Читать книгу: «The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories Volume Two», страница 9

The park holds dozens of self-contained dramas, human and animal, in the space of an eye-sweep. On a Sunday afternoon, in July, when the drought had held and held, and the bushes under the tree-cover were wilting because what showers had fallen were not heavy enough to penetrate the thick leaf-layers, the park was full, and coachloads of people from everywhere were visiting the zoo. There were queues at the zoo gates hundreds of yards long, and inside the zoo it was like a fair. There is a path down the west side of the zoo. It is tree-shaded. A bank rises sharply to the fields used for football and cricket. Being summer, and Sunday, it was cricket time, and four separate games were in progress, each with its circle of reserve players, friends, wives, children, and casual watchers. This world, the world of Sunday cricket, was absolutely self-absorbed, and each game ignored the other three. On the slopes under the trees were lovers, twined two by two. At the end where the Mappin Terraces are, four young people lay asleep. They were tourists, and looked German, or perhaps Scandinavian. They all four had long hair. The two girls had long dresses, the young men fringed leather. They owned four rucksacks and four guitars. Most likely they had been up talking, singing and dancing all night, or perhaps had not the money to pay for a night’s sleep. Now they slept in each other’s arms all day without moving. Quite possibly they never knew that cricket was being devotedly played so close, and that while they slept the zoo filled and emptied again. From the slope where they were you can see nicely into the children’s zoo, and across to the elephants’ house. You can see, too, the goats and bears of the terraces. Some people who had given up the effort of getting into the zoo sat on the slopes near the four sleepers, talking a lot, not trying to be quiet, and they watched the elephants showing off, poor beasts, in return for their little house and the trench-enclosed space they have to live in. A woman arrived with a plastic bag and sat on a bench, with her back to the lovers and the sleeping young people, and fed sparrows and pigeons, frowning with the concentration of the effort needed to let the poor sparrows (who were so small) get as much food as the (unfairly) large pigeons. And a little girl in the children’s zoo clutched at a donkey no higher than she was, and cried out: ‘It’s getting wet, oh the donkey’s getting wet!’ True enough, here came a small sample of the long-awaited rain. Not much. A brief sparkling drench. No one stopped doing anything. The cricketers played on. The woman frowned and fussed over the unfairness of nature. The lovers loved. The four sleeping young people did not so much as turn over, but a passing youth tiptoed up and covered the guitars with the girls’ long skirts. And the little girl wept because of the poor donkey who was getting wet and apparently liking it, for it was kicking and hee-hawing. Where was her mamma? Where, her papa? She was alone with her donkey and her grief. And the rain pelted down and stopped, having done no good and no harm to anything. It was weeks before some real rain arrived and saved the brown scuffing grass; weeks before that moment of high summer which was nothing to do with the gardener’s calendar, or even the length of the days, shortening fast again, again the same number of hours as in the long-forgotten no-spring. But it is a moment whose quality is over-lushness, heaviness, fullness, plenty. All the trees are crammed and blowzy with leaf. They sag and loll and drag. The willows trail too long in the water, and then they look as if someone has gone around each one in a boat with shears, chopping the fronds to just such a length, like human hair trimmed around with a pudding-basin. The ducks and geese who have been delicately, languidly, nibbling bits of leaf, and floating in and out through the trailing green curtains, now tread water and strive upwards on their wings to nip off bits of leaf. Perhaps it is the birds who have eaten the low branches away to an exact height all around? There are so many of them now, the chicks all having grown up, that everywhere you look are herds of geese, flocks of ducks, the big swans, water-hens. Surely the park can’t possibly sustain so many? What will happen to them all? Will they be allotted to other less bird-populated parks, each bird conditioned from chickhood to regard every human being in sight as a moving bread-fountain? Meanwhile, the rowing boats and the sailing boats have to manoeuvre through crowds of waterfowl, the sparrows are in flocks, the roses teem and mass, everything is at the full of its provision, its lushness. The hub of the park now is not the chestnut avenue, and the so English herbaceous border, but the long Italianate walk that has the fountain and the tall poplars at one end, the formal black-and-gold gates at the other, and roses lining it all the way. A summer avenue, asking for deep blue skies and heat, just as the chestnut avenue, and the hawthorns, the plums, cherries and currants, are for spring, or for autumn.

The summer gardeners all seem to be youngsters working with bare torsos, or bare feet. They cool off by standing in the fountain’s spray as the wind switches it about. ‘They say’ that the hippies have decided this work, summer gardening, is good for them, us, society. One evening I heard these sentiments offered to one gardening girl by another:

‘There aren’t any hang-ups here, you can do your own thing, but you’ve got to pull your weight, that’s fair enough.’

There is a different relationship between these summer amateur gardeners and the park’s visitors, and between the visitors and the familiar older gardeners, these last being more proprietary. I remember an exchange with one, several springs ago, on an occasion when it had snowed, the sun had come out, and friends had rung to say that the crocuses were particularly fine. Out I went to the park and found that the new crocuses, white, purple, gold, stood everywhere in the snow. Each patch had been finely netted with black cotton to stop the birds eating them. I was bending over to see how the netting was done – a tricky and irritating job, surely? – when I saw a uniformed gardener had emerged from his watchman’s hut and was standing over me.

‘And what may you be doing?’

‘I am looking at your crocuses.’

‘They are not my crocuses. They are public property.’

‘Oh, good.’

‘And I am paid to watch them.’

‘You mean to tell me that you are standing in that unheated wooden hut in all this cold and snow just to guard the crocuses?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Isn’t this cotton any use, then?’

‘Cotton is effective against bird thieves. I am not saying anything about human thieves.’

‘But I wasn’t going to eat your crocuses!’

‘I am only doing my job.’

‘Your job is to be a crocus-watcher?’

Yes, madam, and it always has been and my father before me. When I was a little lad I knew the work I wanted to do and I’ve done it ever since.’

Not thus the youngsters, much less suspicious characters, understanding quite well how respectable citizens may envy them their jobs.

There was this incident when the geraniums had flowered once, and needed to be picked over to induce a second flowering. There were banks of them, covered with dead flowers. I myself had resisted the temptation to nip over the railings and dead-head the lot: another had not resisted. With a look of defiant guilt, an elderly man was crouching in the geraniums, hard at work. Leaning on his spade, watching him, was a summer gardener, a long-haired, barefooted, naked-chested youth.

‘What’s he doing that for?’ said he to me.

‘He can’t stand that there won’t be a second flowering,’ I said. ‘I can understand it. I’ve just dead-headed all mine in my own garden.’

‘All I’ve got room for is herbs in a pot.’

The elderly man, seeing us watching him, talking about him, probably about to report his crime, looked guiltier than ever. But he furiously continued his work, a man of principle defying society for duty.

On a single impulse, I and the gardener parted and went in different directions; we were not able to bear causing him such transports of moral determination.

But, of course, he was quite in the right: when all the other banks of geraniums were brown and flowerless, the bank he had picked over was as brilliant as in spring.

By now it had rained, and had rained well, and just as it was hard to remember the long cold wet of the early year in the cold drought, and the cold drought in the dry heat, now the long dryness had vanished out of memory, for it was a real English summer, all fitfully showery, fitfully cool and hot. Yet it was autumn; the over-fullness of everything said it must be. A strong breeze sent leaves spinning down, and the smell of the stagnant parts of the lakes was truly horrible, making you wonder about the philosophy of the park-keepers – it was against their principles to clear away the smelly rubbish? They couldn’t afford a man in a boat once a week to take it away? Or they had faith in the power of nature to heal everything?

In my garden, last year’s wasteland – so very soon to be left behind – the roses, the thyme, geranium, clematis, were all strongly flowering, and butterflies crowded over lemon balm and hyssop. The pear tree was full of small tasteless pears. The tree was too old. It could produce masses of blossom, but couldn’t carry the work through to good fruit. At every movement of the air, down thumped the pears. All the little boys from the Council flats came jumping over the walls to snatch up the pears, which they needed to throw at each other, not to eat. When invited to come in and pick them, great sullenness and resentment resulted, because the point was to raid the big rich gardens along the canal, into which hundreds of gardenless people looked down from the flats, to raid them, dart away with the spoils, and then raid again, coming in under the noses of furious householders.

One afternoon I was in a bus beside the park, and the wind was strong, and all the air was full of flying leaves. This was the moment, the week of real autumn. Rushing at once to the park, I just caught it. Everything was yellow, gold, brown, orange, heaps of treasure lay tidily packed ready to be burned, the wind crammed the air with the coloured leafage. It was cooling – the Northern hemisphere, I mean, not the park, which of course had been hot, cold and in between ever since the year had started running true to form, some time in July. The leaves were blown into the lakes, and sank to make streams of bubbles in which the birds dived and played. All around the coots’ battered nest lay a starry patterning of plane leaves in green and gold. You could see how, if this were wilderness, land would form here in this shallow place, in a season or two; how this arm of the lake would become swamp, and then, in a dry season, new earth, and the water would retreat. All the smelly backwaters were being covered over with thick soft layers of leaf; the plastic, the tins, the papers vanishing, as, no doubt, the park-keepers had counted on happening when autumn came.

I walked from one end of the park to the other, then back and around and across, the squirrels racing and chasing, and the birds swimming along the banks beside me in case this shape might be a food-giving shape, and this food shape might have decided to distribute largess around the next bend and was being mean now because of future plenty. There were many fewer birds. The great families bred that year off the islands had gone, and the population was normal again, couples and individuals sedately self-sufficient.

Only a week later, that perfection of autumn was over, and stripped boughs were showing the shape of next spring. Yet, visiting Sweden, where snow had come early and lay everywhere, then leaving it to fly home again, was flying from winter into autumn, a journey back in time in one afternoon. The aircraft did not land when it should have done, owing to some hitch or other, and, luckily for us, had to go about in a wide sweep over London. I had not before flown so low, with no cloud to hide the city. It was all woodland and lakes and parks and gardens, and a highly coloured autumn still, with loads of russet and gold on the trees. All the ugly bits of London you imagine nothing could disguise were concealed by this habit of tree and garden.

In the park, though, from the ground, the trees looked very tall, very bare, and wet. The lakes were grey and solid. When the birds came fast across to see if there was food, they left arrow shapes on the water spreading slowly, and absolutely regular, till they dissolved into the shores: there were no boats out now, for these had been drawn up and lay overturned in rows along the banks, waiting for spring.

And the dark had come down.

The park in winter is very different from high, crammed, noisy summer. A long damp path in early twilight … it is not much more than three in the afternoon. Two gentlemen in trim dark suits and tidy, slightly bald heads, little frills of hair on their collars – a reminiscence of the eighteenth century or a claim on contemporary fashion, who knows? – two civil servants from the offices in the Nash terraces walk quietly by, their hands behind their back, beside the water. They talk in voices so low you think it must be official secrets that they have come out to discuss in privacy.

The beds are dug and turned. New stacks of leaf are made every day as the old ones burn, scenting the air with guilt, not pleasure, for now you have to remember pollution. But the roses are all there still, blobs of colour on tall stems. All the stages of the year are visible at once, for each plant has on it brightly tinted hips, then dead roses, which are brown dust rose-shaped, then the roses themselves, though each has frost-burn crimping the outer petals. Hips, dead roses, fresh blooms – and masses of buds, doomed never to come to flower, for the frosts will get them if the pruner doesn’t: Pink Parfait and Ginger Rogers, Summer Holiday and Joseph’s Coat, are shortly to be slashed into anonymity.

For it will be the dead of the year very soon now, soon it will be the shortest day.

I sit on a bench in the avenue where in summer the poplars and fountain make Italy on a blue day, but now browny-grey clouds are driving hard across from the north-east. Crowds of sparrows materialize as I arrive, all hungry expectation, but I’ve been forgetful, I haven’t so much as a biscuit. They sit on the bench, my shoe, the bench’s back, rather hunched, the wind tugging their feathers out of shape. The seagulls are in too, so the sea must be rough today, or perhaps there is an oil slick.

Up against the sunset, today a dramatic one, gold, red and packed dark clouds, birds slowly rotate, like jagged debris after a whirlwind. They look like rooks, but that’s not possible, they must be more gulls. But it is nice to imagine them rooks, just as, on the walk home, the plane trees, all bent one way by the wind, seem, with their dappled trunks, like deer ready to spring together towards the northern gates.

Mrs Fortescue

That autumn he became conscious all at once of a lot of things he had never thought about before.

Himself, for a start …

His parents … whom he found he disliked, because they told lies. He discoveed this when he tried to communicate to them something of his new state of mind and they pretended not to know what he meant.

His sister who, far from being his friend and ally, ‘like two peas in a pod’ – as people had been saying for years – seemed positively to hate him.

And Mrs Fortescue.

Jane, seventeen, had left school and went out every night. Fred, sixteen, loutish schoolboy, lay in bed and listened for her to come home, kept company by her imaginary twin self, invented by him at the end of the summer. The tenderness of this lovely girl redeemed him from his shame, his squalor, his misery. Meanwhile, the parents ignorantly slept, not caring about the frightful battles their son was fighting with himself not six yards off. Sometimes Jane came home first; sometime Mrs Fortescue. Fred listened to her going up over his head, and thought how strange he had never thought about her before, knew nothing about her.

The Danderlea family lived in a small flat over the off-licence that Mr and Mrs Danderlea had been managing for Sanko and Duke for twenty years. Above the shop, from where rose, day and night, a sickly reek of beers and spirits they could never escape, were the kitchen and the lounge. This layer of the house (it had been one once) was felt as an insulating barrier against the smell, which nevertheless reached up into the bedrooms above. Two bedrooms – the mother and father in one; while for years brother and sister had shared a room, until recently Mr Danderlea put up a partition making two tiny boxes, giving at least the illusion of privacy for the boy and the girl.

On the top floor, the two rooms were occupied by Mrs Fortescue, and had been since before the Danderleas came. Ever since the boy could remember, grumbling went on that Mrs Fortescue had the high part of the house where the liquor smell did not rise; though she, if remarks to this effect reached her, claimed that on hot nights she could not sleep for the smell. But on the whole relations were good. The Danderleas’ energies were claimed by buying and selling liquor, while Mrs Fortescue went out a lot. Sometimes other old women came to visit her, and an old man, small, shrunken and polite, came to see her most evenings, very late indeed, often well after twelve.

Mrs Fortescue seldom went out during the day, but left every evening at about six, wearing furs: a pale shaggy coat in winter, and in summer a stole over a costume. She always had a small hat on, with a veil that was drawn tight over her face and held with a bunch of flowers where the fur began. The furs changed often: Fred remembered half a dozen blond fur coats, and a good many little animals biting their tails or dangling bright bead eyes and empty paws. From behind the veil, the dark, made-up eyes of Mrs Fortescue had glimmered at him for years; and her small old reddened mouth had smiled.

One evening he postponed his homework, and slipped out past the shop where his parents were both at work, and took a short walk that led him to Oxford Street. The exulting, fearful loneliness that surged through his blood with every heart-beat, making every stamp of shadow a reminder of death, each gleam of light a promise of his extraordinary future, drove him around and around the streets muttering to himself; brought tears to his eyes, or snatches of song to his lips which he had to suppress. For while he knew himself to be crazy, and supposed he must have been all his life (he could no longer remember himself before this autumn) this was a secret he intended to keep for himself and the tender creature who shared the stuffy box he spent his nights in. Turning a corner that probably (he would not have been able to say) he had already turned several times before that evening, he saw a woman walking ahead of him in a great fur coat that shone under the street lights, a small veiled hat, and tiny sharp feet that took tripping steps towards Soho. Recognizing Mrs Fortescue, a friend, he ran forward to greet her, relieved that this frightening trap of streets was to be shared. Seeing him, she first gave him a smile never offered him before by a woman; then looked prim and annoyed; then nodded at him briskly and said as she always did: ‘Well, Fred, and how are things with you?’ He walked a few steps with her, said he had to do his homework, heard her old woman’s voice say: ‘That’s right, son, you must work, your mum and dad are right, a bright boy like you, it would be a shame to let it go to waste’ – and watched her move on, across Oxford Street, into the narrow streets beyond.

He turned and saw Bill Bates coming towards him from the hardware shop, just closing. Bill was grinning, and he said: ‘What, wouldn’t she have you then?’

‘It’s Mrs Fortescue,’ said Fred, entering a new world between one breath and the next, just because of the tone of Bill’s voice.

‘She’s not a bad old tart,’ said Bill. ‘Bet she wasn’t pleased to see you when she’s on the job.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Fred, trying out a new man-of-the-world voice for the first time, ‘she lives over us, doesn’t she?’ (Bill must know this, everyone must know it, he thought, feeling sick.) ‘I was just saying hullo, that’s all.’ It came off, he saw, for now Bill nodded and said: ‘I’m off to the pictures, want to come?’

‘Got to do homework,’ said Fred, bitter.

‘Then you’ve got to do it then, haven’t you?’ said Bill reasonably, going on his way.

Fred went home in a seethe of shame. How could his parents share their house with an old tart (whore, prostitute – but these were the only words he knew), how could they treat her like an ordinary decent person, even better (he understood, listening to them in his mind’s ear, that their voices to her held something not far from respect) – how could they put up with it? Justice insisted that they had not chosen her as a tenant, she was the company’s tenant, but at least they should have told Sanko and Duke so that she could be evicted and …

Although it seemed as if his adventure through the streets had been as long as a night, he found when he got in that it wasn’t yet eight.

He went up to his box and set out his schoolbooks. Through the ceiling-board he could hear his sister moving. There being no door between the rooms, he went out to the landing, through his parents’ room (his sister had to creep past the sleeping pair when she came in late) and into hers. She stood in a black slip before the glass, making up her face. ‘Do you mind?’ she said daintily. ‘Can’t you knock?’ He muttered something, and felt a smile come on his face, aggressive and aggrieved, that seemed to switch on automatically these days if he saw his sister even at a distance. He sat on the edge of her bed. ‘Do you mind?’ she said again, moving away from him some black underwear. She slipped over her still puppy-fatted white shoulders a new dressing-gown in cherry-red and buttoned it up primly before continuing to work lipstick on to her mouth.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the pictures, if you’ve got no objection,’ she clipped out, in this new, jaunty voice that she had acquired when she left school, and which, he knew, she used as a weapon against all men. But why against him? He sat, feeling the ugly grin which was probably painted on his face, for he couldn’t remove it, and he looked at the pretty girl with her new hair-do putting thick black rings around her eyes, and he thought of how they had been two peas in a pod. In the summer … yes, that is how it seemed to him now; through a year’s-long summer of visits to friends, the park, the zoo, the pictures, they had been friends, allies, then the dark came down suddenly and in the dark had been born this cool, flip girl who hated him.

‘Who are you going with?’

‘Jem Taylor, if you don’t have any objection,’ she said.

‘Why should I have any objection, I just asked.’

‘What you don’t know won’t hurt you,’ she said, very pleased with herself because of her ease in this way of talking. He recognized his recent achievement in the exchange with Bill as the same step forward as she was making, with this tone or style; and out of a quite uncustomary feeling of equality with her asked: ‘How is old Jem, I haven’t seen him lately?’

‘Oh Fred, I’m late.’ This bad temper meant she had finished her face and wanted to put on her dress, which she would not do in front of him.

Silly cow, he thought, grinning and thinking of her alter ego, the girl of his nights, does she think I don’t know what she looks like in a slip, or nothing? Because of what went on behind the partition, in the dark, he banged his fist on it, laughing, and she whipped about and said: ‘Oh Fred, you drive me crazy, you really do.’ This being something from their brother-and-sister past, admitting intimacy, even the possibility of real equality, she checked herself, put on a sweet contained smile, and said: ‘If you don’t mind, Fred, I want to get dressed.’

He went on, remembering only as he got through the parents’ room and saw his mother’s feathered mules by the bed, that he had wanted to talk about Mrs Fortescue. He realized his absurdity, because of course his sister would pretend she didn’t understand what he meant … His fixed smile of shame changed into one of savagery as he thought: Well, Jem, you’re not going to get anything out of her but do you mind and have you any objection and please yourself, I know that much about my sweet sister … In his room he could not work, even after his sister had left, slamming three doors and making so much racket with her heels that the parents shouted at her from the shop. He was thinking of Mrs Fortescue. But she was old. She had always been old, as long as he could remember. And the old women who came up to see her in the afternoons, were they whores (tarts, prostitutes, bad women) too? And where did she, they, do it? And who was the smelly old man who came so late nearly every night?

He sat with the waves of liquor-smell from the ground floor arising past him, thinking of the sourish smell of the old man, and of the scented smell of the old women, feeling short-breathed because of the stuffy reek of his room and associating it (because of certain memories from his nights) with the reek from Mrs Fortescue’s room which he could positively smell from where he sat, so strongly did he create it.

Bill must be wrong: she couldn’t possibly be on the game still, who would want an old thing like that?

The family had a meal every night when the shop closed. It was usually about ten thirty when they sat down. Tonight there was some boiled bacon, and baked beans. Fred brought out casually: ‘I saw Mrs Fortescue going off to work when I was out.’ He waited the results of this cheek, this effrontery, watching his parents’ faces. They did not even exchange glances. His mother pushed tinted bronze hair back with a hand that had a stain of grease on it, and said: ‘Poor old girl, I expect she’s pleased about the Act, when you get down to it, in the winter it must have been bad sometimes.’ The words the Act hit Fred’s outraged sense of propriety anew; he had to work them out; thinking that his parents did not even apologize for the years of corruption. Now his father said – his face was inflamed, he must have been taking nips from the glass under the counter – ‘Once or twice, when I saw her on Frith Street before the Act I felt sorry for her. But I suppose she got used to it.’

‘It must be nicer this way,’ said Mrs Danderlea, pushing the crusting remains of the baked beans towards her husband.

He scooped them out of the dish with the edge of his fried bread, and she said: ‘What’s wrong with the spoon?’

‘What’s wrong with the bread,’ he returned, with an unconvincing whisky glare, which she ignored.

‘Where’s her place, then?’ asked Fred, casual, having worked out that she must have one.

‘Over that new club in Parton Street. The rent’s gone up again, so Mr Spencer told me, and there’s the telephone she needs now – well, I don’t know how much you can believe of what he says, but he’s said often enough that without him helping her out she’d do better at almost anything else.’

‘Not a word he says,’ said Mr Danderlea, pushing out his dome of a stomach as he sat back, replete. ‘He told me he was doorman for the Greystock Hotel in Knightsbridge – well, it turns out all this time he’s been doorman for that strip-tease joint along the street from her new place, and that’s where he’s been for years, because it was a night-club before it was strip-tease.’

‘Well, there’s no point in that, is there?’ said Mrs Danderlea, pouring second cups. ‘I mean, why tell fibs about it, I mean everyone knows, don’t they?’

Fred again pushed down protest: that, yes, Mr Spencer (Mrs Fortescue’s ‘regular’, but he had never understood what they had meant by the ugly word before) was right to lie; he wished his parents would lie even now; anything rather than this casual back-and-forth chat about this horror, years old, and right over their heads, part of their lives.

He ducked down his face and shovelled beans into it fast, knowing it was scarlet, and wanting a reason for it.

‘You’ll get heart-burn, gobbling like that,’ said his mother, as he had expected.

‘I’ve got to finish my homework,’ he said, and bolted, shaking his head at the cup of tea she was pushing over at him.

He sat in his room until his parents went to bed, marking off the routine of the house from his new knowledge. After an expected interval Mrs Fortescue came in, he could hear her moving about, taking her time about everything. Water ran, for a long time. He now understood that this sound, water running into and then out of a basin, was something he had heard at this hour all his life. He sat listening with the ashamed, fixed grin on his face. Then his sister came in; he could hear her sharp sigh of relief as she flumped on the bed and bent over to take off her shoes. He nearly called out, ‘Good night, Jane,’ but thought better of it. Yet all through the summer they had whispered and giggled through the partition.

Mr Spencer, Mrs Fortescue’s regular, came up the stairs. He heard their voices together; listened to them as he undressed and went to bed; as he lay wakeful; as he at last went off to sleep.

Next evening he waited until Mrs Fortescue went out, and followed her, careful she didn’t see him. She walked fast and efficient, like a woman on her way to the office. Why then the fur coat, the veil, the make-up? Of course, it was habit, because of all the years on the pavement; for it was a sure thing she didn’t wear that outfit to receive customers in her place. But it turned out that he was wrong. Along the last hundred yards before her door, she slowed her pace, took a couple of quick glances left and right for the police, then looked at a large elderly man coming towards her. This man swung around, joined her, and they went side by side into her doorway, the whole operation so quick, so smooth, that even if there had been a policeman, all he could have seen was a woman meeting someone she had expected to meet.