by Francis King
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
Francis King
Mouse
The Pushchair
The Interrogations
Death by Water
The Appeal
Everybody is Nobody
The Miracle
Now You See It
Dreams
The Sitting Tenant
Causes
Francis King
The Sunlight on the Garden
Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011.
‘One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov.’ Beryl Bainbridge
Mouse
Derek Hammond would always call me Mouse.
From the top of the steps he would shout down into the steamy changing-room, with its smells of sweat, chlorine and carbolic soap, ‘Mouse, Mouse, where the hell are you?’ Everyone would look up at him and then across at me. The general laughter that followed was as though all of them were flicking at my naked body with their damp towels – a humiliation that they often inflicted on me.
He would hold up a slice of toast: ‘Oh, Mouse, Mouse, Mouse! Can’t you possibly concentrate long enough not to incinerate every slice of bread you get your grubby paws on?’
He would loom above me: ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to beat you, Mouse. This is the third time you’ve been the last person to leave the study and have forgotten to turn off the light.’ His voice would be jolly, he would be smiling. After the beating he would say: ‘ Sorry for that, Mouse.’ Once he added: ‘ It’s all for the good of your soul, you know.’
When I told my widowed mother how much I hated to be called Mouse, not merely by him but, in derisive imitation, by the other boys in my year, she said: ‘ Oh, but that’s just affectionate.’
‘No, no, it isn’t.’
‘Of course it is. The trouble is that you’re always so touchy. Your father often used to call me Little Rat. That was affectionate too, of course it was. And a rat is a far less attractive creature than a mouse. Mice are sweet little things.’
I did not want to be a sweet little thing. In any case, she had not convinced me. The trouble was that I looked like a mouse. I was diminutive for my age. My eyes were tiny and bright, with pink rims, my nose was long and pointed, my ears were far too large, and I had virtually no chin. I hated my appearance, just as, unwillingly, I admired and envied his. If I was like a mouse, he was like a lion, golden, lithe and strong.
I was his fag for only a year. That was the length of any new boy’s servitude. In any case, he had then moved on, first to read PEP at Oxford and then, after the outbreak of the War, to join Fighter Command as a pilot. At the end of the last day on which I was at his peremptory beck and call, he inspected the shoes that I had polished for him and declared, in the jocular, vaguely jeering tone now so familiar to me: ‘ Oh, Mouse, Mouse, I have an awful feeling that you’ve used black polish, not brown.’ He held out one of the shoes. ‘Look, Mouse. Bloody look!’ Suddenly the lion sprang off the chair in which he had been lolling. With the hand that was not holding out the shoe he grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and thrust my head downwards. ‘Look, blast you, you little twerp!’ The hand released me and ruffled my hair. He laughed. ‘What’s to become of you, Mouse? You’re absolutely hopeless.’ I did not answer, biting my lower lip as, red-faced, I stared down at my feet. I felt myself to be, not for the first time in his presence, on the verge of tears.
‘Oh, well, never mind. I have something for you. A present. Not that you deserve it, Mouse. No one can ever have had to put up with quite so useless a fag. What do you think about all the time?’ He had asked me that question on many other occasions. ‘ That bally thumping of yours? Do you really think that you’re going to become another Rubinstein or Solomon? You’re far more likely to end up playing for dancing classes at a girls school. Oh, Mouse, Mouse, Mouse!’ He gave a theatrically exaggerated sigh. ‘Well, never mind. It takes all sorts.’ He drew out his wallet. It was made of crocodile leather, a gift, he had once told me, from an uncle who had made a fortune in the meat trade in Argentina. His dream was to go out there for a while – oh, not to make money, but to play polo, he said.
‘Here you are, Mouse! Not that you deserve it.’
To my amazement it was a large, white £5 note. Such a note had never been seen in the impoverished household of my mother and myself. She had once told me that, if one used such a note, one had to endorse it, like a cheque, before it was valid.
I shrank away, as though from something contaminated. I could not believe that he was giving me so large a sum. My uncles never tipped me more than ten shillings; usually I had to be content with a florin or a half-crown from them.
‘Come on! What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever seen a five-pound note?’
Mutely I put out my hand.
‘Well, there you are, Mouse. You’ve been an awful trial to me, but you’re not a bad little squirt. Perhaps you’ll improve.’
‘Thanks. Thanks a lot.’ Looking down at it, I began to uncrease the note between the fingers of both hands.
I used the money to buy some second-hand piano scores from a murky, dusty, labyrinthine shop in Charing Cross Road to which I often used to go when I had any cash. During the Blitz, the shop, all its stock, the proprietor and his elderly woman assistant, who hobbled around with an iron brace on her right leg, were all to be annihilated by a bomb.
Five years later I was walking my mother’s spaniel, Roy, in Kensington Gardens. This was a task that my mother, mysteriously to me, enjoyed and claimed for her own. But she had had a fall in the black-out, while returning from her work as an auxiliary nurse at St Mary Abbot’s Hospital, and was now laid up with a sprained ankle. Roy, who was almost as old as I was, was exasperating me, as always, with his slow, panting progression from one tree to another, first to sniff and then laboriously to cock a rheumatic leg and emit a slow trickle of bronze-coloured urine. I tugged on the lead but, obstinate, he would not budge.
Suddenly, Roy froze and jerked up his head. A moment later, I too heard the churning of a VI. That sunny afternoon the Gardens were full with people in their Sunday best – many of the men in dark suits, most of the women in hats. At the approaching noise, almost all of them flung themselves down either on the pathway or on the grass. I remained standing, tugging at Roy.
Soon I realised that, in charge of a wheelchair, a tall, elegant woman was also standing – not far from me, in the centre of the same path along which I had been dragging the dog. In an instant, as I waited for the VI to detonate, I took in the beautifully tailored grey suit, the grey gloves, the pale-pi
nk blouse and the pale-pink hat, its brim tilted at a jaunty angle up and away from the face.
I then heard a voice, unmistakable to me. ‘Mouse! Mouse!’ Irrationally, I at once felt the same trepidation that I did when I used to hear it back at school. The voice was coming from the wheelchair. My first emotion was one of astonishment. I had thought the figure slumped in it to be an old man.
As I stared in incredulity, the VI passed over with a now diminishing splutter. The splutter ended in the muffled thump of its impact on what I later learned was a block of Knightsbridge flats. All the people who had been lying on the lawn or the path, now scrambled to their feet and began nonchalantly to dust themselves down. The women straightened their hats, one even taking a mirror out of her bag and peering into it as she did so. In recollection the scene has now become a comic one for me. At the time, it was merely a humdrum part of wartime life in London.
‘Mouse! Come over!’ With a mixture of bewilderment and dread, I had been hesitating. Slowly I walked towards the wheelchair. ‘Don’t you recognise me?’
Of course I could not reply: ‘You’ve changed out of all recognition.’ So I did not venture an answer. He had had large, strong hands, the nails of which, unusual for a schoolboy, he had always scrupulously manicured. Now they were like the talons, stiff and striated with purple and black, of some dead bird of prey. I took in the face. One side was crimson and hideously rucked up and there was a pink celluloid eye-patch over the eye. Even on that summer’s day there was a tartan rug reaching from his waist to his ankles.
‘How strange to meet you here! I’ve often wondered what happened to you.’ His voice had always been forceful. Now it was little more than a hoarse whisper. He turned his head upwards with a brief grimace, as though it hurt him to do so. ‘Ma – this is Mouse.’ I felt a spasm of fury. Why did he have to use that derisive nickname after so long time? ‘You remember my talking of Mouse?’
‘Yes, of course, I do. Hello, Mouse.’ She raised her hand from the wheelchair and held it out to me. My first impression was of her narrowness. The pale face was narrow, with the grey-green eyes set close together, and the waist, legs, ankles and feet were all narrow. ‘ Was he a terribly demanding taskmaster? I’m sure he was. He has no patience.’ Later, I was to see many examples of this lack of patience in his treatment of a woman who, however urgent the job in hand, never herself hurried.
‘Well, what are you up to? You must have left the old place by now’
‘Oh, yes, a year ago.’
‘Did you make house prefect?’ He laughed. ‘I bet you didn’t.’
Humiliated, I shook my head. I might have added: ‘But I’m the youngest person ever to have played at a National Gallery concert.’
‘And now?’
‘I’m up at Oxford. Balliol. I got a music scholarship.’ I almost added that, but for the scholarship, I could never have gone there.
‘No call up? Don’t tell me you’re a pacifist. That would be entirely in keeping with all I remember of our Mouse.’
‘No. Asthma. I have this asthma.’
‘Oh, Christ, yes! How you used to gasp and wheeze!’ His face cracked into a lop-sided smile, the mouth twisting upwards. ‘ Well, you can see the sort of state I’m in. No more bloody use. Shot down,’ he added bleakly.
‘You’re going to be back on your feet in no time at all.’ His mother spoke with a desperate attempt at conviction that could not fool me and certainly could not have fooled him. ‘They’re quite confident about that.’ She was always to speak of the doctors and nurses as ‘they’.
‘So it’s now the vacation?’
‘That’s right. But I must get a job.’
‘Must?’
‘My scholarship doesn’t stretch all that far.’ Though I did not want it to be, my tone was resentful. That tone said: ‘ You’ve never had to worry about money for a single moment. My mother and I have to worry about it all the time.’
‘What sort of job are you looking for?’ Lady Hammond asked.
‘Oh, anything. I thought I might get some tutoring. Music would be best. That’s the only thing I’m good at.’
‘So you still want to be another Rubinstein or Solomon?’ Hammond interposed.
I did not answer. It was the same affectionate yet jeering tone that I remembered from those already remote days when I had been his slave.
Lady Hammond tilted her head, the sunlight glinting on the ornamental silver buckle at one side of her pink hat. ‘ I might think of something,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t want to do farm-work, I imagine. If you did, I could ask our bailiff.’
‘Mouse would be no bloody use at farm-work. He was always hopeless at anything practical.’
‘Let me have a think about it.’ She opened the bag hitched to one of the handles of the wheelchair and drew out what looked, at first glance, like a small silver cigarette case. Attached to it was a pencil, also silver, almost as slim as a matchstick. She opened the cover of the case and then passed both it and the pencil over to me. ‘Give me your address. On that pad inside. Oh, and also add the telephone number. Do you live in London?’
‘Yes, not far from here … Stop it Roy!’ He was tugging impatiently at his lead. It was difficult to write with one hand while the other attempted to restrain him.
‘Let me have him while you’re writing.’
I disentangled the lead from my wrist and she took it from me.
‘Now stop that! Sit! Sit!’ Amazingly Roy at once obeyed her. He stopped jerking at the lead and moved close against one of her legs, his head raised to look up at her with those eyes that my mother called soulful and I thought merely sloppy. He was never as obedient as that with my mother, much less with me.
‘Well, it was good seeing you, Mouse. You haven’t changed at all. Except that you’re much bigger now. The mouse could now almost pass for a rat.’
‘Do you know my son’s companion?’ That was how Lady Hammond would introduce me to visitors or people encountered when we were out together. But I was far more than merely a companion. Perhaps she thought that, by ignoring that fact, she allowed me to retain my dignity. All too often – since the staff at the Hall had been so much reduced by the war – I was also nurse, messenger, butler and valet. As I practised at the sadly out-of-tune Bechstein piano in the music room, I would hear the thumping of Hammond’s stick on the ceiling above me. As I wandered across the overgrown croquet lawn, I would hear, from the open window beneath which his daybed had been placed, his imperious ‘Mouse, Mouse, Mouse!’ Sometimes he wanted me to ‘nip down’ (as he usually put it) to the village store for the Senior Service cigarettes at which he constantly sucked with desperate greed. Sometimes I had to perform some more intimate duty for him – hauling him on and off the commode, fetching him the urine bottle and then emptying it, or sponging down his once athletic and now emaciated and shattered body. So far from showing any gratitude for these services, they would all too often make him irritable. ‘ Oh, you’re so clumsy!’ he would exclaim, writhing under my hesitant touch. ‘Oh, do call Nanny!’
Nanny had first been nanny to Lady Hammond. She had then become nanny to Hammond, an only child. Now that Hammond had physically regressed to babyhood, she had once again become nanny to him. By the time that I met her, she must have been in her eighties, a tiny, bowed woman, with round, red cheeks and wispy grey hair pulled back into a tight little bun on a neck criss-crossed with wrinkles. As she bent over Hammond, she would make odd, inarticulate crooning noises or mutter ‘There, there; there!’ Clearly her memory was failing. When we encountered each other by chance, she would peer at me with a vague alarm as though wondering who this intruder might be. Her chief occupation was to listen to the war news on the wireless. An arthritic hand cupped round an ear, she would lean towards the over-amplified set in the cramped nook that everyone called ‘The wireless room’. Its blackout curtains were frequently left closed, with only a dim overhead light illuminating her tiny form. Lady Hammond never entered there. Now that he
r cherished son had been so decisively removed from the hostilities, she had lost all interest in them. From time to time Nanny would excitedly come up with the news of some battle won or some city bombed. But as far as Lady Hammond was concerned it might have been the bailiff giving a report on the birth of a calf or the state of the milk yield. Hour after hour her tall, narrow figure would sit upright in a straight-backed chair at a card-table, a game of patience spread out before her. She would stare down, deliberating. Then slowly she would extend a hand, withdraw it, extend it again. Once, as I entered the room with a message from Hammond, she peered up at me with a look of vague distraction. Then she leaned over and moved a card. ‘Yes?’ I passed on the message. She nodded. No more. Then she said in a fretful voice: ‘I’m having no luck with Miss Milligan today. So I’m going to try Sevens.’ All her life, I decided, had now become this endlessly extended game of patience.
At weekends, Sir Lionel would appear. He would arrive by train at Manningtree station, seven miles away, and Lady Hammond would drive over to fetch him in the long, sleek Armstrong Siddely that I would sometimes be asked to ‘be an angel and polish’. They received a special petrol allowance, partly because of Hammond’s disability but chiefly because Sir Lionel was now a junior minister in the Air Ministry. Much of the weekend Sir Lionel would spend in his study, official papers piled up before him. Twice during my time at the Hall, he returned to London immediately after breakfast on the Sunday, after an urgent telephone call from Downing Street. He did not at all care for it when his wife despatched me to summon him to meals. Without a word of thanks, he would explode ‘Oh, blast! Oh, hell! Am I never be to left in peace?’ An amateur boxer in his youth, he had a large saddle nose, obviously smashed by a fist, its tip a shiny, red pommel. He was constantly raising a forefinger to it and sniffing. He rarely addressed me, and when he did so his tone was always perfunctory, sometimes even contemptuous. It was he who paid me each Saturday, slowly counting out the notes in front of me and then, having handed them over, adding ‘You’d better check there’s been no mistake.’