Finding Again the World Read online

  He leaned back in his chair and watched them. They screwed up their eyes tight like children and lifted up their faces. They intoned their words antiphonally and his eyes followed from face to face.

  “And let us,” said Miss Stevens, “remind ourselves of that promise thou hast made to us in The Book of Moroni: ‘If ye by the grace of God are perfect in Christ, and deny not his power, then are ye sanctified in Christ by the grace of God. . .’”

  Miss Adetti’s voice took up, “‘. . . through the shedding of the blood of Christ, which is in the covenant of the Father . . .’”

  Both voices rose in unison, “‘. . . unto the remission of your sins, that ye become holy, without spot.’”

  They lowered their heads and sat for a few moments in silence.

  “Thank you,” said Robert quietly.

  Miss Stevens glanced at Miss Adetti and then said, “Mr. Hardwick, we’d like to leave this book with you for a few days. We’d like to have you read it?” She stood up and picked up her briefcase. Miss Adetti got up and took the wooden chair back to the other side of the room. “And perhaps we could call back on you in a few days’ time?”

  “I shall look forward to it,” said Robert. He wheeled himself ahead of them and opened the door. As they stood by the front door, Miss Adetti said, “Well, it’s been just fine meeting you, Mr. Hardwick.” She smiled warmly at him.

  He backed his chair away and started to close the door. They were just turning out onto the pavement. Miss Stevens hitched her briefcase higher under her arm. Suddenly he pulled the door open again and rammed his chair forward, bucking the wheels over the fibre mat.

  “Hey! You!”

  Two startled faces turned to stare at him. His body bent forward from the chair.

  “If I was standing up,” he bellowed, “I’d be six foot three.”

  SINGLE GENTS ONLY

  After David had again wrested the heavy suitcase from his father’s obstinately polite grip and after he’d bought the ticket and assured his mother he wouldn’t lose it, the three of them stood in the echoing booking hall of the railway station. His mother was wearing a hat that looked like a pink felt Christmas pudding.

  David knew that they appeared to others as obvious characters from a church-basement play. His father was trying to project affability or benevolence by moving his head in an almost imperceptible nodding motion while gazing with seeming approval at a Bovril advertisement.

  The pink felt hat was secured by a hat-pin which ended in a huge turquoise knob.

  Beyond his father’s shoulder, looking over the paperbacks on the W H. Smith stall, was a woman in a sari. David kept under observation the vision of the bare midriff and the ponderous hand of the station clock while pretending to listen to the knit-one-purl-one of his mother’s precepts.

  His father eventually made throat-clearing noises and David promptly shook his hand. He stooped to kiss his mother’s cheek. Her hat smelled of lavender, her cheek, or possibly neck, of lily-of-the-valley. He assured her that the ticket was safe, that he knew where it was; that he’d definitely remember to let her know in the letter for which she’d be waiting if the train had been crowded; if he’d managed to get a seat.

  The loudspeakers blared into demented announcement flurrying the pigeons up into the echoing girders. The onslaught of this amplified gargle and ricochet coincided with his mother’s peroration, which seemed to be, from the odd phrase he caught, a general reworking of the Polonius and Mr. Micawber material, warnings against profligacy, going to bed late, burning the candle at both ends, debt, promiscuity, not wearing undershirts, and drink.

  She gripped his hand.

  He watched her face working.

  As the metal voice clicked silent, she was left shouting,

  “THE SECRET OF A HAPPY LIFE IS . . .”

  Mortified, David turned his back on the gawping porter.

  She continued in a fierce whisper,

  “. . . is to apportion your money.”

  He returned their wavings, watching them until they were safely down into the tiled tunnel which led to the car-park, and then lugged his case over to the nearest waste basket, into which he dropped the embarrassing paper bag of sandwiches.

  With only minutes to go before his train’s departure, the barmaid in the Great North-Western Bar and Buffet set before him a double Scotch, a half of best bitter, and a packet of Balkan Sobranie cigarettes. Flipping open his new wallet, he riffed the crisp notes with the ball of his thumb. The notes were parchment stiff, the wallet so new it creaked. Smiling, he dismissed the considerable change.

  The Scotch made him shudder. The aroma of the Sobranie cigarettes as he broke the seal and raised the lid was dark, strange, and rich. He was aware of the shape and weight of the wallet in his jacket’s inside pocket. Stamped in gold inside the wallet were words which gave him obscure pleasure: Genuine Bombay Goat. With a deft flick of his wrist, he extinguished the match and let it fall from a height into the ashtray; the cigarette was stronger than he could have imagined. He raised the half of bitter in surreptitious toast to his reflection behind the bar’s bottles. Smoke curling from his nostrils, he eyed the Cypriot barmaid, whose upper front teeth were edged in gold.

  * * *

  He sat in a window seat of the empty carriage feeling special, feeling regal, an expansive feeling as physical and filling as indigestion. He crossed his legs, taking care not to blunt the immaculate crease in his trousers, admiring his shined shoes. A mountain of luggage clanked past, steam billowed up over the window, a whistle blew. And then the carriage door opened and a toddler was bundled in from the platform followed by a suitcase and parcels and carrier-bags and its mother. Who hauled in after her an awkward stroller.

  Doors slamming down the length of the train.

  “Ooh, isn’t the gentleman kind!” said the woman to the toddler as David heaved the suitcase up onto the luggage rack.

  “And these?” said David.

  From one of the carrier-bags, a yellow crocodile made of wood fell onto his head.

  The toddler started to struggle and whine as the train pulled out. It was given a banana. It was pasty-looking and on its face was a sort of crust. Old food, perhaps. Possibly a skin disease. It started to mush the banana in its hands.

  Turning away, David gazed out over the backs of old jerry-built houses, cobbled streets, cemeteries, mouldering buildings housing strange companies found in the hidden parts of town visible only from trains: Victoria Sanitation and Brass, Global Furniture and Rattan, Allied Refuse. Clotheslines. The narrow garden strips behind the house looking as if receding waters had left there a tide-line of haphazard junk.

  The train cleared the neat suburbs, the gardens, the playing fields for employees, picked up speed, vistas of distant pitheads, slag-heaps, towering chimneys and kilns spreading palls of ochre smoke, all giving way to fields and hedges, hedges and fields.

  Inside his head, like an incantation, David repeated:

  The train is thundering south.

  Beside the shape of the wallet in his jacket’s pocket was the letter from Mrs. Vivian Something, the University’s Accommodations Officer. The tone of the letter brusque. He had not replied promptly as he had been instructed so to do and no vacancies now existed in the Men’s Halls of Residence. Nor were rooms now available on the Preferred List. Only Alternative Accommodation remained.

  274 Jubilee Street.

  The morning sunshine strong, the train thundering south, the very address propitious, Jubilee.

  As the train bore him on towards this future, he found himself rehearsing yet again the kind of person he’d become. What kind of person this was he wasn’t really sure except that he’d known without having to think about it that it wasn’t the kind of person who lived in Men’s Halls of Residence.

  Blasts on its whistle, the train slowing through a small country stati
on.

  Nether Hindlop.

  On the platform, rolls of fencing wire, wicker crates of racing pigeons, holding a ginger cat in his arms, a porter.

  But at the least, he thought, the kind of person who bestowed coins on grateful porters. He still blushed remembering how on his last expedition to London he’d tipped a taxi-driver a shilling and the man had said,

  “Are you sure you can spare it?”

  And later, even more mortifying, after a day in the Tate and National galleries, he had sat next to a table of very interesting people, obviously artistic, in a crowded cafe in Soho. He’d listened avidly as they chatted about Victor this and Victor that and he’d realized gradually that Victor must be Victor Pasmore. And as they were leaving, the man with the earring had paused by his table and said in a loud voice,

  “So glad to have had you with us.”

  Even though he had been seared with shame and burned even now to think of it, he had in a way been grateful. He admired the rudeness and aggression and the ability to be rude and aggressive in public; the realm of books apart, he still considered it the most splendid thing that he had heard another person actually say.

  But he found it easier to approach what he would become by defining what he was leaving behind. What he most definitely wasn’t—hideous images came to mind: sachets of dried lavender, Post Office Savings Books, hyacinth bulbs in bowls, the Radio Times in a padded leather cover embossed with the words Radio Times, Sunday-best silver tongs for removing sugar-cubes from sugar-bowls, plump armchairs.

  But how, he wondered, his thoughts churning deeper into the same old ruts, how did one change from David Hendricks, permanent resident of 37 Manor Way, ex-Library Prefect and winner of a State Scholarship, to something more . . . more raffish.

  “Hold a woman by the waist and a bottle by the neck.”

  Yes.

  Somerset Maugham, was it?

  Not much of a point of etiquette in his own teetotal home, he thought with great bitterness, where wild festivities were celebrated in Tizer the Appetizer and where women were not held at all.

  “Whoopsee!” cried the mother.

  The toddler was launched towards him, was upon him. He looked down at his trousers. He tried to prise the clenched, slimy fingers from the bunched material.

  “There,” he said, “there’s a good boy . . .”

  “Not afraid of anything, she isn’t!” said the woman proudly.

  David blushed.

  “Proper little tomboy, encha?”

  David smiled.

  And regarded his ruined knees.

  * * *

  The house stood on a corner; the front of the house faced onto Jubilee Street, the side of the house faced the cemetery on the other side of Kitchener Street. From the coping of the low wall which bounded the cemetery, rusted iron stumps stuck up, presumably the remains of an ornamental fence cut down for munitions during the Second World War. In an aisle of grass between two rows of tombstones, a small dog bunched, jerking tail, its eyes anguished.

  There were no facing houses on the other side of Jubilee; there was a canal, tidal the driver had told him, connecting with the docks. The tide was out. Seagulls screeched over the glistening banks of mud. The smell came from the canal itself and from the massive redbrick brewery which stood on its far side.

  Most of the tiny front garden was taken up by an old motorbike under a tarpaulin.

  “Not Mr. Porteous?” she said.

  “No,” said David, ‘Tm afraid not.”

  She held the letter down at a distance, her lips moving. Wiry hairs grew on the upper lip. He suddenly blushed remembering that her house had been described as Alternative Accommodation and hoping that she wouldn’t be embarrassed or hurt.

  Her gross body was divided by the buried string of the grubby pinafore. Her hair was grey and mannish, short back and sides with a parting, the sort of haircut he’d noticed on mentally defective women in chartered buses. The torn tartan slippers revealed toes.

  “They didn’t mark that down,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “About the back double.”

  “Double?”

  “With the Oxford gentleman.”

  “Oh,” said David. “You mean. . . ?”

  “Yes,” she said. “They should have marked that down.”

  He manoeuvred his suitcase round the hatstand and bicycle in the gloom of the narrow passage and followed her ponderous rump up the stairs. Reaching for the banister, grunting, she hauled herself onto the dark landing.

  Even the air seemed brown.

  “This is the bathroom,” she said, “and the plumbing.”

  He sensed her so close behind him that he felt impelled to step inside. The room was narrow and was largely taken up by a claw-foot bathtub. Over the tub, the height of the room and braced to the wall, bulked the monstrous copper tank of an ancient geyser.

  She was standing behind him, breathing.

  He began to feel hysterical.

  The lower part of the tank and the copper spout which swung out over the tub were green with crusty verdigris; water sweating down the copper had streaked the tub’s enamel green and yellow. Wet, charred newspaper half blocked the gas-burners in the geyser’s insides.

  “If you wanted a bath, it’s a shilling,” she said, slippers shuffling ahead of him, “with one day’s warning.”

  Following her into the bedroom, he stared at the vast plaster elephant.

  Two single beds stood on the brown linoleum. The wallpaper was very pink. Pinned on the wall between the beds was a reproduction cut from a magazine of Annigoni’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth.

  “You can come and go as you please—the key’s on a string in the letterbox—but we don’t have visitors.”

  David nodded.

  “I don’t hold with young ladies in rooms.”

  “No, of course,” said David. “Quite.”

  His gaze kept returning to the elephant on the mantelpiece. Inside the crenellated gold of the howdah sat a brown personage in a turquoise Nehru jacket sporting a turban decorated with a ruby.

  “Well . . .” he said.

  Staring at him, doughy face expressionless, she unscrewed a Vicks Nasal Inhaler and, pressing one nostril closed, stuck it up the other.

  He politely pretended an interest in the view.

  Below him, a staggering fence patched with warped plyboard and rusted lengths of tin enclosed a square of bare, packed earth.

  There was a bright orange bit of carrot.

  On one of the sheets of tin, it was still possible to make out an advertisement for Fry’s Chocolate.

  In the middle of this garden sat a disconsolate rabbit.

  When the sounds seemed to have stopped, he turned back to face the room. He looked round nodding judiciously, aware even as he was doing it that it was the sort of thing his father did. He had, he realized, no idea of how to conclude these negotiations.

  “And this other person? The man from Oxford?”

  “Mr. Porteous.”

  “He’s . . .?”

  “We had a telegram.”

  “Ah,” said David, “yes. I see.”

  “Cooked breakfast and evening meal included,” she said, “it’s three pound ten.”

  “Well,” said David, contemplating the elephant, “that sounds . . .”

  “And I’ll trouble you,” she said, “in advance.”

  * * *

  He shoved the empty suitcase under the bed.

  The thin quilt, the sheets, the pillow, all felt cold and damp.

  He thought of turning on the gas-fire but didn’t have a shilling piece; he thought of putting a sweater on.

  Jingled the change in his pocket for a bit, inspected the wallpaper more closely; the motif was lilac blossoms in pink edged wit
h purple. It was five-thirty. He wondered at what time, and where, this evening meal was served, if “evening meal” meant tea in some form or dinner.

  Voices.

  Slap of slippers on lino.

  He eased his door open a crack.

  “Evening Post. Now that should serve her nicely, the Evening Post. Six pages of the Post. Read the newspaper, do you? Not much of a fellow for the reading. Scars, though! Now that’s a different story entirely. Did I show you me scars?”

  Through the banisters, an old man’s head with hanging wings of white hair. Behind him, a stout boy in a brown dressing-gown.

  The boy stood holding a sponge bag by its string; his calves were white and plump.

  “Now there’s a dreadful thing!” said the old man, who was scrabbling about on his hands and knees with the sheets of newspaper manufacturing a giant spill. “A dreadful thing! Two hundred homeless. Will you look at that! There, look, and there’s a footballer. Follow the football, do you? Fill in the Pools? Never a drop of luck I’ve had. Spot the Ball? But a raffle, now! A raffle. I fancy the odds in a raffle. A raffle’s a more reasonable creature than Spot the Ball.”

  He disappeared into the bathroom.

  The front door slammed shaking the house.

  Boots clumping.

  Then the dreadful voice of Mrs. Heaney.

  “PERCY?”

  “WHAT?”

  “PERCE!”

  “Quick, now!” shouted the old man. “Quick! Holy Mother, she’s in full flow!”

  Matches shaking from the box, he secured one against his chest and then rasped it into flame. He set fire to the drooping spill.

  “BACK, BOY! BACK!”

  Body shielded by the door, face averted, he lunged blindly. The expanding sheet of light reminded David of war films. The old man’s quavering cry and the explosion were nearly simultaneous.

  Brown shoulders blocking the view.

  Suddenly from below, at great volume, Paul Anka.

  I’M JUST A LONELY BOY . . .

  The old man was in the smoke stamping on the spill.

  Ash, grey and tremulous, floated on the air.

  * * *