The Collected Short Fiction Part 29

"Good boy," he said. "Get what you're paying for out of her, and think of me while you're doing it, though I don't expect you will."

As for the other five pounds, I could probably manage to w.a.n.gle it out of what I had, by sc.r.a.ping a bit over the next week or two, and cooking the cash book a trifle if necessary, as we all do. Anyway, and being the age I was, I hated all this talk about money. I hated the talk about it much more than I hated the job of having to find it. I did not see Madonna in that sort of way at all, and I should have despised myself if I had. Nor, to judge by how she spoke, did it seem the way in which she saw me. I could not really think of any other way in which she would be likely to see me, but I settled that one by trying not to think about the question at all.

My Uncle Elias's special lodging in Wolverhampton was not the kind of place where visitors just rang the bell and waited to be admitted by the footman. You had to know the form a bit, if you were to get in at all, not being a resident, and still more if, once inside, you were going to find the exact person you were looking for. At about half past nine I thought it best to start lounging around in the street outside. Not right on top of the house door, because that might have led to misunderstanding and trouble of some kind, but moving up and down the street, keeping both eyes open and an ear c.o.c.ked for the patter of tiny feet on the pavement. It was almost dark, of course, but not quite. There weren't many people about but that was partly because it was raining gently, as it does in the Midlands: a soft, slow rain that you can hardly see, but extra wetting, or so it always feels. I am quite sure I should have taken up my position earlier if it hadn't been for the rain. Needless to say, I was like a cat on hot bricks. I had managed to get the pie inside me between calls during the afternoon. I struggled through it on a bench just as the rain was beginning. And at about half past six I'd had a cup of tea and some beans in the cafe I'd been to the night before. I didn't want any of it. I just felt that I ought to eat something in view of what lay ahead of me. Though, of course, I had precious little idea of what that was. When it's truly your first experience, you haven't; no matter how much you've been told and managed to pick up. I'd have been in a bad state if it had been any woman that was supposed to be coming, let alone my lovely Madonna.

And there she was, on the dot, or even a little early. She was dressed in the same clothes as she had worn that morning. Too big for her and too old for her; and she had no umbrella and no raincoat and no hat.

"You'll be wet," I said.

She didn't speak, but her eyes looked, I fancied, as if she were glad to see me. If she had set out in that green powder of hers, it had all washed off.

I thought she might be carrying something, but she wasn't, not even a handbag.

"Come in," I said.

Those staying in the house were lent a key (with a deposit to pay on it), and, thank G.o.d, we got through the hall and up the stairs without meeting anyone, or hearing anything out of the way, even though my room was at the top of the building.

She sat down on my bed and looked at the door. After what had been said, I knew what to do and turned the key. It came quite naturally. It was the sort of place where you turned the key as a matter of course. I took off my raincoat and let it lie in a corner. I had not turned on the light. I was not proud of my room.

"You must be soaked through," I said. The distance from the fairground was not all that great, but the rain was of the specially wetting kind, as I've remarked.

She got up and took off her outsize black jacket. She stood there holding it until I took it and hung it on the door. I can't say it actually dripped, but it was saturated, and I could see a wet patch on the eiderdown where she had been sitting. She had still not spoken a word. I had to admit that there seemed to have been no call for her to do so.

The rain had soaked through to her white blouse. Even with almost no light in the room I could see that. The shoulders were sodden and clinging to her, one more than the other. Without the jacket, the blouse looked quainter than ever. Not only was it loose and shapeless, but it had sleeves that were so long as to droop down beyond her hands when her jacket was off. In my mind I had a glimpse of the sort of woman the blouse was made for, big and stout, not my type at all.

"Better take that off too," I said, though I don't now know how I got the words out. I imagine that instinct looks after you even the first time, provided it is given a chance. Madonna did give me a chance, or I felt that she did. Life was sweeter for a minute or two than I had ever thought possible.

Without a word, she took off her blouse and I hung it over the back of the single bedroom chair.

I had seen in the cafe that under it she had been wearing something black, but I had not realized until now that it was the same tight, s.h.i.+ny sheath that she wore in the show, and that made her look so French.

She took off her wet skirt. The best I could do was to drape it over the seat of the chair. And there she was, super high heels and all. She looked ready to go on stage right away, but that I found rather disappointing.

She stood waiting, as if for me to tell her what to do.

I could see that the black sheath was soaking wet, anyway in patches, but this time I didn't dare to suggest that she take it off.

At last Madonna opened her mouth. "What would you like me to begin with?"

Her voice was so beautiful, and the question she asked so tempting, that something got hold of me and, before I could stop myself, I had put my arms round her. I had never done anything like it before in my whole life, whatever I might have felt.

She made no movement, so that I supposed at once I had done the wrong thing. After all, it was scarcely surprising, considering how inexperienced I was.

But I thought too that something else was wrong. As I say, I wasn't exactly accustomed to the feel of a half-naked woman, and I myself was still more or less fully dressed, but all the same I thought at once that the feel of her was disappointing. It came as a bit of a shock. Quite a bad one, in fact. As often, when facts replace fancies. Suddenly it had all become rather like a nightmare.

I stepped back.

"I'm sorry," I said.

She smiled in her same sweet way. "I don't mind," she said.

It was nice of her, but I no longer felt quite the same about her. You know how, at the best, a tiny thing can make all the difference in your feeling about a woman, and I was far from sure that this thing was tiny at all. What I was wondering was whether I wasn't proving not to be properly equipped for life. I had been called backward before now, and perhaps here was the reason.

Then I realized that it might all be something to do with the act she put on, the swords. She might be some kind of freak, or possibly the man in the blue jersey did something funny to her, hypnotized her, in some way.

"Tell me what you'd like," she said, looking down at the scruffy bit of rug on the floor.

I was a fool, I thought, and merely showing my ignorance.

"Take that thing off," I replied. "It's wet. Get into bed. You'll be warmer there."

I began taking off my own clothes.

She did what I said, squirmed out of the black sheath, took her feet gently out of the s.e.xy shoes, rolled off her long stockings. Before me for a moment was my first woman, even though I could hardly see her. I was still unable to face the idea of love by that single, dim electric light, which only made the draggled room look more draggled.

Obediently, Madonna climbed into my bed and I joined her there as quickly as I could.

Obediently, she did everything I asked, just as the man in the blue sweater had promised. To me she still felt queer and disappointing-flabby might almost be the word-and certainly quite different from what I had always fancied a woman's body would feel like if ever I found myself close enough to it. But she gave me my first experience none the less, the thing we're concerned with now. I will say one thing for her: from first to last she never spoke an unnecessary word. It's not always like that, of course.

But everything had gone wrong. For example, we had not even started by kissing. I had been cram full of romantic ideas about Madonna, but I felt that she was not being much help in that direction, for all her sweet and beautiful smiles and her soft voice and the gentle things she said. She was making herself almost too available, and not bringing out the best in me. It was as if I had simply acquired new information, however important, but without any exertion of my feelings. You often feel like that, of course, about one thing or another, but it seemed dreadful to feel it about this particular thing, especially when I had felt so differently about it only a little while before.

"Come on," I said to her. "Wake up."

It wasn't fair, but I was bitterly disappointed, and all the more because I couldn't properly make out why. I only felt that everything in my life might be at stake.

She moaned a little.

I heaved up from on top of her in the bed and threw back the bedclothes behind me. She lay there flat in front of me, all grey-anyway in the dim twilight. Even her hair was colourless, in fact pretty well invisible.

I did what I suppose was rather a wretched thing. I caught hold of her left arm by putting both my hands round her wrist, and tried to lug her up towards me, so that I could feel her thrown against me, and could cover her neck and front with kisses, if only she would make me want to. I suppose I might under any circ.u.mstances have hurt her by dragging at her like that, and that I shouldn't have done it. Still no one could have said it was very terrible. It was quite a usual sort of thing to do, I should say.

But what actually happened was very terrible indeed. So simple and so terrible that people won't always believe me. I gave this great, bad-tempered, disappointed pull at Madonna. She came up towards me and then fell back again with a sort of wail. I was still holding on to her hand and wrist with my two hands, and it took me quite some time to realize what had happened. What had happened was that I had pulled her left hand and wrist right off.

On the instant, she twisted out of the bed and began to wriggle back into her clothes. I was aware that even in the almost nonexistent light she was somehow managing to move very swiftly. I had a frightful sensation of her beating round in my room with only one hand, and wondered in terror how she could possibly manage. All the time, she was weeping to herself, or wailing might be the word. The noise she made was very soft, so soft that but for what was happening, I might have thought it was inside my own head.

I got my feet on to the floor with the notion of turning on the light. The only switch was of course by the door. I had the idea that with some light on the scene, there might be certain explanations. But I found that I couldn't get to the switch. In the first place, I couldn't bear the thought of touching Madonna, even accidentally. In the second place, I discovered that my legs would go no farther. I was too utterly scared to move at all. Scared, repelled, and that mixed-up something else connected with disappointed s.e.x for which there is no exact word.

So I just sat there, on the edge of the bed, while Madonna got back into her things, crying all the while, in that awful, heart-breaking way which I shall never forget. Not that it went on for long. As I've said, Madonna was amazingly quick. I couldn't think of anything to say or do. Especially with so little time for it.

When she had put on her clothes, she made a single appallingly significant s.n.a.t.c.h in my direction, caught something up, almost as if she, at least, could see in the dark. Then she had unlocked the door and bolted.

She had left the door flapping open off the dark landing (we had time-switches, of course), and I could hear her pat-patting down the staircase, and so easily and quietly through the front door that you might have thought she lived in the place. It was still a little too early for the regulars to be much in evidence.

What I felt now was physically sick. But I had the use of my legs once more. I got off the bed, shut and locked the door, and turned on the light.

There was nothing in particular to be seen. Nothing but my own clothes lying about, my sodden-looking raincoat in the corner, and the upheaved bed. The bed looked as if some huge monster had risen through it, but nowhere in the room was there blood. It was all just like the swords.

As I thought about it, and about what I had done, I suddenly vomited. They were not rooms with hot and cold running water, and I half-filled the old-fas.h.i.+oned washbowl, with its faded flowers at the bottom and big thumbnail chippings round the rim, before I had finished.

I lay down on the crumpled bed, too f.a.gged to empty the basin, to put out the light, even to draw something over me, though I was still naked and the night getting colder.

I heard the usual sounds beginning on the stairs and in the other rooms. Then, there was an unexpected, businesslike rapping at my own door.

It was not the sort of house where it was much use first asking who was there. I got to my feet again, this time frozen stiff, and, not having a dressing-gown with me, put on my wet raincoat, as I had to put on something and get the door open, or there would be more knocking, and then complaints, which could be most unpleasant.

It was the chap in the blue sweater; the seaman or showman or whatever he was. Somehow I had known it might be.

I can't have looked up to much, as I stood there shaking, in only the wet raincoat, especially as all the time you could hear people yelling and beating it up generally in the other rooms. And of course I hadn't the slightest idea what line the chap might choose to take.

I needn't have worried. Not at least about that.

"Show pa.s.s off all right?" was all he asked; and looking straight into the distance as if he were on his platform, not at anyone or anything in particular, but sounding quite friendly notwithstanding, provided everyone responded in the right kind of way.

"I think so," I replied.

I daresay I didn't appear very cordial, but he seemed not to mind much.

"In that case, could I have the fee? I'm sorry to disturb your beauty sleep, but we're moving on early."

I had not known in what way I should be expected to pay, so had carefully got the ten pounds into a pile, Mr Edis's fiver and five single pounds of my own, and put it into the corner of a drawer, before I had gone out into the rain to meet Madonna.

I gave it to him.

"Thanks," he said, counting it, and putting it into his trousers pocket. I noticed that even his trousers seemed to be seaman's trousers, now that I could see them close to, with him standing just in front of me. "Everything all right then?"

"I think so," I said again. I was taking care not to commit myself too far in any direction I could think of.

I saw that now he was looking at me, his small eyes deep-sunk.

At that exact moment, there was a wild shriek from one of the floors below. It was about the loudest human cry I had heard until then, even in one of those lodgings.

But the man took no notice.

"All right then," he said.

For some reason, he hesitated a moment, then he held out his hand. I took it. He was very strong, but there was nothing else remarkable about his hand.

"We'll meet again," he said. "Don't worry."

Then he turned away and pressed the black time-switch for the staircase light. I did not stop to watch him go. I was sick and freezing.

And so far, despite what he said, our paths have not recrossed.

Meeting Mr. Millar (1972).

Before it is too late, I set out the events exactly as I recall them.

I seem to recall them very well, and they were not of a kind easily forgotten; but amnesia is, I know, more likely to play a part in my tale than exaggeration. As a matter of policy, I am determined to damp down, to play down, to pipe down. I am a man of the twentieth century as much as anyone else.

Of course when it comes to carrying conviction, I make a bad start by being an author. "After all, he is an author!" I remember my grandmother saying when I anxiously questioned her about a particularly improbable tale Maurice Hewlett had told at her tea party that afternoon. I daresay it is precisely because I have sometimes made small sums of money with my pen that I have not related before now this story that is true.

And really with my pen. With this very pen in fact; and I was using the same pen when a year or two after the war (the real war-the first one), I took up my abode at the top of a house in Brandenburg Square. Fountain pens could then be had that were designed, positively, to last at least one lifetime.

I have faintly disguised the address because it is potentially libellous to designate a named house as haunted. I believe mine to be the narrative of a haunted man rather than of a haunted house, but after so many lawsuits, albeit mostly successful, I wish to avoid even a remote risk of another one.

I had the run of three small, dusty rooms, sketchily furnished, on the third floor. Hot in summer, cold in winter, they had been intended for servants' bedrooms. In one of them had lately been installed some inexpensive cooking and was.h.i.+ng-up apparatus. In a former cupboard or glory-hole had been lodged an equally inexpensive bath and water-closet; to both of which the supply of water percolated but irregularly.

My father had been killed. My mother had almost no resources beyond the consequent pension. I was an only child and knew myself open to criticism for not taking a job, living at home, and handing over the proceeds. But my mother never did criticize, and I believed that I could at least make enough to pay my small rent and maintain myself. I was remarkably sanguine, but so, in the event, it worked out. I was never once in arrears, and never once reduced to living for a week or a month or a year on nothing but bread and margarine, as have been so many poets. That was partly, of course, because I never set up to write poetry: the basic bread and b.u.t.ter of my income was provided by the odd employment of going over other people's p.o.r.nographic ma.n.u.scripts and turning them into saleable books. As p.o.r.nography is no longer as badly thought of as it was, I can mention that this work was given me by a man named Major Valentine. In any case, he is now dead; though I maintained touch with him almost until the end, partly because I was grateful to him for having kept me alive and enabled me to go my own way during such a critical period.

Major Valentine had been a comrade of my father's in the trenches. I first met him when he came to visit my mother after it was all over. He turned up one day, still in a "trench coat", and in the course of conversation remarked that the war had changed many people's ideas about the sort of books they wanted to read, and that he was going to put his gratuity into setting up as a publisher. I was eighteen at the time and I was pretty certain that there was an unbridgeable gulf between the amount of a major's gratuity and the topless tower of phantom gold needed even by the wariest of publishers. I knew a little about it because already I was set upon being a writer myself, and took the current Writers and Artist's Year Book to bed with me nightly until my bloodstream had absorbed all it had to teach or hint at. But naturally I said nothing, because in those days boys did not venture to carp at mature men, let alone when the mature men were war heroes also; and I was rewarded by being offered an "editor's" job there and then, no doubt in part as tribute to my father's memory and my mother's obvious problems. The American term "editor" was not then commonly used in the context of publis.h.i.+ng, and my father's friend was already displaying how modern he intended to be. Before the war he had been a free-lance journalist. He actually so described himself to me, possibly because he claimed also to have made a success of it, which is most uncommon.

I had been cheaply and indifferently educated in the formal sense, and against a stressful and impecunious home life. Fortunately for me, formal education counts little for most artists (and, according to my experience, less than is commonly supposed for most other people). Though I wanted "to write", I had little idea of how to earn money at it-and a complete mental blank, with unpleasant elements of panic, whenever I thought about trying to earn money at anything else. Valentine made it clear that he was not yet in a position to offer enough to maintain me; but I clutched with joy and relief at the proffered regularity of his pittance, explained myself to my mother that same evening (Major Valentine could not stay to supper, and it was just as well), and was set up within the month in Brandenburg Square.

Valentine was never in a position to pay me much more than he paid me at the outset; but I beavered soberly around, and wrote increasingly persuasive letters, so that other jobs came in, a usefully wide variety of them, perhaps, when I came to writing my own first novel.

Major Valentine's subsequent career may as well be disposed of now: p.o.r.nography is never-I think I may say never-as lucrative as it seems likely to be (I refer to the p.o.r.nography that is recognized as such), and within three or four years Valentine turned to schoolmastering and then went back to the army as an instructor. In the end, he married. It was rather late in life, by the usual standard: but he married a woman who was older than he was, none the less, and she seemed to make him very happy-or perhaps keep him so, as he always seemed a happy person by nature. I went to visit them on several occasions, and certainly Valentine was living in very much better style than ever before when I had known him. Moreover, he was now a lieutenant-colonel. I suppose he had taken up with the Territorials. He was even fortunate in the manner of his death, which was in a fis.h.i.+ng incident, and, they said, instantaneous.

When I took possession of my Brandenburg Square attic, there were two tenants below me.

On the second floor was the office of a political weekly named Freedom. Though appearing in English, it seemed to be produced by a staff composed entirely of foreigners, some of whom appeared to have difficulty even with conventionalities about the weather or the staircase cleaning when I chanced to run into them on their landing. A surprisingly large number and variety of them were encountered by me during the six months or so we were in the building together. I wondered how the paper could maintain them all, especially as it was hard to believe it had much sale among the general public. From time to time I used to extract copies from the waste sacks left out at night.

In the bas.e.m.e.nt of the building lived a young man and woman of mildly intellectual aspect. At that time, however, the man worked in the local branch of a well-known provisions chain; and the woman had a part-time job with a credit bookmaker. These dispositions were consequent upon their having four children and, therefore, little margin.

Even the very smallest of the children, none the less, had reached some kind of age for schooling; and the young wife used to flit up to my attic in the afternoon for a cup of coffee and a talk after her return from the bookmaker's establishment and before her departure to collect the child.

At first, I was not too keen. I was scrupulous about her position as a married woman living in the same house. Moreover, her visits soon became more and more frequent, almost daily; while at the same time I noticed that she always refused to commit herself about the day following, which I thought vaguely sinister. I fancied I owed it to myself to object a little to being interrupted in the course of composition (or editors.h.i.+p). Needless to say, none of this reserve availed for much or for long. It was no more than the subjective initial slowness or protest of the youthful male, respectably reared. Soon I was looking forward to this woman's visits so much that my morning's work suffered noticeably; and regretting in an entirely different way her continuing refusal to say whether tomorrow she would be back. "I simply can't tell you," she would reply. "We must make the most of the present." But her putting it like that helped to make it difficult for me to do so. Her name was Maureen. The name of her husband was Gilbert. Once she asked me to visit their place after the evening meal, but it could hardly be expected to be a success. The husband just sat there, worn out after a hot day in the provisions shop, and reading the New Statesman; and two or three of the children were old enough to stay up and ask questions and fall about. We never tried it again, I think.

The ground and first floors of the building were originally unlet, but that could not be expected to continue for very long now that the country was getting back on to its feet again. All the doors on to the hall and staircase were kept locked, and Maureen used to complain that it made the house seem depressing. I told her that it made for peace and quiet, but I appreciated that peace and quiet were not what Maureen was princ.i.p.ally looking for, despite the hullaballoo of four small children in a not very large flat. One day I observed her in conversation with the window cleaners who swilled away once a month at the outsides of the never opened sashes. Of course they were glad of a few words with a pretty housewife having time on her hands. "They say there's nothing inside but emptiness," Maureen told me later. I made no comment, but filled in by kissing her hair or something of the kind. Maureen had at that time rather droopy hair, possibly owing to lack of vitamins during the war; which she kept off her brow with a big tortoisesh.e.l.l slide. Her brow was really beautiful, and so were her eyes. They had that gentle look of being unequal to life, which, as I later realized, always attracts me in a woman.

One night the numerous office staff of Freedom did not depart at the usual hour; and, as late as ten or eleven o'clock, looking over my banister, I saw them still heaving and rolling great packages on the landing below. They were being very quiet about it as far as conversation went: not at all like foreigners, one felt. Obviously, there was a crisis, but for that very reason I felt it unkind to probe. In bed, I was kept awake not merely by the stolid thumping downstairs but also by the likelihood that the crisis was one affecting the whole building and the harmless, neutral way of life we had all worked out within it. Conceivably it was my first clear apprehension of the truth that is the foundation of wisdom: the truth that change of its nature is for the worse, the little finger (or thick gripping thumb) of mortality's cold paw.

And, duly, the next day the builders moved in. They actually woke me up with their singing, whistling, jostling, rowing, and other customary noises. They were in for an endless three weeks (though nowadays it would be six or nine); and, as serious work became impossible, I moved back to my mother's cottage for a spell, my first of more than a night or two since I had gone to London. The day of my departure was the first time also, as I well remember, that I kissed Maureen full and pa.s.sionately on the lips. I had feared, if I may be honest, to commit myself so far: with Maureen's husband and children in permanent residence just below me, to say nothing of my own narrow circ.u.mstances. Now the break in my regime seemed to make it less of a commitment. It was not a very sympathetic way of seeing things perhaps, but the options are so greatly fewer than people like to think.

When I reached the cottage, I found it impossible to work in the little bedroom that was always reserved for me, as the gravel lane outside was being "metalled" and widened. Even in the small sitting-room facing the other way, the noise was disturbing, and I had to throw the Daily Chronicle over work sent me by Valentine, every time I heard my mother's step, which was frequently, as she was solicitous and would have liked to keep me with her. In the end, the rumbling, indecisive steamroller, the clanking tar-boiler, the roadmenders more loudly jocund than Michael Fairless, withdrew to agitate other households, to diminish the more distant hedgerow. "Do stop as long as you can," said my mother.

Maureen had told me, before I left, that our ground, first, and second floors had all been made the subject of a single new letting. She had a way of picking up such things. She did not know whether the Freedom people had been actually driven out. It was impossible to believe that the enterprise could have much future in any case; and, indeed, I never heard of it again after that late sad night of removal and retreat, nor saw a copy of the paper on any bookstall or barrow.

In the end, I went to London for the morning in order to prospect. The whole front of the house had had its woodwork repainted, partly in blue, partly in white; including my two small square attic windows that looked on to the street. The early nineteenth-century front door had been brightly blued, and, to the left of it, at shoulder-height on the whited jamb, was an unusually large bra.s.s plate: Stallabra.s.s, Hoskins and Cramp. Chartered Accountants. The plate needed polis.h.i.+ng, possibly because it had only just arrived from elsewhere.

It was the time of day when Maureen was working with her bookmaker. I let myself in and mounted towards my abode. The internal paintwork had been renewed from top to bottom, though rather roughly, as was to be expected so soon after the war, and in crude colours. The staircase walls had been repapered in an a.s.sertive mid-green. There was even a mottled carpet, where before there had been dark lino and unravelling drugget. It occurred to me that the heterogeneous impression might be a consequence of drawing upon stock-ends sold off (in this moment of world historical renewal) at bargain prices. There was no one about, and all the doors were closed, and everything was silent. At least, and at last, the builders were out.

My own front door contained a letter-box, though no postman had in my time ever ascended to it, all our letters being left on a shaky shelf in the ground floor pa.s.sage. Now I found a billet-doux marked "By Hand": the agents were upset because I had not been there to admit the decorators. Would I please call in at their office as soon as possible? I never did anything more about that and nor did the agents. The building belonged to a vague charitable foundation which supported a school for needy boys. The school had been moved out of London before my time and the offices of the foundation with it. I had not found the agents to be over-officious. It had been one of the attractions.