“Well, he must be looking at
something
. People don’t just stand
there
looking
.”
“Tom does,” said Millie unguardedly. She said: “How many
Christmases since you had Tom home? Four? Funny, in a warm wet
country like England that he should have had snow both times. He
doesn’t care for it, either.”
Wendie and Mrs. Brosset, with a glance across Millie, agreed:
“No, Tom never cared much for snow.” They walked, with rather
ironly happy steps, up to the homey house. But in the morningroom
window they saw Tom see them, spin round and bolt away.
In the cloakroom, taking off their galoshes, when Mrs. Brosset
had gone off for a word with the cook, Wendie looked at Millie with
sudden boldness and said: “Millie, there’s one thing I do think you
ought to know. It’s quite evident that Tom hasn’t told you – that’s
not
my
business, of course – but if you don’t know you may say the
wrong thing and bring some awkwardness up. The last Christmas
Tom was back here with us wasn’t much of a Christmas for anyone.
A girl who was here got ill – she got
so
ill that she had to be taken
away.”
“Appendicitis?” said Millie.
Wendie glanced round, then she shut the cloakroom door. Then
she got out a comb and tugged at her hair, at the mirror, not looking
at Millie. “No, much worse,” she said. “She went right off her head.”
“Without warning? Oh dear.”
“Well, we had never seen her before she came to stay here, so if
she
was
feeling funny, how were we to know? When she’d been
taken away of course we blamed ourselves fearfully, but as mother
said, how ever were we to know?”
“What made you ask her for Christmas, if you had never seen
her?”
“Tom had asked us to ask her. She’d been a friend of his.”
Millie, filling the marble cloakroom basin, methodically started to
wash her hands. “Did she get better?” she asked, in her kind calm
little voice.
Wendie said: “Well, no. She got worse – I suppose that was being
shut up. So we were almost glad – if you know what I mean, Millie
– when we heard she had died. That was only three months ago.”
Millie, drying her hands on the roller, looked at the fourth finger
of her left hand. Her engagement ring sat at the plump base of the
finger, pressed down by the platinum wedding ring. “Three months
ago,” she said. “Three months ago, just fancy. Three months ago was
when Tom proposed to me. What a sad story. But thank you for
telling me, Wendie.”
“Don’t tell anyone.
Don’t
tell Tom. I suppose I oughtn’t to have.”
“This is a simple lunch,” said Mrs. Brosset, carving the excellent
slab of cold corned beef. “But we must save our insides up for
Christmas, you know. Also, Millie, this afternoon will be active; we
want you to help us trim up the Christmas tree.”
Aunt Shandie, who did not cease to devour Millie with an
interested eye, said: “Yes, a Christmas tree feels funny without
children, but it’s a family custom we’ve never broken, you know. I
say, Christmas makes us all children at heart. And, who knows, there
may be some real children again!”
“Stranger things have happened,” said Olivia, taking salad,
looking down her nose. Of all the Brossets, Olivia had seemed least
friendly to Tom’s bride. Olivia was a forbidding-looking dark girl,
whose manner suggested muffled anger, or strain. In appearance, she
was so like Tom, she might have been his twin, and it was clear to
Millie coming in from the outside, that since childhood there had
been a bond between them. Tom went on eating corned beef
impassively, while Millie watched Olivia watching his face.
Aunt Shandie, disturbed by the uneasiness as a bird is by a sudden
change in the weather, went on sending tinkling remarks across.
“We keep the same Christmas pleasures year after year,” she said.
“Except, of course – ” She broke off and dabbed her mouth with her
napkin, looking round with her little bright flustered eyes.
“Except of course what?” said Millie, tranquil as ever.
“Except, of course, we don’t care to play hide-and-seek.”
“I’d love to help with the tree in half an hour,” said Millie over her
shoulder as she and Tom, arm in arm, left the diningroom. She had
taken Tom’s arm; she was insisting that Tom should walk her over his
old home. “Show me it all,” she insisted, “take me upstairs and
downstairs. I want to see the old schoolroom, the back stair, the
attics, everywhere where you played. Why, I think this house must
have been just grand to grow up in, Tom. It must be full of
memories. It’s such a nice spreading house. Anyone could get lost in
it easily.”
Tom did his best to enter into the mood. The house, though not
more than forty years old, had a respectable air of reaching into the
past. Two wings ran out from the main block; the passages were cut
off from the central landings by sound-proof baize doors. A quite
perplexing number of doors down the passages quite often led, as
Millie discovered, to cistern cupboards or housemaids’ cubby-holes.
Stretches of waxed oilcloth reflected the piercing light let in by
skylights or windows. They looked into the sisters’ rooms, the room
that had always been Tom’s (properly hung ship prints and school
groups) and into the old night nursery, now a sewing room.
Moderate central heating took the edge of the chill off, and though
Millie, with her fingers on Tom’s arm, could feel his inner tension
increasing, there seemed no physical reason to feel fear.
He stood still and said: “Well, I think that’s about it. The girls will
be waiting for you – wouldn’t you run along?”
“But what’s up there, Tom? What’s up that flight of stairs? – Listen,
your old schoolroom: we haven’t seen that yet.”
“Why not let that keep for another day? Get your coat and let’s
go into the garden while it’s still light.”
“But what
is
up there?” She stood pulling his elbow till he went
with her up the cord-carpeted stairs.
The room at the top, the schoolroom, had a window at each end.
Bentwood chairs were pulled in to the bare, square table, that had
been carved and dug in and stained with ink. School books and
juvenile books in the big bookcase gave out, in spite of the heating,
a dead smell. Under one window stood a strong deal chest, hasped
with iron: it stood the height of a table and was about five foot long.
This room had not been decorated for Christmas; you could see that
nobody came in here – and from here the snowy landscapes outside
the windows looked metallic and threatening. The room seemed to
stand in a frightened trance from this light. Millie, detaching her
arm from Tom’s, said: “No, I don’t like this room so much.” She
added: “It feels quite cut off from everywhere.”
“It is,” he said. She whisked round to look at his face – but dared
not look long; she said in an uncontrolled voice: “Let’s go down,
Tom; let’s go down to the girls –
What’s the matter
? Have I done
anything?”
“You?” said Tom. “Not that I know.” He walked past her to the far
window to kick the chest, with his most curious smile. “That’s all
right,” he said. “It’s perfectly empty now. Come and look at it, Millie:
it’s very strong.”
“What was it for?”
“Well, it was once used to hide in.”
“Come downstairs,” she said suddenly, desperately.
“Well, you brought me up here. I thought you were after
memories? This is the Mistletoe Bough chest: a girl got shut up in
here. Come here, Millie, I’d like to show it to you. Would you like
to get inside and see how it feels?”
“
I’m
going down,” she repeated.
“No, you mustn’t leave me alone . . . This is why we don’t play
hide-and-seek anymore.”
Millie stood with a box of painted glass fruit in her hand; she kept
passing brittle pears and oranges to Olivia who, standing up on a
ladder, wired them to the spikes of the Christmas tree. Wendie was
clipping the candle-holders on. “I say, Millie, you do look white,”
she said.
Looking down from the ladder, impassive as ever, Olivia only
said: “Where’s Tom?”
“He went off to write a letter in our room.”
2
Millie added: “We
were up in the schoolroom: it looks very deserted.”
Olivia reached out for another trailer of tinsel. “We none of us
ever cared for that room much.”
The tree was done: its unlit candles and jewel ornaments gleamed in
the last afternoon light. Then the drawing-room in which it stood
was discreetly shut up till tomorrow. After tea, Millie fetched down
her fancy work; she was alone in the drawing-room with Aunt
Shandie, who sat with her board of patience the other side of the
fire. Aunt Shandie’s impatient sighing and the slippery sounds of
cards drawn off the pack distracted Millie, who could not help
listening: she wondered where all the others had slipped away to.
Tom had not appeared at tea. Whenever she felt Aunt Shandie
looking across the fire, Millie bent over her work: she did not like
being watched. Then, cocking her head like an old parrot, the aunt
said: “
This
will be a brighter Christmas for Tom.”
“I hope so,” said Millie, stitching away.
“That poor creature. I could have told from the first, we were
bound for trouble. But nobody listens to me. Chasing about like that
– up and down stairs, in and out in the snow. They turned the lights
out and ran about in the dark. On top of the engagement and
everything. It was a big party, too big a party, and I never did like
excitable games. This was the only room where they left lights. I
stayed here by the fire, and I remember I said to her: ‘You stay quiet
with me.’ But oh no, she must be off after him. He came in and
pulled her out and they went off to hide together. And what
happened then? Well, well, he knows better now. No more silly
games. Oh no, you’ve got him quiet. He and she would have soon
come to no good – ”
She stiffened and went quickly back to her cards, for Olivia
looked in to say: “Millie, come here a minute: we just want to ask
you something.” They shut themselves into the room with the
Christmas tree, where Wendie and Mrs. Bosset already stood,
looking frightened and tightly holding each other’s hands.
“We don’t think Tom’s well,” they said. “We think you should go
to him, Millie. He’s sitting up in your bedroom, with all the lights
on, and he won’t come down or speak to us; we’ve all tried. He
keeps asking for you. He seems to think you have quarrelled. Do
make it up with him, Millie: nervous excitements are so bad for
Tom.”
Millie said: “I don’t understand. But you none of you want me to.
If I’d known what had happened that other Christmas I’d never have
let Tom come back here at all. I should have been told when we
married. What
did
happen?”
Mrs. Bosset said: “The poor girl he’d got engaged to shut herself
into
3
that box and could not get out again.”
“I did not even know he had been engaged.”
“I expect he did not want to distress you, dear.”
Millie’s look held the nearest thing to contempt. She went up to
Tom: he was sitting in an armchair pulled up to the unlit gas fire; he
had wrapped round his shoulders the eiderdown from her bed, but
he still shivered. She saw he was at the height of one of his “queer”
fits, to which their honeymoon had accustomed her. The nullity of
the pale blue spare room surrounded him, in the glare of electric
light. “Leave me alone,” he said, as she came in. “This is the only
room I can stay in.”
“Why?”
“It’s the only room in this house that is not damned by the past.
It’s a room I only came into when I married you. But you should
never have made me come back here again.”
“I didn’t know about the girl in the box. We could never have
come back here if you’d told me that.”
“I could only live
4
with someone who didn’t know. They’ve all
told you now, I suppose. But no one knows but Olivia. She let her
out: I put her in. It was the day we had announced our engagement,
so there was a party here: we were all playing hide-and-seek in the
dark. She and I went up to hide in the old schoolroom; she told me
she did not really want to marry me. She said she had changed her
mind and wanted to go away. I was mad with her; we had a fight in
the dark, knocking about among the furniture. I said she would be
making a fool of me in front of all my friends and my family – but
really I was so much in love with her that I did not care what I did.
I knew she was terrified of being shut up. – So I opened that chest
under the window, and picked her up and put her in – she was small
– and put down the lid and sat on it. She hammered about inside.
I lighted a cigarette and sat where I was and took no notice of her.
I said once: ‘I’ll let you out when you’re sorry.’ I don’t know how long
I sat. She started to be quite quiet, but I thought she was trying to
frighten me. Somebody who was in the seeking party felt their way
into the room and found me by my cigarette. They put their hand
on my arm and said: ‘Caught.’ It was Olivia. She said: ‘Oh, it’s you.’
When I did not speak she suddenly turned the lights on and stared
at me. She said: ‘Who else is here?’ and I said, ‘Look for yourself.’
She pulled me off the chest and opened the lid.
She
lay there, with
her knees doubled up, not looking at us, not moving, not saying a
word. Olivia got her out. She stood and began to moan, then she
ran off down the passage, still moaning away.
5
Olivia guessed: she
said to me, ‘Now what have you done?’ I said: ‘She wasn’t in there
long,’ and Olivia said: ‘It must have been long enough.’