When he’d finished he went downstairs again and Mr Mundy said, with a dreadful forced sort of brightness, ‘My word! The girls are in for a treat tonight, all right! What time’s he coming for you, son?’
‘Half-past seven,’ said Duncan shyly, ‘the same as last time. But we’re going to a different pub, on a different bit of the river. They sell a better sort of beer, Fraser says.’
Mr Mundy nodded, his face still stretched in a ghastly smile. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the girls won’t know what’s hit them tonight!’
He had not been able to believe it when Duncan had brought Fraser home, that other time, two weeks before. Fraser had not been able to believe it, either. The three of them had sat in the parlour together, at a loss for things to say; in the end the little cat had come trotting innocently in, and that had saved them. They’d spent twenty minutes making her chase after bits of string. Duncan had even got down on the floor and shown Fraser his trick of letting her walk up his body. Mr Mundy had gone around since then like a wounded man. His limp had worsened; he’d begun to stoop. Mr Leonard, in his crooked house in the street off Lavender Hill, had been very dismayed at the change in him. He spoke more passionately to him than ever about the necessity of resisting the lure of Error and False Belief.
Tonight, once Fraser arrived, Duncan planned to get out as quickly as he could. He and Mr Mundy ate their tea, then stood together washing up the dishes; and as soon as the dishes were stacked away, he put on his jacket. He sat in the parlour, at the very front of his chair, ready to spring up the moment he heard Fraser’s knock.
But he picked up a book, too, to pass the time, and to make himself look careless. The book was a library book on antique silver, with a table of hallmarks: he worked his finger down the page, trying to memorise the significance of anchors, crowns, lions, thistles—all the time, of course, listening out for that tap at the door…Half-past seven came and went. He began to grow tense. He started to imagine all the ordinary things that might be keeping Fraser away. He pictured Fraser coming breathlessly to the door, just as he had come breathlessly up to the factory gate, that other time. His face would be pink, his hair would be bouncing over his brow, and he’d say, ‘Pearce! Had you given up on me? I’m so sorry! I’ve been—’ The excuses grew wilder as the minutes ticked by. He’d been stuck in an Underground train, going out of his mind with frustration. He’d seen a person get hit by a car, and had to send for an ambulance!
By quarter-past eight Duncan had begun to worry that Fraser might have come, have knocked, and gone away unheard. Mr Mundy had switched the wireless on, and the programme was rather noisy. So, on the pretext of getting himself a glass of water, he went out into the hall and stood quite still, cocking his head, listening for footsteps; he even, very softly, opened the front door and looked up and down the street. But there was no sign of Fraser. He went back into the parlour, leaving the door propped open. The radio programme changed, then changed again a half-hour later. The grandfather clock kept sending out its heavy, hollow chimes.
It took him until half-past nine to understand that Fraser wasn’t going to come. The disappointment was dreadful—but then, he was used to disappointment; the first sting of it faded, turned instead into a settled blankness of heart. He put down his book, the table of hallmarks unlearnt. He was aware of Mr Mundy’s gaze, but couldn’t bring himself to meet it. And when Mr Mundy got up, came awkwardly to him, and lightly patted his shoulder and said, ‘There. He’s a busy chap, I expect. He’ll have run into a couple of pals. That’s what’s happened, you mark my words!’—when Mr Mundy said that, he couldn’t answer. He found he almost hated the feel of Mr Mundy’s hand. Mr Mundy waited, then moved off. He went out to the kitchen. He let the parlour door close behind him, and Duncan suddenly felt the closeness and the airlessness of the dim, small, crowded room. He had a horrible sense of himself falling, falling, as if down the narrow shaft of a well.
But the panic, like the disappointment, flared in him and died. Mr Mundy returned in time with a cup of cocoa: Duncan took it from his hands and meekly drank it. He carried the cup out to the kitchen and washed it himself, turning it over and over in the stream of cold water. The milk that was left in the pan he put down in a saucer on the floor, for the cat. He went out to the lavatory and, for a little while, just stood there in the yard, looking up at the sky.
When he went back into the parlour Mr Mundy was already going about shaking cushions, getting ready for bed. As Duncan watched, he started turning off the lamps. He moved from one lamp to the next. The parlour grew dark, the faces in the pictures on the walls, the ornaments on the mantelpiece, drawing back into shadow. It was just ten o’clock.
They went upstairs together, slowly, taking one step at a time. Mr Mundy kept his hand in the crook of Duncan’s elbow; and at the top he had to pause, still with his hand on Duncan’s arm, to get his breath back.
When he spoke, his voice was husky. He said, without looking at Duncan, ‘You’ll come in, son, in a minute, to say goodnight?’
Duncan didn’t answer straight away. They stood in silence, and he felt Mr Mundy stiffen as if afraid…Then, ‘Yes,’ he said, very quietly. ‘All right.’
Mr Mundy nodded, his shoulders drooping with relief. ‘Thank you, son,’ he said. He drew off his hand and made his slow, shuffling way along the landing to his bedroom. Duncan went into his own room and started to undress.
This room was small: a boy’s room—the very room, in fact, in which Mr Mundy himself had used to sleep, when he was young and lived in this house with his parents and sister. The bed was a high Victorian one, with polished brass balls at each of its corners; Duncan had once unscrewed one of these and found a slip of paper inside it, marked in a smudged childish hand: Mabel Alice Mundy twenty dredful curses on you if you read this! The books in the bookcase were boys’ adventure stories with broad, colourful spines. On the mantelpiece, set out as if to fight, were some badly painted old lead soldiers. But Mr Mundy had put up shelves, too, for Duncan to display his own things, the things he’d bought in markets and antique shops. Duncan usually spent a moment, before he went to bed, looking over the pots and jars and ornaments, the teaspoons and tear-bottles, picking them up and delighting in them all over again; thinking about where they’d come from and who’d owned them before.
But he looked at it all, tonight, without much interest. He briefly picked up the bit of clay pipe he’d found on the beach by the riverside pub, that was all. He put his pyjamas on slowly, buttoning the jacket, then tucking it tidily into the trousers. He cleaned his teeth, and combed his hair again—combed it differently this time, making it neat, putting a parting in it like a child’s. He was very aware, as he did all this, of Mr Mundy waiting patiently in the room next door; he pictured him lying very still and straight, his head propped up on feather pillows, the blankets drawn up to his armpits, his hands neatly folded, but ready to pat the side of the bed, invitingly, when Duncan went in…It wasn’t much. It was almost nothing. Duncan thought of other things. There was a picture, hanging over Mr Mundy’s bed: a scene of an angel, safely leading children over a narrow, precipitous bridge. He’d look at that until it was over. He’d look at the complicated folds in the angel’s gown; at the children’s large, innocent-spiteful Victorian faces.
He put down his comb and picked up the bit of clay pipe again; and this time touched it to his mouth. It was chill and very smooth. He closed his eyes and moved it lightly across his lips, backwards and forwards—liking the feel of it, but made miserable by it, too; aware of the uneasy stir of sensations it was calling up inside him. If only Fraser, he thought, had come! Perhaps, after all, he’d simply forgotten. It might be something as ordinary as that. If you were another sort of boy, he said bitterly to himself, you wouldn’t have sat around here just waiting for him to turn up, you’d have gone out to find him. If you were a proper sort of boy you’d go out to his house right now—
He opened his eyes—and at once met his own gaze in the mirror. His
hair was combed in its neat white parting, his pyjama jacket buttoned up to the chin; but he wasn’t a boy. He wasn’t ten years old. He wasn’t even seventeen. He was twenty-four, and could do what he liked. He was twenty-four, and Mr Mundy—
Mr Mundy, he thought suddenly, could go to hell. Why shouldn’t Duncan go out and get Fraser, if that’s what he wanted? He knew the way to Fraser’s street. He knew the very house Fraser lived in, because Fraser had taken him past the end of his road, once, and pointed it out to him!
He moved about very quickly now. He messed up the parting in his hair. He put on his trousers and his jacket, pulling them on right over his pyjamas, not wanting to waste even a minute by taking the pyjamas off. He put on his socks and his polished shoes, and as he stooped to tie his laces he realised that his hands were shaking; but he wasn’t afraid. He felt almost giddy.
His shoes must have sounded loudly against the floor as he walked about. He heard the uneasy creaking of Mr Mundy’s bed, and that made him move faster. He stepped out of his room and glanced just once across the landing to Mr Mundy’s door; then he went quickly down the stairs.
The house was dark, but he knew his way through it as a blind man would, putting out his hand and finding doorknobs, anticipating steps and slippery rugs. He didn’t go to the front door, because he knew that Mr Mundy’s bedroom overlooked the street, and he wanted to go more secretly. For even in the midst of his excitement—even after having said to himself that Mr Mundy, for all he cared, could go to hell!—even after that, he thought it would be horrible to look back and see Mr Mundy at the window, watching him go.
So he went the back way, through to the kitchen and out, past the lavatory, to the end of the yard; and only when he got to the yard door did he remember that it was kept shut with a padlock. He knew where the key was, and might have run back for it; but he couldn’t bear to go back now, not even as far as the scullery drawer. He dragged over a couple of crates and clambered up them, like a thief, to the top of the wall; he dropped to the other side, landing heavily, hurting his foot, hopping about.
But the feeling, suddenly, of having a locked door behind him was wonderful. He said to himself, in Alec’s voice: There’s no going back now, D.P.!
He made his way along the alley at the back of Mr Mundy’s house, and emerged in a residential street. The street was one he walked down often, but it seemed transformed to him now, in the darkness. He moved more slowly, taken with the strange aspect of it all: very aware of the people in the houses that he passed; seeing lights put out in downstairs rooms and springing on in bedrooms and on landings, as the people went to bed. He saw a woman lift a white net curtain to reach for a window latch: the curtain draped her as a veil would a bride. In a modern house, a frosted bathroom window was lit up and showed, very clearly, a man in a vest: he sipped from a glass, put back his head to gargle, then jerked forward to spit the gargle out. Duncan caught the ring of the glass as it was set down on the basin, and when the man turned on a tap, he heard the water rushing through a waste-pipe, spluttering as it struck the drain below. The world seemed full, to him, of extraordinary new things. Nobody challenged him. Nobody seemed even to look at him. He moved through the streets as a ghost might.
He walked, in this unreal, fascinated way, through Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith, for almost an hour; then slowed his step and grew more wary, finding the end of Fraser’s street. The houses here were rather grander than the ones he was used to; they were that kind of red-brick Edwardian villa you saw turned into doctors’ surgeries, or homes for the blind, or—as in this street—boarding-houses. Each had its own name, set above its door in leaded letters. Fraser’s house, Duncan saw as he drew close to it, was called St Day’s. A sign said No Vacancies.
Duncan stood, hesitating, at the gate to the shallow front garden. He knew that Fraser’s room was the one on the ground floor, on the left-hand side. He remembered that, because Fraser had made a joke of the fact that his landlady called this room front bottom; he said it was like something one’s nurse would say. The curtains at the window were drawn together. They were old black-out curtains, and perfectly dark. But there was a slim, brilliant blade of colour where Fraser hadn’t pulled them quite shut. Duncan thought he could hear a voice, too, talking monotonously, in the room beyond.
The sound of the voice made him suddenly uncertain. Suppose Mr Mundy was right, and Fraser had spent the evening with his friends? What would he think of Duncan turning up in the middle of it all? What sort of people would the friends be? Duncan imagined university types, clever young men with pipes and spectacles and knitted ties. Then he had an even worse thought. He thought that Fraser might be in there with a girl. He saw the girl very clearly: stout, blowsy, with a tittering laugh; with wet red lips and cherry-brandy breath.
Until he’d had this dreadful vision he’d been going to walk to the front door, like a proper visitor, and ring the bell. Now, as he grew nervous, the temptation to tiptoe over to the window and just quickly peer inside was too much for him. So he unlatched the gate and pushed it open; it swung noiselessly on its hinge. He went up the path, then made his way between rustling bushes to the window. With his heart thudding, he put his face to the glass.
He saw Fraser at once. He was sitting in an armchair at the back of the room, beyond the bed. He was dressed in his shirt-sleeves, and had his head put back; beside his chair was a table with a mess of papers on it, and his pipe in an ashtray, and a glass, and a bottle of what looked like whisky. He was sitting quite still, as if dozing, though the voice that Duncan had heard before was still going monotonously on…But now the voice gave way to a low burst of music, and Duncan realised that it was coming from a radio, that was all. The music, in fact, seemed to wake Fraser up. He got to his feet and rubbed his face. He went across the room, moved just out of Duncan’s vision, and the sound was abruptly cut off. As he walked, Duncan saw that he’d taken his shoes off. His socks had holes in them: great big holes, showing his toes and uncut toenails.
The sight of the holes and the toenails gave Duncan courage. When Fraser moved back towards his chair as if meaning to sink down in it again, he tapped on the glass.
At once, Fraser stopped and turned his head, frowning, searching for the source of the sound. He looked at the gap in the curtains—looked right, as it seemed to Duncan, into Duncan’s eyes; but couldn’t see him. The sensation was unnerving. Again Duncan felt, but less pleasantly this time, like a ghost. He lifted his hand and tapped harder—and that made Fraser cross the room and take hold of the curtain and pull it back.
When he caught sight of Duncan, he looked amazed. ‘Pearce!’ he said. But then he winced, and glanced quickly at the bedroom door. He thumbed back the catch of the window and quietly raised the sash, putting a finger to his lips.
‘Not too loudly. I think the landlady’s in the hall. What the hell are you doing here? Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ said Duncan quietly. ‘I just came looking for you. I’ve been waiting at Mr Mundy’s. Why didn’t you come? I waited for you all night.’
Fraser looked guilty. ‘I’m sorry. The time ran away with me. Then it was late, and—’ He made a hopeless gesture. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I was waiting for you,’ Duncan said again. ‘I thought something must have happened to you.’
‘I’m sorry. Truly I am. I didn’t suppose you’d come and find me! How did you get here?’
‘I just walked.’
‘Mr Mundy let you?’
Duncan snorted. ‘Mr Mundy couldn’t stop me! I’ve been walking in the streets.’
Fraser looked him over, peering at his jacket, frowning again but beginning to smile. He said, ‘You’ve got—you’ve got your pyjamas on!’
‘So?’ said Duncan, touching his collar self-consciously. ‘What’s wrong with that? It’ll save me time.’
‘What?’
‘It’ll save me time, later, when I go to bed.’
‘You’re crazy, Pearce!’
??
?You’re the crazy one. You smell of drink. You smell awful! What have you been doing?’
But bafflingly, Fraser had started to laugh. ‘I’ve been out with a girl,’ he said.
‘I knew you had! What girl? What’s so funny?’
‘Nothing,’ said Fraser. But he was still laughing. ‘It’s just—this girl.’
‘Well, what about her?’
‘Oh, Pearce.’ Fraser wiped his lips and tried to speak more soberly. ‘It was your sister,’ he said.
Duncan stared at him, growing cold. ‘My sister! What are you talking about? You can’t mean Viv?’
‘Yes, I mean Viv. We went to a pub. She was awfully nice—laughed at all of my jokes; even let me kiss her, in the end. Had the grace to blush, too, when I opened my eyes and found her sneaking a glance at her wrist-watch…I put her on the bus and sent her home.’
‘But, how?’ asked Duncan.
‘We just walked to a bus-stop—’
‘You know what I mean! How did you meet her? Why did you do it? Take her out, I mean, and—?’
Fraser was laughing again. But his laughter had changed. It was rueful now, almost embarrassed. He lifted a hand, to cover his mouth.
And, after a moment, Duncan began to laugh, too. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t know what he was laughing at, even—whether it was Fraser, or himself, or Viv, or Mr Mundy, or all of them. But for almost a minute he and Fraser stood there, on either side of the window-sill, their hands across their mouths, their eyes filling with tears, their faces flushing, as they tried, hopelessly, to stifle their laughter and snorts.