an hour.
Not until I was safely out of the front door did my spirits begin to rally. The woman is a monster! But I put her out of my mind, I was in much too good a humor to let her spoil it, and soon I was bubbling with exuberance once more. For some reason I felt reluctant to sit by the canal, and I wondered, as I do every morning, whether today I would cross the bridge and revisit Kitchener Street. But I didn’t revisit Kitchener Street, not that day, nor did I go to the canal, I went to the river instead, for I knew that I should only become morbid if I watched the rain spotting the black surface of the canal, for the rain carries ideas, this I learned in Canada, where it rains almost all the time. Along the towpath I went then climbed up to the main road—how fast everything seemed to be moving in the rain!—crossed over, then threaded my way through narrow streets to an alley between the warehouses, then to a set of worn stone steps descending to the river itself. Oh, the river! Great broad swirling stream, old Father Thames in the raw gray day! On the far side, the cranes of Rotherhithe poking at me through the mist like fingers, or insects. On the lower steps, as I gingerly descended, a creeping green slime, and one of the steps was eaten away and the rest were crumbling and pocked. At the foot of the steps the water churned and eddied, gray-green like the sky, the thick, lowering blanket of sky, spitting rain, soaking me through, my cap a soggy, useless thing by this point so I tossed it into the river and watched it float away. I love the wetness of a day like this, I love wetness and darkness and skies like thick gray blankets, for it is only at such times that I feel at home in the world.
I made my way in a state of some exhilaration back across the main road (there was some honking and emotion in the traffic, for I had one of my forgetful moments, I became uncoupled), then back along the towpath. Close to my bench I left the canal and quite on impulse moved up the hill to Omdurman Close, until I stood on the bridge across the railway lines. Far below me the rails glistened, bedewed iron cobwebs, but no imps could terrorize me in weather like this, this was my day! Over the bridge then, a damp ecstatic squelch it was, for the rain was really very heavy now—and at the other end I stood and gazed upon the allotments spread beneath me, strip by strip, in a sort of haze, each one fenced off, tenanted by its shed. Nothing, nothing had changed here! Down the path I shuffled, muddy, puddled path though it was, careless of its mud and its puddles, until I stood again at the gate to my father’s allotment.
Nothing had changed. I opened the gate and advanced down the path, the potato plants to either side of me bedraggled and flattened like prostrate courtiers, as the rain splattered onto the soil and formed pools in the troughs between the rows. Set back from the shed, off to the right of it, the compost heap, a soggy thing this day, its eggshells and peelings congealing in a slick moist fecund mash, and there before me the shed itself, cleansed by the rain, I felt no black horror from it, none of the sheer giddy waves of horror that my father provoked from the place and which came in time to haunt him to the very threshold of his sanity—none of that, nor, as I turned toward the soil again, did I feel the horror there either, there was peace in the soil, for the rain brings peace to the living and the dead, to all things under the ground and under the water, they all rest in the rain, I knelt down in the potato patch and laid my head on the soil; and then a voice said: “Here! What do you think you’re doing?”
Here! Here! Here here here here here! It echoed as I turned, stumbling, toward the source, a bearded figure in a cap and raincoat on the other side of the fence. Here! Here! Here here here here here! The imps took up the cry, damn them, damn their filthy souls to hell! Oh, I fled, I went squelching and weeping back up the path and over the bridge with the sounds of their filthy voices ringing in my ears until I was back on the bench, a damp and heaving wreck, I should have known, I told myself, I should have known, they never rest, I must be cunning, I must be like the fox.
Mrs. Wilkinson saw me coming in, soggy bit of flotsam that I was, and she wasn’t at all happy that I was so wet. But I ignored her as I shuffled upstairs, heedless also of the dead souls who emerged from the dayroom to peer at my dripping and beleaguered shell. I sat on the side of my bed with my elbows on my knees, a sad and sorry water-spider indeed— and then she came barging in, without knocking, all brisk matronly zeal. “Out of those wet things, Mr. Cleg,” she said, “we don’t want you catching your death of cold.”
I was totally debilitated by this point, my exuberance, my energy, all evaporated, vanished like the mist. I rose rather wearily to my feet and permitted her to make a start on my buttons. After a moment I felt more engaged, I brushed her fingers from me and continued with the buttons myself. She swept out. “A hot bath for you, Mr. Cleg,” she cried, “I’d no idea you’d get yourself soaked to the skin.” I could hear her in the bathroom down the passage, humming to herself as hot water came coughing and gushing from the old brass taps. When I was ready I wrapped myself, shivering, in the faded old dressing gown I’d had since the colonies, and padded down the passage.
It is an old house, Mrs. Wilkinson’s, with an old bathroom; the tub itself is a vast, claw-footed, cast-iron affair that stands beneath a sloping skylight on a floor of black and white lozenge-shaped tiles. When the pipes are coughing forth their scalding torrents the room quickly fills with steam, and this is how it was when I appeared in the doorway. Mrs. Wilkinson was bending over the tub, one hand on the rim and the other testing the water. Turning her head toward the door she stared at me for a moment or two then straightened up. “Come along, Mr. Cleg,” she said, “let’s warm up those chilly bones of yours.”
I hung my towel on the hook on the back of the door and cautiously approached. The water in this house always has a faintly reddish-brown tinge to it, copper oxide in the pipes, I imagine. Mrs. Wilkinson stood by her bath of steaming brown water with hands outstretched to take from me my dressing gown. Naturally I drew back. “Don’t be bashful, Mr. Cleg,” she wheedled, “I’ve seen plenty of men in this bath.”
I bet you have, I thought, as I retreated toward the door. “Mr. Cleg,” she said, “don’t be silly.” Still moving backwards I groped behind me for the door handle. She was a big woman, but I felt I could handle myself if I had to; fortunately it did not come to that. “Then I leave you to your own devices, Mr. Cleg,” she said, and went out, shaking her head. There is no lock on the bathroom door (there are no locks anywhere in this house except, significantly, on the door to the attic stairs, and of course the dispensary) but through careful arrangement of my towel I managed to cover the keyhole; and then at last I clambered into the bathtub and stretched my lanky limbs: there was no smell at all.
I find myself for some reason thinking about the coal cellar in Kitchener Street. My mother once trod on a rat down there, so she’d always have me go down for her. After a while I began going down for no reason at all, I simply grew to like it there in the darkness with the smell of coal dust in my nostrils, and I can never smell coal these days without remembering the cellar, and perhaps this is why I’m thinking of it now. My sense of smell has always been acute, and it occurs to me that this whole thing about gas might have something to do with it—I am oversensitive, in an olfactory way, and this could cause me to detect nuances of odor that are perhaps imperceptible to a normal nose, or that perhaps don’t even exist at all? But I shan’t dwell on it any further; the smell has disappeared, it was probably a mistake, and I was a fool to make such a fuss about it. Oddly enough I remember now how the streets used to smell when I was a boy: of beer. There was a brewery not far from the canal, and most days the air would be filled with that distinctive brewery smell—malty, yeasty, whatever it is. My mother hated it, but then she hardly ever drank—a glass or two of mild on a Saturday night—because for her drink was associated with my father’s moods. She once told me when we were sitting by ourselves in the kitchen that she thought ours would have been a happy house if my father didn’t drink. I don’t believe this; I believe that my father’s cruelty to my mother would have occurred even if he’d never touched a drop, though perhaps in a different form. This is because it had to do with his nature, with what was—or rather, was
But it’s strange that I should have liked the cellar, because that’s where he belted me. I remember once (I’m not sure if this was before or after my mother’s death) he told me to stop scraping the tines of my fork across my plate, he said it irritated him. Well I did it again, and he went off the deep end. The cellar’s natural gloom was always thick with coal dust, which drifted in the air like tiny points of blackness, the devil’s germs, I used to think, and they invaded your eyes and mouth and nostrils, even the very pores of your skin, and I always came up feeling blackened by the place, and this, too, was a sensation I enjoyed, for I liked to imagine myself a coal-black boy who could move through darkness without being seen. I also remember the sounds: how the stairs creaked when I went down, and how they creaked differently when my father was coming down behind me. Then, as well as the creaking, there would be the unbuckling of his belt—the clank of prong and buckle, and the slither of leather pulled through trouser loops—and I can never hear those sounds now without thinking of pain, though the pain of the belting was never as bad as the minutes that preceded it: my father’s rage, the way he ground his teeth together and pulled his lips apart and hissed at me to get down the cellar—the
