The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book (38 page)

What did the man say, from the mound of rags on the bed?

‘Going to put you up for the MCC.’

The story shocked and frightened Mr Stone. It awakened all the unease which he had lost sight of since joining Welfare, which he had submerged in the creation of the Unit, in the thrill of authorship and the savouring of his good fortune.

It was not one of the stories he told Margaret. And it was no consolation that evening to be in his own brightened home, where everything spoke of newness and the possibility of rapid change, where the bedroom with the green lampshade could become a prison. Its mustiness was again unfamiliar and threatening.

He was glad when morning came and he could get away to the office.

From his gloom he was rescued by Whymper, on whom the story of the Prisoner of Muswell Hill—as the newspapers later called the affair—had had an altogether stimulating effect. He too was shocked and horrified, but his fury was translated into energy, into a desire, as he said, ‘to shame the country which permits this sort of thing to happen’.

‘This is too big and disgraceful for
Oyez! Oyez!,’
he said. ‘I think we should call in the Press.’

Mr Stone wished to dissociate himself from Whymper’s zeal. He saw the advantages of publicity, but at the same time he feared, as he
had feared the previous evening to reveal anything to Margaret, to publicize a humiliation which was so close to them all, a humiliation which rendered the threatened more vulnerable.

But he didn’t say this. He only said, what Whymper expected him to say, ‘I think we should move cautiously. I think this is a matter for higher authority.’

And Whymper agreed, not as one who had had an unexpectedly easy success but as one who out of deference and a desire for harmony was accepting a brake on his enthusiasm.

Once again it was as though unspoken words lay between them.

Higher authority was approached; higher authority was approving; and the story was given to the Press. In this way the Knights Companion scheme came to the notice of the public. The story was released in time for the Sundays, and there was enough interest for follow-up stories to appear in the dailies, national and provincial. The local Muswell Hill paper, whose posters, while photographers and reporters were in the area, proclaimed nothing more exciting than ‘Boy, 11, Bitten by Alsatian’, had solider fare for its readers.

In the commendations that followed, both from within Excal and without, Mr Stone found himself rejoicing. The Unit had established itself; its future was assured; the crusade would go on. He fended off congratulations by saying they had had a lot of luck. Whymper said as much. And Mr Stone revealed to Tomlinson and Tomlinson’s friends the high-level discussions that had taken place before they had ‘released the story’—speaking the words as one who had earned the right to speak them—to the Press.

*

Some time later Mr Stone travelled north on business. He took the opportunity to visit the Yorkshire asylum, called a hospital, where the daughter of the Prisoner of Muswell Hill was lodged. The Prisoner himself had died shortly after his release. The daughter had been freed of her fur coat and cats. She missed neither. She was entirely harmless and was allowed to look after the room of one
of the doctors. Every morning she presented him with a bouquet of flowers from the hospital gardens. Every day she bought two sweets from the canteen. One she kept for herself, the other for a person she was unwilling to name. For this person she looked all morning. She did not find him. Then sadly she gave the sweet to the staff nurse.

W
ITH THIS SUCCESS
there came a change in Mr Stone’s attitude to Whymper. Nothing was said, and their relationship continued as before, but Mr Stone found himself more and more reassessing Whymper. He found himself studying Whymper’s face and mannerisms, attempting to see them as if for the first time, and he wondered how he had come to suppress his initial distaste, how he had managed to feel affection for Whymper, to enjoy his obscene laugh and obscene jokes (Whymper on the types of fart, Whymper on the types of female walk), his puns (‘equal pay for equal shirk’), the aphorisms (‘soup is the best substitute for food I know’) which were probably not his own, the violence of his socialist-fascist political views. He felt he had been made a fool of by Whymper and had succumbed to the man’s professional charm. In these moods he was unwilling to concede honesty to any of Whymper’s actions. He saw only that his own folly and softness were complementary to Whymper’s cleverness and ruthlessness.

Of all this he told Margaret nothing. She and Whymper had become great friends. For Whymper’s benefit Margaret had extended her party manner: she dropped daring words and was ‘unshockable’. She gauged Whymper well. They enjoyed one another’s jokes, and each rejoiced that to the other he was a ‘character’.

Nor could Mr Stone tell Margaret of his irritation, annoyance, and in some moments his anguish, to find, as he thought, that Whymper was ‘riding to success on his back’. These were the words that came to his mind, and they created a picture of almost biblical pitifulness: a lusty, fat-cheeked young man on the back of someone
very old, very thin, in rags, supporting his feebleness on a staff. Mr Stone could no longer hide from himself his displeasure at finding their names, Whymper and Stone, coupled so frequently. Always in such items in the house magazine it was Whymper who was quoted, so that over the months it had begun to appear that Whymper was the Unit. His own contribution, his passion and anguish had gone for nothing, had gone to magnify Whymper. Out of his life had come this one idea; for this single creation his life had been changed for good, perhaps destroyed. And it had gone to magnify Whymper, young Whymper, whose boast was that he made nothing.

Yet with this there remained the concern for Whymper that had grown out of their relationship, a concern that was almost parental and at times was like pity. Between what Whymper saw himself to be and what he was the gap was too great. His attempts at smartness were pathetic. His clothes were good; he wore them badly. He tapped his cigarette with such careful elegance; when the cigarette came out from between his bruised lips it was wet and disagreeable to see. Attempting authority, he frequently only invited rebuff; and though he seemed always half to expect rebuff, he had never learned to handle it. And like a reproach to Mr Stone was Whymper’s growing and often proclaimed affection for Margaret and himself, an affection for which, in spite of everything, Mr Stone found that he was grateful and pleased, and perhaps a little surprised, for in the office their relationship continued to be formal.

About himself Whymper spoke continually, but about his family he had little to say. He was a Londoner. His father still lived in Barnet, but when Whymper spoke of him it was as of someone far away and unimportant. His mother he never mentioned. He was a man without a family, someone who belonged only to the city. As secret as his parents he kept his house. He seldom spoke of it except to indicate that it was fully owned by him. All his important activities appeared to take place outside it, and Margaret and Mr Stone began to feel that his house was not a place to which Whymper invited anyone. They were both surprised, then, when one evening after dinner
he said, ‘I just can’t keep on eating this muck of Margaret’s. You must come and have dinner with me, just to see what can be done with food.’

His house was Kilburn, on that side of the High Road which gave him a Hampstead telephone number. It was an undistinguished terrace house with no garden. Whymper lived on the ground floor; the basement and other floors he rented out. Margaret and Mr Stone sat in the front room while Whymper busied himself in the kitchen, which was at the end of the hallway, on the landing of the basement stairs. The front room was roughly and sparsely furnished. There was a type of buff-coloured matting on the floor. The two armchairs were perfunctorily modern, their simplicity already turned to shabbiness. A bullfighting poster, dusty at the top, was fixed with yellowing adhesive tape to one wall; the other walls were bare. The bookcase was a jumble of paperbacks, old newspapers and copies of
Esquire, Time
and the
Spectator;
separate from this was a neat shelf of green Penguins. To Margaret and Mr Stone, who had expected something grander, something more in keeping with Whymper’s clothes, the room spoke of loneliness. While they sat waiting, they heard footsteps in the hall and on the stairs: Whymper’s tenants.

He brought in the food plate by plate. His plates and dishes had been chosen with greater care than his furniture. The first thing he offered was a plateful of cold sliced beef below a thick layer of finely chipped lettuce, cabbage, carrots, capsicums and garlic, all raw. Then he brought out a tall, slender bottle.

‘Olive oil,’ he said.

Margaret let a few drops fall onto her plate.

‘It isn’t going to explode,’ he said, taking the bottle away from her. ‘Like this.’ He poured with a slow, circular motion. ‘Go on. Eat it up.’ He did the same for Mr Stone, then went out to the kitchen.

Margaret and Mr Stone sat silently in the dim light, staring at the plates on their napkined knees.

‘You remember during the war,’ Whymper said, coming back, ‘how those starving Poles didn’t have nice white bread like ours and
were living on
black
bread? It’s just ten times as good as our cotton wool, that’s all. Don’t have a
slice,
Margaret. Break off a hunk. None of your fish-and-chips graces tonight, dear. Have some butter with it. You too, Stone.’

They broke off hunks.

He left them again.

‘What are we going to do, Doggie?’

He returned with a label-less bottle of yellow fluid.

‘Don’t wait for me,’ he said. He filled three tumblers. ‘This used to be a great wine-drinking country. Today you people with your one bottle of Beaujolais think it’s something you sip. What do you think of that, Stone? It’s the resin that gives it the flavour.’

He sat opposite them. ‘Mm!’ he said, sniffing at his plate with mock disgust. ‘Those dirty foreigners, eating all this garlic and grease. Where’s the tomato ketchup?’ He started champing through his chipped grass and olive oil, drinking retsina, biting at his hunk of black bread, and maintained a steady flow of cheerful talk, mainly about food, while they nibbled and sipped.

Afterwards they had biscuits with brie and camembert. And then he gave them turkish coffee out of a long-handled, shining copper jug.

They returned home extremely hungry, but feeling extraordinarily affectionate towards the ridiculous young man. A day or two later they were agreeing that the dinner was ‘just like Whymper’.

And it was as though, having invited Mr Stone to his home, he had decided that there was no longer to be any reserve between them. Now they often had lunch together, Whymper initiating Mr Stone into the joys of traveling about London by taxi in the middle of the day at Excal’s expense. And Mr Stone was subjected to Whymper’s confessions.

It turned out in the first place that Whymper had a ‘mistress’. He used the word with a tremendous casualness. She was a radio actress whose name Mr Stone knew only vaguely but which for Whymper’s
sake he pretended to know very well. Whymper spoke of her as a public figure, and was full of stories of her sexual rapacity. It appeared that food had a disturbing effect on her. Once, according to Whymper, when they were in a restaurant she had suddenly abandoned her main course, picked up her bag and said, ‘Pay the bill and let’s go home and—’

‘She tears the clothes off you,’ Whymper added.

Mr Stone regretted encouraging Whymper, for Whymper’s talk became increasingly of sex. The details he gave of his actress mistress were intimate and embarrassing. And once, after a dinner at the Stones’, he said of Gwen, ‘I feel that if I squeeze that girl she will ooze all sorts of sexual juices.’

Overwhelmed by the word ‘mistress’ and by Whymper’s talk, Mr Stone was beginning to doubt that the actress existed, when Whymper arranged a meeting one lunchtime in a pub. (‘Daren’t give her lunch,’ Whymper said.) She was, disappointingly, over thirty, with a face that was overpowdered, lips that were carelessly painted, and teary eyes. She gave an impression of length: her face was thin and long, she had no bust to speak of, and her bottom, long rather than broad, hung very low. There was nothing of the actress, as Mr Stone had imagined the type, about her, either in looks or voice. He could not imagine her tearing the clothes off anyone, but he was glad that she was sufficiently excited by Whymper to wish to tear off his clothes; and he was glad that Whymper was sufficiently excited by her to permit this. Towards them both he felt paternal: he thought they were lucky to find one another.

‘She’s a very charming person,’ he said afterwards.

And Whymper said: ‘I can put my head between her legs and stay there for hours.’

He spoke with an earnestness that was like sadness. And thereafter the sight of Whymper rolling a cigarette between his lips always brought back this unexpected, frightening, joyless sentence.

After this meeting, Mr Stone heard nothing of the actress for
some time. Instead Whymper let drop talk, disconnected and vague, as though the humiliations were still close, of his childhood and army experiences. ‘We were listening to the Coronation on the wireless, with some of my mother’s friends. And I was quite big, you know. My mother said, “Come and look, Bill. They’re coming down the street.” And I went and looked. I went. They all roared with laughter. I could have killed her.’ ‘They say the army makes a man. It nearly broke me. You know the old British soldier. “Terribly” stupid and “frightfully” brave. I was neither.’

Sometimes he kept up a running commentary of contempt on everything he saw. This could be amusing. Once, just as they turned into a street, he said, ‘Look at that idiot.’ And before them, as though conjured up by Whymper’s words, was a man in bloated motorcyclist’s garb, the low-hanging seat of which was stained with monkeylike markings. There were days when the sight of black men on the London streets drove him to fury; he spent the whole of one lunchtime walk loudly counting those he saw, until both he and Mr Stone burst out laughing. But these midday walks with Whymper also had their embarrassments. Well-dressed women with their daughters infuriated him as much as black men; and once, when they were behind such a couple on a traffic island at Oxford Circus, Mr Stone heard him mutter, ‘Get out of the way, you old bitch.’ He frequently muttered abuse like this in crowds. But this time he had spoken too loudly. The woman turned, gave him a slow look of deep contempt, at which he seemed to cringe; and the depression that came upon him persisted until they returned to the office.