Then suddenly there was a blaze of light above and ahead, and the landlady’s dumpy form silhouetted in a doorway.
‘This is it.’ She stood aside to let him pass. He dumped his bags on to a narrow bed, and straightened up, hands digging into his aching back.
The view was wonderful. Through huge brick chimneys, a distant blue view of the dome of St Paul’s. He’d always wanted a view of St Paul’s, but in all his wanderings from lodging to lodging, he’d never had one. You only really felt you were in London when you had a view of St Paul’s . . .
For the rest, the room was long and narrow, with sloping ceilings and two dormer windows. He’d always wanted a room with dormers, a real artist’s garret . . . and besides the narrow bed, there were two nice old lath-back rocking chairs and clippie rugs on polished floor-boards.
What a room to bring a girl to! He’d never had a girl, beyond talking to them, or doing the jive with them at the Friday night Slade hop. Alone with girls, he grew tongue-tied. But up here, the alone-ness far above the world and the dormer windows with their view of St Paul’s might do his talking for him . . .
‘How much is it?’ he asked, already knowing he’d take it.
‘Thirty shillings a week. Week in advance. Week’s notice either side.’ The woman was staring at his scuffed old bags, lying on the bed, as if she was learning all she needed to know of her new lodger from them. Nervously she put up her hand and tucked a stray strand of dark hair back inside her headscarf. As she did so, he noticed her ear. It was absurdly fine and shapely, on such a mess of a creature. But then he’d noticed such things before. His Auntie Daisy, his mother’s older sister, had beautiful shapely legs. No varicose veins or anything, though she was over sixty. Those beautiful legs haunted him at family Christmas parties; they went so ill with that grey hair and that high-pitched cackling laugh (over women’s dirty jokes muttered in corners after the port wine had gone round twice). He had an absurd desire to rescue those beautiful legs and return them to their rightful owner, who would be satisfyingly grateful . . .
He reached inside his coat to get out his wallet.
‘Don’t pay me now,’ said the woman hurriedly, though she hadn’t looked at him. ‘Pay me when you come downstairs again. I’ll fill out your rent-book.’ Then she was gone.
The room only began to seem odd as he unpacked and wandered round exploring it, shirts or jumpers or pyjamas in his hands.
Behind the sun-faded floral curtains lurked black-out curtains, with cobwebs and the transparent bodies of flies and even spiders still in their rigid folds. There was a wartime identity card on the mantelpiece of the cast-iron fireplace, made out in the name of Colin Borden, born 18/1/23. Behind the door hung a soldier’s greatcoat with a corporal’s stripes. And on top of the coat hung a soldier’s gas mask case with steel helmet still attached, the way they’d carried them in the War. The greatcoat and gas mask and helmet annoyed him especially; they made it hard to get the door more than half open. He wondered if he dared move them. Landladies could be funny if you moved their things. He remembered hideous purple vases and huge plaster Alsatian dogs that he’d removed and hidden in drawers in previous digs, only to find them resurrected when he returned from college and put back in place; and how the landlady’s manner had turned suddenly freezing. He’d once been thrown out in the middle of a term after a protracted battle over three flying ducks; the woman had literally screamed at him; been foaming at the mouth . . . and her husband had been very nasty too and thrown his bags down the stairs . . .
He’d better go and ask. And pay his rent at the same time. He descended the endless dark stairs, paid his respects to the bear whom he christened ‘Horace’. Though that didn’t change the expression of diabolical malevolence on its face as it dismembered a wretched penguin between its claws under the dim light of the forty-watt bulb on the landing. He had a funny idea that polar bears only lived at the North Pole, and penguins only at the South, which would make Horace or the unfortunate penguin very well-travelled . . . but somehow in the face of the bear’s expression, the joke wilted and died. He had to knock on several doors when he reached the ground floor, before he got a response through one. He was beginning to realize what a huge house this was. Was he the only lodger? It was so silent, and by his watch it was now well past five; time for people to be home from college or work, doors to be open, insults and moans to be exchanged, or at least good evenings said. But the hall remained dark, shining, polished and empty.
Anyway, she called a muffled ‘Come in’ and he gave her two pound notes without looking at her. It was kinder not to look at her; those terrible pebble-like glasses; that prim, pale mouth without a trace of lipstick, like a dead thing; that lumpish mass of wool cardigan. He had a feeling that she didn’t want to be looked at, so it was a kindness. So many women turned into sad sacks. It must have been the War . . . before the War his own mother had been a smasher . . . you could still see it in the family photograph album . . . her on the beach in her bathing-costume laughing in the summer of ’39. She never got into a bathing-costume again after the War, though she could only have been forty-three. It had been the War, her giving all the good food to him and his father, saying she didn’t feel hungry, she would just have a little bit of bread and butter . . .
He turned his eyes to her room instead. It was a room in two halves. In one half, dark, polished furniture was piled close, huddled like refugees in a cattle-truck. In the other half, two plain deal tables held a mass of filing-trays, typescript, Biros and a telephone.
Again, the woman seemed to sense the way his eyes were wandering, though she did not raise her eyes from writing firmly with a Biro in a pink book he knew to be a rent-book.
‘I work for the BBC,’ she said. ‘I bring a lot of work home.’
‘Are you on the telly?’ he asked eagerly. Then bit his lip. Such a shabby creature could never get on the telly.
‘Sound radio,’ she said tightly, as if she sensed an insult. ‘Only the overseas service. Talks on English culture. To places like West Africa.’ She dismissed it all, with a flourish, as she handed him the rent-book. ‘You’ve found your bathroom? Next floor down, on the left. I’m afraid it’s not very convenient for you.’
He thought she had a nice voice; a posh, cultured, English voice; he was glad she had something left that was beautiful; as a sort of souvenir of her youth; like his aunt’s legs.
He asked about the greatcoat and gas mask, very haltingly. She just shrugged. ‘Put ’em in the wardrobe, if they worry you.’
He was suddenly cross that she’d said ‘worry’ instead of ‘bother’ or ‘annoy’. It made him sound like a hysterical kid, afraid of the dark. He instantly resolved to leave them where they were. He turned to go.
‘Oh, one more thing,’ she said, as he was half-way through the door. ‘When you’ve unpacked your bags . . . put them into the loft, will you? That’s the door next to yours, at the head of the stairs. There is a light-switch, but you’ll have to feel for it. Only, my cleaning woman doesn’t like luggage lying around when she’s dusting. Just makes her job more difficult, and cleaning women are hard to find these days.’
‘Right,’ he said, and left her.
The light-switch in the loft wasn’t hard to find. The dim, bare bulb revealed roughly-laid boards, fading away into dimness and dust. There was already luggage stacked there; far better luggage than his poor fibre case and grip. Huge leather portmanteaus, with straps and torn and faded labels on the side. The Mena House Hotel, Gizeh, Egypt. The Grand Hotel, Biarritz. He stood there, feeling like a peasant; feeling that in his own little life, of which he had been so proud, nothing had ever happened. Even if he got his degree, a good degree, and a good job in teaching, and even eventually a headship or a training college lectureship, he could never afford to stay in the Grand Hotel, Biarritz. These people had a head start, and he could never catch up, even if he had a West End exhibition in Bond Street, and it was favourably reviewed in the Observer . . .
He was just turning to go, in a flurry of self-disgust, when he saw the book, tucked in between a rafter and the roof proper, almost as if it had been wedged there to hold the roof in place.
And suddenly he was very nosy. He had been a book-child always. Whatever had come to him in the way of colour and excitement in his life had come from books. He could never leave a book unopened.
He reached out timidly and touched it. It seemed wedged pretty tight. Maybe it was holding some bit of the roof in place? He had an awful vision of tugging it out and something giving way, and slates falling and daylight showing through, and having to go and tell the woman downstairs what he’d done. There’d be no hiding what he’d done, because the rain would come, and the wetness would travel down through the house inexorably . . .
He was on the point of giving up, when the defiant book-child within him, the nosy child, gave one more tug, and the book was in his hand, thick with a sooty, grainy dust that almost bit at his fingers. And the smell was the choking smell of sulphur and soot and brimstone, the smell of London roof-tops, of a London far older than he was, that had him coughing beyond control. He held his handkerchief to his mouth so she would not hear him coughing all down through that dark house, and come up to find what he’d done.
But he realized with thankfulness that he’d done no damage to the roof. Nothing rattled and fell; no daylight showed. He switched off the light with a sooty hand, and closed the door leaving black fingerprints on it, and fled into his room. Gingerly he spread his handkerchief (his by now ruined white handkerchief that his mother had carefully washed for him and given him when he left home) on a part of the floor that was only polished board, where no harm could be done, and laid the book upon it.
Then he went downstairs to the bathroom and washed his hands, and fought a long battle to remove the wet, sooty fingerprints his hands were leaving everywhere. And then he came back and opened the book with newly-scrubbed, trembling fingers.
Something fell out, as it caught on his damp fingers. A square of thin cardboard, about ten by eight. It twisted as it fell, and lay face down. On the back was stamped,
Molloy Brothers, Photographers, 29 Bond Street
He turned it over and was lost.
It was a studio photograph of a girl; the sort that posh families get taken for Country Life when their daughter gets engaged to some bigwig.
It was obviously taken some time ago, for she was wearing that kind of shiny, satiny, clinging dress that they went in for in the 1930s. Cunning kind of dress; covered her up with complete modesty and yet showed to perfection what a marvellous figure she had. Only her long slender arms were bare. And her long, long neck.
It was the eyes that got him. Dark and huge. Sad. Infinitely romantic. Her lips were slightly parted in a smile, showing the tips of her top front teeth, in the way that was fashionable then.
He squatted motionless a long, long time, glorying in her fragile beauty; eating up every detail of her with his eyes. This was the sort of girl he’d always wanted: a lady, and yet with every evidence of being a woman too. He thought, when the photograph was taken, she must have been about his own age.
Finally, when he had temporarily looked his fill, he put her gently aside and looked at the book. It was some kind of business diary, the kind with a whole page given over to every day of the year.
And the year was 1940.
And on the very first page, what he knew must be her handwriting; elegant and spiky. He knew a little bit about graphology, as he knew a little bit about so many things. The tall ascenders meant she had high aspirations; the deep curling descenders meant she had a deeply sensuous nature. Or so the book on graphology he’d read had said.
And that first page was full; jam-packed with writing. And the next, and the next. So full of life; so long ago. All her inner life was spread before him, as if she lay naked on a bed. He could have her, all of her. Trembling, he read the first page.
‘January 1st. First day of the year, and my birthday. I have reached the great age of 21. A third of my life is gone, and I have done nothing yet.
‘John and Ros took me to the Café de Paris to celebrate. Champagne as usual. How sick I get of the never-ending champagne. What is there to celebrate? Only another useless year of my life is past. Oh, it was the year I got married to Ben, but that was all Ben’s and my mother’s and father’s doing. As usual, I simply went along with the tide, the path of least resistance.
‘Everyone was there at the café, the usual mob, working very hard at being jolly. Nearly everyone in uniform – but the kind of uniforms that keep them in London and give them endless time to go to the Café de Paris. Is nobody fighting this war? I am sure Hitler is not wasting time like this; he is plotting something. Chamberlain is useless, and so are the same old pack around him. The appeasers have gone into uniform, that’s all. It is like a comic opera, a fancy dress ball. I am the worst of all, the fancy dress wife who has never even been to bed with her husband. Would I have ever married Ben, if I had not known he was going straight overseas from the church? If he gets killed, I shall be a fancy dress widow. Though he is not likely to die of anything in Egypt, except sunstroke.
‘There was one man at the café who had really done something. An RAF squadron leader who has actually flown a bomber over Germany. Dropping leaflets. He was really quite amusing about it – says the Germans will never go short of lavatory paper. All his planes came home. He says the Germans could not find them in the dark. And none of the planes found their proper targets in the dark. It was like playing blind-man’s buff – one of his planes had to land in the Orkneys they got so lost coming home – when they should have been in Lincolnshire . . .’
Harry came out of his dream of 1940 to hear a low, persistent tapping on his door. It had been so low, and so persistent that he only now realized it had been going on for some time before he’d noticed it; as if it was a normal part of the goings-on of the household. He looked round desperately for somewhere to hide the book and photograph, without his footsteps betraying him. Finally, in a panic, he shoved book and photo under the nearest rug on the floor. They made a square bump, but it couldn’t be helped. Then he stood up, and called out breathlessly, ‘Come in,’ and suddenly didn’t know what to do with his hands.
The woman entered; the muddy eyes behind her glasses everywhere but on his face. He could have sworn she noticed the square bump under the rug, but she made no comment.
‘I thought you’d like to know that United Dairies deliver every day. Leave them a note of what you want in your empty bottle. They do eggs and butter and cream as well as milk. He calls on Friday evening for his money. And if you run out of bread on a Sunday morning, there’s a convenient little Jewish baker just round the corner as you turn into the main road. And here’s your front door key. Don’t lose it, please. I’m not about very much in the evenings. I often have to work till midnight at Portland Place.’ She gave him a timid, glancing swerve of her eyes. ‘My name is Mrs Meggitt, as you will have gathered from your rent-book . . . I’m going to work now. Good night.’
She closed the door behind her silently. He listened for her descending the stairs, but could hear nothing through the thick woodwork. It must be exciting, working for the BBC, and yet she filled him with nothing but dullness.
He put the front door key she had given him into his jacket pocket, then turned the key in the lock of his own door, and retrieved the diary, furtive as a spy now; or a man going to a secret mistress. He sat at the narrow table, and read; her photograph propped against a vase of dried flowers watching him silently, sadly, yearningly.
‘March 21st. First day of spring, officially, and the weather for once came up to expectations. Wonderfully warm, and daffodils out in St James’s Park, where I went to feed the ducks. Whoever goes short when the rationing really starts, it won’t be those ducks. They’re as fat as pigs, so fat they don’t bother to fly any more. And not just ducks, but lovers everywhere on the grass. Quite shocking �
�� one doesn’t know where to look. The men are mainly Polish and Canadian, in uniform, and those uniforms seem to have an incredible effect on the girls. Decorum is quite gone; the park keepers seem to have lost hope of controlling them, and don’t come around any more. I was outraged while walking past them, but as I came out through the park gates I felt incredibly lonely. I got a wolf-whistle from some soldiers passing in a lorry which quite cheered me, though it was a very half-hearted whistle by comparison with the one that two WAAFs got a few yards further on. Looking like a lady is going to have its disadvantages in this war. I almost wish bombs would fall on London. It would wake everybody up. It seemed so real, when the sirens first went last September. I think I would rather feel scared than feel nothing.’
He read on and on, enthralled. Until he suddenly felt very cold and stiff, and looked at his watch and saw that two hours had passed. He got up and stretched, and tried to light the gas fire, but there was no gas. He found the meter behind a little faded floral curtain under a shelf, in the corner of the long room that served as a kitchen, and stuffed in five shillings. But the fire once lit only made him feel colder, and he suddenly wanted the loo.
He hobbled downstairs, but then realized he didn’t know exactly where the loo was. On the left, she’d said . . . but he had to open two wrong doors before he found it. Two bedroom doors. And by the time he had found relief, he was seized by an overwhelming curiosity. He had few scruples, but he was not in the habit of invading other people’s bedrooms when they weren’t around. But he could have sworn that during his frantic search for relief he had seen, on the dressing-table of one of the bedrooms, a photograph of a girl . . . a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl.
The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral Page 9