A Sense of Reality: And Other Stories Read online

  ‘But these were not really elephants,’ I said.

  ‘A stall is part of a stable, isn’t it? What do you want a stable for if they aren’t real? Go on. Was it a good fate or an evil fate?’

  ‘It’s not that kind of fate either,’ I said.

  ‘There’s no other kind,’ he said. ‘It’s your fate to read to me. It’s her fate to talk like a frog, and mine to listen because my eyesight’s bad. This is an underground fate we suffer from here, and that was a garden fate—but it all comes to the same fate in the end.’ It was useless to argue with him and I read on: ‘Unfortunately the festivities were brought to an untimely close by a heavy rainstorm.’

  Maria gave a kwahk that sounded like a malicious laugh, and ‘You see,’ the old man said, as though what I had read proved somehow he was right, ‘that’s fate for you.’

  ‘The evening’s events had to be transferred indoors, including the Morris Dancing and the Treasure Hunt.’

  ‘Treasure Hunt?’ the old man asked sharply.

  ‘That’s what it says here.’

  ‘The impudence of it,’ he said. ‘The sheer impudence. Maria, did you hear that?’

  She kwahked—this time, I thought, angrily.

  ‘It’s time for my broth,’ he said with deep gloom, as though he were saying, ‘It’s time for my death.’

  ‘It happened a long time ago,’ I said, trying to soothe him.

  ‘Time,’ he exclaimed, ‘you can—time,’ using a word quite unfamiliar to me which I guessed—I don’t know how—was one that I could not with safety use myself when I returned home. Maria had gone behind the screen—there must have been other cupboards there, for I heard her opening and shutting doors and clanking pots and pans.

  I whispered to him quickly, ‘Is she your luba?’

  ‘Sister, wife, mother, daughter,’ he said, ‘what difference does it make? Take your choice. She’s a woman, isn’t she?’ He brooded there on the lavatory-seat like a king on a throne. ‘There are two sexes,’ he said. ‘Don’t try to make more than two with definitions.’ The statement sank into my mind with the same heavy mathematical certainty with which later on at school I learned the rule of Euclid about the sides of an isosceles triangle. There was a long silence.

  ‘I think I’d better be going,’ I said, shifting up and down. Maria came in. She carried a dish marked Fido filled with hot broth. Her husband, her brother, whatever he was, nursed it on his lap a long while before he drank it. He seemed to be lost in thought again, and I hesitated to disturb him. All the same, after a while, I tried again.

  ‘They’ll be expecting me at home.’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You couldn’t have a better home than this,’ he said. ‘You’ll see. In a bit of time—a year or two—you’ll settle down well enough.’

  I tried my best to be polite. ‘It’s very nice here, I’m sure, but …’

  ‘It’s no use your being restless. I didn’t ask you to come, did I, but now you are here, you’ll stay. Maria’s a great hand with cabbage. You won’t suffer any hardship.’

  ‘But I can’t stay. My mother …’

  ‘Forget your mother and your father too. If you need anything from up there Maria will fetch it down for you.’

  ‘But I can’t stay here.’

  ‘Can’t’s not a word that you can use to the likes of me.’

  ‘But you haven’t any right to keep me …’

  ‘And what right had you to come busting in like a thief, getting Maria all disturbed when she was boiling my broth?’

  ‘I couldn’t stay here with you. It’s not—sanitary.’ I don’t know how I managed to get that word out. ‘I’d die …’

  ‘There’s no need to talk of dying down here. No one’s ever died here, and you’ve no reason to believe that anyone ever will. We aren’t dead, are we, and we’ve lived a long long time, Maria and me. You don’t know how lucky you are. There’s treasure here beyond all the riches of Asia. One day, if you don’t go disturbing Maria, I’ll show you. You know what a millionaire is?’ I nodded. ‘They aren’t one quarter as rich as Maria and me. And they die too, and where’s their treasure then? Rockefeller’s gone and Fred’s gone and Columbus. I sit here and just read about dying—it’s an entertainment that’s all. You’ll find in all those papers what they call an obituary—there’s one about a Lady Caroline Winterbottom that made Maria laugh and me. It’s summer bottoms we have here, I said, all the year round, sitting by the stove.’

  Maria kwahked in the background, and I began to cry more as a way of interrupting him than because I was really frightened.

  It’s extraordinary how vividly after all these years I can remember that man and the words he spoke. If they were to dig down now on the island below the roots of the tree, I would half expect to find him sitting there still on the old lavatory-seat which seemed to be detached from any pipes or drainage and serve no useful purpose, and yet, if he had really existed, he must have passed his century a long time ago. There was something of a monarch about him and something, as I said, of a prophet and something of the gardener my mother disliked and of a policeman in the next village; his expressions were often countrylike and coarse, but his ideas seemed to move on a deeper level, like roots spreading below a layer of compost. I could sit here now in this room for hours remembering the things he said—I haven’t made out the sense of them all yet: they are stored in my memory like a code uncracked which waits for a clue or an inspiration.

  He said to me sharply, ‘We don’t need salt here. There’s too much as it is. You taste any bit of earth and you’ll find it salt. We live in salt. We are pickled, you might say, in it. Look at Maria’s hands, and you’ll see the salt in the cracks.’

  I stopped crying at once and looked (my attention could always be caught by bits of irrelevant information), and, true enough, there seemed to be grey-white seams running between her knuckles.

  ‘You’ll turn salty too in time,’ he said encouragingly and drank his broth with a good deal of noise.

  I said, ‘But I really am going, Mr …’

  ‘You can call me Javitt,’ he said, ‘but only because it’s not my real name. You don’t believe I’d give you that, do you? And Maria’s not Maria—it’s just a sound she answers to, you understand me, like Jupiter.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you had a dog called Jupiter, you wouldn’t believe he was really Jupiter, would you?’

  ‘I’ve got a dog called Joe.’

  ‘The same applies,’ he said and drank his soup. Sometimes I think that in no conversation since have I found the interest I discovered in those inconsequent sentences of his to which I listened during the days (I don’t know how many) that I spent below the garden. Because, of course, I didn’t leave that day. Javitt had his way.

  He might be said to have talked me into staying, though if I had proved obstinate I have no doubt at all that Maria would have blocked my retreat, and certainly I would not have fancied struggling to escape through the musty folds of her clothes. That was the strange balance—to and fro—of those days; half the time I was frightened as though I were caged in a nightmare and half the time I only wanted to laugh freely and happily at the strangeness of his speech and the novelty of his ideas. It was as if, for those hours or days, the only important things in life were two, laughter and fear. (Perhaps the same ambivalence was there when I first began to know a woman.) There are people whose laughter has always a sense of superiority, but it was Javitt who taught me that laughter is more often a sign of equality, of pleasure and not of malice. He sat there on his lavatory-seat and he said, ‘I shit dead stuff every day, do I? How wrong you are.’ (I was already laughing because that was a word I knew to be obscene and I had never heard it spoken before.) ‘Everything that comes out of me is alive, I tell you. It’s squirming around there, germs and bacilli and the like, and it goes into the ground like a womb, and it comes out somewhere, I daresay, like my daughter did—I forgot I haven�
��t told you about her.’

  ‘Is she here?’ I said with a look at the curtain, wondering what monstrous woman would next emerge.

  ‘Oh, no, she went upstairs a long time ago.’

  ‘Perhaps I could take her a message from you,’ I said cunningly.

  He looked at me with contempt. ‘What kind of a message,’ he asked, ‘could the likes of you take to the likes of her?’ He must have seen the motive behind my offer, for he reverted to the fact of my imprisonment. ‘I’m not unreasonable,’ he said, ‘I’m not one to make hailstorms in harvest time, but if you went back up there you’d talk about me and Maria and the treasure we’ve got, and people would come digging.’

  ‘I swear I’d say nothing’ (and at least I have kept that promise, whatever others I have broken, through all the years until now).

  ‘You talk in your sleep maybe. A boy’s never alone. You’ve got a brother, I daresay, and soon you’ll be going to school and hinting of things to make you seem important. There are plenty of ways of keeping an oath and breaking it in the same moment. Do you know what I’d do then? If they came searching? I’d go further in.’

  Maria kwahk-kwahked her agreement where she listened from somewhere behind the curtains.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Give me a hand to get off this seat,’ he said. He pressed his hand down on my shoulder and it was like a mountain heaving. I looked at the lavatory-seat and I could see that it had been placed exactly to cover a hole which went down down down out of sight. ‘A moit of the treasure’s down there already,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t let the bastards enjoy what they could find here. There’s a little matter of subsidence I’ve got fixed up so that they’d never see the light of day again.’

  ‘But what would you do below there for food?’

  ‘We’ve got tins enough for another century or two,’ he said. ‘You’d be surprised at what Maria’s stored away there. We don’t use tins up here because there’s always broth and cabbage and that’s more healthy and keeps the scurvy off, but we’ve no more teeth to lose and our gums are fallen as it is, so if we had to fall back on tins we would. Why, there’s hams and chickens and red salmons’ eggs and butter and steak-and-kidney pies and caviar, venison too and marrow-bones, I’m forgetting the fish—cods’ roe and sole in white wine, langouste legs, sardines, bloaters, and herrings in tomato-sauce, and all the fruits that ever grew, apples, pears, strawberries, figs, raspberries, plums and greengages and passion fruit, mangoes, grapefruit, loganberries and cherries, mulberries too and sweet things from Japan, not to speak of vegetables, Indian corn and taties, salsify and spinach and that thing they call endive, asparagus, peas and the hearts of bamboo, and I’ve left out our old friend the tomato.’ He lowered himself heavily back on to his seat above the great hole going down.

  ‘You must have enough for two lifetimes,’ I said.

  ‘There’s means of getting more,’ he added darkly, so that I pictured other channels delved through the undersoil of the garden like the section of an ant’s nest, and I remembered the sequin on the island and the single footprint.

  Perhaps all this talk of food had reminded Maria of her duties because she came quacking out from behind her dusty curtain, carrying two bowls of broth, one medium size for me and one almost as small as an egg-cup for herself. I tried politely to take the small one, but she snatched it away from me.

  ‘You don’t have to bother about Maria,’ the old man said. ‘She’s been eating food for more years than you’ve got weeks. She knows her appetite.’

  ‘What do you cook with?’ I asked.

  ‘Calor,’ he said.

  That was an odd thing about this adventure or rather this dream: fantastic though it was, it kept coming back to ordinary life with simple facts like that. The man could never, if I really thought it out, have existed all those years below the earth, and yet the cooking, as I seem to remember it, was done on a cylinder of calor-gas.

  The broth was quite tasty and I drank it to the end. When I had finished I fidgeted about on the wooden box they had given me for a seat—nature was demanding something for which I was too embarrassed to ask aid.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Javitt said. ‘Chair not comfortable?’

  ‘Oh, it’s very comfortable,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps you want to lie down and sleep?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll show you something which will give you dreams,’ he said. ‘A picture of my daughter.’

  ‘I want to do number one,’ I blurted out.

  ‘Oh, is that all?’ Javitt said. He called to Maria, who was still clattering around behind the curtain, ‘The boy wants to piss. Fetch him the golden po.’ Perhaps my eyes showed interest, for he added to me diminishingly, with the wave of a hand, ‘It’s the least of my treasures.’

  All the same it was remarkable enough in my eyes, and I can remember it still, a veritable chamber-pot of gold. Even the young dauphin of France on that long road back from Varennes with his father had only a silver cup at his service. I would have been more embarrassed, doing what I called number one in front of the old man Javitt, if I had not been so impressed by the pot. It lent the everyday affair the importance of a ceremony, almost of a sacrament. I can remember the tinkle in the pot like far-away chimes as though a gold surface resounded differently from china or base metal.

  Javitt reached behind him to a shelf stacked with old papers and picked one out. He said, ‘Now you look at that and tell me what you think.’

  It was a kind of magazine I’d never seen before—full of pictures which are now called cheese-cake. I have no earlier memory of a woman’s unclothed body, or as nearly unclothed as made no difference to me then, in the skin-tight black costume. One whole page was given up to a Miss Ramsgate, shot from all angles. She was the favourite contestant for something called Miss England and might later go on, if she were successful, to compete for the title of Miss Europe, Miss World and after that Miss Universe. I stared at her as though I wanted to memorize her for ever. And that is exactly what I did.

  ‘That’s our daughter,’ Javitt said.

  ‘And did she become …’

  ‘She was launched,’ he said with pride and mystery, as though he were speaking of some moon-rocket which had at last after many disappointments risen from the pad and soared to outer space. I looked at the photograph, at the wise eyes and the inexplicable body, and I thought, with all the ignorance children have of age and generations, I never want to marry anybody but her. Maria put her hand through the curtains and quacked, and I thought, she would be my mother then, but not a hoot did I care. With that girl for my wife I could take anything, even school and growing up and life. And perhaps I could have taken them, if I had ever succeeded in finding her.

  Again my thoughts were interrupted. For if I am remembering a vivid dream—and dreams do stay in all their detail far longer than we realize—how would I have known at that age about such absurdities as beauty-contests? A dream can only contain what one has experienced, or, if you have sufficient faith in Jung, what our ancestors have experienced. But calor-gas and the Ramsgate Beauty Queen? … They are not ancestral memories, nor the memories of a child of seven. Certainly my mother did not allow us to buy with our meagre pocket-money—sixpence a week?—such papers as that. And yet the image is there, caught once and for all, not only the expression of the eyes, but the expression of the body too, the particular tilt of the breasts, the shallow scoop of the navel like something carved in sand, the little trim buttocks—the dividing line swung between them close and regular like the single sweep of a pencil. Can a child of seven fall in love for life with a body? And there is a further mystery which did not occur to me then: how could a couple as old as Javitt and Maria have had a daughter so young in the period when such contests were the vogue?

  ‘She’s a beauty,’ Javitt said, ‘you’ll never see her like where your folks live. Things grow differently underground, like a mole’s coat. I ask you where t
here’s softness softer than that?’ I’m not sure whether he was referring to the skin of his daughter or the coat of a mole.

  I sat on the golden po and looked at the photograph and listened to Javitt as I would have listened to my own father if I had possessed one. His sayings are fixed in my memory like the photograph. Gross some of them seem now, but they did not appear gross to me then when even the graffiti on walls were innocent. Except when he called me ‘boy’ or ‘snapper’ or something of the kind he seemed unaware of my age: it was not that he talked to me as an equal but as someone from miles away, looking down from his old lavatory-seat to my golden po, from so far away that he couldn’t distinguish my age, or perhaps he was so old that anyone under a century or so seemed much alike to him. All that I write here was not said at that moment. There must have been many days or nights of conversation—you couldn’t down there tell the difference—and now I dredge the sentences up, in no particular order, just as they come to mind, sitting at my mother’s desk so many years later.

  4

  ‘You laugh at Maria and me. You think we look ugly. I tell you she could have been painted if she had chosen by some of the greatest—there’s one that painted women with three eyes—she’d have suited him. But she knew how to tunnel in the earth like me, when to appear and when not to appear. It’s a long time now that we’ve been alone down here. It gets more dangerous all the time—if you can speak of time—on the upper floor. But don’t think it hasn’t happened before. But when I remember …’ But what he remembered has gone from my head, except only his concluding phrase and a sense of desolation: ‘Looking round at all those palaces and towers, you’d have thought they’d been made like a child’s castle of the desert-sand.’

  ‘In the beginning you had a name only the man or woman knew who pulled you out of your mother. Then there was a name for the tribe to call you by. That was of little account, but of more account all the same than the name you had with strangers; and there was a name used in the family—by your pa and ma if it’s those terms you call them by nowadays. The only name without any power at all was the name you used to strangers. That’s why I call myself Javitt to you, but the name the man who pulled me out knew—that was so secret I had to keep him as a friend for life, so that he wouldn’t even tell me because of the responsibility it would bring—I might let it slip before a stranger. Up where you come from they’ve begun to forget the power of the name. I wouldn’t be surprised if you only had the one name and what’s the good of a name everyone knows? Do you suppose even I feel secure here with my treasure and all—because, you see, as it turned out, I got to know the first name of all. He told it me before he died, before I could stop him, with a hand over his mouth. I doubt if there’s anyone in the world except me who knows his first name. It’s an awful temptation to speak it out loud—introduce it casually into the conversation like you might say by Jove, by George, for Christ’s sake. Or whisper it when I think no one’s attentive.