Out of the Blackout (3 page)

Simon felt terrible, but—oddly—he also felt sober. He groped around him, groggily tried his feet. Soon he would be able to stand. He patted the inside pocket of his jacket. No wallet. He put his hand gingerly round to the back pocket of his flannels. A threepenny bit. Merely opening his eyes was painful. He groped blindly around the paved floor of the arcade again. No wallet. No money. He felt in the top pocket of his sports jacket: thank God, his return ticket was still there. Simon had no idea, such was his inexperience, what he would have done without the stub of his train ticket. Now all he had to do was to get to Paddington.

It was the countryman's way to walk, and Simon walked. His eye was horribly swollen, but his legs held him up well. When he got into Leicester Square he found a young policeman and asked him the general direction of Paddington, braving his disapproving stare.

‘Been in the wars, have you?' he was asked.

‘It was the bloody Fascists,' said Simon.

‘Yes, well, if you ask me you're two of a kind,' said the policeman. But he pointed out the way.

Set on the right course, Simon soon began noticing signs, and
before long he was walking with more confidence, and in no great pain. He stopped at a public lavatory and cleaned himself up. With the buoyancy of youth, he suddenly felt full of life again. There was plenty of time before the last train to Oxford. He walked on and on, noticing everything with fresh curiosity. The pavements got harder and harder, but still, the distance presented no problems: he had often walked further with his adoptive father round the estate of Sir Henry Beesley. It was around ten o'clock when he came to the area called Paddington.

The feeling came to him slowly: first it was a faint sense of unease, a hollowness in the belly, and he attributed it to the beating-up he had suffered, to the pitch of excitement he had been screwed up to all day, to a lack of food and a surfeit of beer. To anything except the real thing. For this feeling, he realized, was not only hollow: it was eerie. Here was a succession of houses—grimy, early nineteenth-century houses—small hotels and lower middle-class homes. He had known areas like this before, if not around Yeasdon, then in Bristol and in Oxford: grimy, depressing areas that cling around railway stations are all very like each other. Mean, protective of privacy, without dignity, they seem to stretch endlessly forward, to create their own dingy infinity, even though you know that five minutes away there are streets, and lights, and shops. At the corners you turn, and see more of the same, and you feel enmeshed, caught in a maze.

And yet
here,
in
these
streets, among
these
houses, Simon seemed to have a clue to the maze. Here at this corner, for example . . . if he were to turn here, to go down this street . . .

Without so much as a glance at his watch, with the unwilled certainty of a sleepwalker, he turned and went down that street.

Broughton Street it said on the first house in the first terraced row. Simon knew the name, had heard it. And he knew that at the next corner he must cross the road, and then turn again. Into Farrow Street. That was it, Farrow Street. And Farrow Street would be more of the same: some narrow, late-Georgian houses, some low, mean dwellings built in the early days of the railway age. They would be the same, but they would be different,
because they would be still more familiar: they would be
known.
And he would come to No. 17, on the right, and he would know the tiny patch of garden between the pavement and the house, know the two off-white steps up to the front door, know the knocker . . . What
was
that knocker like? Yes—a grinning gnome in brass, set low down in the door, where a child could grasp its fearful leer, his heart thumping the while, preferring it to the more fearful alternative of remaining out on the street.

He crossed the road, turned again, and walked up Farrow Street. He felt he knew every crack in the paving stones, every railing and doorway. He recognized at once the squat form of the house, his old home; knew again the pale yellow roses in the scrap of garden—not very flourishing, and coated with grime. Here were the steps, much dirtier than when he'd climbed them, here was the knocker, which now he had to bend down to touch. But the door was wrong. It was now dark green. What had it been then? Brown. Dark brown. But it was the same door. There was a crack down the lower left-hand panel.

Simon took a few steps backward into the street, and surveyed the house. Suddenly his arm had to lunge out and clutch on to a lamp-post for support. He was possessed by two contrary impulses—to go up and knock at the door, and to run away and put the house behind him. ‘Who am I?' asked one voice. ‘You are Simon Cutheridge,' answered a second. There was no one in the street. Blinds were down, curtains drawn, and behind them—mere shadows—figures moved around in the dimly lit rooms. It was an atmosphere neither attractive nor cosy, but it was not sinister, not threatening. ‘What could you say, if you knocked at the door?' asked his second voice. ‘I could say I am . . . I could say I once lived here,' came back the first. ‘Once lived here, and . . .'

The voices stopped, and a sort of blankness seemed to enter Simon's mind, penetrate its every corner.

And suddenly he was walking. Like a bolt from a bow he was walking away, and then, though he was breathing heavily, he broke into a run. He went not the way he came, but forward, on to the Station. He was getting away from there, getting out of the area. He knew the way to the Station. It would be over there. He turned—left, then left again, then right. Suddenly the
lights were in front of him; he was leaving the insidious, mean streets, and was back on a highway, on a road of shops and cafés and pubs, back in the warm world, with everyday human traffic.

A corner pub had a piano playing inside, a Greek café sent warm smells wafting over the pavement, a prostitute smiled at him hopefully. He blinked, as if he had known this scene, but never like this. Had known it, but darker. He looked left, and there was Paddington Station, there was the station hotel. He had only to walk a hundred yards and cross the street and he would be there. He leaned for a moment against the wall of a shop, a poky little newsagent's. He had come through. He had got out. He had . . . he had
failed.
He had flunked it.

But his legs would not allow him to turn back again. He swallowed, took a breath, then walked down to the traffic lights and across the road. Within minutes the subdued late-night bustle of Paddington Station closed in on him. He looked at the placard with train departures on it, then ran to his platform. Outside the ticket gate there was a knot of his fellow protestors. Immediately he was in the middle of them, getting high again on indignation, feeling the exhilaration of political action, or what seemed very like it. They all had experiences to swap, things that had happened to them since they split up. Simon told of the London University students, the pubs he had drunk in, the beating up. He told them more sketchily about his walk to the Station. About his experience in Farrow Street he kept silent. How could it mean anything to anyone but him? And besides . . . that part of his life was secret.

As the train pulled out, and only then, he felt safe. Yet how could he account for that sour taste in his mouth, of failure and of guilt?

O
nce Simon was back in Oxford, it was easy for him to let Farrow Street hide itself in a corner of his mind. The rest of his first term passed in a frenzy of activity. Political impulses still bore him on at a hectic rate, a senior member of his college was trying hard to seduce him, he had met a girl who interested him. He drank a lot of
beer, went to the odd dance, even landed a small part in the college play. There were lectures and lab classes, and quite a bit of football in the afternoons. It wasn't necessary—it wasn't even easy—to think.

When he went back home to Yeasdon in December it was much more difficult to put the thought to one side. In fact the mere act of sitting on a little train without corridor that drew slowly into Yeasdon Station pricked the thought into tormenting life: as his heart knocked against his ribs, he knew it had knocked thus in nineteen forty-one. He was the same person, only now he was going home, and then he had been going into the unknown. Was that why his heart had knocked on that May day?

Outside the station the first person he saw—stretched out under a car, as he seemed to have been stretched since he was fourteen or fifteen years old—was his best friend in Yeasdon, Micky Malone.

‘Hey, Oxford boy! Yer look as if yer'd seen a ghost!'

‘Micky!'

Simon put his case down on the forecourt, and Micky scrambled out from under the car.

‘What are you so bloody pale for? Don't they feed you there?'

‘I suppose I have seen a ghost, like you said. I was just remembering in the train, how we all came down here for the first time.'

‘Is that all? Can't remember a thing about it meself.'

‘I do. Or at least I tell myself I do.'

‘ “The boy from nowhere”,' said Micky, quoting a name the evacuee kids had given Simon at the time. ‘Well, what's it like being at Oxford, then, boy?'

And they'd gone on to talk of other things.

Of course his mother (as he called her, without a trace of self-consciousness) realized quite early on in the vacation that Simon was unusually preoccupied, and she guessed that it wasn't the new experience of university that was making him so.

‘Something's happened, hasn't it?' she asked him, on his second evening home.

‘I suppose so,' said Simon. ‘I was in London, and I saw the house where I used to live.'

Dot thought for a bit.

‘And did you knock on the door?'

‘No. I—I found I didn't want to.'

‘Well, that's all right, then.'

She knew, of course, that it was not. Dot Cutheridge was in her way a clever woman. She made no attempt to tell him that past things were better not mulled over in that way. He would come out of it in his own time. There was a sort of serene confidence about Dot these days. When you have reared a child to the age of twenty, seen him launched into adult life, your task is in a sense done, your life has had its fulfilment. So, at any rate, Dot Cutheridge and many like her thought, then.

At that time of year there was not much to be done around Sir Henry Beesley's estate, otherwise Simon might have helped his father there, as he always had done during his summer holidays from school. There was as yet no great pressure of college work either. Simon took long, brisk winter walks, and on these walks his mind refused to stay empty for long. Simon struggled to remember.

He had told Micky that he remembered ‘or at least I tell myself that I do.' And that was the problem, wasn't it? We
say
we remember things, but after a time just the saying it has created a static picture in our mind that stands in for the real memory. But surely that wasn't so in this case? He had almost never talked about his train journey from Paddington to Yeasdon, had surely not thought about it for years, not since the early days. Yet there the memory had been: sitting on the train as it pulled into the station, his heart thumping, the faces of the reception committee standing on the platform, some sense of an ordeal, a challenge, ahead.

Then what else could he remember from that time?

He was conscious that for the first months at Yeasdon he had had a nagging feeling of guilt at deceiving the Cutheridges.
Could
a child that young feel guilt? Perhaps that was his first dawning of a moral awareness. Foolish, of course, to feel guilty now. What was done was surely done on orders, or at least under influence too strong for a mere child to resist. And he had half understood that the Cutheridges had wanted to be deceived. But looking back he could feel kinship with that guilty child—ingratiating himself, deceiving, suffering guilt.

He was conscious too that at the time there were many things
he could have told the Cutheridges, could have told Mr Thurston and all the people who tried to find out who he was, but had deliberately not told them. Why had he kept silent? There was some strong influence—he did not know of what kind—from his former life telling him to: telling him not to reveal who he was, where he came from, how he had come to be on that train. But he felt there was another reason too: from the first moment he had loved the Cutheridges, had wanted to be with them, had opted for them rather than what he had left. He had loved them even as he deceived them.

What was it he could have told them, had he wished?

Simon was sitting on a tree stump on the edge of a little coppice. He was wearing a heavy sweater that his mother had knitted for him under a tweed sports jacket, but nevertheless he shivered. He gazed ahead of him, across the rolling fields towards Yeasdon. No—that was not the way to bring it back. He shut his eyes. At once he saw the door in Paddington—brown, with a split in the panel on the bottom left side, with the two steps up to it, and the sooty flowers to either side. Was this a memory of 1941, or of his experience earlier that year? Of 1941, surely. The door was brown, the panel was not seen from above.

What pictures came to him from behind that door?

He had no doubt that his mind had retained, for months or years after his arrival in Yeasdon, imprints of the reality behind that door, pictures of his first five years. Were they now entirely faded? He frowned. A figure. A large female figure in black . . . A man . . . something vaguely inimical about him, something hostile clinging to that vague impression . . . other shapes, mere outlines . . . all of them in the background, none of them attaining definition.

Nothing more. Nothing of any solidity at all. No faces topping the figures. Nothing.

‘I am Simon Cutheridge,' he said to himself on his walk home. ‘you are also a boy who once lived at 17, Farrow Street,' said that irritating voice, in counterpoint inside his head. ‘He isn't Simon Cutheridge. He isn't Simon Thorn either. Don't you even want to know his name?'