‘There were three pairs of socks in it – they had too many holes in them for me to keep – and a brick or two. The landlord was quite content and he even stood me a brandy.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said, ‘sit down and drink your tea. What do you suppose I’d do if you went to prison?’
‘They wouldn’t keep me long,’ he said. ‘Any more than the Huns did, and I had all Germany to walk across then. The Scrubs is nearly next door compared to where I was.’
‘And you are more than twenty years older. Listen! Is that someone at the door?’
‘It’s only your nerves, Liza. No one followed us – I saw to that. Drink your tea and don’t worry. You’ll see – everything will be hunky-dory.’
‘What will they do when he’s not back tonight?’
‘Well, I left the head man his father’s letter, and he’ll probably write to him, but I doubt if the old devil will bother to answer. You know very well he doesn’t like writing letters, and he won’t want to get mixed up in things, and then I suppose the head man might write to the boy’s aunt – if he has her address – and she won’t know a thing.’
‘And after that they’ll go to the police. Kidnapped boy. I can just see the headlines.’
‘He wasn’t kidnapped, Liza. He went away willingly with a friend of his father. The fees are always paid in advance – what do they care? Of course we’ll watch the papers for a week or two just in case. You don’t want to go back to school, do you, Jim?’
‘I think I’d rather stay here,’ I said, although I wasn’t yet quite sure – but it seemed the polite thing to say.
‘There you are, you see, Liza, it’s as I told you. He’s all your own. You’re a mother now. A proper mother, Liza.’
‘And where shall I put him? We’ve only the one room.’
‘You’ve got the whole house to choose from. You’re the caretaker. You have the keys.’
The day which had begun badly at school certainly ended with a sense of excitement and mystery. We tramped all over the house from the basement to the attic. It was like exploring Africa. Every room when unlocked had its individual secret. The Captain, like a native carrier, supported a pile of blankets. I realized that I had never before visited a whole house. My aunt lived in a flat on the first floor, and she kept away from neighbours.
In those days (I don’t know what the custom is now) something was always left in an unoccupied room to enable a landlord to call it furnished, and so I had the choice of three different beds in three different rooms, a dingy sofa in another, and an easy chair big enough to sleep in, but it was the traces of the ancient lodgers who had been expelled, perhaps without notice, or who had moonflit of their own accord, which fascinated me. On the floor of the attic there was a copy of a very old tattered magazine called Lilliput over which I lingered long enough for them to notice. ‘Would you like to sleep here?’ Liza asked, but it was too far away from the basement and human contact, and I said, ‘No.’
‘Take the mag with you if you want,’ the Captain said. ‘Finding’s keeping – remember that. It’s one of the basic laws of human nature.’
We had begun at the top of the house and we trudged on downwards. In another room on a rickety table lay a notebook with lined pages in which somebody had kept accounts. I still remember a few of the entries and they seemed odd to me even then – there were things called penny buns noted down (what can one buy now for a penny, even with a new metric penny?). They seemed much in favour with the owner and there was a note ‘Extravagance’ marked with an exclamation mark – ‘Lunch at the ABC two shillings and threepence.’ With a glance at the Captain I put the notebook in my pocket. There were a lot of blank pages, and I thought it might prove useful. I already had literary ambitions which I had not confided either to my aunt or my father. I had read King Solomon’s Mines four times, and I thought that if I ever went like my father to Africa I would keep a journal of my adventures.
‘Why does nobody live here?’ I asked them.
‘The owners sent all of them away,’ Liza said, ‘because they want the house pulled down. I’m here to keep out squatters till the owners have got permission.’
She opened another door – it was one of the rooms with beds, and on the lino was a broken comb and a tuft of grey hair. ‘An old lady died in this one,’ she said, ‘she was eighty-nine, and she died on her birthday.’ She shut the door again quickly and we went on very much to my relief because of the coincidence. This was my birthday too, though nobody at school knew the fact, the Devil seldom remembered, and my aunt’s letter usually arrived several days late with a postal order for five shillings.
I finally chose the room with the sofa because it was near enough to the basement for me to hear the movements of the other human occupants. There was a small table and a picture on the wall of someone in strange clothes, whom I still for some reason remember was called Mr Lunardi, as he was setting out in a balloon from Richmond Park – it was another odd coincidence seeing that my aunt lived there. The young woman, whom I began to think of as Liza rather than mother, brought up a saucepan to serve as a chamberpot from the basement, and the Captain produced a basin and a cracked jug from a cupboard. ‘Soap,’ he thought aloud and rummaged further.
I was aware of a yet greater requirement. ‘I haven’t any pyjamas,’ I told him.
‘Oh,’ Liza said in a tone of utter dismay and she stopped making up the sofa. It was as though a fatal flaw had suddenly been discovered in their plans for my future, and I hastily reassured them. ‘It doesn’t really matter.’ I was afraid they would send me back to the world of the Amalekites for lack of pyjamas. ‘I will keep my shirt on and my pants,’ I said.
‘It wouldn’t do,’ Liza said. ‘It wouldn’t be healthy.’
‘Don’t worry,’ the Captain said. He looked at his watch. ‘The shops may be closed, but I’ll see to it first thing in the morning if they are.’
‘I can manage,’ I said. ‘Really I can manage,’ because I thought I knew how short of money he was.
‘She wouldn’t be happy if you didn’t have pyjamas,’ he said, and Liza and I listened in silence, as the house door closed behind him.
‘It’s no good arguing with him,’ Liza said, ‘when he gets an idea in his head.’
‘Pyjamas cost an awful lot of money.’
‘He always has money for essentials, or so he says. I don’t know how he does it.’
It had been an odd sort of day which had begun so unexpectedly in the school quad. I sat down on the sofa on top of the blankets and Liza sat down beside me.
I said, ‘He’s an awfully strange man.’
She said, ‘He’s a very good man,’ and of course I didn’t know enough to deny it. I certainly felt happier here than there – than all the ‘theres’, including my aunt’s ‘there’ at Richmond.
‘I’m fond of him in my way,’ she said, ‘and I’m pretty sure he’s fond of me – in his way. But sometimes he does such things for me that he frightens me. If I told him I wanted a pearl necklace I bet you he’d turn up with one. Perhaps they wouldn’t be real pearls – but they might be all the same and how would I be able to tell? Now you for example …’
‘He really is a kind man,’ I said. ‘He gave me two orangeades. And the smoked salmon.’
‘Oh he’s kind right enough. Yes, he’s a kind man. I would never deny that. And you can depend on him – in a way, his way. Those pyjamas – he’ll bring them I’m sure. But how will he have got them …?’
Half an hour later I heard the bell ring once and then twice – and I noticed how tensely she waited for the third ring – and there he was, carrying an unwrapped pair of pyjamas. They weren’t the pyjamas I would have chosen even at that age – because for some reason I hated the colour orange – and these pyjamas were not only striped with orange but they had oranges on the pockets. (I only liked oranges in the form of orangeade, but even when I drank that I would shut my eyes to hide the colour.)
‘Where
did you get them?’ she asked.
‘No difficulty,’ he said – as now he would probably have used the phrase ‘no problem’.
Is it only with today’s eyes that I seemed to see at that moment a certain shiftiness in his? Memory cheats. All I am sure, or half sure, is that he told me, ‘Time for bed, Jim.’
‘Does he have to be Jim?’
‘Any name you want, dear. You choose.’
I’m sure at least that I remember correctly the one word ‘dear’ which was not in common use either at school or in my aunt’s house, or even, I was to find out later, between the two of them.
I went to bed on the sofa in my pants after ruffling the orange pyjamas to disguise the fact.
(2)
I woke next morning to a strange woman’s voice calling out the name ‘Jim’. I had no idea where I was. I felt under the sofa for the familiar chamberpot, but it wasn’t to be found, only a saucepan on the carpet, and in amazement I looked to each side of me expecting to see the wooden divisions which in the school dormitory separated one bed from another, but they were gone. For the first time for years I found myself quite alone – no voices, no heavy breathing, no farts. Only the woman’s voice calling from below ‘Jim’. Who was ‘Jim’? Then I saw the pyjamas on the floor and reluctantly put them on.
As I went down the stairs towards the basement the strange events of the day before came trooping back to mind – I couldn’t make sense of them, though I was quite happy because at least I was not back at school, but I felt entirely lost in this new world. I think, perhaps, that, at the age I was then, a boy doesn’t give as much importance to happiness as to knowing who he really is. I had been an Amalekite – certainly not a happy Amalekite – but what was of greater importance to me than happiness, I had known my exact position in life. I knew who my enemies were and I knew how to avoid the worst at their hands. But now … I pushed open the door at the bottom of the stairs and it wasn’t a woman but a pale worried girl, perhaps not much more than twice my age, who confronted me. She said, ‘Do you like your egg hard-boiled or soft-boiled?’
I said, ‘Soft,’ and I added, ‘Who’s Jim?’
‘Don’t you remember?’ she asked me. ‘The Captain said I was to call you Jim. Do you mind the name?’
‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘I’d much rather be Jim than …’
‘Than what?’
‘I’d rather be Jim,’ I repeated cagily, for there is a strange importance about names. You can’t trust them until you have tried them out. Why should I have been ashamed of Victor and why had I so easily consented to be Jim?
‘Where is the Captain?’ I asked, only to change the subject.
‘Off somewhere,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t know where,’ and she led me into the kitchen and began to boil the water for my egg.
I asked her, ‘Does he live here?’
‘When he’s here,’ she said, ‘yes, he sort of lives here.’ Perhaps the answer had seemed a bit enigmatic even to herself, for she added, ‘When you get to know the Captain better, you’ll know that it’s no good asking him questions. What he wants you to know, he’ll tell you.’
‘I don’t much like these pyjamas,’ I said.
‘They are a bit on the small side.’
‘I don’t mean that. I mean the colour – and the oranges.’
‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘I suppose they came first to hand.’
‘Perhaps we could change them?’
‘We aren’t millionaires,’ she replied indignantly, and then, ‘The Captain’s a very kind man. Remember that.’
‘It’s funny. He has the same name as me.’
‘What? Jim?’
‘No, my real name.’ I added reluctantly, ‘Victor,’ and watched closely to see if she smiled, but she didn’t. She said, ‘Oh, I suppose he borrowed it,’ and she busied herself with my egg.
‘Does he borrow a lot of names?’
‘When I knew him first he had a very classy name – Colonel Claridge, but he changed that one pretty quick. He said he couldn’t live up to it.’
‘What’s his name now?’
‘You are an inquisitive one, aren’t you? It doesn’t matter asking me questions, but don’t go on like that with the Captain. Questions get him worried. He said to me once, “Liza, I seem to have been asked questions all my life long. Give me a rest, won’t you,” so now I give him a rest, and you must too.’
‘But what shall I call him?’
‘Call him the Captain like I do. That’s a name I hope he’ll always keep.’ Suddenly her eyes lighted up, as though she had been brought into a room with a great gleaming Christmas tree hung with baubles and mystery packets. She said, ‘There – do you hear it? It’s his step on the basement stairs. I’d know it from a thousand, yet he always says I must wait to open up till he rings the third time – a long and two shorts. As though I wouldn’t know that it’s him before he rings once.’
She was at the door before she finished speaking and sure enough there were three rings – the long ring and the two shorts. Then the door came open and she was greeting him with a mixture of relief and complaint as though he had been away for a year. I watched with curiosity – I suppose I was seeing the complexity of human love for the first time in my life, but what struck me even then was how quickly the expression of it was over. What remained afterwards was shyness in both of them and a kind of fear. She said, ‘The boy,’ and detached herself.
‘Yes, the boy,’ he said.
‘Will you take an egg?’
‘If it’s not too much bother. I only came in just to see …’
‘Yes?’
‘To see that it was all right with you and the boy.’
I think that he stayed then and had a bit of breakfast with us, but I don’t really remember anything else or whether he was still there when the night came.
(3)
It was about a week after that evening – or was it two or three or even four (time, unlike at school, flowed by uncounted) – before we saw the Captain again, and the circumstances were a little odd. I had learnt a lot during his absence which I had never learnt at school – how to cook sausages and the way you had to spike them before putting them in the pan, and how to break an egg over the pan to make eggs and bacon. I had also become well acquainted with the baker and the butcher, for my adopted mother would often send me out to do the shopping – she had a strange reluctance to leave the house, though every morning she brought herself to go just as far as the corner to buy a newspaper and then she would come scampering back like a mouse to her hole. I didn’t know why she bought the paper for she couldn’t, in the time which she spent on each one, have read more than the headlines. It is only now I realize that she was expecting every day to read, in large letters, some such headline as Mystery of Missing Schoolboy or Child’s Strange Disappearance, and yet when she had finished with a paper she would hide it deep in the waste-paper basket. Once she explained to me, ‘The Captain is a very tidy man. He doesn’t like old papers littering the place,’ but I feel sure that she was really hiding her fears from him because they would have shown a lack of confidence in his wisdom and that doubt of hers might have hurt his pride.
For in his own way he was a very proud man and she had become an essential part of his pride – and a part of his timidity too. Love and fear – fear and love – I know now how inextricably they are linked, but they were both beyond my understanding at the age I was then, and how can I be sure that I really understand them even now?
I was coming out of the baker’s with a loaf of bread at the end of that week – if it was only a week – when I found the Captain waiting for me outside. He put his hand in his pocket and stared at a florin and a shilling piece. It took him quite a while to decide on the shilling. He said, ‘Go back and get two éclairs: she likes éclairs,’ and when I returned, he said, ‘Let’s take a walk.’ Take a walk we did – down several streets, in complete silence. Then the Captain said, ‘It’s a pity you’re not sixteen.’
‘Why?’
‘You can’t even look sixteen.’
We went another street-length before he spoke again. ‘Eighteen I think it is anyway. I always get it mixed up with the age of consent.’
I still didn’t understand.
‘That’s what’s wrong with this bloody country,’ he said. ‘The lack of privacy. There’s no way that a man can talk quietly to a boy under age. It’s too cold for the park, and Liza wouldn’t forgive me if you caught a chill. You are not allowed in a pub. Tea shops aren’t open – not for any refreshment which a man can drink. I can go into a bar, but you aren’t permitted. You can have a cup of tea in a tea shop, but too much tea – but don’t tell Liza that – upsets me and they won’t serve me what I want. So we’ll just have to go on walking. It’s different in France.’
‘We could go home,’ I suggested. I had begun to use the word ‘home’ consciously for the first time – I had never thought of my aunt’s flat as home.
‘But it’s Liza I want to talk about. I can’t talk in front of her.’ He dropped into silence again for a couple of streets. Then he demanded, ‘You are carrying those éclairs carefully, aren’t you? Don’t squeeze the bag. They are like toothpaste tubes if you squeeze them.’
I assured him that I was not squeezing them.
‘She’s very fond of éclairs,’ he told me, ‘and I wouldn’t want them ruined.’
We walked perhaps a hundred yards further before he spoke again. ‘I want you to tell her,’ he said, ‘tell her – but very gently, mind – that I won’t be around for a month or two.’
‘Why don’t you come and tell her yourself?’
‘I don’t want to go into explanations. I don’t like telling lies to Liza and the truth would only worry her. But tell her – tell her on my word of honour – on my word of honour, mind you say that – I’ll be back, and everything will be hunky-dory. Just a few months away. That’s all. And give her my love of course – don’t forget that – my love.’
He stopped and asked in a tone of anxiety, ‘You know where you are? You know the way back?’