Endless Night

‘Only accidents—or other things?’

‘Look here,’ I said, ‘people like to collect disasters. There are plenty of disasters always to collect. That’s the way stories build themselves up about a place.’

‘Is that one of the reasons why they say this property which is being sold will go cheap?’

‘Well, it may be, I suppose. Locally, that is. But I don’t suppose it’ll be sold locally. I expect it’ll be bought for developing. You’re shivering,’ I said. ‘Don’t shiver. Come on, we’ll walk fast.’ I added, ‘Would you rather I left you before you got back into the town?’

‘No. Of course not. Why should I?’

I made a desperate plunge.

‘Look here,’ I said, ‘I shall be in Market Chadwell tomorrow. I—I suppose—I don’t know whether you’ll still be there … I mean, would there be any chance of—seeing you?’ I shuffled my feet and turned my head away. I got rather red, I think. But if I didn’t say something now, how was I going to go on with this?

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I shan’t be going back to London until the evening.’

‘Then perhaps—would you—I mean, I suppose it’s rather cheek—’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘Well, perhaps you’d come and have tea at a café—the Blue Dog I think it’s called. It’s quite nice,’ I said. ‘It’s—I mean, it’s—’ I couldn’t get hold of the word I wanted and I used the word that I’d heard my mother use once or twice—‘it’s quite ladylike,’ I said anxiously.

Then Ellie laughed. I suppose it sounded rather peculiar nowadays.

‘I’m sure it’ll be very nice,’ she said. ‘Yes. I’ll come. About half past four, will that be right?’

‘I’ll be waiting for you,’ I said. ‘I—I’m glad.’ I didn’t say what I was glad about.

We had come to the last turn of the road where the houses began.

‘Goodbye, then,’ I said, ‘till tomorrow. And—don’t think again about what that old hag said. She just likes scaring people, I think. She’s not all there,’ I added.

‘Do you feel it’s a frightening place?’ Ellie asked.

‘Gipsy’s Acre? No, I don’t,’ I said. I said it perhaps a trifle too decidedly, but I didn’t think it was frightening. I thought as I’d thought before, that it was a beautiful place, a beautiful setting for a beautiful house …

Well, that’s how my first meeting with Ellie went. I was in Market Chadwell the next day waiting in the Blue Dog and she came. We had tea together and we talked. We still didn’t say much about ourselves, not about our lives, I mean. We talked mostly about things we thought, and felt; and then Ellie glanced at her wrist-watch and said she must be going because her train to London left at 5.30—

‘I thought you had a car down here,’ I said.

She looked slightly embarrassed then and she said no, no, that hadn’t been her car yesterday. She didn’t say whose it had been. That shadow of embarrassment came over us again. I raised a finger to the waitress and paid the bill, then I said straight out to Ellie:

‘Am I—am I ever going to see you again?’

She didn’t look at me, she looked down at the table. She said:

‘I shall be in London for another fortnight.’

I said:

‘Where? How?’

We made a date to meet in Regent’s Park in three days’ time. It was a fine day. We had some food in the open-air restaurant and we walked in Queen Mary’s Gardens and we sat there in two deck-chairs and we talked. From that time on, we began to talk about ourselves. I’d had some good schooling, I told her, but otherwise I didn’t amount to much. I told her about the jobs I’d had, some of them at any rate, and how I’d never stuck to things and how I’d been restless and wandered about trying this and that. Funnily enough, she was entranced to hear all this.

‘So different,’ she said, ‘so wonderfully different.’

‘Different from what?’

‘From me.’

‘You’re a rich girl?’ I said teasingly—‘A poor little rich girl.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m a poor little rich girl.’

She talked then in a fragmentary way about her background of riches, of stifling comfort, of boredom, of not really choosing your own friends, of never doing what you wanted. Sometimes looking at people who seemed to be enjoying themselves, when she wasn’t. Her mother had died when she was a baby and her father had married again. And then, not many years after, he had died, she said. I gathered she didn’t care much for her stepmother. She’d lived mostly in America but also travelling abroad a fair amount.

It seemed fantastic to me listening to her that any girl in this age and time could live this sheltered, confined existence. True, she went to parties and entertainments, but it might have been fifty years ago it seemed to me from the way she talked. There didn’t seem to be any intimacy, any fun! Her life was as different from mine as chalk from cheese. In a way it was fascinating to hear about it but it sounded stultifying to me.

‘You haven’t really got any friends of your own then?’ I said, incredulously. ‘What about boyfriends?’

‘They’re chosen for me,’ she said rather bitterly. ‘They’re deadly dull.’

‘It’s like being in prison,’ I said.

‘That’s what it seems like.’

‘And really no friends of your own?’

‘I have now. I’ve got Greta.’

‘Who’s Greta?’ I said.

‘She came first as an au pair—no, not quite that, perhaps. But anyway I’d had a French girl who lived with us for a year, for French, and then Greta came from Germany, for German. Greta was different. Everything was different once Greta came.’

‘You’re very fond of her?’ I asked.

‘She helps me,’ said Ellie. ‘She’s on my side. She arranges so that I can do things and go places. She’ll tell lies for me. I couldn’t have got away to come down to Gipsy’s Acre if it hadn’t been for Greta. She’s keeping me company and looking after me in London while my stepmother’s in Paris. I write two or three letters and if I go off anywhere Greta posts them every three or four days so that they have a London postmark.’

‘Why did you want to go down to Gipsy’s Acre though?’ I asked. ‘What for?’

She didn’t answer at once.

‘Greta and I arranged it,’ she said. ‘She’s rather wonderful,’ she went on. ‘She thinks of things, you know. She suggests ideas.’

‘What’s this Greta like?’ I asked.

‘Oh, Greta’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘Tall and blonde. She can do anything.’

‘I don’t think I’d like her,’ I said.