Not After Midnight: Five Long Stories by Daphne du Maurier
London: Victor Gollancz Limited, 1971 ISBN 0575007656
I know my mother was a big fan of Daphne du Maurier's books when I was a child, but as an author she passed me by as I came to adult fiction. She continued to pass me by, until my wife recommend that I read this book, which she enjoyed very much.
A collection of five stories which are too long to be short stories but too short to be novellas, there is a touch of the Tales of the Unexpected about these stories. Du Maurier uses the idea of psychic abilities in a few of the tales, which add to the eeriness and mystery.
The stories are set in various places (Venice, Crete, Ireland, Jerusalem and England), but the protagonists are always middle-class English of the post-war period, with the mannerisms and expectations that come with that.
The stories - apart from the last one, which I'll get to - are very well written, with the reader not knowing what's happening until the end. The characters, in this shorter format sketched rather than fully-formed, are believable and mostly of a type that one recognises quickly. Du Maurier definitely had a skill in mapping out a scenario quickly without it seeming forced.
The only caveat I have about the book is the last story. The premise is too hard to swallow, and the writing seems less.... revised? The characters seem less real, and as a reader you are aware of the structure and machinery of the story much more than when reading the other stories.
All told though, Not After Midnight is very good.
Descriptions of each individual story below -
An English couple are on holiday in Venice, trying to recover their equilibrium after the death of their daughter. They run into a couple of old Scottish women, one who is blind and has psychic abilities, who tells the wife that she can see her daughter with them, looking happy. The husband worries that the old women are somehow trying to scam them, as they re-appear in the evening at their restaurant, where they tell the wife that her husband is also psychic, and must not spend another night in Venice. On leaving the restaurant, they get lost and the husband sees what he assumes to be a child running away from an apartment from which they had both heard screaming
The couple return to their hotel where they receive a message that their son, back in England at school, has appendicitis and needs an operation. The wife arranges to fly back to England, while the husband will pick up their car and return via train.
As the husband travels up the Grand Canal on a vaporetto, he sees his wife with the two women on a vaporetto going the other way. Confused, he returns to his hotel, assuming that his wife had missed the plane. She is not there, so the husband goes to the police with his suspicions and initiates a search. While waiting at the police station he overhears that the police are chasing a murderer.
When he rings England to check on his son, he is surprised to hear that his wife is there, and he speaks to her. He then returns to the Police, who have found the Scottish women. The husband apologises profusely, and walks the women back to their pension. On the way they explain that what he had seen in the Vaporetto was a vision of the future.
On his way back to his hotel, which he has booked because he can't make the train, he sees the child, apparently fleeing from a man chasing her. He follows her into a room, where he realises it is not a child but a dwarf, and that the man banging on the locked door is a policeman. As the dwarf throws the knife that pierces his throat, he thinks "what a bloody silly way to die".
Not After Midnight
Our protagonist, a schoolteacher and keen amateur painter, has booked a holiday in Crete to spend time painting. He books a chalet at a seaside resort, finding out that the previous resident of the chalet drowned. He is disgusted by an American couple, the Stolls. Mr. Stoll is a rude drunk, and his wife silent and deaf. He notes that they head off from their chalet every day to go fishing.
As he travels around the island painting, he notices the Stoll's boat off the coast. As he gets closer he sees that Mrs. Stoll is diving and bringing items up from the seabed, while Mr. Stoll, naked on the shore, engages in a kind of weird dance. After the Stolls leave on the boat, our protagonist goes down to the beach to investigate the hut that Mr. Stoll had been dancing next too - inside he finds empty bottles, and pottery sherds covered in barnacles. The Stolls return, and notice him
Mr. Stoll then contacts our protagonist, and accuses him of being a spy, as was the previous resident of his chalet, which leads our protagonist to wonder what indeed happened to him. Stoll explains that they are diving on a wreck, and offers a relic in exchange for silence. Our protagonist refuses.
Later that night he sees Mrs. Stoll snorkelling outside his chalet. He hides inside, and when he ascertains that she's gone, he goes outside to find she's left him a package, containing a rhyton (a Greek drinking vessel), with an image of "Silenos, earth-born satyr, half-horse, half-man, who unable to distinguish trught from falsehood, reared Dionysys, god of intoxication, as a girl in a Cretan cave, then became his drunken tutor and companion."
Our protagonist has a night filled with nightmares, and in the morning determines to return the rhyton to the Stolls, only to find that they have left the hotel. He determines to return to the site of the shipwreck. Feeling dehydrated, he drinks some barley water he found from the rhyton, and rows out to the shipwreck site, where he sees Mr. Stoll drowned and held down by the anchor of the ship. He looks up and sees Mrs. Stoll and their Greek companion watching him from the cliffs. He realises then that Mr. Stoll was Silenos, and now Mrs. Stoll has decided that our protagonist is to be the new Silenos.
Shelagh Money is in her father's sick-room, when he suddenly calls out to her in horror and dies. She can't understand what it was about her that horrified him so much. During the days that follow, the reader understands that Shelagh is an actress, she doesn't get on with her mother (an attention seeker, Shelagh can't understand what her father saw in her), and truly loved her father.
Going through some old photographs, she focusses on the best man at her father's wedding, Nick, whom she knew her father had a falling out with over him not recommending Nick for a promotion when both were in the Navy. Her father had regretted the loss of contact, and Shelagh determines to find him and see if she can have a post-mortem rapprochement for the sake of her father.
She determines that Nick is now a recluse in Ireland, after suffering a car accident in which he lost an eye. She travels to a remote village, where she discovers that Nick is living on an island in the local Lough. As she explores the area, she is kidnapped by two men and taken to the island. Fearing what might become of her, she invents a story that she is a journalist who has been sent to interview him as a retired naval officer. While in his study she sees her parent's wedding photo, but altered to show Nick as the Husband and her father as the best man, which gets her quite worried. Nick thinks she looks familiar.
Meanwhile, Nick has arranged for her luggage at the local hotel to be transported to the island, where she is forced to stay. The next day Nick shows her an excavation he is undertaking of an ancient Irish burial - he is a recognised expert on them. He takes her for a boat trip on the lake, and Shelagh feels herself falling for him.
When they get back to the island she is left alone while Nick and his workers are having a meeting. After a time he calls her in and confronts her with the fact that he knows she isn't a journalist, and he knows that she had a list of dates that concerned Nick (which she had found in her father's effects). Shelagh changes her story to make it seem she was trying to win a bet.
Nick, with his cronies, then force her to go with them on a boat ride, and then in a van. When they arrive at their destination she is shown explosions in the distance and she realises that Nick is an operative for the IRA. She gets him to talk about her father, and finds out that he was not upset at being passed over for promotion, and that he had a one-night stand with Shelagh's mother. Shelagh is by now hopelessly in love, and is devastated when Nick drops her back at the hotel and leaves.
Shelagh heads back to London, and to her acting, hoping (but failing) to hear from Nick until her opening night as Viola/Cesario, when she gets a letter from him letting her know he's going to America for a time, and asking her to look at the photo enclosed, which solved for Nick the reason why she seemed familiar. It is a photo of Nick playing Viola/Cesario in his youth, and Shelagh realises with horror that not only is she Nick's daughter, but that it was that realisation that killed her father.
We follow a tour group through a night and a day in Jerusalem. Organised by a parish priest who becomes incapacitated and can't go with them - his place taken by another priest, Babcock.
We are introduced to the members of the party one-by-one. Lady Althea and her husband Colonel Mason (who served in Jerusalem with the British Army in 1948) are travelling with their precocious nine year old grandson Robin. The Fosters, a middle-class slightly gauche couple, the Smiths, on their honeymoon, and Miss Dean, an elderly lady of the parish who dotes on her priest and is upset that he can't make the pilgrimage owing to his illness.
Babcock does not want or feels able to guide this group around Jerusalem. At their dinner in the hotel Robin mentions that it is the eve of Passover, and suggests a night-time walk to the Garden of Gethsemane. During the walk Mr. Foster and Mrs. Smith have a dalliance, the Colonel overhears his wife mention that he was not only not fit for promotion in the army, but that he's not much use at anything. Miss Dean overhears that her beloved priest can't stand her attentions. Mr. Smith confides in Babcock that he feels his marriage was a mistake.
The next day they begin to tour the historical sites. The Colonel, at the site where Christ was scourged, is reminded of a boy he tortured in 1948. Mr. Foster has a nasty turn in a crowd, Mrs. Smith is ashamed of what she did the previous night and can't bring herself to go into the churches. Miss Dean falls into the Pool of Bethesda trying to collect some of the water thinking how much her priest would like the gesture.
Lady Althea, a frightful snob, arranges to meet some aristocratic friends who happened to be in Jerusalem, and is desperate to get away from the rest of the group. Eating some bread, she loses both her front teeth just as they turned up - destroying her pride.
Meanwhile Babcock is drawn along by the crowd into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where owing to food poisoning he soils himself. Going to help him, Mr. Smith is separated from Robin.
Robin has a theory of where the true Golgotha was, and navigates himself to that site, unaware that the Smiths had joined forces to search for him.
Eventually all the group are reunited: the Colonel looking after his wife, Mrs. Foster looking after Miss Dean, the Smiths reconciled, and Babcock pondering his shame, reflecting the shaming of Christ during his crucifixion.
The Breakthrough
Steven is seconded to a mysterious research facility. Gradually he understands that the leader of the group, Mac, is intending to capture life force of someone as they die. He has built several computers that enable him to do so.
He has already tapped into the life force of the living, being able to communicate with a dog, and a retarded girl Niki, who is a surviving twin (so her life force is doubled). He has linked her hypnotically to Ken, who has leukemia and is the guinea pig who's life force will be collected when he dies - Mac hopes that Niki will be able to communicate with the life force of Ken after her goes.
Mac succeeds in capture Ken's life force as he dies, but disturbingly Niki has a very bad reaction, and keeps asking Mac to "let me go". At the same time some government inspectors turn up, tipped off that something funny was going on. Mac decides to pull the pin and release Ken's life force.
Steve is left wondering what might have been.
