Out of the Blackout

by Robert Barnard

  At a quarter to five he stood at the end of Miswell Terrace. One more of what he already had seen many of. He could see No. 25: as dank and dejected as the rest. At ten to five he was ringing on its doorbell.

  Just when he was considering ringing again, a door opened somewhere inside the house, and light penetrated the mottled glass of the front door. He heard heavy footsteps, saw a looming shadow on the other side of the glass. Two locks were turned, and then the door was opened.

  She was a heavy old woman, in a shapeless black woollen dress, with a plum-coloured cardigan over it, and slippers on her feet. She was now fat, but Simon guessed she must once have been a fine figure of a woman, in a massive kind of way. Her cheeks were now round, and there were rolls of fat around her neck, but the impression she gave was not comfortable. The mouth was hard, the eyes calculating, and behind all the flabbiness Simon sensed a lifetime of grim purpose and iron will.

  ‘So you’ve come,’ she announced.

  She squeezed her mouth into no similitude of a smile, but from the way she stood regarding him, right hand on hip, Simon could have sworn he sensed a silent satisfaction that he was white.

  ‘Yes, I’ve come.’

  ‘What’s your name, then?’

  He smiled, and watched her as he said: ‘Simon Cutheridge.’

  No flicker passed across that hard face. Simon felt sure that the name meant nothing to her.

  ‘And where are you from?’

  ‘Leeds,’ said Simon. He had already decided that for the moment he would say nothing of Yeasdon.

  ‘Could hear it was the North somewhere,’ said the old woman, with a trace of contempt she took no trouble to disguise. It’s common knowledge, her manner seemed to say, that Northerners are inferior: if I think so, it’s common sense, and everybody thinks so. ‘You’d better come in. Though really, I don’t know . . . Mr Blore’s said nothing to me about leaving, not immediately. Nor to Len either, because I asked him at dinner-time.’

  ‘If I could just leave you my address and telephone number in Leeds, so that if he does leave you could contact me. It would save you the expense of advertising.’

  ‘It would do that, I suppose,’ she said, with that same grudging tone she had used throughout, but with a tiny sparkle in her eye. ‘Well, you’d better see the room.’

  That was more than Simon had dared to hope. She switched on a light—a dim bulb behind a basic shade, that gave a dubious illumination to hall and stairway. Both had been redecorated in the last year or two, with a miserable cheap wallpaper with a tiny pattern of brown leaves. It had left it indescribably cheerless. The old woman cared nothing about his impressions of the place. She turned and began labouring up the stairs.

  ‘It’s a nice room, very nice,’ she said, as she paused for breath on the first landing. ‘There’s everything there, all nice and convenient. And a gas ring . . .’

  She began again, heaving her bulk towards the top floor, jangling her keys as if she were a wardress. Simon made a mental note not to leave anything of a personal nature in his room, if it ever became his. At the top landing the woman turned on another dim light—this time a bare bulb. There were two rooms on this floor, both of them with Yale locks fitted. The woman pondered over her keys, selected one, then opened the door of the room straight ahead.

  The bedsitter thus revealed was small, and predictably depressing. There was a sofa-bed against one wall, and an old, recovered armchair drawn up to a gas fire. On a laminated shelf by the mantelpiece was the gas ring that was apparently one of the attractions of the place. Under the window, curtained with dirty lace, was an infirm wooden table with an aluminium and plastic chair pulled up to it. The only signs of life and individuality were the mug and dirty plate on the table, the assorted paperbacks scattered around, a copy of Playboy, and the pictures which had been pinned to the walls—a large Lowry, a Labour Party poster, and a girlie calendar.

  ‘Yes, well it looks very . . . nice,’ said Simon.

  The woman sniffed, and looked venomously around the walls.

  ‘He put those up.’

  ‘It’s just what I need—really. I’m grateful to you for showing it to me.’

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ muttered the woman, in her tight-lipped way.

  ‘If I could perhaps pay some kind of deposit . . .’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that. Seeing as how we aren’t sure as Mr Blore is leaving. I don’t know what would be right . . . Oh, that’s Len now. He’ll know. You’d better talk to him about it.’

  From two flights down Simon had heard the sound of a key in the door, and the door opening. He mentally noted that the old woman’s hearing was unimpaired. She ushered him out, closed up the room, and began labouring down the stairs, clutching hard at the banisters and breathing heavily. Simon followed her down, his heart beating. When she had regained the hall, she turned to a door which divided the family’s living quarters from the rest of the house. She called:

  ‘Len!’

  The man who came to the door and faced them across the little hallway was fairly tall—perhaps close on six feet—with square shoulders. But his chest was hollow, his frame bony, his face sunken, and he gave an impression of meagreness, of having aged prematurely. He wore a fawn cardigan, buttoned around his stomach, and he was clutching an evening paper. What struck Simon was his manner: under a hearty exterior he seemed unaccountably nervous, and he rubbed his hands together a good deal, perhaps because when he did not they tended to flutter. He greeted Simon with an ingratiating eagerness which, in its effect, was the reverse of welcoming.

  ‘Ah—you’re the young man. Nice to meet you. Well—that’s very satisfactory!’

  He had closed the door to the family quarters, and when they had shaken hands they stood in the cramped little hallway. Obviously it was not going to be easy to gain admittance to the inner sanctum of the Simmeter family life. The old woman was looking at Len, behaving towards him in a way that Simon found hard to comprehend, as it seemed a compound of opposites—both commanding, yet almost fawning, strong-minded yet nervous and uncertain. Had the relationship changed as she had grown older and feebler? Had she once ruled with an iron hand, and now was uncertain of her power?

  ‘He wants to pay a deposit,’ said the old woman, looking at Len.

  Len Simmeter’s manner became still more friendly, without the slightest degree of warmth behind it.

  ‘I don’t see why not, Ma. That’s very generous of him.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Simon. ‘I thought that if Mr Blore did give notice in the next three months, then I’d have the right to the room.’

  ‘And so you would,’ said Len. ‘Quite so. And we’d return it to you if he stayed put. Naturally. Very fair arrangement all round. You told him the rent for the room, Mother?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ Again she looked at him, covertly, uncertain whether she had done right or wrong. She seemed to have done right.

  ‘Well,’ said Len Simmeter, rubbing his hands, ‘it’s four pounds ten a week—’ It was, for those times, decidedly steep. But Len had left his voice on a rising intonation, so that if Simon protested he could add: ‘but for you we’ll say four pounds.’ However, Simon had made up his mind, and he quickly accepted.

  ‘That seems very reasonable,’ he said, with a naive smile. ‘I know that things down here cost that bit more than they do up north.’

  ‘Quite. You’ve no idea—what with the rates, and overheads, and everything. This lot we’ve got lording it at the LCC at the moment don’t help matters either. What they’re not willing to do with other people’s money! You’re like pigs in clover up north, so I’ve heard, where prices are concerned!’ He was protesting too much, and he pulled himself up short. ‘Moving south, eh? Got a good job down here, then, have you?’

  ‘I’m going to be working at the London Zoo. On the scientific staff there.’

  ‘Nice! Very good! Work with a bit of class—professional, like. Well, young feller-me-lad, if you’d like
to leave your name and address, and this deposit you mentioned, we can be in touch as soon as things sort themselves out at this end.’

  Simon tore a piece of paper from his pocket book, and wrote on it against the wall his name, address, and telephone number. He registered with satisfaction that the name seemed to mean nothing to Len either. Then he took from his wallet two five-pound notes. Len Simmeter, who had been standing by rubbing his hands, took them from him, just a shade too hurriedly.

  ‘That’s handsome of you,’ he said. ‘Nice to do business with a real gentleman. I really hope something turns up here. There’s Miss Cosgrove in the other room, of course, but there’s no hope that she’ll move on. Made herself very comfortable here, she has—oh yes! But I think you’ll find a room waiting for you, when you want to move down. When was it, did you say?’

  ‘June,’ said Simon. ‘I imagine it’ll be towards the end of June.’

  ‘Good, good,’ said the man, opening the door to show that the interview was at an end. ‘Well, we’ll be in touch. And we’ll hope to see you down here in June.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Simon, unable to think of any device to prolong the interview further. ‘I’m obliged to you both.’

  He turned as he gained the street, to wave. The man in the old fawn cardigan stood in the doorway, ingratiatingly smiling. He gave a stiff wave, as if it was a habit he’d never got accustomed to. In the shadow of the hall loomed the bulky figure of the old woman. Then the door was shut firmly.

  Walking down the street, Simon felt grubby, and in some odd way diminished. These, surely were mean, shabby people—depressing if he put them in his mind beside the generosity and openness of Dot and Tom Cutheridge, of his father and mother. Was this man, of whom he had no memory, his father? Biologically, possibly, but in no other sense. And yet, oddly, Simon felt go through him a spurt of excitement; he experienced the zest of anticipation, a feeling that he had just accomplished the first stage of a great and difficult project. It was almost, he decided, like the thrill of a chase.

  Ten days later he received a letter to say that the room was his. He paid rent for nearly six weeks before he actually moved down. He had a feeling that the Simmeters were rubbing their hands at having landed a right greenhorn.

  ‘It might suit me very well,’ said Simon in Leeds, packing up those exercise books of memories and impressions he had started eight years before and looked forward now to adding to, ‘to be thought a greenhorn.’

  CHAPTER 6

  When Simon Cutheridge travelled down to London in the third week of June, 1964, he had gone beyond asking himself whether what he was doing was a sensible thing, or one that was likely to make him happier. It had become something there to be done—something to be undertaken stage by stage, like a programme of research. He had drawn a line under his period in Leeds with some relief: he had given away some of his possessions, stored others with friends. He was, now, the clothes he stood up in and the suitcases he carried. He knew that many children adopted at birth developed a niggling itch to ferret out the identities of their real mothers and fathers. How much more natural in him, he thought, who had a history before Yeasdon and the Cutheridges, to wish to blow the dust off that page of his life. He was Simon Cutheridge. But he was also, he felt sure, Simon Simmeter. Or some other Christian name—perhaps some other surname too—but at any rate part of the Simmeter family. For better or worse.

  He took the Underground from King’s Cross to the Angel, because he was not a young man who had yet got into the taxi habit. He was a healthy man, and it was not the suitcases he was lugging that made his heart beat so dramatically as he emerged from the poky entrance to the Angel. He put them down for a minute to steady himself, wiping his forehead. Then he took them up and began walking.

  Miswell Terrace was only five minutes from the station. It was just before three when he rang the doorbell at No. 25, but it was not the old woman’s steps he heard along the passage. When Leonard Simmeter opened the door he had on the same old fawn cardigan, buttoned over the waist, and he rubbed his hands in the same convulsive way. But this time he wore a prepared smile, and he seemed to have lost some of the unaccountable nervousness of their first meeting.

  ‘Ah . . . get here all right? Have a good journey down?’

  Simon uttered conventionalities to answer conventionalities as he was ushered into the depressing hall. Nothing had changed. An old mac and some women’s coats were hung on hooks. A little table held an ancient china fruit bowl, with no fruit in it. The door to the Simmeters’ living quarters had been meticulously shut.

  ‘Yes,’ said Simmeter, with that uneasy, almost shifty chattiness that showed it did not come naturally, ‘I believe it’s not a bad service to the North these days. Not that I’ve ever taken it. Been on the railways all my life, and never been north of Watford. You know us Londoners—we think we’ve got everything here.’ He came to a stop like a deflated balloon. ‘Well, I expect you’ll be wanting to go up.’

  He led the way up the narrow staircase, not offering to help with the suitcases. Simon blundered up after him. Lights were switched on, briefly and grudgingly.

  ‘That’s the bathroom and toilet,’ said Simmeter, opening a door and briefly illuminating a room on the first floor. ‘You share that with Miss Cosgrove on a “first come” basis. There’s a meter there—that prevents arguments, doesn’t it? . . . Right, here we are.’

  They had reached the top of the house. Simmeter put the key in the door, swung it open, and they walked into the dingy little room. All traces of the previous occupant had been carefully removed, so the room presented itself to Simon in all its dismal basicness.

  ‘I think you’ll be very cosy here,’ said Leonard Simmeter, apparently quite sincerely, seemingly unconscious that rooms could be, should be, otherwise.

  ‘I’m sure I shall,’ said Simon heartily.

  ‘How would you like to pay the rent, then?’

  Simon had thought about that. He suspected that Simmeter, knowing he had a respectable and well-paid job, would like him to pay by cheque once a month. It looked better. But he needed to take all the meagre opportunities that offered of contact with the family.

  ‘I’ll pay weekly,’ he said, drawing out his wallet. ‘I can pay you for the first week now.’

  ‘That’s very nice,’ said Simmeter, kneading his palms. It was the stimulus of money, Simon decided, that most often sent him into that routine. The notes were tucked away lovingly in a warm and greasy little notecase. ‘It’s nice to do business with a real gentleman. And are they hard to find these days! Mr Blore was not what I’d call reliable—but then, I’m old-fashioned. Standards aren’t what they were, I know that. Now, here’s the key to the room, and here are the keys to the front door. Hope you settle in all right.’

  And before Simon had a chance to think up further conversational gambits to detain him, Len Simmeter was off down the stairs, leaving Simon to unpack his possessions and gaze at the muddy green wallpaper, peeling at the corners, at the depressing armchair with the shape of the springs visible through the seat, at the sofa-bed which seemed unlikely to be satisfactory in either of its functions. It was an odd sort of homecoming.

  Over the next few days Simon’s personality and preoccupations seemed to develop along two diverging lines. He had a daytime self at the Zoo, where the plunge into his new job was hectic and stimulating, his colleagues welcoming and forthcoming. It was a job that absorbed him entirely, but only while he was doing it. He found himself fending off or postponing offers of hospitality, suggestions of drinks after work.

  Because there was, slumbering uneasily, that early morning and evening self. This self sat in the damp and constricting little room, waiting and watching for wisps of information, possibilities of contact, with the Simmeter family two floors below. The evenings were spent reading, making coffee, having a whisky—and listening, always listening; treasuring up a scrap of a sentence, identifying footsteps, classifying ingrained habits and won
dering how to make use of them. Up there at the top of the house, cut off by doors and staircases and the deep-rooted secrecy of the people themselves, he felt like a far from omniscient God, reduced to judging his creations by overheard whispers, by occasional glimpses, by fragments of behaviour that penetrated by freaks of the atmosphere to his heavenly fastness.

  There were more Simmeters than he had so far met, that he concluded early on. They slept on the first floor, and all three bedrooms there were occupied. Each night, through the crack of his door that he left slightly ajar, he heard three separate sets of footsteps mount the first flight of stairs: first the old woman—slow and heavy, but without help; then, as a rule, Len—fussily closing the door to the ground-floor rooms, checking the front door, and turning off the lights as quickly as possible; then, he was fairly sure, a woman’s—less careful with the door, leaving lights on while she went to the bathroom, once leaving them on after she had gone to bed, so that he heard Len come out and switch them off, muttering bitterly. These last two sets of footsteps sometimes came in a different order, but they never came together.

  The view from his poky garret window was unsatisfactory. By no kind of bodily contortion could he see the tiny front garden, like a folded pocket handkerchief, or the iron gate. But he could see the pavement in front of the house, and on three successive mornings he saw a woman with faded fair hair who seemed to have just turned—to have come out of the gate, and then turned in the direction of the tube station. And it was not Miss Cosgrove, from the room opposite his.