Eight Stories (New Directions Bibelot) Read online

  ‘I culd have sworn you were a tall man with a little tish,’ said the young man gravely.

  ‘What’s the weapons, Mr. O’Brien?’

  ‘Brandies at dawn, I should think, Mrs. Franklin.’

  ‘I never described Mr. O’Brien to you at all. You’re dreaming!’ Lou whispered. ‘I wish this night could go on for ever.’

  ‘But not here. Not in the bar. In a room with a big bed.’

  ‘A bed in a bar,’ said the old man, ‘if you’ll pardon me hearing you, that’s what I’ve always wanted. Think of it, Mrs. Franklin.’

  The barman bobbed up from behind the counter.

  ‘Time, gentlemen and others!’

  The sober strangers departed to Mrs. Franklin’s laughter.

  The lights went out.

  ‘Lou, don’t you lose me.’

  ‘I’ve got your hand.’

  ‘Press it hard, hurt it.’

  ‘Break his bloody neck,’ Mrs. Franklin said in the dark. ‘No offence meant.’

  ‘Marjorie smack hand,’ said Marjorie. ‘Let’s get out of the dark. Harold’s a rover in the dark.’

  ‘And the girl guides.’

  ‘Let’s take a bottle each and go down to Lou’s,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll buy the bottles,’ said Mr. O’Brien.

  ‘It’s you don’t lose me now,’ Lou whispered. ‘Hold on to me, Jack. The others won’t stay long. Oh, Mr. Christ, I wish it was just you and me!’

  ‘Will it be just you and me?’

  ‘You and me and Mr. Moon.’

  Mr. O’Brien opened the saloon door. ‘Pile into the Rolls, you ladies. The gentlemen are going to see to the medicine.’

  The young man felt Lou’s quick kiss on his mouth before she followed Marjorie and Mrs. Franklin out.

  ‘What do you say we split the drinks?’ said Mr. O’Brien.

  ‘Look what I found in the lavatory,’ said the barman, ‘he was singing on the seat.’ He appeared behind the counter with the drunk man leaning on his arm.

  They all climbed into the car.

  ‘First stop, Lou’s.’

  The young man, on Lou’s knee, saw the town in a daze spin by them, the funnelled and masted smoke-blue outline of the still, droning docks, the lightning lines of the poor streets growing longer, and the winking shops that were snapped out one by one. The car smelt of scent and powder and flesh. He struck with his elbow, by accident, Mrs. Franklin’s upholstered breast. Her thighs, like cushions, bore the drunk man’s rolling weight. He was bumped and tossed on a lump of woman. Breasts, legs, bellies, hands, touched, warmed, and smothered him. On through the night, towards Lou’s bed, towards the unbelievable end of the dying holiday, they tore past black houses and bridges, a station in a smoke cloud, and drove up a steep side street with one weak lamp in a circle of railings at the top, and swerved into a space where a tall tenement house stood surrounded by cranes, standing ladders, poles and girders, barrows, brick-heaps.

  They climbed to Lou’s room up many flights of dark, perilous stairs. Washing hung on the rails outside closed doors. Mrs. Franklin, fumbling alone with the drunk man behind the others, trod in a bucket, and a lucky black cat ran over her foot. Lou led the young man by the hand through a passage marked with names and doors, lit a match, and whispered: ‘It won’t be very long. Be good and patient with Mr. O’Brien. Here it is. Come in first. Welcome to you, Jack!’ She kissed him again at the door of her room.

  She turned on the lights, and he walked with her proudly into her own room, into the room that he would come to know, and saw a wide bed, a gramaphone on a chair, a wash-basin half-hidden in a corner, a gas fire and a cooking ring, a closed cupboard, and her photograph in a cardboard frame on the chest of drawers with no handles. Here she slept and ate. In the double bed she lay all night, pale and curled, sleeping on her left side. When he lived with her always, he would not allow her to dream. No other men must lie and love in her head. He spread his fingers on her pillow.

  ‘Why do you live at the top of the Eiffel Tower!’ said the barman, coming in.

  ‘What a climb!” said Mr. O’Brien. ‘But it’s very nice and private when you get here.’

  ‘If you get here!’ said Mrs. Franklin. ‘I’m dead beat. This old nuisance weighs a ton. Lie down, lie down on the floor and go to sleep. The old nuisance!’ she said fondly. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Ernie,’ the drunk man said, raising his arm to shield his face.

  ‘Nobody’s going to bite you, Ernie. Here, give him a nip of whiskey. Careful! Don’t pour it on your waistcoat; you’ll be squeezing your waistcoat in the morning. Pull the curtains, Lou, I can see the wicked old moon,’ she said.

  ‘Does it put ideas in your head?’

  ‘I love the moon,’ said Lou.

  ‘There never was a young lover who didn’t love the moon.’ Mr. O’Brien gave the young man a cheery smile, and patted his hand. His own hand was red and hairy. ‘I could see at the flash of a glance that Lou and this nice young fellow were made for each other. I could see it in their eyes. Dear me, no! I’m not so old and blind I can’t see love in front of my nose. Couldn’t you see it, Mrs. Franklin? Couldn’t you see it, Marjorie?’

  In the long silence, Lou collected glasses from the cupboard as though she had not heard Mr. O’Brien speak. She drew the curtains, shut out the moon, sat on the edge of her bed with her feet tucked under her, looked at her photograph as at a stranger, folded her hands as she folded them, on the first meeting, before the young man’s worship in the Gardens.

  ‘A host of angels must be passing by,’ said Mr. O’Brien. ‘What a silence there is! Have I said anything out of place? Drink and be merry, to-morrow we die. What do you think I bought these lovely shining bottles for?’

  The bottles were opened. The dead were lined on the mantelpiece. The whisky went down. Harold the barman and Marjorie, her dress lifted, sat in the one arm-chair together. Mrs. Franklin, with Ernie’s head on her lap, sang in a sweet, trained contralto voice The Shepherd’s Lass. Mr. O’Brien kept rhythm with his foot.

  I want Lou in my arms, the young man said to himself, watching Mr. O’Brien tap and smile and the barman draw Marjorie down deep. Mrs. Franklin’s voice sang sweetly in the small bedroom where he and Lou should be lying in the white bed without any smiling company to see them drown. He and Lou could go down together, one cool body weighted with a boiling stone, on to the falling, blank white, entirely empty sea, and never rise. Sitting on their bridal bed, near enough to hear his breath, she was farther from him than before they met. Then he had everything but her body; now she had given him two kisses, and everything had vanished but that beginning. He must be good and patient with Mr. O’Brien. He could wipe away the embracing, old smile with the iron back of his hand. Sink lower, lower, Harold and Marjorie, tumble like whales at Mr. O’Brien’s feet.

  He wished that the light would fail. In the darkness he and Lou could creep beneath the clothes and imitate the dead. Who would look for them there, if they were dead still and soundless? The others would shout to them down the dizzy stairs or rummage in the silence about the narrow, obstacled corridors or stumble out into the night to search for them among the cranes and ladders in the desolation of the destroyed houses. He could hear, in the made-up dark, Mr. O’Brien’s voice cry, ‘Lou, where are you? Answer! answer!’ the hollow answer of the echo, ‘answer!’ and I ear her lips in the cool pit of the bed secretly move around another name and feel them move.

  ‘A fine piece of singing, Emerald, and very naughty words. That was a shepherd, that was,’ Mr. O’Brien said.

  Ernie, on the floor, began to sing in a thick, sulking voice, but Mrs. Franklin placed her hand over his mouth and he sucked and nuzzled it.

  ‘What about this young shepherd?’ said Mr. O’Brien, pointing his glass at the young man. ‘Can he sing as well as make love? You ask him kindly, girlie,’ he said to Lou, ‘and he’ll give us a song like a nightingale.’

  ‘Can you sing, Jack?’


  ‘Like a crow, Lou.’

  ‘Can’t he even talk poetry? What a young man to have who can’t spout the poets to his lady!’ Mr. O’Brien said.

  From the cupboard Lou brought out a red-bound book and gave it to the young man, saying: ‘Can you read us a piece out of here? The second volume’s in the hatbox. Read us a dreamy piece, Jack. It’s nearly midnight.’

  ‘Only a love poem, no other kind,’ said Mr. O’Brien. ‘I won’t hear anything but a love poem.’

  ‘Soft and sweet,’ Mrs. Franklin said. She took her hand away from Ernie’s mouth and looked at the ceiling.

  The young man read, but not aloud, lingering on her name, the inscription on the fly-leaf of the first volume of the collected poems of Tennyson: ‘To Louisa, from her Sunday School teacher, Miss Gwyneth Forbes. God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world.’

  ‘Make it a love poem, don’t forget.’

  The young man read aloud, closing one eye to steady the dancing print, Come into the Garden, Maud. And when he reached the beginning of the fourth verse his voice grew louder:

  ‘I said to the lily, “There is but one With whom she has heart to be gay. When will the dancers leave her alone? She is weary of dance and play.”

  Now half to the setting moon are gone, And half to the rising day; Low on the sand and loud on the stone The last wheel echoes away.

  ‘I said to the rose, “The brief night goes In babble and revel and wine. O young lord-lover, what sighs are those, For one that will never be thine? But mine, but mine,” so I sware to the rose, “For ever and ever, mine.”’

  At the end of the poem, Harold said, suddenly, his head hanging over the arm of the chair, his hair made wild, and his mouth red with lipstick: ‘My grandfather remembers seeing Lord Tennyson, he was a little man with a hump.’

  ‘No,’ said the young man, ‘he was tall and he had long hair and a beard.’

  ‘Did you ever see him?’

  ‘I wasn’t born then.’

  ‘My grandfather saw him. He had a hump.’

  ‘Not Alfred Tennyson.’

  ‘Lord Alfred Tennyson was a little man with a hump.’

  ‘It couldn’t have been the same Tennyson.’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong Tennyson, this was the famous poet with a hump.’

  Lou, on the wonderful bed, waiting for him alone of all the men, ugly or handsome, old or young, in the wide town and the small world that would be bound to fall, lowered her head and kissed her hand to him and held her hand in the river of light on the counterpane. The hand, to him, became transparent, and the light on the counterpane glowed up steadily through it in the thin shape of her palm and fingers.

  ‘Ask Mr. O’Brien what Lord Tennyson was like,’ said Mrs. Franklin. ‘We appeal to you, Mr. O’Brien, did he have a hump or not?’

  Nobody but the young man, for whom she lived and waited now, noticed Lou’s little loving movements. She put her glowing hand to her left breast. She made a sign of secrecy on her lips.

  ‘It depends,’ Mr. O’Brien said.

  The young man closed one eye again, for the bed was pitching like a ship; a sickening, hot storm out of a cigarette cloud unsettled cupboard and chest. The motions of the sea-going bedroom were calmed with the cunning closing of his eye, but he longed for night air. On sailor’s legs he walked to the door.

  ‘You’ll find the House of Commons on the second floor at the end of the passage,’ said Mr. O’Brien.

  At the door, he turned to Lou and smiled with all his love, declaring it to the faces of the company and making her, before Mr. O’Brien’s envious regard, smile back and say: ‘Don’t be long, Jack, Please! You mustn’t be long.’

  Now every one knew. Love had grown up in an evening.

  ‘One minute, my darling,’ he said. ‘I’ll be here.’

  The door closed behind him. He walked into the wall of the passage. He lit a match. He had three left. Down the stairs, clinging to the sticky, shaking rails, rocking on see-saw floorboards, bruising his shin on a bucket, past the noises of secret lives behind doors he slid and stumbled and swore and heard Lou’s voice in a fresh fever drive him on, call him to return, speak to him with such passion and abandonment that even in the darkness and the pain of his haste he was dazzled and struck still. She spoke, there on the rotting stairs in the middle of the poor house, a frightening rush of love words; from her mouth, at his ear, endearments were burned out. Hurry! hurry! Every moment is being killed. Love, adored, dear, run back and whistle to me, open the door, shout my name, lay me down. Mr. O’Brien has his hands on my side.

  He ran into a cavern. A draught blew out his matches. He lurched into a room where two figures on a black heap on the floor lay whispering, and ran from there in a panic. He made water at the dead end of the passage and hurried back towards Lou’s room, finding himself at last on a silent patch of stairway at the top of the house; he put out his hand, but the rail was broken and nothing there prevented a long drop to the ground down a twisted shaft that would echo and double his cry, bring out from their holes in the wall the sleeping or stirring families, the whispering figures, the blind startled turners of night into day. Lost in a tunnel near the roof, he fingered the damp walls for a door; he found a handle and gripped it hard, but it came off in his hand. Lou had led him down a longer passage than this. He remembered the number of doors: there were three on each side. He ran down the broken-railed flight into another passage and dragged his hand along the wall. Three doors, he counted. He opened the third door, walked into darkness, and groped for the switch on the left. He saw, in the sudden light, a bed and a cupboard and a chest of drawers with no handles, a gas fire, a wash-basin in the corner. No bottles. No glasses. No photograph of Lou. The red counterpane on the bed was smooth. He could not remember the colour of Lou’s counterpane.

  He left the light burning and opened the second door, but a strange woman’s voice cried, half-asleep: ‘Who is there? Is it you, Tom? Tom, put the light on.’ He looked for a line of light at the foot of the next door, and stopped to listen for voices. The woman was still calling in the second room.

  ‘Lou, where are you?’ he cried. ‘Answer! answer!’

  ‘Lou, what Lou? There’s no Lou here,’ said a man’s voice through the open door of the first dark room at the entrance to the passage.

  He scampered down another flight and counted four doors with his scratched hand. One door opened and a woman in a nightdress put out her head. A child’s head appeared below her.

  ‘Where does Lou live? Do you know where Lou lives?’

  The woman and the child stared without speaking.

  ‘Lou! Lou! her name is Lou!’ he heard himself shout. ‘She lives here, in this house! Do you know where she lives?’

  The woman caught the child by the hair and pulled her into the room. He clung to the edge of her door. The woman thrust her arm round the edge and brought down a bunch of keys sharply on his hands. The door slammed.

  A young woman with a baby in a shawl stood at an open door on the opposite side of the passage, and caught his sleeve as he ran by. ‘Lou who? You woke my baby.’

  ‘I don’t know her other name. She’s with Mrs. Franklin and Mr. O’Brien.’

  ‘You woke my baby.’

  ‘Come in and find her in the bed,’ a voice said from the darkness behind the young woman.

  ‘He’s woken my baby.’

  He ran down the passage, holding his wet hand to his mouth. He fell against the rails of the last flight of stairs. He heard Lou’s voice in his head once more whisper to him to return as the ground floor rose, like a lift full of dead, towards the rails. Hurry! hurry! I can’t, I won’t wait, the bridal night is being killed.

  Up the rotten, bruising, mountainous stairs he climbed, in his sickness, to the passage where he had left the one light burning in an end room. The light was out. He tapped all the doors and whispered her name. He beat on the doors and shouted, and a woman, dressed in a vest and a hat, drove him out of the
passage with a walking-stick.

  For a long time he waited on the stairs, though there was no love now to wait for and no bed but his own too many miles away to lie in, and only the approaching day to remember his discovery. All around him the disturbed inhabitants of the house were falling back into sleep. Then he walked out of the house on to the waste space and under the leaning cranes and ladders. The light of the one weak lamp in a rusty circle fell across the brick-heaps and the broken wood and the dust that had been houses once, where the small and hardly known and never-to-be-forgotten people of the dirty town had lived and loved and died and, always, lost.

  Plenty of Furniture

  1

  Every inch of the room was covered with furniture. Chairs stood on couches that lay on tables; mirrors nearly the height of the door were propped, back to back, against the walls, reflecting and making endless the hills of desks and chairs with their legs in the air, sideboards, dressing tables, chests-of-drawers, more mirrors, empty bookcases, washbasins, clothes cupboards. There was a double bed, carefully made, with the ends of the sheets turned back, lying on top of a dining table on top of another table; there were electric lamps and lampshades, trays and vases, lavatory bowls and basins, heaped in the armchairs that stood on cupboards and tables and beds, touching the ceiling. The one window, looking out on the road, could just be seen through the curved legs of sideboards on their backs. The walls behind the standing mirrors were thick with pictures and picture frames.

  Mr. Allingham climbed into the room over a stack of mattresses, then disappeared.

  ‘Hop in, boy.’ His voice came up from behind a high kitchen dresser hung with carpets; and, climbing over, Samuel looked down to see him seated on a chair on a couch, leaning back comfortably, his elbow on the shoulder of a statue.

  ‘It’s a pity we can’t cook here,’ Mr. Allingham said. ‘There’s plenty of stoves, too. That’s a meat-safe,’ he said, pointing to one corner. ‘Just under the bedroom suite.’

  ‘Have you got a piano?’