Darkness Visible (4 page)

“Better? Eh? Look my dear boy, you’d better sit in that chair for a bit. I have to go—I’ll be back in a few minutes. You go off, when you feel like it. Right?”

Nodding and smiling in a matey kind of way the headmaster went out, pulling the door to behind him. Henderson did not sit down in the offered chair. He stood where he was, the redness draining slowly from his face. He sniffed for a bit, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. Then he went away back to his desk in the hall.

When the headmaster returned to his study and found that the boy had left he was relieved for a bit since nothing irremediable had been said; but then he remembered Pedigree with much irritation. He debated speaking to him at once but decided at last that he would leave the whole unpleasant business until the first hours of morning school, when his vital forces would have been restored by sleep. Tomorrow would be soon enough, though the whole business could not be left longer than that; and remembering his earlier interview with Pedigree the headmaster flushed with genuine anger. The
silly
man!

However, next morning when the headmaster braced himself for an interview he found himself receiving shocks instead of
delivering them. Mr Pedigree was in his classroom but Henderson was not; and before the end of the first period, the new master, Edwin Bell—already “Dinger” to the whole school—had discovered Henderson and suffered an attack of hysterics. Mr Bell was led away but Henderson was left by the wall where the hollyhocks hid him. It was evident that he had fallen fifty feet from the leads or the fire-escape that was connected with them and he was dead as dead. “Dead,” said Merriman, the odd-job man, with emphasis and apparent enjoyment, “Dead cold and stiff,” which was what had touched off that Mr Bell. However, by the time Mr Bell had been quietened, Henderson’s body had been lifted and a gymshoe found beneath—with Matty’s name in it.

That morning the headmaster sat looking at the place where Henderson had appeared before him and faced a few merciless facts. He knew himself to be, as he expressed it colloquially, to be for the high jump. He foresaw a hideously complicated transaction in which he would have to reveal that the boy had come to him, and that—

Pedigree? The headmaster saw that he would never have carried on teaching this morning if he had known what happened during the night. It might be what a hardened criminal would do, or what someone capable of minute and detached calculation would do—but not Pedigree. So that who—?

He still did not know what to do when the police came. When the inspector asked about the gymshoe, the headmaster could only say that boys frequently wore each other’s gear, the inspector knew what boys were; but the inspector did not. He asked to see Matty just as if this were something on the films or television. It was at this point that the headmaster brought in the solicitor who acted for the school. So the inspector went away for a while and the two men interviewed Matty. He was understood to say that the shoe had been cast, to which the headmaster said in an irritated way that it had been thrown, not cast, it wasn’t a horseshoe. The solicitor explained about confidentiality and truth and how they were protecting him.

“When it happened, you were there? You were on the fire-escape?”

Matty shook his head.

“Where were you then?”

They would have known, if they had seen more of the boy, why
the sun shone once more, positively ennobling the good side of his face.

“Mr Pedigree.”

“
He
was there?”

“No, sir!”

“Look boy—”

“Sir, he was in his room with me, sir!”

“In the middle of the night?”

“Sir, he’d asked me to do a map—”

“Don’t be silly. He wouldn’t ask you to bring a map to him in the middle of the night!”

The nobility in Matty’s face diminished.

“You might as well tell us the truth,” said the solicitor. “It’ll come out in the end you know. You’ve nothing to fear. Now. What about this shoe?”

Still looking down, and plain rather than noble, Matty muttered back.

The solicitor pressed him.

“I couldn’t hear that. Eden? What’s Eden got to do with a gymshoe?”

Matty muttered again.

“This is getting us nowhere,” said the headmaster. “Look, er, Wildwort. What was poor young Henderson doing up that fire-escape?”

Matty stared passionately up under his brows and the one word burst from his lips.

“Evil!”

So they put Matty by and sent for Mr Pedigree. He came, feeble, grey-faced and fainting. The headmaster viewed him with disgusted pity and offered him a chair into which he collapsed. The solicitor explained the probable course of events and how a heavier charge might be abandoned in favour of a lesser if the defendant pleaded guilty to render unnecessary the cross-examination of minors. Mr Pedigree sat huddled and shivering. They were kind to him but he only showed one spark of animation during the whole interview. When the headmaster explained kindly that he had a friend, for little Matty Windwood had tried to give him an alibi, Mr Pedigree’s face went white then red then white again.

“That horrible, ugly boy! I wouldn’t touch him if he were the last one left on earth!”

His arrest was arranged as privately as possible in view of his agreement to plead guilty. Nevertheless, he did come down the stairs from his room with policemen in attendance; and nevertheless, his shadow, that dog of his steps was there to see him go in his shame and terror. So Mr Pedigree screamed at him in the great hall.

“You horrible, horrible boy! It’s all your fault!”

Curiously enough the rest of the school seemed to agree with Mr Pedigree. Poor old Pedders was now even more popular among the boys than he had been in the sunny days when he gave them slices of cake and was quite amiably ready to be their butt so long as they liked him. No one, not the headmaster nor the solicitor, nor the judge ever knew the real story of that night; how Henderson had begged to be let in and been denied and gone reeling on the leads to slip and fall, for now Henderson was dead and could no longer reveal to anyone his furious passion. But the upshot was that Matty was sent to Coventry and fell into deep grief. It was plain to the staff that he was one of those cases for early relief from school and a simple, not too brainy job was the only palliative if not remedy. So the headmaster, who had an account at Frankley’s the Ironmongers at the other end of the High Street down by the Old Bridge, contrived to get him a job there; and like 109732 Pedigree the school knew him no more.

Nor did it know the headmaster much longer. The fact that Henderson had come to see him and been turned away could not be condoned. He left at the end of term for reasons of health; and because the tragedy had been what pushed him out, in his retirement in a bungalow above the white cliffs, he went over the dim fringes of it again and again without understanding it more deeply. Only once did he come across what might be a clue, but even so could not be certain. He found a quotation from the Old Testament, “Over Edom have I cast out my shoe.” When he remembered Matty after that he felt a little chill on his skin. The quotation was, of course, a primitive curse, the physical expression of which had been concealed in the translation, like “Smiting hip and thigh,” and a dozen other savageries. So he sat and thought and wondered whether he had the key to something even darker than the tragedy of young Henderson.

He would nod, and mutter to himself—

“Oh yes, to
say
is one thing: but to
do
is quite another matter.”

Frankley’s was an ironmonger’s of character. When the canal was cut and the Old Bridge built, it diminished the value of all the properties at that end of Greenfield. Frankley’s, in the early days of the nineteenth century, moved into rickety buildings that backed on the towpath and were going dirt cheap. The buildings were indeterminate in date, some walls of brick, some tile-hung, some lath and plaster and some of a curious wooden construction. It is not impossible that parts of these wooden areas were in fact medieval windows filled as was the custom with wooden slats and now thought to be no more than chinky walls. Certainly there was not a beam in the place that did not have here and there notches cut, grooves and an occasional hole that indicated building and rebuilding, division, reclamation and substitution, carried on throughout a quite preposterous length of time. The buildings that at last were subsumed under Frankley’s management were random and seemingly as confused as coral growths. The front that faced up the High Street was only done up and unified as late as 1850 and stayed so until it was done up all over again for the visit of His Majesty King Edward the Seventh, in 1909.

By that time, if not earlier, all the lofts and attics, galleries, corridors, nooks, crannies had been used as warehouses and were filled with stock. This was over-stocking. Frankley’s held from each age, each generation, each lot of goods, a sediment or remainder. Poking about in far corners the visitor might come across such items as carriage lamps or a sawyer’s frame, destined not for a museum but for the passing stagecoach or sawyer who had refused to turn over to steam. True, during the early days of the twentieth century, Frankley’s made a determined effort to get as much of the contemporary stock downstairs as possible. This, by a kind of evolution with no visible agent, organized itself into
sections or departments devoted to various interests as it might be tools, gardening, croquet or miscellaneous. After the convulsion of the First World War the place grew a spider’s web of wires along which money trundled in small, wooden jars. For people of all ages, from babies to pensioners, this was entrancing. Some assistant would fire the jar—clang!—from his counter and when the flying jar reached the till it would ring a bell—Dong! So the cashier would reach up, unscrew the jar, take out the money and inspect the bill, put in the change and fire the jar back—Clang! . . . Clang! All this took a great deal of time but was full of interest and enjoyment, like playing with model trains. On market days the noise of the bell was frequent and loud enough to be heard above the lowing of the cattle that were being driven over the Old Bridge. But on other days the bell would be silent for periods that grew longer as the years revolved. Then, a visitor wandering in the darker and farther parts of Frankley’s might find another property of the wooden jars. Tricks of construction might muffle the sound of the bells themselves, and a jar would hiss over the customer’s head like a bird of prey, turn a corner and vanish in some quite unexpected direction.

Age was the genius of Frankley’s. This complex machinery had been designed as a method of preventing each shop assistant from having his own till. The unforeseen result was that the spider’s web isolated the assistants. As a young Mr Frankley took over from the late Mr Frankley and became old Mr Frankley and died, his assistants, kept healthy, it may be, by the frugality and the godliness of their existence, did not die but remained static behind their counters. The new young Mr Frankley, even more pious than his forebears, felt that the overhead railway for money was a slur on these elderly gentlemen and removed it. He was, of course, the famous Mr Arthur Frankley who built the chapel and whose name was shortened to “Mr Arthur” by those gentlemen in their corners whose speech remained uncontaminated by times that were seeing the spread of the horseless carriage. Mr Arthur gave each counter back its wooden till and restored dignity to separate parts.

But the use of the overhead railway had done two things. First, it had accustomed the staff to moderate stillness and tranquillity; and second, it had so habituated them to the overhead method of money sending and getting that when one of these ancient gentlemen was offered a banknote he immediately gestured upwards
with it as if to examine the watermark. But this, in the evolution or perhaps devolution of the place, would be followed by continuing silence and a lost look while the assistant tried to remember what came next. Yet to call them “assistants” does their memory scant justice. On bright days, when even the dim electricity was switched off and the shop relied on plate-glass windows or wide, grimy skylights, some of which were interior and never saw the sky, there were restful areas remaining of gloom—corners, or forgotten passageways. On such days the loitering customer might detect a ghostly winged collar gleaming in an unvisited corner; and as he accustomed his eyes to the gloom he might make out a pale face hung above the winged collar, and lower down a pair of hands perhaps, spread out at the level where the invisible counter must be. The man would be still as his packets of bolts and nails and screws and tags and tacks. He would be absent, in some unguessable mode of the mind, where the body was to be left thus to pass life erect and waiting for the last customer. Even young Mr Arthur with all his goodwill and genuine benevolence believed that a vertical assistant was the only proper one and that there was something immoral in the idea of an assistant sitting down.

Since young Mr Arthur was devout, by one of the spiritual mysteries of the human condition it is undeniable that during his reign the assistants became more and more holy. The combination of age, frugality and devotion made them at once the most useless and dignified shop assistants in the world. They were notorious. Young Mr Arthur was exhausted by his Napoleonic decision about the spider’s web. He was one of nature’s bachelors, less by distaste or inversion than by a diminution of sex drive; and he proposed to leave his money to his chapel. During the Second World War the establishment ceased to pay its way; but minimally. Mr Arthur saw no reason why it should not continue to do so, for the rest of his life. The holy old men were to be supported because they could do nothing but what they were doing and had nowhere else to go. Taxed on this unbusinesslike attitude by the progressive grandson of his father’s accountant, Mr Arthur muttered vaguely, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn.”

It is not possible now to discover whether the reintroduction of separate tills had any effect on the speed of the shop’s decline. All that is certain is that as the decline became more perilous, by an
apparent spontaneity the place made convulsive efforts to save itself. It did not shake off its honourable commitment to the elderly gentlemen who had stood so long and sold so little. But in a first convulsion, it bundled an unimaginable load of oddments away from one loft to another and opened a showroom upstairs! Here was to be seen cutlery and glass; and as all the elderly gentlemen were busy behind their counters, new blood had to be imported. At the time there was none of the right age or cheapness available, so with an air of coming clean and bursting out into the twentieth century, the shop hired—the word “employ” had a masculine dignity—hired a woman. In this long upstairs showroom the electric light—and what is more, with more powerful bulbs than anywhere else in the building—was not turned off, no matter how bright the day, until the front doors had been shut at six. The very way up to this glittering room betokened a basic frivolity that was suited to the goods on display and the sex of their guardian. It was a drumheaded, plaster-moulded survival from the late seventeenth century and there was no way of discovering how anything like that had found itself indoors rather than out. After a short while, to the cutlery and tumblers were added decanters, wine glasses, china, table mats, napkin rings, candlesticks, salt cellars and ashtrays in onyx. It was a shop within as well as above a shop. Yet it seemed a flighty thing, that lighted, drumheaded entrance with the carpeted stairs, the rugs and polished floor, the flash of glass or silver under the wastefully bright lights. Below it the broomsticks remained, the galvanized iron buckets, the rows of wooden-hafted tools. It did not accord well with the pigeon-holes of stained and broken wood, that were filled with nails or pins or tacks or iron or brass screws and bolts.

The old men ignored it. They must have known that it would fail, since the shop, as they were, was in the rip of something uncontrollable, an inevitable decline. Even so, after the upstairs showroom, plastics burst in and would not be denied. Plastics committed enormities in the way of silent buckets and washing-up bowls, sink-baskets, watering cans and trays all of blinding colour. Plastics went even further after that and blossomed as a range of artificial flowers. These all grouped themselves as a kind of bower in the centre of the downstairs showrooms. The bower flung out an annexe of plastic screens and trellises that demanded whimsical garden furniture. Once more, it was a feminine place.
Once more, a female was its guardian; and not just a female, but a girl at that. She had a till like everyone else. She experimented with coloured lights and hid herself inside a fantasy grove.

It was into this complex disorder of ancient and modern, this image in little of the society at large, that Matty was projected by the headmaster. His status was ambiguous. Mr Arthur explained that the boy had better come until they found out what use they could make of him.

“I think,” said Mr Arthur, “we might make use of him in Deliveries.”

“What about the future?” asked the headmaster “—his future, I mean.”

“If he does well enough he can go into Despatch,” said Mr Arthur, with, as it were, a far-off glance at Napoleon. “Then if his head for figures is good enough, he might even move up to Accounts.”

“I don’t conceal from you that the boy seems to have little ability. But he mustn’t stay at school.”

“He can start in Deliveries.”

Frankley’s delivered for ten miles round and gave credit. They had a boy with a bicycle for parcels in Greenfield and two vans for longer or heavier journeys. The second of these vans had a driver and a porter, as he was called. The driver was so crippled with arthritis that he had to be inserted in his seat and left there as long as he could stand it and sometimes longer. This was another of Mr Arthur’s unimaginative kindnesses. It kept a man in a job that was a constant trial and terror to him and ensured that two people did one man’s work. Though the phrase was not yet widely used, Frankley’s was Labour Intensive. It was what was sometimes called “a fine old establishment”.

Tucked away at the bottom of the yard that ran along by the small garden of
GOODCHILD’S RARE BOOKS
, and kept in what was still called the coachhouse, was a forge, complete with anvil, tools, fire, and of course ageing blacksmith, who spent his time making trifles for his grandchildren. This area took Matty and absorbed him. He received pocket money, he slept in a long attic under the rosy, fifteenth-century tiles. He ate well, for this was one of the things Mr Arthur could measure. He wore a thick, dark-grey suit and grey overall. He carried things. He became the Boy. He carried garden tools from one part of the place to another and got
customers to sign for them. He was visible part of the time among stacks of packing-cases outside the smithy—packing-cases which he prised open with an instrument like a jemmy. He became adept at opening things. He learnt the measure of sheet metal and metal rod, of angle iron, girders and wire. He could be heard, sometimes, in the silence of business hours tramping unevenly overhead through the lofts and attics among the stock. He would deliver to it strange objects the name of which he did not know, but which would be sold at the rate of perhaps one out of every half a dozen ordered, while the other five rusted. Up there, the occasional visitor might find a set of jacks for an open fireplace or even a deformed packet of the first, snuffless candles. Matty swept here sometimes—swept those acres of uneven planking where all the brush did was to raise the dust so that it hung about invisibly in the dark corners but sneezily palpable. He began to reverence the winged collars in their places. The only boy of his own age or slightly older, there, was the boy who did the local deliveries either on foot or on the bicycle which he regarded as his own. It was already older than he was. But this boy, thick-set and blond with oiled hair that gleamed as seductively as his boots, had perfected a way of remaining away from the establishment that made his visits seem more like those of a customer than a member of the staff. Where the winged collars had achieved, it seemed, a perfect stillness, the other Boy had discovered perpetual motion. Matty, of course, remained too naive to bend circumstances in his direction as the blond Boy had done. He was perpetually employed and never knew that people gave him jobs to get him out of their sight. Ordered by the blacksmith to pick up the cigarette ends in a corner of the yard where he would be hidden, Matty did not grasp that no one would mind if he loafed there all day. He picked up the few cigarette ends and reported back when he had done it.

It was not many months after his arrival at Frankley’s that a pattern from his days at Foundlings repeated itself. Already he had passed the bower of artificials and smelt it with a kind of shock. Perhaps it was the intolerable and scentless extravagence of the flowers that made the girl inside so determined to smell sweet. Then, one morning he was told to bring a bundle of new flowers to Miss Aylen. He arrived at the bower, his arms full of the plastic roses on which it had not been thought necessary to imitate the
thorns. He looked forward through a gap between his own roses, a leaf meanwhile interfering with his nose. He found that she had made a gap in the wall of the bower by shifting the rose already there from a shelf in front of him. For this reason he was not only able to see through his own roses but into the bower.

He was aware first of a shining thing like a curtain. The curtain was ogival at the top—for she had her back to him—spread very slightly all the way down until it passed out of sight. The scent she wore, obeying its own laws, came and went. She heard him and turned her head. He saw that this creature had a nose that curved out a very short way as if conferring the absolute right of impertinence on its owner, even though at that moment the curtain of hair was caught under it by the turn of her head. He saw also that the line of her forehead was delimited by a line of brow beyond mathematical computation and that under it again was a large, grey eye that fitted between long, black lashes. This eye noted the plastic roses; but she was engaged with a customer in the other direction and had time for no more than a monosyllable.