‘Front or back?’
‘Front.’
‘Oh. Oh of course, it would be. I’ve never been in there.’ He was lounging against the wall at the first landing, one foot on the next flight of stairs. ‘Know who had it before you?’
‘No.’ I didn’t care either, and didn’t pretend to, but that didn’t stop him.
‘An old girl called Mrs Williams. Decayed gentry. Well, no, not gentry really, sort of next drawer down. Originally. Needless to say she wasn’t even bottom drawer when she was here – she’d fallen through the whole lot on to the floor, poor old duck. None of us ever quite knew what she was living on, I mean for food and so on – she never paid any rent. I gathered she’d done something for Doris once, so she had that room as a sort of grace-and-favour.’
‘Who’s Doris? The landlady?’
‘She’s no lady, ma’am, land or otherwise.’ I noticed he’d dropped his voice. ‘I don’t know what it was she owed Mrs W., she must have bailed her out of jail or something once, because I can’t imagine anything else that would make her waive the –’
There was a faint pop, and the light went out, plunging us into irritating blackness. Immediately the sour smell seemed stronger. It was partly stale cooking, I realized, as well as mustiness and dirt. I didn’t think it could be coming from the young man, after all.
He pressed the switch again and reappeared. ‘Look, can I come and look at that room? I’ve often wondered what it was like – the old girl used to behave as if it was full of heads she’d shrunk.’
‘It’s just an ordinary room.’ I started up the next flight, pushing past him. He followed, taking what I’d intended to be a refusal as an invitation. I felt uneasy but too tired to do anything about it.
‘My name’s Toby Coleman,’ he said. I privately thought it was probably Cohen and chalked it up against him that he should have changed it. I felt annoyed at this intrusion. I didn’t want to meet or get on any sort of friendly footing with any of the other people in the house. I wanted to bury myself in this alien world; I’d chosen it with the vague idea that here nobody would bother me or interfere with me; coming from such a different life I had had some dim snobbish feeling that I and the other inhabitants of this house would scarcely speak the same language, and that they would all remain unknown to me except as closed doors to pass, or occasional footsteps or voices through walls, or names on envelopes on the hall table. I hadn’t thought of them in terms of faces and curious eyes and minds beset by their own problems and driven by the inane need to communicate.
We climbed to the top. It was only the third time I’d done the climb, and the first time I’d stopped to think how it would be to do it six months from now. We were both panting as I unlocked the scabrous door and switched on another 40-watt dangling bulb.
I hadn’t seen the room at night before. It was infinitely depressing. The bulb threw a mean, chilly light on the shoddy, shabby furniture and by its plentiful shadows increased the day-time impression of dirty walls and dark, unloved corners.
Toby Coleman went ahead of me and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking round. ‘Gawd,’ he said, ‘it’s bloody well worse than mine.’
This was exactly what I’d wanted to avoid, though I didn’t realize it clearly until then. It was all right so long as nobody else saw it, or saw me in it. As soon as this damn boy walked into it and started passing opinions, I felt instantly ashamed, and to my fury I heard myself saying defensively:
‘Well, I only moved in two hours ago. I haven’t fixed it up yet.’ I had had no intention of fixing it up; I remembered how I’d even decided not to bother cleaning the window. I glared at Toby angrily, but he was impervious.
‘Well, I don’t know what even the Editor of Homes and Gardens could make of a dump like this, but jolly good luck to you. I say, is that a bottle of wine? You couldn’t spare a glass, could you? I’ll pay you back. I haven’t even any coffee left and it’s too damn’ wet to go out.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘don’t think me rude or anything, but I want to be by myself.’
‘Oh hell, do you?’ He sounded genuinely disappointed. ‘What, the whole evening? Couldn’t I come back later?’
‘Is it the drink you want, or just company?’
‘Well, neither really. Or you could say both. You see, I write. I mean, I’m a writer. Have you ever tried to write? It’s the most bloody business. Any excuse is good enough to get away from the typewriter.’ He settled down with a look of cosy permanence in the arm-chair. ‘Did you ever hear the story about the man who was commissioned to do a piece for the Saturday Evening Post? I don’t know why it was the S.E.P. except that they pay so well, and this chap was as broke as the rest of us. Well, he needed the money, he wanted to do the piece, he had a deadline to meet, but he kept putting it off. Any excuse not to get started. He missed two deadlines, and the third and last was set for 1 January. On the last night of December the Editor rang him up and said was it ready? No, not quite, said this character, he was just going to start it but first he had to clean his tennis shoes.’ He stared at me solemnly. ‘My God, I understand that bloke! If I had any tennis shoes, I’d probably be cleaning them this minute instead of talking to you when you obviously wish me in hell.’
He picked up the bottle and looked at the light through it. His face was very thin and quite plain, with its big, beaky nose and starveling eyes, but it was an interesting face. I found myself studying it against my will.
‘If you won’t share your wine with me, which you’ve every right not to do of course, do you know what I’ll do? I shall go down to my room and sit at my table for five minutes, getting maybe three sentences typed before convincing myself that my need for coffee is strong enough to drive me out into the rain. That’ll take half an hour and on the way back I’ll detour past a cinema which will be showing some piece of rubbish that I’ve no real wish to see, but I’ll tell myself that I’ve got to study every market, and in I’ll go. On the way home I’ll have such a dry throat from guilt at wasting the evening that I’ll nip into a pub for a beer. Then when I get chucked out of there it’ll be after eleven, and Doris won’t let me type beyond half past so it won’t be worth starting …’ He smiled at me with his head on one side. It was a funny, wry smile. ‘That’s actually how I make my living. So now you don’t have to ask me why I’m living in this bug-house, you should pardon the expression. It doesn’t explain why you are.’
I felt myself growing angrier and angrier while he was talking. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to listen. I knew very well if he went on talking like that much longer I should get interested in him, I might even get to like him, with his funny alert face and absurd, useless fund of self-knowledge. He wasn’t even the sort of person you could enjoy being rude to. But, I thought, if I’m thoroughly unfriendly and unpleasant right from the start, not only to him but to any of the others who might try to turn themselves from anonymities into individuals for my benefit, then they’ll leave me alone and I can start being whatever this business is going to turn me into.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said curtly. ‘It’s none of your affair why I’ve come here, and it’s none of mine what you do with your time. So long as you don’t use it to waste mine.’ It’s funny how, when you really want to say something bitchy and cutting to someone who’s been bitchy to you, you can’t think of anything till afterwards. When there’s no real call for it, you come suddenly out with a piece of 9-carat bitchery that shakes even you.
He looked at me for a minute and his eyebrows went up. Then he remarked, in his very nice cultured accent, ‘Okay, bugger you mate,’ but without any particular malice, and went out, leaving the door open. I could hear him thudding down the stairs and a door closed on the landing below.
I was left in the solitude I’d so pointedly asked for, in the middle of the room that I had no intention of fixing up.
I closed the door and stood with my back to it, looking. Now that other eyes had seen it and identified it as mine
, I couldn’t regard the room with the same calculated indifference as before, when I’d deliberately refused to notice any of its squalor or inconveniences. There were two rooms under the sloping roof, which had once been one biggish square one. It had been divided by the simple process of putting up two partitional walls set at right-angles. This resulted in a small square room and a small L-shaped room along two sides of it, which was mine. The square room which had been stolen, as it were, from the main area, had a little window up near the ceiling in the short partition. The partitions didn’t look very thick. I leaned over and knocked on the nearest one, to test it, and immediately someone on the other side knocked back.
I snatched my knuckles away as if the wall had been red hot. But I’d found out what I wanted to know. The partitions were somewhat thicker than ordinary hardboard.
Feeling my sense of security dwindling, I instinctively bolted my door. Then I continued my examination.
I couldn’t see the whole room from where I stood at the end of the short arm of the L. This was as narrow as a corridor. One wall – the partition – was bare; along the other ran some rudimentary cooking facilities, consisting of a wash-basin-cum-sink with a tin draining-board and a small cupboard with a top just large enough to hold a gas-stove, about a foot square, with a grill and two small elements. Under the window, with its dirty-looking brown curtains, was a small kitchen table scarred with ancient cigarette burns.
Moving to the elbow of the room, I considered the longer, wider arm of the L. It contained a camp bed covered with the remains of a wartime afghan, made up of lopsided squares, ill-knitted from scraps of clashing wool and full of dropped stitches; there was the chest of drawers, leaning drunkenly over its missing leg; a kitchen chair and an arm-chair with the thin brown cloth of its seat rent by the hernial pressure of escaping springs and the arms worn shiny by many grimy hands. There was also a small gas-fire beneath the mantelpiece, on which stood a pair of hideous plaster Alsatians standing guard each side of an embroidered picture of a crinoline lady in a cottage garden. The walls were covered with the regulation nicotine-coloured paper splashed with dead flowers, peeling in many places. The floor was lino’d; it looked as if it had had football played on it in cleated boots. There was a Hallowe’en coloured rag rug in front of the fire. Lying on this was a metal ashtray, which had evidently slipped off the chest of drawers. I picked it up. It had CINZANO printed across it in patriotic colours. I looked round for a waste-paper basket to throw it into, but of course there wasn’t one.
I put it between the grinning Alsatians, and turned my back to them to survey the room from the opposite direction. The outlook was equally uninspiring. From here I could see the miniature stove head-on; its rusty gas-taps snarled at me like bared teeth. In a small fly-spotted mirror over the sink I could see my own face; not a pretty sight at present.
I felt a wave of depression swell round me suffocatingly, and hastily tore the paper off the bottle of port-type. I tried to open the drawer in the table, which I supposed held cutlery and other utensils including a corkscrew; it stuck, and I was cursing freely by the time it jerked open. Inside were two bent forks, a tin-handled table knife and a bread knife, one ordinary spoon and two teaspoons almost black with age and egg, a fish-slice with a burnt handle, and one of those cutters that enables you to make wavy chips. That appeared at first to be all, though later I did find two knitting-needles of different gauges, a rusty skewer, two corks and an empty thermometer case right at the back.
I wanted a drink so badly that I was quite prepared to rush downstairs to Doris and demand a corkscrew, with menaces. Then I stopped to consider that there were probably other, more important battles to be fought over more essential items Doris would prove not to have provided; a cursory glance into the china cupboard revealed a very sparse and motley collection. In the meantime I had the wine but not the means to get at it, which seemed an intolerable situation.
I sat down on the bed, which, like all its kind, had a hard wooden rim backed up by a deep sag. I would have to borrow a corkscrew from someone, and the only possible person would be Toby. It seemed very humiliating, but there it was.
Just as I was wondering if I could possibly face it, the knocking which had answered mine on the partition started again. I sat frozen, staring at the wall, half-expecting someone to burst through it like a circus lion through a paper hoop. There were three knocks, then an expectant pause, then three more knocks. I didn’t move. After a moment, the knocks were repeated, but this time on the other wall of the partition.
Drawn irresistibly, I moved round the angle. I felt a shiver of nervousness as the clear, hollow sound emphasized the thinness of the barrier. Suddenly the knocking changed. It was on glass this time, near the ceiling. I looked up and saw, in the little window, a huge black face.
I gasped with fright and ran back round the angle again where I couldn’t be seen. I felt my heart slamming and caught sight of my own face in the mirror, as deathly white as the other had been black. I blundered about for a few seconds in a blind panic, then my knees buckled and I flopped on to the cold lino by the bed with a thump. I caught up handfuls of the friendly afghan and hung on to them with my eyes screwed shut.
After a little while I opened them and listened. Apart from my heart, which was still making a distinctly audible noise, there had been no more knocking; I took a deep breath and forced myself to relax. After all, why in God’s name should a black face be more alarming than a white one? So, I was next door to a negro. I should have expected something like that from what the old newsagent had said. I didn’t know what atavistic terror had caused me to behave so stupidly; I felt very silly, crouched there on my knees, and I told myself to get up and stop being an idiot. At that moment there was a knock on the door.
Once again I froze into paralysed stillness. Then I forced myself to call out ‘Who’s that?’ My voice was a croak, and I held the afghan like a talisman.
‘It’s me, Toby.’
I scrambled to my feet and went to the door unsteadily, edging along the wall beneath the little window. I slipped back the bolt and let Toby in, bolting it again after him.
‘What’s the idea of that? Frightened of burglars? They’d never make it up all those stairs.’
Ignoring this, I said, ‘What made you come up?’
‘I thought I heard you knock on the floor.’
I remembered the thump my knees made as I fell on them, and shook my head. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Sorry, I thought you wanted something.’ He started to go.
‘As a matter of fact, I did, I mean I do,’ I said, and found I’d caught hold of his arm to stop him leaving. ‘I haven’t got a cork-screw,’ I finished lamely.
He grinned. ‘Doris’s methods of distribution are a bit eccentric,’ he said. ‘I’ve got three. I’ll give you one. You haven’t by any chance been given two bread knives? No? I just wondered. I’ll pop down and get the corkscrew. Be right back.’ He hurried away, leaving the door open. I quickly closed it and stood against it until I heard Toby returning.
He opened the bottle while I looked for glasses. I found one big tumbler with ‘Stella Artois’ across it in gold, and a bakelite tooth-mug. Both looked filthy and I tried to turn on the Ascot to wash them in hot water, but although the pilot was alight nothing further happened when I turned on the tap.
‘It’s the diaphragm, I expect,’ Toby said philosophically. ‘Perished. Mine’s been like that for weeks. I keep meaning to ask Doris about it – not that she’d do anything. You’re lucky to have running water at all, Mavis hasn’t.’
The words Who’s Mavis trembled on my tongue and were forced back.
‘I haven’t found a kettle yet,’ I said instead.
‘That seems odd, even for Doris; she’s a tea-maniac. Oh wait a minute. I remember she burnt the bottom out of hers recently – she probably pinched the one from here to replace it rather than shell out for a new one. She’s a mean old cow,’ he added without rancour.
‘What wo
uld happen if I asked her for one?’
‘Bugger-all, I should think, judging by my own results. Since I got here I’ve had to buy –’ ticking them off on his fingers – ‘cup and saucer, hers being so cracked they fell to pieces, a dish-towel, a coffee-pot, a cruet (I pinched that from the ABC actually), a shaving mirror and God knows what else. Oh, and sheets, of course, the old hag doesn’t supply those.’ Before this had had time to register he went on: ‘All that, apart from basic things like new lightbulbs so you won’t go blind, and a few quarts of disinfectant. Have you looked at your bed yet? For your sake I hope it’s better than mine was. I’m not too fussy, you get over that in the army, but bugs I don’t care for.’ I was sitting on the bed with my glass in my hand; I stood up sharply and started to withdraw the afghan, but he stopped me.
‘No, no. Not now. Drink first, it’s better that way, believe me.’ He made me sit in the chocolate arm-chair; the springs weren’t as uncomfortable as they looked. Toby sat on the floor. ‘Mind if I light the gas? It’s a bit more cheerful with it on, though if it’s anything like mine half the elements will be defective –’ He patted his pockets absently. ‘Got any matches?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘What, none at all?’ With sudden suspicion, he added, ‘Don’t you smoke?’
‘No,’ I said again.
‘Oh hell,’ he said dejectedly. ‘I was counting on you for a cigarette. I’m completely skint. I’ll have to try John.’ He finished his glass of wine in three enormous swallows, and then bounced to his feet and disappeared round the corner. After a moment, I heard his voice through the partition, and a deeper one answering him. He came back almost at once with a box of matches and two cigarettes loose in his hand.
‘Good old John, he never fails me,’ he said contentedly, settling down again. I watched while he twisted the tap and heard the faint hiss of gas trickling out of the pipes. Toby applied a match, but all that happened was that five small blue bubbles appeared at the base of the elements. ‘Out of juice,’ he said. I got my wallet out of my mac and found three pennies in it. At last we got the fire going.