Rotting Hill (22 page)

    Mark withdrew from the window. He sighed. He did not know why he sighed. But a large white “Ascot heater” stood in a corner of the bathroom which no longer produced hot water. Three months earlier the mechanic of the gas service had called for the routine clean-up. Since then it had been out of action. Mark boiled some water in the kitchen and washed: then he filled the kettle again, and again put it on to boil. After that he went to his guest’s room, knocked at the door, and put his head inside.

    “Charles! Stop dreaming and get up. I have put some water on to boil for you.”

    “Thank you, Mark. Whooah!” Charles yawned.

    “You slept well?”

    “Perfectly.”

    “Good.”

    “Whooah.”

    As he went to his room Mark was smiling. “Whooah!” was so like Charles. Seeing Charles in bed “whooahing” had caused him for some reason to think of Ida Dyat, Charles’s sister. He thought of her, as he always did, in repose. Action was not her element: so, though on horseback her hair was dramatic as a maenad’s, he preferred to think of the stationary cloud of dull gold as she lay back in an armchair reading a book. The indolent red lips he would see for preference at their most indolent, when she had been too lazy to smile and had smiled with her eyes instead—which was less trouble. Her beauty was preraphaelite at its best, brooding or dreaming in some equivalent of the mirror of the Lady of Shalott.

    It was a certain inactivity in Ida’s composition which attracted him most, and it was that, too, that accounted for his romantic attachment remaining in a state of abortive repression, contained within the forms of youthful camaraderie: Mark being one of those men who needed, if not to be hunted by the female, at least to be reminded that women are sexual phenomena. But always a warm wind from the past rushed into his mind when he had, as now, these images

    of her. Then the image suddenly dissolved, his smile faded. For Ida must be a hag of forty-five, he thought. Thinking of Ida as greying and pathetic was so immensely distasteful that he began moving quickly and noisily about. Old Charles stopped young though, he thought. “Whooah.” Mark smiled again.

    But he soon forgot Charles’s sea-lion cry, for he became grimly absorbed in dressing. His bedroom was a far more efficient refrigerator than the “Ascot heater” was a heater. However, the Briton regards chilliness as next to godliness. Mark would have been quite as displeased had the refrigerator failed as he had been at the defection of the “heater”.

    Taking a fresh shirt out of the drawer he identified it—as the one with the smallest buttonholes of any. This abnormality was revealed by all new shirts to some degree. With the shirt in question the buttons refused to go in. Each buttonhole had to be forcibly entered, the one at the top entailing as much sometimes as five minutes strenuous thumbing. Unquestionably this afforded him that grim satisfaction the Briton experiences when senseless obstacles are placed in his way or life bristles with purposeful mischance, all food for his “grit”. But in this case there was another factor: namely the credit and good name of a socialist Britain. Probably it would prove a better advertisement if British manufacturers turned out serviceable shirts—easy to button up and with such conveniences as are prized by self-indulgent foreigners. It was like our taxation. Few foreigners understood
that.
Taxes such as
we
can stand up to would cause a revolution anywhere else. Only
we
have the guts to “take it”. Besides, the obvious explanation of the smallness of these buttonholes aroused Mark’s party-zeal: the motive was
profit.
It saved labour and time in the factory to make them small. It was a relief to one’s feelings to reflect that the days were numbered of “free enterprise” shirt manufacture.

    Even the best shirts tended to shrink and the buttonholes lost width in the wash quite as much as the sleeves lost length, if only a little. But the button naturally was unaffected. Any slight dilation of the buttonholes attendant upon the constant passage, in and out, of the button, was less than its shrinkage in the wash. It
had
of course occurred to Mark to purchase a few dozen shirt buttons, smaller than those on the shirt. But although there were many sorts of buttons in the shops, shirt-buttons (oddly enough) were practically unobtainable.

    As he pulled on a sock one of his fingernails caught in the wool. With an almost new pair of nail-scissors he attempted to cut off the chipped nail. But the scissors were already loose and of a metal formerly unknown to cutlery. The nail was bent by them, it was not severed. He fell back on his nail-file. After a little he gave that up, and stuck a band-aid over the nail.

    The quality of all goods supplied by the sundriesmen had inevitably deteriorated. Then he knew about the small piratic factories that turned out the defective steel goods, inundating England with gimcrack merchandise, and felt grateful that their days were numbered in a collectivist society.

    Mark was superstitious. To start the day in slippers appeared to him almost an ill-omen. The shoes on which his choice fell, on this occasion, were his recently-acquired £5 brown pair. Of these he was still rather proud—an emotion the shoes were not fitted to inspire. And Charles had assured him that there was no pair of shoes to be had worth putting on your feet under seven pounds ten.

    With these shoes he invariably attempted, completely without success, to tie a bow. The shoelaces were too short. In England today the statutory length for shoelaces is fourteen inches. It is illegal to supply laces longer than that. Mark was not aware that he had to thank the Government for this idiotic difficulty, and put it down to some dishonest manufacturer selling short weight on the plea of a non-existent “shortage”. As usual, for all his stout finger-work, he got nothing but a solitary loop, one for the left foot, one for the right.

    He rose to his feet, the petty frustrations involved in the act of dressing done with. A tweed jacket hung from a peg. No peasant weaver could ever have been responsible for the vulgarity of the colour. Mark, who had paid twenty pounds for it, eyed it dubiously. It was about the maximum price for a ready-made tweed. All first-quality tweeds, of course, must be reserved for export. But
why
(the question had once forced its way into Mark’s mind) need what was left for the home-market be so ugly and vulgar?

    Another question: Why should all ready-made jackets, cardigans, jumpers, be made for small and frail men? Mark was tall and muscular, so
that
question it would have been inhuman to ignore. But it was easily answered, too. Far less material was required for a small man or a child than for someone of Mark’s size. Consequently the manufacturers preferred to think that Englishmen, with a few exceptions, are stunted and emaciated.

    Mark took the jacket off the hanger and a phoney smell of ersatz peat assailed his nostrils. It was with no possessive glow he put on this practically new garment and as he left the bedroom he registered depression. He could not guess why
sans amour et sans haine
his heart was so full of a low-grade pain.

    There was no sound of Charles, so he went into the kitchen to prepare the breakfast. He took the “Strachey loaf”, as Charles cheaply called it, out of the bread tin. Officially it was one day old, but when he applied the bread-saw it was like sawing brick. He sawed off four slices and grilled them two at a time. The kettle had been refilled and was acquiring a little heat. He threw the remainder of his butter-ration into the repast, added a few pinches of alleged Darjeeling to the pseudo-Ceylon in the teapot: placed on the tray the two dishes of cereal, a teaspoonful of sugar for each. Sugar was always a bad shortage with him. He took down a jar marked “Strawberry Jam”, recognized by housewives as mainly pectin and/or carrot pulp, given appropriate local colour of course and flavour to match. There was neither nourishment nor pleasure to be had from it. Charles appeared, yawning and smiling.

    “Why no Mrs. Bristers?” he enquired.

    “Oh,
she
does not come when I have ’flu.”

    “Why?”

    “Because—I
believe
this is the reason—Mrs. Bristers thinks I am putting it on. Swinging the lead.”

    “When you quit malingering she comes back.”

    “Yes. Of course she malingers herself meanwhile. She calls off her malinger as soon as I announce my recovery.”

    “Anything I can do,” Charles said, “in Mrs. Bristers’ absence?”

    He was given the kettle to carry.

    “How do you feel this morning?” The guest put the question.

    Mark hesitated a moment. “Depressed!” he confided. “Unaccountably depressed.”

    They both moved into the living-room, the lightly laden Charles in the van.

    “What a poisonous day,” Charles shouted, and the room was in fact so dark that when a match was struck to light the gas-fire it was like a miniature firework display.

    “A bit of fog,” Mark conceded with didactic firmness.

    Where the weather was concerned Mark was always on the defensive, because people were apt to blame the Government for the weather. Then, he had a feeling that very bad weather (of which there was an awful lot)
was,
in fact, compromising in a brave new day.

    They sat down facing one another and Mark poured out the tea.

    “Ah, that is a capital idea.” Charles picked up a piece of toast and examined it. “The dreadful bread arrives disguised as good old-fashioned toast.”

    “Let’s see, you like sugar?” Mark looked up, a cube poised above the cup.

    “If you think it won’t spoil the tea!”

    Mark laughed. Even a bureaucrat laughs sometimes on such occasions, as a clergyman would consider it politic to laugh at not
too
coarse an anecdote. Besides, he was fond of tea. “It is certainly not good tea,” he said in a firm voice. “I have tried to coax some decent tea out of my grocer. But I really believe he had none.”

    “Have you tipped him?”

    “Good gracious no!” Mark protested.

    Charles shook his head, dogmatically flourishing a piece of toast. “I am afraid you cannot expect to get anything if you don’t oil their palms.”

    Mark’s was a damp smile.

    “Do you,” he enquired, “go around oiling everyone’s palm? I know that is done. But it does not strike me as very nice. You may get the lion’s share that way but it is the behaviour of a less noble animal. I will not say a
rat.
”

    “A pig, you think, eh!” Charles laughed, drinking with relish. “Best to drink this stuff while it is so
hot
you can’t taste it.”

    Since Mark had worked at the Ministry of Education and since Charles had become a farmer of a rather lurid black-market type, they had started arguing differently. In their discussions in the old days nothing more concrete or subjective, as a rule, was touched on than the present Catholic revival or the currency of the Incas. Also when, in easy-going debate, Charles’s opinion prevailed, Mark did not mind in the least. Today, however, he would defend his position, at times, almost acrimoniously, particularly where the issue was political. This was very unMark like.

    Mark Robins and Charles Dyat had known one another as schoolboys, been at Marlborough, then at Oxford together. Neither had formed any close friendship except this one of theirs. But its rationale was not likemindedness. Charles was what is labelled “a leader-type”. Mark had little taste for responsibility. These two facts alone may have provided the essential ingredients for a friendship.

    Theirs was not quite the comic marriage-of-opposites, instances of which are so common. Leaving aside physical contrast—Charles who was fair, being only of middling height and Mark being a tall black-haired man—Charles looked at life from a certain social eminence (an imaginary one), whereas Mark was uninterested in social distinctions. Where intellectual distinctions are concerned he was rather romantic, from which circumstance Charles had benefited. Charles he considered very brilliant, unquestionably destined for great things. Again, were one to investigate and collate, their roots would reveal a common soil exploited to different ends. Both came from the prosperous professional middle class: but Charles’s father had been a successful and a pretentious country lawyer, who ran at one time a butler and footman, his large house, Tadicombe Priory, standing in half a dozen acres of pseudo-park, a small satellite farm completing the picture: Mark’s father, on the other hand, was a Manchester doctor with a big practice, with neither time nor inclination to emulate his most snooty patients.

    So the conversation had taken the acrimonious turn it nowadays was always liable to do. Mark ate his handful of cereal, inadequately sweetened with the teaspoonful of sugar (although the Jamaicans were starving because nobody wanted their sugar-cane). Charles noisily tested the friability of a blackened and gritty crust, smeared with ersatz jam. Then Charles sat back, and after a minute or two took up again the question of tipping.

    “Of course I go around oiling palms,” he began aggressively. “Your masters don’t need to—they have their farms like Stalin’s commissars and their privileges. But you and I have to exude pourboires or our health would suffer. You can’t live on one ration book without tipping. Tipping is the black market of the poor.”

    Mark no longer hesitated to recognize the political gulf which yawned and gaped between them. Charles smiled his tough gay smile, belonging to his cavalier complex, as he glanced into the yawning chasm. The white hairs in his brushed-off-the-mouth moustache were not numerous enough to make it “gray”, the gold-gray of the temples he kept clipped. In the yellow gloom he sat up, eyes dancing, a gallant little daguerreotype darkened by the fog of time. Mark returned his gaze, with a bit of a waver, across the grim period-piece of sham-tea, sham-jam, “processed” butter, grey bread scorched into toast. He admired, as he had always done, the lawless eye, the witty mouth.