The Complete Short Stories (38 page)

‘Ai, Ai, Ai,’
chanted
Lotti, ‘Daisy’s dirty old garters,
Ai!’

‘Ai, Ai, Ai,’
responded
the chorus, while Miss Rilke looked lovingly on, holding in one hand Lotti’s
drink, in the other her own.

I remember Daisy as she
stood there, not altogether without charm, beside herself. While laughter
rebounded like plunging breakers from her mouth, she guided her eyes towards
myself and trained on me the missiles of her fury. For a full three minutes
Daisy’s mouth continued to laugh.

I am seldom in the West End of London. But
sometimes I have to hurry across the Piccadilly end of Albemarle Street where
the buses crash past like giant orgulous parakeets, more thunderous and more
hectic than the Household Cavalry. The shops are on my left and the Green Park
lies on my right under the broad countenance of drowsy summer. It is then that,
in my mind’s eye, Daisy Overend gads again, diminutive, charming, vicious, and
tarted up to the nines.

By district messenger
she sent me a note early on the morning after the party. I was to come no more.
Herewith a cheque. The garters were part of herself and I would understand how
she felt.

The cheque was a dud. I
did not pursue the matter, and in fact I have forgotten the real name of Daisy
Overend. I have forgotten her name but I shall remember it at the Bar of
Judgement.

The House of the
Famous Poet

In the summer of 1944, when it was nothing
for trains from the provinces to be five or six hours late, I travelled to
London on the night train from Edinburgh, which, at York, was already three
hours late. There were ten people in the compartment, only two of whom I remember
well, and for good reason.

I have the impression,
looking back on it, of a row of people opposite me, dozing untidily with heads
askew, and, as it often seems when we look at sleeping strangers, their
features had assumed extra emphasis and individuality, sometimes disturbing to
watch. It was as if they had rendered up their daytime talent for obliterating
the outward traces of themselves in exchange for mental obliteration. In this
way they resembled a twelfth-century fresco; there was a look of medieval
unselfconsciousness about these people, all except one.

This was a private
soldier who was awake to a greater degree than most people are when they are
not sleeping. He was smoking cigarettes one after the other with long, calm
puffs. I thought he looked excessively evil — an atavistic type. His forehead
must have been less than two inches high above dark, thick eyebrows, which met.
His jaw was not large, but it was apelike; so was his small nose and so were
his deep, close-set eyes. I thought there must have been some consanguinity in
the parents. He was quite a throwback.

As it turned out, he was
extremely gentle and kind. When I ran out of cigarettes, he fished about in his
haversack and produced a packet for me and one for a girl sitting next to me.
We both tried, with a flutter of small change, to pay him. Nothing would please
him at all but that we should accept his cigarettes, whereupon he returned to
his silent, reflective smoking.

I felt a sort of pity
for him then, rather as we feel towards animals we know to be harmless, such as
monkeys. But I realized that, like the pity we expend on monkeys merely because
they are not human beings, this pity was not needed.

Receiving the cigarettes
gave the girl and myself common ground, and we conversed quietly for the rest
of the journey. She told me she had a job in London as a domestic helper and
nursemaid. She looked as if she had come from a country district — her very
blond hair, red face and large bones gave the impression of power, as if she
was used to carrying heavy things, perhaps great scuttles of coal, or two
children at a time. But what made me curious about her was her voice, which was
cultivated, melodious and restrained.

Towards the end of the
journey, when the people were beginning to jerk themselves straight and the
rushing to and fro in the corridor had started, this girl, Elise, asked me to
come with her to the house where she worked. The master, who was something in a
university, was away with his wife and family.

I agreed to this, because
at that time I was in the way of thinking that the discovery of an educated
servant girl was valuable and something to be gone deeper into. It had the
element of experience — perhaps, even of truth — and I believed, in those days,
that truth is stranger than fiction. Besides, I wanted to spend that Sunday in
London. I was due back next day at my job in a branch of the civil service,
which had been evacuated to the country and for a reason that is another story,
I didn’t want to return too soon. I had some telephoning to do. I wanted to
wash and change. I wanted to know more about the girl. So I thanked Elise and
accepted her invitation.

I regretted it as soon
as we got out of the train at King’s Cross, some minutes after ten. Standing up
tall on the platform, Elise looked unbearably tired, as if not only the last
night’s journey but every fragment of her unknown life was suddenly heaping up
on top of her. The power I had noticed in the train was no longer there. As she
called, in her beautiful voice, for a porter, I saw that on the side of her
head that had been away from me in the train, her hair was parted in a dark
streak, which, by contrast with the yellow, looked navy blue. I had thought,
when I first saw her, that possibly her hair was bleached, but now, seeing it
so badly done, seeing this navy blue parting pointing like an arrow to the
weighted weariness of her face, I, too, got the sensation of great tiredness.
And it was not only the strain of the journey that I felt, but the
foreknowledge of boredom that comes upon us unaccountably at the beginning of a
quest, and that checks, perhaps mercifully, our curiosity.

And, as it happened,
there really wasn’t much to learn about Elise. The explanation of her that I
had been prompted to seek, I got in the taxi between King’s Cross and the house
at Swiss Cottage. She came of a good family, who thought her a pity, and she
them. Having no training for anything else, she had taken a domestic job on
leaving home. She was engaged to an Australian soldier billeted also at Swiss
Cottage.

Perhaps it was the
anticipation of a day’s boredom, maybe it was the effect of no sleep or the
fact that the V-1 sirens were sounding, but I felt some sourness when I saw the
house. The garden was growing all over the place. Elise opened the front door,
and we entered a darkish room almost wholly taken up with a long, plain wooden
work-table. On this were a half-empty marmalade jar, a pile of papers, and a
dried-up ink bottle. There was a steel-canopied bed, known as a Morrison shelter,
in one corner and some photographs on the mantelpiece, one of a schoolboy
wearing glasses. Everything was tainted with Elise’s weariness and my own
distaste. But Elise didn’t seem to be aware of the exhaustion so plainly
revealed on her face. She did not even bother to take her coat off, and as it
was too tight for her I wondered how she could move about so quickly with this
restriction added to the weight of her tiredness. But, with her coat still
buttoned tight Elise phoned her boyfriend and made breakfast, while I washed in
a dim, blue, cracked bathroom upstairs.

When I found that she
had opened my hold-all without asking me and had taken out my rations, I was a
little pleased. It seemed a friendly action, with some measure of reality about
it, and I felt better. But I was still irritated by the house. I felt there was
no justification for the positive lack of consequence which was lying about
here and there. I asked no questions about the owner who was something in a
university, for fear of getting the answer I expected — that he was away
visiting his grandchildren, at some family gathering in the home counties. The
owners of the house had no reality for me, and I looked upon the place as
belonging to, and permeated with, Elise.

I went with her to a
nearby public house, where she met her boyfriend and one or two other
Australian soldiers. They had with them a thin Cockney girl with bad teeth.
Elise was very happy, and insisted in her lovely voice that they should all
come along to a party at the house that evening. In a fine aristocratic tone,
she demanded that each should bring a bottle of beer.

During the afternoon
Elise said she was going to have a bath, and she showed me a room where I could
use the telephone and sleep if I wanted. This was a large, light room with
several windows, much more orderly than the rest of the house, and lined with
books. There was only one unusual thing about it: beside one of the windows was
a bed, but this bed was only a fairly thick mattress made up neatly on the
floor. It was obviously a bed on the floor with some purpose, and again I was
angered to think of the futile crankiness of the elderly professor who had
thought of it.

I did my telephoning,
and decided to rest. But first I wanted to find something to read. The books
puzzled me. None of them seemed to be automatically part of a scholar’s
library. An inscription in one book was signed by the author, a well-known
novelist. I found another inscribed copy, and this had the name of the
recipient. On a sudden idea, I went to the desk, where while I had been
telephoning I had noticed a pile of unopened letters. For the first time, I
looked at the name of the owner of the house.

I ran to the bathroom
and shouted through the door to Elise, ‘Is this the house of the famous poet?’

‘Yes,’ she called. ‘I
told
you.’

She had told me nothing
of the kind. I felt I had no right at all to be there, for it wasn’t, now, the
house of Elise acting by proxy for some unknown couple. It was the house of a
famous modern poet. The thought that at any moment he and his family might walk
in and find me there terrified me. I insisted that Elise should open the
bathroom door and tell me to my face that there was no possible chance of their
returning for many days to come.

Then I began to think
about the house itself, which Elise was no longer accountable for. Its new
definition, as the house of a poet whose work I knew well, many of whose poems
I knew by heart, gave it altogether a new appearance.

To confirm this, I went
outside and stood exactly where I had been when I first saw the garden from the
door of the taxi. I wanted to get my first impression for a second time.

And this time I saw an
absolute purpose in the overgrown garden, which, since then, I have come to
believe existed in the eye of the beholder. But, at the time, the room we had
first entered, and which had riled me, now began to give back a meaning, and
whatever was, was right. The caked-up bottle of ink, which Elise had put on the
mantelpiece, I replaced on the table to make sure. I saw a photograph I hadn’t
noticed before, and I recognized the famous poet.

It was the same with the
upstairs room where Elise had put me, and I handled the books again, not so
much with the sense that they belonged to the famous poet but with some
curiosity about how they had been made. The sort of question that occurred to
me was where the paper had come from and from what sort of vegetation was
manufactured the black print, and these things have not troubled me since.

The Australians and the
Cockney girl came around about seven. I had planned to catch an eight-thirty
train to the country, but when I telephoned to confirm the time I found there
were no Sunday trains running. Elise, in her friendly and exhausted way, begged
me to stay without attempting to be too serious about it. The sirens were
starting up again. I asked Elise once more to repeat that the poet and his
family could by no means return that night. But I asked this question more
abstractedly than before, as I was thinking of the sirens and of the exact
proportions of the noise they made. I wondered, as well, what sinister genius
of the Home Office could have invented so ominous a wail, and why. And I was
thinking of the word ‘siren’. The sound then became comical, for I imagined
some maniac sea nymph from centuries past belching into the year 1944. Actually,
the sirens frightened me.

Most of all, I wondered
about Elise’s party. Everyone roamed about the place as if it were nobody’s
house in particular, with Elise the best-behaved of the lot. The Cockney girl
sat on the long table and gave of her best to the skies every time a bomb
exploded. I had the feeling that the house had been requisitioned for an
evening by the military. It was so hugely and everywhere occupied that it
became not the house I had first entered, nor the house of the famous poet, but
a third house —the one I had vaguely prefigured when I stood, bored, on the
platform at King’s Cross station. I saw a great amount of tiredness among these
people, and heard, from the loud noise they made, that they were all lacking
sleep. When the beer was finished and they were gone, some to their billets,
some to pubs, and the Cockney girl to her Underground shelter where she had
slept for weeks past, I asked Elise, ‘Don’t you feel tired?’

‘No,’ she said with
agonizing weariness, ‘I never feel tired.’

I fell asleep myself, as
soon as I had got into the bed on the floor in the upstairs room, and overslept
until Elise woke me at eight. I had wanted to get up early to catch a nine o’clock
train, so I hadn’t much time to speak to her. I did notice, though, that she
had lost some of her tired look.

I was pushing my things
into my hold-all while Elise went up the street to catch a taxi when I heard
someone coming upstairs. I thought it was Elise come back, and I looked out of
the open door. I saw a man in uniform carrying an enormous parcel in both
hands. He looked down as he climbed, and had a cigarette in his mouth.