Bermuda shorts. His face was brick-red.
I explained my errand and showed him the card with the average-beer-consumption-per-week scale on it. Each average is numbered, and the scale runs from 0 to 10. The company does it that way because some men are shy about naming their consumption in so many words. This man picked No. 9, the second from the top. Hardly anybody chooses No. 10: everyone likes to think there’s a chance that somebody else drinks more than he does.
When we had got that far the man said, “Come on into the living room and sit down. You must be tired walking around in all that heat. My wife’s just gone to do the shopping,” he added irrelevantly.
I sat down in one of the easy chairs and he turned down the sound on the T. V. set. I saw a bottle of one of Moose Beer’s competitors standing on the floor by his chair, half empty. He sat down opposite me, smiling and mopping his forehead with his handkerchief, and answered the preliminary questions with the air of an expert delivering a professional verdict. After he had listened to the telephone commercial he scratched the hair on his chest thoughtfully and gave the sort of enthusiastic response for which a whole seminary of admen had no doubt been offering daily prayers. When we finished and I had written down the name and address, which the company needs so it won’t re-interview the same people, got up, and began to thank him, I saw him lurching out of his chair towards me with a beery leer. “Now what’s a nice little girl like you doing walking around asking men all about their beer?” he said moistly. “You ought to be at home with some big strong man to take care of you.”
I pressed the two Temperance pamphlets into his damp outstretched hand and fled.
I shuffled through four more complete interviews without much incident, discovering in the process that the questionnaire needed the addition of a “Does not have phone… End interview” box and a “Does not listen to radio” one, and that men who approved of the chest-thumping sentiments of the commercial tended to object to the word “Tingly” as being “Too light,” or, as one of them put it, “Too fruity.” The fifth interview was with a spindly balding man who was so afraid of expressing any opinions at all that getting words out of him was like pulling teeth with a monkey-wrench. Every time I asked him a new question he flushed, bobbed his Adam’s apple, and contorted his face in a wince of agony. He was speechless for several minutes after he had listened to the commercial and I had asked him, “How did you like the commercial? Very Much; Only Moderately; or Not Very Much?” At last he managed to whisper, feebly, “Yes.”
I had now only two more interviews to get. I decided to skip the next few houses and go to the square apartment building. I got in by the usual method, pressing all the buttons at once until some deluded soul released the inner door.
The coolness was a relief. I went up a short flight of stairs whose carpeting was just beginning to wear thin, and knocked at the first door, which was numbered Six. I found this curious because from its position it should have been numbered
Nothing happened when I knocked. I knocked again more loudly, waited, and was about to go on to the next apartment when the door swung inward noiselessly and I found myself being looked at by a young boy whom I judged to be about fifteen.
He rubbed one of his eyes with a finger, as if he had just got up. He was cadaverously thin; he had no shirt on, and the ribs stuck out like those of an emaciated figure in a medieval woodcut. The skin stretched over them was nearly colourless, not white but closer to the sallow tone of old linen. His feet were bare; he was wearing only a pair of khaki pants. The eyes, partly hidden by a rumpled mass of straight black hair that came down over the forehead, were obstinately melancholy, as though he was assuming the expression on purpose.
We stared at each other. He was evidently not going to say anything, and I could not quite begin. The questionnaires I was carrying had suddenly become unrelated to anything at all, and at the same time obscurely threatening. Finally I managed to say, feeling very synthetic as I did so, “Hello there, is your father in?”
He continued to stare at me without a tremor of expression. “No. He’s dead,” he said.
“Oh.” I stood, swaying a little; the contrast with the heat outside had made me dizzy. Time seemed to have shifted into slow motion; there seemed to be nothing to say; but I couldn’t leave or move. He continued to stand in the doorway.
Then after what seemed hours it occurred to me that he might not actually be as young as he looked. There were dark circles under his eyes, and some fine thin lines at the outer corners. “Are you really only fifteen?” I asked, as though he had told me he was.
“I’m twenty-six,” he said dolefully.
I gave a visible start, and as if the answer had stepped on some hidden accelerator in me I babbled out a high-speed version of the blurb about being from Seymour Surveys and not selling anything and improving products and wanting to ask a few simple questions about how much beer he drank in an average week, thinking while I did so that he didn’t look as though he ever drank anything but water, with the crust of bread they tossed him as he lay chained in the dungeon. He seemed gloomily interested, much as one would be interested (if at all) in a dead dog, so I extended the average-weekly-consumption card towards him and asked him to pick his number. He looked at it a minute, turned it over and looked at the back, which was blank, closed his eyes, and said “Number six.”
That was seven to ten bottles per week, high enough to qualify him for the questionnaire, and I told him so. “Come in then,” he said. I felt a slight sensation of alarm as I stepped over the threshold and the door closed woodenly behind me.
We were in a living room of medium size, perfectly square, with a kitchenette opening off it on one side and the hallway to the bedrooms on the other. The slats of the venetian blind on the one small window were closed, making the room dim as twilight. The walls, as far as I could tell in the semi-darkness, were a flat white; there were no pictures on them. The floor was covered by a very good Persian carpet with an ornate design of maroon and green and purple scrolls and flowers, even better, I thought, than the one in the lady down below’s parlour which had been left her by her paternal grandfather. One wall had a bookcase running its whole length, the kind people make themselves out of boards and bricks. The only other pieces of furniture were three huge, ancient and overstuffed easy chairs, one red plush, one a worn greenish-blue brocade, and one a faded purple, each with a floor lamp beside it. All exposed surfaces of the room were littered with loose papers, notebooks, books opened face-down and other books bristling with pencils and torn slips of paper stuck in them as markers.
“Do you live here alone?” I asked.
He fixed me with his lugubrious eyes. “It depends what you mean,” he intoned, “by ‘alone’.”
“Oh, I see,” I said politely. I walked across the room, trying to preserve my air of cheerful briskness while picking my way unsteadily over and around the objects on the floor. I was heading towards the purple chair, which was the only one that didn’t have a rat’s nest of papers in it.
“You can’t sit there,” he said behind me in a tone of slight admonishment, “that’s Trevor’s chair. He wouldn’t like you sitting in his chair.”
“Oh. Is the red one all right then?”
“Well,” he said, “that’s Fish’s, and he wouldn’t mind if you sat in it; at least I don’t think he would. But he’s got his papers in it and you might mess them up.” I didn’t see how by merely sitting on them I could possibly disorganize them any more, but I didn’t say so. I was wondering whether Trevor and Fish were two imaginary playmates that this boy had made up, and also whether he had lied about his age. In this light his face could have been of a ten-year-old. He stood gazing at me solemnly, shoulders hunched, arms folded across his torso, holding his own elbows.
“And I suppose yours is the green one then.”
“Yes,” he said, “but I haven’t sat in it myself for a couple of weeks. I’ve got everything all arranged in it.”
I wanted to go over and see exactly what he had got all arranged in it, but I reminded myself that I was there on business. “Where are we going to sit then?”
“The floor,” he said, “or the kitchen, or my bedroom.”
“Oh, not the bedroom,” I said hurriedly. I made my way back across the expanse of paper and peered around the corner into the kitchenette. A peculiar odour greeted me – there seemed to be garbage bags in every corner, and the rest of the space was taken up by large pots and kettles, some clean, others not. “I don’t think there’s room in the kitchen,” I said. I stooped and began to skim the papers off the surface of the carpet, much as one would skim scum from a pond.
“I don’t think you’d better do that,” he said. “Some of them aren’t mine. You might get them mixed up. We’d better go into the bedroom.” He slouched across to the hall and through an open doorway. Of necessity I followed him.
The room was a white-walled oblong box, dark as the living room: the venetian blind was down here too. It
