Familiar and Haunting

  The shop assistant, staring idly through his shop window, saw the school bus approaching its stop, through almost blinding rain.

  The old lady remained in the doorway.

  The school bus stopped. The children began to get off. The traffic swirled by on the splashing road.

  The old lady remained in the doorway.

  The shop assistant’s attention was suddenly caught by something happening out on the road, in the passing traffic. A car had gone out of control on the slippery road. It was swerving violently; it narrowly missed another car and began skidding across the road, across the back of the school bus. Nearly all the children were away from the bus by now—except for one, slower than the rest. In a moment of horror, the shop assistant saw him, unforgettably: a little boy, wearing a badly made blazer, who was going to be run over and killed.

  The assistant gave a cry and ran to the door, although he knew he would be too late.

  But someone else was ahead of him, from that same doorway. The old lady darted—no, flung herself, flew—forward toward the child.

  There were two—perhaps three?—seconds for action before the car would hit the child. The old lady wouldn’t reach him in that time, but the assistant saw her swing her right arm forward, the hand clutching a furled umbrella by its ferrule. The crook of the umbrella hooked inside the front of the little boy’s blazer and hooked him like a fish from water out of the path of the skidding car. The old lady fell over backward on the pavement with the child on top of her, and the car skidded past them, crashed into the bus stop itself, and stopped. The driver sat stupefied inside, white-faced, shocked, but otherwise uninjured.

  Nobody was injured, except Auntie. She died in the ambulance, on her way to the hospital. Heart, the doctors said. No wonder, at her age, and in such extraordinary circumstances.

  Much later, after the funeral, Billy’s mother looked for the letter that Auntie had written to the pension people. “It should have been in her handbag, because the shopman said she didn’t go on to the letter box to post anything. But it wasn’t in her handbag.”

  “She must have left it behind by mistake,” said Billy’s father. “She was getting odd in old age. It’ll be somewhere in her bedroom.”

  “No, I’ve searched. It isn’t there.”

  “Why on earth do you want it, anyway?” said Billy’s father. “All that pension business ceases with her death.”

  “I don’t want the letter,” said his wife. “I just want to know whether there ever was one.”

  “What are you driving at?”

  “Don’t you see? The letter was an excuse.”

  “An excuse?”

  “She wanted an excuse to be at that bus stop when Billy got off because she knew what was going to happen. She foresaw.”

  They stared at each other. Then the nephew said, “Second sight—that’s what you mean, isn’t it? But it’s one thing to foresee, say, which horse is going to win the Derby. And it’s quite another thing to foresee what’s going to happen and then deliberately to prevent its happening. That’s altering the course of things. … That’s altering everything. …”

  The niece said, “But you don’t understand. She foresaw that Billy would be in danger of being killed, so she went to save him. But she also foresaw that very thing—I mean, she foresaw that she would go to save him. That she would save him. Although it killed her.”

  The nephew liked a logical argument, even about illogical things. He said, “She could still have altered that last part of what she foresaw. She could have decided not to go to the bus stop, because she foresaw that it would all end in her death. After all, nobody wants to die.”

  “You still don’t understand,” his wife said. “You don’t understand Auntie. She knew she would save Billy, even if she had to die for it. She had to do it, because it was her nature to do it. Because she was Auntie. Don’t you see?”

  The nephew, seeing something about Auntie he had never properly perceived before, said quite humbly, “Yes, I see. …”

  And the niece, leaning on his shoulder, wept again for Auntie, whom she had known so well since she had been a very little girl. Known so well, perhaps, that she had not known Auntie truly for what she really was, until then.

  As for Billy, he never said much about that rainy day, the last of Auntie’s life. He hadn’t gone to Auntie’s funeral—children often don’t—but he wore his horrible, homemade blazer until he grew out of it. And he never, never forgot Auntie.

  His Loving Sister

  When I was a child, my best friend lived next door. He was Steve Phillips, and he had an elder brother and a little sister. After they were all killed, my mother used to hug me and say, “There but for the grace of God …” Meaning that I might have been killed, too.

  My mother had known Mrs. Phillips—Lizzie Phillips—all her life. Ours was that sort of village in those days. Our family got on very well with all the Phillips family—except for one thing. My parents didn’t like Lizzie Phillips’s brother, Billy Peterman, who ran the only garage in the village and lived over it. He was much younger than his sister, and he was the kind of man who always would look young: rosy cheeks and innocent blue eyes and fair, tousled hair.

  In fact, my father couldn’t bear Billy Peterman.

  My father used to get angry about quite a lot of things, and he said that most garages were crooked somewhere, but the Daffodil Garage was run by a crook. My mother said that Billy Peterman wasn’t really a crook—just weak and lazy. He always had been, even as a little boy. Then my father asked her: where had Billy Peterman got the money to run a garage, anyway, unless he’d sponged on his sister and her family? My mother didn’t answer that, but she would wind up the argument by saying that Lizzie Phillips really loved Billy. She had brought him—and his sister—up when their mother had died. The sister had married young and gone to Canada. That left just Lizzie and Billy. When Lizzie married and had children, she still loved Billy and cared for him as if he were another, older child, and Billy let her.

  My father snorted. The only dealings with the Daffodil Garage that my father would allow himself were for petrol and oil. He always checked his change carefully afterward.

  We knew the Phillipses so well that every morning in term time Mr. Phillips drove me with his own children to school in Ponton. He worked in Ponton, and he dropped us off at school on the way. I used to sit with Steve and Lily in the backseat of the car, and Peter, the eldest of their three children, sat in the front with his father.

  Of course, the Phillipses had to use the Daffodil Garage, because of the family connection. Mr. Phillips never talked much, anyway, and he didn’t grumble, but my father said he must often have been fed up. Sometimes their car had to go back over and over again for the same thing to be put right. And once—and this is where the story really starts—the repairs dragged on for so long that Billy Peterman had to lend another car, one of his own, to the family. On the very day that happened, I started with whooping cough.

  I was in bed upstairs, and my mother was downstairs. My mother could always be at home in the mornings. She worked afternoons, and Lizzie worked mornings, in the same shop in the village. You can see what a useful arrangement that was when we were little: always one mother at home if anything went wrong, in either family.

  Well, Mrs. Phillips had gone off to work, and all the rest of the Phillipses had gone off to Ponton in the car from the Daffodil Garage. My father had gone to work, and there was just my mother and me.

  It was quiet and very peaceful. My coughing had tired me, so I was glad just to lie back on the pillows. My mother had drawn my bed forward so that I could see out of the window and into the street outside. She thought I might be interested to watch the passersby. But there hadn’t really been any that morning.

  But now a police car came cruising slowly down the street. To my amazement, it stopped quite near our house. A policewoman got out and went up the path to the Phillipses’ front door and rang the bell. There was no ans
wer, of course.

  After a while the policewoman came down the path again and into the road and had a word with the police driver. Then she stood and looked thoughtfully at the Phillipses’ house and at the houses on either side. You could almost see her wondering which of the two neighbors to try next.

  She decided on our house. She opened the front gate and walked up the path. Then I lost sight of her under the front porch, but I heard the bell ring, and my mother stopped vacuuming and went to answer it.

  It all seemed very odd to me because the policewoman came right into the house at once, and my mother took her into the sitting room and shut the door. By this time, in spite of the whooping cough, I was out of bed and at the bedroom door, listening. All I could hear were two voices—mostly the policewoman’s—talking in low tones. It was quite a while before my mother showed the policewoman out. She went back to her police car and was driven away.

  I nipped back into bed and called to my mother to come and tell me about whatever it was. She didn’t answer. There was a long, long silence from downstairs. I didn’t know why, but I was frightened.

  Then I heard my mother’s feet coming slowly up the stairs. She came into my bedroom. I had never, never seen her looking like that before. Her face was quite white, with staring eyes, from which rolled down tears and tears and tears.

  She wasn’t seeing me at all, and then suddenly she was. She made a strange, huge leap across the room to me, almost like a kangaroo, and she clutched me in her arms and hugged me there until I could hardly breathe. That was when she first said, “There but for the grace of God…”

  Yes, all three children had been killed outright, and their father.

  They had been driving down the hill from our village to join the main road to Ponton at the T junction. Ours was a minor road; the Ponton road was a major one. So the Ponton traffic on it had the right-of-way, and when I had been with them, Mr. Phillips often had to wait at the T junction. He was a careful, good driver.

  That morning one of those huge container lorries was going along the main road at a moderate pace and coming up to the T junction. The driver saw the Phillipses’ car approaching from a distance. He expected to see it beginning to slow up to stop, but he saw it was still coming on quite fast. He still expected it to stop, and then, the lorry driver said, he caught a glimpse through the windscreen of the other driver’s face—Mr. Phillips’s face. Even at the distance that still separated them, he saw the horror on it. The car couldn’t stop. The lorry driver put on his brakes and swerved, but too late. The car from the Daffodil Garage crashed into the side of the lorry, and everyone in it was killed.

  The lorry driver was all right, but terribly shaken. The accident hadn’t been his fault at all, of course. But whose fault was it then? “I tell you, I saw his face,” the lorry driver kept saying. “He couldn’t stop. I saw his face. …”

  What was left of the car was towed to the nearest garage, which was the Daffodil. In due course the police examined it carefully but found nothing wrong.

  My father, at home, exploded. “Nothing wrong! Of course there was nothing wrong by the time that crook, Billy Peterman, had seen to it. But the brakes must have failed, mustn’t they? He ought never to have let that car out of his garage with brakes in that condition. He killed the four of them, and then, to save his own skin, he tinkered and put things right, before the police got on to him!”

  “Hush!” said my mother. “Hush, hush, hush! Don’t say such things, even if they’re true. Suppose Lizzie ever heard you?”

  “Heard me?” cried my father. “Don’t you think she knows her brother killed them?”

  As I look back now, that time of my childhood seems to have been dark and muddled and strange. Suddenly I hadn’t a best friend anymore. My father was angry for a lot of the time. My mother cried a lot of the time, and she slept at nights in the Phillipses’ house, so that Lizzie Phillips should not be quite alone.

  I suppose there was a funeral, or four funerals. Lizzie Phillips’s sister flew over from Canada. She stayed with Lizzie, and she was very brisk and businesslike. She told us that Lizzie had agreed to go back to Canada with her and settle there.

  “Will she like that?” my mother asked doubtfully.

  “There’s nothing for her here,” said the brisk Canadian.

  “There’s nothing for her anywhere,” said my mother sadly.

  We saw Lizzie go. Her face was a strange pale color; her eyes were dead. She kissed my mother good-bye, but my mother said afterward that she had felt as if she were kissing a statue of somebody. Lizzie drove away with her sister.

  “I wonder if she’ll be able to stick it out there,” said my father. “I think she’ll come back.”

  “No,” said my mother. “I don’t think she cares enough about anything now. I don’t think she will.”

  But as it turned out later, my father was the one who was right.

  What about Billy Peterman all this time? Of course, we didn’t know all the ins and outs of the family’s affairs, but we knew that Lizzie had absolutely refused to see him after the accident. She left for Canada without having said good-bye to him.

  Billy Peterman went on running his Daffodil Garage, apparently just as usual.

  For a long time, I was remembering—when I least wanted to—two faces: my mother’s face on that whooping cough morning, running over with tears, and Lizzie Phillips’s face when she came to say goodbye, like carved stone. And I missed Steve terribly. One afternoon, without telling anybody, I walked all the way from our village down the hill to the T junction with the main road to Ponton. I stood there, just looking, for a long time. Dusk was beginning to fall, and there were already lights on the cars and lorries as they came and went along the main road. I wished Steve weren’t dead. I wished he were alive to play with me again. Suddenly I was frightened that I would call him back.

  He would come: his ghost…

  I turned tail and fled up the hill again. I never went back alone on foot to that T junction again.

  Meanwhile, as people do, we began to live ordinary lives once more. Another family moved into the house next door, and we got on well with them, although not quite as well as with the Phillipses. I played with the children sometimes.

  I think now that my mother must have missed Lizzie’s friendship very much indeed. After all, they had known each other since they were little girls together. She wrote several times to Canada, but there was no reply.

  My father recovered more easily. He still had a hate against the Daffodil Garage, but occasionally he would drop in for petrol if his tank was empty. After such a call, he came home to us quite excited. “I told you so! Lizzie Phillips is back! She couldn’t stand Canada and that bossy sister.”

  “Where is she?” cried my mother. “Where’s she staying? Why hasn’t she come to us?”

  “I suppose she’s staying with Billy; I saw her in Billy’s office at the garage, standing by his cash desk. She wasn’t actually talking to him, but there she was.”

  My mother was startled. “She couldn’t be staying with him!” she said. “Not after what he did! Never!” (That was really the only time my mother let slip that she knew my father was right about Billy Peterman’s responsibility for the accident.)

  “Well, you always used to say she was a loving sister,” said my father. “Anyway, wherever she’s staying, she’s sure to be round here soon to see you.”

  But Lizzie Phillips didn’t call.

  My mother waited a day; she waited two. She felt hurt that such an old friend as Lizzie should be in the same village and not come to see her. In the end, she decided to go herself and call on Lizzie at the Daffodil Garage—if that were really where she was staying. She took me with her. I think she was nervous and wanted the company even of a child.

  As we walked into the forecourt of the garage, my mother said, “Surely, yes, there she is!” I thought I saw the figure of a woman slipping away out of sight. My mother called, “Lizzie! Lizzie! Please!”


  But no one came forward to her.

  My mother went on to where Billy Peterman was sitting in his little office, just sitting. He was a lazy young man, as my mother always said, but he didn’t exactly look as if he were lazing comfortably at his desk now. He would always look a young man, but now he suddenly looked an old young man. The roses in his cheeks had faded; his fair hair looked dull and dusty; his blue eyes gazed vacantly at my mother. He had seen her coming, he must have done, and he must have heard her calling. But he made no move.

  My mother went quite close to him. “Lizzie’s here now, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I want to see her,” my mother said.

  “Well,” he said, in a flat voice, “you have seen her, haven’t you? She’s always here now. With me.”

  “I want to see her and talk to her,” my mother insisted.

  He shook his head.

  “What do you mean, Billy Peterman? You can’t keep her to yourself!”

  He laughed in a strange, flat way. Then he said, “Lizzie died in Canada ten days ago. The letter said she didn’t want to live any longer. They said she died of a broken heart.”

  My mother stared and stared at him. She had never really liked Billy Peterman; none of us did. But she had known him as a little boy, and she was easily touched to pity. Now she said, as if she really meant it, “Poor, poor Billy …”

  He turned his head aside, so that we should not see his face.

  Very soon after that, Billy Peterman sold the Daffodil Garage and moved away. No one knew where he went or ever heard of him again.

  What I have often wondered since is this: Did his loving sister go with him?

  Mr. Hurrel’s Tallboy

  I was only a child at the time, so—just to please me, I suppose—I had been given the job of listening for the knocks on the party wall. (My bedroom-playroom was right against the wall that divided us from our next-door neighbors, the Hurrels. And in fact, I could hear much more than deliberate knocking through that thin wall. But all that comes later.)