Complete Short Stories (VMC) (14 page)

After supper, Miss Arbuthnot too, reminded by the distant sounds of the roundabouts, began to discuss the rough element – which, in her experience, as in all her experiences, was exaggerated beyond anything Harry had ever known. Spinster-like, she described a teeming, Hogarthian scene of pick-pockets, drunkards and what she called, contradictorily, ‘undesirable women’. ‘Oh, once, I dare say, these fairs were very picturesque … the maypoles and the Morris-dancing; and so vividly I remember the colourful peasants I saw at the fair at Nidjni Novgorod … such beautiful embroidery. But now, what is there left of such a life? So drearily commercial as all our pleasures are.’

She drove their inclinations into the corral: now no one cared to go to the fair; except Harry, worldly-wise, crouched over his radiator, nursing his poor hand, with his own inner vision still intact.

In the Home there was an aristocracy, never – from decency – mentioned, of those who had once, and even perhaps recently, seen, over those blind from birth. The aristocracy claimed no more than the privilege of
kindness and of tact and was tempered by the deftness and efficiency of those who had had longest to adapt themselves. Miss Arbuthnot, blinded, Harry imagined, by her own needlework, was the eyes of them all: for she had great inventiveness and authority and could touch up a scene with the skill of an artist. Harry, finding her vision unacceptable, had nothing of his own to take its place; only the pigheaded reiteration ‘It isn’t like that’ – the fair, the races, the saloon bar.

‘I used to like a roundabout when I was a girl,’ Mrs Hussey said timidly.

‘Well, there you have it!’ said Miss Arbuthnot. ‘All we have salvaged of the picturesque. The last of a traditional art, in fact. For instance, the carved horses with their bright designs.’

‘It was going round, I liked,’ Mrs Hussey said.

With a tug, as of a flag unfurling, an old memory spread out across Harry’s mind. He recalled himself as a boy, coming home from school with one of his friends, along the banks of a canal. It was growing dark. His child’s eyes had recorded the scene, which his busy life had overlaid and preserved: now, unexpectedly laid bare, it was more vivid than anything he had witnessed since. Sensually, he evoked the magic of that time of day, with the earth about to heel over into darkness; the canal steaming faintly; cranes at a menacing angle across the sky. He and the other boy walked in single file, on the muddy path which was hoof-printed by barge-horses. The tufted grass on each side was untidy and hoary with moisture; reeds, at the water’s edge, lisped together. Now, in his mind, he followed this path with a painful intensity, fearing an interruption. Almost slyly, he tracked down the boy he had been, who, exposed like a lens, unconsciously took the imprint of the moment and the place. Now, outside the scene, as if a third person, he walked behind the boys along the path; saw one, then the other, stoop and pick up a stone and skim it across the water. Without speaking, they climbed on the stacks of planks when they came to a timber-yard. The air had seemed to brace itself against distant thunder. The canal’s surface wrinkled in a sudden breeze, then drops of rain spread rings upon it. The boys, trying the door of a long shed, found it unlocked and crept inside to shelter, wiping their wet hands down their trousers. Rain drove against the windows in a flurry and the thunder came nearer. They stood close to one another just inside the door. The shapes which filled the shed, set out so neatly in rows, became recognisable after a while as roundabout horses, newly carved and as yet unpainted. Harry moved among them, ran his hand down their smooth backs, and breathed the smell of the wood. They were drawn up in ranks, pale and strange horses, awaiting their trappings and decorations and flowing tails.

The two boys spoke softly to one another; their voices muted – for the wood-shavings and the sawdust, which lay everywhere like snow, had a
muffling effect: nervousness filled them. Harry forced himself to stare at the horses as if to hypnotise them, to check them rearing and bearing down; and became convinced of their hostility. Moving his eyes watchfully, he was always just too late to see a nostril quiver or a head turn; though feeling that this happened.

The rain fell into the timber-yard as if the sky had collapsed, drumming upon the roof of the shed and hissing into the canal. It was dark now, and they thought of their homes. When the horses were swallowed by shadows, the boys were too afraid to speak and strained their ears for the sound of a movement. Lightning broke across the shed, and the creatures seemed to rear up from the darkness, and all their eyes flashed glassily.

The boys, pelting along the footpath, slipping in the squelching mud, their wet fringes plastered to their foreheads, began after a while to feel their fear recede. The canal was covered with bubbles, sucked at the banks and swirled into rat-holes. Beyond the allotments was the first street-lamp, and the boys leant against it to take a deep breath and to wipe the rain from their faces. ‘That was only their glass eyes,’ Harry had said; and there, under the lamp-post, the memory ended. He could not pursue himself home; but was obliged to take leave of his boyhood there – the child holding his wet jacket across his chest. The evening was lying vaguely before him, with perhaps a box on the ears from Lottie Throstle, for getting his books wet; or had she fetched the tin-bath in from the wall in the yard and let him soak his feet in mustard-water? She had had her moods and they defeated his memory.

Miss Arbuthnot was still talking of traditional art and craftsmanship and, rather to her vexation, was upheld in her views by the piano-tuner.

Harry leant sleepily against the radiator, tired from the mental strain of recollection – that patient stalking of his boyhood, tiring to one who had never dwelt on the past or reconsidered a scene. The intensity of the experience was so new to him that he was dazed by it; enriched; and awed by the idea of more treasure lying idle and at his disposal.

That night, nursing his throbbing hand to his chest, the pain easing him by giving a different focus to his distress, he slept his first deep and unbroken sleep since his sister’s death.

On Saturday, as it grew dark, he waited for the bus at the top of the drive. His bowler hat was tilted forward, as if to match his feeling of jaunty anticipation; his scarf was tucked into his coat. Muffled-up, stooping, with his head thrust from side to side, his reddened, screwed-up eyes turned upwards, he looked like a great tortoise balancing on its hind legs – and one burdened by the extra carapace of blindness.

At tea, he had excited envy in some of the inmates when he at last overcame superstition enough to mention the fair. Miss Arbuthnot had doubled
her scorn, but felt herself up against curiosity and surprise and the beginning of a reassessment, in most of their minds, of Harry’s character. He had left behind a little stir of conjecture.

He heard the bus coming down the lane and stood ready, his stick raised, to hail it. The unseen headlights spread out, silhouetting him.

‘You been hurting your hand?’ the conductress asked, helping him into a seat.

‘I just cut it. Is that old Fred up in front?’

‘No, that’s Evan. Fred’s been on a different route, but he said to tell you he’d be waiting for you at the depot along with Jock and Charlie.’

Fred’s heart sank when he saw Harry climbing down from the bus and smiling like a child. Saddling his friends with the old geezer for an evening was too much of a responsibility, and constraint and false heartiness marked the beginning of the outing. He had explained and apologised over and over again for the impulse which had brought Harry into the party.

‘Why, that’s all right, Fred,’ they had assured him.

He thought that a beer or two at the Wheatsheaf would make them feel better; but Harry, after so much enforced abstinence, found the drink go to his head with swift effect; became boastful, swaggering; invited laughter and threw in a few coarse jests for good measure. Sitting by the fire, his coat trailing about him, he looked a shocking old character, Fred thought. The beer dripped on to his knees; his waistcoat bulged above the straining fly-buttons, looped with the tarnished chain of a watch he kept winding and holding to his ear although he could no longer read it. Every so often he knocked his bowler-hat straight with his stick – a slick, music-hall gesture. Cocky and garrulous, he attracted attention from those not yet tired of his behaviour or responsible for it, as Fred was. They offered cigarettes and more drink. When at last he was persuaded to go, he lurched into a table, slopping beer from glasses.

Down the wide main street the fair booths were set out. Their lights spread upwards through the yellowing leaves of the trees. The tunes of competing roundabouts engulfed them in a confusion of sound. They stopped at a stall for a plateful of whelks and were joined by another bus-driver and his wife, whose shrill, peacock laughter flew out above all the other sounds.

‘How are you keeping, Harry?’ she asked. She was eating some pink candy-floss on a stick, and her lips and the inside of her mouth were crimson from it. Harry could smell the sickly, raspberry smell of her breath.

‘Quite nicely, thanks. I had a bit of a cold, but I can’t complain.’

‘Ever such a lot of colds about,’ she said vaguely.

‘And lately I seem to be troubled with my hearing.’ He could not forgo this chance to talk of himself.

‘Well, never mind. Can’t have it all ways, I suppose.’

‘
He
doesn’t have it many ways,’ Fred thought.

‘You ought to take me through the Haunted House, you know, Harry. I can’t get anyone else to.’

‘You don’t want to go along with an old codger like me.’

‘I wouldn’t trust him in the dark, Vi,’ Fred said.

‘I’ll risk it.’

She sensed his apprehension as they turned towards the sideshow. From behind the canvas façade with its painted skeletons came the sound of wheels running on a track, and spasms of wild laughter. Harry tripped over a cable and she took his arm. ‘You’re a real old sport,’ she told him. She paid at the entrance and helped him into a little car like a toast-rack. They sat close together. She finished her candy, threw away the stick and began to lick her fingers. ‘I’ve got good care of you,’ she said. ‘It’s only a bit of kids’ fun.’

The car started forward, jolting at sharp bends, where sheeted ghosts leant over them and luminous skulls shone in the darkness. Vi out-laughed everyone, screaming into Harry’s ear and gripping his arm with both hands.

‘It isn’t much for
you
,’ she gasped sympathetically at each horrific sight; but the jerking, the swift running-on, the narrow – he guessed – avoidance of unseen obstacles, had made him tremble. The close smell was frightening and when, as part of the macabre adventure, synthetic cobwebs trailed over his face and bony fingers touched his shoulder, he ducked his head fearfully.

‘Well, you are an old baby,’ Vi said.

They came out into the light and the crowds again, and she put up her raspberry lips and kissed his cheek.

Her behaviour troubled him. She seemed to rehearse flirtatiousness with him for its own sake – unless it were to excite her audience. She expected no consequence from her coquetry, as if his blindness had made him less than a man. Her husband rarely spoke and never to her, and Harry could not see his indifferent look.

With ostentatious care, Vi guided him through the crowds, her arm in his, so closely that he could feel her bosom against his elbow. He was tired now; physically, and with the strain of being at everybody’s mercy and of trying to take his colour from other people. His senses, with their extra burden, were fatigued. The braying music cuffed his ears until he longed to clap his hands over them: his uncertain stumblings had made his step drag; drifting smells began to nauseate him – shell-fish, petrol and Vi’s raspberry breath.

At the coco-nut shy, she was shriller than ever. She stood inside the net, over the ladies’ line, and screamed each time she missed, and, in piteous
baby-talk, when a coco-nut rocked and did not fall, accused the proprietor of trickery.

Her husband had walked on, yawning, heedless of her importunities – for she
had
to have a coco-nut, just as she had
had
to have her fortune told and her turn on the swing-boats. Jock and Charlie followed, and they were lost in the crowd. Fred stayed and watched Vi’s anger growing. When he knocked down a coco-nut, she claimed it at once as a trophy. She liked to leave a fair laden with such tributes to her sexual prowess.

‘Well, it’s just too bad,’ Fred said, ‘because I’m taking it home to my wife.’

‘You’re mean. Isn’t he mean, Harry?’

Fred, coming closer to her, said softly as he held the coco-nut to his ear and rattled the milk: ‘You can have it on one condition.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You guess,’ he said.

She turned her head quickly. ‘Harry, you’ll get a coco-nut for me, won’t you?’

She ran her hands up under the lapels of his coat in a film-actressy way and rearranged his scarf.

‘That’s right, Harry,’ Fred said. ‘You told me the other day you were going to have a try. You can’t do worse than Vi.’ Her fury relaxed him. He threw the coco-nut from one hand to the other and whistled softly, watching her.

Harry was aware that he was being put to some use; but the childish smile he had worn all the evening did not change: it expressed anxiety and the hope to please. Only by pleasing could he live; by complying – as clown, as eunuch – he earned the scraps and shreds they threw to him, the odds and ends left over from their everyday life.

Fred and Vi filled his arms with the wooden balls and led him to the front of the booth. Vi took his stick and stepped back. Someone behind her whispered: ‘He’s blind. How dreadful!’ and she turned and said: ‘Real spry old character, isn’t he?’ in a proprietary voice. More people pressed up to watch, murmuring sympathetically.

‘Aim straight ahead,’ Fred was saying, and the man in charge was adding his advice. Harry’s smile wrinkled up his face and his scarred-looking eyes. ‘How’s that?’ he cried, flinging his arm up violently. The crowd encouraged him, desperately anxious that he should be successful. He threw again.