The Underside

by H. R. F. Keating

  Nor did it take him long to hit on the reason for her absence. Plainly the fly-paper king’s revenge was to be more prolonged than his mere sending of the little old paper-gatherer to interrupt them the night before. A couple of thick-necked bully boys would have been sent to Mary to warn her from St Giles. To thwart such a letch as he plainly possessed would be, in the greasy-coated king’s eyes, an admirable punishment for impertinence.

  But Mary’s disappearance could not last for ever. Oh, whores were murdered. But they were murdered for good reason and all that Mary had done was to assist unwittingly in the insulting of the monarch. Banishment only was the reward for that, as the history books from Roman times onwards bore witness.

  No, his deep-circling plunge with her in that little paper-strewn chamber had been a fat cheque taken out on the underside. Circumstances now were preventing him cashing it. But there was a bank that would not fail.

  And besides more time to regulate his finances, to secure for himself the maximum sum in negotiable gold for the life that lay ahead, would be welcome. It had seemed when he had visited his stockbroker earlier in the day that at least a week or ten days would be necessary if matters were to be arranged to even reasonable advantage. Well, he would have them. He would live at home in exactly his usual way until the moment came. Then the trap in the stage-floor could be released in an instant. But until then everything would be as usual.

  With one exception. Though he would live the life of the land of rules and arrangements to the letter, he could not betray the underside to which he now belonged body and soul in that one area where the frontiers of each territory so delicately touched. However long it proved that he had to stay at home he would not make love to Elizabeth.

  Or, as he came to see within a few nights of this period, he would not allow her to make love to him.

  After neither of them had made any move on one night and after on the next he had deliberately misinterpreted the way she had pressed against him under the layered blankets, on the third night Elizabeth, as was her way, brought the subject into the open.

  ‘Godfrey,’ she said, some moments after he had turned his back on her. ‘Dearest, please.’

  ‘What— What is it?’ he said, feigning to be half-asleep and not to have understood. And knowing that the pretence would be useless.

  ‘Godfrey dearest, I want you.’

  He did not answer for a little.

  ‘Dearest?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I know, my dear.’

  Once again he tried lying in silence in the darkness, which, since they never had a fire in the room unless one of them was ill, was very dense. He could hear the thin ticking of his watch on the table next to the bed. But there was no sound or movement from Elizabeth that might indicate she had abandoned her wait for his answer. Not the least creak from the mattress or noise from her almost-held breath.

  ‘Godfrey,’ she broke out at last. ‘What is it? I scarcely expected after so long to have to put forward my rights.’

  ‘Your rights?’ he said, startled.

  ‘Yes. Do I not have them as much as you?’

  ‘Why, yes, I suppose so. Yes, you must.’

  But again he retreated into silence. And again she spoke.

  ‘Dearest, I must ask once more: what is wrong?’

  He pushed himself up on one elbow and leant down looking towards the place where she lay.

  ‘My dear, I am sorry,’ he said. ‘But not now. Simply not. I cannot explain why. Except to say that, of course, it is no fault or blame of yours. But no, my dear, no.’

  ‘Very well.’

  And she lay then in a silence equal to his.

  He suspected it was a long time before she went to sleep. And he was awake to know. There were moments too, twice or three times, when he nearly broke his self-imposed vow and surrendered to the warm feminineness he could feel so near to him.

  But instead he nurtured his plans. He added up imaginary sums, reckoned the value of shares, the advantages and disadvantages of each time for selling, whether a lot might not be gained by extending this period of truce. And at last he fell asleep.

  So for that night it was avoided. And next day, fearing there would be a repetition of the same proceedings and knowing that, though Elizabeth had let her question go unanswered, she would not do so twice even in this difficult-to-speak-of domain he told her that he felt he ought to go down to Surrey for a few days since for the picture of the Brocken revels that he had now decided on some studies of pine trees would be essential.

  She did nothing to oppose the idea. But her very readiness to acquiesce was a source of disquiet to him. He wondered if she did not know very well that he was making an excuse and was taking an all the firmer determination to tackle him when he returned. He wished he could make the supposed length of his expedition, which he had in the course of talking stretched to a full fortnight, cover the whole time till his departure. But his midnight calculations, borne out by daylight re-examination, had convinced him that he really ought to wait to sell a large holding of two-and-a-half per cent dated Treasury stocks till the New Year and between that and the present there lay their annual Christmas visit to the Bosworths in Wiltshire, something that could not be omitted without explanation.

  He set out that afternoon with a well-filled valise, his sketching easel, a walking-stick and his bulky satchel of water-colour equipment by railway to Hazlemere and then on to Hindhead, to an inn visited on a similar expedition in his teens.

  But his stay this time proved far different from the carefree visit he remembered, when he had spent every hour of long summer days drawing with immense facility and enormously badly. Now, though he dutifully each day took his satchel and some paper with him, he felt no desire to draw. His art belonged to the world he had left, a ghost world now. Yet the world he ought to be inhabiting was by force of circumstances kept from him.

  So he tramped each day disconsolately through the countryside, pleased rather than otherwise that the weather was cold and grey and miserable. And the full fortnight passed, all but the last day.

  He almost decided that morning not to go out. But the comforts of the inn were sparse and after sitting for an hour in a lumpy chair in front of a too-small fire he took his satchel and set off. And, choosing paths he had hitherto not tried, he came suddenly upon a clump of pines every bit as twisted and tormented as his never-to-be-realised Brocken picture could possibly have wanted. Without thinking at all what he was doing, he sat himself on a convenient sandy bank and began to draw.

  And he drew very well. One study in particular made his heart beat quicker and quicker as he saw what his pencil was doing. He was getting that pine, getting it to its last winter-darkened needle. In all its gnarled and reluctant shape you could yet feel the secret principle of growth striving outwards and upwards.

  Then, as he touched in the last strokes, he realised what it was he had done. Like a jab it came to him that he had been betraying himself. Unthinkingly he had gone back to the enemy, had joined again the upward strivers.

  Almost he ripped the sheet into shreds. But at the last moment a sort of duplicity warned him that the evidence of work done might be useful for Elizabeth, seldom though she asked to see how his work was going till he chose to invite her.

  He rolled the stiff sheet into a cylinder, fastened it quickly into his satchel and set off, striding full out, to the inn. There he brusquely ordered a gig, went up to his room, flung his clothes into his valise and departed. He was going to go back to St Giles. It was just possible that the fly-paper man’s ban on Mary had ceased to be effective and he wanted her. He wanted her now more than ever. He wanted to cash that cheque on the deep-vaulted bank where he had established his account.

  At Charing Cross he put his things into the Left Luggage Office and set off on foot. But he was not to reach St Giles that day. Before he had gone ten minutes on his way he met with one of those chance encounters between people otherwise distant as the poles that mark out the whir
lpool life of London.

  He was at the southern end of St Martin’s Lane, making his way rapidly along, the fever of Mulatto Mary rising sharply in his veins, when about fifty yards further up just by a dyer’s and scourer’s he saw the figure of a woman that seemed acutely familiar and yet which he could swear was absolutely unknown to him.

  He walked on, hurrying still but at the same time keeping his gaze fixed on the enigmatic shape ahead. She was a woman of the working classes, young or in early middle age, almost ludicrously over-burdened with a baby on one arm wrapped in the black shawl that went over her head, with a basket dangling from the arm that held this child and another child, a little boy of two or so, trailing from her other hand which was also clutching a bulging gingham umbrella.

  Nothing unusual in such a sight. Was the disturbance he nevertheless felt due only to the fact of child-bearing being once again forced on his notice? No, that could hardly be. He and Elizabeth were divided for ever now. It no longer mattered whether she had a child or not. But there was something about that figure ahead …

  He was only some twenty paces from her, having been progressing at a much faster rate, when she turned in at one of the passages leading to the courts off the street. And as she did so something, some turn of the body, some tiny idiosyncratic fashion of straightening the shoulders, something gave it to him on the instant. She was Lisa.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  He had stopped still on the pavement, momentarily immobilised by his discovery. No wonder the figure ahead of him had seemed enigmatic. Lisa was to him no overburdened mother carrying her baby with another tot at her side. Lisa to him, for all that he had realised since that Derby Day more than three years ago that she must be married, was the very opposite of the picture she now presented. For him, indissolubly in his memory, she was a figure of whirlpool-deep allure. She was the luckily chanced-upon gateway that had at last led to the land of which he was now a citizen, just entering upon an inheritance that would last for ever.

  For two or three seconds that were a long space in his mind he stood thinking furiously as if his life depended on his deciding whether to follow Lisa or not. Would it not be better simply to recognise that she was married, had children, lived no doubt in a house in the court she had just entered, was—how strange it seemed—a dweller now in the world of regularity, the world he had just left for ever? Or should he follow her, speak with her? If only just to wish her well? Yes, he owed her that much. And he had liked her too. Perhaps—she looked in poor circumstances—a gift would be proper?

  He darted forward and turned into the court in time to catch sight of the door of one of the little houses there just closing. He went over to it and knocked.

  In a moment the door was opened.

  ‘Yes?’ said the woman who stood there. ‘Yes?’ said Lisa. ‘Yes?’ said the mother of the two small children. ‘Yes?’ said a woman expecting nothing, unless it were trouble of a sort.

  ‘Lisa.’

  The expression on her face changed with simple suddenness. Where before it had been a steady wary visage set to receive whatever might come, now the old look of easy familiarity broke over it again with her smile. And the Lisa that once had been stood before him again. That old crookedy smile, the hooked blade-sharp nose, the quick intelligence.

  ‘Why, Mr Godfrey,’ she said. ‘Mr Godfrey of old. Step in. Won’t you step in?’

  He walked in after her. The door opened straight into a room that was simple and bare but not altogether uncomfortable. There was a brisk fire in the range in the chimney, a clock cheerfully ticking on the mantel above, clean cotton curtains in the window and a table with a plush cloth over it.

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ Lisa said. ‘Let me put babby in her cradle and young Joe will stay and play with her.’

  Young Joe seemed more intent on staying and staring at the gentleman. But as soon as his earnest and undeviating regard had extracted a smile and a chuck under the chin—he wondered at himself—he submitted to being herded from the room in front of his mother and baby sister.

  In their absence Godfrey looked round. The room, he saw, showed every sign of a modest prosperity. There was the clock and the curtains. The chair he was sitting in was comfortable. His boot-heels were sinking into a neat rag-rug before the fire. On the dresser on the far wall plates and pewter shone brightly. Evidently Lisa was by no means as poor as his first thoughts had painted her.

  He smiled at his own unwillingness to believe she could be in easy circumstances other than by the exercise of her former profession. And at that moment she came back in.

  ‘Why,’ she said, ‘you’re smiling to yourself in quite your old way.’

  ‘Yes, I dare say I was.’

  ‘And what would you be smiling at? You used to smile at some queer things when you and I knew each other better.’

  She was looking at him with her old teasingly provocative air. It sent his mind tumbling back to their days together. But in those days that look, what had it portended? Often as not some new piece of sexual ingenuity between them. She had looked like that when she had whispered obscenities in his ear. She had looked like that up into the cheval glass she had so carefully tilted over the bed in the rooms in Blue Cross Street.

  He felt a little quiver of shocked propriety. She should not be looking at him in that way now.

  Or should she? Did this mean that she was not after all the respectable married woman she purported to be? The spouse of the honest working carpenter? Was she in fact a side-time whore? Was this an invitation? With her own children in the house, the little boy likely at any time to come wandering in? Surely not. And yet … Well, was that not something of the same piquancy that Lisa had excelled in before?

  ‘Come now,’ she said, looking at him challengingly, ‘a penny for your thoughts.’

  ‘A penny? As I recollect you used to have more from me than a penny.’

  ‘Sure, an’ I did. Five sovereigns’ worth of love was what I had. I remember it well.’

  She was smiling frankly again, the impish smile of old. And he could not quite accept it.

  ‘But Lisa. But …’

  He gestured at the small signs of respectability all round, the clock, the curtains, the plush cloth on the table and, lastly, at the door left just ajar.

  Lisa, quick as ever, read his unexpressed thought.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘you’re thinking that a decent married woman with her childer about her shouldn’t be recalling the like of the things the pair of us did together. You’re wondering am I as decent as I look, or am I making a little bit on the side, with or without the connivance of my Joey?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was wondering all that.’

  ‘Well, Joey’s no conniver, I’ll tell you. And I’d be ashamed to deceive him too.’

  ‘And you’ve no need to make that little bit on the side,’ he chimed in. ‘You seem to be well off.’

  Her sharp crookedy smile flashed.

  ‘Go on with you,’ she said. ‘You know well this room’s not a candle to the place I had in Blue Cross Street till just before I was wed. And do you think it’s champagne I drink of an evening now?’

  ‘Well, no, I suppose not. But do you …?’

  ‘Oh, yes, there’s times I hanker for all that. But I’ve made my bed and I’ll lie on it. An’ I’ve a decent life ahead of me, if all goes any way right at all.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I see that you have.’

  He sat thinking about that life, and the life she had once led.

  ‘So,’ he said at last. ‘So you’ve settled for the top side after all, Lisa?’

  ‘The top side?’

  ‘Yes. For hoping to climb upwards, however slowly. For sticking to the rules everybody has made, more or less. For having one man and staying with him. For all that.’

  ‘Why, yes. I suppose that’s what I have done.’

  Again he sat in silence, astonished.

  ‘Would you take a cup of tea?’ she
said. ‘I’ll put the kettle on directly.’

  ‘No. No, thank you. I must be going. But it’s so strange to see you, Lisa. I looked for you once, you know. Took a cab to your old rooms, wanted you so much, was ready to live with you your sort of life. And you weren’t there.’

  ‘And when was this?’

  She was smiling at him with lively curiosity.

  ‘Oh,’ he answered, ‘it was a good time ago now. It was before I was married. But you wouldn’t know that I am married, would you?’

  ‘So you’re married too and have settled for—what did you call it?—the top side?’

  He gave a grunt of a laugh.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I thought I had done that. But I haven’t.’

  ‘Well, that’s for you to say.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it is. And I’ve chosen my way, and I’m glad of it.’

  He stood up. It was time to go. He and Lisa had nothing to say to each other now. They were from different worlds. And how curious it was that his should be the underside, hers the world of progress.

  But he felt he could not simply walk abruptly out. He searched for something else to say.

  ‘And the Derby?’ he brought out at last. ‘I think I saw you at the Derby. It would have been three years ago, the year Chiaroscuro won at fifty to one. Was it you? Were you there?’

  ‘I was. Joey took me. I made him. We’d not been long wed then, and I’d always wanted to see the Derby. It was the great ambition of my life.’

  ‘I remember that. You told me so once. And I promised I’d take you.’

  ‘You did, I recall it well now. And when the time came you weren’t there and Joey was. So he took me, though I don’t think he much liked the notion.’

  ‘But didn’t he like it when you got there? He looked pleased enough when I saw him.’

  ‘Ah, he was. But that was because he had me, and well I knew it. But I think he came to like the Derby too before the day was done.’

  Well, Godfrey thought, the two of us had the same experience then.