‘Not mine,’ said Hood.
‘I can’t sweep there unless it’s moved.’
‘I don’t know anything about it,’ said Hood, and he heard the man mutter a curse.
15
— Because when it came, Mr Gawber was thinking, the thunderclap and the short circuit in the heavens, announcing itself there in the City like the rumble and flash of summer lightning, it would travel in every direction and be most evident here on the pitches of this bald heath: a sudden airless fissure streaking across the grass to that silent church, dividing Blackheath into two treeless slopes. Already there were no trees, so the slightest crack would heave open the unrooted ground and make it a place where there was no shelter; no place to squat either. It could be horrific: London’s most mammoth sewer ran under this heath.
The morning, so beautiful, with tufts of white cloud racing in the sky, intimated a ripeness that was next to decay — the season’s warning. And more than this, Blackheath, a square mile of grass, was like a roomy cemetery, all that space awaiting diggers and coffins. How lonely sat the city that was full of people! She was a widow, she who had had an imperial fortune. The princess of cities was supine with tramplings. The prospect made him sad, remembering. He had protected himself from life, which was pain, but the last pain was unavoidable. Yet if the eruption came, the fissure underfoot, the storm overhead, he might be granted the life he had denied himself, as the war had briefly proven his resourcefulness; and he came to see in the quake he imagined a humbly heroic retirement, testing him with the repeated whisper ‘Die!’ He would say no and live.
Mr Gawber puffed his morning pipe on the top deck of a bus. His mind, undistracted by a crossword puzzle, sped easily to thoughts of doom; he looked up from the simple puzzle and there was the unsolvable world. He lingered over his annoyance. She had rung again, as she had done a month ago, with the same weepy haste. I must see you, she’d said, it’s very important. You’re the only one who can help me. A dirty trick, that; singling him out to throw herself on him. Perhaps you can stop by on your way to work. I live quite near you now — Blackheath. But only the map made it near. In every other way it was a troublesome detour. He would not get to Rackstraw’s before lunchtime. Charity blunted his anger, and he made his objection generaclass="underline" I’m glad we never had a daughter.
He recognized her house at once, Mortimer Lodge, the fresh coat of pale green paint and white trim subduing the Georgian plumpness. In the western edge, it faced directly onto the heath, like a fort fronting an open plain, defying intruders. It was secure, unshakeable, detached, not crowded by nearby houses; and though it was not tall, its weight was apparent in the spread of its bay-windowed wings. Its hedge had body, its garden balance. The girl was luckier than she knew, but as Mr Gawber swung open the gate he had a vision — he did not know why: perhaps it was an effect of the sunlight slanting explosively on the rooftiles — a vision of Mortimer Lodge bursting open; the front toppling forward into the fountain and birdbath and the roof caving in and a puff of smoke rising from its shattered design. He endured it, let it pass across his mind, and he was left breathless. Now the house was unmarked. He thought he had rid himself of these punishing visions, but since the day he had uttered ‘macaroon’ to the strangers on the crossed line he had sensed a fracture in his life. It surprised him; he was strengthened by it, enlivened, like an old man who senses the onset of magic in his eyes. He wondered if he was mad, then dismissed the thought. He was only late for work, and Araba’s phone-call the previous night had made his dreams anxious and disconnected (searches, a son, ruins). He thought: I hope she doesn’t cry.
He pushed the bell and set a dog yapping inside. The gnome-faced woman with freckles answered the door, the puppy under her arm yelping and choking like a child in tears. He had been told this woman’s name; he could not remember it. Tomorrow, seismic, was at the front of his mind. He removed his bowler hat and said, ‘I believe we’ve met.’
‘Araba’s waiting for you,’ said the little woman.
‘I’m in here,’ called Araba, and when Mr Gawber found her in her loose blue dressing gown in the sunny room he was ashamed for having seen the house so furiously destroyed. He had confounded himself with exaggeration — surely that was insanity, not magic? Araba said, ‘I’m sorry you had to come here like this, but honestly there’s no one else who can help me.’
‘It’s no trouble,’ said Mr Gawber. ‘It gives me a chance to see your lovely house.’
‘You don’t think it’s corny? I always wanted to live in the country — I had to get out of Chelsea. It was so stifling. We’re going to grow our own vegetables here.’
Mr Gawber joined her at the window as she indicated the half-dug garden, a vertical spade in a small rectangle of hacked earth, like the beginnings of a cemetery plot, her own grave. He saw frailty on the actress’s face, lines of indecision he had never noticed before, deepened by shadow. It was more than the shaken guarded look that women habitually had, vulnerable in dressing gowns in their own homes; it was a threatened wincing expression, as if she had, shortly before he entered, heard a very loud noise. And dramatizing this with tragic pats on his arm she passed the unease to him, made him apprehensive, so that staring through the window to what looked to be a family graveyard he could only say, ‘No, I couldn’t agree more.’
She peered abstractly over the hedge as if into the past, and the abstraction in her eyes entered her voice as a drawl when she said, ‘Wat Tyler marched over there, on that road. He was a fantastic person. He was into revolt before people knew the word. God, why aren’t there people like that anymore?’
‘Good question.’ Wat Tyler, the lunatic with the pitch-fork, leading his mob of gaffers? ‘I wish I knew the answer.’
Suddenly Araba said, ‘You know, I’ve never been honest with you.’
He didn’t know how to reply. He said, ‘I never knew Wat Tyler had been here. I’m so glad you said that. Puts it all in a new light.’
‘But you’ve always been honest with me,’ she said, ignoring Mr Gawber, who was nodding studiously at the heath. ‘You’ve always told me the truth.’
‘I suppose I have,’ he said. ‘But there it is.’
‘I was really touched that you came to the play. It meant something.’
‘A very great pleasure,’ he said, and pretending to look at his shoes he glanced at his watch. Nearly ten. What did the woman want?
‘When I saw you there I knew you believed in me. You’ll stand by me and help me no matter what.’
He said, ‘It’s the least I can do.’
‘I admire your frankness — it’s something I never learned.’
My frankness? What have I ever exposed? But her statement gave him courage and he said, ‘I think I should tell you the tax people have been onto me again.’ He reached for his briefcase. ‘I have the correspondence somewhere here.’
‘Don’t show me!’ She walked to the far end of the room, fleeing the letters he held. ‘I couldn’t bear that. No, put them away.’
He stuffed them into the briefcase. ‘They think we’re dragging our feet.’
‘What have you told them?’
‘The standard thing. Thank you for yours of the et cetera. We are awaiting instruction from our client et cetera. Yours faithfully.’ He frowned. ‘They think we’re being a bit bolshie.’
‘Perhaps we are.’
‘I couldn’t agree more.’
‘But that’s not what I wanted to discuss,’ she said.
‘Of course not.’
‘Mister Gawber, that fellow you brought to the play —’