‘It’s not bad,’ Ward echoed reluctantly. ‘Now tell me what the latest growth figures are. They might console me.’
Rossiter paused, lowering his voice. ‘Four per cent. Eight hundred million extra people in one year – just less than half the earth’s total population in 1950.’
Ward whistled slowly. ‘So they will revalue. What to? Three and a half ?’
‘Three. From the first of next year.’
‘Three square metres!’ Ward sat up and looked around him. ‘It’s unbelievable! The world’s going insane, Rossiter. For God’s sake, when are they going to do something about it? Do you realize there soon won’t be room enough to sit down, let alone lie down?’
Exasperated, he punched the wall beside him, on the second blow knocked in one of the small wooden panels that had been lightly papered over.
‘Hey!’ Rossiter yelled. ‘You’re breaking the place down.’ He dived across the bed to retrieve the panel, which hung downwards supported by a strip of paper. Ward slipped his hand into the dark interval, carefully drew the panel back on to the bed.
‘Who’s on the other side?’ Rossiter whispered. ‘Did they hear?’
Ward peered through the interval, eyes searching the dim light. Suddenly he dropped the panel and seized Rossiter’s shoulder, pulled him down on to the bed.
‘Henry! Look!’
Directly in front of them, faintly illuminated by a grimy skylight, was a medium-sized room some fifteen feet square, empty except for the dust silted up against the skirting boards. The floor was bare, a few strips of frayed linoleum running across it, the walls covered with a drab floral design. Here and there patches of the paper peeled off and segments of the picture rail had rotted away, but otherwise the room was in habitable condition.
Breathing slowly, Ward closed the open door of the cubicle with his foot, then turned to Rossiter.
‘Henry, do you realize what we’ve found? Do you realize it, man?’
‘Shut up. For Pete’s sake keep your voice down.’ Rossiter examined the room carefully. ‘It’s fantastic. I’m trying to see whether anyone’s used it recently.’
‘Of course they haven’t,’ Ward pointed out. ‘It’s obvious. There’s no door into the room. We’re looking through it now. They must have panelled over this door years ago and forgotten about it. Look at that filth everywhere.’
Rossiter was staring into the room, his mind staggered by its vastness.
‘You’re right,’ he murmured. ‘Now, when do we move in?’
Panel, by panel, they prised away the lower half of the door and nailed it on to a wooden frame, so that the dummy section could be replaced instantly.
Then, picking an afternoon when the house was half empty and the manager asleep in his basement office, they made their first foray into the room, Ward going in alone while Rossiter kept guard in the cubicle.
For an hour they exchanged places, wandering silently around the dusty room, stretching their arms out to feel its unconfined emptiness, grasping at the sensation of absolute spatial freedom. Although smaller than many of the sub-divided rooms in which they had lived, this room seemed infinitely larger, its walls huge cliffs that soared upward to the skylight.
Finally, two or three days later, they moved in.
For the first week Rossiter slept alone in the room, Ward in the cubicle outside, both there together during the day. Gradually they smuggled in a few items of furniture: two armchairs, a table, a lamp fed from the socket in the cubicle. The furniture was heavy and Victorian; the cheapest available, its size emphasized the emptiness of the room. Pride of place was taken by an enormous mahogany wardrobe, fitted with carved angels and castellated mirrors, which they were forced to dismantle and carry into the house in their suitcases. Towering over them, it reminded Ward of the micro-films of gothic cathedrals, with their massive organ lofts crossing vast naves.
After three weeks they both slept in the room, finding the cubicle unbearably cramped. An imitation Japanese screen divided the room adequately and did nothing to diminish its size. Sitting there in the evenings, surrounded by his books and albums, Ward steadily forgot the city outside. Luckily he reached the library by a back alley and avoided the crowded streets. Rossiter and himself began to seem the only real inhabitants of the world, everyone else a meaningless by-product of their own existence, a random replication of identity which had run out of control.
It was Rossiter who suggested that they ask the two girls to share the room with them.
‘They’ve been kicked out again and may have to split up,’ he told Ward, obviously worried that Judith might fall into bad company. ‘There’s always a rent freeze after a revaluation but all the landlords know about it so they’re not re-letting. It’s damned difficult to find anywhere.’
Ward nodded, relaxing back around the circular red-wood table. He played with the tassel of the arsenic-green lamp shade, for a moment felt like a Victorian man of letters, leading a spacious, leisurely life among overstuffed furnishings.
‘I’m all for it,’ he agreed, indicating the empty corners. ‘There’s plenty of room here. But we’ll have to make sure they don’t gossip about it.’
After due precautions, they let the two girls into the secret, enjoying their astonishment at finding this private universe.
‘We’ll put a partition across the middle,’ Rossiter explained, ‘then take it down each morning. You’ll be able to move in within a couple of days. How do you feel?’
‘Wonderful!’ They goggled at the wardrobe, squinting at the endless reflections in the mirrors.
There was no difficulty getting them in and out of the house. The turnover of tenants was continuous and bills were placed in the mail rack. No one cared who the girls were or noticed their regular calls at the cubicle.
However, half an hour after they arrived neither of them had unpacked her suitcase.
‘What’s up, Judith?’ Ward asked, edging past the girls’ beds into the narrow interval between the table and wardrobe.
Judith hesitated, looking from Ward to Rossiter, who sat on the bed, finishing off the plywood partition. ‘John, it’s just that . . .’
Helen Waring, more matter-of-fact, took over, her fingers straightening the bed-spread. ‘What Judith’s trying to say is that our position here is a little embarrassing. The partition is –’
Rossiter stood up. ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t worry, Helen,’ he assured her, speaking in the loud whisper they had all involuntarily cultivated. ‘No funny business, you can trust us. This partition is as solid as a rock.’
The two girls nodded. ‘It’s not that,’ Helen explained, ‘but it isn’t up all the time. We thought that if an older person were here, say Judith’s aunt – she wouldn’t take up much room and be no trouble, she’s really awfully sweet – we wouldn’t need to bother about the partition – except at night,’ she added quickly.
Ward glanced at Rossiter, who shrugged and began to scan the floor.
‘Well, it’s an idea,’ Rossiter said. ‘John and I know how you feel. Why not?’
‘Sure,’ Ward agreed. He pointed to the space between the girls’ beds and the table. ‘One more won’t make any difference.’
The girls broke into whoops. Judith went over to Rossiter and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Sorry to be a nuisance, Henry.’ She smiled at him. ‘That’s a wonderful partition you’ve made. You couldn’t do another one for Auntie – just a little one? She’s very sweet but she is getting on.’
‘Of course,’ Rossiter said. ‘I understand. I’ve got plenty of wood left over.’
Ward looked at his watch. ‘It’s seven-thirty, Judith. You’d better get in touch with your aunt. She may not be able to make it tonight.’
Judith buttoned her coat. ‘Oh she will,’ she assured Ward. ‘I’ll be back in a jiffy.’
The aunt arrived within five minutes, three heavy suitcases soundly packed.
‘It’s amazing,’ Ward remarked to Rossiter three months later. ‘T
he size of this room still staggers me. It almost gets larger every day.’
Rossiter agreed readily, averting his eyes from one of the girls changing behind the central partition. This they now left in place as dismantling it daily had become tiresome. Besides, the aunt’s subsidiary partition was attached to it and she resented the continuous upsets. Ensuring she followed the entrance and exit drills through the camouflaged door and cubicle was difficult enough.
Despite this, detection seemed unlikely. The room had obviously been built as an afterthought into the central well of the house and any noise was masked by the luggage stacked in the surrounding corridor. Directly below was a small dormitory occupied by several elderly women, and Judith’s aunt, who visited them socially, swore that no sounds came through the heavy ceiling. Above, the fanlight let out through a dormer window, its lights indistinguishable from the hundred other bulbs in the windows of the house.
Rossiter finished off the new partition he was building and held it upright, fitting it into the slots nailed to the wall between his bed and Ward’s. They had agreed that this would provide a little extra privacy.
‘No doubt I’ll have to do one for Judith and Helen,’ he confided to Ward.
Ward adjusted his pillow. They had smuggled the two armchairs back to the furniture shop as they took up too much space. The bed, anyway, was more comfortable. He had never become completely used to the soft upholstery.
‘Not a bad idea. What about some shelving around the wall? I’ve got nowhere to put anything.’
The shelving tidied the room considerably, freeing large areas of the floor. Divided by their partitions, the five beds were in line along the rear wall, facing the mahogany wardrobe. In between was an open space of three or four feet, a further six feet on either side of the wardrobe.
The sight of so much spare space fascinated Ward. When Rossiter mentioned that Helen’s mother was ill and badly needed personal care he immediately knew where her cubicle could be placed – at the foot of his bed, between the wardrobe and the side wall.
Helen was overjoyed. ‘It’s awfully good of you, John,’ she told him, ‘but would you mind if Mother slept beside me? There’s enough space to fit an extra bed in.’
So Rossiter dismantled the partitions and moved them closer together, six beds now in line along the wall. This gave each of them an interval two and a half feet wide, just enough room to squeeze down the side of their beds. Lying back on the extreme right, the shelves two feet above his head, Ward could barely see the wardrobe, but the space in front of him, a clear six feet to the wall ahead, was uninterrupted.
Then Helen’s father arrived.
Knocking on the door of the cubicle, Ward smiled at Judith’s aunt as she let him in. He helped her swing out the made-up bed which guarded the entrance, then rapped on the wooden panel. A moment later Helen’s father, a small, grey-haired man in an undershirt, braces tied to his trousers with string, pulled back the panel.
Ward nodded to him and stepped over the luggage piled around the floor at the foot of the beds. Helen was in her mother’s cubicle, helping the old woman to drink her evening broth. Rossiter, perspiring heavily, was on his knees by the mahogany wardrobe, wrenching apart the frame of the central mirror with a jemmy. Pieces of the wardrobe lay on his bed and across the floor.
‘We’ll have to start taking these out tomorrow,’ Rossiter told him. Ward waited for Helen’s father to shuffle past and enter his cubicle. He had rigged up a small cardboard door, and locked it behind him with a crude hook of bent wire.
Rossiter watched him, frowning irritably. ‘Some people are happy. This wardrobe’s a hell of a job. How did we ever decide to buy it?’
Ward sat down on his bed. The partition pressed against his knees and he could hardly move. He looked up when Rossiter was engaged and saw that the dividing line he had marked in pencil was hidden by the encroaching partition. Leaning against the wall, he tried to ease it back again, but Rossiter had apparently nailed the lower edge to the floor.
There was a sharp tap on the outside cubicle door – Judith returning from her office. Ward started to get up and then sat back. ‘Mr Waring,’ he called softly. It was the old man’s duty night.
Waring shuffled to the door of his cubicle and unlocked it fussily, clucking to himself.
‘Up and down, up and down,’ he muttered. He stumbled over Rossiter’s tool-bag and swore loudly, then added meaningly over his shoulder: ‘If you ask me there’s too many people in here. Down below they’ve only got six to our seven, and it’s the same size room.’
Ward nodded vaguely and stretched back on his narrow bed, trying not to bang his head on the shelving. Waring was not the first to hint that he move out. Judith’s aunt had made a similar suggestion two days earlier. Since he had left his job at the library (the small rental he charged the others paid for the little food he needed) he spent most of his time in the room, seeing rather more of the old man than he wanted to, but he had learned to tolerate him.
Settling himself, he noticed that the right-hand spire of the wardrobe, all he had been able to see of it for the past two months, was now dismantled.
It had been a beautiful piece of furniture, in a way symbolizing this whole private world, and the salesman at the store told him there were few like it left. For a moment Ward felt a sudden pang of regret, as he had done as a child when his father, in a moment of exasperation, had taken something away from him and he had known he would never see it again.
Then he pulled himself together. It was a beautiful wardrobe, without doubt, but when it was gone it would make the room seem even larger.
1961
THE GENTLE ASSASSIN
By noon, when Dr Jamieson arrived in London, all entrances into the city had been sealed since six o’clock that morning. The Cornonation Day crowds had waited in their places along the procession route for almost twenty-four hours, and Green Park was deserted as Dr Jamieson slowly made his way up the sloping grass towards the Underground station below the Ritz. Abandoned haversacks and sleeping bags lay about among the litter under the trees, and twice Dr Jamieson stumbled slightly. By the time he reached the station entrance he was perspiring freely, and sat down on a bench, resting his heavy gun-metal suitcase on the grass.
Directly in front of him was one of the high wooden stands. He could see the backs of the top row of spectators, women in bright summer dresses, men in shirtsleeves, newspapers shielding their heads from the hot sunlight, parties of children singing and waving their Union Jacks. All the way down Piccadilly the office blocks were crammed with people leaning out of windows, and the street was a mass of colour and noise. Now and then bands played in the distance, or an officer in charge of the troops lining the route bellowed an order and re-formed his men.
Dr Jamieson listened with interest to all these sounds, savouring the sun-filled excitement. In his middle sixties, he was a small neat figure with greying hair and alert sensitive eyes. His forehead was broad, with a marked slope, which made his somewhat professorial manner appear more youthful. This was helped by the rakish cut of his grey silk suit, its ultra-narrow lapels fastened by a single embroidered button, heavy braided seams on the sleeves and trousers. As someone emerged from the first-aid marquee at the far end of the stand and walked towards him Dr Jamieson sensed the discrepancy between their attire – the man was wearing a baggy blue suit with huge flapping lapels – and frowned to himself in annoyance. Glancing at his watch, he picked up the suitcase and hurried into the Underground station.
The Coronation procession was expected to leave Westminster Abbey at three o’clock, and the streets through which the cortège would pass had been closed to traffic by the police. As he emerged from the station exit on the north side of Piccadilly, Dr Jamieson looked around carefully at the tall office blocks and hotels, here and there repeating a name to himself as he identified a once-familiar landmark. Edging along behind the crowds packed on to the pavement, the metal suitcase bumping painfully against his k
nees, he reached the entrance to Bond Street, there deliberated carefully and began to walk to the taxi rank fifty yards away. The people pressing down towards Piccadilly glanced at him curiously, and he was relieved when he climbed into the taxi.
‘Hotel Westland,’ he told the driver, refusing help with the suitcase.
The man cocked one ear. ‘Hotel where?’
‘Westland,’ Dr Jamieson repeated, trying to match the modulations of his voice to the driver’s. Everyone around him seemed to speak in the same guttural tones. ‘It’s in Oxford Street, one hundred and fifty yards east of Marble Arch. I think you’ll find there’s a temporary entrance in Grosvenor Place.’
The driver nodded, eyeing his elderly passenger warily. As they moved off he leaned back. ‘Come to see the Coronation?’
‘No,’ Dr Jamieson said matter-of-factly. ‘I’m here on business. Just for the day.’
‘I thought maybe you came to watch the procession. You get a wonderful view from the Westland.’
‘So I believe. Of course, I’ll watch if I get a chance.’
They swung into Grosvenor Square and Dr Jamieson steered the suitcase back onto the seat, examining the intricate metal clasps to make sure the lid held securely. He peered up at the buildings around him, trying not to let his heart become excited as the memories rolled back. Everything, however, differed completely from his recollections, the overlay of the intervening years distorting the original images without his realizing it. The perspectives of the street, the muddle of unrelated buildings and tangle of overhead wires, the signs that sprouted in profuse variety at the slightest opportunity, all seemed entirely new. The whole city was incredibly antiquated and confused, and he found it hard to believe that he had once lived there.
Were his other memories equally false?
He sat forward with surprise, pointing through the open window at the graceful beehive curtain-wall of the American Embassy, answering his question.
The driver noticed his interest, flicked away his cigarette. ‘Funny style of place,’ he commented. ‘Can’t understand the Yanks putting up a dump like that.’
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 41