by Francis King
‘Oh, leave it to me! I’ll take the letters later.’
‘No, no, it’s good for me to make the effort. I mustn’t become housebound like poor old Mrs Green.’
She moves over to the door. Then she pauses, turns back. Her hand is on my head, the fingers running through my hair in a way that vaguely irritates me (later I shall have to jerk a comb through it), although I never tell her so.
‘Is everything all right?’
‘Yes, of course. Why?’
‘You seem … Oh, I don’t know.’
‘Well, I am a little worried. Business couldn’t be worse.’
‘I’m afraid this is a period when most things couldn’t be worse.’
I know that she knows that I am lying. She always does.
‘Ah, well!’ She sighs and moves away again.
Turning my head so that I can look out of the window and up the streets, I watch her as she hobbles along, her body almost a hairpin over the blackthorn stick. I admire her gallantry, as I have always admired it. As once over those three stillborn children (she was far too old for maternity, Dr Lewes tactlessly told her), so now over the crippling and agonising arthritis she never complains except to me. ‘With you I can always let my hair down,’ she often says.
Once again I begin to think of that typescript.
Chapter Four
‘I’ve never believed in miracles but in your case …’ Dr Unwin had a blackhead on the side of his bulbous nose. I yearned to tell him to squeeze it. Having long ago discovered that he and I had both been to Gladbury – he, of course, long before me – he would often waylay me to talk about the school. When Bob, now at Oxford in the immediate aftermath of the War, came to see me, Dr Unwin would also talk to him about it. What had happened to old so-and-so? Was it true that old so-and-so had gone for a Burton over Germany? Bob, surprisingly, almost always knew the answers.
Dr Unwin made a steeple of his podgy fingers. ‘I’m going to recommend your release,’ he told me. ‘I don’t see the remotest possibility of any further problems. Dr Lazarides is not quite as, er, sanguine as I am, but then’ – his body shook with the mirth which eventually erupted as a gulping laugh – ‘he’s always been a terrible pessimist. He once tried to convince me that we were on a losing wicket in the War.’
Standing at my shoulder, as I sat at the easel – it was summer, we were all out in the garden – Noreen asked me: ‘So where will you go?’
I shrugged. ‘Search me!’
‘You could come to the farm.’ It was as simple as that.
‘You’re crazy!’ Bob protested when I told him the plan. ‘She’ll get her hooks into you. Mark my words!’
‘Oh, I don’t mind if she does.’
‘She’ll marry you before you know what’s happened.’
‘And I don’t mind if she does that either.’
My insouciance infuriated him. ‘She’s over the hill, for God’s sake! She’s old enough to be your mother!’
Two – or was it three? – times he came out to the farm. Noreen was charming to him, but he would hardly speak to her. All his talk was of the old days – do-you-remember talk, as Noreen called it. Then he stopped coming. The next Christmas there was a card, addressed to me alone, and a few months after that a wedding invitation – he was marrying a young French widow with a title – also addressed to me alone. For a few more years – by now he was in the States – we wrote to each other. Then silence …
Until that typescript arrived.
Chapter Five
Of course I had seen Bob before; but it was only at the Novices Boxing Competition, in which all the thirteen-and fourteen-year-old new boys had to take part, that I was drawn to him.
Sarge, who had been first an Army PT champion and then an Army PT instructor, was in charge. Small and sturdy, with grotesquely over-developed calf, arm and shoulder muscles and a square head on which the greying hair was cropped short, he had lost part of his left forefinger when, so he maintained, a monkey had bitten it off during service in India. When Bob first heard this, in the gym, he hissed at me: ‘What do you suppose he was doing to the monkey?’
I had learned to box at my preparatory school because Dad, who had once been middle-weight champion at Gladbury, had wanted me to learn and I was eager to please him. I was never much good at it; but at least, when my turn came to enter the ring at Sarge’s summons, I was able to hold my own against the thin, pallid boy, at least six inches taller than I, who was my opponent. As though by tacit agreement, he made no attempt to punch me hard and I made no attempt to punch him hard.
Bob, so tiny, and his opponent, so hefty, had been matched with what I could only assume was deliberate cruelty by Sarge. The curious thing about Bob was the spherical size of his head – ‘ Bighead’ eventually became his nickname – in comparison with the tadpole size of a body which dwindled away into the shortest of legs and the smallest of feet. Repeatedly his opponent punched out at that head, with a viciousness of which Sarge and the older spectators all too clearly approved. Bob could do little but raise his gloved fists now to his mouth and now to his nose, in a vain attempt to shield them. Each time that he rocked back on his heels, there was a gasp of delight from everyone present, with the exception of myself. When some blood began to trickle out of one of his nostrils, one or two people even cheered. Never good at blood, I was beginning to feel vaguely sick and faint. Why the hell didn’t Sarge stop the fight?
At the end of the third round – there were five in all – Sarge did in fact ask Bob: ‘Is that enough for you?’ But, unable to speak, Bob vigorously shook his head, at the same time curling up a tongue to lick at the blood now trickling down the cleft below his nose.
‘Very well,’ Sarge barked. ‘ Proceed!’
I felt an extraordinary pity for this wretched little creature being pounded by someone so much stronger and larger; but I also felt an extraordinary admiration. By not giving in, by shaking his head instead of nodding it, as I would certainly have done, at Sarge’s question, he had, in a strange way, simultaneously got the better of Sarge, responsible for this cruel mismatching, of his triumphant opponent and of the gloating spectators. Later I was to feel a similar combination of pity and admiration when he submitted, without any sound, without any indication of fear before or pain after, to ferocious beatings from the monitors. That he showed neither of those emotions of course only made them the more energetic in their punishment of him. I myself went through my school-days without ever being beaten more than once in the course of a term. Bob, repeatedly leaving the light on in the study when he was the last to quit it, failing to clean his shoes, omitting to take a cold shower, was beaten at least once each week.
A hand pressed to his still-bleeding nose, Bob came and sat down beside me at the ringside. After my own bout I had at once rushed off to shower and change, and now wondered why he did not do likewise. I looked surreptitiously at him, noticing that there was even blood smeared on one of his shoulders, that there was a hole in one of his gym shoes, through which I could glimpse the tip of a grubby big toe, and that his thick, blond hair looked as if it had received a basin cut. I drew a handkerchief out of my pocket and handed it to him. Without a word, he took it from me and pressed it to his nose. When he handed it back, he said: ‘Soak it in cold water. That way it won’t stain.’
So began our friendship.
He was far cleverer than I, confiding in me that, but for a scholarship, his missionary parents in India would never have been able to send him to Gladbury. Having won the scholarship, he had disconcerted and displeased everyone by announcing that he wished to study not Classics – Gladbury was famous for its Classical side – but what was then generally known as ‘stinks’. Attempts were made to dissuade him; but his was a granite obstinacy.
‘I wonder why we’ve become friends,’ he mused to me on one occasion during that first term, when on a bicycle ride through the lush summer countryside, we had stopped for tea at a farmhouse. ‘We’ve nothing in common.�
�� He thought for a while, savagely chewing, as he so often did to my disgust, at the stump of a finger-nail. Then he said: ‘Perhaps that’s why we are friends. The attraction of opposites.’
I constantly marvelled at the contrast between Bob’s mental agility and his physical clumsiness. At the horse in the gym, Sarge would stand in his dazzlingly white gym shoes, his beautifully pressed white flannels, his immaculately laundered white singlet. As each of us arrived at the run to leap-frog over it, he would bark a falsetto ‘ Hup!,’ extending a hand in case any of us fell. Bob would lope, not run, up to the horse, on his face a self-deprecating grin which only intensified Sarge‘s contempt and hatred for him. ‘Hup!’ But instead of accelerating, he would diminish his pace, until he was walking as he neared Sarge. Then he would begin to clamber over the horse.
‘Williams, you’re a disgrace, you’re an utter disgrace. Are you a girl or something?’
Bob grinned. ‘I don’t think so, sir. Maybe you’d like to have a look to make sure.’ That was one of the many occasions on which he was beaten for ‘cheek’.
Chapter Six
Noreen has returned. First I hear her stick on the pavement, then I see her humped back.
‘You’ve taken a long time,’ I say.
Noreen explains that she ran into one of our neighbours, the widow of a general, who shares her interest in antique dolls. The neighbour has just bought a Schoenhut doll, which is equipped not only with a combination of steel springs and swivels to enable all its limbs to be moved but also with an elaborate apparatus to enable it to stand upright. ‘I’d just love to have it.’ She herself possesses a large collection of dolls, which she refuses to let me sell, however much we are offered for them by would-be purchasers like the general’s widow. Can these dolls, I often wonder, be a surrogate for the children she so much wanted but could never bear? I myself never wanted children, much less dolls.
‘With luck I’ll get you that German bisque doll at Bonhams tomorrow.’
‘Oh, that’ll fetch a fortune! Kammer and Reinhart dolls always do,’
‘Wait and see.’
I am determined that, whatever the cost, I will buy her the doll.
Chapter Seven
Years later, when I was no longer Mervyn Frost but Maurice Yates, I was confronted by Sarge, long since retired from Gladbury.
Noreen’s father had died, after a long and savage illness, and for a while we had attempted to run the farm ourselves. But Noreen really wanted only to paint and I, a recluse, terrified that my true identity would be discovered, was totally without any aptitude for the life of a gentleman farmer. There had been a bitter conflict between father and daughter when she had announced that she would marry me; but eventually he had come to accept me, not because of my love for her but because of my love for the antiques with which the rambling farmhouse, part Jacobean, part Queen Anne, part Victorian, was crammed. He, too, loved these pieces – not, like me, for their beauty, but because of what they represented in the long history of his family. It pleased him when I would spend hours on end repairing a Sheraton-style beech chair with a tattered cane-work back, found in the attic, or carefully polished the tambour shutter of a writing-table stuffed almost to bursting point with old receipted bills. From the Brighton public library, to which I never ventured, Noreen would bring me back books on antiques; but I learned more from the emaciated old boy, his voice faintly droning on about how that fold-over pedestal rosewood table had been inherited from his Aunt Flora, and how that porter’s chair in panelled mahogany over there had been bought for a song, an absolute song, at an auction sale up at the Old Rectory in the middle of the War.
It was natural therefore that, when the old man had died – Noreen found him lying out by the pond in the garden, his elderly golden retriever seated beside him, as though patiently waiting for him to wake up and get on with the painfully slow walk on which he was taking her – and when we had at last succeeded in selling the house and the farm to a Canadian businessman who had made his fortune in scrap during the War, we should decide to move to London. What place was more likely to assure my anonymity?
At first we stayed in a Bayswater hotel, from the bedroom window of which I could look out on the Park. As the winter evening closed in prematurely, I could also look out on the prostitutes who, at that period, would wait along the railings, in serried rank as though on guard, for their randy, shifty customers. Once, catching me there, Noreen asked me ‘Tempted?’ ‘No, only curious.’ That was the truth. I was fascinated by the furtive and perilous lives of those shadowy women out there in the cold; but I had no wish to go out and speak to any of them, much less to accompany any of them back to her room. I never wanted anyone but Noreen.
Noreen was now teaching art at a small private girls’ school, as well as painting those pictures, with their cramped brush-work and over-attention to detail, which in later years would, like the prostitutes before them, line the railing separating Bayswater Road from the Park to tempt reluctant buyers. I would spend most of the day in our high-ceilinged double bedroom, reading about antiques or the history of crime. Of the crime, perhaps with good reason, Noreen disapproved – wasn’t it a little morbid (she repeatedly used that word) to be interested in it? Sometimes, restlessness suddenly blowing through me like a breeze unexpectedly shifting the sluggish air of a thunderous afternoon, I would wander out, to mooch along the Portobello Road or Kensington Church Street, staring in at the windows of antique shops and junk shops. Occasionally I would buy something small, a brooch or a necklace for Noreen, some cuff-links for myself, a single Vincennes cup and saucer, a Venetian glass tazza, a baccarat-spaced millefiori. ‘Where are you going to put that?’ Noreen would ask. The answer was in a drawer, or at the bottom of the wardrobe, or in one of the suitcases gathering dust on top of the wardrobe, or under our double bed.
After some months, we decided to look for a flat, largely because there was no room left for these sporadic acquisitions. We could certainly afford one; and in a flat there would be adequate space not merely for the antiques but for Noreen’s painting.
Our flat-hunting took us to a vast Edwardian block, its ornate façade presenting a liver-coloured, much-pitted cliff to a dark, narrow street off Westbourne Grove. Craning our necks upwards to its small, blind windows, we both knew at once that we could never bear to live there. But none the less we entered. The hall was shabby but clean. The house agents had told us to make contact with the porter and so, after some hesitation, we descended to the basement. After we had rung at the bell with ‘Porter’ inscribed in its highly polished brass, there was a long pause. Then a small, elderly, stiffly upright man, with a coxcomb of white hair sticking straight up from above his forehead, opened the door. His face had the congested look of the hard drinker, his breath smelled of whisky. ‘Yes?’
With terror I recognised him as Sarge. The left forefinger, with its missing top joint, was unmistakable. Would he recognise me, despite my moustache and beard, despite the way in which my hair was now parted not at the side but in the middle, despite my paunch and my premature wrinkles and stoop?
We explained why we had come, and Sarge, who was wearing an open-necked shirt and baggy flannels, then said crossly: ‘One moment, please’ and shut the door on us. Eventually he reappeared, now in a fawn uniform, with a black tie. ‘Sorry,’ he said, jangling some keys.
The flat was desolate, its narrow corridors doubling through a labyrinth of small, damp rooms. Noreen was fascinated by an ancient refrigerator, a yellowing funnel sticking out of its top and its door ajar on its rusty interior – ‘My Sanders grandmother had one just like that. It used to remind me of a ship.’
‘Of course it needs a lot of doing over,’ Sarge said dolefully. ‘The old couple lived here for nigh on fifty years. Then they went and died within a week of each other. Lucky for them! Neither could have managed alone.’
There were relics of the old couple everywhere: scattered copies of Reader’s Digest on the hearth of a bedroom; a bu
tcher’s apron, hanging behind a door; a wardrobe which tottered and all but fell on top of Noreen when, out of perverse curiosity, she tugged to open it.
‘I have a feeling this isn’t the one for you,’ Sarge eventually said, in a voice which implied: ‘ Why the hell are you wasting my time?’
Noreen sighed. ‘There’s something about it … the atmosphere …’
‘That’s what they all say. But redecoration would soon make the atmosphere okay. It usually does.’
Perhaps he was right. Perhaps we could have made something of it. The price was cheap enough. But eventually Noreen said: ‘There’s no point in wasting any more of our time,’ and Sarge answered sourly: ‘Or in wasting mine.’
I had a ten-shilling note (worth a good sum in those days) ready to tip him. In the hall I drew it out of my trouser pocket and held it out. ‘Thank you for your trouble,’ I said.
Suddenly Sarge was squinting at me, his mouth open under the small, bristly white moustache. ‘You know … I have the strangest feeling … I’ve met you before. Wasn’t you – wasn’t you at Gladbury?’
‘Gladbury? The school, you mean?’ Could he apprehend my terror, behind my attempted nonchalance? ‘ No, as a matter of fact, I was at Harrow.’
Again he squinted at me. Then his face neared mine, I could smell his whisky-laden breath. He looked malevolent, accusatory. ‘I could have sworn… You remind me so much …’
Noreen hastened to the front door and I strolled after her (don’t hurry, don’t hurry). I turned: ‘ I’m sorry to have troubled you for nothing. Thank you so much.’
‘The chap you remind me of – it’s an interesting story … Maybe you read about it in the papers at the time.’
But Noreen had pushed the swing door open and gone through it. Hurrying now, I followed her.