Complete Stories of Eveyln, Page 25

  I had given up living in St. John’s Wood for four or five years. There was never a definite moment when I “left home.” For all official purposes the house remained my domicile. There was a bedroom that was known as mine; I kept several trunks full of clothes there and a shelf or two of books. I never set up for myself anywhere else, but during the last five years of my father’s life I do not suppose I slept ten nights under his roof. This was not due to any estrangement. I enjoyed his company, and he seemed to enjoy mine; had I settled there permanently, with a servant of my own and a separate telephone number, we might have lived together comfortably enough, but I was never in London for more than a week or two at a time, and I found that as an occasional visitor I strained and upset my father’s household. He and they tried to do too much, and he liked to have his plans clear for some way ahead. “My dear boy,” he would say on my first evening. “Please do not misunderstand me. I hope you will stay as long as you possibly can, but I do wish to know whether you will still be here on Thursday the fourteenth and if so, whether you will be in to dinner.” So I took to staying at my club or with more casual hosts, and to visiting St. John’s Wood as often as I could, but with formal prearrangements.

  Nevertheless, I realized, the house had been an important part of my life. It had remained unaltered for as long as I could remember. It was a decent house, built in 1840 or thereabouts, in the contemporary Swiss mode of stucco and ornamental weather boards, one of a street of similar, detached houses when I first saw it. By the time of my father’s death the transformation of the district, though not complete, was painfully evident. The skyline of the garden was broken on three sides by blocks of flats. The first of them drove my father into a frenzy of indignation. He wrote to The Times about it, addressed a meeting of ratepayers and for six weeks sported a board advertising the house for sale. At the end of that time he received a liberal offer from the syndicate, who wished to extend their block over the site, and he immediately withdrew it from the market. “I could tell they were Jews,” he said, “by the smell of their notepaper.”

  This was in his anti-Semitic period; it was also the period of his lowest professional fortunes, when his subject pictures remained unsold, the market for dubious old masters was dropping, and public bodies were beginning to look for something “modern” in their memorial portraits; the period, moreover, when I had finished with the University and was still dependent on my father for pocket money. It was a very unsatisfactory time in his life. I had not then learned to appreciate the massive defences of what people call the “border line of sanity,” and I was at moments genuinely afraid that my father was going out of his mind; there had always seemed an element of persecution mania about his foibles which might, at a time of great strain, go beyond his control. He used to stand on the opposite pavement watching the new building rise, a conspicuous figure muttering objurgations. I used to imagine scenes in which a policeman would ask him to move on and be met with a wild outburst. I imagined these scenes vividly—my father in swirling cape being hustled off, waving his umbrella. Nothing of the kind occurred. My father, for all his oddity, was a man of indestructible sanity and in his later years he found a keen pleasure in contemplating the rapid deterioration of the hated buildings. “Very good news of Hill Crest Court,” he announced one day. “Typhoid and rats.” And on another occasion, “Jellaby reports the presence of tarts at St. Eustace’s. They’ll have a suicide there soon, you’ll see.” There was a suicide, and for two rapturous days my father watched the coming and going of police and journalists. After that fewer chintz curtains were visible in the windows, rents began to fall and the lift-man smoked on duty. My father observed and gleefully noted all these signs. Hill Crest Court changed hands; decorator’s, plumber’s and electrician’s boards appeared all round it; a commissionaire with a new uniform stood at the doors. On the last evening I dined with my father he told me about a visit he had made there, posing as a potential tenant. “The place is a deserted slum,” he said. “A miserable, down-at-heel kind of secretary took me round flat after flat—all empty. There were great cracks in the concrete stuffed up with putty. The hot pipes were cold. The doors jammed. He started asking three hundred pounds a year for the best of them and dropped to one hundred and seventy-five pounds before I saw the kitchen. Then he made it one hundred and fifty pounds. In the end he proposed what he called a ‘special form of tenancy for people of good social position’—offered to let me live there for a pound a week on condition I turned out if he found someone who was willing to pay the real rent. ‘Strictly between ourselves,’ he said, ‘I can promise you will not be disturbed.’ Poor beast, I nearly took his flat, he was so paintable.”

  Now, I supposed, the house would be sold; another speculator would pull it to pieces; another great, uninhabitable barrack would appear, like a refugee ship in harbour; it would be filled sold, emptied, resold, refilled, re-emptied, while the concrete got discoloured and the green wood shrank, and the rats crept up in their thousands out of the metropolitan railway tunnel; and the trees and gardens all round it disappeared one by one until the place became a working-class district and at last took on a gaiety and life of some sort; until it was condemned by government inspectors and its inhabitants driven further into the country and the process began all over again. I thought of all this, sadly, as I looked out at the fine masonry of Fez, cut four hundred years back by Portuguese prisoners . . . I must go back to England soon to arrange for the destruction of my father’s house. Meanwhile there seemed no reason for an immediate change of plan.

  III

  It was the evening when I usually visited the Moulay Abdullah—the walled quartier toleré between the old city and the ghetto. I had gone there first with a sense of adventure; now it had become part of my routine, a regular resort, like the cinema and the Consulate, one of the recreations which gave incident to my week and helped clear my mind of the elaborate villainies of Lady Mountrichard.

  I dined at seven and soon afterwards caught my bus at the new gate. Before starting I removed my watch and emptied my pockets of all except the few francs which I proposed to spend—a superstitious precaution which still survived from the first evening, when memories of Marseilles and Naples had even moved me to carry a life preserver. The Moulay Abdullah was an orderly place, particularly in the early evening when I frequented it. I had formed an attachment for it; it was the only place of its kind I have ever found, which endowed its trade with something approaching glamour. There really was a memory of “the East,” as adolescents imagine it, in that silent courtyard with its single light, the Negro sentries on either side of the lofty Moorish arch, the black lane beyond, between the walls and the waterwheel, full of the thump and stumble of French military boots and the soft pad and rustle of the natives, the second arch into the lighted bazaar, the bright open doors and the tiled patios, the little one-roomed huts where the women stood against the lamplight—shadows without race or age—the larger houses with their bars and gramophones. I always visited the same house and the same girl—a chubby little Berber with the scarred cheeks of her people and tattooed ornaments—blue on brown—at her forehead and throat. She spoke the peculiar French which she had picked up from the soldiers and she went by the unassuming, professional name of Fatima. Other girls of the place called themselves “Lola” and “Fifi”; there was even an arrogant, coal-black Sudanese named “Whiskey-soda.” But Fatima had none of these airs; she was a cheerful, affectionate girl working hard to collect her marriage dot; she professed to like everyone in the house, even the proprietress, a forbidding Jewess from Tetuan, and the proprietress’s Algerian husband, who wore a European suit, carried round the mint tea, put records on the gramophone and collected the money. (The Moors are a strict people and take no share in the profits of the Moulay Abdullah.)

  To regular and serious customers it was an inexpensive place—fifteen francs to the house, ten to Fatima, five for the mint tea, a few sous to the old fellow who tidied Fatima’s alcov
e and blew up the brazier of sweet gum. Soldiers paid less, but they had to make way for more important customers; often they were penniless men from the Foreign Legion who dropped in merely to hear the gramophone and left nothing behind them but cigarette ends. Now and then tourists appeared with a guide from the big hotel, and the girls were made to line up and give a modest performance of shuffling and hand clapping which was called a native dance. Women tourists particularly seemed to like these expeditions and paid heavily for them—a hundred francs or more. But they were unpopular with everyone, particularly with the girls, who regarded it as an unseemly proceeding. Once I came in when Fatima was taking part in one of these dances and saw her genuinely and deeply abashed.

  On my first visit I told Fatima that I had a wife and six children in England; this greatly enhanced my importance in her eyes and she always asked after them.

  “You have had a letter from England? The little ones are well?”

  “They are very well.”

  “And your father and mother?”

  “They, too.”

  We sat in a tiled hall, two steps below street level, drinking our mint tea—or, rather, Fatima drank hers while I let mine cool in the glass. It was a noisome beverage.

  “Whiskey-soda lent me some cigarettes yesterday. Will you give her them?”

  I ordered a packet from the bar.

  “Yesterday I had a stomach-ache and stayed in my room. That is why Whiskey-soda gave me her cigarettes.”

  She asked about my business.

  I had told her I exported dates.

  The date market was steady, I assured her.

  When I was in the Moulay Abdullah I almost believed in this aspect of myself as a philo-progenitive fruiterer; St. John’s Wood and Mountrichard Castle seemed equally remote. That was the charm of the quarter for me—not its simple pleasures but its privacy and anonymity, the hide-and-seek with one’s own personality which redeems vice of its tedium.

  That night there was a rude interruption. The gramophone suddenly stopped playing; there was a scuttling among the alcoves; two seedy figures in raincoats strode across the room and began questioning the proprietress; a guard of military police stood at the street door. Raids of this kind, to round up bad characters, are common enough in French Protectorates. It was the first time I had been caught in one. The girls were made to stand along one wall while the detectives checked their medical certificates. Then two or three soldiers stood to attention and gave a satisfactory account of themselves. Then I was asked for my carte d’identité. By the capitulations the French police had little authority over British subjects, and since the criminal class of Morocco mostly possessed Maltese papers, this immunity was good ground for vexation. The detectives were surly fellows, African born. Even the sacred word “tourist” failed to soften them. Where was my guide? Tourists did not visit the Moulay Abdullah alone. Where was my passport? At my hotel. The Jamai Palace? No? Tourists did not stay at the hotel I mentioned. Was I registered at the police headquarters? Yes. Very well, I must come with them. In the morning I should have the opportunity to identify myself. A hundred francs, no doubt, would have established my respectability, but my money lay with my passport in the hotel. I did not relish a night in gaol in company with the paperless characters of the Moulay Abdullah. I told them I was a friend of the British Consul. He would vouch for me. They grumbled that they had no time for special enquiries of that kind. The Chief would see about it next morning. Then when I had despaired, they despaired too. There was clearly no money coming for them. They had been in the profession long enough to know that no lasting satisfaction results from vexing British subjects. There was a police post in the quarter and they consented to telephone from it. A few minutes later I was set at liberty with a curt reminder that it was advisable to keep my passport accessible if I wanted to wander about the town at night.

  I did not return to Fatima. Instead I set off for the bus stop, but the annoyances of the night were not yet over. I was halted again at the gates and the interrogation was repeated. I explained that I had already satisfied their colleagues and been discharged. We re-enacted the scene, with the fading hope of a tip as the recurring motive. Finally they, too, telephoned to the Consulate and I was free to take my bus home.

  They were still serving dinner at the hotel; the same game of billiards was in progress in the bar; it was less than an hour since I went out. But that hour had been decisive; I was finished with Fez; its privacy had been violated. My weekly visit to the Consulate could never be repeated on the same terms. Twice in twenty minutes the Consul had been called to the telephone to learn that I was in the hands of the police in the Moulay Abdullah; he would not, I thought, be censorious or resentful; the vexation had been mild and the situation slightly absurd—nothing more; but when we next met our relations would be changed. Till then they had been serenely remote; we had talked of the news from England and the Moorish antiquities. We had exposed the bare minimum of ourselves; now a sudden, mutually unwelcome confidence had been forced. The bitterness lay, not in the Consul knowing the fact of my private recreations, but in his knowing that I knew he knew. It was a salient in the defensive line between us that could only be made safe by a wide rectification of frontier or by a complete evacuation. I had no friendly territory into which to withdraw. I was deployed on the dunes between the sea and the foothills. The transports riding at anchor were my sole lines of support.

  In the matter of Good Conscience, I was a man of few possessions and held them at a corresponding value. As a spinster in mean lodgings fusses over her fragments of gentility—a rosewood workbox, a Spode plate, a crested teakettle—which in a house of abundance would be risked in the rough and tumble of general use, I set a price on Modesty which those of ampler virtues might justly regard as fanciful.

  Next day I set off for London with my book unfinished.

  IV

  I travelled from spring into winter; sunlit spray in the Straits of Gibraltar changed to dark, heavy seas in the Bay of Biscay; fog off Finisterre, fog in the Channel, clear, grey weather in the Thames estuary and a horizon of factories and naked trees. We berthed in London and I drove through cold and dirty streets to meet my Uncle Andrew.

  He told me the full circumstances of my father’s death; the commercial traveller, against whom a case was being brought for reckless driving, had outraged my uncle by sending a wreath of flowers to the funeral; apart from this everything had been satisfactory. My uncle passed over to me the undertaker’s receipted account; he had questioned one or two of the items and obtained an inconsiderable reduction. “I am convinced,” my uncle said, “that there is a great deal of sharp practice among these people. They trade upon the popular conception of delicacy. In fact they are the only profession who literally rob the widow and the orphan.” I thanked my uncle for having saved me £3 18s. It was a matter of principle, he said.

  As I expected, I was my father’s sole heir. Besides the house and its contents I inherited £2,000 in an insurance policy which my father had taken out at the time of his marriage and, without my knowledge, kept up ever since. An injunction, in the brief will, to “provide suitably” for the servants in my father’s employment, had already been obeyed. The Jellabys had been given £250. It was clear from my father’s words that he had no conception of what a suitable provision should be. Neither had I, and I was grateful to my uncle for taking responsibility in the matter. For their part the Jellabys had expected nothing. My father, as long ago as I could remember him, was accustomed to talk with relish of his approaching death. I had heard him often admonish Jellaby, “You have joined fortune with a poor man. Make what you can while I still have my faculties. My death will be an occasion for unrelieved lamentation,” and the Jellabys, in the manner of their kind, took his words literally, kept a keen watch on all sources of perquisite, and expected nothing. Jellaby took his cheque, my uncle said, without any demonstration of gratitude or disappointment, murmuring ungraciously that it would come in quite us
eful. No doubt he thought no thanks were due to my uncle, for it was not his money, nor to my father, for it was no intention of his to give it. It was a last, substantial perquisite.

  The Jellabys had been much in my mind, off and on, during the journey from Fez. I had fretted, in a way I have, imagining our meeting and a scene of embarrassing condolence and reminiscence, questioning the propriety of removing them immediately, if ever, from the place where they had spent so much of their lives; I even saw myself, on the Jellabys’ account, assuming my father’s way of life, settling in St. John’s Wood, entertaining small dinner parties, lunching regularly at my club and taking three weeks’ holiday abroad in the early summer. As things turned out, however, I never saw the Jellabys again. They had done their packing before the funeral, and went straight to the railway station in their black clothes. Their plans had been laid years in advance. They had put away a fair sum and invested it in Portsmouth, not, as would have been conventional, in a lodging house, but in a small shop in a poor quarter of the town which enjoyed a brisk trade in second-hand wireless apparatus. Mrs. Jellaby’s step-brother had been keeping the business warm for them and there they retired with an alacrity which was slightly shocking but highly convenient. I wrote to them some time later when I was going through my father’s possessions, to ask if they would like to have some small personal memento of him; they might value one of his sketches, I suggested, for the walls of their new home. The answer took some time in coming. When it came it was on a sheet of trade paper with a printed heading “T. JELLABY. Every Radio want promptly supplied for cash.” Mrs. Jellaby wrote the letter. They had not much room for pictures, she said, but would greatly appreciate some blankets, as it was chilly at nights in Portsmouth; she specified a particular pair which my father had bought shortly before his death; they were lying, folded in the hot cupboard. . . .