Crazy Pavements

by Beverley Nichols

  He stopped writing, suddenly realizing that he could not put even his bitterness on to paper. His little paragraphs, instead of being the searing, vitriolic things which he intended, still remained ‘gossip’ paragraphs. The power of expression was denied him.

  He covered his eyes with a hand that shook and sweated. He would never be a writer, he told himself. Not for him the bright balance of words, the stabbing sentence, the phrase that rolled with the echo of thun­ders from infinite skies. ‘At least,’ he thought, ‘my experience might have given me that. At least sorrow might have made me articulate.’ But no.

  He bit his lip, and laid down his pen.

  The door opened, and through it Mrs. Gossett peeped her head. She was in fine fettle this afternoon, and had been cooing over the telephone to such an extent that she could seldom obtain the right number until after repeated applications. However, conversa­tions with ‘wrong numbers’ were among Mrs. Gossett’s most ardent delights, especially when the wrong num­bers proved to be men. She would blush, and grip the receiver with feverish fingers, murmuring, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Did I? Yes, aren’t they?’ And sometimes, if she were feeling very daring, and there was any audience to hear her, she would say, to her unseen friend, with wide-open eyes, ‘What do you mean?’ After which she would replace the receiver, and make breathless remarks about ‘men.’

  This time, she tiptoed up to Brian, and suddenly tapped at his desk. He started violently.

  ‘Oh, Mr. Elme! Nervy – nervy!’

  He put his hand over what he had been writing, and tried to smile.

  ‘You startled me.’

  She held out a reproachful finger. ‘Too many late nights,’ she cried. ‘I know.’

  ‘That’s not it,’ he said, shaking his head.

  ‘Well, what is it?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  This was her favourite sort of talk. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Her eyes were like goggles. She scented violent improprieties. ‘Have you been – I mean – that is to say – Oh, really, I do think, Mr. Elme . . .’ She looked away, achieving a very healthy blush.

  Not receiving any answer, she turned her neck slightly and looked at him out of the corner of her eye. Had he been watching her she would again have turned her head, and might even have buried her head in her hands, or flown timidly from the room. But he was staring straight in front of him, with eyes that saw nothing. So, with a sigh at so much wasted opportunity, she allowed herself to cool down a little, turned towards him, and said sweetly:

  ‘Is your copy done?’

  Again he started. His hand closed over the top sheet, crumpling it, holding it tightly.

  ‘No. I’m afraid not yet.’

  ‘But what are you writing?’ Her curiosity was strongly aroused.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘They look like paragraphs.’

  ‘They are. But they’re not for publication.’

  ‘Not for publication?’

  Brian looked at her, and thought how easily one could have placed one’s whole fist in her mouth.

  He shook his head.

  ‘But why not?’

  ‘They’re a little too frank.’

  She gasped. She was so used to creating naughti­nesses out of nothing that this open admission on his part was like a plum which was too large for her to swallow.

  ‘Too frank! B-b-b-but . . .’ Oh, the appalling in­genuousness of that stutter!

  ‘You don’t mean . . .’ she hissed.

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  She giggled nervously. ‘But really, I might have seen. And I do think it’s terribly odd to – to write – indeed, I don’t know what you’ve written, but if it’s what I think – n-n-not that I’m thinking at all, really . . .’ She paused, out of breath. ‘Oh, why do you look at me like that?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Oh, Mr. Elme, really! I don’t know what I ought to say. It’s most difficult. I really think you might remember . . . I mean . . . I’m not shocked, oh no, but after all . . .’ It was too much for her. It was really unkind of anybody to give her so large and delicious a plum to swallow all at once. One could not possibly manage it. And so, with a toss of her head, and a look that was meant to express outraged inno­cence, dark knowledge, enticement and discourage­ment simultaneously, she darted from the room.

  As Brian left his office, at about seven o’clock, he realized from a certain liveliness in the streets that it was an anniversary of something or other. A few people waved flags. Across the street a trio of young men were singing, a little sheepishly, ‘It’s a long, long way to Tipperary.’ Of course. August 4th. The war. The great war.

  There is something faintly vulgar about anniver­saries. Independence day is far from exclusive, and the only people commemorating Guy Fawkes (who, in case we have forgotten, conferred a somewhat dubious benefit upon mankind by failing to blow up the Houses of Parliament) are the lowest urchins of the gutter.

  But Brian wanted vulgarity, wanted it passionately, the very stuff and smell of it. And after dinner, during which he drank far too much, he set out in a tram to the other side of the river, and got it.

  Do you know Great Charlotte Street? It runs away from the Ring at Blackfriars, where so many burly noses are broken on Thursdays, and so much plebeian blood stains the sawdust. On every holiday night, the pavements of Great Charlotte Street are lined with booths, selling every conceivable object, and the mar­keting populace becomes a pandemonium lit by the crude flares of gas and naphtha.

  Thither Brian a little unsteadily wended his way, guided by the memory that in the old days he and Walter had sometimes wandered there, exploring the pubs, buying absurd trophies from the more rickety barrows.

  To-night, the chaos, the noise, the glare, the smell seemed intensified. Under a harsh white light, that turned every face to chalk, a gaunt man was crying in a fierce wail, ‘Eels all alive, all alive. Any’ow you like. They’re all alive.’ And then his red hand delved into a bucket, extracted a slimy wriggling horror, and, in one shuddering moment, cut off its living head, slitting its back with a single movement, while spurts of brownish blood stained his sleeve.

  Brian watched, fascinated, and went to have another drink. When he came out, the crowd was denser than ever. He wandered up the stalls. There were dough­nuts at two a penny – ‘Something you can enjoy,’ and barrows of jars containing vermilion pickled cabbage and gherkins. There were slabs on which reposed rab­bits, with flesh like wet clay, decorated by pieces of desolate fur. There were bright tin kettles, and stalls of fluttering lace, and a great rushing and shouting where they were selling jellied eels in white bowls, at two­pence a portion.

  There was a sort of peace here, in this crowd. These people had not time to worry about the sort of things which had been worrying him. They were too busy wondering if they would be able to afford a Sunday dinner, or to pay for their next week’s rent. He caught a little of their own clear spirit.

  Besides, at every turn there was something new. A dwarf holding up his arm, from which hung many strings of white tape, barrels of ‘Ice Gems,’ biscuits with little hard sugar tops in arsenic green, a man flicking his macaroons with a brush of gay feathers, a tired girl trying to sell pots of aspidistras, frightened birds in their cages, shut-eyed and trembling, parrots, pink and gay, shabby, pathetic canaries.

  There were quick bursts of colour – a load of toma­toes, glittering like enamelled balls, piles of soap, purple and jade and orange, and daisies in the gaudiest tints of summer. And always the barrel-organs pealed, and the crowd on the pavement grew thicker and the lights were more wildly distracting.

  A sudden flare of red, and smell of blood, and he was before a butcher’s shop. A raucous voice bawled out, ‘Go on. Keep on keepin’ on. That’s all you got to do. You don’t want to worry. I don’t. ’Ullo, ’ullo, ’ullo. There’s beef for yer.’ And next door a rival merchant cried, ‘Quality, qualitee. Abserlootly the prett
iest bit of sirloin you ever see.’

  The red turned to pink, and he was by a sweet stall. Here glittering masses of walnut cream chips, London rock, and coco-nut ice sparkled beneath the jets. By the side of the stall a bunch of ugly children protruded pink tongues, licking carmine ice-cream. Like an im­mense cornelian, a glass barrel of orangeade glittered against the gas.

  Strange scraps of conversation came to his ears.

  ‘Tied a bit o’ string round ’is neck, I did. That’s the last of ’im.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go to church with that woman if you paid me a dollar.’

  ‘Don’t believe ’e can work.’

  ‘She ’ad a glass of bitter and I ’ad a glass of stout. Did us good, it did.’

  And still the barrel-organs, throbbing on the air like tom-toms, and the cheap cracked gramophones making strident cries into the street.

  Another drink. Oh – this was good – better far than the streets of the west with their smug brilliance and their careful costliness. For endless was the pageant which unrolled itself here beneath the aloof skies of night. There was a little man with a bowl in which floated twenty-four white ducks. There was a boy sell­ing the champion fly-catcher – two a penny. A speci­men, covered with greasy, grisly insects hung from his arm. There were ‘men’s strong pants and vests – 1s. 11½d.,’ and masses of white china, coarsely splashed with the price in blue chalk. At one stall a woman was squeezing a steaming rag over a row of beetroots, at another a girl was trying on a pair of cheap shoes, balancing on the curb, waving a slim foot before the bright eyes of local youths.

  He paused before a window bearing the strange legend, ‘The lady in the window wishes you to know that she has obtained great benefit from Jones’s hair lotion.’ Beyond the legend sat a female with hair down to her knees, gazing with an expression of acute bore­dom at the gaping crowd.

  He had a longing to buy everything. Who would not want these bright balloons, painted with a map of the world, with the British Empire splashed so gener­ously in red that Canada, for example, almost infringed upon Mexico? And who could resist these rolling wagons of fruit and vegetables, with pomegranates at a halfpenny, sliced through the centre, ruby red? And luscious plums, warranted English, at threepence a pound? And these cabbages split in half, revealing a creamy, complex centre? And these round, sleek onions, ‘sound Spanish,’ whose praises the swarthy man with ear-rings was singing so lustily?

  This was England. This would go on, triumphant, coarse, obscene, vital, long after Lord William, Maurice, Julia and the rest of them had retired to their futile tombs. He felt more than exhilarated. He felt tearful – seized with an absurd nationalism that made him sing out loud.

  And – as you will have observed – a little drunk. More than a little. For here he was stumbling through the door of yet another bar, a bar which in the old days he had often visited with Walter, more in sorrow than in anger.

  He found his way to the counter. But before he got there, his tired, confused legs seemed to give way. He found himself sitting on somebody’s knee. Amiably he looked round. His heart stopped.

  Yes. It was Walter.

  ‘You never did know how to get drunk, did you?’

  Angel of tact! He tried to get up. Walter steadied him.

  ‘Can’t sit here like this.’

  He was guided to the seat. Utterly weary he buried his face in his fingers. The room was going round. The world was going round. He was hot and cold. It was the end and the beginning. He put out his hand. Another hand gripped it.

  ‘Don’t go.’

  ‘’Course I won’t.’

  ‘I want you – awfully.’

  ‘Right-o.’

  ‘Lots to say.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They remained there, without speaking. A cool wind blew through the window, making an ineffectual effort to dissipate the thick fog of smoke which hung round the room like a pall. The air was insufferable. A gramophone bawled:

  ‘You’d better not

  You’re getting hot

  Getting away with a terrible lot.’

  A momentary pause.

  Brian – thickly, ‘What about getting along?’

  Walter took his arm.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  ‘Oh last regret . . . regret shall die!’

  As a matter of fact, it is a comparatively early regret. The old cling to their griefs, in a sort of desper­ate emotional loneliness, as though afraid of being left without even sorrow as a companion. The young can throw them off. And Brian, though we must bid him farewell, was still absurdly young. His regrets had died. He was, in fact, exactly as we first met him.

  He lay in bed. The sunlight poured in on the sheets, golden and generous, but still gentle with the cool airs of morning. A slender finger of light lit upon the old green counterpane, which, on the other side of the room, covered the sleeping figure of Walter.

  Brian stretched his limbs. Gee! It was good to be alive this morning. He took in a deep breath of the sweet air and felt the blood coursing through his lungs, down to the tips of his fingers, along his eager legs, up again to his funny excited brain. One oughtn’t to be lying in bed like this. In a few minutes one would get up and put on some flannel trousers and scamper with Walter over the clean-swept streets, into the mists of Hyde Park, and splash with a whirl of white and silver into the Serpentine. The first bathe of the year. Lord! he would get up and give Walter a clout on the head for snoring like a sick elephant.

  There was a noise outside the door. It was Mrs. Pleat. She’d get the shock of her life when she saw Walter was back. He lay very still, waiting.

  The door opened softly, and she peeped in. In an instant her mournful but searching eye had noticed the familiar figure sleeping on the floor. She went up to it, bent over and sniffed. For a moment her underlip pro­truded itself, and then tightened back again, as though drawn by elastic.

  ‘So ’e’s come back.’

  Brian nodded.

  ‘’Bout time, too, if you arsk me,’ she said darkly, and again disappeared.

  There was the sound of dishes being taken from racks, the gurgle of water being poured into a kettle, the sudden pop and sigh of a gas-jet.

  Then, a shuffle of footsteps, and once more Mrs. Pleat appeared.

  She stood in the door, and regarded the recumbent figure of Walter with infinite meaning, and profound melancholy.

  ‘It’s Toosday,’ she said.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  (John) Beverley Nichols was born in Bristol in 1898. He was educated at Marlborough College and Balliol College, Oxford, and published the first of his more than sixty books, a novel called Prelude, in 1920. While a student, Nichols became known for his outspokenness on political topics and issues like women’s rights; he continued to espouse strong views throughout life, becoming a pacifist and advocate for disarmament after the First World War and later, as an openly gay man, an advocate for sexual tolerance.

  Nichols wrote several novels in the 1920s and 1930s, including Crazy Pavements (1927), a satire inspired by Nichols’s own experiences among the ‘Bright Young People’, which became a bestseller and was reprinted frequently throughout the following decade. He published a volume of autobiography covering his first twenty-five years, appropriately entitled Twenty-Five, in 1926, and in 1932 published his first work on gardening, Down the Garden Path, which has remained continuously in print. Best known today for his gardening volumes, Nichols was a versatile writer in many genres, publishing poetry, plays, nonfiction, children’s books, and a number of well-regarded mystery novels.

  Beverley Nichols met the actor Cyril Butcher in the early 1930s, and the two became lifelong partners. Nichols died in 1983.

 

 

 
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