Finding Again the World Read online

  In front of Mrs. Heaney’s place at the head of the table stood a bottle of Cream Soda.

  The kitchen was silent except for the budgerigar ringing its bell and stropping itself on the cuttlefish. The cooked evening meal was a fried egg, a wafer of cold ham, a quarter of a tomato, and three boiled potatoes.

  The slice of ham had an iridescent quality, hints of green and mauve.

  In the centre of the oilcloth stood Heinz Ketchup, Crosse and Blackwell’s Salad Cream, HP Sauce, Branston Pickle, OK Sauce, Daddy’s Favourite, Al Sauce, a bottle of Camp Coffee, and a punctured tin of Nestle’s Evaporated Milk.

  Sliced white bread was piled on a plate.

  The old man bobbed and fidgeted darting glances.

  The fat boy was called Asa Bregg and was from Manchester and had come to university to study mathematics. Ken, who had acne and a Slim Jim tie and lots of ballpoint pens, was an apprentice at Hawker-Siddeley. Percy, presumably Mrs. Heaney’s son, glimpsed earlier in overalls, was resplendent in a black Teddy-boy suit, white ruffled shirt, and bootlace tie. What forehead he had was covered by a greasy elaborate wave. He was florid and had very small eyes. The old man was addressed as “Father” but David was unable to decide what this meant.

  Cutlery clinked.

  Percy belched against the back of his hand.

  The old man, whose agitation had been building, suddenly burst out,

  “Like ham, do you? A nice slice of ham? Tasty slice of ham? Have to go a long way to beat . . .”

  “Father!” said Mrs. Heaney.

  “. . . a nice slice of ham.”

  “Do you want to go to the cellar!”

  Cowed, the old man ducked his head, mumbling.

  The budgerigar ejected seeds and detritus.

  David studied the havildar or whatever he was on the label of the Camp Coffee bottle.

  Mrs. Heaney rose heavily and opened four tins of Ambrosia Creamed Rice, slopping them into a saucepan.

  Percy said,

  “Hey, tosh.”

  “Pardon?” said David.

  “Pass us the slide.”

  “Pardon? The what?”

  Percy stared.

  “Margarine,” said Ken.

  “Oh! Sorry!” said David.

  Crouched on the draining-board, the cat was watching the Ambrosia Creamed Rice.

  The old man, who’d been increasingly busy with the cruet, suddenly shouted,

  “Like trains, do you? Interested in trains? Like the railway, do you? Fond of engines?”

  “Father!”

  Into the silence, Asa Bregg said,

  “I am. I’m interested in trains. I collect train numbers.”

  The old man stared at him.

  Even Percy half turned.

  Ken’s face lifted from his plate.

  Asa Bregg turned bright red.

  “I’m a member of the Train-Spotters Club.”

  * * *

  Alone in the room that was his, David stared at the plaster elephant. He wondered how they’d got the sparkles in.

  After the ham and Ambrosia Creamed Rice, he’d walked the neighbourhood—dark factories across the canal, bomb-sites, news agents, fish and chips, Primitive Methodist Church, barber, The Adora Grill, and had ended up in the Leighton Arms where in deepening depression he drank five pints of the stuff manufactured opposite his room an independent product called George’s Glucose Stout.

  The pub had been empty except for an old woman drinking Babycham and the publican’s wife, who was knitting and listening to The Archers.

  At the pub’s off-licence, as a gesture of some kind, he’d bought a bottle of cognac.

  He arranged on top of the chest of drawers the few books he’d been able to carry, the standard editions of Chaucer and Spenser serving as bookends, and settled himself on the bed with Cottle’s Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Reader. Skipping over some tiresome introductory guff about anomalous auxiliary and preterite-present verbs and using the glossary, he attempted a line of the actual stuff but was defeated by the conglomeration of diphthongs, thorns, and wens; he had a presentiment that Anglo-Saxon was not going to be his cup of tea.

  Heavy traffic up the stairs, voices, a strange jangle and clinking. Mrs. Heaney appeared in the doorway and behind her a tall man with blond hair.

  “This is Mr. Porteous,” she said, “from Oxford.”

  “David Hendricks.”

  “How do you do? Jeremy Porteous. If I could trouble you?” he said, handing the tightly furled umbrella to Mrs. Heaney. He dropped the canvas hold-all on the floor and, slipping off the coiled nylon rope and the jangling carabiner and pitons, tossed them and the duffle coat onto the bed.

  He glanced round.

  “Splendid,” he said. “Splendid. Now, in the morning, Mrs. . . . ah . . . Heaney, isn’t it? . . . I think, tea.”

  “About the rent, Mr. Porteous.”

  “A matter for discussion, Mrs. Heaney, if you’d be so kind, following breakfast. I’ve had rather a gruesome day.”

  And somehow, seconds later, he was closing the door on her.

  He smiled.

  “There’s a person downstairs,” he said, “called ‘Father.’ Seemed to want to know, rather insistently, if I enjoyed travelling by bus.”

  David grinned.

  Advancing on the gas fire and elephant Jeremy said, “There’s a special name, isn’t there, for this chocolate chap? The one on its neck?”

  “Mahout,” said David.

  Seemingly absorbed, Jeremy moved back a pace the better to view the elephant. He had a slight limp, David noticed, and was favouring his right leg.

  “Pardon?” said David.

  “A plate,’” repeated Jeremy, “‘of Spam.’”

  David wondered how it was possible to wear a white shirt in combination with an anorak smeared with mud and at the same time look as suave as the men in the whisky advertisements.

  “What are you going to . . .” David hesitated “. . . read at university?”

  “Actually,” said Jeremy, “I’m supposed to be involved in some research nonsense.”

  “Oh!” said David. “I’m terribly sorry. I just assumed . . . What did you do at Oxford?”

  “I spent the better part of my time,” said Jeremy still intent on the elephant, “amassing an extraordinarily large collection of photographs of naked eleven-year-old girls with their ankles bound.”

  David stared at the elegant back.

  He could think of absolutely nothing to say.

  The gas fire was making popping noises.

  Desperate to break the silence, David said,

  “Have you been climbing? Today, I mean?”

  “Just toddling about on The Slabs at Llanberis. Are any of these free? I really must rest these shirts.”

  As he wrestled open a drawer in the chest, the mirrored door of the wardrobe silently opened, the flash of the glass startling him.

  “Did you hurt your leg today?” said David, embarrassed still and feeling it necessary to ease the silence. “When you were climbing?”

  “I hurt it,” said Jeremy, dropping on his bed toothpaste, toothbrush, towel and a large green book, “not minutes ago, and quite exquisitely, in what is probably referred to as the hall. On a sodding bicycle.”

  He added to his toiletries a pair of flannel pyjamas decorated with blue battleships.

  “Good God!” he said, pulling back the quilt, patting further and further down the bed. “This bed is positively wet.”

  “Mine feels damp, too,” said David.

  “Yours may be damp,” said Jeremy. “Mine is wet.”

  He hurled the rope and the climbing hardware into a corner.

  “Wet!” he shouted, striking the bed with his furled umbrella, “Wet! Wet! Wet!”

 
He seemed almost to vibrate with rage.

  He pounded on the lino with the umbrella’s ferrule.

  “Can you hear me, Mrs. Heaney? Are you listening, you gravid sow?”

  He stamped so hard the room shook and the wardrobe door swung open.

  “WET!”

  He glared about him.

  He snatched at the string between the beds.

  It broke.

  With a loud clung, the gas-meter turned itself off.

  He stood beside the bed with his eyes closed, one arm still rigid in the air holding the snapped string as though he were miming a straphanger in the underground. Light glinted on the gold and onyx cuff-link. Slowly, very slowly, he lowered the arm. Opening his fingers, he let the length of string fall to the floor. Eyes still closed, he let out his pent breath in a long sigh.

  He limped over to the window. He swept aside the yellowed muslin curtains. He wrenched the window high. He limped to the mantel. He hurled the elephant into the night.

  David realized that he, too, had been holding his breath.

  The edges of the curtains trembled against the black square.

  David cleared his throat.

  “Would you,” he said, reaching under the bed, “would you like a drink?”

  “Ummm?” said Jeremy, turning, wiping his hands with a handkerchief.

  “A drink?”

  “Ah, brandy!” said Jeremy. “Good man! It might help in warding off what these beds will doubtless incubate. Sciatica, for a start.”

  “Lumbago,” said David.

  “Rheumatoid arthritis,” said Jeremy.

  “Mould,” said David.

  Jeremy laughed delightedly.

  Digging into his hold-all, he came up with a black case that contained telescoping silver drinking cups which, with a twist, separated into small beakers. He caught David’s expression and said,

  “Yes, a foible, I’m afraid, but I’ve always been averse to the necks of bottles. Equal in the eyes of God and all that sort of thing, certainly, but would one share one’s toothbrush? Well, bung-ho!”

  Along the rim of the beaker, David saw the shapes of hallmarks.

  “‘Lumbago,’” said Jeremy. “Don’t you find that certain words make you think of things they don’t mean? ‘Emolument,’ for example. Makes me think of very naked, very fat, black women. Something I read as a stripling about an African king’s wives who were kept in pens and fed starchy tubers—so fat they couldn’t get up—just rolled around—and oiled all over, rather like . . .” his hands sketched a shape “. . . rather like immense seals . . . What was I starting to say?”

  “Lumbago,” said David.

  “Yes,” said Jeremy. “I wonder why?”

  There was a silence.

  “So!” said Jeremy.

  David nodded.

  Jeremy held out his cup.

  “What are you going to do?” said David.

  “In the morning,” said Jeremy, “we shall fold our tents. What was that woman called?”

  “Mrs. Heaney?”

  “No. The lodgings woman.”

  “The Accommodations Officer?”

  “She’s the one. Cornbury? Crownbury? We shall proceed against her.”

  “But I thought—well, from her letter, that there wasn’t anywhere else.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Are you just allowed to leave a . . .?”

  “Who,” demanded Jeremy, “who got us into this—this Lazarhouse in the first place? The responsibility is purely hers. We shall question her judgment with indignation and bitterness.”

  “But . . .”

  “With voluble indignation and bitterness. We shall demand reparations. Silver,” he said, “is so comforting to the touch, isn’t it?”

  David held up the brandy bottle.

  “Well,” said Jeremy, “yes.”

  “But you see . . .” said David.

  “See what?”

  “I paid her a week’s rent.”

  “Always,” said Jeremy, “try to postpone payment. On the other hand,” he said judiciously, “never bilk.”

  “Well,” said David, “now that you’ve . . . I mean, she’s not likely to return my . . .”

  “Life,” said Jeremy, climbing into his pyjama bottoms, “is very much a balancing, a trading-off of this against that. It’s a simple question, surely? The question is: Are you the sort of person who lives in a place like this? To which,” he said, working a khaki sweater down over his pyjama top, “one hopes there can be but one reply.”

  He reassembled the bed and spread his duffle coat over the quilt and on the duffle coat spread two sweaters and his rope.

  “I find sleep impossible,” he said, “without weight.”

  Whistling “We Plough the Fields and Scatter,” he went out with toothbrush and towel.

  David sat on the bed enjoying the brandy, enjoying the weight and balance of the silver cup, savouring Jeremy’s use of the word: we. Thinking about the amazing fluctuations of the long day, he decided that the flavour of events was exactly caught in the casual connective of biblical narrative: And it came to pass . . .

  The wallpaper made him feel as if he were sitting inside a friendly pink cave.

  He was, he realized, drunk.

  Jeremy returned whistling the hymn about those in peril on the sea and started to work himself under the layer of bedding. He asked David to pass him the book, a large paper edition of The Wind in the Willows with illustrations by Ernest Shepard.

  “I say,” said Jeremy. “Would you . . . I mean, would it be a terrible imposition?”

  “Would what?”

  “Just to read a few paragraphs?”

  “I haven’t read this,” said David, “since I was a child.”

  “Oh, but you should!” said Jeremy with great earnestness. “It never lets you down.”

  “From the beginning?”

  “No,” said Jeremy. “Let me think. Oh, this is lovely! There’s the field mice singing carols to Ratty and Mole at ‘Mole End’—that’s always very nice. But . . . I know! Let’s have the part where Ratty and Mole go to visit Toad. Remember? Where the motor-car wrecks Toad’s caravan? Yes here it is.”

  He passed over the book.

  He closed his eyes, composed his hands.

  “Most kind of you.”

  David began.

  The old grey horse, dreaming, as he plodded along, of his quiet paddock, in a new raw situation such as this simply abandoned himself to his natural emotions. Rearing, plunging, backing steadily, in spite of all the Mole’s efforts at his head, and all the Mole’s lively language directed at his better feelings, he drove the cart backwards towards the deep ditch at the side of the road. It wavered an instant—then there was a heart-rending crash—and the canary-coloured cart, their pride and joy, lay on its side in the ditch, an irredeemable wreck . . .

  Toad sat straight down in the middle of the dusty road, his legs stretched out before him, and stared fixedly in the direction of the disappearing motor-car. He breathed short, his face wore a placid, satisfied expression, and at intervals he faintly murmured “Poop-poop!”

  The Mole was busy trying to quiet the horse, which he succeeded in doing after a time. Then he went to look at the cart, on its side in the ditch. It was indeed a sorry sight . . .

  The Rat came to help him, but their united efforts were not sufficient to right the cart. “Hi! Toad.”’ they cried. “Come and bear a hand, can’t you!”

  David, turning the page, glanced over at Jeremy. His eyes were closed, his breathing deepening.

  “Glorious, stirring sight!” murmured Toad, never offering to move. “The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today—in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped—always somebody els
e’s horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!”

  “O stop being an ass, Toad!” cried the Mole despairingly.

  “And to think I never knew!” went on the Toad in a dreamy monotone.

  David looked up.

  With a long sigh, Jeremy had turned on his side.

  His breathing deepened into a snore.

  The coiled rope was balanced on the hump of his shoulder.

  “All those wasted years,” David continued, reading aloud in the pink bedroom, “that lie behind me, I never knew, never even dreamt! But now—but now that I know, now that I fully realize! Oh what a flowery track lies spread before me, henceforth! What dust-clouds shall spring up behind me as I speed on my reckless way!”

  Jeremy’s exhalations were a faint, breathy whistle.

  David closed the book.

  The edges of the curtains trembled against the black square of the open window.

  He switched off the light.

  He pulled the quilt up to his chin and lay in the darkness listening.

  Somewhere far distant in the night, in the docks perhaps, perhaps slipping its moorings and preparing to move out down the river to the sea, a ship was sounding, sounding.

  THE EASTMILL RECEPTION CENTRE

  After a year in the university’s Department of Education, a year worn thin discussing the application of Plato to the secondary Modern School and enduring my tutor, a mad dirndl woman who placed her faith in Choral Speaking, this was to be my first taste of the real world.

  While Uncle Arthur was assembling a ring of the necessary keys, I stood looking down from his office window into the asphalt quadrangle where the boys were lounging and smoking, strolling, dribbling a football about. They all wore grey denim overalls and black boots.

  “The wife and I,” said Uncle Arthur, “were not blessed with issue.”

  I turned and nodded slowly.

  “So in a sense—well, the way we feel about it—every last one of these lads is our lad.”

  I nodded and smiled.

  Uncle Arthur was short and tubby and was wearing grey flannels and a grey sleeveless pullover. Strands of fine blond hair were trained across his reddened pate. He looked jolly. In the centre of the strained pullover was a darn in wool of a darker grey. It drew attention like a wart.

  “Here’s your keys, then. They’re all tagged. And use them at all times. Artful as a barrel-load of monkeys, they are, and absconders is the last thing we want. One whistle with lanyard. There’s your timetable. And a word of advice, a word to the wise. If you get yourself into difficulties, just you come to me. I’m House Father and it’s what I’m here for. Comprendo?”