The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (45 page)

—and had to blow his nose into his white beard.

He was so outraged on that occasion that he challenged Moggs to a fight; but when Moggs said: “All right, come on then,” he backed out. But he was always addicted to false beards, false man that he was. In
The
Tempest
he insisted on the part of Prospero, mainly because the Magician had to
wear a beard eighteen inches llong.

Here, Priscilla came in. She had insinuated herself into the good graces of everyone in the Dramatic Society and, when she asked if she could have a go at Ariel, she was received with enthusiasm by everyone but Charles Small. He knew in his heart that she would steal the show. And so she did. When she sang the song that ends:

her voice was so silvery, and she had such an air of having put on the incorruptible, and drifted so like gossamer, that there was a burst of applause. And when Charles, stroking his beard in the region of his navel, said:

he sounded just like the old man. All he needed was the
Jewish
Chronicle,
rolled-up, to swat this fairy. When he called her his “
tricky spirit
”, he made a noise like I. Small after a bad bargain: he nearly called her a bleddy tricky spirit. And when he said:
“
Now my charms are all o’erthrown
,” he meant it. It was the only decent line he delivered in the play. Moggs played Caliban, walking on all fours and dressed in coconut matting. An aged man (he was not a day under thirty) played the drunken Stephano. He was, in fact, blind drunk, and was loudly applauded. His name was Gooch, and he was the stage-struck son of a notoriously wealthy ironmonger of the district. He had a car, a Renault; a pocketful of pound-notes, and a dissipated air: Priscilla took to him like a duck to water. And water he was. She paddled delicately upon the rippling surface of him, dived to the depths of him to spoon up his basic content, and left him disconsolate and disturbed with nothing but the memory of a waggling wet tail that sprinkled him with rejected drops of himself, making more ripples—ripples that did not soon leave the surface of him.

Charles Small remembers that it was Priscilla, the little bitch (would to God he had had only a few feet of her guts!), who brought Ivy Narwall into his miserably frustrated life.

Here, again, was where Solly Schwartz came in. Love and admiration aside, how deeply Charles Small wishes that the
hunchback
had never been born! For Solly Schwartz smashed Narwall, who came to London with his family. His wife could not face the sneers of Slupworth—the sneers of the people she despised, who had good cause to hate her. She went south with her head high, giving the porter sixpence for carrying six heavy trunks. The Narwalls travelled first class—she took it out of the
housekeeping
later on—and established themselves in London. They were still well-to-do, but they were now mere retailers; they manufactured nothing. They held no tradesmen by the short hair. Public demand compelled them, indeed, to lay in
considerable
stocks of American canned products through Schwartz, who had the agency. Mrs. Narwall had nothing to do, no one to intrigue against, only Ivy to dominate, because the elder daughter, Sybil, got married.

And there again,
God
have
mercy
on
the
old
cow,
there again was dust and ashes! Sybil took after her mother. She had a hard head and a hard face. She had been engaged to be married to a decent young fellow from the Midlands, an engineer with prospects. His name was Dunkerton. One day Dunkerton got his left leg caught in some machinery. They stopped the machine when the teeth of the cogs had chewed him up to the thigh, so that his leg had to come off, and he was a sad-looking creature with his
skinny white face and his crutches. Sybil, beautiful and proud, told Dunkerton that she could never marry a cripple. (In
Slupworth
, old jokes were resuscitated; e.g.,
She
heard
he
had
a
wooden
leg
and
so
she
broke
it
off.
)
Then Sybil married a motor-car
salesman
who turned out to be a rotter, and led her the devil of a life. His name was Glass; he gave her a black eye; but she stayed by him, out of vanity rather than affection, until he took her to South Africa with their child, who, curiously enough, had one leg shorter than the other, or longer than the other.

Old Narwall ran about from shop to shop, making everyone’s life a burden. Lumpitt was so delighted at Narwall’s discomfiture that he got drunk, and was sacked. He called on Solly Schwartz in a contrite mood and asked for a job, and was given a
five-pound
note and told to go and take a flying leap at himself and never to show his face again. Mrs. Narwall, having nothing else to do, took to drink. She decanted her gin into medicine bottles and took it out of a tablespoon. Old Narwall, although he
sometimes
raised his eyebrows at the grocery bills, had not the courage to protest. He took it out on Ivy. So did the old woman. Between them, they bewildered and bedevilled the girl until, one night, she swallowed five aspirin tablets, hoping that she might die. She had heard that aspirin was bad for the heart. It didn’t work—in fact she felt somewhat better afterwards.

Mrs. Narwall and her husband took to following each other up and down the house, spying, peeping, turning off the gas, counting match-sticks and sheets of toilet-paper. Mrs. Narwall was mad with pride—she dressed opulently always—and Narwall was mad with fear, fear of poverty. Both of them were eaten up with avarice, although, at that time, they must have been making more than three thousand pounds a year—which was a great deal of money in those days.

One day old Narwall said to Ivy: “Ivy, there is no room in this world for idle hands. You must go to Harrison’s Business College, and learn short-hand and typewriting. You must put your nose to the grindstone.”

“Yes, Father,” said Ivy.

A week later I. Small suggested—poor fool—that Priscilla ought to go into the millinery business; he had a customer who was a milliner. Then it was Millie Small’s turn to speak, and by Christ she spoke! … Oh, so that’s what he was, was it? Milliners, already! He was only waiting for her to die, so that
he could fiddle about with milliners. It was quite all right. As long as she knew. Milliners! But while she lived, the girl should be a florist. What were milliners? Nothing!

In the end there was a conference with Nathan, the
Photographer
. He, putting fingertip to fingertip, said: “Millinery is millinery.”

No one denied this.

He continued: “What is millinery? Hats. There are milliners in Paris who make hats for eight, ten pounds a time. But is this Paris? No. You’ve got to be a person of … of reputation to make money out of millinery. You must have talent. You must have …
khine
—taste!”

I. Small said: “Milliner, schmilliner—you see, Millie?”

Nathan, the Photographer, continued: “Then again, florists …”

“… Schmorists,” said I. Small.

“Florists. Now the florists’ business is, is—precarious. How long does a flower last? I ask you. Ask yourself.”

“Like a bleddy firework,” said I. Small.

“Exactly,” said Nathan, the Photographer. “Flowers, they come up, they pass away. It takes push, it takes drive, above all it takes capital to be a florist. You buy tulips. Tulips, all right. So-much a dozen to-day. To-morrow? Where are your tulips? Or say roses. A bud to-day and gone to-morrow. So much money down the drain. Let her learn short-hand—that’ll do her more good.”

I. Small nodded. Priscilla said: “I’m going to be a dancer.”

“Bleddy-well short-hand,” said I. Small.

So Priscilla went to Harrison’s Business College, saying over her shoulder: “All the same, I’m going to be a dancer.”

As a pupil she did not amount to much, but at Harrison’s she met Ivy Narwall, who adored her, and whom she dragged to the Dramatic Society, where Charles Small fell in love with her.

*

Pondering these matters, Charles Small, whose empty stomach is trying to digest itself, undergoes such convulsions of disgust at the sour taste of himself that he vomits into the
chamber-pot
; but out of his empty self nothing emerges but pale green foam. He can’t even vomit properly—even in this he is
frustrated
, poor sod. It is not merely the memory of his disgraceful behaviour at the railway station, when he ran away and left Ivy
at the mercy of her terrible mother. There are other things with which he must reproach himself; other cowardices,
unforgivable
weaknesses galore.

He remembers, with agony, what Ivy told him when they met again many years later. Mrs. Narwall had dragged her home ignominiously through the smoky streets, so impatient to get her hands on the girl that she actually spent sixpence for
tram-fare
instead of walking to her suburb as she would normally have done. Having pushed Ivy into her bedroom and shut the door, she threw her face-down on the bed, pulled down her drawers (durable, respectable blue serge drawers with a detachable cotton lining) and beat her on the bottom with a heavy clothes brush until her arm was tired. And Mrs. Narwall had an arm like a stevedore, a good fourteen inches round the biceps. Having got her breath, she let loose a torrent of vituperation such as Ivy had never heard before. Probably Mrs. Narwall had picked it up from her grandfather, a drunken tackier, a murderous brute from whom she had inherited her mighty arms. Slut,
streetwalker
, fly-by-night, common prostitute, whore, and Jezebel were among the milder of her epithets. Then, her arm being rested, she went to work again with the clothes brush, until Ivy’s tender bottom was purple with bruises, and bleeding in two places. Even then she would not have desisted, only the girl’s shrieks grew so loud and vibrated with such pain that neighbours called a policeman. Ivy fainted. Mrs. Narwall locked her in her room, where she was incarcerated for a week. She was beaten every day, she told Charles, with the clothes brush, a hair brush, and a cane, and fed on bread and water, until even Mr. Narwall was moved to say: “For goodness’ sake, woman, enough!”

Then Ivy tossed for a week in a high fever, so that a doctor had to be called in—another five shillings down the drain. He was a drunken old failure with a frayed collar, dirty cuffs and grubby hands, reeking of whisky and shag tobacco. He
prescribed
what he called a Cooling Medicine. Then—this was worst of all—Mrs. Narwall made him examine Ivy to ascertain that she was still a virgin. She was, of course: Charles Small, that milky little man, was far too timorous for that kind of thing. When Ivy was healed and, red-eyed with weeping, began to creep about the house again, her spirit—such as it was—forever broken, Mrs. Narwall said: “Let that be a lesson to you, you bad girl! Running off like a prostitute with a dirty Jew!” She
could not forget Solly Schwartz, who had been the ruin of the Narwalls in Slupworth. “A nasty little Jew-boy. Thank your lucky stars, my girl, that you’ve a mother that knows what’s good for you. He jewed you all right—ran like a rabbit and left you standing. Now, my girl, you’ll do as you’re bid. You shall marry Jack Squire.”

“Yes, Mother,” said Ivy.

“And until you do, you don’t set foot out of this house if I have to kill you, you little prostitute, and thank your lucky stars for your mother who takes care of you, because if it wasn’t for her you’d be ruined by now. Say ‘Thank you, Mother.’”

“Thank you, Mother,” said Ivy.

“You’ll marry Jack Squire then.”

Ivy fished up one last chewed-out fibre of courage, and,
bursting
into tears, said: “But please, please, Mother—I don’t like him!”

“You will marry Jack Squire, my girl, if I have to kill you first. I’ll make a respectable woman of you, whether you like it or lump it. There!” She picked up a rolling-pin.

Ivy cringed and said: “Yes, Mother, yes, I’ll marry Jack Squire; I’ll do anything you tell me to do, only please don’t beat me any more because I can’t bear it.”

“Right!” said Mrs. Narwall, and went back to her task of rolling pastry. She was making a steak-and-kidney pie, with precious little steak in it.

This Jack Squire was
persona
grata
with the Narwall family. Ivy loathed him; he set her teeth on edge. She did not like the way he looked at her; she shuddered at the lustfulness of his eyes and the looseness of his constantly-licked lips that belied the unctuous piety of his conversation. He was well known and highly respected among the Congregationalists; dressed in black; was inclined, at forty, to a certain rotundity, a chubbiness which Ivy found revolting. He made an excellent living as agent for a great Lancashire cotton manufacturer and, having worked his way up from the position of junior salesman, had acquired a habit of jocularity—very proper jocularity—what he called “rational enjoyment”. He neither drank nor smoked. He contended that if God had intended him to smoke He would have put a
chimney-pot
on top of his head. This was his idea of a joke. There was that about him which made Ivy’s blood run cold. Whenever he came to the house he shook hands with her, and his hand-clasp
lingered—it seemed to last for hours—it was like taking hold of a squid. He lost no opportunity of brushing against her or touching her, for he was, as the saying goes, “sweet” on her. Ivy told Charles, when they met again, that the very sight of him made her physically sick. But her detestation of Jack Squire, deep-rooted as it was, was not so powerful as her deadly, ineradicable fear of her mother and her father. So, pliable little thing that she was, she married Jack Squire. She cried at the wedding, thinking (the irony of it!) of the lean, lively, passionate Romeo that was Charles Small; of the noble Othello that was Charles Small; of the powerful and sinister Macbeth that was Charles Small. On her wedding night she locked herself in a cupboard, but had to come out for lack of air. Jack Squire was waiting….