THIS TIME, THE whole house was awakened. Along they came flocking, pale and ramshackle in the moonlight, clutching their pyjama-cords and their half-donned dressing gowns, and gathered in the doorway of the boys’ room.
What is it? What’s happened? Why? How do you mean?—while Vernon, half-hysterical with fear, lay face downward on his pillow, choking and sobbing.
“No…. No …!” he gasped once, when Dot, leaning solicitously over the bed, asked him where it hurt? Enthusiastic though Dot was about psychological explanations in general, at night-time she preferred something that could be silenced with an aspirin. Herbert, tweaking futilely at her sleeve and murmuring, “Let me …” got the full brunt of her bewilderment.
Peppermints! That bag of peppermint bullseyes Herbert had passed round yesterday evening—that was the cause of it all! Peppermints on an empty stomach—well, all right, a full one, then, don’t quibble—peppermints were well known to cause …
Well, to cause …
To cause whatever it was that Vernon had got, for Heaven’s sake. That’s what peppermints were well known to cause: and if only Herbert had had the faintest understanding of his own child….
Meanwhile Cynthia, a fluttering vision of whitely moonlit hair and floating negligée, had undertaken to ring the doctor; in less than a minute she was back again to ask what his telephone number was, she couldn’t find it in the local directory; and did he spell his name Grieves or Greives?
He’ll never turn out at this hour of the night, predicted Herbert: and drugs, drugs, drugs, I don’t believe in drugs countered Dot, as if contradicting him. By this time, Piggy too was in the doorway, blinking and censorious, and wanting to know if something had happened? On being told that it had, she shrugged contemptuously and departed, apparently satisfied.
By now, Dot and Herbert, united by anxiety for their eldest child, were locked in deadly, sotto voce combat about who it was who hadn’t bought any aspirins last Saturday; while Cynthia, ping-pinging away on the telephone downstairs really seemed settled for the night. “It couldn’t be GREAVES, could it?” she shouted up the stairs once; and on receiving no clear answer went back, apparently happily, to her dialling. “Who?” she would squeal occasionally, on a startled yelp; or “But I thought … Oh, I’m so sorry …”, and then, nothing daunted, would try again. Of all the neighbourhood, Imogen reflected, only the doctor could be sleeping peacefully that night. Robin, of course, had been no trouble at all right from the start. He’d just looked in once and remarked “Oh, Christ!” and gone away again.
And in the midst of all this turmoil the prime mover of it all crouched, white-faced and almost unnoticed on his bunk, waiting for someone to make it not have happened.
They got the story out of him at last—Dot, Herbert, and Imogen between them—and it was no wonder he had been so scared. It is no joke to have the same nightmare twice in the space of a few minutes, falling back into it the moment you close your eyes, for all the world as if it had been there all the time, quietly waiting.
“And I didn’t even know I was asleep,” Vernon sobbed. “I thought you’d only just gone out of the room, Granny … I just shut my eyes, and opened them again, and it was there. Just like before … sort of looking down at me … and sort of talking … and oh, Granny, Mummy, this time it had teeth….”
It must have had them in the previous dream, of course, or Vernon would have remarked on it being toothless. But Imogen could guess what it was he was trying to describe. It was what teeth look like when the lips are drawn back from them in laughter, or in horror. Yellow teeth in the moonlight, long and sharp they must have seemed to Vernon, for here he was describing them as “fangs”, and from the wet, loose lips the slobber had hung in strings, swinging, as the face came nearer. He had tried to scream … to hit out … and then, suddenly, he was screaming, was hitting out … and the terrible face was gone.
*
Two aspirins, Dot decided, and a cup of hot milk. While she went in quest of these remedies, driving Herbert before her like a delinquent hen, Imogen stayed sitting on Vernon’s bunk and assuring him all over again that yes, of course it was only a dream, and that no, of course he wouldn’t dream it again, nobody ever dreams the same dream more than twice.
“Don’t they really, Granny? Not ever?”
Vernon’s interest seemed to have been caught by this tendentious piece of arithmetic, and Imogen found herself having to assemble impromptu bits of supporting evidence from far and wide, starting with the Bible. Soon, to make him smile, she was telling him of various silly dreams she had had in the course of her life—carefully-selected dreams, of course, about kittens, and the seaside, and headmistresses bicycling up lamp-posts.
Vernon listened gratefully, smiling sometimes, seeing through his step-grandmother’s rather transparent intentions, but nevertheless trying to go along with it all. Trying to be bamboozled, to be manœuvred out of the darkness and the terror, and to be palmed off with the light of common day.
Only a dream. Only a dream. By the time Dot came back with the hot milk and the aspirin, Vernon seemed to be quite tranquil again, though inclined to be argumentative about the milk.
“No, that’s not skin, it’s cream, it’ll do you good,” Dot admonished him; and then, to Imogen: “Why don’t you go off to bed, Imogen, and get some sleep? There’s nothing more you can do, he’ll be fine now, he’ll have forgotten all about it by the morning. Now, come on, dear, drink it up….”
Milk. The Milk of Forgetfulness. Dot was pouring it into him like petrol into a car, confident of getting results.
Would he forget, though? From the bottom of her heart, Imogen willed that it should be so. Willed him to forget the nightmare; to forget all the fuss and commotion it had caused. And, above all, to forget that moment when his eyes had met hers, and she had known, and he knew that she had known, that it hadn’t been a dream at all. It had happened.