The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

JOAN AIKEN Hair

TOM ORFORD STOOD leaning over the rail and watching the flat hazy shores of the Red Sea slide past. A month ago he had been watching them slide in the other direction. Sarah had been with him then, leaning and looking after the ship’s wake, laughing and whispering ridiculous jokes into his ear.

They had been overflowingly happy, playing endless deck games with the other passengers, going to the ship’s dances in Sarah’s mad, rakish conception of fancy dress, even helping to organise the appalling concerts of amateur talent, out of their gratitude to the world.

“You’ll tire yourself out!” somebody said to Sarah, as she plunged from deck-tennis to swimming in the ship’s pool, from swimming to dancing, from dancing to ping pong. “As if I could,” she said to Tom. “I’ve done so little all my life, I have twenty-one years of accumulated energy to work off.”

But just the same, that was what she had done. She had died, vanished, gone out, as completely as a forgotten day, or a drift of the scent of musk. Gone, lost to the world. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, he thought. Not matter, no. The network of bones and tendons, the dandelion clock of fair hair, the brilliantly blue eyes that had once belonged to Sarah, and had so riotously obeyed her will for a small portion of her life — a forty-second part of it, perhaps — was now quietly returning to earth in a Christian cemetery in Ceylon. But her spirit, the fiery intention which had co-ordinated that machine of flesh and bone and driven it through her life — the spirit, he knew, existed neither in air nor earth. It had gone out, like a candle.

He did not leave the ship at Port Said. It was there that he had met Sarah. She had been staying with friends, the Acres. Orford had gone on a trip up the Nile with her. Then they had started for China. This was after they had been married, which happened almost immediately. And now he was coming back with an address, and a bundle of hair to give to her mother. For she had once laughingly asked him to go and visit her mother, if she were to die first.

“Not that she’d enjoy your visit,” said Sarah dryly. “But she’d be highly offended if she didn’t get a lock of hair, and she might as well have the lot, now I’ve cut it off. And you could hardly send it to her in a registered envelope.”

He had laughed, because then death seemed a faraway and irrelevant threat, a speck on the distant horizon.

“Why are we talking about it, anyway?” he said.

“Death always leaps to mind when I think of Mother,” she answered, her eyes dancing. “Due to her I’ve lived in an atmosphere of continuous death for twenty-one years.”

She had told him her brief story. When she reached twenty-one, and came into an uncle’s legacy, she had packed her brush and comb and two books and a toothbrush (“All my other possessions, if they could be called mine, were too ugly to take”), and, pausing only at a hairdresser’s to have her bun cut off (he had seen a photograph of her at nineteen, a quiet, dull-looking girl, weighed down by her mass of hair) she had set off for Egypt to visit her only friend, Mrs Acres. She wrote to her mother from Cairo. She had had one letter in return.

“My dear Sarah, as you are now of age I cannot claim to have any further control over you, for you are, I trust, perfectly healthy in mind and body. I have confidence in the upbringing you received, which furnished you with principles to guide you through life’s vicissitudes. I know that in the end you will come back to me.”

“She seems to have taken your departure quite lightly,” Orford said, reading it over her shoulder.

“Oh, she never shows when she’s angry,” Sarah said. She studied the letter again. “Little does she know,” was her final comment, as she put it away. “Hey, I don’t want to think about her. Quick, let’s go out and see something — a pyramid or a cataract or a sphinx. Do you realise that I’ve seen absolutely nothing — nothing — nothing all my life? Now I’ve got to make up for lost time. I want to see Rome and Normandy and Illyria and London — I’ve never been there, except Heathrow — and Norwegian fjords and the Taj Mahal.”

Tomorrow, Orford thought, he would have to put on winter clothes. He remembered how the weather had become hotter and hotter on the voyage out. Winter to summer, summer to winter again.

London, when he reached it, was cold and foggy. He shrank into himself, sitting in the taxi which squeaked and rattled its way from station to station, like a moving tomb. At Charing Cross he ran into an acquaintance who exclaimed, “Why, Tom old man, I didn’t expect to see you for another month. Thought you were on your honeymoon or something?”

Orford slid away into the crowd.

“And can you tell me where Marl End is?” he was presently asking, at a tiny ill-lit station which felt as if it were in the middle of the steppes.

“Yes, sir,” said the man, after some thought. “You’d best phone for a taxi. It’s a fair way. Right through the village and on over the sheepdowns.”

An aged Ford, lurching through the early winter dusk, which was partly mist, brought him to a large redbrick house, set baldly in the middle of a field.

“Come back and call for me at seven,” he said, resolving to take no chances with the house, and the driver nodded, shifting his gears, and drove away into the fog as Orford knocked at the door.

The first thing that struck him was her expression of relentless, dogged intention. Such, he thought, might be the look on the face of a coral mite, setting out to build up an atoll from the depths of the Pacific.

He could not imagine her ever desisting from any task she had set her hand to.

Her grief seemed to be not for herself but for Sarah.

“Poor girl. Poor girl. She would have wanted to come home again before she died. Tired herself out, you say? It was to be expected. Ah well.”

Ah well, her tone said, it isn’t my fault. I did what I could. I could have prophesied what would happen; in fact I did; but she was out of my control, it was her fault, not mine.

“Come close to the fire,” she said. “You must be cold after that long journey.”

Her tone implied he had come that very night from Sarah’s cold un-Christian deathbed, battling through frozen seas, over Himalayas, across a dead world.

“No, I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll stay where I am. This is a very warm room.” The stifling, hothouse air pressed on his face, solid as sand. He wiped his forehead.

“My family, unfortunately are all extremely delicate,” she said, eyeing him. “Poor things, they need a warm house. Sarah — my husband — my sister — I daresay Sarah told you about them?”

“I’ve never seen my father,” he remembered Sarah saying. “I don’t know what happened to him — whether he’s alive or dead. Mother always talks about him as if he were just outside in the garden.”

But there had been no mention of an aunt. He shook his head.

“Very delicate,” she said. She smoothed back her white hair, which curved over her head like a cap, into its neat bun at the back. “Deficient in thyroid — thyroxin, do they call it? She needs constant care.”

Her smile was like a swift light passing across a darkened room.

“My sister disliked poor Sarah — for some queer reason of her own — so all the care of her fell on me. Forty years.”

“Terrible for you,” he answered mechanically.

The smile passed over her face again.

“Oh, but it is really quite a happy life for her, you know. She draws, and plays with clay, and of course she is very fond of flowers and bright colours. And nowadays she very seldom loses her temper, though at one time I had a great deal of trouble with her.”

I manage all, her eyes said, I am the strong one, I keep the house warm, the floors polished, the garden dug, I have cared for the invalid and reared my child, the weight of the house has rested on these shoulders and in these hands.

He looked at her hands as they lay in her black silk lap, fat and white with dimpled knuckles.

“Would you care to see over the house?” she said.

He would not, but could think of no polite way to decline. The stairs were dark and hot, with a great shaft of light creeping round the corner at the top.

“Is anybody there?” a quavering voice called through a half-closed door. It was gentle, frail, and unspeakably old.

“Go to sleep, Miss Whiteoak, go to sleep,” she called back. “You should have swallowed your dose long ago.”

“My companion,” she said to Orford, “is very ill.”

He had not heard of any companion from Sarah.

“This is my husband’s study,” she told him, following him into a large, hot room.

Papers were stacked in orderly piles on the desk. The bottle of ink was half full. A half-written letter lay on the blotter. But who occupied this room? “Mother always talks as if he were just outside.”

On the wall hung several exquisite Japanese prints. Orford exclaimed in pleasure.

“My husband is fond of those prints,” she said, following his glance. “I can’t see anything in them myself. Why don’t they make objects the right size, instead of either too big or too small? I like something I can recognise, I tell him.”

Men are childish, her eyes said, and it is the part of women to see that they do nothing foolish, to look after them.

They moved along the corridor.

“This was Sarah’s room,” she said.

Stifling, stifling, the bed, chair, table, chest all covered in white sheets. Like an airless graveyard waiting for her, he thought.

“I can’t get to sleep,” Miss Whiteoak called through her door. “Can’t I come downstairs?”

“No, no, I shall tell you when you may come down,” the old lady called back. “You are not nearly well enough yet!”

Orford heard a sigh.

“Miss Whiteoak is wonderfully devoted,” she said, as they slowly descended the stairs. “I have nursed her through so many illnesses. She would do anything for me. Only, of course, there isn’t anything that she can do now, poor thing.”

At the foot of the stairs an old, old woman in a white apron was lifting a decanter from a sideboard.

“That’s right, Drewett,” she said. “This gentleman will be staying to supper. You had better make some broth. I hope you are able to stay the night?” she said to Orford.

But when he explained that he could not even stay to supper she took the news calmly.

“Never mind about the broth, then, Drewett. Just bring in the sherry.”

The old woman hobbled away, and they returned to the drawing room. He gave her the tissue-paper full of Sarah’s hair.

She received the bundle absently, then examined it with a sharp look. “Was this cut before or after she died?”

“Oh — before — before I married her.” He wondered what she was thinking. She gave a long, strange sigh, and presently remarked, “That accounts for everything.”

Watching the clutch of her fat, tight little hands on the hair, he began to be aware of a very uneasy feeling, as if he had surrendered something that only now, when it was too late, he realised had been of desperate importance to Sarah. He remembered, oddly, a tale from childhood: “Where is my heart, dear wife? Here it is, dear husband: I am keeping it wrapped up in my hair.”

But Sarah had said, “She might as well have the lot, now I’ve cut it off.”

He almost put out his hand to take it back; wondered if, without her noticing, he could slip the packet back into his pocket.

Drewett brought in the sherry in the graceful decanter with a long, fine glass spout at one side. He commented on it.

“My husband bought it in Spain,” she said. “Twenty years ago. I have always taken great care of it.”

The look on her face gave him again that chilly feeling of uneasiness. “Another glass?” she asked him.

“No, I really have to go.” He looked at his watch, and said with relief, “My taxi will be coming back for me in five minutes.”

There came a sudden curious mumbling sound from a dim corner of the room. It made him start so violently that he spilt some of his sherry. He had supposed the place empty, apart from themselves.

“Ah, feeling better, dear?” the old lady said.

She walked slowly over to the corner and held out a hand, saying, “Come and see poor Sarah’s husband. Just think — she had a husband — isn’t that a queer thing?”

Orford gazed aghast at the stumbling slobbering creature that came reluctantly forward, tugging away from the insistent white hand. His repulsion was the greater because in its vacant, puffy-eyed stare he could detect a shadowy resemblance to Sarah.

“She’s just like a child, of course,” said the old lady indulgently. “Quite dependent on me, but wonderfully affectionate, in her way.” She gave the cretin a fond glance. “Here, Louisa, here’s something pretty for you! Look, dear — lovely hair.”

Dumbly, Orford wondered what other helpless, infirm pieces of humanity might be found in this house, all dependent on the silver-haired old lady who brooded over them, sucking them dry like a gentle spider. What might he trip over in the darkness of the hall? Who else had escaped?

The conscious part of his mind was fixed in horror as he watched Louisa rapaciously knotting and tearing and plucking at the silver-gold mass of hair.

“I think I hear your taxi,” the old lady said. “Say good-night, Louisa!”

Louisa said good-night in her fashion, the door shut behind him — and he was in the car, in the train, in a cold hotel bedroom, with nothing but the letter her mother had written her to remind him that Sarah had ever existed.