In the Time of Greenbloom (29 page)

“I know! I know!” Mr Cudlopp shook with the laughter which, as John later discovered, accompanied even his most prosaic remarks. “Again' the rules, eh? Don't you worry, Mr Blaydon! What's said in the Carpenter's doesn't ever go out into the street, especially in a case like this where it could cause a young man more than a red
face
!” He beamed at John. “If you know what I mean?”

Playing up, John cringed appropriately. “It certainly could,” he said. “I've had two beatings this term already.”

“Well, what's it to be?” went on Mr Cudlopp, “another of the same Mr Blaydon? and a nice glass of cyder for your brother?”

“That would be splendid, and you must join us, Mr Cudlopp.”

“Thank you sir, thank you.”

They took their glasses over to a small table beside the screen adjoining the entrance. Michael fumbled comfortably in the pockets of his tweed jacket and produced the pipe Mother had given him for Christmas. He stuffed the bowl carefully with John Cotton's tobacco and after a certain amount of grunting and patting eventually puffed out a sigh of smoke. “Had a little one while you were keeping
cave
,” he said quietly, “just to establish the atmosphere and so on. The host here's a good fellow—great bowls player, but inclined like most of them to be a little hail-fellow-well-met on the slightest provocation. Just as well to have him on our side though; so although I could ill afford it, I thought it would be as well to stand him one, but no doubt you'll be able to pay me back sometime?” he paused. “I'm not worried about
breaking the School rules but I think we should keep on the right side of the licensing laws; when's your birthday?”

“March the 25th.”

“Sixteenth?”

“No, fourteenth.”

“Confound it! I told him you were sixteen. Still, never mind! Just remember though, won't you?”

“Yes Mick.”

“How's the cyder?”

“Lovely, thanks; but I do hope you've got some peppermints. I don't want anyone to smell my breath when I get back to Beowulf's.”

“What time have you to be back?”

“Not till ten; they've given me a late pass.”

“It will have worn off by then—takes about two hours thirty-five minutes without screening, one hour fifteen with. Whisky of course is different, that's why I rarely touch it; it doesn't do to go in to lectures reeking of whisky.”

“No.”

They sat on in silence for a time and John noticed that Michael's attention was tending to stray increasingly in the direction of the shove ha'penny board where two of the purple-suited men were enjoying what was evidently a keen game. He lifted his glass and took a second long pull at his cyder and then waited for its effect. It was not long delayed; the feeling of warmth and lightness began to seep into him from some central point within himself. The air of the bar became sweeter, the bar itself more spacious and better proportioned, and he realised with increasing delight that all the people in it were fundamentally rather pathetic and very lovable. He drained his glass.

“I think I'll have another.”

“What's that?” Michael jerked his face away from the shove ha'penny battle.

“Another cyder,” John repeated a little thickly.

Regarding him sadly, Michael engulfed the remainder of his pint.

“I wouldn't just yet old chap. At your age one wants to start the way one means to go on; and it's a bad thing to get into the habit of taking one's beer too fast.” He glanced at his watch and got up. “I'll get you another one in—half an hour. Cyder's potent stuff, and it's a pity really that you don't care for beer because the alcohol-content is about half that of these fermented fruit juices, and incidentally you can't beat malt and hops as a thirst-quencher, that's why, on the whole, I've made a sort of local rule always to stick to it myself, unless of course I'm in a hurry. By the way, I suppose you have brought a little money with you?”

John smiled; all at once his thefts seemed extraordinarily, almost painfully, funny. “I haven't got a penny,” he said. “Not today.”

Michael frowned. “I thought you were given your pocket-money on Saturdays?”

“No, on Fridays.”

“But surely, that was yesterday, wasn't it?”

“Yes.” How amusing that he should be angry with him for not having stolen anything lately in the way of money. The money
he
was spending belonged to Father who'd been left it by his father, who'd made it out of cotton before the Great War. Money was very amusing, particularly in relation to Michael who was looking more solemn than ever as he absorbed the broad smile on John's face.

“Do you mean to say you've spent the whole lot in twenty-four hours?”

“You mean the whole two bob? Yes I have, in the tuck-shop yesterday.”

“Good Lord! What on earth did you spend it on?”

“Doughnuts and jam puffs—I was hungry. Anyway I don't think it's an awful lot when it's supposed to last a week.”

“From my point of view I admit that it wouldn't be a lot. This morning's already cost me about double that, and by the time I get you back tonight it'll probably be considerably more! The point is that one's income is in scale with one's position and you have spent in a single day the equivalent of
my weekly-allowance part of which I'm having to spend on you.

Within the irrational gaiety which had seized him ever since he had finished his cyder, John tried to feel responsible and penitent.

“I'm awfully sorry Mick! If I'd known you were going to take me out I'd have kept some of it so's I could stand you a drink.”

“It's not that old chap. It's just that I feel I ought to remember Mother's commission and give you a little advice on things of this sort.” Smiling briefly he turned and went over to the bar. “That bitter's uncommonly sound this morning Mr Cudlopp, I think I'll try another glass before you change barrels.”

Mr Cudlopp frothed with laughter as he drew the glass. “Shall I repeat the young gentleman's too, Mr Blaydon?”

“Not yet—Oh well, I suppose you might but I don't think I'm going to let him drink it just yet. He put down that first one in five minutes flat.”

“Then sir, if you'll forgive me, he must be a chip off the same block,” said Mr Cudlopp as Michael brought the drinks over to the table.

“About lunch,” he said; “I don't suppose you're very hungry yet, are you? Half-terms, as far as I remember, were usually marked by fairly substantial meals and it's only two or three hours since your breakfast. In about half an hour, that's to say at closing time, we'll be going round to Horab's rooms. Can you hold out till then?”

“Who's Horab?”

“That Jewish friend of mine at Balliol—you must have heard me mention him. As a matter of fact he'd have been with us now but for the fact that today is Schobbers.”

“Schobbers?”

“The Jewish sabbath; starts on Friday, ends with the evening star on Saturday night. Horab has to stay indoors until it's over; but he always has plenty of food in his rooms; it's kosher stuff of course but I think you'll enjoy it just the
same, it's supposed to be very much more wholesome than our own food. Do you think you can manage to wait until then?”

“When is closing time?”

Michael looked tired. “I told you, about half an hour, say an hour at the outside.”

“Oh.” John's stomach rumbled beneath his grey waistcoat. “Yes, I think so. I don't suppose they'd have a sandwich here, would they?”

“They could probably
make
you one; but they're not very easy on the pocket you know, John. In fact, they cost almost twice as much as a pint of their best bitter.”

“Oh, all right. I'll hang on then.”

“Good laddie.” Michael flexed his knees like a policeman. “In that case there's just time for me to have a game of shove ha'penny with my friend Albert over there. I occasionally give him quite a good run for his money and I think I may be in form this morning. It's a very skilled game, teaches one to be deliberate and to think ahead. I always call it the ‘working man's chess' and if you can acquit yourself well on the shove ha'penny board you'll find that you'll always enjoy the confidence of even the poorest clients later in life. If you like you can come and watch the game.”

“No thanks! I think I'll sit here for a bit but I can't guarantee not to touch my cyder for another half-hour.”

“Oh don't worry about that, one mustn't become a slave to one's own rules. If you drink it reasonably slowly you'll find it will sustain you until it's time for us to go and meet Horab. Cyder's a very healthy drink you know, apart from a little fruit-sugar and water there's nothing much in it really.”

Pint in hand he moved over eagerly to the far end of the room.

John drank his cyder very slowly trying to make it last out against the clock behind the bar. In the long intervals between the sips he watched Mr Cudlopp drawing beer and accepting drinks from new customers, and became more and more interested in his manner of drinking. The high polish
of his face, he noticed, was particularly marked over the upper lip where the surface of the beer rested when his glass was raised to his mouth. He wondered if perhaps, the beer in the course of the years might not have had some subtle effect on the skin, and began to calculate how many pints, quarts, and gallons, must have lain against that particular area of skin prior to its transit through his body. The trouble was that he did not know Mr Cudlopp's age, nor how long he had been drinking at his present smooth pace; but the picture of an amber water-fall of beer at the rate of say four gallons a week, impinging almost ceaselessly on this human basin year in and year out, quite fascinated him and made him wonder why Mr Cudlopp allowed it to happen.

He certainly did not look as though he were enjoying it; the torrents of his laughter, the ponderosity of his winks, the chuckles which underbubbled his remarks, were all belied by the dead and desperate look in his eyes. When he actually drank he looked suddenly vacant as though he were steeling himself against some private and painful ordeal. More puzzling still, he did not seem to acknowledge even to himself that he was drinking at all. There was no perceptible movement of the submerged upper lip or the pouting lower one, no filling of the cheeks or of the throat itself; the glass was raised, tilted against the teeth, and then replaced nearly empty on the counter. It looked as though time really did stand still for him when he was drinking, so that since there was no before or after for Mr Cudlopp, he was allowed to remain precisely the same for several hours in every week. It was a strangely depressing thought.

For John himself the hour dragged on to its close; and at last, Michael, having been ‘stood' another pint for his victory over Albert, suggested it was time they made their way to his friend Horab Greenbloom's rooms in Balliol College.

  *   *   *

It was only as they were climbing the dark staircase to the first floor that John remembered he had left his boater at the Carpenter's Arms. Michael said they could get it later when ‘they opened again' and that in the meantime they were better off without it in view of the fact that by going into a college they would be breaking another school rule. John found himself quite satisfied with this argument. The day seemed to be taking a particular and predestined shape of its own; and perhaps as a result of the cyder or perhaps because of a hollowness which he had sensed somewhere inside him ever since ‘the Moors', he was able to assume a new courage and nonchalance about everything that was happening.

Of late he had been worried by an increasing tendency to discount all the appearances of the world through which he moved. The spaces about him seemed to be filled with persons and things as remote and insignificant as the stars of the night sky. He found it difficult to believe in all the sounds sights and movements which betokened the living world, and if he had been blind dumb and deaf and so inhabited a dark consciousness of his own, he would have felt no more divorced from the appearances which his senses continually forced him to accept; he might even have accepted them more readily. Within his mind there were unused dimensions which were quite different from those his senses offered him; dimensions of light and shade, of nobility and degradation, better fitted than those the world had used to clothe the passions and aspirations which walked its surfaces. Opening his eyes to people and things, seeing their faces and facades, listening with his ears to the sounds they made, he was often tempted to rock with a dreadful laughter at their demand for serious acceptance, and at such times knew himself to be poised on the edge of a void filled with conceptions more awful even than those which he sensibly encountered.

Now, as he walked with Michael past the black gates of St John's College he looked about him greedily, willing himself to accept the trees in the walled sanctuary, the embellishments
of the Martyr's Memorial, and the wide-windowed front of the Randolph Hotel. These things, he told himself, were all that there was, he must walk beneath them round them and through them as other people walked on their two legs, seriously giving them their due.

At the head of the stairs in Balliol College Michael knocked on the outer door and a muffled though somewhat raucous voice called out “Come in!”

Michael shouted that since the door was locked, they could not
get
in, whereat on the other side of the door they heard the utterance of a tired blasphemy followed by a long pause. They heard the springs of a chair squeaking, the sound of something being knocked over and a few moments later the thud-pad of an uneven and impatient walking, then a hand scrabbled at the yale lock and at last the door before them was opened.

The room beyond it was in semi-darkness, all the curtains being drawn and only one low-calibre bulb shining out from a standard lamp beside an arm-chair. Against this background the small face of their host shone out with palest-green clarity. It was an almost Egyptian face with pitch-black hair and beautifully painted little eyes enclosed between smooth lids; eyes like nothing so much as those depicted on the faces of attendants round the burial chambers of dead Pharaohs. The cheek-bones and their overlying cheeks, as rich as cold cream, were high, the lips thick and gelatinous as turkish delight, and the nostrils of the neat little nose exquisitely curved and petulant.