Strange Stories (15 page)

By contrast with the blazing highway, the main impression of the interior was darkness. After a few moments, I also became aware of a smell. Everything in the shop smelt of that smell, and, one felt, always would do so; the mixed odour of any general store, but at once enhanced and passe. I can smell it now.

“We do not necessarily want to buy anything,” said my father, “but, if we may, should like to look round?”

Since the days of Mr. Selfridge the proposition is supposed to be taken for granted, but at that time the message had yet to spread. The bazaar-keeper seemed hardly to welcome it. He was younger than I had expected (an unusual thing for a child, but I had probably been awaiting a white-bearded gnome); though pale, nearly bald, and perceptibly grimy. He wore an untidy grey suit and bedroom slippers.

“Look about you, children,” said my father. “Take your time. We can’t buy presents every day.”

I noticed that my mother still stood in the doorway.

“I want those wires,” said Constantin.

“Make quite sure by looking at the other things first.” Constantin turned aside bored, his book held behind his back. He began to scrape his feet. It was up to me to uphold my father’s position. Rather timidly, I began to peer about, not going far from him. The bazaar-keeper silently watched me with eyes colourless in the twilight.

“Those toy telegraph poles in your window,” said my father after a pause, fraught for me with anxiety and responsibility. “How much would you take for them?”

“They are not for sale,” said the bazaar-keeper, and said no more.

“Then why do you display them in the window?” “They are a kind of decoration, I suppose.” Did he not know?, I wondered.

“Even if they’re not normally for sale, perhaps you’ll sell them to me,” said my vagabond father, smiling like Rothschild. “My son, you see, has taken a special fancy to them.”

“Sorry,” said die man in the shop.

“Are you the principal here?”

“I am.”

“Then surely as a reasonable man,” said my father, switching from superiority to ingratiation

“They are to dress the window,” said the bazaar man. “They are not for sale.”

This dialogue entered through the back of my head as, diligently and unobtrudingly, I conned the musty stock. At the back of the shop was a window, curtained all over in grey lace: to judge by the weak light it offered, it gave on to the living quarters. Through this much filtered illumination glimmered the facade of an enormous dolls’ house. I wanted it at once. Dolls had never been central to my happiness, but this abode of theirs was the most grown-up thing in the shop.

It had battlements, and long straight walls, and a variety of pointed windows. A gothic revival house, no doubt; or even mansion. It was painted the colour of stone; a grey stone darker than the grey light, which flickered round it. There was a two-leaved front door, with a small classical portico. It was impossible to see the whole house at once, as it stood grimed and neglected on the corner of the wide trestle-shelf. Very slowly I walked along two of the sides; the other two being dark against the walls of the shop. From a first-floor window in the side not immediately visible as one approached, leaned a doll, droopy and unkempt. It was unlike any real house I had seen, and, as for dolls’ houses, they were always after the style of the villa near Gerrard’s

Cross belonging to my father’s successful brother. My uncle’s house itself looked much more like a toy than this austere structure before me.

“Wake up,” said my mother’s voice. She was standing just behind me.

“What about some light on the subject?” enquired my father.

A switch clicked.

The house really was magnificent. Obviously, beyond all financial reach.

“Looks like a model for Pentonville Gaol,” observed my father.

“It is beautiful,” I said. “It’s what I want.”

“It’s the most depressing-looking plaything I ever saw.”

“I want to pretend I live in it,” I said, “and give masked balls.” My social history was eager but indiscriminate.

“How much is it?” asked my mother. The bazaar-keeper stood resentfully in the background, sliding each hand between the thumb and fingers of the other.

“It’s only second-hand,” he said. “Tenth-hand, more like. A lady brought it in and said she needed to get rid of it. I don’t want to sell you something you don’t want.”

“But suppose we do want it?” said my father truculently. “Is nothing in this shop for sale?”

“You can take it away for a quid,” said the bazaar-keeper. “And glad to have the space.”

“There’s someone looking out,” said Constantin. He seemed to be assessing the house, like a surveyor or valuer, “It’s full of dolls,” said the bazaar-keeper. “They’re thrown in. Sure you can transport it?”

“Not at the moment,” said my father, “but I’ll send someone down.” This, I knew, would be Moon the seedman, f who owned a large canvas-topped lorry, and with whom my father used to fraternise on the putting green.

“Are you quite sure?” my mother asked me.

“Will it take up too much room?”

My mother shook her head. Indeed, our home, though out of date and out at elbows, was considerably too large for us.

“Then, please.”

Poor Constantin got nothing.

***

Mercifully, all our rooms had wide doors; so that Moon’s driver, assisted by the youth out of the shop, lent specially for the purpose, could ease my birthday present to its new resting place, without tilting it or inflicting a wound upon my mother’s new and self-applied paint. I noticed that the doll at the first-floor side window had prudently withdrawn. For my house, my parents had allotted me the principal spare room, because in the centre of it stood a very large dinner table, once to be found in the servants’ hall of my father’s childhood home in Lincolnshire, but now the sole furniture our principal spare room contained. (The two lesser spare rooms were filled with cardboard boxes, which every now and then toppled in heart arresting avalanches on still summer nights.) On the big table the driver and the shop boy set my house. It reached almost to the sides, so that those passing along the narrow walks would be in peril of tumbling into a gulf; but, the table being much longer than it was wide, the house was provided at front and back with splendid parterres of deal, embrocated with caustic until they glinted like fluorspar.

When I had settled upon the exact site for the house, so that the garden front would receive the sun from the two windows, and a longer parterre stretched at the front than at the back, where the columned entry faced the door of the room, I withdrew to a distant corner while the two males eased the edifice into exact alignment.

“Snug as a bug in a rug,” said Moon’s driver when the (perilous walks at the sides of the house had been made straight and equal.

“Snugger,” said Moon’s boy.

***

I waited for their boots, mailed with crescent slivers of steel, to reach the bottom of our creaking, coconut-matted stair, then I tiptoed to the landing, looked, and listened. The sun had gone in just before the lorry arrived, and down the passage the motes had ceased to dance. It was three o’clock, my mother was still at one of her schools, my father was at the rifle range. I heard the men shut the back door. The principal spare room had never before been occupied, so that the key was outside. In a second, I transferred it to the inside, and shut and locked myself in.

As before in the shop, I walked slowly round my house, but this time round all four sides of it. Then, with the knuckles of my thin white forefinger, I tapped gently at the front door. It seemed not to have been secured, because it opened, both leaves of it, as I touched it. I pried in, first with one eye, then with the other. The lights from various of the pointed windows blotched the walls and floor of the miniature entrance hall. None of the dolls was visible.

It was not one of those dolls’ houses of commerce from which sides can be lifted in their entirety. To learn about my house, it would be necessary, albeit impolite, to stare through the windows, one at a time. I decided first to take the ground floor. I started in a clockwise direction from the front portico. The front door was still open, but I could not see how to shut it from the outside.

There was a room to the right of the hall, leading into two other rooms along the right side of the house, of which, again, one led into the other. All the rooms were decorated and furnished in a Mrs. Fitzherbert-ish style; with handsomely striped wallpapers, botanical carpets, and chairs with legs like sticks of brittle golden sweetmeat. There were a number of pictures. I knew just what they were: family portraits. I named the room next the hall, the occasional room, and the room beyond it, the morning room. The third room was very small: striking out confidently, I named it the Canton Cabinet, although it contained neither porcelain nor fans. I knew what the rooms in a great house should be called, because my mother used to show me the pictures in large, once fashionable volumes on the subject which my father had bought for their bulk at junk shops.

Then came the long drawing room, which stretched across the entire garden front of the house, and contained the principal concourse of dolls. It had four pointed French windows, all made to open, though now sealed with dust and rust; above which were bulbous triangles of coloured glass, in tiny snowflake panes. The apartment itself played at being a cloister in a Horace Walpole convent; lierne vaulting ramified across the arched ceiling, and the spidery Gothic

pilasters were tricked out in mediaeval patchwork, as in a Puseyite church. On the stout golden wallpaper were decent Swiss pastels of indeterminate subjects. There was a grand piano, very black, scrolly, and, no doubt, resounding; four shapely chandeliers; a baronial fireplace with a mythical blazon above the mantel; and eight dolls, all of them female, dotted about on chairs and ottomans with their backs to me. I hardly dared to breathe as I regarded their woolly heads, and noted the colours of their hair: two black, two nondescript, one grey, one a discoloured silver beneath the dust, one blonde, and one a dyed-looking red. They wore woollen Victorian clothes, of a period later, I should say, than that when the house was built, and certainly too warm for the present season; in varied colours, all of them dull. Happy people, I felt even then, would not wear these variants of rust, indigo, and greenwood.

I crept onwards; to the dining room. It occupied half its side of the house, and was dark and oppressive. Perhaps it might look more inviting when the chandelier blazed, and the table candles, each with a tiny purple shade, were lighted. There was no cloth on the table, and no food or drink. Over the fireplace was a big portrait of a furious old man: his white hair was a spiky aureole round his distorted face, beetroot-red with rage; the mouth was open, and even the heavy lips were drawn back to show the savage, strong teeth; he was brandishing a very thick walking stick which seemed to leap from the picture and stun the beholder. He was dressed neutrally, and the painter had not provided him with a background: there was only the aggressive figure menacing the room. I was frightened.

Two rooms on the ground floor remained before I once more reached the front door. In the first of them a lady was writing with her back to the light and therefore to me. She frightened me also; because her grey hair was disordered and of uneven length, and descended in matted plaits, like snakes escaping from a basket, to the shoulders of her coarse grey dress. Of course, being a doll, she did not move, but the back of her head looked mad. Her presence prevented me from regarding at all closely the furnishings of the writing room.

Back at the north front as I resolved to call it, perhaps superseding the compass rather than leading it, there was a cold-looking room, with a carpetless stone floor and white walls, upon which were the mounted heads and horns of many animals. They were all the room contained, but they covered the walls from floor to ceiling. I felt sure that the ferocious old man in the dining-room had killed all these creatures, and I hated him for it. But I knew what the room would be called: it would be the trophy room.

Then I realised that there was no kitchen. It could hardly be upstairs. I had never heard of such a thing. But I looked.

It wasn’t there. All the rooms on the first floor were bedrooms. There were six of them, and they so resembled one another, all with dark ochreous wallpaper and narrow brass bedsteads corroded with neglect, that I found it impracticable to distinguish them other than by numbers, at least for the present. Ultimately I might know the house better. Bedrooms 2, 3, and 6 contained two beds each. I recalled that at least nine people lived in the house. In one room the dark walls, the dark floor, the bed linen, and even the glass in the window were splashed, smeared, and further darkened with ink: it seemed apparent who slept there.

I sat on an orange box and looked. My house needed painting and dusting and scrubbing and polishing and renewing; but on the whole I was relieved that things were not worse. I had felt that the house had stood in the dark corner of the shop for no one knew how long, but this, I now saw, could hardly have been true. I wondered about the lady who had needed to get rid of it. Despite that need, she must have kept things up pretty thoroughly. How did she do it? How did she get in? I resolved to ask my mother’s advice. I determined to be a good landlord, although, like most who so resolve, my resources were nil. We simply lacked the money to regild my long drawing room in proper gold leaf. But I would bring life to the nine dolls now drooping with boredom and neglect...

Then I recalled something. What had become of the doll who had been sagging from the window? I thought she must have been jolted out, and felt myself a murderess. But none of the windows was open. The sash might easily have descended with the shaking; but more probably the poor doll lay inside on the floor of her room. I again went round from room to room, this time on tiptoe, but it was impossible to see the areas of floor just below the dark windows... It was not merely sunless outside, but heavily overcast. I unlocked the door of our principal spare room, and descended pensively to await my mother’s return and tea.