Authors: Robert Aickman
‘A long war,’ said Colonel Adamski. ‘Those so-called
concentration
camps, of which we hear so much. A bad illness. A heartbreak that is without hope. The suffering that grows with religion. These are among the things that set the faculty for truth in motion. Or sleeplessness. Shakespeare complains often of not sleeping, but see how much he owes to it! Even the absurd local poet, Strindberg, would be still more
grotesque
if shafts of truth had not occasionally struck home as he lay wakeful; at one time in this very place. It would have been better by far if he had never left it. Then think of your own great statesman, Lord Rosebery: recognised by all as a man marked out, a man in a different mould from the pygmies who swarmed around his feet; though few of those who knew this could say why. Some of them even wrote books to explain how unable they were to account for Lord Rosebery’s obvious greatness. Did you know, Mrs. Sawyer, that for many years Lord Rosebery hardly slept at all?’
‘I’m afraid he was rather before my time,’ said Margaret.
‘He would have understood well that we who live here are at once cursed as Mrs. Slater says, but chosen also. He had the blue eyes that are commonest among our kind.’
‘It seems to me that most of you
look
very much like the rest of the world.’
‘We have the commonplace aspect of monks. Remove the distinguishing clothing, and many monks resemble Mrs. Slater. If you will pardon the paradox.’
The hall was now quite quiet.
‘May I give you some more coffee, Colonel Adamski?’
‘If you please.’
She refilled both cups, and then sat thinking.
‘Are there boundaries?’ she asked, after a while. ‘Or
frontiers
? To me it seemed that the wood, this special wood that you all speak of, was just part of the whole Swedish forest.’
‘That is true,’ said the Colonel. ‘Every now and then one of us fails to return. Some find tracks into the further forest, and return never.’
‘Perhaps they have merely decided to leave the Kurhus, and find that the simplest way of doing it? I can imagine that. I wanted to leave this afternoon, but it seemed almost impossible … I am glad now that I stayed,’ she added,
smiling
, and unwrapping a lump of sugar from its paper.
The Colonel bowed gravely. ‘They go,’ he said, ‘because they have reached their limit. For men and women there is to everything a limit, beyond which further striving, further thought, leads only to regression. And this is true even though most men and women never set out at all; possibly are not capable of setting out. For those who do set out, the limit varies from individual to individual, and cannot be foreseen. Few ever reach it. Those who do reach it are, I suspect, those who go off into the further forest.’
Margaret’s eyes were shining. ‘I know that you are right,’ she cried. ‘It is something I have long known, without finding the words.’
‘We all know it,’ said the Colonel. ‘And we all fear it. Because beyond our limit is nothing. It is a little like the Italian parable of the onion: skin after skin comes away, until in the end there is nothing – nothing but a perfume that lingers a little, as the dead linger here a little after death, perfuming the air, and then are gone. Or, more grandly, it is like Nirvana, no doubt; though Nirvana is something no European can understand. For me, it is like a particular moment in the war; a moment when, having no weapons, I had to fight hand to hand. It was not a moment I care to recall, even when I walk in the wood. It is far from true, Mrs. Sawyer, that we soldiers are men of strength and blood. New soldiers are like that in the least. But it was for me the moment when I stopped sleeping, stopped dreaming. Dreams, Mrs. Sawyer, are
misleading
, because they make life seem real. When it loses the support of dreams, life dissolves. But perhaps we have spoken enough of this funny little group to which I have found my way? Even I who am one of them do not deceive myself that it is the whole world, and you are only a visitor among us, here today and gone tomorrow, as your idiom puts it?’
‘I shall be sorry to be gone,’ said Margaret matter-
of-factly
. She tilted the coffee pot, then lifted the lid. ‘I’m afraid there’s no more. In England the coffee’s bad, but there’s more of it. I expect that’s symbolical too.’
The Colonel laughed politely.
‘Should I enter the wood, Colonel Adamski? Now, I mean, when all of you are walking? Mrs. Slater forbade me most strictly. What do you advise?’
‘You will have realised by now that on many questions there is no one view amongst us. No more than in the rest of the world. No more than in a monastery, to return to that example. You might be surprised! I went to school with monks, and can assure you that they differ among themselves every bit as much as politicians or businessmen. Mrs. Slater’s view reflects Mrs. Slater. When I was stationed for years in Britain with the Polish forces, waiting and learning, but mainly waiting, I learned that Britain’s strength lay in women like Mrs. Slater, cautious and unimpassioned. It would be wrong for me to argue with so excellent an example of your fellow-countrywomen.’
‘But should I enter the wood, Colonel Adamski?’
‘Why ever not, Mrs. Sawyer, if you want to? Why ever not? Few of us night-walkers actually bite. And certainly we should never bite a lovely lady like you.’
He moved in his chair.
‘Oh,’ said Margaret, remembering. ‘I do hope I haven’t been keeping you?’
‘But most agreeably.’ The Colonel rose and faintly clicked his heels. ‘Your husband is a fortunate man. I could only wish he didn’t build roads.’
‘Why?’ asked Margaret.
The Colonel spread out his hands.
‘The blood. The noise. The aggression and hostility. The devastation and emptiness. The means with no ends. The first roads, the first roads like that, were built by Hitler. The place of war is now taken in society by motoring. I, a soldier, tell you that my trade has changed its shape. But these are not things I should disclose to a road-builder’s wife, who has done me the honour of taking coffee with me after dinner. I apologise, Mrs. Sawyer. I go.’ The Colonel again made the faintest possible click with his heels, and went off up the stairs, stepping very silently for so well-built a man.
It seemed likely that all who meant to go out had now gone; possibly the entire guest-list, with the exceptions of Mrs. Total and Mrs. Ascot, Mrs. Slater and Margaret herself. Margaret sat on in the silent hall with its scattered fairy lights, hardly in sum providing even illumination by which one
wishing
to could read. In the end, a single late-departer descended the staircase. It was the small, slim girl, who earlier had worn a white dress. Now she wore a dark garment (there was not enough light for Margaret to discern the exact colour); which fitted as a skin and as tightly as a young one. She tripped down the stairs, swiftly but not hurriedly; not only as if to be last was her proper place, but perhaps even as if aware that she was expected and awaited. She looked skinnier and frailer than ever: her legs attentuated rather than slender, her breasts almost invisible in the darkness of the fabric that covered them. As she walked past, she glanced at Margaret directly, for the first time: her big blue eyes seemed to flash for a
half-second
, as light caught them; and to Margaret it seemed that her tiny, almost wasted mouth smiled slightly though whether in recognition it was impossible to say. In any case, she was past in a moment, and, in another, out through the door on to the terrace, where the blackness covered and absorbed her instantly.
Margaret found that, without volition, she had risen to her feet and was staring out towards the night beyond the glass panels in the door. She walked down the hall and
followed
the girl on to the terrace.
It was quite unexpectedly cold: she had forgotten the contrast in temperature between the Swedish daylight and the Swedish darkness. Later in the year, as she understood, there would be no darkness at any time during the
twenty-four
hours, but now it was thick and moonless and starless, thick and icy. Shaking all over in her dinner dress (though she could recall that many of the other guests had not looked particularly wrapped up when they went forth) and with her teeth already chattering so badly that her head felt like a skull, Margaret none the less groped her way slowly along the dark terrace, trying to dodge round the almost invisible tables and chairs, and guiding herself by the dim, pale line of the stone balustrade to her left. In the end, she reached the few steps down to the transverse path along which Mrs. Slater had so long before emerged; descending them with stress in her
high-heeled
shoes; and tottered off towards the wood she had entered that afternoon, the wood about which opinions seemed to differ so much, the wood where her own view of things had shifted perceptibly, as she knew quite well, and even though she had but dropped in as a foreign tripper, and but for a period of time to be counted more rationally in minutes than in hours, days, or years.
She went forward among the trees for perhaps fifty yards, then stopped. She had not even reached the nodule where the wider path untwined into the little rabbit-runs. She realised that if she went further, she would lose even the edgeless oval of something less than darkness behind her. Now there was no sound from the Kurhus kitchen, nor a light, visible through the foliage, in any part of the structure. It struck Margaret that the staff might go away each night to sleep. For the staff – the staff, of course,
slept
;
and might well find the indulgence easier when uncontrasted with universal wakefulness. To Margaret, the cold was the strangest thing. In only a few minutes her body had become so cold that she no longer even suffered from the chill. It felt like a body packed in a single block of ice; serene, and no longer any responsibility of hers. She wondered whether if one really were packed in a block of ice, one still spent a third of one’s life with one’s eyes closed, sleeping.
She had ceased to shiver or to chatter. She stood still and, there being nothing at all to see, listened. The steady, slight rustling of the afternoon was still to be heard. It could then have been the small creatures of the day. Margaret supposed it could not be the small creatures of the night; even more numerous, she understood. Still it seemed unlikely that small creatures would continue the same noise – and the same
degree
of noise (so that only when one stopped making an unnecessary noise oneself could one hear it) – in light and in darkness. Then Margaret realised that this might be a wood in which
nothing
slept; perhaps not even the trees.
The soft rustling went on and on. Occasionally a black bird swooped down invisibly. Outside and beyond the clear ice that enfolded her, Margaret suddenly began to be afraid lest in the darkness one of the perambulant Kurhus guests brush past her. She doubted whether she could face such an occurrence.
Probably it was this comparatively trifling fear which tipped the scale. Probably everything in the world is decided by tiny last straws. Though she had no doubt that, for a little time to come, she would despise herself, Margaret resolved upon retreat, upon leaving it at that: she would return to the Kurhus at once; go to her room; rub the ice out of herself with the huge Swedish bath towel, have a hot bath, turn on the heater, if there was one; snuggle down, as the women’s papers put it, in bed; aim to sleep, even pray to sleep, if she had to, though not once in her life hitherto had she found sleep to involve anything of the kind. And tomorrow, as would then be logical and necessary, she would return, having made herself as invisible as possible during the short remaining time at the Kurhus, to Sovastad, a day of her holiday lost, to say nothing of a day of Henry’s money.
Perhaps
, she thought, she had reached her limit; considerably sooner than for a brief period that evening she had supposed, even taken for granted about herself.
As she picked her way out of the dark wood, she realised that she had begun to shiver again. Crossing the silent hall, she wondered whether it would all end merely in a bad cold. It would be an appropriate sequel to her surrender. She despised herself for not changing her clothes and returning to the wood. She had not even confirmed that the people who had gone out through the Kurhus hall were in the wood at all. She was only sure that even in her thickest clothes she would find the wood almost as icy as if she were wearing nothing.
She rubbed herself down. She sank into steaming water. She went to bed. She felt self-betrayed, that she had behaved as an average woman would do; she had reached a point where she could be told little more and beyond which, if she went on, she would have to go alone, frozen and undefended; but she soon slept, and with no special measures.
*
When she woke to the morning sun (as high as this on the mountains the sun could shine at any hour), she knew that she would have to go at once. If a taxi could not be got, she would make her way on foot down the mountain to Sovastad, leaving her small luggage for Henry to go after when he returned. At one point she would not have wished that Henry should visit the Kurhus, but now it did not matter. She put on the dress in which she had arrived.
There was no demur. The hall was empty of guests, as it so often was, but the young Swede who looked like a boxer, was behind his desk, produced Margaret’s passport, and said he would ring up for a taxi at once. He did enquire whether Margaret wanted breakfast, but seemed unsurprised when she declined. Margaret wanted to meet neither Mrs. Slater nor Colonel Adamski, and did not know which, in their very different ways, she wanted to meet the less. Perhaps she wanted least of all to meet the frail-looking girl with bright blue eyes; whose resistance to cold, even in thin black tights, seemed to be so much greater than her own. The young reception clerk did not offer to abate half of Henry’s liability; or seem to think that the matter called for reference.
Surprisingly soon, the taxi arrived and Margaret directed it back to the familiar hotel in Sovastad. She hoped that she would not find it full. Her present reservation began, of course, only on the night of the next day, when Henry would be back. Looking out of the taxi’s rear window, she saw the white tables scattered about the deserted terrace, the bright flowers in hanging baskets, the vast sweep of green
descending
the side of the mountain, of which the lower part had not yet caught the morning sun. Presumably the regular inmates of the Kurhus were, in their own way, resting after the night’s peregrinations. There was still so much that Margaret did not understand.