Since young Mr Arthur was devout, by one of the spiritual mysteries of the human condition it is undeniable that during his reign the assistants became more and more holy. The combination of age, frugality and devotion made them at once the most useless and dignified shop assistants in the world. They were notorious. Young Mr Arthur was exhausted by his Napoleonic decision about the spider’s web. He was one of nature’s bachelors, less by distaste or inversion than by a diminution of sex drive; and he proposed to leave his money to his chapel. During the Second World War the establishment ceased to pay its way; but minimally. Mr Arthur saw no reason why it should not continue to do so, for the rest of his life. The holy old men were to be supported because they could do nothing but what they were doing and had nowhere else to go. Taxed on this unbusinesslike attitude by the progressive grandson of his father’s accountant, Mr Arthur muttered vaguely, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn.”
It is not possible now to discover whether the reintroduction of separate tills had any effect on the speed of the shop’s decline. All that is certain is that as the decline became more perilous, by an apparent spontaneity the place made convulsive efforts to save itself. It did not shake off its honourable commitment to the elderly gentlemen who had stood so long and sold so little. But in a first convulsion, it bundled an unimaginable load of oddments away from one loft to another and opened a showroom upstairs! Here was to be seen cutlery and glass; and as all the elderly gentlemen were busy behind their counters, new blood had to be imported. At the time there was none of the right age or cheapness available, so with an air of coming clean and bursting out into the twentieth century, the shop hired—the word “employ” had a masculine dignity—hired a woman. In this long upstairs showroom the electric light—and what is more, with more powerful bulbs than anywhere else in the building—was not turned off, no matter how bright the day, until the front doors had been shut at six. The very way up to this glittering room betokened a basic frivolity that was suited to the goods on display and the sex of their guardian. It was a drumheaded, plaster-moulded survival from the late seventeenth century and there was no way of discovering how anything like that had found itself indoors rather than out. After a short while, to the cutlery and tumblers were added decanters, wine glasses, china, table mats, napkin rings, candlesticks, salt cellars and ashtrays in onyx. It was a shop within as well as above a shop. Yet it seemed a flighty thing, that lighted, drumheaded entrance with the carpeted stairs, the rugs and polished floor, the flash of glass or silver under the wastefully bright lights. Below it the broomsticks remained, the galvanized iron buckets, the rows of wooden-hafted tools. It did not accord well with the pigeon-holes of stained and broken wood, that were filled with nails or pins or tacks or iron or brass screws and bolts.
The old men ignored it. They must have known that it would fail, since the shop, as they were, was in the rip of something uncontrollable, an inevitable decline. Even so, after the upstairs showroom, plastics burst in and would not be denied. Plastics committed enormities in the way of silent buckets and washing-up bowls, sink-baskets, watering cans and trays all of blinding colour. Plastics went even further after that and blossomed as a range of artificial flowers. These all grouped themselves as a kind of bower in the centre of the downstairs showrooms. The bower flung out an annexe of plastic screens and trellises that demanded whimsical garden furniture. Once more, it was a feminine place. Once more, a female was its guardian; and not just a female, but a girl at that. She had a till like everyone else. She experimented with coloured lights and hid herself inside a fantasy grove.
It was into this complex disorder of ancient and modern, this image in little of the society at large, that Matty was projected by the headmaster. His status was ambiguous. Mr Arthur explained that the boy had better come until they found out what use they could make of him.
“I think,” said Mr Arthur, “we might make use of him in Deliveries.”
“What about the future?” asked the headmaster “—his future, I mean.”
“If he does well enough he can go into Despatch,” said Mr Arthur, with, as it were, a far-off glance at Napoleon. “Then if his head for figures is good enough, he might even move up to Accounts.”
“I don’t conceal from you that the boy seems to have little ability. But he mustn’t stay at school.”
“He can start in Deliveries.”
Frankley’s delivered for ten miles round and gave credit. They had a boy with a bicycle for parcels in Greenfield and two vans for longer or heavier journeys. The second of these vans had a driver and a porter, as he was called. The driver was so crippled with arthritis that he had to be inserted in his seat and left there as long as he could stand it and sometimes longer. This was another of Mr Arthur’s unimaginative kindnesses. It kept a man in a job that was a constant trial and terror to him and ensured that two people did one man’s work. Though the phrase was not yet widely used, Frankley’s was Labour Intensive. It was what was sometimes called “a fine old establishment”.
Tucked away at the bottom of the yard that ran along by the small garden of GOODCHILD’S RARE BOOKS, and kept in what was still called the coachhouse, was a forge, complete with anvil, tools, fire, and of course ageing blacksmith, who spent his time making trifles for his grandchildren. This area took Matty and absorbed him. He received pocket money, he slept in a long attic under the rosy, fifteenth-century tiles. He ate well, for this was one of the things Mr Arthur could measure. He wore a thick, dark-grey suit and grey overall. He carried things. He became the Boy. He carried garden tools from one part of the place to another and got customers to sign for them. He was visible part of the time among stacks of packing-cases outside the smithy—packing-cases which he prised open with an instrument like a jemmy. He became adept at opening things. He learnt the measure of sheet metal and metal rod, of angle iron, girders and wire. He could be heard, sometimes, in the silence of business hours tramping unevenly overhead through the lofts and attics among the stock. He would deliver to it strange objects the name of which he did not know, but which would be sold at the rate of perhaps one out of every half a dozen ordered, while the other five rusted. Up there, the occasional visitor might find a set of jacks for an open fireplace or even a deformed packet of the first, snuffless candles. Matty swept here sometimes—swept those acres of uneven planking where all the brush did was to raise the dust so that it hung about invisibly in the dark corners but sneezily palpable. He began to reverence the winged collars in their places. The only boy of his own age or slightly older, there, was the boy who did the local deliveries either on foot or on the bicycle which he regarded as his own. It was already older than he was. But this boy, thick-set and blond with oiled hair that gleamed as seductively as his boots, had perfected a way of remaining away from the establishment that made his visits seem more like those of a customer than a member of the staff. Where the winged collars had achieved, it seemed, a perfect stillness, the other Boy had discovered perpetual motion. Matty, of course, remained too naive to bend circumstances in his direction as the blond Boy had done. He was perpetually employed and never knew that people gave him jobs to get him out of their sight. Ordered by the blacksmith to pick up the cigarette ends in a corner of the yard where he would be hidden, Matty did not grasp that no one would mind if he loafed there all day. He picked up the few cigarette ends and reported back when he had done it.
It was not many months after his arrival at Frankley’s that a pattern from his days at Foundlings repeated itself. Already he had passed the bower of artificials and smelt it with a kind of shock. Perhaps it was the intolerable and scentless extravagence of the flowers that made the girl inside so determined to smell sweet. Then, one morning he was told to bring a bundle of new flowers to Miss Aylen. He arrived at the bower, his arms full of the plastic roses on which it had not been thought necessary to imitate the thorns. He looked forward through a gap between his own roses, a leaf meanwhile interfering with his nose.
He found that she had made a gap in the wall of the bower by shifting the rose already there from a shelf in front of him. For this reason he was not only able to see through his own roses but into the bower.
He was aware first of a shining thing like a curtain. The curtain was ogival at the top—for she had her back to him—spread very slightly all the way down until it passed out of sight. The scent she wore, obeying its own laws, came and went. She heard him and turned her head. He saw that this creature had a nose that curved out a very short way as if conferring the absolute right of impertinence on its owner, even though at that moment the curtain of hair was caught under it by the turn of her head. He saw also that the line of her forehead was delimited by a line of brow beyond mathematical computation and that under it again was a large, grey eye that fitted between long, black lashes. This eye noted the plastic roses; but she was engaged with a customer in the other direction and had time for no more than a monosyllable.
“Ta.”
The empty shelf was under his elbow. He lowered the roses and they cocked up, hiding her from his view. His feet turned him and he went away. “Ta” spread, was more than a monosyllable, was at once soft and loud, explosive and of infinite duration. He came partly to himself near the smithy. Brilliantly he asked if there were more flowers to deliver but was not heard for he did not know how faint his voice had become.
Now he had a second preoccupation. The first, so unlike the second, was Mr Pedigree. When the Boy was sweeping clouds of dust in the loft and when his face had more anguish in its right, expressive side than the occasion would warrant, Mr Pedigree would be there in his mind. When his face contorted with sudden pain it was not the dust nor the splinters. It was the memory of the words screamed at him in the hall—“It’s all your fault!” In one very private experience, he had seized a spike and stuck it clumsily into the back of the hand that held the broom. He had watched, a little paler perhaps, the blood turn into a long streak with a drop at the end—and all this because the soundless voice had screamed at him again. Now it seemed to him that this glimpse of part of a face, this fragrance, this hair, filled with a similar compulsion all the parts of his mind that the memory of Mr Pedigree did not inhabit as of right. The two compulsions seemed to twist him inside, to lift him up against his own wishes and leave him with no defences and no remedy but simply to endure.
That morning he drifted away from the yard and climbed the stairs into the lofts. Familiarly he picked his way among packing-cases bursting with shavings, past piled paint, through a room where there was nothing but a set of rusting saws and a heap of hip baths stacked one inside the other, down through rows of identical paraffin lamps and into the long room for cutlery and glass. Here in the centre there was a great skylight of ridged glass that was supposed to let daylight down into the main showroom from a second skylight above it. Looking down, he could see the irradiated glow of coloured lights, could see them move among the ridges as he moved. He could see also, his heart quickening, a vague mass of colour down there that was the flower counter. He knew at once that he would never come this way again without a sideways and downward look at that blurred mixture. He went forward and into yet another loft, empty this one, then a step or two down some stairs. These led down the wall at the farthest point from where the yard was. He put a hand on the guard rail, bent down and peered along under the ceiling.
He could see the mass of artificial flowers but the opening where the customers were dealt with was to one side of him. He could see flowers on this side, and the roses he had stacked all too quickly on the other. All that was visible in the middle was the very top of a light brown head with a white centre-parting down it. He saw that the only way to do better was to walk along the shop and glance sideways as he passed the bower. He did think for a moment to himself that if one were sufficiently knowing—like for example the blond Boy—one might stop and chat. His heart jumped at the thought and the impossibility of it. He went quickly therefore, but his feet seemed to get in his way as if he had too many of them. He passed a yard from the counter that was not stacked with flowers and looked sideways without moving his head as he passed. But Miss Aylen had bent down and the bower might have been empty for all he could see.
“Boy!”
He broke into a shambling trot.
“Where’ve you been, Boy?”
But they did not really want to know where he had been, though they would have been amused and liked him better for it if they had known.
“The van’s been waiting for about half an hour. Load her up!”
So he hauled the bundles into the van, bundles of metal flung shatteringly into the corner, put down half a dozen folding chairs and finally swung his clumsy body into the seat by the driver.
“What a lot of flowers we’ve got!”
Mr Parrish, the arthritic driver, groaned. Matty went on.
“They’re just like real aren’t they?”
“I never seen ’em. If you had my knees—”
“They’re good, those flowers are.”
Mr Parrish ignored him and set himself to the craft of van-driving. Matty’s voice, practically of its own accord, went on speaking.
“They’re pretty. Artificials I mean. And that girl, that young lady—”
The noises that Mr Parrish made dated from the days of his youth when he had driven one of Frankley’s three horse-vans. He had been transferred to a motor van not many years after such an innovation became available and he took two things with him—his horse-van vocabulary and a belief that he had been promoted. There was no sign at first, therefore, that Mr Parrish had heard the Boy. He had heard everything the Boy said, however—was waiting for the right moment to wrap up his silence, roll it into a weapon and hit Matty over the head with it. He did so now.
“When you address me, my lad, you call me ‘Mr Parrish’.”
This may well have been the last time Matty ever tried to confide in anyone.
Later that day he was able to go once more through the lofts over the main shop. Once more he glanced sideways at the coloured blur in the ribbed skylight and once more he peered along under the ceiling. He saw nothing. When the shop closed he hurried to the empty pavement in front of it but saw no one. Next day at the same time he got there early, and was rewarded with an exhibition of light-brown hair with honey lights, the apparently naked crooks of knees and the gleam of two long, shining stockings as they disappeared from the platform of a bus to the interior. The next day was Saturday—a half-day—and he was kept busy all morning so that she had gone before he was free.
On Sunday he went automatically to morning service, ate the large, plain dinner that was served in what Mr Arthur called the Refectory, then wandered out for the walk he was ordered to take for his health. The winged collars snoozed meanwhile on their beds. Matty went along, past GOODCHILD’S RARE BOOKS, past Sprawson’s and turned right up the High Street. He was in a curious state. It was as if there was a high, singing note in the air from which he could not detach himself and which was the direct result of some interior strain, some anxiety that could—if you remembered this thing or that thing—sharpen into anguish. This feeling became so strong that he turned back to Frankley’s as if sight of the place where one of his problems lay would help to solve it. But though he stood and looked it over, and the bookshop next to it and Sprawson’s next to that, he was given no help. He went round the corner of Sprawson’s to the Old Bridge over the canal and the iron loo at the root of the bridge flushed automatically as he passed. He stood, and looked down at the water of the canal in that age-old and unconscious belief that there is help and healing in the sight. He had a moment’s idea of walking along the towpath, but it was muddy. He turned back, round the corner of Sprawson’s, and there was the bookshop and Frankley’s again. He stopped walking and looked in the window of the bookshop. The titles did not help him. The books were full of words, physical reduplication of that endless cackle of men.
Now some of the problem was co
ming into focus. It might be possible to go down into silence, sink down through all noises and all words, down through the words, the knives and swords such as it’s all your fault and ta with a piercing sweetness, down, down into silence—
On the left in the window, below the rows of books (With Rod and Gun), was a small counter with a few items on it which were not in the strict canon of bookishness at all. Such was the alphabet and the Lord’s Prayer in a hornbook. Such was the carefully mounted scrap of ancient music on parchment—music with square notes. Such was the glass ball that lay on a small stand of black wood just to the left of the old music. Matty looked at the glass ball with a touch of approval since it did not try to say anything and was not, like the huge books, a whole store of frozen speech. It contained nothing but the sun which shone in it, far away. He approved of the sun which said nothing but lay there, brighter and brighter and purer and purer. It began to blaze as when clouds move aside. It moved as he moved but soon he did not move, could not move. It dominated without effort, a torch shone straight into his eyes, and he felt queer, not necessarily unpleasantly so but queer all the same—unusual. He was aware too of a sense of rightness and truth and silence. But this was what he later described to himself as a feeling of waters rising; and still later was described to him and for him by Edwin Bell as entering a still dimension of otherness in which things appeared or were shown to him.
He was shown the seamy side where the connections are. The whole cloth of what had seemed separate now appeared as the warp and woof from which events and people get their being. He saw Pedigree, his face contorted with accusation. He saw a fall of hair and a profile and he saw the balance in which they lay, the one the other. The face he had never fully seen of the girl among the artificials was there in front of him. He knew it familiarly but knew there was something wrong with the knowledge. Pedigree balanced it. There was everything right with this plain knowledge of Pedigree and his searing words.