The sale of an early Chapdelaine portrait made quite a stir, and the bidding at Sowerby’s began briskly. The picture was exhibited on an easel on the auctioneer’s dais. From my seat in the front row I was dismayed to notice, as the bids rose past the four-figure mark, that the portrait was beginning to fade. The background remained, but by the time twenty-five hundred had been reached, Mrs. O’Shea had vanished completely. The bidding faltered and came to a stop; there were complaints. The auctioneer inspected the portrait, directed an accusing stare at me, and declared the sale null. I had to take the canvas ignominiously back to my flat, and the evening papers had humorous headlines: where did the colours run to? no bid for chapdelaine’s white period.
When the telephone rang, I expected that it would be Patrick and picked up the receiver gloomily, but it was a French voice.
“Armand Chapdelaine here. Miss Bell?”
“Speaking.”
“We met, I think, once, a few years ago, in the company of young Patrick O’Shea. I am ringing from Paris about this odd incident of his mother’s portrait.”
“Oh, yes?”
“May I come and inspect the canvas, Miss Bell?”
“Of course,” I said, slightly startled. “Not that there’s anything to see.”
“That is so kind of you. Till tomorrow, then.”
Chapedelaine was a French Canadian: stocky, dark, and full of loup-garou charm.
After carefully scrutinising the canvas, he listened with intense interest to the tale about Patrick and his mother.
“Aha! This is a genuine piece of necromancy,” he said, rubbing his hands. “I always knew there was something unusually powerful about that woman’s character. She had a most profound dislike for me; I recall it well.”
“Because you were her son’s friend.”
“Of course.” He inspected the canvas again and said, “I shall be delighted to buy this from you for two thousand five hundred pounds, Miss Bell. It is the only one of my pictures that has been subjected to black magic, up to now.”
“Are you quite sure?”
“Entirely sure.” He gave me his engagingly wolfish smile. “Then we will see what shot Madame Mére fetches out of her locker.”
Mrs. O’Shea was plainly enjoying the combat over Patrick’s poems. It had given her a new interest. When she heard the news that two thousand five hundred pounds were lodged in a trust account, ready to pay for the publication of the poems, if necessary, her reaction was almost predictable.
“But that wouldn’t be honest!” she said. “I suppose Mr. Chapdelaine bought the canvas out of kindness, but it can’t be counted as a proper sale. The money must be returned to him.” Her face set like epoxy, and she rearranged her feet more firmly on the footstool.
“On no account will I have it back, madame,” Chapdelaine riposted. He had come down with me to help persuade her; he said he was dying to see her again.
“If you won’t, then it must be given to charity. I’m afraid it’s out of the question that I should allow money which was obtained by what amounts to false pretences to be used to promote that poor silly boy’s scribblings.”
“Quite, quite,” said the Major.
“But it may not be necessary—” I began in exasperation. An opaque blue gleam showed for an instant in Mrs. O’Shea’s eye. Chapdelaine raised a hand soothingly and I subsided. I’d known, of course, that I too was an object of her dislike, but I had not realised how very deep it went; the absolute hatred in her glance was a slight shock. It struck me that, unreasonably enough, this hate had been augmented by the fact that Chapdelaine and I were getting on rather well together.
“Since madame does not approve of our plan, I have another proposition,” said Chapdelaine, who seemed to be taking a pleasure in the duel almost equal to that of Mrs. O’Shea. I felt slightly excluded. “May I be allowed to do a second portrait, and two thousand five hundred shall be the sitter’s fee?”
“Humph,” said Mrs. O’Shea. “I’d no great opinion of the last one ye did.”
“Hideous thing. Hideous,” said the Major.
“Oh, but this one, madame, will be quite different!” Chapdelaine smiled, at his most persuasive. “In the course of seven years, after all, one’s technique alters entirely.”
She demurred for a long time, but in the end, I suppose, she could not resist this chance of further entertainment. Besides, he was extremely well known now.
“You’ll have to come down here though, Mr. Chapdelaine; at my age I can’t be gadding up to London for sittings.”
“Of course,” he agreed, shivering slightly; the sitting room was as cold as ever. “It will be a great pleasure.”
“I think the pub in the village occasionally puts up visitors,” Mrs. O’Shea added. “I’ll speak to them.” Chapdelaine shuddered again. “But they only have one bedroom, so I’m afraid there won’t be room for you, Miss Bell.” Her tone expressed volumes.
“Thank you, but I have my job in London,” I said coldly. “Besides, I’d like to be getting on with offering Patrick’s poems; may I take them now, Mrs. O’Shea?”
“The?—Oh, gracious, no—not till the picture’s finished! After all,” she said with a smile of pure, chill malice, “I may not like it when it’s done, may I?”
“It’s a hopeless affair, hopeless!” I raged as soon as we were away from the house. “She’ll always find some way of slipping out of the bargain; she’s utterly unscrupulous. The woman’s a fiend! Really I can’t think how Patrick could ever have been fond of her. Why do you bother to go on with this?”
“Oh, but I am looking forward to painting this portrait immensely!” Chapdelaine wore a broad grin. “I feel convinced this will be the best piece of work I ever did. I shall have to get that house warmed up though, even if it means myself paying for a truckload of logs; one cannot work inside of a deep freeze.”
Somehow he achieved this; when I took down a photographer to get a story, with pictures, for the magazine on which I work, we found the sitting room transformed, littered with artists’ equipment and heated to conservatory temperature by a huge roaring fire. Mrs. O’Shea, evidently making the most of such unaccustomed sybaritism, was seated close by the fire, her feet, as ever, firmly planted on the blanket-wrapped bundle. She seemed in high spirits. The Major was nowhere to be seen; he had apparently been banished to some distant part of the house. Chapdelaine, I thought, did not look well; he coughed from time to time, complained of damp sheets at the pub, and constantly piled more logs on the fire. We took several shots of them both, but Mrs. O’Shea would not allow us to see the uncompleted portrait.
“Not till it’s quite done!” she said firmly. Meanwhile it stood on its easel in the corner, covered with a sheet, like some hesitant ghost.
During this time I had had numerous calls from Patrick, of course; he was wildly impatient about the slow progress of the painting.
“Do persuade Armand to go a bit faster, can’t you, Ellis? He used to be able to dash off a portrait in about four sittings.”
“Well, I’ll pass on your message, Patrick, but people’s methods change, you know.”
When I rang Clayhole the next day, however, I was unable to get through; the line was out of order apparently, and remained so; when I reported this to the local exchange, the girl said,” Double four six three . . . wait a minute; yes, I thought so. We had a nine-nine-nine call from them not long ago. Fire brigade. No, that’s all I can tell you, I’m afraid.”
With my heart in my suede boots I got out the car and drove down to Clayhole. The lane was blocked by police trucks, fire engines, and appliances; I had to leave my car at the bottom and walk up.
Clayhole was a smoking ruin; as I arrived they were just carrying the third blackened body out to the ambulance.
“What began it?” I asked the fir
e chief.
“That’ll be for the insurance assessors to decide, miss. But it’s plain it started in the lounge; spark from the fire, most likely. Wood fires are always a bit risky, in my opinion. You get that green applewood—”
A spark, of course; I thought of the jersey-wrapped pile of poems hardly a foot distant from the crackling logs.
“You didn’t find any papers in that room?”
“Not a scrap, miss; that being where the fire started, everything was reduced to powder.”
When Patrick got through to me that evening, he was pretty distraught.
“She planned the whole thing!” he said furiously. “I bet you, Ellis, she had it all thought out from the start. There’s absolutely nothing that woman won’t do to get her own way. Haven’t I always said she was utterly unscrupulous? But I shan’t be beaten by her, I’m just as determined as she is—Do pay attention, Ellis!”
“Sorry, Patrick. What were you saying?” I was very low-spirited, and his next announcement did nothing to cheer me.
“I’ll dictate you the poems; it shouldn’t take more than a month or so if we keep at it. We can start right away. Have you a pen? And you’ll want quite a lot of paper. I’ve finished the volcano poem, so we may as well start with that—ready?”
“I suppose so.” I shut my eyes. The cold clutch on my wrist was like a fetter. But I felt that having gone so far, I owed this last service to Patrick.
“Right—here we go.” There followed a long pause. Then he said, with a great deal less certainty:
“On each hand the flames
Driven backward slope their pointing spires—”
“That’s from Paradise Lost, Patrick,” I told him gently.
“I know. . . .” His voice was petulant. “That isn’t what I meant to say. The thing is—it’s starting to get so cold here. Oh, God, Ellis—it’s so cold. . . .”
His voice petered out and died. The grasp on my wrist became freezing, became numbing, and then, like a melted icicle, was gone.
“Patrick?” I said. “Are you there, Patrick?”
But there was no reply, and, indeed, I hardly expected one. Patrick never got through to me again. His mother had caught up with him at last.
The Dark Streets of Kimball’s Green
Em! You, Em! Where has that dratted child got to? Em! Wait till I lay hold of you, I won’t half tan you!”
Mrs. Bella Vaughan looked furiously up and down the short street. She was a stocky woman, with short, thick, straight grey hair, parted on one side and clamped back by a grip; a cigarette always dangled from one corner of her mouth and, as soon as it dwindled down, another grew there. “Em! Where have you got to?” she yelled again.
“Here I am, Mrs. Vaughan!” Emmeline dashed anxiously round the corner.
“Took long enough about it! The Welfare Lady’s here, wants to know how you’re getting on. Here, let’s tidy you up.”
Mrs. Vaughan pulled a comb and handkerchief out of her tight-stretched apron pocket, dragged her comb sharply through Emmeline’s hair, damped the handkerchief with spit and scrubbed it over Emmeline’s flinching face.
“Hullo, Emmeline. Been out playing?” said the Welfare Lady, indoors. “That’s right. Fresh air’s the best thing for them, isn’t it, Mrs. Vaughan?”
“She’s always out,” grunted Mrs. Vaughan. “Morning, noon and night. I don’t hold with kids frowsting about indoors. Not much traffic round here.”
“Well, Emmeline, how are you getting on? Settling down with Mrs. Vaughan, quite happy, are you?”
Emmeline looked at her feet and muttered something. She was thin and small for her age, dark-haired and pale-cheeked.
“She’s a mopey kid,” Mrs. Vaughan pronounced. “Always want to be reading, if I didn’t tell her to run out of doors.”
“Fond of reading, are you?” the Welfare Lady said kindly. “And what do you read, then?”
“Books,” muttered Emmeline. The Welfare Lady’s glance strayed to the huge, untidy pile of magazines on the telly.
“Kid’ll read anything she could lay hands on, if I let her,” Mrs. Vaughan said. “I don’t though. What good does reading do you? None that I know of.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re getting on all right, Emmeline. Be a good girl and do what Mrs. Vaughan tells you. And I’ll see you next month again.” She got into her tiny car and drove off to the next of her endless list of calls.
“Right,” said Mrs. Vaughan. “I’m off too, down to the town hall to play bingo. So you hop it, and mind you’re here on the doorstep at eleven sharp or I’ll skin you.”
Emmeline murmured something.
“Stay indoors? Not on your nelly! And have them saying if the house burnt down, that I oughtn’t to have left you on your own?”
“It’s so cold out.” A chilly September wind scuffled the bits of paper in the street. Emmeline shivered in her thin coat.
“Well, run about then, and keep warm! Fresh air’s good for you, like that interfering old busybody said. Anyway she’s come and gone for the month, that’s something. Go on, hop it now.”
So Emmeline hopped it.
Kimball’s Green, where Mrs. Vaughan had her home, was a curious, desolate little corner of London. It lay round the top of a hill, which was crowned with a crumbling, blackened church, St. Chad’s. The four or five streets of tiny, aged houses were also crumbling and blackened, all due for demolition, and most of them empty. The houses were so old that they seemed shrunk and wrinkled, like old apples or old faces, and they were immeasurably, unbelievably dirty, with the dirt of hundreds of years. Around the little hill was a flat, desolate tract of land, Wansea Marshes, which nobody had even tried to use until the nineteenth century; then it became covered with railway goods yards and brick-works and gas-works and an electric power station, all of which belched their black smoke over the little island of Kimball’s Green on the hilltop.
You could hardly think anybody would choose to live in such a cut-off part; but Mrs. Vaughan had been born in Sylvan Street, near the top of the hill, and she declared she wasn’t going to shift until they came after her with a bulldozer. She took in foster children when they grew too old for the Wansea Orphanage, and, though it wasn’t a very healthy neighbourhood, what with the smoke and the damp from the marshes, there were so many orphans, and so few homes for them to go to, that Emmeline was the latest of a large number who had stayed with Mrs. Vaughan. But there were very few other children in the district now; very few inhabitants at all, except old and queer ones who camped secretly in the condemned houses. Most people found it too far to go to the shops: an eightpenny bus-ride, all the way past the goods yards and the gas-works, to Wansea High Street.
So far as anyone knew, Emmeline belonged in the neighbourhood; she had been found on the step of St. Chad’s one windy March night; but in spite of this, or because of it, she was rather frightened by the nest of little dark empty streets. She was frightened by many things, among which were Mrs. Vaughan and her son Colin. And she particularly hated the nights, five out of seven, when Mrs. Vaughan went off to play bingo, leaving Emmeline outside in the street. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for two friends, Emmeline really didn’t know how she could have borne those evenings.
As Mrs. Vaughan’s clumping steps died away down the hill, one of the friends appeared: his thin form twined out from between some old black railings and he rubbed encouragingly against Emmeline’s ankles, sticking up his tail in welcome.
“Oh, Scrawny! There you are,” she said with relief. “Here, I’ve saved you a piece of cheese-rind from tea.”
Old Scrawny was a tattered, battered tabby, with ragged whiskers, crumpled ears, and much fur missing from his tail; he had no owner and lived on what he could find; he ate the cheese-rind with a lot of loud, vulgar, guzzling noise, and hardly washed at
all afterwards; but Emmeline loved him dearly, and he loved her back. Every night she left her window open, and old Scrawny climbed in, by various gutters, drainpipes, and the wash-house roof. Mrs. Vaughan wouldn’t have allowed such a thing for a minute if she had known, but Emmeline always took care that old Scrawny had left long before she was called in the morning.
When the rind was finished Scrawny jumped into Emmeline’s arms and she tucked her hands for warmth under his scanty fur; they went up to the end of the street by the old church, where there was a telephone booth. Like the houses around it was old and dirty, and it had been out of order for so many years that now nobody even bothered to thump its box for coins. The only person who used it was Emmeline, and she used it almost every night, unless gangs were roaming the streets and throwing stones, in which case she hid behind a dustbin or under a flight of area steps. But when the gangs had gone elsewhere the call-box made a very convenient shelter; best of all, it was even light enough to read there, because although the bulb in the call-box had been broken long ago, a street lamp shone right overhead.
“No book tonight, Scrawny, unless Mr. Yakkymo comes and brings me another,” said Emmeline, “so what shall we do? Shall we phone somebody, or shall I tell you a story?”
Scrawny purred, dangling round her neck like a striped scarf.
“We’ll ring somebody up, shall we? All right.”
She let the heavy door close behind her. Inside it was not exactly warm, but at least they were out of the wind. Scrawny climbed from Emmeline’s shoulder into the compartment where the telephone books would have been if somebody hadn’t made off with them; Emmeline picked up the broken receiver and dialled.
“Hullo, can I speak to King Cunobel? Hullo, King Cunobel, I am calling to warn you. A great army is approaching your fort—the Tribe of the Children of Darkness. Under their wicked queen Belavaun they are coming to attack your stronghold with spears and chariots. You must tell your men to be extra brave; each man must arm himself with his bow and a sheaf of arrows, two spears and a sword. Each man must have his faithful wolfhound by his side.” She stroked old Scrawny, who seemed to be listening intently. “Your men are far outnumbered by the Children of the Dark, King Cunobel, so you must tell your Chief Druid to prepare a magic drink, made from vetch and mallow and succory, to give them courage. The leaves must be steeped in mead and left to gather dew for two nights, until you have enough to wet each man’s tongue. Then they will be brave enough to beat off the Children of the Dark and save your camp.”