The Underground Man (25 page)

I carefully set about disentangling my frozen joints, thinking how this is becoming something of a habit with me, when I became conscious of the most heavenly music slowly pouring over me. A whole host of celestial voices were singing their Praises Be, as if welcoming me to the kingdom in the sky. The graveyard was utterly dark and dank but my mind was filling up with light. And though the air particles remained tight and empty, they had become enlivened and quivered amongst themselves.

It was some time before I gathered my wits and understood that the glorious sound which had stirred me emanated from the church behind my back. The choir was rehearsing the harmonies of ‘Father Who Didst Fashion Me' and had not quite reached the end of the second verse when they were pulled up by their master's muffled voice and, after a short pause, made to recommence with the first line of that same verse.

I was stamping some life back into my dead leg and
rubbing some heat back into the palms of my hands when I saw just how marvellously the church was lit up, so that all the tableaux in the stained-glass windows radiated from the candlelight within. The saints, the angels and even the lambs – all brimmed with a heavenly glow. It was as if a great ship had stolen up behind me, with its cargo of hallelujas and kindly light. And no one else there to witness its arrival – just me and the grudging graves. I was struck by how a church's windows might be admired from outside as well as in, and I stopped my stamping to watch as the blues and purples were gently coaxed from the glass by the choir.

I was sitting up in the bath back at the hotel with Clement scrubbing my back before the significance of my experience in Greyfriars' cemetery truly came home to me. That here, if I could only put my finger on it, was a demonstration of the duality of man. We are not, as I had feared, simply a camera obscura – just a spectator of the light of the world. No. We are both the camera obscura and the lighthouse. We receive light and we send it out.

Called in again on Bannister. He did not answer his door. In fact, he had rather carelessly left the thing unlocked. I was in and out without anybody paying me much attention. Perhaps they think me some learned old gent.

Skipped down the stairs and was halfway back to the hotel before I realized I had cut my hand on the glass. Bandaged it with my handkerchief.

Clement wanted to know how I had come to hurt myself. Told him I had taken a fall. Packed up my bags without too
much interference from him and we got to the station with hardly a minute to spare.

Home again. The estate looks even colder and more wretched than before.

Unpacked and bathed and was back in my old routines within a couple of hours.

A month ago, I was quite convinced how my own body, or some element in it, was intent on bringing me down.

I see now how it is upstairs I am akilter – my mind which is askew.

Out onto the balcony late last night. The wind was all around. Fished out my father's Dutch clog pipe from my pocket but found it broken in two. Must have sat on it. So I stood there in my slippers and leaned against the balustrade and let the breeze billow in my dressing gown and whistle in my ears.

A while later – perhaps an hour or so – a strange mist crept in from the lake. It rolled silently over the orderly lawns and seeped right through the hedges. I stood and watched it thicken up, watched it lap against the walls below. And quite soon the whole house was adrift in it and beginning to gently creak and sway. And we were advancing through a milky sea, with me in my slippers at the helm.

The clouds stole back at some point to reveal a sky alive with painful stars. And I became cold and tired and empty and my legs began to ache. I felt lost in the world and lonely and found no purchase in the mist below. So I took a reading from the heavens, set a course for the Cotswolds and retired to bed.

In the night I had a terrible vision.

This morning, peering at myself in the mirror, I noticed a mole on my left shoulder which I had never seen before and, turning, saw how it was just one of a considerable scattering, spread diagonally across my back. A great constellation of freckles, stretching from my shoulder right down to my waist.

Is it possible, I wonder, that there might be some correspondence between these moles and the stars I watch at night? There is something undeniably Orion-like about that cluster just beneath my shoulder blade.

The next time I am out on the balcony at night I shall compare them. I shall use a mirror.

A grey and tedious day today. Nothing worth noting at all with the exception of a letter from Professor Bannister (threatening me with all manner of things, including policemen, which I chose to ignore) and an experiment I undertook in an idle moment, as I sat at table waiting for lunch to arrive.

Found my attention drawn towards a jug of water, about two foot in front of me. No doubt the same jug which has sat there every day for the last ten or twenty years. Today, however, I noticed how its little spout was turned up and away from me most contemptuously and how, when I moved my head to get a better view of it, the water in its belly threw back all sorts of refracted and untrustworthy light.

My first thought was to put something in it. Put something in the water and spoil its fun. I thought, ‘If there is mashed potato on my plate when lunch arrives I shall drop a spoonful straight in.' But then I thought, ‘No, not mashed potato. I shall harness the energy of my mind to send the blasted thing whistling across the table and crashing to the floor.'

I should mention that, for quite some time now, I have been wondering if it might not be possible for a man to cause objects to move by using the power of his mind. (I have some notes somewhere.) So I went straight ahead and concentrated
my attention on that patronizing jug, glaring at it with undiluted fury and bringing to the boil such quantities of psychic energy that my ears were soon as warm as toast. I glared and I stared and grunted, but my efforts were all in vain. The damned jug did not budge a single inch, which was, of course, deeply humiliating. Outwitted by a common jug!

When my lunch finally arrived I told Mrs Pledger that I was sick of the sight of the water jug and asked it to be removed at once. I now wonder, however, if the experiment's failure might be down to not just my mental shortcomings but an unusually stubborn jug.

Lying in bed this evening, I eyed all the phials and bottles on my bedside table which contain all my preparations and powders and pills. How merrily they jangled against each other as a maid strolled past my door. I feel sure this has some bearing on the water jug business, though I cannot think just what.

Most of it fades or falls away. We are more like Mr Snow than we care to think. But the odd memory, or sliver of it, perseveres. Nags away, like a stone in the shoe.

It is as if it has been stalking me since I first disturbed it in the Deer Park in the mist but even if I had known it was closing in on me I somehow doubt I would have been able to get out of its way. It had a fair old head of steam on it, had momentum on its side.

I happened to pick up my
Gray's Anatomy
, as I am in the habit of doing, and it fell open at the title page, where I clearly saw the name ‘Carter', who is credited for all the
illustrations in the book. I was not aware that the name had so profoundly registered in me – I must have picked that book up a dozen times before – and was half out of my chair to poke at the dying fire when I became suddenly aware of something moving powerfully in on me …

I froze. I listened hard. Something inside me stirred. As if a whole series of forgotten cogs had been set in motion; some deep-sunk machinery in my memory fired-up by the name in the book.

My free hand clung to the mantelpiece and I felt my presence in the room diminish. I heard a voice cry ‘Carter' down all the years. Then,

My hand has the poker in a fierce grip, as if I am about to do someone some terrible mischief. But whatever machinery previously stirred in me has all but seized-up again and I am left clinging to the mantelpiece, staring into the fire.

I prod and I poke at the embers, but they refuse to come back to life.

Three things always stick in my mind about him … You're quite sure it is all right for me to speak? … Well, the first is when I had only been at the house a month or two and was still finding my way about and I was right down in the basement and heading for the kitchens, I suppose, when I came across him in the shadows, sitting on a step.

He seemed to think my name was Rosie. There's no knowing where he got that idea from. But I had been warned by Mrs Pledger that he was confused enough to begin with and that in such an event it was probably best not to bother to put him right.

Well, he asked me where the trolleys had got to. I should explain that between the kitchens and the lifts up to the dining room is a fair old stretch, so there are tramlines set into the flags of the basement corridors and when the food is ready to go upstairs it is put inside the metal carts, then wheeled down the tracks. So I understood that these were the carts the old Duke was after, but seeing as how I did not know where they were kept I told him, in my politest voice, that I supposed that they were all locked up and I was about to carry on my way when he jumped up and grabbed me by my hand and insisted that I help him hunt them down.

Well, to be honest, I hoped we would not find them. I was very nervous about the whole affair and not half as pleased as he was when we came across one, tucked in a corner, just by the cupboards off the main corridor. Well, having found the
cart I made my excuses and was all set to leave again but the old Duke … beg your pardon, His Grace … was having none of it and insisted I help him out.

Well, he … Oh, I don't quite know how to put it … but he made me … made me … push the cart up and down … with him inside. He climbed inside the cart, where the plates and tureens would normally go, and had me push him up and down the corridors … at speed.

There I've said it. Oh, dear… You'll have to excuse me a second … Oh, my goodness … What a to-do.

The second thing … now what was the second thing? Oh, yes. That they discovered His Grace … and I should say here that I was not personally present at this one, but my good friend Molly was and she's no reason to lie … but that they found him one morning in the dumb waiter which we use to bring the coal up from below. Just sitting there when they pulled it up, he was. All squashed up in the coal lift, with his face as black as you like.

Molly told me she was all set to scream – as indeed you would be – but he raised a finger to his lips so she never got the chance. He said that if she listened very hard she would hear the coal miners far below. Said you could hear them digging up the coal.

Well, she asked to be taken off coal duty after that one. Said she'd rather sweep the mausoleum every morning than risk another episode like that.

The third and final thing which stays with me, and the last thing I want to mention here, happened really not that long ago when I was coming in to work one morning, at the very crack of dawn. I was almost at the house and thinking to myself how the world was freshening up and was very much looking forward to spring when I saw a strange shape hanging from a tree. Very peculiar. I thought to myself, it looks just like a man. And of course it
was
a man. It was the
Duke himself, caught by his trousers. Just dangling from a tree.

I went to the bottom and shouted up to him. Asked if he required assistance of any sort. And he explained that he had been checking on the bud situation and that he appeared to have got his trousers snagged. I asked if he had been there very long and he said that he did not think so, but that whatever it was I intended doing I should hurry up because there was no knowing how long his trousers would hold out. It was a fair old drop.

So I went and called Clement, who came running. We had to fetch a ladder to get him down.

Yes, that last one will certainly stay with me. His Grace hanging from a tree.