Outside her activity with the Old Folks and the W I she felt the depths and working of Mrs Harrod’s life close to her own which had not so far flashed and shuddered to all kinds of unjust visitations from chance. The recounted tales had the same edgy bitterness and gallows humour of certain Yiddish storytellers, those poor of the Polish and Russian towns in the last century became finally real to her. The empty flat above the garage, though draughty in winter, was luxury compared to Mrs Harrod’s cottage at Preston Bottoms. It had bathroom, gas and electric light, while the Bottoms had washbowl, fireplace, oil lamps and earth closet, and a long walk to the lane for every drop and swallow of water. Mrs Harrod never compared the blatant inconvenience of one to the normal equipment of the other, but Myra let her do a weekly wash in the huge white Axiomatic standing under the kitchen window. The spin drier made it light to carry back, saved her living among stalactites of steaming cloths during days when the fields were black with rain.
The sun dipped its beam through the kitchen window. ‘Have a biscuit, Mrs Harrod.’
‘Thank you. I do like these tinned biscuits. They’re old-fashioned. Better made. Not like them one and tuppence, penny off packets. I used to cook my own when John was alive. He’d come in from his work and eat as many as a dozen before charging off to play darts at the Legion.’ Myra remembered the last general election. She and George pinned a Labour poster on their gate, and one day, walking towards Preston, she saw a picture of the Tory candidate grinning in the window of Mrs Harrod’s hovel. Here was she, mistress of a detached Georgian residence squat in its own grounds, with garage, outhouses and flat, off main village street and in quick reach of town (as it might say in the Observer if ever they decided to sell it for five thousand more than they’d spent on it) and there was Mrs Harrod stuck in a lopsided cottage, ready for the council to condemn it out of hand, so that by another malevolent crack of fate’s bullcosh she’d end up in the workhouse, though still carried ga-ga to the polls in some spinster’s car who’d guide her shuddering hand into a cross by the right Tory name. Myra smiled, though thanked God for the voting Labour masses that still seemed to inhabit the north: cloth-capped, hardworking, generous and bruto, or that was the impression she got from reading a book (or was it books?) called Hurry on Jim by Kingsley Wain that started by someone with eighteen pints and fifteen whiskies in him falling downstairs on his way to the top.
George had considered using the garage flat as a study, a snug retreat where he could have books and drawing board, wireless and map table, a bed even – as if, Myra thought, to get away completely, wanting to leave me but not quite able to. His idea of marriage was to come home, eat, and read a book, thinking that enough communion passed between man and wife if they merely sat close and silent. He had great faith in his presence for generating love and affection. The miracle was that it sometimes worked, often enough for their marriage to be felt by Myra as pleasant, if not happy.
There were times when George drank himself into a three-day stupor. It came on him like a cold or illness, began when they went out to dinner or a party. He would drive home drunk – to prove he wasn’t drunk – cool and slow, careful and safe. When Myra was in bed he would go on drinking, open a bottle of rotten steam (as he called it) and listen to Bach or Vivaldi until he fell asleep or senseless. The next day would be the same, and the day after, his private kind of necessary oblivion. She remembered him telling her how the electric spring of his life had tightened itself beyond bearing on many nights of his lonely youth. Sometimes at midnight, in a deliberate trance-like way, he would get into his car and drive around the empty, lit-up roads of London. He would go from Notting Hill to Kilburn and Cricklewood and Hampstead, swing back at full pelt through St John’s Wood and Maida Vale to Kensington and Hammersmith, then via Shepherd’s Bush to Pembridge Square, stopping for petrol and coffee on his mad figure-of-eight career. He played a game called ‘Jump-the-lights’ – seeing them on red a few hundred yards away, treading the accelerator as if it were a piece of sacred earth he wanted to get the feel of before going on a long journey. The reds glowed like blood-eyes in a great mirror, drawing him closer by the second, his eyes shining, half conscious, fixed by the hypnotic stare and defying them to make him stop – when he was already out of the zones of his own power to do so. He sped between, unscathed, always untouched, a sweaty smile of triumph and relief, a heart battering him back to consciousness.
Now he was a quiet, hard-working enjoyer of the settled life because his dream of the dream-house had come true. Lectures often took him as far away as Plymouth or Edinburgh. Calm authoritative George, she saw him as the young, heavying fuddy-duddy of thirty-five expounding on the geological structure of the Kentish Weald, and theorizing on its relationship to the economic life of today. He was considered brilliant, his knowledge overlapping into anthropological and all manner of social sciences. She loved him for this knowledge, could forgive all the nights spent reading and writing alone at the kitchen table, and hearing mad rain gunning the windows loud enough to drown any footsteps. She kept the house going, fires lit, bulbs in their sockets, stove, radio, gramophone, dishwasher, all machines in smooth running order, so that the house worked as soon as his hand touched the doorknob.
She saw him – drunk and happy after his lectures, arguing till daylight, a long fluent talker when he had something to say, a conversationalist all-admired. Books and papers overwhelmed his front-room study, and the thought of him taking over the garage flat might not be a bad one, except that he would then pass all his evenings there and rob her even of that much time with him.
Early on they had talked of turning the flat over to what children came along, for George’s dream also included a pair of tow-headed Crispins crunching the gravel and grass, and high-jumping blue-eyed over the jungle-jim erected on the front lawn for all passing enviously to see. It had also been her picture, but she couldn’t stand the thought of it now, for both pregnancies had ended in miscarriage, the unexpected start of labour, and the bloody totality of George’s dream pushing out too early and dead, bursting her asunder in a most awful pain and waste of the world’s spirit. There was no physical explanation for it. She should keep on trying, the doctor said, but to ‘try’ for such a thing was a spoliation of human dignity that believed in procreation before everything else. If at first you don’t succeed, try try again – the spider image of Robert the Bruce – that Ouraboros of conventional response fitted only a fool without wit or patience, unable to wait, goaded by failure into accepting a maxim coined by the successful ashamed at the sight of other people’s disasters.
So the house became a factory that produced good living: a day of work gave peace in the evening, and a fine table to pick and choose from. The larder was flexible in its offerings because Myra bottled, smoked, salted, pickled, baked and prepacked; collected cook books and recipes from the Observer and Sunday Times, wrote cheques for magazines pandering to house and home, namely Which? Where? How? When? and What? – a super householder driven into the ground by it. Her ideal had once been to work in some newly relinquished colony, teaching economics or social relations, helping to form a new nation from the top-heavy powergrid of exploitation, or rescue it from the threat of black dictatorship. Love, getting married – it had occurred to her, but was to stay subservient to the main ideal. Even the dreamlike beginning of her affair with George didn’t seem to threaten it, for one could live with a man, get married, have children even, and still axe out a career from the thousand circumstances that tried to deflect one from it. But George’s dream drew her in, engulfed hers because its bricks and slate reared up around her, a house to be worked on for months before the multiple lists of emendations were finally screwed up and burned one morning with the rest of his yesterday’s rubbish.
Myra went to London, to shop, buy books, call at the house of her brother and sister-in-law, go around the galleries. These pleasurable expeditions took her off early in the morning and brought her back late at night, seemed to last lo
ng enough for her to face another month in her bucolic outhouse. She had bought the framed drawings and pictures from her own pocket, wise purchases, easy in price, but transforming the white and empty walls. She received notices of new exhibitions, even an occasional invitation to a vernissage, but so far she hadn’t gone to any of these openings, preferred seeing three or four shows at one outing. George had left this side of the decoration to her on the assumption that she had better taste, and she accepted, if only to have one aesthetic corner of their dream world to herself.
The house was supposed to run itself, yet where was the spare time? She still couldn’t snap its iron grip and begin a life of writing and reading that George had promised when they first met. He had tried to get a man from the village to do part-time on the garden, someone at any rate who could hump the heavy work and cut Myra’s time on it to half a day, but farms and gardens of the surrounding estates took all the labour, and George’s ideal house was by no means set in an ideal countryside where people could help him maintain it.
Spring was breaking up the enveloping peace, and Myra couldn’t say which would be a better life: something useless, sterile and exciting; or a writing, reading, constructive time-passing inside her own spiritual boundaries. In the long run, which was the best to have lived? The question was idle, a maggot that would kill you until you died, deny you either, push you into a limbo of both and nothing. You lived what you lived and couldn’t change it by one act. Only an outside force over which you had no control – unexpected, huge, enthralling – could do that, and you wouldn’t know it was happening because you’d be too busy fighting it.
Coffee finished, Mrs Harrod would clean out the living-room. The sun’s warmth drew back from the linoleum table-top. It would rain later, so she’d better get that winter and spring rubbish burnt, smoke out the garden and maybe clear her draughts. The deadness of life might blossom if she had empty time. The soul developed and deepened in idleness, which was freedom. George would be the first to agree, because that was what he too had always wanted. Two incompatibles in quest of the same thing. She looked forward to firing the leaves, as if such action would release the held-in fire of her past existence into the wind.
13
People in the compartment sat dead to each other the whole four hours to London, refusing Frank’s offer of fag-packet or batch of newspapers, and he thought what unsociable bastards. He supposed that in any other country somebody at least would have talked, said good morning, nice day, raining – but no, not here. And do you know, at the end it turned out they were all close friends going to a cricket match?
He found a room in Camden Town at three pounds a week, its walls distempered puke-green and kek-yellow, furnished with a gas-ring, bed, and a wardrobe so big he was surprised they hadn’t let it out to a family at thirty bob a week. If they had he wouldn’t have cracked his shins on it every time he tried to get into the room.
The stairs were washed every week by a disinfectant that smelled of sweat, soon overwhelmed by train-dust and smoke-soot from surrounding railways. There was no bathroom in the eight-roomed house, and the only lavatory for a score of people was a smashed pan stuck in a shed at the end of a postage-stamp garden. Coming to London certainly brought you down in the world. It was true of many people, for they couldn’t have been born with such rancid unearthly pallors.
But the winter was almost over, a clean wind snapping along early-morning streets after fresh rain, letting him breathe a few minutes before the traffic roar opened its awful voice. People seemed to have been killed, pole-axed, driven to earth and sent pale at the blow. They looked as if they saw nothing but pavement and road, or advertisements ringing them: a silver jet-liner going through the heart spraying jelly-babies and electric shavers.
It was the first long time he’d spent in London, and he liked it so much he was a fortnight before starting work. He often walked eight hours through the streets and did not feel weak; but after three in the British Museum he almost fainted. The historical totality of the exhibits staggered him, and the precise old-maidish way in which so much insignificant stuff had been gathered together intimidated him as massive proof of his own unimportance. He almost wanted to set fire to it, blow it to bits, yet went on other days, fixed by Egyptian mummies and Samoan canoes, flint heads and spear tips – the preliminary skill and precision work that had, after thousands of years, landed him at his machine.
He bought a saucepan to boil eggs and make tea in – otherwise it was Lyons, fish and chips, or one-and-ten snacks at Mike’s on the corner. He got work at a car park in Soho, a safe enough place for a man who wanted neither past nor future. He guided cars in, drew them out, issued tickets and collected money, easy and mindless work, necessary at the moment because he also was mindless, caved-in and floating among dead buildings at the bottom of a smoky sea. With a spear in your metaphorical side the only thing you could do was move, move, move – even if only in circles, even if only on crutches. You could look at the traffic flowing around Cambridge Circus, bury yourself in Cyclorama or some museum – as a man in the last extremities of toothache crawls under the bedclothes with a bottle of whisky – but sooner or later you have to get up and move again.
Anything to escape from this padded cell that he could only flop into blindfold, hugging the pick-up and sound-box of all he brought with him from Lincolnshire, still ripping at his psychic vitals. He gripped the splintered and tacky wood of the bed to stop himself taking a tube to the farthest outpost of the Northern Line and making a way to Lincolnshire, that county where his guts lay bleeding, and his love, still working perhaps, still alone maybe, waiting for him to come back and who knows, wanting to hear from him, a word, an address, an acknowledgement of agony, a promise to return tomorrow, soon, before long, something better than never. She sat alone, waiting. She loved him, wanted him to come back and love her, make love to her, show love, warmth, tenderness, care, make up for the promises he’d smashed like museum china, spread his spirit over the house. The bed frame deflected his beating fist, strong enough to outlast him. His mind swam through the fish-seas of doubt and reversal. He could never go back after doing so much the right thing in leaving when he did. There was no guarantee that she had given up her job and moved already to London with her husband, but at least she’d be able to see Kevin whenever she wanted. If she couldn’t it wouldn’t be his fault. For this big reason he couldn’t go back; he had smashed promises by leaving, but would smash bigger ones by returning.
The rank walls, the damp spring darkness made a trap-cage baited with the rotten meat of all his life’s impossibilities. They had got him, cornered him there in this room, while his Bill Posters’ heart chewed on them, chewing itself, himself that he couldn’t run from unless to Lincolnshire. Memories of her were burning ash-blue in the brain, wouldn’t leave him alone. The voice of what he’d gone to bed with the night before had been calling him through the hours of sleep and darkness – and it wakened him by six o’clock only to face it again, day after day.
He’d always wanted to live a while in London, enjoy himself and see things, but now that he was here the ashes were in his mouth, choking him. Out of the window, a great gaping hole torn to the north, was the open starbag of the heavens, and there was nothing to stop him fish-swimming through it except an outmoded feeling of pride and obstinacy.
Nine-thirty in the evening was too early to sleep, and too late for a trek to Soho, but he put on his coat and descended the narrow unlit stairs. A pram blocked one landing, he got round it and opened the front door. The orange-lit roar of Camden Road, and the cold heavy atmosphere of soot and iron filings surrounded him. It was invigorating, the one fact of London that shielded him from a final black fit. Even the museums smelled of it: if you were to bump, into that mummy in the British Museum and accidentally crumple it up, the dust and plaster and death would reek of London pall, streets and petrol. On Sunday morning he would go out early, pick up an Observer and Pictorial at the tube station and ride down t
o Trafalgar Square to feed the pigeons, and the same throaty smell of tool sheds and locomotives dragged at his nostrils.
The pub was well enough packed for a midweek. He stood at the saloon bar feeling how out of place it would be to shout for a black-and-tan, unless he wanted a rough-house. Uncertain of its benefits, he felt more diffident about getting into one in London than if he was in Nottingham. The odds were too chancy, forces too foreign and remote. Yet he remembered one of his Nottingham mates who, unless he got blind drunk, spewed his guts up, and was knocked to the ground in unequal fight, didn’t feel he’d had a good time – the sort of thing that now seemed a waste of life to Frank Dawley.
The pint tasted good, and he took a reasonable time over it. A young man who sat at a nearby table with his girl friend was trying to light a cigarette. Every time he struck a match the girl blew it out, intent on revenge for something the young man seemed to have forgotten. He treated it as a joke for the first six matches, but eventually, once when he almost got his fag alight through a skilful cupping of hands and still her breath drove it out, he put down his box of matches, laid his cigarette on it, and landed her a sharp smack at the face. She burst into tears, and he comforted her, until she stopped crying and agreed to a Babycham.
The Death of William Posters: A Novel (The William Posters Trilogy Book 1) Page 16