We heard that the same thing was to be observed in other parts of our city. It was not only on our pavements that the young people were gathering in admiration and then emulation of the migrating tribes; and, while emulating, became. We all knew, we understood, and it was spoken of in the teashops and pubs and at all the usual gathering places: it was discussed, making news, making things happen. We knew that soon our young people would leave; we made the ritual noises of wonder and alarm; but now it was happening everyone knew it had been bound to happen, and we marvelled at our lack of foresight… and at the shortsightedness of others, whose neighbourhoods were still without this phenomenon and who believed they were immune.
Emily began showing herself off. First from our window; making sure she had been seen, and then on the pavement outside, strolling there as if unaware of the young people across the road. This period took longer than I expected, or than she needed to be accepted. I think, now it came to the point, she was afraid of taking this big step away from shelter, from childhood, from the freedom of fantasy: for now she looked like the other girls and must behave and think like them. And how did they look? Well, the key to the clothes of the migrating ones was of course practicality, it had to be: utility stylised. Trousers, jackets, sweaters and scarves, everything thick and strong and warm. But from the markets, the rubbish dumps, the old warehouses, came what seemed an endless supply of old 'fashionable' clothes that could be adapted or at any rate transformed into bits and pieces of all kinds. So what they looked like was gipsies, of the old sort, and for the same reason. They had to be warm and free to move; their feet would have to carry them long distances. But an exuberancy of fancy kept them colourful, and warm weather brought them out like butterflies.
There came a day when Emily walked across the street and added herself to the crowd there, as if it were quite easy for her to do this. Almost at once she accepted a cigarette from the boy who seemed to be the strongest personality there, allowed it to be lit for her, and smoked with ease. I had never seen her smoke. She was there while the light faded out of the sky around the tall buildings with their little glimmering windows. She was there long afterwards. The young people were a half-visible mass under the branches. They stood talking softly, smoking, drinking from bottles they kept lodged in their jacket pockets; or they sat on the little parapet that surrounded the paving of the nearest blocks of flats. That space of pavements and waste lot, with the trees and the weeds, bounded on one side by the little parapet, on the other by an old wall, had become defined, like an arena or a theatre. The crowds there had claimed it, shaped it: we would not again be able to see that space as anything but where the tribe was forming.
But Hugo was not there. She had hugged him, kissed him, talked to him, whispered into his ugly yellow ears. But she had left him.
He sat on a chair at the window and watched her, making sure that the curtains concealed him.
Coming suddenly into the room a stranger would have to say: 'That's a very yellow dog!' Then: 'Is it a dog, though?' What I saw of him, though Emily never did, for he was turned to face her entrance from the moment she crossed the street to come home, was a straw-yellow dog sitting with its back to the room, absolutely still, hour after hour, its whip-tail sticking out through the bars of the chair, all of him expressing a sad and watchful patience. A dog. A dog's emotions — fidelity, humility, endurance. Seen thus from the back, Hugo aroused the emotions most dogs do: compassion, discomfort, as if for a kind of prisoner or slave. But then he would turn his head and, expecting to see the warm abject lovingness of a dog's eyes, fellow-feeling vanished away: this was no dog, half-humanised. His strong green eyes blazed. Inhuman. Cat's eyes, a genus foreign to man, not sorry and abject and pleading. Cat's eyes in a dog's body — cat's eyes and face. This beast, whose ugliness drew one's eyes as good looks do, so that I was always finding myself staring at him, trying to come to terms with him and understand the right he assumed to be there in my life — this aberration, this freak, kept watch over Emily, and with as much devotion as I did. And it was Hugo who was hugged, caressed, loved when she returned at night smelling of smoke, of drink, and full of the dangerous vitality she had absorbed from the wild company she had been part of for so many hours.
She was with them now every day from early afternoon until midnight and after; and I and the animal would be sitting behind the curtains, peering out at the dark, for there was only the one street lamp, and nothing much could be seen of the crowd milling about out there, except the pallor of faces, little gleams and flashes as cigarettes were lit, nothing heard of their talking together until they laughed, or sang for a while, or when voices rose wildly in a quarrel — and at such times I could feel Hugo trembling and shrinking. But quarrels were soon quelled by general consent, a communal veto.
And when we knew Emily was coming back, both of us, Hugo and myself, would quickly leave our post and go to where
we could be believed to be asleep, or at least not spying on her.
***
Throughout this period, whenever I was drawn in through the flowers and leaves submerged under half-transparent white paint, I found rooms disordered or damaged. I never saw who or what did it, or even caught a glimpse of the agent. It was seeming to me more and more that in inheriting this extension of my ordinary life, I had been handed, again, a task. Which I was not able to carry through. For no matter how I swept, picked up and replaced overturned chairs, tables, objects; scrubbed floors and rubbed down walls, whenever I re-entered the rooms after a spell away in my real life all had to be done again. It was like what one reads of a poltergeist's tricks. Already my entrance into that place was with a lowered vitality, a sense of foreboding, instead of the lively and loving anticipation I had felt on first being able to move there… I really do have to make it clear here that this feeling of discouragement was not at all like the misery that accompanied the 'personal' scenes; no, even at the worst, the disorder and anarchy of the rooms were nothing like as bad as the shut-in stuffiness of the family, the 'personal'; it was always a liberation to step away from my 'real' life into this other place, so full of possibilities, of alternatives. When I talk of 'lowering' here, I mean only in terms of the generally freer air of this region; I could not compare it with the constrictions and confinements of the place, or the time, where that family lived out its little puppet play.
But what laws, or needs, did the unknown destroyer obey? I would find myself in the long but irregular passage, like a wide hallway that extended itself indefinitely full of doors and little enclaves where a table might stand with flowers or a statue, pictures, objects of all kinds, each with an exact place — and open a door on a room next to it and there everything would be awry. A violent wind would be blowing the curtains straight out into the room, knocking over small tables, sweeping books off the arms of chairs, littering the carpet with ash and cigarette stubs from an ashtray which was wheeling there, ready to topple. Opening another door, everything stood as it ought: there was order, a room not only ready for its occupants, as neat as a hotel bedroom, but one which he, she, they, had just left, for I could feel a personality or presences in a room seen through a half-open door. Which, entering, perhaps only a moment later, I might find in chaos, as if it were a room in a doll's house, and the hand of the little girl had been inserted through the ceiling and knocked everything over on a freak of impulse or bad temper.
I decided that what I had to do was to repaint the rooms… I talk as if they were a permanent, recognisable, stable set of rooms, as in a house or a flat, instead of a place which changed each time I saw it. First, paint: what was the use of tidying, or cleaning furniture that would have to stand between such forlorn and shabby walls? I found paints. Tins of different sizes and colours stood waiting on spread newspapers on the floor in one of the rooms that was temporarily empty — I had seen it furnished only a few minutes before. There were brushes and bottles of turpentine and the painter's ladder I had seen during one of my early visits here. I started on a room I knew welclass="underline" it was the drawing-room that had brocade curtains and pink and green silks and old wood. I stacked what was usable in the middle of the room under dust-sheets. I scrubbed down the ceiling and walls with sugar soap, with hot water, with detergents. Layer after layer of white paint went on, first dull and flat, then increasingly fine, until the last one covered everything with a clear softly shining enamel, white as new snow or fine china. It was like standing inside a cleaned-out eggshell; I felt that accretions of grime had been taken off which had been preventing a living thing from breathing. I left the furniture there in the centre of the room under its shrouds, for it seemed too shabby now for such a fine room, and I felt that there seemed little point in setting it out: when I returned the poltergeist would have flung everything about or thrown muck at the walls. But no, it was not so, this did not happen; or I think it did not — for I never saw that room again. And it was not that I looked for it and failed to find it… would it be accurate to say that I forgot it? That would be to talk of that place in terms of our ordinary living. While I was in that room, the task made sense; there was continuity to what I did, a future, and I was in a continuing relation to the invisible destructive creature, or force, just as I was with the other beneficent presence. But this feeling of relatedness, of connection, of context, belonged to that particular visit to the room, and on the next visit it was not the same room, and my preoccupation with it was altered — and so with the other rooms, other scenes, whose flavours and scents held total authenticity for the time they lasted and not a moment longer.