Conrad sat and nobody stared at him, nobody looked over a shoulder, nobody laughed; his clothes were properly adjusted, his face clean, his voice unheard. But he was embittered now because he was unregarded. It was as if he were dead and his unhappy ghost unable to communicate some incomprehensible wish belonging to the past. He got up; nobody looked at him; the girl with the borzoi had disappeared; the lovers were quiet because the shadows were reaching them, because soon it would be dark enough to be happy in; the nurserymaids were going back to Bayswater. He banged his fist on the paling and ran his nails along the bar, but nobody looked at him. The desire to grip a sleeve, to say, ‘I am alive like you,’ was almost irresistible; for if one were dead and so unhappy, there would be no hope left, no comfort – ‘one day I shall be dead.’ But these were fancies; at the same depth as his hate he knew that he was alive; for if this had been death, he would not have envied Jim; this was life which Jim was escaping, into which persistently, with a love indistinguishable in its effect from hatred, they were trying to push him back.
But no, he was wrong again. He was giddy, leaning across the paling, allowing the grass to shift and return, as the pawnbroker’s face had receded and approached. This wasn’t the life into which Jim might be thrust. That life did not include Milly.
He thought that nothing would induce him to return to Battersea; one was not driven to return to someone one did not love. One returned home, for that should mean comfort, tenderness, knowledge, understanding. These were things it was impossible, once experienced, to do without; but one could dispense with the satisfaction of a crude hunger, one could dispense with shame. But a dog, he thought, returns to its vomit. If I’m not careful, I’ll be back where my brother’s so often been before me.
That was the distance he had travelled from her in a night. Before their bodies had known each other, they had been closely acquainted; they had even shared something, their nerves and their suspicion, in which Jim had no part at all; she had sneered at him, as she sneered at all the world except his brother, but the sneers were without malice. He could believe that she loved him in a way, and that way, though it promised no satisfaction, was better than this shared lust, this shared ignorance of anything beyond a touch, a sense of physical closeness, a heat and a movement.
You began it, he accused her, rubbing his fist along the paling, but never again, never again. He was determined to sleep out, but in the darkness and the autumn cold, he was turned from the Park by a man who rang a bell. The motorcars purred away, running softly; the Guardsmen walked away down Knightsbridge with their canes under their arms; the amateur whores were drinking coffee at the stall.
Conrad walked back up Piccadilly; every policeman stared at him, every woman grinned. The old game began again; they conspired to make him mad. It would be a bad look-out for them, he thought, if I were really mad, with a revolver in my pocket, and suddenly he knew why they all looked at him: the bulge and hang of his pocket told what he carried. They could see through the cloth; perhaps there was a hole and the metal shone. Presently, he thought, they will stop me and take it away, and I shall be able to do nothing with it after all. He had not yet decided what he would do with it, but if he could find a quiet place and sleep a little, he would be able clearly to consider its uses. It began to rain, a cold stinging rain close to hail; the people sheltering under the Ritz arcade stared at him: a policeman came down the pavement, watching him. It was as if they all envied him the power he carried. He did not dare to stay in one place lest they should rob him of it.
But the rain went on, he was drenched below the knees, and his back began to stiffen with rheumatism. He walked to keep warm and he only got more wet. It occurred to him that he might go to his old lodgings, but his landlady would be in bed, and he had not enough money to pay his fare all the way. The fire would be out, he would hang his dripping clothes over a chair and all night the drops would fall over the linoleum, and in the morning in damp clothes he would have to go to work. The director’s nephew would talk and laugh among the clerks, and if cautiously he opened the door of his inner room, he would hear his voice: ‘A night on the tiles.’ Then the manager would pass through the clerks’ room and hear what was said and be aware of the hidden current of mockery. He would ring his bell, as the man in the Park had rung his bell, and speak to him in front of his secretary, Miss Batlow, lean, elderly Miss Batlow with pince-nez, who fumbled in the files. The rain dripped from the canopy of the Criterion.
‘Discipline, Drover, discipline. We must have someone who can keep discipline’ – one hand on his telephone, another tapping a pencil, and presently the director’s nephew in his place in the inner room.
There was always suicide. That would solve the problem of how to stay out and keep dry, the problem of his rheumatism, the problem of how to keep his black-striped trousers neat. ‘There is one thing we value very highly in an employee, Drover: neatness.’
He dived out suddenly, recklessly, into the rain. Neatness, I’ll show them. The water splashed up above the kerb as the taxis came by from the theatre; it drummed on the umbrellas and scattered the lamplight like oil on the black surface of the street. It ran from the brim of his hat behind his collar; when his foot turned on the slippery pavement a pain ran inwards at his spine. It was difficult to know what kept him alive; he had no ambition, work was only a grim struggle to survive; the only man he loved was locked away from him; the only woman he had ever loved had shown him exactly what love between a man and a woman was worth. But it was that short pleasure which made him pause; it seemed nothing when it was first over, when he was ashamed and Milly cried and the walls shook and day came. Then the betrayal of his brother seemed everything. Hours passed and the body stirred again and pleasure, however short, seemed more important than a scruple. If I were stupid enough, he thought with envy, I should go back now; I’d forget everything but meeting her again; if she were stupid, she’d be wanting me now, forgetting everything, even Jim, in her hunger; if we were stupid, like Jim, we’d not care a damn about anything but the moment.
But she’s no more stupid than I.
The rain drove between lamp and lamp and made the street dark. A bus drove down and stopped at the kerb beside him, like a small lit house in which people sat and talked and were warm before a fire; the lights on the wet pavement flickered like the gas flames in asbestos towers.
‘Battersea,’ somebody said (he thought it was the conductor). ‘Last bus.’ He sat in it and tried to see through the steaming windows Shaftesbury Avenue unwind behind them.
‘Is this the last bus?’ he asked, and the conductor said: No. There were many more. It was hardly eleven yet. But it was too late, Conrad thought, to do anything now. He was going back – like a dog to its vomit, he told himself again, for I’m not stupid enough to think that when this is over anything will be changed: it will all happen again, self-condemnation and despair. I’ll be happy for ten minutes. If she has any sense, she’ll have locked the door of her room; she can’t lock the hall door, for it’s broken.
A police boat went gently down the stream, burning a red light, and disturbed a sleeping gull which beat up through the rain to the level of the bus windows, then sank again on rigid wings into the dark and the silence, while the sheets of rain fell between.
If she has the sense – but he would not expect more sense from her than from himself, and he had come back. Pushing open the broken door and letting the rain drive after him into the hall, he saw her at once sitting on her bed with her frock off and her shoe slapping on the floor and her bony knees and her starved face.
She said: ‘I was afraid you weren’t coming back. Kay’s not come home. She’s away with some man. I couldn’t bear to be alone.’ The uncompleted form lay on her dressing-table; the common familiar scent came to him. He thought: how generous she is, pretending that she’s pleased I’ve come, but she can’t be as stupid as that, she can’t be as stupid as that.
He said: ‘I got so wet,’ but she interrupted
him, ‘Don’t talk. Don’t say anything. Come to bed,’ and for a moment he was able to think: how foolish to imagine that home meant comfort, tenderness, knowledge, understanding; home is hunger about to be satisfied, bitterness about to be forgotten; that’s all one wants of home. He said: ‘I didn’t mean to come. I couldn’t keep away’; and saw her expression harden at the very moment when she took him in her arms. ‘Don’t talk,’ Milly said. ‘I hate you when you talk.’
5
‘THERE’S been a man hanging about nearly all day,’ Mrs Simpson said. She moved an ash-tray a few inches and flicked with a duster.
The Assistant Commissioner looked up sharply; he had known quite well that something worried her, for ever since he returned from the Yard she had been at him about one thing or another. Quite suddenly a few hours ago he had remembered that he was dining with Caroline Bury and had telephoned to say that he would not be at home for dinner and that his evening clothes must be laid out. Mrs Simpson liked a lot of warning; she was growing too old for her job, but the same would be said of him very soon and he had not the heart to dismiss her, not did he wish to go back to the silky domination of a manservant younger than himself.
‘A man in dark striped trousers?’ he asked.
‘If I didn’t think you’d be in any minute asking for something, ringing up,’ Mrs Simpson added with unhappy scorn, ‘I’d have gone out and given him a bit of my mind. He ought to have been ashamed of himself, wasting all the day like that. He was here at lunch time, he was here at tea time. While there are some people who have to work themselves to the bone.’
The Assistant Commissioner looked at his watch. ‘I must be off in a few minutes.’
‘You’ll have a taxi?’
‘No, no, I’ll walk.’
‘It would give me the creeps,’ Mrs Simpson said, ‘spending all the day with murderers and thieves. Why, I dream sometimes that you’re bleeding on the doorstep.’
‘Come, come, Mrs Simpson, this is London.’
‘Them as knows what London is,’ Mrs Simpson said, ‘would not be surprised to find their nearest and dearest bleeding.’
‘Well, I must be off. You mustn’t have – er – these fancies.’
‘Your tie needs straightening,’ Mrs Simpson said. She turned her tongue against him as if it were a knife; in her harsh pulls at his black tie she seemed to put him in his place, to rebuke him for offering advice to someone older than himself, to someone who knew London so much better. She defended herself always in this way against the faintest hint of patronage. Ten years’ seniority gave her the privilege of advising. ‘You ought to take a taxi,’ she said. ‘I’d take a taxi,’ but the advice from her was not convincing; it would have needed more than ‘the creeps’ to have broken the routine of a lifetime, the fitting on of the straw hat, the secure pinning of the brooch in the high-necked blouse, presently the slap, slap of old feet going down the street towards the Embankment, towards the trams.
‘I must take exercise when I can get it, Mrs Simpson.’
‘Get along with you. When you’ve reached your age you need a rest.’ She flicked her way, apprehensively, to the window, ran the duster over the dustless gleaming pane, stared down into the dark street. ‘I’ll call a taxi.’
‘No,’ the Assistant Commissioner said and snapped his watch-case.
‘I don’t see why I should go home worrying, just because you won’t take a taxi.’ There was ‘nothing to her’ in her grey dress, her apron which had once been white; her grey hair was pulled tight on the top of her head into a bun no larger than an egg-cup. She was like a wisp of smoke at the window from an almost extinct fire. ‘I’ve got enough to worry about.’
‘Quite unnecessary,’ the Assistant Commissioner said.
‘I don’t want to find a new job at my age.’
‘But what was there about this man – ?’
‘I didn’t like his face.’
‘You mustn’t trust too much –’
Mrs Simpson laughed; it was, so far as he could remember, the first time he had heard her laugh. The laugh caught in the loose strings of her throat, and the sound was like a cough. ‘You telling me,’ she said. ‘Faces. I can tell a face when I see one. Sixty years I’ve been in service. Nurserymaid, nurse, cook, housekeeper. Why, I was even in the pantry once.’ She had never been so self-revealing; the past she generally kept as securely concealed as her savings, which, he happened to know, lay flat, in india-rubber bands, at the bottom of a trunk. ‘I didn’t like his face,’ she said, and her lips screwed up as if at the memory of innumerable faces which during sixty years of service she had disliked: the soft unformed faces of stupid children, employers who didn’t know their own minds, vulgar women who railed because their food was a little burned. How she had suffered, she seemed to say, at vulgarity, obstinacy, stupidity; certainly, she didn’t want another job at her age. ‘I’m well suited here,’ she strangely confessed.
‘I promise you, Mrs Simpson, that I’ll take a taxi if the man – er – becomes, becomes a nuisance.’
She had to be satisfied with that; one did not expect any generous response from an employer. ‘The custard was a bit better today, Amy,’ that was the kind of praise to which she was accustomed. Indeed any unreserved praise she had always met with suspicion as the prelude to some piece of cheeseparing, the demand for another dish from a joint already finished in the servants’ hall.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you are old enough to take care of yourself, I suppose.’ She surprised the Assistant Commissioner for the second time by fetching his coat and helping him into it; she had never done it before. She flicked at some dust on the hem with her cloth and left in its place several pieces of fluff which she had removed from under the sideboard. ‘I suppose you’ll be sitting up all night now. What you want to go out to dinner for with all those papers to read, I can’t think.’
‘It’s an old friend.’ She sniffed, following him down the stairs, and her little dark eyes were full of suspicion; she opened the front door and peered out before she let him by, kept her eyes on him as he stepped carefully over a sodden gutter, as he crossed the slippery shining rain-wet road to the opposite pavement. ‘Anyway,’ she screamed after him, ‘you’ll have to take a taxi home. There’ll be more rain before night.’
Brown clouds blew up against all that was left of the moon; the air seemed to hold rain which had not yet begun to fall. One forced one’s way as if through drenched washing hanging from a line. Nothing, the Assistant Commissioner thought, will induce me to take a taxi tonight; for they were skidding on the wet tarmac. The air was busy with the grinding of brakes, the shriek of sliding rubber, the heavy single drops of rain collecting on the leaves of plane trees and then sliding downwards to the pavements and the gravel walks. Everybody walked fast to get somewhere before the storm came, everybody but the Assistant Commissioner, whose liver felt the damp, whose head swam with the nausea of swamp and jungle and the hopeless East. Nobody played round the fountains; the water was tossed and tossed trivially between the darkened sky and the shaded pool.
Why is he following me? the Assistant Commissioner wondered apathetically; it’s the same man. When he reached the pavement by the National Gallery, he looked back and saw at the far end of the Square the small black-clothed figure loitering by a lion. Between them were the electric standards and the smudged pavings and the rampart and nobody at all. He could come across and talk to me now. But the man only moved restlessly round the lion’s base.
The Assistant Commissioner turned his back again and went on his way, up Charing Cross Road, down into the subway, up Tottenham Court Road, turned this way, turned that, conscious all the time of the figure very far behind. This can’t go on indefinitely, he thought; he has the chance to speak to me tonight; tomorrow I shall be forced to have him detained and questioned. Then the eighteenth-century door, the sense of heavy curtains, crowded furniture, pictured walls, the expectation of someone who had died while he was abroad; and the thought of Ju
stin spread a vacancy between chair and chair while he waited, until he felt himself a dried pea rattling in an empty pod.
That was what struck him too on seeing Caroline. It was not that she was ten years older; the years could make no impression on that haggard brightly painted face, whose beauty he could recognize more easily than other men because it had so often pitiably grimaced at him from the interior of eastern shrines; it was that she was not alive in the same way. She had lost her background; the slow and simple, the rubicund Justin was dead; her brilliance was no longer seen flashing against a rough brown tweeded curtain, it glowed, glittered, was lost in wide empty spaces of air. He wondered whether her charity, her passion to help, had been a little dulled, now that Justin was dead.
‘How are you, Caroline?’ She grimaced at him with a hand to her throat: ‘The doctors say that I’ve got to go to the south. It’s absurd, of course. Next week. . . .’ So it had been true, he thought, after all. She trailed about in odd timeless garments; always she gave the impression of being dressed consciously for a monument in a manner which might not seem ridiculous when the fashions changed. ‘Don’t tell the others,’ she croaked at him. ‘Some of them are capable of following me.’
The Assistant Commissioner said with complete sincerity: ‘You had always the, the power to inspire – er – affection.’ He was surprised when she laughed at him. ‘Affection? Don’t be absurd. They get what they can out of me. I’m a bit tired of them. I want to be alone.’ But she was already alone; the Assistant Commissioner, the others (poets, painters, novelists and politicians) had no more ability to populate her brain than a set of ghosts; and the only ghost she would have welcomed did not appear: Justin, ‘just up from the country’, his thick platitudes threading the wit and the pretensions like the remnants of a sound old cloth in a much patched coat.
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