Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (5 page)

‘Stinking old sods,’ said Barley to Rye. ‘They all deserted her; now they’re all fawning on her again, waiting for her to start singing. Makes you sick.’

It was rather a loose judgement. For most of her friends had been acutely sorry for her, but too bewildered by what had become a major sensation to be able to talk with her on the old terms.

Still, here she was now, back with her friends, and nobody was gladder than Dr Murdoch, who had always had a high appreciation of her musical abilities. The Delius was not a very easy work for these amateur singers. It would need considerable rehearsal before they went to London to rehearse with the orchestra. Dr Murdoch was therefore delighted to see Polly in her old place again, with the first trebles; and he prayed that she might not take it into her head to sing in the extraordinary manner which had provoked so much talk in the neighbourhood, and beyond.

This did not happen – to the disappointment of the sensationalists. What did happen was stranger – though only detected by those who sat near to Polly, including her old friend Miss Dunstable, the librarian. Although, at that first, and at subsequent rehearsals, Polly opened her mouth and appeared to be singing, she never actually made a sound. Miss Dunstable listened carefully. No – not even a whisper. That limpid treble of Polly’s seemed to have vanished like a dried-up spring. Miss Dunstable, being tactful, said no word to anyone. Dr Murdoch, with even his keen ear, was unable to detect, amongst a choir of nearly a hundred men and women, that one of them was contributing precisely nothing. Only Miss Dunstable and another lady, Mrs Reeks, a chemist’s wife, realised what was happening, or rather, what was not happening. Yet Polly herself seemed to be completely satisfied. She even remarked, at the end of the first rehearsal: ‘How lovely it is to sing again, Lorna! And what a beautiful work it is!’

Lorna Dunstable glanced significantly at Brenda Reeks.

‘Yes, dear,’ she said. ‘One can see how you enjoy it.’

At the next rehearsal – the same thing happened. At the third – again, not a sound from that wrinkled little face.

Barley knew nothing of all this. Like anyone else, she was merely happy to see Polly so much more like her old self – her pre-flute self. And on the day of the concert she helped Polly put the finishing touches to the white satin dress she would have to wear. It was hard not to laugh at her appearance; and Barley felt glad that her work at the theatre would not allow her to be present at the concert. To watch all those mummies warbling away would have been, Barley knew, too much for her. But she reminded Rye and advised him to be present, in case of anything unusual happening.

What happened at that concert was very unusual indeed. And yet it was not detected by even Rye Merton, who had taken a seat fairly near the orchestra and was able to pick out Miss Ponsonby, in her white dress, with all the other ladies – young, middle-aged, old, thin, fat, red-faced, white-faced, cross-eyed, bandy-legged – who filled the tiered seats behind the orchestra. He could pick out Polly, chiefly because she was so small, standing at least a foot and a half below Lorna Dunstable and Brenda Reeks. (Brenda was an Olympic woman of operatic build; Lorna was sylph-like, and swayed like a murmuring reed when she sang.) In between these two, Polly looked like a faint white blob, a large piece of cottonwool dropped there by mistake.

Rye watched her eagerly. It seemed literally hours before the chorus had anything to do. Delius, an impractical composer, seems to take a delight in dragging on an enormous chorus and only using it for the last few episodes of an abnormally long and luscious work. Rye was terribly bored. He was no musician and kept glancing at the programme notes, trying to make out which variation they had reached. They all seemed much the same to him, except that some were loud, some soft, some slow, some fast.

After hours of this, Rye began to get restless and long for the bar. The chorus hadn’t even stood up yet. Perhaps, thought Rye, he had made a mistake and they were singing in the next work. But there was an interval after the
Appalachian Variations.
No; sooner or later all these grotesque women in white and these waxwork dummies in black would open their mouths.

Sure enough they did. The men first, singing la-la-la in soft undertones of sound, like waves on a seashore. Then more la-la-la. Then much more from the orchestra and Rye began to think the women were only brought there just to fill up the seats. He had, by now, lost interest in Polly, though he noticed her from time to time. Her face was always turned to the conductor.

Then, at long last, with a wave of the hand from the conductor, all the ladies and gentlemen of Sydenham Choral Society rose to their feet. One could almost hear their sigh of relief. And now, everybody’s eye was fixed on Sir Kenneth Corporal who, sleek and black-haired, with a wasp-like waist and delicate engraving fingers with which he seemed to describe the shape of music in the air – suddenly poised his baton towards the singers. A glorious sound of music burst forth. Lorna and Brenda leant forward, giving of their utmost. Their great moment had come. The orchestra was silent while the singers poured out Delius’s exotic and vigorous harmonies.

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, down the mighty river

Aye, Honey, I’ll be gone when next the whippoorwill’s a-calling . . .

And then the baritone soloist (distinguished from the common hacks of Sydenham, by full evening dress with tails and white tie): ‘And don’t you be too lonesome, love, and don’t you fret and cry.’

It was during this snatch of solo that Rye Merton noticed, far up in the glass dome of the hall, a tiny dark speck. It did not impress itself on him greatly. But when he next looked along the first row of the lady trebles, he realized that there was a space where Miss Ponsonby had been.

Neither Brenda nor Lorna, her immediate neighbours in the hall, had anything to report in the inquiries which followed. They had been so intent on the singing, their eyes so glued to Sir Kenneth (who had been a bit of a martinet at the morning’s rehearsal), that all thought of anything but the music had gone, as it should have gone, right out of their minds. It was not, in fact, until the work ended on the long drawn-out string notes, that Lorna realized the place next to her was empty. And that, during the singing, with the women’s first entry, she thought she had heard a faint chirruping sound. Brenda said that she had definitely felt something soft and light flutter against her cheek, for only a second. Other strange stories bewildered the curious. Sir Kenneth said that he had been put off his beat, for a moment or two, by the sudden intrusion of a peculiarly beautiful singing, far above him. He had glanced up but seen nothing.

Mr Henry Brissey, the soloist, came forward with an astonishing yarn. He had never noticed Miss Ponsonby at all. She would be to him, only one of many undistinguished ladies. But he had noticed, he said, a small dark bird, flutter away from the front row of the trebles and disappear quickly far up into the roof of the hall.

He was, naturally, laughed at. But nobody had anything more plausible to report. Miss Polly Ponsonby, who had certainly taken her place with the other ladies at the beginning of the concert, had completely disappeared by the end of the first half.

After endless investigations by the police, it was finally assumed that Miss Ponsonby must be dead. In her will she left the house, all its contents, and her small bank balance to Barley, ‘in return for companionship through a great crisis’. There was a legacy of a hundred pounds for a Bird-watching Society. One curious feature of the will related to Mr Ponsonby’s flute: this was to be given, if possible, Christian burial. Barley buried it herself, reverently, with Rye in attendance, in the back-garden, and made a little bed of forget-me-nots over it.

It was many weeks before Barley realized a curious thing. Always, outside the house, vaguely in the air, there seemed to be the distant and heavenly sound of a bird singing. This persisted, sometimes far away, sometimes near, throughout the winter months. Spring came. There were days when Barley thought she could see the bird, very high up, a mere speck. Then, one May morning, when she had risen very early and the smell of summer filled the air, Barley, leaning over her bedroom window saw, nearer than ever it had been, the bird who had kept her company throughout the winter. It was, without a doubt, a skylark.

Acting on a strange and touching impulse, she called, ‘Polly, Polly, is it you?’

The bird was singing as though its heart would break. And for several seconds it would not stop. Barley called again.

‘Polly, I believe that it is you.’

It was Polly. And suddenly the wearied endless stream of song ceased, and the small bird fell like a stone to the grass in the recreation ground. Barley rushed out and searched in the dewy grass. For many minutes she went round and round the place where she thought the bird had fallen. Then, just as she was about to take one step forward, she heard a tiny voice from the ground.

‘Oh Barley, I have finished singing forever. Pick me up, dear. Take me home.’

Barley, wondering whether she were dreaming, picked up the small warm bird, covered it in her hands, and took it home. She laid it on a cushion on the sofa where the bright morning sun shone upon it. The little body was trembling with faint life. Barley knew it must die.

‘Oh, Polly dear, can you speak to Barley once again?’

Very, very faint came the answering words, words that were like the tinkle of light rain upon summer leaves.

‘Barley, I had to go this way, dear. It had been coming on me for weeks. I tried to stop singing forever. I did not want to leave you. But this was my fate and I knew it. My father told me at one of the séances that my mother had beaten him. There was no music where he had gone to, he said. And he warned me that if I let myself go the same way, I should meet with the same fate. Now, it is the lark who sings at Heaven’s gate, dear; and I have done that. During the rehearsals I could not dare to sing. I was too frightened. Not until I got to the beautiful Albert Hall and watched Sir Kenneth could I find my voice again. The moment we stood up I knew something curious was happening to me. I saw Sir Kenneth’s baton raised. And then – well, Barley dear, I sang . . . and the moment I touched my first note I knew that Polly Ponsonby had ceased to exist as you knew her. I could, of course, have stayed there, perched on Brenda’s shoulder perhaps. I did brush my wings against her cheek. But when a lark sings he must rise. And rise I did and found, by merciful providence, a broken pane of glass through which I flew to the Albert Memorial.

‘I wanted to let you know, but I could not do so earlier, in case you should tell Rye and he would put me in a cage. It was that which kept me away from you, Barley. Yet all through the winter, when I should, of course, have emigrated, I could not resist singing over my old places. There is nowhere more beautiful than Sydenham in the world, I am sure. I am glad that I stayed. But it has given me a chill from which I shall
not
recover. I don’t mind. I have sung my life out as a lark should. And now I go to – nothing, as larks do. It is much better to be a lark than go on wandering round circles as the spiritualists do, or live forever in Heaven as the Christians do – or, as I fear some do, pass to the other place. A lark has the best of both worlds, and by his art of singing gives the very breath of life to his body. Mr Shelley knew all about it. Goodbye, Barley dear. Don’t stuff me. Bury me with father’s flute.’

With a little shudder the small bird died. And so Polly Ponsonby passed forever away from Baker’s Lane.

If you go to the cottage now, a very old lady who lives alone, a Miss Merton, may perhaps be induced to talk of these events. But she prefers to remain silent with her memories.

III

The Sack

It’s no use pretending I can go on much longer. I can’t. And that is an understatement. Yet I must understate it, try to rationalise it. Get it out of my system. And the only way I can do that is to put it down on paper. For who to read? God knows.

Living alone, I’m well aware that one gets silly ideas. You come back to the house when you’ve been for a prowl round the park, and it’s late afternoon with the sun setting and winter round the corner, as you might say (for it’s autumn as I try to write this), and you see a kitchen chair or a saucepan or a shovel left exactly where you left them. And you think – they’ve been moved. Then, looking back, you realize everything is just as when you went out. Except that it’s a bit darker.

And that is what is so awful.

No. That is overstatement. It isn’t ‘awful’. It’s plain ordinary. And yet, the very ordinariness of everything can be frightening. And of course, I’ve had such a horribly ordinary life. And now, being ‘redundant’ – that’s about as ordinary as you can get in days when inflation drains you and catches you in the stomach, and Mr Rising Price, to use an old-fashioned term, gets you by the short and curlies.

Why did I write ‘short and curlies’? Nobody uses that phrase any more. As I see it written down, I realize how out of everything I am – a redundant old fool in his sixties who spent years trapped on the wrong side of the Post Office counter. Not even one hold-up to give an edge to any day.

Years. Yes, years. All those years gone now, and Dorothy gone, and both girls in Canada with their families, and letters on my birthday and at Christmas. They think I’m all right. I suppose I am, really. Just lonely. Is it even worth telling them that I got the sack – which is what being ‘redundant’ means?

The sack . . . The word has crept in. No. It’s leapt in, in a way I didn’t expect. I’d never even thought of other meanings of the word until I wrote that.

But that is exactly what the thing does. Creeps, and leaps. For all I know, it might strangle.

I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. And sex is something of the past – not that I ever had much. Oh, I think of sex often. Who doesn’t, particularly in these days? Who can escape from it?
Playboy
and so on. And now,
Knave.
I’m sick of it all. I try to read serious books, like Lucretius. Yes, I’ve tried him, God knows why, except that I remember reading him when I was a lad of sixteen, and other classical writers. Juvenal, for example. Yes, I try to keep my mind on serious matters.

But that Sixth Satire of Juvenal – God! it’s strong stuff! And how he hated women . . .

It’s no use. I’m getting nowhere. I said to myself – I’ll sit down and try to relate quite simply what has been happening in the last few days. So I’ll start again – perhaps send a copy of this to Pam or Cynthia in Canada.

Are you listening, either of you? Four thousand miles away. Can you hear your old father? If you want the truth, he’s crying out loud for help, and doesn’t know how to make you hear. I suppose there’s nothing really wrong with him. But he doesn’t want to be slotted into a home for MDs – he doesn’t want to have this electrical treatment they give people like me nowadays, like putting them in a mental cage, it seems to me.

Here are the bare facts.

It began with my neighbour in this respectable avenue in this vile town of Hadderminster where all they do is make carpets and pull down old houses and cottages, and dig up the roads, exposing drains and gas pipes, and generally make a foul mess of what was once not so bad a little place in the Midlands. Here I’ve lived all my life.

Why did this man have to become my neighbour? He’s called Knowles – Kenneth Knowles, but we’re not on Christian name terms. It’s Mr Knowles and Mr Patch, and always will be. Better that way, really. I can’t see him calling me Ted, or me calling him Kenneth, or Ken. No. In the Avenue it’s Mister, Mrs, or Miss. Still, there’s a feeling of neighbourliness. If I was trapped in the bungalow at night with a fire raging in the hall, Mr Knowles would be on the scene before you could say knife. And I suppose I’d come to his rescue too, if needed.

But why did he have to become my neighbour? I never liked him from the start, when he came here a year ago. Nobody knew anything about him; and his grim-looking sister spoke to nobody, only made me mad with her hideous little yapping dog she keeps locked up all day and only lets out at fixed times to do his jobs. And I know the times; I’m keyed up for them. I can hear that yap in advance, time it exactly.

But all this has nothing to do with what I’m trying to write about. And K. Knowles, for all I know, is a perfectly decent kind of chap. About my age, or a little younger. I don’t suppose he really meant me any harm. Other neighbours, people I’ve known well for years, wondered who he was and what kind of life he’d lived before he bought the house next door. Only I found out.

As I write, it’s late at night. I had to stop. I’m hot. The electric heater’s on, two bars, in this little breakfast-room where Dorothy and I had all our meals. I’ve just unbuttoned the collar of my shirt and ripped my tie off. There’s a fire laid in the grate, I laid it this morning, then I thought – I don’t really need a fire, not in early October. Then it came to evening, and I thought – no, I’ll use the electric, it’ll save me going to the outhouse, where the sack –

Why didn’t anybody teach me, when I was young, to write properly? To put down in clear sentences of good English just what you want to put down? I just can’t seem to assemble my thoughts coherently enough to get my story – is it a story? – in order.

So – what? The sack. Yes. I’m writing about a sack – about
The
Sack. The one my neighbour gave me. Now I’ve got that down, I may be able to stick to facts.

Yesterday, Mr Knowles said to me – no. I don’t want to put that down now. I must try to get things in proper order. And it starts with dead leaves.

Dead leaves – the leaves of last autumn, which I’d crammed into a plastic sack and was dragging down to the bottom of the garden, intending to burn them. Dorothy said – keep them for compost. But I just couldn’t be bothered with that sort of thing, after she’d gone. So I decided to burn them. And when I think of burning them, I think of ash, and that puts me in mind of ashes and sack-cloth. Funny, how things come together.

He said to me, over the box hedge: ‘Mr Patch,’ he said, ‘Mr Patch, that plastic sack – it’s got a hole in it. Try this one.’

And he slung a proper sack over the hedge. It fell at my feet. Proper sack? What do I mean by that? I mean, an old-fashioned sack – made of ‘coarse material’, to use a dictionary definition. The kind of sack I’ve known so well for so many years. The sack the postman uses.

It seemed to me presumptuous of him, if that’s the right word. For I didn’t really need his sack. But the way he’d slung it at me – there was a kind of contempt in the gesture. He’s a tall, very well-built man; and it was only me who found out (one gets to ways of finding out things when one’s worked in the Post Office for years) that he’d been in the CID. Once I’d got that established, a lot about him that had seemed mysterious, fell together. Those wide shoulders, huge hands, sturdy legs, and cunning eyes . . . Yes. He’d lived a dangerous life, no doubt about it. And now, retired, with that grim sister, it could be boring for him. In a way, I admire him. I felt – this is the kind of anonymous man who protects people like me. And never gets much of a reward – except, I suppose, a feeling of satisfaction when he’s run somebody to earth. There’s a pride about him I understand. For even I have my pride – after years of doing out ‘special issues’ and going slower when you see there’s a queue building up the other side of the counter. You develop pride, that way. And you learn to be patient.

As for K. Knowles – I suppose he needed patience too, a different kind of patience, a predatory kind of patience, eager for the pounce, then swooping down, like a hawk. Oh yes, I do admire him, even if I hate him for dropping that sack in my path, and knowing quite well what he was doing.

I
know
he knew what he was doing.

But what did the sack do? that is what I’m trying to put down. And – what is it doing now?

All my life I’ve felt that what they call ‘inanimate’ objects have a life of their own. ‘Of their own?’ Do I mean that? Not exactly. I mean – a life in relation to what are called ‘animate’ objects. A much slower life; but stealthy. As a child, I remember watching a chunk of coal burn, and then suddenly sizzle or sparkle in the grate, and then fuse into flame, only to die, and become a clinker by morning. I used to say to myself – that was an ‘inanimate’ object only an hour ago, before it went into the grate and the match was struck. So, all my life I’ve questioned ‘inanimate’ objects. A leaf, for example. A dead leaf. Or a candle, before flame touches the wick, and the wax curls. A chair. A spoon. Inanimates? And – a sack?

I
am
right. Take stone, even the most ancient stone. Those at Stonehenge, say. Does one call them ‘inanimate?’ Of course, it could be proved that the stones on Salisbury Plain have been there for thousands of years. But are they exactly the same now as the stones which were dragged there, inch by inch, from Pembrokeshire? Only a dolt who believed that the stars didn’t revolve, could believe that. Lucretius says a lot about this kind of thing, somewhere.

Anyway, this sack. I just said, ‘Oh, thank you, Mr Knowles.’ And picking it up, as he went back to his house, I threw it in the garage – empty now, except for garden tools, logs and a lawnmower and odds and ends; for I had to give up the car.

It was then, when I first picked it up, that I began to itch.

It’s odd, and I suppose irrelevant. But I ask myself, what would the sack have done if I’d still got the car and used it on a cold night to cover the engine with? Perhaps that is what they call a ‘rhetorical’ question. No answer needed. And yet – what would it have done to the engine of the old Riley?

I can’t go on writing. I have to go to the outhouse, and see what the sack is doing. But no. In writing that down, I begin to see how crazy I’ve become. I’m a ‘case’. Because, of course, the thing will be there, where I left it. Or, did I leave it there, in the outhouse, by the coal and sticks? Did I? I cannot remember.

I think it’s wiser not to move from here. Yes. I won’t go away from this table until I’ve written down what I know is true. I will
not
go to the outhouse.

I’m getting my thoughts in order. This is what I have to put down. First: a day after I’d thrown the sack in the garage (and locked the doors as I always do, even though I’ve no car), I opened the back door, next morning, to take in the usual pinta, and – there was the sack.

Put down plain like that, it reads so simple it seems to mean nothing; and maybe it does mean nothing. Maybe I didn’t leave the sack in the garage. Maybe I left it outside, and the wind lifted it to the back door, to huddle up over the one milk bottle. Like a lurker.

It’s odd, now I come to think of it, how I used that word ‘huddle’ – for that is exactly what it did. It had arranged itself over the milk bottle, as though it needed sustenance. Yes, sustenance. The sack was starved. It needed milk. It came to the milk.

That is how it seemed to me, ten days ago. But still, I said to myself (before the later events came to pass) I must have imagined that I locked it up in the garage.

And so, I took the milk bottle in, picked up the sack, and as I did so there was a little whip and snarl of wind, suddenly veered to the north – biting cold. A wind with teeth in it. I dropped the sack, came in quickly, and locked the door. Early morning; but one likes to be on the safe side. The milkman had told me that there was a lurker around. And living alone, you get used to locking up, even in the morning.

Later that same day, I went out. Sack not there. At first, that signified nothing. For why should it be there, with a howling wind striding from the north?

I thought no more of it, but walked to the bakery, to get bread. It was only on the way back, happening to look up to the one chimney on the bungalow, that I began to ask myself –
had
I left the sack in the garage the night before?

Because now, it was curled round the chimney and the TV aerial. Draping itself over the tiles, in a kind of graceful manner, almost protective, as though it had settled there for the winter.

Yet I still told myself – the wind did it. Until the wind dropped and in a dead quietness when even the withering roses – the white roses Dorothy loved so much – till even the white rose petals didn’t quiver, I saw the sack hunched up, or should I say ‘bunched’ up, against the front door, the door I now never use, not even for the Vicar should he happen to call, as he once did, not long after Dorothy went. There it was; and when I write ‘hunched’ or ‘bunched’ – I mean – in a kind of pyramid, or a tent, as though three sticks had been stood up inside, wigwam-fashion, holding it tent-wise. Like a little tabernacle.

I wish I hadn’t used that word, ‘tabernacle’. For even as I wrote it I half knew what it meant. And now I’ve looked it up in
Chambers.
‘A tent, or movable hut . . . or, the human body as the temporary abode of the soul . . .’

It was not until then – not until I saw the sack slooped against my front door, as though it was saying, ‘Let me in, please . . .’ – it was not until then that I was certain: I
had
left it, in the locked garage, the night before.

From that moment, I knew I was not just imagining things. From that moment, my life has become a torment.

But I must not overstate. In a kind of way, I’ve learnt to live with it, learnt to live with this torment, this bit of ‘coarse material’, dun grey with a slither of rustiness in it, and a prickly roughness that seems to tinge the fingers. Learnt to live with it – yes. But I cannot easily touch it. For one thing, I’m now convinced that this itching I get, all over my body, was caused by contact with the sack. There’s a kind of tic in it. Yes, a tic.

But I am not really writing of physical matters, although one cannot discountenance them. So – what happened next?

I think it was this way. After I’d seen the sack before the front door, I decided it might be a good thing to open the door and let the sun into the hall. And when I did – well, I opened the door to nothing. Or, rather, only to the rose bushes in the bed near the door. The sack had been blown away.