The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (retail) (epub)

  ‘Oh yes, the port,’ Lotus said, ‘the port. All right, I’ll get it.’

  As soon as she had gone Christine began to walk up and down the room furiously. ‘What’s the idea? Why are you encouraging that horrible woman? “Your little friend”, did you hear that? Does she think I’m your concubine or something? Do you like her to insult me?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly, she didn’t mean to insult you,’ Ronnie argued. ‘She’s tight – that’s what’s the matter with her. I think she’s damned comic. She’s the funniest old relic of the past I’ve struck for a long time.’

  Christine went on as if she had not heard him. ‘This hellish, filthy slum and my hellish life in it! And now you must produce this creature, who stinks of whisky and all the rest better left unsaid, to talk to me. To talk to me! There are limits, as you said yourself, there are limits… Seduced on a haystack, my God!… She oughtn’t to be touched with a barge-pole.’

  ‘I say, look out,’ Ronnie said. ‘She’s coming back. She’ll hear you.’

  ‘Let her hear me,’ said Christine.

  She went on to the landing and stood there. When she saw the top of Lotus’ head she said in a clear, high voice, ‘I really can’t stay any longer in the same room as that woman. The mixture of whisky and mustiness is too awful.’

  She went into the bedroom, sat down on the bed and began to laugh. Soon she was laughing so heartily that she had to put the back of her hand over her mouth to stop the noise.

  ‘Hullo,’ Ronnie said, ‘so here you are.’

  ‘I couldn’t find the port.’

  ‘That’s all right. Don’t you worry about that.’

  ‘I did have some.’

  ‘That’s quite all right… My wife’s not very well. She had to go to bed.’

  ‘I know when I’ve had the bird, Mr Miles,’ Lotus said. ‘Only give us another drink. I bet you’ve got some put away somewhere.’

  There was some sherry in the cupboard.

  ‘Thanks muchly.’

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’

  ‘No, I’m going. But see me downstairs. It’s so dark, and I don’t know where the lights are.’

  ‘Certainly, certainly.’

  He went ahead, turning on the lights at each landing, and she followed him, holding on to the banisters.

  Outside the rain had stopped but the wind was still blowing strong and very cold.

  ‘Help me down these damned steps, will you? I don’t feel too good.’

  He put his hand under her arm and they went down the area steps. She got her key out of her bag and opened the door of the basement flat.

  ‘Come on in for a minute. I’ve got a lovely fire going.’

  The room was small and crowded with furniture. Four straight-backed chairs with rococo legs, armchairs with the stuffing coming out, piles of old magazines, photographs of Lotus herself, always in elaborate evening dress, smiling and lifeless.

  Ronnie stood rocking himself from heel to toe. He liked the photographs. ‘Must have been a good-looking girl twenty years ago,’ he thought, and as if in answer Lotus said in a tearful voice, ‘I had everything; my God, I had. Eyes, hair, teeth, figure, the whole damned thing. And what was the good of it?’

  The window was shut and a brown curtain was drawn across it. The room was full of the sour smell of the three dustbins that stood in the area outside.

  ‘What d’you pay for this place?’ Ronnie said, stroking his chin.

  ‘Thirty bob a week, unfurnished.’

  ‘Do you know that woman owns four houses along this street? And every floor let, basements and all. But there you are – money makes money, and if you haven’t any you can whistle for it. Yes, money makes money.’

  ‘Let it,’ said Lotus. ‘I don’t care a damn.’

  ‘Now then, don’t talk so wildly.’

  ‘I don’t care a damn. Tell the world I said it. Not a damn. That was never what I wanted. I don’t care about the things you care about.’

  ‘Cracked, poor old soul,’ he thought, and said: ‘Well, I’ll be getting along if you’re all right.’

  ‘You know – that port. I really had some. I wouldn’t have told you I had some if I hadn’t. I’m not that sort of person at all. You believe me, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ He patted her shoulder. ‘Don’t you worry about a little thing like that.’

  ‘When I came down it had gone. And I don’t need anybody to tell me where it went, either.’

  ‘Ah?’

  ‘Some people are blighters; some people are proper blighters. He takes everything he can lay his hands on. Never comes to see me except it’s to grab something.’ She put her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands and began to cry. ‘I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough, I can tell you. The things people say! My Christ, the things they say…’

  ‘Oh, don’t let them get you down,’ Ronnie said. ‘That’ll never do. Better luck next time.’

  She did not answer or look at him. He fidgeted. ‘Well, I must be running along, I’m afraid. Cheerio. Remember – better luck next time.’

  As soon as he got upstairs Christine called out from the bedroom, and when he went in she told him that they must get away, that it wasn’t any good saying he couldn’t afford a better flat, he must afford a better flat.

  Ronnie thought that on the whole she was right, but she talked and talked and after a while it got on his nerves. So he went back into the sitting-room and read a list of second-hand gramophone records for sale at a shop near by, underlining the titles that attracted him. I’m a Dreamer, Aren’t We all? I’ve Got You Under My Skin – that one certainly; he underlined it twice. Then he collected the glasses and took them into the kitchen for the charwoman to wash up the next morning.

  He opened the window and looked out at the wet street. ‘I’ve got you under my skin,’ he hummed softly.

  The street was dark as a country lane, bordered with lopped trees. It glistened – rather wickedly, he thought.

  ‘Deep in the heart of me,’ he hummed. Then he shivered – a very cold wind for the time of year – turned away from the window and wrote a note to the charwoman: ‘Mrs Bryan. Please call me as soon as you get here.’ He underlined ‘soon’ and propped the envelope up against one of the dirty dishes. As he did so he heard an odd, squeaking noise. He looked out of the window again. A white figure was rushing up the street, looking very small and strange in the darkness.

  ‘But she’s got nothing on,’ he said aloud, and craned out eagerly.

  A police whistle sounded. The squeaking continued, and the Garlands’ window above him went up.

  Two policemen half-supported, half-dragged Lotus along. One of them had wrapped her in his cape, which hung down to her knees. Her legs were moving unsteadily below it. The trio went down the area steps.

  Christine had come into the kitchen and was looking over his shoulder. ‘Good Lord,’ she said. ‘Well, that’s one way of attracting attention if all else fails.’

  The bell rang.

  ‘It’s one of the policemen,’ said Ronnie.

  ‘What’s he want to ring our bell for? We don’t know anything about her. Why doesn’t he ring somebody else’s bell?’

  The bell rang again.

  ‘I’d better go down,’ Ronnie said.

  ‘Do you know anything about Mrs Heath, Mrs Lotus Heath, who lives in the basement flat?’ the policeman asked.

  ‘I know her by sight,’ Ronnie answered cautiously.

  ‘She’s a bit of a mess,’ said the policeman.

  ‘Oh, dear!’

  ‘She’s passed out stone cold,’ the policeman went on confidentially. ‘And she looks as if there’s something more than drink the matter, if you ask me.’

  Ronnie said in a shocked voice – he did not know why – ‘Is she dying?’

  ‘Dying? No!’ said the policeman, and when he said ‘No!’ death became unthinkable, the invention of hysteria, something that simply didn’t happen. Not to ordinary people. ‘
She’ll be all right. There’ll be an ambulance here in a minute. Do you know anything about the person?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Ronnie said, ‘nothing.’

  ‘Ah?’ The policeman wrote in his notebook. ‘Is there anybody else in the house, do you think, who’d give us some information?’ He shone a light on the brass plates on the door post. ‘Mr Garland?’

  ‘Not Mr Garland,’ Ronnie answered hurriedly. ‘I’m sure not. She’s not at all friendly with the Garlands, I know that for a fact. She didn’t have much to do with anybody.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ the policeman said. Was his voice ironical? He pressed Miss Reid’s bell and when no answer came looked upwards darkly. But he didn’t get any change out of Number Six, Albion Crescent. Everybody had put their lights out and shut their windows.

  ‘You see –’ Ronnie began.

  ‘Yes, I see,’ the policeman said.

  When Ronnie got upstairs again Christine was in bed.

  ‘Well, what was it all about?’

  ‘She seems to have conked out. They’re getting an ambulance.’

  ‘Really? Poor devil.’ (‘Poor devil’ she said, but it did not mean anything.) ‘I thought she looked awful, didn’t you? That dead-white face, and her lips such a funny colour after her lipstick got rubbed off. Did you notice?’

  A car stopped outside and Ronnie saw the procession coming up the area steps, everybody looking very solemn and important. And it was pretty slick, too – the way they put the stretcher into the ambulance. He knew that the Garlands were watching from the top floor and Mrs Spencer from the floor below. Miss Reid’s floor was in darkness because she was away for a few days.

  ‘Funny how this street gives me goose-flesh tonight,’ he thought. ‘Somebody walking over my grave, as they say.’

  He could not help admiring the way Christine ignored the whole sordid affair, lying there with her eyes shut and the eiderdown pulled up under her chin, smiling a little. She looked very pretty, warm and happy like a child when you have given it a sweet to suck. And peaceful.

  A lovely child. So lovely that he had to tell her how lovely she was, and start kissing her.

  * * *

  WILLIAM GOLDING

  * * *

  MISS PULKINHORN

  This isn’t a ghost story. I wish it were. What I personally believe doesn’t come into this story. An organist has to subscribe to what the chapter believes or at least keep his mouth shut. Come to that, the chapter is rocky enough if you ask me, what with this reservation of the Sacrament and all the rest. Isn’t that in a rubric or flat against the thirty-nine articles or something?

  I suppose Miss Pulkinhorn knew them by heart. What a woman! Understand me, I can think of a dozen women, fifty women connected with the cathedral, and all sincere, devout, and good. But Miss Pulkinhorn was an oddity. A cathedral always collects one like that, crazy with opinions and hate. You can even see a couple like her, hats perched up, feathers a-quiver, nodding and whispering away the reputation of half the city. They always believe in their own privileged goodness, of course – want their pennies and their buns: want to keep pride and vanity and hate and yet remain God’s own special chicken. She was one of that sort. She set about removing me because after all I’m a worldly creature even for an organist but she couldn’t catch me up to anything. And when I got my knighthood and became Sir Edward, I was canonized, so to speak – part of the dignity of the diocese – and she couldn’t touch me. Besides, I altered a little – what with music and glass for a hobby – I found it easy enough to conform. As I got interested in painted glass, year by year time slid away. Time doesn’t count in a cathedral even though this story stretches over a whole generation. When I first knew her I thought a church window was a hole to let in light. By the end, I was a knighted organist and something of an authority on painted glass and our own windows in particular; though with one exception they’re a shoddy lot. The exception is the Abraham window in the ambulatory and it’s part of this story in a very subtle way. But the time factor in a cathedral doesn’t affect the concentration, the unity of a story. Time ceases to be a dimension, drawing things apart. Two hundred years are nothing and what happened five hundred years ago is just round the corner. I see his strange involuntary association with Miss Pulkinhorn as a single thing that grew persistently and slowly as a great tree. When it was a seedling I was a cheerful young man with a tendency to – irregularities. When it ended, position and respectability lay on me like the dust on the tombs.

  She was desperately poor, you know, and kept up appearances in a huge wreck of a house. Those were easy days for finding servants but all she ever had was a woman to help in the mornings. She was a great one for the cathedral and I don’t suppose she ever missed a service, but sat out the lot, simmering with disapproval. Between whiles she came into the cathedral once a day and swept round it in a – possessive manner; though not only the weather but the vestments, the candles, the images, must have been purgatory for her. Between the two wars when they re-dedicated the chapel of St Augustine and reserved the Sacrament there, I’m told she nearly left the diocese. She carried an ebony cane with a silver top and she was so tiny it seemed to reach her shoulder. She wore a black silk dress and a black silk coat that reached her instep. Her neck was enmeshed in black netting stiffened at the nape with wire. The netting spread down in front under the short ‘V’ of her dress-front which was fastened with an enormous topaz brooch. Her hat was a round black thing set exactly on top of her head and gleaming with feathers. She would come through the north-west door, go up the north aisle, her stick clicking as she went, and into the ambulatory. When she passed the chapel of the Sacrament she would lift her chin higher, and come as near as a lady should to a sniff. A light burns there whenever the Sacrament is present, and is put out if it’s not. She’d go on round the ambulatory, down the south aisle, across inside the great west door, and out again where she had come in. I labelled that round in my mind as ‘Miss Pulkinhorn’s tour of the estate’. I suppose she was going through the list of all the things that ought to be different, mentally removing everything that conflicted with her own peculiar conception of God.

  Take a candle now. Is there anything prettier in the world than those little nests of lighted candles you’ll see – say in Chartres cathedral? There they are, alive and twinkling in the darkness with those unbelievable windows smouldering above them. I had the luck to hear Miss Pulkinhorn on the subject of candles. She struck her cane on the floor and hissed: ‘Like a Christmas Tree!’ Precisely. Miss Pulkinhorn didn’t understand Christmas. Anything more than the bare date was pretty high up on the list of her ‘superstitions’. She had some honorary position which gave her the chance to direct the future behaviour of fallen women, poor things. And she kept what she could of the city very, very clean. One night when I had her too much on my mind I totted up her list of triumphs; three wives, two school-masters, and a parson.

  And, of course, him.

  He was her masterpiece, her magnum opus, the crown of her life’s work. I don’t think she intended to do what she did. I’m sure she meant everything for the best. She wanted to teach him a lesson; and believe me, when so much bigotry and ignorance gets mixed up with jealousy on however high a plane, it curdles into a poison that can turn a woman into a witch. It can make a criminal trick feel like an act of charity. I’m sure she called it charity. She probably prayed for him with the dead top of her mind while everything underneath was festering.

  Was he a saint? No, I’m certain he wasn’t. Read about the saints, even the least spectacular among them, and somewhere in their characters you’ll come across steel-sheer adamant, something that can’t be driven. He was a good man but a weak man; immeasurably better than most of us, and he lived, you’ll see, on the very fringe of lunacy. He was a self-deceiver, as successful in his line as Miss Pulkinhorn, but his deceit had a kind of innocence about it. I didn’t believe in his illuminated face, of course. That rumour began to float about and madden
ed Miss Pulkinhorn. I watched him, so I ought to know. You can see from the organ-loft across the chancel right into the chapel of the Sacrament. Glancing in my mirror as I played – my driving mirror, I call it – I could see the choir or the decani at least, and beyond them the Bohun chantry and Bishop Winne holding up two stumps. Beyond that I could see the light flickering by the Sacrament and shining on his bowed bald head. That was my daily life for a generation. Fill in the summer differences for yourself. If he’d started shining or levitating or any of the stock things, I should have spotted him in my mirror.

  Then there’s the window. He didn’t notice things as a normal man does but he might have noticed Abraham unconsciously. Mind, I’m not doubting his belief. Day after day, year after year, you’d see him shambling up the north aisle, his bright, silly face tilted a little, his patched overcoat flapping round him, his broken shoes scraping over the stones. In summer that coat looked like a piece of dusty carpet that daylight discovers crumpled somewhere in a shed. In winter he moved in it a shadow among shadows. He was old, thirty years ago when I saw him first and he changed no more than Miss Pulkinhorn. Three times a day he went into the chapel of the Sacrament, knelt at the back, and worshipped what was reserved there. He came for a while in the morning after consecration or perhaps during the service and sometimes followed the Sacrament into the chapel. He’d come back at midday for a longer spell and then exactly at half past six in the evening. If the light was out he’d go away. What point was there in his staying? But you could set your watch by his half past six visit.

  This is an indecent story. It trespasses on the privacies of two most unfortunate people. Yet I was woven into it and can’t escape my knowledge nor partial responsibility for what happened. What mercy we all need! Now I look back after these years I can feel nothing but remorse and shame for my lack of wit; and pity for them, pity for us all.

  But this indecency – he wasn’t properly conscious, you know. Sometimes when the fit was on him he’d give things away with a kind of frantic eagerness. And some of his visits to the chapel were more successful than others. He’d be there, bowed and kneeling and occasionally his head would lift and his arms – and he’d look ecstatic. You see that gesture here and there in religious art as a symbol of revelation. There’s a figure like that in Chartres and one in Rheims. I’ve even seen it in a hieroglyphic four thousand years old and always meaning the same thing. But we’ve got it too, in the Abraham window. Some people object to the secondary colours, orange, purple, and mauve, that you get in fifteenth-century glass, but I enjoy it. There they are, God appearing from a great burst of colour, smiling in a friendly, fatherly way, and Abraham below in the right-hand light, smiling up with face and hands lifted.