He was only six when his father took him on that first far distant journey, through strange countryside, into another county, to a place he did not know. It was the time of year when all the colours of the fields seemed to be one colour, seen through a grey cloth of sooty rain, and the engines of the three separate trains in which he travelled were sulky-bellied monsters, gasping forward in the half-fog of smelly, steamy air.
After the third train his father and himself were in a big, high station. Above him was a double-winged glass roof that hung there like the wings of a giant crow. The engines of trains standing in the station made hoarse gyrating breathless sounds. The trains bore on the sides of them long names wreathed in steam that smelled of cooking. He was aware of the faces of passengers seen through holes of steamy glass, like broken ice, as they peered out with bored hope across platforms. A great mass of smoke rose against the crow’s wings. All was black. His father was black too: black overcoat, black hard hat, black shoes, black-pointed waxed moustache and black umbrella. Only his gloves were brown and his eyes a bright soft blue as they stared at the world of echoing smoky monsters.
Then his father and himself were in another place, in another part of the station. It had a long curved marble counter. On it there were copper geysers with rows of gas-blue grinning teeth. At many round marble tables with ferns on them and pots of yellow mustard many people sat eating and drinking. Frightening steam flew from geyser taps at unexpected moments, making him jump, reminding him of the barber’s shop where his father went to be shaved.
His father was incredibly at home in this place. He took off his coat and hat and gloves and hung them up on a hat-stand with his umbrella.
‘Would you like a big poached egg on toast? Or would you rather have a sandwich?’
‘A samwidge.’
‘And a nice hot cup of cocoa?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes what? I don’t hear anything.’
‘Please.’
‘That’s the ticket.’
A lady with starched cap and large white butterfly apron-strings was standing over the table where his father and himself were sitting.
‘Would the sandwiches be ham?’
‘Ham, sir. Yes.’
‘Very well. One ham sandwich. Two poached eggs on toast. And two cups of cocoa.’
When the sandwich arrived the lady also put before him, beside his plate, a little pot of mustard. She even opened it; and his father, when she had gone, smiled for the first time that day.
‘She thinks you’re a man. She thinks you like mustard.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you don’t, do you?’
‘No.’ His father was watching him. ‘No thank you.’
‘That’s the ticket. Eat your sandwich while it’s hot. We’ve got a good way to go.’
He knew, of course, that he ought to have laughed at his father’s remark about the sandwich being hot. But the sandwich was not only cold. It was also very big. He could scarcely hold it with both hands. It was cut triangularwise and pieces of fat fell out of it. Then he felt the bread sticking in his throat. He could not swallow and he found himself looking up at his father’s face, seeing on it once again the dreadfully strange remote expression he had seen so often in the trains.
‘Can’t you get through it all?’
‘I don’t like the fat.’
‘Never mind,’ his father said. ‘I’ll wrap it in my clean handkerchief. You’ll be glad of it later. Have you got a handkerchief?’
‘Yes.’
‘Blow then. Blow hard.’
After that they were in a street of trams. The trams were like drunken ships, reeling down canals of black water. Big bells donged in the foggy rain. A great bridge, scalded black at the edges, went over a street and it was dark under the bridge except for the blue sparks of tram-wires and the fiery ovens of chestnut sellers sheltering from the rain.
Then they were walking. There were no trams. The causeways of the street were high up, with steps and railings. It was an old place. Black entries were cut between the houses. There were many holes in the pavements where the rain was black.
His father stopped on the high causeway and closed his umbrella.
‘This is where we’re going,’ he said. ‘Remember to take your cap off.’
After that they were in a little shop. Just over the threshold there was a piece of sack on the floor. ‘Wipe your feet,’ his father said and he began to say ‘It’s not a proper door-mat. It’s only a sack,’ but his father made terrible, hissing train-like noises of remonstrance and a bell on a spring jangled far-away down a passage, echoing emptily.
It was a long time before anyone answered that bell. He became aware, as he waited, of strange creatures staring down at him from glass cases on the walls. A fox was one of them. It was an old, shabby, yellow fox and was running among yellow grasses. There was a stoat too, almost a white stoat, with glass eyes like pink shoe buttons, and a heron, grey like the winter day.
Then she was in the shop. He did not know at all how she had suddenly managed to get there. She was grey like the heron and old and shabby like the fox. She was tall, with shining yellow hands and throat and a long black skirt that came down below her ankles. She was so old and far off and fearsome in her deathly tallness that he was terrified when she came down to him, kneeling, touching with her skinniness his own small hands.
‘Is this the boy?’
Perhaps I am going to stay with her, he thought. Perhaps she is going to keep me.
‘Yes. Say how do you do to Aunt.’
‘How do you do.’
She fixed on him eyes that were globular and bloodless with a queer fondness.
‘Not hard to see who he features,’ she said.
After that they were sitting, the three of them, in a little room behind the shop. It was not like home. Until that moment there had been excluded from his experience any idea that there might be rooms in the world that were not like home. The table in the centre of the room had no cloth on it. There was no carpet and no mat on the floor. A black horse-hair chair from which the stuffing was coming out like old frizzly whiskers stood on one side of the fireplace and his father sat in it, holding his bowler hat on his knees.
‘I bin thinking about you,’ she said. ‘It was about your time to come.’
‘That’s right.’
‘How old is the boy now?’
‘Six.’
That was always the time, he thought, when old people like her groped into cupboards and came to you with peppermints or cake or biscuits or oranges to keep you quiet while they spoke of other things.
But it did not happen this time. He thought it strange that she had nothing to give. She was the first old lady he had ever known who had nothing to give.
‘Have you seen Joe?’ she said.
‘Not yet,’ his father said. ‘We came straight up.’
‘You’ll see him before you go, won’t you?’ she said. ‘He’s down at Market. He’d like to see you, Joe would.’
Then his father and the old woman began to talk, gradually forgetful of him, in growing darkness. The rain on the backyard outside was figured with smoky, lowering mists. The walls of the room stared out, like those of the shop, with the wild dead eyes of creatures imprisoned in cases. He felt imprisoned too. Darkness began chaining and confusing him and filling him with fears.
‘It’s time to light the gas. Can we light the gas?’ he said.
His father let out once again the awful hissing train-like noises of remonstration.
‘Sit still! Sit still,’ his father said. ‘Don’t be a whittle-breeches.’
‘I can find a light,’ she said. ‘Somewhere.’
Then he was made aware of another unbelievable, mystifying, terrible thing. There was no gas in that house. A candle borne before her face threw into upward elongations the drawn fissures of her long neck. The flame waved flatly above its enamel holder as she set it down on the table. Then he knew how much he hated candlelight. He hated all its shadowy wanderings. He wanted the singing, greenish friendly glow of gas, the first beautiful plop of the red-flared mantle destroying dark with whiteness.
He felt a great lump swell in his throat. A house without gas, without a cloth on the table, without even a bit-hearthrug on the floor: that must be a terribly poor house, he thought, the poorest he had ever known, and he sat there imprisoned and haunted by its candle-shadows until the lump of homesickness and fear was too big in his throat to swallow.
‘Have you been up there?’ she asked.
‘No. Not today.’
‘Are you going up there?’
‘Not with the boy,’ he said. ‘It’s too far with the boy.’
‘I hoped it’d be a better day than this for you,’ she said. ‘We had a lot of days a good deal like this when she was here.’
His father did not speak.
‘That was one of them slopping, dirty winters. Up to your neck. I recollect how the water used to run like rivers off the causeways.’
His father did not speak. His face, old as it then seemed to the boy, as he afterwards knew, only a young face, was white and disturbed and set hard beyond the candle-flame.
‘It was a day like this when they took her up there,’ she said. ‘Only colder than this. Not fit to turn a dog out. Nor a cat, nor nobody.’
His father still had nothing to say.
‘You ever hear from him?’ she said.
‘Christmas.’ His father spoke now with a checked, far-off voice. ‘Every Christmas time.’
‘I’d Christmas the skin off his back,’ she said, ‘if I could.’
‘Little pigs,’ his father said. ‘Little pigs.’
‘Well, and what are their ears for?’ she said. ‘They’ve got to hear sometime, haven’t they?’
‘What they don’t hear,’ his father said, ‘they don’t grieve over.’
‘Grieve,’ she said, ‘grieve, my dear God, grieve—you may well talk about grieve.’
‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘But that’s all done with now.’
‘She was like a tallow candle,’ the old lady said. ‘No more to her ’n a tallow candle. And not much of it at that.’
That was the moment when his hatred of candle-light went deeper still. He felt he could not bear the awful, melancholy wandering light of it. He could not bear the hollow carvings of the shrunken face made so old and fearsome by the light and the shadows. He wondered for several minutes if she would cry—but to his everlasting surprise she did not cry. In her face there was only a stony, thin-jowled hatred of something that frightened him then and that he long remembered.
He saw his father stir at last in the chair. He felt the lump in his throat ready to burst with rapture as he took his large silver watch from his pocket.
‘Well, we ought to be getting on.’
Then his father got up and took from his inside pocket an envelope which he laid on the table.
‘Oh! no, no, no, no,’ she said.
‘You take it,’ his father said. ‘Take it.’
She did not speak this time but she took his hands fiercely in hers and clenched them. Even then she did not cry. Her face was terribly fleshless and dry in the candlelight and the boy reached, at that moment, a strange and long-enduring conclusion about the old.
There must be a time, he thought, when they were so old and dry that their tears could not flow any more. That could only be it. And no doubt there would come a time, he thought, when he, too, like her, would be able to cry for things no longer.
‘What did you give her?’ he said to his father, out on the high causeway.
‘Just a little something.’
‘Some money?’
‘Just a little something.’
The streets were blue with twilight and trams were dancing past chestnut ovens, flashing their sparking fires.
‘Are we going to see Joe now?’
‘We won’t have time to see Joe,’ his father said. ‘We want some tea before we catch the train.’
‘Who is Joe?’
‘He’s your uncle. My uncle.’
‘Is he married to that lady?’
‘Yes.’
‘And who was she?’ he said. ‘The one you were talking about? The one who was like the tallow candle?’
‘Her sister.’
That was all his father answered. Later the three trains roared him home, under friendly gas-light, through the rainy night-time. And then there was no more speaking of the old lady, the house with the candle and the woman who was like a candle until, in the last train, they were nearly home.
‘Did you understand what we were talking about back there?’ his father said.
‘No.’
‘That’s just as well. There’s no need,’ his father said.
How could someone be like a tallow candle? he thought. He was troubled by that as he had been troubled by the shadows of the candle in that dark and gas-less room. Was it because she was pale and alone and dying, perhaps in that house, that they spoke of her like that? Because in time the flame of her died and went out?—he could only think that that was it.
‘What was her name?’ he said.
His father began to feel in his pocket for something.
‘Could you eat the rest of the sandwich? I saved it for you.’
‘Yes please.’
‘That’s the ticket,’ his father said. ‘That was funny, wasn’t it, when the waitress thought you liked mustard?’
‘Yes.’
He held the sandwich in both hands and stared at it. He did not want it very much.
‘Did she die?’ he said.
But his father did not speak or look at him. It was exactly as if he himself had not spoken, and there was no answer except the shriek of the train carrying him home, after his first far distant journey, through the sleepy night-time.