Miss Smith had not slept for a long time. She was afraid to sleep because of the nightmares. Her hair hung lank about her shoulders, her eyes were dead and seemed to have fallen back deeper into her skull. She stood listening to this child, nodding her head up and down, very slowly, in a mechanical way. Her left hand moved gently back and forth on the smooth surface of her kitchen table.
‘My baby?’ Miss Smith said. ‘My baby?’
‘You have lost your baby,’ James reminded her.
Miss Smith nodded a little faster.
‘I will show you,’ James said.
He caught her hand and led her from the house, through the garden and through the gate into the fields. Hand in hand they walked through the grass, over the canal bridge and across the warm, ripe meadows.
‘I will pick you flowers,’ James said and he ran to gather poppies and cow-parsley and blue, beautiful cornflowers.
‘You give people flowers,’ James said, ‘because you like them and you want them to like you.’
She carried the flowers and James skipped and danced beside her, hurrying her along. She heard him laughing; she looked at him and saw his small weasel face twisted into a merriment that frightened her.
The sun was fierce on Miss Smith’s neck and shoulders. Sweat gathered on her forehead and ran down her cheeks. She felt it on her body, tightening her clothes to her back and thighs. Only the child’s hand was cool, and beneath her fingers she assessed its strength, wondering about its history. Again the child laughed.
On the heavy air his laughter rose and fell; it quivered through his body and twitched lightly in his hand. It came as a giggle, then a breathless spasm; it rose like a storm from him; it rippled to gentleness; and it pounded again like the firing of guns in her ear. It would not stop. She knew it would not stop. As they walked together on this summer’s day the laughter would continue until they arrived at the horror, until the horror was complete.
The woman called Mrs Dankers placed a rose-tipped cigarette between her lips and lit it from the lighter on the dashboard. The brief spurt of light revealed a long, handsome face with a sharpness about it that might often have been reminiscent of the edge of a chisel. In the darkness a double funnel of smoke streamed from her nostrils, and she gave a tiny gasp of satisfaction. On a grass verge two hundred miles north of London the car was stationary except for the gentle rocking imposed by the wind. Above the persistent lashing of the rain the radio played a popular tune of the thirties, quietly and without emotion. It was two minutes to midnight.
‘Well?’
The car door banged and Dankers was again beside her. He smelt of rain; it dripped from him on to her warm knees.
‘Well?’ Mrs Dankers repeated.
He started the engine. The car crept on to the narrow highway, its wipers slashing at the rain, its powerful headlights drawing the streaming foliage startlingly near. He cleared the windscreen with his arm. ‘It’ll do,’ he murmured. He drove on slowly, and the sound of the engine was lost in a medley of wind and rain and the murmur of music and the swish of the wipers.
‘It’ll do?’ said Mrs Dankers. ‘Is it the right house?’
He twisted the car this way and that along the lane. The lights caught an image of pillars and gates, closed in upon them and lost them as the car swung up the avenue.
‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘It’s the right house.’
Within that house, an old man lying stiffly in bed heard the jangle of the bell at the hall door and frowned over this unaccustomed sound. At first he imagined that the noise had been caused by the wind, but then the bell rang again, sharply and in a peremptory manner. The old man, called Cronin, the only servant in the house, rose from his bed and dragged a coat on to his body, over his pyjamas. He descended the stairs, sighing to himself.
The pair outside saw a light go on in the hall, and then they heard the tread of Cronin’s feet and the sound of a bar being pulled back on the door. Dankers threw a cigarette away and prepared an expression for his face. His wife shivered in the rain.
‘It’s so late,’ the old man in pyjamas said when the travellers had told him their tale. ‘I must wake the Marstons for guidance, sir. I can’t do this on my own responsibility.’
‘It’s wet and cold as well,’ Dankers murmured, smiling at the man through his widely spread moustache. ‘No night to be abroad, really. You must understand our predicament.’
‘No night to be standing on a step,’ added Mrs Dankers. ‘At least may we come in?’
They entered the house and were led to a large drawing-room. ‘Please wait,’ the man invited. ‘The fire is not entirely out. I’ll question the Marstons as you warm yourselves.’
The Dankerses did not speak. They stood where the man had left them, staring about the room. Their manner one to the other had an edge of hostility to it, as though they were as suspicious in this relationship as they were of the world beyond it.
‘I am Sir Giles Marston,’ said another old man. ‘You’ve sustained some travelling difficulty?’
‘Our car has let us down – due, I suppose, to some penetration of the weather. We left it by your gates. Sir Giles, we’re at your mercy. Dankers the name is. The lady is my good wife.’ Dankers stretched his arm towards his host in a manner that might have suggested to an onlooker that he, and not Sir Giles, was the welcomer.
‘Our need is simple,’ said Mrs Dankers. ‘A roof over our heads.’
‘Some outhouse maybe,’ Dankers hazarded, overplaying his part. He laughed. ‘Anywhere we can curl up for an hour or two. We cannot be choosers.’
‘I’d prefer a chair,’ his wife interceded sharply. ‘A chair and a rug would suit me nicely.’
‘I’m sure we can do better than that. Prepare two beds, Cronin; and light our guests a fire in their room.’
