He must certainly stay with her for a little longer, see if he could somehow straighten things out.
She made her way directly over to the station entrance, a tiny determined untidy figure. He followed. There were yet more people inside the old ticket hall, family groups with children, some of them dancing round in a circle holding hands and singing. Like a folk-song collector coming across a prized rarity, he recognised the tune. It had been a TV jingle at the time the commercial service had closed down, though the name of the product it had advertised had become distorted past disentangling.
But Marigold did not linger. Squeak, squeak went the shopper over to the long-stilled escalators. There she shouldered the basket – he felt the cessation of sound as a positive blessing – and marched away down the unmoving moving stair into the gradually increasing darkness.
But before it had got quite black a faint orangey light began to appear from below, getting slowly brighter as they descended.
When at the bottom they crossed the landing and walked on to one of the two platforms its source became apparent. Candles and lanterns, as many as three dozen in all, were dotted along the whole length of the platform and a small community was evidently encamped there, family clusters that reminded him at once of the ‘praying knees’ at the baths in Kentish Town. The two places even sounded a little alike. Here there was not quite the tingling resonance of that night of ritualised hymn-singing, but the confined space and smooth tunnel walls did give the muted and sparse talk he heard – somewhere further along a child was monotonously crying – a distinctive timbre.
And, he realised as he anxiously followed Marigold along the platform’s length, there was a characteristic smell too. The sour odour of long human habitation in a cramped space, body stink, urine stink, old clothes stink. It came back to him then, clearly as if he was pacing this very platform waiting for a train to whisk him along to South Wimbledon, the smell he would have had in his nostrils then, the faint sooty bitterness of impacted dust marginally disturbed. He could remember it exactly.
Trains, those frequent trains on the Underground, moderately frequent even when the service had begun to suffer from lack of manpower when car factory jobs paid much more than a public service could find – their very existence, he thought, summed up all that city life had been before. Getting rapidly from suburbs to centre had been an essential of its being. They had been right to call the Paris underground the Métro – Paris, were things as bad there as they were here? – since swift internal travel was metro-polaneity itself. The millions drawn together in minute complexities of divided and sub-divided mutually dependent occupations had needed such mobility almost as much as they had needed to breathe, and breathing had often been trouble enough up in the streets towards the end. To go to jobs, to cinemas, theatres, football matches, concerts, the bright lights, meetings, courses and classes: the whole complex of the Underground spelt city life, for worse or for better. Spelt it and smelt it, with that characteristic, just remembered, faintly sooty odour.
Replaced in his nostrils at this moment by brutal basic human stink. The smell of timidity in hiding.
But, it dawned on him, if there were people down here it was after all at least possible that anybody could walk from one station to the next along the tunnels. It might even be the quickest way of getting to Wimbledon if the Army was spread out in strength in the whole area south of the River.
Perhaps, again, the mad way was the best way.
‘Hello, Old Marigold.’
A woman had hailed her, loudly and cheerfully, from among the huddled groups they had been passing as they had made their way along the edge of the platform in a procession of two, the shopper shrilling out in front of them like a stuck-record blackbird. She was a stout creature of sixty or so, sitting propped against the rear wall, her gross red cheeks contrasting sharply in the light of a lantern with the whiteness of the wan faces all around her.
Marigold halted.
‘Hello, dear,’ she called. ‘You still here then?’
‘It’s me legs,’ the stout woman shouted back. ‘Look at ‘em. All swolled up like balloons. Can’t walk more nor twenty yards, or I’d of been out of this here old hidey-hole long ago.’
Marigold bent down to the shopper and began to rummage inside it.
‘Here,’ she called out. ‘Got something as might do you a bit o’ good.’
She produced one of her boxes, a smallish cardboard one much rubbed at the edges. But immediately he recognised the bold design printed on it. It had been something Jasmine had had. An exactly similar box had stood on the bathroom shelf for months and months, abandoned after a first enthusiasm. It had been some slimming stuff. Or had it been tanning stuff, sun-tanning stuff? Whichever it was, the plastic bottle in the cardboard box had been designed with a large hole in its centre ingeniously increasing its apparent size while reducing the actual contents. And it had been hellishly expensive.
Marigold carefully opened the top flap and tipped on to her cracked and skinny palm a small shower of pieces of dried leaf.
‘Boil ‘em up and drink it down,’ she said, going over to her acquaintance and transferring the fragments to her. ‘I don’t promise nothing, mind, but it may get you on your feet again, girl.’
She cut off the stout woman’s cheerful thanks.
‘Got to be getting along, see. Taking this feller to Wimbledon, got to see his wife what’s dying.’
He felt a jab of shock at this crude announcement of his predicament. Or, he realised, he had felt that he ought to have been shocked. Because he had not been, only surprised. He tried to work out why. Was it because privacy had been gone so long, was one of the lost luxuries of civilisation? Or even because individuality, the right to personal sorrows, had gone? Neither seemed quite right.
No, he decided, as if the revelation was still slowly flowering inside him, it was simply because of this liking for Marigold which he had discovered in himself. She had said what she had in a spirit of pure goodwill. And he accepted it. He accepted her liking for him, and that it had created in him an equal liking for her – was ‘liking’ too weak a word? – however deranged her mind might be.
They reached the far end of the platform. Marigold, without a word, lowered the shopper into the track pit, turned and slipped down after it. Then with a bright ‘Upsy-daisy’ she lifted the basket to plank its thin axle down on the ‘live’ rail in the centre of the pit.
He was unable to keep back a gasp as he saw the axle descend. He actually expected to see a great bluish flash as so many thousand volts passed through the shopper and into Marigold.
But a moment later he smiled at his own ridiculousness. The smooth rail, though it was no longer steel-burnished as it had been in the days when at five-minute intervals it had been brushed by the pick-up arm of trains, was now simply a convenient place to rest the shopper on. Dead as metal anywhere. Marigold was perfectly right to make use of it.
‘Come along then.’
From the platform edge he looked into the tunnel ahead. The dim lights of the lanterns and candles scarcely penetrated its blackness at all. He could see its floor for two or three yards, a level surface of neat regular-sized chunky pebbles all covered in the same sooty brownness. On the circular walls he could make out the dozen or so pipes and cables that had played their parts in the running of the system years before, disappearing equally into the dark. A single white plastic-covered wire penetrated a yard deeper perhaps before it too was lost to sight. But that was all.
The blackness looked impenetrable. Was Marigold not even going to light one of her stubs of candle?
Yet from her familiarity with the stout and cheery cripple it was plain she had travelled this way often before. Trust her then. Trust her.
He scrambled awkwardly down on to the track. Marigold, as soon as she had seen he was coming, had marched off into the black. He plunged in in his turn.
For the first hundred yards or so, while there was still some light comin
g from the platform behind him, the going seemed almost impossible. At every step he felt constrained to check and peer ahead into the darkness, despite Marigold’s tiny figure plodding away unhesitatingly in front of him. He could make out only with difficulty where he was putting each foot and could not rid himself of the idea that at any instant he would topple forward helplessly into some unseen trap. But, curiously, as soon as a slight curve in the tunnel had blotted out the last vestiges of light and he was deprived even of the minimal reassurance he had been getting from the glint on the white plastic wire at his side, he began to make better progress.
In front now he could hear, above the noise of Marigold’s light footsteps crunching on the pebbles, a continuous whiny sizzling sound from the scraping of the shopper’s axle on the dead ‘live’ rail. And he found, no longer attempting to rely on his eyes, that he was walking a great deal more confidently, though each step was short and he imagined they could not be progressing at much more than a couple of miles an hour.
He began trying to calculate how long at that rate it was going to take to get to South Wimbledon station.
But he had to give up. He found he had no idea, comparing this walk with trips to Wimbledon by car, or even visits by Tube along this very line, just what the distances involved were. Yet it did not matter that he could produce no result to his sum. He was going steadily forward, short step by short step, and surely still he had time in hand.
Then another reassuring sound came to his ears. Marigold started to hum and chirrup in her old way once again. He felt a quick corresponding lightening in his own spirits.
And before long he realised that Marigold’s burblings down here were a good deal more coherent than they had been before, up in the light. Or was it that he was paying them more attention, cut off in the dark? He thought not. No, she sounded distinctly more at ease here.
She must like this darkness then. Like all dark places, with her insistence on going through that almost murky tunnel under the Vauxhall viaduct. She must be a creature of underground secret places.
And this discovery, too, was oddly reassuring.
He listened with yet greater care.
‘… that great ball thing o’ theirs, swinging and bashing. An’ it was a nice place, that was. Comfy. An’ what they put up after. Great block o’ flats. No better than where Old Credit Cards lived. That’s what I called him, Old Credit Cards. Old Credit Cards. Cor, he’d of paid me with one o’ them, if I’d let him. Me, going round to a bank in me overall. “Please sir, Mr James put his little number on this piece o’ paper, an’ are you going to give me seven-and-six an hour?” ’
This mental picture, whatever exactly it was of, evidently so amused her that she chuckled away to herself for two or three dozen lightly crunching steps in the blackness, with the tiny hiss of the shopper’s axle unfaltering on its rail.
She must, he hazarded, have once had a job as a daily cleaner. In the long ago. And she must have lived in a house that had been demolished. Well, there had been enough of those in the days of new, new, new.
‘Puff, puff, puff, puff. You’re a silly old Jim all right. I told you, didn’t I? An’ the Doc. He told you. Bronchitis, he said. An’ that time in Spain. Spain, cor, fancy you an’ me in Spain. I said to you then … Well, an’ he was always off there, an’ to the South o’ France, old Jabez. The Canary Islands. Fairy canary. Yeh, that’s what he was, young Jabez, fairy canary. Jabez. What a name, eh? What a name. An’ up on all them posters. Used to make me feel proper silly on me way there. Jabez.’
Jabez. The name rang a bell for him too. A bell that had once shrieked horribly painfully in his head. Jabez, a pop star of some sort, and Jasmine caught up in his come-and-gone bright-flaring meteor wake. Jasmine in her narrow bed now with the flowered headboard, gaunt, unrecognisable, a skeleton animated by a puffed-up fire. Jasmine who had lived that escalating sweep of grabbed enjoyment. New friends, new jobs, new cars, new parties, new places to go, new drugs, new lovers, new ways of love.
What would he say to her? Soon now. Not ‘I forgive you, Jasmine.’ Not Mrs Brilling’s tidy ending. That was certain. To forgive was to condone. And he did not condone that life. He did not.
‘But, Jim, I says, Jim, what’s the use o’ coming to Sunny Spain if all you does is puff, puff, puff. An’ it done for him in the end, done for him, done for him.’
For several minutes – or what seemed like several minutes since the eye-masking dark dissolved time into a formless fluid – she went on and on repeating that ‘Done for him’. Done for whom, he asked himself. And at once he knew the answer. Her husband. She had of course been married. He knew it clearly as if he had met the fellow. Jim. Yes, Marigold had been married to Jim and had been left a widow when he had died from, yes, bronchitis, from too much smoking.
Then, suddenly, pricking like a needle thrust, light somewhere far ahead. He stumbled and cursed.
‘It’s all right, dearie. Only Stockwell Station coming up.’
Well, they had been plodding along for what had seemed hours. It was only to be expected that they would reach the next station eventually. Yet he felt too that far from plodding for hours they were making almost dizzyingly fast progress.
His heart began to thud. From the fossil layers of memory he dug the names of the stations still to be passed by. Soon Stock-well, then Clapham North, Clapham Common, Clapham South, then Balham – Balham where poor Dr Satpathi had hoped to set up as a village storyteller – then Tooting Bec and Tooting Broadway and Colliers Wood. And then it would be South Wimbledon. The distance to the house was measurable.
Yes, Marigold had been right indeed. Down here in the dark was the way to make good speed.
Stockwell Station, when they came to it, was much as the Oval had been, except that its platform was on the other side of the track. But there were more dim lights on it, and huddled clumps of cringeing, almost silent refugees. This time Marigold recognised no one, although she seemed to be recognised, or at least accounted for, by such of the pale apathetic faces that glanced at them as they went by.
In three minutes they were in the dark again. The now friendly dark. And the shopper was hissing its way ahead along the dead live rail.
As soon as the last trace of light had disappeared behind them Marigold began humming and chirruping once more. He felt the sound like a warm coat draped round his shoulders.
‘Saturdays an’ that telly. Oh, lord. Checking his points for his old pools from the football results. Poor old Jim. Thinking he was going to live the different life. Different, cor. Parties. All you could think of to drink, an’ the next morning … “Mr Jabez”, I says, “star you may be, but when it’s naked bodies all over the lounge and that mixed up there’s no telling what from what …” Ah, well, not the first time Old Marigold got the sack. But it weren’t their fault, not really. Not with the way things were. Cor, all them posters everywhere, naked bitches left an’ right. An’ the films, an’ the clothes, showing off all they’d got. Shops full of ‘em too. An’ them TV ads. Cigars, they said. Sex, I said, sex an’ no mistake. In the papers too, every day showing their tits for all to see. No wonder. No wonder, eh? An’ them books an’ magazines. Couldn’t go nowhere to buy a bag o’ sweets without you saw ‘em. Sticking out their arses at you. No wonder. An’ models. “Mr James,” I said, “model she may be but I knows the word for her an’ it’s whore.” Poor Marigold, the sack again. An’ not a penny from Old Credit Cards.’
A lot of it he was not able to make out at all. Yes, she must have worked as a cleaning woman not only for Jabez but for someone who was apt to forget to pay her. But Jabez, what an extraordinary coincidence. Why, she might even have met Jasmine. Or have seen her. Naked bodies all over the lounge.
Only the sheer energy of Marigold’s unceasing monologue hauled him away from sombre, biting thoughts.
‘Tranqs an’ peps. Tranqs an’ peps. That’s what I used to call ‘em. Tranqs an’ peps’ – that was the Jasmine life again, all right – ‘An�
�� half the time he didn’t know which was which, our Jabez. Mucking about with your head. Stupid. Stupid. Well, they wasn’t going to do that to Old Marigold, much as they’d of liked to make me into one o’ their zombies. All down the High Street in me white nightie. Doctor, you must be mad, I said. Mad. Oh dear.’
And she laughed till the confining tunnel echoed and echoed with merriment.
It was infectious. He realised that now he was feeling happier than he had felt for years. Happier here, down in the inky darkness tramping along, tired as he was and achingly bruised, in the wake of a madwoman, he was feeling happier than he had done at any time since the bad times had come.
He thought of her, all down the High Street in her white nightie, escaping from the mad plan of those sane doctors, that wild craze for quick answers, those quick operations that had made the zombies, those formerly violent men, and apparently women too, turned into convenient walking puddings.
But dangerous puddings somehow still, surely. He had always taken good care to steer well clear when he had seen any of them.
On and on they went. Marigold’s voice sometimes fell into mere humming, sometimes repeated almost exactly what he had heard her say before. Clapham North Station came up out of the dark, little different from Stockwell except that here the two lines that had taken trains southwards and northwards linked together with the platform in between them. But soon they were in their own dark tunnel once more. And then after another long, long time of walking it was Clapham Common, again a platform between the two lines.
He wondered, while they walked past the refugees here, whether up above there were dogs roaming the common as Marigold had warned him there might be. Or was there an Army camp there, lines and lines of camouflaged tents laid out in a strictly orderly fashion?
And again the dark.
Clapham South, when they came to it, was, for no particular reason that he could make out, deserted. They could in fact tell they were going through a station only by the comparative airiness, this time, on their right-hand side. Perhaps up on the surface the dangers that had driven people in the districts nearer the centre to take refuge no longer existed. Or perhaps the Army had succeeded in creating a sort of peace.
A Long Walk to Wimbledon Page 18