Endless Night / Бесконечная ночь. Книга для чтения на английском языке

This particular old boy of mine was frothing with rage, I remember, as soon as he arrived and had seen how things were going. I used to catch snatches here and there when I was standing by ready to assist in my chauffeurly and handyman way. It was always on the cards that Mr Constantine would have a heart attack or a stroke.

‘You have not done as I said,’ he half screamed. ‘You have spent too much money. Much too much money. It is not as we agreed. It is going to cost me more than I thought.’

‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Santonix. ‘But the money’s got to be spent.’

‘It shall not be spent! It shall not be spent. You have got to keep within the limits I laid down. You understand?’

‘Then you won’t get the kind of house you want,’ said Santonix. ‘I know what you want. The house I build you will be the house you want. I’m quite sure of that and you’re quite sure of it, too. Don’t give me any of your pettifogging middle-class economies[13]. You want a house of quality and you’re going to get it, and you’ll boast about it to your friends and they’ll envy you. I don’t build a house for anyone, I’ve told you that. There’s more to it than money. This house isn’t going to be like other people’s houses!’

‘It is going to be terrible. Terrible.’

‘Oh no it isn’t. The trouble with you is that you don’t know what you want. Or at least so anyone might think. But you do know what you want really, only you can’t bring it out into your mind. You can’t see it clearly. But I know. That’s the one thing I always know. What people are after and what they want. There’s a feeling in you for quality. I’m going to give you quality.’

He used to say things like that. And I’d stand by and listen. Somehow or other I could see for myself that this house that was being built there amongst pine trees looking over the sea, wasn’t going to be the usual house. Half of it didn’t look out towards the sea in a conventional way. It looked inland, up to a certain curve of mountains, up to a glimpse of sky between hills. It was odd and unusual and very exciting.

Santonix used to talk to me sometimes when I was off duty. He said:

‘I only build houses for people I want to build for.’

‘Rich people, you mean?’

‘They have to be rich or they couldn’t pay for the houses. But it’s not the money I’m going to make out of it I care about. My clients have to be rich because I want to make the kind of houses that cost money. The house only isn’t enough, you see. It has to have the setting. That’s just as important. It’s like a ruby or an emerald. А beautiful stone is only a beautiful stone. It doesn’t lead you anywhere further. It doesn’t mean anything, it has no form or significance until it has its setting. And the setting has to have a beautiful jewel to be worthy of it. I take the setting, you see, out of the landscape, where it exists only in its own right. It has no meaning until there is my house sitting proudly like a jewel within its grasp.’ He looked at me and laughed. ‘You don’t understand?’

‘I suppose not,’ I said slowly, ‘and yet – in a way – I think I do…’

‘That may be.’ He looked at me curiously.

We came down to the Riviera again later. By then the house was nearly finished. I won’t describe it because I couldn’t do it properly, but it was – well – something special – and it was beautiful. I could see that. It was a house you’d be proud of, proud to show to people, proud to look at yourself, proud to be in with the right person perhaps. And then suddenly one day Santonix said to me:

‘I could build a house for you, you know. I’d know the kind of house you’d want.’

I shook my head.

‘I shouldn’t know myself,’ I said, honestly.

‘Perhaps you wouldn’t. I’d know for you.’ Then he added, ‘It’s a thousand pities you haven’t got the money.’

‘And never shall have,’ I said.

‘You can’t say that,’ said Santonix. ‘Born poor doesn’t mean you’ve got to stay poor. Money’s queer. It goes where it’s wanted.’

‘I’m not sharp enough,’ I said.

‘You’re not ambitious enough. Ambition hasn’t woken up in you, but it’s there, you know.’

‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘some day when I’ve woken up ambition and I’ve made money, then I’ll come to you and say “build me a house”.’

He sighed then. He said:

‘I can’t wait… No, I can’t afford to wait. I’ve only a short time to go now. One house – two houses more. Not more than that. One doesn’t want to die young… Sometimes one has to… It doesn’t really matter, I suppose.’ ‘I’ll have to wake up my ambition quick.’

‘No,’ said Santonix. ‘You’re healthy, you’re having fun, don’t change your way of life.’

I said: ‘I couldn’t if I tried.’

I thought that was true then. I liked my way of life and I was having fun and there was never anything wrong with my health. I’ve driven a lot of people who’ve made money, who’ve worked hard and who’ve got ulcers and coronary thrombosis and many other things as a result of working hard. I didn’t want to work hard. I could do a job as well as another but that was all there was to it. And I hadn’t got ambition, or I didn’t think I had ambition. Santonix had had ambition, I suppose. I could see that designing houses and building them, the planning of the drawing and something else that I couldn’t quite get hold of, all that had taken it out of him. He hadn’t been a strong man to begin with. I had a fanciful idea sometimes that he was killing himself before his time by the work he had put out to drive his ambition. I didn’t want to work. It was as simple as that. I distrusted work, disliked it. I thought it was a very bad thing, that the human race had unfortunately invented for itself.

I thought about Santonix quite often. He intrigued me almost more than anyone I knew. One of the oddest things in life, I think, is the things one remembers. One chooses to remember, I suppose. Something in one must choose. Santonix and his house were one of the things and the picture in Bond Street and visiting that ruined house, The Towers, and hearing the story of Gipsy’s Acre, all those were the things that I’d chosen to remember! Sometimes girls that I met, and journeys to the foreign places in the course of driving clients about. The clients were all the same. Dull. They always stayed at the same kind of hotels and ate the same kind of unimaginative food.

I still had that queer feeling in me of waiting for something, waiting for something to be offered to me, or to happen to me, I don’t quite know which way describes it best. I suppose really I was looking for a girl, the right sort of girl – by which I don’t mean a nice, suitable girl to settle down with, which is what my mother would have meant or my Uncle Joshua or some of my friends. I didn’t know at that time anything about love. All I knew about was sex. That was all anybody of my generation seemed to know about. We talked about it too much, I think, and heard too much about it and took it too seriously. We didn’t know – any of my friends or myself – what it was really going to be when it happened. Love I mean. We were young and virile and we looked the girls over we met and we appreciated their curves and their legs and the kind of eye they gave you, and you thought to yourself: ‘Will they or won’t they? Should I be wasting my time?’ And the more girls you made the more you boasted and the finer fellow you were thought to be, and the finer fellow you thought yourself.

I’d no real idea that that wasn’t all there was to it. I suppose it happens to everyone sooner or later and it happens suddenly. You don’t think as you imagine you’re going to think: ‘This might be the girl for me… This is the girl who is going to be mine.’ At least, I didn’t feel it that way. I didn’t know that when it happened it would happen quite suddenly. That I would say: ‘That’s the girl I belong to. I’m hers. I belong to her, utterly, for always.’ No. I never dreamed it would be like that. Didn’t one of the old comedians say once – wasn’t it one of his stock jokes[14]? ‘I’ve been in love once and if I felt it coming on again I tell you I’d emigrate.’ It was the same with me. If I had known, if I had only known what it could all come to mean I’d have emigrated too! If I’d been wise, that is.

Chapter 4

I hadn’t forgotten my plan of going to the auction.

There was three weeks to go. I’d had two more trips to the Continent, one to France and the other to Germany. It was when I was in Hamburg that things came to a crisis. For one thing I took a violent dislike to the man and his wife I was driving. They represented everything I disliked most. They were rude, inconsiderate, unpleasant to look at, and I suppose they developed in me a feeling of being unable to stand this life of sycophancy any longer. I was careful, mind you. I thought I couldn’t stand them another day but I didn’t tell them so. No good running yourself in bad with the firm that employs you. So I telephoned up their hotel, said I was ill and I wired London saying the same thing. I said I might be in quarantine and it would be advisable if they sent out a driver to replace me. Nobody could blame me for that. They wouldn’t care enough about me to make further inquiries and they’d merely think that I was too feverish to send them any more news. Later, I’d turn up in London again, spinning them a yarn of how ill I’d been[15]! But I didn’t think I should do that. I was fed up with the driving racket[16].

That rebellion of mine was an important turning point in my life. Because of that and of other things, I turned up at the auction rooms on the appointed date.

‘Unless sold before by private treaty[17]’ had been pasted across the original board. But it was still there, so it hadn’t been sold by private treaty. I was so excited I hardly knew what I was doing.

As I say, I had never been to a public auction of property before. I was imbued with the idea that it would be exciting but it wasn’t exciting. Not in the least. It was one of the most moribund performances I have ever attended. It took place in a semi-gloomy atmosphere and there were only about six or seven people there. The auctioneer was quite different from those auctioneers that I had seen presiding at furniture sales or things of that kind; men with facetious voices and very hearty and full of jokes. This one, in a dead and alive voice, praised the property and described the acreage and a few things like that and then he went half-heartedly into the bidding. Somebody made a bid of £5,000. The auctioneer gave a tired smile rather as one who hears a joke that isn’t really funny. He made a few remarks and there were a few more bids. They were mostly country types standing around. Someone who looked like a farmer, someone who I guessed to be one of the competitive builders, a couple of lawyers, I think, one a man who looked as though he was a stranger from London, well dressed and professional-looking. I don’t know if he made an actual bid, he may have done. If so it was very quietly and done more by gesture. Anyway the bidding petered to an end, the auctioneer announced in a melancholy voice that the reserve price had not been reached and the thing broke up.

‘That was a dull business,’ I said to one of the countrylooking fellows whom I was next to as I went out.

‘Much the same as usual,’ he said. ‘Been to many of these?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘actually it’s the first.’

‘Come out of curiosity, did you? I didn’t notice you doing any bidding.’

‘No fear,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to see how it would go.’

‘Well, it’s the way it runs very often. They just want to see who’s interested, you know.’

I looked at him inquiringly.

‘Only three of ’em in it[18], I should say,’ said my friend. ‘Whetherby from Helminster. He’s the builder, you know. Then Dakham and Coombe, bidding on behalf of some Liverpool firm, I understand, and a dark horse from London, too, I should say a lawyer. Of course there may be more in it than that, but those seemed the main ones to me. It’ll go cheap. That’s what everyone says.’

‘Because of the place’s reputation?’ I asked.

‘Oh, you’ve heard about Gipsy’s Acre, have you? That’s only what the country people say. Rural Council ought to have altered that road years ago – it’s a death trap.’

‘But the place has got a bad reputation?’

‘I tell you that’s just superstition. Anyway, as I say, the real business’ll happen now behind the scenes, you know. They’ll go and make offers. I’d say the Liverpool people might get it. I don’t think Whetherby’ll go high enough. He likes buying cheap. Plenty of properties coming into the market nowadays for development. After all, it’s not many people who could afford to buy the place, pull that ruined house down and put up another house there, could they?’

‘Doesn’t seem to happen very often nowadays,’ I said.

‘Too difficult. What with taxation and one thing and another, and you can’t get domestic help in the country. No, people would rather pay thousands for a luxury flat in a town nowadays up on the sixteenth floor of a modern building. Big unwieldy country houses are a drag on the market.’

‘But you could build a modern house,’ I argued. ‘Labour-saving.’

‘You could, but it’s an expensive business and people aren’t so fond of living lonely.’

‘Some people might be,’ I said.

He laughed and we parted. I walked along, frowning, puzzling to myself. My feet took me without my really noticing where I was going along the road between the trees and up, up to the curving road that led between the trees to the moorlands.

And so I came to the spot in the road where I first saw Ellie. As I said, she was standing just by a tall fir tree and she had the look, if I can explain it, of someone who hadn’t been there a moment before but had just materialized, as it were, out of the tree. She was wearing a sort of dark green tweed and her hair was the soft brown colour of an autumn leaf and there was something a bit unsubstantial about her. I saw her and I stopped. She was looking at me, her lips just parted, looking slightly startled. I suppose I looked startled too. I wanted to say something and I didn’t quite know what to say. Then I said:

‘Sorry. I – I didn’t mean to startle you. I didn’t know there was anyone here.’

She said, and her voice was very soft and gentle, it might have been a little girl’s voice but not quite. She said:

‘It’s quite all right. I mean, I didn’t think anyone would be here either.’ She looked round her and said, ‘It – it’s a lonely spot.’ And she shivered just a little.

There was rather a chilly wind that afternoon. But perhaps it wasn’t the wind. I don’t know. I came a step or two nearer.

‘It is a sort of scary place rather, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I mean, the house being a ruin the way it is.’

‘The Towers,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘That was the name of it, wasn’t it – only I mean, there don’t seem to have been any towers.’

‘I expect that was just a name,’ I said. ‘People call their houses names like The Towers to make them sound grander than they are.’

She laughed just a little. ‘I suppose that was it,’ she said. ‘This – perhaps you know, I’m not sure – this is the place that they’re selling today or putting up for auction?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve come from the auction now.’

‘Oh.’ She sounded startled. ‘Were you – are you – interested?’

‘I’m not likely to buy a ruined house with a few hundred acres of woodland land,’ I said. ‘I’m not in that class.’

‘Was it sold?’ she asked.

‘No, it didn’t come up to reserve[19].’

‘Oh. I see.’ She sounded relieved.

‘You didn’t want to buy it either, did you?’ I said.

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘of course not.’ She sounded nervous about it.

I hesitated and then I blurted out the words that came to my lips.

‘I’m pretending,’ I said. ‘I can’t buy it, of course, because I haven’t got any money, but I’m interested. I’d like to buy it. I want to buy it. Open your mouth and laugh at me if you like but that’s the way it is.’

‘But isn’t it rather too decrepit, too —’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I don’t mean I want it like it is now. I want to pull this down, cart it all away. It’s an ugly house and I think it must have been a sad house. But this place isn’t sad or ugly. It’s beautiful. Look here. Come a little this way, through the trees. Look out at the view that way where it goes to the hills and the moors. D’you see[20]? Clear away a vista here – and then you come this way —’

I took her by the arm and led her to a second point of the compass. If we were behaving unconventionally she did not notice it. Anyway, it wasn’t that kind of way I was holding her. I wanted to show her what I saw.

‘Here,’ I said, ‘here you see where it sweeps down to the sea and where the rocks show out there. There’s a town between us and that but we can’t see it because of the hills bulging out farther down the slope. And then you can look a third way, to a vague foresty valley. Do you see now if you cut down trees and make big vistas and clear this space round the house, do you see what a beautiful house you could have here? You wouldn’t site it where the old one is. You’d go about fifty – a hundred yards to the right, here. This is where you could have a house, a wonderful house. А house built by an architect who’s a genius.’

‘Do you know any architects who are geniuses?’ She sounded doubtful.

‘I know one,’ I said.

Then I started telling her about Santonix. We sat down side by side on a fallen tree and I talked. Yes, I talked to that slender woodland girl whom I’d never seen before and I put all I had into what I was telling her. I told her the dream that one could build up.

‘It won’t happen,’ I said, ‘I know that. It couldn’t happen. But think. Think into it just like I’m thinking into it. There we’d cut the trees and there we’d open up, and we’d plant things, rhododendrons and azaleas, and my friend Santonix would come. He’d cough a good deal because I think he’s dying of consumption or something but he could do it. He could do it before he died. He could build the most wonderful house. You don’t know what his houses are like. He builds them for very rich people and they have to be people who want the right thing. I don’t mean the right thing in the conventional sense. Things people who want a dream come true want. Something wonderful.’

‘I’d want a house like that,’ said Ellie. ‘You make me see it, feel it… Yes, this would be a lovely place to live. Everything one has dreamed of come true. One could live here and be free, not hampered, not tied round by people pushing you into doing everything you don’t want, keeping you from doing anything you do want. Oh I am so sick of my life and the people who are round me and everything!’

That’s the way it began, Ellie and I together. Me with my dreams and she with her revolt against her life. We stopped talking and looked at each other.

‘What’s your name?’ she said.

‘Mike Rogers,’ I said. ‘Michael Rogers,’ I amended. ‘What’s yours?’

‘Fenella.’ She hesitated and then said, ‘Fenella Goodman,’ looking at me with a rather troubled expression.

This didn’t seem to take us much further but we went on looking at each other. We both wanted to see each other again – but just for the moment we didn’t know how to set about it.

Chapter 5

Well, that’s how it began between Ellie and myself. It didn’t really go along so very quickly, because we both had our secrets. Both had things we wanted to keep from the other and so we couldn’t tell each other as much about ourselves as we might have done, and that kept bringing us up sharp, as it were, against a kind of barrier. We couldn’t bring things into the open[21] and say, ‘When shall we meet again? Where can I find you? Where do you live?’ Because, you see, if you ask the other person that, they’d expect you to tell the same.

Fenella looked apprehensive when she gave me her name. So much so that I thought for a moment that it mightn’t be her real name. I almost thought that she might have made it up! But of course I knew that that was impossible. I’d given her my real name.

We didn’t know quite how to take leave of each other that day. It was awkward. It had become cold and we wanted to wander down from The Towers – but what then? Rather awkwardly, I said tentatively:

‘Are you staying round here?[22]’

She said she was staying in Market Chadwell. That was a market town not very far away. It had, I knew, a large hotel, three-starred. She’d be staying there, I guessed. She said, with something of the same awkwardness, to me:

‘Do you live here?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t live here. I’m only here for the day.’

Then a rather awkward silence fell. She gave a faint shiver. А cold little wind had come up.

‘We’d better walk,’ I said, ‘and keep ourselves warm. Are you – have you got a car or are you going by bus or train?’

She said she’d left the car in the village.

‘But I’ll be quite all right,’ she said.

She seemed a little nervous. I thought perhaps she wanted to get rid of me but didn’t quite know how to manage it. I said:

‘We’ll walk down, shall we, just as far as the village?’

She gave me a quick grateful look then. We walked slowly down the winding road on which so many car accidents had happened. As we came round a corner, a figure stepped suddenly from beneath the shelter of the fir tree. It appeared so suddenly that Ellie gave a start and said, ‘Oh!’ It was the old woman I had seen the other day in her cottage garden. Mrs Lee. She looked a great deal wilder today with a tangle of black hair blowing in the wind and a scarlet cloak round her shoulders; the commanding stance she took up made her look taller.

‘And what would you be doing, my dears?’ she said. ‘What brings you to Gipsy’s Acre?’

‘Oh,’ Ellie said, ‘we aren’t trespassing, are we?’

‘That’s as may be. Gipsies’ land this used to be. Gipsies’ land and they drove us off it. You’ll do no good here, and no good will come to you prowling about Gipsy’s Acre.’ There was no fight in Ellie, she wasn’t that kind. She said gently and politely:

‘I’m very sorry if we shouldn’t have come here. I thought this place was being sold today.’

‘And bad luck it will be to anyone who buys it!’ said the old woman. ‘You listen, my pretty, for you’re pretty enough, bad luck will come to whoever buys it. There’s a curse on this land, a curse put on it long ago, many years ago. You keep clear of it.[23] Don’t have nought to do with Gipsy’s Acre. Death it will bring you and danger. Go away home across the sea and don’t come back to Gipsy’s Acre. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

‘We’re doing no harm.’

‘Come now, Mrs Lee,’ I said, ‘don’t frighten this young lady.’

I turned in an explanatory way to Ellie.

‘Mrs Lee lives in the village. She’s got a cottage there. She tells fortunes and prophesies the future. All that, don’t you, Mrs Lee?’ I spoke to her in a jocular way.

‘I’ve got the gift,’ she said simply, drawing her gipsy-like figure up straighter still. ‘I’ve got the gift. It’s born in me. We all have it. I’ll tell your fortune, young lady. Cross my palm with silver and I’ll tell your fortune for you.’

‘I don’t think I want my fortune told.’

‘It’d be a wise thing to do. Know something about the future. Know what to avoid, know what’s coming to you if you don’t take care. Come now, there’s plenty of money in your pocket. Plenty of money. I know things it would be wise for you to know.’

I believe the urge to have one’s fortune told is almost invariable in women. I’ve noticed it before with girls I knew. I nearly always had to pay for them to go into the fortune-tellers’ booths if I took them to a fair. Ellie opened her bag and laid two half-crowns in the old woman’s hand.

‘Ah, my pretty, that’s right now. You hear what old Mother Lee will tell you.’

Ellie drew off her glove and laid her small delicate palm in the old woman’s hand. She looked down at it, muttering to herself. ‘What do I see now? What do I see?’

Suddenly she dropped Ellie’s hand abruptly.

‘I’d go away from here if I were you. Go – and don’t come back! That’s what I told you just now and it’s true. I’ve seen it again in your palm. Forget Gipsy’s Acre, forget you ever saw it. And it’s not just the ruined house up there, it’s the land itself that’s cursed.’

‘You’ve got a mania about that,’ I said roughly. ‘Anyway the young lady has nothing to do with the land here. She’s only here for a walk today, she’s nothing to do with the neighbourhood.’