Finding Again the World Page 5

  There were hundreds of keys; long rusted keys, flat keys, keys with little round numbers tied to them, keys bunched together on rings, here and there sparkling new Yale keys, keys to fit clocks, and keys for clockwork toys. The old man’s fingers played greedily among them, spreading them, separating large and small.

  “Well?” he said, looking up suddenly.

  “I’ve never seen so many,” said David.

  “Few people have,” said the old man. “Few people have.” His eyes turned back to the table, and he moved one or two of the keys as though they were not in their proper place. And then, as if remembering his manners, he said, “You may touch them. I don’t mind if you do.”

  David picked up a few keys and looked at them. His hands became red with rust, and he dropped the keys back on the table, stirring them about idly with his fingertip.

  “Not like that!” snapped the old man suddenly. “Do it properly! You have to heap them up and scatter them. If you’re going to do it do it properly.”

  He pulled at the strings on the other bag and cascaded a stream of keys onto the table. The air swam with red rust. David sneezed loudly and the old man said, “Pay attention!”

  He raked the keys together into a large heap and burrowed his hands deep into them. When they were quite buried, he stopped, his eyes gleaming with a tense excitement. His breathing was loud and shallow. He looked up at David, and his eyes widened. “Now!” he shouted, and heaved his hands into the air.

  Keys rained and rattled about the room, clicking against the mirror, breaking a cup on the cardtable, slapping against the leather-covered books, and falling loudly on the floor-boards. A small key hit David on the forehead. The old man remained bent across the table as if the excitement had exhausted him. The silence deepened.

  Suddenly, a key which had landed on the edge of the mantelpiece overbalanced and fell, rattling loudly on the tiles of the hearth. Still the old man did not move. David shifted his weight restlessly and said into the silence, “I think I’ll have to be getting home now. My mother’s expecting me.”

  The old man gave no sign that he had heard. David said again, “I’ll have to be going now.” His voice sounded flat and awkward in the silent room.

  The old man pushed himself up from the table. Deep lines of irritation scored the side of his mouth. David began to blush under the fierceness of the old man’s eyes. “I can’t quite make up my mind about you,” the old man said slowly. He did not take his eyes from David’s face.

  “Sometimes I think you’re a polite boy and sometimes I think you’re a rude boy.” He paused. “It’s unsettling.” David looked down and fiddled with one of the buttons on his shirt. “Lift up another box of keys,” said the old man suddenly.

  “But I have to go home,” said David.

  “Quite untrue,” said the old man.

  “Really I do.”

  “A lie!” shouted the old man. “You are lying. You are telling lies!” He pounded on the table with his fist so that the keys jumped. “I will not tolerate the telling of lies!”

  “Please,” said David, “can I open the curtains?”

  “I’m beginning to suspect,” said the old man slowly, “that you don’t really like my keys. I’m beginning to think that I was mistaken in you. “

  “Please. Honest. I have to,” said David, his voice high and tight with fear of the old man’s anger.

  “Very well,” said the old man curtly. “But you are a rude boy with very little appreciation. I want you to know that.” Reaching inside his jacket, leaving brown rust marks on the lapel, he took out his notebook and wrote in it. He passed the piece of paper across the table. David read: You have very little appreciation.

  The old man turned away, presenting his silent and offended back. David didn’t know what to do. Hesitantly he said, “I do like the keys. Really I do. And the lion. And thank you for the tea.”

  “So you’re going now, are you?” asked the old man without turning around.

  “Well, I have to,” said David .

  “It’s a great pity because I don’t show it to many people,” said the old man.

  “Show what?”

  “It would only take a moment,” said the old man turning round, “but you’re in too much of a hurry.”

  “What is it?”

  “Can you really spare me two minutes? Could you bear to stay with me that long?” Suddenly he chuckled. “Of course you want to,” he said. “Go and sit on the settee over there and I’ll bring it to you.”

  “Can I open the curtains now?” asked David. “I don’t . . . I mean, it’s hot with them closed.”

  “Don’t touch them! No. You mustn’t!” said the old man. He was struggling to take something from one of the bookshelves. He came and stood over David and then stooped so that David could see the black leather case in his hands. It was so stuffy in the room that it was difficult to breathe properly, and when the old man was so close to him David became aware of a strong smell of urine. He tried to move away.

  Almost reverently, the old man opened the leather case. Lying on the red silk lining was a small grey ball. They looked at it in silence.

  “There!” breathed the old man. “Do you know what it is?”

  “No,” said David.

  “Go on! Go on!” urged the old man.

  “I don’t know,” said David.

  “Try.”

  “A marble?”

  “A marble!” shouted the old man. “Why would I keep a marble in a leather case! Of course it isn’t a marble! That’s one of the most stupid remarks I’ve ever heard.”

  “I’m sorry,” said David, frightened again by the anger in the old man’s glaring face.

  “You’re an extremely silly boy. A brainless boy. A stupid boy.” He slammed shut the leather case. “Stupid! Silly!” shouted the old man.

  “I want to go home now,” said David, beginning to get up from the settee. The old man pushed him back. “A marble!” he muttered.

  “Please . . .” said David.

  “It’s a bullet!” shouted the old man. “A rifle bullet.”

  “I didn’t know,” said David. He tried to get up again, but he was hemmed in by an occasional table and the crowding presence of the old man. The dim light in the room seemed to be failing into darkness. David’s throat was dry and aching.

  “This bullet,” said the old man, “was cut out of my leg in 1899. December 1899. Next I suppose you’ll tell me that you’ve never heard of the Boer War!”

  David said nothing, and the old man’s black shape loomed over him.

  “Have you heard of the Boer War?”

  David began to cry.

  “Have you?”

  “I want to go home,’’ said David in a small and uncertain voice.

  “Quite untrue,” said the old man. “I will not tolerate liars. You told me you went to school, and yet you claim not to have heard of the Boer War.” He gripped David by the shoulder. “Why? Why are you lying to me?”

  “Please,” said David. “I’m not telling lies. Please let me go.”

  “Oh, very well,” said the old man. “Maybe you aren’t. But stop crying. It irritates me. Here. You may touch the bullet.” He opened and held out the leather case.

  “There’s no need to cry.”

  “I want to go home,” snuffled David.

  “I know!” said the old man. “I know what you’d like. I’ll show you my leg. The bullet smashed the bone, you know. You would like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “No,” said David.

  “Of course you would.”

  The old man moved even nearer to the settee, and leaning forward over David, lifting with his hands, slowly raised his leg until his foot was resting on the cushion. The harsh wheezing of his breath seemed to fill the silent room. The smell of stale urine was strong o
n the still air. Slowly he began to tug at his trouser-leg, inching it upwards. The calf of his leg was white and hairless. The flesh sank deep, seamed and puckered, shiny, livid white and purple, towards a central pit.

  “If you press hard,” said the old man, “it sinks right in.”

  David shrank further away from the white leg. The old man reached down and grasped David’s hand. “Give me your finger,” he said.

  David tore his hand free and, kicking over the coffee table, rolled off the settee. At first, in his panic, he wrenched the doorknob the wrong way. As he ran out of the darkened room, he heard the old man saying, “I’ve tried to teach you. I’ve tried to teach you. But you have no appreciation.”

  THE ESTUARY

  I sometimes think my tiredness is different from other people’s. A different kind of thing. Once, I think it was in Reader’s Digest, I saw the words “depth fatigue” and I’m pretty sure that’s what I’ve got. Take the way I feel when I wake up in the morning. Apart from the specific things—dull headache, sore throat, inflamed eyelids, and nausea—I feel chronically tired all over. It’s as if all the cartilage has melted from between the bones and pads of tiredness have filled the spaces. And every morning these aching pads stiffen my back and legs and make it difficult for me to get out of bed.

  The pain is in no way imaginary, I can assure you, although I know it’s psychosomatic. The doctor I was using last year left me in no doubt about that. (Marvellous it was. I must have had about three weeks of working days off in trips to the hospital—allergy, lungs, heart, diabetes, ears, nose and throat—they tested everything before they threw me out.)

  And so I took his pills—purple for go and blue for stop—until he refused to renew the prescription. He got rather moral towards the end and told me sternly that I ought to take myself in hand. And perhaps it was a good thing really because the purple ones only made me feel tired at a more active level.

  I know it’s psychosomatic but knowing why you’re ill doesn’t cure you. The important thing is to remove the cause. As I told him and which he didn’t appreciate. (But I wasn’t too bothered about that because he’d stopped giving me time off work anyway.) No, you’ve got to remove the cause and in my case that’d necessitate a pension—which creates certain problems when you’re only twenty. I could present a case to the Ministry of Pensions that seems to me logically water­tight—I’m tired because I’m bored and I’m bored because I hate working—but unfortunately they’re not the most compassionate of institutions.

  I’m sure my boredom’s partly seasonal. Like tides. I offered that idea, which I consider quite original, to Dr. Cottle when I had to go and see him the other day but he’s not a man who’s attuned to the philosophic outlook. Oh, he’s kind and well meaning but he’s difficult to talk with. Though I’d rather one hour with him every two weeks than have done the thirty days.

  His main fault is that he’s obsessive. Every visit we get back to the same thing. Why were you crying? Why were you shouting? What did the words mean? But I always deny any knowledge; tell him I was too upset to remember.

  Then he says, “You can’t hold out for ever. You need to tell me.” He is, of course, very wrong but I keep on going because—well, lots of reasons. The probation officer from the court checks up. Mrs. Grice the welfare lady, who told me she prays for me. And the appointments are always on Thursdays when I’m low on cigarettes and he keeps on offering me Players No. 3 which are a welcome change from tipped Woodbines.

  Dr. Cottle interests me. The first few times I went he managed to control himself—he was using a Carl Rogers technique then—but the periods of silence seemed to eat his nerves raw. After a couple of visits I got a library book on Rogers and the non-directive method which gave me the whiphand. Since then, I’ve managed to bring him out quite a lot.

  I think I disturb him. I chat away about my mother and father, my brother and sister, infancy and adolescence, work and relaxations, uncle tom cobbley and all. I offer him ideas and theories and I smoke his cigarettes.

  And we sit there in his office. Two big leather armchairs. A small and expensively simple mahogany coffee-table. A Persian rug. Two Georgian sherry decanters. (One filled with Harvey’s Bristol Cream and the other with Tio Pepe.) Vast glass ashtrays which slowly fill with butts. And on the just off­white wall a large, and in my opinion, rather pretentious, hard edge abstract.

  And he always says—he’s got one of those lazy, chocolate brown voices—“You can trust me, David. You know that, don’t you?” And always at some point or other, “I’m not an officer of the court, you know.” And whenever he says that I can always picture over by the door the small, discreet filing-cabinet (pastel; oyster grey, of course) and I say in my intense voice, “I know that, Doctor.” He tries not to show it but it irritates him when I call him that.

  And just before I go he always says, “Do you think you’re feeling happier in yourself!” And I always reply, “I’m always happy in myself.” Then he usually smiles his roguish smile, which must have wreaked transference on Christ knows how many ladies, and says, “No more notions of doing anything silly?” (He’s far too delicate to come right out with it. If he said the word “suicide” it’d embarrass him.)

  And that’s what I mean when I say he’s difficult to talk with. I told him the very first time that I saw him that I hadn’t been trying to commit suicide but there was no shaking him. He must have got a really strong line from the police and the two fishermen so I’ve given up arguing now.

  I suppose the fishermen and the other man—I never did find out whether he was a local or a visitor—I suppose they felt they had a stake in me after getting soaked to the armpits and hauling me ashore and nothing I could say was going to do them out of their moment of glory. So as far as Dr. Maximillian Cottle is concerned it was a desperate bid at self­destruction. The whole matter’s basically too simple for him to understand though he’s cottoned onto the fact that I’m hiding something. So every visit we get back to Why were you crying? Why were you shouting? What did the words mean?

  The last time I went he abandoned all pretence of finesse. He was using his no nonsense, all cards on the table voice.

  “When you were carried back to the beach,” he said, having a quick refresher from my dossier, “you were crying in an hysterical manner.”

  PAUSE. Looks at me. Waits hopefully.

  “The fishermen reported that when they first reached you, you were shouting, ‘Don’t go! Don’t GO. Please don’t go!’”

  PAUSE. Looks up enquiringly and irritably scratches the back of his hand.

  “On the beach you cried and said over and over again, and I quote, ‘You can’t leave me. You can’t just go away.’”

  The silence slowly builds.

  And then I gave a little half shake of my head (I didn’t want to overdo it because he watches me like a hawk) and I did my half embarrassed and half exasperated laugh and said, “I really can’t remember. I really can’t. I’m as mystified as you are.”

  Then he said, “I feel, David, that until you admit to yourself that you were shouting; until you explain your words; until you acknowledge them as yours you won’t be able to enter into a period of adjustment.”

  So we sat there in the black armchairs, silently, and I tried to look as if I was struggling to remember. Every now and then, I breathed heavily through my nose. I frowned slightly. I pinched at my lower lip.

  He lay stretched out in his chair staring at me and pressing his fingertips into a steeple; making his fingertips march up and down. Then after he’d played all the finger games he could think of he said, very reluctantly, “Perhaps you’d care to talk about something else. . . ?”

  And so I told him again about being bored.

  I told him about the No. 93 bus. About catching it every morning at 8:15 at the Canning Road terminus. About the people in the bus queue. A schoolboy with ginger hair. The
woman who works as a char at the United Hospital and who doesn’t sleep at night because of the pain in her legs. The girl who works in Josiah’s Beauty Salon on Papermill Road whose hands are always raw from peroxide. A labourer, his boots white with cement dust. A small man, stooped in a shabby raincoat, carrying a cheap cardboard attaché case, who stands rigidly staring across the road at nothing. And every morning the same bus-conductor. An old man with white hair who has to stop half-way up the stairs to the top deck to catch his breath; who wears gloves with the fingers cut off. An old man whose fingers are so stiff and clumsy that they slip on the keys of his ticket machine.

  Dr. Cottle seemed a bit restive so I said, “That’s most important. Important to me, Dr. Cottle.”

  He said, “You feel the bus-conductor to be important?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  He always regresses to an uninspired and dreary Rogers sort of response when he doesn’t think he’s getting anywhere. But I didn’t give him a chance to try anything else. I bore on relentlessly. I told him all about the library again.

  I told him about Miss Nevins. How her slip always shows at the back of her dress. A dress which ends only six or seven inches above the ankle. And how the slip is always mauve trimmed with mauve lace. And how she always has a hankie, trimmed with mauve lace, tucked into the sleeve of her cardigan. And how she always moves in a cloud of lavender like something put away in a winter drawer.

  He crossed his legs carefully, making sure he didn’t crush the crease in his trousers, and said, “I’ve heard this before, David. Do you think it’s possible you’re telling me this to avoid telling me something else?”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “This is more important than anything else.”

  And then I told him about explaining that with two tickets you could take out one Fiction and one Non-Fiction but not two Fiction or two Non-Fiction; that Fiction means a story book that isn’t true and Non-Fiction means for example a book about history or science; and, no madam, biography is Non-Fiction although yes it is a story—the story of somebody’s life—but the difference is that it’s a true story and not an untrue story. Which is a funny way of dividing things up but no not even this once and the book must be replaced because the library has strict rules.