Chocky
by John Wyndham

Eight

A young man representing, as he put it, the Hindmere and District Courier turned up that afternoon. Mary dealt with him briskly. Yes, she had seen that rubbish about a guardian angel, and was surprised that a paper had printed such nonsense. Matthew had had swimming lessons, but had lacked the confidence to trust himself to the water. What had happened was that in the emergency he had known what he ought to do to swim; he had made the motions he had been taught to make, and discovered that he could swim. He had been very brave in going to the rescue of his sister, and very fortunate, but there was nothing miraculous about it. No, she was sorry he couldn’t see Matthew; he was out for the day. And, in any case, she preferred not to have him troubled about it. After considerable persuasion the reporter went away, ill-satisfied.

The same day Landis rang me up at the office. He had, he said been thinking about Matthew, and a number of questions had occurred to him. My first thought was that he was about to offer to come down again, which would not please Mary; fortunately, however, that was not his idea, at the moment, at any rate; instead, he suggested that I should have dinner with him one evening. It crossed my mind to ask him if he had heard Matthew on ‘Today’ that morning, but I had no wish to get involved in a lot of explanation in the middle of a busy day, so I did not mention it. In the circumstances I could scarcely refuse his invitation, and it also occurred to me that he might have thought of a suitable consultant. We agreed to meet at his Club the following Thursday.

I got back to find Mary preparing our dinner with grim resolve and a heavy hand, as she does when she is put out. I inquired why.

‘Matthew’s been talking to reporters again, she said, punishing the saucepan.

‘But I told him…’

‘I know,’ she said bitterly. ‘Oh, it isn’t his fault, poor boy, but it does make me so wild.’

I inquired further.

Reporters, it seemed, was a manner of speaking. There had been only one reporter. Matthew, on his way home, had encountered him at the end of the road. He had asked if he was speaking to Matthew Gore, and introduced himself as the representative of the Hindmere and District Courier. Matthew told him he must speak to his mother first. Oh, of course, agreed the young man, that was only proper, naturally he had called on Mrs Gore to ask her permission. He had been hoping to have a talk with Matthew there at the house, only he had not been at home. But it was very fortunate that they had met like this. They couldn’t really talk, standing here on the corner, though. What about some tea and cakes in the cafe” over there? So they had adjourned to the café.

‘You must write to the editor at once. It’s disgusting,’ she told me.

I wrote a suitably indignant letter, without the least hope that it would be heeded, but it helped to reduce Mary’s feelings to a mere simmer. Rather than risk raising the temperature again I refrained from mentioning Landis’s call.

Wednesday passed without incident – well, when I say ‘without incident’, there was a letter in the morning post addressed to Matthew and bearing a printed inscription in the left-hand corner: ‘The Psychenomenon Circle’, which I thought it judicious to abstract, and pocket.

I read it in the train later. The writer had heard on the radio a very brief reference to Matthew’s unusual experience, and felt convinced that a more detailed account was likely to be of great interest to the members of his circle who were interested in psychic experiences and phenomena of all kinds. If Matthew would care to – etc., etc…

But, if Wednesday was undisturbing, Thursday made up for it.

I was in the act of transferring my attention from The Times personal column to the leader page, an almost antisocial exercise in a full railway compartment, when my eye was caught by a photograph in the copy of the Daily Telegraph held by the man in the opposite seat. Even at a glance it had a quality which triggered my curiosity. I leant forward to take a closer look. Habitual travellers’ develop an instinct which warns them of such liberties. My vis-à-vis immediately lowered his paper to glare at me as if I were committing trespass and probably worse, and ostentatiously refolded it to present a different page.

The glimpse I had had, brief though it was, disturbed me enough to send me to the Waterloo Station bookstall in search of a Telegraph I could rightfully read. They had, of course, sold out. This somehow helped to convince me that my suspicions were well founded, and on arriving in Bloomsbury Square I lost no time in sending a message round the office requesting the loan of a copy of today’s Telegraph. Eventually one was unearthed, and brought to me. I unfolded it with a sense of misgiving – and I was right to feel it…

Half a page was devoted to photographs of pictures on display at an exhibition entitled ‘Art and the Schoolchild’. The one that had caught my eye on the train caught it again, and reduced the rest to scribbles. It was a scene from an upper window showing half a dozen boys laden with satchels jostling their way towards an open gate in a wall. The boys had an angular, spindly look; curious to some no doubt, but familiar to me. I had no need to read the print beneath the photograph, but I did:

‘ “Homeward” by Matthew Gore (12) of Hinton School, Hindmere, reveals a talent and power of observation quite outstanding in one of his age.’

I was still looking at it when Tommy Percell, one of my partners came in, and glanced over my shoulder.

‘Ah, yes,’ he told me.’ Spotted that on the way up this morning. Congratulations. Thought it must be your youngster. Didn’t know he’d a gift for that kind of thing. Very clever – but a bit queer, though, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said, with a feeling that the thing was slipping out of my hands. ‘Yes, it is a bit queer…’

Landis drank half his sherry at a gulp.

‘Seen the papers?’ he inquired.

I did not pretend to misunderstand him.

‘Yes, I saw today’s Telegraph,’ I admitted.

‘But not the Standard? They’ve got it, too – with a paragraph about a child-artist of genius. You didn’t tell me about this,’ he added, with reproach.

‘I didn’t know about it when I last saw you.’

‘Nor about the swimming?’

‘It hadn’t happened then.’

‘Both Chocky, of course?’

‘Apparently,’ I said.

He ruminated a moment.

‘A bit rash, wasn’t it? Putting this picture in for exhibition, I mean.’

‘Not rash – Unauthorized,’ I told him.

‘Pity,’ he said, and ordered a couple more sherries.

‘That picture,’ he went on.’ The figures have a curious, attenuated, not to say scrawny look. Is that characteristic?’

I nodded.

‘How are they done?’

I told him what Matthew had told Mary and me. It did not appear to surprise him, but he fell into rumination again. He emerged from it to say:

‘It’s not only the figures. All the verticals are exaggerated. It’s almost as if they were seen by someone accustomed to different proportions – to a broader, squatter view so that it seems.…’ He broke off, staring expressionlessly at his glass for a moment. Then his face took on a look of sudden illumination. ‘No, it isn’t, by God. It’s like looking through slightly distorting glasses, and painting what you see, without compensation. I bet you that if you were to look at that picture through a pair of glasses which diminished the verticals only it would appear to have normal proportion. – It’s as if Chocky’s perception can’t compensate adequately for the characteristics of Matthew’s eyes…’

‘I don’t follow that,’ I said, after a moment’s thought. ‘The eyes that are seeing the view are also seeing the picture. Surely the two distortions ought to cancel out?’

‘It was an analogy – or nearly – and maybe I was oversimplifying,’ he conceded, ‘but I’ll be surprised if it isn’t something along those lines. Let’s go and have dinner, shall we?’

Over the meal he inquired in detail into the swimming incident. I told him as much as I could, and he clearly found it no less significant than the painting. What astonished me most of the time, and still more on later reflection, was his lack of surprise. It was so marked that I almost had a suspicion for a time that he might be humouring me – leading me on to see how far I would go in my claims for Matthew, but I had to abandon that. I could detect no trace of scepticism; he appeared to accept the fantastic without prejudice.

Gradually I began to get a feeling that he was away ahead of me; that while I was still in the stage of reluctantly conceding Chocky’s existence as an unavoidable hypothesis, he had passed me, and was treating it as an established fact. It was rather, I thought, as if he had applied Sherlock Holmes’ dictum: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’; and had thorough confidence in the finding that the formula had produced. For some reason that I couldn’t quite determine, it had the effect of slightly increasing my disquiet.

After dinner, over coffee and brandy, Landis said:

‘As I expect you’ll have gathered, I’ve been giving the problem considerable thought, and in my opinion Thorbe is your man. Sir William Thorbe. He’s a very sound fellow with great experience – and not bigoted, which is something in our profession. I mean, he’s not an out and out psycho-analyst, for instance. He treats his cases on their merits – if he decides analysis will help, then he’ll use it; if he thinks it calls for one of the new drugs, then he’ll use that. He has a large number of quite remarkable successes to his credit. I don’t think you could do better than to get his opinion, if he’s willing to take Matthew on. I’m certain that if anyone can help it’s Thorbe.’

I did not greatly care for that’ if anyone’, but let it pass. I said:

‘I seem to remember that the last time we met you were doubtful whether Matthew needed help.’

‘My dear fellow, I still am. But your wife does, you know. And you yourself could do with some definite assurance, couldn’t you?’

And, of course, he was right. Mary and I were a lot more worried about Matthew than Matthew was about himself. Just the knowledge that we were doing our best for him by taking competent advice would relieve our minds.

In the end I agreed that, subject to Mary’s consent, I would be glad to have Sir William Thorbe’s opinion.

‘Good,’ said Landis. ‘I’ll have a word with him. I’m pretty sure that in the circumstances he’ll be keen to see Matthew. If he will, I’m sure you’ll get as good a diagnosis as anyone can give you. I’ll be able to let you know – in a few days, I hope.’

And on that, we parted.

I arrived home to find Mary erupting with indignation. I gathered she had seen the Evening Standard.

‘It’s outrageous!’ she announced, as if my arrival had pressed a siphon lever. ‘What right had she to send the thing in without even consulting us? The least she could have done was to ask us. To enter it like that without your even knowing! – It’s sort of – what do they call it? – invasion of privacy.… She didn’t even ask Matthew. Just sent it off without telling anybody. I shouldn’t have thought she’d have dared do such a thing without getting somebody’s consent. I don’t know what some of these teachers are coming to. They seem to think they have all the rights over the children’s lives, and the parents have none. Really, the kind of people these Teachers’ Training Colleges turn out these days.… You’d have thought that out of ordinary courtesy and consideration for a child’s parents’ point of view.… No manners at all.… How can you expect a child to learn decent behaviour when he’s taught by people who don’t know how to behave…? It’s quite disgraceful. I want you to write a really stiff letter to the headmaster tomorrow telling him just what we think of her behaviour, and demanding an apology.… No, do it now, tonight. You won’t have time in the morning…’

I’d had a tiring day.

‘She wouldn’t apologize. Why on earth should she?’ I said.

Mary stared at me, took a breath and started off again. I cut it short.

‘She was doing her job. One of her pupils produced a picture that she thought good enough to submit for this exhibition. She wanted him to have the credit for it. Naturally, she thought we’d be delighted, and so we should have been – but for this Chocky business.’

‘She ought to have asked our consent…’

‘So that you could explain to her about Chocky, and tell her why we didn’t want it shown? And, anyway, it was right at the end of the term. She probably had just time to send it in before she went away. I wouldn’t mind betting at this very moment she’s expecting to receive a letter of thanks and congratulation from us.’

Mary made an angry sound regrettably like a snort.

‘All right, ‘I told her. ‘You go ahead and write the headmaster that letter. You won’t get your apology. What are you going to do then, make a row? Local newspapers love rows between parents and schoolteachers. So do the national ones. If you want more publicity for the picture than they’ve already printed you’ll certainly get it. And somebody’s going to point out that the Matthew Gore who painted the picture is the same one who is the guardian angel hero. – Someone’s going to do that anyway, but do we want it done on a national scale? How long will it take before Chocky is right out of the bag?’

Mary’s look of dismay made me sorry for the way I’d put it. She went on staring at me for several seconds, then her face suddenly crumpled. I picked her up and carried her over to the armchair…

After a time she pulled the handkerchief out of my breast-pocket. Gradually I felt her relax. One hand sought, and found, mine.

‘I’m sorry to be so silly,’ she said.

I hugged her.

‘It’s all right, darling. You’re not silly, you’re anxious – and I don’t wonder.’

‘But I was silly. I didn’t see what making a row might lead to.’ She paused, kneading the handkerchief in her clenched right hand. ‘I’m so afraid for Matthew,’ she said unsteadily. She raised herself a little, and looked into my face. ‘David, tell me something honestly.… They-they won’t think he – he’s mad, will they, David…?’

‘Of course not, darling. How could they possibly? You couldn’t find a saner boy anywhere than Matthew, you know that.’

‘But if they find out about Chocky? If they get to know that he thinks he hears her speaking…? I mean, hearing voices in your head… that’s.…’ She let it tail away.

‘Darling,’ I told her.’ You’re being afraid of the wrong thing. Put that right away. There is nothing – nothing at all – wrong with Matthew himself. He’s as sane and sensible a boy as one could wish to meet. Please, please get it into your head quite firmly that this Chocky, whatever it is, is not subjective – it is objective. It does not come from Matthew, it is something outside that comes to him. I know it’s hard to believe, because one doesn’t understand how it can happen. But I’m quite convinced it is so, and so is Landis. He’s an expert on mental disorders, and he’s thoroughly satisfied that Matthew is not suffering from any aberration. You must believe that.’

‘I do try, but… I don’t understand. What is Chocky…? The swimming… the painting… all the questions…?’

‘That’s what we don’t know – yet. My own idea is that Matthew is – well, sort of haunted. I know that’s an unfortunate word, it carries ideas of fear and malevolence, but I don’t mean that at all. It’s just that there isn’t another word for it. What I am thinking of is a kindly sort of haunting.… It quite clearly doesn’t mean Matthew any harm. It’s only alarming to us because we don’t understand it. Doing my best to think of it objectively it seems to me we’re being a bit ungrateful. After all, remember, Matthew thinks it saved both their lives.… And if it didn’t, we don’t know what did.

‘Whatever it is, I think we’d be wrong to regard it as a threat. It seems intrusive and inquisitive, but basically well disposed – essentially a benign kind of – er – presence.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Mary. ‘In fact you’re trying to tell me it is a guardian angel?’

‘No – er – well, I suppose I mean – er – yes, in a way… I said.