The Keys to the Street (6 page)

For a little while he continued to read
Dead Souls
, or tried to read it, but the doings of Chichikov no longer held his attention. He had been distracted, not so much by the sight of the pale fair-haired girl with the swinging stride as by the emotion and the reflections thinking back to that earlier time had evoked.

He put the book into his buggy, a wooden barrow with four
wheels and a handle like the shaft of a spade, and, pushing it ahead of him, began ambling along one of the paths in a westerly direction. He had no clear idea where he was going, a common state for him to be in, for one of the benefits of his condition was perfect freedom.

It was a warm, still afternoon and this he enjoyed after the winds of the past weeks, the cold spring, the long damp winter. If happiness was denied him forever, was something exclusively for others, he could feel pleasure and that sometimes more intensely and sensuously than those who lived under roofs and slept in beds. His appreciation of the sun on his face and the soft balmy air was luxurious and profound. It almost made him smile.

Another of his principles was never to make plans during the afternoon or evening as to where he would sleep that night, for to do so was to abrogate that freedom, and freedom was all he had. Everything else had been taken away or he had taken it away himself. He would give some thought to his night’s “lodging” when it was dark and the streets were empty, the cars had gone, the pubs had closed, and those like himself came into their own.

He crossed over York Bridge and entered the sequestered part of the park on the southern shore of the lake. On the seats along here his fellows were often to be found, Effie with her bundles wrapped in green plastic, or Dill, who would be accompanied by his dog but encumbered by so little, a nylon backpack, a couple of coats tied round his middle by their sleeves; but there was no one today. He knew Dill could live that way because he mostly had a bed in the Marylebone Road shelter or the one in the Edgware Road, something Roman’s guilt and sense of being always a phony and a fake would never allow him to have. After all, how many of those others had possessed a house of their own, possessed it, sold it, and banked the money?

For much of each day Roman lived in the past. And this was deliberate, a purposeful exploration of the time of his happiness, a reliving. Sometimes this dreaming occupied him for several hours on
end as he walked across the park and the streets that made a network like the weaving of a nest around its center. He would select a particular happening from that past and enter it again, as it might be the birth of one of his children and the things he said to Sally and she to him, or even earlier to his first meeting with Sally at university.

Once he had been quite unable to do this, had been afraid to do it, more than afraid, terrified. The sight of that delicate fair girl reminded him that when they first encountered each other had been the time of his beginning this process of recall. Walking away from her, his bedding in the buggy, he had thought that speaking to an ordinary person, a dweller in the world he had left, should serve as a sign for him, and there and then he decided to put an end to the time of denial. Total change, absolute alteration of circumstances, utter abandonment of the past—all these had served their purpose. Now it was time to move on and take the plunge into pain. He would rip the scar tissue off the wound and lay a cold probe against the rawness. He had nothing to lose. It had to be done and now was the time to begin.

He had begun by a kind of meditation, his eyes on his wedding ring, the symbol of what had been and what was lost. Since then, in this world he had chosen for himself, both unreal and more real than any reality he had ever known, he had re-experienced every day his lovely history, a chapter of it or part of a chapter, and it did not heal the pain or come near healing it. But something else was happening. He was more aware than he had ever been of what it was to be a human being and it was as if, in all his joyous and contented days, he had never really known this before. And self-pity, so rebellious and consuming, was utterly gone. He had become unaccommodated man, perhaps even what those existentialists said man should be, free, suffering, alone, and in control of his own destiny.

Now he chose for his excursion into the past a holiday he and Sally and Elizabeth had had in Crete. It was ten years before, almost exactly ten years. Elizabeth had been four or five. They had chosen
May for the wildflowers that cover the island with blossom at that time and because the sun was warm but not yet hot. He chiefly remembered from that holiday the color of the sea, the blue of Elizabeth’s eyes, the languor and the sweet idleness and his and Sally’s lovemaking, the best since their honeymoon. They had been the young ardent lovers of seven years before and in those two weeks Daniel had been conceived. With a pain that made him gasp, Roman remembered their bed and waking in the morning naked, uncovered by bedclothes, and Sally naked beside him. Like gods they were, discovered by the morning light.

As he left the park by me Clarence Gate, he found himself able to summon up from that past time the things they had said to each other and even the expression in Sally’s eyes, the tranquillity and sometimes the passion. He remembered walking on the beach with his daughter and carrying her because the sand was too hot on the soles of her small tender feet. “Daddy, Daddy,” she had said, lifting up one foot, “my soul is burning!” Or that was what it sounded like and they laughed, he and Sally, for what did he know then of burning souls and hellish torment?

Across Gloucester Place he walked and into the hinterland of Marylebone Station, where the shabby streets make so extreme a contrast with Nash’s palatial terraces. He took the steps down into Boston Place and through Blandford Square into Harewood Avenue. The sight of a corner shop reminded him that he must buy food for his supper. Sometime or other it must be done, but shops were always open till all hours in these streets. He came into Lisson Grove and turned south, conjuring Elizabeth’s face in his mind, its innocence and its rapture, and as sometimes happened, the tears came into his eyes and fell down his cheeks.

Other people took no notice. They expected him to be different from them, demented, drug-crazy, drunk, ungoverned, mad. It was because of these things that he was where he was and they were where they were. Only Pharaoh, leaning against the door of a shop
closed for the night, eyed him with some feeling of kinship and, holding out the bottle from which he had been drinking, said, “Here, mate, want a sup?”

Roman had long ago ceased to worry about catching things from drinking out of other people’s bottles and, though he didn’t want it, God knows what it was, he accepted and took a swig. Rioja and meths, he thought. Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, the way he had learned from Dill and Effie, he sat down on the stone step and looked up at Pharaoh. He never stopped hoping to see some change in the man’s face, some improvement. By that he meant that madness would be less evident there, that the slipping away of sanity would have halted so that something human still remained, some kindly light in the feral bloodshot eyes, some relaxing of the mouth so that the lips were neither curled back nor sucked together in a whitened rigidity.

But there was no change and the sign of humanity Pharaoh had given in offering a drink to a man in tears, was a rare happening. Soon even that would cease. He squatted down and thrust his haunted face into Roman’s, his black beard that he streaked with dark blue dye into Roman’s beard.

“Have you got a key for me?” he said.

Roman shook his head. Anyone who looked more closely at Pharaoh—no one ever looked closely—would have seen the hundreds of keys that hung round him, strung there on the rope that served him as a belt, pinned to his clothes with safety pins, brass and steel and chrome, Yale keys and Banhams, front door keys and backdoor keys, keys for opening suitcases and keys for locking padlocks. From the irregular bulges in his clothes Roman suspected his pockets too were filled with keys. He clinked and rattled when he walked, shuffling in and out of doorways, going where his voices sent him in search of the ultimate key.

Where did they come from? Whose had they been? Pharaoh never said and Roman never asked.

“The keys of the kingdom,” Pharaoh said.

His black eyes rolled. When he looked about him he made jerky startled movements. One of his voices told him that when Christ said, “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” it was an actual bunch of keys that He handed to Peter. These were lost, had been lost for two thousand years, but it was Pharaoh’s mission to find them. He speculated constantly as to their nature and appearance.

“They’ll be made of gold, won’t they? Purest gold? Only gold’d unlock the gates of heaven.”

Pharaoh should not be here at all, an outsider, on the street, but in the kind of place that had no existence these days, a place that was comfortable and clean and civilized, where he could have some dignity, where caring people would look after him and doctors well versed in the tragedy of his existence would put him on a regimen of drugs. Roman had no idea whether he was autistic or schizophrenic or mentally handicapped. He preferred the word “mad” to all these because he knew that he too was mad and that being mad was a prerequisite of what he had done in becoming an outsider.

Patting Pharaoh on the shoulder—from which the man with the blue-streaked beard started back, recoiling and snarling like a wildcat poked with a stick—Roman got up and continued on his course toward the Marylebone Road and across it back into Gloucester Place. It amused him to reflect that being addressed by Pharaoh would once have alarmed him very much. He would have been frightened, though not admitted it, would have pretended not to hear. And to have entered into a conversation with such a creature would have been unthinkable. He was such a creature himself now, or not far off.

Turning into Crawford Street, he waited before crossing the road for the red and white food delivery van to pass. What would Express Tikka and Pizza say if he phoned from a call box and asked for a delivery of Chicken Masala to the third seat on the left going up the
Broad Walk from Chester Road? A verbal equivalent, he supposed, of the look he got in the sandwich bar where he asked for cheese and pickle.

They looked askance, but they served him. It was his accent, Roman knew, it made them think that maybe they were wrong, that this was no dosser but an eccentric, an absentminded professor who forgot to have baths. He would have lost his accent if he could, but his attempts to do so sounded like grotesque parodies. Tomorrow, he was reminded, he had better have an all-over wash, in a public convenience somewhere. Keeping clean, or avoiding utter filthiness, was one of the grimmer problems the outsider faced, and one that no insider ever took into account.

Turning into Old Quebec Street, wondering where to settle down and eat his supper, he came under the windows of Talisman, the environmentalist publishers. He wore no watch but told the time by the state of the light and traffic and the movement of people, and he guessed it was seven. The staff, such as it was, would have gone home an hour ago. To the front door Talisman’s logo of a lyre-tree leaf was attached with its name and that of its editor-in-chief, Tom Outram. Once his name had been there too, but that, like so much in his old life, was water under the bridge, flowing into the sea of his memories.

4

N
o one but Alistair would phone so early. Urgency was always implicit in phone calls made before nine in the morning.

Bean had called and collected Gushi. It was half past eight. Mary thought she knew who her caller must be and she hesitated before picking up the receiver. But there was always her grandmother to think of. Her grandmother was strong and healthy but very old.

“How are you settling in?”

He had never spoken to her like that before. It was the phrase of an elderly parent delivered in a tone that was solicitous but querulous, too, and aggrieved. She tried to sound brisk and cheerful.

“Fine,” she said. “I’m all right. It’s nice here. I’ve been walking a lot.”

As soon as she had said it she knew it was an unwise thing to say, for he immediately countered by telling her not to overdo things. She was not strong, she was a fragile creature. He managed, without putting this into words, to imply that by her irresponsible and thoughtless conduct she had put her health in jeopardy.

“When am I to be allowed to come and see you?”

“Alistair,” she said, “we’re having a separation, remember?”

“A
trial
separation.”

She tried again. “I have left you. We’re apart. We’ve discussed it, we decided. My coming here was to mark the beginning of our separation.”

“Oh, come on,” he said, “that’s just a figure of speech. The mistake
was mine in giving any of that stuff credence. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, that’s the real reason, isn’t it?”

Hers or his? There was no need to ask. He implied that being parted from him would increase her affection for him. Affection—that lukewarm word. Even of that she felt very little. If you were like her, receptive, anxious to please—euphemisms, she told herself, for passive and ingratiating—you found it hard to understand how anyone thought love could be won by bullying. He set about bullying her now.