Fowlers End

by Gerald Kersh

  “I wasn’t prepared to look so far ahead,” I said, with a heavy heart. “And when do you expect to have this child?”

  “Our little baby? Well, really, you know you can’t say to within a day. Do you know the signs of the zodiac?” “No, I’m sorry to say I don’t—except one or two,” I said.

  “Well,” she said triumphantly, “as I’ve worked it out on my little calendar, Eric should be born under the sign of Sagittarius, the Archer.” A new thought struck her: “We could call him Sagittarius—or what do you think? Too much of a mouthful? I know! Archer Laverock!”

  “They would simply call him Archie in the end,” I said gloomily.

  Meanwhile the beasts of the zodiac were roaring and whinnying and bleating in my ears, like the zoo on that illomened dawn when they butchered the horse. This accursed zodiac spun in my mind as a roulette wheel spins when your last chip is on the table: lions, goats, fishes, twins, bulls, rams, all ran into a sickening blur. Then a number came up, so to speak: the sign of Sagittarius. I shouted, “Wait a minute! Did you say Sagittarius?”

  “The Archer,” said June Whistler. “I looked it up in the office. It means that Eric will be a leader of men. Headstrong, perhaps, but better than a Pisces.”

  “But my dear,” I said, “I’ve just remembered—the sign of Sagittarius covers the month of November.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “This is only March,” I said.

  “I know, darling. I’m at least five days gone. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  A well-known hangman once told me that men reprieved at the foot of the gallows have a tendency to fall into a deep sleep. This is exactly what I did; and when I awoke about half an hour later, there was June Whistler looking gravid, with her feet up, baby wool and crochet hook in hand, murmuring to herself, “Knit one, slip one, knit two together,” and consulting the Directions Supplement in a magazine called Little Mother.

  “I think pink is a sissy color,” she said, “so I’m using white wool. I think it’s a good omen. I read it up. Belisarius was the greatest general that ever lived, darling, and the greatest archer of his time; and his name means ‘White Prince.’... Oh, I used to think that it would be nice to be a man, but one thing you will never know—the feel of a little baby beating under your heart.”

  “You’ve got something there,” I said, picking up my suitcase. “And now I must be on the job. I’ll see you Sunday.”

  “Do you see any big blue veins in my breast?”

  “I can’t say that I do.”

  “It says in the book that the labia turn mauve and get tumid. Am I mauve?”

  “Normal,” I said.

  “Tumid?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “What is tumid? Because if it means frightened, I’m not, you know.”

  Before I left to visit my mother, who lived at Turners Green, June Whistler said, “If it’s a girl I’ll call her Labia.”

  What was the use of arguing?

  Turners Green is a middle-class, respectably established kind of Fowlers End; only it is situated in a westerly direction near a creek by the River Brent, the official name of which is Nobbut Creek but which the local youth calls “F.L.” Junction, because of what gets washed up there. Goodness knows from where these flaccid tubes of latex drift, or what wicked current carries them; but the fact remains. When young, I believed that they had something to do with aqueous animals—like, say, cuttlefish bones—and started to collect them. It was a terrible moment when, in my innocence, I brought the whole three hundred into the sitting room in a boot box when my mother had visitors for tea. She put them in the dustbin with the fire tongs, and when I reported to her that the dustman had said, “These quiet ones are always the worst” and asked her what he meant, she boxed my ears.

  “If only your father were alive!” she cried. I knew that if that kindly, ineffectual man had been around he would have gone into his study to stifle his laughter under a green cushion, and then, having had his laugh out, said something like this: “Dan, my boy, never touch one of those things again. Otherwise you will come out in blotches and your head will fall off.”

  There was a time, though, when Turners Green was very genteel—that is to say, inaccessible to the common herd—one of those outlying suburbs where people like ourselves made cliques and wouldn’t talk to anyone but ourselves. We used to have a variety of nods and smiles—big ones for the vicar and his wife, medium-sized ones for the tradesmen, and the merest smidgeons of smiles cut off in that central cleft of the upper lip (by means of which zoologists associate men with fishes) for the working classes. There really was a Green there, too; and it was quite a Green when I was about three feet high—full of shrubberies and fraught with mystery. I never quite got over my astonishment at the fact that, when I was eighteen, I measured its periphery in one hundred and three strides, and the trees were dwarfed. It is bordered by a graveled path and used to be presided over by an old man with a badge and a drooping mustache who was notable for his hatred of children. His name was Marsh. Marsh by name, Marsh by nature. Whenever he saw one of us he would double misshapen, earthy fists like prize Idaho potatoes and shout in the most debased kind of Hampshire accent, “Git orf my grass, or I’ll tan that arse orf that!” There is a gasworks in the vicinity (I wonder how I failed, accidentally, to set light to it) and, over all, the gentle thunder of the railway, to which I used to listen before I fell asleep. I still love that exciting clash of shunting and the desolate wail of whistles in the night.

  We lived on what they called the Bridge, close to All Souls Church. The psychiatrists will say that there must be something wrong with me but, although my life there in my infancy was a chapter of accidents, I cannot think of the place without affection. There comes back into memory that smell of peace and quiet that seemed to come over the world between the wars, when we were too young to prophesy.... At the foot of the street was the Broadway, in which there was a cinema where Tarzan of the Apes was to be seen; and a progressive furniture shop that went in for hire-purchase. God knows how, but an American had found his way there and opened a dry-cleaning shop with a steam pressing machine—made by Braithwaite, he told me, and weighing nearly a ton. Every evening at sunset he would walk into the middle of the street, take a little Union Jack out of his pocket, blow his nose into it, and return. Nobody paid the slightest attention to him. We all thought that it must be, quite simply, a patterned handkerchief.

  I always had a catching at the throat when I went home. True, everything and everybody were smaller and shabbier; but I could not forget my delight in the places where I used to spend my pocket money, fourpence, on a copy of the Magnet Library and a chocolate-coated marshmallow bar. Let it be said to my credit on the Everlasting Plane that I always saved a penny to give away. Then I would go and lie on my stomach on the Green, reading the misadventures of Billy Bunter and voluptuously eating the marshmallow bar. Then I would go home, pilfer whatever I could find in the larder—half a dozen apples, bread and butter, pie, cake, cold potatoes, or anything like that—and go away to work up an appetite for tea, still reading Billy Bunter.

  And there was a meal I always loved: my father kindly and dignified, my mother busy and solicitous, and Raymond the servant proud of me because of my appetite, which was voracious....

  After tea, plethoric with all that I could consume, I sometimes walked to the public library, which was situated on the other side of the Green until the Germans bombed it under the false impression that it was Whitehall, and get myself, if I were lucky, a bound volume of Chums or The Boys’ Own Paper.

  After Snellgrove-in-the-Vale, this was bliss. Indeed, I was happy there—everybody loved me, I loved everybody; nobody pestered me, I troubled nobody. Why, sometimes I was so delighted at the realization of my happiness that my eyes filled with tears and I gave my marshmallow money—twopence—to a beggar in the street. For we had a beggar; he pretended to sell bootlaces, and said he had lost his legs in the Boer War. Apart from having
my hair cut, they were good times.

  I remembered, as I made my way there, with what ineffable glee I used to greet my father when he came up to me with his hands behind his back, looking severely juridical. I knew what was coming. Up would come one of his fists, clenched in a threatening gesture. Then it would open and I would see on his palm a shilling. He was treating me to the cinema....

  Such recollections as these bring into my mind an image. It is of a shabby-genteel man in a pub, who has a red nose; starting off with observations on the state of the weather, the government, and the world at large, he works his way to the present state of his finances, and the better days he has seen. In the end you buy him a pint of beer. Your memory, when it gets around to the child that was father of the boy, is just such a maudlin liar, on the bum for buckshee tears—for which, from time to time, you have a craving when the ducts are dry and there is nothing to cry about. As for my youth, considering it carefully, I wouldn’t have it over again for any consideration. Dr. Faustus was all wet; neither by divine nor diabolical agency can you have your cake and eat it. Youth is a dream, middle age a forlorn hope, and old age a nostalgia with a pervasive flavor of newly turned earth. Turn your back for five minutes and nothing can ever be the same again.

  My mother was psychic—that is to say, she lived in a state of permanent premonition, so she was right at least half the time. If the sky became black and raindrops as big as shillings started to come down and there was a rumbling overhead, she had a premonition of a thunderstorm. If, at bedtime, my father’s thermometer said zero, she would say, “I don’t know what it is, but something seems to tell me there will be a frost tonight.” No disrespect to her memory—she had a good heart—only I state the innocent fact. She had taken to telling her own fortune with the cards and was always forewarned of coming events. Today, as it happened, there were crumpets for tea, and she said, with delight, “Oh, Daniel, I dreamt of you last night, so I told Simmons to deliver half a dozen extra. Something seemed to tell me you were coming, and I know what a sweet tooth you have, so I made some meringues.... Your Uncle Hugh will be here at any moment. He said he’d drop in.”

  Here a rationalist might have broken down the dreams, omens, et cetera, by reminding her that if there was one dish Uncle Hugh liked better than crumpets it was meringues. But I could not hurt her feelings. I stroked the cat. My mother said, “Be careful, son—something seems to tell me she’s going to have kittens.” Since the cat’s belly was almost touching the floor I said that I shouldn’t be surprised. But the subject of pregnancy had become distasteful to me, and the appalling thought came into my mind: And what if the Costas girl should prove to he pregnant, with the other one five days gone? But I said, “I came to tell you, Mother, that I’ve gone into show biz.”

  “I thought you looked tired, poor dear. Shall I give you a little brandy?”

  “No, really, thanks. I’m all right.”

  “It’s so long since I’ve seen you. A thimbleful won’t hurt you with your tea,” she said, and filled a liqueur glass. “I keep it in case of illness.”

  “Right you are,” I said, and took a sip.

  “Oh, dear, you’re not going to turn into a drunkard, are you? I had such a terrible dream ...”

  But then Uncle Hugh was driven up in his great Lanchester limousine. She loved that, the dear old lady— she could see in her mind’s eye a cautious movement of lace curtains up and down the street and a glitter of envious neighborly eyes. But before he came in she whispered to me, “I’ve had such dreams about you, dear. I’ve been so worried. I’ve put aside a little money for you. Three hundred pounds—out of my dividends. I don’t need it. It’s for you, my boy—only you mustn’t tell your Uncle Hugh!”

  “Thank you,” I said, pressing her hand. “You save it. I don’t want it. But thank you very much.” I had to blow my nose to get the tears of gratitude out of my eyes before I could put on an air of dignity for Uncle Hugh’s sake.

  In those days, which were still the days of Barron, I regarded Uncle Hugh as the prototype of the bourgeois; only his stomach was not protuberant, and he did not wear a white waistcoat and a silk hat. True, he smoked cigars, but not very big cigars; and I can put my hand in the fire and swear that he pinned to himself or ringed himself with no diamonds. About this kind of thing, so long ago, one’s attitude was: Aha, a capitalist who wears no white waistcoats and no diamonds! O-ho! A bourgeois who keeps no mistresses and smokes no cigars with the bands on! Doublebeware! But now I see Uncle Hugh as a good, earnest kind of fellow. Abourgeois, yes, but none the worse for it. I have known—God forgive me!—an earl’s son who went about in navvy’s moleskins strapped under the knee and hobnailed boots in order to hammer home the fact that he was associated with the working class. While I admired him no end, I felt that somewhere, somehow, something was lacking in those moleskin trousers. Give him a road to lay, give him a ditch to dig—and look for him in the public library.

  Now I know that there was, about Uncle Hugh, a permanence and an intransigence. But I did not know it then. I hated every word he said but would defend to the death his right to say it—two minutes after my speech for the defense. Uncle Hugh was necessary—necessary to be held up and forgotten, written off. Such are the joys of youth.

  He was a pouter pigeon of a man dressed in gray, with an iridescent tie and a didactic air that set my nerves on end. My mother assured me that Uncle Hugh knew everything: therefore, I hated him. Uncle Hugh was always right: therefore, it was incumbent on me to be in the opposition. He did me no harm; only I had to hate him. Now that I know him for what he was, I am overwhelmed with a great regret that we had not come together and become friends. If it gives peace to his soul, let it be said that I like him in restrospect.

  I know that he liked me and would have given me the last pound out of his pocket. Only he would have wanted to know what for, and, perhaps, offered advice which I could not swallow. Even when you put on a front for Uncle Hugh, you knew—or thought you knew—that he would see through it. He had some sharp instrument up his sleeve to puncture you with, just when you were at the most comfortable stage of self-inflation.

  Now he came in, abominably clean and distressingly crisp, ha-ha-ing in his black overcoat, and blowing.. Weather was good for Uncle Hugh. He could see Charles Dickens in a fog or Charles Kingsley in a bitter northeaster. Impervious was the word for Uncle Hugh. If you punched him in the jaw his reaction would be to find a cold bandage for your hand.

  He said, in a voice which in those days I likened to a foghorn, “Well, damme, if it isn’t little Danny! Give me your hand, m’boy—grip it, shake it! Well now, educated the working classes yet with Circulating Libraries? Delighted to see you. Made your fortune, no doubt? Lend me three million and I’ll guarantee you four and a half per cent.”

  “Daniel is in show business,” my mother interposed, with a certain dignity.

  Then Uncle Hugh became interested, dropped his badinage, got keen. “And I’m delighted to hear it,” said he, “because I can tell you without reservation that the fortunes of the future will be got out of talking pictures. There, for once, my young friend, you made a wise move. We are agreed now, aren’t we, that that wheeze of yours about libraries was a folly? No shame to you, no blame to you, m’ boy—I’ve done worse myself in my time. On my word, when I didn’t know better I pinned my faith, like that kids’ game, blindfold, with the donkey’s tail. Know better now, though. Live and learn, eh? You don’t live unless you learn, and vice versa. Who’s your firm?”

  “I am at present,” I said stiffly, “manager of the Pantheon at Fowlers End. It is a silent, but we run variety. We are a conservative house and will not wire for sound. Sound is not here to stay—I have it on the best authority.”

  Uncle Hugh said, “Look here, m’ boy, it’s all very well in times like these for a man to make an honest living the best way he can. But whichever way you take it, Dan, there is always tomorrow. You can take it from me that the only way to live (not count
ing the present) is in the future. Silent, did you say? Give it away. And variety, I think you said? A corpse.”

  “Oh, advise him, advise him!” my mother cried. “Oh, Daniel, Daniel, listen to your Uncle Hugh!”

  If there is one thing I cannot take, it is good advice from those who know best: it brings out the mule in me. And of all the advisers on God’s green earth the last one I might regard would be Uncle Hugh. So I set my teeth and said nothing. It was, I suppose, that I didn’t like his manner. You could have fit a fire under me then, and I wouldn’t have budged, just out of perverse spite, while he went on, “No, Dan, while all experience is necessary, give it up. I give silent pictures just under a year. I think I can tell you with confidence that the electricians are taking over, and the patent holders. Look, for example, at Western Electric, and the other boys with the sound systems. No, young fellow, the photoelectric cell has it because, to tell you the truth, the public wants reality. What are you showing?”

  Very stiffly I told him my running-sheet. He laughed in his borborygmic City way and said, “And look—Morton Downey is pulling in the fortunes with Home Towners. There never has been a success on earth like Al Jolson in The Singing Fool. ‘Climb Upon My Knee, Sonny Boy’— give you my word, Dan, it brought tears to my eyes.... No, don’t interrupt—”