V
It was a tall, narrow, peeling house in a terrace well north of Hyde Park. Ronnie had been resistant, even grudging, about meeting me. He had hurt his foot in some way, he said, which prevented him from getting out to keep appointments. When I had said I would see him at home he had tried to marshal secondary excuses, but I had over-ruled them. I assumed he was ashamed of his domestic circumstances, perhaps comparing them notionally with mine.
It looked as though I’d been right. I picked my way down to a basement area containing some reeking dustbins and a rusty old motor-bike frame. The door opened before I could ring and I was confronted by a stout middle-aged Indian in a turban.
‘Mr Ronald Smith?’ I said.
‘He has injured his foot. It is ironic that so distinguished an intellectual should be susceptible to the frailties of fleshly nature. He can see no one.’
‘He is expecting me.’
‘One should expect only the unpredictable.’
‘I’m it. Are you going to let me in?’
‘Very well. Be kind enough to tell Ronnie I made my best endeavours.’
He led me down a narrow passage partly barricaded with old gas cookers to the back basement room. He opened the door without knocking and said, ‘A bird of paradise has alighted on our withered bough, Ronnie.’
‘Mabs?’ said Ronnie’s voice.
‘Yes,’ I called. ‘Sorry I’m late—they’ve found a new place to dig up the M1 .’
‘Oh, well. Thanks, Fred. Push off, will you? Come in, Mabs. You find me at a decided disadvantage.’
He was half lying in a low wicker chair which had itself begun to subside laterally. His bandaged foot rested on a cardboard carton full of what looked like loose sheets of Keesing’s Contemporary Archives. The room was a chaos of books, magazines, newspapers and jumbled objects, not apparently souvenirs or even knick-knacks but things which had washed up there—the handset of a telephone with no instrument attached, a child’s football boot, garden shears, a road-mender’s warning cone and so on, besides odd crockery, suitcases piled into a corner, plastic bags full of clothes. A roughly made bed lay against one wall. Beneath the window was a desk with modern electric typewriter and working papers neatly stacked, but all lightly powdered with dust. A pocket of civilisation, a city state of the intellect, but empty of its citizens. The hordes of disorder beyond its walls had only to find a ladder and it would be theirs. At eye-level through the window I could see the ruins of a garden half buried in junk. The room itself had that particular smell, musty, dank, slightly sweet, that hangs around the houses of old people who are losing their ability to cope. It wasn’t too bad yet.
An enormous black cat rose from a basket and stumped across the room to inspect me.
‘I’m sorry to force my way in,’ I said. ‘Your friend did his best. And I haven’t even brought you any champagne.’
‘Not exactly the occasion, though it has been in my mind I might as well go back on the bottle.’
‘But I’ve brought you one of Pellegrini’s cold pheasant pies.’
‘Have you? Very thoughtful.’
‘Is there a fridge?’
‘Bust, like most other things. Let’s have some now.’
‘Not me. I’m just about to have a gross luncheon with a Chicago film executive.’
‘I thought you were smelling somewhat glamorous.’
‘I’m not looking bad, either. You have to live up to these people’s expectations of you.’
‘Live down it would be, in my case.’
I found a knife and plate and cut him a slice of pie. Almost from habit, because of dealing so often with my mother’s food, I chopped it into smaller pieces for him. As soon as he took the plate from me he started to cram his mouth and chew as though he had been literally starving.
‘This might amuse you,’ he said, mumbling through crumbs. ‘I own this building. I inherited it from an aunt. You remember we’re some kind of distant cousins—well, I did a bit of research, and believe it or not you are at this moment standing in part of the Millett inheritance, a little dribble of property come down to me through dowries and jointures. You are still in a sense at Cheadle. I hope the thought doesn’t depress you.’
In fact he clearly hoped the opposite. The cat came to his elbow, clawed at the chair and mewed. He dropped a piece of pie for it. I sat on the edge of the bed.
‘Do you still own the whole house?’ I said.
‘Yes. It’s all let. I’ve become a slum landlord in my old age. I seem to attract a peculiarly hopeless class of tenant. They’re almost all on supplementary and most of them owe me about six months’ back rent, but I haven’t the energy to go through the rigmarole of turning them out.’
‘What about your friend Fred?’
‘He does a few things for me in exchange for his rent.’
‘It doesn’t look to me as though he was worth it.’
‘Oh, he’s all right. You’ve caught me at a bad time. He’s such a bore that I can’t help being bloody to him, and now I’m stuck in here he can’t get in to do anything. The trouble is he’s read too much and tried to fit it all in. Marx, of course, Spengler, Toynbee, Weber, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, you name it. He’s a natural polytheist, always looking for another niche to fit a god into. Can I have some more of that pie? And a glass of water? Turn right outside the door and you’ll find a tap.’
I cut him another large slice, found a tumbler and filled it in a greasy little hell-hole of a kitchen. I felt in danger of getting emotionally side-tracked. Ronnie clearly needed taking care of. He was teetering on the brink of that pit of non-coping into which old people so suddenly can fall, and from which there is so little chance of recovery. It shouldn’t be a long-term commitment. If the tenants were as badly behind with their rent as he said there should be no problem about getting them out. He could then sell the house well enough to buy a sizable annuity and could find a small modem flat somewhere . . . But that wasn’t what I’d come for. Later, perhaps. Meanwhile I’d have to find someone to keep an eye on him. But he had a daughter, didn’t he, damn it? Ask about her later. First things first. I was an hour behind schedule already, but still felt I couldn’t afford to rush straight in.
‘How’s the book going?’ I said as I sat again. ‘It must hold things up not being able to get out and see people.’
‘Doesn’t make any bloody difference. The book’s kaput.’
‘Oh, Ronnie!’
‘The editor I’d set it up with moved on to another publisher. The fellow who took over farted around for a bit looking for an excuse to cancel.’
‘They can be swine, can’t they? It happens again and again.’
‘Yes.’
No wonder he was depressed. No wonder that the pit had opened for him, too. Even in the slight backwater of Night and Day Ronnie had given the impression of living in the rushing midstream, like one of those fish native to Alpine rivers. Events and people had been his element, much more so than we had at the time realised. I remembered his liveliness on his visit to Cheadle, his sense of excitement with the projected book, and realised now that that had been a chance—very likely a last chance—to get out not exactly into the main stream again, but at least into waters where some current flowed. Not this stagnant and decay-smelling mud-hole. Something about the dullness of his last reply—about his whole attitude to my visit—struck me.
‘Was I the excuse, Ronnie?’
‘As a matter of fact, yes.’
‘Oh, God!’
‘They took the line that the book wasn’t worth publishing unless it contained important new material on Brierley, and they weren’t prepared to risk that if you were likely to come down on them with a ton of writs.’
‘But you needn’t have mentioned me. I thought I’d made that clear.’
‘They wouldn’t see it. As a matter of fact there was a complication. Apparently the editor who’d taken me over had had a scrap with you in some previous firm. I gathered you’d given him a mauling. Name of Eric Martleby.’