Darkness Visible (26 page)

“Bugs.”

“It was holy because men worshipped it. Don’t you think that infinite charity would fix that for us?”

“Infinite charity is choosy.”

“Water is holiness. Was holiness.”

“Today I have not struck a believing streak.”

“And now; as water was then, so something as strange and unexpected and necessary in our mess. Silence. Precious, raw silence.”

“Double-glazing. Technology has the answer.”

“Just as it put the wild holiness in a pen and conducted it demurely through a pipe. No. What I meant was random silence, lucky silence, or destined.”

“You’ve been there now, in the last few days?”

“As soon as Stanhope offered us the place. Certainly. There’s a
kind of landing passage at the top of the stairs with the rooms opening out. You look through small dormers, that way to the still, untouched canal, the other way into the green of the garden. Silence lives there, Sim. I know it. Silence is there and waiting for us, waiting for him. He’s not aware of it yet. I’ve found it for him. The holiness of silence waiting for us.”

“It can’t be.”

“I wonder how it comes about? Certainly there’s a sense of going down, of all the town being built up there and this being, as it were, at the bottom of steps, shut away, a kind of courtyard, a private place farther down into the earth almost holding the sunlight like a cup and the quiet as if someone was there with two hands holding it all—someone who no longer needed to breathe.”

“It was innocence. You said—a kind of dolls’ tea party. That’s sad.”

“What’s sad about it?”

“They’ve grown up, you see. Look, Edwin. There’s some trick of the building, some way in which sound is reflected away—”

“Even the jets?”

“Why not! Somehow the surfaces will have done it. There’ll be a rational explanation.”

“You said it was innocence.”

“My aged heart was touched.”

“Put that way—”

“Have the girls left any traces behind them?”

“The place is still furnished, more or less, if that is what you mean.”

“Interesting. Do you think they would be interested? The girls, I mean.”

“They aren’t home.”

Sim was on the point of explaining that he had seen Sophy walking past the shop but thought better of it. There was a touch of curiosity in Edwin’s face whenever he heard an inquiry about them—almost as if the non-events, the strange, sensual, delightful and poignant linkage that did not exist except in the world of a man’s supposing, were not private, but out there, to be detected, read like a book, no, like a comic strip, part of the generation-long folly of Sim Goodchild.

Because he was old, felt himself to be old and irritable with
himself as much as with the world, he did a violence to his accustomed secrecy and revealed a small corner of the comic strip.

“I used to be in love with them.”

There—it was out and blinding.

“I mean—not what you might think. They were adorable and to be, be cherished. I don’t know—they still are—well she is, the brunette, Sophy, or was still when I last saw her. Of course the fair one—Toni—she’s gone.”

“You old romantic.”

“Paternal instinct. And Stanhope—he really doesn’t care about them you know, I’m certain; and then with those women—well that’s all a good while ago. One felt they were neglected. I wouldn’t have you for the world think—”

“I don’t. Oh no—”

“Not that—”

“Quite.”

“If you see what I mean.”

“Absolutely.”

“Of course my child—our children—were so much older.”

“Yes. I see that.”

“So it was natural with two such decorative little girls living practically on our doorstep.”

“Of course.”

There was a long pause. Edwin broke it.

“I thought tomorrow night if that’s convenient for you. It’s his evening off.”

“If Ruth is well enough.”

“Will she come?”

“I meant if she’s well enough to be left. What about Edwina?”

“Oh no. No. Definitely. You know Edwina. She met him, you see. Just for a minute or two. She’s so, so—”

“Sensitive. I know. I can’t think how she can bear her job as almoner. The things she must see.”

“It is a trial. But she makes a distinction. She said plainly afterwards. If he were a patient it would be different. You see.”

“Yes I see.”

“In her own free time it’s different you see.”

“Yes.”

“Of course if there were an emergency.”

“I understand.”

“So it’ll just be the three of us, I’m afraid. Not many is it, when one remembers the old days.”

“Perhaps Edwina would care to come and sit with Ruth.”

“You know how she is about germs. She’s as brave as a lion really, you see, but she has this thing about germs. Not viruses. Just germs.”

“Yes, so I believe. Germs are dirtier than viruses. Germs probably have viruses, would you say?”

“She simply has this thing.”

“She’s not a committee. Women often aren’t. Are you a committee Edwin? I am.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh Lord. Different standards of belief. Multiply the number of committee members by the number of standards of belief—”

“I’m still not with you, Sim.”

“Partitions. One of me believes in partitions. He thinks, for example, that although Frankley’s is on the other side of this wall—or is until they knock the place down—the wall remains real and it’s no good pretending otherwise. But another of my members—well, what shall I say?”

“Perhaps he’ll pierce a partition.”

“Your man? Let him do it really, then, and beyond doubt. I know—”

I know how the mind can rise from its bed, go forth, down the stairs, past doors, down the path to the stables that are bright and rosy by the light of two small girls. But they were asleep and remained asleep even if their images performed the silly dance, the witless Arabian thing.

“Know what?”

“It doesn’t matter. A committee member.”

All is imagination he doth prove.

“Partitions, my majority vote says, remain partitions.”

One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.

Edwin glanced at his watch.

“I must rush. I’ll let you know the time when he gets in touch.”

“Late evening is best for me.”

“For the whole committee. Which one had a thing about the little girls?”

“A sentimental old thing. I doubt he’ll bother to come.”

He ushered Edwin out of the shop door into the street and gestured courteously to his hurrying back.

A sentimental old thing?

Sim sighed to himself. Not a sentimental old thing but the unruly member.

At eight o’clock, Ruth being propped up with a good book and his stomach rather distended with fish fillet and reconstituted potato, together with peas out of a tin, Sim made his way through the shop, relocked the door behind him and walked the few paces to Sprawson’s. It was broad daylight but on the right-hand side of the building there was nevertheless a light in Stanhope’s window. The town was quiet and only a jukebox in the Keg of Ale disturbed the blue summer evening. Sim thought to himself that the alleged silence of the stables was not really necessary. They might well hold their small meeting—but meeting was hardly the word for three people—might well hold it in the street; but as he thought this, a helicopter, red light sparking away, flew the length of the old canal, and as if to rub in the point a train rumbled over the viaduct. After both machines had passed, his ears, newly sharpened perhaps, detected the faint chatter of a typewriter from the lighted window where Stanhope was still working at his book or a broadcast or his column. Sim ascended the two steps to the glass door and pushed it open. This was familiar ground—solicitors and the Bells to the left, the Stanhope door to the right—at the other end of the short hall the door which gave on to the steps down to the garden. It was all an absurdly romantic area to Sim. He felt, and was aware of, the romance and the absurdity. He had no connection whatsoever with the two little girls, had never had and could expect none. It was all pure fantasy. A few, a very few visits to the shop—

There was a clatter from the stairs on the left. Edwin appeared tumultuously, a man this time of gusto, who threw his long arm round Sim’s shoulder and squeezed it tremendously.

“Sim, my dear fellow, here you are!”

It seemed so silly a greeting that Sim detached himself as quickly as he could.

“Where is he?”

“I’m expecting him. He knows where. Or I think so. Shall we go?”

Edwin strode, larger than life, to the end of the hall and opened the door above the garden steps.

“After you, my dear fellow.”

Plants and shrubs and smallish trees in flower trespassed on the path that led straight down to the rosy-tiled stables with their ancient dormer windows. Sim had a moment of his usual incredulity at the reality of something that had been so near him and unknown, for so many years. He opened his mouth to speak of this but shut it again.

Each step you took down the steps—there were six of them—had a quite distinct quality. It was a kind of numbing, a muffling. Sim who had swum and snorkeled on the Costa Brava found himself likening the whole process at once to the effect of going under water; but not, as with water, an instant transition from up here to down there, a breaking of a perfect surface, a boundary. Here the boundary was just as indubitable but less distinct. You came down, out of the evening noise of Greenfield, and step by step, you were—numbed was not the right word, nor was muffled. There was not a right word. This oblong of garden, unkempt, abandoned and deserted, was nevertheless like a pool of something, a pool, one could only say, of quiet. Balm. Sim stopped and looked about him as if this effect would reveal itself to the eye as well as the ear but there was nothing—only the overgrown fruit trees, the rioting rose stocks, camomile, nettles, rosemary, lupins, willowherb and foxgloves. He looked up into the clear air; and there, astonishingly at a great height, a jet was coming down, the noise of its descent wiped away so that it was graceful and innocent as a glider. He looked round him again, buddleia, old man’s beard, veronica—and the scents of the garden invaded his nostrils like a new thing.

Edwin’s hand was on his shoulder.

“Let’s get on.”

“I was thinking how preferable all this is to our small patch. I’d forgotten about flowers.”

“Greenfield is a country town!”

“It’s a question of where one looks. And the silence!”

At the end of the path down the garden they came to the courtyard, shadowed away from the sun. At some time the entrance had been closed by double doors but these had been taken away. Now the only door was the small one, opposite, that led out to the
towpath. Stairs went up on their left hand.

“Up here.”

Sim followed Edwin up, then stood and looked round him. To call the place a flat would be an exaggeration. There was room for a narrow divan, an ancient sofa, a small table, chairs. There were two cupboards and on either side open entries led to minute bedrooms. There were dormer windows that looked out over the canal, and back up to the house.

Sim said nothing, but simply stood. It was not the mean size of the room, nor the floor, of one-plank thickness, the interior walls of some sort of cheap boarding. It was not the battered, second-hand furniture, the armchair from which stuffing hung or the stained table. It was the atmosphere, the smell. Someone, Sophy presumably, had been there recently, and the odour of cheap and penetrating scent hung in the air as a kind of cover to an ancient staleness, of food, more scent, of—no, neither a glow nor perspiration—but sweat. There was a mirror surrounded by elaborate gilding on one wall, with a shelf below it on which were bottles, half-used lipsticks, tins, and sprays, and powder. Under the dormer, on top of a low cupboard, was a huge doll that leaned and grinned. The central table had a pile of oddments on it—tights, a glove puppet, a pair of pants that needed washing, a woman’s magazine and the earplug from a transistor radio. But the velvet cloth on the table was fringed with bobbles, between the patches on the wall where pictures and photographs had once been stuck and left traces of sticking, were ornaments such as china flowers and some bits of coloured material—some of them made into rosettes. There was dust.

Inside Sim, the illusions of twenty years vanished like bubbles. He said to himself yes of course, yes, they weren’t looked after and they had to grow up, yes, what was I thinking of? And they had no mother—poor things, poor things! No wonder—

Edwin was delicately removing the objects from the table. He laid them on the cupboard top under the dormer. There was a standard lamp by the cupboard. The shade was pink and had bobbles like the tablecloth.

“Could we get the window open, do you think?”

Sim hardly heard him. He was examining what could only be called his grief. At last he turned to the dormer and examined it. No one had opened it for years but someone had begun to paint
the surround, then given up. It was like the cupboard door under the dormer at the other end of the room. Someone had begun to paint that pink and also given up. Sim peered through the dormer that seemed to stare, blearily, back at the house.

Edwin spoke at his side.

“
Feel
the silence!”

Sim looked at him in astonishment.

“Can’t you feel the, the—”

“The what, Sim?”

The grief. That’s what it must be. Grief. Neglect.

“Nothing.”

Then he saw the glass door open at the top of the steps at the other end of the garden. Men came through. He swung round to Edwin.

“Oh no!”

“Did you know about this?”

“Of course I knew the place was here. This is where we had our dolls’ tea party.”

“You might have told me. I assure you, Edwin, if I’d known I wouldn’t have come. Damn it man—we caught him shoplifting! And don’t you know where he’s been? He’s been to jail and you know why. Damn it man!”

“Wildwave.”

On the stairs the voice was suddenly near.

“That’s what nobody really believes. I don’t know where you’re taking me and I don’t like it. Is this some kind of trap?”