I Shall Not Want (40 page)

But the fifteen minutes were running out by now and he did not linger. He laid the sheaf of lilies across the coffin and reached about in the darkness for his hat. Then pulling the iron grille shut behind he stepped out onto the gravel pathway again. It was the first session of evening now, and above him a pale star was shining. Putting his hat on his head he set off towards the gate and the waiting hansom and the world of life.

But the hat on his head did not feel familiar. It rested hard across his forehead. He took it off and screwing up his eyes in the half light he looked inside. There across the lining the words “Eliud Tuke” appeared, carefully inscribed in indelible ink in immaculate, flowing handwriting. John Marco stood staring at the words. Then his anger, his resentment of the man, overcame him. With a great sweep of his arm he flung the hat away. It mounted on an arc into the air, like a large black kite that has lost its string, and sailed off over the crosses and marble tablets into the surrounding dusk.

John Marco stood there looking after it. It seemed to him at that moment that it was the last bit of his old life that he had thrown from him.

Tredegar Terrace during the demolition of Morgan and Roberts' presented all the air of desolation of a ruined city: an earthquake might have taken place in its stride. From Lexington Street at one end to Topley Crescent at the other, a huge gash suddenly appeared in the stucco foothills of Bayswater and there were new horizons, new vistas. The glass roof of Paddington Station, like a gigantic potting shed, was temporarily a part of the landscape and the spire of St. Mary's Church was seen for the first time by those who worshipped there. Even those who lived nearest to the demolition and resented the cataclysm most—and the noise of destruction while the housebreakers were actually at work and the row of twelve retail shops were crashing down storey by storey, was simply intolerable—were forced to admit that the sight of so much sky and the sense of freedom that the clearing gave was welcome. It was as though a piece of Salisbury Plain had miraculously been transplanted into the Western purlieus of London.

But the relief of it was to be short-lived. Already the scaffolding was going up in places, and soon there was going to appear something far larger and taller, something vast and frowning in stone amid those residential acres of painted brickwork.

It had not all been easy. Mr. Bulmer, in his office in St. Swithin's Lane, had done his part, of course, with the ineffable ease of the born financier. And the public had behaved exactly as Mr. Bulmer had always been sure they would behave. Just at first they had been shy and diffident. Stray investors, the little people to whom a hundred pounds either way meant the difference between a happy old age and a wretched one, paid their deposits
and waited hopefully. But the big money, the important stuff, stayed away. Then a rumour started (it was, of course, Mr. Bulmer himself who had started it) that the issue was already over-subscribed, and the Stock Exchange became first inquisitive and then enthusiastic. Rich men advised other rich men to invest their money, and trustees transferred the riches that they were guarding. With the exception of the shares of the little people—an ex-Army man in Cheltenham, a widow in Bournemouth, the rector of some unheard-of village—there probably wasn't a halfpenny that anyone had risked himself. But Mr. Bulmer had not expected that there would be: he was content with things as they were. The cheques that were now flowing across his table, all signed on account of someone else, were simply so many testimonials to his skill in drawing up a prospectus.

John Marco, of course, had had his work to do in preparing things. His experience with Mr. Skewin, who had been so desperately anxious to cling to a business that was ruining him, had been a lesson. He did not attempt any more sieges, any more assaults by force. Instead, he went direct to the ground landlord. There were three of the leases that were up that year. When the tenants sought to renew them they found that they were confronted by rentals that would have put a Baring or a Coutts out of business. The tenants expostulated, they reasoned, they begged; they offered bribes; they consulted their lawyers. And they lost. Like early settlers going West, they were forced to emigrate one by one to Hammersmith and Fulham.

Alone among them all, there was the fishmonger at the corner of Lexington Street—one of the key sites to the entire block—who was really obstructionist. An elderly man in a white overall and a straw boater, he stood by the terms of his lease. It had six years to run and he meant to see it through. He had been there for nineteen years already and when he realised in what way things were going he felt like one of the captains of the trawlers which supplied him, when he sees a foreign fishing smack spreading
its net over protected waters. If he could have semaphored for a gun-boat he would have done so.

For a time, indeed, it actually looked as if his slanting marble slab, with the corpses of cod and salmon and Dover sole arranged like a flower garden, was going to prove mightier than the City of London: Mr. Bulmer could not move until John Marco had his option on all the sites, and the fishmonger remained piscine in his indifference. But in the end he too came round. In his handsome upstairs drawing-room—even the long velour curtains and the cushions on the couch, John Marco noticed, smelt hauntingly of his profession—it was all concluded. For the remaining years of his lease he was prepared to accept a sum that was between two or three times what it was worth; and John Marco—or rather the ex-Army Captain in Cheltenham and the widow in Bournemouth, and the rest of them—had to pay.

The mass eviction of the tenantry from Tredegar Terrace took in all two years and four months before it was completed. And on the day it was all settled and the last of them had moved out, the housebreakers arrived and started to get their pickaxes into that memorial mass of brickwork.

ii

John Marco stayed on in the rooms which the Old Gentleman had occupied, until the staircase that approached them was scaffolded all down one side and cracks had begun to appear across the ceilings.

During the last months he had been restless and on edge: he had been unable to sleep. It was not the noises that kept him awake, though at night the walls around him groaned and started as though the demolishers were still at work, and the whole place creaked like a ship in heavy weather. It was the sense of excitement, of anticipation, inside him that kept sleep away. As soon as he closed his eyes he saw it—this new building with its high doorways and its long gallery of windows.

And it wasn't simply a dream any longer, something in moonshine that he had scribbled across the pages of his pad. There were drawings, real drawings by now, over in the architect's office in Kensington. He had made many excuses to go there, simply to look at them. The architect hadn't understood; he had thought that John Marco came to criticise. He couldn't believe that all that John Marco wanted was to unroll the big sheet of parchment with its silly clouds and impossible shadows, and stand gazing at this child's picture-book drawing of the stone façade. And quite soon now, this drawing and his own imagination of it would have come true, translated off the parchment into stone and glass and polished metal.

But his impatience every hour was increasing. Half-a-dozen times a day he would go round to the site and stand on the pavement looking up at the men at work above him. From where he was standing they seemed to be working with the ineffectualness of dwarfs up there among the forest of scaffolding.

And during all this time the firm was carrying on among the ruins. Behind windows pasted across with large notices, “BUSINESS AS USUAL DURING REBUILDING,” the assistants struggled on, not knowing where to look for things or where to put them when they were found. Mr. Hackbridge, his long frock-coat silvery with the dust that settled everywhere, paraded up and down, a kind of frosted Santa Claus, on a temporary floor that squeaked under his feet like duck boarding.

John Marco himself was the only one who seemed unconcerned. From a make-shift office in one corner he kept an eye on everything. He even bought up the entire bankrupt stock of dresses from a French firm in Brighton, and conducted a special out of season sale amid the turmoil. It was like business in ruined Babylon.

Nevertheless he was glad enough to get away to the quietness of his new lodgings in the evenings. He would stand for a moment at the corner of Lexington Street looking back at the ground layer of the stone-work above
which the first shapes of windows were beginning to show themselves; and then would turn and go off with the gratifying, enlarged feeling of a man whose mark is being left on the world.

The house in Windsor Terrace where he now lived was old-fashioned and comfortable. It housed gentlemen. There were barristers and professional men living there. And the landlady was delighted to have John Marco staying with her. He was reserved and well-turned out and so obviously possessed of means; some woman, she often reflected, would be very lucky one day when she got John Marco for a husband.

And in an aloof, bachelor fashion John Marco found himself beginning to enjoy the ordinary things of life again; he even forgot he was lonely. Sunday mornings were little oases of self-indulgence. He no longer attended an Amosite Tabernacle at all—it was the fashionable St. Luke's Parish Church in Green Street where he now worshipped—and after service he liked to saunter pleasantly off towards the Park.

At those moments with a white slip to his waistcoat and the gold knob of his cane in his hand, he seemed, though still alone, to be stepping into the fullness of things.

iii

It was on one such Sunday morning, a clear shining day with the trees looking as bright as if they had been painted and the frocks of the ladies in the carriages making little splashes of colour against the railings of Park Lane, that he saw Hesther again; saw Hesther and saw his son.

It was not difficult to distinguish her among the Sunday morning crowd. She was heavily veiled and dressed all in black like a nun. It was old shabby stuff that she was wearing, brown in places and bunched together as though by the hand of some back-street dressmaker. Her shoes, too, when they came into sight below the long trailing skirt were shapeless and down at heel. In one hand she was holding a long bulging reticule; her other hand was round the boy's.

John Marco stood and regarded her. This was something that he had not been prepared for, something that had been happening quietly in Clarence Gardens during the years since he had left. There was no excuse for it. She still had the rest of Mr. Trackett's money; she was well provided for. But as he looked he realised that it was not poverty that drove her to this, it was something different, something deep within her that was finding a bleak satisfaction in penury. Out there in those scarecrow clothes in the sunlight of the Park, she was punishing herself by being Mr. Trackett's niece.

It was not, however, at Hesther that he was looking now: it was at the boy. He was shabby, too; unspeakably shabby, in fact. There was a meanness about his clothes, as though they had been bought cheap and then left to wear themselves out utterly. His wrists showed thin and bony beneath the cuffs, and under the long raincoat that he was wearing—it was so long that it fell below his knees—his legs were spindly and quite straight. As he walked the raincoat swung open, and John Marco could see that he was wearing long stockings like a girl's.

John Marco did not move from where he was but stood looking after them when they had passed. And then slowly, so as not to be observed, he followed them. His face was set hard and he was angry. A mad woman—Mr. Tuke had said; and for once Mr. Tuke had been right. She was different from everyone else in the Park, isolated in this fantastic mourning that she was wearing. He noticed that other people, casual cheerful people, nudged each other and looked over their shoulders at her as she passed. And as he followed, he noticed another thing. She and the boy were not speaking. In the midst of all that chatter and noise of voices around them, these two were silent. They walked on hand in hand as though sworn to some mysterious vow of silence.

His feeling of humiliation, as he studied them, increased. There was something so calculated about their drabness. It was as though Hesther were deliberately parading her
condition before the whole world. “Perhaps she's revenging herself on the boy,” he thought for a moment; “revenging herself on him because he is partly mine.”

But she seemed to be loving and solicitous enough. When they reached the roadway at Lancaster Gate she let go of his hand for a moment and put her arm right round him to protect him from the dangers of the traffic. Then having got him safely to the other side she dropped her arm and took hold of him by the hand again. The only remarkable thing was that they still had not spoken.

John Marco did not follow any further. He suddenly wanted them out of his sight, wanted to be able to forget them again. But as he stood there, he knew that he would not be able to forget; something that he had not expected, something from which he had been unable to protect himself, had brought him up close against them.

He took one last glance from the gates of the Park where he was standing, and saw the two figures in the distance, one black and formless and the other, small and silent. And he resolved then, at that moment, that he would get the boy away from her; whether or not she would consent to give him up, he would have to separate them.

A gentleman with a lady on his arm had raised his hat and was bowing to him. John Marco lifted his hat and bowed back. All round him, Sunday morning was going on as usual.

iv

The decision to go round and see Hesther, see her and tell her to her face that he was there to claim his son, had taken possession of him. For two days he pondered over it, counting all other thoughts an interruption. And then in the evening of the third day just as the light was disappearing from the sky and the lamps were being lit down the long sweep of Clarence Gardens, he made his way up the cold familiar steps and pulled at the massive bell handle.