You know the English and their front rooms. Here is a front room that will outdo them all.
On the last Saturday of that hot September, the brown bus put down Naomi and Bevis in the sun-faded holiday hamlet at the end of the naked stretch of new concrete road that ran parallel to the sand dunes, because this was as far as it went.
Top End, the bus driver told them, was at the far end of the new road and a little way on. You couldn’t miss it; there was a pub and a shop, and the chalets and bungalows were up on the sand hills off the narrow road. Anyone would tell them where their place was, he said.
There was a little clump of people at the bus stop; flowered print dresses and baggy shorts, peeled noses and pale varicosed legs. It was mostly the older folk who came to this unfashionable coast. Before the war it had teemed, and it was still cheap.
The people got into the bus, and it rattled off round the semi-circle of wooden-fronted buildings: the chemist’s shop with the handwritten ticket about printing and developing snapshots, the picture postcard stand and the dusty piles of children’s buckets and spades, the amusement arcade with the pin tables and the pop music: past all these and back the way it came—to where the sky met the flat, raw sweep of fenland behind the sea, and crazy lanes zig-zagged the great dyked fields.
Naomi felt suddenly forsaken. “Wouldn’t there be any chance of getting a taxi, darling?” she said, and wished she hadn’t, because it always annoyed Bevis when she seemed to take the initiative in things. Yes, the suggestion had prickled him; he breathed heavily through his nose when he looked about them. There was no sign of a garage; apart from an old red sports car parked at the end of the buildings, where the road gave way to sand, at the deep cutting through the sand hills leading to the beach, there was nothing on wheels.
“Well, what do you think?” he snapped, and stooped to pick up their cases. “Come on, let’s get on with it.” He set off up the straight, hot road—and Naomi followed him.
The blare of the pop music faded behind them, and they were walking in tandem in the middle of the empty road to a point up ahead, with whispering hay in the fields at either side; on their right the high dunes shielding the sea, and the endless fens on their left. And all the while she watched this man she had married that spring.
It will be all right, she told herself. We haven’t made a good start, but it hasn’t been easy, what with both of us having to go out to work to scrape together the money for the mortgage on the house. This fortnight’s going to make all the difference. Two inexpensive weeks by the sea with just the basic joys of sunshine and idleness. Time to find ourselves again. Next year, maybe, we’ll start a family...
Strange how thin and frail Bevis looked with his arms tautened by the weight of the cases. They had met and courted in the winter, and he had looked almost burly in winter clothes. Quite different now. She would have to fatten him up during the holiday. Only trouble was he had an appetite like a little bird, and smoked far too much. The strain of carrying the heavy cases was telling on him already; he was breathing heavily, and tendrils of his wispy, fair hair were sticking to his pale brow.
No use offering to carry one of them, though they both knew she was basically the stronger. And that was another thing he detested.
He dumped down the cases in the sandy grass at the road verge and lit a cigarette, avoiding her gaze. There was a frosting of sweat around his mouth, and his fingers holding the match trembled with fatigue.
Naomi said: “That’s right, darling. Have a bit of a rest, there isn’t much further to go.” And she crossed to the fence and looked across a narrow field to the sand hills, where the wind from the sea was ruffling the spiky crests of the grass up there, and some of it reached her because she felt its languorous breath mold her dress, lightly, to her body. She wondered if Bevis was watching her.
She stretched herself lazily, and suddenly felt very alive. “It really is a most wonderful September,” she said. But he didn’t reply, and when she turned he was already hefting the cases and setting off again down the middle of the road.
Top End was how they had been told it would be, and the pub was closed, so they enquired at the shop, which was really only a glass lean-to on the end of a weatherboard bungalow, and the woman had to call her husband in from the garden, and after some thought he remembered that the Leevis place was the last house along the sand hills. How far? Perhaps half a mile or a bit more.
In the end, the man offered to deliver their cases in his van later on in the afternoon, so they set off again unencumbered, and Bevis’s spirits rose; he took Naomi’s hand, and they swung along gaily, speculating on what the place was going to be like, not to mention Mrs. Leevis, who was no more to them than a semi-illiterate, pencilled note telling them that in reply to their advertisement she could offer her bungalow, et cetera.
“Well, at any rate, however awful the place is, we’re right on the beach,” said Naomi.
The narrow road hugged the foot of the sand hills, and the bungalows were set on the crests, among the dry grass and the straggling gorse, each plot bounded by a wire fence. They were spaced at haphazard intervals, and none of them were close together. Weatherboard, concrete, and flaking paint with the silvery wood showing through. Bijou verandahs of fretted wood peering over the crests to the grey, crawling sea below, where the seagulls swooped. Seedy, small monuments of insularity, and not a soul in sight; everywhere seemed deserted. But then it was nearly October.
“It can’t be much further,” cried Naomi, and she slipped off her shoes and ran barefoot to the top of the next rise in the narrow road. “Yes, there it is!” calling back to him as he strode up to join her.
The last roof lay half-hidden by a copse of tall gorse, and beyond that the road wound on to an infinity of solitude.
“It’s terribly isolated out here,” she said, and suddenly wished she hadn’t.
The bungalow, when they came to it, was a crouching block of salt-bleached concrete in a sand declivity, with a low-pitched roof of grey slate. Naked-looking iron pipes; eyeless, curtained windows; an uncompromising back door with an empty milk bottle on the step.
Quelling a sudden stab of disappointment, Naomi said: “Come on, darling. This is really the back of the house. The front of it will be facing the sea, and that might be quite nice.” And they walked together through the warm, yielding sand round the small building. “Yes, it’s not too bad at all. There’s a verandah and a French window looking right out to sea.”
They were standing together, in the open space of sand in front of the verandah, when the woman came out of the gate in the wire fence from the gorse copse.
“Are you the people?” she called to them. “Yes, I can see you must be. I’ll get Ned to carry your cases indoors. Where’s your cases?”
Bevis was no good with strangers, so Naomi walked the few paces to meet her, smiling.
“The man from the village shop’s going to deliver them later,” she said, adding interrogatively: “Mrs. Leevis?”
She was about fifty-five, and wore a gillyflower-colored dress and beads to match, and a large hat of shiny black straw under which the straggly tendrils of white hair were scraped back into a bun that pushed out the hat at the back. Broken veins crazed her cheeks pinkly under a heavy tan, and her eyes were palest blue and disconcertingly watchful. She was tall, and moved with a memory of straightness and strength.
“Yes, that’s right dear,” she said. Her teeth were white, and her own. “Well, I expect you’d like to go inside and get settled in.” And she led them round to the back door and unlocked it standing aside to let them pass, her eyes flickering over the slender girl and the pale young man. “I think you and your husband will find everything quite comfortable.”
There was a narrow, dark-wallpapered passage with four doors leading off. First, a kitchen. “It’s not big, but very convenient, you’ll find,” said Mrs. Leevis. And Naomi looked at her doubtfully: cramped as a ship’s galley, with painted whitewood table and two chairs; a dresser with plates and a row of dusty, hanging cups; a food cupboard. There was no fridge, and the cooker worked with bottled gas.
“There’s plenty of gas for your fortnight,” said Mrs. Leevis, opening the cupboard, “and you’re welcome to the bits and pieces in here.” These comprised half empty packets of rice and sugar, some condiments and preserves, and a bottle with dried sauce lacquered around the stopper. Naomi made a mental resolve to consign the lot to the waste bin and wipe out the shelves as soon as the woman’s back was turned.
“Well, it’s a lovely bright kitchen,” she made herself say. And indeed the afternoon sun came full into the narrow room, mellowing its dusty rawness.
Mrs. Leevis nodded dismissively; she seemed to want to hurry on with the tour of the bungalow; eager, like a child, to reach the best part which lay just around the next corner, through another door.
She showed them the bedroom opposite the kitchen, with the double bed, and drew back the blinds to show the tangled thicket of gorse beyond the fence.
“You’re not overlooked here,” she said.
The second bedroom was only a windowed cupboard with an iron cot covered by an army blanket. There was a musky smell of maleness in the room, and Naomi winced to see a spider scurry across the bare floorboards and disappear in the wainscoting.
“Well, that just leaves the front room,” said Mrs. Leevis, and there was no mistaking the edge of pride in her tone. “I’ll go first, ’cos I keep it locked always.”
It lay at the end of the passage; the last remaining door, and Mrs. Leevis unlocked it, casting them a sidelong glance as if to say: “This is what you’ve been waiting for, and you won’t be disappointed.”
Naomi tried to catch Bevis’s eye, but he was watching the woman gravely, and she was able to quench a wayward impulse to giggle.
“There!” exclaimed Mrs. Leevis, moving aside to let them pass. “This is where you’re going to spend many a happy evening, I shouldn’t wonder.”
It’s hideous, thought Naomi. Hideous in every possible way, and I hate it! She looked to Bevis for a confirming glance, but he was still regarding the woman, and nodding as she spoke. “All my treasures. And you’ll live amongst them, and they’ll become part of you also…”
It was dark, to begin with. The French window at the end was shaded by the verandah roof, which cut off the view of sea and sky, so that there were only the sand hills to be seen, and they were in deep shadow from the wall of the building. There were no other windows in the room.
And it was shaped like a cube. Five paces to the window and five paces across (heaven knows, it might have been five paces up the maroon-papered walls to the high, dark ceiling). Mrs. Leevis pressed a switch, and a single bulb burned starkly inside a raw glass cone, picking out the hotchpotch of heavy furniture that crammed the space beneath it: boggle-tasselled Victoriana and tubular steel side by side; spindly small tables loaded with domed, wax fruit, pale photographs in silver frames and passepartout. They followed Mrs. Leevis across to the fireplace, turning and weaving through the maze of objects that lay between.
“This is a pretty thing,” said Mrs. Leevis, taking an object from the cluttered mantelpiece. “I had it since I was a girl like you, dear, and I often pick it up and turn it over in my hands to remind me...”
What she was holding was small and brightly colored, but it remained a glazed blur on the edge of Naomi’s vision. Her whole shocked attention was on the thing she could see under the woman’s arm, among the jumble of knickknacks, between the swelling base of a lustre vase and a brass bell shaped like a crinolined lady.
In a sealed, liquid-filled cylinder of glass lay slackly turned coils of ochre and brown, ending in a tiny, v-marked head, and the dead eyes were opaque like drowned seed pearls.
She screamed as she tripped and fell back over something, and Bevis steadied her; shocked at first, then irritated to see the cause of her sudden terror.
Mrs. Leevis stooped to right the footstool that Naomi had overturned. “Well, I never saw such a fuss,” she said disapprovingly. “It’s only a little adder our Ned killed up in the sand hills when he was a lad. He put it in pickle. I’m sure it couldn’t harm a soul, and it always looks so pretty in the light. All those soft colors.”
“I can’t bear—such things,” faltered Naomi, looking to Bevis for support, but he only pursed his lips and fumbled for his cigarette packet.
There was not much else to say after that. Mrs. Leevis was last out of the room. She looked back adoringly before she turned off the light and relocked the door. They went outside with her, and stood to watch her go.
“Anything you want, just call,” she said, pointedly addressing Bevis. “We’re not far away, and Ned is always very willing.” She went out through the gate in the wire fence and into the dappled sunlight of the gorse. And now they could see it: half-hidden there a stone’s throw away: an old railway carriage with a green-painted roof and steps leading up to a door with a rustic arch. And then they heard the heavy rasp of a big saw biting into wood. It came from somewhere behind the strange building.
“That must be her son,” said Bevis, and then he growled: “What did you have to go and make that ridiculous scene for? The old girl thought you’d gone crazy.”
Naomi didn’t answer. Still grumbling, he followed her into the kitchen and watched her fill a kettle and put it on the stove for tea.
She shut her mind to him, telling herself that it would be all right soon, and that she had to make this holiday work for both their sakes—and it would be she who would have to make all the allowances.
Only—one thing—she would never be able to use that awful front room. It wasn’t just the thing in the glass cylinder, but something about the whole room that was infinitely disturbing.
Later, when the man from the shop had delivered their cases, she suggested a swim—their first that year—but he had found a deck chair in the toolshed and was reading a paperback, sulkily, in the sunlight at the back of the bungalow. “All right, then, I’ll go on my own,” she said.
It was while she was changing in the bedroom that she had the sensation of being watched. The curtains were still open, and she rushed to close them. Before the folds shut her in secretly, she peered along the blank mass of gorse hedge ten feet away from the window; no sign of anyone.
But later, when she glissaded down the far side of the sand hills, and walked alone across the empty shore to the distant, murmuring sea—and even when the sea’s coolness closed about her and greenly bid her—there was still the sensation that she was being watched.
In the days that followed, the unsubstantial relationship between the young couple faltered and broke under the strain of their nearness to each other. Five months of married life in a mortgaged semi-detached suburban house, where they had met over breakfast and the radio weather forecast, and parted outside the insurance office where Naomi worked, to meet again in the evening for supper and television, had been the only background they had known together before; three days and nights of the small bungalow on the sand hills sundered them.
Naomi quickened to the sun and the sea, and came alive. She lived in her bikini, her rounded limbs browned and free. Bevis, fair and pale-skinned, kept out of the sun; sat reading all day on the verandah, outside the open French window. And on the third night he went to sleep alone in the small bedroom.
On the morning of the fourth day, the mares’ tails came in from the west. By mid-afternoon, the sky was tumbled grey ness, and the rain slanted down, pockmarking the sand. He sat alone in the front room—where she had never set foot since that first time—and Naomi was hunched at the kitchen table, tapping a fingernail nervously on the rim of an empty teacup and staring out through the window across the inland fens.
Around five o’clock, the downpour slackened and retreated in a line across the sand hills. A thin fan of sunlight burst through a widening patch of cerulean blue, and Naomi scraped back the chair and went out into the passage.
“I’m going to walk down to the shop,” she called, taking down her mackintosh. “Coming?”
No reply. She went out, slamming the door behind her; across the damp sand to the narrow road that wound back to the village.
Free. She felt free again, with the tangy wind plastering her hair to her cheek, and her hands thrust deep into the secret warmth of her coat pockets. Free from Bevis and his sulky tantrums, his half-hearted desires and his self-doubting. But what was going to happen now; what was going to happen when they went home after next week? She’d hoped that the holiday would have given them a fresh start, but would they ever—now—be able to pick up even the flat, untrammeled, undemanding routine of the house and their jobs…?
What was that?
She stopped and stared up at the swaying spikes of grass fringing the crest of the sand hills on her left.
Something had moved up there: a dark shape had bobbed up from behind the dunes, in a flickering instant, caught in the corner of her eye!
Something—someone—watching her? Following her along the far side of the sand hills?
She waited a few moments, then set off again, quickening her pace. And then the rain came down again.
Whatever—whoever—it was must now be behind me at the speed I was walking, she thought. And in any event, she was now more than halfway to Top End. Up the next rise in the road, and around the next bend, she would be able to see the pub and the shop; to see and be seen. There was no comfort for her in the straggling line of bungalows on the dunes, with their dead-eyed windows. And to go toward them meant approaching whoever was following her. Better anything than that. Keep going. Keep whatever it was behind her. She broke into a run.
On the next rise she could see her goal, and there she dared to pause and force herself to turn slowly and look back along the line of dunes, silhouetted against a pinky-grey band of sky below the black overcast
Of course, there was no one there. But she went on even faster, breaking into a run, and not just because the rain was now sluicing down, soaking her under the sodden mackintosh, but because she sensed, again, the watching eyes. And they were fingering her back.
Naomi didn’t dare turn again—and above all she didn’t dare to turn quickly—because then she would surprise her watcher and then she would see him!
At length, soaked and sobbing with relief, she opened the door of the lean-to shop, and the tiny clang of the bell made the woman look up from behind the counter, slack-mouthed.
“Why! You’re wet through. And you look as if you’ve seen a ghost!”
Naomi found a smile to put on, and bought a few things she had no need of, inconsequential things: a pot of chocolate spread, which she detested; some matches; a packet of sweet biscuits; salt. Then she found that she had brought no money with her.
The woman had been joined by her husband, now, and Naomi could feel them staring at her as she stood with her head bowed in the middle of the tiny shop, clutching her purchases, while the rain roared down on the sloping glass roof above.
“You don’t look well to me, love,” said the woman; and to her husband: “She don’t look well, and it isn’t fit to turn a dog out. Get the van and drive the young lady back to her place. You know where it is.”
It was a blessed relief to go back in the van. The man didn’t say much, and Naomi avoided looking toward the sand hills. He put her off at the gate, and said she could drop the money in at the shop next time she was by. Naomi thanked him, and ran through the rain to the door.
Dusk was closing in above the overcast, and she nearly trod on the thing that lay on the step.
It was a wild bouquet of daisies, rose hips, and hawthorn, mixed with waxy leaves of laurel, all neatly tied together with a strip of bass. It signified nothing to her, so she pushed it aside with her foot.
As soon as she had closed the door behind her, Naomi sensed that something was wrong. She heard Bevis moving about in the small bedroom; he dropped something on the floor and swore savagely so that she should hear.
“Bevis—what are you doing, darling?”
No answer. And he came out before she could reach the bedroom door, brushing past her, sullen-faced, and into the kitchen.
Oh, God, she thought. He’s off in one of his tantrums again. What have I said? What have I done?
She followed him. He was filling a kettle of water at the sink, and, with a sick, numbed feeling, she saw that his hands were shaking. He was going through the motions of making a cup of tea, but she knew it was a meaningless performance, put on for her sake.
But why…?
Go carefully. Ease the bitterness from him gently. Don’t tempt the flood that could engulf us both in more acrimony.
She took off her coat. “It wasn’t a very successful trip to the shop,” she said. “I forgot the things we really need, and got myself soaked.”
He slammed the kettle on the stove and lit the burner with the third match, cursing the two that broke in his hasty fingers. Then he took up his stand with his back to her, arms akimbo, waiting for it to boil.
Wearily, she sat down at the table. It was nearly dark out side, and the rain had settled down to a steady drizzle that promised to last all night. She shivered in her damp dress.
“What’s the matter, Bevis?” she asked dully.
No reply.
When the kettle gave a tinny whistle he slopped hot water into the teapot and poured himself a cup. She watched him carry it to the door and pause there. Then she looked down at her fingers and waited for it; when he was in this kind of mood, he could never resist an exit line.
“You must think I’m a complete cretin!” he snarled, and without waiting for her to answer, walked down the corridor. The door of the front room slammed behind him.
Hold on, that was it. Hold on with both hands and let some time go past. She sat for a while, making a blank in her mind against the hurt and the emptiness; then she changed her clothes and began to prepare their supper, standing at the sink, where she could see her face in the streaming, dark window pane, and it seemed to her that the rain made tears down her reflected cheeks.
When it was done, she went out into the passage. “Bevis—supper’s ready!” Her voice was as calm and matter-of-fact as she could make it; and when he didn’t reply or come out, she walked slowly down the passage, though she had no intention of going into that dreadful room.
“Bevis—can’t you hear me?”
The door of the small bedroom was open, and she knew that he had staged it this way—for her to see.
His suitcase lay on the bed, bulging and strapped.
Then he was standing there, watching her. He must have been waiting behind the door of the front room with his hand poised to open it at the sound of her footsteps hesitating and stopping.
“Tomorrow,” he growled. “Tomorrow, we’re getting out of here. And we’d go tonight, if there was a bus.”
“Why…why?” Naomi shook her head in dazed bewilderment.
“Why?...you innocent-faced little...” She saw him coming at her, and she shrank away against the wall. He reached her in two strides, and then his hand was cupping her chin, forcing her head back hard against the wall. His face was close to hers, so that she could smell the stale tobacco on his breath.
“Bevis...please…you’re hurting me!”
“Hurt?” His spittle splashed her face. And then the rambling abuse: the torrent of reproaches mouthed with all the fury of an inadequate personality exploding under the stress of a massive obsession. She cowered back against the wall, eyes closed, willing herself away from there.
Suddenly, shockingly, the burden of his complaint came through to her.
It concerned—unbelievingly—a man. A lover. Her lover!
“Bevis, you must be crazy!”
“Don’t lie. I’ve seen you together!”
A great calm settled over her, She stared at him and shook her head. “No, Bevis.”
“Down there on the beach!” he shouted. “You weren’t alone all those times. While I was up here on my own, you were with your fancy boy!”
Dully, she raised her hand and dragged his from her face. “No, you’re not mad, Bevis,” she said bitterly. “You’re just a child who’s never grown up. Your imagination—”
And then all her strength was cut away from under her; destroyed in the instant by his next spluttering words:
“I saw you together today! He followed you to the village!”
No defense now; no protesting. She was face-to-face again with the horror of the afternoon; her secret imaginings dragged out and dressed before her eyes; a ghoul with a turnip head and scarecrow rags brought to life. She saw again the thing on the sand hills, and felt the watching eyes that probed her back.
“Yes, I saw him. The big, handsome boy from next door. You like them like that, don’t you?”
Unresisting, as his hand slashed her face. Uncaring of the hurt. Falling down the wall with the taste of blood in her mouth when he struck her with his clenched fist And, through it all, his voice screaming at her:
“You like them big and tough, don’t you?”
Lying with her cheek against the cold floorboards with his feet inches from her eyes. Watching as they turned and went into the small bedroom. And when he came out he was carrying his case.
He walked past her, and out of the front door, slamming it behind him. A few moments later, she thought she heard him cry out to her, but surely it must have been her imagining.
She lay in the dark passage while an age went past, listening to the million tiny creaks of the woodwork, the wayward sound pattern of the rain, the bass roll of the breakers on the shore below the sand hills.
He wasn’t coming back.
Naomi got up and switched on the passage light. The door of the front room was still open; lowering her eyes so that she wouldn’t have to see inside, she pulled it close.
Alone. She was alone.
Outside, the sand and the desolation of fen, the silent bungalows on the dunes, and the winding road that she would never find the courage to tread. Not now.
“Bevis!...come back!”
She ran to the back door and dragged it open, hoping that he might be standing there in the loom of light, in the rain, with his suitcase in his hand; pale, defenseless, and frightened of what he had done to her; waiting for her to come to him and tell him that it was all right, that it didn’t matter; waiting for her greater strength to reassure him.
There was nothing but the sweep of rain-splattered sand, and the forlorn bunch of wild foliage lying just where she had left it.
And something else. Something sprawled by the gate.
Sprawled and shapeless, like…
She ran across the wet sand. It was Bevis’s suitcase. The handle had been wrenched from its fastenings, and the thick strap broken, the lid burst open, and the contents scattered in heaps like a trampled man. She fingered his leather shaving case—her wedding present to him—it had been twisted and riven apart like a rotten apple. His thick paperback book lay in two pieces, ripped across the spine.
She forced the knuckles of her hand into her mouth to choke the cry of horror, and stumbled back to the door, locked and bolted it behind her, and turned out the light.
As she leaned back, wild-eyed, she seemed to hear it again: Bevis’s cry for help, the cry she had disregarded.
If he called again, she would answer. But in her heart she knew that he was beyond the compass of her voice; that his frail body and peevish spirit had ended out there in the night.
To live through the night; to survive. She forced herself to come to grips with it.
Adding it up: the windows were all shut against the rain, and the door was locked and bolted behind her.
Nothing—no one—could reach her in here without her hearing the noise of his coming in. And, if that happened, she would run out the door and down the road, screaming all the while.
Calm. Be calm. All you have to do is crouch very still. And just exist.
And then—with a choked intake of breath—she remembered!
The French window!
The window in that awful room. Bevis had been out on the verandah all the morning, before the rain came. And she knew he would never have thought to lock it when he came in.
Her frail house of cards, her only defense, was yawning open not twenty paces from where she stood.
She had to go in there and lock that door; cross that obscene room, under the eyes of the thing in the glass cylinder. Now, before it was too late.
Ten dread-filled steps down the corridor, and the handle squeaked to her touch. The light was still on, as Bevis had left it.
Deliberately fixing her gaze on the French window, she crossed the room, swaying past the cluttered furniture. The wave of relief was a physical, tangible thing, and she almost smiled to herself to find the door locked and the key there.
And so, she never saw them till she turned round...
They were sitting very still, side by side, on a Victorian sofa near the fireplace. And, before her stupefied gaze, they got up together.
Mrs. Leevis wore a dress of beige lace with a corsage of artificial pansies, and a picture hat trimmed with a velvet cabbage rose, She had the air of a proud mother at a country wedding.
“It’s nice we all meet in my lovely room,” she said. “Now we can all be happy together—’’ turning fondly to the looming figure at her side, “—just you and me and our Ned.”
Brown boots and a lumpy suit reeking of mothballs. A spray of ferns in his buttonhole. Great red hands hanging limply. And his eyes were quite mad.
“He’ll be kind and gentle to you,” said Mrs. Leevis. “Not like the other.”
Then he was coming toward her, and, through her own screams, Naomi heard the woman tut-tutting with mild disfavor as she moved behind her to block the way to the door.