The knocking came: a cheerful rat-tat-tat!
I rushed downstairs, where my mother and father were already waiting. We trooped through our front door and down our front path, through our front gate, sharp right for a step or two, and then sharp right again through the Hurrels’ gate and up their path to their front door.
The door stood open, with Mrs. Hurrel—tiny, frail, gasping with excitement—welcoming us in. The ground floor of their house was Mr. Hurrel’s workshop, with all his tools and timber; he was a retired furniture restorer and cabinetmaker. We were taken upstairs to their living room, which was the room next to mine, with the party wall between.
Against this wall stood the tallboy.
I was prepared—I had been prepared by my parents’ explanations—for the appearance of the tallboy. I knew that it was so very tall only because it was really two chests of drawers, made to fit with beautiful exactitude one on top of the other. The lower section had three long drawers and stood on four elegant, little, splayed-out legs. The upper section had three long drawers and, at the very top, a pair of short ones.
All that was no surprise to me. What I was not prepared for was the awe-inspiring magnificence, the majesty of the tallboy. Its surface of polished wood glowed richly; its head reared almost to the ceiling. It dwarfed into insignificance the figure of Mr. Hurrel, who stood beside it. Yet he had made it; it was his. It was as if, all those years, ordinary-looking, ordinary-sized Mr. Hurrel had had this tallboy inside him, imprisoned, cramped, struggling to get out. Now it was out, and it stood there in its full splendor, a masterpiece of furniture.
The tallboy was Mr. Hurrel’s masterpiece; it was also his whim. Nobody, really, made tallboys nowadays—hadn’t done so, seriously, for well over a hundred years. But in his job, Mr. Hurrel had had the repairing of antique tallboys, and the dazzling idea had come to him of making one of his own. He had worked on it in his spare time for several years, and now, in retirement, he had finished it at last.
Mr. Hurrel stood by his tallboy, smiling only a little. He said nothing, because he had nothing to say. His tallboy spoke for him.
My mother was exclaiming at the number of drawers: “The storage space!”
The Hurrels’ grown-up son, Denis, who had taken time off from his job in Scotland for the occasion, said, “Mum has to stand on a chair to reach the top drawers!”
“Yes, just fancy!” said Mrs. Hurrel breathlessly. Her son put an arm affectionately round her shoulder and laughed.
The only other person in the room was the Hurrels’ daughter, Wendy. She was much older than her brother, unmarried, and working in London. She came home sometimes, but we never felt that we knew her well. She was pale, insignificant-looking, silent.
Mrs. Hurrel was pulling out one of the drawers of the tallboy, to show my mother the quantity of sheets, tablecloths, and other things she was able to keep there. The drawer pulled out smoothly, smoothly, and when it was pushed back, there was a tiny puff of air—a sigh of air escaping at the last moment. (I had very sharp ears in those days; I heard it.) So perfect was the fit.
My father was respectfully questioning Mr. Hurrel about the making of the tallboy, and Mr. Hurrel, after all, was taking pleasure in answering him; you could see that. He spoke of mortise and tenon and dowel pegging and the dovetailing—the finest—of the fronts and backs of all the drawers; of canted front corners and dentil molding and cross-grained banding and cock-beading. He spoke of the woods he had used: pine for the back and for the cornice framing; oak for the drawers; but everywhere else, solid mahogany or mahogany veneer. “Honduras mahogany,” said old Mr. Hurrel. “Only the best…”
I was gazing at the wooden handles of the drawers; from the center of each knob a little star twinkled at me. “Are they really gold?” I asked, because the tallboy deserved only the best.
Mr. Hurrel did not laugh at me. “Not gold,” he said. “Brass. I’ve always fancied that decoration. And wooden handles for the drawers—they were my fancy, too.”
While we were talking, Denis had brought a bottle of champagne out of the fridge, and his mother had brought glasses. My father said jovially that someone ought to smash the bottle against the side of the tallboy, to launch it, as they used to do with oceangoing liners. Mr. Hurrel shuddered, and his wife said quickly, “Nobody’s ever going to hurt your tallboy, Edward.” And, indeed, when Denis opened the champagne bottle, he was careful to turn away from the tallboy, so that the cork flew out in the opposite direction.
Then we all drank our glasses of champagne, toasting the new tallboy, and Mr. Hurrel, its maker, and Mrs. Hurrel, his wife. We wished them health and long life. It was the first time I had ever tasted champagne. It seemed to explode in my mouth in rockets of liquid excitement. To my mind, the champagne and the tallboy went together: both dizzyingly splendid. Sublime.
But our champagne wishes did not, alas, come true.
Mrs. Hurrel had always been delicate, and not long after our celebrations she had to take to her bed. There was even talk of her going into the hospital, but she wouldn’t have that. So old Mr. Hurrel nursed her and did the housekeeping as best he could. And the arrangement was that he would knock on the party wall if he needed help urgently. Twice he did that and woke me, and I woke my mother, and she went round, even in the middle of the night.
Wendy came for a weekend and helped, and Denis came for another weekend. He suggested taking his mother back to Scotland with him, and his father, too, of course. He had a house in Scotland and was marrying a Scottish girl, so there would be a home for them. The old people wouldn’t hear of it.
Denis Hurrel came round to talk to my parents. You could see that he was worried. He’d been talking to Wendy on the telephone; he thought she would come down to help again.
“Just for the weekend?”
“No.” He looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t suggest anything to her, I promise you, and anyway, it’s not ideal. But she’s likely to come for good.”
My parents were startled and very doubtful. “Give up her job? Leave all her friends in London?”
“She hasn’t any friends,” Denis said quickly. “So she says. And she’s always had this idea she’d like to queen it at home, be housekeeper for my dad. She never really got on with Mum for that very reason, I think. She wanted Dad to herself, always.”
“But, Denis, it’s your mother she’ll have to care for. Constant attention.”
“Wendy’ll manage that, and in return, she’ll have the running of the house for Dad.”
“Well, I don’t know. I’m sure …” my mother said.
“Look! If you get worried, ring me in Scotland. I’ll come.”
“There!” said my father. “That sounds all right to me.”
And so it was, for a long time. Wendy did the shopping and the cooking and housecleaning and nursed her mother. Old Mrs. Hurrel became a permanent invalid, but she was fairly cheerful. How long she would live was another matter, people said.
Mr. Hurrel never seemed to notice Wendy and all that she was doing for him. She might not have been there, for the attention he paid to her. He cared only for his furniture—his tallboy particularly. He was always polishing it. It was his darling, his magnificent child.
And Wendy? Nobody knew what she thought of life with her parents.
And then one day, suddenly, one of those parents died. No, not invalid Mrs. Hurrel, but Mr. Hurrel. He died in his sleep—heart disease, according to the doctor. His wife was terribly upset, of course, and so was Denis, when he came for the funeral. Again, he tried to persuade his mother to move up to Scotland; she refused. “I stay here,” she said, “where he made his beautiful tallboy. Wendy will look after me.”
As for Wendy herself, if she had been rather taciturn before, she was almost speechless now. You felt that the death of her father had embittered her. I was frightened of her because I had this feeling that now she was bottling something up inside her. Something larger than herself. And dark. And very frightening.
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“I don’t think Denis should have left Wendy in sole charge of the old lady,” my mother said uneasily. “I’ve a good mind to ring Scotland and tell him so.” But she didn’t.
At first there seemed nothing particular to worry about, except that Mrs. Hurrel told us that Wendy no longer spoke to her at all. Nor did she acknowledge our greetings in the street. Nor did she greet us with even a word whenever we rang at the Hurrels’ front door.
“Cooped up in that house for most of the time, not talking,” said my mother. “It’s not natural. She’ll begin to go off her head.”
My father said, “She’ll begin talking to the furniture.”
“She does,” I said, pleased to add an item of solid fact to the conversation. “I can hear her through the wall. She bangs about a lot, and she talks to the furniture.”
They stared at me. “Talks to the furniture?”
I didn’t realize until then that my father had only been joking. No one is supposed literally to talk to furniture.
“Or perhaps she talks just to the tallboy,” I suggested, trying in some way to make the whole thing sound more likely.
They came to my room that evening, put their ears to the party wall, and listened. You couldn’t distinguish the words, but you could recognize the voice; it was Wendy all right. Her tone was bitter and furiously accusing, and as well as talking, she was violently banging about, as I had said.
My father whispered, “She really is going off her head.”
My mother whispered back, “She shouldn’t be looking after that poor old dear, helpless in bed.”
They went downstairs at once, to telephone to Scotland.
If they had not gone off so promptly, I should have asked them to wait and to go on listening, with more care still. In the pauses in Wendy’s raving and banging, there was something else one could just hear, a sound that was not exactly a voice, and yet, goaded, it spoke, as it seemed: It replied.
On the telephone Denis Hurrel promised my mother to come home that very weekend.
That Friday evening my mother gave my father his tea and then went out to call on a friend. I was upstairs. I felt easier in my room than usual, because there was no sound from the other side of the party wall. Wendy was elsewhere in the Hurrels’ house or perhaps out of the house altogether, but that was very seldom nowadays.
Our front doorbell rang. I paid no attention to the caller; my dad was there to deal with whoever it was.
Later my mother came back, and soon after, I came downstairs to be with them. Wendy had started up again, on the other side of the party wall, worse than ever before. …
Downstairs, my father was telling my mother about the visitor. “I was taken aback. I mean, Wendy’s never called round before.”
“Was it about her mother?”
“No, and I didn’t have time to ask about her. Wendy was in such a hurry—such a state—to borrow our ax.”
“To borrow what?”
“Our ax, our hatchet.” My father’s voice faltered as he saw my mother’s expression. “It’s all right. Really. She only wanted it to chop wood for their fire.”
My mother said, “The Hurrels haven’t an open fire anywhere in that house.” My father’s jaw dropped. My mother was crying, “Oh, that poor old thing in bed! Oh, my God! And you lent her an ax!”
My mother had started for the front door, but my father passed her. I followed them out of the house; I was too frightened to be left behind, alone.
We ran down to our front gate, in through the Hurrels’, and up to their front door. As we came up the path, we could see the light in Mrs. Hurrel’s bedroom, upstairs, and we could hear Wendy’s voice, raised high.
My father rang the doorbell and, at the same time, lifted the flap of the letter box, to call through it. He never did so, because the lifting of the flap allowed us to hear more clearly what was going on upstairs. Wendy was now shouting at the top of her voice. “I’ll kill you!” she howled. “I’ll kill you!”
No one had ever thought of my father as a particularly strong man; I do not think he thought that of himself. But instantly he had drawn back and then run at the door like a battering ram, and we flung ourselves upon the door at the same time. The door fastenings broke, and we all fell inside.
At the same time, from above, came a woman’s scream, with a great crash. My father and mother tore upstairs to Mrs. Hurrel’s bedroom. I hid under the stairs, too terrified to follow them this time. So I know only what they chose to tell me later.
They found old Mrs. Hurrel sitting on the edge of her bed, white-faced and shivering, trying to stand up, trying to walk. She kept saying that she must go to Wendy. Wendy was in the living room; something terrible had happened to Wendy.
They went into the living room.
Wendy lay on the floor, dead—a glance was enough to confirm that—with the tallboy on top of her. She still held in her grip the ax, our ax. She had evidently been attacking the tallboy with the ax, particularly chopping at its legs. In her fury, she did not foresee the consequences, or perhaps she did not care. She had severed one front leg completely; the other one was splintered and had broken. The tallboy had tottered, and the upper section had fallen forward, all its drawers shooting out ahead of it in their smooth, their deadly way. She had not sprung back in time to escape, and the upper drawers had caught her about the head and face and neck, and the fall of the upper casing upon her had completed the tallboy’s counterassault, or self-defense. The contents of the drawers lay in confusion all about the body, white cotton and linen stained with Wendy’s blood.
All this I learned only bit by bit, and much later; I was a child, to be shielded from nightmares. I was sent to stay for some time with a school friend living on the other side of town. When I was finally allowed home, a great deal had happened in my absence: the inquest and the funeral, for instance. Old Mrs. Hurrel was to live with Denis and his new wife in Scotland, and meanwhile he was clearing the house and putting it up for sale.
“What about the—” My father could not get the word out.
My mother said, “What about the tallboy, Denis? Your father could have repaired it, if he were still alive. Perhaps another craftsman as clever as he was …”
“No,” said Denis. “No.” He looked strangely at them and then told some story about a dog that at first seemed to me to have nothing to do with the tallboy and its ruination. He said the dog, a big, beautiful creature, a pedigree, belonged to a master with a vicious streak in him. The man tormented and beat the dog cruelly, and one day the dog turned on the man and savaged him, so that the man died.
“It wasn’t really the dog’s fault,” said Denis. “You could say he was under extreme provocation. You could say he was acting in self-defense. But they shot the dog afterward. They had to shoot the dog.”
My father covered his eyes with his hands, and my mother cried, “But, Denis, the tallboy is just a piece of furniture, and your father…”
Denis said, “My father’s not here; but I think he would agree about what should be done with the tallboy. Although it would have broken his heart.”
Early next morning, before most people were about, Denis built a bonfire in the Hurrels’ back garden. When it was going well, he fetched the tallboy: first the drawers, one by one; then the upper casing; then the lower, with its mutilated legs.
Watching from our back window, I saw the remains of the tallboy, as Denis carried them. You could see that it had once been big and beautiful, a pedigree thing, as Denis had said. But it wasn’t just that the legs had been hacked and broken. Everywhere the surface of the wood had been bruised and broken, the veneer splintered off. Regularly Wendy must have kicked at it and battered it, with whatever object came to her hand as a weapon. Those were the hangings I had heard, between her cursings, through the party wall.
Denis put all the pieces onto the blazing bonfire, and they caught fire quickly and burned, and burned utterly away. By the next day the bonfire was nothing but a heap o
f white wood ash, and Denis Hurrel had gone back to Scotland with his old mother.
And that evening, at dusk, when nobody was noticing, I climbed our fence and went to the bonfire. I sifted through the wood ash with my fingers, and in the end I found three of those little brass stars that had winked at me from the center of the tallboy’s wooden drawer knobs. They were blackened from the fire, but I pocketed them up, and later I cleaned them and polished them, till they shone like gold. And I have them still.
That’s really the end of the story, I suppose. New people moved into the Hurrels’ house next door, and I could hear them sometimes through the party wall. But when everything had gone quiet next door—in the middle of the night, for instance—I used to think I could hear something else: the ghost of a voice, or perhaps the voice of a ghost. Not the voice of old Mr. Hurrel, returned to this world to lament the death of his beloved tallboy, not the voice of Wendy, murderous-sounding with jealousy and hatred, but another voice that was hardly a voice at all—an undertone that implored mercy, that pleaded for its life…
I heard that voice, or thought I heard it, for as long as we lived in that house. I wonder if anyone, later, ever heard it. Or whether, anyway, with the passage of time, the voice failed and fell into silence, as do the voices of all things to which life has been given, or even lent.
The Hirn
This was a new motorway, and Mr. Edward Edwards liked that. He liked new things—things newly designed and newly made. He drove his powerful car powerfully, just at the speed limit, eating up the miles, as the saying is—eating up as an impatient boa constrictor might swallow its unimportant prey.
The new motorway sliced through new countryside. (Old countryside, really, but new to motorway travelers, and that was what mattered.) Open it was, with huge fields, mostly arable. Mr. Edwards approved the evident productivity.
He drove well, looking ahead at the road, keeping an eye on the rearview mirror, and at the same time sparing casual glances toward the landscape on the right and on the left.