by Paul Binding
And now Mrs. Fuller was showing me her two downstairs sitting-rooms, in one of which it might be my privilege to sit on a weekday evening. Here I noticed a copy of The Channel Ports Advertiser spread out on one of the occasional tables. In a few weeks’ time, I thought, its pages would be carrying articles written by myself. The room itself was extremely, well, pretty with rose-patterned wallpaper, chintz-covered sofa, and green felt carpet. Definitely not a place for a fellow to sprawl out comfortably, let alone have a smoke at the end of his working-day.
Time now to go upstairs. On the first floor were a bathroom and two bedrooms, the door of one of which was ajar. Mrs. Fuller’s footsteps slowed down as we passed it, as if she half-wanted me to peek into it, which of course I did. It had an unmistakably masculine air, containing a tallboy, at least a dozen prints on the wall of Greek- and Roman-looking subjects, and a dressing table on which different-sized hairbrushes with tortoiseshell backs were neatly arrayed.
“The occupant is absent,” Mrs. Fuller explained, without further elaboration. “Now I shall take you up to your room, Mr. Bridges. It will be your sanctuary.”
Well, that boded well. With increased enthusiasm for this place becoming my new quarters I followed Mrs. Fuller up a very steep flight of stairs to the top floor. She then opened the door of the room on our left, like some magician performing a favorite trick, and truth to tell I instantly wanted to applaud her. The room she revealed was not large and was furnished very simply—bed, bedside table, wash-stand, chest of drawers, small dressing table, bookcase, desk, two chairs, and on the floor three ragrugs—but more congenial to an independent bloke like myself than I had dared to hope for.
“I’ll really be able to write here to my heart’s content!” I exclaimed.
“And it’s not cut off from the world outside either!” said Mrs. Fuller. She pointed toward the dormer window. My eyes followed her, and momentarily I was baffled, even unnerved. Had I not reached the top of the house? Well, you wouldn’t think so to look at all the water on the glass panes. This room, so like a ship’s cabin in shape and size, might have lain below the Plimsoll Line.
“March is certainly coming in like a lion,” Mrs. Fuller said (it was the fifth of March), “but I’ll open the window nevertheless . . .”
She suited action to words, and straightaway rain swept into the room in cold anger. Nevertheless, I couldn’t stop myself moving closer to the open dormer, and what I saw through the onrush, beyond the tumble of gray roofs, walls and gardens below, made me gasp: the broad, rough, striped back of some primeval monster stretching itself under the sombre, laden sky. Perhaps it was half a minute before I realized I was looking at the sea, at the English Channel here at its narrowest.
“The sea will be your constant companion,” Mrs. Fuller was telling me, “as it is mine. To lie at night, when one is full of sorrow, and to listen to it, in all its various moods—that’s the most wonderful thing in the world!” An image came to me of this woman in her bed a mere one floor below me—though not directly underneath, thank heavens!—catching the sounds of the sea with the delicate shells of her ears! I must beware of such pictures. “And most days—though sadly not today—you can see from the window the French coast. When people ask me if I’ve ever been abroad, I say, ‘Well, I see France practically every day of my life.’”
How to respond to so arch a remark? “I haven’t been abroad, myself,” I said. “So seeing France out of my bedroom window will be quite something for me, Mrs. Fuller. I’ll be very happy to be your lodger. If you’ll have me, that is!”
Mrs. Fuller graciously inclined her Grecian head: “I shall be happy to have you, Mr. Bridges! But I just have one question to ask you.”
“Please, ma’am!”
Imagine my astonishment when she inquired: “Are you cheerful?”
Hoping I didn’t betray my reaction, I replied, “I truly think I am!”
“Cheerfulness makes the world go ’round, I believe.”
“So it is said.” By Mr. Hough at any rate! I could have added.
“Edmund—Mr. Hough—considers you cheerful, Mr. Bridges.”
“Does he?” I said. “That’s most kind of him!”
We had shut the door of “my” room behind us and were back on the landing. This last exchange had disconcerted me; behind it lay something I obviously couldn’t yet know about. To change the subject, I pointed at the door on the other side of the landing. “Is that where your other lodger lives?”
“Other lodger?” she repeated sharply. “I have no other lodger. That is my Mercy Room, Mr. Bridges.”
My face must have displayed my puzzlement.
“Mercy Room?” Not a term I knew.
“I wonder Edmund—Mr. Hough—didn’t tell you, Mr. Bridges. Living on my own—except for dear Sarah, of course—I constantly feel I don’t do enough for others. So from time to time I make that room available for somebody in need. I like to think that every now and again I’ve been the means of easing distress.”
What was I expected to say here?
“Oh, I’m sure you have been, Mrs. Fuller!” I managed. Would she often make these demands on me, this woman in lilac resembling some house-bound seabird?
“One simply has done the best one could!” said Mrs. Fuller, apparently disinclined to leave the landing and traipse back down the stairs. “Whatever else can be said of me, I have been merciful. Because of experiences of my own, my heart goes out readily to the sorrowful.” I didn’t think the time was ripe for me to hear all this. Perhaps I should make some impromptu witticism to change the subject completely, but I couldn’t think of one. “George, my husband,” she went on, “disappeared—as the good Edmund Hough no doubt told you.”
No, the good Edmund Hough most certainly had not told me anything of the sort, had merely written the plain words “the late Mr. Fuller.”
“Disappeared?” I repeated interrogatively. Not that disappearance was all that rare an occurrence to a newspaper-man like myself. In London’s dockland people disappeared all the time, and, if ever found, turned out to have been dispatched horribly.
“Disappearance is not easy to accept, let me tell you,” said Mrs. Fuller, her eyes blazing at me her wish that I should not accept it easily either. “That is why I must have a cheerful person in my house as lodger.”
Oh Lord, I exclaimed to myself, so that’s to be my role here, is it? Perhaps Mrs. Fuller too felt she had struck the personal note rather too loudly, for turning herself ’round to descend the stairs, she said, “Well, there are probably some domestic matters that we should now establish once and for all.”
These matters seemed, as I went down the stairs behind her, to proceed from the back of her bent, elegant neck. Perhaps just as well; I wouldn’t have wanted to look her in the eye. Not only was she charging me a pretty steep monthly sum, and not only did she expect me unfailingly to pay it in advance, but she required a deposit (two months’ rent), which she would not refund me till the end of the calendar year, nine months off! Also she didn’t expect me to entertain visitors without her permission, which she reserved her right to refuse.
“I must have a peaceful, uncomplicated life after all I’ve been through. I have a right to ask for that. Besides, Castelaniene is my own house.”
Two steps behind her, I had no alternative but to acquiescence. By the time we were once more down in the hall, we had fixed the day I should move in. Easter Monday falling on April 6 that year, Edmund Hough had decided I should start work on the Wednesday of that same week, Wednesday being the paper’s publication day. I would therefore take up my residence at Mrs. Fuller’s on Tuesday, April 7..
Just as I was debating what manner would be best for saying goodbye—
“Now you’ve met everybody—or almost!” Mrs. Fuller cried, “There they are! I was hoping you’d see them before you left.” She pointed to the stairway leading down to the basement, that region under the wall-eyed Sarah’s sway. Two pairs of pricked-up ears showed in the interstices of the banis
ters; below them narrow green eyes glinted in shadowed pointed heads. “Japheth and Ham,” Mrs. Fuller told me. “Their mother—called Mrs. Noah, naturally—must be out catching mice. She is an animal with a very particular part to play in existence. But you’ll be friends with all three ere long.”
“I’m sure I will,” I replied. “I’ve a way with animals.” All my landladies would have agreed on that. Probably nobody cares for animals quite so ardently as someone who has had a lonely childhood. From the mice I rescued out of traps to the jackdaw with an injured wing I found in our backyard, from the variety of half-abandoned dogs who roamed South London to the local organ-grinder’s shivering pet monkey, my affections had gone out to them as fellow beings and friends.
I decided I’d walk back to the station, and distance be blowed! After the intensity of my interview with Mrs. Fuller, the continuing rain refreshed rather than discomfited me. As it assailed me, I thought, I’m going to share my new home with two absences—one from that first-floor bedroom with the tallboy and the classical prints, the other from the Mercy Room. What an odd situation to be in!
From the end of St. Ethelberga’s Road I saw it again, but now more extensively because of the lower vantage-point: the back of that mighty primeval beast, the sea, flexing its muscles under the still discharging clouds. Gulls wheeled inland, away from its power, crying as they did so.
Inevitably I spent my last weeks in South London finishing things off at the paper and sorting through my stuff at my lodgings. I had accumulated very little in my twenty-three years of existence, having inherited next to nothing when my parents died—separately, but, in my view of events, at a single stroke. I had fewer than forty books, some of them my father’s, three postcard-albums, and a cheap leather-framed print of Camberwell Green. Some clothes, some shoes. Ah, well! The way in which my home had come to an end had made me suspicious of putting trust in possessions, and chary about acquiring more of ’em. I suppose I have stayed that way, indeed seen to it that I have.
One afternoon I took a walk, the first in well over a year, to the house at the back of Grove Lane, Camberwell, to which my parents had moved when I was two; we’d left it when I was sixteen for two wretched years of chopping-and-changing. Small trees, still leafless, guarded the buff-bricked façades of the small terrace to which it belonged. In the bay-window of our former parlor a slender girl my own age, her dark hair piled high on her head, was smiling to herself as she watered a potted geranium. Its bright red flowers matched her cheeks. Behind the girl I could see a lamp, a sofa, two deep armchairs, all the paraphernalia of comfortable family life. I never was to learn this sweet-faced flower-tender’s name, but the mere sight of her was welcome—made me more cheerful as, apparently, I would have to be in Dengate. Inside that very house I had listened to the incessant arguments of my mother and father, and the forlorn attempts of our maid, Doris, to smooth them over.
“Oh, madam,” she’d say, “you know what they say about luck. That it always turns. The old sun’s got to come out some time.”
That night I woke up at 4:00 a.m., something I’d hardly ever done before. Whatever were these extraordinary sounds I was hearing? Increasing in volume they drove sleep from my head. Be calm, I told myself, because if you’re not, you won’t find out what’s going on and so save yourself from possible danger!
Outside, beating the walls of my lodging-house, hammering at the roof-tiles overhead, a wind was blowing the likes of which the humdrum hugger-mugger of South London had surely never entertained before. Invigorated by its noise rather than fearful, I clambered out of bed, and stumbled over to the window. What a scene of violence! Cry havoc! Trees—planes, birches, beeches, sycamores—rocking frantically to and fro; wooden fences creaking, bending, loosening, splitting; dustbins toppling over, then rolling so helplessly their contents fell out; windows rattling as if their frames were being tugged free of the brick walls. But no people anywhere. Well, what sane human being would be out in this . . . hell? The only living creature I eventually spied was a white cat who shot like a streak of electric snow from behind a fallen dustbin, off into I-couldn’t-make-out-where. I’ve seen him in dreams since. His plight apart, this entire hypnotic show exhilarated me, might even, I felt, have been put on for my benefit. I didn’t once think of my current sharp-tongued landlady or her fat, spoilt, middle-aged son. They had stopped being real to me once I’d learned I was to move to Dengate.
The next morning everybody was talking about the storm, which had spent itself out ’round about six o’clock. Its visitation on London, it soon transpired, was as nothing compared to its vehement and continuing harassment of the southern Home Counties, in particular the Kent coast and the ports of Dover and Dengate. Just my luck, I thought, that the Channel Port I’m bound for has its greatest drama in years before I arrive there with my journalist’s skills.
Down in Dengate the gale proper began about 4.30 a.m. on Friday, March 27, and didn’t abate all day. A brief lull followed in the small hours of Saturday, and then up it flared again, raging for the rest of the night and the whole of the next day. Even for the notorious spring equinox, it was excessively savage. For precedents townsfolk had to scour records and the memories of the aged. At its fiercest the prevailing southwesterly wind roared through the Straits of Dover (at the end of which Dengate stands) at a speed of forty-seven knots per hour, top force on the Beaufort Scale for a “Strong Gale.” It whipped the high waves that it created with such strength that their crests became spray which dangerously reduced visibility for all navigators of the Dover Strait, the busiest seaway on the globe. On those two dreadful days of March 1885 many a ship making her way through its narrowest section was in such distress that coastguards were overstretched ’round the clock and had to call for reinforcements.
Though in London the Thames swelled and writhed and splashed its filthy water onto the embankment, we city-folk were unable quite to appreciate the turmoil on the coast. I recalled Mrs. Fuller opening the attic window for me at Castelaniene, and showing me a sea I mistook for a broad-backed prehistoric monster. And now that monster had revealed its innermost terrifying self, even to those who declared themselves familiar with and even fond of it.
Well, eventually my very last evening in London came ’round (as I sometimes thought it never would) and Will Postgate, the fellow at the paper I was closest to, had chosen to play the biggest part in it. Three years and six months older than myself, Will had gone straight from school to the newspaper. He was already that desirable being “a seasoned pressman,” and managed all our sports and entertainments features. Printers never intimidated him; his own father being a professional binder and book-designer, Will had, he said, “imbibed printers’ ink with my mother’s milk.” Nor did the trade’s well-known radicalism ever scare him. On the contrary, having grown up with politics, he held confidently progressive opinions himself. He also had an enviable ability to draw—amusingly and accurately. Every so often he’d grab a piece of paper, and before you knew where you were, he’d covered it with comical likenesses of the company present. Will was tireless in his endeavors to bring my education up to scratch. My innocence amazed him—about politics, how society worked, and more intimate matters too, these last prompting him to arrange a trip to Limehouse I will never be able to forget. But for all my deficiencies Will liked me well enough to introduce me to friends of his outside the paper, some of them reporters elsewhere, a lively, not to say racy bunch, with whom I was proud to associate.
And they all came along for my farewell bash at a restaurant in Dean Street, Soho, for mock-turtle soup and first-class steak-and-kidney pie, with both beer and full-bodied red wine to wash the meal down: Walter Pargeter, Ben Jackson, Lionel Cartwright, Arthur Maltby. They live on now, caught in that moment, so significant to me, me so insignificant to them, in the lightning pencil sketch Will did of us all that evening, myself a stripling by comparison with the others, my mouth agape with admiration.
An invisible guest present mig
ht not have realized that my own imminent departure from London was the occasion for the dinner, so heated was the talk on other matters—on whether MPs should take a religious oath when they weren’t believers, on the appropriate role of trade unions, on what the term “socialist” properly denoted . . .
For some quarter of an hour I had not spoken a single word, when Will, flushed with wine and argument, stood up to say: “Gentlemen, we must now put the cut-and-thrust of discourse behind us. I speak, I know, for all of us here when I say that we shall greatly regret our friend Martin Bridges being no longer in our midst, enlivening us with his repartee and comic turns. And I myself shall feel a bit under-employed now I no longer have to supervise his sentimental education. Instead I shall have to let Life—or rather Life as it manifests itself in a certain remote Kent port, Dengate by name—continue my good work. I could end my little speech with a few extra words of wisdom about The Ladies, the pleasures and the perils thereof, but will pass on to Humanity itself, and will recite for all our benefits some stirring lines:
‘The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.
Sow seed,—but let no tyrant reap;
Find wealth,—let no impostor heap;
Weave robes,—let not the idle wear;
Forge arms,—in your defence to bear.’”
“Doggerel, Postgate, doggerel,” said Lionel Cartwright.
“Doggerel by Percy Bysshe Shelley himself,” said Will. “I have composed a banjo accompaniment to it but forgot to bring my instrument along.”
For my part I felt quite embarrassingly moved by the recitation, though as much by Will’s voice, sufficiently loud to make our fellow diners turn ’round, as by the actual words themselves, which struck me, for all their nobility, as a mite impracticable.
After such soul-stirring stuff the actual goodbyes bidden me were a bit anticlimactic.
