Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

The Tunnel

ALL THAT SPRING AND SUMMER Clancy and I lived on the third floor of the old grey-brick tenement block in what might have been — we never really knew — Deptford or Bermondsey, Rotherhithe or New Cross. It was cheap because the block was due for demolition in the autumn and all the tenants had notice to quit by September. Most of them had gone already, so that those who remained were like survivors camping in a ruin. The vacated rooms were broken into at night and became the sources of foul smells. The old cream paintwork of the stair-wells, which here and there had darkened like enormous nicotine stains, was daubed with aerosol slogans and obscenities, and all through that hot drought of a summer the dust and litter from the streets, old pages of newspapers and polythene bags found their way up the flights of stairs, even as far as the third floor.

We didn’t mind. It was all we could afford. We even relished the way we scooped out for ourselves a little haven, oblivious of the squalor around us. We were very young; we had only just left school. We were absorbed with each other, and we didn’t think about what we’d do in a month’s time, or two months’, or when the winter came or we had to find somewhere else to live. We made love insatiably, the way very young people in love can. And when that summer arrived, endlessly sunny and hot, we thought of it as a blessing on ourselves, despite the dust and the smells, because it was possible to live quite well in that room, with its scant furniture, draughty windows and twin gas ring, so long as the weather was good. We even saved on the few clothes we had between us, because, most of the time, with the dirty windows up and the hot air swimming in from the street, we wore nothing at all.

We had run away because that was the only way Clancy and I could go on seeing each other without Clancy’s parents stopping us. We hadn’t run far. Clancy’s parents lived in a big, elegant Regency house by the park in Greenwich, and we knew that by going a couple of miles away, into the kind of area they preferred to think didn’t exist, we’d be as safe as if we’d fled to the ends of the country. Clancy’s father was a sort of financial expert who acted in an advisory capacity to the government and knew people in the House of Lords, and her mother came from good, sound pedigreed stock. They were not the kind of people to drag the police into a hunt for their daughter. But it was not beyond them to employ some private agency to track us down. And this was one of the reasons why, despite the scorching weather, we seldom left our third floor room, and when we did we kept a sharp eye open for men in slow-moving cars hugging the kerb, who might suddenly pull up, leap out and bundle Clancy inside.

Clancy’s family was small. There were only Clancy herself, her mother and father and an ageing uncle who lived in seclusion in an old manor house in Suffolk where Clancy had spent summers when she was small. Clancy’s father was obsessively proud of the fact that he was descended from a once noble line which could be traced back to the reign of Henry VIII; and — like Henry VIII himself — he had turned cold, as Clancy grew up, towards his wife and daughter because they were a perpetual reminder that he had no son. There was nothing, apparently, he could do to change this fact; but he was dead-set on preventing the only remaining eligible member of the family from being absorbed into the riff-raff.

I only met Clancy’s mother and father once, and that was by accident one Saturday afternoon when Clancy had promised me her parents wouldn’t be back till late. I had gone to the house in Greenwich. We made love on Clancy’s bed, looked at her photo albums and listened to the Beach Boys. We were sitting under the vine in the conservatory and Clancy was urging me to sample her Dad’s stock of malt whisky, when her parents suddenly turned up, having changed their plans for the evening. Clancy’s father asked me in icy, eloquent tones who the hell I thought I was and told me to get out. It was as if my presence in the house had no connection whatsoever with Clancy, as if I were some random, alien intruder. He was a tall, poised, steel-haired man with an air of having had the way of dealing with such situations bred into him and of merely summoning it automatically when required. I remember thinking that he and Clancy’s mother, and perhaps Clancy too, belonged to some completely foreign world, a world that had ceased to exist long ago or perhaps had only ever existed in people’s minds; so that whenever I thought of Clancy’s parents, looking out from our tenement window, I had to make an effort to believe they were real.

My own parents were no obstacle to us. They had had me late in life, so there was a big gap between our ages, which, oddly enough, smoothed our relations. They did not care what I did with my life. They had a council house in Woolwich and no shining example to set me. I’d gone to a large comprehensive; Clancy had gone to a classy girls’ school in Blackheath; and we might never have known each other if it wasn’t for Eddy, a big, hulking, raw-faced boy, who later joined the Royal Artillery, who told me in his matter-of-fact way that he had robbed two girls from Clancy’s school of their virginity; and urged me to do the same. With rather less swagger, I followed Eddy’s bidding (“Tell them they’ll thank you for it afterwards”), but, unlike Eddy, I found the initial conquest wasn’t an end in itself.

Clancy’s parents soon found out — Clancy had a knack of defiant truthfulness. I don’t know what outraged them more: the knowledge that their daughter was no longer intact and the possible scandal of some schoolgirl pregnancy — or the mere fact that Clancy associated with a boy from a council estate. I knew what I would say to Clancy’s father if I ever had to face him. I would repeat to him something I’d read in the letters of Gauguin (my favourite artist at that time and the only artist I knew anything about). Gauguin says somewhere that the Tahitians believed, unlike Europeans, that young people fall in love with each other because they have made love, not the other way round. I would explain that Clancy and I were good, regular Tahitians. But when the opportunity arose that Saturday afternoon — despite the sun shining through the vine leaves in the conservatory and Clancy’s thin summer dress and the malt whisky in my head — Gauguin’s South Sea paradise, which was only an image for what I felt for Clancy, paled before the cold aplomb of her father.

But Clancy’s uncle did not share the parental disdain. This I discovered in about our third week in the tenement. Clancy had to go out now and then to draw money from her Post Office account, which was our sole source of income at that time. One day she returned with, of all things, a letter from her uncle. Apparently, she had written to him, explaining everything, confident of his trust, immediately after our flight, but for complete security had not given an address and had asked him to reply via a Post Office in New Cross. Clancy showed me the letter. It was written in a shaky hand and was full of fond platitudes and breezy assurances, with a certain wry relish about them, to the effect that Clancy had enough sense now to lead her own life.

I said: “If he’s so much on our side, why don’t we go to him?” And I had a momentary vision, in Bermondsey, of dappled Constable landscapes.

“That’s just where they’ll look for us first.”

“But he won’t tell them that you’ve got in touch.”

“No.”

And then Clancy explained about her uncle.

He had always had a soft spot for her and she for him, since the days when she used to play muddy, rebellious games round his estate in the summer. As she grew up (her uncle lost his wife and his health declined), it became clear that there were strong temperamental differences between him and her parents. He did not care for her father’s sense of dignity or for his precious concern for the family name. He would be quite happy, he said, to sink heirless beneath the Suffolk soil. And he disapproved of the way Clancy was being rigorously groomed for some sort of outmoded high society.

“So you see,” said Clancy, putting away the letter, “I had to tell him, didn’t I? It’s just what he’d want.”

She kissed the folded notepaper.

“And another thing”—she got up, pausing deliberately before she went on. “I know for a fact when Uncle dies I’ll get everything; he won’t leave a thing to Mum and Dad. So you see — we’re all right.”

She said this with a kind of triumph. I realised it was an announcement she must have been saving up till the right moment, in order to make me glad. But I wasn’t glad — though I put on a pleased expression. I’d never really reflected that this was what Clancy’s background meant — the possibility of rich legacies, and I had never seen myself as a story-book adventurer who, having committed a daring elopement, would also gain a fortune. Nevertheless, it wasn’t these things which disturbed me and (for the first time) cast a brief shadow over my life with Clancy. It was something else, something I couldn’t understand. Clancy stood, smiling and pleased, at the window with the sun coming in behind her. She was wearing jeans and one of those tops made from gauzy, flimsy materials which she liked, I think, precisely because when she stood in front of the light you could see through them. It was the first fine weather of the spring, the first time we had been able to lift up our window wide to let some of the stinking air from inside out and some of the less stinking air from outside in. We’d been living together for three weeks, fugitives in a slum. The way happiness comes, I thought, is as important as the happiness itself.

From our tenement window you could see all that was ugly about that part of London. Directly opposite, across the road, was a junior school — high arched neo-Gothic windows, blackened brickwork, a pot-holed asphalt playground surrounded by a wall with wire netting on top — which, like the tenement, was due to be pulled down at the end of the summer. It stood at the edge of an area, to the left as we looked from the window, which had already been demolished or was in the process of being demolished. Everywhere there were contractors’ hoardings, heaps of ruined masonry and grey corrugated metal fencing. Old blocks of terraced houses got turned into brick-coloured wildernesses over which dogs prowled and paths got trodden where people took short cuts. To the right, on the other side of the school, there was an odd, inexplicable path of worn grass with a stunted tree and a bench on it, and beyond that, on the other side of a side street with a few tattered shops, was another wasteland — of scrap yards, builders’ yards, half defunct factories and fenced-off sites which seemed to be depositories for cumbersome, utterly useless articles: heaps of car axles from which the oil ran in black pools, stacks of rusted oil drums, even a pile of abandoned shop-window dummies, their arms and legs sticking up like some vision from Auschwitz. Beyond this was the railway line to London Bridge on its brick arches, the tower blocks, precincts and flimsy estates which had sprouted from previous demolitions; while if you looked far round to the right you could see the nodding antennae of cranes by the Thames.

All this we could survey at leisure, but because we were on the third floor, when you lay on the bed (which we did most of the time) and looked out of the window, you saw only the sky. When the good weather came we lifted up the sash window high and moved the bed according to the position of the gradually shifting rectangle of sunshine, so that we could sunbathe most of the day without ever going out. We turned nice and brown and I told Clancy she was getting more and more like the cinnamon-coloured South Sea girls Gauguin painted.

We would lie looking up at the blue sky. Now and then we’d see flights of pigeons and gulls, or swallows swooping high up. All day long we could hear the noise from the street, the demolition sites and the breakers’ yards, but after a while we got accustomed to it and scarcely noticed it. We could tell time was passing by the periods of commotion from the school playground. We joked about our bed being a desert island, and made up poems about ourselves and our room in the style of John Donne.

I began to wish that when we’d hastily packed and fled I’d brought more books with me. All I had was my life of Gauguin and Sonnets, Lyrics and Madrigals of the English Renaissance which I’d borrowed from my English master at school and never given back. I thought of my old English master, Mr. Boyle, a lot now. He had a passion for Elizabethan poetry which he vainly tried to transmit to members of the fourth and fifth year, who laughed at him, I amongst them, and spread rumours that he was queer. Then in my last year, after I’d met Clancy, I suddenly began to appreciate his poems, their airy lucidity and lack of consequence. I think Mr. Boyle thought all his efforts were at last rewarded. He pressed books on me and wrote fulsome comments on my work. And I longed to tell him it was all only because of Clancy, because she was light and lucid like the poems — because we’d lost our innocence together but kept it, because we’d made love one wet Thursday in a secluded part of Greenwich Park …

I read aloud from Mr. Boyle’s book, lying naked in the sunshine on the bed. I wondered if he could have foreseen its being read like this. Clancy wriggled at bits she liked. A lot of the poets were obscure, little known men with names like George Turberville and Thomas Vaux. We tried to imagine what they had looked like and who the mistresses were they wrote to, and where they fucked them, in four-posters or in cornfields. Then Clancy said: “No, they were probably not like that at all. They were probably cold, scheming men who wanted positions at court and wrote poems because it was the done thing.” She would say sudden sharp, shrewd things like this as if she couldn’t help it. And I knew she was right.

“Like your Dad, you mean,” I said.

“Yes.” Clancy laughed. Then I told her how her Dad reminded me of Henry VIII, and Clancy said there was an old hollow tree in Greenwich Park where Henry VIII fucked Anne Boleyn.

At night, because of the heat and because we hardly moved during the day and only tired ourselves by making love, we would often lie awake till dawn. Clancy would tell me about her uncle’s estate in Suffolk. There was a crumbly red-brick house with tall chimneys and a stable yard, a lawn, a walled orchard and a decaying garden with a wood at the end. Through the wood and across a stretch of heath was the tail of an estuary, winding up from the sea. Marshes, river walls and oyster beds; the smell of mud and salt. There was a tiny wooden jetty with two rowing boats moored to it which were beached high in the mud when the tide went out, and in hot weather, at low tide, the sun cooked the mud so that when the water returned it was warm and soupy for swimming. In the marshes there were shelduck and red-shanks — once she had seen an otter — and in the wood there were owls which you could hear hooting at night from the house.

When I listened to Clancy describing things in such detail I would be amazed by the fact that she’d done all these things, years ago, and I’d never even known she existed. And I’d long for the impossible — to have gone down those same paths with her, watched the same marsh birds, swum in the same muddy water when she and I were little more than infants. As she rambled on we’d hear the trains clacking to and fro along the railway. Once, just as she was talking about the owls in the wood we heard a ship hooting on the Thames. And for most of the night there’d be a strange mixture of noises from the tenement itself: radios and TVs and people arguing, an old man’s cough and the sound of bottles smashing, the noise the kids made invading the stairs and the yells and threats when somebody tried to drive them out. But we hardly let this bother us, and, even in that area of London, there came a time when, while Clancy babbled, you could imagine that outside there were mud-flats and marshes and meadows with dykes and sluice-gates; just as at other times, when we’d try to remember lines from Romeo and Juliet which we’d both done for “O” level, we’d try to imagine that instead of the scrap yards and junk tips there were the piazzas and bell-towers of Verona.

“What’s your uncle like?” I asked Clancy.

“He’s a randy old bastard who can’t do anything about it because he’s stuck in a wheel-chair.” Clancy smiled. “You’d like him, he’s like you.”

I said I didn’t have a wheel-chair.

“I didn’t mean that.”

“How old is he?”

“Seventy-three.”

“What’s he do?”

“In weather like this, he sits out in the orchard with this nurse in a bikini who brings him drinks. He used to paint a bit — watercolours — before his illness.”

I was lying on my front and Clancy was stroking the backs of my legs. I couldn’t imagine myself in a wheel-chair.

“How ill is he? Seriously?”

“Pretty ill. It’s the winters. It gets cold there. The house isn’t in such wonderful condition, you know.” I realised that Clancy was speaking as if of some future home. “He nearly died last winter.”

I pictured Clancy’s uncle sitting out in the orchard with his voluptuous attendant, enjoying perhaps his last summer.

I said, “Do you think he’s happy.”

“I think he’s happier now — since my aunt died — than he’s ever been. But then he’s an invalid.”

When Clancy became exhausted with talking about Suffolk she would ask me about Gauguin. I said he was a French stock-broker who gave up his job to be a painter. He left his wife and family and went to Tahiti, where he lived with a native girl, painted his greatest pictures and died, in poverty, of syphilis.

One day Clancy was gone a long while on one of her trips to the Post Office. I was worried. I thought her parents’ spies had swooped at last. But then she returned, sweating, with the money, a carrier-bag of shopping and a lumpy brown paper parcel. “Here,” she said, kissing me and taking off her blouse, “For you.” Inside the parcel there were six assorted pots of watercolour paint and a set of three brushes.

“You ought to be a painter,” Clancy said. And after a moment’s pause, “—or a poet.”

“But you shouldn’t have bought this. We need the money.”

“It’s my money.”

“But — I don’t know how to paint. I haven’t painted since I was a kid.”

“That doesn’t matter. You’ve got the feel for it. I can see. You ought to be an artist.”

I thought of explaining to Clancy that admiring an artist or two wasn’t the same as possessing their gifts.

“But what am I going to paint on? I’ve got nothing to paint on.”

Clancy quickly gulped down a mug of water from the sink and waved her hand. “There’s all that — and all that.” She pointed to two walls of the room from which the wallpaper had either been stripped back to the bare plaster or peeled of its own accord. “You can use the draining board as a palette. If you like, you can paint me.” And she pulled off the rest of her clothes and bounced onto the bed, hair tossed back, one knee raised, one arm extended.

So I began to paint the walls of our room. I quickly forgot my initial doubts at Clancy’s whim and made up for them with gratitude. I suppose I was really flattered and touched by the idea Clancy had of me, which only corresponded to some idea I secretly nursed of myself, as an artist, producing wonders in some garret.

My painting lacked skill, and the subjects were predictable — palm trees, paradisial fruits, lagoons, native girls in flowered sarongs, all stolen from Gauguin. But I knew what I was really painting and Clancy knew what I was really painting and what it meant. Each native girl was intended to be Clancy; and each one, it was true, was slightly less crude and ungainly than its predecessor, so that one day I really hoped to capture Clancy in paint. All through the early part of June I painted the first wall, while Clancy wrote to her uncle, describing my great talents and saying how few people truly understood life. To be happy and occupied seemed easy. You found a place of your own and made love. You rented a squalid room in Bermondsey and painted Polynesian scenes on the wall. Clancy’s more extravagant fancies didn’t seem to matter. Once she wrapped her arms round my neck as I cleaned my brush: “I had a letter from Uncle today. When we go to Suffolk you’ll paint there, and write poems, won’t you? All the painters painted there.” I didn’t answer this. As for being a poet, I didn’t get beyond Sonnets and Lyrics of the English Renaissance. I was content as we were.

Then things changed. Nothing fundamental altered, but a host of minor things that had never bothered us before began to affect us. The dirt of our room and the smells of the tenement which we’d been heedless of up till then because we were preoccupied with each other, began to irritate us. This was odd because it was just at the time when I was transforming our little hole into a miniature Tahiti that we began to sense the filth around us. Before, we’d tipped all our rubbish, empty tin cans, milk cartons and vegetable peelings, into old grocery boxes till they overflowed, and we’d hardly noticed the stink or the swarms of flies. Now we bickered over whose turn it was to carry the rubbish boxes down to the dustbins at street level. We felt our lack of changes of clothes, even though we seldom wore any. Before, we used to wash clothes, because it was cheaper than the launderette, in an old two-handled zinc tub we’d found propped under the sink; and we’d washed ourselves in the same way, one of us sitting in, laughing, while the other tipped water over us. Now Clancy began to hanker after showers and proper laundering. Somehow we stopped thinking the same things together and wanting to do the same things at the same time — make love, eat, sleep, talk — which had meant that in the past there was never any need for decisions or concessions. Now the slightest things became subjects for debate. We began to get insecure about being found out and dragged back to the homes we’d left, even though we’d survived for nearly three months; and at night the noises in the tenement, the scufflings and shouts on the stairs made us nervous. Clancy would start up, clutching herself—“What’s that?! What’s that?!”—as if the police or some mad killer were about to burst in at the door.

Even the endless sunshine, which was such a blessing to us, began to feel stale and oppressive.

We were aware at least of one, unspoken reason for all this. Our money was dwindling. The figures in Clancy’s Post Office book were getting smaller and smaller and the time was coming when we’d have to get jobs. We’d both understood that this would happen sooner or later. It wasn’t so much the having to work that depressed us, but the thought that this would change us. We wanted to believe we could go out to work and still keep our desert island intact. But we knew, underneath, that work would turn us into the sort of creatures who went to work: puppets who only owned half their lives — and we’d anticipated this by stiffening already and becoming estranged from each other. Maybe this was a sort of defeatism. Clancy started looking at the job columns in newspapers. We’d existed quite happily before without newspapers. It was a sign of how different things were that I’d watch her for some time sitting with the pages spread in front of her, before asking the needless question: “What are you doing?”

“Looking for jobs. What’s it look like?”

“If anyone’s going to get a job it’ll be me,” I said, tapping a finger against my chest.

Clancy shook her head. “No,” she said, licking a finger to turn over a page, “You’ve got to perfect your painting. You mustn’t give that up, must you?”

She really meant this.

“You’re not going out to work while I piss about here,” I said, feeling I was adopting a stupid pose.

Then we had a row — Clancy accused me of betraying ideals — the upshot of which was that we both went out the next Monday looking for jobs, feeling mean and demoralised.

There was a dearth of employment, especially for school-leavers. But it was possible to find casual, menial jobs, which was all we wanted. Clancy got a job as a waitress in a pizza house near the Elephant and Castle. I went there once and bought a cup of coffee. She was dressed up in a ridiculous white outfit, with a white stiff cap with a black stripe and her hair pinned up like a nurse. On the walls of the pizza house there were murals with pseudo-Italian motifs which were worse than my pseudo-Gauguins. I looked at Clancy at the service counter and thought of her lying on the bed in the sunshine and swimming in the muddy creek in Suffolk and how she’d said: “Paint me.” It was so depressing that when she brought me my coffee we said “Hello” to each other as if we were slight acquaintances.

I got a job in a factory which made lawn-mowers. Bits of lawn-mower came along on moving racks and you had to tighten up the nuts with a machine like a drill on the end of a cable. This was all you did all day. It turned you into an imbecile.

Three or four weeks passed. We’d come in, tired and taciturn after work, and spend the evening getting on each other’s nerves. We thought, once we left our jobs behind then we’d return to our own life. But it wasn’t like that. We brought our jobs home with us as we brought home the day’s sweat in our sticky clothes. Clancy was still serving frothy coffee; I was still tightening nuts. Clancy would slump on the bed and I’d stare out the window. Work seemed a process of humiliation. I looked at the scrap-heaps and demolition sites which once we’d been able to ignore, which we’d even transformed into a landscape of happiness. I thought: We’d escaped, in the midst of everything we’d escaped; but now the tower blocks and demolition sites were closing in. I made an effort to keep cheerful. I read out poems from the book and I explained to Clancy how I was going to finish my mural. But she didn’t listen. She no longer seemed to care about my artistic talents. All she seemed interested in were the letters from her uncle, and when one arrived she’d read it over in a lingering, day-dreamy way and not let me look at it. It was as if she were trying to make me jealous.

Once, as I was flipping through Sonnets and Lyrics, I came across a poem I hadn’t noticed before. “Here,” I said, “listen to this.” And I read aloud:

Sweet Suffolk owl, so trimly dight,

With feathers like a lady bright …

I thought she would like it.

She whipped the book from my hands and flung it across the room. It landed under the sink, near the zinc tub. It was a good, solid book; and it wasn’t even mine. I watched the pages come away from the binding at the spine.

“It’s crap! All the poems in that book are crap! Artificial, contrived crap!”

She said this with such venom that I believed her at once. A whole reservoir of delight was instantly poisoned.

“Like those paintings,” she said, getting up and gesturing. “They’re crap too! Sentimental, affected, second-hand crap! They’re not even well painted!”

And at once I saw my Tahitian girls — each one a would-be Clancy — for what they really were: stumpy, stick-legged ciphers, like the drawings of a four-year-old.

“Crap, crap! All of it!”

Then she began to cry, and brushed me away when I tried to comfort her.

It was now past the middle of July. Everything was turning bad. Then, to cap matters, I had an accident with a saucepan of boiling water and scalded myself badly.

It happened needlessly and stupidly. The ledge on which our two gas rings rested was only a rickety affair, held up by wall brackets. The plaster below, into which the wall brackets were screwed, was soft and crumbly and we knew there was a danger of the ledge giving way. I kept saying to Clancy I’d fix it. One day we were making kedgeree. Clancy had put the saucepan on to boil for the rice and I was bending down to scrap something into the rubbish box which was just to the left of the gas rings. Clancy suddenly said, “Look out!” A great chunk of plaster had fallen out of the wall and the left hand bracket was hanging on only by the tips of the screws. Instead of doing the sensible thing and jumping out of the way, I reached to hold up the ledge. Just as I did so the bracket came away and most of the contents of the boiling saucepan slopped over my hands.

I did a sort of dance round the room. Clancy yelled at me to put my hands under the tap. “Cold water! It’s the best thing!” she said, trying to keep calm. But although I knew she was quite right, I didn’t want to do this at first. I wanted to scream and curse and ignore Clancy and frighten her. It was a kind of revenge for her deriding my painting.

“Fuck! Fuck!” I said, waving my hands and hopping.

“The tap!” said Clancy.

“Shit! Shit!”

The pain was bad at first, but it was nothing to the pain that began about an hour later and went on for hours. By this time I was sitting astride a chair by the sink, my arms plunged into cold water, my forehead pressed against the sink rim, while Clancy kept topping up the water, which would start to steam after a while, and sponged my upper arms. It wasn’t pain alone, though that was bad enough. I started to feel shivery and sick — Clancy put a blanket round my shoulders. At the same time we were both silently thinking that perhaps I had a serious scald which needed proper medical treatment. This frightened and dismayed us. It wasn’t just that we feared that a visit to a hospital would lay us open to discovery — we were already worried that our jobs might do that. It was more that going to a doctor would be a sort of admission of helplessness. Up till now everything we’d done, even getting jobs, had been done independently, of our own choosing, and hard though things had got, nothing had made us feel we couldn’t survive by ourselves.

“I’m scared,” Clancy said.

“It’s all right. I’ll be all right,” I said, my face pressed against the wet enamel of the sink. “I shan’t go to any doctor.”

Clancy sponged my arms.

“I didn’t mean it about your painting. Really. And I didn’t mean to throw your book at the wall. I was just depressed.”

Most of that night we sat like that, I slumped over the sink and Clancy sponging. I was too much in pain to sleep. Whenever I took my hands from the water they felt as if they were being scalded a second time. Clancy tried to say reassuring things and now and then her hand tightened on my shoulder. We listened to the trains clacking up and down and the strange noises of the tenement. Only at about four did we attempt to go to bed, and then Clancy half filled the zinc tub with water and placed it by the bed, so that I lay on one side with my arms dangling into water — though I didn’t sleep. Clancy nestled with her arm round me. I felt her doze off very quickly. I thought: In spite of the pain I’m in, in spite of our lousy jobs, in spite of everything, we are happier now, and closer than we’ve been for several weeks.

In the morning there were huge pearly blisters on my hands. The fingers had mostly escaped unharmed but the palms, the wrists and parts of the backs of the hands were in a hideous state. The pain had eased but the slightest touch or trying to bend my wrists brought it back instantly. Clancy got up, went out to a chemist and came back with various things in tubes and bottles including a thick, slimy cream the colour of beeswax. She made a phone call to her pizza house and gave some excuse about not coming in. The fact was that though I could waggle my fingers I could not close my blistered palms and Clancy had to spoon-feed me and literally be my hands. I knew the important thing with burns was to keep the blistered area free of infection and to let the skin repair by exposure to the air. So for two days we sat, out of the direct sunlight, my hands held out in front of us like a pair of gruesome exhibits, waiting for the blisters to go down. Things were like they were when we’d first run away and got our room.

“Will it leave a scar?” Clancy said.

“Probably,” I said.

“I won’t mind.”

“Good.”

“There could be worse places for it.”

Even when, on the fourth day, Clancy went back to work (I insisted that she did — I could just hold a spoon by this stage, and I was worried she’d lose her job if she left it any longer), the evenings were somehow special. They were not like the dull, fretful evenings we had had of late. Clancy would come in, her waitress work over, and only want to know about my hands. We discussed them and fussed over them like some third thing which tied us together. It was as if we had a child. As they began to get better we started to make grim, extravagant jokes at their expense:

“The blisters’ll burst and pus will go flying all round the room.”

“They’ll shrivel up into nothing.”

“They’ll go manky and mouldy and have to be cut off — then you’ll be a cripple and I won’t love you any more.”

I thought: When my hands are better, when I’m no longer an invalid — this happiness will fade.

But though, after a week, my hands were no longer very painful, it was some time — over three weeks — before the skin fully recovered and hardened. Throughout this period I sat idle in the room all day and I noticed, each evening, how Clancy’s mood dulled, how she became tired again and begrudging. She saw this herself and tried to resist it. Once she came in with another brown paper parcel. It was a book—Love Poetry of the Seventeenth Century. She had made a special trip in her lunch break to get it.

“It can’t be much fun sitting here all by yourself all day.”

We had moved the bed permanently under the window now, and I used to sit, propped up against the metal bed-head, looking out, like some dying man on a verandah, taking his last view of the world. I thought about lots of things — in between snatches of Herrick and Crashaw — during those long, hot days. Of the lawn-mower factory — someone else would have my job by now and perhaps no one would know I’d ever been there. Of my parents and Clancy’s parents; whether they really worried about us or had forgotten us. Of Gauguin dying in Tahiti. And I thought about Clancy’s uncle. Clancy hadn’t had a letter from him for a while (she usually had one about once a week), and this worried her. I imagined him sitting, just as I was sitting, a cripple, in his wheel-chair in the sunshine. I wondered whether he really did enthuse about Clancy and our running away or whether it was just the foolish, romantic notion of a tired, slightly dotty old man who couldn’t move. Perhaps, in his enthusiasm, he merely lied for Clancy’s sake, because he was really too sick and worn out to care. I thought about the money that Clancy said he had. I didn’t believe in this money. The money of people with big houses in the country always proves to be non-existent. Or it all gets accounted for in debts and duties. In any case, the money made me uneasy. The more I thought, the more suspicious and sceptical I became. I found I couldn’t imagine the orchard wall, the creek with the jetty. I even began to believe that Clancy’s uncle and his house didn’t exist; they were some fiction invented by Clancy as an incentive — like Clancy’s father imagining he was descended from the aristocracy.

I read from the book Clancy had bought me — Lovelace, Suckling, the Earl of Rochester — but my attention wandered. I became irritable and sullen. I had to sit with my hands inside a plastic carrier-bag because otherwise flies would come buzzing round settling on my cracked and blistered skin. Every time I wanted to turn a page I had to take out my hands, wave away the flies and use just my finger tips on the book. If I wanted to shift my position I had to do so without using my hands. Simple things became complicated feats. I would sit pondering the absurdity of my position: stuck on a bed with my hands in a polythene bag, reading Lovelace to the sound of bulldozers, half surrounded by the painting (there was still a lot of wall to go) which I was incapable of continuing. And from this I’d leap to wider absurdities. What were we doing in a condemned tenement in Bermondsey? What would become of us in the future?

“You’ve let the cover curl up in the sun.”

Clancy had come in. She had her tired, waitress face.

“I know,” I said. “Sorry.”

I used to watch the school across the road; the kids coming and going in the morning and afternoon and streaming into the playground at breaks. It was getting near the time they broke up for the summer; then the school would close for good and the demolition men would move in. Through one of the tall windows, opposite but a little below our room, I could see the teacher standing before the blackboard, but because of the level of the window I couldn’t see his seated class. It looked as if he was speaking and gesticulating to no one. I watched him struggling to communicate with his invisible audience, waving his arms and raising his voice, and I felt sorry for him. He made me think of Mr. Boyle, who even now would be offering Sidney and Spenser to the fifth year, who were more interested in Rod Stewart and Charlton Athletic. It seemed ages since I left school, though it was only a year. I thought of all my old school friends and what they were doing, whether they had jobs or not. I thought of Eddy. He’d somehow disowned me as soon as I got interested in poetry. I wondered if there were units of the Royal Artillery in Northern Ireland. I wondered if Eddy was sitting in an armoured car in the Falls Road thinking of Mr. Boyle.

In the third week of July the school closed and the din from the playground ceased. Almost immediately several council vans turned up and took away the interior furnishings. Some of the equipment in the kitchen was dismantled and some old fold-up desks were stacked in the playground. Then the vans drove away, leaving the school like a forlorn fort amidst the besieging demolition sites. I asked myself if the kids who had gone to the school cared that it was going to be flattened. I saw some of them sometimes, playing games over the demolition sites, rooting about amongst the rubbish heaps, setting fire to things and being chased off by the site workers.

Then one day, only about a fortnight after the school closed, there were two boys in the school playground. They were walking around, looking at the heap of desks and peering through the wired ground-floor windows. I was puzzled as to how they’d got there. Then I saw the head of a third boy — and a fourth — appear over the playground wall in the far left corner where it joined the school building. There seemed to be a loose section of the wire netting above the wall, which could be lifted back and squeezed under, and although the wall was a good ten feet, the pile of desks in the corner made it possible, even for a boy of eleven or so, to lower himself down. In a short while there were five boys in the playground, mooching about in grubby jeans and T-shirts.

Their first impulse was to ransack everything. I watched them try to force their way into the school building through the big door from the playground. When this failed, they picked up some old lengths of piping left by the council workers and, poking them through the metal grilles over the windows, began smashing the panes. They used the same bits of piping to hack up lumps of asphalt from the playground, which they hurled at the upper windows. The noise they made was lost in the general noise of demolition. One of them climbed up onto the roof of one of the two small lavatory buildings abutting the school wall and, with the aid of a drain pipe, tried to reach the second-floor windows — but climbed down when he realised he would be visible from street level. Then they started to dismantle the lavatories themselves — crude little temporary buildings made from flimsy prefabricated materials, with corrugated asbestos roofs.

I wondered whether these were the same kids who broke into the tenement and set fire to the litter on the stairs. They came the next day, and the day after that, and the next day again. It seemed odd that they should return at all to the school — like released prisoners going voluntarily back to prison. They stripped the lavatories bare so that the cisterns, bowls and rusty urinals were exposed, and these became the subjects of scatological frenzies. They started to break up some of the desks from the pile in the corner. One day I noticed them throwing about something soft and dark which they had discovered on the asphalt. They were hurling it at each other’s faces and laughing. I realised it was a pigeon, a sooty-feathered London pigeon that must have fluttered very recently into the playground to die. They kept tossing it at each other; until one of them picked it up by the wing, raised it high and jerked his arm hard so that the wing came off in his hand. They all laughed. He did the same with the second wing. Then they began a mad, yelling, directionless game of football, kicking the pigeon’s body across the asphalt and against the playground walls. The grey lumps of bird turned a dark, purply red. The game ended when one of the boys kicked the bird unintentionally over the playground wall. Nobody seemed interested in retrieving it.

This was on the third afternoon. After the game with the pigeon they grew listless and lethargic. They sat and sprawled about on the broken-up asphalt, now and then gouging up lumps of it and throwing them aimlessly. The sun blazed down. They looked like real prisoners now, idle and demoralized inside the high walls. I thought: They’ve had enough; they’ll go now — their old playground holds nothing for them.

But they didn’t go. They re-appeared the next morning. It was as if there had been some over-night resolution. Between them, they had a pick-axe, a shovel and a long-handled fork. Perhaps they had been stolen from one of the building sites. They began to discuss something in the near right-hand corner of the playground, looking at the ground and marking out imaginary lines with their feet. Then one of them lifted the pick-axe and, rather clumsily at first, began hacking at the asphalt. It was difficult to see all this. Even with my high vantage point, the near wall partially obscured them. But it was obvious they were digging a hole. When one had wielded the pick-axe for a few minutes another would take over, and at intervals one of them would scrape away the dislodged asphalt and earth with the shovel. The unoccupied ones sat around, looking on silently and intently.

I wondered what all this meant. By mid-day they had dug a hole deep enough to come up to their shoulders and there was a substantial heap of earth on the asphalt. Two of them went off and returned later with other tools — trowels, garden forks, a bucket. All of a sudden, I understood. They were digging a tunnel. The hole was perhaps seven or eight feet from the right hand wall. If they dug towards it and for about the same distance beyond it they would emerge in the little triangle of grass — now almost worn away or dried up by the sun — with the solitary bench on it.

I watched them work on all that afternoon and the next morning. They reached the tricky point where they had to turn the angle of the hole so that they could start to dig horizontally towards the wall. Why were they doing it? Was it a game? Had they transformed the playground, in their minds, into some prison camp, patrolled by armed guards and watch-dogs? Their task was too strenuous for a game, surely. And yet, if it wasn’t a game, it was absurd: They were trying to escape from a place they had entered — and could leave — at their own free will. Suddenly, I wanted them to succeed.

“Look Clancy—” I said. Clancy had come in from work. She had a carton of yoghurt with her. She sat down, ripped off the foil and began eating without speaking. “—a tunnel.”

Clancy looked out of the window. “What tunnel?” All she could see was a pile of earth in the playground.

She licked at her yoghurt, bending her face over it.

“A tunnel. The kids are digging a tunnel in the playground.”

“That’s a stupid thing to do.”

I didn’t explain. We didn’t talk much to each other in the evenings now. It seemed an effort.

For several days I watched them dig. I forgot my hands, my irritation, my uselessness. From where I sat, I could see the goal of their labours — the patch of grass to the right of the wall — whereas they could not. I surveyed their exertions like a god. But there was much that I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see how far the tunnel had progressed — all I could see was the expanding heaps of earth and, every few minutes, a boy emerging from the entrance hole, gasping and smeared with soil, and another taking his place. I began to have fears for them. Might the whole thing cave in? Had they dug deep enough to go beneath the foundations of the wall? How were they managing to breathe and to extract the earth as they dug? But now and then I would glimpse things that reassured me: odd bits of wood — fragments of desks and the torn-down lavatories — being used for shoring, lengths of hose-pipe, a torch, plastic bags on the ends of cords. On the asphalt over the estimated line of the tunnel they marked out a broad lane in chalk where, clearly, no one was to stand. Their ingenuity, their determination enthralled me. I remembered the pigeon they had kicked round the playground. But I worried about other things that might still thwart them. Might they run into a gas main and be forced to stop? Might they simply give up from exhaustion? And if they overcame all this, might the council men or the demolition workers arrive before they had time to finish? The more I thought of all these things, the more it seemed that their escape was real: that there was a conspiracy of forces against them and some counter-force in the boys themselves.

I did not want to imagine them failing.

I said to Clancy: “My hands will be better soon.”

“Oh — really. That’s good.”

“It could have been worse. Think of all the worse things that could have happened.”

“That’s right — look on the bright side.”

We were quite apart now, wrapped in ourselves. Clancy spent all her time sweating in the pizza house or brooding over her uncle and his absent letters, and I spent all my time obsessed by the tunnel.

It was nearing the middle of August. The sun kept shining. The evening papers Clancy sometimes brought home spoke of droughts and water restrictions. People were complaining of the fine weather. They would have complained just as much if the summer had been wet. On the little triangular plot by the school the thin grass had turned a straw colour and the earth was hard and cracked. I kept watch on this patch of ground now. At any moment I expected the tunnellers to break surface. In the corner of the playground the diggers seemed to be getting excited. The nearer the moment came, the more I exaggerated the dangers of discovery and I willed the council men to delay one more day. I thought of the difficulty of digging up, entombed by earth, against the hard, baked top-soil.

And then, one afternoon, it happened. It seemed odd that it should happen, just like that, without fanfares and announcements. Suddenly, a segment of cracked soil lifted like a lid, only about five feet from the outer face of the wall. A trowel poked upwards, and a hand, and then, after a pause in which the earth lid rocked and crumbled, a head thrust into the air in a cloud of dust. It wore an expression of serene joy as if it had surfaced in a new world. It lay perched for some time on the ground, as if it had no body, panting and grining. Then it let out a cry of triumph. I watched the head drag out shoulders and arms, and a body behind it; and then the four on the other side of the wall disappear one by one into the hole and re-appear, struggling out, on the grass triangle. No one seemed to see them — the traffic went by heedlessly, the bulldozers whined and growled. It was as if they had been transformed and were invisible. They brushed themselves down and — like climbers on a mountain peak — shook each other’s hands. And then, they simply ran off — down the adjacent side street, past the boarded up shops and the empty terraces — covered in earth, clasping each other and flinging their fists ecstatically into the air.

Clancy came in about an hour later.

“Clancy,” I said, “Clancy, I want to tell you something—” But she was waving an envelope at me, a long white envelope with black print on it. Her face was strangely agitated, as if she might be either pleased or upset.

“Look,” she said.

“Clancy, Clancy—”

“Look at this.”

She took the letter out of the envelope and placed it in front of me. It bore the heading of a firm of solicitors in Ipswich. The letter began with condolences and mentioned the “sad death” of Clancy’s uncle, as if this were something that Clancy should already be aware of, and then went on to speak of “our late client’s special and confidential instructions.” The gist of it was that Clancy’s uncle was dead and Clancy had been left the larger part of his money and property, subject to its being held in trust till she was twenty-one. There were vague, guarded statements about the exact scope of the legacy and a reference to “outstanding settlements,” but a meeting with Clancy was sought as soon as possible.

“Well — what do you think?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“Sorry about your uncle.”

We looked at each other without speaking. I didn’t know what else to say. I took Clancy’s hand in my own, half-healed, scabrous hand.

I said: “Clancy, it’s your day off tomorrow. Let’s go out. Let’s go out and get a train to somewhere in the country, and talk.”