The Furnished Room

by Laura Del-Rivo

  ‘All right then.’

  ‘Listen, this phone is in the dining-room. Someone might come in.’

  ‘All right. Well, goodbye.’

  ‘Wait...’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wait... No, nothing.’ Dyce said: ‘Joe?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘I mean, you can take care of yourself all right, can’t you?’

  Beckett smiled. He replaced the receiver and left the kiosk. As Silent had warned him about the station, he decided that his best plan would be to walk to the next town, Horsley, from where he could take a Green Line bus to Victoria.

  Sealing and Horsley are both situated in valleys, separated by a high sandstone ridge. The ridge is so high that, on fine days, one can see three counties. Or perhaps it is five. He could not remember.

  He climbed the steep lane. The hedgerow had a country smell like brown bread, and the odour of wet earth stirred secretly.

  When he reached the heights, a sailor gale hit him. The road lay along the spine of the ridge, flanked by steep drops on either side, and formed a target for bad weather.

  The gale buffeted him so that it was difficult to stand upright. Trees, uprooted by last night’s storm, had fallen across the road and torn leaves hung from the telegraph wires. He was alone on the high altitude. He flung himself into the gale like a swimmer into the sea and gulped down draughts of cold air. Unlike town air, which only reaches the edge of the nostrils, country air fills the lungs. Beckett felt drunk with it. The exhilaration was so great that he could hardly hold it. He started to run, with his head back and his arms outflung, in order to work off some of the joy that threatened to explode inside him.

  As he ran, he shouted aloud into the deafening wind: ‘Glory... glory... glory!...’

  Then he pulled up, and stood, with the wind outlining him coldly, like a god surveying the countryside arrayed below him.

  A fine drizzle fell, and there were different diffusions of light. Milk white, electric light, foggy purple, the acid-thinned grey of morning mists, curdled light, veils of black crepe, water-colour washes, choking industrial black and sulphur, intensities of lemon, gold and silver radiance — all were choral like the ranks of angels, cherubim and seraphim.

  Since he had left Silent, his tyrannical will had abdicated, his stubborn mind had stopped forcing matters, and he had abandoned hope. Having made these rejections, he received, like grace, an insight that was more potent than formal knowledge. Blessed, he gave praise and blessing to all creation. Previously, he had felt paralysed in a world without meaning. Now he experienced the polar opposite state; he was strong and had potentialities, and he affirmed everything.

  He had lived in a negative hell that was absence of God. His present vision was that God was the common force manifested in all nature and in the conscious receptacle of his own soul. This force was at high tide in his soul. It was vital and yet peaceful, like exultation. It gave him back his lost sense of meaning.

  Meaning confers freedom from paralysis. Beckett recognized that his newfound freedom entailed the responsibility of retaining and increasing it. Accordingly, he made various resolutions.

  He resolved to make his experience on this hill the centre of his life, and to try to re-attain its ecstasy. He resolved to realize his potentialities, by study, work, and living, and, to fight against sliding back into the trough of boredom and lethargy. He finally resolved to undergo whatever sentence he received for his crime of manslaughter without complaint, and without being broken by it.

  It occurred to him that although he was an agnostic he had used religious terminology best to express his inexpressible experience. The concepts God, hell, and rebirth were all religious. This led to the conclusion that religion was rooted in subjective experience, which accounted for the success of religion. It seemed to him that religious doctrines were formal projections of human experience and paradox. He was glad that he had arrived at this idea, as it cured his bitterness against his Catholic upbringing.

  He left the road and descended to Horsley by way of a track down the sharp flank of the ridge. He moved in leaps and bounds; loose scree spurted from his heels. His momentum prevented a fall; after a perilous leap he went straight on to the next before he had time to fall.

  He took the coach to Victoria, then the bus to Notting Hill. He had decided to go to the police station and give himself up. He chose the local police station because he wanted to complete his circuit; to return to the district where he had fought the looming walls of his bedsitter, where the air had swollen heavy and oppressive with the vitality it had drained from him, where he had lain sick with accidie, like a python, crushing his chest and coiled round his immobilized limbs.

  There was something dashing and daring in his decision to return. He wanted to show that he could get back to base before voluntarily giving himself up. He had caused a death, and would suffer for it. It seemed to him that these two facts were on the heroic level. They had an order, an expensive tragedy, which was absent from the haphazard trivialities that dotted the lives of most people.

  Near Tewkesbury Road, a woman spoke to him. Momentarily, he did not recognize her. She was a housewife, drearily clothed, holding a shopping-bag of groceries. Then he realized that she was Gash’s landlady. She said: ‘I thought you should know the bad news. It was such a shock.’

  ‘News?’

  ‘Poor Mr Gash passed away last night.’

  He looked at her, frowning. Then he looked at the pavement. Then at her again. He said: ‘No. No, that’s terrible.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was so ill. I mean, he hadn’t ever told me about it. He hadn’t ever seen a doctor. All the time he was having these attacks of asthma, but he never complained. But I mean, he should have gone to a specialist about it, shouldn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A lady I knew had this asthma, and she went to a specialist and had injections. She had to keep off things, various things to eat, as well. But poor Mr Gash didn’t take care of himself at all. He was all for the spirit and never mind the body. Well, that doesn’t do any good, does it?’

  He agreed absentmindedly. ‘No.’ Then he said: ‘Asthma?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what the doctor said, when he came this morning. I found him this morning, you see. I could tell he was dead, and I called the doctor.’

  ‘Poor Gash, dying alone.’

  ‘I went into his room this morning, you see, to ask him, if he’d like a cup of tea as we were making one for ourselves. And when he didn’t answer me, I thought at first that he was just in one of his far-away states. Then I asked him again: “How about a nice cuppa tea, Mr Gash?” And he still didn’t answer.’

  Beckett rubbed his fist between his brows.

  She said: ‘He’s been lodging with me for years now, and I’d sort of got fond of him, in spite of his odd habits. I mean, there wasn’t any harm in him, was there? A bit cranky, but a kind old bird.”

  He tried to think of something to say. He repeated: ‘It’s terrible.’

  ‘Anyway, I’ve phoned his daughter, and she’ll be coming up to take care of the arrangements. She’ll let you know about the funeral and everything.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Well, I thought you should know. You were the only person who ever visited him. His only friend, so to speak.’

  They parted. When Beckett reached Gash’s house, he paused to notice the closed curtains. Inside, the body of Gash would be laid out on his pile of blankets on the floor, with death drawn down over the eyes. He wondered whether his own belongings were still in the corner where he had left them. The thought of Gash dead, Dyce’s aunt dead, and his mother dying, produced a sharp lurch of delight in being alive himself.

  He noticed that, opposite his old lodging, a man was sauntering with hands in pockets. The man stopped and looked up at the windows. Then he started to cross the road towards the house.

  Beckett was sure that the man was a policeman. He broke out in a sweat of shock. H
is brain was confused, and he could only stand and gape at the policeman. Then, from the confusion of his brain, the dominant impulse emerged: to run. He wanted to run and escape while there was still time.

  At that moment the front door opened, and Ilsa walked out.

  The policeman saw her, and gave her a quick, hard glance, noting her description.

  She walked down the street towards Beckett. She had not seen him yet.

  Beckett stood as if frozen. He could not run now, for that would attract her attention, which would in turn attract the attention of the policeman. He kept still, just inside Gash’s gate. Ilsa was on the other side of the street, and might not notice him.

  She was wearing her slim white dress with the gold belt. She paused to light a cigarette, screening the match with the open flap of her handbag, and he saw the thin awkward angle of her arm as she fumbled the match.

  The policeman also watched her.

  Then she saw Beckett, and shouted to him across the street: ‘Joe-Joe!’ She ran towards him, teetering, in her tight dress and high heels, in an odd Charleston run as if her knees were tied together. As she ran, she waved enthusiastically, and screamed in her strident voice: ‘Honey! I went to your house and the old bitch told me you’d left! Told me you’d done a flit!’

  Then she was in his arms, and he said with automatic affection: ‘Ilsa, Ilsa, Ilsa.’

  ‘I get so choked with anybody else but you.’ She buried her face in the shoulder of his zipper jacket.

  As he held her, he thought, ironically, that it was typical that he should be betrayed by this girl for whom he felt the unreal parallels of love and indifference. She had prevented his heroic gesture of giving himself up and had subjected him to the humiliation of capture.

  In the end the lie had won. He was speaking the easy words of love: ‘Ilsa, darling Ilsa,’ although dissociation was like a cold stone in his mind.

  He accepted that he was like that. With people, he would never get farther than a kindness born of basic indifference. He would always live behind a glass wall. But although he was condemned to live in unreality, he had been given, as recompense, the power to experience ultra-reality. He had been equipped to receive experiences like his vision on the hill. This equipment, built into his brain, was his recompense for his difference from other people. He decided that it was worth the price.

  Over Ilsa’s blonde head he met the eyes of the policeman, who was watching with folded arms and a tight smile of satisfaction.

  Beckett held the girl, but was already alone as the policeman started to walk towards him.

  The children were wheeling and shouting as always; their screams ricocheted from the buildings. Two women walked along the pavement, pushing their shopping in wheeled baskets. A front door banged, a radio played. The sky was London grey over Tewkesbury Road on a Saturday morning.

  About the Author

  Laura Del-Rivo was born in 1934 to middle-class Catholic parents in Cheam, Surrey. Her father worked in a bank. She was educated at Holy Cross Convent, New Malden, and left school at sixteen. She had various unremarkable jobs and went to Soho cafés after work. She lived in furnished rooms before she joined a house of writers and painters in Chepstow Villas, Notting Hill. Laura Del-Rivo was part of a loose group of writers which included Colin Wilson. She was photographed by Ida Kar and recently appeared in Kar’s retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery.

  The Furnished Room was released as a film, West 11, starring Alfred Lynch, Eric Portman, Kathleen Breck and Diana Dors, in 1963. Laura Del-Rivo became, and remains, a Portobello Road market trader. Her most recent novel is Speedy and Queen Kong, published by Paupers’ Press. She is still writing.

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