I wouldn’t advise Violet Lane — there is no telling about the beds in Violet Lane — but perhaps in Dreary Station you have already found a lodging good as mine, if you were once the gentleman or if you ever took a tea kettle from a lady’s hands. A fortnight is all you need. After a fortnight you will set up your burner, prepare hot water for the rubber bottle, warm the bottom of the bed with the bag that leaks round its collar. Or you will turn the table’s broken leg to the wall, visit the lavatory in your robe, drive a nail or two with the heel of your boot. After a fortnight they don’t evict a man. All those rooms — number twenty-eight, the one the incendiaries burned on Ash Wednesday, the final cubicle that had iron shutters with nymphs and swans and leaves — all those rooms were vacancies in which you started growing fat or first found yourself writing to the lady in the Post about salting breast of chicken or sherrying eggs. A lodger is a man who does not forget the cold drafts, the snow on the window ledge, the feel of his knees at night, the taste of a mutton chop in a room in which he held his head all night.
It was from Mother that I learned my cooking.
They were always turning Mother out onto the street. Our pots, our crockery, our undervests, these we kept in cardboard boxes, and from room to empty room we carried them until the strings wore out and her garters and medicines came through the holes. Our boxes lay in spring rains, they gathered snow. Troops, cabmen, bobbies passed them moldering and wet on the street. Once, dried out at last and piled high in a dusty hall, our boxes were set afire. Up narrow stairs and down we carried them, over steps with spikes that caught your boot heels and into small premises still rank with the smells of dead dog or cat. And out of her greasy bodice the old girl paid while I would be off to the unfamiliar lavatory to fetch a pull of tea water in our black pot.
“Here’s home, Mother,” I would say.
Then down with the skirt, down with the first chemise, off with the little boots. And, hands on the last limp bows: “You may manipulate the screen now, William.” It was always behind the boxes, a screen like those standing in theater dressing rooms or in the wards of hospitals, except that it was horsehair brown and filled with holes from her cigarette. And each time we changed our rooms, whether in the morning or midday or dusk, I would set up the screen first thing and behind it Mother would finish stripping to the last scrap of girded rag — the obscene bits of makeshift garb poor old women carry next their skin — and after discarding that would wrap herself in the tawny dressing gown and lie straight upon the single bed while I worked at the burner’s pale and rubbery flame. And beyond our door and before the tea was in the cup, we would hear the footsteps, the cheap bracelet tinkling a moment at the glass, would hear the cold fingers lifting down the sign.
Together we took our lodgings, together we went on the street. Fifteen years of circling Dreary Station, she and I, of discovering footprints in the bathtub or a necktie hanging from the toilet chain, or seeing flecks of blood in the shaving glass. Fifteen years with Mother, going from loft to loft in Highland Green, Pinky Road — twice in Violet Lane — and circling all that time the gilded cherubim big as horses that fly off the top of the Dreary Station itself.
If you live long enough with your mother you will learn to cook. Your flesh will know the feel of cabbage leaves, your bare hands will hold everything she eats. Out of the evening paper you will prepare each night your small and tidy wad of cartilage, raw fat, cold and dusty peels and the mouthful — still warm — which she leaves on her plate. And each night as softly as you can, wiping a little blood off the edge of the apron, you will carry your paper bundle down the corridor and into the coldness and falling snow where you will deposit it, soft and square, just under the lid of the landlady’s great pail of slops. Mother wipes her lips with your handkerchief and you set the rest of the kidneys on the sooty and frozen window ledge. You cover the burner with its flowered cloth and put the paring knife, the spoon, the end of bread behind the little row of books. There is a place for the pot in the drawer beside the undervests.
In one of the alleys off Pinky Road I remember a little boy who wore black stockings, a shirt ripped off the shoulder, a French sailor’s hat with a red pompom. The whipping marks were always fresh on his legs and one cheekbone was blue. A flying goose darkened the mornings in that alley off Pinky Road, the tar buildings were slick with gray goose slime. After the old men and apprentices had left for the high bridges and little shops the place was empty and wet and dead as a lonely dockyard. Then behind the water barrel you could see the boy and his dog.
Each morning when the steam locomotives began shrieking out of Dreary Station the boy knelt on the stones in the leakage from the barrel and caught the puppy by its jowls and rolled its fur and rubbed its ears between his fingers. Alone with the tar doors dripping and the petrol and horse water drifting down the gutters, the boy would waggle the animal’s fat head, hide its slow shocked eyes in his hands, flop it upright and listen to its heart. His fingers were always feeling the black gums or the soft wormy little legs or quickly freeing and pulling open the eyes so that he, the thin boy, could stare into them. No fields, sunlight, larks — only the stoned alley like a footpath on a quay down which a black ship might come sailing if the wind held, and down beneath the mists coming off the dead steeple-cocks the boy with the poor dog in his arms and loving his close scrutiny of the nicks in its ears, tiny channels over the dog’s brain, pictures he could find on its purple tongue, pearls he could discover between the claws. Love is a long close scrutiny like that. I loved Mother in the same way.
I see her: it is just before the end; she is old; I see her through the red light of my glass of port. See the yellow hair, the eyes drying up in the comers. She laughs and jerks her head but the mouth is open, and that is what I see through the glass of port: the laughing lips drawn round a stopper of darkness and under the little wax chin a great silver fork with a slice of bleeding meat that rises slowly, slowly, over the dead dimple in the wax, past the sweat under the first lip, up to the level of her eyes so she can take a look at it before she eats. And I wait for the old girl to choke it down.
But there is a room waiting if you can find it, there is a joke somewhere if you can bring it to your lips. And my landlord, Mr. Banks, is not the sort to evict a man for saying a kind word to his wife or staying in the parlor past ten o’clock. His wife, Margaret, says I was a devoted son.
Yes, devoted. I remember fifteen years of sleeping, fifteen years of smelling cold shoes in the middle of the night and waiting, wondering whether I smelled smoke down the hallway to the toilet or smelled smoke coming from the parlor that would bum like hay. I think of the whipped boy and his dog abed with him and that’s what devotion is: sleeping with a wet dog beneath your pillow or humming some childish time to your mother the whole night through while waiting for the plaster, the beams, the glass, the kidneys on the sill to catch fire. Margaret’s estimation of my character is correct. Heavy men are most often affectionate. And I, William Hencher, was a large man even then.
“Don’t worry about it, Hencher,” the captain said. “We’ll carry you out if we have to.” On its cord the bulb was circling round his head, and across the taverns and walls and craters of Dreary Station came the sirens and engines of the night. Sometimes, at the height of it, the captain and his man — an ex-corporal with rotten legs who wore a red beret and was given to fainting in the hall — went out to walk in the streets, and I would watch them go and wait, watch the searchlights fix upon the wounded cherubim like giants caught naked in the sky, until I heard them swearing in the hall again and, from the top of the stair, an unfamiliar voice crying, “Shut the door. Oh, for the love of bleeding Hell, come shut the door.”