The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (26 page)

He loathes the memory of this ridiculous father and despicable mother. Still, in his loneliness, there come back strange
remembrances
…. There was a dreadful November morning when the carriages drove to East Ham, and they went through the iron gates of the cemetery and walked through avenues of bitter cold monuments to an oblong hole in the ground, the cold ground, and into this hole two men with ropes let down a box; and in this box lay all that was corruptible of Millie Small. All the men of the family were assembled, darkly dressed, dressed (the bloody hypocrites!) in formal suits. And he, Charles Small—dirtiest hypocrite of all!—swathed in the blackest black, was almost overcome by a mad desire to giggle. And then he saw the old man, stricken, overwhelmed, crushed. The prayer was said—that resonant prayer:

—and the old ones plucked blades of grass, wizened frost-bitten grass, and threw them away, and let running water trickle over their fingers before they left the graveyard. The others seemed remarkably cheerful. Charles remembers that he was very annoyed at this. But on the other hand, you could not blame them. All said and done, what was his mother but a confounded nuisance to everyone with whom she came in contact—hysterical, cowardly, unstable, savage, weak, untruthful, malevolent. She blew hot and cold with the same breath. No doubt she loved her husband and her children; but her love was—sexlessly, of course—an impure love, curiously compounded of vanity, petty pride, hunger to possess, and fear of loss. It was a sort of jealousy—it was akin to hate. What were her virtues? Was she generous? She would give her last penny to a beggar in the street … but at home, if one asked her for a penny to buy chocolate, she would
talk for half an hour about the value of a penny. You might say that after all it was only a penny, but then she would come back with: “If you wanted a piece of bread and was a penny short, would the baker say it’s only a penny?” In the end, of course, you would get your penny. But it felt heavy in your hand, and the chocolate tasted bitter; you ate it guiltily, without appetite, joylessly, thinking all the time of hard shifts and close scrapes, of hands beaded with soapsuds out of the sink, hastily wiped on an apron and fumbling at the catch of a purse, while through the musty house echoed the thudding of the old man’s hammer against the leather of dirty old boots. And while you so dolefully sucked your pitiful little bar of chocolate wishing you had bought marbles instead, some jolly beggar to whom she had graciously given sixpence without argument was cheerfully knocking back a pint of wallop in the nearest pub.

Charles Small wants to be sick. Once, for example, when the old man was hammering his guts out downstairs in Noblett Street, a flower-seller came to the door—a frightful figure of a man, more than six feet tall, with a red nose, a purple face, orange-coloured hair, yellow teeth, and a voice that sounded like a rasp upon leather. “Hoi!” he shouted, and the aspirate made the little shop smell like a beer house. He held out to Mrs. Small a horrible little pot of wilted chrysanthemums, and said: “’Ere y’are, lady, eighteenpence or one of your old man’s old coats.”

Charles Small was brooding solemnly in a corner, because she had just scolded him for asking for sixpence to buy fireworks, for it was early November, the day before Guy Fawkes Day, when the meanest wretch in town lit a cracker or fired a squib in memory of Guido who tried to blow up Parliament. Charles had had a great desire to burn Guy Fawkes in effigy, dancing round a bonfire and singing:

but his mother had reasoned with him severely, telling him that fireworks were a waste of money. You spent a halfpenny for a squib, and where did it get you? Nowhere. One—two—three
—it was all gone in smoke. And what was the use of wasting money on something for everyone else to see? For a halfpenny you could buy a roll of bread—seven rolls for threepence, fresh rolls. And to go and spend sixpence on squibs? Madness! In any case, they were dangerous. Charles pleaded that everybody let off fireworks over the Fifth of November:

—it was History; and what was more, in the ashes of the bonfire the boys baked potatoes.

This, he now realises, was about the most injudicious thing he could possibly have said to Millie Small. What? Potatoes? He didn’t have enough potatoes at home? He had to go out with little ruffians and cook potatoes like a tramp in the ashes and the dirt and come home with goodness knows what diseases? He could have baked potatoes to-morrow. No bonfires. No baked potatoes. No sixpence. No fireworks. They were dangerous.

It was useless to argue. Charles sulked in the shadows of the shop. Then in came the big coster with his musty little pot of dying chrysanthemums, and his beery breath, glaring at her with his great grey bloodshot eyes that looked like oysters caught in little nets of red thread.

“Lovely pot of ’zanths, lady—come on, lovely pot of ’zanths. Eighteenpence or an old coat. Come on!”

She screamed: “Srul!”

The old man came up, mumbling, his mouth full of nails, hammer in hand. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and his cuffs were turned back almost to the armpits. As he stood there, armed with a hammer, scowling over his military moustache, while his mouth bristled with bright iron brads, he might have passed as a terrifying figure. “What the bleddy——” he began.

“Lovely ’zanth. Eighteenpence or an old coat,” said the coster.

Then Charles Small saw that his parents were afraid. The coster had an air of menace. I. Small, that shrewd man of
affairs, said, “A couple of flowers in the house, eh, Millie…. I’ll give you a shilling.”

“Done for a bob!” said the coster, handing over the
flowerpot
and pocketing the shilling.

As soon as he was gone I. Small and his wife turned on each other, suddenly courageous.

“The rates to pay, and so flowers she wants!”

“He calls himself a man! Why didn’t you throw the hooligan out?”

“By her, throwing out holligans is by me a full-time job.”

“You should call a pleeceman.”

“Pleeceman, schmeeseman! Flowers she wants! That’s all she’s short of.”

I. Small went down noisily to his workshop. Soon they heard the noise of his hammer again. “A few flowers for the house,” said Mrs. Small, wrapping the flower pot in red crêpe paper. But the chrysanthemums died that night. There was a terrible scene. Now she is dead, and serve her right. No one was really sorry; no one except I. Small, and he was heartbroken. Why? He never knew an unbroken hour of happiness with that woman. She crossed him at every path, she bedevilled and bewildered him. She humiliated him. She ruined him. Oh, if only Charles Small’s father had hit Charles Small’s mother a good swinging punch on the jaw! But he could only shout and flap about with a torn newspaper; a crushed man.

And so, perhaps, when she died, his heart was broken and his world had come to an end because there was no one at whom he could safely shout and flap; because, remembering all of him that was so ridiculous, everyone was sorry for him. Suddenly, they all became polite to I. Small, and went out of their way to be kind to him. So, by imperceptible degrees, the old man’s world changed, and he was lost. Therefore he clung desperately to what he thought he knew: that is to say, he threw his hooks into his son, Charles Small.

*

To pity and to hate in retrospect: that way madness lies. But Charles Small’s brain is spinning and whining and teetering like a humming-top … like the clockwork humming-top his mother bought him that grey day when she went to visit the Nameless Woman of Chelsea.

She, he had gathered, having long ears, this Nameless Woman, was an abomination of desolations. No decent woman would touch her with a broomstick, for fear of contracting an
unmentionable
disease that caused one to rot away, to fall into paralysis, and to go raving mad. Mrs. Small and her sisters talked of her only in whispers, I. Small, of course, did not whisper. He would break into the
psst-psst-psst
of the women with the buzz-saw cry of a hunting leopard—which was as close as he could get to a
sotto-voce
—saying: “Not in front of the children! That’s what they are! All they can talk about is obstitutes. Not another word! In my house never should nobody mention that woman!”

To this, Lily, the wife of Nathan, the Photographer, said: “You mean prostitute, Srul.”

“Mnyeh!”
said I. Small, stamping out of the room, and dragging Charles after him. Charles, of course, was devoured by curiosity. “What’s an obstitute?” he asked, when they were alone, for I. Small’s male rage had gone in smoke, with a harmless
pop
like a Chinese cracker.

The old man said: “Don’t use such language. It’s … a Bad Woman.”

“Daddy, what does she do?”

I. Small was embarrassed. He said: “Better you shouldn’t know. But touch a Bad Woman, and your head falls off. Enough! Go; be a good boy.”

For some time after that Charles Small wondered about Bad Women. In what way, exactly, was a woman Bad? He had, for example, been called a Bad Boy for playing with matches, for throwing stones, for getting his feet wet, and for losing a pocket handkerchief. Yet his mother and his father did all these things, and more. I. Small could not hang a picture without doing incalculable damage, or strike a match without setting light to the wrong thing. He could not boil a kettle of water without making an explosion, followed by an uproar. Mrs. Small never had a handkerchief—she was always losing them—and she always had a cold because her feet were always wet. They were Good. Then what was Bad? The boy pondered, and remembered one breakfast-time when he cracked an egg and an appalling stench came out. His mother snatched it away, pronouncing it Bad. He arrived at the conclusion that a Bad Woman was in some way comparable to a bad egg, and thereafter he went about sniffing at women. None of them smelled very good to
him—only one, and she was the Bad Woman, the Nameless Woman.

She was a harmless young woman, he recollects, who had been a close friend of the Moss girls, and a frequent visitor at the Moss house, especially on Sundays. Then she fell in love with an Italian, a prosperous dried-fruit merchant, who could not marry her because his wife, a good Catholic, could not divorce him. So they went and lived in sin, in an elegant maisonette in
Kensington
, where he kept her in style. But thereafter the Moss girls shuddered, almost spat, when her name, or rather her
namelessness
, was mentioned in public. Secretly (trust them!) they went out of their way to meet her, the double-faced bitches, and, green with envy at her furs and her jewels, sighed over her fall; and went back to their husbands, full of embittered virtue and vague discontent, thanking God that they were not as she was; wishing to God that they were. Charles Small remembers …

Early one afternoon his mother took him to a shop in Oxford Street to buy him a hat. He wanted a virile tweed cap with a stiff peak. She would not hear of that—rough boys wore caps—and clapped on his head and paid for a hat which, even to this day, when he thinks of it, causes him to dig his nails into his palms, and knot his legs, and groan curses at the ceiling, the whey-coloured ceiling. It was a hat such as could never have been seen before or since—a furry pudding-basin with ear-flaps. On the crown, looking as if it might fall off at any moment, hung a fuzzy knob. Crowning humiliation! Charles Small was hauled out of the shop, crying at the top of his voice … and a pretty spectacle that must have been, with most of his teeth missing! Millie was embarrassed. She threatened him with grievous bodily harm, and in the same breath promised him rich rewards if only he would stop crying. He already knew the value of her threats and her promises, and cried on. Then, in the street, they almost collided with a most beautiful and elegant lady who exclaimed: “Why, Millie!” in an upper-class accent. Then Charles Small’s mother and the lady kissed each other and conversed in undertones, while Charles, informed by some intuition that this was the Bad Woman, licked away some tears from his lip and cautiously sniffed.
If
this
is
a
Bad
Woman,
he thought,
what
does
a
Good
Woman
smell
like?
Recollecting, he guesses that she must have used Opponax, that supposedly aphrodisiac perfume which was so popular in those days … those dead
days unburied that walk, and walk, crying for a good deep grave. The Bad Woman, the Nameless One, took them to a quiet, elegant shop where they had tea and the most exquisite pastries, full of fresh cream and fruit. Charles Small regrets that he was too preoccupied with the confectionery to pay attention to the conversation. But at last, stuffed to the back teeth, he had a very urgent whisper of his own, tugging at his mother’s skirt, so that Millie had to take him away for a minute or two. By the time they had returned the Nameless Woman had paid the bill and was ready to go. She and his mother embraced discreetly. The Nameless Woman (he has not forgotten the pressure of her hands, which were so slender and plump, and yet so strong) snatched him up and kissed him. He can still feel the pleasant roughness of some frill of lace at her bosom … and above all the good, the excellent, the inescapable smell of her….