Fowlers End (22 page)

Then Copper Baldwin appeared with an expression for which I can find no other words but melancholy satisfaction on his long face. From some vantage point—he had the strange gift of being able to merge into his surroundings, thereby cloaking imself in invisibility—he must have overheard the whole conversation, because he said, “As if I ain’t got trouble enough already with the plumbing!” He winked at me and jerked his head. “Perfumed lady to see you, Mr. Laverock.”

My heart did not know what to do with itself: it leapt up, sank down, and described orbits. Perfumed lady: I thought of my mother, who used lilac, and of June Whistler, who, if she could not find an appropriate perfume in one of the multiple chemists’ shops, exuded it by effort of will.

“What
perfume I didn’t say,” said Copper Baldwin. “She’s waiting for you down in the orchestra.” Sam Yudenow being now out of earshot, he whispered, “Miss Noel. It would appear that she got blotto and slept under the drums.” He cleared his throat and went on in a haughty, superior kind of tone: “You’ve read your Russians, I dare say? You can’t repent unless you’ve sinned. Right? I mean, a child’s repentance ain’t worth a fart in a colander. Whereas ... Well, anyway, the Russians ‘ad something there. If you’ve got any conscience at all, the worse you sin, the better you repent. The deeper t
he repentance, the firmer the purpose of amendment—so up you go: by which token my father ought to be well established in ‘Eaven by now. What I mean to say is, Miss Noel is down in the orchestra with the ‘orrors. Between you and me, Dan, she kind o’ defiled herself. Do me a favor, as manager o’ this gaff, and go down and talk to ‘er. I rely on shock effect. Nothing personal, you
know; only you might kind o’ shame the poor bitch, if you get what I mean. It’s all right, I’ll clean up. Do be a pal, kind o’ talk to ‘er, and I’ll get a pot o’ strong tea. Will you please?”

“Of course I will,” I said.

“She is sort o’ fragrant,” said Copper Baldwin. And so she was, with a fragrance that I can only describe as something like meat boiled in spirits. She did not smell of herself but of an aftermath—a predigested smell, and she was sitting in some mess of her own creating as far away from the piano as she could possibly get, crying her poor heart out. It touched my heart. I did not know how to address her, so, on that wheezy old piano, with my nine fingers, I attempted to play the
Moonlight Sonata—where
upon, as if I had stretched her like an accordion, she became a person in one piece.
Then Copper Baldwin, whose timing was perfect and who must in any case have been looking at the whole operation and listening to it from a distance, came down with his tea. He took one look and one sniff and left me alone with Miss Noel.

Poor lady, she wept, while she wiped her nose on whatever came to hand and apologized for weeping.

I said, “Oh, come now, Miss Noel, please don’t cry. I give you my word, there’s nothing to cry about. What’s the matter? You’ve taken to drink? Oh, please, I beg you, don’t let it distress you. Put it this way: in distressing yourself you distress me.”

“Not for the world!” she cried.

“Well, say for example that we do. Let’s just say. Can’t you see where it leads? It makes a trail of evil. Get me? You must go your way down, and if I have any love for you, or any loyalty to you, what can I do but follow you, trusting in God? Oh, my dear Miss Noel,” I said, “look at yourself. Can you imagine the taste of a rotten stomach, a bloated liver, and I don’t know how many yards of intes
tines packed with corruption—all this translated into what I can only call an effluvium? Oh, my dear Miss Noel, please stop to consider!” I played a few chords of Schubert. “You are worthy of so many higher things. You have no right to go to the devil the way you are going,” I said. “Now look here, I will stand by you.”

She cried, so bitterly that I was sorry I had spoken; but presently, taking a double handful of air less than a foot in front of her nose, she seemed to catch hold of some vagrant bit of herself. Then she spoke like a conscious woman.

She said, in the most woebegone voice I have ever heard, “‘Stay with me, Beauty, for the light is dying—my dog and I are old, too old for roving’—what am I talking about?”

I said, “My dear Miss Noel, it seems to me that you are talking sense out of place. That means to say, making no sense. You are in the Pantheon, Fowlers End, and must conduct yourself accordingly. As your manager, it is my duty to see that you do so. And by God, so you shall!... Now look here, my dear, I have only nine and a half fingers, and rusty at that, but while Copper Baldwin brings us a cup of tea I will play you a sort of rendering of something I remember while you tell me about yourself and why you condescend to go under yourself. Speaking for myself,” I said, “I am, Miss Noe
l, a protagonist of good old freedom, and I loathe and despise anybody who wants to strangle freedom, in the state or in the individual. Now listen to me—what are you, Miss Noel, but a kind of state? There is a sort of tyrant dictating to you at the present moment. Isn’t that so? He makes you do what you don’t want to do. Aren’t I right? Yet you obey him. You do, every minute, against your better judgment, don’t you?”

She said, “Yes.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Would you do me a very great favor?”

“If I can, Miss Noel.”

“Then will you please go away?”

“Why?” I asked.

“I made messes and I smell. I’m filthy.”

Always the one for a bit of metaphysical discussion, I said, “Meaning: if I go away there will be no mess, et cetera? That my absence will cleanse you? No. The muck, such as it is, will still be here.
You’ll
still be here, double dirty. You’ll make a whole rigmarole in your poor head about what you think I saw and multiply the dirt like the grains of wheat on the chessboard—swamp yourself with it. Come now, Miss Noel; what you have inadvertently dropped on the floor is nothing in itself. Everybody’s full of it. It’s only a matter of keeping it in its place and putting it where
it belongs. Somebody told me once that dirt is only misplaced matter. Be that as it may, in general; in this particular case, if that’s all that’s on your mind, it’s nothing Copper Baldwin can’t shift with a bucket of water and a mop. The real significance of it is what it left behind when it came out—I mean, shame.”

“I am ashamed,” said Miss Noel, crying.

“Always have been,” I suggested.

“They made me,” she said, between two sobs. “Oh, please tell me, what am I going to do?”

There being no more time for dissertation, and she being in such distress, I said, “Have a good wash, change your clothes, and play the piano. There’s nothing like a wash and a change and a little quiet music to clarify the intellect.”

“I haven’t got another dress.”

I said, feeling like one of those characters you read about in books, “Then you shall have another dress.... Copper, a word with you.” I took him aside and said, “Since you seem to be so lousy and free with your bloody money
to all the Cruikbacks and what not, lend me another couple of quid. On my honor, you’ll get it back.”

Without argument he gave me two pound notes, and then said dryly, “Anything else this morning?”

I said, “Get hold of some boiling water and fill up the hand basin in the ladies’ toilet. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

Then I walked across the street to Godbolt’s, memorizing my order, which, in my haste, I blurted out in a breathless rush: “One gentleman’s handkerchief, one lady’s handkerchief, one lady’s jumper, one skirt, one pair lady’s knickers, one pair stockings, one comb, one cake scented soap.”

Mr. Godbolt looked at me curiously—he was yet to discover that I was Sam Yudenow’s new manager—while he made a hunchback of himself in his obsequiousness. “We have a very nice quality gent’s handkerchief at sixpence—”

“One of those, please—”

“And a very nice lady’s handkerchief at two shillings a dozen.”

“Could I have sixpennyworth?”

“I could do you three for sevenpence,” he said.

“The way that works out, one of the handkerchiefs out of the dozen is free of charge,” I said.

He simpered, “That’s right.”

“May I have that one?”

He was not the sort of man who appreciates a good, subtle joke. But he tittered in a nervous way and started to pull out shallow, square boxes tied up with green ribbon, saying, “Guaranteed to be one hundred per cent.”

I said, “Oh, all right, do me three for sevenpence. Now what about the underwear?”

“I can do you a very nice knicker for one-and-eleven-three.”

“Do me one,” I said.

“Would the lady like a lovely shade of vyoo-rose?”

“You haven’t anything in brown?”

“Not in brown, sir, but I can do you a beautiful knicker in navy blue. What size, if I may ask?”

“Say, a lady about five feet two, with wind.” I drew him a diagram in the air. “And make it vieux-rose.” He was unused to this way of doing business and could not stop his sales talk: “Guaranteed one hundred per cent genuine art silk. I have another very superior knicker that will last you a lifetime, in blue serge, with a cotton washable knicker lining at three-and-eleven—”

“Congratulations. But I’ll have the first one you mentioned.”

“The medium size has plenty of give in it. It fits small and large alike.”

“The very thing. What about a jumper of the same nature?”

“I have a very popular line of jumper at four-and-elevenpence-farthing, in royal blue, peach, vyoo-rose, black—”

“Black. And do me a skirt, also black, if you will.” He did me one at nine-and-elevenpence-three-farthings, which is draper’s language for ten shillings; and a pair of guaranteed one hundred per cent genuine artificial silk stockings, flesh color. When I told him that I had seen flesh that color when somebody I knew upset boiling water on her foot, he shook his head with hypocritical regret and started to quote one of the Psalms, breaking off in the middle of the fourth line to ask whether the lady wouldn’t like a suit of combinations. And that struck me as being a good idea, the
weather being what it was.

“Better give me a suit of combinations,” I said.

“I have a lovely comm, knee length, at six-and-three.” Here, Godbolt looked left and right, and left again,
lowering his voice. “And the French opera comm with genuine blue shoulder straps at eight-and-four—”

“The common or garden, and make it s
nappy,” I said.

“As for the soap,” said Godbolt, “we have an arrangement with Mr. Laylock the chemist. He sells no underwear, I sell no drugs, tee-hee! That will be twenty- four-and-threepence.”

Having the money safe in his hand, he said, “A gay young sprig, I dare say? Showering your wealth, in a manner of speaking, on the Strange Woman of the Scriptures? Oh, however you may have sinned—and I read it in your face—settle down, settle down!”

“Who with?” I asked.

“Oh, I have lived a decent life, but I know the world. Why are you buying these undergarments for the lady except, as they say, to ‘try them on’ her? Get married. Will that be all? Could I interest you in a satinette tie? Oh, be warned! Laylock’s shop is on the left, and don’t forget to say Mr. Godbolt sent you. I thank you, sir, and a very good day to you.”

Laylock the Chemist, whose establishment was no more than twenty yards away, was a shop to which its proprietor had transferred his ancestor’s sign, LAYLOCK— CHYMIST—ESTAB. 1824. His window was filled with a great cardboard advertisement for tangerine-colored lipstick. Above this, on the left, was stuck a gelatin transfer which said,
Dr. Bissell’s Cachets for Feminine Disorders.
This was in blue. In red, to the right of it, was stuck another sign saying,
Male Weakness? Take Street’s Striped Pills No. 74! Say: “Seventy-Four!”

Laylock was a secretive tall man, dressed all in black; I remembered him, years later, when I saw Boris Karloff playing the dope fiend in
Smart Money.
The whole place reeked of cough drops and scented soap gone bad. All
over the place, ersatz violet waged a running battle with paregoric; and there was, on the side, a pincer movement, a secret collaboration between a stopped-up drain and the miasma of the street. Someone had tried to attack all this with carbolic, traces of which, sprinkled from a punctured tin can, were visible on the bare floor. Looking at Mr. Laylock the pharmacist, I was impressed by the scrubbed complexion of his hands. He must have washed them every hour or so. But they did not convey an impression of cleanliness; they put into my mind an idea that he had just scoured and pa
red them after burying something in the cellar.

And it was: Oh, was it a cake of soap I wanted, then? No, really now, only one? He could do me a golden gift-wrapped box of six. No? One only? Then right I was—here was a silver-wrapped box of three...

“One!” I cried.

“Have two?”

“One.”

“Glycerin soap, baby soap, or disinfectant?” asked Laylock.

“I’d better have one of each,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” he said comfortingly. “I’ll do you the three for nine-pence.”

“And while you’re about it, do me a bottle of eau de cologne.”

“Genuine
7211,
full half-pint, eightpence?”

“That’ll do.”

“Let me do you a sponge now, sir. I’ve got a real honeycomb.... No? Well then, a lovely loofah, only tenpence; worth three-and-six, only you don’t have much call for them round here. In fact, the last one I sold, a boy ate it. You’re a stranger here, I see. The standards aren’t high, sir. Oh, let me do you a loofah for tenpence. Ninepence?”

“Oh, all right, a loofah. Also a comb—”

“A Wave-Comb?” he asked, producing a coarse comb with bent teeth. “Guaranteed to give a lovely wave? Sixpence?”

At this I revolted, and shouted, “And how the bloody hell do you work that one out?”

He said, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. A fine comb, perhaps? Could do you one for sevenpence.”

“All right. Do me, at the same time,
a sixpenny nail file.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that, sir—they run threepence, fivepence, sevenpence—”

“Fivepence. And a bottle of aspirin tablets—”

“Ten, twenty-five, fifty, one hundred—”

“Ten.”

“Will that be all, sir? I thank you, sir.... Stranger here, sir? Delightful place, sir, but overcrowded, overpopulated. A nice douche can, sir? For purely hygienic purposes—or something in the rubber-goods line? We all have our own faith, and personally I am very strict. The climate hereabout is inclement. I can do you a line of rubber goods in the finest latex at three for sixpence in a tin box, on the understanding that you undertake to use them only to keep your money in, the way sailors do.... No? Well, they
do
say in Fowlers End that it
is
like shaking hands with gloves on....”

I paid him, picked up my parcels, and ran across the street. Sam Yudenow was still communing with his soul, I suppose, and brooding in his eyrie over the concept of the Greenburger. Down in the orchestra poor Miss Noel had the shakes. She had been drinking methylated spirits. Knowing it to be a fact that if you give a methylated-spirits drinker a glass of water the morning after, he will get mad drunk again, I got her some milk and made her drink it, while Copper Baldwin stood by and watched with wonderment
thinly disguised as scorn. I said, “Now, there—there, now then, drink it all up. I want you to play for me when you feel better. Don’t we, Copper? ... Copper, for Christ’s sake, did you put that hot water in the basin, in the ladies’ toilet? Then lend a hand while we get her there. You swabbed up, I see. Come on then—lend a hand with Miss Noel.” “What to do?”