26

IT WAS AFTERNOON when he approached his flat again and by a strange coincidence it was the time when Mrs Harrow in her patchy furs was setting out again on her usual trip. This time he did follow her, he didn’t care whether he was seen or not. He wanted to find out once and for all whether her house existed. He waited till she had got on to the bus and got on behind her. She sat at the front and he at the back. He turned his face to the window and spent his time watching the people passing along the streets. He was thinking that it would be interesting if her dream turned out to be a reality. He wanted it to be reality. He wanted her to have succeeded with her project. For if she succeeded then he might succeed too in whatever he decided to do next. He couldn’t continue with the life he was leading. That was quite settled in his mind. It would be pitiable, however, if she too turned out to be a figure of comedy, if she too had been living in a lie constructed out of her own psychological debris, especially when, as he looked out of the window, he could see so much of the city being rebuilt, the old slums being demolished, the tall new buildings taking their place.

When she eventually got out he followed her, past the university up a long street of largish houses. She turned in at one of them. Somehow she seemed to have become more brisk and effective and real as she approached the house, as if she was wearing a new authority. It was quite noticeable, something to do with her sense of purpose which communicated itself to her walk. If one has a purpose then one has everything, he thought. It doesn’t matter what the purpose is, as long as one believes in it, then that of itself creates life. Even the rat has a purpose, the dog, the ant, the fly. Without purpose there is nothing at all, there is only fog, the sandy grit of tedium and emptiness that rubs at the eyes.

She entered and he followed her. He waited for a bit and then stood outside an open door. He heard her moving about in the room. Then he went into the room. She was standing looking up at a pair of purple curtains, admiring them. She swung round when he spoke. “Good afternoon, Mrs Harrow,” he said. “I thought I’d come along and give you a hand. I saw you going in. I happened to be in the neighbourhood quite by chance. It really is amazing, isn’t it?” She was astonished to see him as if he had broken into her private dream, but she gained control of herself rapidly.

“It’s very beautiful,” he said looking around him. And truly enough it was. The walls had been wallpapered in white, but the rest was purple throughout, curtains, chairs, carpets.

He said, “I’ll give you a hand if you like.”

“Do you think the students will like it?” she asked eagerly.

“I’m sure they will,” he said. “I should like to stay here. It’s very quiet.” And it was too. He couldn’t hear the sound of any traffic.

“This isn’t all,” she said suddenly. “There are other rooms. I have a bathroom and four bedrooms and a living room.”

Her face had come alight, her clumsy body seemed to glow with achievement and pride of ownership. “I had to do something,” she said, “when my husband … It won’t be long now till I get everything arranged. If you’d care to see the other rooms. I was going to do some painting this afternoon. I have some paint pots in my bag here.”

They walked into the other rooms, one of which still remained to do. The others were tastefully decorated each in a different colour, one in red, one in green. He felt as if he were in an art gallery walking from room to room admiring. How much she must have denied herself to do this!

“I thought,” she said, “that I would call them the Purple Room, the Red Room and the Green Room. I got the idea from a magazine.”

Tom suddenly felt that he wanted badly to do physical work again. He was tired of reading and writing. There was a part of him that felt starved after all those months. In the old days he had felt the same satisfaction when he had started work with a pick on a fine summer’s morning and the stones of the road sparkled ahead of him, though the feeling had worn away in the course of the day with the pain and the tiredness. But at the beginning it was fine, that release of new areas of himself long unused.

“I should like to do some painting,” he said. “I should like to help. I haven’t got anything else to do anyway. Would you like me to do that?”

“It would be a great help,” she said. “I’ll go out and get some buns and rolls and I’ll make tea later.”

So she gave him the paint and the brushes and the turpentine and he spread on the floor some newspapers that she had brought. He had done some painting before though he wasn’t a very good painter. Painting looked much easier than it really was. Still it was rather easier than wallpapering. All that stretch of wall waiting to be covered with yellow paint. For she had decided to call this the Yellow Room. He painted slowly and smoothly, feeling a kind of sleepy rhythm permeate what he was doing. It was as if suddenly he had decided that afternoon that he would let things happen and not impose himself on them any more, as if he had committed himself to the inevitable. He brushed with a sleepy sensuous motion, aware only of the painting and nothing else. He didn’t wonder whether it was going to be good or bad, he let it be what it was going to be. What he did think of was that he was doing something useful, that he was transforming a dull room without character into a pretty room, that the room was being transformed under his eyes, that moment by moment he was creating more and more colour, that he liked what he was doing. He wanted to do as much as possible, to tire himself out so that he would sleep, he wanted to go on till he had finished, so that in fact the lights were put on and he was still working in a dream of satisfaction as more and more of the walls became yellow, as less and less of them retained their drab dull white. He ate his rolls and buns and drank his tea but he wouldn’t stop for long. He wanted to see the entire transformation taking place, though now and again Mrs Harrow would say, “Isn’t it time for you to go home?” But even she began to feel this as an adventure as, for the first time, she stayed on late enough to put on the lights and see her house for the first time in their glow. She fussed about with tea and biscuits as he steadily worked on making the room sunnier and sunnier. Some part of him was flowering in the paint, some part of him had long needed this efflorescence into reality, some part of him demanded this relentless, effortless blossoming. He imagined at one stage that he was creating a vast yellow flower, that he was himself this huge yellow flower, that he was bringing into birth a new species. His arm passed from aching to tranquillity. He no longer felt tiredness when he stretched. He was like a remorseless god, intent and domestic. At one stage he found himself whistling a tune he thought he had forgotten, while Mrs Harrow watched him from the door, a smile on her lips.

When he was finally ready he said, “I think that’s enough for now.” And he stretched sensuously like a cat. He said, “Will you be all right now getting home?” She said yes, and he left her and went into a pub for a drink.

For the first time for many months he felt that he had deserved the drink. He drank his first pint slowly savouring it richly in his mouth. Then he bought another one. At one stage in the evening he got into a game of draughts with an old man who was smoking a pipe. The old man beat him easily.

“What you have to do,” said the old man, “is gain control of the centre. That’s what you have to do. You’re always out on the flanks. Gain control of the centre.” The old man puffed smoke contentedly.

“I think I’ll get married,” said Tom for no reason at all, after he had lost the game.

The old man looked at him through clouds of smoke. “Merrit, eh? Are ye no merrit yet?”

“No,” said Tom. “But I think I shall get married.” He felt warm and happy and slightly drunk.

The old man was quiet for a while, then he said, “It’s a big step in a man’s life. I’ve been merrit thirty-six year.” He added, “I’m here every night of the week.”

“What?” said Tom. “You mean you leave the house every night and come and sit here? What does your wife do?”

“My wife has to put up with it,” he said. “Son, when I was your age, if my wife looked at any other man I’d clobber him. We used to fight each other all the time, all the time. I clobbered a bloke once for smiling at her, a stranger he was. Mind you, I didna like him. We was in this bar and he was sitting at the other end of the bar by hisself, and he smiled at my wife and I went over and clobbered him. But that’s all gone now. Now I know she’ll be waiting for me and I’ll be waiting for her.”

“In here?” said Tom.

“She knows where A am,” said the old man comfortably. “She knows where A am. She’s the best wife any man could have.”

The bar began to fill up and there was no room any longer to play draughts. Tom found himself sitting at a table with the old man and a lot of other people who seemed to be in a group. Two of them started a long discussion on Marx and the UCS.

One of them was saying, “What Marx means by the dictatorship of the proletariat is that the working classes—that’s me and you—will take over in the end.”

“I agree wi’ ye,” said the other man who had a small black thin moustache and looked like a film star whose name Tom couldn’t remember. “I agree wi’ ye, but you haveta remember that the Chinks did it wi’oot a proper proletariat.”

“You could do it yourself wi’oot a proper proletariat,” said the first man who burst out laughing. He turned round to the others and said, “Imagine old Ken here doing it wi’ a’ the proletariat standing roon. Aw, bugger off.”

The old man had told them that Tom was thinking of getting married, and he found himself surrounded by people offering him drinks, advice and jokes.

At a little after ten o’clock he was standing outside the pub saying goodbye to a lot of new hazy friends, swaying on his feet, and laughing a great deal.

He floated off eventually, waving his arms and saying, “Goo’ night, sweet ladies, goo’ night. Goo’ night sweet Lil,” he shouted after a large man with a broken nose who worked in a shipyard. “Goo’ night Desperate Dan,” he shouted, swaying, “goo’ night my red comics.”

Staggering from side to side he set off home.