by Lynn Brock
And then this damnable, idiotic, maddening trouble with the Prossips had begun—just when there had seemed at last, a hope …
He turned his head towards the door of the room. A thick portière was drawn across it and, actually, the sound of the gramophone was a faint and remote whining. No portière, however, could shut out its real torture, the malice of its persistency; for Whalley’s ears that faint, distant whine was a savage, raucous clamour, hammering at their drums. For a little space he remained, half-turned in his chair, listening to it with rigid intentness. Then, as a heavy thump shook the ceiling above his head he flung down his pen furiously, sprang to his feet, and stood with both hands clenched before his face, glaring upwards.
The paroxysm of anger passed almost instantly—before a second thump followed the first. But he remained for a space surprised by its violence and by its sudden complete obliteration of his self-control. It had produced in him for a moment an absolutely novel sensation—a sensation of being on the point of surrendering his will and his consciousness to some overpowering, hostile, dangerous force. A little like the sensation when one was just about to surrender to an anæsthetic—but much more violent—much more eager to leave behind all the things one knew. A dangerous sensation. For a moment he realised he had been upon the point of shouting—bellowing like a mad animal. He discovered that his legs were trembling a little at the knees and that his hands were still raised absurdly in the air, clenched in front of his face. When he dropped them he looked at them—he had a trick of looking at his hands—he saw that their palms were moist with perspiration.
Ridiculous. Grotesque. Shaking legs and sweating hands. That sort of thing would never do. That sort of thing, he must remember, was just the sort of thing those sluts upstairs hoped he would do—allow the business to get on his nerves and shout and slam doors and bang things about. Thank Heaven he hadn’t shouted. Shout? Good God, he had never shouted at anyone in his life. All along, since this annoyance had begun, he had kept a close watch on himself, a tight grip on his temper. He had gone out of his way to shut doors quietly, to speak more gently to the dog. No slightest symptoms of resentment, he flattered himself, had rewarded those idiots in the top flat for all their trouble. No doubt they kept watch up there, too—listened—always hoping for some sound of anger or retaliation. Well, they had waited in vain—they would wait in vain.
Now, why on earth had that one particular thump had that strange effect upon him. They had been thumping and banging away up there for nearly three weeks now. He had heard hundreds of thumps. At least a hundred times a day, he supposed, he had heard a thump somewhere above his head. There—they were at it again now. But he was able to smile now—felt no anger whatever, merely an inclination to yawn. Yet that one particular thump, no louder than the rest, had swept away from him all knowledge of himself save a desire to shout madly. Funny. Too many cigarettes, probably. The afternoon was stuffy. And, of course, the thing had been going on for three weeks now.
The fountain-pen had rebounded from the surface of the table when he had thrown it down and, falling on the carpet had marked it with a small inkstain. An agitated dismay seized him. He clucked, hurried to the roll-top desk, reduced its disorder to chaos with searching hands, found at last a small piece of blotting-paper in a drawer and hurried back to go down on his knees over the stain. The ink had soaked into the pile of the carpet swiftly, however, and the blotting-paper proved of little avail. He picked up the pen with another cluck, and examined its nib solicitously. It had been Elsa’s first gift to him on the first day of their brief engagement—a pledge of the victorious future it was to have won for them. He smiled wryly as he rose to his feet again; there had been no victories.
Luckily, the pen had escaped damage. Laying it on the table, he tore off the bescrawled sheet of the writing-block and, having collected the crumpled debris from the carpet, rolled the result of his afternoon’s work into a ball and dropped it dejectedly into a waste-paper basket. One more afternoon gone—one more defeat—
Thump.
Furiously his face, its pallor flushing darkly, jerked upwards towards the ceiling. He shouted ragingly, ludicrously.
‘Stop it! Stop it, blast you! Stop it, I say!’
4
In the top flat, as if upon an awaited signal, Bedlam had broken loose. Trampling feet were charging from room to room; doors were banging; furniture was hurtling about; a whistle was screaming; a tray was beating like a war-drum; a bucket was rolling backwards and forwards along the passage. For just an instant after he had realised in stupefaction that his own voice had uttered those three cracked, strangled cries, Whalley had hoped that the noise of the traffic might have drowned them. There had been just an instant of silence save for the traffic and the whine of the gramophone. But then exultant triumph had burst forth above him, preluded by a first long-drawn blast of the whistle. The whistle was new. The enemy had made special preparation for the celebration of victory.
As he stood at the centre of the room, dismayed by his folly, he heard the handle of the door turn and saw the portière ruck and sway inwards as the door opened a little beneath it. He made no movement to draw it aside; for the first time his eyes were unwilling to meet Elsa’s. Lest she should edge her way in, he wiped his face hurriedly with his handkerchief in a vague attempt to obliterate its disturbance. His voice essayed bored amusement.
‘Having rather a field day upstairs, aren’t they?’
‘Beasts. Did you call?’
‘Call? No.’
‘Oh, I thought I heard your voice.’
‘No.’
It was his first lie to her—curt and clumsy. He eyed the portière uneasily, glad that it hid him from her clear, steady gaze. There was no suspicion in her voice when it spoke again, but it waited just too long before it did so. She knew that he had shouted, and that he had told her a lie.
‘You can’t possibly work with that awful row going on. Let’s take Bogey for a walk before tea.’
‘It’s going to rain. It’s raining already. Besides, I must do the kitchen.’
‘But you did it not a week ago, dear. Don’t bother about it today. Let’s chance the rain and go out.’
Yes. She had heard him shouting like a lunatic. He was certain now. Well, bad enough that she should know that he had shouted, but …
He hurried to the portière, pulled it aside and saw the slight, adored figure framed in the aperture of the partially opened door. Her unfathomable, enfolding smile fell upon his ruffled spirit like morning sunlight and banished all its anger and defeat and bitter self-reproach. He caught her in his arms and kissed her passionately before he blurted out his confession.
‘Yes. I did call out. I shouted up to them to stop—like an infernal ass.’
She patted his arm, offering him just excuse.
‘It really is rather awful this afternoon. But we’re going to keep on laughing at it, aren’t we, dear? Let’s go out. The kitchen can go for days still, quite well. And it’s such a job.’
He hesitated, for a moment disposed to yield. But just then, startlingly, the offensive upstairs developed a new activity. Behind Elsa, as she stood facing him in the passage, was the little landing—corresponding to that upon which the Prossips’ gramophone rested—covering in the well of the former staircase. Two of its sides were fenced in by surviving balusters, the other two by ugly partitions of painted boarding, the handiwork of the jobbing contractor who had carried out the ‘conversion’. One of these partitions formed the back of the Prossips’ coal-cellar, the greater part of which descended into the Whalleys’ flat. This frail wall, consisting of a single thickness of match-boarding like the landing’s floor, had suddenly been assailed by a wild bombardment, alarming in its abrupt violence. There was no need to speculate as to the nature of the enemy’s ammunition; each furious blow upon the boards was followed by the unmistakable sound of broken coal falling. Already, where the tonguing of the boarding had split away in places, tricklings of black
dust had begun to find their way through, to fall upon the rug covering the Whalleys’ landing.
They stood for a little while staring at this visible invasion which, trifling as it was, held an outrage infinitely more acute than the total volume of all the outrageous noises which had assailed their ears during the past weeks. Elsa laughed at length. But for the first time her sense of humour had failed her, and her laugh was, she knew, a failure.
‘Idiots. Well, they’ll have plenty of slack for the winter. I must rescue my rug.’
She stole on tiptoe to the landing and rolled back the rug out of danger, then stole back to him. ‘I shan’t be a moment getting ready.’
Her husband did not appear to have heard her. He was still staring at the trickling coal-dust with a frowning, calculating absorption that made her catch at his hands anxiously.
‘You’re not going to do anything, Si? Don’t. It will only make things worse.’
He came out of his brooding reverie and laughed harshly.
‘Do anything? Yes. I’m going to wash the kitchen floor.’
‘Let me help you to move the things out. I’ve finished all my darning.’
But he twisted away from her, freeing himself from her hands impatiently. ‘No. Don’t worry me, Elsa. Just leave me to myself.’
Incredulously her eyes followed him, hoping that he would turn back to her. His hands—Simon’s hands—the gentlest, tenderest hands in all the world, had pushed her off—pushed her off quite roughly—so roughly that one of her elbows had struck the balusters behind her sharply. Oblivious of the deafening uproar that raged within a few feet of her, she strove with that unbelievable fact, refusing to believe it, trying to find excuse for its devastating reality. An intolerable sense of separation and loneliness fell about her like a dark mist. She became conscious of a little nervous tic beating at the corner of her mouth. With a determined effort she smiled, bracing her whole body with a deep breath.
The coppery glare that announced the near approach of the storm, passing in through the kitchen windows, reached her and detached her vividly against the darkness of the little unlighted passage. When Whalley turned at the bathroom door to ask: ‘Tea at a quarter to five—will that do? I shan’t finish until then,’ he saw her so, illuminated as if by a baleful spotlight. The whistle was blowing again now—in the coal-cellar, apparently—and its shrill screaming blended with the blare of the gramophone and the thudding smash of the coal in an orchestra of almost stunning viciousness. The small, trim, beloved figure, despite its erectness, seemed to him suddenly forlorn—menaced. A little chill passed between her and his eyes and made her indistinct. His heart missed a beat.
Absurd. He turned about again. Her ‘Of course, dear. Any old time,’ had been whispered along the passage to him laughingly. Unusual lighting effects had always affected his imagination strongly … his invincible, idiotic instinct to dramatise. As for shivers and palpitations, they were familiar enough. He went on into the bathroom, which he used also as his dressing-room.
When its door shut Mrs Whalley returned to the bedroom in which she had been working and, having arranged a number of freshly-darned socks and stockings in neat pairs, put them away in her work-basket, walked slowly to the wardrobe and halted before the long mirror set in its central door.
All her life, in moments of loneliness—before her marriage she had had many of them—she had found comfort and company in her own reflection. It confronted her now—at first reassuringly, extraordinarily unchanged by the strains and stresses of the past two years. Two tiny creases, one beneath each long eye (her eyes looked even longer than usual today, she noticed, and, because her jumper was jade and the light was dull, were bright bronze-flecked emerald) were only detectable when she bent forward until her nose all but touched the glass. There was no other line or wrinkle in the fresh smoothness of her skin, no trace of flabbiness or heaviness along the clean sweep of her jaws, about her resolute chin, or at the corners of her lips. Thank Heaven for that. She had always detested flabbiness of any sort. Her lips (she had never had any need to touch them up) had retained their warm red. Her teeth, save for an occasional stopping, had never given her any trouble. Her hair, without any doubt whatever, had grown brighter in colour and much thicker since, at last, Simon had consented to its cropping four years before. No danger of stoutness for her—another good fortune to be grateful for; she was thinner and lighter than she had been at eighteen. Making allowances for short hair and short skirts, that old, tried friend in the mirror had altered hardly at all in twenty years. If at all, for the better. She had been very lucky.
But as she continued her scrutiny, a vague distrust grew in her. There was some change today in that now detached and aloof image. Her eyes narrowed themselves as she searched for it. Where was it? What was it? Elsa of the mirror refused comfort and company today. Had withdrawn. Had—what? It was as if an Elsa who had been had suddenly stopped being and was looking out at someone else—someone different—someone who, she knew, would be very different. What was it? She frowned. After all—ultimately—one was quite alone—
She turned away from the glass and, moving to the narrow space between the two trim beds, stooped and raised the rug which she had spread over Bogey-Bogey’s basket that, as was his desire, his afternoon sleep might be enjoyed in darkness. Bogey-Bogey appeared, a silken-coated black cocker, curled in a warmly-smelling knot. He had not been asleep; his tail was wagging slowly and his lustrous eyes were wide open. They regarded her with solemn reproach and then, revolving fearfully towards the uproar of the passage, refused to be enticed back to her. Nor would he raise his head from his paws. Even a kiss and the magic word ‘Walky-walk’ evoked from him merely a yawn and a slight increase in the tempo of his tail.
A little sharply, Mrs Whalley routed him out of his basket.
‘Now then, young man. Pull yourself together and get that tail up.’
But Bogey-Bogey’s nerves had been sorely tried recently and the new noise in the passage daunted his small soul beyond trust even in his mistress. He yawned again miserably, and then retired under her bed, reducing himself several sizes. In a vain attempt to dislodge him from this retreat, she struck her nose forcibly against the bed’s iron underframe. A little warm gush of blood descended her chin and when she scrambled to her knees she saw that her jumper—a recent, long-considered purchase—was grievously stained. As she rose to hurry to the washstand and sponge away this defilement, holding her already saturated handkerchief to her nose, a crashing peal of thunder, apparently directly above the house, joined itself to the Prossips’ orchestra. Bogey-Bogey yelped shrilly. Mrs Whalley realised that she had a violent headache.
‘Well, well—’ she said aloud and, to her dismay, was suddenly overcome by a gust of dry, choking sobbing. She went on, however, towards the washstand, her head thrown back as far as it would go, her free hand guiding her. The jumper must be saved, because it had to last her through the summer. If it was to be saved, the blood must be sponged off at once. Most urgent necessity. Simon, who was liable to come into the bedroom at any moment now that he had abandoned the attempt to work, must on no conceivable account know that misfortune had befallen his birthday gift to her. Any damage done to anything upset him so, now. His hands—Simon’s hands—had pushed her away.
At that moment, as it happened, four other people who resided in various parts of No. 47 Downview Road were thinking about Mrs Whalley.
Upstairs, Marjory Prossip, who hated her passionately, was hoping, while she plied her industrious and skilful needle, that at some time in the immediate future—probably that very afternoon—that conceited, stuck-up little green-eyed thing in the first-floor flat would receive an extremely unpleasant surprise. Her heavy face brightened to a faint animation. What a bit of luck that that little beast of a dog had been alone.
In the ground-floor flat, the elderly Hopgood, who in bygone days had received many a half-crown from Mrs Whalley’s father, and who regarded her, with a rather melanc
holy tenderness, as one of his last links with a past of incredible brightness now vanished for ever, was thinking about her rubbish-bin.
The rubbish bins of the other tenants were kept in the front garden, imperfectly concealed in a recess under the bottom flight of the outside staircase. Mr and Mrs Whalley, however, preferred to keep theirs on their landing of the staircase, outside their hall-door. Lately the Corporation’s scavengers had been kicking up a fuss about having to go up to the landing for the bin, and, upon their last call, had refused point-blank to do so. To Hopgood’s indignation, they had been impertinent to Mrs Whalley when she had remonstrated with them. As he smoked his pipe and waited for his tea-kettle to boil, Hopgood decided that he would himself carry down Mrs Whalley’s bin to the front garden each Monday and Thursday afternoon and carry it up again when it had been emptied into the Corporation cart.
Pleased with this solution of Mrs Whalley’s little difficulty, Hopgood proceeded to the brewing of his tea. He had been really shocked by the way in which the Corporation men—two great, hulking, grinning young louts—had spoken to her and looked at her. Especially the way they had looked at her—looked at her legs—looked her all over, grinning—as if she was one of the young sluts they messed about with. People of that kind, Hopgood had noticed—messengers, vanmen, bus-conductors—in fact, the lower classes generally—had suddenly become markedly uncivil and aggressive lately. He had thought a good deal about this, and, for some reason which he could not quite explain, he was somehow uneasy about it. Things had got queer, somehow. All those things in the newspapers now—wars and disasters and revolutions and suicides and murders. Everything had got queer, somehow, this year. It was pleasant to see a lady like Mrs Whalley tripping in and out with her little spaniel—a bit of the old times still left—something you could look up to and feel sure about … Looking at her legs … The swine.