‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the butcher is at the next corner but one. I’ve been there often.’
‘Well, son, I’ll say goodbye then. Time for me to be off.’ Yet he seemed strangely unwilling to go. He asked me, ‘You two getting on well together?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘fine.’
‘You call her Mum like I told you?’
‘She wants me to call her Liza.’
‘Oh, that’s Liza all over. She always likes things straight and true. I admire her for it, but the trouble is that straight and true can be a bit dangerous at times. For instance it’s much safer if you called her Mum, not Liza. If people hear you calling her Mum they sort of accept the situation. They don’t ask questions.’
‘She says it might make them wonder where I’ve sprung from.’
He pondered a little over my reply and then he said, ‘Yes. I hadn’t thought of that. Perhaps she’s right. She does think things through. She learnt that in the school of suffering, poor Liza did. That devil your father …’
‘Does she know my father?’ I asked with curiousity, for I could hardly remember much of him myself.
‘She knew him once, but don’t you speak of him to her. I want her to forget.’ He repeated ‘to forget …’ He added, ‘And here I am forgetting the most important thing of all.’ He took an envelope from his pocket and said, ‘Give her that and tell her if there’s any trouble, if she’s short of anything … give it to she knows who.’
‘To she knows who,’ I repeated. It was a difficult message to memorize, like a phrase in a grammar lesson.
He asked, ‘Is she happy with you there?’
‘She seems all right,’ I said.
‘I don’t want her to feel lonely – ever. Does she speak of me sometimes?’
‘Oh yes,’ I told him. ‘She’s always wondering when you’ll turn up. She listens to footsteps.’
‘I think,’ he said with a kind of humble doubt, ‘that she’s a bit fond of me. In her own way of course.’
That tone of his came back to my mind when she said to me in her turn (I had just given her the envelope ‘with his love’), ‘I do think he likes me a lot – in his own way.’ They neither of them seemed to be quite sure of the other’s way. She added, ‘You like him, don’t you?’
We seemed, between the three of us in those days, to be doing a lot of thinking.
‘You’ve got to get to know the Captain,’ she repeated and she spoke in such an earnest tone that I can remember the exact phrase she used to this day. It was as if for a moment she had let me into the important secret which would help to explain what was already a mysterious past and any future, equally mysterious, which was likely to come.
(4)
As for the immediate future – well, perhaps not really the immediate, for I cannot remember now what length of time passed before we saw the Captain again and I have no memory of his return. Was it after weeks or months? Never mind, my memory leaps ahead to an evening when he took me to a movie house in order to see a film – it was I think called King Kong. (It was by that time already an ancient film even to my young eyes, but I remember how the Captain remarked to me as he bought the tickets, ‘In this old flea-house you can see all the old films, and the old films are always the best.’) There were few people in the cinema, for it was very early evening, but he took great care about our seats – a little too close for my eyesight and I asked whether we couldn’t go back a few rows. The answer was ‘No’, firmly stated, and I assumed that the Captain had become short-sighted with age, for a man in his forties was to me as old as the pyramids. King Kong, if it was King Kong, clambered about the skyscrapers with a blonde girl – whose name I don’t remember – in his arms. Every man’s hand was against him – police, soldiers, even firemen I seem to remember. The girl kicked a bit, but she soon became quiescent.
‘It’s a great story,’ the Captain whispered into my right ear.
‘Yes.’
I believe that in the story the authorities – whoever they were – even brought planes into action against King Kong, who naturally interested me much more than the burden he carried.
‘Why doesn’t he drop her?’ I asked.
I suppose I sounded very heartless to the Captain, for he replied harshly, ‘He loves her, boy. Can’t you understand that – he loves her?’ But of course I couldn’t understand. I had watched her kicking King Kong and to me love was more or less the same thing as liking, except that it might involve kissing, and kissing to me had little importance. Kissing had been something imposed on me by my aunt, but surely all the same neither liking nor loving could involve kicking. One kicked an enemy, in order to hurt. I realized that well enough, although I had never desired to hurt anyone except a boy called Twining who had made my life miserable as an Amalekite at a period which now began to seem years away.
An odd thing came to my notice when the lights went on. I saw that the Captain had tears in his eyes. I felt sorry for King Kong, but not to that extent. After all he was the stronger and he could have kicked back – as I couldn’t with Twining who was two years older. I assumed that it was something else which had disturbed the Captain and I asked him, ‘Is anything the matter?’
‘The poor chap,’ he said, ‘all the world was against him.’
‘I liked King Kong, but why did he carry the girl around all that time when she didn’t like him?’
‘How do you know she didn’t like him?’
‘Because she kicked him.’
‘A kick or two doesn’t mean anything. It’s a woman’s way. He loved her. You can be sure of that.’
That meaningless word ‘love’ again. How often my aunt had asked me, ‘Do you love me?’ And of course I had always answered ‘Yes.’ It was the easiest way out of a difficult situation. I couldn’t very well reply, ‘You bore the pants off me.’ She was a good woman in her way, but now I couldn’t help comparing her sandwiches with the meal which the Captain had given me at The Swan. I knew already that I liked the Captain, and that soft word ‘love’ with its mysterious demands would never come between us, I felt sure.
We walked a little way together from the cinema and at a street corner he paused and asked me as he had once before, ‘You know the way home?’ The word ‘home’ still made me hesitate a little, even though I had begun to use it experimentally myself. It was the word which my aunt had always used and on those brief occasions when I had seen the Devil he would of course use it too, saying ‘Time to go home, boy,’ though all he meant was the train to Richmond and my aunt’s house. I said, ‘Home?’
‘To Liza,’ he said, and I had the feeling that somehow I had failed him, but I didn’t know how.
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘it’s only three streets away. Aren’t you coming?’
‘Better not.’ He put a newspaper into my hands and said, ‘Give her this. Tell her to read page two, but not to worry. Everything’s going to be OK.’
So I went on to the place they so wanted me to call home, though I was a little disappointed that he was not coming with me.
3
TO LOVE AND to like – it must have been difficult for me as a child to learn how to distinguish between the two. Even in later years, when sexual desire began to play its part, I would find myself wondering, do I love this girl or do I really only like her because of the pleasure that for the time being we share?
As I went back home, carrying the newspaper, I was pretty certain that I liked the Captain, but I wasn’t at all certain yet whether I liked Liza. Both of them were mysterious to me, but while I found the mystery of the Captain interesting, the mystery of Liza was like a disappointment; there was a sense of something lacking between us.
I gave her the newspaper and the message, but she put the newspaper away in a drawer in the kitchen and I knew that she wasn’t going to read it so long as I remained there.
‘What’s on page two?’ I asked her boldly.
‘What do you mean page two?’
‘The newspape
r. He said you had to read page two.’
‘Oh, it’s only one of his jokes,’ she said and she began to lay the table for our supper.
That night I couldn’t sleep and when all was quiet I went down on tiptoe to the kitchen. I found the paper still there in the waste-paper basket, and I carried it up to my sofa bed.
All the same I didn’t at once turn to the page the Captain had named. I was too excited. I felt as though I were on the brink of learning something about the Captain of vital importance. He had admitted to me on our first day together that he didn’t always tell the truth, but in my young eyes a newspaper invariably contained truth, gospel truth. How often in the past I had heard my aunt exclaim about some extraordinary, even inconceivable, event, like the birth of a hippo or a rhinoceros in the London zoo, ‘Of course it’s true. It’s in the papers.’
I can still see the front page of the Telegraph – the Captain was a Telegraph man (the Telegraph, I can believe now, went with the bowler hat, the walking-stick and the trimmed moustache – it was a stage property to help him create a character). A headline blazed up at me in big type conveying some totally uninteresting news – perhaps the fall of a government – I can’t pretend to remember now. If only it had been murder … but it wasn’t any story worth sticking in a twelve-year-old mind. But two stories on page two remain with me to this day: one was of a suicide of a rather horrible kind – a man who drenched himself in petrol and then set light to himself with a match, and the other dealt with what was called a gang robbery. Gangs were a feature of my imagination: the Amalekites were a gang. Apparently this gang had tied up and gagged a jeweller in a district called Wimbledon. He had been working late, ‘taking stock’, when a man of ‘military bearing’ had knocked on the door and asked the way to Baxter Street – a street unknown in Wimbledon. After the man had turned away and before the jeweller had time to close his door the gang had arrived, and with them when they left went the whole stock, valued at several thousand pounds. There was no evidence that the man with ‘the military bearing’ was concerned in the robbery and the police appealed to him to come forward and help in their inquiries. It was believed that the same gang had been concerned in another robbery some weeks before.
I crept down and replaced the paper, and afterwards, lying on the sofa with sleep a long way off, I wondered at the strange coincidence that the street which was said not to exist bore my own name. My adopted mother next day seemed harassed and apprehensive. I had an impression that she was in fear of a strange caller. Twice there was a ring at the bell and she sent me to answer it, while she waited at the bottom of the stairs with that anxious look on her face. The first time it proved to be only the milkman and the second time someone who had got the street number wrong. In the middle of supper that night – as usual, my favourite dish, a hamburger with an egg on top – she spoke up suddenly apropos of nothing at all, with a kind of ferocity as though she were contradicting a remark of mine (but I had been as silent as herself). ‘He’s a good man,’ she said. ‘He’d never do anything that was really wicked. It’s not in his nature. You should know that.’
‘Know what?’
‘Sometimes I think he’s just too kind to live. He makes me scared.’
It was during the prolonged absence of the Captain which followed that Liza began to worry about my education. ‘You ought to be learning things,’ she told me over a cup of tea.
‘What things?’
‘Pretty nearly everything,’ she said. ‘Like sums.’
‘I was never much good at sums.’
‘Spelling.’
‘My spelling’s not bad.’
‘Geography. If only the Captain would return he’d teach you that. You see he’s a very travelled man.’
‘Is he travelling now?’
‘I expect he is.’
‘You don’t think he might have set himself alight?’ I asked, remembering page two.
‘Good heavens no. What makes you say that?’
‘It was in that Telegraph he sent you.’
‘So you read that paper?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you said nothing. That wasn’t straight of you. The Captain wants you to be straight. He says that one day you’ll look after me when he’s gone.’
‘He’s gone now.’
‘He means gone away for ever.’
‘You’d miss him badly, wouldn’t you?’
‘It would be like dying – only worse. I want to be the one that goes first. But he says I’ve got to look after you. I think that’s why he brought you here. To make sure I don’t go first.’
‘Are you very sick?’ I asked with the cold curiosity of my age.
‘No, but I was once. That was the first time he saw me – he came with your father to the hospital. Sometimes when he looks at me – he looks at me in a scared sort of way. As though I were still lying sick in that bed … Then I get sore at him. I don’t want him scared because of me. He might do something rash.’
This conversation was perhaps my second lesson in what love might mean between two grown-up people. Love, it was quite clear to me now, meant fear, and I suppose it was the same fear which made Liza go out very early each morning to buy a Telegraph so that she might know the worst – the dreaded sequel to whatever it was she had read on page two, but when she was back in the safety of the kitchen she didn’t know where to look, she had to turn every page, even the sports and financial pages, and she no longer hid from me that she was seeking some sort of news of the Captain with a deadly apprehension.
I cannot pretend that all these details which I am trying so hard to reconstruct from my memory are necessarily true, but I feel myself today driven by a compulsive passion now that we are separated to make these two people live before my eyes again, to bring them back out of the shadows and set them to play their sad parts as closely as possible to the truth. I am only too well aware of how I may be weaving fact into fiction but without any intention of betraying the truth. I want above anything else to make the two of them clear to myself, so that they will continue to live as visibly as two photographs might seem to do propped up on a shelf beside my bed, but I don’t own a single photograph of either of them. Why am I so possessed by them? Of the Captain I have heard nothing for years, and Liza, whom I left of my own accord, I see only from time to time, always with a sense of guilt. It’s not because of any love I feel for them. It is as though I had taken them quite coldbloodedly as fictional characters to satisfy this passionate desire of mine to write.
4
THE BELL RANG, but only once – and that wasn’t the right signal for the Captain.
‘Shall I go?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps it’s the postman.’
‘He came when you were out fetching a paper. Don’t go. It may be one of the neighbours.’
The bell rang a second time.
‘They can see the light in the basement,’ I told her.
‘The inquisitive bitches,’ Liza said. ‘That Mrs Lowndes at twenty-three asked me who you were. I was out cleaning the steps. I said you were my son and that you’d been living with your father until he died. Do you know what she said? “Why is he not at school?” she said.’
The bell rang a third time more imperiously.
‘What did you tell her?’ I asked.
‘I said, “He has private lessons,” but I don’t think she believed me.’
The bell rang again twice. ‘Suppose it’s the police,’ Liza said.
‘What would they want?’
‘You’d better go and see. Be careful. If they ask about the Captain, you don’t know him, you’ve never seen him, and he’s not here.’
I went slowly and nervously up from the basement and gave the bell enough time to ring again. Then I bent down and looked through the keyhole, but I could see only a section of grey overcoat slashed open by a pocket. I opened the door and there was my father.
‘The Devil,’ I exclaimed before I could stop myself.
My father was a whit
e-bearded burly man with a fine set of teeth for his age, but perhaps they were capped. They flashed their double row at me now in quite a genial fashion. ‘May the Devil come in?’ he asked, and I stood aside for him.
‘Liza,’ he called, ‘Liza,’ looking up the stairs.
‘She’s in the basement,’ I told him, and he picked his way down carefully step by step, for the stairs were narrow and his feet were big.
‘So it’s you,’ Liza said. She stood by the kitchen table with a carving-knife in her hand, but that was only because she had been in the middle of washing up. ‘How did you know?’
‘I got a picture postcard from Roger.’
‘Roger?’
‘It was a picture of Bruges cathedral. He asked me to look you both up in case you needed help because he’d been away a long time.’
‘Who’s Roger?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I forgot. He likes to call himself the Captain, doesn’t he?’ He turned on me. ‘You’ve been causing quite a bit of trouble, Victor.’
The name angered me. I said, ‘I’m Jim now.’
‘Well, it’s your mother who chose Victor. I never liked the name. It sounded a bit like boasting. I think it was because you were born on May something or other when we celebrate the day the Germans surrendered.’
‘I wasn’t. I was born in September.’
‘Oh, then there must have been another reason. Perhaps she thought to have you at all was her victory. Over me. I wasn’t so keen on a child.’
‘Well, I’m Jim now.’
‘Jim’s a shade better, but it’s still a bit on the common side.’
‘We don’t need any help from you,’ Liza said.
‘I wish that silly fellow had told me earlier where you were both hiding. It would have saved me a lot of bother about Victor. Oh, all right, Jim, if you like it better. There was first your aunt, and then a fool called Bates. He wrote me an extraordinary letter. Said he was your headmaster. Never heard of him till then. I always paid the bills to a man they called the bursar. But your aunt was the worst of the lot. How are you, old girl?’