The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Page 40

  ‘Go on.’ Clarinda’s sluggishness was making the child frantic.

  But Clarinda refused to be rattled. With careful grace she went through the moonlit ritual of twisting the scarf round her head and enveloping her abundant soft hair.

  The child led her back halfway round the copse to where there was a tiny path between the bushes. This path also was exceedingly muddy; ploughed up, as Clarinda could plainly see, by innumerable hoofmarks.

  ‘I’d better go first,’ said the little girl; adding with her customary good manners, ‘I’m afraid it’s rather spiky.’

  It was indeed. The little girl, being little, appeared to advance unscathed; but Clarinda, being tall, found that her clothes were torn to pieces, and her face and hands lacerated. The radiance of the moon had sufficed outside, but in here failed to give warning of the thick tangled briars and rank whipcord suckers. Everywhere was a vapour of ancient cobwebs, clinging and greasy, amid which strange night insects flapped and flopped.

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ said the little girl. ‘You’d better be rather quiet.’

  It was impossible to be quiet, and Clarinda was almost in tears with the discomfort.

  ‘Quieter,’ said the little girl; and Clarinda did not dare to answer back.

  The slender muddy trail, matted with half-unearthed roots, wriggled on for another minute or two; and then the little girl whispered, ‘Under here.’

  She was making a gap in the foliage of a tall round bush. Clarinda pushed in. ‘Ssh,’ said the little girl.

  Inside it was like a small native hut. The foliage hung all round, but there was room to stand up and dry ground beneath the feet.

  ‘Stand on this,’ whispered the little girl, pointing to a round, sawn section of tree, about two feet high and four in diameter. ‘I call it my fairy dinner table.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m all right, thank you. I’m always here.’

  Clarinda climbed on to the section of tree, and made a cautious aperture in the boscage before her.

  The sight beyond was one which she would not easily forget.

  Clearly, to begin with, this was the maze, although Clarinda had never seen or heard of such a maze before. It filled a clearing in the copse about twenty or thirty yards wide and consisted in a labyrinth of little ridges, all about nine inches high. The general pattern of the labyrinth was circular, with involved inner convolutions everywhere, and at some points flourishes curving beyond the main outer boundary, as if they had once erupted like boils or volcanic blow-holes. In the valleys between the ridges, grass grew, but the ridges themselves were trodden bare. At the centre of the maze was a hewn block of stone, which put Clarinda in mind of the Stone of Scone.

  Little of this, however, had much immediate significance for Clarinda; because all over the maze, under the moon, writhed and slithered and sprawled the smooth white bodies of men and women. There were scores of them; all apparently well-shaped and comely; all (perhaps for that reason) weirdly impersonal; all recumbent and reptilian, as in a picture Clarinda remembered having seen; all completely and impossibly silent beneath the silent night. Clarinda saw that all round the maze were heaps of furry skins. She then noticed that the heads of all the women were bound in black fillets.

  At the points where the coils of the maze surged out beyond the main perimeter were other, different figures. Still wrapped in furs, which distorted and made horrible the outlines of their bodies, they clung together as if locked in death. Down to the maze the ground fell away a few feet from Clarinda’s hiding place. Immediately below her was one of these groups, silent as all the rest. By one of the shapeless figures she noticed a long thick staff. Then the figure soundlessly shifted, and the white moonlight fell upon the face of the equally shapeless figure in its arms. The eyes were blank and staring, the nostrils stretched like a running deer, and the red lips not so much parted as drawn back to the gums: but Clarinda recognised the face of Mrs Pagani.

  Suddenly there was a rustling in the hiding-place. Though soft, it was the first sound of any kind since Clarinda had looked out on the maze.

  ‘Go away, you silly little boy,’ muttered the little girl.

  Clarinda looked over her shoulder.

  Inside the bower, the moonlight, filtered through the veil of foliage, was dim and deceitful; but she could see the big eyes and bird-of-prey mien of the other child. He was still wearing his bright blue hooded garment; but now the idea occurred to Clarinda that he might not be a child at all, but a well-proportioned dwarf. She looked at the black ground before stepping down from the tree trunk; and instantly he leapt at her. She felt a sharp, indefinite pain in her ankle and saw one of the creature’s hands yellow and clawlike where a moonbeam through the hole above fell on the pale wood of the cut tree. Then in the murk the little girl did something which Clarinda could not see at all, and the hand jerked into passivity. The little girl was crying.

  Clarinda touched her torn ankle, and stretched her hand into the beam of light. There was duly a mess of blood.

  The little girl clutched at Clarinda’s wrist. ‘Don’t let them see,’ she whispered beseechingly through her tears. ‘Oh please don’t let them see.’ Then she added with passionate fury, ‘He always spoils everything. I hate him. I hate him. I hate him.’

  Clarinda’s ankle hurt badly, and there was palpable danger of blood poisoning, but otherwise the injury was not severe.

  ‘Shall I be all right if I go?’

  ‘Yes. But I think you’d better run.’

  ‘That may not be so easy.’

  The little girl seemed desolated with grief.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Clarinda. ‘And thank you.’

  The little girl stopped sobbing for a moment. ‘You will come back?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Clarinda.

  The sobbing recommenced. It was very quiet and despairing.

  ‘Well,’ said Clarinda, ‘I’ll see.’

  ‘Punctually? That makes all the difference, you know.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Clarinda.

  The child smiled at her in the faint moonlight. She was being brave. She was remembering her manners.

  ‘Shall I come with you?’

  ‘No need,’ said Clarinda rather hastily.

  ‘I mean to the end of the little path.’

  ‘Still no need,’ said Clarinda. ‘Thank you again though. Good-bye.’

  ‘Good-bye,’ said the little girl. ‘Don’t forget. Punctual.’

  Clarinda crept along the involved muddy path: then she sped across the soft wet sward, which she spotted with her blood; through the gate where she had seen Rufo, and down the hill where she had seen the pigs; past the ill-spelled notice; and home. As she fumbled with the patent catch, the church clock which kept ward over Mrs Pagani’s abode struck three. The mist was rising again everywhere; but, in what remained of the moonlight, Clarinda, before entering the house, unwound the black scarf from her head and shook her soft abundant locks.

  The question of Mrs Pagani’s unusual dwelling-place arose, of course, the next morning, as they hurriedly ate the generously over-large breakfast which Mrs Carstairs, convinced that London meant starvation, pressed upon them.

  ‘Please not,’ said Clarinda, her mouth full of golden syrup. She was wearing ankle socks to conceal her careful bandage. ‘I just don’t want to go.’

  The family looked at her; but only Dudley spoke. ‘Whatever you wish, darling.’

  There was a pause; after which Mr Carstairs remarked that he supposed the good lady would still be in bed anyway.

  But here, most unusually, Mr Carstairs was wrong. As Dudley and Clarinda drove away, they saw the back of Mrs Pagani walking towards the church and not a couple of hundred yards from their own gate. She wore high, stout boots, caked with country mud, and an enveloping fur coat against the sharpness of the morning. Her step was springy, and her thick black hair flew in the wind like a dusky gonfalon.

  As they overtook her, Dudley sl
owed. ‘Good morning,’ he shouted. ‘Back to the grindstone.’

  Mrs Pagani smiled affectionately.

  ‘Don’t be late,’ she cried, and kissed her hand to them.

  V. S. NAIPAUL

  The Perfect Tenants

  We heard about the Dakins before they arrived. ‘They’re the perfect tenants,’ Mrs Cooksey, the landlady, said. ‘Their landlady brought them to me personally. She says she’s sorry to lose them, but she’s leaving London and taking over a hotel in Benson.’

  The Dakins moved in so quietly it was some days before I realized they were in the house. On Saturday and Sunday I heard sounds of washing and scrubbing and carpet-sweeping from the flat above. On Monday there was silence again.

  Once or twice that week I saw them on the steps. Mrs Dakin was about forty, tall and thin, with a sweet smile. ‘She used to be a policewoman,’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘Sergeant, I think.’ Mr Dakin was as old as his wife and looked as athletic. But his rough, handsome face was humourless. His greetings were brief and firm and didn’t encourage conversation.

  Their behaviour was exemplary. They never had visitors. They never had telephone calls. Their cooking never smelled. They never allowed their milk bottles to accumulate and at the same time they never left an empty milk bottle on the doorstep in daylight. And they were silent. They had no radio. The only sounds were of scrubbing brush, broom and carpet-sweeper. Sometimes at night, when the street fell silent, I heard them in their bedroom: a low whine punctuated infrequently with brief bass rumbles.

  ‘There’s respectable people in every class,’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘The trouble these days is that you never know where you are. Look at the Seymours. Creeping up late at night to the bathroom and splashing about together. You can’t even trust the BBC people. Remember that Arab.’

  The Dakins quickly became the favourite tenants. Mr Cooksey invited Mr Dakin down to ‘cocktails’. Mrs Dakin had Mrs Cooksey up to tea and Mrs Cooksey told us that she was satisfied with the appearance of the flat. ‘They’re very fussy,’ Mrs Cooksey said. She knew no higher praise, and we all felt reproached.

  It was from Mrs Cooksey that I learned with disappointment that the Dakins had their troubles. ‘He fell off a ladder and broke his arm, but they won’t pay any compensation. The arm’s bent and he can’t even go to the seaside. What’s more, he can’t do his job properly. He’s an electrician, and you know how they’re always climbing. But there you are, d’you see. They don’t care. What’s three hundred pounds to them? But will they give it? Do you know the foreman actually burned the ladder?’

  I hadn’t noticed any disfigurement about Mr Dakin. He had struck me as a man of forbidding vigour, but now I looked on him with greater interest and respect for putting up so silently with his misfortune. We often passed on the stairs but never did more than exchange greetings, and so it might have gone on had it not been for the Cookseys’ New Year’s Eve party.

  At that time I was out of favour with the Cookseys. I had left a hoard of about fifteen milk bottles on the doorstep and the milkman had refused to take them all at once. For a whole day six partly washed milk bottles had remained on the doorstep, lowering Mrs Cooksey’s house. Some unpleasantness between Mrs Cooksey and the milkman had followed and quickly been passed on to me.

  When I came in that evening the door of the Cookseys’ sitting-room was open and through it came laughter, stamping and television music. Mr Cooksey, coming from the kitchen with a tray, looked at me in embarrassment. He brought his lips rapidly over his false teeth and made a popping sound.

  ‘Pop-pop. Come in,’ he said. ‘Drink. Cocktail.’

  I went in. Mrs Cooksey was sober but gay. The laughter and the stamping came from the Dakins alone. They were dancing. Mrs Dakin shrieked whenever Mr Dakin spun her around, and for a man whose left arm was permanently damaged he was doing it quite well. When she saw me Mrs Dakin shrieked, and Mrs Cooksey giggled, as though it was her duty to cheer the Dakins up. The couple from the flat below mine were there too, she on the seat of an armchair, he on the arm. They were dressed in their usual sub-county manner and looked constrained and unhappy. I thought of this couple as the Knitmaster and the Knitmistress. They had innumerable minor possessions: contemporary coffee tables and lampstands, a Cona coffee machine, a record-player, a portable television-and-VHF set, a 1946 Anglia which at the appropriate season carried a sticker: FREE LIFT TO GLYNDEBOURNE AT YOUR OWN RISK, and a Knitmaster machine which was never idle for long.

  The music stopped, Mrs Dakin pretended to swoon into her husband’s injured arms, and Mrs Cooksey clapped.

  ‘’Elp yourself, ’elp yourself,’ Mr Cooksey shouted.

  ‘Another drink, darling?’ the Knitmaster whispered to his wife.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Mrs Dakin cried.

  The Knitmistress smiled malevolently at Mrs Dakin.

  ‘Whisky?’ said Mr Cooksey. ‘Beer? Sherry? Guinness?’

  ‘Give her the cocktail,’ Mrs Cooksey said.

  Mr Cooksey’s cocktails were well known to his older tenants. He had a responsible position in an important public corporation – he said he had thirty-four cleaners under him – and the origin and blend of his cocktails were suspect.

  The Knitmistress took the cocktail and sipped without enthusiasm.

  ‘And you?’ Mr Cooksey asked.

  ‘Guinness,’ I said.

  ‘Guinness!’ Mr Dakin exclaimed, looking at me for the first time with interest and kindliness. ‘Where did you learn to drink Guinness?’

  We drew closer and talked about Guinness.

  ‘Of course it’s best in Ireland,’ he said. ‘Thick and creamy. What’s it like where you come from?’

  ‘I can’t drink it there. It’s too warm.’

  Mr Dakin shook his head. ‘It isn’t the climate. It’s the Guinness. It can’t travel. It gets sick.’

  Soon it was time to sing Auld Lang Syne.

  The next day the Dakins reverted to their exemplary behaviour, but now when we met we stopped to have a word about the weather.

  One evening, about four weeks later, I heard something like a commotion in the flat above. Footsteps pounded down the stairs, there was a banging on my door, and Mrs Dakin rushed in and cried, ‘It’s my ’usband! ’E’s rollin’ in agony.’

  Before I could say anything she ran out and raced down to the Knitmasters.

  ‘My husband’s rollin’ in agony.’

  The whirring of the Knitmaster machine stopped and I heard the Knitmistress making sympathetic sounds.

  The Knitmaster said, ‘Telephone for the doctor.’

  I went and stood on the landing as a sympathetic gesture. Mrs Dakin roused the Cookseys, there were more exclamations, then I heard the telephone being dialled. I went back to my room. After some thought I left my door wide open: another gesture of sympathy.

  Mrs Dakin, Mrs Cooksey and Mr Cooksey hurried up the stairs.

  The Knitmaster machine was whirring again.

  Presently there was a knock on my door and Mr Cooksey came in. ‘Pop-pop. It’s as hot as a bloomin’ oven up there.’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘No wonder he’s ill.’

  I asked after Mr Dakin.

  ‘A touch of indigestion, if you ask me.’ Then, like a man used to more momentous events, he added, ‘One of my cleaners took ill sudden last week. Brain tumour.’

  The doctor came and the Dakins’ flat was full of footsteps and conversation. Mr Cooksey ran up and down the steps, panting and pop-popping. Mrs Dakin was sobbing and Mrs Cooksey was comforting her. An ambulance bell rang in the street and soon Mr Dakin, Mrs Dakin and the doctor left.

  ‘Appendix,’ Mr Cooksey told me.

  The Knitmaster opened his door

  ‘Appendix,’ Mr Cooksey shouted down. ‘It was like an oven up there.’

  ‘He was cold,’ Mrs Cooksey said.

  ‘Pah!’

  Mrs Cooksey looked anxious.

  ‘Nothing to it, Bess,’ Mr Cooksey said. ‘’Itler had the appendix took out of all
his soldiers.’

  The Knitmaster said, ‘I had mine out two years ago. Small scar.’ He measured off the top of his forefinger. ‘About that long. It’s a nervous thing really. You get it when you are depressed or worried. My wife had to have hers out just before we went to France.’

  The Knitmistress came out and smiled her terrible smile, baring short square teeth and tall gums, and screwing up her small eyes. She said, ‘Hallo,’ and pulled on woollen gloves, which perhaps she had just knitted on her machine. She wore a tweed skirt, a red sweater, a brown velveteen jacket and a red-and-white beret.

  ‘Appendix,’ Mr Cooksey said.

  The Knitmistress only smiled again, and followed her husband downstairs to the 1946 Anglia.

  ‘A terrible thing,’ I said to Mrs Cooksey tentatively.

  ‘Pop-pop.’ Mr Cooksey looked at his wife.

  ‘Terrible thing,’ Mrs Cooksey said.

  Our quarrel over the milk bottles was over.

  Mr Cooksey became animated. ‘Nothing to it, Bess. Just a lot of fuss for nothing at all. Gosh, they kept that room like an oven.’

  Mrs Dakin came back at about eleven. Her eyes were red but she was composed. She spoke about the kindness of the nurses. And then, to round off an unusual evening, I heard – at midnight on a weekday – the sound of the carpet-sweeper upstairs. The Knitmistress complained in her usual way. She opened her door and talked loudly to her husband about the nuisance.

  Next morning Mrs Dakin went again to the hospital. She returned just before midday and as soon as she got into the hall she began to sob so loudly that I heard her on the second floor.

  I found her in Mrs Cooksey’s arms when I went down. Mrs Cooksey was pale and her eyes were moist.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I whispered.

  Mrs Cooksey shook her head.

  Mrs Dakin leaned against Mrs Cooksey, who was much smaller.

  ‘And my brother is getting married tomorrow!’ Mrs Dakin burst out.

  ‘Come now, Eva,’ Mrs Cooksey said firmly. ‘Tell me what happened at the hospital.’

  ‘They’re feeding him through a glass tube. They’ve put him on the danger list. And – his bed is near the door!’