The Complete Short Stories (55 page)

The Portobello
Road

One day in my young youth at high summer,
lolling with my lovely companions upon a haystack, I found a needle. Already
and privately for some years I had been guessing that I was set apart from the
common run, but this of the needle attested the fact to my whole public:
George, Kathleen and Skinny. I sucked my thumb, for when I had thrust my idle
hand deep into the hay, the thumb was where the needle had stuck.

When everyone had
recovered George said, ‘She put in her thumb and pulled out a plum.’ Then away
we were into our merciless hacking-hecking laughter again.

The needle had gone
fairly deep into the thumby cushion and a small red river flowed and spread
from this tiny puncture. So that nothing of our joy should lag, George put in
quickly,

‘Mind your bloody thumb
on my shirt.’

Then hac-hec-hoo, we
shrieked into the hot Borderland afternoon. Really I should not care to be so
young of heart again. That is my thought every time I turn over my old papers
and come across the photograph. Skinny, Kathleen and myself are in the photo
atop the haystack. Skinny had just finished analysing the inwards of my find.

‘It couldn’t have been
done by brains. You haven’t much brains but you’re a lucky wee thing.’

Everyone agreed that the
needle betokened extraordinary luck. As it was becoming a serious conversation,
George said,

‘I’ll take a photo.’

I wrapped my hanky round
my thumb and got myself organized. George pointed up from his camera and
shouted,

‘Look; there’s a mouse!’

Kathleen screamed and I
screamed although I think we knew there was no mouse. But this gave us an extra
session of squalling hee-hoo’s. Finally we three composed ourselves for George’s
picture. We look lovely and it was a great day at the time, but I would not
care for it all over again. From that day I was known as Needle.

One Saturday in recent years I was mooching
down the Portobello Road, threading among the crowds of marketers on the narrow
pavement when I saw a woman. She had a haggard, careworn, wealthy look, thin
but for the breasts forced-up high like a pigeon’s. I had not seen her for
nearly five years. How changed she was! But I recognized Kathleen, my friend;
her features had already begun to sink and protrude in the way that mouths and
noses do in people destined always to be old for their years. When I had last
seen her, nearly five years ago, Kathleen, barely thirty, had said,

‘I’ve lost all my looks,
it’s in the family. All the women are handsome as girls, but we go off early,
we go brown and nosey.’

I stood silently among
the people, watching. As you will see, I wasn’t in a position to speak to
Kathleen. I saw her shoving in her avid manner from stall to stall. She was
always fond of antique jewellery and of bargains. I wondered that I had not
seen her before in the Portobello Road on my Saturday-morning ambles. Her long
stiff-crooked fingers pounced to select a jade ring from among the jumble of
brooches and pendants, onyx, moonstone and gold, set out on the stall.

‘What do you think of
this?’ she said.

I saw then who was with
her. I had been half-conscious of the huge man following several paces behind
her, and now I noticed him.

‘It looks all right,’ he
said. ‘How much is it?’

‘How much is it?’
Kathleen asked the vendor.

I took a good look at
this man accompanying Kathleen. It was her husband. The beard was unfamiliar,
but I recognized beneath it his enormous mouth, the bright sensuous lips, the
large brown eyes forever brimming with pathos.

It was not for me to
speak to Kathleen, but I had a sudden inspiration which caused me to say
quietly,

‘Halo, George.

The giant of a man
turned round to face the direction of my face. There were so many people — but
at length he saw me.

‘Halo, George,’ I said
again.

Kathleen had started to
haggle with the stall-owner, in her old way, over the price of the jade ring.
George continued to stare at me, his big mouth slightly parted so that I could
see a wide slit of red lips and white teeth between the fair grassy growths of
beard and moustache.

‘My God!’ he said.

‘What’s the matter?’
said Kathleen.

‘Halo, George!’ I said
again, quite loud this time, and cheerfully.

‘Look!’ said George. ‘Look
who’s there, over beside the fruit stall.’

Kathleen looked but didn’t
see.

‘Who is it?’ she said
impatiently.

‘It’s Needle,’ he said. ‘She
said “Halo, George”.’

‘Needle,’
said
Kathleen. ‘Who do you mean? You don’t mean our old friend
Needle
who —’

‘Yes. There she is. My
God!’

He looked very ill,
although when I had said ‘Halo, George’ I had spoken friendly enough.

‘I don’t see anyone
faintly resembling poor Needle,’ said Kathleen looking at him. She was worried.

George pointed straight
at me. ‘Look
there.
I tell you that is Needle.’

‘You’re ill, George.
Heavens, you must be seeing things. Come on home. Needle isn’t there. You know
as well as I do, Needle is dead.’

I must explain that I departed this life
nearly five years ago. But I did not altogether depart this world. There were
those odd things still to be done which one’s executors can never do properly.
Papers to be looked over, even after the executors have torn them up. Lots of
business except, of course, on Sundays and Holidays of Obligation, plenty to
take an interest in for the time being. I take my recreation on Saturday
mornings. If it is a wet Saturday I wander up and down the substantial lanes of
Woolworth’s as I did when I was young and visible. There is a pleasurable
spread of objects on the counters which I now perceive and exploit with a
certain detachment, since it suits with my condition of life. Creams,
toothpastes, combs and hankies, cotton gloves, flimsy flowering scarves,
writing-paper and crayons, ice-cream cones and orangeade, screwdrivers, boxes
of tacks, tins of paint, of glue, of marmalade; I always liked them but far
more now that I have no need of any. When Saturdays are fine I go instead to
the Portobello Road where formerly I would jaunt with Kathleen in our grown-up
days. The barrow-loads do not change much, of apples and rayon vests in common
blues and low-taste mauve, of silver plate, trays and teapots long since
changed hands from the bygone citizens to dealers, from shops to the new flats
and breakable homes, and then over to the barrow-stalls and the dealers again:
Georgian spoons, rings, earrings of turquoise and opal set in the butterfly
pattern of true-lovers’ knot, patch-boxes with miniature paintings of ladies on
ivory, snuff-boxes of silver with Scotch pebbles inset.

Sometimes as occasion
arises on a Saturday morning, my friend Kathleen, who is a Catholic, has a
Mass said for my soul, and then I am in attendance, as it were, at the church.
But most Saturdays I take my delight among the solemn crowds with their aimless
purposes, their eternal life not far away, who push past the counters and
stalls, who handle, buy, steal, touch, desire and ogle the merchandise. I hear
the tinkling tills, I hear the jangle of loose change and tongues and children
wanting to hold and have.

That is howl came to be
in the Portobello Road that Saturday morning when I saw George and Kathleen. I
would not have spoken had I not been inspired to it. Indeed it’s one of the
things I can’t do now — to speak out, unless inspired. And most extraordinary,
on that morning as I spoke, a degree of visibility set in. I suppose from poor
George’s point of view it was like seeing a ghost when he saw me standing by
the fruit barrow repeating in so friendly a manner, ‘Halo, George!’

We were bound for the south. When our
education, what we could get of it from the north, was thought to be finished,
one by one we were sent or sent for to London. John Skinner, whom we called
Skinny, went to study more archaeology, George to join his uncle’s tobacco
farm, Kathleen to stay with her rich connections and to potter intermittently
in the Mayfair hat shop which one of them owned. A little later I also went to
London to see life, for it was my ambition to write about life, which first I
had to see.

‘We four must stick
together,’ George said very often in that yearning way of his. He was always
desperately afraid of neglect. We four looked likely to shift off in different
directions and George did not trust the other three of us not to forget all
about him. More and more as the time came for him to depart for his uncle’s
tobacco farm in Africa he said,

‘We four must keep in
touch.’

And before he left he
told each of us anxiously, ‘I’ll write regularly, once a month. We must keep
together for the sake of the old times.’ He had three prints taken from the
negative of that photo on the haystack, wrote on the back of them, ‘George took
this the day that Needle found the needle’ and gave us a copy each. I think we
all wished he could become a bit more callous.

During my lifetime I was
a drifter, nothing organized. It was difficult for my friends to follow the
logic of my life. By the normal reckonings I should have come to starvation and
ruin, which I never did. Of course, I did not live to write about life as I
wanted to do. Possibly that is why I am inspired to do so now in these peculiar
circumstances.

I taught in a private
school in Kensington for almost three months, very small children. I didn’t
know what to do with them but I was kept fairly busy escorting incontinent
little boys to the lavatory and telling the little girls to use their
handkerchiefs. After that I lived a winter holiday in London on my small
capital, and when that had run out I found a diamond bracelet in the cinema for
which I received a reward of fifty pounds. When it was used up I got a job with
a publicity man, writing speeches for absorbed industrialists, in which the
dictionary of quotations came in very useful. So it went on. I got engaged to
Skinny, but shortly after that I was left a small legacy, enough to keep me for
six months. This somehow decided me that I didn’t love Skinny so I gave him
back the ring.

But it was through
Skinny that I went to Africa. He was engaged with a party of researchers to
investigate King Solomon’s mines, that series of ancient workings ranging from
the ancient port of Ophir, now called Beira, across Portuguese East Africa and
Southern Rhodesia to the mighty jungle-city of Zimbabwe whose temple walls
still stand by the approach to an ancient and sacred mountain, where the rubble
of that civilization scatters itself over the surrounding Rhodesian waste. I
accompanied the party as a sort of secretary. Skinny vouched for me, he paid my
fare, he sympathized by his action with my inconsequential life although when
he spoke of it he disapproved. A life like mine annoys most people; they go to
their jobs every day, attend to things, give orders, pummel typewriters, and
get two or three weeks off every year, and it vexes them to see someone else
not bothering to do these things and yet getting away with it, not starving,
being lucky as they call it. Skinny, when I had broken off our engagement,
lectured me about this, but still he took me to Africa knowing I should
probably leave his unit within a few months.

We were there a few
weeks before we began inquiring for George, who was farming about four hundred
miles away to the north. We had not told him of our plans.

‘If we tell George to
expect us in his part of the world he’ll come rushing to pester us the first
week. After all, we’re going on business,’ Skinny had said.

Before we left Kathleen
told us, ‘Give George my love and tell him not to send frantic cables every
time I don’t answer his letters right away. Tell him I’m busy in the hat shop
and being presented. You would think he hadn’t another friend in the world the
way he carries on.

We had settled first at
Fort Victoria, our nearest place of access to the Zimbabwe ruins. There we made
inquiries about George. It was clear he hadn’t many friends. The older settlers
were the most tolerant about the half-caste woman he was living with, as we
found, but they were furious about his methods of raising tobacco which we
learned were most unprofessional and in some mysterious way disloyal to the
whites. We could never discover how it was that George’s style of tobacco
farming gave the blacks opinions about themselves, but that’s what the older
settlers claimed. The newer immigrants thought he was unsociable and, of
course, his living with that nig made visiting impossible.

I must say I was myself
a bit off-put by this news about the brown woman. I was brought up in a
university town to which came Indian, African and Asiatic students in a variety
of tints and hues. I was brought up to avoid them for reasons connected with
local reputation and God’s ordinances. You cannot easily go against what you
were brought up to do unless you are a rebel by nature.

Anyhow, we visited
George eventually, taking advantage of the offer of transport from some people
bound north in search of game. He had heard of our arrival in Rhodesia and
though he was glad, almost relieved, to see us he pursued a policy of
sullenness for the first hour.

‘We wanted to give you a
surprise, George.’

‘How were we to know
that you’d get to hear of our arrival, George? News here must travel faster
than light, George.’

‘We did hope to give you
a surprise, George.’

At last he said, ‘Well,
I must say it’s good to see you. All we need now is Kathleen. We four simply
must stick together. You find when you’re in a place like this, there’s nothing
like old friends.’

He showed us his drying
sheds. He showed us a paddock where he was experimenting with a horse and a
zebra mare, attempting to mate them. They were frolicking happily, but not
together. They passed each other in their private play time and again, but
without acknowledgement and without resentment.