Adventures in the Skin Trade Read online

  “Your photograph has been taken.” Immortalized in a moment, she shopped along forever between the cut-glass vase with the permanent flowers and the box of hairpins, buttons, screws, empty shampoo packets, cotton-reels, flypaper, cigarette cards. At nearly two in the morning she hurried down Chapel Street against a backcloth of trilbies and burberries going the other way, umbrellas rising to the first drops of the rain a month ago, the sightless faces of people who would always be strangers hanging half-developed behind her, and the shadows of the shopping center of the sprawling, submerged town. He could hear her shoes click on the tramrails. He could see, beneath the pastelled silk scarf, the round metal badge of Mrs. Rosser’s Society, and the grandmother’s cameo brooch on the vee of the knitted clover jumper.

  The clock chimed and struck two. Samuel put out his hand and took up the strip of snaps, Then he tore it into pieces. The whole of her dead, comfortable face remained on one piece, and he tore it across the cheeks, up through the chins, and into the eyes.

  The pom growled in a nightmare, and showed his little teeth. “Lie down, Tinker. Go to sleep, boy.” He put the pieces in his pyjama pocket.

  Then there was the framed photograph of his sister by the clock. He destroyed her in one movement, and, with the ripping of her set smile and the crumpling of her bobbed head into a ball, down went the Girls’ School and the long-legged, smiling colts with their black knickers and bows; the hockey-legged girls who laughed behind their hands as they came running through the gates when he passed, went torn and ruined into his pyjama pocket; they vanished, broken, into the porch and lay in pieces against his heart. Stanley Road, where the Girls’ School stood, would never know him again. Down you go, Peggy, he whispered to his sister, with all the long legs and the Young Liberals’ dances, and the boys you brought home for supper on Sunday evenings and Lionel you kissed in the porch. He is a solicitor now. When I was eleven years old and you were seventeen I heard you, from my bedroom, playing the “Desert Song.” People were downstairs all over the world.

  Most of the history sheets on the table were already marked and damned in his father’s violet writing. With a lump of coal from the dead fire, Samuel marked them again, rubbing the coal hard over the careful corrections, drawing legs and breasts in the margins, smudging out the names and form numbers. History is lies. Now take Queen Elizabeth. Go ahead, take Alice Phillips, take her into the shrubbery. She was the headmaster’s daughter. Take old Bennet and whip him down the corridors, stuff his mouth with dates, dip his starched collar in his marking ink and hammer his teeth back into his prim, bald, boring head with his rap-across-the-knuckle ruler. Spin Mr. Nicholson on his tellurion until his tail drops off. Tell Mr. Parsons his wife has been seen coming out of the Compass piggyback on a drunk sailor, catching pennies in her garters. It’s as true as History.

  On the last sheet he signed his name several times under a giant pinman with three legs. He did not scribble on the top sheet. At a first glance was no sign of interference. Then he threw the coal into the grate. Dust drifted up in a cloud, and settled down again on the pom’s back.

  If only he could shout at the ceiling now, at the dark circle made by the gas, at the cracks and lines that had always been the same faces and figures, two bearded men chasing an animal over a mountain edge, a kneeling woman with faces on her knees: Come and look at Samuel Bennet destroying his parents’ house in Mortimer Street, off Stanley’s Grove, he will never be allowed to come back. Mrs. Baxter, have a dekko from under the cold sheets: Mr. Baxter, who worked in the Harbor Trust Office, can never come back either. Mrs. Probert Chestnuts, your billygoat is gone, leaving a hairy space in the bed; Mr. Bell the lodger coughs all night under his gamp; your son cannot sleep, he is counting his gentlemen’s three and eleven-three halfhose jumping over the tossed blankets. Samuel shouted under his breath, “Come and see me destroying the evidence, Mrs. Rosser, have a peep from under your hairnet. I have seen your shadow on the blind as you undressed, I was watching by the lamppost next to the dairy, disappeared under a tent and came out slim and humped and black. I am the only gooseberry in Stanley’s Grove who knows that you are a black woman with a hump. Mr. Rosser married to a camel, every one is mad and bad in his box when the blinds are pulled, come and see me break the china without any noise so that I can never come back.

  “Hush,” he said to himself, “I know you.”

  He opened the door of the china pantry. The best plates shone in rows, a willow tree next to an ivied castle, baskets of solid flowers on top of fruits and flower-coiled texts. Tureens were piled on one shelf, on another the salad-bowls, the finger-bowls, the toast-racks spelling Porthcawl and Baby, the trifle-dishes, the heirloom mustache-cup. The afternoon tea-service was brittle as biscuits and had gold rims. He cracked two saucers together, and the horn-curved spout of the teapot came off in his hand. In five minutes he had broken the whole set. “Let all the daughters of Mortimer Street come in and see me,” he whispered in the close pantry: the pale young girls who help at home, calculating down the pavement to the rich-smelling shops, screwing up their straight, dry hair in their rooms at the top of the house; their blood is running through them like salt. And I hope the office girls knock on the door with the stubs of their fingers, tap out Sir or Madam on the glass porch, the hard, bright babies who never go too far. You can hear them in the lane behind the post office as you tiptoe along, they are saying, “So he said and I said and he said and Oh yeah I said,” and the just male voices are agreeing softly. Shoo them in out of snoring Stanley’s Grove, I know they are sleeping under the sheets up to their fringes in wishes. Beryl Gee is marrying the Chamber of Commerce in a pepper-and-salt church. Mrs. Mayor’s Chain, Madame Cocked Hat, Lady Settee, I am breaking tureens in the cupboard under the stairs.

  A tureen-cover dropped from his hand and smashed.

  He waited for the sound of his mother waking. No one stirred upstairs. “Tinker did it,” he said aloud, but the harsh noise of his voice drove him back into silence. His fingers became so cold and numb he knew he could not lift up another plate to break it.

  “What are you doing?” he said to himself at last, in a cool, flat voice. “Leave the Street alone. Let it sleep.”

  Then he closed the pantry door.

  “What are you doing, ranting away?”

  Even the dog had not been wakened.

  “Ranting away,” he said.

  He would have to be quick now. The accident in the cupboard had made him tremble so much that he could hardly tear up the bills he found in the sideboard drawer and scatter them under the sofa. His sister’s crochetwork was too difficult to destroy, the doilies and the patterned tea-cosies were hard as rubber. He pulled them apart the best he could, and wedged them up the chimney.

  “These are such small things,” he said. “I should break the windows and stuff the cushions with the glass.” He saw his round soft face in the mirror under the Mona Lisa. “But you won’t,” he said, turning away, “you’re afraid of the noise.” He turned back to his reflection. “It isn’t that. You’re afraid she’ll cut her hands.”

  He burnt the edge of his mother’s sunshade at the gas-mantle, and felt the tears running down his cheeks and dropping onto his pyjama collar.

  Even in the first moment of his guilt and shame, he rememberered to put out his tongue and taste the track of the tears. Still crying, he said, “It’s salt. It’s very salt. Just like in my poems.”

  He went upstairs in the dark, with the candle shaking, past the box-room to his own room, and locked the door on the inside. He put out his hands and touched the walls and his bed. Good morning and goodbye, Mrs. Baxter. His window, facing her bedroom, was open to the windless, starless early morning, but he could not hear her breathe or sleep. All the houses were quiet. The street was a close grave. The Rossers and the Proberts and the Bennets were still and safe and deep in their separate silences. His head touched the pillow, but he knew that he could not sleep again. His eyes closed.

  Come down i
nto my arms, for I shan’t sleep, girls asleep on all sides in the attics and spare rooms of the square, red houses with the bay windows looking out on the trees behind the railings. I know your rooms like the backs of my hands, like the backs of your heads in the pictures when you are leaning over onto the next-door shoulders. I shan’t sleep again. Tomorrow, today, I am going away by the 7:15 train, with ten pounds and a new suitcase. Lay your curling-pins on my pillow, the alarm at six-thirty will hurry you back to draw the blinds and light the fires before the rest come down. Come down quickly, the Bennets’ house is melting. I can hear you breathe, I can hear Mrs. Baxter turn in a dream. Oh, the milkmen are waking!

  He was asleep with his hat on still, and his hands clenched.

  2

  The family awoke before six o’clock. He heard them, from a sunken half-sleep, bothering on the landing. They would be in dressing gowns, stale-eyed and with ragged hair. Peggy might have put two blushes on her cheeks. The family rushed in and out of the bathroom, never stopping to wash, and collided on the narrow top of the stairs as they nagged and bustled to get him ready. He let himself sink deeper until the waves broke round his head again, and the lights of a city spun and shone through the eyes of women walking in his last remembered dream. From the lapping distance he heard his father shout like a man on the opposite shore:

  “Have you put the sponge bag in, Hilda?”

  “Of course I have,” she answered from the kitchen.

  Don’t let her look in the china-pantry. Samuel prayed among the women walking like lampposts. She never uses the best china for breakfast.

  “All right, all right, I just asked.”

  “Where’s his new hairbrush?”

  “That’s right, shout my head off. Here it is. How can I give it to you if you’re in the kitchen. It’s the brush with the initials—S.B.”

  “I know his initials.”

  “Mother, does he want all these vests? You know he never uses them.”

  “It’s January, Peggy.”

  “She knows it’s January, Hilda. You haven’t got to tell the neighbours. Can you smell something burning?”

  “It’s only mother’s sunshade,” Samuel said in the locked bedroom.

  He dressed and went down. The gas in the breakfast room was on again. His mother was boiling an egg for him on the gas-stove. “We’ll have our breakfast later,” she said, “you mustn’t miss the train. Did you sleep well?”

  “No burglars last night, Sam,” his father said.

  His mother brought the egg in. “You can’t expect them every night.”

  Peggy and his father sat down in front of the empty grate.

  “What do you think you’ll do first when you get there, Sam?” said Peggy.

  “He’ll get himself a nice room, of course, not too central. And don’t have an Irish landlady.” His mother brushed his collar as he ate. “Go and get yourself settled straightaway, that’s the important thing.”

  “I’ll get myself settled.”

  “Don’t forget to look under the wallpaper for bugs.”

  “That’s enough of that, Peggy. Sam knows a clean place when he sees one.”

  He saw himself knocking at a lodging-house in the very centre of the city, and an Irishwoman appearing at the door. “Good morning, madam, have you a cheap room?” “Cheaper than sunlight to you, Danny Boy.” She would not be more than twenty-one. “Has it got bugs?” “All over the walls, praise be to God." "I’ll take it.”

  “I’ll know what I’m doing,” he said to his mother.

  “Jenkins’ motor isn’t here yet,” Peggy said. “Perhaps there’s a puncture.”

  If he doesn’t come soon, they’ll notice everything. I’ll cut my throat on a piece of china.

  “Remember to call on Mrs. Chapman. Give her all our love from 42.”

  “I’ll call on her tomorrow, Mother.”

  The taxi drew up outside. The corners of bedroom blinds would be lifted all over the street.

  “Here’s your wallet. Don’t put it in your handkerchief pocket now. You never know when you’ll be wanting to blow your nose.”

  “You’ll be scattering largesse,” Peggy said. She kissed him on the forehead.

  Remind me to wipe it off in the cab.

  “You’re kissing the editor of the Times now,” said his mother.

  “Well, not quite that, Sam. Not yet, eh?” His father said, “Rungs of the ladder,” and then looked away.

  “Write tomorrow morning sharp. Send us the news.”

  “You send me your news, too. Mr. Jenkins is blowing his horn.”

  “Better than blowing your trumpet,” Peggy said. “And there’s never any news in Mortimer Street.”

  You wait, slyboots. Wait till the flames touch the doilie with the herons on it.

  He came down to pat Tinker.

  “Come on, don’t fuss over the old dog, he’s all fleas. It’s gone seven.”

  Peggy was opening the door of the taxi for him. His father shook him by the hand. His mother kissed him on the mouth.

  “Goodbye, Mortimer Street,” he said, and the cab was off. “Goodbye, Stanley’s Grove.”

  Through the back window he saw three strangers waving. He pulled down the blind.

  3

  Sitting with his bag in the lavatory of the moving train, for all the compartments were full, he read through his notebook and tore out the pages in order. He was dressed in a brand-new brown tweed overcoat, a brown townsuit, a white starched shirt with a woolen tie and a tiepin, and black, shining shoes. He had put his hard brown hat in the washbasin. Here was Mrs. Chapman’s address next to the telephone number of a Mr. Hewson who was going to introduce him to a man who worked on a newspaper; and under these the address of the Literary Institute that had once awarded him a guinea for a poem in a competition: “Will Shakespeare at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior.” He tore the page out. Then the name and address, in red ink, of a collected poet who had written him a letter thanking him for a sonnet-sequence. And a page of names that might help.

  The lavatory door half opened, and he shut it quickly with his foot.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  Hear her apologizing down the corridor, full as an egg. She could turn every handle the whole length of the train, and in every closet a fully-clothed man would be sitting with his foot against the door, lost and alone in the long, moving house on wheels, travelling in silence with no windows, at sixty miles an hour racing to another place that did not want him, never at home wherever the train stopped. The handle turned again, and Samuel coughed somebody away.

  The last page of the notebook was the only one he kept. Under a drawing of a girl with long hair dancing into an address, he had written: Lucille Harris. A man he met on the Promenade had said as they sat on a bench, looking at the legs passing: “She’s okay. She’s a girl I know. She’s the best in the world, she’ll take care of you. Give her a call when you’re up. Tell her you’re Austin’s friend.” That page he placed in his wallet between two one-pound notes.

  The rest of the pages he picked up from the floor, bunched together, and threw down between his legs into the bowl. Then he pulled the chain. Down went the helping names, the influential numbers, the addresses that could mean so much, into the round, roaring sea and onto the rails. Already they were lost a mile behind, blowing over the track now, over the glimpses of hedges into the lightning-passing fields.

  Home and help were over. He had eight pounds ten and Lucille Harris’ address. “Many people have begun worse,” he said aloud. “I am ignorant, lazy, dishonest, and sentimental, I have the pull over nobody.”

  The handle turned again.

  “I bet you’re dancing,” he said to the person on the other side of the locked door.

  Footsteps pattered away down the train.

  First of all, when I reach there, I’ll have a Bass and a stale sandwich, he decided. I’ll take them to a table in a corner, brush off the cakecrumbs with my hat, and prop my book against the crue
t. I must have all the details right at the beginning. The rest must come by accident. I’ll be sitting there before noon, cool and calm, my hat on my knees, my glass in my hand, looking not a day under twenty, pretending to read and spying from the corners of my eyes at the waiting, drinking, restless people busily alone at the counter. The other tables will be crowded. There will be women, beckoning without moving, over their cold coffee; old, anonymous men with snuff on their cheeks, trembling over tea; quiet men expecting no one from the trains they wait for eagerly every hour; women who have come to run away, to take a train to St. Ives or Liverpool or anywhere, but who know they will never take any train and are drinking cups of tea and saying to themselves, “I could be catching the twelve o’clock but I’ll wait for the quarter past”; women from the country with dozens of children coming undone; shop girls, office girls, street girls, people who have nothing worse to do, all the unhappy, happy in chains, bewildered foreign men and women in the station buffet of the city I know from cover to cover.

  The door rattled. “You there,” a voice said outside. “You’ve been there for hours.”

  He turned on the hot water tap. It spurted cold water into the basin before he could take his hat out. “I’m a director of the company,” he said, but his voice sounded weak to him and without assurance.

  When the footsteps had faded again, he gathered up his cases and walked out of the lavatory and down the corridor. Standing outside a first-class compartment, he saw a man and a ticket-inspector come to the door and hammer on it. They did not try the handle.