Far Cry from Kensington (2 page)

Between eleven o’clock and midnight the house gradually fell
hushed and finally mute. On a few occasions the people in the house next door, a
young Cypriot who described his occupation as vendor, and his English wife and
sister-in-law, would decide to go out into their garden to have a row, or, as they
called it when apologizing next day, a bit of an argument. These were all-night
occasions, but they were rare. Generally by midnight the last lavatory chain would be
pulled — That’s Basil,’ said Milly — and the house slept.

I lay in bed absorbing the stillness. The silence was actual, it was
beautiful to my ears, all the more that in my inward ear I heard again the past
day’s sounds. Now that they were mute, I could put their sense together. And
so, one of the night-thoughts out of many that I recall now, began with my waking to
actually enjoy and almost hear that silence with which I have begun my story. My job
was the noisiest I have ever known and in due time I will describe it. I say now that
the silence that I woke to recalled to my mind another silence of my childhood while
visiting relatives in Africa: I had been taken by car from Bulawayo to the Victoria
Falls. Nature was still in the heat of the day. At a certain point, nearing the
luxuriant forest of the Zambesi river, a deeper silence fell that made me realize
that the previous silence had been illusory.

Milly had met her husband, John Sanders, in her native Cork early in
the twentieth century when he was a soldier garrisoned there. Milly’s mother
was a widow who kept a corner shop of general goods, with two marble-topped tables at
which ginger-pop and lemonade were served. John Sanders, a young sergeant, came
frequently to buy his cigarettes and to chat. One day he asked Milly to a dance.
Milly, behind the counter, looked at her mother, who nodded. The nod meant
‘Yes, you can go,’ as Milly explained to me.

Milly’s narrative skill was considerable. Once, I told her so; she looked at me
in such bewilderment, such doubt whether I was serious or in some way suggesting the
stories were not true, that I never again complimented her on her style. I just
listened, and noted how she brought a scene to life by a chance descriptive detail in
the right place and by that graphic and right placing of words which most of the
Irish excel at. She had no Irish blarney, she never exaggerated. I could listen to
Milly for hours.

When I first knew her she was a very pretty woman of sixty, with thick shining silver
hair and fine features. I think she had probably been a beauty, but she was
embarrassed by any compliments about her looks.

Her bedroom was unheated and so she liked to undress and prepare for bed before the
fire in her sitting-room, a partitioned part of the kitchen; but to do this she
always turned off the television; she wouldn’t for the world undress in front
of an actor in a play, an announcer, or one of the ministers of religion who uttered
his few comfortable words at the end of the day.

Nor would Milly be seen walking with a man. She would certainly stop in the street to
speak to a neighbouring male and would accompany a man she knew from the front door
to his car, waving him good-bye. But she wouldn’t walk down the street or cross
the road with him. She had been widowed ten years. She followed some rule of her
early days, I imagined.

Once in the course of conversation I became aware that Milly, who had borne three
children, was under the fixed impression that you could not conceive a child unless
you had experienced an orgasm — she called it ‘that feeling’. I
didn’t argue. I didn’t even draw any conclusion about Milly’s
marital life, and on the question whether she thought, reversely, that an orgasm
inevitably produced a child, I kept my peace.

*          *          *

My office was in a converted Queen Anne house, now pulled down to make
way for a sheer squared-off piece of real-estate off St James’s Street. It was
the Ullswater and York Press, known generally as the Ullswater Press, one of those
small publishing houses which had barely survived the austerities of war-time, such
as the rationing of paper supplies, the shortage of English printers, the lack of
transport to carry the books from printers abroad; it had only kept going because the
public was avid for books, especially the serious kind of books that the Ullswater
Press provided. Then, as now, all jobs in publishing were greatly sought after, and,
perhaps consequently, poorly paid. It was here, on the first floor, where the big
general office was situated, that all the noise of the day went on. This room, which
I imagine must have once been two interleading drawing-rooms, accommodated an
editorial department at one end and a general sorting, post and packing section at
the other. In between were three desks and a row of cabinets where the typing and
filing went on; the two girls employed in these activities were sometimes joined by
Cathy, the book-keeper, who would bring her bundles of bills from the
accountant’s room upstairs when he wanted to be alone or to receive a visitor
in private.

In these months, the last of the firm of Ullswater and York before it failed, the
accountant often wanted his privacy. When he sent Cathy down to us we speculated
among ourselves who the visitor might be. Somebody ominous. Cathy, who had been in
the firm far longer than any of us, wouldn’t say. ‘Is it the bailiffs at
last, Cathy?’ No answer. She was aged somewhere between fifty and seventy, with
a puckered, reddish face, a balding head perhaps due to frequent dyeing, and
spectacles with the thickest lenses I have ever seen, before or since. Cathy would
bend her head with its few strands of hair, reddish and grey at the roots, black at
the tips, over her bills, muttering to herself until we brought her a cup of tea with
a biscuit in the saucer, whereupon she would look up with a smile of gratitude far
more than was called for. Cathy’s voice when she spoke above the existing din
was a crackle of broken English. She had been in a German concentration camp in the
’ thirties, and had got away.

The name of the firm, Ullswater and York, had no geographical connotation. There was a
Mr Ullswater and a Mr York, partners. Two other directors and shareholders had joined
the firm. Mr Ullswater, by far the elder of the partners, had now almost retired. He
spent his days in the country, turning up once a month for a directors’
meeting. He wore a bowler hat and a tweed suit, in winter a grey coat. He would
arrive in a taxi, tall, white-haired, large-faced and amiable, climbing the stairs
with a leisurely air. But he always left in a hurry, marching off as quickly as
possible round the corner to his club. Martin York was a round-faced, square-cut man
of about forty.

I never got my last week’s wages. They owe me seven pounds, 1954 valuation. The
noise in our general office might well have been due to an unconscious desire on our
part to keep the devils away, after the practice of primitive tribes. The devils were
to come in the end and Martin York was to go to prison for multiple forgeries and
other types of fraud, but we employees, although we knew that the firm was rocky, did
not as yet foresee quite so drastic a near future. We thought merely that we would
soon have to find another job. In the meantime we got on with the jobs we had.

The shorthand-typist was called Ivy, a tall girl fresh from the secretarial college.
Mary, the filing clerk, was a sixteen-year-old who had come straight from school. The
packer and sorter was a young man called Patrick and I was, as usual, Mrs Hawkins,
general do-all, proofreader, literary adviser and secretarial stand-in when the
respective secretaries of Mr York and Mr Ullswater left to get married and were never
replaced.

The Cypriot husband and his English wife in the house next door to
Milly’s were having a row. It was two in the morning. They had started the
rumpus in the garden but had gone indoors to continue it.

Now the first half-flight of Milly’s stairs led to a small landing with a window
from which you could see straight through the opposite window into the next-door
house, three feet away; if you sat on the second half-flight of Milly’s stairs
you could see the exact equivalent of landing and half-flight next door.

I had been to bed but the fearfulness of the noise on this occasion had brought me
down to Milly who was already up in her dressing-gown. The wife next door was
screaming. Should we do something? Should we ring the police? We sat on the stairs
and watched through the landing windows. Our stair-light was out but theirs was on.
Apart from the empty piece of staircase we could see nothing as yet. The rest of our
house was quiet, everybody asleep or simply ignoring the noise.

There had been a christening party that afternoon in the house next door. The row
concerned the true paternity of the baby boy, some friend of the husband having
raised the subject to him, in an aside, at the christening party. I do not think
there was any real doubt in the husband’s mind that he was the father; only, it
gave rationality to the couple’s mutual need to dispute, which had spilt
rowdily over into the garden; the guests had all gone home.

Evidently, the baby slept through the pandemonium for all we could hear were the
wife’s shouts and screams and the husband’s fury: noises off.

Suddenly they appeared on the stairs, the second half of their staircase, before our
eyes, as on a stage. Milly, always with her sense of the appropriate, dashed down to
her bedroom and reappeared with a near-full box of chocolates. We sat side by side,
eating chocolates, and watching the show. So far, no blows, no fisticuffs; but much
waving of arms and menacing. Then the husband seized his wife by the hair and dragged
her up a few stairs, she meanwhile beating his body and caterwauling.

Eventually I phoned the police, for the fight was becoming more serious. A policeman
arrived at our door within ten minutes. He seemed to take a less urgent view of the
din going on in the next-door house and was reluctant to interfere. He joined us on
the staircase from where we could now only see the couple’s feet as they
wrestled. The policeman crowded beside us, for there was no convenient place for him
to sit. My hips took up all the spare space. But finally our neighbours descended
their staircase so that we could see them in full.

‘Can’t you stop them?’ said Milly, passing the chocolates.

The policeman accepted a chocolate. ‘Mustn’t come between husband and
wife,’ he said. ‘Inadvisable. You get no thanks, and they both turn on
you.’

We could see the force of this argument. Milly offered to make a cup of tea, which she
was always ready to do. Finally the policeman said, ‘I’ll go and have a
word with them. This time of night, disturbing the peace.’

We heard him ring their front door-bell; it was a long ring, and at the same time we
saw the scene before us disintegrate. The wife and husband sprang apart, she tidying
her hair, he pushing his shirt into his trousers. They disappeared from view. From
the street came the sound of their front door opening, and the mild reproving voice
of the policeman. The wife’s voice, thrown high and clear into the empty night,
was pleading, apologetic, conciliatory. ‘We was just having a bit of an
argument, officer.’

The light on the stairs opposite went out. End of the show. Milly and I had a cup of
tea in the kitchen and discussed something else.

When I left the house for the office at nine the next morning, the smiling, nut-brown
face of our Cypriot neighbour looked up at me from the job he was doing on one of the
wheels of his car. ‘Good morning, Mrs Hawkins,’ he said.

How did he know my name? I didn’t know his. People always knew who I was before
I knew them, in those days. Later, when I got thin I had to take my chance with
everyone else; and this confirms my impression that a great large girl is definitely
a somebody, whatever she loses by way of romantic encounters. ‘Good
morning,’ I said.

Generally, I got to the office between half-past nine and quarter to
ten in the morning. The clock in the big general office was unreliable, and because
of a chronic lack of ready cash was likely to remain so. I think that if a clock is
not punctual you can’t expect the people who live with it to be so. We were all
fairly lax about time as the business more and more declined. Patrick, the packer and
sorter, was most often the first to arrive, and it was he who would take the first
phone calls. I don’t know if my memory exaggerates but, looking back, it seems
to me that almost every morning I would find Patrick on the phone, shouting to cover
his embarrassment and inability to cope with the caller’s problem. At that hour
the caller was usually an author and the problem was money. Later in the morning,
just before noon, the printers and binders would have their hour; their problem too
was money, bills unpaid. And certainly, till the bills were paid, there was no hope
of sending more books to press.