what
they’d planned – ?”
He broke off, suddenly staring down at the far side of the roof,
into the garden. Her eyes followed his: a long faint ray of bluish
light wavered over gravel, a bush, an edge of the lawn. In the trees,
somewhere, a bird gave a croak of terror. Phyllida’s teeth chattered;
she pressed her hand to her mouth lest she be betrayed by the very
sound. Felix, meanwhile, had whisked round to face the window
behind them – his eyeballs shone out, unearthly: a candle was
creeping upstairs. As one, the two fugitives flung themselves flat,
face down – blotted out, they dared hope, on the roof’s leaded
blackness. The candle hesitated, inside the window, but then went
on up: soon its trail of gleams could be traced through the attic
skylights. “That was old Claud’s step,” Felix muttered. “Must have
been sent to look for us. But just as glad not to find us, if you ask
me. He . . . Oh my gosh, darling, hold on – !”
They held on. Below, the silence was rent by the prolonged,
demonic shriek of a cat. Hell seemed to jag through the air at them
– where would it ever stop?
“Get me out of this . . .” Phyllida moaned at last. “Can we climb
down, shin down a pipe, jump? Dead or living, I won’t go back
through that house!”
They found themselves in the garden, with nothing worse than
scraped hands, bruised knees and elbows and, on Phyllida’s part,
torn nylons. (Not for nothing had Felix mountaineered over the
roofs of Ravenswood, as a child.) From the lawn, the unnatural blue
ray had faded out: now, however, a sort of fulvous
12
glow pulsed
from between the cracks of the drawing-room shutters; and, as they
watched the silhouette of the house, sulphur-pale smoke, luminous
in the surrounding night, began to come puff by puff from the
drawing-room chimney. Within, a monstrous bellows must be at
work.
“My . . .” breathed Phyllida.
“Yes, they’re going strong,” said Felix, staring with bitter face. He
added, almost harshly: “Come on, let’s get going. Seen enough?
Then what are we waiting for?”
They stepped back – and none too soon. For the hall door burst
open, swinging wide on its hinges, and Miss Battiter, long hair
streaming, uttering a shrill whinny, bounded over the threshold,
with Uncle Ben in his chair giving close chase. The chair lurched
down the porch steps, swayed back again into balance and resumed,
at top speed, its malevolent course. Felix pulled trembling Phyllida
into a bank of shrubs, just in time – pursued and pursuer were
headed their way, and, a split second later, came whistling past. A
scorched smell remained, to hang on the air. The desperate scutter
of flat feet, the crash of branches, the rubber-shod bouncing and
swish of the flying chair-wheels died out, at last, far away in the
grounds.
“So, what?” said Phyllida.
“Battiter’s nerves have cracked. Hope she does make a getaway,
but I doubt it. I somehow thought that would happen, one of these
evenings. – All clear, I think – for the moment. Come on, come
on
!”
“But where to, where to?”
“I’ve got friends in a farmhouse; they’ll take us in, I know.”
Serpentine, the sheltering line of shrubs led through to the
stygian gloom of the drive; down which, pausing to listen, not
daring to speak, they groped. At the end, the spiked gates were
locked: interminably, they edged their way along the inside of the
wall, till their fingers happened, with joy, upon strong-stemmed ivy.
To climb, to drop down on the other side on to the cushiony grass
verge of the road, was the work of minutes which seemed blessedly
few. There they stood, smelling the woods, hearing the brook –
Phyllida drew her first free breath, and Felix kissed her. Hand in
hand, they set off towards Little Birdover.
“All the same,” she said, “how did
you
get into this?”
“You may well ask. I must seem a weak, blind fool! From the start
I’ve never liked Aunt Eugenia, but to come to believing
this
of her
was another matter. I don’t really know when I first smelled a rat;
and it was only last year, I had to face the worst. Since I’ve been a
boy she’s kept me hanging around; handing me fat cheques every
Christmas and on my birthdays – either as bribes or hush-money, as
I see it now. For some time I’ve felt bad about taking her tips, when
I didn’t like her, but to tell you the truth, I’ve sometimes hardly
known where to turn. A succession of jobs packed up on me – I
swear, through no fault of mine: possibly Auntie put the evil eye on
them – my mother’s an invalid, with no one but me in the world; she
needs comfort and care, and I’d hate to see her go short. That’s, at
least, how things have been up to lately. However, just this last
month I’ve landed up in work with a good big firm which cannot but
stay the course: it offers me a pretty solid future. So, I came to
Ravenswood
this
year just for the pleasure of tearing Auntie’s cheque
up, saying I’d repay others, and warning her I’d got wise to her little
games. I didn’t just want to fade out; I wanted to snap her hold on
me – though, frankly, easier said than done.”
“What did she want
you
for, though? Also for witchcraft?”
“Some idea, I daresay, of passing it down through the family, to
the next generation – not enough to have roped in that wretched
Claud. But also she kept on hoping I’d bring a girl here to stay –
‘Have you
no
nice, pretty friend?’ she’d keep on and on at me. She
and Uncle Ben have reached a point in their rites when they cannot
get further without a girl to work on: and no one from round
here, of course, would come next or near the place – you know how
quickly rumours get round the country . . . What was my horror,
when I arrived this morning, to hear they’d succeeded in trapping
somebody –
you
! I at once tore back into Brindford, to meet that
train you were thought to be coming on, with the idea that, by
some
means, I’d head you off. When you weren’t on it, I like a fool
decided you’d somehow got wind of the matter, or simply changed
your mind. So I trundled back here to stage my big scene with
Auntie. Why I didn’t wait for that later train, I can’t think.”
“I might, of course, have simply thought you were mad.”
“You don’t think so
now
, Phyllida?” he said soberly. Their handclasp tightened; Phyllida shook her head.
“Nothing at all to say?” asked Felix softly.
“Not yet, I don’t think.”
“Neither have I, then – yet. One day, I’m going to say, ‘I love
you.’”
Ahead of them, the village church clock struck midnight. This, at
last, was tomorrow – and Christmas Day.
At the farmhouse, the good people asked few questions. Tea was
made and drunk in the cheerful kitchen; while, upstairs, an extra
truckle bed was being got ready for Phyllida, in the children’s attic.
Her last waking sight was of two small cherubic forms tucked up
in cots, from whose ends hung bulging stockings: Santa Claus,
apparently, had already called. Cheek, then, upon her own pillow,
she blissfully knew no more.
She was not to know, for instance, that, soon after, the attic
ceiling was lit by a distant fiery glow, or that the yard outside,
together with all the village, rang with movement, echoed with
urgent calls and the clink of buckets hurriedly drawn from wells.
Dreamlessly, Phyllida slept on: she thereby missed the excitement
which kept all Little Birdover up and about that night. Ravenswood
Hall – who knew quite at what hour? – had burst into flames, to
become a blazing furnace long before help arrived. So great had
been the heat that it cracked the walls: they fell, leaving nothing,
this Christmas morning, but fuming rubble. Unaccountable rings of
footprints, it was reported, remained on the ashes which blackened
and strewed the earth.
13
Home for Christmas
M
illie at once saw, from the light on their bedroom
ceiling, that snow must have fallen during the night. As though
someone had spoken, she woke from a deep, plausible dream to the
unreality of this unknown spare room silently glared into by the
snow. The satin pattern on the blue wallpaper glimmered, and the
white door through to the dressingroom, the white mantlepiece
seemed to be carved out of something solidly bright. Someone must
have been in and gone out (with a glance at them both sleeping) for
the curtains had been drawn right back, the gas fire lit, and an oval
tea-tray stood on the commode between the two beds. At the far
side of the commode, the tray and the lamp, Tom lay like a papoose,
rigidly sleeping, rolled in his eiderdown. His profile was thrust into
the pillow. The Edwardian white ends of the two beds cut off most
of the room.
Millie lay enjoying the silence. Their voyage home had been
long: she was still glad not to waken to the dragging sound of the
sea, the straining sounds of the ship.
They had arrived last night – Tom, in his agitation, running the
car on to the edge of the lawn. Tom must have driven thousands of
times through his father’s gate, yet (because she was there?) he
seemed not to know the way: he had swerved too wide at every turn
of the drive, so that their lights veered madly over the evergreens.
In fact, he had given Millie every reason to fear that this important
night of bringing his bride home might coincide with one of his
“queernesses.” But once they were inside, in the red hall, with his
family lined up, smiling, everything had gone better. Millie was just
that bride all young men’s families hope to welcome some day – she
was small but not silly-looking, her smile was composed but eager;
she lifted her golden-brown eyes, beaming, to each face. For their
parts, Tom’s family had been almost effusively kind – in fact, it all
went off with immense smoothness as though the arrival had been
rehearsed. So much so that Millie said to herself, how is it that
important things in one’s life seem always to have happened before?
Even Tom played his role with a weary exactitude.
Had
it all been
hollow? . . . She had just wondered enough to be glad of the snow
this morning – it should keep the first day here pitched on a merry
plane.
Tom so often woke up tense and silent that Millie, though
disappointed, thought little of it when he
3
said nothing about the
snow. He got up as soon as he woke and stood in the bow window,
looking out in a queer, rather caged way. In fact, you would think
from the way he looked at the lawn, that an enemy had followed
him to the door. “It will make such a Christmassy Christmas,” Millie
ventured. “Have you often had a white Christmas here before?”
“Once. Last time,” said Tom. He walked off to his dressingroom.
Millie had an equable temperament. While she was dressing, she
looked out at blackbirds making prints on the lawn. She hummed,
and merrily clattered her jade-backed brushes. She got down a little
late, though before Tom: the family – Mr. and Mrs. Brosset, Aunt
Shandie and Tom’s two sisters Olivia and Wendie – smiled from the
breakfast table as she came in. The mantlepiece was crowded with
Christmas cards, also depicting snow-scenes. The solid diningroom
was stuck over with holly and mistletoe. Millie thought some talk
had stopped when she came in, but now she sat down it all started
again.
“I do like a white Christmas,” said Millie, unfolding her napkin
and looking down happily at her sausage. “Tom says you had snow
last time he was here for Christmas.”
“Why, yes,” said Mrs. Brosset, with just a glance at the others. “I
believe we did. Why, yes; we certainly did.”
Then Tom came down, and once more they were all smiling. But
while they smiled constraint fell on the room.
It was twelve o’clock in the morning: Tom and his sister Olivia stood
in the window of the morningroom. Millie had gone to the town
with her mother-in-law and Wendie; they all had to do that lastminute shopping that nearly always crops up on Christmas Eve.
Aunt Shandie had taken holly round to the church. But though the
house sounded empty, Olivia had carefully shut the morningroom
door, and she and Tom talked in stealthily lowered voices. She said:
“You don’t think she’s noticing anything?”
“Why should she? She’s new to everything here. You don’t know
Millie,” said Tom. “She’s easy-going; she never bothers much about
anything. If she weren’t like that I could never go through with –
this
.”
“Do
you
really know Millie?” said Olivia sternly, fixing on Tom
her direct, reflective stare. “She might notice a hundred things and
not tell you. The fact is, she is pretty frightened of you.”
Tom returned Olivia’s look – then he jerked away and looked out,
so that the white reflection froze his face. “
Why
bring this all up?”
he said. “The others have got more feeling – they haven’t as much
as looked crooked at me.”
“But you and I know more than the others, Tom.”
“If there just wasn’t
snow
,” he said. “Snow, of all things! Snow
now
,
of all times. Snow waiting for me . . .” He got out his cigarette case,
but this was a mistake, for his hands shook. Tom said: “I could swear
she
sent the snow.”
The fall had not been heavy: snow just powdered the trees,
glittering as the sun crept through a film. The dark brick gabled
house looked almost plum-colour as Millie, with her mother-in-law
and Wendie, scrunched gaily round the bend of the avenue. They
were all three chattering – after weeks of honeymoon Millie was
glad to be back in women’s society. Parcels filled their baskets
or twirled from their fingers on string loops. “Why, look,” cried
Wendie, “there’s Tom at the window, watching for us.” She gave
Millie a sly, flattering smile.
“He doesn’t see us,” said Millie, impassively.