He advanced, crunching careless of everything over small debris of some sort, abruptly transforming his pace from wild blundering to holily slow. At any instant, he felt, the whole house-front, the candle-flickering window, the magic music coming from behind it would disappear like a fragile palace of ice breathed on by some fiery dragon.
But it did not. The candle-light flickered. The music cascaded.
He reached the house. Above, that pure voice went on singing and singing, up, down, up, down, glittering decoration flung off in crystalline streams. There. Beyond doubt there.
A flight of four steps led up to the substantial front door. He decided there was nothing else for it but to go up them and to try the heavy doorknob. If the door did not open he would wait till the aria came to an end and then he would knock. But he would get in. He must.
He mounted the steps, feeling them charged with meaning as those of an altar. He put his hand on the doorknob.
It swung away from him and the door gave the slightest of squeaks.
He almost expected the music to stop at the sound, tiny though it was. But it went on unfalteringly. Directly in front of him in the faint light coming from a door slightly ajar he could make out a flight of wide stairs, carpetless but with their carved banisters still intact. Preserved.
He walked forward to the stairs – the floor under his feet was rock-solid – and simply went up them towards the door through which the faint golden candle-light was coming. And still the trills, the poised high notes, the sweet unerring descents continued. Softly as he could he went up to the door. He reached it. He looked in round it.
The room he saw was big. It must have been a fine drawing-room once. Now it was almost completely bare. Vaguely he glimpsed a pile of bedding in a corner. But what caught his attention was first the candle, which was in a tall brass candlestick up on a noble carved mantelpiece backed by a huge gilt-framed mirror, under which a dull fire slumbered, and then the piano, a concert grand, black and lustrous. Almost hidden behind its raised lid, the singer sat dressed in something long and white made richer with pearly ornamentation. She was, from what he could see, a majestically built creature with a pile of yellowy hair, not young, not old. She was accompanying herself as she sang with closed eyes.
He stood in the doorway, still as he could stay, and waited for the aria to reach its end.
When it did so the singer, after a long pause, opened her eyes. He stood without moving so as not to alarm her. Then, when he saw that she had taken in his presence there, something moved him not to speak but to applaud. He clapped quietly for half a minute, a minute, more. When at last he broke off the singer rose from the piano without a word and made him a slow curtsey.
‘It is a long long while since I sang before an audience,’ she said in a voice of measured dignity. ‘Do you know how to shoot a gun?’
He blinked, feeling a sudden blanket-stifling bewilderment.
‘A gun,’ the majestic creature repeated with a tinge of irritation. ‘Do you know what to do with a gun? You ought to: you’re a man.’
He shook his head, the dense feeling of clogging stupidity thickening in his mind instant by instant.
‘To do with a gun?’ he asked gropingly. ‘What gun?’
‘That one there. But surely one gun is like another.’
She had gestured towards a corner, a generous movement conveying ‘Look’ to the topmost row of the opera-house.
He looked. Leaning against the wall, barely visible in the candle-light, was what he guessed to be a sporting rifle of some sort.
‘I suppose I could use it, if I had to,’ he answered with painful slowness. ‘If there was ammunition, that is.’
He became aware of a sweet cloying odour. And then he knew what it was. Powder. Face-powder. She must still be using it, have a huge supply somewhere.
‘Ammunition?’ she answered, somewhat sharply.
Again he felt that deadening bewilderment.
‘Ammunition, bullets,’ he said.
‘Oh, there are boxes and boxes of bullets. Downstairs where I found the gun. So, good. You can stay and protect me. I won’t sing any more tonight.’
The sheer effrontery of what she had said sent another dazing muffled blow through his head. He struggled with possible replies. To compliment her on her voice again, in case she was mad and dangerous? To ask simply how she came to be here, singing in the dead acres of deserted Mayfair? To ask her her name? To ask where the bullets were exactly? To ask if she could get him a drink of water?
But he was not to have to choose between these flooding-in demands.
The mere state of turmoil they had induced in him piled on to the effects of his beating-up, the slicing shock of seeing Dr Satpathi die, even his lack of food – he had had nothing since he had shared his twist of fire-baked bread in the Estate cell – all worked on him with the suddenness of seemingly solid ground without warning caving in.
He felt momentarily dizzy, was just aware that he was falling and then altogether lost consciousness.
Part Eight
What brought Mark back to consciousness was moonlight. He came to, seemingly from a deep sleep, to find his eyes filled with moonlight slanting across the big room and so strong it was hard to look into.
At once the thought of what moonlight signified swept coldly into him.
It must be well past 4 a.m. if the moon were this high in the sky. And, before, it had been only perhaps midnight. He had lost four hours. Five even.
He began to push himself up, the remembrance of where he was and how he had come to be there – what madness had possessed him to go haring after the sound of that singing the way he had? – returning to him piece by piece. His sudden carried-away lurching run through the deadened silent Mayfair streets and mews in search of that will-o’-the-wisp voice. The candlelit window. The unlocked door. The fairytale atmosphere of it all. Had he been bewitched, literally? Yes, he had indeed been bewitched from his duty to Jasmine, dying there in Wimbledon. Perhaps now even dead already.
But, no, that at least was not possible. It was still dark. At the very worst it could not be much past 6 a.m. That would give him six hours still. And six hours would be enough. If he kept going at a good hard pace. And there would be daylight to see by before much longer. It ought to be still well possible.
He made to get right up.
And only then did he properly realise exactly whereabouts in the big room he was. He had been standing just inside the doorway when that confused blackness had come in on him. But now he was lying, not where he had fallen, but in the corner where as he had entered he had glimpsed a pile of bedding. And soft bedding was under him, and across his stomach preventing him from rising there was a heavy arm.
And the hand – by God, yes – was resting on his genitals. His trousers had been opened. The fingers were lightly curled. And he was in a state of slight excitement.
The very realisation of what must have happened produced in him at that moment a sudden thrill of long-in-abeyance sexual urgency.
The train of events was clear. The singer – she had been saying this to him when he had collapsed – had wanted him to stay, had wanted him as a protector, had needed someone who could use that gun which she was too ignorant to be able to handle herself, and she was offering him as payment this. Warmth, food no doubt, and herself.
And her music.
He felt the temptation, a strong dark-running stream. It would be a wonderful life. Like the life that had used to be. Comfort. Food there for the taking, because, yes, if there were ‘boxes and boxes’ of ammunition there was bound to be crate after crate of provisions, equally left by some former occupant and missed by the looters, canned breasts of chicken, quail, turkey, lobster bisque soup, asparagus tips, fine coffee beans in sealed containers, wine too in all probability. A fine cellar. And then the music. She would sing for him, night after night. He would live life as it was meant to be once again, as it had been before. And the soft enfolding of her bod
y. It had been a long, long time since he had experienced all that that was.
He lay and thought about it. A refuge. Out of the danger-swirling hurly-burly ravaging of the deserted city. To have those hidden, fire snaking under the ground, unknowable perils barred off at all points. And the refuge would be one answering to his own most felt needs. No requirement here to summon up postures of religiosity so as to share the protection of some place like the Baths at Kentish Town, no requirement to obey a savage self-motifying code in anywhere like the Estate. Here the essence of the human spirit that had moved him and ruled him before would once more be his to command, to live in.
A real life again.
So why was there doubt in his mind? He could abandon Jasmine. He had done his best to reach her. He had already risked enormously much more for her than he had risked for anything in his whole life before. Surely he could retire honourably from the journey now?
He lay trying to spread a blankness over his mind.
Because he knew that he could not retire. Little Dr Satpathi’s story of the King who had learnt the value of the sweat of the brow was there in his head linked to a whole train of other things he had discovered since he had set out, and no amount of arguing and rationalising could push that thought down. An obstinate stony shape.
The King had come to see that he had to live in the real world. And for him himself to grab now at this unexpectedly offered chance of wrapping himself round with comforts would be to do once again what he had persistently done long ago in his days with Jasmine. To opt out. To let things happen.
Very quietly he put his hand on top of the singer’s and with every gentleness he lifted it and eased himself from under her weighty slumbering arm.
Dying Jasmine. The claim of the past that had happened. Wife, wife, bane of my life. No other possibility was really open to him. Perhaps, when this was over, he might try to come back … But a future that far away, far away in terms of hazards, was too remote to contemplate.
He got cautiously to his feet and crept over to the window by the piano so as to get a better idea of the position of the moon and of the time through its miraculously whole panes.
So far as he was able to judge, it was probably not much after 5 a.m. with the moon still not all that high in the sky. Bad enough, but the moonlight itself should be a tremendous help. The weather, he saw too, had changed radically. Instead of the uniform cloud layer there had been before, ragged black shapes were moving fast now across an otherwise clear and starry sky. Nor was it as cold. It was, in fact, distinctly warmish and damp, almost muggy. Well, November could do that.
As he turned from his inspection of the night he caught a strong whiff of aniseed from the broken bottle still in his pocket. It was, he thought, a piquancy, with its overtones of sophistication, oddly appropriate to the luxurious surroundings he was leaving.
He gave a last look to the room’s sleeping occupant – she was snoring lightly, a pleasant rather musical sound – and then he tip-toed through the still slightly ajar door.
Outside, he found the street transformed. In the softly flooding moonlight it glittered like the Milky Way. Evidently tiny fragments of glass from the windows shattered in almost every other house nearby had been lying there all along – he had just been aware of crunching over them as he had come up – and now with the moonlight pouring down on to them they sparkled like a largesse of diamonds.
He made his way along over them as easily as if he was in one of the glaringly over-lit streets of old, and at the corner he found no difficulty in heading southwards once again.
Within five minutes he was stepping from an alley-like lane into the wide sweep of Piccadilly. Opposite lay Green Park, looking rollingly rural in the moonlight with the dark masses of its huge, not yet wholly leafless planes casting soft sprawling shadows and its knee-high grass swaying gently in the warmish southwesterly wind. To his left, as he looked this way and that, he saw the famous club almost always called ‘the In and Out’. Those two stark injunctions to vehicles were still visible in their thick black letters on the white of its forecourt entrance pillars. In the building itself a stray shell had at some time punched a neat hole just under the roofline.
He strode out across the wide tarmac in front of him. Down to the right by Hyde Park Corner, he noticed, a young tree had thrust itself through the exact centre of the roadway. In the strong light from the moon its bare branches stood out blackly, a pen-and-ink drawing. There was a gateway into the park almost directly opposite him, its gates had gone though most of the railings on either side were intact.
On the other side he paused for a moment taking in the sight before him, the waiting park. How different it looked in its remote loneliness from the way he remembered it, shut off by night but by day alive with people strolling over its well-trimmed grass like stiff well-behaved dolls, clean, bright-coloured, at leisure, safe. But that had been long, long ago.
And now … Now there was still a straight path running in front of him, broad enough for the grass not to have encroached entirely over its asphalt, with swollen-trunked planes on either side making an avenue. And it led due south, as far as he could recollect, coming out beside Buckingham Palace. Skirt round the Palace and he would be in Buckingham Palace Road, and that would lead him almost to Chelsea Bridge.
He hurried forward. His sleep or faint or whatever it had been had done him good. His bruises, though they had made him creakingly stiff for the first few yards he had walked, were only dully painful now.
Wimbledon. He was not so many miles distant from that little pebbledashed house here. The River surely must mark much more than half of what was in fact less than a day’s walk, and he could be crossing it in half an hour’s time. And if it was no more than 5 a.m. now, then he could be at the house easily before midday.
To confront Jasmine.
But what exactly to say to her then? She wanted, her mother had told him, to put her life in order. Well, it had been disordered enough. He certainly would have things to say to her on that score. But to forgive her for it? Could he do that? Had he forgiven her those years of misery she had brought him? Wouldn’t it be wrong to say that he had simply because she was dying? The fact of her imminent death had not brought him all this way, through all that he had come through, just to feed her with platitudinous lies. And he had not forgiven her. Time had not altered anything. Only, in the ground-down years of the recent past, he had been without desire to re-sharpen the edges that had kept the sores fresh.
Should he make himself forgive her now? No. That surely would be to condone the life she had led. And wildness like that must not be condoned.
The lip of a huge ragged rain-heavy cloud met the pinky silver disc of the moon and a vast shadow raced across the waving grass towards him, seeming even to contain within it little devil shadows coming forward of their own volition.
He shook himself.
Ridiculous to let himself be so deeply affected by the remembrance of Jasmine and her lovers, her cannabis sessions, her drunks, her gambling club nights, her jobs taken up and abandoned, her ambitions.
He strode out along the wide path, easy to walk on despite the invading grass. Even with the moon behind the cloud it was not at all difficult to keep direction.
And then, somewhere behind him, he heard, above the soughing of the wind in the branches of the huge planes, a curious sound.
He stopped and listened hard.
In a moment it came again. Something between a whimper and a snarl.
A dog. It must be one of the stray dogs that were everywhere. Best to hurry on. They could be nasty, and not only to children like the bedraggled little girl in the pink frock Brian Parkinson had rescued.
But, hardly had he set off again, when he heard a second similar sound, seeming to come this time from over his other shoulder. For an instant he considered halting again to make sure his senses were not deceiving him. But it came to him immediately that it was altogether likely that there should be more than
one dog in the park. It was the sort of place they might well gather together.
Almost at once, in confirmation, a whole series of whinings broke out behind him. Distinct and separate sounds.
A pack. There must be a pack of dogs roaming here in the tall swaying grass. A pack of dogs long since lost to domesticity.
He quickened his pace to a walk that was only just short of a run.
It should take less than ten minutes, five even, to cross to the far side, and there surely there were buildings beyond the Palace where he could barricade himself in if he had to.
He wished he had taken that gun from the singer. But he would have had to have searched for ammunition and he would not have been so expert with it in any case.
Besides, he could be in no real danger.
But he kept up the striding walk that had sent a sweat flushing up over his whole body. And it soon became unmistakably clear that the dogs were tracking him. There was a wide sickle of whining behind him, rising and falling.
The Pernod, he thought. Its sharp aniseed smell still hung on him. Aniseed, the traditional lure for hounds.
He broke into a run, an awkward trot, the best he could manage in his bruised condition. And at that moment the moon briefly emerged from the cloud and one of the animals directly behind him gave a long neck-stretched howl.
But he must be almost at the other side now. There was a distant glimmer of whiteness not far away that should be the Palace.
He found he could run faster than he had thought, a lot faster in a wild swaying flight.
Then, like a ribbon of tide racing lickingly across flat sands, three or four of the pursuing animals crossed in front of him from the left and as they came on to the asphalt of the path scrambled skiddingly round and began bounding towards him. He swung desperately off to the side. At once his feet were clung at and obstructed by the grass.
A Long Walk to Wimbledon Page 13