The Backward Shadow

  I emerged at a little before 11, feeling almost happy. I walked slowly back to where Dottie had left the car, passing the post office and next to it the darkened bow-window of our shop. I stopped a moment to look up at the façade with its freshly-painted name, in bold clear purple letters outlined in gold. The frontage itself had all been stripped to the wood and varnished. A street-lamp showed me the display on the rostrum inside the window—Dottie had cunningly used a plain white packing-case with its lining of natural straw, on its side, with goods spilling out of it in well-organised confusion like a practical man’s cornucopia. Hanging on a plain board at the back were a craftsman’s tools, not new ones, but old and well-used. Swatches and hanks of unbleached wool, straw, bamboo, raffia and cane hung from the ceiling. On a succession of small shelves on one side wall were objects like paint-pots, brushes, a few unbaked crocks, even a small blow-lamp, and finally a glass-blower’s pipe, for although there was no hand-blown glass in the shop Dottie had not given up hope of getting some and had put the pipe there for luck. In the window was a hand-written sign.

  You will not get plastic objects from Us.

  Try Them.

  I personally did not care for this touch, but it was Henry’s only personal contribution to the decor and Dottie had allowed it because, I suppose, she knew his history and understood as well as I did why it mattered to him, like a definition of his creed.

  I arrived back at the cottage to find everything quiet and a dry note from Henry on the hall table:

  ‘Have driven Mrs. G. home’ (Mrs. Griffiths had been baby-sitting for me, I’d forgotten about her) … ‘you needn’t have stayed out so long. H.’

  I went upstairs. Dottie was asleep, and so was David. I had never felt so wide awake in my life; sleep would be quite impossible. I made myself a cup of strong coffee, as if on purpose to banish sleep still more decisively. For a long time I sat in the kitchen, not reading or doing anything except sip my coffee and stare into space. My whole body seemed to be trembling with the need for some action, and suddenly I knew what it must be.

  I went upstairs again, changed out of the glamour-rags Dottie had picked out for me into a skirt, sweater, warm tights and anorak. Then I went into the spare room and crouched by Dottie’s bed.

  I had to shake her shoulder to bring her even half way awake.

  ‘Dottie, listen. I’m going up to London. Can I leave David with you, just for tomorrow? I’ll be back tomorrow evening.’

  ‘Isn’t it the middle of the night?’

  ‘Yes, it’s better. Less traffic. Anyway, I must.’

  At the door her voice stopped me. ‘Jane—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Take John’s address.’

  ‘I won’t have time—’

  ‘You might. Take it, it’s on a piece of paper in my bag.’ Irritated by the delay, I rummaged about till I found it, and stuck it into my pocket.

  Chapter 14

  A LOT of other motorists besides myself seemed to have imagined it was easier to drive at night, and it took me the best part of another hour and a bit to get to Hammersmith. I glanced at our house—that’s to say, Father’s—as I went past; it was dark. I hadn’t seen him for months, though we dropped each other notes occasionally. I had a sudden feeling of panic about where I was going, and a craven desire to turn into our drive, get Father out of bed, sit and talk for an hour, and then go to sleep in the room where I spent my not-very-happy and yet now, somehow, strangely attractive, because safe, adolescence. However, the pull was not quite strong enough, and in any case, I thought: ‘It isn’t far from Earl’s Court—I can always come back—afterwards.’

  I drove on.

  The Earl’s Court Road was quite alive; there were several coffee-bars still open, despite the cold weather. However, the subtle plimsol-line between respectable day-time occupancy of the area and the emergence of disreputable-looking night-denizens had been crossed, and the streets had a strongly sinister atmosphere in which even quite ordinary people took on a faintly lupous appearance and seemed suspect.

  I drew up under a lamp-post, near the side-turning which would take me to Toby’s street. Now I was so close, I was grimly unsurprised to find that my burning desire to confront him was wavering. What if Whistler were there …? It hardly bore thinking about. This was one occasion when I was quite determined to behave with dignity, and not have any loss of self-control with which to reproach myself later. But to ensure this, and also to gather my courage, I needed a minute to sort myself out. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter past one.

  I thought: If I go to Toby’s now, it will be patently obvious that I’ve come to check up on him because of Dottie’s report; perhaps he’ll even think I’ve come to catch him out with the girl, and if he’s not sleeping with her he’ll have every right to be very angry. After all, it could have been just a casual supper together. On the other hand, if she is there, it’ll be (my mind went blank at this point. Sober, I couldn’t really visualise a scene with Toby in bed with Whistler as its focal point). Better to go by day, when I can easily explain my visit as a simple dropping-in and bring up the subject of Whistler in some more or less natural way. I reviewed my behaviour towards Toby the last time I’d seen him, and remembering clearly only one thing—the look I had thrown at him when he had tried to sit down with a newspaper—I shrivelled in my skin. If he were to plead that look alone as a reason for turning his back on me, I would be totally at a loss for a defence. In any case, what use was it to defend myself? Love lost by one moment’s explicit unfairness can’t be won back by trying to justify it. My only real hope was that I was wrong; that it was only my guilty conscience telling me that that look had been such a fundamental thing. It deserved to be; but one doesn’t always get one’s deserts. On the other hand—there was his silence. Two months of it … but I hadn’t written either … perhaps he was waiting for a sign from me … perhaps he would be overjoyed to be confronted by me on his doorstep at one in the morning, we would hold each other, talk for a bit, everything would be explained, and then, as naturally as water sinking into thirsty earth, we would go to bed. Once, he had drawn back from making love to me because he was afraid it would bind us together again, give us renewed responsibility for each other. The next time, we had slept together, actually slept in each other’s arms, but without making love, due to the comic and annoying physical accident about which I’d told Dottie. But the mere fact of being so close to him must have reminded him, as it did me, that our love was a permanency, only waiting for him to grow and develop enough to take hold of it and accept it fully. I was ready—God knows, I’d been ready all the time. I was readier this moment than ever before, and surer; but perhaps that was only because I had had such a fright and really had to face the fact that I might have lost him altogether. All self-doubts are apt to fly before such an eventuality.

  The torment of not knowing almost drove me to change my mind again and go bursting in on Toby that night. I went as far as the house where his studio-flat was. Never having been there, I couldn’t be sure which window his was, but as the whole house was in darkness it made little difference. I sat in the car for ten minutes, debating with myself. Several very dubious-looking characters drifted by, every one of them pausing to peer in through the windows, I suppose in the hope of surprising some couple in a pornographic position on the back seat. When they saw it was a lone woman, just sitting there in the dark, several of the men knocked hopefully on the windscreen. I hated this so much that eventually I blew a terrific blast on my horn, which made the latest applicant for my services jump and run.

  Eventually a policeman came strolling along, and this, oddly enough, alarmed me more than the lubricious strollers and made up my mind for me. I moved off. Driving away from Earl’s Court with a feeling of the deepest misery—Toby so near me, yet unreachable, unmerited, perhaps no longer loving me—I drove aimlessly through the streets for a long time, too wretched even to wonder what to do and where to go. I supposed dimly that I wo
uld wind up at Father’s, but as it grew later and later I became more disinclined to arrive there and have to wake him up and explain. I thought of going to a hotel, but dismissed the idea—I loathe hotels, especially cheap ones in the middle of the night, not that I’ve ever had any experience of them, but London altogether at that hour is so sleazy and frightening that I wanted more than anything just to find somebody I knew—somebody kind and undemanding and not too curious—yet who could one disturb at this hour who would not be curious?

  Hot on the heels of this question came the answer.

  I pulled up once again. I was at Little Venice, and the water of the canal glinted golden from the street lamps; the leaves of the old trees fringing the banks moved with a soft sound which I could just hear between the intermittent roars of passing cars. It was as nearly peaceful there as one could hope for, and certainly not at all sinister, perhaps because there were no people. I took the bit of paper out of my pocket and opened it in the light from the dashboard. It gave an address in Paddington. I got out my A-to-Z and looked it up. It wasn’t more than a few minutes’ drive from where I was.

  I started the engine up again, rather reluctant to break the relative quiet, but it didn’t break it for long because it died almost as soon as I’d choked it into life. I glanced at the petrol gauge, which was silly of me, since it had been pointing to zero ever since I’d inherited the car from Addy. I tried the starter a couple of times without result. Then I pulled my anorak hood over my head and, thanking God there was no rain, abandoned the car and started walking, carrying nothing but my A-to-Z and the bit of paper. I’d even forgotten to bring my wallet.

  The street was a sad one, one of those neighbourhoods which has known much better days but which is now just one rung up the ladder from a slum. The houses were, or had been, beautiful, and their frontages still had a certain magnificence, although the moulding, pilasters—even the window-sills—were crumbling away and it was many years since any of them had been painted. But they had a splendid Regency uniformity, a whole terrace built at once with an integrity of design which had retained its splendour through every degree of indignity and neglect.

  I found the place easily, though the number on the pillar at the top of the flight of wide, once-gracious steps had been chipped away and defaced. The blistered and peeling front door was not locked, and swung open when I fell against it, stumbling over a roller-skate on the porch. At first I was too nervous to venture into the dark, murky-smelling hall, but then I realised I would have to—there were no individual bells; I really had no notion of how I could possibly locate John in this large warren, filled to bursting-point, I could sense, with sleeping humanity. The hall was almost pitch-dark, but as I got used to it I found enough light came in through the front door to prevent me bumping into two or three prams, a push-chair, a child’s waggon and two bicycles that all but made even that spacious hall impassable. Several tiles were out of the marble floor and I had to make my way slowly and with the greatest care to the foot of the curving stairway, whose stone steps, once adorned with carpetting, now bore no traces of it except one forgotten stair-rod which nearly caused me to break my neck by rolling under my foot, and clattering musically down to the bottom.

  A door opened on the first floor and a woman’s voice whispered querulously, ‘That you at last, you bit of stopping-out dirt?’ I stopped in my tracks in momentary terror, but then, realising this might be my salvation from the hell of knocking on strange doors, I hurriedly groped my way up the last stairs and confronted a dim headless wraith in a long pale garment. The head, which was there but too black to perceive, made itself manifest by opening its white eyes very wide. ‘Who you?’ it asked.

  In a low, polite whisper, I said I was looking for John.

  ‘What John you wanting? There’s three Johns here. My son’s name John. You not looking for him, I hope, cause you won’t get to him this time of night.’

  ‘The John I want isn’t anybody’s son. He plays the guitar.’

  ‘Oh, him. Third floor front …’ The sleeve of the pale garment raised itself apparently without human agency and an invisible hand indicated the general direction. The disembodied eyes watched me curiously as I felt my way round the banisters, and answered with a suspicious roll when I turned to whisper good-night.

  The stairs were apparently endless, curving onward and upward; there are few things bleaker and colder than uncarpeted stone stairs. The only light came from the huge curtainless windows at every landing; it felt like an empty house which has been filled up with refugees who are not involved in any part of it except their own rooms and corners.

  On what I judged to be the third floor I groped to the only door I could see and knocked on it very softly. By this time I had quite decided that I was suffering from a rather prolonged fit of madness, but having pointed myself in this direction, crazy though it undoubtedly was I couldn’t seem to turn aside. I knocked again, and this time I heard a movement in the room—a grunt, the squeak of a bedspring; then a well-remembered voice said, ‘Who that? Somebody out there?’

  ‘John!’ I hissed joyfully. ‘It’s me—Jane!’

  I heard the padding of large bare feet, and the door was unbolted and opened a crack. We stared into each other’s faces in pitch blackness for several seconds.

  ‘Jane?’ John’s voice asked incredulously.

  ‘It’s me, you fathead! Let me in!’

  In another moment I was being clasped against a vast expanse of chest. ‘Jane! Jane!’ he kept saying exultantly. ‘You come to see me! You come back again!’ He almost carried me into the room and instantly switched on a single ceiling light, holding me, almost off the ground, out in front of him.

  He hadn’t changed much. Well, not at all, really; it was just that I had hardly ever seen him in any other surroundings than my room or his at Fulham, except a few times at the hospital after David’s birth. This big, rambling, underfurnished room was such a contrast to the little cupboard at the top of the house in Fulham where he had lived next to mine; now I saw him in a room big enough not to make him look like a giant in a gnome’s cave and I realised he was not so enormous as I had always thought. His big black face was split from ear to ear with a smile of simple delight. He rubbed his hand back and forth over the top of his woolly head and with the other held my shoulder and rocked me violently to and fro while we both laughed like idiots.

  Suddenly an irritable movement at the other end of the room caught my eye, and to my astonishment I saw that there were three beds in the room, and that two of them were occupied. I clapped my hand over my mouth. John followed my eyes and said in a normal voice, ‘Oh, don’t mind them! They just share the room, that’s all.’

  ‘But we’ll disturb them!’

  ‘So what? You think they never disturb me? Ain’t no prizes for guessin’ which from us three does the less disturbin’.’ He led me to a ricketty kitchen chair, took his guitar and a pile of dirty clothes off it and made me sit, ‘They got their lady-friends comin’ and goin’ all night every night. You the first lady-friend I had to visit me since I moved in with them randy bastards.’

  ‘Shh!’

  ‘What “shhh”? I talk how I like. I don’t owe them nothin’.’ He picked up his guitar and struck a loud, deliberate chord. The hump of grey blankets in one bed didn’t move; the other heaved and a dark voice from the depths said peevishly, ‘Can’t a man sleep without the damn radio playin’ half the night?’

  ‘That ain’t no radio, boy!’ retorted John, strumming louder. ‘Won’t hear nothin’ that good on no radio!’

  The other man sat up in bed sharply and said, ‘Kill it, frigger, before I slit your black skin from your neck to your navel!’ He was wearing a flannel sweat-shirt with the words ‘Go Man Go’ written on it.

  John laughed and said, ‘Since you asked me so nice—’ and put the guitar aside. The other man turned his back, lay down and went to sleep with a deep sigh.

  ‘Why do you have to share a room?’ I a
sked. ‘Money?’

  ‘Not that so much. I got a goodish job now, same band I with before but they move up in the world and me with ’em. Now we get lots of dates, lots of good places; you know what’s a debutante?’ I nodded. ‘Very rich kind of girl with stinkin’ rich daddies. Well, them kinds of people gettin’ very liberal now, want to show they ain’t colour-prejudice, and besides we play good; so they engages us to play for their dances. Big deal! Best hotels, sometimes in their own country houses, some even send a car for bringin’ us. Some of them’s real democratic, we even get champagne to drink and same food as the guests; but that ain’t every time of course. It’s more often beer and sandwiches and havin’ to play five, six hours on the trot, take your break when it’s not your solo. Them kids, though, Jane! You look at ’em, start of the evening, in their lovely clothes, and you think how pretty they are, how clean, and how their riches make ’em look somethin’ better than humans, different somehow. And everyone’s so nice to each other, so polite, you know what I mean—cultured. You feel like you’re playing for a bunch of angels. And then they start dancin’ and every time it give me a shock to see how they dance, wild, like anybody, like I seen these two here dancin’ with their whore-women, only it looks worse in them long dresses. I’ll tell you somethin’, when their daddies and mummies gets up to dance, what do they do? Same kind of wild twistin’ and Bosanovarin’ and stuff as the kids do. I seen one old mummy, her crown fell right off and got kicked clear across the floor before she could bend her old self over to pick it up. False teeth and glasses falling off you often see, but when one of them little diamond crowns falls in among all them jumpin’ feet it gets you.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I asked the other boys, that time—what we blowin’ for? Just to send these people? Look at what we’re doin’ to ’em! They ain’t theirselves no more, they gone back to the jungle they say we come from. Because of course they don’t talk so liberal when they get a bit of that champagne inside their bellies, then you get to hear what they really think, and they don’t mind you hearin’ neither, sayin’ things like—well, I wouldn’t tell you what they says, but personal, real personal. And some of them pretty dressed-up little debutantes, they gets to feeling so curious, there ain’t nothing they won’t do to satisfy theirselves about … and some of our boys don’t stop at nothin’ neither. Course, I don’t—lower myself—to doin’ nothin’ like that, Jane. Somehow I don’t even like to think of it. But these fellows here—’ he jerked his big thumb over his shoulder at his sleeping room-mates—‘they’d take three or four of ’em out into the bushes or into the back of a car in their beer-break and come back after it and tell the rest of the boys in the band all about it while they’re shakin’ the wet out of their saxes.’