Fear Read online

  Doors banged everywhere, and furniture was overturned, as the beatific throng surged and stumbled through the involved darkness of the old building. Glasses went and china and Birmingham brass warming pans. In a moment, Gerald heard the Japanese armour crash to the boards. Phrynne screamed. Then a mighty shoulder, made strong by the sea’s assault, rammed at the panelling and their door was down.

  ‘The living and the dead dance together.

  Now’s the time. Now’s the place. Now’s the weather.’

  At last Gerald could make out the words.

  The stresses in the song were heavily beaten down by much repetition.

  Hand in hand, through the dim grey of the doorway, the dancers lumbered and shambled in, singing frenziedly but brokenly; ecstatic but exhausted. Through the stuffy blackness they swayed and shambled, more and more of them, until the room must have been packed tight with them.

  Phrynne screamed again. ‘The smell. Oh God, the smell.’

  It was the smell they had encountered on the beach; in the congested room, no longer merely offensive, but obscene, unspeakable.

  Phrynne was hysterical. All self-control gone, she was scratching and tearing, and screaming again and again. Gerald tried to hold her, but one of the dancers in the darkness struck him so hard that she was jolted out of his arms. Instantly it seemed that she was no longer there at all.

  The dancers were thronging everywhere, their limbs whirling, their lungs bursting with the rhythm of the song. It was difficult for Gerald even to call out. He tried to struggle after Phrynne, but immediately a blow from a massive elbow knocked him to the floor, an abyss of invisible trampling feet.

  But soon the dancers were going again; not only from the room, but, it seemed, from the building also. Crushed and tormented though he was, Gerald could hear the song being resumed in the street, as the various frenzied groups debouched and reunited. Within, before long there was nothing but the chaos, the darkness, and the putrescent odour. Gerald felt so sick that he had to battle with unconsciousness. He could not think or move, despite the desperate need.

  Then he struggled into a sitting position, and sank his head on the torn sheets of the bed. For an uncertain period he was insensible to everything: but in the end he heard steps approaching down the dark passage. His door was pushed back, and the Commandant entered gripping a lighted candle. He seemed to disregard the flow of hot wax which had already congealed on much of his knotted hand.

  ‘She’s safe. Small thanks to you.’

  The Commandant stared icily at Gerald’s undignified figure. Gerald tried to stand. He was terribly bruised, and so giddy that he wondered if this could be concussion. But relief rallied him.

  ‘Is it thanks to you?’

  ‘She was caught up in it. Dancing with the rest.’ The Commandant’s eyes glowed in the candlelight. The singing and dancing had almost died away.

  Still Gerald could do no more than sit up on the bed. His voice was low and indistinct, as if coming from outside his body. ‘Were they … were some of them …?’

  The Commandant replied more scornful than ever of his weakness. ‘She was between two of them. Each had one of her hands.’

  Gerald could not look at him. ‘What did you do?’ he asked in the same remote voice.

  ‘I did what had to be done. I hope I was in time.’ After the slightest possible pause he continued. ‘You’ll find her downstairs.’

  ‘I’m grateful. Such a silly thing to say, but what else is there?’

  ‘Can you walk?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I’ll light you down.’ The Commandant’s tone was as uncompromising as always.

  There were two more candles in the Lounge, and Phrynne, wearing a woman’s belted overcoat which was not hers, sat between them drinking. Mrs Pascoe, fully dressed but with eyes averted, pottered about the wreckage. It seemed hardly more than as if she were completing the task which earlier she had left unfinished.

  ‘Darling, look at you!’ Phrynne’s words were still hysterical, but her voice was as gentle as it usually was.

  Gerald, bruises and thoughts of concussion forgotten, dragged her into his arms. They embraced silently for a long time: then he looked into her eyes.

  ‘Here I am,’ she said, and looked away. ‘Not to worry.’

  Silently and unnoticed, the Commandant had already retreated.

  Without returning his gaze, Phrynne finished her drink as she stood there. Gerald supposed that it was one of Mrs Pascoe’s concoctions.

  It was so dark where Mrs Pascoe was working that her labours could have been achieving little; but she said nothing to her visitors, nor they to her. At the door Phrynne unexpectedly stripped off the overcoat and threw it on a chair. Her nightdress was so torn that she stood almost naked. Dark though it was, Gerald saw Mrs Pascoe regarding Phrynne’s pretty body with a stare of animosity.

  ‘May we take one of the candles?’ he said, normal standards reasserting themselves in him.

  But Mrs Pascoe continued to stand silently staring; and they lighted themselves through the wilderness of broken furniture to the ruins of their bedroom. The Japanese figure was still prostrate, and the Commandant’s door shut. And the smell had almost gone.

  Even by seven o’clock the next morning surprisingly much had been done to restore order. But no one seemed to be about, and Gerald and Phrynne departed without a word.

  In Wrack Street a milkman was delivering, but Gerald noticed that his cart bore the name of another town. A minute boy whom they encountered later on an obscure purposeful errand might, however, have been indigenous; and when they reached Station Road, they saw a small plot of land on which already men were silently at work with spades in their hands. They were as thick as flies on a wound, and as black. In the darkness of the previous evening, Gerald and Phrynne had missed the place. A board named it the New Municipal Cemetery.

  In the mild light of an autumn morning the sight of the black and silent toilers was horrible; but Phrynne did not seem to find it so. On the contrary, her cheeks reddened and her soft mouth became fleetingly more voluptuous still.

  She seemed to have forgotten Gerald, so that he was able to examine her closely for a moment. It was the first time he had done so since the night before. Then, once more, she became herself. In those previous seconds Gerald had become aware of something dividing them which neither of them would ever mention or ever forget.

  The Telephone

  by Mary Treadgold

  ‘If you would catch the spleen and laugh yourselves into stitches, follow me,’ I called to Sir Toby – and as I ran across the stage caught the eye of the white-haired man in the V.I.P.’s row. The light from the stage streamed out over the darkened theatre. He was leaning forward, amused, laughing – and as Sir Toby chased after me I laughed back. I had fallen in love with him at sight – there, from the middle of the stage of an end-of-term Dramatic School performance of Twelfth Night.

  We met at the party after the show – and met again – and again – and then we began to meet in backstreet Soho restaurants, and then in my tiny London flat. I loved him desperately. I had never been in love before, and Allan had not been in love for over thirty years – not since he had married Katherine, he told me, in some queer little snowbound Canadian township. ‘I never meant this to happen. I’ve never felt like this about any woman before. I don’t understand myself,’ he said restlessly.

  All through that winter I clung to Allan. We kept the long secret winter afternoons and evenings together. There was so much that he wanted to give me – the things that I wanted for myself, more than wanted, believed that I must have. ‘I want to give you kindness – and shelter – and love,’ he said. He and Katherine had had no children.

  But it could not go on like that. Every time he came to my flat the conflict in him deepened. It was like the deepening rift splitting a tree-trunk down to its roots. He would turn wearily towards me. ‘How can I hurt her?’ he would ask me. ‘Katherine and I – we