The Death of William Posters (27 page)

Frank lit his cigar. ‘Nobody has the right to ask me why I am how I'm not. The only questions I'll answer are those I've already asked myself and been able to answer. Those will be the ones I've spent my life answering – or trying to. Since coming to London I've not been getting very far.'

‘I'm with you there,' Albert said. ‘It's a dust bowl. All your time goes on drinking to keep alive. Any more wine in that bottle?'

Teddy slid it over: ‘I get all my answers from other people. It's the best I can do, but I'm satisfied.'

‘You have to be,' Handley said.

‘I don't know where mine come from,' Frank said. ‘So I suppose they come from myself.'

‘The best thing is just to go on living, and doing the best sort of work you can,' Albert reflected. ‘Pessimism is everybody's right, as long as they earn it.'

‘You've got to break through that sort of thing though,' Frank said, ‘unless you want to die young – or be dead in everything after a certain age, which is the same thing. That's why I left home and lit off. Pessimism is an idleness inside you, a spiritual deadness, if you like. It's a load on your back that you've got to throw off.'

‘Pessimism,' Teddy said, ‘is a creative force for an artist. It puts spirit into his work. If he knows how to channel it properly it becomes genius.'

‘Well, I'm not an artist,' Frank said. ‘Not that I believe you. If I did I wouldn't want to read a book or look at a picture again.'

‘You'd be starved of culture if you didn't,' Teddy laughed.

‘That would be the fault of people like you, then.'

Teddy called the waiter. ‘Why are you so quarrelsome, Frank? I suspect too much food does this to people, don't you, Albert? Your brains can addle from rich food.'

‘Why don't you lay off?' Albert said. ‘Keep your nail file out of him. I've seen you do this to people before, and I don't like it.'

Frank felt as if his head were about to shatter. He had wit enough to counter Teddy's low-powered stabs, but not the patience to tolerate Albert coming to his defence. ‘It's time I was on my way,' he said, standing up. ‘All the best of luck to you two money-faced bastards. I don't think any harm will ever come to you.'

‘Don't go,' Teddy called. ‘We were only talking. Come on, Frank, sit down.'

Albert caught him up at the door. ‘For God's sake don't take things like that. Teddy's all right. He's a good sort, you know that.' He held his arm, to draw him back.

‘If you don't let go of me,' Frank said, ‘I'll kick you into the floor.' He went outside, and walked in the warm, humid sun down Greek Street.

18

Days drifted through warm and open weather, city air softened by spring, wind flapping between streets, getting a lift on the backs of red buses then jumping off to charge around the next corner at oncoming cars. He didn't see Handley or Greensleaves again. Neither did he go back to work at the car park. For the moment, maybe for good, he had finished with all that. He still had money from saved wages, even from the sold car in Nottingham. Living on a few pounds a week he discovered in himself a talent for thrift which at one time he would have squashed with ridicule but now regarded as the equipment necessary for survival. He felt a healthy leanness, existed within a thinner casing of flesh which gave a more direct and brittle contact with the world.

His life-long habit of getting up at six wouldn't leave him, and he sat by the window, reading until eight o'clock, pages punctuated by some black train shouldering a rapid pock-thumping way through the cutting. The window rattled and pages turned in its noise. He washed on the landing, where a bathroom and lavatory had been built into one of the single rooms, then sat in his shirtsleeves, ignoring the still sharp air of morning. He boiled tea, and drank the pot out. The room had lost its grimness, for he had adapted himself to London standards of isolation, discomfort and independence. He offered to paint the room white if the landlord paid for the paint. When this was agreed to, he borrowed brushes, pushed the furniture into one half of the room and covered it with newspaper – halfway one day, all white the next. It looked clean, felt more comfortable, a haven after climbing the gloomy stairs.

Not working, and seeing no one, increased his perceptions and sensibility, such moods in the past coming on only in illness or the half-fever of a bad cold. His ability to connect with these moods now, when the fever did not exist, provided a springboard for numerous other comparisons. It was as if he'd worn glasses all his life and suddenly thought to clean them: his sight seemed sharper, thoughts quicker.

Many of his days were spent in Highgate library. He went through books that he couldn't take out, took books out that he couldn't read there. He was able to extract the kernel of a book, having read much and quickly while at Pat's. A history of Europe was absorbed by examining the list of contents – joining and cementing what he already knew, concentrating on English social history of the nineteenth century to find some explanation for the world he had grown up in. He learned botany and anatomy by diagrams, geography by reading and comparing maps, reinforcing and drawing together the scattered islands of his past knowledge which, he discovered, were more numerous than he'd imagined. It was a game for the uneducated: books of reproductions tied up what he had seen in the galleries.

Large areas of a jigsaw were forming. The encyclopaedia, dictionary, atlas, were three dormer windows high enough to embrace new views. Fiction was the depth gauge, plumb-line and echometer fathoming his deepest needs and feelings. Knowledge for its own sake was bare-faced and domineering, but each title of a novel was the top winch of a fairy-tale well whose storyline of chain and bucket let you down with varying degrees of speed into the waters of illumination. Knowledge confirmed the structure of the outside world, while a novel prised open previously unknown regions within yourself. Conrad, Melville, Stendhal – the giants. In war novels, detective novels, shit novels, you put a scarf over your eyes before going into their unconvincing strait-jackets; in the others, one had to take this scarf off before reading the first word. He wondered why he had not been born with this understanding, why nearly thirty years had gone by before touching the possibility of it. How many people had it in them, but never saw it?

He fought free of a narrow sort of life and began to wonder what he had let himself in for – though it didn't destroy his patience with this new existence. Calmness is death, he knew, but at the moment he enjoyed it, took advantage of the unlimited days to see if any meaning would come out of his life. To solve the enigma of anyone else's would only be possible after the unfettering of his own spirit.

Walking one day he recalled some words from
Moby Dick:
‘And if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive.…' In the Old Testament there is a story (he remembered it from school, being full of memories in the sunny desert of London), of two armies face to face, one far larger than the other, a host as it is called. During the night God sent rats into the tents of the biggest army and they ruined it by chewing the leather of their shield straps. Rats are unacknowledged legislators that rule the world. They started the Black Death that wiped out half Europe in the Middle Ages. The Tartars, besieging a Crimean city, catapulted a bubonic corpse over its walls, so that plague as well as famine broke its obstinacy. Out of that town, the plague-scythe cut down Europe as if it were a single head of corn. A man's body is a battlefield of rat and anti-rat – the rat to kill, and the other to keep him human. Every man has his rat, his own brown rat sitting like an alter ego on his shoulder, dodging inside when storms flash and adversity baffles the air to stoke the inner chaos that such sights cause.

The legend of the rats had been a long time forming, a legend which for some reason exuded the heavy smell of a sagebush growing in sand. In some far-off time people didn't like the rats. They threatened to destroy the real souls in them, so the Pied Piper came and drew the rats away. But the people refused him the bread they had promised as his fee, called him a trickster. So the Pied Piper sent back the rats, but charmed away the people's children to inherit the innocence their parents had known before the rats came. The truth was that the parents couldn't live without the rats, wanted them back, took them to their bosoms and became one with them.

The Pied Piper was hunted for his never-ending hostility to the rats. The rats were a disease of society and also of the soul, and society, being imperfect, enabled them to survive. The rats were the carriers of this disease. They perpetuated it. The Pied Piper wanted to take this disease of society away. When people, used by those who desired power and not just to live, wanted the rats to stay with them they turned the Pied Piper into Bill Posters and hunted him forever as they had formerly, in their innocence, hunted the rats.

The rats, of course, became invisible: there weren't any to be seen. But they were continually breeding, ardently proliferating their rodent species in the various underworlds of oblivion. They dwelt far below the surface even of a child's dilatory mind, quick, cruel, whiskered and ordured noses exploring dark caverns and nibbling the energized vapours of cloaca that kept them alive. They lived in the rat-filled banks and hollows of ashtips and streams, feet planted, heads turned in momentary awareness against the outside world, on the forced refuse, the hopes, the gangrenous wrecks of people's lives, a thousand seams below. It was an evil impossible to fathom, excavate, analyse: the depths were too packed, putrescent, liquid, unrecognizable, a mud-death of suffocation, cone-roads descending. Such depths were wardened by rats, the only true history impossible to classify by seam or layer. One fell into it by turning on the gas-tap. One walked away from it – by walking away, or by the body taking you off if the spirit wanted you to stay by the world-wide rat-pit of rat-darkness which is body-death and soul-death.

Frank desired neither, fought both, wanted body-life and soul-life, to steer a narrow course on the narrowing tightrope across the top of the world's circus tent, balanced safe above the rat pits spreading below, the world-width of black mud surrounded on every far distance by dim faces of spectators in thrall to the rats laughing and waiting for his fall.

He hoped there was no question of falling. He would not fall, hoped his limbs, blood and bones would hold him back. But it was necessary to fight in order to keep the same dignity and independence he had known in his more stable, traditional, less knowing existence where the rats had been less likely to get at him.

He forgot about the future. Living alone, it didn't exist. He hadn't talked to anyone for days, and thought he never wanted to again.

Wearing jacket, trousers and jersey shirt, and a pair of boots he'd splashed ten guineas on, he went to meet Myra at Paddington, her letter still in his pocket. He picked her out from the barrier as she stepped off the train dressed in a light brown coat and carrying a shopping basket. He had forgotten what she looked like and was afraid of not recognizing her. ‘I didn't expect to see you,' she said, handing in her ticket.

‘It's a good beginning,' he joked, remembering his impression of her as someone cold and half awake, while thinking that you don't know what a house is like to live in until you've made a fire in it. They walked to the cafeteria. He was surprised that they didn't feel like strangers to each other as he stood in line for coffee and buns. She recalled writing her letter out in the garden one sunny day, sitting on the steps and trying to stop the wind flicking her pages. She'd wanted to be among streets and traffic, away from the so-called peace which was noisy enough to drown the real feelings in her. But silence wasn't finding it so easy to hold them down any more, and in becoming real again she hoped she wasn't making Frank too responsible for something that couldn't yet be seen as either good or bad. The few paintings glimpsed at Albert's party, the crush of people, the meal and walk with Frank, were important because she was inclined to overrate them. She shouldn't have written the letter, but had no power to resist it.

She asked how Albert was. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘I haven't seen him for a while. Nor have I been to the gallery. I packed all that in.'

‘You did seem a bit out of place there. What happened?'

‘We were having some dinner, the day Teddy handed me your letter, and the talk went on and on, so vicious and useless that I couldn't stand it. It was starting to pull me in. When you feel that something's played itself out, you've just got to go.'

He seemed more real now that he was free from a world that had no genuine use for him. Some re-humanizing process had occurred in the time elapsed. The other night had been an artifact in which they were not quite being themselves. It seemed clearer now, with the reality of traffic roaring outside and a train journey behind her. There was so little emotion between them that it couldn't possibly be false. Sun softened into the room and she felt drawn to his rather large hands resting by the cup, eating, pushing the plate away. ‘I suppose you saw our photo in the newspaper?'

They talked in a clatter of metal trays. ‘I did. But I hoped you hadn't, by some miracle. What did your husband say?'

‘Not much, though he didn't like it. I said it was all chance and coincidence, that I happened to be there when the painter needed help.' It hadn't been easy, for George must have brooded on it all day, pacing it out in the fields, encasing it from hedge to fence to looping footpath. His high standards would tell him to ignore it, but they let him down as the endless belt of daytime wore on. By evening he was incensed, and only her calm talking smoothed things out for the hours that followed. It was a unique experience at her age, and in this so far quiet marriage. Why had such an innocent photo pitched him from accepted order and unthinking peace to a life of suspicion – that he hid very well but that she now felt in him all the time? It was mysterious to her. Could a man hold that stupid photograph responsible for portents which must always have been with him? The answer came now that she was sitting with Frank.