At first I turned back to the shop, thinking I’d take the picture back in and ask Mrs. Loony H. to store it for me for a while; but I got a queer sensation looking through the glass. The place looked quite empty and dead as if no one had been in it for years. All the stuff inside—you could see if you put your face against the glass—looked dim, as though it were underwater. There was a chair with a round cane back and a shelf with a lot of china rabbits on it, blue and green and pink with fat ears—and a bead shawl draped over a screen, all in shadow. There was no sign we’d even disturbed the dust. It gave me the creeps a bit.
I pushed the picture over the road instead to the steps of Elsie Meeney’s and somehow bumped it up them, first one, then the next. It looked exactly the same as at the tea party—the same old doilies and empty shelves and curtains on a rail. I thought I saw Alice and the other one inside and I did just think, all of a sudden, of going in. It gave me a very pleasant feeling, actually, to think how I’d go in.
‘It would give me great pleasure,’ I would say, ‘great pleasure, if you would accept this painting—’
‘Oh we couldn’t!’
‘Yes, take it. It’s just a small thing . . .’
‘Oh Madam! It’s beautiful! We couldn’t.’
‘Take it!’
But I couldn’t really get at the door-handle when I thought about it, with the picture in the way. I could have leaned forward but there was the orange. I was thinking it out when I saw Alice come marching through the archway with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and her sleeves rolled up. She had a very violent expression.
She saw me and her expression grew worse—you could see it was habit—and I bobbed down and let the picture fall slowly backwards against my head. I put the orange under my chin and spread my arms out and by getting up slowly I could balance it on my head, though what with my schoolbag and my gas mask I was shaky. It was glass-downwards and not very comfortable. I could see their two seedy old heads looking at me over the rail. ‘It’s that girl, Allus!’ ‘What girl?’ ‘That nasty argumentative girl that caused trouble.’ Of course I couldn’t actually see they were there because the orange kept my chin down.
I went very quietly down Ginger Street and nobody came by. As I’ve said before Cleveland Spa is the deadest town in the whole world—streets and streets of houses with heavy old curtains and neat front gardens and never a soul. In some streets there’s about one old lady in every house. They were left over from the first war when all the men got killed and they’ve just had to sit ever since. I could only see the bottoms of their gates and gateposts today, and the lines on the pavements, but I knew exactly where I’d got to because of going up and down Ginger Street so often—six times a day counting the dinner hours; and even after not doing so all the time we were bombed I recognized every single inch. I wouldn’t be surprised if when I’m old and they take me all doddering in a wheelchair with my mouth hanging open and my chin nodding away, I’ll know every inch still. It is surprising as a matter of fact how little of a thing you have to see to recognize it. Rowley for instance could tell a Ford car from a Rover car when he was still in his pushchair, and couldn’t see more than wheels. It makes one very interested in eyes.
I didn’t know where I’d decided to go, but after a while I found my feet were walking me on to the promenade. I passed the big stone gates that go down to the sea-wood, and went on steady and straight to the steps that led up to Miss Philemon’s front door. The bottom step had always had a small piece missing from it as if someone had taken a bite. I paused and looking at the step, and gulping rather—it is difficult to hold an orange against your throat for long with a weight on your head—I seemed to see Miss Crake’s old phiz looking down from above.
‘Dora, there is something outside.’
‘Is there, dear?’
‘It’s a picture. It is proceeding in this direction. There are legs beneath it.’
‘How very extraordinary. Let me see. Just let me finish toasting this bread.’
‘It is proceeding at about the height of an Upper Fourth.’
‘Dash! I’ve dropped the butter down the bookcase.’
‘It is proceeding at an awkward angle. It is turning in at the gate.’
‘Why, I expect it’s Jessica. Put on the kettle, dear.’
‘Oh no—I’m wrong. It’s turned back. It’s going away. How strange.’
When I got back to the sea-wood gates I had a flash of some sort of sense. I put the picture down and straightened up. ‘You must look,’ I said, and looked back at the windows where old C. and Miss P. ought to have been standing, Miss P. with the knife in one hand and the butter in the paper in the other, and their funny old faces asking questions. It was not as bad as I’d expected—just like any other bombed house.
I pushed the picture behind the little sentry-box thing where you used to have to buy a ticket to go to the sea-wood when there were men before the war to sell the tickets, and I went off down the steps and into the trees that grew all over the slope of curled-back leaves. The smell of the wild garlic was tremendous. It had begun to rain harder and you could hear the drops everywhere, but no wet came through. I went on and on down the narrow path, just plodding on, and it grew dark and miserable.
I came to the little side-path that led off, and I went down it. The wood had got much scruffier since last September. Some branches had come down through the winter and nobody had cleared them away. The wood had grown thicker and the trees seemed to stand closer together. After a while they thinned out and the bandstand came in sight below in the rain. A lot of paint seemed to have washed off it.
I went down the path and across the flat grass it stood on, and sat on the top step just inside and put my head against the iron post. The flower-beds were getting very tatty-looking and the grass was muddy with puddles forming in it. Like a shabby old meadow. There was an awful smell of men’s lavatories and one of the stacked-up metal chairs had fallen to bits on the floor. Someone had drawn hearts with arrows through on the floor and there was a bundle of fish-and-chip papers, transparent with dark grease in a corner. Near to my face on the post someone had written a foul word in very perfect letters.
The rain pattered down on the roof and the grass and the ruins of the flower-beds and the dismal old garlic and the tall sad trees and prickled the beck and spattered the sea, and the fat barrage-balloon on the cliffs up above and the men looking after it and the fields beyond and then the moors and then the mountains, wet and sodden and grey for evermore. It drenched my bare legs sticking out of the bandstand, and my socks and my brown lace-ups.
I suppose I sat there for a very long time. Far, far away I knew that the rest of the world was going on. If I’d tried I think I could have imagined it all—people sitting, breathing, telling each other things, shouting at each other, nodding at each other over teacups, narrowing their eyes and pointing guns at each other, looking at their watches, lighting the gas. Mother spinning round the kitchen saying to Rowley, ‘Heavens, Jess’ll be in in a minute and no tea. Don’t move one inch while I fly out for the kippers.’
But I wasn’t going to try, and I sat on and on.
Once above me through the sea-wood some boys went running, shouting and making noises at each other like guns, and then an old man in a macintosh with a dog. He called to the dog. Then it was all quiet again. Then Miss Philemon came walking through the wood in a pixie hood and a waterproof cape and carrying her case of books in front of her in both hands like Little Red Riding Hood.
‘Stop this,’ I said. ‘This is the sort of thing I can’t stand. It’s on the edge of enjoying people dying.’
Perhaps she’s right and everything I see is out of focus, I thought. It’s funny Walter de la Mare didn’t spot it though if it’s true. It was a terrible poem. It was a terrible poem. But there was one thing good about it—the idea was good, the idea of the maniac was good. Walter de la Mare would have understood that.
But would he? Did anybody really see anything the same as anybody else? Rowley could tell the difference between even little bits of cars, but he couldn’t understand different angles. ‘My right is your left,’ you had to keep saying. My right is everybody else’s left. The rain stopped and I still sat on and on and on, and it began to grow dark.
I said to myself, ‘I am here but I am nothing. I see nothing. I know nothing. Whenever I think I know, I don’t. It’s always lies. What I see turns out to have been always fancy. It’s “Oh, Jessica!”, “For goodness’ sake, Jessica!”, “Poor old Jessica!”, “Jessica’s a bit off her nut.”’ Just when you think someone’s thinking like you do, they give you a blank look and can’t remember.
‘I’m all alone,’ I thought, ‘I’m utterly, utterly alone.’ I said it out loud and started howling a bit and got up and walked back up through the wood. When I got to the gates I looked back into the trees and shouted, ‘There’s nobody there, there’s nobody there.’ A woman—a frightful-looking woman in one of those awful musquash coats with a filthy old peke trailing along behind her turned her face on me and opened her eyes in fright. They stuck out a bit, like eggs. But I didn’t bother. Nobody was going to interest me. She was nothing. I was alone.
I hauled the picture along back to the station somehow and saw the station-master’s ghastly old trousers-bottoms as I got to the barrier.
‘Best come this way,’ he said and took me round by the gate for the luggage. I saw the arc the bolt makes on the station floor and his poor old waddly shoes with the toes turning up. But I put them out of my head. He wasn’t going to interest me.
There was a train in, and I heaved the picture on to the floor of an empty carriage, shoved it along between the seats and got in after it. The station-master was watching with his horrible purple lip hanging down—I didn’t bother to look, for I knew—and came shambling along and laid his chin on the window.
‘Tha’s late,’ he said.
‘I’ve got permission.’
‘Yon’s a great thing. Orter be int van.’
I tried to look over his head because I knew I was utterly alone. Everyone in this world was utterly alone. And I had a pain in my stomach.
‘No chips today then?’ he said and stood back to wave his arm to the guard. I saw he had a sort of look in his eye and I got a bit of a shock because just in the glance I got I thought it was a kind look—almost sort of merry—and before I could stop myself I thought of Rupert Brooke saying, ‘I must love every greasy button . . .’ But I soon stopped.
‘It’s no good loving,’ I said to the horses on the floor. ‘No good comes of loving.’ I rolled the orange round and round, first into one eye socket, then into the other. ‘Actually,’ I thought, ‘it was a bit snobbish to pick out workmen. He meant everyone—he ought to have loved everyone’s buttons. Clerks’ buttons, schoolmasters’ buttons, that old bird in the musquash coat’s buttons. If you have to remind yourself to love dirty old workmen’s buttons, then you don’t really.’ I wondered about the types of buttons that Dickens and poor old Thomas Hardy loved. Or maybe they didn’t.
The train stopped now and then and a few people got in and out. Some of them gave me looks. One of them said, ‘Orter be int van, yon,’ and pointed at the picture (I’d got it on the opposite seat now). Another man—a soldier—sat and looked at it for a bit. He joggled back and forward just looking at it. I looked at it too, rolling and rolling the orange, watching them, the horsemen, pacing around on the bright pink grass. (It’s grass, not sand, and blowing about.) ‘What’s it meant to be when it’s at ’ome?’ the workman asked, and another man in overalls said, ‘It’s that Picasso, likely,’ and they both laughed and looked at me, but I didn’t say anything.
I’d really got into a very funny mood by this time and when we got to Cleveland Sands station—my station—I surprised myself by not getting out. I just sat on. I felt all kinds of things watching me—God, I suppose, and my conscience and everything, and I just said, as if it were Miss LeBouche, ‘I’m not going home. I don’t want to.’
‘Where are you going?’ asked God, puzzled. Quite nice.
‘I don’t know.’
‘All right,’ He said.
‘I’m going to Dunedin Street,’ I said. ‘I’m taking the picture to those people.’
I felt better at once. I realized suddenly how much I longed to see them. ‘Well I never!’ she’d say, and put up her hands in the air. ‘Well look who’s here,’ and she’d begin laughing. ‘Come over, lass, come ’ere.’ She would really want to see me that woman, and Ern and the old man. In fact I couldn’t think why I’d only just thought of it.