The inn was not quite where I remembered it. There was the Town Hall, but they had built a new cinema with a Moorish dome and a café, and there was a garage which hadn’t existed in my time. I had forgotten too the turning to the left up a steep villaed hill.
‘I don’t believe that road was there in my day,’ I said.
‘Your day?’ Lola asked.
‘Didn’t I tell you? I was born here.’
‘You must get a kick out of bringing me here,’ Lola said. ‘I suppose you used to think of nights like this when you were a boy.’
‘Yes,’ I said, because it wasn’t her fault. She was all right. I liked her scent. She used a good shade of lipstick. It was costing me a lot, a fiver for Lola and then all the bills and fares and drinks, but I’d have thought it money well spent anywhere else in the world.
I lingered at the bottom of that road. Something was stirring in the mind, but I don’t think I should have remembered what, if a crowd of children hadn’t come down the hill at that moment into the frosty lamplight, their voices sharp and shrill, their breath fuming as they passed under the lamps. They all carried linen bags, and some of the bags were embroidered with initials. They were in their best clothes and a little self-conscious. The small girls kept to themselves in a kind of compact beleaguered group, and one thought of hair ribbons and shining shoes and the sedate tinkle of a piano. It all came back to me: they had been to a dancing lesson, just as I used to go, to a small square house with a drive of rhododendrons half-way up the hill. More than ever I wished that Lola were not with me, less than ever did she fit, as I thought ‘something’s missing from the picture’, and a sense of pain glowed dully at the bottom of my brain.
We had several drinks at the bar, but there was half an hour before they would agree to serve dinner. I said to Lola, ‘You don’t want to drag round this town. If you don’t mind, I’ll just slip out for ten minutes and look at a place I used to know.’ She didn’t mind. There was a local man, perhaps a schoolmaster, at the bar simply longing to stand her a drink. I could see how he envied me, coming down with her like this from town just for a night.
I walked up the hill. The first houses were all new. I resented them. They hid such things as fields and gates I might have remembered. It was like a map which had got wet in the pocket and pieces had stuck together; when you opened it there were whole patches hidden. But half-way up, there the house really was, the drive; perhaps the same old lady was giving lessons. Children exaggerate age. She may not in those days have been more than thirty-five. I could hear the piano. She was following the same routine. Children under eight, 6–7 p.m. Children eight to thirteen, 7–8. I opened the gate and went in a little way. I was trying to remember.
I don’t know what brought it back. I think it was simply the autumn, the cold, the wet frosting leaves, rather than the piano, which had played different tunes in those days. I remembered the small girl as well as one remembers anyone without a photograph to refer to. She was a year older than I was: she must have been just on the point of eight. I loved her with an intensity I have never felt since, I believe, for anyone. At least I have never made the mistake of laughing at children’s love. It has a terrible inevitability of separation because there can be no satisfaction. Of course one invents tales of houses on fire, of war and forlorn charges which prove one’s courage in her eyes, but never of marriage. One knows without being told that that can’t happen, but the knowledge doesn’t mean that one suffers less. I remembered all the games of blind-man’s buff at birthday parties when I vainly hoped to catch her, so that I might have the excuse to touch and hold her, but I never caught her; she always kept out of my way.
But once a week for two winters I had my chance: I danced with her. That made it worse (it was cutting off our only contact) when she told me during one of the last lessons of the winter that next year she would join the older class. She liked me too, I knew it, but we had no way of expressing it. I used to go to her birthday parties and she would come to mine, but we never even ran home together after the dancing class. It would have seemed odd; I don’t think it occurred to us. I had to join my own boisterous teasing male companions, and she the besieged, the hustled, the shrilly indignant sex on the way down the hill.
I shivered there in the mist and turned my coat collar up. The piano was playing a dance from an old C. B. Cochran revue. It seemed a long journey to have taken to find only Lola at the end of it. There is something about innocence one is never quite resigned to lose. Now when I am unhappy about a girl, I can simply go and buy another one. Then the best I could think of was to write some passionate message and slip it into a hole (it was extraordinary how I began to remember everything) in the woodwork of the gate. I had once told her about the hole, and sooner or later I was sure she would put in her fingers and find the message. I wondered what the message could have been. One wasn’t able to express much, I thought, in those days; but because the expression was inadequate, it didn’t mean that the pain was shallower than what one sometimes suffered now. I remembered how for days I had felt in the hole and always found the message there. Then the dancing lessons stopped. Probably by the next winter I had forgotten.
As I went out of the gate I looked to see if the hole existed. It was there. I put in my finger, and, in its safe shelter from the seasons and the years, the scrap of paper rested yet. I pulled it out and opened it. Then I struck a match, a tiny glow of heat in the mist and dark. It was a shock to see by its diminutive flame a picture of crude obscenity. There could be no mistake; there were my initials below the childish inaccurate sketch of a man and woman. But it woke fewer memories than the fume of breath, the linen bags, a damp leaf, or the pile of sand. I didn’t recognize it; it might have been drawn by a dirty-minded stranger on a lavatory wall. All I could remember was the purity, the intensity, the pain of that passion.
I felt at first as if I had been betrayed. ‘After all,’ I told myself, ‘Lola’s not so much out of place here.’ But later that night, when Lola turned away from me and fell asleep, I began to realize the deep innocence of that drawing. I had believed I was drawing something with a meaning and beautiful; it was only now after thirty years of life that the picture seemed obscene.
1937
THE BASEMENT ROOM
1
WHEN the front door had shut the two of them out and the butler Baines had turned back into the dark and heavy hall, Philip began to live. He stood in front of the nursery door, listening until he heard the engine of the taxi die out along the street. His parents were safely gone for a fortnight’s holiday; he was ‘between nurses’, one dismissed and the other not arrived; he was alone in the great Belgravia house with Baines and Mrs Baines.
He could go anywhere, even through the green baize door to the pantry or down the stairs to the basement living-room. He felt a happy stranger in his home because he could go into any room and all the rooms were empty.
You could only guess who had once occupied them: the rack of pipes in the smoking-room beside the elephant tusks, the carved wood tobacco jar; in the bedroom the pink hangings and the pale perfumes and three-quarter finished jars of cream which Mrs Baines had not yet cleared away for her own use; the high glaze on the never-opened piano in the drawing-room, the china clock, the silly little tables and the silver. But here Mrs Baines was already busy, pulling down the curtains, covering the chairs in dust-sheets.
‘Be off out of here, Master Philip,’ and she looked at him with her peevish eyes, while she moved round, getting everything in order, meticulous and loveless and doing her duty.
Philip Lane went downstairs and pushed at the baize door; he looked into the pantry, but Baines was not there, then he set foot for the first time on the stairs to the basement. Again he had the sense: this is life. All his seven nursery years vibrated with the strange, the new experience. His crowded brain was like a city which feels the earth tremble at a distant earthquake shock. He was apprehensive, but he was happier than he had ever been. Eve
rything was more important than before.
Baines was reading a newspaper in his shirt-sleeves. He said, ‘Come in, Phil, and make yourself at home. Wait a moment and I’ll do the honours,’ and going to a white cleaned cupboard he brought out a bottle of ginger-beer and half a Dundee cake. ‘Half past eleven in the morning,’ Baines said. ‘It’s opening time, my boy,’ and he cut the cake and poured out the ginger-beer. He was more genial than Philip had ever known him, more at his ease, a man in his own home.
‘Shall I call Mrs Baines?’ Philip asked, and he was glad when Baines said no. She was busy. She liked to be busy, so why interfere with her pleasure?
‘A spot of drink at half past eleven,’ Baines said, pouring himself out a glass of ginger-beer, ‘gives an appetite for chop and does no man any harm.’
‘A chop?’ Philip asked.
‘Old Coasters,’ Baines said, ‘they call all food chop.’
‘But it’s not a chop?’
‘Well, it might be, you know, if cooked with palm oil. And then some paw-paw to follow.’
Philip looked out of the basement window at the dry stone yard, the ash-can and the legs going up and down beyond the railings.
‘Was it hot there?’
‘Ah, you never felt such heat. Not a nice heat, mind, like you get in the park on a day like this. Wet,’ Baines said, ‘corruption.’ He cut himself a slice of cake. ‘Smelling of rot,’ Baines said, rolling his eyes round the small basement room, from clean cupboard to clean cupboard, the sense of bareness, of nowhere to hide a man’s secrets. With an air of regret for something lost he took a long draught of ginger-beer.
‘Why did father live out there?’
‘It was his job,’ Baines said, ‘same as this is mine now. And it was mine then too. It was a man’s job. You wouldn’t believe it now, but I’ve had forty niggers under me, doing what I told them to.’
‘Why did you leave?’
‘I married Mrs Baines.’
Philip took the slice of Dundee cake in his hand and munched it round the room. He felt very old, independent and judicial; he was aware that Baines was talking to him as man to man. He never called him Master Philip as Mrs Baines did, who was servile when she was not authoritative.
Baines had seen the world; he had seen beyond the railings. He sat there over his ginger pop with the resigned dignity of an exile; Baines didn’t complain; he had chosen his fate, and if his fate was Mrs Baines he had only himself to blame.
But today – the house was almost empty and Mrs Baines was upstairs and there was nothing to do – he allowed himself a little acidity.
‘I’d go back tomorrow if I had the chance.’
‘Did you ever shoot a nigger?’
‘I never had any call to shoot,’ Baines said. ‘Of course I carried a gun. But you didn’t need to treat them bad. That just made them stupid. Why,’ Baines said, bowing his thin grey hair with embarrassment over the ginger pop, ‘I loved some of those damned niggers. I couldn’t help loving them. There they’d be laughing, holding hands; they liked to touch each other; it made them feel fine to know the other fellow was around. It didn’t mean anything we could understand; two of them would go about all day without loosing hold, grown men; but it wasn’t love; it didn’t mean anything we could understand.’
‘Eating between meals,’ Mrs Baines said. ‘What would your mother say, Master Philip?’
She came down the steep stairs to the basement, her hands full of pots of cream and salve, tubes of grease and paste. ‘You oughtn’t to encourage him, Baines,’ she said, sitting down in a wicker armchair and screwing up her small ill-humoured eyes at the Coty lipstick, Pond’s cream, the Leichner rouge and Cyclax powder and Elizabeth Arden astringent.
She threw them one by one into the wastepaper basket. She saved only the cold cream. ‘Tell the boy stories,’ she said. ‘Go along to the nursery, Master Philip, while I get lunch.’
Philip climbed the stairs to the baize door. He heard Mrs Baines’s voice like the voice in a nightmare when the small Price light has guttered in the saucer and the curtains move; it was sharp and shrill and full of malice, louder than people ought to speak, exposed.
‘Sick to death of your ways, Baines, spoiling the boy. Time you did some work about the house,’ but he couldn’t hear what Baines said in reply. He pushed open the baize door, came up like a small earth animal in his grey flannel shorts into a wash of sunlight on a parquet floor, the gleam of mirrors dusted and polished and beautified by Mrs Baines.
Something broke downstairs, and Philip sadly mounted the stairs to the nursery. He pitied Baines; it occurred to him how happily they could live together in the empty house if Mrs Baines were called away. He didn’t want to play with his Meccano sets; he wouldn’t take out his train or his soldiers; he sat at the table with his chin on his hands: this is life; and suddenly he felt responsible for Baines, as if he were the master of the house and Baines an ageing servant who deserved to be cared for. There was not much one could do; he decided at least to be good.
He was not surprised when Mrs Baines was agreeable at lunch; he was used to her changes. Now it was ‘another helping of meat, Master Philip’, or ‘Master Philip, a little more of this nice pudding’. It was a pudding he liked, Queen’s pudding with a perfect meringue, but he wouldn’t eat a second helping lest she might count that a victory. She was the kind of woman who thought that any injustice could be counterbalanced by something good to eat.
She was sour, but she liked making sweet things; one never had to complain of a lack of jam or plums; she ate well herself and added soft sugar to the meringue and the strawberry jam. The half-light through the basement window set the motes moving above her pale hair like dust as she sifted the sugar, and Baines crouched over his plate saying nothing.
Again Philip felt responsibility. Baines had looked forward to this, and Baines was disappointed: everything was being spoilt. The sensation of disappointment was one which Philip could share; he could understand better than anyone this grief, something hoped for not happening, something promised not fulfilled, something exciting which turned dull. ‘Baines,’ he said, ‘will you take me for a walk this afternoon?’
‘No,’ Mrs Baines said, ‘no. That he won’t. Not with all the silver to clean.’
‘There’s a fortnight to do it in,’ Baines said.
‘Work first, pleasure afterwards.’
Mrs Baines helped herself to some more meringue.
Baines put down his spoon and fork and pushed his plate away. ‘Blast,’ he said.
‘Temper,’ Mrs Baines said, ‘temper. Don’t you go breaking any more things, Baines, and I won’t have you swearing in front of the boy. Master Philip, if you’ve finished you can get down.’
She skinned the rest of the meringue off the pudding.
‘I want to go for a walk,’ Philip said.
‘You’ll go and have a rest.’
‘I want to go for a walk.’
‘Master Philip,’ Mrs Baines said. She got up from the table, leaving her meringue unfinished, and came towards him, thin, menacing, dusty in the basement room. ‘Master Philip, you just do as you’re told.’ She took him by the arm and squeezed it; she watched him with a joyless passionate glitter and above her head the feet of typists trudged back to the Victoria offices after the lunch interval.
‘Why shouldn’t I go for a walk?’
But he weakened; he was scared and ashamed of being scared. This was life; a strange passion he couldn’t understand moving in the basement room. He saw a small pile of broken glass swept into a corner by the wastepaper basket. He looked at Baines for help and only intercepted hate; the sad hopeless hate of something behind bars.
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ he repeated.
‘Master Philip,’ Mrs Baines said, ‘you’ve got to do as you’re told. You mustn’t think just because your father’s away there’s nobody here to –’
‘You wouldn’t dare,’ Philip cried, and was startled by Baines’s low interject
ion:
‘There’s nothing she wouldn’t dare.’
‘I hate you,’ Philip said to Mrs Baines. He pulled away from her and ran to the door, but she was there before him; she was old, but she was quick.
‘Master Philip,’ she said, ‘you’ll say you’re sorry.’ She stood in front of the door quivering with excitement. ‘What would your father do if he heard you say that?’
She put a hand out to seize him, dry and white with constant soda, the nails cut to the quick, but he backed away and put the table between them, and suddenly to his surprise she smiled; she became again as servile as she had been arrogant. ‘Get along with you, Master Philip,’ she said with glee, ‘I see I’m going to have my hands full till your father and mother come back.’
She left the door unguarded and when he passed her she slapped him playfully. ‘I’ve got too much to do today to trouble about you. I haven’t covered half the chairs,’ and suddenly even the upper part of the house became unbearable to him as he thought of Mrs Baines moving around shrouding the sofas, laying out the dust-sheets.
So he wouldn’t go upstairs to get his cap but walked straight out across the shining hall into the street, and again, as he looked this way and looked that way, it was life he was in the middle of.
2
The pink sugar cakes in the window on a paper doily, the ham, the slab of mauve sausage, the wasps driving like small torpedoes across the pane caught Philip’s attention. His feet were tired by pavements; he had been afraid to cross the road, had simply walked first in one direction, then in the other. He was nearly home now; the square was at the end of the street; this was a shabby outpost of Pimlico, and he smudged the pane with his nose looking for sweets, and saw between the cake and ham a different Baines. He hardly recognized the bulbous eyes, the bald forehead. This was a happy, bold and buccaneering Baines, even though it was, when you looked closer, a desperate Baines.
Twenty-One Stories Page 12
