The Other Side of a Frontier, page 3
‘This is more embarrassing than I thought,’ she said.
‘I am very sorry,’ I said. ‘Actually I am in favour of snobbery, it is a sign of character. It’s a bad thing to have, but it’s a bad thing not to have had. You can’t help having the diseases of your time.’
‘There you go,’ she said.
The suffering of others is incredible. When it is obscure it seems like a lie; when it is garish and raw, it is like boasting. It is a challenge to oneself. I got up from my chair and went towards her. I was going to kiss her.
‘You are the sentimental type,’ she said.
So I didn’t kiss her.
Then we heard someone passing the bungalow and she went to the window. Thompson was going by. The lock of black hair was curling over his sweating forehead and he gave a hesitant staggering look at the bungalow. There was a lump of fear on his face.
‘He’d better not know where you’ve been,’ she said. She moved her lips to be kissed, but I walked out.
I was glad of the steady sense of the fresh grey air when I got outside. I was angry and depressed. I stood at the window of my house. Thompson came in and was very talkative. He’d been lost, of course. He’d seen people. He’d seen fields. He’d heard trees. He’d seen roads. I hardly listened. I was used to the jerky wobbling voice. I caught the words ‘legion’ and ‘temptation’, and thought he was quoting from the Bible. Presently I realized he was talking about the British Legion. The postman had asked him to go to a meeting of the British Legion that night. How simple other people’s problems are! Yet ‘No’ Thompson was saying. He was not going to the British Legion. It was temptation.
I ought to have made love to her and kissed her, I was thinking. She was right, I was a prig.
‘You go,’ I said to Thompson, ‘if you want to. You’d enjoy it.’
But how disgusting, obvious, stupid, to have made love to her then, I thought.
‘Do as you like,’ I said.
‘I’m best alongside you,’ said Thompson.
‘You can’t always be by me,’ I said. ‘In a month, perhaps less, as you know, I’ll be leaving here and you’ll have to go.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You tol’ me. You been straight. I’ll be straight with you. I won’t go to the Legion.’
We ate our meal and I read.
‘In every branch of our spiritual and material civilization we seem to have reached a turning point,’ I read. ‘This spirit shows itself not only in the actual state of public affairs …’
Well, I thought, I can ask her over tonight, I needn’t be a fool twice. I went out for an hour. When I returned, Thompson was fighting Temptation hard. If he went to the Legion how would he get back? No, best not. He took the Legion on in its strength. (She is a type, I thought.) At four he was still at it. At five he asked me for his money. (Well, we are all types, I was thinking.) Very shortly he brought the money back and asked me to keep his pension papers. At half past six I realized this meant that Thompson was losing and the Legion and all its devils winning. (What is a prig, anyway?) He was looking out at the night. Yet, just when I thought he had lost, he had won. There was the familiar sound of the Wild West monologue in the kitchen. It was half past eight. The Legion was defeated.
I was disappointed in Thompson. Really, not to have had more guts than that! Restlessly I looked out of the window. There was a full moon spinning on the tail of a dying wind. Under the moonlight the fields were like wide-awake faces, the woods like womanish heads of hair upon them. I put on my hat and coat and went out. I was astonished by the circle of stars. They were as distinct as figures on a clock. I took out my watch and compared the small time in my hand with the wide time above. Then I walked on. There was a sour smell at the end of the wood, where, no doubt, a dead rabbit or pigeon was rotting.
I came out of the wood onto the metalled road. Suddenly my heart began to beat quickly as I hurried down the road, but it was a long way round now. I cut across fields. There was a cottage and a family were listening to a dance-band on the wireless. A man was going the rounds of his chickens. There was a wheelbarrow and there were spades and steel bars where a water mill was being built.
Then I crossed the last fields and saw the bungalow. My heart throbbed heavily and I felt all my blood slow down and my limbs grow heavy. It was only when I got to the road that I saw there were no lights in the bungalow. The colonel’s daughter, the sergeant’s daughter, had gone to bed early like a child. While I stood I heard men’s voices singing across the fields. It must have gone ten o’clock and people were coming out of the public house. In all the villages of England, at this hour, loud-voiced groups were breaking up and dispersing into the lanes.
I got to my house and lit a candle. The fire was low. I was exhausted and happy to be in my house among my own things, as if I had got into my own skin again. There was no light in the kitchen. Thompson had gone to bed. I grinned at the thought of the struggles of poor Thompson. I picked up a book and read. I could hear still the sound of that shouting and singing. The beer was sour and flat in this part of the country, but it made people sing.
The singing voices came nearer. I put down the book. An argument was going on in the lane. I listened. The argument was nearing the cottage. The words got louder. They were going on at my gate. I heard the gate go and the argument was on my path. Suddenly – there could be no doubt – people were coming to the door. I stood up, I could recognize no voice. Loud singing, stumbling feet, then bang! The door broke open and crashed against the wall. Tottering, drunk, with their arms round each other, Thompson and the colonel’s daughter nearly fell into the room.
Thompson stared at me with terror.
‘Stand up, sailor,’ said the colonel’s daughter, clinging to him.
‘He was lonely,’ she said unsteadily to me. ‘We’ve been playing gramophone records. Sing,’ she said.
Thompson was still staring.
‘Don’t look at him. Sing,’ she said. Then she gave a low laugh and they fell bolt upright on the sofa like prim, dishevelled dolls.
A look of wild love of all the world came into Thompson’s eyes and he smiled as I had never seen him smile before. He suddenly opened his twitching mouth and bawled:
‘You’ve robbed every tailor,
And you’ve skinned every sailor,
But you won’t go walking Paradise Street no more.’
‘Go on. That’s not all,’ the colonel’s daughter cried and sang: ‘Go on – something – something, deep and rugged shore.’
She put her arms round his neck and kissed him. He gaped at her with panic and looked at her skirt. It was undone.
He pointed at her leg in consternation. The sight sobered him. He pulled away his arms and rushed out of the room. He did not come back. She looked at me and giggled. Her eyes were warm and shining. She picked leaves off her skirt.
‘Where’s he gone? Where’s he gone?’ she kept asking.
‘He’s gone to bed,’ I said.
She started a fit of coughing. It strained her throat. Her eyes were dilated like an animal’s caught in a trap, and she held her hand to her chest.
‘I wish,’ she cried hysterically, pointing at me in the middle of her coughing, ‘I wish you could see your bloody face.’
She got up and called out: ‘Thompson! Thompson!’ And when he did not answer she sang out: ‘Down by the deep and rugged shore – ore-ore-ore.’
‘What’s the idea?’ I said.
‘I want Thompson,’ she said. ‘He’s the only man up here.’
Then she began to cry. She marched out to his room, but it was locked. She was wandering through the other rooms calling him and then she went away, away up the path. She went calling him all the way down to her bungalow.
In the morning Thompson appeared as usual. He brought the breakfast. He came in for ‘orders’. Grilled chop, did I think? And what about spotted dick? He seemed no worse. He behaved as though nothing had happened. There was no guilty look in his eyes and no apprehension. He made no apology. Lunch passed, teatime, and the day. I finished my work and went into the kitchen.
‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘about last night.’
Thompson was peeling potatoes. He used to do this into a bucket on the floor, as if he were peeling for a whole crew. He put down the clasp-knife and stood up. He looked worried.
‘That was a terrible thing,’ Thompson said, as if it was something he had read about in the papers. ‘Terrible, sir. A young lady like that, sir. To come over here for me, an educated lady like that. Someone oughter teach her a lesson. Coming over and saying she wanted to play some music. I was took clean off my guard. It wasn’t right,’ said Thompson. ‘Whichever way you look at it, it wasn’t right. I told her she’d messed me up.’
‘I’m not blaming you. I want to know.’
‘And she waited till you was out,’ Thompson said. ‘That’s not straight. She may class herself as an educated young lady, but do you know what I reckon she is? I reckon she’s a jane.’
I went down to the bungalow. I was beginning to laugh now. She was in the garden digging. Her sleeves were rolled up and she was sweating over the fork. The beds were thick with leaves and dead plants. I stood there watching her. She looked at me nervously for a moment. ‘I’m making the garden tidy,’ she said. ‘For Monday. When the bitch comes down.’
She was shy and awkward. I walked on and, looking back, saw her go into the house. It was the last I ever saw of her. When I came back, the fork she had been using was stuck in the flower bed where she had left it. She went to London that night and did not return.
‘Thank Gawd,’ Thompson said.
There was a change in Thompson after this and there was a change in me. Perhaps the change came because the dirty February days were going, the air softer and the year moving. I was leaving soon. Thompson mentioned temptation no more. Now he went out every day. The postman was his friend. They used to go to the pub. He asked for his money. In the public house the labourers sat around muttering in a language Thompson didn’t understand. He stood them drinks. At his first pint he would start singing. They encouraged him. He stood them more drinks. The postman ordered them for him and then tapped him on the pocket book. They emptied his pockets every night. They despised him and even brought complaints to me about him after they had emptied his pockets.
Thompson came back across the Common alone, wild, enthusiastic, and moaning with suspicion by turns. The next day he would have a mood. All the countryside for ten miles round knew the sailor. He became famous.
Our last week came. He quietened down.
‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.
‘I’ll stay by you.’
‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘I’ll be going abroad.’ ‘You needn’t pay me,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay by you.’ It was hard to make him understand he could not stay with me. He was depressed.
‘Get me out of here safe,’ he pleaded at last. ‘Come with me to the station.’ He could not go on his own because all the people he knew would be after him. He had told them he was going. He had told them I was saving his pension and his last fortnight’s pay. They would come creeping out of cottage doors and ditches for him. So I packed his things and got a taxi to call for us. How slowly we had lived and moved in these fields and lanes! Now we broke through it all with a rush as the car dropped down the hill and the air blew in at the window. As we passed the bungalow with the sun on its empty windows, I saw the fork standing in the neglected bed. Then we swept on. Thompson sat back in the car so that no one should see him, but I leaned forward to see everything for the last time and forget it.
We got to the town. As the taxi slowed down in the streets, people looked out of shops, doors; a potman nodded from the pub.
‘Whatcha, Jack,’ the voices called.
The police, the fishmonger, boys going to school, dozens of people waved to him. I might have been riding with royalty. At the station a large woman sweeping down the steps of the bank straightened up and gave a shout.
‘Hi, Jacko!’ she called, bending double, went into shrieks of laughter and called across to a friend at a first-floor window. It was a triumph. But Thompson ignored them all. He sat back out of sight.
‘Thank Gawd I’ve got you,’ he said. ‘They skin you of everything.’
We sat in the train. It was a two-hour journey.
‘Once I strike Whitechapel,’ he said in the voice of one naming Singapore, ‘I’ll be OK.’ He said this several times, averting his face from the passing horror of the green fields.
‘Don’t you worry,’ he said. ‘Don’t fret yourself for me. Don’t you worry.’ His optimism increased as mine dwindled as we got nearer London. By the time we reached London he was almost shouting. ‘I’ll fall on my feet, don’t you worry. I’ll send you my address.’
We stood on the kerb and I watched him walk off into the yellow rain and the clogged, grunting, and mewing traffic. He stepped right into it without looking. Taxis braked to avoid him. He was going to walk to Whitechapel. He reckoned it was safer.
Things as They Are
Two middle-class women were talking at half past eleven in the morning in the empty bar of a suburban public house in a decaying district. It was a thundery and smoky morning in the summer and the traffic fumes did not rise from the street.
‘Please, Frederick,’ said Mrs Forster, a rentier who spoke in a small, scented Edwardian voice. ‘Two more large gins. What were you saying, Margaret?’
‘The heat last night, Jill. I tossed and I turned. I couldn’t sleep – and when I can’t sleep I scratch,’ said Margaret in her wronged voice. She was a barmaid and this was her day off.
Mrs Forster drank and nodded.
‘I think,’ said Margaret, ‘I mean I don’t mean anything rude, but I had a flea.’
Mrs Forster put her grey head a little on one side and nodded again graciously under a flowered hat, like royalty.
‘A flea, dear?’ she said fondly.
Margaret’s square mouth buckled after her next drink and her eyes seemed to be clambering frantically, like a pair of blatant prisoners behind her heavy glasses. Envy, wrong, accusation, were her life. Her black hair looked as though it had once belonged to an employer.
‘I mean,’ she began to shout against her will, and Frederick, the elderly barman, moved away from her. ‘I mean I wouldn’t have mentioned it if you hadn’t mentioned it.’
Mrs Forster raised her beautiful arms doubtfully and touched her grey hair at the back and she smiled again.
‘I mean when you mentioned when you had one yesterday you said,’ said Margaret.
‘Oh,’ said Mrs Forster, too polite to differ.
‘Yes, dear, don’t you remember, we were in here – I mean, Frederick! Were we in here yesterday morning, Frederick, Mrs Forster and me…’
Frederick stood upright, handsome, old, and stupid.
‘He’s deaf, the fool, that’s why he left the stage,’ Margaret said, glaring at him, knowing that he heard. ‘Jill, yesterday? Try and remember. You came in for a Guinness. I was having a small port, I mean, or were you on gin?’
‘Oh, gin,’ said Mrs Forster in her shocked, soft, distinguished way, recognizing a word.
‘That was it, then,’ said Margaret, shaking an iron chin up and down four times. ‘It might have hopped.’
‘Hopped,’ nodded Mrs Forster pleasantly.
‘I mean, fleas hop. I don’t mean anything vulgar.’ Margaret spread her hard, long bare arms and knocked her glass. ‘Distances,’ she said. ‘From one place to another place. A flea travels. From here, at this end of the bar, I don’t say to the end, but along or across, I mean it could.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Forster with agreeable interest.
‘Or from a person. I mean, a flea might jump on you – or on me, it might jump from someone else, and then off that person, it depends if they are with someone. It might come off a bus or a tram.’ Margaret’s long arms described these movements and then she brought them back to her lap. ‘It was a large one,’ she said. ‘A brute.’
‘Oh, large?’ said Mrs Forster sympathetically.
‘Not large – I mean it must have been large, I could tell by the bites, I know a small flea, I mean we all do – don’t mind my mentioning it – I had big bites all up my leg,’ said Margaret, stretching out a long, strong leg. Seeing no bites there, she pulled her tight serge skirt up with annoyance over her knee and up her thigh until, halted by the sight of her suspender, she looked angrily at Frederick and furtively at Mrs Forster and pulled her skirt down and held it down.
‘Big as pennies, horrible pink lumps, red, Jill,’ argued Margaret. ‘I couldn’t sleep. Scratching doesn’t make it any better. It wasn’t a London flea, that I know, Jill. I know a London flea, I mean you know a London flea, an ordinary one, small beastly things, I hate them, but this must have been some great black foreign brute, Indian! Frederick! You’ve seen one of those things?’
Frederick went with a small business of finger-flicking to the curtains at the back of the bar, peeped through as if for his cue. All bars were empty.
‘Never,’ he said contemptuously when he came back, and turning his back on the ladies, hummed at the shelves of bottles.
‘It’s easy,’ Margaret began to shout once more, swallowing her gin, shouting at her legs, which kept slipping off the rail of the stool and enraged her by jerking her body, ‘I mean, for them to travel. They get on ships. I mean those ships have been in the tropics, I don’t say India necessarily, it might be in Egypt or Jamaica, a flea could hop off a native onto some sailor in the docks.’
‘You mean, dear, it came up from the docks by bus,’ said Mrs Forster. ‘You caught it on a bus?’
‘No, Jill,’ said Margaret. ‘I mean some sailor brought it up.’
‘Sailor,’ murmured Mrs Forster, going pale.
‘Ted,’ said Margaret, accusing. ‘From Calcutta. Ted could have brought it off his ship.’
Mrs Forster’s head became fixed and still. She gazed mistily at Margaret and swayed. She finished her drink and steadied herself by looking into the bottom of the glass and waited for two more drops to come. Then she raised her small chin and trembled. She held a cigarette at the end of her thumb and her finger as if it were a stick of crayon and she were writing a message in blue smoke in the air. Her eyes closed sleepily, her lips sucked, pouted, and two tears rolled down her cheeks. She opened her large handbag and from the mess of letters, bills, money, keys, purses, and powder inside she took a small handkerchief and dabbed her eyes.
