Strange Stories (32 page)

I suppose I should also say that it was good to have Monica there as well, scrappy though she was, a bit like an undernourished fish. Monica knew many things that she should not have known, and which you can’t talk most grown women into bothering about. You’ll have come upon what I mean for yourself. 

With the two of them, one didn’t feel a fool. I even forgot about the heat. I simply can’t remember how the woman and Monica managed about that. Perhaps I didn’t even notice. I daresay there were creatures making a happy home for themselves in the vast pile of ancient warmth. I should have thought there would have been, but I didn’t worry about it at the time. Over the heap, on the dirty wall, was a black-and-white engraving of an old man whose face I knew, because he had been hanged for political reasons. Every now and then, I could see him winking at me through the murk, though I was too pressed to recall his name just then. You remember my telling you that I couldn’t keep my hands off the Newgate Calendar and all that went with it. I think his was the only picture in the room. 

I keep calling it a room. What else can one call it? A gigantic rathole, a sewage-overflow chamber, a last resting place for all the world’s shorn hair? For me it was an abode of love. My first. Maybe my last. 

The woman’s hair just smelt of itself. The waste hair was drawn into one’s nose and mouth and eyes, even into one’s ears, into one’s body everywhere. Monica, I believe, had no hair. The tatters of known and unknown fur insinuated themselves between her and me, as if they had been alive. They tickled and chafed but I never so much as tried to hold them back. Joy was all my care, for as long as the appointment lasted. 

At the time, it seemed to last more or less for ever. But of course I had no comparisons. The woman and Monica set themselves to one thing after another. Sometimes in turn. Sometimes together. I was half-asphyxiated with heat and hair. I was wet and slimy as a half-skinned eel. I was dead to everything but the precise, immediate half-second. Like the Norseman, I had discovered a new world. 

In the end, the woman began tangling her fragrant hair round my crop. I’ve told you that my neck was like a turkey’s in those days. Stringy and very slender. 

I am sure that the sweet scent of her hair came from nothing she put on it. In any case, the shop had not struck me as going out for the ladies. For what she was doing, she did not need to have especially long hair either. The ordinary length of hair among women would serve perfectly well. The ordinary length in those days. From what had gone before, I guessed that part of the whole point lay in the tangling process bringing her great mouth harder and tighter than ever against mine. Hair that was too long might have defeated that. 

At first the sensation was enough to wake the dead. And by then, as you will gather, that was just about what was needed. 

Then it was as if there was a vast shudder in the air. At which the entire spell broke. Nothing had ever taken me more completely by surprise. 

It can always be one of the most upsetting experiences in the world, as you may have learned for yourself. I don’t know whether it comes worse when one is fully worked up or when the whole miserable point is that one is not. 

But that time there was something extra. You won’t believe this: I saw a vision of my mother. 

She was just standing there, looking tiny and sad, with her arms at her sides, as the woman’s had been, and with her own dignity, too. My mother was not wringing her hands or tearing at her wisps of hair or anything fanciful like that. She was just standing very still and looking as if she were a queen, too, a different sort of queen naturally, and this time on the scaffold. That idea of a queen on the scaffold came to me at once. 

Until that moment, the huge dark woman had been powerful enough to do exactly what she liked with me. Now, at the first effort I exerted, I broke clean away from her and her hair, and rolled backward on top of Monica. I knew that I had, in fact, dragged a big hank of the woman’s hair right away from her head. I could not be mistaken about that because the hank was in my hand. I threw it back among the rest. 

I positively leapt to my feet, but even before that the woman was standing, her feet among the garbage, and with a knife in her hand. It was not one of the slim blades that in those days ladies carried in their garters for safety. This lady wore no garters. It was a massive working knife, of the kind employed by butchers who are on the heavier side of the trade. If there had been a little more light, its reflections would have flashed over the walls and ceiling as had happened with the hairdresser’s razors. 

Monica had climbed up too. She stood between us shuddering and shivering and fishy. 

The woman did not come for me. She stepped elegantly across the room, across the place, to the door, and leaned back against it. That was her mistake. 

When Monica had undressed me, she could easily have robbed me. I was soon to discover that she had taken nothing. That had been a mistake too. 

My few sovereigns and half sovereigns were in a sovereign case, left behind by my father, and among the things given me by my mother when I was confirmed. My other coins were in a purse that had been knitted for me with my name on it. A poor orphan girl named Athene had done that. But there was something else that Monica might have found if she had been tricky enough to look. Wherever I went in those days, I always carried a small pistol. It had been the very first thing I bought with my own money, apart from penny broadsheets and sticks of gob. Even my mother had no idea I possessed it. I did not want her to grieve and fret about what things were like for me in the highways of the world. 

She never knew I had it. 

Down in that place, the pistol was in my hand more swiftly than thought in my head. 

The woman, for her part, gave no time to thinking, or to trying to treat with me. She simply took a leap at me, like a fierce Spanish bull, or a wild Spanish gypsy. There was nothing I could do but allow the pistol to speak for me. I had never discharged it before, except in play on the Heath at night. 

I killed the woman. I suppose I am not absolutely certain of that, but I think so. Monica began to whimper and squirm about. 

The heat made dressing myself doubly terrible. 

I had to decide what to do with Monica. I can truly say that I should have liked very much to rescue her, but I had to drop the idea as impracticable. Apart from everything else, quite a good lot else, I could never have brought her to my home. 

I never even kissed her good-bye, or tried in any way to comfort her. I felt extremely bad about that. I still do. It was terrible. 

The door opened to me at once, though I had to step over the woman’s body to reach it. 

Outside, a stone passage ran straight before me to another door, through the glass panels of which I could see daylight. The reek and savor of baking was overwhelming, and the heat, if possible, worse than ever. There were other doors on both sides of the passage. I took it that they led to the different ovens, but I left them unopened. 

The door ahead was locked, but the key was on my side of it. Turning it caused me considerable trouble. It called for a knack, and my eyes were full of sweat and my hands beginning to tremble. Nor of course had I any idea what or who might be on the other side of the door. The panels were of obscured glass, but it seemed to me that too little light came through them for the door to open onto the outer world. 

Before long, I managed it, perhaps with the new strength I had acquired from somewhere or other. No one had as yet appeared at my rear. I think that, apart from Monica, I was alone down there; and, at that moment, I preferred not to think about Monica. 

I flung the door open and found myself in a small, empty, basement shop. It had a single window onto an area; and, beside it, a door. When I say that the shop was empty (and just as well for me that it was), I mean also that it seemed to contain no stock. Nothing at all. There was a small, plain counter, and at the back of it tiers of wooden shelves, all made of dingy polished deal, and all bare as in the nursery rhyme. Brightly colored advertisements were coming in then for the different products, but there was not a bill or a poster in that shop. Nor was there anything like a list of prices, or even a chair for the more decrepit purchasers. I think there was a bit of linoleum on the floor. Nothing more. 

I paused long enough to trail my finger down the counter. At least the place seemed to be kept clean, because no mark was left either on the counter or on my finger. 

In the shop it was not so hot as in the rest of the establishment, but it was quite hot enough. When later I was allowed to look into a condemned cell, it reminded me of that shop. 

But I now had the third door to tackle, the outer door, that might or might not lead to freedom. It looked as if it would, but I had been through too much to be at all sure of anything. 

As quietly as I could, I drew the two bolts. They seemed to be in frequent use, because they ran back smoothly. I had expected worse trouble than ever with the lock, but, would you believe it? when the bolts had been drawn, the door simply opened of itself. The protruding part of the lock no longer quite reached into the socket. Perhaps the house was settling slightly. Not that there was any question of seeing much. Outside it was simply the usual, narrow, dirty street with high buildings, and a lot of life going on. A bit of a slum, in fact. Most streets were in those days. That was before the concrete had taken everything over. 

I couldn’t manage to shut the door. As far as could be seen, one had to be inside to do that. I soon dropped it and started to creep up the area steps. The steps were very worn. Really dangerous for the older people. 

For some reason it had never occurred to me that the area gate might be locked, but this time it was. And this time, naturally, there was no key on either side. The area railing was too spiky and too high for me to leap lightly across, even though I was a very long and lanky lad at that time. I was feeling a bit faint as well. For the third time. 

A boy came up, dragging a handcart full of stuff from the builders’ merchants. He addressed me. 

“Come out from under the piecrust, have yer?” 

“Which crust?” 

The delivery boy pointed over my shoulder. I looked behind me and saw that over the basement door was a sign. It read “Mrs. Lovat’s Pie Shop.” 

At once I thought of the man’s name in the picture downstairs. Simon, Lord Lovat. Of course. But Lord Lovat hadn’t been hanged, not even with a silken rope. He had been beheaded. Now I should have to think quickly. 

“You’re wrong,” I said to the boy. “I went in to get my hair cut and by mistake came out at the back.” 

“You were lucky to come out at all,” said the boy. 

“How’s that?” I asked, though I wasn’t usually as ready as all this suggests. Not in those days. 

“Ask no questions and you’ll be told no fibs,” said the boy. 

“Well,” I said, “help me to get out of it.” 

The boy looked at me. I didn’t care for his look. 

“I’ll watch out for the bobby,” said the boy. “He’ll help you.” 

And I had to slip him something before he let me borrow four of his bricks to stand upon on my side of the railing and four to alight upon the other side. I slipped him a whole five shillings; half as much as his wages for the week in those days. I had taken the place of the barber’s assistant who would have had to stand on a box. 

After I had helped the boy put the bricks back in his cart, I lost myself in the crowd, as the saying goes. Apart from everything else, I had aroused suspicion by overtipping. 

I never heard another thing. Well, not for a very long time, and then not in a personal way. 

But I had temporarily lost my appetite for criminal literature. I became out of touch with things for a while. I suffered not only for myself but for my mother. Fortunately, I knew few people who could notice whether I was suffering or not. They might have mocked me if they had, which I could never have endured. 

It was a much longer time until I strolled down Fleet Street again. Not until after I was married. And by then Temple Bar had gone, which made a big difference. And manners and customs had changed. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes not. Only on the surface, I daresay, in either case. 

I still sometimes break into a sweat when I think of it all. I don’t commonly eat meat pies, either. And for a long time I had to cut my own hair, until my wife took over. Since she passed on, I’ve not bothered with it, as you can see. Why disfigure God’s image? as the Russians used to put it. He’ll disfigure you fast enough on his own. You can count on that. 

*** 

The old man was beginning to drool, as, according to him, the woman had done, so that I shut my newly acquired pad and bound it with the still unstretched elastic. 

If it had not been in a pub that I had met the old man, where then? I had met him in the auditorium of the Elephant, to which I had been sent as a dramatic critic. That too is properly an old man’s job, but, in case of need, the smaller papers had, and still have, a habit of sending the youngest person available. I had also to cover boxing matches, swimming matches, dance contests, the running at Herne Hill, and often political and evangelical meetings. Never football matches at one end, or weddings at the other, both of which involved specialists. 

The programme for that evening is before me now. I kept it with my notes of the old man’s tale, and I have just found the packet, one of hundreds like it. 

“Order Tea from the Attendants, who will bring it to you in the Interval. A Cup of Tea and A Plate of Bread and Butter, Price 3d. Also French Pastries, 3d. each.” 

Wilfrid Lawson, later eminent, played the clean-limbed, overinvolved young hero, Mark Ingestre, in the production we had seen. 

There had been a live orchestra, whose opening number had been “Blaze Away.” 

There were jokes, there were adverts (“Best English Meat Only”), there were even Answers for Correspondents. The price of the programme is printed on the cover: Twopence.