The formation of Charles II’s jaw compelled that poor man to eat no solid food, he was fed on liquid hominies. Not so Mr Horton: he liked his liquids, and the stronger the better, but he liked to eat too. This proved a matter of further contention; for Mr Cadwaller ran a profitable dining-room downstairs, and Mr Horton liked his food, when he ate it there, very well done. But Mr Cadwaller liked his guests to eat their food half-raw, it saved gas. And here was this Horton consistently sending his back to be burnt! That is, when he ate it there. For upstairs there was a no-cooking-in-the-rooms rule: and from beneath Mr Horton’s door there crept into the linoleumed lincrustaed passage the most eloquent odours. Yet how could this be done? No trivet for the gas-fire, no gas-ring. Cadwaller even looked outside the window, as if Horton might have been an alcoholic hanging out his bottle, his gas-ring on a nail. However carefully Mr Cadwaller searched, he never found the answer. For Mr Horton cooked, beneath a tent of sheets, on an electric blanket.
Thus these two long-jawed gentlemen went to war: finesse of economy became their touchstone, they tried to outdo each other at every move—and the sphere widened, they openly criticized each other’s tactics in fields outside any personal engagement. Thus, when on one morning of strong sunshine Mr Horton looked in on Cadwaller and found him sitting in a chair in front of which was spread newspaper to prevent the sunshine fading the carpet, and moreover moving round the room with the newspaper and his chair as the poisonous beautiful sunlight travelled round, and moreover trying to do his pools at the same time—Mr Horton was able to scoff at him for dispersing his concentrative powers. ‘You’ll never hit the jackpot that way,’ he said. ‘Why not spread the paper all over?’
‘Because I like to look at my carpet,’ Cadwaller growled. ‘What’s the use of buying a carpet and not looking at it? Besides, I need the paper for the boiler.’
‘You could burn the paper later.’
‘Eh?’ Cadwaller hadn’t thought of that. But quickly, ‘I suppose you want me to go out and buy papers to put on the carpet?’
‘Chuck away seventy thousand quid if you like. I don’t care.’
And for a moment Mr Cadwaller would think he was really losing seventy thousand; and they would pause facing each other wildly, big turnip chins raised and trembling like the masks of warrior-ants.
All such arguments, absurd as they always became, were distinguished by the cardinal difference between them: Cadwaller’s thrift was immediate, the act of expenditure itself gave him unbearable pain; while Horton held the long view, he never minded shelling out if finally profits might be reaped. He liked to foresee things. Thus Horton would with much misgiving pay the registration fee on a parcel, realizing the payment that otherwise must be made in time, fares and shoe-leather: but Cadwaller could not put that shilling on the counter—and took instead tenpence worth of bus fares, and lost time and shoe-leather into a bad bargain. And while Cadwaller wore his old coat out and stitched leather into the elbow-holes, cuffs and neck—Horton foresaw the necessity of this and simply had the arms from his chair removed. (Trouble there, they were Cadwaller’s chairs; but Horton made him a footstool of the arms, to save the wear and tear of bedroom slippers.)
As is natural, this common ground brought them much together, not as friends, not exactly as enemies—perhaps more like passionate chess-players. They could never resist each other’s company. Their blood rose to each meeting. They went to the Sales together, where there was much argument as to what was true ‘clearance’ and what was cheap stock brought in for the sale: and whereas neither bought much, Cadwaller would fall eventually for something he did not want at all, simply because it was so very heavily reduced, while Horton bought necessities, seeing the heat of summer through a winter’s fog, or even buying two things, like a piece of mirror and a picture-frame, which he could put together to make something of three times the original value.
On such expeditions they would sometimes lunch together, and both, as often happens with ‘mean’ people, wanted a taste off each other’s plates. And so after a few hair-raising encounters when one or the other was served a larger or more appetizing helping, they agreed to order two plates of different dishes and two empty plates as well and then divide exactly both taste and helping. It proved an efficient solution—and if a more plentiful helping of something else passed them on its way to another table, then it was bad luck, it was painful and as pain must be forgotten. What could not be forgotten was a difference between them on the matter of alcohol. Needless to say that they paid for their own: Cadwaller always ordered mild beer, slow long pints of mild beer, perhaps three, but each occasioning an equally mild outlay and each worth its weight in drinking-time: but Horton ordered a small whisky in a large glass, believing in the greater toxic value of spirits, and watched with joy the publican’s knuckles whiten as he pressed home the free soda-water. His joy was thus only confined by Cadwaller’s presence, for Cadwaller too enjoyed the publican’s discomfort, but at his, Horton’s, expense.
Thus life continued, in and out of Dwaller Ho. The two great chins, the downdrawn moustaches faced each other and fiddled, fought it out. Ring up TIM? Nonsense, ring up a friend, combine a chat with the time. Take out your sister? Take her in a taxi to a cheap restaurant—the taxi’ll do all the plinthing she needs. Keep the veg water for soup? But what of the reducing costs, the expanding gas-bill? Tip the waiter a bit more to get a bigger helping next time? But what if all that money goes in a common pool? Switch out the hall-lights when no one’s there? But the poor filaments they make these days—and what of the switches anyway, what of deterioration, wear, my God, and tear? And keep the Ascot pilot flame going to warm the place.
As time went on, and in early summer, that fruitful time that follows the mortal months, Cadwaller killed himself.
They had argued about horse-shoes and motor-tyres: shoeing a horse cost exactly twice the cost of motor-tyres over the same distance. Four treads each. Deep in this and adjacent problems of shoe-leather, Cadwaller, during a particularly wet April, refused to have his walking-shoes repaired until the holes achieved a reasonable importance, like the size of the yolk of a flat-fried egg: one could walk on inclined welts. But welts or no, those holes let in water, he caught cold, it lingered, he refused fires and hot-water bottles during the deepening bronchial troubles, there were developments, and in the latter middle of a starless night he died all by himself in the dark, not wishing to turn the light on or ring for his nurse.
Birds were singing in those days. The guests at Dwaller Ho were upset, despite the discomfort to which, in their creaking partitions, amid their personal sounds and their occasional smells, they had always been put. But even so most of them felt more for poor Mr Horton than for the dead Cadwaller himself. For they knew that neither could live happily without the other. They had all recognized how much each had meant to the other; neither old man had ever tried to hide their curious rivalry, and it was a local joke. Yet not only a joke, it was touching, too, in its way—and now there was poor Mr Horton alone, bereft of his adversary, his playmate. He sat at his window, the early summer sunshine too fresh for his worn skin and his grey hair, and more than ever that long jaw seemed to press his mouth closed, always as if he were offended and refused to speak, as if he were the little boy left out of the game, alone and with no one to play with.
But if the sight of him then was touching, his fellow-guests were really moved on the day of the funeral. For early that morning Mr Horton was seen to pick his way through the broken glass and old crates and rubbish of the garden to a single flowering bush at the end wall. He carried a knife. He stood by the bush for some minutes, staring at it, then looking at the knife in his hand, as if he were considering whether it was worthwhile to risk the blade. Then his shoulders suddenly shook—the poor old fellow couldn’t be weeping?—and he bent down and cut off a branch of flowers. Another and another. And finally turned, his head bowed, and carried back to the house an armful of blossom.
Everyone knew hi
s intention. And though they smiled to see this final economy and murmured that Cadwaller would turn six feet beneath when these, his own flowers cut free of charge, touched his grave—nevertheless they were deeply moved by old Horton’s thought.
The day of the funeral was one of sunshine and fresh warmth, a pale and lovely day of early flowering summer. There were few mourners: but when the hearse drew up at the cemetery gates, and the little file of people came in ones and twos up the asphalt path, lost and at a loss among so vast a civic sea of marble and granite—Mr Horton was already there standing at a respectful distance away from the yellow mound of new-turned clay. The grave was like any hole in the ground—only the mourners, and they much more than the coffin, gave it presence and meaning. And of the mourners, Mr Horton, a sad figure and the older for the fresh blossom held in his hand, seemed, in his resemblance to the dead man and in the memory the other had of the two together, to sanctify the moment more than the priest, the fair weather, the grave.
A short service was read, the coffin lowered, and then, when the carpet of green grass had been finally placed over the grave, Mr Horton went forward alone to place his flowers on his old companion’s last resting-place. He stood for a minute, head bowed, in silent prayer. Then turned and walked, a solitary figure, away into the years of loneliness.
They watched him go, they saw the last of him turn out through the cemetery gates. But nobody, naturally, saw the giant chuckle beneath Mr Horton’s bowed shoulders: nobody knew the true nature of his last tribute, his bloom, his last word, Rubus Idaeus, the common raspberry.
A Woman Seldom Found
ONCE a young man was on a visit to Rome.
It was his first visit; he came from the country—but he was neither on the one hand so young nor on the other so simple as to imagine that a great and beautiful capital should hold out finer promises than anywhere else. He already knew that life was largely illusion, that though wonderful things could happen, nevertheless as many disappointments came in compensation: and he knew, too, that life could offer a quality even worse—the probability that nothing would happen at all. This was always more possible in a great city intent on its own business.
Thinking in this way, he stood on the Spanish steps and surveyed the momentous panorama stretched before him. He listened to the swelling hum of the evening traffic and watched as the lights went up against Rome’s golden dusk. Shining automobiles slunk past the fountains and turned urgently into the bright Via Condotti, neon-red signs stabbed the shadows with invitation; the yellow windows of buses were packed with faces intent on going somewhere—everyone in the city seemed intent on the evening’s purpose. He alone had nothing to do.
He felt himself the only person alone of everyone in the city. But searching for adventure never brought it—rather kept it away. Such a mood promised nothing. So the young man turned back up the steps, passed the lovely church, and went on up the cobbled hill towards his hotel. Wine-bars and food-shops jostled with growing movement in those narrow streets. But out on the broad pavements of the Vittorio Veneto, under the trees mounting to the Borghese Gardens, the high world of Rome would be filling the most elegant cafés in Europe to enjoy with apéritifs the twilight. That would be the loneliest of all! So the young man kept to the quieter, older streets on his solitary errand home.
In one such street, a pavementless alley between old yellow houses, a street that in Rome might suddenly blossom into a secret piazza of fountain and baroque church, a grave secluded treasure-place—he noticed that he was alone but for the single figure of a woman walking down the hill towards him.
As she drew nearer, he saw that she was dressed with taste, that in her carriage was a soft Latin fire, that she walked for respect. Her face was veiled, but it was impossible to imagine that she would not be beautiful. Isolated thus with her, passing so near to her, and she symbolizing the adventure of which the evening was so empty—a greater melancholy gripped him. He felt wretched as the gutter, small, sunk, pitiful. So that he rounded his shoulders and lowered his eyes—but not before casting one furtive glance into hers.
He was so shocked at what he saw that he paused, he stared, shocked, into her face. He had made no mistake. She was smiling. Also—she too had hestitated. He thought instantly: ‘Whore?’ But no—it was not that kind of smile, though as well it was not without affection. And then amazingly she spoke:
‘I—I know I shouldn’t ask you … but it is such a beautiful evening—and perhaps you are alone, as alone as I am….’
She was very beautiful. He could not speak. But a growing elation gave him the power to smile. So that she continued, still hesitant, in no sense soliciting:
‘I thought … perhaps … we could take a walk, an apéritif….’
At last the young man achieved himself:
‘Nothing, nothing would please me more. And the Veneto is only a minute up there.’
She smiled again:
‘My home is just here….’
They walked in silence a few paces down the street, to a turning that young man had already passed. This she indicated. They walked to where the first humble houses ended in a kind of recess. In the recess was set the wall of a garden, and behind it stood a large and elegant mansion. The woman, about whose face shone a curious pale glitter—something fused of the transparent pallor of fine skin, of grey but brilliant eyes, of dark eyebrows and hair of lucent black—inserted her key in the garden gate.
They were greeted by a servant in velvet livery. In a large and exquisite salon, under chandeliers of fine glass and before a moist green courtyard where water played, they were served with a frothy wine. They talked. The wine—iced in the warm Roman night—filled them with an inner warmth of exhilaration. But from time to time the young man looked at her curiously.
With her glances, with many subtle inflections of teeth and eyes she was inducing an intimacy that suggested much. He felt he must be careful. At length he thought the best thing might be to thank her—somehow thus to root out whatever obligation might be in store. But here she interrupted him, first with a smile, then with a look of some sadness. She begged him to spare himself any perturbation: she knew it was strange, that in such a situation he might suspect some second purpose: but the simple truth remained that she was lonely and—this with a certain deference—something perhaps in him, perhaps in that moment of dusk in the street, had proved to her inescapably attractive. She had not been able to help herself.
The possibility of a perfect encounter—a dream that years of disillusion will never quite kill—decided him. His elation rose beyond control. He believed her. And thereafter the perfections compounded. At her invitation they dined. Servants brought food of great delicacy; shell-fish, fat bird-flesh, soft fruits. And afterwards they sat on a sofa near the courtyard, where it was cool. Liqueurs were brought. The servants retired. A hush fell upon the house. They embraced.
A little later, with no word, she took his arm and led him from the room. How deep a silence had fallen between them! The young man’s heart beat fearfully—it might be heard, he felt, echoing in the hall whose marble they now crossed, sensed through his arm to hers. But such excitement rose now from certainty. Certainty that at such a moment, on such a charmed evening—nothing could go wrong. There was no need to speak. Together they mounted the great staircase.
In her bedroom, to the picture of her framed by the bed curtains and dimly naked in a silken shift, he poured out his love; a love that was to be eternal, to be always perfect, as fabulous as this their exquisite meeting.
Softly she spoke the return of his love. Nothing would ever go amiss, nothing would ever come between them. And very gently she drew back the bedclothes for him.
But suddenly, at the moment when at last he lay beside her, when his lips were almost upon hers—he hesitated.
Something was wrong. A flaw could be sensed. He listened, felt—and then saw the fault was his. Shaded, soft-shaded lights by the bed—but he had been so careless as to leave on
the bright electric chandelier in the centre of the ceiling. He remembered the switch was by the door. For a fraction, then, he hesitated. She raised her eyelids—saw his glance at the chandelier, understood.
Her eyes glittered. She murmured:
‘My beloved, don’t worry—don’t move….’
And she reached out her hand. Her hand grew larger, her arm grew longer and longer, it stretched out through the bed-curtains, across the long carpet, huge and overshadowing the whole of the long room, until at last its giant fingers were at the door. With a terminal click, she switched out the light.
Among the Dahlias
The Stories of William Sansom Page 42