Little Black Book of Stories (14 page)

There were so many different blacks around that range. Various fuels were burned in it, unlike modern Agas which take oil, or anthracite. I remember coal. Coal has its own brightness, a gloss, a sheen. You can see the compacted layers of dead wood—millions of years dead—in the strata on the faces of the chunks of good coal. They shine. They give out a black sparkle. The trees ate the sun’s energy and the furnace will release it. Coal is glossy. Coke is matt, and looks (indeed is) twice-burned, like volcano lava; the dust on coal glitters like glass dust, the dust on coke absorbs light, is soft, is inert. Some of it comes in little regular pressed cushions, like pillows for dead dolls, I used to think, or twisted humbugs for small demons. We ourselves were fed on charcoal for stomach upsets which may explain why I considered the edibility of these lumps. Or maybe even as a small child, I saw the open mouth of the furnace as a hell-hole. You were drawn in. You wanted to get closer and closer; you wanted to be able to turn away. And we were taught at school, about our own internal combustion of matter. The ovens behind other doors of the range, might conceal the puffed, risen shapes of loaves and teacakes, with that best of all smells, baking yeast dough, or the only slightly less delightful smell of the crust of a hot cake, toasted sugar, milk and egg. Now and then—the old ranges were temperamental—a batch of buns in frilled paper cups would come out black and smoking and stinking of destruction, ghastly analogies of the cinder-cushions. From there, I thought, came the cinders that fell from the mouths of bad children in fairy-tales, or stuffed their Christmas stockings.

The whole range was bathed in an aura of kept-down soot. In front of our own, at one time, was a peg-rug made by my father, by hooking strips of colourful scraps of cloth—old flannel shirts, old trousers—through sacking, and knotting them. Soot infiltrated this dense thicket of flags or streamers. The sacking scalp was stained sooty black. The crimsons and scarlets, the green tartans and mustard blotches all had a grain of fine, fine black specks. I sometimes thought of the peg-rug as a bed of ribbon seaweed. The soot was like the silted sand in which it lay.

Not that we did not brush and brush ceaselessly, to cleanse our firesides of this falling, sifting black dust. It rises lightly, and falls where it was, it whirls briefly, when disturbed, and particles may settle on one’s own hair and scalp, a soot-plug for every pore in the skin of the hands. You can only collect so much; the rest is displaced, volatile, recurring. This must be the reason why we spent so much time—every morning—making the black front of the black stove blacker with black-lead. To disguise and tame the soot.

“Black-lead” was not lead, but a mixture of plumbago, graphite, and iron filings. It came as a stiff paste, and was spread across, and worked into all the black surfaces, avoiding the brassy ones of course, and then buffed and polished and made even with brushes of different densities, and pads of flannel. It was worked into every crevice of every boss on that ornate casting, and then removed again—the job was very badly done if any sludge of polish could be found encrusted around the leaves and petals of the black floral swags along the doors. I remember the phoenix, who must, I think, have been the trademark of that particular furnace. It sat, staring savagely to the left, on a nest of carved crossed branches, surrounded by an elaborate ascending spiral of fat flames with pointed tongues. It was all blackest black, the feathered bird, the burning pyre, the kindled wood, the bright angry eye, the curved beak.

The black-lead gave a most beautiful, subtle and gentle sheen to the blackness of the stove. It was not like boot-blacking, which produced a mirror-like lacquer. The high content of graphite, the scattering of iron filings, gave a silvery leaden surface—always a
black
surface, but with these shifting hints of soft metallic lightness. I think of it as representing a kind of decorum, a taming and restraining both of the fierce flame inside and the uncompromising cast iron outside. Like all good polishing—almost none of which persists in modern life, for which on the whole we should be grateful—the sheen was built up layer by infinitesimal layer, applied, and almost entirely wiped away again, only the finest skin of mineral adhering and glimmering.

The time is far away when we put so much human blood and muscle into embellishing our houses with careful layers of mineral deposits. Thinking of black-lead made me think of its opposite, the white stone and ground white-stone powder with which we used, daily, or more often, to emphasise our outer doorsteps and windowsills. I remember distinctly smoothing the thick pale stripe along the doorstep with a block of some stone, but I cannot remember the name of the stone itself. It is possible that we simply called it “the stone.” We were only required to stone the step when we didn’t have a maid to do it. I thought of holystone, blanching stone (perhaps a fabrication) and a run through the
Oxford
English Dictionary
added whetstone and sleekstone, a word I hadn’t known, which appears to refer to something used on wet clothes in the laundry. Finally I found hearthstone, and hearthstone powder, a mixture of pipeclay, carbonate of lime, size and stoneblue. “Hearthstone” was sold in chunks by pedlars with barrows. I remember the sulphur in the air from the industrial chimneys of Sheffield and Manchester, a vile, yellow, clogging deposit, which smeared windows and lips alike, and stained the brave white doorsteps almost as soon as they were stoned. But we went out, and whitened them again. We lived a gritty, mineral life, with our noses and fingers in it. I have read that the black-lead was toxic. I thought of the white-lead with which Renaissance ladies painted their skins and poisoned their blood. “Let her paint never an inch thick, to this favour shall she come.” I remember the dentists, giving us gobbets of quicksilver in little corked test-tubes, to play with. We spread this on our play-table with naked fingers, watching it shiver into a multitude of droplets, rolling it back together again. It was like a substance from an alien world. It adhered to nothing but itself. Yet we spread it everywhere, losing a silvery liquid bead here, under a splinter of wood, or there, in the fibres of our jumpers. Quicksilver too is toxic. No one told us.

Hearthstone is an ancient and ambiguous idea. In the past, the hearth was a synecdoche for the house, home, or even family or clan. (I cannot bring myself to use that humiliated and patronised word “community.”) The hearth was the centre, where the warmth, the food and the burning were. Our hearth was in front of the black-leaded range. We had a “sitting-room,” but its grate (also regularly black-leaded) was always empty, for no one visited formally enough to sit in its chilly formality. Yet the hearthstone was applied to what was in fact the lintel or
limen,
the threshold. Northerners keep themselves to themselves. The hearthstone stripe on the flagstone step was a limit, a barrier. We were fond of a certain rhetoric. “Never cross my threshold again.” “Don’t darken my door.” The shining silvery dark and the hidden red and gold roar were safely inside. We went out, as my mother used to say, feet first, on our final crossing of that bar. Nowadays, of course, we all go into the oven. Then, it was back to the earth out of which all these powders and pomades had been so lovingly extracted.

Jack Smollett realised that this was the first time his imagination had been stirred by the writing (as opposed to the violence, the misery, the animosity, the shamelessness) of one of his students. He went eagerly to his next class, and sat down next to Cicely Fox, whilst they waited for the others to arrive. She was always punctual, and always sat alone in the pews in the shadow out of the multi-coloured light of the lampshades. She had fine white hair, thinning a little, which she gathered in a soft roll at the back of her neck. She was always elegantly dressed, with long, fluid skirts, and high-necked jumpers inside loose shirt-jackets, in blacks, greys, silvers. She wore, invariably, a brooch on her inner collar, an amethyst in a circle of seed-pearls. She was a thin woman; the flowing garments concealed bony sharpness, not flesh. Her face was long, her skin fine but paper-thin. She had a wide, taut mouth—not much lip—and a straight, elegant nose. Her eyes were the amazing thing. They were so dark, they were almost uniformly black, and seemed to have retreated into the caverns of their sockets, being held to the outer world by the most fragile, spider-web cradle of lid, and muscle, all stained umber, violet, indigo as though bruised by the strain of staying in place. You could see, Jack thought fancifully, her narrow skull under its vanishing integument. You could see where her jaw-bone hung together, under fine vellum. She was beautiful, he thought. She had the knack of keeping very still, with a mild attentive almost-smile on her pale lips. Her sleeves were slightly too long and her thin hands were obscured, most of the time.

He said he thought her writing was marvellous. She turned her face to him with a vague and anxious expression.

“
Real
writing,” he said. “May I read it to the class?”

“Please,” she said, “do as you wish.”

He thought she might have difficulty in hearing. He said:

“I hope you are writing more?”

“You hope . . .?”

“You are writing
more.
” Louder.

“Oh yes. I am doing wash day. It is therapeutic.”

“Writing isn’t therapy,” said Jack Smollett to Cicely Fox. “Not when it’s good.”

“I expect the motive doesn’t matter,” said Cicely Fox, in her vague voice. “One has to do one’s best.”

He felt rebuffed, and didn’t know why.

HE READ “How We Used to Black-lead Stoves” aloud to the class. He read contributions aloud, anonymously, himself. He had a fine voice, and often, not always, he did more justice to the writing than its author might have done. He could also, in the right mood, use the reading as a mode of ironic destruction. His practice was not to name the author of the piece. It was usually easy enough to guess.

He enjoyed reading “How We Used to Black-lead Stoves.” He read it
con brio,
savouring the phrases that pleased him. For this reason, perhaps, the class fell upon it like a pack of hounds, snarling and ripping at it. They plucked merciless adjectives from the air. “Slow.” “Clumsy.” “Cold.” “Pedantic.” “Pompous.” “Show-off.” “Over-ornate.” “Nostalgic.”

They criticised the movement, equally gaily. “No drive.” “No sense of urgency.” “Rambling.” “All over the place.” “No sense of the speaker.” “No real feeling.” “No living human interest.” “No reason for telling us all this stuff.”

Bobby Forster, perhaps the star pupil of the class, was obscurely offended by Cicely Fox’s black-lead. His
magnum opus,
which was growing thicker, was a very detailed autobiographical account of his own childhood and youth. He had worked his way through measles, mumps, the circus, his school essays, his passions for schoolgirls, recording every fumbling on every sofa, at home, in the girls’ homes, in student lodgings, the point of the breast or the suspender he had struggled to touch. He sneered at rivals, put imperceptive parents and teachers in their place, described his reasons for dropping unattractive girls and acquaintances. He said Cicely Fox substituted things for people. He said detachment wasn’t a virtue, it just covered up inadequacy. Come to the point, said Bobby Forster. Why should I care about a daft toxic cleaning method that’s thankfully obsolete? Why doesn’t the writer give us the feelings of the poor skivvy who had to smear the stuff on?

Tamsin Secrett was equally severe. She herself had written a heart-rending description of a mother lovingly preparing a meal for an ingrate who neither turned up to eat it nor telephoned to say she was not coming. “Tender succulent al-dente pasta fragrant with spicy herbs redolent of the South of France with tangy melt-in-the-mouth Parmesan, rich smooth virgin olive oil, delicately perfumed with truffle, mouthwateringly full of savour . . .” Tamsin Secrett said that description for its own sake was simply an
exercise,
every piece of writing needed an
urgent human dimension,
something
vital at stake.
“How We Used to Black-lead Stoves,” said Tamsin Secrett, was just mindless heritage-journalism. No bite, said Tamsin Secrett. No bite, agreed her daughter, Lola. Memory Lane. Yuk.

CICELY FOX SAT rigorously upright, and smiled mildly and vaguely at their animation. She looked as though all this was nothing to do with her. Jack Smollett was not clear how much she heard. He himself, unusually, retaliated irritably on her behalf. He said that it was rare to read a piece of writing that worked on more than one level at once. He said that it took skill to make familiar things look strange. He quoted Ezra Pound: “Make it New.” He quoted William Carlos Williams: “No ideas but in things.” He only ever did this when he was fired up. He was fired up, not only on Cicely Fox’s behalf, but more darkly on his own. For the class’s rancour, and the banal words in which it expressed that rancour, blew life into his anxiety over his own words, his own work. He called a coffee break, after which he read out Tamsin Secrett’s cookery-tragedy. The class liked that, on the whole. Lola said it was very touching. Mother and daughter kept up an elaborate charade that their writings had nothing to do with each other. The whole class colluded. There was
nothing
worse than dried-up overcooked spag, said Lola Secrett.

THE CLASSES TENDED to end with general discussions of the nature of writing. They all took pleasure in describing themselves at work—what it was like to be blocked, what it was like to become unblocked, what it was like to capture a feeling precisely. Jack wanted Cicely Fox to join in. He addressed her directly, raising his voice slightly.

“And why do you write, Miss Fox?”

“Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.”

This answer was, though it should not have been, unusual.

Jack himself found it harder and harder to know where to begin to describe anything. Distaste for the kind of words employed by Tamsin and Lola made him impotent with revulsion and anger. Cliché spread like a stain across the written world, and he didn’t know a technique for expunging it. Nor had he the skill to do what Leonardo said we should do with cracks, or Constable with cloud-forms, and make the stains into new, suggested forms.