Darkness Visible (24 page)

“Nevertheless—you see, I have brought you to the gates of the park.”

“Let’s get it over.”

They stood together a few yards inside the gates, while Edwin swung on his heel looking round. Groups of children were playing here and there. The attendant stood only a few yards from the public lavatory, watching the children morosely as they ran in and out or took each other there.

Edwin discovered the man behind them with a great start. Sim, turning as well, found himself looking straight into the man’s face. There was something a little stagey about his appearance, as if he
were got up to play a part. He wore a broad-brimmed black hat and a long black overcoat, into the pockets of which his hands were thrust as Edwin’s were thrust into his. He was, Sim saw, exactly the same size as he was so that they met eye to eye. Yet the man’s face was strange. The right side was browner than a European’s would be, yet not so distinctly brown as to type him as Hindu or Pakistani and certainly he was no Negro, for his features were quite as Caucasian as Edwin’s own. But the left side of his face was a puzzle. It seemed—thought Sim for a moment—as if
he held a hand mirror which was casting faint light from the grey, misty day which lowered the colour of that side a tone or two. In that side, the eye was smaller than the right one and then Sim knew that this lighter shade was not a reflection but a different skin. The man, many years before, had had a skin graft that covered most of the left side of his face and was perhaps the reason why Edwin had said he had a mouth not for speaking, because the skin held that side of the mouth closed as it held the eye nearly closed, an eye, perhaps, not for seeing. A fringe of jet-black hair projected down under the black hat all round and on the left side there was a mulberry-coloured thing projecting through rather longer black hair. With a sudden lurch of his stomach Sim saw that this thing was an ear, or what was left of it—an ear imperfectly hidden by the hair and suggesting immediately that its appearance dated from the event that had occasioned the skin graft. Of all sights he had not expected to see such deformation. It made him wince to look at it. His mouth that had opened in the first movement of some social advance, stayed opened and he said nothing. It was not necessary because he could hear Edwin talking eagerly at his side and with that particularly loud, braying note that was a parody teacher’s and so often taken off behind his back. But Sim paid no attention to what Edwin was saying. His own gaze was held by the man’s one-and-a-half eyes and his half-mouth not meant for speaking and the extraordinary grief that seemed to contract it as much as the pull of the skin. Moreover, the man seemed to be outlined—but this must be some quirk of psychology—against his background in a way that made him the point of it.

Eyes held, Sim felt the words rising through him, entering his throat, speaking themselves against his own will, evoked, true.

“My inclination is to think that all this is nonsense.”

The man’s right eye seemed to open wider; and the effect was as if a sudden gleam of light came from it. Anger. Anger and grief. Edwin answered.

“Of course it’s not what you expect! The paradox is that if you had thought a bit, Goodchild, you’d have known it couldn’t be what you expect!”

A particularly snarling jet soughed louder and louder down over them. At the same moment the High Street seemed to be invaded by a whole string of articulated juggernauts. Sim raised a hand to his ear, more in protest than in hope of keeping the noise out. He glanced sideways. Edwin was still speaking, his short nose lifted, the hectic on his cheeks. It sounded like a comminatory psalm, overthrowing, trampling down.

Sim could only tell what he himself said because he was inside with it.

“What are we getting ourselves into?”

Then the jet had passed, the juggernauts were grinding themselves away, to turn right and go round to the spur of the motorway. He looked back at the man and found with a jolt of surprise that he had gone. A kind of mash of surmises, most of them ridiculous, filled his mind; and then he saw him, ten yards off and striding away, hands in long coat pockets. Edwin was following.

They went like that, the three of them, in single file along the main, gravelled path. Grief and anger. The two so mixed they had become a single, settled quality, a strength. Again, words seemed to find their own way up his body towards his throat like bubbles in a bottle; but with the man’s face hidden ahead there he contrived to keep them in.

I’d
expected
some
kind
of
Holy
Joe.

As if they shared a mind, Edwin slackened his pace and drew alongside.

“I know it’s not what anyone would expect. How are you doing?”

Unwillingly, again, and cautiously—

“I’m—interested.”

They were approaching an area where children were playing. There were swings, a see-saw, a small, metal roundabout, a slide. As they moved towards the centre of the park the road noises—and there, now, was the sudden roaring, rattling passage of a train—tended to be muffled as if the trees round the edge of
the green did indeed muffle sound as they hindered sight. Only the jets soughed over, one every two or three minutes.

“There! Did you see!”

Edwin had reached sideways and grasped Sim’s wrist. They were stopped and looking forward.

“See what?”

“That ball!”

The man had not slackened his pace and was getting ahead of them. Edwin lugged again at Sim’s wrist.

“You must have noticed!”

“Noticed what, for—”

As if he were talking to a particularly dim pupil Edwin began to explain.

“The ball that boy kicked. It shot across the gravel and through his feet.”

“Nonsense. It went between his feet.”

“I tell you. It went
through
them!”

“Optical illusion. I saw as well, you know. It went between them! Be your age, Edwin. You’ll be having him levitate next.”

“Look, I
saw
it!”

“So did I. And it didn’t.”

“Did.”

Sim burst out laughing and after a moment or two Edwin allowed himself to smile.

“Sorry. But—look. As clearly—”

“It didn’t. Because if it did—you see, Edwin the, the miracle would be trivial. More than trivial. What difference would it make if the ball struck and bounced off? Or did in fact, as I am sure it did, happen to find a passage between his feet in an unusually neat but still possible way?”

“You are asking me to doubt the evidence of my own eyes.”

“For God’s sake! Haven’t you seen a conjurer? He’s unusual, he’s extraordinary, he embarrasses me and so do you, but I’m not going to have a trick of the light or a minimal coincidence stuffed down my throat as a violation of the natural order, as a miracle if you prefer the word.”

“I don’t know what word to use. It was another dimension, that’s all.”

“Scientistic top-dressing.”

“His life, as far as I have shared it—and that’s a matter of
minutes—well, it may be hours—is thick with that sort of—phenomenon.”

“Why isn’t he in a laboratory where the controls are?”

“Because he has something more important to do!”

“More important than the truth?”

“Yes. Yes, if you like!”

“What then?”

“How should I know?”

But the man had stopped by a seat that was set by the gravelled path. Sim and Edwin stopped too, a few yards short of the seat, and Sim had a moment or two of feeling acutely foolish. For now, plainly, they were following the man not as if he were another man but as if he were some rare beast or bird with whom there was no possibility of human intercourse but whose behaviour or plumage or pelt was of interest. It was silly, since the man was no more than some sort of white man dressed all in black, and with a head on him, the one side of which had received severe damage many years ago and been imperfectly repaired; and who—all this Sim told himself with increasing comfort and increasing amusement—who was very reasonably annoyed at what life had done to him.

Edwin had stopped talking and was looking where the man was looking. There was a scatter of children playing, little boys mostly but also a small girl or two on the edge of the group. There was also a man. He was a slender old fellow, seeming, thought Sim, older than I am, the oldest man in the park, this childish morning, a slender, rather bent old fellow with a mop of white hair and an ancient pepper-and-salt suit, a suit far, far older than the children, a good suit, a too good suit, a suit that gentlemen used to have made for them in the days when there were gentlemen and waistcoats were worn; also brown, elastic-sided boots, but no coat on this childish morning, together with an anxious, rather silly face—the old man was playing ball with the children. It was a big ball, of many colours. The old fellow or perhaps old gentleman or just old man was active, springy, and he threw the ball to one boy and had it back and then to another boy and had it back and all the time he was working his way—him and the boys—towards the lavatories, with an anxious and gleaming smile on his thin face.

What am I seeing?

Sim swung round on his heel. The park attendant was nowhere to be seen. There were, after all, many groups of children and one man cannot be everywhere. Edwin was looking outraged.

The old man, with an agility that the years had not impaired very much, kicked the ball hard with his shiny boot and laughed and giggled with his thin mouth. The ball beat the boy, beat all the boys. The ball flew and bounced and came as if the old man had intended it, bounce, bounce, and the man in black held up his hands with the ball in them. The old man, giggling and waving, waited for the ball back and the man in black waited and the children. Then the old man with a loping, a springy catlike run came across to the path, but began to slow and stop smiling and even stop panting and he bent a little, just a very little and examined each of them in turn. No one said anything and the children waited.

The old man lowered his chin and looked up at the man from under white, springy eyebrows. He was a clean old man, unnaturally clean in his suit, however worn. His voice was expensively educated.

“My ball, I think, gentlemen.”

Still no one said anything. The old man gave his silly, anxious giggle again.

“Virginibus puerisque!”

The man in black held the ball against his chest and looked at the old man over it. Sim could only see the undamaged side of his face, his undamaged eye and ear. The features had been regular, attractive, even.

The old man spoke again.

“If you gentlemen are connected with the Home Office, then I can only assure you that the ball is my ball and that the little men at my back are undamaged. To put the matter clearly, you have nothing on me. So please, give me my ball and go away.”

Sim spoke.

“I know you! All those years ago—in my shop! The children’s books—”

The old man stared.

“Oh, so it’s a meeting of old acquaintances is it? Your shop? Well allow me to tell you, sir, we pay as we go, these days, no credit allowed or given. I paid! Oh yes I paid all right! Not for that but for life you see. You don’t understand, do you? Ask Mr
Bell, there. He brought you. But I’ve paid so don’t any of you dun me. Give me that ball! I bought it!”

Something was happening to the man in black. It was a kind of slow convulsion, and it shook the ball at his chest. His mouth opened.

“Mr Pedigree.”

The old man started. He stared into the melted face, peered, head on one side as if he could look under the white skin of the left side, searched all over, from the drawn mouth to the ear on that side, still so imperfectly hidden. The stare became a glare.

“And I know you, Matty Woodrave!
You
—all those years ago, the one who didn’t come and had the face, the cruelty, the gall to, to—Oh I know you! Give me that ball! I have nothing but—it was all your fault!”

Again the convulsion, but this time with the grief and anger made audible—

“I know.”

“You heard him! You’re my witnesses, gentlemen, I hold you to it! You see? A life wasted, a life that might have been so, so beautiful—”

“No.”

The word was low, and grated as if from somewhere that was not accustomed to making speech. The old man gave a kind of snarl.

“I want my ball, I want my ball!”

But the whole attitude of the man before him who held the ball so firmly against his black-clad chest was a refusal. The old man snarled again. He glanced round and cried out as if he had been stung; for the children had run or drifted away and were mixed among the playing groups spread round the park. The old man loped out into the empty space of grass.

“Tommy! Phil! Andy!”

The man in black turned to Sim and faced him over the ball. With great solemnity he held the ball out in both hands and Sim understood that he must take it with an equal solemnity. He even bowed a little as he took the ball between his two hands. The man in black turned away and walked after the old man. As if he knew they had made the first step of following him, he gestured on one side of him in a gesture of admonition, without looking round. Don’t follow me.

They watched him right across the grass until he disappeared behind the lavatory. Sim turned to Edwin.

“What was all that about?”

“Some of it is clear at any rate. The old man. Pedigree, his name is.”

“I said, didn’t I? He used to shoplift. Children’s books.”

“Did you prosecute?”

“Warned him off. I understood him. He wanted the books as bait, the old, old—”

“There, but for the grace of God.”

“Don’t be sanctimonious. You’ve never wanted to go round interfering with children, neither have I.”

“He’s a long time there.”

“Spend a penny just like anyone else.”

“Unless he’s having trouble with the old man.”

“It’s such a particularly contemptible business. Let’s hope we don’t see him again.”

“Who?”

“The old fellow—what did you call him—Pettifer?”

“Pedigree.”

“Pedigree, then. Disgusting.”

“Perhaps I’d better have a look—”