They soon ordered fresh drinks, and the conversation went from golf to games, and from games to books about games, and then to books themselves. Young Halliwell was here again surprised. For he found that the older man, so far from being totally ignorant of such matters, so far from being solely interested in women, and drinking and night-clubs and cars and racing, had, in his quiet, friendly, rather gloomy way, fully as warm an interest in the subject as his junior, and a considerably wider breadth of knowledge. Finally he said that his favourite author had always been Dickens, and that David Copperfield was actually the last book he had read.
‘I don’t know what it is,’ he added, ‘but I don’t seem to find any time to read nowadays. One’s always doing something else. But I mean to try and take it up again now.’
Young Halliwell was struck by his use of the word ‘now’ and the oddly wistful and optimistic tone in which it was uttered. It seemed to denote some break in this man’s life, some event or tragedy which had brought some sort of release. Young Halliwell wondered, even, whether this could be connected with his no longer being in the company of his usual friends.
They ordered drinks again, and became even more friendly. They told each other where they lived, and discussed the respective merits and demerits of living in rooms or a hotel. Young Halliwell said that you could get extremely lonely in a room by yourself, and George replied that if it came to that, you could be even more lonely in a hotel.
He went on to say that he had recently had an attack of ’flu (he had caught a chill at Brighton) and that though he had stayed in bed for four or five days, no one in the hotel had taken any interest in him. He said, indeed, that if it had not been for an old friend happening to ring up and coming round to see him, he would have been quite alone. He said, with a smile, that, apart from this friend, his only company had been a white cat, with whom he had made friends.
Young Halliwell asked him if he didn’t feel any weakening after-effects of his attack, and George replied that perhaps he did, but that on the whole he believed that the rest had done him good. It was a good thing, he said, to have a complete break sometimes. You could sort of sort things out and start again.
Young Halliwell was by this confirmed in his previous impression that there had lately been some crisis in this strange, likeable man’s life, and he felt even more curious. But it was, of course, impossible to pursue the matter, and the subject was changed.
It was now nearly closing time, and they ordered one more round of drinks before they were turned out. Time being short, and the succession of small ports he had taken having at last gone slightly to young Halliwell’s head, he was emboldened to ask a question he had wanted to ask from the beginning.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I believe I’ve seen you about before this, haven’t I? Haven’t I seen you in the “Black Hart” with a girl, and a man with a moustache?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said George, ‘that’s right. I expect you have.’ And there was a pause.
‘Didn’t I hear that she was a film actress or something?’ said young Halliwell, disingenuously feigning blithe disinterest and confusion of mind. ‘Or have I got it all wrong?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said George. ‘She’s been on the films. Yes.’
‘Yes. I thought she had,’ said young Halliwell. ‘She’s frightfully attractive, isn’t she?’
‘Oh, yes, she is. Very. There’s no doubt about that. Very,’ said the big man, looking at his drink, and young Halliwell realized that he should never have mentioned this subject – though he still did not know why. He quickly changed the conversation, and a few minutes later they were out in the air.
They walked down the Earl’s Court Road in the glare of the lamps, discussing Poland and the prospects of a war in the near future. They agreed that, in spite of all ominous signs to the contrary, it would probably not take place until next spring.
At the coffee-stall outside the station, they stopped and had tea and a hot pie each. Just before they left the big man asked for two pennyworth of milk, which was given him in a carton.
‘This is for my cat,’ he explained to young Halliwell, again smiling in that peculiarly charming and disarming way, as he stuffed the carton into his shabby raincoat pocket. ‘I get this every night.’
They walked together a little farther, for young Halliwell had expressed a desire to see the outside of George’s hotel, and they exchanged views on inclusive terms and bed-and-breakfast problems.
At last, however, the time came to part, and, slightly embarrassed, they shook hands.
‘Well, I hope I’ll be seeing some more of you,’ said young Halliwell. ‘It’s been a very nice evening.’
‘Yes, I hope so,’ said George, and added, rather awkwardly, and surprisingly, ‘Though as a matter of fact I shan’t be here for long.’
‘Oh – really?’
‘Yes. I’m moving out in about a fortnight’s time.’
‘Oh – really. Where are you going?’
‘Well, I don’t really know. I haven’t fixed yet. But I feel one’s got to make a change.’
‘Yes. I suppose one has.’ And there, was an embarrassed pause in which neither had anything to say…
‘Well, I’ll run into you before you go, anyway, I hope,’ said young Halliwell at last. ‘Well… Good night.’
‘Yes. Rather. I hope so. Good night.’
‘Good night!’
‘Good night!’
And the big man went into his hotel, and the young man walked back along the Earl’s Court Road, infected with a sudden feeling of sadness. He had expected to have talked with someone older, harder, more mature than himself, but young as he was, he had a feeling of having talked to someone younger, less hard, and though more knowledgeable even less mature than himself. He also had a feeling of having talked to a ghost. He never saw George Harvey Bone again.
Chapter Two
There were others, too, who observed George Harvey Bone from a distance, and indulged in speculation regarding his character and employment. Without knowing it he was something of a character in his hotel. Practically only seen late in the deserted breakfast-room each morning and then again walking late at night through the lounge to bed, he was yet part and parcel of the small hotel as a whole, and contributed to its atmosphere. The guests would ask each other about ‘that man’. Some would talk of ‘that funny man’, would wink as he passed through – and on the whole he was a somewhat unpopular figure. He seemed to carry his loneliness about him on his person, like someone branded.
Many guests wondered where he worked during the day. Because he was out all day they were certain that he worked at something, and because they could not gain the faintest conception of what this was, they concluded that it was something not altogether reputable. Only the porter, to whom he gave a weekly tip of two shillings, knew of the complete emptiness and unemployment of Mr Bone’s life. Frequenting the public bars of the same houses as Mr Bone visited in the saloon bar, he knew the Netta gang by sight, and had a pretty accurate picture of Mr Bone’s external life. He liked and respected Mr Bone, both because he was tipped regularly by him, and because of occasional conversations they had on the subject of professional football and football pools, in which department this unusual hotel guest was both shrewd in his forecasts and impressive in his general knowledge.
The Manageress of the hotel, a thin, affable woman named Miss Mercer, was, on the contrary, of the class which looked upon the unsociable, late and mysterious Mr Bone with suspicion, if not dislike, and she would have been glad, in her heart, to have got him out of the hotel. There was no means of doing this, however, as he was regular in his payments, and, at least within the walls of the hotel, quiet and impeccable in his behaviour. Indeed, apart from one slight eccentricity – that of having adopted, and of feeding with milk from outside, the hotel cat, whose affections he had completely captured – his normality was nowhere to be questioned. And even this little eccentricity, if such it could be called, was, she had t
o admit, of the most amiable kind.
One morning, towards the close of the summer of 1939, Mr Bone came into her ‘office’ to pay his bill. When she had given him his receipt, he surprised her by telling her that he proposed to leave the hotel in a week or so, and that he thought he had better tell her in case she wanted to let his room.
‘Oh,’ she said, easily simulating polite sorrow in an influx of secret pleasure, ‘I am sorry. Are you going out of London?’
‘Well, I don’t really know at present,’ he said, baffling to the end. ‘I haven’t quite fixed up.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘we’ll miss you. You’ve been here a long time now, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, I have,’ he said. ‘It’s well over two years now.’
‘We’ll be quite lost without you,’ she said smiling. ‘I hope you come back sometime. I hope you’ve been happy here.’
‘Oh, yes, I hope I will,’ he said, smiling back. ‘I’ve been very happy… Well… Is that all right?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s all right… Thank you very much for telling me.’
‘No – not a bit,’ he said, and, smiling again, walked out of the room.
When he had gone, she remembered his smile, and deciding that she had probably misjudged the man, she was almost sorry he was going. His sad smile, and his big, quiet, morose presence, haunted her on and off all day.
Chapter Three
So that was that, he had done it at last…
He walked after breakfast along the Earl’s Court Road in the rain, and was astounded by his initiative and audacity. It was all over now; he had taken the final step and given notice.
He couldn’t back out of it now, he was through; through with Earl’s Court, through with Netta, through with it all.
Earl’s Court in the rain… The summer had crashed: it had crashed at Brighton: it would never rise again. Only rain now – the grey, wet end of hope and love.
Where was he going? He had a week to decide. Where? Anywhere, Notting Hill, Bayswater, South Ken, Shepherd’s Bush, Knightsbridge, but never again Earl’s Court. Good-bye to the Squares, the Gardens, the Mansions; the Penywerns and Neverns; the Private Hotels; the Smith’s, the Station, the Turkish Baths; the A.B.C. and Express Restaurants; the pubs, the florists and tobacconists, all the bleak scenery of his long disgrace and disaster – good-bye for ever. The grey, ending rain was cool and blessed on his face.
He had to thank an attack of ’flu for this – that, and, of course, Johnnie. Johnnie was the only one who came to see him: he came from the other end of London. ‘They’ were near by: but of course they didn’t come near him: they didn’t miss him: they wouldn’t have missed him if he’d have died. Well, he had died on them, now.
He had thought he was going to honest-to-God die at one time. He had caught it, of course, at Brighton: all the strain and horror, and walking about in the rain: the bout of ‘dead’ moods, the worst he had ever had.
He had been really frightened one night, but the next morning he had been a bit better, and by staying in bed he had slowly got all right.
Johnnie had been the turning point. The chambermaid had come in and said there was a Mr Littlejohn on the phone. He had wanted to get up but he was too weak, and he asked her to say he was in bed with a spot of ’flu. Nothing more – but Johnnie was along at seven o’clock in the evening. He put his head round the door, and said ‘What’s all this about, my boy?’
He came every night until he was up again. They drank a little whisky from a half-bottle in a tooth glass and talked. He told Johnnie a lot. Not everything – he didn’t mention names – he was somehow ashamed to – and no details. But he hinted a lot, and he believed Johnnie cottoned on.
It was, really, just a talk about women in general. At the end Johnnie had said, ‘Of course, there’s only one thing to do if a woman really gets you down – and that’s run away.’ And at this Johnnie had looked at him rather shyly, and a little while afterwards had left him.
Run away. Somehow the fact that Johnnie had suggested the notion, that Johnnie was secretly behind him, enabled him, for the first time, to think of running away as a serious proposition. He lay awake half the night thinking about it, and took it up again next morning. Then, as he lay in bed and rested, in the peace of his convalescence, the idea slowly grew in strength, itself gave him strength and peace, and at last set into a quiet yet resolute intention. He would leave the neighbourhood and never see Netta again.
He wondered whether, when he actually got up, the thing would be in any way practicable or possible, whether it was within his capacity to walk out of the hotel, to go along the streets and about in the neighbourhood without using the phone, without haunting her haunts, without throwing himself consciously or unconsciously into the way of meeting her, and, having met her once, sinking back into hell. He found, when he at last got out of doors, a little weak and giddy, that he had no sort of desire to see her, that soon he was even taking a sort of pleasure in dodging her.
He believed he had reached the crisis at last: that he had burned his passion out. It was only just in time. His whole health would have been wrecked if he had gone on like that. But now the climax had come: he had had a rest: the ’flu, and the ‘dead’ moods (both brought on, he believed, by drinking and nervous exhaustion) had receded, and he could start again. He limited himself to two beers in the morning: had lunch at the hotel, slept in the afternoon, had a few more beers in the evening, and went to bed early.
One night he got into conversation with a young man, and talked about games and books and things. It was a great relief, it did his soul a lot of good to meet a fresh face and new personality in a pub, and talk about disinterested things. He could hardly remember a disinterested moment ever since he had met Netta. He told the young man a lot about the books he had read, secretly making up his mind to read them again himself.
The young man, oddly enough, had mentioned Netta: he had seen him about with her. He had said she was ‘frightfully attractive’. That had hurt: but only for a moment. The subject had been changed, and he had found he didn’t mind. He knew that Netta was frightfully attractive. He had never denied it. He wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. They were welcome to her. It showed, though, that he could never get away from her so long as he was in Earl’s Court. Even a stranger talked about her.
Netta was Earl’s Court now – he saw that as he walked along this morning in the rain. She was the buildings and the shops and the rain. Now that he no longer phoned her in the morning, now that the centre of his life was no longer her flat, that aura which she once gave forth – that appalling field of magnetic influence – no longer irradiated from her flat (being weakest at the farthest point from and strongest at the nearest point to, her actual bedroom, her being), but was spread out into the entire hateful neighbourhood.
He went into the Express and ordered a small coffee. It was lovely to sit and read a newspaper, without having to look at the clock all the time, arguing with yourself as to what time you should choose to phone her in relation to her bath and Mrs Chope. He sat over his coffee as long as he liked. This morning he was going to phone Johnnie. He had promised to do that when he was up and well again. Well, now he was up and well.
He went to the line of telephone booths in the station and boxed himself in. He felt a little nervous. By her cruel and arbitrary behaviour she had made this instrument, the telephone, so terrifying and odious that he could no longer use it for any purpose without a feeling of trepidation, without a feeling that the person at the other end of the line was going to hurt him.
He dialled Johnnie’s office number, and a girl’s voice said, ‘Fitzgerald, Carstairs and Scott’. He said, ‘Is Mr Littlejohn there, please?’ and the girl said what name please, and he said Mr Bone, and there was a long pause. He was afraid that he was interrupting Johnnie in mighty theatrical affairs, that Johnnie might be at that moment closeted with the dread Fitzgerald, Carstairs, or Scott, and that he would be embarrassed or a
ngry at being called to the phone by a nonentity who could only claim an old school friendship. Johnnie came to the phone, however, and was most cheerful. ‘Hullo, old boy,’ he said. ‘How are you?’
They had a little conversation, and then he told Johnnie that he had given notice at his hotel, and that he had got to find somewhere to live.
‘That’s funny,’ said Johnnie, ‘my ceiling’s fallen in, and I’m homeless at the moment.’
‘Oh – really?’
‘Yes. I’m in an awful mess,’ said Johnnie, and added, it seemed jokingly, ‘You’d better come and live with me.’
George only laughed at this, but a few moments later Johnnie surprised him by saying, ‘Well, let’s talk about it, anyway. When can we meet?’
They arranged to meet that night, the same place as before, Earl’s Court station, and they rang off.
He came out and walked along in the rain.
‘You’d better come and live with me.’ It stuck with him all the morning. It would never come to anything, of course, but he was very proud and happy to have a friend who could say such a thing.
Chapter Four
‘Well, where are we going?’ said Johnnie, as they crossed over the road by the station and he replied, ‘Oh – we might as well go to the usual.’
He had thought this out while waiting for Johnnie. To begin with she would probably not be in there. And even if she was, did he care? No – not now – not with Johnnie by his side – an old friend with whom he might be going to stay. Not now that he was clearing out. He wished she would come in; he would like her to see him looking well and sober for once, and to learn of his independence and approaching departure.
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