The Weight of Numbers Page 9

  It was true: there was no colour here. Not a spot of colour anywhere. No traffic light. No yellow beam from a warden’s torch. They were in the world of the movies now. The world of black and white.

  A park bench hung in the fork of a tree. It was quite undamaged. The brass plaque on its back winked white.

  Far ahead of her Kathleen glimpsed the silhouetted bulk of St Pancras station. She knew where she was. ‘Dick? Dick. Where shall we go?’ His stare was vacant, without intelligence. She tried to take his hands in hers but they were fists. She took hold of his arms. ‘Dick.’

  He swallowed. He was done.

  Was that it? She wondered. Was there really nowhere for them to go? ‘Dick,’ she said, in a small voice. ‘Dick, do you want to kiss me?’ She thought of his mouth, red like a wound, the suck of it. ‘Do you? Dick?’ She leaned into him. She ran her hands up his arms.

  The braid on his jacket came away in her fingers.

  She picked it off.

  It was metal foil.

  She let go of him.

  It was the foil wrappers from slabs of chocolate.

  The white stuff sticking it to his sleeve was cow gum. It clung in crumbs to the material of his jacket.

  So.

  She let go of his arms. She felt calm. Dead calm.

  ‘Dick?’ she said. ‘Where are you from?’

  He gave her an address in Fitzrovia: a road off Gower Street. They were practically there. Perhaps they had been headed there all along.

  She asked him, ‘Is this where you’re taking me?’

  He stared into her eyes.

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

  The bloated look was back: his look of need.

  ‘Dick? Do you want me to come home with you?’

  She imagined the sort of place where he might be staying. A bleak furnished room with thin walls.

  She looked him in the eye, right in the eye, without passion, with a cool, calculating curiosity. She said, ‘It doesn’t matter, Dick. I’ll come with you.’

  She imagined the tightness of his muscles, the tremors coursing under his skin, the nature of the experiment to which she was now committing herself.

  Limping now, she led him across Southampton Row and around Bloomsbury Square. The gardens were chained shut. They turned off Gower Street. She counted off the houses, looking for a hotel sign.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said.

  It wasn’t what she’d been expecting. It wasn’t a boarding house. It was one of a row of smart Georgian terrace houses. Beside the door, a plaque bore the name of a distinguished-sounding philosophical society.

  Dick stood beside her on the polished marble steps, shifting from one foot to another. Out of embarrassment? In anticipation? She said, ‘Are you sure this is the place?’

  ‘Aye-aye,’ he said, and winked at her, as though the whole evening had been one long, terrific joke.

  ‘Are you going to let us in?’

  He sobered up.

  ‘Dick?’

  His eyes grew big with need. ‘Spare us a kiss, love – a little kiss.’

  Did he not understand? ‘Inside,’ she said. She took hold of his hands. ‘Take me in with you.’

  The door opened. A young woman appeared, smoking a cigarette. ‘Yes?’

  Kathleen let go of Dick’s hands.

  ‘What do you want?’ The woman was tall and gawky-looking; her white blouse, trimmed with a dark material, carried an intimidating hint of education. Smoke from the woman’s cigarette wafted into Kathleen’s face. It was strong and foreign-tasting, and it made Kathleen want to rub her eyes.

  Dick was staring at the pavement. He was scuffing his shoes against each other like a shamed schoolboy.

  ‘Come along inside, Mr Jinks,’ said the woman, without surprise, without ceremony, grinding her spent cigarette underfoot.

  Dick stepped inside the hall.

  ‘Dick?’ Kathleen reached out after him.

  He did not notice. His eyes were downcast. ‘Good evening, Miriam.’

  His use of her Christian name made the woman bridle. ‘Get along, Mr Jinks,’ she said.

  Suddenly, Kathleen was afraid. ‘Dick!’ she cried, sharp, to wake him. ‘Dick! You don’t have to—’

  ‘That’s enough out of you,’ said the woman called Miriam.

  Kathleen peered past her, looking for Dick.

  She saw ornate moulded coving; a chandelier; rich red carpeting on the stairs at the hall’s far end; closed doors, painted white. An umbrella stand, heavy with men’s mackintoshes.

  Dick had vanished.

  Miriam stood, her hand on the door, her head inclined at an ironic angle, waiting for Kathleen to be done with her inspection. Kathleen tried to make out her face, but the light from the hall held her in silhouette.

  ‘Goodnight, then.’ Miriam swung the door.

  ‘Wait!’ Kathleen’s words came out in a great rush. ‘Is he a sailor, really, I mean, whether what he said, I mean, his uniform, but still he could be, or could have been… I want to know.’

  The door was shut, and one by one, the lights in the building were going out.

  Kathleen has approached her life objectively. In this way she has protected herself, even from bombs and fire storms.

  But her experiments are becoming large and unwieldy. They produce results that have no meaning, or that offer up too many meanings. Her experiments keep colliding. Unfamiliar phenomena peel off and spin away, feelings which vanish the moment she stops to analyse them.

  The night following her aborted night with Dick, she went with the girls of her boarding house to the Royal Opera House. The opera house hosts regular dance evenings. Shop girls spin and caper amidst gilt and sumptuous red furniture under a dome of perfect blue, like a blackbird’s egg.

  There was Margaret, in a red print dress, dancing with the policeman from the pub. The smile she gave Kathleen as she rocked past was all mouth; her eyes had no warmth in them.

  Kathleen, seated at the edge of the dance floor, folded her hands in her lap, as unfamiliar feelings exploded and vanished inside her like fireworks. It was not that she had liked the policeman. It was not that she had thought of him since that night in the Four Feathers. It was not, precisely, that Margaret had done anything wrong, when she’d steered her new girlfriend away from him that night in the pub. It was not that Margaret had cheated her or, if she had, it was not as though the cheat was very great. It was not precisely anything. It was simply the wreckage left behind when experiments collide: experiments in men, experiments in friendship. Kathleen wondered what conclusion might be drawn from this result.

  Sitting beside her she noticed Hazel, a girl from her rooming house, in a new yellow dress which lent her skin a sallow, yielding quality that men seemed to shun. Margaret wheeled by, her face in the shade of the policeman’s massive chin, and Hazel yawned, ‘Kath, love, you ought to watch that cheeky cow.’

  More sparks! How did Hazel know that Margaret had steered her away from the policeman? What would happen if Kathleen asked Hazel what she meant, straight out?

  On and on, like dominoes. The more you experimented, the less you really knew. Kathleen has been looking the world straight in the eye, without passion, as though it were a series of soluble problems. She has been living as though life were a set of coolly posed questions. She had expected answers to her questions, not feelings.

  Kathleen told Hazel the story of her night with Jinks.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Hazel exclaimed. ‘Weren’t you frightened?’

  Kathleen shook her head.

  Hazel said, ‘I’d have called a copper.’

  This was Hazel’s one stock response to things: ‘I’ll call a copper, I shall.’ At first, people were taken aback by such threats: awkward bus conductors; inept waitresses; men who had the misfortune to bump against Hazel on the street. Then, quite quickly, they learned that she was not very bright.

  3

  The Blitz is in full swing. Loss is common throughout the Lo
ndon herd, and exhaustion is a way of life. At the same time, there is very little terror. The government’s conscientious plans to deal with the collapse of civil order seem foolish now, a nanny’s unnecessary bothering. The beds in hospitals from Croydon to Middlesex, readied for tens of thousands of shell-shock victims, lie empty. Come the air-raid sirens, Londoners flock to the Underground. Afterwards, they re-emerge from the deepest tunnels quite willingly, they do not shun the light, and H. G. Wells’s fearsome, trogloditic Morlocks remain a thing of dreams.

  The theatres and cinemas, shut up when the first bombs fell, were reopened almost immediately. In garret rooms in Plumstead and Elstree, young screenwriters, numbed by the Blitz, stumble gormlessly through the toils of self-expression, and Senate House, kindly and oblivious, polishes their efforts bland again, reducing their screen characters to sanctioned types: broken-spirited airman; sparky shopgirl; callow heroin-waiting; hard-bitten New York journalist with her too-high heels and racy opinions; dependable, if tipsy, artisan. So every man, passing through the censor’s narrow gate, becomes an Everyman, a symbol for the mass, hardly a man at all.

  Every night, after work, Kathleen finds herself watching films so similar to each other they may as well be one film: a series of civilized exchanges conducted in more-or-less interchangeable white rooms. Each room is handsomely furnished. There is always a floor-length mirror, a box of cigarettes on a coffee table and, by the window, a man and a woman, smoking.

  The handsome couple have reached some sort of emotional crisis. The man opens his mouth to speak. ‘Have you any idea what this involves?’ Though the man and the woman are in black and white, the inside of the man’s mouth is red.

  ‘I could get myself shot!’

  Kathleen comes awake, trying to scream.

  ‘The cutlets, please,’ says the colourless young man, the sole occupant of the table before her.

  The pencil in her hand is a complex surgical instrument. She does not know how to operate it. All by themselves, as if by a ponderous magic, letters emerge from under the pencil’s tip: t… l… e… t… …1

  Kathleen blinks at the colours around her with eyes still tuned to black and white. She is at work. She is standing by table three. She says, automatically, ‘Anything to drink?’

  ‘Yes. A cup of tea, please.’

  She writes: T

  All day, Kathleen has been falling into dreams. It is happening to them all, and so frequently, almost every conversation drifts to the subject of sleep sooner or later: how much sleep you need, what sort of sleep it is and when you take it. Jenny from the kitchens reckons peeling vegetables for the lunchtime rush gives her a good fifteen minutes of deep sleep, ‘no dreams, mind’.

  Kathleen envies her. Her waking hours are riddled with dreams. Whenever she closes her eyes, a dream appears. Sometimes it is impossible to distinguish between sleeping and waking. On several occasions she has breakfasted, washed, dressed, run to the station and boarded the tube train to work – only to wake up in bed, dizzy and disorientated, and utterly demoralized at the thought that she will have to go through all this morning’s rigmarole again.

  Recently, dreams such as these have begun to nest inside each other, so that she finds herself waking up from a dream into another dream, and from that dream into another, and another, each one a little chillier, stiffer and more realistic than the last. Who is to say when the chain of dreams ends and reality begins?

  Kathleen remembers John Arven telling her to look things in the eye. Replace your horror with a cool curiosity, he said to her: then the horror goes away. She has followed his advice dutifully enough, but last night she saw something that spoiled her belief in him. It was the opening reel of a film about the agonies of a young conductor of an orchestra of refugees.

  An elegant woman in a fur coat and bright heels walks the streets of a ruined city. What city? It is impossible to tell. There are no signs, no advertisements; the headlines on the shredded newspapers which bowl along the street beside her, worrying her feet, are too far away to read. All we can say is that the city is modern, its destruction accomplished only recently, by wave after wave of bombing from the air.

  The elegant woman holds the collar of her coat tight around her neck, picking her way with unfeasible ease and steadiness over roads reduced to crumbled stream beds, strands of brick-shingle, dunes of plaster dust. Her heels kick motes of light across the screen…

  It was, after all, only a scene from a film. But it has made Kathleen look differently at things. The smooth, calm movements of the woman on the film suggested that the character had blocked reality out altogether, preferring to live among memories of the city before it was bombed. But you could just as easily take the scene to mean the opposite: that the woman had achieved a complete psychic adjustment to the bombing.

  Utter denial or total acceptance? Everywhere Kathleen turns now, the London masses are dreaming their way through the Blitz. They are not looking the Blitz in the eye at all. They are coming to a glancing, unconscious accommodation with it. They are trying to work around it, to sidestep it and integrate it into a life they try to make as ordinary as possible. Proudly displayed in every shop window she passes, a sign: ‘Business as Usual’. A triumph of fantasy.

  She thinks: a city is razed, but we pretend otherwise. We survive because we pretend.

  Waitressing at Lyons is not a job that Kathleen could just turn up one day and do. They trained her. In an upstairs room, she was taught how to dress a dining table. The idea is that it should look exactly like every other dining table of that size – not just within that restaurant, but in every restaurant Lyons own. Kathleen has learned how to dress a table for two, for four, for eight. She has memorized the place of each glass, plate, fork, knife, spoon and trivet. Precision is called for, and precision is something Kathleen enjoys. The neat creases, the bright, cruel reflections of each glass, bottle, plate and cup, the mathematical creases of the tablecloths: these things have for her a nostalgic appeal. They remind her of the kitchen at home, blistering white, and of her mother.

  The idea behind all this precision is that a customer, seated at a four-seater in Piccadilly, might as well be seated at a four-seater in Holborn; that a customer might forget, seated at his table, that the restaurant has an actual location. The idea is that Lyons corner houses might become for their customers a single place, a unique, unmappable location. Behind everyday appearances – this is the idea – lies a better world; the world of the Lyons corner house.

  Tonight, in her room, in the dark, by the glow of distant harbour fires, she writes to Sage, Professor Arven, John, whatever it is he calls himself: ‘We survive because we pretend. Life is too rich, too complex, too uncertain. Life resists method. Life will not be examined. It will not be picked up and laid down.’

  And wakes up. The beautiful cadences of her letter evaporate on the air.

  Grim, determined, she gets up, turns on the light, checks the blackout and writes, for real this time:

  ‘Dear Prof. Arven, I have yet to receive a reply to my letter of 3rd inst.’

  The following evening after work, Kathleen finds the buses have been badly disrupted. She does not have money enough for the cinema tonight, so she decides to walk home. She walks along shattered streets, past twisted bicycles and ziggurats of shattered masonry, walls made of sandbags and windows criss-crossed with paper tape. The air, though dry, smells wet, a trick of the plaster dust that already reddens the sky as the day slides towards evening. As she goes, a magnificent sunset builds around her, reviving the city’s spirits: green and rose and deepest carmine, indigo and lemon; towers and vistas, cloudy bridges, dusty promenades. A city of spirit hangs over this city of stone.

  She passes her neighbourhood library – a handsome Edwardian building – and sees that a bomb has been dropped on it.

  The explosion has knocked the roof aside as though it were a lid, and the upper storey has come crashing down over the public rooms. The whole frontage has fallen away. Dislod
ged joists lie up against the remaining walls like pencils in a jar, confusing the geometry of the once orderly rooms. The walls are lined with books. The bomb has done them no harm, though the upper storey has crushed and buried the centre stacks completely.

  Kathleen is surprised to see six or seven men inside the ruined library, browsing the shelves. They are like her: ordinary people returning home from work. They wear hats and coats. They carry satchels and leather bags. They move past each other, abstracted, intent on the titles before them. Business as usual.

  A short, ill-favoured old man in a sort of quilted smoking jacket – something that went out of fashion long before she was born – opens his satchel and takes out a book. He surveys the stack. He locates the spot he was after, and slots his book back into its rightful place on the shelf.

  She says, ‘We survive because we pretend.’

  She is among them. She has joined them. She is browsing the books, tilting her head to read titles in the fading light. She is picking her way over loose boards, easing past strangers, murmuring ‘excuse me’ and ‘thank you’. Plaster crumbles underfoot. Index cards stir and flap at her ankles as she edges sideways along the shelves with slow, muted movements. Three tall, book-lined walls surround her, shielding her from too much reality, and slowly the fantasy, the browsers’ brave ‘as if’, takes hold.

  She reads: ‘Apart from its mode of projection, the construction of the space vessel offers little difficulty since it is essentially the same problem as that of the submarine. Naturally the first space vessels will be extremely cramped and uncomfortable, but they will be manned only by enthusiasts.’

  It is from the entry for the biologist J. B. S. Haldane, in an encyclopaedia of philosophy so large it has been published in two volumes: ‘A to K’ and ‘L to Z’. She glances back at the flyleaf and receives a shock. The editors’ names are printed there. J. B. Priestley is one, and underneath his name, in smaller type: J. D. Arven.