Parlour Four

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘. . . softening of the brain . . . ’

  The words came to me out of near-darkness in Parlour 4. I suppose that some low bedside lamp had been left on, and that my parents were preparing to get into the big bed at the other end of the room. I suppose that I had come awake just before the words were spoken. It was my mother who had spoken them in what she must have thought (if she thought at all) was a voice much too low to rouse me.

  ‘I tell you, Jamie, softening of the brain. If you don’t stop now, within five years the whisky will have killed you.’

  The chill horror that instantly overwhelmed me on hearing these words, I have to trust my reader to achieve some sense of. It was a sudden apocalypse of dereliction and dismay, an instant crumbling of the entire world I knew. But what followed was – if it be conceivable – more terrifying, more annihilating of the very roots of my being, still. My father spoke in penitence, pledging himself to reform. But he did this in a tone utterly alien to my whole conception of him: a whining, cringing, subservient tone. My own heart seemed to shrink within me as I heard it.

  And it went on. My mother began again about softening of the brain; my father whined and blubbered. My sense of time dissolved into a meaningless eternity of anguish. And then – I suppose – I fell asleep.

  When I woke up next morning it was at the normal time, but to an instant memory of an experience which I knew must transform my entire life. I was the son, the only child, of a man likely to die a drunkard’s death. I had seen drunkards in the streets of Edinburgh on several occasions – chiefly when being driven home from a party in a cab which had necessarily to traverse some mean streets on the journey. Something nasty, I now knew, must already have been happening to their brains – and was due to happen to my father’s brain if he didn’t change his ways. It was a stiff piece of knowledge to have come suddenly to a small boy in the night. A skilled writer could probably wring a good deal of pathos out of it. But now, looking back on those hours, those days, from the threshold of old age, I seek for some sort of precision in the experience, and grope after distinctions. Overwhelming as was the revelation of my father’s peril, it was less utterly crushing than the memory of his mere manner during the episode. He was by nature a commanding, although by no means arrogant, man. He ruled us – my mother and myself – with an easy good humour which we would never have dreamed of challenging. He had his quirks and oddities, and we loved him for them. Now, there had been this: the weak and maudlin self-reproaches, the whining, the patently hopeless promises of reform. Suddenly, and as if revealed by a flash of lightning, was somebody closer to me than a brother or sister would have been – and somebody I had never known.

  Before breakfast, he and I went as usual to the baths. His manner was wholly normal, so that I found myself covertly scanning his figure, his face, for small indications that might hint the truth. I noticed for the first time certain minute and zigzag red lines on his nose. They could even be distinguished – but only just – on cheeks wholesomely bronzed from our holiday in the sun. And he certainly didn’t dodder or totter, or stutter in the uttering of his customary idle and cheerful remarks. It hadn’t come to that. Not yet. There was an old man whose duty it was officiously to wrap our naked bodies in unnecessarily voluminous bath-robes before conducting us from one chamber to another. (The place, after all, was a hydropathic, and there were rituals to observe.) I wondered whether the old man also was destined to go soft in the brain.

  At breakfast, my mother, too, seemed her usual composed self. This added to my horror. If in an unformulated way, I must have wondered how any faithful and affectionate wife could live on undisturbed – or with even the public appearance of being undisturbed – having the ghastly knowledge she had. I ate my porridge, with its allotted teaspoonful of brown sugar and tot of cream, almost unaware of what I did: said I wasn’t hungry for finnan-haddie; escaped from table as quickly as I could. I went outside, and presently found myself on that flat roof to the dining-room: a spot where I felt tolerably secure of solitude, since I seemed to be the only person to whom it ever occurred to mount the spiral staircase giving access to it. I paced the roof from side to side, mechanically re-enacting a small fantasy I had invented not long before. I was an admiral pacing his quarter deck, pausing now to gaze out to port and now to starboard, eager to descry an enemy sail. It was of course the Nelson Monument that had bred this small piece of theatre. And there, now, its battlements just visible above the fir trees, the Monument was. Had it not been in view, my mind might never have evolved the notions it now did.

  Nelson had been a hero. That was why the people of a nearby little town had built the thing. Probably Lord Roberts of Kandahar had been a hero too. Could I possibly, in the appalling situation in which I found myself, act in some heroic fashion on my own account? Within seconds – for I was a tolerably clear-headed small boy even in my extremity – I knew this to be nonsense. The situation held no scope for anything of the kind; I was a boy standing on the roof of a dining-room and not on a burning deck.

  But at least there had come to me the idea of finding a role. In Black Beauty was there not somebody who rescued a cabby from an abyss of inebriety through the persistent timely tender of cups of coffee or perhaps cocoa? I considered this seriously, and saw that there would be considerable practical difficulties in applying the technique to my father, even supposing him at all disposed to submit to it. More promising seemed the stance of an Angel Child. For some months before going to school I had been provided with a governess who taught me my letters and numbers, and who was given to rewarding any progress I made by reading to me from a little book of stories strongly homiletic in character. I had thus heard of numerous angelic children adept at bringing quarrelsome servants or brothers or even parents in accord, or eliciting from tramps confessions of idleness, promises of amendment, and undertakings never again to neglect saying their prayers. I felt (not unreasonably) that, despite their appearance at the breakfast-table, my parents must be in large measure estranged as a consequence of the state of affairs that I had heard about on that terrible night. Perhaps I could do something about that. Perhaps I could be an Angel Child.

  I started in as one at once. Tumbling down the spiral staircase, I went in search of my parents, and found them in a small lounge in which they frequently spent half-an-hour after breakfast. My father was reading The Scotsman, and my mother knitting some garment for my own wear. It was a lovely morning, I said, so might we not all go for a walk? Perhaps up to the Monument. There would be a splendid view.

  They were surprised but – I thought – pleased. About my habit of solitary rambling I knew that they a little differed, my father judging it a reasonable sort of pleasure, and my mother believing it would be more ‘natural’ for me to be constantly seeking playmates among the other children at the hydro. But now once or twice a glance I caught between them worried me. Was it possible that they were not merely surprised by my unusual initiative, but wondering? Could it have occurred to them that I had been awake when I ought to have been asleep, and had as a consequence heard what was unfit for my ears? I think I felt obscurely that any awareness that they were taking a walk with an Angel Child might militate against the success of my operation. Nevertheless, I persevered. I managed to choose one of the broader paths, on which three could walk abreast. I managed to position myself between them, so that I could take a hand of each. I considered the possibility of myself pausing or halting for a moment as if to pick up and admire a particularly large fir cone, and in doing so slip my parents’ hands each into other. But this, I decided, would be rushing things. We reached the Monument; we admired the view; my father pointed out in the distance a modest house once belonging to his grandfather, and told a story about this ancestor that I didn’t really follow. Then we walked back to the hydro. It had been an uneventful expedition. Still, it had been a start.

  But I got no further that day. After lunch my parents disappeared – mysteriously, because contrary to their habit.
Had they sought, I wondered, some retired place in which my mother could renew her dire prognostication and my father make those horribly abject responses? The thought of it as perhaps a tediously reiterated scene made me chill all over, and at dinner the appearance of a favourite currant pudding failed to attract even a flicker of my interest. My mind was given wholly to a desperate searching for any means which an Angel Child might feasibly take to save an incipient drunkard from his doom. I thought, for instance, of persuading my father to climb with me unaccompanied to the battlements of the Monument, and there achieve a man-to-man talk, temperate and even worldly in tone, on the perils of alcohol in a general way. But, try as I would, it sounded hollow and unpersuasive on my inward ear.

  My bedtime was pronounced, as it now invariably was, at half-past eight. Surprisingly, I went to sleep at once – only to wake up again at some unknown hour in darkness and what was still an empty room. My wakefulness at once became intolerable. It couldn’t yet be what grown-ups for some reason called the small hours (weren’t they, when occasionally I had encountered them in illness, eternities of a sort?). It couldn’t even be midnight, or my parents would be in bed. I decided to read, since that would at least carry the pleasure of something forbidden at such an hour. I switched on my bedside light, knowing that I could instantly extinguish it at the sound of an opening door, and reached out for Black Beauty.

  Black Beauty wasn’t there, and I realised with dismay that I must have left it in that Reading Room. The dismay was acute, and for an odd and trivial reason. I have mentioned that it had been a prize at baby-school. Such a school might now be called a pre-prep. And because hitched to a proper prep which was in turn hitched to an august and heavily classical public school proper, even its prizes for near-infants were handsomely bound in full calf, with elaborately gilded and be-laurelled inscriptions in Latin and Greek on the front and back covers respectively. I somehow knew that this was pretentious and absurd on a silly little story about a talking horse, and I couldn’t bear the thought of some unknown guest at the hydro discovering it, opening it, and finding my name under the word Dux on the inside. Desperate although the venture would be, I nerved myself to retrieve my property at once.

  The desperateness proceeded from the fact that – here on the ground floor – I could get to the Reading Room only by passing the big room dedicated to badminton by day, and by night to the stupid games and charades and so forth which my father and mother were presumably goggling at now. To be detected prowling past its doors would be extremely unpleasant. Nevertheless, I scrambled out of bed and undertook the journey.

  ‘. . . softening of the brain . . .’

  Through a door slightly ajar I heard the words once more – and in my mother’s voice. And then I heard my father’s voice as well: the abject and maudlin voice. I am fairly sure it carried the truth of the situation to me instantly, and that the truth made me, at least for some instants, incapable of hearing anything more. What I next did hear was lukewarm applause, and then a penetrating whisper from some elderly man who must have been sitting near the door.

  ‘As family entertainment, I call it in damned bad taste.’

  And so it was. What I had listened to on that dreadful night had been nothing more than a rehearsal of one of my father’s ploys for the discomfiting of what he regarded as a smug section of society. Probably the disappearance of my parents that afternoon had been to give a final polish to the wretched little playlet they had now presented: a kind of domesticated Grand Guignol affair. And that my mother had lent herself to it was an index of the extent to which my father dominated us.

  Forgetting all about Black Beauty, I rushed back to Parlour 4, flung myself on my bed, and gave way to a passion of weeping. The relief was, of course, unspeakable – but so, obviously, was the sheer shock inherent in the thing. I must have wept unrestrainedly for some time, since eventually I was aware of my mother bending over me and murmuring soothing words.

  ‘Was it a very bad dream, darling? But it’s over now. For here I am, and here is your daddy, too. Now, go to sleep again.’

  And there ends, I suppose, anything that can be called my story. But not of my wondering about the whole weird experience. Did it, in some ‘unconscious’ fashion, influence my later life in ways I cannot guess? Did I invent it all, and then, at some impenetrable level of the mind, come to transform fiction into fact? Even this I do not know. Professor Freud and his followers speak of screen memories, of fabrications which substitute themselves for authentic experiences not to be contemplated – and particularly of one which they call (a shade oddly) ‘the primal scene’. In Parlour 4, I suppose, there may have been scope for my exposure to something of that kind.

  There is one further thing that I remember, or seem to remember. It is the sense of having been let down. I believe that again I sulked for a time, simply because the opportunity of being an Angel Child had been denied me. This, if true, is perhaps the most shocking part of the whole thing. But I am uncertain about it. After all, I have been writing of events – or non-events – from very many years ago.

  ANDRÉ

  André now had a job. His mother was devout; the Curé said a good word for him; here he was as a functionary, a government official. The government, indeed, was of a local order, that Ville de Douarnenez not much known to the world beyond the bounds of this part of Brittany.

  Still, at sixteen André had made a promising start. Although on a part-time basis, his employment ran to two stints a day, with overtime at pay-and-a-quarter every now and then. Promotion was always possible, or could at least be dreamed of. André had for long admired the youths – some of them no older than he was now – who worked, at a high speed that seemed entirely agreeable to them, on the lumbering mechanised dustcarts which beneath an imperiously flashing yellow light made their jerky way through the narrow streets of Douarnenez and even of sleepy Tréboul itself. It was exciting merely to watch the powerful revolving jaws of these monsters. They crushed and swallowed whatever you cared to pitch into them, and their servants, although possibly drafted on the work willy-nilly under some law for ameliorating juvenile unemployment, were exhilarated by their task.

  A cart seldom came quite to a halt; at its rear were minute protruding platforms upon which the young men leapt as it moved – thence to lean out and forward scanning the lines of waiting dustbins ahead with all the fixed regard of charioteers intent upon the goal, drinking the wind of their own speed. They vied with one another in spotting on the footpaths promisingly indigestible objects to chuck within the hungry maw of their voracious master. Every now and then one of the lads, after a swift precautionary glance around, would hurl in not merely the contents of a rubbish bin but the rubbish bin itself. The monster would falter for a moment, take as it were a deep pneumatic breath, and crumple and engulf the offering as if it were no more than a matchbox, or a paper carton thrown down in the street after its last Gauloise had been smoked. And the willing slaves of the monster, their torsos glittering with sweat and their muscles in fine trim for display, would utter triumphant shouts as if themselves accomplishing a prodigious feat of strength. These paeans they mingled with pleasantries of an innocently indecent sort.

  For André such companionable jollity still lay in an uncertain future. His present labour was solitary, and the receptacle he served was not a mechanical giant but a black plastic sack. Emptied into a larger sack several times in the course of each stint, it had to last a week before a fresh sack (to the value of perhaps ten centimes) would be issued to him by the responsible superintendent. By that time, a good many small rents would have appeared in the current sack, occasioned by the more jagged objects which unthinking persons had left littering the beach.

  Such was André’s employment. He was, of sorts, a beachcomber, although one toiling without hope of private profit. Once in the early morning when almost nobody was abroad, and once in the late afternoon when, alike above and below the tide-line, a scattering of sun-dazed gluttons still la
y inconveniently around, André traversed first the big and then the little beach to and fro on innumerable straight lines, stooping every few feet or yards to gather up with one hand the miscellaneous rubbish which he then transferred to the sack he trailed behind him with the other. It was monotonous work, and when the monotony was disturbed it was because something more than commonly disagreeable had to be dealt with. But André was conscientious, and if he sometimes had the bold thought that a little spade, or long-handled pincers, or those handsome black and yellow gants industriels issued to the young men on the big rubbish carts would improve his lot, he judged that an application for anything of the kind would be adversely regarded by those powers to whom he owed the favour of being employed at all. So he carried on as he was, and habit eventually dulled his sensibilities in this direction.

  André lived in the upper part of Tréboul, midway along the little Passage des Sirènes. It was a modest dwelling, but satisfactory in that, simply by jumping on his bicycle at its door, he could project himself without so much as touching the handle-bars straight down the rue des Professeurs Curie, past the splendours of the Centre Curé Marine and the Grand Hôtel of Tréboul and the Universe, so as to arrive like a bullet at his place of employment. This conduced to punctuality. But to his mother, the house’s main satisfactoriness lay in the fact that from its garret window her son could edify himself with a glimpse of Monsieur Saint Yves. If indeed the battered devotional object perched above its massive granite steps was Saint Yves. For, although the monument seemed miraculously to have left off crumbling centuries ago, it was not before any indisputable identification had become impossible.

  There were those who held the figure to be that of Saint Anne, a Breton princess who, miraculously transported to Nazareth, there gave birth to the Virgin Mary – having accomplished which exalted task she returned to Brittany, where she was subsequently paid a family visit by our Saviour. But an old woman had told André of her grandmother’s declaring that the abraded saint was neither Saint Anne nor Saint Yves but Saint Tugen, since long ago he had held aloft what was distinguishably a key. And any key, if touched by Saint Tugen’s key, would infallibly drive away mad dogs – Saint Tugen being in fact one of the most useful of Brittany’s specialist saints.