Cold Hand in Mine Page 21

  Mr Millar drew the door fully open. "Come in," he said, still neither looking me in the eye nor offering his hand. Also he was still without his jacket.

  "No one with you?" He seemed disappointed, though, as I have said, it was absurd.

  "No," I said. "Only me."

  "Working?" He said it not in the way of apology for interrupting me, or even in the way of making conversation, but rather as if he referred to some unusual hobby he had heard I went in for.

  "Yes. But it doesn't matter. I'm glad of a break." That, of course, was not the exact truth.

  "Sherry?"

  The bottle indicated that it came from one of the colonies, and the three glasses on Mr Millar's desk were from the threepenny and sixpenny store. One is not supposed to say such things so plainly, but on this occasion I think they are of significance. Conclusive perhaps was that the bottle had to be opened, and some small shavings or chippings brushed out of two glasses with the back of a carbon paper, before they could be used. It seemed clear that the feast had been assembled especially for me.

  "Thank you very much."

  It was not a matter of an alternative to sherry. Obviously there was none.

  Mr Millar fumbled away with a not very good corkscrew; one (as I knew even then) with too small a radius to the screw and too slender and cutting a handle. I almost felt that I should offer to help. I was quite sure that at least I should say something, as time was passing in silence while the cork split off and refused to come out; but I could think of nothing to the purpose.

  I had not been offered a seat, though there were two new office chairs, as well as the one behind Mr Millar's equally new desk. Mr Millar's desk was in imitation mahogany, where the desk outside imitated some much lighter and yellower wood. The sanctum was papered in light purple, or perhaps deep mauve: I can see it now, even though I never saw it again after this one visit, and quite a brief visit too, as will be seen. There was also some purple stuff on the centre part of the floor, where the desk stood; though the purple was not the same. There were four or five old portraits of the kind one can buy twice a week at certain auction-rooms. Normally such portraits are genuinely ancient, but of limited artistic value. They are like the "old books" which so many people believe to be of great value but which, though quite truly old, prove almost impossible to sell at all in the hour of need. These specimens were of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gentry in lace and wigs, four men and one woman; and they were in battered, discoloured frames. The one woman was elderly and unexceptional. Somehow it could not occur to one that these could be likenesses of Mr Millar's own ancestors.

  "Pity there was no one with you," said Mr Millar, pouring out. He fished out from one glass a scrap of tinfoil dropped off the bottle. That was quite a job too, as only a paperknife was available to do it.

  "My home is not in London," I said. "I don't know many people here yet."

  Mr Millar seemed uninterested, and one could hardly blame him.

  "I wonder how long Lloyd George will last?"

  This was, almost aggressively, "making conversation. Plainly I had failed badly in having no one with me. But at last the glass of sherry had reached me. As I was still not offered a seat, I sat down on one for myself. Immediately Mr Millar sat down also. I could think of nothing intelligent to say about Lloyd George, but I suppose I said something.

  "Santé!" said Mr Millar, still not looking at me — or at anything else, as it seemed to me. He was like a man with two glass eyes. I took a strong pull at the sherry glass, fortunately quite large.

  "Thundery weather," said Mr Millar. "How long before it breaks?"

  "Not just yet I should say."

  "You're a countryman?"

  "More an outer suburban, I'm afraid. At least it's become that."

  "Rather good sherry, don't you think?"

  "Frightfully good."

  "Do you take the Post or the Telegraph?"

  "I take The Times."

  "Bit young for that, aren't you?"

  "I grew up with it."

  "Really?"

  "Never another paper in our house."

  "Good Lord! You'd better write and tell them so." Mr Millar laughed metallically.

  It seemed that there was positively nothing to me without that missing person "with me". Really we could hardly continue.

  "Let me fill you up." He said it as perfunctorily as he had said everything else; but I accepted with some relief. I much needed daredevilry. I could hardly escape for a few more minutes.

  I could think of nothing to say which would continue the conversation. I doubted very much whether anything I could possibly say, would continue it. The central fact about Mr Millar was that his thoughts were elsewhere: were, I felt all the time I was with him, elsewhere permanently. His glass eyes and wandering hands spoke truth of a kind, where his lips spoke only cotton wool.

  "Fancy anything for the Cambridgeshire?"

  I could but shake my head. From one point of view, I could see that Mr Millar might hope for more lively company.

  "What about the tennis this summer? Good to have it back, don't you think?"

  "Good to have a lot of things back."

  "But there's a lot that won't come back so soon."

  "Yes," I said. "That's true."

  "I shouldn't wonder if there's never proper polo to watch again. Not polo worth watching."

  He was sitting sideways at his desk, showing me his left profile. I have said little — indeed, as I see, virtually nothing — about Mr Millar's appearance. Perhaps it is because there is so little to say. As far as I recall, he was a slender, dark man of medium height. He was cleanshaven, always a trifle black in the jowl — but only a trifle. I suppose he was 40; maybe a well-preserved 50. He had a wad of blackish hair, carefully trimmed round the edges, so that it seemed to fit his head like a cap, and always honeyed with brilliantine. He was at all times well dressed; at all times noticeably so, but not in a pejorative sense, except, conceivably, for such details as the suède shoes I have mentioned (he was wearing a townsman's country suit with them, it being the eve of the weekend). His counterparts are to be seen everywhere, at all times . . .

  I think I might even say that Mr Millar belonged to a type whose members tend to make one feel that their thoughts are elsewhere. But few of them carry this impression as far as Mr Millar carried it. Even at that first (but almost only) meeting, I sensed that Mr Millar's thoughts were as far away as those of Boris Godunov, who had, some said, made away with the rightful heir; or even of our own misled Macbeth.

  "While you're here," said Mr Millar, "there's something I'd like to explain. It seems a good opportunity."

  "Oh yes," I said, slanting my sherry glass, now once more less than half full.

  "We're very busy just now. I often have to stay on. So don't be surprised if you hear sounds."

  "I'm glad you've mentioned it."

  "I didn't want you to think we'd got the burglars in." Mr Millar laughed his metallic laugh. "I supposed at first I could come to an arrangement with the girl in the basement. Rather a sweet person, don't you think?"

  "From what I've seen of her," I said.

  "But of course she has her family to think about and all that sort of thing. So I've decided to shake down up here. After all, why not?" Mr Millar's colourless eyes roamed uneasily round the room, almost, it seemed, as if he thought his question might be answered. His gaze then proceeded to traverse the ceiling. To me his news was so unwelcome that again I could find nothing whatever to say.

  "You're one of these famous authors, I'm told?"

  "I aim to be," I replied.

  "I once thought I'd write a book myself."

  "Had you a subject in mind?" I enquired without a trace of sarcasm.

  "I'm sure I had," said Mr Millar. "God knows what it was!" He laughed again. "Let me fill you up."

  "I really ought to be on my way."

  "Just one more before you go," said Mr Millar, making a discernibly minimal effort to r
etain me. He was waving the bottle about nervously, but managed to concentrate enough to refill my glass.

  "Yes, a sweet little person that!"

  I smiled as man to man; or rather that was how it would have been if both of us had been men, instead of one of us an adolescent and the other a simulacrum.

  "Man was not meant to live alone. Don't you agree?"

  "There are arguments on both sides," I replied.

  "You wait till you're older," said Mr Millar, and laughed his laugh. "You can't talk till then."

  "I live a long way away, you know," he continued. "I couldn't possibly go home every night when we're so infernally busy. Couldn't stand the fag of it."

  "I suppose it's a good thing accountancy's so prosperous." But I was quite surprised that Mr Millar claimed to have a "home", however distant.

  "Yes, I suppose it is if you care to see it like that."

  I rose. "Anyway, I must leave you to it."

  "Glad you were able to come."

  He saw me only to the door of his sanctum; then turned back, his mind concentrated upon someone or something else, one shrank from thinking what.

  From then on, as I might have known, Mr Millar seemed to remain in his office almost every night. The rest of them disappeared at more or less the usual hour, but Mr Millar would continue pottering up and down stairs, locking and unlocking doors, carting small objects from place to place, making and answering late telephone calls, sometimes talking to himself as he roamed. When his shuffling about stopped me working (which, I have to acknowledge, was only occasionally), I would quietly open my door and shamelessly eavesdrop down my dark stair. But Mr Millar's activities seemed so trivial and futile as to be hardly worth spying on for long, and the chatter he addressed to himself (quite loudly and clearly) was not so much obsessive as escapist. The burden of his thoughts had long ago driven him out of his own personality, even when he was by himself. He had become a walking shell from which the babble of the world re-echoed.

  Did he ever really sleep? And, if so, on what? His sanctum had offered nothing but the floor when I had been in it; but, as I have said, I never entered it again. I suppose a sofa could have been introduced without my meeting it coming upstairs or hearing it bruise the new paintwork. I did not know whether Mr Millar locked his door, the outer one or the inner one, when finally he ceased to travail on the staircase and from room to room. Assuredly, I never heard him snore through the ceiling; although his bleak sanctum was immediately below my bedroom. But snoring is always absurd, and absurd was never quite the word for Mr Millar.

  That was how it was in the early days of Mr Millar's virtual residence beneath me. (I often wondered about the terms of his lease. It was as well that the agents we had to deal with were so easy-going.) But before long Mr Millar began to receive visitors.

  I had observed that rather late in the evening he seemed often to be out of the building. I would wander downstairs for some reason, or come back from the gallery of a theatre or the front rows of a cinema (my mother warned me about the effect on my eyesight). At any time between, perhaps, nine o'clock and two o'clock, I would find the lights on, and some of the doors still open, but no sight or sound of Mr Millar. I supposed that even he had had to seek a bite of food. I never looked into any of the open rooms, because I feared that Mr Millar would spring from behind the door, cry Peep-bo, and do me a hideous mischief; but I think I was right in supposing him out of the office at these times, and this was confirmed when he got into the way of not returning alone.

  Normally I only heard voices; voices and trudging steps, coming up the stairs, often very slowly, and then interminable talk on the floor below me, though sometimes there were other noises less easily definable, or explicable. More often than not, the voices were female; and, more often than not, very common voices, even strident, though I could seldom hear precise words. Up to a point the explanation was obvious enough: in those days, and before Mr R. A. Butler's famous Act, there were streets in the immediate area where it was far easier to pick up a woman and do what you liked to her than to pick up a taxi. On other evenings, Mr Millar's late callers were men, and several of them at a time, and as rough-spoken as the women. But the women also usually came several at a time: several at a time and apparently all friends together.

  I really had no will to investigate closely: Mr Millar both bored me and alarmed me, in oddly equal measure. But the noise that he and the late callers made together was sometimes a serious nuisance, though the things I have described did not happen every night.

  An unfortunate development was that I felt inhibited from bringing in my own few friends, especially my few but precious girl friends. One never quite knew what would happen, and explanations were at once ridiculous, unconvincing, and sinister. It was impossible to devise even an invented explanation that meant anything. A very young man who can bring no one home is at a major disadvantage. I found myself spending far longer periods as a hermit than I cared for. I perceived that I was being handicapped by circumstances even more than by temperament in making new approaches. Moreover, Mr Millar had not only altered the atmosphere in the house, but had already brought about an indefinable change in me.

  It first struck me in the matter of Maureen. Maureen had ceased to visit me, and when we met by chance, we were strangers. We stared into one another's eyes coldly, as if divided by incommunicable experiences. What horrified me, when I thought about it, was that I realized I did not care. And I had previously become far fonder of Maureen than I had ever been able to make real to her. Nor was it that another had taken her place. Far from it. It had somehow diminished.

  In the end, and inevitably, I met, or at least encountered some of Mr Millar's late visitors; on the doorstep, or surging upwards with Mr Millar in the midst, or, once or twice, standing silently on the staircase waiting for something to happen. It was especially odd to come upon these complete strangers standing about one's own staircase late at night. Never did they think of speaking to me; but then the persons actually accompanying Mr Millar, sometimes arm in arm with him, never spoke to me either, though often plainly embarrassed, even startled, to see me. Least of all at these times did Mr Millar himself speak to me. He kept his eyes away from me in his usual way; apprehending me and making way for me, drawing the others back, all as if with his pineal gland.

  Mr Millar's callers looked as they sounded, only sometimes still rougher. Hogarthian groups can be entertaining in a picture but seem less so when encountered going the other way on a narrow stair. The men callers looked like small-size professional criminals; with violence taken for granted, and a bad end also. I noticed that the sexes were seldom mixed among Mr Millar's callers, though once I did encounter a very pregnant girl, horribly white, being dragged upstairs by a man with gashes all over his face. Men and women alike tended to become silent even among themselves when they saw me; and when I did catch things they said, the things were always banalities worthy of Mr Millar himself. Never was there any question of a "revelation". But then about Mr Millar, though everything was in a sense wide open, nothing was revealed from first to last.

  An almost ludicrously flat explanation of the late callers occurred to me at one time. Was it not possible that these people, or some of them, really were clients; concerned with small enterprises, cafés for example, which, though doubtless shady, still needed to keep accounts of a kind, perhaps several sets of them (as my great-uncle would have said)? The people might have reasons for not calling during the daytime. They might even have good and honest reasons: the demands made by one-man and one-woman businesses. Thus, further, might be explained, or partly explained, Mr Millar's policy of sleeping in the office, and his claim that business required it. And indeed that explanation may have been a true one as far as it went; whatever else may be said or surmised about the late callers. It struck me also, however, that at no time did I seem to see any other persons who could be thought of as friends of Mr Millar. One would suppose that these late callers were his friends;
even his only friends. Certainly he treated them as friends: with uneasy shoves in the ribs, and sidelong jocularities, and teeth-flashing After-yous.

  Looking back on it all, it seems to me that it slowly worked up. There appeared to be nothing stable about Mr Millar's life in any of its aspects: one doubted whether he slept regularly, ate regularly, ever saw the same friend twice; had any underlying framework of habit and routine. None the less, there was a perceptibly advancing intensification as the pageant of his life with us flowed on; at once ludicrous and alarming, as everything else about Mr Millar — and steadily more embarrassing for me, in every sense of that epithet.

  Indeed, I suppose I should try to say a word about why I did not myself soon move out; or at least seek some other abode sooner than I did.

  About this I could rationalize unanswerably. With truth I could say that three rooms at a low rent in central London were exceedingly hard to find, and that everyone I knew told me I was very lucky and should sit tight at all costs — not that any of them knew in the least what the costs were. I could stress how notional was my cash basis, so that almost any change, not absolutely compelled, would indeed on balance be almost certainly for the worse. I could point out that the inconvenience (or menace) linked with Mr Millar was by no means continuous. Even towards the end, or apparent end, of his sojourn, there would be several evenings in each week when there was no trouble at all except the marginal one connected with his own, solitary fumblings and mumblings. And then there was the important problem, one which I could never forget, presented by my mother's strong, though mainly silent, wish to have me back with her at the cottage. Any weakening on my part would probably lead to my giving up my London life completely, and the new friends I had made. They were few, but I felt that they were nearly a matter of life or death to me, even though Mr Millar was a problem there too.