An Accidental Man

  with love

  Mollie

  Dear Ludwig,

  were you at that party? I loved it, especially the later stages. Come and house-hunt.

  Yours

  Andrew

  My dear Sebastian,

  Your unspeakable communication received, meet me six Tuesday Kings Arms Sloane Square. Will telephone.

  Your wounded bird

  K.

  And please come Mill House parentwise?

  My dear Mr and Mrs Leferrier,

  just to say briefly at once how very glad we all are about the engagement of our dear daughter to your son, I am sure they will be very happy. My husband and I so much hope you will come and stay with us for the wedding and I will write soon with details of times. With our warmest wishes

  Yours sincerely

  Clara Tisbourne

  Dear Ludwig,

  I have moved to Stepney, but let us meet soon. I feel, for reasons which are not obscure and perhaps not important, depressed.

  Yours

  Garth

  My darling husband,

  I hope you have found a job, I have no spirit to write, but I am well, and I hope to see you, not now, but soon, and this with the ever-love of your ever-wife

  Dorina

  Dearest Gracie,

  thanks for your rotten letter, I am very miserable, but I know you don’t care,

  your bitter brother

  Tisbourne

  My dear Father,

  thank you for your cable, that won’t do I’m afraid, but I will await your letter.

  Your affectionate son

  Ludwig

  PS I have just discovered that my fiancée is very rich. I didn’t know this before. I have obtained the Oxford appointment.

  Dearest Dorina,

  just to say that we so very much hope that you will come and stay with us soon, which we feel sure will benefit everybody.

  With much love

  Clara

  Dear Mr Secombe-Hughes,

  I do hope you will let me have some money soon as I am beginning to be in financial difficulties, excuse this letter, I am too embarrassed to say this when I am at work, and please excuse me,

  Yours faithfully

  M. Ricardo.

  PS I now have six IOUs.

  Dearest girl,

  I haven’t written for two days, I know, I am wretched too, I have no job, I will write properly soon. Oh God I love you.

  A.

  Do not go away anywhere with anybody even briefly.

  My dear Charlotte,

  thank you for telephoning, yes, could you come and see us tomorrow if possible, Dorina urgently needs rational company and I urgently need advice.

  love

  Mavis

  PS Have you seen Matthew?

  Dear Ralph,

  all right I was a fool to tell you, but you were worse than a fool to react as you did, and we cannot leave things here. I am in agony. Sorry.

  Patrick

  My dear Mavis,

  I would like to see you if you would like to see me. Would you? And if so will you telephone me?

  Best regards

  Matthew

  Austin Gibson Grey lay half-dressed upon his unmade bed and watched his long thin window change from a summer blue through purple to a lurid London night red. Having got drunk at the Tisbournes party he had made a complete nonsense of all his arrangements. He had let the flat to Charlotte for three pounds a week, partly because he was sorry for her but largely to spite George and Clara and also out of vanity. The trouble was that five minutes earlier he had accepted George’s offer of a loan. Could he use George’s money to subsidize Charlotte to spite George? No. So he had to write to George to refuse the loan after all. And meanwhile he was broke. He had only gone to the party for the drinks and the sandwiches, having had no lunch, and to see Gracie of course, and then there were no sandwiches, only rotten cheese biscuits, and no Gracie.

  Charlotte’s money would hardly cover the rates. He owed a month’s rent and a quarter’s electricity. He owed for clothes and for some books which he had already sold. He had sold his watch and his stamp collection. He had already borrowed as much as he could hope to get from Ludwig and Mitzi. No job that he would dream of taking had been offered. He would not be triumphed over. He was at the end of his tether. In fact he had been there for some time. Of course he could cancel Charlotte. But all he had left now was his pride.

  It’s all so petty, he thought, but it’s destroying me. He had to eat, and Mitzi’s suppers were getting smaller and smaller. Anyway there were days when he hated Mitzi. If only there were somewhere he could get away to, somewhere to which he could take Dorina, making mock of them all, somewhere in the south beside the sea, where the wind was warm and Dorina could walk barefoot in the waves and pick up shells to give him, and he would be clean and free and cherished. At present he felt too demoralized even to take a bath and his body smelt. Anyway Mitzi had turned the hot water off to save money.

  He had still not been to see Dorina, and with everything in this muddle he could not go, and now that Charlotte had insinuated herself into the flat there was nowhere to bring Dorina even if he did get a job. He hated Charlotte. And he had read a letter from Dorina to Ludwig which he had found in Ludwig’s room. It was quite a simple letter, but it was so affectionate and pleading. He hated Ludwig. He sat up jerking his pillows about. The pillows were old and greasy and wafer-thin and emitted dust. There was no clean linen any more. The warm powdery dirty London air drifted through the window and sifted down into his lungs making him gasp. He had mislaid his tablets. Wolfing cheese biscuits at the Tisbournes he had bitten his tongue again, it still hurt.

  Someone knocked on the door and Austin hastily covered himself. The room was dark and a tall figure stood in the faint illumination from the landing. ‘May I turn the light on?’ said Garth.

  The light went on as Austin was fumbling for his shirt. His underwear was filthy.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t realize you’d have gone to bed.’

  ‘I haven’t gone to bed,’ said Austin, ‘I was just — resting.’ His shirt seemed to be inside out.

  ‘Can I help you, Father?’

  ‘No.’ Austin got his shirt and trousers on and pulled up over his rumpled bed an Indian counterpane so worn and frail that if he had let it out of the window it would have floated away like thistledown.

  Austin sat on the bed. Garth sat on the floor with his back to the wall. He had a bulky bundle with him and looked, as the young can, poor and shabby and elegant at the same time.

  ‘Well, how are you, Garth?’

  ‘Very well, Father.’

  ‘Has Charlotte moved in?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you moved out?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve got all my things here.’

  ‘You mean in that bundle? Need you look quite so like Dick Whittington? Did that suitcase ever turn up?’

  ‘No.’

  Austin kicked a pile of underwear away under the bed with his heels. He felt hungry and nervy. The sight of Garth’s ostentatiously calm face filled him with irritation and pain. ‘Well, Garth, tell me about your life.’

  ‘Several things, Father. First of all could you lend me the key of that blue trunk, you know, at the flat, in the kitchen cupboard.’

  ‘Is it locked? I don’t keep keys. I don’t even know what’s in it.’

  ‘It’s full of pictures and things — I mean photos — remembrances of my mother — all her stuff.’

  ‘Oh —’ He must have locked the trunk against Dorina. Why did it seem so aggressive of Garth to speak of Betty as his mother, indeed to speak of her at all?

  ‘You’ll have to break it open,’ said Austin.

  ‘You don’t mind if I take one or two of those things, that big photo with —’

  ‘Oh take the lot, take the lot.’

  ‘Have you got a job yet, Father?’

  ‘No. Have you?’

  ‘I’m still
looking for the right one. At present I’m just washing up.’

  ‘Washing up?’

  ‘Yes. In a Soho restaurant.’

  ‘I think I’m a bit old for washing-up,’ said Austin, ‘but it may come to that. You said there were several things. That’s one, or maybe two. What’s the next? Need you sit on the floor? There is a chair.’

  Garth continued to sit on the floor. ‘Would you mind if I went to see Dorina?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Austin. ‘Wait a moment.’ He felt a jolt of terror. ‘What for?’

  ‘I feel I could help,’ said Garth, speaking slowly. ‘I thought at first I couldn’t. But now I feel I can. I’ve been talking about her to Ludwig.’

  ‘Oh, have you?’

  ‘I feel everything should be opened out a bit more, there should be more fresh air and talk. Dorina needs to talk to people. I don’t mean doctors or anything like that. She needs news of other people’s troubles. She needs ordinariness.’

  ‘And you imagine you can provide that!’

  ‘Well, would you mind?’

  ‘Yes, I would,’ said Austin. ‘You don’t understand anything about Dorina and me and I forbid you to meddle.’ He tried hard to keep his voice steady, but embryos of anger were swelling in his chest and constricting his lungs. Dorina and Garth would walk hand in hand in the garden and talk about him. They would look into each other’s eyes. This was an old nightmare. Huge balls of anger grew inside his chest.

  Garth was sitting very still with his hands on his knees, his serious face puckered up with care and cunning. The light was bright in the room and the night was hot and red outside and moths flew in and out like paper fragments.

  ‘All right,’ said Garth. ‘I’m probably a fool. I just hate to see you so sort of tied up and so full of resentment against everybody and so anxious. One’s got to overcome resentment. That’s one of the most important of all things. Just see that it’s possible. If you can once see that it’s possible you can see that it’s easy, and if you can see that it’s easy you can do it. You should just try to forgive us all.’

  ‘Go away, will you, Garth, please,’ said Austin quietly. He feared that awful seizure, that black outburst of anger that ripped out of him when it came like a physical eruption, as nauseating and inevitable as vomiting. Blackness poured out. Betty, walking in the garden, hand in hand with Garth.

  ‘I know I’m making you angry,’ said Garth. ‘It’s not easy to talk to you like this. Anger is frightening. And you are my father. I just felt I had to sort of testify. Please think about it and forgive me. I won’t ask if you’d mind if I went to see Uncle Matthew, I know you would. But I must say one thing. I think you ought to go and see Uncle Matthew. There’s no need to make any drama about it. Just go and see him. Ask him to lend you some money.’

  ‘Garth, get out, would you,’ said Austin. ‘There’s a good boy.’

  ‘You could break this circle if you wanted to —’

  ‘Get out.’

  ‘And the sky wouldn’t fall if Uncle Matthew met Dorina in an ordinary way —’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Austin uttered in a low screeching voice. ‘You’re mad. Don’t you know that Matthew and your mother, don’t you know — ?’

  Garth shifted a little, rocking his head slowly to and fro. ‘I suspected,’ he said, ‘that you thought — that you imagined — something of the sort —’

  ‘And then you suggest to me —’

  ‘But I don’t believe it.’

  ‘You don’t — ?’

  ‘No. Nor do I for a second believe that you really believe it. Sorry, Father.’

  Austin swayed, clutching himself, giving out a low raucous cry. He seized the tumbler which stood on his bedside table and threw it at the wall. It failed to break and rolled back to his feet. He seized it again and rising up hurled it at the side of the window frame. The tumbler shattered and one of the window panes cracked. Garth was gone. Austin was lying on his bed, biting the thin greasy pillow and uttering big quiet tearless sobs. Papery moths flitted above him. Some flew against the blazing electric light bulb and fell down on to his twitching back. Later he went to sleep and dreamt of Betty falling into a well. The waters closed over her head.

  Dorina had read an African folk tale about a woman who was turned into a doll. The doll was somebody’s wife and was kept in somebody else’s pocket and brought out every now and then to be looked at as two men walked along a road. One of the two men was her husband, but was it he who had transformed her into a doll or the other man and whose pocket was she kept in and how did it all end? She could not remember.

  Charlotte was very neat this evening. She had a smart summer suit on, off-white with cinnamon stripes. She was slim and tall and her sleekly waved hair was purplish grey. She sat primly with knees and feet together. Already that morning she had cleaned Austin’s flat from end to end. Then she had had a bath with expensive bath salts.

  Mavis was untidy. Her blue nylon overall was spotted with grease. Her hair moved cloudily, her eyes were dreamy and young. The house was still empty and echoing, its future uncertain, time on a brink. She had told Mrs Carberry she might occasionally bring Ronald with her to work. But she was not to think that Ronald could be foisted, that no.

  Mavis and Charlotte and Dorina were sitting in the drawing-room drinking elderberry wine. Mavis and Charlotte sat together. Dorina sat a little apart at the open window, looking out at the garden, at the spiky pink roses and the starry daisies on the lawn and the privet hedge pale as yellow marjoram bleaching in the sun. The garden was so much like the inside of her head. It was hard to realize that other people could see it too.

  Mrs Carberry was crying in the kitchen. Her eldest son had been arrested for stealing. Her second son was on probation for drugs. Her husband had hit her. There was a handbag that she wanted, crinkly blue leather with brass rings, but it was too expensive. Perhaps it would be reduced in the sale.

  ‘Did you see Matthew at that party?’ said Mavis.

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlotte, ‘but he didn’t see me.’

  ‘Is he much changed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He wrote to me.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘He said he wanted to see me if I wanted to see him.’

  ‘And do you?’

  ‘One is curious.’

  So Matthew had written to Mavis. Charlotte wondered, can I rebuild my life even now and be an independent person walking on the face of the earth, set free from people’s pity? Can I build walls against the seas of sadness and resentment and jealousy or must I be their victim after all?

  ‘So you think that’s why Austin was so anxious to let you the flat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you think, Dorina?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Will you come and stay with me, Dorina?’

  ‘Dear Charlotte —’

  ‘Don’t press her, let her think about it.’

  ‘You think Austin felt she might come and stay with you in his flat as a sort of halfway house?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A grass snake got in with the goldfish once. Dorina’s father tried to lift it out with a stick. It would have eaten the fish. Accidentally he killed it. Dorina ran away weeping. There were such terrible things in the world.

  Mavis felt a great void where her faith had been. This feeling was new, she had not missed it before. Yet it was not that she suddenly felt it was valuable. She had sacrificed her life for something of no value. Yet the sacrifice itself was of value. Could that be so?

  Mrs Carberry had seen such awful scenes on telly before her husband came home and switched over to the World Cup. She saw some men out in the East shooting a prisoner. He was all tied up and they held his head down and shot him with a pistol. Sometimes the television men would say, hold it, don’t kill him till our cameras are ready.

  ‘I do think Dorina should come and stay with me.’

  ‘So do I.’

/>   ‘She could do me a lot of good. You could do me a lot of good, Dorina. Why not think about that? Stop thinking of yourself. Think of me.’

  ‘Dearest Charlotte —’

  It was hard to picture the outside of the house from the inside. It was as if the inside proliferated, breeding all sorts of new dark uninhabited rooms. Sometimes it smelt of blood. But the garden was separate and clear, another kind of dream place, lit by a cool grey sun by day and night. There were statues there. One’s mind, wasn’t that just chemistry too?

  ‘I think I’ll go out into the garden.’

  Once she had thought that Austin was drugging her. But of course that was just a fantasy.

  ‘Yes, do, it’s so sunny.’

  ‘If you ever want anywhere to run to, Dorina, run to me.’

  ‘Dearest Char —’

  Upon the white treads of the stair the flies are dying, sprayed by Mrs Carberry. Are they in agony? What is it like for a fly to die? Dorina feels she ought to kill them quickly by stepping on them but she cannot.

  ‘Do you think she ought to see somebody?’

  ‘You mean a doctor?’

  ‘Or a priest.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Austin’s the trouble, not her.’

  Mavis felt a void where her faith had been, an empty space left underneath her heart, only she had not noticed it for years. She had made a great sacrifice for nothing, she had made a mistake.

  ‘So you will see Matthew.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Isn’t it funny his living at the Villa. Who would have thought it this time last year. It’s funny, yes, funny.’

  ‘I wonder if he still owns that cottage.’

  ‘You mean in Sussex where Austin and Betty were staying when Betty was drowned?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He sold it to a cousin of Geoffrey Arbuthnot.’

  ‘Ludwig hasn’t been to see us.’

  ‘He is sick with love, happy boy.’

  ‘Happy since he is loved.’

  ‘Happy anyway. It is better to be sick with love than just sick.’

  ‘Are you all right, Char?’

  ‘Yes. And take that look off your face. I’m not one of your cases.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Char.’

  ‘I can hear somebody crying.’