by A. L. Barker
When he got out of bed he was surprised by a sudden spate of energy. It was as if another body struggled to break loose from his own, wanting to run and leap and fight. He stood his ground, not answering any of the signals. He dressed with stubborn slowness and when he was ready went to his brother’s rumpled bed, picked up the pillow, tossed it and punched it as it fell. It hit the wall and dropped at his feet. Joe let it lie there with lumps of brown flock leaking from the seams. If it had had a little white neck he would have wrung it.
He liked the noise of his boots on the stair boards. In the same way he liked hearing himself walk on grit or seeing his shadow scissoring along in front. It was an extra dimension which he always forgot he had.
Each floor at Aberglaslyn Terrace opened on to a black well of a landing with stairs pitching steeply down. The banister rails were of iron or they would have broken long ago under the stresses which had mapped out the walls like some dead and fly-blown world. The first-floor landing was wider than the rest. Here the small professional men for whom the Terrace was built had had their drawing-rooms and parlours. Two families lived on the first floor of number twelve, the Lampitts and the Stogumbers. They kept their ashcans in the Moorish half-arch and the Lampitt boys were dab-hands with catapults and had shot all the plaster falbalas off the ceiling.
A woman was washing the landing floor. Joe stood a moment looking incuriously as she leaned forward on her hands and the bell of her skirts revealed huge bottle calves knotted with grape-coloured veins. Something unwonted moved in his stomach, a qualm of dismay and hatred. Even as she sat back on her haunches to look up at him he leaped past crying, “’Morning, Mrs Stogumber!” He had reached the bottom of the stairs when she called. “Joe! It’s Sunday, Joe.” She spoke in a guttural voice which he had often mimicked for his own amusement. It did not amuse him now, it lit in him a white hot flame of rage. “Mr Stogumber never gets up on Sunday, like a rich man he is, smoking and eating and reading in bed. Like Mr Onassis. But I am not like Mrs Onassis. I am like Leah, I am the handmaiden,” said Mrs Stogumber. “Will you bring the News of the World, Joe? Wait and I will get the money—”
He swung round shouting, “Keep your bloody money!” And then it all folded up, quietly, without another breath, for there at the top of the stairs was only old Mrs Stogumber, mute with shock, one red hand like a crab pressed to her chest. “Pay me when I come back,” he muttered and ran into the street.
He went to the shop at the corner, bought five cigarettes and lit one. He also bought a quarter of tea and half a pound of sugar in a cone of blue paper. As he was going out he remembered Mrs Stogumber’s News of the World.
When he let himself into the hall she was gone from the landing, only her bucket was left. He folded the newspaper and slipped it under the handle.
Basement dwellers on the Terrace had to have a crustacean liking for damp and dark. If they didn’t have it, they acquired it. As Joe stood on the flight of stone steps that led from the hall the webby blackness came up, thick and lively and shrill with the sound of water singing in a pipe. A crack of light showed him the line of a door and when he gave a low whistle the light snuffed out and there was a soft fumbling as of someone pressing against the other side.
He had to rap with his fingernails before the bolts were drawn. When he went into the room there was no one in sight. It was large and lofty, crammed from floor to ceiling with furniture. Tables, chairs, couches, chiffoniers, wash-handstands, rolled up carpets, picture frames, corded boxes, a cottage piano and a mahogany wardrobe like a cliff—all stacked together, with narrow lanes giving access to the corners of the room. The damp bloomed on everything, cobwebs twitched in the draught or swayed like the rags of a banner. Along each lane the dust was broken as if something had rolled up and down, something soft and aimless.
“Bolt the door,” said a voice. “They’re always trying to get in.”
As soon as he had thrust the bolt home the waiting game was on. He tossed the packets of sugar and tea on an old cabin trunk that carried withered labels—Delhi, Calcutta, Srinagar. She might be anywhere, away to the window or in the corner back of the piano.
“Did you bring the whisky?”
“Can I get whisky at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning?” The room was very cold, an old dusty cold, well entrenched. “You’ll have to drink tea.”
“Oh, it’s not to drink, not the whisky. Horrible stuff!” The voice moved up behind the wardrobe. “It’s for the saucers, sixteen of them round my bed. They can’t get by the fumes. Ah, you should see them on their backs with their legs in the air—all dead drunk!”
“I know a better way than that.”
She came out sideways, with a little dipping, loaded motion. She was dropsical with clothes, layers pushed on anyhow, some stuffed up under the rest so that she bulged and drooped in unlikely places. A pink pelisse hung down to the floor, wound about her thighs was a man’s jacket with sleeves pinned across her stomach. Over all she wore a turtle-necked jersey and a striped scarf. Her feet were hidden by her skirts, her fingers bunched into mittens. The only bit of her which showed was a yellow-boned nose jutting from the depths of a knitted balaclava.
She veered slightly towards Joe and scuttled away into the lee of the wardrobe as if she were being bobbed up on an ebbtide.
“All you’ve got to do is catch them in a shoebox and show them to the landlord.” He found a label, written over with brown old ink—‘Mr and Mrs V. Martineau, Southampton via Bombay’—and chipped it with his thumbnail. “It’d be cheaper than whisky.”
She called over her shoulder, “Whisky enlarges the liver.’
“They haven’t got any liver.”
“They’ve got jaws, they’ve got stomachs!” She came dipping back in a frenzy. “They’ll eat me alive!”
“Not them. They’re harmless. If you was to show them to Frobisher he’d have to give you something to get rid of them. He might cut your rent. He wouldn’t fancy the Sanitary digging their little knives into these walls.”
She had come close, like a small moulting bird fearing to miss a crumb. “I don’t think I should do that. It would mean making a fuss. Scenes.” Her eyes shone under the balaclava, bubble-round with alarm. “That can’t be what I ought to do.”
‘I’m telling you.” Joe tried shrugging the cold off his shoulders.
She rolled into the entrance of one of her lanes and lodged against a chest of drawers. “They’d put me into the street!”
“If they did, you could get a better room.” The wooden alleys smelling of whisky and wintergreen were not bulwarks, not to Joe. But she had run to shelter and his enormous yawn opened up a corresponding hollow in his stomach. He thought of breakfast.
Suddenly she came out again. She was bright, bridling. “Victor, my husband, has gone to find us a house. I’m only waiting here until he comes back. The day we moved in Victor said, ‘Don’t unpack. I can’t have you live in a place like this. I’ll find somewhere else.’ Everything’s ready—Victor doesn’t like to be kept waiting. He’s in such a hurry—”
“Not him.”
“He was such a big man!” Her remembering, her longing, was for the bigness of the man who had sheltered her under his elbow.
“He’s not coming back. He never meant to. I keep telling you.”
Mrs Martineau’s head began to tremble and turn like clockwork. The blow shattered her for all she had taken it before. She crouched, trying to wedge herself between the wardrobe and the chest of drawers. “He writes. Ten pages a week—”
“Not him. Never a word.”
She crept away with her face to the overhang of her furniture, clinging as if she were on a narrow ledge that jutted into space. “He’s gone to find a house—”
“He’s gone,” said Joe, “to Timbuktu or Calico.” He split another label with his thumb. She wouldn’t come out, not for a long while now. “It’s better to look at things as they are.” He couldn’t see there was any other way. He couldn’t see why she
had to pretend she was packed ready to leave, or why she fooled herself that a man who had walked out sixteen years ago was coming back any minute. He looked at Mrs Martineau’s things as they were and he saw the stacked furniture, the cold cavernous room, and the dust. Nowhere to hang out the flags, no corners to run to, either. But then she was cracked, so cracked she was fit to fall apart. He felt neither pity nor the patience he would have spent on any scrap of buckled iron. He would have liked to flush her out with a shout or a sudden noise, running a stick along the lanes of furniture as he used to batter the railings on his way to school. Not that he expected her to be shocked into sanity, it was the humour of it that tempted him. One day it would look funny enough and he would do it.
*
They had started an argument the night before. Not such an argument, only Alex Munn trying to get his mind made up for him. He was in his shirt-sleeves, chin ready lathered. He kept putting his finger on the side of his nose but he was too agitated to start using the razor.
“Do you think I’d have a moment’s peace if she came to a bad end?”
Jessie Munn yawned, opening her mouth like a trumpet.
“I used to think Stella wasn’t human. I thought she was made of bible-paper and granite—she thrashed me for whistling on a Sunday.” An old fear brought a whine to his voice. “She lay in wait to catch me as if she hadn’t a sin to call her own.”
“She had, though. She found out she was human.”
“She’s dead, my sister’s dead.” Alec stood still, razor upheld with a touch of piety. “Any mud you sling now will stick to the girl—your own niece.”
“She’s no relation of mine. She’s a by-blow.”
“Last night this was settled,” said Joe. “She wasn’t coming.”
Jessie reached across the cluttered table to the stove and forked slices of fried bread out of a pan. She pushed the plate over to Joe. “Your pa’s got conscience.”
“I call it heart,” said Alec, licking the blown soap off his lip.
Joe filled his cheek with bread. “Is there anything to show—her being a by-blow?”
Jessie laughed, her folded arms shaking on her bosom.
“First,” said Alex, “where would we put this girl?”
Joe stopped eating. Even crisp fat on his tongue could not quell a pang of alarm. The girl, all foreign and queer, was there, in the way. She was like a squint, he couldn’t look at any of the familiar room without her.
It was a smallish room and the four of them had to live in it. Evidence of their living was everywhere, on shelves, hooks, in corners, in mid-air where the line of shirts hung. Space had to be earned, there was none to spare for anything which did not feed, clothe, warm or clean the Munns. The exception was a one-eyed cat in a box under the sink.
They ate their meals in sight of the broom and the pail of kitchen slops, and on Friday nights the walls sweated warmly while they each took a turn in the hip-bath before the fire. It had been good enough for Joe, he had never asked for a change.
He said with righteousness and a slow kindling of anger, “I don’t want her here.”
“If it’s the street or us we could give her a shakedown somewhere.” Alec drew the razor tenderly over his jaw. “And if it’s a case of charity it would come better from us, even at half-cock, than from some holy-stoned institution. Furthermore, I’m her only surviving relative.”
Jessie rolled back in her chair, clasping her arms behind her head. “She may be provided for.”
“If the lady’s pension died with her, there’d be nothing left for an orphan she’d never legally adopted.”
Joe eyed his mother. She had a soft streak, a kind of squeamishness that reacted to any tragedy provided it was laid on thick enough.
“I admit liability. But it’s not for me to say whether she comes.”
“I remember the first time I met your sister. Nice—I thought I looked nice—I had blue beads and earrings to match, and lace gloves—I always sweat in gloves. And she looked at me as if she’d been sipping vinegar. ‘A woman’s adornment is her virtue, Miss Clewer,’ she said.” Jessie’s laughter rolled round the room, her huge bosom speckled and darkened with it.
Christy Munn, letting himself in, hauling up to reach the knob of the door, swung round bristling and panicky. It tickled Joe to see him with his hackles up and his ugly bullet head down like a little ox ready to charge.
Jessie rubbed her damp cheek along her arm, Alec held the razor poised, his upper lip flexed ready for the next stroke. There was a moment’s silence while they all looked at Christy.
He raised himself on creaking boots and shut the door, turning the knob with arduous care. Then he went, not looking at any of them, to the box under the sink and knelt beside it. From his jacket he took a rusty black ball, his cupped hands prizing it, and lowered it into the box. The cat began to wash her kitten. She broke into a crackling purr, her one eye winking and glowing at Christy, who leaned his head against the wall with a gesture of no less contentment.
The sight seemed to prick Jessie. Something, some faint irritation struggled up from lazy depths. “I must drown that kitten.”
“If you do, Chris will bite your finger off.”
Smiling, Jessie spread one thick red hand on her knee. Under the joint of the forefinger was a ring of purple marks. A week ago she had found three newborn kittens in the cat’s box and she had laughed. She had had a good laugh because the cat was thought to be a torn. Christy, suffocating with excitement, was on his knees, cradling one of the creatures in his hands. With broad amusement Jessie filled a bucket and drowned two of the kittens. Christy screamed, sharp demented screams, and when, not ungently, she tried to prise the survivor from his grasp, he bit her. Jessie looked at her finger, holding it up as if someone had put a ring on it. The pain surprised her because she felt a stab of it, layers down, near her heart. She sucked her finger noisily. “You’re a nice one—” but she couldn’t meet the stony glare of the child. “All right, keep it—for the present.” And she dropped the dead kittens in the ashcan.
Alex had finished shaving. He mopped his chin, he was spry like a man stepping from under a load. “This girl’s school age still, it’ll be a year before she earns anything towards her keep.”
“Fancy,” said Jessie, “a little schoolgirl.”
But this time it was Joe who felt himself adrift in the gale of her laughter. “We don’t want her here!”
“She’s got a claim and I admit it—as a matter of principle.” Alec spread a firm hand on the air. “That’s all.”
“It’s enough!”
“What are you afraid of? The girl?” Alec’s long jaw gapped slyly. “She’s not lethal.”
Joe did not look at him. He bunched his fists on the table and leaned across them, straining to fix and quell the glimmer under Jessie’s wettish lids. It was like trying to smoke out a puddle.
*
Rumbold was working with a great show of absorption. The show was for his own benefit because he had begun to think in circles and the only thing now was to step outside himself. He hung over the Buick and wouldn’t trust Joe within yards to hand up a spanner or sweep away the dead wiring. He took infinite pains cleaning, setting and testing down to the last pin, a perfect demonstration of a man devoted to his job. But he had to work at the devotion. He kept finding that his hands were on their own and his thoughts were going through the hoops again.
At noon he sent Joe to Evie’s for sandwiches and kept up appearances by eating them at the bench while he stripped the commutator.
“Think I’ll ever be able to do that?” Joe spread his own square heavy fingers. “Some of them parts aren’t no bigger than a split pea.”
“What didn’t you like about him?”
“Who?”
“Brind. Major Monty Brind.”
“I don’t know any majors.”
“He’s a breed.” A far-flung breed, indigenous to a system rather than a soil. “The Monty Brinds are born with sand
in their boots, they always land right way up.”
Rumbold was smiling hard, catching at a sudden good turn in his spirits. After all, there was nothing to worry about. Brind wouldn’t jeopardise his own chances, he was a dedicated man and it was his habit to succeed.
“Wherever there’s a string you’ll find Brind pulling it. He was an officer in my unit.” That was one picture—the high-boned soldier in a uniform from Tautz. “When they rationed even the N.A.A.F.I. beer, Brind had a bottle of Scotch. He could get a pass when everyone else was nailed down. But he was taken prisoner with the rest of us.” That hadn’t been impressive. There were too many Japs, all bow-jawed and slit-eyed, like a job line in human nature. “I saw the jungle turn yellow, I saw an army blotted up and none of that registered till I saw Monty Brind waiting in line for a cup of sour rice.”
That was another picture, which he must have jettisoned long ago for he was quite unable to remember how Brind had looked at that one moment of defeat. There had not been another. Filthy and tattered and gaunt with fever, a toiling scarecrow Brind had been, like the rest of them, but never again a broken dead-beat. There was something immutable in him, an inhumanity which was proof against his own suffering and everyone else’s.
“I thought there were no more strings to pull. I was wrong. And that’s what kept me going—the sight of Monty Brind coming out topside again.”
The old order had been blown sky-high and everyone had to believe in something. Rumbold believed in a fiddle, as a fair guarantee that the pieces were going to come down in the same pattern as before. “They put us to work building an air-strip. Eighteen hours a day on a ration of bad rice and rubber nuts. We traded our watches and razors, cigarette lighters, rings, everything we had, for bad meat and blown tins and rotten fruit—anything we could eat. When the rest of us were stripped bare, Brind still managed to come across with something he could barter, something they wanted. People said it was information, but whatever it was, he climbed back to the top of the pile with it.”
