A Garden of Trees (10 page)

From beneath the great portico the birds chattered clamorous and invisible. Inside there was silence, and the vision of wings. A dim brownness, a watery stillness, an aquarium of eternity looking outwards to the light. The light was on the walls, the people were fishes, observing their observers they were sleepy like the sea. Paintings do what churches do, by stressing one's insignificance they make possible self-repose. Squares of light, windows of eternity, solitude supported upon golden tides of foam. Swimming through the stillness I came upon a red velvet chair like coral. I sat in it. Sleepy with opaqueness I closed my eyes. When I opened them again I saw standing in front of me a girl whom I thought was Annabelle.

Of course it wasn't. It was just a girl in a red coat looking at a Michelangelo picture and standing there with some of the poised intensity of the figures in the painting, a poise which I had recognized as being characteristic of Annabelle. She was standing with her weight on one leg and her head turned over her shoulder, the whole force of her seeming to be concentrated upon the point of her hip. I got up and walked round her to see her face, and it was a sad face, rather old and puffy, but it was the girl in the red coat who made me realize how much I loved Annabelle. It was funny, I thought. A stranger in a red coat with dark untidy hair.

So I walked away. I walked out down the steps with the chattering of birds beginning again, and in front of me the traffic like a furnace of machines. I wondered where I could find her, where I could come across her as if by accident. In the street it was dirty, there was a hammering of metal, a noise of steam and scorching and the arid smell of dust. I walked past St. Martin-in-the-Fields and down into the Strand. Where I could touch her, stand beside her, watch her face as it turned. But the noise was too insistent. It was enveloping, ferocious, like a forest fire. I could not think. I turned back furiously the way I had come, the afternoon like smoke and my body choked to breathe it, and then, as in a shaft of daylight, I saw Peter on the other side of the road.

A click of vision. The noise retreated. Quietly the cars ran gliding on their way. He was on the edge of a small crowd at the back of the National Gallery, an audience collected to watch the street performers' turns. I could hear a man shouting his patter to get the crowd to give him money. Peter was throwing him pennies. I crossed over to him. He was leaning forwards, impatiently, like a child at a circus. “Oh look,” he said, “have you got any pennies?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do lend me them, you see, this is a man who bends bars on his forehead.”

I gave him what I had. He threw them all with a clatter onto the pavement, and the man picked them up like a sparrow hopping for crumbs. Then he held them up warily to the light and examined them. “Like a five pound note,” Peter said: “What an extraordinary man!” The man had thrown his cap down on to the ground and was jumping up and down on it, and all the time he was gasping out his thick unintelligible patter when suddenly, with no change in his voice, he picked up a large iron bar, rolled up his shirt sleeve, and began beating the bar heavily against his forearm. The flesh on his arm turned yellow, and then blue, and gradually the bar became bent. He was now making a noise like a boiler before it bursts. Then he stopped, just as suddenly, rolled his sleeve down, put his cap on his head, picked up the assortment of bars, mostly bent, which were on the pavement beside him, pushed his way hurriedly through the crowd, and disappeared down the steps of a gentlemen's lavatory. I could see a policeman coming sauntering towards us.

“But his forehead!” Peter said. “He didn't do it on his forehead!”

“Does he beat it on his forehead?” I said.

“No,” Peter said. The crowd was shuffling away before the policeman's advance. “Do you think he can beat it on his forehead?”

“I don't suppose so,” I said.

“He just bends it, you see.” Peter was standing scratching his head, and the policeman was viewing us suspiciously. “But we must find him,” Peter said. “You can't possibly go away without seeing his forehead.” He moved towards the lavatory.

I followed him. A desire to laugh was like an itch in my throat. Going down the damp stone steps Peter said, “he must bend them back again, I suppose, sometime, unless he has a great many bars.” Inside the lavatory the cubicles were spaced out along one wall like a row of miniature loose-boxes. There was no sign of the man. “He's engaged,” Peter said. We stood in the middle of the floor peering at the notices on the doors. The lavatory attendant came out from his room and stood watching us over his spectacles. He was a small bald man in a dirty white coat. “Perhaps he lives here,” Peter said. “Perhaps he stays here and bends all these pipes.” The attendant came forward and stood behind Peter, his head coming up to Peter's elbow. “Here he is,” Peter said: “He's at home.” We went up to one of the doors and knocked.

“'Ere,” said the attendant.

“I want him to bend them back,” Peter said.

“Who?” the attendant said.

“I will give him ten bob,” Peter said.

“You will?”

The attendant worked his spectacles up and down on his nose with a movement like someone eating spaghetti. Then he went over to the door and banged on it loudly. “'S all right Charlie,” he said. “'S not the cops. Bloke ‘ere wants to give yer ten bob.” A cautious utter came from inside the door.

“Ten bob to bend ‘em back again,” said the attendant. “Take it or leave it.” He strolled back to his room by the entrance. There was a noise of an exploding boiler again and then the man emerged defensively from his cubicle with a cluster of bars in each hand. He looked like a prehistoric plumber. He was a savage square man whose neck was about twice as thick as the top of his head, like the hero of a strip-cartoon. The veins on his forehead stood out softly. Peter tried to explain what he wanted, while the man stood opposite us whistling through his nose. Then he took the ten shilling note that Peter offered him, stuffed it into his pocket, and selected a bar about half an inch thick. He handed this to Peter, who took it and tried it out once or twice on his knee without making any impression on it and handed it back politely. The man braced himself, threw his head back, raised the bar ceremoniously and placed it on his forehead. The veins bulged horribly. He clasped and clasped his hands several times on the end of the bar like a mountaineer feeling for a hold on a rock, and then he jumped with both feet off the floor, uttered a muffled grunt, and heaved. The bar straightened considerably. He paused, jumped again, and heaved; and this time the bar slipped coming scraping down the front of his face and taking skin off his nose. Peter said, “Good heavens!” and the man stared stupidly in front of him. He hit the bar once or twice like a petulant child, and then smacked a hand on to his face sending blood splashing in drops around his ears. He held his hand up staring at it. Then he smacked his hand on to his face again, and finally uttered a tremendous bellow. The attendant came hurrying out of his room.

“Did ‘e ‘it yer Charlie?” the attendant said. “Did ‘e ‘it yer on the nose?”

“Good heavens no,” Peter said, backing away nervously.

“This is a convenience,” shouted the attendant. “A respectable convenience!”

“I'm sure it is,” Peter said, stumbling over a mop and pail.

“Wot's up?” yelled the attendant, putting his mouth about an inch from Charlie's ear. “Wot's up with yer face, Charlie?”

Charlie muttered into an enormous brown handkerchief that he had produced from his pocket and was now holding clasped upon his nose.

“The bar slipped,” I explained. “It slipped and scraped his nose.”

“It did, did it?” yelled the attendant. “Slipped and scraped his nose, did it, slipped and scraped his nose?” He repeated this at the top of his voice.

“That's right,” Peter said, but was unable to make himself heard.

“I'll give yer slip and scrape yer nose,” reiterated the attendant.

Just then Charlie removed his bloodstained handkerchief from his face and uttered another great bellow. Peter was walking round him patting him anxiously on the back, but the attendant sprang forwards and this time really let himself go. “ ‘Ush it up, Charlie,” he roared: “For Christ's sake ‘ush it. We'll ‘ave the cops down with all this bloody noise.” The sound of his voice in the enclosed space was like a landslide.

And then, as the echoes cleared, there was the sound of heavy boots descending the steps. The attendant acted with speed. He pushed the bleeding Charlie back into his cubicle, slammed the door on him, and turned to us, saying, “In you go, quick, I don't want no trouble in this convenience.” Propelled by his whisper we made a rush for two locked doors and pushed against them futilely. “No pennies,” Peter said. “Charlie's got the lot.” The attendant whirled us round and pushed us into a cubicle at the end which was unlocked. “Into the free,” he whispered viciously. “It's the free that's good enough for some.” He slammed the door on us. “And others too,” we could hear him adding, repeatedly, as the policeman or whoever it was arrived at the bottom of the steps.

I was laughing so much I couldn't breathe. I leant against the wall and Peter pulled out a handkerchief to mop his face, but he seemed to remember Charlie's, so he put it away again hurriedly. We could hear the policeman's footsteps going sedately along outside, and I was holding my breath so tightly that I thought the wall would fall down. After a long pause I let my breath out quickly, and then couldn't get it in again. Peter leant over and whispered very seriously, “I say, what's a free?”

I couldn't answer. I sat on the seat and wondered if I should ever get my breath back and then Peter whispered again, more loudly, “What did he mean by a free?”

I tried to speak, but after a few syllables my whisper cracked into a squeak but I was able to go on laughing. “What a wonderful idea,” Peter said. “Why doesn't everybody come here?” He was peering round trying to read the writing on the walls. From somewhere on our right I could hear Charlie's interminable mutter; but the sound, all steam and rumblings, seemed to be in keeping with the place. I was more concerned with my laughter, which seemed liable to explode again at any moment. Outside, the policeman was talking to the attendant: we could hear his boots creaking as if he was standing still. The attendant was putting him off cleverly, uttering high-pitched grunts of innocence. I was beginning to breathe more easily when Peter leaned over towards me again. “I say,” he said, “do you realize that it is a criminal offence for two Englishmen to be found together in a lavatory? It is the only thing the public cannot stand.” And then we were both laughing.

I don't know how long we stayed there, but eventually the policeman went, and the attendant came to let us out. We wanted to see how Charlie was doing, but the attendant would not let us. He drove us out, heedless of our apologies. In the sunlight we felt very stupid and exhausted. As we walked away we could hear the attendant and Charlie greeting each other below the earth. The noise they made was like the beginnings of a water-spout.

Peter was meeting Annabelle for tea, and I went with him. As we walked I asked him, “Do things like that often happen to you?” and he said, “They seem to,” and after a while he added, “They do if you look for them, you know. They seem quite often to happen to me.”

And I suppose they did. Looking back on the days that I spent at this time with Peter and Annabelle and Marius, it seems that something like that was always liable to happen; wherever I went with them the expectation of an extraordinary incident followed us like a ghost, even quite normal occasions being turned by this sense of anticipation into moments of oddity. It was all happy at first, while the laughter of the ghost was a benevolent laughter. It was only later that the ghost, as if in the passing of time he had grown tired of such childishness, became malevolent. It was then, as Alice had said, that life demanded to be taken as a business. But we were all young when I first knew them, and we did not look ahead to the future.

As I walked with Peter I thought of how it seemed that whenever I was in the presence of any of them I ceased to be conscious of myself as an individual and became, for the moment, a working part of the function in which we were engaged. And it was in this guise that the feeling of myself as an individual, as apart from consciousness, became actual. Going up the street through the sunlight I existed as a movement of the passing afternoon, but the existence was a real one, an experience that demanded neither thought nor question, a certainty that was very different from the dreams and self-enquiries of my moods when I was alone. I wondered if this was what Alice had described as fun, but the function of childishness would not have been fun to her. And then there were moments when the oddity was too mysterious for laughter.

Peter led the way into a store in Regent Street, up in a lift to the restaurant where the air was warm and scented, and as I looked around me turning with the heat of the room I saw Annabelle sitting with Marius at a table for four. We went across and sat opposite them, Peter facing Marius and Annabelle facing me, and Peter began telling Marius the story of the man with the iron bars. There was a band playing wearily in the corner, and Peter's words seemed to swim among the music like a child splashing gaily in an oily sea. Annabelle was not listening to the story, nor to the music, and as I watched her her eyes went down from Peter, down to the table-cloth which was blue and chequered and on which two knives lay, and she took one of the knives in her smaller pointed fingers and spun it, carefully, so that it flashed under the light like a catherine wheel. I was watching her hands and her wrists as they disappeared into the sleeves of her dress, and all the time she was looking downwards so that the lashes of her eyes were visible like fringes against her cheeks. Peter was saying, “A free lavatory, just think of it, a free lavatory,” and Annabelle was leaning forwards with her hair falling down over her forehead and the neck of her dress open slanting against her throat. The warm oily water of the restaurant lapped around us, and Marius was laughing at Peter as he splashed, and Annabelle and I were floating like two bubbles in the sea. As she sat I had the impression that her clothes were quite separate from her, they were drapings of a statue unveiled and alone. At the centre there was darkness, the darkness of a cave: and as the sea broke over her, as the bubbles were devoured, the openings at her wrists and throat were yet caverns which the waves dared not enter, chasms of infinity in which the swimmer might drown. I wished that all might dissolve, become one with the waters; and Peter was saying, “No, not comic, tragic: just think of the tragedy of that poor man's nose.”