The 9th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

SALLY Patrick Davis

‘I am departing this world sound of mind and body whatever the coroner, bless him, may feel compelled to say. I simply wish to hasten the moment, which faces us all, when I enter the next world. No other living person is in any way responsible or remotely involved.’

Last November there was an item in the national press reporting the death under somewhat unusual circumstances of David Pitt, a fine commercial artist who had been working, until a few weeks previously, for Willow, Martin and Chalmers, the advertising agency. Mr Pitt, it was written, had thrown up his job in October for no reason that made sense to his employers (or to most of his friends), despite the offer of a partnership, and had gone to live in a remote hamlet on the north coast of Devon. John Chalmers was reported as saying: yes, he believed Mr Pitt had been in love at the turn of the year, he had been disappointed, but had quite recovered. The firm had been prepared to waive the customary three months’ notice because they expected Mr Pitt to return. They had told him that he could have his job back at any time, that they regarded his retreat to Devon as a temporary absence, a recharging of batteries, a sabbatical. The firm did not, of course, concern itself with the private affairs of its employees. No, there were no complaints about the work.

On several counts this part of the report was not true. John was a friend of David’s and at one time had been closely involved with his private affairs. He had been saddened by Victoria’s decision to marry a Frenchman, an industrialist. And David’s work certainly had given them cause for worry during that last month. He had scarcely done any. But John was never one for presenting unearned increments to the Press.

The newspapers reported that David had committed suicide by drowning. This was the verdict of the coroner. There was no cause to doubt the note left in the cottage, the note with which I started this account. David had been seen the previous evening, and was heard in his cottage talking to himself as usual. The coroner made much of this, questioning the witnesses closely. There had been a storm that night. Next morning he did not collect his milk from the shop and in the evening his body was found in the far corner of the cove, wedged between two rocks.

But, except for me, his friends did not believe the disclaimer in the last sentence of the note. They discussed motives. Artistic temperament, love sickness, schizophrenia, manic depression, other fashionable ailments were diagnosed. Of these only the second came near to the truth, for reasons which the others could not have suspected.

There was one clue: the portrait. This was among the paintings, few of them completed, found in the cottage. All but the portrait were local landscapes, suffused with a fierce impressionism that was new for David, and most impressive. I bought two of them and have them with me now. The portrait was of Sally. I have that, too. David left it to me. Had any of the older inhabitants of the village seen it, their identification of the sitter must have posed enough riddles to keep a dozen reporters in business for weeks. But they did not see it; and since the law was satisfied and the Press given no reason for curiosity, Sally’s name was not uncovered.

The portrait is a fine painting in my opinion. David has Sally sitting in an armchair that is placed sideways to the viewer. She is wearing a blue dress with a high collar that fits closely round the neck. There is a glow of firelight reflected in her eyes and on her face, but you cannot see the fire, and the background and the brown armchair are painted in sombre colours. It is the face which rivets the attention, half turned towards the painter, smiling, loving, youthful, fragile, with a hint of humour in the hazel eyes; an innocent face but also one that belongs to a being who possesses worlds of knowledge. David has managed to capture in paint the quality of the flesh, ivory pale yet warmed by the fire and by an inner potency of spirit. Sally must have been, indeed was, perhaps is, a most unusual girl.

I have known David since childhood and had always hoped that he would paint something good. This is good. Yet, knowing him well, and reading between the lines of his last letter, I do not believe he thought of the painting as an end in itself. This work, which I value so highly and which the world will value one day, was for him a by-product of a larger act of creation, his union with Sally. It was, I think, a celebration of that act, and a testament of love.

There is a proper time for everything and a decent way to do things. At the inquest I said nothing of David’s last letter to me, and of the narrative that was enclosed with it. I made no comment on the painting. That he had died of his own wish by his own hand was public fact and my information did not change that. I wanted time to think. I was not ready for the questions.

The account that follows is based closely on David’s narrative. I have added a word or a phrase only where it seemed that the reader might not understand. David was a painter chiefly, but would sometimes write a story or an article. His narrative was written in the third person, just as it is here. No doubt he found that this device helped him to see things objectively, to look at himself and the events from outside.

I was tempted to call the piece ‘David’s Testament’. But in the end I have kept to his own title, for it is Sally who dominates.

Mrs Brown blocked the doorway of the cottage, staring up the steep coombe-side at the evening sky.

‘There’s a storm coming, Mr Pitt. Ted always reckons on a storm with clouds like that. There’s spite in them clouds. You’d better take your raincoat.’

David fetched the coat from the line of pegs in the kitchen. She was probably right. She knew about the weather.

‘I’ll not be long then.’ He squeezed past her into the street, looked up at the sky for himself. ‘Does look dark.’

‘I know you likes your walk,’ she said. ‘But they can blow hard, terrible hard.’

He stepped out between the dozen cottages of the hamlet, and by the last of them stopped, and looked back. She was still by the door. This evening she looked frail, her full seventy-three years. On impulse David blew her a kiss. She waved a hand. Then he was round the corner and climbing up the zig-zag path through the woods.

This corner of Devon had never failed to cure him of the urban malaise. He came back year after year. London is an exciting city; his job paid well and interested him; but the greater reality was here, by the sea, a mile from the nearest road, where he could be at peace. That urge to inspect the rest of the world that seemed to possess every one of his friends had passed him by. And there was nothing here to remind him of Vicky, lost to him in body but not so easily lost from his mind. He had felt the need to keep the place inviolate, even from her, and had never brought her down. Here he could forget her for whole days. Almost this was his home, and the rest of the world a temporary residence.

He came to the end of the wood, where the path broke out on to the open cliffside, about half-way up. A dozen times he had tried to paint this view: the great cliffs falling sheer to the sea in jutting headlands, and between them the little coves filled with the sea at high tide, and the heather and the gorse blazing in a fine discord up on the grasslands. He could never capture the magic, especially the sea, mile upon mile of sea, blue or grey or green, smooth as velvet, or white-capped, tossed and furrowed by the Atlantic winds.

Oddly enough, Mrs Brown was quite a critic. ‘Don’t you waste no more paint on that one,’ she’d say. Or ‘Nearly got it there you have, Mr Pitt. But I don’t take to that tree, I don’t think Ted would like it. Too brown, he’d say.’ Her eyesight had been failing this last year, and she would peer closely at the canvas, moving round it like a dog worrying a bone, sometimes smelling it. And she was often right. She treated him as a son, not bothering with other visitors now.

David walked quickly to his favourite promontory two miles on, where a huge block of stone rested on a ledge beyond the path, and the sea swept round on either side far below. On this September evening, overcast and prematurely moving into dusk, the sea had a peculiar oily calm unlike anything he had seen before. He lay on the rock to watch.

The seagulls floating on the water looked very small. They were a long way down. The waves broke strongly enough against the cliffs, spray and foam boiling white, but ten yards out there was no movement. The clouds were closing in and down, black and swollen. The world grew suddenly smaller. He shivered.

He thought of Sally again, who had died in the same storm that had killed her fisherman father, and whom Mrs Brown never mentioned. In ten years the subject had not come between them, though Ted, her husband, was so often the invisible partner in her conversation. This teased at him as much as the mystery of Sally’s death. Yet he himself had not raised the subject. Once or twice he had been about to do so when some breath of a feeling had stopped him: not tact, not quite fear, perhaps awe, and an instinct that somehow their relationship would be changed, and for the worse, if the silence was broken from his side.

There was nothing in the cottage to recall Sally: no photographs, no books, no collections of postcards or stamps, none of the remnants that usually lie in cupboards and drawers long after the children have left. Mrs Brown had cleaned away all trace of her daughter’s existence. David had learned of her from a neighbour. Twenty-two, pretty, and liked everywhere, her body had been washed ashore in the cove below the village, along with large sections of her father’s boat, his body, and other sad jetsam. She had been devoted to him in death as in life.

But she had not been on his boat that day, or anywhere near it. Ted had been fishing. She had gone to Barnstaple for a dance, and until the body was found they had supposed her to have accepted the offer of a bed in town, since to return through the fury of the storm would have been uncomfortable, perhaps dangerous.

How had the sea caught her? No one knew. She had left the last bus at the top of the coombe around eleven o’clock and was never seen alive again.

David had wondered at this tragic and romantic story, a true mystery. The solitary girl walking down through the black and storm-tossed woods to the village: had she panicked and run blindly past the houses and over some precipitous section of cliff? There were plenty of those. But the girl had lived among them all her life, probably knew them blindfold, had no reason to approach them if going directly to her home. And storms were common. She had shown no signs of fear on leaving the bus, though the driver remembered that she had expressed anxiety for her father. What had happened?

The story tugged and nagged at him now, staring down at the distant sea. In some sense it was more real to him than many of the events from his own past. And thinking on Sally he forgot the storm approaching him, so that its beginning was quite unexpected. A few swift exploratory gusts, and then the whirlwind. At once the sea below was a fury of white, the crests of the waves torn out by the wind to fly across the surface in sheets of spray.

He flattened to the rock and clung to it. His raincoat, a heap beside him, trembled, hesitated, then shot into the void to fall like a wounded bird far out among the waves. He was frightened, giddy. The wind was tugging, heaving, pulling, beating at him, howling demoniacally.

Then came the rain, above the wind a new and louder roar. He was hit by a Niagara of water, so dense that it was difficult to breathe, impossible to think. He was an insect pinned to a wall, racked on this vertiginous rock above a boiling sea, bombarded by a deluge that flew horizontally through space. For a brief fantastic moment he thought the wind had lifted the sea bodily four hundred feet.

For perhaps half an hour he lay there, stunned, unthinking, pressed against the comforting stone. He was aroused by his own shivering, a mixture of cold and fear. The wind had eased. He could relax that convulsive grip on the rock’s crevices. But it had grown dark, opaquely and positively dark. Must get off the rock, he thought and forced himself to slide backwards to where the rock jutted from the path and was tolerably wide. There he turned, still on his stomach, and moved along the path until the full shelter of the slopes above broke the force of the wind. A hundred yards in there was a small cliff, and with his back to this, and one hand gripping the stem of a large bush of heather, David sat up, and began to live.

The rain here was falling, not beating sideways. The cliff itself was pouring water. He wondered what was happening to the streams in the valleys. A vivid flash followed at once by an eardrum-splitting crash of thunder pressed him back against the rock-face. The cliffs below fell into a void of driving rain.

He might have stayed anchored to this corner of comparative safety until the storm passed three or four hours later, if a new element of danger had not driven him out. Stones and rocks began to fall from the slopes above, loosened from the earth by the weight of rain. One large rock must have hit the top of his cliff, for he felt a shock run through it, and he was showered with slivers and fragments. Larger pieces bounced on the slopes near him and shot into the night.

Without clear thought he was running along the path. It was scarcely visible, and he fell. Then he moved at a sort of crouching walk within the shelter of the inlets, and at a crawl round the two headlands.

He reached the wood. Here it was blind dark, and the gale blowing through the trees, and the rain beating on them, made a continuous deafening thunder. He needed to rest. A lightning flash revealed that he was below one of the many stout though stunted oaks that gave the wood its peculiar character. He climbed and sat with a leg on either side of the trunk, and his chest against it, conscious now of a steady shower of leaves, twigs and small branches. The trunk trembled to the wind’s power but gave a most comforting assurance of solidity.

And then through this Stygian world came another human. A figure with a torch hurried past below him, a girl of twenty or so in a flowing cloak who seemed quite able to withstand the wind. A stranger. She was not of the village.

He slithered down and ran after the beam of light before it should be lost. He did this instinctively, and never thought to look for reasons. Perhaps it was the sight of another human being, any human being; perhaps it was from the glimpse of her shadowy face, a beautiful face marked not with fear, but with deep anxiety.

She was well beyond the wood before he caught up with her. He managed to stay a few yards behind on the way back to the first of the headlands, where she stopped. He sat down, her unseen guardian. He was reluctant to make himself known yet could not let her from his sight. Although the wind had lost that first violence, still he did not care to stand on the exposed point. The fiercer gusts plucked at him, as though irritated by the obstruction to their path. The girl seemed unconcerned. Her cloak flapped and billowed wildly, dangerously, but she kept her feet.

She was peering at the invisible sea, looking from left to right and back again. She remained like this for three or four minutes, motionless except for the turning head, the flapping cloak, and her hair streaming out horizontally like seaweed in a tidal race.

Suddenly she turned and ran past him back towards the wood. Had he been sitting on the path instead of squatting against the slope of the cliff, she must have fallen over him.

Again he glimpsed her face, closer this time. It was white, drawn tight with fear and anguish, a face that haunted, a face that he had to follow. It did not seem unnatural to follow. No other course was possible. But what had she expected to find out there in the blackness of the night-wrapped storm?

The girl kept running. It was a narrow twisting path, rock-rough in places, and was now along its entire length a kind of ford through the waters that rushed down the hillside. David slipped and stumbled but never left the path. He did not consider the danger. With all his faculties he was intent upon tracking that wavering insubstantial beam of light. Sometimes he lost it as driving rain blinded him, or bushes came between them. And it was the girl who fell at last, rolling several feet, the torch beam gyrating wildly. She came to rest in a clump of gorse, and was up and on the path before David could reach her. No cries, no curses, just silently up and on. It was almost inhuman.

After this she slowed and eased his task and there were no more than ten yards between them when, at the entrance to the wood, she paused, wiped her face with a large white handkerchief, and looked back straight at him. He, too, had stopped. He felt as though he was gazing straight into her heart, a heart that was bursting with despair. Then she was off again. In trying to stuff the handkerchief into the pocket of her cloak she dropped it. David snatched it up as he hurried past, for in the wood he had to keep close if the light from her torch was to help him escape the overhanging branches and other hazards. The noise there was still deafening, with the old trees swaying, creaking and groaning, the wind howling through them, and the rain battering down, stripping off the sodden leaves.

When three sheep, maddened by fear, perhaps by the sheer volume of noise, dashed down the hillside and across the path in front of the girl, he heard nothing. Briefly the solid white bodies appeared in the torchlight, eyes glaring, and then were gone towards the precipice below, an apocalyptic vision.

The swift and startling passage of these sheep did not check the girl. Her glance did not follow them. On she went, driven as fiercely by her fears as they by theirs. And on behind her he followed, downward through the last of the wood and out on to the main path from the road above. He was scarcely conscious of their position. All that mattered was the light, always the light, and whether it was near or far from him.

There were lights on in the village, but windows and doors were shut tight. Although he knew every yard of the short street, tonight the scene was so distorted by the storm, or perhaps by his weary half-blind eyes, that nothing was familiar.

The girl seemed to have picked up a lantern, a mariner’s storm lantern. Its more generous light swayed out of the village and among the trees on the other side, then dropped down the steep zig-zag path towards the cove. He hurried after, slowed by the twistings of the path that hid the light and left him in darkness. But there was only the one path, and only the cove at its foot. He knew that he would catch up with her.

As he descended, the great hungry roar of the breakers rose over the noise of wind and rain. By lightning flashes he glimpsed through the foliage furious seas bursting against the rocks. He paused, repelled. Something of the reality of his position came through to him and he began to be afraid. What in Heaven’s name was he doing here? Nothing, nothing would make him go close to those waves.

Then the lantern gleamed briefly below, and on he went. Soon he came out on to the wide level shelf of rock and earth that stretched for the length of a cricket pitch fifty feet above and beside the cove. At the far end the path continued down to the shore. At this end, and at right angles, a kind of causeway of natural rock, widened and made regular with stone outworks, sloped gently seawards beside a vertical pitch of cliff. Formerly there had been a lower and longer section, a breakwater jutting beyond the cliffs. On a clear day the foundations could be seen beneath the sea, a dark rectangular shadow. But a storm had removed it, and the light at its sea-tip. Now the causeway ended where the cliffs curved round to make a headland, and a low wall edged it.

David saw the lantern shining near the far end of the causeway, illuminating sheets of spray that swept by. He was glad that she had not gone down to the shore. He moved carefully towards her. The darkness was intense. The cliff gave some shelter, but on the other side the sea foamed and roared below. The tide was up. No one could have survived a fall.

The girl was standing on the extreme edge of the causeway, holding her lantern before her and swinging it from side to side, as if signalling out to sea. He peered into the storm, disbelieving that any small boat could live out there, or could expect shelter in the rough and unprotected cove. Yet why else should she wave her lantern?

When he was but a few yards from her, she moved forward, paused, and disappeared slowly over the edge. He stumbled to the wall and straining forward, peered down. Gouts of stinging spray beat against him, filling his eyes with salt water so that he was practically blinded. But he knew what she was doing. And it was madness.

Down this vertical outer face of the causeway were the remains of the old steps, some missing, others dangerously reduced, that once led to the breakwater. Now they led to the raging sea.

David felt sick from the taste of fear. Perhaps he should have followed, tried to draw her back, but he did not have the courage. He gripped the low wall, clung to it as though his whole world might disappear and this his sole support. The light still shed its wavering beams down there, irradiating a patch of sea and spray. That she had survived so far was a miracle.

Then he saw something that killed all power of movement, fused him to the wall with a total paralysis of fear.

The light was out on the water, moving out on the water, the girl holding it high above her head. No, she was not on the water. She was above the water, ten or fifteen feet above the water.

The girl was swinging the lantern in wide arcs. The spray swept over her, the wind tore at her cloak and hair. She was thirty, forty yards away now, a lonely circle of light above the wastes of storm-tossed sea, waving her lantern regularly, desperately, though her arms must have been breaking. And below her – nothing, space, sea spray, wind.

Then there was a terrifying rumbling, roaring, very loud and near, quite distinct from thunder, as if masonry or rock was sliding and falling in huge quantities. David felt, or thought he felt, the ground shake beneath his feet. And above this, above all the multitudinous noises of the gale, he heard quite distinctly a thin distant cry, her cry.

For a brief moment he stood there, still locked by fear. He could see nothing, think nothing. Then he was running like a madman back up the causeway. His senses, stretched by fear, led him safely to the path, and he stopped. He looked back.

The causeway was still there. The occasional and now distant lightning revealed the great blunt silhouette, the black cliffs on the left, the sea beyond. Nothing moved. No light shone out. He was alone. Some instinct told him that he was quite alone.

He sat down. He was unnerved, exhausted, still trembling with a residue of fear, far from the hope of connected rational thought. He sat there for a long time.

The storm was dying perceptibly, the wind less strong, the thunder distant, the rain a steady drizzle. Only the sea raged with undiminished fury.

At some point he forced himself to rise and go slowly back down the causeway. Afterwards he used to think this the most courageous thing he had done. He reached the edge, the low salt-sprayed wall. There was only the sea. She had gone.

When he entered the cottage the expression on his face must have told her. For Mrs Brown said at once, wearily, with resignation, almost pity in her voice, and yet with a hint of triumph: ‘You’ve seen Sally.’

And only then, not until then, did he connect that old mystery with his present experience. He sat down very suddenly on the floor by the fire. When the clock on the mantel-shelf struck eight he was amazed; he felt that he had been out for hours, days, half a lifetime. ‘Sally, Sally, Sally.’ The name ran through his mind nearly to the exclusion of any other thought.

Mrs Brown treated him like a child. She helped him off with his sodden clothing, put him into his pyjamas and a dressing-gown, made him drink the brandy she kept for emergencies. He could not eat much, but did begin to recover. He was able to tell her what had happened.

When he had finished she said: ‘And the handkerchief? You have the handkerchief?’

They looked at each other. ‘It should be in the pocket of my trousers.’

Mrs Brown went into the kitchen where she had piled the wet clothes. She came back, a white handkerchief in her hand. She was turning it over, looking at the corners. She held it out to him, a strange expression on her face. In one corner were embroidered the initials ‘S.B.’, and beneath them a pattern of three interlocking hearts.

She went out again, leaving him to digest this new fact: for here was a fact, incontrovertible, unassailable. He heard her climb the stairs and walk across the floor of her bedroom overhead. A drawer was opened and closed, all slowly and deliberately, and she was on her way back. She came in holding two more handkerchiefs, unfolded, and marked like the one he had recovered, except that the initials were different.

‘She made three of them, one for me, one for her father, and one for herself. She was fifteen. Our hearts were joined like this, she said, and must never be parted. I kept mine in a drawer. Ted always took his to sea with him, and it was on his body when they found it, tied round his arm under his jersey. Hers I never found.’

She looked quickly at him, then away at the fire. They were silent for a long time. When she spoke she startled him. He had dozed off. ‘And there’s something else on it. My Ted and Sally went in 1934. That breakwater went in the great storm of 1872. Many a time I heard my father tell of it, and other folks. It was never rebuilt.’

In silence again they digested that piece of information. For David, things did not quite fit. He did not understand what had happened but was too exhausted to puzzle. He gave in, dragged himself to bed. He slept until ten the next morning and still felt beaten, flattened, sucked dry of energy.

Mrs Brown brought him the daily paper and some breakfast. She said nothing in particular, only recounting some of the damage done to the village by the storm: chimneys down, tiles gone, flooded rooms, fallen trees, the one telephone out of action.

The paper told the same story on a wider scale. Flooding down the narrow coombes had caused the worst damage. Several lives had been lost. The storm, at least, David had not imagined. What had he imagined? Nothing, he told himself over and over again. He had not imagined a thing. What he had seen had been there, and anyone with him would have seen it too. And yet, and yet . . .

Next day he went into Barnstaple to look up the files of the local newspaper. He wanted to confirm about the breakwater, which he did; and he wanted to see if the death of Sally and her father had been reported. Mrs Brown still kept her silence, and he thought there might be more than the neighbour had recalled.

There was. No one had seen Sally after she left the bus. They had not been able to account for her surrender by the sea. But at the inquest one small and curious fact had emerged unbidden and apparently irrelevant. The court reporter had given it the light touch.

An old woman from the village, now dead, had placed a lantern on a hook outside her house: always she did this in dirty weather at night, always had, always would. During the storm her lantern had gone. She had come to complain to the Coroner, having found no satisfaction with the police. She wanted a replacement. The Coroner tried to soothe her. She had persisted. Finally he had paid for a new lantern himself. He was a busy man.

David found nothing else new in the report. The questions still circled round, whirlpools in the mind.

That evening, the second after the storm, he went for his customary walk. He was nervous but determined to be normal. He did not get far. Half-way through the wood, at about the spot where the sheep had burst across the path, he came suddenly to the lip of a chasm, earth-streaked and rubble-strewn. The path had vanished with the fallen cliff. There was a gap of fifty yards. Trees hung over the edge at drunken angles. He drew back, frightened. He had glimpsed the sea at his feet far below, the sea which had swallowed the millions of tons that must have hit it two nights past, which had swallowed Sally, which could swallow him.

So he had heard a real fall, which might well have shaken the causeway by its impact. But the cry! What of the cry!

Mrs Brown did not seem too well over the next few days. He began to worry about her. On the morning when he had to leave she looked more than ever withdrawn. Her frame was shrinking, as though the life spirit was draining out. He thought she ought to see a doctor and said so.

‘Doctors can’t cure me, my dear. I’ll be joining my Ted soon.’

‘Oh, stuff and nonsense. You’ve many a summer yet.’ But David did not believe his own words. For the first time in his memory she had not referred to Ted as someone who was near by, about to come in, or unexpectedly engaged elsewhere.

‘Are you sure you will be all right? Send a telegram if you need my help. I’ll come at once.’

She smiled. ‘You be off then, Mr Pitt. You’ll be back soon enough.’ She waved him out of sight.

In London again he began to feel distaste for his work and for the city. It was a feeling stronger and longer-lasting than the usual post-holiday disenchantment. He was unable to rid his mind of Sally and the storm and the village and Mrs Brown, and could not concentrate on work. He turned the problems over and over, even jotted down on paper a short account of the events. He was out of his depth, deeply disturbed yet at times excited, as though he might be on the edge of an important discovery. Once, walking across Waterloo Bridge during a lunch-hour, he felt a close-to-irresistible urge to shout, to throw his briefcase and the hats of his fellow pedestrians into the river, so powerfully was he overtaken by the sensation that great events were pending.

In October, five weeks after his return, it was not a telegram that came from Mrs Brown but a letter, with a covering note from the doctor. She had died quietly and easily three days earlier. She had lost the will to live, he wrote, though none in the village could say why.

David opened the letter, fumbling, anxious. ‘It is time for me to go,’ he read. ‘Now that Sally has chosen you and has company, I have no worries.’ Her writing was surprisingly firm; it did not wander over the page. ‘I have told them that you are to have the cottage. They will write to you about it when I am gone, which won’t be long now, praise God. I’ve missed him all these years.

‘Sally is a good girl. Look after her and she’ll be no trouble. Here is her handkerchief. She gave it to you and will want you to be having it. The other two they’ll bury with me. Goodbye, dear friend, and God keep you.’

Nothing else. Whatever she had known of Sally, living or dead, had gone with her. It was left to him to find out more if he would.

He unfolded the handkerchief, with its carefully embroidered initials and its three hearts. For a long time he stared at it as it lay on his knee. He felt sad that he would not again see the old lady. But he felt happy about the cottage, contented, almost as if he had been expecting this for a long time, which was not the case. Sally had long hair and a lovely face. He did not think of her as anguished now, haunted, despairing. She was smiling.

He refolded the handkerchief and placed it carefully into the inner breast-pocket of his coat. Was the old lady right? Had he Sally now as well as the cottage? He would have to go down there to find out. He would have to, wouldn’t he?

David’s narrative finished with the words exactly as reproduced above. On the 12th October he left his London flat and moved to the cottage. Two weeks later he instructed his solicitor to sell the flat and all the furniture. On the 16th November he was drowned. His will, dated 14th November I understand, left everything to his sister. But he left me the portrait. What happened down at the cottage? The letter that David wrote to me when enclosing the narrative provides the only evidence. It is dated 5th November, was postmarked 16th November, but was obviously begun much earlier and added to on several occasions, almost like a journal. I have separated the successive entries, which are obvious enough in the original because of the spacing, or a change of pens, and in one case from the use of pencil. The writing throughout is controlled. The handkerchief, by the way, was not found on his body. I made discreet inquiries.

Dear Patrick,

The enclosed story is as true as I can make it, and you are the only person I care to entrust it to. If you find it a queer tale, I can only plead that it happened, which I think gives to it a kind of power that might be missing from fiction, though of course fiction also ‘happens’. But you know what I mean. If there is a sequel, I will write it down and you shall see it.

Sally came to me last night. She’s a very beautiful girl. She has luminous brown eyes, and when I gaze into them I feel that I have come home. Looking at her gives me the feeling I sometimes get when a bit of painting goes especially well, a feeling of exact propriety, of rightness, of inevitability. Her face has an ethereal quality, which is perhaps only natural. The skin has but the faintest tinge of pink and looks even paler because framed by that long black hair. Her body . . . well, I am not sure that I want to relate even to you the detail of everything, though Sally says she does not mind. After all, this is our honeymoon. She has proved to me that I am her first lover.

I am not accustomed to instant autobiography, have never kept a diary. You will ask questions and I shall not have answered them. But you can write to me.

Sally took me down to the causeway last evening. The leaves are nearly all fallen now, even in this sheltered corner, so that the views from the path into and across the cove are more extensive. There was, I thought, a hint of frost in the air. I confess that I had been reluctant to go that way since the evening of the storm, but Sally says that the best way to conquer fear is to face it, and of course she is right. It is obvious that the villagers cannot see her as I do. I have to be careful when we go out together or they will think me mad. I do the shopping, of course, and most of the eating. Sally says that she must watch her figure, which I thought rather funny. But she was serious. She drinks milk, nibbles at water biscuits, and sometimes eats a boiled egg. I never used to bother much with milk, so have had to invent a story for Mrs Duncannon, who sells the stuff. I’ve told her that my London doctor has ordered me to swallow as much of it every day as I can manage.

I have begun to paint Sally. I have to do it in the cottage, where the light is never too good, for I could not explain to the inevitable viewer outside how I am able to paint the portrait of a young lady while gazing at a grass bank or a patch of sea. Besides, the older villagers might recognise her likeness, and how should I get out of that one? She is a good sitter, content to stay reasonably still for thirty or forty minutes at a stretch.

November 3rd. The evenings draw in. I get an odd feeling now, almost a certainty, that my present way of life will not last. This makes me both nervous and excited. Sally won’t say anything directly. But she looks at me sometimes with a question in her eye, as though she was assessing me, judging my fitness for some plan that she has yet to disclose.

I have found that she likes red wine, which she had never drunk, and which I have to get from Barnstaple. If my money is to last, I ought not to be buying wine, not regularly. Yet I am unable to worry about money or security now that I am with Sally. There’s a turn-up for the book, you will say, remembering how for years I prostituted my talent for commerce (your phrase). Most evenings we sit drinking before a wood and coal fire in the living-room. It is then that I catch her staring at me. She smiles and I try to hide my disquiet. But she knows. I realised this afternoon, with a shock, that she would be fifty-eight if she had lived. As things are, she’s been preserved for me. And if things are to continue as they are, I’ll have to preserve myself for her.

Here’s an odd fact. My neighbour’s dog, with whom I used to be great friends, will not now come near me. But the tabby cat from Mrs Gladower’s cottage across the street visits us more than ever.

Down to the causeway again tonight. It’s always at night now, or at any rate after dark. I think I begin to know what Sally has in mind and I am afraid. Yet I trust her. I could not live without her.

The painting is going well. At work on it I feel fulfilled yet relaxed, and each problem as I reach it seems to solve itself. Of course I have never been so in love with the subject of my work.

Birth must be terrifying, and I dare say most of us would refuse the experience had we the choice. So with death. Sally does not talk of death. I suppose she takes it for granted. But she has made it clear that from her point of view our present life is not a satisfactory compromise. For one thing, I grow older and she does not. I’m no believer in the standard religions, so I lack received knowledge of the next stage. That does not worry me. It is the moments of transit that I fear. As soon as I am ready Sally wants me to move on. It may be that her own time is limited. I must reverse the old custom and follow my wife wherever she leads.

I wish it was summer. The sea will be so cold. I shall post this to you tomorrow morning. I do not wish strange eyes to read it, not until you’ve seen it, old friend, and it has acquired, as it were, the shell and patina of history. And you are to have the painting, which will be, I suppose, the only ‘proof’ of our marriage. I think I have got her pretty well. It’s odd, isn’t it? As I write these words, with Sally in the other armchair staring at the flames of the fire that flicker and shadow the black beams and white walls of her mother’s living-room, a room I know far better than I know myself; as I write, everything about me is real and vivid. Yet when you read what I have written, for you this will be history, already to a large degree unreal. We cannot truly share experience, can we? Though I wish that I could convey to you the quality of my sharing with Sally. We hardly need words (which is just as well, for the villagers are beginning to fall quiet at my approach!). To be together is a sufficient excellence. Nothing else is important. But I cannot paint quicksilver thought, nor can clumsy words wrapped in an envelope carry to you the spirit of things. Never mind. Lie back, close your eyes, add a thousand per cent to what I write, and perhaps you will understand why you and I cannot meet again. The causeway will be my launching pad to felicity. Tomorrow night, for a storm is forecast. I suppose my departure will cause the tongues to wag. How could one explain?

Sally has just looked up and says to write you her love. She is laughing and looks happier than she has done for some days. She has been rather solemn. She can be very funny when she is happy.

Farewell, and be good.

David