Prowlers

by Maurice Gee

  Some bit of their nature was twisted on the skew. I blundered away from it. A wet bush grabbed me in its springy arms. I wrestled my way to the other side, where I squatted and moaned, with fingers hooked in my collar bones. The music stopped. The window opened. Royce said, ‘Who’s there?’ I bit my hand to make myself be silent.

  ‘Reen, there’s a hat here on the ground.’

  I heard them murmur, heard footsteps on the floor, and then a distant sound of telephoning. Irene cried, ‘You’d better go. We’re calling the police.’ The bell-notes of her voice! They still ring distantly, through dark and rain.

  I ran down the wide path of shadow from the bush and tumbled over the picket fence and picked myself up and ran again through the pelting rain along streets whose names I did not know. I’d known them once but they belonged in another life. Yet one of them came up and spoke to me. What it said was, ‘Phil Dockery’.

  And there, dripping, muddy, I stood at his door. Phil Dockery. I shivered and could not speak, and he, snapping his teeth, pulled me in, and gave me a towel to dry my hair and poured me a tumbler of gin. He said to the pretty girl who blinked at me, ‘This is Noel Papps, Rhona. Least I think so.’ And to me, ‘Rhona, Noel.’ No doubt it’s my passion for neatness, for equation, that sees him move us side by side and smile. It’s true though, he was getting rid of Rhona that night. But I’m going too fast. Let me go back to my glass of gin. I swallowed it in gulps, and opened my collar and dried my chest, and steam rose off me in the heat of his fire. ‘I lost my hat.’

  ‘Lost your marbles, I’d say,’ Phil said. ‘I like your mo.’

  I wiped it with the towel.

  ‘What happened, Noel? Did someone stick you up?’

  ‘I went to Irene’s.’

  ‘Ah, so that’s it. You should have asked me first, boy. I could have saved you the trouble.’

  I took off my shoes and socks and dried my feet. He said, ‘See how he clips his toenails, Rhona. A very clean chap, Noel is.’

  ‘What’s she doing, Phil. With Royce, I mean.’

  ‘Daddy first, so why not little brother? Why go outside the family?’

  I was starting to be warm, and that was enough to make me happy. And the gin. I felt I’d walked a long way heel to toe and now was striding out again. Irene was far away, very small. ‘How do they get away with it?’

  ‘No one wants to see. Rhona doesn’t know what we’re talking about, do you, Rhona?’

  ‘I’d better go,’ the girl said.

  ‘Stay a while. It’s only nine. Noel will walk you home, won’t you Noel?’

  ‘If I can get dry.’ I grinned at her; and began to swell up with belief in myself. That’s how easily love can be moved over. Conditions were right for transaction, that’s the truth. Capital in the feelings could be moved, like shifting it from one account to another; and the only word wrong here is ‘love’.

  But I’m not leaving it there. Before I go on I’m going back. Irene can’t be treated in this way. Nor can I. I want to know what went on before I came into Phil’s warm room and met Rhona Clews. Thinned-out thoughts of Irene, did I say? They were fast and shadowy, like bats in the night. English thoughts. Back home in Jessop I approached her with a kind of density in my being, the product of my boyhood, youth, unsatisfied longing; and lust, and guilt and shame, and outrage at the way she had to live. It could not be moved except by chance; this and that, sequentially; which occurred. But what was it? I can’t so lightly put it aside.

  All I can do is use what I’ve just thrown out. Take back ‘love’. And say that a part of me was Irene, she increased me. And so did Kitty. And, in his way, so did Phil. I may be shallow, shifty, a kind of Aral Sea in my emotions, but if luck hadn’t been with me that night – Phil I mean, and Rhona, and circumstance – I’d have found a space in me so great, and had my being thinned to such a degree, I might not have found myself again. I mean that perhaps I would have gone mad.

  I do not like this as a meaning of love. I don’t much like the person I am. On the other hand I like myself very well. There’s something quite appealing, something very human, in shiftiness.

  Let’s get away from me and look at Phil. He’d thickened up. He’d grown into a man. His chest had that pigeon architecture that made me, through the rest of our lives, think of him, alternately, as hollow or filled with a great coarse-fibred heart pumping gallons of thick blood to his busy parts. His hair had thinned; somehow he was weak in his hair. His widow’s peak seemed stuck on with glue. That’s all I can remember about him physically – that and his moustache. Yes, he had one, a little brown slug adhering to his upper lip as though with its own slime. I saw why he liked my healthy bush. His nose had fattened up and was thick across the bridge and made him look both greedy and aggressive. I notice noses. I’ve always felt they show a person’s character. He had man-chopping teeth, yellowish, with, like me, mines of black amalgam in his molars when he laughed. Big pink tongue sitting in his mouth like a meal. Blue eyes, sickle-sharp; happy now. That was Phil. A lovely fellow.

  He asked about my job at the Institute. He does not want to know things for themselves but for the uses they might have. The Lomax owned some city properties, but Phil soon found I knew nothing about them. Chemistry he looked on as no job for a man. Pouring things from one tube to another, that was girl’s work. But I’m putting words in his mouth. He simply shrugged and let the question die. The truth is, I make Phil uneasy. I have a sign on him, and Kitty had it: special knowledge of a part of his life. He could not take it from us and we had power over him. So although he might think my work nothing, because it was my work it puzzled him. And although he might want to shuck off poor unwanted Rhona on me, I could say no.

  ‘Kitty’s got her knife in you, Phil.’

  Here was another thing that puzzled him. ‘What’ve I done? What did she want to marry that twerp for?’

  Twerp was the last thing I’d call Des Hughes. In some ways I’d back him against Phil. I’d back him for his rage, and outrage too, and his conviction. And I thought he’d give Phil a good run for ruthlessness.

  ‘Tell them to stop sending that postal note back. It’s only a bloody bob, after all.’

  ‘A bob’s a lot to them.’

  ‘Well why don’t they keep it? It’s a gift. Kitty and me were at school together.’

  ‘Kitty and I. You’re the enemy, Phil. You’re the bloated capitalist.’

  ‘That’s what they wrote on the envelope. All I’m doing is trying to make a living. I could pull those houses down, tell ’em that. I will one day.’

  He loved wrecking even more than getting possession. When the contractors went in with their bulldozers Phil was there. He loved to see walls come crashing down. In a way I think that was possession for him. He kept a poor-boy fear that someone would come along and grab his pie, and wrecking was gobbling. That got it in his belly and made it safe. All right, a fancy; but most of the properties he bought when he began were buildings marked for knocking down. In the slump, of course, he had to take his losses. The slump grabbed most of his property out of his hand. But he was tough at the end of it. There wasn’t much poor-boy in him then, or much looking back. Kitty was the only one he ever sent a shilling.

  I did not walk Rhona home. The rain came down more heavily and Phil drove us in his car. She sat in the back. I’d found her attractive in a round-faced pretty way and was disappointed not to see more bone. I like bone in a face, I like a bit of jaw and eye-ridge, cheek-bone. I like a nose that stands in a face. Hollows, angles, do not put me off. Rhona had none of that – and how typical of our relationship that I should start this account of her with negatives.

  Sitting in the back, she was in shadow. Light and shade moved on her face and it had all the bone I could wish for then. Who was Rhona? She’s a mystery; but that’s because I was never curious. The things I don’t know about her could have been discovered. I was, with her, desirous, angry, frustrated, pitying, but never tried to find out who she was. I us
ed her, tried to use her, to increase myself. The use she made, or tried to make, of me is one of the things that make me curious now.

  ‘What do you do, Rhona? Do you work?’ I was anxious to discover that sort of thing, and I felt a throb of pleasure when she replied that she was a records clerk in a solicitor’s office. I began to want her very much.

  ‘She tells me stuff about the clients,’ Phil said.

  ‘I do not,’ the girl said, shocked. I saw tears start in her eyes. It was enough, I loved her. I was, you must remember, still eighteen, although thirty-one.

  Phil stopped at the house where Rhona lived with her widowed mother. ‘How about it Noel, walk her up?’

  ‘Phil,’ she said, putting her face in light. I saw her pupils shrink. I saw her mouth open and shut like a goldfish mouth.

  ‘I want to keep the motor running. If I stall her she won’t start.’

  Something in Rhona died when he made that excuse. I put that statement down without firm knowledge; it’s more than a guess though. She never spoke to me about Phil, though I made accusations in plenty later on. But something fled from Rhona and I felt it brush me by. It made me cold, it made me still; a pause in time when some particle of life passed from her. Her face, in light, was thick, emotionless. Phil grinned at it. He winked and clicked his tongue. ‘Beddybyes, kid.’

  I walked her up the path and climbed with her on to a veranda and heard rain rattle on an iron roof. I shook her hand. Her fingers were icy cold. I saw, I think I saw, a smile on her mouth – a tiny thinning of her lips, gone as soon as it appeared. She went inside and turned the key and her footsteps clipped away down the hall, and in a room down there a light went on.

  Phil tooted his horn. I ran back to the car and wiped my hair and Phil said, ‘Nice girl, that. She’s just a bit too serious for me.’ He made no boasts and that was hard for him. ‘You should try and get a date. She’s more your type.’

  I replied, ‘Maybe I will.’ And I said to myself, That’s my decision.

  ‘OK, chauffeur, drive me to my door.’

  He obeyed.

  22

  The Lomax Memorial Lecture of 1933 was delivered by Dr Noel Papps. His subject: Developments in Fuel Research in Great Britain. If you look at the list of lecturers over the years you’ll see great names. Rutherford spoke on ‘Matter and Electricity’ in 1925. But in 1933 they were short of money and so chose someone from the staff. I did not let them down. I’m an actor, remember. I can be funny or dignified. My voice can crackle and lash, and fall and reverberate and die. I sometimes think my voice is the best thing about me. It’s a voice to open up vistas, and sit you in a puddle on your bum. I’m willing to bet that lecture of ’33 was the most entertaining, most ‘thrilling’, those dignified Jessopians ever heard. And I had a pimple on my nose.

  All that confidence, ability. Yet a pimple. It seemed to happen to me all the time. I must be reminded I would never be a man. A creature, Noel Papps, who dreamed of consummations, and peeked in windows, and sat in a wet bush mewling and biting his hand. And ten minutes later leered at a new girl. The toxins in my blood reminded me.

  Yet I got up there and performed. I forgot my nose and believed in myself; and they laughed, and they sat breathless, and applauded: the Director, the Bishop, the Mayor, the Chairman of Trustees, and our MP.

  My parents were in the audience but Kitty did not come. Irene sat next to the Chairman of Trustees. The lecture was a memorial to her father, after all, and she had dressed for it in the gown I saw her wear that other night, at her piano. Pearl ear-rings gleamed in her hair. The house might need new barge boards and a coat of paint and weeds grow in a gravel path, but there was money still in the Lomaxes.

  ‘Busy men in white lab coats,’ I said, ‘these are the men of the future. I won’t call them a priesthood, there’s no room for imprecisions here, but I’ll say this: they have a kind of poetry in them. Symbols, equations, valencies, there’s a dance equal in importance to any dance of words the poet makes, to any melody from our musicians.’

  Irene smiled. She put her head on one side and seemed to concede the argument. It mattered to me, and I knew as I went on that I would never be free of her and that her behaviour – whatever it might be – was her right. Her possession of a part of myself was simply a condition of my life and, partly, no doubt, because of the elation my performance roused in me, I grew elated at my taking from and giving to her, and in my mind struck a bargain: that we should ask nothing, but go on all our lives. I performed for her, with my talk of coal and oil, that ancient treasure buried in the earth. Irene clapped. And when I’d had my thanks, and shaken hands with His Worship Mr Big, and the Hon. Mr Puff, and Bishop Pomp, she took my arm.

  ‘Noel, you’ve been back two months. Why haven’t you called?’ There was no dinner with the lecture that night and her gown was out of place, but our town already held Irene eccentric. I felt protective of her and almost put my arm round her waist. Whatever you want to do it’s all right with me, I wanted to say. My parents came up, Tup Ogier with them, pleased with me. ‘Tup, tup,’ he said – the last time I was to hear that little measure of his satisfaction. Early November now. Before the end of the month he would be dead. ‘Irene, my dear,’ he said, and took her hand. She came to his house now and then and played the piano. But science, more than music, was his love. He beamed at me from his wasted face, from his good eye. ‘Just a mite flowery, young Noel. Ten out of ten otherwise.’ He asked me to call and said he had something to give me. Irene, sly and slanting, said she had something for me too.

  I went in the weekend, to Tup first. He still lived in Lotte Reinbold’s little house, and his garden, like Irene’s, had its share of weeds. Dandelions and stringy thistles sprouted in the brick path where Edgar Le Grice had knocked him down. The rhododendrons, dead at their heart, grew long new bending branches in a fringe, and the sunken garden, concave and spongy with ivy, looked as if it might hide the mouth of an underworld. Tup, in the French doors, withered gnome, called at me to watch my step. His wonky eye rolled without bearing and if I had not known him so straight, if I had been seeing him for the first time, he would have frightened me. His larger nostril seemed to gape more widely and compensate by smell for images lost to his sight. We went into the sitting-room and I saw Lotte Reinbold’s collection of busts, her jury Tup called them, on the mantelpiece: Mozart, Brahms, Schubert, Chopin. (Beethoven had been brained by Edgar Le Grice.) Her piano, a wedding gift from Tup, and not as good as the burned one, she claimed, occupied half a wall, and I saw with a start, with a flooding of easy delight, that the music on the stand was The Harmonious Blacksmith. Irene had been.

  Tea was brewing. Round wine biscuits were on a plate. We sipped and munched and Tup questioned me about my life in science. I told him about the Institute – Fred Gooch’s blowflies, Arthur Burroughs’ watery core, Billings’ work in the cold storage of apples, Dye’s on the male genitalia of various insects, and my own suspicions about pakihi – all that solid, all that real old stuff. And about the politics of the place, which didn’t interest him. He gave me his magnifying glass, his ‘truth teller’; and later we stood in the French doors and looked at Settlers’ Hill and the Berthon dome white against the sky. We reminisced about it like old men. Tup advised me not to forget astronomy. The glass, he had told me, banished fear; but a little bit of fear was salutary, and that other glass, on the hill, opened one to it, and showed too how it might be contained. ‘There’s nothing like astronomy for tension.’ He told me how he’d looked out into space and sometimes cried with fear at the spinning suns, and the gulfs between, immeasurable – not, he conceded, by mathematics, instrument, but in the human scale, by the mind. He had watched the comet – Halley’s – advance, coming out of deeps beyond comprehension, and had lost, he said, all sense of his being; and regained it, in the end, by an act of will. And when the comet stood at its apogee and filled his lens the margin of understanding over terror was so fine – a crescent as thin as a fingernail clippin
g – his sanity depended on taking one more breath, just that simple physical willed act. And that, he said, is the margin we hold: that’s all that keeps us from idiocy.

  I won’t pretend to go along with this. I told him I did not understand and that depressed him. But we went back into the room and found the tea warm enough for a second cup, and we had more biscuits, and he grinned as though this act, drinking, munching, proved his case. Perhaps it did. Sometimes, these days, I understand it. We hold on by our fingernails, by an act of will. But my grasp of that slips away.

  I promised to visit him more often. And he told me not to waste too much time on an old man, but get on with my work, and get a wife.

  I laughed, ‘Irene?’

  He said, ‘You leave Irene alone. She’s doing very well. I warned Phil off.’

  ‘Does he want her?’

  ‘Phil wants whatever he can’t have. But the pair of you are beetles, Noel. Coleoptera. Irene’s Chrysopa.’ He grinned. ‘Go away and look it up.’

  I thought about it as I walked to her house. It offended me to be classed with Phil. Our generic difference was plain and Tup, of all people, should recognize it. He was closer to the truth with Irene. ‘Chrysopa’ got her sparkle and fragility even though it left a good deal out. But what did he mean, she was doing well? I wondered if he knew about her and Royce, then wondered if there was anything to know. It was impossible; but, at once, self-evident; and I lurched on my foundation of sanity and had to take that willed breath Tup had spoken of.