Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper Page 6
He roared with laughter and shouted: ‘Bitch,’ and reached out to the radio in time for the eight o’clock news.
He got out of bed and started his breakfast arrangements. The idea here was to cook all your own stuff, and to go out and do little bits of shopping. Sometimes he wheedled Alice to cope with it all for him, but she appeared to be busy today. The news said we had brought down a lot of ’planes, only losing a third of the quantity ourselves, and that Russia had also, and that our recent shipping losses were only a third of the enemy’s. After the news, there would be a talk on interesting ways of cooking rice, and tonight and tomorrow there would be talks by a Pole, a Slovak and a Norwegian on what they had for breakfast in their own country. While his bacon was frying, he switched over to get some music, and one way and another his breakfast hour was enlivened by Handel in the Strand, Molly on the Shore, and the news in German, which he followed more or less, thinking: ‘German’s just like English. Quite astonishing.’ And he thought: ‘Spoils one’s selective taste, all this choice of programmes, at all hours of the day and night.’ He felt in good form. There was a new mood of relief. After all, it was only fair that a fox should have a bit of peace between hunts, and be at leisure to relax from the panorama of beauty and ugliness and moods: the mood which transported to the heights, and the mood which brought you down the muddy hole to ruin. One was still a fox, a rather pleasant thing to look at, well trimmed, but really only a menace and a blot to the face of the green and yellow earth.
He sat in sudden dejection, again sorry that he was free to go on as before.
It seemed that God didn’t want him, even in this poor way.
… All over England, statelier homes and houses sat about long tables, having breakfast handed to them on silver trays.
‘Fried liver, Sir William?’
‘Why, thank you, James! I think I will, what?’
‘And the car is waiting at the door, Sir William.’
‘Thank you, James!’
The city and the hearth. The ministry and the hearth.
Home and children.
Religion, the future, grandchildren.
But in London the days began with the dreary scream of a smelly bus. The radio said:
‘Well, now, any workers who ought to be thinking about the factory, or some similar destination, I ought to remind you that it is just coming up to six minutes to eight. Meanwhile, here is Bing Crosby singing Take Me Back To My Boots And Saddle.’
Mr Bowling thought:
‘Well, I shall shove in to the new flat and chance it. I must have a bit of a think.’
He was sitting sadly in his red dressing gown when Alice knocked and came in with a large plate of bacon and two whole eggs, some toast, real butter and a spot of real marmalade. Her shiny face beamed at him.
He was halfway through his breakfast, but he smiled politely at her for her kindness, and winked when she said on no account to tell Miss Brown, and finally he pretended he was still frightfully hungry, and allowed her to set the dish down before him. When she stooped, she made rather a daring business of kissing him on the bald bit on his head.
One day in the hall he had made the fatal error of giving her a kiss, he’d been in a jubilant mood about something or other, some trifle, and she was a dear old thing. But it had been a fatal error of judgment and appeared to have unloosed the last bonds of love which bound her in her fading age.
She liked to hover now, in a portly, starchy and speechless manner, red and ugly in the face, with dry, protruding lips, such as he disliked, love was in the lips, if it was anywhere, you could kiss your way to happiness, or recoil from lips to something quite different. She looked like the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, but she thought there was still time to be Juliet just once more; and she clearly thought he was Romeo. It was awkward. In another sense, she looked as sinister as Lady Macbeth. She had endearing habits with policemen, and could be seen in the shadows of the square outside, leaning up against the railings in the arms of the law. If you walked down the road and didn’t come back for two hours, they’d still be there quite motionless. What did she do now that the Government had removed the railings? It was a serious thought all over England, he mused. Had the Government made any provision? Could such apply for a special war bonus?
The only thing to do with her was to banter her, and make a fearful joke of everything, and to hope her duties would quickly call her from the room. The trouble was, she hovered. There was just that bright smile, that you-are-a-one gaze of loving admiration, and that habit of tidying up the room. She never said much. ‘Your room, Mr Bowling!’ Or: ‘Your clothes, Mr Bowling, tch!’ And she’d wink and tidy up everything. Her false teeth slid about rather. She said she liked his suits, the blue one, the grey one and the brown one. She said she liked his bowler hat best, and not to wear the felt, dear. And she said she liked him in striped pyjamas, decided this was a cue for a wink and added something else.
‘Now, now,’ he bantered, embarrassed, ‘you’re a naughty girl, Alice! At your age!’
Beams.
‘How old do you think I am, then?’
‘Older than that copper I saw you with last night. Who were you with last night,’ he chanted, shaving, ‘Oh, who were you with last night! I can’t think how you manage it, standing up, what?’
Her shiny face turned beetroot.
‘Oh, get on with you, Mr Bowling! That’s not like you to make a remark like that!’
‘Sorry …!’
‘What a thing to have said!’
She rustled out in her starch, and he knew she was delighted. When he was having a snooze one day she crept in and was rather a nuisance.
‘Now, now, Alice? Won’t you ever grow old?’
Her face shone like the sun and she sat on the bed.
‘You’re the nicest gentleman I’ve ever had to look after,’ she said. ‘And that’s saying something.’
She just sat and beamed.
He thought then, as he thought again now:
‘Oh, my God—I shall have to get out of this!’
Just then Mr Winthrop knocked and walked in without waiting.
Alice didn’t like him and hurried out. ‘He tells tales to Miss Brown,’ she pouted about him.
CHAPTER VI
MR WINTHROP took up a position by the fireplace, and was anxious to know whether Mr Bowling would like to come upstairs and have some coffee with him and a few friends next Thursday. He said that was in three days time, and he said they would have an awfully interesting time, and he knew he would not be bored, and the coffee was from his aunt in Sussex, whose husband had been a coffee planter in Ceylon. He asked Mr Bowling if he would join the Home Guard, you only needed to turn up once a week, and then when Invasion came you had a definite job to do. He said all the chaps were decent blokes, mostly city, though he was afraid some were ‘mixed up with the stage’, an item which caused him to frown, and to start swaying to and fro on his little brown shoes as if he was the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He looked flabby and boring, and apropos of his remark about the stage, suddenly confided that he was married, and that his wife was on the stage, ‘or she was when I last heard from her.’ Then he frowned away from that, and rattled on, ‘sure I’m not boring you?’ about what he would do if he was Minister of Supply, and what he would do if he had five minutes talk with Stalin, and what he would do with Japan and the Generals over there, and how he would advise President Roosevelt. The entire time, he was completely unaware that one of his more important buttons was undone, a detail which would have robbed each and every one of his interviews of all dignity and consequence. So far from being amused, however, Mr Bowling became suddenly aware that there would be no party upstairs for Mr Winthrop on Thursday and that in that case it was safe to accept the invitation. A black, black mood had descended upon him, and he sat trying not to glower at Mr Winthrop’s button. Mr Winthrop, completely unaware of how very fateful his intrusion was being for himself, leaned to and fro and tried to run the World W
ar and bring it to a successful conclusion for democracy and freedom, and of course Capitalism.
‘What is freedom?’ Mr Bowling heard his own voice querying. He was looking out of the window.
In the pretty square, a little girl and a little boy were playing on the grass with hoops. Mr Winthrop peeping out at them, portentously drew a neat illustration, explaining that what we were fighting for was so that the little girl and boy could go on playing with hoops, and so that, in due course, their own little girls and boys could play with hoops in their turn, instead of being slaves and working in a pit or at a lathe for a Nazi controlled world. He went on and on and on, and it was all quite good, but Mr Bowling was no longer listening, his vision transcended far beyond Mr Winthrop’s present vision, and he saw the slavery which the world endured, even when it had got what it fondly called freedom—the slavery of the soul forcibly tied to the body.
‘With Ivy,’ he thought, ‘what could ever be a greater bondage, than the bondage of those days?’
There were a thousand forms of slavery, under the title Freedom; ought the title to be improved? and it might be that under the horror of slavery, there was much freedom, beauty and rest. This was frightening, it needed thought. And where, then, the happy medium?
Mr Winthrop had all the arguments, of course. It was all quite good, and all that sort of thing. But it was all rather hackneyed and sickening.
‘My dear chap,’ he said gloomily to Mr Winthrop, ‘if we win this war, which I know now we will, what happens? Why, we’re right back where we started from.’ His black mood descended and he longed for the shadows of night and wondered what exact time old Winthrop went to bed. Had he a mother and father?
‘I often wonder,’ Mr Winthrop went on and on saying, ‘when I think of these appalling atrocities, what kind of precautions it is possible for the people to take? When they know the brutes are coming, I mean. The women and girls, I mean. Such things do not bear thinking of.’
‘All things must be thought of,’ Mr Bowling said despondently. ‘In the matter of living. And dying.’
Mr Winthrop thought:
‘A queer card, this chap Bowling. Depressive. Don’t think he likes me.’ He blew his nose and said: ‘Ah—music?’ and went to the piano. He started to play and sing Sigh No More Ladies, in a voice like a eunuch.
Mr Bowling sat stock still looking rather thoughtful.
He sat there for an hour after Mr Winthrop had cleared out, saying:
‘On Thursday then, Bowling? Shall we say eight o’clock? Can’t possibly provide food, with this confounded rationing—but nobody expects it these days.’
‘I shall have eaten.’
‘Splendid! You play bridge, of course.’
‘Yes and no.’
‘We’ll have to see. Hope you won’t be bored? We can chat.’
He gave a pull at his pipe with wet lips and smiled not too comfortably and backed out. His pipe smoke lingered behind him, blue, circular, wafting towards Heaven.
Mr Bowling sat solemnly staring around the room. It was nice, yes, and it had atmosphere, there was taste here. There was the open window, the smell of grass, the smell of tar, the bright squeals of children.
But in the room were a hundred ghosts.
Ghosts of a hundred men and women and girls who had hired this room before; the lonely, the hungry, the wretched, the frightened, the suicidal, the rapable, the mean, the happy.
Eyes were here. Eyes which may have thought of the far-off days of mother and home, and who now stared in fear at the gas fire, the little brass pipe leading to the tap of it, and thought in fear of God:
Dare I?
Perhaps the contented stared here too—but how could you be contented here?
No, the atmosphere was post-modern here; it was spelt in five letters: worry.
The marks of their heads were on the wall, at the head of the divan. They had sat there writing letters. ‘Dear Sir, In answer to your advertisement in today’s Daily Telegraph, I am of public school education, aged thirty-eight, can speak French and a little German. I …’
Mr Bowling sprung to his feet and decided he couldn’t stand the place a day longer. He must have been out of his mind to have come here. But then you acted according to the circumstances, mood and decisions of the time, didn’t you? Something prodded you from behind, and you jumped.
This time he jumped into the bathroom. He would wash this place out of his skin, find a furnished flat and live in comfort for the remaining time Fate placed at his disposal. It was unlikely that it would be long.
While he bath’d, the door handle was tried four times. The bally house seemed to be full. Alice had said it was empty, but one supposed the cautious felt it safe to return from the country towns.
He had little idea who lived in the house. He had seen women coming in and out, and a tall chap with a bald head; and another chap who wore a little straw hat.
By tea time, he had found a furnished flat which was down the hill, a threehalfpenny bus ride. It was in a modern block oddly out of place with the rest of Addison Road. He fell for the flat at once, it was on the fifth floor, you could see houses and gardens and Shepherds Bush Green, and pubs by the dozen. It had been newly painted and the hangings, such little as were needed, were new. There were three large rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom which was a joy, and a little balcony to sit out on and have your tea. The owner was in Ireland on a war job. The furniture was yellow and modern looking, the cupboards and lights were in the wall, there was plenty of glass and crockery and sheets, and there were two yellow lifts which you worked yourself. He was so excited that he noticed everything and noticed nothing. The only snag was that the manager was sorry but he could not come in until next week, they were having the drains up. He went out into the street and felt like a violent walk. He enjoyed a perverted kind of outing, walking vigorously the whole way to the gap which had been his home with Ivy, there was the mirror still stuck to the wall, where he had shaved time and time again, and had shouted round at Ivy: ‘Oh, for the love of Mike, my dear child, will you stop nagging? Well, really, Ivy, you drive a chap balmy! Honestly!’ They’d cleared up the mess at the bottom, and there was the now-earthy gap where Ivy and he had fallen in that black minute, and, shocked, it had come to him that, of all people who ought to be allowed to die, it was himself, with perhaps poor Ivy as runner-up; but no, the likes of them had to survive a direct hit which must kill the two lovebirds upstairs. For them, they must carry on in the old way; and she must scream, on with the bloody motley, and he must cry in customary anger: ‘Are you hurt?’
‘No.’
‘Well, shut up screaming, then.’ And then his hand on her mouth in the darkness there and the choking dust.
And then the sound of fire engines.
And then the sound of sliding timber and brick, a crash or two of slates; and the feel of wetness at his knees and feet, and the feel of her poor, unhappy body slipping down at his feet in supplication; she’d been released at last, this was her freedom.
‘I’ve set you free, Ivy! My poor child, you’re free, my dear? Good luck, my dear? I hope you get a better break next time? … Goodbye, Ivy, my dear?’
Suddenly tears blinded his eyes. Why in God’s name did he come here? He’d be going to Watson’s next!
Suddenly he started running like a madman down the dirty road. ‘Taxi? … Taxi? …’
In the taxi he lay back flat, like a poker. Had he seen his face, it was pale and drawn.
He looked sick.
But he sprung out lightly and was outwardly himself when he knocked on Miss Brown’s private door and went in to give a week’s notice.
He felt as if he was drugged. Watching himself talking to Miss Brown, who was at tea in her hat and surrounded by photographs and prints and paintings and ornaments, and talking to a nurse who wore a wide smile and a pretty blue bonnet, he heard their voices, his own and the two women’s, and the lawn mower outside, and the milkman, and a horse and cart.
&nb
sp; ‘This is my niece, Mr Bowling. Miss Brashier. She’s at King Charles’s. Will you have a cup of tea with us? I’m sorry you can’t stop just for a cup …! You may speak before Miss Brashier, you don’t mind, I know, Ivy.’ Ivy! ‘Leaving us, Mr Bowling, oh, now, I really am disappointed, and so will dear Mr Winthrop be, he was telling me all about you.’
‘Yes, well, I want a bigger place and …’
‘Poor Mr Bowling got bombed out, Ivy. It was so sad.’
‘I am sorry,’ Miss Brashier’s voice said. She said it well, considering the number of such cases she had had to deal with, and the number of time bombs she had known were whizzing down in the yard outside the ward window. ‘But let’s hope those times are over! They say our air defences are marvellous now!’
He went upstairs, forgetting all about dinner, and all about alcohol, and sat playing some Brahms quietly for a very long time. It got darker and darker.
Mr Winthrop’s footsteps started to come up the stairs. Mr Bowling heard them pause outside his door, hesitant. But no knock came. The steps started to go on up the winding stairs towards the noisy cistern there.
Mr Bowling leapt to his door like a cat and softly opened it.
Mr Winthrop groped for the light switch at the top of the narrow stairs, and tried not to make any noise, in case of waking up Miss Hull, a new tenant on his floor. She went to bed early, he knew, and got annoyed if the radio was on too loud.
He thought he heard a slight sound behind him, and he paused.
Then he thought he heard somebody breathing.
The next thing he knew was the uncomfortable sensation of a hand coming at him from behind and gripping his nose and mouth. His own hand had reached for the light switch, and found it. But very quickly indeed did he withdraw it again and tear at the hairy hand which now held him in a suffocating grasp. He at once thought of burglars, and didn’t care at all how much they stole, so long as they let him breathe. He felt himself being pulled a complete but slow back-somersault; there was another hand at his chest, he presumed it was fishing for his wallet.