The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

THE TRAINS by Robert Aickman

On the moors, as early as this, the air no longer clung about her, impeding her movements, absorbing her energies. Now a warm breeze seemed to lift her up and bear her on: the absorption process was reversed; her blood stream drew impulsion from the zephyrs. Her thoughts raced from her in all directions, unproductive but joyful. She remembered the railway posters. Was this ozone?

Not that she had at all disliked the big industrial city they had just left; unlike Mimi, who had loathed it. Mimi had wanted their walking tour to be each day from one Youth Hostel to another; but that was the one proposal Margaret had successfully resisted. Their itinerary lay in the Pennines, and Margaret had urged the case for sleeping in farmhouses and, on occasion, in conventional hotels. Mimi had suggested that the former were undependable and the latter both dreary and expensive; but suddenly her advocacy of Youth Hostels had filled her with shame, and she had capitulated. “But hotels look down on hikers,” she had added. Margaret had not until then regarded them as hikers.

Apart from the controversy about the city, all had so far gone fairly well, particularly with the weather, as their progress entered its second week. The city Margaret had found new, interesting, unexpectedly beautiful and romantic: its well-proportioned stone mills and uncountable volcanic chimneys appeared perfectly to consort with the high free mountains always in the background. To Mimi the place was all that she went on holiday to avoid. If you had to have towns, she would choose the blurred amalgam of the Midlands and South, where town does not contrast with country but always merges into it, neither town nor country being at any time so distinct as in the North. To Margaret this, to her, new way of life (of which she saw only the very topmost surface) seemed considerably less awful than she had expected. Mimi, to whom also it was new, saw it as the existence from which very probably her great-grandfather had fought and climbed, a degradation she was appalled to find still in existence and able to devour her. If there had to be industry, let the facts be swaddled in suburbs. The Free Trade Hotel (R.A.C. and A.A.) had found single rooms for them; and Mimi had missed someone to talk to in bed.

They had descended to the town quite suddenly from the wildest moors, as one does in the North. Now equally suddenly it was as if there were no towns, but only small long-toothed neanderthals crouched behind rocks waiting to tear the two of them to pieces. Air roared past in incalculable bulk under the lucent sky, deeply blue but traversed by well-spaced masses of sharply edged white cloud, like the floats in a Mediterranean pageant. The misty, smoky, reeking air of the city had continually enchanted Margaret with always changing atmospheric effects, a meteorological drama unavailable in any other environment; but up here the air was certainly life itself. The path was hard to find across the heather, the only landmarks being contours and neither of them being expert with a map; but they advanced in happy silence, all barriers between them blown down, even Margaret’s heavy rucksack far from her mind. (Mimi took her own heavier rucksack for granted at all times.)

“Surely that’s a train?” said Margaret, when they had walked for two or three hours.

“Oh God,” said Mimi, the escapist.

“The point is it’ll give us our bearings.” The vague rumbling was now lost in the noisy wind. “Let’s look.”

Mimi unstrapped the back pocket on Margaret’s rucksack and took out the map. They stood holding it between them. Their orientation being governed by the wind, and beyond their power to correct mentally, they then laid the map on the ground, the top more or less to the north, and a grey stone on each corner.

“There’s the line,” said Margaret, following it across the map with her finger. “We must be somewhere about here.”

“How do you know we’re not above the tunnel?” enquired Mimi. “It’s about four miles long.”

“I don’t think we’re high enough. The tunnel’s further on.”

“Couldn’t we strike this road?”

“Which way do you suggest?”

“Over the brow of the next hill, if you were right about that being a train. The road goes quite near the railway and the sound came from over there.” Mimi pointed, the web of her rucksack, as she lay twisted on the ground, dragging uncomfortably in the shoulder strap of her shirt.

“I wish we had a canvas map. The wind’s tearing this one to pieces.”

Mimi replied amiably, “It’s a bore, isn’t it?” It was she who had been responsible for the map.

“I’m almost sure you’re right,” said Margaret, with all the confidence of the lost.

“Let’s go,” said Mimi. With difficulty they folded up the map and Mimi returned it to Margaret’s rucksack. The four grey stones continued to mark the corners of a now mysterious rectangle.

As it chanced, Mimi was right. When they had descended to the valley before them, and toiled to the next ridge, a double line of railway and a stone-walled road climbed the valley beyond. While they watched, a train began slowly to chug upwards from far to the left.

“The other one must have been going downhill,” said Mimi.

They began the descent to the road. It was some time since there had been even a sheep path. The distance to the road was negligible as the crow flies, but it took them thirty-five minutes by Mimi’s wrist-watch, and the crawling train had passed before them almost as soon as they had started.

“I wish we were crows,” Mimi exclaimed.

Margaret said “Yes” and smiled.

They noticed no traffic on the road, which, when reached, proved to be surfaced with hard, irregular granite chips, somewhat in need of re-laying and the attentions of a steam roller.

“Pretty grim,” said Mimi after a quarter of an hour. “But I’m through with that heather.” Both sides of the valley were packed with it.

“Hadn’t we better try to find out exactly where we are?” suggested Margaret.

“Does it really matter?”

“There’s lunch.”

“That doesn’t depend on where we are. So long as we’re in the country it’s all one, don’t you think?”

“I think we’d better make sure.”

“O.K.”

Mimi again got out the map. As they were anchoring it by the roadside, a train roared into being and swept down the gradient.

“What are you doing?” asked Margaret, struggling with a rather unsuitable stone.

“Waving, of course.”

“Did anyone wave back?”

“Haven’t you ever waved to the driver?”

“No. I don’t think I have. I didn’t know it was the driver you waved to. I thought it was the passengers.” The map now seemed secure.

“Them too sometimes. But drivers always wave to girls.”

“Only to girls?”

“Only to girls.” Mimi couldn’t remember when she hadn’t known that. “Where are we?” They stared at the map, trying to drag out its mystery. Even now they were on the road, with the railway plain before them crossing contour after contour, the problem seemed little simpler.

“I wish there was an instrument which said how high we were,” remarked Mimi.

“Something else to carry.”

Soon they were reduced to staring about them.

“Isn’t that a house?” Mimi was again pointing the initiative.

“If it is, I think it must be ‘Inn’.” Margaret indicated it. “There’s no other building on the map this side of the railway tunnel, unless we’re much lower down the valley than we think.”

“Maps don’t show every small building.”

“They seem to in country districts. I’ve been noticing. Each farm has a little dot. Even that cottage by the reservoir yesterday had its dot.”

“Oh well if it’s a pub we can eat in the bar. O.K. by me.”

Again they left behind them four grey stones at the corners of nothing.

“Incidentally, the map only shows one house between the other end of the tunnel and Pudsley. A good eight miles I should say.”

“Let’s hope it’s one of your farms. I won’t face a night in Pudsley. We’re supposed to be on holiday. Remember?”

“I expect they’ll put us up.”

The building ahead of them proved long deserted. Or possibly not so long; it is difficult to tell with simple stone buildings in a wet climate. The windows were planked up; slates from the roof littered the weedy garden; the front door had been stove in.

“Trust the Army,” said Mimi. “Hope to-night’s quarters are more weatherproof. We’d better eat. It’s a quarter past two.”

“I don’t think it’s the Army. More like the agricultural depression.” Margaret had learnt on her father’s estate the significance of deserted farmhouses and neglected holdings.

“Look! There’s the tunnel.”

Margaret advanced a few steps up the road to join her. From the black portal the tunnel bored straight into the rock, with the road winding steeply above it.

“There’s another building,” said Margaret, following the discouraging ascent with her eyes. “What’s more, I can see a sign outside it. I believe the map’s wrong. Come on.”

“Oh well,” said Mimi.

Just as they were over the tunnel entrance another train sped downwards. They looked from above at the blind black roofs of the coaches, like the caterpillar at the fair with the cover down.

It was hard to say whether the map was wrong or not. The house above the tunnel, though apparently not shown, was certainly not an inn. It was almost the exact opposite: an unlicensed Guest House.

“Good for a cup of tea,” said Mimi. “But we’d better eat outside.”

A little further up the road was a small hillock. They ascended it, cast off their heavy rucksacks, loosened their belts a hole or two, and began to eat corned beef sandwiches. The Guest House lay below them, occupied to all appearances, but with no one visible.

“Not much traffic,” said Margaret, dangling a squashed tomato.

“They all go by train.”

The distant crowing of an engine whistle seemed to affirm her words.

The sharp-edged clouds, now slightly larger, were still being pushed across the sky; but by now the breeze seemed to have dropped and it was exceedingly hot. The two women were covered with sweat, and Mimi undid another button of her shirt.

“Aren’t you glad I made you wear shorts?”

Margaret had to admit to herself she was glad. There had been some dissension between the two of them upon this point, Margaret, who had never worn shorts in her life before, feeling intensely embarrassed by Mimi’s proposal, and Mimi unexpectedly announcing that she wouldn’t come at all unless Margaret “dressed like everybody else.” Margaret now realised that for once “everybody” was right. The freedom was delightful; and without it the weight of the rucksack would have been unendurable. Moreover, her entire present outfit had cost less than a guinea; and it mattered little what happened to it. That, she perceived, was the real freedom. Still she was pleased that none of her family could see her.

“Very glad indeed,” she replied. “I really am.”

Mimi smiled warmly, too nice to triumph, although the matter was one about which Margaret’s original attitude had roused strong feelings in her.

“Not the ideal food for this heat,” said Margaret. “We’ll come out in spots.”

“Lucky to get corned beef. Another girl and I hiked from end to end of the Pilgrim’s Way on plain bread and marge. It was Bank Holiday and we’d forgotten to lay anything in.” Then springing to her feet with her mouth full, she picked up her rucksack. “Let’s try for a drink.” She was off down the road before Margaret could rise or even speak. She was given to acting on such sudden small impulses, Margaret had noticed.

By the time Margaret had finished her final sandwich, Mimi had rung the Guest House bell and had been inside for some time. Before following, Margaret wiped the sweat from her face on to one of the large handkerchiefs Mimi had prudently enjoined; then from one of the breast pockets of her shirt produced a comb and mirror, rearranged her hair so far as was allowed by sweat and the small tight bun into which, with a view to efficiency on this holiday, she had woven it, and returned the articles to her shirt pocket, buttoning down the flap, but avoiding contact so far as possible with her sticky body. She approached the front door slowly, endeavouring to beget no further heat.

The bell, though provided with a modem pseudo-Italian pull, was of the authentic country house pattern, operated by a wire. The door was almost immediately opened by a plain woman in a Marks and Spencer overall.

“Yes?”

“Could I possible have something to drink? My friend’s inside already.”

“Come in. Tea or coffee? We’re out of minerals.”

“Could I have some coffee?”

“Coffee.” The word was repeated in a short blank tone. One would have supposed she had to deal with sixty orders an hour. She disappeared.

“Well shut the door and keep the heat out.”

The speaker, a middle-aged man wearing dirty tennis shoes, was seated the other side of a round wooden table from Mimi, who was stirring a cup of tea. There was no one else in the room, which was congested with depressing cafe furniture, and decorated with cigarette advertisements hanging askew on the walls.

“You know what they say in New York?” He had the accent of a North Country business man. His eyes never left Mimi’s large breasts distending her damp khaki shirt.

“I used to live in New York. Ten years altogether.” Mimi said nothing. It was her habit to let the men do the talking. Margaret sat down beside her, laying her rucksack on the floor. “Hullo.” His tone was cheekier than his intention.

“Hullo,” said Margaret neutrally.

“Are you two friends?”

“Yes.”

His gaze returned to the buxomer, nakeder Mimi.

“I was just telling your friend. You know what they say in New York?”

“No,” said Margaret. “I don’t think so. What do they say?”

“It isn’t the heat. It’s the humidity.”

He seemed still to be addressing Margaret, while staring at Mimi. Giving them a moment to follow what he evidently regarded as a difficult and penetrating observation, he continued, “The damp, you know. The moisture in the atmosphere. The atmosphere’s picking up moisture all the time. Sucking it out of the earth.” He licked his lower lip. “This is nothing. Nothing to New York. I lived there for ten years. Beggars can’t be choosers, you know.”

A door opened from behind and the taciturn woman brought Margaret’s coffee. The cup was discoloured round the edge, and the saucer, for some reason, bore a crimson smear.

“One shilling.”

Startled, Margaret produced a half-crown from a pocket of her shorts. The woman went away.

“Nice place this,” said the man. “You’ve got to pay for that these times.”

Margaret lifted her cup. The coffee was made from essence and stank.

“What did I say? How’s that for a cup of coffee? I’d have one myself, if I hadn’t had three already.”

“Are you staying here?”

“I live here.”

The woman returned with one and sixpence, then departed once more.

“There’s no need for a gratuity.”

“I see,” said Margaret. “Is she the proprietress?”

“It’s her own place.”

“She seems silent.” Immediately Margaret rather regretted this general conversational initiative.

“She’s reason to be. It’s no goldmine, you know. I’m the only regular. Pretty well the only customer by and large.”

“Why’s that? It’s lovely country and there’s not much competition from what we’ve seen.”

“There’s none. Believe me. And it’s not nice country. Believe me again.”

“What’s wrong with it?” This was Mimi, who had not spoken since Margaret had entered.

“Why nothing really, sister, nothing really. Not for a little girl like you.” Margaret noticed that he was one of the many men who classify women into those you talk to and those with whom words merely impede the way. “I was just kidding. I wouldn’t be here else. Now would I? Not living here?”

“What’s wrong with the place?”

Margaret was surprised by Mimi’s tone. She recollected that she had no knowledge of what had passed between the two of them while she had been combing her hair on the little hill.

“You know what the locals say?”

“We haven’t seen any locals,” said Margaret.

“Just so. That’s what I say. They don’t come up here. This is the Quiet Valley.”

“Oh really,” cried Margaret, not fully mistress of her motives all the same. “You got that name out of some Western.”

But he only replied with unusual brevity, “They call it the Quiet Valley.”

“Not a good place to start in business!” said Margaret.

“Couldn’t be worse. But she just didn’t know. She sank all she had in this place. She was a stranger here, like you.”

“What’s wrong with the valley?” persisted Mimi, her manner, to Margaret’s mind, a little too tense.

“Nothing so long as you stay, sister. Just nothing at all.”

“Is there really a story?” asked Margaret. Almost convinced that the whole thing was a rather dull joke, she was illogically driven to enquire by Mimi’s odd demeanour.

“No story that I’ve heard of. It’s just the Quiet Valley and the locals don’t come here.”

“What about you? If it’s so quiet why don’t you move?”

“I like quiet. I’m not one to pick and choose. I was just telling you why there’s a trade recession.”

“It’s perfectly true,” said Margaret, “that there seems very little traffic.” She noticed Mimi refasten the shirt button she lad undone to cool herself. The man averted his eyes.

“They all take the railroad. They scuttle through shut up like steers in a waggon.”

Mimi said nothing, but her expression had changed.

“There seem to be plenty of trains for them,” said Margaret, smiling.

“It’s the main line.”

“One of the drivers waved to us. If what you say is true, I suppose he was glad to see us.”

For the first time the man concentrated his unpleasing stare on Margaret.

“Now as to that——” His glance fell to the table and remained there a moment. “I was just wondering where you two reckon on spending the night.”

“We usually find a farmhouse,” said Margaret shortly.

“It’s wild the other side, you know. Wilder than here. There’s only one house between the tunnel and near Pudsley.”

“So we noticed on the map. Would they give us a bed? I suppose it’s a farm?”

“It’s Miss Roper’s place. I’ve never met her myself. I don’t go down the other side. But I daresay she’d help you. What you said just now——” Suddenly he laughed. “You know how engine drivers wave at girls, like you said?”

“Yes,” said Margaret. To her apprehension it seemed that an obscene joke was coming.

“Well, every time a train passes Miss Roper’s house, someone leans out of a bedroom window and waves to it. It’s gone on for years. Every train, mark you. The house stands back from the line and the drivers couldn’t see exactly who it was, but it was someone in white and they all thought it was a girl. So they waved back. Every train. But the joke is it’s not a girl at all. It can’t be. It’s gone on too long. She can’t have been a girl for the last twenty years or so. It’s probably old Miss Roper herself. The drivers keep changing round so they don’t catch on. They all think it’s some girl, you see. So they all wave back. Every train.” He was laughing as if it were the funniest of improprieties.

“If the drivers don’t know, how do you?” asked Mimi.

“It’s what the locals say. Never set eyes on Miss Roper myself. Probably a bit of line-shooting.” He became suddenly very serious and redolent of quiet helpfulness. “There’s a Ladies Room upstairs if either of you would like it.”

“Thank you,” said Margaret. “I think we must be getting on.” The back of her rucksack was soaked and clammy.

“Have a cigarette before you go?” He was extending a packet of some unknown brand. His hand shook like the hand of a drug addict.

“Thanks,” said Mimi, very offhand. “Got a match?” He could hardly strike it, let alone light the cigarette. Looking at him Margaret was glad she did not smoke.

“I smoke like a camp fire,” he said unnecessarily. “You have to in my life.” Then, when they had opened the door, he added, “Watch the weather.”

“We will,” said Margaret conventionally, though the heat had again smothered them. And once more they were toiling upwards beneath their heavy packs.

They said nothing at all for several minutes. Then Mimi said, “Blasted fool.”

“Men are usually rather horrible,” replied Margaret.

“You get used to that,” said Mimi.

“I wonder if this really is called the Quiet Valley?”

“I don’t care what it’s called. It’s a bad valley all right.”

Margaret looked at her. Mimi was staring defiantly ahead as she strode forward. “You mean because there are no people?”

“I mean because I know it’s bad. You can’t explain it.”

Margaret was inexpert with intuitions, bred out of them perhaps. The baking endless road was certainly becoming to her unpleasant in the extreme. Moreover, the foul coffee had given her indigestion, and the looseness of her belt made it impossible to loosen it further.

“If you hadn’t heard that train, we’d never have been here.”

“If I hadn’t heard it, we’d quite simply have been lost. The path on the map just gave out. That’s apt to happen when you merely choose paths instead of making for definite places.”

In her vexation Margaret raked over another underlying dissimilarity in their approaches to life, one already several times exposed. Then reflecting that Mimi had been perfectly willing to wend from point to point provided that the points were Youth Hostels, Margaret added, “Sorry Mimi. It’s the heat.”

A certain persistent fundamental disharmony between them led Mimi to reply none too amicably, “What exactly do you suggest we are going to do?”

Had Margaret been Mimi there would have been a row; but, being Margaret, she said, “I think perhaps we’d better take another look at the map.”

This time she unslung her rucksack and got out the map herself. Mimi stood sulkily sweating and doing nothing either to help or to remove the sweat. Looking at her, Margaret suddenly said, “I wonder what’s become of the breeze we had this morning?” Then, Mimi still saying nothing, she sat down and looked at the map. “We could go over into the next valley. There are several quite large villages.”

“Up there?” Mimi indicated the rocky slope rising steeply above them.

“The tunnel runs through where the mountains are highest. If we go on a bit, we’ll reach the other end and it may be less of a climb. What do you say?”

Mimi took a loose cigarette from a pocket of her shirt. “Not much else to do, is there?” Her attitude was exceedingly irritating. Margaret perceived the unwisdom of strong Indian tea in the middle of the day. “I hope we make it,” added Mimi with empty cynicism. As she struck a match, in the very instant a gust of wind not only blew it out but wrenched the map from Margaret’s hands. It was as if the striking of the match had conjured up the means to its immediate extinction.

Margaret recovering, closed the map; and they looked behind them. “Oh hell,” said Margaret. “I dislike the weather in the Quiet Valley.” A solid bank of dark grey cloud had formed in their rear and was perceptibly closing down upon them like a huge hood.

“I hope we make it,” repeated Mimi, her cynicism now less empty. They left their third set of grey stones demarcating emptiness.

Before long they were over the ridge at the top of the valley. The prospect ahead entirely confirmed the sentiments of the man at the Guest House. The scene could hardly have been bleaker or less inviting. But as it was now much cooler, and the way was for the first time in several hours comfortably downhill, they marched forward with once more tightened belts, and keeping strictly in step, blown forward by a rising wind. The recurring tension between them was now dissipated by efficient exertion under physically pleasant conditions; by the renewed sense of objective. They conversed steadily and amiably, the distraction winging their feet. Margaret felt the contrast between the optimism apparently implicit in the weather when they had set out, and the doom implicit in it now; but she felt it not unagreeably, drew from it a pleasing sense of tragedy and fitness. That was how she felt until well after it had actually begun to rain.

The first slow drops flung on the back of her knees and neck by the following wind were sweetly sensual. She could have thrown herself upon the grass and let the rain slowly engulf her entire skin until there was no dry inch. Then she said: “We mustn’t get rheumatic fever in these sweaty clothes.”

Mimi had stopped and unslung her rucksack. Mimi’s ruck-stack was the heavier because its contents included a robust stormproof raincoat; Margaret’s the less heavy because she possessed only a light town mackintosh. Mimi encased herself, adjusted her rucksack beneath the shoulder straps of the raincoat, tied a sou’wester tightly beneath her chin, and strode forward, strapped and buttoned up to the ears, as if cyclones were all in the day’s work. After a quarter of an hour, Margaret felt rain beginning to trickle down her body from the loose neck of her mackintosh, to infiltrate through the fabric in expanding blots, and to be finding its way most disagreeably into the interior of the attached hood. After half an hour she was saturated.

By that time they had reached the far end of the tunnel and stood looking down into a deep narrow cutting which descended the valley as far as the gusts of rain permitted them to see. Being blasted through rock, the cutting had unscalably steep sides.

“That’s that,” said Margaret a little shakily. “We’ll have to stick to the Quiet Valley.”

“It looks all right the other side,” said Mimi, “if only we could get over.” Despite her warm garb, she too seemed wan and shivery. On their side of the railway, and beyond the road that had brought them, was a sea of soaking knee-high heather; but across the cutting the ground rose in a fairly gentle slope, merely tufted with vegetation.

“There’s no sign of a bridge.”

“I could use a cup of tea. Do you know it’s twenty-five past six?”

As they stood uncertain, the sound of an ascending train reached them against the wind, which, blowing so strongly from the opposite direction, kept the smoke within the walls of the cutting. So high was the adverse gale that it was only about a minute between their first hearing the slowly climbing train and its coming level with them. Despite the long gradient, steam roared from the exhaust. The fireman was stoking demonically. As the engine passed to windward of the two women far above, and the noise from the exhaust crashed upon their senses, the driver suddenly looked up and waved with an apparent gaiety inappropriate to the horrible weather. Then he reached for the whistle lever and, as the train entered the tunnel, for forty seconds doubled the already unbearable uproar from the exhaust. It was a long tunnel.

The train was not of a kind Margaret was used to (she knew little of railways); it was composed neither of passenger coaches nor of small clattering trucks, but of long windowless vans, giving no hint of their contents. A nimbus of warm oily air enveloped her, almost immediately to be blown away, leaving her again shivering.

Mimi had not waved back.

They resumed their way. Margaret’s rucksack, though it weighed like the old man of the sea, kept a large stretch of her back almost dry.

“Do the drivers always wave first?” asked Margaret, for something to say.

“Of course. If you were to wave first, they probably wouldn’t notice you. There’s something wrong with girls who wave first anyway.”

“I wonder what’s wrong with Miss Roper?”

“We’ll be seeing.”

“I suppose so. She doesn’t sound much of a night’s prospect.”

“How far’s Pudsley?”

“Eight miles.”

“Very well then.”

Previously it had been Mimi who had seemed so strongly to dislike the valley. It was odd that, as it appeared, she should envisage so calmly the slightly sinister Miss Roper. Odd but practical. Margaret divined that her own consistency of thought and feeling might not tend the more to well-being than Mimi’s weathercock moods.

“Where exactly does Miss Roper hang out, do you suppose?” enquired Mimi. “That’s the first point.”

The only visible work of man, other than the rough road, was the long gash that marked the railway cutting to their left.

“The map hasn’t proved too accurate,” said Margaret.

“Hadn’t we better look all the same? I’m really thinking of you, dear. You must be like a wet rag. Of you and a cup of tea.”

The wind was very much more than it had so far at any time been, but they could find no anchoring stones. Walls had long since ceased to line the road, and there appeared to be no stones larger than pebbles. While they were poking under clumps of heather, a train descended, whistling continuously.

In the end they had to give up. The paper map, on being partly opened, immediately rent across. The downpour would have converted it into discoloured pulp in a few moments. They were so tired and hungry, and Margaret, by general temperament the more determined, so wet, that they had no heart in the struggle. Mimi stuffed the already sodden lump back into Margaret’s rucksack.

“We’d better get on with it, even if we have to traipse all the way to Pudsley,” she said, re-tying a shoe lace and then tightening her raincoat collar strap. “Else we’ll have you in hospital.” She marched forward intrepid.

But in the end, the road, which had long been deteriorating unnoticed, ended in a gate, beyond which was simply a rough field. They had reached a level low enough for primitive cultivation once to have been possible. Soaked and wretched though she was, Margaret looked back to the ridge, and saw that the distance to it was very much less than she had supposed. They leaned on the gate and stared ahead. Stone walls had reappeared, cutting up the land into monotonously similar untended plots. There were still no trees. The railway had now left the cutting and could presumably be crossed; but the women did not make the attempt, as visible before them through the flying deluge was a black house. It stood about six fields away: no joke to reach.

“Why’s it so black?” asked Margaret.

“Pudsley. Those chimneys you’re so fond of.”

“The prevailing wind’s in the other direction. It’s behind us.”

“Wish I had my climbing boots,” said Mimi, as they waded into the long grass. “Or Wellingtons.” The grass double soaked the bottom edge of Margaret’s mackintosh, which she found a new torture. Two trains passed one another, grinding up and charging down. Both appeared to be normal passenger trains, long and packed. Every single window was closed. This produced an odd effect, as of objects in a bottle; until one realised that it was, of course, a consequence of the weather.

By the time they had stumbled across the soaking fields, and surmounted the high craggy walls between, it was almost completely dark. The house was a square, gaol-like stone box, three storeys high, built about 1860, and standing among large but unluxuriant cypresses, the first trees below the valley ridge. The blackness of the building was no effect of light, but the consequence of inlaid soot.

“It’s right on top of the railway,” cried Mimi. Struggling through the murk, they had not noticed that.

There was a huge front door, grim with grime.

“What a hope!” said Mimi, as she hauled on the bell handle.

“It’s a curious bell,” said Margaret, examining the mechanism, and valiant to the soaking shivering end. “It’s like the handles you see in signal boxes.”

The door was opened by a figure illumined only by an oil lamp standing on a wall bracket behind.

“What is it?” The not uneducated voice had a curious throaty undertone.

“My friend and I are on a walking tour,” said Margaret, who, as the initiator of the farmhouses project, always took charge of these occasions. “We got badly lost on the moors. We hoped to reach Pudsley,” she continued, seeing that this was no farmhouse, open to a direct self-invitation. “But what with getting lost and the rain, we’re in rather a mess. Particularly me. I wonder if you could possibly help us? I know it’s outrageous, but we are in distress.”

“Of course,” said another voice from the background. “Come in and get warm. Come in quickly and Beech will shut the door.” This slight inverted echo of the words of the man at the Guest House stirred unpleasing associations in Margaret’s brain.

The weak light disclosed Beech to be a tall muscular figure in a servant’s dinner jacket suit. The face, beneath a mass of black hair, cut like a musician’s, seemed smooth and pale. The second speaker was a handsome well-built man, possibly in the late forties, and wearing a black suit and tie, which suggested mourning. He regarded the odd figures of the two women without any suggestion of the unusual, as they lowered their dripping rucksacks to the tiled floor, unfastened their outer clothes running with water, and stood before him, two dim khaki figures, in shirts and shorts. Margaret felt not only ghastly wet but as if she were naked.

“Let me introduce myself,” said the master of the house. “I am Wendley Roper. I shall expect you both to dine with me and stay the night. To-morrow will put an entirely different face on things.” A slight lordliness of manner, by no means unattractive to Margaret, suggested that he mingled little with modern men.

Margaret introduced Mimi and herself; then said: “We heard higher up the valley that a Miss Roper lived here.”

“My aunt. She died very recently. You see.” He indicated his clothes.

“I am so sorry,” said Margaret conventionally.

“It was deeply distressing. I refer to the manner of her death.” He offered the shivering women no details, but continued: “Now Beech will take you to your room. The Rafters Room, Beech. I fear I have no other available, as the whole first floor and much else is taken up by my grandfather’s collection. I trust you will have no objection to occupying the same room? It is a primitive one, I regret to say. There is only one bed at present, but I shall have another moved up.”

They assured him they had no objection.

“What about clothes? My aunt’s would scarcely serve.” Then, unexpectedly, he added: “And Beech is too big and tall for either of you.”

“It’s quite all right,” said Margaret. “Our rucksacks are watertight and we’ve both got a change.”

“Good,” said Wendley Roper seriously. “Beech will conduct you and dinner will be served when you’ve changed. There’ll be some hot water sent up.”

“You are being most extraordinarily kind to us,” said Margaret.

“We should take the chances life brings us,” said Wendley Roper.

Beech lighted a second oil lamp which had been standing on a large tallboy and, with the women carrying their rucksacks, imperfectly lighted the way upstairs. On the first floor landing there were several large doors, such as admit to the bedrooms of a railway hotel, but no furniture was to be seen anywhere, nor were the staircase or either landing carpeted. At the top of the house Beech admitted them to a room the door of which required unlocking. He did not stand aside to let them enter first, but went straight in and drew heavy curtains before the windows. He had set down the light on the floor. The women joined him. This time there was a heavy brown carpet, but the primitiveness of the room was indisputable. Beyond the carpet and matching curtains, the furnishings consisted solely of a bedstead. It was a naked iron bedstead, crude and ugly.

“I’ll bring you hot water, as Mr. Roper said. Then a basin and towels and some chairs and so forth.”

“Thank you,” said Margaret. Beech retired, closing the door.

“Wonder if the door locks?” Mimi crossed the room. “Not it. The key’s on Beech’s chain. I don’t fancy Beech.”

“Can’t be helped.” Margaret had already discarded her clothes, and was drying her body on a small towel removed from her rucksack.

“I’m not wet through, like you, but God it’s cold for the time of year.” Mimi’s alternative outfit consisted of a dark grey polo-necked sweater and a pair of lighter grey flannel trousers. Soon she had donned it, first putting on a brassiere and knickers to mark renewed contact with society. “Bit of a pig-stye isn’t it,” she continued. “But I suppose we must give thanks.”

“I rather liked our host. At least he didn’t shilly-shally about taking us in.” Margaret was towelling systematically.

“Got a nice voice too.” Mimi decided that she would be warmer with her sweater inside her trousers, and made the alteration. “Unlike Beech. Beech talks like plum jam. Where, by the way, are the rafters?”

The room, which was much longer than it was wide, and contained windows only in each end wall, a great distance apart, was ceiled with orthodox, though cracked and dirty plaster.

“I expect they’re just above us.”

“Up there?” Mimi indicated a trap door in a corner of the ceiling.

Margaret had not previously noticed it. But before she could speak, the room was filled with a sudden rumbling crescendo, which made the massive floorboards vibrate and the light bed leap up and down upon them. Even the big black stones of the walls seemed slightly to jostle.

“The trains!”

Dashing to a window, Mimi dragged back the curtains, and lifting the sash, waved, her mood suddenly one of excitement, as the uproar swept down towards Pudsley.

Then she cried: “Margaret! The window’s barred.”

But Margaret’s attention was elsewhere. During the din, the door had opened, and Beech, a large old-fashioned can steaming in one hand, a large old-fashioned wash-basin dangling from the other, was in the room, and she absurdly naked.

“I beg your pardon,” he was saying. “I don’t think you heard me knock.”

“Get out,” said Mimi, flaming, her soul fired by an immemorial tabu.

“It’s perfectly all right,” intervened Margaret, grasping the small wet towel.

“I’ll fetch you some towels.”

He was gone again. He seemed totally undisturbed.

“He couldn’t help it,” said Margaret. “It was the train.”

Mimi lowered the window and re-drew the thick curtains. “I’ve an idea,” she said.

“Oh? What? About Beech?”

“I’ll tell you later. I’m going to wait at the door.”

Soon Beech returned with two large and welcome bath towels and a huge, improbable new cake of expensive scented soap. Margaret had filled the rose-encircled basin with glorious hot water; but before washing, Mimi stood by the door to receive two simple wooden bedroom chairs, a large wooden towel-horse, and a capacious chamber-pot, before Beech descended to assist with dinner. “I’ll set you up another bed and bring along some bedding later,” he said, as his tall shape descended the tenebrous stairs, now lighted at intervals by oil lamps flickering on brackets.

Mimi rolled up the sleeves of her sweater and immersed her rather fat arms to the elbows. Margaret was drawing on a girdle. Her spare clothes consisted in another shirt, similar to the one the rain had soaked, but stiff and unworn, a cream coloured linen skirt of fashionable length, and a tie which matched the skirt. She also had two pairs of expensive stockings, and a spare pair of shoes of lighter weight than Mimi’s. Soon she was dressed, had knotted her tie, and was easing the stockings up what she felt must be starkly weather-roughened legs. She felt wonderfully dry, warm, and well. Her underclothes felt delightful. She felt that, after all, things might have turned out worse.

While Margaret was dressing, Mimi had been scrubbing hands and forearms, then submitting her short hair to a vigorous, protracted grooming with a small bristly hairbrush. She was too busy to speak. She concentrated upon her simple toilet with an absorption Margaret would not have brought to dressing for her first dinner in evening clothes with a man.

With one stocking attached to its suspender, the other blurring her ankle, Margaret leaned back comfortably and asked, “What was your idea?”

Mimi returned brush and comb to her rucksack. “I think it’s obvious. Old Ma Roper was mad.”

Margaret’s warm world waned a little. “You mean the window bars? This might have been a nursery.”

“Not only. You remember what he said? ‘The manner of her death was deeply distressing.’ And that’s not all.”

“What else?”

“Don’t you remember? Her waving to the trains?”

“I don’t think that means she was mad. She might merely have been lonely.”

“Long time to be lonely. Let’s go down if you’re ready.”

Beech was waiting for them in the gloomy hall. “This way please.” He opened a huge door and they entered the dining-room.

Very large plates, dishes, and cutlery covered the far end of a heavy-looking wooden table, at the head of which sat their host, with a place laid on either side of him. The room was lighted by two sizzling oil lamps, vast and of antiquated pattern, which hung from heavy circular plaster mouldings in the discoloured ceiling. The marble and iron fireplace was in massive keeping with the almost immovable waiting-room chairs. On the dark green lincrusta of the walls engravings hung behind glass so dirty that in the weak green light it was difficult to make out the subjects. A plain round clock clicked like a revolving turnstile from above the fireplace. As the women appeared, it jerked from 2.26 to 2.27. By habit Mimi looked at her watch. The time was just after eight o’clock.

“Immediately you entered the house, the rain stopped,” said Wendley Roper by way of greeting.

“Then perhaps we’d better be on our way after dinner,” said Mimi.

“Most certainly not. I meant only that if you’d arrived a few minutes later, I might have lost the pleasure of your company. Will you sit here?” He was drawing back the heavy chair for Mimi to sit on his right. Beech performed the like office for Margaret. “I should have been utterly disconsolate. You both look remarkably attractive.”

Beech disappeared and returned with a tureen so capacious that neither of the women would have cared to lift it. Roper ladled out soup into the huge plates. As he did so, a train roared past outside.

“I suppose the railway came after the house had been here some time?” asked Margaret, feeling that some reference to the matter seemed called for.

“By no means,” answered Roper. “The man who built the railway, built the house. He was my grandfather, Joseph Roper, generally known as Wide Joe. Wide Joe liked trains.”

“There’s not much else for company,” remarked Mimi, engulfing the hot soup.

“This was one of the last main line railways to be built,” continued Roper. “Everyone said it was impossible, but they were keen all the same, partly because land in this valley was very cheap, as it still is. But my grandfather was an engineering genius and in the end he did it. The engravings in this room show the different stages of his work.”

“I suppose he regarded it as his masterpiece and wanted to live next to it when he retired?” politely enquired Margaret.

“Not when he retired. As a matter of fact, he never did retire. He built this house right at the beginning of the work and lived here until the end. The railway took twenty years to build.”

“I don’t know much about railway building, but that’s surely a very long time?”

“There were difficulties. Difficulties of a kind my grandfather had never expected. The cost of them ruined the Company, which had to amalgamate in consequence. They nearly drove my grandfather mad.” Margaret could not stop herself from glancing at Mimi. “Everything conspired together against him. Things happened which he had not looked for.”

Beech reappeared and, removing the soup, substituted a pile of sausages contained in a rampart of mashed potato. As he manoeuvred the hot and heavy dish, Margaret noticed a large dull coal-black ring on the third finger of his left hand.

“Primitive fare,” apologised Roper. “All you can get nowadays.”

None the less, the two women found it unbelievably welcome.

“I do see now what you might call railway influences about the house,” said Margaret.

“My grandfather lived in the days when a railway engineer was responsible for every detail of design. Not only the tunnels and bridges, but the locomotives and carriages, the stations and signals, even the posters and tickets. He had sole responsibility for everything. An educated man could never have stood the strain. Wide Joe educated himself.”

At intervals through dinner passing trains rattled the heavy table and heavy objects upon it.

“Now tell me about yourselves,” said Wendley Roper, as if he had just concluded the narrative of his own life. “But first have another sausage each. There’s only stewed fruit ahead.” They accepted.

“We’re Civil Servants,” said Mimi. “That’s what brought us together. I come from London and Margaret comes from Devonshire. My father is a hairdresser and Margaret’s father is a lord. Now you know all about us.”

“An entirely bankrupt lord, I regret to say,” added Margaret quietly.

“I gather most lords are bankrupt in these times,” said Roper sympathetically.

“And many hairdressers,” said Mimi.

“Everyone but Civil Servants, in fact?” said Roper.

“That’s why we’re Civil Servants,” replied Mimi, eviscerating her last sausage from its inedible skin. “Though you don’t seem altogether bankrupt,” she added. Food was increasing her vitality.

He made no reply. Beech had entered with a big glass bowl deeply but unbeautifully cut, filled with stewed damsons.

“The local fruit,” said Roper despondently.

But they even ate stewed damsons.

“I am absolutely delighted to have you here,” he remarked when he had served them. “I see almost no one. Least of all attractive women.”

His tones were so direct and sincere that Margaret immediately felt very pleased. Having, until this year she took a job, lived all her life against a background of desperate and, as she thought, undeserved money troubles, and in a remote country district, she had had little to do with men. Even such a simple compliment from a good-looking and well-spoken man still meant disproportionately much to her. She observed that Mimi seemed to notice nothing whatever.

“I don’t know what would have become of us without you,” said Margaret.

“Food for the crows,” said Mimi.

Suddenly the conversation loosened up, becoming comparatively cordial, intimate, and general. Roper disclosed himself as intelligent, well-informed, and a good listener to those less intelligent and well-informed, at least when they were young women. Mimi’s conversation became much steadier and more pointed than usual. Margaret found herself saying less and less, while enjoying herself more.

“Beech will bring us coffee in the drawing-room,” said Roper, “if drawing-room’s the right expression.”

They moved across the hall to another bleak apartment, this time walled with official-looking books, long series of volumes bound in dark blue cloth or in stout, rough-edged paper. Again there were two complicated but not very efficient lamps hissing and spurting from the coffered ceiling. The furniture consisted in old-fashioned leather-covered armchairs and sofas; and, before the window at the end of the room, a huge desk, bearing high heaps of irregular documents, disused and dusty. About the room in glass cases were scale models of long extinct locomotives and bygone devices for ensuring safety on the railways. Above the red marble mantel was a vast print of a railway accident, freely coloured by hand.

“You do keep things as the old man left them,” said Mimi.

“It is a house of the dead,” said Roper. “My aunt, you know. She would never have anything touched.”

Beech brought coffee: not very good and served in over-large cups; but pleasantly warm. Margaret still found the house cold. She hoped she was not ill after the soaking and strain of the day. She continued, however, to listen to Mimi and Roper chatting together in surprising sympathy; every now and then made an observation of her own; and, thinking things over, wondered that on the whole they had turned out so well. It was Margaret who poured out the coffee.

What were Mimi and Roper talking about? He was asking her in great detail about their dull office routine; she was enquiring with improbable enthusiasm into early railway history. Neither could have had much genuine interest in either subject. It was all very unreal, but comfortable and pleasing. Roper, many aspects of whose position seemed to Margaret to invite curiosity, said nothing of himself. Every now and then a train passed.

“A pension at sixty doesn’t make up for being a number all your life. A cipher. You want to get off the rails every now and then.”

“You only get on to a branch line, a dead end,” said Roper with what seemed real despondency. “It’s difficult to leave the rails altogether and still keep going at all.”

“Have you ever tried? What do you do?” It was seldom so long before Mimi asked that. She despised inaction in men.

“I used to work in the railway company’s office. All the Ropers were in the railway business, as you will have gathered. I was the only one to get out of it in time.”

“In time for what?”

“In time for anything. My father was the company’s Chief Commercial Manager. Trying to meet the slump killed him. Things aren’t what they used to be with railways, you know. My grandfather was run over just outside that window.” He pointed across the dusty desk at the end of the room.

“What a perfectly appalling thing!” said Margaret. “How did it happen?”

“He never had any luck after he took on this job. You know how two perfectly harmless substances when blended can make something deadly? Building the railway through this valley was just like that for my grandfather. A lot of things happened . . . One thing the valley goes in for is sudden storms. On a certain night when one of these storms got up, my grandfather thought he heard a tree fall. You noticed the trees round the house The original idea was that they’d provide shelter. My grandfather thought this tree might have fallen across the line. He was so concerned that he forgot the time table, though normally he carried every train movement in his head. You can guess what happened. The noise of the approaching train was drowned by the wind. Or so they decided at the inquest.”

When a comparative stranger tells such a story, it is always difficult to know what to say, and there is a tendency to fill the gap with some unimportant question. “And was the tree across the line?” asked Margaret.

“Not it. No tree had fallen. The old man had got it wrong.”

“Then surely they were rather lax at the inquest?”

“Wide Joe had always been expected to meet a bad end, and the jury were all local men. He was pretty generally disliked. He made his daughter break off her engagement with a railwayman at Pudsley depot. Marrying into the lower deck, and all that. But it turned out he was a bit wrong. The man got into Parliament and ended by doing rather better for himself than my grandfather had done by sticking to the railway. By then, of course, it was too late. And my grandfather was dead in any case.”

“That was your aunt?” enquired Mimi.

“Being my father’s sister, yes,” said Roper. “Now let us change the subject. Tell me about the gay world of London.”

“We never come across it,” said Mimi. “It’s just one damn thing after another for us girls.”

The moment seemed opportune for Margaret to get her pullover, as she still felt cold. She departed upstairs. In some ways she would have been glad to go to bed, after the exhausting day; but she felt also an unexplained reluctance, less than half-conscious, to leave Mimi and Roper chatting so intimately alone together. Then ascending the dim staircase with its enormous ugly polished banisters in dark wood, she received a shock which drove sleep temporarily from her.

The incident was small and perfectly reasonable; it was doubtless the dead crepuscularity of the house which made it seem frightening to Margaret. When she reached the first-floor landing she saw a figure which seemed hastily to be drawing back from her and then to retreat through one of the big panelled doors. The impression of furtiveness might well have resulted solely from the exceedingly poor lighting. But as to the opening and shutting of the door, Margaret’s ears left her in no doubt. And upon another point their evidence confirmed the much less dependable testimony of her eyes: the withdrawing feet tapped; the half-visible figure was undoubtedly a woman’s. She appeared to be wearing a dark coat and skirt, which left her lighter legs more clearly discernible.

Stamping on absurd fears, quite beyond definition, Margaret ascended the second flight and entered the bedroom. After all, it was quite probable that Beech did not do all the work of the house: most likely that Roper’s staff should consist of a married couple. Margaret sat upon one of the hard chairs Beech had brought, and faced her fear more specifically. It took shape before the eyes of her mind: a faceless waxwork labelled “Miss Roper”, mad, dead, horribly returned. The costume of the figure Margaret had seen was not that of the tragic Victorian in Wendley Roper’s narrative: but then Miss Roper had died only recently, and might have kept up with the times in this respect, as more and more old ladies do. That would be less likely, however, if she had really been mad, as Mimi had suggested, and as the tale of the broken engagement would certainly require had it been told by one of the period’s many novelists. The room Margaret was in had seen it all. Suddenly, as this fact returned to memory, the grimy dingy papered walls seemed simultaneously to jerk towards her, the whole rather long and narrow attic to contract upon her threateningly. Though enormously larger, the room suddenly struck Margaret as having the proportions of a railway compartment, a resemblance much increased by the odd arrangement of the windows, one at each end. Old-fashioned railway carriage windows were commonly barred, Margaret was just old enough to have noticed. This recollection brought rather more comfort than was strictly reasonable. Relaxing a little, Margaret found that she had been seated motionless. Her muscles were stiff and she could hear her heart and pulses, whether or not proceeding at the normal rate it was hard to say. Some time must have passed while she had sat in what amounted to a trance of fear. But their only watch was on Mimi’s wrist, her own having been stolen while she washed in the Ladies Lavatory of a restaurant to which her father had taken her for her birthday. Above all, she was colder than ever. She extracted the pullover from her rucksack and put it on. It was V-necked and long-sleeved. The warmth of its elegant, closely woven black wool was cheering. Before once more descending, Margaret adjusted the lamp which had been left in the bedroom. Then she recalled Roper’s remark that the whole first floor of the house was occupied by his grandfather’s collection; which for some reason did not make the actions of the woman she had seen seem more reassuring. But a minute later she crossed the first-floor landing firmly, though certainly without making any investigation; and reached the door of the preposterous “drawing-room” without (she was quite surprised to realise) any particular incident.

Immediately she entered, however, it was obvious that the atmosphere in the room had very much altered since she had left. Her fears were cut off like the change of scene in a film, to be replaced by a confused emotion as strong and undefined as the very different sensations which had accompanied the short period between her glimpsing the woman on the stairs and reaching the chair in her bedroom. Not only were Mimi and Roper now seated together on the vast leather-covered sofa before the empty fireplace, but Margaret even felt that they had vulgarly leapt further away from one another upon hearing her return.

“Hullo,” said Mimi cheekily. “You’ve been a long time.”

For a moment Margaret felt like giving the situation a twist in her direction (as she felt it would be), by relating some of the reason for her long absence; but, in view of the mystery about Miss Roper, managed to abstain. Could it be that Miss Roper was not dead at all? she suddenly wondered.

“Mind your own business,” she replied in Mimi’s own key.

“I hope you found your way,” said Roper politely.

“Perfectly, thank you.”

There was a short silence.

“I fear Beech has gone to bed, or I’d offer you both some further refreshments. I have no other servant.”

After the initial drag of blood from her stomach, Margaret took a really hard pull on her resolution.

“Do you live alone here with Beech?”

“Quite alone. That’s why it’s so pleasant to have you two with me. I’ve been telling Mimi that normally I have only my books.” It was the first time Margaret had heard him use the Christian name.

“He leads the life of a recluse,” said Mimi. “Research, you know. Dog’s life if you ask me. Worse than ours.”

“What do you research into?” asked Margaret.

“Can’t you guess, dear?” Mimi had become very much at her ease.

“Railways, I’m afraid. Railway history.” Roper was smiling a scholar’s smile, tired and deprecating, but at the same time uniquely arrogant. “If you’re a Roper you can’t get it quite out of the blood. I’ve been showing Mimi this.” He held out a book with a dark green jacket. “Early Fishplates,” read Margaret, “By Howard Bullhead.” The print appeared closely packed and extremely technical. The book was decorated with occasional arid little diagrams.

“What has this to do with railways?”

“Fishplates,” cried Mimi, “are what hold the rails down.”

“Well not quite that,” said Roper, “but something like it.”

“Who’s Mr. Bullhead?”

“Bullhead is a rather technical railway joke. I’m the real author. I prefer to use a pseudonym.”

“The whole book’s one long mad thrill,” said Mimi. “Wendley’s going to sell the film rights.”

“I can’t get it altogether out of my blood,” said Roper again. “The family motto might be the same as Bismarck’s: blood and iron.”

“Do you want to get it out?” asked Margaret. “I’m sure it’s a fascinating book.”

But Mimi had leapt to her feet. “What about a cup of tea? What you say I make it?”

Roper hesitated for a moment. Margaret thought that disinclination to accede conflicted with desire to please Mimi.

“I’ll help.” Normally tea at night was so little Mimi’s habit that Margaret stared at her.

“That would be very nice indeed,” said Roper at last. Desire to please Mimi had doubtless prevailed, though indeed it was hard to see what else he could say. “I’ll show you the kitchen. It’s really very nice of you.” He hesitated another moment. Then they both followed him from the room.

Before the kettle had boiled in the square old kitchen, Margaret’s mind was in another conflict. Roper no longer seemed altogether so cultivated and charming as towards the end of dinner; there were now recurrent glimpses in him of showiness and even silliness. The maddening thing was, however, that Margaret could no longer be unaware that she found him attractive. Some impulse of which her experience was small and her opinion adverse, was loose in her brain, like the spot of light in a column of mercury. Upon other matters her mind was perfectly clear; so that she felt like two people, one thinking, one willing. Possibly even there was a third person, who was feeling; who was feeling very tired indeed.

Mimi, sometimes so quick to tire, seemed utterly unflagging. She darted about the strange domesticities, turning taps, assembling crocks, prattling about the calor gas cooker: “Your gas doesn’t smell. I call that service.”

“The smell is added to coal gas as a safety precaution,” said Roper.

“Why don’t they choose a nicer smell then?”

“What would you suggest?”

“I don’t mean Chanel, but new-mown hay or lovely roses.”

“The Gas Board don’t want all their customers in love with easeful death.”

“What’s your favourite method of committing suicide?”

Though this was one of Mimi’s most customary topics, Margaret wished that she had chosen another. But Roper merely replied: “Old age I think.” He seemed fascinated by her. Neither he nor Margaret was doing anything to help with the preparation. In the end Mimi began positively to sing and the empty interchange of remarks came to an end.

As Mimi was filling the teapot, Roper unexpectedly departed.

“Do you like him?” asked Margaret.

“He’s all right. Wonder if there’s anything to eat with it.” Mimi began to peer into vast clanging bread bins.

“Have you found out anything more about him?”

“Not a thing.”

“Don’t you think it’s all rather queer?”

“Takes all sorts to make a world, dear.”

“It seems to take an odd sort to make a railway. You yourself suggested——” But Roper had returned.

“I thought we might end this delightful evening in my den, my study, you know. It’s much warmer and cosier. I don’t usually show it to visitors. I like to keep somewhere quite private. For work, you know. But you are no ordinary visitors. I’ve just looked in and there’s even a fire burning.” This last slightly odd remark was not to Margaret made less odd by the way it was spoken; as if the speaker had prepared in advance a triviality too slight to sustain preparation convincingly. “Do come along. Let me carry the tray.”

“I’ve been looking for something to eat,” said Mimi. “Do you think Beech has laid by any buns or anything?”

“There’s some cake in my den,” said Roper, like the hero of a good book for boys.

This time the door was open and the room flooding the hall with cheerful light.

It was entirely different from any other room they had entered in that house: and not in the least like a den, or even like a study. The lamps were modern, efficient, adequate, and decorative. The furniture was soft and comfortable. The railway blight (as Margaret regarded it) seemed totally absent. As Roper had said, there was an excellent fire in a modern grate surrounded by unexciting but not disagreeable Dutch tiles. This seemed the true drawing-room of the house.

“What a lovely lounge!” cried Mimi. “Looks like a woman in the house at last. Why couldn’t we have come in here before?” Her rapidly increasing command of the situation seemed to Margaret almost strident.

“I thought the occasion called for more formality.”

“Dog in the manger, if you ask me.” Mimi fell upon a sofa, extending her trousered legs. “Pour out. Margaret, will you?”

Margaret, conscious that whereas Mimi ought to be appearing in a bad light, yet in fact it was she, Margaret, who, however unjustly, was doing so, repeated with the tea the office she had already performed with the coffee. Roper, who had placed the tray on a small table next to an armchair in which Margaret proceeded to seat herself beside the fire, carried one of the big full cups to Mimi. He poured her milk with protective intimacy; and seemed to find one of her obvious jokes about the quantity of sugar she required intoxicatingly funny. He moved rather well, Margaret thought. Mimi, moreover, had been right about his voice. His remarks, however, though almost never about himself, seemed mostly, in the light of that fact, remarkably self-centred. It would be dreadful to have to listen to them all one’s life.

Suddenly he was bearing cake. Neither of the women saw where it came from but, when it appeared, both found they still had appetites. It tasted of vanilla and was choked with candied peel.

In the kitchen Margaret had noticed that despite the late hour the traffic on the railway had seemed to be positively increasing; but in the present small room, the noise was much muffled, the line being on the other side of the house. None the less, frequent trains were still to be heard.

“Why are there so many trains? It must be nearly midnight.”

“Long past, dear,” interjected Mimi, the time-keeper. The fact seemed to give her a particular happiness.

“I see you’re not used to living by a railway,” said Roper. “Many classes of traffic are kept off the tracks during ordinary travelling hours. What you hear going by now are the loads you don’t see when the stations are open. A railway is like an iceberg, you know: very little of its working is visible to the casual onlooker.”

“Not visible, perhaps. But certainly audible.”

“The noise does not disturb you?”

“No, of course not. But does it really go on day and night?”

“Certainly. Day and night. At least on important main lines, such as this is.”

“I suppose you’ve long ceased to notice it?”

“I notice when it’s not there. If a single train is missing from its time, I become quite upset. Even if it happens when I’m asleep.”

“But surely only the passenger trains have time tables?”

“My dear Margaret, every single train is in a time table. Every local goods, every light engine movement. Only not, of course, in the time table you buy for sixpence at the Enquiry Office. Only a small fraction of all the train movements are in that. Even the man behind the counter knows virtually nothing of the rest.”

“Only Wendley knows the whole works,” said Mimi from the sofa.

The others were sitting one at each side of the fire in front of which she lay; and had been talking along the length of her body. Margaret had realised that this was the first time Roper had used her Christian name. It seemed hours ago that he had called Mimi by hers. Suddenly, looking at Mimi sprawling in her trousers and tight high-necked sweater, Margaret saw the point, clearer than in any book: Mimi was physically attractive; she herself in all probability was not. And nothing else in all life, in all the world, really counted. Nothing, nothing. Being cleverer; on the whole (as she thought) kinder; being more refined; the daughter of a lord: such things were the dust beneath Mimi’s chariot wheels, items in the list of life’s innumerable unwantable impedimenta. Margaret stuck out her legs unbecomingly.

“Can I have another cup of tea?” said Mimi. Her small round head was certainly engaging.

“There you are,” said Margaret. “Now will you both forgive me if I go to bed? I think I could do with some sleep after my soaking.”

“I’m a beast,” cried Mimi, warmly sympathetic. “Is there anything I can do? What about a hot water bottle, Wendley? Margaret is always as helpless as a butterfly. I have to look after her.” She was certainly rather sweet too.

“Not a hot water bottle, please,” replied Margaret. “They’re not in season yet. I’ll be all right, Mimi. See you later. Good night.”

Between sympathy and the desire to get her out of the room, Margaret thought on her way upstairs, Mimi had absolutely no conflict whatever; she merely took her emotions in turn, getting the most out of all of them, and no doubt giving the most also.

This time there was no vague figure which crept back from the stairs: or possibly it was that Margaret’s thoughts attended a different will o’ the wisp. Immediately she entered the bedroom, she noticed that the promised second bed had arrived, as lean and frugal as the first. In the long room the two beds had been set far apart. Margaret was unable to be sure whether the second bed had or had not been there when she had last entered the room.

Her mind still darting and plunging about the scene downstairs, she selected the bed which stood furthest from the door. At that moment Mimi seemed to her in no particular need of consideration. Margaret dashed off her clothes in the clammy atmosphere, dropping the garments with unwonted carelessness upon one of the two dark, thin-legged chairs; then, as a train pounded past, rattling the small barred windows at each end of the room and suddenly parting the curtains to let in the infernal glare outside, climbed into her pyjamas and into the small tight bed. She now realised for the first time that there were no sheets, but only clinging blankets. To put out the single oil lamp was more than her courage or the cold permitted. She buttoned her jacket to the top and wished it had long sleeves. It had been only an absurd dignity, a preposterous aggression which had led her to reject a hot water bottle.

She was quite unable to sleep. Her mind had set up a devil’s dance which would not subside for hours at the best. The bed was the first really uncomfortable one in which Margaret had ever slept: it was so narrow that blankets of normal size could be and were tucked in so far that they overlapped beneath the occupant, interlocking to bind her in; so narrow also that the cheap hard springs of the wire framework gave not at all beneath the would-be sleeper’s weight; and the mattress was inadequate to blur a diamond pattern of hard metallic ridges. Although, in accordance with her reserved and intellectual nature, preferring by day to wear garments fitting closely at the neck, Margaret found that the same sensation in bed, however much necessitated by the temperature, amounted to suffocation. Nor had she ever been able since first she could remember to sleep with a light in the room. Above all, there were the trains: not so much the periodical thunder rollings, she found, as the apparently lengthening intervals of waiting for them. Downstairs the trains had seemed to become more and more frequent, here they seemed to become slowly sparser. It was probably, Margaret reflected, a consequence of the slowness with which time is said to pass for those seeking sleep. Or perhaps Wendley Roper would have an answer in terms of graphic statics or inner family knowledge. The long-term effect was as if the train service were something subjective in Margaret’s head, like the large defined shapes which obstruct the vision of the sufferer from migraine. “No sleep like this,” said Margaret to herself, articulating with a clarity which made the words seem spoken by another.

She forced herself from the rigid blankets, felt-like though far from warm, opened the neck of her pyjama jacket, and extinguished the light, which died on the lightest breath. What on earth was Mimi doing? she wondered with schoolgirl irritation.

Immediately she had groped into the pitch dark bed, a train which seemed of an entirely new construction went past. This time there was no blasting of steam and thundering or grinding of wheels: only a single sustained rather high-pitched rattling, metallic, inhuman, hollow. The new train appeared to be descending the bank, but Margaret for the first time could not be sure. The sound frightened Margaret badly. “It’s a hospital train,” her mother had said to her long ago on an occasion of which Margaret had forgotten all details except that they were the most horrible she had ever known. “It’s full of wounded soldiers.”

In a paroxysm of terror, as this agony of her childhood blasted through her adult life, Margaret must have passed into sleep, or at least unconsciousness. For the next event could only have been a dream or hallucination. The room seemed to be filling with colourless light. Though even now this light was extremely dim, the process of its first appearance and increase seemed to have been going on for a very long time. As she realised this, another part of Margaret’s mind remembered that it could none the less have been only a matter of minutes. She struggled to make consistent the consciousness of the nearly endless with the consciousness of the precisely brief. The light seemed, moreover, the exact visual counterpart of the noise she had heard made by the new train. Then Margaret became aware of something very horrible indeed: it began with the upturned dead face of an old woman, colourless with the exact colourlessness of the colourless light; and it ended with the old woman’s crumpled shape occultly made visible hanging above the trap door in the corner of Margaret’s compartment-shaped room. Up in the attic old Miss Roper had hanged herself, her grey hair so twisted and meshed as itself to suggest the suffocating agent.

Margaret’s hands went in terror to her own bare throat. Then the door of the room had opened, and someone stood inside it bearing a light.

“I don’t think you heard me knock.”

As when she and Mimi had arrived she had noticed in Roper’s first words the echo of the man at the Guest House, so now was another echo—of Beech’s cool apology for that bedroom contretemps which had so fired Mimi’s wrath. To Margaret it was as if a nightmare had reached that not uncommon point at which the sufferer, though not yet awake, not yet out of the dream, yet becomes aware that a dream it is. Then all was deep nightmare once more, as Margaret recalled the shadow woman on the stairs, and perceived that the same woman was now in the room with her.

Margaret broke down. Still clutching her throat, she cried repeatedly in a shrill but not loud voice. “Go away. Go away. Go away. Go away.” It was again like her childhood.

The strange woman approached and, setting down the lamp, began to shake her by the shoulders. At once Margaret seemed to know that, whoever else she was, she was not the dead Miss Roper; and that was all which seemed to matter. She stopped wailing like a terror-stricken child: then saw that the hand still on one of her shoulders wore a dull coal-black ring; and, looking up, that the face above her and the thick black hair were Beech’s, as had been that indifferently apologetic voice. Nightmare stormed forward yet again; but this time only for an adult speck of time. For Margaret seemed now to have no doubt whatever that Beech was indeed a woman.

“Where’s your friend?”

“I left her downstairs. I came up to bed early.”

“Early?”

“What’s the time? I have no watch.”

“It’s half-past three.”

The equivocal situation returned to life in Margaret’s mind in every detail, as when stage lights are turned on simultaneously.

“What business is it of yours? Who are you?”

“Who do you think I am?”

“I thought you were the manservant.”

“I looked after old Miss Roper. Until she died.”

“Did that mean you had to dress like a man?” The woman now appeared to be wearing a dark grey coat and skirt and a white blouse.

“Wendley could hardly live alone in the house with someone he wasn’t married to. Someone he had no intention of marrying.”

“Why haven’t you left then?”

“After what happened to Miss Roper?”

“What did you do to Miss Roper?” Margaret spoke very low but quite steadily. All feeling was dead in her, save, far below the surface, a flickering jealousy of Mimi, a death-wish sympathy with the murdering stranger beside her. So that Margaret was able to add, steadily as before: “Miss Roper was mad, wasn’t she?”

“Certainly not. Why do you say that?”

“Her father preventing her marrying. The bars on the windows.”

“You can be crossed in love without going mad, you know. And madhouse windows are not the only ones with bars.” The large white hand with the black ring on the engagement finger had continued all this time to rest on Margaret’s shoulder. Now with a sharp movement it was withdrawn.

“So this was simply a prison? Why? What had Miss Roper done?”

“Something to do with the railway. Some secret she had from the old man and wouldn’t tell Wendley. I never asked for details. I was in love. You know what that means as well as I do.”

“What sort of secret? And why did it have to be a secret?”

“I don’t know what sort of secret. I don’t care now. She wanted to keep it secret from Wendley because she knew what he would do with it. She spent all her time trying to tell other people.”

“That’s why—— Margaret was about to say “that’s why she waved”, then stopped herself. “What would Wendley have done with it?”

“Your friend should have some idea of that by this time.” This unexpected remark was delivered in a tone of deepest venom.

“What do you mean? Where is Mimi?” Then a sudden hysteria swept over her. “I’m going to find Mimi.” She struggled out of the crib-like bed, bruising herself badly on the ironwork. The trains seemed to have long ceased and everything was horribly quiet in the Quiet Valley.

The woman, approaching the cheap little bedroom chair on which Margaret’s clothes lay tumbled where she had dropped them, picked up Margaret’s tie, and held it between her two hands twelve inches or so apart. In the negligible light of one oil lamp there began a slow chase down the long narrow room.

“You’re not on his side really,” cried Margaret, everything gone. “You know what’s happening downstairs.”

The woman made no answer, but slightly decreased the distance between her hands. Margaret perceived how foolish had been her error in deliberately selecting the bed furthest from the door. None the less, a certain amount of evasion, as in a childhood game of “Touch,” was possible before she found herself being forced near the end wall, being coralled almost beneath the trap door in the ceiling above. If only she could have reached the other door, the door of the room! Much would then have been possible.

As they arrived at the corner beneath the trap, Margaret’s heel struck Mimi’s open rucksack, hurled there by its casual owner, hitherto forgotten or unnoticed by Margaret, and concealed by the dim light. Margaret stooped.

Three seconds later her adversary was lying back downwards on the floor, bleeding darkly and excessively in the gloom, Mimi’s robust camping knife through her rather thick white throat. “Comes from Sweden, dear,” Mimi had said. “Not allowed to sell them here.”

It did not take Margaret long, plunging into the pockets in the dead woman’s jacket, to find Beech’s bunch of keys. This was fortunate, as the scream of the murdered woman, breaking into the course of events below, was followed by running footsteps on the murky stairs. The agile Mimi burst into the room crying, “Lock it. For God’s sake lock it”; and Margaret had raced the length of the Rafters Room and locked it before Wendley Roper, heavy and unused to exercise, had arrived at the landing outside. The large key turned in the expensive, efficient lock with a grinding snap he could not have mistaken. The railway hotel door was enormously thick, a beautiful piece of joinery. Margaret waited, her body drooping forward, for Roper to begin his onslaught. But it was a job for an axe, and nothing whatever happened; neither blows on the door, nor a voice, nor even retreating footsteps.

Mimi, ignorant that the room had a third occupant, was seated on the side of her bed with her hands distending her trousers pockets. She was panting slightly, but her hair was habitually cut too short ever to show much disorder. Margaret had previously thought her manner strident; it was now beyond bearing. She began to blow out a stream of curses, particularly horrible in the presence of the dead woman.

“Mimi, my dear,” said Margaret gently. “What are we going to do?” Still in her pyjamas, she was shivering spasmodically.

Mimi, still with her hands in her pockets, looked round at her. “Catch the first departure for hell, I should say.”

Though she was not weeping, there was something unbearably desolate about her. Margaret wanted to comfort her: Mimi’s experiences had been unimaginably worse even than her own. She put her cold arms round Mimi’s stiff hard body; then tried to drag Mimi’s hands from her pockets in order to take them in her own. Mimi, though offering no help, did not strongly resist. As Margaret dragged at her wrists, one of her own hands round each, a queer little trickle fell to the floor on each side of her. Mimi’s pockets were tightly stuffed with railway tickets.

Dropping Mimi’s wrists, Margaret picked up one of the tickets and read it by the light of the strange woman’s lamp: “Diamond Jubilee Special. Pudsley to Hassellwicket. Third Class. Excursion 2/11. God Save Our Queen.” Mimi’s fists were clenched round variegated little bundles of pasteboard rectangles.

It was impossible to tell her about the dead woman.

“I’m going to dress. Then we’ll get out.” Margaret began to drag on the clothes she had worn for dinner. She buttoned the collar of her shirt, warm and welcome about her neck. She looked for her tie, and could just see it in one hand of the dead woman as she lay compact on the floor at the end of the room behind Mimi’s back.

“I’ll pack our rucksacks.” Fully dressed, Margaret felt more valiant and less vulnerable. She groped at the feet of the corpse for Mimi’s rucksack and assembled the scattered contents. But, though feeling the omission to be folly, she did not go back for Mimi’s knife. In the end, she had packed both rucksacks and was carefully fastening the straps. Mimi had apparently emptied her pockets of tickets, leaving four small heaps on the dark carpet, one from each pocket; and was now sitting silent and apparently relaxed, but making no effort to help Margaret.

“Are you ready? We must plan.”

Mimi gazed up at her. Then she said quietly: “There’s nowhere for us to go now.” With the slightest of gestures she appeared to indicate the four heaps of tickets.

No argument that Margaret used would induce Mimi to make the least effort. She just sat on the bed saying that they were prisoners and there was nothing they could do.

Feeling that Mimi’s reason might have been affected, though of this there was no sign, Margaret began to contemplate the dreadful extremity of trying to escape alone. But apart from the additional perils to body and spirit (there was no knowing that Roper was not standing outside the door), she felt that it would be impossible for her to leave Mimi alone to what might befall. She set down her rucksack on the floor beside Mimi’s. When filled, she always found it heavy to hold for long.

“Very well. We’ll wait till it’s light. It should be quite soon.”

Mimi said nothing. Looking at her, Margaret saw that for the first time she was weeping. Margaret once more put her arms round her now soft body, and the two women tenderly kissed. They came from very different environments and it was the first time they had ever done so.

The desperate idea entered Margaret’s mind that help might be obtained. Surely there must be visitors to the house of some kind sometimes; and neither she nor Mimi was a powerless old woman. Margaret’s eyes unintendingly went to the knife in her victim’s throat.

For a long time the two women sat close together saying little.

Margaret had not for hours given a thought to the railway outside. Since that strange and dreamlike new train, nothing had passed. Then, from the very far distance, came the airy ghost of an engine whistle: utterly impersonal at that hour and place, but, to Margaret, filled with promise.

She rose and drew back the curtains from one of the queer barred windows.

“Look! It’s dawn.”

A girdle of daylight was slowly edging over the horizon, offering a fine day to come, unusual in such mountainous country. Margaret, aflame for action, looked quickly about the room. She herself was wearing colours unlikely to stand out in the yet faint light. Mimi’s grey was hardly more helpful. There was only one thing to be done. Leaping across the room, Margaret ripped a large piece of material from the dead woman’s white blouse patched with blood. Then, as in the growing radiance Mimi for the first time saw the body, Margaret, throwing up the narrow window, waved confidently to the workmen’s train which was approaching.