The Underground Man (20 page)

The weather this month has been very bad. We have had just about everything thrown our way. These last few days especially have been some of the coldest for a long while, with a great deal of frost and snow. Icicles, some of them six foot long, have been hanging off all the gutters and Clement has had to lean from the windows with a broom to knock them down, which was a shame for they were most impressive but necessary, lest they fall and cleave some unfortunate chap in two.

Every pipe in the house is frozen-up – the staff have had to fetch water from the well – and when the thaw eventually comes around I have no doubt we shall have a hundred leaks on our hands. But what the cold weather has also brought with it is the freezing-up of the lake. Very rare. It is nothing but one great crystal slab with a surface as smooth as glass.

The day it first froze over there were children knocking at the back door at dawn, after permission to skate. Now it would be the meanest of old men who would deny folk a
pleasure which came so cheaply to him, and once word got round that the lake was open people came from all over, with their ice-skates tucked under their arm. From first light until last thing at night any number have been out on the ice, all of them slowly spinning in a giant human wheel. Courting couples, their arms crossed before them, glide gently left then right; whole families make chains, each member holding on to the waist of the one in front, as their many-headed, many-legged creatures go snaking over the solid lake.

All this I have observed from an upstairs study and this very afternoon I watched musicians troop across the snow and set up on the benches at the ice's edge. They played their fiddles and whistles and squeeze-boxes until their fingers must have been numb from the cold. But while they played I caught the odd half-familiar fragment of a tune, which was brought to me on the breeze.

I stood there for a while this evening with the window open an inch or two to let the music in. The moon was up and around the lake several dozen lamps were hung on poles. They formed a glowing oasis in the night which I was admiring when Clement appeared at my side. We both stood there quietly for a moment, watching the distant figures swinging under the stars.

‘The lake is very busy tonight,' I said.

Clement nodded. A distant cheer found its way through to us.

‘O, yes,' I said, ‘they are having a gay old time.'

As I turned to face him I noticed how Clement stood rather strangely – almost Napoleon-like – with one arm tucked inside the front of his jacket. For a second I thought he had perhaps burnt his arm and had it bandaged, but as I watched he slowly withdrew it and there, in his hand, were a pair of ancient skates.

When the penny finally dropped I stepped back, aghast,
saying, ‘O no, Clement, I couldn't possibly. No, I really don't think I could.'

But old Clement deposited the skates into my outstretched hands, which had the effect of momentarily silencing me.

I turned them over.

‘I mean to say, Clement, that a skate would be very pleasant,' I went on, ‘but you know how I am not one for the crowds.'

Well, he swept out of the room at such speed that if I had not known him better I might have thought he had taken offence. I made a closer examination of the old skates. A most unsophisticated pair they were. Very heavy. Little more than a pair of old bread knives bound together with straps. I was still looking them over when Clement swept back through the door with a heap of clothes in his arms. These he dumped on the rug before me and proceeded to pick out various jackets and mittens and woollen caps.

Then Clement dragged from the heap a ten-foot huckaback scarf and set about winding it around my neck, so that when he had finally done wrapping and tucking only my old man's eyes were left peeping out.

I looked at my reflection and, in a muffled voice, said, ‘If I fall, Clement, I shall bounce back up,' and padded my prodigious girth with mittened hands.

It was in this state of woolly incognito that Clement sent me out into the night, a lantern clamped in one hand, my ancient ice-skates in the other.

It must have been several days since I last ventured outside, for the fresh air made me come over quite giddy. The world had been charmed by snow and ice and all the trees were whitely gowned. Every fold in the land glowed in the moonlight, as if the clouds had given in to gravity and tumbled from the sky.

My boots made a fresh path towards the lake, each footfall
packing down the snow with a creak. The voices grew steadily louder and the distant figures slowly took shape and in time I found myself at the edge of the frozen lake, hanging my lantern with the others on an alder branch. The hearty babble of all the skating strangers washed around me, their dreamy locomotion drew me in.

As I strapped my skates to the soles of my boots I leant against a rowing boat, which was half in and half out of the ice. It was a second before I spotted on its bench a young child, every inch of him swaddled in coats and scarves, just like me. I assumed he had been put there by his parents while they were both out on the ice, being too much of a mite to skate himself. To his credit, he seemed to wait most patiently. I nodded my bandaged head at him and he nodded back.

‘Are mother and father out taking a spin?' I asked.

From his jacket pocket he produced a half-eaten apple.

‘Apple,' he said, as if offering me a bite.

‘Good boy,' I answered and patted him on the head, then I turned, drew in a draught of chilly air and cast myself out onto the ice.

I had not skated for many a year and my arms were rather inclined to flail about. But after a while I began to find my balance, then some confidence and quite soon felt I was making some modest contribution to that great turning, stirring mass.

As everyone swept round in the circle a space was left in the middle of the lake where, now and then, an especially gifted skater would show off his skating skills. A man in a balaclava executed an impressive figure of eight, the blades of his skates making a hissing sound as they cut into the ice. Then a young girl – no more than fourteen years old – took the stage and slowly wound herself up into a tight little spin,
gradually drawing her arms and feet into her so that she was soon spinning on a sixpence and sending out a fine white spray. Her audience gave her a round of applause but she continued to spin furiously on, until I feared she would cut right through the ice and disappear into the lake below. Then she suddenly cast a leg out and with a graceful backward slide emerged from the blur and in no time had rejoined her more sedate skating companions.

But though I am old and bow-legged I did not envy her. For I was brimming with the simple pleasure of skating with my fellow man. O, we swung and we sang and we gathered speed, did so many anticlockwise circuits I thought we had escaped the grasp of Time. I was lost in a skating-ceilidh. It was Fellowship, without a doubt.

You see, I have been thinking about my baker, Ignatius Peak, and his enviable religious zeal. I recall how ‘Fellowship' was the biggest bee in his bonnet. And, indeed, what could be a worthier pursuit than harmony with one's fellow man? But out on the ice tonight I felt as if I had found my own version of it. It rather crept up on me. I was a stranger, skating among other strangers. Nobody said a word. Yet between us we seemed to stir up enough fellowship for the whole wide world.

I believe I may have found what I have been looking for – Mr Fowler's head. As I write this he stares blindly across the study, in meditation many leagues deep. If the tortured fellow in
Gray's Anatomy
had attained an air of resignation then it
is indifference – profound indifference – Mr Fowler's creamy head personifies. How can I put it? He is passive yet full of prospect. Silent, but like an unstruck bell.

These past few weeks I have undertaken several house-safaris and on a number of occasions climbed the stairs to fumble in the attic's airless gloom, but my only trophies so far have been the odd book, a wind-up monkey and a bee in several parts. Sensing a fresh approach was necessary if I was to succeed where I had previously failed, I gave my tactics a thorough review: rather than wander up and down the corridors, I decided to pull back from the problem and come at it more objectively.

Rigged myself out, as usual, in beaver and sable coat then strode purposefully down the Great Stairs to sally forth into the frosty morn. On the porch I did a bit of marching on the spot to warm me up, then weighed anchor, swung to starboard and took the narrow gravel path which skirts the house. For it was my intention this morning to circumambulate the place; a task which, I believe I am right in saying, I have never previously carried out. One tends always to approach one's home or leave it, rather than go around and around. But there is something magical about a circle and the act of circling itself seems to generate all sorts of powerful stuff.

Once I had embarked on this mission, however, I discovered that keeping close to the house would not be as easily executed as I might have hoped. I was constantly finding walls and hedges and flower beds in my way. But by some mindful orienteering and a little clambering here and there I managed to go some way towards accomplishing the task I had set myself.

How instructive to look at my house instead of
from
it. I did not immediately recognize the balcony where I have recently taken to stargazing and smoking my pipe, nor the
bay window of my bathroom, come to that. It demands, I now see, a special sort of thinking to match up the picture one has of the inside of a room with how it might look from
without
. The same might be said about journeys to and from a place … that when one travels in each direction one might sometimes just as well be covering different ground.

My aim today, however, was to turn up some room or annexe which had previously eluded me, so as I tramped along the path and scaled the occasional wall I continually scanned the house. I was approaching the barometer tower and beginning to puff and pant and wonder, frankly, if I had not dreamt up for myself another fool's errand when I rounded a corner and came upon a place which had entirely slipped my mind.

There are times when I am quietly impressed by my powers of forgetfulness. In this instance they had brought about the disappearance of a whole host of bricks and mortar. A sizeable building, so no mean feat. But as I stood there staring at it, its mental equivalent slowly re-emerged in my mind. Wasn't this the place my grandfather once whistled for me his favourite tunes? I believe it was. The longer I stared at the outhouse the more my memory's muscle was restored, so that in time I could recall with some certainty how it had originally served as a stable block before the riding school went up. It was like bumping into an old acquaintance.

The building is not connected to the house and stands, I should say, a good twenty yards clear of it. Over the years it has become ivy-covered and introverted-looking. A sapling now sprouts from its roof. I spotted an old gardener nearby, pushing a creaking barrow towards a smouldering fire, and called out to him. He gave not the slightest hint that he had heard me and seemed to carry on his way undisturbed. But as I continued to observe the fellow I saw how he leaned a little
to the left, slowly swung his barrow over a few degrees and, in his own time, wheeled his pile of rotting leaves in my direction.

He pulled up and let his barrow down. He had an unlit pipe in his mouth. I asked if he knew anything about the old stables, which obliged him to push his cap back on his bald head.

‘I believe they are used for storage, Your Grace,' he said.

Well, the door was bolted but was not padlocked. Its wooden stalls were all intact. Not much effort had been made to clean the place up for the floor was still strewn with strawdust and the sweet pungency of horses seemed still to hang in the air, though the only evidence of the building's former use was a pair of cobwebbed cartwheels which leant against the far wall.

Like a policeman I investigated, my breath making their own small clouds, until I came across an aged staircase, tucked away in a corner. I went up it with considerable caution, each step creaking painfully as it bore my weight, to come out in a low loft, beneath the naked tiles of the roof. Somewhere, behind a rafter, a bird rustled in its nest.

The room was bare but for a few tea chests which huddled together in a corner. Of these, two were empty, the others containing old tools, a broken sundial and a coil of stinking rope. But sliding the cover off the last one I found myself face to face with Fowler's porcelain head. I imagine he had been packed away in a bed of springy straw but the intervening years had withered it and only a few blackened strands of the stuff now clung to his eyes and mouth. I peered down at him in his wooden box. He stared back at me with his strange sightless eyes.

‘I remember you,' I said.

All through my childhood that head sat on a mahogany chest of drawers in the corner of my father's study and I had
no reason to doubt it had rested there since the very dawn of time. The bust utterly fascinated me, with his bald, inscribed cranium and his vacant gaze. Once, while my father sat at his desk, writing, I silently climbed the chair next to the cabinet and slowly reached out a hand. My finger was hardly an inch from the porcelain when my father said,

‘You must not touch him, boy.'

I froze right there on tiptoe with my finger in midair.

‘Touching is forbidden,' he added, then returned to his paperwork.

And now, all these years later, that same head stared up at me from a damp old crate and stirred in me a whole world of forgotten thoughts. The head was identical in every detail – except size, for it seemed strangely diminished, as if the years had worn it away. He nestled uncomfortably in the old straw, like a creature in cold hibernation.