The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books

by Elspeth Davie

  At this point several people turn their eyes, in desperation, and stare at the unmoving man sitting now quite isolated at the end of his row. No one could say why it is imperative to turn to him. Isn’t he a brute, after all – a stubborn, fat man with a crimson face, conspicuous only in being a figure of monumental unhelpfulness? Yet something about the man suggests that, like some squat, purple-cheeked Atlas, he is supporting the whole weight of the hall on his shoulders. The short, bulging neck holds up the overhanging gallery. The legs are planted like pillars to the floor, and over his paunch the fingers come together in a massive lock. His bottom is sunk into the plush of his seat like a bulbous root into the deep earth. Nothing can budge him now. He is dedicated to absolute immobility, and the whole house knows it.

  This man has never taken his eyes off the violinist. He stares ahead, unblinking – his blue, slightly protuberant eyes fixed. It is as though on him, rather than on the conductor, has now fallen the responsibility of holding audience and orchestra together – of pushing back the white heads in the dress circle, checking the obstreperous group outside the door, and by a superhuman effort of will turning the curious eye of the audience back into a listening ear. The soloist lifts his violin and for the first time throws a piercing glance down into the body of the hall. He exchanges one look with the immobile man sitting there. There is no recognizable emotion in this look, nothing that would ordinarily be called human warmth. Yet the man below glows and shines for an instant as though caught in a flare of brilliant light. The violinist raises his bow and begins to play.

  In the meantime, one of the group outside in the vestibule has at last remembered about the open doors. He pulls them to violently and the drama outside is shut away, at any rate from the ears – for figures can still be seen moving about behind the obscured glass. All the same there is a feeling of uneasiness – a feeling that the fellow lying behind that door will not allow himself to be shut away and forgotten after swaying the entire audience. This unease is justified. Scarcely have those around the door drawn their first breath of relief before it swings open again, and the leader of the group strides in. His air is even more commanding than before. Now he looks like an ambassador from an important state. He walks along the empty row looking for something, before starting to tip up the seats and feel about on the floor. By this time the music has again gathered volume and nobody can hear the sound of the seats, though he is as skilful and rhythmical in the way he raps them back as the man behind the kettledrums. And now he is finished with that row and goes into the one in front where the stout man is sitting. He works his way along the seats, tipping, patting and groping till he reaches him. Now he is actually feeling around the other’s feet. But the man – this rapt Buddha of non-helpfulness – shifts neither his legs nor his eyes. He allows the other to squeeze past him, to glare at him, and even to push his foot aside.

  At first there is mounting curiosity as to what the searcher will come up with. Yet the seated man has managed to concentrate most of this curiosity upon himself and then, by not moving a hair or allowing his attention to swerve for an instant, has directed it up towards the orchestra. This is something which almost amounts to an athletic feat. The sheer effort of lifting this crowd on his eyeballs alone is appalling.

  The swing doors open again and a woman appears and moves diffidently, apologetically, down the gangway, all the time looking towards the searcher and waiting for a sign. But the man is now working along a row further back and keeps shaking his head. Suddenly he disappears. He has pounced on something down there. It is a long handbag in imitation plum-coloured leather with a zip pocket at the back – useful but not elegant. An advertisement would describe it as a bag which could go anywhere. And it has gone far and been kicked around a lot. Already it has travelled a couple of rows back and sideways ten feet or so. The man and woman join up enthusiastically and are soon on their way out again, the woman meantime peering into the bag to assure herself that, in spite of the hideous confusion of the last ten minutes, everything is intact inside, right down to the fragile mirror in the lid of her compact.

  Now some of those in the audience had imagined it might be a pair of spectacles the man was hunting for – spectacles belonging to the fainting man who, added to the horrors of coming to in a strange place, would find himself unable to focus on the strange faces looming over him. A few have never been able to shake off the suspicion that all the time these spectacles have been lying, ground to powder, under the stubborn heels of the man sitting at the end of the row. At sight of the handbag, however, some tie linking them to the group outside the door snaps forever. As the man and woman finally push their way out there is a glimpse of a deserted vestibule. The group, as though sensing a defeat, have disappeared.

  The music is sweeping to its climax. One by one each section of the orchestra is gathered up and whirled higher and higher in a struggle to reach the four, slow, separate chords which end the concerto. On this level plateau they at last emerge into safety, and the end is in sight. The fourth and final chord crashes down, submerging all doubts, and a great burst of clapping and stamping follows it. It is some time before the stout man joins in this applause. Rather, it seems that he is quietly receiving part of it for himself, along with the soloist, the conductor, and the rest of the orchestra. But now, for the first time, he lowers the heavy lids of his eyes towards the ground and allows himself a discreet smile. Then he lifts his hands and begins to clap. His applauding heels shuffle the floor.

  The Swans

  THE PAINTSHOP WAS deservedly proud of its reputation as one of the best of its kind in the city. For here it was not simply a matter of selling paints and wallpaper. From morning till night the three men behind the counter offered a never-ending service of advice to customers, regardless of whether they made a sale or not. They were patient over the perpetual problem of matt, gloss or eggshell surface, grave and dedicated when consulted about a pattern for the lavatory wall, properly thunderstruck on hearing – for the hundredth time – the tragedy of the kitchen ceiling. It was no wonder the shop was crowded. Nevertheless, there were certain times in the day when they had it to themselves. Then the three of them – Joe Wheeler, Duncan and Jim Paton – would lean their elbows on the counter and look across to the long, black wall of partly-demolished houses on the other side of the street. ‘So are they ever going to pull the rest of it down?’ Joe Wheeler would say. ‘Or are we going to stand here and stare at that until kingdom-come?’

  These back walls – the only remaining part of the buildings – had a special fascination for the three men and had added a strange dimension to their day. There they saw ancient patches of striped and flowered wallpaper marked with pale oblongs where the pictures had been, chopped-off shelves lined with worn oilcloth, built-in cupboards whose blue and yellow paint had peeled down to the dead wood. Like old wounds opening, the varnish had cracked into deep strips along mantlepieces. Cinders still filled one or two grates, and pieces of half-burnt coal. A single grey curtain hung at a window without glass. Indeed, it was hard to escape the feeling that everyone who had ever looked out of these windows had been old and grey, that their very clothes had been grey as dust.

  The men in the paintshop knew every scar on the walls opposite – walls so lashed by rain, stripped and scoured by gales, that sometimes it seemed time was running backwards, making these the skeletons and ghosts of all the brand-new houses which, week in, week out, they heard described by customers. For here in the shop all talk was of the long-lasting, the indestructible nature of things – unscratchable surfaces, walls which would endure through lifetimes. The paint men could deliver strong warnings, but most of their time was spent reassuring their customers. And the customers could be very worried indeed. It seemed they had to believe that their own house would still stand up even if its inmost fabric was attacked with a hatchet.

  This afternoon, in the short lull after lunch, the men were behind the counter staring abstractedly across to the other side
. This was a city where whole streets of fine old houses had been needlessly torn down, but the half-demolished street had not been one of them. Jim Paton reminded them of this. ‘But you’ll agree these had to come down?’ he said. ‘Would you want the old, decayed stuff forever?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Joe. ‘No question of it. All I’m asking is why can’t they make a proper job of it when they’re at it? Knock the whole thing down at one go! Isn’t the city full of these left-overs?’ He turned aside from the others to attend to a woman who’d just come in. They heard him say, ‘Depends what you want it for – bedroom, bathroom, kitchen? Now kitchens and bathrooms get a lot more wear. You want something tough. But just take your time. Think about it.’ She retired again with a handful of information. Joe returned to the counter and again all three brooded on the scene in front. ‘The human species!’ Joe shook his head. ‘Are we a dirty, messy lot, then? I’m beginning to think it! Is there anything worse than the mess human beings can make when they really get down to it? Look at that!’

  They had been looking for months. In front of the wall of houses was a huge area of dust and rubble. Old bricks and blocks of cement, rusty pipes and strips of roofing were scattered around. And into this area had been thrown enough rubbish to fill a thousand wastebins – peel, newspaper and sodden carrier bags, tins, rags, strips of carpet and linoleum, milk bottles, whisky bottles, cartons and old vegetables. The chips of broken glass, in every size and colour, would have filled a cathedral window. ‘A stupid, messy species!’ pronounced Joe darkly again.

  The young couple who now entered the paintshop, however, did not appear to belong to this species. Joe hastened towards them, for beauty lightens the spirit and quickly puts strength back into the legs. They wished to see wallpapers and he took them to the shelf where a tome, heavy as the Domesday Book, lay open, displaying every sort of covering for walls. The girl turned the thick pages slowly, stopping at stripes and certain patterns of leaves. ‘Be sure it’s the right green,’ warned the man. ‘Remember the ceiling.’

  ‘Greens can be difficult,’ Joe murmured from behind. ‘Let me take it to the window shelf. You’ll maybe get them in a better light.’

  At the word ‘light’, the three of them turned and looked through the windows straight across to the long, black wall of broken houses. ‘The odd things that got left behind!’ exclaimed Joe. ‘Do you see there’s still coal and ashes in some of those fireplaces?’

  ‘I see that,’ said the young man, peering across.

  ‘And in winter I’ve seen snow and coal together. Not exactly what you’d expect to find in your own fireside, is it? And now the willowherb growing up those bathroom pipes! If they stand long enough there’ll be moss along the mantelpiece and mushrooms on the shelf.’

  The man now wandered away to look at colour lists. But the girl still stood at the window, looking across every now and then as if to match the peeling papers of the walls opposite with those pristine ones in the sample book. Yet Joe, watching her, sensed something else. Every instant her expression changed as though over there she saw first the black walls and then some flash of brilliance, darkness again, and again brightness. Was it a bird? thought Joe. A glint of red glass in the rubble? Or was she imagining the coal and snow together?

  ‘We see some odd things across there,’ he said. ‘Pigeons in the fireplaces. And I’ve seen myself – though you’ll never believe it – an owl on a cupboard shelf. In broad daylight too. I was stone sober at the time, and it was no pigeon – that’s for sure.’

  ‘But I do believe it,’ said the girl gravely.

  Joe studied her face again. ‘I believe it wasn’t such a bad-looking street in the old days,’ he said cautiously. ‘It got worse and worse through the years, and then I suppose it had to go. I only wish they’d bash the whole thing down and have done with it. I can’t abide this half-and-half business.’

  ‘Do you know something?’ said the girl. ‘I’ve actually heard a good deal about those houses – or at any rate one of them – I couldn’t say which. One of my mother’s aunts lived over there somewhere. Maybe fifty years ago, maybe more.’

  ‘Well, well, – do you tell me that? Now, that’s interesting!’ said Joe, still with some caution. He tried but failed to remember any good thing he’d said about any house in that row in the last twelve months.

  ‘When she was first married she took in lodgers. Short-term lodgers. Well, there were only two my mother ever heard her talk about. And they were swans. Swans from Russia.’

  ‘Swans!’

  ‘A couple of ballet-dancers from the theatre at the back. It was a company on a two-week visit – a well-known company. Swan Lake – they danced the whole of Swan Lake.’

  ‘Two swans from Russia!’ Joe gave a thin, long-drawn-out sound through his teeth, as though whistling them back across the ice-blown Steppes.

  ‘I don’t say they came straight from there,’ said the girl,

  ‘but they had Russian names. Their grandparents had been born there.’

  ‘Anyway, Russian or not, that explains it,’ said Joe.

  ‘Explains what?’

  Joe smiled to himself but did not answer. It explained the sudden changes in her expression as though she’d seen white birds fly over demolished chimneys, or sooty fireplaces sprinkled with snow as soft as swan feathers.

  ‘They worked hard enough on all accounts. How those dancers worked! At it from morning till night. The theatre changed hands long ago.’

  ‘A bingo hall,’ said Joe. ‘Well, you’ll find a lot of birds up there all right, though I doubt not many swans like those. Did she ever see them again?’

  ‘My mother says she kept in touch – sent a card now and then to the one who married and had a baby.’

  ‘So that was the end of dancing for her?’

  ‘I never heard.’

  ‘Ah well,’ Joe gently brooded on the loss. ‘Still, somebody got a swan for a mother.’

  The shop was filling up again. Turning, he was swept into a discussion on sandpaper. ‘Coarse ones for the tough jobs, and fine ones for the smooth, clean finish,’ he advised. He moved on. Up at the window the man had joined the young woman and they were going slowly again, page by page, through the book of wallpapers. From halfway down the room Joe watched till they’d come to the end of the book and had closed it up. The girl turned, gave him a smile and shook her head. So there was nothing they wanted. Nothing amongst the flowers, the leaves, the stripes or squares. In a way he was glad. He had pictured something different for her – a wall which was plain and so smooth you might well see, sweeping across as though through an indoor sky, the sharp, black bird shadows.

  Almost two months later, work started again on the wall of houses. First a vast hoarding went up around the area and for a few weeks became a gigantic scribbling board where the neighbourhood painted and chalked up its politics and religion, its messages of love and hate. Posters were stuck here and there. In no time the red and yellow slogans became stamped the one upon the other like shouts vying in shrillness. The houses behind stayed silent and almost hidden. Only the empty windows of their top floors and a few broken chimneys could be seen above the hoarding, and for a while it seemed that these chalked boards spoke for the present, while the houses spoke only of the past. Again the people in the paintshop lifted their eyes from the ordered patterns in their hands to stare across at the bizarre, criss-crossing patterns on the boards. Their feelings were mixed. Some shut this out and got on with the choice of stripe or square, as though to show that at least some area of the universe could be regulated. Others saw life in the haphazard scrawls – frantic, vulgar, moving, hateful – but life. Yet even the stuff on the boards did not last. The chalk was washed by rain and the paint chipped off by penknives. Wind tore the posters. The paper mouths of candidates for election, the vendors of quick salvation, were stripped of half their smile in one night’s gale.

  And one day the final demolishers moved in. All morning a great swinging b
all of metal battered the wall of the buildings. From behind the hoarding came a slow, steady rumbling of falling bricks, then the thick sigh of heavy dust subsiding. In places, the more stubborn stone took a fierce barrage of beating before it finally let go, but by midday it was all down. A huge powdery cloud hung in the air over that part of the city, making the noon light glow a dusky orange like that of the setting sun.

  All during the morning, whenever they had a moment, the men in the paint shop had looked across. One moment they had still seen the skeletal lines of upper windows. When they looked again, even these ghosts had vanished. There was only the dust-cloud slowly rising. Joe had been called away to advise on paint. It was the same old question. ‘Yes, long-lasting of course,’ he reassured, ‘but not ever lasting. I can’t promise that, I’m sorry to say – not for walls or anything else. I’ve had a bit of wear and tear in my time and it’s starting to show … Bit of the shine gets rubbed away, your brilliant gloss starts to go, chips flaking off here and there. It’s all the same – paint, skin, teeth, hair – well, it’s got to come sometime, hasn’t it?’

  ‘They get me worried,’ said Joe, as he returned to the counter, ‘those ones who want a signed and dated guarantee of immortality for themselves and their houses. We’re not gods!’