The pictures were like nightmare flashes. At the social occasions beloved by Mrs Andrews, tall women in horn-rimmed spectacles spilled their cocktails over his clothes and did not apologize. In a cellar in Chelsea that Mrs Andrews said was a Portuguese restaurant he had spat a forkful of food on to the floor. Afterwards he explained that something had moved in his mouth. ‘You have a prejudice against eating in restaurants,’ accused Mrs Andrews. ‘This menu is famed all over London.’ But Major Eele had been adamant. ‘I will not eat live food,’ he said.
He was new to London in those days, and he had not liked it. He had not cared for the intensity of the traffic, or the underground trains that were full of a human smell and of people who lit up tipped cigarettes and pushed with their elbows. When the honeymoon was over and the marriage had collapsed he returned to the country, but later, when he retired, he came to live in The Boarding-House. He had given up smoking his pipe and had developed interests that were metropolitan.
‘My husband,’ Mrs Andrews was saying, introducing him to a barman in the Berkeley. ‘What will you have, my dear?’ ‘What was the stuff I had last night?’ ‘Sherry, my dear?’ But he said it wasn’t sherry, but something coloured red. A discussion followed, a fruitless one in a way because what he wished to make clear was that he did not care to have the red drink again. ‘It gave me diarrhoea,’ he told the barman, and Mrs Andrews laughed loudly and said in jest that he should not use that word in mixed company.
Major Eele shuddered.
‘Are you well?’ asked Mrs le Tor. ‘You are not acting well.’
Mrs Andrews has disguised herself, thought Major Eele, looking at her; and then he remembered that this was Mrs le Tor, a local tart.
‘I am not up to anything today,’ said Major Eele, greatly debilitated by the memories of Mrs Andrews. He had married her because of a single urge. ‘My dear, I’ve just had my hair done,’ Mrs Andrews had been wont to say at night. Major Eele shuddered.
‘You’ve had a seizure,’ said Mrs le Tor. ‘Can I get you a glass of water? It’s this heat.’
Major Eele shook his head.
‘Shall we return to your nice boarding-house and I’ll rustle you up a cup of tea. There’s nothing so good as a cup of tea–’
He could not struggle against the hand on his arm and the relentless driving voice. ‘I am going to the cinema. I’m sorry, I have very little money just now.’
‘You poor dear man. Here, let me lend you a pound. Come now, take a pound and you shall pay me back when funds have looked up.’
‘I do not want a pound. Why should I take a pound from a strange woman? Why are you pressing all this on me?’
‘I am only trying to help you. Major Eele.’
‘I am on my way to a cinema. I’m sorry, but I don’t at all want any help. I do not wish to take your money or your help. I came to the door of the house, about to leave it and you were there. You have attached yourself like a barnacle to me, though I have made it clear I do not require your services. Bye-bye, Mrs le Tor.’
‘Oh, Major Eele, you have had a seizure. You have had a seizure here on the street and I held you up. I assure you you are not fit to walk eight miles. But please yourself, for goodness’ sake. You have been rather rude, you know.’
‘I apologize–’
‘Why say I attached myself like a barnacle to you? I did no such thing. I wished only to discuss a letter I had received which seemed to refer to my visit to your boarding-house. I am not used to receiving anonymous letters.’
She pushed the letter at him and he took it and examined it.
Dear Mrs le Tor,
I put it to you …
He read the letter, and it dawned on him then, for a reason he could not fathom, that Mrs le Tor was a genuine and respectable woman. ‘Good God,’ said Major Eele aloud, thinking of the words he had used to this woman, how he had drawn her attention to his lack of money, how he had advised her to ply her trade at the doors of other houses in the road. He had said that she had clung to him like a barnacle.
‘I have never heard of The Boarding-House or of the dead Mr Bird,’ said Mrs le Tor. ‘And then I came and met you all, to try and find an explanation. And then this other letter. And then I meet you and you are rude. Are you the guilty one, Major Eele? Is this a play of yours?’
‘No, I am not the guilty one, and I must tender my apologies: I fear I have laboured beneath a misconception. I took you to be otherwise than what you clearly are. I find myself greatly embarrassed, Mrs le Tor. I can only bid you good day.’
The Major was not at all himself. The images of life with Mrs Andrews, the hot sun striking mercilessly at his back while he stood and talked, the woman’s face with its glistening teeth: all these combined with the awkwardness he felt to make him feel, as well as awkward, distressed.
‘I am worried about you. Can I let you walk away into the sun, eight miles on your feet on an afternoon like this? You are not a young man now, Major Eele.’
He had found a pair of socks, long after he and Mrs Andrews had broken up, a pair of socks marked with Mrs Andrews’ previous husband’s name. It had hurt him, even then, that she had taken it upon herself to add to his wardrobe in this way, thinking he would never notice.
‘Will you have tea with me one day?’ he asked Mrs le Tor. He spoke impulsively but he uttered the words deliberately, standing straight and firm on the pavement. ‘One day next week.’ And he mentioned the name of a tea-shop in a near-by high street.
‘Well, that is kind–’
‘I cannot offer you tea today, because I am otherwise engaged. But I would deem it an honour, and more than an honour, if you would join me next week. It is something I would quite look forward to. We can discuss those letters. I feel sure we shall arrive at an explanation.’
She is finer looking than Mrs Andrews, he thought; she has better bones, and more calf to her leg.
He has asked me to tea because I said he was not a young man, thought Mrs le Tor: how sweet!
‘Let us say that then,’ said Major Eele, inwardly complimenting himself on his keen politeness. I would quite fancy this one, he thought; I would fancy her more than Andrews in her time.
‘How kind,’ murmured Mrs le Tor.
The arrangements were made and the two parted, with many assurances on Major Eele’s part that he was in good health, and had never had a seizure in his life.
Dalliance, though Major Eele, in a new mood: no need to get caught up, no need for wedding bells. He remembered again the socks that had once been the property of Mr Andrews; he remembered the moment he had lifted them from a drawer and pulled the two socks apart and noticed the name-tape. He could quite see her coming across them somewhere in her flat and putting them with his things, not thinking he would mind even if he did notice.
‘Holy gun,’ said Major Eele as he walked down Jubilee Road, ‘there was a woman for you.’ On that last night, that tenth night, he believed she had made an attempt on his life. It was never easy in her flat to get a plate of food, and on this particular night, he insisting that he would eat at home, she prepared for him a repast which she had discovered in a tin, left behind, as afterwards she confessed, by previous tenants. Shortly after midnight he awoke with an ache in his stomach. He tried to wake Mrs Andrews to tell her, but she, who had already explained that she had had her hair done, rejected him with an expression that was new to him. He lay in the dark, thinking; and then, at three o’clock, he sat upright and put on the light. He filled his pipe and struck a number of matches before it got going. ‘What the hell is this?’ asked Mrs Andrews, waking in discomfort and fumbling beneath her body. ‘For God’s sake, there are used matches in the bed.’ He explained that he had a pain in his stomach and had thought a smoke might ease it. ‘A smoke? For God’s sake, take a look at the state of my sheets.’ An early morning quarrel had ensued, in the course of which Mrs Andrews, wishing to cause him concern, had confessed that the food she had given him that night had been in fact a cat’s pre
paration. He had leapt from the bed then and dragged on his clothes, and had later quit the flat for ever.
Major Eele walked slowly, though he knew that the slower he walked the sooner he would have to take a bus. In the distance he could hear the noise of traffic, coming from an area that was more used by motor-cars and lorries and buses. It was quiet where he walked; no sound came from the open windows of houses: children were having their afternoon sleep, mothers were resting. In one house only in Jubilee Road a lover came to visit his housewife mistress. He let himself into the house without a sound, and when the two met they spoke in whispers, for somehow it was that kind of afternoon, an afternoon that was full of silence, with only Major Eele abroad.
In his Notes on Residents Mr Bird had written:
Major Eele (69) came to me only seven years ago. He had had the misfortune to embark upon a marriage with a woman of forty-odd years, a marriage of which he has repeated to me various yarns. Major Eele is greatly given to chat, but like most of the people here he is not always accurate. After all, I am not always accurate myself: inaccuracy is a symptom of our condition, I suppose, and I do not begrudge the old Major his little embroideries. Major Eele has often dropped into conversation with me in the afternoon and referred to me as a man of the world. By this I deduce that he is seeking information. I have, in fact, engaged the Major upon a practical course of education in the hope that in the future he will leave me in peace, as I particularly dislike people coming to my door at all hours, though naturally I make a point of saying I do not mind. I would not like to have to ask the Major to move on.
‘I would like to go into that bar in the Berkeley with Mrs le Tor upon my arm and look out for Mrs Andrews’ face.’ He said this aloud, and began to laugh at the thought of it: how now, ten years later, with his new sophistication, he would march up to the bar and order two Camparis, and carry them back to a little table where Mrs, le Tor awaited him with a smile. She was a smart woman, he thought; a smarter woman than Mrs Andrews any day. There would be Mrs Andrews, perched on a high stool, up at the bar with no one to talk to except the barman, eating a little white onion. ‘Heavens,’ he would whisper to Mrs le Tor, ‘d’you see that woman, the one with no calves to her legs? D’you know who that is? That’s Mrs Andrews, one time a wife of mine.’ Major Eele paused in his walking to survey the scene more closely. ‘Why, Mrs Andrews, my old heart, what a thing this is, running into you here.’ Again he spoke aloud, but nobody heard, for the pavement was still deserted in the heat of the day.
10
On chosen days the delivery vans of the big stores crept through the district of SW17, delivering almost anything that one could hope for: the green vans of Selfridge’s, Barker’s with stripes, Harrod’s with a prominent coat of arms, by Royal Appointment. They carried assorted meats and clothes, groceries, furniture, hardware and haberdashery. They brought out specially, for long established customers, for the older families of the district and beyond it, special tins of smoking tobacco and special blends of tea, and free-range chickens already slaughtered. The men who drove them knew their way about and enjoyed that knowledge, because to them it was more interesting to know a bit about a place and to memorize certain weekly details. They knew where to leave their parcels if a house seemed empty: around the back as previously arranged a year or so ago and kept to as a rule ever since, or on a basement window-sill, or in a garden shed. The men who drove the vans could tell you a thing or two, but they probably never would, guarding their inside information because it was their business and not yours.
In the quiet roads, daily driving lessons took place. The men with the vans knew the instructors by sight and did not envy them their chore. They saw the cars with L plates and the notice of a motoring school crawl jaggedly from drive to avenue, from lane to crescent. Often, their goods delivered at a door, they paused to watch the practising of the reverse gear, cars going backwards round a corner, tyres rasping on the pavement edge.
At eleven o’clock every day, until the day he took to his ultimate bed, Mr Bird had banged the door of The Boarding-House behind him and had set off to walk the neighbourhood for an hour. To the driving instructors and to the men of the delivery vans he had become a familiar figure, walking alone with his stick, moving slowly because of his size and his bad foot. Often they waved a hand at him and as often as they chose to do so he waved a hand back. ‘A boarding-house keeper. Two Jubilee Road.’ More than once one driving instructor had thus informed another. The men, who cleared the dustbins bade him good day as he passed, addressing him without much respect but without ill-will either. And the brothers of St Dominic’s smiled at him, and received in turn their special due: a greater gesture, reserved for their cloth.
Mr Bird had come to know the pets of the area, the dogs and cats of Jubilee Road and Peterloo Avenue, of Mantle Lane, Crimea Road and Lisbon Drive, and of other places too. He knew the animals by sight and often paused to stroke them, though he was not himself an animal-lover and had never owned a pet of any kind. He knew which windows held goldfish in a tank or caged birds, canaries and budgerigars, a parrot that said its name was Hamish. He liked to see the brewery dray horses; unnecessary, he thought, in a mechanized age, yet pleasant to watch going by: some kind of publicity stunt, he reckoned. In Jubilee Road, by the front gate of number fourteen, there was a collection box built into the form of a large dog, with a notice on it that mentioned the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and asked for alms. Mr Bird never dropped anything into it and wondered if anyone ever had. He had often thought that a suburban road seemed an unprofitable site for an artificial dog, begging.
In the mornings, when Mr Bird took his constitutional walk, Jubilee Road was at its quietest. Earlier, with people going to work, with bicycles and a few cars passing along, it had a small buzz. Women rubbed at brasses on hall-doors, someone might sweep a step; curtains were dragged back and roller blinds released with an early morning twang. But by eleven o’clock all that was over. Jets screamed above, but between their screams it was still and calm in Jubilee Road; except on Tuesdays, when the dustmen clattered and shouted out, and that was anyway later in the morning, nearer lunchtime.
Sometimes women, pushing prams or deep baskets on wheels for shopping, nodded to him when they met; children were heard, even by Mr Bird, to remark upon his limp or his slow progression, and mothers smiled more openly at him then, smiling their apology, trusting he understood. A few such women knew him by name and addressed him, remarking on the weather or the noise of the jets or something that might have occurred, like a road accident.
Major Eele, Studdy and Nurse Clock, the three residents who were regularly about in the mornings, had occasionally met him on the streets strolling along or leaving the shop where his habit it was to buy a tube of Rowntree’s Gums, his favourite sweet. Nurse Clock’s bicycle would carry her on her way, popping gently while she sat motionless on the saddle, only her lips at work, murmuring the verses of a hymn. She had had the engine added at Mr Bird’s suggestion, for he often had noticed her labouring against a wind or up a long hill. It pleased him whenever he heard the familiar two-stroke tone and occasionally he would ask her about it and remind her to add, now and again, the necessary oil.
When Mr Bird died Studdy took to walking in the mornings as Mr Bird had walked, banging the door at eleven o’clock, buttoning his overcoat and doing up the belt as he passed down Jubilee Road. By nature, Studdy had never been a hard worker and it suited him well to slip into Mr Bird’s role, venturing unhurriedly out at a set hour, saluting the dustmen and the van-drivers, saving a word for the brothers at St Dominic’s and becoming familiar with the local pets. Studdy in time came to walk the roads and the avenues like a king, peeping at the windows, noticing everything. He felt that the area was his to know as Mr Bird had known it, with an intimacy that was reserved for those who were interested in the houses, who liked to watch and were curious.
But for some days after his altercation with the man i
n Mrs Rush’s Morris Minor Studdy did not go walking, nor even appear in the public rooms at The Boarding-House. Nurse Clock gave him codeine, warning him that the pain in his face would become intense if he did not dose himself regularly. ‘A rest can do you no harm at all,’ pronounced Nurse Clock, taking his wrist to feel his pulse and making him think of the pin in his lapel.
Studdy lay on his bed and did nothing. It was the first time that such a thing had happened, that a venture had resulted in so unfortunate an outcome. He saw that in future he would have to tread with greater care, yet he could not see that he had been foolish in any way. He had been quite subtle, he thought, asking the woman if she was having trouble with her car, as though he were about to help in a natural way, and then coming firmly to the point. In future he would have to see that men were not about, hiding in motorors or loitering near by.
The Boarding-House Page 10