*
The work was completed by midsummer. All the rooms, and even the stairs, were wired up for the electricity. Neville organised a gathering in the parlour, at dusk. He turned to Lettie and pointed to the brass switch beside the door.
‘You do the honours, little lady,’ he said.
Lettie could just reach. She pressed down the switch; the room blazed with light. She clapped her hands in excitement. The grown-ups cowered, blinking. How bright it was! Corners they had never seen were pitilessly exposed.
‘Good Lord,’ said Eithne. ‘Look at those cobwebs.’
Small wooden discs were all that remained of the old gas piping. A new wire, boxed in, ran up the wall and across the ceiling where the light blazed in its new glass dome. Neville switched on two table lamps, with fringed shades. Now it was revealed, how dingy the room looked!
Winnie thought: I’m going to have my work cut out. Until that moment, the parlour had been one of the darkest rooms in the house. Now she could see that the cornice was grey with soot. Like the furniture, she felt exposed; as if she were naked. As if everybody could suddenly see what had been happening with Alwyne.
Alwyne sat in a cloud of cigarette smoke. He looked unmoved, but then that was hardly surprising. Mrs O’Malley blinked, like a rabbit caught by torchlight.
‘Are you sure it’ll be all right?’ she asked.
A spasm of irritation crossed the butcher’s face. Eithne noticed this. ‘Well I think it’s lovely,’ she said brightly.
‘Glad someone’s grateful,’ said Mr Turk, running his hand over his moustache.
Eithne moved to the mantelpiece and looked at herself in the mirror. ‘Good grief,’ she said. ‘I’m getting wrinkles.’
*
Later, in his bedroom, Ralph inspected his face in the harsh light of the mirror. He too had an unwelcome surprise. Boils seemed to have erupted on his chin. He had noticed them before, when he was trying to shave, but never had he seen them so pitilessly exposed. He gazed at them with fascination. The larger ones, pink and protruding, resembled nipples; some had a yellowish blob at their tip.
Boyce had had some boils too, but it hadn’t put off the girls. Ralph remembered Boycie, dressed up in his green checquered jacket and yellow waistcoat, patent-leather pumps on his feet, all set to sally forth and conquer. What a swell! He had had no difficulties in that department. He told Ralph his secret.
‘Make ’em laugh,’ he said. ‘Tell ’em a limerick and you’re home and dry.
‘I know a blithe blossom in Blighty
Whom you, I’m afraid, would call flighty,
For when Zeps are about
She always trips out
In a little black crêpe de Chine nightie.’
That night Ralph had a pollution. He woke up, hot with shame. The sheet was wet and sticky. What would Winnie think, when she came to change it? Worse still, if his mother helped her? These unfortunate accidents were happening with increasing regularity – three times, in fact, since the last laundry day. Three plus one meant four stains, a total impossible to ignore. Ralph could feel the stiffer patches, where the stains had dried, with his finger.
Only the top sheet was affected, as Ralph slept on his back. In the next room the clock chimed three. Nowadays the sound was barely audible through the newly constructed wall. However, it galvanised him into activity. He would fetch a clean sheet from the cupboard downstairs, and replace the soiled one. In the morning he could bundle the dirty sheet into the laundry box and nobody would be the wiser.
Ralph got out of bed and crept to the door. As he did so, he remembered his dream. It had been of Winnie. She had been bending over, her skirt hitched up – no, he mustn’t think of it. Blushing, he opened the door and felt for the light switch – the brand-new switch that was somewhere on the wall. He ran his hand across the surface and finally found it. He clicked it on.
The stairs were flooded with light – blinding, harsh light. Half-way up them, a figure froze.
It was Alwyne, making his way upstairs. He stared at Ralph; Ralph stared at him. For a split second, it seemed that their eyes met. They didn’t, of course; Alwyne’s eyeballs flickered, revealing the whites.
‘Who’s there?’ hissed Alwyne.
‘It’s only me,’ whispered Ralph. His heart was hammering. Alwyne, too, seemed startled. It must be due to the unnatural light. Alwyne could sense light through his eyelids; he had told him this when Ralph had asked why he lit his lamp in his room. I’m afraid of the dark, he had said. No wonder, thought Ralph, after all the poor man had been through.
‘I’ve just been to the bathroom,’ whispered Alwyne.
‘I know,’ said Ralph. ‘I hear you all the time.’
Alwyne paused. Then he said: ‘Can I come in?’
Ralph switched on the light in his bedroom. Alwyne closed the door behind them. He felt his way to the bed and sat down.
‘What do you mean, you hear me all the time?’ Alwyne asked.
‘I know why you have to go,’ said Ralph.
Alwyne’s head reared up. ‘Go where?’ he snapped.
Ralph flushed. ‘You know where I mean.’
‘No I don’t, young fellow.’
They were whispering, but Ralph lowered his voice further. ‘To the lavatory.’
There was a silence.
Ralph said: ‘It’s because of the constipation, isn’t it?’
Alwyne slumped down. He started shaking. The man was chuckling! Ralph wasn’t surprised; the question of bathrooms, and what one did in them, was fraught with embarrassment. He noticed that though Alwyne’s black, wiry hair had grown long, he was thinning on top. The white flesh showed through. Ralph was filled with compassion. All sorts of things were being revealed, now they had electric light.
‘It’s you who told me about it,’ said Ralph. ‘The binding effect of putrefying flesh. That’s why I stopped eating meat.’
Alwyne lifted his head. ‘My dear boy. I’m very fond of you.’ He wiped his wet eyes with his sleeve. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
Where did that all come from? Ralph gazed at the man, sitting there in his stained dressing gown and slippers. Behind him the new wall had been painted cream; they hadn’t been able to find a wallpaper that matched. Ralph planned to hang things on it, when he thought of things to hang.
‘It’s not been easy for you, has it?’ said Alwyne.
Ralph nodded. ‘I’m not sure about this electric light.’ He thought: Mrs O’Malley thinks it’s going to explode, the Spooners don’t want to see anything, Alwyne can’t see anything anyway and I don’t like it because it shows up my boils. ‘My mother says it makes her look old.’
‘Your mother is a very beautiful woman.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Winnie –’ He stopped. ‘People – have described her to me. You must love her very much.’
Ralph nodded. Then he realised, for the hundredth time, that Alwyne couldn’t see him. ‘I do.’
Alwyne mused: ‘To live in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love over the nasty sty.’
Ralph froze. ‘How do you know?’
‘Know what?’
He knew about Ralph’s sheet! But how could he? Ralph paused, confused.
Alwyne said: ‘Are you familiar with Hamlet?’
‘A little bit. Not really.’
‘Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed; pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse; and let him, for a pair of reechy kisses, or paddling in your neck with his damn’d fingers, make you to ravel all this matter out. Hamlet was a young man in a not dissimilar position to your own.’
‘Was he a vegetarian too?’
Alwyne chuckled. ‘Well, plenty of blood got spilt. Enough to make anyone forswear the flesh.’
Ralph had no idea what Alwyne was talking about. He had had his doubts about the fellow from the start.
‘I expect you’re unacquainted with the works of Doctor Freud,’ sa
id Alwyne. ‘He has some interesting things to say about sons and mothers. Quite explosive, in fact, if anyone cares to read him.’
Ralph was suddenly sleepy. He wished the chap would leave him alone and let him fetch the sheet. The trouble with Alwyne was that he talked too much. Ralph couldn’t blame him. After all, there was nothing else for him to do.
Ralph stood up. ‘I think I’ll go to the lavatory,’ he said.
That did the trick. Alwyne, too, got to his feet. He touched Ralph’s arm. ‘Let’s keep this to ourselves, eh? The state of my bowels could be of no interest to anybody whatsoever. Understood?’
*
That Mr Turk now owned the house, and had further plans for it, caused the lodgers some unease. They were at his mercy, and who knew what the future might bring? Until recently they had felt secure in the moribund state of their surroundings. There were upheavals enough in the world, one only had to read the newspapers. A major push was taking place on the Somme, which, if memory served them, was exactly the same place the Allies had been fighting in four years earlier, and all those men dead for nothing. The safest thing was to lie low.
Mr Turk, however, had other ideas. The introduction of electricity was unnerving enough. Mrs O’Malley, fearing it would leak out of the socket in her skirting board, had plugged the holes with lumps of suet pudding. The rumble of the vacuum cleaner, mounting the stairs and bumping against their doors, was as alarming as an approaching tank. And why was its bag so swollen? What had it been swallowing, to be so puffed-up?
It was the speed of Mr Turk’s plans that took them by surprise. For in the following week a telephone was installed. Winnie was in the basement, doing the weekly wash. This was a laborious undertaking and took from dawn to dusk – laying a fire, filling the copper with water, bringing it to the boil, pounding the clothes, scrubbing them on the washboard, and then wringing them through the mangle and hanging them up to dry on the clotheshorses in the kitchen, because out in the yard they would get covered with smuts. Then there was the ironing to do, which lasted well into the following day. Sometimes the lodgers washed their own intimate items and dried them in front of their fires but there were still armfuls to deal with, despite the welcome discovery that Mr Turk, perhaps suspecting the household’s standards of hygiene, sent his own garments to the laundry.
So Winnie was not party to the commotion in the hallway. Besides, she had other things on her mind. Where on earth were Mrs Turk’s drawers?
Winnie was on intimate terms with the bodies upstairs. Each week she scrubbed at their most private secretions until her hands were raw. Bloodstains were the most stubborn to deal with; though Mrs Turk wore pads they were far from efficient and her monthlies were as familiar to Winnie, and as regular, as her own. The state of some other undergarments, particularly those of the male members of the household, left a great deal to be desired. Then there were the stains from past meals – gravy, tea, and worst of all beetroot. Even the sheets, which she bundled off to the laundry, bore witness to what had happened between them. Ralph’s stains were familiar to Winnie; after all, she had grown up with three brothers. Mr Spooner’s sheets, from his permanent occupation of his bed, didn’t bear close inspection. And the sheets belonging to her master and mistress bore the all-too-visible proof of their vigorous conjugal relations. Every garment, every item of bedlinen, was known to her. So where were Mrs Turk’s drawers?
There should have been seven pairs in the pile, but as far as Winnie remembered she hadn’t seen any for weeks. Mr Turk had bought his wife two pairs of fancy silk knickers, edged with lace, but even these seemed to have disappeared. For a mad moment Winnie thought somebody had stolen them from the laundry-box. Her suspicions fell on Alwyne. There was something grubby about the way he crept around the house; he reminded her of Mr Snape, the rat-catcher in her village, who was rumoured to sniff ladies’ bicycle seats. Female undergarments had disappeared from washing-lines and when Mr Snape had enlisted in the navy the thefts had ceased.
Winnie dismissed this thought as both disloyal and illogical. Alwyne had no need of perverted sexual practices, with herself available to satisfy his lust. Besides, could a blind man tell whose knickers were whose, just by feeling them?
It was then that Winnie had the obvious idea of checking in Mrs Turk’s bedroom. Wiping her hands on her apron, she went upstairs.
In the hallway she found Mrs Turk, Lettie and Mrs O’Malley clustered around the table. An object sat on it.
‘Look at our telephone, Winnie,’ said Mrs Turk. ‘The man’s just gone.’
Winnie had heard the sound of a workman but she had been busy out the back. The stairs creaked as Alwyne descended.
‘What’s all this then?’ he asked.
‘We’ve got a telephone,’ said Mrs Turk.
‘It’s called a Candlestick Telephone,’ said Lettie.
‘How do you know?’ asked Mrs Turk.
‘The man said so.’
Black and shiny, it had a tall stem with a mouthpiece on top. A trumpet-shaped earpiece hung on its hook. Brown flex snaked across the table. On the wall nearby was fixed its bell, a wooden box with two brass domes on top, nippled like bosoms.
They had of course seen a telephone before; it was just a startling sight, to have one in the house. It sat there like a periscope connecting them to the underworld. Winnie felt that, if she leaned close, she could hear millions upon millions of people whispering secrets to each other.
‘I don’t know who to telephone,’ said Mrs Turk. ‘Nobody I know has one.’
There was a silence. She had spoken the truth for all of them. To Winnie’s knowledge, only two people in her village possessed a telephone, the doctor and Lord Elbourne.
They gazed at the object, sitting there ready to serve them. That there was nobody to telephone made them feel friendless. This seemed perverse, of course, as the thing had been invented to connect them up.
‘You could always use it to place an order,’ Alwyne said to Mrs Turk. ‘I know! You could telephone the butcher.’
‘But he lives here.’
Alwyne chucked. ‘It was a joke.’
‘Oh.’ Mrs Turk pushed back her hair. ‘Of course, he has one in the shop. He needs one here as well, he has a lot of important business to attend to. I expect we’ll use it too, when we get used to it. Soon everybody will have one, I’m sure.’ She smiled brightly. ‘I think it’s ever so exciting.’
‘How close do I put my mouth?’ asked Mrs O’Malley. ‘Do I have to pay?’
‘For calls? I expect so. Ask Mr Turk. He’s in charge now.’ She moved towards the basement stairs. ‘I must get started on the supper.’
Winnie saw her chance. She hurried upstairs. As she did so she thought: it’s a funny old to-do. The electric light shows me how ugly I am and the telephone shows me I’ve got nobody to speak to. And people say that’s progress.
She let herself into the bedroom, opened Mrs Turk’s cupboard and pulled out the top drawer. It was full to the brim, as usual, with her mistress’s underwear.
Winnie straightened up. There was only one answer. Mrs Turk wasn’t wearing any knickers. But why? Was it the hot weather?
Down in the hallway, the telephone rang. Winnie froze. It was surprisingly loud – an insistent, jangling double-ring.
Winnie hurried downstairs but Lettie got there first. Casually, as if she did this every day, she put the trumpet to her ear and spoke into the mouthpiece.
‘Good afternoon, Letitia Spooner speaking.’
Mrs Turk, who had hurried up from the kitchen, stared at her. ‘How do you know what to do?’ she whispered.
Lettie turned to her. ‘The man showed us. Weren’t you watching?’
How fearless the child was! Truly, the world belonged to them now. ‘Letitia Spooner of 45, Palmerston Road.’ Winnie and her mistress gazed at the little girl as she spoke into the telephone as if she had been doing it all her life. ‘May I be of assistance?’
They heard a scratchy voice, like
a mouse’s scrabbling claws.
‘Who is it?’ hissed Mrs Turk.
‘Very well, I’ll tell them.’ Lettie replaced the earpiece in its holder and turned to them. ‘It’s Mr Turk. He says he’s coming home at six o’clock and we’ve got to go to the window. He’s got a surprise.’
*
Throughout his life Ralph remembered that day. Two major things happened. The motor car arrived, and he smoked his first cigarette.
Everything was sharply in focus that afternoon, as if the very sunshine knew, before Ralph did, the significance of that particular Wednesday. He walked home along the river. The warehouses on the opposite bank looked close enough to touch. The vinegar factory in Silver Street cast a knife-sharp shadow. He walked up Back Lane, past the dwellings that echoed with voices whose words just escaped him. When he emerged from the tunnel he noticed that a new poster had been stuck on to the side of his house: DOCTOR FAIRBURN’S RUPTURE TRUSS. SAY GOODBYE TO HERNIAS. What was a truss? And a hernia? Everything seemed crystal clear and yet mysterious, as if the grown-ups had something to tell him that he didn’t yet understand.
Alwyne was sitting in the parlour listening to a gramophone record. As a sop to the lodgers for their expulsion from the back room, the gramophone had been moved to the front one. The table was laid for supper.
‘Haydn’s String Quartet in D minor,’ said Alwyne. ‘His chamber pieces are woefully under-appreciated.’
They are by me, anyway, thought Ralph. He preferred Boyce’s songs from the Hippodrome, A Little of What You Fancy and Jolly Good Luck to the Girl Who Loves a Soldier.
‘Did you see the telephone?’ said Alwyne. ‘At least when we catch the flu we can get hold of the doctor before anyone else does.’
The influenza was raging across Europe, apparently, as if the fellows there didn’t have enough to worry about. Now, in London, people were starting to drop like flies.