The Hopkins Manuscript

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I will not dwell upon my visit that night to Money Bags at the Coliseum with my uncle and aunt. It was inspiring and pitiful by turns – a make-belief composed bewilderingly of courage and unwholesomeness.

There was something very wonderful in that London night twelve days before the end. Once more I was reminded of a giant luxury liner with every light ablaze: with bands playing – with silk-dressed women and white-tied men with eyes turned resolutely from the fatal gash of an iceberg in the lungs of the ship beneath them.

London blazed with light as if it would squander its glittering wealth before it died. Its outskirts were almost deserted, but as we drew near to Hyde Park Corner we came upon thousands of people surging in and out of the Park and along the pavements of Piccadilly. The crowds were uncannily quiet: they had not come for display: they had come to quench loneliness – to poultice their minds with life and movement – to draw the chill, festering terror from their brains with the warm comfort of humanity.

Through the railings of St James’s Park I saw the pale glimmer of tents and a glow of braziers where detachments of the Guards were quartered under arms, and once, up a dark side street, I saw a patrol moving with slung rifles.

And all the way, in the taxi, my uncle kept saying: ‘There’s no danger – we’re perfectly safe’, until I began to hate him. I can quite understand that he felt some personal responsibility for my safety because I was his guest, but you would have thought, by the way he carried on, that the armed police and military patrols in the streets were there for his especial benefit.

‘We don’t need military protection in Beadle,’ I remarked with some asperity – and Uncle Henry burst out in a rich oily laugh as if I had made a brilliant joke.

One of my saddest reflections is the manner in which Uncle Henry and Aunt Rose declined in my esteem during that last brief visit to them. I try to think of it as little as possible because sometimes my conscience is uneasy and I wonder whether I was unjustly critical. I had always known them to be selfish and pleasure-loving: over-eager for their food and comforts. I imagine it is difficult to be otherwise when two people have lived together for forty-five years in utter freedom from financial stress and the responsibility of children. I had always enjoyed my Christmas visits because they gave me a good time, but I knew perfectly well that I was only welcomed as useful in making up their parties, calling taxis after theatres and seeing Aunt Rose safely across roads.

And now, in the face of the approaching cataclysm, I saw less than ever to admire in their incurable complacency. I do not believe that it was an expression of philosophy or courage: I believe it was the symbol of a smugness so ingrained by time and habit that nothing, however tremendous, could bring them again into sympathy with the common people of the world.

Uncle Henry was seventy-four and my aunt a year his junior. Both of them had lived for twenty-five thousand comfortable, self-indulgent days. A few days in addition, more or less, could be of little moment to them. But I was only forty-seven, and I could not help reading into the fat, smug laugh of Uncle Henry a gloating pleasure that he had got the better of me by twenty-seven years: the gloating pleasure of a selfish cricketer who has had his innings and made his runs before the rain comes on.

But let me forget it. Let me accept the discredit of ungenerosity and give Uncle Henry and Aunt Rose the doubtful credit of abounding self-control!

I cannot offer a calm criticism of Money Bags, the musical comedy at the Coliseum. Conditions were not favourable to a reasoned analysis of its dramatic merits.

For the first ten minutes I thought it was the best show I had ever seen: from then onwards it was as hollow as a blown sparrow’s egg.

The audience was far different from that healthy, joyous throng at the Christmas Pantomime. The theatre was full, but there were no children: the onlookers were mostly of the unwholesome ‘men about town’ type: the type that is known as ‘sophisticated’: those poor, hunted, complex-ridden people who have never found the gateway that leads to the crystal sunlight of simplicity.

They came bubbling into the theatre with a kind of breathless exhilaration as if they had been taking secret swigs at the oxygen tubes in the dugouts beneath them. A young man next to me, with a pasty, twitching face, had obviously drunk too much: his laugh was like the bark of a dog, and when he tried to concentrate upon the show he could not sit still for a second – his long white fingers kept side-stepping about his chin and sliding around inside his collar.

I admired the actors, for they worked with defiant bravado. I do not know when Money Bags was written, but if it had been composed in the peaceful days of the previous year it had certainly been adapted to suit the conditions of these last pitiful weeks. Every joke of the past fifty years had been added to the piece; the audience roared with laughter, and the actors looked up with surprised smiles as the managers of a bankrupt firework company might greet the unexpected success of a box of mouldy rockets.

My heart went out to those brave little girls of the chorus who danced and sang and smiled in the same old dauntless, glassy way.

But within twenty minutes of the rise of the curtain the whipped-up hilarity had spent itself. Relentlessly the damp seemed to seep into the verbal squibs that were popping on the stage, and long before the interval they would scarcely pop at all.

Even before the interval some people began to edge from their seats and creep out of the theatre. I was thirsty, and tried to get some lemonade between the acts, but the refreshment bar was nearly a riot. ‘Double whisky! – double brandy! – double whisky!’ was being bawled out around me. I stared at those pale, jostling faces, those burning eyes, and hated them. I thought of the cool night air of Beadle: of the warm, amber glow in the windows of The Manor House across my valley – of the Vicar in his study – of Pat and Robin, reading by the fireside in Colonel Parker’s library – and I knew that these people around me in the theatre bar were the dregs.

I could get no lemonade: all that I could secure was a very small bottle of soda water peculiar to theatre bars – so fizzy that most of it bubbled out when the girl opened it and the drop that remained tasted like very hot chicken-run wire.

Money Bags, after the interval, was hopeless: all effort at concentration had gone and people were continually sneaking out as if news had been passed quietly around that the theatre was on fire.

I longed to go myself, but Uncle Henry and Aunt Rose seemed to be enjoying themselves in their own incredible way. Uncle laughed richly every time there was a joke and frequently when there wasn’t. Aunt Rose watched the audience creeping out with the smug, indulgent smile of a woman immune to sea-sickness watching the shamed departure of diners from the restaurant of a rolling ship. I knew that if I suggested leaving they would conclude at once that I was afraid.

And so we stayed to that bitter end: to that pitiful, empty-seated end. And when the curtain rose for the last time upon that group of tired, brave actors, a lump came to my throat, a mist to my eyes – and I cried: ‘Bravo!’ I was glad, in that moment, that I had stayed.

London had changed ominously in those hours of the theatre. The streets were almost empty and people scrambled for taxis as if they were rescue boats around a sinking ship. I could see that all feared to walk in the streets alone.

Four policemen stood together at the foot of St Martin’s Lane. When at last I secured a taxi, the driver sat pondering before he would agree to drive us out to Notting Hill. ‘It’s perfectly safe,’ said Uncle Henry, and the man glowered at him. ‘Who said it wasn’t?’ he snarled – and then with a curt jerk of his head towards the door he said: ‘Get in!’

There was a line of piled rifles in Trafalgar Square and a platoon of soldiers resting beside them. A police car with a radio stood at the kerb, nearby, and a tall Captain of the Guards was stooping with his head at the window, speaking to the police officer at the wheel.

A few people still roamed the pavements of Pall Mall – they looked like sleep-walkers – like people dreading a return to haunted houses. But as we reached the Bayswater Road and left the military encampments of the Park the broad streets were utterly deserted. At the corner of Notting Hill Tube Station I saw a group of six armed policemen – otherwise it was a district smitten with the plague.

The taxi-driver hunched himself over the wheel and flew down the last wide stretch of the Bayswater Road. He jammed on his brakes outside my uncle’s house and jerked his head backwards towards the door. ‘Get out – quick,’ he snapped.

‘There’s no danger,’ declared Uncle Henry, as he groped in his pocket for money.

‘No danger!’ growled the man. ‘Three taxis held up since sunset – two men shot dead.’ He snatched the money, grated his gears and rattled off into the darkness.

‘Absurd,’ said Aunt Rose. ‘The soldiers and police are everywhere.’ But I could not conceal a smile as the old lady glanced furtively down the deserted road and Uncle Henry fumbled rapidly for the latch-key.

I could tolerate this no longer. There was nothing for me to do in London. Another walk in those tragic streets would have dragged me to the depths of depression, and another theatre would have driven me mad. Never had I longed so desperately for my home.

I sat with my uncle before his library fire: the night was warm – the curtains were tightly drawn and the room was suffocating.

My uncle was laughing at the panic-stricken taxi-driver.

‘It’s a disease, my boy – infectious disease. One man gets into a funk and the germ spreads down all the taxi ranks in London! There’s absolutely no danger if you keep your head.’

He handed me a whisky and soda, and raised his own to the red light of the fire. ‘Well – here’s luck, my boy.’

I took the plunge.

‘I must go home tomorrow, Uncle – I’m sorry – it’s been a very short visit…’

I was astonished at the effect of my casual words upon the old man. The light died from his eyes and his round, rosy cheeks seemed to fall suddenly away into little pouches of utter weariness.

‘But… but my dear boy!’ he murmured. ‘You… you promised us at least three days…’

‘I’m on the Defence Committee at Beadle,’ I lied. ‘We’ve got a very important meeting. I must be there’ – but my uncle went on speaking as if he had not heard – in a low voice, with his eyes upon the dying fire.

‘We had planned it all, you know… quite a programme… a motor drive to Hampton Court tomorrow… a picnic lunch: we could walk in the Park like we used to, and perhaps a boat on the river for a little while…’ He raised his head with a last brave rally of gaiety. ‘And the Trocadero Cabaret in the evening, my boy! – delightful show! – lively music and jolly pretty girls!’

It was a hard struggle to hold my ground. There was something pitiful in those faded, appealing eyes and bowed old head: something pitiful in that dapper, old-fashioned little evening tie and the drooping pink rose in that buttonhole: an old man clinging desperately to the last rending shreds of a self-indulgent life. I thought of the supper he had planned at the Trocadero – the bottle of claret and the grilled sole – the hurried, padding feet of waiters and the memories… I thought of them both when news of my visit arrived – a frantic search for spectacles – an excited scanning of the amusement page of the newspaper – a desperate determination to be true until the end to the name I had once given them: the name which had so immensely pleased them: ‘connoisseurs of happiness’…

But I could not draw back now. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve simply got to go.’

I played him a last game of chess before we went to bed: it was deathly still outside, although once, through the darkness, I thought I heard a distant shout, and running footsteps. I am glad that Uncle Henry won the game. He laughed as he cried: ‘Checkmate!’ I never heard that deep, familiar laugh again.

Only two trains were running each day to Beadle now, and for the sake of my uncle and aunt I delayed my departure until the evening.

We went in the afternoon for a short stroll in the Park, and uncle pointed out some green railings that he had been instrumental in putting up when he was an official at the Office of Works. It was a lovely, warm spring day. The white narcissi were thrusting their way through the fading daffodils, and the trees had a beautiful pale sheen upon them. The birds were bold in their journeys to find food for their hungry young families, and as we sat beside the lake, they hopped around our feet in the hope of crumbs.

We talked a little of old, far-off days. Aunt Rose reminded me of a never-forgotten holiday in a tiny Cornish village when I had been a child – when Aunt Rose and Uncle Henry had been young. With my father and mother we had tramped the sun-baked moorlands and gone at dawn in a fishing-boat around Astral Head and helped the men to haul their nets. Sunlight and springy turf – the tang of salt air and eggs for tea. I saw my mother and my aunt again: two lovely women who wore blue jerseys in the fishing-boat and hauled the nets like men. The spring leaves in the lime trees were misty as I stared at them, and I became a child again. These plump, white-haired people were all that remained to link me with those happy, boyhood days, and now my last hour with them was ending.

They passed from my life with a cup of china tea and a buttered scone in my aunt’s old, over-furnished drawing-room: the window stood open: a butterfly hovered over the flowers – and for a second it brought back those Cornish moors of long ago.

The train crept out of London in the April twilight, and the sunset glowed upon the face of Big Ben across the Thames. I said ‘goodbye’ to that calm, stately city, and wished it happiness in the ten days of life that remained to it.