The People on Privilege Hill Read online

  “Yes,” they said at the zoo. “Come this way please. The owner would like to speak to you,” and they took me to the owner’s house up the curved white steps and under the spun-sugar portico.

  He was the soul of kindness (well, I’d given him my everything) and said he wanted to tell me himself that Pangbourne was now very ill and must be “put out of his misery.” He seemed sad. He took my hands—I had forgotten the gloves—and looked at them. “What pretty hands.”

  Together we walked to the gorillarium and Pangbourne still sat in the cage. “I’ll leave you together,” said the owner. It was early in the morning, the public not yet admitted. The zoo lay still.

  I had not my canvas stool with me and so I had to lean against the barrier fence as we are not meant to do. I took a very quick glance at Pangbourne, who was gazing as usual at the sky. A revelation came to me.

  I bore him, I thought. All these years I have bored him. I have literally bored him to death.

  But then the gorilla sighed and heaved himself together somewhat. Still without looking at me he felt around for a twig. After a pause he made a stab or two at the syrup bottle and fell back exhausted. Then he passed the twig to me through the bars.

  BABETTE

  When, some time ago, Babette’s novel of before the war was reissued, the world went mad for it again. It flamed up in the bookshops and in the media, and sold in thousands to the reading groups. For a season it burned bright: book of the month, the week, the day, the moment. It was the book my mother and her friends had always doted on and which I had not therefore deigned to read. Now I read it and found it to be perfect. Leafy Glades it’s called: a crazy, heartbroken, generous, funny, brave, piercing hymn to life. Babette had written other books, all forgotten. It was on the strength of Leafy Glades alone that she had earned the title “Babette”—as it might have been “Colette” or “Fonteyn.”

  But then she and Leafy Glades faded away. Their autumn had arrived. Winter fell.

  Until now. So many years on came a new spring.

  I reviewed the reprint of Leafy Glades for the Times Literary Supplement. Like every other reviewer, I assumed of course that Babette was dead. Long, long dead.

  But there came a letter from the TLS and, inside it, another (pink) envelope with “Kindly Forward” on it, and my name. Inside this was a scrap of toilet paper where a spider had been writing shorthand in violet ink. All I could make out was a phone number. Not even a signature.

  I phoned up.

  “Hi,” said a strong, hard voice. “This is Babette. I am quite able to take your call at the moment if you will tell me, first, who you are so that I can decide if it will be worth my while. Please speak slowly after the tone. Oh, well, hello. I thought you’d ring. I’ll be right over.”

  “But you’re—?”

  “Dead? No. I’m living in Shepperton or Isleworth. Or somewhere. It’s all one. I used to live somewhere near you, I think.”

  “Oh yes. I know. I know the house. Not far from the church.”

  “You didn’t put that in your review.”

  “Well, I tried to write about the book.”

  “That’s why I wrote to you. I want to give you a present. I shall come over and see you. And the old homestead.”

  “I ... can’t I come and fetch you? And drive you home again?”

  “Drive me? No. I’ve got my bus pass. I’m all of sixty now, you know, amazing as it may seem.”

  “Yes. Well. But—”

  “I’ll be with you at twelve o’clock sharp.”

  “Yes. Of course. When?”

  “Today,” she said.

  There she stood. My house has steep steps up to the front door and she stood below them on the gravel, bearing in her right hand a six-foot stave. I saw her begin to strike the ground with the butt of the stave, as if, at a given sign, it would pluck her up into the air and drop her on my doormat. I ran quickly down to her. She was a creature of tatters and wisps, in a long coat and none-too-clean balaclava helmet.

  “Let’s go,” she cried and set off towards the gate, me trotting behind, wishing for a muffler in the cool spring air.

  There is all about the divine south London suburb in which I live a network of little passages thought to have once been the tracks around the edges of fields. They run now between fine gardens of many mansions. They are three feet wide and their clapboard walls are six feet high, flimsy and sometimes almost swaying in the wind. One can slink secretly about the town along these old sheep-runs. They are called “The Slips.”

  Dark things occur there and at night many a soul has wished that she had kept to the high street. Many a slip.

  Babette stopped dead in the middle of the first Slip and examined the rich graffiti on the wooden walls. “Do you remember that boy?” she said. “He drew a crucifix here. He wrote beneath it ‘What a way to spend Easter.’ He’s a bishop now.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “My son could get rid of all these,” she said of the graffiti. (Son? Babette? A family life?) “He’s a specialist with the airbrush, though of course he is retired now. Tell me—can one still hear—?” and she began to thump the stout oak on the tarmacadam among the condoms and the chickweed. “Ah! There!” she said. “You can still hear the little streams in the chalk that eventually reach the Thames.”

  We came out among affluent mansions and palm trees bought at Harrods. Then we plumbed into the next Slip. Then another. Then we burst out near the church and opposite stood the tall sentry box of a house that I’d always heard had been Babette’s.

  “No blue plaque,” she said and I was surprised to see eyes full of tears. I could have died for her.

  “It’s too soon,” I told her. “You’re too young. You have to have been dead fifty years before you get a blue plaque.”

  She gave me a look through the slit in the balaclava. “Well, there it is,” she said. “Place of my joys. He died, you know, my Romeo. He never left me. Two apartments under one roof. What is called a ‘successful conversion.’ Like St. Paul. We were the top one. Only the roof above us. We got in at the side. Through a side door. The ground floor with the columns and the fanlight and the bust of Lord Nelson belonged to the Admiral and his wife. Dead of course, long ago. They looked like black beetles.”

  At that moment the front door opened and two black beetles walked out hand in hand. When they caught sight of Babette, terrible fear came upon them and they hoofed it down the terrace and round the corner, registering unbelief.

  “Still alive,” she said—Babette. “Well, we gave them a good fright. Now, look. Before we moved we had to leave some treasures behind us. In the roof. We couldn’t get them out through the side door. The Admiral and his dame could have obliged us. Through their front door. But they wouldn’t hear of it. So we had to haul them up into the roof—it was before the fall of France—and we boarded up the opening. They’ll still be up there. I’d like you to accept them.”

  I asked what they were.

  “Oh—a big Victorian rocking horse. An eighteenth-century doll’s house. And a bathtub.”

  “A doll’s house tub?”

  “A human’s bathtub fit for Cleopatra. Indestructible. Cast-iron. White porcelain thick as your finger. Painted feet. Acanthus leaves. Worth a bomb now. Though what is a bomb worth? It’s all yours if you want it.”

  “You lifted a Victorian cast-iron bathtub into the roof?”

  “We used block and tackle. My son was talented and strong.”

  “But surely it will all belong to whoever lives there now?”

  “I don’t see why. I labelled them with my name and number and the new address, and ‘To Await Collection.’ It was scarcely fifty years ago. My telephone number is little changed.”

  “But however could I get them out?”

  “I’ll write. But first we must make sure that they are still there. My son used to crawl up that drainpipe. When we lost our doorkeys. It still looks firm. See the little window under the eaves? Shin up and
take a shufti.”

  “You mean that you expect me to climb up the side of the house? Up ... three floors? Up the drainpipe?”

  “I don’t see why not. You’re young. Well, fairly young.”

  “But I review for the Times Literary Supplement.”

  We enjoyed this notion.

  “I knew you were the one for my inheritance,” she said. “I’m off now. Let me know how you get on.”

  “But you were coming back for lunch.”

  “All in good time,” she said.

  But there was no good time.

  There was no time at all.

  A few weeks later a newspaper rang me to ask if I would write Babette’s obituary.

  “But she had years to go yet,” I said. “I walked all the way round the town with her the other day.”

  “Well, she’s gone,” said the newspaper.

  After a time I called at Babette’s old house. I did not call on the Admiral and the Admiral’s apartment because I had found lately that I was forever bumping into the pair of them taking the air on the Common and an expression I did not care for darkened the Admiral’s beetle brow. I called instead at the side door.

  Nobody answered, so I left a note asking the occupants of the top flat to call on me in Putney, and to my surprise they did. They were a serious but colourless couple and when I told them that there might be treasures in their roof they looked as embarrassed for me as if I had been reading too many children’s books. They said they had heard that there had once been very mad people living in the house. A fat, middle-aged man used to climb up the drainpipes and the dear Admiral had watched muttering, “Let him fall.”

  “I believe there is a magnificent bathtub in your roof.”

  They stared. “Are you a friend of the family?”

  “Oh yes,” I said.

  They got up to go.

  “There will be a blue plaque one day on your house,” I said. “Babette was a genius. A wonderful novelist.”

  “We don’t read novels,” said the colourless couple. “We believe in the quest for absolute truth.”

  “That is where you might find it.”

  “What—in a bathtub? In our roof?” And they scuttled away, having consumed a good deal of cake.

  I decided that I had to climb Babette’s drainpipe.

  First I looked out my old catsuit.

  Then I decided that I would perhaps attend a gym.

  Then that I would choose the next but one most moonless night and to hell with the Times Literary Supplement. I would carry a torch between my teeth and under the eaves high above the treetops I would penetrate Babette’s attic with light.

  I never did.

  For on the next moonless night—just as well I hadn’t chosen it—the suburb resounded to the fall of Babette’s house of joy.

  Some great weight had fallen through the attic floor.

  The weight had fallen first through the ceiling of the colourless couple, then through their floor, and the ceiling of the Admiral and his missus, bringing with it mouldings, staircases, chimney and the roof; and leaving four bodies one-dimensional in the dust.

  There was no sign of the antique doll’s house or the rocking horse that were rumoured to have been recently discovered and transported to a top dealer. It was said that there had been builders about, opening up ceilings. The four, now dead, occupants had been planning a cruise together. A bath, stubborn, immovable in the dark, they had had to leave. But it was now restless and had taken matters into its own hands and descended.

  In the heap the bath raised its blunt head and was plucked out of the rubble like an oyster from chowder, and I am lying in it now.

  The brass taps, the chain, the plughole, the plug now gleam with polish. I have painted the body of the bath blue and its acanthus feet turquoise, and it stands in the middle of my bathroom like a barque upon a lake, as in all the classy magazines.

  I believe that Babette’s bathtub, like Babette’s one great novel, will last for ever and I lie in the steam and bubbles considering her, and all of us who try to write the truth.

  THE LATTER DAYS OF MR. JONES

  1.

  The last of his tribe, the last of his kind, Mr. Jones walked each day from his house next to the church up to the Common, as he had done for perhaps fifty years. He was well over eighty, upright, amiable, a military-looking man with the old soldier’s legacy of highly polished shoes. He walked, had always walked, with a couple of dogs held taut on a single lead: Yeoman and Farmer. They had tails that curled briskly over their backs and optimistic eyes. It was said that if Mr. Jones had had a tail and the dogs well-polished shoes, they would have made triplets. Alas. The last of the Yeomen and Farmers—generations of dogs had always had the same names—were gone. They had become too much for Mr. Jones and had begun to pull him over now and then. He had had a fall by the pond. When the time came for the last couple to go Mr. Jones did not replace them and he now strode forth with glazed eyes, brandishing only a walking stick. Some of his less sensitive neighbours stopped him to ask, “No dogs, Mr. Jones?” and he would stare them out and say, “No, I’m afraid not,” and talk about the weather, which was one of his few topics.

  When he reached the pond on the Common, Mr. Jones always sat down on a long green seat. In one of the houses that stood on the edge of the Common there had been an infant school ever since he was a boy, and twice a day, even now, at break times its big door opened to disgorge children who all made for the pond with a particular kind of shrill and shouting music. This they kept up steadily for half an hour. “Mr. Jones, Mr. Jones—how’s Yeoman? How’s Farmer?” They danced facetiously in front of him and crept up from behind the seat to pretend to throttle him. They quarrelled about who should climb on his knee and stroke his white moustache. When they became really tiresome a teacher came blowing her whistle in short, sharp blasts to say, “That’ll do. Stop it. Don’t be unkind to Mr. Jones.”

  But he was the mildest of men and seemed unaware of anything the children did to him. He said little and drew back beneath his beetle brows, and stared across the Common at things the children had never seen and would never see.

  Mr. Jones was odd.

  He lived in the house where he had been born, and his mother before him, in a road of Victorian mansions in a beautiful London suburb on a hill. He had been the youngest of a big family, all now dead. He had been “educated at home” though the other Joneses had gone away to school. There were faded victorian photographs in family albums of all the children gathered round Mr. Jones in his pram, two uniformed nursemaids in attendance. Bonneted Mr. Jones had watched the others flinging sticks into the pond, pushing each other over, falling in, yelling, bursting into tears, spitting and being smacked, then everyone laughing again. The winter when Mr. Jones had taken his first tottery steps, bending with mittened hands to try to pick up snow, he still remembered. The setting sun balanced orange on the edge of the Common, sending immense shadows through the trunks of the pines had seemed to hesitate, trying to hold on to the last of the winter day.

  Orange, black and white, Mr. Jones remembered. Orange sun, the glossy blanket of snow and in the hollows at his feet in their little buttoned boots, black needles of grass pricking up through crisp rime. They were only glimpses now, but very vivid and the light of his life.

  Now, children wore jeans and hunkish white sand-shoes at all seasons, or they were in tracksuits and he could not tell if they were boys or girls. They were all very fat and always eating. Nobody was shy and they made fun of the elderly. Sometimes when they came crawling round him and the dogs, he felt like reprimanding them, but he’d never had the knack of command. He had been less than three months in the army—though this was not generally known—because he could not obey orders at any speed and his commanding officer had sent for him one day to say that they felt that he would be happier as a civilian. A courteous man. He had known Mr. Jones’s father. So Mr. Jones did only fire-watching duties through the Second War and helped his
mother in the way that sisters had once been expected to do. Mr. Jones’s sisters had long left home to be New Women. They had cut off their hair. The eldest one had been a suffragette before he was born.

  Mr. Jones’s mother had adored her youngest child from the start. “My Baby Jones,” she said each time they brought him home from the Common. She lifted him from the pram and kissed him. “You aren’t quite like other people but you’re a beloved son all the same.” In the schoolroom, until he was a young man, she had read to him from the shelves of children’s books that had been in the family for generations. There was a first edition of Alice.

  The whole house was much the same now as then. His grandparents would have recognised it, as they almost would have recognised the whole road, although the road had had its ups and downs.

  There were, for example, no households now with five or six indoor servants, no tradesmen coming to take grocery orders twice a week. In 1940 the houses in the road had passed into the pallor of wartime and in 1941 two of them had been bombed to rubble. Then squatters had arrived. Then squatters were flung out. High rooms were partitioned with plywood into tenements. Then in the seventies one by one the houses began to be bought up and restored. Then more than restored, with every feature replaced at great expense. Cellars became underground garages with overhead doors that opened magically before their owners’ cars had reached the bottom of the hill. Gardens became paved with pastel stone set round a single palm tree. Serpentine box bushes flanked each front door. The two bombed, rebuilt houses were now indistinguishable from the others.

  The people in the houses were very different too. There were no servants living in, except for nannies who had apartments on top floors and cars to take the children to school. Husbands were not much in evidence except when out jogging early and late—in their ski-suits. They were called “partners.” The women Mr. Jones thought looked rather like rats. Anxious rats with frightening jobs in the City—or in several cities—and in what seemed to Mr. Jones their late middle age they appeared in couture maternity clothes that emphasised their condition so grossly that he had to look away. Huge, set-piece firework parties took place at Guy Fawkes and Christmas and at Hallowe’en and Thanksgiving, for the road was now international, and the façades were covered in webs of fairy lights. His neighbours told him they could get him more than two million for his house, but he didn’t seem to understand.