IT took me all of two more weeks to get the hang of the typewriter, a foot-high erection of jangling steel with a temperament behind every lever, and to sort the letters which made up the book into some sort of order. Addy herself grew infuriated, saying she’d had no idea they were in such a muddle, she’d just written them at odd times and stuffed them into the folder, never seriously intending to ‘do’ anything with them. ‘If ever a work of art was untainted by considerations of commerce, it’s this one,’ she said grimly, as we knelt on the floor together with the innumerable sheets of paper spread out round us like the sea round a pair of islands. The pages ranged from foolscap sheets to perforated scraps torn off a small shopping-pad; most of the writing had been done with a blunt pencil. It was fatal to let Addy start re-reading any of it, because she immediately started making extensive corrections. ‘That was all right as long as it was just for me, but if other people are going to see it …’ I teased her and said real artists were only concerned with the impossible task of satisfying themselves. ‘What bosh,’ said Addy contemptuously. ‘I’m easy to please. I think every word I write is inspired. But I don’t expect others to regard it with my biased eye.’
At last I was ready to start the fair copy, and Addy went off in the car and returned with reams of quarto and boxes of carbon, rubbers, rubber thimbles, and a box containing a fascinating lump of something like plasticine for cleaning the typewriter keys. (It wasn’t much good for cleaning anything when we got finished playing with it.) Then she established me at a large table with everything neatly arranged within reach, and left me to it.
But not for long. She couldn’t keep away. She kept making excuses to come into the room and would edge her way over to me and stand, breathing heavily, mesmerized by the sight of her hectic scribble being translated into beautiful clean print on the uniform white sheets. As soon as one was free of the machine, she would pounce on it and set about ravishing its virgin perfection – slashing great lines through it, writing inserts in the margin and indicating their intended positions with balloons and arrows and crosses. As I retyped it, she would suddenly twitch and gag behind me as she saw something else that needed changing.
After a week of this I had typed a total of fifty-two pages. Forty-one of them were waiting to be retyped, twelve for the second time, eighteen for the third.
‘Darling,’ I said at last, ‘whether you’re paying me by the hour or by the page, you’ll be broke very soon if I don’t take the whole issue out from under your thieving hands. Let me go home and do you a fair copy and send it to you, and then you can make ALL your alterations at once.’
With the greatest reluctance, she agreed. ‘It’s like sending your only child away to boarding-school,’ she said fretfully as she drove me to London. I smiled secretly. I knew she didn’t mean me. I think she had almost completely forgotten, during the past three weeks, that there was a bona fide child involved in any of this.
But I hadn’t.
Prior to Addy’s remark about the likelihood of its being a boy, I hadn’t cared, one way or the other; now I wanted a son. This was irrational, since obviously I was more nearly capable of rearing a girl by myself than a boy – I knew almost nothing about little boys except that their need of a father was imperative if they were not to grow into Oedipus-riddled weaklings or even outright homosexuals. I had also heard that if you allowed yourself to think of your unborn child as positively one sex, and then it turned out to be the other, the pre-natal influence of your wrong conviction had a most undesirable effect – you found yourself landed with an effeminate boy or a brawny hairy girl, thoroughly unbalanced and with every right to blame you.
In any case, I was rapidly reaching the stage when I suspected that every passing thought about the baby could have a positive and permanent effect on it for good or ill – as if it had been made of very soft clay and each thought was a fingerprint. I endeavoured to think only beautiful but strictly neuter thoughts, but this was difficult, since I was considering it more and more as a potential human being, and almost all humans are so unmistakably one sex or the other. It was relatively easy to think about a neuter baby, but almost impossible to envisage a neuter child or a neuter adolescent. So eventually I evolved a system where, to be fair, I followed each boy-fantasy scrupulously with a girl-fantasy. Only as the boy-fantasies invariably came first, the girl-fantasies were always faint and unconvincing repetitions, to be raced through like homework in order to return to the ever-strengthening image of a boy.
The house looked, and smelt, just as usual. Addy sniffed ostentatiously as I let us in. ‘I smell bugs,’ she said.
‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘though I’m surprised you know what bugs smell like.’
‘I was a nurse in the fourteen-eighteen war,’ she said succinctly.
The house was very quiet. It was the middle of a week-day – but even allowing for that, it was very quiet. We toiled up with my things from the car. The L-shaped room had an air of damp neglect, and (as it were) hardly looked up when I came in.
‘There’s a funny smell in here, too,’ said Addy.
I sniffed. It was a faint staleness; vaguely familiar; I couldn’t identify it. ‘Just being empty,’ I suggested, hurrying to light the gas and open the window.
‘That’s unlucky,’ said Addy, pointing to the Christmas tree, a pathetic little object bedecked like a corpse at a mortician’s. Underneath it on the table was Toby’s present, the paper and carbons. They were almost buried under a layer of pine-needles. The sight sent a cold pang through me. I’d been, for five weeks, an escaper to another world; now, faced with the tree he’d helped me to buy, the memory of the Christmas that had gone so bleakly wrong came back as clearly as one remembers last night’s painful experience on waking from a deep, exhausted sleep.
Addy was watching me closely. ‘Perhaps I was wrong to bring you back here,’ she said. ‘You look funny. Are you going to be all right?’
‘Yes, I think so,’ I said. ‘I’ve got something to do now.’ I spread an old newspaper on the floor and lifted the dead tree, with all its trimmings, on to it.
‘Oh, save the decorations for next year!’ Addy said.
I shook my head. Separating the tree from Fred’s pot, I carried the sad remains down and out to the dustbin in the front. Addy came with me, and handed me the manuscript through the window of the Galloping Maggot.
‘Take care of your little self,’ she said, fixing her young blue eyes on me. The ‘little’ touched me; sentiment was unusual from her. I blinked and nodded. Our eyes stayed locked for a long moment, hers stern and tender at the same time. Then she let in the clutch and the car bounded forward.
‘Thank you for everything!’ I suddenly remembered to shout after her. Her hand appeared through the window and made a rude gesture to my thanks. The car turned a corner and I had a quick glimpse of her stern profile, her gay white hair blowing. Then she was gone.
Now it was she who seemed unreal, she and the cottage and the last five weeks. But the manuscript was left; it gave me an incredulous feeling, like a solid trophy brought back from a dream.
I went slowly upstairs again. This time I let myself stop outside Toby’s door. I stood on the landing, thinking how we had met there when I came out of hospital. My heart was beating painfully. He will always be important to me, I thought with sudden doomed certainty.
I knocked. There was no answer; I hadn’t expected one. It was too quiet. I tried the door – it was locked. That gave me an uneasy jolt. Toby never locked his door. He always said there was nothing to steal except Minnie, his old typewriter, and he added that if anyone stole her he would personally murder the thief.
I went up the last flight to my own floor. The silence began to seem slightly uncanny. I tried John’s door; he was nearly always in at this time of day, but he wasn’t in now. As I opened the door, a stench came out and hit me in the face. It was the mother and father of the faint smell in my room, and was compounded of stale air, unwashed linen, John’s own personal smell – and, to my surprise, rum.
Uneasily I closed the door and went into my own room. It had perked up slightly already. I set myself to work, washing curtains, dusting and cleaning. It was much later that I made a tour of the house and found that, though it was now after eight o’clock at night, it was still quite empty.
And it stayed empty.
Actually I expect Jane and Sonia were in the basement, but somehow this didn’t count. The house was hollow and silent beneath me. I’d never been the nervy type who minds the dark or being alone in an empty house. Perhaps because I’d never been alone in an empty house for any length of time.
During the days it was all right. I worked on Addy’s book, and went to the doctor’s, or shopping. I ate out sometimes. Often I went to Frank’s for coffee and toast. Every time I’d been out I hurried back hoping to find lights on and the house full of the small comfortable sounds of inhabitance. I wouldn’t let myself admit, at first, how much I dreaded the dark crouching quiet of the night.
It seemed to get worse, not better, as the days passed. I felt a sense of unreality, as if I had been left alone in a condemned house. Where were Mavis and Doris? Where on earth was John? – and Toby? Were they all dead? Had the house been sold? Ludicrous things comforted or upset me. It was a disproportionate relief to find the pilot light in the bathroom Ascot still burning. It gave me a feeling of shivery disquiet to see the piles of ‘3d. Off – Buy Now’ throw-aways mounting on the door-mat. Doris had always pounced on these, and never let them filter through to anyone else.
At night I lay in bed and found it increasingly hard to sleep. The weather was freezing, and the cold seemed to permeate the corpse-like house. It was only by burning my gas-fire nearly all the time that I maintained my little beach-head of living warmth against the encroaching rigor mortis that I imagined was gripping the house.
My imagination was working overtime. All the womanish terrors which I had always felt myself to be above, came creeping over me as I lay alone. I thought of everything – prowlers, burglars, murderers, maniacs – even ghosts. I was disgusted with myself, but I couldn’t help it. I got so that I even imagined small sounds, and frightened myself half senseless by my interpretations of them.
One night about a week after my return, I imagined I heard a door close, far below. It was nearly midnight. I had been lying there since ten o’clock, fighting the urge to switch the light on. I lay absolutely still, listening. Had it been the door? I now thought I could hear more faint sounds. They seemed to get louder and nearer. Footsteps coming up the stairs … I began to sweat. I tried to get hold of myself. In the morning it would seem senseless and babyish. But now I was sure I could hear something. Traffic outside and the roaring of fear in my ears prevented my being sure until the footsteps were on the last flight.
Now it was unmistakable. It was a slow, irregular sound – a few steps up, then a pause, then a few more steps. My body was rigid in every muscle. I hadn’t bolted the door. I had no weapon. I was alone in the dark and in this neighbourhood could probably scream myself hoarse and no one would come. I don’t think I’ve ever known such physical fear. It was at its peak long before I heard the footsteps stop outside my door and someone fumbling at the handle.
I didn’t even hear my own scream as the intruder came into the room. I knew I had screamed only when a hand clutched at my mouth and a voice said urgently, ‘Don’t – don’t!’
It was the familiar smell that reached my frozen senses first, and then the softness of the hand, and then the voice. Slowly I relaxed as my fear receded, leaving me as limp as a sheet thrown over the pile-driver of my heart, nearly bursting through my ribs.
John was slumped on the floor by the bed, his hand still holding my mouth, but loosely, as if he, too, had suddenly lost all his strength. I moved it and said in a shaking voice, ‘You stupid bloody great idiot, you nearly made me die of fright!’
He grunted and shook his head.
‘Get up and turn the light on, for God’s sake.’
He obeyed, finding the light after a few moments’ blundering about. Reality and sense and comfort returned in a split Second. ‘Tomorrow,’ I said grimly, ‘I shall go out and buy some night-lights. Now will you kindly tell me what the hell’s the idea?’
He really looked worse than I felt. He was unshaven, his frizzy beard stuck to his chin like black crêpe-hair. His clothes were filthy and torn and he had what on anyone white would have been a black eye. He was shivering like a wet dog and tears were running down his cheeks.
‘I sorry,’ he began. ‘I sorry, I sorry –’
‘Okay, that’ll do,’ I interrupted hastily. ‘Never mind being sorry, just tell me where you’ve been and what’s been going on around here. And what you meant by coming in here in this state,’ I added severely. I could see he was full of rum to the gills.
He came back to my side, almost fell on to the floor again and put his head down on my knees.
‘You go away,’ he sobbed. ‘You go away Christmas Day, never say good-bye – you just go. Then later, Toby, he go too. Same as you, one time he there, next time he gone. Not say nothing, not say good-bye or comin’ back or nothing. I felt all alone with them two old women. They never like me. That Mavis, she say black men smell. I hear her. She mean me to hear. And Doris, not let me play my guitar for keep myself company. So I go to the club and I get drunk.’
He lifted his head and stared at me angrily.
‘I get so drunk I fall down. I can’t play. They sack me. I been there three years, best guitar they could have, they sack me first time I ever get drunk. I fight with boss. I hit him, then they hit me many, many. They throw me out in the gutter.’ His big hands played with the afghan and he stopped looking at me.
‘So then what?’
‘I come back here. I got nowhere else to go. In my room I get more drunk. I bust your cradle.’
‘My what?’
‘I make you baby-cradle, like I promise. It was for your Christmas present, not quite finished, but then you go away before I can give it to you.’
‘And you – broke it?’
He nodded. ‘Broke it all up. It was a good cradle, best thing I ever make.’ He started to cry again. I began to cry myself. The pain one could inflict, just by forgetting to say good-bye! I could hardly bear to think of him breaking the cradle, his big gentle hands gone savage and destructive on the thing he had made with such care and love. It nearly broke my heart to think of it.
I tried not to cry; I knew it would only make him worse. ‘But how long ago was all this?’ I asked, trying to be practical.
‘Long time, days and days. Then I hate myself and I hate you and Toby and them old women, and I got to get away. I go all sorts of places. I get drunk at night, sleep in park, or where I can. Police catch me, I spend a night in jail – everything. Get in fights. See terrible things, terrible people – bad people. Me bad too. Me rotten bad right through.’ Then he raised his head and said in a slightly less self-abusive voice, ‘Not bad like them others, though. I not go with them bad women like all them others.’
‘That’s good,’ I said. I stroked his head and he rested it on my knees again. He seemed more peaceful now and my own heart had calmed down. ‘And why did you come in here?’
‘I dunno,’ he mumbled tiredly. ‘Just want to be in your little white room. You scare me to hell when you scream. I not think you ever come back.’
We sat quietly for a long time.
‘Come on,’ I said at last, when both my legs were going to sleep. ‘Let’s have some hot coffee and I’ll bathe your eye.’