Spider

by McGrath, Patrick

  When my father rose the next morning, and dressed for work, and went downstairs, he found my mother at the kitchen stove frying bacon. She had laid a clean white cloth on the table and poured his tea. She was all quiet bustling activity; she broke a couple of eggs into the skillet and a moment later set the plate before him: bacon and eggs, fried tomato and fried kidneys. “I popped out and got you something nice for your breakfast,” she said. “You need a good breakfast in the morning, you work hard.” Then she cut three slices from a fresh loaf and smeared them with dripping for his lunch. My father ate his breakfast; he said nothing, but dead as he was he couldn’t have been unaware of the meaning and quality of her gesture. “Drink your tea while it’s hot,” she murmured as she wrapped his sandwiches in newspaper. He left for work a few minutes later, out through the back door; I watched him from my bedroom window. She was at the sink as he went out, I heard the water running, he paused a moment in the doorway, and looked back at her. She gave him a small smile, without lifting her hands from the washing-up water, and he produced an expression about his mouth, a sort of squeezing together of the lips, that was part resignation, part regret; and then he nodded once or twice. Cycling to work in the sharp fresh early morning air I imagine him feeling oddly at peace; it was the night that brought the passion and the confusion and the pain, in the morning it was different.

  Several times over the course of the day he resolved to have done with Hilda Wilkinson altogether. He reminded himself of what she’d said to him the previous night, he remembered how much he disliked the people she drank with, and not least, he thought about the devastation of my mother, should she ever find out what was going on. That truly gave him pause; flaccid and unmanly it may have been, but that he was not prepared to face. No, this brief affair with Hilda Wilkinson, this brief encounter—best put it behind him, forget about it, return to the routines of everyday life, those stable routines that he’d known, so it seemed, forever.

  My father’s resolution remained firm until, I would guess, about the middle of the afternoon. He was overhauling the plumbing of a warehouse in East Ham with his mate Archie Boyle, a cheery fat youth with hair the color of a carrot. I see him on a wooden stepladder, his shins braced against the top step, working with hammer and wrench on a length of old lead piping high in the dust and the gloom. Every clang of his hammer echoes dully through the empty building, and over this reverberating clangor comes the sharp, thin sound, from down the other end, of Archie’s whistling; he is at work preparing sections of new pipe for my father to install. In his left hand my father grips the wrench, which is locked upon an antiquated octagonal nut that over the years has fused with its pipes, and with the right he wields the hammer, and with it delivers a series of steady blows to the shank of the wrench, in an effort to loosen the nut. Each hammer blow resounds through the warehouse like the tolling of some awful funereal requiem bell, flakes of rust drift free, and he has to turn his head to keep them from getting in his eyes. Slowly the nut starts to turn. My father’s mind, lulled by the steady dirgelike clangor of his hammer blows, superimposed, in that big empty chamber, like some sort of eerie gothic symphony, on the slow tuneless whistling of Archie Boyle, has drifted, again, to the events of last night, to the sight of Hilda with her coat pushed back, her hands on her hips, bare-legged, one knee crooked so her skirt rides up her white thigh, grinning her chinny grin from the shadows—and with that image the idea of having her, there in the alley, that tart (how he savors the word!), up against the wall, with her skirt pushed up round her waist—

  Suddenly from out of the pipe leaps a great hissing spurt of cold water. It hits him square in the chest and almost knocks him off the ladder. From all around the loosened nut spring jets of hissing water—the pipes have not been shut off at the mains. Archie comes trotting down the warehouse as my father descends the ladder, dripping wet and cursing, while the water sprays the ceiling and the top of the wall, then runs down to form a spreading puddle on the concrete floor. “Bloody hell!” shouts my father as he strides away to shut off the water. He does not need to be told that this is his fault.

  When he returns, Archie, still whistling, is hard at work with bucket and mop. No great problem, after all; but as my father angrily resumes work on the eight-sided nut he knows that if it hadn’t been for Hilda this wouldn’t have happened. The pair resume their tasks; but all the while, outside the dusty warehouse windows, the light is thickening in the bleak gray November afternoon; and as it thickens my father cannot keep his thoughts from turning, again and again, to Hilda, to his tart, and the longing comes back like a fever, and his resolutions are all forgotten.

  Soon afterwards the two plumbers left the empty warehouse. With the descent of darkness a damp, chilly fog had drifted in from the river, and my father pulled his cap low and tied his scarf tightly about his throat. After parting with Archie he mounted his bicycle and pedaled off in the direction of Kitchener Street. The moisture of the fog gathered round his spectacles and made his eyes smart as through obscure, deserted streets he rode, past black walls that glistened slickly where they caught the diffuse glow of the streetlamps, then retreated once more into inky indistinctness. Occasionally a figure hurried by, the footsteps becoming suddenly loud then just as quickly receding into silence. My father’s route carried him along streets that tended down toward the docks, and as it did so the fog became denser, the city more deserted, the atmosphere more eerily muffled. Chill and damp though the evening was, with the onset of darkness, and the fading of his morning’s resolutions, my father’s physical desire had grown stronger, and now he was flushed and distracted with it; he could no more remember his decision to end the affair than he could have risen on his bicycle over the roofs and chimneys of the East End and left the imperatives of the flesh beneath and behind him forever.

  On he crawled through the dark drear fog, his body on fire with the longing for Hilda Wilkinson. It smoldered inside him like the molten coke at the heart of a forge, it burned and seethed in the fog so that by the time he wheeled his bicycle into the back yard of number twenty-seven he was a man diseased, a man in fever, no longer responsible for his actions.

  He entered the kitchen. I’ve told you what this room was like, it was a poky, ill-lit room, and one would be hard-pressed to call it cosy. Nevertheless my mother had taken pains to render it warm and homelike. The curtains, as shabby and faded as her apron, were drawn across the grimy window over the sink, and from the stove issued the sizzle and odor of liver frying in onions. She had washed the dishes, swept the floor, and even brought in from the front parlor her only plant, a wilted and failing aspidistra. Wiping her hands on her apron, she gave my father the same small smile he had seen early that morning—an eternity ago, so it seemed!—and reached into the cupboard for a bottle of beer. Me, I was at the table, gazing at the ceiling; I wanted no contact with my father, none at all, not after last night. He stood in the doorway stamping his boots on the doormat as the fog came swirling round him into the room. He did not return my mother’s smile, he did not even attempt the equivocal pursing of the lips he’d managed in the morning. My mother was standing at the kitchen table with her back to him, pouring out a glass of beer. “Close the door, Horace,” she said, “the fog’s coming in. I’ve fried you a nice bit of liver—” She was cut short by a loud bang! as my father slammed the back door. He stamped across the kitchen floor, frowning, sat down heavily at the table (ignoring me as I was ignoring him) and drank the glass of beer. “Don’t drink so fast,” murmured my mother, busying herself at the stove. In response to this my father refilled the glass, and in the process the thing frothed over onto the tablecloth, a nice piece of embroidered cambric that had been a wedding present from his late mother-in-law. “Oh Horace,” cried my mother, “now see what you’ve done! Be a little more careful, please.” But still her tone was mild, she was determined that they wouldn’t fight.

  My father didn’t care. He was a changed man now, hard as granite and cold as ice. A ne
w sort of anger burned in him, and it burned with a cold, hard, gemlike flame: I could see it in his eyes when he took his glasses off, the hard flame burning in those hard pale-blue eyes of his. He had been a surly, humorless husband and father for years, but never before had I seen in him an anger as fierce, as cold, as this. It was as if he’d crossed a line of some sort, lost the ability to feel even a spark of human sympathy toward my mother. The tablecloth, the smiles, the sizzling liver—none of it could touch him, he knew only an urge to push her roughly out of his path, and so strong was the feeling he could barely suppress the violence her very presence aroused in him. He sat at the table without taking off his scarf or his jacket or his boots, without looking at me, without rolling a cigarette, he sat there with a face like tortured thunder and threw back glass after glass of beer until the big quart bottle was almost empty. My poor mother, the effort she was making was immense, and in return she was getting nothing but this wordless fury. “What is it, Horace?” she whispered as she put his plate of liver and onions on the table, pushing aside the houseplant as she did so. “What’s the matter with you?” She stood there peering at him with her head slightly to one side and a mass of pained, bewildered wrinkles working on her brow. Nervously she kept wiping her hands on her apron although they were quite dry. My father glared at the steaming liver, his fists to either side of the plate clenched so tight that the knuckles were like billiard balls trapped and straining beneath the skin. “Tell me, Horace,” came the voice again, and still he glared, fighting down a wave of sheer black rage, grimly clutching for control, grimly holding on. Get away from me! screamed a voice in his head, but my mother, my poor foolish mother, did not get away, instead she drew closer, reached out a hand, made as if to touch him. At last he turned toward her—the kitchen was silent, for the skillet was no longer sizzling, only the drip of the tap—and what a face he showed her! Never will I forget that face, not for as long as I live: brows knit in agony, lips pulled back from his teeth, all his mouth frozen in a terrible rictus that expressed both violence and utter helplessness, tortured helplessness in the face of that violence, and the eyes!—his eyes were burning not with the hard, gemlike flame now but with the same pain that contorted his brow and his lips, his whole sorry physiognomy, it was all there, and my mother read it and was shocked by the suffering that was in him, and she drew closer. “No!” said my father as her fingers fell upon his shoulder, “No!”—and then, with a strangled sound that half choked him in the utterance he rose clumsily to his feet, knocking the chair over backwards with a clatter, and stumbled across the kitchen to the back door, and out into the fog. My mother stood a moment gazing after him with her fingers pressed to her lips. Then she darted after him, down the yard to where the gate at the end stood open, and into the alley beyond. “Horace!” she cried. But night had fallen, the fog was thicker than ever, and she could see nothing, nor did any sound come back to her through the darkness, and after taking a few steps in one direction, and then in the other, she came back into the yard, back into the kitchen, and closed the door behind her. The chill and stink of the fog could be felt within the room’s warmth, and she stood for a moment and hugged herself and shivered. “Oh Spider,” she whispered; I was still sitting there, stunned by what had happened. She gazed at the plate of cooling liver and the stain of spilt beer on the tablecloth, and then she sank onto a chair and laid her head on her hands and wept.

  Rain again today. I love rain, did I tell you this already? Also I love fog, and have since I was a boy. I used to love going down to the docks in a fog to listen to the foghorns as they hooted and honked at one another, and watch the pallid glow from the lights of vessels slipping downstream with the tide. It was the cloak of spectral unreality I loved, the cloak it spread over the familiar forms of the world. All was strange in a fog, buildings grew vague, human beings groped and became lost, the landmarks, the compass points, by which they navigated melted into nothingness and the world was transfigured into a country of the blind. But if the sighted became blind, then the blind—and for some odd reason I have always regarded myself as one of the blind—the blind became sighted, and I remember feeling at home in a fog, happily at ease in the murk and gloom that so confused my neighbors. I moved quickly and confidently through fog-blanketed streets, unvisited by the terrors that lurked everywhere in the visible material world; I stayed out as late as I could in a fog. Last night, as I sat scribbling in my garret room at Mrs. Wilkinson’s, I got up from time to time to stretch my limbs and gaze down at the rain as it came drifting through the halo of the streetlamp opposite; and I realized how little I’d changed, how my emotions in the rain that day (yesterday, I mean) so closely matched the feelings I’d had for fog as a boy. What lies at the root of it all, I wonder, what force is it that once drew a lonely child out into foggy streets and still exerts its attraction in heavy rainfall some twenty years later? What is it about the misting and blurring of the visible world that gave such comfort to the boy I then was, and to the creature I have since become?

  Queer thoughts, no? I sighed. I bent down to pull my book out from under the linoleum. Nothing there! I groped. Momentary lurch of horror as I assimilated the possibility of the book’s absence. Theft? Of course—by Mrs. bloody Wilkinson, who else! Then there it was, pushed just a bit deeper than I’d expected; no little relief. My father was stumbling blindly through a fog, barely conscious of his whereabouts, the chaos within him further befuddled with the beer he’d just drunk. Great relief, in fact; what on earth would I do if she got her hands on it? Is the best place for it really under the linoleum? Isn’t there a hole somewhere I can tuck it into? The streetlamps were smears of light in the fog, flecks and splinters of weak fractured yellowy radiance that picked up the glitter of wild light in his eyes, the fleeting blur of whiteness of his nose and brow as he charged by. Somewhere I’ve seen a hole, I know I have, but where, where? On he blundered until at last he saw a building aglow, and like a moth to the flame he drew near, and found himself outside the Dog and Beggar. In he went, into the dry warmth of the place, and suddenly there was the smell of beer and tobacco in his nostrils and the murmur of talk in his ears. I just can’t afford to take the chance.

  For a few moments he stood there in the doorway, his chest heaving violently as he brought his breathing under control. His eyes were still wild, his skin damp and sleek with the wet. He glanced about the room, with its scattering of small round tables; there was a thin drift of sawdust on the bare wood floor, and standing at the bar was an old man reading the racing results. Two more old men sat at a table near the fireplace, where a small coal fire was burning, their lips working silently over gray toothless gums. All the talk came from the saloon bar, beyond the glass partition, and from that direction Ernie Ratcliff now appeared. Glancing at my father as he laid a thin hand upon a beerpump, he murmured: “Well come in, Horace, if you’re coming.” And my father, his passions still roiling in his breast, nodded blankly once or twice and closed the door. Like a man in a dream he approached the bar. Ratcliff noticed nothing amiss—or if he did, it was not his way to mention it. “Nasty out,” he remarked, “real pea-souper. Pint of the usual, is it, Horace?” My father nodded, and a few seconds later had carried his pint to a table and sat there gazing at the fire.

  Then all at once he seemed to awaken, to recognize his surroundings. He picked up his glass of beer and drained almost the entire pint in one draught. He rose to his feet and made his way back to the bar. “Same again?” said Ratcliff amiably. “Nice drop, this”—and he pulled my father another pint.

  An hour later my father was once more out in the fog. He had not grown calm in the meanwhile, very far from it. The manic turmoil had subsided, but from that subsidence had emerged a decision. Decision, I say; it was more of an impulse, even an instinct, than a decision, a sort of simple blind drive toward the satisfaction of a hunger—and I need hardly tell you what that hunger was. Unsteadily he’d emerged from the Dog and Beggar, buttoned his jacket and tied his sc
arf about his throat. Then he’d set his steps toward the Earl of Rochester, and been quickly swallowed by the fog, which was thicker than ever.

  By the time he reached the Earl of Rochester my father appeared to be under control. He did not lurch, he did not slur his speech, but he was in fact drunk, and no less in the grip of instinct than he had been when he left the Dog. The Rochester was full when he arrived; this was a Friday night, and it was already close to nine. He pushed open the door and stepped quickly inside, a wisp or two of the fog clinging to him as he entered. A wave of chatter and laughter, smoke and warmth and light rolled over him. He pushed his way through to the bar and ordered whisky. When he had it he turned, looking for Hilda.

  She was at a table in the corner with Nora and the rest. She glanced up, then promptly rose to her feet and made her way through the crush toward him. Odd, this; you would expect her to make him come to her. I think I know what accounted for her behavior in the Rochester that evening, and for much that occurred afterwards, for I believe she’d learned something about my father since the events in the alley the previous night, something specific; when the time comes I shall explain all this in detail. Now, though, she came pushing through the crowd, her face flushed and a glass of port held aloft in one hand like an ensign, and as she came she bantered with the men, who made way for her, laughing, as a brisk sea parts before a vessel under sail. Then she was beside him, and as he had the first taste of the whisky the bite of the spirit added fuel to the desire he’d been feeling since nightfall. With one boot on the brass rail at the bottom of the bar, and his eyes never leaving her face, he pulled out his tobacco. “So, plumber,” said Hilda—she too had been drinking, and she recognized the wildness in him—“feeling better tonight, are we?”