Essential Stories (16 page)

“Were you hurt?” she said anxiously.

“It was a miracle, not a stone touched me. I was in a little black cave. It was like a tomb. I was in that place alone for twelve hours. I could hear them working to get at me but after the first fall there was a second and then I thought I was finished. I could hear nothing.”

“What did you do? I would have gone out of my mind,” she said. “Is that how you got the scar on your nose?”

“That was in a fight,” he said, offhand. “Madness is a terrible thing. I stared into the blackness and I tried to think of one thing to stop my mind wandering but I could not at first for the fear, it was chasing and jumping like a mad dog in my head. I prayed and the more I prayed the more it chased and jumped. And then, suddenly, it stopped. I saw in my mind a picture. I saw the mantelpiece at home and on it a photograph of our family—my father and mother, my four sisters and my brother. And we had an aunt and uncle just married, it was a wedding photograph. I could see it clearly as if I had been in my home. They were standing there looking at me and I kept looking at them and thinking about them. I held on to them. I kept everything else out of my mind; wherever I looked that picture was before my eyes. It was like a vision. It saved me.”

“I have heard people say they hear voices,” said Miss Freshwater’s niece, kindly now.

“Oh, no! They were speechless,” said Evans. “Not a word! I spoke to them,” he said. “Out loud. I promised God in front of all my family that I would cleanse my soul when I got out.”

Evans stood blazing in his trance and then he picked up his cup from the grass and took it to her.

“May I please have some more tea?” he said.

“Of course,” she said. “Sit down.”

He considered where he should sit and then put himself beside her.

“When I saw you looking at your photographs,” he said, “I thought, ‘She is down the mine.’ ”

“I have never been down a mine in my life. I don’t know why. We lived near one once when I was in the north,” she evaded.

“The mine of the past,” he said. “The dark mine of the past.”

“I can see why you are a preacher, Robert,” she smiled. “It’s funny how one cannot get one’s family out of one’s head. I could feel mine inside me for years—but not now.”

She had entirely stopped mocking him.

“I can’t say they ever saved me,” she said. “I think they nearly ruined me. Look at that ugly house and all that rubbish. Did you ever see anything like their furniture? When I was a girl I used to think, Suppose I got to look like that sideboard! And then money was all they ever talked about—and good and nice people, and nice people always had money. It was like that in those days, thank God that has gone. Perhaps it hasn’t. I decided to get away from it and I got married. They ought to have stopped me—all I wanted was to get away—but they thought my husband had money, too. He just had debts and a bad stomach. When he had spent all my money, he just got ill to punish me . . . You don’t know anything about life when you’re young and when you are old it’s too late . . .”

“That’s a commonplace remark,” she went on, putting her cup on the tray and reaching for his. “My mother used to make it.” She picked up her scarf and began to tie it on her head, but as she was tying it Evans quickly reached for it and pulled it off. His hand held the nape of her neck gently.

“You are not old,” he shouted, laughing and sparkling. “Your hair is golden, not a grey one in it, boy.”

“Robert, give me that scarf. It is to keep out the dust,” she said, blushing. She reached for the scarf and he caught her wrist.

“When I saw you standing at the station on Monday, I said, Now, there is a woman! Look at the way she stands, a golden woman, that is the first I have seen in this town, she must be a stranger,” he said.

“You know all the others, I expect,” she said with amusement.

“Oh, indeed, yes I do! All of them!” he said. “I would not look at them twice.”

His other hand slipped from her neck to her waist.

“I can trust myself with them, but not with you,” he said, lowering his voice and speaking down to her neck. “In an empty house,” he whispered, nodding to the house, letting go of her hand and stroking her knee.

“I am far past that sort of thing,” said Miss Freshwater’s niece, choosing a lugubrious tone. She removed his arm from her waist. And she stood up, adroitly picking up the tray, and from behind that defence, looked round the garden. Evans sprang up but instead of coming near her, he jumped a few yards away and squatted on his heels, grinning at her confidently.

“You look like the devil,” she said.

He had placed himself between her and the way to the house.

“It is quiet in the garden, too,” he said with a wink. And then she saw the wheelbarrow which he had left near the fire.

“That barrow ought to go well in the sale,” she said. “It is almost new. How much do you think it will fetch?”

Evans stood up at once and his grin went. An evasive light, almost the light of tears, came into his hot blue eyes and he stared at her with an alarm that drove everything else out of his head.

“They’ll put it with the tools, you will not get much for it.”

“I think every man in the town will be after it,” she said, with malice.

“What price did you want for it?” he said, uncertain of her.

“I don’t know what they cost,” she said carelessly and walked past him very slowly back to the house, maddening him by her walk. He followed her quickly and when she turned, still carrying the tray, to face him in the doorway, she caught his agitation.

“I will take the tray to the kitchen,” he said politely.

“No,” she said, “I will do that. I want you to go upstairs and fetch down all those shoes. And the trunk. It can all go.”

And she turned and walked through the house to the kitchen. He hesitated for a long time; at last she heard him go upstairs and she pottered in the kitchen where the china and pans were stacked on the table, waiting for him to come down. He was a very long time. He came down with the empty trunk.

“It can all go. Burn it all. It’s no good to anyone, damp and rotten. I’ve put aside what I want,” she said.

He looked at her sullenly. He was startled by her manner and by the vehemence of her face, for she had put on the scarf and her face looked strong-boned, naked and ruthless. She was startled herself.

His sullenness went; he returned to his old excitement and hurried the barrow to the fire and she stood at the door impatiently waiting for the blaze. When he saw her waiting he came back.

“There it goes,” he said with admiration.

The reflection of the flame danced in points of light in her eyes, her mouth was set, hard and bitter. Presently the flame dropped and greenish smoke came out thickly.

“Ah!” she gasped. Her body relaxed and she smiled at Evans, tempting him again.

“I’ve been thinking about the barrow,” she said. “When we’ve finished up here, I’ll make you a present of it. I would like to give it to you, if you have a use for it?”

She could see the struggle going on inside him as he boldly looked at her; and she saw his boldness pass into a small shrug of independent pride and the pride into pretence and dissembling.

“I don’t know,” he said, “that I have a use—well, I’ll take it off you. I’ll put the shoes in it, it will save bringing the car.” He could not repress his eagerness any longer. “I’ll put the shoes into it this evening. Thank you.” He paused. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said.

It was the first time he had called her ma’am. The word was like a blow. The affair was over. It was, she realised, a dismissal.

An hour later she heard him rumbling the barrow down the path to the gate. The next day he did not come. He had finished with her. He sent his son up for his money.

It took Miss Freshwater’s niece two more days to finish her work at the house. The heavy jobs had been done, except for putting the drawers back into the chests. She could have done with Evans’s help there, and for the sweeping which made her hot but she was glad to be alone because she got on more quickly with the work. She hummed and even sang as she worked, feeling light and astonishingly happy. Once or twice, when she saw the white sheet of the Mission tent distantly through the trees, she laughed:

“He got what he wanted! And I’m evidently not as old as I look.”

The last hours buzzed by and she spun out the time, reluctant to go. She dawdled, locking the sheds, the windows and doors, until there was nothing more to keep her. She brought down a light suitcase in which she had put the few things she wanted to take away and she sat in the dining-room, now as bare as an office, to go through her money. After the destruction she was having a fit of economy and it had occurred to her that instead of taking a taxi to the station, she could walk down to the bus stop on the Green. She knew that the happiness she felt was not ebbing, but had changed to a feeling she had not had for many years: the feeling of expectancy, and as this settled in her she put her money and papers back into her bag. There was a last grain of rubbish here: with scarcely a glance at them, she tore up the photograph and the unfinished letter she had found in the trunk.

“I owe Evans a lot,” she thought.

Nothing retained her now.

She picked up her case. She left the house and walked down the road in the strong shade of the firs and the broad shade of the oak trees, whose leaves hardened with populous contentment in the long evening light. When she got to the open Green children were playing round the Gospel Tent and, in twos and threes, people were walking from the houses across the grass towards it. She had twenty minutes to wait until her bus arrived. She heard the sound of singing coming from the tent. She wondered if Evans would be there.

“I might give him the pleasure of seeing what he missed,” she thought.

She strolled across to the tent.

A youth who had watered his hair and given it a twirl with a comb was standing in his best clothes at the entrance to the tent.

“Come to Jesu! Come to Jesu!” he said to her as she peeped inside.

“I’m just looking for someone,” she said politely.

The singing had stopped when she looked in but the worshippers were still standing. They were packed in the white light of the tent and the hot smell of grass and somewhere at the far end, invisible, a man was shouting like a cheapjack selling something at an auction. He stopped suddenly and a high, powerful country voice whined out alone: “Ow in the vale . . .” and the congregation joined in for another long verse.

“Is Mr. Evans here tonight?” she asked the youth.

“Yes,” he said. “He’s witnessing every night.”

“Where is he? I don’t see him.”

The verse came to an end and once more a voice began talking at the other end of the tent. It was a woman’s voice, high and incomprehensible and sharp. The hymn began again and then spluttered into an explosive roar that swept across the Green.

“They’ve fixed it. The loudspeaker!” the youth exclaimed. Miss Freshwater’s niece stepped back. The noises thumped. Sadly, she looked at her watch and began to walk back to the bus stop. When she was about ten yards from the tent, the loudspeaker gave a loud whistle and then, as if God had cleared his throat, spoke out with a gross and miraculous clearness.

“Friends,” it said, sweeping right across the Green until it struck the furthest houses and the trees. “My friends . . .”

The word seemed to grind her and everyone else to nothing, to mill them all into the common dust.

“When I came to this place,” it bellowed, “the serpent . . .” (An explosion of noise followed but the voice cleared again) “. . . heart. No bigger than a speck it was at first, as tiny as a speck of coal grit in your eye . . .”

Miss Freshwater’s niece stopped. Was it Evans’s voice? A motor coach went by on the road and drowned the next words, and then she heard, spreading into an absurd public roar:

“I was a liar. I was an adulterer. Oh my friends, I was a slave of the strange woman the Bible tells about, the whore of Babylon, in her palace where moth and dust . . .” Detonations again.

But it was Evans’s voice. She waited and the enormously magnified voice burst through:

“And then by the great mercy of the Lord I heard a voice cry out, ‘Robert Evans, what are you doing, boy? Come out of it’ . . .” But the voice exploded into meaningless concussions, suddenly resuming:

“. . . and burned the adulteress in the everlasting fire, my friends— and all her property.”

The hymn started up again.

“Well, not quite all, Robert,” said Miss Freshwater’s niece pleasantly aloud, and a child eating an ice-cream near her watched her walk across the grass to the bus stop.

THE FALL

It was the evening of the Annual Dinner. More than two hundred accountants were at that hour changing into evening clothes, in the flats, villas and hotel rooms of a large, wet, Midland city. At the Royal was Charles Peacock, slender in his shirt, balancing on one leg and gazing with frowns of affection in the wardrobe mirror at the other leg as he pulled his trousers on; and then with a smile of farewell as the second went in. Buttoned up, relieved of nakedness, he visited other mirrors—the one at the dressing table, the two in the bathroom, assembling the scattered aspects of the unsettled being called Peacock “doing”—as he was apt to say—“no so badly” in this city which smelled of coal and where thirty-eight years ago he had been born. When he left his room there were mirrors in the hotel lift and down below in the foyer and outside in the street. Certain shop windows were favourable and assuring. The love affair was taken up again at the Assembly Rooms by the mirrors in the tiled corridor leading towards the bullocky noise of two hundred-odd chartered accountants in black ties, taking their drinks under the chandeliers that seemed to weep above their heads.

Crowds or occasions frightened Peacock. They engaged him, at first sight, in the fundamental battle of his life: the struggle against nakedness, the panic of grabbing for clothes and becoming someone. An acquaintance in a Scottish firm was standing near the door of the packed room as Peacock went in.

“Hullo, laddie,” Peacock said, fitting himself out with a Scottish accent, as he went into the crowded, chocolate-coloured buffet.

“What’s to do?” he said, passing on to a Yorkshireman.

“Are you well now?” he said, in his Irish voice. And, gaining confidence, “Whatcha cock!” to a man up from London, until he was shaking hands in the crowd with the President himself, who was leaning on a stick and had his foot in plaster.

“I hope this is not serious, sir,” said Peacock in his best southern English, nodding at the foot.

“Bloody serious,” said the President sticking out his peppery beard. “I caught my foot in a grating. Some damn fools here think I’ve got gout.”

No one who saw Peacock in his office, in Board Rooms, on committees, at meetings, knew the exhausting number of rough sketches that had to be made before the naked Peacock could become Peacock dressed for his part. Now, having spoken to several human beings, the fragments called Peacock closed up. And he had one more trick up his sleeve if he panicked again: he could drop into music hall Negro.

Peacock got a drink at the buffet table and pushed his way to a solitary island of carpet two feet square, in the guffawing corral. He was looking at the back of the President’s neck. Almost at once the President, on the crest of a successful joke he had told, turned round with appetite.

“Hah!” he shouted. “Hah! Here’s friend Peacock again.”

Why “again”? thought Peacock.

The President looked Peacock over.

“I saw your brother this afternoon,” shouted the President. The President’s injured foot could be said to have made his voice sound like a hilarious smash. Peacock’s drink jumped and splashed his hand. The President winked at his friends.

“Hah!” said the President. “That gave our friend Peacock a scare!”

“At the Odeon,” explained a kinder man.

“Is Shelmerdine Peacock your brother? The actor?” another said, astonished, looking at Peacock from head to foot.

“Shelmerdine Peacock was born and bred in this city,” said the President fervently.

“I saw him in
Waste,
” someone said. And others recalled him in
The
Gun Runner
and
Doctor Zut.

Four or five men stood gazing at Peacock with admiration, waiting for him to speak.

“Where is he now?” said the President, stepping forward, beard first. “In Hollywood? Have you seen him lately?”

They all moved forward to hear about the famous man.

Peacock looked to the right—he wanted to do this properly—but there was no mirror in that direction; he looked to the left, but there was no mirror there. He lowered his head gravely and then looked up shaking his head sorrowfully. He brought out the old reliable Negro voice:

“The last time I saw l’il ole brudder Shel,” he said, “he was being thrown out of the Orchid Room. He was calling the waiters goatherds.”

Peacock looked up at them all and stood, collected, assembled, whole at last, among their shouts of laughter. One man who did not laugh, and who asked what the Orchid Room was, was put in his place. And in a moment, a voice bawled from the door, “Gentlemen. Dinner is served.” The crowd moved through two ante-rooms into the Great Hall where, from their portraits on the wall, Mayors, Presidents and Justices looked down with the complacent rosiness of those who have dined and died. It was gratifying to Peacock that the President rested his arm on his shoulder for a few steps as they went into the hall.

Shel often cropped up in Peacock’s life, especially in clubs and at dinners. It was pleasing. There was always praise; there were always questions. He had seen the posters about Shel’s film during the week on his way to his office. They pleased, but they also troubled. Peacock stood at his place at table in the Great Hall and paused to look around, in case there was one more glance of vicarious fame to be collected. He was enjoying one of those pauses of self-possession in which, for a few seconds, he could feel the sensations Shel must feel when he stepped before the curtain to receive the applause of some great audience in London or New York. Then Peacock sat down. More than two hundred soup spoons scraped.

“Sherry, sir?” said the waiter.

Peacock sipped.

He meant no harm to Shel, of course. But in a city like this, with Shel appearing in a big picture, with his name fifteen feet long on the hoardings, talked about by girls in offices, the universal instinct of family disparagement was naturally tickled into life. The President might laugh and the crowd admire, but it was not always agreeable for the family to have Shel roaming loose—and often very loose—in the world. One had to assert the modesty, the anonymity of the ordinary assiduous Peacocks. One way of doing this was to add a touch or two to famous scandals: to enlarge the drunken scrimmages and add to the divorces and the breaches of contract, increase the overdoses taken by flighty girls. One was entitled to a little rake off—an accountant’s charges—from the fame that so often annoyed. One was entitled, above all, because one loved Shel.

“Hock, sir?” said the waiter.

Peacock drank. Yes, he loved Shel. Peacock put down his glass and the man opposite to him spoke across the table, a man with an amused mouth, who turned his sallow face sideways so that one had the impression of being inquired into under a loose lock of black hair by one sharp, serious eye only.

“An actor’s life is a struggle,” the man said. Peacock recognised him: it was the man who had not laughed at his story and who had asked what the Orchid Room was, in a voice that had a sad and puncturing feeling for information sought for its own sake.

Peacock knew this kind of admirer of Shel’s and feared him. They were not content to admire, they wanted to advance into intimacy, and collect facts on behalf of some general view of life’s mysteriousness. As an accountant Peacock rejected mystery.

“I don’t think l’il ole brudder Shel has struggled much,” said Peacock, wagging his head from side to side carelessly.

“I mean he has to dedicate himself,” said the man.

Peacock looked back mistrustfully.

“I remember some interview he gave about his schooldays—in this city,” said the man. “It interested me. I do the books for the Hippodrome.”

Peacock stopped wagging his head from side to side. He was alert. What Shel had said about his early life had been damned tactless.

“Shel had a good time,” said Peacock sharply. “He always got his own way.”

Peacock put on his face of stone. He dared the man to say out loud, in that company, three simple English words. He dared him. The man smiled and did not say them.

“Volnay, sir?” said the waiter as the pheasant was brought. Peacock drank.

Fried Fish Shop, Peacock said to himself as he drank. Those were the words. Shel could have kept his mouth shut about that. I’m not a snob, but why mention it? Why, after they were all doing well, bring ridicule upon the family? Why not say, simply, “Shop.” Why not say, if he had to, “Fishmonger?” Why mention “Frying”? Why add “
Bankrupt
Fried Fish Shop”?

It was swinish, disloyal, ungrateful. Bankrupt—all right; but some of that money (Peacock said, hectoring the pheasant on his plate) paid for Shel’s years at the Dramatic School. It was unforgiveable.

Peacock looked across at the man opposite, but the man had turned to talk to a neighbour. Peacock finished his glass and chatted with the man sitting to his right, but he felt like telling the whole table a few facts about dedication.

Dedication—he would have said. Let us take a look at the figures. An example of Shel’s dedication in those Fried Fish Shop days he is so fond of remembering to make fools of us. Saturday afternoon. Father asleep in the back room. Shel says, “Come down the High Street with me, Tom. I want to get a record.” Classical, of course. Usual swindle. If we get into the shop he won’t have the money and will try and borrow from me. “No,” I say. “I haven’t got any money.” “Well, let’s get out of this stink of lard and fish.” He wears me down. He wore us all down, the whole family. He would be sixteen, two years older than me. And so we go out and at once I know there is going to be trouble. “I saw the Devil in Cramers,” he says. We go down the High Street to Cramers, it’s a music shop, and he goes up to the girl to ask if they sell bicycle pumps or rubber heels. When the girl says “No,” he makes a terrible face at her and shouts out “Bah.” At Hooks, the stationers, he stands at the door, and calls to the girl at the cash desk: “You’ve got the Devil in here. I’ve reported it,” and slams the door. We go on to Bonds, the grocers, and he pretends to be sick when he sees the bacon. Goes out. “Rehearsing,” he says. The Bonds are friends of Father’s. There is a row. Shel swears he was never anywhere near the place and goes back the following Saturday and falls flat on the floor in front of the Bond daughter groaning, “I’ve been poisoned. I’m dying. Water! Water!” Falls flat on his back . . .

“Caught his foot in a grating, he told me, and fell,” the man opposite was saying. “Isn’t that what he told you, Peacock?”

Peacock’s imaginary speech came suddenly to an end. The man was smiling as if he had heard every word.

“Who?” said Peacock.

“The President,” said the man. “My friend, Mr. McAlister is asking me what happened to the President. Did he fall in the street?”

Peacock collected himself quickly and to hide his nakedness became Scottish.

“Ay, mon,” he nodded across the table. “A wee bit of a tumble in the street.”

Peacock took up his glass and drank.

“He’s a heavy man to fall,” said the man called McAlister.

“He carries a lot of weight,” said his neighbour. Peacock eyed him. The impression was growing that this man knew too much, too quietly. It struck him that the man was one of those who ask what they know already, a deeply unbelieving man. They have to be crushed.

“Weight makes no difference,” said Peacock firmly.

“It’s weight and distance,” said the Scotsman. “Look at children.”

Peacock felt a smile coming over his body from the feet upwards.

“Weight and distance make no difference,” Peacock repeated.

“How can you say that?”

An enormous voice, hanging brutally on the air like a sergeant’s, suddenly shouted in the hall. It was odd to see the men in the portraits on the wall still sitting down after the voice sounded. It was the voice of the toastmaster.

“Gen—tle—men,” it shouted. “I ask you. To rise to. The Toast of Her. Maj—es—ty. The Queen.”

Two hundred or more accountants pushed back their chairs and stood up.

“The Queen,” they growled. And one or two, Peacock among them, fervently added, “God bless her,” and drained his glass.

Two hundred or more accountants sat down. It was the moment Peacock loved. And he loved the Queen.

“Port or brandy, sir?” the waiter asked.

“Brandy,” said Peacock.

“You were saying that weight and distance make no difference. How do you make that out?” the sidelong man opposite said in a sympathetic and curious voice that came softly and lazily out.

Peacock felt the brandy burn. The question floated by, answerable if seized as it went and yet, suddenly, unanswerable for the moment. Peacock stared at the question keenly as if it were a fly that he was waiting to swat when it came round again. Ah, there it came. Now! But no, it had gone by once more. It was answerable. He knew the answer. Peacock smiled loosely biding his time. He felt the flame of authority, of absolute knowledge burn in him.

There was a hammering at the President’s table, there was hand-clapping. The President was on his feet and his beard had begun to move up and down.

“I’ll tell you later,” said Peacock curtly across the table. The interest went out of the man’s eye.

“Once more,” the President’s beard was saying and it seemed sometimes that he had two beards. “Honour,” said one beard. “Privilege,” said the other. “Old friends,” said both beards together. “Speeches . . . brief . . . reminded of story . . . shortest marriage service in the world . . . Tennessee . . .”

“Hah! Hah! Hah!” shouted a pack of wolves, hyenas, hounds in dinner jackets.

Peacock looked across at the unbeliever who sat opposite. The interest in weight and distance had died away in his face.

“Englishman . . . Irishman . . . Scotsman . . . train . . . Englishman said . . . Scotsman said . . . Och, says Paddy . . .”

“Hah! Hah! Hah!” from the pack.

Over the carnations in the silver-plated vases on the table, over the heads of the diners, the cigar smoke was rising sweetly and the first level indigo shafts of it were tipping across the middle air and turning the portraits of the Past Masters into day dreams. Peacock gazed at it. Then a bell rang in his ear, so loudly that he looked shyly to see if anyone else had heard it. The voice of Shel was on some line of his memory, a voice richer, more insinuating than the toastmaster’s or the President’s, a voice utterly flooring.