The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books Page 4

  In the morning Edith was up first. The others, waking slowly from their first, deep sleep, heard her voice calling to them from overhead, and giving themselves time for only a glance at the flooded garden, they dressed and went up to find her. She stood in a corner of the empty attic, surrounded by all the buckets and basins she had collected together and listening with interest to the variation of notes struck from them by the rapid drops of water falling from the roof. Craters and grey rings of damp covered the celling and the floor was thick with drifts of plaster which had blown far and wide, so that even the webs in distant corners were hung with a fine white dust.

  ‘But there is more to see down below,’ said Edith, after they had listened to a full range of musical notes for some time. Following her down through the house, they were soon aware that, in the attic, they had only seen where the softening-up had taken place – a crumbling at the top which had convulsed the body of the building with more spectacular results.

  The house had plainly given up. It had allowed the screws to loosen and the hinges to crack, and let the watery blisters rise under the face of paint. Tiles, sticking grimly to the roof through the storms of years, had been lifted in a matter of minutes, like slices of bread off a board. The glass lay everywhere. Long splinters were piled under the broken windows, and shining crumbs of it, fine as sugar, crunched under their feet in odd corners as they moved about. Throughout the morning they came on the fragments inside old shoes or in the folds of newspapers. They cut their fingers on it in the fringes of rugs and down the sides of armchairs. In every fireplace a heap of soot had fallen and lay, thickly quilting hearths and rugs and thinning out to sift with the leaves and plaster around passages where the cold wind still blew. It was difficult, they discovered, to get out of their own front door. Pushing against a bank of sodden leaves and twigs, they came face to face with a great, jagged branch which had fallen against the steps, and was still quivering and clawing at the door with a persistency which made them draw back at once into the hall with a feeling of panic. For as long as the scraping went on they remained inside, whispering and peering occasionally out into the garden through the slot of the letter-box.

  Only when the wind had died down did they begin to hear the complaint of the house itself. There was a creaking and a wheezing about them, and a far-off rattling of unidentified broken things from places which they had not yet investigated. They could hear the heavy shifting of the house through all its loosened boards and joints, like a patient cautiously turning over to feel which of his limbs pain him most, and from overhead a faint whine and whistle in the chimneys and a half-hearted hiss as another puff of soot came down. But above all it was the huge sighing of the building which they heard, as a last gust of wind blew through it from end to end. They recognized it at once as a sigh which came from the bottom of its heart – a heart from which, in the last week, they had extracted as much life-blood as it was possible to take away without a complete collapse ensuing. The foreboding which, since morning, had increased in all of them except Edith, they now diagnosed in one another as the growing pangs of guilt.

  Edith had now to work harder than she had ever done before to disperse the atmosphere of this guilt which hung about the place and threatened to thicken and congeal in the empty spaces where they had felt such light-heartedness only a few days before. She set about the task bravely, but at times it was too much even for her.

  ‘It is a case of complete breakdown, I am sorry to say,’ she would remark, as she came across further signs of damage in the next few days. ‘We have done everything we could for it all these years. No people could have done more. But now is the time to make a change. Luckily for us, we have done most of the moving already – we have only ourselves to take away now. If other people can move themselves, so can we.’

  But they were not convinced. Indeed if they had taken pickaxes and sledge-hammers to the house, they could not have felt more responsible for the damage. Nevertheless, it could perhaps be patched and propped again. The harm was extensive but not, after all, so serious. If necessary they could even pack the place up with furniture again – they could replace and rebuild and reorganize, and in a few years they might manage to make up to the house something of what it had lost and suffered at their hands. They would take it upon themselves.

  ‘We will take it upon ourselves.’ This was the phrase they repeated over and over again in answer to all the consolation and suggestion which Edith offered them. Already they were sagging under the weight. Again they had begun to assume the resigned, identical expressions of a united family – still shaken, but ready for their folly to be forgiven and forgotten. Very soon they would try to go back, not to where they had started, but far further back to a state of absolute and unquestioning innocence. Decidedly, they were to give up the rest of their lives to regain favour with God and house.

  Their elder sister now began to search the place methodically from top to bottom, as though her own life depended on it. She would disappear early in the day, to be found hours later, moving about on her knees in some dark corner, or lying flat on her back, prodding and knocking on a low slant of roof above her head; or they would hear her in some distant part of the house, stamping slowly about in a circle, as though engaged in some ritual dance of her own. There were times when they wondered whether she might be searching for hidden treasure, known only to herself, or thumping the walls to find some secret cupboard where the family fortune lay. Most of the time, however, they took little notice and seldom mentioned it amongst themselves. The possibilities in human nature had only lately been opened up to them, and it was a discovery which, given time and their usual routine, they hoped would one day be completely forgotten as though it had never been made.

  Meantime Edith appeared to have lost interest in the damage in the house. She passed by the wastes of damp, the cracking plaster and broken windows many times every day, with scarcely a glance, and made no comment when, after six days, slater and plasterer had failed to turn up. Nor did she comment on the limitations of her three brothers who stood about much of the time with their loose, clean hands at their sides or deep in the pockets of jackets which they had never removed. She had nothing to say about all this because she had better things to hope for. She was hoping in fact for bigger and deeper damage – damage long-standing, spectacular and terrible to cure. Dry rot was her aim.

  She found what she was looking for one evening in a small unused bedroom downstairs, which until lately had contained a chest-of-drawers, a bed, and a marble washstand with ewers. There was nothing here now except one cane chair against the wall and a picture over the fireplace. Where the furniture had been, pale shapes, complete with knobs and spirals, were traced on the wallpaper, and above them, one long rectangular strip where a school photo had hung, keeping in living memory for over sixty years two hundred boys in striped blazers and tabbed socks. The remaining picture was a sombre reproduction in brown and white, but its subject was a garden in midsummer, where a family of young men and women were giving a tea party to their friends. There was nothing sombre about these people; they were obviously a frolicking crowd with generous and careless habits. Fruit of all kinds had been allowed to spill from baskets into the grass where tame birds pecked at it. A puppy was lapping up the milk running from a jug which had been knocked over in the midst of some game, or perhaps by the foot of the girl in a white dress who was swinging in a hammock above. Behind her in the distance could be seen an imposing house, not unlike their own, and at the gate stood an eager young man, identical with the other men in the picture, but showing by his anxious face and his untidy necktie that he had seen the world and found it wanting, and was now only too thankful to be back. As she stared at this picture – A Homecoming – Edith stamped mechanically but strenuously at the floorboards beneath it.

  She did not need to stamp long. After a minute her foot went softly through the crumbling wood and a long piece of boarding fell in, covered on its inner side with a thick
web of greyish-white strands, blotched here and there with blue and yellow patches. Edith fell on her knees and peered down into the area which had suddenly split open under her eyes. It was a place of primeval dampness and darkness, smelling of must and decay, but seeming, at first sight, to be nothing more than a disagreeable hollow under the floor. As she became accustomed to the darkness, however, she saw that what she stared into was not an empty hole but a world, well-established and powerful, where a secret growth had been going on, over months or years, spreading insidiously about the roots of the house. Here and there, springing out of the darkness, white blotches could be seen, stuck like tufts of cotton wool to the rotting wood, and between the black cracks spongey, yellowing mushrooms grew out. Further down, spread widely over the level places, was a layer of poisonous-looking red powder. Only one corner had been opened up, but Edith knew she knelt over a place where life had spawned and spread in the darkness over a vast area, wider and deeper than anything she had imagined during her rapping and stamping of the past week.

  ‘This, at any rate, had nothing to do with us,’ said Edith, when she had summoned the family together. ‘The place will die of it sooner or later, if nothing is done. No doubt something will be done. But not by us. We brought it safely through its choked drains and its damp spots. We patched it up where it was thin. Pruned it down where it bulged. We can’t forget the money spent to give it space to expand at the back, the cost of the paint it soaked up, year after year, to prevent the rust from getting it! But the cure of this is beyond us. We have our own health to think of. We are not surgeons or nurses to stand by at operations of this scale! Let it go to somebody else. As for us, there is nothing else for it – we must get out and stay out!’

  As they stepped forward, one after the other, to look down into the opening, they breathed an air which smelt not only of decay, but also of certain freedom. This time they saw there was nothing more for them to do. Under these boards conscience could be finally buried. They would pack up and leave the place forever.

  On a dark morning in the middle of November, they stood together for the last time outside the front door of the house.

  ‘We have everything to look forward to!’ exclaimed Edith after a long silence, while they braced themselves for the final departure. It was true, at any rate, that they were looking straight in front of them now – down the stony drive, and beyond it to the bleak stretches of empty fields, already beginning to darken under the rain. It was not, after all, the whole world which was before them, but a small hotel nearby, from where they would carry on the long-drawn-out negotiations over the head of the house. California and the decks of the ocean liners were as far off as they had ever been, and it was too late to group themselves, as their relations had done many times before them, for an exuberant send-off photo on the front steps of the house. The men required every scrap of jauntiness still left in them simply to carry the luggage down to the gates, and the women, worn out with their own displays of excitement and enthusiasm, had let their faces fall again, and now longed only to settle as soon as possible under some other roof.

  They did not look back when they came to the gates, and when they were beyond them they did not immediately shake the dust of the place from their feet, for nothing as soft as dust had been under them. But the three men put down their cases and sat down outside to remove, for the last time, the cruel pieces of gravel which had lodged in the heels of their shoes. This done, and walking with greater confidence and dignity, they passed out of sight of the house forever.

  The Spark

  ‘I FIND IT strange, Mr Abson, that your face doesn’t change much at the things I’ve been telling you. But you do listen, don’t you?’

  ‘I listen, Mrs Imrie. I find what you say very interesting.’

  ‘“Interesting”! But you do feel what I’m saying to you? About the little puffs of smoke between the tiles … the dog howling at the back?’

  Abson was thoughtful for a few minutes, his round, black eyebrows raised, melancholy eyes fixed on the floor.

  ‘Later, Mrs Imrie. Things come over me later. When I’ve had time.’

  ‘When you’ve had time? But you have lots of time, Mr Abson. Who’s disturbing us? You’re a person of feeling, aren’t you? A person would need to be inhuman not to respond to what I’ve just told you.’

  ‘That’s how I’m made, Mrs Imrie.’

  ‘How? Not inhuman, I hope?’

  ‘I mean I go over things later.’

  ‘Later? How late?’

  ‘Indeed I am not!’ exclaimed a girl who had just opened the door. ‘It’s all your crazy clocks running on again!’

  ‘I’m not referring to you, Brenda,’ said her mother. ‘I’m talking to Mr Abson here who feels everything later than other people.’

  The girl shrugged herself through the room and over to a corner where she hung up her coat and stared close and long at a small mirror. As she watched her daughter combing out her hair the woman at the table seemed at ease, as though her own nerves were being combed out strand by strand from the knotted frizzle they had got into while sitting too long with the passive Mr Abson. But after a while she turned to him again, speaking, however, in a more patient and relaxed tone.

  ‘How late do you mean, Mr Abson?’

  The man gave his peculiar half-sigh. That is to say, he drew in his breath, held it for a while, and expelled it almost without a sound. But, halved like this, it was also irritating, as though he had no wish to give generously of his feelings – even feelings of desperation – like other people.

  ‘How late, then?’ Mrs Imrie repeated.

  ‘At night. When I go to my own room. In bed probably. I go over things when I’m in bed. I suppose that’s what I usually do.’

  It was quieter in the room. The girl had stopped combing her hair, or she was combing it very lightly. The woman took up some sewing again. ‘You mean things don’t strike you right off? Even funny things you see or hear?’ Mr Abson turned his eyes towards the window, but said nothing.

  ‘I suppose that means you don’t sleep well.’

  ‘Not always.’

  ‘I’m glad I’m not troubled like that. With me it’s when my head touches the pillow. Or when would I ever get my work done next day? I’ve no time to think day or night, it seems!’ She sewed steadily for a bit, and once she whispered: ‘The whole roof caving in ..!’

  After a while Mr Abson gathered up some papers from the table into a brief-case and prepared to go into the other room which was officially his for the evenings if the family were not entertaining visitors in there. They had only a very hazy idea of his job for he had not talked much about this. But they knew his firm made tiles and pots and mugs, and they associated him with a peculiar foreign jar they had once seen there – long, black and white, narrowing at the top to show that nothing was to be got out of it and nothing put in except perhaps a bare twig or two. And yet with a mournful, drooping lip to it.

  ‘Don’t go unless you must,’ said Mrs Imrie. ‘It’ll probably take a bit to heat up in there. Jim and May will be back soon and we’ll have a cup then.’

  ‘I’ll come back later then, if I may,’ said Abson. He went out and they heard the door of the other room close behind him.

  ‘Always later!’ exclaimed Mrs Imrie. ‘I’m afraid later’s not much use to me. I’ve got to have the laughs on the dot, and the crying too. And I like a gasp when it’s tragedy – even a blink would be enough. Something. When I told the butcher about them throwing the twin babies out of the window and the fireman nearly gone himself with the smoke, he doubled over as though he’d a pain here – doubled over his knife. Mrs Liddel did more. She wailed out loud.’

  ‘There was a safety-net, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Has the world gone quite heartless? Yes, there was a safety-net. And lots of people down below, including that mother – watching her two babies being thrown, one after the other, out of a fourth-storey window!’

  ‘Anyway, they’r
e safe. No damage done.’

  ‘Talk about sleeping! Imagine that poor woman’s dreams when she does close her eyes. Will she ever get it out of her head? No she will not. Some people have reason to lie awake at night.’

  ‘We don’t know what’s in Mr Abson’s head.’

  ‘No, we don’t. Whatever it is, it doesn’t show on the face. The strangest thing about buildings when they collapse is the slowness. It’s like a slow-motion picture. A sag here and a bulging there, and a slow, slow puff of dust.’

  ‘I’ve seen something like it on TV.’

  ‘The sparks are dangerous. I believe they can travel miles.’

  ‘And still keep alive?’

  ‘Seemingly. In a wind.’

  ‘Surely not miles?’

  ‘A long distance. You think they’re dead, and the next thing you know there’s a fire blazing away miles from the first place.’

  ‘A single spark,’ said the girl.

  ‘But if it’s alive, after all – and travelling fast.’

  ‘A dark spark,’ said the girl again, brooding on it.

  ‘And more dangerous for not shining,’ said her mother. They sat in silence for a few minutes till the girl took up her comb again and began on her hair. This time there was a faint cracking and she laughed. ‘More sparks,’ she said, drawing out a strand and letting it float free from her head.

  ‘Look, leave your hair alone,’ said her mother, ‘and get that comb away from the table.’

  Later on, twenty minutes or so before her brother was due back, the girl knocked on the door opposite and opened it. Mr Abson was sitting there with his papers at a small table. The room had not heated up and as she spoke she could see the little white puffs of breath before her in the air.