The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book (33 page)

At length the passion passed. It was quite late and he was stiff and cold. He nevertheless prolonged his stay in the study until past ten. Then, for no reason, he went down to the sitting-room. Margaret did not speak; she was reading a library book. He said nothing to her. He went up to the bathroom. It had become the rule that he should go first. It was also a rule that he should smoke his pipe there; it warmed the room up, Margaret said, and she loved the smell of his tobacco. It was his custom therefore to puff vigorously on his pipe four or five times before leaving the bathroom. Tonight, because of their quarrel, he went without his pipe.

From the bedroom he listened to her own preparations. When she came in he was under the sheets, motionless. She did not put the light on. She set the alarm and got into bed.

He was falling off to sleep when he heard her.

‘Doggie.’

He didn’t reply.

Minutes later she spoke again.

‘Doggie.’

He mumbled.

‘Doggie, you’ve made me very unhappy.’

Whereat he almost lost his temper. Fatigue alone kept him silent.

She started to sob.

‘Doggie, I want to eat a piece of your cake.’

‘Why don’t you go and eat the damned thing?’

She sobbed a little more.

‘Won’t you come and eat a little piece with me, Doggie?’

‘No.’

‘A little piece, Doggie.’

‘For heaven’s sake!’ he said, throwing the bedclothes off.

She was sitting up.

They went to the bathroom and got their teeth. They went down to the sitting-room, almost stuffy after the cold bedroom, and ate large pieces of Olive’s cake in silence.

Then they went up to the bathroom and took out their teeth, and went to bed, still silent.

He was now wide awake.

‘Doggie,’ she said.

‘Doggie.’

It was some time before they could fall asleep, and they suffered frightfully from indigestion.

Olive continued to send her cakes. But Mr Stone knew that the relationship between his sister and himself belonged to the past.

*

So step by step he became married; and step by step marriage grew on him. For Margaret revealed a plasticity of character which abridged and rendered painless the process of getting to know her, getting used to her. He was at the core of their relationship; she moulded herself about him so completely and comfortingly that it was with surprise, when he observed her with her friends, that he remembered she did have a character of her own, and views and attitudes. And just as at first it seemed that Margaret had become an extension of Miss Millington, so he now saw them both as extensions of himself. It was, too, with a growing pleasure, which he did not in
the beginning care to acknowledge even to himself, that he thought of the suspension that came to the house as soon as he left it in the morning, and of its reanimation in the afternoon in preparation to receive him.

His habits were converted into rituals; they grew sacred even to him. He succumbed to gardening, of the type that Margaret desired, his attentions to beds and bulbs being regarded as sacramental by both Margaret and Miss Millington, willing acolytes (Miss Millington, whose only concern with the garden before had been to dust it, in her uncontrolled, deluging and expensive way, with pepper dust, and perhaps, when flowers appeared, to make some reference to their loveliness). So it was established that he was ‘fond of gardening’. But he drew the line when Margaret, saying, ‘Something for you, Doggie,’ tried to get him to become a regular listener to
Country Questions
and
In Your Garden.
He soothed her disappointment by repeating, what he had heard in the office, that the people who spoke on the radio with rustic accents about country matters lived in Mayfair; window-boxes were the only land
they
knew. This became one of his ‘sayings’; his statements had never before been regarded as ‘sayings’.

It was established, too, that the black cat next door was an enemy. The two women entered into a sweet conspiracy to conceal the creature’s activities from the Master. An intermittent afternoon watch was kept and ravages hastily repaired so that the Master might not be upset when he returned. The women succeeded better than they knew. The war taken out of his hands, Mr Stone’s hostility towards the cat diminished, leaving him with a sense of something lost.

But beneath the apparent calm which marriage had once more brought to him, there grew a new appreciation of time. It was flying by. It was eating up his life. Every week—and how quickly these Sundays followed one another on the radio:
Coast and Country
after the news, or
The Countryside in October, The Countryside in November,
monthly programmes that seemed like weekly programmes: Sundays which made him feel that the last one was yesterday—every racing week drew him nearer to retirement, inactivity, corruption.
Every ordered week reminded him of failure, of the uncreative years once so comfortingly stacked away in his mind. Every officeless Sunday sharpened his anxiety, making him long for Monday and the transient balm of the weekdays, false though he knew their fullness to be, in spite of the office diary he had begun to keep, tabulating appointments, things to be done, to flatter himself that he was busily and importantly occupied.

The tree, changing, developing with the year, made its point every day. And when, sitting at the Sunday tea, trying to reassure himself by his precise, neat, slow gestures, he sometimes said, ‘You are part of me, Margaret. I don’t know what I would do without you,’ he spoke with an urgency and gratitude she did not fully understand.

L
ATE IN
M
ARCH,
the buds white in sunlight on the black branches and daily acquiring a greenish tinge, Mr Stone and Margaret left London for a fortnight. It was his holiday—he who would soon be in need of no holiday—and it was also their honeymoon. They went to Cornwall. Mr Stone preferred to spend his holidays in England. He had thought after the war that he would go abroad. In 1948 he went to Ireland; but the most enjoyable part of that holiday was the journey from Southampton to Cobh in a luxurious, rationing-free American liner. A fortnight in Paris two years later had been, after the first moment of pleasure at being in the celebrated city, a tedious torment. He had dutifully gone sightseeing and had been considerably fatigued; he often wondered afterwards why he followed the guidebook so slavishly and went to places as dreary as the Panthéon and the Invalides. He had sat in the cafés, but hated the coffee, and to sit idling in an unfamiliar place was not pleasant, and the cups of coffee were so small. He had tried aperitifs but had decided they were a waste of time and money. He was very lonely; his pocket was playfully picked by an Algerian, who warned him to be more careful in future; everything was hideously expensive; the incessant cries from men and women of
le service, monsieur, le service!
had given him a new view of the French, whom he had thought a frivolous, fun-loving people made a little sad by the war. And for the last two days he was afflicted by a type of dysentery which made it impossible for him to take anything more solid than mineral water.

So Cornwall it was. Margaret suppressed her disappointment in reflections about the need to economize, which, already delicately
acknowledged, had begun to obtrude more and more into their conversation, now that Mr Stone was only eighteen months or so from retirement. She told Grace Tomlinson, and Grace agreed, that it was high time they got to know their own country.

They put up at the Queen’s Hotel in Penzance. The season had not properly begun. The weather was unusually bad, the hotel people said, as though assuring them they had not done a foolish thing; and they received much attention.

They took buses and went for walks, Mr Stone feeling conspicuous in his black city overcoat (Simpsons’s, and twenty years old: Simpson’s clothes, as he and Tomlinson had long ago agreed, were worth the extra money, and it had once been a source of satisfaction to Mr Stone that he was often, so far as dress went, a complete Simpson’s man). In another part of England he might have felt less conspicuous in his black overcoat. But in that landscape it was like an emblem of softness and inaptitude. Human habitation had scarcely modified the land; it was not as if a race had withdrawn but as if, growing less fit, it had been expunged from the stone-bound land, which remained to speak of discord between man and earth.

Once on a bare cliff they came upon a dead fox, as whole as the living animal, no marks of death or violence on it, lying on its side as if in sleep, its fur blown about by the wind.

On Sunday they went to Chysauster. It was a difficult walk, and for part of the way led down a murderous rocky lane. The wind was sharp and naggingly irregular, the sunshine thin and fitful. By the time they arrived they were both bad-tempered, in no mood for abandoned Celtic dwellings. They sat against a low stone wall in the lee of the wind, Mr Stone reckless of his overcoat, and worked through the tea they had brought, the carrying of which had added to their discomfort. From time to time, but never long enough to warm them, the sun came out.

Afterwards, like giants entering the houses of men, they examined the cluster of solid stone hovels. How thick the walls, how clumsy, how little space they enclosed, as though built for people
sheltering from more than the elements! Mr Stone thought of the Monster with her watering can, the nest-building of the Male: this was not their setting. Then he remembered his own Simpson’s coat. He saw himself, a cartoon figure, with knotted club and leopard skin: he could not hold the picture for long. The hovels were indefinably depressing. He wanted to get away.

They had planned to get a bus to St Ives and from there to get another back to Penzance. In the hotel room, with maps and bus time-tables, such an adventurous return had seemed simple enough. But the walk to Chysauster had taken longer than they expected; and now they could not determine where they were. Margaret, proclaiming her stupidity in these matters, left the fixing of their position to him, and with wind and cheating sun his temper was wearing thin again.

Then they saw the fire. Across the dry bare field at the back of the hut-cluster it advanced silently towards them with much clean white smoke.

And they saw they were not alone. To their left, considering the fire and not them, was a very tall, big-boned man in a dark-blue beret and a tattered, unbuttoned army tunic. He looked like a farm labourer. His elongated heavy face was dark red; his eyes were small, the lips puffed and raw.

Mr Stone felt urgently now that they should be off.

‘How do we get to the road for St Ives?’ he asked, and found himself shouting, as though his words would otherwise be overcome by the smoke of the silent fire.

The man in the army tunic didn’t speak. He glanced at them, then started walking briskly away with long-legged strides. Over the wall that separated the huts from the field he went, and along a white path in the field itself, walking into the smoke.

And hurriedly, not willing to lose sight of him, they followed, scrambling over the wall.

The man was disappearing into the smoke.

Mr Stone knew panic.

The man stopped, turned towards them, and was lost in smoke. And they followed.

They heard the low, contented crackle of the fire. Smoke enveloped them. They were robbed of earth and reality. He was robbed of judgement, of the will to act.

Then Margaret’s cry, ‘Doggie!’ recalled him to questioning and fear, and they ran back to the wall, out of the smoke, into the clear open air, to rocks and earth and sky.

Behind the wall they stood, watching the fire. It came right up to the wall and before their eyes burnt itself out. The smoke was dissipated in the air. And it was as if there had been no fire, and all that had happened a hallucination.

Reality was completed by the arrival of a Morris Minor. Mr Stone inquired about the road to St Ives. The new visitors offered a lift to Penzance.

It was only when they were in the car that they saw, not far from the stone huts, the man in the army tunic. He was gazing at the only slightly charred field. He did not look at them.

‘Well, of course,’ the desk-clerk said confidingly, when Margaret gave him an account of the afternoon’s happenings, ‘the thing about Cornwall’—his Birmingham accent prolonging the
g
like a piano pedal—‘is that it is steeped in legend. Positively steeped.’

Mr Stone never doubted that the incident could be rationally and simply explained. But that hallucinatory moment, when earth and life and senses had been suspended, remained with him. It was like an experience of nothingness, an experience of death.

*

They decided to give the Cornwall of legend the miss—the desk-clerk told with relish of a man he knew whose house had been burned down after a visit to Chysauster—and they were helped by the weather, which continued cold, drizzly and uncertain. The day before they left, however, the skies cleared and in the afternoon they went for a walk. Their way led along cliffs which, rimmed with deep
white footpaths, fell to the sea in partial ruin, on a principle of destruction that was easy to comprehend but was on such a scale that the mind could not truly grasp it. It was still cold, and they encountered no more than half a dozen people on the way, among them a man who, to Mr Stone’s satisfaction, was wearing a black city overcoat. Just when they were getting tired and craving for sweet things, they saw a neat sign promising tea fifty yards on.

The establishment was as neat as the sign. A clean white card on each crisp checked tablecloth, a blue cloth alternating with a red, announced the owner as Miss Chichester. Miss Chichester was what her name, her establishment and her card promised. She was middle-aged, stout, with a large bosom. Her brisk manner proclaimed the dignity of labour as a discovery she expected to be universally shared; her accent was genteel without exaggeration; in her dress and discreet make-up there was the hint, that though perhaps widowed and in straitened circumstances, she was not letting herself go.