Complete Short Stories (VMC) (13 page)

Now a deeper despair showed him daily the real tragedy of his blindness. This orderly, aseptic world was not only new to him, but beyond his imagining. Food and talk had lost their richness: central-heating provided no warmth: he crouched over radiators with his hands spread over the pipes, his head aching with the dryness of the air. No one buttoned his coat for him. He tapped his way round with his stick, often hitting out viciously and swearing. ‘There are ladies present,’ he was told, and, indeed, this was so. They lowered the atmosphere with little jealousies and edged remarks and irritated with their arguments about birds (‘I could not mistake a chaffinch’s song, Mrs Hussey, being country-bred-and-born’) or about Royalty (‘But both Lady Mary and Lady May Cambridge were bridesmaids to the Duchess of York’). They always remembered ‘as if it were yesterday’, although begging pardon for contradicting. Morale was very high, as it so often is in a community where tragedy is present. Harry was reminded of the Blitz and Cockney resilience and understatement. Although a Cockney himself he detested understatement. Some Irish strain in him allowed his mind to dwell on the mournful, to spread alarm and despondency and to envisage with clarity the possibilities of defeat. When he confessed to fear, the Boys had relished the joke. ‘That’ll be the day!’ they said. He found the burden of their morale very tiring. ‘The war’s bad enough in itself,’ he had thought; as now he thought: ‘Surely it’s bad enough being blind,’ when he was expected to sing hymns and alter all his ways as well.

After the concert, his luck seemed to change; at first, though, to deteriorate. The still, moist winter weather drew the other inmates out on walks about the village. Only Miss Arbuthnot remained indoors with a slight cold. In the end, the sense of nervousness and irritation she induced in Harry drove him out, too. He wandered alone, a little scared, down the drive and out on to the high road. He followed the brick wall along and turned with it into a narrower lane with a softer surface.

The hedges dripped with moisture although it was not raining. There was a resinous scent in the air which was all about that neighbourhood and pronounced healthy by Matron, who snuffed it up enthusiastically as if she were a war-horse smelling battle. Harry’s tread was now muffled by pine-needles and once a fir-cone dropped on his shoulder, startling him wretchedly. Every sound in the hedgerow unnerved him: he imagined small, bright-eyed animals watching his progress. From not following the curve of the hedge sharply enough, he ran his face against wet hawthorn twigs. He felt giddiness, as if he were wandering in a circle. ‘Bad enough being out by myself in the country, let alone being blind, too,’ he thought, as he stumbled in a rut.

He could imagine Matron when he returned – if he returned – ‘Why, Harry, you naughty old thing, going off like that! Why didn’t you go with Mr Thomas, who knows the neighbourhood so well and could have told you the names of all the birds you heard, and made it nice and interesting!’

The only birds he, Harry, could recognise – and he did not wish to recognise any – were jackdaws (and they were really rooks), who seemed to congregate above him, throughout his walk, wheeling and cawing in an offensive manner; perhaps disputing over him, he thought morbidly; staking their claims before he dropped.

Then suddenly he lost hedge and ditch. He was treading on turf and the air had widened. He felt a great space about him and the wind blowing, as if he were on a sea-cliff, which he knew he could not be in Oxfordshire. With a sense of being confronted by an immense drop – a blind man’s vertigo – he dared not take a pace forward, but stood swaying a little, near to tears. He heard rough breathing and a large dog jumped upon him. In terror, he thrashed about with his stick, the tears now pouring from his eyes which had no other function.

He heard a woman’s voice calling and the squelch of the wet turf as she ran towards him across what he had imagined to be the middle of the air. She beat the dog away and took Harry’s arm.

‘You all right, dear? He’s plastered you up properly, but it’ll brush off when it’s dry.’

‘I don’t know where I am,’ Harry said, fumbling for his handkerchief.

‘It’s the common where the bus stops.’ She pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to him. ‘That’s our bus over there.’

‘You a conductress then?’

‘That’s right, dear. You’re from that Home, are you? It’s on the route and we can give you a lift.’

‘I don’t have any coppers on me.’

‘You needn’t worry about that. Just take my arm and we’re nearly there. It’s a scandal the way they let you wander about.’

‘The others manage better nor I. I’m not one for the country. It always gives me the wind-up.’

At the gates of the Home she helped him down, saying: ‘Any time, dear. Only too pleased. Take care of yourself. Bye-bye!’

No one had noticed his absence and he concealed his adventure. One of the daily cleaners, with whom he felt more confidence than with the resident staff, brushed his coat for him.

After this, the lane, which had held such terror, was his escape-route. The buses came every hour, and he would sometimes be waiting there; or the drivers would see him stumbling across the common and would sound the horn in welcome. Sitting in the bus before it drew out, he could enjoy the only normal conversation of his day.

‘A shilling each way Flighty Frances! That’s not much for a man of your substance, Harry.’

‘It’s just I fancy the name. I had an old mare of the name of Francie. Time was, no doubt, I’d have had a fiver on it. Now I’m left about as free of money as a toad of fleas.’

He would try to roll his own cigarettes, but tore the paper and spilt the tobacco, until the bus-drivers learnt to help him. In their company he opened out, became garrulous, waggish, his old manner returning. He came to know one from another and to call each by his name. Their camaraderie opened up to him garage gossip, feuds at the depot, a new language, a new life. His relationship with them was not one of equality, for they had too much to give, and he nothing. This he sensed and, while taking their badinage and imagining their winks, he played up his part – the lowering rôle of a proper old character – and extracted what he could from it, even to the extent of hinting and scrounging. His fumblings with his cigarette-making became more piteous than was necessary.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, have a proper cigarette … messing about like that.’

‘That’s all I got the lolly for, mate.’

‘Whose fault’s that – if you’ve got to drink yourself silly every night.’

‘I haven’t had a pint since I come down here.’

‘Well, where’s your money gone to – wild living, I suppose? And women.’

‘Now don’t you start taking the mike out of me, Fred.’ He used their names a great deal – the first pride he had felt since his blindness was in distinguishing Fred from Syd or Lil from Marg. The women had more individuality to him, with wider variety of inflection and vocabulary and tone; and the different scents of their powder and their hair.

‘Supposing Flighty Frances comes in, what are you going to do with your winnings, Harry? Take us all out for a beer?’

‘I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘I forget the taste of it myself. I could do with a nice brown. It’s the price of it, though, and how to find my way back afterwards, and all them old codgers sitting round fanning theirselves each time I free a belch. Very off-hand they can be with their ways.’

‘What do you do all day?’

The driver felt a curiosity about a life so different from his own, imagined a work-house with old people groping about, arms extended, as if playing Blind Man’s Buff.

‘We have a nice listen to the wireless-set – a lot of music which I never liked the sound of anyway – and plays about sets of people carrying on as if they need their arses kicked. You never met a breed of people like these customers on the wireless; what they get into a rare consternation about is nobody’s business. Then we might have some old army gent give a talk about abroad and the rum ways they get into over there, but personally I’ve got my own troubles so I lie back and get in a bit of shut-eye. The other night we had a wagon-load of virgins up there singing hymns.’

He played to the gallery, which repaid him with cigarettes and
bonhomie
. His repartee became so strained that sometimes he almost waited to hear Flo, his late wife, say sharply: ‘That’s enough now, Harry. It’s about time we heard something from someone else.’ He had always talked too much; was a bad listener; almost a non-listener, for he simply waited without patience for others to stop talking that he might cap their story. ‘Well, hurry up, hurry up!’ he would think. ‘Get a move on with it, man. I got something to say myself on those lines. If you go drivelling on much longer, chances are I’ll forget it.’

‘No, what I’d do, say this horse comes in, bar the fact I’d only make about seven bob all told, but what I’d do is take the bus down to the fair on Saturday. I like a nice lively fair.’

‘What, and have a go on the coco-nut shies?’

‘I wouldn’t mind, Fred,’ he boasted.

‘You can come along with me and Charlie, Saturday evening,’ Fred said, adding with an ungraciousness he did not intend: ‘Makes no odds to us.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Harry said. ‘Have to see what’s fixed up for Saturday. I’ll let you know tomorrow.’

‘All right, Harry. We’ll get one of the boys to pick you up at the gates Saturday after tea, and we can put you on the last bus along with all those coco-nuts you’re going to knock down.’

They left him at the gates. He lifted his white stick in farewell and then walked up the drive, slashing out at the rhododendron-hedge and whistling shrilly. Now he was in for a spell of his old difficulty – currying favour. He would not have admitted to Fred that he could not come and go as he pleased, that for the rest of the day he must fawn on Matron and prepare
his request. This he overdid, as a child would, arousing suspicion. He lowered himself in his own eyes by praising the minced meat and going into ecstasies over the prunes and custard. His unctuous voice was a deep abasement to him and an insult to Matron’s intelligence. ‘My, that’s what I call a meal, quite a pre-war touch about it. Now, say I have another go at that basket-work, ma’am?’

‘What are you up to today, Harry?’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you.’

Later, the wind drove gusts of fair-music up the hill. Miss Arbuthnot complained; but Harry could not hear it. Missing so much that the others heard was an added worry to him lately; for to lose hearing as well would finish him as a person, and leave him at the mercy of his own thoughts which had always bored him. His tongue did his thinking for him: other people’s talk struck words from him like a light from a match; his phrases were quick and ready-made and soon forgotten; but he feared a silence and they filled it.

Matron found him alone, after the basket-making class was over. He was involved in a great tangle of withies. His enormous hands engrained with dirt looked so ill-adapted to the task that Matron, stringent as she was about the difficulties of others, found them wretchedly pathetic. So few men of action came her way; the burly, the ham-handed ended up in other backwaters she supposed, with gout and dropsy and high blood-pressure. She felt, as Harry himself felt, that he was not the type. He was certainly ill-matched to his present task of managing the intractable, and even dangerous, tangle of cane.

‘When is your birthday, Harry?’ she asked; for she was interested in astrology and quite surprised how many Cancer subjects came her way.

‘April the twenty-first. Why?’

‘Taurus the Bull,’ she said.

He began to bristle indignantly, then remembered his purpose and bent his head humbly, a poor broken bull with a lance in his neck.

‘You mean,’ some instinct led him to say, ‘I’m like a bull in a china shop?’

Her contrition was a miracle. He listened to her hurried explanations with a glow in his heart.

‘I only thought you meant I was clumsy about the place,’ he said. ‘I don’t seem to cotton-on to half what the others say and I keep spilling my dinner.’

‘But, Harry …’

‘I’ve had my sight longer than them, and it takes more getting used to doing without it,’ he went on, and might have been inspired. ‘When you’ve been lucky to have your eyes so long as me, it takes some settling to.’
‘You’ve still got yours,’ hung in the air. He managed to insinuate the idea and seem innocent of the thought; but he had lost his innocence and was as cagey as a child. His late wife would have said: ‘All right, you can come off it now, Harry.’ Matron said: ‘We only want to make you happy, you know; though sometimes you’re such an old reprobate.’

After that, he had to endure the impatience of being coaxed to do what he desired, and coquetry was not in his line. He became unsure of himself and the trend of the conversation, and with a Cockney adroitness let the idea of the fair simmer in Matron’s mind, undisturbed. Busy again with his basket-work, he let one of the osiers snap back and hit him across the face. ‘I’m no spoil-sport, Harry,’ she said. This daunted him; in all his life he had found that sport was spoiled by those who claimed this to be their last intention. He awaited all the rest of the phrases – ‘I should hate to be a wet blanket’, and ‘Goodness knows I don’t want to criticise’. In his agitation, he took up the picking-knife to cut an end of cane and cut into the pad of his thumb. At first, he felt no pain; but the neatness with which the blade divided his flesh alarmed him. He missed his sight when he needed to feel pain. Blood, crawling between his thumb and fingers, put him into a panic and he imagined the bone laid bare, and his head swam. Pain, coming through slowly, reassured him more than Matron could.

For the rest of the evening, he sat alone in his corner by the radiator, and the steady throbbing of his bandaged thumb kept him company, mixed as it was – and, no doubt, in Matron’s mind too – with the promise of the fair. ‘I should insist on their bringing you back,’ she had said. ‘There’s the rough element to contend with on a Saturday night.’ In other years he had been – proudly – a large part of the rough element himself.