The Underside

by H. R. F. Keating

  But, once having put one topic beyond the magic circle, he began to feel the spell was broken. If one subject was omitted from their sessions of free-spoken thoughts, everything else had to be held up to the test before being introduced. No longer was Arthur Balneal and his uncheckable fecundity matter for mutual joking.

  But his preoccupation was not to go for ever unmentioned between them.

  It was on an evening at the very end of November, an evening turned to darkest night by the fog which had clung to the streets all day, yellow and seeping. Abruptly and quite unexpectedly then Elizabeth chose to refer to it.

  They were seated snugly in the drawing-room. The thick red curtains were carefully drawn. The gaslight’s calm radiance had displaced every foggy particle that might have penetrated the windows. Behind Godfrey’s chair stood the heavy screen that came out only when a particularly unpleasant day sent tiny sneaking currents of cold air in through the very least joins in the window-frames. The fire was glowing with warm cheerfulness.

  And in the midst of a long contented silence Elizabeth spoke.

  ‘Dearest, that notion of yours, it worries you still?’

  He did not need to ask what she meant, though he hesitated an instant wondering whether to pretend he had not understood. But subterfuges of that sort were not possible between them.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, almost immediately. ‘To be entirely frank, I still feel as I did when we last spoke of it.’

  ‘But, my darling, that was almost two months ago.’

  He glanced away.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose it was.’

  ‘And you have been thinking of it all that time?’ Elizabeth was looking steadily across at him. Her lucid grey gaze was hard to bear.

  ‘—I suppose I may have been.’

  ‘Yet you said nothing?’

  ‘What was there to say? What on earth was there to say?’

  ‘Simply that you were thinking of this, my darling. I believed that you told me everything that came into your mind.’

  ‘Well, in this instance there was something that I did not.’

  ‘My dear. But you should, you must.’

  Suddenly he let his pent anger go.

  ‘I must, must I? Cannot a man think a single thought of his own without being compelled to confess to it? As if he were some Romanist?’

  ‘Was it a thought then that had to be “confessed”?’

  ‘No, it was not. Or, if it was, it was only so because the last time the subject was discussed between us you made an unholy to-do about it.’

  ‘A to-do? My dear, we discussed it thoroughly because it merited thorough discussion. You told me, of your own accord, that this idea was worrying you. And I tried, with you, to go into it on a simple scientific basis and show that it did not stand up to examination. I had thought that that was the end of it.’

  ‘Well, it was not.’

  ‘I see that it wasn’t. But, my dear one, it ought to have been. Dearest, we must look at it again. We must ask together why. Why this idea has come to mean so much to you.’

  ‘I neither know nor care.’

  For a moment or two Elizabeth sat stock-still in stunned silence. He had not used such a tone to her once in all the time they had known each other.

  But at the end of that small time-weighty pause she spoke.

  ‘No, let us talk together calmly and clearly. We must not let such a—such a chimera as this come between us.’

  ‘Very well,’ he answered, still somewhat sullen.

  ‘I think I see now where I—where we went astray before. It was not enough simply to show that the idea is based on untenable grounds: we ought to have asked why it was of such apparent importance to you.’

  Godfrey made no reply. The sound of a cab going by in the fog outside, the horse’s hooves clopping out at a cautious walk, echoed strangely and heavily.

  ‘Godfrey? Dearest?’

  He sighed.

  ‘Yes, I suppose we ought to ask why that has been so.’

  ‘Then why? Why, my darling? Why should you be so obsessed by this notion of a child being necessary as a sort of mark of approbation for our marriage?’

  ‘Obsessed? Really now, that is going too far.’

  ‘Is it, my dear? Truly?’

  Her grey eyes were looking at him unbendingly.

  ‘Well, no,’ he admitted at last. ‘No, perhaps “obsessed” is in a way the word.’

  ‘Then we must try to find out what it is that makes you feel this is so important. Dearest, however deep we have to cut.’

  ‘But I do not know. I tell you, Elizabeth, I do not know. The thought is there. There. And that is all to be said about it.’

  ‘No, my dearest. That I cannot believe. There must be a reason why such an irrational idea means so much to you. There must be a reason lying in you somewhere. And, if only we bring a strong enough light to bear, then surely, surely, we will see it.’

  Godfrey raised his hands from the arms of his chair in a gesture of weary despair.

  He saw that they had stumbled quite suddenly on to the very edge of a gaping trap. It was the core of Elizabeth’s creed that there was nothing in life that could not eventually be brought to the light of knowledge, though there might be things that as yet human understanding did not know how to reach to. Her belief he himself had come to accept wholeheartedly. And now abruptly it no longer seemed sufficient. He felt that whatever it was deep in him that had caused to flower in his mind the idea of their marriage being incomplete without the proof of a child did not intend to yield to any surgeon’s knife. And Elizabeth was all surgeon, cutting and exposing. Was this a division of the ways for them then? A long growing apart to come?

  ‘My dear, my dearest one,’ he said, ‘I think we had better not speak of this any more, not at least for tonight.’

  ‘No,’ Elizabeth answered, as he had feared she might. ‘No, we have left it too long already. In the dark it will fester and spread. We must find what it is that has caused this aberration in you.’

  ‘My dearest. No.’

  ‘Yes, Godfrey. I say yes.’

  ‘No.’

  It had taken on in an instant the absurd note of a children’s quarrel. But children’s quarrels, though they may not last long, are more bitter and more inflexible than those of grown men.

  Godfrey stood up, his face stiff with coldness.

  ‘I am sorry, Elizabeth,’ he said. ‘But I am not going to discuss this any further.’

  ‘Godfrey, we must and we shall.’

  ‘We shall not.’

  ‘Godfrey, tell me. Tell me now: what was it that put this idea into your mind? When did it first come? What led to it? Godfrey, answer.’

  ‘No, Elizabeth.’

  ‘What led to it? What?’

  ‘No.’

  He turned vehemently on his heel and walked out of the chill-protected room. In the hall it felt noticeably colder and the fanlight above the front door was thickly misted with the dense fog beyond. He snatched an old wideawake from its place on the hatstand above the rack for hanging brushes—the clothes brushes, the hat brush, the mud brush—and jammed it on to his head. He jerked his heavy coat from its appointed hook, jabbed and shoved his arms into the arm-holes and, disdaining the neatly ranged gloves in the glove-box, he heaved open the door and flung himself out into the night.

  He was unable even to see across the street. The gaslamp some twenty yards down was no more than a dim patch of yellow light in the thick darkness. But he was determined to get as far as he could from the house before Elizabeth decided to come and reason with him and he set off stridingly along the wet pavement forcing himself to make each pace fully long though every sensible instinct urged caution.

  By the time he had reached the lamp-post, coming upon it in a single instant, a glossy wet streak in the enveloping black, he knew that he was already beyond pursuit. He would hardly hear now if Elizabeth opened the door and called or perhaps sent Billy out after him. But he continued
to walk as fast as he could force himself to, taking pleasure in thrusting into the dense cold clinging wet stuff all around him.

  Soon he ceased to know at all where he was, and the thought of being cut off from that everyday piece of knowledge added to the curious feeling of comfort that was growing in him with every forward pace he took.

  He walked on and on, sometimes following the line of a kerbstone, just visible glistening at his feet, sometimes deliberately stepping off into the roadway as into an unknown sea.

  He imagined he was in little danger of being run down. Whatever vehicles had to be out on a night like this were bound to be going at no more than a walking-pace. Indeed, once he followed for what he guessed must be a mile at least an old four-wheeler that was creeping along with some huddled great-coated figure inside and the driver in front no more than an occasionally dimly heard curse or groan. Even the light from its lamps was invisible to him.

  At times he met other ghost figures passing near him, not seeing him at all but making their way through the impenetrable thickness, coughing and with handkerchiefs held to their faces, lonely as if they were crossing a range of far hills. And only once in perhaps two hours’ walking did he abruptly realise where he was.

  He found his way suddenly blocked by tall iron railings. At first he thought it must be some gate, into a churchyard perhaps. But then, moving along, he found the railing continued to stretch away beside him and he came to the conclusion that he must be somewhere at the edge of the Park. Perhaps even he was within a few yards of the spot where more than three years before he had waited for much of a long summer afternoon to see the Bosworth carriage and the young American lady doctor who had written to him so impulsively to tell him her feelings about his picture ‘Torquato Tasso Leaving the City of Ferrara’.

  He smiled in the enveloping soot-reeking dark and felt the moisture on his face gather into heavy drops. Hard to imagine that sunny scene now. Hard to see those brilliant open carriages, those high-stepping horses and all the beau monde that had paraded there so confidently, the twirling of parasols, the tall silk hats bent in respectful attention.

  And the thought of the Park and its wide spaces gave him a sudden determination. He could not enter here but he could walk in Green Park on the other side of Piccadilly which was not shut off. If he followed the line of these railings, with any luck he could guide himself there.

  He set off, trailing his bare fingers along the cold uprights of the railings till he found that he had got to Hyde Park Corner. And there he plunged off hopefully at what he guessed was the right line, blinking his smarting eyes in his efforts to see.

  Though he discerned nothing, before long he found the hard pavements and the cobbled roadways under his feet yielding to soft grass and the occasional looming shape of a massive tree and he felt confident that he had succeeded in hitting on Green Park. He progressed in an entire silence now, going anywhere and totally content to have put himself into such a limbo.

  Would that it could last for ever. Would that the slow choking folds of fog would never blow at last away. Would that daylight would never come. Then he would never have to face the straight lines, the rigid pattern of actions-and-consequences that daylight life required. Then he would never have painfully to dredge up those answers to Elizabeth’s probing persistent questions, answers that he half-guessed could never be brought to light. Then he would never have to resolve the dilemma he had found himself in, the choice between the philosophy she had taught him, that blessed belief that at the last light would show all, and admitting to himself that the happy oneness between them must be coming to an end.

  But already he felt in his face the stirrings of a tiny steady wind. The softly swirling irresponsible fog was beginning to be swept away.

  Soon it was possible to make out around him the shapes of the tall trees. And then it was borne in on him that he was not the only person wandering there. Pillars of thicker darkness, which he had at first taken for bushes or piles of hurdles, became clearly discernible as the vague outlines of human beings. And there were women as well as men, meeting and parting or meeting and slowly walking off together.

  ‘Hello, dear, looking for a feel, are yer?’

  It was the voice of a woman, coarse and harsh. And suddenly she loomed out in front of him from the shadow of the thick trunk of a tree, a ghost-figure in the still fog-scented night.

  ‘What? What? What did you say?’

  She came a couple of steps nearer. It was too dark to make out anything of her features or the details of her dress. But he could see a pale blur of a face looking up at his and the outline of a spreading skirt and what looked like a shawl round the head.

  In the wet darkness she gave a chuckle now, plainly intended to reassure.

  ‘Like a nice feel, dear?’ she repeated. ‘Come on, there’s no one near. Only cost you a bob.’

  But he had well understood what she was asking from the first. Yet he stood beside her unmoving, paralysed. Thoughts tumbled through his head. He ought to repudiate the disgusting creature at once. But he felt, strong as the reek of soot-laden fog had been in his nostrils, a tug of attraction. It was the appeal, he knew, not so much of the drab in front of him now as of all that she embodied, the old thrilling world that he thought he had left behind him for ever. It was, powerful, rank, sudden, almost irresistible, the call of the underside.

  And the underside was now only one foot away. Only the merest easily breakable bubble-skin separated him once more from that other world.

  Only the distance between his hand, held rigidly to his side at this moment, and what it was this creature had offered him under her skirt.

  ‘Come on.’

  She stooped a little suddenly and started to gather up that skirt. He saw below him the two whitish tapering columns of her unstockinged legs. Going up into the blackness above.

  And he reached forward.

  What was he doing? Why was he doing it? He did not want to. And yet, as he felt his fingers penetrating the abundant clogged hair, he did want. He wanted passionately.

  It was childish. Absurd. And yet … It was not even vigorously satisfying, although his prying fingers were now causing him to experience more than a little genital excitement. Yet he wanted this. He wanted it more, he noted with dismay, than the love-making he joined in two or three times a week in his own lawn-sheeted bed though he had felt that as rapture and delight.

  Then his fingers encountered a sticky wetness that for a moment mystified him, then briefly horrified him, but almost at once flooded him with an overpowering fascination.

  ‘You’re not clean,’ he said.

  ‘’Course I ain’t. I just been stroked.’

  ‘You have?’

  But he knew that she had. The realisation that some unknown man had spent there, and not long before, had been what had sent the blood racing in him.

  ‘’Course I been stroked. An’ may be yer’d like to do it too? Yer can fer a bob or two more.’

  Yes, this was what he wanted, needed, must and would have. This world. The underside.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Yet Godfrey, for all that he felt committed once again to the rich and fertile dark side of life, found the constraints he had re-learnt in the time he had lived solely in the aspiring world were still strong. Fears that he had once overcome had reasserted themselves. Even in the first beating flush of his excitement at contact with the fog-emerging creature who had accosted him he recognised that prudence was still too engrained in him to allow him to pursue the encounter to the end which the drab had proposed.

  Instead, while his hand was yet prying and feeling and keeping him cord-attached to the underside, he began engaging the night-creature in alienating conversation.

  ‘Is it often that you come here?’ he asked. ‘What are you doing here on a night like this?’

  ‘Why, tonight’s as good as any other. You’re glad enough I’m ’ere, ain’t yer?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’r />
  The voice enacted the rôle of gentleman, cool and detached. The groping fingers enacted another rôle, petty and prying and passionate.

  ‘Then give us yer shilling. Give us more. I’m a poor woman.’

  Godfrey withdrew his hand with sharp abruptness. He found, quickly as he could, a few silver coins and thrust them towards the creature in front of him. She took them scrabblingly and he saw her holding them up, finding out how much she had got.

  ‘But why here?’ he asked, wanting to rush away, yet still unable to go. ‘Surely even on a night like this you’d do better to be underneath a streetlamp?’

  A coarse laugh greeted this.

  ‘Lor, you ain’t seen me, that’s certain. Ain’t seen me face.’

  ‘Well, no, I suppose I have not. Why?’

  ‘’Cos it ain’t much of a face, and that’s a fac’. Lost me nose I did. Got it cut away in an accident when I was a kitchenmaid a good many year ago now. ‘Course I couldn’t get no work arter that.’

  Godfrey, in the still clinging darkness, imagined the face that would be leering up into his. He imagined too the body beneath it, scrawny, aged and dirty. The body with which his hand had until a moment before been in the most intimate contact. And joy abruptly flooded his veins again.

  The woman he had encountered at a coffee-stall one night after leaving Lisa. That haggish disgusting creature. She had boasted that there were men who preferred her to all the charms of the most doll-like whores to be got. Now he understood.

  Now he understood why there were people who went to the parks at night. He had heard Captain Harnett say at the club once that there were on some evenings as many as a thousand men to be found on the hunt here in Green Park and in Hyde Park before the gates were shut. He had thought then it could not be possible. He had thought, in his days of innocence, that only the merest handful of the most depraved could want to pursue the disgusting practices Harnett had cheerfully enumerated. But now he knew.