Here Be Dragons Page 8

  They came at last to a mouldering terrace of white cottages; very old, standing above the broken iron stumps where there had once been railings; dark windows whose lamp-reflecting glitter defied the eye to see within; chimneys twisted as if in some disaster; shut doors that had a sealed look. These faced a piece of waste land, rutted, and scattered with newspaper and rubbish, and the coiled-serpentine shapes of old tyres. Beyond this, black buildings towered softly against the orange sky, and hidden traffic faintly roared.

  “Here we are,” said John, and stopped in front of a door that stood open. He looked at her, and she looked back at him. She could just make out by the dim light that he was smiling. It was at this moment that Nell began to know there was not going to be much ordinary happiness between herself and her cousin John. She did not yet know that she would have to become used to, and to put up with, the fact.

  “Afraid?” he asked.

  “Of course not. Why should I be?”

  “I thought you mightn’t have seen a place like this before. It’s not on the pictures, you know. It’s real.”

  Nell looked past him down the passage. It was black and it smelt. “I suppose if you’ve been living here it can’t be too bad,” and she stepped over the threshhold.

  Somewhere at the end of the passage a door opened. A shaft of light shone out and she caught a glimpse of a small, dim, cluttered room full of people, all staring towards the door. There were two or three of them; sitting quite still; not talking.

  “All right,” said John, and a woman’s voice called back, “Oh, it’s you. He’s been expectin’ you this hour. She’s up there too. I don’t know what’s—” the words were lost as someone shut the door.

  “I’ll lead the way, shall I,” and he went ahead of her up the stairs. Nell followed, picking her way over holes in the oilcloth and broken boards, and thinking now that her clothes might be unsuitable for the party merely because they were clean. Who was ‘she’? Not, she hoped, Gardis. She was trying to forget the faces of the people in that room.

  They came to a landing where she could just make out several closed doors by the faint glow filtering through a skylight; she thought that it must be reflected from the street. John went across and knocked on one.

  They waited. She wrinkled her nose against the composite smell of stale cabbage, onions, dirty carpet and, from a half-open door on her left, something worse. “You know,” he turned to her, half-whispering, “I should have told you about Benedict. In my opinion and that of a lot of my friends, Dylan Thomas and Day Lewis are going to be very minor figures compared with Benedict Rouse. (Betjeman may be able to keep his end up: I don’t know: but he does express the spirit of the age, in some ways, while those other poets don’t.) And Benedict has such wonderful technical ability. His ear is exquisite—in the precise sense, I mean.”

  He stopped, and listened. There was a movement from within; what kind of movement Nell would have had difficulty in saying. It included something that might have been laughter; and it was also a kind of stirring, as if something were waking up. When in response to a call she followed John in, she saw a low, grey, bare room almost filled by a great bed. The blackened brass of its frame winked in the light of two candles guttering in the air from the open window, and on it was lying a young man, who turned a long, smiling face towards them. Nell had to summon all her small store of recently-gained London sophistication, when she saw, streaming over his naked chest from the head of someone humped recumbent under the coverlet beside him, a mass of black hair. To Nell it looked dismayingly familiar.

  “Hullo,” he said. He pushed the hair aside onto its owner, who did not move, and sat up. “I thought you weren’t coming. How do you do?” to Nell.

  “How do you do?” she said.

  She wondered if the walls of this room often heard the phrase, which was associated by herself with rare visiting clergy, rarer tennis parties, and meeting friends’ parents on Claregates Open Day. It seemed unlikely. But Benedict had a how-do-you-do voice.

  “Do sit down,” he said; he had got off the bed and was now rapidly pulling on a shirt, “John, shift those magazines off the chair, can’t you.”

  “You mustn’t let Nell make you conventional.” John slid a mass of Picture Posts onto the floor and inclined the broken chair towards Nell. “Is there anything to eat? She is ravenous—as usual.”

  “I was just going to cut some bread and butter. Will you make the coffee?”

  “Can’t Gardis do that? I’m tired.” He sat down limply on the forlorn rusty web, once a carpet, which covered the floor and leaned his head against the wall.

  “I’ll do it. I’m not tired,” said Nell, and was disconcerted to see a black eye like a snake’s open amidst the mass of hair on the bed. Gardis was not asleep, and she was finding something amusing.

  “The things are in the cupboard, if you’re going to be so kind,” said Benedict.

  “Coffee stinks,” observed a voice from under the coverlet, “how about some gin?”

  “I’ve no money for gin,” said Benedict, who was moving about, and getting bread out of a cupboard.

  Nell did not know that one of the distinguishing marks of the poet’s face is its lining and marking, even in youth, by the tides of passionate feeling. These may be the mild, moon-swayed neaps that blanched the face of Coleridge, or the scorching, sterile ebbs that pinched up the face of Swinburne, but always they leave their mark beside the mouth and on brow and cheek; and here, in the face of the smallish, slender young man; on his high forehead where the brown locks strayed, round his suffering eyes, was the authentic wrack.

  “You have got money too, I heard it go jingle-jangle,” Gardis was saying.

  “I want that for food, thank you.”

  “Bourgeois …” she said drowsily. John, finding the floor uncomfortable, had taken Nell’s chair while she was at the cupboard, and as she went to and fro between room and landing, filling a kettle at a tap which sent, taking its own time, a scanty stream into a leaden sink on the floor, she heard him lecturing Gardis on her Hollywood notions about artists.

  “… I admit that you have to go to the limits in order to create anything permanent, but you need not stay there. Look at Flaubert. He said that the proper milieu for an artist was the middle-class one. I don’t say that I agree with him (and in any case French middle-class life is so different from its English equivalent) but he lived that life himself and he was a wonderful artist.”

  “All this class-stuff … And what a collar! You look like something out of The Seven Little Foys.”

  Gardis was now sitting up on the bed, screwing her hair into its knot. She had contrived to put on her clothes, Nell hoped, while lying under the bedclothes; she feared that she had dressed herself in front of the young men during the prolonged filling of the kettle. Perhaps she was afraid that Nell would give a report to Lady Fairfax. But I can’t imagine her being afraid of anything, thought Nell, kneeling on the floor by a rusty gas ring whose feeble flame seemed to work under the same principles as those which animated the tap.

  Benedict was glancing at her now and then with approval. He liked her childish appearance and practical manner, while her thinness and her straight brown hair, the colour of a dead leaf, refreshed in him that spirit (like that of most poets, his nature contained some dozen or so spirits) which perpetually craved coolness and freshness. Even his passion for Gardis could not always reconcile him to the sight and touch of her small feverish hands—which seemed never to be quite clean …

  “… good heavens, no-one’s going to mind you being a ‘Commie’, as you call it, over here,” John was saying contemptuously now to Gardis. “We still possess some remnants of freedom in this country. I’m always telling you to be a Commie, if it makes you feel any better.”

  “Maybe I will, then … I often feel like one. Only if they did find out back home … you people haven’t any notion how far back they trace you—ten years, fifteen years, maybe. Then if you’ve written a preface to
a Commie’s book, or been seen around with Commies, or helped one in any way—wham. They’ve got you … ’Tisn’t quite as bad as it was a year or two back, but …

  “What are your politics?” she demanded, turning suddenly upon Nell.

  “Conservative” Nell answered, without looking up from her midwifery to the kettle.

  “Wha-a-a-t? You admit it? You admit right out you’re a Fascist reactionary?”

  “Of course she’s a Tory. So would you be, if you’d always lived in the country and been a parson’s daughter (Church and State, you know). Leave her alone.” John’s tone was authoritative.

  “But I never heard anyone admit right out that they were a Fascist. It’s thrilling.” Gardis was sitting on the bed hugging her knees, and Nell did not know if the black eyes fixed on her were mocking or not. “Coming to the powder-room?” Gardis asked suddenly. “It’s across the landing,” and Nell, although she did not know exactly what a powder-room was, thought that she would.

  She followed her out of the room, and John shut the door firmly behind them.

  Gardis pranced ahead into the place smelling of something worse. They had to strike matches; Nell grazed herself against a terrible rusty bath filled with yellow newspapers, and saw in the flickering light the blue damp oozing in patches out of the walls. Mould, and damp dust, and decay and worse … Gardis, who had not troubled to shut the door during her own tenancy, leaned against the lintel and seemed inclined for a chat. Nell shut it with decision. Afterwards, while they were tidying themselves, Gardis murmured slyly: “Do you like those boys in there?”

  She was holding a match high above her head so that Nell could see. There was a mirror on the wall, so old that its last traces of beauty had been broken down into the strange repulsiveness attaching to domestic objects of great age; all that was left of the bows and roses that had once decorated the frame were some wires and fragments of plaster, whose gilt had turned almost black. God alone knew where it had come from; it might even have reflected a white wig towering above a face covered thickly with red and white paints, but now it only cried out to be taken down, down from the oozing wall, and destroyed. Yet its degradation was not quite complete: the few patches of silver left on the blotched surface returned the fragmented images of the two girls with touching purity and faithfulness.

  “Do you?” Gardis repeated.

  “I like Benedict.” Nell turned away from the glass. “Shall I hold one for you now?”

  “(If you will.) Oh, Ben. He’s … no use. Are you a virgin?” She was using her lipstick, but her eyes slid round to laugh at Nell, who found herself capable of giving a nod. Then she swallowed, and said: “Are you?”

  “Haven’t been since I was fifteen,”—there was a glint of surprise in the eyes—“If I told you how many men I’ve had you’d die. And do you like dear little John? He’s a stuck-up snooty specimen of a typical Britisher, isn’t he?”

  “He is my cousin,” Nell said repressively. The question did not embarrass her, for she had never thought about her true feelings for John. He was silly, and he was untrustworthy, and he had behaved badly. This was his official rating. It was family feeling (she told herself) that made her give a note of protest to her reply now.

  “I don’t see how that makes him any better … let’s get out of here. I’m afraid we’ll both catch something … You’d better gargle when you get home. I shall.” It annoyed Nell that every now and then Gardis prevented herself from seeming completely detestable by saying something almost kind. It made relations with her less straightforward.

  A far-off, solemn, major note was rolling faintly through the open window as they came back into the room.

  “Ten,” said Nell, surprised.

  “That’s Big Ben,” said John, now lying on the bed, “the wind must be this way; we don’t often hear him ‘live’.”

  “Can I help?” Nell had gone over to the table where Benedict was laboriously adding to a pile of bread and butter. “What a lot you’ve done. How many more people are coming?” She began to spread butter on the waiting slices.

  “Chris, I think. He said he might. He’s absolutely desolate without Nerina, of course,” said John. “No-one else. Don’t look blank, Nell. It doesn’t become you. What’s the matter?”

  “You said—‘a party’ …”

  “Aren’t you having a swell time?” Gardis’s voice sounded mocking, as she bustled about with her official secretarial manner collecting cups.

  “Yes … I only thought …”

  “This is a party,” John said coldly. “Anywhere where a few people meet to talk and see one another is a party. I warned you there wouldn’t be a lot of suburban bull.”

  Nell felt herself snubbed. But really—! as her mother would say. So this was all there was to be, except for Chris, who was ‘desolate’. And was she enjoying it? She could not truthfully say.

  She liked Benedict, but the partly incomprehensible talk and peculiar manners of the other two disconcerted her, while John seemed to have one manner for use in public and another manner for use when he and she were alone together. Realizing suddenly that she had been looking at him ever since she came back into the room, she looked quickly out of the window and said, “Oh!”

  “What? Oh, the canal,” Benedict put down his knife and came to stand beside her, “isn’t it lovely? It’s black now, by daylight it’s usually olive-green. When you see it from the other side, as you’re going past on the bus, with these little white houses standing above it, it’s even better.”

  “It must look like Venice,” she said.

  He smiled. “The houses in Venice aren’t often white, they’re usually russet-colour or pale grey.”

  “Have you been there often?”

  “I was living there last summer. I had a job as a waiter in a hotel.”

  “Oh. It must … have been very interesting.”

  “She means how shocking.” It was a biting voice from the bed.

  “I don’t.” Nell turned to him and spoke sharply. “I would a jolly sight rather do that, anyway, than work in an office.”

  “Not want the job that kind Auntie got for us?” said Gardis. “Naughty, naughty.”

  “Well—” John sat up, prepared for argument. “I think it’s bloody trahison des clercs. I’m always telling him so.”

  “It’s better than working all day at something literary … If I did that I shouldn’t want to write poetry in my spare time. I should want to get drunk,” Benedict said.

  “You’d want that anyway,” from Gardis. “Jesus! Who let the kettle go off the boil? And where’s the Nescafé?”

  “I’m awfully sorry, it took such ages,” Nell said guiltily, “while we were tidying I put it in the grate.”

  “Well, you can go right in and boil it up again.”

  “The gas went out, it wasn’t anybody’s fault,” said Benedict fretfully. “John, have you got a shilling? Gardis, then? Oh hell.”

  “I’ve got one.” Nell produced a neat purse.

  “Oh … thank you.” He snatched it and put it into a black metal case that was fixed on the floor and turned a little wheel. The ring began to hiss feebly.

  “A match. A match. Haven’t any of you got a match? I hate the smell and it’ll be all over the room.”

  Again Nell supplied what was wanted, from a box hurled in a corner which she had noticed, and when the ring was lit, the kettle replaced, Benedict said to her:

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been working all day and haven’t eaten. I don’t usually forget but I got so … John, you don’t want those damned candles now, do you. I know you hate light as a bat does but I can’t see to cut the bread.”

  “Do you want to? I know Chris’s appetite, but there’s enough here even for him. Oh, here he is. Come in,” John called.

  Nell looked up from the kettle, and saw a huge boy in rough clothes edging himself into the room. ‘Boy’ was the word for him, for although his thick bright beard glinted in the candlelight, the cheeks abo
ve it shone like apples. He muttered something in a hoarse shy voice and sat down in a corner.

  “How’s Nerina? When’s she coming home?” John began charmingly at once, and Nell saw Chris’s face light up.

  “She’s all right,” he mumbled. “Not for another three days, though. They’ve asked her to stay on.”

  “Oh, well, that’s good in one way, isn’t it?” He turned to Nell. “I’ve told you how lovely Chris’s woman is, haven’t I? She’s doing a week’s washing-up and waitressing at a café in Southend, living in.”

  “I’d a’ been down there too,” Chris turned to Nell as if to excuse himself, giving her a little bob of his head as if to introduce himself at the same time, “on’y I’ve got this here picture to paint for this old lady. I did start out one night walking, had to turn back halfway there. Shouldn’t have been back in time next day, see. And it’s ten pounds clear.” He stopped. It was plain that he meant to keep quiet now.

  “It’s a portrait of her little dog,” John said.

  “Nell, come and help,” said Gardis. She looked suddenly very cross, and as Nell handed round bread and butter and coffee, she wondered if Gardis were comparing the party with others she had been to in America or at Odessa Place, for certainly, now that Benedict had insisted on having the gas lit, the room had lost all its shadowy charm and looked, to Nell at least, merely squalid.

  But no-one else seemed to mind. The names of painters and writers and musicians and poets went to and fro, and there were scraps of argument about politics, and many references from John and Gardis to ‘my stuff’. Nell gathered that this was their painting and writing. She sat in complete silence, occasionally mixing fresh Nescafé for a cup thrust out impatiently by someone who neither looked at her nor stopped talking. In half-an-hour only one remark was addressed to her. Chris, who had been as quiet as herself, leant across and said hoarsely: