“Who told you that?” he said quietly when he had finished eating. “Ambrayses?”
He put down his knife and fork.
“Three of us set out,” he said. “I won’t say who. Two got through easily, the third tried to go back halfway. On the right day you can still catch sight of him in the mirror, spewing up endlessly. He doesn’t seem to know where he is, but he’s aware of you.
“We lived there for three months, in some rooms on Salt Lip Road behind the Rue Serpolet. The streets stank. At six in the morning a smell so corrupt came up from the Yser Canal it seemed to blacken the iron lamp-posts; we would gag in our dreams, struggle for a moment to wake up, and then realise that the only escape was to sleep again. It was winter, and everything was filthy. Inside, the houses smelled of vegetable peel, sewage, perished rubber. Everyone in them was ill. If we wanted a bath we had to go to a public washhouse on Mosaic Lane. The air was cold; echoes flew about under the roof; the water was like lead. Sometimes it was hardly like water at all. There were some famous murals there, but they were so badly kept up you could make furrows in the grease. Scrape it off and you’d see the most beautiful stuff underneath, chalky reds, pure blues, children’s faces!
“We stuck it for three months. We knew there were other quarters of the city, where things must be better, but we couldn’t find our way about. At first we were so tired; later we thought we were being followed by some sort of secret police. Towards the end the man I was with was ill all the time; he started to hear the bathhouse echoes even while he was in bed; he couldn’t walk. It was a hard job getting him out. The night I did it you could see the lights of the High City, sweet, magical, like paper lanterns in a garden, filling up the emptiness. If only I’d gone towards them, walked straight towards them!”
I stared at him.
“Was that all?” I said.
“That was all.”
His hands had begun to tremble, and he looked down at them. “Oh, yes. I was there. What else could have left me like this?” He got up and went to the lavatory. When he came back he said, “Ambrayses has a lot to learn about me.” He bent down, his eyes now looking very vague and sick, as if he was already forgetting who I was or what I wanted, and quickly whispered something in my ear: then he left.
As he walked across the street he must have disturbed the pigeons, because they all flew up at once and went wheeling violently about between the buildings. As they passed over her an Indian woman, who had been sitting in the sunshine examining a length of embroidered cloth, winced and folded it up hurriedly. Though they soon quietened down, coming to rest in a line along the top of the precast C amp;A facade, she continued to look frightened and resentful-biting her lips, making a face, moving her shoulders repeatedly inside her tight leather coat, from the sleeves of which emerged thin wrists and hands, powdery brown, fingernails lacquered a plum colour.
The older Asian women fiddle constantly with their veils, plucking with wrinkled fingers at the lower part of their faces. In the bus station they lift their feet-automatically looking away from him-to let the cleaner run his brush along the base of the plastic banquette. They have features as coarse and wise as an elephant’s but underneath they are in a continual nervous fidget.
The furniture in Mr. Ambrayses’s front room, inert great drop-leaf tables and sideboards with stained, lifting veneers, was strewn with the evidence he had accumulated: curled-up grainy photographs, each a detail enlarged in black and white from some colour snap until, its outline fatally eroded and its context yawing, it reached monstrous or curious conclusions; articles cut from yellowed newsprint found lining the drawers of an empty house; cassettes furred with dust, which when you played them gave out only the pure electric silence of the machine, punctuated once or twice by feral static; his notebooks, where in a clear hand he had written, Each event, struck lightly against its own significance, can be excited into throwing off a spark; it is this energetic mote which lies at the heart of metaphor-and of life; or: The lesson we learn too late is that we cannot have only by wanting. Then on another page, Nothing impedes us; we need only learn to act.
He preserved the circulars, bills, Christmas cards, charity appeals, and small parcels which came through his letterbox for the previous tenants of the house. Almost as if by accident a little of this lost or random communication was addressed to him, from Australia: he gave it pride of place. This was how I learned that his daughter had married and emigrated there several years before.
“She was ungrateful,” he would say, avoiding my eyes and staring at the television. (A car drove slowly out of some factory gates, then faster through a housing estate and onto an empty road.) “She was an ungrateful girl.”
Two chimney sweeps called to see him the Wednesday after I had talked to Dr. Petromax in the El Greco. He was out.
“Is he expecting you?” I asked them.
They didn’t seem to know. They waited patiently in the garden for me to let them in-a large awkward boy in Dr. Martin’s boots, and a man I took to be his father, much smaller and more agile in his movements, who said: “You’ve a fair view here anyhow. You can see a fair way from here.” The boy didn’t answer but stood as if marooned on the concrete path which, like a mirror in the rain, reflected one or two thick yellow crocus buds. Piles of red bricks, rusty brown conifers, the conservatory with its peeling paint, the shed door held closed by a spade, everything else that afternoon was dark; it was more like October than April. “We’re used to working in town.” The boy looked warily at the rain, rubbed some of it into the stubble on his bony, vulnerable skull. He seemed to cheer up.
“You’ll have a few accidents in these lanes then,” he said. “With tractors and that.”
Later he brought the brushes in, and, glancing away from me shyly, spread two old candlewick bedspreads on the lino to protect it. He knelt with a kind of dreamy conscientiousness in Mr. Ambrayses’s tiled hearth, like a child fascinated by everything to do with fire: arranged the canvas bag over the fireplace; fixed it there with strips of Sellotape which he bit carefully off the roll; pushed each extension of the brush up through the bag until the smell of soot came into the room, rich and bitter, and he was forced to stop suddenly.
“There’s still three exes here,” said his father. “It’ll go three more.”
“No it won’t,” said the boy, stirring and pummelling away at the chimney.
“I’ll go and look.”
When he came back he said, “I can hear it rattling at the top.”
“It might be rattling but it’s not going up.”
They stared at one another.
“I can hear it as plain as day; there’s something at the top. I can fair hear it, plain as day, rattling against it.”
At this the boy only pummelled harder.
“Has plenty come down?” his father asked.
“Aye.”
“That’s all we can do then.”
The boy pulled the brush gently back into the room, disassembling the extensions one by one while the man stood looking down at him breathing heavily, hands on hips, watching in case he had fetched the obstruction out. They ripped the bag off, revealing the fireplace choked to three-quarters of its height with soot: nothing else. The boy screwed the Sellotape up contemptuously into a glittering sticky ball. He invited me to look up the chimney, but all I saw was a large dark recess, much rougher than I had imagined it would be, blackened and streaked with salts, like a cave.