Knock Four Times

by Margaret Irwin

  He followed her with his arms full of bottles, and the glasses on the tray all clinked together hilariously, deliriously, as she ran with them up the two or three steps to their sitting-room. Crash! One had broken and he heard the sisters scolding and chattering.

  At their party he had met a girl whom he had since met once in the street. He remembered that now as he went down the stairs nearly a year later, and said to himself, “I shall meet her a third time.”

  There was nobody now behind the curtain. The Girls Below had left, and the schoolmistress who had taken their floor and bought the curtain, which had once been, as Dicky had told him, his parents’ bedspread, was never in till seven-thirty ; then went punctually about her culinary occupations behind it in simple ignorance of the varied scenes and persons it had sheltered.

  The doors on the Ground Floor were shut and silent as usual. No one knew much about the Ground Floors, who had been here ever since the house was converted. They were an obscure and nondescript little family who, secure in their holes, kept themselves to themselves and the child heaven knows where, under the kitchen table presumably ; afraid to move, afraid to make friends in the house or the road lest it might lead to difficulties, afraid to have in a charwoman lest she might steal the coals, afraid to live and certainly very much afraid to die. For the one excitement of the Ground Floors was Having the Doctor. Then they warmed and expanded into comparative humanity, they hung about on the stairs or in the passage and especially on the front doorstep, to tell anyone who passed exactly what the Doctor said and what they said to him ; and the superb calm of their triumph when they could say, “The Doctor is coming every day,” showed that their tide of life was flowing at its fullest when it most nearly approached death.

  Chance went out into the road. The old-fashioned gas-lamps made ineffectual patches in the velvet darkness. A soft, scurrying wind stroked at his face and blew in his ears. A dead leaf was tossed up to the chimney-tops ; he raised his face to look at it and a raindrop fell on his cheek. Even the imprisoned trees down at the farther end of the road could remember they were trees on a night like this. And up at the other end were the black figures moving in and out of the lighted doorway of Le Coche.

  Now that velvet curtain had rolled up, he stood in the glare of the footlights among a crowd of chattering comedians and faced the great Le Coche himself in his white cap and apron and shirt-sleeves, who brandished his long and supple carving-knife as dexterously as Harlequin’s lathe, a monstrous white pig dressed as a French cook, his little hard eyes under their white eyelashes appraising each customer as he or she came forward, and each fraction of an ounce on the scales. This was the relentless master-spirit that kept the shop open every day in the year excepting Christmas Day until ten o’clock at night, and till midnight on Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, trading astutely on the careless housekeeping and haphazard hospitality of Rainbow Road.

  Chance was turning over a sixpence in his pocket, for on this last night he would taste with the deliberate zest of the gourmet the excitement of getting what he could with a few pence for his supper. Were two pennyworth of brawn and four pennyworth of Russian salad a just distribution between the necessities and the luxuries? or should he have a piece of cold liver sausage wrapped in gold or red or emerald-green, and an olive or two, of course? or two ounces of tongue, or one of those fresh cream cheeses that you could mash with sugar as they did in Paris, or some of those diminutive sausages of Le Coche’s own making, or a pig’s trotter? only he had no idea what to do with it and it made him wonder if Le Coche’s own feet were like that.

  But his zest cooled, for there was no one with whom to share it. He was buying his last supper in Rainbow Road alone as he had bought all his others. He had been content to be alone, he had jealously guarded his isolation for the sake of its freedom ; now he was not so much sick of it as aware that his time for that too was over.

  He wished that he had a companion, and the meaning of the word struck him for the first time, for it is one’s meals that one most desires to share. It would be fun to choose and cook and eat this supper with somebody happy and adventurous, somebody whose imaginative appreciation of food had not yet been blunted by three well-cooked, well-served meals a day.

  And as he thought this, some trick of reflected light on the shop-window made him fancy for one instant that above the faces of the street-urchins looking longingly in at the Christmas-tree sausages was another face, fair, bareheaded, framed in dark furs and the darkness of the street, flitting like a silvery night-moth past the lighted window.

  At last the French Jews had finished their compliments to Monsieur and to Madame his wife, his tired, patient, unquestioning wife who must once have been so pretty. She was ladling golden masses of mayonnaise out of a great china bowl, she did not ever wish to do anything else. The bulky caretaker in the red shawl was informing the company that what she wanted was a little love of a game pie, and she didn’t care what she spent as long as it was on her belly.

  Now a car stopped at the door and someone very large and grand called from the doorway to know if they had a roast duck ready.

  But Le Coche scarcely raised his little white eyes. He was a staunch Republican, everyone must take their turn, and the small boy whose head scarcely reached the counter, and his still smaller snuffling sister, came next. The personage from the door made important movements and gazed abstractedly at a dish of sauerkraut to cover her discomfiture when they passed unnoticed, she complained in passionate tones to the man who joined her that it would make the whole dinner late. Chance wondered what mischance to the joint or entrée had sent them to this outpost of civilization. Le Coche rivalled the magic cooking-pot that told what everybody in the town was having for supper, and that told much.

  The Jimmys’ supper had shown care combined with economy of time, for Mrs. Jimmy still went out to a typing job and her husband’s obscurely artistic occupation did not leave him leisure to cook. The Girls Below, in spite of the superiorities of their kitchen, used to live on tins of Indian corn except when their young men took them out to dinner. But the Ground Floors’ suppressed need for self-expression found vent in many and marvellous meals of which the odour strayed insidiously upwards at strange hours, of savoury stews at midnight, of kippers and bacon and mushrooms at four in the afternoon, of roast joints or game and bread sauce at breakfast time. In their perverse and furtive way the Ground Floors also were artists.

  But lower than the Ground Floor, lower than the street, was the Basement, and Chance, wrestling with the ill-fitting latchkey in the lock on his return, looked down at the lighted window beneath his feet in baffled curiosity that he knew so little of the Basement as to be unable to guess what they would have for supper. For in the Basement lived the caretaker and the only thing she took care of was that nobody should ever see her.

  The stairs at the top of the house were dark except for the glimmer that came up through the banisters from below. The square casement window at the corner, which opened on to the leads, gave no light, since it hung between the street-lamps and the stars.

  At that corner Chance had the fancy that somebody stood back against the wall as he passed, somebody who smiled at him, somebody exquisite and happy and hurrying away, somebody who entrusted to his care with shy and tender confidence the Chinese snuff-bottle that he had forgotten his left hand was still holding in the pocket of his coat.

  The thick darkness of the empty room felt warm and welcoming round him. Somebody had been here and but just departed, just now or just a year ago, it did not matter when. That restless fever of expectation had departed also. Sometime he would know what he was waiting for, to-night or tomorrow or in a year or two of to-morrows, it did not matter when.

  He cooked his eggs with care, added the delicacies from Le Coche, and then when he had cleared away his supper and lit his pipe and lay back in the long arm-chair with his feet just resting on the top of the gas-fire, he was unwontedly willing to look at nothing but the smoke
-wreaths drifting lazily upwards, to do nothing but turn over and over the Chinese snuff-bottle in his pocket, to think of nothing at all.

  Wreath and coil and spiral followed each other ; the darkness outside pressed close round the glowing room balanced up there among the chimney-pots. The wind rose and howled among them, the rain beat down on the roof. But Chance did not notice it ; he did not even distinguish from among the patter of raindrops the tinkling, tripping notes of a harp picking out a melody from Mozart down below in the street. For the room was so securely shut in to itself, it so hugged itself, delighted in itself, that he was as much imprisoned by it as if he were smothered in roses at a banquet of Heliogabalus.

  At this florid fancy, alien to his imagination, a sudden spurt of annoyance shook him, breaking up the mood of white content into a hundred different-coloured splinters, personal, inquisitive, possessive, suspicious, and among these jagged ends of desire and rivalry he recognized himself.

  That sudden sharp antagonism was his first and last clear thought before he fell asleep or believed afterwards for explanation that he slept. For then it seemed to him that as midnight struck and Le Coche shut up his shop, that master-spirit, set free, strode out into the darkness and brandished the long and supple knife that had reminded him of Harlequin’s lathe. Like Harlequin he passed along the street, striking at each door, and it opened to reveal, not the present occupants, but those who had lived there most and had set the impress of their ardent spirits on the rooms that held them.

  He came up the steps of Number 39 and up the stairs, and in response to his rap at the ground floor sitting-room, two servants in streamered caps and bellying skirts passed in and out bearing trays of heavy steaming food to the dining-room.

  He struck at the first floor, and the crowded coloured room that Chance had seen that afternoon nearly a year ago when the Girls Below had called him in to their party, was dark and empty, except for a hunched figure who sat waiting for nothing by the fire.

  He struck at the second floor and the Jimmys disappeared, and there by the window, drawing back the heavy curtain with one hand, stood a gaunt woman with stark, frizzed hair, looking out at a young man in khaki who was going away and would never come back.

  He came up to the top floor and struck with all his force against the door, so much that Chance wondered why it did not wake him. But it only did not do so because of the two who were in possession of the room.

  For he was aware now that there were two, though one, fainter and more evanescent, seemed no more than a piece of decoration ; as if amidst the bustle and glamour and hybrid activity of an Oriental bazaar, among booths of rich foods, sweet drinks, bangles and brooches and pearl-inlaid tables designed for and by European taste, he had at last observed painted on a wall behind him a little Tudor angel with pale and shining hair and stiff gold wings.

  All that his mind could do was to follow these two, circling round and round that happy, idle, busy room, and then out of it, out on to the stairs where he had passed somebody who had wished him well. This time he did not pass her ; he turned and followed her, down the stairs, out into the dark and windy street, past one twisted turning and another and another, away from Rainbow Road to where the houses grew wider and nobler, separating themselves disdainfully from each other, round railings that enclosed a spacious oval of darkness and tree-tops and a church spire, a rural estate complete with its religion railed off for the exclusive use of a one-time landed gentry.

  And up a flight of spotless steps and into a hall where an ancient French clock ticked leisurely between a couple of Baxter prints, and up a flight of softly carpeted grey stairs and into a long, cold, spacious and discreetly furnished drawing-room, where sat an elegant and still pretty woman who said, “Where have you been again?”

  And Celia …

  He heard a knock ; the woman’s face faded, and now he could not see that other figure that had just entered the room.

  He heard two knocks, and all the discreet furniture went whirling away through space, faster and faster away among a multitude of worlds.

  Three knocks, and he said to himself, “I’m waking up and I haven’t seen her ; I must see her before I wake up.”

  Four knocks, and the room round him came rushing back, its cheap and cheerful possessions spun round him crying, “Here we are again!”

  He sprang from his chair wide awake and furious as he still heard the sounds echo upwards through the house. In another moment he would have dreamed what he wanted to know ; he would have known who she was.

  But as he went down the stairs his mind became quiet in anticipation. This was what he had been waiting for all the evening, all his life. He still held in his hand the Chinese snuff-bottle.

  Chapter II

  She was Celia. She could have no other name. It belonged to her as the mock gentility of the names “Papa” and “Mamma” could never belong to her parents, Colonel and Mrs. Belamy, who had therein humorously enclosed themselves from their children as in an Early Victorian cabinet. For that was deliberately acquired, while Celia’s name, like all other reminders of herself, was of accident and therefore of necessity hers, and even, like other reminders, to be combated and suppressed.

  Long ago she had perturbed her parents by begging them to call her Cissie. This desire for vulgarity was unnatural in a girl whose parents showed perfect taste in the choice of their possessions, who herself possessed eyebrows like crescent moons, a transparent skin, and the hands of an old portrait. They could not be expected to know that Celia disliked and shrank from all her attributes that made them most congratulate themselves upon their choice of a younger daughter.

  She despised herself for being thin-skinned and fastidious ; she suffered agonies of self-reproach when she disliked elderly women to pat her fine-spun, silvery fair hair ; she envied her robust contemporaries who did not mind, who even enjoyed it, when young men kissed them carelessly in taxis. The girls she chose as friends were apt to be large and noisy and to wear unnecessary jewellery and artificial silk stockings. When Celia described them to her mother, she called them art-silk. She was not always kind to her parents. If she could have had a friend who kept an aspidistra in the drawing-room, it would have been a treasured and, it is to be feared, a flaunted triumph.

  All this was as deliberate a choice as were her mother’s china and her prints and the cool, considered colours of her furniture, and had the same equally sincere motive, since each wanted to escape from the life round her.

  Mrs. Belamy’s first escape had been in her son Adolphus, known as Dodo. He had failed for Sandhurst in the spring of 1914 and been thrust by his father into a cousin’s office, where he was intended to remain as the family skeleton for the rest of his days, but had since distinguished himself during four years in the trenches and obtained a military job in India which he was fulfilling with much credit. Colonel Belamy, who had not seen active service, continued to shake his head over the irregular methods by which young men contrived to sneak into the Army sideways. In expression his son looked the elder by at least one generation. Mrs. Belamy must have often wished that she had met the son first.

  Colonel Belamy had retired too long to learn a sense of his unimportance during the War, but from that time his look of perplexed petulance increased, and he lost the few friends he had through his collection of Waterford glass, which gave him a right to complain of the narrow interests of his brother officers. In the past there had been one or two who used to come to dinner and bring sweets for Iris and Celia and tell Dodo of campaigns in the Soudan or West Africa but Colonel Belamy always used to bring the conversation back to the difference between strawberry empanelment and flat fluting or how he had picked up those waisted celery-jars at a sale where not a soul understood their value.

  In this he showed his taste to be a match for his wife’s, but it afforded her no consolation, an article of which she appeared in constant need. Her pleasantly plaintive air caused most people to say of her : “Poor Mrs. Belamy—and s
he is so very charming really.”

  But this defence was never in answer to any attack, nor was the pity on account of any known trouble.

  When she had rid herself of her elder daughter and closest companion by arranging for her as early and expensive a marriage as possible, Mrs. Belamy found that next to her servants and her husband her greatest trial was her younger daughter.

  Celia did not fill the house with bandboxes and telephone calls and personality as Iris had done. When her mother told her of the new servants, she did not say sympathetically every three minutes, “Darling angel, what devils they are, aren’t they?” When her father accused her of being a modern girl or a discontented daughter, she foolishly agreed with him, which of course only made trouble. While Iris, by ignoring him, had reduced him to a state of abject adoration amounting to a cheque of £500 for her trousseau. And the most disturbing grievance was that Celia, for all her tinkling silver tinsel charm, a thing so rare and brittle that it needed to be treasured in a glass case or the softest and warmest of hearts, did not attract nearly as many young men to the house as Iris had done.

  It is true that whenever she introduced one, Colonel Belamy always found some urgent reason to object to him in the cut of his coat or the turn of his speech or the probable trend of his politics, but Iris had never minded that, merely seizing the occasion to say coolly, “Very well then, since you don’t like him, we’ll have tea in the upstairs sitting-room next time and not bother you.” But Celia was so absurdly sensitive, she shrivelled up and said she would rather have no friends at all than have them called bounders or fools or scoundrels, which of course only made trouble. And in a sudden fit of despair caused by her daughter’s twenty-fifth birthday, Mrs. Belamy said in broken tones, “If you go on like this, always snubbing any decent young man like Ronny, you’ll be an old maid all your life, and that would make me more miserable than even your father could do.”