by Denton Welch
One day, while I was sitting there, a youngish man in a dog-collar came hurrying round the north buttress, which partly hid me. He opened the garden gate, and when he turned to latch it again he saw me. I was afraid that he was going to turn me out and reprimand me for irreverence, but instead he smiled as if quite used to seeing me there and as if he approved. He said that he had often noticed me from the vicarage windows and he was glad that I enjoyed the peace and quiet and the sun; then, just when he seemed about to lean on the gate and talk, his manner changed. He had evidently remembered that he had no time to spare. With one more smile he turned and walked quickly towards the house.
I was left with an empty feeling, as though something nice had been taken away from me capriciously. He had so obviously wished me well; I began to wonder if some shyness or stiffness in me had driven him away. I was filled with regret. He might have been a friend instead of a stranger. I could hear the clanging trains in the New Cross high street, and the dust and filth seemed to be trying to invade my retreat. I got up to go back to the school.
I walked a different way, along a footpath between fences, to delay my return for as long as possible. The class that afternoon was ‘book illustration’, and the master who taught was so nervous that he either praised extravagantly or spat out some demolishing remark and then glided away, seemingly dismayed by his own excessiveness.
I sat on a high stool, trying to design a frontispiece for The Way of All Flesh, which I had chosen as my book; but it seemed hopeless. No ideas took form, and the extraordinary perversity of my materials conquered me. No one was there to help me technically or to give me the confidence which would have made my thoughts run clear. I toyed with my brushes and paints and longed for the end of the afternoon.
At last it came and I was free to get away from the school. I left the other students laughing and shouting and washing their brushes in the lavatory basins. I seemed to have no connection with them. They belonged to another world. I ran down the tunnel-like passages and let myself out into the open air.
I was filled with a sort of exultation. What should I do? Should I wander in the drab streets around me? Past the eel shop, where the writhing black things were slowly dying on zinc trays; there was a bicycle shop which blared music against the noise of the trams, and beyond that was a junk shop where I had noticed some little prints in old oval frames. They were sepia coloured by Bartolozzi, the sort I had read about. I went to bargain with the man, who turned out to be likeable and understanding, but he would not sell me the smallest one for five shillings—he wanted eight. We talked a little and I turned the pictures over and saw that one had the charming old framemaker’s label still on it. I wanted that one particularly, but it was even more expensive. The man was busy. There was no place for me. I said goodbye and walked away, unsatisfied.
I walked in the direction of ‘home’. I would catch a bus later, when I was tired. I stared at the people’s faces, looking for something that I had known a long time ago or had perhaps dreamt about. But the faces told me nothing; they were set and oblivious, like slices of pallid cheese wrapped in grey muslin. So many people, yet nobody for me.
I jumped on to a bus and let the scene merge and blur and melt. The motion soothed me into a waking sleep. I sailed high above noise and dirt and danger.
At Park Lane I got off and walked into the park. There were lovers there lying in the grass, and I thought how flimsy they looked, like trash washed up on a beach, or corpses in an old war photograph. But what were their thoughts? I wondered. Were their minds filled with extraordinary things which only came to flower when they lay down? Had they forgotten all about the world outside, or did the eyes of other people give an added excitement? Would some of them be lovers for years after this day’s beginning?
My questions multiplied and grew more fantastic. I think something ancient in me really condemned them as whores and lechers, but I ignored this deeper feeling and invented for them strange situations and romances.
I could not stay in the park all the evening, and I hated to go back to Adam Street alone, so I decided to have tea and ice-cream at Fuller’s. But when I sat down at the small round table and had the chocolate-fudge sundae in front of me, my malaise increased rather than diminished. People at the other tables leant towards one another and talked in low contented voices. Outside the traffic roared and grated. I hurried through what I had meant to enjoy, then turned into the street again.
I began to walk very slowly towards Portman Square, letting the crowd push me this way and that. Outside the house I found my brother and a friend just about to set off for the evening. They asked me perfunctorily to join them, but I looked at the friend’s rolled umbrella, at my brother’s smartness, and I felt tousled and callow. Their age, their sleekness and assurance made them inhuman. I said hurriedly that I had to visit an old friend of my mother’s. They talked and joked with me for a moment, then walked off down the road, the friend swinging his umbrella a little.
Having said that I was going to see my middle-aged friend, I decided that I would. But when I had climbed up the stone steps to her old-fashioned flat, there was no one at home. The bell buzzed through the empty rooms. I bent down and looked through the letter-box. The hall was fawn colour and dead. It seemed possible that ghosts were haunting the flat while she was away. I listened for sinister movements and voices, then turned away almost in despair. To find the door locked at that moment was a catastrophe.
I trudged back across the bridge, feeling sick and empty. It was almost dark now and the lights were lit. Near the Marble Arch I noticed a group of people not moving but standing still on the pavement outside a fun fair. As I passed them I heard blues music, the ping of balls and wire springs, tinkle of money, and over everything the snarling voices of two people in the doorway. A young woman in black with fair, parched-looking hair confronted a man, whose tie had blown over his shoulder. A belt with a nickel buckle was pulled tightly in round his stomach. He was lifting his lip, sneering at the girl’s stream of abuse, hunching his broad shoulders as he pushed his hands deep into his pockets. Then, as she paused for breath, he began. He poured contempt on her clothes, her body, her age, her voice, her class, her sex. He seemed to be trampling on everything they’d ever known or done together. I stood quite still on the edge of the crowd, too horrified and fascinated to break away. I could picture them just the night before, close to each other in the dark, or kissing like the people in the grass. Now they were murderous, searching for the worst poison and the sharpest pain.
The woman began to move away. She seemed to be broken and conquered by the man’s brutal words; but all at once she darted back and slashed him in the face with her handbag. It was as if he had at last said the unbearable thing.
There was blood. The metal clasp had caught his cheek, and as he put his hand up to it, the woman burst into a storm of tears. He made as if to rush at her and smash her face in, but people in the crowd caught his arms behind him. Seeing him powerless, the woman with a strange movement jerked her head up and her tongue flashed out like a serpent’s. For one moment she was quite spiritualised and transformed with hate; then she slipped through the crowd and I saw her running, half crouching, along the pavement. She was sobbing again violently. Hate was over, and only misery left.
The man turned and tried to fight the men who were holding him. The little crowd swayed. I broke away and started to run too.
In my dismay it seemed to me as if the earth’s crust had cracked and I had looked through and seen reality at last.
THE YOUTH RANG THE BELL
The youth rang the bell of the house in the crescent on Black-heath, then waited very anxiously.
The door was opened almost at once by a large woman with tight dark eyebrows and waved hair. She was frowning and the youth hated to think of the fighting tautness of the great bosom under the tired stretching cardigan.
‘Who is it? What do you want? There is no “governor” in this house so it’s no good as
king for him.’
She was about to shut the door in his face, but he must have looked so innocently affronted and bemused that she stopped, waiting for him to say something.
‘The lady at the Christian Science reading room told me that you took paying guests,’ he said carefully, using the words ‘lady’ and ‘paying guest’ to please her, but hating her at the same time with all his heart for her crude barbarian manner.
A curious change came over the large woman. She went quite blank. It was as if the curtain had come down so that the scene could be changed. This pause was necessary for the readjustment of voice, manner, pose and movement. She was still a little truculent, feeling that she had been tricked into the wrong behaviour by the unexpectedness of his appearance and by the strange blend of determination and anxiety in his face.
‘Oh,’ she said, giving a well-bred little laugh, as though she were delicately amused at her own impetuosity. ‘Come in. We can talk in the drawing-room.’
She led Martin into a fine room the width of the house, with slender sash windows at each end. But the atmosphere was degraded and polluted by her treasured possessions. The sepia photographs of soldiers, and one of a woman with feathers in her hair and a train, the ferns and cactus plants, the coloured cushions, Christian Science periodicals and gardening magazines, seemed to spread a slime over everything.
Martin felt that it would not do for him, that he could not live there. He was trying not to hear the pretension in Mrs Sedley-Morgan’s voice, trying not to notice the repeated gurgle of amusement as she displayed her house so carelessly; but he was being swamped by her rapacious eyes, the bird-like will to force that streamed out of her,
She took him to the top of the charming severe staircase and threw open a door.
‘Of course, this is my best room,’ she said; ‘isn’t it lucky that it’s just become empty! I usually have such amusing young people in the house—students mostly. You are a student?’
‘I’ve just begun at an art school,’ Martin said, hating to answer her, but compelled by the fierce eyes.
‘Oh, what fun! Isn’t the view exciting across the heath to the pond? And the sun streams in, just streams in. I charge three and a half guineas.’
The sudden mention of money was a breath of truth blown on the trash so unexpectedly that it jarred and startled, and seemed for a moment even uglier than the lies.
Martin looked at the green coiling wallpaper, perhaps a pattern adapted and perverted from a Jacobean embroidered bed-hanging.
Is it worth three and a half guineas, he thought soberly, to live with that, and with the sun that streams in, the view of the duck pond, Mrs Sedley-Morgan’s mountain breasts and those eyes inexorable and alcoholic as corkscrews? What sort of people would like it? There must be a sort.
He had thought her eyes alcoholic, partly because they corkscrewed into him, and partly because they frightened him, just as alcohol did. They were demons ready to seize on him and force him to their will.
‘Yes, it’s very nice,’ he said; ‘but may I let you know? I must talk it over with my people.’ He had no people, except the elder brother from whom he was about to break away. He mentioned ‘people’, feeling that Mrs Sedley-Morgan would then be less inclined to stampede him into a decision there and then.
‘Oh, well, if you’d rather they made up your mind for you …’ Again the little mondaine gurgle and this time a flutter of the hand to accentuate it.
She sailed down the stairs in front of him. She had a presence, there was no denying it. That was the most horrible thing about her. All those soldiering years in India were behind her.
In the hall she did a curious thing, to underline her amateur standing, it would seem, or perhaps merely to insult.
‘If you’d like anything cheaper, I know a little Miss Green who comes to the church. She’s starting a house on the other side of the heath. I said I’d tell people about it. I’ll go and get you her address.’
Martin heard her rummaging in her sordidly untidy bureau. She came back with the address scrawled on an old envelope. He took it, thanked her and turned abruptly away, as if he could bear no more of her. He was down the stone steps and out of the crescent in a few moments.
How clean it was on the heath! How easing, how relieving. The tightness was going from his muscles, the constriction of his breathing, his seeing, his thinking. ‘Bitch of a woman, bitch of a woman, bitch,’ he kept saying under his breath. But soon he was singing the words out loud, almost hoping that he would be heard by the children playing round the pond or the passing bicyclists.
He wondered whether he could stand another interview or not, and decided in the end to force himself to go to Miss Green’s. After a short search he found the house in a quiet blind alley off the heath. It had plane trees in front of it, and its eighty-year-old flat stucco face was reassuring. Again he rang the bell and waited. This time a younger woman, a woman of perhaps thirty-eight or thirty-nine, opened the door. Her hair was bobbed in the fashion of the 1920s. She wore a white knitted jersey, so long that it was almost a tunic dress, and one of the dark brown eyes had a slight cast in it, so that she seemed to be looking away shyly and engagingly as she confronted him.
He looked beyond her at the clean quiet hall and knew at once that Mrs Sedley-Morgan had done her good turn for the day. How annoyed she would be, if she could see his satisfaction in this other house, his calm acceptance of Miss Green’s disjointed manner and faraway eyes!
She took him upstairs, turning to him at the bend and saying quietly, almost as if she were talking to herself, ‘This house has character. We haven’t been here long. You should have seen the dirt! It made me feel quite hopeless for about the first week.’
The first room she showed Martin, he decided to have. It looked on to the trees, was small, had a grey carpet, grey walls, a large grey cupboard built out from the wall and a new raw-looking basin with hot and cold taps. The extreme freshness and characterless quality of the room were just what he was needing. He wanted to submerge himself in the quiet greyness, to be left alone there at once. But Miss Green would have it that he should see the other rooms before deciding. She took him all over the house, telling him simply that she had no other guests yet. Every room was in the same subdued, utterly safe taste. The monotony of it filled Martin with gratitude. He had craved just this soft greyness, as of the interior of a brain, this absence of all exuberance and invention.
‘May I bring my luggage and come back tonight?’ he asked. The pain and discomfort of answering a question directly, of making any decision, were showing clearly on Miss Green’s face. Martin thought, ‘She is floating in grey clouds all the time.’
‘Yes, I think so,’ she said at last, ‘I think that would be all right.’
Martin nodded jerkily, then hurried away to collect his things from his brother’s dark little mews flat behind Chester Square. When he got back Miss Green had prepared supper for him alone in a small front sitting-room under his own bedroom. He sat there reading a book and drinking her tomato soup, which he guessed had been blended cleverly from vegetable stock, milk and tomato crystals. The rest of the meal was equally frugal and acceptable.
He went to bed that night relieved of a great weight of homelessness and the horrible exacerbation of his brother’s presence.
AN ENCOUNTER BY THE RIVER
Suddenly I remember that afternoon by the river near Henfield. It must have been in the summer of 1933 when I was in a sort of disgrace with my aunt and grandfather because I had left China to go to an art school and would not ‘settle down’. My aunt had said, ‘If you want to study art, why don’t you do some work? You should be sketching every day; instead of that, you wander in the fields doing nothing at all from morning till night.’
I left the house and wandered again as she had described, only this time I wandered on my bicycle and got as far as the river. It is a forgotten place, because the road-bridge was washed away a hundred years ago and now there is only a footb
ridge and a track across the fields.
I threw my bicycle into the hedge and started off across the tufty grass. In the winter, I thought, this will all be flooded. Now it was hot and heavenly with the scented, dried-up grass and a loneliness almost piercing.
I sat down on the bank where I had sometimes seen small boys bathing. The river was wider and deeper there and one could dive from the bridge. I sat there nursing my solitude yet longing for somebody to talk to. And as I longed, I saw approaching from the old farmhouse on the opposite bank a brown figure—almost the colour of the landscape; that sort of worn, lichen, olive green-brown.
It crossed the bridge and walked along the bank in my direction. When he was still some way off I saw that his hair was of that pale ‘washed’ gold, because it suddenly glinted in the sun as if it were metal.
He came up to me coolly, with the loose, bent-kneed stride of someone used to walking over rough fields.
‘Thinking of going in?’ he said pleasantly and in an unexpectedly ‘educated’ voice.
I was so pleased at his sudden appearance and so curious that I looked him straight in the face and smiled. He smiled back.
I saw the gold hair, untidy and rough, gold eyebrows too, sunburnt chestnut skin and the vivid brick-dust cheeks and lips which framed the almond-white teeth. Not distinguished or handsome—the ears were thick, the nose was short and thick, the lips were thick, all the details unfinished, yet the skin, the teeth, the eyes, the hair had that wonderful, shorter-than-springtime, polished, shining look as of some liquid or varnish of life spread over the whole body. The shirt and the breeches were the colour of the mud and the cow-dung caked on them. By their dullness and drabness they stimulated one’s imagination so that one could almost feel the tingling fire and coolness of the body they sheathed.
‘Lusty’ and ‘rough’ were the words that flooded through me as I looked at him. In their right sense they fitted him perfectly. As you can see I was extremely impressed by him. He must have been a few years older than I was and my capacity for hero-worship was enormous at that time. It still is. He was all that I was not—stalwart, confident and settled into a ‘manly’ life.