me interrupt, Miss Reeve. I’ll look in again later.” “Oh, do come in, Mr. Waley. We’re almost ready for bed.” “I was sorry to hear about your accident this afternoon.”
“It was such a silly thing, really. I caught my foot in a slipnoose of bramble. It was as if somebody had set it on the path on purpose, only that would be too ridiculous for words. But it was a shock—and I tore myself painfully, trying to get free.”
There was still the ghost of that panic, Roger noticed, in Miss Reeve’s pasty, pudgy features, and signalling behind the round lenses of her spectacles. “It’s not a very nice path for a walk,” she added, “but one can’t keep Jane away from the lake.”
‘Tm having all the undergrowth cleared away from the banks,” said Roger; “that should make it easier walking.” “Oh, that’ll be ever so much nicer, Mr. Waley.”
“Florinda won’t like it,” thought Jane, sitting stiffly in her wicker chair by the fire. “She won’t like it at all. She’ll be in a wicked temper will Florinda.” But she said aloud in a voice of small protest—for what was the use of speaking about Florinda to grown-ups—“It won’t be nice at all. It will be quite horribly beastly.”
The men didn’t care for the work they had been set to do. It was the skeletons, they said—and they prodded suspiciously with their implements at the little lumps of bone and feather and fur that their cutting and scything had revealed. There was a killer somewhere in the woods; owls said one, stoats said another, but old Renshawe said glumly it was neither bird nor beast, that it was Something-that-walked-that-shouldn’t, and this infected the others with a derisive disquiet. All the same, fifty yards of path were cleared during the morning, which took them beyond the small Doric pavilion that once served as boathouse and was reflected by a stone twin housing the loch mechanism on the eastern side of the lake.
Miss Reeve took Jane out in the afternoon to watch the men’s progress. Jane ran ahead down the cleared path; paused at the pavilion to hang over the flaking balustrade and gaze down into the water: whispered something, shook her head and ran on.
“Hullo, Mr. Renshawe—alone?” she cried, as rounding a sudden twist in the path she came upon the old man hacking at the undergrowth. Renshawe started and cut short, and the blade bit into his foot This accident stopped work for the day.
“It wasn’t right Miss Jane, to come cm me like that,” he said, as they were helping him up to the house. “You gave me a real turn. I thought—”
“I know,” said Jane, fixing him with her serious, puzzled eyes. “And she was there, too, watching all the time.”
Whatever the killer was, it moved its hunting-ground that night Two White Orpingtons were found dead beside the arks next morning, their feathers scattered like snow over the bare ground.
“And it’s not an animal, neither,” said Ron, the boy who carried the mash into the runs and had discovered the kill.
“What do you mean, it’s not an animal?” asked Wakefield.
“I mean that their necks is wrung, Mr. Wakefield.”
“Oh, get away!” said Wakefield.
But the following morning another hoi was found lying in a mess of feathers and blood, and Wakefield reported to his master.
