He dragged the body into the park and off the path and sank it in grass. Laughter carried down the slope from a thicket of bushes and low hiding trees: lovers. Beneath him London lay on a plain, the humps and spires showing in dim aqueous light, yellow distances like a burnt-out sea drenched and smouldering under a black sky.
4
Volta Road, Catford, was in his eyes a corridor of cracked Edwardian aunts in old lace, shoulder to shoulder, shawled with tiles and beaked with sloping roofs; the upper gables like odd bonnets with peaks jutting over the oblongs of window lenses and the dim eyes blinded by criss-crossings of mullioned veils. With the long breasts of their bay-fronts forward and their knees against bruised, clawed steps, they knelt in perpetual genuflection, their flat grey faces set at one another across the road, as if — gathering dust — they were dying in their prayers. They were tall enough to keep Volta Road in shadow for most of the day. In among those four-storey houses one’s primness stood out in the senility, paler than all the rest, with a low hedge and clematis beside the door and a garden gnome fishing in a dry bird-bath, Number Twelve, Gawber’s.
He walked towards it tonight in a mood of distress, hurrying home to be calmed. Once, this road had the preserved well-tended look of the nearby roads of lesser houses, small-shouldered bungalows with freshly painted trim, owned by families for their cosy size and kept in repair. But the houses on Volta — with servants’ bells in every room and names like The Sycamores — had fallen into the hands of speculators and building firms and enterprising landlords — who partitioned them with thin walls, sealing off serving-hatches and doors, building kitchens in back bedrooms, installing toilets in broom cupboards, bolting a sink or a cooker on a landing so that the stacked dishes were in full view of the street. Many of the houses were hives or insects’ nests, every bed-sitting room a tiny home in which people were battened down like weevils, murmuring to other families through the chipboard walls. The density was obvious from the panels of buzzer bells on the front doors or the clusters of unwashed milk bottles on the top steps.
Mr Gawber had been born in Number Twelve and he had grown up in it, moving into the front bedroom with Norah when, ten years after his father, his mother died. He had attended the boys’ school, St Dunstan’s, at the top of the road and the Anglican church at the bottom. Now the church was Baptist and mostly black; it had gone simple: he stayed away. He had seen the street’s residents grow old and die or retire to the country, and after the war the houses had moved into a phase of decline that was, even now, unchecked. The occupants were numerous, they were every human colour, and the street was made nearly impassable by their parked cars. The street had been lined with elms; the trees had risen, almost to the height of the house-tops, and the boughs had met over the street. Then they were cut down. The killing had taken a week, and hearing the drone of the saws Mr Gawber felt they were cutting his arms off. The stick-like saplings planted in their place had gone quickly, after one season of promising leaves — that autumn children had snapped their tender branches and used them for swords and spears. The window-boxes were empty, the hedges torn out, the gardens paved for cars and motor-bikes. In three front gardens old wheel-less cars rotted with their doors ajar. It was not a bad road — there were many worse — but it would never improve. Eventually it would be bought wholesale by the council and boarded up and rained on, then pulled down and tall blocks of flats built on it. That was the pattern. Out here there was nothing worth preserving, not even sentiment, for that had passed away with the older residents who had gone when the trees had.
The native families were dispersed, and Mr Gawber thought: I am a relic from that other age. Latterly, he had studied the new families. They were limpers and Negroes and Irishmen who wore bicycle clips; dog-faced boys in mangy fur coats and surly mothers with red babies and children with broken teeth and very old men who inched down the sidewalk tapping canes. All of them escapees who had arrived and would never go. There was a tall Chinese and his wife in Number Eight and an Indian with a blue Landrover next door — he washed the huge thing on Sunday mornings with his radio going. Mr Gawber had fit them into houses, matching their colours with names on the bell panels. He did not know them well; they did not seem to know each other, and oddest of all, none of the darker people wore socks. Tropical folk with tropical names: Wangoosa, Aroma, Palmerston, Churchill, Pang. Estate agents and men with unreliable eyes and dandruff on their shoulders had tried, first with leaflets pushed through the letter-slot and finally by bumptious visits, to gain possession of Mr Gawber’s house. They sat on Mr Gawber’s sofa with their knees apart and spoke ominously of encroaching blacks, using their own unlucky hostages as an oblique threat; they told Mr Gawber there was a nice class of owner-occupier and more fresh air in Orpington and often they alluded to the length of Volta Road that had already fallen to them, as if to show that it was only a matter of time before they would have it entirely. But Mr Gawber held on. Orpington? He was a Londoner. And he would not surrender his father’s house.
In winter it was tolerable; it had a bleakness Mr Gawber liked. The cold rain composed it, blew the newspapers into corners, restored the black shine to the street and kept the limpers indoors. Rain tidied it and gave London back some of her glamour, even some of her youth: the city was designed for grim weather, not crowds. It was best in drizzle or gleaming darkly under a thin layer of ice. Then Mr Gawber felt an affection for it and saw the pelted dripping lamps on the platform at New Cross as magical jelly moulds mounted on Arabian posts, or he lingered on Catford Hill to watch the heaving rain-reddened buses.
But winter was distant tonight. Mr Gawber walked down the sidewalk feeling spied-upon. In the warm weather that started the poisons in bricks and woke the smell of decay the life in those houses spilled into Volta Road — babies were wheeled out for approval; youths met and tinkered with motor-bikes and taunted girls; arguments turned into fights, shameless courtships into loud weddings. There, on the steps of Palmerston’s he had seen one on a Saturday afternoon, a wedding party enlivened by music from steel dustbins, the guests’ lavender buttocks on windowsills, all the people using the occasion to raise their voices. They hollered and laughed and late at night the party broke up, leaving pools of vomit all the way to the corner. This evening they were out, Wangoosa mending his bicycle, Churchill dandling his baby, the Indian tuning his Landrover, each one claiming his portion of the road. He wished these families away.
Mr Gawber destroyed it with his eyes. He policed the ruins and found the idlers guilty of causing a nuisance and a breach of the peace, of unlawful assembly, uttering menaces, outraging the public modesty and tax evasion. He blew a shrill whistle and had them carried off, then levelled the road, reducing the houses to a field of broken bricks and lumber; and he let the grass reassert itself and cover the rubble with its green hair. It would serve them right. The summer’s disorder, those hot lazy mobs, made him wish for a cleansing holocaust — some visible crisis, black frost combined with an economic crash. It was certainly coming: a slump, a smothering heaviness, a power cut and a blinding storm stopping lifts between floors and silting up the Thames, and but for the tolling of funeral bells there would be silence. Hardship was a great sorter. He rather enjoyed the thought of deprivation, candlelight, shortages, paying with official vouchers and coupons, and cold baths with home-made soap. He included himself in the challenge. It would be a fair test for everyone, like the war, that last dose of salts. Let it all come down! The foolish would go to the wall, but those who endured, and jolly good luck to them, would be the better for it. It would not be easy for him at his age — even harder for poor Norah — but he’d survive the collapse. It was a matter of patience, belt-tightening and book-keeping. In that sense he knew he was the older sort of Englishman: he valued decency above all things, and hardship, testing instinct, only made decency a greater prize.