by David Storey
I’ve no sooner touched the ground and given a big sigh of relief than a voice snarls over my shoulder, ‘What the hell have you been doing, Arthur?’
It’s George Wade. He’s leaning forward in the darkness to see my face.
‘I’ve been watching you for the past ten minutes,’ he tells me. ‘It’s a good job I recognized you from down here … or you might have fallen into the hands of the police.’
He’s sniffing around to smell my breath.
‘I got fastened in a room … locked in by somebody.’
I smell of soot and stagnant water. Though to George this might mean whisky. He’s trembling, and tapping the ground with his stick.
‘You must have done a fair amount of damage up yonder,’ he says, and bends his head back to look at the skyline. ‘I hope you make a point of mentioning it to Mr Weaver. It gave me a great shock that first tile. Very nearly caught me on the head. … Did you take all his roof off?’
‘There’s still the chimney, Mr Wade. I shouldn’t worry too much. … And what about you? What’re you doing out here? You look frozen.’
‘Oh …’ he says, and taps his stick again.
‘You’re not still looking for the dog?’
‘I haven’t been able to find the animal, Arthur. All this damn time. I’ve a mind Maurice let it go on purpose. You know what he’s like on these occasions. They go to his head. It’s quite like him to do it.’
‘Well you won’t find him looking for it. Anyway—the dog might have gone home.’
‘But Mr Weaver assured me it couldn’t get out of the garden,’ he says as if he’s gone over this in his mind many times. ‘But if you’re impatient to go in, Arthur, don’t let me keep you out here. After all, I keep the wretched thing. It’s all part of the risks of ownership. If you get cold in those teeth you’ll know about it.’
‘What’s the time?’
He brings out his watch. ‘Nearly ten past ten,’ he says, and turns, as if that’s another reminder, towards the bushes. I watch him go unbelievingly. All over a little pooch.
Round the back of the house, near the kitchen door, is parked Slomer’s old and famous Rolls—in the tradesman’s drive. I go into the kitchen and have a wash in the sink. I find I’ve lots of little cuts on my hands. I wipe them clean, brush my clothes down, and start looking round for what’s on.
The lounge has been cleared of most of its furniture, though it still has the leaved wallpaper, and it’s been taken over by a dancing party. Tommy Clinton stares up at me without recognition, blinking, from a cushion. The other rooms are shared out as bars, buffets, and rest places. In the hall a crowd has collected with the Mayor and Labour Aldermen to sing football songs to carol tunes. ‘Put it in—put it in. Pull it out.’ They move slowly round the tree which has been hauled into the middle of the floor, half its fairy lights broken like bad fruits.
I recognize Maurice’s voice coming from the pantry, singing a line or two behind the party in the hall. I bang on the door and shout his name.
‘Is that you, Arthur?’ he calls. The lock slides back and he looks out through half-closed eyes. ‘What is it, cock?’ He’s stripped to the waist; his skin is still inflamed from the afternoon’s game, and some of the cuts have started bleeding again. ‘I thought Tommy’d locked you in upstairs.’
‘I’ve just got out.’
He laughs a minute. Judith, the Mayor’s secretary, leans over his shoulder and smiles in a teetering stupor. ‘Where’s your teeth, Tarzan?’ she says. ‘Aren’t you coming in with the gay young things of 1934?’
‘What’ve you got to offer?’
‘Oh, boy. I’ve got lots of things to offer you.’
‘Nay, bloody steady on,’ Maurice says.
‘Have you seen Weaver?’ I ask him.
‘Not for hours, kiddo.’ He shakes his head slowly, trying to clear it. ‘Why don’t you come in here? I’m coming out soon. It’s freezing like a prison, and the bitch’s like ice, aren’t you, love? Perhaps you could thaw her, Art.’ He shuts and bolts the door.
A minute later he shouts. ‘You still there, Art?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why don’t you flick off then?’ They both have a chuckle.
I go up the stairs, past the second of the aspidistras, which holds a brassière and other clothes in its leaves like sensational fruit. The door of the main front bedroom is slightly open. I’m just getting my eye to the crack when it’s pulled right open and Weaver looks down at me with a mild look of surprise, a faint smile, and a blinking of his doll blue eyes. He’s in evening dress now, and immediately alters his expression to make me feel scruffy, undistinguished, and unwanted.
‘I hope I’m not disturbing you, Arthur?’ he says.
I say ‘No’ and shake my head.
‘You surely haven’t broken off your celebrations just to come here,’ he goes on. ‘What is it you want?’
Before I can think of anything bright I hear Mrs Weaver’s voice beyond the door. ‘Is that Arthur Machin, darling? Why don’t you ask him to come in?’
‘Come in, Arthur,’ Weaver says.
I scrape in past him.
There’s one thing—it’s comfortable on Mrs Weaver’s bed. A chandelier sparkles just above my head and throws the light into every corner of the room.
Behind me, stretching the length of the wall, is an elaborate tapestry of a hunting scene: the dogs have just got their teeth into a small, pale animal, and it’s already dripping blood.
Slomer smiles at me, and holds up his glass indicating I should drink. ‘You drink up, young man,’ he says in a thin dried voice, like rustled paper. ‘This only happens once a year.’ For him, it seems, it does.
It’s the same tone as when he said, ‘So this is the young man who had his teeth knocked out today,’ as I came into the room.
The glass in my hand is empty. I cover it with my fingers and take a deep drink.
No one seems sure what we are celebrating. As a party, this scene in the bedroom is a flop. Weaver sits in an armchair by the door and stares between his knees at the carpet, where a small pool of the drink he’s just spilt darkens the fabric. Mrs Weaver, near the window and me, gazes at the same pool in angry restraint. We sit in silence for a long time because this seems the limit of Slomer’s recreational ambitions. I think all the time about how I could get shut of Weaver and Slomer and have a few minutes with Mrs Weaver, who is burning me up from three yards away in a tight dress with a silver sheen.
‘They’re very noisy downstairs,’ she says eventually. I wonder if she has the same idea as me.
Weaver nods moodily. ‘It’s the last time I turn the house over to this sort of thing,’ he says.
‘Why?’ Slomer asks.
His head turns towards the door, where Weaver is sitting, and reveals a small uneven growth of beard, like down, below his mouth. Even then, in this changed position, I can’t see exactly where his deformity is.
‘Why?’ Weaver says, his eyes queerly distorted as he looks at Slomer. ‘Why? … Because every scruff in town’s crept in. I don’t like it.’
‘Do they always behave like this?’ Slomer asks innocently.
Weaver suspects the slightest thing Slomer says or does, and he concentrates hard before saying ‘I suppose they do. The M.P.’s down there, and the Mayor. … But I don’t suppose those two’ll offer any better example.’
Slomer gives a little chuckle, which immediately has Weaver moving in his seat as if one of Slomer’s thin white fingers is digging him reproachfully in the ribs.
‘Do you think I’m wrong in saying that?’ Weaver asks.
‘Wrong?’ Slomer smilingly examines Weaver.
‘After all,’ Weaver tells him, ‘an M.P. isn’t necessarily a better man—it’s a question of personal opportunity rather than any distinction of insight or ability.’
> ‘I don’t know either man,’ Slomer says. ‘Their position means nothing to me. I understand that you were once asked to stand … I’ve forgotten for which party.’
He’s satisfied at having committed Weaver to an opinion, and Weaver flushes at having exposed himself.
It doesn’t seem I have to say anything. Between taking in Mrs Weaver and wondering how much her dress is reinforced, I’ve been taking in Slomer—like a drink on a hot day. He finds it amusing, as he does everything in the room. He’s fairly interested in the tapestry, though he’s said nothing about it. Mrs Weaver keeps glancing from it to him and back again, inviting an opinion. He stares at me and the tapestry background as if he finds the juxtaposition ludicrous or even maybe obscene.
I’m disappointed. To start with, Mrs Weaver’s a changed woman. I don’t think she’s looking at me as I feel I’m looking at her. I’m the court jester, big and dumb, a centre of confidential amusement. I blame this on my teeth, on Mellor, but above all on the cripple in front of me, who seems to suggest his deformity is the only proper shape of the body. I see him as a prematurely aged boy crouching in his chair, his old man’s eyes peering out in amusement at the sensations his appearance arouses in those who are prepared to tolerate it. His evening suit’s been tailored to fit the distortion. Some kind of tailor that.
‘Our young man’s growing restless,’ Slomer says to Weaver. ‘I suppose he feels he should be with people his own age downstairs and not with us old tired dogs.’
‘Well I’m sure I don’t want to detain him from the brighter attractions elsewhere,’ Weaver says. ‘He needn’t stay up here for me. What about you, darling?’
Before she can tell him, Slomer’s saying, ‘He’ll likely do less damage up here, don’t you think?’
‘I shouldn’t think he’d be the one to take the house to pieces,’ Mrs Weaver says.
‘What’s that?’ I ask her.
‘We thought we heard someone taking the tiles off the roof a while back,’ she tells me. ‘We had to persuade my husband it was the drinks he’d been mixing.’
‘You didn’t persuade me,’ he says. ‘I still think someone or something was up there. I tell you, I saw something distinctly, like a huge sack dangling from the gutter. … How anybody could get up there beats me.’ He sounds relieved to have something specific to complain about. ‘All the drainpipes are broken at the front.’
‘You’d be surprised how industrious people can be’, Slomer says, ‘when they’ve a drop of alcohol in their veins. I’ve often wondered why employers like you, Weaver, don’t take advantage of the fact. Controlled alcoholism seems indispensable, I would have thought, to a really proficient industrialist.’
I suddenly get the idea that Slomer is out to cause trouble. He’s looking at me, and he’s looking at Weaver, trying to fire us into some sort of conflict. I hadn’t really measured up his look of relief when I first came into the room. He wanted to be amused.
‘Why did you come up here, Mr Slomer?’ I ask him. ‘To get out of the way of the noise?’
‘Well … We are celebrating the Eve of Christ’s Nativity,’ he says slowly.
‘That’s a good description …’ Weaver begins.
‘The debauchery downstairs is just as much part of it as we are. After all, one of us here has licensed it with his accommodation.’
‘Now look here,’ Weaver protests reasonably, ‘I’m not responsible for their behaviour.’
‘I don’t know who else is,’ Slomer says. ‘If they weren’t here they wouldn’t be behaving like this—least, not in their own homes.’
‘It’s their abuse of a good thing. One expects …’
‘But surely, Weaver, you’re not an idealist where human behaviour’s concerned? I’ve always detected if anything a general lack of faith in your personal dealings with people.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
Both of the Weavers flush, and for some reason look at me.
‘We don’t want to go into that on an occasion like this,’ he tells them firmly.
‘I’d much rather you would, Slomer,’ Weaver says. ‘It’s not a very pleasant thing to have said about you.’
‘Well … I withdraw it then.’
‘You’ve already said it,’ Weaver tells him. ‘And in any case, as a matter of interest, I’d like to know very much what you mean.’
His face is tight and red, like a desperately angry woman, and his blue eyes are full of hate.
‘You know what I mean,’ Slomer suggests, watching Weaver’s sudden display of pettishness with a drawn-out look of mischief.
‘I haven’t the foggiest notion what you mean. … You said I had a general lack of faith where other people are concerned. I’ve always felt it was otherwise. I’ve never stinted myself.’
‘Well … take our young man here, for example,’ Slomer says, and looks at me calmly. ‘Hasn’t he been the cause of a certain lack of faith?’
He watches us all with a healthy slyness.
‘Who—Machin?’
Weaver stares at me with the residue of his hate-look to see if I know what’s meant by this.
‘Machin,’ Slomer says.
‘What are you talking about?’ Weaver asks.
‘Oh now look, I don’t want to get serious, a night like this,’ Slomer says.
‘If you want an argument, Slomer, why can’t you say so?’ Weaver complains. ‘If you don’t, why do you start things like this?’
‘I don’t mind arguing,’ Mrs Weaver says. ‘So long as you make it amusing. It’s dry enough up here as it is.’
‘And there’s the lady herself speaking,’ Slomer says. ‘But even then, I don’t want to rake over things I really don’t know that much about.’
‘What do you mean’, Mrs Weaver asks, ‘when you say Machin here is the cause of a lack of faith? What are you suggesting exactly, Slomer? Do you know something about the man that we don’t?’
‘Nothing that you don’t know,’ he says.
He watches me flush under the strain of his little party game.
‘My wife knows about it, too, then?’ Weaver asks.
‘And you know it,’ Slomer answers pettishly.
‘Christ, man, what are you trying to say?’ Weaver says intensely.
‘I know what’s he’s trying to say,’ Mrs Weaver says. She looks straight at Slomer as if to say, ‘Come on man, be honest. Out with it.’
‘What’s that?’ Weaver says suspiciously, suddenly not wanting to be hurt.
‘He’s referring to the story you heard, darling … about an affair someone imagined I was having with Machin.’
Slomer can’t quite control his pleasure, so his attempt to look shocked is slightly overdone.
‘No. I wasn’t referring to anything like that,’ he says, appearing to be subdued. ‘If there is such a story it’s the first I’ve heard of it.’
Mrs Weaver is a pricked balloon.
I don’t look at Weaver. I listen to Slomer’s gasps of embarrassment.
‘Oh, come now,’ Mrs Weaver says, pulling up courage out of a surprisingly calm voice. ‘Don’t come with that old trick, Slomer. All this theatrical surprise. Really, man, give us a bit of credit for …’
‘I’m sorry. Very sorry,’ he says. ‘But I assure you I wasn’t expecting anything … I didn’t realize … You’ll have to excuse my silly clumsiness.’
‘Well …’ Mrs Weaver says. ‘You’d have heard about it sooner or later, I imagine.’ She tries to patch the hole now all the air has escaped. ‘And you’ll understand the natural disgust both I and Mr Weaver feel.’
‘Naturally. I have the same sentiments exactly,’ Slomer says. ‘It seems strange how such a story should have arisen.’
‘It does,’ Mrs Weaver says. ‘Though it has a simple enough explanation which we needn’t trouble with now.�
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She smiles faintly at me. ‘I’m sorry, Machin,’ she says. ‘Sorry you came overwhelmingly into the conversation just now.’
I tell her about it being all right, and put on a worried look over my stunned bewilderment. I still find it best not to look at Weaver. So he knows about that Wednesday visit of mine. Did Johnson tell him? May? I feel like a clay target propped up for pot shots.
‘What were you referring to, then?’ Weaver says quietly.
Slomer shakes his head, slowly. ‘I was thinking of that time you were suggesting dropping Machin for that other young feller … I forget his name. It was around November.’
They’re quiet for a few minutes. Then Weaver says, ‘I don’t see how that reflects my general lack of faith you mentioned, Slomer.’
‘Perhaps not,’ Slomer says. ‘In anti-climax, Weaver, I doubt if anything now would support my previous opinion. I must have had a little too much of this drink of yours—you go seeing corpses hanging off the end of your tiles, and I see the uncompromising detrimental view of human nature. Let’s make our excuse a mutual one.’ He looks at me in a way that tells me I should be grateful for the way he’s managed things. ‘All the same, young man, they were all for dropping you, that selection committee of ours, and I had some job to keep you. Mr Weaver will tell you. He knows. But … I can’t say I’ve been disappointed.’ He doesn’t make it clear whether his satisfaction is with me or the evening. He nods his head once or twice, then slips a large watch between the lapels of his jacket. ‘And I see by my onion that it’s just after half past eleven. Which means … that I should be going. I like to break Christmas in at home.’