The Flying Goat (20 page)

And in that moment he could have shot himself.

The train was almost ready to start when the old man and the girl came into the carriage. The girl was very sweet with him, putting his travelling case and the wreath on the rack, reminding him of things, kissing him very tenderly good-bye.

‘You know where you're going? Now don't forget. Ham Street. First stop and then you change and get the other train. You think you'll remember? Ham Street and change first stop?'

‘Yes. I think I shall remember.'

‘And carry the wreath this way up. Like this. You see, there's a little handle.'

He said yes, he would remember and carry it that way up, and then she kissed him good-bye through the open window and the train moved away.

‘Oh! dear,' he said to me, ‘we went to the wrong station and then had to run for it.'

He was dressed all in black. He had pure white hair and a very pink fresh face, and he looked rather like a picture of a French priest. He gave me
a smile. ‘When you get over eighty, running for trains isn't what it used to be.'

‘You're not over eighty?' I said.

‘Oh! yes. Eighty-three. You think I don't look it?'

He looked perhaps seventy. I said so.

‘They all say that,' he said. ‘No, eighty-three. At eighty I had an illness, a sort of stroke, and the doctors said, “You won't get better.” Then I did get better and they said, “It's very remarkable. We'll give lectures on you,” and so they've been giving lectures on me.' He looked up at the rack. ‘Is the wreath all right?'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘it's all right.'

He was silent and I thought perhaps he was tired of talking and I handed him an evening paper.

‘No,' he said, ‘thank you. Thank you all the same. But since my illness I can't read. I can write, but I can't read.' He looked out of the window at the darkness. ‘Yes,' he said, ‘Yes.'

He looked at me. ‘What were we talking about?'

‘You were telling me,' I said, ‘how you could write but not read.'

‘Ah yes. Yes.' He began to forage in his pockets. ‘Yes, I can write. I write quite well, quite straight.'
He turned out first one pocket and then another. ‘I am trying to find a specimen of my writing.' He found a piece of blue paper. ‘No. That's who I am, where I'm travelling to. In case I get lost.'

He gave me the paper to read. It had written on it: ‘Simpson. Travelling to Ham Street.'

‘I am going to a funeral,' he said. ‘Is the wreath all right?'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘it's all right.'

He took out his snuff-box, opened it and handed it to me. I thanked him and said no. The box was silver and on the lid were engraved figures of men cycling. He said, ‘The arms of my cycling club. I do a great deal of cycling.'

‘Still?'

‘Oh, yes! In the summer. Oh yes! I cycle all over the countryside.'

Again he looked out of the window, briefly, watching the darkness. Then he looked at me.

‘What were we talking about?'

‘About the cycling.'

‘Ah yes. Yes. About the cycling. Oh! yes I'm energetic. I go into the bathroom every morning and wash in cold water and do my exercises. Take a bath once a week. Cycle in summer.'

He held out his hands to me.

‘Are they the hands of a man of eighty-three?'

They were full, beautiful hands, wonderfully pink and fresh like his face.

‘Oh, no!' he said. ‘In summer I cycle from Ham Street to Rye, three times a week, to get a shave.'

‘That's a long way.'

‘Seven miles.'

For a time he told me about the cycling. Then he began to tell me about his youth.

‘I was a grocer. An apprentice.' He stopped. ‘But this is not fair to you. Talking about myself.'

‘I like it,' I said.

‘You have some way of making me do it,' he said. He paused, looked up. ‘The wreath is all right?'

‘Yes, it's all right. I'll watch it.'

‘What were we talking about?'

I told him.

‘Oh, yes. We sold everything. Provisions, furniture, blankets, stockings. A big connection. I used to drive about the country in a trap, taking orders. Ladies' stockings. Oh, yes! In those days you measured the length of the leg. Pleasant. Blankets was another thing. I remember selling a hundred
pairs of blankets in one day, just by telling them that I'd dreamed it was going to be the coldest winter on record.'

‘And now,' I said, ‘it's all different?'

‘Oh, yes!'

‘You sit back and take it easy?'

‘Oh, no! I'm the director of a company with a capital of five million.' He put his hand on his neck-tie. ‘You see that pin?'

‘The Prince of Wales's feathers?'

‘Exactly. The late Edward VII gave it to me. Any time I like I can walk into Buckingham Palace.'

The train was rushing on. The wreath trembled as we swayed over points.

‘What was I saying?'

I reminded him. He went on to talk about his daughter. ‘She is a pianist. You may have heard of her?' He told me her name. I said yes, I had heard of her.

‘You are musical yourself?' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘I knew it. You have a musical face.'

I told him how I heard his daughter, often, play the piano. He was touched. The train rushed on,
lights were hurled past us in the darkness. Sitting silent, he suddenly looked frail and tender. I thought of him as a boy, measuring the ladies' legs for stockings, in the seventies. He took out his snuff-box.

‘You really won't try any?'

I hesitated.

‘Go on.'

‘All right.'

‘Snuff said!' he laughed.

We took snuff together, holding the pinches delicately in our hands, his own strong and pink, the sniff of his nostrils urgent and deep.

‘I shan't forget you,' he said. ‘I keep a diary. I shall put you in it.'

We sat silent. I felt suddenly very close to him, as though I had known him a long time. He looked out of the window, at the travelling blackness, then at me again.

‘Where am I going?' he said, like a child.

‘To Ham Street. Don't you remember?' I said.

‘Oh, yes! I remember.'

We talked a little more, I blew the snuff down my nose, and then I saw lights flashing past, increasing, in the darkness, and the train began to slow down.

I got up. ‘I'll get the wreath down for you,' I said.

I reached up and got down the wreath and the suit-case. I held the wreath by the little handle of string looped at one end. ‘I'll carry it and find out about your train,' I said.

‘It's very nice of you.'

When the train stopped at the junction we got out and I found out about his train and then took him to where it was waiting, in the opposite platform. He got into the carriage and I followed him and settled his things for him, putting the wreath on the rack above his head.

‘You know where you're going?' I said.

‘Yes. I haven't forgotten.'

We said good-bye and shook hands and slowly, in a little while, the train moved off. He waved his beautiful pink hands out of the window and the wreath trembled above his head.

The summer I had the scarlet fever the only boy I could play with, during and after the scarlet fever, was Arty Whitehead. Arty had some buttons off and he lived with his uncle. His uncle had an elephant's nest in a rhubarb tree.

It was very hot that summer. As I leaned from the bedroom window and looked down on the street of new brick houses and waited for Arty to come and play with me the window-sill would scorch my elbows like hot sand-paper. On the wall of our house my father had planted a Virginia creeper. That summer, under the heat, it went mad. It pressed new shoots forward every day and they ran over the house and the house next door and then the house on the corner like bright green and wine-red lizards with tiny hands. One of the games I played was to watch how far the creeper grew in a week, sometimes how far it grew in a day. After three or four weeks it grew round the corner of the street and I could no longer see the new little
lizards glueing their hands on the wall. So I would send Arty round the corner to look instead. ‘How far's it grown now, Arty?' Arty would stand by the green railings of our house and look up. He had simple, tender eyes and his hair grew down in his neck and over his ears and he always talked with a smile, loosely. ‘Growed right up to mother Kingsley's! Yeh, yeh! Growed up to the shop,' he'd say. Mother Kingsley's was a hundred yards up the next street. But I was only six, I couldn't see round the corner, and either I had to believe in Arty or believe in nobody. And gradually, as the summer went on, I got into the way of believing in Arty.

Arty came to play with me every day. Another game I played was blowing soap bubbles with a clay pipe. They floated down from the open window and Arty ran about the street, trying to catch them with his hands. One day I blew a bubble as big as a melon, the biggest bubble I'd ever seen, the biggest bubble that anyone would ever have seen if there'd been anyone in the street to see it. But there was no one but Arty. This great melon bubble floated slowly down in the hot sunshine and then along the scorched empty street. The funny
thing about it was that it wouldn't burst. It floated beautifully away like a glass balloon polished by sun, keeping about as high as the windows of the houses. When it got to the street-corner a puff of wind caught it and it turned the corner and disappeared. I called to Arty to run after it and he ran like mad after it with his cap in his hand. It was then about two o'clock in the afternoon but Arty didn't come back until six that evening.

When he came back again his lips were tired and looser than ever and I could see that he'd been a long way. ‘Where you been?' I said.

‘Arter the balloon.'

‘All this time? Didn't it bust?' I said.

‘No,' he said, ‘it never busted. Just kept like that. Just went on. Never busted.'

‘Where?' I said. ‘How far?'

‘Went right up past the school and over Collins's pond and over the fields. Right out to Newton. Past our farm.'

‘Whose farm?'

‘Our farm. Went right over. Never busted.'

‘I never knew you had a farm,' I said.

‘Yeh, yeh,' Arty said. ‘My uncle gotta farm. Big farm.'

‘Where?'

‘Out there,' Arty said. ‘Just out there. Great big farm. Catch foxes. Catch wild animals.'

‘What wild animals?'

‘Foxes. All sorts,' Arty said. ‘All sorts. Elephants.'

‘Not elephants,' I said.

‘Yeh, yeh,' Arty said. ‘Yeh! Catch elephants. My uncle found elephant's nest one day.' His eyes were pale and excited. ‘Yeh! Elephant's nest in a rhubarb tree.'

That was the first I ever heard about it. In the beginning I had to believe Arty about the Virginia creeper, then I had to take his word for the bubble, which no one but Arty and I had ever seen. Then I did something else. Perhaps it was the after effects of the fever, the result of being shut up for nearly eight weeks in a bedroom which was almost like a boiler-house in the late afternoons; perhaps it was because I had temporarily forgotten what the world of reality, school and fields and sweetshops and trains, was like. Perhaps it was having Arty to talk to, and only Arty to play with. But gradually, from that day, I began to take his word too for the elephant's nest in a rhubarb tree.

After that, I began to ask him to tell me what it
was like, but he never gave me the same description twice. ‘Yeh,' he would say. ‘It's big. Ever so big. Big rhubarb.' And then another day it was different. ‘It's jus' a little squatty tree. Nest like a sparrow's. That's all. Little squatty tree.' Finally I was not sure what to believe in: whether the rhubarb tree was like a chestnut or an oak, with a nest of elephants like a haystack in the branches, or whether it was just rhubarb, just ordinary rhubarb, the rhubarb you eat, and it was a nest like a sparrow's, with little elephants, little shiny black elephants, like the ebony elephants that stood on my grandmother's piano. I was sure of only one thing: I wanted to go with Arty and see it for myself as soon as I got better.

It was early August when I came downstairs again and about the middle of August before I could walk any distance. When I went out into the street everything seemed strange. I had not walked on the earth for eight weeks. Now, when I walked on it, it seemed to bounce under my feet. The things I had thought were ordinary seemed suddenly odd. The streets I had not seen for eight weeks seemed far stranger than the thought of the elephant's nest in a rhubarb tree.

One of the first things I did when I got downstairs was to go and see how far the Virginia creeper had gone. When I got round the street-corner I saw that someone had cut that part of it down. The little wine and green lizards had been slashed with a knife; they were withered by sun and the tendril-fingers were dead and fixed to the wall. As I looked at it I was not only hurt but I also knew that there was no longer any means of believing whether Arty had been right about it or wrong. I had to take his word again.

Then about three weeks later Arty and I set off one morning to find the elephant's nest in a rhubarb tree on his uncle's farm. Arty was about twelve years old, with big sloppy legs and thick golden hair all over his face, so that he looked almost, to me, like a grown man. All the time I had a feeling of being sorry for him, of knowing that he was simple, and yet of trusting him. I wanted too to make a discovery that I felt my father and mother and sister and perhaps other people had never made. I wanted to go home with a story of something impossible made possible.

It was very hot as we walked through the bare wheatfields out of the town. Heat danced like
water on the distant edges of the white stubbles. We walked about a mile and then I asked Arty how much farther it was.