The Complete Short Stories (58 page)

After seeing George taken away home by
Kathleen that Saturday in the Portobello Road, I thought that perhaps I might
be seeing more of him in similar circumstances. The next Saturday I looked out
for him, and at last there he was, without Kathleen, half-worried,
half-hopeful.

I dashed his hopes. I
said, ‘Halo, George!’

He looked in my
direction, rooted in the midst of the flowing market-mongers in that convivial
street. I thought to myself; ‘He looks as if he had a mouthful of hay.’ It was
the new bristly maize-coloured beard and moustache surrounding his great mouth
which suggested the thought, gay and lyrical as life.

‘Halo, George!’ I said
again.

I might have been
inspired to say more on that agreeable morning, but he didn’t wait. He was away
down a side street and along another street and down one more, zigzag, as far
and as devious as he could take himself from the Portobello Road.

Nevertheless he was back
again next week. Poor Kathleen had brought him in her car. She left it at the
top of the street, and got out with him, holding him tight by the arm. It
grieved me to see Kathleen ignoring the spread of scintillations on the stalls.
I had myself seen a charming Battersea box quite to her taste, also a pair of
enamelled silver earrings. But she took no notice of these wares, clinging
close to George, and, poor Kathleen — I hate to say how she looked.

And George was haggard.
His eyes seemed to have got smaller as if he had been recently in pain. He
advanced up the road with Kathleen on his arm, letting himself lurch from side
to side with his wife bobbing beside him, as the crowds asserted their rights
of way.

‘Oh, George!’ I said. ‘You
don’t look at all well, George.’

‘Look!’ said George. ‘Over
there by the hardware barrow. That’s Needle.’

Kathleen was crying. ‘Come
back home, dear,’ she said.

‘Oh, you don’t look
well, George!’ I said.

They took him to a
nursing home. He was fairly quiet, except on Saturday mornings when they had a
hard time of it to keep him indoors and away from the Portobello Road.

But a couple of months
later he did escape. It was a Monday.

They searched for him in
the Portobello Road, but actually he had gone off to Kent to the village near
the scene of the Haystack Murder. There he went to the police and gave himself
up, but they could tell from the way he was talking that there was something
wrong with the man.

‘I saw Needle in the
Portobello Road three Saturdays running,’ he explained, ‘and they put me in a
private ward but I got away while the nurses were seeing to the new patient.
You remember the murder of Needle — well, I did it. Now you know the truth, and
that will keep bloody Needle’s mouth shut.’

Dozens of poor mad
fellows confess to every murder. The police obtained an ambulance to take him
back to the nursing home. He wasn’t there long. Kathleen gave up her shop and
devoted herself to looking after him at home. But she found that the Saturday
mornings were a strain. He insisted on going to see me in the Portobello Road
and would come back to insist that he’d murdered Needle. Once he tried to tell
her something about Matilda, but Kathleen was so kind and solicitous, I don’t
think he had the courage to remember what he had to say.

Skinny had always been
rather reserved with George since the murder. But he was kind to Kathleen. It
was he who persuaded them to emigrate to Canada so that George should be well
out of reach of the Portobello Road.

George has recovered
somewhat in Canada but of course he will never be the old George again, as
Kathleen writes to Skinny. ‘That Haystack tragedy did for George,’ she writes. ‘I
feel sorrier for George sometimes than I am for poor Needle. But I do often
have Masses said for Needle’s soul.’

I doubt if George will ever see me again in
the Portobello Road. He broods much over the crumpled snapshot he took of us on
the haystack. Kathleen does not like the photograph, I don’t wonder. For my
part, I consider it quite a jolly snap, but I don’t think we were any of us so
lovely as we look in it, gazing blatantly over the ripe cornfields, Skinny with
his humorous expression, I secure in my difference from the rest, Kathleen with
her head prettily perched on her hand, each reflecting fearlessly in the face
of George’s camera the glory of the world, as if it would never pass.

The Black Madonna

When the Black Madonna was installed in the
Church of the Sacred Heart the Bishop himself came to consecrate it. His long
purple train was upheld by the two curliest of the choir. The day was favoured
suddenly with thin October sunlight as he crossed the courtyard from the
presbytery to the church, as the procession followed him chanting the Litany of
the Saints: five priests in vestments of white heavy silk interwoven with
glinting threads, four lay officials with straight red robes, then the
confraternities and the tangled columns of the Mothers’ Union.

The new town of Whitney
Clay had a large proportion of Roman Catholics, especially among the nurses at
the new hospital; and at the paper mills, too, there were many Catholics, drawn
inland from Liverpool by the new housing estate; likewise, with the canning
factories.

The Black Madonna had
been given to the church by a recent convert. It was carved out of bog oak.

‘They found the wood in
the bog. Had been there hundreds of years. They sent for the sculptor right
away by phone. He went over to Ireland and carved it there and then. You see,
he had to do it while it was still wet.’

‘Looks a bit like
contemporary art.’

‘Nah, that’s not
contemporary art, it’s old-fashioned. If you’d ever seen contemporary work you’d
know
it was old-fashioned.’

‘Looks like contemp —’

‘It’s
old-fashioned.
Else
how’d it get sanctioned to be put up?’

‘It’s not so nice as the
Immaculate Conception at Lourdes. That lifts you up.

Everyone got used,
eventually, to the Black Madonna with her square hands and straight carved
draperies. There was a movement to dress it up in vestments, or at least a lace
veil.

‘She looks a bit gloomy,
Father, don’t you think?’

‘No,’ said the priest, ‘I
think it looks fine. If you start dressing it up in cloth you’ll spoil the
line.’

Sometimes people came
from London especially to see the Black Madonna, and these were not Catholics;
they were, said the priest, probably no religion at all, poor souls, though gifted
with faculties. They came, as if to a museum, to see the line of the Black
Madonna which must not be spoiled by vestments.

The new town of Whitney Clay had swallowed
up the old village. One or two cottages with double dormer windows, an inn
called ‘The Tyger’, a Methodist chapel and three small shops represented the
village; the three shops were already threatened by the Council; the Methodists
were fighting to keep their chapel. Only the double dormer cottages and the inn
were protected by the Nation and so had to be suffered by the Town Planning
Committee.

The town was laid out
like geometry in squares, arcs (to allow for the by-pass) and isosceles
triangles, breaking off, at one point, to skirt the old village which, from the
aerial view, looked like a merry doodle on the page.

Manders Road was one
side of a parallelogram of green-bordered streets. It was named after one of
the founders of the canning concern, Manders’ Figs in Syrup, and it comprised a
row of shops and a long high block of flats named Cripps House after the late
Sir Stafford Cripps who had laid the foundation stone. In flat twenty-two on
the fifth floor of Cripps House lived Raymond and Lou Parker. Raymond Parker
was a foreman at the motor works, and was on the management committee. He had
been married for fifteen years to Lou, who was thirty-seven at the time that
the miraculous powers of the Black Madonna came to be talked of.

Of the twenty-five
couples who lived in Cripps House five were Catholics. All, except Raymond and
Lou Parker, had children. A sixth family had recently been moved by the Council
into one of the six-roomed houses because of the seven children besides the
grandfather.

Raymond and Lou were
counted lucky to have obtained their three-roomed flat although they had no
children. People with children had priority; but their name had been on the
waiting list for years, and some said Raymond had a pull with one of the
Councillors who was a director of the motor works.

The Parkers were among
the few tenants of Cripps House who owned a motorcar. They did not, like most
of their neighbours, have a television receiver, for being childless they had
been able to afford to expand themselves in the way of taste, so that their
habits differed slightly and their amusements considerably, from those of their
neighbours. The Parkers went to the pictures only when the
Observer
had
praised the film; they considered television not their sort of thing; they
adhered to their religion; they voted Labour; they believed that the twentieth
century was the best so far; they assented to the doctrine of original sin;
they frequently applied the word ‘Victorian’ to ideas and people they did not
like — for instance, when a local Town Councillor resigned his office Raymond
said, ‘He had to go. He’s Victorian. And far too young for the job’; and Lou
said Jane Austen’s books were too Victorian; and anyone who opposed the
abolition of capital punishment was Victorian. Raymond took the
Reader’s
Digest,
a magazine called
Motoring
and the
Catholic Herald.
Lou
took the
Queen, Woman’s Own
and
Life.
Their daily paper was the
News
Chronicle.
They read two books apiece each week. Raymond preferred travel
books; Lou liked novels.

For the first five years
of their married life they had been worried about not having children. Both had
submitted themselves to medical tests as a result of which Lou had a course of
injections. These were unsuccessful. It had been a disappointment since both
came from large sprawling Catholic families. None of their married brothers and
sisters had less than three children. One of Lou’s sisters, now widowed, had
eight; they sent her a pound a week.

Their flat in Cripps
House had three rooms and a kitchen. All round them their neighbours were
saving up to buy houses. A council flat, once obtained, was a mere platform in
space to further the progress of the rocket. This ambition was not shared by
Raymond and Lou; they were not only content, they were delighted, with these
civic chambers, and indeed took something of an aristocratic view of them, not
without a self-conscious feeling of being free, in this particular, from the
prejudices of that middle class to which they as good as belonged. ‘One day,’
said Lou, ‘it will be the thing to live in a council flat.’

They were eclectic as to
their friends. Here, it is true, they differed slightly from each other.
Raymond was for inviting the Ackleys to meet the Farrells. Mr Ackley was an
accountant at the Electricity Board. Mr and Mrs Farrell were respectively a
sorter at Manders’ Figs in Syrup and an usherette at the Odeon.

‘After all,’ argued
Raymond, ‘they’re all Catholics.’

‘Ah well,’ said Lou, ‘but
now, their interests are different. The Farrells wouldn’t know what the Ackleys
were talking about. The Ackleys like politics. The Farrells like to tell jokes.
I’m not a snob, only sensible.’

‘Oh, please yourself.’
For no one could call Lou a snob, and everyone knew she was sensible.

Their choice of
acquaintance was wide by reason of their active church membership: that is to
say, they were members of various guilds and confraternities. Raymond was a
sidesman, and he also organized the weekly football lottery in aid of the
Church Decoration Fund. Lou felt rather out of things when the Mothers’ Union
met and had special Masses, for the Mothers’ Union was the only group she did
not qualify for. Having been a nurse before her marriage she was, however, a
member of the Nurses’ Guild.

Thus, most of their
Catholic friends came from different departments of life. Others, connected
with the motor works where Raymond was a foreman, were of different social
grades to which Lou was more alive than Raymond. He let her have her way, as a
rule, when it came to a question of which would mix with which.

A dozen Jamaicans were
taken on at the motor works. Two came into Raymond’s department. He invited
them to the flat one evening to have coffee. They were unmarried, very polite
and black. The quiet one was called Henry Pierce and the talkative one, Oxford
St John. Lou, to Raymond’s surprise and pleasure, decided that all their
acquaintance, from top to bottom, must meet Henry and Oxford. All along he had
known she was not a snob, only sensible, but he had rather feared she would
consider the mixing of their new black and their old white friends not
sensible.

‘I’m glad you like Henry
and Oxford,’ he said. ‘I’m glad we’re able to introduce them to so many people.’
For the dark pair had, within a month, spent nine evenings at Cripps House;
they had met accountants, teachers, packers and sorters. Only Tina Farrell, the
usherette, had not seemed to understand the quality of these occasions: ‘Quite
nice chaps, them darkies, when you get to know them.’

‘You mean Jamaicans,’
said Lou. ‘Why shouldn’t they be nice? They’re no different from anyone else.’

‘Yes, yes, that’s what I
mean,’ said Tina.

‘We’re all equal,’
stated Lou. ‘Don’t forget there are black Bishops.’

‘Jesus, I never said we
were the equal of a Bishop,’ Tina said, very bewildered.

‘Well, don’t call them
darkies.’