Authors: Celia Fremlin
Even Herbert couldn’t, when it came to the point. Impossible he might be, and every bit as selfish as his wife claimed, but all the same the thought of Imogen’s loneliness seemed to work on him just as it had on the others, like a stick of gelignite. He arrived, small and shame-faced, and as if the Hounds of Hell were after him, on the day before Christmas Eve.
Imogen, of course, tried to be nice about it: he wasn’t
her
husband. She greeted him at least civilly, her brain a-whirl with
calculations
about where to put him if he and Dot were still supposed to be quarrelling; while Dot, a little in the background, looked him up and down with a knowing, I-told-you-so sort of look.
“There’s no room, Herbert, you can’t stay,” she began smugly. “Don’t say I didn’t tell you …!”—and when he didn’t say she hadn’t, her voice rose to a screech:
“I told you not to do this! I told you! Oh, you’re impossible …!”
Herbert didn’t deny it, though he seemed to have no particular plans for doing anything about it. He listened to Dot’s tirade gravely; unpacked his things; had his tea; and then, later in the evening, he and Dot had a long, complicated, sotto voce quarrel behind closed doors. What it was about, Imogen never really learned, but the outcome seemed to be that Herbert wasn’t to be sent home after all: he was to stay and be impossible here.
First Dot: then the boys: then Cynthia. All of them uninvited: and now Herbert as well. It was the last straw.
Or so Imogen thought. In fact, it turned out to be the last but one.
“This is Piggy,” announced Robin, leading in out of the
darkness
a tall, heavily-built girl with a huge suit-case, and a heavy, loosely-braided plait of blonde hair falling over one shoulder. “I’m not sleeping with her,” he added, glancing round as if for applause.
Actually, of course, it only made things more difficult. Now the girl would have to have a room, a bed, of her own. One of the small attics it would have to be, they were the only rooms left.
One of them Imogen had already taken over for herself, until such time as she could make up her mind where she really wanted to be; but there was still the adjoining one, though it would need quite a bit of clearing-out before you could put anyone into it. It would be cold, too … Imogen was already short of spare blankets, and sick to death of carrying them up and down stairs.
It was all a great nuisance. What did Robin think he was playing at, anyway? He’d explained that the girl had been thrown out of her flat and had nowhere to go—but why was he letting that bother him? If he wasn’t sleeping with her, or
borrowing
money from her (and you could see at a glance that she had none to be borrowed) then what
was
he doing? What was in it for him? Christmas spirit?
It was eerie. Really it was.
C
HRISTMAS IN THE
House of Mourning: Edith, with many meaning looks, sympathy firing on all cylinders, brought in a pot of white hyacinths, but only because there were no such things as black ones. Imogen thanked her nervously, and waited to see from which direction the next assault would be launched. “A Quiet Christmas” everyone had earnestly agreed—and you could see them, as they spoke, working out just how much it would save, and what they could do with the money. No presents, it wouldn’t seem right, Yippee! And now, after all that, here they were, one after the other, twitching packages guiltily from behind their backs and shoving them at her as if they were dirty postcards. Soap. Bath salts. Writing-paper. All the things that a widow might reasonably be expected still to have some use for. And because they’d promised not to give her anything, and were breaking the promise, she had to be extra grateful and thank them twice, once for the present and once for the betrayal.
But one of the betrayals—Cynthia’s—was a magnificent one: a brilliantly expensive Kaftan, covered in gold embroidery, and glitteringly unsuitable for anything except the kind of parties that Imogen would never be going to again. It would have been all right for the kind of parties she sometimes used to go to with Ivor; and he would have liked her to wear a thing like this. Would have liked it, that is, all the while she remained at his side, manifestly his possession; but on the other hand, he hated her to remain at his side at parties: it cramped his style with the beautiful wives of important husbands. And so actually it would all have been rather complicated. Her grief for Ivor was always running into tangles like this: no sooner did she get thinking, Oh, how Ivor would have loved this, than she had a sudden vision of how it would actually have been.
And somehow the truth made her feel like crying even more. Funny.
Still, you don’t cry on Christmas morning. Not with everyone looking at you and wondering if you are going to, and what they are supposed to do about it if you do.
“Oh,
thank
you, Cynthia, how lovely!” she enthused, shaking out the glittering folds and holding it up for inspection. “Look, Dot! Look, all of you! Isn’t it gorgeous?”
“Beautiful,” said Dot, disapproving. It wasn’t that she was shocked, exactly, or disliked the garment in itself: it was just that she could see at a glance that no good would come of it. Some women have this gift.
Herbert’s eyes were almost popping out of his head.
“It’s the tops!” he cried. “You’ll be quite the cat’s whiskers!”—two expressions which—as he must surely have known—his wife couldn’t endure. To have a husband who is impossible, that’s one thing, and you can complain about it to your friends without loss of status: but to have a husband who is
vulgar
…
“
Herbert!
”
was all she said, and he subsided at once, while Imogen, still murmuring her embarrassed gratitude, re-folded the glittering thing and laid it back in its tissue-paper under Cynthia’s self-satisfied scrutiny. You could see that Cynthia had won: but without, as yet, having any idea what the battle was about.
It was about Ivor, of course—what else? Even dead, she couldn’t leave him alone.
During the five days since Cynthia’s arrival at Heathrow, nearly four hours late and having mislaid her vaccination certificate, Imogen had almost forgotten about her visitor having once been Ivor’s wife. She seemed more like an Act of God, scattering scarves, luggage, presents, hairspray all over the house and wanting to sleep with her head to the north, and with three hot-
water-bottles
. She couldn’t eat parsnips, or anything fried, and every mealtime started with her crying out “Where are my pills?” Three lots of them there were—white ones for her nerves, yellow ones for her blood-pressure, and pink ones for—what was it?—migraine,
or something. They’d been prescribed by her doctor in Bermuda, a dear, lovely man.
Promise
me, he’d said to Cynthia,
promise
me you’ll take them regularly while you’re in England; and she’d promised. If only—Imogen mused darkly—if only the dear, lovely doctor could have made her promise also to put them back in the same place at the end of each meal. But alas, he hadn’t. Handbags, pockets, drawers had to be ransacked day after day, while the food cooled on the table, and everyone felt they must stop eating so as to look as if they were helping, and Cynthia clambered back and forth past their chairs, joggling the table, and saying she didn’t want to be a nuisance.
*
And now here she was waiting for Imogen to say something. Stick her neck out—put her foot in it—something. That gleaming, over-generous present had been a lead-in.
Imogen waited.
Forgiveness. That’s what it was. Cynthia forgave her; wanted bygones to be bygones. Christmas, surely, was the time for burying the hatchet?
Indeed yes. But what hatchet? Which bygones? Imogen didn’t want to be behindhand in Christmas charity, but she couldn’t make out what it was all about. It wasn’t as if Ivor had left Cynthia for Imogen; he’d left her for peace and quiet, and freedom, and punctual well-cooked meals. Imogen couldn’t see how forgiveness came into it, in either direction, especially after all this time.
But this, for some reason, simply made Cynthia burst into tears, and declare that Imogen didn’t understand, had never understood: which of course was true. But where do you go from there?
“I know you despise me,” Cynthia sobbed, “you always have! You think I’m just stupid and impractical and silly … maybe I am, but all the same, Ivor loved me, he’d have wanted me to have my rights … he loved me just the way I am! He’d had enough of clever women, his first wife was a right blue-stocking, and years and years older than him … if you’d ever met her,
you wouldn’t wonder that he ended up falling for a silly,
feather-brained
, harum-scarum little thing like me….”
No? Imogen reflected on this whole harum-scarum little trip all the way from Bermuda just in time for the dividing-up of Ivor’s estate: she pondered, too, on the feather-brained little phone-calls to solicitors and lawyers that had been going on … and suddenly her eyes filled with tears. Ivor, why aren’t you laughing? Can’t you hear my wicked, uncharitable thoughts, off wherever you are?
Naturally, Cynthia thought that the tears in Imogen’s eyes were tears of remorse, and at once she was all kindness and sympathy:
“Oh, Imogen, darling, I didn’t mean …
Of
course
I don’t hold it against you, my poor dear. Not now, not any longer. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, the bitterness is all gone now, it’s all been wiped away by this terrible, terrible tragedy. We are sisters in sorrow now, Imogen. Sisters, as Ivor would have wished….”
Ivor would have hated sisters, if he’d had any. He’d have hated the demands they were entitled to make, and the things they could remember about you when you were ten. Shrinking within Cynthia’s scented Orlon embrace, Imogen wondered how soon she could decently detach herself, and move out of range. The awful thing was that Cynthia
was
being kind, in a way. Just as Edith was kind, and Dot, and Herbert. In their separate ways, and with due regard to their own interests, they were all being kind.
But what can friends do for you when what you really need is enemies? People on whom to try out your precarious, convalescent aggression: people you can fight with, score off, not bother about. Sorry, didn’t mean to hit you, just wanted to find out if I still could….
*
Roast turkey. They’d promised there wouldn’t be, but there was. Robin brought Piggy down to join the family meal, her plait tied with a shoe-lace, but she’d taken one look and gone off to cook
herself some Macrobiotic rice. Which of course made everyone feel more guilty than ever.
“For the children …” they said, helping themselves to sprouts, bread-sauce, gravy. “Christmas is for the children….” A heavy burden, you’d have thought, for two such small boys, one of whom didn’t like stuffing.
After dinner there were more presents—“for the children”, of course: two fragile, ecstatic little props on which the whole vast, dark day was balanced, more precariously than they could ever know.
No tree. The anxious, behind-doors debate on this issue had been mercifully resolved only yesterday by the discovery that the trees were all sold out. And so now the boys’ presents lay in a heap on the carpet, waiting for some sort of uneasy ritual to be improvised. And to complicate matters even further, a legend seemed to be right now in the making that Ivor had been in the habit of dressing up as Father Christmas and handing out presents to his grandsons with beaming bonhomie and idiotic chatter about reindeer and chimneys and the rest. Imogen was aware of an anxious, whispered conference going on in the corner of the room as to whether Herbert should, or should not, take over this rôle—or non-rôle, rather, for none of it, to Imogen’s recollection, had ever happened. Mercifully, the debate ended in a decision that he shouldn’t; and with whoops of happy greed, the boys fell on their parcels without ceremony, tearing into the coloured wrappings and lovingly-penned messages like termites into timber. This year, of course, there was no present from Grandpa, but never mind, there were plenty of others.
*
Ivor as Father Christmas! Oh well. In a way, he’d have rather enjoyed the rôle—would certainly have undertaken it if someone from the B.B.C. had asked him to, and had come along with a camera-team to record it—“Professor Barnicott, author of this and this and this, relaxing with his grandsons”—that sort of thing: but it so happened that no one had.
Well, and so why not let him have the legend, then?—this
legend that Dot and all of them were so busy concocting? The jovial, benign grandpa, each year bringing the magic of Christmas to his little grandsons? He’d have loved it—of course he would: and all for free, now that he was dead. No boredom. No bother. No risk of the kids wrecking the whole image by crying and squabbling. It was a soft option, being dead. Good old Ivor!
*
Father
Christmas,
though. And after barely three months. What else would they have done to him, between them, by the time another year had passed—and all the years to follow?
Ivor, Ivor, she cried silently, what are they doing to you? Come back, just for one moment, and let me look at you, remind myself what you were really like …!
But already he was slipping away into the past, smaller and smaller, further and further away, scarlet hood, white beard and all.
*
“Granny! I say, Granny!”
Imogen roused herself, with an effort. There at her side was Timmie, gazing up into her face wide-eyed, and slightly aggrieved. “Granny, I thought Grandpa was supposed to be dead? Well, he isn’t. He’s still here. In his study, all dressed up as Father Christmas! Why isn’t he dead, Granny, like he’s meant to be?”
N
ATURALLY, NOBODY TOLD
Timmie off for telling lies. For one thing, it was Christmas, and for another, as Dot pointed out, there are no such things as lies nowadays, there is only the inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. On top of which, Timmie, it seemed, took after her, he was very sensitive really, and this was his way of coming to terms with his grief.
If any. To be honest, he and his grandfather had never really hit it off. Timmie was inclined to spoil Ivor’s most impressive reminiscences by saying things like “Who’s Churchill?” Still, he must feel
something
about his grandfather’s death; it was a relief, in a way, to see some sign of it at least.
And so, after the first stunned moments, Timmie was treated as a cross between an invalid and an O.B.E., everyone vying with one another to respect his feelings and hoping that someone else would ask the insensitive questions which would get him talking.
Because it
was
rather mysterious. There had, of course, been a mass surge towards the study right at the beginning, and an uneasy, half-embarrassed search had been undertaken, but naturally nothing was to be found. No Father Christmas costume. Nothing.
“What makes you so sure it was Grandpa?” someone ventured to ask him. “I mean, anyone could dress up as Father Christmas …?”
Timmie seemed, for a moment, to be puzzled by the question.
“He was in his big chair, that no one else may sit in,” he began. “He had his glasses on, and he was reading one of his big books—the Greek book, the very big one. And he was cross,” Timmie added, as if this clinched the identification. “He jumped up and
sort of came at me, like I’d done something awful. And I
hadn’t,
Mummy, I hadn’t touched a thing. And I never meant to interrupt him. I mean, he’s supposed to be dead. It’s not
fair
!”
Of all this array of evidence, nothing remained for public scrutiny except the Greek Lexicon. There it lay, the large Liddell and Scott, open, and balanced on the arm of Ivor’s big leather chair, just as it always used to be when he was working. But of course that didn’t prove anything, anyone could have put it there. No one had, but obviously they could have. No point in making a drama of it, anyway.
The questions and arguments teetered this way and that. Someone must have been looking up a word for a crossword puzzle? What, in
Greek
?
Well, just looking up a word, then. But none of us
knows
any Greek….
Suddenly, Imogen could bear no more of it. She slammed the big Lexicon shut, and leaned across the armchair to put it away on the low shelf where it belonged. And now, with the only piece of tangible evidence thus removed, the whole puzzle seemed suddenly to disintegrate. There was nothing more to be explained, no more to be said. Timmie was reassured that it couldn’t possibly have been Grandpa—not that he seemed to be all that bothered—and the subject was dropped, except for Dot saying “I told you so!”
She hadn’t, of course, how could she? But it turned out that she wasn’t referring specifically to Timmie’s recent implausible recital, but to an earlier, and more generalised prediction of hers to the effect that whatever Herbert did, he always managed to make a mess of it. Apparently not dressing up as Father Christmas came into this category; he couldn’t even not do
that
without making a mess of it.
Well, this seemed to be the gist of it, anyway, as far as Imogen could make out through the open door. Most of the time, she tried to keep out of the way when Herbert and Dot were quarrelling, but it was difficult when they quarrelled on the stairs: which they often did, because it was commonly Herbert’s attempt to
escape unobtrusively up to their room that jogged Dot’s memory about whatever it was that he had or hadn’t done.
And that, to all intents and purposes, was the end of the episode. For some reason, Imogen could not bring herself to tell the rest of them about the small additional shock she had received while they weren’t noticing. Leaning over to put the Lexicon back on the shelf, she had caught a whiff of whisky: and on investigating more closely, she discovered a whisky bottle and a recently-used glass standing exactly where Ivor used to stand them—on the floor between the armchair and the bookshelves.
Someone had been sitting in Ivor’s chair this afternoon,
drinking
whisky and reading Greek, just as he used to drink and read. Downing glass after glass, perhaps, as he had been wont to do while he waited for the bloody visitors to go…. For a moment, leaning heavily over the chair arm, Imogen could have sworn she smelt traces of his pipe as well, and heard him clearing his throat: but that, of course, was fantasy.
Who had it been, sitting here? Obviously, she could have questioned them all, but somehow she knew already that they were all going to say No, and what would be the point of that?
Why look for trouble—Easier by far just to wash up the glass, throw away the empty bottle, and then the whole mystery would cease to exist. Just as the mystery of the Lexicon had ceased to exist the moment she had put it back on the shelf where it belonged. How safe it looked, how settled, big and shabby and solid, next to the Classical Dictionary, just where it
had always been.
*
It was nearly a week later when the next peculiar thing happened. “You must have got a poltergeist here, darling,” Cynthia had said, half-laughing, half-scared. But then, Cynthia was by nature given to exaggeration. In actual fact, the whole thing
might
have been just some silly kind of a muddle. With all these ill-assorted people in the house, brought together by nothing more unifying than a need to get away from somewhere else, there were bound to be misunderstandings.
Once again, it was Timmie who had first stumbled upon the thing, but this time his brother Vernon had been with him. It had been a grey, not-quite-freezing afternoon just before the New Year, and the first Imogen knew of anything being amiss was the sound of shrill, childish voices, furiously protesting, just beneath her window. Then a deeper voice—a man’s voice—interrupting, overriding easily the high, indignant chirping.
For a while, Imogen paid no attention. Lying idly on her bed, half-reading, half-day-dreaming, she felt a vast reluctance to bestir herself. Although it was barely three o’clock, the winter afternoon was already on the wane. For some time now, she had been noticing the shadows gathering in the angles of the ceiling. The sharp rectangle of light from the dormer window was a silvery purple now instead of white; soon it would be too dark to read.
It was the front attic that was “her” room for the time being—the smallest of the three attics that spanned the width of the house under the roof. The adjoining one was Piggy’s; and the third, and largest, was still a lumber-room, as it had been for years.
This attic was Imogen’s room only temporarily, of course. When all this turmoil of comings and goings had subsided (Imogen was still enough of a novice at widowhood to believe that it might), then she would choose one of the rooms down on the first floor for her own.
Really
her own, furnished according to her own taste, and not to the taste of Ivor’s ghost. She would buy cheap, bright rugs that hadn’t come from Persia or Benares or anywhere. She would fill the shelves with paperback novels and pots of trailing ivy, and hang on the walls pictures which hadn’t been presented by the artist in grateful recognition of this, that or the other.
Her
pictures, not Ivor’s. It was high time Ivor got moving. It wasn’t fair to be dead and yet to stay around like this, in every room, in every corner of the house…. There ought to be
something
like a fly-spray, a fly-spray for ghosts, a ghost-spray….
Ivor would have laughed at that, if he’d been in one of his
good moods. No, he wouldn’t, he’d have called it whimsy, with that impatient twist of the mouth that he kept for fools….
*
Oh, shut up, you’re dead, who cares what
you
think? You have no business telling me what’s whimsy and what isn’t, not any longer.
Get out! Get out! Get out!
*
The dispute outside seemed to be escalating. In one of the childish voices she could hear the beginning of tears.
But still she lay there, doing absolutely nothing. Hell, they were Dot’s children, let
her
sort it out. And Robin—yes, that male voice now rising beyond irritation and into anger was
certainly
his—Robin was Dot’s brother, not Imogen’s. Nothing to do with Imogen really, none of them. No blood-tie at all. At intervals over the years, whenever Ivor’s family life became more than she could cope with, she had attempted to console herself with these sort of reflections, but it never worked for long. Blood may be thicker than water, but when it comes to family quarrels, it’s being
there
that puts you in the wrong. It is one’s presence, not one’s genes, that lands one with all the responsibility.
And that was why she was lying so very quietly right now. Let her so much as put her head out of the window into the biting December dusk, and call out “What’s going on?” and she would at once be to blame for the whole thing, and responsible for putting it right. She would be called upon to decide whether something was
fair
or not; whether Dot was or wasn’t spoiling her brats rotten….
*
It was unusual, though, to hear Robin yelling at the kids like this. He didn’t like children, admittedly, and of course children are very intuitive about this sort of thing, and gather round the child-hater like flies round a honey-pot. Luckily, as well as
disliking
them, Robin was also very good at not noticing they existed, and so normally there was very little trouble, except when Dot
caused it by complaining to her brother that he treated the children as
things
, not
people
.
But they
were
things, Robin would retort, wide-eyed: to think of children as people was sheer anthropomorphism—and a
brother-and-
sister slanging-match would ensue, to which the boys would listen with the greatest of interest. What sort of complexes it was giving them was hard to tell. They were happy children, and correspondingly difficult to fathom.
They didn’t sound very happy at the moment, though. Not Vernon, anyway.
“We didn’t!” he was shrieking. “We didn’t, we didn’t, we didn’t …!”
“And if you say we’re liars”—Timmie took up the grievance even more shrilly—“If you say we’re liars, then you’re just a …”
But before he had selected from his fairly extensive vocabulary exactly the word that would best describe his uncle, a sharp crunching on the gravel told Imogen that Robin was getting out.
Worsted? Triumphant? Bored with the whole thing? Robin was the only man Imogen had ever known who could even be bored by victory.
*
It would have been easier to discover what it had all been about if they hadn’t all told her at once, each with an escalating
conviction
of the justice of his cause that made the crockery on the tea-table ring. It would have been easier, too, if Dot hadn’t been arguing, in top register, from two somewhat contradictory premises: first, that her sons hadn’t touched a thing and had never been anywhere near Uncle Robin’s room: and second that none of this would have happened if Herbert had taken them out for a Sunday afternoon walk, like other fathers.
The four-poster bed. This, Imogen quickly gathered, was the storm-centre of the dispute. The four-poster bed in the room which had once been hers and Ivor’s, and was now Robin’s. Someone (and here the voices rose to such a pitch of assertion and denial that Piggy, who was apparently unused to family life, murmured “Oh no …!” and hurried from the room)—
someone
had dragged all those old papers down from the attic again and dumped them all over the bed! Not to mention pulling the pillows about, messing around with the curtains, and generally leaving the place looking like a battle-field.
“Well,
of
course
it was the bloody kids: who else could it be?” Robin demanded.
A good question. But all the same, Dot remained unshaken in her conviction that
her
sons would never dream of … well, of whatever it was; how could she be expected to make head or tail of it with everyone going on at her like this?
Playing
houses
?
Fighting with
pillows
?
Impossible! And
anyway
, all normal children play this sort of game, it’s ridiculous to make such a fuss about it. Besides, no one had ever told them
not
to play in that room. Why, not so long ago it had been the room belonging to their dear grandfather….
The implied suggestion that in his lifetime Ivor would have smilingly allowed the boys to romp on his precious bed and throw his manuscripts about, reduced everyone momentarily to stunned silence; and when, one by one, they took up the threads of the dispute again, it was in an altogether quieter and more coherent manner, so that Imogen was at last able to piece together some sort of a picture of what must have actually happened. It must have been something like this.
Sunday afternoon. The grown-ups all asleep, or sunk in
impenetrable
lethargy. Boredom stalked the place, hounding the little boys from room to room, up and down the staircases, until presently it brought them to the threshold of the room which had once been Granny’s and Grandpa’s. Some impulse (grief, claimed Dot, when she wasn’t claiming that it hadn’t happened at all) made them open the door and peep in.
To their surprise, the curtains round the bed were closely drawn. They had never seen it like this before—indeed, until that moment they hadn’t realised that the bed
had
curtains. Intrigued, and a little scared, they had tiptoed nearer; parted the curtains an inch or two; whereupon—
“We saw a wizard!” shrilled Timmie. “He was sitting in the middle of the bed casting spells …!”
Spells? What do you mean, spells?