第1章 MATTY(1)

CHAPTER ONE

There was an area east of the Isle of Dogs in London which was an unusual mixture even for those surroundings. Among the walled-off rectangles of water, the warehouses, railway lines and travelling cranes, were two streets of mean houses with two pubs and two shops among them. The bulks of tramp steamers hung over the houses where there had been as many languages spoken as families that lived there. But just now not much was being said, for the whole area had been evacuated officially and even a ship that was hit and set on fire had few spectators near it. There was a kind of tent in the sky over London, which was composed of the faint white beams of searchlights, with barrage balloons dotted here and there. The barrage balloons were all that the searchlights discovered in the sky, and the bombs came down, it seemed, mysteriously out of emptiness. They fell in or round the great fire.

The men at the edge of the fire could only watch it burn, out of control. The water mains were broken and the only hindrance in the way of the fire was the occurrence of firebreaks here and there where fires had consumed everything on other nights.

Somewhere on the northern edge of the great fire a group of men stood by their wrecked machine and stared into what, even to men of their experience, was a new sight. Under the tent of searchlights a structure had built itself up in the air. It was less sharply defined than the beams of light but it was far brighter. It was a glare, a burning bush through or beyond which the thin beams were sketched more faintly. The limits of this bush were clouds of tenuous smoke that were lit from below until they too seemed made of fire. The heart of the bush, where the little streets had been, was of a more lambent colour. It shivered constantly but with an occasional diminution or augmentation of its brightness as walls collapsed or roofs caved in. Through it all—the roar of the fire, the drone of the departing bombers, the crash of collapse—there was now and then the punctuating explosion of a delayed-action bomb going off among the rubble, sometimes casting a kind of blink over the mess and sometimes so muffled by debris as to make nothing but noise.

The men who stood by their wrecked machine at the root of one northern road that ran south into the blaze had about them the anonymity of uniform silence and motionlessness. Some twenty yards behind them and to their left was the crater of the bomb that had cut the local water supply and smashed their machine into the bargain. A fountain still played in the crater but diminishingly and the long fragment of bomb-casing that had divided a rear wheel lay by their machine, nearly cool enough to touch. But the men ignored it as they were ignoring many small occurrences—the casing, the fountain, some fantasies of wreckage—that would have gathered a crowd in peace time. They were staring straight down the road into the bush, the furnace. They had positioned themselves clear of walls and where nothing but a bomb could fall on them. That, oddly enough, was the least of the dangers of their job and one almost to be discounted among the falling buildings, trapping cellars, the secondary explosions of gas and fuel, the poisonous stinks from a dozen sources. Though this was early in the war they were experienced. One of them knew what it was like to be trapped by one bomb and freed by another. He viewed them now with a kind of neutrality as if they were forces of nature, meteors it might be, that happened to strike thickly hereabouts at certain seasons. Some of the crew were wartime amateurs. One was a musician and now his ear was finely educated in the perception and interpretation of bomb noises. The one that had burst the mains and wrecked the machine had found him narrowly but sufficiently sheltered and he had not even ducked. Like the rest of the crew he had been more interested in the next one of the stick, which had struck further down the road, between them and the fire, and lay there now at the bottom of its hole, either a dud or a delayed action. He stood on the undamaged side of the machine, staring like the others down the road. He was muttering.

"I'm not happy. No. Honestly chaps, I'm not happy."

Indeed, none of the chaps was happy, not even their leader whose lips were set so firmly together. For by some kind of transference of effort from them, or by a localized muscular effort, the front of his chin trembled. His crew were not unsympathetic. The other amateur, a bookseller who stood at the musician's side and who could never put on his wartime uniform without a feeling of incredulity, could assess the mathematical chances of his present survival. He had watched a wall six storeys high fall on him all in one piece and had stood, unable to move and wondering why he was still alive. He found the brick surround of a window on the fourth storey had fitted round him neatly. Like the others, he had got beyond saying how scared he was. They were all in a state of settled dread, in which tomorrow's weather, tonight's Enemy's Intention, the next hour's qualified safety or hideous danger were what ruled life. Their leader carried out within limits the orders that were sent him but was relieved even to tears and shudderings when the telephoned weather forecast indicated that a raid was impossible.

So there they were, listening to the drone of the departing bombers, estimable men who were beginning to feel that though everything was indescribably awful they would live for another day. They stared together down the shuddering street and the bookseller, who suffered from a romantic view of the classical world, was thinking that the dock area would look like Pompeii; but whereas Pompeii had been blinded by dust here there was if anything too much clarity, too much shameful, inhuman light where the street ended. Tomorrow all might be dark, dreary, dirty, broken walls, blind windows; but just now there was so much light that the very stones seemed semi-precious, a version of the infernal city. Beyond the semi-precious stones, there, where the heart of the fire was shivering rather than beating, all material objects, walls, cranes, masts, even the road itself merged into the devastating light as if in that direction the very substance of the world with all the least combustible of its materials was melting and burning. The bookseller found himself thinking that after the war if there ever was an after the war they would have to reduce the admission fee to the ruins of Pompeii since so many countries would have their own brand-new exhibitions of the broken business of living.

There was an episode of roaring, audible through the other noises. A red curtain of flame fluttered near the white heart of the fire and was consumed by it. Somewhere a tank of something had exploded or a coal cellar had just distilled out its own coal gas, invaded a closed room, mixed with air, reached flashpoint—That was it, thought the bookseller knowledgeably, and now safe enough to be proud of his knowledge. How strange that is, he thought, after the war I shall have time—

He looked round quickly for wood; and there it was, a bit of lath from a roof and lying close by his foot so he bent, picked it up and threw it away. As he straightened up he saw how intently the musician was attending to the fire with eyes now rather than ears and beginning to mutter again.

"I'm not happy. No, I'm not happy—"

"What is it old chap?"

The rest of the crew were also staring more earnestly into the fire. All eyes were aimed, mouths drawn in. The bookseller swung round to look where the others were looking.

The white fire, becoming pale pink, then blood-coloured then pink again where it caught smoke or clouds seemed the same as if it were the permanent nature of this place. The men continued to stare.

At the end of the street or where now, humanly speaking, the street was no longer part of the habitable world—at that point where the world had become an open stove—at a point where odd bits of brightness condensed to form a lamp-post still standing, a pillar box, some eccentrically shaped rubble—right there, where the flinty street was turned into light, something moved. The bookseller looked away, rubbed his eyes, then looked again. He knew most of the counterfeits, the objects that seem endowed with life in a fire: the boxes or papers stirred into movement by localized gusts of wind, the heat-induced contractions and expansions of material that can mimic muscular movement, the sack moved by rats or cats or dogs or half-burnt birds. At once and violently, he hoped for rats but would have settled for a dog. He turned round again to get his back between himself and what he was sure he had not seen.

It was a remarkable circumstance that their captain was the last to look. He had turned from the fire and was contemplating his wrecked machine with the kind of feeling that kept his chin still. The other men drew his eyes to them by not meaning to. They turned away from the fire far too casually. Where there had been a whole set of eyes, a battery of them staring into the melted end of the world, that battery now contemplated the uninteresting ruins from a previous fire in the other direction and the failing jet of water in the crater. It was a sheer piece of heightened awareness, a sense sharpened by dread that made the captain look at once not where they were looking but where they were not.

Two-thirds of the way down the street, part of a wall collapsed and spilt rubbish across the pavement so that some pieces went bowling across the road. One piece struck, of all things, a dustbin left standing on the other side and a metallic clang came from it.

"Good God!"

Then the others turned back with him.

The drone of the bombers was dying away. The five-mile-high tent of chalky lights had disappeared, been struck all at once, but the light of the great fire was bright as ever, brighter perhaps. Now the pink aura of it had spread. Saffron and ochre turned to blood-colour. The shivering of the white heart of the fire had quickened beyond the capacity of the eye to analyse it into an outrageous glare. High above the glare and visible now for the first time between two pillars of lighted smoke was the steely and untouched round of the full moon—the lover's, hunter's, poet's moon; and now—an ancient and severe goddess credited with a new function and a new title—the bomber's moon. She was Artemis of the bombers, more pitiless than ever before.

The bookseller contributed rashly.

"There's the moon—"

The captain rebuked him savagely.

"Where did you think it would be? Up north? Haven't any of you got eyes? Do I have to notice everything for everybody? Look there!"

What had seemed impossible and therefore unreal was now a fact and clear to them all. A figure had condensed out of the shuddering backdrop of the glare. It moved in the geometrical centre of the road which now appeared longer and wider than before. Because if it was the same size as before, then the figure was impossibly small—impossibly tiny, since children had been the first to be evacuated from that whole area; and in the mean and smashed streets there had been so much fire there was nowhere for a family to live. Nor do small children walk out of a fire that is melting lead and distorting iron.

"Well! What are you waiting for?"

No one said anything.

"You two! Get him!"

The bookseller and the musician started forward. Half-way down the street the delayed-action bomb went off under a warehouse on the right-hand side. Its savage punctuation heaved the pavement across the road and the wall above it jerked, then collapsed into a new crater. Its instantaneity was dreadful and the two men came staggering back. Behind them the whole length of the street was hidden by dust and smoke.

The captain snarled.

"Oh—Christ!"

He ran forward himself, the others at his shoulder, and did not stop until he was where the air cleared and the heat from the fire became a sudden violent attack on the skin.

The figure was a child, drawing nearer. As they picked their way past the new crater they saw him plain. He was naked and the miles of light lit him variously. A child's stride is quick; but this child walked down the very middle of the street with a kind of ritual gait that in an adult would have been called solemn. The captain could see—and now, with a positive explosion of human feeling—why this particular child walked as it did. The brightness on his left side was not an effect of light. The burn was even more visible on the left side of his head. All his hair was gone on that side, and on the other, shrivelled to peppercorn dots. His face was so swollen he could only glimpse where he was going through the merest of slits. It was perhaps something animal that was directing him away from the place where the world was being consumed. Perhaps it was luck, good or bad, that kept him pacing in the one direction where he might survive.

Now they were so near that the child was not an impossibility but a scrap of their own human flesh, they became desperate to save and serve him. Their captain, indifferent now to the slight dangers that might ambush them in the street, was the first to reach the child and handle him with trained and devoted care. One of the men raced in the other direction without being told, to the phone a hundred yards away. The other men formed a tight and unprofessional knot round the child as he was carried, as if to be close was to give him something. The captain was a bit breathless but full of compassion and happiness. He busied himself with the kind of first aid for burns which is reversed by the medical profession every year or so. In a very few minutes an ambulance came, the team was told all the nothing that was known about the child and he was driven away, the ambulance bell ringing, perhaps unnecessarily.

It was the dimmest of the firemen who expressed the general feeling.

"Poor little bugger."

All at once they were talking to each other enthusiastically about how incredible it was, a kid walking out of the fire like that, stark naked, burnt but going on, steadily making his way towards a glimpse of safety—

"Plucky little bugger! Didn't lose his head."

"They do wonders now. Look at them pilots. Getting faces as good as new they say."

"He might be a bit shrivelled like, down the left side."

"Thank Christ my kids are out of it. And the missus."

The bookseller was saying nothing and seemed to be staring at nothing. There was a memory flickering on the edge of his mind and he could not get it further in where it could be examined; and he was also remembering the moment when the child had appeared, seeming to his weak sight to be perhaps not entirely there—to be in a state of, as it were, indecision as to whether he was a human shape or merely a bit of flickering brightness. Was it the Apocalypse? Nothing could be more apocalyptic than a world so ferociously consumed. But he could not quite remember. Then he was deflected by the sounds of the musician being sick.

The captain had turned back to the fire. He looked down a street that in the event had proved neither as hot as they supposed nor as dangerous. He jerked his attention away from it and back to the machine.

"Well. What are we waiting for? They'll want to tow us if we can be towed. Mason, try the steering and see if you can free it. Wells, come out of that trance! Start tracing the brake lines—quickly now and cheerfully!"

Under the machine, Wells swore horribly and profoundly.

"Now then Wells, you're paid to get your hands dirty."

"The oil went straight into me fucking mouth!"

A burst of sniggering—

"Teach you to keep your mouth shut!"

"What's it taste like, Wellsy?"

"Can't be worse'n the canteen!"

"All right lads, turn it up. We don't want the breakdowns to do our work for us do we?"

The captain turned back to the fire. He looked at the new crater half-way down the road. He saw quite clearly in a kind of interior geometry of this and this and that and that how things had been and how they might have been and where he would have been running if he had set off at the very first moment he had realized the child was there and needed help. He would have run straight into the space where now there was nothing but a hole. He would have run into the explosion and he would have disappeared.

There was the clatter of a part falling under the machine and another burst of cursing from Wells. The captain hardly heard it. The skin had seemed to freeze on his body. He shut his eyes and for some sort of time saw that he was dead or felt that he was dead; and then that he was alive, only the screen that conceals the workings of things had shuddered and moved. Then his eyes were open again and the night was as normal as that kind of night could ever be, and he knew what the frost was on his skin and he thought to himself with the cunning immediacy that was part of his nature that it just didn't do to examine such things too closely and anyway the little chap would have suffered just as much and anyway—

He turned back to his own smashed machine and saw that the tow was coming. He came, silent and filled in an extraordinary way with grief, not for the maimed child but for himself, a maimed creature whose mind had touched for once on the nature of things. His chin was quivering again.

*

The child was called number seven. After the kind of holding operations that had to be performed while he recovered from shock, number seven was the first present he got from the world outside him. There was some small doubt as to whether his silence was organic or not. He could hear, even with the ghastly fragment of ear on his left side, and the swelling round his eyes soon subsided so that he could see well enough. He was contrived a position in which he did not have to be doped very much and spent days and weeks and months in it. But, though the burnt area reckoned as a percentage of the whole made it improbable, he did in fact survive, to begin a long progress through hospitals of one sort of expertise or another. By the time he had come to speak his occasional word of English it was impossible to discover whether it was his native tongue or whether he had picked up the word in hospital. He had no background but the fire. He was known in successive wards as baby, darling, pet, poppet, sweetie and boo-boo. He was at last given a name because a matron put her foot down, a thing of power. She spoke roundly.

"We can't go on calling the child number seven behind his back. It's most improper and injurious."

She was an old-fashioned matron who used that kind of word. She was effective.

The appropriate office was working through the alphabet in rotation, since the boy was only one among the wreckage of that childhood. The office had just presented a baby girl with the name "Venables". The young wit who was given the job of using "w" suggested "Windup", her chief having displayed less than perfect courage in an air raid. She had found she could get married and still keep her job and she was feeling secure and superior. Her chief winced at the name and drew his pen through it, foreseeing a coven of children all shouting "Windup! Windup!" He made his own substitution, though when he looked at what he had written it seemed not quite right and he altered it. There was no obvious reason for doing so. The name had first jumped into his mind with the curious effect of having come out of empty air and of being temporary, a thing to be noticed because you were lucky to be in the place where it had landed. It was as if you had sat silently in the bushes and—My!—there settled in front of you the rarest of butterflies or birds which had stayed long enough to be seen and had then gone off with an air of going for ever, sideways, it might be.

The boy's current hospital accepted "Septimus" as a middle name but made no use of it. Perhaps it had overtones of "Septic". His first name, Matthew, became "Matty"; and as "Seven" was still written on all the relevant papers, no one used his surname. But then, for years of his childhood, all visitors had to peer among sheets and bandages and mechanisms to see any part of him but the right side of his face.

As the various aids to recovery were removed from him and he began to speak more, it was observed that his relationship to language was unusual. He mouthed. Not only did he clench his fists with the effort of speaking, he squinted. It seemed that a word was an object, a material object, round and smooth sometimes, a golf ball of a thing that he could just about manage to get through his mouth, though it deformed his face in the passage. Some words were jagged and these became awful passages of pain and struggle that made the other children laugh. After his turban came off in the period between the primary work and what cosmetic work was possible, the ruin of his half-raw skull and blasted ear was most unappealing. Patience and silence seemed the greater part of his nature. Bit by bit he learnt to control the anguish of speaking until the golfballs and jagged stones, the toads and jewels passed through his mouth with not much more than the normal effort.

In the illimitable spaces of childhood, time was his only dimension. Adults who tried to establish contact with him were never successful with words. He accepted words and seemed to think long about them and sometimes he answered them. But it was a dissociated traffic out there. He was, at this time, to be approached by a method beyond conceptual artifice. Thus the nurse who squeezed him with her arms, knowing just where his body could bear the contact, found the relatively good, relatively undamaged side of his head burrowing against her breast in wordless communication. Being, it seemed, touched being. It was natural that this girl should discount what further thing she had noticed, since it was too delicate, even too private a perception to be called awareness of a symptom. She knew herself not to be particularly intelligent or clever. So she allowed the awareness to float in the back of her mind and paid no particular attention to it, only accepting that she, more than the other nurses, now knew the Matty-ness of Matty. She found herself saying things to herself that would mean one thing to others but something quite different inside her.

"There's Matty thinking I can be in two places at once!"

Then she would find what she had noticed was blown away or rendered massively inaccurate by the words her mind had accidently wrapped round it. But it happened too often and it settled into a pattern of belief that she accepted as a kind of definition of his nature.

Matty believes I'm two people.

Then later and even more privately—Matty believes I bring someone with me.

There was a delicacy in her mind that knew this belief to be unique to Matty and not to be discussed. Perhaps she felt a certain delicacy about the nature of her own mind in its surely unusual working. But she felt nearer this child than the others and she showed it in a way that the other children resented because she was pretty. She called him, "My Matty". When she did that it was the first time since his emergence from the furnace that he was observed to employ the complex musculature of his face in a communicative way. The rearrangement was slow and painful as if the little mechanism was in need of oil, but there was no doubt about the end-product. Matty was smiling. But his mouth remained lopsided and closed all the time, which made the smile unchildlike and seemed to concede that though smiling was possible, it was not a common practice and a wicked one if indulged in often.

Matty moved on. He suffered this in animal patience, seeing this was what was going to happen and there was no escaping it. The pretty nurse hardened her heart and told him how happy he would be. She was accustomed to partings. She was young enough to consider him lucky to be alive. Besides, she fell in love and that deflected her attention. Matty went one way and she went the other. Presently the delicate perceptions ceased, for she did not or could not use them on her own children. She was happy and forgot Matty for years until middle age overwhelmed her.

Matty was now fixed in a different position so that skin could be transferred from one part of his body to the other. It was a condition of some absurdity and the other children in the burns hospital, none of whom had much to laugh at, enjoyed his plight. Grown-ups came to entertain and console him but no woman held his undamaged side to her breast. She would have had to contort herself to do so. His smile went unused. There was rather more of him visible now to the casual visitor; and these, hurrying to their own unfortunates, were repelled by the sordid misery in which Matty passed his days, and they flashed sideways at him an uneasy smile which he interpreted with absolute precision. When at last he was cut loose, and having been as much as possible repaired was set on his feet, his smile seemed to have gone for good. The blasting of his left side had given him some contraction of the sinews that growth had not yet redressed, so he limped. He had hair on the right side of his skull but the left side was a ghastly white, which seemed so unchildlike it was an invitation by its appearance of baldness to discount his childishness and treat him as an adult who was being stubborn or just silly. Organizations ground on round him for his benefit but there was little more that could be done with him. His background was probed and probed without result. For all that the most painstaking inquiries could find, he might have been born from the sheer agony of a burning city.

CHAPTER TWO

Matty limped from hospital into his first school; and from that into a school maintained by two of the biggest trade unions in Britain. Here, in the Foundlings School at Greenfield, he met Mr Pedigree. They could be said to have converged on each other, though Matty was going up and Mr Pedigree was going down.

Mr Pedigree had declined from teaching at an ancient choir school through two less historical foundations and a considerable period which he accounted for by foreign travel. He was a slight and springy man with hair of faded gold and a face that was thin and lined and anxious when it was not vexed or arch. He joined the staff at Foundlings two years before Matty got there. The Second World War had, so to speak, disinfected Mr Pedigree's past. He lived therefore, unwisely, in a top room at the school. He was no longer "Sebastian", even to himself. "Mr Pedigree", a figure of the unimportant schoolmaster, was what he had become, and grey was beginning to appear streakily in his faded hair. He was a snob about boys and found the orphans generally repellent with some notable exceptions. There was no use found here for his Classics. He taught elementary geography mixed with elementary history and elementary English Grammar thrown in. For two years he had found it easy to resist his "times" and he lived in a fantasy. He pretended to himself that he was always the owner of two boys: one, an example of pure beauty, the other, an earthy little man! His personal charge was a large class into which boys who had given some evidence of having reached their educational ceiling were thrust, there to mark time until they could leave. The headmaster considered that with this lot he could do little harm. This was probably true except in the case of the boy with whom Mr Pedigree had his "spiritual relationship". For there appeared, as Mr Pedigree grew older, an extraordinary kink in the relationship beyond what a heterosexual person might think extraordinary. Mr Pedigree would lift the child on to a pedestal and he would make himself all in all to him, oh yes, all in all; and the little boy would find life wonderful and all things would be made easy for him. Then, as suddenly, Mr Pedigree would turn cold and indifferent. If he spoke to the child it would be sharply; and since it was a spiritual relationship, with not even the touch of a finger on a vellum cheek, what had the child, or anyone else, to complain of?

All this was subject to rhythm. Mr Pedigree had begun to understand that rhythm. It was when the beauty of the child began to consume him, obsess him, madden him—bit by bit, madden him! During that period, if he were not very careful he would find himself taking risks beyond what was common sense. He would find himself driven—the words bubbling over his lips before some other person, a master perhaps—driven to say what an extraordinarily attractive child young Jameson was, one really had to consider him a beauty!

Matty did not immediately go into Mr Pedigree's group. He was given a chance to exhibit his intellectual potential. But hospitals had taken too much of his time as the fire had taken any gloss there might have been about him. His limp, his two-toned face and ghastly ear hardly concealed by black hair swept over the baldness of his skull made him a natural butt. This may have contributed to his development of a faculty—to give it a name—which was to increase throughout his life. He could disappear. He could become unnoticeable like an animal. He had other qualities too. He drew badly but with passion. Leaning over the page, encircling it with an arm as his black hair swung free, he would sink into what he drew as if about to dive into a sea. His outlines were always without a break and he filled each space with colour of absolute evenness and neatness. It was a deed. Also he would listen devotedly to anything told him. He knew large portions of the Old Testament and small portions of the New Testament by heart. His hands and feet were too big for his thin arms and legs. His sexuality—and this was brilliantly perceived by his fellows—was in direct proportion to his unattractiveness. He was high-minded; and his fellows considered this to be his darkest sin.

The Convent School of Saint Cecilia was a hundred yards down the road and the grounds of the two establishments were separated by a narrow lane. On the girls' side was a high wall with spikes on top. Mr Pedigree could see the wall and the spikes from his top room and it brought back memories from which he flinched. The boys could see it too. From the landing and the great window three storeys up outside Mr Pedigree's room you could look over the wall and see the blue dresses and white, summery socks of the girls. There was a place where the girls could get up and peer through the spikes if they were naughty enough or sexy enough, which of course was the same thing. There was a tree on the boys' side that could be climbed and the young creatures could see each other face to face with only the lane between them.

Two of the boys who had taken particularly against Matty's high-mindedness, mostly because they were of exceptional low-mindedness, set out with the directness and simplicity of genius to play on all his weaknesses at once.

"We been talking to the girls, see?"

And later—"They've been talking about you."

And later—"Angy's sweet on you, Matty, she keeps asking about you."

Then—"Angy said she wouldn't mind a walk in the woods with you!"

Matty limped away from them.

Next day they gave him a note, which in a confusion of ideas from the adult world they had printed then signed. Matty inspected the note, torn from a rough workbook like the one he had in his own hand. The golf balls emerged from his mouth.

"Why didn't she write it? I don't believe it. You're having me on!"

"But look, it's got her name there, 'Angy'. I expect she thought you wouldn't believe her unless she signed it."

Shrieks of laughter.

If Matty had known anything at all about girls of school age he would have seen that they would never send a note on such paper. It was an early example of sexual differentiation. A boy, unless deflected, would apply for a job on the back of an old envelope. But if girls got hold of stationery the results were liable to be frightful, purple, scented and strewn with flowers. Nevertheless, Matty believed in the note torn from the corner of a rough workbook.

"She's there now Matty! She wants you to show her something—"

Matty stared from one to the other under lowered eyebrows.

The undamaged side of his face flushed red. He said nothing.

"Honestly Matty!"

They crowded in on him. He was taller than they were but stooped by his condition. He laboured at words and got them out.

"What does she want?"

The three heads came as close now as they could get. Almost at once, the redness sank away in his face so that the spots of his adolescence seemed even more definite against their white background. He breathed his answer.

"She didn't!"

"Honestly!"

He looked at each face in turn, his mouth left open. It was a strange look. So a man swimming in the deep ocean might lift his head and stare before him in search of land. There was a trace of light in the look, hope struggling with a natural pessimism.

"Honestly?"

"Honestly!"

"Cross your heart?"

Once more shrieks of laughter.

"Cross my heart!"

Again that aimed, imploring look, movement of a hand that tried to brush aside banter.

"Here—"

He thrust his books into their hands and limped quickly away. They held on to each other, laughing like apes. They broke apart, clamorously collected their fellows. The whole troupe clattered up the stone stairs, up, up, one, two, three storeys to the landing by the great window. They pushed and shoved against the great bar that ran from one end to the other at boy-height, and held the verticals that were less than a boy's width apart. Fifty yards away and fifty feet down a boy limped quickly towards the forbidden tree. Two little patches of blue did indeed show above the wall opposite it on the girls' side. The boys along the window were so entranced they never heard the door open behind them.

"What on earth is all this? What are you men doing up here?"

Mr Pedigree stood in the doorway, nervously holding the doorknob and looking from one end of the row of laughing boys to the other. But none of them minded old Pedders.

"I said what's all this? Are there any of my men here? You, the lad with the lovely locks, Shenstone!"

"It's Windy, sir. He's climbing the tree!"

"Windy? Who's Windy?"

"There he is, sir, you can see him, he's just getting up!"

"Oh you are a feeble, nasty, inky lot. I'm surprised at you, Shenstone, a fine upstanding lad like you—"

Scandalized, gleeful laughter—

"Sir, sir, he's doing it now—"

There was a kind of confusion among the leaves of a lower bough. The blue, sexy patches disappeared from the wall as if they had been knocked off by shot. Mr Pedigree clapped his hands and shouted but none of the boys paid any attention. They went cascading down the stairs, and left him there, flushed and more agitated by what was behind him than in front. He looked after them down the well of the stairs. He spoke sideways into the room and held the door open.

"Very well my dear. You can run along now."

The boy came out, smiling confidently up at Mr Pedigree. He went away down the stairs, assured of his own worth.

When he had gone Mr Pedigree stared irritatedly at the distant boy who was coming unhandily down the tree. Mr Pedigree had no intention of interfering—none whatever.

The headmaster heard from the Mother Superior. He sent for the boy who came limping and spotty and anxious. The headmaster was sorry for him and tried to make things easy. The episode had been described by the Mother Superior in such words as hid it behind a veil which the headmaster knew he must lift; and yet he viewed the lifting of a veil with some apprehension. He knew that lifting any veil was liable to uncover more than the investigator bargained for.

"Sit down there, will you? Now. You see we've had this complaint about you. About what you did when you climbed that tree. Young men—boys—will climb trees, that's not what I'm asking you about—but there may be considerable consequences coming from your action, you know. Now. What did you do?"

The unmended side of the boy's face became one deep, red flush. He looked down past his knees.

"You see, my dear boy, there's nothing to be—frightened of. People sometimes can't help themselves. If they are sick then we help them or find people who can help them. Only we must know!"

The boy neither spoke nor moved.

"Show me, then, if that's easier for you."

Matty glanced up under his eyebrows then down again. He was breathing quickly as if he had been running. He took his right hand across and took hold of the long lock dangling by his left ear. With a gesture of absolute abandon he ripped the hair across and exposed the white obscenity of his scalp.

It was perhaps fortunate that Matty did not see how the headmaster shut his eyes involuntarily, then forced them open and kept them open without any change of expression in his face. They both said nothing for a while until the headmaster nodded understandingly and Matty, relaxing, brought the hair back across his head.

"I see," said the headmaster. "Yes. I see."

Then for a while he said nothing but thought of phrases that might go in his letter to the Mother Superior.

"Well," he said at last, "don't do it again. Go along now. And please remember you are only allowed to climb the big beech and even then, up to the second bough. Right?"

"Sir."

After that, the headmaster sent round the various masters concerned to find out more about Matty and it was obvious that someone had been too kind—or perhaps unkind—and he was in a stream that was too much for him. The boy would never pass an examination and it was silly to make him try.

It was for this reason, therefore, that one morning when Mr Pedigree was dozing in front of his class as they drew a map, that Matty came clumping in, books under his arm, and stopped in front of the master's desk.

"Good God boy. Where have you come from?"

It seemed the question was too quick or too profound for Matty. He said nothing.

"What d'you want, boy? Say quickly!"

"I was told, sir. C.3, sir. The room at the end of the corridor."

Mr Pedigree gave a determined grin and wrenched his gaze away from the boy's ear.

"Ah. Our simian friend swinging from branch to branch. Don't laugh, you men. Well. Are you house-trained? Reliable? Brilliant intellect?"

Quivering with distaste, Mr Pedigree looked round the room. It was his custom and entertainment to arrange the boys in order of beauty so that the most beautiful occupied the front row. There was no doubt at all in his mind as to where the new boy should go. At the back of the room on his right, a tall cupboard left enough space for a desk that would be partly concealed by it. The cupboard could not be shifted flush against the wall without blocking a window.

"Brown, you exquisite creature, I shall want you out of there. You can sit in Barlow's place. Yes, I know he'll be back; and then we shall have to do some more arranging, shan't we? Anyway Brown, you're an imp, aren't you? I know what you get up to at the back there when you think I can't see you. Stop laughing, you men. I won't have you laughing. Now then, what's your name, Wandgrave. Can you keep order, mm? Go and sit in that corner and just keep quiet and tell me if they don't behave, mm? Go along!"

He waited, grinning with determined cheerfulness until the boy was seated and partly out of sight. Mr Pedigree found that he could divide the boy by the line of the cupboard so that only the more-or-less undamaged side of his face was visible. He sighed with relief. Such things were important.

"All right everybody. Just get on. Show him what we're doing, Jones."

He relaxed, dallying now with his agreeable game, for Matty's unexpected arrival gave him an excuse for another round of it.

"Pascoe."

"Sir?"

There was no denying that Pascoe was losing what had never been a very high degree of attractiveness. Mr Pedigree wondered in passing what he had ever seen in the boy. It was fortunate the affair had gone very little way.

"Pascoe, dear friend, I wonder if you would mind changing places now with Jameson so that when Barlow comes back—you don't mind being just a little further from the seat of judgement? Now, what about you, Henderson. Eh?"

Henderson was in the middle of the front row. He was a child of bland and lyric beauty.

"You don't mind being close to the seat of judgement, do you, Henderson?"

Henderson looked up, smiling, proudly and adoringly. His star was in Mr Pedigree's ascendant. Moved inexpressibly, Mr Pedigree came out of his desk and stood by Henderson, his fingers in the boy's hair.

"Ghastly, dear friend, when did you last wash all this yellow stuff, eh?"

Henderson looked up, still smiling and secure, understanding that the question was not a question, but communication, brightness, glory. Mr Pedigree dropped his hand and squeezed the boy's shoulder, then went back to his desk. To his surprise the boy behind the cupboard had his hand up.

"What is it? What is it?"

"Sir. That boy there. He passed a note to him, sir. That's not allowed is it sir?"

For a while Mr Pedigree was too astonished to answer. Even the rest of the class were silent until the enormity of what they had heard penetrated to them. Then a faint, increasing booing sound began to rise.

"Stop it you men. Now I said stop it. You, what's your name. You must have come straight out of a howling wilderness. We have found a cop!"

"Sir you said—"

"Never mind what I said, you literal creature! My goodness what a treasure we've come across!"

Matty's mouth had opened and stayed open.

It was odd indeed after that, that Matty should adopt Mr Pedigree. It was a sign of the poverty of his acquaintance that he should begin to dog the man and irritate him, since attention from Matty was the last thing he wanted. In fact, Mr Pedigree was on the slope of his rising curve and had begun to recognize where he was in a way that had not been apparent to him in the long distant days of the choir school. He knew now that points on the curve signalled themselves precisely. As long as he admired beauty in the classroom, no matter how overt his gestures of affection, everything was safe and in order. But there came a point where he began—had to begin—to help boys with their prep in his own room, forbidden as it was, dangerous and delirious; and there again the gestures would be innocent for a time—

Just now, in the last month of this term, Henderson had been elevated by nature herself to that pre-eminent beauty. Mr Pedigree himself found it strange that there was such a constant supply of that beauty available, and coming up year after year. The month was strange both for Mr Pedigree and Matty, who dogged him with absolute simplicity. His world was so small and the man was so large. He could not conceive of a whole relationship being based on a joke. He was Mr Pedigree's treasure. Mr Pedigree had said so. Just as some boys spent years in hospital and some did not, so he saw that some boys did their bounden duty and reported on their fellows and some did not, even though the result was desperate unpopularity.

Matty's fellows might have forgiven or forgotten his appearance. But his literal-mindedness, high-mindedness and ignorance of the code ensured that he became an outcast. But baldy Windup yearned for friendship, for he did not only dog Mr Pedigree. He dogged the boy Henderson too. The boy would jeer and Mr Pedigree would—

"Not now, Wheelwright, not now!"

Quite suddenly Henderson's visits to Mr Pedigree's room became more frequent and unconcealed and the language in which Mr Pedigree addressed the class became more extravagant. It was the top of the curve. He spent most of one lesson in a digression, a lecture on bad habits. There were very, very many of them and they were difficult to avoid. In fact—and they would find this out as they grew older—some of them were impossible to avoid. It was important however to distinguish between those habits which were thought to be bad and those which were actually bad. Why, in ancient Greece women were thought to be inferior creatures, now don't laugh you men, I know what you're thinking, you nasty lot, and love reached its highest expression between men and between men and boys. Sometimes a man would find himself thinking more and more about some handsome little fellow. Suppose for example, the man was a great athlete, as it might be nowadays, a cricketer, a test player—

The handsome little fellows waited to find out what the moral of this discourse was and how it related to bad habits but they never did. Mr Pedigree's voice trailed off and the whole thing did not so much end as die, with Mr Pedigree looking lost and puzzled.

People find it remarkable when they discover how little one man knows about another. Equally, at the very moment when people are most certain that their actions and thoughts are most hidden in darkness, they often find out to their astonishment and grief how they have been performing in the bright light of day and before an audience. Sometimes the discovery is a blinding and destroying shock. Sometimes it is gentle.

The headmaster asked to see the report books of some boys in Mr Pedigree's class. They sat at a table in the headmaster's study with the green filing-cabinets at their back. Mr Pedigree talked volubly about Blake and Barlow, Crosby and Green and Halliday. The headmaster nodded and turned the reports over.

"I see you haven't brought Henderson's along."

Mr Pedigree lapsed into frozen silence.

"You know, Pedigree, it's most unwise."

"What's unwise? What's unwise?"

"Some of us have peculiar difficulties."

"Difficulties?"

"So don't give these private lessons in your room. If you want to have boys in your room—"

"Oh but the boy's welfare!"

"There's a rule against it, you know. There have been—rumours."

"Other boys—"

"I don't know how you intend me to take that. But try not to be so—exclusive."

Pedigree went quickly, with heat round his ears. He could see clearly how deep the plot was; for as the graph of his cyclic life rose towards its peak he would suspect all men of all things. The headmaster, thought Pedigree—and was half-aware of his own folly—is after Henderson himself! So he set about devising a scheme by which he could circumvent any attempt on the part of the headmaster to get rid of him. He saw clearly that the best thing was a cover story or camouflage. As he wondered and wondered what to do, he first rejected a step as impossible, then as improbable, then as quite dreadful—and at last saw it was a step he would have to take, though the graph was not falling.

He braced himself. When his class was settled he went round them boy by boy; but this time, beginning with awful distaste at the back. Deliberately he went to the corner where Matty was half-hidden by the cupboard. Matty smiled up at him lopsidedly; and with a positive writhe of anguish, Pedigree gave a grin into the space above the boy's head.

"Oh my goodness me! That's not a map of the Roman Empire my young friend! That's a picture of a black cat in a coal cellar in the dark. Here, Jameson, let me have your map. Now do you see Matty Windrap? Oh God. Look I can't spend time loitering here. I'm not taking prep this evening, so instead of going there you just bring your book and your atlas and the rest of it to my room. You know where that is don't you? Don't laugh you men! And if you do particularly well there might be a sticky bun or a slice of cake—oh God—"

Matty's good side shone upwards like the sun. Pedigree glanced down into his face. He clenched his fist and struck the boy lightly on the shoulder. Then he hurried to the front of the classroom as if he were looking for fresh air.

"Henderson, fair one. I shan't be able to take you for a lesson this evening. But it's not necessary is it?"

"Sir?"

"Come here and show me your book."

"Sir."

"Now there! You see?"

"Sir—aren't there going to be any more lessons upstairs, sir?"

Anxiously Mr Pedigree looked into the boy's face, where now the underlip stuck out.

"Oh God. Look, Ghastly. Listen—"

He put his fingers in the boy's hair and drew his head nearer.

"Ghastly, my dear. The best of friends must part."

"But you said—"

"Not now!"

"You said!"

"I tell you what, Ghastly. I shall be taking prep on Thursday in the hall. You come up to the desk with your book."

"Just because I did a good map—it's not fair!"

"Ghastly!"

The boy was looking down at his feet. Slowly he turned away and went back to his desk. He sat down, bowed his head over his book. His ears were so red they even had a touch of Matty's purple about them. Mr Pedigree sat at his own desk, his two hands trembling on it. Henderson shot him a glance up under his lowered brows and Mr Pedigree looked away.

He tried to still his hands, and he muttered,

"I'll make it up to him—"

Of the three of them only Matty was able to show an open face to the world. The sun shone from one side of his face. When the time came for him to climb to Mr Pedigree's room, he even took extra care in the arrangement of his black hair so that it hid the livid skull and purplish ear. Mr Pedigree opened the door to him with a shudder that had something feverish about it. He sat Matty down in a chair but himself went walking to and fro as if the movement were an anodyne for pain. He began to talk to Matty or to someone, as if there were an adult understanding in the room; and he had hardly begun when the door opened and Henderson stood on the threshold.

Mr Pedigree shouted,

"Get away, Ghastly! Get away! I won't see you! Oh God—"

Then Henderson burst into tears and fled away, clattering down the stairs and Mr Pedigree stood by the door, gazing down them until he could no longer hear the boy's sobs or the noise of his feet. Even then, he stayed where he was, staring down. He groped in his pocket and brought out a large white handkerchief and he passed it over his forehead and across his mouth and Matty watched his back and understood nothing.

At last Mr Pedigree shut the door but did not look at Matty. Instead, he began to move restlessly round the room, muttering half to himself and half to the boy. He said the most terrible thing in the world was thirst and that men had all kinds of thirst in all kinds of desert. All men were dypsomaniacs. Christ himself had cried out on the cross, "ΔιΨ?ω." The thirsts of men were not to be controlled so men were not to blame for them. To blame men for them would not be fair, that was where Ghastly was wrong, the foolish and beautiful young thing, but then he was too young to understand.

At this point Mr Pedigree sank into the chair by his table and put his face in his hands.

"ΔιΨ?ω."

"Sir?"

Mr Pedigree did not reply. Presently he took Matty's book and told him as briefly as he could what was wrong with the map. Matty began to mend it. Mr Pedigree went to the window and stood, looking across the leads to the top of the fire-escape and beyond it to the horizon where the suburbs of London were now visible like some sort of growth.

Henderson did not go back to his prep in the hall nor to the lavatories that had been his excuse for leaving it. He went towards the front of the building and stood outside the headmaster's door for whole minutes. This was a clear sign of his misery; for it was no mean thing in his world to bypass the other members of the hierarchy. At last he tapped at the door, first timidly, then more loudly.

"Well boy, what do you want?"

"See you, sir."

"Who sent you?"

"No one, sir."

That made the headmaster look up. He saw the boy had been crying very recently.

"What form are you in?"

"Mr Pedigree's, sir."

"Name?"

"Henderson, sir."

The headmaster opened his mouth to say ah! then closed it again. He pursed his lips instead. A worry began to form itself at the back of his mind.

"Well?"

"It's, it's about Mr Pedigree, sir."

The worry burst into full flower, the interviews, the assessment of blame, all the vexations, the report to the governors and at the end of everything the judge. For of course the man would plead guilty; or if it had not gone as far as that—

He took a long, calculated look at the boy.

"Well?"

"Sir, Mr Pedigree, sir—he gives me lessons in his room—"

"I know."

Now it was Henderson's turn to be astonished. He stared at the headmaster, who was nodding judiciously. The headmaster was very near retirement, and from tiredness as much as anything switched his determination to the job of fending the boy off before anything irremediable had been said. Of course Pedigree would have to leave, but that could be arranged without much difficulty.

"It's kind of him," said the headmaster fluently, "but I expect you find it a bit of a bore don't you extra work like that on top of the rest, well, I understand, you'd like me to speak to Mr Pedigree wouldn't you, I won't say you said so, only say that we don't think you're strong enough for extra work so you needn't worry any more. Mr Pedigree simply won't ask you to go there any more. Right?"

Henderson went red. He dug at the rug with one toe and looked down at it.

"So we won't say anything about this visit to anyone else will we? I'm glad you came to see me, Henderson, very glad. You know, these little things can always be put right if you only talk to a, a grown-up about them. Good. Now cheer up and go back to your prep."

Henderson stood still. His face went even redder, seemed to swell; and from his screwed-up eyes the tears jetted as if his head was full of them.

"Now come along, lad. It's not as bad as that!"

But it was worse. For neither of them knew where the root of the sorrow was. Helplessly the boy cried and helplessly the man watched, thinking, as it were, furtively of what he could not imagine with any precision; and wondering after all whether fending off was either wise or possible. Only when the tears had nearly ceased did he speak again.

"Better? Eh? Look my dear boy, you'd better sit in that chair for a bit. I have to go—I'll be back in a few minutes. You go off, when you feel like it. Right?"

Nodding and smiling in a matey kind of way the headmaster went out, pulling the door to behind him. Henderson did not sit down in the offered chair. He stood where he was, the redness draining slowly from his face. He sniffed for a bit, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. Then he went away back to his desk in the hall.

When the headmaster returned to his study and found that the boy had left he was relieved for a bit since nothing irremediable had been said; but then he remembered Pedigree with much irritation. He debated speaking to him at once but decided at last that he would leave the whole unpleasant business until the first hours of morning school, when his vital forces would have been restored by sleep. Tomorrow would be soon enough, though the whole business could not be left longer than that; and remembering his earlier interview with Pedigree the headmaster flushed with genuine anger. The silly man!

However, next morning when the headmaster braced himself for an interview he found himself receiving shocks instead of delivering them. Mr Pedigree was in his classroom but Henderson was not; and before the end of the first period, the new master, Edwin Bell—already "Dinger" to the whole school—had discovered Henderson and suffered an attack of hysterics. Mr Bell was led away but Henderson was left by the wall where the hollyhocks hid him. It was evident that he had fallen fifty feet from the leads or the fire-escape that was connected with them and he was dead as dead. "Dead," said Merriman, the odd-job man, with emphasis and apparent enjoyment, "Dead cold and stiff," which was what had touched off that Mr Bell. However, by the time Mr Bell had been quietened, Henderson's body had been lifted and a gymshoe found beneath—with Matty's name in it.

That morning the headmaster sat looking at the place where Henderson had appeared before him and faced a few merciless facts. He knew himself to be, as he expressed it colloquially, to be for the high jump. He foresaw a hideously complicated transaction in which he would have to reveal that the boy had come to him, and that—

Pedigree? The headmaster saw that he would never have carried on teaching this morning if he had known what happened during the night. It might be what a hardened criminal would do, or what someone capable of minute and detached calculation would do—but not Pedigree. So that who—?

He still did not know what to do when the police came. When the inspector asked about the gymshoe, the headmaster could only say that boys frequently wore each other's gear, the inspector knew what boys were; but the inspector did not. He asked to see Matty just as if this were something on the films or television. It was at this point that the headmaster brought in the solicitor who acted for the school. So the inspector went away for a while and the two men interviewed Matty. He was understood to say that the shoe had been cast, to which the headmaster said in an irritated way that it had been thrown, not cast, it wasn't a horseshoe. The solicitor explained about confidentiality and truth and how they were protecting him.

"When it happened, you were there? You were on the fire-escape?"

Matty shook his head.

"Where were you then?"

They would have known, if they had seen more of the boy, why the sun shone once more, positively ennobling the good side of his face.

"Mr Pedigree."

"He was there?"

"No, sir!"

"Look boy—"

"Sir, he was in his room with me, sir!"

"In the middle of the night?"

"Sir, he'd asked me to do a map—"

"Don't be silly. He wouldn't ask you to bring a map to him in the middle of the night!"

The nobility in Matty's face diminished.

"You might as well tell us the truth," said the solicitor. "It'll come out in the end you know. You've nothing to fear. Now. What about this shoe?"

Still looking down, and plain rather than noble, Matty muttered back.

The solicitor pressed him.

"I couldn't hear that. Eden? What's Eden got to do with a gymshoe?"

Matty muttered again.

"This is getting us nowhere," said the headmaster. "Look, er, Wildwort. What was poor young Henderson doing up that fire-escape?"

Matty stared passionately up under his brows and the one word burst from his lips.

"Evil!"

So they put Matty by and sent for Mr Pedigree. He came, feeble, grey-faced and fainting. The headmaster viewed him with disgusted pity and offered him a chair into which he collapsed. The solicitor explained the probable course of events and how a heavier charge might be abandoned in favour of a lesser if the defendant pleaded guilty to render unnecessary the cross-examination of minors. Mr Pedigree sat huddled and shivering. They were kind to him but he only showed one spark of animation during the whole interview. When the headmaster explained kindly that he had a friend, for little Matty Windwood had tried to give him an alibi, Mr Pedigree's face went white then red then white again.

"That horrible, ugly boy! I wouldn't touch him if he were the last one left on earth!"

His arrest was arranged as privately as possible in view of his agreement to plead guilty. Nevertheless, he did come down the stairs from his room with policemen in attendance; and nevertheless, his shadow, that dog of his steps was there to see him go in his shame and terror. So Mr Pedigree screamed at him in the great hall.

"You horrible, horrible boy! It's all your fault!"

Curiously enough the rest of the school seemed to agree with Mr Pedigree. Poor old Pedders was now even more popular among the boys than he had been in the sunny days when he gave them slices of cake and was quite amiably ready to be their butt so long as they liked him. No one, not the headmaster nor the solicitor, nor the judge ever knew the real story of that night; how Henderson had begged to be let in and been denied and gone reeling on the leads to slip and fall, for now Henderson was dead and could no longer reveal to anyone his furious passion. But the upshot was that Matty was sent to Coventry and fell into deep grief. It was plain to the staff that he was one of those cases for early relief from school and a simple, not too brainy job was the only palliative if not remedy. So the headmaster, who had an account at Frankley's the Ironmongers at the other end of the High Street down by the Old Bridge, contrived to get him a job there; and like 109732 Pedigree the school knew him no more.

Nor did it know the headmaster much longer. The fact that Henderson had come to see him and been turned away could not be condoned. He left at the end of term for reasons of health; and because the tragedy had been what pushed him out, in his retirement in a bungalow above the white cliffs, he went over the dim fringes of it again and again without understanding it more deeply. Only once did he come across what might be a clue, but even so could not be certain. He found a quotation from the Old Testament, "Over Edom have I cast out my shoe." When he remembered Matty after that he felt a little chill on his skin. The quotation was, of course, a primitive curse, the physical expression of which had been concealed in the translation, like "Smiting hip and thigh," and a dozen other savageries. So he sat and thought and wondered whether he had the key to something even darker than the tragedy of young Henderson.

He would nod, and mutter to himself—

"Oh yes, to say is one thing: but to do is quite another matter."

CHAPTER THREE

Frankley's was an ironmonger's of character. When the canal was cut and the Old Bridge built, it diminished the value of all the properties at that end of Greenfield. Frankley's, in the early days of the nineteenth century, moved into rickety buildings that backed on the towpath and were going dirt cheap. The buildings were indeterminate in date, some walls of brick, some tile-hung, some lath and plaster and some of a curious wooden construction. It is not impossible that parts of these wooden areas were in fact medieval windows filled as was the custom with wooden slats and now thought to be no more than chinky walls. Certainly there was not a beam in the place that did not have here and there notches cut, grooves and an occasional hole that indicated building and rebuilding, division, reclamation and substitution, carried on throughout a quite preposterous length of time. The buildings that at last were subsumed under Frankley's management were random and seemingly as confused as coral growths. The front that faced up the High Street was only done up and unified as late as 1850 and stayed so until it was done up all over again for the visit of His Majesty King Edward the Seventh, in 1909.

By that time, if not earlier, all the lofts and attics, galleries, corridors, nooks, crannies had been used as warehouses and were filled with stock. This was over-stocking. Frankley's held from each age, each generation, each lot of goods, a sediment or remainder. Poking about in far corners the visitor might come across such items as carriage lamps or a sawyer's frame, destined not for a museum but for the passing stagecoach or sawyer who had refused to turn over to steam. True, during the early days of the twentieth century, Frankley's made a determined effort to get as much of the contemporary stock downstairs as possible. This, by a kind of evolution with no visible agent, organized itself into sections or departments devoted to various interests as it might be tools, gardening, croquet or miscellaneous. After the convulsion of the First World War the place grew a spider's web of wires along which money trundled in small, wooden jars. For people of all ages, from babies to pensioners, this was entrancing. Some assistant would fire the jar—clang!—from his counter and when the flying jar reached the till it would ring a bell—Dong! So the cashier would reach up, unscrew the jar, take out the money and inspect the bill, put in the change and fire the jar back—Clang!…Clang! All this took a great deal of time but was full of interest and enjoyment, like playing with model trains. On market days the noise of the bell was frequent and loud enough to be heard above the lowing of the cattle that were being driven over the Old Bridge. But on other days the bell would be silent for periods that grew longer as the years revolved. Then, a visitor wandering in the darker and farther parts of Frankley's might find another property of the wooden jars. Tricks of construction might muffle the sound of the bells themselves, and a jar would hiss over the customer's head like a bird of prey, turn a corner and vanish in some quite unexpected direction.

Age was the genius of Frankley's. This complex machinery had been designed as a method of preventing each shop assistant from having his own till. The unforeseen result was that the spider's web isolated the assistants. As a young Mr Frankley took over from the late Mr Frankley and became old Mr Frankley and died, his assistants, kept healthy, it may be, by the frugality and the godliness of their existence, did not die but remained static behind their counters. The new young Mr Frankley, even more pious than his forebears, felt that the overhead railway for money was a slur on these elderly gentlemen and removed it. He was, of course, the famous Mr Arthur Frankley who built the chapel and whose name was shortened to "Mr Arthur" by those gentlemen in their corners whose speech remained uncontaminated by times that were seeing the spread of the horseless carriage. Mr Arthur gave each counter back its wooden till and restored dignity to separate parts.

But the use of the overhead railway had done two things. First, it had accustomed the staff to moderate stillness and tranquillity; and second, it had so habituated them to the overhead method of money sending and getting that when one of these ancient gentlemen was offered a banknote he immediately gestured upwards with it as if to examine the watermark. But this, in the evolution or perhaps devolution of the place, would be followed by continuing silence and a lost look while the assistant tried to remember what came next. Yet to call them "assistants" does their memory scant justice. On bright days, when even the dim electricity was switched off and the shop relied on plate-glass windows or wide, grimy skylights, some of which were interior and never saw the sky, there were restful areas remaining of gloom—corners, or forgotten passageways. On such days the loitering customer might detect a ghostly winged collar gleaming in an unvisited corner; and as he accustomed his eyes to the gloom he might make out a pale face hung above the winged collar, and lower down a pair of hands perhaps, spread out at the level where the invisible counter must be. The man would be still as his packets of bolts and nails and screws and tags and tacks. He would be absent, in some unguessable mode of the mind, where the body was to be left thus to pass life erect and waiting for the last customer. Even young Mr Arthur with all his goodwill and genuine benevolence believed that a vertical assistant was the only proper one and that there was something immoral in the idea of an assistant sitting down.

Since young Mr Arthur was devout, by one of the spiritual mysteries of the human condition it is undeniable that during his reign the assistants became more and more holy. The combination of age, frugality and devotion made them at once the most useless and dignified shop assistants in the world. They were notorious. Young Mr Arthur was exhausted by his Napoleonic decision about the spider's web. He was one of nature's bachelors, less by distaste or inversion than by a diminution of sex drive; and he proposed to leave his money to his chapel. During the Second World War the establishment ceased to pay its way; but minimally. Mr Arthur saw no reason why it should not continue to do so, for the rest of his life. The holy old men were to be supported because they could do nothing but what they were doing and had nowhere else to go. Taxed on this unbusinesslike attitude by the progressive grandson of his father's accountant, Mr Arthur muttered vaguely, "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn."

It is not possible now to discover whether the reintroduction of separate tills had any effect on the speed of the shop's decline. All that is certain is that as the decline became more perilous, by an apparent spontaneity the place made convulsive efforts to save itself. It did not shake off its honourable commitment to the elderly gentlemen who had stood so long and sold so little. But in a first convulsion, it bundled an unimaginable load of oddments away from one loft to another and opened a showroom upstairs! Here was to be seen cutlery and glass; and as all the elderly gentlemen were busy behind their counters, new blood had to be imported. At the time there was none of the right age or cheapness available, so with an air of coming clean and bursting out into the twentieth century, the shop hired—the word "employ" had a masculine dignity—hired a woman. In this long upstairs showroom the electric light—and what is more, with more powerful bulbs than anywhere else in the building—was not turned off, no matter how bright the day, until the front doors had been shut at six. The very way up to this glittering room betokened a basic frivolity that was suited to the goods on display and the sex of their guardian. It was a drumheaded, plaster-moulded survival from the late seventeenth century and there was no way of discovering how anything like that had found itself indoors rather than out. After a short while, to the cutlery and tumblers were added decanters, wine glasses, china, table mats, napkin rings, candlesticks, salt cellars and ashtrays in onyx. It was a shop within as well as above a shop. Yet it seemed a flighty thing, that lighted, drumheaded entrance with the carpeted stairs, the rugs and polished floor, the flash of glass or silver under the wastefully bright lights. Below it the broomsticks remained, the galvanized iron buckets, the rows of wooden-hafted tools. It did not accord well with the pigeon-holes of stained and broken wood, that were filled with nails or pins or tacks or iron or brass screws and bolts.

The old men ignored it. They must have known that it would fail, since the shop, as they were, was in the rip of something uncontrollable, an inevitable decline. Even so, after the upstairs showroom, plastics burst in and would not be denied. Plastics committed enormities in the way of silent buckets and washing-up bowls, sink-baskets, watering cans and trays all of blinding colour. Plastics went even further after that and blossomed as a range of artificial flowers. These all grouped themselves as a kind of bower in the centre of the downstairs showrooms. The bower flung out an annexe of plastic screens and trellises that demanded whimsical garden furniture. Once more, it was a feminine place. Once more, a female was its guardian; and not just a female, but a girl at that. She had a till like everyone else. She experimented with coloured lights and hid herself inside a fantasy grove.

It was into this complex disorder of ancient and modern, this image in little of the society at large, that Matty was projected by the headmaster. His status was ambiguous. Mr Arthur explained that the boy had better come until they found out what use they could make of him.

"I think," said Mr Arthur, "we might make use of him in Deliveries."

"What about the future?" asked the headmaster "—his future, I mean."

"If he does well enough he can go into Despatch," said Mr Arthur, with, as it were, a far-off glance at Napoleon. "Then if his head for figures is good enough, he might even move up to Accounts."

"I don't conceal from you that the boy seems to have little ability. But he mustn't stay at school."

"He can start in Deliveries."

Frankley's delivered for ten miles round and gave credit. They had a boy with a bicycle for parcels in Greenfield and two vans for longer or heavier journeys. The second of these vans had a driver and a porter, as he was called. The driver was so crippled with arthritis that he had to be inserted in his seat and left there as long as he could stand it and sometimes longer. This was another of Mr Arthur's unimaginative kindnesses. It kept a man in a job that was a constant trial and terror to him and ensured that two people did one man's work. Though the phrase was not yet widely used, Frankley's was Labour Intensive. It was what was sometimes called "a fine old establishment".

Tucked away at the bottom of the yard that ran along by the small garden of GOODCHILD'S RARE BOOKS, and kept in what was still called the coachhouse, was a forge, complete with anvil, tools, fire, and of course ageing blacksmith, who spent his time making trifles for his grandchildren. This area took Matty and absorbed him. He received pocket money, he slept in a long attic under the rosy, fifteenth-century tiles. He ate well, for this was one of the things Mr Arthur could measure. He wore a thick, dark-grey suit and grey overall. He carried things. He became the Boy. He carried garden tools from one part of the place to another and got customers to sign for them. He was visible part of the time among stacks of packing-cases outside the smithy—packing-cases which he prised open with an instrument like a jemmy. He became adept at opening things. He learnt the measure of sheet metal and metal rod, of angle iron, girders and wire. He could be heard, sometimes, in the silence of business hours tramping unevenly overhead through the lofts and attics among the stock. He would deliver to it strange objects the name of which he did not know, but which would be sold at the rate of perhaps one out of every half a dozen ordered, while the other five rusted. Up there, the occasional visitor might find a set of jacks for an open fireplace or even a deformed packet of the first, snuffless candles. Matty swept here sometimes—swept those acres of uneven planking where all the brush did was to raise the dust so that it hung about invisibly in the dark corners but sneezily palpable. He began to reverence the winged collars in their places. The only boy of his own age or slightly older, there, was the boy who did the local deliveries either on foot or on the bicycle which he regarded as his own. It was already older than he was. But this boy, thick-set and blond with oiled hair that gleamed as seductively as his boots, had perfected a way of remaining away from the establishment that made his visits seem more like those of a customer than a member of the staff. Where the winged collars had achieved, it seemed, a perfect stillness, the other Boy had discovered perpetual motion. Matty, of course, remained too naive to bend circumstances in his direction as the blond Boy had done. He was perpetually employed and never knew that people gave him jobs to get him out of their sight. Ordered by the blacksmith to pick up the cigarette ends in a corner of the yard where he would be hidden, Matty did not grasp that no one would mind if he loafed there all day. He picked up the few cigarette ends and reported back when he had done it.

It was not many months after his arrival at Frankley's that a pattern from his days at Foundlings repeated itself. Already he had passed the bower of artificials and smelt it with a kind of shock. Perhaps it was the intolerable and scentless extravagence of the flowers that made the girl inside so determined to smell sweet. Then, one morning he was told to bring a bundle of new flowers to Miss Aylen. He arrived at the bower, his arms full of the plastic roses on which it had not been thought necessary to imitate the thorns. He looked forward through a gap between his own roses, a leaf meanwhile interfering with his nose. He found that she had made a gap in the wall of the bower by shifting the rose already there from a shelf in front of him. For this reason he was not only able to see through his own roses but into the bower.

He was aware first of a shining thing like a curtain. The curtain was ogival at the top—for she had her back to him—spread very slightly all the way down until it passed out of sight. The scent she wore, obeying its own laws, came and went. She heard him and turned her head. He saw that this creature had a nose that curved out a very short way as if conferring the absolute right of impertinence on its owner, even though at that moment the curtain of hair was caught under it by the turn of her head. He saw also that the line of her forehead was delimited by a line of brow beyond mathematical computation and that under it again was a large, grey eye that fitted between long, black lashes. This eye noted the plastic roses; but she was engaged with a customer in the other direction and had time for no more than a monosyllable.

"Ta."

The empty shelf was under his elbow. He lowered the roses and they cocked up, hiding her from his view. His feet turned him and he went away. "Ta" spread, was more than a monosyllable, was at once soft and loud, explosive and of infinite duration. He came partly to himself near the smithy. Brilliantly he asked if there were more flowers to deliver but was not heard for he did not know how faint his voice had become.

Now he had a second preoccupation. The first, so unlike the second, was Mr Pedigree. When the Boy was sweeping clouds of dust in the loft and when his face had more anguish in its right, expressive side than the occasion would warrant, Mr Pedigree would be there in his mind. When his face contorted with sudden pain it was not the dust nor the splinters. It was the memory of the words screamed at him in the hall—"It's all your fault!" In one very private experience, he had seized a spike and stuck it clumsily into the back of the hand that held the broom. He had watched, a little paler perhaps, the blood turn into a long streak with a drop at the end—and all this because the soundless voice had screamed at him again. Now it seemed to him that this glimpse of part of a face, this fragrance, this hair, filled with a similar compulsion all the parts of his mind that the memory of Mr Pedigree did not inhabit as of right. The two compulsions seemed to twist him inside, to lift him up against his own wishes and leave him with no defences and no remedy but simply to endure.

That morning he drifted away from the yard and climbed the stairs into the lofts. Familiarly he picked his way among packing-cases bursting with shavings, past piled paint, through a room where there was nothing but a set of rusting saws and a heap of hip baths stacked one inside the other, down through rows of identical paraffin lamps and into the long room for cutlery and glass. Here in the centre there was a great skylight of ridged glass that was supposed to let daylight down into the main showroom from a second skylight above it. Looking down, he could see the irradiated glow of coloured lights, could see them move among the ridges as he moved. He could see also, his heart quickening, a vague mass of colour down there that was the flower counter. He knew at once that he would never come this way again without a sideways and downward look at that blurred mixture. He went forward and into yet another loft, empty this one, then a step or two down some stairs. These led down the wall at the farthest point from where the yard was. He put a hand on the guard rail, bent down and peered along under the ceiling.

He could see the mass of artificial flowers but the opening where the customers were dealt with was to one side of him. He could see flowers on this side, and the roses he had stacked all too quickly on the other. All that was visible in the middle was the very top of a light brown head with a white, centre-parting down it. He saw that the only way to do better was to walk along the shop and glance sideways as he passed the bower. He did think for a moment to himself that if one were sufficiently knowing—like for example the blond Boy—one might stop and chat. His heart jumped at the thought and the impossibility of it. He went quickly therefore, but his feet seemed to get in his way as if he had too many of them. He passed a yard from the counter that was not stacked with flowers and looked sideways without moving his head as he passed. But Miss Aylen had bent down and the bower might have been empty for all he could see.

"Boy!"

He broke into a shambling trot.

"Where've you been, Boy?"

But they did not really want to know where he had been, though they would have been amused and liked him better for it if they had known.

"The van's been waiting for about half an hour. Load her up!"

So he hauled the bundles into the van, bundles of metal flung shatteringly into the corner, put down half a dozen folding chairs and finally swung his clumsy body into the seat by the driver.

"What a lot of flowers we've got!"

Mr Parrish, the arthritic driver, groaned. Matty went on.

"They're just like real aren't they?"

"I never seen 'em. If you had my knees—"

"They're good, those flowers are."

Mr Parrish ignored him and set himself to the craft of van-driving. Matty's voice, practically of its own accord, went on speaking.

"They're pretty. Artificials I mean. And that girl, that young lady—"

The noises that Mr Parrish made dated from the days of his youth when he had driven one of Frankley's three horse-vans. He had been transferred to a motor van not many years after such an innovation became available and he took two things with him—his horse-van vocabulary and a belief that he had been promoted. There was no sign at first, therefore, that Mr Parrish had heard the Boy. He had heard everything the Boy said, however—was waiting for the right moment to wrap up his silence, roll it into a weapon and hit Matty over the head with it. He did so now.

"When you address me, my lad, you call me 'Mr Parrish'."

This may well have been the last time Matty ever tried to confide in anyone.

Later that day he was able to go once more through the lofts over the main shop. Once more he glanced sideways at the coloured blur in the ribbed skylight and once more he peered along under the ceiling. He saw nothing. When the shop closed he hurried to the empty pavement in front of it but saw no one. Next day at the same time he got there early, and was rewarded with an exhibition of light-brown hair with honey lights, the apparently naked crooks of knees and the gleam of two long, shining stockings as they disappeared from the platform of a bus to the interior. The next day was Saturday—a half-day—and he was kept busy all morning so that she had gone before he was free.

On Sunday he went automatically to morning service, ate the large, plain dinner that was served in what Mr Arthur called the Refectory, then wandered out for the walk he was ordered to take for his health. The winged collars snoozed meanwhile on their beds. Matty went along, past GOODCHILD'S RARE BOOKS, past Sprawson's and turned right up the High Street. He was in a curious state. It was as if there was a high, singing note in the air from which he could not detach himself and which was the direct result of some interior strain, some anxiety that could—if you remembered this thing or that thing—sharpen into anguish. This feeling became so strong that he turned back to Frankley's as if sight of the place where one of his problems lay would help to solve it. But though he stood and looked it over, and the bookshop next to it and Sprawson's next to that, he was given no help. He went round the corner of Sprawson's to the Old Bridge over the canal and the iron loo at the root of the bridge flushed automatically as he passed. He stood, and looked down at the water of the canal in that age-old and unconscious belief that there is help and healing in the sight. He had a moment's idea of walking along the towpath, but it was muddy. He turned back, round the corner of Sprawson's, and there was the bookshop and Frankley's again. He stopped walking and looked in the window of the bookshop. The titles did not help him. The books were full of words, physical reduplication of that endless cackle of men.

Now some of the problem was coming into focus. It might be possible to go down into silence, sink down through all noises and all words, down through the words, the knives and swords such as it's all your fault and ta with a piercing sweetness, down, down into silence—

On the left in the window, below the rows of books (With Rod and Gun), was a small counter with a few items on it which were not in the strict canon of bookishness at all. Such was the alphabet and the Lord's Prayer in a hornbook. Such was the carefully mounted scrap of ancient music on parchment—music with square notes. Such was the glass ball that lay on a small stand of black wood just to the left of the old music. Matty looked at the glass ball with a touch of approval since it did not try to say anything and was not, like the huge books, a whole store of frozen speech. It contained nothing but the sun which shone in it, far away. He approved of the sun which said nothing but lay there, brighter and brighter and purer and purer. It began to blaze as when clouds move aside. It moved as he moved but soon he did not move, could not move. It dominated without effort, a torch shone straight into his eyes, and he felt queer, not necessarily unpleasantly so but queer all the same—unusual. He was aware too of a sense of rightness and truth and silence. But this was what he later described to himself as a feeling of waters rising; and still later was described to him and for him by Edwin Bell as entering a still dimension of otherness in which things appeared or were shown to him.

He was shown the seamy side where the connections are. The whole cloth of what had seemed separate now appeared as the warp and woof from which events and people get their being. He saw Pedigree, his face contorted with accusation. He saw a fall of hair and a profile and he saw the balance in which they lay, the one the other. The face he had never fully seen of the girl among the artificials was there in front of him. He knew it familiarly but knew there was something wrong with the knowledge. Pedigree balanced it. There was everything right with this plain knowledge of Pedigree and his searing words.

Then all that was unspeakably hidden from him. Another dimension from low on his right to higher on his left became visible with huge letters written in gold. He saw that this was the bottom of the window of the bookshop and that it had GOODCHILD'S RARE BOOKS written in gold. He found that he himself was leaning to one side and, after all, the golden words were horizontal. The glass ball on its stand of black wood had retreated behind the condensation of his breath on the window. The sun no longer blazed in it. Confusedly he remembered that all that day there had been no sun but solid cloud from which rain pricked every now and then. He tried to remember what had happened, then found that as he remembered he changed what had happened. It was as if he laid colours and shapes over pictures and events; and this was not like crayoning in the spaces of a crayoning book where the lines are all set out but like wishing things and then seeing them happen; or even having to wish something and then seeing it happen.

After a while he turned away and began to walk aimlessly up the High Street. The rain prickled down and he hesitated then looked round him. His eye fell on the old church, half-way up the left-hand side of the street. He walked more quickly towards it, first thinking of shelter, then suddenly understanding that it was what he had to do. He opened the door, went in and sat right at the back under the west window. He pulled up his trouser-legs carefully and knelt down without really thinking what he was doing. There he was, almost without his volition, in the right attitude and place. It was Greenfield Parish Church, a huge place with side aisles and transept and full of the long, undistinguished history of the town. There was hardly a slab in the floor without an epitaph on it and not much more unlettered space on the walls. The church was quite empty and not merely of people. It seemed to him empty of the qualities that lay in the glass ball and had found some kind of response inside him. He could not make any connection and there was a lump in his throat too big to swallow. He began to say the Lord's Prayer then stopped, for the words seemed to mean nothing. He stayed there, kneeling, bewildered and sorrowful; and while he knelt the painful and extraordinary necessities of the artificials and the brown fall with the honey lights came flooding back.

The daughters of men.

He cried out silently to nowhere. Silence reverberated in silence.

Then a voice spoke, quite clearly.

"Who are you? What do you want?"

Now this was the voice of the curate who was clearing up certain things in the vestry. He had been submitting himself to an austerity of which his vicar knew nothing. He was surprised in this by the sound of a choir boy scrabbling at the vestry door and trying to get in to retrieve a comic he thought he had left. But the voice sounded right inside Matty's head. He answered it in the same place. Before the balance with its two scales, the one with a man's face, the other with a fire of anticipation and enticement, he had a time that was made of pure, whitehot anguish. It was the first exercise of his untried will. He knew, and it never occurred to him to doubt the knowledge, or worse, accept it and be proud of it, that he had chosen, not as a donkey between carrots of unequal size but rather as the awareness that suffered. The whitehot anguish continued to burn. In it was consumed a whole rising future that centred on the artificials and the hair, it had sunk away from the still-possible to the might-have-been. Because he had become aware he saw too how his unattractive appearance would have made an approach to the girl into a farce and humiliation; and thought, as he saw, that it would be so with any woman. He began to weep adult tears, wounded right in the centre of his nature, wept for a vanished prospect as he might have wept for a dead friend. He wept until he could weep no more and never knew what things had drained away from him with the tears. When he had done he found he was in a strange position. He was kneeling but his backside was touching the edge of a bench. His hands were grasping the top of a pew in front of him and his forehead lay on the little shelf where the prayer and hymn books were. As he opened his eyes and focused them he found he was staring down into the wetness of his own tears where they had fallen on stone and lay in the grooves of an ancient epitaph. He was back, in dull, grey daylight with the faint whisper of rain above him on the west window. He saw the impossibility of healing Pedigree. As for the hair—he knew that he must go away.

CHAPTER FOUR

It was typical of Matty's jagged and passionate character that once he had decided to go away he should go as far as humanly possible. It was part of the strange way in which circumstances were apt to adjust themselves round him as he went—as if for all his jaggedness he was fitted for the journey with streamlined farings—that his way to Australia should be made easy. He met what seemed like compassionate officialdom where there might have been indifference; or perhaps it was that those who winced at the sight of his shrivelled ear speeded him out of their sight. It was no more than months before he found himself with a job, a church, a bed in the Y.M.C.A. in Melbourne. All three were waiting for him downtown in Fore Street by the London Hotel. The ironmonger's was not as large as Frankley's but there were storerooms overhead, packing-cases in the yard at the side and a machine shop to stand in for a forge. He might have stayed there for years—for a lifetime—if it had lived up to his innocent belief that by going far and fast he had outdistanced his troubles. But of course, Mr Pedigree's curse came with him. Moreover, either time or Australia or the two together quickly sharpened his vague feelings of bewilderment into downright astonishment; and this at last found words somewhere in his head.

"Who am I?"

To this, the only answer from inside him was something like: you came out of nowhere and that is where you are going. You have injured your only friend; and you must offer up marriage, sex, love, because, because, because! On a cooler view of the situation, no one would have you, anyway. That is who you are.

He was also someone who lacked more skin than he knew. When he had come at last to realize just how great an effort even the kindest people had to make not to be visibly affected by his appearance he ducked away from any intercourse he could. It was not just the unattainable creatures (and pausing for forty minutes at Singapore, that doll-like figure in its glittering clothes and standing submissively by the passenger lounge) but a minister and his kindly wife, and others. His Bible, on India paper and in squashy leather, gave him no help. Neither—though in his innocence he had thought it might—did his English voice and emergence from the Old Country. When they were assured that he did not think himself special and did not look down on Australia and did not expect preferential treatment, his workmates were unkinder than they might have been through sheer annoyance at being wrong and missing a treat. Also there was a quite gratuitous confusion.

"I don't care what you're bleeding called. When I say 'Matey' I mean 'Matey'. My bleeding oath!"

—And turning to the Australian equivalent of Mr Parrish—

"Telling me how to speak the King's bleeding English!"

But Matty left the ironmonger's for a very simple reason. The first time he had to take some boxes of china to the Wedding Gifts Department he found it presided over and rendered unspeakably dangerous by a girl both pretty and painted. He saw at once that travel had not solved all his problems and he would have gone back to England there and then except that it was impossible. He did the best he could, which was to change jobs as soon as there was one to be had. He got work in a bookshop. Mr Sweet who ran it was too short-sighted and vague to grasp what a handicap Matty's face would be. When Mrs Sweet, who was not short-sighted or vague, saw Matty she knew why nobody browsed in the shop as they used. The Sweets, who were much richer than English booksellers would be, lived in a country house outside the city and soon Matty was established there, in a minute cottage that leaned against the main building. He was odd-job man; and when Mr Sweet had had him taught to drive, chauffeur between the house and the shop. Mrs Sweet, her face averted, pointed out that his hair would keep in place better if he wore a hat. Some deep awareness of self rather than awareness of identity made him choose a black one with a broad brim. It suited both the mournful, good side of his face, and the lighter, but contracted and more formidable left side where the mouth and eye were both pulled down. It lay so close to the purple knob of his ear that people seldom noticed his ear was anything out of the ordinary. Piece by piece—jacket, trousers, shoes, socks, roll-neck sweater, pullover—he became the man in black, silent, distant, with the unsolved question waiting on him.

"Who am I?"

One day after he had taken Mrs Sweet to the shop and was waiting to bring her back, he stood by the tray of battered books that were displayed outside the shop and all at fifty cents or less. One seemed curious. It had wooden covers on either side and the back was so worn the title was illegible. Idly he picked it out and found it was an old Bible, heavier in wood than squashy leather, though the paper was much the same. He leafed through the familiar pages, stopped suddenly, turned back, then forwards, then back again. He bent his face nearer the page and began to mutter under his breath, a mutter that died away.

One of Matty's characteristics was a capacity for absolute inattention. Speech would wash over him without leaving a trace in his mind. It is likely that in the Australian churches he attended less and less—and in the English churches, and far back in class, at Foundlings—there was talk of the difficulty of moving from one language to another; but explanations must have failed before the present fact of black print on a white page. In the very middle of the twentieth century there was a kind of primitive grating between Matty and the easy world of his fellows that sorted out, it seemed, filtered out, ninety-nine per cent of what a man is supposed to absorb and gave the remaining one per cent the shiny hardness of stone. Now, therefore, he stood, the book in his hands, lifted his head from it and stared aghast through the bookshop.

It's different!

That night he sat at his table with both books before him and began to compare them, word by word. It was after one o'clock in the morning when he stood up and went out. He walked the straight and endless road up and down until the morning when it was time to drive Mr Sweet into the city. When he got back and put the car away it seemed to him that he had never heard before how the quality of bird-noise in the countryside was a kind of mad laughter. It disturbed him so much that he cut a lawn quite unnecessarily, to hide in the noise of the machine. When they heard the first whirr! the flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos that haunted the tall trees round the low house took off, crying and circling, then fled away across the sunburnt grass where the horses grazed—fled to and filled a solitary tree a mile off with their whiteness and movement and clamour.

That evening after high tea in the kitchen he took out his two books and opened them both at the title-page. He read each title-page several times. At last he sat back and shut his book of squashy leather. He took it, went out, across the nearer lawn and along through the vegetable garden. He came to the fence that lay between the garden and the way down to the pool where the yabbies swam. He looked at the miles of moonlit grass that swept away to where there were dim hills on the horizon.

He took out his Bible and began to tear the pages out, one by one. As he tore each, he let the breeze take it, fluttering from his hand to blow away turning over and over into the distance where it was hidden at last among the long grass. Then he went back to his cottage, read in the other Bible between wooden covers for a time, said his mechanical prayers, went to bed and to sleep.

*

That was the beginning of what was mostly a happy year for Matty. He had a time of conflict with himself when the new girl who served in the village store proved to be pretty; but she was so pretty that she quickly moved on to be replaced by one to whom he could be peacefully indifferent. Happily he moved round the grounds or through the house, his lips moving, the good side of his face as cheerful as one side of a face can be. He never took his hat off where other people could see him and this led to rumours in the village that he slept in it, which was not true. It was not the kind of hat he could sleep in, being broad-brimmed, as everyone knew very well; but the story suited him, matched his withdrawal. The early sun, and always the moon, would find him in his bed, the long smear of black hair lying all ways to one over the pillow, the white skin of his skull and left face disappearing and reappearing as he moved in his sleep. Then the first birds would jeer and he would jerk upright, to sink back for a few moments before he got out of bed. After the bog and the basin he would sit and read, in the book with the wooden covers, his mouth following the words, his good side frowning.

During the day his lips would continue to move, whether he was driving the rotavator through the dust of the vegetable patch, or laying out the hoses, or waiting at traffic lights, the engine idling, or carrying parcels or sweeping, dusting, polishing—

Sometimes Mrs Sweet was near enough to hear.

"—one silver charger of the weight of an hundred and thirty shekels, one silver bowl of seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them full of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering: 56 One golden spoon of ten shekels full of incense: 57 One young bullock, one ram, one lamb of the first year for a burnt offering: 58 One kid of the goats—"

Sometimes she would hear him in the house as his voice got louder and louder, stuck like a scratched gramophone record.

"21 And he said unto them—said unto them—said unto them—said unto them—"

Then she would hear a few quick steps and know that he had gone into his own place to look at the book lying open on the table. He would come back after a few moments; and through the rub and squeak of the window being polished she would hear him once more.

"said unto them Is a candle bought to be put under a bushel or under a bed? And not to be set on a candlestick? 22 For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was anything kept secret, but that it should come abroad. 23 If any man—"

A happy year, all things considered! Only there were things—as he said to himself once in a moment of quite brilliant and articulate explanation—there were things moving about under the surface. If things moved about on the surface there was something to be done. For example, there were explicit instructions as to conduct if a man should defile himself. But how if the thing that moves beneath the surface is not to be defined but stays there, a must without any instructions? Must drove him to things he could not explain but only accept as a bit of easing when to do nothing was intolerable. Such was the placing of stones in a pattern, the making of gestures over them. Such was the slow trickling of dust from the hand and the pouring of good water into a hole.

It was during this year that Matty ceased to go to a church which had made only perfunctory efforts to retain him. Ceasing to go to church was as much a must as the other gestures, and positive. Yet the change from that year to the next, which might have slipped by in the usual well-oiled manner leaving no trace anywhere but on the calendar, came to creak for Matty like a rusty hinge. Mrs Sweet's widowed sister came from Perth to spend the Christmas break and the New Year and brought her daughter. Sight of the girl with her fair hair and a skin to match sent Matty walking the road again until the small hours and it turned his eyes to the sky as if he might find some help there. Then lo! high in the sky he saw a familiar constellation. It was Orion the hunter, glittering, but with his dagger bursting fiery up. Matty's cry stirred the birds awake like a false dawn; and in the silence after they had settled again he understood the roundness of the earth and the terror of things hung in emptiness, the sun moving the witchway, the moon on its head; and when he added in the ease with which people lived in the midst of majesty and terror then the rusty hinge creaked round and the question which went with him always, changed and came clearer.