Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (13 page)

He left the room. In about a quarter of an hour, after a muddling search in the pantries and kitchen, he came back again with a saucepanful of boiling coffee and half a bottle of Cognac. Taking the hammer he again attacked the N. Laying it down on the carpet before the fire, he waited a while hoping it might melt. But no. He would have to go through with it. A pity, he mused, that this could not happen in summer. Perhaps it yet might. For one could have enjoyed even a dictionary on a hot summer’s night.

For about ten minutes he continued his cold repast, thankful to find that at last the other letters were beginning to thaw; though, this perhaps was a doubtful blessing since they thawed over his bed, making it impossible for him to use it.

Finally he turned to the coffee and drank that. He did not, after all, touch the brandy. He was too depressed. Sitting there with his knees hunched up to his chin, by the fire, he contemplated the future. He did not complain; he accepted his fate; he bore Miss Bond no malice. He only wondered how best he could control and utilise this accomplishment through the long years of his life. He had never taken anyone into his confidence – except one friend (who is responsible for this history) and even that trusted friend had, he knew, been less sympathetic than amused. The secret must live and die with him; once it became common knowledge he could never be anything but ridiculous. Quintin Claribel, man-of-letters, would cease to exist; in its place the world would find a freak. Turning to his diary he wrote an account of the night’s happenings. One day, perhaps, some use could be made of the theme. Not now.

So thinking, he dragged the mattress from the bed, threw aside the wet blankets, wrapped himself in rugs and dressing-gowns, and fell asleep before the fire.

At nine he was roused by Simmons who, seeing the wet bedclothes, the recumbent form on the floor, the bottle of brandy by his side, rejoiced exceedingly to think that the young master was starting to sow his oats, and ran quickly down to the servants’ hall to report the matter to cook, whose comments upon such excesses were known to be pungent and to the point.

The rest of that winter Quintin spent very quietly. He was, he said, writing a book, an occupation respected by his mother but not by his father, who could not see why the task should keep a young man so locked away from society. Quintin took but little interest in the affairs of the estate; the tenants, who had praised him on his twenty-first birthday party, now shook their heads critically. He was not like his father, they said. He didn’t shoot, rarely rode, never talked to them over their garden gates. And what was the story about him and Miss Postle, whom he had bitterly insulted so that never again did she visit Hassocks?

One afternoon, late in March, Mr Claribel went up to his son’s study, determined to have a frank talk with him. Had he spent so much on the education of his son for this to be his reward?

Quintin was writing and looked up irritably.

‘I wanted to have a talk with you, Quintin,’ began Mr Claribel.

‘Yes, Father?’

‘I don’t understand what has come over you these last few months. Ever since your birthday you have been behaving very strangely. Is anything worrying you?’

‘I am writing a book, Father. It occupies all my thoughts. I am sorry to seem so distrait.’

‘A book
cannot
occupy all a man’s thoughts. One would think you had no affection left for your parents.’

Quintin who had been in the middle of a particularly difficult sentence, said earnestly (hoping thus to get rid of his parent), ‘I love and respect you, Father, above any man in the world. As for Mother, she is an angel.’

This was so feelingly said, the smile that accompanied it so charming, that Mr Claribel rose at once, convinced they had been misjudging the young man; he even accused himself of not taking enough interest in the book. It was obvious that it meant a great deal to him; and Mr Claribel, though he did not understand the high mysteries of art, always admired industry, whether of brain or body.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘just try to be more sociable, my dear boy. That’s all we ask. Come and play a game of billiards with me this evening. I rarely have anyone to play with and I’m sure some such relaxation would do you good.’

‘I love billiards,’ said Quintin absently. Already his fingers had reached for the pen. His father sighed and left the room; Quintin sighed too, with relief, and went on writing.

Just before tea he took a turn in the park. He had not been out all day. The wind was blowing from the east; there would perhaps be frost that night; possibly even snow. Quintin, in spite of this, felt very happy. His book was going well and he was confident that he now had his tongue under complete control. Nevertheless, it would be pleasant when summer came and he could relax a little.

It was the sort of day when the first wheatears arrived and he walked on to a high field, where on other days of early spring, he had seen the grey and white birds and been thrilled by the prophecy of summer that they brought. In the middle of the field, high up, with Hassocks House, a solid eighteenth-century building far away beyond the knoll of scots pines – he stopped. There were no birds. But there was something else that filled him with apprehension and drove all thoughts of summer out of his mind. Faintly, in the darkening sky, he could see, not many yards beyond him, some words. They did not make up a complete sentence. All he could read was: ‘. . . and respect you . . . ab . . . any man in . . . Mother is an ang. . . .’

He stared, thunderstruck. He shivered and rubbed his icy hands together, cramped by a day with the pen. He could not even place the sentence that the words vaguely suggested; he could not fill in any of the gaps. ‘Mother is an ang . . . ?’ He racked his brain to remember; but he could not remember having said anything about Mother. All day, surely, he had been busy on his book; his father had tiresomely interrupted him, and he had said something merely to get rid of him. What?

It was obvious that the broken words he saw were hardly frozen yet, the thermometer had not dropped enough. Perhaps by morning the temperature would rise and he would be safe. But it was very disquieting nevertheless. He hurried home, upstairs to his room, and sat down. He felt very weakened by what he had seen. He had said nothing unkind all day; his thoughts had been exclusively concerned with his work. What could it mean?

At tea-time, anxious to restore himself to his father’s confidence, he nodded his head quite eagerly when it was suggested that tomorrow he might try out a new pony.

‘Unless the weather is too hard,’ said his father, helping himself to cake and thinking happily that their son was, after all, a very good son.

Quintin made no comment. Like the child of twelve years ago he sat staring in front of him. Blazing in their full icy glory, encircled like a coronet above Mr Claribel’s bald head, were the words ‘I love and respect you, Father, above any man in the world. As for Mother, she is an angel.’ They were smaller than previous words; each letter no more than an inch in height. But they were shockingly clear; shockingly attractive. Of all his works this, undoubtedly, was the most finished, the most graceful. It had none of the ingenuousness of ‘Vile Old Owl’; none of the vigorous brutality of ‘Noodle’. This was the fastidious product of a more adult genius.

Without a word he rose and left the room. He was very shocked. Surely, what he had said had been true? He did love his father; his mother was an angel. No! It was not true. He did
not
love his father; his mother might very well be an angel, but what cared he? He had spoken only in order to get rid of a parent who, in fact, he regarded as a tiresome old bore without a single original thought beneath his hairless scalp. Dismayed by this realization, Quintin nearly wept. He was brought very low.

The words were circled round the electric light shade. He could not bring himself to eat them yet; he could not feel that he had been justly treated. But it was clear, it was clear from the way they hovered over his finger bowl during dessert, that they demanded to be eaten.

‘You are shivering, Quintin,’ remarked his angelic mother. ‘Are you cold?’

‘No. No,’ he muttered, looking away from her, not caring to meet her gentle eyes. He heard his father saying, ‘Shall we play billiards, Quintin?’

He rose abruptly. ‘Yes.’ Anything for action. Preceding his father to the billiard room he found his cue and whipped the cover from the table. Soon, they were silently immersed in the game and for perhaps twenty minutes, all went well. Quintin played indifferently but with style; his father played brilliantly. The shameful circlet had not reappeared since dinner and Quintin began to hope that, after all, fate had played him an unjust trick and had now repented. Outside the snow was falling. He was aware of the horrible dangers that surrounded him and he longed to be completely alone.

‘You are very quiet,’ said Mr Claribel. He smiled and nodded pleasantly, not daring to allow himself a word. His father was crouching low over the table, intent upon a break. As he was about to aim his cue at the red, he was jerked in the back by Quintin who had leaned forward, under the shaded green light, and was clutching wildly at something in the air.

‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ cried Mr Claribel. ‘Can’t you see I’m in the middle of a shot?’

‘I can’t help that,’ mumbled Quintin whose mouth and hands, to his father’s amazement, were dripping wet.

‘Are you going to have a fit or something?’ snapped Mr Claribel. But Quintin again made a snatch at the air and brought his hand to his open mouth. In doing so he dropped a piece of ice on the table – it was, as a matter of fact, a hemisphere of the letter B. At the sight of the water on the table, Mr Claribel went wild.

‘Where the devil is all this water coming from?’ he shouted. ‘Burst pipe – burst pipe – ’ and he ran to the door calling for everybody whose name he could remember.

While he was gone, presumably in search of an amateur plumber, Quintin hastily consumed the rest of the sentence – ‘I love billiards’ – which had suddenly shot out of the void above him, just as his father was about to take his shot. It had been too much for him. Such chilly mockery, so glacial an echo of words reminding him all too coldly that, indeed, he loathed the game of billiards – this had been too much for him. He was, for the first time, almost glad to eat his words. And having eaten them he hurried away from the room, unable to face his father’s wrath when he should see the puddle on the table.

Locking his door he sank on his bed. Nobody came to him until, much later, his mother knocked; he begged her to leave him, and she reluctantly did so. All night he lay on his bed with his clothes on. He felt doomed; he could face no more English winters. The life of a Trappist, vowed to perpetual silence, was perhaps the only future in store for him.

Towards dawn he ate
‘I
love and respect you father above any man in the world as for mother she is an angel’
. All these hours it had been waiting around a silver tankard on the dressing-table. He gulped it down in one great gulp, before any of it had time to thaw. It was, he presently wrote in his journal, the one utterance of his which he consumed entire.

After that, life was never the same with his parents. Summer passed quite happily, but winter, he knew, could not be postponed. In October he announced his intention of travelling south. He was never again to return to England.

He found the south of France greatly to his liking. There was rarely any frost and on those occasions when cold weather did come, he stayed quietly in his villa and saw nobody. He was waited upon by a deaf and dumb servant, called Jocelyn, who had been the blacksmith’s son in the village at home, a youth who had never received much kindness and was full of gratitude to his young master. They must have been a strange couple. It is said that they were more like friends than master and servant, and would often be seen setting off for the day in the car, in pursuit of rare birds, a study that engaged much of the time not given to writing. There were, certainly, occasions when Quintin had to eat his ice but Jocelyn seems to be ignorant of the circumstances and nothing definite is known. Indeed, those years are remarkable for their obscurity; Quintin seems to have had no close friends at all and, from what can be gathered, his life was remarkably discreet and pure.

Meanwhile, his first, his second and his third books were published. They were exquisitely written and evoked praise from the exquisite quarters. His parents, who had sorrowfully abandoned him to his own devices, wrote kindly of these successes and suggested a visit to Hassocks. ‘The house is so dull without you. We never have any parties, nobody comes to see us.’ But their letter had the misfortune to arrive in midwinter, and Quintin, though he wrote back quite affectionately, was not to be enticed away.

It was not, in fact, until his thirtieth year that any move was made. In that year, having just finished his fifth book, he accepted the offer of a furnished house in Switzerland which some friends had unexpectedly to leave. He knew perfectly well the dangers that lay ahead in a country where snow and ice are as common as grass in England. And he went there deliberately; for two reasons. ‘I am now,’ he wrote, ‘surely old enough to have complete control of my speech.’ (And, indeed, those who met him declared it was remarkable that a man who wrote such impeccable English should have so little to say.)

His second reason; he was actually tempted to make experiments in a country colder than any he had so far visited. He felt that the time had come for him to face up to this accomplishment of his, for so long kept secret from the world. Intending to write a book upon the matter, it was desirable, even necessary, that he should test the power of his tongue to the uttermost. He never expected that he would be able deliberately to create glacial words; he had, alas! tried that too often – spending, sometimes, weary hours on bitter nights speaking his own poems aloud into the still frozen air, with no result whatever except a sore throat. But he decided that he would simply withdraw the guard he had placed upon his speech; he would even loosen his tongue with drink, mix freely with the types of people he detested, and observe the results. Was there not something attractive, too, in the idea of Quintin Claribel, the brilliant essayist, the remote man of letters, never seen by the press, never once interviewed – suddenly completely changing the manner of his life?