‘Rose Cottage, Rose Walk, N.W.5.’
Even as he caught the nearly-whispered words, there sounded the shrill note of a bell and down upon them coasted a figure in a clerical hat, which stopped just short of Charley’s machine and dismounted from a bicycle.
‘Hullo, Mr Fisher – in trouble with the Law? I’m sure he can’t have done anything very serious, he’s an old friend of mine, I’m the Vicar of Saint James’s, Highgate,’ said the new arrival. ‘I’ve been over seeing someone in Hampstead … what’s he done?’
Charley was relieved to see that Mr Fisher had a respectable friend. Wild thoughts of having to carry the old man off to the station on the back of the bike had been passing through his mind.
‘Nothing really, sir. Collecting litter or something. But I thought it was time he went home – on such a cold night. And I still do,’ he ended severely. ‘At his age.’
‘Yes, yes, quite right. It is cold. I’ll see him home – I’m going his way. You’ll give me the pleasure of your company, won’t you, Mr Fisher?’
This was received with a silent downward bend of the head. Mr Geddes’s unusually keen sight had enabled him to recognize the old man at a distance of some hundred yards, and it now told him that Mr Fisher was trembling so violently that he seemed about to fall.
‘I’ll take him into the Vicarage and give him something hot to drink,’ he said. ‘I’ll look after him – it’s all right. (He’s quite sane – just – lives in a world of his own, that’s all),’ he added, in an undertone.
‘All right, sir. We have to keep an eye on them, you know. I’ll be off, then. Thank you. Good-night.’
Charley kept his face and voice rather stern to the last: he could not quite put his finger on the point where the Law had been deflected and cheated of doing its job, but he felt that it had. However, presumably the Church could be trusted to take over. With a gesture of farewell, which pointedly excluded Mr Fisher, he mounted his machine and rode off.
‘There!’ exclaimed Mr Geddes, ‘he’s gone. Now let’s walk up this way and you can tell me all about it.’
Mr Fisher made an inarticulate sound, which Mr Geddes’s patient and practised ear interpreted rightly.
‘No, leave it for tonight. You’ve made a good-sized heap,’ glancing towards the grisly collection, ‘the keepers will come tomorrow and burn it. Come along – we’ll soon be home.’
In fact, he did not think that they would.
Mr Fisher’s gait, a cross between a shuffle and a totter, was not only slow, but instantly aroused the fear that he might at any minute fall down, and the path leading up from the valley towards the ponds, and thence off the Heath, was steep.
‘An educated man,’ Mr Fisher said feebly, beginning to move waveringly between the tussocks. ‘We might ’ave some conversation – only I am rather tired. I don’t mind admitting it, not to an educated man. But people will … I don’t like people,’ he ended suddenly, on a pettish note like a weary child.
Mr Geddes answered only by wheeling the bicycle nearer to him, and they moved into step together, beginning the long ascent. For some time they made their way in silence. Mr Geddes was occupied in steering his bicycle and keeping an eye on his companion in case he stumbled, and he also felt irritable, and tired, and strongly disinclined for talk following an afternoon with a tiresome former parishioner. He wished, increasingly, that she had ceased to keep in touch with him after she left the parish. So far as Mr Geddes could make out, she derived no benefit from their continuing relationship, while all he himself got from it was irritation.
But let her, for heaven’s sake, be temporarily forgotten. He had better say something to the old man.
However, it was Mr Fisher who broke the silence.
‘I was brought up,’ he observed, ‘to think every little ’elps.’ There was criticism implied here; of Charley Mackray and Mr Geddes, who had prevented the picking up of litter.
‘“Little drops of water”,’ Mr Fisher continued severely, between small, stifled gasps, while the uncertainty of his gait perilously increased.
‘Yes, of course.’ Mr Geddes paused, steadying the bicycle. ‘The lights look rather fine from here, through the trees, don’t you think?’
‘And “little grains of sand”,’ Mr Fisher paused, and looked outwards. ‘No, I don’t think they do look fine. Dreadful, they look to me, wicked, and not caring about the likes of us. “Make the mighty ocean, And the something land” (you would know. Being educated).’
He began to totter on again, restored by Mr Geddes’s ruse, and muttering to himself as he went.
‘… postage, that’s the problem. One pair of ’ands can’t manage it all, in London, but abroad … it’s the postage … and I been thinking, what good could any of ’em do.’ The breathless, muted voice was almost inaudible. ‘Some millionaire, perhaps. But mostly that sort doesn’t care.’
Mr Geddes, with fifty years’ experience behind him in listening to the uneducated and the inarticulate, had the impression, as the whispers went on, that some scheme was being mulled over which should benefit humanity. He said nothing, however, wanting Mr Fisher to keep his breath for climbing the hill.
‘I’ve worked – it all out, evenings. Oh, it’s a task, a regular task, it is. A lifetime’s task, you could say,’ the old man muttered, looking down at the path under his straying feet.
They had now reached the brow of the hill and again Mr Geddes paused. Several paths leading down to the Ponds and Parliament Hill Fields sloped away before them, but it undeniably did look a long way.
‘Sure you’re up to walking?’ he asked.
Mr Fisher answered by tottering to a near-by seat and collapsing on it, with a mutter about getting his breath, at the same time trustfully turning to his companion his long sheep’s face, which in the moonlight looked as if he might well be dying. For a moment neither said anything, and the wind blew against them with the note that, even from a cloudless sky, hisses snow.
‘Can you ride a bicycle?’ suddenly demanded Mr Geddes, all his practical ability challenged.
‘Used to. ’Aven’t for years,’ in a gasping whisper.
‘Come on, then, I’ll help you mount, and wheel you down the hill!’ Mr Geddes exclaimed cheerfully, and was relieved to see the words have a reviving effect.
The old man got slowly up, and put out a small hand, which even through its glove struck cold and frail, into the one held out to him.
He mounted successfully, as if his muscles responded to the challenge of memory, and in a moment they were wheeling down the hill, Mr Geddes with a supporting arm around the light body balanced on the saddle, and Mr Fisher gripping the handles with what strength he had and even a faint smile of pleasure.
In ten minutes they were going along the path beside the Fields that look out over the main road, and a man out walking a couple of greyhounds glanced at them curiously.
‘Better get down, p’raps,’ observed Mr Fisher. ‘People …’
‘Yes, perhaps … can you manage?’
Mr Fisher replied by dismounting without mishap, and the final totter to the Vicarage began. It took nearly as long as their entire descent from the middle of the Heath.
As the large, gloomy house loomed before them, looking out over its be-shrubbed and tolerably wide carriage-sweep, Mr Geddes noted the dreary glow from his curate’s uncurtained window. He thought, for the hundredth time, that he must arrange for his mother to come. Two unusually busy men, living alone and ‘doing’ for themselves, needed feminine support as well as eatable cooked food. Their present way of living was rapidly approaching the limit of discomfort. Discomfort didn’t matter so much, but if it interfered with one’s work …
Mr Fisher tottered with some briskness up to the pillared porch, then sat down abruptly on the step while Mr Geddes got out his key.
‘Gerald!’ shouted the Vicar, striding into the hall and standing at the foot of the broad staircase mounting into darkness, ‘get us something hot to drink th
ere’s a good chap, will you? – I’ve got someone freezing down here …’
Reading Simone Weil, I suppose, he thought, as a faint distant shout replied. ‘Come in, Mr Fisher, there’ll be a hot drink in a minute – would you like a brandy?’
But Mr Fisher was too occupied with getting himself safely into the hall, and in shutting the door, to reply.
In a moment Gerald came down the stairs, pale, peering, and giving a general impression of having stumbled through some theological palisade, leaving books collapsing in all directions behind him.
‘Oh … hullo, Vicar … I was just working on my sermon … what’ll you have … er … good …’ in the direction of Mr Fisher, who had now collapsed into a very old armchair which had faithfully accompanied Mr Geddes all the way from Cambridge in 1919 to settle at last on the floor of Saint James’s Vicarage.
‘This is Mr Fisher, a friend of mine. We met on the Heath,’ said Mr Geddes, firmly discouraging questions. ‘Did you say brandy, Mr Fisher?’
‘I don’t touch spirits, never, as a rule. But it would be warming – thank you.’ He inclined his head slowly and deeply towards Gerald, who was hesitating, rather appalled by the visitor’s age and the colour of his skin. He made off towards the cavernous kitchen.
‘Come along, Mr Fisher … Gerald, I hope the fire’s in …’ the Vicar called after him.
He led the way to the study.
Did him an injustice there, he thought, or perhaps he’s getting sick of the woman; I hope so. (‘The woman’ was poor Simone Weil, whom Gerald was just discovering.)
The fire was in, if only just, and Mr Geddes recklessly piled on small logs, comfortably conscious that prunings from the Vicarage garden’s too-abundant trees would provide plenty more. ‘Come close to the fire, Mr Fisher – this is the best chair, I think – and I’ll draw the curtains.’ (Was it his curate’s immersion in his inward world that caused him never to think of drawing curtains, however bleak and drear the night outside?) ‘There, that’s better.’
Mr Fisher was soon sitting, as upright as he could make himself, almost on top of the fire, with a small glass of brandy in one trembling hand. He now slightly cleared his throat.
‘Ah,’ he began, ‘there’s nothing like a open fire. I always ’ave a open fire at ’ome. Wood. I collects it. On the Heath. I like to see the flames making their movements, and you can believe there’s caves and that, in the red coals.’
‘Yes …’ Mr Geddes was hastening out of the room in search of something hot for himself, which he hoped was brewing in the kitchen. They took it in turns to perform such tasks, and past experience warned him that if Gerald and milk were involved, the latter would shortly be boiling over. But he stopped at the door.
‘An open fire? Isn’t that rather dangerous in that old house – and at your age, Mr Fisher?’ He remembered Mr Fisher’s habit, deplored by Gladys Barnes, of putting just-extinguished candles into his pockets.
Mr Fisher was staring into the fire. ‘I am careful. I give you my word I am careful. And Miss Barnes kindly allows me to keep my wood on her landing, so there’s no occasion for me to go down to the back yard. In this yere cold weather there is nothink like an open fire. For the beauty of it. And there’s wood for the taking, over the ’Eath.’
‘Well, I hope Miss Barnes keeps an eye on your fire for you while you’re out?’ Mr Geddes lingered.
‘No, she don’t. I don’t like people in my place, especially I don’t like womenfolk – throwing things away, and always putting in a word when you wants to be quiet. The ladies can keep themselves to themselves and I’ll keep myself to myself.’
He turned back to his contemplation of the fire and Mr Geddes, stifling a laugh, made his way to the kitchen – to be met by the usual odour and the dismayed face of his curate.
‘I only turned my back a second, I give you my word.’
‘It comes up before you can see it,’ Mr Geddes told him, pouring out milk from a fresh bottle which he opened by bursting the foil cap with his thumb. ‘The drinking chocolate’s come – oh good.’ He snatched a tin from a half-unpacked box of groceries on the old wooden table. ‘You having some?’
‘No thank you, I don’t … er … you hadn’t forgotten the meeting at eight-fifteen?’ said Gerald, absently watching the preparation of the brew.
‘No – no, it’s been at the back of my mind ever since I got in, I’ll get rid of him the minute I can but I must just see him on his way,’ Mr Geddes was now swallowing the almost boiling drink standing.
‘There are quite a number of things on the Agenda … that draught at the back of the church …’
‘Damn the draught,’ said Mr Geddes impatiently, ‘though of course I don’t sit there … do you mind draughts, Gerald? (I must get back to him, he’ll be falling into the fire).’
‘Not really,’ was the dreamy answer, ‘I suppose if one’s been to … our kind of school … one doesn’t.’
‘No, we do learn not to notice minor discomforts … gosh, if you could stand my alma mater, you can stand most things!’
He glanced at his wrist. ‘It’s after eight … can you go on, and tell them I’ll be there in five minutes … you might get the prayer over for me, if you will?’
He hurried off, and Gerald, having scraped ineptly at the burnt milk crusted on the gas cooker with a cloth that should have been burned some months ago, put it on the draining-board, with the wondering reflection that in the late Mrs Geddes’s time the kitchen might have been comfortable, even cosy. He went off to the Parochial Church Council Meeting.
Mr Fisher was asleep. Mr Geddes gently shook him by the shoulder, and the pale eyes slowly opened and stared at him.
‘I have to go to a meeting now,’ the Vicar told him, ‘but you’re welcome to stay if you like – I shall be some time, I’m afraid, but if you wait, I or my curate will see you home.’
‘I will be getting on my way.’ Mr Fisher began to get to his feet.
‘Sure? We could run to a taxi, I think – you must be very tired – if you like to wait?’
‘No, no, thank you. It has been a pleasure, talkin’ to an educated man.’
‘Then I really must go. Good-night, Mr Fisher – we’ll be seeing one another. You can let yourself out, can’t you?’
The old man’s gesture of farewell, a solemn movement of the hand and a deep bend of his head, remained with Mr Geddes as he crossed the dark garden to the church, looming some fifty yards away.
The taxi fare would have come out of his own pocket: he thought he knew human nature well enough, after fifty years of bashing at it, to be sure that Mr Fisher would not steal anything on his way out. A strange old man. Oddly likeable.
The church clock struck the hour, high up in the windy moonlight. St. Thomas’s Eve! Tomorrow would be the shortest day.
11
At Christmas, Gladys relied upon the arrival of two envelopes from ladies for whom she had formerly worked, and on the morning of the twenty-third she and Annie were awaiting the postman.
‘Sure not to be here till round about eleven and then it’ll be the van,’ observed Gladys, stationed at the bedroom window overlooking the street.
‘Oh I can’t think about nothing else but them moving in. I do think it was too bad not to ’ave let us know – that Peggy – she’s downright unkind.’
‘Well let’s hope they’ll let us have Christmas Day in peace. Sure to, come to that. Whoever heard of anyone moving in on Christmas Day?’
‘You don’t know, Glad,’ Annie said with dismal significance, ‘that sort’ – she meant the sort employed by Thomas Pearson – ‘they don’t work not like ordinary people.’
‘Oh do for pity’s sake cheer up – here’s the van!’
Gladys ended on a joyful scream and ran across the room. She hurried down the stairs, surprising in their pink and grey new carpet after the dinginess of the sisters’ landing, and dashed open the freshly painted front door.
If it had been a white postman, there wo
uld have been perhaps friendly exchanges about smartness, come into a fortune, won the Pools, or even ‘about time, too’, concerning the redecorating. But the two letters she almost snatched from a well-kept black hand were delivered without a smile, and intellectual eyes, behind glasses, looked at her gravely. ‘Thanks ever so – just what I wanted!’ she cried, beaming. There was no answering smile but an expression of benevolence replaced the gravity.
Educated student. Doing it for the money. Don’t laugh, might crack something, decided Gladys, toiling up the stairs with the letters. ‘Annie, Annie, it’s all right – they’ve come!’ she began to scream, as she reached the landing. ‘Now we can enjoy ourselves.’
There followed a delightful half hour, while they examined the three pound notes sent by Mrs Harriman and the two sent by Mrs Lysaght, and discussed how they would spend them.
Mrs Lysaght was Mr Geddes’s former parishioner who had moved to Hampstead. It was she who had persuaded Gladys to resume the church-going that Gladys, more from the delightful pressure of living than from indolence or disinclination, had allowed to lapse: and perhaps it was the only contribution towards leaving the world a better place than she found it that Mrs Lysaght had made.
Gladys did not have to leave for work until the afternoon, and she was just, with a pleasant sense of leisure, swathing herself in the cardigans and mufflers fitted to face the piercing wind while she ‘popped round to Joneses’; and debating with Annie whether, in view of their Christmas box, she might not instead go up the Archway in search of some nice bargains in the way of food, when the bedroom door was roughly opened. Gladys screamed. Annie cowered into her wrappings.
‘You Gladys Barnes?’ demanded the dark man who stood there, unsmiling, with a hand on the door.
Gladys, open-mouthed, nodded.
‘Mrs Pearson’s moving in this afternoon,’ he said. ‘The men’ll be here soon. You be here to let them in.’
‘I – I –’ Gladys was trembling so that the words would hardly come, but she found some courage. ‘I can’t, I got to go to work, ’meditely after lunch, they’re expecting me. And it’s the money –’