WELL, that had been at noon. When he’d recovered a little, he’d turned to me with a sort of shaky, fumbling anger and told me to clear out of his house, that I was no better than a street-woman; and I’d been glad, because I couldn’t have stood it if he’d turned round and been sympathetic and helpful.
Walking back now to the house in Fulham, I let myself wonder why I’d instinctively chosen an ugly, degraded district in which to find myself a room. There was the practical aspect of cheapness; I’d never been any good at saving money and the need to do so now was acute. But there was something more to it than that. In some obscure way I wanted to punish myself, I wanted to put myself in the setting that seemed proper to my situation. It was odd that I wouldn’t have felt the backstreets of Fulham to be the most fitting place for me before what had happened in Father’s office.
It was raining properly now, with a spiteful drubbing persistence. My hair clung to my head and the water ran down my sleeves and hands and made little puddles in the pockets of my trenchcoat, transforming the dust there to a consistency like the sediment at the bottom of a bottle of cheap wine. A bottle of cheap wine suddenly seemed like a good idea. Half-way back along the sloppy grey streets I turned into an off-licence and bought some port-type, that sickly, syrupy muck that you can get three bottles of and have change from a pound. I’m no connoisseur of wines, but I know what’s bad. I chose this not only because it was cheap but because I could get an effect from it without enjoying it. The way I was feeling, it would be quite dangerous to buy liquor I might enjoy drinking.
It was nearly dark when I reached the house. I let myself in and felt my way along the passage, bumping my hip against the hall table as I groped for the banister. I swore viciously at the table; I swore again as I tripped over the bottom step of the staircase.
‘Why not switch on the light, instead of using words which have no possible application to a static object?’
‘I didn’t know there was a light,’ I said sullenly.
It came on. It wasn’t much of a light, a 40-watt bulb dangling nakedly from the hall ceiling, but it was enough to show me the table, the stairs and the man who’d spoken to me.
He was small and dark and thin like a fledgling blackbird. He had maroon-coloured shadows round his eyes and didn’t look very clean.
‘The switch is just here, inside the door,’ he said. ‘You have to run like hell to the next landing before it goes out.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, turning to go.
He followed me up and showed me where the next switch was.
I thanked him again, rather shortly. I wasn’t sure whether the faint sour smell was the house or him.
‘Where’s your billet?’
‘Right at the top.’
‘Front or back?’
‘Front.’
‘Oh. Oh of course, it would be. I’ve never been in there.’ He was lounging against the wall at the first landing, one foot on the next flight of stairs. ‘Know who had it before you?’
‘No.’ I didn’t care either, and didn’t pretend to, but that didn’t stop him.
‘An old girl called Mrs Williams. Decayed gentry. Well, no, not gentry really, sort of next drawer down. Originally. Needless to say she wasn’t even bottom drawer when she was here – she’d fallen through the whole lot on to the floor, poor old duck. None of us ever quite knew what she was living on, I mean for food and so on – she never paid any rent. I gathered she’d done something for Doris once, so she had that room as a sort of grace-and-favour.’
‘Who’s Doris? The landlady?’
‘She’s no lady, ma’am, land or otherwise.’ I noticed he’d dropped his voice. ‘I don’t know what it was she owed Mrs W., she must have bailed her out of jail or something once, because I can’t imagine anything else that would make her waive the –’
There was a faint pop, and the light went out, plunging us into irritating blackness. Immediately the sour smell seemed stronger. It was partly stale cooking, I realized, as well as mustiness and dirt. I didn’t think it could be coming from the young man, after all.
He pressed the switch again and reappeared. ‘Look, can I come and look at that room? I’ve often wondered what it was like – the old girl used to behave as if it was full of heads she’d shrunk.’
‘It’s just an ordinary room.’ I started up the next flight, pushing past him. He followed, taking what I’d intended to be a refusal as an invitation. I felt uneasy but too tired to do anything about it.
‘My name’s Toby Coleman,’ he said. I privately thought it was probably Cohen and chalked it up against him that he should have changed it. I felt annoyed at this intrusion. I didn’t want to meet or get on any sort of friendly footing with any of the other people in the house. I wanted to bury myself in this alien world; I’d chosen it with the vague idea that here nobody would bother me or interfere with me; coming from such a different life I had had some dim snobbish feeling that I and the other inhabitants of this house would scarcely speak the same language, and that they would all remain unknown to me except as closed doors to pass, or occasional footsteps or voices through walls, or names on envelopes on the hall table. I hadn’t thought of them in terms of faces and curious eyes and minds beset by their own problems and driven by the inane need to communicate.
We climbed to the top. It was only the third time I’d done the climb, and the first time I’d stopped to think how it would be to do it six months from now. We were both panting as I unlocked the scabrous door and switched on another 40-watt dangling bulb.
I hadn’t seen the room at night before. It was infinitely depressing. The bulb threw a mean, chilly light on the shoddy, shabby furniture and by its plentiful shadows increased the day-time impression of dirty walls and dark, unloved corners.
Toby Coleman went ahead of me and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking round. ‘Gawd,’ he said, ‘it’s bloody well worse than mine.’
This was exactly what I’d wanted to avoid, though I didn’t realize it clearly until then. It was all right so long as nobody else saw it, or saw me in it. As soon as this damn boy walked into it and started passing opinions, I felt instantly ashamed, and to my fury I heard myself saying defensively:
‘Well, I only moved in two hours ago. I haven’t fixed it up yet.’ I had had no intention of fixing it up; I remembered how I’d even decided not to bother cleaning the window. I glared at Toby angrily, but he was impervious.
‘Well, I don’t know what even the Editor of Homes and Gardens could make of a dump like this, but jolly good luck to you. I say, is that a bottle of wine? You couldn’t spare a glass, could you? I’ll pay you back. I haven’t even any coffee left and it’s too damn’ wet to go out.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘don’t think me rude or anything, but I want to be by myself.’
‘Oh hell, do you?’ He sounded genuinely disappointed. ‘What, the whole evening? Couldn’t I come back later?’
‘Is it the drink you want, or just company?’
‘Well, neither really. Or you could say both. You see, I write. I mean, I’m a writer. Have you ever tried to write? It’s the most bloody business. Any excuse is good enough to get away from the typewriter.’ He settled down with a look of cosy permanence in the arm-chair. ‘Did you ever hear the story about the man who was commissioned to do a piece for the Saturday Evening Post? I don’t know why it was the S.E.P. except that they pay so well, and this chap was as broke as the rest of us. Well, he needed the money, he wanted to do the piece, he had a deadline to meet, but he kept putting it off. Any excuse not to get started. He missed two deadlines, and the third and last was set for 1 January. On the last night of December the Editor rang him up and said was it ready? No, not quite, said this character, he was just going to start it but first he had to clean his tennis shoes.’ He stared at me solemnly. ‘My God, I understand that bloke! If I had any tennis shoes, I’d probably be cleaning them this minute instead of talking to you when you obviously wish me in hell.’
He picked up the bottle and looked at the light through it. His face was very thin and quite plain, with its big, beaky nose and starveling eyes, but it was an interesting face. I found myself studying it against my will.
‘If you won’t share your wine with me, which you’ve every right not to do of course, do you know what I’ll do? I shall go down to my room and sit at my table for five minutes, getting maybe three sentences typed before convincing myself that my need for coffee is strong enough to drive me out into the rain. That’ll take half an hour and on the way back I’ll detour past a cinema which will be showing some piece of rubbish that I’ve no real wish to see, but I’ll tell myself that I’ve got to study every market, and in I’ll go. On the way home I’ll have such a dry throat from guilt at wasting the evening that I’ll nip into a pub for a beer. Then when I get chucked out of there it’ll be after eleven, and Doris won’t let me type beyond half past so it won’t be worth starting …’ He smiled at me with his head on one side. It was a funny, wry smile. ‘That’s actually how I make my living. So now you don’t have to ask me why I’m living in this bug-house, you should pardon the expression. It doesn’t explain why you are.’
I felt myself growing angrier and angrier while he was talking. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to listen. I knew very well if he went on talking like that much longer I should get interested in him, I might even get to like him, with his funny alert face and absurd, useless fund of self-knowledge. He wasn’t even the sort of person you could enjoy being rude to. But, I thought, if I’m thoroughly unfriendly and unpleasant right from the start, not only to him but to any of the others who might try to turn themselves from anonymities into individuals for my benefit, then they’ll leave me alone and I can start being whatever this business is going to turn me into.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said curtly. ‘It’s none of your affair why I’ve come here, and it’s none of mine what you do with your time. So long as you don’t use it to waste mine.’ It’s funny how, when you really want to say something bitchy and cutting to someone who’s been bitchy to you, you can’t think of anything till afterwards. When there’s no real call for it, you come suddenly out with a piece of 9-carat bitchery that shakes even you.
He looked at me for a minute and his eyebrows went up. Then he remarked, in his very nice cultured accent, ‘Okay, bugger you mate,’ but without any particular malice, and went out, leaving the door open. I could hear him thudding down the stairs and a door closed on the landing below.
I was left in the solitude I’d so pointedly asked for, in the middle of the room that I had no intention of fixing up.
I closed the door and stood with my back to it, looking. Now that other eyes had seen it and identified it as mine, I couldn’t regard the room with the same calculated indifference as before, when I’d deliberately refused to notice any of its squalor or inconveniences. There were two rooms under the sloping roof, which had once been one biggish square one. It had been divided by the simple process of putting up two partitional walls set at right-angles. This resulted in a small square room and a small L-shaped room along two sides of it, which was mine. The square room which had been stolen, as it were, from the main area, had a little window up near the ceiling in the short partition. The partitions didn’t look very thick. I leaned over and knocked on the nearest one, to test it, and immediately someone on the other side knocked back.
I snatched my knuckles away as if the wall had been red hot. But I’d found out what I wanted to know. The partitions were somewhat thicker than ordinary hardboard.
Feeling my sense of security dwindling, I instinctively bolted my door. Then I continued my examination.
I couldn’t see the whole room from where I stood at the end of the short arm of the L. This was as narrow as a corridor. One wall – the partition – was bare; along the other ran some rudimentary cooking facilities, consisting of a wash-basin-cum-sink with a tin draining-board and a small cupboard with a top just large enough to hold a gas-stove, about a foot square, with a grill and two small elements. Under the window, with its dirty-looking brown curtains, was a small kitchen table scarred with ancient cigarette burns.
Moving to the elbow of the room, I considered the longer, wider arm of the L. It contained a camp bed covered with the remains of a wartime afghan, made up of lopsided squares, ill-knitted from scraps of clashing wool and full of dropped stitches; there was the chest of drawers, leaning drunkenly over its missing leg; a kitchen chair and an arm-chair with the thin brown cloth of its seat rent by the hernial pressure of escaping springs and the arms worn shiny by many grimy hands. There was also a small gas-fire beneath the mantelpiece, on which stood a pair of hideous plaster Alsatians standing guard each side of an embroidered picture of a crinoline lady in a cottage garden. The walls were covered with the regulation nicotine-coloured paper splashed with dead flowers, peeling in many places. The floor was lino’d; it looked as if it had had football played on it in cleated boots. There was a Hallowe’en coloured rag rug in front of the fire. Lying on this was a metal ashtray, which had evidently slipped off the chest of drawers. I picked it up. It had CINZANO printed across it in patriotic colours. I looked round for a waste-paper basket to throw it into, but of course there wasn’t one.
I put it between the grinning Alsatians, and turned my back to them to survey the room from the opposite direction. The outlook was equally uninspiring. From here I could see the miniature stove head-on; its rusty gas-taps snarled at me like bared teeth. In a small fly-spotted mirror over the sink I could see my own face; not a pretty sight at present.
I felt a wave of depression swell round me suffocatingly, and hastily tore the paper off the bottle of port-type. I tried to open the drawer in the table, which I supposed held cutlery and other utensils including a corkscrew; it stuck, and I was cursing freely by the time it jerked open. Inside were two bent forks, a tin-handled table knife and a bread knife, one ordinary spoon and two teaspoons almost black with age and egg, a fish-slice with a burnt handle, and one of those cutters that enables you to make wavy chips. That appeared at first to be all, though later I did find two knitting-needles of different gauges, a rusty skewer, two corks and an empty thermometer case right at the back.
I wanted a drink so badly that I was quite prepared to rush downstairs to Doris and demand a corkscrew, with menaces. Then I stopped to consider that there were probably other, more important battles to be fought over more essential items Doris would prove not to have provided; a cursory glance into the china cupboard revealed a very sparse and motley collection. In the meantime I had the wine but not the means to get at it, which seemed an intolerable situation.
I sat down on the bed, which, like all its kind, had a hard wooden rim backed up by a deep sag. I would have to borrow a corkscrew from someone, and the only possible person would be Toby. It seemed very humiliating, but there it was.
Just as I was wondering if I could possibly face it, the knocking which had answered mine on the partition started again. I sat frozen, staring at the wall, half-expecting someone to burst through it like a circus lion through a paper hoop. There were three knocks, then an expectant pause, then three more knocks. I didn’t move. After a moment, the knocks were repeated, but this time on the other wall of the partition.
Drawn irresistibly, I moved round the angle. I felt a shiver of nervousness as the clear, hollow sound emphasized the thinness of the barrier. Suddenly the knocking changed. It was on glass this time, near the ceiling. I looked up and saw, in the little window, a huge black face.
I gasped with fright and ran back round the angle again where I couldn’t be seen. I felt my heart slamming and caught sight of my own face in the mirror, as deathly white as the other had been black. I blundered about for a few seconds in a blind panic, then my knees buckled and I flopped on to the cold lino by the bed with a thump. I caught up handfuls of the friendly afghan and hung on to them with my eyes screwed shut.
After a little while I opened them and listened. Apart from my heart, which was still making a distinctly audible noise, there had been no more knocking; I took a deep breath and forced myself to relax. After all, why in God’s name should a black face be more alarming than a white one? So, I was next door to a negro. I should have expected something like that from what the old newsagent had said. I didn’t know what atavistic terror had caused me to behave so stupidly; I felt very silly, crouched there on my knees, and I told myself to get up and stop being an idiot. At that moment there was a knock on the door.
Once again I froze into paralysed stillness. Then I forced myself to call out ‘Who’s that?’ My voice was a croak, and I held the afghan like a talisman.
‘It’s me, Toby.’
I scrambled to my feet and went to the door unsteadily, edging along the wall beneath the little window. I slipped back the bolt and let Toby in, bolting it again after him.
‘What’s the idea of that? Frightened of burglars? They’d never make it up all those stairs.’
Ignoring this, I said, ‘What made you come up?’
‘I thought I heard you knock on the floor.’
I remembered the thump my knees made as I fell on them, and shook my head. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Sorry, I thought you wanted something.’ He started to go.
‘As a matter of fact, I did, I mean I do,’ I said, and found I’d caught hold of his arm to stop him leaving. ‘I haven’t got a cork-screw,’ I finished lamely.
He grinned. ‘Doris’s methods of distribution are a bit eccentric,’ he said. ‘I’ve got three. I’ll give you one. You haven’t by any chance been given two bread knives? No? I just wondered. I’ll pop down and get the corkscrew. Be right back.’ He hurried away, leaving the door open. I quickly closed it and stood against it until I heard Toby returning.
He opened the bottle while I looked for glasses. I found one big tumbler with ‘Stella Artois’ across it in gold, and a bakelite tooth-mug. Both looked filthy and I tried to turn on the Ascot to wash them in hot water, but although the pilot was alight nothing further happened when I turned on the tap.
‘It’s the diaphragm, I expect,’ Toby said philosophically. ‘Perished. Mine’s been like that for weeks. I keep meaning to ask Doris about it – not that she’d do anything. You’re lucky to have running water at all, Mavis hasn’t.’
The words Who’s Mavis trembled on my tongue and were forced back.
‘I haven’t found a kettle yet,’ I said instead.
‘That seems odd, even for Doris; she’s a tea-maniac. Oh wait a minute. I remember she burnt the bottom out of hers recently – she probably pinched the one from here to replace it rather than shell out for a new one. She’s a mean old cow,’ he added without rancour.
‘What would happen if I asked her for one?’
‘Bugger-all, I should think, judging by my own results. Since I got here I’ve had to buy –’ ticking them off on his fingers – ‘cup and saucer, hers being so cracked they fell to pieces, a dish-towel, a coffee-pot, a cruet (I pinched that from the ABC actually), a shaving mirror and God knows what else. Oh, and sheets, of course, the old hag doesn’t supply those.’ Before this had had time to register he went on: ‘All that, apart from basic things like new lightbulbs so you won’t go blind, and a few quarts of disinfectant. Have you looked at your bed yet? For your sake I hope it’s better than mine was. I’m not too fussy, you get over that in the army, but bugs I don’t care for.’ I was sitting on the bed with my glass in my hand; I stood up sharply and started to withdraw the afghan, but he stopped me.
‘No, no. Not now. Drink first, it’s better that way, believe me.’ He made me sit in the chocolate arm-chair; the springs weren’t as uncomfortable as they looked. Toby sat on the floor. ‘Mind if I light the gas? It’s a bit more cheerful with it on, though if it’s anything like mine half the elements will be defective –’ He patted his pockets absently. ‘Got any matches?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘What, none at all?’ With sudden suspicion, he added, ‘Don’t you smoke?’
‘No,’ I said again.
‘Oh hell,’ he said dejectedly. ‘I was counting on you for a cigarette. I’m completely skint. I’ll have to try John.’ He finished his glass of wine in three enormous swallows, and then bounced to his feet and disappeared round the corner. After a moment, I heard his voice through the partition, and a deeper one answering him. He came back almost at once with a box of matches and two cigarettes loose in his hand.
‘Good old John, he never fails me,’ he said contentedly, settling down again. I watched while he twisted the tap and heard the faint hiss of gas trickling out of the pipes. Toby applied a match, but all that happened was that five small blue bubbles appeared at the base of the elements. ‘Out of juice,’ he said. I got my wallet out of my mac and found three pennies in it. At last we got the fire going.
‘Not bad – better than mine,’ was Toby’s comment when we found that only one element was broken. He lit a cigarette and drew on it with relish.
I swallowed a mouthful of wine and then pointed to the partition. ‘Who lives in there?’ I asked casually.
‘That’s John,’ he said, as if that told me everything.
‘Yes, I know, but he’s – what’s he like?’
‘Good bloke.’ He dragged at his cigarette again and added with a grin, ‘A very good bloke.’
‘He was knocking on my wall before you came up.’
‘Well, it’s his wall too,’ he said reasonably.
‘Yes, but what was he knocking for?’
‘I don’t know. Why not ask him?’
‘He was peering in through the window.’ I was keeping my voice very low, but Toby kept his at a normal level.
‘Probably wanted to see what you looked like.’
‘It gave me a hell of a fright.’
‘Why? Oh, I see what you mean!’ He threw back his head and laughed heartily. ‘Hearing knocks, then looking up and seeing those white eyes rolling at you …’
‘It wasn’t the white eyes so much as the black face round them.’
‘You mustn’t mind old John. He’s just naturally inquisitive. Like a chimp, you know, he can’t help it. He could no more resist having a look at you than a monkey could resist picking up anything new and giving it the once-over.’
‘Yes, and then when he’s picked it up he’ll probably try to eat it.’
Toby laughed again. He had a very infectious laugh. My own mouth started twitching a bit. It was an unfamiliar feeling, after a whole week, the feeling of a laugh starting.
‘You’ve got him all wrong. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, old John. He’s got those great brutal-looking hands that you’d think could snap your backbone like a twig, and then when he shakes hands with you and you feel them, damn me, they’re like a baby’s bottom. And you see him handling anything delicate – well, like an egg, for instance. He’s a first-class cook, old John, you must get him to make you an omelette one day, and just watch him break those eggs. He takes them between his finger and thumb – massive bloody great thumb just about as big as the egg – and the other fingers spread themselves out like a duchess holding a Dresden teacup and he just taps the egg against the edge of the bowl, so lightly you can hardly hear it; then he lifts the two halves apart – I tell you, it may not sound like much, but it’s bloody marvellous.’ He shook his head wonderingly, grinning to himself. ‘He does needlework too,’ he added as an afterthought.
‘I don’t believe you!’
‘So help me!’ He swivelled round on the floor excitedly, as if to try and convince me, and then suddenly changed his mind and raised his voice. ‘Hey, John!’ he shouted.
Instinctively I made a gesture to silence him, but from next door came a prompt, baying shout of reply.
‘Isn’t that right, you do needlework?’ Toby yelled.
‘That’s right boy!’
‘You see?’ said Toby to me in his ordinary voice, and craned backwards to get the wine bottle. ‘My God, this is filthy stuff! What do you drink this for?’ He poured another glass each for us. It didn’t seem so bad to me; I thought it was going down rather nicely.
I said, ‘Look, you don’t have to drink it.’
‘Oh, it won’t kill me,’ he said tolerantly, topping up. ‘It’s a bit sticky, that’s all. I like a dry wine, myself. Preferably with a thick steak. A bloke once told me, an old Frenchman actually, that what you should do is get a hunk of underdone steak in your mouth, then pour in some wine and sort of suck it through the meat. It gets mixed up with the blood, he said; it’s supposed to improve it somehow. All that happens when I try it is that I make disgusting noises and suck half the steak down my windpipe.’
‘Maybe it was a Gallic joke.’
‘Could be; I’ve never been sure. Another tip he gave me that never works is to fill the bottom of your mouth with a kind of lake of wine and bring your tongue smacking down on it like a beaver’s tail, so that wine squirts between your teeth. You can imagine what happens when I try that.’ He drank ruminatively. ‘The nose-trick. Are you some kind of an artist?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘I can see you’re revelling in your mystery-woman act. Never mind; I’ll prise it out of you eventually.’ He sighed heavily. ‘I suppose I ought to get back to work. As a matter of fact I’d just begun to get steam up when I heard your knock. Now it’ll take me hours to get into it again.’ He looked at me aggrievedly as if it were all my fault.
I was on the point of asking him about his writing, but then I remembered my determination not to get interested. He was squatting on his heels, bouncing gently and staring at me. ‘You’re quite pretty, aren’t you,’ he said at length. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Jane,’ I said.
‘That’s funny. One of the tarts is called Jane.’
Two tarts in one house called Jane, I thought.
‘The other one’s called Sonia. She’s Czech or something. Did Doris tell you about them?’
‘She mentioned them.’
‘Must say that for old Doris. She’s nice and frank about things like that. I mean, if I were a landlady, I’d boast about having artists and musicians in my house and keep quiet about the tarts. Wouldn’t you? But actually, you know, in some crazy way I think Doris is rather proud of having them here. Shows what a great big all-embracing tolerance she’s got. Not that we ever see them, or practically never. They’ve got a separate entrance.’
‘How do you know their names then?’
‘Men ring up for them on the party phone, and we have to buzz them. And then of course one listens to their conversations. At least I do, and I expect everyone else does.’
‘How do you justify that?’
‘Hell, I don’t try to justify it! I just couldn’t possibly stop myself. I can barely stop myself reading other people’s letters. It’s an occupational disease. Of writers. Curiosity, I mean. Will you be having any intriguing phone calls?’
‘I’ll take good care not to.’
‘Look out, you’re smiling,’ he said suddenly.
He continued to bounce and stare for a moment, then with an extra vigorous bounce stood upright.
‘Thanks for the excuse,’ he said. ‘I’m being terribly strong-minded, leaving now and not waiting to be thrown out.’ He crushed out his cigarette in the Cinzano ashtray and drained the last of his wine. ‘You must come and visit my room sometime. Don’t worry, no etchings. No nothing very much. Still, what’s mine is yours, and don’t get too grateful till you see what it amounts to. Well, good night. Don’t drink too much more of that, it’s pretty vomit-making, especially on an empty stomach. Whee –’ He lurched down the room in a parody of drunkenness, swinging on the angle as if it were a lamp-post, and left me alone.
I picked up the bottle. His advice was kindly meant, I expect, but unnecessary, as it was empty. I was a little startled to realize we’d put away a whole bottle in what seemed like a few minutes. I thought Toby must have had the lion’s share, because apart from a rather tight feeling across my forehead I felt perfectly normal.
I sat on in the arm-chair, thinking about John breaking eggs with gestures like a conductor, and giggled a little. I wished I had something to eat, but it didn’t seem very important. Then, idly, I began thinking that there must be something I could do to make the room look a bit better.
The first thing to get would be another lamp; a table lamp would do, with a long flex and a 100-watt bulb. I began to examine the skirting-board for a plug, and when I found one beside the crockery cupboard my spirits gave a little lift. I’d get two 100-watt bulbs while I was at it, and put one in overhead. Even if the dirt and flaws did show up more under a brighter light, it would be less depressing than this, and anyway, some of the dirt I could remove. I gave a tentative tug to a raw edge of the offensive wallpaper and felt how easy it would be to rip it all off. Underneath was firm white plaster which would gratefully accept a coat of some light-coloured emulsion paint – pale green, perhaps. All the walls at home were pale green; it was Father’s favourite colour. Against my will I heard Father’s shaky voice again, telling me to go; as clearly as if he’d been with me now, I knew that he was already regretting it. For no apparent reason I remembered a photograph of him in his first-war sergeant’s uniform …
No, well, not pale green, then. I passed rather quickly on to the pock-marked floor. How much would it cost to put down some of that cheap matting stuff? It couldn’t be much, the area was so small. I looked again at the arm-chair, with its greasy chocolate-coloured cover. I wasn’t much good at sewing, but with a generous remnant of cretonne I could probably manage something … I couldn’t make it look worse, that was one sure thing. And curtains – hell, any fool could make those. Perhaps John would help! I found myself giggling.
I still had my key from home. Father couldn’t object to my going back while he was out and picking up some of my things. My French print, that’d go well over the mantelpiece; some books; my bits of green glass from Majorca with which to replace the foredoomed Alsatians. I might even pinch that white mesh firescreen with the plant-stands, to mask the gas-meter? Father never liked it. Get some pots of ivy to trail round, disguising things …
I began to feel elated. Already I could see the room as it would be when I’d finished with it. It needed me. My transformation of it would be a work of creation, like making a garden. I began to sing, and then to dance. My head was light. I felt wonderfully alive and capable, as I had felt on the train coming home that time, with fifteen hard-earned pounds in my pocket. ‘I can do anything! I can do anything!’ I fitted the exultant words to my tune.
The bright colours of the afghan kept spinning past me as I whirled round and round. No, I thought suddenly, whatever I changed, the afghan I would keep. It was a friend; vivid, tattered, rakish, with its torn black wool fringe, I loved it! I would keep it forever and have it buried with me. As I danced past, I snatched a corner of it, meaning to wrap it round me as a bizarre cloak. Then I stopped.
The pillow on the bed had no cover except its own soiled mattress-ticking and there were no sheets, only a pair of dingy grey army blankets. The mattress was also soiled. As I lifted the blankets aside to look closer, something moved.
When the blackness cleared I was leaning against the partition wall, fighting back an ocean of dismay. My excitement of a moment earlier had disappeared like a pricked bubble. I stood looking at the room, not as it could be, but as it was, feeling the beginnings of a horrible sick lonely fear. Suddenly I was in the middle of a nightmare – the more so because I couldn’t remember what the point of my being here was. Where was my own room at home, and safety, and familiarity, and where was my father? I began to cry like a baby, blubberingly. Why had I run away, and if I had to run, if I had to be alone, why hadn’t I found myself somewhere bright and clean to live? I remembered it had had something to do with pride, but that seemed crazy. Surely if one had one’s self-respect to keep up, one needed light and sheets and hot water … This place was horrible, a pigsty – what had Toby called it? A bug-house. I was living – I’d chosen, of my own free will – to come and live in a bug-house. There was a black man watching me and things crawling in my bed. And it was too late to back out, too late to change my mind. There was something at the bottom of it all, some prime cause, some terror I couldn’t even bring myself to remember. I only knew that somehow I was irretrievably, inescapably trapped.
I slipped down on to the floor in front of the fire and lay there sobbing, the afghan cradled in my arms for consolation, like a child’s teddy-bear.