by David Nobbs
But how? He tried several methods. He tried selecting at random the first word of each line, and then working forwards, or selecting the last word, and working backwards. He tried writing the first word of the first line, the second word of the second line, the third word of the third line, and so on, and then going back and filling in the gaps, just as he had done with his impots at prep school. He tried writing down words which he knew to be conducive of poetic inspiration, words like “spring” and “autumn” and “corpses” and “e’er” and “o’er”. All to no avail. As those ten long days passed, the moments when he wrote no words grew longer, and longer, and longer.
And all the while Mrs Pollard was finding excuses to visit his room. She would leave things there and have to return for them. She would think she heard the shilling finish in his fire. She would bring him a cup of tea and an assortment of sweet biscuits. Each time she came she seemed to hover over him, and each time, had there been a train to his thought, she would have broken it.
Finally, towards dusk on the tenth day, when he had not added a word for many hours, she remarked: “Still working, then?”
“Er, yes.” He was annoyed at the interruption, although it interrupted nothing.
“You’ll get round shoulders. Still, it’s none of my business.”
“No.”
“I’ve never really been creative myself.” She had taken the fact that he had replied as an invitation, and had seated herself on the sofa, setting off a series of twangings and screechings that irritated Barnes beyond measure. “I’ve never really had anything to say,” she continued. “But you….” she paused, and for the first time for ten days Barnes looked at her as if she existed.
“I?”
“You have something to say.”
“And how am I going to say it?”
“In your poems.”
“I’ve written no poems.”
“You said you were writing poems. I was led to believe that you were writing poems. I don’t expect my tenants to lock themselves away for days on end, not speaking to me, and not even a couplet to show for it.”
“I tried.”
With astonishing speed a soft maternity enveloped Mrs Pollard. “You’re new to this business, aren’t you?” she asked.
He blushed and fidgeted awkwardly. “Yes,” he admitted.
“You aren’t really a poet at all.”
“No.”
“As if I minded. You could have told me.”
“I didn’t know.”
“No offence, I hope. Some of my best friends haven’t been poets. But I said to myself when you mentioned it: ‘That one a poet? H’m. I wonder.’”
Barnes replied quite mechanically to her maternity. All the verse had gone out of him. Of infinite possibilities he no longer had the slightest inkling. He was a boy again, and he could think of nothing to say to this new mother of his.
“Perhaps you’ll think of something later on,” said Mrs Pollard. “Some blank verse, or a nice hexameter. There’s no harm in keeping on trying.”
“I’m just not a poet.”
“You mustn’t say things like that. Faint heart never won fair lady.”
His faint heart fluttered like a moth with thrombosis, and he lowered his eyes.
“I’ll make you a stew,” she said, as if it was a thought that had just occurred to her for the first time and had opened up visions far in excess of those she had ever imagined. “Perhaps that’ll cheer you up.”
“Thank you.”
“You do like my stews, don’t you? You aren’t tired of them?”
“Not at all, no.”
“You aren’t just saying that?”
“No, I—it would be very nice.”
Left to himself, he made a final great effort to concentrate on his work. It was no use giving up. What would Chaucer’s friends have said if he’d packed the whole thing up just before Strood? The possibilities were even more infinite than he had imagined. Well, he must be that much more determined. It was a challenge, and he must rise to it. Perhaps he had been trying in the wrong way. Perhaps there had been something over-deliberate in his approach. Well, he must try a more open method, make himself more receptive, allow his thoughts and images freedom to form in their own good time. He decided to make his mind go a complete blank. This it did instantly, and it was still a complete blank when Mrs Pollard returned.
“I wondered if you’d like a little garlic?” she inquired coyly.
“Yes, that would be very nice.”
“Only some do and some don’t.”
Garlic. No garlic. Could she really think he cared?
“You’ve done nothing yet, then?”
“Not yet.”
“Never mind. Keep trying. It’s a fine thing, poetry. It’s not anything about the house, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not because you’re not happy here?”
“Oh no. No.”
“I hope you’ll be happy. Mr Veal has never complained.”
“Mr Veal?”
“The old man upstairs.”
“Oh.”
“With garlic, then.”
He resumed his creative activities. Nothing happened. The possibilities became so infinite, and the infinite stretched so far, that it seemed as if it might burst into a million fragments. Instead it receded. Far into the distance, with infinite slowness, it slid. He had no power to follow it, and a flat despair came upon him. For a while he was aware of nothing at all, but then odours of stew began to impinge themselves on his misery. He realised that he was hungry.
The odours came from the kitchen, and were constantly changing in the strangest ways. Where was Mrs Pollard? Why did she not bring him his stew? A simple comfort would have been most welcome. He had had comforts in his time. Miss Potter, Mrs McManus of Barnstaple, Mrs Egham, Mrs McManus of Newport (I.O.W.) and Mrs Bell, they all had seen to that. And now there was Mrs Pollard. She was mothering him, and trying to make him happy in a thousand little ways. Her hair was growing white, and she wanted to make him happy. And yet he wondered. What lay behind it? Maternal instincts he had seen, but were there others? He waited and waited, and his uneasiness grew.
Chapter 4
NOT SINCE MR JENNINGS HAD MRS POLLARD FELT SO much concern over a stew. She wanted to make Barnes a stew that he would never forget, a stew that would help him to overcome his worries and inspire him to write his poems. She opened the door of the fridge and gazed at the frosted wonderland inside. She went to the cupboard and peered at the rows of smiling edibles that stood in its dark, spicy depths. And she realised that for the first time in her life she was at a loss where to begin.
In desperation she consulted Thorneycroft’s Thought For Food and started to read Chapter One: “Your Guest Arrives”. She had never before sought the advice of the great culinary philosopher and gastrophile, but then she had never before been at a loss. In the past her stews had just happened. One minute they had not been there and the next minute, hey presto, there they had been.
The most important thing to consider, in choosing a menu, was the nature of the person who would eat the food. However carefully prepared, however exquisitely cooked, however delightfully presented a meal might be, it could not be a complete success unless it was served to the right person, said Thorneycroft, and Mrs Pollard believed him. But although he gave examples of kinds of people—the ascetic scholar was one, and the young executive was another—none of them were remotely like Barnes. What kind of a person could he possibly be? She turned to the chapter on stews, but to no purpose. Each recipe was absolutely delicious, of that she had no doubt, but which of them was right for her Barnsey?
In the end she had to abandon the book—a Christmas present—and return to her shelves. But it was no use. She was quite incapable of deciding which ingredients to use, and eventually, with a sudden despairing decision she relinquished control of her faculties and flung into the casserole the first objects that came to hand—some c
apers, an onion, some stewing beef, a sprig of tarragon, a lobster, some plums, and a sheet of gelatine. Onto all that she poured some stock.
While these ingredients were settling down she went to Barnes’ room and asked him about the garlic, and then, after she had returned and added the garlic, she tasted the stew. It was displeasing. She fetched from the larder a bay leaf, some more stewing beef, a bottle of sherry, another onion, and some carrots. She put a spoonful of sherry and the carrots into the stew, tasted it again, and grimaced. It still displeased her, though not so strongly as before.
At first she was not unhappy. She was performing a heroic holding action, and it occupied all her energies. But when she had tried every imaginable combination of ingredients, and the stew had still not become more than a pathetic shadow of the feast on which she had set her heart, she grew very depressed. She went to see Veal, as was her custom when things became too much for her.
She climbed slowly the dark, narrow, creaking staircase. She was panting and having great difficulty in breathing and before she entered his room she waited for it to die down.
Veal was asleep, and Mrs Pollard sat quietly for a few minutes on a wooden chair at the side of his bed. Then, when she felt calmer, she adjusted his sheets and tidied the bottom of his bed, making sure that the blankets were properly tucked in. She brushed his shoes, wound up his alarm clock, made certain that his suitcases were arranged in inverse order of size, and then stood at the bottom of the bed and looked down on him where he slept. She stood there for a few moments, and then she realised with a shock that she had been thinking of other things—of Barnes, of the stew, and of how she could make things easier for him in a thousand little ways.
She hastened downstairs and began once more to taste the stew. She did so with horror. She had hoped that in the interim it might have matured, or that, returning to it after a breather, she would find that her fears had been exaggerated. But it seemed, if anything, even less tasty than before. It was very far from being the ideal stew after which she had hankered.
She realised now, when it was too late, that the success of a stew depends not so much on the nature of the ingredients as upon their relationships among themselves, one to another. The sweetest carrot tastes bitter inside a camembert. At first the introduction of ingredients into the casserole had improved the stew, but only at first. She had introduced too many, far too many, so that it had become a struggle for survival down there in the cauldron. It would be difficult to state the exact moment at which the stew had ceased to improve, and had begun to deteriorate. Very likely it was with the introduction of the lobster. Anyway Mrs Pollard became certain that, could she but remove the lobster, the dish would become, if not ideal, at least edible. The lobster, however, had disintegrated, as lobsters will, given the slightest encouragement, and had permeated the stew to such an extent that not only was there nothing which could be said to be the lobster, but there was nothing that could be said not to be.
The only thing for it was to remove from the wreckage those objects which she judged most likely to be completely distasteful, and which were still sufficiently whole to be distinguishable—the sprig of tarragon, for instance. After removing each object she tasted the remainder and to her delighted surprise it began to grow more and more edible. With increasing excitement she removed objects and with increasing relish she tasted what was left. Really, it was almost delicious. She removed something which looked suspiciously like a burnt carrot, and ate another spoonful. She decided that it was perfect. At last! She had done it, and she could have cried for joy.
It was at this moment that she discovered that not a morsel of stew remained. She had just eaten the last spoonful.
Chapter 5
FOR A FEW MOMENTS HER HAND QUIVERED ON THE knob of his door, but she exerted no pressure, and the handle did not turn. Her stomach felt hollow. Her hands were weak. Once or twice she wavered, as if she was plucking up her courage and determining to walk boldly into his room and tell him the terrible news, but in reality she already knew that she would not.
She walked slowly through the kitchen, past the dying fire and the deserted knitting basket, and crept up the narrow staircase. Up there, separated from Veal by a thin and peeling wall, she lay wakeful. In the distance a steel bar was being hammered upon her forehead, and nearer at hand, a long while later, she heard a jangled squeak, as Barnes converted his sofa into a bed.
For he had noticed suddenly that the fire had gone out. He stood up, stretched painfully, and creaked into the kitchen. All round the range stood pots and pans and tins, and there, in the centre, was the empty, unwashed casserole. It was most strange.
Hunger was biting into him, and furtively he found some bread and ate three slices, dry. After that there was no point in staying up, so he cleaned his teeth, undressed, placed his clothes untidily over the back of his wooden chair, tightened the cord of his pyjamas, converted his sofa into a bed, and crept into it. The moon rose in a sky that was cold and hard and empty at last of snow. The trees drooped under the weight of the snow that had fallen, and there was no movement anywhere. He drifted towards sleep without reaching it, and he settled down for a long vigil, gazing at the ceiling till his eyes smarted, remembering the nights when it had thundered and he had longed to lie warm and crumpled beside whatever mother he had at the time. In this way he came near to the warmth of sleep, and then suddenly he was awake again, and there it was inside him, happiness. It forced him out of bed and sent him scampering to the window.
The moon was falling over the bare top of a hill, and light fingers of cloud were stretching wakefully across the sky. A grey light was beginning to spread from the east, and from the earth a thin steam was rising and dying as it rose. Mists began to gather and the sky turned slowly orange. Here and there a bird sang in surprise at finding itself alive on such a morning, after the storm.
The morning! In the morning he would start to discover the purpose of existence. It was not here, in this dingy room. It was not inside himself. It was not to be found through the rarefied isolation of artistic creation, even if what he had produced had been art. He realised that now. It was out there on the sides of the hills, where people lived, and in the factories, where they worked. He must work, feel himself useful, and embark upon a voyage of discovery. In the morning he would find himself a job. In the morning he would thrill to the vibrant excitement of human activity. In the morning he would become a new man, Fletcher.
Meanwhile he closed the curtain and went back to bed, and fell, like Mrs Pollard, into a kind of sleep.
Chapter 6
FLETCHER EMERGED THREE HOURS LATER IN A MANNER that astounded Mrs Pollard. His face, taking cheerfulness almost to the point of no return, carried all before it in a manner that she had not seen from him before. In her embarrassment she assumed that he would mention the events of the previous evening, but he made no reference to them. Rather he announced his intention of taking a short walk before breakfast. This could have knocked Mrs Pollard over with a feather. Judge then of her shock when she saw him leap down the steps in one bound and set off in the general direction of the Midland Station at a pronounced trot, rubbing his hands eagerly together.
She couldn’t understand it, and she didn’t like it. He had never taken a walk at any time, let alone before breakfast, and he had certainly never rubbed his hands together when she was looking. However, there was no time to worry about that. She must make him his breakfast. Stew.
It was not the usual thing for breakfast, but she felt that there would be no peace between them until she had redeemed herself. She decided, having learnt from her mistake, to aim at something simple, and she chose from her larder onions, potatoes, carrots, stewing beef and haricot beans. Onto these she poured a generous proportion of stock. Next she secured to the floor, at a yard’s distance from the casserole, a wooden chair, and she then sat on it. She began to stir the stew. This she did with an enormous spoon. It really was enormous, for a spoon. One would have been excuse
d had one mistaken it for a dredging bucket. This spoon, this great spoon, had once belonged to Builth Evans, of the Merioneth Axe Murders, and had become a valuable family heirloom. Mrs Pollard, who was descended from the Evanses on her grandmother’s side, was extremely proud of the spoon, and had made a will bequeathing it to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, should it survive her. It was over four feet long and had at its head a curious double joint, characteristic of the best Welsh domestic spoons. The purpose of this joint was to allow the spoon to lie in the vertical while the handle was in the horizontal position, and vice versa. When the handle of the spoon was wiggled, the wiggle communicated itself, via the joint, to the spoon, thus setting up a cross-wiggle. The result was a stir only slightly inferior to that obtainable with any other spoon.
Mrs Pollard believed that by thus employing the spoon she was making it useful, and that it was therefore a boon to her, in that it was of use. Wearisome and clumsy though her efforts were, she firmly believed that she was using a labour-saving device.
Fletcher, in the meantime, was advancing by leaps and bounds, as he grappled with the problems involved in discovering a new city. His nervous excitement led him on a prodigious walk, up and down the hills, through parks, past quaint old pubs and great modern stores, the dreams of master hacks. On all sides stretched streets of square brick houses, appealing or appalling, according to one’s spelling. Eventually, at the end of one of these streets, he came upon a vista. Below him lay the valley and the factories, and on the other side of the valley a belt of derelict open spaces and car parks threaded its way into the centre of the city and petered out among a mass of printing presses, garages and canteen windows. Beyond them, on the right, rose the towers and spires of the principal buildings.
Fletcher stopped walking and leant against the wall, looking out over this new land. The city was given over, in the main, to heavy industry. A hundred years ago, he mused, it had been little more than a collection of villages, each with its own peculiar customs and institutions. Now it housed, he estimated, some half a million souls, several of them taxi-drivers, others lawyers, journalists, smelters and so on, down through the whole gamut of human activity. There was not much here, he judged, to attract the tourist, but there was a thriving air of activity which would no doubt compensate for the lack of historical interest and beauty. The inhabitants, he felt sure, retained the traditions of independence and individuality which their manly life had given their forefathers.
