“Up here.”
Sim followed Edwin up, then stood and looked round him. To call the place a flat would be an exaggeration. There was room for a narrow divan, an ancient sofa, a small table, chairs. There were two cupboards and on either side open entries led to minute bedrooms. There were dormer windows that looked out over the canal, and back up to the house.
Sim said nothing, but simply stood. It was not the mean size of the room, nor the floor, of one-plank thickness, the interior walls of some sort of cheap boarding. It was not the battered, second-hand furniture, the armchair from which stuffing hung or the stained table. It was the atmosphere, the smell. Someone, Sophy presumably, had been there recently, and the odour of cheap and penetrating scent hung in the air as a kind of cover to an ancient staleness, of food, more scent, of—no, neither a glow nor perspiration—but sweat. There was a mirror surrounded by elaborate gilding on one wall, with a shelf below it on which were bottles, half-used lipsticks, tins, and sprays, and powder. Under the dormer, on top of a low cupboard, was a huge doll that leaned and grinned. The central table had a pile of oddments on it—tights, a glove puppet, a pair of pants that needed washing, a woman’s magazine and the earplug from a transistor radio. But the velvet cloth on the table was fringed with bobbles, between the patches on the wall where pictures and photographs had once been stuck and left traces of sticking, were ornaments such as china flowers and some bits of coloured material—some of them made into rosettes. There was dust.
Inside Sim, the illusions of twenty years vanished like bubbles. He said to himself yes of course, yes, they weren’t looked after and they had to grow up, yes, what was I thinking of? And they had no mother—poor things, poor things! No wonder—
Edwin was delicately removing the objects from the table. He laid them on the cupboard top under the dormer. There was a standard lamp by the cupboard. The shade was pink and had bobbles like the tablecloth.
“Could we get the window open, do you think?”
Sim hardly heard him. He was examining what could only be called his grief. At last he turned to the dormer and examined it. No one had opened it for years but someone had begun to paint the surround, then given up. It was like the cupboard door under the dormer at the other end of the room. Someone had begun to paint that pink and also given up. Sim peered through the dormer that seemed to stare, blearily, back at the house.
Edwin spoke at his side.
“Feel the silence!”
Sim looked at him in astonishment.
“Can’t you feel the, the—”
“The what, Sim?”
The grief. That’s what it must be. Grief. Neglect.
“Nothing.”
Then he saw the glass door open at the top of the steps at the other end of the garden. Men came through. He swung round to Edwin.
“Oh no!”
“Did you know about this?”
“Of course I knew the place was here. This is where we had our dolls’ tea party.”
“You might have told me. I assure you, Edwin, if I’d known I wouldn’t have come. Damn it man—we caught him shoplifting! And don’t you know where he’s been? He’s been to jail and you know why. Damn it man!”
“Wildwave.”
On the stairs the voice was suddenly near.
“That’s what nobody really believes. I don’t know where you’re taking me and I don’t like it. Is this some kind of trap?”
“Look, Edwin—”
The black hat and blasted face rose above the level of the landing. The shock of grey-white hair and the pinched face of the old man in the park followed behind him. The old man stopped on the stairs with a kind of writhing twist.
“Oh no! No you don’t Matty! What is this, Pederasts Anonymous? Three cured and one to go?”
The man called Matty had him by the lapel.
“Mr Pedigree—”
“You’re as big a fool as ever, Matty! Let me go, d’you hear?”
It was ridiculous. The two strange and unattractive men seemed to be wrestling on the stairs. Edwin was dancing round the top.
“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!”
Sim had a profound wish to be out of it and away from the ravished building that was so brutally robbed of its silence. But the stairs were blocked. Exhausted for the moment by his efforts to escape, the old man was gasping and trying to speak at the same time.
“You—talk about my condition—it’s a beautiful condition—nobody knows. Are you a psychiatrist? I don’t want to be cured, they know that—so good day to you—” and with an absurd effort at the socially correct thing, he was bowing to Sim and to Edwin above him and at the same time trying to wrench himself away “—a very good day to you—”
“Edwin, let’s get out of here for God’s sake! It’s all a mistake, ridiculous and humiliating!”
“You have nothing on me—any of you—let me go, Matty, I’ll, I’ll have the law—” And then the man in the black hat had let him go, had dropped his hands. They stood on the stairs, partly visible like bathers on an underwater slope. Pedigree had his face at the level of Windgrove’s shoulder. He caught sight of the ear a foot above him. He convulsed with loathing.
“You hideous, hideous creature!”
Slowly and inexorably the blood consumed the right side of Matty’s face. He stood, doing nothing, saying nothing. The old man turned away hastily. They heard his feet on the cobbles of the courtyard, saw him appear on the garden path between the overgrown flower beds. He was hurrying away. Half-way up the path he turned, still moving, and glanced under his shoulder at the dormer windows with all the venom of a villain in a melodrama. Sim saw his lips move; but the curious muffling—for after this desecration of the place, that magical quality had declined from a mystery to an impediment—smothered his words. Then he climbed the stairs and went through the hall and out into the street.
Edwin spoke.
“He must have thought we were police.”
Windrove’s face was white and brown again. His black hat had been pushed a little on one side and the ear was only too visible. As if he knew what Sim was looking at, he took off his hat to settle his hair. Now the reason for the hat was more evident. He smoothed his hair down carefully, then adjusted the black hat to hold it down.
This revelation of a fact seemed to go some way towards making it tolerable for the viewer. Windgraff—Matty, had the old man said?—Matty when he revealed his disability, his deformity, his, one must so call it, handicap, was no longer a forbidding monstrosity but only another man. Sim found himself, before he was aware of making up his mind, sharing round the social small change. He held out his hand.
“I am Sim Goodchild. How do you do.”
Windgrove looked down at the hand as if it were an object to be examined and not shaken. Then he took the hand, turned it over and peered into the palm. Sim was slightly disconcerted by this and looked down himself to see if the palm was dirtied in any way, or interesting, or decorated—and by the time the words had fallen through his awareness he understood that his palm was being read, so he stood there, relaxed, and now not a little amused. He looked into his own palm, pale, crinkled, the volume, as it were, most delicately bound in this rarest or at least most expensive of all binding material—and then he fell through into an awareness of his own hand that stopped time in its revolution. The palm was exquisitely beautiful, it was made of light. It was precious and preciously inscribed with a sureness and delicacy beyond art and grounded somewhere else in absolute health.
In a convulsion unlike anything he had ever known, Sim stared into the gigantic world of his own palm and saw that it was holy.
The little room came back, the strange, but no longer forbidding creature still stared down, Edwin was moving chairs to the table.
It was true. The place of silence was magical. And dirty.
Windrave let go his hand and he took it back in all its beauty, its revelation. Edwin spoke. It was possible to detect a little dust on the words, a little tou
ch of jealousy.
“Did you promise him a long life?”
“Don’t, Edwin. Nothing like that—”
Windrove went to the other side of the table and that became at once the head of it. Edwin sat down on his right. Sim slid into a chair on his left, three sides of the table and an empty side where Pedigree was not.
Windgrove shut his eyes.
Sim stared round the room, free of it. Here and there, were drawing pins that had held up decorations. A rather poor mirror. The divan by the dormer with its rows of, of bobbles—the doll with her frills that sat, propped on the far corner of the cupboard and held there by a cushion—those pony pictures and that photograph of a young man, a pop star probably but now anonymous—
The man laid his hands on the table, palms upward. Sim saw Edwin glance down and take the right-hand one in his own left hand and reach across with the right. He had a moment of embarrassment at the idea, but reached out and took Edwin’s hand in his, and laid his right hand on Windrow’s left. It was a tough and elastic substance he touched, no universe, but warm, astonishingly warm, hot.
He was shaken by a gust of interior laughter. The Philosophical Society, with its minutes, chairman, committee, its taking of halls and assembly rooms, its distinguished guests, to have come down to this—two old men holding hands with a—what?
It was a time after that—a minute, ten minutes, half an hour, that Sim discovered he wanted to scratch his nose. He wondered whether to be brutal and lift his hands away, thus breaking the small circle, but determined not. It was a small sacrifice after all; and now, if one did detach oneself from the desire to scratch one immediately found how far away those others were, miles, it seemed, so that the circle, instead of being a small one was gigantic, more than a stone circle, county-wide, country-wide—vast.
Sim found he wanted to scratch his nose again. It was provoking to have two such disparate scales, the one of inches, the other, universal more or less—the nose must be wrestled with! It was an itch just a fraction to the left of the tip, a tickle fiendishly adjusted to set every nerve of the skin throughout the body tickling in sympathy. He fought resolutely, feeling how hard his right hand was held—and now the left as well, squeezed, who was squeezing who—so that his breath came in great gasps with the effort. His face contorted with the anguish of it and he struggled to get his hands away but they were held firm. All he could do was screw up his face again and again round his nose, trying to reach the tip absurdly with his cheeks, with his lips, his tongue, with anything—and then, inspired, he bent down and rubbed his nose on the wooden surface between his hands. The relief was almost as exquisite as the palm of his hand. He lay, his nose against the wood and let his breathing become even again.
Edwin spoke above his head. Or not Edwin and not speech. Music. Song. It was a single note, golden, radiant, like no singer that ever was. There was, surely, no mere human breath that could sustain the note that spread as Sim’s palm had spread before him, widened, became, or was, precious range after range beyond experience, turning itself into pain and beyond pain, taking pain and pleasure and destroying them, being, becoming. It stopped for a while with promise of what was to come. It began, continued, ceased. It had been a word. That beginning, that change of state explosive and vital had been a consonant, and the realm of gold that grew from it a vowel lasting for an aeon; and the semi-vowel of the close was not an end since there was, there could be no end but only a readjustment so that the world of spirit could hide itself again, slowly, slowly fading from sight, reluctant as a lover to go and with the ineffable promise that it would love always and if asked would always come again.
When the man in black let go of Sim’s hand, all the hands had become nothing more than just hands again. Sim saw that, because as he lifted his face off the wood, he brought his hands together in front of it; and there was the right palm, a tiny bit sweaty, but not in any sense dirty, and just a palm like any other. He sat up and saw Edwin mopping his face with a paper tissue. With one accord they turned to look at Windrove. He sat, his hands open on the table, his face bowed, his chin on his chest. The brim of the black hat hid his face.
A drop of clear water fell from under the brim and lay on the table. Matty lifted his head; but Sim could read no expression in this blasted side of the face.
Edwin spoke.
“Thank you—thank you a thousand times! God bless you.”
Matty looked at Edwin closely, then at Sim who saw that now there was indeed an expression to be read on the brown side of the face. Exhaustion. Windrove stood up, and without speaking moved to the stairs, then began to descend them. Edwin jumped to his feet.
“Windgrove! When? And look—”
He went quickly to the stairs and down them. Sim heard his rapid speech indistinctly from the courtyard.
“When may we meet next?”
“Are you sure? Here?”
“Shall you bring Pedigree?”
“Look here, are you, er, OK for money?”
Presently there came the click of the latch from the door leading out to the towpath. Edwin came up the stairs.
Reluctantly Sim stood up, looking round him at the pictures and the places where pictures had been, the doll, the cupboard with the gollywog hanging on it. Side by side they left, courteously insisted on each other going first down the stairs and then side by side again up the garden path, up the stairs, through the hall—the typewriter still clattering in Stanhope’s study—and out into the street. Edwin stopped and they faced each other.
Edwin spoke with profound emotion.
“You are such a wonderful team!”
“Who?”
“You and he—in the occult sense.”
“I and—he?”
“A wonderful team! I was so right you know!”
“What are you talking about?”
“When you went into that trance—I could see the spiritual combat mirrored in your face. Then you passed over, right there, in front of me!”
“It wasn’t like that!”
“Sim! Sim! The two of you played on me like an instrument!”
“Look Edwin—”
“You know something happened, Sim, don’t be modest, it’s false humility—”
“Of course something happened but—”
“We broke a barrier, broke down a partition. Didn’t we now?”
Sim was about to deny it hotly, when he began to remember. There was no question but that something had happened and likely enough it needed the three of them.
“Perhaps we did.”
Chapter Fourteen
12/6/78
My dear friend Mr Pedigree came as far as the stairs in the stables of Sprawson’s but would not stay he is afraid we mean him harm and I do not know what to do. He went off and I was left with Mr Bell who still teaches at Foundlings and Mr Goodchild from the bookshop. They expected something words perhaps. We made a circle with ourselves for protection against evil spirits for there were many in the stables green and purple and black. I held them off as best I could. They stood behind the two gentlemen and clawed at them. How do the two gentlemen live when I am not there I ask myself. Mr Bell offered me money it was funny. But I cried like a child for poor Mr Pedigree who is bound every way by his person it is hideous to see hideous. I can only spare him the time I can spare from being a guardian to the boy. If it were not for worrying about Mr Pedigree I would have a happy life guarding the boy. I will be his servant all the days of my life and look forward to many years of happiness if only I can heal Mr Pedigree and my spiritual face.
13/6/78
Great and terrible things are afoot. I thought that only me and Ezekiel had been given the way of showing things to those people who can see (as with matchboxes, thorns, shards, and marrying a wicked woman etc.) because it. I cannot say what I mean.
She had lost her engagement ring she is engaged to Mr Masterman the PT master who is quite famous I am told. We were all looking for it wherever she had been. I told
the boys to look under the elms and looked near them myself. Then she came after they had gone and asked had I looked under the elms I said no meaning to go on and say the boys had looked for to say I had looked myself would be a lie but she said before I could speak well I will look and walked off. She is very beautiful and smiling and I gave my foolish person a hard pinch as hard as I could for punishment for what it did and I went on looking for the ring. But looking up (I must remember to give it another hard pinch for that but at the time I did not think) I saw her drop the ring which she said she had lost and then pretend to find it, she threw her arms on both sides and cried bingo. She came to me laughing with the ring held out on the finger of her left hand. I could not say anything but was quite at a stand. She said I must tell everyone where I told her it might be—in fact I ought to tell Mr M I found it. This evening I do not know what to do. Since I vowed to do whatever a person asked me if it is not wicked I do not know whether what she asks is wicked. I am lost like it might be the ring. Now I ask myself what this sign means. Can to lie be a sign I ask myself. She smiled and lied. She lied by doing not by saying. Her saying was true but not true. She did not find it but she found it. I do not know.
14/6/78
All day I was in a daze thinking about the ring and what it meant. She is the terrible woman but why did she give the sign to me? It is a challenge. It means she does not care if her jewel is lost or not. I went to bed after my portion and offering myself to be a sacrifice if it was right. I do not know if what I then had was a vision or a dream. If it was a dream it was not like an ordinary dream they say people have because who could stand such a thing every night I ask myself it may have been like a dream in the Bible. Pharaoh must have been troubled or he would not have sent to find out. It was no ordinary dream. Or perhaps it was a vision and I was really there. It was the woman in the Apocalypse. She came in terrible glory all in colours that hurt she was allowed to torment me because of my bad thoughts about Miss Stanhope. Yet it was not just my fault my thinking about her, she acting so queer with the jewel it took me all day to see she knew about signs and how to show them. But the thing is the woman in the Apocalypse put on Miss Stanhope’s face and laughing and caused me to defile myself with much pain which when I woke up I discovered and was frightened and astonished because since Harry Bummer in Northern Territory I thought I could not defile myself and then I could not either be frightened or ashamed.