The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (20 page)

‘The doctor ordered it. There was this little milk-round,
so we took it – until something better turns up. We're not stopping here.' She turned round and spoke for a moment with defensive pride, holding up her head. ‘It's only something temporary. We shan't stop another winter.'

Behind the pride he could detect the fear of it all in her voice; she seemed to know this and all of a sudden said something in a hurried whisper and then went out. He heard the outer door grating against the bricks as she tugged it open and afterwards, above the wind, he thought he heard her calling.

After two or three minutes she came back. Her hair was ragged from the wind, and in her hands she was clasping a bunch of coloured primroses, washed-blue and pink and red, tangled with scraps of leaf and grass, that she had hastily snatched up from somewhere. She put them into a cup of water which she set in the centre of the table, her face turned away from him as she did so.

And for a minute it was painful for him to look at her. He saw in the bland, soft glowing flowers the inexpressible recollection of other things. He again wanted to say something to her, but it was no use. He hated suddenly the flat drabness of the little room thrown into relief by the small glowing centrepiece of flowers. He was driven to hatred of the drying clothes under the ceiling, the rattling window, the sour smell
of milk, the slight whimpering of the child which had again begun overhead.

He was saved from expressing or hiding what he felt by the noise of someone entering the kitchen, and a minute later the man with the spanner came into the living room. He changed the spanner from one oil-greased hand to another as the woman spoke. ‘This is my husband – Mr. Hanson,' she said.

‘You're the paper bloke,' the man said.

‘That's me.'

‘You want tell 'em to write some sense in some o' the papers.'

‘Yes?'

‘Yeh, you do an' all!'

He wiped his oily palms on the flanks of his trousers and sat down at the table.

‘Will you sit here?' she said to Hanson, and he sat down too. He heard the husband give a short laugh as he cut himself a lump of cheese, leaving on the wedge the greenish imprint of a finger.

‘Flower show early, ain't it?' He pointed the cheese at the cup of primroses, ironically. ‘Well, well. Very nice. Very nice.'

As she poured out tea the woman gave no sign. Upstairs the short whimpered cries of the child became fused into a single unbroken cry, and the father lifted his head.

‘What's up wi' Jean?'

‘Earache again.'

‘Then why the bleedin' hell don't you fetch her down?' He ceased gnawing at the cheese with small chimbling bites like those of a rat. ‘Sittin' here jawin' and lettin' the kid bawl.'

‘I'll fetch her,' she said.

‘You neent bother!' he said. ‘I'll fetch her meself. I'll fetch her.'

He went with a show of temper out of the room, and she stood for a moment in silence, looking painfully down at her hands, not able to speak.

‘I think I'll go,' Hanson said.

‘I – '

Her words would not come, and she made instead a brief, stupefied gesture towards the cups and the food. Before he could reply he could hear footsteps on the stairs, and then for a second her voice came to life. ‘Don't take too much notice. He's not strong. It's because he's not really well. He can't hold his temper. It's just when strangers come.'

Hanson could not speak.

‘It's nothing. I get used to it, I get used to it,' she said.

A second later the man came in with the child, a girl of three, in his arms. At the sight of a stranger the child turned away her puffed tear-damp face. The
man brought her to the table, holding her on his knee, talking to her in a new, wheedling, tender voice, pouring out tea for her in a saucer and then sopping into it lumps of broken cake. ‘Make old ear better, won't it? Dad make old ear better?'

In the few minutes before Hanson got up to go the father continued to hold the child apart, in a kind of alliance with himself against the mother and even, Hanson thought, against him. During all this time the child did not speak. In the silences the window broke into the renewed chattering of a machine-gun, and sometimes the echo of the sea itself could be heard in the mournful beating of the poplars.

‘If I'm to get that train,' Hanson said, ‘I ought to go.'

He got up from the table, saying goodbye to the child, who did not answer. Without holding out his hand, he said good afternoon to the father, who grunted in answer something about getting the newspapers to write the truth about things. They were at the root, he said, of everything, damn near everything. One way or another you could trace it all to the newspapers.

Hanson said a final good afternoon and went into the kitchen and so outside, the woman going with him. In the strong March wind her hair was flung torturously about her cold face. For a moment she stood
gazing at the earth and then said, ‘I'll walk as far as the gate with you,' and they walked together across the wind-dried yard with its storm-driven litter of feathers and straw and golden-claret catkins. All the time it appeared to him as if she were about to stop and say something. She wanted perhaps to express regret for things: or she wanted to get off her mind some oppressive, tortured explanation.

Whatever she wanted to say was never spoken. She halted by the gate in the wire fence and said goodbye, holding out her hand. The wind had beaten her hair unmercifully, giving her face a wild, bloodless look. He searched it in vain for a sign of pride or vivacity, but the eyes that were lifted up to him were quite dark and cold, and strangely repressed, as if they had got into the habit of not looking far.

After walking away at last he turned and looked back. She was walking back to the house, pressing her body against the wind and at the same time gazing down at the earth. He halted a moment in the hope that she would turn round, but nothing happened and he went on.

When he turned again she had disappeared altogether and nothing moved against the dead little house except the high sunless poplars beaten by the sea-wind.

Mr. Elisha Peacock woke suddenly at four o'clock in the morning, in the dead of darkness, feeling very ill. For some moments immediately before waking he was aware of a strange sound of tinkling glass, of his whole body fighting a violent constriction in his chest. When he woke at last it was some time before he realized that the sound was that of the night wind shaking the coloured glass chandelier above his head, that the conflict in his body was in reality a wire of pain boring down into his heart.

It was then that he realized he was very ill. In the moment of realization he suddenly heard too the striking of ten or a dozen clocks downstairs in the small jeweller's shop he had kept for thirty-five years. The sounds, not quite simultaneous, at first clear and then discordantly confused, rolled over and over his half-wakened mind in waves of metallic tumult. He managed at last to struggle up on one elbow. The pain, as if a hot gimlet were being turned slowly down into his chest, had now slightly lessened. The clocks had ceased. In the night silence he could hear no sound except the small renewed clash of the glass hangings
above his head, and there was only one thought in his mind. It was the strange, painful thought that he, Elisha Peacock, after sixty-eight years of tranquil living, had reached the point where he must die in the night, alone, frightened like a child by the silence and the darkness, before anyone could reach him or he could get downstairs to the telephone.

With this thought in his mind he managed to get slowly out of bed and put his feet into his slippers. The pain in his heart had now ceased to have direction or motion, and lay there only like a dull embedded bullet. He felt that he wanted to press it away and so held both hands locked across his chest, staggering a little as he walked. He felt very weak as he walked downstairs, slowly, not troubling to put on the lights, feeling his way by the cold walls of the staircase, and he was troubled by a remote but fierce idea that he did not want to die. By the time he reached the passage which led from the stairs to the glass door of the shop this thought had replaced all others: had become not merely a wish but a determination. He at last put on the lights of the shop, where the telephone was, and then stood still: a small, grey, perplexed little figure, his pain-washed eyes blinking in the white reflected light that sprang at him from the cabinets and shelves of glass and silver with which the shop was full.

For one moment he looked at the telephone, thought
better of it, and then went into the room behind the shop, switching on the light. By the fireplace, in which the fire was quite dead, there was a cupboard. He stood with his hand on the brass knob of it, intending to get himself a glass of brandy. But for a long time he could not move. The upward motion of his arm had brought on the pain in his heart again. Suddenly he shut his eyes and felt that he was falling.

It was some moments later that he came to himself, knowing that he must have fainted. He pulled himself up to the cupboard and found the bottle of brandy and a glass. He poured out a little brandy and drank it. It smoothed away the harsh edges of his weakness and pain and for a second or two he looked vaguely about him, slowly coming back to his senses before going back upstairs, still carrying the bottle and the glass, still half-stupefied, so that he forgot to switch off the lights.

From that moment until eight o'clock he lay in bed, thinking. The pain in his heart had ceased, there remained in its place a huge, accumulative fear. He felt that he had been down to the edge of life, had looked over into a vast space of unknown darkness, and had only just managed to come back. This fear was sometimes so strong that he held himself immobile, not daring to move. He lay looking at the grey winter morning light distribute itself reluctantly on the tiny
pieces of rose and emerald glass of the chandelier, which still shook and tinkled in the moving air. After sixty-eight years something almost catastrophic had happened to him, and now fear of its recurrence drove his thoughts back into the past. He recalled his life in the shop. He was not married. Outside, in permanent gilt lettering, he had had put up a quarter of a century ago a large notice: ‘Peacock for Presents. Pence to Pounds', and on this simple motto he had built up a secure, comfortable business. He had tried during all that time not to harm anyone; he felt he could recall honestly that he had never cheated a single person out of a single penny. He was not afraid of the opinion of any man. He had tried to be decent, upright, considerate, and he felt that perhaps he had succeeded. No, he was not afraid of that.

It was only the conscious realization of his fear of death that disturbed him. He knew suddenly, as he lay looking at the pieces of glass quivering above his head in the increasing light, that he had been afraid of it for years. The desire never to give pain to others had made him sensitive to the thought of any pain to himself. In one sense it had made him an ultra-careful man – he remembered how in the days of gas-lighting he would never go to bed without turning off the main for fear of being blown up or asphyxiated in the night – in another, quite careless. What had happened that
morning had brought to his mind another result of his fear. Somehow he had shrunk from making a will.

But now he would rectify that. Yes, now he must see to it. When Edward came at eight o'clock he would explain what had happened; they would call in a solicitor. Edward would understand; you could talk to Edward. Edward was his assistant: a thoughtful, conscientious young man remarkable for resource and promptitude. He was not only a shop-assistant, but he came in every morning an hour earlier than opening time in order to cook breakfast. When he thought of Edward the little jeweller felt his mind instantly strengthened and tranquillized.

At eight o'clock the clocks downstairs began striking the hour and they had no sooner finished than he heard the sound of Edward unlocking and opening the back door. He lay still for a few moments, listening, and then called.

‘Edward!' he called. ‘Edward!'

He was surprised at the weakness of his own voice. It dissolved against the walls of the room, unheard. He tried to raise himself slightly on his elbow, but it seemed as if his body were made of wax that dissolved too under its own slight motion. He could only lie back on the pillows, weakly repeating Edward's name.

A few moments later he heard the young man mounting the stairs; then his voice:

‘Mr. Peacock! Are you there, Mr. Peacock? Was that you calling? Mr. Peacock!'

‘In here, Edward,' was all he could say, ‘in here.'

Edward came hurriedly into the bedroom, a bespectacled young man with brown, alarmed eyes.

‘Oh! there you are, Mr. Peacock. All the lights were on downstairs, Mr. Peacock, and I couldn't make it out. Whatever's the matter?'

‘Nasty turn, Edward,' he said. ‘In the night. About four o'clock.' He tried to smile. ‘An awful pain in my heart, Edward. Nasty.' He tried again to struggle up in bed.

‘I wouldn't try to get up if I were you, Mr. Peacock,' Edward said.

‘No good lying here, Edward.'

‘That's all very well, Mr. Peacock,' Edward said, ‘but if you're not well, I ought to ring up the doctor. Shall I?'

‘I don't know, Edward. I don't know what to say. I've never been like this before, Edward. I don't know – '

He tried again to get up. For the second time his body melted like wax on the pillows. He shut his eyes for a moment, weak and tired, and when he opened them again Edward had gone out of the room, and he called after him:

‘Edward! Edward!'

It was only after he had called six or seven times that he realized once more how weak his voice was, that it had no more strength than the gentle, insistent sound of the chandelier trembling above his head, that it was now very like the voice of a child, crying in trouble and getting no answer.