Dark Places (4 page)

And it had been with a sticky pocket of my Norfolk jacket full of fluff-covered humbugs that I had been frightened in Roden Street by an odorous skinny woman. ‘Boy!' she called hoarsely from across the street, and made to cross, so that I popped another humbug in my mouth for reassurance and walked faster. There she was, though, blocking the pavement in front of me now, inescapable, with a bony pointing finger and a glittering eye. ‘Boy!' she cried in a hoarse voice like a bird. ‘Stop, boy!' I thought of feigning deafness, but I had already flinched from her cry, and those glittery eyes had seen me hear her. I thought of feigning being foreign, and bamboozling her with some Greek, but with my mouth full of humbug I could not have done that. I thought of turning and fleeing from her crooked bony finger, but I was stuck to the pavement, and could not make myself move.

She was a wild-eyed woman with thin strands of hair falling down the sides of her face, and her skin was grey, her eyes set in dark rings, her lips the colour of a bruise; she was so skinny under her rag of a dress, and a rag of a shawl, she was like a bundle of rubbishy bits of stick; and against her she held a bundle that was a baby, of a nasty putty-colour, with lumps of hair stuck to its otherwise-bald head. ‘Boy! Look!' she cried, and came closer, thrusting back the rags around the baby so I could see its face, wizened and pasty, and smell a smell of sour milk and femaleness: a rank, sharp smell of women and hunger.

She released me from her eyes and yelled something across the street, and I thought for a moment that she had already despaired of me and had found a new victim, but then I saw two tattered children run, all ungainly, across from a doorway and stand beside her with their feet bare and their ankles covered with scabs—had the sand-flies got them on a picnic, the way they had got Kristabel once?

‘Boy, we are hungry, look, these are starving away to nothin, see,' the woman cried in her hoarse voice, not like a woman's, ‘and my milk for the bub here is all gone,' and her hands grasped at the opening of her bodice so I thought she was going to expose her titties to me, but she did not. ‘We are hard-working and God-fearing Christians, boy, but we cannot manage in these hard times now when there is not work to be had.'

The humbug filled my mouth and I felt my spittle gathering in my cheeks, for I could not swallow, I was almost gagging, looking at these unpleasing and crusted beings. I felt how my cheeks puffed and popped with my humbug, I felt how the folds of fat around my neck glistened, I felt how the red blood surged under my skin, and I was ashamed.

How I loathed them in my shame, and wished for the pavement to open under them, and make them vanish! I thought to give them what I had, all my humbugs and the half-crown and two threepences in my pants pocket, to make them disappear and leave me alone with my full stomach, but I thought then that if I gave them all I had they would not disappear, but follow me. I pictured them trailing after me all the way home, with the woman's rough voice slicing my flesh with her words, and the silent children trudging, staring at my large buttocks moving up and down under the Norfolk jacket. They might stay then, sitting on the front steps or across the road, the woman's voice coming in at the windows as we sat down to our saddle of lamb, Mother and Father looking at me as a fool for bringing them home with me.

But the woman's hand, shaking, was stretched out, almost touching one of my buttons, and she would not let me go now. I could not seem to turn away from her tight-stretched grey face, and could not have pushed past, for I could not touch that papery skin, those dingy bits of fabric, and I feared to touch the human body and soul within.

Their eyes all watched like small animals as I felt in my pockets and came up with my fists full: humbugs in one hand and coins in the other. Their eyes were not on my face now, but on those fists, and I flung them open over their heads so there was a clattering and tinkling on the pavement, and they all dived on them, sprawling over themselves to grab and scrabble. While they clawed on the ground, I ran, straining against my clothes, bursting at the underarms of my jacket, feeling my chest tighten and my breath grow reedy, until I was safely home.

‘Why have you been running, Albion?' Mother wanted to know, coming out from the drawing-room all cool and smooth. ‘Have you been fighting again, Albion?' In Mother's cool fragrant presence, ravenous-eyed women seemed a blasphemy. I felt shame at even having such images in my mind; they were like a shameful bodily function. All words stuck in my throat, and I could not tell my serene mother that I had been ashamed, and afraid, and nearly sick with some feeling or other, and that the world had toppled from its tidy axis for a few minutes.

But the image of that woman nagged at my mind, and ranged itself with the shuffling men lining up outside the church, and sitting along the gutter with their boots in the mud, chewing slabs of bread.

I thought long and frowning over the idea of hunger, and decided to forgo my elevenses one morning so that by dinner-time I would know what it meant to be hungry. Under my jacket my stomach made petulant sounds, and there was a shaky sensation around my fat middle, and my mouth tasted of pennies, and I could not concentrate, and broke one of the masts of my best brig. I was glad, then, when I heard Manning hit the gong, and I could go down to the dining-room. That was hunger, then!

But, as I ate through my plate of cold tongue with pickle, and my slice of cold pie, and my pile of bread-and-butter, and my glass of milk, I wondered. There was always food. I knew that some kinds of food cost more than others, of course, but there was always bread, there were always eggs and milk, and after all potatoes grew right there in the dirt: there was always food.

I thought, then, to try to enquire of Father, in a man-to-man way, whether it was true that a person, or a woman, could be hungry, actually have nothing to eat, when, as I had established, there was any amount of food bursting out of the ground and being extruded from fowls and cows. As far as Father was concerned I was interested in an abstract question of political economy, and he was pleased to see me taking an interest at last.

‘That is true, Albion,' Father agreed when I asked him at the end of breakfast the next day. Kristabel and Mother had left the table—I did not want them listening and exchanging glances across me—and Father seemed in a jocular frame of mind, having impaled his kidney on his fork and made some remark in Latin at which I smirked uneasily, trying to convey simultaneously that I understood but had no further comment to make. Now he chewed the kidney, nodding approvingly. ‘That is all absolutely true, my boy, and it does you credit that you are considering such problems.' I swelled with pride: Father did not often find much to praise me for.

‘It does you credit, Albion,' Father said, ‘but consider this: what is it that causes a farmer to grow more potatoes than he needs himself ? It is that others will pay him money for his excess, and with that money he will purchase, say, a pair of boots he cannot make for himself.' I nodded, I followed, and was even beginning to guess the next stage in the argument, when he continued. ‘So you see, Albion, it would not work simply to give away the food, no one would bother to grow it.'

He looked searchingly at me, so I nodded, ‘Yes, Father, I understand,' and tried not to blush at the memory of the humbugs and threepences tossed into the air, for that was the wrong thing to have done, it seemed: I should not simply have given them away.

But there was another part of the problem which I was trying to get clear in my mind. ‘So,' I said, cautiously, unwilling to have Father think me a fool after such a promising start to this discussion, ‘so, Father, there are people without the money to buy the food?' I was tentative, afraid his interested look would fade and he would dismiss me from his mind as a dolt: I knew Father's opinion of my brains was not high, so I had to go carefully, but he was listening blandly. ‘Yes, Albion,' he said patiently. ‘That is so,' and waited for my next question.

‘Why do they have no money, Father?' I said, blurted rather, for I was ashamed of the nakedness of my question. ‘They have no money because they cannot find work, Albion,' Father said, still patient, but I saw his finger begin to probe towards his fob-pocket for his watch, and I tried to be quick, before he lost interest altogether. ‘Why cannot they find work, Father?' Father was pulling the watch out now and laying it on his palm as he spoke. ‘They cannot find work because they ask too much for their labour,' he said, opening the watch and looking at the time. ‘
Tempus fugit
, Albion,' he said, and slipped his watch away, and I thought I would not get to the bottom of my problem after all.

But as he stood and buttoned his jacket, Father said, in quite a kindly way, so that I felt less doltish, ‘You see, Albion, when they ask for wages that are too high, business cannot afford to employ them, so they cannot find work. When they ask for lower wages, business will find it profitable again to employ them, they will find work, they will have money, they will buy food, and all will be again as it ought be. Do you see, Albion?' and, as he was leaving the room, I rushed to follow him. ‘Oh yes, Father, I understand perfectly, thank you, I see it all now,' I gushed, but Father had rung for Manning to fetch his hat and gloves, and was no longer listening, so I went away to my room to consider the beautiful logic of what he had told me.

I hoped never again to have an encounter such as I had suffered with my mouth full of humbug, but I also wished to rush out and find that woman with her accusing eyes, and explain the inexorable and impersonal logic of it all to her, and show her the way in which the answer to her problem was in her own hands.

Four

AS A YOUNG MAN of good prospects approaching manhood, one who was now starting to grow into his fat, and one who finally seemed to have outgrown the shameful asthma, certain social events began to be expected of me when I was home from school for the holidays: afternoon teas, mainly, with charades, and a game on the lawn later. Here I was expected to deal with the sisters, cousins, sisters' friends, and sisters' friends' cousins, of the boys who were at school with me. Reluctantly, and only because there was no choice, I went with Kristabel and sat in various drawing-rooms.

At home, Kristabel was always a square peg failing to fit a round hole: Mother longed for a dainty flouncy type of daughter, and although she and Kristabel made the best of it among the quilting and the tatting, Kristabel was never going to be that sort of daughter. But in other people's drawing-rooms, Kristabel blossomed, and her sharp remarks made people laugh, so she did not mind these afternoons. ‘Oh, at least it is a chance to get out of that everlasting house!' she told me.

But I dreaded the visiting. I was awkward, all fumbles and spills taking my tea, tipping the biscuits off their silly little tray—the sort of biscuits, I discovered too late, that shattered into many crumbs around one's boots. I did not quite know what to do with my hands, or my cup of tea on these occasions. I watched myself leaning on things stiffly, trying to look relaxed as the others did: I tried getting my hands out of the way in my pockets, and found them bunching into fists in the darkness there, so I took them out again; I tried crossing my arms, or sitting down and crossing my legs, but whatever I did my body seemed all thumbs.

I watched Davis, who seemed to have been doing this all his life. Davis was a dab hand with a cricket bat and had a hank of pale hair that hung over one eye. This hank of hair, or something about the way he stood and smiled, drove the cousins and sisters into a frenzy: they positively shouted each other down, all speaking at once to attract his attention with some saucy remark or other. They had not seen him, as I had, picking his nose in Religious Instruction, and flicking the snot across the room at the Map of the World.

My trouble was females seemed a race apart: human, I imagined, but not human in the way I myself was human. It was the plumage of a different species, the way their hair looped, folded, curled and fell; I could not understand how there could be any room for their organs of digestion within their tiny stiff waists; and although I had secretively studied various marble breasts, half-covered with marble drapery, on display in the Gardens, they had not been deeply informative. I could not imagine what bulges and ledges of flesh might be underneath the bodices of these sisters and friends of sisters.

Quite apart from the physical differences, there were others, even less comprehensible. How were the minds of these girls constructed, so they could keep up their trilling and exclaiming, and did not need to have anything of significance to say before they spoke? I could never have sparkled and tinkled to try to draw a smile from a young man scowling with shyness. I could not possibly have pretended all the phobias of which I learned: of spiders, of sunlight, of large birds, of tea gone cold, of draughts, and of yellow and green worn together. These girls did not laugh aloud when I committed some gaffe or other, only soothed and wiped up my slopped tea with a cloth, but I was abashed and found it easy to be surly. It was all too easy to imagine them tittering together about
poor old Albion
when I left the room; and was not all that soothing and mopping almost too solicitous: was it even possible that there was an element of parody?

Faces grew solemn when I joined a group of muslins and boaters, chat grew thin and lifeless, boys stopped doing droll things with their ties, and the laughter of the muslins faded. Silence grew like fungus around my facts when I brought them out and displayed them to these others. They nodded, they made sounds of appreciation behind their lips, but I saw their eyes growing distant and beginning to slide sideways over my shoulder as if someone might be approaching who urgently needed to be spoken to.

It was never long before I found myself no longer part of a large group, but part of a small group, one of three, or even two, edging away mentioning cups of tea. In a group I found myself watching faces carefully, like a deaf person, trying to work out what the joke was about Jocelyn's show pony. I suspected that it was not a horse they were speaking of, though I did not know what else a show pony might be. But everyone was laughing, so I laughed too, and hoped no one would ask me what was funny.