Free Strange Stories by Robert Aickman Page A

what need might arise, was resolved against dragging her into a roadside foodplace. He took all he could, including, surreptitiously, some sad souvenirs of Elizabeth, but he recognized plainly enough that there was almost everything remaining to be done with the flat, and that he would have to return one day to do it, whether or not Nell came with him. In the meantime, it was difficult to surmount what was happening to the flat, or to him. Only Nell was sweet, calm, and changeless in her simple clothes. If only the nature of time were entirely different!
    ‘You’ll be terribly cold.’
    She seemed never to say it first, never to think of it.
    He covered her with sweaters and rugs. He thought of offering her a pair of his own warm trousers, but they would be so hopelessly too wide and long.
    Islington was a misty marsh, as they flitted through; Holloway pink as a desert flamingo. The scholarly prison building was wrapped in fire. Finsbury Park was crystal as a steppe; Manor House deserted as old age.
    When, swift as thoughts of love, they reached Grantham, they turned aside to buy Nell’s dress. She chose a roughtex- tured white one, with the square neck outlined in black, and would accept nothing else, nothing else at all. She even refused to try on the dress and she refused to wear it out of the shop. Stephen concurred, not without a certain relief, and carried the dress to the car in a plastic bag. The car was so congested that a problem arose.
    ‘I’ll sit on it,’ said Nell.
    Thus the day went by as in a dream: though there are few such dreams in one lifetime. Stephen, for sure, had never known a journey so rapt, even though he could seldom desist from staring and squinting for uncovenanted blemishes upon and around the bright coachwork. Stephen recognized that, like everyone else, he had spent his life without living; even though he had had Elizabeth for much of the time to help him through, as she alone was able.
    Northwards, they ran into a horse fair. The horses were everywhere, and, among them, burlesques of men bawling raucously, and a few excited girls.
    ‘Oh!’ cried Nell.
    ‘Shall we stop? ’
    ‘No,’ said Nell. ‘Not stop.’
    She was plainly upset.
    ‘Few fairs like that one are left,’ said Stephen, as he sat intimately, eternally beside her. ‘The motors have been their knell.’
    ‘Knell,’ said Nell.
    Always it was impossible to judge how much she knew.
    ‘Nell,’ said Stephen affectionately. But it was at about that moment he first saw a dark, juicy crack in the polished metalwork of the bonnet.
    ‘Nell,’ said Stephen again; and clasped her hand, always brown, always warm, always living and loving. The huge geometrical trucks were everywhere, and it was an uncircumspect move for Stephen to make. But it was once more too misty for the authorities to see very much, to take evidence that could be sworn to.
    The mist was more like fog as they wound through Harewood’s depopulated community. Harewood really should marry Doreen as soon as it becomes possible, thought Stephen, and make a completely new start in life, perhaps have a much better type of youngster, possibly and properly for the cloth.
    Stephen was struck with horror to recollect that he had forgotten all about the costly book which had been almost certainly intended for Harewood, and which Harewood would be among the very few fully to appreciate and rejoice in. The book had not really been noticeable at first light in the eroding flat, but his lapse perturbed Stephen greatly.
    ‘A fungus and an alga living in a mutually beneficial relationship,’ he said under his breath.
    ‘What’s that? ’ asked Nell.
    ‘It’s the fundamental description of a lichen. You should know that.’
    ‘Don’t talk about it.’
    He saw that she shuddered; she who never even quaked from the cold.
    ‘It’s unlucky,’ she said.
    ‘I’m sorry, Nell. I was thinking of the book we left behind, and the words slipped out.’
    ‘We’re better