What better way to welcome in the new year than with creepy stories of ghosts and doom?
Robert Aickman’s is a name I’ve often come across as a writer of the uncanny but his stories were scattered across anthologies and I had no real picture of him. In 2014, the centenary of his birth, Faber republished many of his story collections and his novel, and after only a seven-year wait I finally persuaded Father Christmas to give me his first solo book, Dark Entries. ‘The School Friend’ is the first story in that collection and it is very, very strange and horrible.
The epigraph to the story is a quote: ‘To be taken advantage of is every woman’s secret wish’, attributed to Princess Elizabeth Bibesco, née Asquith, a writer and coiner of aphorisms who married a much older man and died young. (She seems a fascinating person and I’d like to read her work!) This epigraph acquires resonance as the story progresses; it implies rape fantasy, submission, perhaps consenting to becoming a victim in order to gain what you want.
The central figure in the story is Sally Tessler, whom the narrator Mel first meets at school. Sally is precociously clever and her mathematical ability is ‘almost magical’; she dresses in a distinctive way and is beautiful. The narrator is reminded of Tessa in The Constant Nymph – a novel, play and film in which the child Tessa falls in love with an older man and dies as a teenager, unrequited. Virginity and purity are associated with Sally by the narrator. Yet Sally gives Mel a strangely illustrated copy of Petronius’s Satyricon, a Roman novel packed with sexual adventures, and surprises her by being very knowledgeable about all the activities depicted in it.
Sally lives alone with her father, Dr Tessler, ‘the victim of some serious injustice’ and very mysterious. He never leaves the house, but brings Sally up very strictly according to a ‘threefold’ regimen: ‘reading, domestic drudgery, and obedience’. There is no mother. At the very least, this seems a very unhealthy atmosphere for a child to grow up in.
Sally gives Mel another book: an elderly copy of Faust in German. It turns out later to be a first edition. Faust memorably sells his soul to the devil for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasure. Sally wins a university scholarship, moves away and becomes a scholar in the Classics.
The death of Dr Tessler and his weirdly old-fashioned funeral (of what did he die?) brings Sally back to her old home town, to which Mel has also moved back, under a cloud. Sally moves into her father’s house and sends Mel a postcard, inviting her to tea. The postcard shows a photograph of Mitylene, the capital of the island of Lesbos, home of Sappho. Sally does not receive her own post at home but goes to collect it every day.
The tea and the house are dismal and Sally is changing; she is dirty and badly dressed; later, when she meets Mel at the supermarket, she aggressively rejects her. After Sally is seriously injured in an accident, Mel has to visit the house to ‘keep an eye on it’ at the (odd?) insistence of the ward matron. Of course she explores the house...
The house itself is weirdly suggestive of Sally’s body and Mel feels like an invader. It is unkempt and slatternly, as Sally has become, stained and hostile. It contains – what does it contain? Mutilated toys, a prison-like refuge stuffed with occult books, signs of bestial violence. Sally seems to have been trying to protect herself from something. Mel sees a horribly white-faced man in a black frock-coat who instantly vanishes: ‘I thought at first that dead or alive, it was Dr Tessler; but immediately afterwards I thought not.’
The matron tells Mel that Sally is pregnant and in a terrifying scene back at the house the two women confront each other, while upstairs Sally’s ‘baby’ grunts and snuffles like a pig. ‘Let me tell you, Mel, [...] that it’s possible for a child to be born in a manner you’d never dream of.’
‘Will you be godmother? Come and see your godchild, Mel.’
The noise was coming from the library. Distraught as I was, I now realised that the scrabbling noise was connected with the tearing to pieces of Dr Tessler’s books. But it was the wheezing, throaty cry of the creature which most turned my heart and sinews to water.
And at the end of the story, Sally and Mel meet as if nothing has happened. Sally’s appearance is as it has always been, ‘with that strange imperishable untended prettiness of hers, and her sweet absent smile. She wore a white dress.’ She has sold the house and is moving to the Cyclades; she invites Mel to join her since Mel is not happy.
Mel gives away little information about herself. A writer, she has returned to her parents’ house after an unnamed ‘catastrophe’ which she refuses ever to enumerate. She has a distant relationship with her own father, and she says that she went ‘swiftly to the bad’ but in what way we do not know. She is knowing, almost certainly not telling us everything, and what she does tell us seems both portentous and banal.
The story coalesces around the two women’s sexuality and allies it with knowledge and creativity. It is hard not to see Dr Tessler as oppressive and incestuous. Perhaps he has made a Faust-like pact; perhaps Sally has. Returning to the house as an adult, Sally does not clean it as she did as a child but instead becomes like it, dresses herself in it. She seems to be terrorised by some supernatural creature which may even be raping her, but does not flee. Is it that same creature she calls her child? Does she have to undergo an appalling test of her courage to expurgate a traumatic past?
The working of the story is subtle. It is told slantwise and partially, so that we have the sense of a meaning but not the meaning itself, and nothing is ever explained. The surface events are unsettling but they become very much more disturbing when you try to piece them together. And because we can’t explain it, we cannot close the book feeling that we are safe from it.
Happy New Year!
(The illustrations are by Charles Keeping: for an edition of Beowulf translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland, picture found here; and for The Wedding Ghost by Leon Garfield, found here)