The Boarding-House

by William Trevor

  ‘What is going on?’ she asked Rose Cave.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What is going on? The house is up for sale, is it?’

  Rose Cave told her what she knew, which was not much but seemed enough for Mrs Slape.

  Rose Cave read about the man in Tel-Aviv who had turned upon a dog, because, he said, the dog had chased his daughter. She was a keen reader of such details, on the bus that carried her to her work, and later in her lunch-hour. The owner of the dog, she learnt, planned legal action against the biting man. She did not find it amusing really, though she read with interest the news about the man in Cumberland who had formed a society for the preservation of the house-fly. She thought about that for a while, wondering if there was a reason good enough for taking trouble over house-flies. Privately she thought not, but reserved judgement because the report in the newspaper was brief.

  Rose Cave was worried in two ways. She deplored the end of The Boarding-House; as well, she felt that justice was at stake. Mr Bird had been clear in his wishes, as expressed through the will he had taken the trouble to leave behind: he had intended The Boarding-House to continue in the same manner, with the same people living there. That much was clear to Rose Cave, as it was to all who were now affected. But no one knew that before he died, an hour or so before the end, Mr Bird had visualized The Boarding-House as it would be after his time. He saw a well-run house safe in the care of his two chosen champions, with all its inmates intact and present, a monument to himself. He dozed awhile in peace, and then, awake, he imagined for a moment that he had died and that The Boarding-House was dying too. He thought that someone asked him a question, seeking an explanation for his motives and his planning. He heard himself laughing in reply, the same soft sound, like water moving, and he said aloud: ‘I built that I might destroy.’ Nurse Clock had looked up from her magazine and told him to take it easy.

  Rose Cave knew nothing of this. She reflected on people turned away from a home: Mr Obd, lonely and distressed, as increasingly he was nowadays, forced to flee to some other place to lay down his head. It was not, she knew, always easy for coloured people. She had read of cases in which Africans or West Indians had been glad to take rooms which were infested with mice or even worse. Mr Obd would suffer insults and rejections, he would feel the white world had turned against him. She thought of Major Eele, a man who was often absurd and cruel in his baiting of others, a man who now might be exposed to baiting and cruelty himself. There was a niche for him here: he had his place, his own chair in the television lounge. Some new abode, among people who were not prepared to honour his eccentricities, would not be the end of the world for Major Eele, but it would not be easy to accept either. The Boarding-House was an ordinary enough establishment, but the devil one knew, reflected Rose Cave, was still preferable to the other one.

  When she had thought about Mr Scribbin and Miss Clerricot and Venables, her mind turned to herself. But somehow she could not focus it on the future, perhaps because it simply did not wish to move in that direction. It strayed into the past, needling its way back to the bungalow in Ewell, throwing up scenes from childhood. ‘Look, Mummy,’ she had said when she was three. ‘Look, I can touch the lavatory paper.’ Her mother had come to see and had nodded absently over this new milestone, the child reaching up with the tips of her fingers, achieving something that delighted her.

  Few people had ever come to the bungalow in Ewell. A clergyman used to call now and again, and an elderly woman who had a connexion with the sale of November poppies for the British Legion. Once, one Saturday afternoon, a man had called around, descending from the seat of a motor-cycle and walking up the short, red-tiled path to the front door with his goggles still covering his eyes. She had seen him from the sitting-room window. ‘A man is coming,’ she said, and her mother had looked up quickly from something she was reading by the fire. ‘A man has got off a motor-bike,’ Rose Cave had said, ‘with goggles on his face.’ ‘My God!’ remarked her mother, standing up and crossing the room quickly. ‘Go and play in the kitchen, Rose.’ The bell had sounded, and her mother, a hand to her hair, had gone to the door and allowed the goggled person to enter the hall and then the sitting-room.

  ‘Not dead,’ her mother often had explained about the man who had been her father. ‘Not dead, Rose; it is just that he does not choose to live here with us.’ And when she questioned that she was told that one day she would understand it better.

  In the kitchen she took out baking-tins and strainers and played for a while, talking to a doll in the window-sill, arranging the cooking things on the kitchen table. She was six at the time; already she could hear herself saying one day soon at school: ‘My father came in off his motor-bike and is not ever going away again, because he likes our house and wants to stay.’ Someone, probably Elsie Troop, the girl who said she’d seen the King, would say at once: ‘It’s only a bungalow.’ Elsie Troop said that invariably; she had said it so often that some of the others were beginning to say it too. But as she played with the baking-tins and the strainers she didn’t mind at all what Elsie Troop might say. She tiptoed into the hall and peered through the coloured glass in the hall-door to see if she could catch a glimpse of the motor-cycle. She heard the subdued tones of her mother and the man as she tiptoed back to the kitchen.

  Later her mother came out to make tea. She carried a tray back to the sitting-room, murmuring to herself in agitation, her face flushed, commenting that all there was was a pound of Lincoln Creams. ‘May I have tea in there?’ Rose Cave had asked, knowing through intuition that she would not be allowed this. Her mother did not reply, but poured milk into a mug and gave her a slice of bread and a Lincoln Cream, and told her to be good.

  ‘Is that my dad?’ she asked afterwards. ‘Who?’ said her mother. ‘Was the man on the motor-bike?’ But her mother shook her head, laughing a little. ‘Do not say dad, Rose. Say father – if you have to say it at all. The gentleman is just a friend.’ But Rose knew that this was not wholly true, because her mother did not go in for having friends. ‘Is he going to come again, on his motor-bike?’ Her mother said yes, she rather thought he was, and hurried away to wash and dry the tea things.

  The following Saturday the motor-cycle had drawn up again and the man had walked up the red-tiled path with his goggles on. ‘Go and play in the kitchen. Rose,’ her mother said, but afterwards, after tea, Rose had been called into the sitting-room and had seen a tall, smiling man with a pipe in his mouth. His goggles were on the arm of a chair. ‘I have a present for you,’ the man said and took a bag of Fox’s Glacier Mints from his pocket. Her mother said to thank him, calling him Mr Mattock. ‘Thank you, Mr Mattock,’ said Rose Cave, curtsying as she had been taught at school. ‘Sweet,’ said Mr Mattock.

  When Mr Mattock had gone, strapping the goggles around his head and buttoning himself into an enormous coat, she had thought about him for a while. The smell of his pipe still lingered in the sitting-room and in the hall, which made it easier for her to carry the image of a man sitting down in her mother’s arm-chair, his long legs stretched out on the hearth-rug, smoke enveloping his head, coming out of his mouth and, as far as she could see, his nose. ‘What a funny man,’ Rose Cave said, to see how her mother would reply. ‘Funny, Rose?’ She said she thought it funny to make so much smoke; she said he looked funny in his goggles. But her mother had not seemed to agree. ‘I think Mr Mattock is a very nice man; a wonderful father for some lucky little girl.’

  Her mother speaking in this vein reminded her of Elsie Troop. ‘My dad put me on his shoulder so I could see all the better,’ Elsie Troop would repeat; ‘and when the King went by we heard him say: “Who is that pretty little thing on that gentleman’s shoulder?” Rose Cave hasn’t even got a dad.’

  ‘Wonderful father?’ she asked. ‘Whatever do you mean, Mummy?’ Her mother said nothing more, but the atmosphere was as thick with her mother’s thoughts as it was with Mr Mattock’s smoke, and in a rudimentary way Rose Cave was aware of t
he contents of her mother’s mind. ‘Shall Mr Mattock call again?’ she asked. ‘Next Saturday?’ Her mother said he would, and added, laughing, that it was getting to be a Saturday thing with Mr Mattock. ‘Yes, he shall come again,’ she said; but in fact, and for a reason that had always remained mysterious, he hadn’t.

  ‘Poor Mother,’ Rose Cave would say later in her life, throwing an arm about a pair of thin shoulders and thinking of Mr Mattock on his motor-cycle, Mr Mattock who had seemed so foreign in the feminine bungalow, with his goggles and his belching smoke.

  As always. Rose Cave had not intended to become involved like this with her own past and with the past of her dead mother. She had wished to think of some practical course of action, some way of combating the machinations of Nurse Clock and Studdy or, failing that, the consideration of some provision for her own future living arrangements. ‘We must go in a body and beard them,’ she said to herself. ‘The whole thing must be laid bare.’ But she did not, even with this quite sound suggestion fresh in her mind, feel sanguine about the outcome. It seemed to Rose Cave that the die was already cast: the unlikely alliance was made of a stern fibre; indeed, it gathered its strength from its very unlikeliness. They, the residents, had been dilatory; the others were clearly well ahead, things were moving. The fabric of The Boarding-House was under attack, she felt that in her bones. ‘I could see a solicitor,’ said Rose Cave on a bus, and opened her Daily Express.

  ‘Miss Cave could be useful,’ said Nurse Clock. ‘I wonder would she take a small salary for full-time duties, or agree to her keep in lieu of wages? Pin money should see her through.’

  ‘Miss Cave has no experience in the wide world.’

  ‘What experience is needed,’ Nurse Clock argued, ‘for wheeling them around in a bath-chair, or putting a blanket on their poor old legs?’

  Studdy shrugged, stating in this silent way that he agreed: he saw at once that no experience was necessary for wheeling about the aged or tucking them up with a blanket. ‘I have a plasterer coming this morning,’ he reported, ‘to repair the ceiling in Mr Bird’s attic. We can save that ceiling if we act pronto.’

  ‘A stitch in time,’ said Nurse Clock in a rumbustious way. ‘But take care with Mrs Slape now. You upset her, you know, saying you wanted more fish served.’

  For a moment Studdy wished for the days gone by, for the time when the hatred was ripe and uncomplicated between this woman and himself, when he had carried the small weapon in his lapel and had persuaded her patients to wear a potato. Then he remembered the vision he awoke with in the mornings: the old and the senile dying fast in his boarding-house. Studdy saw silver-backed hair-brushes brought in The Boarding-House in a ninety-year-old’s luggage, and brooches and ear-rings and small inlaid boxes filled to the brim with interesting letters. He saw himself in room after room, shaking his head over their little radios, saying that something was just a trifle wrong, that the radio would have to go in for a few days’ repairs. He saw unhurried games of cards with old soldiers who had forgotten the title of their regiments, with clergymen and men who once had been men of business. He saw small sums of money thrown idly on the green baize, winking at him.

  20

  Mr Scribbin took off his shoes and placed them beside his bed. He clad his feet in slippers of fawn felt and found the change agreeable. It was gloomy in his room because he wished it to be so. In the dimness with his slippers on he was conscious of a certain peace, a peace that was complete for Mr Scribbin when the room was filled with the echo of wheels moving fast on rails, or the sounds of shunting and escaping steam.

  He placed a record on his turn-table and sat in a wicker chair. It was dawn near Riccarton Junction; owls hooted far away, a light wind rustled the trees. Mr Scribbin shivered, feeling that light wind to be chill. He could hear the distant whistle of a V.2 with a freight as it approached the mouth of a tunnel. Then the rumble began, a harsh whisper at first, deadening the sounds of nature.

  Mr Scribbin rose and increased the volume. The train crashed through the room, the sound bounced from wall to wall, the rhythmic roar of fast spinning wheels dominated his whole consciousness. Entranced, he returned to the wicker chair.

  The train burst from the tunnel, gathered fresh momentum, and sped into the dawn. A curlew cried once in the remaining silence, and knuckles struck the panelled wood of Mr Scribbin’s door.

  ‘Mr Scribbin dear, we cannot have all this,’ said Nurse Clock. ‘We are all at the end of our tethers, losing sleep and peace of mind because of trains that rattle through our little boarding-house.’

  ‘What?’ asked Mr Scribbin.

  ‘It is really better that you seek another place, with better insulation.’

  ‘Insulation, Nurse Clock? I’m sorry, what are you talking about?’

  The needle of the gramophone moved on to the next section of the record. A V.2 steamed placidly in Steele Road station.

  ‘Please turn that off, Mr Scribbin. You and I must have a little chat.’ Nurse Clock smiled and came further into the room. She sat on the edge of Mr Scribbin’s bed. ‘A little chat,’ she repeated, smiling more broadly, trying to put him at his ease and make him see that what she said was for the best.

  ‘What is the matter?’

  ‘Nothing at all. Nothing is the matter except that there have been so many complaints about these trains. Our friends are kept awake at nights. There was a nice play on the television just now that you couldn’t hear a word of.’

  Mr Scribbin’s ragged head sank on to his chest. ‘I’m sorry about the noise,’ he said. ‘I get carried away. I am interested in trains.’

  ‘Don’t we all know that?’ Her teeth were displayed generously. She was making a joke of it, softening the blow. ‘So you see,’she said.

  Mr Scribbin raised his head and shook it. His eyes looked larger and sadder in the gloom. His long fingers were clasped together.

  ‘Let’s have a little light on the subject,’ said Nurse Clock, and rose and snapped on the electric light and then pulled over the curtains.

  ‘Now I can see you.’ She spoke almost flirtatiously, but Mr Scribbin did not notice.

  ‘What is the matter apart from the noise? I am sorry I interfered with the television play. I did not realize.’

  ‘I’m sorry to say, old boy, there have been complaints all along. People have come to me and to Mr Studdy and announced that they could not sleep at nights because trains were coursing through the house. That can be distracting, you know.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr. Scribbin, and then he had an idea. ‘Supposing I moved to Mr Bird’s old room? It is way up at the very top, no one would hear a thing. That should solve the problem, Nurse Clock.’ He shot up his eyebrows, widening and rounding his eyes, presenting her with this questioning countenance. He was pleased that he had thought of the move himself and showed his pleasure by adding a smile to his face. He saw nothing wrong with Nurse Clock. It was funny, though, the way she had called him old boy: that was more a term between men. Was it, he wondered, some new fashion for women to use it, some expression of friendliness or endearment?

  ‘No,’ Nurse Clock snapped briskly. ‘That would not do at all.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We have other plans for Mr Bird’s old room. We cannot switch you about, just because you have a whim for it. You must be reasonable now: if we did it for you we’d have to do it for everyone. The house would be a bedlam.’

  ‘What are you saying to me then?’

  ‘I have said it.’ She was becoming a little impatient. She did not see why this miserable man should not accept his fate as fate was being accepted every day of the year by millions of others, the homeless, the refugees. What on earth was all the fuss about? London was full of houses with rooms to let.

  ‘There are many nice places, a lot of them more convenient than here. There are places with huge big rooms where you can play your trains for weeks on end and nobody would ever know.’

  ‘But Mr Bird–’

  ‘
He is dead.’

  ‘In his will he laid it down that we should go only voluntarily–’

  Nurse Clock laughed. ‘That was far from legal. You cannot make stipulations like that in a will. Provisions like that aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.’

  ‘I have my rights,’ said Mr Scribbin, more to himself than to Nurse Clock. He revised his opinion of her; he recalled she had attempted to make off with his clothes in that casual manner, or at least had played some part in their thwarted conveyance to foreigners; he saw a glint in her eye as she spoke to him now, a glint that seemed like evidence of ruthlessness.

  He did not know anything about her, except that apparently she and Mr Studdy had tried to send off Major Eele as well. He remembered what Major Eele had said.

  ‘Compensation?.What about that?’

  ‘Now, now, my dear, you really do not understand. It is you who should be compensating us, the trouble you’re causing these days. I assure you, I have had it on my mind, the way you carried on with Mrs Trine. Did it not occur to you that Mrs Trine must have been shocked out of her wits to have witnessed such scenes? How selfish, Mr Scribbin; whatever can Mrs Trine have thought of us? And then the everlasting puffing and rattling that comes out of this room. I must tell you now, though it hurts me to say it, Mrs Trine asked me quietly if you were in your right mind.’

  Mr Scribbin looked alarmed, and then puzzled. ‘Who is Mrs Trine?’ he asked.

  Nurse Clock jumped to her feet. ‘You know full well who Mrs Trine is. You met Mrs Trine and argued with her and led her a long dance in the hall. Mrs Trine is important in the locality, Mr Scribbin, as most certainly you are aware.’

  But he was not aware of this, though by now he had guessed that Mrs Trine must have been the woman who had come after his clothes.

  ‘I could not let my things go like that,’ he protested. ‘I have not got so many that I can spare–’

  ‘That’s meanness,’ cried Nurse Clock. ‘That’s downright meanness, Mr Scribbin: you should be ashamed of yourself. People are starving. People have no rags to their backs–’