Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (8 page)

So Lionel passed those lazy years, doing little in the shop or house, yet still responsible for the keeping of the accounts, and emerging into the shop at three to have a chat with the customers and talk of the old days and of Dr Rothway, now dead. So Harold, working with feverish energy, kept his friend fed, and at nights retired to his attic room to prune and ponder over those poems which nobody had ever seen. Then Lionel would play the piano and sometimes sing songs of Roger Quilter and Arthur Somervell; until ten-thirty, when Harold would bring him his cup of Bourn-Vita and send him to bed – in winter with a bottle.

Apart from the tediousness of the black-out and the encouragement of many memories of an earlier conflict, the war affected them very little. They would discuss their old experiences in the army, then lapse into a long silence over the fire, where the milk simmered in the saucepan. Then, with a sigh, Lionel would turn to his book-keeping.

‘We’ve made a clear profit of seven hundred this year,’ he remarked, one October evening in
1940
; and he wondered what was the use of the money. He went on: ‘I had a letter from the old man. He’s very shaky now, and they’ve had some bombs up there. I ought to go and see him; it may be the last time. What’re you looking at me like that for?’

Harold started. ‘I didn’t know I was looking at you. Sorry. Yes, I suppose you should go. How long?’

‘It depends. We could close shop for a bit. Why don’t you come too?’

‘I don’t want to. When will you go?’

‘Tomorrow – or the next day – ’

‘Tomorrow?’ Harold got up and started to make the Bourn-Vita. He was thinking of an interview he had had that morning with a doctor, an interview Lionel knew nothing about. The doctor had given him three months of life, unless he were prepared to go into a sanatorium in the Cheddar Hills. Even then there was hope of little more. Harold did not fear death; he welcomed it as a mistress he had wooed all his life, to whom those heart-burning odes of his muse had been addressed. But he feared for the future security and happiness of his friend.

‘Can’t you wait a month or so?’ he asked.

‘Better go before the winter sets in. You know how cold it gets up there.’

‘Tomorrow, then?’ Harold spoke very quietly.

‘I think so, Harold.’

‘Well, go to bed now. You’ll have a long day travelling.’

‘I don’t want to go to bed. I’d like to talk, Harold, about you and me – and the queer mystery of our lives.’

Harold did not answer. Lionel was possessed of a desire to tell him about Ilona, enjoyed a score of times in the women of his week-ends. But he knew that Harold could never understand. Sadly he went to the stairs. ‘I ought to be putting you to bed,’ he said. ‘You’re ill. Not me.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’

‘Except – ’

‘Except nothing. Here, take your Bourn-Vita.’

Lionel took the cup. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘what power it is you’ve got over me.’

‘Power?’

‘Yes. You always had. You know it.’

‘You imagine it. You do as you like, don’t you? You’re free?’

‘No. I’m not free. I never shall be. Neither will you.’

He went to bed. For a long time Harold stared at the fire. Yes, he thought, he had power all right; and how frightful that power would be after death! Even now he began to relish the prospect of the future when, unfettered by mortal chains, he would be able, for the rest of Lionel’s life, to stay by his side – whispering in his ear, accompanying him upon his lonely walks, attendant upon him during those sordid week-ends – what limitless opportunities stretched before him! And all this – was he to throw it away at the command of some absurd altruism? At the end of the year, when January dawned, stark and cold, he would be free to haunt. ‘No! No!’ he cried. And all his genuine attachment to so old a friend rose up in him. At all costs he must be saved that fate. ‘Kinder to kill than to haunt,’ he muttered. And he remembered the decision he had made years ago.

Long into the night he sat there. The fire died out. Towards dawn he took a torch, went upstairs, listened outside Lionel’s room, silently opened the door and crept to the bedside.

Cherubic and innocent, with a smile round the lips, Lionel lay in sleep. On the bedside table was the novel he had been reading, open at a page. By the light of the torch, Harold read: ‘She drew him to her. All his tired manhood was enfolded and consecrated in the warmth of her bosom.’

Harold looked down at him. The time had come. His hands curled over the sleeper’s throat, an inch away from the pink flesh. Then suddenly, with a little groan, he turned, tiptoed from the room, and closed the door. He could not do it. Lionel must take what had to come to him.

Lionel left for Yorkshire the following morning. He had the greatest misgiving about Harold as he stood in the corridor waving good-bye to him. The hectic rose-coloured spots on the white cheek-bones, the wasted body, the cold hand-clasp, the over-zealous dark eyes burning with an inner light, the husky voice and the strained breathing – all this gave to Harold Weary a melancholy nobility which remained fixed in Lionel’s memory as the train drew out of the station. ‘Perhaps it is the last time I shall see him,’ he thought. Then he shuddered. Already he felt haunted. And a heavy feeling of guilt hung over him. His very health – his plumpness, his rich, rolling blue eye, his portly swagger, mild organist’s hands – all this was a reproach to him when he thought of the emaciated figure in the black overcoat with the questing fire of the eyes of Don Juan awaiting necrophilous pleasures. ‘I’ll never go back,’ he told himself. ‘I’ll give him my interest in the business.’ But he knew, with a horrible certainty, that he would go back.

For five days Harold waited, hoping for word from Lionel that he was on his way home. On the fifth evening, when he had closed shop, he took the account books into the kitchen, counted the money in the till, and thought he had better make some effort to enter up the day-book. Always bad at figures, he found now that even to calculate the simplest sum was a task beyond him. He sat in the kitchen, over the ashes of a dead fire, groaning at the bitterness of his fate and cursing his life.

The door to the shop was open and a draught of wind cut through. But he was beyond feeling cold, for his heart was numbed, the passion of his life dead as the ashes in the grate. There was, he knew, but one gate left to happiness – and that gate, death, so soon to be opened, perhaps this night. Then might he hover forever over the life which had for twenty years been given to him and which he had nursed so single-mindedly. The whole pattern of his days was clear before him. An unfortunate soul, born to haunt, yet blessed beyond price in that he had found a host for his ghost. ‘Thank God,’ he muttered, ‘I didn’t kill him. Thank God I had the courage to wait.’ He began, with pleasure, to contemplate the future. In what place, at what time, after his death, should he make his presence known to Lionel? He must do his best not to frighten him. Should he merely whisper in his ear in the night: ‘Lionel! Guess who’s here!’ Or brush his cheek with a feather? Or announce himself by the sudden opening of a door as was the common way with so-called ‘departed’ spirits? None of these preliminary signs satisfied him. And there must certainly be no cheap poltergeist horseplay. There must be another way, some absolutely original way, for a ghost to make his first mark upon the page of the life he had lived.

Then he had it. In verse, in his own verse, should the hint be dropped. A page at a time, left casually on the table at night Terrifying? Probably. Yet the nature of the verses should compensate the haunted man for the chilled terror he would have to endure. For Lionel had always been desperately anxious to read his poetry.

Fired by this plan, Harold ran up to the attic to find the pages of a canto (it was an ode to Hecate) he had recently been purifying. Coming out from the attic, he paused on the landing. He had heard from far below, in the shop, two things: the ringing of the telephone, the playing of the piano.

For a moment he could not move. Then, dropping some of his manuscript on the stairs, he ran quickly down, calling out in a gasping voice, ‘Who’s there?’

He stumbled through into the dark shop. In God’s name, what was that music, that wild, sweet melancholy from the upright Bechstein in the shop window, just behind the door? He knew it so well; he had heard it so many times.

The telephone still rang. Crashing into the cash-desk, he snatched the receiver. There was a telegram for Weary. He waited, the music still surging on in great passionate waves, like a ship lost in a huge sea and a black night. The voice came from the ’phone. ‘My son killed in an air-raid last night. Writing.’

Then he knew who was playing the ‘Valse Triste’ on the Bechstein behind the door.

Outrage defeated terror, and he stumbled forward in the half-darkness of the shop. There was no figure seated before the piano; yet still the music continued. ‘Stop that playing!’ he screamed. Then he was convulsed by a fit of coughing.

Against the closing bars of the music a voice sounded: ‘Half a mo, old man. If we’re going to argue, might as well wait till I’ve finished.’

It was Lionel’s voice, soft and warm, sounding from a dense pocket in mid-air. Then came the last three high chords of Sibelius’s ‘Valse’ fading into the thin, cold whine of wind which rustled a pile of music on the counter. Then an unendurable silence and Harold knew that to be outraged was futile. Lionel had beaten him to the post.

‘I’m sorry,’ muttered Harold. ‘You scared me, Lionel.’

‘I meant to. Jolly well done, eh? What you might call a good sense of drama.’

‘Where are you? Can you – appear?’

‘I’m not saying what I can do.’

‘That means you don’t know how to.’ Harold laughed bitterly. ‘If only it were me – my God, how you’d suffer!’

‘Yes. You wanted me to suffer, didn’t you, old man?’

‘On the contrary, I did my best – ’

He was rudely interrupted by a copy of Mozart’s Sonatas, which came whizzing through the air and fell at his feet.

‘That’s just to show you I know how to handle things over here. But don’t worry. I’m going to look after you, with the same loving care you showed me.’

‘Cheap tricks,’ snapped Harold. ‘Which any ghost could – ’

‘Get back to the kitchen.’ The command shot out from somewhere in the cash-desk. ‘You’re standing in a direct draught and it’s bad for you. You don’t want to die yet.’

‘You mean you don’t want me to.’

There was a sudden push in Harold’s back and he found himself in the kitchen. Again the voice came, apparently from the tea-pot.

‘Poor Harold – struggling with the books – and the fire out! Lost without me, aren’t you?’

‘Not in the least.’

‘Speak honest. What’s the use of lying now? Light the gas-stove and put the milk on. You look worn out.’

‘Why should I obey you?’

‘Quite right. Why should you?’

There was a long silence. Then Harold broke it. ‘Where are you? Why don’t you speak?’

No answer. Harold laughed. It was clear that Lionel had declared a war of nerves. Challenged, he felt equal to it. Going upstairs, he opened the door of his attic. A voice chuckled from the desk. ‘Well, Harold! I’d never have guessed! These poems of yours are quite hot stuff. Fancy you writing – ’

‘Leave my poems alone!’ shrieked Harold. ‘I won’t have them touched by your filthy hands.’

‘You mustn’t, Harold, you really
mustn’t
.’ Lionel’s voice purred, like a great cat, in his ear; a gloved hand touched his cheek.

‘Don’t touch me, either!’ screamed Harold.

‘I was wearing gloves when the bomb hit the Bradford train,’ said Lionel. ‘So you needn’t worry, old man. My filthy hands won’t touch you.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.’

‘So am I. Since we’ve got to go on living together, Harold, we might as well make the best of it.’

‘I shan’t live long. You know that.’

‘It doesn’t make any difference whether you live or die. You can’t escape me.’

‘When I’m dead, you won’t be able to escape me.’

There was no response to this. Harold sneered. ‘That’s got you. You never thought of that, did you?’

The curtains fluttered. There was silence. Harold sat the whole night in the attic, crouched over a miserable oil-stove. Except for the wild autumnal wind, the house was silent.

Perhaps it was, of all things, the long silences which were the most paralysing torments endured by the yet stoical personality of Mr Weary during his last few weeks on this earth. Stoical he certainly remained, betraying little of his trouble to those who came to the shop to offer their condolences on the death of his partner. The precentor, who now had a living at Wrothesbury Magna, cycled over a day after he had heard of the tragedy.

‘My dear Weary, this is a dreadful blow to us all.’

Harold threw his leaf-like right hand into the air as though to offer his soul to whatever gods there be.

‘Soon or late, death strikes,’ he murmured.

The vicar hemmed, wondering whether to offer Christian consolation. He had heard that Weary was a subscriber to the Rationalist Press.

‘There is every reason for a belief in the doctrine of Purgatory, my dear fellow,’ he ventured. He had grown daringly Anglo-Catholic since reaching the stall of Wrothesbury Magna.

‘Purgatory,’ remarked Harold, ‘is perhaps nearer than we think.’

Lionel suddenly hissed from under the counter: ‘So is Hell. Tell him that and see how he takes it.’

The vicar started. ‘Did you say anything, dear fellow?’

‘Nothing, vicar.’

The vicar sighed, intimated that he would say a mass for so dear a departed soul, and free-wheeled his cycle down Calverley Hill. It was near to Advent and he wanted to hear Steggall’s anthem, ‘Remember Now Thy Creator’, sung in the cathedral. Advent came, with the wind shrieking in the stripped elms, and the élite of Calverley Hill staggering home under umbrellas that were almost wrested from their hands. They would hurry past Weary and Hoare’s, noticing inside, under the warm pool of light over the counter, the drawn, predatory shape of Mr Weary, packing music back into the portfolios, then coming outside to draw the shutters. He closed early now, for there was seldom anyone to visit the shop after four-thirty. The old gatherings, which had once made the place merry with gossip, had ceased.

‘You can’t get much out of old Weary. Wonder what he thinks about every evening up there, alone? He plays the piano, anyway. I heard it as I passed the other night. Piano? But Weary never played the piano in his life. Hoare was the one who played. Queer! Oh well, I expect I imagined it.’

Every evening there alone . . . and how he longed to be alone! Yet he never saw his tormentor; always it was the voice, sounding from a place where he had least expected it. Once, after a long period of silence (it had been a week-end), he prophesied to himself, ‘In five minutes his voice will sound from the coal-scuttle.’ But quarter-of-an-hour elapsed before the voice came, from behind the reproduction of Lord Leighton’s ‘Wedded’. ‘Funny you and I ever admitted a picture like this to the house, Harold, don’t you think?’

Then Lionel would pester him to administer to himself various comforts, such as another cushion behind his head, more coal on the fire, what about a cup of tea, old long-face? He effectively bullied him into gathering all the windfalls from the orchard and storing them carefully in the attic. After that, Harold never wrote again. The over-heavy scent of decayed Blenheims made him feel sick. Lionel took exception to this.