The Underground Man (16 page)

But we do not like to eat them. They are bitter! We spit the fellows out. Yet, when spilt or planted (or even spat) onto fertile soil, that little pip will set about its ambitions of one day becoming a sapling, one day a tree. In its tough little shell are all the elements required to throw up a tree – bizarre … a
tree from a pip! – which one day, many years hence, may produce pippy apples of its own.

Around two o'clock I decided that if I did not make some effort to move about I might expire right there in my chair. So I called down for my long sable coat and beaver and laced up a pair of brown ankle boots. I already had on my moleskin trousers and knitted waistcoat and when I added my coat and hat and stood before the mirror I thought myself very smart indeed. As he picked the odd speck of dust from my shoulders Clement expressed concern at the prospect of my walking out alone, but once he understood I merely intended to take a stroll around the house he was greatly put at ease.

I checked my supplies before departing – compass, handkerchief and a pencil and paper in case I needed to make some notes – and had removed my sable while I limbered up when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Clement slipping a large oatmeal biscuit into my coat pocket. Made no mention of it.

Stood at my bedroom doorway, having difficulty recalling whether there was still a stairway at the end of the West wing or if it had been removed after becoming riddled with worm. By and by, however, I satisfied myself that it was the East wing not the West which had suffered the worm and that the stairs had most definitely been replaced … a good fifteen years ago, most likely. No, twenty. (Or even twenty-five.)

Clement was still most eager to accompany me but I insisted (quite forthrightly I thought) to be allowed to go on my own. We both stood by the door for a minute, rather stuck for something to say. Then I patted him on his shoulder and set off, feeling like a soldier marching off to war. When I looked over my shoulder a few seconds later I found
Clement still standing there, so we waved to one another and I carried on my way.

I was right at the end of the corridor before I realized I was headed eastward instead of west. What an idiot! Thankfully, Clement had surrendered his post at my bedroom door and was busy tending the fire so I was able to retrace my steps and creep past on tiptoe. Cantered quietly down the corridor until I had reached the bend.

I was completely lost within five minutes, but not altogether troubled. It was quite exciting to meander from room to room, taking in some which were quite foreign to me and others which I found I knew quite well. So, here was a study crammed with furniture and a ten-foot marble fireplace that might as well have belonged in a neighbour's house. But here was a room I remembered very fondly, for I had planned to decorate it and name it the Bachelors' Hall, where all the single men in Nottinghamshire could meet and socialize. I had envisaged indoor sport and much singing and manly camaraderie, but the long tables stood bare and dusty, without ever having had a single port or pastry set down on them. It is disturbing sometimes to find one's old dreams half alive and shabby-looking when, in truth, one would prefer them dead and six foot underground.

I strolled down one corridor after another, exploring every new avenue I came upon. One was carpeted with rugs from the Orient, the next had a plain parquet floor. Down one curving hall I ran the gauntlet of my whole glum ancestry, who glared down at me from their portraits. Another was lined with the mounted heads of deer. The walls of one room were covered with oil paintings of horses whose legs were too big for their bodies. And round the next corner I found my mother's old Sewing Room, which I had always thought to be in another part of the house.

When I became hopelessly disorientated I consulted my trusty compass. It was a minute or two before it dawned on me that finding North was not necessarily going to help me out. But by wiping the grime from a pane of glass and squinting out at the cold, damp world I found I could roughly calculate my whereabouts in the house by my relationship to one of the trees.

Eventually found myself down in the kitchens. Two girls were peeling the vegetables and quite taken by surprise. I think they mistook me in my sable coat for a bear which had wandered in from the woods. So I swiftly removed my beaver and introduced myself and their screaming died down in no time at all.

I was pleased to inform them that my walk had stimulated in me a healthy appetite and asked them to pass this news on to Mrs Pledger. As I turned to go I noticed two chickens stretched out on the table, waiting to be plucked. They looked rather pathetic lying there, with their heads dangling off the deck, so I put in a request for a little parsnip soup instead, then scurried away before Mrs Pledger had a chance to show her face.

I was out of the door and halfway down a cream-painted corridor before I realized my predicament. Had to return to the kitchens and ask the girls for directions back to my rooms.

Stood on my head for a good ten minutes, which left me seeing stars for about half an hour. After dinner I put on my sable and went out on to the balcony to puff on my father's pipe. The white smoke went down into me and filled me up and soothed me from top to toe. Few men, I think, could manage to fill a pipe and smoke it without becoming more philosophical by several degrees. There is something in the very nature of pipe-smoking which demands it.

As the smoke curled all about me I took in the icy moon through my old telescope. They say it has its own seas, just like ours. So, for a while, I dwelt on those distant waters and wondered what drove their tides. I studied the same stars I have studied a hundred times before and in my own modest way considered my Maker. Think I might have hit upon something, namely …

I am no clearer now, an hour later, if any of this makes sense. It may have just been the tobacco talking. However, of one thing I am certain, which is that as I stood out there on the balcony grappling with such grand and hefty thoughts, I again sensed, very close to me, the presence of the floating boy.

He was silent – just hung there in the near distance, looking down at me. He is a nervous boy, so I took great care not to frighten him off, and managed to find a way of looking up at the moon through the telescope whilst observing him in the periphery of my other eye. In doing so I began to make out something of his form. He is very young. There is a milkiness about him. He is a most blurred and milky young boy.

I had just finished breakfast this morning and was admiring Sanderson's map when Mrs Pledger knocked at my door and came striding in, full of bustle, with her mouth firmly set.

‘What can I do for you, Mrs Pledger?' I asked.

‘I have some bad news, Your Grace,' she replied.

In that case, I told her, she had better come right out with it, double-quick. So she filled her chest and raised her head and, in what sounded suspiciously like a well-rehearsed tone, informed me that Mr Snow, my old gardener, had recently passed away.

Well, this knocked the stuffing right out of me. I must have slumped down in a chair. All sorts of emotion began to bubble up inside me and I was still waiting to see how they might manifest themselves, when Mrs Pledger raised her hand to regain my attention, then proceeded to tell me how Mr Snow had passed away quite peacefully in his sleep but that … and here she faltered… but that Mrs Snow had died soon after.

Well, by now I had more than enough to cope with, but Mrs P. had her tap turned full on and words continued to pour from her … how it was ‘a most dreadful thing, to be sure', but how Dr Cox reckoned ‘the shock of losing her husband had almost certainly contributed to the death of his wife' until, with her left hand twisting her apron pocket, Mrs Pledger finally drew her speech to a close by saying how Mrs Snow was ‘nearly as old and infirm as Mr Snow and how it was hardly any surprise at all'.

By now I was altogether swamped and baffled. I may have nodded my head and murmured, ‘Quite so,' once or twice but, in truth, this represented little comprehension on my part. Several conflicting thoughts fought for my attention,
like sheep all squeezing through a gate. One was grief at the loss of my old gardener and it whispered in my ear, ‘Mr Snow, your old gardener … gone.' A second was more concerned with that dependency between Mr Snow and his wife which I had witnessed on my recent visit, and it whispered, ‘Here is confirmation, as plain as your nose – one flame is extinguished and it takes another one with it when it goes.'

Other thoughts gnawed away at me – all of them murky and half-formed – by far the loudest being a nagging voice of doubt, which wondered at the peculiar manner Mrs Pledger had divulged her story and why, at that very moment, she refused to look me in the eye.

‘How long between the death of Mr Snow and his wife?' I asked Mrs Pledger.

Her fingers screwed her apron pocket tighter still. ‘Three days, Your Grace,' she said.

And now a new voice leapt into the chorus. ‘Three days!' it shouted. ‘John Snow dead three days!' And yet another voice, more distant, began ranting, ‘All that contemplation last week on the circulation of gossip, yet no one thought to put you in the picture … Three full days since John Snow died!'

And an anxious, bilious ball rose in me. I was not as strong as I had been a minute before, but I staggered to my feet and, though there was barely room for it, drew in a breath and looked my housekeeper full in the face.

‘When is their funeral, Mrs Pledger?' I asked and heard the stitching of her apron pocket coming apart in her hand.

‘Their funeral was two days ago, Your Grace.'

I buckled beneath an impossible weight. The whole house folded up around me. My ears had in them a high-pitched ringing, so that I barely heard Mrs Pledger as words continued to fly out of her. ‘You have not been well, Your Grace,' was
in there somewhere. As was, ‘Dr Cox said it would only upset you more.'

And now the growing ball of anxiety pushed right up into my throat. My whole body brimmed with emotional pain. I thought, ‘My staff and Dr Cox have decided between them that I am weak. They have kept the Snows' death to themselves.'

I saw the cortège carrying their bodies, laden with wreaths and not a single petal from me. ‘Have I not the right to grieve?' I thought to myself. ‘I am a grown man – why not let me grieve?' The horses leaned forward into their harnesses and the cortège began to pull away.

‘He was my friend,' I told Mrs Pledger. ‘I should have liked to have said goodbye to my old friend.'

She nodded at me, then mercifully turned and left me to suffer my distress alone. And as the door closed behind her I felt the bubble finally burst and I fell, as if my legs had been kicked from under me. I fell and continued falling and was at long last engulfed in my own tears.

I wept for my old and much-loved gardener and his faithful wife who had followed him to the grave. I wept for my absence at their funeral; their being seen off without my being there. I wept from the shame of my own staff thinking me weak and mad and not to be trusted with the truth. And I wept because of that damned pain which climbed the ladder of my ribcage and might have strangled me had it not been for kind Conner. And somewhere in my tears I believe I wept for Mrs Pledger – for having picked the shortest straw and having to wend her way up to me, to own up to my staff's deceit.

With one hand I rubbed at my streaming eyes while the other clawed at the rug on which I sprawled. I think my fingers would have liked to unpick the whole carpet, thread by thread. I shook and shuddered, as if some pump had
broken free inside me; had to snatch my breath in great wet gulps until my shoulders ached. But when my eyes ran dry and my sobs subsided, I got to my feet and stumbled over to the mirror on the mantelpiece. There was the old man looking back at me, his pink little mouth all twisted and limp. His brows were knitted together above a pair of marbly eyes and his whole visage looked thoroughly beaten and bruised.

But I was in no position to be of any use to him, for I was too busy enjoying the show. How perverse that at such moments I am still fascinated by my every twitch and tremble, by my tear's slow journey down my cheek. That even as I moulder in a pit of misery some part of me still coolly observes my every move.

I did no headstands this evening. No pipe-smoking, no gazing at the stars. I did not leave my rooms at all. I simply lay on my bed and stared into space.

I had lost a friend and missed his funeral, and suffered the indignity of not being the master in my own house.

I was tempted to get on the mouthpiece and blow down to every last one of them and ask if they'd prefer me to be the black-hearted tyrant instead of the whimsical old fool that I am.

At last, I took down my wind-up monkey and gave him a turn or two and watched him go through the effort of raising his little hat for me.

Although the sun had barely risen, enough of it filtered through the skylights for me to make my way along the tunnel without incident. When I emerged near Holbeck village I still had no idea where my destination lay and it was only my seeing a curl of smoke from the Reverend Mellor's chimney which prompted me to pay him a visit.

After a restless night's sleep I had woken early, with just one thought on my mind – that I must get out of the wretched house or risk being suffocated by it. I dressed quickly in a blue cotton morning suit and took the main stairs down into a deserted hall; called in at the cloakroom where I picked up my beaver, a burgundy frock coat and matching cape. Took the door under the Great Stair Way down to the tunnels and, without any particular forethought, set off down the Southwest passage to find myself, within the hour, on the doorstep of Reverend Mellor's vicarage.