The son opened the door and the fly flew into the light. The old man struck at it but it sailed away higher.
“There it is,” he said, getting up on the chair. He struck again and the son struck too as the fly came down. The old man got on top of his table. An expression of disgust and fear was curled on his smaller face; and an expression of apology and weakness.
“Excuse me,” he said again, looking up at the ceiling.
“If we leave the door open or open the window it will go,” said the son.
“It may seem a fad to you,” said the old man shyly. “I don’t like flies. Ah, here it comes.”
They missed it. They stood helplessly gaping up at the ceiling where the fly was buzzing in small circles round the cord of the electric light.
“I don’t like them,” the old man said.
The table creaked under his weight. The fly went on to the ceiling and stayed there. Unavailingly the old man snapped the duster at it.
“Be careful,” said the son. “Don’t lose your balance.”
The old man looked down. Suddenly he looked tired and old, his body began to sag and a look of weakness came on to his face.
“Give me a hand, old boy,” the old man said in a shaky voice He put a heavy hand on his son’s shoulder and the son felt the great helpless weight of his father’s body.
“Lean on me.”
Very heavily and slowly the old man got cautiously down from the table to the chair. “Just a moment, old boy,” said the old man. Then, after getting his breath, he got down from the chair to the floor.
“You all right?” his son asked.
“Yes, yes,” said the old man out of breath. “It was only that fly. Do you know you’re actually more bald at the back than I thought. There’s a patch there as big as my hand. I saw it just then. It gave me quite a shock. You really must do something about it. How are your teeth? Do you have any trouble with your teeth? That may have something to do with it. Hasn’t Alice told you how bald you are?”
“You’ve been doing too much. You’re worried,” said the son soft with repentance and sympathy. “Sit down. You’ve had a bad time.”
“No, nothing,” said the old man shyly, breathing rather hard. “A bit. Everyone’s been very nice. They came in and shook hands. The staff came in. They all came in just to shake hands. They said ‘We wish you good luck’.”
The old man turned his head away. He actually wiped a tear from his eye. A glow of sympathy transported the younger man. He felt as though a sun had risen.
“You know—” the father said uneasily, flitting a glance at the fly on the ceiling as if he wanted the fly as well as his son to listen to what he was going to say—“you know,” he said. “The world’s all wrong. I’ve made my mistakes. I was thinking about it before you came. You know where I went wrong? You know where I made my mistake?”
The son’s heart started to a panic of embarrassment. “For heaven’s sake,” he wanted to shout, “don’t! Don’t stir up the whole business. Don’t humiliate yourself before me. Don’t start telling the truth. Don’t oblige me to say we know all about it, that we have known for years the mess you’ve been in, that we’ve seen through the plausible stories you’ve spread, that we’ve known the people you’ve swindled.”
“Money’s been my trouble,” said the old man. “I thought I needed money. That’s one thing it’s taught me. I’ve done with money. Absolutely done and finished with it. I never want to see another penny as long as I live. I don’t want to see or hear of it. If you came in now and offered me a thousand pounds I should laugh at you. We deceive ourselves. We don’t want the stuff. All I want now is just to go to a nice little cottage by the sea,” the old man said. “I feel I need air, sun, life.”
The son was appalled.
“You want money even for that,” the son said irritably. “You want quite a lot of money to do that.”
“Don’t say I want money,” the old man said vehemently. “Don’t say it. When I walk out of this place to-night I’m going to walk into freedom. I am not going to think of money. You never know where it will come from. You may see something. You may meet a man. You never know. Did the children of Israel worry about money? No, they just went out and collected the manna. That’s what I want to do.”
The son was about to speak. The father stopped him.
“Money,” the father said, “isn’t necessary at all.”
Now like the harvest moon on full glow the father’s face shone up at his son.
“What I came round about was this,” said the son awkwardly and drily. “I’m not rich. None of us is. In fact, with things as they are we’re all pretty shaky and we can’t do anything. I wish I could but I can’t. But,”—after the assured beginning he began to stammer and to crinkle his eyes timidly—“but the idea of your being—you know, well short of some immediate necessity, I mean—well, if it is ever a question of—well to be frank, cash, I’d raise it somehow.”
He coloured. He hated to admit his own poverty, he hated to offer charity to his father. He hated to sit there knowing the things he knew about him. He was ashamed to think how he, how they all dreaded having the gregarious, optimistic, extravagant, uncontrollable disingenuous old man on their hands. The son hated to feel he was being in some peculiar way which he could not understand mean, cowardly and dishonest.
The father’s sailing eyes came down and looked at his son’s nervous, frowning face and slowly the dreaming look went from the father’s face. Slowly the harvest moon came down from its rosy voyage. The little face suddenly became dominant within the outer folds of skin like a fox looking out of a hole of clay. He leaned forward brusquely on the table and somehow a silver topped pencil was in his hand preparing to note something briskly on a writing pad.
“Raise it?” said the old man sharply. “Why didn’t you tell me before you could raise money? How can you raise it? Where? By when?”
THE NIGHT WORKER
A marriage was in the air. In a week the boy’s Cousin Gladys was going to be married. The boy sat in a corner of the room out of the way. Uncle Tom and Aunt Annie danced round the girl all day, pushing her this way, pulling her that; only a week to go and now—as the boy watched them in the little dark kitchen, out of the way of people’s feet—the dance got fiercer, gayer, rougher. “Do what you like, you’re free already,” they seemed to say to her. And then: “You dare! You wait! You’re still our daughter. Do as you’re told.” The boy watched them. He was seven. He did not know what a marriage was, and he gazed at them, expecting it to come into the room like a bird, or to be put on the table like a cake.
Aunt Annie stood at one end of the table with her back to the window, making a pie. He watched the mole move on her bony arm as she rolled the pastry.
“Hurry up with that sleeve, my girl. Haven’t you taken out the tacking?”
“It’s a fiddling job,” said Gladys, holding up her needle.
“Here, give it us,” said Aunt Annie, wiping the pastry off her fingers and snatching the needle. “Who’s taking the Bible class on Sunday, then?”
“Not me,” said Gladys.
Aunt Annie flopped the pastry over the pie-dish and the boy saw it hang in curtains over the edge, while his Aunt stood straight looking down at the parting in Gladys’s thick hair. Aunt Annie’s grey hair was screwed back and in her bony face she had bold false teeth, so that she clucked when she talked and had the up and down smile of a skull. She had the good nature of a skeleton.
The boy was waiting for her to trim the pastry on the pie-dish. When she had done this she opened the oven door and a smell of hot cake came across the room. In came the boy’s Uncle Tom, a sad, cake-eating man. How did a man so short come to marry a woman so tall? It must have been because Uncle Tom looked like a crouching animal who lived by making great jumps. He was a carpenter, whose skin was the colour of chapel harmonium keys; a yellow, Chinese-looking man with split thumb nails and a crinkled black beard and he frightened because he never quite came into the
room, but stood in the doorway, neither in nor out, with a hammer or a chisel in his hand.
“I done them stair-rods, my girl,” he said. It was like a threat.
“I’ll take them round,” Gladys said.
“She’s going at twelve,” said Aunt Annie.
“Jim be there?” asked her father.
“Yes,” said Aunt Annie. She seemed to the boy to have the power to make her tall teeth shine on the scowl of Uncle Tom, and to put the idea of springing on us all out of his head. “Jim’ll be there. She’s taking the boy.”
Then Gladys laughed and, leaning down the table, put her soft arm round the boy’s waist and rubbed her cheek in his hair.
“I’m taking my young man round. You’ll look after me, won’t you?” she said. One of their inexplicable fits of laughter started. Aunt Annie’s teeth clucked and clicked. Uncle Tom went, “Ha, Ha, Ha,” like a saw and lit a pipe.
“Only another week, Glad. It’s just because of the neighbours,” said Aunt Annie.
“Ay, my girl, neighbours talk,” said Uncle Tom, and blew out violet smoke as if he were smoking the neighbours out.
The girl put on a prim, concealing expression. One minute she was a girl and the next a woman, then a girl again.
“Stars above, look at the time. Quick,” she cried to the boy, getting up from the table.
They ran upstairs to her room at the back where he slept too, a room which did not smell of camphor like his Aunt’s room. He did not like to see Gladys take off her kitchen dress and stand, with bare shoulders and bare arms, in her petticoat, and bare-legged too, because then she became a person he did not know. She was shorter and more powerful. But when her Sunday blue dress was over her head and after she had said “Oh these blooming things,” when the hooks caught in her hair, he liked her again.
“How do I look?” she said, when she had her straw hat on, and, not waiting for an answer, she said, “Now, there’s you! Brush your jersey! Quick.”
Jim was waiting, she said. They went out of the room like the wind and the text “Honour Thy Father” swung sideways on the wall. Down those dark stairs, they went, two at a time and were half out of the door, when Uncle Tom made his great jump after them.
“Don’t forget them stair-rods.”
“Goodness,” she said, grabbing them, “I’m going dippy.”
And then she was going down the street so fast that the boy had to trot.
“Oh!” She breathed more easily when they had got out of her street. “That’s better. You ain’t seen my new house.” But she was talking to the street, not to him, smiling at it. She went along, smiling at the sky and the children playing hopscotch on the pavement, and the green grocer’s cart, as though she were eating the world like an orange and throwing away the skin as she went along. And her breasts and her plump chin jumped in time with her step.
“Which house is it?” the boy said.
“Not yet. Round the corner.”
They turned the corner and there was another long street. “In this street?” he said.
“No. Round another corner.”
He took her hand. She was walking so fast he was afraid of being lost. And then, down the next street, she calmed down.
Her face became stern. “Look at him, standing like a dummy! He hasn’t seen us.”
A man in a grey cap and a blue serge suit was standing on the pavement.
“Smoking,” she said. “Bold as brass. There’s men for you. He promised he’d give it up. Standing there daft and idle.”
They were all workers in this family. Everything was work to them. Uncle Tom was always sawing and hammering. He had made the chests of drawers and the tables in his house. Aunt Annie scrubbed and cooked. Cousin Gladys was always sewing and even when she came in from her factory, she had, as they said, “something in her hands”—a brush, a broom, a cleaning cloth or scissors. Jim was a worker, too. He worked at the post office in the middle of the town. One day Uncle Tom took the boy on top of a tram and when they came near the post office, he said: “Eh, look out this side and you’ll see Gladys’s Jim working. He’s got a good job. Sometimes he’s on nights. He’s a night worker. Now, look out for him when the tram slows down.” The boy looked into the grey window of the post office as the tram passed by. Inside were dim rows of desks and people and presently he saw Jim in his shirt sleeves. He was carrying a large wastepaper basket.
“What’s he doing?” said the boy.
“Sorting,” said Uncle Tom. “Sorting the mail. His father put him into that job when he was fourteen.”
The boy saw Jim lift the wastepaper basket and then suddenly empty it over the head of another man who was sitting at a desk. He saw Jim laughing. He saw the man jump down and chase Jim across the office, laughing too.
“Larking about,” said Uncle Tom indignantly. “That’s government work.”
The boy stopped laughing. He was scared of Jim after this. Jim was a tall man with a hungry face, but there was a small grin on his lips and after seeing him empty the wastepaper basket the boy did not know what to make of him. It made him feel there was something reckless and secretive in the lives of Cousin Gladys and Jim.
Jim stood outside the gate of the house.
“You come to see the house,” he said to the boy. The boy murmured.
“Lost his tongue,” said Jim.
“I’ve been in,” he said to Gladys.
Gladys took his arm.
“Have you brought the things? I’ve got the stair-rods.”
“I put them inside,” he said.
“Oh, let me see,” she said eagerly. The three went to the green front door of the house and Jim let them in. It was a small house of grey brick with a bay window.
“There,” Jim said, pointing to the things. “I didn’t take them upstairs. I waited for you.”
On the floor was a wash-basin and a jug.
“I must wash them before we go,” she said. “Take them to the kitchen.”
Jim stood and winked at the boy.
“Orders,” said Jim.
“I can’t stand dirt,” she said, getting up.
“Well,” said Jim, “I’m waiting, aren’t I?” He put this question to the boy and winked again.
“Oh,” Gladys said, “don’t be soft.”
“Don’t look,” said Jim to the boy.
And then Gladys and Jim put their arms round each other and kissed. He saw her heels come off the ground and her knees bend. Gladys blushed and stepped back.
“Oh no, you don’t, does she?” Jim said to the boy. And he pulled Gladys and gave her another kiss.
“Jim!” she cried. “You’ll have me over.”
The boy laughed and pulled at her waist from behind and they were all laughing until her shoe kicked the china basin on the floor. That stopped them.
“What’ll Ma say when she sees my dress,” Gladys said.
“Oh,” said Jim. “He won’t tell.” Winking again at the boy. “Here’s a penny. Go into the garden and see if you can find some chocolate.”
“No,” said Gladys, kissing the boy and holding his hand. “He’s my young man. He’s looking after me.”
They walked from room to room in the house. After Uncle Tom’s house it was bare and smelled of size and new paint. The curtains were up but there was very little furniture. In the sitting-room there was only a blue carpet and a small settee. Jim and Gladys stood at the door and took deep breaths when they looked at this room. There was a vase on the mantelpiece and Gladys moved the vase from the middle to the end.
“Now I’ve made it lopsided,” she said. “It wants two.”
“It wants a picture,” said Jim, looking at the bare, lilac coloured walls. “It looks bare.”
“Don’t complain,” said Gladys pouting.
“I’m not. I was only thinking,” he said, putting his arm round her waist, but she stepped away. Jim gave her a look. The boy had seen her sulk before. He loved her and when she sulked he was frightened.
Jim went out into the hall and while he was out she stroked the boy’s head and pressed him against her leg.
“You like it, don’t you?” she said. “You don’t think its bare?”
“No,” he said.
“I’ll marry you. You don’t grouse.”
“Here—Glad—what’s this here?” called Jim sharply from the hall. “When you’ve done spooning …”
Her sulk went at once. She went out. Jim and she were looking at a small dark spot on the ceiling.
“A leak!” she cried.
“From the bathroom,” he said.
“Who left the water on last time?” she said.
“Your mother—washing things,” Jim said.
“She never,” Gladys said.
They both rushed upstairs. The carpet was not yet down on the stairs and their steps and voices echoed. It was a house of echoes. The boy did not follow. He went to see the painters’ pails in the kitchen and to stir the oily remains of paint in them with a stick. He looked into the clean sink. He could not understand why Gladys and Jim were going to live in this house. He wanted to live there with them. He could not understand the laugh of his Aunt and Uncle, that peculiar laughter, so pleased and yet jealous, so free and yet so uneasy, when they talked about Gladys living in this house. It was a laughter marked by side glances. The boy couldn’t understand why it was important for him to be there, and he felt lost. He went at last upstairs and on the landing he heard them in the bathroom. They were talking. They had forgotten him. In the evasive way of grown-up people they had gone upstairs to look at the cause of the water coming through the ceiling and, now they were there, they were not talking about that at all. They were talking about people, about some person. The boy stood still and listened.
“They don’t want him. He’s away all the time travelling and she’s having another, that’ll be the fifth. Terrible, isn’t it? Five, imagine it,” Gladys was saying.
“Can’t someone put her wise,” Jim said.
“I’d throw myself in the river.”
The boy saw Gladys falling into the river. He thought, “I wonder why Gladys wants to get her clothes wet and what will Aunt Annie say.”
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