The Complete Short Stories

  But there was Miss Marjorie Pettigrew. Miss Pettigrew’s appearance and bearing attracted me with a kind of consolation. I learned that she had been at Watling for about six months and from various hints and abrupt silences I gathered that she was either feared or disliked. I put this down to the fact that she wasn’t a neurotic. Usually, neurotics take against people whose nerves they can’t jar upon. So I argued to myself; and that I myself rather approved of Miss Pettigrew was a sign that I was a different sort of neurotic from the others.

  Miss Pettigrew was very tall and stick-like, with very high shoulders and a square face. She seemed to have a lot of bones. Her eyes were dark, her hair black; it was coiled in the earphone style but she was not otherwise unfashionable.

  I thought at first she must be in Retreat, for she never spoke at mealtimes, though she always smiled faintly when passing anything at table. She never joined the rest of the community except for meals and prayers. She was often in the chapel praying. I envied her resistance, for though I too wanted solitude I often hadn’t the courage to refuse to join the company, and so make myself unpopular like Miss Pettigrew. I hoped she would speak to me when she came out of her Retreat.

  One day in that first week a grand-looking north-countrywoman said to me at table, nodding over to where Miss Pettigrew sat in her silence,

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with her at all.’

  ‘Wrong with her?’

  ‘It’s pretence, she’s clever, that’s it.’

  By clever she meant cunning, I realized that much.

  ‘How do you mean, pretence?’ I said.

  ‘Her silence. She won’t speak to anyone.

  ‘But she’s in Retreat, isn’t she?’

  ‘Not her,’ said this smart woman. ‘She’s been living here for over six months and for the past four she hasn’t opened her mouth. It isn’t mental trouble, it is not.

  ‘Has she taken some religious vow, perhaps?’

  ‘Not her; she’s clever. She won’t open her mouth. They brought a doctor, but she wouldn’t open her mouth to him.’

  ‘I’m glad she’s quiet, anyhow,’ I said. ‘Her room’s next door to mine and I like quietness.’

  Not all the pilgrims regarded Miss Pettigrew as ‘clever’. She was thought to be genuinely touched in the head. And it was strange how she was disapproved of by the Cloisters, for they were kind — only too intrusively kind — towards obvious nervous sufferers like me. Their disapproval of Miss Pettigrew was almost an admission that they believed nothing was wrong with her. If she had gone untidy, made grotesque faces, given jerks and starts and twitches, if she had in some way lost their respect I do not think she would have lost their approval.

  I began to notice her more closely in the hope of finding out more about her mental aberration; such things are like a magnet to neurotics. I would meet her crossing the courtyard, or come upon her kneeling in the lonely Lady Chapel. Always she inclined her coiled head towards me, ceremonious as an Abbess greeting a nun. Passing her in a corridor I felt the need to stand aside and make way for her confident quiet progress. I could not believe she was insane.

  I could not believe she was practising some crude triumphant cunning, enduring from day to day, with her silence and prayers. It was said she had money. Perhaps she was very mystical. I wondered how long she would be able to remain hermited so within herself. The monks were in a difficult position. It was against their nature to turn her out; maybe it was against their Rule; certainly it would cause a bad impression in the neighbourhood which was not at all Abbey-minded. One after another the monks had approached her, tactful monks, sympathetic, firm and curious ones.

  ‘Well, Miss Pettigrew, I hope you’ve benefited from your stay at the Abbey? I suppose you have plans for the winter?’

  No answer, only a mild gesture of acknowledgement.

  No answer, likewise, to another monk, ‘Now, Miss Pettigrew, dear child, you simply can’t go on like this. It isn’t that we don’t want to keep you. Glory be to God, we’d never turn you out of doors, nor any soul. But we need the room, d’you see, for another pilgrim.’

  And again, ‘Now tell us what’s the trouble, open your heart, poor Miss Pettigrew. This isn’t the Catholic way at all. You’ve got to communicate with your fellows.’

  ‘Is it a religious vow you’ve taken all on your own? That’s very unwise, it’s …’

  ‘See, Miss Pettigrew, we’ve found you a lodging in the town…’

  Not a word. She was seen to go weekly to Confession, so evidently she was capable of speech. But she would not talk, even to do her small bits of shopping. Every week or so she would write on a piece of paper, ‘Please get me a Snowdrop Shampoo, 1s. 6d. encl.’ or some such errand, handing it to the laundry-girl who was much attached to her, and who showed me these slips of paper as proudly as if they were the relics of a saint.

  ‘Gloria, are you coming for a walk?’

  No, I wasn’t going for a trudge. It was my third week. Squackle-wackle was becoming most uninteresting.

  I sat by my window and thought how happy I would be if I wasn’t waiting uncertainly for a telephone call. I still have in mind the blue and green and gold of that October afternoon which was spoiled for me at the time. The small ginger man with his dark green cloak slipping off his shoulders crossed the grass in the courtyard below. Two lay brothers in blue workmen’s overalls were manipulating a tractor away in the distance. From the Lady Chapel came the chant of the monks at their office. There is nothing like plainsong to eternalize a memory, it puts a seal on whatever is happening at the time. I thought it a pity that my appreciation of this fact should be vitiated by an overwhelming need for the telephone call.

  I had hoped, in fact, that the ginger man had crossed the courtyard to summon me to the telephone, but he disappeared beneath my window and his footsteps faded out somewhere round the back. Everything’s perfect, I told myself; and I can’t enjoy it. Brown, white and purple, I distinguished the pigeons on the grass.

  Everyone else seemed to be out of doors. My room was on the attic floor, under the dusty beams of the roof. All along this top floor the rooms were separated by thin partitions which allowed transit to every sound. Even silent Miss Pettigrew, my immediate neighbour, could not lie breathing on her still bed without my knowing it. That afternoon she too was out, probably over in the chapel.

  The telephone call was to be from Jonathan, my very best friend. I had returned from my coffee session in the town that morning to find a letter from him which had been delayed in the post. ‘I’ll ring you at 11.30, he had written, referring to that very day. It was then past twelve. At eleven-thirty I had been drinking coffee with unutterable Squackle-wackle and Jennifer.

  ‘Has there been a call for me?’ I inquired.

  ‘Not that I know,’ said the secretary vaguely. ‘I’ve been away from the phone all morning, of course, so there may have been, I don’t know.’

  Not that there was anything important to discuss with Jonathan; the idea was only to have a chat. But at that moment I felt imperatively dependent on his voice over the telephone. I stopped everyone, monks and brothers and pilgrims. ‘Did you take a telephone message for me? I should have received a very urgent call. It should have come at eleven-thirty.’

  ‘Sorry, I’ve been out,’ or ‘Sorry, I haven’t been near the phone.’

  ‘Doesn’t anyone attend to your telephone?’ I demanded.

  ‘Hardly ever, dear. We’re too busy.

  ‘I’ve missed an important telephone call, a vital —’

  ‘Can’t you telephone to your friend from here?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s impossible, it’s too bad.’

  Jonathan did not have a telephone in his studio. I wondered whether I should send him a wire and even drafted one, ‘Sorry love your letter arrived too late was out please ring at once love Gloria.’ I tore this up on the grounds that I couldn’t afford the expense. And something about the torment of the affair attracted me, it was bette
r than boredom. I decided that Jonathan would surely ring again during the afternoon. I prepared, even, to sit in the little office by the telephone with my sense of suspense and vigilance, all afternoon. But, ‘I’ll be here till five o’clock,’ said the secretary; ‘of course, of course, I’ll send for you if the call comes.’

  And so there I was by the window waiting for the summons. At three o’clock I washed and made up my face and changed my frock as if this were a propitiation to whatever stood between Jonathan’s telephone call and me. I decided to stroll round the green-gold courtyard where I could not fail to miss any messenger. Once round, and still no one came. Only Miss Pettigrew emerged from the cloisters, crossing the courtyard towards me.

  I was so bemused by my need to talk to Jonathan that I thought, as she approached, ‘Perhaps they’ve sent her to call me.’ Immediately I remembered, that was absurd, for she carried no messages ever. But she continued so directly towards me that I thought again; ‘She’s going to speak.’ She had her dark eyes on my face.

  I made as if to pass her, not wishing to upset her by inviting approach. But she stopped me. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘I have a message for you.

  I was so relieved that I forgot to be surprised by her speaking.

  ‘Am I wanted on the telephone?’ I said, half-ready to run across to the office.

  ‘No, I have a message for you,’ she said.

  ‘What’s the message?’

  ‘The Lord is risen,’ she said.

  It was not until I had got over my disappointment that I felt the shock of her having spoken, and recalled an odd focus of her eyes that I had not seen before. ‘After all,’ I thought, ‘she has a religious mania. She is different from the neurotics, but not because she is sane.’

  ‘Gloria!’ — this was the girl from the repository poking her head round the door. She beckoned to me, and, still disturbed, I idled over to her.

  ‘I say, did I see Miss Pettigrew actually speaking to you, or was I dreaming?’

  ‘You were dreaming.’ If I had said otherwise the news would have bristled round the monastery. It would have seemed a betrayal to reveal this first crack in Miss Pettigrew’s control. The pilgrims would have pitied her more if they had known of it, they would have respected her less. I could not bear to think of their heads shaking sorrowfully over Miss Pettigrew’s vital ‘The Lord is risen.

  ‘But surely,’ this girl pursued, ‘she stopped beside you just now’.

  ‘You’ve got Miss Pettigrew on the brain,’ I said. ‘Leave her alone, poor soul.’

  ‘Poor soul!’ said the girl. ‘I don’t know about poor soul. There’s nothing wrong with that one. She’s got foolish medieval ideas, that’s all.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be done with her,’ I said.

  And yet it was not long before something had to be done with Miss Pettigrew. From the Sunday of the fourth week of my stay she went off food. It was not till supper-time on the Monday that her absence was noticed from the refectory.

  ‘Anyone seen Miss Pettigrew?’

  ‘No, she hasn’t been down here for two days.’

  ‘Does she eat in the town, perhaps?’

  ‘No, she hasn’t left the Abbey.’

  A deputation with a tray of food was sent to her room. There was no answer. The door was bolted from the inside. But I heard her moving calmly as ever in her room that evening.

  Next morning she came in to breakfast after Mass, looking distant and grey, but still very neat. She took up a glass of milk, lifted the crust end of the bread from the board and carried them shakily off to her room. When she did not appear for lunch the cook tried her room again, without success. The door was bolted, there was no answer.

  I saw Miss Pettigrew again at Mass next morning, kneeling a little in front of me, resting her head upon her missal as if she could not bear the weight of head on neck. When at last she left the chapel she walked extremely slowly but without halting in her measure. Squackle-wackle ran to help her down the steps. Miss Pettigrew stopped and looked at her, inclining her head in recognition, but clearly rejecting her help.

  The doctor was waiting in her room. I heard later that he asked her many questions, used many persuasives, but she simply stared right through him. The Abbot and several of the monks visited her, but by then she had bolted the door again, and though they tempted her with soups and beef broth. Miss Pettigrew would not open.

  News went round that her relatives had been sent for. The news went round that she had no relatives to send for. It was said she had been certified insane and was to be taken away.

  She did not rise next morning at her usual seven o’clock. It was not till after twelve that I heard her first movement, and the protracted sounds of her slow rising and dressing. A tiny clatter — that would be her shoe falling out of her weak hands; I knew she was bending down, trying again. My pulse was pattering so rapidly that I had to take more of my sedative than usual, as I listened to this slow deliberated performance. Heavy rhythmic rain had started to ping on the roof.

  ‘Neurotics never go mad,’ my friends had always told me. Now I realized the distinction between neurosis and madness, and in my agitation I half-envied the woman beyond my bedroom wall, the sheer cool sanity of her behaviour within the limits of her impracticable mama. Only the very mad, I thought, can come out with the information ‘The Lord is risen’, in the same factual way as one might say, ‘You are wanted on the telephone,’ regardless of the time and place.

  A knock at my door. I opened it, still shaking with my nerves. It was Jennifer. She whispered, with an eye on the partition dividing me from Miss Pettigrew,

  ‘Come along, Gloria. They say you are to come away for half an hour. The nurses are coming to fetch her.’

  ‘What nurses?’

  ‘From the asylum. And there will be men with a stretcher. We haven’t to distress ourselves, they say.’

  I could see that Jennifer was agog. She was more transparent than I was. I could see she was longing to stay and overhear, watch out of the windows, see what would happen. I was overcome with disgust and indignation. Why should Jennifer want to satisfy her curiosity? She believed everyone was ‘the same’, she didn’t acknowledge the difference of things, what right had she to possess curiosity? My case was different.

  ‘I shall stay here,’ I said in a normal voice, signifying that I wasn’t going to participate in any whispering. Jennifer disappeared, annoyed.

  Insanity was my great sort of enemy at that time. And here, clothed in the innocence and dignity of Miss Pettigrew, was my next-door enemy being removed by ambulance. I would not miss it. Afterwards I learned that Jennifer too was lurking around when the ambulance arrived. So were most of the neurotics.

  The ambulance came round the back. My window looked only on the front but my ears were windows. I heard a woman’s voice, then in reply the voice of one of our priests. Heavy footsteps and something bumping on the stairs and strange men’s voices ascending.

  ‘What’s her name, did you say?’

  ‘Marjorie Pettigrew.’

  The hauling and bumping up the stairs continued.

  ‘Ain’t no key. Bolt from the inside.’

  Whenever they paused I could hear Miss Pettigrew’s tiny movements. She was continuing to do what she was doing.

  They knocked at the door. I pulled like mad at the rosary which I was telling for Miss Pettigrew. A man’s voice said, kindly but terribly loud,

  ‘Open up the door, dear. Else we shall have to force it, dear.’

  She opened the door.

  ‘That’s a good girl,’ said the man. ‘What was the name again?’

  The other man replied, ‘Marjorie Pettigrew.’

  ‘Well, come on, Marjorie dear. You just follow me and you won’t go wrong. Come along, Marjorie.’

  I knew she must have been following, though I could not hear her footsteps. I heard the heavy men’s boots descending the stairs, and their unnecessary equipment bumping behind them.

&
nbsp; ‘That’s right, Marjorie. That’s a good girl.’

  Down below the nurse said something, and I heard no more till the ambulance drove off.

  ‘Oh, I saw her!’ This was the laundry-girl who had been fond of Miss Pettigrew. ‘She must have been combing her hair,’ she said, ‘when they came for her. It was all loose and long, not at all like Miss Pettigrew. She was always just so. And that going out in the rain, I hope she doesn’t catch cold. But they’ll be good to her.’

  Everyone was saying, ‘They will be kind to her.’

  ‘They will look after her.’

  ‘They might cure her.’

  I never saw them so friendly with each other.

  After supper someone said, ‘I had a respect for Miss Pettigrew.’

  ‘So did I,’ said another.

  ‘Yes, so did I.’

  ‘They will be very kind. Those men — they sounded all right.’

  ‘They meant well enough.’

  Suddenly the ginger man came out with that one thing which stood at the core of this circuitous talk.

  ‘Did you hear them,’ he said, ‘calling her Marjorie?’

  ‘My God, yes!’

  ‘Yes, it made me feel funny.’

  ‘Same here. Fancy calling her Marjorie.’

  After that the incident was little discussed. But the community was sobered and united for a brief time, contemplating with fear and pity the calling of Miss Pettigrew Marjorie.

  The Twins

  When Jennie was at school with me, she was one of those well-behaved and intelligent girls who were, and maybe still are, popular with everyone in Scottish schools. The popularity of boys and girls in English schools, so far as I gather, goes by other, less easily definable qualities, and also by their prowess at games. However, it was not so with us, and although Jennie was not much use at hockey, she was good and quiet and clever, and we all liked her. She was rather nice-looking too, plump, dark-haired, clean, neat.

  She married a Londoner, Simon Reeves. I heard from her occasionally. She was living in Essex, and once or twice, when she came to London, we met. But it was some years before I could pay my long-promised visit to them, and by the time I got round to it, her twins, Marjie and Jeff, were five years old.