The Time Before This

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  All I could think of was: Bone Lake must be growing up. The cops were crooked already.

  ‘Can I have a receipt?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re a great one with the questions … Because we don’t give receipts, period. You want to pay the costs of the court? It’s thirty dollars, cash money.’

  ‘And no receipt?’

  ‘Just that.’ It had emerged as his favourite phrase. I wondered how much it had covered in the past, how many arguments it had clinched, how much dirt it had swept under the rug. I would have argued – my mouth was already opened for protest – but at that moment Mary came out of the back room, supporting the old man.

  He looked dreadful – his knees buckling, his face a shambles, his skin the colour of dirty water. There could be no dispute on so pitiful a topic; any delay, any single word, might snuff out the last of this candle. I put thirty dollars on the desk, and moved forward, and took a firm grip of the old man, hunching my shoulder under his. He felt like a bundle of sticks, and he smelt of fear and blood and old old age.

  Thus linked – could it be for the rest of his life? – we made for the doorway, a step at a time. When we reached the threshold, Labelle called out: ‘Hey, you!’

  I said: ‘Yes?’ without turning my head.

  ‘I wouldn’t write it, if I was you.’ His voice was loud, with a harsh confidence. ‘Don’t forget – when you pull out, your friend will still be here.’

  He seemed even more my friend as we struggled through the doorway, and out into clean air.

  It was nearly midnight, and the clean air was also bitterly cold. Mary set our direction, which was across town, by streets carpeted with frozen slush, and lined with shuttered stores, some derelict, all shabby. The full moon was our lamp; it shone with hopeful brilliance on broken windows, the poised daggers of icicles, the broken edge of a sidewalk, the snow trodden into dirty frosting or ploughed up into a bright furrow. It shone also upon us, the most dubious decoration of all.

  I had feared that the old man would never make it; indeed, when we left the police station, it seemed likely that he would not manage more than a few steps before he came to the end of all his journeys. It would be a better death for him, under the glistening Pole Star, than on the bare floor of a police cupboard; but it would be death, none the less. Yet, astonishingly, the outside air did for him what it did for all of us; it touched his heart with hope, and therefore with life.

  His first few steps had scarcely been steps at all; even with help on either side, he had achieved no more than a baby’s staggering gait. But he had improved with each wavering stride, as if he were learning to walk again, and had shown himself a prodigy; starting as a child, he grew a whole year within the first fifty yards. Soon he was making fair progress; Mary dropped to one side, allowing him more freedom; and I had only to give him an occasional supporting arm, to maintain a slow, steady headway.

  He was also learning to talk again, which was not so welcome.

  It was his old familiar tirade, made more nonsensical still by the alcohol which the brisk air had not dispersed. He was wandering and muttering, making angry cries against unseen enemies, making pleas for understanding, making statements of great assurance on matters which had already slipped from his memory. Sometimes he sang, the old sad songs which soldiers once found merry; sometimes he stopped dead, his legs astride the snowy pathway, and refused to go on until he had solved some interior riddle. He was an old man with too much on his mind, or not enough, and very soon I was sick of him.

  When, for the fifth time, he came to a meandering stop, and said: ‘I know! I know the secret! And now I’m dying!’ I discovered that, in reaction, I was already bad-tempered. He was not unique; not even original. We were all dying, from the day we were born. I would learn nothing in this idiot company … Mary came closer to him, trying to calm and comfort his despair; and presently he got going again, and I swallowed my irritation, and ranged up alongside, and gave him, once again, a helping hand. Living or dying, laughing or crying, we were all brothers still.

  Yet I could not help lecturing. ‘You’d do better if you stopped talking, and tried to concentrate.’

  At that moment he was walking normally, and now he nodded normally, as if we were two wise men in agreement. He answered, with all the courtesy in the world: ‘You may well be right … In any case I am grateful for your assistance.’

  ‘Do it for me some time.’

  But I had started a sudden new train of thought. ‘That’s what makes the world go round!’ he declaimed, flinging wide an arm which caught me on my half-frozen cheek and stung intolerably. ‘I do beg your pardon,’ he said loudly, and then began to sing. ‘The golden rule, you young fool,’ he sang, over and over again, to a measured air which presently I recognized as the chime made by a clock when it strikes the hour. His voice grew louder still, as piercing as a tuneless piano; the refrain changed to: ‘The golden rule, you damned fool!’ A man – the sole passer-by in all our journey – stopped on the other side of the street, and stared at us, a tall grim guardian of propriety. It suddenly seemed an enormous waste of time to have lifted the old man out of one trouble, only to have him go staggering off into another.

  I took a hard grip on his arm, and said: ‘For Heaven’s sake, keep quiet! Do you want to get arrested again?’

  The thought, and my spiteful hold, penetrated. ‘By no means, by no means,’ he answered, in a voice which had now fallen to a whisper. He wiped his mouth, as if sponging away his offence. ‘You won’t leave me, will you?’

  I said: ‘I won’t leave you, if you behave yourself.’

  He had not heard me. He pleaded again: ‘You won’t leave me, will you? You cannot leave me!’

  ‘All right. I won’t leave you.’

  ‘A solemn promise?’

  ‘A solemn promise.’

  ‘I believe you, as a man of honour.’ He nodded again, owlishly wise, and then said, like a child delaying its bedtime: ‘Why won’t you leave me?’

  ‘Because it would be wrong.’

  It was the simplest answer I could think of; it was, for me, a true answer; and I hoped it would calm him down. It calmed him down, indeed, to such an extent that he put his arm round my shoulder, like a kindly tutor, and said solemnly: ‘I see that you share my moral sense … Whenever you propose to do anything, you should stop and ask yourself: “If everyone did this, what would the world be like?” You will soon discover the right answer.’

  Then, as if all strength had drained away with this advice, he fell at my feet in a dead faint. A dribble of blood darkened the snow as his head rolled loosely over.

  Cursing all folly – his and my own – I picked him up, and set out to carry him the rest of the way. He was hollow-light, like an armful of kindling, but, on the slippery path under a moon which had now clouded over, it was a wearisome job.

  At a crossroads where I paused to shift his weight, and my heavy snow boots crunched through a rime of ice, a dog barked. Our wretched caravan moved on.

  It was with relief that I saw Mary, who was walking ahead, stop at last before a squat house on a dim street corner, and call out: ‘We’re home.’

  Home, Be It Never So

  Home, for the old man, was a two-down, two-up rooming house which, though it must have been built (like all of Bone Lake) within the last three years, was already shoddy and run to seed. There were lights on when we arrived – or rather, there was one light, deep within the echoing hallway; the moon outside was far brighter and cleaner than this murky sentinel which waited for us. The moon had shone down on a crazy sort of building, thrown together with cement blocks, tar-paper, and corrugated iron; the hallway, which was angular and dim, smelt of cooking – if burnt fat is part of cooking – and a sour poverty.

  The house was not even doomed to become a slum; it had started life as one. It looked mean, it smelt mean; and the only person stirring was the meanest thing about it.

  She
was a woman, grim and sallow and small; dressed (far out of her age group) in the kind of sloppy flowered housecoat worn by brides who have given up. She had sighted us first through what I guessed to be an ever-open crack in her door, and had come out very quickly to meet us in the hall. She stood staring at us, hands on hips, like a statue of watchful malice, as we came in – and, to be absolutely fair, we were not the kind of procession for which doormen bowed and managers trotted forward with a bunch of long-stemmed roses.

  Mary wore a rumpled camel-hair coat, wet with snow, bloodstained on one shoulder; I was dressed like the northland version of a newspaperman who is saving his money for better things; and I was carrying an old man, exhausted to the point of death, whose face under the lamplight was swollen, bruised, and caked with dried blood.

  But still, I thought, she need not have faced us with such vile contempt. She need not have looked at the derelict old man, and said with waspish, sneering satisfaction: ‘I guess he’s corned again.’

  For the first time that evening I sighed; a genuine deep-felt sigh of exasperation. This was not my day. Round every new corner, I blundered on to a battlefield; whatever I did, someone had been there first and booby-trapped the area. First I had run away from the old man, and he had caught up with me. Then I had set out to rescue him, and collided with the police – and lost thirty dollars. Now I had carried him home, like any good Samaritan, and it seemed that I had done the wrong thing again, and must explain my ignoble actions to this resident harpy.

  I felt that even if I did something invincibly good, like pulling an orphan child from a hole in the ice, I would find myself behind bars, charged with loitering, trespass, damage to municipal property … But patience was still a virtue, and the old man in my arms was still real and pitiful. I summoned what spirit I could, and answered: ‘He’s had an accident. He’s been hurt.’

  ‘So what’s new?’ The woman’s rasping voice, like her appearance, was the most unpleasant thing in this unpleasant house. ‘He’s always having accidents … Well, you can just dump him, and get out of here.’

  Mary came forward. ‘He really is hurt,’ she said. ‘He needs help.’

  The woman looked at her. ‘So it’s you again,’ she said, with manifest spite. ‘Didn’t I tell you to stay away from here?’

  ‘He needs help,’ said Mary again, more stubbornly.

  ‘He needs his head examined. With an ice pick.’

  The old man chose this moment to come to his senses. He did so swiftly; at one second he was the stillest of still life, at the next he had stirred, and slipped from my arms, and shaken himself like a waking dog as he finally stood upright. He remained a fearsome sight; the dim light did nothing for the weal on his face save to make it more livid still, and he wavered about on his legs in a slow, erratic circle, the best he could manage in self-control.

  ‘Mrs Cross,’ he stuttered, and produced, to my astonishment, a sketchy bow. ‘Apologies for my appearance … Met with a mishap … My friends were kind enough. …’ He waved his hand around in our direction; it was an introduction of sorts, though I had no inclination to bow myself. ‘Hope I haven’t kept you up.’

  ‘That’ll be the day.’ She was surveying the old man with relentless hatred; a disgusting slattern herself, she was made bold by her belief that she had found a worse human being. One could tell that she had grown sick to death of him, and yet she needed him also; she had to have him near by, as a yardstick of misery and human decline. ‘You’ve tied one on again,’ she declared loudly. ‘Time you finished up in jail where you belong!’

  Mary had moved forward again, protective in a way I had not yet matched, and taken the old man’s arm. ‘Come on,’ she said, encouragingly. ‘We’ll get you upstairs.’

  Mrs Cross glared at her. ‘Cheap trash!’ she said. And then: ‘Where are you going, miss?’

  ‘I’m taking him upstairs.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting to see you come down!’

  On the point of flight, I changed my mind. If Mary could prove herself brave, against these degrading odds, so could I. I took the old man’s other arm, and the three of us moved towards the bare cement staircase.

  Mrs Cross called after me: ‘Hold it! Where do you think you’re going?’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  ‘No visitors after ten o’clock. What do you think I’m running here?’

  I was tempted to answer, and then thought better of it. She could out-bawl me, any time … ‘He needs help,’ I said mildly, and kept on retreating.

  As we made our escape, she shouted after us: ‘I’ll be waiting for you! And keep the door open!’

  Laboriously up the stairs we went, myself now supporting the old man, and Mary trailing behind us. The ascent was painfully slow; twice he had to pause for a rest, once he fell, and lay still in gasping despair. For some unholy reason, I recalled another agonizing journey; the phrase ‘The Stations of Mrs Cross’ slipped into my mind unawares, before I could stop it. I had been brought up to hate blasphemy, and I still did so; the appalling lapse made me angry – or made me more angry still, because there had already been quite enough in that evening to turn all the milk of humanity sour. Even Mary, who must have been exposed to Mrs Cross before, was muttering to herself, as if the new outrage had been more than she could bear.

  But as we passed the threshold of his room, the old man put us both to shame. He looked closely into our faces, divining our disgust, and said: ‘If we knew all about her, we would forgive her.’

  At any other moment, perhaps from any other man, it would have sounded false, like those phoney answers to interviewers: ‘To what do you attribute your success in running this motel?’ – ‘Well, I guess I just love people.’ (Love people! One might as well say: ‘I just love liquid’, as if it didn’t matter whether one drank champagne or kerosene.) But the old man managed to give his words a positively saint-like conviction; it was clear that he really did mean what he said about Mrs Cross, and that he himself had already forgiven her all things.

  In the circumstances, it was the most generous remark I had ever heard; and as soon as he had said it – as though its virtue had cost him dear – he staggered forward and collapsed upon his bed.

  For the moment, he was as well off there as anywhere else, and I did not move to help him. But he could not be left indefinitely.

  ‘We ought to get a doctor,’ I said. ‘Is there one?’

  Mary had come to the foot of the bed, and was looking down at the old man with a world of compassion. ‘There is,’ she answered, ‘but he’s off north somewhere. Mercy mission, but he got snowed in. They were talking about it at the hotel.’

  Well, I thought, we’ll just have to run our own mercy mission … I took a moment to look round the room. It was icily cold, and hardly furnished at all; a bed, a sagging armchair, and an unpainted pinewood chest was the total catalogue. Behind the door was a rucksack, hanging from its chafed and twisted straps; in one corner stood a pair of high-laced boots, the leather cracked, the toes curling upwards; on top of the chest was a metal coffee pot and a pair of silver-backed brushes, battered and scratched; the worn bristles were as yellow as corn. The iron bedstead was covered with what looked like an ancient army surplus blanket; across one corner of its faded khaki was stencilled the word ‘blighty’.

  Giving pitiful clues to the threadbare past, the room promised a most meagre end to a long life.

  I returned to the wretched proprietor of this castle. The old man, stretched out on his back, was stirring again. He was also moaning, as his hand went to the ravaged cheek which must, even in this chilly room, be thawing into agony. The rest of his body was shaking with cold.

  ‘We’ve got to get him to bed,’ I said. ‘And get him warm somehow. This room’s like a morgue.’

  ‘I’ll make some coffee,’ said Mary obediently. ‘There’s a ring at the end of the hall. But–’ she looked round, ‘they must have taken away his heater.’

  ‘Then they’ll bring it back.’ I was bendi
ng over the old man, gently wrestling him out of his clothes; he helped me as much as he could, baring his shivering body which was wasted away to nothing, like a skeleton drawn with a single smudgy chalkline. It took a long time. Presently he whispered: ‘Nightshirt – pillow,’ and under the pillow I found a red flannel shirt with a flapping tail – a veritable relic of the stately past. Finally I tucked him in under the blanket, still trembling violently, as Mary came back with a coffee pot which made a thin plume of steam in the bitter air.

  I said: ‘Back in a minute,’ and went downstairs again.

  I had expected a battle over the heater, and was savagely ready for it; when I reached the entrance hall, the battle took place. There was no heater, said Mrs. Cross, looking at me with a malevolent stare as if I had demanded a mink stole on a silver tray. Well, there was a heater but it didn’t work – the old man had broken it. Well, there was another heater, but heaters cost money to run. Well, there was this heater, but it was five dollars a month, cash in advance. Well, there was this heater – and I hope you fall on to it and fry, her furious eyes said as she handed it over, and I started up the stairs again.

  She shouted after me: ‘And don’t stay all night! Single room means what it says!’ I had an idea that she would take the heater away again, as soon as I was gone. But that would be another day, another field of battle.

  For the moment, at an investment of thirty-five dollars, old Shepherd was home, and dry.

  A sort of peace had come to the old man’s room when I returned. He had drunk some of his coffee, and Mary had bathed his face; now she was rubbing his feet under the blanket, while he lay back, his eyes closed. The room slowly warmed as the electric heater did its work. It was domestic tranquillity, of a sort; a moment when one could slip away without too bad a conscience. Thinking that he was falling asleep, I said softly: ‘If he’s OK, I’m on my way.’

  Mary nodded, not interrupting what she was doing, and I glanced around for my coat. When next I looked at the old man, he had sat up in bed, bright as a button, and was smiling at me. Then he said, without preamble: ‘Were you in the last war?’