—
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
Inside the Belsize Bookshop. The general air — as they entered — was not quite what greeted Ananda when he sneaked into one of the porn shops near Wardour Street: studied indifference. Here, the eye-contact was normal, unhesitating. The man seemed vaguely charmed by Ananda’s uncle — and why not, given the broad toothless smile he’d thrown him as they walked in?
On the table with other new arrivals was, displayed frontally, Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Poems, a paperback, with the lapidary KING PENGUIN on the top. Strange picture on the jacket, bright but oddly forbidding, of what looked like an angel wrestling with a man. Ananda turned the book over and noted the painting was by Gauguin — obviously not one of his Tahiti scenes. Nestor Davidson admired Hill — could he be slightly in awe of him, like the rest? No, Mr. Davidson wasn’t one to submit in that way; but he’d recommended even the later, difficult poems. Strange creature, Hill. Was he more English or European? Antique or contemporary? Ananda opened the book gingerly, read with pleasure the first dour line of biography on the first page: “…son of a police constable.” The epic begins in the ordinary; “There is no bloodless myth will hold,” Hill himself had sternly written. Ananda had read and been drawn to the early poetry; he turned page after page of stately verse, jealously compressed, and full of icy hauteur, till he lighted on “Ovid in the Reich.” It was tiny; he knew it. He’d first noticed it in an anthology. He read it now in one gulp, then slowly reread the second, final, perplexing stanza:
I have learned one thing: not to look down
So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,
Harmonize strangely with the divine
Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.
A customer rustled by. “Excuse me,” said Ananda, moving to his right. You were often blocking people’s paths in this country. You were meant to. If you hadn’t come between someone and their destination at least once in the day, you must find a means of doing so. Slowing others down — as with a car stationary at a zebra crossing — affirmed sociableness. He returned to the page. Was this Ovid speaking in the poem? He’d been banished, hadn’t he, for an obscure misdemeanour? By some Emperor? Was it Augustus? No, it couldn’t be — Augustus was the guy after whom August was named. Would Ovid have been able to be so equanimous about the Nazis? Perhaps, in Tomis, on his sequestered estate, he wouldn’t have heard too much about Auschwitz, except as rumour. Who were the “damned” here? (Hindu theology had no concept of damnation — this could be why Ananda was fascinated by it.) Were they the wretched in the concentration camps? Or the functionaries and commanders who directed their fate? If the latter, then it was probably okay to make that ironical, faux mystical remark about them “harmonizing strangely” with “the divine love.” But if it was the former, then wasn’t such a statement inadmissible, even revolting? He reconsidered the lines. For some reason, he found he’d been reading them each time as “I have learned one thing: not to look down / Too much upon the damned”; rather than “so much,” as in the poem. He’d grown attached to the misreading. He smiled. It brought to the voice a senatorial wryness, the private sense of humour of a marginalised man. “So much” gave Ovid an aloofness he couldn’t possibly have had any more in Tomis.
Ananda put the Collected Poems where it had been, half leaning, half standing. He walked over to the Crime/Horror section, where his uncle stood with his back to him, fussily poring over some pages as if they contained a legal correspondence. To see him doing anything silently was exemplary; he spoke incessantly, so that silence changed him, like those aliens he’d sometimes describe — those who are near us, deceptively normal.
“Which one?” Ananda asked, and his uncle blinked, smiling with genial remoteness.
It was Skeleton Crew—the new collection by Stephen King.
“Any good?” Ananda asked the question academically, without seriousness.
“It is good,” said his uncle. “His stories are usually engrossing — about uncanny occurrences that change people’s lives.” Approbation for a writer was unexpected, except where Tagore was concerned — out of tune with his personality.
The taste for Stephen King had evolved quite recently though, and swiftly. Ananda was still getting accustomed to it — to the unrelenting onward stride, after more than a decade defined by the Pan Book of Horror Stories.
“Maybe I should buy it,” said his uncle, narrowing his eyes. “I’ve gone through all the books in the library.” By “all” he meant horror, the supernatural, life after death — that queasy, uneasy addendum to literature; even so, it was unlikely he could have actually exhausted the lot. “One of the staff said they’re closing the library next year,” he added. Ananda was a bit taken aback. He’d never seen this library — never needed to — but hadn’t thought it would just vanish. He read about such developments in the papers only with the faintest attention, events on the hazy outskirts of the endless, ugly debate about the National Health Service. Opera house closures. Local authorities. Public money. What would his uncle do now?
“Should I get it?” he said with agonised self-absorption. The question wasn’t meant for Ananda; he was asking it of himself, aloud.
Ananda, eavesdropping, volunteered: “If you need it, take it.” Horror, murder, like poetry, were addictions; they were meant to numb and enchant simultaneously — to insidiously engender the desire they satisfied. It depended on how much you could get by with — or without — in a day.
“I have one I’m midway through,” said his uncle, visibly doing some mental arithmetic. “It should last me three — no, maybe four — days.” He was looking for reassurance about his chances of survival.
“Then you’ll be fine,” said Ananda, trying desperately to extricate Skeleton Crew from his uncle’s grip. “You’re in no desperate rush to get it.”
5 Heading for Town
They were pointed to the city. Not the City, where his uncle used to work. No, towards London. Of course, King’s Cross was on the very verge of the capital-see City; but it was its utter opposite. No money seemed to reach it.
—
They had, in October, embarked on the 168 from Belsize Park, reaching Euston — from there, his uncle holding forth, walked till they were in York Way. Here, they woke to sunlit industrial blankness. This was neither Belsize Park nor Oxford Street. What then? They hit upon a notion — they were in “Dickens’s London.” “You can feel it’s still there,” Ananda observed tersely.
—
They now came to the abattoir-like entrance of Belsize Park tube station. The rush of souls was swelling, given it was Friday. But there were still fewer people going in the direction they were compared to the first lot of homecomers. The revellers headed for Leicester Square and Oxford Circus would increase in an hour.
Ananda plunged his hand into his pocket to take out the travel card valid till midnight. His uncle carried, in a flap in his wallet, his pensioner’s travel pass, which gave him infinite freedom to avail himself of both spheres of London public transport — underworld and overground.