Out of the Blackout (9 page)

‘Oh! Oh my God!'

Mrs Simmeter was clutching at the little rail on the wall, and her face was twisted with pain. Clearly her ankle had gone from under her as she eased herself down the two steps towards the connecting door.

‘Here,' said Simon, his heart leaping with anticipation as he ran down to her. ‘Look, rest on me. Rest your weight on my shoulder. That's right. Take the bad foot off the ground.'

‘I'll be all right in a minute. Don't tell Len you had to help me. It's my wonky ankle—never can trust it. But it's never been as bad as this before.'

Without asking permission Simon leaned adroitly forward and threw open the door to the Simmeters' quarters.

‘Now—you've got to sit down and put the foot up. If you can try to put most of your weight on the good foot, I'll take the weight on the other side.'

Together they went through the door and into the murky passage. It was dimly lit like the hall, and papered in the same dispiriting pattern. On the left was a door, shut, that must lead to the dining room—unused, Simon guessed, having glimpsed it through the window from the street. Ahead, at the end of the passage, was a large kitchen, and off to the right was another door. The old woman gestured in its direction.

‘In there. The end door. I can sit on the sofa.'

As the two made their slow and painful progress towards the door, and through it, and across the room to the sofa, Simon was thinking: I must be sensible. Keep a grip on myself. No swooning, like that first time in Farrow Street. No fits of the megrims if
I recognize anything. It's what I expect to do anyway. And if I go over faint, there'll be two of us on the floor.

The thought of that made a chuckle go through his body. The old woman felt it, and threw him a sour look, as if she distrusted his kindness and thought he was laughing at her. Simon concentrated anew on his task, looking straight ahead.

The room was very much what he might have expected. The Simmeter family seemed to have a bias towards browns and muddy greens. The wallpaper had once been a fawn embossed one, but age had darkened it. The sofa towards which he was inching the old lady was heavy and hideous, and it was covered with a thick, prickly material in dark greens and purples that had shaded, with time, towards black. There were two bulky matching armchairs. They sent no shock of recognition to Simon's brain. He eased Mrs Simmeter down on to one end of the sofa.

‘There,' he said, in the tones of his stepfather. ‘Easy does it.'

‘Oh. Oh dear. Ah—that's better.'

‘Now you've just got to rest it.'

‘Don't tell Len, will you?' She added with the fierceness of declining powers: ‘He
seizes
on things like this!'

‘I should think Len will see when he comes in. I don't think you'll be using this leg again today. Anyway, I think you should put it up.'

She seemed not to want him to touch her, and she herself painfully raised the hurt foot up on to the sofa.

‘I'm much obliged to you,' she said—grudgingly, as if thanks were to be distributed sparingly, like ha'pence on Guy Fawkes Night. ‘I'll be all right now. Sorry to have inconvenienced you.'

‘No inconvenience at all. It looks very swollen. Do you have anything you put on it?'

‘No. It'll go down of its own accord.'

‘Can I get you anything? Can I make you a cup of tea, perhaps?'

‘No, there's no call. Perhaps a glass of water.'

As they talked, Simon had been looking round the room. The only decorations on the wall were two old engravings, mottled brown with age. The carpet was threadbare, and added no light or colour to the room. All the furniture was dark, massive, disfigured by bulbous—

That was it. The shock of recognition. It came as he was looking at the legs of the sideboard. It was a long, solid construction, formed in the days when furniture was furniture, and built all too inevitably to last. It stood on four hideous and dropsical legs—each one a great bulbous sphere, with smaller spheres above and beneath, and echoed by similar protuberances poking out of the doors like goitres. But it was the legs that flashed to Simon's mind a vision—of himself, sitting on the floor, very small, dwarfed by this great palace of a sideboard, running his hand over this polished globe and turning it in his mind's eye into a pumpkin—the pumpkin that in one of his books turned into a carriage in which the Prince and Princess rode away, but which in his fantasy became a pumpkin airliner that took him to the moon.

‘Oh yes. Of course. A glass of water,' he said.

The kitchen was cream-painted, with a linoleum floor. Lighter and pleasanter than the sitting-room, it was yet featureless, with no trace of a joy in food—with no trace of food at all, since everything had been put neatly back in its place behind cupboard doors. Simon pulled open one or two of the doors, found a glass, and filled it from the tap. As he returned with it to the shadowy sitting-room, his eyes darted round for objects of interest, and then fixed themselves on three family photographs. Two were on the sideboard, one on a little occasional table behind the sofa. As he passed the sideboard he ignored the picture of a young man in an RAF cap and tunic—a young man who bore no resemblance to Len—and took up instead a wedding photograph in a tarnished frame.

‘I love family photographs,' he said.

His tone sounded unconvincing even to himself, but once the old woman had shot him a sharp, contemptuous glance, she went back to rubbing her ankle.

‘So your son's been married, has he?'

The picture was brown with age and not very clear. It showed a much younger Len Simmeter, in lounge suit with wide lapels and baggy trousers, standing in the doorway of a red brick, neo-Gothic church. On his arm was a mildly pretty woman whose manner was somehow uncertain, as if she hardly knew how to cope with this big day in her life, as if she hardly knew how she came to be marrying at all. The uncertainty of manner
contrasted oddly with her clothes, since she was wearing what would then have been called a costume, and a smart one, and on her head was a sideways-tilted hat with a feather that curled round her ear. It was as if she had bought clothes that clashed entirely with her personality and fate. The clothes were, somehow, someone else's, while the manner was her own.

‘Oh yes, Len was married. They didn't have a white wedding. It's a waste, I said to them, when you've no use for the dress afterwards. You dye it and it still looks like a wedding dress. Then she spent all that money on that flashy costume.'

She seemed to remember the clothes, but to have forgotten the people.

‘And she's—not still alive?'

‘Oh no. Dead. She died in the war. We're an unlucky family. Had more than our fair share, I can tell you.'

She doled out these little driblets of information and complaint with the same grudgingness that seemed to characterize all her actions and attitudes. Simon brought over the glass of water, put it in her hand, and then stationed himself behind the sofa. Here he could see the other photograph, and, unwatched, could print it on his mind. While the fat old woman drank, resting the glass on her heavy breasts, he quietly squatted on his haunches and looked close.

It was the same woman as in the wedding photograph. Len Simmeter's wife. My mother, thought Simon? A little older now, but still looking somehow as if she were adrift in the world. Only in the eyes, which were beautiful, was there any suggestion that somewhere there might be reserves of purpose. By her side, clutching her skirts, was a small boy of perhaps two, looking at the camera with that posed sweetness that a studio portraitist at that time probably insisted upon.

Me, thought Simon to himself. That must be me.

He looked into the boy's eyes, hoping for a moment of recognition, an uprush of memories. None came. Me—but
another
me, thought Simon sadly.

He wanted desperately to ask more questions. After a struggle he restrained himself. One or two questions might be regarded as natural, as a display of merely polite interest. To ask more would seem nosey, especially to the Simmeters. To show a close interest in them as a family might be to shut that door
against him for ever. Simon came from behind the sofa, and took the glass out of the old lady's hand.

‘Now, you're sure there's nothing more I can do?'

‘No. No, there's nothing more. Len'll be home soon. I suppose I'll have to tell him.' And as Simon made reluctantly for the door, she brought out that grudging ‘Thanks.' Squeezing the last toothpaste from the tube would seem easier.

It was later that same evening that Simon heard well-known footsteps up the stairs, and then a tap on his door. Simon had been entering things in his notebooks, and in fact had started a sketchbook in which he had made versions of the two photographs he had looked at closely, to fix them in his memory. He had no great skill with the pencil, but after three or four attempts he thought he had caught something of the woman's face in both pictures, given some idea of the clothes, the church, caught the feeling of the picture of the mother and son. Then he had begun to jot down various possible lines of inquiry, paths into the great areas of grey matter that still remained: the registers of the Paddington churches; the local newspapers; more people who might remember the Simmeters in Farrow Street, or old colleagues of Len's at Paddington Station.

When he heard the footsteps begin the ascent to the second floor, he turned over the pages of his notebook to a blank one.

‘Oh, er, Mr Cutheridge, sorry to interrupt—'

Len Simmeter's head came round the door.

‘No—not at all. I'm not doing anything important.'

‘I know you intellectuals. Never want the flow of thought broken in on. And quite right too. No, I just wanted to thank you for what you did for Mother this afternoon.'

‘It was nothing. The least I could do.'

‘It was most kind and much appreciated. Poor old Ma—she's failing a bit now. Doesn't like it known—as perhaps you noticed?'

‘Yes, I did.'

‘She's been a fine woman all her life. Firm. Determined. The backbone of the family, in good times and bad. Hates her own weakness, she does. It's terrible for us to watch her cracking up like this.'

But there was a glint in Simmeter's eye, and he had resumed
that nervous rubbing of his palms. He gave Simon the impression that the crack-up was not entirely unwelcome.

‘She seemed to have all her faculties,' said Simon. ‘There didn't seem to be any mental crack-up.'

‘She hasn't got the concentration she once had. The purpose. She was always the one to take the decisions. Now she finds she's having to hand over to—someone else.' He took a step into the room. ‘Well, you have got it nice in here, young feller. That's Venice, isn't it? Tell by the gondolas. Never got beyond Rome, myself. Fine city. Wonderful city.'

‘Were you there in the war?'

‘Before. Long before. Well, it
is
very tasteful and homely in here now. Not like when the other one was here.'

‘Mr Blore?'

‘Put up political posters, can you imagine? Political posters in your own bedroom. I've never heard the like. He'll be well punished if his lot gain power, that's one consolation. But you've got it very nice. You've got discrimination, that's what you've got!'

The flattery was too laughable to follow up. Simon said:

‘Your mother's all right now?'

‘She's fine. I made her some nice soup, and she got that down. Connie—that's my sister—she's home now, and she'll put her to bed. I've told her she's got to put her to bed. Oh yes, Mother will be back on her feet in a couple of days—thanks to you, young man.'

‘Not at all. We must have that drink some time.'

‘That's right. We must.' He rubbed his hands again, as if making up his mind to it took a great deal of effort. ‘Tomorrow's Saturday, and that's always a bit rowdy. I don't like a rowdy crowd myself—no more do you, I'm sure. Lot of rough types around here: it's a mixed area, and no mistake. Mother would worry if I went out to a pub on Saturday, and I want to spare her poor old mind any worry. Likewise Sunday is against her principles. Well—let's say Monday.'

‘Monday. That would be fine.'

‘Nice quiet time of the week. We can have a nice chat without being disturbed. I'm not one for sing-songs and that sort of thing, but I do like a good chat.' He smiled once more that twisted, hesitant, unaccustomed smile. ‘I think you and I see eye
to eye over a lot of things, young feller. I'm looking forward to having a nice chat with you.'

That was my father, said Simon to himself as the footsteps receded down the stairs. That night he was surprised to wake up in the long watches and find he had been crying.

T
he Colonel Monk was a terrible pub. As a place for a boys' night out together it was convenient, but it certainly wasn't desirable. It was just round the corner from the Simmeters, in Marbury Street, and Simon had suggested they go somewhere quiet. The Colonel Monk was quiet because it was not very nice. True, it was untouched by the modernizer's hand, but then it seemed pretty well untouched by the cleaner's as well. The acres of dark varnish presented a sticky as well as a smoky aspect, and many of the advertisers' placards around the walls and over the bar were for types of cigarettes no longer on the market, brands of spirits no longer distilled. The landlord was surly, and pulled a vile pint, and the clientele stared at their glasses, dropped ash into their laps, and edged reluctantly aside to let them order at the bar.

‘Well, this is cosy,' said Len. ‘Very cosy indeed.'

Len used the words ‘nice' and ‘cosy' very frequently, Simon had noticed, and seemed to have redefined them in his own image. As he put the money down on the bar for two cloudy pints of bitter, Len looked around him.