THE SHADOW ON THE WALL

Mildred Fanshawe was a bachelor woman in her early forties. She was an interior decorator, and valued as such by quite a wide circle of customers and friends. But she was better known, to most of them, by her neuroses. Of these she pretended to make fun, just as they, without pretending, made fun of them to her. ‘Have you seen a single magpie lately, Mildred? I mean a magpie without a mate?’ ‘Have you seen the new moon through glass?’ ‘Have you broken a looking-glass?’—‘You must have, because looking-glasses are part of your stock-in-trade,’ and so on.

If such enquiries were half teasing, they were also meant to be therapeutic, a way out for Mildred from the tyranny of her superstitions—if tyranny it was. Her friends were too fond of her to think she was making them up, much as they laughed at them. Laughter, even unkind laughter, they thought, is one way of curing an obstinate obsession.

But much as friends may laugh at you and much as you may laugh at yourself, it isn’t an inevitable cure for something—difficult to define, more difficult to avow—which has got well below the surface.

Naturally in the course of business Mildred was asked to spend half-days or days or weekends with her clients or would-be clients. The day-by-day visits she didn’t mind, indeed looked forward to them; but she rather dreaded the weekends, because when she was left to herself, especially in a strange house, her irrational fears were liable to get the better of her.

Her friends knew of this peculiarity and were tolerant and sympathetic, even while they smiled at it. ‘We must have the house exorcised before we ask Mildred to stay!’

Joanna Bostock was a good customer and a good friend. Mildred had worked for her and knew her house well—that is to say, she knew parts of it well. The entrance hall was supported on each side by two honey-coloured columns that divided the main structure of the ground floor. To the right was the large dining-room with two long windows balancing the façade of the house; to the left was the main staircase, with its stained-glass windows, of Victorian date, and to the left of the staircase, a library and a drawing-room from whose doors, sometimes shut and sometimes open, Mrs. Bostock and her guests, when she had any, parted for the night, slowly going upstairs, politely making way for each other—‘No, you, please’—until the hall was left unoccupied and Mrs. Bostock, or her butler, if she had one, turned out the light.

Mildred had been to Craventhorpe many times in the exercise of her profession, and knew its outside well. Around an oval patch of lawn crowned by a fountain said to be by Bernini, which was supposed to play but never did, a gravel sweep led to the front door. Long, low, and built of the most beautiful pink-red brick, this was the aspect of the house which was meant to catch the beholder’s eye. Leaving her car, Mildred, who was by nature over-punctual, would sometimes walk to the left, where the west wing of the house, no less beautiful than the front, overlooked the garden and the tulip-tree, a truly monumental arboreal adornment which many people (for the house was sometimes open to the public) came from far to see. How it soared into the air! How its blossoms, not very like tulips, but near enough, gave it an exotic, an almost fabulous appeal! It was said to be the tallest tulip tree in England. Be that as it might, Mildred could never look at it without awe.

Generally, at this point, where the garden sloped down to a duck-pond, where the ducks were said to drown their redundant offspring, Mildred would turn back to the front door to announce her arrival.

But sometimes she made a circuit of the house. Its northern and its eastern aspects were very different—they were its back parts, they were almost slums! Joanna had never asked Mildred what to do with these outside excrescences, botched up at such or such a date and, architecturally, not fit to be seen. It was not true, as some people said of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century builders, that they couldn’t go wrong. They built for show, for outside or for inside effect. And if it didn’t show, they couldn’t care less.

Craventhorpe was built in the shape of a hollow E; and the hollow, over which the architects had taken no trouble, was an eyesore to Joanna Bostock. What to do with it? Make it a sanctuary for wild birds? But they had the pond to disport themselves on or in and indulge their instincts. (She was fond of animals of all sorts.) Or grass it over? Or make it a miniature maze with an occasional garden statue, naked except for being bearded, leering over the edge of the hedge at the visitors laughing, but half frightened, by their efforts to find their way out?

Joanna hadn’t consulted Mildred about this outside job, which didn’t need curtains or carpets or colours for the walls; nor had she consulted her about the east wing, one side of which looked down on the empty space, and was seldom used except for children and grandchildren. (Joanna was a widow whose husband, dying young, had left her the house and the children to go with it.)

Afraid of arriving too late, afraid of arriving too early, Mildred was the first guest to be announced. (For some reason she was relieved that Joanna had found a temporary butler.)

After the usual embracements, ‘Darling,’ Joanna said, ‘I am so glad you came before the others. Now come and have a drink, I am sure you need one.’

She led the way to the library where the drinks stood on a glass tray with gilt handles, a glittering array.

‘Now what?’ she asked. ‘Which?’ She had a way of making invitation seem still more inviting.

‘Oh, a very little for me,’ said Mildred. ‘Just some Dubonnet, perhaps.’

Joanna poured it out for her, and whisky on the rocks for herself.

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I’m very glad you came early—you could never come too early—’ She paused and added, ‘You’ve never stayed here before, have you? I wonder why?’

‘Perhaps because you never asked me,’ said Mildred, sipping her drink.

Her hostess frowned. ‘Oh no, I’m sure I’ve asked you scores of times. But you’re always so much in demand.’ She paused again, and poured out another tot of whisky. ‘Isn’t it awful how this grows on you? Not on you, dear Mildred, who dread nothing,’ she laughed, a little tipsily. ‘Not even a mill, and we haven’t one round here, not to speak of, unless you dread a thousand things?’ She laughed. ‘Now what was I going to say?’ She seemed to rack her memory. ‘Oh, yes, our other weekend guests. I won’t say who they are, even if I could remember, but you know most of them, and they will be overjoyed to see you, even if you—’

She stopped, and Mildred remembered Joanna’s reputation for forgetfulness.

‘So we should be eight for dinner, and I hope we shall be, but there’s a man I can’t rely on—he has some sort of job, half international, I suppose—you wouldn’t know him, Mildred. He’s called Count Olmütz—’

‘No, I don’t remember that name.’

‘Well, he’s an old friend of the family if I can call myself a family.’

‘Oh, Joanna.’

‘Yes, I mean it. But what was I going to say?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Well, this man Olmütz should be coming in time for dinner’—Joanna glanced at the clock, which said 6.30—‘if it’s only to make the numbers even. We can have general conversation, of course, and you are so good at it, dear Mildred, but eight is a better number than seven, more cosy—and he has a lot to say, too much perhaps. But what was I going to say?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Oh, now I remember,’ Joanna said. ‘I know you don’t much like staying away from home.’

She stopped and gave Mildred a piercing look. ‘But what I wanted to say was, you needn’t feel nervous in this house. You have done so much for it, you know it so well. Indoors it’s your creation, except for that eyesore that looks down on the courtyard—’