A Long Walk to Wimbledon

by H. R. F. Keating

  He popped another sliver of the meat into his mouth and flicked up to the head of the column.

  ‘ “I never wear a watch,” ’ he read out, through his munching, ‘ “partly because I am convinced I know exactly what the time is anyway, and partly because I suffer from the delusion that it is possible to be in two places at once (i.e. spreadeagled in the garden in my bathing suit, and lipsticked and gowned for an important lunch) and wearing a watch would merely undermine my happy, optimistic nature. But I do love toys so I have been wearing a digital watch which Debenhams have put out at a very good price.” ’

  He had to stop. Marigold, looking perched up on the parapet like a little Chinese doll with her thatch of grey hair, was laughing so loudly that he was afraid she would attract attention from either one end of the bridge or the other.

  ‘Well, yes,’ he said to her, ‘it does seem funny now.’

  He took another slippery handful of the dark meat and chewed at it till the full violence of her mirth had subsided.

  ‘Go on,’ she said at last. ‘Give us some more o’ that.’

  ‘Well, all right. But please, Marigold, don’t laugh so much or they’ll come to see what it’s all about.’

  He gulped down the last of his large mouthful.

  ‘What is this we’re eating?’ he asked. ‘It’s very good. Is it pigeon?’

  She gave him a quick glance out of the corner of her eye.

  ‘It’s rat,’ she said. ‘Catch ‘em and smoke ’em, I do. Barter ‘em too, only I kids on then it’s rabbit.’

  Nausea rose up in him like a piston. In an instant he was covered all over in a light sweat. With the curious practicality of moments of physical crisis, he swung round so as to vomit, if he did, into the swiftly running, light brown Thames below. But people had eaten rats before, he reminded himself. In the siege of Paris. What trivial items the mind stored. Well, no doubt they were a dangerous diet, but he lived in an envelope of danger after all.

  ‘You won’t be wanting any more then,’ Marigold said when he swung round again.

  ‘No. I was hungry all right. And that’s done me good. But no more, thank you.’

  ‘Then I s’pose we’d best be getting on. I dare say we made ourselves look mad enough to please anybody.’

  He slipped down from the parapet. Had they established enough of an air of harmless lunacy? If any of the men down at the far end had seen them, had they been convinced?

  And, if they did get by, how long now till he would be seeing Jasmine? Would he really be in time? He should be. If all went totally well, he would be. And with more than a bit to spare. If all went totally well.

  Marigold had neatly wrapped the remaining rat pieces in The Times that had given her so much cheerful entertainment and had put the packet inside the shopper basket. Now she set off again, heading for the centre of the wide empty bridge, trotting at her customary brisk pace, only wandering the squeaky shopper from side to side more than when there had been no soldiers to see them.

  Looking between sweeps of his falling hair – no need yet to start the mad mumbling – he saw that the platoon taking a break on the ground or up on the broken brick wall that had once formed the outer boundary of the big cold-store beside the bridge were still contentedly talking and joking among themselves. A shout of laughter came floating across.

  But they were men at liberty to look around. Would one of them, seeing two civilians coming over the guarded bridge, take it into his head to investigate? Out of a sense of duty? Or seeing a chance to do a little happy bullying?

  That seemed to be the real danger. The tanks and scout cars, so far as he could make out, were unmanned with only one guard standing stiffly beside them.

  But would another patrol come at any moment marching out of the dark arch of the viaduct? Those lay on their route, too, so what if as they went through they met an officer coming the other way? The one who had been having his breakfast?

  But, wandering and weaving, they had reached the very end of the bridge. Scattered across the wide roadway were the remains of the light metal pedestrian overbridge he remembered. The torn and twisted metal, though crushed where the tanks had rolled over it, was not easy to get past. But Marigold hoisted up the shopper and picked her way, even singing a cracked tuneless song, and he in his turn got through too, muttering away now as hard as he could go.

  ‘Death to the French. Death to the French. Curses on thee, Spanish jade.’

  And they were over. They were off the bridge. They had crossed the River.

  At least they had crossed the River, whatever happened to them.

  And the River marked half of his journey. More than half by a good deal, if he was measuring the distance in strictly arithmetical miles. It was now no more than two or three hours’ hard walking to Wimbledon, if he could follow a straight route and if nothing happened to delay him. Two or three hours only, and Jasmine there waiting for him, her rich and greedy prettiness gone, dying, thin, but waiting. Waiting still well buoyed up by oily Tommy’s costly stuff. Waiting for the sight of his face, the touch of his hand, the sound of his voice.

  But saying what?

  Ahead the dark arches under the viaduct were tantalisingly near now. No one at all seemed to be paying them the least attention. And, so far as he could make out, no one was coming through in the darkness to meet them.

  Abruptly another thought came into his mind. Now that he was across the River, he would never go back to the Highgate house again.

  True, he might be able to bluff his way across in the same way as Marigold had bluffed their way over. But he did not want to. The risk, and all the other risks, were not worth it just to take up again a niche in a cold damp barricaded house which in the days when houses had belonged to people, when people had owned more property than they could keep about their persons and fight to hold, had been his. No, he did not want to go back there. To Mayfair and Mozart perhaps, but not to Highgate.

  He shook his head at the discovery.

  In the little group of idling soldiers just behind them he saw a man rise abruptly to his feet.

  He looked quickly at Marigold beside him. Had she noticed? Would it be best to make a dash for the darkness of the arch ahead?

  The man seemed to be coming towards them. Walking with purpose.

  Marigold was keeping the same pace, brisk enough, but wandering. Would her mad act be enough to save them again? What if this fellow was not the friendly sort they had met at the other end of the bridge?

  They could be marched to some camp in less than two minutes. They might even, in a crude joke, be bundled over the river wall down into that swift-flowing brown water.

  ‘Marigold?’ he said urgently.

  She paid no attention. He swung his head and looked back at the soldier.

  The fellow had stopped. He had just turned the corner of the low wall he had been sitting on earlier and he was hauling up the bottom edge of his battle-blouse. Taking a pee.

  That high-flying droning plane had been a good omen.

  He looked ahead to the arches of the viaduct. But it seemed that Marigold, in her wandering course, was taking them off the line that would lead through the wide central arch. Had she seen something in the dark there? That breakfasting officer?

  No. This near, it was plain that there was no one there.

  ‘Marigold, why aren’t we going by the roadway?’

  ‘Don’t want to. Want to go by the side. Nice little way there. Marigold likes it.’

  Was there a zebra to cross or something? Well, anyway, trust her.

  The arch she was making for was very much narrower than the one that took the roadway under the viaduct. It had evidently been simply a path for pedestrians. Soon he saw that over the years it had got more than half filled with rubbish, long since coagulated into one slimy mound with only here and there isolated objects sticking up from the greeny-dark mass, pieces of indestructible bright polythene, bottles, the loop of a motor-tyre, the melting shape of an o
ld armchair.

  As he entered behind Marigold the clawing stink that assailed him brought back his experience on the path leading down from the Archway Bridge. Long ago now it seemed.

  ‘Marigold,’ he called out, remonstratively.

  But she ignored him. Murmuring happily to herself, the shopper trailing now behind her, she picked her way up the slowly rising mound. He followed, his feet slipping and sliding. The low roof, blackened and shining damp, was soon so close that he had to stoop. The smell brought up from his lungs a fierce protesting cough.

  ‘Marigold.’

  ‘Nice this way.’

  And she trotted onwards. At the mound’s top, where he saw that he would have to bend nearly double, the globous eye of an ancient clothes-washer peered down at them, just catching the daylight from behind. Beside it a cat appeared, spitting arched defiance.

  Marigold stopped and with a great amount of puss-pussing tried to induce it to come to her. But here even her powers failed and with a last curse the gone-wild creature turned and vanished. Marigold trudged her way to the top and then began to descend the far slope. He followed, sweaty and angry.

  Why had she done it? Why had she insisted on this cramped darkness?

  At last, slipping and slithering, they came out into the day and the sunlight again.

  He thought about demanding an explanation from her. There had been no reason for the detour as far as he could see, not even the excuse of putting a zebra in their way to cross. But a look at her dreamily contented face told him that, whatever question he might put, it would get no answer that he could understand.

  She was mad. That was it. And though at times her madness had helped him, it could not always be expected to do so.

  He began to think once more of parting from her.

  Then, as he followed her and the once again merrily squeaking shopper, there did come a zebra where it was sensible to cross. He caught up with her and they went over it side by side.

  Would it help their luck to hold? There had been the plane, too. Things must be going to go well.

  At the far end of the road which they had crossed he recognised, though he had never been a cricket fan, the high brick stadium walls of the Oval.

  But up on them, he saw at the same moment, ominously silhouetted, there were more soldiers, the short barrels of their automatic rifles clearly to be seen against a background of white boarding. And on the tall flagpost over the old pavilion a bright pennant was flying briskly in the morning breeze.

  ‘Yes,’ Marigold said, seeing what he was looking at, ‘that’ll be Army all right. It’ll be one o’ their places.’

  ‘Places?’

  ‘Places. That’s what I calls ‘em. Don’t know what they likes to say they are. Camps, I think. Camps. But whatever they say they means prison.’

  Yet, for all the hatred of being confined that she had shown, she kept trotting onwards. He went with her, but with doubt now billowing up higher and higher with every step.

  Up on a wall to their right a painted noticeboard, survivor of countless storms, saved from a firewood fate only by having been put up so high, proclaimed ‘Luxury Flats Two Only Remaining.’ Shouldn’t they slip into the empty derelict block and try to work their way round behind, out of sight?

  He put the idea to Marigold, vainly trying to make her stop. Anger began to shoot jabbing rays through his mind.

  ‘They’ll pick us up,’ he shouted, gesturing down towards the soldiers. ‘For nothing. For no reason. You’ll see.’

  But her only reply was to echo exaggeratedly his furious gesture as she trotted along. His anger increased. To have entrusted himself to such a creature. It had been folly, sheer folly.

  ‘Stop,’ he yelled.

  She did at least halt.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, forcing himself to be calm. ‘Listen, Marigold, you’ve been very helpful to me. I admit that. But I’m afraid I must exercise my own judgment here. If this is the edge of the military area, then I’m going to go back as far as the river and then get round by Lambeth somehow, the way that sentry advised. Do you understand? I’m going to take a long, long way round to Wimbledon. I can do it. Even if I’ll only just be in time. But I’m not going to risk being arrested.’

  He thought of the burnt desert of Lambeth Marigold had described to the sentries. But he could get through that. He must. And, if it was all a blackened barrenness, then at least there would be no troops there.

  ‘Billy boy, Billy boy,’ Marigold said, looking him up and down. ‘Not safe to be out, you ain’t. Not safe at all.’

  ‘Well, goodbye, Marigold,’ he answered, loudly and clearly. ‘Goodbye and thank you.’

  She put her arms akimbo on the thick ceremonial cording that held together her chop-ended old mackintosh.

  ‘You trust your Auntie Marigold,’ she said. ‘You trust her, an’ don’t go waving an’ shouting an’ making them soldiers come down this way. You trust Marigold, an’ she’ll have you in Wimbledon faster than you ever thought.’

  It was a nonsensical claim. He almost swung on his heel and marched straight off. Only, partly Marigold’s warning about not attracting the soldiers’ attention deterred him, and partly he did not want to leave her on bad terms.

  ‘So you just come along o’ me ’

  And off she went again, calmly as ever – her burbling humming picked up again at once – and he found himself following.

  He could not, as he tramped along behind her, think why he was letting her lead him. She was mad. He was a rational being. It was absurd, however many times she had been right about the dangers they had encountered.

  But she was leading him, and he was following.

  Hastily he began his mad-act chanting once more. The soldiers ahead were not so far away.

  Would they get past this lot as easily as they had got past the sentries on the bridge and the men by the viaduct? He doubted it. He very much doubted it. The Oval was a military prison, even if it was on the edge of the Army-occupied area. Probably, in fact, it had been chosen because it was on the perimeter, close to where troublemakers would be picked up. Troublemakers like themselves.

  But, as they got a little nearer, he saw that not everyone round the walls of the Oval was a soldier. Marigold had an argument on her side in the shape of a handful of civilians mingling with the troops, an old woman hawking round a plastic bucket of scrubby little apples, three laughing girls there for the usual reason and, even more of a reassuring sign, half a dozen children. He was reminded of old television news pictures of armed troops and going-about-their-business civilians side by side on the streets of Belfast. Perhaps it meant that it was not as dangerous here as he had feared. Perhaps they would get through.

  ‘Death to the French. Curses on thee, Spanish jade. Le coeur a ses raisons. Awake, for morning in the bowl of night hath flung the stone that puts the stars to flight.’

  No one seemed to be paying them particular attention, though a good many people glanced up at the sound of the savage squeaking of the shopper.

  Why hadn’t he found something oily to stop it? Or was the noise, in fact, a good thing? Only someone absolutely simple in the head would endure it for hour after hour.

  ‘Wife, wife, bane of my life. Death to the French. Awake, for morning in the bowl of night …’

  They were already almost half-way round the road encircling the stadium. The Surrey Tavern, the pub that had used to serve the cricket crowd, had come into view, the letters of its name, all there bar the first ‘S’, still standing out boldly, white on red. The place now seemed to be a canteen for the troops.

  ‘Death to the French. Death to the French.’

  Another squad of soldiers in column of threes came marching from round the far side, an officer beside them. Peering from under flopping hair, he saw the man momentarily hesitate looking straight in their direction. But the sound of rhythmically booted feet did not come to any sudden halt.

  He shambled onwards, face still firmly to the groun
d, just able to see Marigold ahead of him. Tramp, tramp. Tramp, tramp. Mutter, mutter, mutter, mutter.

  ‘Here we are then.’

  She had stopped. He looked up.

  They were a fair way past the Oval, almost at the large intersection just south of it, evidently another of the places where people congregated. There were some twenty or more of them, mostly busy over the always long-drawn business of barter, one or two sitting talking on the steps of the warm golden-stone church that overlooked the open space. A knot of men outside the old Oval Underground station were playing some sort of gambling game, using old coins as tokens.

  And it was the Underground station, its yellow tiled walls flecked with little black dots still in a good state of repair, that Marigold had pointed out. But why? Why the Underground?

  ‘Marigold,’ he asked, still sharply, ‘where are you trying to take me?’

  She turned her head to answer, though only just.

  ‘We’re going where you want. To Wimbledon. By Tube. All the way. Quick as you like.’

  Part Ten

  Mad. Marigold was, of course, mad. Yet wasn’t this idea of getting to Wimbledon by Tube carrying her madness into a new dimension? Up to now she had simply had her own characteristic way of looking at things, sometimes merely a little odd like the notion of zebra crossings and single aircraft bringing luck, sometimes mysteriously shrewd like some of her comments on the long-ago life in The Times or her method of getting past the soldiers. But when the ordinary logic of life had broken down it was understandable that madness should sometimes be topsy-turvily effective. Yet now surely she had slipped into a wholly lunatic fantasy.

  What could she actually be intending to do? To try to walk along the abandoned railway line deep underneath them, pitch-dark and unknown for mile upon mile? Or was she even further into a world of fantasy and would she just sit in the dark and pretend to herself, and him, that they were going to Wimbledon?

  He felt a sudden yearning concern for her. She had helped him. No, more, despite her infuriating way at times, he liked her. Yes, he liked her, mad though she was. And now she had gone beyond him.