The Woman Who Had Imagination (21 page)

He repeated them and put up the receiver. A moment later the newsboys were crowding at the door, he was setting up the type in the rubber-stamp and stamping the horses' names in violet letters in the stop-press columns. Voices clamoured and swore and urged him to hurry. He stamped frenziedly and dealt out the papers. Excited feet clattered noisily on the iron-rimmed stairs. ‘What won? Volcano. Millenium also ran. Volcano won. Millennium also ran.' Little by little the voices faded away downstairs.

When the last of the papers had been stamped and dealt out he sat alone. The voices crying the papers came up from the streets outside, rising and falling, shrill and inarticulate. He had never been able to tell what they said. Now though he listened carefully their words still eluded him. And he sat there long after they had died away, the memory of their inarticulate sound persisting in his mind like the clamour of voices crying to be understood.

Phoebe Bonner stood watching the sunset over the roofs of London. She was frying a kipper over the gas-ring in one of the two rooms which the Bonners rented at the top story of Pope's Buildings, and though her eyes were fixed on the sunset her mind was far away. She was thinking of the country and the kind of sunset she had grown up to see there. The sunsets in London were mere obscure reflections of the lovely sunsets in the country, brilliant crimson seas of light and waves of phosphorescent gold and clouds of purple riding behind black pine trees.

She turned the kipper with a fork; the fat hissed and a rank odour filled the room. She was fifteen, a thin straight-haired girl with bright black eyes; her clothes were very tight and her body, having no room in them, pushed herself into sudden curves or angles, giving her an appearance of gawkiness. She had come to London from the country to look after her sister's children and to tidy and scrub the two rooms while her sister and her aunt went out to work. Her sister worked in a restaurant from eight in the morning till eight at night. Her aunt was a rag-woman. One corner of the room was piled up with the rags she had
bought and could not sell. Sometimes, when alone, Phoebe turned them over; they stank uncleanly, the discarded clothes of a vast humanity, clothes in which people had worked and loved and had even died, and the living-room was poisoned with a half-sour, half-musty odour that even the smell of the kipper could not destroy.

The girl felt unutterably lonely. When the children had gone to school and her aunt and sister had gone to work no one ever troubled to climb to the top of Pope's Buildings, though she heard people moving about on the floor below, the whiz and treadling of a sewing-machine and the sound of angry voices. A tailor and his wife lived there and whenever the tailor's wife came in drunk he beat her unmercifully. She in turn cried and swore and he banged her about until she could not stand. But there were days when she was quiet and sober and they sewed and pressed in silence, and the world of Pope's Buildings on those days seemed vast and empty.

She turned the kipper again and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was a little after four o'clock. The sun was vanishing rapidly and the golden light was fading. She spread the cloth and laid cups and a teapot on the deal table. In a few moments Christopher would be home.

Christopher was her sister's husband and it was for him that she was frying the kipper. He came home and ate his tea with the children and herself, and she
often ran downstairs and along to the fishmonger's at the corner and bought a kipper or some shrimps for his tea, giving both herself and him great pleasure.

Five minutes later, when she heard him ascending the stairs, she knew by the sound on the bare wooden stairs who was coming up: her aunt lumbered and paused continually for breath, her sister ran quickly and in jerks, the tailor's wife climbed laboriously one by one, swearing to herself. She knew her sister's husband because of the absolute weariness of his step. He climbed like a man whose strength and courage were fading away.

She could hear his loud breathing as he climbed the last few stairs and when he came in his lips were hanging apart and he was breathing harshly through his mouth.

He came in and took off his black felt hat and sat down.

‘Oh! dear,' he said.

He shut his eyes. His voice, his eyes and the way he rubbed his hand across his forehead all had the same weariness as his feet climbing the stairs.

‘I'm sure you walk too far,' said the girl.

‘I haven't walked at all I'm sure,' he protested.

‘Come now — the tea's ready,' she said. ‘I've been and got you a kipper.'

He shook his head.

‘I couldn't eat it,' he said. ‘I'm sorry,' he went on, opening his eyes, ‘but I couldn't eat it.'

‘Oh! I got it for you.'

He turned his head and looked at the kipper lying in the fat of the frying pan and he wanted to be sick.

‘I'll try in a moment,' he said. ‘When I've had a cup of tea.'

He sat up to the table and put down the book he was carrying, a book called
The Meaning of God
. He was a thin white-faced man, quite young, with sparse brown hair which was falling out at his temples, and vague blue eyes, and as he sat at the table his body trembled, and his face looked as though he had been frightened and shocked by an explosion and he would never recover his calmness again. His hands were fine and white and his lips almost feminine in their gentleness.

He drank some tea, and sat silent, and as he drank the girl looked at him.

‘Any luck?' she asked.

He smiled quietly and shook his head. He had been trying to sell the book called
The Meaning of God
. He was studying divinity but having no money with which to take proper courses he was trying to study by himself. He studied in the public libraries and with books that he was able to borrow. A paper sometimes gave him books to review, books like
The Meaning of God
, and when he had written the review, often working himself sick over it by his conscientiousness, he tried to sell the book and buy another with the money. The books were hard to sell, however. No one, it
seemed, had any use for books on God, which were so soon stale and obsolete, and no thought on God seemed to keep its truth for long. The bookshops were full of books on God which would never be read again.

Staring at him, the girl wondered what he did with himself all day, what he ate and what he thought.

‘Do have the kipper?' she said.

He did not want the kipper but for some reason or other he said ‘Yes' and he knew a moment later that he said it because he did not wish to disappoint her.

It was Friday and the children were staying late at school for a concert and would not be home till five. As Christopher tried to eat the kipper Phoebe talked to him. They often talked together; they talked of each other's lives, and one day he told her why he had married Ada, her sister.

‘When I first came to London I used to go to that tea-shop and have my lunch. I always sat at the same table and Ada always served me and somehow we drifted into it.'

He could not explain it any differently. Day after day he had gone to the restaurant and had sat at the same table and nothing had happened. He ordered very little to eat and generally he read a book while he ate, and somehow he got into the habit of ordering the same thing day after day, because it was less trouble and because in that way he could manage his money better. He did not notice the waitress much until one day she said: ‘I don't think it's good for you.' He
looked up astonished, ‘What isn't?' he said. ‘Eating the same thing day after day; why don't you let me bring you something else?' Seeing the sense of it he acquiesced and she brought him some fish instead of his bread and stew, and for the first time he took notice of her. She was dark and sharp-featured, and her skin, even though she powdered it, had an anaemic pallor that was almost transparent. In a day or two she not only brought him another change of food but a larger helping and she begged him not to leave her a tip any longer. She was not strikingly attractive but she touched him by her solicitude, and one day, feeling unspeakably lonely and having not a soul to talk to, he said: ‘Do you mind if I wait for you this evening?' When she came out of the restaurant in the evening she said, ‘Well, where are we going?' He simply shook his head and said, ‘Where you like. I don't know. Let's walk somewhere,' and they walked along the Embankment, talking trivially, and then back through the streets towards Lincoln's Inn. It began to rain and they stood in a passage-way for shelter. The passage was narrow and a cat brushed by Ada's feet and she pressed herself close to Christopher. He had never loved a woman and he had no intention of loving Ada, but as he felt her close to him all kinds of sensations which he could not explain surged up in him. His throat felt tight, his blood throbbed hotly, his loneliness vanished and finally he put his arms about Ada and she kissed his awkward lips. ‘I suppose you're out for
all you can get,' she said. ‘Like all the rest.' She touched his body, and she leaned with all her weight against him. It was utterly dark and London was silent except for a distant murmur of traffic. ‘All right,' she said. He had asked for nothing, but she said ‘All right' as though she were surrendering herself to his desperate entreaty.

Afterwards he saw her again, and one evening when it snowed and he had no money for a theatre she asked him to go home with her.

He remembered boarding a tram with her and travelling into that part of London beyond Rosebery Avenue. It was Saturday evening, the tram was full of half-drunken cockney women, and the lurching of the tram and the smell of gin made him sick.

When he first saw Pope's Buildings in the darkness it looked to him a great black rectangle with a courtyard fenced off by iron railings, exactly like a prison. He remembered mounting the stairs, following Ada's dark form and the trail of her scent upwards and upwards until he panted and began to breathe through his mouth. He caught the stench of stale rags even before she opened the door and from that moment he wished himself dead, his stomach revolting at the two big rooms, the foul rags, and the old woman with her yellowing teeth and thick lips and foreign-looking face, who sat sorting them. There was a single comforting object in the room, a large brown teapot bearing in white letters the words ‘God Bless our
Home', and whenever he felt sick or depressed he looked at the teapot and felt better.

When Ada asked him to go home with her a second time he made a desperate excuse and refused, feeling that he could endure hunger and bad food and loneliness but not the Bonners' two rooms and the stench of rags, but one evening a bitter wind, driving icy rain and sleet, came up from the mouth of the Thames and he felt every lash of it pierce through his coat to his bones as he waited for Ada to come out of the restaurant. He wanted to refuse to go to Pope's Buildings, but Ada was tired and when she said ‘Come on; we've got a fire at least, whatever else we haven't got,' he consented.

The blackness of Pope's Buildings seemed worse than ever. It loomed above them like a monstrosity. Who could have built such a place? he wondered, and he felt that only a monster could have conceived and built it so like a prison.

But inside, perhaps because he had exaggerated his horror of it, the Bonners' two rooms seemed less terrible. The old woman was not at home. A bright fire was burning and he warmed his frozen hands and Ada made him some cocoa and the pile of rags smelt less rankly than before. He drank his cocoa slowly and felt tolerably happy.

The old woman came home, a little tipsy, about eleven o'clock. Her black hat and coat were sprinkled with frozen sleet.

‘Awful night, awful, downright awful,' she muttered. ‘Christ!'

Christopher winced at the blasphemy. He could not bear to hear the name of Christ spoken with derision.

‘You'd better stay here for to-night,' said Ada to him.

‘Oh! no, no, no,' he protested.

Later Ada went out and looked at the night and when she came back she was shivering violently.

‘You're not going out in this,' she said. ‘You can't! It's a blizzard.'

She did not heed his protests and she went into the second room and banged the pillows about and flapped the sheets.

‘Course you'll stay,' said the old woman. ‘Course you'll stay. Lor' lummy.'

He resigned himself and later he undressed quickly and knelt by the bed and said his prayers and then crept into bed and thought of God. Sometimes he suffered from insomnia, and the quiet thought of God often sent him to sleep. ‘God is a spirit,' he repeated to himself, ‘And they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.' What quiet words and how beautiful! He stared at the cracked ceiling and forgot the dirty room and the rags and the old woman, and then shut his eyes.

He was aroused by the presence of someone against the bed. He stirred himself. It was Ada, getting into bed with him. He touched her nightgown and her
thin breasts as she came beside him, his mind too drowsy for speech. In the morning he woke and saw her standing half-dressed, by the window, gaping. Her cheap green drawers and her little green corset that pushed her breasts into a false prominence and her white legs, covered with little unhealthy blue veins, all made her look frowzy and cheap and vulgar. She drew on her stockings and slipped on her skirt and powdered her face. She did not wash herself and from that moment he felt that he hated her. He could not think why he had endured her so long or even why he had endured her at all.

Now it was no use wondering. He ate Phoebe's kipper with the same nausea as he had once felt for Ada. To-morrow it would not matter. He was married to Ada and had already two children by her and probably, she told him, there would be another.

He drank his tea and Phoebe poured out another cup. He had been silent for some moments, thinking.