A Different Sound by Elizabeth Bowen

Author:Elizabeth Bowen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Listen to the Magnolias

Stella Gibbons

Mrs Bestwick lay in the big bed, which she had continued to sleep in after the death of her husband because it reminded her so comfortingly of him, and trembled with fear; not violently, so as to shake the bed or cause the glass to tinkle against the water bottle on the table, but gently, as Mrs Bestwick did everything, and unceasingly; underneath the fresh warm blankets and the newly-cleaned eiderdown and the sheet, which only that morning she had repaired by machining together its two unworn edges.

The hour was three in the morning, and the Midland night lay stilly along the streets and pressed on the wet roofs of Wapminster; there was not a sound outside; not even a cat wailing, or the distant step of a fire-watcher walking home from the post; the blacked-out lamps, rusted into their four-year disuse, curved like graceful iron flowers high and unseen above the blackness in roads and avenues, and the Wap slid between its banks and past the blue-stained, crumbling basements of the old town without a ripple or a gleam. The big bakery was at work, bursting with heat and light behind its shutters, and the staff of the Wapminster Recorder had only just finished putting the paper to bed and gone home to its own, but Dyneford Avenue, where Mrs Bestwick lived, was at least a half mile from both, and on the fringes of the town the silence was complete.

But Mrs Bestwick could hear sounds; bestial, terrifying sounds, as she lay and trembled in her bed. She heard long-drawn puffing and bubbling noises, sonorous honkings, deep sighs that partook of the nature of moans, and sometimes the fling of heavy bodies which, disturbed by dreams so gruesome that even the thick mufflings of sleep could not keep them out, heaved over and jarred the wall against which the beds rested. She was familiar with snores, because her husband had sometimes snored and they had passed mild recurrent jokes about it, but this seemed to her more than an ordinary forcing of human breath through the mouth and nostrils during slumber; it summed up and embodied in its gross texture all the fears which had oppressed her for the past month.

They were here. They were under her roof. They were sleeping in the second-best bedroom and the spare room. Their snores proved it. But every twenty minutes or so, when she awoke with a start out of uneasy sleep, she found it impossible to believe that they were here. And oh, how she dreaded the coming of daylight; if only this night, even with its snores and fear and trembling, could go on for ever.

It was almost exactly a month ago, to the day, that her help Mrs Corder, looking maliciously over the rim of a cupful of pungent copper tea, had said: ‘Terrible about these Yanks, izzen it?’ And Mrs Bestwick had answered in her flat weak voice:

‘Something in the paper, is it? I haven’t seen the Sketch yet.

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