Eyeless In Gaza (7 page)

‘And for heaven's sake,' Joyce went on, ‘don't do anything idiotic. I absolutely forbid . . .'

But even as she spoke the words, Helen stretched out a hand and without any attempt at concealment took the topmost of an elaborate structure of chocolate tablets that stood, like the section of a spiral pillar, on the counter – took it and then, with the same slow deliberation of movement, put it carefully away in her basket.

But before the crime was fully accomplished Joyce had turned and walked away.

‘I might say I'd never seen her before,' she was thinking. But of course that wouldn't do. Everybody knew they were sisters. ‘Oh, Colin,' she cried inwardly, ‘Colin!'

A pyramid of tinned lobster loomed up before her. She halted. ‘Calm,' she said to herself. ‘I must be calm.' Her heart was thumping with terror, and the dark magenta lobsters on the labels of the tins wavered dizzily before her eyes. She was afraid to look round; but through the noise of her heart-beats she listened anxiously for the inevitable outcry.

‘I don't know if you're interested in lobster, Miss,' a confidential voice almost whispered into her left ear.

Joyce started violently; then managed, with an effort, to smile and shake her head.

‘This is a line we can heartily recommend, Miss. I'm sure if you were to try a tin . . .'

‘And now,' Helen was saying, very calmly and in the same maddeningly feudal tone, ‘I need ten pounds of sugar. But that you must send.'

They walked out of the shop. The young man at the cheese and bacon counter smiled his farewell; they were nice-looking girls and regular customers. With a great effort, Joyce contrived to be gracious yet once more. But they were hardly through the door when her face disintegrated, as it were, into a chaos of violent emotion.

‘Helen!' she said furiously. ‘Helen!'

But Helen was still the young queen on her silver florin, a speechless profile.

‘Helen!' Between the glove and the sleeve, Joyce found an inch of her sister's bare skin and pinched, hard.

Helen jerked her arm away, and without looking round, a profile still, ‘If you bother me any more,' she said in a low voice, ‘I shall push you into the gutter.'

Joyce opened her mouth to speak, then changed her mind and, absurdly, shut it again. She knew that if she did say anything more, Helen unquestionably would push her into the gutter. She had to be content with shrugging her shoulders and looking dignified.

The greengrocer's was crowded. Waiting for her turn to be served, Helen had no difficulty in bagging a couple of oranges.

‘Have one?' she proposed insultingly to Joyce as they walked out of the shop.

It was Joyce's turn to be a profile on a coin.

At the stationer's there were, unfortunately, no other clients to distract the attention of the people behind the counter. But Helen was equal to the situation. A handful of small change suddenly went rolling across the floor; and while the assistants were hunting for the scattered pennies, she helped herself to a rubber and three very good pencils.

It was at the butcher's that the trouble began. Ordinarily
Helen refused to go into the shop at all; the sight, the sickening smell of those pale corpses disgusted her. But this morning she walked straight in. In spite of the disgust. It was a point of honour. She had said
every
shop, and she wasn't going to give Joyce an excuse for saying she had cheated. For the first half-minute, while her lungs were still full of the untainted air she had inhaled outside in the street, it was all right. But, oh God, when at last she had to breathe . . . God! She put her handkerchief to her nose. But the sharp rasping smell of the carcases leaked through the barrier of perfume, superimposing itself upon the sweetness, so that a respiration that began with
Quelques Fleurs
would hideously end with dead sheep or, opening in stale blood, modulated insensibly into the key of jasmine and ambergris.

A customer went out; the butcher turned to her. He was an oldish man, very large, with a square massive face that beamed down at her with a paternal benevolence.

‘Like Mr Baldwin,' she said to herself, and then, aloud but indistinctly through her handkerchief, ‘A pound and a half of rump-steak, please.'

The butcher returned in a moment with a mass of gory flesh. ‘There's a beautiful piece of meat, Miss!' He fingered the dank, red lump with an artist's loving enthusiasm. ‘A really
beautiful
piece.' It was Mr Baldwin's fingering his Virgil, thumbing his dog's-eared Webb.

‘I shall never eat meat again,' she said to herself, as Mr Baldwin turned away and began to cut up the meat. ‘But what shall I take?' She looked around. ‘What on earth . . .? Ah!' A marble shelf ran, table-high, along one of the walls of the shop. On it, in trays, pink or purply brown, lay a selection of revolting viscera. And among the viscera a hook – a big steel S, still stained, at one of its curving tips, with the blood of whatever drawn and decapitated corpse had hung from it. She glanced round. It seemed a good moment – the butcher was
weighing her steak, his assistant was talking to that disgusting old woman like a bulldog, the girl at the cash desk was deep in her accounts. Aloof and dissociated in the doorway, Joyce was elaborately overacting the part of one who interrogates the sky and wonders if this drizzle is going to turn into something serious. Helen took three quick steps, picked up the hook, and was just lowering it into her basket when, full of solicitude, ‘Look out, Miss,' came the butcher's voice, ‘you'll get yourself dirty if you touch those hooks.'

That start of surprise was like the steepest descent of the Scenic Railway – sickening! Hot in her cheeks, her eyes, her forehead, came a rush of guilty blood! She tried to laugh.

‘I was just looking.' The hook clanked back on to the marble.

‘I wouldn't like you to spoil your clothes, Miss.' His smile was fatherly. More than ever like Mr Baldwin.

Nervously, for lack of anything better to do or say, Helen laughed again, and, in the process, drew another deep breath of corpse. Ugh! She fortified her nose once more with
Quelque Fleurs
.

‘One pound and eleven ounces, Miss.'

She nodded her assent. But what could she take? And how was she to find the opportunity?

‘Anything more this morning?'

Yes, that was the only thing to do – to order something more. That would give her time to think, a chance to act. ‘Have you any . . .' she hesitated ‘. . . any sweetbreads?'

Yes, Mr Baldwin did have some sweetbreads, and they were on the shelf with the other viscera. Near the hook. ‘Oh, I don't know,' she said, when he asked her how much she needed. ‘Just the ordinary amount, you know.'

She looked about her while he was busy with the sweetbreads, despairingly. There was nothing in this beastly shop, nothing except the hook, that she
could
take. And now that
he had seen her with it in her hands, the hook was out of the question. Nothing whatever. Unless . . . That was it! A shudder ran through her. But she frowned, she set her teeth. She was determined to go through with it.

‘And now,' when he had packed up the sweetbreads, ‘now,' she said, ‘I must have some of those!' She indicated the packets of pale sausages piled on a shelf at the other end of the shop.

‘I'll do it while his back is turned,' she thought. But the girl at the cash desk had emerged from her accounts and was looking round the shop. ‘Oh, damn her, damn her!' Helen fairly screamed in her imagination, and then, ‘Thank goodness!' the girl had turned away. A hand shot out; but the averted glance returned, ‘
Damn
her!' The hand dropped back. And now it was too late. Mr Baldwin had got the sausages, had turned, was coming back towards her.

‘Will that be all, Miss?'

‘Well, I wonder?' Helen frowned uncertainly, playing for time. ‘I can't help thinking there was something else . . . something else . . .' The seconds passed; it was terrible; she was making a fool of herself, an absolute idiot. But she refused to give up. She refused to acknowledge defeat.

‘We've some beautiful Welsh mutton in this morning,' said the butcher in that artist's voice of his, as though he were talking of the Georgics.

Helen shook her head: she really couldn't start buying mutton now.

Suddenly the girl at the cash desk began to write again. The moment had come. ‘No,' she said with decision, ‘I'll take another pound of those sausages.'

‘Another?' Mr Baldwin looked surprised.

No wonder! she thought. They'd be surprised at home too.

‘Yes, just one more,' she said, and smiled ingratiatingly, as though she were asking a favour. He walked back towards the shelf. The girl at the cash desk was still writing, the old woman
who looked like a bulldog had never stopped talking to the assistant. Quickly – there was not a second to lose – Helen turned towards the marble shelf beside her. It was for one of those kidneys that she had decided. The thing slithered obscenely between her gloved fingers – a slug, a squid. In the end she had to grab it with her whole hand. Thank heaven, she thought, for gloves! As she dropped it into the basket, the idea came to her that for some reason she might have to take the horrible thing in her mouth, raw as it was and oozy with some unspeakable slime, take it in her mouth, bite, taste, swallow. Another shudder of disgust ran through her, so violent this time that it seemed to tear something at the centre of her body.

Tired of acting the meteorologist, Joyce was standing under her umbrella looking at the chrysanthemums in the florist's window next door. She had prepared something particularly offensive to say to Helen when she came out. But at the sight of her sister's white unhappy face she forgot even her legitimate grievances.

‘Why, Helen, what
is
the matter?'

For all answer Helen suddenly began to cry.

‘What is it?'

She shook her head and, turning away, raised her hand to her face to brush away the tears.

‘Tell me . . .'

‘Oh!' Helen started and cried out as though she had been stung by a wasp. An expression of agonized repugnance wrinkled up her face. ‘Oh, too filthy,
too
filthy,' she repeated, looking at her fingers. And setting her basket down on the pavement, she unbuttoned the glove, stripped it off her hand, and, with a violent gesture, flung it away from her into the gutter.

THE GUARD WHISTLED,
and obediently the train began to move – past Keating, at a crawl; past Branson; past Pickwick, Owl and Waverley; past Beecham, Owbridge, Carter, Pears, in accelerated succession; past Humphrey's Iron Buildings, past Lollingdon for Choate; past Eno's at twenty miles an hour; past Pears, Pears, Pears, Pears, Pears – and suddenly the platform and its palings dipped and were lost, swallowed in the green country. Anthony leaned back in his corner and sighed thankfully. It was escape at last; he had climbed out of that black well into which they had pushed him, and was free again. The wheels sang cheerfully in his ears. ‘To stop the train pull down the chain penalty for impróper use five póunds five póunds
FIVE POUNDS FIVE POUNDS
 . . .' But how perfectly awful luncheon at Granny's had been!

‘Work,' James Beavis was saying. ‘It's the only thing at a time like this.'

His brother nodded. ‘The only thing,' he agreed. Then, after a moment's hesitation, ‘One's had a pretty bad knock,' he added self-consciously, in that queer jargon which he imagined to be colloquial English. John Beavis's colloquialisms mostly
came out of books. That ‘bad knock' was a metaphor drawn from the boxing contests he had never witnessed. ‘Luckily,' he went on, ‘one's got a great deal of work on hand at the moment.' He thought of his lectures. He thought of his contributions to the Oxford Dictionary. The mountains of books, the slips, his huge card index, the letters from fellow philologists. And the exhaustive essay on Jacobean slang. ‘Not that one wants to “shirk” anything,' he added, putting the colloquial word between the audible equivalents of inverted commas. James mustn't think that he was going to drown his grief in work. He groped for a phrase. ‘It's . . . it's a sacred music that one's facing!' he brought out at last.

James kept nodding with quick little jerks of the head, as though he knew in advance everything his brother would or possibly could say. His face twitched with sudden involuntary tics. He was wasted by nervous impatience as though by a consumption, eaten away by it to the very bone. ‘Quite,' he said, ‘quite.' And gave one last nod. There was a long silence.

‘Tomorrow,' Anthony was thinking, ‘there'll be algebra with old Jimbug.' The prospect was disagreeable; he wasn't good at maths, and, even at the best of times, even when he was only joking, Mr Jameson was a formidable teacher. ‘If Jimbug gets baity with me, like that time last week . . .' Remembering the scene, Anthony frowned; the blood came up into his cheeks. Jimbug made sarcastic remarks at him and pulled his hair. He had begun to blub. (Who wouldn't have blubbed?) A tear had fallen on to the equation he was trying to work out and made a huge round blot. That beast Staithes had ragged him about it afterwards. Luckily Foxe had come to his rescue. One laughed at Foxe because he stammered; but he was really extraordinarily decent.

At Waterloo, Anthony and his father took a hansom. Uncle James preferred to walk. ‘I can get to the Club in eleven minutes,' he told them. His hand went to his waistcoat
pocket. He looked at his watch; then turned and without saying another word went striding away down the hill.

‘Euston!' John Beavis called up to the cabman.

Stepping cautiously on the smooth slope, the horse moved forward; the cab heaved like a ship. Inaudibly, Anthony hummed the ‘Washington Post.' Riding in a hansom always made him feel extraordinarily happy. At the bottom of the hill, the cabby whipped his horse into a trot. They passed a smell of beer, a smell of fried fish; drove through ‘Good-bye, Dolly Gray' on a cornet and swung into the Waterloo Bridge Road. The traffic roared and rattled all about them. If his father had not been there, Anthony would have sung out aloud.