After Julius (6 page)

It was awkward at first: they didn’t seem to know. He had announced himself with a flourish to a motherly old peach who sat by a switchboard knitting in a colour that he could have told
her wouldn’t suit a rabbit in a Disney film. She looked blank: asked if he had an appointment with anyone. He said he never made appointments, which was true, he’d never made one in his
life. Who did he wish to see? He named his editor. ‘He’s not in this week,’ she said, but he could see that he’d made his mark by knowing a name she knew. So he named the
first name on the imprint. ‘He’s dead,’ she replied in the same neutral voice, and then looked as though one of them had dropped something. He had begun to sweat: ‘Well,
someone,’ he said. He couldn’t be kept waiting, and so palpable a lie seemed to strike her as she began to fiddle with the switchboard.

‘You go right upstairs to the top and the first door on the right.’

‘You don’t happen to have an extra strong peppermint on you?’

But she shook her head, looking dazed: ‘I’m sorry.’

He took the stairs slowly, and in order to take his mind off coughing, he concentrated upon mourning Dottie. He wasn’t used to stairs. When he reached the top, the door on the right was
open and a girl stood in its way. The first thing he noticed was her legs, because she was wearing stockings like some of those pictures that had reminded him of Dot. But she wasn’t like Dot
– she was a skimpy little thing with a pale London face and she was holding out a hand and saying in a small cool upper-class voice: ‘How do you do?’

‘How d’you do?’ he muttered, and wondered how she knew he’d come off the boats.

There was hardly space in the room for both of them to stand, she remarked, but he was suspicious of her, and thought she managed to make even this sound like an advantage.

‘My name is Emma Grace: I believe you were asking for my father. Did you know him?’

He shook his head. ‘It was just a name. I had to say someone.’

She frowned and he noticed her extraordinary eyes – funny, he’d never seen that before – poor girl – he wondered if it made her feel a freak . . .

She was offering him a cigarette. He shook his head, and watched her light hers. The door behind him burst open and a woman in a blue overall reached round him to put a cup of tea on the
table.

‘Sorry dear – the saucers all get used on the cats.’

The tea already had the cold fog of cooling milk – funny what a lot of drinks were brown . . . She was asking him whether he would like some. He shook his head again: there was getting to
be a fog on the whole enterprise. The woman disappeared as explosively as she had arrived, and there was a short silence while the murky air settled and the papers she had all over the table lay
down. She cleared her throat: it didn’t sound as though she was used to doing it.

‘Now, what can I do for you, Mr Brick?’

‘I come about the money.’

‘What money?’

‘All that money you owe me. It runs well into a hundred pounds, but I don’t want all of it today. Just some, and a few questions answered, so I know where I am.’

‘Mr Brick, I’m sorry to seem so stupid, but do we publish you, because I don’t seem to know . . .’

‘You’ve got two books of mine and six agreements to publish them.’

‘Yes? I mean I’m sure we have, of course, I’m awfully sorry I haven’t read your work; we divide it up you see, so not everybody has to read everything.’ She took a
sip of her tea, and added rather hopelessly, ‘Things
get
divided up: that’s why I didn’t know about you.’

He wasn’t used to admissions and began to feel sorry for her. He felt in his pockets for the neat packed-up lump of sugar he’d taken from London Airport. ‘I don’t suppose
they put sugar in that tea. This lump has probably travelled miles in an aeroplane.’ He put it by her cup. ‘Packed against damp, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘It’s very kind of you, but I don’t take sugar, actually.’

‘Don’t you
actually
? Well, I’ll have it back then.’ He wouldn’t have taken it in the first place if he hadn’t particularly liked it. ‘It’s
wonderful the trouble they take nowadays about details: they have a bird’s-eye view of the lot. It all goes with splitting the atom: there’s detail for you, if you don’t look at
the consequences. In the end I expect they’ll freeze people in squares and travel them in paper with the Company’s name on it. Anything might come out of a detail like this.’

She was staring at him, each eye equally amazed.

‘It wasn’t rude,’ he said; ‘your voice is so – orderly – I had to see if I can copy it.’

‘And can you?’

‘And can you?’ he echoed. ‘Not yet, but I will in time.’

‘Time,’ she said, shaking her head as though to empty it. ‘Your money. I’ll have to go downstairs.’ She got up. ‘Do you mind waiting here?’

When she had shut the door (couldn’t she
afford
proper stockings?), he hurried through an examination of everything that lay on her desk. Rather like a teacher’s –
nothing nice, except for a marbled green pencil with wood that smelled good and foreign. He put it in his pocket, turned to the telephone and picked up the receiver. A girl answered it, and when he
said nothing, asked what he wanted.

‘The Tower of London.’

There was a pause, and she said, who was that, and was it a joke.

‘It’s on the River Thames and no joke. This is the Head Beefeater. I’ve written a book about the Life of a Beefeater, so naturally I’m here and it stands to reason I want
to speak to them.’

‘Want to speak to who?’

‘Any other old Beefeater you can knock up. Hurry, my dear, or they may become extinct.’

There was another pause, and then she said: ‘It still sounds funny to me.’

Trying to copy Emma, he said:

‘In a job like yours you should be grateful for entertainment of any kind.’

‘Replace your receiver: I’ll call you when I’m through to them.’ Her voice sounded icy, but beaten, and he put back the receiver grinning. Real green penguin dialogue
that – quite a job to shift it into actual life. Actually, actually, euacherley – he couldn’t get it dead like her. He’d never been able to conduct his telephoning sitting
down before – he only used telephone boxes for some fun, like other people used squibs.

She was a long time. But then,
he
wouldn’t cough up a sum like fifty pounds in a hurry. He took a sheet of paper, got the green pencil out of his pocket and wrote: ‘“Is
anybody there?” said the Traveller.’ ‘The shadow of an ordinary man’ (
Alfred
– to the shadow). There was a pause while he digested his dislike of that jumped-up
little cock-of-the-concrete-roost: then he wrote ‘Journeys end with lovers meeting’, ‘So come into the garden Maud’, and put it on the table where she would see it. That
would show her he knew a thing or two. Just as he was wondering if he couldn’t have done better at this game if he gave it a bit more thought, she came back, and glided round him to her
chair.

‘Sorry if I seemed a long time. I had to go down to Accounts.’ She handed him an envelope.

‘Here – what’s this?’ It felt suspiciously thin, and he opened it. A single piece of paper, with printing and writing – some sort of money order – not a bit
what he had in mind, but before he could think of how to deal with this piece of crooked dealing, the telephone rang, and he watched her face change from attention to mystery and then suspicion as
she listened to whatever was being said. Finally, and with dangerous sweetness, she said:

‘Mr Brick, I think this call is being made at your request. Which department of the Tower of London do you want, because they all have different telephone numbers?’

He felt himself getting hotter under the collar and tried to outstare her:
she
wasn’t one to see a joke, and with all this gap he’d lost his taste for it.

‘Me? How could that be?
I
don’t know anyone at the Tower of London: I don’t come from this town at all.’ He coughed, on purpose, and then couldn’t stop.
‘Excuse me –’

By the time he had managed to stop, she had finished with the telephone and was staring at him and looking so anxious he had to smile. He rubbed the sweat off his forehead and said:
‘It’s all right. I expect with all the books you read you get fancy ideas about TB; well, I have the laugh on you there. Have you by any chance got a nice strong peppermint
handy?’

She jerked open a drawer and hunted about.

‘Only fudge, I’m afraid.’ She held out a battered paper bag. ‘It’s coffee.’

‘Kept it too long, haven’t you?’

‘It’s home-made,’ she answered stiffly.

‘It looks like furry sand.’ He put a piece in the side of his mouth and waited for the scalding, salt taste to settle down his throat. ‘See here. About this.’ He waved
the piece of paper.

‘It’s a cheque, made out to you for fifty pounds. Isn’t that what you wanted?’

‘It’s not what I came for.’ He had begun to feel both angry and frightened: he didn’t like girls having the upper hand about life and he’d never seen a cheque
before – how was he supposed to know what to do with it?

Suddenly, she smiled, for the first time, and he felt that there was something somewhere the same about them: this made the difference enjoyable and mysterious. She was younger than he – a
London girl who worked indoors with books and money . . .

‘If you can wait until my lunch hour, I’ll come out with you and we’ll cash it. That is, if you’ve got time?’

‘I’ve got time.’

‘If you like, we could get a hundred ten shilling notes.’

He looked at her sharply, but she just wanted to please – she wasn’t making fun of him.

‘Are you lunching with anybody?’

He shook his head.

‘Because I’m allowed to take our authors out to lunch sometimes. It’s lovely for me, because then I get a much better lunch. We could go to the bank afterwards.’

‘All right. I’d be pleased to.’ He noticed how, when she seemed unsure of herself, she used the same word twice: she must have done this before, or he wouldn’t be
noticing it now . . .

‘Would you like something to read?’ She was indicating the dusty shelves crammed with books which were sooty and warped, and made him think of prunes laid out to dry.

‘I’m not much of a reading man.’ But he got up obediently to look for something while she started writing. He ought to have been feeling rather fine: fifty pounds for the
asking and a meal thrown in
and
a girl of a kind he’d not ever had much to do with, but he had begun to suffer from the sense of shock which nearly always follows an escape from
something: the alternative to this cheerful situation blared in his mind. Supposing he had just got the fifty pounds? Supposing he hadn’t even got that? The day outside was the same, and,
like it or not, it was one of his days, to be followed by a chain of others which bound him to his life. At the moment they presented an enormous void, marked only by daylight and street lamps.
What was the point of money – of this great place where he knew no one? He hadn’t just been thinking of Dot – he’d been clinging to her. The damage of two years in a
hospital in a cocoon of weakness and irresponsibility, wrapped in events over which he had no control, was suddenly manifest. ‘It’s not what happens, it’s when you realize
it.’ All that time he had lived within the prescribed goal: this would be good for you, this would be bad, this was something you had to be careful about. Eat well, don’t smoke, and a
fuck was equal to a five-mile walk. That had all been on the landslide of being able to take one’s body for granted, when one was still rejoicing in the extreme, merciful difference, when one
could remember exactly what it had been like to be just a hulk of pain – agony smudged by drugs – complaining, trying to joke, crying because one was ashamed of having complained,
sullen because one had been weak enough to cry – no days and nights then, just time with no size or shape to it – the occasional sparks of gratitude when their kindness reached him, the
nightmare troughs when they seemed to be urging him to move, to drink, to do anything which seemed beyond his bounds of endurance . . . He was sweating from the memory. Occupational therapy –
that was how he’d started writing – a psychological accident – surely not how most people started to do such a thing; and this jolted him back to his present, these few hours of
sitting in her office with her, having a meal somewhere posh and going to the bank – it was like the last bit of ground, the overhang of a cliff over nothing: ‘Good-bye,’ she
would say, ‘pleased to have met you’; no, that was like Alfred, although he never was pleased to have met anybody, but she’d say something, and then disappear back into the
orderly privileged life she looked as though she had.

When he turned round to her, he found that she was already regarding him: was neither writing nor reading. Surprise at this, and some idea of his own dilemma, provoked him into asking:

‘What do writers
do
? When they’re not writing, I mean. How do they spend the rest of their lives?’

‘It depends whether they’re rich or poor. Most of them have some sort of work.’

‘What sort of work?’

‘Oh – a lot of them have literary fringe activities. Some of the women have houses and children and things like that.’

‘I’m not a woman,’ he said sternly.

She didn’t smile – just said: ‘Do you mean what do I think
you
ought to do?’

‘I mean what
is
there?’

‘Oh. Well – what did you do before you started writing?’

‘I was brought up as a boatman.’

‘A boatman?’

‘Have you ever heard of Fellows, Morton and Clayton?’

She shook her head. She didn’t know everything, then.

‘Well they were the biggest canal carrying company. My Dad worked for them. The whole family worked for them.’

‘Do you mean like Painted Boats and Emma Smith?’

‘I don’t mean for a lark in an emergency: I mean it was our life – my Dad; his Dad and on back – before engines when they had Number Ones and mules, before railways when
everone needed the boats. That’s all history; I’m talking about this day.’