The rail at his right side brushed and brushed with steady regularity against his leg.
How far did he have to go down here till he got to South Wimbledon? He sent his mind back to the long-ago days when he had on occasion walked the length of Merton High Street from South Wimbledon Station back to Colliers Wood. Out with Jasmine looking for something or other that she had to have there and then from the shops, something new she had read about or seen advertised on television, some exotic ingredient for a Sunday-paper recipe seen the day before. It had been less than a mile. Really only half a mile even, or not a great deal more. But say it was a full mile, and say he was walking now as slowly as only two miles an hour. Then half an hour, half an hour at most and he would be up on the surface again and within a few hundred yards of the house.
It would be over, his long walk.
He found – he was sure – that he had increased his pace. The flick, flick, flick of the rail against his leg, muffled by the double thickness of the burberry, was surely more rapid than it had been before.
At this rate he would complete the journey in twenty minutes. Or, say, a quarter of an hour from this moment.
And he was ready to complete it now. Ready.
There was nothing more to think about, and, somehow, he knew, nothing more in the way of danger to worry about. The refugees down at Colliers Wood Station had not after all been people hiding from some peril above, only poor simple-minded zombies who had chanced to drift there.
He was well into the station at South Wimbledon before he realised it. The darkness was so unbroken that it took him quite some time to sense that there on his right there was no longer the rounded wall of the narrow tunnel but the wider space of a platform.
When it broke in on him he halted for a moment, feeling an unquenchable flutter of excitement in his stomach. Then he turned and felt his way over to the platform. There, he sat on the edge and carefully fished out Marigold’s thick candle stub. He brushed his hand over the surface beside him and decided it would be quite rough enough to strike a match on. Thank goodness, the crudish country-made sticks were not the safety matches of old.
A scrape. A flare.
The soft flame seemed intolerably harsh to his eyes, but though blinking and tearful he managed to get it to the wick of the candle and make sure that it had taken hold. Then he shut his eyes and opened them again only cautiously some twenty or thirty seconds later.
The platform, as far as he could see, was deserted as an undiscovered cave, bare and empty. Again, as at Colliers Wood, a few peeling remains of the old posters showed up in the faint light of the candle. There was one of the ones that there had used to be for women’s tights, all peas-in-a-pod alike, preter-naturally long legs flaunted sinuously. And he could make out quite close to him the words of the old Government warning on a cigarette advertisement, statutorily printed on the base of every poster extolling the carcinogenous and revenue-producing. And one more, ripped almost right away, was left simply proclaiming ‘New’. Well, that had said it all.
He got carefully to his feet, stooped and picked up the candle stub between two fingers and, slowly so as not to blow its flame out, raised it until it gave him the maximum light.
Then he set off along the platform, remembering without having to think that the exit to the stairs was about two-thirds of the way along.
But, when he was within ten or fifteen yards of it, something caught his eye standing in the dead centre of the platform. It was an object about a foot or eighteen inches high, shaped like a fat vase, with a chunky exterior and a tuft of some sort on top.
A bomb.
It was his first instinctive thought. But then he reasoned that, even if it were, it must have been standing where it was, waiting to go off, for years.
Keeping as close to the wall as he could, he approached it. When he was almost level he saw, with incredulous astonishment, that it seemed to be a pineapple. Or at least an imitation pineapple, pale orange in colour and with its tuft a hideous plastic green. What – what could it be?
Abruptly he crossed over to it and tugged at the tuft. It lifted to reveal itself as a lid. And inside there was a smooth white bowl-shaped lining. Then he realised what it was. An ice-bucket. Indispensable adjunct for properly sophisticated drinking. A plastic pineapple-shaped ice-bucket. Left here for inconceivable reasons.
He swung round and hurried through the exit.
The escalators were in place and in good condition, their ridged steel treads and aluminium sides glinting in the candle’s light. He began to mount.
He was deadly tired. The effort seemed enormous. But tiredness was to be expected after all that he had gone through during this already long day from his five o’clock awakening in the strong moonlight in Mayfair, through the nightmare hunt he had survived in Green Park, his meeting with Marigold, the heart-thudding business of getting across blocked Vauxhall Bridge and then their long, long bowels-of-the-earth tramp.
But there was not much further to go now. Ten minutes. Not that.
And already from above he could see daylight, pale and sluggish but daylight. He paused a moment to blow out Marigold’s candle and then took the remaining deep steps of the still escalator, stilled these many years, almost at a run.
Then he was up on top again. The old ticket-hall led straight out into the open and he saw at once that, since they had gone down into the tunnels, it had begun to rain heavily. He slipped through a gap between two of the heavy, long-useless ticket-checking machines, hurried across to the entrance and looked out.
Cloud, dark grey and ragged-bottomed, covered all the sky, and the rain was falling in great plashy drops, filling the gutters of the roadway in front with deep-spreading puddles and making it hard to see clearly even across the width of the crossroads.
But all the old absolutely familiar buildings were there. They came back to his mind as if it had been only the day before that he had last seen them and not a gap of years. The Grove public house, looking rather like some pleasant suburban residence, neatly and comfortably red-tiled. It might for all the world have been waiting till it was opening time except for its boarded-over windows. No rolling drunk arrack swiggers here. And on the other corner, the bank, Barclays, showing signs still of the time when it must have been attacked, as so many other banks had been at the start of the Second Riots when money had still seemed to be something worth having. And the bookie’s shop was still there too, its windows a blank but its sign still visible. How many times had he waited outside there when Jasmine, in one of her betting crazes, had insisted on going in and had pushed across the grilled counter bundles of notes they could ill spare. Wife, wife, bane of my life …
But soon he would see her, be face to face with her.
Rapidly, scurryingly, he took off the burberry, still with its dangling torn strip where the dog had got its teeth into it, and reversed it so that the rain-proof, or nearly rain-proof, side was outermost. He tugged his way into its reluctant sleeves again fast as he could. He must be off. Almost impossible to tell because of the thickness of the cloud, but it might well be as late in the day as eleven o’clock. Only an hour more then left of odious Tommy’s allowance. No, almost certainly a good bit more, since Tommy would have been bound to have left a generous margin so as to avoid any possible wrath.
And perhaps he himself had been pushing on the time a bit. It might even be as early as ten.
But it would be criminal all the same not to hurry over these last few hundred yards. Probably not as much as a quarter of a mile. Four hundred yards, five hundred at most. How appalling if he arrived only a minute after Jasmine had breathed her last.
He could run. Or could he? Wasn’t he too worn-down with fatigue? He could try. Damn it, he could try.
He wheeled abruptly out of the station entrance and into the smacking rain. Bending his head, he trotted. The sole of his right shoe was flapping noisily now and within moments he felt the cold rainwater soaking in. The pavement was vilely slither
y, often greened-over. Occasionally one of his feet struck a ridge of tussocky grass. He could hardly see where he was going.
But it didn’t matter. It was not far. And he knew the way so well.
Past the little shops on the far side. The name-board of the tandoori take-away was still there, but it was impossible to make out where the Chinese take-away that had used to be a few doors along had been. Past the bus-shelter on this side with the looming poster-site behind it. The trim piece of lawn that had once been there, always immaculately kept, was a thicket of brown willow-herb stalks now and only one of the three huge posters had anything left of it after the weather-beaten years, a picture of a giant gin glass, beaded bubbles winking at its brim.
‘Closing Down Sale’. The crudely white-painted words opposite just caught his eye.
The bottoms of his trousers were wringing wet already, flapping coldly against his ankles.
But in a couple of minutes, scarcely more, he would at least be inside and in the dry.
There were blocks of flats beside him, new since he had last come here with Jasmine a few weeks before the parting. New then, beginning to crumble into ruin now. Though there appeared to be a coil of smoke rising laboriously from one of the roofs. Yes, there would be people here for all that the rain was keeping them under cover. And behind the cracks of window-boarding and through nail-holes in corrugated iron wary eyes would be squinting out at this stranger.
And then, head down though he was, he saw just ahead on the brownish shiny-with-rain pothole-scarred surface of the roadway the patchy alternate black and white stripes of a zebra crossing. At once he swerved, slowed to a walk and crossed to the opposite side.
He might still need luck, Marigold’s luck. He was not there yet. Not quite there. And the time, impossible to be sure of it. It might, it just might, be almost midday. He wished he could see another solitary plane. One for luck. But the rain-grey sky put that altogether out of the question.
He pushed himself to a run again.
Half a minute later, as he padded on, aching-legged, past the boarded-over shops, conscious that he was absurdly once more keeping to the pavements, from a turning just ahead – was it the one that led to Mrs Brilling’s? – there rode ponderously out a man on a bicycle, a heavily mackintoshed figure wearing a sou’ wester, looking inflexibly to the front.
He almost shouted out to him before he disappeared into the turning opposite, loud as he could, ‘Hello there, is it all right here?’ Something like that. Some greeting.
But it would only have scared him.
His run had slowed almost to a walk again, but there was hardly any distance to go. Past a shop he had quite forgotten, a big double-fronted place that had sold motor-boats, power-boats they had called them. There was one still left inside the smashed plate-glass window, a bright jazzy yellow hull.
And now, arriving almost as if it was in a dream where everything was easy and foreordained, there came the turning.
How many houses along? Can’t remember. Never mind. Recognise it at once. Couldn’t forget it, ever.
It was just as it had been, too. Except that it all seemed to have got dimmer. The front-door was still that good-taste pale primrose. Only it had faded to an indeterminate cream. But the two long hammered-glass panels in it were intact, and so was the little lantern in the porch with its blobby coloured-stone lights.
He pushed open the flimsy ironwork gate. It squealed appallingly. Mrs Brilling would know he had arrived at last. He darted a glance at the sky.
Yes. Not noon yet. Half-past eleven at the very latest. Probably much earlier. He had made it. With time to spare.
He felt the sweat on his back and sides already beginning to cool. He swallowed to ease the dryness of his mouth. A step into the porch out of the heavy dripping of the rain. A finger to the dinky bell-push with that little black swinging bell engraved on its white plastic.
Bing, bong.
So it was still working. That inflated dulcet sound.
He waited.
Did she still feel obliged not to answer at once, even if she happened to be standing within a yard of the door in that narrow passageway of an entrance hall? It seemed she did.
But, no. She had been upstairs. Upstairs, with Jasmine, watching her draw the last painful breaths. He could hear now through the flimsy door her heavy steps descending. He had heard that sound, too, often enough before, in the once upon a time.
And a sudden chill. A moment of unreasoning fear.
He forced himself to be rational. He was in time.
Mrs Brilling was drawing back the bolts on the other side of the door. Little tiny chromium bolts. He remembered them of old. A good biff would send the pair of them, top and bottom, flying off. But to her they represented security.
And now the latch.
The door creaked back open. Mrs Brilling was standing there. She had changed a good deal. Gone were the ever-pink puffy rouged cheeks he remembered. Instead they sagged in a yellowish face. And gone too the bouncily pneumatic cherished body. She was fatter now, but heavily so. And she wore over an old green dress two thick but threadbare cardigans, one pink and grey-stained, the other baby blue.
He felt sorry for her all at once. She had had a bad time.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said.
‘Yes. The journey was much worse than I thought, but I’m here.’ She looked at him. Piggy little eyes.
‘She’s dead,’ she said. ‘She went only an hour or two after I’d phoned you. You could never trust that Tommy.’
He felt the shock as if it were the buffet of some enormous gust of wind. He had to put out a hand to the wall of the little porch to steady himself.
All for nothing. All the miles, the effort, for nothing. All the dangers. For a Jasmine dead before he had even set out.
He looked at Mrs Brilling. Easy to see she hated him.
But it had not been for nothing. No, the journey made in the belief that it had to be made had given him its gifts.
The knowledge now which nothing could take away that survival was possible.
And more precious than that, the knowledge that the rulelessness which seemed to be everywhere in the world now was a force that could be come to terms with, that had to be accepted and welcomed and lived in. That it was a swirling sea that had to be swum in. That swimming against that everywhere element was the sure way to drown. The knowledge that the world was a mad world but that madness was something to be acknowledged. And shared.
Impossible now, certainly, to say just how that was always to be done. But it was to be done. Perhaps face to face with Jasmine some of the answers would have come, from those gaunt cheeks, those burning eyes. But in due time they would come in other ways. They would come.
‘Well, since you’re here, you’d better come in. Though I don’t know what I shall give you to eat. But come in, come in. There’s a terrible draught when the door’s open.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I will come in. But not for long.’
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © H. R. F. Keating 1978
First published 1978 by MACMILLAN LONDON LIMITED
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ISBN: 9781448200986
eISBN: 9781448202300
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A Long Walk to Wimbledon Page 20