A Long Walk to Wimbledon

by H. R. F. Keating

  A LONG WALK TO WIMBLEDON

  H.R.F. Keating

  Contents

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Part Six

  Part Seven

  Part Eight

  Part Nine

  Part Ten

  Part Eleven

  Part One

  When the telephone started to ring Mark could not think for some time what it was. The instrument had long been lost to sight behind an emergency stack of food cans, and nor was the sound the familiar unfamiliar burr-burr of old. It was instead an almost continuous trickle of ringing which, when at last he had realised what was happening and had begun to lift away the cans, mostly of a brand of nauseously soapy carrots, he saw as being made by some sort of cranked handset.

  No doubt the call – if it was a call and not just some accident– was intended for some other house. But old habit had stirred to life like the rangy body of a sleeping bear at the first pricklings of spring and he picked up the softly dust-covered receiver.

  ‘Hello? Hello? Hello?’

  At once he recognised the sharp tinny voice, and a whole network of mental responses he had long believed dead sprang up again. It was Mrs Brilling, Jasmine’s mother. As it had so often been in the long-ago. Was she phoning all the way from Wimbledon to Highgate?

  ‘Yes?’ he said, almost choking with caution.

  ‘Mark? Is that you, Mark? Heaven knows the trouble I’ve had getting through to you.’

  New atrophied limbs pins-and-needled. He was being put in the wrong, as he had always been before.

  ‘Yes, it’s me,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Mark, it’s Jasmine. She’s dying, Mark. She wants to see you.’

  He did not answer.

  Jasmine. What if she were dying? She belonged to another era. When there had been husbands and wives and ex-wives. Giving in marriage and obtaining divorces. Before. When there had been time and energy enough for such luxuries as forgiving. This would all have meant something then.

  Yet a behaviour-groove from those days had kept his ear to the receiver.

  ‘Mark, she’s your wife, whatever happened. She’s dying, Mark. Tommy says so. You remember Tommy, the manager from the shop? He was always a marvel at diagnosing. What he didn’t know about natural remedies wasn’t worth knowing, Mark. And he says she’s dying.’

  He remembered the manager of Mrs Brilling’s shop, Herb and Heather, over at Kingston upon Thames. A pretty odious creep.

  He continued to keep silent. Unable to deal in any way with the new old question that was being thrust at him.

  ‘Mark? Mark?’

  Yes. I’m here.’

  ‘Mark, I tried to talk her out of it. I’ll be quite frank with you, Mark. I don’t want you here. If only because I can’t see how I’m going to feed you.’

  That little tin-hammer voice.

  ‘Mark, she wants to put herself in order.’

  Rage burst out of him now, weakly lashing at target and air.

  ‘Put herself in order? Put herself in order? Why didn’t she put herself in some sort of order when we were married? Why didn’t she try to live some kind of decent life? Why the drink, Mama? Why the men? Why all that money for joints, day in day out? We parted, you know, over all that. It was finished between us. Finished for ever. All those absurd clothes, those holidays, that procession of ridiculous jobs.’

  ‘Mark, you’ve got to come. She’s asking for you.’

  ‘But how can I get all the way over to Wimbledon? Right across London? How?’

  It was succumbing, of course. Why was he doing it? Just because that rubber-ball self-confidence had so often before bounced him into giving way? No. Surely it was not altogether that.

  Now it was Mrs Brilling who was staying silent. Waiting.

  ‘It’s God knows how many miles,’ he burst out again. ‘There aren’t buses any more, you know, and the Tubes aren’t exactly running.’

  He despised the cheap sarcasm before it was half-way out.

  ‘Well, haven’t you got a bicycle? It isn’t really so far. You used to do it in not much over the hour in the car, before the traffic got so bad.’

  ‘I haven’t got a bicycle.’

  ‘Oh, that’s just like you. Other people have them. Everyone round here has. Jasmine had one till she got too tired to ride it. I suppose you let yours get taken, the way everything’s taken these days.’

  ‘I never needed a bicycle, Mama.’

  ‘Well, if you haven’t got one, you’ll have to walk, won’t you? I only hope you’re in time. Tommy’s made up some special stuff for her. And you should have seen all the things I had to give him in exchange. He says it will keep her going for the next forty-eight hours. The next forty-eight hours whatever happens. What time is it?’

  He bent low and squinted through the one pane of clear glass left in the polythene-flapping window. The sky was lighter than it had been for some days, with a hint of pale wintry sun.

  ‘It must be just after mid-day.’

  ‘Well then, if you set off at once you should be in plenty of time.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. I expect I’ll be with you some time tonight then.’

  He had agreed. He should have said brutally that he had no intention of making the journey. That he had long ago ceased to owe Jasmine anything. But he had agreed. Why?

  It was because she was dying. It came to him clearly now. Dying Jasmine had a claim on him that the living spiralling-away estranged Jasmine had altogether forfeited.

  However far it was, whatever the difficulties, he would go.

  ‘Now listen, Mark. She says you’ve still got a bottle of her Pernod. You remember how she loved Pernod? She says she was just opening a bottle when you made that last ridiculous – When she left. She says you won’t have got rid of it. You never threw things away. That was one of the – Well, never mind that now. Mark, bring that bottle for her. Bring it. God knows, there’s nothing else left to comfort her.’

  He slammed the receiver down. Absurd ritualistic gesture from the gesture days.

  He supposed it must have been a full two hours from the time he had had the phone call till he had been ready to set out. He had even at first felt too disturbed – his heart was beating perceptibly faster – to be able to get to grips with any preparations. Yet the call, for all that it had seemed extraordinary in the long long silence that had seeped down everywhere, had not really been such an altogether unlikely thing. He knew quite well that long ago the telephone exchanges had been taken over by the Armed Police, and he had heard too that if you had some gold or some cannabis leaves or anything else you might otherwise have bartered you could get one of the men there to try putting through a call for you. Most lines were still in place and quite often they could be made to work.

  And, when he had felt capable of getting down to leaving, there had turned out to be a lot to do.

  First he had taken such precautions as he could against intruders. It was hardly likely anyone would want to take over the house – places to live round about had been going by the dozen ever since the Flight – but there were things worth looting, if only those cans of soapy carrots, a past daily payment from one of his pupils. So he had heaved the refrigerator from the kitchen where it had stood uselessly for so long up on to the table in the front room to block that one window not sheeted over with corrugated iron.

  He had next heated up and carefully eaten all the remaining vegetables in his stew-pot. Then there had been the fire to put out, acutely galling when so much of his time was spent keeping alive its glim of heat, and there had been his dangling length of fuse to squash int
o blackness.

  How would he light it again when he got back? Perhaps he would find someone who had a match to barter.

  Next he had had to collect together everything he might need for the journey. He had remembered that there ought to be a London Guide somewhere in the house, well worth having if only half the rumours he had heard were true. Those rumours the parents round about would often send their children in lieu of more tangible payment for the reading and arithmetic he taught them. But search through the chill blacked-out rooms as he might all he could find was an old bus map, which meant that almost certainly he would have to stick to the main roads. He must have used the Guide for fire-lighting at some time, though he could not recall doing so. But that was scarcely surprising when there had been so many mind-numbing marrow-cold endless winter days, in one winter or another.

  Stuffing away a change of socks and some spare handkerchiefs, he had wished he had warmer clothes and better shoes. He had mended his only surviving pair of brogues towards the end of the summer when it had been still possible to go barefoot, but the crude soles he had fashioned out of rubber from the tyre of an abandoned car needed frequent and painful re-sewing to keep them from flapping. And he was already wearing all his remaining clothes indoors except his long double-sided burberry, saved as a last resource for when it got really cold. Not that it had not been chill enough these past few days. But it still must be only mid-November and there was bound to be worse to come.

  The bottle of Pernod – yes, he had known just where to find it he stowed in one of the burberry’s deep pockets and into the other he put an untouched loaf he had by a happy chance cooked that morning, still adhering to the length of stick on which he had patiently twirled it over the sullen smoke of his fire. He had filled, too, his plastic flask with long-boiled water. Even if he got stuck somewhere during the night he should have enough for the journey. Besides there was nothing else really to take, only some of his dried beans, hard enough to cook at the best of times, and vegetables still in the ground at the back. Or a can of the soapy carrots, those ostentatious payments.

  At last there had been no more to do, and, knowing he was being ridiculous, he had attempted to smarten himself up a bit before facing the world, washing in water that would probably have dried to nothing before he got back and putting his fingers comb-wise through beard and hair. Finally he had shrugged on the burberry, mackintosh side inwards since there was no sign of rain for once, and had slung the water flask over his shoulder.

  Then he stepped out into what had been the front garden, long a tangle of over-grown lilacs and self-seeded sycamore saplings, of drifts of run-wild Michaelmas daisies, thistles and rampant interlacing creepers, not worth trying to cultivate when anything it grew could be so easily stolen.

  It was as cold out-of-doors as he had feared, with a gusting wind from almost due east. But the sun was shining – judging from its height there must be not much more than two hours of daylight left – although it had ceased to have any real warmth in it. Reasonable enough weather.

  He pulled the front door hard closed behind him. The lock clicked home with a dull snick.

  In the street he turned and made his way towards Archway Road. It had been a long time, months and months, since he had been as far from the house as the old shop-lined high street, the A1, the Great North Road, which would take him on the first stretch of his long walk south. It lay now at the very edge of their ‘village’ or ‘area’ or ‘community’ – the half-dozen residential streets looking inwards to themselves for safety and comfort had never acquired a name – and he felt an apprehensive inward tightening as he approached.

  But the wide road lay empty, its broad pavements scattered with grainy dust and intersected by broken lines of dark green tussocky grass, its shops that once would have been bright and lit and busy on a November’s afternoon boarded up, broken and defaced. Not a bicycle. Not even the faintest sound of any motor vehicle, though he had seen them here before, their drivers people who somehow had access to the Army’s supplies of petrol or the Armed Police’s or who were using big bulging gas-bags attached to their vehicles’ roofs.

  He stepped out into the pot-holed roadway and looked up to the crest of the hill above, beyond the old Highgate Underground station. Carts from the comparative safety of the country, with food or such items as crude hand-made electric cells, had come there when they had had enough to barter. But there was nothing to be seen there now, only behind the wreck of a beer-tanker that had been held up and pillaged years before the big faded sign of a little hut-like shop still proclaiming ‘Tempus Fugit – Antiques’.

  He turned and took a long survey of the route ahead.

  Fears which he had been holding back ever since he had known he was going to make the journey right across London to that little pebble-dashed house in South Wimbledon, where it seemed the once so reckless, so seeking Jasmine had finally come to rest, now abruptly broke through the sand-barrier he had piled up against them.

  That huge rusty beer-tanker. He had not actually seen it being ambushed but he had heard what had happened soon enough. It had been back in the days when a semblance of metropolitan life had still existed despite blatant lawlessness, and one of the big gangs of predators roaming everywhere except the very centre of the city then had swarmed across the through-way pushing a broken-down mini-bus in front of them as the tanker had thundered down the hill. The driver and his guard had not had the ruthlessness to swerve round the obstacle and into the gang and they had paid for that by being hauled from their cab and battered insensible in spite of the shots the guard had fired. And then the gang – there had been more than thirty of them – had got roaring drunk on the contents of the long tank and had stayed that way till it was drained dry. Black damage had been done every day of that monster drunk. Women had been raped, men wantonly beaten up, houses set on fire. And, ever since, the tanker wreck had stayed there, slowly rusting, a stark reminder, while all around the chaos that had seemed there and then to have reached a peak had risen up to the same level.

  If the time when there had been tankers loaded with beer speeding from the breweries had long gone, there were, according to the rumours he was brought, plenty of places still where crude liquor was manufactured and round which its aggressive dependants would range. The stuff was called arrack. Arrack for some reason.

  He looked away to where above the old rail line cut into the side of the hill it was possible to see for miles over the vast bowl of London. Thickly massed trees, the outliers of Highgate Wood, were dark and sombrely green in the thickening light and beyond them the distant buildings down below looked from here for the most part just as they had done when the city was flourishing.

  The pale sun showed up whitish patches here and there, the sides of concrete blocks.

  It was not the actual area he would have to go through. His route would lie further west. But it ought to be much the same, and it did not appear to be from this high vantage point at all menacing. The scene breathed even a spirit of tranquillity, with the wood in the foreground giving it something of a rural air. But all the hearsay accounts brought by payment-dodging pupils could not be total imagination. There would be dangers in the bowl of the city.

  The looting bands that had marched the streets even before the final breakdown would not have dispersed. And no doubt any lone walker would be for them so much appetising prey.

  One of the children, the son of the fussy fat little former owner of a car showroom, had come one morning with a story of fifteen bodies strung up from fifteen consecutive lamp standards not far away. That had been supposed to be the work of a gang. A piece of wild brutality. It could be true. At the time he had convinced himself that the deaths, if they had happened, were only a bizarre manifestation of the suicide outbreak then at its height. But it might not have been that.

  Certainly the Armed Police had long ago lost the ability to keep order, even if they had had it when they had been formed. And, if other tales he had hear
d were true, they themselves were often as much to be feared as counted on.

  Yes, there were bound to be bad parts down there, between him and Wimbledon.

  Between him and Jasmine.

  He forced himself to look once more at the reason for his journey, little though he wanted to have to think again of Jasmine, to put his feelings towards her into flux once more. He felt that was asking too much of his long-deadened emotions. But he must have his object in setting out simple and plain before him, without any wrappings of sentiment, or any sour clinging streaks of rancour, if he was not to turn back even as soon as this.

  And, once he had brought his mind to it, his object was clear. Whatever his feelings about Jasmine had been once, whatever the life of escalating wildness she had led had done to him all that long time ago, one fact was certain now. She was dying and she wanted to see him. Whatever else had ceased to count, death still survived.

  ‘Wife, wife, bane of my life.’

  He started at the sound of his own voice. How long was it since he had last murmured half-aloud that absurd incantation?

  Without realising what he was doing he found he had crossed back to the pavement and was beginning to walk downhill. Towards Wimbledon.

  The wind came in chilling gusts on his left side, whipping the bottom of his coat hard against his legs. A cloud obscured the pale sun and at once it seemed a little dark. What time would it be? Heavens, how long it had been since he had worried about one or two hours more or less. But it might be 3 p.m. now, or getting on for that. And if Jasmine really had only forty-eight … No, forty-five or forty-six hours left now he must not linger.

  His stamping feet gritted out on the pavement dust and when a stride chanced to fall on a grass ridge he could feel the bump through the thinness of the sole of his shoe and the layer of tyrerubber.

  The boards nailed across the shop windows had been torn away here and there, doubtless to use as fuel. With others, past storms had loosened corrugated sheets leaving awkwardly-shaped black holes. What if from one of these a beast-man should suddenly leap?