She pulled him along: “Singing and dancing, and people who mek you laugh.”
“Cowboys and Indians?”
“No, not tonight.”
“Aren’t there any lions and tigers and snakes?”
“Them’s in a circus,” she said. “Besides, you don’t want to see such nasty things. They bite you.”
He had been so certain of seeing unique and astonishing scenes that he hadn’t bothered before this to question it; and now his wide-open ever-deepening stage had shrunk to a few lights shining on a woman singing at one end and a man trying to make people laugh at the other. He bit his lip in anger: had he been forced to get washed for that?
When they got off the bus in Nottingham the rain had lifted and the world changed. Slab Square rose up and greeted him on the forehead when he tripped, leaving a mound soon forgotten in the well-lit confusion. The dull sky seemed to be held at bay by barking newspaper sellers who thrust folded Posts at Lydia as they went across the square. Though he was big enough for his age, she dragged him through crowds like a dog on a lead, mixing him with traffic while his eyes were elsewhere: in dazzling windows, on the highlighted cabs of advancing buses, on faces crowding their reflected images in the wet pools before his feet. A sonorous booming of the great council-house clock ruled over the tinselled darkness for eight long beats, drowning voices and motor-horns, leaving only a smouldering smell of petrol until the world opened again after the collapse of the final gong. “Come on,” she tugged, “what are you counting them for? It’s eight o’clock and if we don’t ’urry we’ll keep Tom waiting.”
Tom already had the tickets, had got them half an hour ago, he said, and been for a drink to the Peach Tree rather than stand in the rain. Brian thought of him as old, dressed in a white muffler and good topcoat, hair well-combed with brilliantine, tall and delicate and never saying boo to a goose — a phrase he’d heard his grandfather use about him. Merton found him easy to tolerate, even had a certain respect for his gentleness. He’d been a bit of a lad though once, Lydia said with some pride — though in lieu of this, consumption had given him dignity. Tom had worked twenty years in the tobacco factory, and it was assumed that dust had caused his consumption so that the union made sure he had the wherewithal to maintain himself. Though in one way he appeared as strong as any other man, in another he seemed hardly to exist, walking on the world’s rim as if ready to shake hands and say goodbye to it at a week’s notice. He was in the rare position of a man regarded as dying on his feet, yet was looked upon by others with as much respect as if he had in some way proved himself a scholar, though as far as Brian knew he never read anything but newspapers.
Time went quickly. Brian kept his eyes on the stalls clock, hardly laughed at what the funny men said, though he was amused when they fell about the stage. He liked the man with the seal best because it barked and flapped its feet when everybody clapped. The only thing he didn’t like while fixed in his plush seat was the cigar smoke, and he felt sick until lost at what was happening on the stage. But the swirl of glaring colours clouted his brain and stupefied his ears with the music’s tuneful and furious beating. His eyes stared when women danced across the stage in something that looked like a bathing costume, and pushed out even harder when someone came from the wings in what looked like nothing at all.
At the interval Tom and Lydia smoked cigarettes, something Lydia never dared do in the house. She opened the packet and folded back the silver-paper with deliberate pleasure, handing the cigarette-card to Brian. When the ice-cream woman came down the gangway she said, feeling for her purse: “Get three tupp’ny cups, Brian, there’s a good lad.”
Tom pushed a shilling into his hand, and he struggled against solid-tree-trunk legs along the row, elbowed his way up the blocked gangway. Many people stood talking, and he waited in an ice-cream queue for the freezing cardboard cups and wooden spoons, novelties he had never seen in such pristine condition, had seen only crushed and mud-marked underfoot. He was reading the words on each when the lights dimmed for the second half.
Curtains opened, and a flourish of oriental music was driven out from the orchestra as if at the crack of a whip. Brian guided himself down the gangway, looking along each darkening row for Lydia and Tom, and keeping an eye turned on the stage so as to miss nothing. A black-faced lady in flowing robes appeared from the proscenium, greeted by arabesques of eastern music. Brian stared at her elaborate robes and turbanned headdress, at the silks and satins covering her figure with such neatness, was even more entranced at her sudden strange wailing. “Hey,” he called, a few yards from his seat, “Aunt Lydia, is she the Abyssinian queen?”
“She must be,” came some answer.
“That’s a good ’un.”
“She does look like it, and all.”
“I never thought of it myself.” Remarks flitted among the laughter, and Lydia pulled him into his seat, convulsed herself. Brian peeled the top from his ice-cream, eyes still on the stage, half believing himself to be in Abyssinia except when he turned to see the red-framed figures change as the curtains swung to for a new act.
The bus made him feel sick on the way back so Lydia and Tom got out to walk. “The trams never used to mek people badly,” she remarked. “But these new trolley-buses is terrible.” They didn’t mind the walk: it was fresh and without rain, and Brian saw a million stars when he looked up, like luminous breadcrumbs on some mighty tablecloth. Lydia and Tom stopped at a pub, left him outside while they had a couple at the saloon bar, and they came out after half an hour, Lydia bending with beer-smelling breath to give him a packet of crisps. They turned down the dark road, passed the fire of a nightwatchman’s hut where new drains were being laid.
“Uncle Tom,” he asked, “is Abyssinia a long way away?”
“Yes,” he told him, laughing, “ever such a long way.”
“How far?”
“Thousands o’ miles.”
“I’d like to go there.”
“You will some day.”
“I want to go soon.”
“Them black people’ll eat you if you do,” Lydia said.
“No, they wain’t. I’ll ’ave a gun like they ’ave on’t pictures. Anyway, Paul Robeson’s Abyssinian and ’e don’t eat people.”
“That’s a good ’un!” Tom said.
Houses were left behind and they walked through the long tunnel of the railway bridge, where Lydia was always afraid with or without Tom’s company. “Come on,” she snapped to him, “don’t tread in them puddles o’ water, you’ll get your socks all wet.”
“I’d like to go to Abyssinia,” he said. “I want to goo a long way.”
“I wish you’d stop talking about Abyssinia,” she complained. “You’re getting on my nerves.”
They walked for a time in silence. “I’m going to draw a map when I get home, Aunt Lyddy.”
“You don’t know how to draw maps,” she said, easier in her mind now that they were near the Nook.
“I do; it’s easy.”
“That’s the first thing I knew.”
“We do ’em at school,” he persisted. “I like making maps up.”
Tom said he wouldn’t go in with her, and they drew together by the hedge in what looked like a more desperate combat than that which was supposed to have taken place between St. George and the Dragon. After a few minutes Tom went into the blackness of the lane, and Lydia opened the gate so that she and Brian could go into the lighted house.