Spider (8 page)

My father didn’t care. He was a changed man now, hard as granite and cold as ice. A new sort of anger burned in him, and it burned with a cold, hard, gemlike flame: I could see it in his eyes when he took his glasses off, the hard flame burning in those hard pale-blue eyes of his. He had been a surly, humorless husband and father for years, but never before had I seen in him an anger as fierce, as cold, as this. It was as if he’d crossed a line of some sort, lost the ability to feel even a
spark
of human sympathy toward my mother. The tablecloth, the smiles, the sizzling liver—none of it could touch him, he knew only an urge to push her roughly out of his path, and so strong was the feeling he could barely suppress the violence her very presence aroused in him. He sat at the table without taking off his scarf or his jacket or his boots, without looking at me, without rolling a cigarette, he sat there with a face like tortured thunder and threw back glass after glass of beer until the big quart bottle was almost empty. My poor mother, the effort she was making was immense, and in return she was getting nothing but this wordless fury. “What is it, Horace?” she whispered as she put his plate of liver and onions on the table, pushing aside the houseplant as she did so. “What’s the matter with you?” She stood there peering at him with her head slightly to one side and a mass of pained, bewildered wrinkles working on her brow. Nervously she kept wiping her hands on her apron although they were quite dry. My father glared at the steaming liver, his fists to either side of the plate clenched so tight that the knuckles were like billiard balls trapped and straining beneath the skin. “Tell me, Horace,” came the voice again, and still he glared, fighting down a wave of sheer black rage, grimly clutching for control, grimly holding on. Get away from me! screamed a voice in his head, but my mother, my poor foolish mother, did not get away, instead she drew closer, reached out a hand, made as if to touch him. At last he turned toward her—the kitchen was silent, for the skillet was no longer sizzling, only the drip of the tap—and what a face he showed her! Never will I forget that face, not for as long as I live: brows knit in agony, lips pulled back from his teeth, all his mouth frozen in a terrible rictus that expressed both violence and utter helplessness, tortured helplessness in the face of that violence, and the eyes!—his eyes were burning not with the hard, gemlike flame now but with the same pain that contorted his brow and his lips, his whole sorry physiognomy, it was all there, and my mother read it and was shocked by the suffering that was in him, and she drew closer. “No!” said my father as her fingers fell upon his shoulder, “No!”—and then, with a strangled sound that half choked him in the utterance he rose clumsily to his feet, knocking the chair over backwards with a clatter, and stumbled across the kitchen to the back door, and out into the fog. My mother stood a moment gazing after him with her fingers pressed to her lips. Then she darted after him, down the yard to where the gate at the end stood open, and into the alley beyond. “Horace!” she cried. But night had fallen, the fog was thicker than ever, and she could see nothing, nor did any sound come back to her through the darkness, and after taking a few steps in one direction, and then in the other, she came back into the yard, back into the kitchen, and closed the door behind her. The chill and stink of the fog could be felt within the room’s warmth, and she stood for a moment and hugged herself and shivered. “Oh Spider,” she whispered; I was still sitting there, stunned by what had happened. She gazed at the plate of cooling liver and the stain of spilt beer on the tablecloth, and then she sank onto a chair and laid her head on her hands and wept.

R
ain again today. I love rain, did I tell you this already? Also I love fog, and have since I was a boy. I used to love going down to the docks in a fog to listen to the foghorns as they hooted and honked at one another, and watch the pallid glow from the lights of vessels slipping downstream with the tide. It was the cloak of spectral unreality I loved, the cloak it spread over the familiar forms of the world. All was strange in a fog, buildings grew vague, human beings groped and became lost, the landmarks, the compass points, by which they navigated melted into nothingness and the world was transfigured into a country of the blind. But if the sighted became blind, then the blind—and for some odd reason I have always regarded myself as one of the blind—the blind became sighted, and I remember feeling at home in a fog, happily at ease in the murk and gloom that so confused my neighbors. I moved quickly and confidently through fog-blanketed streets, unvisited by the terrors that lurked everywhere in the visible material world; I stayed out as late as I could in a fog. Last night, as I sat scribbling in my garret room at Mrs. Wilkinson’s, I got up from time to time to stretch my limbs and gaze down at the rain as it came drifting through the halo of the streetlamp opposite; and I realized how little I’d changed, how my emotions in the rain that day (yesterday, I mean) so closely matched the feelings I’d had for fog as a boy. What lies at the root of it all, I wonder, what force is it that once drew a lonely child out into foggy streets and still exerts its attraction in heavy rainfall some twenty years later? What is it about the misting and blurring of the visible world that gave such comfort to the boy I then was, and to the creature I have since become?

Queer thoughts, no? I sighed. I bent down to pull my book out from under the linoleum. Nothing there! I groped. Momentary lurch of horror as I assimilated the possibility of the book’s absence. Theft? Of course—by Mrs. bloody Wilkinson, who else! Then there it was, pushed just a bit deeper than I’d expected; no little relief. My father was stumbling blindly through a fog, barely conscious of his whereabouts, the chaos within him further befuddled with the beer he’d just drunk. Great relief, in fact; what on earth would I do if she got her hands on it? Is the best place for it really under the linoleum? Isn’t there a
hole
somewhere I can tuck it into? The streetlamps were smears of light in the fog, flecks and splinters of weak fractured yellowy radiance that picked up the glitter of wild light in his eyes, the fleeting blur of whiteness of his nose and brow as he charged by. Somewhere I’ve seen a hole, I know I have, but where, where? On he blundered until at last he saw a building aglow, and like a moth to the flame he drew near, and found himself outside the Dog and Beggar. In he went, into the dry warmth of the place, and suddenly there was the smell of beer and tobacco in his nostrils and the murmur of talk in his ears. I just can’t afford to take the chance.

For a few moments he stood there in the doorway, his chest heaving violently as he brought his breathing under control. His eyes were still wild, his skin damp and sleek with the wet. He glanced about the room, with its scattering of small round tables; there was a thin drift of sawdust on the bare wood floor, and standing at the bar was an old man reading the racing results. Two more old men sat at a table near the fireplace, where a small coal fire was burning, their lips working silently over gray toothless gums. All the talk came from the saloon bar, beyond the glass partition, and from that direction Ernie Ratcliff now appeared. Glancing at my father as he laid a thin hand upon a beerpump, he murmured: “Well come in, Horace, if you’re coming.” And my father, his passions still roiling in his breast, nodded blankly once or twice and closed the door. Like a man in a dream he approached the bar. Ratcliff noticed nothing amiss—or if he did, it was not his way to mention it. “Nasty out,” he remarked, “real pea-souper. Pint of the usual, is it, Horace?” My father nodded, and a few seconds later had carried his pint to a table and sat there gazing at the fire.

Then all at once he seemed to awaken, to recognize his surroundings. He picked up his glass of beer and drained almost the entire pint in one draught. He rose to his feet and made his way back to the bar. “Same again?” said Ratcliff amiably. “Nice drop, this”—and he pulled my father another pint.

An hour later my father was once more out in the fog. He had not grown calm in the meanwhile, very far from it. The manic turmoil had subsided, but from that subsidence had emerged a decision. Decision, I say; it was more of an impulse, even an instinct, than a decision, a sort of simple blind drive toward the satisfaction of a hunger—and I need hardly tell you what that hunger was. Unsteadily he’d emerged from the Dog and Beggar, buttoned his jacket and tied his scarf about his throat. Then he’d set his steps toward the Earl of Rochester, and been quickly swallowed by the fog, which was thicker than ever.

By the time he reached the Earl of Rochester my father appeared to be under control. He did not lurch, he did not slur his speech, but he was in fact drunk, and no less in the grip of instinct than he had been when he left the Dog. The Rochester was full when he arrived; this was a Friday night, and it was already close to nine. He pushed open the door and stepped quickly inside, a wisp or two of the fog clinging to him as he entered. A wave of chatter and laughter, smoke and warmth and light rolled over him. He pushed his way through to the bar and ordered whisky. When he had it he turned, looking for Hilda.

She was at a table in the corner with Nora and the rest. She glanced up, then promptly rose to her feet and made her way through the crush toward him. Odd, this; you would expect her to make him come to her. I think I know what accounted for her behavior in the Rochester that evening, and for much that occurred afterwards, for I believe she’d learned something about my father since the events in the alley the previous night, something specific; when the time comes I shall explain all this in detail. Now, though, she came pushing through the crowd, her face flushed and a glass of port held aloft in one hand like an ensign, and as she came she bantered with the men, who made way for her, laughing, as a brisk sea parts before a vessel under sail. Then she was beside him, and as he had the first taste of the whisky the bite of the spirit added fuel to the desire he’d been feeling since nightfall. With one boot on the brass rail at the bottom of the bar, and his eyes never leaving her face, he pulled out his tobacco. “So, plumber,” said Hilda—she too had been drinking, and she recognized the wildness in him—“feeling better tonight, are we?”

My father was rolling a cigarette, his head lowered and his fingers busy with Rizla paper and Old Holborn, but his eyes were still on her. When it was rolled he lit it with a match and said: “Come down the allotments.”

Yes, she could feel how wild he was, and it excited her. “Down the allotments?” she said, lifting her eyebrows and resting her tongue on her top lip. He turned toward the bar, nodded, and drank off the whisky. “When?” she said.

For a few moments he was silent, waiting for the barmaid. He bought himself another whisky, a sweet port for her. They stood among the milling drinkers, and it was as though invisible threads bound them together. “I’ll go now,” he said, “you come down in a bit.”

Hilda brought her port to her lips. She allowed a small pause to occur. “All right, plumber,” she said, “I don’t mind if I do.”

I remember where I saw a hole: it’s behind the gas fire. It used to be a fireplace. There’s an empty grate and a chimney; that’ll do me nicely, I’ll just slip it in there. But I must stop for a minute, all night I’ve had the strangest sensation in my intestines, as though they were being twisted like a length of rubber hosing. Something odd is going on down there, though just exactly what I don’t know; probably something I ate.

O
n I scribbled, on through the hours of darkness, getting down on paper my exact and detailed reconstruction of that terrible night, all I’d thought about during those long, empty years cooped up in Canada. I was in my bedroom when, not long after my father had stormed out, my mother called up the stairs to me. I came out onto the landing and there she was, down by the front door in her coat and headscarf. “I’m going out, Spider,” she said, “I shan’t be long.” She had put some lipstick on her mouth, I noticed, and a spot of rouge on each cheek—this was how she looked when she went out with my father on Saturday nights. It was only Friday, but after what had happened she could clearly sit no longer in the kitchen. “I’m going to meet your father,” she said, the last words I ever heard her say in life. I saw her leave the house through the back door, and I watched her as she stood pulling on her gloves in the yard. She’d left the light on in the kitchen and for a moment she was bathed in its glow; this I saw from my bedroom window. Then down the yard she went, a neat little woman off to meet her husband, and soon she was swallowed by the fog and lost to my view. But I was
still with her,
you see, I was still with her as I leaned on my windowsill and clouded the glass with my breath, I was with her as she moved down the alley, clutching her handbag, cautiously advancing by the dim gleam of the lamppost at the end of the alley. She did not know if my father was in the Dog, nor what sort of reception to expect should she come upon him there, but she could no longer sit weeping in the kitchen as he stayed out drinking and seethed with resentments she did not understand but which apparently, and through no fault of her own, were directed at her. She reached the Dog, stepped bravely into the public bar, and walked right up to the counter. “Evening Mrs. Cleg,” said Ernie Ratcliff. “Looking for your old man? He was here, but I believe he’s gone.” He peered about the room with his little weasel eyes. “No,” he said, “no sign of him, Mrs. Cleg.”

“I see,” said my mother. “Thank you, Mr. Ratcliff.” She was turning away from the bar when a fresh thought struck her. “Mr. Ratcliff,” she said, “can you tell me where the Earl of Rochester is?”

I see my father striding through fogbound streets toward the allotments. Down Spleen Street he strides, the looming gasworks barely visible above him, along Omdurman Close and across the bridge over the railway lines, a small dark figure striding through fog, the ring of his hobnailed boots muffled and dull on the pavement. When he reaches the top of the path he pauses; the fog is less dense up here, up on the high ground, and he can just make out the moon, and off to his left the first of the sheds. He stands there a moment or two, his figure smudged but distinct against the gray-black night with its dim blur of moonlight, with the allotments beneath him and beyond them a maze of streets and alleys falling away over toward the docks, whence through the fog comes the mournful hooting of the ships; and a few moments later he is unlocking the door of his own shed, and then he is in, and fumbling in his pockets for a match. It is cold and damp in the shed, and in the darkness, with its strong smell of earth, it is, he thinks, like being in a coffin. Then the match flares, he lights the candle on the box by the horsehair armchair, and the flame throws a dull unsteady glow upon the place. He opens a bottle of beer and paces the floor, his shadow huge and misshapen in the dim flickering light that the candle flame casts upon the crude plank walls and raftered gables of the roof. From out of the shadows of the back wall the eye of the stuffed ferret suddenly catches the candle flame and casts a sharp glittering sliver of light across the shed. The alcohol in my father’s system allows him no pause, no peace, in which he might consider what he is doing; he remains in a sort of fever, still driven by that single fixed instinct.