Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (7 page)

Then a telegram came.
Invalided out. Book room. Coming tomorrow.

Lionel met him and was shocked at his haggard face and shrunken stoop. But Harold did not want to talk of his illness. He immediately agreed that the shop would do. That was all he said.

‘It’ll do.’

‘But don’t you think it’s wonderful?’

‘Ay. It’s all right.’

‘And the cathedral quite near, and – oh, I wish you’d be more enthusiastic!’

‘I’m not a fellow who shows his enthusiasm.’ But Harold’s eyes lit and he seized Lionel’s arm. ‘I knew you’d never go back on me,’ he said.

They went to the agent and paid their deposit. Afterwards, searching for a place to have tea, Harold pointed to the café with its leaning timbered front.

‘This looks your sort of place. Old-fashioned and that.’

‘No, not there,’ said Lionel. ‘The food’s not up to much.’

He felt as though he had plunged a sword through his own heart as they sat in the palm-lounge of the Clevedon Hotel discussing the business before them.

A week later Lionel returned home, and Harold with him. He never saw Ilona again. She had left Wellsborough by the time, in the spring of
1919
, they came to occupy the shop.

The business started favourably. Almost their first customer was Dr Rothway, the cathedral organist, who had grown to like Lionel. There had been, of course, another music shop in the town; but the war had closed its doors and Weary and Hoare were soon accepted in its place. Puffing up Calverley Hill for his daily afternoon walk, the doctor often dropped in, perhaps to order Harwood’s latest organ piece, or merely to have a chat and air his favourite grievance – the non-musical Dean. This was sufficient to give prestige to the new business. Lionel, quick to realize the possibilities, earnestly studied the publishers’ catalogues and ordered copies of every new piece of church music by any composer of distinction. The precentor, a young man, an enemy of the aged doctor, got the Weary and Hoare habit. It was his pleasure to drop in and try new piano music on one of the upright Rogers pianos.

It was the exciting period of gramophone development and before the days of radio. By
1925
one side of the shop had been turned into a small studio, with a sound-proof wall, where records could be played. Elena Gerhardt, Elizabeth Schumann, Gervase Elwes, Galli-Curci – these, and other heavenly voices, soared out into the shop from Columbia and His Master’s Voice. Portraits of modern composers filled the walls; busts of the great classical giants surmounted the high shelves. Miniature orchestral scores were added to stock. The lighter side of music was ignored. No jazz or ragtime ever found its way to Weary and Hoare. Albums of hackneyed classics – Tchaikovski, Rubinstein, Weber – were the only concessions made to lower brows. Boys from the Cathedral School, some of the lay-clerks, the cathedral clergy themselves – all came to regard a visit to Weary and Hoare as something more than a mere visit to a shop. Cathedral tittle-tattle floated across the counter, for Lionel was one of those men who invite confidences, obviously discreet, and, in any case, unimportant enough to entrust with a scandal.

He was kept far too busy in those early years ever to ask himself whether he were content with his life. Hardly a day was ever spent out of Wellsborough, and many of the evenings he would be occupied with the accounts and business correspondence, while his partner, precise at domestic tasks, saw to the housekeeping. They kept a strict time-table. At nine-thirty the shop opened. From nine to nine-thirty the two men walked, generally down the hill, once round the cathedral close, and back again. At ten a woman came to do the rougher housework and shopping. During the morning Lionel looked after the counter. Until eleven Harold retired to an attic room which he had made his own private sanctum and where he continued to write his poetry – verses which were never seen by Lionel. At eleven he came down to the kitchen and started to prepare lunch. They closed shop from one to two-fifteen, eating their lunch in the kitchen while Harold read the newspapers and offered acid commentaries on the events of the day. While Harold looked after the shop, Lionel cleared away the lunch. By three o’clock, their busiest time, both men were to be found in the shop. On Sundays Harold spent the day in bed, reading the papers and the many strange books which, slowly, he had collected in his room. They were books on such subjects as serpent-worship, alchemy, astrology – all the abracadabra of an imagination arrested in adolescence. Slowly he became a mine of curious facts – tags of which he would drop out at incongruous moments.

‘There were people in Malekula who used to eat their dead,’ he remarked once, lolling in the doorway of the bathroom while Lionel was shaving.

‘Were there?’ Lionel chuckled. ‘Well, thank Heaven we’ve progressed beyond that, anyway.’

‘I don’t know that we have. It’s not a bad way of getting rid of corpses.’

‘There’s cremation.’

But the word ‘cremation’ fired Harold to sudden anger. ‘When I die, don’t you dare to cremate me.’

‘Oh, all right. Anyway, I shall konk out before you. I’m five years older.’

‘No. You’ll hang on after me. Quite a long time too.’

Lionel carefully cleaned his razor. ‘Why’re you so opposed to cremation?’ he asked.

‘I want my body to go the natural way.’

Lionel went to his bedroom to dress. He did not spend a very easy day. The remark ‘I want my body to go the natural way’ kept coming back to him. What
was
the natural way of a body after death – particularly when it was Harold’s?

And he remembered again (what he had never really forgotten) an earlier remark, made years ago: ‘Then I shall haunt you.’

As the years passed Weary and Hoare became each other’s habit, and could not have escaped even had it occurred to them to try. Their names, inscribed by themselves in the book of fate, were chains around them. By
1930
, when the business was practically running itself and the balance-sheet showing a nice profit, Lionel, then a man of forty-two, knew one morning of summer when he woke to hear the cuckoo in the orchard that he had incarcerated his life in the tomb of security; and that Harold Weary had hammered the nails into the coffin. He did not know precisely why this revelation had suddenly come to him, unless it were the recollection of Delius’s nostalgic piece, ‘On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring,’ which floated into his mind from hearing the cuckoo in the orchard and made him rise from the lonely couch of the last twelve years thinking of the wife who might have shared it and the children who should now be growing up to inherit the fruits of his labour. He felt suddenly old; and, as always when he was unhappy, his right leg began to ache.

At breakfast he opened a letter from his father.

‘I must go to Haggerley Ford,’ he said, when he had read it.

Harold stared at him. ‘Go? You can’t. How can I manage here alone?’

‘My mother’s dying, Harold.’

‘So am I.’

‘You – ’ Lionel stared at the white face. He noticed, for the first time, a pastel bloom in the sallow cheeks.

‘Yes. I never told you. I’m t.b.’ Harold coughed, as though to demonstrate the truth of what he had said. ‘That’s why they discharged me from the Army. I knew it years ago. I knew it before I met you. There are no old bones in Harold Weary.’

‘But – why on earth don’t you see a doctor?’

‘You want me to die, don’t you?’

‘Don’t be so silly!’

‘Is it silly?’

‘Of course it is. I certainly
don’t
want you to die.’

‘No.’ Harold looked at him, struck by a new thought. A secretive smile flickered round the thin lips. ‘Of
course
you don’t. I never realized.’

‘Realized what?’

Harold wouldn’t answer. Instead, ‘Does it ever strike you,’ he asked, ‘that this house might be haunted?’

‘I don’t believe in such things as ghosts.’

‘Yes, you do. You’re terrified of them. Ever since you heard that scream on the canal as a kid.’

‘Don’t be so damn’ silly!’ Lionel’s leg gave a sudden twinge of pain. Harold, ignoring him, went on: ‘It’s the attic stairs, isn’t it – where I work? That’s the place you don’t like.’

Then Lionel’s temper burst out. ‘My mother’s dying,’ he cried, ‘and you start this sort of talk. You’re too damned selfish, that’s the trouble. I’m leaving today and you’ve jolly well got to look after the place yourself. Do you good! You’ll have less time for those ridiculous poems you keep saying you’re working on but which nobody ever sees.’

‘I’ll thank you to attack me. Not my poems.’

‘Oh, this is a silly argument. Pull yourself together, Harold, for God’s sake.’

‘There’s nothing to pull together. I’m a sick man.’

‘I don’t believe it. If you took more exercise and stopped reading all those unhealthy books, you’d be a different man. You’re not ill. You’re weary. That’s all.’ Into Lionel’s mind came an image; a choir-boy in the vestry of a Yorkshire church. ‘Art thou languid?’ he sneered.

He saw Harold slowly rising from the table. Then he ran upstairs to pack his bag, crying, as he ran, a mocking, inane echo of the choirboys’ taunt: ‘No, he’s weary! No, he’s weary!’

Resentment filled Harold Weary as he heard again those words which had always hung in his mind. For indeed he felt, he had always felt, tired to death – and knew, and had always known, that he had been born only to die. But was not death also the gateway to his true vocation? Now he knew, with absolute certainty, that he would haunt Lionel Hoare; and he knew, too, that Lionel both expected it and dreaded it. For what could be the ultimate purpose of their partnership, except that Hoare should be haunted by the ghost of Weary? The uneasy look along the canal, the fear in the bright eyes . . . Harold smiled, then chuckled, then fell to a fit of harsh coughing. How glorious the future was going to be!

Capriciously, his mind pointed to another mood; he realized with embittered tenderness how much he loved this friend. Even though he had been so cruelly hurt by him, could he, in
cold blood
(the aptness of the phrase pleased him), submit him to such a fate? Yet how could he be spared? For, once dead, Harold knew that he would have no control over his movements. There was no escape for the wretched Lionel. A ghost must walk where his fate lay.

He stood at the table, fingering a bread-knife, tormented by the thought of the inevitable torments he must inflict, and would enjoy inflicting, upon his only true friend. He was not a cruel man; he did not desire such a fate for Lionel. But what escape could there be for him?

There was only one certain escape. Lionel must die before him.

As soon as that thought entered his mind he was filled with compassion for his friend. Quickly he went upstairs, anxious only to appease him.

‘Lionel, I’m sorry.’ Lionel was wrapping shoes in newspaper and did not look up. ‘Forgive me. You must go away – of course you must. Only – come back. Don’t desert me. I’m too proud to tell anyone else what I told you. I knew even as a kid that I wouldn’t live long. That’s why I wanted a friend like you, someone healthy and normal. I don’t envy you your good health. When I die you’ll have the shop – you’ll have
everything
.’ He paused and could not resist a smile; so much was implied in the word ‘everything’. ‘You won’t be too old to marry,’ he added. He thought a wife would help Lionel to bear the burden of his haunting.

It was as though the laugh of Ilona had tumbled in the room. Lionel for a moment could not speak. Then he took Harold’s hand. ‘Chuck it, old man!’ he said. ‘Talk to me about anything, but not about getting married. There! Of course I’ll come back. And we’ll get you well somehow.’

He whistled the tune of the ‘Valse Triste’ as he continued his packing.

The mother died, the father went to live with some friends, and Lionel, after three weeks in old haunts, decided to spend a few days in London before returning to Wellsborough. He wanted, if only for a short while, the gaiety and exuberance of a great town.

He found, easily enough, what he chiefly wanted; found it by mistake, when he was slightly drunk and wandering back to his hotel towards midnight. He was easy and obvious prey and the girl was kind to him, particularly sympathetic to the pain in his leg.

Afterwards, his conscience hammered at him. ‘It’s a sin,’ he kept saying, ‘a sin.’ But he giggled as he said it.

‘Sin be damned,’ said the girl. ‘You wanted me and I found you. So what? Nobody’s come to no harm that I know of.’

Nobody, he thought, except the dim figure of a girl pegging-up clothes in an orchard; nobody, except unborn children. But what did that matter now? It was hypocritical to pretend that he hadn’t enjoyed this back-room business.

So he returned to Wellsborough, a man with a different view of life, who had lost a mother, gained for one night a paid lover, and assumed, without knowing it, the swagger that such adventures beget. He felt that now nothing very much mattered; he would, he decided, do what he damn’ well pleased.

He was amazed to find the shop gleaming with new paint and distemper, inside and out, and the names, Weary and Hoare, vivid in blue and gold over a white background; more amazed still to find Harold in a new suit, and seemingly in much better health than when he had left him.

‘Well, you’ve properly bowled me over,’ he admitted.

‘I thought we were getting a bit stale,’ replied Harold. ‘I want you to branch out a bit, Lionel. Don’t be such a slave to the shop. I haven’t been pulling my weight. Now I intend to.’

Miraculously, his health improved; and so a new phase opened in the history of Weary and Hoare which was soon remarked upon by everybody in the town. It was Mr Weary who now appeared more generally behind the counter; Mr Hoare who, quite often, was away on business. Their daily morning walk was continued, except during those week-ends when Mr Hoare had gone away. When he returned, it was always noticed that he was in exuberant spirits.

‘Have a nice week-end?’ the precentor would ask curiously.

‘Oh, so-so! Just a little jaunt, y’know. Mustn’t get rusty.’

‘Where did you go?’

And from the other end of the counter would come Mr Weary’s voice: ‘You mustn’t ask Mr Hoare questions like that, precentor.’

Lionel would laugh. ‘That’s right. Trade secrets, eh, Mr Weary?’

‘And where
did
you go, Lionel?’ Harold asked once, when they were alone in the kitchen.

‘Never you mind, old man. That’s a secret, like your poetry.’

No more reference was ever made to Lionel’s week-ends.

With the jealous tenderness of an old lady to a cat did Harold Weary, during those last years of their life together, feed Lionel Hoare with his own subtle milk of human kindness. The fattening process continued well into the second year of the Second Great War. By that time Lionel had become very plump, his skin pink and patchy, his movements, once brisk and bird-like, now lethargic and sensuous. Harold, as though to compensate for his partner’s weight, had wasted to a shadow, with a head shrunk deep into hunched shoulders. Many times Lionel had tried to induce him to get medical advice on his condition; but he never succeeded. After a time he gave it up and sleepily abandoned himself to bask and purr under the consumptive’s ministrations. There were still the week-ends – at Bristol, Ilfracombe or Weston-super-Mare, and occasionally London – when Lionel indulged his still amateur and long-delayed taste in women. Week-ends that remained an agreed secret – though Harold knew perfectly well to what foreign harbours his companion steered his dishonoured barque. But nothing must be said; Harold knew that. To pry into the other man’s secret life would be to run the risk of losing him for ever.