Familiar and Haunting

  “Oh, dear, Mrs. Baxter!” said Mrs. Cook, much distressed.

  “When he was dying,” said Mrs. Baxter, after she had blown her nose, “I could see there was something he wanted to say. I’d been reading the Twenty-third Psalm to him—you know, about the valley of the shadow of death. He was trying to speak. I leant right over him, and he managed to whisper his very last words. He said, ‘Are the runner beans up yet?’ Then he died.”

  Nobody spoke. Mrs. Baxter recovered herself and went on.

  “I knew—I knew he wouldn’t leave that garden after he’d died. I just hoped the next owners would look after it as lovingly as he’d done, and then in time he’d be content to go. That’s what I hoped and prayed. But the first lot of people were going to cover it with dog kennels, and I heard that the second lot were going to lay it out with artificial streams and weeping willows and things. Well, he made their lives a misery, and they left. And now your husband …”

  “He’s just never liked gardening,” said Mrs. Cook.

  The two women stared at each other bleakly.

  “Why can’t Dad be allowed to watch TV?” asked Judy. Then, answering herself: “Oh, I see, he ought to be working in the garden every spare minute in daylight and fine weather.”

  “Mr. Baxter quite enjoyed some of the gardening programs, sometimes,” Mrs. Baxter said defensively.

  There was a long silence.

  “It’s lovely soil,” said Mrs. Baxter persuasively. “Easy to work. Grows anything. That’s why we came to live here, really. All my married life, I never had to buy a single vegetable. Fruit, too—raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, all colors of currants. So much of everything, for just the two of us, that we had to give a lot of stuff away. We didn’t grow plums or pears or apples—except for the Bramleys—because Mr. Baxter wouldn’t have trees shading the garden. But all those vegetables—you’d find it a great saving, with a family.”

  “It seems hard on my husband,” said Mrs. Cook.

  “It’s hard on mine,” said Mrs. Baxter. “Look at him!” Startled, Mrs. Cook and Judy looked where Mrs. Baxter was looking, through the French windows and down the length of the garden. The sun fell on the weedy earth of the garden, on nothing else.

  Mrs. Cook turned her gaze back into the room, but Judy went on looking, staring until her eyes blurred and her vision was fogged with a kind of brown fogginess that was in the garden. Then suddenly she was afraid.

  “But look!” said Mrs. Baxter, and took Judy’s hand in her own little paw, which had grown soft and smooth from leisure in Senior House. “Look!” Judy looked where she pointed, and the brown fogginess seemed to concentrate itself and shape itself, and there dimly was the shape of an old man dressed in brown from his brown boots to his battered brown hat, with a piece of string tied around the middle of the old brown waterproof he was wearing. He stood in an attitude of dejection at the bottom of the garden, looking at the weeds.

  Then Mrs. Baxter let go of Judy’s hand, and Judy saw him no more.

  “That was his garden mac,” said Mrs. Baxter. “He would wear it. When all the buttonholes had gone, as well as the buttons, and I wouldn’t repair it anymore, then he belted it on with string.”

  “He looked so miserable,” said Judy. She had been feeling sorry for her father; now she began to feel sorry for Mr. Baxter.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Baxter. “He’d like to go, I’ve no doubt of it, but he can’t leave the garden in that state.” She sighed. She gathered up her handbag and the other empty bag.

  “Don’t go!” cried Mrs. Cook and Judy together.

  “What more can I do? I’ve told you; I’ve advised you. For his sake, too, I’ve begged you. No, I can’t do more.”

  She would not stay. She waddled out of the house and down the front path, and at the front gate met Mr. Cook. He had just got out of the car. She gave him a scared little bob of a good-day and scuttled past him and away.

  Mr. Cook came in wearily; his face was grayish. “Who was that old dear?” he asked. But he did not really want to know.

  His wife said to him, “Arthur, Judy is going to get your tea—won’t you, love?—while I explain a lot of things. Come and sit down and listen.”

  Mrs. Cook talked, and Mr. Cook listened, and gradually his face began to change. Something lifted from it, leaving it clear, almost happy, for the first time for many weeks. He was still listening when Judy brought his tea. At the end of Mrs. Cook’s explanation, Judy added hers: she told her father what—whom—she had seen in the garden when Mrs. Baxter had held her hand. Mr. Cook began to laugh. “You saw him, Judy? An old man all in brown with a piece of string tied round his middle—oh, Judy, my girl! When I began really seeing him, only the other day, I was sure I was going off my rocker! I was scared! I thought I was seeing things that no one else could see, things that weren’t there at all! And you’ve seen him, too, and he’s just old man Baxter!” And Mr. Cook laughed so much that he cried, and in the end he put his head down among the tea things and sobbed and sobbed.

  It was going to be all right after all.

  In Mr. Baxter’s old-fashioned mind, the man of the family was the one to do all the gardening. That was why, in what Judy considered a very unfair way, he had made a dead set at her father. But now all Mr. Cook’s family rallied to him. Even Mike, when the need was explained, left his bicycle for a while. They all helped in the garden. They dug and weeded and made bonfires of the worst weeds and began to build a compost heap of harmless garden rubbish. They planted seeds if it were not too late in the season and bought plants when it was. Mr. Cook followed the advice of the Encyclopaedia and occasionally had excellent ideas of his own. When Judy asked him where he got them, he looked puzzled at himself and said he did not know. But she could guess.

  Every spare moment that was daylight and fine, Mr. Cook worked in the garden, and his illness was cured. His appetite came back, he slept like a top, and he would have enjoyed television again except that in the middle of programs he so often fell asleep from healthy exhaustion.

  Well over a year later, on a holiday jaunt in Walchester, Judy was passing one of the cinemas. An audience mainly of senior citizens was coming out from an afternoon showing of Deadly Amazon. Judy felt a touch on her arm, soft yet insistent, like the voice that spoke, Mrs. Baxter’s: “My dear, how—how is he?”

  “Oh, Mrs. Baxter, he’s much, much better! Oh, thank you! He’s really all right. My mum says my dad’s as well as she’s ever known him.”

  “No, dear, I didn’t mean your father. How is he—Mr. Baxter?”

  Judy said, “We think he’s gone. Dad hasn’t seen the foggiest wisp of him for months, and Dad says it doesn’t feel as if he’s there anymore. You see, Dad’s got the garden going wonderfully now. We’ve had early potatoes and beans and peas—oh, and raspberries—and Dad plans to grow asparagus—”

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Baxter. “No wonder Mr. Baxter’s gone. Gone off pleased, no doubt. That is nice. I don’t think you need worry about his coming back. He has enough sense not to. It won’t be long before your father can safely give up gardening, if he likes.”

  “I’ll tell him what you say,” Judy said doubtfully.

  But of course, it was too late. Once a gardener, always a gardener. “I’ll never give up now,” Mr. Cook said. “I’ll be a gardener until my dying day.”

  “But not after that, Arthur,” said his wife. “Please.”

  A Christmas Pudding Improves with Keeping

  It was boiling hot weather. The tall old house simmered and seethed in a late heat wave. The Napper family shared the use of the garden, but today it was shadier and cooler for them to stay indoors, in their basement flat. There they lay about, breathless.

  “I wish,” said Eddy, “I wish—”

  “Go on,” said his father. “Wish for a private swimming pool, or a private ice-cream fountain, or a private—” He gave up, too hot.

  “I wish,” said Eddy, and stopped again.

  “Go to the park
, Eddy,” said his mother. “Ask if the dog upstairs would like a walk and take him to the park with you. See friends there. Try the swings for a bit of air.”

  “No,” said Eddy. “I wish I could make a Christmas pudding.”

  His parents stared at him, too stupefied by heat to be properly amazed. He said, “I know you always buy our Christmas pudding, Mum, but we could make one. It wouldn’t be too early to make one now. We could. I wish we could.”

  “Now?” said his mother faintly. “In all this heat? And why? The bought puddings have always been all right, haven’t they?”

  “I remember,” said Mr. Napper, “my granny always made her own Christmas puddings. Always.”

  “You and your granny!” said Mrs. Napper.

  “She made several at once. I remember them boiling away in her kitchen for hours and hours and hours. She made them early and stored them. When Christmas came, she served a pudding kept from the year before.” He sighed, smacked his lips. “A Christmas pudding improves with keeping.”

  Mrs. Napper had closed her eyes, apparently in sleep, but Eddy was listening.

  “We used to help with the puddings,” said Mr. Napper. “We all had a turn at stirring the mixture. You wished as you stirred, but you mustn’t say what your wish was. And the wish came true before the next Christmas.”

  “Yes!” cried Eddy. “That’s it! I want to stir and to wish—to wish—”

  “Well,” said his mother with her eyes shut, “if we ever make our own Christmas pudding, it won’t be during a heat wave.”

  “I just wish—” Eddy began again.

  “Stop it, Eddy!” said his mother, waking up to be sharp. “Go to the park. Here’s money for ice cream.”

  When Eddy had gone, his father said, “That settled him!”

  His mother said, “The ideas they get! Come and gone in a minute, though …” They both dozed off.

  But the idea that had come to Eddy did not go. Not at all.

  The Nappers had moved into their basement flat in the spring of that year. Once, long before, the whole house had been one home, for one well-off family, with servants, or a servant, in the basement kitchen. Later the house had been split up into flats, one floor to a flat, for separate families. Nowadays one family lived on the first floor, where the bedrooms had been. Another family lived on the ground floor, where the parlor and dining room had been. (And this family owned a dog and shared the garden with the Nappers.) And the Nappers themselves lived in the basement.

  The conversion of the house into flats had been done many years before, but this was the first time since then—although the Nappers were not to know it—that a child had lived in the basement. Eddy was that child.

  From their very first moving into the basement, Eddy had had strange dreams. One dream, rather, and not a dream that his dreaming eyes saw but something that he dreamed he heard. The sound was so slight, so indistinct, that at first even his dreaming self did not really notice it. Swish—wish—wish! it went. Swish, wish, wish! The dream sound, even when he came to hear it properly, never woke him up in fright. Indeed, it did not frighten him at all. To begin with, he did not even remember it when he woke up.

  But swish—wish—wish!—the sound became more distinct as time passed, more insistent. Never loud, never threatening, however, but coaxing, cajoling, begging, begging and imploring.

  “Please,” said Eddy to his mother, “oh, please! It’s not a heat wave now; it’s nearly Christmas. And it’s Saturday tomorrow; we’ve got all day. Can’t we make our own Christmas pudding tomorrow? Please, please!”

  “Oh, Eddy! I’m so busy!”

  “You mean we can’t?” Eddy looked as if he might cry. “But we must! Oh, Mum, we must!”

  “No, Eddy! And when I say no, I mean no!”

  That evening, as they sat round the gas fire in their sitting room, there was an alarming happening: a sudden rattle and clatter that seemed to start from above and come down and that ended in a crash, a crash not huge but evidently disastrous, and it was unmistakably in their own basement flat, in their own sitting room.

  And yet it wasn’t.

  Mrs. Napper had sprung to her feet with a cry: “Someone is trying to break in!” Her eyes stared at the blank wallpapered wall from which the crashing sound had seemed to come. There was nothing whatsoever to be seen, and now there was dead silence—except for the frantic barking of the dog upstairs. (The dog had been left on guard, while his family went out, and he hadn’t liked what he had just heard, any more than the Nappers had.)

  Suddenly Eddy rushed to the wall and put his hands flat upon it. “I wish—” he cried. “I wish—”

  His father pulled him away. “If there’s anybody—or anything—there,” he said, “I’ll get at him.” He knocked furiously on the wall several times. Then he calmed himself and began rapping and tapping systematically, listening intently for any sound of hollowness and swearing under his breath at the intrusive barking of the dog upstairs.

  “Ah!” he said. “At last!” He began scrabbling at the wallpaper with his pocketknife and his fingernails. Layer upon layer of wallpaper began to be torn away.

  “Whatever will the landlord say?” asked Mrs. Napper, who had recovered her courage and some of her calm.

  Mr. Napper said, “Eddy, get my toolbox. I don’t know what may be under here.” While Eddy was gone, Mrs. Napper fetched dust sheets and spread them out against the mess.

  What lay underneath all the ancient wallpaper was a small, squarish wooden door let into the wall at about waist level; its knob was gone, but Mr. Napper prized it open without too much difficulty. The dog upstairs was still barking, and as soon as the little door was open, the sound came down to them with greater clearness.

  With one hand Mr. Napper was feeling through the doorway into the blackness inside. “There’s a shaft in here,” he said. “It’s not wide or deep from front to back, but it seems to go right up. I need the torch, Eddy.”

  Even as Eddy came back with the torch, Mr. Napper was saying cheerfully, “We’ve been making a fuss about nothing. Why, this is just an old-fashioned service lift, from the time our sitting room was part of a big kitchen.”

  “A lift?” Eddy repeated.

  “Only a miniature one, for hauling food straight up from the kitchen to the dining room and bringing the dirty dishes down again. It was worked by hand.”

  Mrs. Napper had not spoken. Now she said, “What about all that rattling—and the crash?”

  Mr. Napper was shining his torch into the shaft of the service lift. “The ropes for hauling up and down were rotten with age. They gave way at last. Yes, I can see the worn-out ends of the cords.”

  “But why should they choose to rot and break now?” asked Mrs. Napper. “Why now?”

  “Why not now?” asked Mr. Napper, closing that part of the discussion. He was still peering into the shaft. “There was something on the service shelf when it fell. There are bits of broken china and—this.”

  He brought out from the darkness of the square hole an odd-looking, dried-looking, black-looking object that sat on the palm of his hand like an irregularly shaped large ball.

  “Ugh!” said Mrs. Napper instantly.

  Mr. Napper said, “It’s just the remains of a ball of something, a composite ball of something.” He picked at it with a fingernail. “Tiny bits all stuck and dried together …” He had worried out a fragment, and now he crumbled it in his hand. “Look!”

  Mrs. Napper peered reluctantly over his shoulder. “Well, I must say-”

  “What is it?” asked Eddy. But suddenly he knew.

  His mother had touched the crumblings and then immediately wiped her fingers on a corner of dust sheet. “It looks like old, old sultanas and raisins and things. …”

  “That’s what I think,” said Mr. Napper. “It’s a plum pudding. It was a plum pudding.”

  Eddy had known: a Christmas pudding.

  “But what was it doing there, in that service lift thing?” asked Mr
s. Napper. “Did someone leave it there deliberately, or was it just mislaid? Was any of it eaten, do you think?”

  “Hard to tell,” said Mr. Napper.

  “And why did the workmen leave it there, when they sealed up the shaft, to make the separate flats?” She was worrying about this mystery. “Perhaps it was between floors and they didn’t see it.”

  “Or perhaps they didn’t like to touch it,” said Eddy.

  “Why do you say that?” his mother asked sharply.

  “I don’t know,” said Eddy.

  They cleared up the mess as well as they could. The ancient pudding was wrapped in newspaper and put in the wastebin under the kitchen sink.

  Then it was time for Eddy to go to bed.

  That night Eddy dreamed his dream more clearly than ever before. Swish—wish—wish! went whatever it was, round and round. Swish-wish—wish! In his dream he was dreaming the sound, and in his dream he opened his eyes and looked across a big old shadowy kitchen, past a towering dresser hung with jugs and stacked with plates and dishes on display, past a little wooden door to a service lift, past a kitchen range with saucepans and a kettle on it.

  His gaze reached the big kitchen table. Someone was standing at the table, with his back to Eddy: a boy, just of Eddy’s age and height, as far as he could tell. In fact, for an instant, Eddy had the strangest dream sensation that he, Eddy, was standing there at the kitchen table. He, Eddy, was stirring a mixture of something dark and aromatic, with a long wooden spoon in a big earthenware mixing bowl, stirring round and round, stirring, stirring. Swish—wish—wish … Swish—wish-wish …

  Wish! whispered the wooden spoon as it went round the bowl. Wish! Wish! But Eddy did not know what to wish. His not knowing made the boy at the table turn toward him. And when Eddy saw the boy’s face, looked into his eyes, he knew. He knew everything, as though he were inside the boy, inside the boy’s mind. He knew that this boy lived here in the basement; he was the child of the servant of the house. He helped his mother to cook the food that was put into the service lift and hauled up to the dining room upstairs. He helped her to serve the family who ate in the dining room, and sat at their ease in the parlor, and slept in the comfortable bedrooms above. He hated the family that had to be served. He was filled with hatred as a bottle can be filled with poison.