Hangover Square (3 page)

What a noise that engine made! And yet it exhilarated him. He always had these few moments of exhilaration after his brain had ‘blinked’ and he found himself hearing and understanding sounds and sights once again. After that first tremendous rush of noise and comprehension – exactly like the roar of clarification which would accompany the snatching away, from a man’s two ears, of two oily blobs of cotton wool which he had worn for twenty-four hours – he took a simple elated pleasure in hearing and looking at everything he passed.

Then there was the pleasure of knowing exactly what he was doing. He knew where he was, and he knew what he was doing. It was Boxing Day, and he was taking the train back to London.
He had spent the Christmas holiday with his aunt who had given him ten pounds. This was a station – Hunstanton station – where he had arrived. Only it had been night when he arrived. Now he was catching the 3.4 in the afternoon. He must find a third-class compartment. Other people were going back to London, too. The engine was letting out steam, as engines will, as engines presumably have to before they start. That was a porter, whose business it was to carry luggage, and who collected a tip for doing so. There was the sea. This was a seaside town on the east coast. It was all right: it was all clear in his head again.

What, then, had been happening in his head a few moments before – and in the long hours before that? What?… Well, never mind now. There was plenty of time to think about that when he had found a compartment. He must find an empty one so that he could be by himself. If he had any luck, he might be alone all the way to London – there oughtn’t to be many people travelling on Boxing Day.

He walked up to the far end of the train, and selected an empty compartment. As he turned the handle of this, the hissing of the engine abruptly stopped. The station seemed to reel at the impact of the sudden hush, and then, a moment later, began to carry on its activities again in a more subdued, in an almost furtive way. That, he realized, was exactly like what happened in his head – his head, that was to say, when it went the other way, the nasty way, the bad, dead way. It had just gone the right way, and he was back in life again.

He put his suit-case on the rack, clicked it open, and stood on the seat to see if he had packed his yellow-covered
The Bar
20
Rides Again
. He had. It was on the top. It was wonderful how he did things when he didn’t know what he was doing. (Or did he, at the time, in some way know what he was doing? Presumably he did.) Anyway, here was his
Bar
20. He clicked the bag shut again, sat down, pulled his overcoat over his legs, put the book on his lap, and looked out of the window.

He was back in life again. It was good to be back in life. And yet how quiet and dismal it was in this part of the world. The trolley was still being rolled about the platform at the barrier
end of the station: two porters were shouting to-each other in the distance; another porter came along trying all the doors, reaching and climactically trying his own handle, and fading away again in a series of receding jabs: he could hear two people talking to each other through the wooden walls of the train, two compartments away; and if he listened he could hear, through the open window, the rhythmic purring of the mud-coloured sea, which he could see from here a hundred yards or so beyond the concrete front which was so near the station as to seem to be almost part of it. Not a soul on the front. Cold and quiet. And the sea purred gently. Dismal, dismal, dismal.

He listened to the gentle purring of the sea, and waited for the train to start, his red face and beer-shot eyes assuming an expression of innocent vacancy and misery.

Chapter Three

The train shuddered once or twice, and slid slowly out towards Heacham.

He put his feet up on the seat opposite, adjusted his body comfortably against the window, and looked idly at his shoes. Something in the sight of the pattern of the brogue on the brown leather all at once gave him a miserable feeling – a little clutch at his heart followed by an ache. For a brief moment he was at a loss to account for this pain: then he realized what it was and all his misery was upon him again.
Netta! Netta!
…

He had forgotten!… For a whole five minutes – while he had walked up that platform and found a compartment, and taken his book from the suitcase, and looked out of the window while he waited for the train to start – he had been somehow tricked into not thinking about Netta! A record, certainly!… And he had been reminded of her by the sight of his own shoes. It was because the brogue on his own brown shoes was exactly the same as the brogue on the new brown shoes she had begun wearing a week or so ago. He had noticed the similarity when they were sitting in the ‘Black Hart’ having gins-and-tonic that
morning after that awful blind when Mickey had passed out in the taxi. A nice state of affairs, when you’re so in love with a girl that the sight of your own shoes tears your heart open! Such was the awful associative power of physical love. He took his feet down, because he knew he could no longer catch a glimpse of his own shoes without incurring the risk of being pained.

Five minutes’ respite, breathing space – well, that was something – getting on! But wait a moment – what about his ‘dead’ period? Did he think about Netta in his ‘dead’ moods? Or did that strange shutter which fell, that film which came over his brain, somehow cut him off from Netta, from the pre-occupation of his days and nights? Perhaps it did – perhaps it was a sort of anaesthetic which Nature had contrived to prevent him going dotty through thinking about Netta. But then if he had not been thinking about Netta, what had he been thinking about? And that reminded him. He had asked himself just that question as he walked up the platform, and he had promised himself to seek an answer to it.

Well, then, what
had
he been thinking about –
what
went on in his head when the shutter was down? What? What?…

It was no good. He had no idea. Not the vaguest idea. This was awful. He must try and think. He really must try and think. But what was the use of thinking? He never could remember, so why should he remember now?

When did it start, anyway? How long had he been ‘under’? It had been a long time this time, he was certain of that. It went right back into yesterday. What could he remember of yesterday – Christmas Day? He could remember lunch – ‘Christmas Dinner’ as it was called – with his aunt. He could remember that clearly. He could remember the ultra-clean tablecloth, the unfamiliar wine-glasses, the turkey, and the mince-pies. Then he could remember having coffee afterwards. And then he said he would go and ‘walk it off’ and his aunt went up to her bedroom to sleep. He could remember putting on his raincoat in the hall. He could remember going down towards the sea, and then walking along the cliff towards the Golf Course… Ah! There you were! That was it. It must have happened while he was walking
along the cliff. Yes. He was sure of it. He could see himself. He could almost hear it happening in his head, as he walked along the cliff and looked out towards the sea. Snap. But what then? What?… Nothing. A blank. Absolutely nothing. Nothing until he suddenly ‘woke up’, about ten minutes ago on Hunstanton station – ‘woke up’ to find himself looking into the eyes of the man who was clipping his ticket, and hearing the fearful hissing noise of that engine.

Good God – he had been ‘out’ for twenty-four hours! – from about three o’clock on Christmas afternoon to three o’clock on Boxing Day. This was awful. Something ought to be done about it. He ought to go and see a doctor or something.

What was he
thinking
about all that time – what was he
doing
? That was the point – what was he
doing
? It was terrifying – not to know what you thought or did for twenty-four hours. A day out of your life! He could be terrified now, he could let himself be terrified – but the thing had been happening so often recently that it had lost its terrors, and he had too many other worries. He had Netta to worry about. That was one thing about Netta – you couldn’t worry about much else.

But, really, it was awful – he ought to do something about it. Imagine it – wandering about like an automaton, a dead person, another person, a person who wasn’t you, for twenty-four hours at a stretch! And when you woke up not the minutest inkling of what the other person had been thinking or doing. You might have done anything. You might, for all you knew, have got madly drunk. You might have had a fight, and got into trouble. You might have made friends or enemies you knew nothing about. You might have got off with a girl, and arranged to meet her. You might, in some mad lark, have stolen something from a shop. You might have committed assault. You might have done something dreadful in public. You might, for all you knew, be a criminal maniac. You might have murdered your aunt!

On the other hand it was pretty obvious that you were not a criminal maniac – and that you had not had a fight, or done anything dreadful in public, or murdered your aunt. For if you had people would have stopped you, and you would not be
sitting comfortably in a third-class carriage on your way back to London. And that went for all the other times in the near and distant past – all the ‘dead’ moods you had had ever since they had begun. You had never been arrested so far, you had never shown any signs of having been in a fight, and none of your relations and friends had been murdered!

Your friends and relations, in fact (though they certainly recognized and sometimes chaffed you for your ‘dead’ or ‘dumb’ moods), had never accused you of doing anything in the slightest way abnormal: nor had anyone whom you didn’t know ever claimed to know you.

It was, indeed, abundantly clear from all the evidence that when the shutter was down he behaved like a perfectly reasonable, if somewhat taciturn, human being. How else could he have got to the station? How else could he have packed his bag – and put
The Bar
20
Rides Again
on top so that he could take it out to read in the train? How could he have bought his ticket – known where he was going? No – there was nothing to worry about. He had thought out all this before, and he had always known there was nothing to worry about.

It just was that he wished to God he could remember what he had been doing and what he had been thinking.

Chapter Four

The train, rattling in gentle unison with his thoughts as it slid over the surface of the cold, flat, Boxing-Day bungalow-land of this portion of the coast, began to slow down, and then stopped at its first stop, Heacham.

There was a gloomy pause. Then the handle of his door was rudely and ruthlessly seized, and a cold woman, seeming to bring with her all the pain and bleakness of the Norfolk winter outside, violated his centrally-heated thought-closet.

She was apparently of the servant class, and as soon as she had entered she lowered the window and began talking volubly to a friend on the platform, who had come to see her off. This
woman on the platform wore no hat, he noticed, in spite of the cold; but instead of that she wore a hair-net over her hair. He looked at this hair-net with dull misery in his heart. Even after the train had started, and the woman had vanished, he retained a picture of the hair-net, and wondered why it made him miserable, why he hated the woman for wearing it, why he obscurely felt she had been giving him cause for resentment.

Net… It dawned on him. Of course, that was it. Net. Which equalled Netta… He had been quite right; the woman
had
been hurting him: she had been trying, all the time as she talked to her friend, to remind him of Netta.

Oh dear – these horrible off-hand strangers, who knew nothing of Netta, who would care nothing about Netta even if they did, but who yet had the power to remind him of Netta, and obscurely torture him by wearing hair-nets!…

Netta. Nets. Netta. A perfectly commonplace name. In fact, if it did not happen to belong to her, and if he did not happen to adore her, a dull, if not rather stupid and revolting name. Entirely unromantic – spinsterish, mean – like Ethel, or Minnie. But because it was hers look what had gone and happened to it! He could not utter it, whisper it, think of it without intoxication, without dizziness, without anguish. It was incredibly, inconceivably lovely – as incredibly and inconceivably lovely as herself. It was unthinkable that she could have been called anything else. It was loaded, overloaded with voluptuous yet subtle intimations of her personality. Netta. The tangled net of her hair – the dark net – the brunette. The net in which he was caught – netted. Nettles. The wicked poison-nettles from which had been brewed the potion which was in his blood. Stinging nettles. She stung and wounded him with words from her red mouth. Nets. Fishing-nets. Mermaid’s nets. Bewitchment. Syrens – the unearthly beauty of the sea. Nets. Nest. To nestle. To nestle against her. Rest. Breast. In her net. Netta. You could go on like that for ever – all the way back to London.

But if you weren’t in love with her – what then? Net profit? 2
s
. 6
d
. Net? Nestlé’s Milk Chocolate? Presumably. But in that case, of course, you wouldn’t think about it at all. It was only because you were crazy about her you went on like this. So
crazy that your heart sank when you saw your own shoes, or looked at a woman wearing a hair-net on Heacham station.

Crazy. Perhaps he was really crazy – dotty. With these awful ‘dead’ moods of his – twenty-four-hour slices of life concerning which he remembered nothing – you could hardly call him normal. But he had been into all that and decided there was nothing to worry about. No. He was sane enough. If you didn’t count the ‘dead’ moods, he was sane enough. In fact he was probably too sane, too normal. If only he was a little more erratic, if only he had a little fire, a little originality or audacity, it might have been a different story. A different story with Netta and all along the line.

He was, of course, completely without ambition. He wasn’t like Netta. He didn’t want to hang about film people and theatre people and try to make a lot of money easily. He didn’t want anything, except Netta. She, of course, would hoot with laughter if she knew what he really wanted. He wanted a cottage in the country – yes, a good old cottage in the country – and he wanted Netta as his wife. No children. Just Netta – and to live with her happily and quietly ever afterwards. He would love her, physically love her, even when she was old. He was certain of that, though sophistication condemned the idea as absurd. She was, to him, so utterly different from any other girl that the thought of tiring of her physically was unimaginable.