The interior was worse than could be imagined. All was in tones of grey. The frosted windows were clouded with cobwebs. Mould and dust covered everything. The atmosphere was dense and fusty, while the floor appeared to be paved with decaying cheese. Billing found he could scarcely walk.
The personage (now very faint) said, ‘It will not be too bad.’ It then faded away and Billing was alone, shut in.
His feeling was one of intense grief. He wandered about without any fixed intention or plan of escape. Worse was to come. He found himself in an interior room, more distressing than the others, more suffocating.
The room was ill-lit. Amid dark shadows, propped in one corner, sat Gladys Lee. She was shrouded in dust sheets and sunk in her final demented stage, her eyes red-rimmed. She beckoned Billing forward. Her mouth fell open with a terrible crack, revealing broken sticks of teeth.
Billing woke feeling sick and sat up in bed. The crack still rang in his head. He was convinced it was real.
Leaving Rose to sleep, he made his way barefoot downstairs. The staircase was presently uncarpeted. By the light from a streetlamp he saw that the glass in the front door had been shattered. Retreating, he went back to the top of the stairs and switched on the hall light.
A half-brick lay on the mat inside the door, with fragments of glass all round.
He went and woke Rose. ‘What time is it?’
‘It’s only half-past twelve. Who’d do such a thing, do you think?’
She pulled a face. ‘Bloody Dwyer, who else? My husband – George Dwyer, the drunken cretin. Him and that bird of his from the next street. He must have seen us coming and going round here. I wouldn’t put anything past him.’
They went down and stared at the damage. Hugh found a piece of cardboard with which to block up the hole, while Rose swept up the fragments of glass and had another swear.
‘It wouldn’t have been your George,’ he said, squatting down beside her. ‘No man would do a thing like that deliberately. It must have been a passing yob, hitting our door by accident.’
‘You don’t know George. Friday and Saturday nights especially, when he’s had a few.’
‘But how would he know where you were?’
‘Oh, he’d find out. Don’t forget he’s a taxi driver. He’s got friends crawling all round town, he has. One of them must have seen us in the street, unloading the car or sommink.’
When they had cleared away all the glass, they had a cup of tea before returning to bed. Going up the stairs, feet cautious of splinters on the rough treads, he suddenly said, ‘Friday and Saturday nights … You mean he might come back tomorrow night?’
‘Oh, I suppose he might. He can be a vindictive little bugger, can George.’
‘I must say you take this pretty calmly.’
‘Hasn’t nothing of the sort never happened to you when you were in the United States? Are the Yanks all that different? You picked up enough women there, by all accounts.’
The double negative irritated him. ‘Is that how the working class goes on? Bashing up property?’
‘We certainly don’t make a little tin god of it, like you posh fellers.’
He burst out laughing, partly in annoyance. ‘Oh, forget it. Let’s get to bloody sleep.’
Saturday evening saw Hugh Billing in a nervous state. It was dusk when he finished giving the side door and window an undercoat and swept the side passage with the worm-eaten old broom from Gladys’s shed.
‘We’ll have to do something about Dwyer,’ he called in to Rose, who was working in the bathroom. ‘Otherwise, we’ll always be worrying.’
He kept his real worry to himself. Dwyer had become a vast figure of evil in his mind. Not knowing what the man looked like, he was free to imagine an ogre, bent on the destruction of their happiness. Dwyer was a nightmare, linked to the nightmare from which the smashing of the glass had roused Billing. He was a spectre beyond reason, which had to be laid. The thought of him brought Billing to a state close to paralysis. But he fought against his nerves and, with Rose’s none too reluctant help, developed a plan, based on the premise that Dwyer, to have thrown a brick with any accuracy through the front door, would have had to stop his cab temporarily opposite the house.
On Saturday nights, they generally went down to the local pub for a drink and a bite to eat. On this evening, they had supper ‘at home’, as they already began to think of it. By ten o’clock, the remains of cold smoked herring, salad, and Jacob’s Club biscuits were cleared away and they sat staring at each other.
‘He may not show up, of course.’
‘Seems a bit unlikely.’
‘Yes.’
‘Still, he might.’
‘I know. Be prepared, eh?’
‘It’s always best. Teach him a lesson.’
‘A bloody good lesson.’
‘Else we’d never feel safe.’
‘I’ll go outside.’
‘It’s far too early.’
‘Better be ready, just in case.’
‘You’re right there.’
By ten-thirty, he was in position in the front garden, concealed from the road by a wispy privet bush. The nearby street-lamp lit the front of the house. Billing and Rose had planned everything carefully. They had pinned a sheet of cardboard over the unbroken pane of the door and left the door standing open. Billing had even gone to the trouble of crumpling up a few pages of the Daily Mirror, placing them where they could be seen, on the upper step and in front of the open door. In the darkness, the house thus presented a derelict air, attractive to the vandalous-minded. Rose waited inside while Billing crouched uncomfortably by his bush. He felt the gravel under his thin shoes. A twig scratched persistently at his right cheek. One buttock nudged the railings which marked the extent of his property. His right hand was cold where he clutched a poker, his offensive weapon, too tightly.
What a mass of contradictions you are, he told himself. You’re in acute fear of this Dwyer, you see him as an ultimate brute. At the same time you long to get at him, to kill him, even. Rose is to blame for all this. How did I get into such a mess?
More deeply, he thought, Father didn’t care one bit for me or he would never have allowed himself to fall off that ladder. Such things are never really accidental. If he were still alive, he’d give me some guidance and protection in life and not let me drift. Now I’m going to get beaten up, all because of him.
He clutched the poker tighter.
By eleven, he had stopped thinking.
Some people went past in the street, most of them quietly. Cars roared by, including the odd taxi. A dog came and barked tentatively before moving on. The air grew colder.
By eleven-thirty, Billing had had enough. He whistled to Rose and went inside.
‘We mustn’t give up,’ Rose told him, giving him a hug. ‘This is about George’s time. Have a snort of gin and then let’s get back on watch again.’
‘I’ve had enough.’
‘Just till quarter past twelve. We must nail the old bugger if we can.’
Back by the privet, Billing immured himself to hardship by recalling scenes from his American past. Taking over a new apartment in Riverside, hearing a phone ring as he entered and running from room to room trying to locate it. Being in a woman’s house when the mosquito door banged and in came a businesslike dog with a cigar in its mouth. The woman – her name had gone – taught rehabilitative drama at the Alabama State Penitentiary, Children’s Division. Waking in Greenwich Village and finding that someone had built a punk tree outside his window, made entirely of copies of the St Petersburg Times. A sign on a road outside Atlanta, Georgia, erected in sorrow or pride, saying ‘One driver in every ten on this road is drunk’. America was much more surreal than England. It was a pity.