Darkness Visible: With an Introduction by Philip Hensher

  Now he lifted the lamp and got himself up, slowly, by holding onto the door. He got upright, with the clanking wheels round his waist and the lamp, now held high, the foot of it even, above his head. He turned and walked slowly, deliberately, towards the water. Now the mud did feel human feet, the warm mud moving away to this side and that as this foot pressed and sank and then that foot. The man’s face was additionally contorted now as if with unutterable pain. His eyes flickered shut and open, his teeth gleamed and gritted, the lamp shook. He walked in, his feet went, his calves, his knees, strange creatures touched him underwater or snaked away over the rippled surface and still he went, down and in. The water rose past his waist and to his chest. The frog broke out of the hypnosis of the light and dived. The water at past this midpoint of the pool was at the man’s chin; and then suddenly, higher. The man floundered and the water washed. For a yard it may be, he was out of sight and there was nothing to be seen by whatever was watching but an arm and hand and the old lamp with its bright white globe and the dancing crazy creatures. Then black hair floated wide on the water. Down there underneath he was thrusting strongly into the ooze with his feet and he got his head up and grabbed a breath. After that he rose steadily towards the other side and the water ran from him and from his hair and his wheels; but not from the lamp. Now he stood; and though the air was hot and the water steamed he began to shudder, shudder deeply, convulsively, so that he had to hold the lamp with both hands to keep it upright and from falling in the mud. As if this shuddering was some kind of sign, thirty yards away across the water, a huge lizard turned and loitered off into the darkness.

  The man shuddered less and less. When he was no more than trembling he picked his way round the pool and back to the car. It was all solemnity and method. He held the lighted lamp up carefully, heaved it four times at four points of the compass. Then he turned down the wick and blew it out. The world returned to what it had been. The man loaded the lamp and the wheels and the chain into the boot. He dressed. He arranged his curious hair and set his hat firmly on it. He was quiet now, and a drift of fireflies came back and danced over the faint gleam of the water each to its own image. The man got into the driver’s seat. He pressed the starter and had to do it three times. It was perhaps the strangest noise of all in that wilderness, the suburban sound of the starter and then the engine catching. He drove slowly away.

  Matty set out, not by air, though he could just about have afforded the cheapest one-way fare, but by sea. It may be that the air was too presumptuous and high for him; or it may be that hidden away at the back of his mind was not the sight of the dollgirl in Singapore with her glittering clothes, but just an unease over the whole question of Singapore Airport, a gleaming Wickedness detached from any substance. For certainly he now moved easily among women as among men, looked and was struck no more by the one than the other, and would not have avoided the Wanton with her cup of abominations in fear for his peace of mind or virtue.

  He gave his car away but took what other few things he had. He tried to ship as a seaman; but there was no place for a man of his age whatever it was, who was skilled in odd-jobbing, sweet-packing, grave-digging, car-driving in difficult circumstances and, pre-eminently, in Bible-studies. Nor did it matter that he had testimonials from many kinds of people, all of whom wrote of his probity, reliability, honesty, fidelity, assiduity (Mr Sweet), discretion, without mentioning that they had found these qualities really rather repulsive.

  So he went at last to the docks with his small suitcase which contained the shaving material for the right side of the face, one spare pair of pants, one spare shirt, one spare black sock, one flannel, one bar of soap. He stood for a while looking up at the side of the ship. At last he looked down at his feet and appeared to be lost in thought. At last he lifted the left foot and shook it three times. He put it down. He lifted his right foot and shook it three times. He put it down. He turned round and looked at the port buildings and the low line of hills that was all a continent could muster from its inside to bid him farewell. He seemed, or would have seemed, to look through those hills at the thousands of miles over which he had travelled and at the hundreds of people that for all his care he had, if not met, at least, seen. He stared round the quay. In the lee of a bollard there was a pile of dust. He went to it quickly, bent down, took a handful and strewed it over his shoes.

  He climbed the ladder, away from the many years he had spent in Australia, and was shown the place he had to sleep in with eleven others, though none of them had arrived. After he had stowed his one suitcase he went back up again to the deck and stood again, still, silent and staring at the continent he knew he was seeing for the last time. A single drop of water rolled out of his good eye, found a quick way down his cheek and fell on the deck. His mouth was making little movements, but he said nothing.

  Chapter Six

  While Matty was in Australia Mr Pedigree came out of jail and was cherished by a number of societies. He had a little money coming to him from his mother’s will, for that ancient lady had died while he was still inside. It gave him, not so much freedom, as a degree of mobility. He was able therefore to break away from those who were trying hopelessly to help him and made for central London. He very soon went straight back to jail. The next time he came out he had aged many more years than the period of his sentence for his fellows had, as he said to himself, weeping with self-pity, cottoned on. He had never had any spare flesh and now a little of what he could not well spare was worn away. He was lined, too, and bent and there was no doubt about the grey that was spreading through the faded straw of his hair. He had sat to begin with on a bench in a London terminus and had it up-ended under him by the police at one o’clock in the morning and it may be that this experience removed any magnetism there was in London, for from that time he worked his way to Greenfield. That was, after all, where Henderson had been; in death Henderson had been subsumed into Mr Pedigree’s mind as the desired perfection. He found that there was a hostel in Greenfield that he had never known of before—would not have had to know of before. It was heartlessly clean and the large rooms were divided into separate cubicles, each with a narrow bed, a table and chair. Here he lived and from here he made his expeditions: one to the school where he gazed through the gate and saw the place where Henderson had fallen and the fire-escape above it and the edge of the leaded roof. There was no reason in law why he should not go closer; but he had joined or was in the process of joining the wall-creepers, men of decayed appearance who keep a wall at their side so as to be sure there is at least one direction from which trouble will not come. He was now the sort of man whom a policeman feels in his bones should be moved on; and consequently he began to feel himself that he ought to be moved on and whenever he saw a policeman, moved himself on or sideways round a corner as soon as possible.

  Yet he still had his little income and except for his compulsion—which in many countries would not have got him into trouble—he was without vice. He had next to nothing and lived on it without feeling any hardship. He owned what he stood up in. His Victorian paperweights had gone, sold alas before the market blew up, and his few netsukes—though they had fetched more—all gone except one. This was a netsuke he called his lucky charm and kept in his pocket so that it was always there to be fingered, smooth ivory, the whole thing no larger than a button which of course it really was, the two boys merging so excitedly and excitingly. Sometimes the netsuke burned his fingers. It was after one of these burnings that he made what was now becoming one of his regular trips to jail. This time the possibility of an operation was put to him; at which he began to scream on and on, piercingly and mindlessly, so that even the Home Office psychiatrist gave up. When he came out he went back to Greenfield again; and it was as if his brain had now settled into simple patterns, rituals both of action and belief. On the first day of his arrival he came down the High Street, noting as he did so how there were more and more coloured people about. He crept down until he found himself facing the
front of Sprawson’s with the bookshop and Frankley’s on one side of it and the Old Bridge humped up on the other. There was an antique public lavatory on the root of the bridge this side. It was a cast-iron structure, pictorially impressive, not so much stinking as smelly and not so much dirty as with the appearance of dirt (that black creosote) rather than the substance. Here, too, by a technological marvel of the eighteen-sixties the cistern filled and flushed, filled and flushed night and day, sure as the stars or the tides. It was the scene of the moderate triumph that had sent Mr Pedigree back to jail on the last occasion; but he did not return solely with a rational hope or desire. He came back because he had been there before.

  He was developing. Over the years he had moved from a generous delight in the sexual aura of youth to an appreciation of all the excitement attendant on breaking taboos if the result was sufficiently squalid. There were public lavatories in the park of course, and more by the central car stack, there were some in the market—oh there were public lavatories dotted round the place, far more of them than anyone without Mr Pedigree’s specialized knowledge would guess. With school barred for ever, they were the next step in some direction or other. He was now about to leave the protection of the wall at the end of Sprawson’s when he saw a man come out of the house and walk up the street. Mr Pedigree peered after him, then looked back at the urinal, then back at the receding man. He made up his mind and loped, bending and swaying up the High Street. As he went he straightened up. He passed the man and turned.

  “Bell, isn’t it? Edwin Bell? Aren’t you left from my time? Bell?”

  Bell faltered to a stop. He gave a kind of high whinny.

  “Who? Who?”

  The years, all the seventeen of them, had made a great deal less difference to Bell than to Pedigree. Though Bell had also had his troubles, they had not included the awful problem of putting-on weight. He had kept, too, the singular garb of an undergraduate of the late thirties, all except the Bags, and there was about him, the carriage of his snub nose, the tiny evidence of authority exercised and assertion without contradiction.

  “Pedigree. Of course you remember me! Sebastian Pedigree. Don’t you remember?”

  Bell jerked upright. He drove his fists deep into his overcoat pockets, then brought them together in panic in front of his privates. He gave a kind of wail.

  “Hu–llo! I—”

  And fists driven deep, nose up, mouth open, Bell began to tiptoe, as if by this simple tactic he could lift himself above his embarrassment; and so doing was nevertheless reminded that to pass by on the other side was not the action of a liberal person and therefore he came down again which made him stagger.

  “Pedigree, my dear fellow!”

  “I’ve been away you see, rather lost touch. Retired and thought—oh yes, I thought I might as well look up—”

  Now they were facing each other, the crowd in its many colours moving round them. Bell stared down into the old man’s face, the lined and silly mask that looked up at him so anxiously.

  “I might look up the old school,” said the lined face sillily and piteously. “I thought you’d be the only one left from my time. Henderson’s time it was—”

  “Oh I say, Pedigree—you—I’m married you see—”

  Insanely he began to ask Pedigree if he was married too and then managed to stop himself. Pedigree never noticed.

  “I just thought I’d look up the old school—”

  And there, floating in the air between them was the quite clear and specific knowledge that if Sebastian Pedigree put his foot inside the school buildings he would be taken up for loitering with intent; and the equally clear and specific knowledge that if Edwin Bell took him in arm-in-arm the law would stand back for the time being and it wasn’t worth it for either of them only Pedigree would think it was; and taking Pedigree in was what a saint would do probably, or Jesus or maybe Gautama and certainly Mahomet, let’s not think of Mahomet in this instance as it will get me into deep waters and Christ how am I going to get rid of him?

  “So if you were going that way—”

  Edwin jerked up on his toes again. He struck his buried fists together convulsively.

  “Oh bother! I’ve just remembered! My, my—I must go back at once. Look Pedigree—”

  And now he had turned, striking a vivid coloured female with his shoulder.

  “—I’m so sorry, so sorry, so clumsy! Look Pedigree, I’ll keep in touch.”

  He turned to tiptoe down the street and knew without looking that Pedigree was coming after him. So then there was a kind of confused charade in which Edwin Bell, his privates still concealed by fists as well as clothes, ducked and wove through the saried marketeers, followed as closely as possible by Pedigree while both of them talked at once as if silence would allow something else to be heard, something deadly. It turned in the end—when they had reached Sprawson’s and there was a clear danger of Pedigree coming right upstairs, past the solicitor’s office, right up to the flat—into a naked avowal, a terrified prohibition from Edwin Bell, hands out, palms facing outward and his voice high—

  “No, no, no!”

  He broke away as if there was a physical bond between them and fled away up the stairs, leaving Pedigree alone in the hall and still talking about the possibility of coming back to the school and about Henderson as if the boy were still there. Then, when Pedigree stopped he became aware of where he found himself, in a private building with that glass door there leading down to the garden, stairs leading up both sides, and doors, one at least for a firm of solicitors. So Mr Pedigree became once more a wall-creeper, moving out and down two steps to the stone pavement in front of Sprawson’s. Then he hurried across the street to the comparative safety of shop fronts and looked back. He glimpsed Edwin’s face at an upper window with Edwina’s beside it and then the curtain hurriedly pulled back.

  It was thus that Mr Pedigree on his return became a problem not merely to the police who knew something about him, if not all, not merely to the park-keeper and the young man in a grey raincoat whose duty it was to head off the likes of Mr Pedigree, but precisely to Edwin Bell, the only man left from the old times in Greenfield. The process by which Mr Pedigree felt himself connected to Bell defied reason. Perhaps he needed a link with what passed for normality, since now his rituals began, bit by bit, to consume him. Thus, after leaving Bell, or rather after Bell left him, Mr Pedigree went towards the seductive urinal on the Old Bridge and would have gone in but a police car shoved its nose over the crest of the bridge and he went nimbly for his age down the steps and sheltered on the towpath under the bridge as if from rain. He even held out a palm in a dramatic gesture, then examined it for possible drops of water before walking away along the towpath. He did not want to walk along the towpath but he was facing in that direction and the police car had made the road behind him painful. So Mr Pedigree went widdershins round a circle that was in fact a rectangle. He went along the towpath, past the old stables behind Sprawson’s, past the jumble of roofs that was the back parts of Frankley’s the Ironmongers, past the long wall that cut off the almshouses from the perils of water; and coming then by a kissing gate on his left (with Comstock Woods on his right) through the footpath to the side streets and then left again, past the almshouses, Frankley’s, Goodchild’s and Sprawson’s in reverse order; then left once more and in furtive triumph, the police car defeated, to the roots of the Old Bridge and the black urinal again.

  What was strange and sad and sane was not his abortive meeting with Bell—a meeting which Bell, having backed away, took very good care not to have repeated—but the fact that there were no meetings at all. Sim Goodchild had been dimly visible beyond the books in his shop window. As Pedigree came past Sprawson’s for the second time there had been the sound of a woman’s voice raised high, where Muriel Stanhope was embarking on the quarrel that would send her finally to Alfred and New Zealand. High walls, less penetrable than brick, than steel, walls of adamant lay everywhere between everything and everyt
hing. Mouths opened and spoke and nothing came back but an echo from the wall. It was a fact so profound and agonizing, the wonder is there was no concert of screaming from the people who lived with the fact and did not know that they endured it. Only Sim Goodchild in his bookshop whimpered occasionally. The others, Muriel Stanhope, Robert Mellion Stanhope, Sebastian Pedigree, thought it was their individual and uniquely unfair treatment by a world that was different for everyone else. But for the Pakistanis, the men in their sharp suits, the women in gaudy colours with a corner snatched across the face, but for the Blacks, the world was different.