A Long Walk to Wimbledon

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘You think we ought to risk going down there?’ he asked again.

  ‘I think I must, my dear sir. True, they may not extend that universal welcome to – ahem – a tropical, but at this moment I have an overwhelming desire for their “peace”. And besides I am deucedly chilly.’

  It was this last admission that decided him. He was feeling cold enough himself and it was plain that Dr Satpathi, deprived of the protection of his garish green overcoat, might suffer badly if they stayed out all night. There had been people every winter found dead in the streets from exposure.

  ‘Come on then,’ he said.

  They advanced along the side road, able to make out less and less of their surroundings because of the increasing glare of light reflected from the big white noticeboard with its pink-lettered message.

  ‘All prayer is good, I believe,’ Dr Satpathi said after a little. ‘Yet I am not sure I altogether trust that urgent need for additional knees.’

  ‘No.’

  They reached the sign. It was attached, he saw, to the stubs of railings that had once barred off a flight of white stone steps leading into the tall building, now revealed as somewhere dating back to perhaps the turn of the century, a deeply indented pile in red brick striped with bands of pinkish stone. Looking upwards, he saw a fanciful skyline and, running all along the façade in incised art-nouveau lettering, the words ‘St Pancras Public Baths’. So it was in one of the old swimming-baths that these people, whoever they were, had established themselves. No doubt the building had been better preserved than many others and had seemed attractive to set up in. But to set up as what exactly?

  There must have been a hidden peephole in the heavy double doors at the top of the steps because, before they had done anything to draw attention to themselves, one of the leaves was abruptly opened a cautious few inches.

  In the spill-over of glare from the searchlight – it was a car headlamp fed by a wire snaking from the building – a man could be seen peering down at them. He was oldish, probably in his late fifties, bald, with a beard cut with unusual neatness, stocky of body and dressed noticeably trimly in sweater and trousers. Between his hands rested a thick and knobbly cudgel. Yet for all his brisk appearance there was, he sensed, a sort of shrinkingness about him.

  ‘You have read our sign?’ he called out.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered quickly, anxious over any possible rebuff awaiting Dr Satpathi. ‘My friend here is not well. He’s been attacked and he’s very cold. Can you help us?’

  ‘All are welcome,’ the man answered without much evident warmth, though he did not appear to have been scandalised by the colour of Dr Satpathi’s skin.

  He opened the door and stepped out. Behind him, Mark saw with a dart of anxiety, there were two more cudgel-armed men, each bearing an odd resemblance to the first even though one was much younger and the other had a head crowned by a mass of fluffy grey hair. But all three seemed to share a quality he found hard to pin down, a sort of wary blandness.

  But it was too late to retreat now.

  Putting a hand under Dr Satpathi’s elbow, he began to climb the steps. The three cudgel-carrying figures at the top did not budge.

  ‘Will you be praying knees for us?’ their leader abruptly demanded.

  Mark halted. There had been a flicker in his voice of something very like greed.

  Would he pray with these people? He was not really religious. Not even the leaden miseries of the past few years nor the sharp agonies he had gone through with Jasmine had revived in him the need to supplicate that he had known as a boy. But neither had he any strong anti-religious feeling.

  In his cupped hand he felt Dr Satpathi’s cold-trembling become yet more violent.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, tumbling to a decision. ‘If you want praying knees we will pray with you.’

  The watchful faces in the background disappeared. Their questioner stepped aside. They went up the last few steps and into the building.

  The door behind them was promptly slammed shut by the bald man who had come in at their heels. Too promptly? Was it a trap sprung?

  But all he did was call out.

  ‘Sister Raquel. Sister Raquel.’

  One of two inner doors opened quietly – its wooden panel had been replaced by corrugated iron, no doubt when it had been taken for fuel as doors everywhere had been – and a woman in her late twenties or early thirties appeared. She reminded Mark, despite her short skirt and a pullover that did nothing to hide the femininity of her figure, of a nun. She had a look of aggressive obedience that he remembered.

  ‘Sister will look after you,’ the bald door-keeper said dismissively, climbing up on to a high stool and perching there, his cudgel across his knees.

  ‘Come,’ the girl whispered, as if the tattered little entrance to the baths with its ticket-seller’s box and its still remaining posters advertising a dance was the vestibule of a church.

  Relieved at least that even just inside the building it felt much less cold, Mark followed her with Dr Satpathi still holding his arm.

  She led them through what must once have been part of the changing-rooms, but with rows of sharp-smelling hens in the old wire clothes-baskets sleepily clucking as they passed, and then they came directly into the bath itself.

  A hollow ringing sensation struck Mark’s senses even before he had had time to take in the deep sloping empty pool and the huddled clumps of people down on its tiled floor and round its edge. No doubt the sound was produced simply by the tiles everywhere – there was even a tall crudely executed tiled mural on one wall, a pink and red design on a black background – and by the glass panes in the high tunnel-domed roof. But even the quietest noise there echoed and twanged, and afterwards whenever he thought about the place he heard that tingling high-pitched gloss on every sound.

  Yet the groups on the floor of the pool and up on its broad surround were anything but noisy. There were a good many children – and, Mark saw, more women by far than men – but even though they were chattering a little the combined sound of their voices did not rise above a murmur. A murmur that sang, however.

  ‘There are some vacant places at the Deep End,’ Sister Raquel whispered.

  In the light – orangey-dim electric bulbs hung from the ceiling: they must have a generator – Mark saw now that Dr Satpathi was in a worse condition than he had realised. Not only was he still limping heavily, but his face had also suffered when he had been knocked down and a dull contusion was thickening all his left cheek. As if conscious of the bad impression his appearance might give, he tried now to hold his ripped trousers together in front of himself, making his gait yet more shuffling.

  Plainly it had been right to decide to take temporary refuge here. But what had their pledge to be praying knees committed them to?

  Sister Raquel took them, a head-bowed figure, to collect from what had been the men’s changing-room a thin old foam mattress to share between them and a couple of blankets and she showed them the lavatories, clean as such places once had used to be even if there was no running water. But there was paper to use, a half-ripped away copy of a cookery book called High on the Hog.

  Burdened with their bedding they made their way to the Deep End ladder and Mark succeeded in getting Dr Satpathi down it and establishing themselves in a small area bounded by one of the blue lines which had once guided swimmers as they had happily trolled their lengths. Taking the Pernod bottle out of the pocket of his burberry before wadding it up to give the little Indian some additional comfort, he was struck by an acute sense of shame at its clearly printed bright red label. Hastily he explained how he had come to be carrying it, hoping though he did not like to raise his voice much to be overheard by the people next to them, a young man distinguished by a more than unusually numerous crop of boils on his face and neck, his wife who was nursing a subduedly wailing baby and a little girl of five or six clutching with quiet obstinacy the chipped and battered remains of a large talking doll.

  He had just fin
ished his over-elaborate account of Jasmine’s need for this particular drink when there was a stir of movement all over the big echo-tingling place. Faces, pinched and pale as faces always were but with an odd half-attained serenity about them, craned one and all upwards. He looked towards where they were gazing so unanimously.

  Up on to the tubular skeleton that had once held the diving-boards, burned long ago no doubt, a man was climbing. He was dressed in a long robe made of some white sheeting, impressive enough despite its amateur-drama air. Or perhaps, Mark thought, there was a certain force of personality emanating from its wearer, for all that he was busily occupied in getting to the top of the tower without catching his floppy garment on any of the bars.

  But, whatever it was, here was a force not altogether to be lightly regarded.

  Mark turned a little uneasily to Dr Satpathi. But the Indian, half sitting half lying propped on the wadded burberry, had his eyes closed in sleep.

  At last the climber reached the top and stood with legs braced on one cross-strut and thick pink hands grasping another. The face, too, was a deep pink with, clear to see on forehead and cheekbones, a number of stubby protuberances as if his feelings like a thick paste inside him were on the point of bursting out at any moment.

  A hush had fallen over the whole big reverberating hall. Even the smallest children were not making a sound.

  Mark’s shoulders twitched. He could feel emotion stored behind him, as charged as a heavy voltage of electricity.

  ‘We shall not want.’

  The white-robed man pronounced the words rollingly. The tiled walls sang with them.

  ‘We shall not want.’

  The massed response came back like tingling thunder.

  ‘We do not fear.’

  ‘We do not fear.’

  Dr Satpathi had woken from his doze and pushed himself upright, twisted on to one side so as to spare his bruised hip.

  The preacher, his lumpy face already beginning to shine with sweat, repeated the litany. The gathering all round sent it surging muffledly back. Again, again, again and again.

  Mark found himself half-responding to the hypnotic effect of the reiterated reverberating sound. Fiercely he told himself that he was where he was only because it was sensible to take a rest.

  ‘We shall not want.’

  ‘We do not fear.’

  At last the preacher allowed the chant to die away. A silence hung in the air, part replete, part still expectant.

  ‘May the Great Spirit which is and ever shall be grant us at our ending the everlasting rest which we are promised. May it come soon. May it come softly. May it come sweetly.’

  There was a single receptive murmur from, it seemed, every person in the high tunnel-domed hall.

  ‘Let us join hands in amity and sing.’

  The young boil-covered husband next to Mark stretched a hand across the blue-tile dividing line between them. Mark glanced at it and shook his head in a tight gesture of negation. The fingers of the hand snapped softly but imperiously.

  Mark felt yet more of a fool. But no doubt this was in part at least what he had promised them when he had agreed to be a pair of praying knees, a small price to pay for the comfort Dr Satpathi needed. He grasped the young man’s hand – its palm was hotly moist – trusting that payment would not extend much beyond this.

  He saw from the look he was given that he was expected to take Dr Satpathi’s hand, just as the boily young man was grasping his small daughter’s who in turn held one of her mother’s. Dr Satpathi seemed entirely ready to co-operate.

  ‘Eternal Father, strong to save …’

  The words of the old hymn rolled out, a little changed he realised. In place of the familiar plea ‘for those in peril on the sea’ there was a call now for help ‘ ’mid dangers that we cannot see.’

  Well, those there were certainly. And if the huddled people here were not necessarily receiving help from above to avert them they were at least safer where they were than outside. The thought of staying with them, of giving way, was tempting.

  He joined the singing. If for no other reason than a suspicion that it would be a mistake to antagonise the boil-pocked young man gripping his hand.

  Dr Satpathi, he heard, had also added his voice, a reedy tenor, to the surging boomy chorus, his earlier distrust of ‘the need for additional knees’ apparently forgotten.

  ‘Abide with me.’

  The shivery Victorian hymn followed, beloved once of Cup Final football crowds, eighty or a hundred thousand voices joining together before a match most of them had paid half a week’s earnings and had travelled the length of the country to see. That had all been a long time ago, an impossible time.

  ‘Change and decay all round I see.

  ‘O Thou who changest not, abide with me.’

  And was that yearning so wrong? To hope that a future awaited on the other side, one not greyly deprived and shot through with blood-red danger streaks? He felt the swirl and sweep of it all moving over him. Warm, reassuring, easy.

  Dr Satpathi’s hand in his hand had become moist as the young husband’s. It seemed he had found the safety he had craved sooner than he had expected. The long tramp to Balham and that colony of fellow Indians would not be necessary now.

  The deep reverberating singing went on and on, broken every now and again by a return to the litany they had earlier chanted. ‘We shall not want.’ ‘We do not fear.’ Mark reckoned that hours, two, three or even four, must have passed. He had surrendered almost totally to the hypnotic effect of it all. He no longer tried to think. At some time it must come to an end, and then he would attempt to see where he stood. But in the meanwhile, his hands riveted to those of the young husband and Dr Satpathi, he let it happen. Dream-lost.

  And then at last, whether in obedience to some inner signal in the preacher’s consciousness – perhaps he was simply on the point of exhaustion: his pink lump-marked face had become a muddy-grey – or whether because some pre-set period had come to an end, it was over. The preacher simply did not lead them into another hymn or another round of chanting, and after a short pause he produced from somewhere under his flowing robe a small grubby-looking piece of paper.

  He peered at it and then spoke again.

  ‘Fuel gathering,’ he said in a distinctly more workmanlike voice, making Mark wonder if in the old days he had not been a non-conformist minister or an enthusiastic young vicar.

  ‘Fuel gathering for the boilers. Peter tells me that stocks are getting low, and perhaps you have all felt that the radiators have not been as warm as they can be. So from tomorrow we shall send out an extra party. David will lead it. Be ready if he calls on you.’

  Mark saw his neighbour, whose hand he had dropped as soon as the singing had ended, square his shoulders.

  It came to him, with immense relief, that if some of these people left the place on occasion he himself ought to be able to get out. Because he knew now, now that the chanting and singing no longer enveloped him, that whatever safety there was here for Dr Satpathi he himself was going to be off again walking to Wimbledon as soon as it was light. The call which Jasmine made to him was stronger by far than any hopes of safety.

  ‘But some good news,’ the preacher went on. ‘The wind has been much stronger and the batteries are well charged. So we can have the lights on a little later. But on the other hand it has not been raining these last few days, and the tanks are going down faster than we like. So, please, please, use as little water as you can. Remember what happened before. There were people killed over by Regent’s Park in fights for water.’

  He stopped to let the warning sink in. And Mark, who had heard much the same rumour from some of his pupils – only with them the fights had taken place in Golders Green – wondered whether he was not deliberately keeping his congregation in a state of frightenedness, giving them a sort of communal bugaboo. But the tales could be perfectly true.

  ‘Now,’ the preacher resumed – the pinkness was stealing back to
his face highlighting the knobby lumps – ‘will the servers please distribute the rations.’

  A number of women got up, went through a door still marked ‘Showers’ and returned with baskets of flat round loaves which, though they were a dull grey colour, reminded Mark of the excellent crusty Greek bread he had used to buy at a local delicatessen before it had been wrecked in the First Riots. He contrived to push the thin stick of bread he had baked himself under the edge of his wadded burberry and when he and Dr Satpathi were offered a quarter of one of the big round loaves he accepted.

  Unfair to take advantage of what seemed to be simple charity. But a lot of miles lay between him and Wimbledon next day and he would need all the sustenance he could get.

  He sat and chewed at the tough doughy stuff, and then quite suddenly felt overwhelmed with tiredness.

  ‘A sleep and a forgetting.’

  ‘What was that, my dear fellow?’ Dr Satpathi asked.

  ‘Sorry. Muttering aloud. I’m stupid with tiredness.’

  He lay back on the thin old foam mattress.

  He had expected to fall asleep at once, but no sooner had he shut his eyes than his mind began to race with sharp nightmarish thoughts. Was this place as innocent as it appeared to be? What about the greed with which they had seemed to gather in more praying knees? Was it after all going to be so easy to leave in the morning? When the boily young man had let go his hand just now, was it because he felt a bond had been knotted?

  Jaggedy visions of the day past added themselves to his state of turmoil. The out-of-the-blue trickle of ringing from his long-buried telephone. The Happies’ truck, swaying and unpredictable and ominous. The long empty streets and the black-eyed window-less houses. Mrs Brilling’s tinny voice saying ‘She’s dying, Mark. She wants to see you.’

  To cease upon the midnight with no pain.

  He groaned aloud.

  ‘You are not asleep, my dear fellow?’

  He opened his eyes.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I can’t seem to get off. It’s noisy, I suppose. That wretched little girl squeaking her doll.’

  The girl extracted at that moment a particularly loud grating bleat from the rosy plastic object she so obstinately clutched. He winced.