Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (37 page)

In the silence that followed I could hear myself shaking. Then it began again.

‘Ooh. I don’t like you lot. You’re like a wet weekend in Warrington, you are. Or Helsinki. Hell’s inky, eh? Get it? Oh dear. I should have got meself a blotting paper coffin. I tell you, you’re the worst Tuesday night audience I’ve had all week. All you do is stare. I should have taken steps. I should have taken the lift. . . . You don’t like me. You’ve given me the bird. The cormorant, the great crested grebe, the tit, the great tit. I tell you. You get on my tits. I tell you. You’ve given me the bleeding vulture. You want to come screaming down and peck out my eyes. A pint of blood, please! Mine’s a pint. Don’t do it! Don’t ruin my act, you bitch! Don’t do it!’

As the voice rose to a scream I found I was screaming with it; then the door opened and Auntie Winnie came in. The room was full of light again. She asked what was the matter and I told her what she had expected to hear, that it was a nightmare. My aunt looked at me closely for a moment.

‘What did you see?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. It was dark.’

‘What did you hear?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘You go back to sleep then,’ she said. Surprisingly, I did.

Auntie Winnie interrogated me the following morning about my nightmare, but I pretended to have forgotten all about it. I was naturally distrustful of the curiosity of adults and much preferred their indifference. Experience had taught me that lying and reticence were almost the only defences I had against the outside world.

At the same time I longed to confide in someone who would listen and would not use that confidence as a means of exercising power over me. I dreaded the return of night. I no longer much liked to be in the house. In the afternoon, despite the showers of rain that blew across the Shad valley, I walked out and followed the stream for many miles meeting no-one before reluctantly returning to Dovecotes.

That night nothing really happened. There was a moment in the dark when I thought I heard the voice again whispering to me: ‘I’m a caution, I am. I’m a piece of elsewhere. Eh? Eh?’ but it could have been a dream, and I did not embarrass myself or Auntie Winnie by crying out.

The following morning, there was only one guest in the dining room. I had not seen him before, so I assumed that he must have come the previous evening. He was a tall, thin, elderly man in a grey suit and seemed out of the usual run of Auntie Winnie’s guests. When I asked Auntie Winnie about him she said that his name was Mr Fenton. ‘Don’t you go talking to him too long, though,’ she said, ‘I think he’s one of those.’

‘One of those what?’

‘Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. Just you do as I say. Take him in his bacon and eggs and don’t let him talk to you, do you hear?’

‘What does he do?’

‘He’s a connoisseur.’ She pronounced the word ‘connisewer’ and I assumed that he must be a sanitary inspector of some kind, though he did not look like one. When I took him his eggs and bacon he shook hands with me, asked my name and told me that his was Basil Fenton.

I smiled and ran back to the kitchen as I had been instructed to. He did not seem like a dangerous man to me: he had an accent like the announcers on the radio’s Home Service.

Later that morning I saw Mr Fenton talking to Auntie Winnie in the hall. Auntie Winnie beckoned me over and asked me to fetch Mr Fenton’s briefcase from his room, so I ran upstairs.

I found Mr Fenton’s room immaculately tidy. His briefcase, as he had stated, was on the dressing table. On the bedside table stood a white rosebud on a short stem in a tumbler of water and a leather-bound book with a sinuous design on the binding. I only had a brief moment to look inside the book and see that it was poetry by a man called Dowson.

When I came down stairs Mr Fenton was alone in the hall. I handed him the briefcase.

‘Thank you, Ronald,’ he said. ‘Do you know what it is that I do?’

‘Not really,’ I said, thinking that it might be rude to mention sewers.

‘I am a dealer in art and I am going over to some auction rooms in Crowforth to bid for a painting. Would you like me to show you what it looks like?’

I nodded. Mr Fenton took a catalogue from his briefcase and showed me a coloured reproduction of a painting, as I recall, a water-colour, though I cannot be sure. It was of gothic ruins in a river valley. Several men and women in Regency costume were wandering in the foreground. A man in a tall hat was pointing out some architectural feature with his stick to a bonneted lady.

‘That’s Kirkstall Abbey,’ I said. I knew it because it was near where we lived in Leeds.

Mr Fenton seemed mildly surprised. He said: ‘Quite right, Ronald. Well done. Now, tell me, what interests you most? People, animals or things?’

Without thinking, I replied: ‘People.’

Mr Fenton nodded and said: ‘A good answer, and an unusual one for someone of your age.’

That was the end of the conversation, because by this time Auntie Winnie was back from wherever she had been and was giving Mr Fenton what Mum used to call ‘a meaning look’.

That evening Auntie Winnie gave me my supper early and allowed me to sit in the residents’ lounge to watch television until eight o’clock, because she had to go out. I cannot remember exactly what I saw on the television that night—it was black and white in those days—but I have the impression that it was extremely dull, because I felt no regrets when it reached eight o’clock. I switched off the television in the lounge and went into the hall. The house was empty except for me, or so I believed. I had gone half way up the stairs when I noticed something out of the ordinary.

At the top of the stairs was a small landing and a passageway, along which ran a banister rail. It looked as if someone had pushed a white object through the uprights of the banister towards me. The object was completely circular, much creased, and about the size of a head, perhaps slightly larger, and, as I continued to stare at it, I began to identify the thing as a mask of some kind, made perhaps out of papier maché or possibly plaster. The colour was greyish white and some of its more prominent features—the cheeks, the chin, the nose and lips—had a shiny surface.

It reminded me of those pictures of the Man in the Moon in Victorian children’s books where the silver disc in the night sky has been given a leering, would-be comic face. The closed mouth was wide and grinning, the lower lip impishly thrust out; the eyes were dark, though not quite blank. I did not like the thing at all. If someone had put it there for a joke it was not at all funny. A few sparse black hairs sprouted from the side of the head, and, though the thing had no neck, just below the chin was a large red and white spotted bow tie, like a clown’s. It was after all only a mask of some kind, intended to be a bit of harmless fun.

Then one of its leprous, puckered eyelids winked. I had no breath to scream; I simply stood still. Time passed—I don’t know how long; it could have been only seconds—during which I blinked and convinced myself that it had been an illusion, but, as soon as I had, the mouth opened and began to jabber in that same beery well-oiled voice that I had heard before:

‘I’m a caution I am; a piece of elsewhere. There’ll never be another. Boys will be boys, eh? Lucky for you girls, or you’d get no fun. Here’s a funny thing. I came home last night. Now, there’s a funny thing. I walked into the house, and there’s a man on the patio, not a stitch on. Not a stitch on! Can you imagine that, lady? She’s not talking. So I says to the wife, I says: “Allo, allo, what’s going on here? What’s this naked man doing on my patio.” She says: “He’s a nudist from next door and he’s come in to use the barbecue.” There’s a clever one from the wife, eh? I says: “Use the barbecue? All right where’s your bloody steaks? Where’s your little sausages? Where’s your chops?” She says: “You are, mate! He’s going to chop you into chops. He’s going to chop your chopper off and make a little sausage. He’s going to have you, you worthless pillock, and there’ll be nothing left but blood and bits and bones and blood, and pieces of elsewhere and nothing!” Are you listening? Can you hear me? Hands up anyone who’s not here? Me! I’m nowhere! I’ve gone to pieces, Me! Aaargh!’

The voice rose to a scream.

It was Mr Fenton who came back to Dovecotes before Auntie Winnie and found me at the bottom of the stairs. He summoned an ambulance and I spent the rest of the night in Crowforth cottage hospital. I had concussion and it was assumed that I had fallen down stairs, but no serious damage had been done apparently. When Auntie Winnie came to take me home the following morning she said: ‘I haven’t told your Mum and Dad. They’re in France and it would only worry them unnecessarily.’ Unnecessarily for whom? Not for me.

When she asked me what had happened I muttered that I thought I had seen something at the top of the stairs.

‘Oh, that!’ said Auntie Winnie. ‘White was it? Did you think it was a ghost then? Well that’s your own fault. You’d left a laundry bag on the landing. I told you to take it down, but you never listen. You men never listen.’

I was now desperate to go home, but, as my parents were still abroad, I could not. I refused to go up to bed at night unaccompanied; I stayed in my room whenever possible. I knew that Auntie Winnie was beginning to find me thoroughly tiresome, but none of my attempts to placate her succeeded. My only source of consolation was Mr Fenton who talked to me quietly and seriously when he could, and showed me pictures of the items he was buying in the local auction rooms, but this relationship was frowned upon by my aunt who broke up our little talks whenever she saw them taking place. My nights were restless and tormented by terrible dreams which I cannot now remember. I had difficulty getting up in the morning to help Auntie Winnie out.

One afternoon a couple of days after my fall Auntie Winnie said to me: ‘I really don’t know what to do with you, Ronald. Mr Barbel is coming over tonight to hold another development session and when he’s finished I’m going to ask him to come and have a look at you.’ She must have seen my dismay because she went on: ‘Now, don’t you start fussing. We’re very lucky to have Mr Barbel. He’s a very wise and a very deep man. He’s what we call a sensitive. He’s also a professional healer, you know. He’s done a lot of laying on of hands and he’s had some amazing results.’

That evening, having handed round the sandwiches to the baggy mooncalfs attending the development session, and having avoided the eyes of Mr Barbel, I went upstairs to bed alone, keeping my eyes firmly on the stair carpet, as I did so. I reached my bedroom safely, got into my pyjamas and waited in fear for Mr Barbel’s arrival.

When he and Auntie Winnie came I think I had dozed off, half hopeful that they had forgotten all about me. I sat up in bed while my aunt and Mr Barbel stared at me as if I were a stranger. Mr Barbel wore a narrow silk bow tie and a powder blue linen suit in the breast pocket of which was an orange silk handkerchief; a strange concession to dandyism for such a mean, wrinkled little man. He looked like an amateur conjurer at a church concert.

Winnie said: ‘Now Mr Barbel is here to have a little talk to you, and see if he can find out what’s the matter. So you just do what he says and answer his questions. I told you he was a healer, so he may want to lay his hands on you, but don’t be afraid. It’s for your own good.’

‘All right, Mrs Pye,’ said Mr Barbel. ‘You leave me with the young lad, now. We’ll soon sort him out.’

Auntie Winnie left the room without a murmur of objection and now I was alone with Mr Barbel who was staring at me searchingly through his pebble glasses. I noticed that long grey hairs, like tiny tentacles were feeling their way out of his nostrils.

‘Now then, laddie,’ said Mr Barbel, seating himself on my bed. ‘What’s this all about, then, eh?’

My responses to his questions were sullen and incoherent. Mr Barbel whom I now hated fiercely was the last person in whom I wanted to confide, but he took my intransigence calmly. His myopic stare came closer to me and he nodded several times.

He said: ‘Are you a “sensitive”, laddie? I think you’re a sensitive.’ Then from his breast pocket he took his orange silk handkerchief which must have been drenched in cologne because a powerful scent suddenly invaded the room. Along with the handkerchief he drew out a little round gold watch on a gold chain. I thought it looked like a lady’s pendant watch, the kind my Mum occasionally wore round her neck to school.

‘Now then, laddie,’ said Mr Barbel, ‘I’m going to see if I can help you. You see this little gold pendant. It’s actually a watch only you can only see the back of it, just like a round gold circle. Now you keep an eye on that little gold circle, laddie, and don’t worry about a thing. Don’t think about a thing. Your thoughts are elsewhere, laddie; your eyes are on the gold.’ He began to swing the watch gently to and fro. My eyes followed it, but I did not feel drowsy, nor did I feel particularly under the spell of Mr Barbel whose gravelly voice droned on; ‘Keep your eyes on the little gold circle, laddie. Just relax. Don’t you worry about a thing . . .’

I felt Mr Barbel’s cold, gnarled hand slide under the bedclothes and into my pyjama trousers. I screamed, but it was not his hand that made me scream, it was the white face that leered over his shoulders and shouted: ‘He won’t find anything there, laddie! Eh? Eh? He won’t find anything there!’

The next moment Mr Fenton had burst into the room and seized Mr Barbel by the collar. I believe he hit him and broke his pebble glasses. At any rate, there was a great fuss about it all and the police were summoned. I don’t think I made a very coherent witness, because in the end, no charges were brought against anyone. My parents were summoned from France and I went home to them late the following day. That was the last I ever saw of Auntie Winnie.

About a year later, following an anonymous tip-off, the police conducted a search under the patio of Dovecotes where they found the remains of Percy Pye, the club comedian. Winnie died in prison some years later.

Mum visited her there once and all Auntie Winnie would do was tell stupid jokes, so she never went again.