Striking a match he had heard the father and son again and was distracted by their muffled voices. They were in front of the house, the old man pushing into a pile the litter of papers, the boy resting on the handle of the cart, watching his father gasp. Hood shook out the match and from his window looked down two storeys, annoyed by the interruption, but feeling an affectionate pity for them and a hatred for their grubby job. The man was too old to be punching waste paper with a broom and stooping with his pan; the boy too young to be standing in the gutter with his clumsy barrel. It seemed to Hood a shabby and undeserved penance, which they performed sighing, with inappropriately serious faces; and Hood felt mingled outrage and self-contempt, wanting to save them from a job he would not do himself.
He knew the third figure, a tall man in a plum-coloured suit sauntering towards them on the opposite side of the street. And yet he was almost surprised to see him — he had once hammered that man so hard in a dream he was convinced the brute was dead. The man appeared cheerful, but that was deceptive. He crossed over, pitching forward into a tiger’s slouch with each step, and Hood could see he was drunk. The man paused and jerked his face at the old sweeper, muttered something and passed by. He went five paces, drew a bag from the pocket of his jacket and removed a brown bottle from the bag. He crumpled the bag and lazily drop-kicked it into the gutter the man had cleared. He shouted and pointed to it, but the old man ignored the protesting squawk; he went on sweeping. The boy looked back anxiously, not at the shouting man but at the crumpled bag in the newly swept gutter.
Hood placed his cigarette on the Burmese box and slid the window open. The men faced each other: authority in a plum-coloured suit, servitude with a push-broom, the simplest example of unfairness; and the judging child.
‘Pick it up!’
‘— no attention to him,’ the old man was saying to the boy.
But the boy left the cart and started in the direction of the bag.
‘Get back here,’ said the old man. ‘Don’t listen to him.’
The boy obeyed his father. This infuriated the drunk, and Hood heard again, ‘Pick it up!’
Now the old man turned and screamed, ‘Get off out of it! You stitched me up last week and you’re not going to stitch me up again! Right, you made the mess and you can bloody well —’
The tall man staggered towards the father and son, howling with his whole face and swinging the bottle in his hand; his voice, his suit insisted. The old man clutched his broom like a weapon and lowered his puckered face behind it, crying, ‘Pack it in!’ But it was the boy’s face that alarmed Hood: it had become delicate with fear, as if it might shatter like white china, and wincing it looked pathetically young. Not daring to draw a breath the boy wore the quick mask of a nervous infant panicked by noise. The man was threatening his father, now standing close, raising his arms and working his mad face at him.
Hood had been with Mayo that other time. She had said, ‘He’s not political, it doesn’t matter.’ ‘I’ll kill him,’ Hood had said; and she laughed and turned away from the window: ‘You’ve got an Irish temper! What would that effect?’ Watching the man go then he had said. ‘His ass, May. His ass.’
He wanted to see the old man triumph and teach the boy courage, and he looked for a flourish of the broom handle, a whack or an insult to turn the drunk away. Hood imagined himself leaping from the window, flying two storeys to the bastard’s back and dragging him to the street. In an uprush of anger he saw himself with the man by the ears and tearing his head off. But there was nothing. Hood seethed and stayed where he was, the thick curtains in his hands, the pelmet shaking above him. And the boy looked on, helplessly at his helpless father, as the man struck, slapped him (‘Dad!’), nearly losing his balance, and spat out something more. Hood saw the old man close his eyes and tighten his grip on the broom; he saw the boy’s face break and the tears, and the drunk’s expression — that of a scavenger seizing a piece of meat in his teeth and turning away to protect it. He saw all this with terrible clarity, but he heard nothing more, for at that moment a train passed in the ditch at the end of the crescent. The train closed in on the quarrel, quickly, without an announcing sound. Then there was for fifteen seconds the drone of wheels on rails and the rattle and screech of the carriages, sealing the humiliation by drowning it in a single wave of clatter; and ending it, for when the train had gone by, leaving the traces of a hum on the housefronts, the old man had the broom on his shoulder and the boy was trundling up the road, following his father with the yellow barrel. The drunk slouched away, carrying himself crookedly to the hill.
2
On that train, the 17.27 from Charing Cross, sat Ralph Gawber, an accountant. His thin face and his obvious fatigue gave him a look of kindliness, and he rode the train with tolerance, responding to the jump of the carriage with a gentle nod. In his heavy suit, in the harsh August heat, he had the undusted sanctity of a clergyman who has spent the day preaching without result in a stubborn slum. He held The Times in one hand, folded flat in a rectangle to make a surface for the crossword, and with the ballpoint pen in his other hand he might have been studying a clue. But the crossword was completely inked in. Mr Gawber was asleep. He had the elderly commuter’s habit of being able to sleep without shifting position; sleep took him and embalmed him lightly like a touch of sadness he would soon shake off. He was dreaming of having tea with the Queen in a sunny room in Buckingham Palace. Jammed in the corner, the standing passengers’ coats brushing his head, the lunchbox of the shirtless man next to him nudging his thigh, he dreamed. Around him, travellers slapped and shook their evening papers, but Mr Gawber slept on. The Queen suddenly smiled and leaned forwards and plucked open the front of her dress. Her full breasts tumbled out and Mr Gawber put his head between them and sobbed with shame and relief. They were so cool; and he felt her nipples against his ears.
He had caught the morning train dressed warmly for the chilly summer fog which blanketed Catford and gave him a secure feeling of privacy among the bulky lighted cars half-lost in vapour. The fog cheered him with forgetfulness, slowly and unaccountably, allowing him amnesia. But the sun had burst into his compartment at London Bridge, dramatically lighting the Peek Frean biscuit factory and releasing a powerful odour of shortbread. At once, he loathed his suit. The boats on the river were indistinguishable in the broad dazzle, and by the time Mr Gawber had walked the quarter mile to Kingsway he was perspiring. It seemed to him, in travelling this short distance from his home in South London, as if he had left a far-off place, where the weather was different, and had to cross a frontier to work.
All day at his desk at Rackstraw’s he had been hot, and twice he had gone to the tiled stairwell at the centre of the building, just to stand and be cool. ‘Lovely day,’ Miss French had said. He had to agree. Only the weather brought Mr Gawber and his secretary together in conversation. He bore it and memorized the clouds for her. He would not tell her what he secretly felt, that London looked deranged in summer heat, collapsing and crowded, sunburnt necks and ugly exposed navels, the paint blistering, the very bricks sweating old poisons through their cracks. And this summer something dreadful was happening: a slump, or worse — an eruption. He’d seen the figures and smelled smoke; the economy wanted a complete rejig.
Before lunch he had asked, ‘What do we hear from Miss Nightwing?’
‘Nothing,’ said Miss French. ‘Monty’s brought the second post. I’ve been through it myself.’
‘She’s very naughty,’ said Mr Gawber.