The Fox in the Attic (5 page)

The Fallen
... as Dr. Brinley drank the melancholy toast his hand trembled, and his heart was torn anew at the tragedy that he himself should have been too young to serve. For what bond can equal the bond which unites for ever those who have once been heroes together, however long ago? “I was at the Alma, I was at Inkermann ...” Oh to have been able to say today “I charged with the Light Brigade!” But they wouldn't have him; for alas, in 1853 he was only aged fifteen.

The Fallen ... at one with them, perhaps, in their everlasting blank sleep: or conscious only at this annual moment of the raised glasses that he too was one of the forever-unforgotten. But now he must die in any case, and die alone ...

For Dr. Brinley believed he was at least doctor enough to know that in a very few months he himself would have to take to his bed. For a while the invaluable Blodwen—the fat, white, smiling Blodwen—would look after him. But only for a while. Blodwen was a wonderful nurse, so long as she thought you might recover: but not for “the dying part.” She couldn't do with
that
. A village woman of fifty, drawn to sick beds like a moth to a candle and never yet had she seen a body dead! No, at a given stage and with nothing said Blodwen disappeared and her sister Eirwen took her place. For Eirwen was wonderful with “the dying part,” kind Eirwen had closed more eyes than any woman at the Cross. They always knew what it meant when Blodwen left them and Eirwen took her place.

Meanwhile?—Meanwhile, he drained another glass.

He felt now he was set on a pinnacle: he supposed it must be the pinnacle of his own approaching death. Anyway, from his pinnacle how remote they all suddenly began to seem, this crowd he had courted all his life! This crowd here jabbering and eating ... hoping ... young.

From his pinnacle (it swayed a little as in the wind, from all the whiskey he had drunk) he now saw all the hearts of all the kingdoms of the world outspread, on offer—such as all his life he had coveted. But a change seemed somehow lately to have seeped into his soul from the very bottom: he found now he did not desire them any more.

Suddenly his pinnacle shot up to a towering height from which these people looked no more than minute gesticulating emmets. Moreover his pinnacle was swinging violently to and fro, now, in a full gale: he had to set his whole mind to clinging on.

He hoped the motion would not make him sea-sick.

The bishop, covertly watching him, saw that gray look, the sagging and trembling jaw: “This man has at last begun to die,” he said to himself. But then he saw also the transparent empty eyes, and recalled looking in through other eyes like them—younger eyes, but opening onto the same unbottomed vacant pit within: “Also he is very,
very
drunk,” he told himself understandingly.

Maybe—reckoning from the bottom up—the old doctor was indeed three parts dead already: for already there was so much nothing in him down there where once the deeper emotions had been. But at the still-living trivial brink of his mind there was something stirring even now: something which teased and foxed him, for he could not quite recognize what it was ...

“Thursday!” that something said.

Moreover his eyes had begun to prick with tears! Was there something wrong about “Thursday,” then? “
Thursday!
” “THURSDAY!” The word was booming insistently in his head like any bell. He took another sip of whiskey to recall his wandering memory.
A-a-a-ah!
Now it had come back to him. The telephone call, the little body ... he had to hold an inquest ...

At that the lately too-penetrable eyes clouded over, the jaw closed, the drooping cheeks tautened to expression of a kind. He turned and gripped the bishop's arm with his bridle hand and his face was all puckered to suit his words: “My Lord!” he gulped, “It's a mere little maid!” The bishop turned towards him, attentive but mystified. “A green child,” Dr. Brinley went on. “Yet here's
me
still, and
you
!”

The bishop still looked mystified; and the doctor was mildly shocked to find how little his own pathetic words moved even himself. So he tried again—and at least his old voice now quavered dramatically enough: “A wee maid scarce six years of age, they said. Dead! Tell me the meaning of it, you man of God!”

Then he hiccuped, burst altogether into tears and upset his glass. They all turned kindly faces on him.

“Come on, Doc,” he heard the High Steward saying: “Give us ‘Clementine.'”

Midnight, back now at Newton Llantony ...

As the clouds broke and the bright moon at last came out, the single point of light to which distance diminished the lamps of all roystering Flemton paled.

In the big Newton drawing-room the shutters did not quite reach to the semi-circular tops of the windows, and through these high openings the moon sent bars of light into the black gloom within. It shone on the shapeless holland bag which enclosed the great central chandelier: threw criss-cross shadows on the dust-sheets covering the furniture and covering the old mirrors on the walls. It shone on the new gilt frame of the life-size khaki portrait above the fireplace: glinted on the word “Ypres,” and the date and the name, inscribed on brass.

It glinted on the painted highlights in the dead young man's eyes.

It shone on the small shapeless dark shape in the middle of the big sofa opposite, the outstretched arms. Glinted on the little slits of eyeball between the half-open lids.

Augustine, in his white attic bedroom under the roof, woke with the moon staring straight in his eyes.

Round him the house was silent. In all its hundred rooms he knew there was no
living
being that night but him.

Downstairs a door banged without reason. His scalp pricked momentarily, and the yawn he was beginning went off at half-cock.

He who so loved to be alone felt now a sudden unmitigated longing for living human company.

His sister Mary ...

Her child Polly, that little niece he loved ...

For a moment, being but half-awake, he thought Polly had crept into his bed and was sleeping there, tiny and warm and humid, her feet planted firmly against his chest. But when he stirred she vanished: the bed was empty and cold.

Where would they be now, Polly and her mother? He had an idea they were away from home, there had been something in Mary's last letter ...

Instinctively Augustine knew that this eremitical phase of his life was now over, had finally served its turn: indeed he was tempted to get out his Bentley that very minute and drive to London, drive right through the night as if he meant never to come back to Newton. “
London!
” He recalled it now:
that
was where Mary was taking Polly for a day or two, she had written; and he could be with them there by breakfast.

But he decided after all to wait till morning. He must at least be still here when the ambulance arrived, he remembered ...

Meanwhile he lay where he was, neither awake nor asleep, in his familiar boyhood bed, cold and sweating.

Something in the room creaked.

Augustine waited till the morning before starting; but the belt of rainy weather traveled eastward ahead of him across Carmarthen and Brecon. Clearing even the eastern counties of Wales about midnight, long before dawn it had arrive in London (where Polly was). There it poured heavily and steadily all day. All that wet Tuesday it felt in London as if thunder was about, though none was heard.

On the opposite side of Eaton Square from Polly's there was a certain tall house which Polly always passed slowly and with evident respect. It belonged to Lady Sylvia Davenant, but Polly called it “Janey's house.” Seen from a window of the upstairs drawing-room of this house, the umbrellas in the street below, that Tuesday, looked like mushrooms on the run (thought Sylvia Davenant), and the tops of the cars like special sleek slugs—also very much on the run, as they cleft a passage through the mushrooms.

“A good simile,” thought Lady Sylvia, “because mushrooms and slugs both are creatures of the rain, the very thought of them evokes wetness—but no, a bad simile because mushrooms never move at all and even slugs are ... sluggish. But, ‘
run
...'? What does run in the rain?—Only colors I suppose,” she concluded rather wildly.

With an effort she recalled her attention to Janey at her side. For this was little Janey's “Hour”: her drawing-room hour with her aunt between tea and bedtime. Janey had flattened her nose against the pane, thus clouding it with her breath so that she could hardly see out at all.

“Darling,” said Lady Sylvia brightly, “what do
you
think those umbrellas look like?”

“Like umbrellas,” said Janey perfunctorily. “Auntie, why
does
rain?”

“Darling!” said Lady Sylvia, “You know I don't like being called ‘Auntie,' it sounds like someone old. Why can't you just call me ‘Sylvia'? Don't you think that's a pretty name?”

“You
are
old,” said Janey. “Anyway, Sylvia's a girl in the Gardens already ...‘Saliva,'
I
call her.”

“
Darling!
”

Janey withdrew her face an inch or two from the misted glass, put out her tongue and licked herself a neat round peephole.

“Look!” she cried, pointing through the trees at a sudden light which appeared in a top window on the far side of the Square: “There's Polly-wolly going to bed HOURS BEFORE ME —YAH!” she yelled: “Polly-wolly-doodle! Pollyollywollyolly-doodle-OODLE-OOOOO!”

The yell could not possibly have carried across the wide Square but it nearly split her aunt's eardrum: extraordinary it could come from so very small a body!

“Darling
please
! Not
quite
so loud! And who is this ‘Polly'?”

“Oh, just a person in the Gardens sometimes ... soppy little kid.” Janey paused, glanced at the clock, considered, and added with a perceptible effort: “I bet she wets her bed.”

Janey looked sidelong at her aunt. The “Hour” had still twenty minutes to go, but now already Her Ladyship was crossing the room to ring for Janey's
gouvernante
. “Goody!” thought Janey, with a chapter to finish upstairs.

Janey was an only child (and the result of a mechanical accident at that). She had been parked on her Aunt Sylvia for a couple of months interminable to both of them while her parents were getting their divorce.

Janey was quite right about the light opposite. Polly was going to bed, and going to bed rather earlier than usual.

Nanny had lit the gas, although it was not really dark yet, to combat all that wet and gloom outside. Now she sat in front of an enormous blaze of coal mending her stockings (which were of black cotton with white toes and heels). The heat of the fire, and the steam rising from the round zinc bath on the middle of the carpet, made the room with its tight-shut window like a hothouse; and Polly's face was shiny with perspiration. Nanny had lit the light against the gloom but Polly
wanted
to look out: she was feeling sad, and the rain and gloom outside and all those wet hurrying people suited her mood.

Polly had a slight cold—it always happened when she came to London! This was the reason she was to have her bath in the nursery tonight instead of going down the draughty stairs to the big mahogany bathroom two floors below. Moreover, Polly had been today to the dentist. That also seemed always to happen whenever she came to London. He seldom hurt her, but he did indignities to the secret places of her mouth—shrivelling its sensitive wet membranes with a squirt of hot wind, plastering a dry cloth onto her wet tongue, poking wads of dry cotton wool into her cheek, hooking over her bottom teeth a bubbling sucking thing which plucked at the roots of her tongue ... by the end she had felt as if her dried-up mouth had died of drought and would never be able to wet itself again. Nor could she quite breathe through her nose because of her cold ... almost she had wished he
would
hurt, to take her mind off that horrible dryness and off the thought that any moment her nose might run and she not able to get at it.

But most of all Polly was sad because she was lonely—and that happened
only
when she came to London! She never felt lonely at home in Dorset; for at Mellton Chase there were animals to play with, but in London there were only children.

Kensington Gardens, you would have thought, were full of “suitable” playmates for Polly. But all those children were Londoners—or virtually Londoners. Already they had formed their own packs, and nothing their nannies could say—Polly's Nanny was high in their hierarchy, so the nannies tried their best—would make them treat the little country child as one of themselves. Under orders, they would take her kindly by the hand and lead her away; but once out of sight they turned her upside down, or stood round her in a ring jeering her ignorance of their private shibboleths.

They would call her derisively “Little Polly-wolly-doodle,” or even worse names such as “Baby-dolly-lulu.” Any name with “baby” in it was hard to bear, for Polly's age was just five and her struggle out of the slough of babyhood so recent a memory that the very word “baby” seemed still to have power to drag her back into it.

Of all these groups in the Gardens, the most exclusive and the most desirable was “Janey's Gang.” This gang had a rule: no one could join it who had not “Knocked down a Man.” This was not impossible even for quite small children, for nothing in the rule required that he should be looking; and if you had made him fall into water you were an Officer straight away.

Janey herself was huge: she was turned seven. Janey claimed three Men to her credit, two of them in water and the third in a garden frame. She had done it so skillfully (or her curls were so golden, her blue eyes so wide) that not one of the three had suspected the push was intentional. No wonder the gang was titularly “Janey's Gang”!