The Ka of Gifford Hillary (23 page)

That, too, must apply to the expenses of a girl who made any pretence of maintaining a smart appearance, and I wondered now how Christobel could look so well turned out as she did on her money. She, of course, could have been earning money for herself by now, but it was much my fault as anyone’s that she was not. I ought to have insisted two or three years ago that she should train for some career, but I had never bothered to do so; and as, like her mother, she was lazy by nature, she had never done anything about it for herself.

So there it was. Partly through a mean instinct to keep as much of my income as I reasonably could for my own enjoyment, and even more from lack of thought for them, I had allowed three people for whom I was responsible to be harassed for years by financial worries, and deprived them of much happiness.

As I sat there, filled with shame at these thoughts, it occurred to me that perhaps it was by no mere chance that Johnny had brought me to Edith’s house that night. Although I had now been dead for over twenty-four hours, there was still no indication that I was about to enter another sphere of consciousness. Quite possibly, then, what I was now experiencing could be explained by the old belief in Purgatory. Perhaps, before I could be allowed to pass on, I should see myself as others to whom I had done harm had seen me, and be harrowed by contrition for all my faults.

With that unhappy surmise in mind my thoughts again became vague and wandering until they ceased to flow. But, as a result of my past indifference of my family’s welfare, before the night was out I was to suffer still deeper shame.

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I was roused by the opening of the door, and Christobel’s voice saying: ‘Stay where you are for a minute, while I put on the fire.’

By the light from the hall-way she crossed the room, switched on the three bars of the electric fire, and when it was
glowing fully called softly over her shoulder: ‘You can come in now. This will give enough light to save you from tripping over anything.’

Closing the door behind him a man came into the room—presumably Archie. He was considerably older than I should have expected, and much nearer to my age than to hers. As he took off his overcoat I saw that he was wearing a dinner jacket; so it looked as though Christobel’s story to Harold that she was going to a cinema was because she did not trust him and wished for reasons of her own to mislead her mother, and that actually she had gone straight up to the West End to dance and sup. It had struck me that she looked very smartly turned out for the pictures and possibly a visit to some local night-spot afterwards. A glance at the clock showed me that it was a quarter to four, and no local place would have kept open till near that hour.

Archie was a tallish man, rather red in the face and with thinning hair. Christobel seemed to be carrying her drink pretty well but it was obvious that he had knocked back quite a bit more than was good for him and, slurring his words a little, he said rather peevishly:

‘I do wish you’d have let me take you to … to the flat.’

‘No thanks,’ she replied with a shake of her head. ‘Not at this time of night, and have the porter recognise me coming out. Besides, I loathe having to get up and dress again.’

He gave an anxious glance at the ceiling. ‘You’re quite sure no one’ll hear us?’

‘No, darling, not a chance of it.’ She threw herself down on the chesterfield at full length, and added: ‘Even if Mother is awake, without her hearing aid she is as deaf as a post; and my kid brother is right at the top of the house.’

She had not taken her feet from the floor; so as she lay there invitingly her knees were on a level with her chin. Swaying slightly he stood looking down on her with an appreciative leer.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘What are you waiting for?’

At that, he plumped down beside her, took her in his arms and gave her a long rich kiss. But after a moment she pushed him away and asked:

‘How about that hat in Josette’s window that you were going to buy me?’

‘Oh, come on,’ he protested. ‘It’s only … only the other day I paid your hairdresser’s bill for you.’

‘I know that.’ She gave him a quick kiss on the nose. ‘But you like me to dress well, and it’s over a fortnight since you gave me a present. Please don’t be a meanie.’

Sitting up he got out his pocket book and with fumbling fingers extracted some pound notes. ‘Here you are, then. It was a fiver, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s right. Thank you, my poppet.’ Taking the notes she performed the age-old gesture of pulling up her skirt and stuffing them into the top of her stocking.

Again he bent over her, then said in a tone that implied no insult: ‘You know the truth is that you’re a … a damned expensive gol … gold-digging little bitch.’

‘Am I?’ she laughed up at him. ‘Anyway you’ve no cause to complain. You know that I always give you jolly good value for your money.’

I slunk away then, out through the passage and the front door to the street. It was the final humiliation, and that Harold should have foreseen the possibility of just such a situation added to its bitterness. Through my neglect of her, I had been brought to witness my daughter in the act of prostituting herself to a drunken man.

Heedless of where I was going, I moved through a few silent residential streets instinctively taking a downhill direction and some ten minutes later arrived at the north bank of the Thames. Turning right, I made my way along the embankment until I reached Putney Bridge. There I remained for well over an hour, again contemplating my strange and unhappy condition.

Johnny and James Campbell had been perfectly right in their assessment of my attitude to suicide. In spite of Bill Wiltshire’s view, that in certain circumstances it was the decent thing to do, I don’t think I could ever have brought myself to take my own life; yet, so miserable was I from the experiences of the past night that, had I still been alive, I really believe I would seriously have considered throwing myself off the bridge into the river. But as I was already dead, to do so offered no escape from the thoughts that tormented me.

The sky over London is never dark, but gradually it lightened to the east until the street lamps were dimmed and the outline of Fulham Palace became clear in a new day. I had nothing to do and nowhere to go; but I decided that I must make an effort to rouse myself from the slough of despondency into which I had fallen, and that the best way to do so would be to make use of my extraordinary asset of invisibility. By it I could enter houses unseen and listen to the most intimate conversations. That at least offered a prospect of taking my mind off my own worries.

Crossing the bridge I proceeded towards London. As it was a Sunday morning the streets were still deserted, except for an occasional night-hawk taxi crawling home and a few groups of young people on bicycles making an early start for a day in the country.

The district that I entered was a mean and shabby one. The main street was lined with poor shops and the gutters were littered with refuse from rows of stalls that had stood there for a Saturday market. In the side turning solid rows of low, flat-topped, mid-Victorian houses faced one another. Each had a pillared portico, and at one time they had no doubt been small family residences for respectable head clerks, small tradesmen and widows with modest incomes; but they had fallen into a sad state of destitution and were now either tenements or cheap lodging houses.

I entered several and their interiors only added to my depression, yet somehow I felt forced to continue my investigations. Behind the grubby curtains I found a squalor which I had hardly realised existed. Few of the families had more than two rooms and sometimes numbered as many as six people. The greater part of them were still asleep; the grownups huddled under dirty coverlets in narrow beds, and often in the same room an old woman or children stretched out on palliasses on the floor. Among them were quite a number of negroes and others of obviously foreign origin.

In recent times many of the worst slums in the old East End have been demolished and replaced by big blocks of modern workers’ flats; so a large part of the very poor have established new slum areas in Notting Hill and down there in Walham Green. Consequently, I knew that I was looking at what is called the ‘submerged tenth’—the ne’er-do-wells, the petty crooks and near down-and-outs—that form a social sore in every great city, and for which no Government, given the best will in the world, can do very much. But all the same I was appalled by what I saw.

That must not be taken to imply that I became a sudden convert to Socialism. It is my firm conviction that although the honest Socialists—and there are many of them—have as their ideal the redistribution of wealth so that poverty shall be eliminated, the means by which they would attempt to do so are hopelessly impracticable. The results of increasing taxation on the better-off and the restriction of private enterprise could lead only to a general reduction of the standard of living over the whole country, and, eventually, to wide-spread unemployment. As has already been shown by a Labour Government, the additional revenue obtained from increased taxation does
not go to bettering the lot of the very poor, but is squandered in paying the vast non-productive bureaucracy necessary to administer nationalised industries and maintain controls. Moreover as the prosperity of the country decreased so too would the amount received from taxes, with the final result that the Government itself would face bankruptcy, and be compelled to stop the payment of pensions, food subsidies, health benefits and all the other measures of social security which the people now enjoy as citizens of the Welfare State.

No, I was certainly not converted to Socialism; but there came into my mind the saying of Christ that: ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ And I had been a rich man.

Again I wondered if I was in Purgatory, and that, just as I had been shown the results of my selfishness towards my family, so I had now been directed here in order that I might see the appalling conditions in which many of my fellow human beings had been living while I, without giving them or their like a thought, must often have driven past these very houses in my big car, on my way into London and to a lunch, the price of which would have fed a whole family for a week.

I was jerked out of this fresh cause for heart-searching by a new and rather diverting experience. It was in a house crowded with negroes. In one carpetless room on the second floor, furnished only with a truckle bed, a single cupboard, a wash-stand and two chairs, a dusky couple had already woken. The woman, a beautifully healthy young animal clad only in an incredibly filthy kimono which she had left hanging open in front, was cooking up some mess on a gas ring; the man was sitting propped up in bed plucking chords from a homemade guitar and softly crooning a cheerful little ditty. I had entered by the window and was comforting myself somewhat with the thought that even the direst poverty could not prevent young people getting some joy out of life, when he glanced in my direction.

Suddenly his eyes began to roll in terror. Letting out a blood-curdling yell, he leapt from his bed, dashed for the door, wrenched it open and fled shouting downstairs. The only possible explanation was that he had seen me as a ghost,
and it was interesting to know that physically sensitive human beings could do so as well as animals. But, more important at the moment, the sight of the whites of his eyes rolling ludicrously in his coal-black face, then of his flailing legs beneath the flying tail of his shirt as he bolted for the door, were just the things needed to restore my sense of humour.

Deciding that I had done quite enough slumming, I moved north-eastward at a walking pace, heading roughly in the direction of Hyde Park; but the mean streets seemed endless and by the time I reached the Queen’s Gate area there were many more people about. Quite a few were entering a Church for early service, the Sunday papers were being delivered, and every few minutes I noticed the curtains of a window being drawn back.

The rows of one-time private mansions in the pleasant tree-lined streets and squares of this district had also been transformed, but in their case into private hotels and spacious apartments having anything from five to ten rooms. Here and there, too, whole rows had been demolished to make way for big blocks of luxury flats.

Like Don Cleofas in Le Sage’s tale, after he had rescued the demon Asmodeus from imprisonment in a bottle by a sorcerer, roofs were no longer a shield to the privacy of any home I chose to examine, and during the next few hours I entered fifty or more, leaving each with a different emotion. There is no truer saying than that ‘one half of the world does not know how the other half lives’, and, applicable as it was to myself and the slums I had visited that morning, it also proved far more so than I would ever have suspected about these people many of whom were of my own social standing.

Most of them, of course, were behaving quite normally, but on average they seemed no happier than the poor wretches who had to struggle for existence some three miles to the south-west in Walham Green. A pair of, presumably, newly-weds, whom I surprised in an upper maisonnette, balanced out the cheerful negro couple whose morning I had inadvertently spoilt; but I was also the invisible witness of several grim little scenes.

In one flat I saw a youngish night porter who had just come off duty slap and jeer at a middle-aged woman who was
paying him to make love to her. In another, over breakfast, a despotic-looking uncle was deriving sadistic enjoyment from outlining the penalties he meant to inflict upon his school-boy nephew if the youngster did not get a better report at the end of the term which was due to start the following week. In a third a girl of about twenty-six, who was dressing in the bedroom of a white-haired man with the benign expression of a bishop, said to him. ‘If you want me to spend another night with you, you’ll have to make it better worth my while. Fifteen quid isn’t good enough for letting you use me as a human pincushion.’ In a fourth, again over breakfast a hard-faced mother was laying the law down to her grown-up son, and telling him that unless he broke off his engagement she would cut off his allowance.