The Pyramid (20 page)

“You must never, never come into the music room unless I call you in!”

I said I was sorry, humbly enough, and did not mind her anger much this time, what with the light and company; and presently we had our lesson. That same week, Henry Williams moved to Stilbourne. I cannot remember the exact occasion. It was merely the start of a new phase, in which we became aware of him as part of the scenery. At the top of the curved High Street, where it joined our Square by the Town Hall, was the smithy, separated from Bounce’s house by a little lane. A few yards down the lane was a gateway which led into the yard behind the forge. At the back end of the yard was a sort of cowshed with a loft. Henry lived in the loft as if he were a pigeon. Sometimes he helped the blacksmith, sometimes he cleaned Dr. Ewan’s car, or pumped up its tyres with a foot pump. When the market was held under the little Town Hall, Henry would be there among the stalls, helping generally, and generally available. Bounce parked her car in the yard; or rather Henry parked it there for her, since the lane was not ample enough for her manoeuvres. Henry serviced her car too, and cleaned it as if it were the crown jewels, so that it winked and shone. Half-consciously, I thought of Henry as belonging to Bounce because she treated him like that. She would stand in
the yard between a heap of rusting iron and a tangle of nettles and talk loudly about the car as he cleaned it—talk gruffly from two yards away, but at the same time kindly, jovially, as if the car were a living thing and she was stroking it. Henry would work submissively and nod, until Bounce turned abruptly and bounced back to her house.

I could not understand my mother’s pitying amusement. Why should not Miss Dawlish be devoted to her car? I should have been just as devoted in her place. But—and this was impossible to understand at all—my mother did not seem to like Henry. I on the other hand liked him very much and ultimately felt this to be another of my deficiencies. He would talk to me as I watched him, in his lilting voice, and he treated me with courteous respect. If he met me when he came to the dispensary for cough mixture, he always called me “Master Oliver”, tussing slightly.

When the yard behind the smithy altered between one week and the next—acquired shiny tools, vats of oil and cans of petrol—and I described this new triumph of Henry’s with excitement my mother cut me off.

“Pooh! I haven’t any patience!”

Despite the death of her father, possession of a car seemed to make Bounce herself more amiable. She slept more soundly on the organ seat, her mouth lax and mobile as a baby’s. She even evolved a joke which we were accustomed to share from lesson to lesson. I had a new set of violin exercises by some foreigner called Kummer. The coincidence of my late arrival one evening and the arrival of this green volume with
KUMMER
on the front did it.

“I shall call you ‘Kummer’,” she said, “because you don’t come!”

She shook and cawed on the organ seat. After that, she would call me nothing else and we had many a good laugh together. When the vicar found us one day by the railing before the bow window, she got him to share our joke.

“I call him Kummer because—”

At the end of this term, however, she astonished me as much as she had ever done in her life. I was ten and had just begun at the local Grammar School. I carried a half-size violin now, which I played just as badly as the quarter-size one. I went to her front door, hearing from the yard Henry’s click! clink! though the blacksmith had shut down for the night and gone over to the Feathers. I tapped at the music room door and Bounce was ready for me, because she spoke at once, though softly.

“Come in, Kummer!”

I went in, and found myself with my nose a yard from her shirt front. I was opposite one of the pearly buttons on the band or front facing, whatever it was, down the middle. This in itself was a change, for I was used to seeing the brown tie there. But there was more to come. On either side, between the band and the shirt proper, there was now a frill of white and scalloped muslin. Her hands were raised; and more scalloped muslin projected from inside each cuff. As my eye followed the decorated band up to her neck, I discovered that the brooch now lay in a nest of frills where the knot of her tie had been; so in my astonishment I looked up to her face. It had softened and brightened mysteriously—a face if not young, at least with a hint, a memory of youth, of girlhood. Even her hair had flowered out of its severity, was enlarged and cloudy. Her eyes—but it did not take them long to read the incredulity in mine. Her lips sucked in their surround of wrinkles, the hollows defined themselves beneath each cheek bone; and for the first and last time in my experience of them, a round, pink flush appeared on each. As I watched, this flush spread, over her face till she was dusky from forehead to throat. She went abruptly to the piano so that I could tune my violin, left me with a scale to play, then positively—her face turned away—rushed out of the room. When she came back, her face was its usual pale yellow and quite unqualified by frills. She was severe and very critical of my playing. I never saw the frills again.

For not long after this our whole situation altered. I was coming back from buying sweets in the High Street and stopped as usual to see if Henry was in his yard. This was always a matter of some anxiety for me since my mother did not approve of my pestering him. My time there had a feeling of forbidden fruit which as usual made it even more attractive. Sometimes, if he happened to be cleaning a car he would talk while I stood; and he would tell me for example what a sump was, or why tyres had patterns on them. But on this occasion Henry was not alone. There was a tall, blonde woman with him, a woman pale, adenoidal and gormless, who stood at the bottom of the ladder up to the loft with a baby in her arms. She was arguing with him.

“Well I’m not going to, see? It’s no good, Henry. I got to have stairs!”

I went away with my sweets while Henry was replying liquidly. The blonde and the baby were Henry’s quite unforeseen wife and child. I envied them very much, for it seemed a wonderful thing to me not to have a proper house but to camp in the loft like Gipsies. As for Bounce, I cannot tell down what chasms of humiliation and bitterness she was thrown or threw herself.

“Poor soul!” said my mother, laughing and shaking her head pityingly. “You’d never believe it, would you?”

“Believe what, Mother?”

But my mother went on laughing and shaking her head. This was a most exhilarating time for everyone; and I shared the exhilaration without understanding its source, perhaps on the unconscious principle that one should get any enjoyment that was going. But just when the exhilaration was lifted to a new height I found myself alone in the enjoyment of it. For only a few weeks after Mary Williams turned up with baby Jacky, they all three moved into the big house and shared it with Bounce. This made me particularly happy, gave me the peace of exorcism and I no longer dreamed of the long
corridor
and the empty rooms for I knew that Henry lived in them. Now, when I took a bottle of tonic across for Mary’s anaemia, I did not turn right into the music room but left, down into the yard beside the kitchen and scullery with a glimpse of a long, unkempt garden; and there would be a pram on the flagstones with Jacky squealing in it and an invisible Mary clattering dishes. Yet my mother did not share my peace and happiness. She was unaccountably bitter when she spoke of Henry, and exasperated when she spoke of Bounce. I could not understand precisely how I was to adjust my attitude in this matter. When I was not in Bounce’s presence I imitated my mother; and got an astonishing rebuke from Henry of all people. I took my bicycle into his yard one day to have the handlebars firmed up, and I spoke about Bounce as if he and I and all of us were on one side of a fence, and she on the other, with the Stilbourne eccentrics. He looked up at me out of a face smudged with oil, and with eyes swimming as ever in glycerine.

“Indeed,” he said, “Miss Dawlish is a dear, kind lady.”

So I stood, silent and blushing a little.

My father acquired a primitive wireless set and a little later, a gramophone. I began to understand what music might be, and what playing might be. Kreisler, Paderewski, Cortot, Casals—despite the hiss from the clumsy discs, despite the permanent frying crackle and bursts of morse from the headphones of the wireless set, music came through. But Bounce—when I tried to share this new happiness with her—attacked my father, attacked me, with a savage
indignation
.

“
Why
has your father done this, Oliver? He’s supposed to
like
music! I would never,
never
listen to anything so cheap, nasty, vulgar, blasphemous—”

I stood, nodding and smiling, in a half-embarrassed,
half-ingratiating
way and hoped only that she would stop. There came a knock at the music room door; and after her exit I heard her shouting.

“I must
not
be interrupted, Mary, when I’m teaching! Very well. I’ll have the steak and kidney warmed up.”

Indeed, we were changing, all of us. Bounce was becoming more manly and abrupt, less elastic in stride, and a little fatter. With Henry and Mary she was rough, proprietary. Sometimes she would refer to them as ‘My family’. Henry had changed too. He was solider. Instead of the shiny blue serge and peaked cap, he sometimes wore an overcoat and trilby, like the other business men of the town. As for me, I was becoming devious, secretive and cynical. It was a generation later that I discovered, on looking back,
why
I felt myself to be full of dishonesty and guilt. As for Mary Williams, she simply became more faded, more adenoidal; and sourer. Once, when I took over her bottle of tonic, and let myself into the yard, I saw Bounce standing on the
flagstones
and Mary Williams akimbo in the doorway of the scullery. They were both talking loudly at the same time; and then Mary raised her voice in a kind of whining scream that came through loud and clear.

“All I say is, Auntie Cis, I got to have my kitchen!”

Then they saw me, standing by the door from the hall, holding out the bottle. There was silence, except for Jacky, who threw a rattle out of his chair and made a loud remark.

“Bub! Bub!”

I delivered the tonic without a word said, and went away in the silence.

Once, when I sat in the dicky seat of her car—we were going over to Calne, to play and sing in the Elijah—Bounce and Henry were sitting in front. The hood was down and I halfheard a long, muttered conversation, which built up to the point where Henry cried out vehemently.

“No, Auntie Cis! It’s not like that at all, at all!”

After more mutter, he spoke out clearly again.

“But then, like you always say, you got your music.”

“—Kummer, there in the back—”

She slewed in her seat and shouted at me.

“Don’t you think, Kummer?”

“What, Miss Dawlish?”

“Can’t you hear what we’re saying?”

“What d’you say, Miss Dawlish? I can’t hear you. The wind makes so much noise—”

A devious child; but I had my music too. For I had
discovered
the emotional confirmations and enlargements of music, not as a supposition, but as a fact of experience; and though I still endured the violin I had fallen in love with the piano and was bashing the last use out of our tinny upright. I had heard more music than Bounce already and realized the limitations of her musical world. It is worth considering what those limitations were. Her great occasions were
inaccurate
and not very lively performances of St. Paul, the Messiah, the Elijah, some Stanford, and Stainer’s Crucifixion every Easter. For the rest, it was Heller, Kummer, Matthay’s Relaxation Exercises, with Hymns Ancient and Modern on Sundays. As for me, I could only just bear—because it was inevitable—the contrast between my ingratiating exterior and the unvoiced thoughts and unanalysable feelings that flittered behind it as twice a week I passed my useless half-hour.

“I don’t know what Oliver would do, without Miss
Dawlish
. He’s
so
devoted to her—”

And I would think, confusedly, next time I hid behind my nods and smiles and listened to a diatribe about the
Stravinsky
she had never heard—

“This
is
what
devotion
feels
like.”

She was broad now, her hair escaping sometimes from the bun behind the flat hat. She had acquired two gold teeth on one side that gleamed if she gave one of her no-nonsense laughs, in man-to-man jolliness. The pram was occupied now by Jacky’s little sister.

“Come and look at my little niece. Ouji-ouji cluck, cluck! This is Kummer, Di. I call him Kummer because—”

But one dreadful time, waiting for my lesson in the dark hall I heard her voice from the stairs, not manly but earnest and ludicrously pleading—

“All I want is for you to need me, need me!”

Indeed, my fading lessons on the violin were interrupted more and more frequently. It was not the rows that seemed to blow up daily in the old house, nor even the elaborate reconciliations. These did not interrupt my playing; they merely delayed it. The real trouble was the noise, sometimes rhythmically nagging, sometime suddenly shattering, that came from outside the house. It came from what had once been the yard and smithy next door, now turned as cheaply as possible into a workshop garage for Henry. Here were Dunlop advertisements, and old inner tubes hanging on the whitewashed walls like drying octopuses. Here were oil cans, oil drums, a compressor, a workbench and the few enigmatic instruments that were necessary to Henry’s mechanical surgery. The whole place had the shine of oily dirt that comes with internal combustion.

I was, I remember, demonstrating my comparative ability to cope with the second position. Bounce was sitting on the long organ seat. Her square shoes were on the organ pedals, her tweed skirt and jacket hairy in the gaslight. As I played, her full chest swayed forward, her head dropped a little and her eyes closed. I was thankful and played carefully to her shut eyes and the unconscious sphincter movements of her mouth—