“Oh yes. And getting rather desperate about it, I think. So silly. (Only women and perverts get desperate about becoming older.) My real regret is Elizabeth.”
“Why? Do you …?” Nell suppressed the words like her so much?
“She will think I introduced her to some very ill-bred people. She may even think I’m ill-bred too.”
Nell was not anxious to be led into a discussion of Elizabeth’s opinion of him, because he always became so angry when people did not like and admire him, and so she only made a soothing sound. Then she looked at her watch.
“Don’t do that,” he said instantly.
She laughed; she had only done it at the prompting of that instinct which always warned her, when in his company, to be the first to suggest making a move.
“Why must you wear one of those horrible things?” he went on.
“I couldn’t do without one, now. I’m used to it.”
“Yes; in other words you’re a slave; a slave to Time. Don’t you like just being here with me? Where have you got to go rushing off to? You’re so active, Nello.”
“Nowhere, actually. But I was … we’ve got someone on at The Primula this evening in place of Nerina, and I was just wondering how they’re all getting on.” (Too well she liked just sitting there with him … the useless, hopeless, ‘fruitless’—in the pet word of her headmistress at Claregates—pastime that led nowhere, and achieved only a little temporary happiness) … “she’s awfully ancient; Miss B. dug her up from somewhere in one of the back courts … we were all rather afraid she would collapse.”
“In place of Nerina? Miss Berringer hasn’t sacked her, has she?”
“Oh no. But she didn’t come in yesterday evening or this evening. We’re wondering if she’s ill.” She hesitated; she had meant from the beginning of their talk to ask him if he knew Nerina’s address, but had put off mentioning it because of the annoying little pain. “Do you happen to know where she lives?” she said.
“It’s somewhere at the back of Kentish Town Road, I think. But why are you wondering if she’s ill? Did she look ill the last time you saw her?”
“Not ill, exactly, but I do think she’s missing Chris very much.”
“The bloody Army,” he said, but mildly. “Well, I suppose I must get to work.” He stood up, as if he had abruptly come to a decision, and the quick movement almost audibly dispersed the peace in the room. “I’ve been meaning to … only this business with Benedict rather got in the way. Thank you for your sweet company, Nello.” He paused; Nell had gone to the dressing table. “Are you going to brush your hair? If you are, I’ll stay.”
She shook her head. “Only comb it.” But he lingered at the door, watching.
“I shouldn’t take your parents’ passion for television too seriously,” he said, turning away as she put down the comb. “You must make allowances for novelty with elderly people, you know. By the way, will you make arrangements to be at home tomorrow evening, please.”
“I’m going to a film with Robert.”
“Oh, you must put him off. I may need you.”
Nell just smiled, sitting at the dressing table and beginning to paint her nails.
“I mean it, Nello. You may be able to be of real use to someone in a serious hole if you arrange to stay in.”
“Do run along, John, if you have work to do. I have; masses.”
“I shall expect you to be here.”
He shut the door behind him with distinct annoyance. Such rubbish; as if I should put off Robert, Nell thought.
In a moment she got up and turned on the light; the shadows in the room had lost their tender bloom and become merely inconvenient, and she was remembering the expression which had come into his face when he had heard that Nerina was perhaps ill.
Was the ‘someone in a serious hole’ Nerina?
The next day, to John’s great pleasure, was very hot.
He passed its earlier hours in his favourite place, lying half-asleep on the sofa and watching the shaft of sunlight imperceptibly moving round the room while its clear morning gold changed to the heavier beam of afternoon. The old woman shuffled in and out, silently setting before the boy and the huge cat dozing on his chest a scrap of fish or a steaming drink; the two scarcely spoke to one another throughout the unnoticed gliding by of the hours. It was one of the days when Miss Lister appeared lost in the past.
Late in the morning he suddenly began to feel charged with energy. He gently lifted the warm limp weight from his chest and set it on the floor, laughing at its outraged expression, then sprang up and stretched himself and went into the kitchen. Miss Lister sat there with The Sketch, before the open window.
“I wasn’t asleep,” she said instantly.
“I know, auntie. I’m going out now. Thank you for a lovely time.”
“That’s all right, dear. It’s cosy, just you and me, isn’t it? Will you be back tonight?”
“I don’t know. … I don’t think so.”
“Sorry you had such a business waking me up last night. Getting old and deaf.”
“Nonsense. You’ll never be old.” He dropped a kiss on the tiny claw, covered with brown patches, resting on the table; it was the first distasteful moment of the day, “I do wish you would let me have a key.”
She shook her head. “Can’t do that, dear. You’d lose it.”
“I would be so careful, truly.”
“No, dear. I’m not afraid of burglars (I once told one he ought to be ashamed of himself and go home, when I found him in the kitchen; I wasn’t much older than you; I’m not afraid of the brutes). But I can’t have strangers wandering in.”
“They wouldn’t have the chance to. But I won’t worry you. Good-bye.”
He left her humming ‘Dolly Gray’ to herself, apparently moved to memory by some photographs of marching soldiers in the paper, and slipped out through the stiffly opening, seldom-used front door and into the street.
It was asleep in the lunch-time hush. All the little shops were closed; children were indoors at their meal or taking it at school; lemons and carrots in the greengrocers’ glowed through the warm shadows. He went down the steep narrow hill, past Well Walk and its large now-fading elms beneath which Keats once strolled, to the East Heath Road, and there was the Heath outspread. The rains of summer had left its grass still green, but already the chestnut leaves, first to bud and first to wither, were shaded with gold, and the still air cast a veil over the sky that made its blue faint and pale. A distant figure in black, walking slowly under the motionless trees accompanied by a dog, might have been either man or woman; it was only a human figure, acceptably unobtrusive, and just warding off from the scene that hint of mystery, which some find sorrowful, that haunts an empty landscape.
But Nature did not please John best of all; he preferred people and houses, because to watch people, and to reflect their actions back in words, was his purpose in life; and now as he went down the avenue of lime trees casting a shade green as emeralds and making the fields beyond their cool gloom appear dazzlingly bright, he was looking towards the Viaduct, the massive brick erection spanning the Heath’s darkest and deepest pond.
They were not visible from the lime-tree walk, but in fancy he could see the two black archways set one at either side of the towers supporting the bridge, and he was recalling the story, told to him by one of those women whom his mother had paid to take him out, when he was a little boy.
He remembered Mrs. Russell well; and now he knew what she had been; a near-lady fallen on hard days, with a fondness for beads and scent, and a liking for chatting with the fine big outdoor men who were the keepers of the Heath. John could hear her excited laugh now. The noise had strangely repelled him even when he was six years old: he had never liked loud talk and rough greedy behaviour; the silent, the soft, and gentle, and orderly, and getting what he wanted by secret ways, had, ever since he could remember, been what had drawn him towards itself.
One of the keepers had told Mrs. Russel
l the story.
This had been before the Great War, before 1914. There had been a young girl who had ‘fallen into some kind of trouble’, and she had run away. She had gone to live in one of the cold, dark, lofty cells hollowed in the bricks of the Viaduct, hiding there by day (not so many people used to come up to the Heath in those days; people worked longer hours and there wasn’t so much money about for making excursions) and coming out at night to buy her food—in those days, too, the shops in Kentish and Camden Town stayed open very late. But presently, the man had said, she began to smell, and the keepers, about their business of guarding and tidying the Heath, noticed this animal odour coming out of the dark hole and went in and found her, and brought her out. After that, the bars of iron had been placed across the archways.
The story had enthralled the little John, standing silently beside Mrs. Russell and hearing the deep voice sounding far above his head, punctuated by her exclamations of wonder and disgust.
What had become of the girl? Had the keepers sent her to prison? What had been the trouble into which she had fallen? And what had she done all day, hiding in the dark hole from which she could look out, and downward, at the wide sleepy faces of the water-lilies gazing up at the bright sky? He had once smelled a water-lily; an older boy, a member of a gang of rough, determined children sleeping in air-raid shelters and eating when and where they could, with whom he had for a few days played by the pond, had given up a whole morning to securing the flower with the help of sticks, and string, and wadings into frighteningly deep mud.
John had never forgotten the feeling of the thick, wet, heavy petals thrust against his face by the triumphant picker. The faint, dirty smell of the boy’s hand had been overcome at once by the astonishingly powerful scent of the flower; a scent that went too far, like a banquet which will at any moment collapse into riot as the water-nymphs undulate into the hall.
Soon afterwards, these children had been found by their friends and relations and the authorities, and had left the Heath. He never saw them again, but the flavour of their lawless life had lingered on, holding for him a wonderful charm that had persisted until now, almost into his manhood. This memory, so strong as almost to deserve another name which should embody its power over him, had formed his present way of living. It returned upon him, whenever he crossed this part of the Heath; shutting all other thoughts and feelings away; and of course when there returned at the same time the awful sentence she began to smell, what he breathed, almost before the horror had time to get upon him, was the scent of the water-lily.
Now these memories gradually receded, and he looked vacantly about him. He was crossing those wide upland slopes stretching between Kenwood and Highgate Village which must surely, as the months of summer which see them covered in red sorrel and silver grasses suggest, have formerly been grazing meadows. But he was bored by now, and as he walked quickly onward over the grass bleached to pale gold, his eager expression was already welcoming those streets of houses yet unseen where he was going to look for Nerina. They would make no demands upon his pity or his kindness; they would only hold up their mysterious squalid beauty to the mirror of his senses; and he longed to be among them.
Half an hour later, he was; his long legs carried him swiftly through the cheerful commercial ugliness of the main roads, and now the beauty of private life, expressed in houses shabby and quiet, was opening before him again.
The streets were a maze without an ending beneath a silent, hot, blue afternoon sky; façades of pale brown brick trimmed with white stone looked out forlornly on trampled gardens where the white privet, flower of the back streets, bloomed. He began to wander, lost in delight. The languor of mid-afternoon hushed the long empty roads; there was hardly anyone about; late August heat beat upwards from pale pavements, and every now and then he passed a bush covered in black berries that looked at him with a glinting stare: children of the elderflowers that had been white there in early summer; witch-potion berries; country cousins to the drugs and nostrums sold in the furtive little chemists’ shops in the main roads … and he had forgotten that he was looking for Nerina. He was wandering, moving always more dreamily and slowly, farther and farther into the maze of back streets.
But when he had drifted at last to a standstill, and, everything now forgotten, was sitting on a low balustrade of weathered grey limestone that had once held a row of iron railings and now had only the sockets, with the flowers of a privet bush falling on his shoulders, he saw a girl with fair hair go by at the end of the road: like someone in a painting; beautiful; and she made him think of Nerina.
He sighed, and got up from the balustrade. Human beings: except inasmuch as they provided material for writers, what a bloody nuisance they were.
There came a puff of breeze and the innocent smell of the privet blossoms blew over him. Then, floating across the roofs from two or three roads away, there came a hoarse, hollow, quavering cry.
It was the voice of the rag-and-bone man, walking slowly down some street hidden by the brown houses under their roofs of warm grey slate; moving along beside his small cart loaded with iron bedsteads and pickle jars and old mattresses, and drawn by a plump elderly pony:
“A—a ra’—a—a a’ bo-a—a—,
A—a ra’—a—a a’ bo-a—a—,”
and as the call floated down through the dreaming air, a flock of pigeons went up; grey and white in the hot, still blue, and their shadows skimmed across the road.
That was the voice of London, my old love, John thought; the voice of my wicked old love; and, looking about him and realizing that a turning far on to the left of this street would bring him out near Landseer Circus, he began to move more quickly towards it.
Now a slope covered with tall, white, ruinous houses was bringing him out onto one of the many gentle ridges of North London; gradually lifting its burden of very poor houses up into the sunlight of a crescent where grew huge, ancient, shabby trees. Attic windows here glared darkly at the sky, and their bleached, askew frames were sinking sideways into their roofs. They sent down a breath from Mayhew’s London—and older yet: Hogarth’s procuresses, and country innocence blasted and betrayed. And here, glancing upwards, he saw at one of these terrible windows a turbanned head; this was where Africa could afford to live, and Africa had found it.
Front doors stood open; a stench of stale fat or a cold catty breath came out of dark entries as he went by. The oval expanse of grass was trampled almost bare; the trunks of the big noble sycamores were scored deeply with names and initials and linked hearts; all round the crescent was a curve of huge, decaying, massive dark grey mansions; with attics high, high in the sky of summer, and appearing as if sealed for ever against its warmth and light. The dusty masses of leaves and the dirty masses of plaster and brick enclosed the air here, making it smell stale. John, disliking nothing that he saw, sat down on one of the remaining patches of grass and smoked: this was Landseer Circus, and if Nerina lived here she would be easy to find, for he saw people going in and out of each other’s houses continually; they must all know one another; while the place was becoming crowded with children beginning to swarm home from school. Someone would be sure to know Nerina, if she lived here.
Presently a shadow fell upon him.
He looked up; an African girl of about twelve years old was slowly pushing a perambulator across the grass, with an African baby in it, gazing into the distance with a grave expression that somehow matched her neat clean dress and her polished shoes.
“Good afternoon,” said John.
She just nodded; she did not turn to look at him.
“I wonder if you can help me,” he went on. “I expect your mother has told you never to talk to strangers and she is quite right. There are some very wicked people about. But I am only trying to find a friend, whom I think lives in the Crescent. Her name is Nerina. Do you know her?”
Now she did turn to look at him.
“Chris’s Nerina?”
“That’s exactly what she
is. Do you know her, then?”
“Not so well as what I do him. He painted my photo. In my Guides uniform, I am.” The voice, gentle as his own, had a cooing undertone that suggested—to John, at least—generations of forefathers who had come running in haste at the master’s summons; timid, yet anxious also to please; but her liquid black pupils set in yellowish whites looked at him without a trace of anxiety or suspicion.
“Can you show me the house where she lives?”
The girl nodded and pointed. “It’s the one with the red curtains. But she don’t live there no more now; she’s gone away,” and the voice dropped to a doleful note.
“Oh dear. Far away?”
Again a shake of her head. But a glimmer of laughter was in the black eyes.
“How far?” he asked, beginning to smile too.
“Just down there in Padstow Street,” pointing to a turning visible from where they stood, “that’s the house, with the blue curtains.” They both burst out laughing; a crowd of little boys rushed shouting past the perambulator accompanied by three dogs seeming well able to support the prevailing spirit of the group, and the African baby began to cry.
“There, s’sh; there,” she said, rocking it.
“Will you tell me your name, please?”
“Grace. What’s your name, please?” The glint of laughter, which the baby’s distress had banished, returned.
“John Gaunt. Do you like it?” Admiration he must have, if only from a little African girl.
She shook her head, laughing still.
“Oh, well, I like yours. It’s charming. And now will you come with me to the house where Nerina is?”
“Go on; you can get there easy yourself; it’s that one with the blue curtains; I showed you.”
“I know, but I want you to come too; I like your company.”
“Mammy says I’m not to go there and I don’t want to neither,” she answered calmly. “That Angie is a bad woman who drinks. She drinks all her pension away. I wouldn’t even take our baby the side of the road where her house is; he might catch something. But tell you what I will do, John, I’ll come to the end of the patch with you and across the road to ours.”
Here Be Dragons Page 30