To the Dark Tower

by Francis King

  "Couldn’t you ring him up?" Shirley ventured at last.

  "Ring him up? How can I? He closes the shop on Saturday afternoon."

  "But couldn’t you ring him up at his home?"

  Mother flushed. "No, I can’t do that," she snapped.

  "Why not? Hasn’t he got a phone there?"

  "Oh, do stop these absurd questions!" Mother shouted in exasperation. "You don’t understand. Do go away!"

  "But why not?" Shirley reiterated as she scurried for the door.

  She was to learn why, later.

  Eventually, Mother did ring up Cousin Maurice at his home: and a wife, whom Shirley had never known to exist, told her that he was ill, dangerously ill.

  Mother said: "Oh, I must see him! I must see him!" Tears ran down her cheeks. She went into the garden and cut all the roses, with a dry snip-snip of scissors. Then she wrapped them in tissue-paper and said to Shirley: "Do I look all right, dear? Do use your wits for once. Do I look all right?"

  "You look lovely, Mummy."

  "Good. I want to show that woman."

  Her cheeks were still blotched with tears.

  The next morning she returned, her eyes red with grief and sleeplessness. Shirley was eating breakfast. Removing the fur which Cousin Maurice himself had given to her, removing the cloche hat and the black net gloves, she sank into a chair.

  "He’s dead," she said.

  "Dead?" Shirley looked at her blankly. She felt an extraordinary elation, her head sang. "Dead?"

  Then with a sudden choking groan, as though she were trying to retch, Mother collapsed across the table. "Dead, dead, dead!" she screamed, her rings knocking on the smooth mahogany. "He was dead before I got there. I never saw him alive." She writhed in the chair as though in physical anguish, her eyes poured, saliva ran from her open mouth.

  She was thinking of the death’s head, strangely bald, shrunken and topped with white scars, that had lain propped in a darkened room. She had put her lips to his forehead, while his wife looked on, silent, tearless, in a stiff black dress, and the children whimpered next door.

  But Shirley was thinking of Mother on a late summer evening in a silk wrap, massaging the lobes of her ears; and in her hand was a telegram; and Father was dead.

  At the funeral Mother and Cousin Maurice’s wife, both in widow’s weeds, sat close together, their hands clasped. Mother was enormous, magnificent, her plump throat clasped in three folds by a triple necklace of pearls. But Cousin Maurice’s wife was thin, and sallow, and the only jewellery she wore was a worn circle of gold on her wedding finger.

  Afterwards, they wept together; and Mother said: "We are friends now, aren’t we?"

  And Cousin Maurice’s wife blew her nose, nodding.

  He had his successors: and as Shirley was then growing up, while Mother herself was growing old, a certain jealousy was felt for the daughter. Not that these middle-aged shopkeepers and travellers were ever interested in the child. They always preferred Mother, who dyed her hair red, and wore rubber corsets, and joked coarsely and raucously. But Mother never ceased to humiliate Shirley. "My dear child," she would say in front of one of her friends’, "you’re as flat as a rolling-board. But don’t stoop so. It doesn’t help." It was always assumed that Shirley was to be an old maid: "My poor girlie! I doubt if we shall ever marry her, with a figure like that. What do you think, Paul? Perhaps we can find some gentleman whose tastes are not quite—orthodox. Really, she might be a boy." And she screamed shrilly in laughter, while Shirley got up and left the room.

  Worst of all, Shirley was treated as Mother’ femme de chambre. Mother had a certain sense of propriety which made it impossible for one of the servants to bring up her breakfast when she was ‘entertaining’. So this task devolved on Shirley. She grew used to knocking on the door, not once but repeatedly, so that she might be heard above the spurts of laughter and the raised voices.

  "Come in!" yelled Mother. And then: "Ah! It’s my little Shirley. My innocent little Shirley. The child knows nothing, you know. Put the tray down here, dear... No—not on Uncle Henri’s knees! Whatever next!"

  In nausea she would leave them as soon as possible, bearing with her an image of some tousled ‘gentleman’, the hair thick on his chest where his pyjama jacket divided, and Mother smoking a cigarette as often as not between stained fingers, her face creased, and greased with Crême Pomeroy, and surrounded by a wig-like mat of red hair.

  The nicest of them was Théo, who had a short fringe, and was plump, and spoke in an oddly soprano voice. His pleasures so often coincided with Shirley’s: he liked to go to the shooting gallery up the road, and helped her with the house she was building out of bamboos, and bought ice-creams for her and himself. Once he took her to the cinema in Fontainebleau and wept throughout.

  Afterwards, they walked back through the Forest, and he climbed a tree, and waved his arms, and began to sing, " Auprès de ma blonde". Then he climbed down, rather sheepishly, and said: "We’d better hurry. Your mother will wonder what has happened to us."

  They walked on, in silence, until suddenly he turned to her: "Your nose shines dreadfully, you know."

  "Does it?"

  "Why don’t you powder it?" he suggested kindly.

  "Mother won’t let me use make-up—yet."

  "But that’s not make-up. Why, even I use powder—after a shave."

  "Do you? ... Do you think it would make me look better?"

  "Of course it would. You take no trouble with yourself. You don’t care how you look." As though to modify the harshness of these criticisms he slipped his arm through hers: "One simply must take trouble, you know. Appearances do count. Look at this waistcoat of mine—double-breasted—latest style. It’s damnably uncomfortable, one can hardly breathe. But it gives a man an air. People stare at him. You take my advice. Just think a little more about how you look."

  "Yes, I will, Théo. If you really think it will make any difference."

  "I’m certain it will."

  He began to whistle, pleased with himself, full of self-importance, while his dainty letter feet moved forwards under white spats.

  That evening, after dinner, Shirley crept up to Mother’s room. She had seldom been in there when it was empty. She fumbled for the light on the dressing-table and clicked it on. Smells, unnoticed before, now filled her nostrils—stale perfume, perspiration from the soiled jacket and trousers over the chair, smells of the medicine Mother took and the marigolds, drooping in a vase, and Théo’s hair-oil. On the bed was a koala bear with a zip-fastener down its back: it had been stuffed with Mother’s nightdress and Théo’s pyjamas. Their slippers lay side by side. On the bedside table was a glass for Théo’s teeth, and a Bible which he sometimes read.

  Shirley looked at herself in the mirror, turning her face this way and then that. She moved the light, she pulled her hair up on to her head. But whatever she did she looked drab, dull, untidy. About her lay bottles with great globular stoppers, curling-tongs, bits of newspaper which had been scorched where the tongs had been tried on them, some false hair. She took this last, fixed it as a fringe on her forehead, and then began to giggle. But a moment later she was crying. Why did she always look so ridiculous. Why did the false hair make Mother seem so chic while she looked absurd in it?

  She lay for a while on the enormous bed, which had in its centre a hollow, a cradle. She imagined Théo and Mother lying on either side, and then slowly, slowly, tumbling downwards into the centre. Oh, it was useless. She put out a hand, took Mother’s medicine bottle, and removed the cork. Her tongue ran round the rim, she pulled a face. It was bitter, crusted.

  Then she got up and returned to the dressing-table. She looked for powder. Ah, here it was. A large and bedraggled puff was stuck in what looked like an ornamental soup-tureen. She did not realise that this was for toilet use only. Tentatively, she touched nose, one cheek, the other cheek. Then, bolder, she took up a pair of tweeze
rs and began to pull at her eyebrows: She winced at the pain, made a gap in the centre, and then left off in fright. With two combs she scraped her hair upwards.

  At that moment there were footsteps. In panic she pulled out the combs, tried to tidy the table, upset a perfume bottle. The nauseating liquid trickled on to her bare legs. It felt as if she had wet her knickers.

  "What are you doing in here?" Mother came in. Then seeing the damage she shouted in one of her sudden paroxysms of rage: "You slut! You bitch! Get out of my room! Get out! At once!" She rushed towards Shirley. "Making yourself up! Using my things! How dare you!" She looked around for something to hurl at her, picked up the enormous puff, and threw it in her face. Shirley burst into tears.

  But no sooner had she done this than Mother, with one of her sudden changes of temper, began to laugh shrilly. "You idiot! You little idiot! You don’t know how funny you look!"

  Shirley gazed at herself in the glass. Her face was caked in a uniform white, except where the tears had made runnels.

  Mother still rocked with merriment; already she had collapsed on to the bed. "Oh, it’s priceless!" she sobbed. "You—look—so—crazy!"

  Shirley rushed for the door. But there she collided with Théo who had come up at the sound of their voices. First he gaped at her; then he said, "My God! What have you been doing?"; then he, too, was laughing hysterically.

  Weeping, caring nothing for the pain, she scrubbed her face with a nail-brush over the kitchen-sink.

  For as long as she could Mother made her wear the clothes of a schoolgirl—black woollen stockings, blue tunic, strap-shoes. At eight o’clock she was packed off to bed: so that it became difficult to remember a time when she was allowed to play in the garden for as long as she liked. If anything exciting was to happen—a dance at the hotel, a visit to Paris—Mother always said: "You’re too young, Shirley. You’re far too young." She wanted her to remain perpetually adolescent, clumsy, gauche. She could not bear to think of her coming to womanhood just at the moment when her own powers were waning. She thought that by holding Shirley in this bondage she could hold time in bondage also.

  It was not surprising that the child did not reach puberty until she was eighteen.

  In that year one of the English aunts, whom Shirley had never met, left her a few hundred pounds in her will. She would go to the Slade she decided, where Father himself had studied. In this way she would become an Artist. How magical that sounded! She would escape Mother, and her ‘gentlemen’, and the yearly visits of Miss Corry and Miss Witherby. She would be free.

  Somehow, she never got to the Slade. But the next year saw her at an art school in South Kensington, where she won most of the prizes. She found that she could, with the greatest of ease, reproduce the style of the principal, Mr. Blain. It was an ‘academic’ style, not dissimilar to her Father’s. Out-side an art school or an academy it would not have had much success. But for the moment she was the best pupil. Both she and Mr. Blain were thrilled.

  He was a kindly widower who might have passed for a civil servant. He was interested in birds and plants and had a ‘flatlet’ off Baker Street. He played the recorder.

  At the end of her last term he asked her to tea, and she helped him press some wild-flowers in a room with jars full of tadpoles in it, and acorns growing shoots in old medicine bottles, and a model yacht which Mr. Blain sailed on the Serpentine.

  When they were eating their tea before a gas-fire Mr. Blain said: "And what are you g-going to do when you l-leave the school?" He always stammered when he talked of anything other than his hobbies.

  Shirley thought of her father and said: "Well—I really wanted to continue studying in Paris."

  "Paris!" His light-blue eyes widened, he ceased for a moment to masticate buttered scone. "D-do you think that would be a g-good idea?"

  "Don’t you?"

  "Well—w-wouldn’t it be serving both G-God and M-Mammon?"

  She was not sure what he meant by this. But she knew it was a form of disapproval.

  "What else can I do?" she asked.

  "Of course, there’s advertising", he began brightly, in a manner which he usually kept for prospective parents. "Plenty of possibilities there. Plenty of money."

  She wrinkled her nose, and he broke off. "But you’ve too much talent for that. Leave the commercial side alone."

  "Yes," she said. "Leave the commercial side." It was pleasant, sitting like this, drinking out of a cup without a handle, while they discussed her whole future.

  "I’ll tell you what!" he said suddenly. He sat up with a start, so that the plate on his knees tilted at an angle and spilled melted butter on to his trousers. But he did not seem to notice it: and she did not dare to point it out to him. "I’ve got a f-friend," he began. "She has a shop in Chelsea. They make all their own stuff—trays, all that sort of thing. Why don’t you join her? It’s interesting work. And with my recommendation..."

  "Oh, yes. It sounds lovely."

  "There’s a studio there. So in your f-free time, you could paint—seriously, I mean. And then, in no time—why, you’ll be hung, you mark my words. You’ll be famous."

  "Oh, no ..." she protested. But she felt that his words were somehow prophetic. Like Laura Knight, she thought. The picture of the year, reproduced in The Times.

  "Shall I speak to my friend—Miss Mincer?"

  "Oh, do. Oh, please."

  It was all settled. In the silence, the warmth, she ate cup-cakes from the Lyons’ round the corner. Life seemed suddenly full, rounded off, complete.

  It was only when they said good-bye that she felt something missing. Their handshake seemed a sketch, a suggestion. But of what? She did not know. And he was too shy, too frightened, to enlighten her.

  She never went to his flat again. Except for occasional visits that he paid to Miss Mincer the last she saw of him was when, one by one, the leavers went to his study to say good-bye. She was the last on the list.

  It was difficult, when she was summoned into the small, untidy room, crowded with paintings by ‘promising pupils’ to realise that if she ever came here again it would be as a stranger. She saw then the pathos of it all—the pathos of all departures, from however uncongenial an environment.

  He began: "I haven’t really much to say to you. J-just good-bye—and good luck. It’s been a real pleasure to have you as a pupil—and—and as a f-friend..." Then he blushed, for this last addition was not part of the speech as he had already delivered it sixteen times. "Just one thing before you go," he continued. "I—I have here a—a little gift—a token. Only a token. Nothing more." He pushed aside papers nervously, with both hands, as though he were doing a breast-stroke through them. "Ah, yes," he said at last. "Here it is."

  "But this is very kind of you," she began. "Oh, it’s nothing, it’s nothing at all, really." She took the brown paper parcel with a murmured "Thank you." "Good-bye," he said. "Good-bye." Their hands met. Then she went out. It was a book called Eyes and No Eyes, by Claud Blain, F.R., brought out nearly twenty years ago by a firm of educational publishers. On the fly-leaf was the dedication: "To Edith, beloved wife", opposite a colour reproduction, "Flea-bane by river-bank". Other students brushed past her, carrying canvases, paint-boxes, rucksacks. Their voices were shrill with plans, excitement, talk of the future. As they went out they left the door open behind them, and a wind, sharp with the promise of snow, blew down the corridor. She shivered and moved away.

  For no reason her eyes were filling with tears.

  At Miss Mincer’s she learnt how to put lacquer on to trays and paint on to boxes. On a handloom she made scarves with ravelled ends. Lampshades were decorated with an acanthus pattern. She made the things, Miss Mincer sold them.

  It was a shop in a side street in Chelsea, "Lucky Finds", with a doormat which said "Welcome" and a scrofulous Sealyham whose growl implied the reverse. In the shop sat Miss Mincer, polishing her nails on a buff, knitting, or readin
g a book from Mudie’s Library (Subscription C). She wore a flowered smock and ankle-socks above court-shoes. It was impossible to tell where she had come from, or how she had found herself among reproductions of Van Gogh’s "Sunflowers", framed copies of "Trees" in William Morris calligraphy, a couple of Paisley shawls, one of which had a cigarette burn through it, and of course the scarves, the lampshades, the boxes, the trays.

  Next door was her great friend Miss Plumpton. "Oh, yes, we’re bosom friends," she told Shirley. Miss Plumpton kept a tea-room where she also served two-course luncheons at one-and-six a head. The cakes were craggy, but tended to suddenly crumble if one persevered hard enough. From Miss Plumpton’s ears dangled gold ear-rings, her hair was wrenched back in a tight little knot. "Spanish", she would have called it, forgetting that the effect is not so easily achieved when the tint has changed from black to grey. Once upon a time she had been on the fringe of Chelsea’s artistic sets, but at the present her only cultural pretensions were back numbers of Time and Tide and a badge from the League of Nations. "I was a model for Augustus John, dear," she confided to Shirley. "That was more years ago than I’d really like to confess." She giggled, as though at some rare audacity: but whether the artist or the passing of years was the cause, one could not tell. "Oh, yes!" she sighed. "I’ve had a full life. I’ve known them all." She shook a meagre handful of currants into what was going to be a castle pudding and then continued: "But that’s all over now. It’s all right for a bit. But it doesn’t really do, you know."

  "No. I suppose not." Shirley was not very certain to what she referred.

  "Yes. It’s all over now," she continued. "Funny to think how crazy I was about art, and poetry, and that sort of thing. The time I first heard Scriabin’s "Poème d’Exstase"! There was an air-raid on: but I walked home, blithe as a lark. And Stephen Phillips—and Rhoda Broughton... I don’t suppose you read Rhoda Broughton now. And the time I saw George Moore in Ebury Street ... I’d never touched one of his books. But the girl who was with me said, ‘That’s George Moore’, and really the way ... Oh, how I do love to hark back to it all! It makes poor Mincie laugh until the tears come into her eyes. But it’s all over now. It’s all over."