The Black Book (15 page)

On the fifth there is a storm. Lightning and vast thunder running along the ribs of the Palace, shivering fire and quake. A woman killed by a roof tile. Driven slates skiddering in the snow like little snow-ploughs.

On the sixth I wake to find the world finally snowed under. Drifts a foot high on the roads, in the gardens, cemeteries, playgrounds. That statuary coy and naked, ankles rooted in the white quilt. Morgan with a red nose, sneezing his head off. Big fires howling in the lounges. Every visitor who opens the front door sends a great ringing blast of air down the corridors. Death creeps in among the other scents which run laughing from one end of the hotel to the other. A breath of cold as piercing as ammonia eats our nostrils.

Altogether a curious expectancy hangs over this day, as if I am expecting something utterly momentous to happen to me. Or perhaps the world. I scan the paper, but there is nothing to justify this premonition. War has not been declared. The nature poet occurs on the middle page. Snow. Bird and holly. Even this is not the expected cataclysm. All the old invocations served up in metre: I can never understand this frightful brand of Englyshe Countrie sentiment, with its inevitable false rhyme which is so much more annoying than no rhyme at all.

The robin hangs upon the bush
A jewel in the winter hush.

Altogether nothing is happening and there is the huge feeling that something has happened or must happen. Traffic disorganized. The postman dispenses his spurious cheer of dishonoured cheques and late greetings. A very merry Yuletide to you and yours. Tarquin will not let me draw his blinds. He knows, he says, that it is a bloody day and prefers to spend it by candlelight.

The robin twirts upon the bough,
The postman has a nasty cough.

But nothing turns up; the anticipated Thing leaves me in suspense. Then.

At teatime, buttering toast in Tarquin's room, swallowing my spittle at its appetizing flavour, I am approached by Charles, the deaf mute. On his little tablet he has the hieroglyph: “The flat telephone. A lady.”

I hound down those immense corridors like a convict. Everything is silent in the room. I think suddenly of Gregory, I don't know why. Gregory has just gone up for a breath of air. I put the receiver to my ear and it is cold. You are talking suddenly in that pure animal's voice. Gracie is lying dead in the bed. It is unrolling through me, your voice with its queer frigid tones, a fugue of snow and cattle, and our bodies like lumber on the white quilt. I am sitting here like a drawn fowl, feeling my viscera dissolve and flow down over my knees to the carpet. You are taking a holiday, you say. A holiday! From what? And, above all, how, when every latitude is swollen with desire and unrest, every meridian poisoned? Here I will show you my wounds like Mercator's projection. A new cartography. Forgive me, I did not mean it. You cannot help the snow. There are four candles in the room. Yes, and the first edition of Baudelaire. Books? Do not send me a book. Not even the Song of Songs. You cannot sleep with a book! No, there's no comfort. Hullo, can you hear me? No, not even poetry. The nerve centres are all dead. Send me a scalpel, a bright new scalpel with the cutting edge of prophecy to it. Send me a poleaxe, a humane killer. Why do you not speak to me? Hullo. Are you there? Then go on speaking, because I have nothing to say to you. Nothing. I am being burnt inside with the old damnable bruises. To hell with books, do you hear me? I said nothing. Good-bye. The Italian towns are lying there crippled among the priests and the Mother Church. Give my love to Keats. Are you weeping? After this I shall go to bed and order a bowl of snow. I shall press it to my face with trembling hands. A month from now we shall meet, you say? If I could believe in eternity as a few slips of printed paper with numbers on them, I might find you intelligible. Speak to me. You are speaking but it is like water squirted over a statue. Say something sharp, decisive. Speak me a scalpel or a jack-knife. No, I am quite alone. The laughter? I heard nothing.

As you are about to blurt out something comes the bright cleavage, I return to my buttered toast on the top floor. Premonition fulfilled. I am suddenly aware of the dullness of the evening, the snow closing with its blue breath; old women in their prisons knitting, milk, hassocks, prayer books. Gales of fire in the lounges and old men dressing for dinner. Tarquin in bed, surrounded by the bones of history, dying piecemeal in life, dying. There is no one I can turn to for comfort.

A gale of wind has begun to ripple across the world; the poles are toppling over into the blue fluttering wings of snow like doves. There is a glacier running slowly in my blood. My skin is chapped and rough as canvas.

I could go quietly mad here, in this room, by this three-day cadaver who sits wrapped in a shawl, decomposing. One of these days you will find me lighting matches and holding them to my mouth. The last kiss under the mistletoe, the last druidical idiom of departure on the wet mouth.

“Your rustic besom?” says Tarquin nicely. He is being very tactful and dramatic. He would sell his soul for a mouthful of schoolgirl confidences. I lie to him, but I can see he does not believe me. His nose quivers like a carrot.

Come, you attenuated skeleton, with the razor nose and the one foot in eternity, let's brim a negus to the death of the world, to the snow, the calamity of whiteness, the doves, the harlots, the music. I mean a real toast, with laughter that is not a cheap swindle. This desire was too delicate an infant. By God! we'll make a man of it.

BOOK TWO

I
f the spring ever breaks in this district it is with an air of surprised green. A momentous few weeks of fruition in which the little unwary things come out in their defenceless, naïve way. The soot and the metal paralysis soon eat them. The canker of steel rusting slowly in the virginity of the rose.

The cold weather drives us breast to breast in these chilly form rooms by the iron stoves. A raw fug of anthracite and unwashed bodies. The children fart incessantly; and in the form room upstairs Marney, the hunchback, sits down before the fire and spreads out the sodden folds of his handkerchief, sniffing. As the rank menstruous steam goes up he will throw over his shoulder some such profundity as:
¿
Es este obrero quien fuma?
or
¿ Somos nosotros quienes hemos hablado al banquero?
All winter he has a roaring cold, and every day his sopping handkerchief is dried at the boiler thus. The children squeak and fart and hold their eternal palavers behind his back. The air tastes faintly of steamed snot.

This is
Honeywoods.
The two suburban houses telescoped into one, gathered, as it were, under the armorial banner of Eustace Adams Honeywood, Esq. Inside these rotting brick walls, in the bare, unwashed rooms, the children parade themselves daily, in a vain attempt to master the principles and practice of big business. Outside, the trams pass, rocking and hooting, cannonading the windows in their loose frames. The big green board is chipped and faded, and whitened with pigeon shit. The gutters sag and the lightning conductor twangs on the wind like a harp string.

All this is custom now. Familiarity has bred, not so much contempt, as a sort of unreasonable love of the place. In the crooked little vestry, which is the holy of holies, Eustace himself lies all day in a sleepy coma. On the door is the decomposing postcard on which he has written, at some time before the flood, the glyph:
E. A. Honeymood, Director.
That means you must tap before entering in order to wake him up. Prediluvial, paleolithic, geologic—there is no chronological qualification which expresses accurately the age of this community. It is outside chronologies.

This is a reflection from the little desk behind the door at which I maunder through the day's work. Next door, from the typing room, the symphonic racket of typewriters leaks across the ocean of papers, of files, bills, acknowledgements. The so-called English mistress, with no roof to her mouth, is dictating a few anthology pieces and classics for the typewriters to reduce to Morse.

Tomowwow and tomowwow and tomowwow
Cweeps in this petty pace fwom day to day.

The desks are humming and the inkpots dancing. A mild solo of nose blowing from the Commerce room where Marney is drying his handkerchief and teaching commercial Spanish. Dust along the floors, and a poisoned sunlight along the windows. This is the time when the blackbird opens up her drumfire, streams of softnosed dum-dums on the stunned fields. The captive canary in the corner completes its millionth exploration of the world, and falls asleep. It is bored. Spring has broken like a bucketful of pounded ice and we are still working our feet in our shoes for warmth. There is some irrational problem about Keats, and the nightingales spinning silk in my mind, battling with the sleep. The crepuscular morning opening like a vegetable, and this soft decay in which we either work or sleep. At a precise point in the meditation, when I have reached Greece, or Carthage, or the Syrian lions spitting gold dust, Eustace will open one lidless blond eye and say: “
Cam
on, me lad. Get on with that letter.”

“It's done.”

“Oh.” And he will fall asleep again, wringing his ear peevishly with his finger; or else walk up and down importantly, one finger and thumb searching in his waistcoat for something he never finds, fussing and moping, taking off his glasses and replacing them, whistling through his teeth, or sucking the sore spot on his thumb. Eustace is a queer cuffin. If he farts by mistake he pretends nothing has happened. If I fart he is indignant. “Remember you're in a college with young ladies, me lad,” he says stiffly. If I reply, “Hoity-toity,” he will pretend to give me the sack. This is interesting because he cannot do so. I am his secretary, true, but our agreement is not monetary. In return for my services he allows me to spend three days a week learning typing. A gentleman's agreement. Hence Keats, hence the lions spitting gold dust, hence to long comfortable dozes in which the whole world is gathered up in a grain of birdseed and handed to the canary. From a private secretary to a mascot is a short step. From a mascot to a housekeeper …

“There's that smell again!” he says. I take no notice. Keats must come first. The subject of faulty drainage is as old as Noah. “Do you notice it?”

“Yes.”

“It's the girls' bogs again.”

Faint drafts of cheese or cosmetics or soap and sweat, and then a long curling whiff of this vegetable odour. Someone will have to go into that fetid little tabernacle and prize open the cistern. (“Plunger won't work, eh? Yes. Yes. I'll have a plumber up to look at it.”) It is not the first time. Keats's poetry, I say firmly to myself, rattling my knuckles on the desk like the bones of Judas, was the product of his disease. Five more years, three more years even … “Miss Ethelred complained this morning that the pan won't flush,” Eustace says suddenly. “I can't make out what that girl eats, like. It's
always
her blocking up the bogs. Once more and I'll sue her ma and pa.” The faint whiff like a boiled pudding, engulfing Keats, Venice among its floating furniture, Severn, and that little cock teaser Shelley, like a blob of pus scribbling, scribbling. Or Hamlet with the incandescent father? “Listen,” he says, “do it just this once. I won't never ask you again. Just this once.”

I am glad, for the sake of this mythology, that Marney takes it into his head to come seesawing down the stairs at this precise moment, to contribute his gothic charade to the morning. Here, his hunchback figure, foreshortened, wagging down the stairs. First the legs and body, all splayed, then the little knot of the head; like one of those carnival figures they carry on poles in Italy. His nose hangs down like Notre Dame in gloom. As always when he sees the hunchback, Eustace finds a vein of broad jocular humour spring up in him. One has to be like this with him because he is so vain, so terrifying in his vanity. Quick, pretend that he is not deformed, that he is a great brisk normal man. We experience a panic of embarrassment; we become servile in the face of the gigantic egotism of this little East End Jew. “Ah ha!” yells Eustace, “so it's you is it, Mister Marney?”

Marney's head sits back on his hump, perpetually cocked up at the ceiling. In order to look at Eustace he makes some compensating mechanism hold him forward, stiffly, as if thrust out on an invisible stick. He is smiling his glittering self-satisfied smile, opening and shutting those little pale mushrooms under his nose. He is snicking amiably now, pulling down his waistcoat hard. “D'you notice the smell, then?” roars Eustace with incredible joviality; and Marney, scenting a joke, demands vot smell he means. “A smell I'm talking of, sir. A smell what's been bothering us today.” Marney is acting for all he is worth, sniffing and pouting, his vanity throwing up images of himself, now in this pose, now in that. “It's not me,” he admits at last, “it's not me vot's made it.” And from this piece of wit grows Eustace's deep false bassooning laughter, and the queer snickering of Marney—like someone swishing a cane. My cue. I contribute a modish snicker to the party, politely, as befits a secretary who can't help overhearing. We are both nervous of Marney.

The hunchback's dry knot of hair rides his scalp as if in the grip of a hurricane. His face becomes so taut with laughter that one fears it will suddenly fly into a dozen rough fragments, like a canvas mask. He is breathing right in the mouth of Eustace, leaning on the desk, offering his amusement to the blond man, who sits in utter disgust, laughing back at him. Once every twelve snicks or so Marney's body suffers a sort of tiny compensating convulsion. It is like watching a shirt pass through a wringer. His arms are tossed wide, his head comes down. Then the magazine of laughter is emptied snick snick snick. Shall he tell us what it is? he says at last, archly. Shall he? It's the girls' lavatory. They follow each other out into the hall; Eustace is driving him back deliberately now, laughing him back to his room. And Marney retreats with self-satisfied unction, snickering and louting. Projects himself uncouthly upstairs again like a crab, while Eustace keeps him on his way with little squirts of laughter. Then back to his desk, swearing under his breath, disgusted, outraged, humiliated. Marney! Eustace sitting there furious with Marney, in his little polished black hoofs, with his blond hair falling away on each side of his head.