To the Dark Tower (5 page)

June 5th
, 1937

For the first time he asks me to return with him to his rooms. We take the ferry across to Kingswear. It is only now that I am fully aware of his poverty. I have seen him make a lunch off a piece of bread and butter; he has often refused to go to cinemas with me or to have a drink; but I have never realised the cause—the need to husband his resources. Those of us who have never felt the lack of money so often do this—suggesting lavish meals, always assuming that the other person can afford to disregard expenses. And when we are met by a refusal or excuse—for people are often too proud to say ‘I can’t afford this’—then we accept what they say at its face value; we really believe that ‘It’s more fun to eat sandwiches at a coffee stall’, or that ‘The gallery is the only place to sit in at a theatre.’

His room is at the very top of an uncarpeted staircase, in a house whose façade is peeling, yellow and grimed and blotched. There is an unmade bed. Greyness of sheets. Papers littering a card table, pyjamas thrown over a chair, cigarette-ends on the floor. A pot full of stale urine under the bed.

"I’ll make some cocoa," he says. But the gas won’t come; he fumbles in his pocket for a shilling.

"Here you are." I flick it across to him, placing myself gingerly on the bed.

"Thanks." He produces an aluminium saucepan with a ridge of sediment running round the inside and shakes the cocoa out of its packet. He is going to make it with water.

At that moment there is a deafening noise from next door. The room vibrates. Excruciating, epicene moans from a saxophone and crooner. Cauldwell pulls a face.

"Do you have to write through that?"

"I don’t really notice it when I’m writing. But when I’m reading—or trying to get to sleep... You see, I so often write all night and try to sleep during the day. It’s hopeless."

He goes back to the cocoa, stirring it lethargically. A breath of wind detaches a sheet of manuscript and blows it against the door. It makes a dry, scraping sound.

Next door there is now a clatter of bones and an emasculated rhumba. If they could hear the real thing!

I notice a photograph on the table beside me. It is unframed, leaning against a tumbler of water—a woman of about thirty-five, tired, a little wan, the pores of her face unnaturally enlarged, her neck sagging as though with incipient goitre. She has a slight moustache, fair, because she must peroxide it. She is wearing one of those shiny black silk dresses which one sees on shop assistants, and a rope of pearls.

"My goodness. Who on earth is this?"

Colour mounts to his forehead. "My girl."

"Your—girl!" So this is a girl—the rubbed coarseness of the neck, the breasts that would sag were it not for the upward tilt of their brassière. I begin to chuckle, half in surprise, half in malice.

"What are you laughing at?"

"It’s—rather—funny. That’s all." I look at the ageing face for a second time. "No, really... She’s old enough to be——"

"Give it to me!" He darts forward and snatches at the photograph. The face is neatly severed from the goitrous neck. We each hold a fragment.

"Now look what you’ve done! Now look!" In a tearful rage he slaps me across the face with the flat of his hand.

This is too much. I punch him in the mouth. He begins to spit teeth and blood into a basin, muttering: "You swine... You bastard..."

"I’m sorry, old chap. I didn’t mean to hit you so hard." Rage is a matter of seconds with me—a sudden paroxysm, and then nothing. "What’s the matter? Knocked out a tooth?" I try to pat his shoulder.

But immediately he begins screaming: "Let me go! Don’t touch me! Get out of here! Leave me alone! I don’t want to see you again!"

At that moment the cocoa boils over, sizzles, and finally puts out the gas. There is a hush in the radio programme. But, "Get out! Clear out!" he still yells at me, his face messy with blood and saliva.

The door slams behind me. Faces appear on the landing. I hurry away.

And that, I imagine, is the last of Frank Cauldwell.

June 6th
, 1937

This morning he comes round to the house, says nothing of the night before. There is a gap in his teeth, through which saliva tends to trickle. He behaves as if the whole incident had never taken place. Should I offer to pay for a visit to the dentist?

June 7th
, 1937

He swims ten yards by himself and then collapses on to the sand, like a fish, white and panting and gleaming with moisture. In the afternoon he scribbles in a notebook.

June 8th
, 1937

There is a fair on.

"I love fairs," he says rather surprisingly.

"So do I." (But I do not admit the reason. I do not tell him how much I enjoy being surrounded by a crowd while I win packet after packet of Woodbines in the shooting-gallery.)

"Let’s go."

"All right."

We thrust ourselves through smells of sweat and scent, and acrid fumes from the merry-go-round. Sailors lurch against us with women on their arms. Strings of coloured lights sway gaudily. We are conscious of being rather aloof, of being spectators. A woman’s hand rests on my sleeve in the crowd; chapped, nails bitten and then varnished scarlet. Her thick, smiling lips reveal brittle teeth. Her legs gleam, bare and white and flaccid at the knees. Then a sailor picks her up.

At the shooting-gallery I say to Cauldwell: "Come on. I challenge you to a match. Do you shoot?" My vanity is ludicrous.

"I’m sorry. I haven’t any money." He turns out his pockets, ruefully smiling. "I paid my landlady this morning. And that’s that."

"That’s all right. I’ll pay."

Of course I win. One round is enough for him. But I continue, taking as prizes a teddy-bear that smells of sawdust, a vase with flamingos on it, some raffia napkin rings, and four packets of Woodbines. The Woodbines I distribute to some sailors; the vase and napkin rings are returned to the man in charge; and the teddy-bear is Cauldwell’s. I have the admiration of the little crowd.

Swing boats. I have difficulty in persuading Cauldwell. "They’re horrible things," he complains, looking up at the young men who pull muscularly at the ropes and at the girls who accompany them, screeching, wind-blown, their skirts billowing upwards to reveal pink thighs. "I hate them."

"Come on! It’s great fun. I don’t believe you’ve ever been up."

He looks uncomfortable: perhaps this diagnosis is correct.

I am in charge. A feeling of freedom, of being on the high seas. The wind dishevels one; one is so far above the white, nondescript faces, peering up, appraising the exposure of youthful thighs. If one thinks anything, it is how appalling it will be to have to cease these aerobatics and come to earth. I take a pleasure in swinging our boat higher than anyone else. Again my vanity.

"Oh, do look out. We nearly went right over. Do be careful." I am conscious of Cauldwell, strapped unhappily, one hand to his mouth, his teeth unnaturally bared.

"This is fine," I say. "Don’t you feel free? Don’t you feel on top of the world?"

He looks downwards and then looks away, out to the river, coiling and gleaming like a noose about us. His hands grip the sides, the knuckles white.

On our left a girl makes eyes at me. She is a farm-girl, I imagine, with hands like bunches of bananas. Then her skirt >blows up, covering her rubicund face, while she cackles with mirth.

"I’m feeling sick."

I had forgotten Cauldwell. He is crouched now, greenish, swallowing hard, a handkerchief to his mouth.

"Sick?"

"Oh, do let’s stop. Do let’s go down. I’ve had enough. Please." He is like a child. I have visions of him being sick from up here on to those peering faces. I cease to tug at the rope. We swing lazily, hover, settle, the river ceases to hold us in its enormous snare. We clamber out into a circumscribed space—lights, faces, noise. Everything seems suddenly static and rather flat. Cauldwell belches and clutches my arm giddily.

"All right?"

"I will be in a moment. I hate heights. And I’m a rotten sailor. Sorry."

A youth in a white artificial-silk scarf blows a squeaker into Cauldwell’s face. He frowns. This makes me feel suddenly sorry for him: he seems to have lost all reserves, all self-possession.

"Come and have a drink," I suggest, and add hastily, "on me."

"Thanks."

When we are in the stuffy bar-parlour I turn to him: "I hope you won’t mind my asking this. But when you said just now that you hadn’t any money, did you mean that you hadn’t any at all? Did you mean that you were broke?"

He looks into his glass, his greenish pallor changing to a blush. "Yes. I am broke. I’ve spent most of to-day looking for a job. No luck, I’m afraid. And I need three or four more weeks for the novel." In the parlour there are farmers discussing the year’s prospects; there are some rowdy youths, and two girls who laugh, throwing back their peroxided heads and clutching their sides; there is an old man, half-drunk, breaking wind noisily; the atmosphere is thick with smoke and din. But Cauldwell’s voice is subdued, almost inaudible. He seems afraid of being overheard.

"Look. I’ve got an idea." I feel suddenly paternal towards him. "Why don’t you come and stay with me? I could put you up quite easily."

His eyes flicker with the pleasure, and then go dull again. "That’s very good of you. But I wouldn’t make the ideal guest. As I told you once, I work most of the night and sleep during the day. And I hate being disturbed."

This sounds almost ungracious. But I persist. "I don’t mind about that. I won’t badger you. I have plenty of work to do myself. The spare room’s at the top of the house. You can spend all your time there if you like."

He hesitates. "Well—thank you. If I could stay for—well—a week..."

"Stay as long as you like."

"No. Only a week. A week will be enough. After that I want to leave Dartmouth... I really don’t know how to thank you."

"So you’re going to leave Dartmouth after a week?"

"Yes. I think I must. I’ve studied my subject from close quarters. Now I shall have to move away. I can’t get it into focus otherwise."

I feel suddenly curious. "What
is
your novel about?"

He smiles, watching the two women in the corner, stomachs stuck out, calves bulging, cascades of ash-blonde hair undulating round plump shoulders. "I never like to tell people about my work until it is finished. I don’t know why. I feel that if the secret is shared it somehow evaporates."

"I see."

But the explanation does not satisfy me.

June 10th
, 1937

Cauldwell has not appeared all to-day. Clark tells me that when he called him at eight he was up, dressed, and at work. He asked not to be disturbed. At midday he went to the kitchen and made himself a sandwich and a cup of tea. He hasn’t been seen since.

"I hope the gentleman’s all right, sir," says Clark, when giving me this information.

"That will do, Clark."

He limps out, disapproval on every line of his face.

June 11th
, 1937

Another swimming lesson: Cauldwell improves. But when, in a moment of high spirits, I try to duck him he leaves the water and sulks over a book. His back is peeling from the sun: even to look at it is excruciating. But perhaps he will tan afterwards.

June 13th,
, 1937

All last night Cauldwell was pacing his room or roaming about the house. Eventually I put my head out of my door. "For Heaven’s sake!" I bawled.

Silence.

This morning, when I take
The Times
out to the summer-house I find him asleep there. He has dribbled on to the cushion of his chair, and waking up, he gives a sort of grunt. Then he sees where he is, and apologises.

June 14th
, 1937

This evening I take out all the old family albums. Cauldwell has asked to see them. He put them on the floor, then kneels beside them, completely absorbed. There is a nostalgia in this, which I try to combat. How the past tyrannises over one—I with photographs of Lucy on horseback, Lucy with her three borzois, Lucy in a wheel-chair; myself self-possessed and arrogant, leaning over a ship’s rail, in bathing-trunks, in khaki, in dusty field-boots, then lying on my stomach, a baby, pink, cherubic, callipygous; Judith and Dennis snapped in Italy, both naked, tanned, immodest, with a glaucous sea behind them. I have tried to rid myself of this horla, the past. I have tried to bundle it away with the lockets, rings, daguerreotypes, letters. But the sight of these faces revivifies it. It is still potent.

Cauldwell always asks questions. "Who’s that? ... And
she
was the sister of
him
? And this is you, of course... No? ... Your brother, then..."

Here is S. N. George, in the days when he was an Oxford dandy, rather too conscious of looking like the picture of Swinburne in his college hall; here is one of my A.D.C.’s, a boy of eighteen, whose babyish face was blown off in the trenches; Eckworth, diplomatic attaché, supercilious, erratic, who cut his throat with a razor; Rolf, whom we thought a genius, but who married a dull woman and begot dull children on a small property in Cumberland; Andrée, smiling with ingenuous voluptuousness as she poses on a veranda; youthful faces, troubled faces, yellowing features corroded by time, fashions and gestures of a lost era—these could once incite anger or pity, contempt or lust, all dead, all forgotten, all bundled away between the heavy covers.

"May I keep this?" Cauldwell holds up a picture.

It is a photograph of me, a young man of eighteen in an open-necked shirt, with a week’s growth on my chin, staring arrogantly into the camera. I am frowning, eyes screwed together, brows furrowed, deep lines running vertically on each side of my mouth. In my hand I hold a riding-whip which I am flicking against a booted leg. My face is plumper, lips fuller, more sensual.

"Why do you want it?"

He shrugs his shoulders. "I feel it must be very like you at the time... It is, isn’t it?"

"Yes. I suppose it is. You can have it."

Carefully he places it in his wallet, smiling.