Cold Hand in Mine Page 22

  All these things were entirely enough to settle the matter. But what really settled it was, I think, something quite different. It was as if Mr Millar had injected me with a lightly paralysing fluid, cocooned me in an almost indetectable glaze or fixative; diminishing my power of choice, weakening my rational judgment, to say nothing of the super-refinement that had been put upon it by the super-refinement of the way I had been brought up. Though, when I thought about it, I was antagonized by almost everything to do with Mr Millar, yet I realized that he was an experience (or ordeal) I might be unwise to avoid. I could not live for ever as a child, free and light as air. As we acquire weight in the world, we lose it within ourselves. Maturity is always in part a matter of emptying and contracting. By that standard, Mr Millar, almost weightless, almost adrift, almost without habits (where a baby has nothing else), had passed beyond mere maturity; but contact with him amounted to a compressed and simplified course in growing up. Mine was similar to the real reason why a schoolboy does not run away from the school he hates.

  One evening — it was perhaps seven o'clock — came Maureen, once more tapping gently at my door.

  "How are you getting on?" she asked. It was the first time in months that actual spoken words had passed between us; and never before had she been able to visit me except in the afternoon, between her job and collecting the youngest child.

  She was wearing a short, sleeveless grey dress, with a scooped out neck: very little of it altogether in fact; and with several stains on the front, left there by cooking, or the children. She wore no stockings and a pair of high-heeled shoes that more or less matched her dress. She had left off her slide, and her hair was drooping over her eyes, so that she had to look up from under it. Her hands were in need of a wash, and there was even a small grimy patch on her face.

  It was summer, and I was wearing simply a shirt and trousers.

  I stepped up to her and held her tightly and kissed her as if it were for ever.

  "Stranger!" said Maureen affectionately.

  I took off her dress, quite gently; and then wriggled her out of her underclothes, which were charming.

  We lay down together on my cheap bed, neither glamorous nor particularly comfortable.

  "What about you?" asked Maureen.

  So I removed my own clothes, which I had quite forgotten about; and I put her shoes neatly alongside one another.

  We were together for three or four hours, until long after it was dark, listening to our hearts, and, intermittently, to the sounds of London.

  I did not ask her about her husband and family, nor did she expound; and when suddenly she said, "I'm going now," my luck was in, or ours, because Mr Millar was not even walking from room to room with bits of paper in his hands, let alone entertaining the visitors. I should have hated Mr Millar to have seen me kissing Maureen goodbye.

  "When can I see you again?"

  "I simply can't tell you. We must make the best of the present." Talk about maturity! I still had far to go, and perhaps had even experienced a setback, a reversion to happy childhood.

  I have said that the pageant (or mirage) of Mr Millar's life seemed steadily to work up, to intensify.

  One thing that was a new embarrassment as far as I was concerned was that Mr Millar was drinking. The ludicrous side of it, if one saw it like that, was that large crates of cheap spirits were continually being delivered to the house by men in peaked caps. Remarkably often they rang my outside bell instead of the one appertaining to Messrs Stallabrass, Hoskins and Cramp. I would toil down, with all the men in their braces staring at me as if they had never seen me before, and all the girls giggling, and then have to toil up again; the booby who had fallen into the trap. (Mr Millar himself continued almost invisible during working hours, at least as far as I was concerned. For a time I wondered whether he did not use the day for sleeping.) I have described the spirits that were ceaselessly delivered as "cheap": they were gins made by brewers, and whiskies not made in Scotland or in Ireland; both with jazzy labels on the bottles.

  The alarming side of Mr Millar's new propensity was that now when I returned home, I would sometimes find him not wandering about, but sprawling or huddled on the staircase, very white and dishevelled, breathing hard, and once or twice with the pupils of his eyes unnaturally turned upwards. The stairs would smell of drink, sometimes the whole house, though I do not think I ever actually saw Mr Millar with a glass in his hand or a bottle (after that first uneasy party with him, of course). None the less, he must have been drinking heavily, if one might judge by the deliveries; and I began to fear worse consequences, such as delirium tremens, concerning which I felt the apprehension that arises from total ignorance. My great-uncle, again, had been terrifying on the subject without going much into detail, "while your mother's in the room", as he had said. Nor did the possibility of finding Mr Millar lying dead on the stairs rather than merely insensible at all attract me.

  In the meantime, the aspect of the matter, not necessarily either funny or frightening, which none the less gave me the most trouble was that Mr Millar, instead of merely talking to himself, had begun to warble and carol, to bawl and bellow. He seemed capable of keeping it up, at least intermittently, for hours on end, as he fussed around.

  When he was japing his late-night friends, the noise could be appalling. The urban sons of toil, even when the nature of their toil is probably criminal, are seldom slow in striking up, nor, traditionally, are the daughters of joy, who seemed to constitute the larger part of Mr Millar's acquaintanceship. Indeed, the police came ringing in protest: at my bell of course. And, on another occasion, banging and thumping at the outer door; a small posse of them, to judge by the sound; and by the stamping when once they had got in.

  As far as I was concerned, there was occasionally another kind of interruption. I would hear hysterical shouting in the room below me and then steps running up my own uncarpeted stair. There would be frantic pounding at my attic door, and when I opened it, a dishevelled girl too distraught to say what was the matter. I would glance over her shoulder as she stood there crying and raving and beating at me to let her in; and there would be Mr Millar at the bottom of the stair, comparatively calm, though not always entirely steady. He never spoke a word at these times, but seemed merely an uneasy spectator, collapsed against the banister. One might have thought him genuinely embarrassed and baffled by what had happened: resolved not to take the risk of saying a word when someone else was dealing with the situation.

  In all the circumstances, I could not possibly admit the girl, so I would edge her downstairs again, saying that I would see her safely out into the street, and of course trying to buck her up, though I had no idea how best to do that. We would creep past Mr Millar, sometimes with my arm round the girl's shoulders; and he would never say a word of any kind, or make a move.

  On one of these occasions, out of the four or five that I suppose there were in all, I was much frightened. It was bad enough to have to drag the girl past Mr Millar himself standing there watching; but on the occasion I refer to, when I reached the bottom of my stair, which ran straight up between two walls, I found that standing beside Mr Millar, and previously hidden from me, were two huge louts in cloth caps. They looked like chuckers-out or unsuccessful bruisers, but now they were as still and silent as Mr Millar. I did not find it easy to continue downwards with the shrinking girl at my other side, pressing herself against the wall; but I managed it and, as usual, nothing further happened. When I came up again after these incidents, Mr Millar had usually withdrawn into his room and shut the landing door. This time all three of them had disappeared. I expected some kind of rumpus to resound from below me; but none did.

  On another occasion, I remember that the girl was of a different type from the usual: standing ashake on my dingy doorstep, she told me that she had met Mr Millar at Wimbledon, but, though she knew she had been a fool, she had no idea it would be like this. "I had no idea it could be," she said, her eyes boring into me. She very much
wanted me to telephone the police but I thought it would solve nothing and end nothing. Moreover, I should have had to borrow Mr Millar's telephone. So I just manoeuvred her out in the usual way, and in the street she recovered remarkably. "I'm most awfully sorry to have been so silly," she said. Then she added, "Curse it, I've left my coat behind and it's a new, summer one."

  Going down for my post a day or two later, I found Mr Millar's male staff chucking a girl's coat from one to another in the big ground floor room; snatching at it and yelling at each other in mock antagonism. I supposed it was the same coat. I remember the colour still; a rather unusual greenish yellow, like yerba de maté.

  Nor, very evidently, were lawn tennis and improvised office throwabouts and kickabouts (more usually with a waste-paper basket) the only sporting interests of the firm. Every day I noticed communications from bookmakers; and others with continental stamps that I identified as coming from operators of casino systems. (My great-uncle yet again, I fancy.) I suppose now that the bookmakers' letters can only have arrived during the racing season, and that I must tend to exaggerate their continuity. But I truly remember a very large number of them. I suppose there is a possible link between accountancy and the computation of odds; and even more, one would think, on the tables than on the turf. I came to modify my speculations about what Mr Millar did during the day: since he went to Wimbledon, he might well go to race meetings also, as well as on occasion simply sleeping.

  Certainly there were sometimes "sporting types" about the building during the day. I do not refer here to the evening bashers and barrow boys, but to men in tweeds, with rolled umbrellas and public-school idioms. They would exchange loud badinage with the firm's staff, slap the bottoms of the girls (remarkably hard, I thought), and be gone in fast, popping cars almost as soon as they had come. One of them is associated with a development that was particularly upsetting; and thus with my decision to move out.

  Up to a point, I could not mistake this particular man. The noise of his car was both doubly loud and very distinctive. I could always hear him approaching from afar. And when he had arrived, he immediately clumped upstairs with a quite particular firmness. He always climbed right up to Mr Millar's own second floor, and there, with clatter and circumstance, he would open Mr Millar's outer door, using, apparently, a key on his own ring. He would go inside, be heard loudly tumbling things about for a minute or two, and then emerge, relock the door, and clump off again. The whole performance was regularly audible through my window, door, and floor; right through to the long withdrawing thunder of the man's machine.

  Originally, I supposed that it was Mr Millar himself arriving and departing; Mr Millar who had left something behind, or wanted to see how things were getting on. But one day I met the stranger. His car roared up just as I was about to go out. In came a round, red-faced, stocky man in a green suit and a green pork-pie hat. He threw back the front door and gave me a really heavy push against the wall — in fact, seriously bruising my elbow, as I later found, so that for several days I had some difficulty in writing. Before I could say a word (if I could have thought of one) he was well upstairs with his familiar clump. I knew that from those around I could expect laughter rather than sympathy, so I continued on my way.

  All the time I was in Brandenburg Square, I spent nearly every weekend with my mother. On the few occasions when I did not, but stayed up in London, either to complete some work or to spend time with a friend, I thought I had established that Mr Millar took himself off; as, of course, one would expect. I assumed that he withdrew to the home he had mentioned to me over the sherry; difficult though I had found it to imagine.

  Some time (I cannot remember how long) after my direct encounter with the sporting man in the green suit came one of these London weekends. I think my mother had departed to stay with my father's stepsister in Frinton, as, since my father's death, she had grown into the way of doing several times each year. By now I had ceased inviting people round to see me even at these rare weekends, so disconcerting was the atmosphere in my house. And, at that particular weekend, it was possibly as well that I had.

  Everything remained silent and as usual on the Saturday night, while I worked away on some rubbish from Major Valentine; but after I had gone to bed, quite late, I was awakened by the noise of somebody moving about downstairs.

  Almost my first conscious thought was that the noise was nothing like loud enough to have actually awakened me. Then I remembered that it was a Saturday-Sunday night when there should (as I thought) have been no noise inside the building at all. I realized that my unconscious mind might have taken stock of this fact and sent out an alarm. I was frightened already, but that thought made me more frightened.

  The noise was totally unlike the usual stamping and banging. I could hardly hear it at all; and was soon wondering whether the whole thing was not fancy, a disturbance inside my own ears and head. But I could not quite convince myself of this as I lay there rigid with listening, while the gleam from the street lamp far below seemed to isolate my small bedroom from the blackness of so much around me. I began to wonder if this might not be purely a conventional burglary. I could just see the time by my watch. It was ten minutes past three.

  It was my duty to take action.

  I made my muscles relax, and with a big effort jumped out of bed. In the most banal way, I seized the bedroom poker. (At that time, even central London attics still had fireplaces.) I opened the door into my sitting-room, darker than the bedroom, but not so dark that I could not cross with certitude to the outer door, where the light-switch was. Without turning on the light, I opened the outer door. I looked down my pitch-dark flight of stairs. When a light was on further down I could from this point always see the glow. Now there was no light.

  I became aware that a smell was wafting up. It was quite faint, at least where I was, but, none the less, extremely pungent and penetrating. I must admit that the expression "a graveyard smell" leapt into my mind at the first whiff of it. Even a faint whiff was quite enough to make me feel sick in a moment. But I managed to hang on, even to listen with all the intentness I could muster.

  There could be no doubt about the reality of the sounds beneath me; but every doubt about what caused them. Something or someone was shuffling and rubbing about in the almost total darkness: I found it impossible to decide on which landing or on which part of the staircase. In a flight of rather absurd logic, the thought of a blind person came to me. But, truly, the sounds hardly seemed human at all: more like a heavy sack wearily dragging about on its own volition, not able to manage very well, and perhaps anxious not to disturb the wrong person.

  As well as feeling sick — really sick, as if about to be sick — I was trembling so much that no difficult further decision was needed: investigation was just physically impossible. I withdrew into my own territory, and locked my door as quietly as I could. By conventional standards, I suppose I had heard enough to justify a robbery call to the police, but I do not think it was only the lack of a telephone that deterred me. I sat there in the dark, with my handkerchief held tightly to my nose. Soon I began to feel chilled, and crept back to the comfort of my blankets.

  Mercifully the smell did not seem strong enough to penetrate, but I pressed my face hard into the pillow, and lay listening, stretching my ears hard for sounds I dreaded to hear, eager above all to draw no attention to myself. And thus, in the end, despite all discomforts, I fell asleep.

  And on the Sunday morning, while I was still trying to eat my breakfast, I heard the first, distant roar of the green man's noisy car. I heard him throw open the street door with a bang and come clumping up the many flights of stairs. Neither he nor anyone else connected with the firm downstairs had ever before entered the building on a Sunday when I had been there. The man did not even pause at Mr Millar's level, as he usually did, but came straight up to the attic. I could feel my flesh creep obscurely as I heard him. Horrors often come in pairs. Instead of ringing my bell, he waited silently for a moment. Per
haps he assumed that his advent was sufficiently apparent already, as indeed it was. However, since I did nothing, he delivered an immense kick at the lower rail of the door.

  I opened up with as much as I could manage of dignity. At least the faint smell seemed gone.

  "Thought you would have heard me," said the man, in a thick but (as we said in those days) educated voice.

  "I did."

  "Well then," said the man; but as if he were offhandedly agreeing to take no exception to a slight. He stared at me hard: his manner was most unlike Mr Millar's. Nor was he wearing or carrying his pork-pie hat.

  "Seen anyone about?"

  "Since when?" I asked.

  "Yesterday or today," said the man, as if it hardly needed saying, which of course it did not.

  "No," I said truthfully. "No, I don't think so."

  "Or heard?" asked the man, staring at me still harder, consciously breaking me down.

  "What should I have heard?"

  "People or things," said the man. "Have you?"

  "Out of the ordinary, I suppose you mean?"

  I was merely gaining time, but the vigour of the man's affirmation shook me.

  "If you like."

  I was, in fact, so shaken that I hesitated.

  "What happened?" asked the man. It was the tone the prefects used to learn in public schools for interrogating the juniors.

  "I don't know what it was, " I replied with extreme weakness of spirit. Doubtless I should have played my part as new boy and asked what business it was of his.