The Ballad of Peckham Rye

by Muriel Spark

  ‘I’ll come,’ Dougal said.

  ‘I can’t take you,’ the policeman said. ‘But I’ll get you a torch. It’s just a straight run. All the coins and the old bronze have been taken away, so there’s nothing there except some bones we haven’t cleared away as yet. But you can say you’ve been through.’

  He went to fetch the torch. A young apprentice electrician emerged from the tunnel with two empty tea-mugs in his hand and went out through the crowd to a café across the road.

  The policeman came back with a small torch. ‘Give this to the constable at the other end. Save you trouble of bringing it back. Well, good-bye. Glad to know you. I’ve got to go on duty now.’

  This tunnel had been newly supported in its eight-foot height by wooden props, between which Dougal wound his way. This tunnel — which in a few days’ time was to be opened to the public, and in yet a few days more closed down owing to three scandals ensuing from its being frequented by the Secondary Modern Mixed School — was strewn with new gravel, trodden only, so far, by the workmen, and by Dougal as he proceeded with his bags.

  About half-way through the tunnel Dougal put his bags down and started to pick up some bones which were piled in a crevice ready to be taken away before the official opening. Then he held the torch between his teeth and juggled with some carefully chosen shin bones which were clotted with earth. He managed six at a time, throwing and catching, never missing, so that the earth fell away from them and scattered.

  He picked up his bags and continued through the hot tunnel which smelt of its new disinfectant. He saw a strong lamp ahead and the figure of the electrician on a ladder cutting some wire in the wall.

  The electrician turned. ‘You been quick, Bobby,’ he said.

  Dougal switched out his torch and set down his bags on the gritty floor of the tunnel. He saw the electrician descend from the ladder with his knife and turn the big lamp towards him.

  ‘Trevor Lomas, watch out for the old bones, they’re haunted,’ Dougal said. He chucked what was once a hip at Trevor’s head. Then with his left hand he grabbed the wrist that held the knife. Trevor kicked. Dougal employed that speciality of his with his right hand, clutching Trevor’s throat back-handedly with his claw-like grip.

  Trevor went backward and stumbled over the bags, dropping the knife. Dougal picked it up, grabbed the bags, and fled.

  Near the end of the tunnel, where the tight from the big lamp barely reached, Trevor caught up with him and delivered to Dougal a stab in the eye with a bone. Whereupon Dougal flashed his torch in Trevor’s face and leapt at him with his high shoulder raised and elbow sticking out. He applied once more his deformed speciality. Holding Trevor’s throat with this right-hand twist, he fetched him a left-hand blow on the corner of the jaw. Trevor sat down. Dougal picked up his bags. pointing his torch to the ground, and emerged from the tunnel at Gordon Road. There he reported to the policeman on duty that the electrician was sitting in a dazed condition among the old nuns’ bones, having been overcome by the heat. ‘I can’t stop to assist you,’ Dougal said, ‘for, as you see, I have to catch a train. Would you mind returning this torch with my thanks to the police station?’

  ‘You hurt yourself?’ the policeman said, looking at Dougal’s eye.

  ‘I bumped into something in the dark,’ Dougal said. ‘But it’s only a bruise. Pity the lights weren’t up.‘

  He went into the Merry Widow for a drink. Then he took his bags up to Peckham High Street, got into a taxi, and was driven across the river, where he entered a chemist’s shop and got a dressing put on his wounded eye.

  ‘I’m glad he’s cleared off,’ Dixie said to her mother. ‘Humphrey’s not glad but I’m glad. Now he won’t be coming to the wedding. You never know what he might have done. He might have gone mad among the guests showing the bumps on his head. He might have made a speech. He might have jumped and done something rude.

  I didn’t like him. Our Leslie didn’t like him. Humphrey liked him. He was bad for Humphrey. Mr Druce liked him and look what Mr Druce has come to. Poor Miss Coverdale liked him. Trevor didn’t like him. But I’m not worried now. I’ve got this bad cold, though.’

  Chapter 10

  THERE was Dixie come up to the altar with her wide flouncy dress and her nose, a little red from her cold, tilted up towards the minister.

  ‘Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife?’

  ‘No, to be quite frank,’ Humphrey said, ‘I won’t.’

  Dougal never read of it in the newspapers. He was away off to Africa with the intention of selling tape-recorders to all the witch doctors. ‘No medicine man, ‘Dougal said, ‘these days can afford to be without a portable tape-recorder. Without the aid of this modern device, which may be easily concealed in the undergrowth of the jungle, the old tribal authority will rapidly become undermined by the mounting influence of modern scepticism.’

  Much could be told of Dougal’s subsequent life. He returned from Africa and became a novice in a Franciscan monastery. Before he was asked to leave, the Prior had endured a nervous breakdown and several of the monks had broken their vows of obedience in actuality, and their other vows by desire; Dougal pleaded his powers as an exorcist in vain. Thereafter, for economy’s sake, he gathered together the scrap ends of his profligate experience — for he was a frugal man at heart — and turned them into a lot of cockeyed books, and went far in the world. He never married.

  The night after Humphrey arrived alone at the honeymoon hotel at Folkestone, Arthur Crewe walked into the bar.

  ‘The girl’s heart-broken,’ he said to Humphrey.

  ‘Better soon than late,’ Humphrey said. ‘Tell her I’m coming back.’

  ‘She’s blaming Dougal Douglas. Is he here with you?’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice it,’ Humphrey said.

  ‘I haven’t come here to blame you. I reckon there must be some reason behind it. But it’s hard on tine girl, in her wedding dress. My Leslie’s been put on probation for robbing a till.’

  Some said Humphrey came back and married the girl in the end. Some said, no, he married another girl. Others said, it was like this, Dixie died of a broken heart and he never looked at another girl again. Some thought he had returned, and she had slammed the door in his face and called him a dirty swine, which he was. One or two recalled there had been a fight between Humphrey and Trevor Lomas. But at all events everyone remembered how a man had answered ‘No’ at his wedding.

  In fact they got married two months later, and although few guests were invited, quite a lot of people came to the church to see if Humphrey would do it again.

  Humphrey drove off with Dixie. She said, ‘I feel as if I’ve been twenty years married instead of two hours.’

  He thought this a pity for a girl of eighteen. But it was a sunny day for November, and, as he drove swiftly past the Rye, he saw the children playing there and the women coming home from work with their shopping-bags, the Rye for an instant looking like a cloud of green and gold, the people seeming to ride upon it, as you might say there was another world than this.