Bilgewater (19 page)

Marston Bungalow was better than this, I thought. Television sets and lighted chimneys and fumes and ferments: at least that desert had people in it.

There was a great door like a church and church-like pointed windows in the thick rough walls on either side and a long, rusty-feeling bell-rope hung beside the door. I pulled on this not expecting it to move. But it moved easily very far down in my hand until I thought I might be pulling it down altogether. I had the fancy that I was about to pull the whole great house down, that there would be a rumble and a crack and the massive, pathetic old place would slowly subside around my feet. I knew from the utter stillness that it was empty, a house dead long ago waiting for its final destruction.

When I let go of the chain however, it moved smoothly upwards with a long groan and though there was no sound of a bell the house stood on.

The idiocy of it all suddenly hit me as the wind struck up again and the moon disappeared before the next attack of hail and sleet. It frightened me so that it almost made me stumble and fall. I had no idea where I was. I had not one penny. I was soaked to the skin and I had fled the house of two cheerful and hospitable dentists and two good friends, fled from them into space without a word. I was utterly helpless, utterly irresponsible, utterly unwise. I, Bilgewater—I, and I turned away from the unlikely door ready to make off in any direction, anywhere, anywhere, into the night.

With a huge squeal and groan of its hinges the great door, now behind me, was pulled very slowly wide open and Terrapin stood looking at me, an oil lamp held high above his head.

H
e said, “I was doing a prose. Come in.”

I said, “But I thought you were poor.”

We each stood, letting the two statements sink in, letting them bang about for future reference, like memos in a rough note book: like Paula's great pad above her telephone labelled
NOTES AND POINTS OF REFERENCE
. The oil lamp blazed up and a blast of wind blew me towards him into the hall.

He stood looking at me very seriously indeed, his fair hair hanging down, his cheek-bones gaunt, his eyes round and large and blue. I noticed how tall he was, the immense length of his legs in black velvetish trousers, his long thin top half in a white roll-top jersey and I thought again, he is like a clown. A very distinguished, marvellous clown.

There was something else about him, too, which I found difficult to admit because it was an archaism, a sort of borrowed standard, the sort of thing that my dearest Uncle Edmund HB or silly Puffy Coleman or pathetic Mrs. Gathering might have said. He looked a gent.

There. He did. Churning out uranium in a Siberian mine, slopping about in the communist rice-fields of China, marching shoulder to shoulder with the workers, wagging the biggest red flag in the world, sitting in a hole in the road with a hanky round his head knotted greasily at each corner, Tom Terrapin would look a gent. Like Robert Graves said he did, like George Orwell wished he didn't, like Lancelot was and didn't even notice. Tom Terrapin looked the young master, the lord of high estate. I thought of smooth pin-eyed Jack Rose lying back on the pink plush, his voice just a bit near the upholstery, Jack Rose the answer to the maiden's prayer, Jack Rose who didn't live in Shalott after all. I thought, my goodness, I've been getting them the wrong way round.

He said, “Well, how was the country-house week-end?”

I blinked through my dim specs.

“At the Rose establishment? I thought you were off for a couple of days hunting.”

“We—didn't,” I said.

“It was Bridge,” I said. “And drinking. They were dentists. They believe in hanging.”

“You're rather wet.”

I looked down and saw that I was indeed so wet that a puddle was squashing out of my shoes and surrounding my feet on the filthy marble floor. The floor spread for great distances and like the terrace outside was made of a chessboard though here of vast marble squares. A very battered but beautiful staircase rose up from them some fifty feet away, dividing into two at the top and surrounding the hall as a gallery. There were niches in the staircase wall, some with statues in them and there was a broken column near my elbow with the bust of a Roman nobleman on it, lacking a nose. At the foot of the staircase was a huge motor-bike standing on clean newspaper with bits and pieces of spare-parts and tools around it, very tidily arranged. The place was absolutely freezing, so cold that puffs of white smoke came out of our mouths when we spoke, like arctic dragons.

He said, “How on earth did you get here?” still staring, lowering the lamp so that the shadows darkened under his cheek bones and gave his long narrow nose a haughty look like Sir Walter Raleigh or Mc Chou En Lai; and I felt at once a sort of peasant—and a fool again and wet and silly and ugly, running in from the rain.

“I really only came to speak to a Mrs. Deering,” I said primly, shivering as my coat clung to me, colder, soggier every moment.

“Mrs. Deering! Mrs.
Deering
!” He looked absolutely flabbergasted. “Do you
know
Mrs. Deering?”

“Yes. She said that if I was in trouble—”

“Are you? Whenever did she say that?”

“I met her. On a bus. She said I looked worried and if I was in any trouble—”

“Mrs.
Deering
! She's the housekeeper. She's dreadful.”

“I thought she was dreadful. But she said she lived at Marston Hall and I thought it was an estate or a block of flats and I could ask someone. Deering isn't a usual name—” I added feebly.

“But whatever did you want her to do?”

“Lend me the fare home.”

“Mrs.
Deering
?”

“Yes. I'd got half way. To Marston Bungalow. But I'd run out. I only had five p. left. It was just enough to get here. I didn't know anything about you—so you needn't think—I'd run away. I'd run away from the Roses. It was not possible to stay. They were terrible—terrible. Jack and Grace—”

“Grace was there?”

“Yes.”

“Jack had asked her, too?”

“Yes.”

“Without telling you?”

“Yes.”

“The shit.”

I began to cry.

“I climbed out of the window,” I said through long, horrible sobs. “I dropped from a balcony into a bush. I dropped my mother's beads into a pot. If they are my mother's sort of people they'd better have them. I don't want them. I'm finished with my mother. I'm finished with Jack Rose—waaaaaaaaaaaah,” I wailed and Terrapin came over and got me by the elbow and led me howling and bellowing up the Grinling Gibbons, bawling and weeping along the first oak landing, uncaring that Mrs. Deering might suddenly emerge from some lair behind the baize nor that the statues of previous Terrapins, scantily draped, were regarding me from their alcoves with expressions of considerable disdain.

“Come on love,” said Terrapin hastening me on. “We'd better get you warmed up and sorted out.” We marched on up another flight of stairs and along another immense gallery. There seemed to be almost no furniture at all and it was as cold as a museum with the heat turned off in January at the North Pole. Still I wept.

We reached a small door and he pushed me up a spiral staircase in front of him until I burst out of it into a very little round room with slit windows all the way round and a glorious electric fire standing right in the middle. It was the turret room in which I had imagined I had seen the light and there was such a light—an electric bulb hanging on a string down from the inside of the pinnacle. “Take your clothes off,” said Terrapin and with a slam of the door was gone.

With the odd, huge sob, but getting odder and further apart, I began unquestioningly to take off my glasses, coat, dress, tights, shoes. There was a towel over a chair and I rubbed my legs with it and hands and hair. There was an iron bed with a red blanket on it very neatly tucked in and I took it off and wound myself in it, wrapping my feet in it, almost covering my head. In the one up-right, kitchen chair I crouched like Old Mother Shipton as close to the fire as I could, hugging myself, giving an occasional great sigh and sob.

Terrapin came back and said, “Good heavens. Here. Put these on,” and vanished again, so that after a while I removed the blanket and pulled on the cloches he had tossed through the door. There seemed to be a long black woollen dress with tight sleeves and a queer high neck like someone attending the front row of the French Revolution, and a big fur thing like a hearth mat with sleeves. They had a musty smell about them but the dress was lovely and soft and clung to me all over. The hearth mat was gloriously soft and warm too, and fell about me as if it were almost a living, slinky skin. I sat on the chair and gradually allowed my freezing feet to emerge. I wriggled and stretched my toes to the electric fire.

Then I looked about.

There was a wooden table, very cheap-looking, the kitchen chair, and the iron bed. On the table were Terrapin's books—a note book, school exercise book, Greek lexicon and a book of proses open with the pen laid beside it. There was a little box of ink cartridges on the table and an alarm clock with brass bells on top from Woolworths. There was no carpet, no curtaining and the walls were roughly plastered over stone. Behind the door some clothes were hanging—his school suit and his House scarf. There was a wooden chest at the foot of the bed with a glass of water on it, and an apple. That was all. Apart from the electricity, which had been permitted to this patch of the house, it might have been a monk's cell, a solitary and enclosed nest that would not have disgraced a hermit or guru. A kingdom of the mind.

Except for an astonishing difference. From the roof of the turret, way above the light, where two beams crossed it, were two rows of hooks, and from each of these, like huge broken flowers, hung a company of marionettes. They were big, brilliant, large-handed and shod, with trails and wisps of dresses, flat-trousered, floating-haired. There were asses' heads and sirens and punchinellos and harlequins and señoras with high combs, and ghosts and skulls and witches. There were people I knew. There was a long-necked, bright-cheeked, plume-haired dutch-doll one like Paula. There was a ninny one with loose teeth like Puffy. There was one with a cloud of gold hair and heavy eye-lashes like brushes. They hung there like dusters of bright, dead birds, stirring slightly in the air currents which ran here and there overhead in the upper reaches of the turret like the tide gently rocking the feathery fishes that sleep in the reefs of distant warm seas.

“You look good.”

Terrapin had brought a big mug of tinned tomato soup and some bread and butter. “Black,” he said.

“What?” I took the mug but still gazed up above my head.

“In black. You look marvellous in black. Black fur, black dress, wet hair. Cheeks aflame. Purple feet.”

I put my feet in under the dress. He walked all round me.

“I might make a graven image of you.”

“No thanks,” I said tearing my eyes away from the heights and drinking the soup. I wondered why I was so happy that he hadn't. I wondered why I didn't feel neglected that I, Bilgewater, with my frog-face and crude hair and tortoiseshell eyes was not among the rest. “I didn't know you could make things like that.”

“You could have known.”

“How?”

“You could have known anything about me. We lived under the same roof—just you and I and Paula and your father—for plenty of years.”

I said nothing.

“At first—after the first Half Term I was there all the holidays, too. Wandering about.”

“I was frightened,” I said. “You were on the Other Side.”

“Make me sound like the dead. A shade.”

“Well you hardly
said
anything. You hardly spoke. Didn't you ever think I might be—well, not used to—”

“You didn't exactly chatter yourself.”

I drank the lovely hot soup.

“Thundering about that swimming pool—”

“You seemed—young,” I said. It was the most extraordinary experience. Wrapped in rolls of black and beauteous furs, feeling the hot bright-orange soup going gloriously down, my very toes responding; the little round room in the tower, the heat flowing up from the fire and making the paper company drift and whisper together above my head—all so strange. And I was speaking truthfully, keeping back nothing, as fearless as if I were talking to myself. But not to myself—to this sweet and most beloved boy. I felt that we knew each other inside out.

He flung himself down on the bed and put his hands behind his head and I leaned forward and looked at the work on the table. I can do Greek. It seemed to be Xenophon. His writing was beautiful—large and very even and sloping and black. I ran my finger over the page and drew up my feet on to the chair-rung.

“Where're you trying for?”

“Jesus and John's.”

“Cambridge?”

“Yes.”

“So'm I. Next week like you.”

“Yes, I know.”

“If I get in,” I said. “It's not so easy for a girl.”

“You'll get in. You got marvellous A levels.”

I looked over at his profile on the bed. “I didn't know you knew anything about my A Levels. Anyway, a lot depends on the interview. You often don't even get an interview if you're a girl.”

“You'll get an interview.”

“How d'you know?”

“Because you're very good.”

“My writing's awful. I'm no good at English. The General Paper—”

“English? General paper? I know because I know you. I've known you for years. I've watched you.”

“I've known you, too,” I said after a time. I put my head down on his work table and let my forehead roll about on Xenophon. Looking up, I thought I saw something that made me uneasy out of the corner of my eye-ball, behind the doot, but it was very important, I found, not to concentrate on that. I said, putting my hands over my face for a moment, “Terrapin, I do know you.”