The bookshop was a good place to loiter. A small part of the window obscured from within by the back of a bookcase acted as a mirror. Lifting his eyes from the grubby copy of A Farewell to Arms which he was pretending to study, he saw that the greengrocer was closing his shop, lugging the sacks of onions and potatoes to the back, piling up the boxes of tomatoes and lettuces, demolishing the careful pyramids of apples and oranges, and dragging the green artificial grass from the front trestle table. Scase put down his book and sauntered across the road to the junk shop. Here part of the pavement was piled with the cheaper items, a wood-topped desk with all the drawers missing, two cane-bottomed chairs with the seats sagging and split, a tin bath piled with cracked crockery. On the desk was a cardboard box almost filled with a tangle of old spectacles. He rummaged among them, picking out one or two pairs to hold before his eyes, as if testing the vision. Through a distorted haze he saw the greengrocer take off his fawn working coat and replace it with a blue denim jacket from a peg at the back of the shop. Then he disappeared for a second and came back with a pole with a hook on the end and clanged down the metal front to the shop.
A few seconds later he came out of the front door, shut it firmly behind him and made his way up Delaney Street. So he didn’t live above the shop. But he would still need a key to the Yale lock on the front door since the shopfront had been locked from the inside and there was no other way he could get in to open up the premises except through the front door. He would keep the key on him, perhaps on a ring with others, perhaps in the pocket of his jacket. He had been wearing tight-fitting jeans with two back pockets, both lying flat against the curve of the buttocks. There had been no key there. Almost automatically Scase picked up one pair of spectacles after another and turned them over in his hands. Perhaps it might be worthwhile buying a pair or two if he could find some which weren’t too distorting to the vision. A change of spectacles would alter his appearance. He had never before thought of disguise, since it seemed an art beyond his capacity. But there was one skill he knew he had. It was many years since he had exercised it but then it had never once let him down. He didn’t think it would let him down now. He could pick pockets.
The exhilaration of knowing that he had found them at last was so intoxicating that he could hardly bear to leave Delaney Street. But the door of number 12 was locked against him, there was nowhere he could safely conceal himself and he needed to get back to the safety and anonymity of his attic room, needed time to rest and think and plan. Before leaving he walked for the last time down the street, surveying the possibilities. It was then he noticed the narrow passage which led down the side of the Blind Beggar, and which was flanked by the grimy brick wall of the pub and by the corrugated-iron fence about seven feet high which surrounded the acre of weed-infested wasteland. He saw that the panels which faced Delaney Street, rusting, the concrete supports no longer firmly upright, had sagged apart in places producing slits from which it would be possible to keep watch on the street. The problem was to gain access to the wasteland and to check that there were no high windows in surrounding buildings from which the vantage point could be observed.
He glanced quickly up and down the street, then stepped into the passageway. If challenged he would have a credible excuse ready; he would say apologetically that he was looking for a lavatory. He quickly saw that this explanation would have more plausibility than he had realized. The passage led to a small yard smelling strongly of beer and less strongly of urine and coal dust. To the right was the back door of the pub and in front of him an outside coal store, now disused, and a wooden door with a slit at the top and bottom on which the word “gents” had been crudely painted.
He darted into the lavatory and shut the bolt. Through the top slit he could see one dingy and heavily curtained upstairs window at the back of the pub, and could examine the fence. Here it was even less secure than in the front, and the gap between two of the panels was, he thought, sufficiently wide to enable a slim man to force his way through. After dark it could probably be done with some safety, despite the old-fashioned lamp which projected on brackets at the corner of the pub wall. But this was late summer, a miserably cold and disappointing summer but the light still lasted well into the evening. Unless there were no upper windows overlooking the wasteland, his time of observation might have to be restricted to the hours of darkness.
The huge wooden seat almost engulfed him. It must have been here as long as the pub itself. He slid his thin buttocks to its edge and crouched there, keen as a cornered animal, all his senses alert. There were no voices from the house. He could hear no footfalls, no shouts from Delaney Street and even the rumble of traffic passing down Mell Street was muted. The reek of disinfectant was pungent as a gas. A thin drizzle had begun to fall and the wind was rising, blowing a mist through the slit of the door, obscuring his spectacles. He took out his handkerchief to wipe them and saw that his hand was shaking. He thought it strange that this particular moment, closeted as he was in safety, unobserved, should be so traumatic. Perhaps it was a delayed reaction to the shock of finding them at last.
It was time to go. Having made up his mind he left the shed swiftly and with his shoulder pressed against the most vulnerable panel of the fence. It gave slightly. With his hand he pulled the second panel forward, aware of the sharp edge of the metal biting into his hand. The gap widened. He slipped through.
It was like stepping into a garden. As he worked his way round in the shadow of the fence the weeds were almost waist-high. They looked so fragile with their small pink flowers, yet they had forced their way through this impacted earth, in part splitting the concrete. Where they were highest he paused to survey the wasteland. It was better for his purpose than he had dared to hope. There was only one gate. This faced Delaney Street and he could see that it was barred and padlocked. Once there had been a row of houses there, now demolished, he supposed, for redevelopment, and in front of him was a blank windowless wall where the neighbouring house had been sliced away. There were no windows in the side wall of the Blind Beggar and the area was bounded on the fourth side by a glass and concrete building which looked like a school. He might possibly be seen from its upper windows, but the building would be empty after school hours unless, of course, it was used for evening classes. But surely not in summer? He would have to find out.
Then he realized that it might not be necessary. He could be in luck. Two decrepit vehicles, a battered van and the chassis of a car, wheel-less and with its left door hanging loose, had been parked or dumped within a few yards of the Delaney Street boundary. They could shield him from any prying eyes from the school if only they were in the right place, standing against a part of the fence where the panels weren’t completely joined. Even so, vision would be restricted. Ideally he needed to be exactly opposite the door to number 12. He worked his way towards them, still keeping close to the iron fence as if its height and corrugated surface could somehow confuse an onlooker and make him invisible.
He quickened his pace as he approached the van, the first of the abandoned vehicles, resisting the urge to run for its comforting cover. When at last he reached it, he stood panting with relief, eyes closed, back pressed against the fence. After a few seconds he made himself open his eyes and look round the wasteland. It was still deserted but more desolate now as the drizzle turned to a slanting rain and the clumps of weeds strained against the fretful, changeable wind. Then he turned to examine the fence. It was as he had hoped; there was a gap just below eye-level. It wasn’t exactly opposite the greengrocer’s shop, but it was close enough and the gap sufficiently wide to give him an uninterrupted view.
He stood there, legs slightly bent, arms wide, fingers clutching at the curve of the iron, staring at the closed door of number 12, watching and waiting. The rain fell steadily, soaking his shoulders, running in rivulets under his jacket collar. He tried to wipe his streaming spectacles but his handkerchief was quickly soaked. The street lamp at the corner of Delaney Street was swit
ched on, laying a shivering gleam on the wet pavement. Somewhere a church clock struck the quarters, the half-hours, the sonorous chimes of nine, ten and eleven o’clock. The swish of passing cars down Mell Street became less frequent. The noise from the pub grew, became raucous, then faded with a clatter of departing feet and the last valedictory shouts. And still they didn’t come. From time to time he stretched himself upright to ease the intolerable ache of shoulders and legs, but bent his eyes again to the gap whenever he heard a footfall. It was half past eleven before they returned home. He watched them, both it seemed drooping a little with tiredness, as the girl felt in her bag for her keys. They spoke together easily, casually, as she pushed the door open. And then they were inside and it closed behind them. A few seconds later the two windows on the first floor became oblongs of pale light. Only then, so cramped that he could hardly move, aware for the first time of hunger, of his jacket and shirt like a wet poultice against his back, he forced himself once more through the gap in the fence and made his painful way to Baker Street Station and took the Circle line to Victoria.
19
When Maurice got home late that afternoon the kitchen, although lit, was empty. He found Hilda in the garden. She was standing at the wrought-iron table arranging a cut-glass bowl of roses. It was a shallow, crudely shaped bowl and it took a second or two before he could remember how they had come by it. Her parents had given it to them as a wedding present. He could picture them conferring anxiously over it, spending more money than they could afford. He remembered, too, that his mother had owned one very like it. He had never been trusted to help wash it up. She had made trifle in it for Sunday tea, a layer of bought sponge cakes covered with jelly and topped with thick synthetic custard. This bowl was filled with crumpled wire to hold the roses. As Hilda forced in each stem the wire scraped against the glass, setting his teeth on edge. The roses had been picked too late and over-handled. Surely Philippa, when she did flowers for the drawing room, always cut them early in the day and left them in the cool, standing in water. These lay in a flabby heap on the table, their heads already drooping, their stems lax. Suddenly he decided that he didn’t like roses. It was a surprising discovery to make at this particular moment and after so many years. They were an over-praised flower, soon blowzy, their beauty dependent on scent and poetic association. One perfect bloom in a specimen vase placed against a plain wall could be a marvel of colour and form, but flowers ought to be judged by how they grew. A rose garden always looked messy, spiky recalcitrant bushes bearing mean leaves. And the roses grew untidily, had such a brief moment of beauty before the petals bleached and peeled in the wind, littering the soil. And the smell was sickly, the stuff of cheap scent. Why had he ever imagined that it gave him pleasure?
Hilda, dissatisfied with her arrangement and pulling out the stems to start again, had pricked herself. There was a bead of blood on her thumb. “Died of a rose in aromatic pain.” Browning or Tennyson? Philippa would have known. While his mind was tracing the source of the quotation, she said pettishly: “I miss Philippa doing the flowers. It’s too much, cooking the meal and trying to make the table look nice.”
“Yes, Philippa had a pleasant decorative sense. Are those for tonight?”
Immediately she looked up at him, defensive, worried.
“Won’t they do?”
“Isn’t the arrangement too large? People need to be able to see each other over the flowers. You can’t talk to someone you can’t see.”
“Oh, talking!”
“Talking is what a dinner party’s about. And they smell too strong. We want to smell the food and wine. Roses on the dinner table confuses the senses.”
She said with the note of sulky truculence which he found particularly irritating and which he had heard more frequently since Philippa’s departure: “I don’t seem to be able to do anything right.”
“Right? Right for whom?”
“Right for you. I don’t know why you married me.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth she stared at him appalled, or so it seemed to him, as if there were words between which their minds could formulate, but which it would be fatal to speak aloud. He picked up one of the roses. The blossom drooped over his palm. He said, hearing the coldness in his voice: “I married you because I was fond of you and because I thought we could be happy together. If you aren’t happy you must try to tell me what’s worrying you.”
It was paradoxical that the truth could sound so false, could be so much less than the truth. If he had loved her enough he could have made himself lie and say “Because I loved you.” But if he had loved her enough the lie wouldn’t have been necessary.
She muttered: “You needn’t talk to me as if I’m one of your students. I know you think I’m stupid, but you don’t have to patronize me.”
He didn’t reply, but stood watching her as she forced the last rose stem through the crumpled wire, grazing its stem. But the arrangement was top-heavy and the entangled wire keeled over onto the table, spilling rose petals, pollen and dollops of water. She gave a little moan and began dabbing at the water with her handkerchief. She said: “Philippa leaving, you blamed me for that. I know what you thought. I couldn’t give you a child of your own and I couldn’t even make the adopted one stay with me.”
“That’s ridiculous, and you must know that it is. I could have stopped Philippa leaving, but I wasn’t prepared to pay the price. Philippa must find her own way back to reality.”
She said, so quietly that he could only just catch the words: “It would have been different if I’d been able to have a baby.”
He felt a tremor of pity, transitory, but strong enough to make him unwise. He heard himself speaking: “That reminds me, there’s something I meant to tell you. I went to see Dr. Patterson last week. There’s nothing wrong, it was only a check-up. But he got out my records and confirmed what I half guessed when we saw the specialist together twelve years ago. I’m the one who’s infertile. It’s nothing to do with you.”
She stared at him, rose in hand. She said: “But you had Orlando!”
He said sharply: “It’s nothing to do with Orlando. It happened after he was born. The doctor puts it down to an attack of mumps I had when he was six weeks old. These things aren’t uncommon. There’s nothing to be done about it.”
She stared at him; her full unwinking gaze was unnerving. He wanted to turn away, dismissing the inconsequent detail of his infertility with a nonchalant shrug, a wry smile at the perversity of fate. But his eyes were held by that dumb unwinking stare. He cursed himself for his folly. Because of a bowl of ruined roses, because of a moment of futile compassion, he had blurted it out. Not the whole truth, he had never imagined himself telling that, but a part of the truth, the essential truth. A secret he had kept for twelve years, a part of him which he had become fond of, as one might a slightly disreputable friend, was his no longer. He had reacted to his particular guilty secret as he supposed the majority of his fellow men did to theirs. Most of the time he had been able to forget it, not by any conscious effort of will, but because it was as much part of him as his digestion, unintrusive unless it gave trouble. Occasionally it would come into his mind and he would cogitate upon it as an interesting and intriguing complication of his personality which repaid study, much as he might cogitate about the complexities of a student’s style. Sometimes he had even enjoyed it. A guilty secret is, nevertheless, a secret and can be relished with at least some of the innocence of childhood conspiracies. Sometimes, but increasingly rarely, it had intruded into his waking thoughts and provoked disagreeable sensations of distress and worry, even slight physical manifestations of quickened breath which he would have diagnosed as guilt and shame if those were words which he had ever cared to use. And now it was no longer his secret. He had borne its weight for twelve years and now he would have to shoulder the burden of her reproach, her renewed disappointment. Self-pity took hold of him. Why should she stare at him like that with those amazed unbelieving ey
es? He was the one who was entitled to understanding. It was he, not she, who was maimed.
She said: “You’ve known all the time, haven’t you? It isn’t true that you’ve been to Dr. Patterson. You knew when we first had those tests, when you said that you didn’t want to go on with them any longer, that you’d had enough. And you let me think it was my fault that we couldn’t have a child. All those years, you let me think it was me.”
“It’s no one’s fault. It’s not a question of fault.”
He must have been mad to think for one moment that all that was lacking between them was truth. The tragedy of his marriage—except that tragedy was too grand a word for such a commonplace misfortune—was not that she always made the wrong response to his needs; it was that there was no right response which it was within her power to make. She said accusingly: “I could have had a child if I hadn’t married you.”
“You might have had. That supposes that you would have married someone else, that he wanted a child, that both of you were capable of parenthood.”