IT WAS THAT very night when Mavis’ nightmares began again, and at first Margaret supposed she was doing it on purpose, just to keep up with the Joneses. After all, everyone except Mavis had been involved in an almighty emotional scene that evening, and naturally Mavis would not wish to be utterly left out. Why should she alone be relegated to sound and peaceful sleep when everyone else had such good reason for lying uneasily in their beds?
Not that Margaret herself was conscious of any such unease. On the contrary, she went to bed that night feeling tired out by emotion as by a twenty-mile walk, and fell almost at once into a deep sleep; and when she woke, drowsy and reluctant, she thought at first that her alarm clock must have woken her, and that it was morning.
But it wasn’t. Not even the faintest glow of the early summer dawn had as yet blurred the sharp square of blackness outside her open window, and the air drifting in smelt of the deep night, with no trace as yet of morning freshness. And the sounds, too, as her ears slowly woke and joined her other senses, were the sounds of night: the drone of a single sleepless car far off: the distant wail of some night creature, so far away and so unidentifiable that the mind does not even stir itself to guessing. The house itself was filled with midnight stirrings—creakings and clickings in beams and floorboards such as are never heard by day; and now, as well there was the sound of the doorhandle being softly turned.
Margaret felt no surprise or shock, for it was somehow an expected sound; still stupid and slow with sleep, she only now became aware that this was the sound which must have woken her. She could not remember having heard it before, even in her dreams; but nevertheless her ears remembered, and were unsurprised.
Somehow she wasn’t frightened—it was as if the capacity for fear had not yet wakened, with her other faculties, from deep sleep. She felt nothing but a vague receptiveness towards whatever might be about to happen, just as she used to feel, in the deep of the night, when a little frightened girl with icy feet would creep in beside her—was it Helen, or Claudia, or some improbable mixture, defying years and personalities, of the two? “But it couldn’t possibly be bears, dear,” hovered aimlessly on her lips, still slack with sleep; “you must have been dreaming…”
Again the doorhandle whickered feebly—whoever it was was failing to turn it firmly enough, and Margaret felt irritation, though not yet fear, begin to awaken in her.
“Who is it?” she called sharply; “What do you want? Turn the handle right round!”
Absolute, paralysed stillness. No sound, no breath, gave any intimation that the intruder was still there; neither did any creak or shuffle of footsteps indicate that he or she was going away. Margaret lay very still, and as the seconds began to build up at last into minutes, she became uneasy; no one, surely, could hold their breath so long, or stand so still?
“Who is it?” she called again, more softly this time. “Come in! Why don’t you come in?”
Still nothing. Still the person must be standing, like a dead thing, without breathings outside her door. Silence seemed now to have taken possession of the house utterly; it was pressing in now, through the closed door, right into the room itself, rising like a great, waveless tide, obliterating all trace of sound. The familiar creakings and stirrings of the old wood were utterly stilled; even Margaret herself seemed to have stopped breathing.
Suddenly a crash, like ten thousand metal tea-trays, reverberated up through the house, and Margaret leaped from her bed half stunned with shock. She crossed the room and flung open the door, on to a darkness and emptiness that still seemed to be filled with flying echoes from somewhere downstairs.
Too amazed to think, she shuffled on her dressing-gown and slippers and stumbled downstairs into the hall; and then, still too dazed for real alarm, she hurried along the passage towards the crack of light that blazed beneath the kitchen door. She threw open the door, expecting she knew not what scene of carnage and catastrophe, and was confronted by the spectacle of Mavis, in her nightdress, dabbing feebly at a pool of Horlicks Malted Milk; while all around lay fragments of one of the precious Wedgwood mugs.
“What in all the wide world—!” began Margaret, bewilderment as yet leaving no room for indignation. “Mavis—what are you doing? What has happened?” Even now she could not bring herself to believe that all that fearful noise had been simply the breaking of a mug.
Mavis straightened up from her task. “Oh, Mrs Newman, I’m ever so sorry. I really am. I couldn’t get to sleep, you see, and then when I did drop off I had the most dreadful dream, I just couldn’t stop in bed after what I dreamt. So I came down here, I thought a hot drink might settle my nerves, you see, I never meant to disturb anybody. And I was just going to carry it upstairs back to my room when—I don’t know—I somehow—”
“But what’s happened?” persisted Margaret. “Were there burglars or something? Did you fall downstairs? What was all that noise?”
“What noise?” Mavis looked more stupid than you would think a human being could look. Even the cat could have made it clearer what had been going on.
“That crash—that terrific noise!” Margaret repeated irritably; and only now, as Mavis continued shaking her head, her hair flapping, in blank incomprehension, did Margaret admit to herself that she might perhaps have exaggerated the sound—natural enough, really, when she had been listening in the silence so intently and for so long. Another idea struck her.
“Mavis—did you come to my room before you came down here? Did you try the doorhandle—?”
And then, without warning, Mavis screamed. Even though she muffled the sound almost at once, clapping her hand to her mouth and applying grimaces of self control like brakes to a skidding car, the sound still seemed to ring back and forth from the cooking pots and preserving pans hanging around the walls, on and on, long after Mavis had gone white, and then red, and had finally taken her hand from her mouth and plunged into a hopeless tangle of apologies and explanations.
“I’m sorry, Mrs Newman! Oh, I’m so terribly sorry. Oh, I never meant to startle you so; but you did give me such a shock. You see, trying the door handle, that was the start of my dream! Really it was! There was this room, you see, I don’t know what room it was, but in my dream I knew I had to get into it. So I got hold of the handle and turned it, but it wouldn’t open; and then—Oh, Mrs Newman, I don’t think I can tell you the rest…!”
“Whatever’s going on? What’s happened?”
Claudia, stately in her long housecoat, was standing in the doorway. Mavis ran to her like a child to its mother, clutching at her sleeve, pulling her into the room. “Oh, Claudia!” she kept ejaculating; and Margaret resignedly took over the task of explaining the situation, in so far as so typical a Mavis-predicament was susceptible of rational explanation.
“And now Mavis says she’d rather not tell us about this nightmare,” Margaret finished crisply. “And I don’t doubt that this is very wise; she will do better to put it out of her mind. So there is no reason, really, why we should not all go back to bed now and get some sleep.”
Margaret had not really supposed—or, in her heart, perhaps, hoped—that the episode would end thus tamely. As might have been expected, Claudia’s principles combined with her curiosity to produce a compound of irresistible power.
“Mother! But that would be repressing it! That’s the worst thing she could possibly do! Don’t take any notice of Mother, Mavis, she doesn’t understand. Of course you must talk about your dream—talk, and talk, and talk—get it out of your system! There’s no such thing as ‘forgetting’ in a case like this. To ‘forget’ just means to ‘repress’—to push it all back into your subconscious again, where it will grow, and fester, and break out again at last in some dreadful neurosis—just when you are getting so much better, too, Mavis! Don’t do it! Don’t risk it! Tell us the whole thing, now.”
“Hadn’t she better finish wiping up the Horlick’s first?” enquired Margaret, observing that Mavis still had the wet floor cloth, like a stage property, dangling from her hand. “Or would a job like that do something dreadful to her subconscious?”
“Why, Mother—thank you! That was really perceptive!” said Claudia with such naive and unexpected gratitude that Margaret was greatly ashamed of her intended sarcasm. Taking the cloth from Mavis’ inert fingers, she herself got meekly down on to her knees; and as she wiped, and rinsed, and wiped again, she heard the whole story of Mavis’ dream.
“There was this room, you see,” Mavis began again, in tones of almost religious awe as she contemplated the uniqueness of her creation, her very own unaided nightmare—“There was this room, and I knew, somehow, that I had to get into it. I don’t know why I had to—you know how in dreams there sometimes aren’t reasons for things, but you just simply know?—Well, that’s how it was; I just knew that I had to get into this room. So I reached out, in my dream, to turn the handle of the door; but the minute I did that—I don’t quite know how to explain this—but the minute I touched that handle, and heard the little noise it made—I somehow began to be frightened. Not of anything—do you know what I mean?—it was more that the sound of that handle had changed the dream into a frightening dream. All at once, I knew that something terrible was going to happen—”
“Aha! You felt there was going to be something terrible inside the room? You didn’t want to open the door—?” interposed Claudia, evidently already agog with some interpretation. Margaret felt that she would have been annoyed, if she had been in Mavis’ position, to have Claudia practically dreaming her dreams for her like this; though really, the girl had rather stuck out her neck and asked for it. A dream that started off like that was a sitting duck to any amateur psychoanalyst. And, in fact, Mavis appeared to be rather pleased at the interruption.
“That’s right!” she agreed eagerly “That’s exactly how I felt! That something more dreadful than I could possibly imagine was going to be inside that room. And yet I still knew that I had to open that door—do you understand?”
Claudia nodded her head violently, in paroxysms of understanding; evidently each item in the dream was fitting into her interpretation like a set of Russian dolls. “Go on!” she urged Mavis excitedly; and Mavis continued: “So I tried the handle again … and again … and each time the nightmare feeling got worse. The horrible thing inside that room … I knew it was going to be more horrible than I could bear … I knew I was going to go mad when I saw it, yet still I knew that I must open that door, I must … I struggled and wrenched at that handle, and then—suddenly—the door came open!”
Mavis paused, and gulped: whether from horror or for dramatic effect it was impossible to say. Even Margaret could not hide her curiosity now.
“What happened then? What did you see?” she asked impatiently; but Mavis, apparently determined now to squeeze the utmost dramatic effect from her experience, paused for several seconds before answering.
But was it just for dramatic effect? Mavis’ face gleamed deathly white under the bare kitchen bulb, and her grey eyes were brilliant with a strange light.
“Go on, Mavis! You’ll feel better when you’ve got it out into the open,” urged Claudia eagerly. “What did you see?”
“Absolutely nothing!” declared Mavis—and yet somehow, horribly, the words conveyed no sense of anti-climax; you felt as she spoke that this nothingness was just one more inevitable step downwards into the black centre of the nightmare: “I couldn’t see anything because the room was dark, you see, absolutely pitch dark; and somehow I hadn’t expected that. I don’t know what I had expected, but not that. There was a terrible nightmare feeling about it being dark—I knew it shouldn’t be—mustn’t be—that there was something all wrong. I reached for the light, to switch it on, but there was no switch there—the wall was soft, and rotten—it gave under my hand like some horrible, soft thing … and then, suddenly, I knew that it was Maurice who was in that room. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there, just sitting, all alone in the dark, staring at nothing, like a dead person, and that was why the walls had gone soft and sick like that—it was something to do with him … Oh, Claudia, send him away! Send him away! I can’t bear to have him in the house … He gives me such terrible dreams …!”
Mavis was sobbing hysterically now—victim, Margaret suspected, largely of her own eloquence—and Claudia was consoling her with many long words. Depersonalisation—infantile regressive fantasies—sado-masochistic delusions of omnipotence … gradually the soothing patter of polysyllables, familiar as nursery rhymes, began to have their effect. Mavis’ sobs subsided, and she began to listen with interest to her case. Yes, she agreed, with a sniff and a gulp, it probably did mean that she was developing some sort of subconscious fixation on Maurice. Well, naturally it did. It was perfectly obvious that if you dream of a person with terror and loathing, it must mean that you really love them; Mavis declared herself amazed that so self-evident a proposition hadn’t been obvious to her from the start. Thus encouraged, Claudia offered yet further illuminations. Mavis’ subconscious guilt-feelings, of course, were all tied up with this subconscious love for Maurice; and although Margaret could not help feeling that Mavis’ guilt feelings might have been better employed in offering to replace the broken Wedgwood mug, she nevertheless listened fascinated to Claudia’s authoritative account of the death-wishes that the four-year-old Mavis must have entertained towards her mother. Or perhaps her father; either way, it seemed to fit perfectly with Claudia’s interpretations.
“And so really,” Claudia concluded, “this dream of yours is a very encouraging sign. It means that your repressed guilt-feelings have broken through into consciousness at last, and from now on you will be able to face them consciously, instead of disguising them in the form of an imaginary fear of Maurice. I always knew there was something irrational about that fear. Don’t you see?”
Mavis did; and so, for that matter, did Margaret. She saw that Mavis had succeeded triumphantly in drawing back everyone’s attention on to herself; Mavis’ precarious psychic state was once more reinstated on its pedestal at the centre of the household.
The only problem now remaining was that of persuading Mavis to go back to bed. It was nearly three o’clock by now, and Margaret, for one, had no wish to spend the remaining hours of the night listening to any more of Mavis’ guilt-feelings breaking through into consciousness; nor did she wish to lie listening to the muffled highlights of this process chirruping up intermittently through her bedroom floor, which was what would certainly happen if she simply went away and left them to it.
“Come along, Mavis,” she kept urging. “You’ll feel better if you can get some sleep”: or “We mustn’t keep Claudia up like this, you know; she leads a very busy life.”
This last, of course, was worse than useless; it simply provoked Claudia to an impassioned exposition of her imperviousness to such ordinary human weaknesses as needing sleep: while Mavis, with that iron obstinacy of the weak for which one never quite learns to prepare, flatly refused to stir. Nothing, she declared, absolutely nothing, would induce her to set foot again that night in her own room—the room where she had suffered the nightmare. She would not: she could not: “The dream would all come over me again, I know it would!” she pleaded; and in the end there was nothing to do but give in.
“Well—would you be happier in another room?” Margaret suggested at last, in desperation. “Shall we make you up a bed on the couch in the dining-room? Just for tonight, I mean,” she appended threateningly. “We’re not having this sort of nonsense every night, I’m telling you now!”
“Oh, Mrs Newman! Oh, thank you! I think I shan’t be scared—hardly at all—now. Not in the dining-room. I really do feel better now, you see; it’s just the thought of my own room—the same room where I had the dream. It sort of clings there, a dream like that. Do you know how I mean?”
I do indeed, thought Margaret disagreeably. You mean you’ve thought up a marvellous new dodge for keeping everybody fussing over you all night. First Claudia ministering to your guilt-feelings; and now me running after you with blankets and hot-water bottles!
“Well, at least you could come and help me get the couch ready,” she said aloud, and not very graciously; and Mavis followed her meekly upstairs to the chest where spare blankets were stored. Together they collected a sufficient pile of bedding and carted it downstairs. Thus laden, Margaret fumbled at the dining-room door.
“Open it for me, will you, Mavis?” she urged her less-heavily laden companion; and Mavis obeyed, clumsily.
“And the light—put on the light as well,” Margaret admonished her irritably; and Mavis did so.
Her screams were like nothing Margaret had ever heard before. They seemed hardly human—without words—beyond all sense or reason.
Or so it seemed. But now, peering round the panic-stricken girl, Margaret could see the sense and the reason. For there, at the bare, polished table, staring in front of him into what, until this moment, had been total darkness, sat Maurice.