Though there were three boys, there were also twelve long years between Hilary Brigstock and his immediately elder brother, Gilbert. On the other hand, there was only one year and one month between Gilbert and the future head of the family, Roger.
Hilary could not remember when first the suggestion entered his ears that his existence was the consequence of a "mistake". Possibly he had in any case hit upon the idea already, within his own head. Nor did his Christian name help very much: people always supposed it to be the name of a girl, even though his father asserted loudly on all possible occasions that the idea was a complete mistake, a product of etymological and historical ignorance, and of typical modern sloppiness.
And his mother was dead. He was quite unable to remember her, however hard he tried; as he from time to time did. Because his father never remarried, having as clear and definite views about women as he had about many other things, Hilary grew up against an almost entirely male background. In practice, this background seemed to consist fundamentally of Roger and Gilbert forever slugging and bashing at one another, with an occasional sideswipe at their kid brother. So Hilary, though no milksop, tended to keep his own counsel and his own secrets. In particular, there are few questions asked by a young boy when there is no woman to reply to them; or, at least, few questions about anything that matters.
The family lived in the remoter part of Surrey. There was a very respectable, rather expensive, semi-infant school, Briarside, to which most of the young children were directed from the earliest age practicable. Hilary was duly sent there, as had been his brothers ahead of him, in order to learn some simple reading and figuring, and how to catch a ball, before being passed on to the fashionable preparatory school, Gorselands, on his way to Cheltenham or Wellington. Some of the family went to the one place, some to the other. It was an unusual arrangement, and outsiders could never see the sense in it.
Almost unavoidably, Briarside was a mixed establishment (though it would have been absurd to describe it as co-educational), and there Hilary formed a close and remarkable friendship with a girl, two years older than himself, named Mary Rossiter. The little girls at the school were almost the first Hilary had ever met. Even his young cousins were all boys, as happens in some families.
Mary had dark, frizzy hair, which stuck out round her head; and a rather flat face, with, however, an already fine pair of large, dark eyes, which not only sparkled, but seemed to move from side to side in surprising jerks as she spoke, which, if permitted, she did almost continuously. Generally she wore a shirt or sweater and shorts, as little girls were beginning to do at that time, and emanated extroversion; but occasionally, when there was a school celebration, more perhaps for the parents than for the tots, she would appear in a really beautiful silk dress, eclipsing everyone, and all the more in that the dress seemed not precisely right for her, but more like a stage costume. Mary Rossiter showed promise of natural leadership (some of the mums already called her "bossy"), but her fine eyes were for Hilary alone; and not only her eyes, but hands and lips and tender words as well.
From within the first few days of his arrival, Hilary was sitting next to Mary at the classes (if such they could be called) and partnering her inseparably in the playrooms and the garden. The establishment liked the boys to play with the boys, the girls with the girls, and normally no admonition whatever was needed in those directions; but when it came to Hilary and Mary, the truth was that already Mary was difficult to resist when she was set upon a thing. She charmed, she smiled, and she persisted. Moreover, her father was very rich; and it was obvious from everything about her that her parents doted on her.
There were large regions of the week which the school did not claim to fill. Most of the parents awaited the release of their boys and girls and bore them home in small motor cars of the wifely kind. But Mary was left, perhaps dangerously, with her freedom; simply because she wanted it to be like that. At least, she wanted it to be like that after she had met Hilary. It is less certain where she had stood previously. As for Hilary, no one greatly cared — within a wide span of hours — whether he was home or not. There was a woman named Mrs Parker who came in each day and did all that needed to be done and did it as well as could be expected (Hilary's father would not even have considered such a person "living in"); but she had no authority to exercise discipline over Hilary, and, being thoroughly modern in her ideas, no temperamental inclination either. If Hilary turned up for his tea, it would be provided. If he did not, trouble was saved.
Hilary and Mary went for long, long walks; for much of the distance, hand in hand. In the midst of the rather droopy and distorted southern-Surrey countryside (or one-time countryside), they would find small, worked-out sandpits, or, in case of rain, disused, collapsing huts, and there they would sit close together, or one at the other's feet, talking without end, and gently embracing. He would force his small fingers through her wiry mop and make jokes about electricity coming out at the ends. She would touch the back of his neck, inside his faded red shirt, with her lips, and nuzzle into the soft, fair thicket on top of his head. They learned the southern-Surrey byways and bridlepaths remarkably thoroughly, for six or eight miles to the southeast, and six or eight miles to the southwest; and, in fact, collaborated in drawing a secret map of them. That was one of the happiest things they ever did. They were always at work revising the secret map, by the use of erasers, and adding to it, and colouring it with crayons borrowed from Briarside. They never tired of walking, because no one had ever said they should.
One day they were badly frightened.
They were walking down a sandy track, which they did not exactly know, when they came upon a large property with a wall round it. The wall was high and apparently thick. It had been covered throughout its length with plaster, but much of the plaster had either flaked, or fallen completely away, revealing the yellow bricks within, themselves tending to crumble. The wall was surmounted by a hipped roofing, which projected, in order to throw clear as much as possible of any rain that might descend; and this roofing also was much battered and gapped. One might have thought the wall to be in a late stage of disease. It was blotched and mottled in every direction. None the less, it continued to be very far from surmountable, even by a fully grown person.
Hilary took a run at it, clutching at a plant which protruded from a gap in the exposed pointing, and simultaneously setting his foot upon the plaster at the bottom of a large space where the rest of the plaster had fallen away. The consequence was instant disaster. The plant leapt from its rooting, and at the same time the plaster on which Hilary's small weight rested fell off the wall in an entire large slab, and shattered into smaller pieces among the rank grass and weeds below, where Hilary lay also.
"Hilary!" It was an authentic scream, and of authentic agony.
"It's all right, Mary." Hilary resolutely raised himself, resolutely refused to weep. "I'm all right. Really I am."
She had run to him and was holding him tightly.
"Mary, please. I'll choke."
Her arms fell away from him, but uncertainly.
"We'd better go home," she said.
"No, of course not. I'm perfectly all right, I tell you. It was nothing." But this last he did not really believe.
"It was terrible," said Mary, with solemnity. She was wearing a skirt that day, a small-scale imitation of an adult woman's tweed skirt, and he could see her knees actually knocking together.
He put his arm round her shoulder, but, as he did so, became aware that he was shaking himself. "Silly," he said affectionately. "It wasn't anything much. Let's go on."
But she merely stood there, quivering beneath his extended arm.
There was a perceptible pause. Then she said: "I don't like this place."
It was most unlike her to say such a thing. He had never before known her to do so.
But always he took her seriously. "What's the matter?" he asked. "I am all right, you know. I truly am. You can feel me if you like."
And then the dog started barking — if, indeed, one could call it a bark. It was more like a steady growling roar, with a clatter mixed up in it, almost certainly of gnashing teeth: altogether something more than barking, but unmistakably canine, all the same — horribly so. Detectably it came from within the domain behind the high wall.
"Hilary," said Mary, "let's run."
But her unusual attitude had put Hilary on his mettle.
"I don't know," he said. "Not yet."
"What d'you mean?" she asked.
"I see it like this," said Hilary, rubbing a place on his knee. "Either the dog is chained up, or shut in behind that wall, and we're all right Or else he isn't, and it's no good our running."
It was somewhat the way that Mary's own influence had taught him to think, and she responded to it.
"Perhaps we should look for some big stones," she suggested.
"Yes," he said. "Though I shouldn't think it'll be necessary. I think he must be safely shut up in some way. He'd have been out by now otherwise."
"I'm going to look," said Mary.
There are plenty of stones in the worn earth of southern Surrey, and many old bricks and other constructional detritus also. Within two or three minutes, Mary had assembled a pile of such things.
In the meantime, Hilary had gone on a little along the track. He stood there, listening to the clamorous dog almost calmly.
Mary joined him, holding up the front part of her skirt, which contained four of the largest stones, more than she could carry in her hands.
"We won't need them," said Hilary, with confidence. "And if we do, they're everywhere."
Mary leaned forward and let the stones fall to the ground, taking care that they missed her toes. Possibly the quite loud thuds made the dog bark more furiously than ever.
"Perhaps he's standing guard over buried treasure?" suggested Mary.
"Or over some fairy kingdom that mortals may not enter," said Hilary.
They talked about such things for much of the time when they were together. Once they had worked together upon an actual map of Fairyland, and with Giantland adjoining.
"He might have lots of heads," said Mary.
"Come on, let's look," said Hilary.
"Quietly," said Mary, making no other demur.
He took her hand.
"There must be a gate," she remarked, after they had gone a little further, with the roaring, growling bark as obstreperous as ever.
"Let's hope it's locked then," he replied. At once he added: "Of course it's locked. He'd have been out by now otherwise."
"You said that before," said Mary. "But perhaps the answer is that there is no gate. There can't always be a gate, you know."
But there was a gate; a pair of gates, high, wrought iron, scrolled, rusted, and heavily padlocked. Through them, Hilary and Mary could see a large, palpably empty house, with many of the windows glassless, and the paint on the outside walls surviving only in streaks and smears, pink, green, and blue, as the always vaguely polluted atmosphere added its corruption to that inflicted by the weather. The house was copiously mock-battlemented and abundantly ogeed: a structure, without doubt, in the Gothic Revival taste, though of a period uncertain over at least a hundred years. Some of the heavy chimney-stacks had broken off and fallen. The front door, straight before them, was a recessed shadow. It was difficult to see whether it was open or shut. The paving stones leading to it were lost in mossy dampness.
"Haunted house," said Mary.
"What's that?" enquired Hilary.
"Don't exactly know," said Mary. "But Daddy says they're everywhere, though people don't realize it."
"But how can you tell?" asked Hilary, looking at her seriously and a little anxiously.
"Just by the look," replied Mary with authority. "You can tell at once when you know. It's a mistake to look for too long, though."
"Ought we to put it on the map?"
"I suppose so. I'm not sure."
"Is that dog going to bark all day, d'you think?"
"He'll stop when we go away. Let's go, Hilary."
"Look!" cried Hilary, clutching at her. "Here he is. He must have managed to break away. We must show no sign of fear. That's the important thing."
Curiously enough, Mary seemed in no need of this vital guidance. She was already standing rigidly, with her big eyes apparently fixed on the animal, almost as if hypnotized.
Of course, the tall, padlocked bars stood between them and the dog; and another curious thing was that the dog seemed to realize the fact, and to make allowance for it, in a most undoglike manner. Instead of leaping up at the bars in an endeavour to reach the two of them, and so to caress or bite them, it stood well back and simply stared at them, as if calculating hard. It barked no longer, but instead emitted an almost continuous sound halfway between a growl and a whine, and quite low.
It was a big, shapeless, yellow animal, with long, untidy legs, which shimmered oddly, perhaps as it sought a firm grip on the buried and slippery stones. The dog's yellow skin seemed almost hairless. Blotchy and draggled, it resembled the wall outside. Even the dog's eyes were a flat, dull yellow. Hilary felt strange and uneasy when he observed them; and next he felt upset as he realized that Mary and the dog were gazing at one another as if under a spell.
"Mary!" he cried out. "Mary, don't look like that. Please don't look like that."
He no longer dared to touch her, so alien had she become.
"Mary, let's go. You said we were to go." Now he had begun to cry, while all the time the dog kept up its muffled internal commotion, almost like soft singing.
In the end, but not before Hilary had become very wrought up, the tension fell away from Mary, and she was speaking normally.
"Silly," she said, caressing Hilary. "It's quite safe. You said so yourself."
He had no answer to that. The careful calculations by which earlier he had driven off the thought of danger had now proved terrifyingly irrelevant. All he could do was subside to the ground and lose himself in tears, his head between his knees.
Mary knelt beside him. "What are you crying about, Hilary? There's no danger. He's a friendly dog, really."
"He's not, he's not."
She tried to draw his hands away from his face. "Why are you crying, Hilary?" One might have felt that she quite urgently needed to know.
"I'm frightened."
"What are you frightened of? It can't be the dog. He's gone."
At that, Hilary slowly uncurled, and forgetting, on the instant, to continue weeping, directed his gaze at the rusty iron gates. There was no dog visible.
"Where's he gone, Mary? Did you see him go?"
"No, I didn't actually see him," she replied. "But he's gone. And that's what you care about, isn't it?"
"But why did he go? We're still here."
"I expect he had business elsewhere." He knew that she had acquired that explanation too from her father, because she had once told him so.
"Has he found a way out?"
"Of course he hasn't."
"How can you tell?"
"He's simply realized that we don't mean any harm."
"I don't believe you. You're just saying that. Why are you saying that, Mary? You were more scared than I was when we came here. What's happened to you, Mary?"
"What's happened to me is that I've got back a little sense." From whom, he wondered, had she learned to say that? It was so obviously insincere, that it first hurt, and then once more frightened him.
"I want to go home," he said.
She nodded, and they set off, but not hand in hand.
There was one more incident before they had left the area behind them.
As they returned up the gently sloping, sandy track, Hilary kept his eyes on the ground, carefully not looking at the yellow wall on his left, or looking at it as little as possible, and certainly not looking backwards over his shoulder. At the place where the wall bore away leftwards at a right angle, the track began to ascend rather more steeply for perhaps a hundred yards, to a scrubby tableland above. They were walking in silence, and Hilary's ears, always sharper than the average, were continuously strained for any unusual sound, probably from behind the wall, but possibly, and even more alarmingly, not. When some way up the steeper slope, he seemed to hear something, and could not stop himself from looking back.
There was indeed something to see, though Hilary saw it for only an instant.
At the corner of the wall, there was no special feature, as one might have half-expected, such as a turret or an obelisk. There was merely the turn in the hipped roofing. But now Hilary saw, at least for half a second, that a man was looking over, installed at the very extremity of the internal angle. There was about half of him visible, and he seemed tall and slender and bald. Hilary failed to notice how he was dressed: if, indeed, he was dressed at all.
Hilary jerked back his head. He did not feel able to mention what he had seen to Mary, least of all now.
He did not feel able, in fact, to mention the sight to anyone. Twenty years later, he was once about to mention it, but even then decided against doing so. In the meantime, and for years after these events, the thought and memory of them lay at the back of his mind; partly because of what had already happened, partly because of what happened soon afterwards.
The outing must have upset Hilary more than he knew, because the same evening he felt ill, and was found by Mrs Parker to have a temperature. That was the beginning of it, and the end of it was not for a period of weeks; during which there had been two doctors, and, on some of the days and nights, an impersonal nurse, or perhaps two of them also. There had also been much bluff jollying along from Hilary's father; Hilary's brothers being both at Wellington. Even Mrs Parker had to be reinforced by a blowsy teenager named Eileen.
In the end, and quite suddenly, Hilary felt as good as new: either owing to the miracles of modern medicine, or, more probably, owing to the customary course of nature.
"You may feel right, old son," said Doctor Morgan-Vaughan; "but you're not right, not yet."
"When can I go back to school?"
"Do you want to go back, son?"
"Yes," said Hilary.
"Well, well," said Doctor Morgan-Vaughan. "Small boys felt differently in my day."
"When can I?" asked Hilary.
"One fine day," said Doctor Morgan-Vaughan. "There's no hurry about it. You've been ill, son, really ill, and you don't want to do things in a rush."
So a matter of two months had passed before Hilary had any inkling of the fact that something had happened to Mary also. He would have liked to see her, but had not cared, rather than dared, to suggest it. At no time had he even mentioned her at home. There was no possibility of his hearing anything about her until his belated return to school.
Even then, the blowsy teenager was sent with him on the first day, lest, presumably, he faint at the roadside or vanish upwards to Heaven. His heart was heavy and confused, as he walked; and Eileen found difficulty in conversing with a kid of his kind anyway. He was slightly relieved by the fact that when they arrived at the school, she had no other idea than to hasten off with alacrity.
The headmistress (if so one might term her), who was also part-proprietor of the establishment, a neat lady of 36, was waiting specially for Hilary's arrival after his illness; and greeted him with kindness and a certain understanding. The children also felt a new interest in him, though with most of them it was only faint. But there was a little girl with two tight plaits and a gingham dress patterned with asters and sunflowers, who seemed more sincerely concerned about what had been happening to him. Her name was Valerie Watkinson.
"Where's Mary?" asked Hilary.
"Mary's dead," said Valerie Watkinson solemnly.
Hilary's first response was merely hostile. "I don't believe you," he said.
Valerie Watkinson nodded three or four times, even more solemnly.
Hilary clutched hold of both her arms above the elbows. "I don't believe you," he said again.
Valerie Watkinson began to cry. "You're hurting me."
Hilary took away his hands. Valerie did not move or make any further complaint. They stood facing one another in silence for a perceptible pause, with Valerie quietly weeping.
"Is it true?" said Hilary in the end.
Valerie nodded again behind her tiny handkerchief with a pinky-blue Swiss milkmaid on one corner. "You're very pale," she gasped out, her mouth muffled.
She stretched out a small damp hand. "Poor Hilary. Mary was your friend. I'm sorry for you, Hilary."
"Did she go to bed with a temperature?" asked Hilary. He was less unaccustomed than most children to the idea of death because he was perfectly well aware that of late he himself was said to have escaped death but narrowly.
This time Valerie shook her head, though with equal solemnity. "No," she said. "At least, I don't think so. It's all a mystery. We haven't been told she's dead. We thought she was ill, like you. Then Sandy saw something in the paper." Sandy Stainer was a podgy sprawling boy with, as one might suppose, vaguely reddish hair.
"What did he see?"
"Something nasty," said Valerie with confidence. "I don't know what it was. We're not supposed to know."
"Sandy knows."
"Yes," said Valerie.
"Hasn't he told?"
"He's been told not to. Miss Milland had him in her room."
"But don't you want to know yourself?"
"No, I don't," said Valerie, with extreme firmness. "My mummy says it's enough for us to know that poor Mary's dead. She says that's what really matters."
It was certainly what really mattered to Hilary. He passed his first day back at school looking very pallid and speaking no further word except when directly addressed by Miss Milland or Mrs Everson; both of whom agreed, after school hours, that Hilary Brigstock had been sent back before he should have been. It was something to which they were entirely accustomed: the children often seemed to divide into those perpetually truant and those perpetually in seeming need of more care and attention than they were receiving at home. That it should be so was odd in such a professional and directorial area; though Mrs Cartier, who looked in every now and then to teach elementary French, and was a Maoist, said it was just what one always found.
Hilary had never spoken to Sandy Stainer, nor ever wanted to. The present matter was not one which he would care to enquire about in such a quarter. Moreover, he knew perfectly well that he would be told nothing, but merely tormented. Sandy Stainer's lips had somehow been sealed in some remarkably effective way; and he would be likely to find, in such a situation, clear conscience and positive social sanction for quiet arm-twisting and general vexing of enquirers, especially of enquirers known to be as vulnerable as Hilary. And Mary had been so much to Hilary that he had no other close friend in the school — probably no other friend there at all. Perhaps Hilary was one of those men who are designed for one woman only.
Certainly he had no little friends outside the school; nor had ever been offered any. Nor, as usual, was the death of Mary a matter that could be laid before his father. In any case, what could his father permit himself to tell him; when all was so obscure, and so properly so?
Within a day or two, Hilary was back in bed once more, and again missing from school.
Doctor Morgan-Vaughan could not but suspect this time that the trouble contained a marked element of "the psychological"; but it was an aspect of medicine that had always struck him as almost entirely unreal, and certainly as a therapeutic dead end, except for those resolved to mine it financially. He preferred to treat visibly physiological disturbances with acceptably physiological nostra. In the present case, he seriously thought of again calling in Doctor Oughtred, who had undoubtedly made a very real contribution in the earlier manifestation of the child's illness.
"Do you read the local paper, Mrs Parker?" asked Hilary, whiter than the sheets between which he lay.
"I don't get round to it," replied Mrs Parker, in her carefully uncommitted way. "We take it in. Mr Parker feels we should."
"Why does he feel that?"
"Well, you want to know what's going on around you, don't you?"
"Yes," said Hilary.
"Not that Mr Parker reads anything very much. Why should he, when he's got the wireless? The Advertiser just piles up in heaps till the waste people come for it from the hospital."
"What do they do with it at the hospital?"
"Pulp it, I believe. You've got to do what you can for charity, haven't you?"
"Bring me all the local papers in the heap, Mrs Parker. I'm ill too. It's just like the hospital."
"You couldn't read them," said Mrs Parker, as before; carefully not conceding.
"I could," said Hilary.
"How's that? You can't read."
"I can," said Hilary. "I can read anything. Well, almost anything. Bring me the papers, Mrs Parker."
She expressed no surprise that he should want to read something so boring even to her; nor did it seem to strike her that there might be anything significant in his demand. In fact, she could think of nothing to say; and as, in any case, she was always wary about what she let fall in the ambience of her employment, she left Hilary's room without one word more.
But, as much as three days later, Eileen had something to say when she brought him his midday meal (not a very imaginative one) and an assembly of pills.
"You are old-fashioned," remarked Eileen. "At least that's what Mrs Parker thinks."
"What d'you mean?" asked Hilary in a sulky tone, because he disliked Eileen.
"Asking for the Advertiser, when you can't even read it."
"I can read it," said Hilary.
"I know more than Mrs Parker knows," said Eileen. "It's that little girl, isn't it? Mary Rossiter, your little sweetheart."
Hilary said nothing.
"I've seen you together. I know. Not that I've told Mrs Parker."
"You haven't?"
"Not likely. Why should I tell her?"
Hilary considered that.
"She's a silly cow," said Eileen casually.
Hilary was clutching with both hands at the sheet. "Do you know what happened to Mary?" he asked, looking as far away from Eileen as he could look.
"Not exactly. She was interfered with, and mauled about. Bitten all over, they say, poor little thing. But it's been hushed up proper, and you'd better hurry and forget all about her. That's all you can do, isn't it?"
In the end, having passed at Briarside and at Gorselands through the more difficult years of the Second World War, Hilary went to Wellington also. His father thought it a tidier arrangement: better adapted to more restricted times. By then, of course, Hilary's brothers, Roger and Gilbert, had left the school, though in neither case for the university. There seemed no point, they both decided; and their father had had no difficulty in agreeing. He had been to a university himself, and it had seemed to him more of a joke than anything else, and a not particularly useful one.
Despite the intermittent connection with Wellington, theirs had not been a particularly army family, and it was with surprise that Mr Brigstock learned of his youngest son's decision to make the army his career, especially as the war was not so long concluded. Hilary, as we have said, was no milksop, and no doubt the Wellington ethos had its influence; but, in any case, it is a mistake to think that an officers' mess is manned solely by good-class rowdies. There are as many (and, naturally, as few) sensitive people in the army as in most other places; and some of them find their way there precisely because they are so.
A further complexity is that the sensitive are sometimes most at their ease with the less sensitive. Among Hilary's friends at the depot, was a youth named Callcutt, undisguisedly extrovert, very dependable. On one occasion, Hilary Brigstock took Callcutt home for a few days of their common leave.
It was not a thing he did often, even now. The atmosphere of his home still brought out many reserves in him. It would hardly be too much to say that he himself went there as little as possible. But by now both Roger and Gilbert were married, and had homes of their own, as they frequently mentioned; so that Hilary was beginning to expect qualms within him on the subject of his father's isolation, and, surely, loneliness. Late middle-aged people living by themselves were always nowadays said to be lonely. Unlike most sons, Hilary at times positively wished that his father would marry again, as people in his situation were expected to do; that his father's views on the subject of women had somehow become less definite.
And really the place was dull. Stranded there with Callcutt, Hilary perceived luminously, as in a minutely detailed picture, how entirely dull, in every single aspect, his home was.
More secrets are improperly disclosed from boredom than from any other motive; and more intimacies imparted, with relief resulting, or otherwise.
"I love it here," said Callcutt, one day after lunch, when Mr Brigstock had gone upstairs for the afternoon, as he normally did.
"That's fine," replied Hilary. "What do you love in particular about it?"
"The quiet," said Callcutt immediately. "I think one's home should be a place where one can go for some quiet. You're a lucky chap."
"Yes," agreed Hilary. "Quiet it certainly is. Nowadays, at least. When my two elder brothers were here, it wasn't quiet at all."
"Remind me where they are now?"
"Married. Both of them. With homes of their own."
"Nice girls?"
"So-so."
"Kids?"
"Two each."
"Boys?"
"All boys. We only breed boys."
"Only?"
"There hasn't been a girl in the Brigstock family within living memory."
"Saves a lot of trouble," said Callcutt.
"Loses a lot of fun," said Hilary.
"Not at that age."
"Particularly, perhaps, at that age."
"How's that? You're not one of these Lolita types, like old whatnot?"
"When I was a child I knew a girl who meant more to me than any girl has meant to me since. More, indeed, than anyone at all. Remember that I never knew my mother."
"Lucky chap again," said Callcutt. "Well, in some ways. No, I shouldn't have said that. I apologize. Forget it."
"That's all right."
"Tell me about your girl friend. I'm quite serious. As a matter of fact, I know perfectly well what you meant about her."
Hilary hesitated. Almost certainly, if it had not been for the absence of other topics, other possible activities, other interests, he would never have mentioned Mary Rossiter at all. He had never spoken of her to a soul for the twenty years since she had vanished, and for at least half that time he had thought of her but infrequently.
"Well, if you like, I will tell you. For what it's worth, which isn't much, especially to a third party. But we've nothing else to do."
"Thank the Lord!" commented Callcutt.
"I feel the Brigstocks should do more to provide entertainment"
"Good God!" rejoined Callcutt.
So, for the first time, Hilary imparted much of the story to another. He told how sweet Mary Rossiter had been, how they used to go for surprisingly long walks together, how they found the crumbling wall, and heard, and later saw, the shapeless, slithery dog, which seemed the colour of the wall, and saw also the collapsing mansion or near-mansion, which Mary, just like a kid, had immediately said must be a haunted house. Hilary even told Callcutt about the maps that the two children had drawn together, and that they had been maps not only of Surrey, but of Fairyland, and Giantland, and the Land of Shades also.
"Good preparation for the army," observed Callcutt.
But Hilary did not tell Callcutt about the lean, possibly naked, man he had so positively seen at the extremest angle of the wall. He had been about to tell him, simply without thinking, at the point where the incident came in the narrative; but he passed over the matter.
"Bloody savage dogs!" said Callcutt. "I'm against them. Especially in towns. Straining at the leash, and defecating all over the pavements. Something wrong with the owner's virility, I always think."
"This was the worst dog you ever saw," Hilary responded. "I'm quite confident of that."
"I hate them all," said Callcutt sweepingly. "They carry disease."
"That was the least in the case of the dog I was talking about," observed Hilary. And he told Callcutt of what had happened next — as far as he could tell it.
"Oh, God!" exclaimed Callcutt.
"I suppose it was what people used to call a mad dog."
"But that was well before your time, even if you were a kid. There aren't so many mad dogs these days. Anyway, what happened to the dog? Shot, I take it?"
"I have no idea."
"But surely it must have been shot? Things couldn't just have been left at that."
"Well, probably it was shot. I just don't know. I wasn't supposed to know anything at all about what had happened."
"Good God, it should have been shot. After doing a thing like that."
"I daresay it was."
There was a pause while Callcutt wrestled with his thoughts and Hilary with his memories; memories of which he had remembered little for some longish time past.
"It was the most frightful thing," Callcutt summed up at last. "I say: could we pay a visit to the scene of the crime? Or would that be too much?"
"Not too much if I can find the place." This was indeed how one thing led to another. "I haven't been there since."
"I suppose not," said Callcutt, who hadn't thought of that. Then had added: "What, never?"
"Never," said Hilary. "After all, I'm not here very often."
"Whose car shall we take?"
"As far as I can recall the lie of the land, we had better walk. I daresay it's all caravans and bungalows by now."
And so, substantially, it proved. It would no doubt be wrong to suggest that the municipal authority or statutory body or honorary trustees responsible for the conservation of an open space had in any major degree permitted the public heritage to diminish in area or beauty, but whereas formerly the conserved terrain had merged off into pastures and semi-wild woodland, now it seemed to be encircled almost up to the last inch with houses. They were big, expensive houses, but they had converted the wilderness of Hilary's childhood into something more like a public park, very beaten down, and with the usual close network of amateur footpaths, going nowhere in particular, because serving no function. Round the edge of this slightly sad area Hilary and Callcutt prowled and prospected.
"It was somewhere about here," said Hilary. "Certainly on this side."
"I should have said it had all changed so much that we were unlikely to get far without comparative maps. None of these houses can be more than ten or twelve years old."
They varied greatly in style: from Cotswold to Moroccan, from Ernest George to Frank Lloyd Wright. Some seemed still to value seclusion, but more went in for neighbourliness and open plan. Despite all the desperation of discrepancy, there was a uniformity of tone which was even more depressing.
"I agree that my place has disappeared," said Hilary. "Been built over. Of course it was pretty far gone even then."
The houses were served by a rough road, almost certainly "unadopted". It assured them a precarious degree of freedom from casual motor traffic.
One of the biggest houses was in the Hollywood style: a garish structure with brightly coloured faience roof, much Spanish ironwork, mass-produced but costly, and a flight of outside steps in bright red tiles. The property was surrounded by a scumbled white wall. Hilary and Callcutt stared in through the elaborate, garden-of-remembrance gates.
"It's like a caricature of the old place," said Hilary. "Much smaller, and much louder — but still. ."
The windows were all shut and there was no one in sight. Even the other houses seemed all to lie silent, and on the rough road nothing and no one passed. The two men continued to peer through the bars of the gate, ornate but trivial.
From round the back of the house to their left emerged, in like silence, a large, moulting, yellow dog. They could hardly even hear the patter of its large feet on the composition flagstones.
Hilary said nothing until the dog, which originally they saw head on, had turned and, with apparent indifference to them, displayed the full length of its right flank. Then he spoke: "Bogey," he said, "that's the same dog." Callcutt was known to his intimates as Bogey, following some early incident in his military life.
Callcutt thought before speaking. Then he said: "Rubbish, Hilary. Dogs don't live twenty years." But he wasn't quite sure of that.
"That one has."
But now the dog began to bark, growling and baying most frighteningly, though, as on the previous occasion, not coming right up to the gate, or attempting to charge at them. If the fact that, a moment before, it seemed not to have seen them, might have been attributed to extreme senility, there was nothing remotely senile about its furious, almost rabid aggression now; and even less, perhaps, about the calculating way it placed itself, whatever might have been the reason. It stood a shapeless, sulphurous mass on its precisely chosen ground, almost like a Chinese demon.
"That is just what it did before," Hilary shouted above the uproar. "Stood like that and came no nearer."
"If you can call it standing," Callcutt shouted back.
He was appalled by the dog, and did not fail to notice that Hilary had turned white, and was clinging to the decorative gatebars. But in the end Callcutt looked upwards for a second. He spoke again, or rather shouted. "There's a wench at one of the upstairs windows. We'd better clear out."
Before Hilary had managed any reply, which the barking of the dog in any case made difficult, there was a further development. The glass-panelled front door of the house opened, and a woman walked out.
Perhaps she had emerged to quiet the dog and apologize, perhaps, on the contrary, to reinforce the dog's antagonism to strangers: to Hilary it was a matter of indifference. The woman was of about his own age, but he knew perfectly well who she was. She was the grown-up Mary Rossiter, who twenty years before had been killed by a dog, probably a mad dog, possibly a dog that had been shot, certainly a most unusual dog, this very present dog, in fact.
Whatever he felt like, Hilary did not pass out. "Do you mind if we go?"
He withdrew his gaze and, without really waiting for Callcutt, began to walk away sharply. Again, it was somewhat as on the previous occasion: veritably, he was behaving exactly as a small boy might behave.
He did not pace out along the rough road, past the houses. Instead, he walked straight into the dilapidated public forest. Callcutt had almost to run after him, in a rather absurd way.
Hilary could not be unaware that while he retreated, the dog had stopped its noise. Perhaps he had even gone far enough to have passed beyond earshot, though it seemed unlikely. None the less, it was quite a chase for Callcutt, and with the most uncomfortable overtones.
Hilary pulled himself together quite quickly, however — once more, as before; and was even able to tell Callcutt exactly what he had apprehended — or, as he put it to Callcutt, fancied.
"I'd have taken to my heels myself, I promise you that," said Callcutt.
"I know it was Mary," said Hilary. "I know it."
They remained silent for some time as they walked over the patchy, tired ground.
Then Callcutt spoke. There was something he could not keep to himself, and Hilary seemed all right now.
"You know how we were laughing about the names of those houses? Samandjane, and Pasadena, and Happy Hours, and all that; the executive style. Do you know what the doggy house is called?"
Hilary shook his head. "I forgot to look."
"You wouldn't believe it. The name above our heads was Maryland."