Under the Skin

by Nina Bawden

  ‘Mr Nbola. I’m a friend of his. I’ve just heard that he’s ill.’

  Her smile was kind. If you didn’t look at the rest of her, she might have been any nice old woman, comfortable and good-hearted.

  ‘He is a little better today.’

  She opened the door wider and admitted me to a long, dark hall. Inside, as in any unheated London house in winter, it seemed colder than outside. The walls were covered with a thick, bubbly, chocolate-brown paper of a kind I had not seen since childhood.

  ‘I’m Mrs Latour,’ she said, and held out her hand. It was small and covered with dark liver spots – a hand not made for rings but she wore two: enormous, theatrical rings in heavy gold settings. There was nothing else flamboyant about her. ‘Are you from the university?’ she asked. ‘I am sure he will be glad to have a visitor.’

  She began to climb the stairs. I followed her. Tiny though she was, her body had a stiff, elderly, corseted look. I remembered reading somewhere that midgets are perfectly formed – not dwarfs, but like ordinary people seen through the wrong end of the telescope. I wondered if I looked to her like some grotesque enlargement of the norm.

  She said, over her shoulder, ‘We have tried to look after him. But he says he is not hungry. He only wants to drink tea. Luckily we are a very quiet house so he has been able to rest. On this floor there is only him and a Chinese gentleman who teaches at the London School of Oriental Studies. We prefer to have academic people because my husband has a heart condition and suffers if there is too much noise.’

  We were on the second flight of stairs. I paused to look at a framed photograph of a tall circus clown and a tiny creature, a male midget, in absurdly baggy plus fours and a poacher’s jacket.

  ‘That is my husband, with Coco,’ Mrs Latour said, from the landing.

  I hurried up, ashamed of being caught prying, but she beamed at me pleasantly. ‘We have performed with all the great clowns,’ she said. ‘That photograph was taken when we were with Bertram Mills, at Olympia. Here is one of us both.’

  I looked at the picture. I could think of nothing to say.

  ‘You must have had a very interesting life,’ I said foolishly.

  ‘Indeed, yes. We were better known, of course, in France. Fantin and Latour. Our son is at the moment with the Grande Cirque. He has had very good notices.’

  She spoke with tender pride like any mother of her son. Lifting her pudgy, ringed hand, she tapped on a door and said, ‘Mr Nbola, you have a visitor.’

  Jay said, ‘When I first arrived, I tell you, Tom, I did not know where I had landed up. I did not know where to look. If the Chinese gentleman had not come in behind me I think I would have fled. But I am glad now. Mrs Latour and her husband are very nice. Very kind.’

  The room was narrow and high, carved out of a larger room; the plaster swag of the Victorian ceiling was cut off abruptly at the partition wall. It was clean, barely furnished and very cold. We huddled over the gas fire that roared as importantly as a miniature furnace but gave off little heat. It was the pressure, Jay explained. At night, when the other fires in the house were in use, the jets were barely alight.

  ‘I go to bed then,’ he said, and grinned.

  His face shocked me. He was so much thinner. When he smiled, his lips stretched over his teeth. His eyes seemed to have sunk into the hollows of his skull.

  I said he should have asked for an additional fire. He shook his head. ‘I don’t like to bother Mrs Latour. Besides, we pay extra for heating. In bed with a hot water bottle is cheaper.’ He looked anxious. ‘Are you cold, Tom? I am very, very sorry. If only you had let me know you were coming.’ His gaze flickered away from mine. ‘I have nothing to offer you. Except – wait a minute!’

  He bent down to a cupboard at the side of the fire. It contained his food store: margarine, tea, a few tins and a half-finished bottle of milk. ‘Here,’ he said triumphantly, holding up a miniature bottle of whisky with a loop of pink ribbon at the neck. ‘Thomas brought me this the other day. He could not stop – Thomas is always very busy – and I do not like to drink alone. You don’t mind drinking out of a cup?’

  ‘No.’ I watched him fiddling with the gold foil on the bottle. ‘Thomas wasn’t very anxious to give me your address.’

  He gave me a quick look. ‘Oh – Thomas is a man who likes to make mysteries. It makes him feel big.’

  ‘You hadn’t asked him not to tell me?’

  ‘Why should I do that?’ he asked with transparently assumed astonishment – he was a frightfully bad liar –‘It is as I said. Thomas is like a woman. He enjoys inventing secrets.’ He looked at me to see if I had believed this and went on, ‘And he was probably being difficult because you are English. He dislikes Englishmen. He has a great fat chip on his shoulder. The other day he was invited to lunch at? Chatham House and he was made to eat sandwiches, standing up. He was extremely angry. He said he would not have been treated so casually if he had been a white man.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. Most meetings of that kind are buffet affairs.’

  I laughed, not at poor Thomas, but because Jay was so obviously trying to divert my attention.

  He said seriously, ‘Of course you’re right, Tom. And even if you were not, Thomas is a fool to get angry. It is a waste of energy. There is no real battle in England on this matter of colour. Only pinpricks.’ He waved his hand contemptuously. ‘Skirmishes on the frontier.’

  I wondered if he really believed this. ‘Less of the iceberg shows above the surface, perhaps,’ I said.

  He shrugged his shoulders. He did not want to discuss this. He poured out the whisky and handed me a white china cup with a flourish. ‘It is very good whisky,’ he said. ‘It will help to keep out the cold.’

  Drinking reduced the discomfort between us, though things were far from right. I decided to ignore the clear fact that he had not wanted to see me – when I first entered the room he had looked at me with simple dismay – and asked about his illness. He did not want to discuss this either. He had seen a doctor, Mrs Latour had insisted. It was bronchitis. It was not serious. He was feeling much better. The implication behind his short answers was that his health was no concern of mine. He was behaving rather like a son bored by a fussy parent, letting his gaze wander round the walls of his room with an affected lack of interest.

  He seized on a more impersonal topic. Mrs Latour had been very kind. She and her husband were both very nice, everyone who lived in the house appreciated how nice they were and did what they could to help them, carrying coals, and so on. Though they had had special bathroom and kitchen equipment installed, the domestic boiler in the basement was far too large for them to manage. They had been thinking about converting to oil but it was unlikely they would do this now. Their son was coming from France next month on his way to America and had written to say he wanted to take his parents with him. If they decided to go, they would almost certainly sell the house. It would give them a little capital – they had no source of income other than from their lodgers – and that would be all they would need. They had a daughter in California and their son was doing well in his profession.

  Jay spoke about them in a flat, serious way as if determined to prove to me – and to himself – that they were perfectly ordinary people.

  I tried to exorcise the ghost of a giggle. ‘It won’t be so easy to sell the house if everything is low down.’

  Jay laughed outright. Then he turned his laugh into a cough and looked uncomfortable.

  He said, ‘If they do go, it will be sad for all of us here. It will not be easy to find such agreeable lodgings again.’

  ‘You could come back to us.’

  He shook his head, unsmiling.

  ‘I wish you would, anyway. It was such a dreary, idiotic nonsense. I feel terrible about it.’

  He said slowly, ‘There is no need. You need not feel at all responsible for me, Tom.’

  ‘I don’t. It’s not that.’ I hesitated, because it was that, in part. I said, ‘W
e’ve been very dull since you left. I’ve missed you. Louise too. We’ve both missed you.’

  ‘How is Louise?’

  ‘All right. She’s had a cold. She’d be very happy if you’d come back. Really Jay.…’

  He laughed as if he did not quite believe this but as if it gave him pleasure all the same. Then he stood up, looked at the cheap alarm clock on the mantelpiece and said, ‘It is too early to go to a pub. But there is quite a pleasant café on the comer. If you like, we could go there and have tea.’

  ‘Should you go out?’

  ‘I think a short walk would strengthen me. Besides, I am hungry – I must be getting better. The café is not a very grand place but the food is quite good and the conditions are hygienic. I would be pleased if you would be my guest there.’

  The café was empty. The owner, a tall, shambling man like a tired old bear, set two plates of sizzling steak and chips in front of us, nodded gloomily to Jay and shuffled back behind the counter where he sat, limply folded over on a high stool and staring at the black, bare window. He looked as if he had been born depressed, lived depressed, and would never be anything else to the day he was lowered into his grave and earth shovelled on top of him.

  He looked as if he lacked the energy to boil an egg, but the steak was good, red in the middle and charred on the outside. I enjoyed it, though I was not in the least hungry and had only chosen the steak, the most expensive dish on the menu, to please Jay. It did please him. The ritual of being a host (‘Is it done as you like it, Tom? If not we can send it back at once’) invigorated him and smoothed out his earlier prickliness. He set out to be amusing and to charm me, rather as a young man might set out to charm his father, once he had successfully asserted his independence. The balance of our relationship had shifted and if this saddened me a little – who doesn’t, after all, prefer to be the giver? – I told myself that it was a change for the better.

  By the time we left, the pub was open and we went in for a beer. The pub, like the café, was clean and ‘respectable’. It glittered with brass. On the counter were various devices for coaxing money out of the reluctantly charitable: there was a plastic dog that shot pennies off its nose into a red and yellow kennel, a lighthouse of coppers for spastics and a rather sadly unimaginative Christmas stocking for the blind. A piano in one corner promised an increase in jollity later in the evening; for the moment a murmuring gloom prevailed. Two Jamaicans in denims were playing darts; by the fire a pair of old ladies scorched their knees and silently contemplated their glasses of gin and orange.

  We talked in undertones, as if in church.

  ‘It is a very good pub, very friendly,’ Jay said. He looked at me anxiously. ‘It is very quiet now, but it is early. Later on it will be more amusing. Before I was ill I came in here one evening and some Welshmen taught me to sing their national anthem in Welsh.’

  ‘That can’t have been easy. It’s a difficult language.’

  ‘Yes.’ Jay looked reflective. ‘At least they said it was their national anthem. But from the laughter which resulted I think it may not have been.’

  He looked pleased when I laughed and then lifted his glass to a newcomer, a thickly set, powerful-looking man who had just come in with a girl. He acknowledged Jay with a grin and a surreptitious jerk of his head towards his companion. They went to sit at the bar.

  ‘A friend of mine,’ Jay said proudly. ‘Mr Jones. Mr Edward Jones who is working on an important building site. He is one of the Welsh gentlemen I told you about. He has three children, one a boy the same age as Philip.’ He looked at Jones’s girl who had blonde hair back-combed into an enormous beehive and who wore stiletto heels, jeans and a tight sweater. ‘I do not think that can be Mrs Jones,’ he murmured gently.

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Perhaps there will be an opportunity to introduce you later. He is a nice man, though not educated. We had an excellent evening together.’ He chuckled. ‘He has an immense capacity for beer.’

  Absurdly, I felt slightly piqued. I had not meant to tell Jay about the possibility of the African job until it was settled. That I changed my mind now was partly of course because I couldn’t bear not to tell him, but I had, also, an infantile desire to impress myself on him as a friend of more standing than a builder’s labourer. Kunz had told me, when we lunched, that I could take it as almost quite definite that the scheme would be accepted, and that I would be offered the job. In fact, if I would attend a sort of preliminary Board composed of himself and two other men who would be concerned in my appointment, the whole thing might be satisfactorily arranged before he went back to Geneva.

  ‘So I should have a clearer idea tomorrow. Though of course it may still fall through.…’

  Jay’s delight was whole-hearted. ‘It will be a magnificent experience for you, Tom,’ he said solemnly. ‘An experience you will remember all your life. How does Louise take to it?’

  ‘She’s excited. She’s bought a book on Swahili.’

  ‘We must have another beer to celebrate,’ he cried, and swept up our glasses.

  By the time we got to our fourth pint, the pub had filled up and was growing noticeably noisier. Certainly, the hush that fell when Mrs Latour came in was uncomfortably noticeable. She made her way to the bar, diminutive and erect in a black coat and a round felt hat of the kind schoolgirls wear and asked for a bottle of Tolly and a packet of cigarettes. She had to stand on tiptoe to peep over the counter. After that first, brief silence, talk was resumed again. No one – apart from the odd, covert glance – looked at her except Jay who watched her with a peculiar, intense stare. When she tucked the beer bottle into her basket and smiled, timidly, it seemed, in our direction, he gave a deep, shuddering sigh before he sprang to his feet and went to open the door for her. There was something more than mere politeness in his gesture; it was performed with a kind of belligerent flourish that attracted attention. When he called after her, ‘Good night, Mrs Latour’, the hush fell again and several people turned to stare at him. He walked back to me and said in a loud voice, as if to cover up some embarrassment he felt, ‘What about another beer?’

  ‘I won’t, if you don’t mind. I ought to get back. Let me get you one.’

  ‘No, thank you, Tom. I think I should go home too.’ His gaiety had left him and he looked tired and listless.

  I took our glasses to the bar. Mr Edward Jones grinned at me as I edged my way in. He had a broad, good-natured but stupid face the colour of mulled claret and very light blue eyes threaded with veins. ‘D’you see what came in then?’ he asked in a friendly, confidential voice. His girl gave a thin shriek and he winked at me and tweaked her nipple. ‘Give me the nigs any time,’ he said. ‘At least they’re human.’

  I grinned back, reluctantly, and with a miserable sense of kinship.

  One of the boys at my school had had a deformed sister, a neckless

  child whose head, it was said, rose directly out of her shoulders. The boy, Alfred Budge, lived in my town; this was generally considered a piece of luck on my part. ‘Have you seen Budge’s sister?’ I was often asked enviously. For a long time I was able to say, truthfully, that I had not. Though I had often glimpsed Budge on Saturday mornings wheeling an ominously loaded pushchair down the main street, I had always managed to avoid coming face to face with him, pointedly looking the other way or fleeing in panic into the nearest shop. But one morning I was too late; he saw me and called out. I was forced to cross the road and stand by the pushchair while he asked about some homework we had been set that week-end. I tried not to look down at the child – partly from squeamish fear and partly out of courtesy to Budge – but she put out her hand and tugged at my jacket. I was terrified sick; it took all my control not to jerk back and slap her hand away. ‘Say Hallo, Shirley,’ Budge said calmly – he was a remarkably brave boy and a good one – and I looked at her. She was more horrible than I had imagined; like a tadpole, with a great head and shrunken limbs mercifully encased in a blanket. The worst thing about her –
oh, quite the worst thing – were her eyes which were blue and clear and normal as any child’s. I don’t remember what I said to her. I gave her a sweet, I think, and prompted by Budge she thanked me, but I remember clearly – I can remember it now – that I hated her. And Budge too. I couldn’t forget her eyes.…

  I revenged myself on him the next week when I gave a select group in the lavatories an account of our meeting, adding a few picturesque details for good measure. One boy, who was something of a natural cartoonist, drew a picture on the wall; I added a caption underneath.

  The café where we had eaten was opposite the pub; it jutted out onto the pavement and on the invitingly blank wall at the side, in the light of the street lamp, someone had chalked the words Keep Brixton.… Though the following word was blocked by two boys who were standing on the pavement with their backs to us, it didn’t need much imagination to guess the rest of this hospitable message. I glanced shamefacedly at Jay as we crossed the road.

  But I was wrong. Or wrong now, anyway. The boys had been making an alteration. As we drew level with them they turned, uncertainly, and we could see what they had been up to.

  Keep Brixton Full Size.

  Jay stood stock-still. His head was sunk between his shoulders, his profile without expression. He said, to the bigger boy. ‘Did you do this?’ His tone was one of mild surprise.

  The child, who held a lump of chalk in his hand, stared at him dumbly. The other one giggled shrilly and hopped sideways. The older boy – he was about twelve – ducked his head to run but Jay shot out an arm.

  ‘Dirty little pig,’ he said slowly. ‘Dirty little white pig.’

  He got the boy by the shoulders and shook him, half lifting him off the ground. Then, suddenly, he began to shout in Swahili. His white teeth gleamed in his dark face, he showed the whites of his eyes like a horse. The boy hung from his hands, limp as a puppet. His terrified eyes were fixed on Jay’s terrifying face. The other child danced up and down in the gutter, shouting in a high, thin voice.