The Day the Call Came Read online

  THE DAY THE CALL CAME

  THOMAS HINDE

  With a new introduction by

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  The Day the Call Came by Thomas Hinde

  First published London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964

  First Valancourt Books edition 2013

  Copyright © 1964 by Thomas Hinde

  Introduction © 2013 by Ramsey Campbell

  The right of Thomas Hinde to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  The publisher is grateful to Mark Terry of Facsimile Dust Jackets, LLC for restoring the copy of the dust jacket used for this edition.

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘I like to remember things my own way . . .’

  Let me declare my interest from the outset. I first encountered The Day the Call Came back in 1966 and was both dazzled and disturbed. It was in the Corgi Modern Reading paperback, a splendid series now so forgotten that there appears to be no account of it on the Internet. As I recall I first became aware of the imprint when I encountered its edition of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a book I no sooner saw than bought. Like Penguin in those days, Corgi Modern Reading seemed to guarantee books worth having, and they generally were. Few of them rewarded me more than The Day the Call Came, and I’ve often been delighted to acknowledge my debt to it as a writer. Not long after I read it I had a stab at emulating its method in a short story called ‘The Lost’, and I believe I’ve subsumed its influence in some recent comedies of paranoia – that’s how vital it remains for me. It belongs to a mode that Kafka may have invented and Rex Warner subsequently developed, but in this novel as well as his novella The Investigator Thomas Hinde finds it a highly individual voice and brings it into a world that is still contemporary. Indeed, he might be writing about one that is all the more with us.

  Nothing is more crucial to the effect of The Day the Call Came than its style. Perhaps the narrator is as unreliable as any of Poe’s, but his tone is far more chilling and insidious. He doesn’t need to assure us that he is being reasonable, because that’s how he sounds. We can’t even feel we know more about him than he does, given his interludes of lucidity. One insight the book offers is how sane the deranged may appear, even often to themselves. We may sense that he’s at least as intelligent as we are, and more devious in pursuit of his secrets. Indeed, late in the book he reflects that ‘you can do a lot of suspicious things under people’s noses’ because ‘even if they notice their minds busily fit reasonable explanations to them.’ It’s both an indication of the way he deals with people and an inadvertent description – a projection, in fact – of the way his own mind plays tricks on him.

  The prose is as lucid as the summer sunlight in which many of the events take place. (Not for nothing is a later Hinde novel called Daymare – a good term for quite an amount of his work.) We may be surprised by how the ominous first line leads to a lyrical celebration of the landscape, a passage that gives way to a hallucinatory glimpse, hinting how insecure the narrator’s vision really is. His thoughts of his children subtly suggest how his viewpoint always turns inwards: the fairy-tale giant that has lodged in his mind from his childhood, the way he perceives their behaviour in terms of his own at their age, his refusal to have them at home (a prohibition that, we may feel, his wife has accepted too readily, unless – like so much else here – that’s merely how he sees her response). The memory of the giant seems less simply nostalgic, more menacing, when it’s followed so closely by another image that could be a child’s fantasy – the houses that ‘hadn’t moved yet’. Late in the novel a dream of ‘healthy fluffy bunny’ rabbits turns as hideous as any child’s nightmare.

  At times the prose has the glancing quality of the uncanny that we find in M.R. James. Even a tense may be ominous. Hinde’s later novel The Village offers tours de force of the pluperfect, but in The Day the Call Came a single use can imply a great deal: ‘I’d liked my family . . .’ We may learn to watch out for words too. When our narrator says that he has overheard a neighbour ‘drawing other people into conspiracy with her’, perhaps the observation is less innocent than the context would have us believe, or is his paranoia infecting us? The spy’s eye that’s trained on everything around him is as keen as any in the genre that had come to the fore at the time – we may think of the obsessive detail to be found in Len Deighton’s espionage novels of the same period – but the kind of detail on which Hinde’s narrator fixes (or fixates) sets him unnervingly apart from his companions on the contemporary shelves. Not least the jokes, some of which are hilarious, convey a sense of a skewed view of the world: see the entrance of Percy Goyle’s dog, for example. Even the most apparently objective sections of the narrative can’t help betraying the nature of the narrator in some aside or other – his having ‘failed to trace’ an aspect of a neighbour’s background, for instance. We may suspect why his wife sometimes grows frightened when she can’t find him, and wonder why the sight of his daughter playing on the lawn should give him indigestion. Some of what we learn about him – his name, his age – feels like information he has only inadvertently let slip.

  The incident of the typed letter seems to offer a route back to sanity, but the narrator gets lost along the way. Each of his forays into apparent rationality falls victim to his inflamed intelligence, which is too cunning to take even his own thought processes at face value. One of Hinde’s achievements in the book is to render episodes simultaneously comic and, in terms of the observer’s conclusions, disturbing – see the splendid episode of the Draycotts’ preparation for their camping trip and the developments that follow their exodus (developments that may begin to make us wonder which of the events we’re told about have actually taken place: do the Draycotts actually return so soon?) It’s when the narrator turns his suspicion on his family, however, that we’re reminded that this may not be a comedy at all.

  As he grows more devious, so does the narrative and in particular his belief in his own rationality, but he can’t help betraying himself to us when we’re as trapped inside his head as he is. A passing observation about the traffic he encounters on a family outing is enough to suggest a whole history of hidden paranoia. I confess that, as the offspring of a schizophrenic, I may be uncommonly conscious of familiar symptoms – the assumption that someone has been ‘worked on’, the aircraft that’s identified as belonging to a watcher (both persistent beliefs of my mother’s) – but this novel is liable to make any reader uneasily alert. As the social comedy grows wilder, so do the deranged observations it provokes. When the narrator becomes obsessed with the notion that his neighbours are sharing secret jokes about him, we might think the laughter he overhears is our own, however nervous.

  The last stages of his disintegration intensify both the comedy and the nightmare – the inappropriate remarks he inserts into social gatherings, the absurd denials with which he confronts his family, the disguise he dons – but the dark humour (even of the horrendously hilarious visit to the Brightworths) can’t camouflage the terror. The novel ends with that, all the more powerfully because so much is left unsaid and, worse, imminent. The fiction of Thomas Hinde is long overdue for appreciative reappraisal, and this book is a fine introduction. When I was asked to contribute to the horror volume of The Book of Lists
I included it in my survey of great horror novels not usually regarded as such (along with books by Peter Ackroyd, John Franklin Bardin, Samuel Beckett, Patrick Hamilton, José Carlos Somoza and others). It did occur to me that readers might not be able to find some of them, but now in the case of The Day the Call Came they can. May this new edition lead to a revival of his work.

  Ramsey Campbell

  Wallasey, Merseyside

  June 9, 2013

  Ramsey Campbell has been described by The Oxford Companion to English Literature as ‘Britain’s most respected living horror writer’. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild. His latest books are the novel The Kind Folk, the short story collection Holes for Faces and the novella The Last Revelation of Gla’aki.

  THE DAY THE CALL CAME

  PART ONE

  That was the day the call came. It came without warn­ing. For years I’d known it would come, sooner or later. I’d got used to knowing it would come. I’d stopped expecting it.

  There’d been nights when I’d woken and gone into a sweat at the thought that at any moment the telephone by my bed might ring. They’d got fewer.

  It might not come by telephone, of course. They’d never told me that. But I thought it would. The radio transmitter-receiver which I kept in my attic, hidden be­low three loose floorboards – somehow I’d never quite taken that seriously. Even the two-monthly checks . . .

  There’d be no danger. I’d only have to lift the receiver and say yes and yes. There’d be no confusion or doubt. I’d lie there, propped on my elbow, listening and saying yes, wide awake as I always could be the instant after sleep, my mind racing ahead, calculating the problems. I wouldn’t have to ask questions. They’d never give orders which needed amplifying or could be misunder­stood. And afterwards I’d invent some story about a wrong number or a madman to tell Molly – if she’d woken. That was how I’d imagined it coming.

  It didn’t come like that.

  It came in the evening. I’ll tell you what I’d been doing that day.

  It was the first day of my children’s holidays. I was glad it was going to be fine for them. On and off it had been fine for a week but that was the first day I felt cer­tain. At dawn it had that stillness, bright but not too bright, which you get when an English summer suddenly arrives. It was in no hurry. It was going to be fine not just today but for many days.

  I stood on my back drive, sometimes watching for the sun to rise over the hills, sometimes looking down at the mist which still hid my orchards in the low lands. For a long time nothing changed, then it was quickly getting brighter, as if someone was making a dim-up on a stage machine. Several inches above the hills where I hadn’t expected it the sun came through the mist, round and yellow. At the same moment I saw that the mist was thinning below me and row after row my trees were coming into view. Beyond them I could see the common and the golf course.

  My orchards were out of place in that part of the country. I suppose they used to be a paddock and a couple of meadows belonging to some farmhouse which had disappeared, land where the farmer could bring his cattle in winter or when the lord of the manor was stag-hunting on the common. They stuck out into the com­mon like a promontory. From here above them I could see clearly the neat green rectangle made by my leafy trees. The sun was lighting their tops. Beyond and to their right I saw the bracken and broken silver birches of the common. The sun was lighting these too. To their left I saw the sandy bunkers and yellow gorse of the golf course. The sun wasn’t lighting these yet.

  The rest of the morning is less clear, but I must have gone to my attic to work till breakfast. After breakfast I must have sat in the farm office, as I usually did at that time of day. No doubt I paid some bills and read some catalogues. Probably I went over the argument again about how I was going to handle the crops that year – though I think even then I’d decided.

  Perhaps it was the weather, or perhaps I’m casting back the flavour of what happened later on to what went before, but I seem to remember feeling restless that morning. I needed to go out more often than usual and walk about the sunlit lawn before I could clear my thoughts and make decisions.

  Something worried me, but when I tried to trace it I couldn’t. It was less a feeling of worry than a feeling that I ought to be worried.

  One small incident stands out. I was half-way across the lawn to the azaleas on the descending bank where it ends. I was watching a grey squirrel which had clamped itself to a pine trunk, perfectly still, thinking I couldn’t see it as I certainly shouldn’t have done if I hadn’t noticed it scurry there, when something made me turn and look at the house. I saw Molly passing a window. A fraction of a second later, before she had fully passed it, she saw me and turned rather suddenly and opened the window to lean out.

  She smiled. ‘Isn’t it lovely!’

  ‘Isn’t it!’

  Now at the second before she’d seen me and turned I’d noticed that she was climbing past the window and deduced that she was going upstairs. And it wasn’t till we’d spoken like this and I’d turned to stare with her away across the low lands to the distant hills of heather and blue sky that I recovered from the shock of what I’d thought at that second: that the stairs she was going up were not those from ground to first floor but those from first floor to my attic.

  It only lasted that long, and the actual moment of doubt a shorter time. Yet it should at once have been clear to me that she was on the lower stairs. True, the windows were in the same vertical line, but as well as being at different heights they were of totally different shape. The only explanation, and it wasn’t satisfactory, was that some dazzling effect of the sunlight on the glass had prevented me from seeing the other window, ten feet above the one she was passing.

  It wasn’t satisfactory because I was less concerned about how I had made the mistake than why.

  My attic was private and Molly never went there.

  ‘This should worry them,’ she said. She referred to a joke of ours that most of English industry and commerce was geared to cold damp weather so there was tremen­dous pressure against letting us have anything else. It may not be a joke. ‘Don’t forget the train.’

  ‘Twelve-forty?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said and shut the window.

  My attic was private because it had always been agreed between us that she mustn’t disturb or – till it was ready – try to see my work.

  It was because of my work that Molly never expected me to show much ambition about the farm. My farm was too small to be very profitable unless I’d done something intensive like chickens. One day I was going to be suc­cessful but it would be no thanks to my thirty-three peaty acres of English soil.

  It was also perfectly understood between us that Molly asked no questions about my work. The times I had been nearest to telling her, the times I had felt my love for her persuading me that this was more important than anything else, had been when I had come down from my work and seen how badly she wanted to ask about it, but wouldn’t let herself. I’d seen anxiety in her eyes.

  More often, because it had become habit, she hadn’t wanted to ask.

  I don’t remember whether the idea of my work was my own or whether they suggested it. It has been con­venient. In the early mornings and again in the long winter evenings I would go to my attic. Molly expected it and would have been uneasy if I hadn’t. It gave me all the time I wanted for my training. Sometimes I had bought materials for my work and, once or twice though not too often, I’d left the bills for these lying where she would see them.

  Though it was perfectly understood that Molly should never go to my attic workroom, and though I trusted her completely, I kept the door locked when I was else­where, and locked it when I was inside.

  I met the twelve-forty. This year the breaking-up
day of each of my children’s schools was the same and I’d arranged for them to meet in London and catch a down train together. Molly stayed at home to cook lunch.

  She was boiling a pudding. She made good puddings, in an old-fashioned way in a cloth, which we called ‘giants’ heads’, because the position of two raisins had once looked like two eyes. It was the sort of inspira­tion Molly had and as soon as she’d said it I’d seen that it did look exactly like the round pop-eyed head I’d always imagined on the pot-bellied giant who smells Jack hiding in the copper. Sometimes I thought that the shout her children gave to hear that it was giant’s head for pudding was the most concrete moment she looked for­ward to in their holidays. I don’t much like puddings.

  They were hopelessly excited. Though they had been together for an hour in the train they both talked without stopping or listening. They seemed pleased to see me but only as an extra, sometimes forgotten, audience.

  It was funny to hear them. Although Dan, who was eleven, snubbed everything Peggy, who was nine, was saying, I felt he only did it to make space to tell his own things. And though Peggy was being snubbed she hur­ried on to the next, hardly bothering to defend the last. It was the sort of exchange I’d heard end with her sudden­ly saying, ‘Oh you’re horrid,’ and bursting into tears, though this time she didn’t. They’d not yet learned to be ashamed of their excitement and hide it. I thought they were backward, but I was pleased. Perhaps they hid it at school but could not stop it breaking out when they saw each other.

  I remember how the sun shone that afternoon, making me narrow my eyes and glance for shade when I came out to see what they were doing. They couldn’t decide.

  They couldn’t decide if they wanted to be in their rooms or in the garden. Or whether they wanted to be together or apart. Or which of the things they’d thought of doing in the months they’d been away was the thing they most wanted to do. It made me remember how I’d felt on the first day of my own holidays.