A Long Walk to Wimbledon

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘One moment,’ Dr Satpathi said.

  He pushed himself up, not without a little moan of his own, and slid over to the girl.

  ‘Would you like me to tell you a story?’ he asked.

  The girl regarded him with suspicion.

  ‘This story,’ the little Indian said with unexpected firmness, ‘is called the Tale of the Fat Merchant and the Three Hyenas. Once upon a time there was a very fat merchant who met three hyenas one day. To the first he said “What an ugly brute you are” and the hyena chased him all the way back to the village. When he met the second he said “Really, you are a creature of rare beauty” but the hyena went to his house and ate four of his chickens. When he met the third hyena the merchant just said “Ram-Ram” which is our way in India of saying “Good day”. And the hyena looked at him and said “Ram-Ram” also.’

  The little girl was wide-eyed.

  ‘Is that all?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Yes. It is not a very long story.’

  ‘Tell another.’

  ‘Very well, if you will sit quiet and not play with your doll.’

  ‘All right. But it’s got to be long.’

  ‘I shall do my best.’

  ‘And it’s got to be nice. Like the Praying.’

  ‘We shall see.’

  Dr Satpathi turned and pulled the wadded burberry across the blue line separating their two camps. The girl sank down against her mother.

  Mark closed his eyes again. He could half-hear the softly lilting voice embarking on a new story, an involved affair about a pundit, whom Dr Satpathi described as being ‘somewhat like the gentleman who led us in the Praying’. The pundit’s wife had nagged him into going to beg from the King, but he had refused to accept anything unless it had been earned by the King himself. So the King, complaisant fellow, had gone out at night dressed in rags and had carried water, rather badly, for a householder, eventually earning four paisa. ‘They are what pennies are called in my country. Do you know what pennies are?’ ‘Yeh, silly, I play wiv ‘em, an’ the silver ones.’ The pundit’s wife, of course, had been highly displeased with so petty a haul and had thrown the despised coins into something called the tulsi pot, a sort of sacred flower-urn. And, naturally, up had sprung Jack-and-the-Bean-stalk plants laden with seeds of gold.

  Sleep came.

  When he awoke he saw that it must be just about dawn. In the tunnel-domed roof where the big panes had not been replaced by wood or cardboard the first faint greyness of day made pale squares.

  So how many hours had passed? It was his first thought. Sunrise must be at about a quarter past seven, old time. So now it would be just on seven. Fewer than thirty hours left of Tommy’s forty-eight. Twenty-nine only in fact. Twenty-nine hours.

  But that should be more than enough to get across to Wimbledon, even without the company of Dr Satpathi. Which might have been as much a hindrance as a help.

  If he got away from here. But surely they wouldn’t try to keep him.

  Cautiously he sat himself up, partly so as not to draw attention to himself, partly not to disturb little Dr Satpathi, lying beside him curled into a ball.

  The sight of him brought quite unexpectedly into his head the conclusion of the story of the pundit. He must have heard the last part of the tale before he had actually dropped into full sleep.

  The King, he remembered, had got to hear about the magical gold-fruited plants growing in the pundit’s tulsi pot and, seeking jewels for his daughter’s wedding, had come to see it. They had dug up one of the four plants and, behold, it sprang from a pais earned by the sweat of the royal brow.

  A moral tale indeed. He wondered exactly why Dr Satpathi had chosen it. But perhaps he had been unable on the spur of the moment to think of anything else that would meet his obdurate audience’s demand for something ‘nice, like the Praying’. Or had there been some other subtle reason?

  But no time to sit thinking about that now. Get up instead and spy out the land.

  He began heaving himself out of the blankets. Dr Satpathi gave a groan and opened his eyes.

  ‘Hello,’ he said to him. ‘Are you feeling bad?’

  The little Indian unrolled himself and lay on his back considering.

  ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘No, my dear chap, I am not feeling too bad at all.’

  He propped himself up on one elbow and gave a small deprecating smile.

  ‘I am afraid,’ he said, ‘that not for the first time I must have over-dramatised my fairly trifling physical woes. Today I think you will find me an altogether swifter companion on the march.’

  ‘But – but I thought you’d be staying here.’

  ‘Staying here? No, no, not at all.’

  ‘But they seem to be all right about having you, and you seemed to find it sympathetic last night. You’re a religious man, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am.’

  For a little he was silent.

  ‘Yes, I am religious. And these people are too. And, yes, I believe they would have no objection to a tropical. But nevertheless I have no intention of staying.’

  ‘But why not?’

  ‘It is a little difficult to acount for.’

  Suddenly he smiled, a flash of brightly white Indian teeth.

  ‘Shall we say that I must have chosen that story last night chiefly in order to tell something to myself. What is the meaning of that tale after all? That work, work in the world, is, as we say in India, the noblest dharma, the best lot. No, my dear fellow, I think that rather than attemping to lose myself here nightly in the Praying, as they call it, I should make my way to Balham and there among my fellow countrymen take up the ancient and not dishonourable profession of village storyteller.’

  Mark considered.

  ‘Yes,’ he said after a little. ‘Yes, if you see it like that, then the sooner we get on our way the better.’

  ‘You fear a little too much greed for praying knees?’ Dr Satpathi said, uncoiling gracefully to his feet. ‘You may be right. I think not. I hope not. But we must see.’

  Part Four

  There proved when it came to it not to be any real difficulties about leaving the Baths, only silent disappointed looks from Sister Raquel and various fidgety delays which infuriated Mark, though Dr Satpathi seemed to accept them patiently enough.

  They returned their mattress and blankets to the store. They accepted some breakfast even, more of the flat grey doughy bread. They used some of the community’s supposedly running-down water supply.

  An almost complete whodunit, gaudily jacketed, in the lavatory this morning. Relic of a time-slipped era.

  But at last they were able to step out into the street and Mark heard with a perceptible lightening of spirit the heavy double doors slam behind them. He drew in a deep breath. The gusting wind of the day before had not returned and the grey mistiness was penetratingly cold.

  They must keep up a good body-warming pace. And for him it would be doubly necessary. At a guess nineteen or twenty of the odious Tommy’s promised ration of hours must have gone. Twenty-eight only remaining. It should be an ample allowance. He was after all walking to Wimbledon, not Wales. But time for accidents ought to be left. As much as possible.

  ‘Shall we go then?’ he said to Dr Satpathi.

  ‘By all means, my dear fellow.’

  Within a couple of minutes they were back in Kentish Town Road, its wide pot-holed surface sloping gently down in front of them till it disappeared in the mist. There was no sign of activity of any sort, only to either side the boarded-up and barred-over empty shop-fronts with here and there an old painted sign or washed-out poster still visible. ‘Bingo Today’, ‘Let us Design Your Dream Kitchen’.

  They stepped out along the roadway, brownish where its wood-blocks showed through the unrenewed tar.

  ‘We could be in Balham by early afternoon,’ Mark said cheerfully, ‘and then I’d get to Wimbledon quite shortly after.’

  ‘Well, I am prepared for a cracking pace,’ Dr Satpathi ans
wered. ‘My bruises are certainly much less incommoding.’

  ‘I’m delighted you’re so much better. And you even came to my rescue last night.’

  Dr Satpathi chuckled.

  ‘From that five-year-old dragoness with the squeaky doll? I only wish all the physical hazards we may encounter yield as easily to the storyteller’s art.’

  Mark laughed.

  ‘Tell me some more stories. They’ll while away the miles.’

  ‘Very well, my dear fellow.’

  But the Indian, walking with hardly a limp now, once more took a considerable time in choosing from his store.

  Mark was on the point of prompting him again when abruptly he began.

  ‘Once upon a time – I adopt the European gambit, you understand – a man was taking a snooze under a large and shady tree. Suddenly he awoke to discover that the tree had all along been concealing a bear, now climbing down the trunk towards him. The fellow was greatly disconcerted. “If I run,” he said to himself, “the animal will surely catch me, but if I stay he will equally certainly cause me some considerable mischief.” Better, he decided, to stay and do what he could.’

  At the corner of a turning on the left a group of three dogs appeared. They stood still and stiff-legged, watching as they made their way past, footsteps seeming all at once harshly loud and Dr Satpathi’s gentle story-telling voice monstrously noisy.

  ‘So just as the bear was on the point of reaching the ground, our friend caught hold of its forepaws. The bear could do nothing, but neither could the man. Round and round the tree the pair of them danced, with all the coins which the man kept wrapped in a corner of his dhoti one by one falling to the ground. However, a traveller chanced to pass by, and our friend had wit enough to call out to him “I say, coins are falling from this bear’s anus and the more we are dancing the faster they come.” Immediately, of course, the traveller volunteered to take our friend’s place, who in that manner lived to fight another day.’

  They had come to a place Mark remembered well, where a big low yellow-brick rail viaduct crossed the road, spanning as well the equally broad Camden Street forking off to the left. It had once had small public gardens on either side of its massive pillars. Now overgrown shrubs and tall desiccated weeds made a matted thicket which hid the brickwork to a height of ten or twelve feet.

  He put a hand on Dr Satpathi’s arm to halt him while he made a careful examination of this possible hiding-place. But he could see nothing that stirred inside it.

  They went on, going through the bridge – water dripping heavily from the blackened brickwork above – and down towards the next big road junction. If he recalled it correctly, it would have Camden Town Underground station on the right and a big pub, the Mother Red Cap, on the left. The Mother Red Cap had been a stopping place on his London walks with his father’s students. A short talk about the place of ‘the Pub’ in English social life – all that seemed centuries ago – and then a mini-dissertation on the origins of the name Mother Red Cap. How possibly she had been the original of Mother Damnable of Kentish Town in Cromwell’s day, a widow at whose house the notorious Moll Cutpurse had lodged. And that did not seem such centuries ago now.

  ‘Can you rise to another story?’ he asked Dr Satpathi. ‘I suspect that last one was carefully chosen.’

  The Indian gave him one of his sudden-sun smiles.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘perhaps so, but I could not counsel anyone to rely for moral guidance altogether on the folk-tales of India. They are, for one thing, decidedly contradictory. And nor am I sure that I myself would be able to follow the advice I have just been giving were I truly to land in any sort of a fix.’

  ‘We must just hope then that we don’t,’ Mark said.

  And then he came to a full stop.

  The big intersection ahead – it had come into view as they had mounted the crest of the bridge taking the road across the old Grand Union canal – was alive with people. There must be, he calculated, at least fifty of them, men and women, moving about, standing leaning against the wall of the big pub, the Mother Red Cap he had remembered, and even sitting on the pavements and in the roadway.

  Fifty people. And – it came to him with a lurch of dismay, though he had known it inwardly from the moment he had seen them – every one of them drunk.

  The Mother Red Cap must be then one of the arrack manufactories his rumour-bringing pupils had talked about.

  All that he had heard about the gang that had attacked the beer tanker by Highgate Station came back to him. The senseless beatings-up, the huge bonfires, the rapes. Would it be the same here? Arrack was distilled liquor surely. Spirits. Crude spirit. Its effects would be worse than those of beer, much worse.

  ‘What – what shall we do?’ he said to Dr Satpathi, equally frozen to a halt beside him.

  ‘It seems to be some sort of drunken dance unless I am much mistaken.’

  It was. Or at least a dozen or more of the drunks were swaying round together, holding hands, dipping and swaying, and the sound of aimless singing drifted up too.

  They must have been at it all night. Getting drunk and staying drunk.

  ‘We must steer clear,’ he said. ‘Steer well clear. God knows, if they spot us they may do anything.’

  ‘Yes. You are no doubt quite right. Though they look harmless enough at the moment.’

  ‘Damn that. We’ll have to find a way round.’

  He pulled Dr Satpathi back and took shelter behind the jutting wall of a building just before the bridge.

  ‘I’ve got a map here,’ he said, tugging the old sheet out. ‘Only a bus one, I’m afraid, but with any luck it’ll show us the lay-out of the streets round.’

  He unfolded it and peered at its maze of pinky-red lines.

  Dr Satpathi sighed.

  ‘One’s reading-glasses would have helped,’ he said. ‘But, alas, those went at Archway.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mark answered, trying to focus the little print.

  It swam at last into clearness.

  ‘Yes. I remember now. It’s marked here, where the buses used to go round to avoid the congestion at the crossroads. You see? They used to go down here, Camden Street. And I remember there used to be a big bus-stop just behind the crossroads. Somewhere here. We could go the same way.’

  ‘We won’t get lost? I am afraid I have only the sketchiest notion of our route.’

  ‘I think it will be all right. But we’ll have to risk it anyhow. We can’t take the chance of falling into the hands of those people.’

  He felt he was being sensible. Drunks might not be as wholly incalculable as Happies, but they were likely to be a good deal more vicious.

  But what if they did get lost? It would be easy enough to do, without direction signs, with no one to ask, with their map little better than a sketch-plan. And the further off their intended route they were forced the worse it would be. Yet the risk must be taken.

  ‘We’ll have to go back as far as the viaduct,’ he said to Dr Satpathi. ‘Camden Street should keep us clear of them then.’ Would it? They could only try.

  They hurried back to the massive yellow-brick rail-bridge and swung around the corner into Camden Street, Mark completely careless now whether or not there was anyone lurking in the high tangles of vegetation that had once been neat little examples of municipal gardening.

  Camden Street, wide as Kentish Town Road, appeared so far as they could see to be equally deserted. They set off along it, keeping now without discussion to the far pavement rather than the brownish roadway. As far from the drunks as possible.

  Ahead to their right now the huge mass of the old A.B.C. bakery stood up against the grey of the sky, cliffs and towers of dirtyish cream. They crossed over the canal again, a high-piled floating mass of rubbish.

  In the distance Mark could just make out the sound of the drunks’ singing, a faint sea-like murmur, caught and gone.

  At the far end of the huge bakery – a cat appeared at one of its high smashed-open wind
ows, mewed once and jumped down inside again – another wide road intersected Camden Street, Camden Road according to the map. It led straight back to the big intersection.

  Mark put a restraining hand on Dr Satpathi’s arm as they came up to it.

  ‘I’ll creep to the corner and look down to the crossroads,’ he said. ‘There may be some of them wandering up towards us.’

  He had whispered.

  ‘Yes, yes. I will wait,’ Dr Satpathi whispered back.

  Cautiously Mark walked over towards the corner of the big cream-coloured bakery. Pasted to its wall was a rain-paled notice saying in fat red letters, ‘Danger Broken Glass’. For an instant he was able to smile at the irony of it. Then he thought of the reeling ungoverned drunks.

  For the third time in the course of his journey he got down flat on his stomach and began pulling himself forward by his forearms.

  He reached the corner. It smelt of animal urine, strong as a harsh disinfectant.

  He gave a last shove forward, grit scraping beneath him.

  ‘Boooo!’

  He actually screamed at the sound.

  It was absurd. He knew it almost as he opened his mouth. If a loud male voice goes ‘Boooo’ at you, you are not being killed or even being attacked. But the surprise had been too much for his stretched nerves.

  Before he had done more than realise how ridiculous he was being, a heavy figure dropped from one of the bakery windows above and landed with a crack of nailed boots, straddling him.

  ‘Just my joke, old boy. Saw you playing cowboys. Couldn’t resist it.’

  He rolled over on the grit-strewn pavement.

  The man above him looked like a soldier despite the lack of insignia on his green-and-brown camouflage battle-smock. But, something seen hardly anywhere outside the Army and the Armed Police, he was crisply clean-shaven and his pale-coloured hair – he was going a little thin on top – was trimmed quite short. The eyes in his ruddy-complexioned face were of an intense bright blue and were alight with pleasure.

  It could only be pleasure.