The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book (31 page)

He had never cared for the opinion of the street, refusing to bid anyone on it good-day for fear that such greeting might be imposed on him in perpetuity, leading to heaven knows what intimacy. But he did not want the street to suspect that his household had been modified, and it was his intention to have Margaret move in in instalments. He thought his plan had so far been successful. Two suitcases were almost enough for what Margaret had at the Earl’s Court hotel, where their procession through the small dark lobby had attracted discreet stares from the old and frank, uncomprehending stares from the very old, making Mr Stone feel that he was engaged in an
abduction, though Margaret’s triumphant gravity suggested that the operation was one of rescue. They had arrived at their house in the early evening, as though for dinner; and Mr Stone had handled the suitcases with a certain careless authority to hint to whoever might be watching that the suitcases were his own.

They had scarcely settled down in bed, each silent in his own cot (Margaret in the one taken from the room where Olive occasionally slept), when she sat up, almost with her party brightness, and said, ‘Richard, do you hear anything?’

Something he had heard. But now there was only silence. He settled down again, fearing speech from her.

Flap!

It was undeniable.

Thump! Creak! Measured noises, as of someone ascending the thinly-carpeted staircases firmly, cautiously.

‘Richard, there is a man in the house!’

At her words the steps ceased.

‘Go and look, Richard.’

He disliked the repetition of his name. But he dragged himself up to a sitting position. He thought she was relishing the role of the frightened woman, and he noted with distaste that she had pulled the blankets right up to her neck.

The responsibility was new. It wearied, irritated him. And though he was alarmed himself, he at that moment hoped that someone was in the house, standing right behind the door, and that he would come in and batter them both to death and release.

Flap, thump, flap.

He flung off the bedclothes and ran to the landing and put on the light, hoping by his speed and violence to still the noise, to drive it away.

‘Hello!’ he called. ‘Who is it? Is there anyone there?’

There was no reply.

Carefully he approached the banister and looked down the well of the stairs upon a gloom made sinister by the elongated leaning
shadows of the rails. Far below him he saw the telephone, its dial dully gleaming.

He hurried back to the room. He closed the door, turned on the light. She was standing directly below the lampshade in her frilly nightdress, her mouth collapsed, her bed disarrayed, the inadequate sheet already peeling off the three large cushions (red, white and blue, and arranged by Miss Millington in that order) that served as mattress.

‘I didn’t see anyone,’ he said with mild irritation, and sat down on his bed.

For some time they remained as they were, saying nothing. He looked about the room, avoiding her eye. He had always thought of his bedroom as comfortable. Now that it held a second person, he took it in detail by detail, and as he did so his irritation grew. The tasselled lampshade had been painted green by Miss Millington at his orders, not to cover grime but simply for the sake of the green; the lighted bulb now revealed the erratic distribution of all her labouring, overcharged brushstrokes. The curtains were made of three not quite matching pieces of brown velvet, chosen by Miss Millington to hide dirt. The carpet was worn, its design and colours no longer of importance; the cracked, ill-fitting linoleum surrounds (hard as metal) had lost their pattern and were a messy dark brown. The wallpaper was dingy, the ceiling cracked. Next to the dark, almost black wardrobe a ruined armchair, which had not been sat on for years, served as a receptacle for miscellaneous objects.

Flap! Creak! Thump!

‘Richard! Dial 999, Richard!’

He realized the necessity, but was greatly afraid.

‘Come down with me to the telephone,’ he said.

He would willingly have had her precede him down the steps, but his new responsibility did not permit this. Arming himself with a bent poker, dusty to the touch, he tiptoed down the stairs ahead of her, expecting a blow from every dark corner of his once familiar
house. Arriving at the hall, he telephoned, poker in hand, regretting his action as soon as he heard the cool, unhurried inquiries.

They went upstairs to wait, turning on all lights on the way and recovering their teeth from the bathroom. Except for their own movements there was now silence.

When the bell rang Mr Stone went down to the door with the poker in his hand. The officer, armed only with an electric torch, gave the poker an amused look, and Mr Stone began to apologize for it.

The officer cut him short. ‘I’ve sent my man round to the back,’ he said, and proceeded, expertly and reassuringly, to dive into all the corners that had held such threat.

They found no one.

The constable who had been sent round to the back came in through the front door; and they all sat in the still warm sitting-room.

‘With some of these semi-detached houses noises next door often sound as though they’re coming from this side,’ the officer said.

The constable smiled, playing with his torch.

‘There was a man in the house,’ Margaret said argumentatively.

‘Is there any door or entrance in the back he could get in by?’ the officer asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I only came to the house tonight.’

There was a silence. Mr Stone looked away.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ he asked. From the films he had seen he believed that police officers always drank tea in such circumstances.

‘Yes,’ Margaret said, ‘do have a cup of tea.’

The tea was declined, their apologies politely brushed aside.

But the house blazed with lights, and the police car attracted attention. So that on the following day, far from attempting to hide his marriage, Mr Stone was compelled to proclaim it and to endure the furtive glances, the raised curtains of the street.

Even Miss Millington, used to curious happenings in the house during her absence, could not hide her excitement at the police visit.

*

One thing relieved him. They had come to one another as wits. And when, towards the end of their pre-marriage acquaintance (the word ‘courtship’ did not appeal to him), his efforts grew febrile, he had sought to establish himself as someone with a rich sense of humour and an eye for the ridiculous in ‘life’. He feared, then, that marriage might mean a lifelong and exhausting violation of his personality. But to his surprise he found that Margaret required no high spirits from him, no jocularity, no wit; and again to his surprise he discovered that her party manner, which he had thought part of her personality, was something she discarded almost at once, reserving it for those of her friends who knew her reputation. And often during their after-dinner silence (he reading the paper, Margaret writing letters or knitting, thin-rimmed spectacles low down her nose, ageing her considerably) he would think with embarrassment for both their sakes of the brightness of her first remark to him, its needle-sharp enunciation (‘Do you … like
cats?’),
and of the unexpected brilliance of his last remark at that meeting (‘I imagine that’s why they’re called nuts’). For never again was she so impressively abrupt or ‘brittle’ (a word whose meaning he thought he fully understood only after meeting Margaret), and never again was he so brilliant.

Of Margaret’s history he never inquired, and she volunteered little. The thought sometimes arose, though he suppressed it, for Margaret by her behaviour had signalled that what they had said during their ‘courtship’ was to be discounted, that she was not as grand as she had made out. Neither was he; and this was more painful. For his own secrets, which had never been secrets until the night of their meeting, had to be revealed. His head librarianship, for example, and his £1,000 a year. Margaret asked no questions. But secrets were burdensome; he lacked the patience or the energy to conceal or deceive. Neither his position nor salary was negligible, but he felt that
Margaret had expected more and that secretly she mocked at him, as he secretly mocked at her, though his own mockery he considered harmless.

Secretly she might mock, but of this nothing escaped her in speech or expression. And it was astonishing to what degree he was able to recreate his former routine. He was out all day at the office as before; and Margaret at home became an extension, a more pervading extension, of Miss Millington, who had accepted the new situation and her new mistress with greater calm than her master. Certain things he lost. His solitude was one; never again would he return to an empty house. And there was the relationship with Olive. Though she was all goodwill and though he might try to pretend that their relationship remained what it was, he knew that a further falsity, more corroding than that introduced by the birth of Gwen, had invaded it. And then there was the smell, the feel of his house.

The mustiness, the result of ineffectual fussings with broom and brush by Miss Millington, in which he had taken so much pleasure, was replaced not by the smell of polish and soap but by a new and alien mustiness. The sitting-room for some weeks he could scarcely call his own, for it was dominated by a tigerskin, which came out of store in excellent condition and which Margaret explained by producing a framed sepia photograph of a dead tiger on whose chest lay the highly polished boot of an English cavalry officer, moustached, sitting bolt upright in a heavy wooden armchair (brought from goodness knows where), fighting back a smile, one hand caressing a rifle laid neatly across his thighs, with three sorrowful, top-heavily turbanned Indians, beaters or bearers or whatever they were, behind him. Many little bits of furniture came with the tigerskin as well. Very fussy frilly bits he thought them, and they looked out of place among the bulky nineteen-thirty furniture which was his own. But Miss Millington, falling on them with a delight as of one rediscovering glories thought dead and gone, regularly and indefatigably heightened their gloss, using a liquid polish which, drying in difficult crevices, left broken patterns of pure, dusty white. To accommodate
the new furniture there had to be rearrangements. Miss Millington and Margaret consulted and rearranged, Miss Millington with painful joy, eyes closed, lips compressed, wisps of grey wet hair escaping from her hair net, doing the pushing and hauling about. So afternoon after afternoon Mr Stone returned home to a disturbing surprise, and the expectant glances of the two women waiting approval.

Before his marriage he had been to Miss Millington an employer. Now he became The Master. And to the two women he was something more. He was a ‘man’, a creature of particular tastes, aptitudes and authority. It was as a man that he left the house every morning—or rather, was sent off, spick and span and spruce and correct in every way, as though the world was now his audience—and it was as a man that he returned. This aspect of his new responsibility deepened his feeling of inadequacy; he even felt a little fraudulent. Miss Millington, in particular, appeared confidently to await a change in his attitude and behaviour towards her, and he felt that he was continually letting her down. He had been a ‘man’ in a limited way and only for a few days at a time with his sister Olive; it was an intermittent solace which he welcomed but which he was at the end always glad to escape. Now there was no escape.

From his role as their brave bull, going forth day after day to ‘business’ (Miss Menzies’s word, which was Margaret’s as well), he hoped to find rest in the office. But rest there was none, for increasingly his manner, to his disquiet, reflected his role. The neatness on which he prided himself became a dapperness. And even if one forgot the irreverent allusions of the young to his married state, in the beginning a source of much pain to him, there was a noticeable change in the attitude of the office people. The young girls no longer petted him or flirted with him, and he could not imagine himself making as if to hit them on the bottom with his cylindrical ruler, the weapon with which he repelled their playful advances. And as he progressively lost his air of freedom and acquired the appearance of one paroled from a woman’s possession, the young men, even those who were married, no longer tolerated him as before, no longer
pretended that he might be one of them. He attracted instead the fatiguing attentions of Wilkinson, the office Buddhist, whose further eccentricity was sometimes to walk about the office corridors in stockinged feet.

He had fallen into the habit of staying in the office later than was usual or necessary, as though to recapture a little of the privacy and solitude he had lost. Turning off the library lights one evening, and going into the darkened corridor, he bumped into a man as tall as himself. The man’s clothes felt rough; he was a guardsman. And a girl’s voice (he recognized one of the typists) said a little breathlessly, ‘We can’t find the light switch, Mr Stone.’ He showed where it was. He did more: he turned the lights on. And it was only when he was on the train, his briefcase containing the evening papers resting lightly on his lap, that he realized the truth of the situation. ‘Damned fool,’ he thought, his anger directed as much towards himself as towards them. He took a dislike to that typist and was glad when not long afterwards she left the office.

The office not offering refuge, he was driven to seek it at home, so that his goings forth and returnings were both in the nature of flights, until at length he found that he had settled down into the new life, had grown to expect that as soon as he opened the garden gate the front door should be opened by a sprucer Miss Millington, that Margaret, who had given the signal for the opening, should be in the front window and should from that point advance, at first as though to receive him, and then to embrace him, brushing off some of the fresh powder from her cheeks on to his. She dressed every afternoon for his return as carefully as she dressed him for his departure in the mornings.

The street still watched, especially for this evening encounter. And, as an aid to composure, it became his custom to start whistling as soon as he came within sight of the house. ‘That was very nice, Richard,’ Margaret said one day as she kissed him. ‘This doggie is for sale.’ He had been whistling, ‘How Much is That Doggie in the Window?’ So he whistled it every evening. And that was how he became ‘Doggie’ and, more rarely, she became ‘Doggie’.