A Long Walk to Wimbledon

by H. R. F. Keating

  Then he recalled that, yes, there had been statues in the middle of Portland Place. Three or four spaced out along its length.

  He got to his feet again. The fall had made his bruises throb sharply once more. He felt sick too. But no real harm had been done. This time.

  He took his bearings again and plunged off, keeping his right foot now close to the kerb of the central island.

  At last, after he had paced on for what had seemed an extraordinary length of time, a statue loomed up just ahead. Whose had it been? It was still intact as far as he could see. He peered up at its outline against the dark sky as he creepingly neared it. A large bust on top of a heavy plinth. Some scientist, hadn’t it been? Or somebody to do with medicine. Yes. Lister. Lord Lister. Pioneer of antisepsis. Listerine. It had been a germ-killer. Vanished now. And there had been times up at Highgate when any sort of antiseptic would have been a godsend. When he had cut his foot at the beginning of the summer and the wound had not healed for all those weeks, a pus-filled mess. Yes, the age of scientific development was over. Here at least, and everywhere within the farthest range of his knowledge.

  Half step, half step, half step. On and on –

  And was it? Yes. The second statue. And perhaps there had after all been only three.

  Who was this one of? He strained upwards to get it outlined against the sky. Man on a horse. Some sort of plumy helmet. Yes, a field-marshal. Name forgotten. But once famous, statuable. There had been a different world then.

  He gave a pat to the solid stone of the long plinth as he passed.

  And now, farewell, Field-Marshal, all alone in the dark. Little, cautious, sliding, slow, grit-grating step after step away from you. And others, and others. With each one now the single dull ache into which all his bruises had coalesced seemed to be getting heavier. And the sharp line of pain that had been the blow he had received across the face was jabbing unexpectedly more often than it had before. The chill, too, was edging further and further into him, millimetre by millimetre.

  Should he take a short rest till he had more energy? Stop and sit down? Or lie down even till the moon came up and progress at a better rate was possible? Would that be faster in the end? With the burberry wrapped round him he ought to survive five or six hours of exposure.

  No, force himself on at least as far as the next statue. Whose was that? Easy. Quintin Hogg, founder of the Polytechnic in Upper Regent Street not far away. He could recall the shape of it fairly well. The bearded – or was it bald? – sage, seated. And a schoolboy or young student on either side, one with a football tucked under his arm. Bit sentimental. But different. And it honoured an educationalist after all. Payment in something better than cans of soapy carrots and messes of unlikely rumours. Yet in a way hadn’t those scornful fees been no more than he had deserved? A man who had made a real stand only that one time when he had said ‘No more’ to Jasmine?

  Wife, wife, bane of my life.

  Ah, here he was. Quintin Hogg and disciples. Step by step sidle past.

  And there to the left should be the looming liner bulk of Broadcasting House. Only – he peered harder as he tramped on – only against the dark sky the big building was no longer linerlike. The whole front section of its top half looked as if it had slid downwards in some huge landslip to lie buckled and broken on top of the lower half. Behind, he could just make out thick interior floors careening forwards as if their descent had been arrested by a vast and time-enduring frost.

  Yes, there must have been a long battle at some time for Broadcasting House and its radio facilities, that voice that in the months before had bleated out appeals for everybody to keep indoors, to seek the safety of their cellars. And then whichever lot of them it had been that had won the battle had very soon abandoned the spoils. Too little power available to operate the apparatus? Or the realisation that the time was past when airy opinions any longer affected people? People who had been so opinion-hungry once, opinion-hungry and news-hungry, as if each item that was new might be something that would for a moment satisfy an evergrowing sweet-toothed craving.

  But, for whatever reason, at last the silence had set in.

  By going well over to the right away from the huge half-ruined building he succeeded in finding a clear path that took him into the short, very broad stretch of Upper Regent Street leading down to Oxford Circus. Yet when at its start he peered at the buildings on either side, once tall anonymous bourgeois commercial blocks with biggish anonymous shops at pavement level, it was plain that they had all suffered considerable damage, especially those on the east. There must be rubble, in great chunks, lying in the roadway ahead. Would it be possible to get past?

  He saw himself sprawling, knocked unconscious.

  But he must try. If acres of the centre of London were going to be a wrecked battleground it would take hours and hours of painful work to get through. The ration of time he had, still reasonable if he could make steady progress, would be cut to the bone.

  He set off, advancing slowly, stopping every two or three yards to strain at the ground in front for hidden obstacles, at times even when it seemed particularly confusing stooping right down and sweeping with extended arms.

  It took a terribly long time even to get along the short length to Oxford Circus – it must be much more than the hundred yards or so he had remembered from the time when infected by the rush to be first he had stepped out like a racer among the evening crowds making for the Underground – and for every twenty yards he gained now the amount of debris grew an inch or two thicker. Soon it was no longer possible to find the roadway at all and he had to walk on a layer, frighteningly uneven, of broken bricks and stone in constant fear of tripping on some twisted metal window frame or of having a jagged piece of glass slice into one of his legs.

  When at last he looked up to what had formerly been the tall concave-fronted buildings round the Circus itself he saw that they had all been reduced almost to ground level. And he realised that the whole of the circus roadway was piled with huge broken chunks of masonry. A wild moon-surface.

  There could be no question of trying to get through. In daylight it would be a hazardous enough scramble. In this darkness it was quite impossible.

  He turned round at once. So much time taken away from his total. He must not think of resting now. Go back. Find some way round. That was the only thing to do.

  He would go westwards, since the damage had seemed to be worse towards the east. He would go west, if necessary along right as far as Hyde Park, a whole extra mile and more of half-blind shuffling. But there at least in the park there could not be debris and he could be certain of being able to head towards the River again.

  But the journey now looked as if it had become no longer the difficult but perfectly possible walk he had once envisaged but something much more like an explorer’s haul over miles of tough terrain.

  Yet there proved almost at once still to be pieces of luck. He found the first westwards-leading side-street he could get into was much less choked with debris than Upper Regent Street itself. And when he had fumbled his way along it as far as Cavendish Square he was able to make a little faster progress in the faintly better light of its open space – all its fine old trees, he saw, had been whittled into dead pointed poles by shell blast – and at the far end he noticed that the buildings silhouetted against the sky to his left were more or less intact.

  So the battle that had been fought with rockets and artillery for Oxford Street had not extended far along its western half. Oxford Circus might be the jumbled hill of masonry blocks that had stopped him, but, a quarter of a mile or so further along, the street must begin to look much as it had done when it had been a thronged acquisitive scrambling jamboree of shoppers. If now blank and purposeless.

  He crossed over to the far side.

  And there he recognised the turning leading more or less due south as New Bond Street. As well take that as any other, he thought, though it would be a mistake to follow it too far since it bor
e away to the east before long – something he had got confused by many a time on foot in the West End: those days seemed like another planet – and if he wanted to cross the Thames by Chelsea Bridge he would need to keep much more to the west. So at some point he would have to turn off to the right, and then – the idea struck him – he would walk across Green Park. Out in the open he would make some real progress at last.

  But it was a great deal darker in the narrow width of Bond Street, that high-fashion shopping mecca that had attracted its pilgrims since the eighteenth century. Perhaps, he thought, there were some of its offerings still in the windows on either side behind smashed glass or careful boarding, things of no value to looting eyes, flimsily floating couture dresses, fashion garments for men, neckties of thick silk, fine porcelain, paintings for the collector, ornate antique furniture, clocks and watches no longer needed for telling the time though perhaps useful still as a little useless gold to barter.

  However, by glancing up frequently to the strip of sky above, he was able to keep more or less to the centre of the roadway, though when he looked forwards he was sometimes reduced to putting his hands up in front of his face and feeling his way into the blackness. Even so he tripped on what was probably the edge of a wooden block jutting up from the roadway, falling on all fours, and half a dozen times or more he found he had strayed right over to one kerb or the other. Only, in the scarfing dark the mere difficulty of moving at all at least seemed to put the ache of his bruises and the sick feeling induced by the cold into some limbo where they no longer worried him.

  He would place one foot in front of the other, pause a moment, decide he was safe and then repeat the action. It sent him forward. But he guessed that it was at a speed not much greater than ten or twelve yards in each minute.

  Then suddenly a high kerb that seemed to run illogically at right angles to his path sent him sprawling flat on his face.

  He lay full length, deprived by the shock of any ability to get up again. It seemed so unfair. There ought not to have been a kerb there at all if the faintly paler sky above – he had been looking up at it when he fell – was keeping him in the right line.

  But then in a little jet of memory he got it. New Bond Street and Old Bond Street. Where what had been one continuous roadway slightly changed its name they had, years ago, constructed a pavement going right across to divert the jerking and competing traffic into a one-way system.

  He felt better the moment he had made the discovery and began pushing himself up again.

  His right hand, reaching out, became entangled in what seemed to be a mesh of light ironwork, except that it was not iron-cold to the touch. He found it, when he tried to extricate himself, in fact brittle and breakable.

  And in an instant he knew what it was. A skeleton. A body. Someone killed here years before and picked clean by rats or by the kites that had long ago come back in their dozens to the dustheap of the metropolis, circling and wheeling. A wave of ridiculous unreasoning revulsion slid up in him.

  He rolled himself away from the thing, scrambled shakily to his feet, gave one glance upwards, saw from the sky that a little way back a side-street opened up – he had missed it earlier: he ought to have taken it – and plunged off towards it, taking long hysterical strides in the blackness, a part of his mind conscious that he had seen worse sights but his will overcome by nerve-jangled panic.

  Quite soon in the yet narrower streets of the outskirts of May-fair he lost himself completely. All sense of direction deserted him. He blundered into walls and the spiky remains of iron railings – lengths from these had been favourite weapons in the First Riots – and he tripped persistently over the low worn kerbstones – jumping up again at once as if the bones that had lain so long whitening away on the area of pavement between the two Bond Streets had sprung to dead life at his touch and were stalking him through the darkness.

  At last the tattoo-beating of his heart slowed, and forcing himself to halt and look at the thin strip of sky between the massively tall houses, he was at least able to place himself in the middle of the narrow roadway.

  But the roadway of which street? He had no idea.

  And time. How much time had he lost by this nonsense? If he failed to sort his way out now, how many more minutes, even hours, would he lose from that small stock?

  He made himself walk forward, hoping that by merely going he would eventually recognise somewhere familiar, perhaps Park Lane, or Piccadilly or even Bond Street again. Certainly for all he knew he might well be facing the way he had come and even within a short distance of his starting point. All he could say was that he was somewhere in Mayfair.

  Mayfair. The Mayfair once of the socialites, of the opulent.

  And it was quiet. Quieter here than it had been anywhere before. The tall houses on either side of the narrow streets seemed to muffle every least noise. They were, so far as he could see, largely intact. The area must have been deserted by its inhabitants well before the Flight proper had got under way, and perhaps because most of the houses had been carefully emptied and well protected looters had done less here than elsewhere. Certainly where buildings were white or light-coloured it was sometimes possible to see that their doors were still in place although windows, where they had not been bricked up, were almost invariably gaping glassless holes.

  But, as he made his way along piece by piece, only the shuffle and flap of his own tyre-shod shoes broke the deadened silence.

  Then, working his way round yet one more corner hoping for a glimpse of the open space of Green Park or of Hyde Park, he heard – was it so? – a woman’s voice ringing out in distant song.

  The sound was so utterly unexpected that at first he almost convinced himself that, for all that it was a rich and lovely soprano and was accompanied by soft piano chords, it must be coming from inside his own head.

  The music, he even quickly recognised, was an aria from a Mozart opera. He could not put a name to it. But he had never been good at linking to particular notes Italian words whose meaning he was only half-sure of.

  He stood where he was and listened like a desert traveller drinking and drinking at suddenly arrived-at oasis water, all else forgotten. Obliterated.

  Mozart. He had heard no Mozart for years. Nor any music, come to that. Music had been one of the lost things. One of the pleasures he had thought would never again exist for him. No doubt here and there people played guitars or sang or perhaps even had record players and power for them. He himself during the past three years and more might have had the energy of spirit to have risen a handful of times into creaking song. But of real music he had heard not a note since very soon after life had contracted for him to that small area of Highgate.

  The aria came to a end.

  The silence which followed, a small deeper pool in the ocean of silence that was broken only by rare human voices and by the sounds of nature, wind, beating rain, crack or rumble of thunder, seemed even more deadened than it had been before. He felt a sense of desolation, of deprivation, of a snatched-away happiness such as, in the long era of gradually eroded pleasures, he had not experienced for years. The music had gone. Mozart had vanished again.

  Mozart.

  Tears that had come into his eyes, pricking and stinging, began to trickle down his cheeks and into his beard. The music, after his long absence from it, had affected him with multiplied strength, yet more powerful for its being in particular Mozart. Mozart who had always said to him especially that there is a resolution to the jars and tangles of the world, that at some great and distant end every ill shall be balanced by a good. Balanced and cancelled.

  There had been a time, at the start of the black years, when music and poetry too – he had read Shakespeare’s sonnets day after day – had seemed doubly and trebly precious. Something to be clung to. A source of air-pure encouragement. But with the slow grinding of the months, one after another interminably the same but for their weather, he had simply lost the energy to read or to put cassettes into the pl
ayer when he had still had batteries for it. Bit by bit in the business of survival books had ceased to mean anything to him, except as fire-lighting material, and so had music. He had forgotten them as if they had never affected him in any way.

  And now the voice had come to a halt, the voice which had been sending to his heart that time-lost message, whatever words were being sung, some unlikely lady captured by a stage-villain Turk bewailing her lot, or a vengeful woman betrayed by an all-conquering lover, or a mythical queen claiming revenge. And with that halt he had been brought back once more to the desert of silence.

  He would never find that marvellous sound. And he wanted to with a blotting-out vigour of desire which he thought had gone from him never to return. He wanted to get to its source, to hear it and see the singer, to bathe in it.

  Then it began again. The same aria, sung with the same cascading beauty.

  He pushed his head up the better to hear. He decided on the direction from which it was coming. In the enfolding darkness he set off at a run.

  Fragments of rubbish in the roadway sent him slipping and staggering but hardly slowed him. And as he blundered on the music, which flowed unstopping, clearly grew louder. A stumbling turn, with under his feet the feel of cobblestones, meant he had entered some close-walled mews and at once the sound leapt in volume like a flame fed with fresh oil. It must be coming from the street at the other end of this narrow passage. It must.

  A staggering run, leaning dangerously far forward, and the sound gained in loudness with each lurching step.

  And then, rounding the corner, there not far away was a light. It was in the first-floor window of a tall house, the soft glimmer of a candle reflected on glass. All the windows of the place seemed to have their panes intact. Miracle. And the voice was coming from behind the lighted window. Miracle of miracles.