1
There was a letter for Mr Squales. The first letter in fact that he had received for weeks. It was sudden and unexpected. Also, strange and beautiful – like sunlight penetrating into a closed room.
Mrs Vizzard looking up from the basement saw the blue and gold trousers of the postman as he mounted the front steps, and went upstairs at once to see what he had brought. She had made it a regular and rather pleasant duty for years to see what letters the other residents at No. 10 were receiving. It was her way of keeping her finger on the pulse of things. She was thus the first person in the house to touch Mr Squales’ letter. And, for some reason that she couldn’t understand, she didn’t like it. It frightened her. She wanted to tear it up. Tear it up and burn it and not say anything about it.
As soon as the thought came to her, she was ashamed of it. She recognised it for the piece of insane jealousy that it was, and it served to remind her how obsessed she had become. Really it was things like that that alarmed her about herself. It wasn’t a straightforward alarm either. Not simply concern for the way in which Mr Squales had disturbed the smoothness of her life. No, it went much deeper and farther back than that. There was guilt and conscience, and remorse and all the rest of it mixed up there. Every episode of this kind – and there were tiny instances daily – brought it back to her that she had never felt this way about Mr Vizzard. It was a new sensation, and it savoured terrifyingly of unfaithfulness.
She had put the letter face downwards on the hall‐stand because she didn’t like holding it. Now she lifted it up again and studied it closely. It was written on large expensive notepaper that bent rather than creased as she handled it. It reminded her of a five‐pound note that the bank manager had once passed to her. And it was large, expensive‐looking handwriting, with the address heavily underlined with an oblique indented slash of the pen. Obviously the hand‐writing of a woman.
With a start she realised that she must have been standing there for the better part of a minute with the letter still in her hand. Almost in a trance, in fact. Giving a little shudder, she braced herself and began to descend the dark stairs again. Now that she had quite got over this sudden fit of silliness she wondered whether she should go straight in with the letter or wait until she took Mr Squales his breakfast at 8.30.
The breakfast on a tray had been her own idea. It had been born on that day when Mr Squales had first put his arms around her. He was hungry and he was hers, and that had been sufficient.
As she got this morning’s tray ready – the small tea‐pot that she had bought specially for the purpose, the three thin slices of bread and butter, the freshly‐boiled egg under its knitted cosy like a pointed pixie cap – she recognised this for the most delicious moment in the day. Sometimes as she stood outside his door she could scarcely bear to knock and destroy the suspense. She was waiting, she realised, for the occasion when, in answer to her knock, he would throw the door open and embrace her. But up to the present it hadn’t happened that way. Usually by the time she got there Mr Squales wasn’t up. Sometimes he was sitting up in bed smoking, his dark eyes fixed on her. But almost as often he was still asleep. If anything since he had been getting his breakfast in bed in this way his hours had become rather later.
Balancing the tray one‐handed, Mrs Vizzard raised her right one to knock. As she did so the old fluttery excitement came back again. And then, staring up at her from beside the toast‐rack, she saw the letter. The horrible thing had succeeded even in ruining this moment, in coming between her and her betrothed.
It was one of Mr Squales’ more wakeful mornings. He was alert and watchful, sitting up against the pillows, a thin spire of smoke rising from the drooping cigarette between his lips. And, as soon as he saw her, he smiled – that slow melting smile of his that made Mrs Vizzard want to drop the tray that she had been carrying so carefully and rush and place her head on his bosom.
‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said softly, almost reproachfully. ‘Lying here, waiting.’
As he spoke, it seemed to Mrs Vizzard that they were the most beautiful words that she had ever heard. Then she happened to glance towards the clock. It showed twenty minutes to nine. Evidently the affair of the letter had taken up more of her time than she had realised.
She placed the tray on his knees and she quivered as his hand brushed against hers. When the tray was securely balanced – Mr Squales wasn’t really sitting up straight enough to be comfortable – he reached out and caught hold of her hand again. This time he raised it to his lips and kissed it, and Mrs Vizzard experienced that same shameful quiver again as she felt the rough texture of his unshaven cheek.
Then his eye caught the letter and he dropped her hand, abruptly it seemed. He picked up the envelope and examined it.
‘There’s a letter for you,’ Mrs Vizzard said foolishly.
But Mr Squales did not reply. He only frowned. That letter – and he recognised the writing in a flash – was a piece of his private life. About the only piece left, indeed. It was his, and his alone. And he didn’t want to have any one else butting into it. So he merely put it back on the tray again and poured himself out a cup of tea.
‘And did my dear one sleep well,’ he asked. ‘No bad dreams?’
Mrs Vizzard didn’t reply immediately. She stood there looking down at the letter.
‘Sleep?’ she said with a jerk. ‘Oh, yes, I slept well.’
Mr Squales nodded his head approvingly as though she had slept well specially to please him. He began tapping the white crown of the egg with the back of his spoon.
‘I often wonder,’ he said between the taps, ‘what I have done to deserve this? Why should I, a wanderer, suddenly find such kindness – such love – when I was by the wayside?’
The egg broke and Mr Squales hurriedly began chasing a rich yellow rivulet which was coursing down the side of the egg‐cup. Mrs Vizzard stood there watching him. She had never before seen a man crack an egg while he was smoking a cigarette.
‘You haven’t forgotten this afternoon, have you?’ she asked. ‘Forgotten this afternoon? Indeed, no!’
His mouth was full as he was speaking, and his voice was blurred and muffled. He took a sip of tea and wondered, despondently, what it was that was happening this afternoon. If anything, his days from being too empty had suddenly become too full. Mrs Vizzard was always thinking up something new for him – something for both of them. His afternoons, so far as he could see, were degenerating into a series of rather feminine birthday treats. He was only glad that there weren’t any relatives of Mrs Vizzard’s whom she might want to take him to see.
Then a happy subterfuge came into his mind, and his face fell. ‘There is only one thing about it that makes me reluctant to go. Would you understand it, I wonder, if I told it to you?’
Mrs Vizzard’s hand strayed across her bosom.
‘Tell me,’ she said faintly.
‘It is the question of money,’ he explained. ‘Your money and my pride. How can I go on letting you spend so much on me? A theatre… a cinema… they all cost money.’
‘But the Tate Gallery doesn’t cost anything. It’s a free day,’ she told him.
The Tate Gallery! Of course, now that she mentioned it, he remembered perfectly. It was the Blakers13 that she wanted to be taken to. There had been an article in The Spirit World that had said that Blaker was a man who dipped his earthly brush on to a psychic palette, drawing trance pictures that only the Inner Eye could have seen: Mrs Vizzard had made him read it and he recalled how, at the time, he had reflected that there might be an opening in Spiritualist papers for that kind of writing. But the recollection did nothing to encourage him. Mr Squales had never really cared for picture galleries.
‘Everything costs something,’ he said at last. ‘You are so good to me. How do I know that before I come back we shall not have taken food somewhere?’
There was a pause.
‘Will you come if I promise that we don’t spend a penny?’ Mrs Vizz
ard asked him.
Mr Squales’ heart sank as he realised what it was that he had done. Simply by being too clever, he had committed himself to the pictures and ruined any chance of tea.
But already Mrs Vizzard was speaking again.
‘Will you come if we walk there and come back to tea afterwards?’ she persisted.
She stood there on the rug – it was a rug that she had brought through from her own sitting‐room – appealing to him.
‘Do say you’ll come,’ she said.
She was ashamed of it as soon as she had said it. There she was, a responsible adult woman behaving like a schoolgirl. The sheer nakedness of her attitude appalled her.
But Mr Squales was smiling again.
‘You didn’t think that I didn’t want to go?’ he said. ‘It would make me unhappy, very unhappy, if you had actually thought that. We will go together as we said, and if ’ – here Mr Squales took another spoonful of egg – ‘we find a place where we can drink a cup of tea, and talk and forget the world, who am I to stop it? This afternoon we will see the Blakers.’
Blaker? Blaker? Was it really Blaker or was it just plain Blake? He didn’t know because he’d never heard of him before. Not that it mattered. His afternoon was done for anyway.
Now that Mrs Vizzard was happy again she could afford to go back and get on with the rest of her duties. In the anticipation of the outing she had even forgotten the letter.
Mr Squales made no attempt to stop her. He watched her go from the room, and then as soon as the door was shut after her and he had heard her footsteps die away in the passage, he snatched up the envelope and ripped it open. To his surprise he found that his fingers were trembling with excitement.
And no wonder! The letter was from Mrs Jan Byl and was written in her own imperious hand. Her blunt majestic nib had raced across the paper leaving the crosses to the t’s streaming like a comet’s tail. And in the result it was considerably more like painting than mere writing. But it was the substance of the letter more than the characters that roused Mr Squales. He drew in a deep breath and reached out for another cigarette.
‘Dear Professor Qualito,’ the letter ran, ‘I have done you an injustice. A grave injustice. The things you told me while your spirit was far away were terrible. Terrible.’ Mrs Jan Byl had underlined this word so heavily that the nib had divided itself. ‘But I know now that they were true.’ – True was also underlined. – ‘One cannot afford to be petty in Spiritualism – there is no place for littleness. Will you, therefore, consent to enter the trance state again in my house? If you come I feel that we may be on the verge of great discoveries. Important discoveries. If we could obtain proof’ – likewise underlined – ‘you would be famous. It is not in our powers to deny such an opportunity. Come to‐morrow, Tuesday, if you are not engaged. I need your help.
‘Yours inquiringly,
‘Hermione Jan Byl.’
Mr Squales drew in a deep draught of cigarette smoke and lay back holding his breath until his lungs were near bursting point. He was in ecstasy.
‘There you are,’ he told himself. ‘I knew I’d made an impression. I’m not usually wrong about women.’
Then, as the first flush of mental conquest ebbed away, he reflected in a kind of golden daze on the financial aspects of the thing.
‘She sent me away. Now she wants me back. I’ll go. But this will cost her something.’
Within reason, he could charge her anything. It wasn’t even as if he were relying on it now – that always kept the price down. Thanks to Mrs Vizzard he was independent. And he was better dressed than he had been the last time he had seen Mrs Jan Byl. He had to thank Mrs Vizzard for that, too – it was she who had made him a present of the clothes that he was wearing. In his new light grey he could look the part as well as play it. He only wished now that he had shown more confidence in himself in the choice of the suit. He ought to have chosen something darker and more professional. The only thing that comforted him was that he had stipulated a double‐breasted waistcoat at the time of ordering.
‘To‐morrow, Tuesday,’ – that meant to‐day. And he remembered Mr Blaker! It was Mr Blaker who stood between him and his five – possibly even ten – guineas. He crushed out his cigarette angrily in his saucer. Blast Mr Blaker.
‘Opportunity only knocks once,’ he told himself. ‘This is where Mr Blaker goes down the drain so far as I’m concerned. I’ll have to square it first with my intended. There may be trouble. There may be tears. But go I must. And go I’m going to.’
2
But Mr Squales wasn’t the only one – not even the only one in Dulcimer Street – whose afternoon had been arranged for him. Mr Josser was just such another.
There he was, all keyed up and ready to spend a couple of pleasant hours doing nothing in particular while Mrs Josser went over to the infirmary to see Mrs Boon, when the worst, the very worst, the worst possible, occurred. Mrs Josser got one of her headaches.
She had suffered from them before – the very word ‘her’ denoted this – and Mr Josser knew exactly what it meant. Knew exactly, but still did not realise how deeply he would be involved. It just didn’t seem possible that he should be asked to go over to the infirmary instead.
For one brief moment when Mrs Josser put it to him in the bedroom he very nearly refused point blank. He was fed up; fed up, he confessed inwardly, with the Boons and everything about them; fed up with Percy and the murder and with Mrs Boon too. Then the feeling passed as rapidly as it had come and he was himself again, with a fierce attack of conscience into the bargain. Of course, he’d go and see her; he couldn’t leave Mrs Boon just lying there half‐paralysed and with no one to talk to her. Besides, he was the one person she’d really want to see. He’d be able to sit at her bedside and tell her all about Percy.
‘And take her some flowers,’ Mrs Josser told him as he was leaving. ‘Take her a bunch of something bright.’
He’d got right over to Walham Green where the hospital was before he actually bought the flowers. And that irritated him. Because on his way in the bus he’d been passing barrow after barrow laden up with stocks and marguerites and sweet‐peas – just the sort of thing to brighten up a sick‐ward. And now that he wanted a flower seller there wasn’t one in sight. Walham Green might have been visited by locusts for all the blossom that was about.
He found a shop finally, a small retail corner of the cut‐flower trade, tucked away in a corner beside a tobacconist’s. The proprietress, a pale fat woman in black, was finishing off a sheaf of Arum lilies when he went in, and over her head hung a black‐edged notice that said wreaths and crosses made to order. It seemed irreverent to disturb her. And the result was disappointing when he did so. On the more frivolous side of her practice there was nothing but roses and carnations to be had – all the cottage flowers, as the woman called them, had been sold out earlier. So in the end Mr Josser chose carnations. He bought half a dozen of them and they cost him three and threepence – three shillings for the carnations and threepence for the asparagus fern that went with them. As he came out of the shop Mr Josser caught sight of himself in a long mirror by the doorway. Despite the asparagus fern, the flowers made an extraordinarily small bunch. A small, elon‐gated bunch. They might have been a bouquet for an only moderately successful concert‐singer.
The infirmary – the infirmary of the Little Sisters of Compassion – to which Mr Josser was going, was a forbidding, impregnable‐looking sort of building. As though fearing riot or assault, or possibly only the big outside world, the Little Sisters had hidden their good works away behind a high brick wall. Mr Josser had to pull out an old‐fashioned bell‐handle beside a green front door and stand on the pavement as though he were a tradesman waiting to deliver something.
The door was opened almost immediately, however, and Mr Josser found himself face to face – or rather face to what was left showing of face – with a nun wearing a gigantic overhanging headdress of black cashmere, secured by very large pi
ns on to a starched framework as stiff as a man’s dress‐shirt. It seemed quite astonishing to hear a normal, and rather pleasant, female voice issuing from such a contraption.
‘I’ve come to see Mrs Boon, if it’s convenient,’ he said, and added rather lamely by way of explanation, ‘I… I’m a friend.’
The Sister did not seem to need any further explanation. She accepted him. Closing the door behind her, she indicated a little waiting‐room with a glass door, and a row of hard, upright chairs. Mr Josser went in and sat down rather self‐consciously underneath a highly‐coloured plaster statuette of Our Lord with the heart picked out in gilt oddly enough in the middle of the chest, and the wounds painted in very vividly in vermilion. Feeling awkward and Protestant and out of place, he looked down at his shoes and tried to avoid catching the eye of the other two visitors who were waiting with him.
Then a girl in the plain grey dress of a ward‐maid came along and told him that Sister had said that he could see Mrs Boon if he came now. Holding the flowers in front of him, Mr Josser followed.
The walk seemed in a way to be a continuation of his walk inside the Prison. Between the Prison and the Infirmary there was very little to choose. It was as though by his simple inability to manage his own affairs, young Percy had sentenced the Boons, mother and son alike, to a life of bleak walls and long, echoing corridors and barred windows. Even the Infirmary had metal grilles across the skylights.
When he actually reached the ward, Mr Josser’s embarrassment increased. The young ward‐maid handed him over to another of the nuns, and in the wake of that prodigious bonnet Mr Josser followed right down the centre of the ward as though he were a procession. There must have been twenty beds at least. And as he walked he was aware of sick womanhood all round him. Old ladies with wispy plaits of hair like bleached straw, and young buxom things in tight pink bed‐jackets, lay in two long rows; lay in two long rows and watched him. He was a thoroughly self‐conscious Mr Josser by the time he had reached Mrs Boon’s bedside in the corner.
London Belongs to Me Page 43