Mr. Porter and the Brothers Jones

by Reinhold, Margaret;

  Not long afterwards, Mrs Maw’s cat, crouched in the shadows under the hedge, watched with interest while the elderly man from next door roved up and down his garden, taking a few short steps at a time, raking the ground with a flashlight. He appeared to be searching for something. He walked with bent head, looking to the right and to the left. After a while he went back into the house.

  Within half an hour he was back, trailing the little beam of his flashlight hither and thither. “You fool!” Mr Porter told himself. “Why didn’t you wait to see if it was still alive? Why didn’t you see if you could help it?” Another voice within him mocked, “Give first aid to a mouse? Is that what you’re saying?” “Why not? It could have been in pain. At least I could have put it out of its misery!” “How?” “A stick, a stone … I’d have found a way.” More taunting laughter from the other self. “You?”

  Mrs Maw’s cat watched with her cold, brilliant eyes. She could have told Mr Porter that, as he was to discover in the morning, the mouse lay dying and invisible among fallen leaves in the very path of Mr Porter’s wandering light beam.

  In the first light of morning he saw it at once, grey against the red of the leaves. With compelling curiosity, an ogreish fascination, he examined the little corpse. The mouse’s eyes were still open, shiny as in life, but its limbs were stiff. A deep triangular wound encircled its chest where the door had caught it. It was dead, dead, dead.

  Later, he consoled himself that the mouse had died as a martyr to a cause—the cause of the army of other field mice that were invading the house. For the mouse had not inadvertently found itself locked in the house after all: a whole battalion of mice was entering the sitting room from a narrow hole, in the skirting under a window. Mr Porter crouched on the floor, peered into the hole and saw, at the far end of a little tunnel, another fragile, squeaking creature, one of the many who, that winter, would come to share the warmth and comfort of his cottage.

  He rose to his feet, then sank into his chair before the fire. He considered the situation. Aggression, counter-aggression. The mice had won. If anyone had to move from the cottage that winter it would be Mr Porter.

  Dr Katzenheimer, hearing this tale solemnly told, wondered if she might allow herself to laugh. Yes! Since laughter lay also in the sombre folds of Mr Porter’s face.

  Before the session ended, and on this note of good humor, Mr Porter announced, “I’m having dinner with Jerome Jones, at l’Étoile.”

  “Ah,” said Dr Katzenheimer, unwilling to provoke a negative reaction from Mr Porter by expressing pleasure. “Good,” she added noncommittally and rose to her feet.

  Mr Porter took a bus to Tottenham Court Road and arrived far too early. He had had a busy day. Mercifully, his bowels had emptied themselves that morning and that had left Mr Porter free for a brisk session with Dr Katzenheimer, followed by an aggressive few hours at the office. Then he had done a little shopping and returned home to spruce up for his unaccustomed outing. Now he stood on the pavement comparing his watch with the clock above Heal’s in some dismay. Once again, his system for keeping time had let him down. He snarled at his watch, then set himself to think up a plan as to how to occupy himself for the next twenty-five minutes. He pulled uncertainly at his giant gloves, settling his fingers more firmly in their cosy depths. He moved slowly in the direction of Charlotte Street. It was a cold night. He passed a black child playing alone on the doorstep outside a lamplit open door. He glared at it in disapproval of its careless parents. Sauntering along, feeling the cold, he decided he would go to the restaurant and wait there for Jerome. He tried to delay his arrival a little, restraining himself from trotting, but still he arrived at least fifteen minutes early.

  Suddenly overwhelmed by hunger while waiting at the table, he ordered his first course—a single fragile slice of smoked salmon, half a lemon and a dry wholemeal biscuit. After a few greedy morsels, he settled himself to wait for Jerome. Momentarily relaxed, he inspected his fellow diners with keen interest. The man at the table next to his, sitting alone, a well-known actor, distinctly overweight, slurped his way through avocado vinaigrette. Then, to Mr Porter’s melancholy amusement, he peeped surreptitiously around before pouring the remainder of the vinaigrette sauce onto his heavily buttered roll. Mr Porter brooded on the compelling nature of hunger and greed. Nothing more painful, he considered, than the servile craving of starving domestic animals on the streets, say of Naples or Athens, and worse further East, of course—but just as painful in a different way, the secret and shamefaced greed of the well-fed human.

  At this moment Jerome arrived, eagerly searching the room for Mr Porter’s face before being shown to the table by the headwaiter. “I started,” said Mr Porter calmly and without embarrassment. “I was early and I was hungry. What will you have?”

  When they had settled into their meal (Mr Porter next ate a sliver of grilled chicken with a dollop of creamed spinach), Jerome began, “I want desperately to tell you how Lilac and I became involved in this … affair … after years of being friends … and in-laws of course … I must tell someone—and you’re the first—the only person—remotely capable of understanding.”

  Mr Porter was not sure that he felt flattered. Part of him wanted to hear what had happened between Jerome and Lilac, another part didn’t want to hear at all—but he was certain of one thing: he didn’t want to hear about it in the restaurant.

  “Look here,” he said sensibly. “If there’s an immediate problem, tell me now. If it’s a long story, I have a proposition. I have a cottage in the country, in East Hampshire, not far from London. It’s quiet there. Come on Saturday for lunch. I’ll give you directions. Then we can talk.”

  Jerome was disappointed. He had looked forward to unburdening himself tonight. But he was not in a position to argue. “All right,” he said, “that’s very kind of you! If you’re sure …?”

  “More discreet,” said Mr Porter.

  Jerome couldn’t quite make out what Mr Porter was on about—discretion and all that. He glanced around in the restaurant. No one was paying the slightest attention to their conversation. Still, if that was what the old boy preferred … He’d have to think of some story that would satisfy Beatrice for his absence on Saturday.

  It was not discretion that concerned Mr Porter. It was rather that he felt that this love story, because that was what he deemed the relationship between Jerome and Lilac to be, was about to be told in an unsuitable setting. He couldn’t bear to think of Lilac in Jerome’s arms while waiters clattered about with plates and the flames of flambéed food shooting up and sizzling around them. If he had to hear details of the most intimate goings-on between a girl who strangely moved him and this rather mysterious young man, it must be in suitable circumstances.

  “Is there anything of urgent concern?” he asked Jerome.

  The latter shook his head. “Except that I’m worried for Lilac—especially after what you said was a call for help.”

  “I think that can wait a few days. It’s a big subject.”

  For dessert Mr Porter ordered a single apple and, with a severe expression, began to peel it with care.

  “Tell me a little more about yourself,” he said absently, concentrating on his task. Jerome asked “What would you like to know?” Mr Porter assumed a vaguely professional role. “Oh, mother—father—what they were like—how many children in the family—where were you born, and so forth.” He put his knife down and gazed at Jerome with an attentive, sympathetic expression.

  “There were three of us in the family,” said Jerome. “My mother, Joshua and I, and I was the odd one out. That’s how I remember it. My father died when I was seven. I don’t really know what he was like. He was ill, I believe, for a year before he died. Joshua became a sort of father to me—authoritative, critical, often threatening—but kind also, sometimes. My mother—well—Joshua was her real love. I sometimes thought, as I got older, that she was in love with him. She didn’t really care for me. That’s to say, she took care of
me dutifully, but I didn’t believe she loved me—much—although I longed to be loved by her. I longed to be held—hugged as she hugged Joshua. He rather shied away from her. I could never understand it. There was I, desperate for a cuddle—and there he was, all the cuddles in the world available to him, pushing her away. Not quite pushing, that’s an exaggeration, just holding her at arm’s length.

  “What did she look like?”

  “She was quite beautiful—a female version of Joshua—tall, thin, fine features, long sandy hair—reddish-blonde I suppose—elegant, angry. I remember her as angry a great deal of the time, at least with me, but I think she was also angry at her fate, being left a young widow with two small boys. We weren’t poor, but we weren’t extravagantly well-off, either. I was sent away to school, of course, when I was eight, and Joshua was at school too. In those days I thought he was a bit of a hero; he did well at most things. I did quite well also, but I didn’t have the glamour that he did.”

  “Hm …” said Mr Porter. “Were you jealous of him?”

  “I was as far as our mother was concerned. I couldn’t understand why she made such a fuss of him and was so down on me.”

  “Hm,” said Mr Porter again, meditatively.

  “I think she made Joshua feel it was his duty to look after her,” Jerome went on. “And, of course, he did as well as he could at that age. She was demanding and, as I said, angry. It was her anger that killed her, in my opinion—driving so fast, so aggressively. She was killed in a crash on the motorway not long after I met Beatrice, before Joshua knew Lilac.”

  “I know how you are going to interpret this,” said Mr Porter to Dr Katzenheimer. “Jerome made love to Lilac as she represented their mother in his unconscious mind. Joshua’s possession, in a way, that he’d wanted so much as a child. But why did Joshua arrange for this to happen? Why did he, unconsciously, want Jerome to make love to Lilac?”

  Dr Katzenheimer shrugged. “Some old secret attraction between two boys?” she suggested. “It happens in nurseries—as you know so well with Vera …? Maybe they made the connection with one another through Lilac, the intermediary? Unconsciously, of course … or perhaps Joshua wanted Jerome to share the burden of their mother …”

  “I do often feel, and always did feel as a child, that Joshua might do me some real harm if he could,” Jerome had said over coffee at l’Étoile, “especially if I provoked him too much.”

  “You don’t think sleeping with his wife was a provocation?” Mr Porter, who had refused coffee, was now addressing himself to the last quarter of his apple, slicing fine and sparing shreds from it and popping them into his mouth one by one.

  “Of course you’re right,” agreed Jerome. “It’s the way it happened … I hadn’t made a conscious decision about it, if anything I leaned the other way. It was she who …” He fell silent. Mr Porter laid down his knife and rinsed his hands in a token manner in the little bowl of water that had been placed beside his plate. A slice of lemon—or was it a flower petal?—drifted on the water’s surface. He peered at it, then deliberately dried his hands on his napkin. He faced Jerome again.

  “Saturday,” he said. “Come in good time. I’ll give you a kind of picnic lunch. You’ve got the directions. Now if you’d please excuse me …”

  When Jerome tried to pay the bill, he found that Mr Porter had made arrangements to settle it before they had started.

  By this time Mr Porter had already left, over-tipping the waiter who handed him his coat and, with a mild wave of his hand to Jerome, sallying out into the winter darkness.

  Five

  The night after his second meeting with Lilac Jones, Mr Porter, turning and tossing in his king-size bed, could not sleep. In spite of extreme tiredness and two glasses of beer for supper instead of the usual one, he hardly closed his eyes all night. Towards morning, however, he was mercifully overcome by sudden, heavy sleep. It was then that he had a dream.

  He dreamed he was in an alien land far from any place he had ever known. There was a sense of great strangeness. It was a warm and moonlit night. He walked through a room which was hot and brightly lit, and stepped through louvered doors onto a small balcony. The sea lay dark beneath him and brilliant stars shone in the sky above. Silence. Small waves lapped the shore. He could see behind him shadowy outlines of deep blue mountains. A scattering of fishing boats lay across the sea, their lights fractured in shimmering reflections.

  Mr Porter stood on the balcony looking at this scene, which seemed to him extraordinarily beautiful. Then, as if pre-ordained, a light went on in the room next to his, which he saw through the louvered doors. Footsteps were heard. Mr Porter watched with rising excitement.

  The doors were opened and a woman came out on the neighbouring balcony. He couldn’t see her properly in the darkness, but he knew that her hair was long and fair and that she was young. In fact, she seemed familiar to him, although he didn’t know who she was. She stared straight ahead, looking out at the great vista of sea and the shining horizon. He, too, turned away and they stood for a while ignoring one another in silence. At the predestined moment she turned—and he did the same. They faced one another across the little abyss between the balconies. Now he could see her face, pale and luminous. She smiled, and stretched out her arms towards him—a gesture of love.

  For a moment it seemed as if he was about to embrace her. Then, without warning, the space between them widened. The balcony on which she stood began to recede. Her arms were still stretched out to him, now supplicating and imploring. He leaned towards her and with a violent effort was able to grasp her cold hands. For a moment he held her. Then, to his horror, her hands slipped from his and, toppling over the balcony rail, she fell down and down. She went on falling and falling through the starlit air. Far below he heard her cry out. He too cried aloud, hoping she would hear his voice, which might save her, but even as he called, he knew that she was dead.

  His own cry woke him. He struggled out of a suffocating sleep and saw dawn on the London skyline. He was both desolate and angry. He was certain that he wouldn’t be able to sleep again and that this was a night wasted—except for the dream.

  He thought wearily that he had better jot it down while it was fresh in his mind, so that he could discuss it with Dr Katzenheimer. Pencil poised, he realised that the girl in the dream was that blonde girl, Lilac Jones, who had been waiting on the corner of High Street. He paused to consider this interesting detail and at that moment, the fingers holding his pencil slowly relaxed. The pencil fell to the bed. His eyes closed. Blessed sleep overtook him once more.

  When he woke a few hours later, he saw the pencil on the duvet and the notebook in position. For the life of him he couldn’t remember anything at all of what he’d been about to write down. “One less dream for her,” he thought, referring to Dr Katzenheimer. He felt a mixture of satisfaction and regret. The satisfaction had to do with keeping back something his psychiatrist might demand. The regret was because he was vaguely inquisitive about the dream. He experienced a mysterious sense of haunting beauty and desolation as he clambered from his bed.

  Grumpily he wrapped his dressing gown around him and set out for the kitchen. The morning had begun.

  On Wednesday afternoon Lilac appeared again as Mr Porter was approaching Wimpole Street with one of his boxes of groceries. She emerged from her parked car where she had evidently been lying in wait and ran recklessly across the road to meet him.

  “Hullo!” she said rather breathlessly. “Can I help? Can I come up?”

  Mr Porter struggled with his box. Defeated, he placed it on the doorstep. “Lilac,” he said sternly, “what is this about? Why are you doing this?”

  She looked a little put out, eyes darkening with hurt. She said “It’s just—I enjoyed it very much, seeing your flat, talking to you. I thought, if it’s not too much for you—maybe we could talk again. I won’t stay long—”

  She looked as if she might weep if he refused. “Perhaps you’d let me take you out to tea?
” she offered.

  He said, “Lilac, I shall give you a cup of tea—this once—but you mustn’t … jump on me like this, suddenly out of the blue. I don’t like it. You must telephone if you want to see me.”

  She said bravely, “Couldn’t we have a standing arrangement on Wednesdays? You could break it any time you wanted—when you come back from doing your shopping? Just a short meeting—”

  She must be desperate, thought Mr Porter, but he was cautious about his assessment of her, remembering Dr Katzenheimer’s remarks about his aggression. Nevertheless, he believed he sensed despair in Lilac.

  “We shall see,” he said briskly. “Now, if you’ll hold the door open for me when I’ve unlocked it …”

  He and his groceries preceded her up the stairs. She followed meekly.

  He put the kettle onto boil. “China or Indian?” he called from the kitchen, tapping his containers of tea.

  “What?” she hurried to his side. “Oh, I like Indian,” she cried—“Or, whatever you’re having—China, if you prefer …”

  She was altogether too eager to please. They sat facing each other, each sipping delicately, eyeing one another.

  “I suppose you have a very busy life,” said Lilac politely. “Do you work?”