The Flying Goat (17 page)

Suddenly he could not bear the heat any longer. He got up and banged at the window with his fists again. It would not open. Then his persistent knocking split off a wafer of sun-burned paint, and he saw underneath it the head of a screw. He saw then that the window had been screwed up for years.

He went down to the engine-room and borrowed a screw-driver from the engineer and then, scraping off more paint, at last had the screws clear, so that he could turn them. There were four screws and in five minutes he had taken them out. The window opened easily then, and he left it open and the clear evening air began to come in, slowly, very sweet, out of the August dusk, clarifying the room and giving it new life.

He sat down at his desk. The tributes to Mr. Montague as a public figure, from many prominent public figures, had come in and were laid under a paper weight. He took them up and read them through.

Then, refilling his pen and taking up a pile of the obsolete pink election-ballot sheets always used in that office, by Mr. Montague's orders, for the sake of economy, he began to write his notice.

He took his tone from the tributes to a public figure. Filling his lungs with the fresh August night air, he wrote:

‘It is with the profoundest regret that we learn, to-day, of the sudden and untimely death of Mr. Charles Macauley Montague, founder, proprietor, and editor for forty-five years of this paper, and for almost all of that time a public figure.'

Once a week, every market day, the man Osborne and his wife drove down to the town in the old Ford tourer piled up with chicken crates, to take their girl to the travelling optician. They called him the eye-doctor. ‘Now then, look slippy,' the man would say. ‘We don' wan' keep th'eye doctor waiting,' or the woman: ‘You think th'eye doctor's got all day to wait? Git y' things on quick. Look about you.' But they were never late. Punctually at half-past nine the car came down into the town, mud-spattered or chalk white from its journey across the field-track from the poultry farm, the man with rusty moustaches hanging down like loose tobacco from the pouch of his mouth; the woman like a hen herself with beak-nose and cherry-hung hat bobbing like a comb; and the girl sitting between them on the cart-cushion, staring with still stone-coloured eyes into the distance, as though she could see beyond the ends of the earth.

‘Summat do wi' cat's eyes.' The man had become
slightly addicted to boasting about it. He had a habit of blowing into his moustaches, with a sound of astonishment. ‘Knock-out, ain't it? Think as the gal's got eyes like that? He reckons it gonna take about eight or nine months to cure it. Seven and six a time – that's money.'

The eye-doctor rented the front room of a house behind the market. He hung his card in the window, above the fern pots. ‘J. I. Varipatana. Optician. Attendance Tuesdays 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. 2 p.m. – 4 p.m.' And punctually at ten o'clock he would come to open the door to them, with the shell-white smile dazzling on his dusky sand-coloured face, his dark hand extended, and his way of greeting them with impersonal courtesy.

‘Mrs. Osborn. Mr. Osborn. Miss Osborn. Please enter.'

In the front room a number of cards with test numbers hung on the wall facing the light. The eye-doctor stood with his hands clasped behind his back, the white almost feminine smile constantly on his dark face. ‘And how is business with Mister Osborn? Nice weather. And Mrs. Osborn? You look very well. And the little lady?'

The girl sat as though far away, dumb.

‘Well, speak up. Th'eye doctor's speaking to you. Lost your tongue?'

‘The eyes are a little better?'

‘Yes,' the girl would say.

‘Good. Very good. Very good.' The voice slow, correct, rather beautiful. ‘You persevered with the lotion?'

‘Yes.'

‘Come near the window.'

He would hold back one curtain a little, so that the light fell on the stone-coloured, almost dead eyes. ‘Yes. Look up to me. Now shut the eyes. Now open. Look out of the window. Look just like that for one minute. Yes.' The voice soft, in rumination, sauvely gentle. ‘Now shut them again. Open now. Look sideways.'

And then, as she looked sideways, he would put his hands on her face, the fingers supporting her head, the thumbs touching the eyelids. Like that he would look down at her, still smiling, until the force of his own eyes drew her own back again. With his thumbs he peeled back the lids and then released them. The man and woman watched in silence, waiting for the verdict.

‘The cataract is no worse.' The smile remained
on the lips, even as they spoke and shut. ‘Indeed perhaps a little better.'

By silence they demonstrated their complete faith in him. They saw him as someone who could perform a miracle. Still more, the girl took on importance because it was on her that the miracle was being performed. And they, in turn, took importance from her.

One week the women grew impatient, impelled by fear. ‘Ain't she never goin' to git no better?'

‘My dear Mrs. Osborne.' The voice itself had something miraculous in it, some gentle hypnotic healing quality. ‘I am not a magician. The eyes are very precious, very delicate. You see, think of it like this. If you cut your finger I can put something on it that will heal, that will destroy the germs. Some iodine, something to burn out the infection. But no – not on the eyes. No drastic measures can cure the eyes. Only time and faith can cure the eyes. You must be patient, and have faith.'

Continually, week by week, the girl herself had the impression that she could see less. At a distance of forty feet hung a curtain of mist that her eyes could not penetrate, and gradually, she felt, this mist began to close in on her. She began to see the
hens at home only as vague lumps of colour, and on dull days, when the light was poor, the black hens were lost on her altogether. The hens, which she fed morning and evening, were the test for her, and gradually, with the range of vision lessening, she had to begin to rely less on sight than hearing. By hearing, by listening to the sound of hen noises, her mind conjured the vision that eyes could not see. She began to hear things with wonderful clarity.

In the eye-doctor's small front-room there were no hens, no test for her. And she was always frightened. Partly through fear, partly through some notion that if she said a thing often enough it would eventually become a fact, she said, always, that she could see a little better.

At the end of the consultation the eye-doctor wrapped up a bottle of lotion in white paper and Osborn paid the seven and six. Osborn felt that by doing so he paid for something else besides a cure. He bought prestige, importance, some essence of slight mystery, a thing to boast about.

‘Cost us pounds a'ready. Every week she's got 'ev this special tackle. You can't git it in England. He gits it from India – it's some rare herb or summat and it don't grow in England. Gits it from some
head man over there. Ah! I tell y', costs us pounds, costs us a small fortune. You know what he told me? Reckons where he comes from they ain't got such things as bad eyes and like o' that. It's this herb as does it.'

Then one week the girl could read only the large capitals on the text-cards. At home the hens had begun to resemble balls of brown and white mist. With the mist closing down on her, she was more frightened than ever.

‘Well, I think it may be only temporary. But just to be on the safe side, I am going to give you a new lotion.' The voice was easy, smooth, like a beautiful oil itself. ‘Now Mr. Osborn, I should charge you one pound for this lotion. The herb from which it is distilled is very rare indeed and in my country it only grows on hills above 10,000 feet, and it can only be gathered after the snow has melted. My people have known about it for centuries. You see? But wait please – wait one moment, please, one moment. I am not going to charge you one pound, not anything like one pound. Because I know you, because I want your daughter to get better – half price. To you only, half-price. Ten shillings.

‘Half a quid a week – that's what it costs us. Enough to break anybody – but there y'are. I don't care what it costs, I ain't goin' t'ave anybody say I was too mean to fork out the dough. Course, he ain't ordinary doctor – you don't expect to pay ordinary prices.'

One morning it was not the eye-doctor but a woman who opened the door, and the card was not in the window.

‘No, he ain't come.'

‘Very like had a break-down? – puncture or summat?'

‘Well, it seems funny. He always drops me a card so as I get it first post Tuesdays. But to-day I ain't had one.'

‘H'm, funny. Well, we'll go back to market and then come round again.'

At twelve and again in the afternoon Mr. Varipatana was not there. They drove home. ‘Hope he ain't bad or nothing. You're sure he must be took bad or else he'd write?' They spoke with concern, making the illness of an important man a thing of importance for themselves.

To the girl it seemed as if they drove in semidarkness. She could hear the wind, now, with the
aggravated keenness of her hearing, as she had never heard it in her life. Her mind gathered the sounds and translated them into images. The sounds seemed to her to come through an immense expanse of space. She sat with her hands in her lap and when she touched one hand against another she was reminded of the sensation of Mr. Varipatana's hands pressing on her eyes. They seemed to be pressing her down into greater darkness.

‘Well, I hope nothing's happened to the man. I hope he ain't been took bad or nothing. She's used every drop o' lotion up.'

They drove down to market as usual, a week later. Mr. Varipatana was not there.

‘He ain't bad?'

‘I dunno. He sent a letter saying he wasn't comin' no more. That's all I know.'

In the afternoon they drove back, the eyes of the man and woman depressed, short-focused, as though seeing nothing, the girl with her eyes still and fixed, as though on some illimitable distance. Osborn felt cheated, turning the lost money over and over in his mind.

The girl sat with her hands in her lap. She recalled the touch of Mr. Varipatana's hands on her
eyelids, and it seemed suddenly as if the hands shut down the lids with suave finality, for ever.

The car stopped before she was aware of it. She was jerked back to reality. She felt the pressure of mist on her eyes and was frightened.

Instinctively she put out her hands.

There were fifteen thousand people in Claypole, but only one actress. She kept a milliner's shop.

My name is Sprake. I kept the watchmaker-and-jeweller's shop next door to Miss Porteus for fifteen years. During all that time she never spoke to me. I am not sure that she ever spoke to anyone; I never saw her. My wife and I were a decent, respectable devoted couple, Wesleyans, not above speaking to anyone, and I have been on the local stage myself, singing in oratorio, but we were never good enough for Miss Porteus. But that was her affair. If she hadn't been so standoffish she might, perhaps, have been alive to-day. As it is she is dead and she died, as everybody knows, on the front page of the newspapers.

No one in Claypole knew much about Miss Porteus. We knew she had been an actress, but where she had been an actress, and in what plays and in what theatres, and when, nobody knew. She looked like an actress: she was tall and very
haughty and her hair, once blonde, was something of the colour of tobacco-stained moustaches, a queer yellowish ginger, as though the dye had gone wrong. Her lips were red and bitter; and with her haughty face she looked like a cold nasty woman in a play. She dressed, just for show, exactly the opposite of every other woman in Claypole: in winter she came out in chiffon and in summer you would see her walking across the golf-course, not speaking to anyone, in great fox furs something the colour of her own hair.

Her shop was just the same: at a time when every milliner-draper in Claypole used to cram as much into the shop-window as possible, Miss Porteus introduced that style of one hat on a stand and a vase of expensive flowers on a length of velvet. But somehow that never quite came off. The solitary hat looked rather like Miss Porteus herself: lonely and haughty and out of place.

The backways of her shop and ours faced on to each other; the gardens were divided by a partition of boards and fencing, but we could see from our bathroom into Miss Porteus's bathroom. You could see a great array of fancy cosmetic bottles outlined behind the frosted glass. You could see Miss
Porteus at her toilet. But you never saw anyone else there.

Then one day we did see someone else there. One Wednesday morning my wife came scuffling into the shop and behind the counter, where I was mending a tuppenny-ha'penny Swiss lever that I'd had lying about for months, and said that she'd seen a man in Miss Porteus's back-yard.

‘Well, what about it?' I said. ‘I don't care if there's fifty men. Perhaps that's what she wants, a man or two,' I said. Just like that.

I was busy and I thought no more about it. But as it turned out afterwards, my wife did. I daresay she was a bit inquisitive, but while she was arranging the bedroom curtains she saw the man several times. She got a clear view of him: he was middle-aged and he had side-linings and he wore a yellow tie.

That night, when I went to bed, the light was burning in Miss Porteus's bathroom, but I couldn't see Miss Porteus. Then when I went into the bathroom next morning the light was still burning. I said, ‘Hullo, Miss Porteus left the light on all night,' but I thought no more about it. Then when I went up at midday, the light was still on. It was still on that afternoon and it was on all that night.

My wife was scared. But I said, ‘Oh! it's Thursday and she's taken a day off and gone up to London.' But the light went on burning all the next day and it was still burning late that night.