‘I say you don’t … do you?’
A pause, fearful and long. ‘Don’t what, Dody?’
Dody breathed quickly. ‘Love Stan?’
The pillow heaved up, it was Nita turning and pressing her face hard into the pillow, gritting her teeth, stopping herself from saying anything, from crying, from laughing, from screaming, from showing any of herself even in the dark. The dark whirled round her like a blush. But then her head was up again and she laughed: ‘Who, me? What do you take me for?’
*
The next day was dull and low-clouded as before, the pale smoke from the cottage chimneys pencilled up paler than the sky, almost white against the dying green of the beeches above: pencilled, then blew suddenly down untidily on to the roofs, as though some huge invisible bird had swooped past. There were the beginnings of small winds, but the day was too heavy for them; the grey roofs seemed to shine against such a weight of dullness.
Though Dody and Nita had awoken early, breakfast was a scramble—and they went off to school much earlier than usual. But outside the school gates and in the playground there lay a vast emptiness, as though nothing were ever to happen again—nobody there, the doors open, and the clock outside resting its gold hands at half-past eight. That clock seemed to have stopped. And when at last the other children came first drifting then running hot-faced in, and school was assembled, the other clock in the inky oak classroom seemed also to keep stopping. So the morning dawdled, stopping and dragging, towards eleven.
At half-past ten their excitement returned, they began to feel the eyes of the others, their secret grew huge and vulnerable again. Earlier, Nita had stared blushing at the book, sure that the others knew and were looking and laughing at her: but soon, when she had looked round, it had been disappointing to see that no one at all was taking any notice of her. Now, at twenty-five to eleven, the feeling came back: soon they were to do this thing and so it seemed that everyone knew about it. By five to eleven they were looking at each other and at the clock, it seemed an endless time—when a miracle happened! The Mistress suddenly shut the book from which she had been reading and herself looked up at the clock. Just then the clock jumped a minute forward, and this must have decided her, for she smiled and said: ‘All right. Off you go—quietly, children.’
They walked to the door and then bolted down the steps and out on to the asphalt, out through the gate and never stopped until they were at the shop. Nita handed over her penny clasped hot and stayed outside while Dody went in. The shop-door bell rang loud and crisp like a tram-bell, much too loud, startling, so that Nita looked fearfully up and down the street. If the boys heard, they would know—for sure, for sure! But there was only a soldier in washed blue sitting on a bench, two old ladies with shopping baskets looking at a cat. The cat rubbed itself up against their black skirts and the ladies laughed, one stroked it with her stick. The street had an empty look, no cars, no bicycles, and thus it seemed all the more empty for the ringing and echoing chattering cries of all the children hidden away in the playground round the corner. The bell clanged again and Dody crashed out holding something small and hard against her breast, and nodding with her chin right in, and holding out urgently one hand to drag Nita in the direction her legs seemed already to be running. They ran together, away from the school, and Dody whispered: ‘Yellow and white pieces she gave me—lots—come on …’
Up the road, up the steep road, higher and higher up to the asylum! The asylum tower, purple and green, stood out above them, very near, but the asylum wall was really much further away when you were down in the streets. And the streets suddenly ended, the common began. They raced along, hurrying against the minutes, the fifteen minutes of Break, and came to where the may-bushes started and the ground rose to meet the beginning of the tall asylum wall.
Here a chalky, scrap-grass path led in between the may-bushes. Along this they ran, along by the rainy smell from under the bushes. The wall came suddenly, and then the path continued straighter between the wall, high and purple and iron-spiked on the top, and the dark underneath of the straggling may-bush wood. The may stopped, and the other bushes withering dark-green with their dusty crimson berries—and Nita stopped too. Dody stopped. They could peer out now at the huge asylum wall curling out into the open, standing high and commanding over the open common. Deep purple and darker glazed bricks, severe and authoritative, glowered at the open grass that fanned away on all sides, down from it. This wall was the summit point of the common, the place to which everyone eventually walked—and now Nita pointed in its direction and whispered: ‘Look! Look! There!’
They looked round then fearfully. No one in sight. Only the bare common, gorse, chalk-patches, dying grass. They left the may-bushes and raced off up towards the wall, two small figures growing smaller up the slope, growing murky like half-seen flies in all that dull, dead common-land.
Later, when they had gone, the wall still stood glowering out over the empty common. Once a watery sunlight opened up and for a moment chalk boulders and something metal like a can winked weakly, the pale copper-green asylum cupola glittered into transient life. Then it was as dark, darker than before. A single cyclist was drawn slowly as on a string across some distant intersecting path. The leaves of the few straggling trees hung still, dark green and hardened, shrunk to the last point before they would turn colour. And on the wall, intimately lonely among the greater loneliness of the weather and that wide vacant space, there could be read two messages written in chalk, white on the purple brick, spidery and scrawled straight capital letters, words that looked bare and cold out there in the open:
NITA HOBBS LOVES STAN CHUTER.
A long chalk line had been drawn through this, and underneath was written emphatically, with yellow first letters to each word:
THE PERSON WHO WROTE THIS IS DAFT.
Displaced Persons
HAVE you watched Time eating at a place? The bearded jaws tearing unseen at the air of a still room, the stiller for so many silent people, the stiller for a drying-off of thought and of those motions of building that alone can compensate for the wolfish mouthfuls of living every minute hugely lost? The voracious bearded jaws, biting off the air, always up somewhere near the ceiling, between the frieze and the quiet electric cord?
The Indian House stood furnaced in melancholy red by a September sunset; such a light was brassy, spacious, and seemed to glow up from below, underlining thus the shadows and the tall empty windows of that immense Indian-built warehouse in such a way that a sense of desolation and black-veiled sorrowers, of a Second Coming made a funeral of the Indian part, of the brownish plastered façade of an already mournful London evening. But there were no black-bowed figures, no figures at all, the pillared and domed warehouse stood irrevocably empty, consumed within by its own void and on the outside, reflecting on mogulish plaster screens and friezes, by the faraway funeral red. Such a dead design was of course accentuated by the business in its forecourt, where there were piled and strewn huge chunks of grey granite and rough white marble, material for the grinding of tombstones. Strange wooden hoisting devices stood about, lashed and poised, like derelict siege catapults. But the tombstone industry was silent, it was past six o’clock, the only movement was to be sensed across the road, across the tramlines and under the overhead wires, where the doors of the Admiral’s Discretion stood open.
Inside, in the wan electric light, between walls of faded orange, they were drinking. Little noise: they talked, worriedly, in whispers, leaning slightly towards each other. When the bell of the cash-till rang, one of them started, looked up for a moment bewildered; he shook his head and then, as though there was nothing else to be done, slowly as though the whole world and the rest of time were empty and could provide no further move, slowly the hand reached to his waistcoat pocket and from there he drew out a small silvery machine. With this, without looking, sinking back, he rolled a cigarette. He had the face of a pale pike, grey all over and greyer where the stubble grew; on his head was pulled down har
d a fawn-coloured homburg with a greased silk brim.
This man was sitting in that untidy corner improvised by the door bolted open. Along from him, on the same polished pine bench perforated by so many holes, a small straight-necked woman in navy-blue serge sat alone; her hair jet-black, her cheeks flushed with rouge, the very white skin at the back of her neck grained with black ticks where she had been shaved for her shingle, her eyes hardly visible under the felt of a pale blue hat. She was looking at a picture hanging on the wall above, a military scene framed in fumed oak. When this woman with the straight neck and the blinding hat looked up, her whole body had to swing back so that she could see at all. Now, at such a tortured angle, she watched a grey Cardigan charging his Light Brigade into the fly-blown Russian cannon at Balaclava. After a while, a long while, as the electric clock pounced on, as the September sunset through the frosted glass burned darker, as the beer slowly sank in the glasses all around, as this beer then tasted round the teeth and the palates of those mouths and sank again to wash pooling behind waistcoats and the grimed elastic of corsets—after a while, the woman pursed her lips, swung herself vertical, took a peck at the stout-glass, and then with a slight brown froth on her upper lip re-elevated herself towards Cardigan. She remained in this position, strained; but more as if she were waiting for something to happen there in the bar than for Cardigan to make a move.
Indeed this same sensation of waiting hung over all those others who stood singly or in groups round the semicircular bar. They all faced inwards, as though the expected and long-awaited happening might only occur at the pivot of their yellow pine semicircle, the central point where the cast-metal cash-till stood beneath its awning of draped Union Jacks and cards into which were stitched little bottles of aspirin tablets. To either side of the till stood and leant the two bar-tenders, sallow women of uncertain age, one spectacled and frizz-haired, the other taller and sleeker and provided with a jaw so enormous that it was weak—but both pale and slightly moist of skin. They also were waiting. Leaning with their backs to the bottles they stared vacantly just above the heads of the people who circled them. When one or other of the drinkers motioned for his glass to be refilled, one of these attendants would walk over the intervening space—and what a fine, round space, with the drinkers hemmed so close against their pale wood railing!—and enquire the nature of the request still with her eyes raised just so slightly above the drinker’s head. And these drinkers would receive their new glasses mournfully and remain staring inwards towards the till.
But some talked. There was a naval captain accompanied by two ladies and an elderly man wearing a cap, a stiff white collar and a tweed coat. This elderly man carried the rough walking-stick of the retired. And the ladies! One had dyed her hair blonde, so that from behind she looked quite like a young girl; but that the bobbed hair hung straggled over a neck that shrunk away from it—and, of course, when she turned her head, one saw the face of disaster, painted in bright American colours, lifted, stitched up, the new-born virgin of fifty with thin fallen-in lips and every line pouched to a fever-pitch of anxiety: anxiety, but for the eyes, pale, filmed, popping out but not caring. Her sister wore the unmistakable marks of the tropics, the ancient tan, the melancholy wasted skin and the iron-grey hair, the seedy sportswoman and bridge-queen into whose attire there always crept the touch of silk that once had brought an hauteur to the far-flung club of stranded values where, for so many long and now finished years, her honeymoon had slowly set. The naval captain had eyes with a furtive, trustless twinkle. He stood drowned in a dark naval raincoat. The four of them drank long watery whiskies—and often nodded. Yet, however much they nodded, however many times they reasserted the Tightness of the world, they too seemed to be waiting: the woman with the blonde hair often looked up at that pouncing clock, the elderly gentleman coughed and turned away and turned back again, the naval captain and his sportswoman stood opposite each other and jigged from toe to heel, like automatic toys, without ever stopping.
Two white-faced boys then lurched in, giggling. But when they faced up to the bar, the realization of some manly inheritance turned their cheeks suddenly red, as though a neon gas was momentarily infused into them, and then as quickly the new colour faded, so that their faces were white again, faintly greyed with oil—and they ordered ginger beer and bowed their heads over a black bicycle bell. Youth was to have its watery fling! Two others, older, idler, with strapping padded shoulders and about them a sprinkling of brassy gold, on their fingers, their ties, in their teeth—these two with their flat pints leant eagerly over the little balls in the pin-table machine. Eager, and thin-lipped. But between such feverish pulls and pokes at the machine, these two also lounged back and looked up at the clock, at the door, at the fading light; they were waiting, like the others, for the something that would never happen.
But, surprisingly, it did. Suddenly into this hushed air, with its whispers, its shufflings of feet, its dead chinking, and above all and over everything its pervading, soundless whirring of the small yellow electric light bulb, that constant thing, unshaded, throwing its wan unmoving light straight at the top corners where the ceiling met those strange orange walls—now into this hush there broke a sudden huge sound. It exploded in from the street, with no warning—the deafening metal burst of a barrel organ.
What happened then was ubiquitous, the same small movement jerked all that drinking room, all the faces of the drinkers—each face moved slowly round towards the door and there hung, for a second as if out of joint, pressed forward slightly off the equilibrium of the neck; mouths opened for breath, more breath; eyes blank but in their fixedness intent upon peering through the fog of shock. Everybody looked at the door. Nobody saw anything.
The barrel organ must have been placed just beyond the upright jambs, probably on the pavement neatly squared with the wall so that the room formed an extra sounding box; indeed, something new and dark was flushed against the frosted glass. The pike-faced man was staring straight into the bolted door, some six inches from his stony bewildered snout. The naval officer and those others had stopped talking, the bar-girls had each lowered their eyes so that now they peered through the drinkers instead of above them. The bicycle bell lay abandoned in the oily boy’s hand, slackly extended forward, as if it were offered to the door as a warm wet present. The pin-table youths had struck subtly the attitude of boxers, toes preened, shoulders high and heads forward—while behind them their last little silver balls went hurrying round the garish presentation of a painted, modern city, flashing on lights in the urgent accumulation of silver, red, green, yellow and pale-blue skyscrapers, among meteor planes and overhead railways, among the short skirts of citizens dressed in rubbery romanish-mediaeval toguettes of the twenty-first century. These lights, in fact, provided now the only movement, they snowballed on and off, faster and faster like a gale warning. And the gale, the metal-belling wind churning through the door rushed straight about that room, entering it and filling it immediately like a flood-wind, grasping round the crevices among the bottles, under the bar, up to the corners at the very ceiling, down underneath the serge-skirted woman’s ankles, round and about Lord Cardigan and everyone who was there, filling, fillling the void absolutely. And when this in that thunderous second was done and the place was a block of sound—so other small movements hesitated and began. Smiles! Nods! Shufflings of feet! For at last the explosion was recognized to be music, and well-loved music, a tune of warmth and reminisence, a war-time tune:
‘Bless ’em all, bless ’em all,
The long and the short and the tall——’
This music rang round the bar, again and again, a circling tune that came back every few seconds to where it had started and then went off again, round and round, waltzing and merry despite its metal fibre.
But merry to no applause. For one by one, like the lights on the pin-table, the smiles cut out. The faces dropped. The heads turned back towards the bar. The shufflings of feet, the beginning of a dance, stopped. Th
e morose emptiness returned; and with it, unceasing, whirling round the room, the giddy music continued. There was no echo. The sound was hard, bright, filling the empty room with metal rods that clashed for breath; only that sound, exact, reporting without echo.
The drinkers drank without flinching. It was suddenly plain—they were beyond flinching, just as they had been beyond keeping up the first smile that had for a moment seemed to warm them. It was just not worth it.
I was reminded then of two things, both strangely to do with big dogs—perhaps dogs with faces so heavy and eyes as mournful as those that now gazed in again at the cash-till. One of these dogs was the bloodhound once seen at the bottom of an escalator in a Tube station. This dog sat like a rock on the platform at the very edge of the immense progression of upward moving empty stairs. His master tried to urge him on, patting, whispering, purring, whistling, and once even kicking. But move the dog would not. He sat absolutely. He sat and stared sadly at the ceaseless stairs emerging from the ground and travelling emptily upwards to Heaven. He seemed to be nodding and saying to himself: ‘There, that’s another thing they’ve done …’
The other dog is to be found in a quotation from Henri de Montherlant. He writes:‘… And for a long time the baron, sitting in his chair, kept that beautiful gravity of face that men get—it almost gives them the illusion of thoughtfulness—when they lose money. Then he sighed. Newfoundland dogs often have a little humidity at the commissure of the eyes, falling like tears. Why do Newfoundlands dogs cry? Because they have been tricked.’
The Vertical Ladder
AS he felt the first watery eggs of sweat moistening the palms of his hands, as with every rung higher his body seemed to weigh more heavily, this young man Flegg regretted in sudden desperation but still in vain, the irresponsible events that had thrust him up into his present precarious climb. Here he was, isolated on a vertical iron ladder flat to the side of a gasometer and bound to climb higher and higher until he should reach the vertiginous skyward summit.
The Stories of William Sansom Page 3