Bilgewater Read online

  I sat there for two hours and I did not stir.

  The winter day darkened and still I sat on until I was only a shadow of myself in the glass and the french window turned from grey to dark blue, and at length to black.

  I had never seen people drunk before. Not in their homes. I didn’t know there were houses like this—middle-aged and old people pouring glass after glass of alcohol down their throats till they got silly enough not to know what they were saying nor yet to care. Till they grew oblivious to the other people round them, deluded into thinking of them as eager receptacles of their wit and wisdom.

  And Jack so drunk. And enjoying it. And such a fool. Looking such a fool with little spluttery bits of saliva coming out of his mouth like Miss Bex, and that look as if he was trying to control huge indigestion all the time. Parties.

  So these were parties.

  Though the gin had actually been very nice.

  The light came on outside the window and stiffly I got up and drew the curtains and without doing my hair or anything I went downstairs and stood in the hall like a ship awash. Then I went into the sitting room where Mrs. Rose was down again and with only a hint of redness round the neck. The friend of my mother.

  “Hullo,” she said. “Kills you doesn’t it? These festivities! God knows how we all get through Christmas. Hardly December yet. Still—have to keep going.”

  There were sounds off. The rest were coming.

  “Mrs. Rose,” I said, “my mother—”

  She opened her mouth and shut it and leaned over the electric fire and began switching every bit of it on—three switches. You could see the struggle going on inside her—trying to say something serious.

  “I liked your mother,” she said. “Funny—you do remember people from school. Odd the people you know. At school.”

  “Yes—I suppose so. It’s luck I suppose.”

  “Oh no—not at all,” she said, surprisingly definite.

  “Those were her beads,” she said.

  Mr. Rose came in, now jacketless with a little scarf tucked into his shirt collar like a pirate his face very genial and unpiratical above. Grace slid in behind him. I saw that Jack who followed quickly put his hand in the small of her back and then moved away.

  “Bridge?” cried Mr. Rose rubhing his hands. “Oh hell—five.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, “I can’t play.”

  “Oh shame. What about Miss England here?”

  “All right,” said Grace.

  “Let’s teach Bilgewater,” said Jack vaguely.

  “Oh—no thanks. I’ll watch.”

  “Telly if you want,” said Mrs. Rose. “There’s one in the waiting room.”

  But I just sat.

  A ferocity began to fill the room and a dreadful silence as different from the silence in chess as tennis from kung-fu, or rather kung-fu from tennis. After about twenty minutes I stood up but nobody noticed. “I think I’ll just—” I said.

  “SSSSH.”

  A terrible look passed between Mr. and Mrs. Rose at something Mr. Rose had done.

  “I’ll just—” I tried again when there was a general letting out of breath and easing about and an Over or something seemed to be taking place. “I’ll just go and get my book—”

  Nobody took the slightest notice—Grace and Jack totally absorbed, though I saw that Jack’s foot touched Grace’s all me time under the card table.

  “Excuse me,” I said and went upstairs and packed Paula’s suit-case, put on my coat, put my purse in my pocket and went down the stairs again. At the bottom I dropped mother’s amber beads with a clatter into the china jar in which stood the all-knowing potted plant. I heard a noise from the sitting room and Mr. Rose open the door and say something about getting more tonic, so I picked up the suit-case and went back to my room again, locked the door behind me, turned off the light and stepped out of the french window and dropped the suitcase over the balcony into the drive where it landed with a plop.

  I climbed over the balcony and lowered myself down the other side of it until I hung looking inwards, regarding my room from floor level. Then—and it was not easy—I moved my hands down the iron bars bit by bit until my head was on balcony floor level, my body, legs and feet hanging down in space. It occurred to me that if anybody came along the road they would be much diverted. I was clearly to be seen in the light of the lamp which was shining very hot near my left cheek. I wondered if the blue-blazered gentleman were he to come along the road trying to walk off the lunch time festival might think it was a hanging and put up a cheer. It also occurred to me that somebody might just possibly come out of the front door; perhaps to go and look for an off-licence to get more tonic water and opening it be confronted by my feet and legs stirring and swinging in space upon the winter wind. Perceptibly I began to see a face—my mother’s—saying “Marigold! Marigold! Whatever next.” But then I shut my eyes, let go and fell heavily into one of the mustard-coloured shrubs splaying it outwards so that its twin across the way would never look it in the face again. “I’m off,” I told the pair of them. “I’m off. I’ve had enough,” and I marched out of the gate without the slightest idea what was going to happen next.

  CHAPTER 19

  A bus was coming. It was spluttering its way up the hill and stopped outside the dentists’ at the stop across the road from the one at which I had got off yesterday. I ran across and stood for a brief moment looking in. There seemed to be nobody on it.

  I looked down the hill. I think I wondered for a minute whether to go and see the vicar. Then a voice from the upstairs of the bus called “If you’re gettin’ on, get on,” and pinged the bell: so I jumped on and tugged Paula’s case up the stairs and went to the very front seat and collapsed on it as the driver gathered speed and jerked vigorously off.

  “All the way?” asked the conductor.

  “Oh—” I hadn’t even seen where we were goiog.

  “Is it Marston Bungalow?” she said.

  “Oh yes. All right.”

  “Twenty-five p.”

  I opened my purse and there were three ten p., bits. “Oh help,” I said.

  “T’s all right. Twenty-five p.,” she said.

  I got my five p. change and wondered what on earth to do. The journey from Marston Bungalow home was as far again. I hadn’t brought any more money because I had been expecting to go back with Jack in his car on Monday evening. Paula had said Take Ample. You’ll need some for the present for the hostess, but I had thought forty p.—that had included the ten p. at church—would be very much enough.

  Oh help.

  Oh Hades.

  When the bus dragged up to its final abode I got off and found that I was standing at a large and windy roundabout at which very major road works were in progress. There was a huge red notice saying CAUTION HEAVY PLANT CROSSING, a few red lights attached to invisible ropes and the shadows of mountainous heaps of earth here and there in the darkness. I’d noticed on the way out that there did not seem to be any particularly distinguished bungalow at Marston Bungalow: or rather that there were thousands and thousands and thousands of bungalows or little red semi-det villas stretching away as far as I could see in all directions but one, which was the dark line of “the country” which the hungry, hideous city of Teesside was slowly creeping up to, eating nearer bite by bite, the cells of all its little towns floating nearer to each other, then sticking together in an always denser and more nondescript mass—like a disease of the blood. Far away behind the twenty thousand identical streets were the lights of some unloved tower blocks and beyond these a city of fluorescent light, pencil chimneys with small orange paint-brush heads of flame, flares, blazes of fire from furnaces, and wafting smells of gas.

  At “The Bungalow” where I stood at the edge of this great dead Sunday city was a shop or two lit up and shut. Through the uncurtained windows of the anony
mous street-end nearest me there were the bluish lights of the television sets, and except for myself there was no living creature to be seen.

  A wind behind me off the moors, “the country,” blew across the roundabout bringing a flurry of sleet with it and I made for the bus shelter whose windows were mostly knocked out. It smelled of lavatories. I stood and held on to the five p. in my hand.

  What was Marston Bungalow? Whom did I know at Marston Bungalow? Nobody at my school came from so far, no one at St. Wilfrid’s came from so near.

  There must be a telephone box. I set off skirting the road works putting my head down before the sleet and walked all round the kerb of the roundabout. A sudden car screamed at me as it went by, almost knocking the suitcase out of my hand. Nearly back where I’d started I saw the phone box and fell into it. It was lightless—the bulb shattered, the smell worse than in the sheher. As another car swished by the broken pane in the side I saw FUCK OFF scratched fiercely on the wooden board beside the instructions panel. I picked the receiver up but though I joggled it and shook it, and pressed hard on the little pegs, it was silent as the night.

  Marston Bungalow, I thought. Who lives—and I remembered the terrible woman who had sat next to me and eaten meat sandwiches and found the pier kiosk a bit close. She’d got off at Marston Bungalow. She’d been going to Marston Hall. I’d rather die, I thought, than go looking for her.

  It grew very cold in the phone box and I went back to the shelter, turned up my collar and stood with my back to the blast and my hands in my pockets. Marston Hall, I thought.

  A bus came bounding out of the night like a lighted palace, its windows steamed up with the warmth. It was not the Middlesbrough bus. It was going to Whitby—miles away. It looked a cheerful bus, packed with people all chatting and laughing and the conductor gave me a welcoming wink.

  “Are you gettin’ on?” he asked, holding his horses for a moment at the bell.

  “Um—is it Marston Hall by any chance?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is it far?”

  “Five p.”

  I got on. It seemed right that I should. I had a distinct feeling as I climbed in that things were being arranged for me. Giving up my five p. and receiving a flimsy ticket back I asked the conductor to tell me when we were there and sat awaiting events to take me into their hands.

  But I was nevertheless a little surprised when the bus swung away from the great plain of lights and humanity onto the dark places of the moor. Marston Bungalow was not a bungalow as Marston Chase was not a hunting lodge, nor Brambles Farm had been a farm since Queen Victoria ruled the waves: and Marston Hall I did not expect to be a Hall, but another “estate” like these. Everybody lived on estates. “We live on the estate,” they all said. “Which estate are you on?” Uncle Edmund often talked about this, piping his eye. “They talk like eighteenth-century farm-hands,” he said. “‘I am on the estate.’ Alas, alas!” Our own town outside the oasis of St. Wilfrid’s School was a mass of estates, Ings Farm Estate, Manke Hall Estate, Ramshaw’s Estate—Ramshaw’s had been the farm that father and I used to walk to on Sunday evenings to see the rabbits, now a great warren itself. All the old landmarks were gone—the cricket green, Kirkleatham Hall “where the King stayed”—all flattened to bear the large pink spawn of sameness over the earth. The march of the little houses.

  Squeaky violins.

  I’d better shut up or I’ll be getting like Old Price. “Marston Hall,” the conductor called and I got out.

  I got out into a blackness and a bitter wind and a lightless road very much blacker than the roundabout and blacker still after the bus had gone. Except for the wind and weather there was utter silence and not a light anywhere in earth or heaven.

  The bus had brought me to the moor’s edge. It was Sunday and—I couldn’t see my watch but I imagined—about eight o’clock. Buses to Whitby are rare at any time and it would be unlikely that there would be another one tonight.

  Marston Hall. Whatever it was, I thought looking around, it wasn’t an estate. It appeared to be an area of main road without a sign of life upon it. A car whizzed by and a few minutes later another, lighting up the snow in their headlamps.

  I leaned back on a sort of post and thought that perhaps the next car I ought to try and stop, but no more cars came. I put my hands between my back and the post to keep it off the cold stone. I thought of Jack Rose’s hand in Grace’s back.

  Cold stone.

  I felt along. It was a big stone. I turned round and looked up and saw a sturdy pillar with some large piece of carving on the top of it. To the right I saw another pillar and between them a space. Like the awful shrubs, I thought and then—no. They are not. They are not all alike. I moved along a bit and looked into the darkness between the posts. Then I felt about and there was aged metal, peeling, cold. A great tipped gate. They were the stone posts of a huge gateway leading into blackness: the gates of Marston Hall.

  It was a Hall. A real Hall. I picked up the suitcase and, with my left hand out in front of me I began to pick my way like a blind person over bumpy, tufty terrain, between tossing trees into, for all I knew the very pit.

  I passed a little building but derelict, unlit—a lodge. The road dipped down and round a bend, then seemed to be going uphill again. I pressed forward in the wind, on and on, and kept stopping and trying to look here and there. Darkness. On and on and trees on either side. I began to think that the road was not really there. All roads must lead or have led to somewhere yet this one had no sign of intention or hope in it of any kind. I could not even see it. It was just the space between two lines of trees. Perhaps it wasn’t there.

  I was on the top of a rise now. My stockings and shoes were soaked through, my hair sticking cold to my face, my hands frozen. All still dark. There could be no Hall here.

  Then I saw over to my left a faint light. It came and went and was at some height from the ground and I thought that perhaps it was some queer low star. Then I realised that it was a light coming and going because it was behind trees that waved and strained and shook themselves in front of it.

  The path turned now in the direction of the light. The snow had stopped falling and the wind as I stepped out of the trees blew the blizzard away for a moment letting through the moon. It shone bleakly on the path, a curved, rough driveway with patches of sleet, turning round to the end of a terrace with a low wall of urns and balustrades. The terrace itself when I got onto it was broad and slabbed with great old stones, a forecourt for a castle keep.

  The house it belonged to stood up behind, gigantic under the fitful moon, black against a wild white sky. The caverns of its many eyes were dark and uncurtained, the moonlight on the roof showed holes and patches and a great crack tumbled like a suicidal flight of steps down the side of a turret, nearly to the ground, as if with a shove the turret might have been heaved away to fall apart from its parent wall, crash down and vanish like the staircase on the pier. In the turret window at the top there was a light, presumably the one I had seen. Then as I looked I decided that after all it wasn’t: it was just a reflection of the moon. The house was a ruin, long ago deserted, waiting for the end.

  Marston Bungalow was better than this, I thought. Television sets and lighted chimneys and fumes and ferments: at least that desert had people in it.

  There was a great door like a church and church-like pointed windows in the thick rough walls on either side and a long, rusty-feeling bell-rope hung beside the door. I pulled on this not expecting it to move. But it moved easily very far down in my hand until I thought I might be pulling it down altogether. I had the fancy that I was about to pull the whole great house down, that there would be a rumble and a crack and the massive, pathetic old place would slowly subside around my feet. I knew from the utter stillness that it was empty, a house dead long ago waiting for its final destruction.

  When I let go of the chain however
, it moved smoothly upwards with a long groan and though there was no sound of a bell the house stood on.

  The idiocy of it all suddenly hit me as the wind struck up again and the moon disappeared before the next attack of hail and sleet. It frightened me so that it almost made me stumble and fall. I had no idea where I was. I had not one penny. I was soaked to the skin and I had fled the house of two cheerful and hospitable dentists and two good friends, fled from them into space without a word. I was utterly helpless, utterly irresponsible, utterly unwise. I, Bilgewater—I, and I turned away from the unlikely door ready to make off in any direction, anywhere, anywhere, into the night.

  With a huge squeal and groan of its hinges the great door, now behind me, was pulled very slowly wide open and Terrapin stood looking at me, an oil lamp held high above his head.

  CHAPTER 20

  He said, “I was doing a prose. Come in.”

  I said, “But I thought you were poor.”

  We each stood, letting the two statements sink in, letting them bang about for future reference, like memos in a rough note book: like Paula’s great pad above her telephone labelled NOTES AND POINTS OF REFERENCE. The oil lamp blazed up and a blast of wind blew me towards him into the hall.

  He stood looking at me very seriously indeed, his fair hair hanging down, his cheek-bones gaunt, his eyes round and large and blue. I noticed how tall he was, the immense length of his legs in black velvetish trousers, his long thin top half in a white roll-top jersey and I thought again, he is like a clown. A very distinguished, marvellous clown.

  There was something else about him, too, which I found difficult to admit because it was an archaism, a sort of borrowed standard, the sort of thing that my dearest Uncle Edmund HB or silly Puffy Coleman or pathetic Mrs. Gathering might have said. He looked a gent.

  There. He did. Churning out uranium in a Siberian mine, slopping about in the communist rice-fields of China, marching shoulder to shoulder with the workers, wagging the biggest red flag in the world, sitting in a hole in the road with a hanky round his head knotted greasily at each corner, Tom Terrapin would look a gent. Like Robert Graves said he did, like George Orwell wished he didn’t, like Lancelot was and didn’t even notice. Tom Terrapin looked the young master, the lord of high estate. I thought of smooth pin-eyed Jack Rose lying back on the pink plush, his voice just a bit near the upholstery, Jack Rose the answer to the maiden’s prayer, Jack Rose who didn’t live in Shalott after all. I thought, my goodness, I’ve been getting them the wrong way round.