Ruins

Restorations

‘I shall never be able to look back on the funeral with any pleasure,’ Rose said, gloomily. ‘This just about ruins the day.’

She had been standing beside the car, the poor defunct car, with her arms akimbo; now she climbed into the back seat and closed the door firmly, not slamming it but shutting it loudly enough to express a finite but not negligible amount of disgust.

Billing made no answer. He stood where he was, hands in pockets in front of the car, regarding the scenery.

The stretch of road was deserted, apart from an occasional lorry growling by. They were stuck somewhere north of London. No building was in sight. Trees lined the road, with fields beyond. They were waiting on the northbound side of the road, in a lay-by into which they had pushed the Austin. Tall trees, firs and ruinous pines a century old, formed themselves up into untidy woodland beside them. It was almost dark. Minute by minute the air thickened.

The breakdown people should arrive at any time. Hugh did not permit himself to say the words, knowing that he had spoken the sentence aloud before. It would only annoy further the woman he wanted to console. But the garage was being a long while coming. He had had to walk three miles to a phone box to summon them.

He made an effort now to stay in touch with Rose, strolling over to her window and saying, in firmly cheerful tones, ‘I’m sorry, I’m no good at dealing with car engines. I expect it’s the armature again.’

Rose remained looking down. ‘I know, Hugh. You’re the dreamer.’ She had flattened all nuances from the remark, so that only the words remained, spiritless between them.

Billing turned his back, resuming a contemplation of the roadside copse. It was a chilly February day and the sun had already set behind the trees. While the man and woman waited by the car, the hectic colours of day’s end had died from the sky. Now only muted tones remained: shades of oyster, lemon, pearl and then, nearer the horizon, a series of greys and tones neither grey nor blue. The rough trunks of the trees presented themselves in silhouette against this backdrop, providing an avenue towards the distance.

It seemed to Billing that from this arrangement of colours and space something spoke to him, addressed him gravely yet comfortingly. He felt an answer arising in himself. Outwardly he was mute, his usual unkempt self contained within the dark suit he had bought especially for Gladys Lee’s funeral.

He thought, I’m a funny fellow. I wonder if Rose feels all the sensations I do? He was too shy to ask her directly, suspecting that the answer could be deduced – the answer he had found throughout life, that no one felt things as he did. Of course, old Gladys had done, no denying that. But she had become quite gaga towards the end.

It grew darker yet. He watched the great drama through the trees as if it would never happen again. Rose climbed out of the car and begged him to get in, in tones the over-strained patience of which suggested a mother’s tact with a wayward child.

‘I bet it’s the armature. And the fan belt,’ he said.

They sat in the back seat, holding hands.

Darkness had closed in definitively when headlights appeared and a vehicle pulled into the lay-by. Billing jumped out and went over to the cab.

‘Watson’s garage?’

‘I’m Watson.’ The driver was a nondescript man in overalls with a mass of uncombed hair, his plain face made more shapeless by the cigar wedged into one corner of his mouth.

‘That smells like a good cigar,’ said Billing.

‘It’s a Fischer Florett, mate. You can’t buy them in this country. I buy a supply of them when I go on holidays in Switzerland.’

‘It makes a change to see a man smoking a good cigar nowadays.’

‘What’s the problem with your vehicle?’ As Watson spoke, he emerged from his cab. He was a disappointingly small person, his round head hardly coming up to Billing’s chest. Without waiting for an answer to his question, he stomped off to look at the car for himself.

Rose had emerged from the rear of the Austin and said hello to Watson.

‘You two been to a funeral, then?’ he asked, opening up the bonnet, again without waiting for an answer. Rose went over to Billing and took his arm. They stood helplessly while Watson shone his torch and peered about in the engine, muttering as he did so.

‘It’s the armature, I think,’ Billing told him.

Watson eventually slammed down the bonnet and went back to his truck. ‘Major trouble, mate. Didn’t you never have that thing serviced? It’s leaking oil from every joint and your cylinders have seized.’

He operated a series of levers on the side of his truck. A hook descended, which he secured under the Austin. He then hitched the car up until only its back wheels remained on the ground.

‘Better climb in the cab with me,’ he said. ‘’Less you want to stay here all night.’

They squeezed in the front beside him and had the benefit of the Fischer Florett all the way back to the garage, which stood on a bleak crossroads at the edge of a village.

It was late when they reached home in a hired car.

‘What a way to finish up a funeral!’ Rose exclaimed, as she made them some tea.

‘It turned out better for us than for Gladys,’ Billing said, grinning.

Prodding the teabags, Rose said, ‘Fancy the car breaking down. And two hundred pounds’ worth of repairs. I hope that man Watkins is honest.’

‘At least we didn’t come to any harm. Watson.’

‘Watson or whatever. Hugh, I think you enjoy breakdowns, I think your whole life is broken down.’

He was humble with her because she had really remade his life; but then he was humble with everyone.

‘I’ve never achieved smartness, like you. My physique wasn’t made for it. I admire the way you dress, Rose. Don’t let me drag you down to my standards.’

She kissed him as she handed over his mug of tea. ‘Must Do Better. Where are we going to find a spare couple of hundred pounds? We’ve still got to pay for this carpet.’

‘Something will turn up.’

‘I could cheerfully kill you, sometimes.’

He was already on his way next morning to the garden centre where he worked when the post arrived. It consisted in one letter only. Rose opened it. The letter came from a solicitor in Islington, announcing that the late Mrs Gladys Lee had left all her estate to Hugh Frederick Billing.

It was five years since Hugh Billing had first met Rose in the London supermarket where she worked. She left her husband when she discovered through a friend that he was having an affair with a woman in the next street.

‘The very next street!’ she kept exclaiming. Billing wondered if she would have forgiven George Dwyer had the other woman lived three streets away; but he held his peace and discovered to his delight that she was prepared to live with him. Which she did without fuss.

‘I’m a decent working-class woman and I don’t expect a fat lot, Hugh,’ she told him. ‘A bit of courtesy and kindness and I’m yours.’

He remembered how courteous she always was with the girls in the supermarket. Together they looked for somewhere to live. Rose wanted to escape from London and George and eventually they found a rented flat in a side street in St Albans. He was perfectly happy in an expanding garden centre just outside town, while she worked as supervisor in a supermarket in Watford. Every Saturday he caught a bus in to London to go and see Gladys and spend the afternoon with her.

In that way he had witnessed the old lady’s gradual physical deterioration. Her nature remained much as ever, calm and slightly inclined to give orders; she was always pleased to see him, and Rose too, when Rose appeared. Rose, at first inclined to resent this usurper of Hugh’s free afternoons, also grew fond of the old lady and took her boxes of Rose’s Chocolates from the supermarket.

‘Without doing much, I am good for her,’ Billing used to say. ‘As her doctor heals her, so do I. It’s the company, the attention. We all need it.’

‘So you keep telling me,’ Rose said. She had been born in Manchester, but her parents had come to London when she was eleven.

‘But you see it’s been good for me, Rose, being good for someone else. We’ve each got benefit from the friendship.’ It had crossed his mind once or twice that there might be more rewards for him when she was gone; he dismissed the thought as avaricious and distasteful.

Gladys’s mental deterioration, when it came, was sudden and unremitting. She saw her room filling up with snow. Soon there were men of snow closing in on her armchair, men who would not or could not speak to her. Gladys whispered about these things from a stricken face which looked as if it was even then isolated in the middle of a terminal blizzard. After she was discovered wandering in the streets in her nightdress they took her to hospital. There most things were white and she died of it, after a screaming fit.

‘Wandering, just as I’ve spent my life wandering,’ Billing said with a shiver. But he was anchored at last, anchored by Rose, by the flat, by the fact that he now wore clothes she chose for him, by the fact that they were saving up for a bungalow of their own, that they had rented a TV set, that she cared for him enough to seek out a suitable diet so that the bugles no longer shrilled in his head, calling him away.

It was part of his new rootedness that he took to reading while Rose was sitting in front of the TV watching quiz games. From a second-hand bookseller in town he bought the longest and heaviest novels he could find: The Apes of God, Confessions of Felix Krull, The Good Companions, Anthony Adverse, Don Quixote – Billing read them indiscriminately, knowing nothing of their standing in the world. Later he graduated to non-fiction, reading with the same lack of discrimination he had once shown in other fields of endeavour.

Both he and Rose felt they were educating themselves. The neighbours were nice people but talked only about the garden and home wine-making.

Their wine itself was passable. Rose particularly liked the turnip and tea wine. Billing stuck to the potato, which he christened ‘Spirits of Spud’.

His wandering had ceased. The phantom bugles were silenced. His dream of that long journey down the lane had not recurred for – Billing could not recall how long. He ascribed its absence to the way in which the Piranesi engraving had brought both dream and contents to the light of consciousness.

When Billing and Rose drove to London again in her old Austin, repaired at great expense, to claim the house in Shepherd’s Bush which was now theirs, he at once took her upstairs to look at the engraving in Gladys’s bedroom. Rose was not greatly impressed.

‘Gloomy, isn’t it?’

She turned and flung open the window, then leaned out and regarded the cat-traversed gardens below.

‘Do you think you’d be happy here, Rose?’ Billing asked her broad back.

‘You’ve got to be tough. Be thankful for what you can get.’ She straightened and closed the window with a few thumps. ‘Sash cord’s gone. Shepherd’s Bush is a nice area. We’ll have to clear out all Gladys’s junk … Yes, it’s fine. I mean to say, like, beggars can’t be choosers.’

He liked her grudging ways, knowing the kind heart beneath. True, there were times when, harking back in memory to his days in the USA, he regretted that she had achieved Zero Life Style. Americans of even a non-affluent layer of society always achieved a Plus Life Style in some extraordinary way. Like Italians.

Rose had a collection of china horses – he had contributed one himself, a shiny coltish thing with brittle legs. But it could not be said that she was into china horses, as an American would have been. It remained simply a collective hazard on the mantlepiece, a somewhat forlorn reminder of a lost Rosey past which had contained fields and pastureage and idle summer afternoons.

So he put his arms round her, coat and all, and kissed her.

‘Don’t really mind where we live,’ she said, kissing him slowly, ‘as long as you keep slipping it up me.’

‘Oh, god,’ he groaned. ‘Don’t worry your pretty head about that.’

Downstairs, in the main room, he contemplated the chaise-longue.

‘We’ll have to get rid of that, for a start, Hugh … I like this long mirror, though.’

‘Nice, isn’t it?’ He looked in a drawer. Among the clutter of items he saw a birthday card with yachts on. He stared at the bookcase, pulling out the odd book, hoping for something to read.

‘We’ll have to get shot of that lot,’ Rose said behind him, indicating the orderly spines.

‘Not so fast. It’s nice to have books about.’

Some were in foreign languages: German, Swedish. There were several books bound in drab green and written by a man named Bengtsholm. Looking at an inscription in ink on the title page of one of them, he realised that Bengtsholm was Gladys’s husband. After his death, she had reverted to the use of her simple maiden name of Lee, Bengtsholm presenting too many obstacles to the insular English. Many of the books in the case had been his, or were actually written by him. Billing felt awed and excited.

He opened one called ‘Of Analytical Psychology’ and read, ‘Something must be left to your own mental efforts. You might consider what it means to be complete. People should not be deprived of the joy of discovering themselves. To be complete is a great thing. To talk of it is entertaining, but is no substitute for being it. Being complete, however you phrase it, is the main thing in life.’

He stuffed the book back, recoiling. In his mind was an image of that ladder falling and the body going with it. Complete? Psychology filled him with dread – yet it was a pleasurable dread. There were mysterious doors and possibilities, as he knew.

The Psyche and Dream Journeyings. Why not just Journeys? The title caught his eye as he was about to turn away. The Psyche and Dream Journeyings … He pulled it out. It was another great long unexplored volume, with clear print, thick paper, heavy binding and plenty of footnotes.

‘We’ll have to do something about the kitchen,’ Rose called. ‘I should reckon this here oven sailed with Noah on the Ark.’

They went out the back into the damp little garden, in which Gladys Lee had not walked for many months before her death. Most of it was down to grass. An old iron bath stood at the far end, under the grey slate-capped wall. Buddleias grew. There was a rockery covered with ferns. On the whole the soil seemed too poor to sustain weeds.

‘We could do better with this,’ Billing said, airily indicating the landscape. ‘Conifers at cost. A figure or two. Trellis. Clematis.’

‘Get old Frewin down here to help us,’ she said. Frewin was the name of their wine-making neighbours. They had a good laugh about that.

By the kitchen window was a dilapidated shed containing nothing but a broom and old linoleum. Unwanted things could be stored there and eventually they could have a car-boot sale with them.

They looked up at the slate roof, the peeling windows (bathroom window frosted half-way up), rusty gutters, wrinkled brickwork.

‘It’s ours!’ they said proudly, and hugged each other. ‘All ours! Wonderful!’

‘If we sell everything, it’ll bring us in enough cash to completely redecorate inside,’ she said. ‘George taught me how to hang wallpaper. I’m a dab hand at it. We’ll make it look all lovely and light and modern inside and banish Gladys’s ghost. Oh, it will be grand! Better than Buckingham Palace.’

‘I’ll paint the outside. We’ll need to get a long ladder.’ Inwardly, he was a bit sorry about banishing Gladys’s ghost. In some odd way, he longed to preserve everything as it was, in all the seedy pomp of yesterday; but he said nothing, recognising that ultimately Rose’s practicality would triumph over his nostalgia. Probably quite right, too, he said to himself.

Staring at the rockery, he ceased to listen to what she was saying concerning the hanging of wallpaper. A woodlouse was climbing up the slope between two shoulders of stone. A miniature avalanche of soil sent it slipping to the bottom of the slope but, undeterred, it tried again and eventually disappeared behind a brown frond of fern. One snowdrop was flowering in a hollow beside a boulder of clinker.

Weeks passed. Billing and his lady hugged themselves frequently as the realisation of their fortune sank in. It seemed as if they could never discuss it enough. To have a house of their own gave them security and, more than security, dreams.

Rose rearranged her week so that she could take Saturdays off as he did. On Friday nights, they’d drive away to London in the Austin, taking with them such food as jam tarts, pork pies, cakes, and taramasalata, to spend all weekend in Shepherd’s Bush, refurbishing the house, picnicking, chatting, calling to one another.

At the far end of the garden, by the old bath, Billing made a bonfire of various tatty pieces of carpeting while Rose scrubbed the floors of the house with disinfectant. Billing turned off the water supply at the mains and extracted an ancient cast-iron hot water tank from the cupboard next to the kitchen, replacing it with a more effective copper cylinder plumbed into what had been the kitchen broom-cupboard. The cupboard that was now empty he painted with emulsion paint and filled with shelves; so they acquired a pantry. A good secondhand refrigerator fitted neatly into it. Another hug was required when that was in place, and much self-congratulation.

Asleep in the double bed with Rose that night, Billing had a bad dream.

He and Rose lived in a great house which seemed to fill a whole countryside. The corridors went up hill and down dale like mountain paths. They were happy until a stern personage in grey and white uniform came to separate him from her. Doors slammed, mysterious winds blew.

He was taken to a confusing garden, flowerless and a muddle of small constructions. At the far end of it stood a little rundown building, guarded by wooden fences and gates. The personage led him into the building, saying that henceforth Billing had to live here.

It seemed that the building had once been a poultry-house. Although Billing did not wish to enter, the personage would brook no protests. It was a low one-storey place. The doors were stuck and opened only with difficulty, creaking as they did so.

The interior was worse than could be imagined. All was in tones of grey. The frosted windows were clouded with cobwebs. Mould and dust covered everything. The atmosphere was dense and fusty, while the floor appeared to be paved with decaying cheese. Billing found he could scarcely walk.

The personage (now very faint) said, ‘It will not be too bad.’ It then faded away and Billing was alone, shut in.

His feeling was one of intense grief. He wandered about without any fixed intention or plan of escape. Worse was to come. He found himself in an interior room, more distressing than the others, more suffocating.

The room was ill-lit. Amid dark shadows, propped in one corner, sat Gladys Lee. She was shrouded in dust sheets and sunk in her final demented stage, her eyes red-rimmed. She beckoned Billing forward. Her mouth fell open with a terrible crack, revealing broken sticks of teeth.

Billing woke feeling sick and sat up in bed. The crack still rang in his head. He was convinced it was real.

Leaving Rose to sleep, he made his way barefoot downstairs. The staircase was presently uncarpeted. By the light from a streetlamp he saw that the glass in the front door had been shattered. Retreating, he went back to the top of the stairs and switched on the hall light.

A half-brick lay on the mat inside the door, with fragments of glass all round.

He went and woke Rose. ‘What time is it?’

‘It’s only half-past twelve. Who’d do such a thing, do you think?’

She pulled a face. ‘Bloody Dwyer, who else? My husband – George Dwyer, the drunken cretin. Him and that bird of his from the next street. He must have seen us coming and going round here. I wouldn’t put anything past him.’

They went down and stared at the damage. Hugh found a piece of cardboard with which to block up the hole, while Rose swept up the fragments of glass and had another swear.

‘It wouldn’t have been your George,’ he said, squatting down beside her. ‘No man would do a thing like that deliberately. It must have been a passing yob, hitting our door by accident.’

‘You don’t know George. Friday and Saturday nights especially, when he’s had a few.’

‘But how would he know where you were?’

‘Oh, he’d find out. Don’t forget he’s a taxi driver. He’s got friends crawling all round town, he has. One of them must have seen us in the street, unloading the car or sommink.’

When they had cleared away all the glass, they had a cup of tea before returning to bed. Going up the stairs, feet cautious of splinters on the rough treads, he suddenly said, ‘Friday and Saturday nights … You mean he might come back tomorrow night?’

‘Oh, I suppose he might. He can be a vindictive little bugger, can George.’

‘I must say you take this pretty calmly.’

‘Hasn’t nothing of the sort never happened to you when you were in the United States? Are the Yanks all that different? You picked up enough women there, by all accounts.’

The double negative irritated him. ‘Is that how the working class goes on? Bashing up property?’

‘We certainly don’t make a little tin god of it, like you posh fellers.’

He burst out laughing, partly in annoyance. ‘Oh, forget it. Let’s get to bloody sleep.’

Saturday evening saw Hugh Billing in a nervous state. It was dusk when he finished giving the side door and window an undercoat and swept the side passage with the worm-eaten old broom from Gladys’s shed.

‘We’ll have to do something about Dwyer,’ he called in to Rose, who was working in the bathroom. ‘Otherwise, we’ll always be worrying.’

He kept his real worry to himself. Dwyer had become a vast figure of evil in his mind. Not knowing what the man looked like, he was free to imagine an ogre, bent on the destruction of their happiness. Dwyer was a nightmare, linked to the nightmare from which the smashing of the glass had roused Billing. He was a spectre beyond reason, which had to be laid. The thought of him brought Billing to a state close to paralysis. But he fought against his nerves and, with Rose’s none too reluctant help, developed a plan, based on the premise that Dwyer, to have thrown a brick with any accuracy through the front door, would have had to stop his cab temporarily opposite the house.

On Saturday nights, they generally went down to the local pub for a drink and a bite to eat. On this evening, they had supper ‘at home’, as they already began to think of it. By ten o’clock, the remains of cold smoked herring, salad, and Jacob’s Club biscuits were cleared away and they sat staring at each other.

‘He may not show up, of course.’

‘Seems a bit unlikely.’

‘Yes.’

‘Still, he might.’

‘I know. Be prepared, eh?’

‘It’s always best. Teach him a lesson.’

‘A bloody good lesson.’

‘Else we’d never feel safe.’

‘I’ll go outside.’

‘It’s far too early.’

‘Better be ready, just in case.’

‘You’re right there.’

By ten-thirty, he was in position in the front garden, concealed from the road by a wispy privet bush. The nearby street-lamp lit the front of the house. Billing and Rose had planned everything carefully. They had pinned a sheet of cardboard over the unbroken pane of the door and left the door standing open. Billing had even gone to the trouble of crumpling up a few pages of the Daily Mirror, placing them where they could be seen, on the upper step and in front of the open door. In the darkness, the house thus presented a derelict air, attractive to the vandalous-minded. Rose waited inside while Billing crouched uncomfortably by his bush. He felt the gravel under his thin shoes. A twig scratched persistently at his right cheek. One buttock nudged the railings which marked the extent of his property. His right hand was cold where he clutched a poker, his offensive weapon, too tightly.

What a mass of contradictions you are, he told himself. You’re in acute fear of this Dwyer, you see him as an ultimate brute. At the same time you long to get at him, to kill him, even. Rose is to blame for all this. How did I get into such a mess?

More deeply, he thought, Father didn’t care one bit for me or he would never have allowed himself to fall off that ladder. Such things are never really accidental. If he were still alive, he’d give me some guidance and protection in life and not let me drift. Now I’m going to get beaten up, all because of him.

He clutched the poker tighter.

By eleven, he had stopped thinking.

Some people went past in the street, most of them quietly. Cars roared by, including the odd taxi. A dog came and barked tentatively before moving on. The air grew colder.

By eleven-thirty, Billing had had enough. He whistled to Rose and went inside.

‘We mustn’t give up,’ Rose told him, giving him a hug. ‘This is about George’s time. Have a snort of gin and then let’s get back on watch again.’

‘I’ve had enough.’

‘Just till quarter past twelve. We must nail the old bugger if we can.’

Back by the privet, Billing immured himself to hardship by recalling scenes from his American past. Taking over a new apartment in Riverside, hearing a phone ring as he entered and running from room to room trying to locate it. Being in a woman’s house when the mosquito door banged and in came a businesslike dog with a cigar in its mouth. The woman – her name had gone – taught rehabilitative drama at the Alabama State Penitentiary, Children’s Division. Waking in Greenwich Village and finding that someone had built a punk tree outside his window, made entirely of copies of the St Petersburg Times. A sign on a road outside Atlanta, Georgia, erected in sorrow or pride, saying ‘One driver in every ten on this road is drunk’. America was much more surreal than England. It was a pity.

His wandering thoughts were recalled by the sound of a car stopping on the far side of the street. He crouched lower, glancing at his watch. It was ten minutes past midnight. A man was getting out of the driving seat of a cab. It was Dwyer! This was it!

Everything was still. The orange London smog sulked overhead. The man walked slowly across the deserted street, hands in pockets.

Billing gripped the poker, fear gripped Billing.

The man came slowly to the iron gate. He stood there on the pavement, scrutinising the front of the house, with its half-open door, its lightless windows. He was a small, thick-set man, rather less terrifying than Billing’s imaginings. He wore a bomber jacket and cord trousers.

Suddenly he moved, looking to left and right and then, finding the street empty, running forward, covering the front path in two strides and reaching the steps that led up to the open door.

Billing jumped from concealment without thought, brandishing the poker. At almost the same time, Rose emerged from the shadows with a bucket of cold water, which she flung at Dwyer. Unfortunately, Billing, in his excitement, had given a shout of challenge as he emerged. Dwyer turned, fists ready.

Some of the water hit its target. Quite as much soaked Billing.

He struck out boldly, blindly, and the poker caught Dwyer across one shoulder, thwacking into the bomber jacket.

Cursing, Dwyer started to feel in one of his pockets, kicking out at Billing at the same time with a toecap to his right calf. Billing dropped the poker and punched Dwyer on the jaw. Dwyer responded with a left-handed punch which struck Billing full face. Blood immediately poured from his nose. His sight became foggy.

Another man jumped from the taxi and came across the street, shouting, intent on supporting Dwyer.

Still swearing, Dwyer managed to pull a knuckleduster out of his dripping pocket.

This was too much for Billing. He ran round the side of the house to the back garden, Dwyer in pursuit. Both men were shouting.

Rose hurled her bucket at the second invader. She ran down, seized the fallen poker and brandished it. The second man retreated respectfully and went to stand on the far side of the taxi, evidently deciding not to face an armed woman.

Billing almost fell over the broom he had been using earlier. Dashing blood from his face, he grasped it, swung it, and caught Dwyer amidships. With a grunt, Dwyer seized the free end of the broom. Then commenced a kind of folk-dance across the back lawn, each combatant fighting for possession of the weapon. Dwyer did a good deal of cursing. Billing gritted his teeth and hung on. He had an idea.

With the house between the fighters and the streetlamps, it was dark in the small back garden. He was at an advantage; he knew where things were. He had realised that, for all his aggressiveness, the taxi driver was a foot shorter than he. This was not an invincible enemy. The thought gave him hope. He set to work to manoeuvre Dwyer where he wanted him.

It did not take long. Dwyer stopped shouting and started to pant. The waltz they were doing became slower, the turns more gradual, even the supply of swear words more halting.

‘You leave my bloody missus alone – we got no quarrel between us,’ Dwyer said.

‘She’ll never come back to you.’

‘I rescued her from a life of drudgery.’

‘She hates your guts.’

‘You should have met her father.’

‘She hates your guts, Dwyer!’

And there they were. Putting all his strength into it, Billing charged. With the business end of the brush in Dwyer’s chest, he was forced to run backwards. There were only three or four steps to go. The next moment the back of his legs struck the curve of the side of the old bath.

He gave a cry and fell in backwards, helpless to save himself.

The bath was full of dark and oily rainwater, under which all kinds of unnameable things lurked. Among those things Dwyer was momentarily to be numbered. He surfaced, spitting and retching. Billing pushed him under again with the head of the broom.

‘I’m – help, I’m drowning!’ cried Dwyer, gasping. Billing pushed him under a third time, enjoying it. He thought he could actually drown the man and who would know? It would make the world a better place.

‘Swear you’ll stay out of our way and never bother Rose again,’ he shouted, when Dwyer next surfaced. He kept up the pressure with the broom against Dwyer’s chest.

‘Yes, yes, I swear. Let me out of this filthy muck.’ He spat a leaf out.

‘Swear!’ Prod, thrust.

‘Yes, yes, I did swear. I do. No more, guv, help me!’

Billing stood alertly by with his trusty weapon and allowed Dwyer to climb out of the bath and flop on his hands and knees. Dwyer pulled himself up to head blindly for the entrance, hands out before him. All fight had left him.

‘And never come bloody back,’ Billing shouted, as the defeated foe climbed damply into his vehicle and drove away with his friend. The taxi vanished round the corner of the street.

‘You’re marvellous, Hughie,’ Rose said, embracing him. ‘You settled his hash. Come on in and let me mop your poor dear nose.’

‘I fixed him,’ Billing said, proudly letting his nose stream. ‘I sure fixed him good.’ John Wayne couldn’t have managed better.

‘Your poor nose.’ She put a hand on his arm.

‘Don’t bug me, woman,’ he said.

Then he caught hold of her hand and went indoors with her, rather shakily, dripping blood.

Back in St Albans, Billing went to the doctor and got a certificate to remain a week off work. Not only was his nose grotesquely swollen; two crescent moons of a troubled crimson appeared to underline his eyes. It was a time to lurk away from the sight of men and, more particularly, from inquisitive small boys.

Nothing could injure his morale. He had fought and won. Now at last he would have a home he could legitimately call his own – its integrity gained in combat, as it were. He had at last found a native hearth and a surcease from wandering. His old recurrent dream had fulfilled itself; he was at last allowed home to his own fireside.

Yet his spirit, he told himself, was not entirely at rest. As he interpreted the dream, it was his parents who should have admitted him to the lesser home within the greater. He did not see the dreadful Dwyer as standing in loco parentis; that had been Gladys’s role.

These thoughts no more than ruffled the surface of his sea of calm. Yet they recurred when he sat in the old armchair during a week when he might have been working and instead sailed steadily on through the deep waters of the tome entitled The Psyche and Dream Journeyings.

In its pages, he encountered people with all kinds of strange misapprehensions, living distorted lives. ‘Thank heavens I’m not like them,’ he said to himself, marvelling. He read of a woman who could not distinguish her husband from other men, a man who could make love only when clutching a baby pig and other extraordinary cases. He wondered what those cases would have done with their lives if they had not suffered from their disabilities. It soothed him to think how lucky he and Rose were to be normal.

Before they returned to Shepherd’s Bush the next weekend, they gave notice of the move to the landlord of their flat. Their new house was now fit to live in.

It was late when they arrived in Shepherd’s Bush on the Friday night. Walking through the fresh new rooms together, still smelling appetisingly of paint, they decided to go to bed at once so as to make an early start in the morning, laying vinyl flooring in the spare bedroom and finishing the tiling of the bathroom.

Before turning in, Billing took a stroll alone in the garden. He wished to see the old bath which had played such a vital part in his victory over Dwyer. The black water which half-filled the receptacle lay still, without a ripple. It reflected the moon, full that evening and shining overhead, sublimely free of the rooftops and chimney pots.

His heart seemed to open as he gazed up at it. Not just a dead world but a symbol trailing its mythic connotations across the sky. Beautiful, inspiring. He recalled some of the strange associations the doomed people in his book had conjured up: the moon, for instance, as a female spirit, as the Anima in men’s minds.

The book of dream journeyings made mention of the baboons at the great temple of Borabadur who perform a gesture of adoration when the moon rises. All savages fear the dark, some believing the day to be God’s creation and the night the product of the devil, of Satan. So the moon is a heavenly promise. Its crescent is symbolic allusion to the power of the feminine principle. ‘Diana, huntress, chaste and fair …’ There is a timeless quality about her, suggesting wisdom. When the Anima is encountered in dream wanderings, it is like a visitation from the moon among the thickets of the night; and then the Anima often manifests herself as a young woman, to offer guidance or temptation. Her appearance is frequently a sign that a period of confusion and trouble – the night journeying of the psyche – will give way to the daylight of individuation. Anima dreams can be memorably vivid, lingering on in retrospect as tokens of hope long after other dreams have faded with break of day. All this and more, for the books on Gladys’s shelves were ample in discussion. Billing hardly knew whether or not to believe them, but the fact was that he wished to do so, for obscure reasons, and so he remained entertained if not convinced.

As he walked by the bath with these and similar thoughts in his mind, his gaze on the sky, the moon, at the extreme end of his walk before he turned about, appeared to become entangled in the bare branches of an ash tree.

So greatly did this sight move Billing that he stumbled back inside the house, as if he could bear no more loveliness.

He thought of that loveliness again after he and Rose had made love, after he turned the light off and darkness filled their little room. In his present complacent state, he realised, he had had no dreams he remembered for some while. Nothing, except the nightmare provoked by George Dwyer’s flung brick. It was as though the moon had not shone on his sleep.

The pale moonlight was already at their window panes. Humbling himself, Billing carefully formed words like a prayer in his mind: ‘Oh, Anima, I believe in you. Visit me, speak to me, in my dreams tonight, fair creature.’

On waking, he knew the Anima was alive in his mind, almost as tangible as Rose’s head on the adjacent pillow. She was there, leaving only as his eyes opened. She spoke to him.

What she said was: ‘Your parents loved you all along.’

Billing rose in a daze and went into the bathroom. He stared at himself in the mirror, feeling his face. Letting water run into the bath, he went and sat in it naked. He sighed, shook his head, marvelled.

It was the truth. Something had responded to his entreaties. He never doubted for one moment that she – fickle though she might be – had visited him, had spoken – and of course had spoken truth. Undeniable Anima, undeniable truth.

Lying back in the water gasping, he clasped the soap like a heart to his chest. Yes, yes, she had spoken! He was in communication with himself. The psyche had made a true dream journeying and returned from it with treasure. His parents loved him.

His father loved him. All these years, the ghost of his father, of that falling ladder, had not been laid. In his childish mind, he had seen himself as either the subject or the object of the accident, as responsible for it, or as purposely injured by it. He had held the belief that his father died to punish him. Somehow the poisonous error had always lodged within him like a wound.

Of course that was nonsense. His father loved him. His Anima declared it.

Again the ladder was falling. Again he heard his father’s hoarse cry for help. Then the smash of ladder and body against the concrete walk. He was running towards the smash, crying for his father not to be hurt. His father made no reply – his father who loved him.

It was all clear. He could recall it all for the first time. The fearful blankness had gone.

And his mother came running, pushing him away in her fright, clasping his father’s body.

He remembered it all. The weeping that followed. Weeks of weeping. His helplessness. His guilt. The funeral to which his mother thought it best not to allow him to go. His boyish agony over that: as if he had been turned away from the very grave. And all the time she and his father had loved him. Their dear son, their dear only son.

The joy could no longer be withstood. With a great shout, he jumped out of the bath and rushed into the bedroom, naked and dripping, to the sleeping Rose.

‘A miracle, a miracle!’ he shouted. ‘Rose, wake up.’

She sat up and threw back the bedclothes.

‘Come in,’ she said, ‘you daft bugger.’