Dark Companions Read online

  “You don’t approve.”

  “I do not.” Maureen brandished her watch; from her motion she might have been about to slap Alma. “I can’t discuss it with you. I’ll be late.” She buttoned herself into her coat on the landing. “I suppose I’ll see Peter later,” she said and clumped downstairs.

  With the slam Alma was alone. Her hot water bottle chilled her toes; she thrust it to the foot of the bed. The room was darker; rain patted the pane. The metronome stood stolid in the shadow as if stilled forever. Maureen might well see Peter later; they both worked at Brichester Central Library. What if Maureen should attempt to heal the breach, to lend Peter her key? It was the sort of thing Maureen might well do, particularly as she liked Peter. Alma recalled suggesting once that they take Maureen out—“she does seem lonely, Peter”—only to find the two of them ideologically united against her; the most difficult two hours she’d spent with either of them, listening to their agreement on Vietnam and the rest across the cocktail bar table: horrid. Later she’d go down and bolt the door. But now—she turned restlessly and Victimes de Devoir toppled to the floor. She felt guilty not to be reading on—but she yearned to fill herself with music.

  The shadows weighed on her eyes; she pulled the cord for light. Spray laced the window like cobwebs on a misty morning; outside the world was slate. The needle on her record-player was dulled, but she selected the first record, Britten’s Nocturne (“Finnegan’s Half-Awake” Peter had commented; she’d never understood what he meant). She placed the needle and let the music expand through her, flowing into troubled crevices. The beauty of Peter Pears’ voice. Peter. Suddenly she was listening to the words: sickly light, huge seaworms— She picked off the needle; she didn’t want it to wear away the beauty. Usually Britten could transmute all to beauty. Had Peter’s pitiless vision thrown the horrid part into such relief? Once she’d taken him to a performance of the War Requiem and in the interval he’d commented “I agree with you—Britten succeeds completely in beautifying war, which is precisely my objection.” And later he’d admitted that for the last half hour he’d been pitying the poor cymbal player, bobbing up and down on cue as if in church. That was his trouble: he couldn’t achieve peace.

  Suppose he came to the house? she thought again. Her gaze flew to the bedroom door, the massed dark on the landing. For a moment she was sure that Peter was out there; wasn’t someone watching from the stairs? She coughed jaggedly; it recalled her. Deliberately she lifted her flute from its case and rippled a scale before the next cough came. Later she’d practice, no matter how she coughed; her breathing exercises might cure her lungs. “I find all these exercises a little terrifying,” said Peter, “a little robotic.” She frowned miserably; he seemed to wait wherever she sought peace. But thoughts of him carried her to the dressing-table drawer, to her ring; she didn’t have to remember, the diamond itself crystallised beauty. She turned the jewel but it refused to sparkle beneath the heavy sky. Had he been uneducated? Well, he’d known nothing about music, he’d never known what a cadenza was—“what’s the point of your academic analysis, where does it touch life?” Enough. She snapped the lid on the ring and restored it to its drawer. From now on she’d allow herself no time for disturbing memories: downstairs for soup—she must eat—then her flute exercises followed by Victimes de Devoir until she needed sleep.

  The staircase merged into the hall, vaguely defined beneath her drowsiness; the Victorian valentines seemed dusty in the dusk, neglected in the depths of an antique shop. As Alma passed the living-room a stray light was caught in the mirror and a memory was trapped: herself and Peter on the couch, separating instantly, tongues retreating guiltily into mouths, each time the opening door flashed in the mirror: towards the end Peter would clutch her rebelliously, but she couldn’t let her parents come on them embracing, not after their own marriage had been drained of love. “We’ll be each other’s peace,” she’d once told Peter, secretly aware as she spoke that she was terrified of sex. Once they were engaged she’d felt a duty to give in—but she’d panted uncontrollably, her mouth gulping over his, shaming her. One dreadful night Peter had rested his head on her shoulder and she’d known that he was consulting his watch behind her back. And suddenly, weeks later, it had come right; she was at peace, soothed, her fears almost engulfed—which was precisely when her parents had shattered the calm, the door thrown open, jarring the mirror: “Peter, this is a respectable house, I won’t have you keeping us all up like this until God knows what hour, even if you are used to that sort of thing—” and then that final confrontation— Quickly, Alma told herself, onwards. She thrust the memories back into the darkness of the two dead rooms to be crushed by her father’s desk, choked by her mother’s flowers.

  On the kitchen windowsill the medicine was black against the back garden, the grey grass plastered down by rain: it loomed like a poison bottle in a Hitchcock film. What was Peter doing at this moment? Where would he be tonight? She fumbled sleepily with the tin of tomato soup and watched it gush into the pan. Where would he be tonight? With someone else? If only he would try to contact her, to show her he still cared— Nonsense. She turned up the gas. No doubt he’d be at the cinema; he’d tried to force films on her, past her music. Such as the film they’d seen on the afternoon of their parting, the afternoon they’d taken off work together, Hurry Sundown; it hadn’t been the theme of racism which had seemed so horrid, but those scenes with Michael Caine sublimating his sex drive through his saxophone—she’d brushed her hair against Peter’s cheek, hopefully, desperately, but he was intent on the screen, and she could only guess his thoughts, too accurately. Perhaps he and Maureen would find each other: Alma hoped so—then she could forget about them both. The soup bubbled, and she poured it into a dish. Gas sweetened the air; she checked the control, but it seemed turned tight. The dresser—there he had stood, pugnaciously apart, watching her. She set the medicine before her on the table; she’d take it upstairs with her—she didn’t want to come downstairs again. In her mind she overcame the suffocating shadow of the rooms, thick with years of tobacco smoke in one, with lavender water in another, by her shining flute, the sheets of music brightly turning.

  A dim thin figure moved down the hall towards the kitchen; it hadn’t entered by the front door—rather it had emerged from the twin vista in the hail mirror. Alma sipped her soup, not tasting it but warmed. The figure fingered the twined flowers, sat at her father’s desk. Alma bent her head over the plate. The figure stood outside the kitchen door, one hand on the doorknob. Alma stood; her chair screeched; she saw herself pulled erect by panic in the familiar kitchen like a child in darkness, and willed herself to sit. The figure climbed the stairs, entered her room, padded through the shadows, examining her music, breathing on her flute. Alma’s spoon tipped and the soup drained back into its disc. Then, determinedly, she dipped again.

  She had to fasten her thoughts on something as she mounted the stairs, medicine in hand; she thought of the Camside orchestral concert next week—thank God she wouldn’t be faced with Peter chewing gum amid the ranks of placid tufted eggs. She felt for her bedroom light-switch. Behind the bookcase shadows sprang back into hiding and were defined. She smiled at the room and at herself; then carefully she closed the door. After the soup she felt a little hot, lightheaded. She moved to the window and admired the court set back from the bare street; above the roofs the sky was diluted lime and lemon beneath clouds like wads of stuffing. “ ‘Napier Court’—I see the point, but don’t you think that naming houses is a bit pretentious?” Alma slid her feet through the cold sheets, recoiling from the frigid bottle. She’d fill it later; now she needed rest. She set aside Victimes de Devoir and lay back on the pillow.

  Alma awoke. Someone was outside on the landing. At once she knew: Peter had borrowed Maureen’s key. He came into the room, and as he did so her mother appeared from behind the door and drove the music stand into his face. Alma awoke. She was swaddled in blankets, breathing through them. For a moment she lay in
ert; one hand was limp between her legs, her ear pressed on the pillow; these two parts of her felt miles distant, and something vast throbbed silently against her eardrums. She catalogued herself: slight delirium, a yearning for the toilet. She drifted with the bed; she disliked to emerge, to be oriented by the cold.

  Nonsense, don’t indulge your weakness, she told herself, and poked her head out. Surely she’d left the light on? Darkness blindfolded her, warm as the blankets. She reached for the cord, and the blue window blackened as the room appeared. The furniture felt padded by delirium. Alma burned. She struggled into her dressing-gown and saw the clock: 12:05. Past midnight and Maureen hadn’t come? Then she realised: the clock had stopped—it must have been around the time of Maureen’s departure. Of course Maureen wouldn’t return; she’d been repelled by disapproval. Which meant that Alma would have no transistor, no means of discovering the time. She felt as if she floated, bodiless, disoriented, robbed of sensation, and went to the window for some indication; the street was deserted, as it might be at any hour soon after dark.

  Turning from the pane she pivoted in the mirror; behind her the bed stood at her left. That wasn’t right; right was where it stood. Or did it reverse in the reflection? She turned to look but froze; if she faced round she’d meet a figure waiting, hands outstretched, one side of its face incomplete, like those photographs from Vietnam Peter had insisted she confront— The thought released her; she turned to an empty room. So much for her delirium. Deliberately she switched out the light and padded down the landing.

  On her way back she passed her mother’s room; she felt compelled to enter. Between the twin beds, shelves displayed the Betjemans, the books on Greece, histories of the Severn Valley. On the beds the sheets were stretched taut as one finds them on first entering a hotel room. When Peter had stayed for weekends her father had moved back into this room. Her father—out every night to the pub with his friends; he hadn’t been vindictive to her mother, just unfeeling and unable to adjust to her domestic rhythm. When her mother had accused Alma of marrying beneath her she’d spoken of herself. Deceptively freed by their absence, Alma began to understand her mother’s hostility to Peter. “You’re a handsome bugger,” her mother had once told him; Alma had pinpointed that as the genesis of her hostility—it had preyed on her mother’s mind, this lowering herself to say what she thought he’d like only to realise that the potential of this vulgarity lurked within herself. Now Alma saw the truth; once more sleeping in the same room as her husband, she’d had the failure of her marriage forced upon her; she’d projected it on Alma’s love for Peter. Alma felt released; she had understood them, perhaps she could even come once more to love them, just as eventually she’d understood that buying Napier Court had fulfilled her father’s ambition to own a house in Brichester—her father, trying to talk to Peter who never communicated to him (he might have been unable, but this was no longer important), finally walking away from Peter whistling “Release Me” which he’d reprised the day after the separation, somewhat unfeelingly she thought. Even this she could understand. To seal her understanding, she turned out the light and closed the door.

  Immediately a figure rose before her mother’s mirror, combing long fingers through its hair. Alma managed not to shudder; she strode to her own door, opened it on blackness, and crossed to her bed. She reached out to it and fell on her knees; it was not there.

  As she knelt trembling, the house rearranged itself round her; the dark corridors and rooms, perhaps not empty as she prayed, watched pitilessly, came to bear upon her. She staggered to her feet and clutched the cord, almost touching a gaping face, which was not there when the light came on. Her bed was inches from her knees, where it had been when she left it, she insisted. Yet this failed to calm her. There was more than darkness in the house; she was no longer comfortingly alone in her warm and welcoming home. Had Peter borrowed Maureen’s key? All at once she hoped he had; then she’d be in his arms, admitting that her promise to her mother had been desperate; she yearned for his protection—strengthened by it she believed she might confront horrors if he demanded them.

  She watched for Peter from the window. One night while he was staying Peter had come to her room— She focused on the court; it seemed cut off from the world, imprisoning. Eclipsed by the gatepost, a pedestrian crossing’s beacons exchanged signals without meaning; she thought of others flashing far into the night on cold lonely country roads, and shivered. He had come into her room; they’d caressed furtively and whispered so as not to wake her parents, though now she suspected that her mother had lain awake, listening through her father’s snores. “Take me,” she’d pleaded—but in the end she couldn’t; the wall was too attentive. Now she squirmed at her remembered endearments: “my nice Peter”—“my handsome Peter”—“my lovely Peter”—and at last her halting praise of his body, the painful search for new phrases. She no longer cared to recall; she sloughed off the memories with an epileptic shudder.

  Suddenly a man appeared in the gateway of the court. Alma stiffened. The figure passed; she relaxed, but only for a moment; had there not been something strange about its long loping strides, its trailing shadow? This was childish, she rebuked herself; she’d no more need to become obsessed with someone hastening to a date than with Peter, who was no longer in a position to protect her. She turned from the window before the figure should form behind her, and picked up her flute. Half an hour of exercises, then sleep. She opened the case. It was empty.

  It was as if her mother had returned and taken back the flute; she felt the house again rise up round her. She grasped an explanation; last time she’d fingered her flute—when had that been? Time had slipped away—she hadn’t replaced it in its case. She threw the sheets back from the bed; only the dead bottle was exposed. She knelt again and peered beneath the bed. Something bent above her, waiting, grinning. No, the flute hadn’t rolled. She stood up and the figure moved behind her. “Don’t!” she whimpered. At that moment she saw that the dressing-table drawer was open. She took one step towards it, to her ring, but could not look into it, knowing what was there—a face peering up at her from the drawer, its eyes opening, infinitely slowly, the lashes parting stickily— Delirium again? It didn’t matter. Alma’s lips trembled. She could still escape. She went to the wardrobe—but nothing could have made her open it; instead she caught up her clothes from the chair at the foot of the bed and dressed clumsily, dragging her skirt round to reach the zip. The room was silent; her music had fled, but any minute something else would take its place.

  Since she had to face the darkened house, she did so. She trembled only once. The Victorian valentines hung immobile; the mirrors extended the darkness, strengthened its power. The house waited. Alma fell into the court; from the cobblestones, the erect gateposts, the street beyond, she drew courage. Two years and she’d be far from here, a complete person. Freed from fear, she left the front door open. But she shivered; the night air knifed through the dangerous warmth of her cold. She must go—where? To Maureen’s, she decided; that was not too far, and she knew Maureen to be kind. She’d forget her disapproval if she saw Alma like this. Alma strode towards the orange fan which flared from the beacon behind the gatepost, and stopped.

  Resting against the beacon was a white bag, half as high as Alma. She’d seen such bags before, full of laundry. Yet she could not force herself to pull back the gates and pass. Suddenly the gates were her protection against the shapeless mass, for deep within herself she suppressed a horror that the bag might move towards her, flapping. It couldn’t be what it appeared, who would have left it there at this time of night? A car hissed past on the glittering tarmac. Alma choked a scream for help. Screaming in the middle of the street—what would her mother have thought? Musicians didn’t do that sort of thing. Besides, why shouldn’t someone have left a bag of washing at the crossing while she went for help to heft it to the laundry? Alma touched the gates and withdrew, chilled; here she was, risking pneumonia in the night, and for what? The pan
ic of delirium. As a child she’d screamed hoarsely through her cold that a man was bending over her; she was too old for that. Back to bed—no, to find her flute, and then to bed, to purge herself of these horrid visions. Ironically she thought: Peter would be proud of her if he knew. Her flute—must the two years any longer be meaningful? Still touched by understanding, she couldn’t think that her parents would hold to their threat, made after all before she’d written to Peter. What must have been a night breeze moved the bag. Forcing her footsteps not to drag, Alma left the orange radiance and closed the door behind her; her last test.

  In the hall the thing she had thought was Maureen’s coat shifted wakefully. Alma ignored it, but her flesh crept hot and cold. At the far end of the hall mirror, a figure approached, arms extended as if blindly. Alma smiled; it was too like a childish fear to frighten her: “enjoyably creepy”—she tried to recapture her mood of the morning, but every organ of her body felt hot and pounding. She broke and ran to her room; the light, oddly, was still on.

  In the rooms below, her father’s desk creaked; the flower arrangements writhed. Did it matter? Alma argued desperately. There was no lock on her door, but she refused to barricade it; there was nothing solid abroad in the house, nothing to harm her but the lure of her own fears. Her flute—she wouldn’t play it once she found it; she’d go to bed with its protection. She moved round the bed and saw the flute, overlaid by Victimes de Devoir. The flute was bent in half.

  One tear pressed from Alma’s eyes before she realised the full horror. As she whirled, completely disoriented, a mirror crashed below. Something shrieked towards her through the corridors. She sank onto the bed, defenceless, wishing all were over. Music blasted from the record player, the Nocturne; Alma leapt up and screamed. “In roaring he shall rise,” the voice bawled, “and on the surface—” A music stand was hurled to the floor. “—die!” The needle scraped across the record and clicked off. The walls seemed on the point of tearing, bulging inwards. Alma no longer cared. She’d screamed once; she could do no more. Now she waited.