Essential Stories (14 page)

“We may have to duck a bit, that’s all,” I said.

“Oh, I can push the branches up,” said Mr. Timberlake.

“It is better to duck,” I said.

We were gliding now quickly towards the arch, in fact I was already under it.

“I think I should duck,” I said. “Just bend down for this one.”

“What makes the trees lean over the water like this?” asked Mr. Timberlake. “Weeping willows—I’ll give you a thought there. How Error likes to make us dwell on sorrow. Why not call them
laughing
willows?” discoursed Mr. Timberlake as the branch passed over my head.

“Duck,” I said.

“Where? I don’t see them,” said Mr. Timberlake turning round.

“No, your head,” I said. “The branch,” I called.

“Oh, the branch. This one?” said Mr. Timberlake finding a branch just against his chest and he put out a hand to lift it. It is not easy to lift a willow branch and Mr. Timberlake was surprised. He stepped back as it gently and firmly leaned against him. He leaned back and pushed from his feet. And he pushed too far. The boat went on, I saw Mr. Timberlake’s boots leave the stern as he took an unthoughtful step backwards. He made a last minute grasp at a stronger and higher branch, and then, there he hung a yard above the water, round as a blue damson that is ripe and ready, waiting only for a touch to make it fall. Too late with the paddle and shot ahead by the force of his thrust, I could not save him.

For a full minute I did not believe what I saw; indeed our religion taught us never to believe what we saw. Unbelieving I could not move. I gaped. The impossible had happened. Only a miracle, I found myself saying, could save him.

What was most striking was the silence of Mr. Timberlake as he hung from the tree. I was lost between gazing at him and trying to get the punt out of the small branches of the tree. By the time I had got the punt out there were several yards of water between us and the soles of his boots were very near the water as the branch bent under his weight. Boats were passing at the time but no one seemed to notice us. I was glad about this. This was a private agony. A double chin had appeared on the face of Mr. Timberlake and his head was squeezed between his shoulders and his hanging arms. I saw him blink and look up at the sky. His eyelids were pale like a chicken’s. He was tidy and dignified as he hung there, the hat was not displaced and the top button of his coat was done up. He had a blue silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. So unperturbed and genteel he seemed that as the tips of his shoes came nearer and nearer to the water, I became alarmed. He could perform what are called miracles. He would be thinking at this moment that only in an erroneous and illusory sense was he hanging from the branch of the tree over six feet of water. He was probably praying one of the closely reasoned prayers of our faith which were more like conversations with Euclid than appeals to God. The calm of his face suggested this. Was he, I asked myself, within sight of the main road, the town Recreation Ground and the landing-stage crowded with people, was he about to re-enact a well-known miracle? I hoped that he was not. I prayed that he was not. I prayed with all my will that Mr. Timberlake would not walk upon the water. It was my prayer and not his that was answered.

I saw the shoes dip, the water rise above his ankles and up his socks. He tried to move his grip now to a yet higher branch—he did not succeed—and in making this effort his coat and waistcoat rose and parted from his trousers. One seam of shirt with its pant-loops and brace-tabs broke like a crack across the middle of Mr. Timberlake. It was like a fatal flaw in a statue, an earthquake crack which made the monumental mortal. The last Greeks must have felt as I felt then, when they saw a crack across the middle of some statue of Apollo. It was at this moment I realised that the final revelation about man and society on earth had come to nobody and that Mr. Timberlake knew nothing at all about the origin of evil.

All this takes long to describe, but it happened in a few seconds as I paddled towards him. I was too late to get his feet on the boat and the only thing to do was to let him sink until his hands were nearer the level of the punt and then to get him to change hand-holds. Then I would paddle him ashore. I did this. Amputated by the water, first a torso, then a bust, then a mere head and shoulders, Mr. Timberlake, I noticed, looked sad and lonely as he sank. He was a declining dogma. As the water lapped his collar—for he hesitated to let go of the branch to hold the punt—I saw a small triangle of deprecation and pathos between his nose and the corners of his mouth. The head resting on the platter of water had the sneer of calamity on it, such as one sees in the pictures of a beheaded saint.

“Hold on to the punt, Mr. Timberlake,” I said urgently. “Hold on to the punt.”

He did so.

“Push from behind,” he directed in a dry businesslike voice. They were his first words. I obeyed him. Carefully I paddled him towards the bank. He turned and, with a splash, climbed ashore. There he stood, raising his arms and looking at the water running down his swollen suit and making a puddle at his feet.

“Say,” said Mr. Timberlake coldly, “we let some Error in that time.”

How much he must have hated our family.

“I am sorry, Mr. Timberlake,” I said. “I am most awfully sorry. I should have paddled. It was my fault. I’ll get you home at once. Let me wring out your coat and waistcoat. You’ll catch your death . . .”

I stopped. I had nearly blasphemed. I had nearly suggested that Mr. Timberlake had fallen into the water and that to a man of his age this might be dangerous.

Mr. Timberlake corrected me. His voice was impersonal, addressing the laws of human existence, rather than myself.

“If God made water it would be ridiculous to suggest He made it capable of harming his creatures. Wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” I murmured hypocritically.

“OK,” said Mr. Timberlake. “Let’s go.”

“I’ll soon get you across,” I said.

“No,” he said. “I mean let’s go on. We’re not going to let a little thing like this spoil a beautiful afternoon. Where were we going? You spoke of a pretty landing-place farther on. Let’s go there.”

“But I must take you home. You can’t sit there soaked to the skin. It will spoil your clothes.”

“Now, now,” said Mr. Timberlake. “Do as I say. Go on.”

There was nothing to be done with him. I held the punt into the bank and he stepped in. He sat like a bursting and sodden bolster in front of me while I paddled. We had lost the pole of course.

For a long time I could hardly look at Mr. Timberlake. He was taking the line that nothing had happened and this put me at a disadvantage. I knew something considerable had happened. That glaze, which so many of the members of our sect had on their faces and persons, their minds and manners, had been washed off. There was no gleam for me from Mr. Timberlake.

“What’s the house over there?” he asked. He was making conversation. I had steered into the middle of the river to get him into the strong sun. I saw steam rise from him.

I took courage and studied him. He was a man, I realised, in poor physical condition, unexercised and sedentary. Now the gleam had left him one saw the veined empurpled skin of the stoutish man with a poor heart. I remembered he had said at lunch:

“A young woman I know said, ‘Isn’t it wonderful. I can walk thirty miles in a day without being in the least tired.’ I said, ‘I don’t see that bodily indulgence is anything a member of the Church of the Last Purification should boast about.’ ”

Yes, there was something flaccid, passive and slack about Mr. Timberlake. Bunched in swollen clothes, he refused to take them off. It occurred to me, as he looked with boredom at the water, the passing boats and the country, that he had not been in the country before. That it was something he had agreed to do but wanted to get over quickly. He was totally uninterested. By his questions—what is that church? Are there any fish in this river? Is that a wireless or a gramophone?—I understood that Mr. Timberlake was formally acknowledging a world he did not live in. It was too interesting, too eventful a world. His spirit, inert and preoccupied, was elsewhere in an eventless and immaterial habitation. He was a dull man, duller than any man I have ever known; but his dullness was a sort of earthly deposit left by a being whose diluted mind was far away in the effervescence of metaphysical matters. There was a slightly pettish look on his face as (to himself, of course) he declared he was not wet and that he would not have a heart attack or catch pneumonia.

Mr. Timberlake spoke little. Sometimes he squeezed water out of his sleeve. He shivered a little. He watched his steam. I had planned when we set out to go up as far as the lock but now the thought of another two miles of this responsibility was too much. I pretended I wanted to go only as far as the bend which we were approaching, where one of the richest buttercup meadows was. I mentioned this to him. He turned and looked with boredom at the field. Slowly we came to the bank.

We tied up the punt and we landed.

“Fine,” said Mr. Timberlake. He stood at the edge of the meadow just as he had stood at the landing-stage—lost, stupefied, uncomprehending.

“Nice to stretch our legs,” I said. I led the way into the deep flowers. So dense were the buttercups there was hardly any green. Presently I sat down. Mr. Timberlake looked at me and sat down also. Then I turned to him with a last try at persuasion. Respectability, I was sure, was his trouble.

“No one will see us,” I said. “This is out of sight of the river. Take off your coat and trousers and wring them out.”

Mr. Timberlake replied firmly:

“I am satisfied to remain as I am.”

“What is this flower?” he asked to change the subject.

“Buttercup,” I said.

“Of course,” he replied.

I could do nothing with him. I lay down full length in the sun; and, observing this and thinking to please me, Mr. Timberlake did the same. He must have supposed that this was what I had come out in the boat to do. It was only human. He had come out with me, I saw, to show me that he was only human.

But as we lay there I saw the steam still rising. I had had enough.

“A bit hot,” I said getting up.

He got up at once.

“Do you want to sit in the shade,” he asked politely.

“No,” I said. “Would you like to?”

“No,” he said. “I was thinking of you.”

“Let’s go back,” I said. We both stood up and I let him pass in front of me. When I looked at him again I stopped dead. Mr. Timberlake was no longer a man in a navy blue suit. He was blue no longer. He was transfigured. He was yellow. He was covered with buttercup pollen, a fine yellow paste of it made by the damp, from head to foot.

“Your suit,” I said.

He looked at it. He raised his thin eyebrows a little, but he did not smile or make any comment.

The man is a saint, I thought. As saintly as any of those gold-leaf figures in the churches of Sicily. Golden he sat in the punt; golden he sat for the next hour as I paddled him down the river. Golden and bored. Golden as we landed at the town and as we walked up the street back to my uncle’s house. There he refused to change his clothes or to sit by a fire. He kept an eye on the time for his train back to London. By no word did he acknowledge the disasters or the beauties of the world. If they were printed upon him, they were printed upon a husk.

Sixteen years have passed since I dropped Mr. Timberlake in the river and since the sight of his pant-loops destroyed my faith. I have not seen him since, and today I heard that he was dead. He was fifty-seven. His mother, a very old lady with whom he had lived all his life, went into his bedroom when he was getting ready for church and found him lying on the floor in his shirt-sleeves. A stiff collar with the tie half inserted was in one hand. Five minutes before, she told the doctor, she had been speaking to him.

The doctor who looked at the heavy body lying on the single bed saw a middle-aged man, wide rather than stout and with an extraordinarily box-like thick-jawed face. He had got fat, my uncle told me, in later years. The heavy liver-coloured cheeks were like the chaps of a hound. Heart disease, it was plain, was the cause of the death of Mr. Timberlake. In death the face was lax, even coarse and degenerate. It was a miracle, the doctor said, that he had lived as long. Any time during the last twenty years the smallest shock might have killed him.

I thought of our afternoon on the river. I thought of him hanging from the tree. I thought of him, indifferent and golden in the meadow. I understood why he had made for himself a protective, sedentary blandness, an automatic smile, a collection of phrases. He kept them on like the coat after his ducking. And I understood why—though I had feared it all the time we were on the river—I understood why he did not talk to me about the origin of evil. He was honest. The ape was with us. The ape that merely followed me was already inside Mr. Timberlake eating out his heart.

THE WHEELBARROW

“Robert,” Miss Freshwater’s niece called down from the window of the dismantled bedroom, “when you have finished that, would you mind coming upstairs a minute? I want you to move a trunk.”

And when Evans waved back from the far side of the rumpled lawn where he was standing by the bonfire, she closed the window to keep out the smoke of slow-burning rubbish—old carpeting, clothes, magazines, papers, boxes—which hung about the waists of the fir trees and blew towards the house. For three days the fire had been burning and Evans, red-armed in his shirt sleeves and sweating along the seams of his brow, was prodding it with a garden fork. A sudden silly tongue of yellow flame wagged out: some inflammable piece of family history— who knew what?—perhaps one of her aunt’s absurd summer hats or a shocking year of her father’s day-dream accountancy was having its last fling. She saw Evans pick up a bit of paper from the outskirts of the fire and read it. What was it? Miss Freshwater’s niece drew back her lips and opened her mouth expectantly. At this stage all family privacy had gone. Thirty, forty, fifty years of life were going up in smoke.

Evans took up the wheelbarrow and swaggered back with it across the lawn towards the house, sometimes tipping it a little to one side to see how the rubber-tyred wheel was running and to admire it. Miss Freshwater’s niece smiled. With his curly black hair, his sun-reddened face and his vacant blue eyes, and the faint white scar or chip on the side of his nose, he looked like some hard-living, hard-bitten doll. “Burn this? This lot to go?” was his cry. He was an impassioned and natural destroyer. She could not have found a better man. “Without you, Robert,” she said on the first day and with real feeling, “I could never have faced it.”

It was pure luck getting him but, lazy, smiling and drifting, she always fell on her feet. She had stepped off the morning train from London at the beginning of the week and had stood on the kerb in the station yard, waiting for one of the two or three taxi drivers who were talking there to take notice of her. Suddenly, Evans drove in fast from the street outside, pulled up beside her, pushed her in and drove off. It was like an abduction. The other taxi drivers shouted at him in the bad language of law-abiding men, but Evans slowly moved his hand up and down, palm downwards, silently and insultingly telling them to shut up and keep their hair on. He looked very pious as he did this. It made her laugh out loud.

“They are manner-less,” he said in a slow, rebuking voice, giving each syllable its clear value as if he were speaking the phrase of a poem. “I am sorry I did not ask you where you want me to take you.”

They were going in the wrong direction and he had to swing round the street. She now saw him glance at her in the mirror and his doll’s eyes quickly changed from shrewd pleasure to vacancy: she was a capture.

“This is not the first time you are here, I suppose?” he said.

“I was born here,” she said. “I haven’t been here for twenty-five years, well perhaps just for a day a few years ago. It has changed. All this building!”

She liked friendly conversations.

They were driving up the long hill out of the town towards her aunt’s house. Once there had been woodland here but now, like a red hard sea flowing in to obliterate her memory, thousands of sharp villas replaced the trees in angular waves.

“Yes,” he said simply. “There is money everywhere.”

The car hummed up the long, concrete hill. The villas gave way to ribbons of shacks and bungalows. The gardens were buzzing with June flowers. He pointed out a bungalow which had a small grocery shop in the lean-to at the side, a yard where a couple of old cars stood, and a petrol pump. That was his place, he said. And then, beyond that, were the latest municipal housing estates built close to the Green which was only half a mile from her aunt’s house. As they passed, she saw a white marquee on the Green and a big, sagging white banner with the words Gospel Mission daubed on it.

“I see the Gospellers still keep it up,” she said. For it was all bad land outside the town, a place for squatters, poor craftsmen, smallholders, little men with little sheds, who in their flinty way had had for generations the habit of breaking out into little religious sects.

“Oh, yes,” said Evans in a soft voice, shocked that she could doubt it. “There are great openings. There is a mighty coming to the Lord. I toil in the vineyard myself. You are Miss Freshwater’s niece?” he said. “She was a toiler too. She was a giantess for the Lord.”

She saw she had been reckless in laughing. She saw she was known. It was as if he had knowingly captured her.

“You don’t come from these parts, do you?” she said.

“I am from Wales,” he said. “I came here from the mines. I ob-ject-ed to the starvation.”

They arrived at the ugly yellow house. It could hardly be seen through the overgrown laurels and fir trees which in some places fingered the dirty windows. He steadied her as she got out for she had put on weight in the last year or so and while she opened her bag to find some money, he walked to the gate and looked in.

“It was left to you in the will, I suppose?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. She was a woman always glad to confide. “I’ve come down to clear up the rubbish before the sale. Do you know anyone here who would give me a hand?”

“There are many,” he pronounced. “They are too handy.” It was like a line from an anthem. He went ahead, opened the gate and led the way in and when she opened the front door, splitting it away from the cobwebs, he went in with her, walking into the stale, sun-yellowed rooms. He looked up the worn carpet of the stairs. He looked at the ceilings, measuring the size of everything.

“It will fetch a high price,” he said in a sorrowful voice and then, looking over her figure like a farmer at the market, in case she might go with the property, he added enthusiasm to his sorrow.

“The highest!” he said. “Does this door go to the back?” She lost him for a while. When she found him he was outside, at the back of the house, looking into sheds. He had opened the door of one that contained gardening tools and there he was, gazing. He was looking at a new green metal wheelbarrow with a red wheel and a rubber tyre and he had even pulled it out. He pushed it back, and when he saw her he said accusingly:

“This door has no lock. I do not like to see a door without a lock. I will bring one this afternoon.”

It was how she knew he had appointed himself.

“But who will do your taxi work?”

“My son will do that,” he said.

From that moment he owned her and the house.

“There will be a lot of toil in this vineyard,” she said to him maliciously and wished she had not said it; but Evans’s eyes lost their vacancy again and quickened and sparkled. He gave a shout of laughter.

“Oh boy, there will!” he said admiring her. And he went off. She walked from room to room, opening windows, and from an upper one she saw distantly the white sheet of the Gospel tent through the fir trees. She could settle to nothing.

It was an ugly house of large mean rooms, the landings dark, the stairs steep. The furniture might have come out of old-fashioned hotels and had the helpless look of objects too large, ill-met commercially and too gregarious. After her mother’s death, her father had moved his things into his sister’s house. Taste had not been a strong point in the family. The books, mainly sermons, were her grandfather’s; his son had lived on a hoard of engineering textbooks and magazines. His sister read chiefly the Bible and the rest of her time changed her clothes, having the notion that she might be going out.

What paralysed Miss Freshwater’s niece was the emptiness of the place. She had expected to disturb ghosts if she opened a drawer. She had expected to remember herself. Instead, as she waited for Evans to come on the first day she had the sensation of being ignored. Nothing watched in the shadows, nothing blinked in the beams of sunlight slanting across the room. The room she had slept in meant nothing. To fit memories into it was a task so awkward and artificial that she gave up trying. Several times she went to the window, waiting for Evans to walk in at the gate and for the destruction to begin.

When he did come he seized the idea at once. All files marked A.H.F.—that was her father—were “rubbish.”

“Thorpe?” he said. “A.H.F. more A.H.F.! Burn it?” He was off with his first load to lay the foundation to the fire.

“And get this carpet up. We shall trip on it, it is torn,” she said. He ripped the carpet off the stairs. He tossed the door mats, which were worn into holes, outside. By the barrow load out went the magazines. Every now and then some object took his eye—a leather strap, a bowl, a pipe rack, which he put into a little heap of other perquisites at the back door.

But to burn was his passion, to push the wheelbarrow his joy. He swaggered with it. He unloaded it carefully at the fire, not putting it down too near or roughly tipping it. He often tried one or two different grips on the handles before he started off. Once, she saw him stop in the middle of the lawn and turn it upside down and look it over carefully and make the wheel spin. Something wrong? No, he lovingly wiped the wheel with a handful of grass, got an oilcan from his pocket, and gave the wheel a squirt. Then he righted the wheelbarrow and came on with it round the house, singing in a low and satisfied voice. A hymn, it sounded like. And at the end of the day, when she took him a cup of tea and they stood chatting, his passion satisfied for the time being, he had a good look at her. His eye was on the brooch she was carelessly wearing to fasten her green overall. He came closer and put his hand to the brooch and lifted it.

“Those are pearls, I shouldn’t wonder?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. He stepped nimbly away, for he was as quick as a flea.

“It is beautiful,” he said, considering the brooch and herself together. “You would not buy it for fifty pounds, nor even a hundred, I suppose. A present, I expect?” And before she could answer, he said gravely: “Half past five! I will lock the sheds. Are you sleeping here? My wife would go off her head, alone in the house. When I’m at the Mission, she’s insane!”

Evans stared at Miss Freshwater’s niece, waiting for a response to his drama. She did not know what to do, so she laughed. Evans gave a shout of laughter too. It shook the close black curls of his hair and the scar on the side of his nose went white.

“I have the key,” he said seriously and went off.

“Robert,” Miss Freshwater’s niece opened the window and called again. “Can you come now? I can’t get on.”

Evans was on his way back to the house. He stamped quickly up the bare stairs.

“I’m in here,” she called. “If you can get in!”

There was a heap of old brown paper knee high at the door. Some of the drawers of a chest had been taken out, others were half open; a wardrobe’s doors were open wide. There were shoes, boxes and clothes piled on the bed which was stripped. She had a green scarf in a turban round her head, and none of her fair hair could be seen. Her face, with its strong bones and pale skin marked by dirty fingers, looked hard, humorous and naked. Her strong lips were dry and pale with dust.

They understood each other. At first he had bossed her but she had fought back on the second day and they were equals now. She spoke to him as if they were in a conspiracy together, deciding what should be “saved” and what should be “cast into the flames.” She used those words purposely, as a dig of malice at him. She was taller than he. She couldn’t get over the fact that he preached every night at the Mission and she had fallen into the habit of tempting him by some movement of arm or body, when she caught him looking at her. Her aunt had used the word “inconvenient,” when her niece was young, to describe the girl’s weakness for dawdling about with gardeners, chauffeurs, errand boys. Miss Freshwater’s niece had lost the sense of the “convenient” very early in life.

“I’ve started upstairs now,” she said to Evans. “It’s worse than downstairs. Look at it.”

Evans came a step further into the room and slowly looked round, nodding his head.

She leaned a little forward, her hands together, eagerly awaiting for him to laugh so that they could laugh together.

“She never threw away a scrap of paper. Not even paper bags. Look at this,” she said.

He waded into the heap and peeped into a brown paper bag. It contained a bun, as hard as stone.

“Biscuits too,” she said. “Wrapped up! Like a larder. They must have been here for years. In the top drawer.”

Evans did not laugh.

“She feared starvation,” he said, “old people are hungry. They are greedy. My grandmother nibbled like a little rat, all day. And in the night too. They wake up in the night and they are afraid. They eat for comfort. The mice did not get in, I hope,” he said, going to look in the drawer.

“She was eighty-four,” she said.

“My grandmother was ninety,” he said. “My father’s mother. She liked to hear a mouse. It was company, she said.”

“I think my aunt must have been fond of moths,” she said. “They came out in clouds from that wardrobe. Look at all those dresses. I can hardly bear to touch them.”

She shook a couple of dresses in the wardrobe and then took them out. “There you are, did you see it? There goes one.”

She held up an old-fashioned silk dress.

“Not worn for twenty years, you can see by the fashion. There!” She gave the dress a pull. “Did you hear? Perished. Rotten. They are all like that. You can’t give them away. They’d fall off you.”

She threw the dresses on the floor and he picked up one and he saw where moths had eaten it.

“It is wicked,” he said. “All that money has gone to waste.”

“Where moth and dust doth corrupt,” she mocked him, and took an armful of the clothes and threw them on the floor. “Why did she buy them if she did not want them? And all those hats we had to burn? You haven’t seen anything yet. Look at this.”

On the bed was lying a pile of enormous lace-up corsets. Evans considered them.

“The men had patience,” he said.

“Oh, she was not married,” she said.

He nodded.

“That is how all the property comes to you, I suppose,” he said. There was a shrewd flash in his blue eyes and she knew he had been gazing at her all this time and not at the clothes; but even as she caught his look the dissembling, still, vacant light slid back into it.