Thirteen Steps Down (4 page)

so familiar a part of their lives that they called it affectionately "the

Grove." In their rented rooms and flats they grew cannabis in cupboards

with ultraviolet light inside. They dressed in cheesecloth and the concept

of the Global Village was born.

Miss Chawcer knew nothing of this. It flowed over her. She was born in

St. Blaise House, had no brothers or sisters and was educated at home

by Professor Chawcer, who had a chair of philology at London University.

When she was a little over thirty her mother died. From the first the

professor had been against her taking any sort of job, and what the

professor was against invariably didn't happen, just as what he was in

favor of did. Someone had to look after him. The maid had left to get

married and Gwendolen was a natural to take her place.

It was a strange life she led but a safe one, as any life must be that is

without fear or hope or passion or love or change or anxiety about

money. The house was very large, on three floors, innumerable rooms

opening out of square hallways or long passages, with a great grand

staircase consisting of four flights. When it seemed certain Gwendolen

would never marry, her father had three rooms on the top floor converted

into a selfcontained flat for her, with its own hallway, two rooms, and

akitchen. The lack of a bathroom had nothing to do with her

disinclination to move in. "What was the point of being up there when

her father was always down in the drawing room and always, it seemed,

hungry for his meals or thirsty for a cup of tea? Her unwillingness to go

up to the top floor started at that point. She only went up there if she

had lost something and had exhausted all other places where it might be.

Nothing had been painted in the rest of the house and no other rooms

had been modernized. Electricity had been installed, but not everywhere,

and the place had been rewired in the eighties because the existing

wiring was dangerous. But where the old cables had been taken out and

the new ones inserted, the walls had been plastered up over the holes

but no redecoration had been done. Gwendolen said herself she wasn't

much of a cleaner. Cleaning bored her. She was happiest when sitting

about and reading. She had read thousands of books, seeing no point in

doing anything else unless you had to. When she shopped for food, she

kept to the old shops as long as she could, and on the departure of the

grocer and the butcher and the fishmonger, she went to the new

supermarkets without registering that the change had affected her. She

liked her food well enough and had made few changes to her diet since

she was a young girl, except that with no one to cook for her she barely

ate hot meals.

Every afternoon, after lunch, she lay down and rested, reading herself

to sleep. She had a radio but no television. The house was full of books,

learned works and ancient novels, old bound copies of the National

Geographic

and

Punch,

encyclopediaslong

obsolete,

dictionaries

published in 1906, such collections as The Bedside Esquire and The

Mammoth Book of Thrillers,Ghosts and Mysteries. She had read most of

them and some she had reread. She had acquaintances she had met

through the St. Blaise and Latimer Residents' Association, and they

called themselves her friends. Such relationships are difficult for an only

child who has never been to school. She had been away on holidays with

the professor, even to foreign countries, and thanks to him she spoke

good French and Italian, though with no chance of using either except for

reading Montaigne and D'Annunzio, but she had never had a boyfriend.

While she had visited the theater and the cinema, she had never been to

a smart restaurant or a club or a dance or a party. She sometimes said

to herself that, like Wordsworth's Lucy, "she dwelt among the untrodden

ways," but it was said rather with relief than unhappiness.

The professor lived on into extreme old age, finally dying at the age of

ninety-four. For the past few years of his life he had been incontinent

and unable to walk, but his brain remained powerful and his demands

undiminished. With the occasional assistance of a district nurse, even

more occasionally that of a paid carer, Gwendolen looked after him. She

never complained. She never showed signs of weariness. She changed his

incontinence pads and stripped his bed, thinking only while she did so of

getting through it as fast as possible so that she could get back to her

book. His meals were brought and the tray later removed in the same

spirit. He had brought her up apparently with no other purpose than

that she should housekeepf or him while he was middle-aged, care for

him when he was old, and read to keep herself out of mischief.

There had been moments in his life when he had looked at her with a

cool unbiased eye and had acknowledged to himself that she was goodlooking. He had never seen any other reason for a man to fall in love and

marry, or at least wish to marry, than that the woman he chose was

beautiful. Intellect, wit, charm, kindliness, a particular talent or warmth

of heart, none of these played any part in his choice nor, as far as he

knew, in the choice made by other intelligent men. He had married a

woman for her looks alone and when he saw those looks in his daughter

he became apprehensive. A man might see them too and take her away

from him. None did. How could such a man have met her when he

invited no one to the house except the doctor, and she went nowhere

without her father's being aware of it and watching her with an eagle

eye?

But at last he died. He left her comfortably off and he left her the house,

now in the eighties a dilapidated mansion half buried among new

mewses and closes, small factories, local authority housing, corner

shops, debased terraces, and streetwidening schemes. She was at that

time a tall thin woman of sixty-six, whose belle epoque profile was

growing nutcracker like, her fine Grecian nose pointing markedly toward

a jutting chin. Her skin, which had been very fine and white with a

delicate flush on the high cheekbones, was a mass of wrinkles. Such

skin is sometimes compared to the peel of an apple that has been left

lying too long in a warm room. Her blue eyes hadfaded to pastel gray and

her once-fair hair, though still copious, was quite white.

The two elderly women who called themselves her friends, who had red

fingernails and tinted hair and dressed in an approximation of current

fashion, sometimes said that Miss Chawcer was Victorian in her clothes.

This showed only how much they had forgotten of their own youth, for

some of Gwendolen's wardrobe could have been placed in 1936 and some

in 1953. Many of her coats and dresses were of these vintages and would

have fetched a fortune in the shops of Notting Hill Gate where such

things were much prized, like the 1953 clothes she had bought for Dr.

Reeves. But he went away and married someone else. They had been

good in their day and were so carefully looked after that they never wore

out. Gwendolen Chawcer was a living anachronism.

She had cared for the house less well. To do her justice, she had

determined a year or two after the professor died that it should be

thoroughly redecorated and even in places refitted. But she was always

rather slow in making decisions and by thet ime she reached the point of

looking for a builder, she found she was unable to afford it. Because she

had never paid National Insurance and no one had ever made

contributions for her, the pension she received was very small. The

money her father had left paid annually a diminishing return.

One of her friends, Olive Fordyce, suggested she take a tenant for part

of the top floor. At first Gwendolen was appalled but after a time she

gradually came around to the idea, but she would never have taken any

action herself. It was Mrs. Fordyce who found Michael Cellini's

advertisement in the Evening Standard, who arranged an interview and

who sent him round to St. Blaise House.

Gwendolen, the Italian speaker, always addressed him as Mr. Chellini

but he, the grandson of an Italian prisoner of war, had always

pronounced it Sellini. She refused to change: she knew what was correct

and what was not if he didn't. He would have preferred that they should

be Mix and Gwen, as he lived in a world in which everyone was on firstname terms, and he had suggested it.

"I think not, Mr. Cellini," was all she had said.

It would probably have killed her to be called by her given name, and as

for Gwen, only Olive Fordyce, much to Gwendolen's distaste, used that

diminutive. She called him, not her tenant, or even "the man who rents

the flat," but her lodger." When he mentioned her, which was seldom, he

called her "the old bat who owns the place" but on the whole they got on

well, largely because the house was so big and they rarely met. Of

course, it was early days. He had been there only a fortnight.

At one of their very occasional meetings he had told her he, was an

engineer. To Miss Chawcer an engineer was a man who built dams and

bridges in distant lands, but Mr. Cellini explained that his job was

servicing workout equipment. She had to ask him what that meant and,

not being very articulate, he was obliged to tell her she could view similar

machines in the sports department of any large London store. The only

London store she ever went to was Harrods and when next there she

made her way to view the exercise equipment. She entered a world she

didn't understand. She could see no motive for setting foot on any of

these devices and scarcely believed what Cellini had told her. Could he

have been, to use a rare exampleof the professor's inverted-commassurrounded slang, "pulling her leg"?

Every so often, but not very often, Gwendolen went around the house

with a feather duster and a carpet sweeper. She pushed this implement

halfheartedly and never emptied its dust container. The vacuum cleaner,

bought in 1951, had broken down twenty years before and never been

repaired. It sat in the basement among old rolls of carpet, the leaf from a

dining table, flattened cardboard boxes, a gramophone from the thirties,

a stringless violin of unknown provenance, and a basket off the bicycle

the professor had once used to ride to Bloomsbury and back. The carpet

sweeper deposited dirt as regularly as it picked it up. By the time she

reached her own bedroom, dragging the sweeper up the stairs behind

her, Gwendolen had grown bored with the whole thing and wanted to get

back to whatever she happened to be reading, Balzac all over again or

Trollope. She couldn't be bothered to take the carpet sweeper back

downstairs so she left it in a corner of her bedroom with the dirty duster

draped over its handle; sometimes it would remain there for weeks.

Later that day, at about four, she was expecting Olive Fordyce and her

niece for tea. The niece she had never met, but Olive said it would be

cruel never to let her see where Gwendolen lived, she was "absolutely

mad about" old houses. Just to spend an hour in St. Blaise House would

make her ecstatic. Gwendolen wasn't doing anything special, apart from

rereading LePere Goriot. She'd go out in a minute and buy a swiss roll

from the Indian shop on the corner and maybe a packet of custard

creams.

The days when that wouldn't have been good enough were long gone.

Years had passed since she had baked or cooked anything more than,

say, a scrambled egg, but once every cake eaten in this house, every pie

and flapjack and eclair, had been made by her. She particularly

remembered a certain swiss roll, the pale creamy-yellow sponge, the

raspberry jam, the subtle dusting of powdered sugar. The professor

wouldn't tolerate bought cakes. And tea was the favorite meal of all three

of them. Tea was what you asked people to partake of if you asked them

at all. When Mrs. Chawcer was so ill, was slowly and painfully dying, her

doctor on his regular visits was always asked to stay to tea. Her mother

upstairs in bed and the professor giving a lecture somewhere, Gwendolen

found herself alone with Dr. Reeves.

Falling in love with him and he with her, she convinced herself, were

the most important events of her life. He was younger than she was but

not much, not enough, Gwendolen thought, for her mother to put him

beyond the pale on grounds of age. Mrs. Chawcer disapproved of

marriages in which the man was more than two years younger than the

woman. In appearance Dr. Reeves was boyish with dark curly hair, dark

but fiery eyes and an enthusiastic expression. Though thin, he ate

enormously of Gwendolen's scones with Cornish cream and homemade

strawberry jam, Dundee cake and flapjacks, while she picked delicately

at a Marie biscuit. Men didn't like seeing a girl guzzle, Mrs. Chawcer

said--had almost stopped saying now her daughter was over thirty.

Before tea, between mouthfuls and afterward, Dr. Reeves talked. About