Late that afternoon someone told him they’d seen the dog walking across the bridge. It wasn’t true, of course, but we didn’t know that then – they paid a Mexican five pesos to smuggle it across. So all that afternoon and the next Mr Calloway sat in the garden having his shoes cleaned over and over again, and thinking how a dog could just walk across like that, and a human being, an immortal soul, was bound here in the awful routine of the little walk and the unspeakable meals and the aspirin at the botica. That dog was seeing things he couldn’t see – that hateful dog. It made him mad – I think literally mad. You must remember the man had been going on for months. He had a million and he was living on two pounds a week, with nothing to spend his money on. He sat there and brooded on the hideous injustice of it. I think he’d have crossed over one day in any case, but the dog was the last straw.
Next day when he wasn’t to be seen, I guessed he’d gone across and I went too. The American town is as small as the Mexican. I knew I couldn’t miss him if he was there, and I was still curious. A little sorry for him, but not too much.
I caught sight of him first in the only drug-store, having a coca-cola, and then once outside a cinema looking at the posters; he had dressed with extreme neatness, as if for a party, but there was no party. On my third time round, I came on the detectives – they were having coca-colas in the drug-store, and they must have missed Mr Calloway by inches. I went in and sat down at the bar.
‘Hello,’ I said, ‘you still about.’ I suddenly felt anxious for Mr Calloway. I didn’t want them to meet.
One of them said, ‘Where’s Calloway?’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘he’s hanging on.’
‘But not his dog,’ he said and laughed. The other looked a little shocked, he didn’t like anyone to talk cynically about a dog. Then they got up – they had a car outside.
‘Have another?’ I said.
‘No thanks. We’ve got to keep going.’
The men bent close and confided to me, ‘Calloway’s on this side.’
‘No!’ I said.
‘And his dog.’
‘He’s looking for it,’ the other said.
‘I’m damned if he is,’ I said, and again one of them looked a little shocked, as if I’d insulted the dog.
I don’t think Mr Calloway was looking for his dog, but his dog certainly found him. There was a sudden hilarious yapping from the car and out plunged the semi-setter and gambolled furiously down the street. One of the detectives – the sentimental one – was into the car before we got to the door and was off after the dog. Near the bottom of the long road to the bridge was Mr Calloway – I do believe he’d come down to look at the Mexican side when he found there was nothing but the drug-store and the cinemas and the paper shops on the American. He saw the dog coming and yelled at it to go home – ‘home, home, home,’ as if they were in Norfolk – it took no notice at all, pelting towards him. Then he saw the police car coming, and ran. After that, everything happened too quickly, but I think the order of events was this – the dog started across the road right in front of the car, and Mr Calloway yelled, at the dog or the car, I don’t know which. Anyway, the detective swerved – he said later, weakly, at the inquiry, that he couldn’t run over a dog, and down went Mr Calloway, in a mess of broken glass and gold rims and silver hair, and blood. The dog was on to him before any of us could reach him licking and whimpering and licking. I saw Mr Calloway put up his hand, and down it went across the dog’s neck and the whimper rose to a stupid bark of triumph, but Mr Calloway was dead – shock and a weak heart.
‘Poor old geezer,’ the detective said, ‘I bet he really loved that dog,’ and it’s true that the attitude in which he lay looked more like a caress than a blow. I thought it was meant to be a blow, but the detective may have been right. It all seemed to me a little too touching to be true as the old crook lay there with his arm over the dog’s neck, dead with his million between the money-changers’ huts, but it’s as well to be humble in the face of human nature. He had come across the river for something, and it may, after all, have been the dog he was looking for. It sat there, baying its stupid and mongrel triumph across his body, like a piece of sentimental statuary: the nearest he could get to the fields, the ditches, the horizon of his home. It was comic and it was pitiable, but it wasn’t less comic because the man was dead. Death doesn’t change comedy to tragedy, and if that last gesture was one of affection, I suppose it was only one more indication of a human being’s capacity for self-deception, our baseless optimism that is so much more appalling than our despair.
1938
A DRIVE IN THE COUNTRY
AS every other night she listened to her father going round the house, locking the doors and windows. He was head clerk at Bergson’s Export Agency, and lying in bed she would think with dislike that his home was like his office, run on the same lines, its safety preserved with the same meticulous care, so that he could present a faithful steward’s account to the managing-director. Regularly every Sunday he presented the account, accompanied by his wife and two daughters, in the little neo-Gothic church in Park Road. They always had the same pew, they were always five minutes early, and her father sang loudly with no sense of tune, holding an outsize prayer book on the level of his eyes. ‘Singing songs of exultation’ – he was presenting the week’s account (one household duly safeguarded) – ‘marching to the Promised Land.’ When they came out of church, she looked carefully away from the corner by the ‘Bricklayers’ Arms’ where Fred always stood, a little lit because the Arms had been open for half an hour, with his air of unbalanced exultation.
She listened: the back door closed, she could hear the catch of the kitchen window click, and the restless pad of his feet going back to try the front door. It wasn’t only the outside doors he locked: he locked the empty rooms, the bathroom, the lavatory. He was locking something out, but obviously it was something capable of penetrating his first defences. He raised his second line all the way up to bed.
She laid her ear against the thin wall of the jerry-built villa and could hear the faint voices from the neighbouring room; as she listened they came clearer as though she were turning the knob of a wireless set. Her mother said . . . ‘margarine in the cooking . . .’ and her father said ‘. . . much easier in fifteen years’. Then the bed creaked and there were dim sounds of tenderness and comfort between the two middle-aged strangers in the next room. In fifteen years, she thought unhappily, the house will be his; he had paid twenty-five pounds down and the rest he was paying month by month as rent. ‘Of course,’ he was in the habit of saying after a good meal, ‘I’ve improved the property,’ and he expected at least one of them to follow him into his study. ‘I’ve wired this room for power,’ he padded back past the little downstairs lavatory, ‘this radiator,’ the final stroke of satisfaction, ‘the garden’, and if it was a fine evening he would fling the french window of the dining-room open on the little carpet of grass as carefully kept as a college lawn. ‘A pile of bricks,’ he’d say, ‘that’s all it was.’ Five years of Saturday afternoons and fine Sundays had gone into the patch of turf, the surrounding flower-bed, the one apple-tree which regularly produced one crimson tasteless apple more each year.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve improved the property,’ looking round for a nail to drive in, a weed to be uprooted. ‘If we had to sell now, we should get back more than I’ve paid from the society.’ It was more than a sense of property, it was a sense of honesty. Some people who bought their houses through the society let them go to rack and ruin and then cleared out.
She stood with her ear against the wall, a small, furious, immature figure. There was no more to be heard from the other room, but in her inner ear she still heard the chorus of a property owner, the tap-tap of a hammer, the scrape of a spade, the whistle of radiator steam, a key turning, a bolt pushed home, the little trivial sounds of men building barricades. She stood planning her treachery.
It was a quarter past ten; she had an hour in w
hich to leave the house, but it did not take so long. There was really nothing to fear. They had played their usual rubber of three-handed bridge while her sister altered a dress for the local ‘hop’ next night; after the rubber she had boiled a kettle and brought in a pot of tea; then she had filled the hot-water bottles and put them in the beds while her father locked up. He had no idea whatever that she was an enemy.
She put on a scarf and a heavy coat because it was still cold at night; the spring was late that year, as her father commented, watching for the buds on the apple-tree. She didn’t pack a suitcase; that would have reminded her too much of week-ends at the sea, a family expedition to Ostend from all of which one returned; she wanted to match the odd reckless quality of Fred’s mind. This time she wasn’t going to return. She went softly downstairs into the little crowded hall, unlocked the door. All was quiet upstairs, and she closed the door behind her.
She was touched by a faint feeling of guilt because she couldn’t lock it from the outside. But her guilt vanished by the time she reached the end of the crazy paved path and turned to the left down the road which after five years was still half made, past the gaps between the villas where the wounded fields remained grimly alive in the form of thin grass and heaps of clay and dandelions.
She walked fast, passing a long line of little garages like the graves in a Latin cemetery where the coffin lies below the fading photograph of its occupant. The cold night air touched her with exhilaration. She was ready for anything, as she turned by the Belisha beacon into the shuttered shopping street; she was like a recruit in the first months of a war. The choice made she could surrender her will to the strange, the exhilarating, the gigantic event.
Fred, as he had promised, was at the corner where the road turned down towards the church; she could taste the spirit on his lips as they kissed, and she was satisfied that no one else could have so adequately matched the occasion; his face was bright and reckless in the lamp-light, he was as exciting and strange to her as the adventure. He took her arm and ran her into a blind unlighted alley, then left her for a moment until two headlamps beamed softly at her out of the cavern. She cried with astonishment, ‘You’ve got a car?’ and felt the jerk of his nervous hand urging her towards it. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘do you like it?’ grinding into second gear, changing clumsily into top as they came out between the shuttered windows.
She said, ‘It’s lovely. Let’s drive a long way.’
‘We will,’ he said, watching the speedometer needle go quivering to fifty-five.
‘Does it mean you’ve got a job?’
‘There are no jobs,’ he said, ‘they don’t exist any more than the Dodo. Did you see that bird?’ he asked sharply, turning his headlights full on as they passed the turning to the housing estate and quite suddenly came out into the country between a café (‘Draw in here’), a boot-shop (‘Buy the shoes worn by your favourite film star’), and an undertaker’s with a large white angel lit by a neon light.
‘I didn’t see any bird.’
‘Not flying at the windscreen?’
‘No.’
‘I nearly hit it,’ he said. ‘It would have made a mess. Bad as those fellows who run someone down and don’t stop. Should we stop?’ he asked, turning out his switchboard light so that they couldn’t see the needle vibrate to sixty.
‘Whatever you say,’ she said, sitting deep in a reckless dream.
‘You going to love me tonight?’
‘Of course I am.’
‘Never going back there?’
‘No,’ she said, abjuring the tap of hammer, the click of latch, the pad of slippered feet making the rounds.
‘Want to know where we are going?’
‘No.’ A little flat cardboard copse ran forward into the green light and darkly by. A rabbit turned its scut and vanished into a hedge. He said, ‘Have you any money?’
‘Half a crown.’
‘Do you love me?’ For a long time she expended on his lips all she had patiently had to keep in reserve, looking the other way on Sunday mornings, saying nothing when his name came up at meals with disapproval. She expended herself against dry unresponsive lips as the car leapt ahead and his foot trod down on the accelerator. He said, ‘It’s the hell of a life.’
She echoed him, ‘The hell of a life.’
He said, ‘There’s a bottle in my pocket. Have a drink.’
‘I don’t want one.’
‘Give me one then. It has a screw top,’ and with one hand on her and one on the wheel he tipped his head, so that she could pour a little whisky into his mouth out of the quarter bottle. ‘Do you mind?’ he said.
‘Of course I don’t mind.’
‘You can’t save,’ he said, ‘on ten shillings a week pocket-money. I lay it out the best I can. It needs a hell of a lot of thought. To give variety. Half a crown on Weights. Three and six on whisky. A shilling on the pictures. That leaves three shillings for beer. I take my fun once a week and get it over.’
The whisky had dribbled on to his tie and the smell filled the small coupé. It pleased her. It was his smell. He said, ‘They grudge it me. They think I ought to get a job. When you’re that age you don’t realize there aren’t any jobs for some of us – any more for ever.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘They are old.’
‘How’s your sister?’ he asked abruptly; the bright glare swept the road ahead of them clean of small scurrying birds and animals.
‘She’s going to the hop tomorrow. I wonder where we shall be.’
He wouldn’t be drawn; he had his own idea and kept it to himself.
‘I’m loving this.’
He said, ‘There’s a club out this way. At a road-house. Mick made me a member. Do you know Mick?’
‘No.’
‘Mick’s all right. If they know you, they’ll serve you drinks till midnight. We’ll look in there. Say hullo to Mick. And then in the morning – we’ll decide that later when we’ve had a few drinks.’
‘Have you the money?’ A small village, a village fast asleep already behind closed doors and windows, sailed down the hill towards them as if it was being carried smoothly by a landslide into the scarred plain from which they’d come. A low grey Norman church, an inn without a sign, a clock striking eleven. He said, ‘Look in the back. There’s a suitcase there.’
‘It’s locked.’
‘I forgot the key,’ he said.
‘What’s in it?’
‘A few things,’ he said vaguely. ‘We could pop them for drinks.’
‘What about a bed?’
‘There’s the car. You are not scared, are you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not scared. This is –’ but she hadn’t words for the damp cold wind, the darkness, the strangeness, the smell of whisky and the rushing car. ‘It moves,’ she said. ‘We must have gone a long way already. This is real country,’ seeing an owl sweep low on furry wings over a ploughed field.
‘You’ve got to go farther than this for real country,’ he said. ‘You won’t find it yet on this road. We’ll be at the road-house soon.’
She discovered in herself a nostalgia for their dark windy solitary progress. She said, ‘Need we go to the club? Can’t we go farther into the country?’
He looked sideways at her; he had always been open to any suggestion: like some meteorological instrument, he was made for the winds to blow through. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘anything you like.’ He didn’t give the club a second thought; they swept past it a moment later, a long lit Tudor bungalow, a crash of voices, a bathing-pool filled for some reason with hay. It was immediately behind them, a patch of light whipping round a corner out of sight.
He said, ‘I suppose this is country now. They none of them get farther than the club. We’re quite alone now. We could lie in these fields till doomsday as far as they are concerned, though I suppose a ploughman . . . if they do plough here.’ He raised his foot from the accelerator and let the car’s speed gradually diminish. Somebody had lef
t a wooden gate open into a field and he turned the car in; they jolted a long way down the field beside the hedge and came to a standstill. He turned out the headlamps and they sat in the tiny glow of the switchboard light. ‘Peaceful,’ he said uneasily; and they heard a screech owl hunting overhead and a small rustle in the hedge where something went into hiding. They belonged to the city; they hadn’t a name for anything round them; the tiny buds breaking in the bushes were nameless. He nodded at a group of dark trees at the hedge ends. ‘Oaks?’
‘Elms?’ she asked, and their mouths went together in a mutual ignorance. The touch excited her; she was ready for the most reckless act; but from his mouth, the dry spiritous lips, she gained a sense that he was less excited than he had hoped to be.
She said, to reassure herself, ‘It’s good to be here – miles away from anyone we know.’
‘I dare say Mick’s there. Down the road.’
‘Does he know?’
‘Nobody knows.’
She said, ‘That’s how I wanted it. How did you get this car?’
He grinned at her with unbalanced amusement. ‘I saved from the ten shillings.’
‘No but how? Did someone lend it you?’
‘Yes,’ he said. He suddenly pushed the door open and said, ‘Let’s take a walk.’
‘We’ve never walked in the country before.’ She took his arm, and she could feel the tense nerves responding to her touch. It was what she liked; she couldn’t tell what he would do next. She said, ‘My father calls you crazy. I like you crazy. What’s all this stuff?’ kicking at the ground.
‘Clover,’ he said, ‘isn’t it? I don’t know.’ It was like being in a foreign city where you can’t understand the names on shops, the traffic signs: nothing to catch hold of, to hold you down to this and that, adrift together in a dark vacuum. ‘Shouldn’t you turn on the headlamps?’ she said. ‘It won’t be so easy finding our way back. There’s not much moon.’ Already they seemed to have gone a long way from the car; she couldn’t see it clearly any longer.
Twenty-One Stories Page 10