And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
The last words were:
In my end is my beginning.
All this for Sandor’s ring round the bath and his muck on the cooker. Ridiculous. But so is everything. So was Thermopylae. The things that matter don’t necessarily make sense. My end seemed immanent in every breath and my beginning seemed never to have happened.
The turtles would be well on their way now, following whatever track they followed. Just doing it. Not thinking about it, just doing it.
No sound from the bathroom. Sandor didn’t have a bath every morning. I heard his door open, heard him padding to the kitchen, heard and smelled his cooking, heard him go back to his room.
I dressed, went to the kitchen. Muck all over the cooker again. I got the cloth that I always cleaned it with, held it under the cold tap, got it good and wet, knocked on Sandor’s door.
‘Who is it?’ said his voice from inside.
‘Me,’ I said.
He opened the door, Persian dressing-gown, red slippers, hairy ankles.
I held up the wet cloth. ‘Clean the cooker,’ I said.
‘I clean your cooker right enough,’ he said. ‘I break your bones, you don’t go away.’
I shoved the cloth into his face, brought my knee up hard into his crutch. When he doubled over I got both hands on his head, forced it down as I brought my knee up again into his face. What am I doing, I thought. He’ll kill me for sure this time.
He was on the floor with blood all over his face and I thought it might be wise to beat him unconscious if I could but before I could get in another blow his feet shot out and I went flying. Slammed into the wall and that was the last I knew for a while.
When I came to I was on my bed and Mrs Inchcliff was sitting by me. ‘Where’s Sandor?’ I said.
‘He’s gone off to the doctor to get his nose seen to,’ she said.
‘How’d I get here?’ I said.
‘We carried you,’ she said. ‘Mr Sandor and I. What is all this between you two?’
‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Thermopylae. In my end is my beginning.’
So I came limping into the shop rather late and there were all those books and Mr Meager and Harriet selling books and customers buying books and I thought, What in the world am I doing here, what’s all this nonsense with books and who are these people? As I came in through the door the books and people seemed to get farther away instead of closer, receding from me as the shore recedes from a boat that sails away.
‘Got everything sorted out all right?’ said Mr Meager.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘thank you. Sorry I’m late, it couldn’t be helped.’
‘Feeling all right?’ he said. ‘You look a bit off this morning.’
‘No more than usual,’ I said. ‘It’s just that you haven’t seen me for a few days. You probably don’t notice how I look ordinarily.’ My mind seemed clear but my head felt a funny shape. I turned to look at him from the hard side of it. He looked back at me with his whole head nice and hard. He has very bright blue eyes like Paul Newman but nobody would ever buy a poster of Mr Meager.
Harriet brought me a mug of coffee with a manner that seemed unnecessarily domestic. She looked heavily understanding, which irritated me. I felt there wasn’t anything to be understood. And my head really did hurt where I’d hit the wall with it.
‘I rang you up last night,’ she said, ‘but you were out.’ There was the reproachful look again, the same look I’d seen when I first met her.
‘I got home too late to ring you back,’ I said.
‘How are you?’ she said very seriously as if I’d just come back from hospital.
‘I’m fine,’ I said, and she looked hurt. You can tell me, her eyes said. No, I couldn’t tell her. What was there to tell? You can’t do it with turtles, that’s all. You have to fight Mr Sandor and everything else. Every day, every inch of the way.
‘You can’t do it with turtles,’ I said.
‘You can do it with me,’ she said, and gave me a quick grope behind the counter. The singlemindedness of the woman!
‘That’s not the only it there is,’ I said.
‘Sorry,’ said Harriet, and removed herself to the Occult section.
I rang up Neaera when I had a moment. She wasn’t home.
At lunch-time I went to Hyde Park and ate my sandwich and apple under a tree and did not give up smoking. Soon maybe but not yet. I looked at the yellow leaves on the grass and the boats on the Serpentine and the people around me as if I’d come back from the Lakes and the Torrible Zone and the hills of the Chankly Bore. But nobody said how tall I’d grown. All the yellow leaves were too much for me, I didn’t know if I could go back to the shop and last the day out.
I did last the day out. Just. In the afternoon Harriet said, ‘Will you be over this evening?’
‘Harriet …’ I said.
‘God,’ she said, ‘you sound so weary.’
‘I’m pretty thin on the ground right now,’ I said. ‘There’s not all that much of me. I need to be by myself.’
‘Well, good luck to you and all the best,’ she said, and quickly sold a Knightsbridge lady Rising Sap, by Taura Strong.
44 Neaera H
Things appear from unexpected quarters. The single dot before the face becomes another dot of different shape and density.
George Fairbairn had been a background person until now. Now he was the dot before my face, the face before my face. Knowing that I should never see the whole picture I didn’t bother to ask myself what it was.
He had seemed so medium, so unspecially placed between the top and bottom of life that I hadn’t really given him full human recognition until that evening when he brought out the champagne. I’d assumed that he was married, part of a closed circle, no lines moving on his map.
He wasn’t married. He had a flat off Haverstock Hill and that’s where I woke up on Tuesday, the morning after I’d gone to see him at the Aquarium. There was very little in the place, mostly it was furnished with light and quiet. It was on the top floor and looked out over rooftops. There was a Chinese teapot in the kitchen, there was a copy of Lilly’s The Mind of the Dolphin on the table by the bed. In the sitting room were R. H. Blyth’s four volumes on haiku and some natural history. ‘I don’t buy books much any more,’ he said. There was a radio but no gramophone.
A curious man, somewhat off to one side of things. As he said, he didn’t mind being alive but I don’t think it meant a great deal to him. I asked him nothing about himself and he offered no information, that was how it was. He had a clean look and a clean clear feel, nothing muddy. That was enough. There was about him the smell or maybe just the idea of dry grass warm in the sun.
He made breakfast for us. Looking out of the window and across a lawn I saw other people having breakfast in their windows.
‘Do you think you’ll go on doing children’s books?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
We left the flat. In the lift at the Belsize Park tube station there was a Dale Carnegie poster, MAXIMISE YOUR POTENTIAL, it said, and showed a drawing of a thick-faced man in simplified light and shade. He had a pencil poised in his hand and stood looking down at a graph on his desk. Whether you read the graph from his side of the desk or mine the line on it went down.
At Camden Town George kissed me and got out of the train. I went home to Madame Beetle and the snails.