Again that bell-tone beating in the air.
‘No,’ the Professor said.
Felix was peering hard out at the hillside where a bedraggled figure was sitting under a tree in blossom. ‘Montgomery!’ Felix cried out softly, ‘why has your man got pointed ears?’ He turned to the Professor smartly, with a bright smile. ‘No, did you say?’ he said. ‘My my, that’s not very hospitable. I only mean to stay for a little while. Until I find my feet again — I’ve had a few reverses lately. Nothing serious, you understand; nothing on the scale of some I could mention.’
They stood and contemplated each other, Felix with his meaning smile and the Professor grimly staring.
‘You can’t stay here,’ the Professor said.
‘Oh, come,’ Felix cried, ‘we shall fleet the time carelessly as we did in the golden world — oops!’ He clapped a hand to his mouth and raised his eyebrows high in mock dismay. ‘What have I said? — dear me, Professor, you’ve grown quite pale.’ He put his head on one side and contemplated with pursed amusement the old man standing hunched and scowling before him. ‘By the way, I went down to Whitewater the other day,’ Felix said pleasantly. ‘The daughter is in charge there now — quite the chatelaine. You pay a pound and they let you wander around at will. Very trusting, I must say — but then, they always were, weren’t they. I wanted to see if the gilt was still on the Golden World. What an amazing work it is — never ceases to surprise me. It’s so —’ his voice sank softly ‘— so convincing, I always think.’ His cheroot had died; he placed the butt beside the spent match on the window-sill. ‘I spoke to the lady of the house. She was most kind, most helpful.’
The Professor nodded grimly.
‘She told you where I was,’ he said. Felix only smirked. The Professor heard himself breathing and felt that silken ripple in his breast. ‘You can’t harm me,’ he said.
Felix reared back with an astonished smile.
‘Harm you?’ he cried. ‘Why would I want to harm you? No: you are going to be my golden goose, after all.’
He winked then and turned briskly and set off down the stairs, skipping swiftly; halfway down the flight he paused and turned back. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I hope you appreciate how discreetly I’ve behaved here, though you wouldn’t even condescend to shake my hand.’ He wagged his head reprovingly and chuckled and went on down the stairs.
When he was gone, the Professor stood motionless, suspended for a moment, as so often these days, waiting for something that did not come. Idly he tried the bedroom door. It was locked.
CROKE, NOW, try Croke, he is the real thing, the homo verus of myth and legend. He stepped out on the sunlit porch and stopped with a sour look and sniffed the day. Sea stink and the thick pungency of drenched grass and a sort of buttery smell that he supposed must be the smell of gorse. He did not much care for the countryside, trees and weather and suchlike. He was a city man, born and bred. A walk by the canal of an October morning, swans gliding on their own reflections and the sun on the gasworks and the air delicately blued with petrol fumes, that was enough of outdoors for him. He descended the porch steps and turned right along the flagged path past the rose bush and the rain barrel and the bluebottle-coloured mound where the coal-ash from the kitchen stove is dumped. Stunted apple trees grow here, standing in lush grass, and there are fruit bushes and a thick clump of nettles jostling greenly to attention, their webbed ears pricked up. Smell of roses, then of lilac, then of something sweetly dead. A cloud abruptly palmed the sun. Water was dripping nearby, or was it a bird, making that plip, plip noise? He arrived at the iron gate that led from the corner of the lawn into the yard behind the house. The cobbles were still wet in patches. He watched his hand grasp the bar of the gate and for a moment he was held, staring at that withered claw h. could hardly believe was his. Nowadays he avoided looking at himself too closely, not caring to see the dewlapped neck and grizzled chest, the sagging tits, the quaking, varicosed legs. The years had worn his skin to a thin, translucent stuff, clammy and smooth, like waxed paper, a loose hide within which his big old carcass slipped and slid. He would not need a shroud, they could just truss him up in himself like a turkey and fold over the flaps and tie a final knot. He smiled grimly and the gate opened before him with a clang. A wash of sunlight swept the yard and as he stepped forward falteringly into this sudden weak blaze the god unseen anointed him and he felt for a moment an extraordinary happiness.
A hen was picking over bits of straw, sharp eye agleam, looking for something among the slimed cobbles. It paused thoughtfully and dropped behind it a little twirled mound of shit, chalk-white and olive-green. Croke stared in mild disgust: what in the name of God is it they eat? The dog emerged from its bed under the wheelbarrow and advanced lopsidedly a pace or two and halted, gasping. ‘Here, old fellow,’ Croke said and was startled at the loudness of his voice, how hollow it sounded, how unconvincing. He saw himself there, a comic turn, in his candy-stripes and sopping shoes and ridiculous straw hat. ‘Here, boy,’ he said gruffly. ‘Here, old chap.’
The dog, a black and white spaniel with something awful coming out of its eyes, turned disdainfully and waddled back to its lair.
Croke walked on and came to another, wider iron gate. Beyond it were the fields sloping up to the oak ridge. He took off his hat and looked at it, feeling the air suddenly cool on his forehead.
What is it called, that thing, that gold thing?
Under the gate there was a patch of churned-up mud (are there cows?) with little puddles of sky-reflecting water in it like shards of glass. He stepped across the mud-patch shakily but the ground beyond too was boggy and the wet grass clutched at his feet alarmingly. He kept going, though, clambering up the uneven slope and treading on his own squat shadow lurching along in front of him.
Unless to see my shadow in the sun,
And something on mine own deformity.
Not that he was ever let play the king. All he ever got to do was stand around in sackcloth trews and a tunic that smelled of someone else’s sweat, trying not to yawn while a fat queer in a paper crown strode up and down, ranting. Pah. In his heart he despised the whole business, dressing up and pretending to be someone else. It was a pity no one did revues any more. He used to like revues, the old-fashioned kind, before everything got smart and smutty. He had been a great straight-man, because of his size, probably: a big, slow, shiny-faced gom with slicked-back hair standing up there in suit and tie with his brow furrowed while the little fellow ran rings around him, what could be funnier? Strange, he had never minded looking foolish like that. The funny men thought they were the ones in control; wrong, of course; that was the secret. Nasty little tykes, the lot of them, jealous, tightfisted, throbbing with grievances — and chasers too, God, yes, anything in a skirt.
He found himself thinking of Felix. He did not trust that joker, with his dyed hair and his dirty smile. Very sallow, too: was he a jewboy? Got his hands on the girl straight away, of course. They always do. That girl, now –
Oh!
He reared back in fright as a bird of some sort flew up suddenly out of the grass with burbled whistlings and shot into the sky. A lark, was it? He stood with his head thrown back, leering from the effort, and watched the tiny creature where it hung above him, pouring out its thick-throated song. After a minute it got tired, or perhaps the song was finished, and it sank to earth in stages, dropping from one steep step of air to another, and disappeared into the grass again. Croke walked on. Long ago, when he was a child, someone had kept a canary; he remembered it, perched in its cage in a sunny window. Who was that, who would have kept a singing-bird? He could see it all clearly, the cage there, and the net curtain pulled back, and the window with the little panes and the yellow light streaming in. He sighed. Melancholy, thick and sweet as treacle, welled up in his heart.