Cotter's England (24 page)

"I may be, but I'm happy and free."

"Who is happy and free?"

They laughed.

"Would you like a drive in the country?"

No, she had promised Nellie to go straight home.

"Nellie will get along all right."

"No: I promised."

He began to drive. She didn't know where they went; but she realized presently that Tom was talking, talking, the light voice mixing with the street sounds, birds. It stopped when the traffic stopped. He was recounting all kinds of things.

"I'm a lonely walker. I was just thinking about something that happened last time I was in Bridgehead. There was a boy at a corner in the main road. He was in painter's overalls, new, just an apprentice, with a bucket and brush, laughing at the antics of four older painters two houses away, one on the ladder going up, splashing stuff at the others. The boy stood with things in his hand and a rag; his hair blowing like a storm of cornflakes and the rag blowing. Just then a hat came round the corner. It made three hops and it was so funny we all started to laugh; and it hopped into the boy's bucket. A man came round the corner to get his hat which was in green paint. We fished it out and we started to talk. He said, Do you know anything that is going on? He was a local Reuter's correspondent and he said he had no luck. Just the night before, there was a fire in his lodgings, which spread to a few other houses, when he was in the movies. He saw it flashed on the screen. I promised to let him know if anything happened and he gave me his address. The apprentice began to tell him things that had happened in that street. He couldn't stop talking and he kept walking away with the man. I saw them in the distance about half a mile away. I was laughing and turning away when the door of a house opened just across the road and someone began to throw things in the roadway, a vase, then some silver, a picture; so I went the other way. One of the painters said, That is a man who cannot get away from his mother. She never let the husband out of the house; and when he died, she kept the son there. Then the painters asked me where the apprentice was. I said he was about a mile away with the Reuter's correspondent. They began to tell me things and I could hardly get home ..."

At first there were tears in her eyes: then she fell asleep. He did not wake her up, but she woke when they stopped in front of a Hampstead pub. It was a pretty place, a terrace with benches and bushes.

He laughed, "You say you like me to talk; and you fall asleep."

"I thought I was in trouble; then you were talking and I saw people are living everywhere, and I was glad and I fell asleep."

He looked at her gaily and got her drinks, chatting with everyone.

When they got outside, he said, "To Ma Hatchard's?"

The old woman stood in the door of her den. Tom smiled at her, a light passed over her face, she stood away without a word and let them go up.

"You are not well, you're ill," said Tom.

"I should be ashamed to be ill because of a love affair. I've had plenty of experience."

Tom ran out and up several streets looking for things to eat. He bought food at last in a pub. He came back. He moved about like a cat and seemed beside himself with joy at being able to look after her.

He told her that he thought he could cure people. People believed in him and he wanted to help them. It was a power in him sometimes, not always. Even at moments, he had been able to help Marion.

"Only for a little while."

She asked him what he did.

He got up from his chair, stood near her, leaning slightly forward, spread out his arms a little from his body and began to look straight at her, smiling a deep smile. To her surprise, he seemed to grow upwards and outwards and she felt herself smiling, drawn towards him. His hands and face seemed larger and a feeling of happiness spread through her. He sat down and she began to tremble.

"It is there; but I have to develop it. Marion wanted me to go to India to learn. She said I could be of great use to sick people."

They were sitting quietly by the gas fire, not saying much, a little bored and laughing a little about raffling off the furniture in the dingy room, when there was a discussion downstairs and they heard Nellie's voice. She ran upstairs and burst open the door, looking at them both with a terrible accusing face.

"I knew you were here, Tom. I saw the car downstairs."

"Well, I am here. You were right."

"You must take us all home. I have a room for Caroline. She can't stay here with that harpy. I've explained it to Mrs. Hatchard and I've paid her. Get your things together, Caroline, and come home and I'll look after you."

"Caroline is too tired."

"Caroline promised me to come. She wants to come with me."

"Very well," said Tom.

When he got them home, with the bags, he said he would take Eliza Cook out for a drink. Nellie had not spoken a word to him during the drive and did not speak now.

Tom said, "I'll be back in the early hours of the morning. Don't wait up for me or wonder where I am."

Nellie was pale with rage, speechless; but when Tom clapped the front door to, she flung herself into Caroline's arms and burst into a raucous sobbing.

"It's too much for me, Caroline."

Presently she said that her life was like struggling over a stony hill, stubbing her feet, where the stones were people: that was the Philistine world. Robert Peebles had rejected her article outright. She needed Caroline above all. She kept Caroline up very late talking. George had told her he could not sleep in the house; not only was it that she didn't seem able to sleep at night, but roamed about in the dark hours; it was also her coughing and smoking.

"And that's love for you, Caroline. What the men mean by love is routine and comfort."

Caroline slept at last, in the back room. Tom came home later still and slept late.

When Nellie got home, on her late night a few days later, Tom was waiting up for her. He had received a firm answer from the plastics factory at Blackstone in Norfolk and was to go up there the following week.

"So I won't be a burden to you any longer than next week.

Isn't it time, Nellie, you wrote to George and told him he must come home, or you get a week off and go down to Bob's. You look bad, Nellie."

She looked ragged and devitalized; she was dirty and uncombed.

"I don't know. Things are too hard for me, Tom. The damn worthless bugger ought to be home but I don't know what will bring him. I want to disgrace myself and cry all day long."

Tom said he'd take her to Bob's farm the next day, which was Saturday. They could pick up some drinks and food somewhere. But she refused to go there. She wanted to ride into the country and he said he would take her.

"I've got to be here, see someone who's on the danger list. The consolation is George's with Bob, the dear old elf," said Nellie.

Tom said nothing.

She continued nervously, "I want to talk to you about Bridgehead. The poor helpless pets are there depending on us. I can't send much now. Couldn't you get a job and stay at home, Tom? It would keep you out of temptation."

"I couldn't Nellie."

"I'd feel easier, pet."

"No, Nellie."

"Where did you spend the morning, Tom?"

"With Camilla, the Italian goddess."

"Did you see Caroline? Was she home?"

"I don't know. I didn't see her," he said sharply.

"Be careful of her, Tom. She's such a sensitive, naïve, sweet girl. She couldn't take any more of that. She's off men. She needs a rest cure. Don't flirt with her. She's honest. She's too serious. She can be hurt."

"You take a dim view of me, Nellie."

"Eh, pet, I don't blame you with the seasoned women; but you don't know what you're doing, playing with the sensitive plants."

"Thanks."

"Eh, Tom; we don't always calculate the costs."

"No."

"And Camilla, too, Tom. She's had a terrible lesson. She married in haste and now she's feeling her way; always the wrong man. Loneliness is a terrible blindness."

"You think that in her blindness she's feeling for me?" he said with teasing vanity.

He had her beaten. She could never stand a direct hit.

"Where is Caroline now?" Tom pursued.

"She's all right, Tom. She's about the same. The heart's bruised. She's not made for this world, not your world, Tom."

"She has grit. She'll get over it. We're jellies that survive anything. She was happy with me."

Nellie cried out, "What are you monkeying about for, Tom? I know you. You've got nothing to offer but your own selfish pleasure. You like to pry into souls, show them fool's gold, sell them the sideshows, upset my work."

He said seriously, "Nellie, what work is it you think you're doing?"

"Truth not lies. What are you trying to put into my mouth?"

He laughed.

"I like to see you get into a flap. You're so transparent, Nell. You've got just a little twisted spittling spider thread of sympathy and you try to dangle a whole human being on it."

He said this in the croon they used at home.

He continued, "You don't know any more about Camilla or Eliza or Caroline than you know about Tibet, but you'll never admit it. And if you introspected with them for a hundred years you'd never know anything about them. For it's you, Nell. It isn't them. They don't care for death and the lonely road. And neither do you. It's just your spellbinding; but you'll get nowhere with it. And you shouldn't. You don't know—Nell, it's just as if some evil spirit, some demon were speaking out of your mouth. Those aren't your words; and you don't know what work you're at."

She tossed her head-feathers, the strings of hair and turban and the long earrings, the thin scarf, her bony flying arms; she poked her face, the mere rind of a face, here and there.

"It isn't me nor for me, pet. I'm trying to free them from themselves; that's the only freedom. Then their problems will be over. It's you who want them to live in the world of illusion. I want to free them by truth. Death is the end. What is the use of these tawdry loves, as you call them, and such? Aren't they always disappointed? Doesn't that prove that it's shameful degrading nonsense. It's nonsense they sell them so they won't look straight ahead and see where it is all leading."

"That we are all going to die, is news from nowhere. Is that your great truth?"

"My great truth is freedom from illusion, from lies, deceptions, from hypocrisy, from all those shameful loves, the opium of the heart. I want them to come to me and learn, come to me; I can teach them that there is only one way, and they must find it in pain, but I can help."

He crooned, "And so you dabble in their lives as if their lives were puddles, just to cool off your emotions a bit, Nell; and you talk about death and moonshine the way the old man used to talk about poltergeists and bodiless footsteps; just to get an audience. And one of these days you'll bitterly regret it, because I know you. You don't mean an ounce of harm by it; you don't know what you're saying. You're just trying to get a lot of personal influence so that you can see yourself having a big wailing at your funeral and a big piece in the papers." He laughed kindly.

She continued her flurry, snapped, "Eh, sweetheart, I'm afraid time will prove you a false prophet. It's not my funeral but Caroline's I'm worried about. She thinks she can't escape from her loneliness. It's the bloody men, Tom. It was like the morning of the world, she says; I trusted him. He's only a human being like myself; no more trustworthy than myself. So the victim forgives the executioner. And it makes me smile to think that it would mean nothing to him if I died; she says that. Tom, it's unbearable. That's a crazy wicked obsession, I keep telling her, to be thinking of extinction when you haven't first unraveled the secret of life. I talk to her every night—aye, I've been over, when you've been running out after your temptations. We're friends, let's think this thing over, face it, get to know it, find out what it is in yourself that courts misery, makes you fail with humanity, it must be something in you, not in them—"

"Every night? You went over every night to nag her? Where is she now? In the attic? I'm going to her when we get back."

She ignored him: she said savagely, "Men with dead hearts don't want you, I said. Live with the living, live with me. Confide in your friend. She doesn't sleep. You can sleep if you want to, I said. It's a damn insult to me to be howling at night for the love of dead men who've rejected you. That's the way to make a new one in the company of the lost. With me you'll never be lost."

"Do you really think you have the power? It's unlucky to call on powers: they come. That's no philosophy of consolation. Do you remember the Indian boy? In Bridgehead? One of Jago's circle. He was attracted by Jago's scraps of philosophy."

"Yes," she said sulkily, mumbling her cigarette.

"He talked about death all the time and do you remember what happened?"

"No, pet, I don't."

"You do remember, Nell. You had got us separated by then, Estelle and me. I was sleeping in a cot in the same room and Estelle had adopted that fellow, that returned soldier who couldn't get a job, a misfit. He had no room and we had him sleeping on the floor; then he found a place and went. His name was Bob, Robert.

"One night after he'd gone, when I was dead tired, I woke up to hear Estelle dreaming and calling out, 'Bob! Bob!' She had had a nightmare. She saw Bob in flames. 'He's burning!' she said to me. It took me a long time to get her calm. As it happened, that same night someone else, that Indian boy, was burned to death in the house he had just moved into in Bridgehead. You remember, he had money and we all went to his place to eat and drink. He bought records and food just to make friends. But he couldn't make friends, he was too miserable. The evening would start off gay; we'd be there singing and dancing; and it would gradually get quieter and quieter, with him giving us the food and then standing there, quiet and miserable. He spent all his money on us; and he moved to a cheaper place; and in the end he moved to a condemned house they were trying to get the people out of. They let him a top room secretly. The man on the ground floor used to booze. He came in and upset a lamp and the place went up in a few minutes. Right at the end they heard someone screaming. The Indian boy was standing right on the roof calling and shouting and before anyone could do anything, the roof fell in and he fell backwards."