Lewis Percy (9 page)

‘Take your time,’ she whispered. ‘I won’t put the lights out until you go.’

‘I just wanted to return this,’ he said, placing the book on the counter, near her hand. ‘I’ll come back another day.’ He hesitated, and then asked, ‘Can I walk you home?’

‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘but my mother’s here.’

Her mother was in fact looking at him rather insistently from the vantage point of a seat opposite the one Mr Baker would have been occupying had he not been
turned out earlier by Miss Clarke. Ah, but the mother was a surprise. The mother, thought Lewis, was a beauty, a bold strenuous-looking woman, with a curiously out-of-date sexual appeal. She was heavily made up, her mouth a dark red, her eyebrows arched in permanent astonishment, an artificial streak of white inserted into her upswept dark hair. She had exactly the same look of disdain that he remembered from the screen goddesses of his childhood. For all its apparent and carefully nurtured perfection the face was discontented, with an incipient puffiness round the mouth and chin. Lewis could see no resemblance at all between the mother and the daughter, but then he remembered Miss Clarke hinting that the father had gone off with another woman, and he supposed this renegade, this ingrate, to have had the same fair looks that his daughter now possessed.

But why had the father gone off? What sort of a woman did a man go off to, when he had this red-lipped smouldering creature at home? For she was still in the prime of life, not much more than fifty, he supposed. She looked tricky, hard to please, and also capricious, exigent, the last person to be the guardian of a pristine semi-invalid daughter. A fur coat was flung back from a plumpish compact little body; her skirt was short enough to show fine legs in fine stockings. He could see no sign of conjugal or maternal disillusionment in her face, but simply impatience. Mrs Harper looked like a woman whose husband had left only a minute before, to perform some necessary but unimportant duty, and who would return immediately once the duty were out of the way. Mrs Harper, in fact, looked like a woman invisibly accompanied by a man. Yet here she was, tied to her daughter, clocking in at the library four times a day, without any possibility of release from this obligation until the daughter resumed her autonomy.

Lewis felt a pang of pity for them both. He felt too that if he could wean Tissy away from her mother he might effect the happiness of three people. He still retained a sense of chivalry towards women. He was aware of his
lack of experience, and ashamed of it, but he was even more ashamed of certain publications bought in Paris and hidden beneath his sweaters until they could be safely deposited in public rubbish bins. These texts had left him with a sense of surprise and disappointment, and he hated the idea that the getting of wisdom involved both. For himself he envisaged something more chaste, if that could be managed: it could be brief, but it must be perfect, heroic. He would be prepared to lose all, but only if at some point he had gained all. Although Tissy Harper, with her prayerful hands and her downcast eyes, might not provide the promised sins of the flesh, she still represented a quest and a safeguard. She would be kind, would not mock or disregard him, would care for him studiously and with gratitude. And her mother could go back to whatever society she had been forced to abandon – he imagined hotel terraces, bridge games, cocktails – when the girl, her so unsuitable daughter, had become her only occupation.

The problem now was how to divide the mother and the daughter for as long as it might take him to pursue his plan. For he had to emancipate her from her tutelage before he could do anything else. The project appealed to him: it had the requisite altruism. He had an obscure feeling that a man must perform an act of nobility before claiming his prize. This, he knew, was ridiculous. But he had never felt comfortable when he had been merely lewd and selfish. He supposed that in later life, in remote middle age, perhaps, these attributes might be sufficient to motivate him, but by then he would have sunk far from grace, as old people did, his mother excepted. For the time being he knew himself to be not only young but powerless. His powerlessness was reinforced by his virginity, which he felt to be tardy and shameful. In Paris nothing had happened to change his hopeful self. With his abundant hair, his short-sighted smile, and his respectful expression, he had attracted no predatory gaze. And he suspected that he would not have been equal to such a situation. The prospect before him now promised
a certain equality, if only of inexperience, and vouchsafed him, at the same time, a quota of generosity, of honour, even. He needed these feelings not only because they were pleasurable in themselves but because they were required to offset certain censorable images that crept back to him from his unofficial Parisian readings. He had no sensation of being attracted to Tissy Harper. What he felt was a mixture of respect and charity. He would rescue her and take his reward. Or, if circumstances permitted, he would take his reward first and leave her with a legacy of freedom, waking her, like the Sleeping Beauty, from the strange enchantment that had kept her a prisoner for so long. For how long? Since the father had left home, Miss Clarke had implied. When would that have been? There was no clue to this. The key to the whole enigma was the mother, he thought. And if he could free them both they could thank him by performing various domestic duties about the place. These were becoming urgent. No matter how many times he changed the sheets he habitually forgot the day on which the laundry was collected and delivered. He was, as always, extremely hungry. If they would look after him, he thought, he would take them both on. He would marry them both.

Yet initially they must be separated. This looked to him to be a virtual impossibility. Stealthily he followed them out of the library, studied their backs, as they walked, arm in arm, down the lighted street. The mother walked elaborately, in the manner of one throwing out physical hints to passers-by, hips in movement, legs thrust forward, small feet turned outward, like a dancer’s. Beside her her daughter appeared awkward, apologetic, large of foot, meek of gesture, head dipping in obedience or in fear, beautiful indigo eyes cast downwards. Lewis saw that they walked on decisively, disdaining the bus stop, and he did the same, thinking that at least he could find out where they lived. This did not seem to him underhand: he was in any event going in the same direction. Having no strategy at his disposal he merely said, ‘Hello, again, Miss Harper. Or perhaps I should
say good evening. Good evening,’ he added, in the direction of Tissy’s mother.

‘Oh, Mr Percy.’ Miss Harper was not unduly surprised. ‘I don’t think you’ve met my mother. Mr Percy, mother. You may have seen him before. In the library, I mean.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Mrs Harper, tonelessly, in a voice that contained chest notes but was harshened by cigarette smoke. ‘How do you do?’

‘We seem to be walking in the same direction,’ Lewis hazarded.

‘We live in Britannia Road,’ said Miss Harper. ‘And you?’

‘Further on. Opposite the Common,’ he replied. ‘May I walk along with you?’

So the meeting was effected. But it was only to be a meeting, that was clear. He sensed a powerful indifference emanating from the mother; he felt her deliberately withholding her interest in him. And why should she be interested, he thought humbly. She was obviously a woman of the world, a woman of some experience. The daughter must take after the absent father, the father who had so inexplicably left home. He imagined the mother trapped, baffled, chafing at the legacy of that useless husband, inwardly raging at the chore that fell to her lot four times a day. Lewis, in his mind’s eye, saw Mrs Harper raising a cigarette to her lipsticked mouth, stroking her hair up from the nape of her neck, appraising herself in a glass. He did not see how there could be any room for a Miss Harper in Mrs Harper’s life. Mrs Harper, he thought, gave out all the signals of a woman accustomed to playing for high stakes, rather than of merely being a pawn in the game. And Tissy, poor Tissy, must represent to her both burden and sacrifice. In the light of Mrs Harper’s dead-eyed acknowledgement of his presence, Lewis crept nearer to Tissy, wondering if he dared to take her hand.

He saw them to their door. Their little house looked trim, immaculate, at least so he judged from the outside. Clearly he
was not to be invited in. He watched the mother extract a key from a powerful handbag, while the daughter stood politely to one side, like a guest. Desperately he sought to prolong the encounter. Ask me in, he thought, ask me in. Ask me to share your meal: be pleasant, be merciful. He felt all the desolation of one who goes home to an empty house. Above all he was a little shocked by their exclusivity. Surely it was within the bounds of normal politeness to express an interest in a new acquaintance? Yet he could hardly go on asking questions, with their own attention to him so minimal. They were too used to each other’s company, he supposed, and the routine of their days was so deadening that they had lost their manners. For a moment he felt intensely sorry for himself, could hardly face the short distance that separated him from his own house. But I know no one else, he thought sadly. This will have to do.

‘Miss Harper,’ he called. She turned back from the door. ‘I could walk you home, if you like,’ he said, feeling himself blush. ‘I mean, it would give your mother a break. And we live so near each other.’

It was to be concluded that he knew all about her disability; he thought it better to make no reference to it. And she seemed quite tranquil in the knowledge that she had no explanations, no excuses to offer. Looking back on this later Lewis wondered whether he should have challenged her at this point, brought matters out into the open. He could see, past her, through the open front door, a hallway papered in brilliant red. This shocked him; such colours were unknown in his milieu. All his mother’s rooms were white. He saw the dark blushing cave into which Miss Harper was about to be subsumed in womb-like terms: this was to be a birth in reverse. Every night, when the lights were on and the walls glowed red, Miss Harper would become the property of her mother all over again. The creature of her mother. He promised himself that he would examine this thought when he got home. For the time being, whatever reservations he felt about their hospitality, he had to have
an answer to his offer, his request, his plea.

‘Well, I’m not sure,’ was her reply. But she lingered; that was a good sign.

‘Do you always walk home?’ he went on. ‘I do, every evening. The evenings are so long now that my mother’s gone.’ He felt a charlatan, introducing the subject of his mother into this simulacrum of a flirtation. But it is time, he told himself. I am lonely, and why shouldn’t she know it? Why shouldn’t she take account of me for a while? After all, I’m not going to frighten her. She has nothing to fear.

‘We only walk the whole way in the evening,’ she said conscientiously. ‘We usually catch the bus in the morning. And we have lunch out, near the library. I really don’t think …’

‘Tissy,’ came her mother’s voice, to be followed by her mother’s outline, solid black against the brilliant red hallway. She was smoking a cigarette.

‘Mother, Mr Percy has very kindly offered to see me home one evening. But I’ve told him …’

Lewis was aware of the mother smiling, albeit a little sourly.

‘Tell Mr Percy that you’re very grateful for his kind offer,’ she said. Lewis detected a certain sarcasm in the remark. ‘I don’t mind the walk. But you could ask him if he’d like to come to tea one day. Saturday would do. He can walk home with us then.’

Lewis blushed again, and thanked her, and promised to meet them at five o’clock on the following Saturday. Having accomplished his mission he was anxious to be gone. It seemed to him that he had worked too hard for the minimal concession she had made, and he disliked the feeling. He could not quite make out this couple, he thought; he would need his mother to decipher them. A great wave of misery broke over him. He trudged along the street, away from the false promise of that lighted hallway, back to the dark house that it was now so difficult to think of as home. He stood for a long time at the window, staring into the empty
street. Then he let the curtain fall and went upstairs to his room. On the landing he opened his mother’s door and watched the moon stream in over her bed. This, strangely, comforted him. If his mother were present, in however dematerialized a form, he could proceed. And the future was there, after all; it simply had to be filled in. He went thoughtfully to bed, thankful, at least, to have so many new reflections to keep him company.

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