Once, he had been calm, but this summer — was it those Irish bombs? — the city and its faces overwhelmed him with thoughts of ruin. He was not angry but apprehensive. His imagination exaggerated his simple feeling, and he never wished for the worst without an accompanying sense of shame and a frown of guilt he knew passers-by could read on his face.
The pain was not only his. Often he came home to Norah and knew from her eyes she had been blubbing.
He fitted his latchkey and peered at the red and green stained-glass window on the door for the shadow of Norah. Then he entered and met the familiar smell of dry carpets and dead relations. Home was that odour of furnishings and family, and an obscurer unfragrant one in the air of your own skin.
‘Rafie?’
His mother had called him that. The name had stuck, though Norah only used it when she feared something was wrong, to get near to his worry.
‘Sorry I’m late.’ He kissed her forehead. ‘You weren’t worried, Noddy?’
‘You’ve had a phone-call,’ said Norah, insisting on her alarm. ‘That Araba Nightwing. I didn’t know what to tell her. Rafie, I had no idea where you were!’
‘Shambles. Fell asleep on the train, pitched up in Lower Sydenham. Groping around the back end of the borough.’ He laughed, using his age to excuse his mistake: I’m getting feeble, don’t mind me. Nothing about the crossed-line; nothing about the men sparring dangerously in the public house; nothing about his destructive mood. ‘What did Miss Nightwing want?’
‘She was upset. I couldn’t understand a word she said. Poor girl.’
‘Not poor, Noddy. Her income last year ran to five figures. She’s going to be Peter Pan.’
‘She sounded distraught.’
‘She’s an excellent actress.’
‘She’ll make a lovely Peter Pan.’
‘I’m sure.’ He mistrusted actors off-stage: the most convincing were the most suspect. He could not deny their skill, but there was something about their swift ability to persuade that was itself unpersuasive. They did not have a voice of their own and when they attempted one it sounded vulgar and insincere. Their vanity was titanic, their capacity for bluff bottomless. Norah’s respect for them amounted almost to veneration; he was suspicious in the same degree. He had had them as clients his whole life and still did not know them, which was why.
Norah said, ‘I’ll get your tea.’
The rest was ritual. He sheathed his umbrella in the tall blue jar, fastened his coat on a hook, laid his briefcase and bowler hat on the table by the stairs and washed his hands. That was London done with. Then he sat in his unlaced shoes and for minutes there was only the tick of the wooden clock in the hall and the sound of the tea going down his throat, and Norah’s finishing first and saying, ‘I needed that.’
The room was dominated by a painting, blue stripes, an orange sun, a conflagration of red in one corner. He had accepted it in lieu of a small fee, but now the artist was famous and the painting was very valuable. Visitors remarked on it — because of its size and its fiery colour — and Mr Gawber told its story. He was glad to have the story; he had never found the painting much good. And next to the bookshelf, photographs of actors he’d represented, one now in the House of Lords, another the wife of a shipping tycoon, a suicide, a murder victim, several outright failures, a singer who made her name during the war and who in peacetime sank into obscurity: all smiling into their signatures. A fan of theatre programmes twenty years old lay on a small table as casually as if they had been used the previous night — Norah’s doing, and it was she who had framed the programme of the Royal Command Performance.
Norah said, ‘The butcher saved me some nice chops.’
They ate together in the back dining room, facing each other across a table whose grain he had memorized as a child on winter nights between algebra problems: there were yellow lyres and unstrung harps in the beautiful wood. But tonight he stared, seeing faces in the table, and he replayed the day’s conversations, all those extraordinary voices: Who’s there? Don’t be so bloody silly. There’s a war on! If he didn’t understand, was he dead?
Norah said, ‘You’ve gone all quiet, Rafie. Is there anything wrong?’
Everything. The overheated world has split its shell like a cooking egg. Deranged, deranged. The news was written in blood, and smudges of blistered paint said Arsenal Rule! Let it all come down; now he only bought the paper for its puzzle. Norah leaned to enquire, but he said nothing.
Norah said, ‘We’ll have a good holiday. You’ll see.’
He hated the word. He didn’t want a holiday’s brief deception of well-being. He had no intention of repeating last year’s disappointment, when he had sat in a shirt and tie, but with his trousers rolled to his knees, behind a canvas windbreak on a crowded Cornish beach. He had seen gluttonous Yorkshiremen turn into lobsters and tug at children with their claws. Sand blew between the pages of his book, which the sun prevented him from reading. The high-spirited parents, to amuse their children, disfigured the beach with deep trenches too far from the tide-mark to be altered by the sea, and so the scars on the sand remained as an appropriate parody of invasion on this littered beach-head. Holidays required skills Mr Gawber did not possess: pounding posts into the sand; humping and unflexing beach-chairs; acting as a waiter — with a clumsy tea-tray — for Norah. He endured it, praying for it to end, wishing the skies to darken and those families to be rained on. It was the sun — the sun maddened the English and turned them into farting Spaniards. The holiday, that rest at Polzeath, had exhausted him, and though Norah still spoke of it with pleasure it had taken two weeks at Rackstraw’s for him to regain his former grip on things.
Norah said, ‘If we’d had children we’d have our own grandchildren by now. They love the beach.’
A sadness. It was a son they’d had. He had lived for twelve hours and they hadn’t had the heart to name him. Baby Gawber, the death certificate read. Mr Gawber saw him once, and that was thirty years ago, but not a day went by that did not throw up that memory of the infant. He seemed to grow into manhood in his mind, and Mr Gawber always recalled with solemn clarity the chipped paint in the room where he had been told the news. For the second time that day, he remembered his boy.
Norah said, ‘You’ll want to listen to the wireless.’
It was late. The Proms concert was half over. He wouldn’t listen. The second half was always modern, thin and incomprehensible, unexpected pluckings and bongs and vagrantly sorrowing note shifts. It was soulless stuff. He preferred the coughing between movements to the music itself.
Norah said, ‘You’ve left half your meal. I did those runner beans especially for you.’
They tasted of dust. There was dust in the air, and outside in the street he could hear — even from this back room — the shouts of his neighbours, frighteningly loud, the honk of common speech. It could have been a riot, the voices looters’, the slapping feet fleeing felons’. But no, it was always that in summer, the ordinary tyranny of noise.
Norah said, ‘They’re at it again.’
Mr Gawber finished his meal. He ate the beans for Norah’s sake and knew as he did so they would rouse him in the night and make froth in his stomach. He went into the parlour and listened to Norah busy at the kitchen sink. At nine o’clock he heard the television, the yak of typewriters that preceded the news, and the factual voice of the newsreader, Robert Dougalclass="underline" Ireland, bombs, the Prime Minister warned today, record crowds. Phrases reached him; he did not want to hear more. The newsreader said good night, and he heard Norah’s ‘Good night, Robert!’ She usually replied to salutations on the damned thing.