Silent multitude, p.5
Silent Multitude, page 5
Within the walls of the coke store Paper Smith’s home was a warren of bulging uneven passages. At first the piles had been laid out in weeks and months and years, but recently they’d just been stuffed in as they came. In places the stacks leaned together so that they met overhead. The old man propped them apart as best he could, traversing those sections with his back bent as low as was necessary. He circulated pretty frequently— his tunnels were his domain, his creation, his purpose. They were the last eleven years of his life. He would remember laying out some siding now closely packed to the ceiling, and the feel of the whole year would come back to him. Seldom the right year, but a year vivid enough to reassure, to prove that the time since leaving Mary had been more than the single shapeless moment it often seemed. He was comfortable, and safe, and still warm from his recent exertion. He was happy. He remembered triumphs.
“You can of course administer the money yourself, Mr. Smith. But the Promoters do have a group of advisers available if you should wish it. Men with great experience of financial matters, you understand.”
The room had had high mahogany wardrobes, too many of them. And the lodging house carpet, and a view of another lodging house opposite. Everybody used a lot of cheap soap. And Mr. Smith had eighty thousand pounds.
"It’s a considerable fortune, you know. Many of our winners prefer to leave the worry of it to people who have made wise investment their special interest ”
There was whispering outside on the landing. Feet shuffling. Mrs. Deake was angrier with him than ever. Her scorn hissed through the thin panels of the door.
“You want a little time before making a decision, of course. I know I would if I were in your shoes, William. I may call you William, mayn’t I? We’ll be seeing quite a lot of each other and we do like to get on the friendliest possible terms with our winners. My name is Raymond. R^y, if you like.”
News of the visitor had reached the house opposite. Curtains were shuddering. He smoothed the plastic table cloth, ashamed of the crumbs, unable yet to make any answer.
“Ray’s the ante, one of our winners christened me. But perhaps you’re not a gambling man.”
For some reason Mr. Mallalieu was laughing. Bill Smith saw how ridiculous it was to be ashamed. Of anything.
“I have already made my decision, Mr. Mallalieu.” Too high pitched, a little too loud. “I shall handle my money myself, thank you.” The thing of which he was most afraid. The thing he had to do. “I’ve made my plans. I don’t intend to make a fool of myself.”
“Naturally you can do just what you want, Mr. Smith.”
Now the man in the carefully casual clothes was uneasy, trying not to look at the wallpaper and the crooked picture. His discomfort was enjoyable. And Mr. Mallalieu had been expertly fielded.
“I shall invest mainly in Government stock.” Suddenly remembered words. Inspiration. "The return may not be high, but at least it’s dependable. And I shall like to feel that I am helping my country.”
And Mr. Mallalieu had spread his hands, defeated.
The first of his triumphs. He had acted in a dignified manner, and with none of that high-handedness that would have come so easily to another man. Suddenly rich, he had kept his head. Courteous and restrained, even with Mrs. Deake. And not condescending either.
On his pile of newsprint at the intersection of barred sunlight from the two ventilators Paper Smith suddenly felt hungry. Also the dusty air was cold. He remembered the bank managers words about Christmas, about buying something a little extra. Across from the Library precinct, hardly ever reliably open on account of its own incomprehensible feast days, there was a Jewish delicatessen that would certainly be doing business today. In spite of his own indifference to Christmas he always had the feeling that such business wasn’t quite nice. Behind their immense courtesy he suspected Jews of things. He remembered the absence of the taxi drivers, who also were no respecters of Christmas, and forgot it again very quickly. He’d had several triumphs, one way and another, before things had changed and he’d been forced to. Forced to.
He stood up gradually, like a cow, in sections. As he stopped creaking the Cathedral clock struck half past something. The sunlight through the uncurtained office window had probably woken him earlier than usual, but it didn't matter—Jewish shops opened insultingly early, catching Christians on their way to or from Communion. He worked his mouth, swallowing the seventy-one year old saliva with reluctance. He should have had his cup of tea. Perhaps the shop would give him one—Jews had sympathy with old men’s bodies.
He fumbled for coins in the pockets on his inside-out waistcoat and then went up into the barren palaces. He shivered from the cold and from the inexplicable things he was not remembering.
FIVE
Dean Goodliffe was going home to breakfast. The monastic stillness everywhere made the Cathedral seem particularly beautiful. The Close was without cars, and in the solitude its surrounding houses, already old, took on the weight of an age beyond their years. They seemed to draw memories up out of the ground, so that the Dean looked for Christmas pilgrims coming under the archway from St. Mary’s Square. He wasn’t ready for breakfast, or for the rest of the day, or for the days ahead, however few. For years he had believed it was the spiritual life of the Cathedral that counted—that the physical life, the schoolboys, the Diocesan Councils, the building contractors, tourists, journalists, Ministry of Education Inspectors, organists, old ladies who had lost things, all this was merely an interruption, a necessary and serviceful interruption, to the course of the inner life that really mattered. Now that this inner life was the most part of what he was left with, he was disconcerted, and anxiously looped up the time on the safe pegs of the Offices. The hours in between sagged. He hoped that the trouble was simply one of adjustment.
He paused in the Close where he could smell the Christmas tree with its big imitation parcels. There were people, plenty of them, whose lifelong constructions of relative importances faltered when once put to the test. If it turned out that he himself was only another talented administrator it would be a little sad: but it would be how he was, and better that he should catch up late than never with what God had known for years.
He didn’t want to go back to the Deanery. Dean Goodliffe was afraid of the scornful knobs in the Deanery kitchen. Even to boil an egg meant braving the Eezifil and the Switchomat. His housekeeper openly despised gadgets, thus quelling them with her superior intellect. But on him the smell of fear was already strong, so that the battle was as good as lost before it had begun. His housekeeper was no longer with him, had left for the country with the others. To force her to go had needed all her respect for his high office to overcome her affection for his incompetence. She’d had to go, of course. But life would have been very much easier if he’d weakened, allowed himself to be persuaded into applying for an official exemption on her behalf. Indeed he was the weaker vessel. Breathing in the scent of pine needles.
Instead of turning right toward the Deanery, he went left, up into Old Westgate. He had no real purpose other than that of postponing his final confrontation with the Deanery kitchen.
There were many aspects of the new city that he liked. The cleanness had an appealing asceticism about it. The scale gave men a valuable sense of their insignificance before everything except God. There was an almost spiritual logic about the progression of squares and courtyards and arcaded concourses, and a pleasingly Byzantine use of gold and red and blue in the facings of the buildings. It was a place for minds rather than bodies. And as such its position in time—its precise location in the development of socialized man—had a certain wry humor about it.
The Dean paused from habit in front of an antique shop. Though most of his finds for the Cathedral were made in London or Edinburgh, or even abroad in the back streets of Amsterdam, Vienna, Leningrad, there was always the chance that some suitable treasure might turn up here on his very doorstep. The Charles I candlesticks that matched the exquisite Cathedral plate had been found not far off in a hardly smart dealer near Winchcombe. So he turned up his coat collar and stood in the dark wind-tunneling arcade, sorted with his eyes among the bric-a-brac and fashionable Edwardiana, and chose to disbelieve that the days of his Cathedral were numbered. He was still standing by the shop window when he heard Paper Smith’s approaching shuffle.
Caught in the habit of disbelief he kept his eyes on the contents of the window, confident that the shuffle would turn out to be blowing leaves or a rustling window blind. There was nobody in Gloucester. The city had been emptied. When the shuffle approached and became itself and not possibly anything else, he still only turned his head, and that slowly. The police had told him that the city would be quite empty. So he turned his head slowly, with barely suspended disbelief, and watched the shuffling approach of a worn old man.
Plasticized tweed jacket tied with tape over an extraordinary waist coat and what looked like several shirts. Bagged brown trousers and blue sneakers. A narrowshouldered figure that leaned perpetually forward into a wind that in this case was behind it. And the face— which Dean Goodliffe always looked at last, after everything else had prepared him for it—the blank bearded face of a man who no longer used expression to show what he thought or felt. The face of a madman, or a recluse of some kind.
As he made the differentiation Dean Goodliffe remembered himself, and the season.
“Good morning.” Announcing the first hymn. “A happy Christmas to you.”
It only occured to him several seconds later that here might be the congregation he had been wanting. Meanwhile the old man stopped like a rabbit.
“I wasn’t expecting to meet a soul. I thought Gloucester was quite empty.” Seeing the old man for what he was, a tramp obviously. “Just passing through, are you? I thought the police had put blocks on all the roads.”
He stayed where he was. If the old man cared to shorten the yards between them it was up to him. Finally there came a hoarse challenge from the middle of the walkway.
“What d’you want?”
“Want? I don’t want anything.”
He disliked not knowing what to call people. In this case “Old Man,” or “Sir,” or “Friend” were all equally unsuitable. He was accustomed to calling people by what they were; thus “Electrician.”
“What’s your name?” Hearty, but worried about it. “Mine’s Goodliffe. I only wanted a bit of a chat.” Did he?
“What d’you want?”
“I don’t want anything.” Shouted this time. The man was a tramp, deaf, probably demented. “I just thought you might like a cup of tea.”
The words struck home. The old man came closer, sideways a little, looking up through his eyebrows at a place some four feet to the left of the Dean’s head. He formed his own reply with some difficulty. A man of some education.
“Live round here, do you? I like to pay for what I have usually, account at the United G.B. I was on my way along to the shop, Jewish shop, by the Library. Tea not quite in their line however.”
He showed pleasure at his own “however.”
“My house is just around the comer, in the Cathedral Close.” The Dean was puzzled. “And I m afraid you wont find the shop open, you know. Everybody’s been evacuated. Haven’t you been told?”
“Jewish, I said. They’re always open, Easter and Christmas.”
Yet there was no real air of dementia about it. The Dean realized that his tumed-up coat hid his clerical collar, wondered why it was suddenly so important that the old man should come home with him. He suspected it wasn’t so much the milk of human kindness as a wish for company and moral support with the Switchomat.
“They’ve all gone away,” he said. “The shop won’t be open. They’ve all gone away.”
“Jews don’t. Not at Christmas. It’s their religion, you see.”
Change ground.
“Anyway, you said yourself they probably wouldn’t have tea for you. It’s a cold morning—why not come? I could do with company. It’s a time for celebration. We might even run to some sherry if you’d like it.”
With its special dispensation of electricity the Deanery was warm and efficient. He didn’t even realize how special it was in the context of the dying city. He had accepted the physical comforts of life for so long that they were like air, common to all. They were both of them idiots to be out here shivering in the soulless precincts. But the old man had seen a snag and was leaning, ready to go.
“We’ll go and have a look at this shop together, shall we?”
The sherry had been a mistake—it spoke of pretensions. "Then if it’s no good you can come back with me.”
But the old man was gone before he had finished. And obviously wanting to go alone.
The Dean thought of calling a further Christmas greeting. He also thought of mentioning Morning Service to the figure dwindling down the long walkway. It was his dignity that stopped him, and in the circumstances a better name for that dignity would have been pride. He returned slowly to the Deanery, treading on the spaces rather than the lines. The Cathedral clock struck the three-quarters. After breakfast he would go to his favorite chapel, St. Andrew’s by the south transept. He must ask for help. The time, every minute, was precious. It would soon be nine o’clock.
To Paper Smith everything about the man in the dark overcoat had suddenly shouted bank manager. Sherry time. A little celebration. And when the man was proved right, and the delicatessen was closed and dark, its window empty except for tins and a few purplish stumps of salami, this only served as a confirmation. Paper leaned against the glass, peered at the devastated shelves with neat price tags still clipped in slides along their fronts, and hated bank managers who were always right. Just as he had hated Raymond Mallalieu who had tried to tell him what to do with his money.
Now he was really cold, and shivering. In the middle of a city, with money in his pocket, he was both hungry and thirsty. He should have listened more to what the man was actually saying, rather than to the thick orchestrations of his voice. How had he been so sure that the shop would be shut? On one side of the delicatessen was a dry clearer, on the other a hairdresser. It was natural that they should be shut, for it was Christmas. Yet Paper was discovering something sinister in their still black lakes of glass. The reflections of himself they showed him were unreal, so old they were hardly there. There was something sinister in the coldness, in the extraordinary solitude. A waiting. Walls of cold glass waiting. He backed away, out into the middle of the concourse. The sky was white, and the blinding towers moved in the dead hush, and he remembered the tea machine, the taxi drivers, the fused heater, the man in the overcoat he couldn’t even be sure of. He felt his size, his terrible, terrible inadequacy. He stood, his head well down now to the three feet in front of him, watching the beginning of his long shadow as the wind snapped at his trousers and waited. He was without a context in which he dared operate. He waited, an old man, for some end.
Into this fear-charmed circle, her microcell shoes soundless on the paving, her camera loosely held by its strap in front of her, her aluminum blonde hair blown around her sunglasses by the wind at her back, came a young woman, swinging. For a moment she was unaware, not noticing the structure of tension she had entered. Then she stopped. She drew in her breath, smiled, made a small square frame with her fingers in front of her eyes. She took off her sunglasses, dropped down on one knee, then got up and ran lightly over to the steps leading up to the Library. There the pictures inside her frame satisfied her, and she began taking photographs. She took five from varying angles and still the strange old man hadn’t moved.
“Hey, old man, tell me what you’re doing? There’s a pint in it for you. What’re you doing, praying or what?”
Perhaps he was praying.
She looked so real, running down the Library steps. So ordinary Paper Smith had seen a thousand of her, could see a dozen in the old days any time he cared to lift his head. She was the first normal thing that had happened to him that morning.
"If you're not praying, what is it then?” He could smell her, clean and chemical. "Here—you mustn't do that. For God's sake, you mustn't cry!9
He put out his hand, and not minding at all she took it. Standing separate with his hand in hers he embraced her, felt the warmth of her whole body. He cried more than ever.
“What's happened to you? Somebody died, is it? Got a pain, then? Here—you'd better have my handkerchief.” To all her questions he shook his head. He couldn't explain what he didn't understand himself, the years of tender care the city had given him, the years of strenuously denied dependence, the terror of being finally lost. He took out his own rank handkerchief and mopped the running tears from his beard. His shilling for the tea machine fell and bounced and rolled away across the blue and pink paving. He couldn't tell her where his fear had brought him, the substitutes for the simple hand in his he'd sworn he hadn't needed.
“Some people don't care how much they throw their money about. Oh well, cry on then, if it makes you feel any better. I'm in no hurry.”
His face was like tree-bark, she thought. His clothes mossy. The textures would make marvelous play against the sterile elegance of the city. A picture story here, simple, dramatic, from the heart. She must find out the real causes, do her damndest not to cheapen it, not to let her editor cheapen it. The tedious string-pulling to get here had been worthwhile.
“You’re cold,” she said. “We can’t stay here. Let’s go somewhere and talk.”
He didn’t know that he could. Besides, everywhere was sealed and dark.
“Look—I’m Sally Paget.” It was the name of a million girls. He gave no sign either of having heard her or of telling her his own name. “There must be somewhere we can go to get out of this wind.”
