England's Lane

by Joseph Connolly

  And Jim’s stocking—because I do always make one up for him, isn’t it perfectly silly?—that’s nearly done now too. I’ve got the socks and hankies (John Barnes) and a pack of playing cards which he probably will never use but they’d got on the backs a picture of a budgerigar which does look a little bit like Cyril, and you know how you can get quite desperate for any new little ideas, and they were only half-a-crown. But I haven’t yet been able to buy the special Christmas box of a hundred Senior Service that I always get for him because, well—Stan isn’t open, of course: but Sally has just told me that she’s going to be there in the morning, so I can get them then (that is if she hasn’t yet pulverized the entire stock of the shop). And then I’ll round it off with the customary clementine. Normally I’ll trim the stockings with little sprigs of berried holly that I cut from this great and overgrown thicket of it that I discovered on the Heath—but this year, honestly, I just haven’t had a moment to get up there. I used so much to enjoy those rambles on the Heath—and Hampstead Village too: rather smarter than England’s Lane and so full of charm, if occasionally just a little bit too, um … I think they call it bohemian, don’t they? You do see some terribly intense young men and women wearing heavily framed spectacles and duffel coats, all striding about rather purposefully and boldly brandishing Penguin books as if they were weapons. I sometimes would sit outside The Coffee Cup in the High Street, watching the world go by and feeling dreadfully fuddy-duddy for only drinking tea.

  The frock I am wearing for the party is quite a nice navy shantung—full skirt, and a neat little Peter Pan collar of plum velvet, with cuffs of the same material at the three-quarter sleeves: soon, I expect, I shan’t be able to get into it, for the belted waist is really rather nipped-in. It was the very last thing I ever acquired from the beastly tallyman, and I’ve never before worn it. I shall not see him again, that very vulgar and abusive little man—now that is a Christmas present, if ever there was one! I must be very dull, you know, for it had taken me rather a long while to comprehend that of course it is not the intention of such people that ever one should be rid of the shadow of debt—and should you come to approach such a state, well then you are first cajoled and subsequently bullied into pledging more and yet more in order to maintain a deliberately unsupportable level of liability. So upon the last occasion that he called—having firmly refused to allow him even to open his case of samples, much to his evident disgruntlement—I asked him quite coldly to write upon a piece of paper the entire extent of my accumulated folly. I tried not to intake my breath too audibly as I focused upon the figure, and then—I hope with a steady hand—I paid the man in full, and insisted upon a stamped and dated receipt. He was shocked—I imagine he has never before encountered such behavior. His greedy pleasure in handling the notes was tempered by the realization that the matter was at an end: that I was free of him for good.

  And yes, it had pained me … to part with the necklace and earring set that once had belonged to my mother, and whose pearls and tiny emeralds Eunice had carried off to such very great effect. But they were hardly my style—and wherever should I have worn them? The Westminster Bank? John Barnes? The Dairies …? I hardly think so. There is an evil little shop in Chalk Farm where such covert transactions may be carried out—Jim, he has termed it in the past “the nest of Yids”—and I can only hope that the price obtained from the bent-over and somehow deplorable man there was a reasonably fair one. I anyway accepted it without demur, so eager was I by then to be away from the place. As he scooped in eagerly the jewelry and paid me quickly, however, I suspected that I had been rooked. Oh well—no matter. For now I have cast off the unimaginable weight of the millstone of debt—and I feel quite severed too from the being who was unstoppably propelled into the spiral of vanity and irresponsibility that so very nearly was my undoing. And with the money I had left over I have not just paid for all of Paul and Anthony’s presents, but also from John Barnes I bought a very smart blazer for Jim: brass buttons and a paisley lining—he has never possessed such a thing, and I gave it to him this morning. Selfish of me in one way—I just couldn’t have him coming to the party in that perfectly hideous old jacket which he habitually wears. And I also gave him a tie—dark blue to tone with the blazer, and a fetching diagonal stripe in a paler blue and almost a saffron yellow. With his best white shirt which I’ve freshly ironed for him, he ought to be fairly presentable: while he’s sitting down, at least—for his trousers, well … they surpass all understanding. And I rounded off my Christmas spree with a gift box of Bronnley Lemon bath cubes and talcum for Edie, and for Gwendoline I bought from Moore’s a Basildon Bond writing set—pad, envelopes, notelets and blotting paper in a rather attractive deep-green leatherette case with a zip fastener: the rather well fitted-out interior incorporates a loop that will happily accommodate a fountain pen, and also little pockets for stamps and space for an eraser. I feel sure she will appreciate it because she corresponds quite regularly with her two sisters in Bournemouth, as well as her cousin who is, I believe, somewhere in the north.

  The staff of the library are loitering in clusters of twos and threes, all seemingly intent upon the parquet floor and eating rather a lot of cheese footballs. They appear either to be rather old ladies in twinsets and sensible lace-up shoes that survived the very worst that the Blitz could throw at them—their white hair in buns, and bristling with grips—or else lanky and very shy young men, generally ugly and apparently quite mortifyingly sincere, who are glancing rather longingly at the bottles of cheer being currently opened by that newish young lady from Victoria Wine. And oh look … Mr. and Mrs. Bona have arrived. And yes I am aware that their real name is in fact, um … what is it again? Schmidt, I think—but still I know I’ll always think of them as Mr. and Mrs. Bona: silly, isn’t it? And dear old Mr. Levy is doing his pitiable best to usher in Mrs. Dent upon his arm, look … with her feet turned in almost on to their very edges, and wearing a pair of what appear to be the most extraordinary sort of grotesquely misshapen and patent bootees, poor thing—and Mr. Levy, he’s none too steady himself. Mr. Lawrence the newsagent—clearly relieved that this year his papers and magazines are quite safe from damage. Edie—and she’ll be so annoyed with herself once she realizes she has forgotten to take off her pinny—with Gwendoline, and having a good old natter: never stop chattering, those two, once they get together. Miss Jenkins handing a small glass of sherry to Mrs. Jenkins who, following her exertions with the decorations, is enjoying a much-deserved rest in an armchair: they smile to each other so sweetly. Sally proudly standing sentry by her large and thickly iced Christmas cake with its forest of little fir trees, its top-hatted snowmen with red scarves and black buttons … while valiantly resisting devouring it whole. Oh and here’s my Paul …! Aaah …! He does look nice, doesn’t he? Makes me so proud. And little Anthony—his usual quite eager, though unreadable expression, and already looking around for a chair and somewhere to prop his crutches, little fellow. Well … all right then, Milly—I rather think that finally the party is getting under way. And now … oh yes—in she strides, in the manner of a general come to inspect the regiment: Mrs. Goodrich, alone and unconquerable—for I don’t think Mr. Goodrich ever is actually permitted to leave the house—and I don’t know if that was intended to be a smile of greeting toward me, but certainly I can see in it only the customary superior and contemptuous disdain: I think it can be the only way she obtains her pleasures. Doreen has put on some sort of a record, but it’s awfully tinny and distant: Lord, though—let’s just wait until the group strikes up …! That’ll give Mrs. Goodrich something fresh to deplore. And now here’s Reg from the Washington, and that unspeakable Charlie person: I don’t think I’ve ever seen him when he’s not drunk—quite as he is now—and Lord, he’s only just arrived …! Straight across to the Bass and whisky, of course. And so therefore Jim, I imagine, can hardly be far behind. Oh yes—here he comes now … oh my heavens, and at the same time as one of the negroes as well: Kelso, his name is, wh
ich I only quite recently discovered—he’s the nice one, the one with the irrepressible smile … lots of pink gums, and simply acres of teeth. The other (who isn’t here, for certainly you could hardly miss him if he were), he is called Obi, and I rather think everyone is terribly fearful of him. Children in particular, I have heard, will cross the road in order to avoid him—and I do have to agree that his hooded eyes, his scowling presence and highly intimidating bearing do come to rather epitomize the cannibal demon of legend, who gorges upon innocents and missionaries who hoped for something better. And now I can hear Jim’s voice booming … something about Cadbury’s Cocoa, and although dear Kelso appears to be thoroughly happy about it, more than that I truly do not care to know. And oh my heavens …! Oh really! Oh no! That is just too bad of him …! Jim—he is actually wearing his perfectly hideous old jacket …! After all my trouble and expense—I simply can’t believe it. Oh really—I just give up. What on earth can be wrong with the man …?

  Oh look: young Amanda. How very devastatingly pretty she is, and what a beautiful little dress. Paul, he will just be so very desperately sad when eventually she … when eventually they … leave England’s Lane. And along comes Paul now—eyes so bright, ignoring me completely and practically running toward her. While standing just behind and a little away from Amanda … there is her father. I have been striving not to wonder whether he would come, while ruthlessly smothering all anticipation. And now that he is here … gaiety has abandoned me, and I deeply resent the kick to my heart.

  I see myself now to be the deserving victim of my own complacency: I should have been alive to the prick of unease from the very first moment when I began to feel easy. For how many years in this accursed little street have I been guarded, watchful—judicious and justifiably apprehensive? How could I have failed to be aware of the rinsing of my wisdom away into a sluice? To have been so foolish as to have imagined that at last my sentence had been served, my ponderous punishment finally to be up? For this has been a day … just this one day has indeed proved to be fateful.

  Though it began, as all the dull, wondrous or very most terrible days habitually will, quite perfectly normally. For never do we know. Here is at once the single most thrilling and quite chillingly terrifying factor of life: never do we know. Why we continue, of course—hoping in earnest that bad will never come, aspiring the while to splendor. Always I recall a small and indistinct photograph which long ago I happened upon in a newspaper: the sodden and deadweight body of a drowned man, lugged by frogmen from the frozen lake beneath whose icy waters he had perished in his doubtless noble, though ultimately quite laughably stupid attempt to rescue a stranger’s mongrel. I should have thought nothing of it, save for a detail that abides within me forever: the watch. His wrists were dangling like two bent-over and sappy stems, and from one there glinted in the weak winter sunlight the bezel of his watch. His watch, which that very morning—once he had dressed, attended to his toilet, breakfasted … conceivably bestowed a kiss upon a loved one … he had strapped on to himself, quite as always he had done—though, unwittingly, for the very last time ever. Never do we know, you see. We must of course assume that any given dinner date, say … a summer holiday … Christmas itself … we must, we are compelled to assume that every such event actually will take place, and quite as anticipated, or else we might go mad. Because while knowing would derange us, unknowing can be quite as destabilizing. We collaborate in our conviction that a thing is certain, though all is based upon prayer and an unthinking presumption. Gamblers revel in the wanton caprice of the rolling die, while the rest of us are forced unwillingly to play, having not the slightest notion even of so much as the nature of the game. Though as to its outcome, our instinct is true: we lose. Of course. No matter the twists along the way—setback followed by jubilation, fluke superseded by flashes of art, pitfall, windfall, the inevitable tumbles and then such breathtaking escalation … in the end, we lose: every life can end only in failure, because at base it is all we have, it is all we are … and then it disappears. For some—possibly the fortunate few—that end will come with literal death. For such as myself, it arrives of a sudden, and devastatingly, when still there remains simply an eternity of nothingness, spiked by terror, all of which yet I somehow must endure.

  Of course I had not wished even momentarily to be seen at this gaudy little annual beanfeast: a few I have attended briefly, while others I have successfully circumvented by means of some or other only very vaguely plausible pretext. This year, however, I was quite determined to shun it. I had been premature in informing Fiona that it was my intention that soon we should as a family quit this place (puerile behavior on my part—I was eager to witness her rapture) and further had failed to caution her not yet to apprise Amanda of any such possibility, for then I knew—children being children—that the Lane would be alive to it in practically no time. So it has proved—and therefore of course I was anxious to sidestep all of the horribly inevitable, not to say excruciatingly tedious questioning as to oh why, oh when, oh where … prattling, meddling and gossipy empty-headed fools that they all of them are. And then would come the whispered requests for assurance that still my premises will remain as a butcher—as if I genuinely could give a tinker’s damn in hell as to whatever it became, once I was away from it for good. I would sell at the highest price, and once I am gone for all I cared the shop could become anything from a rorty gin palace to a stinking glue factory, by way of a neon and sadomasochistic brothel.

  And then also a matter of consideration, of course … there was Milly. The idiot child Doreen, simply I could snub … but Milly was rather a different concern. For it is not, after all, as if I dislike the woman, you see—oh no, quite to the contrary: I do find her really very personable. And had it been possible for things to have continued in the manner that rather blissfully, if briefly, they hitherto had been conducted … well then: all well and good. But alas, never can a simple affair manage to endure upon so agreeably even a keel. For any woman, eventually, she will of course want more—and never is there more—or else the glow of her pleasure must needs be outshone by the sudden and therefore astonishing dazzle that calls itself many things, though seldom is any more than merely bourgeois guilt; or the fear of discovery, and subsequent shame. This was not true of Milly, however—always she was rather better than that—but simply I became wary, just a little bored, and naturally shy of the declamations to come. And so one way or the other, such a thing will wither … a truth that never has disturbed me: it is not just the natural way of it, but a welcome detonation—a fond farewell, this quickly succeeded by a warm and cheery hello to something other, and altogether fresh. As, indeed, has been quite the way of it: a charming lady whom I encountered in a coffee bar in St. John’s Wood High Street—her name is Alicia, which I imagine to be fairly uncommon. She is some or other variety of press editor—features, conceivably—engaged by our local newspaper, the Hampstead & Highgate Express; I hardly ever see the thing, though I considered it rude to say so. She is articulate, slyly amusing, strikingly curvaceous and has about her an enticement, an air of curiosity: here is a more than adequate foundation.

  But it was Amanda, you see. Fiona, perfectly naturally, had not the slightest intention of gracing this annual gimcrack embarrassment, into which the remainder of the Lane collectively and so very wholeheartedly will throw itself—and I hold in warm admiration her absolute carelessness for whatever this motley of her social inferiors might eventually think, say or do about that. But it was dear little Amanda, you see—so excited by her extremely pretty new dress, though she had made it quite clear to me that she didn’t at all care to go there alone. I divined that it was not the very short walk that was concerning her so much as her subsequent and solitary entrance: she is of the age when a childish shyness vies for precedence with a new and far bolder pride in her appearance, this still tempered, however, by the need for parental endorsement: my heart was full when I saw it. So I determined to escort her to the library, quit
e as she wished, whereupon I should incline my head to the assembled throng, and then immediately escape to Prince Arthur Road, where Alicia has rather a comfortable and alluring … what you might easily term bachelor flatlet, I suppose, snug beneath the eaves of a handsome and substantial Victorian corner building. And here is precisely what happened: Doreen, the silly little thing, failed even to see me, so enrapt did she appear to be with a collection of musical instruments, each of which harbored a fearful potential, in addition to, seemingly, a reincarnated scarecrow. I then had to make perfectly sure that at the moment when there sprang into Milly’s eye, as inescapably there would, that sudden light of something I did not at all care to interpret … that then I should at once very closely be appreciating the intricacy of the molding within the library’s cornices, high above the ghastliness of all those raggedy paper chains, while actively retreating. And so it all quite satisfyingly came to pass: then I was gone.