The Day the Call Came Read online

  I remembered how I’d known that to go on hesitating would destroy the happiness I’d hoped for and that I must decide to what to devote these holidays – sticking in all my stamps, making a Beau Geste boat with gun­powder guns – because there had been holidays when I’d put off this decision and realized too late that too many days had already been wasted.

  Seeing their uncertainty made me sorry that I had to send them away to school, which must be a bad place if it prevented them doing so many things to which they could have brought hope and enthusiasm. Molly had hated their going. There’d been no argument. I couldn’t remember ever having to explain to her how they would disturb me if they were always at home. But I’d seen how she wished they could stay.

  Peggy wanted to make a garden. Dan wanted to build a house in a tree. Dan wanted his house to be finished and belong to him. He wanted practical help which he could then forget. The achievement was the object. Peggy wanted to watch me digging and then to be watched while she dug and then for us to dig together. It was the doing she cared about.

  I helped them. And I persuaded them to try to learn tennis. We had a rough grass court with some rougher netting to stop the balls. It suited Peggy better than Dan. Peggy wanted to be able to tell people about how she was learning and I was teaching her. Dan wanted to start the game and win.

  As the afternoon grew hotter I became more anxious to sit and rest. I envied our cat which I could see lying under a rhododendron bush in the black cavity between the bottom leaves and the ground – and then couldn’t see because it had taken the chance while I was looking away to slip into a safer place. Dan and Peggy didn’t notice the heat.

  After tea I went down the hillside path to the orchards. I liked to go down there at least once a day, even when there was little to do.

  That was why I’d chosen fruit farming – again I’m not sure if it was my idea or theirs – though Molly would have liked some stock. At times of the year I was busy from dawn till after dark, but at others I could take days or even weeks for my real work. It all fitted. I had made these important decisions soon after I joined; and that was soon after we were married, so we were able to take them together. I joined when I was twenty-three.

  My fruit farm kept me fit, but not exhausted. More important, it kept me on the premises, because I never knew at what hour and how urgently I might be needed. That was why, besides the telephone by my bed there was an extension in the main orchard shed and loud bells outside the back door and on a post by the orchard gate. I’d explained to Molly that one couldn’t afford to miss deals in such a competitive business.

  Down in the orchards I lost sight of the common and golf course, though I still had the feeling of being on this green rectangular promontory. When I looked back and up I could see the roofs and chimneys of the houses on the New Lane. They were all different, of course. Mine was about the centre and the tallest. With its red tiled mansard roof it was about the ugliest.

  Once I had hated that row of houses. They had had a flavour of Wells’ monsters from Mars, and seemed to look down on the country they were going to move over. Later I hadn’t minded them. That still summer evening I almost liked them. Perhaps I had been lulled into security because, in eleven years, they hadn’t moved yet. From among them, fainter than seemed likely so that I couldn’t have told exactly from where, I could sometimes hear the sound of tennis ball on racket but interspersed by too much high shouting for it to be a proper game.

  I came up the hillside path. I crossed the front drive and lawn. I went through the french windows into the sitting-room. At once I saw it on the mantelpiece.

  It was propped against the back wall, but it wasn’t conspicuous. True, we didn’t usually prop letters on the mantelpiece, but it wasn’t alone there. Apart from the black striking clock and the two silver-plated candle­sticks there were several ashtrays and six of Molly’s or­namental cups and saucers – strange how she’s come to like these ornaments which her mother and mine would have liked but which I’d assumed she never would. In spite of these, and of the filigree china pot which was holding it up and hiding one corner, I saw it at once. I hadn’t a second’s doubt about what it was.

  It had a presence, that small brown envelope on my sitting-room mantelpiece. I stood watching it, a little warily, as if to suggest that despite my complete accep­tance it should have used more tact. No doubt the shock gave me this instinctive defensive feeling which I didn’t ordinarily have. There wasn’t a sign of how it had got there.

  In that second when everything seemed to stop I be­came aware of what everyone else was doing. Across the lawn on the tennis court I could hear Dan and Peggy. ‘No, no, no, no,’ I heard Peggy call and then a pause when I could imagine them making faces at each other. Upstairs I could hear Molly singing and because of the day of the week and the occasional rustling of paper I knew she was unpacking the laundry. Glancing back through the french windows I could even see our cat – or at least its tail as it made its way carefully through the bottoms of the azaleas a foot beyond the lawn’s edge over the crest of the bank. Its tail moved like a sail, some­times pausing and twitching. And here was I, alone in my sitting-room with that envelope.

  A second later I was beyond the sofa and had it in the inside pocket of my jacket, only able to notice as I hur­ried it there that it was addressed to H.C. BALE in typed capitals and nothing else. I couldn’t read it here.

  My problem was where to read it without causing sus­picion or being seen. Six o’clock wasn’t my time for going to the farm office, still less to my attic workroom. I’d just come from the orchards and could hardly go again. There were trees and bushes in our garden, which was half wild, and even a fir plantation at the far end, but wherever I went there was a chance I might be discovered, and I’d taught myself not to take chances. So I kept it in my jacket pocket.

  I tried not to think about it and for half an hour suc­ceeded but at supper in the kitchen I got the idea that it had begun to work itself out of my inside pocket and was showing between my lapels across my shirt front. I thought that was why Dan had begun to stare thought­fully at a point below my collar bones.

  ‘Daddy,’ he said – and I had a moment of panic when I could think of no answer to the question I expected – ‘do they really gut cats to make rackets?’

  Molly protested. Peggy blocked her ears, showing that it had been meant for her, and began to chant, ‘Dan, Dan, the lavatory man.’ Dan got up to hit her. In the confusion I was able to glance down. The letter wasn’t showing and, casually slipping my hand inside my jacket, I felt it safely in the pocket.

  At about nine when the late dusk of the summer evening was coming I went upstairs, noticing through our bedroom doorway and out through its window the dark red and purple sky where the sun had set. I went up the second flight and sat in my attic chair. I took out the envelope.

  I couldn’t learn much from that. It was pale brown manila, the sort of envelope half the businesses in the country use for their bills and receipts. I had some my­self. I slit it open.

  Inside was a single white sheet. Typed a little above the centre, not in capitals, were the two words ‘Stand by.’

  Just that. On a sheet of quarto without a watermark, typed by a portable typewriter with an élite face, of rather old-fashioned design, a pre-war Imperial I’d have said at a guess – oh yes, I’d done my training.

  I won’t deny that I felt let down, even angry. All right, I wanted to say, but for God’s sake tell me what it’s about.

  Steady there, I said to myself. No hysterics.

  Before I went to bed I thought of fetching my long-barrelled .38 with the silencer and putting it under my pillow, at least of going to the safe in the cellar which I’d built behind the wine racks to check whether it and the others were there and in good order. But I knew they were.

  And I wondered whether I should call them and send the ‘message understood’ signal.

  I didn’t do a thing. I knew that was what they woul
d want.

  I went to bed and made love to Molly. I think she liked it. She gave several quick gasps and I was pleased that I was giving her pleasure – distantly pleased.

  Several ideas came to me in the night. In the morning I woke with them complete in my mind but no memory of how they had arrived. I went to the attic and fetched the letter.

  I’d thought when I woke that I’d been wrong about the weather and there were grey clouds but now I saw that it was the clear grey of the sky before the sun rose. It was rising now and from the stair window I saw it shining through the fir branches. The children’s doors were shut and there were no sounds inside. Yesterday had been exhausting for us all.

  I took the letter to the farm office. The envelope, as I’d realized at once, might have come from my own packet. The paper, as I’d now guessed, was similar if not identical to the watermarkless make I used myself. I’d guessed that the typewriter was an old Imperial por­table and mine was an old Remington portable. I bent and examined the desk closely, but didn’t touch it because I had the idea of taking a dusting for finger­prints on its polished edge and on the typewriter keys. I could have done it – but there wouldn’t have been any. And what was the point?

  I had to admire their efficiency. Not a thing had been moved since I’d last been there after lunch the day before. The catalogues and farm letters were in their neat piles. The chair was pushed back to exactly the distance I al­ways pushed it and set at the angle I always set it to get out. When I sat at the desk I didn’t have to move the machine an inch towards me to adjust it to the distance I liked. I took out a sheet of my quarto and typed, ‘Stand by.’

  I folded the sheet three times and held it side by side with the one I’d been sent. I couldn’t see a single differ­ence. Soon I wasn’t sure which was which.

  There were no inked-up letters, but there was some­thing funny about the descending strokes of the ‘y’s. I examined them with the magnifying glass. It was the final proof that the note had been typed on my machine.

  PART TWO

  It was late that evening, as I was tapping the barometer in the farm office, that it occurred to me that I might have typed that note myself. The idea seemed to float into focus as if I had been half seeing it all day. You may think that once I had recognized it I should have been able to accept or reject it at once. It wasn’t so simple as that.

  True, I was able at once to think I could remember typing it, but that proved little. To start with, even if I had done it, then why had I done it! But more important, if I could ever have completely forgotten doing it, how could I trust myself now that I thought I remembered doing it? There had been a moment when that action – if it had been an action – had not existed for me. How did I know that I wasn’t now inventing it? Because if I could invent it I could also invent the intervening period of continuously remembering it. I had noticed how my dreams would provide not just people but a memory of things about them from long before the dream began. For instance, a dream in which I’d known that Molly had been the second of two twins and one half of her hadn’t come out properly – one half divided vertically. And that this was why that half was wrong, or just more darkly shaded, I can’t describe it any better. In my dream I had not only known this but known how it had affec­ted the whole of our life together. I could have described in detail an infinite number of events from that past life.

  In the same way I now thought I had always known that I had typed that note. It proved nothing. As I stood there tapping my barometer – it was rock steady above thirty-one so that I could give it several extra taps – I didn’t have to work this out. It was just an example of my suspicion that one’s memory was selecting all the time and for this reason there was no such thing as what had ‘really happened’; that was something we invented be­cause of an anxiety to believe ourselves real. I had another reason for being unsure.

  When I joined they didn’t have to tell me that for security reasons my memories of the actual mechanics of those early contacts must be suppressed. And this didn’t mean buried where they might be dug up, but set into competition with other memories, a competition which because of their superficial improbability they would lose. I found it fairly easy.

  I was able to invent incidents in my past and elaborate them and after a few weeks become genuinely unsure whether or not I was remembering what had happened or what I had thought about so carefully that I now be­lieved. And even when something seemed to obtrude as a real memory, by remembering it and rethinking it I could make it not more but less real because any real memory there might have been was obscured by the process of remembering it.

  You may say that’s absurd, because I could have con­firmed the facts in a dozen ways, by asking Molly or other people I’d known.

  The first trouble here was that the sort of facts I wanted confirmed were ones which only I had ever known. But even if I’d wanted to re­assure myself by using ordinary examples, what answer was I likely to get if, for example, I said to someone, ‘Tell me, my father was called William, wasn’t he? And this does look like a genuine letter I had from him when I was a child, not one I’ve forged? And he was killed in a car crash when I was ten?’ Their answers would aim off in many directions, to protect me from myself and protect themselves from contact with someone so odd – and that would be even if I could believe I was actually there in front of them, questioning them, a thing I’d come to feel less sure about. And even if I’d got some sort of corroborative evidence from them and believed it at the time, how could I know soon afterwards that this was real and not an idea or so-called invention of mine? On the contrary, I could be sure that I shouldn’t know.

  But of course there were moments when I thought that I could, if I wanted, work out so-called real from so-called unreal, and moments when in a sort of panic I wanted to. Once I’d even made a chance to talk to Molly about the past by taking her to a place which I re­membered as important to us both: the bar at Victoria where I’d asked her to marry me.

  I hadn’t been there between that time and this visit, and as soon as I went in I was trying to fit the place I was seeing to the place I remembered. It seemed so differ­ent that I wanted to go out and hunt for another though I knew there could only be one in this corner of the station.

  ‘Let’s be romantic,’ I said. ‘Same corner.’ I was hoping that where we had sat, beyond the bar’s angle, I would find something more familiar. I’d taken half a step in that direction before I realized that she’d been shifting her weight to move in a different direction. She stopped herself and followed me, and didn’t mention it, but I saw she was worried.

  Of course I knew that bars could be redecorated and their whole lay-out altered. I told myself this as we reached the table. It was fairly reassuring.

  ‘Keep my place,’ I said. ‘And I’ll fetch them. Two gins and French, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Oh no, beer,’ she said. ‘You always had beer.’

  ‘Did I really propose on beer?’ I said, making it funny. I didn’t feel funny, because those two gins and French standing there on that dark brown polished table had been clearest in my mind when I’d thought about this moment. In those tulip-shaped glasses. And the way I’d stared at them and moved mine about to make a pattern of wet rings. I even thought I remembered giving myself hearty advice to look up because it wasn’t the gins I was proposing to.

  ‘That’s right,’ Molly said when I came back with one for her and a half of lager for myself. ‘And you upset yours and it ran off the table into someone’s shoe. And you said something . . . Yes, you said . . .’ But she couldn’t remember, and anyway I was hardly listening. I had absolutely no memory of the incident.

  Could it possibly have been part of such an important occasion and I had entirely forgotten it? We seemed to start to hunt together for things we could both remem­ber which would prove to us that this half-hour had really happened.

  I expect we found some. I expect I was able, by a little cheating, to convince her.
Myself, I was only convinced that whether or not it had begun as one occasion it was now two quite separate ones. Or rather, four, because there was the one I knew and the one she was telling me about, and the one she knew and the one she was hearing me tell her about – unless of course these were mine as well. I could see them starting to multiply like images in facing mirrors. I saw that the more I went on thinking about them, the more they would multiply and confuse me. I saw another possibility, that Molly had known all along that no proposal in a bar at Victoria had ever hap­pened but hadn’t dared to tell me.

  But if so, why had she invented unnecessary and absurd incidents which I would be certain not to remember – un­less she was thinking it was all a joke, had been trying all the time to make me admit that I had brought her here as some elaborate funny joke.

  Perhaps that attempt of mine to verify the past had been particularly upsetting. Certainly I hadn’t tried again. And nor could I afterwards see things that had happened in the same solid way. My belief, like other people’s, be­came interspersed with long periods of doubt. That quiet summer evening, staring at the rock-steady barometer needle, I felt doubt about that note. I registered it, but I didn’t fight it. I’d learned that that was best.

  For a week nothing happened. My children enjoyed their holidays – or rather I decided they must be enjoying them on such long sunlit days with only small far-up clouds, though I realized how typically adult it was to simplify their feelings in this way. And Molly – what did she do? Cooked for them, telephoned for more food, occasionally made their beds.

  She had a special way of coming downstairs which told me that she had been up to make their beds and after pulling one back and looking at it and then out at the blue sky had decided that it was a bad way to spend her time. I could tell by the way she aimed to go past me without speaking till she saw me watching her and then gave me an uncertain smile as if unsure what I had guessed. How long she spent in the house and how little she achieved always surprised me, and I think it was because she did things with a minimum of efficiency. She would start everything from supper to a drink of orange squash as if it were to be a party and to consider the cost in confusion would be to insult the spirit of the occasion. She got things into the greatest muddle in the shortest time and only later and very slowly put them straight.