by Colin Wilson
Listen, Gerard, let’s forget it, eh? I can’t explain to you. I will one day. Don’t get the idea it’s a mystery. It’s not. But let’s not talk about it.
Sorme said:
Austin, I’m going to leave you. You look dog-tired.
I am. I shall take a strong sleeping-draught. Do you mind very much if I don’t drive you home?
Of course not.
I’ll send you in a taxi . . .
No!
Yes. I really insist.
Don’t be a fool. I’d enjoy walking.
When he came back from the lavatory a few minutes later, Nunne was returning the phone to its rest. He said: The taxi will be here in a few minutes. It’s on my account, so don’t pay.
He yawned, then stretched, and looked at himself in the mirror, saying:
Hair of a woman and teeth of a lion. One of the beasts in Revelation. Why was I born so ugly?
Sorme sat down and picked up the wine-glass.
You really are an idiot, Austin.
Nunne reached out, and touched Sorme’s hair briefly.
He said:
Dear Gerard.
He picked up the phone again and listened for a moment. He said:
Hello, is that the night porter? Mr. Gregory? Ah, this is Mr. Nunne speaking. Do you think you could put my car away for me? It’s outside now. No, I’m sending a friend down with the key in a few minutes. Thank you. Good night.
Sorme said:
By the way, Austin, can you tell me anything about this chap Oliver Glasp?
Nunne lit a cigarette.
What do you want to know?
Well, who is he? He seems very talented.
Do you know his work?
Only the paintings in your flat.
You might like him. Except that he’s quite the most quarrelsome person in London. He has no skin.
Has he . . . any peculiarities?
He’s not queer, if that’s what you mean. I never enquired into his sex life. He’s been in mental homes—tends to fly into sudden rages and throw things. He also has some obsession about pain. It’s his favourite word—at least, it was when I knew him. We quarrelled—I couldn’t stand his touchiness. At the time, he was trying to be an ascetic—sleeping on the bare wires of his bed and all that. . . .
The phone rang. Nunne said:
That will be your taxi.
. . . . .
Back in his own room, he collected the brandy flask and the glasses, and took them upstairs. The kitchen smelt pleasantly of fruit; a bowl of apples stood on the table.
He felt physically tired, and yet curiously excited. Talking to Nunne had given him an intuition of change. He thought, with sudden complete certainty: I have wasted five years. Stuck in rooms. The world was alive. I have done nothing.
Poor Austin. Sadistic and listless, sensual, caring only about people and places. I am freer than he is; yet for five years I have behaved like a prisoner. Why?
He opened the kitchen window and leaned out. The night air smelt fresh. He felt buoyed up by an intuition of kindness and gratitude. It came again: the sense of life, of London’s three millions, of smells in attics and markets.
As he stood there he heard a door close. He turned around and listened; it had been the Frenchman’s room. Probably Callet would come up to the kitchen. The idea of conversation gave him no pleasure. He went quietly down the stairs, and back into his own room.
Instead of switching on the light, he crossed the room and opened the window, then climbed out on to the fire-escape. He sat there, staring into the darkness, faintly lit by lamps and the neon sign of the cinema. A light came on above him; it was in the kitchen. Looking up, he could see Callet’s shadow move across the glass. He congratulated himself on his foresight. But the light disturbed him; it made him feel as if he was avoiding Callet. After a moment’s consideration he went up the fire-escape, to the landing outside the old man’s room. This was the top of the fire-escape. From there, an iron ladder completed the remaining distance to the roof. He pulled at it to test its solidity before grasping the rungs and climbing up. It curved over the parapet, on to the roof.
The parapet was a foot high; it enclosed two sides of the roof, facing north and east. On the west side, only a gutter divided the slates from the drop past five stories to the waste ground between the house and the church. The breeze was cold. He moved round the angle of the roof to shelter from it, then sat cautiously on the slates, his feet braced against the parapet. Towards Camden Town, the lights of the plastics factory that worked all night lit the sky. The exhilaration was still in him, relaxing into a sense of quiet and power. When the sound of a heavy lorry passed on the Kentish Town Road his mind moved ahead of it, through Whetstone and Barnet, to the north. The thoughts were controlled, clear-cut and deliberate. The feeling that drove them seemed to flow steadily and certainly. They moved towards an image of gratitude, of reverence, of affirmation; it became a cathedral, bigger than any known cathedral, symbol of the unseen. He thought: This has taken me five years. A vision of all knowledge, of human achievement in imagination and courage. Not the mystic’s vision, but the philosopher’s, freed from triviality and immediacy. I am the god who dwelleth in the eye, and I have come to give right and truth to Ra. But how many times? Half a dozen in five years. And now stimulated by a sadistic queer and an infatuated girl. Nunne succeeds where Plotinus failed.
He began to laugh, his back jerking against the slates, his feet braced apart. It made him realise that he was cold. He began to wish that he had thought of bringing an overcoat.
Never make a yogi. Not enough patience. Or need the warmer climates. Intensity of life. Monastery in the Himalayas. An old man stared into the dawn, his face lined with strength of will, unimpressed by the five-thousand-foot drop into the valley. Isaiah or Michelangelo. In tense hands, he holds the world’s will, beyond tragedy. A faint pencil line of light along the eastern horizon.
To change. To change. To what?
An image of Caroline came to him, and he felt a momentary distaste. The unseen, the imaginative adventure, was just what she did not represent. Like Kay, the girl from the Slade School, it was an idealism she offended. The warm, predatory body, the desire to be possessed. Her animal vitality conducted the tension away, like an earthing wire.
To change. But no physical change. Only a constant intensity of imagination that would require no cathedral symbol to sustain and remind. Isobel Gowdie, big-breasted farmer’s wife, sweating and curving to the indrive of an abstract darkness, the warm secretions flowing to abet the entry of a formless evil. To escape the dullness of a Scottish farm by daylight, the time trap. Symbol of the unseen. The unseen being all you cannot see at the moment. Until the consciousness stretches to embrace all space and history. Osiris openeth the storm cloud in the body of heaven, and is unfettered himself; Horus is made strong happily each day. Why the time trap? Why the enclosure? Invisible bonds, non-existent bonds, bonds that cannot be broken because they are non-existent. Human beings like blinkered horses.
The cold had penetrated the thin coat and trousers until he felt naked. He stretched and flexed his limbs, then blew into his cupped hands. The iron of the ladder numbed his fingers. He lowered himself back over the parapet, feeling with his feet for the rungs. Descending, he was afraid of the numbness in his fingers, aware now of the drop to the concrete flags below. He felt relieved as his feet touched the iron platform.
When he switched on the light, he saw that his hands were black with dust. There was a blur of grime on his cheek, where he had raised his hand to touch it. He went up to the kitchen, and found that the kettle was half full of hot water.
After he had washed, he set the alarm for eight o’clock. It was three-thirty. He was asleep almost as soon as he closed his eyes.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Pale December sunlight made him sweat as he cycled along Leadenhall Street. The traffic in the City was heavy. He was aware that it irritated drivers of cars when he was abl
e to steer in the narrow lane between a line of stationary traffic and the pavement, and it pleased him to do it. When cycling, he felt that the driver of every car was a personal enemy.
The mental activity of the previous night had left a feeling of freshness, and he felt no irritation towards the traffic. When a woman stepped off the pavement in front of him, forcing him to brake sharply, he only smiled at her and shook his head in remonstrance; he guessed her to be a foreigner from the fact that she was looking left instead of right.
It was shortly after nine-thirty when he stopped in Aldgate High Street. He leaned the bicycle against the wall outside the Lyons Corner House, and locked the back wheel. The self-service bar was almost empty. He bought tea and two toasted buns, and sat at a table near the window. A middle-aged woman wearing a pink smock collected dirty cups off the table. He returned her smile, and felt as he did so a sense of anticipation that was like convalescence. The whole café with its food smells, the workman opposite reading the Daily Express, the heavy traffic in the street outside, all touched some mechanism of nostalgia in him. It felt like waking from a long sleep. He took the leather-bound notebook from his pocket, and wrote in it: ‘Whitechapel, December 1st. I qualify as a modern Faust. Shut up in a room, thinking too much. Enter Austin Mephistopheles, twisting the waxed ends of his moustache. . . . But who is Gretchen?’
He stopped writing, reflecting that Caroline or Gertrude might easily see the notebook. He had been about to elaborate the question. Instead, he wrote: ‘Like Mephistopheles, Austin sells me love or life. My side of the bargain is still obscure.’
On the opposite side of the road a barrel organ began to play, tinnily, each note jangling like a rusty can dropped from a height. It aroused in him a memory that was also a sense of smell and colour. For a moment, it eluded him, then returned: the City office, the smell of ledgers, and the French tobacco of the belligerent Scottish clerk who lived at Southend. The last time he had heard it played, Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix, had been on the Thursday afternoon, five years before, when he had walked out of the office without giving notice, the solicitor’s letter carefully folded in his wallet, and had stepped into the traffic and sunlight of Bishops-gate, still dazed by the feeling of relief.
The memory reconstructed itself with a detail of sense and feeling that he found surprising; it revived the hot afternoon smell of dust and motor exhaust, and the damp smell of the entry below the office where he kept his bicycle. For a moment, he considered walking through Houndsditch to look at the office building again, then dismissed the idea, recalling the boredom and self-contempt that had accumulated there over a year.
Almost immediately the sense of reconciliation disappeared. He had remembered the pink cheeks and the wispy blond moustache of the Scottish clerk, and the memory stirred shame and anger. The Scotsman had professed a violent anti-Semitism: he referred to Hampstead and Golder’s Green as Abrahamstead and Goldstein’s Green. His arguments with Sorme had always finished with mutual declarations of contempt, leaving behind a taste of futility. These arguments, and an abortive affair with the office girl, were all that stood out in Sorme’s memory of the year in the office. The girl’s name was Marilyn; she was plump, not particularly attractive, and came from Stepney Green. But she was given to wearing semi-transparent dresses, with very little underneath them. When she bent over the filing cabinet, the outline of her pants showed clearly through the fabric, and the three clerks stared surreptitiously until she straightened up. Finally, he invited her out to the theatre and took her drinking afterwards. Later the same evening, in the Victoria Park, he knew with certainty that he did not want to possess her, that his desire had been an illusion born of boredom and the sexy innuendo of office conversation. She had probably assumed it was chivalry that had made him gently pull down her skirt after she had raised it. He was glad, three days later, to leave the office without seeing her, and contemptuous of himself for being glad.
The recollection left him feeling uncomfortable and ashamed. He finished the toasted buns and went out.
He walked the bicycle along the pavement as far as Middlesex Street, then mounted and rode slowly towards Bishopsgate. He dismissed the memories, and thought deliberately of Caroline and Gertrude; immediately he began to feel better. In Widegate Street he stared with interest at a pregnant woman who pushed a battered pram loaded with washing, and felt the release of some inner tension of smell and colour, a renewal of the excitement. He turned into Spitalfields Market and dismounted; it was impossible to ride among the people who crowded the narrow space between parked lorries and the market building. Almost immediately a man in shirt-sleeves swung a net-bag of cabbage off a lorry, missing Sorme’s head by a fraction. The man grinned, saying: Watch yer loaf! Sorme grinned back, halting for a moment to avoid a trolley loaded with potato sacks. The inner warmth was like being drunk, but without the sense of limitation.
On the corner of Brushfield Street, he stopped to consult the London atlas he carried in his saddlebag. The traffic in Commercial Street was an unbroken stream, filling the air with vibrations and the smell of diesel exhausts.
. . . . .
The pavement of Durward Street was barely two feet wide; the roofs, window-sills and kerbstones formed a perspective of unbroken parallel lines from one end of the road to the other. The street was deserted.
He stopped before number twelve. The brown paint on the front door had been weathered into scales.
He stood there, in front of the window, hoping to hear some movement from inside the house that would relieve his hesitation. Now he was on the point of knocking, he remembered Nunne’s comments about Glasp, and the warning of the Hungarian priest. He tried to think of the words with which he would introduce himself. Finally, he rapped loudly, and waited.
A window opened above his head. He stood back to look, hoping it would be Glasp. It was the window of the house next door. A woman asked him:
Did you want Mrs. Greenberg, or the lodger?
A man called Glasp, Sorme said. He felt embarrassed, as if some guilty secret was being exposed to the whole street.
The lodger. He won’t be long, the woman said. He usually goes out about this time for breakfast. I don’t know which caff he goes to.
It doesn’t matter. I’ll call back later.
The window slammed again. He noticed the curtains of the house opposite stir as someone looked out at him. He cycled back along the street, irritated with himself, and with the woman next-door for not minding her own business. Her effect had been to make him feel an intruder.
At the end of the street, he dismounted, and leaned the bicycle against the wall, under the No Entry sign. The idea of looking for Glasp in the local cafés did not appeal to him. He looked at his watch, and decided to take a walk round the neighbourhood. It had been a long time since he walked round Whitechapel, thinking of the Jack the Ripper murders. Now, while the mood of receptivity was still on him, the prospect pleased him. He locked the bicycle, binding the chain twice around the wheel.
Opposite the end of Durward Street was the shell of a theatre, with broken rafters and fire-blackened walls exposed. He stood, staring across at it, experiencing a desire to climb the wooden fence that hid the lower story, to pick his way across the rotten floorboards, and smell the odour of damp and decay that came from heaps of rubble. It was almost a physical craving. It puzzled him. Things were happening inside him that he found difficult to understand. It felt as if his nerves had been disconnected, then reconnected in a different order, generating new appetites and a new sensibility. He turned and walked along Vallance Road, away from the main road. He picked his way carefully across the bomb-site, taking care to avoid treading on rusty barrel-hoops. Across the street, an empty school building looked as desolate as the ruined theatre; on its walls, whitewashed letters two feet high stated: Union will get rid of the Reds. At both ends of the inscription was a symbol of a lightning bolt in a circle. He crossed the road past the school, on to anoth
er strip of waste ground bordered by empty houses and stumps of broken walls, and paused for a moment to look in the windowless aperture of a disintegrating building. The floor was covered with rubble, old newspapers nibbled by mice, a torn pink brassière. A narrow stairway, still intact, curved around the opposite wall. As he looked, a mouse ran out from among the newspapers, and disappeared into a hole in the skirting board. Someone had pointed out this house to him before; in 1943, the body of a Finnish sailor had been found on the upper floor by some children playing hide-and-seek; he had been robbed and left to die, battered by a brick swung in a silk stocking.
The house next door was still occupied; the front door stood open, and the smell of frying sausages came from it. Outside the door, a baby lay asleep in a pram.
He wandered, without aim, through the littered streets. In Hanbury Street, the new blocks of flats and the children’s playground looked incongruous. He stopped again outside the barber’s shop at number 29. In the yard behind the shop, the third of the Ripper’s killings had taken place. He had once seen a photograph of it, taken immediately after the murders; it looked completely unchanged by the intervening seventy years. The barber looked up from shaving a customer as Sorme paused by the door. He said:
Hello. Long time no see.
Sorme said: How are you?
Fine. Never see you in here for haircuts these days.
I don’t live around here now.
At the end of Hanbury Street he found himself facing Spitalfields Market again. As he passed the Wren church, an old man came out of the public lavatory, muttering:
Tanner for a cup o’ tea?
Sorme fumbled in his pocket, turning his eyes away from the dewdrop that hung on the end of the man’s nose. The clawed, dry-skinned hand took the two threepenny pieces; the man glanced around quickly to see if any policeman had observed him. His hand rested on Sorme’s sleeve. Uncertain of what was being demanded of him, Sorme looked into the watery blue eyes. The man’s voice was an indistinguishable mumble; he pointed to his feet, on which he wore grubby plimsolls. Sorme assumed he was asking for more money, and started to grope for loose change. He stopped when he caught the words:
