‘Pessimism,’ Teddy said, ‘is a creative force for an artist. It puts spirit into his work. If he knows how to channel it properly it becomes genius.’
‘Well, I’m not an artist,’ Frank said. ‘Not that I believe you. If I did I wouldn’t want to read a book or look at a picture again.’
‘You’d be starved of culture if you didn’t,’ Teddy laughed.
‘That would be the fault of people like you, then.’
Teddy called the waiter. ‘Why are you so quarrelsome, Frank? I suspect too much food does this to people, don’t you, Albert? Your brains can addle from rich food.’
‘Why don’t you lay off?’ Albert said. ‘Keep your nail file out of him. I’ve seen you do this to people before, and I don’t like it.’
Frank felt as if his head were about to shatter. He had wit enough to counter Teddy’s low-powered stabs, but not the patience to tolerate Albert coming to his defence. ‘It’s time I was on my way,’ he said, standing up. ‘All the best of luck to you two money-faced bastards. I don’t think any harm will ever come to you.’
‘Don’t go,’ Teddy called. ‘We were only talking. Come on, Frank, sit down.’
Albert caught him up at the door. ‘For God’s sake don’t take things like that. Teddy’s all right. He’s a good sort, you know that.’ He held his arm, to draw him back.
‘If you don’t let go of me,’ Frank said, ‘I’ll kick you into the floor.’ He went outside, and walked in the warm, humid sun down Greek Street.
18
Days drifted through warm and open weather, city air softened by spring, wind flapping between streets, getting a lift on the backs of red buses then jumping off to charge around the next corner at oncoming cars. He didn’t see Handley or Greensleaves again. Neither did he go back to work at the car park. For the moment, maybe for good, he had finished with all that. He still had money from saved wages, even from the sold car in Nottingham. Living on a few pounds a week he discovered in himself a talent for thrift which at one time he would have squashed with ridicule but now regarded as the equipment necessary for survival. He felt a healthy leanness, existed within a thinner casing of flesh which gave a more direct and brittle contact with the world.
His life-long habit of getting up at six wouldn’t leave him, and he sat by the window, reading until eight o’clock, pages punctuated by some black train shouldering a rapid pock-thumping way through the cutting. The window rattled and pages turned in its noise. He washed on the landing, where a bathroom and lavatory had been built into one of the single rooms, then sat in his shirtsleeves, ignoring the still sharp air of morning. He boiled tea, and drank the pot out. The room had lost its grimness, for he had adapted himself to London standards of isolation, discomfort and independence. He offered to paint the room white if the landlord paid for the paint. When this was agreed to, he borrowed brushes, pushed the furniture into one half of the room and covered it with newspaper — halfway one day, all white the next. It looked clean, felt more comfortable, a haven after climbing the gloomy stairs.
Not working, and seeing no one, increased his perceptions and sensibility, such moods in the past coming on only in illness or the half-fever of a bad cold. His ability to connect with these moods now, when the fever did not exist, provided a springboard for numerous other comparisons. It was as if he’d worn glasses all his life and suddenly thought to clean them: his sight seemed sharper, thoughts quicker.
Many of his days were spent in Highgate library. He went through books that he couldn’t take out, took books out that he couldn’t read there. He was able to extract the kernel of a book, having read much and quickly while at Pat’s. A history of Europe was absorbed by examining the list of contents — joining and cementing what he already knew, concentrating on English social history of the nineteenth century to find some explanation for the world he had grown up in. He learned botany and anatomy by diagrams, geography by reading and comparing maps, reinforcing and drawing together the scattered islands of his past knowledge which, he discovered, were more numerous than he’d imagined. It was a game for the uneducated: books of reproductions tied up what he had seen in the galleries.
Large areas of a jigsaw were forming. The encyclopaedia, dictionary, atlas, were three dormer windows high enough to embrace new views. Fiction was the depth gauge, plumb-line and echometer fathoming his deepest needs and feelings. Knowledge for its own sake was bare-faced and domineering, but each title of a novel was the top winch of a fairy-tale well whose storyline of chain and bucket let you down with varying degrees of speed into the waters of illumination. Knowledge confirmed the structure of the outside world, while a novel prised open previously unknown regions within yourself. Conrad, Melville, Stendhal — the giants. In war novels, detective novels, shit novels, you put a scarf over your eyes before going into their unconvincing strait-jackets; in the others, one had to take this scarf off before reading the first word. He wondered why he had not been born with this understanding, why nearly thirty years had gone by before touching the possibility of it. How many people had it in them, but never saw it?
He fought free of a narrow sort of life and began to wonder what he had let himself in for — though it didn’t destroy his patience with this new existence. Calmness is death, he knew, but at the moment he enjoyed it, took advantage of the unlimited days to see if any meaning would come out of his life. To solve the enigma of anyone else’s would only be possible after the unfettering of his own spirit.
Walking one day he recalled some words from Moby Dick: ‘And if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive.…’ In the Old Testament there is a story (he remembered it from school, being full of memories in the sunny desert of London), of two armies face to face, one far larger than the other, a host as it is called. During the night God sent rats into the tents of the biggest army and they ruined it by chewing the leather of their shield straps. Rats are unacknowledged legislators that rule the world. They started the Black Death that wiped out half Europe in the Middle Ages. The Tartars, besieging a Crimean city, catapulted a bubonic corpse over its walls, so that plague as well as famine broke its obstinacy. Out of that town, the plague-scythe cut down Europe as if it were a single head of corn. A man’s body is a battlefield of rat and anti-rat — the rat to kill, and the other to keep him human. Every man has his rat, his own brown rat sitting like an alter ego on his shoulder, dodging inside when storms flash and adversity baffles the air to stoke the inner chaos that such sights cause.
The legend of the rats had been a long time forming, a legend which for some reason exuded the heavy smell of a sagebush growing in sand. In some far-off time people didn’t like the rats. They threatened to destroy the real souls in them, so the Pied Piper came and drew the rats away. But the people refused him the bread they had promised as his fee, called him a trickster. So the Pied Piper sent back the rats, but charmed away the people’s children to inherit the innocence their parents had known before the rats came. The truth was that the parents couldn’t live without the rats, wanted them back, took them to their bosoms and became one with them.
The Pied Piper was hunted for his never-ending hostility to the rats. The rats were a disease of society and also of the soul, and society, being imperfect, enabled them to survive. The rats were the carriers of this disease. They perpetuated it. The Pied Piper wanted to take this disease of society away. When people, used by those who desired power and not just to live, wanted the rats to stay with them they turned the Pied Piper into Bill Posters and hunted him forever as they had formerly, in their innocence, hunted the rats.