Spider

descending in a sort of cautious sideways movement in a tight-belted dark blue dress with small white spots: my mother’s Sunday dress. I watched her go down, her bottom bulging and a plump hand on the banister, and as I listened to the clack of her heels I couldn’t help remembering the soft slushy shuffling sound my mother’s slippers made when she moved around the house. She had painted her mouth with my mother’s lipstick and fixed her hair with my mother’s comb; the scent, however, was all Hilda. Her belly was prominent in the thin material of the spotted blue dress, it was a generous, fleshy belly that sloped away at the flanks to the firm, trunklike roundness of her upper thighs, between which the material clung like a veil or curtain concealing a shadowy concavity. “Two-up two-down, is it?” she said as my father descended the stairs after her (she’d already stuck her nose into my room, but she hadn’t seen me, I was under the bed), then, without waiting for his answer: “I like a little house like this, Horace, I’ve always wanted one of these, Nora can tell you that.”

Then—and note how casually she tossed this out—“You own it, eh?”

You own it, eh: this is significant, we shall return to this later. Suffice for now that Hilda Wilkinson, a common prostitute, had spent her whole life drifting from lodging to lodging, often at the dead of night; a man who owned his own home was an attractive proposition—how much more attractive, should that man’s wife have disappeared! On she went, her awful boisterous voice ringing through the house, her motives plain as day: “Put your money in real property, that’s what I always say. This the parlor, is it, Horace? Now this is a nice room, you could entertain your friends in here.”

Horace and Hilda spent an hour in the parlor and drank the rest of the whisky. From what I could hear she was comfortable in there, it seemed to appeal to some submerged yearning she had for gentility. She filled it to overflowing with her presence as she admired the modest fireplace with its polished brass scuttle, its poker and irons, and she expressed pleasure as well in the tiled mantelpiece, the oval mirror above it, and the five china geese hanging on a diagonal across the wall. She also liked the pattern of the wallpaper and the chintz cushion covers. The glass-fronted cabinet with its three pieces of Wedgwood: this pleased her too. “I do like a parlor, Horace,” she said, more than once, “gives a place respectability.” What did my father make of this, staving off, as he was, with whisky, an utter maelstrom of guilt when with every passing hour the murder like a virus gnawed deeper into the tissue of his vital organs?

There was bacon in the house, and after finishing the whisky they moved to the kitchen. They ate their breakfast as night fell; I smelled the bacon from upstairs, and it sharpened the edge of my own ravenous hunger, for I had eaten nothing all day; but I would not go down. I sat at the window and gazed at the glow from the kitchen, which barely penetrated the darkness in the yard. I saw Hilda go through the back door to the outhouse, and I was tempted then to go downstairs but the prospect of encountering her when she came back in deterred me. “You should fix that toilet of yours, Horace,” she said on her return. “Fine state of affairs when a plumber’s own toilet don’t work!”

Ten minutes later they left for the Earl of Rochester, and I came downstairs. There was no bacon left, so I had to make do with bread and dripping.

Would that awful day never end? I could think no more about it, that long evening I spent alone in the house with the smell of Hilda everywhere in my nostrils. I went out into the fog after my bread and dripping, and made for the canal, where I wandered along in a morose state, at times desperate, at times tearfully furious, kicking stones into the black water and taking what small comfort I could from the foggy darkness of the night. Where was my mother? Where was she? I returned to number twenty-seven after nine and came in through the back door; the house was empty. I ate more bread and dripping then went up to my room and got out my insect collection again. I heard my father come in late, alone; he sat up in the kitchen drinking beer until he passed out. I crept down around midnight and saw him slumped in a chair by the stove, still in his cap and scarf, and a cigarette adhering to his lower lip even as he slept.

The next day was Sunday. As was his habit he went to his allotment. The fog had dissipated somewhat, it was a cool, cloudy morning, and it looked as if it might rain later. As he cycled through the empty streets he was still very much a man in crisis: barely thirty hours had elapsed since the murder, and he had not yet adjusted to the new territory he occupied. Murder sets a man apart, moves him into a separate world, narrow and constricted, bound and constrained by guilt, complicity, and the fear of betrayal. None of this he had fully realized, for he was still to some extent in shock; he pedaled his bicycle past curtained windows behind which slept a world from which he was now exiled forever, though this, as I say, was not yet apparent to him.

That soon changed! There has always seemed to me to be a sort of bleak poetic justice in the fact that the allotment, to which my father had so often fled from his domestic life, should now be charged with the horror of my mother’s murder. He himself felt this only dimly as he pedaled through the streets that Sunday morning, but the closer he came to the railway bridge the stronger the impulse was to turn around and get as far away from the place as possible. But he did not turn round, for he was also aware of a vague, perverse stirring of excitement at the prospect of seeing again the ground beneath which she lay.

Nothing, however, prepared him for the wave that hit him when he opened the gate and stood at the end of his path. For some moments it swirled about him in a sweeping, spinning movement, as though the allotment had become an active force field in a state of intense disturbance. It warped his perceptions: the shed and the vegetables seemed to turn black in front of his eyes, and before he had taken one step down the path he sensed a sort of thrashing and writhing all about him, and then for the few interminable moments it took him to reach the shed the suddenly dark, damp air of the morning swarmed with tiny malignant germs, and to pass through these swarms required no little determination. The effect was weakened somewhat when he gained the interior of the shed and shut the door on the garden’s malevolence, but outside it did not abate for a moment, the whole of that Sunday.

(I know this feeling, I too have been tormented in this way, I too have felt them clacking and clicking round the back of my head like the teeth of a hound, like a cloud of chattering gnats, in fact the sound is rarely absent, though most of the time it is mercifully subdued, more of a hum than anything else.)

¦

While my father was experiencing the first wave of horror that came off the soil of his allotment, I was back in my room at number twenty-seven. I didn’t yet know that my mother was dead, only that she wasn’t at home, and that a fat woman had been in her place in my parents’ bed. I was again busy with my collection, which helped distract me from all the worry and perplexity these changes were producing. As a boy I collected insects, flies mostly, which I pinned in boxes in artistic formations that I called tableaux. Dead leaves of various colors featured heavily in the boxes I’d set up in the autumn, but by this time many of them had become so brittle that they’d broken up into fragments and fallen away from the pins, forming little heaps at the bottom of the boxes. These I cleared out, also the feathers and twigs, and got out the fresh materials I’d been carefully collecting and which I kept in a cardboard box under my bed. All sorts of things were in that box, anything that looked as if it might come in handy, and I made no distinction between natural objects, twigs and feathers and so on, and matchsticks, bottle caps, bits of string, the cardboard and tinfoil of empty cigarette packets. I tried some pieces of eggshell, also a furry ball of blonde hair that I’d pulled off my mother’s comb earlier in the afternoon; a few fish bones, a few fins. It made a curious sort of assembly, and I wasn’t sure whether I liked it or not. At some point during the afternoon, occupied thus, I heard footsteps outside. Rising from the floor I went to the window and coming down the yard was the woman I’d seen in bed with my father.

I moved away from the window. I decided that I wouldn’t let her in, I wouldn’t go downstairs, she wouldn’t even know that I was in the house. All in vain; she came straight in through the back door without knocking, and I heard in the kitchen the familiar clatter of the kettle at the sink, the dull pop of the gas being lit, and the scrape of chair legs. I sank back onto the floor, careful to make no sound that would alert her to my presence. That too was all in vain; after she’d had her cup of tea she spent a few minutes in the parlor and then came up the stairs. I was at my door when she reached the landing, and I was gripping the knob tightly. She was on the other side, trying to turn it, and she was too strong for me; the knob turned, the door opened, she peered in at me. “Hello Dennis,” she said. “What you doing up here?”

I wanted her out of my room! I mumbled something about my insects; in my mind’s eye I saw her on top of my father, going up and down and gasping like a fish. Suddenly she shuddered. “Those flies!” she said. “Do we have to have them in your bedroom?”

I was downstairs in the kitchen with her when my father got home from the allotments. The strain of the past two days was quite apparent in his features. He had done no work on his garden; on the one occasion he’d