The Boarding-House

by William Trevor

  ‘Do you ever do a bit of spring cleaning at all? I’m thinking I could give you a hand. You know, I like a bit of charitable work. Like I call round now and again to sit with Mrs Maylam.’

  Nurse Clock decided to say nothing. She smiled, giving him a chance to go on.

  ‘You must come across a lot of old treasures. Things in drawers. Photographs. Letters. Isn’t it surprising the way people store things up? D’you ever think that?’

  With truth, Nurse Clock said she didn’t know what to think.

  ‘Well, be seeing you, Nurse.’ He drew himself up, saluting her. She thought he was probably out of his wits, wearing that heavy coat in a temperature like this, saying he liked charitable work.

  In the television lounge Mr Obd watched a man with a long bow launching arrows at a girl who held balloons in her mouth. Since none of the arrows missed the balloons, Major Eele said it was a put-up job. Music played, and the audience applauded. Rose Cave counted the grey stitches of her knitting.

  ‘Now we have cyclists,’ said Mr Scribbin, reading the details in the Radio Times. He nodded at Venables. ‘Cyclists’, he repeated.

  Major Eele said:

  ‘Has anyone ever come across a woman called Hammond who performs with a flock of waltzing birds?’

  Nobody had. Mr Obd changed the channel on the television set. A handsome man was drilling a hole in a road. Seeing the camera turned upon him, he laid the drill aside and spoke of the breakfast that his wife had earlier prepared for him. He smiled and returned to work.

  ‘What has it to do with fixing our roads?’ Major Eele asked, and again nobody could supply him with an answer. He was a little on edge. He had felt that inviting Mrs le Tor to tea was the least he could do, since he had behaved so badly towards her: now he was not so sure that he had not made a mistake. He felt a little spasm of anger at his own folly, and then felt something else: a touch of excitement and a small offering to his pride.

  ‘Hammond, like the organ?’ enquired Rose Cave, remembering that no one had answered the question and thinking that it was perhaps unkind to show no interest at all.

  Venables was watching the television screen. He quite enjoyed the advertisements, especially the dashing ones about cigarettes and pipe tobacco. He tried not to think about what was uppermost in his mind: that The Boarding-House might close now that Nurse Clock and Studdy were running it. He did not like the prospect of making a change. He had been before in a house where young men from an estate office had poured golden syrup on the handle of his door every Saturday night; he had had to leave another place because the landlady, drunken one day, had struck him on the head with a soup-spoon. Venables thought that somehow or other Nurse Clock and Studdy were bound to fall out. What would happen then? A prick of pain came in his stomach, low down, on the left.

  ‘Just like the organ,’ said Major Eele. ‘An American lady. She does the most remarkable things. I think I am right in saying that she organizes the birds to storm and capture a castle.’

  ‘A castle?’ asked Mr Scribbin, suddenly interested. ‘You don’t mean a real castle?’

  ‘There’s a ventriloquist next,’ said Mr Obd, referring to the television.

  ‘You changed the channel,’ said Major Eele. ‘Just when our interest is whetted Sambo changes the channel.’

  ‘Major Eele!’ Rose Cave spoke loudly, feeling outraged and making that clear. ‘Major Eele, you cannot say that.’

  ‘Why not? The channel has been changed. Why can’t I say that? Just when our interest has been whetted–’

  ‘Major Eele, you cannot address Mr Obd in that way.’

  ‘I did not address him. I said he had changed the channel. One minute we are looking at trick cyclists and next it is an advertisement for a plateful of breakfast food.’

  ‘I changed back,’ Mr Obd explained. He did not much mind how Major Eele referred to him. He was used to Major Eele by now; he did not expect too much and he did not receive it. He was trying hard to be cheerful, flashing his smile about, turning the television switches. That same afternoon he had bought a dozen roses and carried them to the flat of Annabel Tonks, but when he rang the bell there was no reply and once again he had been obliged to lay them on the doorstep with the letter he had already prepared.

  ‘You cannot call Mr Obd names.’

  Mr Obd looked at the carpet. The pile had been worn flat. Like the wallpaper in the hall, the pattern had almost disappeared; the overall effect was a stained and dingy brown.

  ‘Sorry, there,’ said Major Eele.

  Mr Obd shrugged, smiling slightly at the carpet, noting that one of the larger stains looked like a can-can dancer. Mr Bird had written of him at length:

  Tome Obd (44) came to London twenty-five years ago, a fresh-faced Nigerian seeking to discover the secret of our legal systems and to return a knowledge king to his native soil. Well, it was not to be. Mr Obd studied the law assiduously but could make no impression on the examiners at his college. Over many years he attempted the course set for him but was finally obliged to sever his academic ambitions for ever. He had left his country with a promise on his lips, and without having attained the machinery with which he might fulfil it he had not the heart to return. I believe I correctly deduce when I state that Tome Obd was smitten by shame. He felt the dishonour of returning empty-tongued too great. He would settle in England, he said, and wrote to his family that he was already a successful lawyer. What excuse he gave them I cannot fathom, except perhaps that he may have spoken of his new sophisticated ways, of his fear that such ways were not the ways of Africa; or perhaps he had said that already he was wedded to a white girl who would not easily be received by the home community. Whatever the truth is, Tome Obd made his peace as best he could and took on clerkly employment, perforce rejecting the allowance that his family had set aside for his long education. Who knows, these simple people may have worked themselves to their Nigerian bones, saving and scraping for the youth who would be a lawyer. Who can blame Tome Obd for not returning?

  Eleven years ago, in 1953, a place was found for Mr Obd in my boarding-house by a certain Miss Tonks. This lady, unknown to me until I heard her voice, telephoned to inquire after a room for a friend, giving Mr Obd’s case as I have given it above. I was at once suspicious. I did not care for this voice on the telephone, nor was I certain where it was that she had heard about us. A boarding-house proprietor cannot be too careful; one never knows what people will try to turn the place into, and I confess that my immediate reaction was that naturally I did not wish to have anyone black about the place. For some time past such elements had been infiltrating the neighbourhood and I had always been staunch in my disapproval, though I am not of course in any way a public man. My inclination, on hearing the request of Miss Tonks presented in terms that were clearly employed to appeal to my better nature and in accents that certified Miss Tonks as a one-time inhabitant of an urban settlement in the Midlands, was to refuse peremptorily to have further dealings with her. That, I say, was my inclination. But I was touched, or must have been touched, by some detail that this lady had revealed in passing. In retrospect, I can do no better than to suggest that it may have had to do with a reference to Mr Obd’s interest in the game of table-tennis, a sport of which, if Miss Tonks’ story is to be believed, he had never wholly mastered the rules. The image of Tome Obd darting about at one end of a ping-pong table, striking back the little white ball, clearly went to my heart. Perhaps the confusion that I sensed in the man’s mind touched me and moved me to listen further to the now irrepressible Miss Tonks. I use the word ‘confusion’ advisedly; for what can the man have felt, this stranger to our country, to find himself taken up by women from Birmingham or thereabouts and placed at one end of a table and told to hit over a stretched net a light ball of an inch and a quarter in diameter? Must he not have wondered at the reason for this ceremony? Must he not surely have been puzzled by the loud cries that greeted each of his muffed attempts, at the numbers that were called out, and at the
eventful news that once again victory had eluded him? Did he know what victory they spoke of? Did he perhaps not think to himself that this was some kind of scorn poured upon his colour, that the game was a chastisement of the African soul?

  Be all that as it may, the fact remains that I said to Miss Tonks on the telephone: ‘Send your Mr Obd round.’

  ‘Welcome to our shores, Mr Obd,’ I said. I stretched out a hand. I addressed him in this way, with a welcome, because I saw it as the polite thing to do. I knew he had been in England for many years now, yet something told me, I think, that no one had ever put into words that simple sentiment.

  I am sorry to say that Mr Tome Obd did not acknowledge my greeting. He did not smile graciously; he did not show gratitude through the medium of speech. Instead he said, as though it were the simplest matter in the world:

  ‘I am told that surely you have a room.’

  This odd piece of language construction was given no questioning tone. It was present to me as a statement. I said nothing.

  ‘I am informed from a reliable quarter,’ continued Mr Tome Obd.

  I looked stern. I observed Mr Obd. His ebony face seemed strange and immensely remote in my small room. I said quietly:

  ‘I am always glad to welcome an imperial cousin.’

  ‘An imperial cousin?’ He questioned me as though I spoke in a mysterious way, as though he did not understand our language. I said, more slowly:

  ‘There is no skin prejudice in this house.’

  He, as though repetition were his forte, repeated the words.

  ‘Skin prejudice?’

  ‘But I must add,’ I said, ‘that those who come here are recommended from the highest sources. I confess it straight away, Mr Obd, we have had foreigners here in the past. Ambassadors of foreign powers are not unknown in the precincts of The Boarding-House, nor are the world’s potentates, oilmen, religious leaders, mystics, men of politics, men of royal blood. The four winds have swept the great and the little, the good and the evil, into our midst here in The Boarding-House–’

  ‘Precincts?’ queried Mr Obd.

  ‘That is difficult to explain,’ I said. ‘Where were you at school, Mr Obd?’

  Thus we went on for some time, for I delight myself by talking in this manner. I drew useful information from Mr Obd, and in the end I offered him a room, planning in my mind to ask a Miss Bedge to vacate hers. I had always looked upon Miss Bedge as a stopgap, and I was not displeased at an opportunity to move her on. In the meanwhile, I impressed upon Mr Obd that there were full toilet and washing facilities in my boarding-house, and there and then pointed out the lavatories and bathrooms to him. After all, one is never quite certain of the habits obtaining in these far-off parts. To drive my point home, I remarked quietly as I pulled one of the w.c. chains: ‘When in Rome do as the Romans do, eh?’

  I said no more to Mr Obd that day except to explain that I had once held a post in the travel business and was thus conversant with the many appeals of his country.

  He came a fortnight later and has been with me ever since. His face has grown more dismal over the years, and he has never done much, nor said much, except to write lengthy letters to that same Miss Tonks, many of which I have perused in an unfinished state in his room. He is fighting a losing battle, only he will not see it, and of course has mentioned nothing of this to me. I feel immediately downcast when I meet him, and offer when I can a word or two of gloomy sympathy. I fear he is heading for disaster.

  ‘You don’t mean a real castle?’ Mr Scribbin asked again, leaning forward in his chair, sloping his narrow back towards Major Eele, who said: ‘A model castle, I think. Though for all I know it may have been otherwise.’

  ‘There was a film recently,’ said Venables, ‘in which the birds took over.’

  Major Eele thought that it need not be a lengthy business: he would sit down to tea with her in the Cadena and leave after nine or ten minutes, claiming another appointment.

  ‘Mrs Hammond’s birds?’ he said. ‘Mrs Hammond’s birds took over, did they? Well, that doesn’t surprise me in the least.’

  Venables felt the warm blanket of pain beginning in earnest in his stomach. Sweat broke on his forehead. ‘Birds of the air, he said. ‘Just any birds. Nothing to do with Mrs Hammond. Just all the birds – the birds of the air.’

  ‘Untrained birds?’ asked Major Eele. ‘How very odd. Are you sure you have got your facts right, Venables?’

  ‘I think it was trick photography. The birds attacked people. It was really rather too much.’ Venables sat still and was aware of his stomach moving. There was a sourness down there and the ache spread from his lower abdomen up to the base of his lungs. He had never been able to face the prospect of going to a doctor. He thought of long hospital trolleys and white-masked men and sharp young nurses in starched linen. He saw a blade cutting through his flesh, and the steel instruments entering the delicate passages of his tubes.

  Major Eele said: ‘Not parakeets? I think Mrs Hammond operates with parakeets.’

  ‘Parakeets?’ repeated Mr Scribbin.

  ‘They are birds, Scribbin, a breed of bird.’

  ‘I know …’ Mr Scribbin was becoming intrigued by the picture of trained parakeets storming and capturing a castle under the guidance of Mrs Hammond of America. He wished to show he understood what parakeets were, and then to ask a few more questions of Major Eele since Major Eele knew about the matter. But Major Eele interrupted him, speaking to Venables.

  ‘Are you sure it was trick photography? It could not have been some other kind of trick? Mrs Hammond’s parakeets, for instance, disguised as day-to-day birds – seagulls, crows, pigeons, what-have-you? Could it have been that, Venables?’

  Venables said he didn’t know, and Major Eele sighed, and Mr Scribbin began again.

  Rose Cave knitted on, occasionally glancing at the television screen, occasionally saying something. It was warm in the room, and rather gloomy. Long curtains held out the daylight, hanging from brass rods. There were three windows in the television lounge and thirty yards of net curtain. As well, there were other curtains, drapes of brown velvet that were there for conventional decoration and could not, in fact, be pulled to. When the electric light was put on roller blinds were used to prevent people from seeing in.

  Rose Cave had become used to the appearance of this room, although it was not an appearance that she herself, given a free hand, would have favoured. When first she had come to The Boarding-House she had noticed things in the room: the Wedgwood plates on the walls, the pottery ornaments, the ashtrays made into the shapes of other objects and those that once had been sea-shells. There was a stuffed woodpecker in a glass case and a heavy writing-desk that nobody ever used, that was covered with travel literature. She had noticed the coloured antimacassars, the chipped grained paint of the skirting-boards and the window-frames, the flowered dado that ran around the four walls, high up, about ten feet from the ground. Almost everything in the room, except the travel literature, dated back to the time before Mr Bird had inherited The Boarding-House. The wallpaper and the paint had remained unchanged for forty-three years; the arrangement on the mantelshelf of four china mermaids, an ebony elephant, a clock, two ashtrays shaped like boats, two brass vases and sundry smaller details had altered little in the same span of time. Mr Bird had seen no reason for change; he had been the most conservative of men.

  ‘I remember as a child,’ said Mr Scribbin, ‘being brought to see an exhibition of performing fish.’

  Rose Cave, her fingers moving fast, the grey wool coagulating and taking useful form, remembered how she and her mother had cycled from Ewell to Dorking one Sunday afternoon during the war. They had made the journey to see some exhibition, though not of performing fish. Why, she wondered, had Mr Scribbin said that about fish, and then it came back to her that previously the men had been speaking of performing birds, and there was of course an obvious connexion. She remembered now, the other exhibition had been one of flower arrangements fr
om Japan. ‘Look,’ her mother had said, reading a notice from a local paper, ‘there is an exhibition of Japanese flower arrangements in Dorking on Sunday.’ They had filled a thermos flask with tea and wrapped up sandwiches and scones and put a little milk in a blue Milk of Magnesia bottle, and had set off on their bicycles. Ten miles: it had taken them hours.

  ‘Scribbin is on about fish now,’ Major Eele remarked. ‘Has anyone ever seen a film in which the fish take over? Whales and haddock waddling through the land, shellfish in the ears of kings and emperors?’

  Venables did not reply, although the Major was looking at him, expecting some reply, expecting a conversation.

  ‘It is quite a theme,’ said Mr Scribbin.

  Venables, his stomach quietening down, could feel the beginning of a laugh. He made an effort to control it.

  ‘What?’ asked Major Eele.

  ‘The fish taking over, like Mr Venables’ birds.’

  ‘Look out for the Rainbow Men,’ warned a gay voice from the television set.

  ‘Ha, ha,’ said Venables, and Major Eele asked him what the matter was.

  ‘Cocoa,’ said Gallelty at the door, standing with cups on a tray and cocoa in a jug. There was a mixture of biscuits, a few of them iced but the majority rather plain.

  Rose Cave put her knitting needles aside, stuck them into the knitted piece and then into the ball of grey wool. She took a cup and saucer from the tray.

  ‘Who else?’ said Gallelty.

  They drank a cup each and ate a few biscuits; and one by one they went to bed.

  12

  ‘I suppose you can go in and out of a house without anyone bothering?’ said Studdy. ‘A nurse would have keys to places? It must be that fascinating.’ He wagged his head, suggesting an inner marvelling at the work she did.

  ‘It is a coincidence that we are both so fond of the aged,’ said Nurse Clock. ‘That gives us something in common.’

  ‘Oh, definitely it does.’

  ‘Funny, really, that both of us should have met up over Mrs Maylam. Do you read to her at all? I have a few books that might interest her–’