outsizes in 18th-century footmen, yelling names and looking down their noses.
We stood at the door of a room, and I was aware of the gold blurs of chandeliers, and a few dozen apparent football scrums, and a hot blast of talk coming out and smacking our faces, so I deduced this was the party all right. One of the boobies yelled: “Mr Claud Tunstall and Mr Edward Oldham,” and from what happened it might just as well have been “The Archangel Gabriel and one Worm”. Because, the moment we were over the threshold, all the scrums loosened up and girls descended on Claud like a cloud of bright, skitering, squawking parrakeets, flashing their red nails at him, unveiling their pearly portals in wide grins, and bearing him off towards a bar where a chap in white was working overtime among all the sweet accessories of Sin. I never saw him again.
Well, as I say, I might have been a worm, no use at all to parrakeets, but that lets in the sparrows. I was just turning slowly on my own axis, so to speak, in the space that was miraculously cleared round me, when I saw a girl looking at me with an appreciative gleam in her brown eye. She was the brownest girl I ever saw – eyes, skin, and hair – homely as a sparrow, and just as alert.
As our eyes met, there came fluting out of one of the scrums a high-pitched female voice: “No, Basil, I’m teetotal, but I can go quite a long way on pahshun fruit.”
The pronunciation of that
We sat together on a couch at the deserted end of the room, and I said: “Let me get you something to drink. What would you like? Though whatever it is, it would taste nicer in civilised surroundings.”
“I agree,” she said simply. “Come on.”
And so, ten minutes after I had entered the Magnifico, I was outside again, buttoning my overcoat warmly about me, and this girl was at my side. It was incredible. This is not the sort of thing I usually do; but it had happened so spontaneously, and to be out there in the street, with a little cold wind blowing about us, was such a relief after that gaudy Bedlam, that the girl and I turned to one another and smiled again. I could see she was feeling the same about it as I was.
Our eyes were towards the dazzle of Piccadilly Circus, when she turned and said, “Not that way,” so we went the other way, and down those steps where the Duke of York’s column towers up into the sky, and then we were in the park. To be walking there, with that little wind, and the sky full of stars huddling together in the cold, and the bare branches of the trees standing up against the violet pulsing of the night – this was indescribable, incredible, coming within a few minutes upon that screeching aviary.
Ruth Hutten was a typist – nothing more. Her father had been one of those old fogies who rootle for years and years in the British Museum to prove that Ben Jonson had really inserted a semi-colon where the 1739 edition or what not has a full-stop. Things like that. Somehow he had lived on it, like a patient old rat living on scraps of forgotten and unimportant meat. Ruth had lived with him – just lived, full of admiration for the old boy’s scholarship, typing his annual volume, which usually failed to earn the publisher’s advance.
When he died, the typewriter was all she had; and now she typed other people’s books. She had been typing a long flaming novel about Cornwall by Gregoria Gunson; and Gregoria (whom I had never heard of before, but who seemed a decent wench) had said, “I’ll take you along to a party. You’ll meet a lot of people there. Perhaps I can fix up some work for you.”
So there Ruth Hutten was, at the Magnifico, feeling as much out of it as I did, and as glad to escape.
She told me all this was we walked through the half-darkness of the park, and I, as naturally, told her all about myself. She was hard up, but I had never known anyone so happy. And I don’t mean gay, bubbling, effervescent. No; you can keep that for the Magnifico. I mean something deep, fundamental; something that takes courage when you’re as near the limit as Ruth was.
To this day I don’t know London as well as Londoners think everyone ought to know the place. I don’t know where we had supper; but it was in a quiet place that everybody else seemed to have forgotten. There was a fire burning, and a shaded lamp on the table. The food was good and simple, and no one seemed to care how long we stayed. I wanted to stay a long time. I had a feeling that once Ruth got outside the door, shook hands, and said “Good night,” I should be groping in a very dark place.
I crumbled a bit of bread on the table, and without looking at her I said: “Ruth, I like you. I’ve never liked anyone so much in my life. Will you marry me?”
She didn’t answer till I looked up, and when our glances met she said, “Yes. If you and I can’t be happy together, no two people on earth ever could.”
This was five years ago. We have had time to discover that we didn’t make a mistake.
We were married at a registry office the next morning. The taxi-driver, who looked like one of the seven million exiled Russian princes, and the office charwoman, who had a goitre and a hacking cough, were the witnesses. I tipped them half a sovereign each. I cling to these practical details because I find them comforting in view of the mad impracticality of what was to follow. Please remember that I am an unromantic northerner who couldn’t invent a tale to save his life. If I tried to do so, I should at once begin to try and fill it with this and that – in short with Something. The remarkable thing about what happened to me and Ruth was simply that Nothing happened. If you have never come up against Nothing you have no idea how it can scare you out of your wits. When I was a child I used to be afraid of Something in the dark. I know now that the most fearful thing about the dark is that we may find Nothing in it.
It was Ruth’s idea that we should spend the few days of our honeymoon walking in Cornwall. Everything was arranged in a mad hurry. Not that there was much to arrange. We bought rucksacks, stuffed a change of under- clothing into them, bought serviceable shoes and waterproofs, and we were ready to start.
Walking was the idea of both of us. This was another bond: you could keep all the motor-cars in the world so far as we were concerned, and all the radio and daily newspapers, too; and we both liked walking in winter as much as in summer.
Cornwall was Ruth’s idea. She had Cornwall on the brain. Her father had done some learned stuff on Malory; and her head was full of Merlin and Tintagel and the Return of Arthur. Gregoria Gunson’s novel helped, too, with its smugglers and romantic inns and the everlasting beat of surf on granite coasts. So Cornwall it was – a place in which neither of us had set foot before.
We made our first contact with Cornwall at Truro. Night had long since fallen when we arrived there on our wedding day. I have not been there since, nor do I wish ever to return. Looking back on what happened, it seems appropriate that the adventure should have begun in Truro. There is in some towns something inimical, irreconcilable. I felt it there. As soon as we stepped out of the station, I wished we were back in the warm, lighted train which already was pulling out on its way to Penzance.
There was no taxi in sight. To our right the road ran slightly uphill; to our left, downhill. We knew nothing of the town, and we went to the left. Soon we were walking on granite. There was granite everywhere: grey, hard, and immemorial. The whole town seemed to be hewn out of granite. The streets were paved with it, enormous slabs like the lids of ancestral vaults. It gave me the feeling of walking in an endless graveyard, and the place was silent enough to maintain the illusion. The streets were lit with grim economy. Hardly a window had a light, and when, here and there, we passed a public-house, it was wrapped in a pall of decorum which made me wonder whether Cornishmen put on shrouds when they went in for a pint.
It did not take us long to get to the heart of the place, the few shopping streets that were a bit more festive, gay with seasonable things; and when we found an hotel, it was a good one. I signed the book, “Mr and Mrs Edward Oldham, Manchester,” and that made me smile. After all, it was something to smile about. At this time last night, Ruth and I had just met, and now “Mr and Mrs Edward Oldham.”
Ruth had moved across to a fire in the lounge. She had an arm along the mantelpiece, a toe meditatively tapping the fender. She looked up when I approached her and saw the smile. But her face did not catch the contagion. “Don’t you hate this town?” she asked.
“I can put up with it,” I said, “now that I’m in here, and now that you’re in here with me.”
“Yes,” she answered, “this is all right. But those streets! They gave me the creeps. I felt as if every stone had been hewn out of a cliff that the Atlantic had battered for a thousand years and plastered with wrecks. Have you ever seen Tewkesbury Abbey?”
The irrelevant question took me aback. “No,” I said.
