The Suburbs of Hell (9 page)

He took to pinning on the door notes saying HARRY—GONE WALKING IN THE COUNTRY, or HARRY—GONE TO LONDON ON BUSINESS. The visits continued, but tailed off.

The nights when he was supposed to be away he spent lying in the dark, listening to the water-drip, the tick and the chime. Sometimes the telephone, felt as hardly more than a vibration of the ceiling, rang in the tabooed room. For two or three days in late November it rang continually.

One day he was woken by the sound he had expected and feared, heavy raps of the knocker on the door. It was not Harry, it was not the sound or the spirit of Harry. He could not tell what time it was, his watch had stopped, but he felt a conviction that he was at last to meet the postman.

He got out of his sleeping-bag, and he was naked. His hands were shaking as he pulled on clothes. Outside in the street it was snowing, but the strange car parked near his window had almost no snow on it.

In the hall he removed the chain, he slipped back two bolts, he made himself open to the stranger.

The slight woman on the snowy step was shivering inside a sheepskin coat, and beating her hands in bright folksy gloves. A headscarf made her unfamiliar. She was staring at him.

‘Greg,’ she cried, ‘what
is
going on? Why don’t you answer my letters? Are you
never
in when I ring? Greg, I’m absolutely in the dark about you.’

‘Diana,’ he murmured, recognizing his brother’s betrayer, bent on coming in.

Diana Ramsey was a petite dark woman of thirty, with a rather diffident manner contradicted by a rather imperious voice. She had always seemed, to her brother-in-law, like a schoolgirl taking on the role of hostess before she was at home with it, and therefore overacting a little: her expressions of pleasure too emphatic, her talkativeness with unpromising material like himself threatening to go over the top. But her hostessly ways served her while she examined what he had done, in a few weeks, with the fruits of her taste and planning. ‘Oh dear,’ was the worst she had to say of the kitchen. ‘Well, all men are born bachelors.’

But the pile of mail on the dining-room table did throw her a little. ‘Oh, Greg,’ she sighed, skimming through the envelopes, ‘how
could
you? And here are my letters to you, and some others addressed to you, too. Haven’t you even looked at them?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I thought they were all for Paul. I thought you would come, or a solicitor, or somebody.’

‘And I did come,’ she said. ‘Obviously I had to. I suppose you thought the telephone calls were not for you, either.’

‘I never go into that room,’ he said. ‘I thought that the police would rather I didn’t.’

At the mention of the police she looked grim for a moment. Then she said: ‘Even the police, above all the police, know that life goes on.’

He said the first thing to her that had not been dragged out of him. He said: ‘Is it your house, Diana?’

She looked up from the letters, sidelong. ‘Do you mind that, Greg?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Why should I? It’s usual. It’s what I expected.’

‘I don’t want it. Truly. Will you let me give it to you?’

He made one of his vehement, inappropriate gestures, rejecting the idea. ‘That would be silly.’

‘No,’ she said with conviction. ‘Not silly at all. But we needn’t talk about it just yet.’

He bowed his head, in doubting agreement.

He had hoped that she would put all the letters into her car and drive away with them to wherever it was, Pimlico he thought, that her lover had his pad or swinging studio. But she had meant all along to stay for a day or two, and now saw that she must stay for a week. There was so much to be done after a death, and it was she who must do it, the paperwork, she meant. As for the housework, well, there she would expect some help. In the kitchen, while he dried dishes for her, she made an attempt to jolly him along about his slovenly ways. ‘Dear Greg,’ she said, growing sentimental at one point, ‘we were good friends, weren’t we? Not, perhaps, just at first—you did make me feel a little bit like a stepmother at first—but later, it was fun.’

Sometimes he had the feeling that, far behind his eyes, there was another pair of eyes, watching her down two dark tunnels.

In the evening she called downstairs for him to come and join her in a drink. At the open door of the room he hesitated, feeling in his body a physical reluctance to go further. His brother’s chair had been moved, and a small cushion which had been behind his head was gone. Had the police taken it? Or had she, a few minutes before, capably tidied it away, with her husband’s life-blood on it?

Her remarks about his silence became less playful, and began to sound a little fretful. But he clung to it, because he knew that if he once began to talk he would never be able to stop, just as he knew that if he once began to weep he would break in two.

She slept that night in her usual place, and in the morning she asked him to come with her to the bedroom. ‘This is always a dreadful moment,’ she said, throwing open a wardrobe; and she asked him to choose whatever he could use from among his brother’s clothes. The rest she would give to the church.

He said, with a sort of horror: ‘No—no, don’t.’ And when she looked surprised, he said more calmly: ‘Leave all his things, just leave them. There is a lot here that I could use. I mean, I haven’t got much of anything. We professional students don’t.’

She closed the doors in silence, then asked: ‘What will you do, Greg?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What will I do when?’

‘Will you stay here? I wish you would, and yet—is it good for you?’

He did a wan imitation of Harry. ‘I reckon that int bad, gal. I mean to say, thass a roof over my head.’

‘Funny old Harry,’ she said.

For a moment he was almost expansive. ‘It was Harry who arranged the funeral. Harry and Whatshisname, the headmaster. Harry’s not particularly practical himself, but he knows so many people that he can get nearly anything done.’

‘I know,’ she said quietly. ‘Harry and I spoke on the telephone, several times. I’m sorry, Greg, but I couldn’t come. For every kind of reason, I just couldn’t.’

‘Oh, I understood that,’ he said.

‘Did you? Well, that’s by the way. Though it’s a relief, I must tell you, to know that you weren’t ignoring my letters deliberately, only accidentally. But we were talking about your living here. Isn’t it very lonely?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘no, I’ve lots of friends here. There’s Harry, and a young guy called Dave, and a girl called Donna, and Frank De Vere, and Arthur, the landlord of the Moon, and Bob the grocer. If I can, I’d like to stay in Tornwich through the summer.’

‘Of course you can,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’re hoping for a job in the autumn?’

‘Hoping,’ he said.

‘And there’s a Donna, is there? That sounds cheerful.’

‘It was Donna,’ he said, ‘who got me to board up the cellar door. She’s a nervous girl. She’s heard of these old smugglers’ tunnels.’

‘What nonsense,’ Diana said. ‘But—well, it’s very satisfactory.’ Passing him to go to the door she took his hand and gave it a light squeeze.

He was sure he did not hate her, but whatever it was that watched her through his eyes watched very coldly. You took him away, it was thinking; but he came back again, hurt.

If he cried, a fault-line would appear between the two tears, and he would crack apart in neat halves.

She was indulgent, exaggerating, as she always had, the difference between their ages. But she was firm. She had not designed the sitting-room on the ground floor for unemployed Ph.Ds to crash in. ‘Why waste those empty rooms on the second floor?’ she asked, friendly and managing. ‘We’ll do it together, make a proper bedroom for you. It will be fun, Greg.’

But he insisted on attending to it himself, doing no more than sweep the bare boards before lugging his possessions upstairs and dumping them in the large room. He had a colourful piece of garden furniture for sleeping on, and his record-player and his loud clock for company.

In the changed state of affairs he preferred to be up under the roof. She assumed that he went out sometimes, and he let her think so.

Over meals she was sometimes playful, in a maternal way. ‘Oh, Greg,’ she said, after some new proof of his impracticality, ‘you are a pillock.’ He guessed that the word was borrowed from her lover’s vocabulary, but found it apt. He visualized a pillock as a sort of phallus made of marshmallow. He felt like a pillock.

Their meals together he found very long. When they were met over a table he discovered great faults in her. He knew that he would have found others, perhaps worse, in anybody else; but then, no other human creature had so sought him out, thrust its company upon him. At times he felt driven to tell her about her shortcomings, but knew that if once he began to speak he would never stop, that it would be the beginning of something violent and irrevocable.

She stayed for a week, and then one morning he carried her things out to the car. It was snowing again, and she was well wrapped up, and when she gave him a hug was soft and yielding like a toy. ‘What a scruff you are nowadays,’ she said, after kissing him. Rather hesitantly, she invited him to spend Christmas at Pimlico, but seemed relieved when he made an excuse. The excuse that came into his head was Donna, and she did not press him.

She went away, with promises to come again, to telephone. Her tyres made the only marks on the snowy road.

He went back inside and shot home the two bolts, put up the chain. Then he boarded up the cellar door.

That night he could not sleep, and wandered downstairs to the room in which he had last seen his brother. Though he rarely drank except to conform, he poured himself a large whisky.

The telephone was on the same table as the drinks. He opened the telephone book and tracked down a name with his forefinger. It was two o’clock in the morning. Carefully, he dialled a number.

The voice of the man who answered was full of sleep. Hearing silence, it was at first angry, then puzzled, then angry again. He put down the receiver.

He went and sat in his brother’s chair and idly picked up a little box from the table beside it. Painted on the lid in enamel was the picture of an eighteenth-century soldier, something from his childhood, something he remembered from his mother’s drawing-room, perhaps on that same small table. He lifted the lid, and just as he remembered it tinkled out
Non più andrai.

He got up and went to the telephone and dialled. This time the man’s voice was, from the start, a furious bellow. He opened the lid and held the box to the mouthpiece.

When the music had played for half a minute he stopped it. The man at the other end was still listening. He could not help giving a broken laugh.

The line clicked, and he heard the purr of lost contact.

He placed the box beside the telephone and returned to his brother’s chair. He leaned back and stretched his legs, studying without expression the almost untouched whisky in the glass between his thin hands.

Just before Christmas Diana rang him to renew her invitation, tentatively, and firmly he renewed his excuse. She asked about his welfare, and the house. He was able to report reassuringly of the house, because he was going through a phase of being obsessively preoccupied with it, and sometimes got up and polished silver or brass in the middle of the endless nights.

Harry, who would still often ‘give him a look’, as he expressed it, asked several times from the doorstep what he meant to do for Christmas. ‘I don’t pay much attention to it myself, but you come to mine, boy, you’ll be very welcome. Dave won’t be there.’ He saw that he had been right in thinking Dave most unhappy in his company, and hedged about his own movements, not letting his irritation show. Knowing now that Diana talked to Harry on the telephone he was cautious, but suggested that he might, just might, go home to his native village.

But when Harry knocked on Christmas Eve he did not deny himself. He led Harry, who had the little dog with him and was none too sober, upstairs and waited upon him with alcohol. He even toasted Harry and the dog, with a sort of diffident bonhomie which made his cheeks ache.

‘No,’ he said, in answer to Harry’s question, ‘I find plenty to do. There are all these books,’ he pointed out, with one of his gestures. ‘I’m working, in my fashion.’

In fact, he had read nothing for two months. He had had books in his hand and had stared at them, but the print would not go in through his eyes.

When Harry had gone, he almost thought that he might venture out where people were, might go to church. In his bare bedroom he pulled down an upper sash and let midnight bells come to him on the freezing air.

At three o’clock on Christmas morning he went downstairs to the telephone. He dialled the number which was now written on the cover of the book, and played the music-box into the mouthpiece.

By the time he closed the lid the man had hung up. The purr on the line was aggressively loud, like a defiance.

He knew when it began to be spring by the birds which came back, increasing in numbers and volume as the nights shortened. At daybreak in his stark bedroom it was the blackbirds and song thrushes he noticed first. Later came woodpigeons and collared doves, whose sound made him think himself back deep in leafy countryside, until the sounds were cut across by the squawk of a gull, the bourdon of a ship’s siren. The dove-voices intrigued him, hinting at hidden gardens in the blank-faced, secretive old town.

On one of his visits Harry was wearing a buttonhole of snowdrops, and said that they were always sold in the pubs in aid of the lifeboat.

The milder weather in some way changed him. In the early morning, in the walled yard which was the only place where he could stand still under the sky, and in which a few daffodils and crocuses had appeared, he felt the sea-air on his skin, and with it a wellbeing which was animal in its lack of reason.

It brought him out of the house, that tremulous sense of health and hope. He was timid at first, and pretended to be busy and purposeful, with the idea that stray glances would not have time to light on him. But most of the few people who might have recognized him were dead or gone away, and his nondescript beard and clothes made him much like any other seaman or fisherman or labourer to be seen there.