The Centre of the Green (2 page)

There they waited, lining the edges of the platforms, picking out spots where the train, when it arrived, would be least crowded, or where at their journeys’ ends they might expect to find themselves close to the way out, to be first in the fresh rush and jostle towards the air. All the time, the escalators carried more and more of them to the platforms, until the trains arrived to thin them out again. It was a process as regular as the breathing of an animal, but during rush hour on the London
Underground
the animal is under strain, and its breathing may become irregular. Such a thing happened this evening at Holborn, where Charles Baker waited for a Central Line train to carry him westwards. Such a thing, such a little thing—instead of three minutes between trains, there were six. The crowd on the platform grew denser and denser, and there were many more people than the train, when it arrived, could hold. And then of course it was already full. There had been other crowded
platforms
at St. Paul’s, Chancery Lane and the Bank, all
subjected
to the same delay. Then, although there would be another train soon enough—perhaps within only two minutes instead of three—the people on the platform
began
to push and struggle to get in. Some of those who had arrived in the train wanted to get out; some who wished
to leave it at the next station crowded the doors and would not move. “Let them out first, please,” the coloured conductress cried, and, “Pass further down the car,” but nobody heeded her. There were sudden spurts of anger. An old workman, wishing to change to the
Piccadilly
Line, butted his way through the jostling, surging people. “Mind the doors,” the conductress cried. The people squeezed and pushed at each other in the heat and sweat. Women found perspiring hands crushed against their breasts. Schoolboys guarded their private parts with satchels of books. The doors of the train closed slowly. Somewhere a man was half in, half out. There was a squeeze, a wriggle, a, “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” but his arm was stuck. The train could not start until the doors were properly closed. Slowly the doors opened again. One man was ejected, and four more got in. The train started, still further delayed by the commotion.

Inside, it was all crush and nervous excitement, with no room to read newspapers or books. Those due to get off at the next station, who had not already found places for themselves near the doors, now tried to push their way up the crowded aisles. “Stop pushing, can’t you? There’ll be plenty of time when we get there.” Two men, trapped face to face, avoided meeting each other’s eyes. Unnoticed in a corner, a timid girl found the elbow of an Irish labourer pressed into her mouth; her
embarrassment
and his strong body-smell combined to induce in her a sort of paralysis, so that she was carried past her stop. At every fresh station until the residential districts of Lancaster Gate and Queensway, fresh crowds of people tried to board the train, pushing and insinuating their bodies into spaces that seemed already to be entirely filled.

Charles Baker, his briefcase between his legs, one elbow propped against a partition, suddenly said to
himself
in simple astonishment, “But why am I hurrying?” For how could it possibly matter to him, who lived in a two-room basement flat in a dingy street between
Westbourne
Grove and Holland Park Avenue, whether he caught this train, or the next, or the next, or any train at all in an evening that stretched, like so many of his
evenings
, emptily in front of him? Nobody was expecting Charles back. Nobody would have tea ready for him. Nobody would say, “What shall we do this evening? Shall we go out, or just stay home and read?” Charles lived alone, as so many people do in London, and the leisure hours for him were far more to be dreaded than the easy work-filled days when he had something to do.

*

The two rooms and the hallway of Charles’ basement made up the width of a very thin house in a whole row of thin houses jammed together. The front room held the bed and the bookcase, a porcelain wash basin, a table, a telephone, three straight chairs, two armchairs, a carpet and a gas fire. The carpet was worn in several places, and kept only moderately free from dust by the daily who came once a week. The mirror over the mantel had brown stains on it. One of the armchairs was covered with dirty chintz, the other with hessian. The net curtain over the window had faded to the colour of old teeth; the thicker inner blackout curtain would never quite close. The windows were streaked with dirt, because Charles would neither clean them himself nor have them cleaned; he and his landlady disagreed over responsibility for the windows. The gas meter was adapted to take either
shillings
or sixpences, and ate both at a great rate. During the winter, Charles would plot and scheme in shops and buses to get these coins in change. It never occurred to
him to buy them in bulk from a bank
.

The back room of the basement held the bath and a
gas stove. The bath was filled by a geyser, and had a wooden cover. When this cover was in place, it was used as a kitchen table, and Charles did the washing-up on it in a chipped enamel bowl. Every evening on his return from work, he would find the accumulated washing-up of breakfast and the evening before piled on top of the bath, and, as he opened the door, he would smell the smells of old cooking. There was linoleum instead of carpet on the floor of this room, and the window was
uncurtained
. Charles manic would dry himself in front of the window after his bath; Charles depressive sat in the bath itself until the last drop of water had run out, his back bent, his head drooping, and used the towel where he was.

The rest of Charles’ flat was all hallway, except that at the end of the hall was a w.c, tucked in under the stair that led to the floors above. It was a very small w.c, and he had to get right into it before he could close the door. A further door led to the area at the back of the house where the dustbins were kept. Since Charles often forgot to lock this door, he was sometimes surprised by Sybil, the landlady, on her way back upstairs from emptying her little polythene trash can. “Don’t mind me,” she would cry as Charles crouched there in embarrassment, or sometimes, “Will you be long?” and Charles would not dare to come out again until he was sure she was nowhere about. The w.c. was unlighted, and a torch was always kept by the roll of Andrex at the back of the wide wooden seat.

For this basement, Charles paid three and a half guineas a week in cash to Sybil, who lived on the first floor. On the ground floor, a cook and a window-dresser lived together, and paid five guineas, partly, as Sybil explained in a moment of frankness, because it was nicer, and partly it wasn’t easy for them to find anywhere else,
poor dears, though thank God
she
was broadminded. The top floor held a very old couple, who were husband and wife. Theirs was an unfurnished tenancy, and even after the Rent Act, Sybil had been unable to raise their rent to more than two pounds a week; after all, if things came to a Tribunal, the Income Tax might get nosey about the other tenants. Every time he went upstairs at the
weekend
to pay his rent, Charles found Sybil ready to discuss some new plan to dispossess this couple, whom she had inherited with the house. She both looked forward to their death and was terrified of their dying; whenever she thought that she had seen nothing of them for some time, she would tiptoe upstairs to listen at their door.

Sybil was a character; it was tiresome for Charles. Reading
Twelfth Might
at school, he had wondered what a “day bed” was. Now he knew that a day bed was only a night bed that you didn’t bother to remake, but just stayed in all day with the telly on. Sybil had been in repertory in Rochester, but the gin had rotted her. For five years now she had done nothing professionally, but occasional small parts in the various radio and television serials. The fees for these appearances did not even pay for her drink. “I live off my lodgers,” she would say. “My God! What a bloody come-down, I mean, really.”

When Charles reached home on this evening, she was waiting for him as she sometimes did, sitting alone in the shabby chintz-covered chair with a bottle of gin on the table by her side. Sybil never made these visits without the excuse of a situation; sometimes, she said, she just had to let her hair down or die. Usually it would be about a job. Did Charles think she ought to go to work in a coffee bar?—start a
rather
select fish-and-chip shop (“more halibut, dear, than cod”) near Belgrave Square? —sell dirty books for a rather disgusting man near the Charing Cross Road? About all these and her other
problems, she was always ready to take down her hair, although sometimes, if she were having one of her
slatternly
days, the hair would be down already, one braid swinging insecurely at her shoulders, the other still half pinned.

This was not one of those days. Sybil had been out for the afternoon “dropping in on old chums”, and was a Knightsbridge Sybil, her face most carefully pancaked, her hair coiffed and shining. She had come straight in to Charles’ room from the off-licence at the corner, and still wore her two-piece and a cone-shaped hat of white fluff. When Charles arrived, she sent him out for tonic water, so that they could really enjoy a cosy chat without having to get up again.

“Charles dear, you know how clever you are,” she said. “You must help me. I’m distraught.” This told Charles at once what they were to talk about. Sybil was only distraught when Herbert, her lover, an unemployed bald South African, was in trouble. Except that he was thinner, Herbert looked very like the conventional
conception
of a sugar-daddy, but since he never had any sugar to speak of, he had to get it from Sybil, who had little enough of her own.

“Herbert?” Charles said.

“How did you guess? It’s so shaming. He’s been had up.”

“Arrested?”

“More or less. Have another drink, dear; you look tired, I must say. I don’t know how you manage it going to that dreary old office every day. I should die.”

“A lot of people do go to offices every day,” Charles said. “They don’t all die. Not until it’s time.”

“It couldn’t come soon enough. Living those awful grey lives, I mean, really.”

“What’s Herbert been arrested for?”

“Well, he hasn’t actually been arrested, poor lamb— more sort of summonsed really. It was the car. It broke down, dear. Well, I mean he hit something. Just a scraze. I’m sure it wasn’t Herbert’s fault. He’s a terribly careful driver. I mean, you know how he won’t even step into the car if he’s had a couple. You remember that awful time when mummy was here?”

Charles remembered that awful time. Herbert couldn’t stay the night with Sybil because mummy was there—they could hardly have slept three in a bed—and he wouldn’t drive because he’d had a couple. It was snowing. Herbert had decided to sleep in the back seat of the car. Sybil had asked Charles for help (“Charles, I’m distraught!”), and he had spent half an hour, standing in the snow, wearing only pyjamas, a dressing-gown and sandals without toes, until he had managed to coax Herbert indoors to spend the night in a chair. “Yes, I remember,” he said.

“Of course you do. You were so sweet. Drink up, dear; you must have another. Well, you do see what I mean, don’t you? I mean he is such a careful driver. Only when the police came along, his licence had expired, and then the insurance wasn’t paid, because after all you can’t expect Herbert to keep up with that sort of thing, because he is so broke.”

Charles had another drink. “You know, Sybil, there was something I had to do,” he began, but of course it was no good. There was no way of getting rid of Sybil until the bottle was empty and her hair completely down. He asked whether Herbert had any friends with legal training (“Of course he has. He’s got
hundreds
of friends, not that they ever do anything for him.”) and suggested that perhaps he’d better consult one of them. (“You’re always so helpful, dear. I should never have thought of that.”) His head ached. He wished Sybil would go away. The level of the gin sank in the bottle.
Sybil sent him out for more tonic, and as he paid for it in the off-licence he wondered whether it wouldn’t be easier not to go back to his flat at all, but to catch a bus somewhere to the centre of London, and stay out for the rest of the evening. There was something he had planned to do. He knew what it was, and played with the idea, keeping it like a treasured sweet at the back of his mind as he walked back with the tonic—very carefully so as not to fall apart, and let his intention out. Sybil poured him another drink, and herself another drink, and
another
, and another. With each drink, Charles increased his control over himself. If he were to relax, he knew, the pieces of his head would fall outwards like the staves of a barrel. Yet if he made it tighter, he might crack up the middle. He felt like china in a vice. Sybil would stay, taking down her bloody hair until the bottle was empty. Ergo, he would empty it—but he was drinking on an empty stomach, and would be sick. He had another, but decided to drink it slowly. Sybil said, “Here I go, talking about myself again, when, let’s face it, I do lead
the
most bloody uninteresting life. So I’m going to sit here quite still like a little mouse, and you’re going to tell me all about yourself for a change.” Gazing through the bottom of his glass to a
room
as round as a goldfish bowl, he suddenly made a discovery, and began to giggle. “Shall I tell you a terribly funny thing?” he said. “Apart from my editor and his secretary, you’re the first person who’s spoken to me for three days.”

“What’s so funny about that?”

“No. There was the man on the bus. He said, ‘Fares, please’.”

“What’s so funny?”

“I don’t know. I just thought it was terribly funny.”

But Sybil was shocked. She knew what was what. She was an actress and a lady. and she knew what response to
make to any situation. She could not see that this was funny at all. Charles stopped laughing. Was she angry with him? Did she dislike him? Would she give him notice? There was a silence. Then Sybil said, “Well, I can’t hang around here all night anyway,” and, taking the almost empty bottle with her, left him alone in the dusk.