‘I mean the class system, Winnie. Here you are, an intelligent young woman, why should you wait on people who’re perfectly capable of looking after themselves?’
Startled, Winnie considered this. ‘Because I get paid for it. If they looked after themselves I wouldn’t have a job, would I?’
Mr Flyte laughed – a short, harsh bark. Winnie had never heard him laugh before. She looked at him. It was a funny feeling, looking at a blind person. You could inspect them like a piece of furniture. Come to think of it, Mr Flyte could do with a good spring-clean himself. His jacket was stained and even in this dim light she could see that his shirt was grubby. This was hardly surprising; she, of all people, knew how seldom he surrendered up any personal items of washing. His skin had the waxy look of somebody who never saw daylight. There was, however, something raffish about him – full lips nestling in his beard, a relaxed looseness to his limbs. She suspected foreign blood. In fact, if he spruced himself up he could be a fine-looking man though much good that could do him now. No wonder he had gone to seed.
Today his face was naked. At meals, and out in the street, Mr Flyte wore black spectacles. In his room, however, he often took them off. Somehow, despite the beard, his face looked more bare than the faces of ordinary men. At times he kept his eyes closed, which could be unnerving – was he dozing? When they were open his pupils fluttered at the top of his eyeballs, as if searching for some truth in the roof of his skull. Winnie’s heart melted. He had lost his sight for his country, the mustard gas had done it, and it felt wicked even to notice that his fingernails were dirty. After all, he didn’t.
Winnie plumped up the pillow, in its fresh pillowcase. The poor man – how could he, of all people, question the need for a helping hand? It must be terrible, being blind, the day dawning for everybody else while you remained in darkness – blackness – with no hope of even a glimmer. For ever. Until you died. The terror of it, being locked into your own thoughts. It must be like being bound in a bandage. The panic, the loneliness … The very idea brought Winnie out in goosepimples. It was hardly surprising that Mr Flyte’s behaviour was odd.
Winnie wondered what his last sight on earth had been. A German face, contorted with rage? A cloud of gas? Was it yellow, the gas? She had no idea. It didn’t bear thinking about. In fact she had only the vaguest idea of that parallel world into which men had been disappearing in such vast numbers for so many years. There were photographs in the paper, of course, but they looked posed, and the men who returned seldom spoke about what had happened to them. There was no way, for example, that she could ask Mr Spooner, upstairs, about his experiences in the trenches. He was in no state for anything of that kind.
Winnie unfolded the clean sheet and shook it out. At least Mr Flyte couldn’t see his room. That was a blessing, she supposed. It really was in a shocking state. The gutter outside was broken and damp had crept in. The wallpaper was blistered and peeling; one section had come away from the wall and hung down like a tongue. Chalky patches had bloomed down one side of the window, sprouting a sort of cotton wool. A substance resembling boiled toffee had also erupted beneath the cornice, where the wash-basin upstairs had leaked. The whole house was going to rack and ruin but what could Mrs Clay do, living on her war widow’s pension?
Winnie tucked the sheet under the mattress. They sent the bedlinen out to the laundry – it would be impossible to wash it all in the copper – and it returned smelling as fresh, as new-born, as a baby’s scalp. It brought a breath of hope into the house. She liked burying her nose in the crisp cotton. The scent made her long for a child of her own, a home of her own, but that was not meant to be. She had realised this some time ago.
‘And what do you look like, Winnie?’
Winnie didn’t falter. She laid the eiderdown on the bed. If she didn’t make a noise, perhaps Mr Flyte would think she had already gone. Where, oh where, was Mrs Clay?
Mr Flyte stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Come on, Winnie. Don’t be coy.’
‘I can’t say, sir.’ Winnie bundled up the dirty sheets and blundered out of the room.
*
Ralph stood still on the top landing. No sound came from the Spooners’ room. What did the little girl do all day, alone with her father? Sometimes she emerged, pattering down the stairs, to run errands but most of the time she was shut up there with him, the door closed. There was no question of school. What did he do all day? Before he went to the Front Mr Spooner had worked as a french polisher, but even then he was a shy, retiring man. He had left the house early in the morning and the little family took their evening meal alone, before the other tenants ate. Occasionally he had played chess with Ralph’s father in the back room but the games were played in a concentrated silence. Each man drank a bottle of stout. That was in another life, now. It was hard to believe that a mere four years had passed. Now it was like having a ghost in the house – a presence, a creak of the floorboards. Mrs Spooner collected the supper for the three of them and took it upstairs. Nobody remarked upon her husband or his condition, and Ralph could hardly bring the subject up. Even Winnie just rolled her eyes and busied herself with something else.
Ralph took a breath and turned the knob of Boyce Argyle’s door. He stepped in and was flooded in sunlight. Though no fire had been lit for months it felt like the warmest spot in the house. This was because, during winter, it was the only room that caught the sun. The railway bridge blocked the lower floors but Mr Argyle’s window was above the gloom; outside was blue sky and a view of rooftops. Only now did Ralph realise that it was a dazzling January day. The windowsill was still encrusted with pigeon droppings; Boyce had liked feeding the birds. How many times had they landed there before giving up?
Down in the yard Winnie was beating carpets. He heard the faint, rhythmic thud, like jungle drums. His mother was out shopping. She had taken the dog, so there was no danger of Brutus padding up to this room to seek his master.
Winnie had made up the bed, as if its occupant had just popped out and would return at any moment. This was a relief; Ralph had dreaded finding a stripped mattress. The room had been tidied – Boyce lived in a state of spectacular disorder – but otherwise everything was as it had always been. The watercolour of Colwyn Bay hung on the wall, its frame stuck around with ticket stubs from variety theatres – the Alhambra, the Tivoli, the London Pavilion. Upholstery held no charms for Boyce; he planned to go on the stage. ‘The smell of the greasepaint!’ he said, ‘the roar of the crowd!’ Ralph would sit on the bed while Boyce practised his routines, twirling his cane and singing:
I’m Burlington Bertie, I rise at ten-thirty
And reach Kempton Park around three …
He taught Ralph to foxtrot, bundling him around the room like a chest of drawers.
The theatre, of course, was known for its fast women. ‘I’m catnip to them,’ said Boyce, ‘I’ve got the knack, it’s easy when you know how.’ Ralph was enthralled by Boyce’s amorous conquests. The chap was a sophisticate, through and through. Once he said, with airy insouciance: ‘Women are cheap in Rio de Janeiro.’ He knew the names of all the soubrettes on the London stage and had pinned their photographs to his wardrobe door – Gladys Cooper, Madie Scott and his latest hot potato Vesta Carr. She was Ralph’s favourite too, because her photograph was the most intoxicating – leaning against a pillar, a come-hither smile on her lips, she was draped in strategically placed ostrich feathers that left little to the imagination. Boyce declared himself in love with her and that he would follow her to the ends of the earth. She was a regular fixture at the Tivoli, where Boyce would applaud her from the gallery, and in fact it was after her most thrillingly suggestive number, If you’ve got it let me see it that the lights came up and they carried the recruiting tables on to the stage.
Ralph missed Boycie keenly. Almost as keenly, in fact, as he missed his father, something that caused him a certain amount of guilt. Boycie was the elder brother he had never had. But it was more than that. The fellow made him laugh. H
is subversive presence had lightened the somewhat oppressive atmosphere of the house. He opened up another life for Ralph, the possibilities of it; he pulled back the curtains to reveal a stage filled with gaiety and illusion. Who was to tell which was the more real – the daily grind at home or a world of wine, women and song? Boyce returned with gifts from this other place – a wilting rose, paper twists of sugar which he stole from West End restaurants and which Ralph hoarded like gold dust. In fact, nowadays it was gold dust.
Ralph knew that Boyce wasn’t dead. He was too full of life. He couldn’t be stopped, at eighteen years, with Ralph growing older and slowly catching him up. In another two years he himself would be eighteen, he would overtake him with Boyce still stopped, it didn’t bear thinking about, it made Ralph’s stomach turn over. Boyce was playing one of his practical jokes.
That night when the Zeppelin came over – that night, for instance, when they all rushed out into the street, the searchlights criss-crossing the sky and old Mr Crocker, from opposite, standing there in his nightshirt shouting and pointing.
‘Where is it?’ asked Boyce.
Mr Crocker flung up his arm. His nightshirt rode up. Underneath he was bare, the bits dangling. ‘There!’
‘Where, Mr Crocker? I can’t see it!’ said Boyce, and the old man flung up his arm again like a railway signal. Up went the nightshirt.
‘There, boy, you blind or something?’
‘Where?’
Up went the nightshirt, revealing the turkey giblets. Boyce and Ralph had snorted with laughter.
‘Oh yes, sir, I can see it now,’ said Boyce. ‘It’s not as big as people say.’
No, Boyce would turn up. ‘Only joking,’ he would grin, stepping through the door in his khaki uniform, slinging down his kitbag. He was always leaving things in the hallway for people to trip over.
Ralph fetched the book from the shelf. He should be studying for his exam but his mother would be out for most of the morning, what with all the queuing. He sat down on the bed, the springs creaking. Thud-thud went his heart. Down in the yard Winnie thumped the rugs. Had she ever looked inside the book? The Human Figure in Motion, its title, gave no hint of what lay within. Boyce had borrowed it from an art student friend of his and never given it back.
Ralph’s palms were moist. He turned the pages one by one, searching for his favourite photographs. Woman walking up incline carrying bucket. Woman standing and ironing. Woman pouring water. The rows of photographs showed a woman performing these humdrum tasks, and she was bare. Completely naked. The sight was deeply, and intoxicatingly, shocking. Somebody called Eadweard Muybridge had taken the photographs but the women – for there were several different ones – seemed unaware of his presence. What sort of women could they be, to expose their bodies like that? Nobody he knew, for sure. They had breasts and buttocks and – most transfixing of all – dense black triangles of hair between their legs. Woman picking up broom.
Ralph’s heart hammered. He knew, of course, that underneath her clothes Winnie was bare but what made him blush was that she didn’t know he knew, that he was trying not to think about it. Not just her – other women too. Women he saw in the street, unaware of his penetrating eyes; the female students at his bookkeeping course. His mother was out of bounds; he couldn’t even think of that.
Ralph thought: if Boyce really is dead, I can keep the book.
This seemed the most shocking thought of all. He snapped the book shut and sat there. Dust danced in the shafts of sunlight. Winnie said that dust was made of human skin, somebody had told her it was made out of tiny particles of the stuff. That was what she swept up, day after day, and beat out of the carpets, just like the woman in Woman beating carpet. She was inhaling the inhabitants of the house, alive and dead. Perhaps she was breathing in his father.
It was hard to believe his father was dead, with no body sent back to them. A parcel had arrived containing his personal items but that was all. His commanding officer had written a letter: Corporal Clay was a brave and trustworthy soldier, liked by all who knew him, but there was nothing about the manner in which he had died, or whether he had suffered, or what there was left of him – if, in fact, anything had been left at all.
Ralph couldn’t speak to anyone about this. He certainly couldn’t speak to his mother. Any mention of her husband upset her and they avoided mentioning his name. Her sorrows were profound, but grief had closed her off from him. She had grown so pale and thin that his heart ached for her. And yet here he was looking at dirty pictures, just as he had been looking at dirty pictures when the telegram came.
Ralph, up on the top floor of the house, didn’t hear the sound of the front door. He was thinking: I shall look after my mother as long as I live. She has only me, in the world.
You’re going to have to be a very brave young man.
Ralph got to his feet and put the book back on the shelf. Never again would he indulge himself by gazing at its contents.
It’s about your father.
Just then he became aware of a sound. It was Brutus, climbing the stairs. He was looking for his master. The final flight was uncarpeted; Ralph heard the dog’s claws scrabbling on the wood.
Brutus pushed open the door and came into the room. He carried a bone in his mouth.
Padding up to Ralph, tail wagging, he dropped it at his feet.
‘My word,’ said Ralph. ‘Where did you get that?’
It was a big bone, a leg bone of some kind, streaked with blood. Brutus gazed at Ralph, his tail waving from side to side.
‘I know where you’ve been,’ said Ralph. ‘You’ve been to the butcher’s.’
A string of saliva hung from Brutus’s jaws; it grew heavier and dropped on to the floor. With his nose, the dog pushed the bone towards Ralph’s foot.
‘No thank you, kind sir,’ said Ralph.
He kicked it away and Brutus pounced on it. The dog lowered himself on to his haunches and tried to gnaw at it, but the thing was too big. He inspected it, his head tilted to one side, then he held it down with his paws and started to lick it tenderly, like a mother licking her new-born baby. He licked off the blood with his pink tongue.
Only then did Ralph become aware of another sound. It floated up from deep within the house, from the back parlour, and for a moment it took him by surprise. A long time had passed – years, in fact – since he had last heard it.
His mother, home from the butcher’s shop, was playing the piano.
Chapter Two
CAGE HOTELS, LIMITED.
These HOTELS are pleasantly and airily situated, in pretty parts of France, with excellent views FACING THE FRONT. Electric and Barbed Wires Throughout. Good Shooting in the Vicinity.
ATTENDANCE FREE.
‘You’ll find our charges very light
Compared with those you had last night.’
The Wipers Times, Ypres, 1917
Mr Turk’s butcher’s shop was a thriving emporium that dominated the northernmost end of the high street. It straddled three frontages, having swallowed up the two neighbouring shops to one side. The far shop had belonged to a pork butcher. Like many such establishments it had been run by a German family and when war broke out and patriotic fervour gripped the nation a local mob had smashed its windows, ransacked the place and flung its fitments into the street. The Weissmans had fled back to Düsseldorf and Mr Turk had taken over the lease.
That made the shop in between – a hardware store – a most attractive proposition. Like all good businessmen Neville Turk could sense the vulnerability of a fellow man, just as a lion can sniff out the weakest creature in a herd, and he gambled on the fragile health of the man who ran it, whose only son had gone down with the Lusitania. Sure enough the shop rapidly declined, the butcher bought the freehold at an advantageous price and his empire-building could begin.
Workmen arrived to knock down the interconnecting walls and install electric lighting. Where did Mr Turk find them? It was a mystery to the local shopkeepers, for stron
g, healthy young men were a disappearing species and their own small repairs remained undone. Mr Turk, however, was a powerful man. He had connections. Rumour had it that he was a Freemason, funny handshakes, hush-hush, and everyone knew that Freemasons had plenty of fingers in plenty of pies. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Within a matter of weeks vast, modern refrigerators had been heaved into the back regions, mahogany counters and display cabinets had been hammered into place, and Turk Quality Butchers was reopened for business.
And it prospered. Neville Turk knew a carcass. He could read its density of muscle, its weight of meat to water, the length of time it had been hung. He knew, by the subtlest tension in its fibres, the extent of the animal’s distress at its moment of slaughter and hence the tenderness of its flesh. Down at Smithfield, in the freezing dawn, he prodded and sniffed; he sized up a flayed beast as a man would size up a whore, raising his eyebrows and giving its pimp a nod. He struck a hard bargain but he was respected for it; pressing flesh both alive and dead, closing the deal.
Back at his shop he was a consummate salesman. Elderly ladies were charmed by his compliments, he made them skittish. The drabbest housewives felt their step quicken as they approached his shop, and even domestics, whom he could treat brusquely, felt themselves blushing as he sized them up while sharpening his knives. Not everybody took to him; he was considered too big for his boots. But like all powerful men he exuded a magnetism, a sense that in his proximity life warmed up.
Besides, he was forty years old and still a bachelor. This gave his presence an added frisson, that of a stallion on the loose. It was generally considered his mother’s fault that he had never married. Mrs Turk was a tyrannical old biddy who kept her son in order – the man seemed afraid of her! It was comic, the way he kowtowed – he, of all people. Mrs Turk had worked at the cash till. Nothing escaped her as she sat in her glass booth, her eyes swivelling from side to side like a mechanical doll at a fairground, on the lookout for a predatory female who might steal away her son. But she had died a year earlier, during the big freeze of 1917, and now Neville lived alone above the shop. Whether he was courting or not, nobody could tell; he certainly spruced himself up, of an evening, and sallied forth but he had always led a mysterious life. The stamina of the man, and up at four in the morning!
In The Dark Page 3
