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 would 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.’
‘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 asked. ‘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.’
‘Are they in the band—those two?’
‘Naaa—they’re just fellows, they got no music, no nothin’, they just work anyplace. They’re big black bodies with heads on ’em but nothin’ inside the heads, you know what I mean? I hate ’em,’ he said dispassionately, ‘and they hate me because I ain’t like them.’
‘But John, then why do you live with them?’
‘Jane, you can’t understand. It’s hard to find a place where to live in this white man’s city. Oh, there’s places, there’s houses, but they’re mostly like this—broken down, nobody carin’ for nothin’ except the rent. I told you I wasn’t doin’ so bad for money, but I couldn’t rent this room for my lone self. You know what each of us is shellin’ out for our third share? Four pound. And for what? Well, look around and you’ll see. One bathroom downstairs which the bath is always full of dirty water cause the drain’s blocked, no cooking allowed for the bachelors, no privacy, no nothin’. Four pound a week.’
‘God!’ I said, appalled. ‘Wasn’t it better at Doris’s?’
‘Better?’ he cried. ‘I tell you, I look back on that bug-run like you’d look back to paradise. Them days, Jane—last year, with you and Toby and old Doris, and Charlie, and that funny woman, what was her name, the nosy one—’
‘Mavis—’
‘Yes, her. She died, did you know that?’
‘Mavis? Died?’
‘Yeh. Fell down them damn stairs, poor old woman. I was real sorry, even though she wouldn’t have no dealin’s with me on account of me bein’ a spade. She was kind to you though, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ I said. I was very shocked.
‘That happened before I left. We all went to her funeral—Doris cried just like a baby. I cried too, but I was cryin’ mostly because she reminded me of them good times with you and Toby.’ He gazed at me through sad yellow eyes. ‘They was the best times I ever had. And you two was my best friends. I won’t never have no friends again like you two.’
I took hold of his huge hand and played with the fingers, dark brown on top, sort of beigy-pink underneath, with a brick-like callous on the side of the thumb from strumming. ‘Why did you leave Doris’s?’
‘Lonely. I tried to be friendly with a girl who came to live in your old room, but she didn’t want no truck with me, she was scared stiff of me, used to run if I spoke to her. She pretty soon married a young fellow who had Toby’s room after Toby left. Then they went and some awful people came, I think they were gangsters or something. I was never so sure they didn’t have somethin’ to do with that poor old woman fallin’. Maybe they bust in on her and scared her or—well, I can’t be sure, but they were real ugly people, the two of them. I used to hear funny conversations through the wall. Whispers—you know; like plannin’ somethin’, with just a few words comin’ plain when they didn’t agree ’bout somethin’. One night I was practisin’ some music real soft, and suddenly that little window—you remember, high up between the rooms—that got smashed right to bits and this fellow put his fist in with a whole lot of bits of razor blades stuck between his knuckles. He shook it at me and said, real quiet and threatening, from behind the partition, “If you don’t stop that row you black animal I’m going to kick that door open and flay the skin right off your face.” Well, I’m no hero. I believed him, so I stopped. And couple of days later I moved out. Doris was sorry in the end. She was scared of these white boys, and I guess she’d found out I was harmless. Funny how she’d come round to me. But with you and Toby and Mavis and me gone, I could see what she was thinkin’. The house’d fill up somehow with the real bad types and there’d be her and Charlie, never knowin’ when they was goin’ to get done up in the night.’ He shook his head again, really concerned for Doris. ‘That poor old cow, she never had no judgement. It was just her good luck she got people like us.’
‘She probably looks back on that time as her golden age, too. After all, it was when she married Charlie.’
But John was pursuing his own thoughts. ‘Maybe you ain’t noticed it so much, living in the country,’ he said. ‘But this bad world is gettin’ worse and worse all the time. The people’s gettin’ worse. Better at hatin’, better at grabbin’. I tell you somethin’, I’m real scared to go out alone some nights.’ He sat back on his bed and looked at the two recumbent figures behind him. ‘You ask me why do I live with these two randy spades and I tell you, money. But that ain’t the only thing. I wish I could find somebody nice to live with, but I can’t seem to find nobody real nice that ain’t fixed up with a wife or somehow, and I sure ain’t aimin’ to live on my own no more. These two ain’t much, but they better than nothin’.’
‘Even though they say they’re going to slice you?’
‘Ah, that’s just talkin’. Ain’t like that white boy—he meant it. We been livin’ here now, the three of us, for near six months, and ain’t hardly been one day we haven’t said we’ll slice each other. Ain’t nobody so much as brought a knife out yet, ’cept to cut his bread. And sometimes when they had their fill of women and they feelin’ good they get me to play and they dance and sing and this whole old house starts jumpin’, and we have a good time together. Sort of. But it ain’t real, like with you and Toby, because them and me, we ain’t alike in our hearts, and under the music and drink we looks down at each other, we’re on the hate-kick same as the rest.’
We’d been talking non-stop for nearly an hour; it was 3 a.m. and he hadn’t asked me a word about myself or why I’d come so late or anything. Sitting there in that sleazy room, half-frozen, too tired to feel like sleeping, I felt the most tremendous love for John and cursed myself for not having written to him or come to see him before. I wondered if Toby had been any better.
‘Do you see anything of Toby?’
John brightened. ‘I see him, time to time. Couple times he’s invited me to his place for a meal. Them’s the times I look forward to! Toby’s a good friend. But afterwards I got to come back here to these two pails of slops which got no conversation ’cept women and cursing the whites and somehow I feel more worse than I did before. Still, it’s worth it to see Toby in that big nice studio-room of his and talk about you and old times.’
‘You talk about me?’ I couldn’t help asking.
‘Sure we do,’ he said, surprised. ‘I always ask about you.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘Dunno. Couple months, maybe.’
‘Not since Christmas?’
His face changed a little and he said, ‘Let’s don’t talk about Christmas. That was my worst, most loneliest time I ever had.’
‘Oh John! We thought of you!’
He looked at me curiously. ‘You was together—you and Toby—Christmastime?’ I nodded. ‘Where?’ I told him. ‘You had a tree?’ I nodded again, unable to speak for remorse. He stood up and walked to the door, opened and closed it aimlessly, wandered around a bit among all the clutter littering the floor and slowly came back to me. He sat down without looking at me. He sat with his knees wide apart and his head hanging down looking at the floor. ‘You want to drink somethin’?’ he asked me after a long time.
‘No thanks John,’ I muttered, almost crying.
‘I could make tea.’ He looked up at me and said more cheerfully, ‘That’s a good idea, you know? Tea? It’s cold in here. I’ll make some, like I used to when you was pregnant in the mornin’s.’ His mood had changed. He was as volatile as a child. Now with something to do—the begrimed electric kettle to plug in on a table several layers thick with food and kitchen crocks, mugs to find and wash in a bucket of water under the table, a lot of business with tea and sugar and condensed milk in a tube—he seemed quite happy again and chattered away about debutantes and clubs and the café where he usually ate, where dope was peddled as a sideline: I asked him if he ‘smoked’ and he said yes of course, with an air of surprise, and explained that when he said dope he meant the hard stuff which he never touched. The two bodies slept on, impervious to light and voices, and I asked if they touched the hard stuff and John said one of them did and was in fact sleeping off a fix right now. The other had a shot now and again but wasn’t hooked. Their names were Frank and Leroy and they were both West Indian … I listened to their whole histories while we drank our tea, which smelt faintly of dirty dish-cloth but which, being very hot, strong and sweet, was comforting. I hadn’t realised how really cold and empty I was; I had sort of gone numb.
I had to bring up Toby again.
‘So you haven’t seen anything of Toby since—for two months?’
‘About that. It was winter, I know that, cause he’d just got himself a new kind of heater that blew hot air along the floor, and he gave me his old oil-stove. There it is,’ he pointed to it standing in a corner under a pile of old Daily Mirrors, ‘only it run out of oil just after I brought it back and I ain’t never got round to buying any. Still, I like havin’ it, somethin’ of Toby’s.’ He took a long drink of tea, looking slowly at me over the rim. ‘What’s with you two people? Ain’t you never goin’ to get married?’
I looked at him and wondered how wise he was. Of course he wasn’t at all clever, but he had a certain basic wisdom about some things.
‘Do you think Toby’s strong enough to marry?’
The golden whites of his eyes didn’t flicker or change. ‘Oh yes,’ he said without hesitating. ‘Toby strong enough. Question is, if you strong enough.’
My first reaction, after the first stunned moment, was: He’s crazy! He doesn’t know the first thing about either of us! Even so, I was oddly hurt—almost insulted. Too much so to ask what he meant or for any further elaboration. I just went on staring at him until he said, quite gently, ‘You been thinking it was the other way round?’ I didn’t answer, and he went on: ‘Who run away? Who all the time don’t want? Toby wanted. He’d married you after the baby, before the baby, any time you was willing. But you run.’
‘I wanted him to be free!’
John laughed, a soft, kind chuckle, and ran his finger round the rim of the cup. ‘You can make music like this,’ he said, ‘with glasses.’
‘I didn’t want to hang onto him! I didn’t want to tie him with my need!’ But even as I cried the words, they sounded false. Completely.
John didn’t look up at me, just shook his head and finished his chuckle. After a moment he said, ‘You know what they say about me?’ He indicated the sleepers with his head. ‘They call me a fag. That’s a fellow only wants it with other fellows.’ I gasped, but covered it with a deep, shaken breath. ‘It’s true I don’t go after women much, but I ain’t a fag, not what they mean. I never wanted Toby that way, and I loved Toby like I never loved anybody—’cept maybe you. And another thing. I know how a man feels. Not men like them—they ain’t real men, they’re just a pair of walking John Thomases. I mean real men, like Toby. You say you didn’t want him to know you needed him. Well, I’ll ask you. What you think men want from women? That’s why I say you the weak one. You too weak to let him know how weak you are. He been waitin’ all this time for you to come to him and need him. I tell you something Jane, I don’t know how much longer he goin’ to wait. He’s strong, but he ain’t that strong. No man ain’t that strong, to go on forever without nobody that needs him.’ He lay back on the bed and looked straight up at the ceiling. ‘I thought about it a lot. I mean if I was a fag or not. And I found the answer in one thing. Why was them months at Doris’s the happiest I ever was? This’ll sound real silly. It was because you was sick and you felt better when I brought you cups of tea. And because Toby was sick a different way and used to talk to me a lot. Half he said I couldn’t understand, that’s the half I just had to feel. But just the talking did him good, he said so. You both needed me, and I felt good. And that was a man’s kind of feelin’ good. Which is what you ain’t givin’ Toby, cause you’re afraid to.’