Nurse Clock ejaculated. Major Eele laughed. Mr Obd looked startled. Mrs Trine said, or began to say, that perhaps she should call around another day. Venables had come to the door of The Boarding-House: he now called back to Miss Clerricot and Rose Cave that further trouble had broken out. Mr Scribbin rescued his clothes.
Studdy, about to enter Jubilee Road, watched from a distance and held himself in the shadow of a tree. He heard Mr Scribbin’s cry and Major Eele’s laugh and sounds of protest from Nurse Clock. He watched for five minutes while Mr Scribbin satisfied himself that all was well, or almost well, for his clothes would now require attention. He saw Mrs Trine wave and drive away with Mr Obd’s gay Nigerian robe in the boot of her car. He heard the door of The Boarding-House bang, and he walked slowly up Jubilee Road.
In this manner, amidst chaos and excitement, did the clothes of Mr Bird, his most personal things, leave The Boarding-House on the night of August 26th.
13
It was a dreaming season in London, that long warm summer. In a magistrates’ court a man who had been charged with the theft of spoons from Woolworth’s claimed to have been guided towards the action in a dream; he said the dream had left him with the compulsion, that for days he had gone in fear of death – for death, he said, was his destined lot unless he stole the spoons.
On the night that Mrs Trine called at The Boarding-House two old men in Wimbledon dreamed of their schooldays and discussed the scenes that had happened over breakfast; for they, too, lived side by side in a boarding-house, though one that was vastly different from the one that had been Mr Bird’s. They talked far into the day, comparing notes and marking the coincidence; and though they did not say it, they hoped that that night too it might be given to them to dream again of their schooldays.
Not far from where the old men dreamed in Wimbledon, Janice Rush, who had been Janice Brownlow, dreamed of Studdy. She saw his face swollen to monstrous size from the blow her friend had struck him. She saw him conveyed along hospital corridors to an operating theatre that was peopled with characters from a television serial. ‘His heart will not take it,’ said one of these, and cast a grim order at a nurse. The man will die, thought Janice Rush, waking up confused. And then it came to her that this was most unlikely. She switched the light on and slipped from bed, noting the form of her slumbering husband and feeling no emotion at the sight of it. In her kitchen she smoked a cigarette and thought about her marriage day, pretending it was not the slumbering husband she had married but someone else, someone she did not know and could not ever meet. She felt the solitude that would have excited Mr Bird, and sighed at the feeling; for she, who in her day had been the belle of flannel dances, who had been beautiful and dearly loved, had never come to terms with her loneliness and never would now. She hadn’t grown to see it and accept it, as his people of The Boarding-House had, or would in time.
Studdy dreamed that he had entered local politics and was asked to become Mayor of SW17. ‘Together again,’ cried Nurse Clock, sitting beside him in the Mayor’s parlour, for somehow she was Mayor as well. In his dream he greeted her and touched her shoulder, and planned a terrible vengeance.
Mr Scribbin dreamed that once he had been a wild man, bare-footed in the street. He, whose night in a way this one had been, since he had made himself felt over the matter of his clothes, dreamed, too, that he was at the controls of the double-chimneyed Lord Faringdon. Beside him stood Mrs Trine, pulling at his overalls, asking for his tie. ‘We are late,’ he cried. ‘We are late, we are late, Mrs Trine.’ He spoke with the rhythm of the wheels, forcing on her the urgency of the circumstances, but she laughed and asked for his tie. ‘We are bound for King’s Cross,’ cried Mr Scribbin, trying to push her off. ‘I cannot hear you,’ laughed Mrs Trine, and then the cab was filled with people: Venables and Major Eele, Nurse Clock and Mr Obd. They held him back while Nurse Clock and Mrs Trine opened the fire and threw in his clothes. His own moans of distress woke him, and when it was difficult to return to sleep he rose and listened to Narrow Gauge on the Costa Brava. Of him Mr Bird had earlier written:
Joseph Scribbin (55) is a lone man, an example of the species. As a child, I imagine, he must have towered over boys and masters alike. Possibly, he had not the strength to match his height, since the height would incline to sap it away. One may imagine the gangling Scribbin tormented by smaller youths, tripped up, knocked over, sworn at by his mentors, who would expect of so high a fellow intelligence to match. He was the sort of boy, I would guess, whose beard grew early, who wore for years on his chin and upper lip a thick mat of down on which food of all descriptions left generous debris. He works today in some position where his body takes sedentary form, since this to Scribbin is an essential thing. I have ceaselessly attempted to cheer him out of his obsession, to offer him, in fact, practical tips as I offered Major Eele, though naturally of a different nature. I have suggested that he should walk with a slouch, affecting a crablike motion. In this way, I claim, his inordinate height would pass unnoticed, though of course the crablike motion might not. He takes no heed of me in any case, just looks dumb and goes away to play his gramophone. I weep when I think of Joseph Scribbin’s life, and the emptiness thereof.
Rose Cave’s mother was in the television lounge, sitting on a chair in the centre of the room, eating a sandwich. ‘I asked for chicken vol-au-vent,’ she cried. ‘Rose, little child, I asked for vol-au-vent and you have brought me a tongue sandwich. Whatever has gone wrong with you?’ ‘I’m sorry,’ said Rose Cave and lifted the sandwich from her mother’s hand and ate it herself. ‘That is unkind,’ cried her mother, ‘to take the bread from a mother’s mouth. What has gone wrong with you? Are you ill? Are you mad? Have you got the change of life?’ ‘Yes, I have got the change of life,’ said Rose Cave, and wept in front of everyone.
Venables was telling Mr Bird, as often in the past he had told him, of his position in the business world as traffic controller in a firm of merit; he was trying to explain what traffic controller meant without detracting too much from the ring of the title, and Mr Bird, as always, was patient and discreet.
‘“Fools rush in”,’ murmured Mr Bird in the ear of Miss Clerricot, ‘“where angels fear to tread.” That’s Alexander Pope, Miss Clerricot.’ She looked at him and said she never knew that Alexander Pope had written those words. She would not discuss the matter that Mr Bird was hinting at, and in the silence that fell between them she felt herself going redder in her dream. ‘To err is human,’ murmured Mr Bird, smiling before he died.
‘You did not record my ultimate observations,’ said he to Nurse Clock in the only dream of Nurse Clock’s life. ‘You informed no newspaper that William Bird died by degrees, a process that began with the feet. I have scanned the British Press and seen no mention of the matter. I call that callous, Nurse Clock; after all, I left you a boarding-house.’
‘And Studdy too! What kind of trick? They will roast you for that, sir, to do so awful an action. Ill nature I call it, Mr Bird: a trick you’ve played on all of us.’
‘I took you in, Nurse Clock, when the Lord-Bloods had ground you to the dust. I left my house to my grandest residents. How could I leave it to you alone? You would turn it into a home for the old.’
And Nurse Clock, who of a sudden was sitting in the death room of her late landlord, took no notice and read her magazine.
Major Eele saw Mr Bird in the distance, sitting on a park seat, his bad leg stretched on the seat in front of him. Mr Bird seemed to be dozing, but Major Eele suspected that he was watching to see if Mrs le Tor should pass by.
Mr Bird lived on, that night and for nights and days to come, in the minds of them all, but most marvellously in the mind of Mr Obd, who dreamed that Mr Bird had risen from the dead.
Tome Obd, who had sat at the writing-desk in the television lounge, a thing that no one had done before, who lay now dreaming of the risen Mr Bird, had again taken flowers to the flat of Annabel Tonks. Miss Tonks, however, was absent, or so it seemed, and
once again Mr Obd found himself on the stone landing outside the door of her flat, standing with flowers and feeling dejected. He had rung the bell and had heard it ringing. He had knocked with the small brass knocker and then in an agony of sorrow had cried aloud: ‘Oh, Annabel, why do our paths never meet?’ When he telephoned her the wires seemed always to cross. ‘That number has been changed,’ an official of the telephone service had informed him recently, but when he enquired for the new number the voice had said: ‘I am not at liberty to divulge it,’ and had added, ‘sir’. It was a long time now since he had laid his pale eyes on the girl he had played ping-pong with in the past. Yet always his flowers had gone when next he called, and not just the flowers but also the accompanying letter. ‘Don’t you know you have an establishment in my heart?’ cried Mr Obd, quoting inaccurately from a beautiful poem. ‘Annabel, Annabel, this is Tome Obd.’
It had never occurred to Mr Obd that Annabel Tonks might possibly have moved away from her flat at the top of all those stone stairs. It had not occurred to him, as it rarely does in such circumstances, that she might have gone quietly and told the tenant who replaced her that she wished her forwarding address to be kept away from a man from Africa who would call with flowers. It did not pass through Mr Obd’s mind that another woman might be taking his flowers week after week and settling them in a vase, and reading, or not bothering to read, his letters in black ink.
‘Open the door,’ cried Mr Obd, beating the door with the palms of his hands. ‘Annabel, Annabel.’
‘Are you Mr Obd?’ asked a girl with fair hair, not his Miss Tonks, but a girl all the same who had opened the door of the flat from the inside.
‘Yes, yes. I am Tome Obd. It is Annabel I wish to see. Look, I have brought her a selection of dahlias.’
‘How lovely,’ cried the girl, burying her face in the bunch. ‘What delicious flowers! Mr Obd, I’m-sorry, Miss Tonks has moved away.’
‘How do you mean that? Moved away? She is out? I may wait. Are you a flat-mate? I have known others. How do you do; my name is Tome Obd.’
Smiling, Mr Obd held out his hand.
‘No,’ the girl said, ‘Annabel Tonks has taken herself to another flat. She is somewhere else in London. I do not know the address.’
Mr Obd shook his head. ‘No, no, you can’t understand. I am a long established friend of Annabel. She would not go somewhere else in London without first telling Tome Obd. What is your name? There are bonds between Annabel Tonks and myself, as I dare say she had told you.’
The girl, whose name was Josephine Tonks, being a sister of Annabel, noticed with interest that Mr Obd’s teeth were not his own. She had, perhaps naturally, never before thought of dentures in an African mouth. She rather imagined she had assumed, without going into it, that the African smile was a real one all the way to the roots. As she reported afterwards, she was quite taken aback at the little gum-line of pink plastic that was included with Mr Obd’s.
‘I’m afraid I know little of Miss Tonks’ life,’ said Josephine Tonks. ‘I cannot answer for her.’
Mr Obd had read in a magazine that girls who live together were often jealous of each other’s men friends. He suspected a case of this now. He knew that Annabel Tonks still belonged in the flat because he could see one of her coats in the hall.
‘You have often left flowers, have you?’ said the girl carelessly. ‘Certainly flowers were occasionally taken away by the caretaker. No one knows where Miss Tonks has sped to. She has vanished into thin air.’
‘Now, that is not true,’ cried Tome Obd. ‘That is far from the honest truth and you surely know it. What is that there? It is my Annabel’s coat hanging upon a hook. Annabel, Annabel, you have an establishment in my heart.’ Mr Obd raised his voice for that last sentence, and Annabel Tonks, seated in front of a looking-glass with a beauty preparation on her face, sighed heavily and wished he would go away. Her sister, who was many years younger, was quite enjoying the drama of the encounter and thinking how romantic it was really, a black man saying he had an establishment in his heart. But Annabel herself, who never quite knew when it was safe to open the door, was bored by now with the drama and the romance of it. It was twelve years since she had last accompanied Tome Obd to the cinema, and two years before that they had played their final game of table-tennis. Surely he could understand, since they had met at a club called the Society for the Promotion of Commonwealth Friendship? Surely he could see, or should at least have seen by now, that she had been promoting Commonwealth friendship and only that?
‘It is absolutely no use whatsoever,’ explained Mr Obd, waving the bunch of dahlias. ‘I must stand here all night if needs be. When have I last seen Annabel? Six months ago. We have got out of touch; it is a poor state of affairs.’
‘Maybe,’ said Annabel Tonks’ sister. ‘Maybe that is very true, but what can we do, for goodness’ sake? I am only another tenant. I fear you must take your troubles elsewhere.’
‘You are jealous,’ cried Mr Obd. ‘You are a jealous young girl.’
‘In fact I am,’ she said. ‘I have a jealous nature, it says so in my horoscope. But what has that to do with anything?’
‘You are envious of my friendship with Miss Annabel Tonks. You are her flat-mate and are envious. I know that to be true.’
‘It is not true at all. I see no reason to be envious of you. Frankly, half the time I don’t understand what you’re saying.’
‘Now you are wounding me,’ cried Mr Obd. ‘You have wounded Tome Obd with your cruel tongue, and you will not even tell me your name.’
‘Go away, please,’ ordered Annabel Tonks’ sister, and shut the door with a swift movement.
‘He will come again,’ said Annabel Tonks, ‘and then I shall see him myself. I have said to him to his face that he is an obtrusion. Next time I shall say that the police will arrest him. You can have that done, you know, with people who are a persistent nuisance.’
Mr Obd did not hear this, for it was said in the depths of the flat, far from the closed hall-door. He wept on the stone landing and the tears rolled down his cheeks and dripped on to his stiff white collar.
‘It is a large house,’ Nurse Clock said. ‘I often thought it could be put to greater profit.’
Studdy watched her, easing cigarette smoke through his nostrils, interested in what she said.
‘It is big, certainly.’ He watched the ash fall on to the dark fabric of his overcoat, and then shifted his eyes back to the nurse’s face.
There was a short silence, a stillness that was broken only by Studdy’s smoking. Eventually he said:
‘Have you plans?’
She knew she needed this man’s co-operation. She saw what Mr Bird had been up to. She nodded, and after another silence spoke again.
14
‘I have new responsibilities,’ said Studdy. ‘I may not be around too often, missus.’
‘What’s that, Mr Studdy?’
‘I say I may not be around too often. I have fresh fields to plough–’
‘What’s that?’
Studdy turned the wireless down.
‘I have fresh fields to plough. The Boarding-House takes up a bit of time. It’s hard to make ends meet above there.’
‘I’ve no more money, Mr Studdy.’
‘It’s not that, missus. It’s just I won’t have too much time to be visiting you. I think–’
‘Aren’t you coming again, Mr Studdy? Are you deserting me, is that it?’
‘Ah, not at all, Mrs Maylam.’
‘Nobody comes here now, did you know that? The woman with the dinners hasn’t been since last week. My bed isn’t clean. Did you hear that, Mr Studdy? Are you deserting me?’
‘Nurse Clock will come, missus, to give you the injections. Take the injections, now, that way you’ll get rid of your old trouble.’
‘You were ever on my side, Mr Studdy. You’re letting an old woman down.’
‘Ah no, not at all.’
‘Back to the land, is it? Y
ou’re going out ploughing, are you?’
‘Ah no, Mrs Maylam, that’s only a figure of speech. Will you be all right now?’
‘You’ve sucked me dry, Mr Studdy. There isn’t another penny in me. No wonder you’re going. Get to hell out, now.’
‘That’s no way to talk to a friend. Haven’t I always been a help to you?’
‘Turn on my old radio, Mr Studdy. You’re a bloody philanderer.’
Later, Nurse Clock said:
‘No nonsense now, Mrs Maylam: let’s throw away this filthy old potato. Lift up your skirt like a good girl and I’ll slip in this nice injection.’ And she, whose greatest joy was to keep the elderly alive and alert, dabbed a portion of Mrs Maylam’s eighty-nine-year-old leg with iodine on cotton wool, and jabbed in her needle.
On quiet afternoons he seemed to be everywhere in The Boarding-House: in the rooms upstairs, the private bedrooms and in the public rooms and the basement; in the hall, dim with brown paint, and on the staircase with the carpet that once had been a blaze of light and was now a dark gravy. In the coolness of that hall, as one entered and glanced at the Watts prints and the flights of china geese, one was especially aware of the deceased Mr Bird. The house was not haunted by the ghost of a dead man but by the needling memory of a living one. A stranger in the hall might have felt a vacuum, might have felt perhaps an absence rather than a presence, or a stranger in a hurry might have felt nothing at all.
In the hall there was a mirror that showed Miss Clerricot her face and caught the length of Mr Scribbin as he passed it. In the television lounge there was a wedding photograph that Mr Bird had bought because he thought it a suitable thing to have. So he had said, coming into the television lounge late one night and placing it on a side table, saying he did not know who the people were but that he had bought it, frame and all, for one and sixpence. The frame, he said, was worth a fortune. It had stood there since, reminding Rose Cave that wedding bells had never come her way, and had not come the way of her mother either. It reminded Major Eele of his marriage night, and the nine nights after, although in fact he had not been married in such splendour.
The Boarding-House Page 14