Out of the Blackout (7 page)

‘That's handsome of you,' he said. ‘Nice to do business with a real gentleman. I really hope something turns up here. There's Miss Cosgrove in the other room, of course, but there's no hope that she'll move on. Made herself very comfortable here, she has—
oh
yes! But I think you'll find a room waiting for you, when you want to move down. When was it, did you say?'

‘June,' said Simon. ‘I imagine it'll be towards the end of June.'

‘Good, good,' said the man, opening the door to show that the interview was at an end. ‘Well, we'll be in touch. And we'll hope to see you down here in June.'

‘Thank you very much,' said Simon, unable to think of any device to prolong the interview further. ‘I'm obliged to you both.'

He turned as he gained the street, to wave. The man in the old fawn cardigan stood in the doorway, ingratiatingly smiling. He gave a stiff wave, as if it was a habit he'd never got accustomed to. In the shadow of the hall loomed the bulky figure of the old woman. Then the door was shut firmly.

Walking down the street, Simon felt grubby, and in some odd way diminished. These, surely were mean, shabby people—depressing if he put them in his mind beside the generosity and openness of Dot and Tom Cutheridge, of his father and mother. Was this man, of whom he had no memory, his father? Biologically, possibly, but in no other sense. And yet, oddly, Simon felt go through him a spurt of excitement; he experienced the zest
of anticipation, a feeling that he had just accomplished the first stage of a great and difficult project. It was almost, he decided, like the thrill of a chase.

Ten days later he received a letter to say that the room was his. He paid rent for nearly six weeks before he actually moved down. He had a feeling that the Simmeters were rubbing their hands at having landed a right greenhorn.

‘It might suit me very well,' said Simon in Leeds, packing up those exercise books of memories and impressions he had started eight years before and looked forward now to adding to, ‘to be thought a greenhorn.'

W
hen Simon Cutheridge travelled down to London in the third week of June, 1964, he had gone beyond asking himself whether what he was doing was a sensible thing, or one that was likely to make him happier. It had become something there to be done—something to be undertaken stage by stage, like a programme of research. He had drawn a line under his period in Leeds with some relief: he had given away some of his possessions, stored others with friends. He was, now, the clothes he stood up in and the suitcases he carried. He knew that many children adopted at birth developed a niggling itch to ferret out the identities of their real mothers and fathers. How much more natural in him, he thought, who had a history before Yeasdon and the Cutheridges, to wish to blow the dust off that page of his life. He was Simon Cutheridge. But he was also, he felt sure, Simon Simmeter. Or some other Christian name—perhaps some other surname too—but at any rate part of the Simmeter family. For better or worse.

He took the Underground from King's Cross to the Angel, because he was not a young man who had yet got into the taxi habit. He was a healthy man, and it was not the suitcases he was lugging that made his heart beat so dramatically as he emerged from the poky entrance to the Angel. He put them down for a minute to steady himself, wiping his forehead. Then he took them up and began walking.

Miswell Terrace was only five minutes from the station. It was just before three when he rang the doorbell at No. 25, but it was not the old woman's steps he heard along the passage. When Leonard Simmeter opened the door he had on the same old fawn cardigan, buttoned over the waist, and he rubbed his hands in the same convulsive way. But this time he wore a prepared smile, and he seemed to have lost some of the unaccountable nervousness of their first meeting.

‘Ah . . . get here all right? Have a good journey down?'

Simon uttered conventionalities to answer conventionalities as he was ushered into the depressing hall. Nothing had changed. An old mac and some women's coats were hung on hooks. A little table held an ancient china fruit bowl, with no fruit in it. The door to the Simmeters' living quarters had been meticulously shut.

‘Yes,' said Simmeter, with that uneasy, almost shifty chattiness that showed it did not come naturally, ‘I believe it's not a bad service to the North these days. Not that I've ever taken it. Been on the railways all my life, and never been north of Watford. You know us Londoners—we think we've got everything here.' He came to a stop like a deflated balloon. ‘Well, I expect you'll be wanting to go up.'

He led the way up the narrow staircase, not offering to help with the suitcases. Simon blundered up after him. Lights were switched on, briefly and grudgingly.

‘That's the bathroom and toilet,' said Simmeter, opening a door and briefly illuminating a room on the first floor. ‘You share that with Miss Cosgrove on a “first come” basis. There's a meter there—that prevents arguments, doesn't it? . . . Right, here we are.'

They had reached the top of the house. Simmeter put the key in the door, swung it open, and they walked into the dingy little room. All traces of the previous occupant had been carefully removed, so the room presented itself to Simon in all its dismal basicness.

‘I think you'll be very cosy here,' said Leonard Simmeter, apparently quite sincerely, seemingly unconscious that rooms could be, should be, otherwise.

‘I'm sure I shall,' said Simon heartily.

‘How would you like to pay the rent, then?'

Simon had thought about that. He suspected that Simmeter, knowing he had a respectable and well-paid job, would like him to pay by cheque once a month. It looked better. But he needed to take all the meagre opportunities that offered of contact with the family.

‘I'll pay weekly,' he said, drawing out his wallet. ‘I can pay you for the first week now.'

‘That's very nice,' said Simmeter, kneading his palms. It was the stimulus of money, Simon decided, that most often sent him into that routine. The notes were tucked away lovingly in a warm and greasy little notecase. ‘It's nice to do business with a real gentleman. And are they hard to find these days! Mr Blore was not what
I'd
call reliable—but then, I'm old-fashioned. Standards aren't what they were, I know that. Now, here's the key to the room, and here are the keys to the front door. Hope you settle in all right.'

And before Simon had a chance to think up further conversational gambits to detain him, Len Simmeter was off down the stairs, leaving Simon to unpack his possessions and gaze at the muddy green wallpaper, peeling at the corners, at the depressing armchair with the shape of the springs visible through the seat, at the sofa-bed which seemed unlikely to be satisfactory in either of its functions. It was an odd sort of homecoming.

Over the next few days Simon's personality and preoccupations seemed to develop along two diverging lines. He had a daytime self at the Zoo, where the plunge into his new job was hectic and stimulating, his colleagues welcoming and forthcoming. It was a job that absorbed him entirely, but only while he was doing it. He found himself fending off or postponing offers of hospitality, suggestions of drinks after work.

Because there was, slumbering uneasily, that early morning and evening self. This self sat in the damp and constricting little room, waiting and watching for wisps of information, possibilities of contact, with the Simmeter family two floors below. The evenings were spent reading, making coffee, having a whisky—and listening, always listening; treasuring up a scrap of a sentence, identifying footsteps, classifying ingrained habits and wondering how to make use of them. Up there at the top of the house, cut off by doors and staircases and the deep-rooted secrecy of the people themselves, he felt like a far from omniscient
God, reduced to judging his creations by overheard whispers, by occasional glimpses, by fragments of behaviour that penetrated by freaks of the atmosphere to his heavenly fastness.

There were more Simmeters than he had so far met, that he concluded early on. They slept on the first floor, and all three bedrooms there were occupied. Each night, through the crack of his door that he left slightly ajar, he heard three separate sets of footsteps mount the first flight of stairs: first the old woman—slow and heavy, but without help; then, as a rule, Len—fussily closing the door to the ground-floor rooms, checking the front door, and turning off the lights as quickly as possible; then, he was fairly sure, a woman's—less careful with the door, leaving lights on while she went to the bathroom, once leaving them on after she had gone to bed, so that he heard Len come out and switch them off, muttering bitterly. These last two sets of footsteps sometimes came in a different order, but they never came together.

The view from his poky garret window was unsatisfactory. By no kind of bodily contortion could he see the tiny front garden, like a folded pocket handkerchief, or the iron gate. But he could see the pavement in front of the house, and on three successive mornings he saw a woman with faded fair hair who seemed to have just turned—to have come out of the gate, and then turned in the direction of the tube station. And it was not Miss Cosgrove, from the room opposite his.

He had said ‘Good Morning' and ‘Good Evening' to Miss Cosgrove two or three times by the end of the first week. He had not wanted to rush into engaging her in conversation. He felt instinctively that the secrecy of the Simmeter family was part of a larger secrecy or wariness that was a birthright of Londoners—an obsessive guarding of their privacy, a blank front to the world's curiosity. The unfriendliness of Londoners had been part of the received wisdom of Yeasdon, in spite of the manifest openness and forthrightness of most of the kids who had landed on them during the war. Their parents, Yeasdon knew, would be different: you could have the same neighbour in London for thirty years and not swap more than the occasional good-morning with him. Thus, making no distinction between Wimbledon or West Ham, Kensington or Kentish Town, the Yeasdoners confidently pronounced on the mores of the
capital, on the strength of their day trips to Oxford Street and a nice play.

So Simon was a little nervous one evening, when he had been in Miswell Terrace a matter of ten days, when out of the blue he invited Miss Cosgrove in. He was on his way down to fill his kettle from the bathroom tap and when he met Miss Cosgrove coming up the invitation in for coffee seemed to present itself naturally.

‘Well, that's kind of you. Thank you very much,' she said, after a moment's hesitation, and clearly surprised. She and Mr Blore, it seemed, had not fraternized. When she came in a few minutes later the kettle was beginning to sing. She looked around the room—at the Constable and Canaletto prints, at the Beatles poster and the embroidered bedspread that his mother had sent him, and said:

‘Well, you've done what you could. I don't think anyone could make this room really pleasant.'

‘I suspect you're right. It's only temporary. I don't want to commit myself to a flat till I know London better.'

‘That's probably wise. I've never gone in for a flat myself because there are other things I prefer to spend my money on, but sometimes I think there are areas I'd prefer to live in. Where do you work?'

‘I'm on the scientific staff at the London Zoo.'

That set Miss Cosgrove going, and got the conversation off to a good start. Miss Cosgrove was not an imaginative soul, and the inherent sadness of the Zoo had never struck her: the London Zoo was her idea of a good day out, she said. She'd taken her mother, five years ago, it must be now, the last time the old lady had managed a day in London. And she'd been back two or three times since. You could spend a whole day there, and still there'd be lots of things left that you wished you'd seen.

Miss Cosgrove was in her early forties: desperately unstylish, but sensible and straightforward. She had a mother in Sussex somewhere, but she had adapted to London, and dreaded the possibility that some day she might have to go back and look after her mother. She managed a law stationer's off Holborn, and loved living near the opera. So cheap! she said. In fact, she seemed to be one of those Londoners who relished everything
it had to offer. Simon found himself volunteering to show her round the Zoo, when he had got to know it better himself.

‘Oh, that
is
kind of you. I would enjoy that, because you learn so much more when you're with someone who really knows. I'm a demon for learning things. I suppose it's some sort of puritan conscience coming out in a funny way. I like to get something
out
of what I do.'

‘Yes,' said Simon. ‘I suppose I'm the same.'

‘After all, when you've got all those theatres and galleries and museums within easy reach, you ought to make use of them, oughtn't you? And evening classes. That's where I've been tonight—one on Italian civilization, because I'm off to Florence in September. I always seem to be going somewhere or studying something. I'd rather spend my money on that than on a bigger flat.'

‘You've been here a long time?'

‘Longer than I care to think. Seventeen years or so. Not that there haven't been efforts to get me out.'

‘Really? Why would Mr Simmeter do that?'

‘Because I rented the room unfurnished, so the rent is controlled: they can't put it up, not by more than a pittance. If I got out they could try various fiddles—doing bogus improvements, and then applying to put it up. It was Mother that tried first. A very forceful lady she used to be. Definitely failing by now, of course. Then the son tried—he's the same type, but he hasn't got the same confidence.'

‘Do you know them well?'

‘Just to hand the rent to—and argue with, if they try anything on.'