The Open Window

»My aunt will be down shortly, Mr Nuttel,« said the remarkably self-assured girl of fifteen. »In the meantime, I am afraid you will have to put up with me.«

Framton Nuttel searched for an appropriate reply: something that would flatter the niece without diminishing the importance of the aunt he had yet to meet. More than ever, he doubted whether these formal calls on one complete stranger after another would benefit the nervous condition he had come to the country to treat.

His sister had anticipated this reluctance. Before he left, she had warned that he would isolate himself, refuse to speak to anyone and make his nerves worse by brooding. She therefore supplied letters introducing him to everyone she knew in the area. As far as she could recall, some of them had been quite pleasant.

Framton wondered whether Mrs Sappleton, whose drawing room he was now visiting, belonged to that fortunate group.

After allowing a sufficient interval of silence, the niece asked whether he knew many local people. Almost nobody, he admitted. His sister had stayed at the local clergyman's house some four years earlier and had given him these introductions. He mentioned the arrangement without enthusiasm.

»Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?« the girl continued.

»Only her name and address.«

He was wondering whether Mrs Sappleton was married or widowed. Something indefinable about the room suggested that men lived there.

»Her great tragedy happened just three years ago,« said the girl. »That would have been after your sister's time here.«

A tragedy seemed strangely out of place in this quiet countryside. Framton asked what had happened.

Vera drew his attention to the large window standing open to the lawn. It reached low enough for people to pass through. He might wonder, she said, why they kept it open on an October afternoon. He observed that the weather was unusually warm, but asked whether the window was connected with the tragedy.

»Three years ago today, her husband and her two younger brothers went out through that window for a day's shooting. They never came back. On the way to their favourite place for hunting birds, they crossed some open, marshy land. All three were swallowed up by a dangerous stretch of bog. It had been an appallingly wet summer, and ground that was safe in other years suddenly gave way. Their bodies were never recovered.«

The girl's steady voice began to tremble. Their little brown spaniel, she explained, had been lost with them. Her poor aunt continued to believe that they would come home one day, the men and the dog together, and walk through that window as they always had. Consequently, the window remained open every evening until it was almost dark.

Her aunt had often described their departure. Her husband had carried his white waterproof coat over his arm. Ronnie, the youngest brother, had sung a line asking Bertie why he was jumping about. It was his usual way of teasing his sister, who found the song irritating. Sometimes, Vera added, on a still evening like this, she almost had the horrible feeling that they really would walk through the window.

She broke off with a small shudder. Framton was distinctly relieved when Mrs Sappleton hurried into the room, apologising for being late.

»I hope Vera has been entertaining you?«

»She has been very interesting,« he replied.

His hostess hoped he did not mind the open window. Her husband and brothers were due back from shooting and always entered by that route. They had been in the marshes looking for birds and would doubtless make a terrible mess of her carpets. Men were always like that, were they not?

She continued cheerfully discussing the day's shooting, the shortage of birds and the prospects for ducks in winter. To Framton, every word was dreadful. He struggled, with limited success, to move the conversation onto a less disturbing subject. Meanwhile, he realised that only part of her attention was his: her eyes repeatedly wandered past him to the window and the lawn beyond. It seemed a particularly cruel coincidence that his visit should have fallen on the anniversary of the disaster.

He announced that his doctors had unanimously prescribed complete rest, freedom from emotional excitement and the avoidance of vigorous exercise. Like many people, he assumed that casual acquaintances were eager to hear every detail of his illnesses and treatment. On diet, he continued, the doctors were less united.

Mrs Sappleton responded with a brief question in a voice that narrowly escaped becoming a yawn. Suddenly she became alert, although her attention had not been caught by anything he had said.

»Here they are at last! Just in time for tea! Look how muddy they are!«

Framton shivered and glanced towards Vera, hoping to communicate his sympathy for the situation. The girl, however, was staring through the window with an expression of stunned horror. A shock of fear made him turn and follow her gaze.

In the fading light, three men were crossing the lawn. Each carried a gun, and one had a white coat hanging over his shoulders. A tired brown spaniel followed close behind. They approached quietly until a rough young voice began singing the line about Bertie.

Framton snatched his stick and hat. The front door, the drive and the gate barely registered as he rushed past them. A cyclist approaching along the road had to steer into the hedge to avoid crashing into him.

The man carrying the white coat came through the window and remarked that most of their mud was dry. Who, he asked his wife, was the man who had just rushed away?

Mrs Sappleton called him an extraordinary visitor. He could talk only about his illnesses, then had dashed out without a word of farewell or apology. One might have thought he had seen a ghost.

»I expect it was the spaniel,« Vera suggested calmly.

She claimed that Framton had confided a horror of dogs. A pack had once chased him into a burial ground beside the Ganges in India, forcing him to shelter overnight in a freshly dug grave. The animals had stood above him, snarling and foaming at the mouth. Such an experience, she observed, would unsettle anyone.

This second explanation was another invention. Producing an elaborate story at a moment's notice was Vera's speciality.