Peter didn’t doubt this. To him the workmen were infallible, possessed of magic powers capable of suspending the ordinary laws that governed lifts. Look how they left the gates open, and shouted to each other up and down the awesome lift-shaft, paying as little attention to the other hotel visitors as if they didn’t exist! Only to Peter did they vouchsafe a word.
But Christmas Eve came, the morning passed, the afternoon passed, and still the lift didn’t go. The men were working with set faces and a controlled hurry in their movements; they didn’t even return Peter’s ‘Good night’ when he passed them on his way to bed. Bed! He had begged to be allowed to stay up this once for dinner; he knew he wouldn’t go to sleep, he said, till Father Christmas came. He lay awake, listening to the urgent voices of the men, wondering if each hammer-stroke would be the last; and then, just as the clamour was subsiding, he dropped off.
Dreaming, he felt adrift in time. Could it be midnight? No, because his parents had after all consented to his going down to dinner. Now was the time. Averting his eyes from the forbidden lift he stole downstairs. There was a clock in the hall, but it had stopped. In the dining-room there was another clock; but dared he go into the dining-room alone, with no one to guide him and everybody looking at him?
He ventured in, and there, at their table, which he couldn’t always pick out, he saw his mother. She saw him, too, and came towards him, threading her way between the tables as if they were just bits of furniture, not alien islands under hostile sway.
‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t find you—nobody could, but here you are!’ She led him back and they sat down. ‘Daddy will be with us in a minute.’ The minutes passed; suddenly there was a crash. It seemed to come from within, from the kitchen perhaps. Smiles lit up the faces of the diners. A man at a near-by table laughed and said, ‘Something’s on the floor! Somebody’ll be for it!’ ‘What is it?’ whispered Peter, too excited to speak out loud. ‘Is anyone hurt?’ ‘Oh, no, darling, somebody’s dropped a tray, that’s all.’
To Peter it seemed an anti-climax, this paltry accident that had stolen the thunder of his father’s entry, for he didn’t doubt that his father would come in as Father Christmas. The suspense was unbearable. ‘Can I go into the hall and wait for him?’ His mother hesitated and then said yes.
The hall was deserted, even the porter was off duty. Would it be fair, Peter wondered, or would it be cheating and doing himself out of a surprise, if he waited for Father Christmas by the lift? Magic has its rules which mustn’t be disobeyed. But he was there now, at his old place in front of the lift; and the lift would come down if he pressed the button.
He knew he mustn’t, that it was forbidden, that his father would be angry if he did; yet he reached up and pressed it.
But nothing happened, the lift didn’t come, and why? Because some careless person had forgotten to shut the gates—‘monkeying with the lift’, his father called it. Perhaps the workmen had forgotten, in their hurry to get home. There was only one thing to do—find out on which floor the gates had been left open, and then shut them.
On their own floor it was, and in his dream it didn’t seem strange to Peter that the lift wasn’t there, blocking the black hole of the lift-shaft, though he daren’t look down it. The gates clicked to. Triumph possessed him, triumph lent him wings; he was back on the ground floor, with his finger on the button. A thrill of power such as he had never known ran through him when the machinery answered to his touch.
But what was this? The lift was coming up from below, not down from above, and there was something wrong with its roof—a jagged hole that let the light through. But the figure was there in its accustomed corner, and this time it hadn’t disappeared, it was still there, he could see it through the mazy criss-cross of the bars, a figure in a red robe with white fur edges, and wearing a red cowl on its head: his father, Father Christmas, Daddy in the lift. But why didn’t he look at Peter, and why was his white beard streaked with red?
The two grilles folded back when Peter pushed them. Toys were lying at his father’s feet, but he couldn’t touch them for they too were red, red and wet as the floor of the lift, red as the jag of lightning that tore through his brain. . . .
THE FACE
Edward Postgate was a one-woman man. Or perhaps it would be true to say, he was a man to whom one facial type appealed. He wasn’t singular in this, for most men have their favourite type. But he was singular in the fact that no other type, or even variation of his own type, seemed to attract him at all. Long before he married Mary Elmhirst, this type was enshrined in his consciousness and most of his friends knew what it was. Not because he told them; he was reserved about such matters, and his marriage, when it came, was a surprise. But the girl’s face was not a surprise, for anyone who had done examinations with him or played bridge with him, or sat with him at a committee or a board meeting, could not help knowing it. He was an inveterate doodler. Sometimes he covered the margin with abstract designs; sometimes with plumes and feathers (he was especially fond of drawing ostrich feathers), but most often it was a face, and it was always the same face, recognizably the same, from whatever angle he drew it. The back view was particularly characteristic, for the girl of his dreams, unlike girls in real life, always did her hair the same way—in a knob low down on her neck. Edward was enough of a draughtsman to be able to show that her hair was dark and shining, her eyes violet blue, her colouring red and white—almost a deep red on the high cheek-bones. Parted in the middle her hair swept round a broad forehead, and was drawn back, but not pulled back, to emphasize the slightly concave line that led from her cheek-bones to her small round chin. However many curves he gave her mouth, it was always a wide one, otherwise her nose, whose low arch made a curve that didn’t vary, might have looked too large.
‘There’s that girl again!’ we sometimes said, and hardier spirits even said to Edward: ‘Why don’t you try another type for a change ?’ Whereat he would smile and sometimes scrunch the paper up. Many of us thought that he was in love with an ideal, a Dulcinea who, unlike Don Quixote’s, never had and never would exist in real life: she was an alibi for feelings that he only had on paper. Not that he avoided women’s society—he was attached to several, and they to him; but in his relations with them there was a marked absence of the obsessiveness that showed so clearly in the drawings; he scarcely seemed to prefer one to another, nor did any of them resemble, even remotely, the face he loved to contemplate.
Edward was a well-built, fair-skinned man, with pale-green hair and amber eyes—at least they said so, I couldn’t quite see it. To me he was self-coloured—not in the sense of being an egotist, he was anything but that—but he had no light and shade: he presented a uniform hue, the neutral hue of a good fellow. One didn’t have to like him first to find him likeable; he was likeable at once. Many a hostess finding herself a man short used to say, ‘Can’t we get hold of that miserable Edward?’—only to find that another hostess had got hold of him. In company he always seemed to be holding himself back, as if he had something he didn’t want to part with; it was the energy, I suppose, that he needed for his paper-mistress—his drawing-mistress, as we sometimes called her.
So his marriage, at the age of twenty-eight, came as a great surprise. Mary Elmhirst didn’t belong to any of the circles he frequented, he ran into her at some seaside town, and they were married almost at once. The match was suitable in every way; she was a doctor’s daughter, at once gay and serious-minded; he worked in the City. As a bachelor he had been a social asset and in continuous demand at parties. As a married man he didn’t exactly drop out, but he would go nowhere without his wife; he ceased being Edward, he became Edward and Mary, or perhaps Mary and Edward. In the social and every other sense he lived entirely for her, and it then became more than ever apparent how superficial his previous friendships had been. We accepted this with a smile and a shrug; a few tried, and one or two pretended to find, rifts in the Postgates’ matrimonial lute, but these were so obviously unfounded that they passed into a joke, a joke against the gossips. Happy the couple that has no history, but also the less interesting: Mary and Edward, whether meaning one or both of them, ceased to be names that came up much in conversation, and where they did, it was chiefly as types of conjugal felicity. Nothing more would happen to them except a child, and this, strangely enough, they did not have, though they were going to have one when five years later Mary Postgate was killed in a motor accident.