The Yellow Meads of Asphodel Read online

  My old sense of chill came back and I went downstairs. Alex and Miss Waterfield were in the garden. Miss Waterfield was saying that she would confirm something by letter and Alex said to me:

  ‘Well, did you get a good picture?’

  My absorption in other things had been such that I hadn’t in fact taken a picture. The only picture I had was one in my own mind.

  ‘Well,’ Miss Waterfield said, ‘you will write to me when you get my letter. Or better still perhaps you would care to come and see me again.’

  ‘I’d certainly like to do that.’

  ‘Good. It’s been very nice to see you.’

  Alex said it had been nice to see her too and once again she put a hand across his shoulder, giving it an almost affectionate squeeze.

  ‘Well, good-bye,’ she said, ‘if you’ll excuse me I must go and look at my bonfire. I don’t want it to go out. If you like you can go out along the river bank.’

  She held out her hand and Alex took it. She held his for some long time and then let it go, I thought, with more than a little reluctance. I held out my own hand but once again she gave me that calculated stare of hostility and declined to take it.

  Alex and I walked along the river bank. Some distance away we paused and turned to look back. Miss Water-field was standing by her bonfire and once again the house, like some gaunt red-brick personification of her, seemed to be watching us.

  Suddenly as we stood there the bonfire gave a great belch of smoke, completely enveloping her, so that it was as if the Indian snake trick had been performed.

  ‘Well, I shall come to see her again.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘Yes. Whatever makes you say that?’

  ‘Him.’

  While the incredulous astonishment on Alex’s face was growing I stood thinking of the man upstairs.

  ‘Him?’ Alex said. ‘You don’t mean—’

  ‘Exteriors,’ I said, ‘don’t always reveal what is underneath.’

  A stunned Alex had no answer and we stood for a few moments looking at the smoke of the bonfire rising to the blue July sky. There was no sign of anyone near.

  ‘Suddenly seems to have disappeared completely,’ Alex said.

  ‘Let him go,’ I said.

  I took one last look at the house with its many windows that seemed to be staring down at us. Upstairs the window where I could have sworn I had seen a face now had its curtains drawn. The column of smoke from the bonfire was now rising bigger and bigger, thicker and thicker, and all the beauty of the day was gone.

  Bonus Stories

  The Mad Woman

  First published in 1934, ‘The Mad Woman’ is a comic sketch about two boys, frustrated in the constraints of youth where everything is ‘boring’, who decide to spy on the local mad woman. The tale relates their wild speculations, their suspense and fear, and the stories they concoct after their adventure.

  Two boys were lounging against a stone sill of a baker’s corner-shop. They were not more than seven or eight, and they wore short trousers which came above their knees and little round caps which stuck like buns on the backs of their heads. The street was dark except for the shop gas-light, which threw pale greenish rectangles across the pavement, and a street lamp down the alley-way of houses. The boys lounged in attitudes of muscular languor, blatantly, their hands thrust into the tops of their trousers, their feet crossed, and their shoulders hunched, as though they were men, labourers, waiting for something to turn up. They had seen men in just such attitudes lounging in pub-corners. Now and then, without speaking and without changing their lolling attitudes, they spat in competition. Occasionally they spat as far as the roadway, but it was a rare event. They spat with manful ferocity, clearing their throats in readiness, as though the pinnacle of achievement in life would have been to spit over the chimneys of the opposite houses.

  Finally they gave it up. It was boring; everything was boring. They had nothing to do but loll against the shop window and spit. It was part of the curse of extreme youth that there was nothing to do. They longed to be men. It was only in boyhood that life was pointless.

  ‘Why ain’t there a fire, or summat?’ they would say.

  It was not that they lacked imagination. They had tied the door-knobs of adjacent houses together and had hobbled the horses of bakers’ carts and had conceived an invisible apparatus of string and tin by which the water could be upset on the heads of passing ladies. But there is an end to all things.

  Once, in the past, it had been different. They had had a confederate. A French boy. His father was a detective in Paris and drank blood. That was why the son was so daring. They even had his word for it that he too drank blood. His father would bring home the blood in a wine-bottle, and André could do anything. They recalled how he would climb the house-roofs and pour water down the chimney-pots, and how he would perpetually carry a revolver about with him. A tremendous fellow. How much better to have been born in France.

  And in consequence, without André, life was pointless. They were jaded. Spitting desultorily, sideways, it was as though they spat the flat taste of it out of their mouths. Tired of searching for excitement in their own lives, they longed for catastrophe in the lives of others – a fire, a domestic row, an accident, a pub-fight. But nothing happened. The street was empty.

  Suddenly, however, the elder conceived a terrific idea. It aroused him like an integral explosion. He stood abruptly upright, his mouth and eyes widened, as though he could scarcely believe it. It seemed to him like a stupendous notion.

  ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘Let’s go and look at the mad woman.’

  The other also stood upright. They looked at each other with open mouths, their minds swaying slightly, as though drunk on the expectation of it all. Then for a moment it seemed almost too immense. It was fantastic. And momentarily they even doubted themselves.

  ‘She ain’t safe,’ one said. ‘She’s dopey.’

  ‘She couldn’t hurt us. She’s locked up. They keep her chained up.’

  ‘She eats kids. I know.’

  ‘She don’t eat nothing. She don’t eat nothing for six weeks sometimes. She don’t go out. She don’t take her clothes off.’

  ‘What’d she do if she see us?’

  ‘Go mad. Raving.’

  ‘Kill us. Shall we go?’

  Simultaneously they moved off down the street. They left the street and walked through others. It was very dark; factories and houses stood in lines of unbroken gloom. The boys walked fast, swaggering. They could feel the small hairs standing upright on their bare legs and brushing stiffly against their trousers. They hardly spoke. Now and then they spat again, carelessly, as if to emphasise that they were not afraid.

  Finally they came to a house that stood alone, in its own grounds, shielded from the street by a barricade of sombre fir-trees and even the dark sky beyond seemed altogether sinister. The house itself seemed dead; there were no lights. And standing there, they thought of the old woman. Where was she? What was she doing? Perhaps she had been taken away? Periodically they had seen her taken away, in the black asylum fly, at the end of some period of violence. The signal for those periods of madness was she would begin to throw her chamber-pots from the bedroom-windows, the china smashing on the street below. And until the fly and the asylum officer came no one could go in to her. The crowd would stand in the street below, in awe at her frenzies, or cheering whenever the chamber-pots came crashing down. Finally, the asylum officer, arriving in the black fry, would go into the house, the mad frenzy of smashing china would quieten down, and presently the old woman would appear at the doorway, in a high fruit-garnished hat of black and purple carrying in one hand a sunshade of mauve silk and clinging with the other hand to the arm of the asylum officer, her head uplifted with silly and triumphant devotion, in the insane belief that he came to marry her and that the fly would take them away to their wedding and their honeymoon. In time, however, she always returned.

  They contemplated the wall i
n awe and silence. It was double their height. They had never before noticed how high it was. Then they remembered the wicket gate through which they had seen the old woman emerge in the belief that it was her wedding day.

  They began to go along the wall towards the gate. They no longer walked. They moved flat along the wall, with a sliding motion, as though on casters, their hands and bodies pressed hard against the stones. They moved on tip-toe, with great stealth, silently. They were conspirators. At intervals they heard imaginary footsteps, strange sounds, curious whispers in the fir-trees. They had no doubt that, with terrific unexpectedness, the old woman would presently leap out at them. Finally, when they reached the gate and halted, they had forgotten everything but the gate, the old woman, and the thunder of their own hearts.

  And standing there, tremulous, they whispered for a moment.

  ‘What’ll she do if she sees us?’

  ‘Whack a pot at us.’

  They laughed, but the sound of their own laughter seemed tremendous, and they silenced themselves.

  ‘Ssh. Open the gate.’

  ‘You open it.’

  ‘You. Go on. You.’

  At last they leaned on the gate and pushed it together. It was locked. It was a high iron-bound gate of oak, and along the top ran invisible ribbons of barbed wire. Climbing up, they cut their fingers on the wire-spikes, and made sounds of pain by drawing in their breath as they dropped down into the garden on the other side.

  Then, as they stood in the garden, in the darkness under the trees, listening, their legs began to go cold and hot, the hairs bristling in spasms of horror. They sucked the blood off their hands; in the darkness they could distinguish nothing but patches of greater darkness, trees and bushes and walking on grass. In the bushes they had a fear that the old woman was waiting for them somewhere beyond; in the grass it was as though she were behind them, in the shrubbery, pursuing them.

  They went on across the lawn without speaking or daring to speak. They were very near the house. And the house became identified with the old woman, so that they were half afraid of it. They skirted round it, wide, keeping to the grass. They moved more than ever as though on casters.

  At the back of the house they halted abruptly. A light was shining in a window. They could see the regular bars of light formed by the slats of venetian blinds. It was very quiet. They waited in a kind of expectant horror for something to happen, for the old woman to appear, to rush out and suddenly tear them to pieces.

  But nothing happened. And presently they went a few steps nearer the light, and then halted, and then went on, and then halted again, and so on, until they were under the window. The yellow horizontal strips of light fell on their faces. It was just light enough to see a stone coping running along the wall, and finally they put their feet on the coping and their hands on the sill and drew themselves up, slowly, so that they could look into the window.

  They stared through the venetian slats with a kind of quiet horror, in suspense. There, in the room, was the old woman. The room seemed very large, and the old woman, all alone, was sitting at a black round table in the centre of it. It seemed to the boys that she was behaving very strangely. She was doing nothing. She was simply sitting quite motionless, staring into space. They remembered her, in her high fruit-decked hat, as a tall woman, with wild eyes and a half-suppressed air of madness. Now she seemed very small, as though she had shrunken. She was very quiet too. They saw, after a moment, that she looked small only because she was sitting very low in her chair, in a pose of vacant dejection. Then they noticed another thing. She was wearing her hat and coat: not the high gay hat in which they had so often seen her, nor the mauve coat, but a yellow, white-feathered hat of a distant period, and a white summer coat of some soft flounced material faded to drab ivory. She looked as though she had just come in from a journey and was too tired to take off her clothes; or as though she were just going on a journey and did not know quite where she wanted to go. There was a strange expression on her face, an expression of complete emptiness, of perfect negation, almost beautiful. It seemed to belong to another world.

  As they scotched on the coping, looking at her, the boys gradually began to feel disappointed. They still stared in suspense but their horror had dribbled away. It was as though they had been cheated.

  ‘She ain’t in chains. You said she was in chains.’

  ‘Her feet are chained. You can’t see ’em. They’re under the table.’

  ‘What she doing?’

  ‘She’s gone to sleep with her eyes open. That’s how dopey folks do. Go to sleep with their eyes open, so they can sleep and see at the same time.’

  ‘D’y think she can see us?’

  ‘She can see us all right. She’s only waiting.’

  They ceased whispering and watched in silence again. The old woman did not move. Against the background of golden varnished wall-paper, faded a little, and the great mahogany sideboard arrayed with tea-caddies and silver pots and wine decanters, all glittering and shining in the gaslight, she looked like someone in a picture. Her face was the same yellowing faded colour as her coat. Her eyes had no colour, but were filmed over and unflickering. She seemed not only to belong to another world, but to an unhappy world. She sat there as though transfixed in everlasting dejection.

  The two boys did not know what to think of her. And then, after a time, they noticed another thing. She was really moving all the time. Her lips were opening and shutting with tiny rapid motions. And they noticed also, on the wall opposite her, a mirror, and they could see, then, that she was talking to the reflection of herself. It was a silent conversation. Her lips never opened any wider than the thin slits of light coming through the venetian blinds, and her teeth remained shut behind them.

  They were ready to give it up. It was beyond them. They had expected to see her chained up; they had had visions of her in a perpetual lunatic struggle for escape. And here she was talking to herself. They were ready to despise her.

  They scotched higher up the wall for a final look at her. And then, as though she heard the scraping of their feet on the wall, she moved. She turned her head briefly in the direction of the sound and moved her body slightly in the chair.

  It was as though she had leapt clean through the window at them. In their terror they fell off the coping. The echoes of their own frightened haste became the sounds of the old woman in mad pursuit. As they tore across the lawn and through the bushes and over the gate, they half-whimpered, half-laughed with terror, never looking back.

  They did not stop until they could see the lights of the corner shop again. And then, when they paused and looked back, the street was empty.

  And all at once, in retrospect, it seemed an altogether terrific affair.

  ‘See the chain on her feet?’

  ‘Yeh. I just see ’em.’

  ‘And how mad she looked. Ain’t she ugly?’

  ‘She’s got a moustache. She’s a man dressed up.’

  ‘Ain’t she big? See her big hands? Think if she’d got hold of us.’

  ‘What’d she do if she got hold of us?’

  ‘Cut us up. Dopey folks always cut you up.’

  They revelled for a moment in the delicious terror of it all. Their minds played with fictitious horrors, magnifying the thing they thought they had seen her do and things they half-wished she had done.

  ‘Once she’d got us in that house we’d never have got out again.’

  But, as they walked on, they had a revelation. It came to them almost simultaneously.

  ‘How could she come after us if she was chained up? That’s why she never moved. See? She couldn’t. All looneys are chained up.’

  And as they went on, walking with a slight swagger again, looking back with derision at the memory of her sitting there motionless in her chair, everlastingly talking to the reflection of herself, they saw that they had no longer any need to be afraid of her.

  They knew that she was chained for ever.

  From T
his Time Forward

  First published in 1943, ‘From This Time Forward’ is narrated by a pilot, visiting the family of a recently deceased colleague, who learns a different side to his old friend’s character. He discusses, with the aristocratic mother and sister of the dead pilot, their conflicting memories in a wrought and tender exploration of the fallacy of knowing.

  In the late autumn when Bradshaw was killed, the beech-woods in the hills beyond the ’drome were bronze with frost and rain. The leaves were falling fast and the hurricanes looked blacker than they ever did in the light of summer. If Bradshaw had lived a little longer he would have been twenty. The week after we knew he was dead, I had a long letter from his sister. It seemed that she was some years older than Bradshaw and the letter was bitter, painful and disjointed. It placed what seemed to me a slightly hysterical emphasis on the futility of things. It seemed also that she had written to the authorities. I did not know quite who she meant by the authorities, but I understood what she wanted them to say. She wanted them to say, as she now wanted me to say, that he was not dead. ‘I cannot sleep at night,’ she said. ‘I can’t do anything. I feel I shall never do anything again.’ It seemed that they had been much more than brother and sister. ‘We knew each other,’ she wrote. ‘We knew each other as no two people ever did. He belonged to me. We were sort of telepathic. I knew when he was coming home. I knew everything about him. He was clean and decent and good. And sometimes I know he isn’t dead. I know. I know.’

  A week later there was another letter: this time from his mother. It was very short. ‘Perhaps you would come to see us,’ it said.

  Three days later I went down to see them in Hampshire. It was one of those houses with a big white drawing-room and French windows leading to a gravel terrace house. There were many large photographs on the black grand piano under the window, and on the white mantelpiece, above the fire and the little silver spirit kettle that was never used, there were many large photographs in silver frames. Among them were several photographs of Bradshaw. Bradshaw as a baby with no hair, as a small boy in a school football team, as a larger boy with a soft, blond face, and thick, blond hair, as a young man in pilot’s uniform. They were all very carefully and beautifully displayed, but I could not see in any one of them the Bradshaw I knew.