The Possessors

  “He’s not dead,” she said. “Only unconscious.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But he’s warm!”

  A piece of wood hissed in the fire, as though to mark the pointlessness of any reply. The blue eyes stared up, glazing now. Selby looked at Deeping. He had accepted it, all right. The acceptance showed in the hunch of his shoulders, the brooding sullenness of his mouth. Selby went to him, and said quietly, “I’m very sorry. There was nothing anyone could have done. He was dead when I picked him up.”

  Deeping wrenched his head around. “How?”

  “Heart. Does he—had he had any trouble in that respect?”

  The head shook slowly. “There’s never been anything wrong with him. Never anything. Except chicken pox, measles—that sort.” He stared at Selby, as though willing him to give some kind of explanation. “How did it happen? You must have some idea.”

  “There must have been a defect. Something which perhaps wouldn’t show up except on a cardiogram. The only way of finding out would be”—he hesitated—“through a post-mortem.”

  Although he had been speaking quietly, Ruth Deeping must have caught his words. She said, her voice harsh, “No. No cutting. It’s enough that he’s dead. It doesn’t matter what caused it.”

  Selby was relieved that she had come past the first terrifying point of recognition, but he would have been happier if there had been tears. The dry-eyed bitterness she was showing made him uneasy. He said to Deeping, “Perhaps you had better take him up to his room. Can you manage?”

  She made no objection as Deeping lifted the body into his arms, and followed him quietly from the room. He heard them going upstairs, and remembered that the other boy was in the kitchen with Mandy. She should have gone to see him, he thought. It is the living who have needs. He went to the kitchen, and found the boy sitting with a glass of hot cordial. Mandy was busying herself with something. He caught her eye inquiringly, and she shook her head slightly. Selby wondered about that. It was the parents who should break the news to him, of course, not casual acquaintances such as themselves.

  Stephen said, “Andy—is he dead, Mr. Grainger?”

  There was some fear in his voice, and a lot of uncertainty. He would not, Selby decided, leave the telling until the Deepings returned from their vigil. He said, “Yes, Steve. I’m afraid he is.”

  “I thought he was.” He hesitated. “It wasn’t—because the sledge tipped over?”

  Fear again, with an edge of guilt. Perhaps he had steered the sledge into the snowbank, or thought he might be blamed for it.

  He said firmly, “Nothing to do with that.” Though, of course, there could be a causal link, provided that there was a congenital defect. He went on, making his curiosity casual: “What happened after the sledge tipped over? How did Andy look?”

  “All right. He was laughing about it. And then . . “Then?”

  “He called to me that he’d found something in the snow.”

  “What had he found?”

  “I don’t know. It looked like a blue ball.”

  Selby said, “You saw it?”

  “Only a glimpse of it. Then Andy fell over.”

  “I see.”

  There was hardly likely to be a blue ball in the rubble brought down a desolate mountainside by an avalanche. A blue boulder, probably, sufficiently spherical to look like a ball. The only odd thing was that, if Stephen had seen it, so should he have when he picked Andy’s body up. He had an exact recollection of the scene: the snow broken but homogeneous. No sign of blue in the white. No boulders.

  “You didn’t pick it up,” he asked, “when you went to help Andy? Whatever it was.”

  “There was nothing there, then. But there was something before. Bright blue and—well, gleaming.”

  Some kind of illusion, Selby decided. He knew that sunlight on snow could play odd tricks with the eyes. George Hamilton came into the kitchen then, started to say something to Selby, but broke it off as he saw the boy. When he spoke again, it was in a more guarded tone. “Can I have a word with you, Selby?”

  “Of course.” He said to the boy, “It didn’t hurt him, you know. It happened very suddenly. Drink the cordial Mrs. Hamilton has made you; it will warm you up. Your mummy will be down to see you very soon.”

  He hoped that was true. Hamilton led him through to the dining room, and said, “That’s the bane of running a boardinghouse—lack of privacy. Pick a pew.” They sat across the dining table from each other. “This is a bit of a shock.

  Selby nodded. “Yes.”

  “Heart, I gather. Poor little chap. I suppose they had no idea of it being dicky?”

  “None, as far as I can see.”

  “It’s the way I’ve always wanted to go. But at that age! Bloody unfair. Still, nothing we can do about it.” He looked restlessly at Selby. “Question is: what happens next?”

  “In England, in circumstances like these, there would have to be an inquest. I’m not sure how things operate in Switzerland.”

  “Nor am I,” Hamilton said, “damn it! I suppose I ought to be, but we haven’t had a death before.” There was a baffled expression on his face. “And we can’t take official advice, not being in touch with anyone.”

  “You can’t do anything with the body, anyway,” Selby pointed out, “until the road to Nidenhaut is clear.”

  “Yes, I’d worked that out. It’s a bit tricky.”

  “Tricky?”

  “I’ve just seen Ruth Deeping. You know they’ve got the room next to ours, with the kids next door to them?” Selby nodded. “She asked me to have Steve’s bed moved into their room.”

  “Well? The other poor kid’s got to be put somewhere.” Hamilton hammered his large hands on the table. “Look.

  I can turn off the radiator, but the hot pipes run under the floor all the way along. I can’t turn them off, without everyone freezing. This house was designed to be warm in winter. And we don’t know how long it’s going to be before they get through from the village. It could be a week, by which time ..

  “Yes,” Selby said, “of course. Do you have a cold room somewhere?”

  “In the basement. Northeast corner, and unheated. Nothing in there but tinned food, a few ropes, and general tackle. We can clear that lot out in a jiffy.”

  “That solves your problem, then.”

  “If we can convince Mrs. Deeping, it does.”

  “Yes,” Selby said. He paused. “You think she might be difficult about it?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “The alternative’s not pleasant.”

  “Would you put it to her, Selby? You’re a doctor, after all. You’re used to this sort of thing.”

  Selby smiled wryly. “Not really. It’s a good many years since I lost a patient.”

  “Anyway, you’re a medical. You can put it better than I would. And she’ll listen to you more easily than she would to me. Will you do it?”

  “All right. We’ll give her an hour or so to get used to things first.”

  “Good man.” He snorted out breath in relief. “I’ll have Peter get things ready down below. Get some ice in, set up a trestle table. And meanwhile I think I could do with a stiffish drink. How does the notion strike you?”

  “Favorably,” Selby said. “Very favorably indeed.”

  At first Ruth Deeping would not hear of her son’s body being moved again. He would stay where he was, she insisted, until he could be taken down to the village. She was not going to have him put away in the basement.

  Selby enlisted Deeping’s support fairly easily, but this did not do much toward convincing her; she looked at her husband with angry resentful eyes, and said she did not expect him to feel as she did about Andy. He had put his own pleasures before the concerns of the boys all their lives, and it was natural for him to be indifferent to them dead. Them, Selby thought—as though she had lost both her children. Deeping did not attempt to reply to her, and looked sheepish. It was surprising how often submissiveness in women
concealed a potential domination, particularly with unpleasantly cocky men like Deeping. Domination, and that same indifference she had charged him with showing to the children. Even before they were born, he did not think she could have felt anything for her husband.

  He said, quietly but firmly, “It will have to be done, Ruth. You must accept that.”

  She shook her head, her eyes hating him. “No.”

  “I’ve seen the room. It’s clean and cool. The best place, I promise you.”

  She said something which he did not catch. He asked her to repeat it. Her voice thick with horror, she said, “There might be rats.”

  He said, compassionately, “No. There are no rats here—George has assured me of that. And the room is 46

  quite bare. You can see that there’s not even a mouse hole.”

  She stared at him. “No. I want him near me.”

  He put a surgeon’s authority into his voice. “As a doctor, I insist.” After a pause, he went on, “You were worried by the thought of rats. Have you seen what the human body looks like when it starts to corrupt?”

  She closed her eyes, escaping from the image. Selby said to Deeping, “George has had a stretcher brought up. It’s outside on the landing. Bring it in, and I’ll give you a hand to get downstairs.”

  Deeping did as he was told. While he was gone, Selby put his hand on Ruth Deeping’s arm. She was shivering slightly.

  “Go downstairs,” he said. “George will give you a brandy.” She gave a slight shake of her head, and he said, “I prescribe that. I’m still talking as a doctor. Afterwards, George will take you down to the basement, and show you what’s been arranged.”

  She remained motionless for a moment. Then she bent down and kissed the boy’s face. After that, she left the room quickly; he heard her footsteps clattering down the stairs.

  Peter, the handyman, took over Selby’s part for the last flight of stairs; they were narrower, more sharply twisted, and Peter, going first, had to negotiate them with care. Selby followed them down, and into the room which had been made ready. It was at the far end of the passage. The door was open, showing a segment of light.

  George was inside. There was an old table in the center of the floor, and a couple of large wooden boxes, their opposite ends knocked out, had been put together to form a rough approximation of an open coffin. Selby looked at it while the other two were putting the stretcher down. The bottom and the sides had been packed with ice. He looked at George, and nodded his agreement. Then Deeping lifted his son’s body from the stretcher, and laid it in the boxes. The body had been put into pajamas, and Selby could not help feeling how cold and lost it looked.

  Deeping put the sheet in also, and drew it up to cover the face. He stared down helplessly for a moment, and said, “Ruth will want to see him now. I’ll go and tell her.”

  “I’ll wait here,” Selby said.

  George waited with him. The air was chilly, after the warmth of the rest of the house, and silent except for a far-off sound which Selby recognized as the roar of the furnace. As much to break the silence as anything, he said, “The ice was a good idea. I didn’t think of that.”

  “Nothing to it,” George said. “My father was a butcher.” He looked at the makeshift coffin, his face expressionless. “Mustn’t develop delusions of grandeur. A butcher’s assistant. Though he was given a shop to manage in the end. He died the year after.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “Fourteen. And there was a slump on at the time. I got permission to leave the Grammar School, and get a job as a clerk. Twelve and six a week. I could have got another half crown as a butcher’s lad, but my mother wouldn’t have that.”

  “You had a rough time of it.”

  George shrugged. “So-so. The war made the difference, of course. I was lucky enough to get into air crew, and qualify as a pilot. That was the difficult bit; the rest was a piece of cake.” He grinned. “To use one of the many habits of speech I picked up in the process.”

  “First-class assimilation,” Selby agreed. “Has it made you happy, do you think?”

  With good-humored scorn, George said, “There speaks the man for whom a butcher’s assistant was something in a blue and white apron at the back door, dodging the dog and making a pass at the scullery maid. My life may not look much of a success by your standards, chum, but it is by mine. Reasonable comfort instead of grinding poverty. And when I look out of my front window I see Grammont and Lake Geneva, not the other side of Crake Terrace with cur dogs peeing up against the gateposts. I bring my mother out every spring. She’s as mad on these bloody mountains as I am.”

  Selby nodded. “I take the point.”

  “Do you? Maybe.” He moved closer to the table, and looked down at the child’s body. “The changes and chances are out as far as he’s concerned, aren’t they? Poor little sod. What a waste.”

  There were footsteps outside, and Ruth Deeping came in, her husband shepherding her. George moved away as she went to the table and stood there. Her face was white and still. George nodded slightly to Selby, and they went out together.

  Afternoon merged into the heaviness of evening. There was a pall over the house, particularly depressing for one of Selby’s mercurial and extrovert nature. The boy’s death had been a shock, and he sympathized with what the Deepings, Ruth especially, must be going through, but this did not seem to him a sufficiently good reason for a general gloom. One could not, after all, deny the psychological fact that, where the loss was not personal, the death of another—even a child—was a confirmation of one’s own continued life. Hence the tradition of the wake, the funeral feast. Send to know for whom the bell tolls, and ask the ringer to jazz it up a bit.

  Impossible counsel, of course, in the cramped confines of a snowbound chalet completely cut off from the world. All one could do was scowl and bear it. George opened the bar early, and Selby took Elizabeth and Diana for a drink. Jane Winchmore came in later with Douglas Poole. They seemed to be getting on well together, Selby noted, in a somewhat low-keyed fashion. It was difficult to imagine her accepting any more warm-blooded approach, or him initiating it. Finally Deeping joined them, and the tone was set for the dull, rather morose exchange of platitudes. Ruth Deeping, it appeared, was keeping a vigil by the side of the dead boy. The living one, in whom she seemed to have lost all interest, was being looked after by Mandy and the maid.

  Selby went up for a bath early, and soaked there moodily for a long time, reading a copy of Ladies’ Home Journal, which Elizabeth had bought at London Airport. He did not rouse himself in fact until she had rapped on the door several times and called him in her controlled but penetrating voice. He dressed slowly, trying to spin the minutes out.

  Ruth Deeping did not come to supper, either. George had put a chair in the basement room for her, and she had said she wanted to stay there. She had accepted tea that Mandy had made for her, but insisted that she could not eat anything. Selby himself had a raging appetite, and Mandy had made an extremely nice steak pie, but the gloom, the muted voices were progressively more difficult to bear. Both for the general good and her own—not to mention his own in particular—Ruth must, Selby decided, be got out of the way. He went down to the basement with a firm step and a determined mind.

  She was sitting with her head resting against the side of one of the boxes, and did not look up as he came into the room. He took a firm hold on her arm, and said, “I’m taking you upstairs now, Ruth. You must lie down for a little while.”

  She still did not look at him. “No.”

  “I insist.” He levered her to her feet. “You can come down again later, if you want to.”

  She had not resisted. She said, her voice helpless, “There must be someone with him.”

  “There will be. Leonard will come down.”

  Her eyes were large in a face haggard enough for a woman fifteen years older than she was. She said, “If he comes first.” She rocked her head from side to side. “I don’t want him to be
alone.”

  Selby nodded, and went upstairs to fetch Deeping. She said nothing to him, merely watched as he took her place by the coffin. Then she let Selby guide her from the room and upstairs. She refused to undress, but consented to slip her shoes off and lie on the bed. He had the maid bring her a strong brandy and hot water and, from the supply he always carried with him, produced half a grain of Nembutal. She took the yellow capsule with some sign of alarm.

  “I don’t want to be put to sleep,” she said.

  “Your nerves are bad,” Selby told her, “inevitably. This is a mild sedative. Something to steady you. Swallow it quickly. Here’s a glass of water.”

  When she had taken it, he watched while she drank the brandy and water. Then he persuaded her to get her head down on the pillow. He left her, and went downstairs for his coffee. When he came up again, twenty minutes later, she was fast asleep. He managed to get her, still clothed, beneath the blankets. She stirred once, but showed no sign of waking.

  Deeping was sitting, looking uncomfortable, in the chair in the basement room. Selby said, “It’s all right. She’s sleeping. I should come upstairs if I were you.”

  Deeping looked ill at ease. He said, “She didn’t want him to be alone.”

  “Look,” Selby said, “she’s had a terrible shock. She’ll feel better when she wakes in the morning. There’s nothing you can do for the boy now—you know that. With the door closed, nothing can touch him.” As the man continued to look hesitant, he said, “Or were you thinking of spending the night down here?”

  “If she wakes up, and comes down …”

  “Does she take sleeping pills normally?”

  “Sleeping pills? No.”

  “She’s got half a grain of Nembutal in her, and a very large brandy on top of that. She won’t wake just yet.” Deeping allowed himself to be persuaded. Upstairs, the atmosphere was lighter, but still on the grim side. Selby drank a lot of whisky in a fairly short time, keeping up with George, who was on large brandies. They were all drinking more than usual, he noticed, even Jane Winch-more. He looked at her with reflective admiration. It was a pity about that temperament. His eye caught her sister’s; she gave him a look briefly complicit. Yes, he thought, more rewarding altogether.