The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (49 page)

With whose reason can he be reasonable, for God’s sake?

His brain rattles inside his skull like a stale monkey-nut in its
shell.
Nuts!
An American expression, Charles Small remembers, signifying
Shucks,
peelings, membranes to be thrown away … the bearded shucks, the withering bearded shucks of tall corn….

Rattling his little dried-up brain in the flimsy shell of his silly skull, Charles Small tries to moisten himself with other men’s juices, muttering:

… Arches, arches … Charles Small remembers a picture that haunts his dreams—as if he has not enough pictures to haunt his dreams—a picture painted by Chirico, depicting a little girl bowling a hoop down a desolate arcade, inevitably skipping to a certain corner where there lurks a horrid masculine shadow. … Those crumbling arches, those falling arches, they remind him of fallen arches, of feet, of boots and shoes, of the old man. Eternal recurrence!

He has fled I. Small down the nights and down the days; fled him through the arches of the years … and still the old man bleddies in his ear, flaps at him with the defunct
Globe
—he can feel only the wind of the blow as it passes—and sometimes gets under his skin and, playing funerals, cries for him.
Nevertheless,
even now, it is perilously easy to gloss over the abuses and remember the day when his father, in the absence of his
Goddamned
mother, became himself, a good if stupid companion, and took him to Kew … and it is easy to remember the virtues of his blasted mother who, left alone, among strangers, behaved somewhat like a civilised human being, and became almost tender. God be with her, wherever she may be … damn her eyes! Touching the matter of eyes,
Charles Small is hard put to know for whom he is weeping—his father, his mother or himself. Perhaps all three.
Tria juncta
in
uno
—and out comes salt water from the eyes, dribbles from the nose, and a noise reminiscent of hiccoughs … and there is another handkerchief for the laundry basket, another pennyworth of soiled life down the drain!

… The Night of the Hæmorrhage—how was it possible not to remember it, and the awful grief of the old man, and the queer courage of the old woman who felt the wind of the scythe and heard the clicking of the bony feet of death, sure as Fate. Suddenly it seemed to Charles Small that his mother became noble, and his father became his child, so that suddenly he, Charles, became the master of the house; and as such he had to stay. What else could he do? His parents were become helpless children; he was a man. Does a proper man abandon a child?

But does a proper man abandon and betray himself?

So came that dawn when Charles Small picked up the suitcase that still stood by the umbrella stand, and crept out of the house like a thief, leaving a note; and betrayed himself and deserted Ivy Narwall on that smoky platform, where he left his suitcase rubbing shoulders with hers, and ran. Yes, in the recollection of this perfidy—here is hell indeed. He got back to the house in time to tear up the note he had left. The old man was looking for him. Grey, now, and wrapped in a grey dressing-gown, I. Small appeared like an old shorn sheep. He was pitiful, so agonisingly pitiful that Charles Small was almost relieved when he was confronted with his tormented mother. Attendants were making ready to carry her off, and she was thanking them for their kindness. The old man was going off the deep end again—this time, not with a yell but with a gurgle. What was one to do, oh God, what? Charles Small knows that these people, whom he has always hated, and whose memory he abhors in a
half-hearted
way, were in his mind at the station. It needed only the appearance of Mrs. Narwall to take the other half of his heart out of him and send him away empty to be refilled with all that he had tried to spit out.

*

He remembers a dreary dream that haunted him through the years; and this was the dream: He was wandering through a park, up and down, over hill and into valley, wandering and wandering, obedient to a blind impulse, step by step into something dark and horrible. And in this dream, at last, he came over the brow of a little hill and saw, far down, an oval house surrounded by trees. He knew that here was his Doom, here was his Weird, and that here he must end. But he had to go over that hill and down and down into the valley, and up a narrow white lane until he found
himself knocking at a red door framed in a Gothic arch. He knew that the house was empty; yet the echoing of his knocking sounded like footsteps on the stairs of that hollow house, keeping time to the beating of his heart, and the red door opened and out of the blackness came a hand with a wedding ring, that snatched him into the darkness and dragged him into a black gulf, a chasm without light. This had been a recurrent nightmare until he thrashed it out of himself, remembering that, one day, when the old man had to go out of town, Millie Small, in her turn, took him to Kew Gardens on a summer afternoon, and led him into the place that housed the Victoria Lilies; but was caught short, and had to leave him, so that he was left alone in the steamy
half-light
…. At that moment a horror fell upon him, and later, dreams. Years passed before he knew the meaning of those dreams; and, having learned that they were nothing but
trivialities
, his own droppings sticking to the heels of his memory, he laughed the dream out of this world to where it belonged, he coughed it into cloud-cuckooland. But then, having rid himself of a dream, he had to lie down at night with the begetter of the dream … the pond in which the mosquitoes fecundated, the coil of shit in which the green-arsed blowflies laid their filthy eggs … himself, Charles Small. There is no point in trying to escape. He is in a Hall of Mirrors. Consciousness is neither here nor there. Awake or asleep he is whirling in a wild waltz in the arms of the shadow, and when, between dances, he goes to the toilet to make himself decent, his own bones grin at himself with teeth that are his own because he has paid for them by the grace of Solly Schwartz…. It is interesting, in this connection, to consider that the work of the dentist, Parmee, will live longer than the three-dimensional work of God that was Charles Small; because his flesh will rot away and his bones will decay, but the gold and the porcelain that Parmee put into his mouth remain. … One of these days, a few centuries hence, someone will dig up all that is left of his Shakespearean mouth, and hammer it into an ear-ring, or, more likely, hand it to a Central Committee that will employ the precious metal internationally, secreted underground; or nationally isotopically, for the destruction of the world. And so runs the world away. The wardens of Belsen and Buchenwald knocked the gold fillings out of prisoners’ teeth—for gold. Who knows where that gold went? Who knows from where it came? Charles Small’s silly little fat-arsed daughter,
Laura, who has recently been given a signet ring, may be wearing part of the diadem of the Emperor of All Men, or a sliver of the misery of the universe; because gold is the only thing Man never throws away. Of all the toys Man treasures, the yellow stuff is the most durable. Put your soul under your hammer and beat it into a gorgeous golden goblet—put your heel on the goblet and trample it into a jagged cake; the gold is there. The dust of Alexander, turned to clay, may stop a bung to keep the wind away. But in Charles Small’s teeth there may be something of Ur of the Chaldees, a bit of Rameses, a grain of Karakoram … and in the crown of some king a thousand years hence there may be a bit of one of the gold-filled teeth of Charles Small, since no one lets gold go to waste.

Not that all this is worth a blown-out egg;
only somehow it is comforting; it smells like philosophy, of which, God knows, Charles Small has desperate need … anything, anything, so long as he can get his false teeth into it!

… Millie Small died of cancer of the womb and much as everyone pitied her in her agony it was impossible not to be bored by her. Alive or dying, she had a nuisance-value. (Why are Charles Small’s eyes wet?) Dying did her good. It made her mind her manners. She stopped saying: “So that’s what he is,” and “So now we know what you are,” and feebly stroked Charles’s hand. She remembered a thousand delinquencies which everyone else had forgotten because they were not worth remembering. Her face was almost exactly the colour of her hair, which was grey as ashes; her eyes were wide with agony, and her hands were shrivelled so that they looked like the claws of a fowl. She made a sort of Confession: “… I didn’t tell the truth about your ribbon at the time of the Jubilee … I was jealous, I hid it, I was in the wrong … I’ll buy you some more ribbon, and I want to give you my fur coat. Srul, give Ruth my fur coat. I can’t take it with me….”

“Oh Millie, Millie, Millie!” the old man said, crying like a child. “What
is
this talk?”

“Srul, I’m going home.” She never liked the word
Die.
“I’m going home, Srul. If I haven’t been good to you, don’t bear a grudge against me—I never meant harm….”

“Millie! Millie!”

“Anything I said in a temper, Srul, don’t remember it against me. I didn’t mean a word I said. You were always a good husband
… Becky makes good
kreplach
—she’ll look after you … I don’t want you should marry again, I wouldn’t rest easy, I couldn’t rest. Promise!”

“May I bled——” said I. Small, and stopped, gulping, “I should drop deddy-well bled if——”

“… Honest, Srul, I was always true to you.” (She had got that out of some novel, probably written by Marie Corelli.) “… Give Sarah Mother’s watch, the one with the gold pin. I meant her no harm when I gave her a good smacking that time when … when … I forget. Where’s Priscilla? Has Prissie come home yet? At least, whatever she is, she might come home to say ‘Good-night’ to her Mummy … after all I’ve been through for her.”

Priscilla had broken her parents’ hearts by running off, at the age of eighteen, with an American millionaire, with whom she was prosperously living in sin, caring not a damn for her own flesh and blood. (
Clever
girl,
thinks Charles Small, with envy.)

“Yes, Millie, yes, any minute, any minute,” moans I. Small, temporising and lying now as ever.

“Where’s Charley?”

He was there, somewhat dazed, juggling with pity and disgust and tears and laughter—hysterical laughter, theatrical tears, histrionic pity, and genuine disgust. “Here I am, Mum,” he said. It was impossible not to weep in sympathy with the affliction of the old man whose blood he had licked off the plate that night so many years ago; and it was hard not to forgive the Boy’s Best Friend in her last agony. “I’m here, Mummy, here I am, Mum, can’t you see me?”

“I’m going home, Charley … I’m done for … I’m going home….”

“Oh, Millie, Millie,” cried I. Small, falling on his knees at the bedside.

Millie Small said, dreamily—she was full of morphine—“Charley, marry Hettie … to please
me
…. You’ve only got one mother…. Marry Hettie, Charley, to please
me
…. I’m sorry I didn’t give you the water-pistol I promised you, but it was dangerous—you could knock somebody’s eye out … but you marry Hettie, and … marry Hettie….” She remembered the circulating library, and the works of Marie Corelli. “Call your daughter Thelma,” she said, “but to please
me,
marry Hettie….”

Then she began to make a noise in her throat like snoring. “Millie, Millie!” the old man cried. But suddenly, for the first time in her life, she became calm: Millie Small was dead.

Charles went out into the echoing corridor, for he could not bear to see his father kneeling and wringing his hands in his great grief, or hear him whispering, for once: “Millie, Millie, come back, come back….”

A gaggle of uncles and aunts were assembled in a waiting-room, silent. It was Nathan, the Photographer, who asked: “Well?”—as if he didn’t know.

Charles Small could not speak; he made a dramatic gesture, drawing a finger across his throat. Millie’s sisters, who hated her—not without cause—burst into tears. Nathan, the
Photographer
, said: “That is Life.” The old man came out of the ward, blind with tears, stumbling, and, gripping Charles’s wrists, stammered: “Charley—your Mama—you haven’t got no …”—and let loose a salty rain from his eyes.

“We must live with the living,” said Nathan, the Photographer.

“Living … schmiving …” snivelled I. Small, “Oh Millie, Millie!”

So Charles Small married Hettie.

“I
T
’
S
your Mother’s wish,” said L Small; and Charles swallowed it, hook, line and sinker, little stinker that he was. He married Hettie, that sloppy, floppy poultice of a woman, with her absurd nose that was bent in the middle, and her submissive, whimpering voice and—even at twenty-four—her tendency to a double chin. She had five thousand pounds; she was a Jewish girl. Some of Charles Small’s best friends are Jewish people, but he knows where they can stick their Yiddishkeit and their pounds. It was Millie Small’s wish that he should marry Hettie, and the agony of that idiotic I. Small was intolerable. Charles Small hits
himself
in the bosom; he takes himself by the right ear and twists it, kicking himself in the ankle with his heel. He punches himself in the jaw, inadvertently biting his tongue, so that he lets out a yelp of pain not unmixed with self-satisfaction.

So he married Hettie, who had five thousand pounds. What the hell did he want with Hettie? He wanted Ivy. And what the devil had he to do with five thousand lousy pounds? He was making a thousand a year, and his tastes were simple … a packet of cigarettes, a warm meal, and Ivy. He already had a considerable sum of money in the bank. He wanted Ivy, nothing and nobody but Ivy; and I. Small and Millie Small and the Narwalls had taken her away from him.

Accursed parenthood! And damnable childhood! Dear God, damn and blast both parents and children, because, each to each they add up to dust and ashes, grey ruin.

The memories of fourteen years of marriage run through Charles Small’s head like shit through a goose. His wife loved him. He had not the slightest regard for his wife. She had borne him two children, but Laura and Jules had not been begotten on Hettie, but on the ghosts of Clara Bow, Dolores del Rio, Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, and Lya de Putti. Not Ivy—he never thought of her like that. Certainly not Hettie; he could not stand her. He could tolerate her only in the dark, and only then if she kept her mouth shut and did not interfere with his imagination.

He remembers a horrid joke: A wife petulantly tells her
husband to hurry up because she is sleepy. The husband replies: “I’m sorry, I can’t
think
of anyone.”

Yet, somehow or other, he has begotten a couple of brats. Would to God they had been syringed away to limbo!

Ah, well … Hettie and he became friends—that is to say, out of pity he became polite to her. And then there were the children. He was determined that Laura and Jules should not grow up tied in knots as he had grown up, so he gave them psychology, which made them so rude that they became
intolerable
; whereupon he was compelled to beat the boy for spitting in his mother’s face and calling her a Bleeding Bastard. He laid on hard, and with gusto; not with a rolled-up copy of the
Sunday
Express,
but with the palm of his hand. That knocked the psychology out of the little sods! It put the fear of God into them, the fear of God, their Father—for they were dirty little cowards, just like the father and the mother that brought them into the world.

Charles Small remembers—oh, how he remembers!—the old man died (“passed away” as the family would have it) without too much fuss. He did not kick up a row because he was
unconscious
. His last words were: “Millie, Millie!” Then he grasped an imaginary copy of the
News
of
the
World,
struck a ghostly blow, and earned the gratitude of his son by getting out of the way and holding his tongue for ever.

And still Charles Small wept, because some kindnesses are hard to forget, and in his ham-handed way the old man was kind, and loved his boychik. So did Millie, no doubt.

Well, the worms had stripped them to the bone, that pretty pair, and here he lay with years and years of life behind and before him, wishing that his too, too solid flesh would melt … Shakespeare again … working himself silly for the
wherewithal
to pay the Inland Revenue, and support a couple of brash little loafers whom he wishes he had never fathered and a lumpy, snivelling blonde who gives him the creeps when she touches him. Poor Hettie; she cannot have had too gaudy a time of it, and he feels guilty about this.
Wham!
—he is off again, pitying, pitying, pitying—torturing himself, exacerbating his hateful desire to inflict pain upon those whom he is pledged to cherish. He used to be a gentle fellow, once upon a time. Now, he would walk a mile to find a hair to put in the soup, just to have something to shout about, and would buy the children trumpets
and drums to make a pretext for a headache and take the toys away. Oh, what a … a … a Thingumybob and coward Whatsisname is he! … He is forgetting even Shakespeare, now….

His abhorred wife, Hettie, comes up to the bathroom. She sounds like a giraffe; and when she uses the toilet it is as if someone is turning a faucet at a considerable height—
kwiss,
kwiss,
kwiss,
splatter!
—and when she pulls the plug,
whoosh
goes Niagara Falls, and
clunk
goes the seat, and
plonk
goes the lid of the seat and
oink,
oink,
oink
go the stairs; and
clickety-click
goes a door on the floor below as it opens, letting out music from the radio, carefully kept low. Charles Small wants to dash downstairs and kick the guts out of that infernal wiry contraption; but he knows that if he goes downstairs he will stay to listen, and he will see himself buggered before he will give them—he nearly called them bleddy beggars—the satisfaction. Father is resting. Hell, what bribing and lying and coaxing, and vague promising must be going on downstairs! The very thought of it gives Charles Small a
bellyache
just below the belt-line, so that he has to go to the bathroom. Water is still tinkling in the cistern. He is glad of this, because he knows that he is going to make a noise. He imagines that the seat is still warm, and although it cannot be, the very idea turns colic into constipation. So he sits, playing with a bit of toilet paper, an American product, widely advertised. Solly Schwartz has the account. The sales-talk is as follows: Mrs. Ex runs weeping to her mother-in-law, Mrs. Wise, complaining that her husband has a stinking temper. The old girl says something to this effect: “Have you ever considered the importance of a non-irritant toilet tissue?” The little woman dries her eyes, runs out and buys Somebody-or-Other’s toilet paper, and husband and wife are in accord at last. Hettie tried even that, the poor girl. Charles Small tiptoes back to the bedroom. There is something like an electric fan spinning in his head, and he touches things including himself as in anticipation of a blue spark and an electric shock. No matter how carefully the kids mute the radio, Duke Ellington shakes the house and blares into his ears—
particularly
his left ear—and a saxophonist blows a great white blast into his left eye and thence, through his neck, into the back of his shoulder, while the drummer makes him waggle his feet in spite of himself, to his intense annoyance.

*

God is just. Charles Small’s heart beats slower and the turbulence of his stomach subsides when he remembers the awful, the inevitable justice of God.

A dozen years after he was married, he had a frightful quarrel with Hettie. It happened one night after the children had been put to bed. Charles was in an expansive mood, in a mood for recitation. He talked his head off and, one thing leading to another, quoted:

And so on and on to:

He looked at Hettie for appreciation and saw that she had fallen asleep. He struck her over the head—not with a piddling evening paper, but with a good solid magazine. Hettie begged pardon, and wept. Charles Small wished that he could crack himself between two finger-nails like a louse … squeeze himself out of the face of things like a blackhead, pull himself out like a rotten tooth. Hettie went to bed in tears. She looked at him plaintively next morning, waiting for him to say a kind word, but there was a taste of rusty iron in his mouth, and something like cold iron pincers on his tongue, despite his remorse and his heartache.

He left the house without a word. But at eleven o’clock he left his office and went to Goldschmidt’s in Bond Street, where he bought a bracelet for three hundred and seventy-five pounds. This would make Hettie happy again; not the gift, as a gift, but the thought behind it. While he was writing the cheque he saw, reflected in a mirror at the back of the counter, a familiar face. It was the face of a woman, dark and sweet. She was dressed very
elegantly, and wrapped in mink. He made a kind of double-take, and said: “Ivy?”

“Charles?”

“Ivy!”’

“I was having my watch mended, Charley. How are you, after all these years? You haven’t changed much.”

“You haven’t changed a bit, Ivy. Will you come and have a drink, a cocktail?”

“I don’t, I never did. Coffee, perhaps.”

They went to Gunter’s.

There, they sat and looked at each other, not knowing what to say. At last Charles Small, playing with a coffee-spoon and looking at the egg-shaped reflection of himself in the back of it, said: “Ivy … about that time in the station.”

“Let’s not think about it,” she said.

“I … I lost my head. Ivy, I’ve never stopped thinking of it, or of you. You know I always loved you, Ivy, on my honour, and I can give you my word, Ivy, that I paid very dearly for what I did to you. I’ve been punished. If you bear a grievance against me, set your mind at rest. I’ve paid, and paid, and paid! I’d give my soul for what I’ve thrown away. Believe me, please believe me, Ivy, I’ve always loved you with all my heart, and always will.”

Ivy’s lips quivered so that she had to put a cigarette between them to steady them, and Charles Small’s hand shook so that the flame from his gold lighter flickered perilously close to her chin. Neither of them could drink their coffee; their hands were too unsteady. “I always loved you, too, Charles,” she said.

“You did? After what I did to you? After what happened? It’s not possible!”

“Don’t think of that now, Charles. What’s done is done, gone and forgotten…. Well, not quite forgotten, perhaps, because I never could forget you. Forgiven, finished.”

Incredulously, Charles Small asked: “Do you mean to say that you don’t hold it against me?”

“Not a bit. You couldn’t help it. I would have run away myself, only I …”

“Only you were relying on me to come back and stand by you.”

“Please don’t let’s talk about it now. It’s so nice seeing you. I thought we should never meet again. But this morning I had a funny feeling, and when I came out to get this”—she pointed
to her wrist-watch, which said that it was noon—“I felt … you know, the way some people feel when there’s a cat in the room. Excuse me, Charles, I can’t think of any other way of putting it. Tell me about yourself. Have you been well and happy?
Prosperous
? Did you go on the stage after all? I didn’t think you did, or I’d have heard of you. We went to all the plays, and I always looked out for you. I always expected, somehow, to see your name on the programme, somewhere. But …”

Charles Small laughed bitterly and said: “You’ll never see my name on any programme, dear Ivy. I threw it all up donkey’s years ago.”

“Oh, but why? You were so fine!”

“To please the Old People. They practically threatened to die. I couldn’t have been any too damned fine, or I’d have gone my way and let them die. Everybody must die, and so must
everybody
live. It would have broken their hearts—
hah!
—what nonsense! What if it did? A mercy-killing, better than cancer. What are hearts made for? No, no, Ivy my dear, I did what they wanted, and did well at it; and oh, good God, how I wish … It would have been rough work, Ivy; furnished rooms, tinned salmon, hand-to-mouth, and all that kind of thing. But there would have been you and me, and you’d have loved me and I’d have loved you, and if I didn’t have a penny to put in the
gas-meter
, we’d have kept each other warm. But the Old Ones were dying, don’t you see, and they had to suck my life. So there you have it, Ivy, my one and only love—and here I am like the shell of a dead crab, stinking to high heaven on a grey beach, covered with flies. Am I prosperous? Oh yes. I have plenty of money. I have plenty of nothing. All I want is Ivy, Ivy, Ivy.”

Ivy was silent.

“And you?” said Charles Small.

“If you don’t mind, Charles, I’d rather not talk much about that now—not here, anyway. I married someone named Squire—perhaps you remember him?”

“What, that horrible man? Oh no!”

“Yes. I have two children, girls. Would you like to see some snaps of them?”