The restaurant was crowded, hopelessly understaffed, but, eventually, the ghost of a meal was served in slow motion. When the black coffee arrived, a cadaverous individual—looking like a vulture at the end of a long fast—hovered near the table, impatiently awaiting my departure. A few minutes later, I found myself on the pavement—with appetite ruined and hunger unappeased.
A few snowflakes fluttered slowly down, as if reluctant to reach the London streets. The sky was an indeterminate blur.
I walked to Piccadilly Circus, then, as anything seemed preferable to the solitude of the flat, I boarded the first bus, went to the front seat on the top deck, and took a sixpenny ticket. When time is an enemy, you employ strange stratagems to outwit it and, although a bus ride was not an exhilarating prospect, it would hack two hours out of the afternoon.
Sometimes, for no discoverable reason, ordinary surroundings suddenly assume a new and bewildering aspect. You see them divorced from automatic associations, with the result that their beauty, their mystery, or their squalor confronts you like an apparition. This is what happened to me as the bus went endlessly on through dingy interminable streets. I saw London as if, having been blind from birth, sight had suddenly been given—and realised therefore what a monstrous and grotesque nightmare a world-city is.
A world-city—a stone octopus, with ever-spreading tentacles petrifying more and more of the countryside! A world-city—a phantasmagoria of squares, churches, monuments, stations, mountainous stores, cinemas, barrack-blocks of flats, teeming tenements, fantastic traffic, slums, suburbs, allotments, rubbish heaps! By day, this demonic world is an inferno of noise. At dead of night, a vast cemetery—where the rich brown earth lies buried under the endless tombstone of the pavement.
In about twenty minutes, the bus reached regions known intimately only by the luckless residents. Trolley buses shot past melancholy shops, derelict houses, filling stations, stucco cinemas, hideous hoardings plastered with inane advertisements. Everything was fog-festooned; everything ached for annihilation.
Dimly-discerned queues stood outside every other shop. Furtive individuals disappeared into tunnels leading to the underworld—from which others emerged to re-behold the fog. Piles of débris, flanked by palsied gaping houses, were sinister reminders of the fact that a V 2 might fall anywhere at any minute. Then, isolated factories emerged, each looking as if it had been tossed on to its site by the random hand of Chance.
Eventually, the conductress appeared and intimated that I was nearing the limit of my sixpenny fare. Before descending I asked the name of the lugubrious region we had reached—and understood her to say we were near Cricklewood.
A minute later I found myself on the curbstone.
Gradually, the mood which I have most reason to fear invaded me. The mood in which anything that contrasts violently with the drabness of actuality seems desirable. The mood in which any artificial paradise is preferable to the hell of mean streets. The mood in which one says good-bye to oneself.
Everyone, in his or her degree, knows the necessity for escape from the unreality of sprawling city squalor—which is the reason why there is a public house or a cinema at the corner of every street. Man is an imaginative being. Yes, an imaginative being—no matter how bestially his imagination is debauched by those set in authority over him.
There are many mansions in most of us, for most of us have many moods. And each “mansion” has its own view, its own occupants, its own memories, its own dreams, its own ghosts. And, above all, its own habits. Directly a mood becomes dominant, you revert to its routine—with the result that your actions become automatic. Nothing creates automatism so surely as servitude to long-established habit. You cannot entertain certain thoughts and certain emotions without those thoughts and emotions acquiring squatters’ rights—and the longer they are allowed to remain, the more difficult they become to dislodge.
As I continued to stand on the curbstone, desire for Carol became so dominant that every memory unrelated to it ceased to exist. Then, hypnotised by habit, I walked on in search of a telephone call-box. Having found one, and having started to dial her number—I remembered that she was dead.
And then, and for the first time, I realised that Carol had been deliverance from loneliness. When she was alive, I had loathed the servitude she represented; I had longed for freedom. Well, now I was free. Free—and afraid. Afraid of these streets—afraid of the hours ahead—afraid of myself.
I do not know how long I stood in that telephone box, trying to decide what to do. If Carol were alive, I should go to her flat. Curtains would be drawn; the room softly fit; time would cease to be an enemy. Silence would hold solace—one’s heart would not beat alone—beauty would enrich the night.
And then, at last, I recognised how pride had distorted my relations with Carol. It had made me rebel against my need for her. Pride is the most convincing of all liars—but nothing outlaws pride so effectively as misery and, now, I was miserable. Pride had persuaded me that only desire goaded me to Carol, but it was a lie. Often I had spent Sundays at her flat. We stayed in all day and usually she read to me. Sometimes, blended with her voice, I heard echoes of my father’s voice reading to me when I was a child—sitting up in bed, wide-eyed, enthralled.
I couldn’t stay in these streets any longer! I’d have to go back to the flat and get through the rest of the day somehow. Henceforward, I should be alone.
Then I thought of something I could do—something I had not done for years—something that would obliterate the present.
I joined a queue.
Ten minutes later, a bus emerged from obscurity.
When I opened the front door, I saw a crumpled piece of paper on the mat. This was the method of communication used by the daily woman, so I picked up the bulletin, expecting it to record some minor disaster—such as the non-delivery of the microscopic amount of milk to which one is officially entitled.
The message consisted of a single succinct sentence:
Gone to oblige a Polish gent.
To a neutral, this statement might seem to indicate merely temporary desertion, but as I had recently heard oblique remarks to the effect that if you didn’t look after yourself, no one else would—that the boot was on the other leg nowadays—and that she was good to them as was good to her—I had no doubt that her departure was permanent. I also had no doubt that it would be useless to look for another daily woman. The marvel was that this one had stayed so long.
I switched on the light. The flat was exactly as I had left it, but it did not worry me to do everything for myself—I had done it before and could do it again.
I went into the sitting-room, carrying the sandwiches which I had bought on my way back. I knew they contained ersatz food, but I also knew that if you wait till you are almost starving, you don’t bother too much about that. At any rate, these sandwiches made it unnecessary to go again into perishing streets and that was worth some sacrifice.
I drew the curtains, then switched on the electric fire. Nothing could banish the bleak anonymity of Major Black’s room, but, when it was lit only by a reading-lamp, merciful obscurity made it seem more intimate. . . .
In the memories of most men is a shrine which they visit when all else is vexation of spirit; but I doubt if ever a man set forth on a pilgrimage stranger than the one I make when my world is dust and débris.
I went into the hall, then opened the door of a room about as big as a fair-sized cupboard. According to the landlord and the estate agent—both adept in the art of verbal exuberance—Major Black’s was a “Three-room flat, kitchen, and bathroom.” This built-in cupboard was the third room—which I had filled with suitcases, trunks, and numerous small odds and ends.