expressions.
The morning after he moved in Gregory encountered Mrs. Fenshawe for the first time. It was quite early. Striding along on his way to the bathroom, he came upon her in the drawing room. She was sitting on a low stool that looked as if it had been made for a child, a rag clutched in one hand, some kind of sharpened metal implement in the other. Using her feet to hold back a section of carpet, she was buffing the parquet flooring, working her way along the length of the room, but making such slow progress that she had moved less than two feet by the time Gregory came back from the bathroom, finding her as busy and preoccupied as before. In the middle of the huge drawing room, she looked like the black head of a slowly contracting caterpillar whose body was formed by the patterned rug. When Gregory asked if he could help with anything, Mrs. Fenshawe turned her leathery face in his direction for a moment but didn’t say a word. That afternoon, on his way out of the house, Gregory tripped over her as she was moving from step to step on her little stool (the lights were off), nearly knocking her down the stairs. From time to time thereafter he ran into her in the most unlikely and unexpected places, and when he was working in his room he sometimes heard the slow, measured creaking of her stool as she made her way along the hall. Once, when the creaking stopped just opposite his door, he assumed, with some distaste, that his landlady was spying on him through the keyhole. He quickly stepped into the hall, but Mrs. Fenshawe, who was fastidiously polishing the parquet under the window, ignored him completely.
Gregory concluded from all this that Mrs. Fenshawe was trying to save money by cutting down on domestic help; she used the stool because it was uncomfortable for her to bend over. This explanation, though presumably correct, did not eliminate the problem, however, because the constant sight of Mrs. Fenshawe creeping along on her stool, and the perpetual creaking from dawn to dusk, soon took on a demonic character in Gregory’s mind. He began to yearn for the moment when the creaking would stop; sometimes he had to wait an hour or two to get some peace. Moreover, Mrs. Fenshawe was usually accompanied by two black cats, which to all appearances she took care of, and Gregory, for no apparent reason, couldn’t stand either of them. At least a dozen times he told himself that none of this was any of his business, and in fact if it hadn’t been for Mr. Fenshawe he would have been able to ignore everything that went on outside his room.
Although the old man’s room was right next door to his and shared the same beautiful terrace, Gregory never heard a sound from Mr. Fenshawe in the daytime. The nights were a different story. Well after ten o’clock, sometimes not until after eleven, Gregory would hear a rhythmic knocking from behind the wall separating the two rooms. Sometimes it was a rich, sonorous sound; sometimes hollow and dull, like someone tapping on a wooden wall with a hammer. This was usually followed by several other acoustical phenomena. At first it seemed to Gregory as if these came in an infinite number of variations, but he was wrong, and within a month he was able to recognize the eight most frequent sounds.
The initial knocking behind the wall was usually followed by a dull, empty noise, rather like the sound of a small barrel or a piece of wooden pipe being rolled along a bare floor. Sometimes there were some quick vigorous thumps on the floor, as if someone were walking barefoot with his full weight on his heels. Other times there was clapping — heavy, mean-sounding slaps like those an empty hand might make against a moist balloon-like surface filled with air. There was an intermittent hissing sound also and, finally, some faint noises that were difficult to describe. A persistent scraping, interrupted by a metallic rapping, then by a sharp flat whack like the sound of a fly swatter, or like the tightly wound string of a musical instrument being snapped.
These sounds followed each other in no particular order, and, with the exception of the soft thumps, which Gregory characterized to himself as barefoot stomping, some of them might even be missing for several evenings in a row. Always performed with a certain amount of technical finesse, the sounds increased steadily in tempo, and once they began one could always look forward to a serenade of the most unusual richness and pitch. The sounds and murmurs were usually not very powerful, but to Gregory, lying under his cover in a dark room and staring at a high, invisible ceiling, it sometimes seemed as if they were loud enough to shatter his brain, and in time his interest in the sounds changed from simple curiosity to an almost pathological obsession, although, since he didn’t go in for self-analysis, he would have been hard put to say just when this change took place. It may be that Mrs. Fenshawe’s peculiar behavior during the daytime made him oversensitive to the miseries he had to endure every night. At the beginning, though, he was so busy with a case that he couldn’t worry very much about all this, and in any event, because he was so busy he slept well and hardly heard anything. After several nights of the noises, however, his dark room began to feel like an echo chamber. Gregory tried to convince himself that Mr. Fenshawe’s nocturnal activities were none of his business, but by then it was too late.
Next Gregory tried rationalizing. Faced with a collection of weird, incomprehensible sounds that no one ever mentioned, he attempted to work out a logical explanation of some kind that would cover everything. This, he soon discovered, was impossible.
Where once he had always slept like a log, dropping off as soon as he hit the sheets, and listening to the complaints of insomniacs with a polite attitude that verged on disbelief, now, in the Fenshawe house, he began to take sleeping pills.
Every week, Gregory had Sunday dinner with his landlords. The invitation was always extended to him on the preceding Saturday. On one of these occasions he managed to sneak a look into Mr. Fenshawe’s bedroom, but he regretted this immediately because what he saw exploded his elaborately constructed theory that his landlord was conducting a complicated scientific experiment. Except for a huge bed, a chest of drawers, a night table, a sink, and two chairs, the bright triangular room was empty. There wasn’t a sign of tools, wooden boards, balloons, metal containers, or kegs. There weren’t even any books.
The Sunday dinners were usually quite dull. The Fenshawes were conventional people who lifted their convictions and opinions from the pages of the
Afterward, Gregory would tell himself that it was a waste of time to worry about any of this: if he could only think the matter through, or at least formulate a reasonable theory about what his neighbor was doing behind their mutual wall in the middle of the night, he told himself, he would finally be free from the agonizing hours of tossing sleeplessly in a dark, lonely room.
But the idea of making sense out of a series of weird, disjointed sounds floated around in Gregory’s head as if in a void. Once, somewhat groggy from a sleeping pill which had made him drowsy without bringing rest, he quietly slipped out of bed and went out on the terrace, but the glass doors to Mr. Fenshawe’s room were covered from the inside with a heavy, nontransparent curtain. Gregory returned to his room shivering from the cold and, feeling like a whipped dog, he slipped under the covers, overcome with gloom because he had tried to do something for which he would always be ashamed.
Gregory’s work kept him so busy that he rarely thought about the noises during the daytime. At most, he was reminded of them once or twice when he bumped into Kinsey at Headquarters. On these occasions Kinsey always eyed him expectantly, with an air of cautious curiosity, but Gregory decided not to bother him about it. After all, in the long run the problem was trivial. In time, perhaps without even realizing it, Gregory gradually began to change his routine: he brought official reports home and brooded over them until midnight, sometimes even later. This enabled him to lie to himself about the ultimate disgrace that was already so close, for during his long hours of sleeplessness, the most extraordinary ideas were coming into his head, and several times he had conceived a desperate desire to just give up and take refuge in a hotel or a boardinghouse.
This evening more than ever, returning from Sheppard’s, Gregory needed peace and quiet. The alcohol had worked its way out of his system long before, although he still felt angry and had a pungent taste in his mouth, and his eyes smarted painfully as if there were sand beneath the lids. The staircase, immersed in darkness, was deserted. Gregory passed quickly through the drawing room, where the dark mirrors glistened coldly in the corners, and closed the door of his room with a sigh of relief. Out of habit — it had already become almost a reflex — he stood perfectly still for a moment, listening. At such times he didn’t think; his behavior was instinctive. The house was as still as death. Gregory turned on a lamp, noticed that the air in the room was heavy and stuffy and flung open the door to the terrace, then set about making coffee in his little electric pot. He had a splitting headache. Earlier in the evening other things had distracted him, but now the pain came up to the surface of his consciousness
