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COLD HAND IN MINE:

Strange Stories by ROBERT AICKMAN

For MARY GEORGE and ANN PYM

who lent me a beautiful apartment without which this book could in no wise have taken form

In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation.

— SACHEVERELL SITWELL "For Want of the Golden City"

The Swords

Corazón malherido

Por cinco espadas

— FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

My first experience?

My first experience was far more of a test than anything that has ever happened to me since in that line.  Not more agreeable, but certainly more testing.  I have noticed several times that it is to beginners that strange things happen, and often, I think, to beginners only.  When you know about a thing, there's just nothing to it.  This kind of thing included — anyway, in most cases.  After the first six women, say, or seven, or eight, the rest come much of a muchness.

I was a beginner all right; raw as a spring onion.  What's more, I was a real mother's boy: scared stiff of life, and crass ignorant.  Not that I want to sound disrespectful to my old mother.  She's as good as they come, and I still hit it off better with her than with most other females.

She had a brother, my Uncle Elias.  I should have said that we're all supposed to be descended from one of the big pottery families, but I don't know how true it is.  My gran had little bits of pot to prove it, but it's always hard to be sure.  After my dad was killed in an accident, my mother asked my Uncle Elias to take me into his business.  He was a grocery salesman in a moderate way — and nothing but cheap lines.  He said I must first learn the ropes by going out on the road.

 My mother was thoroughly upset because of my dad having died in a smash, and because she thought I was bound to be in moral danger, but there was nothing she could do about it, and on the road I went.

It was true enough about the moral danger, but I was too simple and too scared to involve myself.  As far as I could, I steered clear even of the other chaps I met who were on the road with me.  I was pretty certain they would be bad influences, and I was always bound to be the baby of the party anyway.  I was dead rotten at selling and I was utterly lonely — not just in a manner of speaking, but truly lonely.  I hated the life but Uncle Elias had promised to see me all right and I couldn't think of what else to do.  I stuck it on the road for more than two years, and then I heard of my present job with the building society — read about it, actually, in the local paper — so that I was able to tell Uncle Elias what he could do with his cheap groceries.

For most of the time we stopped in small hotels — some of them weren't bad either, both the room and the grub — but in a few towns there were special lodgings known to Uncle Elias, where I and Uncle Elias's regular traveller, a sad chap called Bantock, were ordered by Uncle Elias to go.  To this day I don't know exactly why.  At the time I was quite sure that there was some kickback for my uncle in it, which was the obvious thing to suppose, but I've come since to wonder if the old girls who kept the lodgings might not have been my uncle's fancy women in the more or less distant past.  At least once, I got as far as asking Bantock about it, but he merely said he didn't know what the answer was.  There was very little that Bantock admitted to knowing about anything beyond the current prices of soapflakes and Scotch.  He had been 42 years on the road for my uncle when one day he dropped dead of a thrombosis in Rochdale.  Mrs Bantock, at least, had been one of my uncle's women off and on for years.  That was something everyone knew.