Whispers: An anthology of Fantasy and Horror

LE MIROIR by Robert Aickman

Celia’s father was old enough to be her grandfather, perhaps her great-grandfather. Notoriously, it is one of the advantages that men have over women.

He had beautiful, silvery hair, and a voice like a distant bell of indeterminate note; but, unfortunately, he could move only very slowly, and, even then, aided by a shiny black staff, with a most handsomely jeweled knob. Celia had never known her mother, and that lady’s portrait was always turned to the wall, from which position, in accordance with her father’s adjuration, she had never cared to drag it, or to set about dragging it, for it looked very heavy.

The old house was crumbling now, and something beautiful was lost to it with every year that ended: even the drawing of an unknown, smiling woman by Raphael; even the tiny box found in the Prince of the Moskowa’s fob, and soaked in his blood. In the end, one would have thought that there remained only the mirrors; the looking glasses, if you insist. The mirrors or looking glasses, and the bare utilities for the bare living which has to substitute for life.

All the looking glasses were, of course, mercury-silvered, so that, as well as reflecting, they embellished and discriminated. In each of the state rooms were three or four of the objects; on the walls, on floor stands, on bureaux and escritoires. In the state bedrooms the looking glasses were even more subtly placed and more ingeniously set, in that long ago they had been offered more curious topics to touch upon. It is unnecessary to select from the lists of past guests, because the lists included everyone.

Day by day, Celia’s father would toil round the rooms, struggling up the grand staircases, crawling perilously down them; in every room, on every landing, at every dark corner, gazing in the looking glasses, outstaring time. Sometimes, at a respectful distance, he was followed for much of the way by his old Nurse, though more commonly Nurse was confined by neuritis and weakheadedness to her bed in the little apartment under the flaking tiles that she had occupied since first she came. How old Nurse could be was a subject sedulously eschewed.

Right from the cradle (and Celia’s cradle had aforetime cradled both the shapely John Dryden and the unproportioned Alexander Pope), Celia had vouchsafed her frail, dreamlike drawings; in pencil, even in chalk; and, later, with water color finely touched in. She had studied every urn in the park, and every ancient tree, by every condition of light: the Elizabethan oaks, the Capability Brown beeches, the single exotics planted with ceremony by Mr. Palgrave, by Bishop Wilberforce, by the Prince Imperial. The tenant farmer’s herds served well as artistic auxiliaries; and, sometimes at dusk, the Mad Hunt, which all at these times could hear but only those with the Sight could behold. It was natural that when at length Celia had arrived at her sixteenth birthday, she should wish to go to Paris in order to increase her power and widen her range.

Still in a dream, she found herself enrolled at a long-established and old-fashioned private atelier: Étien’s it had been familiarly named by many generations of students, some of them always British. One felt that Watteau and Greuze must have been among the more recent pupils; Claude, among the earlier professors. But now, as is often found with aging institutions, seven eighths of the attendants were excessively youthful; too young to be taken quite seriously as yet by anyone. The remaining one eighth was composed of shaky eccentrics and inadequates who had been attending (and, of course, contributing) since the year Dot. The professors were wayward, though one or two were geniuses, and merely at cross purposes with the times in which they found themselves. Genius, however, comes normally in inverse measure with capacity to impart. The two things are strongly opposed. One of the pupils, a very old, very tough American woman brought a sackful of cakes and pastries for consumption by all during the two breaks each day.

Celia, aged sixteen years and eleven days (“Give me back my eleven days,” she cried out in a brief moment of melancholy), was escorted to France by Mr. Burphy, die Chief Clerk in Totlands, her father’s solicitors, and of course her own too. They even consumed an evening meal of a sort in the restaurant at the Gare de Lyon, the most gorgeous in Europe. But all the arrangements had really been made by Celia’s distant cousin, Rolf, who lived with two other men of the same generation in a beautiful house up the hill at Meudon, and who knew all the ins and outs. Cousin Rolf fixed Celia up at Étien’s and he even found her a nearby apartment: very high up, but with two rooms, though small ones, and with what amounted to a private staircase down to the sanitary facilities on the floor immediately below. Celia had no occasion ever to encounter in person her remote, though helpful Cousin Rolf. It was unexpected that a girl of Celia’s age and background should be deposited on her own in Paris, and among artists; but she had requested it, she had always spoken quantities of French, and she could not see that there was anyone to make a fuss, as all her aunts were in Ireland, about 150 miles from Dublin, and in no position to go anywhere else, even had they wished to. Fortunately, Celia could depend upon an adequate allowance. This was mainly because her father did not understand the value of money, and, throughout his long life, had made a point of refusing all advice about it, or about anything else.

The first things that Celia bought (apart from a few dresses, pairs of shoes and stockings, lovely lingerie, and even one or two hats, either very small or very large) were additional chattels for her miniature rooms, which, upon entry, she was surprised to find almost unfurnished, as if she had been living still in the days of Mimi, Musetta, Colline, and all those well-known people. In particular, there was not one single mirror or looking glass, not one; not even a cracked fragment in the downstairs cabinet, with, perhaps, MILTON at one corner, or, possibly, JEYES, such as one found in bathing machines.

So Celia went out and purchased four or five looking glasses immediately. All but one would be merely for use each day and were backed with nitrate, though certainly not mass-produced or in any way commonplace; but the last of her acquisitions might have stood in any bedroom at home.

Celia had spotted it in one of the low, dark, hopelessly untidy shops, and its capture had been an impulse of the instant, as is everything that is in any way real. Elements of nostalgia, even of plain homesickness, no doubt entered in.

The shop had proved to be run not by the usual very old man, but by an even older woman, though spryer and more grasping than Nurse at home. The aged tricoteuse had driven a terribly hard bargain, but Celia had to possess the glass; first, for the obvious reason that she could not live without it; second, because it bore extremely faded traces of mysterious male and female figures round the upper part of the frame; third, because the face that had just looked back at her from its shallows and depths had not been her own.

The short distance along which the glass had to be borne presented an even worse problem than the haggling, and the need for lugging it up so many narrow, winding, and decrepit stairs a worse one still.

But the most complex of ordeals sometimes finds its own resolution, and now Celia sat before the beautiful mirror or looking glass, now in one new dress, now in another, and intermittently without troubling to put on a dress at all. She had to seat herself for these transactions, because the looking glass was so short in the frame. She had heard that our ancestors were more stunted than we are, though even this (she knew) had been contested by a woman who owned an immense collection of very old clothes, all of which she had measured anew, giving years to the work. Possibly the beautiful looking glass had been designed for the Gonzaga dwarfs, men and women even as the faded figures gamboling round the top of the frame? Celia wondered if she would ever visit their tiny suites at Mantua; of which her father had shown her small yellow photographs taken years before with early flashlights. In the meantime, she would have to find a chaise longue that was stumpier in the shanks. Her own limbs were as long as they were lovely.

So life continued, for Celia could not quite say how long, as her father wrote letters of any kind only on formal occasions, and Totlands really had no business to transact with her beyond paying out her allowance, with their usual precise punctuality. She had been well aware that Mr. Burphy had been more frightened of her than anything else. How long ago it began to seem! Time flies when we watch it, but has no need to fly when we ignore it.

One morning, Celia felt quite certain of something that of late she had more and more suspected: she was not merely looking older, but looking much older; older, more grained, more perceptibly skinny. The first bright light of spring must have wrought the trick.

At least, Celia presumed it was the spring; which she had always distrusted, even artistically. She knew that spring is the season of maximum self-slaughter; and who could wonder? It was the season when doubt was no longer possible. Momentarily, she clutched at the neckline of her dress, and managed to inflict an actual rent. Even the fabric of her garments seemed to have weakened slightly; and this had been an expensive garment, once.

Celia did not care to look very often in any of the glasses after that, but crept past and around them, her eyes on the jade or turquoise carpet.

All the same, life has in some sense to go forward, as long as it bears with us at all; and Celia, despite her tendency to melancholy, was perfectly courageous. Moreover, she was finding more and more of herself in her art, and had been assured that soon she might quite easily win a medal of some kind. Of course, that had been said to her privately, in order not to upset the others.

She bought many new dresses to replace the one she had torn. She even bought six fancy dresses, or costumes that were all but that; with a view to meeting life from time to time in different and selected disguises. She bought a silk tie and two pairs of silk socks for a man she knew; all in excitingly aggressive colors and patterns. Sometimes she dwelt upon what it would be like to nurture eight or nine children, the fruit of her womb; upon their complex teething and schooling; upon some brusque, shadowy figure to pay for it all and act as head of the household.

How long could it have been before Celia, despite her precautions, caught her own eye in the glass and realized that she must be middle-aged and beyond all chance of concealment? And, needless to say, it had happened at that same dreadful morning hour, when the brightness of the sun is equaled only by the blackness of the heart.

Other faces had continued glinting back at her from time to time, but now she recognized that a stranger had intruded for ever.

She opened a letter that morning from David Skelt, the senior partner in Totlands. He had never before been under any necessity to write to her personally, but had been able to leave the task to his staff, or at least to a partner who was greatly junior.

Mr. Skelt informed her that her father had become so frail that Nurse would have to be supplemented by at least one other nurse; and that her own allowance would have henceforth to be halved at the least, in consequence. He referred to these new nurses as “trained nurses.” Presumably, that might make a big difference in some way.

Prices in Paris were said to be rising and the people to be changing in character; but Celia knew that she still had her art, as well as her beautiful looking glass. She realized that her art must mean more to her with every day that sped past. Whether strangers cared for her art or not, the other pupils could be counted upon for loyalty without flaw. Moreover, most of the pupils were nowadays little more than children, so that all could not sensibly be described as lost. There could always be a completely new generation. The future was an open question yet.

Celia even felt that she could hold her own with the looking glass by a continuous act of will: unremitting, resolute, robust. Long ago, Nurse had upheld virtues of that kind, and now the time was come to practice them. One never knew what one could do until one tried. If one tried hard enough, one could be any age one chose. In the library at home, she had come upon St. Thomas Aquinas’s promise to that effect, even though in Latin, and in Gothic type that grew faint and gray as one watched, and never had much shape to the letters at the best of times.

Alas, there were crab-sized holes in Celia’s petticoat, and, up and down the staircase, rats on the rampage for food, however moldy and mottled. Cousin Rolf could not have known. Their delicate paws were like swift kisses on ones face and arms. It was just as in the attics at home.

Celia took to attending each year the service at the Chapelle Expiatoire, and to painting pictures entitled “Son of St. Louis, Ascend to Heaven!” At these times, she could feel the divine benediction cloaking her shoulders, like a soft stole.

The other pupils at the art school were either complete babies, feeding from bottles containing corn flour; or, in certain cases, motionless skeletons, also fed with corn flour, though not from bottles, because they could not suck.

It did not take long by any standard for the point to be reached where Celia’s ever smaller allowance was intersected by the ever larger cost of everything. Sometimes the watchful could see her white hair and white face at the edge of the rotting curtain as she looked out at the march past for social justice. Through hunting glasses and telescopes they could see plainly that her eyes were at once animated and frightened by the coarse thumping of the drums, the amateur screaming of the brass, the bellowing of the inebriated.

She began cutting away the gangrene from her limbs, or what she assumed to be gangrene. She was too scared to use the sharpest knife she had, as no doubt she should have done. She preferred the small, elegant fruit knives, precisely because they were rather blunt; and because they were silver, though not hallmarked with a lion, as had been so many of the knives at home. A trained surgeon would have acted upon other values, though it is hard to see that they would have made much difference in the end.

The times had become so harsh, and the people so indifferent, that the art school, after all those years, was in real danger of shutting.

Celia reflected that one’s art is strictly one’s own, and that never should it mean more to her than it meant now, or shudderingly seldom.

Faces she took to belong to Raphael, Luca Giordano, and Frederick Leighton now looked upon her, exaltedly and exhortingly, from within the beautiful looking glass. When she was not at art school, or trying to buy simple things with almost no money (a dressing jacket, a pair of gloves, a flask of flowery liqueur), Celia spent most of her time gazing, as she would hardly have been able to deny. Only in that way could she be true to herself. But never until now had she seen faces or forms to which she could attach names. Too often of late she had seen shapes for which no name was possible. On occasion, they had emerged, and had had to be driven back with implements she had found on sale second-hand at very low prices near Les Halles and presumably intended for the meat trade in one of its aspects. Sometimes she was horrified by the spectacle she was compelled to make of herself, and her father might have had an asthmatic attack, had he seen it.

Celia knew perfectly well that if she was to stand any chance of making a permanent mark, as the faces expected of her, then she should practice much more, as ballerinas have to do, and ladies and gentlemen who master enormous pianofortes. She should be plucky, confident, and indefatigable, like Rosa Bonheur. She should probably look like Rosa Bonheur also, though she had enough difficulty already in hanging on to looks of any land. Still, there it was. The demands of art are notoriously boundless; nor are they subject to appeal.

“Oh, let me join you!” cried Celia, stretching out her arms to the real Celia within the beautiful mirror’s mysterious depths. The real Celia stretched voluptuously in a patterned dress on the chaise longue she had bought with such innocent ardor, and on which the beseeching Celia lay among the decayed wreckage, virtually upon the sloping floor, gazed upon by a hundred expectant eyes. The colored figures at the top of the frame had entirely faded long ago.

Celia thought that the real Celia slightly moved one pale hand and even opened her eyes a little wider. She could not remember whether the patterned dress was a silk dress for parties or a cotton dress for shopping. The pattern was known as Capet.

In any case, there would be no actual harm done if she continued to supplicate, to beseech.

Once, about this time, Celia actually heard from Mr. Burphy. It was the very first letter she had ever received from him, and Celia was quite glad that she had opened it, even though the address on the envelope had merely been typewritten. Mr. Burphy said that he had often thought of their romantic trip to Paris together, that he fancied there might be no harm in his recalling it now, that her father unfortunately needed more trained nurses all the time, that there was almost no money left from which to pay for anything, and that he, Mr. Burphy, was about to retire after generations of service with the firm, and was writing to everyone he knew and could remember, for that reason. The rest of the staff had subscribed to buy him a small electric clock, which had taken him completely by surprise, and particularly when Mr. Daniel himself had found a few moments to participate in the presentation!

Celia thought for a long, long time about the elms, and urns, and tiny bubbling springs in her fathers park; and about the tenant farmers comely, contented cows, and occasional frisky bulls. She thought about the forty-seven catalogued likenesses of her ancestors and collaterals; many of them in large familiar groups; one of them turned to the wall. She thought about the schoolroom with a dozen desks and only one occupant. She thought of the withered feathered fans in the conservatory, the property of ladies who, for her, had been dead always. She listened in memory to the Mad Hunt at twilight, and saw it take form. She smelt the rotting grapes, with the German name; and the ullaged wine, with no name at all. She felt the wet camel-hair bristles on the back of her slender hand, as she painted the world and herself into a certain transcendence.

Celia had all along been required to pay the rent in advance, especially as she was a foreigner; and she became anxious if she did not meet all demands in cash, and with punctuality to say the least of it. Often her purse, however slim, was considerably more than punctual, and most of all with the rent.

These rigors may have combined to reverse the effect intended, as so often in life; because somehow the payment due from Celia, after that last payment she was able to make and had made more prematurely than ever, came to be overlooked altogether. It is not such an uncommon event in Paris as is generally supposed.

Quite unfairly, there was a small scandal when Celia was certified to have been dead for something like four or five months before any part of her was actually found by a visitor from the outside world.

After various alarums had been raised, some of them by observers on the other side of the street, the elderly married couple who lived far below Celia, and looked after the place as best they could, sent their burly young nephew, Armand, to beat upon the door, and, if necessary, to beat it down. Armand admitted that he had not cared for the job from the first.

Not much difficulty was encountered, or effort required. Even the noise was minimal, or at least the disturbance; largely because the elderly couple had prudently selected a time which was well after dark, but well before most people had taken to their beds—in fact, when most people were likely to be most preoccupied, with one distraction or another.

In no time, Armand came hurtling all the way down again, nearly doing himself an injury in the feeble light. What he had to say was that he had quite clearly seen Madame lying there in the mirror, but no Madame in the room itself.

However, this summary proved possibly erroneous on at least two counts. The figure seen in the mirror proved, upon Armand’s cross-examination by his adoring aunt and all the community, to be not Madame at all but Mademoiselle perhaps, and therefore beside the present point. And Madame was in the room herself, though as to what had happened to her, the pathologist ultimately declined to make a declaration. The press thought it might have been rats, and it was mainly that hypothesis which caused the scandal, such as it was.