Chapter 4

PHILIP WATCHED HER in terror. Mrs Baines was out of breath as if she had been searching all the empty rooms, looking under loose covers.

With her untidy grey hair and her black dress buttoned to her throat, her gloves of black cotton, she was so like the witches of his dreams that he didn’t dare to speak. There was a stale smell in her breath.

‘She’s here,’ Mrs Baines said, ‘you can’t deny she’s here.’ Her face was simultaneously marked with cruelty and misery; she wanted to ‘do things’ to people, but she suffered all the time. It would have done her good to scream, but she daren’t do that: it would warn them. She came ingratiatingly back to the bed where Philip lay rigid on his back and whispered, ‘I haven’t forgotten the Meccano set. You shall have it tomorrow, Master Philip. We’ve got secrets together, haven’t we? Just tell me where they are.’

He couldn’t speak. Fear held him as firmly as any nightmare. She said, ‘Tell Mrs Baines, Master Philip. You love your Mrs Baines, don’t you?’ That was too much; he couldn’t speak, but he could move his mouth in terrified denial, wince away from her dusty image.

She whispered, coming closer to him. ‘Such deceit. I’ll tell your father. I’ll settle with you myself when I’ve found them. You’ll smart; I’ll see you smart.’ Then immediately she was still, listening. A board had creaked on the floor below, and a moment later, while she stooped listening above his bed, there came the whispers of two people who were happy and sleepy together after a long day. The night-light stood beside the mirror and Mrs Baines could see bitterly there her own reflection, misery and cruelty wavering in the glass, age and dust and nothing to hope for. She sobbed without tears, a dry, breathless sound; but her cruelty was a kind of pride which kept her going; it was her best quality, she would have been merely pitiable without it. She went out of the door on tiptoe, feeling her way across the landing, going so softly down the stairs that no one behind a shut door could hear her. Then there was complete silence again; Philip could move; he raised his knees; he sat up in bed; he wanted to die. It wasn’t fair, the walls were down again between his world and theirs; but this time it was something worse than merriment that the grown people made him share; a passion moved in the house he recognized but could not understand.

It wasn’t fair, but he owed Baines everything: the Zoo, the ginger pop, the bus ride home. Even the supper called on his loyalty. But he was frightened; he was touching something he touched in dreams: the bleeding head, the wolves, the knock, knock, knock. Life fell on him with savagery: you couldn’t blame him if he never faced it again in sixty years. He got out of bed, carefully from habit put on his bedroom slippers, and tiptoed to the door: it wasn’t quite dark on the landing below because the curtains had been taken down for the cleaners and the light from the street came in through the tall windows. Mrs Baines had her hand on the glass door-knob; she was carefully turning it; he screamed, ‘Baines, Baines.’

Mrs Baines turned and saw him cowering in his pyjamas by the banisters; he was helpless, more helpless even than Baines, and cruelty grew at the sight of him and drove her up the stairs. The nightmare was on him again and he couldn’t move; he hadn’t any more courage left for ever; he’d spent it all, had been allowed no time to let it grow, no years of gradual hardening; he couldn’t even scream.

But the first cry had brought Baines out of the best spare bedroom and he moved quicker than Mrs Baines. She hadn’t reached the top of the stairs before he’d caught her round the waist. She drove her black cotton gloves at his face and he bit her hand. He hadn’t time to think, he fought her savagely like a stranger, but she fought back with knowledgeable hate. She was going to teach them all and it didn’t really matter whom she began with; they had all deceived her; but the old image in the glass was by her side, telling her she must be dignified, she wasn’t young enough to yield her dignity; she could beat his face, but she mustn’t bite; she could push, but she mustn’t kick.

Age and dust and nothing to hope for were her handicaps. She went over the banisters in a flurry of black clothes and fell into the hall; she lay before the front door like a sack of coals which should have gone down the area into the basement. Philip saw; Emmy saw; she sat down suddenly in the doorway of the best spare bedroom with her eyes open as if she were too tired to stand any longer. Baines went slowly down into the hall.

It wasn’t hard for Philip to escape; they’d forgotten him completely; he went down the back, the servants’ stairs, because Mrs Baines was in the hall; he didn’t understand what she was doing lying there; like the startling pictures in a book no one had read to him, the things he didn’t understand terrified him. The whole house had been turned over to the grown-up world; he wasn’t safe in the night-nursery; their passions had flooded it. The only thing he could do was to get away, by the back stairs, and up through the area, and never come back. You didn’t think of the cold, of the need of food and sleep; for an hour it would seem quite possible to escape from people for ever.

He was wearing pyjamas and bedroom slippers when he came up into the square, but there was no one to see him. It was that hour of the evening in a residential district when everyone is at the theatre or at home. He climbed over the iron railings into the little garden: the plane trees spread their large pale palms between him and the sky. It might have been an illimitable forest into which he had escaped. He crouched behind a trunk and the wolves retreated; it seemed to him between the little iron seat and the tree-trunk that no one would ever find him again. A kind of embittered happiness and self-pity made him cry; he was lost; there wouldn’t be any more secrets to keep; he surrendered responsibility once and for all. Let grown-up people keep to their world and he would keep to his, safe in the small garden between the plane trees. ‘In the lost childhood of Judas Christ was betrayed’; you could almost see the small unformed face hardening into the deep dilettante selfishness of age.

Presently the door of 48 opened and Baines looked this way and that; then he signalled with his hand and Emmy came; it was as if they were only just in time for a train, they hadn’t a chance of saying good-bye; she went quickly by like a face at a window swept past the platform, pale and unhappy and not wanting to go. Baines went in again and shut the door; the light was lit in the basement, and a policeman walked round the square, looking into the areas. You could tell how many families were at home by the lights behind the first-floor curtains.

Philip explored the garden: it didn’t take long: a twenty-yard square of bushes and plane trees, two iron seats, and a gravel path, a padlocked gate at either end, a scuffle of old leaves. But he couldn’t stay: something stirred in the bushes and two illuminated eyes peered out at him like a Siberian wolf, and he thought how terrible it would be if Mrs Baines found him there. He’d have no time to climb the railings; she’d seize him from behind.

He left the square at the unfashionable end and was immediately among the fish-and-chip shops, the little stationers selling Bagatelle, among the accommodation addresses and the dingy hotels with open doors. There were few people about because the pubs were open, but a blowsy woman carrying a parcel called out to him across the street and the commissionaire outside a cinema would have stopped him if he hadn’t crossed the road. He went deeper: you could go farther and lose yourself more completely here than among the plane trees. On the fringe of the square he was in danger of being stopped and taken back: it was obvious where he belonged: but as he went deeper he lost the marks of his origin. It was a warm night: any child in those free-living parts might be expected to play truant from bed. He found a kind of camaraderie even among grown-up people; he might have been a neighbour’s child as he went quickly by, but they weren’t going to tell on him, they’d been young once themselves. He picked up a protective coating of dust from the pavements, of smuts from the trains which passed along the backs in a spray of fire. Once he was caught in a knot of children running away from something or somebody, laughing as they ran; he was whirled with them round a turning and abandoned, with a sticky fruit-drop in his hand.

He couldn’t have been more lost; but he hadn’t the stamina to keep on. At first he feared that someone would stop him; after an hour he hoped that someone would. He couldn’t find his way back, and in any case he was afraid of arriving home alone; he was afraid of Mrs Baines, more afraid than he had ever been. Baines was his friend, but something had happened which gave Mrs Baines all the power. He began to loiter on purpose to be noticed, but no one noticed him. Families were having a last breather on the doorsteps, the refuse bins had been put out and bits of cabbage stalks soiled his slippers. The air was full of voices, but he was cut off; these people were strangers and would always now be strangers; they were marked by Mrs Baines and he shied away from them into a deep class-consciousness. He had been afraid of policemen, but now he wanted one to take him home; even Mrs Baines could do nothing against a policeman. He sidled past a constable who was directing traffic, but he was too busy to pay him any attention. Philip sat down against a wall and cried.

It hadn’t occurred to him that was the easiest way, that all you had to do was to surrender, to show you were beaten and accept kindness.… It was lavished on him at once by two women and a pawnbroker. Another policeman appeared, a young man with a sharp incredulous face. He looked as if he noted everything he saw in pocket-books and drew conclusions. A woman offered to see Philip home, but he didn’t trust her: she wasn’t a match for Mrs Baines immobile in the hall. He wouldn’t give his address; he said he was afraid to go home. He had his way; he got his protection. ‘I’ll take him to the station,’ the policeman said, and holding him awkwardly by the hand (he wasn’t married; he had his career to make) he led him round the corner up the stone stairs into the little bare over-heated room where Justice waited.