‘I want to make this a long day,’ Baines said. ‘This is the best time.’ He pulled the curtains back. ‘It’s a bit misty. The cat’s been out all night. There she is, sniffing round the area. They haven’t taken in any milk at 59. Emma’s shaking out the mats at 63.’ He said, ‘This was what I used to think about on the Coast: somebody shaking mats and the cat coming home. I can see it today,’ Baines said, ‘just as if I was still in Africa. Most days you don’t notice what you’ve got. It’s a good life if you don’t weaken.’ He put a penny on the wash-stand. ‘When you’ve dressed, Phil, run and get a Mail from the barrow at the corner. I’ll be cooking the sausages.’
‘Sausages?’
‘Sausages,’ Baines said. ‘We’re going to celebrate today. A fair bust.’ He celebrated at breakfast, restless, cracking jokes, unaccountably merry and nervous. It was going to be a long long day, he kept on coming back to that: for years he had waited for a long day, he had sweated in the damp Coast heat, changed shirts, gone down with fever, lain between the blankets and sweated, all in the hope of this long day, that cat sniffing round the area, a bit of mist, the mats beaten at 63. He propped the Mail in front of the coffee-pot and read pieces aloud. He said, ‘Cora Down’s been married for the fourth time.’ He was amused, but it wasn’t his idea of a long day. His long day was the Park, watching the riders in the Row, seeing Sir Arthur Stillwater pass beyond the rails (‘He dined with us once in Bo; up from Freetown; he was governor there’), lunch at the Corner House for Philip’s sake (he’d have preferred himself a glass of stout and some oysters at the York bar), the Zoo, the long bus ride home in the last summer light: the leaves in the Green Park were beginning to turn and the motors nuzzled out of Berkeley Street with the low sun gently glowing on their windscreens. Baines envied no one, not Cora Down, or Sir Arthur Stillwater, or Lord Sandale, who came out on to the steps of the Naval and Military and then went back again because he hadn’t got anything to do and might as well look at another paper. ‘I said don’t let me see you touch that black again.’ Baines had led a man’s life; everyone on top of the bus pricked their ears when he told Philip all about it.
‘Would you have shot him?’ Philip asked, and Baines put his head back and tilted his dark respectable manservant’s hat to a better angle as the bus swerved round the Artillery Memorial.
‘I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. I’d have shot to kill,’ he boasted, and the bowed figure went by, steel helmet, the heavy cloak, the down-turned rifle and the folded hands.
‘Have you got the revolver?’
‘Of course I’ve got it,’ Baines said. ‘Don’t I need it with all the burglaries there’ve been?’ This was the Baines whom Philip loved: not Baines singing and carefree, but Baines responsible, Baines behind barriers, living this man’s life.
All the buses streamed out from Victoria like a convoy of aeroplanes to bring Baines home with honour. ‘Forty blacks under me,’ and there waiting near the area steps was the proper conventional reward, love at lighting-up time.
‘It’s your niece,’ Philip said, recognizing the white mackintosh, but not the happy sleepy face. She frightened him like an unlucky number; he nearly told Baines what Mrs Baines had said; but he didn’t want to bother, he wanted to leave things alone.
‘Why, so it is,’ Baines said, ‘I shouldn’t wonder if she was going to have a bite of supper with us.’ But he said they’d play a game, pretend they didn’t know her, slip down the area steps, ‘and here,’ Baines said, ‘we are,’ lay the table, put out the cold sausages, a bottle of beer, a bottle of ginger pop, a flagon of harvest burgundy. ‘Everyone his own drink,’ Baines said. ‘Run upstairs, Phil, and see if there’s been a post.’
Philip didn’t like the empty house at dusk before the lights went on. He hurried. He wanted to be back with Baines. The hall lay there in quiet and shadow prepared to show him something he didn’t want to see. Some letters rustled down, and someone knocked. ‘Open in the name of the Republic.’ The tumbrils rolled, the head bobbed in the bloody basket. Knock, knock, and the postman’s footsteps going away. Philip gathered the letters. The slit in the door was like the grating in a jeweller’s window. He remembered the policeman he had seen peer through. He had said to his nurse, ‘What’s he doing?’ and when she said, ‘He’s seeing if everything’s all right,’ his brain immediately filled with images of all that might be wrong. He ran to the baize door and the stairs. The girl was already there and Baines was kissing her. She leant breathless against the dresser. ‘This is Emmy, Phil.’
‘There’s a letter for you, Baines.’
‘Emmy,’ Baines said, ‘it’s from her.’ But he wouldn’t open it. ‘You bet she’s coming back.’
‘We’ll have supper, anyway,’ Emmy said. ‘She can’t harm that.’
‘You don’t know her,’ Baines said. ‘Nothing’s safe. Damn it,’ he said, ‘I was a man once,’ and he opened the letter.
‘Can I start?’ Philip asked, but Baines didn’t hear; he presented in his stillness and attention an example of the importance grown-up people attached to the written word: you had to write your thanks, not wait and speak them, as if letters couldn’t lie. But Philip knew better than that, sprawling his thanks across a page to Aunt Alice who had given him a doll he was too old for. Letters could lie all right, but they made the lie permanent: they lay as evidence against you; they made you meaner than the spoken word.
‘She’s not coming back till tomorrow night,’ Baines said. He opened the bottles, he pulled up the chairs, he kissed Emmy again against the dresser.
‘You oughtn’t to,’ Emmy said, ‘with the boy here.’
‘He’s got to learn,’ Baines said, ‘like the rest of us,’ and he helped Philip to three sausages. He only took one for himself; he said he wasn’t hungry; but when Emmy said she wasn’t hungry either he stood over her and made her eat. He was timid and rough with her; he made her drink the harvest burgundy because he said she needed building up; he wouldn’t take no for an answer, but when he touched her his hands were light and clumsy too, as if he were afraid to damage something delicate and didn’t know how to handle anything so light.
‘This is better than milk and biscuits, eh?’
‘Yes,’ Philip said, but he was scared, scared for Baines as much as for himself. He couldn’t help wondering at every bite, at every draught of the ginger pop, what Mrs Baines would say if she ever learnt of this meal; he couldn’t imagine it, there was a depth of bitterness and rage in Mrs Baines you couldn’t sound. He said, ‘She won’t be coming back tonight?’ but you could tell by the way they immediately understood him that she wasn’t really away at all; she was there in the basement with them, driving them to longer drinks and louder talk, biding her time for the right cutting word. Baines wasn’t really happy; he was only watching happiness from close to instead of from far away.
‘No,’ he said, ‘she’ll not be back till late tomorrow.’ He couldn’t keep his eyes off happiness; he’d played around as much as other men, he kept on reverting to the Coast as if to excuse himself for his innocence; he wouldn’t have been so innocent if he’d lived his life in London, so innocent when it came to tenderness. ‘If it was you, Emmy,’ he said, looking at the white dresser, the scrubbed chairs, ‘this’d be like a home.’ Already the room was not quite so harsh; there was a little dust in corners, the silver needed a final polish, the morning’s paper lay untidily on a chair. ‘You’d better go to bed, Phil; it’s been a long day.’
They didn’t leave him to find his own way up through the dark shrouded house; they went with him, turning on lights, touching each other’s fingers on the switches; floor after floor they drove the night back; they spoke softly among the covered chairs; they watched him undress, they didn’t make him wash or clean his teeth, they saw him into bed and lit the night-light and left his door ajar. He could hear their voices on the stairs, friendly like the guests he heard at dinner-parties when they moved down to the hall, saying good night. They belonged; whe
rever they were they made a home. He heard a door open and a clock strike, he heard their voices for a long while, so that he felt they were not far away and he was safe. The voices didn’t dwindle, they simply went out, and he could be sure that they were still somewhere not far from him, silent together in one of the many empty rooms, growing sleepy together as he grew sleepy after the long day.
He just had time to sigh faintly with satisfaction, because this too perhaps had been life, before he slept and the inevitable terrors of sleep came round him: a man with a tricolour hat beat at the door on His Majesty’s service, a bleeding head lay on the kitchen table in a basket, and the Siberian wolves crept closer. He was bound hand and foot and couldn’t move; they leapt around him breathing heavily; he opened his eyes and saw Mrs Baines was there, her grey untidy hair in threads over his face, her black hat askew. A loose hairpin fell on the pillow and one musty thread brushed his mouth. ‘Where are they?’ she whispered. ‘Where are they?’
Chapter 4
PHILIP WATCHED HER in terror. Mrs Baines was out of breath as if she had been searching all the empty rooms, looking under loose covers.
With her untidy grey hair and her black dress buttoned to her throat, her gloves of black cotton, she was so like the witches of his dreams that he didn’t dare to speak. There was a stale smell in her breath.
‘She’s here,’ Mrs Baines said, ‘you can’t deny she’s here.’ Her face was simultaneously marked with cruelty and misery; she wanted to ‘do things’ to people, but she suffered all the time. It would have done her good to scream, but she daren’t do that: it would warn them. She came ingratiatingly back to the bed where Philip lay rigid on his back and whispered, ‘I haven’t forgotten the Meccano set. You shall have it tomorrow, Master Philip. We’ve got secrets together, haven’t we? Just tell me where they are.’
He couldn’t speak. Fear held him as firmly as any nightmare. She said, ‘Tell Mrs Baines, Master Philip. You love your Mrs Baines, don’t you?’ That was too much; he couldn’t speak, but he could move his mouth in terrified denial, wince away from her dusty image.
She whispered, coming closer to him. ‘Such deceit. I’ll tell your father. I’ll settle with you myself when I’ve found them. You’ll smart; I’ll see you smart.’ Then immediately she was still, listening. A board had creaked on the floor below, and a moment later, while she stooped listening above his bed, there came the whispers of two people who were happy and sleepy together after a long day. The night-light stood beside the mirror and Mrs Baines could see bitterly there her own reflection, misery and cruelty wavering in the glass, age and dust and nothing to hope for. She sobbed without tears, a dry, breathless sound; but her cruelty was a kind of pride which kept her going; it was her best quality, she would have been merely pitiable without it. She went out of the door on tiptoe, feeling her way across the landing, going so softly down the stairs that no one behind a shut door could hear her. Then there was complete silence again; Philip could move; he raised his knees; he sat up in bed; he wanted to die. It wasn’t fair, the walls were down again between his world and theirs; but this time it was something worse than merriment that the grown people made him share; a passion moved in the house he recognized but could not understand.
It wasn’t fair, but he owed Baines everything: the Zoo, the ginger pop, the bus ride home. Even the supper called on his loyalty. But he was frightened; he was touching something he touched in dreams: the bleeding head, the wolves, the knock, knock, knock. Life fell on him with savagery: you couldn’t blame him if he never faced it again in sixty years. He got out of bed, carefully from habit put on his bedroom slippers, and tiptoed to the door: it wasn’t quite dark on the landing below because the curtains had been taken down for the cleaners and the light from the street came in through the tall windows. Mrs Baines had her hand on the glass door-knob; she was carefully turning it; he screamed, ‘Baines, Baines.’
Mrs Baines turned and saw him cowering in his pyjamas by the banisters; he was helpless, more helpless even than Baines, and cruelty grew at the sight of him and drove her up the stairs. The nightmare was on him again and he couldn’t move; he hadn’t any more courage left for ever; he’d spent it all, had been allowed no time to let it grow, no years of gradual hardening; he couldn’t even scream.
But the first cry had brought Baines out of the best spare bedroom and he moved quicker than Mrs Baines. She hadn’t reached the top of the stairs before he’d caught her round the waist. She drove her black cotton gloves at his face and he bit her hand. He hadn’t time to think, he fought her savagely like a stranger, but she fought back with knowledgeable hate. She was going to teach them all and it didn’t really matter whom she began with; they had all deceived her; but the old image in the glass was by her side, telling her she must be dignified, she wasn’t young enough to yield her dignity; she could beat his face, but she mustn’t bite; she could push, but she mustn’t kick.
Age and dust and nothing to hope for were her handicaps. She went over the banisters in a flurry of black clothes and fell into the hall; she lay before the front door like a sack of coals which should have gone down the area into the basement. Philip saw; Emmy saw; she sat down suddenly in the doorway of the best spare bedroom with her eyes open as if she were too tired to stand any longer. Baines went slowly down into the hall.
It wasn’t hard for Philip to escape; they’d forgotten him completely; he went down the back, the servants’ stairs, because Mrs Baines was in the hall; he didn’t understand what she was doing lying there; like the startling pictures in a book no one had read to him, the things he didn’t understand terrified him. The whole house had been turned over to the grown-up world; he wasn’t safe in the night-nursery; their passions had flooded it. The only thing he could do was to get away, by the back stairs, and up through the area, and never come back. You didn’t think of the cold, of the need of food and sleep; for an hour it would seem quite possible to escape from people for ever.
He was wearing pyjamas and bedroom slippers when he came up into the square, but there was no one to see him. It was that hour of the evening in a residential district when everyone is at the theatre or at home. He climbed over the iron railings into the little garden: the plane trees spread their large pale palms between him and the sky. It might have been an illimitable forest into which he had escaped. He crouched behind a trunk and the wolves retreated; it seemed to him between the little iron seat and the tree-trunk that no one would ever find him again. A kind of embittered happiness and self-pity made him cry; he was lost; there wouldn’t be any more secrets to keep; he surrendered responsibility once and for all. Let grown-up people keep to their world and he would keep to his, safe in the small garden between the plane trees. ‘In the lost childhood of Judas Christ was betrayed’; you could almost see the small unformed face hardening into the deep dilettante selfishness of age.
Presently the door of 48 opened and Baines looked this way and that; then he signalled with his hand and Emmy came; it was as if they were only just in time for a train, they hadn’t a chance of saying good-bye; she went quickly by like a face at a window swept past the platform, pale and unhappy and not wanting to go. Baines went in again and shut the door; the light was lit in the basement, and a policeman walked round the square, looking into the areas. You could tell how many families were at home by the lights behind the first-floor curtains.
Philip explored the garden: it didn’t take long: a twenty-yard square of bushes and plane trees, two iron seats, and a gravel path, a padlocked gate at either end, a scuffle of old leaves. But he couldn’t stay: something stirred in the bushes and two illuminated eyes peered out at him like a Siberian wolf, and he thought how terrible it would be if Mrs Baines found him there. He’d have no time to climb the railings; she’d seize him from behind.
He left the square at the unfashionable end and was immediately among the fish-and-chip shops, the little stationers selling Bagatelle, among the accommodation addresses and the dingy hotels with op
en doors. There were few people about because the pubs were open, but a blowsy woman carrying a parcel called out to him across the street and the commissionaire outside a cinema would have stopped him if he hadn’t crossed the road. He went deeper: you could go farther and lose yourself more completely here than among the plane trees. On the fringe of the square he was in danger of being stopped and taken back: it was obvious where he belonged: but as he went deeper he lost the marks of his origin. It was a warm night: any child in those free-living parts might be expected to play truant from bed. He found a kind of camaraderie even among grown-up people; he might have been a neighbour’s child as he went quickly by, but they weren’t going to tell on him, they’d been young once themselves. He picked up a protective coating of dust from the pavements, of smuts from the trains which passed along the backs in a spray of fire. Once he was caught in a knot of children running away from something or somebody, laughing as they ran; he was whirled with them round a turning and abandoned, with a sticky fruit-drop in his hand.
He couldn’t have been more lost; but he hadn’t the stamina to keep on. At first he feared that someone would stop him; after an hour he hoped that someone would. He couldn’t find his way back, and in any case he was afraid of arriving home alone; he was afraid of Mrs Baines, more afraid than he had ever been. Baines was his friend, but something had happened which gave Mrs Baines all the power. He began to loiter on purpose to be noticed, but no one noticed him. Families were having a last breather on the doorsteps, the refuse bins had been put out and bits of cabbage stalks soiled his slippers. The air was full of voices, but he was cut off; these people were strangers and would always now be strangers; they were marked by Mrs Baines and he shied away from them into a deep class-consciousness. He had been afraid of policemen, but now he wanted one to take him home; even Mrs Baines could do nothing against a policeman. He sidled past a constable who was directing traffic, but he was too busy to pay him any attention. Philip sat down against a wall and cried.
The Third Man and the Fallen Idol Page 13