Where Nothing Sleeps

by Denton Welch

  ‘I made an athlete of him!’ she chanted gaily, throwing back her hair. She pronounced the th in ‘athlete’ as t. What was her curious accent? Was it French or Polish or Jewish or all three? Robert could not decide.

  He was listening to her carefully now; gradually he edged nearer and nearer to her circle. Although he had been at the art school for a month he was still rather nervous of the other students. Some of them showed surprise to see him in the Life Class so soon, but they were kind to him, only joking and chaffing in a friendly way, as they made a little more room round the stove. It was habit that drove people to the stove. The room was much too hot already for people in their clothes.

  Madame David looked at him rather disconcertingly as she finished her story. There was no pretence about her stare; she was assessing him physically. Her gaze rested finally on his small feet with their high arches. She would see the whole shape clearly, for he wore sandals which only consisted of straps and soles.

  ‘You ought to be a ballet dancer,’ she said emphatically. ‘You could do springs like Nijinsky.’

  Terrified of showing any pleasure at this remark, he turned his head away and muttered something gruffly.

  ‘How old are you?’ Madame David demanded.

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘Ah, perhaps a little old, but you might do something if you worked hard.’

  Obeying a sudden impulse, she let the peignoir fall to the ground; then she began vigorously to slap her biceps and thighs. The soft middle-aged flesh trembled at her brutality, but she did not care, she was demonstrating the exercises for a ballet dancer and a boxer. She swung her legs and arms, swivelling her torso in a miraculous curve at the same time. The stomach undulated, the breasts rose and fell. She was triumphant and magnificent.

  The students watched in admiration; even the ones who were tempted to laugh seemed impressed at the same time, and their amusement died away as their interest grew. It was impossible to tell what Madame David would do next.

  At last, laughing and panting, she threw herself down on the cushioned dais.

  ‘And this is supposed to be a rest!’ she gasped out between breaths.

  She lay there for a few moments, then she looked up at the clock and became businesslike.

  ‘Time’s up!’ she cried girlishly, as she sprang to her feet.

  ‘Now for some naughty ones for the fashion designers!’ She winked so extravagantly that Robert almost expected her heavily mascaraed eyelashes to become entangled and stuck together. He wondered what she was going to do. She dived into the models’ cubicle, and came out wearing nothing but a suspender-belt. Pulling the elastic away, she let it snap back against her flesh with a resounding smack. She laughed loudly at this result, and the whole class laughed with her.

  ‘Short poses,’ she announced, taking up a position. ‘Next time I put on my stockings, then something else—you know what—I forget the name. Strip-tease, only the other way round!’ She ended with another enormous wink.

  Robert turned his paper over and tried to get something down. He knew that he would have to be very quick. The realisation of the shortness of the pose made him uneasy and flustered. He found himself concentrating stupidly on the fastenings which dangled round Madame David’s thighs. Then the door opened and Mr Bridgeman came in.

  He stopped by each ‘donkey’, or easel, for a moment, sometimes drawing a little diagram, sometimes only muttering a few words and passing on. Robert waited for him in sweating anxiety. He was horribly ashamed of his drawing and he tried blindly to hide it from the master by leaning forward and almost crouching over it.

  ‘Let me see what you’ve been doing,’ Mr Bridgeman said, mildly enough. Robert sat back and smiled shamefacedly. He could say nothing and waited for the master to speak.

  ‘This is just fun,’ Mr Bridgeman said at last. ‘I don’t mind your having fun, but it isn’t the way to learn drawing.’

  He took the pencil from Robert’s hand and sat down on the donkey. Robert stood over him, watching uneasily.

  ‘In drawing you must learn to construct, not just to depict surfaces.’ Mr Bridgeman started to draw in a corner of Robert’s paper. Madame David was soon turned into a series of tubes which exaggerated and brought out her volume and stance. Mr Bridgeman suddenly got up in the middle of his drawing and passed on, saying no more.

  Just as Robert was about to begin again, the pose came to an end and Madame David disappeared once more into her little box. The heat in the room was becoming stupefying. It made Robert’s head buzz. The dust-laden atmosphere, thick with the smell of the stove and the students, seemed to coat the inside of his nostrils. Madame David danced out in her black silk stockings, looking depraved and jolly. She seemed an impossible mixture—a benevolent Beardsley woman—a good-natured vixen. She held her hands coquettishly and pointed one toe in a graceful, dainty pose most unsuitable to her. Robert thought that she would now be good to paint, for the black stockings brought out the pearly, nacrous quality of her flesh and made the mauve tint acceptable. He fumbled through the rest of the lesson, trying to get some sort of scribble down each time, before Madame David put on yet another garment. In the days in the Life Room that were to follow he was to learn that Madame David was almost the only model who was alive and human. Many of the others seemed drugged, apathetic, enveloped in a mist.

  The class broke up noisily, there was a sudden surge of animal life in the students. They banged their boards noisily as they put them away. Girls pushed back their hair and reddened their mouths and men tap-danced clumsily and sang. Billings, the good-looking lame boy with the aggressive chin, sang ‘Trees’ with passion. He always did.

  Robert made his way down to the lavatories, where rows of people were washing their brushes in the basins. The soap was being thrown along the line with much swearing and laughing. Each man ran his brushes round the hollow which had been made in the soap, then he rubbed the brush vigorously on the palm of his hand, making various coloured foams, one after the other.

  Robert did not wait to wash the black lead off his hands; he went down to the refectory dirty as he was and bought ‘milk with a dash’ and two huge shortbread biscuits. One or two North Country students seemed to consider these biscuits an extravagant luxury. They twitted him now, as he sat down at the long table, on his liking for them.

  ‘Twopence for a biscuit!’ one said. ‘I wouldn’t pay twopence for a biscuit when they give you a whole plate of soup for that!’

  ‘But you don’t want soup at tea-time,’ Robert suggested.

  ‘Why not?’ the other asked, and he managed to put into this question the intimation that he thought Robert impossibly affected and refined in not considering soup for tea.

  There was little more conversation. The North Country students continued to talk amongst themselves—such a mixture of bawdiness, housewifely gossip on substantial meals and good lodgings, and their progress in their art-teachers’ course—the urns hissed and the waitresses joked or were rude as the students streamed up to the counter to buy.

  Robert left early. Going down the long passage, he pushed open the swing doors and stood amongst the sooty bushes. It was already dark outside; lights winked and glittered and the trams sent out electric sparks. He passed through the entrance gates and walked to the bus stop. Other people were gathered there in an unhappy knot. All their faces seemed worn down with pain and ugliness. He could not bear to look. He felt the wave of gloom and despair sweeping over him. He jerked his feet about to stop it and threw out his hands, turning his head from side to side, as if to shake off his trouble.

  When the bus drew up he climbed the stairs and sat right in front. He watched the people on the pavements and the shopkeepers in their lighted windows. It was nearly closing-time; there was a final bustle before the shutters went up. He noticed again those unpleasant pink lights with which the butchers illuminated their meat. The warm boudoir-pink glow made the raw pieces of dead animal even more horrible.

  He got off t
he bus at the Green Man and started to walk over the heath. In the distance he could just see the last glimmering of the Ranger’s House and the gates of Greenwich Park: It was windy on the heath, and far away, as if in a deep valley, seemed to lie the whole of London. In the air above hung that puce glow which always gave Robert a slight sense of wonder. He thought it one of the most extraordinary colours in the world, and often tried to define it, saying that it was like the curious purple of a burnt-out fire-grate.

  In Chesterfield Walk the lovers had already congregated. Each bend was occupied, sometimes with two couples; and under the heavy, ancient trees, which now afforded no extra shadow, men and girls still leant against the painful, corrugated bark as they had done in the summer.

  Robert walked over the gravel behind the seats. If ever he learned how to draw he wanted to make a picture of the lovers under the trees in the dark. The problem of the night setting never ceased to tease him. He could see in his mind’s eye the grouping of the lovers—the darkness fusing them into pyramids, two-headed ghosts and strange pagodas—but how was he to re-create the actual darkness?

  He walked down Croom’s Hill, passed the Catholic church and came to his lodging. His room was in a Queen Anne house which had been altered and refitted in the later eighteenth century, in the Regency, and again towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. Now it was a guesthouse, with hot and cold water in the bedrooms. The basin in Robert’s room cut into the high wainscot brutally. He hated to look at the fine thick wood gouged and cut out to make a passage for the snake-like pipes. Around the rest of the wainscot he had balanced his old green and gold plates and, close to his bed, a whole row of brilliant oranges. Sometimes in the early morning he would fall on these oranges greedily, eating them one after another or squeezing the delicious juice from three or four of them into his toothglass. Then he would bring back more oranges the next evening to replenish his line along the wainscot.

  The chief glory of Robert’s room, and the object which had decided him in coming to the house, was the Adam’s mantelpiece which stood across one corner. The extreme refinement of its detail made one think that it was moulded in composition and not carved in wood. It looked a thoroughly commercial product of the late eighteenth century, but how attractive it was! How ‘elegant’ and ‘chaste’! That there were probably ten thousand other mantelpieces with bas-reliefs of rams’ heads, swags, husks and quivers of arrows made from the same moulds did not matter in the least.

  A squat little gas-fire stood on the old, cracked marble hearth. All the rest of the room, including the high wainscot, had been repainted a thick pinkish-grey, but the mantelpiece had been reverently left shabby, with half a dozen different coats of paint showing on the most worn and polished surfaces.

  The only window, which looked out on to the park, was charming. It was really a triptych—the largest light with semi-circular head in the middle, flanked on each side by little slits only three panes high and one across. Miss Middlesborough, who owned the house, said that the little slits had been blocked up when she bought the house; they had only been discovered when her architect brother went round methodically, knocking all the walls with his stick. He heard the hollow sound, tore away the wallpaper and the canvas on which it was stretched, and there were the little openings stuffed with old rubbish and newspaper but still complete with their thick wooden sash frames and old glass. Outside the house the stucco covering had to be taken away; then the old curved glass let through the light again, after perhaps a hundred years.

  As Robert lay in bed in the morning he delighted to look through this distorting, mauvish glass. It twisted the trees in the park into shaky, watery shapes and made any birds which flew across look jagged or worm-like.

  Little wheeled traffic passed up and down Croom’s Hill; the chief noise was the ringing of feet on the pavement and voices talking. Until far into the night couples or groups of people seemed to be going up to the heath or coming down from it.

  Now, as Robert entered his room, he pushed the window up at the top to shut out the sound; then he washed his hands and brushed his hair in preparation for supper.

  As he went downstairs to the dining-room he heard a faint twanging and knew that Miss Middlesborough’s old father was playing his great golden harp in the basement. He played entirely according to his own whim and fancy, never having learnt to read music. The strains were unrecognisable as European melodies, but old Mr Middlesborough would have it that they were hymns and sacred airs. Sometimes he would sing in high, goatish falsetto; then the whole effect was almost overwhelmingly bizarre and strange, especially if he could be seen as well as heard; for it would be discovered that he dressed for his harp-playing in an old corded dressing-gown and curious woollen cap which, together with his little square beard, lent him a strikingly Jewish and Old Testament appearance.

  Robert was the first down; he sat by the fire and waited. The dining-room was the least altered part of the house. The plain, thick-moulded, early eighteenth-century mantel, with its grey marble surround, held an art nouveau grate, but apart from this, and the window which had been added perhaps in the Regency, the room was as it had been planned. A heavy, indented cornice joined the ceiling to the walls richly; there were shutters and a seat to the original window and the door was very wide with huge L-shaped hinges. So many coats of paint covered the woodwork that in some places the carving and moulding were almost lost sight of.

  Elsie, the maid, came in with the soup. She was a beautiful girl who managed to work for Miss Middlesborough and also to act as usherette in a cinema. Robert never understood how she did it. Tall, delicately thin and brittle looking, she always wore her cheap, brilliant clothes charmingly. Now, as she came in with the soup, she had a vermilion jersey with glass buttons, and a silly little sprigged apron tied over her navy-blue skirt. Her lovely transparent face, so very well painted and enriched, turned towards Robert as she put the plates down on the table.

  ‘Good evening,’ she said guardedly, with only the beginning of a smile.

  Steps were heard crossing the hall; the door opened and the curate of St Saviour’s came in. He was a pale, flat-faced man of twenty-eight or twenty-nine, who smoked many cigarettes and spoke of himself as the ‘Reverend Parker’ in telephone conversations. He came from an industrial town on the borders of England and Wales and always wore the very light-grey flannel trousers which had been fashionable there in his early youth.

  He gave Elsie an extravagantly bold look and said, ‘Hello, Beautiful!’ She bridled, and turned towards him in spite of herself. She seemed genuinely to despise him, yet she could not help taking notice of him.

  ‘Who are you talking to?’ she asked, turning an elaborately blank stare on him.

  ‘Who do you think, my dear? Him?’ he added, pointing at Robert with his nicotined finger, and chortling at his own display of wickedness and perversity.

  Robert squirmed in his armchair and turned his face abruptly to the fire. The vulgarity of the ‘Reverend Parker’ was insufferable. He remembered the one horrible occasion when he had gone into the lovely Hawksmoor church and found this creature mouthing and aping, his unpleasant voice made far more repulsive by a top-dressing of ecclesiastical refinement.

  It was in vain that Robert told himself not to be bourgeois and reactionary; nothing could reconcile him to beings of this type. It was not snobbishness that made him hate them; it was their snobbishness that he hated; their pitiful little shams: their cloak of what they grandly imagined to be aristocratic wickedness and daring; their appalling assumption that they were as good as he was, if not better.

  Robert laughed to himself as this last thought passed through his head. His conceit always tickled him. But he still found it good not to dislike the ‘Reverend Parker’ for any reason but that of his insensitive stupidity and pretentiousness.

  Parker was now twitting Elsie on her lack of response to his gay salutation.

  ‘I don’t know why you say things like that, Mr Parker,’
she answered flatly.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I say good evening to a pretty girl?’ Parker gave an exaggerated leer.

  ‘Why don’t you just be yourself?’ asked Elsie with detachment, as she left the room.

  ‘Funny girl, that!’ said Parker to Robert. ‘Can’t take a bit of fun as it’s meant. When she brings my breakfast up in the morning her face never changes if I say something bright; she just puts the tray down, says “Good morning” and leaves the room.’ He mused for a moment, then added, ‘I suppose she’s nervous at me taking notice of her.’

  This suggestion was so outrageous that Robert felt relieved when he found that he need not answer, for Miss Calthrop entered at this moment and Parker immediately began to talk to her.

  ‘Good evening, your ladyship; and how are your patients?’ he said. Miss Calthrop was the Lady Almoner in a hospital, which always seemed to amuse him.

  ‘They’re as well as can be expected; and how are your parishioners, Mr Parker, if I may ask?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose they get along as best they can. I never see anyone but old women in church—and a few young ones,’ he added after a pause, as if he owed it to himself not to underrate his powers of attraction. ‘The Vicar got all high and mighty this morning after early service because he could see my flannel bags below my cassock—said it wasn’t reverent and I must get something dark—damned if I will!’

  They sat down now at the table, for Miss Calthrop said that her two friends, who also had rooms in the house, were out to dinner. The food was well cooked and appetising. Elsie served them in perfect silence and Parker talked loudly about his fiancée.

  ‘Every time I see her she tells me she’s got something more for our future home. It’s frightful, Miss Calthrop; a man feels tied hand and foot when his fiancée keeps collecting more and more stuff together. I’m quite weighed down under all her wardrobes and carpets and toast-racks.’