Essential Stories (10 page)

“I always fall on my feet,” he said, “like I done with you.” It was his refrain.

The winter dripped like a tap, the fog hardly left our hill. Winter in England has the colourless, steaming look of a fried-fish shop-window. But we were stoking huge fires, we bunkered, the garden spade went through coal by the hundredweight. We began to talk a more tangy dialect. Things were not put away; they were “stowed.” String appeared in strange knots to make things “fast,” plants were “lashed” in the dying garden, washing was “hoist” on the lines, floors were “swabbed.” The kitchen became the “galley.” The postman came “alongside,” all meals were “piped” and at bedtime we “piped down.” At night, hearing the wind bump in the chimneys and slop like ocean surf in the woods, looking out at the leather darkness, I had the sensation that we were creeping down the Mersey in a fog or lumping about in the Atlantic swell off Ushant.

I was happy. But was Thompson happy? He seemed to be. In the mornings we were both working, but in the afternoons there was little more to do. He sat on a low chair with his knees close to the bars of the range or on the edge of his bed, darning his clothes. (He lived in a peculiar muddle of his own and he was dirty in his own quarters.) In the evenings he did the same and sometimes we talked. He told me about his life. There was nothing in it at all. It was buried under a mumble of obscurity. His memories were mainly of people who hadn’t “behaved right,” a dejecting moral wilderness with Thompson mooching about in it, disappointed with human nature. He didn’t stay to talk with me much. He preferred the kitchen where, the oil-lamp smoking, the range smoking and himself smoking, he sat chewing it all over, gazing into the fire.

“You can go out, you know,” I said, “whenever you want. Do what you like.”

“I’m OK,” he said.

“See some of the people,” I said. Thompson said he’d just as lief stand by.

Everyone knows his own business best. But I was interested one night when I heard the sound of voices in the kitchen. Someone had come in. The voices went on on other nights. Who was it? The milker from the farm probably or the cowman who cleaned out cess pits by lantern light at night and talked with nostalgia about burying bodies during the war. “If there hadn’t been a war,” this man used to say, “I wouldn’t have seen nothing. It was an education.”

I listened. Slow in question, slow in answer, the monotonous voices came. The woodcutter, the postman? I went into the kitchen to see who the profound and interminable crony was.

There was no one. There was only Thompson in the kitchen. Sitting close to the fire with all windows closed, a sallow, stupefied, oil-haired head in his own fug, Thompson was spelling out a story from a
Wild West Magazine.
It was old and dirty and his coal-blackened finger was moving from word to word.

So far Thompson had refused to go out of the house except as far as the coal-shed, but I was determined after this discovery that he should go out. I waited until pay-day.

“Here’s your money,” I said. “Take the afternoon off.”

Thompson stepped back from the money.

“You keep it,” he said, in a panic. “You keep it for me.”

“You may need it,” I said. “For a glass of beer or cigarettes or something.”

“If I have it I’ll lose it,” he said. “They’ll pinch it.”

“Who?” I said.

“People,” Thompson said. I could not persuade him.

“All right, I’ll keep it for you,” I said.

“Yes,” he said eagerly. “If I want a bob I’ll ask you. Money’s temptation,” he said.

“Well, anyway,” I said, “take the afternoon off. It’s the first sunny afternoon we’ve had. I’ll tell you where to go. Turn to the right in the lane . . .”

“I don’t like them lanes,” said Thompson, looking suspiciously out of the window. “I’ll stay by you.”

“Well, take a couple of hours,” I said. “We all need fresh air.”

He looked at me as if I had suggested he should poison himself; indeed as if I were going to do the poisoning.

“What if I do an hour?” he began to bargain.

“No, the afternoon,” I said.

“Do you half an hour?” he pleaded.

“All right, I don’t want to force you,” I said. “This is a free country. Go for an hour.”

It was like an auction.

“Tell you what,” he said, looking shifty. “I’ll do you twenty minutes.” He thought he had tricked me, but I went back into the kitchen and drove him to it. I had given him an overcoat and shoes, and it was this appeal to his vanity which got him. Out he went for his twenty minutes. He was going straight down the lane to where it met the main road and then straight back; it would take a smart walker about twelve minutes on a winter’s day.

When an hour passed I was pleased with myself. But when four hours had gone by and darkness came I began to wonder. I went out to the gate. The land and the night had become one thing. I had just gone in again when I heard loud voices and saw the swing of a lamp. There came Thompson with a labourer. The labourer, a little bandy man known as Fleas, stood like a bent bush with a sodden sack on his shoulders, snuffling in the darkness, and he grinned at me with the malevolence of the land.

“He got astray,” he said, handing Thompson over.

“Gawd,” exclaimed Thompson, exhausted. His face was the familiar pale suety agony. He was full of explanations. He was sweating like a scared horse and nearly hysterical. He’d been on the wrong course. He didn’t know where to steer. One thing looked like another. Roads and lanes, woods and fields, mixed themselves together.

“Woods I seen,” he said in horror. “And that common! It played me up proper.”

“But you weren’t anywhere near the common,” I said.

“Then what was it?” he said.

That night he sat by the fire with his head in his hands.

“I got a mood,” he said.

The next morning cigarette smoke blew past my window and I heard coughing. The Colonel’s daughter was at the kitchen door talking to Thompson. “Cheero,” I heard her say and then she came to my door and pushed it open. She stood there gravely and her eye winked. She was wearing a yellow jersey and looked as neat as a bird.

“You’re a swine,” she said.

“What have I done?”

“Raping women on the commons,” she said. “Deserting your old friends, aren’t you?”

“It’s been too wet on the common,” I said.

“Not for me,” she said. “I’m always hopeful. I came across last night. There was the Minister’s wife screaming in the middle of it. I sat on her head and calmed her down and she said a man had been chasing her. ‘Stop screaming,’ I said. ‘You flatter yourself, dear.’ It was getting dark and I carried her shopping-bag and umbrella for her and took her to her house. I often go and see her in the evenings. I’ve got to do something, haven’t I? I can’t stick alone in that bungalow all day and all night. We sit and talk about her son in China. When you’re old you’ll be lonely too.”

“What happened on the common?”

“I think I’m drunk,” said the Colonel’s daughter, “but I believe I’ve been drunk since breakfast. Well, where was I? I’m losing my memory too. Well, we hadn’t gone five minutes before I heard someone panting like a dog behind us and jumping over bushes. Old Mrs. Stour started screaming again. ‘Stand still,’ I said, and I looked and then a man came out of a tree about ten yards away. ‘What the hell do you want?’ I said. A noise came back like a sheep. ‘Ma’am, ma’am, ma’am, ma’am,’ it said.”

“So that’s where Thompson was,” I said.

“I thought it was you,” the Colonel’s daughter said. “ ‘There’s a woman set about me with a stick on the common,’ he said. ‘I didn’t touch her, I was only following her,’ he said. ‘I reckoned if I followed her I’d get home.’ ”

When they got to the wood Thompson wouldn’t go into it and she had to take his hand; that was a mistake. He took his hand away and moved off. So she grabbed his coat. He struggled after this, she chased him into the thicket and told him not to be a fool, but he got away and disappeared, running on to the common.

“You’re a damn swine,” the Colonel’s daughter said to me. “How would you like to be put down in the middle of the sea?”

She walked away. I watched her go up the path and lean on the gate opposite to stroke the nose of a horse. She climbed into the field and the horses, like hairy yokels, went off. I heard her calling them but they did not come.

When she was out of sight, the door opened behind me and Thompson came in.

“Beg pardon, sir,” he said. “That young lady, sir. She’s been round my kitchen door.”

“Yes,” I said.

He gaped at me and then burst out:

“I didn’t touch her, straight I didn’t. I didn’t lay a finger on her.”

“She didn’t say you did. She was trying to help you.”

He calmed down. “Yes, sir,” he said.

When he came back into the room to lay the table I could see he was trying to catch my eye.

“Sir,” he said at last, standing at attention. “Beg pardon, sir, the young lady . . .”

His mouth was opening and shutting, trying to shape a sentence.

“The young lady—she’d had a couple, sir,” he said in a rush.

“Oh,” I said, “don’t worry about that. She often has.”

“It’s ruination, sir,” said Thompson evangelically.

She did not come to the house again for many days, but when she came I heard him lock both kitchen doors.

Orders at the one extreme, temptation at the other, were the good and evil of Thompson’s life. I no longer suggested that he went out. I invented errands and ordered him to go. I wanted, in that unfortunate way one has, to do good to Thompson. I wanted him to be free and happy. At first he saw that I was not used to giving orders and he tried to dodge. His ulcers were bad, he said. Once or twice he went about barefoot, saying the sole was off one of his boots. But when he saw I meant what I said, he went. I used to watch him go, tilted forward on his toes in his half-running walk, like someone throwing himself blindly upon the mercy of the world. When he came back he was excited. He had the look of someone stupefied by incomprehensible success. It is the feeling a landsman has when he steps off a boat after a voyage. You feel giddy, canny, surprised at your survival after crossing that bridge of deep, loose water. You boast. So did Thompson— morally.

“There was a couple of tramps on the road,” Thompson said. “I steered clear. I never talked to them,” he said.

“Someone asked me who I was working for.” He described the man. “I never told him,” he said shrewdly. “I just said ‘A gentleman.’ Meaning you,” he said.

There was a man in an allotment who had asked him for a light and wanted to know his business.

“I told him I didn’t smoke,” said Thompson. “You see my meaning— you don’t know what it’s leading up to. There warn’t no harm, but that’s how temptation starts.”

What was temptation? Almost everything was temptation to Thompson. Pubs, cinemas, allotments, chicken-runs, tobacconists—in these, everywhere, the tempter might be. Temptation, like Othello’s jealousy, was the air itself.

“I expect you’d like to go to church,” I said. He seemed that kind.

“I got nothing
against
religion,” Thompson said. “But best keep clear. They see you in church and the next thing they’re after you.”

“Who?” I asked.

“People,” he said. “It’s not like a ship.”

I was like him, he said, I kept myself to myself. I kept out of temptation’s way. He was glad I was like that, he said.

It was a shock to me that while I observed Thompson, Thompson observed me. At the same time one prides oneself, the moment one’s character is defined by someone else, on defeating the definition. I kept myself to myself? I avoided temptation? That was all Thompson knew! There was the Colonel’s daughter. I might not see her very often; she might be loud, likeable, dreary or alarming by turns, but she was Temptation itself. How did he know I wasn’t tempted? Thompson’s remark made me thrill. I began to see rather more of the Colonel’s daughter.

And so I discovered how misleading he had been about his habits and how, where temptation was concerned, he made a difference between profession and practice. So strong was Thompson’s feeling about temptation that he was drawn at once to every tempter he saw. He stopped them on the road and was soon talking about it. The postman was told. The shopkeepers heard all his business and mine. He hurried after tramps, he detained cyclists, he sat down on the banks with roadmakers and ditchers, telling them the dangers of drink, the caution to be kept before strangers. And after he had done this he always ended by telling them he kept himself to himself, avoided drink, ignored women and, patting his breast pocket, said that was where he kept his money and his papers. He behaved to them exactly as he had behaved with me two months before in the Euston Road. The Colonel’s daughter told me. She picked up all the news in that district.

“He’s a decent, friendly soul,” muttered the Colonel’s daughter thickly. “You’re a prig. Keep your hair on. You can’t help it. I expect you’re decent, too, but you’re like all my bloody so-called friends.”

“Oh,” I said hopefully, “are prigs your special line?”

I found out, too, why Thompson was always late when he came home from his errands. I had always accepted that he was lost. And so he was in a way, but he was lost through wandering about with people, following them to their doorsteps, drifting to their allotments, back-yards and, all the time, telling them, as he clung to their company, about the dangers of human intercourse. “I never speak to nobody”— it was untrue, but it was not a lie. It was simply a delusion.

“He lives in two worlds at once,” I said to the Colonel’s daughter one morning. I had sent Thompson to the town to buy the usual chops, and I was sitting in her bungalow. This was the first time I had ever been in it. The walls were of varnished match-boarding like the inside of a gospel hall and the room was heated by a paraffin stove which smelled like armpits. There were two rexine covered chairs, a rug and a table in the room. She was sorting out gramophone records as I talked and the records she did not like she dropped to the floor and broke. She was listening very little to what I said but walked to the gramophone, put on a record, stopped it after a few turns and then, switching it off, threw the record away.