IN THE NIGHT it rained, and Sunday morning dawned grey and gusty, with spatters of light rain against the windows of rooms that seemed suddenly dark, after all these days of sunshine. The air indoors was damp and heavy, taking the gloss off the polished furniture, and making the banisters faintly sticky to the touch. And on top of all this, Mavis was roaming about the house trying to find someone to listen to her dreams.
She was wearing her dressing-gown, of course, it being only eleven o’clock, and her grubby mules went slip-slop up and down the stairs and passages, pausing for a while at each room where a preoccupied person might be cornered and made to attend.
It was hard on the wretched girl, Margaret thought, that even Claudia seemed to be taking no interest—Claudia, who had taken Mavis’ earlier dreams with such flattering seriousness. But Mavis must be reasonable; she could hardly expect a box-office success like that every time, and in any case she should know by now that Claudia never liked this sort of thing in the mornings. Go off your head at midnight, and no one could be more interested and sympathetic than Claudia; but do the same thing at breakfast time, and she would elbow you and your ravings absently to one side, muttering about how long the posts might take to Amsterdam, and whether a stout roneo’d memorandum could be sent by book-post.
But Mavis could never learn. Twice since breakfast she had wandered into the dining-room and leaned, breathing, over Claudia’s desk, and tried to engage her interest.
“I was thinking it might have been a phallic symbol?” Margaret had heard her pleading hopefully, in a pathetic bid for Claudia’s attention; but all to no avail. Claudia had settled down to write letters today, and write letters she would, even if Mavis had dreamed the whole of Freud, Jung and Adler rolled into one.
Margaret, too, had proved a poor audience, for she had much on her mind this morning; indeed, she had suffered something of a shock, from which she was slowly recovering. Getting up long before the others, as usual, and going out into the wet, silvery morning to feed her chickens, she had come across unmistakable evidence that the chicken run had been tampered with. The wire gate of the run hung open; the slatted floor of the house itself had been pulled half out, and then left, wedged crookedly, so that it would move move neither out nor back. And beneath this floor, where Margaret had cleared and dug a few days before, the ground had been disturbed again—hasty, clumsy digging had flung clods of earth this way and that, and had left deep, untidy holes all over the ground, interspersed with random hillocks of upturned soil and clay.
Yet the birds were all right. All twelve of them were roaming contentedly—and a little puzzled—in the long grass of the meadow—a treat usually reserved for the last hours of the afternoon. As they gathered round Margaret, hungry for their breakfast, she observed them anxiously for signs of injury or fright; but there were none. Whoever the senseless marauder might be, he seemed to have done no harm.
It was a nuisance, though, as well as unnerving. What in the world had been going on? At breakfast, Margaret held forth to the family about her annoyance and puzzlement, but no one seemed to know anything more about it than she did, or to have any idea of what had happened. No sensible idea, anyway.
“I expect it was rats,” suggested Claudia comfortably. “I always said you’d get rats there sooner or later, one always does with chickens. Nasty, unhygienic creatures—I don’t know why people are allowed to keep them. Poultry-fanning should be left to the professionals.”
“Rubbish! We’ve never had rats! Not in twenty-five years. You only get rats if you neglect the birds—overfeed them and then leave the food lying about. Besides, whoever heard of a rat unlatching a wire gate! Or pulling out a slatted floor!”
“I expect you pulled it out yourself and forgot about it,” surmised Claudia blandly. “And rats do unlatch gates. I’ve read about it. There was an article in Reader’s Digest which—”
It did not seem worth while to refute such rubbish. Claudia was only doing it to be annoying, anyway, so why give her the satisfaction of seeing that one was annoyed?
“Oh well. It can’t be helped,” said Margaret. “None of you seem to know anything about it. I wonder if Maurice knows anything? Is he up yet—?”
“Oh!” suddenly shrieked Mavis; and then clapped her hand to her mouth while they all turned and stared at her.
“I’m sorry—it was just a thought I suddenly had,” she explained confusedly, in answer to the enquiring looks. “Just something that struck me—it’s silly, really. It was this dream I had last night, you see, and so when you said ‘Maurice’—”
But Mavis, it seemed, had dreamed about Maurice once too often; everyone was beginning to be tired of her nightmares, and of the monotonous predictability of the conversation that they led to. Even Claudia didn’t welcome it at breakfast time. Thus snubbed on all sides, poor Mavis was compelled to postpone her confidences till some more favourable occasion. Such an occasion she sought doggedly, but with decreasing success, throughout that grey, drizzling Sunday morning; and it was not until the afternoon, when silvery streaks of sunlight began to break through the clouds, and a slow, steamy warmth to beat up again from the drenched earth, that her opportunity came. It was provided, surprisingly, not by Claudia (who was still busy at her desk) but by Margaret.
This had not, needless to say, been Margaret’s intention. In fact, it had been specifically to discourage Mavis’ confidences that Margaret had suggested briskly that as soon as the rain stopped Mavis should come out and help her to un-wedge the chicken-house floor. She had taken for granted that this proposal would rid her of Mavis’ company (if such it could be called) for the rest of the afternoon. But no: to her astonishment, Mavis accepted the ill-natured invitation with something like alacrity, and after a prolonged fuss and upheaval about coats and boots and slacks (Mavis really possessed no garments in the least suitable for this kind of task, and the decision about what to borrow from whom took her a very long time) she appeared at last clad as if for a Polar expedition, and paddled in Margaret’s wake out into the brightening afternoon.
“No, don’t lean on it, Mavis, that makes it stick worse. Get right down and pull—like this….”
Margaret was as patient as possible with her inept assistant, whose native incompetence was further augmented by wellington boots too large for her and an old overcoat of Derek’s that tangled with her feet in the slippery ground whenever she bent forwards.
“I can’t,” she kept saying: and: “I’m pushing as hard as I can, I mean pulling, isn’t that right?” and then “Oh!” as a sudden jerky movement loosed her hold on the wedged floor, and she toppled backwards, a bundle of heavy, flapping garments, into the muddy chicken-run. Squawking, outraged hens flew in every direction from this bomb-like intrusion into their midst.
“Oh!” cried Mavis again; and Margaret hurried to her side.
“You aren’t hurt, are you?” she enquired, anxious and irritable. “You can’t be, padded up in all those clothes—and the ground’s as soft as can be. Here—let me help you up.”
“No, it’s all right. I’m all right, Mrs Newman.” But still she sat on in the mud, as if settled for a picnic, and with no intention of moving. And then, as quietly and undramatically as an ice-cream beginning to melt in the sun, she dissolved slowly into tears.
It was no good: you had to ask her what was the matter: and then, of course, she told you. Margaret sighed, leaned her elbow on the roof of the chicken-house, and stood listening resignedly to Mavis’ latest dream. To her surprise, and somewhat to her dismay, it seemed to be about the chickens.
“I seemed to be half awake at the beginning,” Mavis explained. “And I lay there in bed thinking to myself: ‘This is a funny time for them to be cackling like that, in the middle of the night … and then, suddenly, I saw that it wasn’t the middle of the night at all, it was day—but such a queer sort of day, as if the light wasn’t real, somehow. So I went to the window in my dream and oh, it was so queer—this strange, bright daylight. The garden was there, and the road, and the houses opposite—and yet somehow they weren’t real any more. They were all bright, and small, like toy houses; and bright little stiff toy trees. Yes, that was it, it was like looking at a toy country, so bright, so pretty—and so weird. And then suddenly it came into my head—in words, as if someone had said it: ‘The title of this is Nightmare’—and then I knew it was coming. The chicken was coming, the tall chicken, I could hear its feet like metal feet, and its cackling, coming nearer, round the corner of the house. It was tall, right up to the upstairs windows, I could see its beak and its great comb, and then I realised it wasn’t really tall, it was walking on stilts, great high stilts … and suddenly it wasn’t a chicken any more, it was Maurice, high up on those stilts, clucking and gobbling. And the toy houses were his, he’d made them, and all that toy landscape, to be instead of the real world, and he was telling me about it, that was the awful clucking sound, because he only had a beak to talk with, and only a tiny brain, a bird’s brain, behind it all….”
Margaret disapproved of the dream. Her disapproval grew and grew until it could only be described as anger—fury, even. How dared Mavis drag the chickens into her disgusting dreams! The happy, innocent chickens, scratching and pecking out here in the sunshine! The intensity, and the unreasonableness, of her resentment quite took Margaret herself by surprise. She should have been laughing at it—pooh-pooh-ing the whole thing. Just a silly woman’s silly dream!
But somehow it wasn’t quite a laughing matter. There are certain dreams that can spread out beyond the dreamer, in ever-widening circles. Margaret felt the first chill ripple even now, lapping against her mind.
“Get up, Mavis!” she snapped, trying to allay by bad temper this queasy flicker of foreboding. “Come along and help me with this corner. Just hold it tight, don’t let it move, while I push from the other side…” and as she tugged and wrenched, and scolded her assistant, she felt that she was fighting off more than just Mavis’ nightmare. Claudia’s schemes for selling the field: the compulsory purchase order: the mysterious invasion of the chicken-run last night: they all seemed to be connected now with Mavis’ dream, separate facets of a single, overpowering threat. Together they were gathering strength, converging on her from every side … Margaret fought and struggled with the recalcitrant wood like one contending with the powers of darkness.
“There!” A final twist and a wrench, and the floor was suddenly free: it could be slid, straight and smooth, back into position. Margaret felt jubilant out of all proportion to the achievement—and so, it appeared, did Mavis, just as though their success had owed anything to her incompetent rumblings.
Margaret did not disillusion her; she was only thankful that Mavis should so quickly have shaken off her morbid fancies. Now everyone else would be able to forget them too.
It was disconcerting, then, that the moment they reached the house, Mavis should start all over again about the dream. “Claudia!” she cried, looking first in one room and then in another “Claudia!—Oh, there you are! Listen, Claudia; you must listen! I’ve had one of my prophetic dreams!”