by Jane Gardam
People start moving away.
I’m tramp, see. Hobo. Drop-out. Gentleman of road. Swag-man. Tramp. May have seen me on road anyday fifteen years. Push pramalong. Full gear. Got long black coat. Rags other clothes under. These not see for many years at time. Not observed. Between these and skin lining newspapers. The news is old. Keep all about me, day night. Pushing pram.
Stop. Have good burrow. Rubbish bins. Sleep park, steps cinema, back church, back seat parked car. Places people gleaming faces nothing do hand soup bread. Grand what pick up too.
Name Horsa. Daft silly woman mother. Dead all I know. Hengist dead too. Julius Caesar dead. Napoleon, Churchill, Harry Pollitt, Hitler.
Dead. Horsa sixty. Maybe seventy. Give take year. Never count up.
Until start thinking wash. Comes on like said—slow, slow.
Hot day. Wash.
Water. Wash.
Wash. Bath.
Soak. Steam.
Grand.
When boy, town called Nevermind (Mugstown, Mutstown) one good thing. Bath. Oh boy! Someone scrubbing away ears, back, toe-nails pure pink-white, shiny. Not elephant slab-grey.
SO.
Go this day down road town maybe Mugstown, Mutstown all I know. Get there over hill, through wood, up village, out village and it was raining. My rain! Deepest Paper under-linings wet as sump and soggy.
Rain turn snow. Horsa shacks up barn. Farmer looks. ‘Get out there, you or I’ll getmegun.’
So pushoff. Pram sticks every tenyards icy mud. Sits down splat. ‘Great goodfornowt,’ yells farmer. ‘Firing hay bloody fags.’ ‘No fags,’ says Horsa. ‘Don’t smoke, farmer,’ but comes out bad: ‘burble-wurble-yah-blah-splot.’
Tramp, see. Loner. No practice mouth, tongue, vocal cordage of sarcophagus.
‘Bad words, filth!’ yells farmer. Horsa steps on. Staggers on.
That night hedge back, bath idea begins rise. Begins simmer. Dog comes up sniffs. Howls. Runs off.
Bit high, Horsa. On high-Horsa. Time go.
What do is this. Look for house good class, empty. Look see water pipes growing up walls. Pass nowagain maybe week and watch what goes.
He goes out.
Kids out.
She goes out.
Twelve clock she back.
Maybe Fridays or somedays she always later. Maybe teatime. Maybe keepfit, yoga, coffee Mugstown friends.
So after two Friday, on Friday three in nips Horsa, first hiding pram outhouse, garden shed, find way bathroom, start in. Oh boy!
So finds this house, oh verynice. Verygoodclassperson. Green grass of Mugstown well-cut, metal-edges. Keep grass not feeling too fullofself. Keep place. Gravel paths of mustard yellow. Windows white nets, swags like innertent. Front door smart boxsweets. Good chain for pullbell.
He goes out.
Kids go out.
She goes out. Big bag so out all Mugstown day.
Up steps goes smelly Horsa pulls chainbell.
Now if one comes, one Gran, one serving-maid, one lodger one mad aunt kept close within, says Horsa, ‘Besogood. Give poor tramp glasswater,’ which sings out ‘Wurble-burble-splash-woosh-splot-PAH,’ and Horsa screamed upon, yelled upon, scourged upon, sentonway.
But if no answer then it’s the great, grand, soap-water kick. Oh boy!
SO.
Up steps—pram hidden safe below. Nobodybout. Road dead nine-thirty clock o’ the morning. Nice quiet houses, nice quiet burglar-alarm red boxes just stand. Inside each, all tables, chairs, clocks, pictures sit looking each other warm-clean out of wind, rain, weather, poor sods.
Up steps smelly Horsa.
Rings bell no answer.
Ringsgain no answer.
Ringsgain turns look updown. Not living soul. Not motor car. Not bike. Only cat gatepost watch through yellow slits. Cat stands, stretches on four fat sixpences, turns round, curls upgain, goes sleep. ‘Carry on Horsa. Have bath.’ Like cats. Clean, interesting.
Round back house kitchen window open. Thought silly woman. Right. Water taps inside window knobbly, window small. Horsa big. Yuge. Elephant Horsa. Horsa the elephant tramp. Horsa theyear. (Hobo. Drop-out, Gentleman road. Swagman. Scrappy. Tramp. Oh boy!)
Maybe left something else open like perhaps back door? Don’t bedaft Horsa. Not your luck and you are lucky. Kick three milk bottles and one little disc. Disc says three more please. SHATTER SHATTER SHATTER. Sounds Horsa killed street greenhouses. Stand still. All well—no alarm. Change disc twenty-seven more please. Very funny joke. Try back door and back door open!
HALLELUIA HORSA! In go. Up stairs. Right in bathroom. Big lump pink soap size breadloaf. Rosepink. Falseteethpink. One, two, three, four towels big, thick, hanging on fat hot coppery pipes. Oh boy!
Horsa works taps, drops in plug. Bath (pale rosepink baby-pink, Mugstownpink) fills up up. Three jars salts green, yellow, lilac. Lilac favourite colour. Lielack.
Pour whole jar lielack in very hot bath and steamrise smells gardens heaven.
Offcome Horsa-boots. Hard work but off come. In time.
Off come black coat, trousers, jacket, waist-coats and let linings now unroll, telling tales of timegoneby. Plop. Dropping noises. Things falling off Horsa into deep hairy carpet. Some move fast. At a run. On various numbers of legs. They dash—not pausing to pass timeday.
All extras gone farewell. Horsa peels last newsprint and good scratch. Hasgo peeling newsprint footbottoms, but these old intelligences must soak. How is it boot in water-closet? It floats. Horsa’s great big black left boot floats tasteful toilet like lobster (uncooked).
Beholdnow mirror. Amber-tinted-rose! And there (how he glares) is Horsa.
AND NOW—
Horsa mustersgether—
soap
flannels
back brushes
front brushes
sponges
nail brushes
sit there you lot
now then—
HERE COMES HORSA
In we go. Oh boy!
Maybe half-hour, maybe hour, maybe four hours. Best bath ever. Friends, let me say, let me proclaim—
PROCLAMATION
oh friends
THIS IS A REAL GOOD
BATH
When water goes off lovely boil have to twiddle butterflies. Golden butterflies, fat kind golden taps twiddle great big slab-elephant toes. OUCH! Get lost! Oh dear! No sense being burnt throwing back—brush. Mirror cracked now. Maybe yes, maybe no?
Maybe yes.
Hot water unending here—picked my house friends—hot water neverends like drizzle and mizzle and deluge and flood of wet night field-end somewhere down old green track. But HOT water, SOAPY water, on-on-ever, constant water. Just the ask. Just the twiddle.
Horsa how you spread!
How you swell in bathtub, how you rise in mound as tide washes steep pink shores.
Lotwater seems over bathroom carpet, soppingpink carpet. Pink carpet not very pink at present. Pink carpet black now where lielack water sops. Oh boy!
Horsa peers out over bathside. Horsa rests big nose-end on smoothpink bath-edge. Pink carpet not pink and now not carpet. More water-meadow. Flooded bog. Little movements in it occur and take place. Hereanthere. Some of Horsa’s creepies drowning. Sad world.
Then down in again Horsa—slap, splursh. Deep, deep down in it.
So out gets last and hangs all towels allover Horsa—one round fatbelly, one round old shoulders, old soldiers, one round fine black headofhair, one last over all as second cover like tent. Tent with pink legs moves off down passage.
His room.
Kids room.
Her room.
Upagain—did Horsa turn off golden twiddleflies?—and what’s this? Dad’s room. Old Dad by look room full old stuff, boxes, rubbish, mess, hats. Dusgusting. Two big wa
rdrobes.
Big fellow grandad. Wheregone not-here?
Maybe dead.
Maybe can’t quite bring selves get rid old clothes.
Think nothing of it Missus. Can help there.
Big fellow grandad, same size Horsa. Good black suit, shirt, tie. Good boots too Horsa, getemonfeet. Ow! Grandad’s toes not spread like Horsa’s. Not gentlemanroad. Better get slit cut grandad’s boots. Waitabit—here’s good coat now—maybe hat. Horsa hears rushing waters.
Horsa fancies hat.
Something for dark wet ditches.
Something for howling storm.
Bowler hat oh very nifty Horsa!
Pork-pie hat no not quite.
Whatsthisnow? Tall box!
TOP HAT!
Look-in-glass, lookinglass, Horsa. Good morning sir, and how do you do? Glory!
Oh boy!
Down again long landing and noise waters. Ah—new boots seem not let in landing waters. Landing stages landing waters and down kitchen get knife cut slit ease toe boot. (What’s new noise?)
Here’s knife. Now then—whataboutit! Food. A foodstore and we have
ham,
cheese,
bread,
tomato sauce,
Suzie’s sauce,
Uncle’s sauce,
and
sweetie bics,
pork pie (not hat)
pork pie juice sticky crust.
Bite pie, blow flakes, out of beard PUFF!
And here is cold dark stew on cold dark shelf.
Now then find bag. (What noise again? Bell?) Nowthen Horsa takecare. Goslow. Put stew in paperbags. Don’t get stew down nice new coat. What’s fallen then eggs? All slippery. Crunch-crunch (Yes door bell—getopram). Dear me, long shelf full jars whole silly little cupboard comes way from wall. Red jam, orange jam, lumpy black-purple jam. Very pretty. Mind glass. Down go porridge plates unwashed off draining board, very sticky. But such tidy little Mugstown lady shoulda washed up. Now then—
Stew in pocket, sauce bottle otherpocket. Sausages where—top hat TOP HAT! O.K. Horsa, bestgonow. Somebody out there front steps. Oh! Best crawlalong under housewall. Quiet now under steps. Grab pram.
Little cough, little twitter steps above. Lady ringing doorbell up above. Coming down steps.
‘Excuse me? Hello? Good morning? Is anybody there? I believe there are some old clothes for charity to be collected from this address. Excuse me sir, I wonder if you have anything for The Homeless?’
‘Nothing about me, Ma’am, nothing about me.’
(Wurbly-burbly-gloshy-woshy-WAH)
‘Eeeeeeeeeek!’ screams good woman, ‘Helphelp. Mad man!’
Nobody notices. Goodbye friend.
Cat openseye. Smiles shuts it. ‘Take your ease, Horsa.’ What’s Homeless?
Like cats.
And Horsa passes downstreet. Top hat (TOP HAT) full of sausages and pockets full of stew. Smell, smell the lielack as Horsa passes by. Shuffle, shuffle behind pram, shuffle under freezing trees. Grandad’s leftboot bitight. Disremembered knife. Never mind find something soon. Maybe sell boots for real good used ones.
Now Horsa, get moveon. Openroad now boy. Loosen necktie, maybe chuckaway. In bin. Here’s bin. Might find old sandwich. Good newspaper bin anyway—keep for later, Horsa. Back normal later. Horsa smells of lilac notforever. Paper padding needed soon as nights draw down. Monthortwo, yearortwo—Horsa no good telling time—but round beginningain. Thinking bath.
Hot day. Bath.
Water. Bath.
Bath. Etcetera.
Whileyetacourse—monthtwo, yeartwo, (‘Evening officer, splendid day. Wurbly, burbly, gurgly—’)
Yeartwoyet.
Smellsalielack.
Top hat full sausages. TOP HAT!
Great world.
Oh boy!
THE SIDMOUTH LETTERS
Lookit, Annie, Lois died.’
‘What!’
‘Hello? Annie? Lookit, Lois died.’
‘When? What?’
‘She died. Can you come round here?’
‘Of course. Of course. I’ll be there at once. Shorty—did you say? You didn’t say—?’
‘Claridges. Take a cab. Oh, and Annie—’
‘Oh Shorty, Shorty!’
‘Annie, will you bring a night case? I’m goin’ to get you to take a train journey for me.’
So that I was in the train to Axminster, a stifling July midday, with a cheque in my pocket for a thousand pounds and a bag by my side with nightdress and toothbrush in it and my feet on the seat opposite saying, ‘No! Lois dead. Dead!’
Yesterday I’d talked all day to her. Drunk as she was we had talked all day. All the way down the Portsmouth Road nearly to Winchester and back, in the hired Mercedes, Shorty driving, oblivious of her with his high-pitched literary friend beside him.
Lois dead.
And I doing Shorty’s dirty work.
Yesterday if anyone had told me that I would ever work for Shorty I’d not have believed it.
Nor was it for any love of Lois. Not love of Lois. Not even friendship for Lois. I’d hardly known her.
But Lois dead! I lit a cigarette and thought.
I first met Shorty Shenfold years and years ago when I was his student doing a year’s course with him on the English Novel at a small university in the Middle West. It was he who had chosen me for the scholarship, gone in to my qualifications with the greatest thoroughness, almost asking—I believe he did ask—for my English birth certificate, my mother’s maiden name and the name of even my kindergarten through to my Cambridge College before deciding on me.
He was impressive. He was not I think called Shorty because of his enormous size—no one got affectionate about Shorty—but because of his predilection for the short: short story, short polemic, short but searching criticism, short shrift. Even for an American his style of lecturing was monumentally dull, but even for an American his accuracy and exhaustiveness were remarkable. His slim books which kept appearing at respectable intervals in better and better bindings and at higher and higher prices, while they read like railway timetables, were magnificently thorough. Not a scholar could fault them. Soon they stopped trying. Every conscientious university in the States bought a copy and each was translated excellently into German—rather more curiously into French. Soon they could be seen on the most hallowed shelves in the world where they were taken out and used for reference in academic emergencies about every ten or fifteen years.
Shorty also became known for a side-line: the occasional short controversial piece about the great which he produced for one or other of the more popular literary papers—clever, sharp, always short—and though not exactly scandalous or irresponsible, with the tang of something rather nasty about it. Shorty was, I think, the first to consider Dorothy Wordsworth as anything more than her brother’s beloved sister. Long before Anthony Burgess he enthusiastically launched into the syphilitic overtones in the life of Shakespeare. It was said that he had much to suggest, after the fifty years of family grace were up, about Kipling, and his piece on how far Keats had got with Fanny Brawne was discussed for many a furious week in The Times Literary Supplement, ensuring that every word of it was widely read. Shorty was a good scholar but his pastimes and tactics were a hyena’s.
His looks however were a bull’s—a bull’s neck, a bull’s crinkly chunk of hair, a bull’s manners and a bull’s dangerousness, and what in the world made me submit to him, when I was hardly twenty years old, a piece of my own unsolicited work about Jane Austen, God alone knows. It was a short piece which in my innocence I had thought might interest him about Jane Austen’s only—and putative—love affair on a seaside holiday on the Dorset-Devon coast, the one or two (I forget now) contemporary hints of it and a history of the later references and theorie
s. The piece established nothing new at all about ‘this shadowy lover’, but I think it was the first time the facts and allusions had been seriously set out.
It was a short report—the family summer holiday ‘by some sea-side,’ probably at Sidmouth, after the loss of the loved childhood home, Jane Austen’s anxiety about her coming life in Bath, and the first suggestions that she felt she was growing out of her youth. Then the meeting with the delightful man ‘said to be a clergyman’ (some said a sailor, some a doctor), thought even by her formidable sister to have ‘been worthy of Jane.’ Then the man’s sudden departure, ‘called away on family business’, and three weeks later the roundabout, astonishing news of his death. I examined all of it as best I could, then the return of the family to Bath and the final move to Chawton; Jane Austen’s eventual new strength there after three years of utter silence; her increased interest in and love for her young nephews and nieces as they grew up, the desk in the window of the unremarkable sitting room looking out at the unremarkable view; the procession of the five great books, the new spectacular sympathy and good sense about love which have ever since comforted the world.
I called the thing something too pompous—Jane Austen—Love and Privacy—I dare say, and it was no doubt as bad and unscholarly as the title. I lost it long ago so I can’t tell. But, no doubt through Shenfold’s training, I believe it was thorough and properly set out, and when he handed it back to me with only a tick and ‘interesting’ on it and passed me out with a very poor grade at the end of my year and hardly—though I was his own particular choice of student from England—hardly a goodbye, I was very disappointed.
I was surprised, therefore, about a year later, to read under the title Jane Austen at Sidmouth and over his name, my article word for word with just the added hint that the lover’s disappearance was a little mysterious, more of a getaway than a death. Don’t ask me how this was done, but the suggestion was certainly there and his, as the rest of the work was undoubtedly mine.
I watched Shorty’s flight up the ladder with some interest after that. I even met him again once or twice in England over the years. The first time was by chance outside the London Library. It was about five years after his piece on the Sidmouth lover, but he recognised me and I think would have pretended not to had I not called out ‘Oh!’