Nightmare

‘You’re not going to do anything, Si? Don’t. It will only make things worse.’

He came out of his brooding reverie and laughed harshly.

‘Do anything? Yes. I’m going to wash the kitchen floor.’

‘Let me help you to move the things out. I’ve finished all my darning.’

But he twisted away from her, freeing himself from her hands impatiently. ‘No. Don’t worry me, Elsa. Just leave me to myself.’

Incredulously her eyes followed him, hoping that he would turn back to her. His hands—Simon’s hands—the gentlest, tenderest hands in all the world, had pushed her off—pushed her off quite roughly—so roughly that one of her elbows had struck the balusters behind her sharply. Oblivious of the deafening uproar that raged within a few feet of her, she strove with that unbelievable fact, refusing to believe it, trying to find excuse for its devastating reality. An intolerable sense of separation and loneliness fell about her like a dark mist. She became conscious of a little nervous tic beating at the corner of her mouth. With a determined effort she smiled, bracing her whole body with a deep breath.

The coppery glare that announced the near approach of the storm, passing in through the kitchen windows, reached her and detached her vividly against the darkness of the little unlighted passage. When Whalley turned at the bathroom door to ask: ‘Tea at a quarter to five—will that do? I shan’t finish until then,’ he saw her so, illuminated as if by a baleful spotlight. The whistle was blowing again now—in the coal-cellar, apparently—and its shrill screaming blended with the blare of the gramophone and the thudding smash of the coal in an orchestra of almost stunning viciousness. The small, trim, beloved figure, despite its erectness, seemed to him suddenly forlorn—menaced. A little chill passed between her and his eyes and made her indistinct. His heart missed a beat.

Absurd. He turned about again. Her ‘Of course, dear. Any old time,’ had been whispered along the passage to him laughingly. Unusual lighting effects had always affected his imagination strongly … his invincible, idiotic instinct to dramatise. As for shivers and palpitations, they were familiar enough. He went on into the bathroom, which he used also as his dressing-room.

When its door shut Mrs Whalley returned to the bedroom in which she had been working and, having arranged a number of freshly-darned socks and stockings in neat pairs, put them away in her work-basket, walked slowly to the wardrobe and halted before the long mirror set in its central door.

All her life, in moments of loneliness—before her marriage she had had many of them—she had found comfort and company in her own reflection. It confronted her now—at first reassuringly, extraordinarily unchanged by the strains and stresses of the past two years. Two tiny creases, one beneath each long eye (her eyes looked even longer than usual today, she noticed, and, because her jumper was jade and the light was dull, were bright bronze-flecked emerald) were only detectable when she bent forward until her nose all but touched the glass. There was no other line or wrinkle in the fresh smoothness of her skin, no trace of flabbiness or heaviness along the clean sweep of her jaws, about her resolute chin, or at the corners of her lips. Thank Heaven for that. She had always detested flabbiness of any sort. Her lips (she had never had any need to touch them up) had retained their warm red. Her teeth, save for an occasional stopping, had never given her any trouble. Her hair, without any doubt whatever, had grown brighter in colour and much thicker since, at last, Simon had consented to its cropping four years before. No danger of stoutness for her—another good fortune to be grateful for; she was thinner and lighter than she had been at eighteen. Making allowances for short hair and short skirts, that old, tried friend in the mirror had altered hardly at all in twenty years. If at all, for the better. She had been very lucky.

But as she continued her scrutiny, a vague distrust grew in her. There was some change today in that now detached and aloof image. Her eyes narrowed themselves as she searched for it. Where was it? What was it? Elsa of the mirror refused comfort and company today. Had withdrawn. Had—what? It was as if an Elsa who had been had suddenly stopped being and was looking out at someone else—someone different—someone who, she knew, would be very different. What was it? She frowned. After all—ultimately—one was quite alone—

She turned away from the glass and, moving to the narrow space between the two trim beds, stooped and raised the rug which she had spread over Bogey-Bogey’s basket that, as was his desire, his afternoon sleep might be enjoyed in darkness. Bogey-Bogey appeared, a silken-coated black cocker, curled in a warmly-smelling knot. He had not been asleep; his tail was wagging slowly and his lustrous eyes were wide open. They regarded her with solemn reproach and then, revolving fearfully towards the uproar of the passage, refused to be enticed back to her. Nor would he raise his head from his paws. Even a kiss and the magic word ‘Walky-walk’ evoked from him merely a yawn and a slight increase in the tempo of his tail.

A little sharply, Mrs Whalley routed him out of his basket.

‘Now then, young man. Pull yourself together and get that tail up.’

But Bogey-Bogey’s nerves had been sorely tried recently and the new noise in the passage daunted his small soul beyond trust even in his mistress. He yawned again miserably, and then retired under her bed, reducing himself several sizes. In a vain attempt to dislodge him from this retreat, she struck her nose forcibly against the bed’s iron underframe. A little warm gush of blood descended her chin and when she scrambled to her knees she saw that her jumper—a recent, long-considered purchase—was grievously stained. As she rose to hurry to the wash-stand and sponge away this defilement, holding her already saturated handkerchief to her nose, a crashing peal of thunder, apparently directly above the house, joined itself to the Prossips’ orchestra. Bogey-Bogey yelped shrilly. Mrs Whalley realised that she had a violent headache.

‘Well, well—’ she said aloud and, to her dismay, was suddenly overcome by a gust of dry, choking sobbing. She went on, however, towards the wash-stand, her head thrown back as far as it would go, her free hand guiding her. The jumper must be saved, because it had to last her through the summer. If it was to be saved, the blood must be sponged off at once. Most urgent necessity. Simon, who was liable to come into the bedroom at any moment now that he had abandoned the attempt to work, must on no conceivable account know that misfortune had befallen his birthday gift to her. Any damage done to anything upset him so, now. His hands—Simon’s hands—had pushed her away.

At that moment, as it happened, four other people who resided in various parts of No. 47 Downview Road were thinking about Mrs Whalley.

Upstairs, Marjory Prossip, who hated her passionately, was hoping, while she plied her industrious and skilful needle, that at some time in the immediate future—probably that very afternoon—that conceited, stuck-up little green-eyed thing in the first-floor flat would receive an extremely unpleasant surprise. Her heavy face brightened to a faint animation. What a bit of luck that that little beast of a dog had been alone.

In the ground-floor flat, the elderly Hopgood, who in bygone days had received many a half-crown from Mrs Whalley’s father, and who regarded her, with a rather melancholy tenderness, as one of his last links with a past of incredible brightness now vanished for ever, was thinking about her rubbish-bin.

The rubbish bins of the other tenants were kept in the front garden, imperfectly concealed in a recess under the bottom flight of the outside staircase. Mr and Mrs Whalley, however, preferred to keep theirs on their landing of the staircase, outside their hall-door. Lately the Corporation’s scavengers had been kicking up a fuss about having to go up to the landing for the bin, and, upon their last call, had refused point-blank to do so. To Hopgood’s indignation, they had been impertinent to Mrs Whalley when she had remonstrated with them. As he smoked his pipe and waited for his tea-kettle to boil, Hopgood decided that he would himself carry down Mrs Whalley’s bin to the front garden each Monday and Thursday afternoon and carry it up again when it had been emptied into the Corporation cart.

Pleased with this solution of Mrs Whalley’s little difficulty, Hopgood proceeded to the brewing of his tea. He had been really shocked by the way in which the Corporation men—two great, hulking, grinning young louts—had spoken to her and looked at her. Especially the way they had looked at her—looked at her legs—looked her all over, grinning—as if she was one of the young sluts they messed about with. People of that kind, Hopgood had noticed—messengers, vanmen, bus-conductors—in fact, the lower classes generally—had suddenly become markedly uncivil and aggressive lately. He had thought a good deal about this, and, for some reason which he could not quite explain, he was somehow uneasy about it. Things had got queer, somehow. All those things in the newspapers now—wars and disasters and revolutions and suicides and murders. Everything had got queer, somehow, this year. It was pleasant to see a lady like Mrs Whalley tripping in and out with her little spaniel—a bit of the old times still left—something you could look up to and feel sure about … Looking at her legs … The swine.

Below him, in the basement flat, the lonely Mr Ridgeway was also meditating a small service to her. In his dark, dampish-smelling sitting-room—only the upper halves of its windows rose above the level of the front-garden—he was re-reading once more a letter which he had written three days before.

‘DEAR MRS WHALLEY,—I am returning, with gratitude, the books which you so kindly lent me some time ago. I have read them with much interest. Please accept my apologies for having kept them so long. But I am the slowest of readers.

‘Since our last meeting I have heard from a medical friend who is specially interested in your husband’s trouble. I enclose some cuttings which he has sent me with reference to a new extract from which excellent results have been obtained, and hope your husband will be persuaded to give the accompanying small supply of it a trial.

‘Yrs sincerely,

‘AMBROSE RIDGEWAY.’

He laid the letter down and sat back in his chair, a stoutish, untidy man of fifty-five or so, with a rather gross and bloated face which had once been handsome and was still redeemed by a pair of very fine eyes. Presently, he told himself, he would shave and put on a clean collar and shirt and his good suit and go up the steep steps to deliver his note and his two small parcels. Perhaps it would be she who would open the door—more probably her husband. Though, in the afternoon he tried to work—poor devil.

Presently, though. There was plenty of time, and not often something to look forward to.

His eyes rested upon the medical journals from which he had clipped the cuttings several days before. They still lay open upon a small table, grey with the dust of Downview Road. Misgiving grew again in him. Was it wise to associate himself in any way with medical matters?

After some meditation he tore up his letter, dropped one of the parcels into a drawer, and then stretched himself on a sofa, covering his face with a dingy handkerchief. He would write just a note of thanks, returning the books.

But presently. There was plenty of time. It was raining. Tomorrow would do just as well.

Harvey Knayle also was thinking just then of Mrs Whalley, in whom, as we shall see, he took an interest of a somewhat complicated kind. He was standing in Edwarde-Lewin’s study, whither they had retired to discuss, before tea, a projected fortnight’s fishing in Ireland, and, while his host fumbled in a drawer, he was telling about the Prossips’ gramophone.

‘What’s the law of the thing, Lewin?’ he asked, jingling his loose silver. ‘How many times may the chap in the flat over you play the same tune on his gramophone continuously before you can take legal action to make him stop?’

Edwarde-Lewin ceased for a moment to be a genial sportsman and became a discouraging solicitor.

‘You can’t stop him,’ he replied curtly. ‘He may play it all day and all night if he wants to. You have no legal redress. Unless you can prove malice.’

‘Now, how does one prove malice?’ enquired Mr Knayle.

‘Just so,’ snapped Edwarde-Lewin, and immediately resumed his geniality and his fumbling. ‘Now, where the deuce did I put that confounded letter—’ He remembered that he had perused, personally, Mr Knayle’s agreement at the time of his last moving. ‘But the lease of that flat of yours is nearly up, as well as I remember. Noisy place, Downview Road, now. You won’t stay on there, will you?’

To his own surprise, Mr Knayle suddenly abandoned a decision at which, upon prolonged and anxious consideration, he had all but arrived that afternoon.

‘Oh yes, I shall stay on,’ he said quite definitely. ‘I’m used to the noise now. Noises don’t worry me. Besides, I like the look-out over the Downs. No houses opposite. Oh yes. I shall stay on.’

Edwarde-Lewin found the missing letter and proceeded to read it aloud. Mr Knayle, however, although, as has been said, he was an ardent fisherman, looked out at the already soaked tennis-courts and went on thinking about the real reason which had decided him to keep on his flat in Downview Road.

5

While he shut the bathroom door, Whalley looked at his wrist-watch. Five past four. He had been sure that it was not yet a quarter to. The kitchen floor always took an hour and a half to do—two hours if one washed the skirtings and the other paintwork. He couldn’t hope now to finish before half-past five. This alteration of a quarter of an hour in his plans threw him into a flurry. He changed feverishly into the old trousers and dilapidated pullover in which he did his housework and, hurrying to the kitchen, began to move its movable furniture out into the passage.

Once a week for the past eighteen months he had performed this detested task—the most detested and most troublesome of the drudgery to which circumstances had doomed him. Like that of all others, its procedure was now stereotyped—a sequence of merely automatic gestures requiring no least direction from will or judgment or even consciousness. He began it, as always, by carrying out the two chairs into the passage and, as he did so, his impatience, already fatigued, rushed on ahead in desperation, foreseeing every dull, familiar detail of the labour before him, every smallest necessary movement, every trifling difficulty, every unavoidabe compromise with the ideal of a perfect kitchen floor perfectly washed.

After the chairs, the small table by the right hand window to be carried into the passage—far enough along it to leave room for the other things to follow it. Then the three baskets in which Elsa kept vegetables and fruit. Then the little cake-larder, which stood on the floor because the walls wouldn’t hold nails securely. Then the set of shelves on which the saucepans and pan stood and hung. Some of them would fall and kick up a clatter. Then the small table by the sink. Then the basins stacked under it. Then the kitchen bin. (That would have to be washed out with hot water and disinfected when it had been emptied into the big bin outside the hall-door). Then the bread-bin and the flour-bin and the three empty biscuit tins under the big table. Then the big table itself (it had to be turned side up to get it through the door and even then its legs had to be screwed through one by one). Then all the small oddments kept on the floor along the walls, because there was no other place to keep them—unused things, most of them—obsolete trays and grids belonging to the electric-cooker—old boxes and jam pots and tins—kept because they might be useful some time.

The sweeping, then—the same old places that took so much time to get into with the sweeping-brush, the same old snags that caught its loose head, the same old stoopings and twistings to get the same old dust and dirt out. Then the dustpan to gather up the dirt. The dustpan to be emptied into the bin. Then the bucket to be rooted out of the cupboard under the sink (it always jammed against the sink’s waste-pipe) and taken to the bathroom and filled with hot water from the geyser. The scrubbing brush and floor-cloths and soap to be collected from the bathroom cupboard. The bucket to be carried back along the blocked passage to the kitchen, very slowly, lest the water should splash over—

At this point, while he hurried from kitchen to passage and back again, his eyes, at each return, fixing themselves for a moment frowningly on the dresser-clock, he began again the old, never-decided debate as to the wisdom of washing the linoleum covering the floor—an expensive, inlaid linoleum which had been a special pride of Elsa’s in the days of the kitchen’s first freshness. Someone had told Elsa that linoleum ought to be washed—with a dash of paraffin in the water. Someone else had told her that it ought to be washed with Lux. Someone else had told her that it ought never to be washed on any account, but done with polish. He had tried various polishes. Certainly the linoleum had looked better when polished—it always looked grey and dull after washing. But the polishes all left a greasy surface in which dirt lodged. Anyhow, the last tin of polish was practically finished now. The linoleum would have to be washed today—

A vibration—and then a new noise rose in pitch and, piercing a way through the uproar of the Prossips’ offensive, became the strident clamour of a plane, flying very low, over the house. It came into view—was illuminated by a blinding flash of lightning—went on its serene, unswerving way, undismayed by the crashing peal that followed. Whalley’s eyes watched it until it disappeared over the tree-tops. He smiled bitterly at a vision of its pilot—young, fearless, efficient—a man doing a man’s job while he washed the kitchen floor.

Twenty past four—and practically nothing done yet. He fell upon the miniature dresser upon which the pans and saucepans were arranged and lifted it towards the door. A pan and two saucepans fell noisily to the floor. As he deposited his burden in the passage, the bombardment in the Prossips’ coal-cellar ceased sharply and the whistle fell to silence. Footsteps had hurried from the top-flat’s sitting-room; the gramophone stopped. While Whalley stood, vaguely debating the reason of this sudden cessation of hostilities, the bell of his own hall-door rang.

After a brief hesitation—for he disliked being seen in his working-clothes by anyone but his wife—he descended to the door and, opening it, saw his landlord, Mr Penfold, standing in the rain beneath a streaming umbrella. The sudden lull upstairs was explained. By unfortunate chance, the enemy had observed Mr Penfold’s approach—no doubt had seen him—from their sitting-room windows, alight from a bus opposite the front garden’s gate.

There had been trouble with Penfold—a truculent individual, by avocation a commercial traveller, who had inherited Nos. 47 and 48 Downview Road from an aunt deceased some few years before. The Whalleys had moved into the flat rather hurriedly, accepting a merely verbal assurance that it would be ‘done up’ in the following spring. But when the following spring arrived, Penfold had refused to remember having given any assurance of any kind as to doing anything. There had been interviews and, subsequently, correspondence, in the course of which he had passed from evasion to incivility and from incivility to impertinence. Finally Whalley had had the kitchen, the dining-room, and the bedroom repainted and repapered at his own cost, and had consoled himself by the fact that he had never since seen his landlord’s face.

It was a large, heavy-jowled face, out of which a pair of cunning little eyes looked at him now with unconcealed hostility. Without moving any part of it visibly, Penfold said at once:

‘Afternoon. What’s this I hear about that dog of yours?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ replied Whalley. ‘Do come in, won’t you?’

Ignoring the invitation to enter, Penfold surveyed the old trousers and pull-over at his leisure and sniffed. Then, taking a fresh stand with his square-toed boots, he transferred his gaze to the cover of the rubbish-bin.

‘Oh! You’ve no idea. I see. Well, I’ll give you an idea, then. I have received complaints from the other tenants of these flats that your dog has been molesting them—attacking them and causing them annoyance and nuisance.’

‘Who has complained, Mr Penfold?’

‘Never you mind.’ Penfold’s hand swept the question aside. ‘That is what I am informed. And I’m satisfied that I’m correctly informed. So we won’t argue about the point.’

‘I haven’t the slightest intention of arguing about it,’ Whalley retorted sharply. ‘Or about anything else. If you have any complaint to make, put it in writing and I’ll pass it on to my solicitors—if I think it worth while doing so.’

Highly amused, Penfold threw back his head and guffawed. He turned then and feigned to depart, but stopped and delivered his ultimatum over a shoulder.

‘Now, listen here, Mister Whalley—as you’re talking about solicitors. According to your agreement, you are permitted to keep a dog in this flat only on the condition that it causes no annoyance to any of the other tenants. Your dog has caused such annoyance. It attacked one of the other tenants savagely. Jumped up on her and tried to bite her hands. It alarmed her so that she was obliged to remain in bed for two days with a heart attack. I give you notice now to get rid of it immediately. If you fail to do so before this day week, I will instruct my solicitors to take action to compel you to keep to the terms of your agreement.’

‘You can start taking them now, damn you,’ snapped Whalley.

Again Mr Penfold surveyed the old trousers and pullover exhaustively as if expecting to extract from them an explanation of his tenant’s childish ill-temper. He sniffed again, then, and turning away irrevocably went down the steps with threatening slowness and heaviness. As Whalley slammed the hall-door, a voice, humming with exaggerated blitheness above his head, informed him that the interview had had an audience. He made his way slowly back along the crowded passage towards the kitchen, revolving wrathfully this latest manœuvre of the Prossips.

The crude but effective ingenuity of it exasperated him—all the more because its malice was feminine and, he knew, had aimed itself more especially at Elsa. For Bogey-Bogey, though he tolerated a master, had but one god and was entirely the property of his mistress—her inseparable companion and, as the Prossips could not have failed to learn from the daily observation of the six months for which they had occupied the top flat, the light of her eyes. They had struck at her most vulnerable point—at his, because the blow was aimed at her.

Savage attack.

The facts were that one day about a week before, Bogey-Bogey, the gentlest and best-tempered of creatures, had escaped into the front garden and, encountering Mrs Prossip and her daughter there, had, after his inveterate habit of doing the wrong thing, rushed at her joyously and jumped up on her skirts. The Prossip girl had jabbed him savagely with her sunshade and he had fled back whimpering to Elsa, who had witnessed the incident from the kitchen and had hurried out to his rescue. She had met the female Prossips on the steps, but they had made no complaint at that time. It had obviously taken them some days to discover that Bogey-Bogey had placed a new weapon in their hands and to induce that brute Penfold to wield it for them. Not that he was likely to have required much inducement—swine. God! What a face—what eyes.

Victoriously, refreshed by its rest, the gramophone resumed its blaring. He walked slowly back along the passage until he stood almost directly beneath the sound, and stood looking up. Its position could be calculated almost exactly.