"Tudor Windows" by Nevil Shute

     'We don't use it,' said Mrs Elroy. 'The light's so bad. It seems so funny to have made a room like this with only that one window.' For some reason I did not speak. 'The children always call this Mummy's room.' She dropped an arm round the child's shoulders. 'Don't you?'

     I took one more long look at the west wall, noticing every discolouration of the plaster, and then turned away. It reminded me of a house that I saw in Warwickshire once, when I was a young man. It was just like that....

     I laid down my glass. In the candle light the room was very dim; in the corners the heavy Victorian furniture loomed black and shadowy. 'There was an alcove in the west wall,' I said. 'About six feet deep, I suppose. With a window. That was before the barn was built against that wall. The barn may have been put there on purpose.'

      I paused. 'You can see the space if you know where to look,' I said. 'Or you can measure up. But the shape of the room is wrong for that period. That tells you straight away.'

      He dropped a walnut with a tiny clatter among the litter of the shells upon his plate.

     'I knew it was that room,' he muttered. 'I slept in the house once.'

     There was a long silence. 'What will you do?' I said at last.

      He roused himself. 'Do? I don't want to do anything.' He fingered the table things irresolutely. 'Do you want to open up the wall?'

     'Yes,' I said frankly. 'I want to see if there is anything there.'

     He rose heavily from the table. 'I will not allow it.'

     'Why not?'

     'Not while the house is occupied.'

*   *   *

According to introductory notes preceding "Tudor Windows" by Nevil Shute in The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories: Volume Two, the story was written in the 1930s. If I were reading it without a writer's name attached, I would suggest it might be by Wakefield or Onions. We have the theme of thwarted intergenerational sorrow and desire; the house with history; the hidden room with a bricked-up window. And we have two gentlemen trying to account for something very queer.

Shute (1899-1960) wrote fiction on many subjects to international acclaim. Michael Dirda is an enthusiastic reader, and for a dead writer Dirda's enthusiasm can often be the link to rediscovery and reevaluation. As can be a reissue by Valancourt, who are giving us at last a sense of the full spectrum of twentieth century writing in the horror and aesthetic/decadent modes.

Name a popular twentieth century author  and you can be sure they have a forgotten horror tale in their bibliography. Writers involved in the world, men and women who heard anecdotes that refused to be forgotten, eventually wrote them up. "All Souls' Night" (1945) by A. L. Rowse, which I recently posted about, is a good example. Rowse didn't need to write a spook story, he just couldn't not write one. Clearly Shute acted similarly.

"Tudor Windows" is a pleasure to read. The characters are crisply drawn, and there is plenty of room for the sober and somber. A nicely melancholy note is struck about lives misspent and time running out. 

     

Jay

9 June 2022

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From: The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories: Volume Two Edited by Ryan Cagle and James D. Jenkins (Valancourt Books, 2017)