The Trouble With Harry (4 page)

While Mrs Wiggs was shaving off a quarter of streaky from a piece of flank at sixpence a pound, Miss Graveley came in. Sam Marlow gallantly stood on the biscuit tin to allow her room. He looked at Miss Graveley with interest, for she seemed in a state of agitation. There was an excitement about her that his artistic eye was quick to notice. They had lived on the Sparrowswick slopes for years, ever since she had retired with a small annuity from her Uncle Moses and he had been sent down from Cambridge with a minute allowance from his father. They had lived on this bosky hill for years, passed each other scores of
times, tripped over each other many times and yet never spoken, nor did they know each other’s names.

But on this occasion Miss Graveley did speak. She said: ‘What a wonderful afternoon!’

Sam said: ‘So was yesterday, but you didn’t say anything to
me
about it.’

Mrs Wiggs said: ‘It’s a regular heat wave.’

Outside in the road the Rolls-Royce sounded a deep and musical electric hooter.

‘Those marvellous paintings,’ said Miss Graveley, smiling at Sam. ‘Somebody told me they were yours – why don’t you sell them and make a lot of money? Think how pleasant it would be.’

Sam regarded her as though she had really hit on something. ‘I must think about it,’ he said.

‘And that song,’ said Miss Graveley. ‘How well you sing it!’

‘What do you want to borrow?’ Sam asked.

Miss Graveley threw up her pale hands. ‘Oh, dear, no! I do think we need a little encouragement sometimes, though, don’t you, Mr Marlow?’

‘How do you know my name?’ asked Sam.

‘It’s on the pictures, isn’t it?’

‘It’s not supposed to be readable,’ Sam said.

‘You can tell it’s not supposed to be,’ said Miss Graveley. ‘They’re all very professional, don’t you think, Mrs Wiggs?’

‘I do indeed, Miss Graveley,’ said Mrs Wiggs, wrapping up the scrap of bacon. ‘I was only saying the other day—’

‘Thank you for your encouragement, Miss Graveley,’ Sam said generously.

‘Now I wonder how you know
my
name,’ said Miss Graveley, with the air of a kitten.

‘Wiggy just told me,’ Sam said.

‘Wiggy? Oh – Mrs Wiggs? I say, what a topping little nickname. Do let me call you Wiggy, Mrs Wiggs.’

‘It’s a pleasure, I’m sure,’ said Mrs Wiggs. ‘Here you are, Mr Marlow – bacon, margarine, sugar, tea, baked beans, potatoes, half a cabbage and some salt – it comes to one and fourpence. Oh, and the cigarettes. It comes to one and sixpence altogether.’

‘
Does
it,’ said Sam Marlow, feeling deeply in his shabby pockets. He wriggled his hands down to the furthermost recesses of his trouser pockets then,
since he was wearing no jacket, he made a business of feeling in his hip pocket. The space in the shop was so limited that his gyrations sent two biscuit tins crashing to the floor and the big painting of the glossy-haired young man in the window leant forward as though suddenly interested in the flower border directly under the window.

‘Perhaps you’d better go outside and look,’ said Mrs Wiggs, ‘while I serve Miss Graveley.’

Sam Marlow the artist went out on to the sunlit front space and searched for one and sixpence. As soon as he appeared the man in the Rolls-Royce played a wonderful
arpeggio
on his electric hooters. Sam looked across at him and waved. The man was sitting on the near side of the car and he was so taken with the pictures lining the stall that he was almost out of the car.

Pretty soon Sam came back into the shop with one shilling and twopence in his hand.

‘I’ve got one and twopence,’ he said.

‘Just a minute, Mr Marlow,’ Mrs Wiggs said.

It was then Sam became aware of something important happening. Miss Graveley was standing
holding up a large, thick tea cup to the light. It was a big, cheap cup, though not chipped; but the middle-aged spinster was holding it and treating it as though it were some fine and ancient porcelain.

‘One and twopence—’ Sam began again.

‘Pssssh!’ said Mrs Wiggs.

Sam succumbed to the tension. He studied the cup over Miss Graveley’s shoulder. She turned and stared at him. Her face was serious and pale with the labour of her deciding. When she spoke she enunciated her words carefully, as a prime minister about to sell out the country might do.

‘What do you think?’ she said.

Sam pondered. ‘I think it will hold tea,’ he said.

‘How about the size? What about the handle? Is it finger size?’

Sam put his finger through the handle. ‘It’s
my
finger size.’

Miss Graveley took hold of his hands and studied his fingers. Mrs Wiggs stood by her brass till awaiting a decision, her face expressionless. Miss Graveley swung around to her, animated by the importance of her decision.

‘I’ll take it!’

‘Twopence-ha’penny,’ said Mrs Wiggs, in her level tone.

‘And the saucer?’

‘Four-and-a-half all together,’ said Mrs Wiggs.

While Mrs Wiggs wrapped up the cup and saucer, being careful to put soft paper inside the cup and between the cup and the saucer, Miss Graveley watched with a dream-like quality in her eyes. She caught sight of herself in a scrap of chromium plating on the bacon machine. She touched her hair, lifting it from her neck.

‘I think I’ll have some ribbon,’ she announced.

‘I want to get up on the heath to paint before the best of the sunlight goes,’ Sam said reasonably. ‘If you’d just take my one and twopence and put the odd fourpence on the slate—’

‘Ribbon?’ said Mrs Wiggs. She looked up at Miss Graveley and there was a perplexed expression in her insignificant face. Mrs Wiggs had come to expect certain things of certain people and Miss Graveley was buying out of character. She had bought a big, ugly cup and now she was talking about ribbon.

‘What kind of ribbon?’

Miss Graveley studied her face and hair in the scrap of chromium. ‘I think blue—’ She turned suddenly to Sam. ‘You’re an artist, Mr Marlow. What colour ribbon shall I have?’

‘Red’s always a good colour,’ Sam said, ‘if it’s for an Easter egg or a parcel of some kind.’

‘It’s for my hair,’ said Miss Graveley.

Mrs Wiggs’ bunion began to throb, which was a sign that things were getting a little beyond her. ‘I think I’ve got a lemonade customer,’ she said, catching the last notes from the Rolls-Royce again.

Sam took Miss Graveley by the arm. ‘How can you talk of lemonade at a time like this?’ He spoke to Mrs Wiggs over his shoulder. He then addressed Miss Graveley. ‘You want some coloured ribbon for your hair?’

Miss Graveley nodded.

Sam’s eyes rested for a moment on the wrapped cup and saucer. ‘Something special going to happen?’ he hazarded.

Miss Graveley blushed and laid her eyelashes on her cheeks in a way she had not done for some twenty years. ‘
Somebody’s coming to tea
,’ she said.

‘A man?’

Miss Graveley nodded, mutely.

‘You old tease!’ said Sam, in a congratulatory tone.

‘Old!’

Mrs Wiggs peered out of the window and set the glossy-haired young man to rights. Outside, the man had got out of the Rolls-Royce and was looking more closely at the paintings.

‘That was figurative,’ said Sam gallantly.

‘How old do you think I am, young man?’ said Miss Graveley, a little apprehensively.

‘Fifty-five,’ said Sam. ‘How old do
you
think you are?’

‘Forty-two,’ said Miss Graveley. ‘I can show you my certificate.’

Sam looked at her and sighed. ‘You’ll have to show more than your certificate to prove that. You should have your hair cut. A nice bob.’

‘I think I’ll just go out and see what that gentleman wants,’ said Mrs Wiggs.

‘You stay here, Mrs Wiggs,’ said Miss Graveley, digesting the artist’s constructive remark. She once again looked at herself in the bacon machine. She
could see herself now with a bob. She looked very beautiful. She leant towards Mrs Wiggs. ‘Could you bob my hair, Wiggy?’

Mrs Wiggs shuffled. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ she said.

‘
I
know, I’m sure,’ said Sam. ‘Take her in the back parlour, Wiggy. I’ll go and get the scissors from the stall.’

Mrs Wiggs dithered. ‘Well, all right, Miss Graveley. Come through.’

Miss Graveley, with the air of a crusader, followed the proprietress of Wiggs’ Emporium into the back parlour. Sam Marlow went to the stall outside. The man in the horn-rimmed glasses had just replaced a picture against the stall and was looking at his watch.

‘I say …’ he said, when he saw Sam.

Sam poured out a glass of lemonade and thrust it into the man’s hand. He took the scissors up and strode back to the ivy-covered cottage.

The man began to follow him. Then he looked at his watch again, gulped the lemonade, and got back into his car. As Sam went in to cut off Miss Graveley’s hair, the Rolls-Royce purred away.

Sam Marlow, the artist, climbed the same woodland path that Abie, the small boy, had climbed some two hours earlier. Instead of a gun, however, under his arm he carried an easel and the things with which to make coloured pictures of what he saw and felt and believed. The woodland came to Sam as a series of separate pictures. He looked to the left and to the right; he looked up and down and sometimes he stopped and looked back the way he had come and saw the steep path framed by the trees with, right at the bottom, the front gate of the first bungalow.

He came out on to the heath and continued his
slow walk. He walked as slowly and silently as little Abie had walked, and he might easily have been stalking big game instead of new angles.

Soon Sam Marlow came upon the dead hedgehog. There was a solitary bluebottle settled on the bullet wound and when Sam lunged his foot towards it the bluebottle leapt sideways after the manner of bluebottles and zoomed away into a wide spiral, its greedy, bulbous eyes still fixed on the blood it had left.

Sam turned the hedgehog over gently with his sandal. He heard a tiny commotion in the bracken nearby and he walked across and looked down intently. He saw the baby hedgehogs moving around and crying gently to each other. Sam was filled with a vast and overwhelming sorrow. He lay down his painting equipment and took the small creatures in his hands. He looked into their small, pointed faces and he rubbed their soft bellies with his forefinger. Pretty soon he had them wrapped in bracken and canvas while their mother lay beneath the leaf-mould under a gorse bush.

The bluebottle watched him, angrily buzzing
around his head and making as if to attack, but Sam took no notice. When all was done and the babies had joined his pack of paints and brushes he turned as if to go. But before he actually moved he swung around with great violence and slapped the bluebottle into the ground in one vicious gesture, quickly stamping out its sickly life against the soft grass.

Sam moved on through the maze of paths, trying to think of a good song to sing. Through his head leapt ‘The Invitation to the Waltz' and other wonderful tunes, but he let them remain there, for there were times when the singing in his head was more wondrous than anything to which he could give voice.

The body of the man called Harry came as a complete surprise to Sam Marlow, though not as a tragedy, as the hedgehog had been. He thought what a queer thing it was, on an afternoon like this, to find a man's body without shoes. First a dead hedgehog with two live babies, then a dead man with two bare feet. Surely here was a sign of some kind. Surely it all meant something. Sam felt strangely full. Mysterious emotions moved about deep down inside him. He
knew, he was certain, that he was supposed to paint something. Perhaps the picture of his life. The strange affair of Miss Graveley's hair; the dead hedgehog; and now this lonely corpse – surely they were a symbol of life and death? Joy and sorrow. Good and evil. Then there was the bluebottle.

Sam lay down his paints, the easel and the baby hedgehogs and he dragged the corpse into a nearby patch of sunlight, for it was screened from the sun by the rhododendron. When the model was suitably illuminated Sam set up his easel and his stool and sat down to paint.

The dead face of the dead man had given him the inspiration he needed. The dead face of this man held the millions and millions of dead faces of all the centuries. In that dead face lay all dead humanity; all cold history; all the odd attitudes and mistakes. He would paint the faces of the world that had been. All the thousands of faces massed together. All the staring eyes of the people as they stood wondering, laughing, weeping, and dull with misunderstanding and ignorance. The faces of the Jews and the Gentiles, the Romans and the Egyptians and the
Greeks. And beyond them he would paint the people who watched across the years and the centuries; the children at scripture; the teachers; the monks and the politicians; the publicans; the people of every day in every country, all standing looking and not knowing.

Sam Marlow, his eyes fixed on the face of the dead man, mixed his colours and then began to paint. He roughed in a hazy background. A background of one tremendous, gargantuan human face, more dead than the face of the corpse which lay in front of him. So intent was he on his task that he did not notice another human face which slowly materialised amongst the evergreen leaves of the rhododendron. There was nothing dead about this face; this was the face of living humanity; brown, humorous, wrinkled, struggling to accommodate a splendid yawn. At the critical, top-dead-centre of this yawn the eyes focused properly on the young artist and the body; the yawn was lost forever.

‘'Struth!' said the new captain.

Sam Marlow, painting a delicate line, carefully removed his brush from the canvas, then raised a quizzical eyebrow at the corpse.

The captain said: ‘And I was kidding meself it was all a nasty dream!'

Sam then saw the face of the new captain floating in the shrubbery like a puzzle picture in a children's comic. He looked from the captain to the corpse, digesting the captain's remark and considering the implications.

‘Is this your body, little man?'

The captain began to emerge from the bush, the gun clasped in his hands. ‘Don't give me away! Don't split on me! I thought he was a rabbit or pheasant or something!' By now the little hanging nooses were appearing amongst the trees.

Sam Marlow studied the body; he had a considerable imagination of his own, but he could not see the reason for the captain's error.

‘Let's get this straight,' he said.