. .
. .
That guard the way
To Paradise.
Well, it was odd enough, in all conscience. The beginnings of delirium tremens?
It was understandable that the owner of that very individual face would see nothing so ordinary in his alcoholic dreams as pink rats. Nature itself would turn cartwheels for the young man with the reckless eyebrows. What was the Paradise that was guarded by so terrifying a strangeness? Oblivion? Why had he needed oblivion so badly that it represented Paradise to him? That he had been prepared to run the known horror of the approaches to it?
Grant ate the fine fresh bap that there was ‘no chew in’ and considered the matter. The writing was unformed but not at all shaky; it looked the writing of an adult who wrote an unformed hand not because his co-ordination was bad but because he had never quite grown up. Because in essentials he was still the schoolboy who had originally written that way. This theory was confirmed by the shape of the capital letters, which were made in pure copy-book form. Odd, that so individual a creature had had no desire to impress his individuality on the form of his letters. Very few people indeed did not adapt the copy-book form to their own liking; to their own unconscious need.
One of Grant’s milder interests had for years been this business of handwriting; and in his work he had found the results of his long observation greatly useful. Now and then, of course, he was shaken out of any complacency about his deductions—a multiple murderer who dissolved his victims in acid turned out to have handwriting remarkable only for its extreme logic; which after all was perhaps appropriate enough—but in general, handwriting provided a very good index to a man. And in general a man who continued to use the schoolboy form for his letters did so for one of two reasons: either he was unintelligent, or he wrote so little that the writing had had no chance of absorbing his personality.
Considering the high degree of intelligence that had put into words that nightmare hazard at the gates of Paradise, it was obvious that it was not lack of personality that had kept the young man’s writing adolescent. His personality—his vitality and interest—had gone into something else.
Into what? Something active, something extrovert. Something in which writing was used for messages like: ‘Meet me Cumberland bar, 6.45, Tony’, or for filling up a log.
But he was introvert enough to have analysed and put into words that country-of-the-moon on the way to his Paradise. Introvert enough to have stood apart and looked at it; to have wanted to record it.
Grant sat in a pleasant warm daze, chewing and considering. He noted the tightly-joined tops of the n’s and m’s. A liar? Or just secretive? A curiously cautious trait to appear in the writing of a man with those eyebrows. It was a strange thing how much the meaning of a countenance depended on eyebrows. One change of degree in the angle this way or that and the whole effect was different. Film magnates took nice little girls from Balham and Muswell Hill and rubbed out their eyebrows and painted in other ones and they became straightway mysterious creatures from Omsk and Tomsk. He had once been told by Trabb, the cartoonist, that it was his eyebrows that had lost Ernie Price his chance of being Prime Minister. ‘They didn’t like his eyebrows,’ Trabb had said, blinking owlishly over his beer. ‘Why? Don’t ask me. I just draw. Because they looked bad-tempered, perhaps. They don’t like a bad-tempered man. Don’t trust him. But that’s what lost him his chance, take it from me. His eyebrows. They didn’t like ’em.’ Bad-tempered eyebrows, supercilious eyebrows, calm eyebrows, worried eyebrows—it was the eyebrows that gave a face its keynote. And it was the slant of the black eyebrows that had given that thin white face on the pillow its reckless look even in death.
Well, the man had been sober when he wrote those words, that at least was clear. That toper’s oblivion in compartment B Seven—the fugged air, the rucked blankets, the empty bottle rolling about on the floor, the overturned glass on the shelf—may have been the Paradise he sought, but he was sober when he blue-printed the way to it.
The singing sand.
Uncanny but somehow attractive.
Singing sand. Surely there actually were singing sands somewhere? It had a vaguely familiar sound. Singing sands. They cried out under your feet as you walked. Or the wind did it, or something. A man’s forearm in a checked tweed sleeve reached in front of him and took a bap from the plate.
‘You seem to be doing yourself very well,’ Tommy said, pulling out a chair and sitting down. He split the bap and buttered it. ‘There’s no chew in these things at all nowadays. When I was a boy you sank your teeth in them and pulled. It was evens which came away first: your teeth or the bit of bap. But if your teeth won you really had something worth having. A nice floury, yeasty mouthful that would last you for a couple of minutes. They don’t taste of anything nowadays, and you could fold them in two and put the whole thing in your mouth without any danger of choking yourself.’
Grant looked at him in silence and with affection. There was no intimacy so close, he thought, as the intimacy that bound you to a man with whom you’d shared a Prep. school dorm. They had shared their public school days too, but it was Prep. school that he remembered each time he encountered Tommy anew. Perhaps because in all essentials that fresh pinky-brown face with the round ingenuous blue eyes was the same face that used to appear above a crookedly-buttoned maroon blazer. Tommy had always buttoned his blazer with a fine insouciance.
It was so like Tommy not to waste time or vitality on conventional inquiries as to his journey and his health. Neither would Laura, of course. They would accept him as he stood; as if he had been there for some time. As if he had never gone away at all but was still on his previous visit. It was an extraordinarily restful atmosphere to sink back into.
‘How is Laura?’
‘Never better. Putting on a bit of weight. At least that’s what she says. Don’t see it myself. I never liked skinny women.’
There had been a time, when they were both about twenty, when Grant had thought of marrying his cousin Laura; and she, he had been sure, had had thoughts of marrying him. But before any word had been said the magic had faded and they were back on the old friendly footing. The magic had been part of the long intoxication of a Highland summer. Part of hill mornings smelling of pine needles, and of endless twilights sweet with the scent of clover. For Grant his cousin Laura had always been part of the happiness of summer holidays; they had graduated together from burn-paddling to their first fishing-rods, and together they had first walked the Larig and together had stood for the first time on the top of Braeriach. But it was not until that summer at the end of their adolescence that the happiness had crystallised into Laura herself; that the whole of summer was focused into the person of Laura Grant. He still had a slight lifting of the heart when he thought of that summer. It had the light perfection, the iridescence, of a bubble. And because no word had been said the bubble would never now be broken. It stayed light and perfect and iridescent and poised, where they had left it. They had both gone on to other things; to other people. Laura indeed had skipped from one person to the next one with the bright indifference of a child playing hop-scotch. And then he had taken her to that Old Boys’ dance. And she had met Tommy Rankin. And that had been that.
‘What’s the fuss at the station?’ Tommy asked. ‘Ambulances and things.’
‘A man died on the train. I expect it is that.’
‘Oh,’ said Tommy, dismissing it. ‘Not your funeral this time,’ he added in a congratulatory way.
‘No. Not my funeral, thank Heaven.’
‘They’ll miss you on the Embankment.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Mary,’ said Tommy, ‘I could do with a pot of good strong tea.’ He flicked the plate that held the baps with a contemptuous forefinger. ‘And another couple of these poor bargains.’ He turned his serious childlike gaze on Grant and said: ‘They’ll have to miss you. They’ll be one short, won’t they?’