Miss Poyser

The spindly armchair was made of wood. It had a hard satin pad on the seat and another round hard pad on the back, that stuck into your back if you slumped. Miss Poyser approved. Miss Poyser never slumped. ‘Poyser by name, poised by nature,’ they’d said when she was younger, and she saw no reason to start sagging just because she was old.

When you have taken a house for the season, even if it is a tiny house in the street next to the post office, it is polite to pay a call on your next-door neighbour. Miss Poyser approved of politeness. In any case, it was practical: it would have been silly to spend week after week ignoring each other on the street and in the shops. Politeness was often practical.

Miss Poyser and her hostess sat on two chairs turned at an angle towards the window and the glass-panelled door that led from the porch. If the street had been less steep, one would have seen the shapes of the passers-by whose voices came in only as a murmur through the window, triple-glazed against the cold. If the front door had been open, the daylight would have shone in and been broken up into bulbous deep-sea shapes by the irregular glass panels of the inner door.

Her hostess was older than Miss Poyser, a little bent with age, indeed; but her straight iron-grey hair gave her a certain dignity very different from her guest’s ebullient snow-white curls. Miss Poyser had accepted a second one of the hard, aromatic biscuits that her hostess had baked, but declined a third. The coffee was good and strong and served in tiny cups, so that it was possible to accept a second cup without risk to her heart. Miss Poyser approved of this. If guests were thirsty then they should drink before they came, good fresh water in a nice big glass. The purpose of a visit was companionship, not gross feeding and drinking.

The afternoon light had faded into dusk, and the conversation had faded away with it. Miss Poyser approved of this also. She considered it morbid to maintain a ceaseless flow of chatter for the sake of chatter. She had recently instituted quiet periods in her school, to teach the children not to be afraid of silence when silence was right. They might spend the rest of their lives plugged into headphones, conceivably they might, but at least she would have done what she could.

A fragile Louis XVI-style clock tinkled four times, bloodlessly. The silence became watchful. Miss Poyser began to feel de trop, as if her hostess were waiting for something and wanted to encounter it on her own. But Miss Poyser made no move to leave. She could be remarkably obtuse when obtuseness was what was called for.

The front-door handle rattled, and the door must have opened, because patterns of light writhed in the glass panels of the inner door. The sound of cheerful footsteps, the clatter of skis being put down and boots taken off, and something like a laugh.

There was nothing more. Just when one might have expected someone to turn the handle of the inner door and open it, the sounds faded, the silence returned, and the light vanished from the glass.

Miss Poyser put her coffee-cup precisely and silently down onto its saucer.

‘Did you see?’ her hostess asked. ‘Did you hear?’

‘I saw,’ Miss Poyser replied.

‘What did you see?’

‘I saw.’

A pause.

‘You were not here the day the cable broke.’

‘No,’ said Miss Poyser quietly. ‘I was not there when the cable broke.’ She sounded like a language lesson, repeating phrases.

‘Perhaps they will come in – tomorrow.’ Her hostess seemed to be talking to herself.

Miss Poyser counted silently to thirteen. ‘What will you tell them?’ There was no answer. She counted her heartbeats again. ‘What will you tell them?’

Her hostess was sitting rigidly upright. ‘That I waited. That I did not forget.’ There was stubborn tearful pride in her voice.

Miss Poyser thought for a while.

‘The children cried when I went away,’ she said. ‘I know they haven’t forgotten but I hope they’re not waiting.

‘I want them to run about and shout and fall over and get up and run about again.

‘I want them to make drawings and say, “that was pretty, I’ll keep it to show Miss Poyser.” I want them to have adventures and say, “that was exciting, I’ll remember it to tell Miss Poyser.”

‘I don’t want faithfulness, I want stories.’

Miss Poyser took a deep breath. Her voice was poised and steady. ‘That’s why I go on. To have something to tell. When they come.’ She was talking about a different ‘they,’ now.

‘You are waiting also?’

‘One should not merely wait.’

‘Perhaps tomorrow – ’

‘My dear friend, I must not be rude, but you are young. They will not come for you tomorrow.

‘And if they do come unexpectedly when you are not here, do you think they’ll go away again? Be sure that when they come for you they will find you, wherever in the wide world you are. Do you think they love you so little, that they wouldn’t do that?’

‘Tomorrow – ’

‘Tomorrow, my dear, you shall not make your fragrant cakes simply to be crumbs for the birds. Tomorrow we will set out to find stories.’

‘Where? There are no stories now.’

‘We shall go to Peliti’s. There is a new kind of cake there. They call it Tropical Forest. It is like a Black Forest cake, but with molasses. Everyone is waiting to know what you think of it. They want to hear what you will have to say. It will make a silly, small story, but it is a start.’

Her hostess had turned to look at her. ‘Peliti’s?’ she said haughtily. ‘Who baked it?’

‘Gianmarco’.

‘Marco.’ There was an obscure gleam in the deep-set eyes. ‘Then it will be hopeless.’

Miss Poyser rose from the chair and swept non-existent crumbs from her lap.

‘Until tomorrow, then.’

‘Until tomorrow, Miss Poyser. But really, the boy cannot cook anything!’

I know, thought Miss Poyser as she walked to the door. That’s why I asked him to do it.

In the porch there were lumps of snow that certainly hadn’t been there when Miss Poyser came in.

They might come sooner than expected, after all.

Still, whenever they came, they would have stories.

This story is taken from "The Snow Cow: Ghost Stories for Skiers" by Martin Kochanski, published by Universalis. ISBN 978-0-956319-0-6.

Copyright 2009 by Martin Kochanski. All rights reserved.

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Miss Poyser