His life-long habit of getting up at six wouldn’t leave him, and he sat by the window, reading until eight o’clock, pages punctuated by some black train shouldering a rapid pock-thumping way through the cutting. The window rattled and pages turned in its noise. He washed on the landing, where a bathroom and lavatory had been built into one of the single rooms, then sat in his shirtsleeves, ignoring the still sharp air of morning. He boiled tea, and drank the pot out. The room had lost its grimness, for he had adapted himself to London standards of isolation, discomfort and independence. He offered to paint the room white if the landlord paid for the paint. When this was agreed to, he borrowed brushes, pushed the furniture into one half of the room and covered it with newspaper – halfway one day, all white the next. It looked clean, felt more comfortable, a haven after climbing the gloomy stairs.
Not working, and seeing no one, increased his perceptions and sensibility, such moods in the past coming on only in illness or the half-fever of a bad cold. His ability to connect with these moods now, when the fever did not exist, provided a springboard for numerous other comparisons. It was as if he’d worn glasses all his life and suddenly thought to clean them: his sight seemed sharper, thoughts quicker.
Many of his days were spent in Highgate library. He went through books that he couldn’t take out, took books out that he couldn’t read there. He was able to extract the kernel of a book, having read much and quickly while at Pat’s. A history of Europe was absorbed by examining the list of contents – joining and cementing what he already knew, concentrating on English social history of the nineteenth century to find some explanation for the world he had grown up in. He learned botany and anatomy by diagrams, geography by reading and comparing maps, reinforcing and drawing together the scattered islands of his past knowledge which, he discovered, were more numerous than he’d imagined. It was a game for the uneducated: books of reproductions tied up what he had seen in the galleries.
Large areas of a jigsaw were forming. The encyclopaedia, dictionary, atlas, were three dormer windows high enough to embrace new views. Fiction was the depth gauge, plumb-line and echometer fathoming his deepest needs and feelings. Knowledge for its own sake was bare-faced and domineering, but each title of a novel was the top winch of a fairy-tale well whose storyline of chain and bucket let you down with varying degrees of speed into the waters of illumination. Knowledge confirmed the structure of the outside world, while a novel prised open previously unknown regions within yourself. Conrad, Melville, Stendhal – the giants. In war novels, detective novels, shit novels, you put a scarf over your eyes before going into their unconvincing strait-jackets; in the others, one had to take this scarf off before reading the first word. He wondered why he had not been born with this understanding, why nearly thirty years had gone by before touching the possibility of it. How many people had it in them, but never saw it?
He fought free of a narrow sort of life and began to wonder what he had let himself in for – though it didn’t destroy his patience with this new existence. Calmness is death, he knew, but at the moment he enjoyed it, took advantage of the unlimited days to see if any meaning would come out of his life. To solve the enigma of anyone else’s would only be possible after the unfettering of his own spirit.
Walking one day he recalled some words from Moby Dick: ‘And if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive.…’ In the Old Testament there is a story (he remembered it from school, being full of memories in the sunny desert of London), of two armies face to face, one far larger than the other, a host as it is called. During the night God sent rats into the tents of the biggest army and they ruined it by chewing the leather of their shield straps. Rats are unacknowledged legislators that rule the world. They started the Black Death that wiped out half Europe in the Middle Ages. The Tartars, besieging a Crimean city, catapulted a bubonic corpse over its walls, so that plague as well as famine broke its obstinacy. Out of that town, the plague-scythe cut down Europe as if it were a single head of corn. A man’s body is a battlefield of rat and anti-rat – the rat to kill, and the other to keep him human. Every man has his rat, his own brown rat sitting like an alter ego on his shoulder, dodging inside when storms flash and adversity baffles the air to stoke the inner chaos that such sights cause.
The legend of the rats had been a long time forming, a legend which for some reason exuded the heavy smell of a sagebush growing in sand. In some far-off time people didn’t like the rats. They threatened to destroy the real souls in them, so the Pied Piper came and drew the rats away. But the people refused him the bread they had promised as his fee, called him a trickster. So the Pied Piper sent back the rats, but charmed away the people’s children to inherit the innocence their parents had known before the rats came. The truth was that the parents couldn’t live without the rats, wanted them back, took them to their bosoms and became one with them.
The Pied Piper was hunted for his never-ending hostility to the rats. The rats were a disease of society and also of the soul, and society, being imperfect, enabled them to survive. The rats were the carriers of this disease. They perpetuated it. The Pied Piper wanted to take this disease of society away. When people, used by those who desired power and not just to live, wanted the rats to stay with them they turned the Pied Piper into Bill Posters and hunted him forever as they had formerly, in their innocence, hunted the rats.
The rats, of course, became invisible: there weren’t any to be seen. But they were continually breeding, ardently proliferating their rodent species in the various underworlds of oblivion. They dwelt far below the surface even of a child’s dilatory mind, quick, cruel, whiskered and ordured noses exploring dark caverns and nibbling the energized vapours of cloaca that kept them alive. They lived in the rat-filled banks and hollows of ashtips and streams, feet planted, heads turned in momentary awareness against the outside world, on the forced refuse, the hopes, the gangrenous wrecks of people’s lives, a thousand seams below. It was an evil impossible to fathom, excavate, analyse: the depths were too packed, putrescent, liquid, unrecognizable, a mud-death of suffocation, cone-roads descending. Such depths were wardened by rats, the only true history impossible to classify by seam or layer. One fell into it by turning on the gas-tap. One walked away from it – by walking away, or by the body taking you off if the spirit wanted you to stay by the world-wide rat-pit of rat-darkness which is body-death and soul-death.
Frank desired neither, fought both, wanted body-life and soul-life, to steer a narrow course on the narrowing tightrope across the top of the world’s circus tent, balanced safe above the rat pits spreading below, the world-width of black mud surrounded on every far distance by dim faces of spectators in thrall to the rats laughing and waiting for his fall.
He hoped there was no question of falling. He would not fall, hoped his limbs, blood and bones would hold him back. But it was necessary to fight in order to keep the same dignity and independence he had known in his more stable, traditional, less knowing existence where the rats had been less likely to get at him.
He forgot about the future. Living alone, it didn’t exist. He hadn’t talked to anyone for days, and thought he never wanted to again.
Wearing jacket, trousers and jersey shirt, and a pair of boots he’d splashed ten guineas on, he went to meet Myra at Paddington, her letter still in his pocket. He picked her out from the barrier as she stepped off the train dressed in a light brown coat and carrying a shopping basket. He had forgotten what she looked like and was afraid of not recognizing her. ‘I didn’t expect to see you,’ she said, handing in her ticket.
‘It’s a good beginning,’ he joked, remembering his impression of her as someone cold and half awake, while thinking that you don’t know what a house is like to live in until you’ve made a fire in it. They walked to the cafeteria. He was surprised that they didn’t feel like strangers to each other as he stood in line for coffee and buns. She recalled writing her
letter out in the garden one sunny day, sitting on the steps and trying to stop the wind flicking her pages. She’d wanted to be among streets and traffic, away from the so-called peace which was noisy enough to drown the real feelings in her. But silence wasn’t finding it so easy to hold them down any more, and in becoming real again she hoped she wasn’t making Frank too responsible for something that couldn’t yet be seen as either good or bad. The few paintings glimpsed at Albert’s party, the crush of people, the meal and walk with Frank, were important because she was inclined to overrate them. She shouldn’t have written the letter, but had no power to resist it.
She asked how Albert was. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen him for a while. Nor have I been to the gallery. I packed all that in.’
‘You did seem a bit out of place there. What happened?’
‘We were having some dinner, the day Teddy handed me your letter, and the talk went on and on, so vicious and useless that I couldn’t stand it. It was starting to pull me in. When you feel that something’s played itself out, you’ve just got to go.’
He seemed more real now that he was free from a world that had no genuine use for him. Some re-humanizing process had occurred in the time elapsed. The other night had been an artifact in which they were not quite being themselves. It seemed clearer now, with the reality of traffic roaring outside and a train journey behind her. There was so little emotion between them that it couldn’t possibly be false. Sun softened into the room and she felt drawn to his rather large hands resting by the cup, eating, pushing the plate away. ‘I suppose you saw our photo in the newspaper?’
They talked in a clatter of metal trays. ‘I did. But I hoped you hadn’t, by some miracle. What did your husband say?’
‘Not much, though he didn’t like it. I said it was all chance and coincidence, that I happened to be there when the painter needed help.’ It hadn’t been easy, for George must have brooded on it all day, pacing it out in the fields, encasing it from hedge to fence to looping footpath. His high standards would tell him to ignore it, but they let him down as the endless belt of daytime wore on. By evening he was incensed, and only her calm talking smoothed things out for the hours that followed. It was a unique experience at her age, and in this so far quiet marriage. Why had such an innocent photo pitched him from accepted order and unthinking peace to a life of suspicion – that he hid very well but that she now felt in him all the time? It was mysterious to her. Could a man hold that stupid photograph responsible for portents which must always have been with him? The answer came now that she was sitting with Frank.
‘My plan for today,’ she said, to prove that thoughts of George did not worry her, ‘is to visit my sister-in-law, then go to the gallery and see Albert’s pictures. It closes soon, doesn’t it?’
‘You ought to go today. It’s worth seeing. I hope his next show is as well.’
‘What makes you unsure about it? You don’t envy him, do you?’
He put down his cup. ‘I used to, when I first met him in Lincolnshire and saw his paintings. I envied him then, if that’s the right word. But now I don’t. He gets into blind rages, attacking the art dealers, critics, and other painters’ work. That’s the sort of thing that’ll ruin him unless he goes back to Lincolnshire for ten years and sees nobody, like before. I’m not saying all those people aren’t worth attacking, but the best way you can do it is by ignoring their existence – I should think. Teddy doesn’t really want him to go back to Lincolnshire, keeps trying to get him to go to Italy or Greece for a year or two. There’s nothing wrong with that, but Albert has to make his own way there, not go under Teddy’s auspices. The less people he has looking after him, the more he’ll be able to look after himself again. Then he’ll be all right.’
‘What about you, though?’
He laughed, cigarette smoke rolling across at her. ‘Me? Whatever happens I’ll be all right – as long as something happens.’ She’d never thought of it that way. ‘That’s the only way I can look at it,’ he said.
‘You’re lucky, then.’
‘I know. Every time I take a breath, or eat some bread and cheese I say to myself: “You lucky bastard!” I was born lucky in that way.’ He told her the skeletal facts about himself. ‘Up to last autumn I was buried in three feet of cold soil, unable to move except for my arms and breath. Now my feet are free, at least.’
He belonged nowhere, she reflected, but he had belonged somewhere so solidly once that it would take him years to find some natural way of life again. He was the sort of man who could not turn back. His face was a mask of animation and strength, grey piercing eyes, highish cheeks, firm jaw and the sort of mouth that bends easily into anger – a man of character shifting between two coastlines of existence. His senses seemed out of tune with the rowdy and continuous traffic-flow along Euston Road where they now walked, and his face had a natural serenity whose only violence might be to protect that serenity from the forces of history. She found it impossible to guess where it would lead him; and difficult to imagine from where he had set out. To try and deflect him from his wilful half-conscious drifting would be an underhand way of helping herself, for his limbo was only noticeable in that it seemed to give more purpose to her own life, while she didn’t yet know what that purpose might serve.
They took a bus to the Embankment, walked up the steps and on to Hungerford Bridge. ‘This is my favourite view,’ he said, leaning on the parapet. ‘I often come here, look at the river for hours, watch it change colour as the sky alters. I kid myself I’m looking at London because I can see up the river to St Paul’s.’ He reached down, closing a hand over her fingers so that she had no thought of drawing away. ‘The river’s moving, going somewhere.’
‘Which is more than we are,’ she said, seeing it swirling along, dark and grey.
‘I want to stay here a while,’ he teased, pressing her hand, feeling like one of those young lovers often walking this way. A train moved slowly out of Charing Cross, shook the bridge under their feet, a noise of steel and thunder that stopped her replying. ‘If I travel,’ he said, ‘it’s got to be out of England. There’s no place for me on this right little tight little island.’
‘Where, though?’
‘I’d go to the moon if I could. I want to go over the water, onto a continent. The sky eats into my brain here.’
‘You’re running away from yourself.’
‘I know. If that’s the only way to find yourself, then you’ll sooner or later run into what you’re running away from, even if you don’t know what it is. You’ll recognize it when you hit it – or it hits you.’ She smiled: he talked as if he’d just discovered the abstract and, like Columbus blundering into America, wanted to pull the whole world over into it. ‘Maybe you won’t like it when you meet it,’ she said.
‘It’s a case of surviving, not liking.’ They walked off the bridge, through the tube station hall and up Villiers Street. ‘If I decide to take off,’ he said, ‘why don’t you come with me?’
His question flew into her heart like a piece of sharpened stone. She stopped walking, as if it would compromise her to answer while her feet still moved: ‘Are you afraid of doing things on your own?’
He laughed. ‘Maybe two can be saved for the price of one! I just think it’s better with somebody else, and I thought you might have an idea of lighting off as well.’
‘I hadn’t,’ she lied, which she knew came too quickly for him to believe it. They had a shepherd’s-pie meal in a pub off Leicester Square, sitting away from the businessmen’s crush at the counter. ‘If you’d like to go to the gallery,’ he said, ‘I’ll meet you somewhere later.’
She wanted to stay with him. ‘I don’t think so. I’ll go another time perhaps.’
‘When I’ve gone away?’
‘I didn’t mean that. Why do I have to explain myself step by step?’
‘Because you want to. Have another glass of red plonk. I’ll get more beer for myself’ – the waitress saw him wave.
‘Beer and wine don’t mix,’ she smiled.
‘Anything mixes. Get me a quart of each in the same bowl and I’ll drink ’em. In fact I’m almost beginning to feel like it.’
‘The very idea makes me sick.’
‘Add a cup of whisky if you like. Let’s drink to a long life – wherever it is.’
‘That’s innocent enough,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I should go to the Arlington after all.’
‘What about your sister-in-law?’
‘Yes, I must go there.’
‘I’ll wait for you. Meet you later.’
‘Come up with me. She lives in Hampstead.’
‘Isn’t it risky? They’ll twig something. It’ll get back to your husband.’
‘It might, but I don’t mind.’
‘Are you sure?’ he asked, wondering whether she liked him more than she hated her husband. ‘Let’s go then.’
The underground shuffled them north. She sat by his side, unspeaking, as if she had made a decision and to open her mouth might turn her from it. Leaving home this morning was an event beyond the far rim of the earth, and as usual in London she felt, with handbag and shopping basket, without a bed to go back to that night. It was alarming and exhilarating, a sort of soul-drift in a desert of streets where she felt no responsibility for the nomad state of her psychic life. At the moment only Frank was real, and the rattle of the carriage going under Belsize Park.
It was a two-floored house in a row of forty-year-olds, comfortable red-brick set on a slope with superb views towards Highgate. The front door was painted yellow, with a mosaic of different coloured heavily-leaded glass – pulling away when Myra tipped the bell.
Frank was introduced to Pamela, a tall buxom young woman wearing corduroy slacks and a green jumper. She looked at him with a half smile, as if surprised that Myra could ever have met a man apart from her husband.
The Death of William Posters Page 21
